Zmavli Caimle

Karma: 65

Zmavli Caimle 30 Jun 2026 0:00 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Jhana Quick Start Guide
I do say that I’ve only sat that long formally but it’s possible that “in reality” I’ve undergone preparatory practices. I could name a few things but one prominent thing I could point to was me being raised Christian (nondenominational but doctrinally Pentecostal) where we did stuff like ecstatic worship and praying in tongues. I attended a youth camp when I was in primary school where we were taught how to speak in tongues.

It involves an element of ~surrender or ~release which I feel is one of the necessary components in jhana (I don’t tend to talk so much about it because I feel it’s often counterproductive in coaching, in the same way telling people to ‘just relax!’ is useless) because I feel like it helps to relieve atta, or to learn the sort of mental motion necessary to reduce it. I think atta is a blocker for jhana and I feel like I can sort of tell when someone has more of it than another, and of what kind.

Ten hours a day! That’s so long! I think I’ve only meditated a maximum of four hours total in a day.

Which technique haven’t you tried yet? Sorry, pronoun referent ambiguity strikes again.

Zmavli Caimle 22 Jun 2026 17:24 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Jhana Quick Start Guide
Personally, it took me months (around 9, I think) to access jhana from when I first seriously started trying, but that was from me trying to self-teach through videos, audio, books, tweets, et cetera. I had a lot of frustration with trying to grasp jhana too much and thus not reaching it even though I could get some piti. Though that’s kind of an inflated number because I was extremely inconsistent with how much I sat and put off sitting a lot. I think I sat for less than ten hours in total before I got 1st jhana and had a big reaction. So, I suppose I’m a very fortunate person.

I follow Brasington’s schema which I think is the same as Pa Auk Sayadaw’s schema, because Brasington studied under him.

Yes! I so wish there was a way to check too, though for me it’s more the fact that I feel very pathetic and sad as a teacher when I can’t give a student a guarantee that they have indeed accessed jhana because I can’t access their qualia.

Could you say more about your theory? I think Nick Cammarata said something similar in a tweet that went something like “it’s more useful/easier to teach teenagers/young people meditation because they have less karma to deal with”. Personally, I do not remember having experienced jhana in childhood. I would read a blog post from you about this.

I would love to hear more about your experiences in attempting to access jhana!

Have you tried other meditation styles? Recently, I’ve been doing some of the meditation described in Charlie Awbery’s Opening Awareness, which I think is basically Dzogchen shi-ne. It’s kind of funny to me because I keep inadvertently entering/nearing jhana when I try to do it even though that is not the point of that style of meditation. I actually don’t know what Dzogchen thinks of jhana, because jhana is very Theravada.

Zmavli Caimle 18 May 2026 22:00 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: David Gross’s comment on: Jhana Quick Start Guide
Goenka is a ‘dry’ path/sukkha-vipassana-yana. That is to say, it has people do insight meditation directly without doing samatha/tranquility meditation (which jhana is). So, I wouldn’t be surprised that you didn’t get jhana. These paths aim to develop knowledge of impermanence/anicca, unsatisfactoriness/dukkha, non-self/anatta, etc. without first developing the jhanas as a foundation. Paths that seek to develop the jhanas before progressing to insight are called ‘wet’/samatha-yana. It is possible to use the same meditation method to achieve different effects or goals and be used by different paths. Breath meditation/anapanasati is common to lots of paths, for example.

You can use many different meditation methods to access jhana (breath, bodyscan, forgiveness, lovingkindness, etc.) but bodyscan is simply the one I prescribe here because my clients seem to find it the easiest, because it is more ‘engaging’ than the breath and doesn’t lead you to getting absorbed in thoughts like with the more emotional meditation methods. The intention and the developing of positive emotion or sensation once you’ve gotten sufficient collectedness is the more important part.

It’s possible (and I am hedging a lot because it’s difficult to tell at this remove) that you experienced piti but not sukha and that’s why it did not feel ‘blissful’ — piti on its own, when very strong can sometimes feel unpleasant, even. I find that this is common with meditation approaches that aim for equanimous/neutral states of mind rather than explicitly pleasant ones. I wonder if the sensations you felt corresponded to what I described of piti. Did you feel or see brightness or lights even while your eyes were closed (I’m assuming they were)? That is a common sign of piti.

From what I’ve read, bhanga ñana isn’t jhana and is instead visceral knowledge of emptiness. To clarify, the jhanas I teach is based on the suttas, not the Visudhimagga, which came later and described deeper and more difficult to access states of consciousness.

Jhana Quick Start Guide

Zmavli Caimle18 May 2026 8:51 UTC

17 points

7 comments11 min readLW link

Zmavli Caimle 22 Nov 2022 16:26 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: jmh’s comment on: LessWrong readers are invited to apply to the Lurkshop
It didn’t work when I tried it again when I received your message, but I tried it again now and it’s working.

Zmavli Caimle 22 Nov 2022 15:24 UTC
1 point
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on: LessWrong readers are invited to apply to the Lurkshop
The Google Drive link containing information about the organizations is broken.

Zmavli Caimle 24 Jun 2022 3:23 UTC
3 points
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on: Does Lesswrong allow GIFs?
I agree, although GIF is rather inefficient, and there are forums that forbid the posting of GIFs in favor of better formats like WEBM. I support the addition of WEBM support to LW.

Zmavli Caimle 12 Apr 2022 18:55 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: dkirmani’s comment on: Review: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
I’m the opposite. My first two languages are VSO, so VSO ordering (function first, then arguments) comes naturally to me. Some languages are SOV—Japanese is the most prominent example. Don’t think I know of any proglangs with that form of syntax, though.

Zmavli Caimle 8 Apr 2022 8:15 UTC
3 points
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on: The Rationalist-Etcetera Diaspora: A SPREADSHEET!!
There is also r/TheMotte, which formed from a schism in r/slatestarcodex. It mostly discusses culture war issues. The reason they split is that Scott was getting concerned that culture war discussion in his subreddit would attract the Eye of Sauron, which is why he asked people to make a new subreddit to discuss culture war (and also made it such that culture war discussion was now prohibited in r/slatestarcodex). Recently, however, the Reddit admins have been making moves to potentially ban the subreddit, so they are thinking about moving elsewhere.

Most of their content is centered on the Culture War Roundup thread, which refreshes weekly. Several posts are made per day.

Zmavli Caimle 19 Feb 2022 2:57 UTC
3 points
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on: Why you are psychologically screwed up
Your links are broken and lead me to an “onboarding” page. The links when I use the original page on Blogger do, however.

Zmavli Caimle 8 Feb 2022 19:04 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why I want to make a logical language

If you however put effort into thinking through the primitives of your language, you can actually easily make words that are understood without having to be learned specifically.

I highly doubt this is true or possible in any meaningful degree. There have already been several conlangs that try this—Lojban is one with its compounding system, another is Toki Pona. While it’s definitely possible to have compounds whose meaning is related to their components, each context a specific component is going to have to be interpreted in its own special way. Again, because of context. You’re going to have to learn something explicitly regardless.

Zmavli Caimle 8 Feb 2022 5:22 UTC
3 points
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on: The ’Why’s of an International Auxiliary Language (IAL part 1)
English is the current “language Z” currently, but I agree that the language Z could be better. Are you planning on designing an IAL? I only do loglangs, so I can’t help (or help to a meaningful degree), but I’m interested in reading your plans if you do have plans.

Zmavli Caimle 7 Feb 2022 21:56 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Aransentin’s comment on: Phonology | Sekko
Hm, you’re right about the apostrophe. Toaq and Eberban use the apostrophe for the glottal stop. Lojban uses the period. What other glyph do you suggest? x? Of the letters in the English alphabet, the following are not used by Sekko: j f v w x.

Zmavli Caimle 7 Feb 2022 16:08 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Phonology | Sekko
In truth, the phonology is unimportant for making a loglang. For making an artlang or an auxlang (auxillary language), phonology is very important—but not for loglangs. It’s more of an aesthetic choice. Also, I’m not very good at phonology. I used to have a loglang partner who co-created the language with me, but she left early on because of mental health issues.

Conlang making is weird because it’s less “design” and more like...feeling what feels right. There are certain things that seem correct and certain things that feel wrong based on which elements you’ve put down previously. You “fix” some points, and the rest of the design falls into place. In that sense, it’s more like discovery. I’ll tell you a little history about Sekko’s phonology, though.

Sekko originally had a Finnish-esque phonology. Voicing distinction on plosives and affricates (we had tʃ dʒ), no voicing distinction on fricatives. At that time, we also had the labiodental fricative f. Vowel and consonant length distinction were already present. The approximants j w were treated as separate consonants and not treated as diphthong allophones—diphthongs were instead pronounced with hiatus. The palatal nasal ɲ was also a separate consonant and not an allophone.

There was no voicing distinction on fricatives because we didn’t want a v-w distinction (and because Finnish didn’t have it either, but we soon stopped caring about faithfulness to a Finnish-esque phonology. Now it’s more of a weird mix of Japanese and Mandarin because of the labialization and palatization of consonants).

Now, this was all fine, except that I didn’t like how diphthongs had to be pronounced with hiatus. It’s much better to permit them to be said with glides. That entailed removing j w as true consonants.

I didn’t like that we had no ʒ but we had dʒ. The labial fricative was removed, and voicing distinction for fricatives permitted.

Because consonants can be palatized now, we had a tj tʃ distinction (think of English “tube”). I didn’t like this, so the affricates also lost their status as true consonants and became allophones.

Now there was less reason to remove ʃ and ʒ (I actually might re-add them). It’s the same situation as before, where there was a sj ʃ ʃj distinction. I didn’t like that very much, so the post-alveolar fricatives had to go.

Zmavli Caimle 7 Feb 2022 15:51 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why I want to make a logical language

In English, it’s not possible to construct easily a word that refers to “someone who has the same teacher as me” or “someone who reads the same blog as me”.

I don’t see how it’s useful to make words (i.e. separate lexemes) for these concepts, when they’re better expressed as phrases. The relationship of “parent-child-sibling” (in the genetic sense) is more fundamental than “employee-boss” because the former is immutable. You cannot lose your genetic relation, whereas you can separate from your boss. I also think it’s good that “coworker” doesn’t imply having the same boss—there could be no boss (e.g. a startup with two co-founders). Whereas there cannot be a child without a parent.

I’m more concerned with removing ambiguity from words (in the sense that words that enclose non-continuous spaces in semantic space have to be separated), than I am in trying to figure out how to divide it exactly. Many natural languages make distinctions (and not make distinctions) differently than in English—and in the same way, you can rederive the relation “has the same boss as me” via phrases using other words rather than creating a word.

No language that gets actually used in practice has people consistently referring to dictionaries to deal with new words. If anyone doing knowledge production has to interface with a dictionary-maker to get his terms approved, that’s widely unpractical.

This is a consequence of the languages being less mature than natural languages. Natlangs have had much more time to build up vocabulary.

Now, what’s the name for 7? You can derive from the pattern that it’s ‘me’.

I cannot see how it’s ‘me’. I can tell the pattern of the vowels: a e i o u. But how is it m?

Zmavli Caimle 7 Feb 2022 2:05 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why I want to make a logical language
Anaphora is super complicated, and I’ve thought long and hard about how to express them. Each loglang has its own ways of dealing with anaphors. Yes, you are correct that Lojban anaphora is poorly designed. There’s the ko’V series, the vo’V series, goi, the letteral series...it’s really bad.

Most people use a variant of the ko’V series. How it works is that you bind a variable to ko’a (or the others in the series), and then when you repeat “ko’a”, it recalls the bound variable. The extremely big issue with this is that it requires forethought. It’s fine when you’re writing, but when you’re speaking, you don’t necessarily know whether or not you’ll need to refer back to something you said before. You could simply repeat the words, and context plus good faith/Grice’s Maxims usually means you can safely assume you meant to refer to the same thing, but you didn’t state it explicitly. Very unloglangy.

Toaq anaphora is also not good. The new Toaq anaphor system is such that all arguments are classified into several classes: animate entity (really Toaq? Animacy distinction?), inanimate entity, abstract entity, adjectives, clauses, LU-clauses, genitives, personal pronouns and demonstratives. Each pronoun refers to the closest argument that fulfills its type—each class has its own pronoun. The issue is if you want to talk about things which belong to the same class, this type of anaphor becomes unwieldy. The plus side is that it requires no forethought.

I plan on having a variation of Toaq anaphors, which I’ll discuss in a later chapter.

Creating new words is something that all loglangs encourage. It’s more of an infrastructure issue—Lojban and Toaq both have community dictionaries that anyone can add to (Jbovlaste and Toadua respectively). People can then define new words to talk about what they want to talk about, as they wish. ~~It also saves a lot of effort on the part of the language maker(s).~~

I distinguish between vagueness and ambiguity. Vagueness is when a word encloses a large volume in semantic space. This is totally fine, and most root words ought to be on the vague side. Ambiguity is when a word encloses disconnected volumes in semantic space. This is unacceptable and should be removed. Consider the vagueness of the word “animal” and the ambiguity of the word “set”.

On the same token English has student and teacher which is similar to child and parent but has no easy way to say the equivalent of sibling for the first pair that exists for the second.

Sorry, I don’t understand what you mean.

Yes, this is something that upset me with Lojban and Eberban and pleased me with Toaq. Lojban usually tries to make particle families have similar forms. This is bad because single-phoneme errors can cause misunderstanding, since particles in the same family would usually take the same places as each other. It’s best to have particles in the same family be phonetically far away, even if it makes it harder to learn. Phonetically-close words should be semantically far away such that even if point errors occur, context can be sufficient to correct it.

Zmavli Caimle 7 Feb 2022 1:43 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Mark_Friedenbach’s comment on: Why I want to make a logical language
You’re right! I totally forgot to talk about monoparsing. I really shouldn’t have missed that.

I don’t like the design choices that Lojban and Toaq made. The latter much less so, but there are still aspects I dislike. I wanted to see if I could, if not do better, at least go in a different direction. It’s why I use Livagian or Eberbanian style grammar with no “main verb”, and use agglutinative morphology rather than analytic.

You can post anything on LessWrong as a personal blogpost. From the LessWrong FAQ:

What can I post on LessWrong? Posts on practically any topic are welcomed on LessWrong. I (and others on the team) feel it is important that members are able to “bring their entire selves” to LessWrong and are able to share all their thoughts, ideas, and experiences without fearing whether they are “on topic” for LessWrong. Rationality is not restricted to only specific domains of one’s life and neither should LessWrong be.

However, to maintain its overall focus while still allowing posts on any topic, LessWrong classifies posts as either Personal blogposts or as Frontpage posts. See more in the post on Personal Blogpost vs Frontpage Posts.

Zmavli Caimle 5 Feb 2022 15:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: irarseil’s comment on: Phonology | Sekko
I thought very much about having a simple high-low tone accent system like Japanese or Ancient Greek. It would make SSM very, very easy and simple, given that I can just make word beginnings take the high tone and continuing syllables take the low tone (or the reverse). However, I’m unduly biased against tonemes, so I didn’t include them. Toaq is a loglang with a seven tone system, if you’re into tonemes.

Stress will not. I already have phonemic vowel length and consonant length. The only remaining differences possible are tone (which is pitch accent), and volume. I don’t want to have volemes (do those even exist?).

Zmavli Caimle 5 Feb 2022 15:02 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: irarseil’s comment on: Why I want to make a logical language
Yes, I do intend it to be as expressive as natlangs. It will be very difficult, but I want to try.

I’m planning on Sekko vocabulary to be fully a-priori. I actually haven’t made many word forms aside from those in example sentences. I’m considering using a Lojban style word-blending system to derive words, except that I would only select languages that have phonemic vowel and consonant length distinctions, like Finnish, Japanese, and Classical Latin.

Phonology | Sekko

Zmavli Caimle5 Feb 2022 11:59 UTC

4 points

8 comments5 min readLW link

Zmavli Caimle

Jhana Quick Start Guide

Phonol­ogy | Sekko

Phonology | Sekko