As a long time meditator, I’m not sure what you find amusing.
Are you saying you have more control of what other people do than your own mind? If not, what are you objecting to in saying that it’s easier to control yourself than others?
I’m really struggling not to see your comment as living down to stereotypes: vapidly smug.
After enough hours of meditation practice it becomes quite clear that one's mind is ungovernable at best. We can just hope to hold a clear intention (meditation practice in a nutshell) and return to the task whenever internal or external interruptions arise. Perhaps more and more parts of the mind will align with the intention. Hopefully the mind gets unified over time and as a result flow states can be experienced.
The person whose comment you're replying to was probably highlighting the fact that this process is not as predictable as the parent comment alluded to.
But there’s empirical results, from sports to military to meditation — you can train focus.
That makes it easier to maintain your focus, as the person originally said. A few cute euphemisms don’t mitigate that demonstrated reality; and so I’m left confused still —
You’re mocking someone pointing out fact with a quip.
I was recently at a meditation retreat, and a group of meditators much more advanced than me universally agreed that an apt description of their minds was "like a box of ferrets".
The illusion that you control your chain of thought vanishes pretty quickly with meditation. The reality is that your attention shifts rapidly (especially between different senses) and that most of those shifts aren't under direct conscious control.
It's almost like the facade of mental control is a sieve that tries to exclude the chaos and let something coherent flow through... And you can't even be certain how it accomplishes that. It's a mystery where the nonsense and sense even comes from, too.
Somehow we mistake the sieve for free will, or that it's even a fully conscious mechanism. But it "just happens". It's very strange stuff.
Some people like to project their problems into the rest of the population. Someone that has never achieved a major capacity to direct their attention will believe that it is not a skill they can attain. If they find someone with such a skill then they are “oh so gifted”, completely dismissing all the training and effort that said person has put into themselves. Timeless dialectic.
Are you saying you have more control of what other people do than your own mind? If not, what are you objecting to in saying that it’s easier to control yourself than others?
I’m really struggling not to see your comment as living down to stereotypes: vapidly smug.