Meditation and Thinking Fast and Slow

I recently finished a 10-day Vipassana retreat and am writing down thoughts I collected along the way.

I have found a connection between meditation and System 1 and System 2 thinking explained in the book Thinking Fast and Slow. In Kahneman’s book, he explained System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control, whilst System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.

The whole concept of meditation is about suppressing reactive action whilst deliberately evaluating all emotions and treating all of them equally in order to make a creative action. The equanimity we train ourselves for is to suppress our System 1 thinking and stop us from being triggered, and the focus required in the long hours of meditation is to increase our capacity for System 2 thinking.