When I practice focus meditation, I train myself to sustain a focus on my breath, for unusual amounts of time, to unusual degrees.
Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn’t that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?
The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between “I want to focus on my breath” and “I am not focusing on my breath”.
Your model of things seem to assume that this level of focus is possible to sustain through “really wanting to” [...] I am reading your reply as supporting a model of cognition akin to homo economicus.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you’re probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you’re currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I’m looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people’s claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don’t actually desire.
There’s no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
One way to test this would to take a non-meditator and give them a lot of money if they managed to sustain attention for an hour. (In this hypothetical, let’s say we have a way to measure this). The way I model this, no amount of money would be sufficient to accomplish an hour of focused attention for a non-practitioner.
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you’re making here.
One is that they’d be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace “focus on the breath” with “lift 500kg”, the answer to “Why aren’t you already lifting it, if that’s what you want?” is partly that you just can’t. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift—but there’d be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn’t at all look like “just not interested in lifting this weight”. I do think you’re physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it’s worth noting this requirement because failing because “can’t” is different than failing because “don’t wanna, so not really trying”.
Another is that “offering a lot of money” is enough to make them really want to do it. There’s no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think “should” motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you’ll get stronger results—the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall’s 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think “Yeah yeah, he’s just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music”—until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears—and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was “lifting a car off of [his] kids”. It’s not that he “couldn’t” lift 500kg in the gym, it’s that it wasn’t worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don’t get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they’ll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said “Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it”. Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.
How?
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of “I should do this, but I’m struggling to get myself to do it”, you notice that you don’t want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you’re asking for.
What happens if you don’t lift 500kg? You don’t get people saying “he broke a record”? Yeah, I guess that’s okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?
What happens if you don’t sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not “come up with rationalizations that sound plausible”, but moves you?
It’s easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.
Right, and to what end? What drives you to want to do this unusual thing? Why isn’t that already connecting to a desire that pulls your focus to your breath?
The answer to these questions is what allows you to resolve the conflict between “I want to focus on my breath” and “I am not focusing on my breath”.
Sorta. Yes, I think that you’re probably physiologically capable of far more focus than you’re currently demonstrating in your meditative practices. And yes, I’m looking at revealed preferences and not buying into people’s claims of desiring things that the evidence shows they don’t actually desire.
There’s no magical law preventing you from being wrong about what you want. How might you notice if you were? What would that look like?
Not necessarily. There are a couple assumptions you’re making here.
One is that they’d be physiologically capable of doing it, in my view. If we replace “focus on the breath” with “lift 500kg”, the answer to “Why aren’t you already lifting it, if that’s what you want?” is partly that you just can’t. Even if you were to try your genuine hardest, it would not lift—but there’d be real signs that you were attempting to lift it, and it wouldn’t at all look like “just not interested in lifting this weight”. I do think you’re physiologically capable of focusing on your breath to a greater extent, but it’s worth noting this requirement because failing because “can’t” is different than failing because “don’t wanna, so not really trying”.
Another is that “offering a lot of money” is enough to make them really want to do it. There’s no magical law saying that people will always be motivated by things that you think “should” motivate them. Indeed, people are usually not very good at drawing these connections. Replace offers of money with a gun to the head, and you’ll get stronger results—the reality of the consequences there are a lot more obvious, so it takes a much dumber person to fail to make the connections.
Eddie Hall’s 500kg lift is a dramatic example of this. You can watch it and think “Yeah yeah, he’s just really big and strong, no need for the overly dramatic music”—until you notice blood spontaneously dripping from his nose. And apparently his eyes, and ears—and brain. He says that the most he could do in the gym was 457kg, and that what it took to get that extra 10% was putting himself in the mindset that he was “lifting a car off of [his] kids”. It’s not that he “couldn’t” lift 500kg in the gym, it’s that it wasn’t worth the risk and he knew it, so he was only motivated to give 90% effort. Give people the motivation to actually try, and they don’t get magic powers but they do produce significantly more force because they’ll actually try.
Heck, it often takes much much less than that. My favorite example is when my friend was able to tap a big strong guy with a wristlock, and she had to argue with him about whether he was strong enough to resist. He insisted that he was genuinely unable to muscle through it, until she said “Jimmy muscled through when I had both hands on it, so unless he’s a lot stronger than you, you can definitely resist when I have one hand on it”. Surprise surprise, he was able to after that.
Well, you weigh your options, and figure out what you want.
Instead of “I should do this, but I’m struggling to get myself to do it”, you notice that you don’t want it, and reflect on the consequences and whether you continue to want them once you realize what you’re asking for.
What happens if you don’t lift 500kg? You don’t get people saying “he broke a record”? Yeah, I guess that’s okay. Your kids will die? On second thought, maybe I can try harder. That latter one feels different, you know?
What happens if you don’t sit there for an hour focusing on nothing but your breath? Why is that bad? What happens if you do? And what is so appealing about that? Not “come up with rationalizations that sound plausible”, but moves you?
It’s easy to get very disconnected from what we actually care about, and what we can do. It takes some work to get back in touch and sort out the contradictions, but the path is absolutely there.