An unusually hardcore meditation book

[dmm]

By Daniel Ingram (free online: www.mctb.org )

Via integrateddaniel.info/book

and via review ( slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha ) by the author of Unsong ( unsongbook.com )

Comments

[dmm]

The https link to the book does not work today, but http still works:

http://mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/

I like it more and more so far...

[dmm]

This chapter is very interesting:

https://mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-vi-my-spiritual-quest/43-the-early-years/

[dmm]

We ended up also buying a hardcopy.

It's a bit too large, not all that convenient to handle...

[dmm]

Этот "стробоскопический эффект" люди, видимо, наблюдают достаточно часто, но не очень понятно, почему они так уж уверены в его фундаментальности (хотя, конечно, совпадение с диапазоном частот нейронных волн говорит о многом).

Почему люди делают именно из этого явления всякие выводы про непостоянство, неудовлетворительность и "безличность", ещё менее понятно...

[dmm]

Anyway, it's good to reread Scott Alexander's review of this, which includes other things as well:

"Remember this quote from Surfing Uncertainty?:

Plausibly, it is only because the world we encounter must be parsed for action and intervention that we encounter, in experience, a relatively unambiguous determinate world at all. Subtract the need for action and the broadly Bayesian framework can seem quite at odds with the phenomenal facts about conscious perceptual experience: our world, it might be said, does not look as if it is encoded in an intertwined set of probability density distributions. Instead, it looks unitary and, on a clear day, unambiguous…biological systems, as mentioned earlier, may be informed by a variety of learned or innate “hyperpriors” concerning the general nature of the world. One such hyperprior might be that the world is usually in one determinate state or another."