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Comment by swayvil | Hacker News Reader

Hey I've done some samatha meditation.

In samatha you do a thing with your attention.

Your attention is basically your root sense. The sense behind your seeing, thinking, hearing, smelling etc.

Your attention is usually all boggled and agitated, so it doesn't see so good.

In samatha you de-agitate your attention. Make it calm. When it's calm you see better. Much better. Stuff that was invisible becomes visible.

Samatha is a refined form of concentration. All of the people here are pretty familiar with concentration and what it's good for. So in samatha you just take it further.

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Sounds useful - do you still practice samatha meditation? If not then what made you stop?

I do not practice samatha meditation anymore. I practice a different kind of meditation now.

We basically have 2 kinds of meditation.

1) Concentrate on a thing for a while.

2) Watch sensations come and go while refraining from moving your attention in reaction to what you're watching.

I did the first for a few years. Then I did both for a few years. Now I only do the second.

Both deliver the calm but they do it differently. They also do some other stuff.

The second is trickier than the first.

Is the second akin to zazen?

Ya.

> Watch sensations come and go while refraining from moving your attention in reaction to what you're watching.

This sounds like standard "mindfulness" meditation, to me.

It is. Samatha is often contrasted with vipassana in the Buddhist traditions. Samatha being calm concentration, vipassana being analytic insight meditation. "Standard mindfulness", i.e. the distillation of Theravada Buddhist insight techniques into the western mainstream, is rooted in vipassana.

However, when you learn vipassana from a religious lineage, the various teachers and monasteries have slightly different techniques and progressions of the practice from what we'd consider "standard mindfulness".

I like to call it "turning into a big fluffy cloud".

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