jackdawed's comments

I've had several, intense Kundalini experiences! I know for certain that I can achieve a classical Buddha awakening in this lifetime, as long as I take care of myself.

Like this https://www.mctb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/%C3%91anas-a...

I let my manager know that there may be times where I have sleep issues. Sometimes it lines up with a 2-week sprint cycle. When I meditated seriously, it was +/- 4 hours. Now it's more like +/- 2 hours. So if I normally wake up at 9am, sometimes I wake up at 7am, other times at 11am. I actively search for companies that are flexible with core hours, and have a later standup (>11am).

It's very hard to describe the quality of this flow state or concentration. But I can get completely absorbed in work that I forget to eat or sleep. Food hits different.

This article comes close to describing how I experience "Attention Deconcentration" http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/deconcentration-soft...

Totally understandable. Complete awakening isn't for everyone, and highly realized people are often an obsessed minority of deeply devoted yet tormented people who were willing to do anything necessary for liberation, including "dying" or the cessation of all experience. Towards the later stages it is like an intense 5-MeO-DMT trip over and over.

Here's a video of it captured live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t8KvdMtT4A

When I first reached stream entry, or the first stage of awakening, a slightly less filtered state, it felt like a massive relief and dropped a huge weight out of my body. My day to day is filled with far less suffering and I would rather die than return to how I was before.

On the other hand, simple guided meditation by a licensed therapist, or the many apps out there are great introductions to the vast majority of people, without the risks that come with insight practice. It's especially important to be cognizant of when you get into "insight territory", which a good teacher should be equipped to deal with safely. The sad part is some Goenka retreats completely neglect this concern for safety.

Originally Theravada Thai Forest tradition, under Ajahn Dune's lineage, but now I'm more aligned with this https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-v-awakenin...

You'd be surprised. Even very realized people like Chogyam can be boisterous, womanizing, drunks. There are plenty of examples of highly awakened people doing conventionally bad and egocentric things. Unfortunately, this kind of stuff holds a lot of people back, if not dissuade them completely, from trying a little bit of meditation to improve their lives. There's a lot of archetypes of this in /r/streamentry. The term is crazy wisdom or divine madness, coined by Chogyam himself.

Ironically, and bit hilariously, conceit/pride is one of the fetters discarded at enlightenment, yet the Buddha Gautama has been quoted, "I am the greatest!"

Alice says a blunt remark that hurts Bob's feeling (unintentional wrongful speech). Bob lets Alice know that he is hurt. The average person would feel guilt/distress and apologize. Instead, Alice is equipped with attainments from meditation. Alice sees the arising of these negative emotions, non-identifies with them, and goes about her life. Bob rightfully sees this as egocentric behavior. The Eightfold Path tries to address this through Right Speech.

I've also seen it make some people more likely to fall into the trap of woo-science and dodgy, spiritual scams. The practice of awakening forces you to investigate the ways you suffer. Before, they may throw their money at these sketchy MLMs and still suffer. With meditation, they can throw their money at them and also suffer a lot less.

You'll love this chapter on MCTB https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-ii-light-a...

I still meditate daily, but more in a maintenance manner, the same way a power lifter goes to the gym out of habit, for health, without the goal of setting new PRs. Most of the time, my mind meditates itself automatically.

I am very good at deep work, and concentrating on stuff. It is also easy to deal with stress and emotions in my day to day. My life feels like playing a third person video game with the FOV slider turned to 360 degrees. Every sensation comes discretely where I can see the beginning and end. 1 second is a really long time, enough room to fit 1000s of sensations, bounded only by your speed of perception. I am aware of how my mind constructs the concept of time, the idea of later. The cool part about hitting stages of enlightenment is that there is a quantum shift in how your brain processes, that I know I cannot regress to a previous stage. But I wonder if awakening is built from physical, neural correlates, then things like dementia or a traumatic brain injury might reverse some of the effects.

Another interesting note is that I have a much higher pain tolerance, as well as sort of better control of my body movements. I know some people describe enlightenment as a full body transformation, not just the mind.

One thing that is keeping me from progressing further is the inconvenience that comes with sleep alterations caused by meditation, and how it affects my work as a programmer. I still have obligations to participate in modern society, pay bills, keep relationships, etc. And I know if I didn't do this, I would be perfectly content doing nothing all day, just meditating. It's why retreats and the monastic life is so conductive to awakening. Maybe this is the ultimate FIRE goal, I'm just working on the FI :)

For the record, the Buddha has never advocated leaving society, especially lay followers. Whether we are a monk, at a retreat, in a family, we all have a duty to be a wise citizen.

Forgive me, English is not my first language so at times I struggle finding the right word for it.

The pali word is "sila", the closest translation is morals. To be deficient in sila is to be deficient in morals, was my thought process. One example is do no harm, or avoid lying. If all your daily life is filled with causing harm, and deceit, then it will be filled with chaos and end up making it harder for you to make progress in awakening or do good stuff. This is one interpretation of karma (cause and effect).

There's a whole other philosophical side to it that I think about, outside of the Buddhist context. That certain choices or circumstances in life end up reducing your moral agency in this world. People can be born under unsafe, and unkind environments, so sometimes it becomes harder to be generous and kind, as if there was less wiggle room in your ability to act as a moral agent. One of the things Buddhism tries to address is removing the layers of conditioning in your mind and concept of self, to give you more freedom.

It is like living in a video game with the FOV slider turned to max. It has made me very good at "deep work" and I have a much easier time managing day to day stress and emotions. However, it brought out immense periods of suffering (dark night) followed by immense peace in cycles. The biggest inconvenience to me is the sleep disruptions, which is why I'm taking a break from deeper insight practice, and just try to maintain it, the same way a power lifter might just go to the gym for health reasons without trying to set a new PR.

If you have any interest in accessing a higher state of consciousness (or more accurately a flatter state of consciousness), it's an interesting hobby to pursue, kinda like being good at mental math.

I'm on the third stage of enlightenment, if you have any questions about my day to day experience.

One of the core practices of insight meditation (Vipassana) is to be mindful of your inner thoughts, like through "noting", and observe them through the lenses of the 3 characteristics. You use one-pointedness concentration (Samadhi) to tune into these thoughts. You can also do Samadhi without Vipassana, as many yogis have, but you cannot do Vipassana without a baseline concentration ability. Some people use mindfulness meditation and Vipassana interchangeably, but it is not entirely accurate, yeah. Mindfulness is only one exercise of the broader insight meditation (Vipassana).

This is a forefront issue that Buddhism tries to address, both modern pragmatic Buddhism and fundamentalist Buddhism. It's why right speech, right action, and morals is one of the first things they drill into you. Most pragmatic practitioners will refuse to teach you if you indicate that you have some mental problems or moral deficiencies that should be addressed by a professional first, as mindfulness may end up doing more harm than good. It's one of the flaws of teaching secular mindfulness, far from its Buddhist roots. I've experienced all these interpersonal deficits after meditating seriously 2 hours every day for 2 years straight. Just need to have the self-awareness to address them, despite the goal of no-self.

I saw a Dr. K video in another comment, and one of my favorite quotes he uses to describe meditation is that, "if you run for 5 miles a day, there will be changes to your body that will definitely happen".

More here:

- https://www.mctb.org/mctb2/table-of-contents/part-i-the-fund...

- https://eudoxos.github.io/cfitness/html/index.html

- https://themindfulgeek.com/ plus a talk he gave at Google https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xxsA9Bn-4

> That's to be expected. These programs are "cash cows". And they send a pretty bad signal [0] [1].

I read these two articles along with many others in the gap year I spent after undergrad, before deciding. I was pretty confident that I could have landed a SWE job without going to grad school with 6-12 months of serious study. But I could not do that while on visa. I was ineligible to be a SWE in the US without a degree related to CS.

I think I talked to ~20 people who went to grad school, bootcamps, or were self taught. I asked them what they liked and disliked about their program/learning path. I came up with two main requirements: the ability to take rigorous undergrad-level courses with structure, and the ability to interact with peers beyond the same course or subject (for a broad view of the industry). I also could not take a post-bacc program because my visa would not be valid unless it was for the next level (no OPT unless MS or PhD). So that brings it down to do an MS, or get deported in 3 months to a country with less SWE opportunities.

> That's also a red flag. Serious programs (that are research focused) are typically need blind when applying; if the lab wants a certain student, it will secure funding for him.

This is less on the school program and more on the US government. As part of the visa application, you need to show your bank account with liquid assets that covers the one year of tuition plus living expenses. I had a relative act as my sponsor, and I supplemented the funds through part time work. Additionally, I was applying for a terminal masters, and most programs only secure funding for students on the PhD track. While I talked with some PIs and expressed interest in joining their labs, this was not factored into my application packet. During the program, I considered remaining in my research lab for a PhD but I decided against it due to the high opportunity cost of not entering industry.

> Interestingly, with these masters, the admission bar is often much lower than the undergrad at the same school, so these are watered down classes.

This is true. I also asked the graduate office what the admissions rate for my program was and they said they don't keep track but would estimate it to be between 50-70% depending on the year. The reason they gave was that the applicants were very self selecting. The majority of my cohort had over 3 years of work experience, albeit in a different field. Some had 20 years. Most of the peers I talked to knew exactly what they were getting out of the program and only applied to 1-2 schools, the other being Georgia Tech OMSCS or a post-bacc program.

I specifically picked this program because I had to take undergrad courses at the school for 1-2 semesters. They were hard, and a lot of undergrads did drop. I ended up being a TA for two of these courses and saw first hand how some students were not cut out for university-level CS.

At the end of the day I feel like my decision was worth the time and money investment. In about 10 months from now, my income after expenses would have more than paid for the 2 years I spent in grad school, and I feel more equipped to pursue a PhD at some later time. Hopefully when I have a green card.

A browser environment designed for researching is something I've been investigating lately. I want to stay with Chromium for convenience (Chrome for work, ungoogled-chromium for personal). Right now I see two paths that might work for me:

- A standalone browser that I use only for research purposes. Currently evaluating Bonsai [1] and am interested in Synth.

- A suite of tools that makes bookmarking and organizing easier when used alongside Chrome. Currently, I pay for Raindrop [2] to manage bookmarks, most likely will pay for Slapdash [3] for indexing, and am evaluating Heyday [4].

For an end-user like me, I would much rather pay for an extension+SaaS for Chrome or Firefox, rather than deal with workarounds for browser incompatibility.

[1] https://bonsaibrowser.com/ [2] https://raindrop.io/ [3] https://slapdash.com/ [4] https://heyday.xyz/

Keep in mind this is for an international student paying out of state tuition with no aid. The 50-60k number is more reasonable for US citizens, <30k if you're coming in with a scholarship. 2 years is the average amount of time for a masters degree. It's typically like 2-3 semesters of classes, then thesis or project. As for credits, my masters segment was 36 credits, while my catch up undergrad segment was 28 credits.

I was in the same research lab as the author, but from a different school (BU). When I found out that most of my peers were also doing their master's part time while working, I wished I could do that. But as an international student, there are a lot of restrictions. I had to do it full time (3-4 classes per semester), and I could only work 20 hours part time on campus, usually as a TA and/or research assistant. I did 3 jobs to max that out since most jobs only required you to work 6-8 hours a week. I could only do one internship for my entire degree. My total cost for 2 years was $117,889. BU did not have scholarships or aid for international students, because saying you need aid is admitting that you lied on the visa application. Then I had to pay $7800 to work on my thesis over the summer, which I chose not to finish because I wanted to start working earlier. To make up for lack of work experience, I pretty much did open source contribs 40 hours a week while working on my thesis and TAing. There was a period of 10 weeks where I was putting in 80-100 hours between school and unpaid work.

It was still worth it in the end. Similar experience coming from no CS undergrad. There were about 3 good classes that were very valuable, like Algorithms, Cloud Computing, and Embedded Systems. The rest was not that great, especially with remote. When I think about ROI compared to a bootcamp, it's a tough one. Really successful bootcamp grads are already self-selecting going into the bootcamp, same with the really smart students in my master's program. But going to a master's program seems to have a better ROI just based on quality of instruction/institution alone.

6 months after graduation and my pay bump has more than covered it. I was feeding the master's program cash cow, so I think of it as I'm helping fund my US and green card classmates' master's. Most of my peers had 50% or full ride scholarships.

I agree, I own both (plastic V60, Kasuya ceramic). I switch it up depending on the weather, as well as the amount of coffee I want to make (300ml vs 400ml+), since they use different filter sizes.