Nadia Asparouhova

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Articles

Does meditation experience improve success with the jhanas?

Jun 26, 2024 | nadia.xyz | Nadia Asparouhova |Nadia Eghbal

Jhanas – a series of altered mental states that are accessed via concentration – are often described as an “advanced meditation practice,” a phrase that suggests that one must be a skilled meditator to access them: just as only a skilled outdoorsman would embark upon an expedition to the Arctic Circle. It implies that meditation exists on a spectrum of difficulty, with perhaps mindfulness apps like Calm and Headspace on one end, and jhanas on the other.
Weekly Dose of Optimism #98

Jun 14, 2024 | notboring.co | Nadia Asparouhova |Daniel McCormick

Hi friends š,Happy Friday and welcome back to our 98th Weekly Dose of Optimism. It was a bad week for harmful diseases and a good week for humans. Letās get to it. Support the spread of optimism and reach 225,000 of the smartest, most curious people on the internet, all in one fell swoop:(1)Liz Murphy for Mass GeneralInvestigators have identified a gene whose expression confers a growth advantage to metastatic cancer cells, which cause 90% of cancer-related deaths.
How to do the jhanas

Jun 13, 2024 | nadia.xyz | Nadia Asparouhova |Nadia Eghbal

The jhanas are a series of eight (or nine) altered mental states, which progress from euphoria, to calm, to dissolution of reality – culminating in cessation, or loss of consciousness. They are induced via sustained concentration, without any external stimuli or substances. This is a practical guide on how to do them yourself. Table of Contents What the jhanas feel like Why learn the jhanas?
Accelerating to Where?

Jan 22, 2024 | thenewatlantis.com | James Pethokoukis |Robert Bellafiore |Nadia Asparouhova |John Ehrett

Sign in or Subscribe Now for audio version The future ain’t what it used to be. From John Maynard Keynes’s prediction of a fifteen-hour workweek to Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s interplanetary waltzing, many futurists and crystal-ball seers of the twentieth century assured us that, thanks to the wonders of technology, things were looking up for the human race.
Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

May 28, 2023 | technewstube.com | Nadia Asparouhova

Tech News Tube is a real time news feed of the latest technology news headlines.Follow all of the top tech sites in one place, on the web or your mobile device.
Remembering GitHub's Office, a Monument to Tech Culture

May 28, 2023 | wired.com | Nadia Asparouhova

It was the spring of 2016, and I was in the Oval Office, waiting to interview for a job. Only I wasn’t in Washington, DC. I was at the headquarters of GitHub, a code hosting platform, in San Francisco, sitting inside a perfect, full-size replica of the office of the president of the United States. A woman arrived to retrieve me. Shaking my hand, she explained that the Oval Office was being dismantled and replaced with a café for employees.
Silicon Valley’s Civil War

May 14, 2023 | tabletmag.com | Nadia Asparouhova

With an estimated net worth of over $1 billion, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the Netscape browser and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is far from an everyman. And yet Andreessen’s biting criticisms of the “entrenched oligarchic structure of the present regime” have made him one of the surprising figureheads of a growing anti-elite movement that could—depending on which side wins out—reshape America’s political and social future.
Silicon or Carbon?

Feb 22, 2023 | thepointmag.com | Nadia Asparouhova

I’m often asked how my parents, who are from two very different countries, met. While my lazy answer is “through mutual friends,” the real answer is that they fell in love with the same country and ended up in the same place. My dad, enthralled by tales from his brother-in-law about life in America, turned down his acceptance to university in Germany and applied to Georgetown University instead.