I have meditated every day for a couple years, so I was curious to try meditating to this. I found it less effective than my typical meditation in silence (well, usually with white/brown noise), though I admit I haven’t tried much guided meditation which would be a more natural comparison. I didn’t have any deep experiences.
Some general reactions:
The structure of the rhyming was reminiscent of Dr. Suess, which I found to be a somewhat odd choice. Somehow I found it a little discordant with meditation. I couldn’t quite “groove on it” if you know what I mean, because either the rhyme scheme was too regular (or being forced too hard), or because the meter wasn’t quite regular enough perhaps. It’s hard to compare against an imaginary benchmark. I get the impression that if someone soothingly spoke the lyrics of Lose Yourself by Eminem I would find the rhyming and meter more amenable to meditation due to irregularities (unfair to compare it against one of the greatest works of lyrical skill, I understand).
I wasn’t so negatively disposed towards the narrator’s voice as other people. I actually kind of enjoyed it, notwithstanding the portions which were whispered or overly excited. I had my eyes closed the entire time, and flipping around through the video afterwards I could see how one could describe the voice and expression as smug together. The accent lent it sort of an air of old-world authority.
The background noises (cars, dogs, etc.) I found to be distracting at times, although at other times I kind of liked it when it wasn’t too punctuated.
I found the concepts being described to be discordant with mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness tends to make the direct sensory processes more salient, while most of what was being described were things that one can’t even visualize, like hydrogen being turned into helium in the center of stars. I’m not sure whether this comes down to a matter of taste, or whether I don’t understand the purpose of the ritual/meditation. It felt like it was, perhaps, “trying a bit too hard,” by which I mean forcing common interests of the sort of people who browse Less Wrong into domains in which it isn’t a natural fit. I think I am probably less enamored by the fact that we are all supernova dust clinging to a pale blue dot floating in the endless void than the average Less Wrong user though, perhaps (I don’t really mean this pejoratively, I mean, it’s amazing and all).
So, all in all, interesting but didn’t really do much for me vis a vis meditation. It may be highly effective in some sort of ritual / chant context, I don’t know enough to make accurate judgments on such things.
I can see where you are going with the “stricter set of formal rules” thing, but I think I disagree on the grounds that the strictness of a set of rules should be determined by how constraining they are, and some of the rules that you describe are not terribly constraining, such as requiring only the use of facts and the lack of first person singular.
I have meditated every day for a couple years, so I was curious to try meditating to this. I found it less effective than my typical meditation in silence (well, usually with white/brown noise), though I admit I haven’t tried much guided meditation which would be a more natural comparison. I didn’t have any deep experiences.
Some general reactions:
The structure of the rhyming was reminiscent of Dr. Suess, which I found to be a somewhat odd choice. Somehow I found it a little discordant with meditation. I couldn’t quite “groove on it” if you know what I mean, because either the rhyme scheme was too regular (or being forced too hard), or because the meter wasn’t quite regular enough perhaps. It’s hard to compare against an imaginary benchmark. I get the impression that if someone soothingly spoke the lyrics of Lose Yourself by Eminem I would find the rhyming and meter more amenable to meditation due to irregularities (unfair to compare it against one of the greatest works of lyrical skill, I understand).
I wasn’t so negatively disposed towards the narrator’s voice as other people. I actually kind of enjoyed it, notwithstanding the portions which were whispered or overly excited. I had my eyes closed the entire time, and flipping around through the video afterwards I could see how one could describe the voice and expression as smug together. The accent lent it sort of an air of old-world authority.
The background noises (cars, dogs, etc.) I found to be distracting at times, although at other times I kind of liked it when it wasn’t too punctuated.
I found the concepts being described to be discordant with mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness tends to make the direct sensory processes more salient, while most of what was being described were things that one can’t even visualize, like hydrogen being turned into helium in the center of stars. I’m not sure whether this comes down to a matter of taste, or whether I don’t understand the purpose of the ritual/meditation. It felt like it was, perhaps, “trying a bit too hard,” by which I mean forcing common interests of the sort of people who browse Less Wrong into domains in which it isn’t a natural fit. I think I am probably less enamored by the fact that we are all supernova dust clinging to a pale blue dot floating in the endless void than the average Less Wrong user though, perhaps (I don’t really mean this pejoratively, I mean, it’s amazing and all).
So, all in all, interesting but didn’t really do much for me vis a vis meditation. It may be highly effective in some sort of ritual / chant context, I don’t know enough to make accurate judgments on such things.
I can see where you are going with the “stricter set of formal rules” thing, but I think I disagree on the grounds that the strictness of a set of rules should be determined by how constraining they are, and some of the rules that you describe are not terribly constraining, such as requiring only the use of facts and the lack of first person singular.