Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Awakening, published by lsusr on May 30, 2024 on LessWrong.
This is the story of my personal experience with Buddhism (so far).
First Experiences
My first experience with Buddhism was in my high school's World Religions class. For homework, I had to visit a religious institution. I was getting bad grades, so I asked if I could get extra credit for visiting two and my teacher said yes. I picked an Amida Buddhist church and a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center.
I took off my shoes at the entrance to the Tibetan Buddhist meditation center. It was like nothing I had ever seen before in real life. There were no chairs. Cushions were on the floor instead. The walls were covered in murals. There were no instructions. People just sat down and meditated. After that there was some walking meditation. I didn't know anything about meditation so I instead listened to the birds and the breeze out of an open window.
Little did I know that this is similar to the Daoist practices that would later form the foundation of my practice.
The Amida Buddhist church felt like a fantasy novelist from a Protestant Christian background wanted to invent a throwaway religion in the laziest way possible so he just put three giant Buddha statues on the alter and called it a day. The priest told a story about his beautiful stained glass artifact. A young child asked if he could have the pretty thing. The priest, endeavoring to teach non-attachment, said yes. Then the priest asked for it back.
The child said no, thereby teaching the priest about non-attachment. Lol.
It would be ten years until I returned to Buddhism.
Initial Search
It is only after you have lost everything that you are free to do anything.
Things were bad. I had dumped six years of my life into a failed startup. I had allowed myself to be gaslit (nothing to do with the startup; my co-founders are great people) for even longer than that. I believed (incorrectly) that I had an STD. I had lost most of my friends. I was living in a basement infested with mice. I slept poorly because my mattress was so broken I could feel the individual metal bedframe bars cut into my back. And that's just the stuff I'm comfortable writing about.
I was looking for truth and salvation. This is about when I discovered LessWrong. LessWrong addressed the truth problem. I still needed salvation.
On top of all this, I had chronic anxiety. I was anxious all the time. I had always been anxious all the time. What was different is this time I was paying attention. Tim Ferris recommends the book Don't Feed the Monkey Mind: How to Stop the Cycle of Anxiety, Fear, and Worry by Jennifer Shannon (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist) so I read it. The book has lots of good advice.
At the end, there's a small segment about how meditation might trump everything else in the book put together, but science doesn't really understand it (yet) and its side-effects are unknown [to science].
Eldritch mind altering practices beyond the domain of science? Sign me up!
[Cue ominous music.]
I read The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama's approach to happiness felt obviously true, yet it was a framework nobody had ever told me about. The basic idea is that if you think and behave lovingly and ethically then you will be happy. He included instructions for basic metta (compassion) meditation. Here's how it works:
1. You focus on your feelings of compassion for your closest family and pets.
2. Then you focus on your feelings of compassion for your closest friends.
3. Then less-close friends.
4. Then acquaintenances.
5. Then enemies.
That's the introductory version. At the advanced level, you can skip all these bootstrapping steps and jump straight to activating compassion itself. The first time I tried the Dalai Lama's metta instructions, it felt so...
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