Review: Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery

Most meditation systems are depth-first : you plunge, deeply, into one area of your mind—by, say, learning how to concentrate on your breath with heroic clarity—and then you take the mental machinery thus developed and try to iron out your life with it. Mark’s is breadth-first : he wants you to mindfully do a whole bunch of different little things—... See more

Technical debt is a concept taken from software development. Let’s say you’re working on a big complicated program. Robust accounting software, for example. And you need to build a new feature rapidly because customers are up your ass about it. So you build it, and it works, but the build isn’t perfect. There are bugs, it doesn’t fully enmesh with ... See more

Many people, me included, ask the question ‘what is it like to be me’ surprisingly infrequently. Asking yourself this, a lot, can stop you from falling into a bunch of varieties of self-destruction, and lead you towards a more self-authored and less self-inflicted life.

I think Mark’s book can probably get you to stop being narrow and dogmatic if you’re on a meditation path that’s sub-optimal, and it can help you think about contemplation in a new way. That’s what it did for me, which was invaluable.

Mark says the reason you meditate is to take care of your ‘technical debt.’ This is something you have, you just don’t know it maybe. You should probably address it. Once you’ve taken care of your technical debt, it’ll be easier to have a good life, which is what we’re aiming for ultimately.

Mark’s conception of meditation is quite different than that of other teachers. Perhaps the main distinguishing feature is, I think, also the best part of his system: the Meta Protocol. The Meta Protocol is simple. As part of your meditative life, frequently ask yourself—in writing or in your head—what, concretely, is going on when you meditate, an... See more

There’s something weird I increasingly encounter on the contemplative path. Which is: if you don’t accidentally fry your brain with meditation, at a certain point, the mind starts to guide you somewhere . The contemplative path reveals itself. And it seems like everyone’s path eventually goes to a similar place, although the trips are different. My... See more

We’re trying to safely, slowly find our way around every square inch of our consciousness, and, sensitively, work through every jagged subroutine, every shitty memory, every unnecessary bit of clenching and grasping we locate.

try to keep the essence of your gifts while you work on the curses furnished in their acquisition.

At one point, Mark memorably summarizes the goal [of meditation] as “happiness dependent on exquisitely and flexibly handling your shit.”