I'm really bad at marketing, but I regularly tweet [0] and chat with the discord [1] community. I'm trying keep the followers up to date with the C++ typescript stuff. Feel free to join
One reason is that he broke a major taboo in publicly declaring himself an Arhat
Then he has this book that is supposed to distil all of the powerful insight practises into a secular path, but everyone I’ve spoken to in his pragmatic dharma community is extremely toxic. It’s literally like the 4chan of Buddhism, huge amounts of racism, lots of depressed teens, very online, lots of people who think they are enlightened (one of which suddenly “rated my capacity for awakening” as zero, and when I said I didn’t care flew into a rage)
It’s exactly what you expect to happen when you take Buddhism, try and condense it down into a path for having the strongest and most intense experience, and market it to terminally online young adult men
Ingram was also heavily involved in this “fire kasina” stuff where you just stare at a flame for days until you start seeing things and go kind of crazy, which is a controversial practise in Buddhism
Finally he’s just not a qualified Buddhist teacher
I agree that a lot of people in that community (and online in general) seem to be chasing after some kind of peak experiences and there's a lot of weird spiritual dick-measuring.
For what it's worth, Ingram himself recommends Kornfield's "A Path with Heart" as one of his favorite books, which is largely about how the goal is to be a better person and that's not the same thing as developing incredible concentration abilities and having intense experiences.
Ingrams path produces such people because his path is broken. Look at the results. He had a novel idea for how to “optimise Buddhism” and it had bad results
I don’t really think it matters what Ingrams favourite books are if his methodology has been so destructive
- giving the letters low contrast colours might be all the rage, but it is a lot more straining to read than something with a decent contrast, especially with a thin font like this one
- the CSS uses pixel sizes, and the default zoom level makes it so tiny that it is practically unreadable on full HD without zooming in 200%
- The combination of a mono font and not using of different sizes, bolding, italics, etc gives each string of characters practically equal weight. The lack of visual weight means there is almost no visual help to guide the eye across the page.
- Similarly, a bit more line-height would give the individual lines a lot more room to breathe, making it much easier to read
Not to be pedantic, but a vipassana retreat is a 10-day (though not always strictly 10) retreat. Vipassana is not itself a retreat but a method for seeing the nature of reality.
Nice! Though, seems odd to me that each entry copies the original article but reformats the text poorly. Would it not be better to simply link to the article itself? As is, much of the code examples aren't formatted. Maybe I'm not understanding the purpose of this.
This is a fundamental problem with RSS/Atom based aggregation: people write their blog posts to work nicely with their own site's CSS, and then when the post is aggregated onto a different site with a different theme it can look very different. Some blogging engines try to avoid this by deliberately stripping out anything but basic HTML from the RSS version of a post, but that can create the same problem in the opposite direction.
In practice it's not a big deal, though. Most posts use pretty simple markup, and of the ones that don't, if you read a Planet regularly you learn pretty quickly whose posts are worth clicking through to the original site to read.
Not clear to me why the README.md has no images of the design itself or its rationale but rather just some dudes bro'ing out on a patio. My intention is not to sound negative... there are good ideas happening here but the README.md is a poor first impression.
As another mentioned, exercise can do it. I find running to be meditative. Other than following the path (and sometimes just running) my mind is free to do whatever. No distractions like computers and TV. I usually run without music as well.
I also took up Brazilian jiu jitsu this year and I'm finding it helpful in another way. I'm not very good at it, so I have to stay focused during class and rolling trying to connect the dots. And it's sufficiently physically exhausting that once I'm done I'm ready to eat and then pass out. The next morning in feeling the soreness of my worn out muscles. Different but not totally unlike the hangovers described. The major difference being a sense of accomplishment and improvement letting me know that what I'm doing is worth the effort.
I run 5 days a week. Getting black out drunk is different. It's probably more like electroshock therapy. Think of it as running is de fragging your drive and getting blackout drunk is rebooting.
Meditation works for me. I am relatively new to it (few months) but have found what I was looking for simply by understanding that I am not my thoughts, that without them I still exist. I began to understand that thoughts are a lot like weather, or like throwing a rock in a pond. For me, I was able to move from that realization to being able to not get swept up in thoughts. This gives me the clarity that I am assuming is similar to what the author found during his hangover. The point for me is understanding that the mind and its processes are a tool. The ability to choose when to use it is freedom.
Some people may also find this through religion or (my opinion) more directly through spiritual practice outside of the framework of a given religion.
Others may use psychedelics. Medical marijuana has been helpful for me in some instances, but I tend to rely too much on it and as a personal choice now try to limit my use. I can understand how alcohol could lead a person to this but there are many healthier alternatives. I could see a person drinking themselves to death before they find it.
I am relatively new to it (few months) but have found what I was looking for simply by understanding that I am not my thoughts, that without them I still exist. I began to understand that thoughts are a lot like weather, or like throwing a rock in a pond. For me, I was able to move from that realization to being able to not get swept up in thoughts.
Is there a personal e-mail I could contact you through? I've been in a rut for a number of years now (had a company that succeeded, was unhappy, now I don't really know what to do) and recently my thoughts about the future have been driving me a bit insane.
I tried to find a way to DM you on Hacker News, but that doesn't seem to be a feature.
