maharishi – @habits

A meditation compendium: learnings and esoterica on the benefits and practice of meditation

I’ve done bits of meditation for 10+ years, but my standards are laughably low: I consider 5 minutes a day as an achievement :)

And thus I’m always reminded of the saying, “if you don’t have time to meditate for 5 minutes, then you should meditate for 10 minutes”.

Guess I’m not wise enough yet!

All the below is copied verbatim from various sources, but mistakes mine:

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Brain changes. People who meditated showed increased activity in the left-anterior part of the brain. Increased activity in this area is associated with positive feelings and emotions. This suggests that meditation makes changes in the brain that help us feel better.

Immune boost. The meditation group also had a stronger response to the flu vaccine. They produced more antibodies against the flu, and their bodies are better equipped to fight off the virus compared to the non-meditators

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Meditation like a massage for your brain

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a state of profound meditation called samadhi. When meditation becomes very deep, breathing becomes slow, steady, and even, and the windows of the senses close to all outward sensations. Next the faculties of the mind quiet down, resting from their usually frantic activity; even the primal emotions of desire, fear, and anger subside. When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor. But one verse (5: 28) adds the significant word sada, “always.” Once this state of deep concentration becomes established, the person lives in spiritual freedom, or moksha, permanently. This is extremely rare.

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Consider washing the dishes the most important thing in life. Washing the dishes is meditation. If you cannot wash the dishes in mindfulness, neither can you meditate while sitting in silence.

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Human beings are animals; meditation is one way (among many) to deny our animal nature and perhaps reach a higher spiritual plane

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The eighth-century Buddhist adept Vimalamitra described three stages of mastery in meditation and how thinking appears in each. The first is like meeting a person you already know; you simply recognize each thought as it arises in consciousness, without confusion. The second is like a snake tied in a knot; each thought, whatever its content, simply unravels on its own. In the third, thoughts become like thieves entering an empty house; even the possibility of being distracted has disappeared.

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The dev bites / bytes code guy email about meditation advice
– Meditation is uninteresting repetition, again and again, no matter the technique. It’s only natural to find it uneasy.
– This is not a race. It’s the opposite of a race. The faster you try to go, the slower you will progress. Yet efforts will lead to results. You have to be motivated without avidity, and it’s not an easy balance to find.
– There is a huge difference in effects, between a casual practice (a few minutes, some of the days) and a robust practice (long sessions every day).
– It’s a long term work. It’s, in fact, a life work. Our teacher jokes that at the center, we are at “Vipassana Kindergarden”. We are just beginning. Now we have to carry on and on. Half of the secret of success is simply showing up, every day.

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I have been practicing meditation for 15 years, sometimes in batch of 100 hours.

The more I practice, the more the time slows down. Not just while meditating, but after the fact as well. Although it fluctuates and I’m not back to my kid self, it feels that I have tremendously more time now than a few years ago.

I suspect that it’s tied to how much present you manage to be.

When you are a kid, you are deeply immersed in whatever you are doing, and less and less so after that, especially in our age of distractions, multitasking, and intellectual work loads.

I think that the more you are immersed in the daily boring stuff, like just walking, doing chores, or taking your shower, the more you register the time you spend doing said activity, and the time seems to pass slowly.

In fact, I am sometimes under the impression my minutes, not just feel longer, but actually contain more, because I do so many things and then looking at the clock, it hasn’t moved much. This sensation increases when I meditate a lot.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109066

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to meditate each morning is a radical act of love, take that time, take care of yourself – Jon Kabat Zinn

Jerry Seinfeld has done transcendental meditation since 1972

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Other lifestyle interventions #
Meditation (mean rating = 5.8), bright lights in the morning (5), cold shower (4.7), and masturbation abstinence (4.1) also got impressive to pretty good ratings.

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When all these sensory and emotional tides have ceased to flow, then the spirit is free, mukta –at least for the time being. It has entered the state called samadhi. Samadhi can come and go; generally it can be entered only in a long period of meditation and after many years of ardent endeavor

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The Buddha withdrew for six years, then returned for forty-five. But each year was likewise divided: nine months in the world, followed by a three-month retreat with his monks during the rainy season. His daily cycle, too, was patterned to this mold. His public hours were long, but three times a day he withdrew, to return his attention (through meditation) to its sacred source

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The right brain is in charge of present-moment awareness, and this is the part of the brain that meditation takes to the gym. Essentially, the longer we meditate, the more we’re able to balance the right and left hemispheres of the brain. The result of this is more attention, awareness, and computing power for the task at hand.

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Chen: For the overwhelming majority of Asian Buddhists, Buddhism is a devotional practice. Bowing to images of deities, burning incense, worshiping at an altar — those are all fundamental elements of Buddhist practice. There is this acknowledgement of worshiping higher beings. Meditation was not at all a mainstream lay practice in Buddhism

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“Meditation is a high interest savings account for your time”

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As a novice monk, several times a day I had to light incense to offer on the altar of the meditation hall. I was taught to pick up the stick of incense with both hands, the left hand on top of the right hand, which picks up the stick of incense. A stick of incense is very light. Why do you have to use both hands? The idea is that you have to invest one hundred percent of yourself into this simple act of picking up an incense stick.

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“meditation is a non-pharmaceutical Ritalin” – Daniel Goleman

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“meditation is as deep and as powerful a tool as we have” – Waitzkin

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Meditation is not about feeling good. It’s about feeling what you’re feeling with good awareness. Plot twist: Eventually that makes you feel good

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Meditation has been linked to reduced activity in the default mode network, which is associated with self-referential thoughts and mind-wandering. This reduction can lead to an enhanced ability to focus on the present moment and increased self-awareness.

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I’ve come out of (non-psychedelic-enhanced) meditations crying. I’ve sat and stared at the traffic outside my window for as long as I might normally have watched a TV show. I’ve had profound creative unlocks I’ve never experienced without drugs or other extreme state changes. I’ve even had brief moments of the fractal vision and plants breathing (IYKYK). It is not the same as a psychedelic experience, but they’re neighbors

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Your best decisions come from stillness. Stillness is amplified in nature & meditation.

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People who exercise, meditate, or do yoga to get high usually report that their experiences get better and better over time, which is a great contrast to the reports of heavy users of drugs.

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Every time you meditate is like making a deposit in a bank (Maharishi)

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Even the gods envy those who are awakened and not forgetful, who are given to meditation, who are wise, and who delight in the repose of retirement (from the world).

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There’s concrete evidence that meditation calms your brain similar to valium. Actual structural and measurable changes within brain itself

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Intensive meditation, even after only one day, can also affect gene regulation in your brain through similar mechanisms. Attending a monthlong meditation retreat reduces the expression of genes that affect inflammation, and experienced meditators can reduce inflammatory genes after just one day of intensive meditation.

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Hindu meditation practices have long understood the benefits of sound, especially through the chanting of “Om.” This sound, central to many Hindu traditions, is more than a symbol; it’s a powerful tool that engages the vagus nerve, known for its role in regulating stress and relaxation responses. The act of humming, inherently part of chanting Om, creates a gentle, soothing vibration. This process not only brings a physical dimension to meditation but also enhances the spiritual experience, as the sound of Om is said to represent the universe’s primal sound.

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And some of my previous writings on meditation:

What’s your ministry?

Jim Carrey’s commencement address at Maharishi University is quintessential Carrey: mostly hilarious, sometimes awkward, and very deep. Among the many parts that stayed with me, this was one of my favorites:

I realized one night in LA that the purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern, like my dad. When I realized this, I dubbed my new devotion, “The Church of Freedom From Concern” — “The Church of FFC”— and I dedicated myself to that ministry. What’s yours?

To a young Carrey, his purpose wasn’t just to tell jokes onstage and get paid. It was greater: He wanted to free people from their everyday concerns, from the worries of their workaday lives. The Church of FFC. And over his almost 4-decade Hollywood career, he has preached his message to countless acolytes.

His use of the word “ministry” is particularly interesting. He doesn’t use the words mission or passion, not once in the speech. He specifically calls his life purpose a ministry, and he uses the Church metaphor to hammer his point.

Wikipedia defines Christian ministry in the following way:

Ministry is an activity carried out by Christians to express or spread their faith, the prototype being the Great Commission. [It is] “carrying forth Christ’s mission in the world”, indicating that it is “conferred on each Christian in baptism.”

Religious wisdom is a big interest of mine. I try to spend some time each day learning from and practicing different religious traditions. Even if it is a few minutes reading from my Personal Bible, or ten minutes of quiet morning meditation. I don’t consider myself a dyed in the wool member of any labelled tradition (here is more about my approach to faith, inspired by Sri Ramakrishna). I find uplift and community in going to Church on Sundays (and like to sing the songs). I receive calm and clarity from long meditation sessions. Feel a sense of discipline and rigor in learning about zakat and salat in Islam, wisdom in reading excerpts of the Talmud and Midrashim. So Carrey’s anecdote got me thinking: What is my ministry? What is yours?

Within the realm of self help and productivity, we are often taught the value of having a life mission, a personal mission statement. To me, the concept of a personal ministry differs from a mission in at least two important ways:

A ministry is evangelical. The root of “evangelism” is good news. As an evangelist, your job is to spread the good word, the good book, the good news. If you have a ministry, a core part of your job – if not the entire job – is to spread your message, because it is the right thing to do. A mission, on the other hand, could be something you keep to yourself
A ministry is about changing others first. A minister’s job isn’t to transform herself but to serve and lead others. Your mission could be to visit every country in the world. But you wouldn’t call that a ministry unless the main reason you were doing all this travel was to inspire others to follow you. To help others, it helps to be clear about your potential community, your hoped for target audience. Pastors call this their flock. A mission, meanwhile, could start and end with yourself, and doesn’t require an audience

Put differently, you can think of a personal ministry as an outward focused, people first mission. Seen this way, it becomes clear that many of today’s most successful people are essentially such ministers:

NYT columnist David Brooks’s ministry is to teach his educated audience how to think deeply about the moral and spiritual dimensions of life. To live more conscientiously and purposefully amidst all the new technology, the fomo, the hyper speed distraction. Brooks uses the term “moral geniuses” to describe behavioral exemplars like Atul Gawande and Dorothy Day. They are saints in his ministerial canon
Startup investor Paul Graham preaches the value of starting a company, and the power of writing software. His flock is some combination of everyone who can write code and everyone who wants to start a company to control their career destiny. His good news is captured in 100s of essays. His church is the Y Combinator school and his many thousands of dedicated essay readers.
Tim Ferriss has a very dedicated flock who will follow him anywhere: These people want to achieve the dream of a 4 hour workweek, want to optimize every aspect of their lives from their bodies to their relationships to their morning routines. He ministers through his podcast, his blog, and his books

What’s your ministry? I’m slowly discovering mine. Some themes on this blog include the power of habits to give your life structure and meaning, the value of studying all religious traditions for their life advice, and the need to free yourself from outdated and perhaps even harmful social structures — whether the corporate ladder, the addiction to prestige, or the college admissions mouse trap (I prefer “mouse trap” over “rat race”).

Who are the flock you want to attract, inspire, and support? What is the insight bigger than yourself that motivates you to get up every morning and spread across the world?

I leave you with a favorite Indian proverb:

Every morning you wake up and ask yourself, what good things am I going to do today, remember that when the sun goes down at sunset, it will take a part of your life with it

Jim Carrey: “So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.”

Who doesn’t love themselves a good graduation speech? Like an inspiring sermon, sans the sometimes awkwardness of religion, plus more ceremony and uplift. You get to hear a thoughtful person tell you the best stories and lessons of their life, in the most punchy and succinct way they can manage.

Among my favorites are David Brooks’s at Dartmouth on the importance of commitments, George Saunders’s at Syracuse on the failures of kindness, and I can’t leave out David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College: “This is water. This is water.”

To that list I’ve now added Jim Carrey at Maharishi. The speech is like a medley of his greatest acting hits: profound, personal, peculiar, and very funny.

Here are some of my favorite bits:

I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about your pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.

My father used to brag that I wasn’t a ham — I was the whole pig. And he treated my talent as if it was his second chance. When I was about 28, after a decade as a professional comedian, I realized one night in LA that the purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern, like my dad. When I realized this, I dubbed my new devotion, “The Church of Freedom From Concern” — “The Church of FFC”— and I dedicated myself to that ministry.

You can join the game, fight the wars, play with form all you want, but to find real peace, you have to let the armor fall. Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.

I’ve often said that I wished people could realize all their dreams of wealth and fame so they could see that it’s not where you’ll find your sense of completion.

No matter what you gain, ego will not let you rest. It will tell you that you cannot stop until you’ve left an indelible mark on the earth, until you’ve achieved immortality. How tricky is the ego that it would tempt us with the promise of something we already possess.