Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Ten days of silence
Karim Amin, who runs the software company Clay, went to a ten-day silent retreat expecting to sit and think. It turned into a spiritual experience taught in a non-dual tradition: instead of watching the breath, you meditate on the space between breaths or keep asking the question Who am I?
On the fifth day he felt connected to all things, no better and no worse than anyone else. When he pictured someone who was suffering, the thought that came was that this person was also him.
The death drive thought
By the seventh day he was asking what came next and imagining telling his friends about his insight. Then he noticed he wasn't there at all, he was imagining the future. The thought that arrived was that picturing the future resembles Freud's death drive, since the only thing waiting in the far future is dying. It pulled him back into his body, and he felt the boredom of that room as delicious and was grateful for it.
Scarcity around food
The retreat also showed him a scarcity around food. He had been thinking constantly about where he would eat next, and then a single pea exploded in his head. He recognized the same accumulation tendency at work, where it shows up as wondering where the next annual recurring revenue will come from. Now he can tell when he has enough, and that frees him to take more risk.
How does non-dual meditation differ from breath focus?
Breath-focused practice gives the mind a single object to return to. Non-dual traditions drop the object and turn attention on the one who is watching, which is why the question Who am I? is so central. The self-inquiry form of this was taught widely by the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi, who lived from 1879 to 1950. Its roots lie in Advaita Vedanta, a school of Indian philosophy whose name means not two.
Why did Freud propose a death drive?
Sigmund Freud introduced the idea in his 1920 essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He was trying to explain why people, including soldiers back from World War I, kept reliving painful experiences in dreams and behavior. His answer was a pull toward returning to an earlier, inert state, which he set against the drives toward life. Many psychoanalysts since have rejected the idea, and others have kept it.
Why does going without food make people obsess over it?
The clearest evidence comes from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment of 1944 and 1945, led by physiologist Ancel Keys at the University of Minnesota. Thirty-six men were held to roughly half their normal calories for six months. They grew preoccupied with food, collected recipes and cookbooks, and talked about meals more than almost anything else. Many of them kept those habits for months after the study ended.
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