3) those who make sure you know they meditate
I'm mainly familiar with these folks. That is why I am not neutral on this subject.
Why do I meditate?
Because it is one of the few things I've found that holds any promise of liberation from the suffering of this world. It also brings a meaning to my life. Being on the search for an unknown mystical goal, be it in part hearsay of sages past thus far, brings a direction and a purpose.
And most of them sound like this. Thank you for summing up your experience, but this is so foriegn to me it almost comes across as gibberish. I just don't share enough reference points with you to understand the maps you would use. Kinda like some people give directions by streets and addresses, and others by landmarks. If you are an address guy, "go 3 houses on the left past the purple Victorian with the big oak, down by the river, around where the old ladies walk the dogs and wave" is hard to even recognize as directions, let alone follow. Your description sounds much like the landmarks version of an address to me. But this is much more of a "me" issue, I think.
Try to sit down and focus on your breath for 5 minutes. You will notice, that your brain sprinkles up thought after thought without you having any control.
So a tried this on my drive into work today. (My wife drives. Though if this were a popular thing, it would go a long way to explain the skills of the average driver....) It didn't work, just too many distractions for something so boring. Tried it again in the office. No random thoughts, just light distractions as people came into the office that I had to tune out.
And this seems like a good time to talk about what I experience,which seems pretty different from what you guys are describing.
The "chatter" you describe is what I would call my attention. It's focused on what I'm doing when I am focused on what I'm doing. Focusing on what I'm doing is not pleasurable, or euphoric, but it does make for a big boost in productivity. Tasks like doing dishes require maybe 10% of my attention, freeing up 90% to wander, and dishes get done at about half speed. This is how I spend my work days. My job only requires my full attention for maybe 10 minutes a day, the rest of the time, I spend listening to audiobooks with half my attention, 10% to my job, and 40% wandering, until I run into something interest, then I pause the audiobook, Google the interesting thing, read until I lose interest, and go back to default work.
So I don't find the chatter distracting, hell, chatter is the goal. I find letting my mind wander to be very nice. But then if attention span or concentration is a spectrum, I'm on the too much of each end of the spectrum. When I have problems, it's with letting go, not maintaining concentration.
And that is what I have always focused on. Clearing out the sticky ideas. Like pain. If I'm in pain, I need to know why. Then what I can do about it. Then do that. But the pain is still there, acting as a distraction, and not serving any purpose. So I turn jp the squelch.
I should back up. On a CB radio, for those old enough to remember, is a squelch knob. This tunes how weak a signal to amplify. Turning up the squelch means that marginal signals don't get amplified, and the background noise is greatly reduced.
I do this with most irritants, most of the time. Identify the signal, verify that it's not important, turn up the squelch on that frequency. My understanding is that most people don't do this. I don't know why.
Most of this thread feels like competitive sprinters giving training advice to a cross country runner. Yes, strapping weights to my ankles will help me build muscles, and I can work on my stride by only running on flat pavement, but not only do the benefits not seem very relevant, but the workout seems like taking all the fun out of exercise.
What I meant by reprogramming in the other thread has to due with altering the way my mind responds to certain triggers. One example is color; I have trained my mind to quickly enter into different modes of thought just by seeing/thinking of a color. Essentially it allows me quickly return to a particular set of thoughts and stay there. I have also created a virtual reality that augments my perception when I imagine it. Here I can store conceptual ideas through beings that I can conversate with.
This makes sense, and is similar to what I was trying to describe in the "can you control your thoughts" thread.
Of those I prefer latticework. That's probably an INTJ thing ... but as we develop we quickly notice that everything has patterns; and if we keep at it, we can abstract that and see that the patterns have patterns (that's the lattice work). Once that is realized, it becomes a lot faster to learn new things (due to the limited number of meta-patterns).
Whoo hoo! This makes sense. This is the only part of this thread that seems intuitive and natural. I'll be looking at latticework and Metacognition to see what I can find. Thanks.