meditating
发表于 ： 周一 12月 12, 2022 5:58 pm
Brooks: What does it feel like when you’re actually meditating? How does it feel like it has changed your life?
Harris: The kind of meditation I’m talking about is called mindfulness meditation. It is the kind of meditation that’s been studied the most in the labs. When you hear about the science around meditation, most of that, if not all of it, is really mindfulness meditation. The beginning instruction for mindfulness meditation is to kind of sit quietly, spine reasonably straight, close your eyes.
Second is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot where it’s most prominent: your belly rising and falling; your chest rising and falling; air entering, exiting your nostrils. And the third step is the most important; as soon as you try to do this seemingly easy thing of just feeling your breath, your mind is going to go most likely into mutiny mode. You’ll have all sorts of random thoughts. What kind of bird was Big Bird? Who was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died? Blah, blah, blah—just, like, random thoughts, powerful urges, powerful emotions. You’re just going to see very quickly how distractible you are.
Many people have the experience of trying to do this, realizing how distractible they are and thinking that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that precludes them and only them from doing this thing called meditation, but that’s a pernicious misconception: “Clearing your mind is impossible unless you’re enlightened or you’ve died.” The goal of meditation is not to stop all thoughts, but just to change your relationship to these thoughts.
So every time you get hit by a random thought or urge or emotion, you just notice that it’s happened and start again and again and again. And every time you notice, you’ve wandered off, and you start again; that’s like a bicep curl for your brain. And that’s what shows up on the brain scans. And what this does—to get to the question you actually asked me—what this does is develop a skill called mindfulness, which you could just translate into “self-awareness.”
Harris: The kind of meditation I’m talking about is called mindfulness meditation. It is the kind of meditation that’s been studied the most in the labs. When you hear about the science around meditation, most of that, if not all of it, is really mindfulness meditation. The beginning instruction for mindfulness meditation is to kind of sit quietly, spine reasonably straight, close your eyes.
Second is to bring your full attention to the feeling of your breath coming in and going out. Pick one spot where it’s most prominent: your belly rising and falling; your chest rising and falling; air entering, exiting your nostrils. And the third step is the most important; as soon as you try to do this seemingly easy thing of just feeling your breath, your mind is going to go most likely into mutiny mode. You’ll have all sorts of random thoughts. What kind of bird was Big Bird? Who was Casper the Friendly Ghost before he died? Blah, blah, blah—just, like, random thoughts, powerful urges, powerful emotions. You’re just going to see very quickly how distractible you are.
Many people have the experience of trying to do this, realizing how distractible they are and thinking that they have some sort of bespoke lunacy that precludes them and only them from doing this thing called meditation, but that’s a pernicious misconception: “Clearing your mind is impossible unless you’re enlightened or you’ve died.” The goal of meditation is not to stop all thoughts, but just to change your relationship to these thoughts.
So every time you get hit by a random thought or urge or emotion, you just notice that it’s happened and start again and again and again. And every time you notice, you’ve wandered off, and you start again; that’s like a bicep curl for your brain. And that’s what shows up on the brain scans. And what this does—to get to the question you actually asked me—what this does is develop a skill called mindfulness, which you could just translate into “self-awareness.”