"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end." ---John Lennon
"The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is[.]" ---Marcel Proust
"something both irreverent and cautionary, here"* ---tbd/unknown
"Meditate for X,000+ hours (>10,000) like water effortlessly and spontaneously flowing downhill." ---author
"It will be ok, but it will be different." ---unknown
by "meditationstuff" and collaborators
Collaborators and Credits (needs to be updated): ...JD, __, __, __, __, __, __, H, A..., [...], and many more [I have to ask several of these people whether they want to be explicitly credited.] (Colophon: H, KQ, MO.)
Copyright: All rights reserved. You may fork/publish lightly transformed (formatted, edited, structurally rearranged) editions of this work if you prominently link back to this original document, possibly warning that the version they are reading might be out of date. No commercial use, nor fee-for-access, are permitted.
(NOTE: FOR TAKES ON THIS MATERIAL BY OTHER PEOPLE,
SEE ALSO: closely related external resources
[this note is repeated in like three places])
(ANOTHER NOTE: I've tried to assemble a "popular introduction or alternative" to my stuff, comprised of books by other people. Some of these books I haven't read, but they seem to get at the vibe or spirit of what I'm going for in this big document. I will disagree with lots of what's in them or even think they're almost net-misleading, but also they're pointing vaguely in the direction that I'm trying to point, like vaguely in the direction of the "'deepest', most important stuff, and collectively, comprehensively so":
Who is this document for?
This document is for people are curious about, serious about (and anything in between) very long-term, goal-oriented meditation, as in years and a lifetime. (And "goal-oriented" includes "no goal" and/or radical, self-determined, open-ended provisionality!)
(So, this document is intended to comprehensively support both complete beginners and "maximally advanced" meditators.)
To get a sense of timescale, working with the practices in this document can be risky for approximately the first 10,000 hours or so, give or take a few thousand hours. (That’s ten thousand hours, 10k hours.)
(Do see the sections links, below, for more about risks.)
If meditating "full time" or "full time plus," ~10,000 hours takes something like three to seven years. If meditating an hour a day, ~10,000 hours takes about twenty years.
(Note! Sort of like how a weightlifter can’t get very strong by lifting weights for a week straight, night and day, without breaks, one can’t just choose to meditate "full time plus." "Maximum available meditation hours" follows a natural, personal rhythm, which is sometimes "five minutes per day." It’s more about how much someone is able to, or choosing to, prioritize meditation in their life, over other things, when potential meditation hours become "endogenously available." "Full time plus" might look like lots of long walks and lots of sleep. Most people will need/want to start very slowly, and take long breaks, and interleave life experiments and valued life experiences, and explore and synergize with, or cut over to, other practice systems or life priorities.)
It’s ok to noncommitally play with (or use à la carte) the practices in this document, or to circle back to this document, on and off, or to use this document as an intermittent touchstone/umbrella/index, while exploring lots of other things. (In any case, there's many ways "up the mountain," and there's no obligation to climb the mountain, and sometimes it happens all by itself, or with the tiniest of nudges.) Just know that this still carries risks! There’s an apocryphal saying, "Better not to start; if you start, better to finish." If one is dabbling, experimenting, tinkering (and there’s nothing wrong with that), one has to be careful, as best they can, to not "start" if one doesn’t intend to start, or one isn’t yet ready to start. (Of course, some people have aleady "started," long ago, etc., etc.)
*
Note:
Partial Guided Tour
(NOTE: FOR TAKES ON THIS MATERIAL BY OTHER PEOPLE,
SEE ALSO: closely related external resources
[this note is repeated in like three places])
(NOTE: FOR TAKES ON THIS MATERIAL BY OTHER PEOPLE,
SEE ALSO: closely related external resources
[this note is repeated in like three places])
Please support this open access work: https://www.patreon.com/meditationstuff [As of this version, now at 10 patrons and $101/month USD. Next round number $110; 9$ to go; 92% complete.]
Author web presence: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com
Canonical location(s) of this document: https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1 ; https://meditationbook.page/
Closely related external resources:
All of these are worth checking out:
(hyper)linking/(deep)linking/(anchor)linking soft guarantees:
Sometimes I revise the anchor links to different sections in the document. When I do this, I preserve old links in the underlying html so that old links, even very old links, should still work. So please "deep link" into the document with (relative) confidence that the links will stay fresh/unrotten, for hopefully years and years and years, when citing, sharing sections on blogs, in private chats, etc.
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[meta-meta note: I want to acknowledge that this document is sort of accumulating warning after warning, which are sort of epicycles on epicycles on epicycles at this point. They’re responding to a twist in the document. And that twist needs to be eventually be untwisted. There’s like (a) an absence or a "not" that needs to be rotated around into (b) a "presence"--from "not this" to "yes that." From FUD to concretes.]
Some things are "totalizing memetic objects." (I may be using that quoted phrase in an idiosyncratic way!) A totalizing memetic object sort of purports to legitimately be about, or say things about "everything." "Everything" could be "reality," or "all of reality," or "everything that exists," "how the future will go," "the world," and stuff like that. There's also things that are "relatively more totalizing" than other things, because they say things about real or illusory "things that touch a lot of other things" or "things that have a lot of implications for other things." Examples in this category could be "minds," "truth," "goodness," "personhood," and things like that.
Here's a couple ways a (relatively) totalizing memetic object works: It might say compact, explicit things like this: "X is A, or X is B, or X is C, and nothing else." In that example, in so many words, it says that X could be three things and those three things are exhaustive. The "and nothing else" does a lot of work. "And nothing else" can be stated explicitly, as above, or it can implied or hinted at, intentionally or unintentionally, reflectively or unreflectively. Another thing about the above is that the mutual exclusivity of A, B, and C (and nothing else) make the assertion "tidy," and/or "explanatorily elegant." Elegant things can be sticky or attractive; they can kind "sink in," sometimes at least a little bit, whether a person wants them to or not, whether a person realizes it or not, at least at first. (This last sentence is possibly an example of "FUD," which will be described below.)
Another way a totalizing memetic object can work is just by being very long and (at least seemingly) comprehensive. This has some of the effects like the above; a long document can lead to an experience of elegance "on the far side of complexity," and a long document, because it's so long, can lull someone into an experience of "this is everything."
The end result is that something might be (at least temporarily) more salient, or mentally or behaviorally, effecting in a person's life than they would retrospectively choose.
There's sometimes a second component to totalizing memetic objects, which is "Fear Uncertainty Doubt" (sometimes abbreviated or initialized as FUD). FUD is sometimes a non-specific warning about possible bad outcomes, or vague information that vaguely might imply possible bad outcomes. The nonspecificity and vagueness here are non-accidental because then a person is affected in broader ways. Someone who has been subjected to FUD sometimes experience a chilling effect on experimentation, play, joy, and so on, because, reflectively or unreflectively, they're are a bit more inclined towards vigilance and caution, for better or worse, justifiedly or unjustifiedly.
Further, FUD doesn't even have to have language like "you might not realize it" or "you might not be able to tell," but language like that can be particularly (self-)undermining, cf. "uncertainty" and "doubt." A person might question themselves more in unproductive ways or be more receptive to authoritative claims, helpful or not. As above, it can cause a person to reduce their behavioral repetoire, including in the space of assertiveness, self-care, and self-regulation.
An alternative to FUD, is supplying mechanistic models, as precisely as possible, of how some things can sometimes lead to specific possibly bad outcomes, for some people, some of the time, as well as an explicit weighing of risks versus benefits, ways in which one might address risks and uncertainties, e.g. how someone might be "better able to tell," and possibly a list of graded alternatives that carry less risk.
Now, currently, as a work-in-progress, this document is long, sometimes elegant, sometimes comprehensive, and arguably has lots of information that shades into FUD. I currently think, especially now "called out," the arguable FUD may be pretty easy to spot, in the large and in the small. (And the charitable angle is what could be taken as FUD are comprehensive and even-handed cautions and highly pragmatic nuance! And this was ever always generally the intent! But I still don't do a good enough job at being specific and mechanistic, and more.)
The other totalizing aspects might be a little harder to spot. For example, I say it's ok to put down the document and come back to it later, that it's part of the practice, sometimes, to not be doing the practice and to not think about the practice. Now, this is intended, in part, to encourage someone to have "nonjudgmental spaciousness" and patience around the practice. But, for some people, this could be experienced as totalizing: There's practicing and not practicing--nothing's logically left out! And even not practicing is practicing! There's no escape! Or it can be uncomfortably felt that way, for some people, after engaging with the document. That's one example. There's a lesser thing, which is suggesting options: "this or not this or even this other thing, are all ok." Again, this is intended to encourage someone to hold everything loosely, provisionally, experimentally. But, sometimes, it could feel claustrophobic.
Generally, when someone or something linguistically/verbally refers to you, to your attributes, your affordances, your choices, it's sort of "nonnatively packaging you and handing yourself back to you," and this can be subtly, loopily problematic, depending on the person in question, word choice, content, and so on. This is a possible side effect, any time language is used.
In some ways, this whole document is actually about mitigating or skillfully handling, over time, the effects of linguistic packaging and (totalizing or non-totalizing) memetic objects. Suffice it to say, here, something that might be helpful on the front-end is inclining towards noticing when something might be "sinking in" in a problematic way, and then pausing and patiently keeping that company, then and there, perhaps neither pushing the experience away nor... [sic]
Even though this section itself could serve as yet more "totalizing-ness" and especially "FUD fodder," after all, a collaborator noted the title of the section includes the word "warning," and it didn't necessarily have to, and here I am being stubborn and keeping it, at least in this draft, I hope this section serves to give a bit of a "reflectively constructive" frame for engaging with this document. A better, future thing may be hunt for vagueness or lack of qualifying/hedging in key places the document. Additionally, it may be possible reframe whole sections "positively" or "optimistically" in way that sacrifices no underlying content, intent, or nuance whatsoever.
Also, not mentioned above, the "vibe" of a document will be reflective of "the whole state of the author" when they were writing (which can change over the course of along writing project). And that vibe can definitely be a little contagious to readers, for some people some of the time. As you might imagine, as you engage with some sections below, I did do some writing--well, you'll see. It's a work in progress. In some places more than others, especially in the meditation instruction proper, I've done my best-so-far, to use precise, general, language that is "uncontaminated" with my vibe--but of course that'll have it's own particular vibe, for better and worse! In any case, as you'll see throughout many sections below, after the philosopher Eugene Gendlin, among many other things, the document, as a living work in progress, is offered in a "multischematic and interschematizable" spirit.
*
a collaborator comments:
"I actually had a conversation recently with a friend as we re-read a year-old doc of his that had a warning at the start, about how the tone of a warning can have a kind of infantilizing effect, and we talked about your protocol as one example of that
[...]
ummm and I would say the new meta-warning sort of helps with that but it’s also sort of still committing the same thing, which it tries noting, but ugh ugh ugh"
a collaborator comments:
"I think the stuff you added [the "document-level meta-warning"] helps me understand a little bit more about what you are getting at with the later warnings. It almost gives off the impression that you are second-guessing yourself whether you would be reckless to put such information into just any old person’s hands, somehow you give off the impression that these methods are incredibly powerful, but also maybe no big deal all at once. It’s an interesting sort of ambivalence, like, "here is this stuff that might really affect you and I want to warn you somehow so that I feel less responsibility for this and get it off my chest." I admit I didn’t really get what the big fuss was about in the FUD sections you mention, which we talked about once. I get them a little better now after reading [...]. The bureaucratic language that [...] mentions about "don’t do if you reside with anyone under age 18..." etc. did also seem a both boilerplate-y and overwrought to me, but keep in mind I have very little experience, so my reaction to that is only interesting insofar as understanding how it might read to an uninitiated person, not to be taken as informed opinion."
an out-of-context, somewhat revised and extended reply of mine:
"[...] The meta-warning (and other warnings) are here to sort of speak to a very large spectrum of readers. One person did mention to me that the document was having a bit of the "totalizing" effect on them (which is not to say that adding the meta-warning necessarily, successfully cancels that effect!). And, a couple people have mentioned some similar effects the first time they encountered some of the practices below. Additionally, the unqualified warnings further down are a too-general way of protecting me from too many people (and protecting them, too!!) who are at least just slightly over on the side of 'shouldn't be engaging in the practices without support,' from reaching out and overwhelming my available time. Long-run, the warnings and risk discussions should be more nuanced, qualified, and backed up by data or representative anecdotes. (Though, there will be design decisions there, too, around thoroughness versus people skipping them because of length!) It’s almost like in a world where/when there is a very, very large community of practice and support one might soften these warnings. Right now, it's not necessarily the right tradeoffs, or the right evolution of tradeoffs in the right order, in how I present the material, but they are my best attempt at each update to the document. Some people skim the warnings and kind of get that that's what they're for, and/or they feel robust and well-resourced, with prior experience, and they proceed anyway. And some people have told me that they've read the warnings and, for better and worse, stopped reading. And, some people have read the warnings and then proceeded cautiously in both good ways and maybe not-so-good ways. And, some people have read the warnings and have reached out with really good questions about their personal situation. This mix of responses may not be god's-eye-view ideal, or in the right ratios, but it feels kind of ok, first pass. I do revisit concerns about both false positives and false negatives, a lot, though, as we learn more and more and as people supply critique and feedback!"
a collaborator comments:
"something something clicking for me about ways my actions within [public facing organization] became much more sane-seeming to collaborators once I was like '[hey], I am doing this because my personal reputation is on the line' or 'because if we don’t do this before [publication], people will storm/swamp me personally about this [...] and empathizing with you-as-document-author in these tradeoffs much better now'"
another note by me:
The verbose nuance, and many qualifiers, and qualifiers on qualifiers, and long introductions in the document can potentially impact readability. But the goal is sort of not to just obviate myself as an in-person teacher, but to err on the side of too much nuance, and too much information, to thoroughly obviate myself. I'd like there to be a big, thriving, supportive community across time, but I'd also like isolated people, where it catches their eye, and they're really willing to dig in and to digest (as a bunch of people have, so far!), to be able to pick this up and de novo use it to train and to even form a community and become a teacher/mentor/etc. without ever having interacted with me personally, if they would like, on their own terms. And that could be contemporaneously or one thousand years in the future, and so on. (Of course, many things will be different, in the future!) Note: All this being said about obviating myself, at this stage of the game, do please reach out, if you have questions!
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
I make many bold assertions in this document, and sometimes I use words like usually, often, etc., that may seem to imply I’m working from a large dataset. Please understand that the protocol has been most heavily tested by me, with a small [though steadily growing, now] additional number of people who are using the protocol either heavily or at least semi-consistently. More and more people are trying this thing out as it becomes more widely known. But, we don’t have a lot of data, and, when I make bold claims, I’m extrapolating from everything I know, which will at minimum be many, many things adjacent to the protocol but not necessarily derived from empirical use of the protocol by other people, and in a small number of cases, even myself. But, for what it’s worth, I eat my own dog food as it were. The protocol has been my sole transformative practice for thousands of hours, and I’ve tried extensively to suss out all former prerequisites and to incorporate them into the practice. And I’m tracking some of the users very carefully. I currently believe other people besides myself can use this thing to take themselves all the way.
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
***
The stuff below has a mild and transient version all the way up to an extreme and chronic version. I describe sort of the worst-case scenarios below. In the worst case, you might need to drop everything, or as much as you possibly can, for weeks, months, or longer to solve it, on your own or finding a teacher or teachers who can help. This could be very costly to finances and relationships. If you experience flickers of any of the below, and you likely will, it happens, a lot, it certainly doesn’t mean you’re on your way to a worst-case scenario, but you should treat flickers calmly but with great seriousness. Don’t make seeming "progress" at the expense of even a slight uptick in the direction of any of the below. Again, you will likely skirt the faint or even moderate edges of all this stuff, so don’t freak out, and/but this is all very, very serious stuff.
At the very, very worst, some people will run into extreme 24-7 muscle tension somewhere in their body lasting months if not a couple years. (Some people also have a less terrible version where the muscle tension is only present while actually sitting down to meditate.) That’s fine though super not great at all if it’s in your thigh or something. But, if it’s in your head, then you’ve got significantly increased intracranial pressure or something, which at worst can cause lingering or permanent dysautonomia of some form, depending on how your body downregulates blood pressure or vasodilates or etc.. I imagine this could be really risky for someone who is at risk for stroke. Additionally, if it happens in your neck or spine then you could be a risk for nerve root impingement and permanent structural or neuromuscular impairment or other disc injury sequelae. And your sleep could get really fucked up depending on how skillful you managing weird musculoskeletal stuff with pillows. These are real risks. It can mess up exercise, intimacy, finances, daily life, etc. [...]
At the very worst, due to weird subtle stuff that you’ll begin experience extreme sensitivity to other people. Like, being around people, working shoulder-to-shoulder with people, being on the phone or video chat with people, sleeping next to someone you care about, will become radically intolerable for some number of weeks or months. This is a real risk. This could destroy relationships both intimate and financial. Due to the same weird subtle stuff, people might come to find being around you to become completely intolerable even if you’re fine being around them. And this as well could destroy relationships both intimate and financial. (To me, this means that meditation and pregnancy or even having kids under eighteen probably don’t mix or mix in risky ways.)
Whether weird subtle stuff or not, your mind is figuring out how to change itself, and that’s a lot of power for a still-dumb mind to have. So we’ll call this interim magnification of negative traits. There is a (possibly quite long) period where self-deception as well as harm to others can very easily increase, where the meditator is blind to it and also really hurt by all the accusations and doesn’t respond to them in a super-constructive way. This will likely be you, especially if you think of yourself as a person who is generally really careful about this sort of thing and/or who doesn’t have the propensity or desire to hurt other people. For more, see here: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/clickbait-title-you-are-so-bad-real-title-benevolence-subtle-imposition-manipulation-and-control-and-ideology/
So then, finally, there’s emotional and motivational dysregulation, sometimes extreme, e.g. extreme suffering and can’t do anything, for hours or days or even weeks, or even more. How fucking weird and terrible things can get, in the worse case, cannot be overemphasized. And, it goes without saying that this can be bad for relationships and finances. Interestingly, I currently don’t think "psychosis psychosis" [sic] is much of a risk, even when things are super crazy weird, maybe like little flashes that are rapidly corrected, but there’s probably a non-zero risk.
Finally, there’s opportunity cost.
Again, this could break you, this could ruin your life, ruin your mind, ruin your relationships, hurt a significant other, hurt your kids in entire-life-affecting subtle and overt ways, etc.
See also these sections:
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A dialogue:
S
Not sure where this should go but I am wondering if anyone would be interested in helping me understand how the extreme negative side effects of meditation happen. I posted an article a little while back about a woman who went on a retreat that caused a psychotic break and ended in her suicide. I'd like to understand if this is a possibility with any kind of meditation, or if there is certain practices (which I would like to see described concretely and not reference to their traditional names since I don't have enough background in all of that to understand those names and their relations) that can cause this. And moreover I am wondering if anyone has an explanation for what the exact mechanisms along this causal path are. For example: mentally "normal" woman => spends 10 hours a day several days in a row silently focusing on her bodily sensations => ??? => psychotic break => suicide. Can you help me fill in the blank? For example, what is going on on a neurological level that would cause e.g., focusing on the breath to cause ... what exactly? disassociation? and then somehow you get wild beliefs that weren't previously held?
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/04/lost-in-thought-psychological-risks-of-meditation/ [Last accessed: 2021-04-11]
P
one point of reference would be a bad or even just really intense psychedelic trip, if you have experience with those
Meditation practices that involve intense concentration can be sort of like turning your consciousness into a laser that's strong enough to punch holes in the walls of the psyche. And then whatever those walls were doing, gets destabilized. If you're doing a lot of destabilizing, without much time to re-stabilize, to re-integrate, then it's possible to end up really lost, and have a really terrible time.
(That was very brief, happy to elaborate. Also I don't 100% agree with the destabilize -> integrate model, and I think mark's wayfinding concept is a nice corrective to it btw, but it's useful for this explanation)
S
I'm not sure I understand the analogy. What is the psyche such that holes could be punched in it? I have had intense psychedelic trips ... I don't actually understand by what mechanisms those work either.
Like, maybe one could say they artificially stimulate sensory neurons to induce sensations / hallucinations / thoughts the mind wouldn't naturally have, via some chemical activity in the brain. But how is intense concentration doing that? I am trying to understand on a very mechanistic if simplified level what is actually happening.
Would it be accurate to say another way to say "walls" is like ... important concepts the brain uses to model the world? So if you basically physically disrupt the neural patterns involved in that modeling then things will be a bit scrambled as the brain attempts to rewire on the fly?
P
Hmm, I don't think I have a real mechanistic model of this. One thing in that direction that might be useful is an analogy from physics, which sees both psychedelics and concentration as "adding energy to the brain", thereby (temporarily) increasing connectivity, and letting things come into contact that normally don't. See https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/.
By "walls" I meant the barriers between things in the psyche that don't normally come into contact. Like for example if you're planning a difficult project, you normally don't want to think about embarrassing memories of failures in the past, and your mind will probably keep them unconscious. Or maybe a friendship where you secretly resent the person but you would never ever let them realize that.
(which overlaps with what you were saying about "walls")
S
Ooh lol I am not sure I have enough such walls.
P
hehe. hmm ok when i said walls i actually also meant to include things that are more like, the way people walk through a city, where everyone's coordinating to maintain a certain amount of space & privacy, in this delicate dance of purposeful ignoring. And imagine how that would get destabilized if suddenly everyone's thoughts started being broadcast to every passerby
D
One kind of thing that happens in some cases I think is something like
X = some complicated phenomenal something or other
(For example, "the world" "exists" "the self")
P(X) = some very important load bearing/keystone belief involving X
("I am the sort of person who is such and such and the entire meaning of my life is wrapped up in this" "there are good things in the world and that's the thing that I strive for" "other people exist, and it is other people that I live for")
Then meditation gives you access to the associated phenomenology of X, and you realize that that semantics of X doesn't quite hold together, or that means that something else is true about X (it is "illusory" or "incoherent" or "nothing could be true about it" or something). This then destabilizes P(X), and so destabilizes this person's entire life
Worse, I think that for many "basic" or "primordial" X, like "self" and "being" especially, there is a sort of "default" conception which breaks down upon phenomenological reflection/meditation
And to beat my dead hobby horse, you either get absurd P(X) statements after going through them ("the self is an illusion" "everything is fake"), or you bracket the whole thing and slowly reconceptualize what X is given the constraints of the phenomenology, and the constraints of all the P(X) it is involved in (the relationship between the X's and P(X)s isn't strictly hierarchical, and also what is changing is often the reflective interpretation of X, or conscious access to X, not so much X itself, which can leave its role in a lot of stuff unchanged)
S
None of the practices in Mark’s document seem that close to the sort of "focus on the breath" / mindfulness work that you get in beginner-level / mass market meditation courses (except maybe in the aux practices which I confess to not having read in full...). Is there something particular about "mindfulness" meditation that is more likely to cause disassociation, psychotic breaks, etc.? And is it a "dose makes the poison" kind of thing?
Mark
Whew this is a complex topic. Some general things come to mind (and it’s a really good question that I personally haven’t tried to mechanistically answer, yet, anywhere):
(1)
Just like we typically don’t over-extend our musculoskeletal joints, like hyperextend our elbows, on a whim, the mind sort of learns, over an entire lifetime, "what not to do." (Sometimes this is too conservative, as in, analogously, a physical trainer will sometimes positively encourage someone do something they thought they couldn’t do, with a healthy, safe outcome.)
Additionally, different people’s systems are more and less "precariously arranged." For some people, if they’re somehow poked in the wrong way (whatever that might mean), nothing much happens, and the person’s system will sort of return to some equilibrium (like a ball in the bottom of a bowl). For other people, one small poke could set off a long cascade of further destabilizing and dysregulating effects. (Over a very long period of time, meditation helps a person’s mind to be more like the first example.)
(People’s minds become more like the latter, precariously arranged, when things have happened that are too fast, too surprising, too painful, too confusing, too adversarially perverse, etc., combined with not having a life situation where they can patiently work through all those sorts of things having happened. And, usually, there are internal and external vicious feedback loops, where some of those things beget more of those things.)
Meditation can be the one small poke. If meditation instructions are "sufficiently different" from what a person normally does with their (body)mind, they might not realize that what they’re about to do will have a potentially destabilizing effect (and it can escalate quite suddenly, very worst case).
I think it’s not TOOOOOOOOO uncommon for people to have "full blown delusions and psychosis" somewhere latent in their system, sort of carefully walled off, even unknown to them, sometimes in a precarious way. Where did this come from? It could be a sort of combination of childhood fantasy crashing into some sort of traumatic event, and that sorts of gets "avoided" and self mixes under the surface for a long time. Also, a person might encounter genuinely invasive nonverbal/coercive/"psychic" stuff from a "dark wizard-y" type person, and a childhood or religious part of them interprets what happened, earnestly (and understandably), as magic or aliens, etc. The adult mind recoils from this and walls it off, but then this "latent stuff" doesn’t get metabolized, processed, integrated, grown up, healed, etc. Then, if the person gets poked in the wrong way, all that stuff comes up and sort of (at least temporarily) "takes over," because it happens to be so traumatically intense or immersive (as if it had just happened or was still happening, because it never got fully metabolized).
(Meditation, properly done, slowly creates a sort of "complex cradle" or "complementary space" for dream, delusion, psychosis, and then slowly titrates those things in, over days, weeks, months, and years, so it can safely metabolized, helped, listened to, accepted, etc. Even then, it can get harrowing.)
(2)
Another thing that can happen is that a person assumes that meditation instructions should be executed in a stereotyped manner and that the effect of meditation is purely good.
Then, if ANYTHING AT ALL BAD happens, the person assumes the right thing to do is MORE OF THE SAME MEDITATION they were doing.
Worst case, this can produce colossal feedback loop escalations and amplifications of bad things.
(3)
Further, there’s a way in which most people don’t start out with a "general undo." They can undo mistakes that are sort of a common type, for them.. But if they’ve just done something new, or a bunch of new things in a row, the bodymind system may have no easy way at all to reverse what’s happened, and, counterintuitively, worst case, learning how to reverse a new, unwanted thing can sometimes take weeks, months, or even years. And, a destabilized person may not be "well resourced" enough to be able to start figuring out how to work through or undo something, for a very long time. And this can contribute to chronic stuff in addition to the acute possibilities mentioned in (1) and (2).
(4)
(As to why some bad states can have similar features between people ("I broke the universe," "everyone is fake"), there are only so many degrees of freedom of the system. And just like in "normal operatng mode" people arrive at similar conclusions (I am a person; I have a body), when the system is pushed to stereotyped extremes, a different people will come to similar conclusions, even if those conclusions seems strange or impossible to a person in "normal mode," e.g. "I am god, jesus, etc.")
(5)
(So, in my stuff, as best I currently know how, in case the reader is "1 in N" and their bodymind is precariously arranged (as are most people, at least a tiny bit), or they have latent intense stuff, or they’re predisposed to take instructions very literally and double down on them, that’s why I err on the side of all the warnings and qualifiers. Granted, they may obscure the forest for the trees or even prime people to experience some bad things.)
Q
S, here’s a concrete made-up story that vaguely resembles stuff that has happened to people i know. let’s say you were sexually abused as a child (shockingly common afaict), and it was really bad, and you did a really good job walling off the part of you that experienced that bc it’s too painful to get in touch with, and you sort of gradually develop a bunch of compensations to deal with this, like being really adhd or suddenly getting really sleepy whenever you get near that whole thing. "precariousness"
a way some people meditate can end up repeatedly forcing them to come into contact with material like this before they’re ready, like maybe they double-down on being with some feeling or sensation related to the trauma that is usually being dissociated or distracted away from, and it can sort of spill out into consciousness and be overwhelming in the same way it was when they were a child. it may not come with any explicit memories so it just feels like suddenly everything is terrifying and bad for no reason. and if they don’t have a way of dealing with this they could end up in an excruciating flashback that doesn’t end, that could be bad enough that it feels like suicide is the only way out.
M (not Mark)
S, one experience I've had that didn't lead to destabilization, but easily could have:
Near the end of a period in my life when I'd been doing psychedelics, well, a bit too often, I was sitting with some friends, totally sober, and suddenly "lost track" of which things were alive and which things were dead.
Best I can figure, there is something in me that tracks "alive/not alive" and "person/not person" and "me/not me." After spending a few months having those concepts poked at, dissolved, and relaxed, I suspect that the "trackers" got a little confused and broken for a bit. Luckily I was in a good place with good people and able to laugh at what was happening and commune with my couch for a few hours, but if it had happened under stress, or something else load-bearing had gotten confused at the same time, I can see how it might have been extremely upsetting
Meditation can break or dissolve those load-bearing but surprisingly fragile concepts much like psychedelics can, but you can also do stuff that will help you ride it out with few or zero side effects.
S
Ok thank you all, I think there are enough commonalities here that I am piecing together a little bit of an idea of what is going on from an inside perspective. Another question I have though is, I can see this happening with psychedelics use, but does anyone have a sense of what exact practices in meditation can lead to this -- some of what some people said sounded like P1 gone terribly overboard. Anyone able to summarize in a bit more detail what practices that lady in that Harper's article was using? Or is it just ANY meditation in general? waves vaguely I imagine different practices would tend to have different risks -- the article made it sound like the mass market mindfulness stuff can lead to not being able to feel feelings. I just find this topic so fascinating and wish there was something like this Cheetah House table but with more mechanism in it https://www.cheetahhouse.org/symptoms
L
It sounds like this was a [...] retreat, which is a pretty widespread/standardized version of a particular vipassana practice. You sit for an hour to two hours, multiple times a day, and I think mainly practice a body scan? So very granular attention to tiny areas of the body, scanning slowly through your entire body.
It’s seemed sketch because the main teaching is a recorded video, with other teachers around to ask questions. It seems noticeably less flexible/adaptive/responsive than other retreat formats.
The fact that the teacher here just doubled down on practicing through it is not surprising.
another description here: uggcf://fjvff-puevf.zrqvhz.pbz/gur-10-qnl-tbraxn-ivcnffnan-ergerng-n-jneavat-p6np4963sr50 [rot13 encoded by the editor; Last accessed 2021-04-11]
A
Mechanism-wise it could be something like privileging atoms of bare sensory experience with attention over more gestalt mental objects. For instance, when encountering pain from sitting, trying to notice the individual sensations that comprise the pain and finding that the pain suddenly dissolves. Reinforcing this kind of thing enough presumably will make it happen more easily and perhaps more globally. I don't know what kinds of meditation - I think this is related to your '10K hours of what' question upthread - but I suspect that to the extent that the meditation instruction includes some "attend closely to everything that is happening" line, something like this is bound to crop up eventually. My very crude story is that the thing that differentiates some practices is some method of integrating that stuff in a net enlivening and functional way, rather than blowing up load-bearing cognitive structures and seeing what happens.
For the record, the blowing stuff up approach was really fine for me for a long time. A lot of my stuff really just seemed to be straightforward spandrels that were producing neuroticism and in whose absence it was easy to reorganize. Then later I ran into stuff that wasn't like that, as far as I could tell.
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[Note, immediately below, it might seems like "nebulosity" or "emptiness" (or "noneternalism") isn't acknowledged, but note that this is a first-pass, orienting exoteric doctrine. In the document as a whole, I often use the term "inappropriate reification" or "provisionality" where "nebulosity" or "emptiness" could mostly be used in place of this phrase. Also see section: far reaches of meditation] (and the very terse and cryptic section "epistemic-aesthetic rigor") for more on truth, etc.
Objective and singular truth exists (and/or objective reality exists and objective truth corresponds to it).
Objective and singular goodness(/ethics/morality) exists.
The human mind is typically confused, uncertain, and ignorant. (Or, a typical person is...)
Nevertheless, we can know typically error-prone approximations of that objective truth and we can know/do approximations of that objective goodness.
Further, the human mind is asymptotically perfectible. That is, we can become better people in a practically unlimited way, all things being equal.
???There are more worse ways than better ways to interact with oneself and others.
In any moment you are the final arbiter of what’s true and good. You have to trust yourself while also being open to being wrong. This is hard but can get easier. [Remember, in the relevant sense, you are the sole and final arbiter of what’s true, good, and beautiful. Feel what you feel. Do what you do. And, again, I think Crowley got something right, here, in the relevant sense (and possibly other things, too; i just haven’t investigated): Do what thou wilt, that is the whole of the law. Love under will. (or something)]
It’s possible to do more harm than good when trying or intending to do good and become better. (Also, you are the final arbiter of what’s better.)
Using systematic (albeit self-adapted) method is often or at least sometimes a good way to improve one’s approximations of truth and goodness. Stated alternatively, we can systematically seek to get the things we want and we can systematically come have better wants (want better things).
Some methods are better than others, depending on what you’re trying to do, such as knowing and doing better.
We want what we want until we want something else, and it’s ok or good to want what we want for as long as we want it.
Perhaps evil or malevolence is objective but things are only bad relative to your skill, power, and knowledge. Perfectibility (asymptotically) includes solving all your problems on your terms, in your words, until there is nothing left that is bad.
You might not feel good and safe all the time, but it’s good to want to feel good and safe, and it’s good to seek to stably feel good and safe or to feel good and safe as much as possible.
Without exception, and no matter how subtle the feeling, there’s always a valid sense in which, if it feels wrong it is wrong. [i.e. if X makes you feel wrong, then X is somehow wrong.*] People often will systematically and relentlessly deny the relevant sense in order to try to immorally coerce and control you. Senses other than the relevant sense can be used to inappropriately destroy institutions. People trying to control you will try to convince you the former is the latter (among an unlimited number of other tactics that don’t refer to groups or institutions.) Of course, you could be mistaken about something or both could be happening. But that’s what the controlling people will do.
You might get hit by a bus or meteor or your cryo chamber might run out of geopolitics or something. But, it’s possible to have a good life, anyway, and it’s possible to impeccably work to reduce the chances of such bad things while having a good, complete, rich, full, life.
Most people will probably be happier striving for and maintaining a stable romantic pair-bond and having one or more kids.
Love properly labeled and defined is probably a uniquely important thing.
Some truths are exceptionless/universal and eternal or sempiternal or timeless or outside-of-time or something. With correct method, you can know those truths by making use of whatever experiences you’ve already had (because those truths will massively redundantly inhere in those experiences without exception.) Some truths and knowledge of correct/good/moral knowledge/behavior are contingent (or relative to, or contextually dependent on, this world and time and place) and, to obtain them, you’ll need to dispel ignorance, to have experiences, to learn. You’ll be wrong and bad a lot. Also, you are good.
Progress is often multidimensionally nonmonotonic.
These are just words. This is just your interpretation of these words. Are there even words? You can’t know anything for sure; and that can be ok, with application of method or just because. There are more precise and accurate and deeper and more correct ways ways to say all the above.
More and more and more of everyone may come together to do good things that we couldn’t do alone.
Sometimes, an edgy joke should go here.
Let go...
Notes:
* Restatements:
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Content warning: Maybe don't read this if you're in an existential dread spiral. Or do. Not sure. It's incomplete, ragged edges. Anyway, this is fuckin' random beautiful brutalist shit (in my opinion) written by some random person at some snapshot instant in time, about metaphysics, existentialism, (non-)eternalism, (non-)nihilism, cosmology, mortality
See also: eternity, suffering, death
*
There is no thing, nothing, that can perfectly, eternally last. Also, there are no gods; no god’s-eye-views; there is no heaven, no hell.
You’re probably going to die, sooner or later, and at uncertain time. This is even with the possibility of life extension, "health extension," though, at the time of this writing, everyone is, in some sense, dying of a terminal illness (aging). In any case, the sun’s going to go out, protons are going to decay, and eventually everything’s going to get cold and/or entropically isotropic. Or the universe is going to big crunch, or whatever. That’s a long ways away, but in any case, we probably can’t escape the universe. It’s just this, nowhere to go. It’s just us.
You probably can’t take anything with you, when you die, including memories, achievements, anything. It’s probably just nothingness.
Life generally involves a lot of uncontrollable and sometimes abruptly surprising suffering.
Nevertheless, excepting suicide, violence, accident, health misfortune, aging, we just keep spontaneously happening, we just keep living, we prefer some things to other things, we act: we seek wellbeing, satisfaction, intimacy, belonging, sex, procreation, interestingness, fun.
So, we want things; we care; it matters. And, also, you can relax! No one gets out alive, in the end. Ah, but you can’t relax! There are still hard problems of living right now and of wanting to keep living.
We’re sort of all in our own nebulous virtual reality bubbles. We make it real because that’s all we know. It’s both real and it isn’t real, like the stakes are real, as far as they go, which makes some things ghastly, horrifying, macabre, hellish. And also it’s possible to see through all that, though in some senses it doesn’t change anything, and/but, at the same time it does--any or all of that can be heaven, at least in principle, with time.
Nebulous virtual reality bubbles, or not, we ever reach across the gap, for each other, and arguably touch, alone and together…
Life is sort of about living in the light of all that, letting everything settle around all of that. Meditation helps everything loosen up, so everything can sort of settle around all of that. Better not to start; if you start, better to finish. Lots of people reading this will have already started. None of this has to be taken as sort of a premise, and none of this is something to hold onto. If any of this is a thing, you’ll find your way there through practice, bottom up, nothing special to be done.
It’s sometimes possible to love and be loved, and to be happy, in hell. And it’s sometimes possible to alight on wellbeing and beauty, for a time, together. Wellbeing and wisdom. Time, space, matter, energy, consciousness, computation, life itself.
Anyway, all of this might be partially or totally wrong! Don’t take my word for it!
*
*Re "Never go full Buddhist": https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/full-retard ** [Last accessed 2021-05-21]
**This is not politically correct.
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There’s an ongoing project of collecting all the reasons why people bounce off of the document, plus corresponding supplementary information:
The document does require text interpretation. Even if it was written in clean, grammatical prose, it would still need to be incrementally parsed and interpreted. It does need to be studied. Lengthy explanations would lose the "cutting at the joints," in the document, where every word is included for a reason. Eventually, I do want there to be a softer entry. But that might be separate from the document itself. This does mean there are "startup costs" and initial cognitive overhead.
The main practices do need to be learned incrementally. It’s not possible to just pick them up and start doing them. Even after one can "hold an entire practice in their head," the doing of it will still evolve substantially over time. So, there is additional cognitive overhead and a learning curve or even learning cliff, here, too.
The main practices might initially seem not like meditation. But, they do asymptote at something that superficially looks like noting practice and shamatha without support. But, this is approached in a bottom up way, as opposed to a top-down way. (As a longer discussion, I currently think canonical concentration practices as well as things like metta being used as a concentration practice, are ultimately counterproductive, because their top-down nature sends a person off sharply on a direction that hasn’t been properly error-checked. And, I currently believe a person will have to do a lot of backtracking, given my understanding and experience of how the mind works.)
Some of the auxilliary/preliminary practices might seem suspiciously non-meditationy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or something. One of my goals was to combine the best of "western depth psychology" with the best of meditation. Lots of meditation practioners and teachers do have crushed or unresolved trauma and behavioral issues. The so-called "purifications" do a bunch of the work of western psychology, but they don’t go all the way, hence the somatic issues, sex scandals, and behavioral blindspots of lots of meditators. One can think of this practice as supercharging the purifications, making them much more comprehensive and thorough. At the same time, the practices do produce an experience of emptiness, and, asymptotically, nonduality. These practices go all the way to the very end, and then some. There is further discussion of this in this later section:
"but is it meditation? (a dialogue between J and Mark)"
*
A, a collaborator, says:
>>>
My 30 second version for a[n...] introduction is:
This document contains meditation instructions, and some things you may want to be aware of before starting or in the middle of a meditative journey.
Some instructions and signposts are (probably) necessary, as figuring it all out on ones own is a tall order. Still, there is a sense in which you will have to "figure it all out on your own," anyway, instructions notwithstanding. Receiving any instructions causes problems, as people try to "do the instructions" instead of "do the thing." This document contains one stab at a "minimum effective instruction set" — use as though "some assembly is required" where "some" means "this document and your interpretation are two ends of the most difficult game of telephone yet devised, and there’s no way it was written correctly or interpreted correctly on the first n tries."
It starts by exploring in what way talking about "the end of the path" is coherent (or not). Then there are some notes on culture and other topics, and then the instructions and additional information are included after that.
Do the thing, and good luck.
[...]
this document and [the reader's] interpretation are two ends of the most difficult telephone game devised, and there’s no way it was written correctly or interpreted correctly on the first n tries
[...]
Might replace "do the thing" with "handle all your concerns, bottom up" or [something like that].
<<<
("Telephone" or "the telephone game" or "Chinese whispers" is game where players whisper a message, from person to the next, until the last person finally says the final received message out loud, and the first person reports the original message. There is almost always a nearly inevitable (and humorous) difference between the first and last message, due to all sorts of possible reasons for successive transmission error.)
*
I'll finally add that this document aspires to be more and more radically complete, over time. It's already quite comprehensive, along maybe all necessary dimensions, but more and more detail and clarity (including cleaner prose and smoother on-ramps) could be added, for a long time. Having an extremely experienced teacher readily available will maybe always be a massive accelerant, but my ideal would be to completely obviate the need for a teacher--I'd like future people to be able to completely reconstruct the practice, and succeed at it, even one thousand years from now (2020), even if the living, person-to-person lineage gets broken, i.e. if everyone using this document dies. That would be sad and likely people would change a lot over one thousand years (cf. biotech and neurotech), but it's likely this material would still be valuable, indirectly or quite directly, just as it is, right now.
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There’s sort of three main types of sections in this document. These are something like the following:
At the time of this writing, it’s not always obvious which kind of section a particular section is, and some sections are a mix of these three sections.
Because “the very being and seeming of the world” can be fluid, the boundaries between these section types (or prose types) can be nebulous, too.
One possible problem with “theoretical model” sections is there can be a temptation to try to “directly see the model in the world,” sort of like a direct overlay versus like a loose analogy. And this sort of shades into something like what I call “preconceiving” or “attempted/direct reifying.”
The latter is something like knowingly or unknowingly almost trying to “make it real, as such” where “it” refers to the ontology or dynamics of some particular theoretical model section. This is similar to Daniel Ingram acknowledging that meditation maps can sometimes predispose practioners to experiencing an facsimile or imagined or fabricated version of a meditative experience. Though, as best I can tell, he and I both believe that the value of maps and models, at least in general, outweigh the risk of this failure mode.
For meditative phenomena, it’s a bitttttttt more clear cut. One either had the “real” meditative experience or they didn’t, albeit perhaps partially or faintly, or something.
For theoretical models, it’s a bit more nebulous. For my part, I authored models the way I did because the writing was experientially resonant and evocative for myself and hopefully for readers. And, as previously noted, the very seeming and being of the world, while not arbitrary, is conditioned and malleable. While I do think there’s a pretty clear (if loopy!) gradient towards something “truer,” “less mediated,” something. Anything along the way (and asymptotically “forever”) that works for you, works for you.
And so if something, at times, seems more usefully theoretical, and, at other times, seems more usefully “phenomenological,” and sometimes the distinction is nebulous, great! (And if something isn’t resonant at all or seems actively bad for your practice and experience, it’s ok to set it completely aside, temporarily or indefinitely. That’s partly why there’s a lot of writing from a lot of different angles [though hopefully well-organized and not too redundant].)
So holding stuff loosely, experimentally, provisionally is good, as well as self-authoring your own stuff, explicitly or intuitively--which you’ll naturally do more and more until that eats up everything, including itself, with no remainder, long run, as it were, in some sense.
So, yeah, analogies, metaphors, touchstones, experiments.
And so then, the more problematic thing is “systematic direct reifying” where you’re sort of trying to continuously spray theoretical models everywhere, to tile everything with how you think it should be or how you think it should be experienced, based on what you read in this document or from other sources, teachers, etc. This will inevitably happen a little bit, but try not to do this! Hold stuff loosely and provisionally and experimentally. Let yourself see what you see versus what you think you should see or what was written down somewhere. Heuristic cautions are "effort", "pushing." Heuristic good signs are, generally, costlessness, effortlessness, and things "coming to you," "arising or becoming apparent on their own." (With exceptions to everything because, in part, of how the mind sort of untangles itself!)
Whether you read this before starting practice or only later, you may still eventually find that you’ve been trying to “direct reify” your intepretation of material in this book or from other meditation books or teachers or via/with other experiences from long ago, and you may find you’ve been doing that for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours, or for much of your life.
And that’s ok!!!!!!!!!!!!
The mind has a natural tendency to do this, for some people, some of the time, even when we're expecting it, to some extent. It’s accounted for in the “ten thousand hours of practice” thing. Much of that ten thousands hours is sort of backtracking, and that still falls under the ten thousand hours. It’s accounted for. So not fifteen thousand hours composed of ten thousand hours of doing the thing with another five thousand hours mixed in, just ten thousand hours of meditation, which includes backtracking. (Of course, ten thousand hours is itself is a rough heuristic and it’ll be different for different people and ten thousand hours isn’t the end; it’s just roughly when things kind of settle down a bit and become a bit more predictable).
I’m kind of rambling about ten thousand hours in the previous paragraph because it can be helpful to consider that there are no shortcuts--rushing, corner-cutting isn’t really possible. One sort of has to “walk the entire mind,” every little nook and cranny and tiny seam. That’s how the mind and meditation work. Good meditation writing and so on will help reduce some backtracking, but really things mostly proceed by exhaustive process of elimination (which works because bodymind is finite in a good way!).
So noting there are no shortcuts, as it were, just patient (as best one can) practice, “slow is smooth; smooth is fast”—-well, not fast, in this case; it’s incredibly slow, but smooth is a smoother ride--but, anyway, noting there are no shortcuts, just shimmery, delicate work, something fizzy and buzzy and spontaneous and sweeping, sometimes just delicate, this might lessen the pressure to fall into trying to “direct reify.”
And, finally, if you do find yourself doing something like “direct reifying,” it might have been going on already for thousands of hours or a lifetime, and might still continue for thousands of hours, even if you know it’s happening!, and that’s ok. That’s part of the de-entrenchment, burn-off, metabolization, integration, redo-to-undo process. Even if it’s “wrong,” in some sense, the fact of it happening at any particular point isn’t itself wrong. It’s just happening beause of prior causes and conditions, and that’s ok. (Some of this language is being used out of order and will make more sense after reading future sections.)
Anyway, all of this applies to this written section, itself, too. Try not to take this section too seriously or to worry too much about whether you’re doing it right, and so on. Different meditation systems, depending, might not have to worry about this sort of thing at all. Different meditation systems sort of need different cautions or lack of caution, because of all the other explicit and implicit elements of the system, and how they all work together, in general, and how they work or don’t work for any particular individual. So do hold any particular system lightly, including this one.
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The goal of the practice is to have a good life, in the most broad and ordinary sense, on your terms, in your words, in your frame, or in no frame. That might look still, quiet, and intimate. That might look big and beautiful. (That might or might not include a good death.) That might look superficially normative and be quite nonnormative under the hood and in the cracks. Or that might quite normative in lots of ways. But the important thing is that it is good for you and everyone you care about (which might be no one, everyone, etc.). It might end too soon or go on too long or who knows. In some sense you might fail: Maybe you or people you care about will get hit by a bus, a heart attack, a meteor, or a nuclear war. But the goal is to have a good (peaceful, interesting, exciting, fun, intimate, quiet, safe, stable, normal, extraordinary) life. That’s the point of all of this. (Asymptotically, nonmonotonically approaching self-perfection might be an interesting, fun, mediately traumatizing, opportunity-costly, incidental side effect.)
Part of having a good life is preparing and account for (the likely possibility of) death such that you actually have a good life. One can have a dispreference for death, while not fearing it, while competently and proactively avoiding it, while seamlessly having that be a part of everything else that is good.
One might have to give up everything in the pursuit of this goal, strangely, weirdly, even as lots of things stay superficially the same. In some ways getting everything you want will first cost you everything, will cost you your entire world, as you realize what you want is nothing like what you initially thought, that reality is nothing like what you initially thought, even though what you want appears superficially similar, in some ways, to what you previously wanted.
You get the good stuff back eventually, though.
"Better not to start. If you start, better to finish."
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."
"Before practice, the mountains were just mountains. During practice, the mountains were no longer mountains. Eventually, the mountains were just mountains again."
Your perception, behavior, ontology, judgments, and preferences get refactored, with lots of mistakes made along the way. Thousands of hours. Lots of opportunity cost. Also lots of opportunity gain. All things being equal, with enough starting resources (financial, relationships) and grace.
*
[This subsection originally published:
https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2021/02/17/commercialization/ and https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1362449583633272843
last accessed: 2021-02-18
(I'll remove the commercialization/distribution pieces, and put them somewhere else, when that relative priority rises high enough!) ]
(0a) I’m having a low-key, exploratory, commercialization networking call, with respect to my stuff, and it inspired me to try to make some bullet points with respect to context and key, counterintuitive constraints.
(0b) Note! I ran out of time to edit this, so there’s super-compressed and maybe cramped and cryptic tweets jammed into this thread, but I figured better to get it out the door.
(1) Key insight: The mind is more malleable than contemporary psychology and, arguably, even contemporary contemplative/meditation communities of practice currently believe. I like to say the mind is 99% software, 1% hardware.
(2a) The space of this malleability is large and multidimensional, but it’s not arbitrary; it has directionality. That directionality, taken to its conclusion, in the "positive" direction, yields something like (a) wellbeing and (b) "creative, proactive, fit-to-context."
(3) Some features of "creative, proactive, fit-to-context" can be "outside view guessed," and planned for, but also must be "individually found, from the inside." This is sometimes a demanding, fraught, counterintuitive process.
(4) It’s also a lengthy process, say on the order of 10,000 hours. My suspicion is that this cannot be shortened without very large advances in neurobiology. The speed limit is simply the speed limit of "learning," involving protein synthesis, downtime, sleep, etc.
(5) Good things happen during that 10,000 hours, but one can’t count on any particular good thing on any particular timeline or ever. That is, part of the process is NOT "having NO goals" but self-alignedly releasing the need for most any PARTICULAR (object-level) goal.
(6) "No particular (object-level) goal" is fundamental to the process, because bodymind change is "path constrained." It can only proceed by gaining "slack," through finding increases in optionality, through "releasing particularities," little by little.
(7a) (It’s important to emphasize "non-arbitrariness," as "no particular goal" might seem nihilist, on face. Actually, though, while not "particularly" constrained, the system is "abstractly constrained," by one’s self-sovereign determination of "what’s good." It’s complicated.)
(8a) Somewhat more incidentally, not only are goals "non-particular" (and dynamic), or "fluid but not arbitrary," but so is ultimately ALL perceptual/representational/behavioral ontology. The system (un-)commits to "no particular thing, anywhere."
(8b) Yet, simultaneously, the system is somehow (aconceptually? preconceptually?) radically concrete and particular.)
(9a) Because of this sort of "global lack of particularity," a value proposition might be:
(9b) This process, in some sense, will cost you everything (all things) and give you nothing (no things).
But, to be a bit paradoxical or contradictory, you will get general wellbeing and wisdom. The ongoing tax on that is being fully open to everyday pain and even suffering.
(9c) (Wellbeing, wisdom, pain, suffering, etc., how all that works, is outside the scope of this tweet thread.)
(10) Regarding commercialization, the process is so hard and so personal, even though there are near-universal, highest-level features. It’s hard to generalize and streamline a 10,000-hour personal journey.
(11) Of course, so far, I have tried to generalize and streamline (though not commercialize!) the process, with my writing, most recently as ongoing work on a 100,000-plus-word "meditation protocol document," which people are putting to use.
(12) So far, I’ve mostly punted on money/commercialization, with an open-access promise, because there’s a way in which meditative progress is, in my current understanding, complexly facilitated or retarded in a "full-stack, culture-complete" sort of way.
(13) One aspect of "full-stack, culture-complete" are the "dynamics of exclusionary stratification": [see next tweet]
(14) I find people get really sensitive about commercialization, though not in the way you might think. (note: I’m not subtweeting anyone or referencing particular private conversations, here).
(15) There are maybe sentiments of how else could modern distribution-at-scale work but through commercialization or stratified monetary gatekeeping, that I’m actually limiting net access & adoption by not (yet) somehow having a high-status, ambitious, exponential business model.
(16) There are maybe sentiments that I’m playing too low-status, that I must insufficiently ambitious, and so on.
(17) But, my ambition is, in fact, global and multigenerational. It’s just that, memetic fidelity, antifragility, and multigenerational adaptability (without memetic perversion? memetic corruption?) is hard.
(18) And, we’re still learning, what the thing is that we, hopefully non-rigidly, don’t want corrupted in the first place. And/but, I/we could be wrong about risks and rewards, which I why I’m engaging with critique and feedback and suggestions, at an accelerating rate.
(19) I think the (maybe) grumbling is a really good sign. It means people perceive value and want to participate in network effects with respect to that value.
(20/20) Anyway, more and more, I’m looking to what’s next, with this work and more generally. I’m also interested in governance, DeFi, AI, and much, much more. So this is all swirling around, all together, in a good way.
(21/20) No particular fixed goal(s), no fixed ontologies (perception, representation, behavior), structural fluidity, might sound kind of chaotic and tangly, and it can be like that, at first, in a waxing and waning pattern.
(22/20) Eventually, across thousands of hours, things become generally quiet, still, and settled, while remaining proactively, creatively sensitive and responsive, as the world turns and true, limit-case unknown unknowns present themselves.
(23/20) It’s sort of the best of both worlds–on the one hand, relatively settled stability, perfectly suitable for pursuing adaptive, stable, very-long-term goals, contingent on the state and path of the world and everything, and, on the other hand, a capacity for continual growth and change, the pursuit of novelty and knowledge, adaptability to misfortune, and the passion and engagement and equanimity and appetite for all of it, whether quiet intimacy, the scope of the whole world, or both, or something else entirely.
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The end state is arrived at asymptotically. There’s always room for improvement because the world keeps changing. The journey will often be nonmonotonic, too.
In any case, what it sort of looks like is coming to be intrinsically motivated to optimize self and world, seamlessly, without limit or exception, to care for everything into the infinite future, including yourself, all together, all at once. (This comes with something like "getting lost in the intrinsically interesting whole-person intricacies of other people.")
Being this way, all the way down to the core of your being, sort of cleanly solves all your problems in the moment and in the limit. ["Infinity" is just a concept, etc., etc. Don’t take refuge in your interpretation of these words. Let it all go.]
Another way to express this is "true (global) total (maximum) positive sum with no negative externalities."
Another way to express this is "embodying a perfectly unified, eternal, sempiternal, and exceptionless will that’s going after the most good and best thing for everybody and everything, including yourself, without compromise or exception, all at once.
One comes to see that there are no terrible, hard truths and no terrible, hard tradeoffs.
One comes to know deeply that, if something feels or seems wrong, no matter how subtle, still, small, and quiet, then something is wrong, somewhere, and it doesn’t have to be.
You have to feel and listen, eventually, ultimately, to each, every, and all still, small, and quiet voice:
"If you’re good to them, then they’ll become good you."
All of the above is not "turiya" or "nonduality," but it is compatible with that "stateless state."
Progressive insight into emptiness unlocks the capacity for turiya and the capacity for all the above. And progress towards turiya is usually progress towards all the above, and vice versa. Using the practices in this document will steadily, albeit nonmonotonically, move you towards all of this. You’ll incidentally get all the meditation-y goodness, too, without having to do anything special.
You will get all the meditation-y goodness, in addition to everything else (which I suspect was the goal of many non-modern-Buddhist systems).
You’ll be aiming at and asymptotically, nonmonotonically arriving at "mastery"/"perfection"/"flawlessness".
There’s a final, additional piece which completes of all of this, that’s something like "proactive recursive bootstrapping," progressively structuring self and world to learn about self and world more and more efficiently and effectively.
Again, working with the practices in this document are intended to efficiently take you towards everything above.
A failure mode is trying to smash yourself into being what you think all the above must be like, by trying to directly aim at preconceived notions. If you don’t do all this "bottom up," then you’ll tie yourself in knots.
The better thing to do is to go after what you want, systematically and iteratively resolving or correcting internal conflict and contradiction and error (with respect to goodness, truth, will, desire, etc., etc., etc.) along the way, and you’ll likely eventually find yourself in the neighborhood of something like what’s described, here. It will eventually be unified and elegant and a simplicity on the far side of complexity and not overwhelming or scattering or impossible. That’s what solving the puzzle box of the mind does. And it will be fun, meaningful, interesting, equanimous, captivating, loving, intimate, exciting, erotic, whatever.
Remember, in the relevant sense, you are the sole and final arbiter of what’s true, good, and beautiful. Feel what you feel. Do what you do. And, again, I think Crowley got something right, here, in the relevant sense (and possibly other things, too; i just haven’t investigated):
Do what thou wilt, that is the whole of the law. Love under will. (or something)
A key insight: If you know you’re doing the absolute best you can at all times in each moment taking into account all future times and all possible futures deep down in your bones then you just relax and let go, and it feels good
Related: You can stop checking, compensating, reminding, self-correcting, etc., if you know both that you’re up to date and also that you’ll responsively and seamlessly update in the presence of new information.
The "good for everyone all at once thing" is equivalent to solving all of your problems.
[For everything above, don’t take refuge in your interpretation of these words, or, if you do, hold it lightly. Let it all go. Let it all go to get the real thing back, later, in the right way, beyond your current conception. This is all just words. The whole document is just words. You must find your own truth or lack thereof, meaning or meaninglessness.]
Said one more time, the goal and the end-state (cf. wisdom, mastery, compassion, love, altruism):
The goal is to arrange self, life, and the entire world so that the guiltless seeking of joy (fun, excitement, interest, intimacy) and the expression/exemplification of love/compassion is safe, good, constructive and unconflicting.
And then you arrive at intrinsically wholehearted, heartfelt, affinity-feeling, pleasurable and rewarding and satisfying [and non-naive, competent, strategic and error-correcting] altruism/compassion/love [that truly expects no personal gain in return and only hopes for something truly good and experientially good for the other person] that’s romantic, paternal, maternal, egalitarian, platonic, and globally inclusive, that nevertheless delivers equal or greater personal safety/fulfillment/everything than selfish[ly-oriented] planning/intention/behavior. [You may find that there’s nothing that you can securely or permanently or stably hold onto for yourself, anyway, that there even is anything to hold onto, anyway.]
There is no end-state, though. Eventually you perhaps become the practice and it just goes by itself, in activity and rest/alone-time, but then you keep going, improving, learning, learning how to learn, proactively learning, proactively living, living your life, etc.
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[Originally published as: "Post-conceptual meta-goodness and changing in the deepest of ways"]
[last accessed: 20200824 https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/03/28/post-conceptual-meta-goodness-and-changing-in-the-deepest-of-ways/]
So, what’s good? Like really actually good, not clunky blocky stilted cringy good?
Or we could say, what do you desire that you endorse desiring?
Or we could say, what are you always already in motion trying to get, whether you realize or it not, whether you’re reflectively thinking about it or not?
There will be maybe lots of things, probably one or more things is in the intimacy or connection space, partially involving in-real-life interaction or perhaps partially involving, say, creative expression. And then there will probably be things involving safety and achievement, including stuff that involves feelings of exhilaration or excitement or deep satisfaction or meaning.
Importantly, there will be ways in which all of this is deeply personal and idiosyncratic. For you, it’s not just some abstract "intimacy" that is good or feels good, but your highly personal, highly specific version, what you might even call "the real thing." And the same goes for everything else you’re trying to do, be, have, achieve, etc.
That is, some or even much of what’s happening around us or will happen to us, we have no preference about, but for some things, we have exquisitely precise preferences, perhaps especially for care and safety, mutual understanding, and sexuality.
Sometimes we want really, really specific things, and there is no substitute.
Perhaps the whole point of everything is that we create a world where everyone can pursue their personal desires and goals.
It’s all fun and games when people’s desires and goals are complementary and compatible.
And/but there’s another way of looking at desires, goals, and goodness.
Sometimes desires and goals can be both problematic and fixed.
For example, you want a really, really, really, really specific intimacy thing or sex thing or achievement thing, and sometimes other things are so good or more important that you can set that thing aside, but some things, for whatever reason, are so important that you can’t.
You can’t set it aside, even though, for example, you’re having trouble finding someone complementary to do it with or arranging your life to be able to do it.
I think for some people, the reason their relationships keep failing or life situations keep failing is because of extreme specificity in wants/needs/desires that are ill-suited to present, contingent circumstances. (There are of course many other reasons.)
So, when faced with extreme specificity, one might strive even more mightily to find the right person or to arrange their life in a particular way. Tremendous collateral and direct good can come from this and also agony. One might also finally resign on getting a particular thing. There can be peace and dignity in this and also agony.
With tools like meditation, there is an additional option which is to change ones deepest wants/needs/preferences. Some preferences can be changed with relatively superficial introspection or exposure to new environments or people. Other preferences can "go all the way to the bottom" and seem immovable, even if they cause tremendous distress. And these sorts of things can be a reason to invest in hundreds or even thousands of hours or meditation, even with its risk and opportunity cost.
If you decide to meditate to change deep things about yourself, that can take months or years, and patience and forebearance are assets here.
But, I’m definitely not saying "crush your desires." Nor am I saying indiscriminately indulge them, though I’m way more on that side. Your desires are your desires until and unless they’re not.
Desire and perceived goodness aren’t arbitrary even if there’s tremendous idiosyncratic contingency in them and nor do they change arbitrarily.
Whatever desires you’ve got, whatever is good as far as you experience and can tell, it’s desirous and good until and unless it isn’t.
So let’s say you’re not crushing or smashing yourself, and little by little things start to change, even while some things are the same as they ever were. And eventually something deeper starts to change, but you can’t even let yourself imagine that this even deeper and more problematic thing will change. And then that finally does too...
So at first one is sort of trying to solve problems and achieve goals (and ignore them and resign on them).
And then with meditation (and therapy and journaling) one realizes that, at least sometimes, and then more and more, it can be possible to not just solve problems but also "dissolve" many problems and not just achieve goals but also to replace goals with better goals.
So there’s this meta-dimension that starts to come into focus. This perhaps whole new degree of freedom with which to relate to self and world.
And, eventually, as you get more and more of a taste of this moving through the contigency of desire/problem/goal space, you might start to ask what is even good anyway?
So much of what you thought was good, that felt immovably intrinsically desirable or good, turned out to be more contingent and more movable than you thought. (Again, you never have to give anything up in any deep way until it’s safe, natural, and effortless to do so. And until then it’s yours and if it’s good it’s good. And if it would hurt other people you then be careful or don’t do it unless there’s a way to make it safe for them.)
So then is there a higher good or more unconditional good? Or, like, what’s the goodness beneath the goodness? Or, maybe better, what are the dynamics of veridical goodness? As language and ontology and concepts are not arbitrary but loosen and start to move... And what’s good or what things are good for or what leads to what starts to move...
Or how does one even plan and live when what’s good is slowly and steadily changing, now?
Over time one starts to get a taste of the unconditional and one starts to get a taste of the laws that govern the dynamics of goodness. (Kant, by the way, I think says that the only instrinsically good thing is the good will.)
And then one can start to live in harmony with one’s own trajectory of self-transformation, in the knowledge that one’s ontology/concepts and one’s evaluation of that ontology or those concepts, one’s assignation of good and bad, is fluid. Not arbitrary, but fluid. And so there becomes sort of a goodness behind the goodness
This goodness might be called post-conceptual meta-goodness, or the goodness that is reflectively aware of its own construction, or reflective participation in the good will, or resting in (ever more) unconditional goodness or enlightened goodness.
To be sure, I personally am blindsided all the time by being arrogant, horrible, destructive, belligerent, stonewalling, creepy, sketchy, abusive, cowardly, selfish, ignorant, impulsive, perfunctory, hateful, feuding, controlling—in all sorts of subtle ways and also just blatantly obvious ways. It’s just right there. Put me in a wide range of unfortunate circumstances (i.e. life) and I’m just a jerk or worse. If I’m lucky people will tell me; if I’m unlucky they won’t or I’ll think I’m being gaslit.
And/but, also, there’s this call towards goodness and this discipline of goodness. Actual-oh-fuck-I-was-wrong-again-and-I-hurt-someone goodness. Actual-wait-this-goodness-isn’t-good-oh-I-misconceptualized-goodness-again goodness. Actual-flexibly-stably-intrinsically-motivating-fluid-extreme-problem-solving-problem-dissolving-ability goodness. Goodness that frees you, goodness that unleashes you, goodness that empowers you. Goodness that supports you in fitting yourself to the world without diminishment.
A bunch of stuff in the list below is more than a glimpse, now, more than a taste. Stable things somewhere or overtly if I think to look...
And it’s kind of weird and exciting that you go through a few rounds of atman dissolving into brahman (what?!), a few rounds of making deeper contact with the source (what?!), and there’s a sense in which you are not you, that was all a misconceptualization (what?!). (I still believe in neurons and forces and fields.) And also you feel like you had to give up everything, and I mean everything, at least once, to get a bunch of it back again.
And also you feel pretty normal. And the world is pretty normal, albeit you’re not confusing the map with the territory, or at least hugely less so.
And also, noting the possibility of getting hit by a bus or a meteor or cancer, you feel like this is barely even just the beginning.
And that’s exciting.
Appendix for this section:
See also:
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[Originally published as "better".]
[Last accessed: 20200824 https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/07/14/better/]
Better
Sometimes, I sort of want to throw in the garbage concepts like arhatship and other milestones. I’d just like to replace it with the concept "better." I like "better" because it doesn’t assume any particular goal. There’s just better than the last thing. (The reason I use "good" so much in the protocol document and not "better" or even "best" is for local methodological, pedagogical, and philosophical reasons: better can sometimes be problematic for local, in the trenches wayfinding. And best is pedagogically misleading and philosophically twisty.)
*
Not, No Goal / Yes, No Particular Fixed Goal
I like better not only because it doesn’t assume any particular goal, and one could clarify that as "no particular fixed goal." Better doesn’t make a thing out of an end state; it doesn’t necessary connote, assume, or imply an end state at all.
It also doesn’t assume sort of "top-down directionality" or "top-down wayfinding."
To do better, to go in the direction of better, you just need to take one little step in some better direction.
Ah, but that’s not exactly right.
*
Nonmonotonicity
There is another piece that needs to be added to "better" and that’s "nonmonotonicity." That is, sometimes, to get to something better, sometimes things need to temporarily get worse. That dip is nonmonotonicity. (Monotonicity [as opposed to nonmonotonicity] is never going down [nor sideways??], only going up, but sometimes there’s going up slower, sometimes there’s going up faster.)
*
Wayfinding
Ok, so with "better" and "nonmonotonicity," there’s still directions/directionality, there’s still wayfinding, in terms of (a) what to do next, and so (b) where to [hopefully or experimentally] go next, for (c) to eventually get somewhere (maybe unknown). And that somewhere, the sort of intuitive/implicit/inexplicit/felt planning horizon gets longer and longer, farther and farther out, the more skilled and experienced one gets; one navigates deeper and longer nonmonotonicity, as sometimes needed, over time.
Nonfinality (((/ ~Thresholds and ~Asymptotes)))
And there’s always a next somewhere, and the "final" (not final) somewhere (no fixed somewhere) is always over the horizon. And sometimes one needs to massively backtrack, and that’s ok. There’s time. It’s built in.
*
And, so, you can just keep going. States, stages, gateless gates, stateless states, unconceptualizable states, pristine states (along some dimensions)—it can be very helpful to have and make maps and milestones. But, traditions recognize that, say, "deconditioning" continues after arhatship. The path always just continues.
You can just keep going—better and better.
Multidimensionality
Above, I haven’t talked about how all this is sort of "multidimensional." Things can be multidimensionally getting nonmonotonically better (and so also worse) at the same time, along a vast number of dimensions. There’s local and large-scale tradeoffs, at first. But the sort of "average" of the whole thing keeps getting better and better. And sometimes there’s big dips, even "late stage" big dips. But some biggest dips eventually just never happen ever again.
Globality
And eventually one starts exploring something like globality, optimizing the whole thing all at once (via mostly little, local operations), while, challengingly, somehow, everything is mediately/indirectly or immediately/directly connected to everything else. Things deconvolve and de-intertwingle over time, what’s weakly separable becomes weakly separate, gloriously non-interacting, to some degree, and to greater and greater degrees, when it wouldn’t be helpful if those things interacted, but it’s still all connected, somehow. It’s the ultimate puzzle, in part because the final goal is over the horizon and one is learning (and unlearning) better and better goals over time until the idea of a goal itself gets replaced with something better, too.
*
(Without Remainder / "Remainderlessness" (((/ ~Thresholds and ~Asymptotes))))
You can just keep going and going. Eventually meditation blurs and blends with life, being lost in life is the same as being in the meditative state, effortless, costless, engaged, nothing to maintain; it’s just what you are. You get to keep all your tools, they become you, they are you, and also you get to just live, to get lost in life, you can just let go, all the way down, and do what you want because what you want is the right thing to do. (Really right—wellbeing, self-aligned, nonartificial...)
If you have the right method, and by method I mean, sure, some invariances, of course, but also something creative, nonstereotyped, fine-grain, innovative, that nevertheless-and-in-any-case can navigate, can travel, in straight lines or along any n-dimensional line, and you just just keep going and going.
Again, you can just keep going and going, better and better.
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full title:
meditation is concrete problem solving, capable of maximal indirectness/obliquity (under/modulo emptiness/nebulosity and under Buddha-nature)
compare with:
cf./vs. The goal of buddhism/enlightenment/etc. is happiness independent of conditions.
originally published as:
happiness dependent on exquisitely and flexibly handling your shit
original location:
https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/06/02/happiness-dependent-on-exquisitely-and-flexibly-handling-your-shit/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)
body:
It’s good that morality, horizontal progress, etc., are still emphasized in contemporary, secular meditation systems. I think this is important because part of my take is that meditation is implicit, concrete problem solving. And, explicit morality can bootstrap elegant and broadly applicable solutions to life’s problems. ("Becoming intrinsically good all the way down is the ultimate life hack.")
But, I can’t help but feel that Ingram’s morality and Shinzen’s horizontal progress are really bolted on, no matter how much they’re verbally or rhetorically emphasized. I know Ingram devotes even more time to morality in MCTB2.
My straw of the situation is something like, "Morality is really important, but also it’s really complicated. Anyway, so, meditate, on the cushion, and just kind of proactively do your best, off the cushion. And, meditation is supposed to help. And, by the way, also, meditation doesn’t help at all."
That’s a bit of a straw/mischaracterization. But, what???
Bolted on. (Or, I’m being impatient and uncharitable with their teachings.)
In contrast, my take is something like all the meditative attainments or experiences or stateless states are incidental to the point of the whole thing.
And, gesturing vaguely, the point of the whole might be something like solving all your problems; pursuing the good; solving homeostasis for all possible futures; having lots of babies; becoming an ever-more-efficient, far-from-equilibriium entropic dissipator, pursuing interest and intimacy, having a good life, etc.
My point is that there will be something the human bodymind is (a) "trying" to do, which (b) can be modeled as agentic telos, anthropomorphized or not, which (c) presumably has to perfectly hew to mechanistic, spontaneous causality under exceptionaless physical law (unified multiversal quantum gravity or whatever we figure out in 100-500 years), which (d) will feel a particular way from the inside, possibly really good or "satisfying," or something.
(The working assumption, here, is that what the human bodymind is "trying" to do, if fully actualized, will look god’s-eye-view rational and feel good from the inside.)
So, a human is system is bootstrap-learning the rules of the system, as well as doing a halting-problem-blind search of the goal landscape, while traveling the landscape, all at the same time.
In other words, the system doesn’t know what’s good for it, in advance, or how to get it. It will not be properly conceived/embodied. But, grace, Buddha, eros, entropic dissipation can contingently get people headed in the right direction, nonmonotonically, faster and faster (e.g., someone picks up a book about "Zen" meditation or Internal Family Systems therapy).
And that will involve rearranging the bodymind as well as rearranging the environment (up to and including the entire planet and beyond). And rearranging the environment, all things being equal, is relatively downstream of rearranging the bodymind. So, meditation.
So, this is sort of vague and poetic, but meditation isn’t some graft of state training plus following some moral rules to transcend those rules–
Meditation is solving the problem of optimal behavior (and procreation) under bounded rationality in an uncertain world. And, the better solutions you have to safety and sex (coordination, intimacy, health, biomedical engineering, space travel) the better you feel.
The ironic thing is that it’s not about happiness independent of conditions. WRONG!
It’s happiness because you’ve flexibly and exquisitely handled your shit. This is the whole of the path.
Ok, I lied, it’s sort of both, because of long-run-anti-wireheading indirect realism.
One could imagine a system having a "belief" about whether or not it will get (or whether or not it already has) "what it wants." The experiences that system has, over time, shape the belief and the want/preference. (The system has a little bit of hardwiring, some initial conditions plus an environment, and then one just lets it run. The system doesn’t have a model of any of this when it starts.)
And so let’s say, at any given time, the system is only in four subjective states:
(*) DOOM/NOT GOING TO GET WHAT I WANT (subjectively not going to get what it wants, though it objectively keeps doing its best, anyway)
(*) DEFINITELY GOING TO GET WHAT I WANT (subjectively feels good, objectively actually uncertain)
(*) NOT SURE IF GOING TO GET WHAT I WANT, DON’T BELIEVE I’M DOING MY BEST ("self conflict"; subjectively feels bad, objectively actually uncertain)
(*) NOT SURE IF GOING TO GET WHAT I WANT BUT WHOLEHEARTEDLY AND SELF-SINCERELY AND SELF-COMPASSIONATELY AND SELF-ALIGNEDLY BELIEVE I’M DOING MY ABSOLUTE BEST (subjectively feels good, objectively actually uncertain)
Anyway, I think those four states are roughly how people work. If the bodymind believes it’s doing its best, wholeheartedly, all the way down, self-consistently, to achieve stable godhood, infinite love-sex, and healthful immportality free of heat death, or if the bodymind believes in the certain inevitability of eventual stable godhood, infinite love-sex, and healthful immortality free of heat death, or if the bodymind is presently experiencing stable godhood, infinite love-sex, and healthful immortality free of heat death–all of those feel theoretically, in principle, exactly just as good (really good), though the system can still, just fine, discriminate between which of these obtain at any particular time. Anyway, that’s the theory.
So, again, I think meditation is actually just concrete problem solving that involves picking the correct, initially unknown problem. (Explicit, lineage-transmissible formulations of the problem+solution only go so far, as we see out in the world. One has to wayfind to an ever-more-correct internal representation/embodiment to make progress.)
All the emptiness and nondual phenomenology are still a thing, all the different parts of the elephant, including why traditional systems emphasize morality, compassion, etc. (Heartfelt compassion, all things being long-run equa(!)l, is a really good way to achieve babies and godhood, or whatever.)
But morality doesn’t need to be bolted on. (Straw?)
Meditation can be concrete planning, intellectual upgrades, morality training, epistemic training, strategic upgrading that will ingest whatever college textbooks and life experiences the meditator learns to ever-more-optimally seek out. (Of course, all this will look more like watching the breath or whatever than studying for a test. We initially think it’s the latter because the normative perpetuation of culture is very wrong about how the bodymind works and most everybody is "stuck in their heads." Still, "watching the breath," or whatever, is also pretty wrong, even though it’s in the right direction.)
So, I think there’s just "development," of a single thing ("bodymind"), not vertical and horizontal, where descriptive meditative phenomenology can be very useful. But, in any case, meditation is not general-purpose strength-training (for which the fruits are applied off the cushion); meditation, in fact, can be "direct" puzzle-solving and "direct" concrete upgrading (albeit weird and counterintuitive and up-front costly and risky, otherwise we’d all already be Einstein-Ghandi-Musk-meditators). I put "direct" in quotes because in one sense it’s direct and in another sense it’s nonmonotonic and oblique (the details are outside the scope of this rant).
To wrap up, to be fair, sophisticated assessors of meditative progress will pay less attention to phenomenology and more attention to (a) interpersonal sophistication (which, depending on niche, might look like impeccably kind, authentically empathetic, local-and-world-scale-win-win-win collaborative reliability) and (b) relative degree of winning at life (which will look different, depending on whether the person started out abused and poverty-stricken versus a childhood of complex and interesting experiences and wealthy, kind, empathetic, intelligent parents). And, from the inside, maybe one might ask, do I experience wellbeing, and do I have a good life, and are those the same thing?
*
New postscript:
Meditation is not a solution as such. There is no "meditate now then do X." You're already always X-ing, and meditation is not separate from life and meditation isn't separable from life; it's not other than life, and it's not a thing. And meditation can be cool and interesting, but, generally speaking, it's not the point, and it has no fixed point, and it has no fixed goal because it undoes itself until only turning towards your life remains.
Meditation won't directly solve your problems and it is not itself a solution as such to anything, but it can help you solve your problems, all things being equal[, until there's nothing left that could be considered meditation].
This isn't my frame, but Daniel Ingram says maybe something like "make sure you have a life you want to wake up to," and this is related to the above.
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originally published as:
good now good later wellbeing suffering paradox
original location:
https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/05/20/good-now-good-later-wellbeing-suffering-paradox-1300-words/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)
notes:
This should be cleaned up and adapted, in a bunch of ways, to be more appropriate for this location in the document.
body:
All things being equal, human beings are ridiculously ANTI-wireheading.
"I can’t feel ok, now. My life is shit, or falling apart, and/or my life has no meaning or purpose."
We balk at seeming tradeoffs between something like "feeling good, now" and "good later." The latter is something like the OPPOSITE of, "a tiger is behind that tree; and/or I’m going to get fired from my job and end up homeless; and/or the physical laws and the universal constants of this universe mean that human activity is a zero-sum game, and I’ll never be safe unless I destroy myself trying to be safe and not even then."
So, we’ll sacrifice "feeling good, now" for "good later," if we feel like we have to, to the point of sort coming to seemingly believe that "feeling good, now" is useless, pointless, or a dangerous distraction.
But there’s the weird thing where our physical body and mind, right here and now, is what enables the pursuit of the "good later." Bodily homeostasis is sort of the attractor from which straying too far is disastrous.
Some people intuitively or intellectually recognize the importance of homeostasis or bodily health, while also feeling that tension of "feeling good, now" versus "good later." And, they push homeostasis as far as they can, sacrificing sleep, using stimulants, eating problematic convenience foods, or even explicitly banking on future advances in healthcare to repair damage done now.
Some people aren’t thinking about health or homeostasis at all, and they come at it from "the other side" (granting that interoceptive wellbeing informs on the status of homeostasis). They’ve generalized to the point that "feeling good is bad," and they strategically avoid feeling good as such: "I’m going to AVOID feeling good, because feeling good, in spirit or actuality, is the same as twenty hours straight of videogames and total loss of momentum and no progress on this work project."
Some people go so far as to confusedly think that "good later" is the only "actual good," some distant, improper reification which demands great sacrifices.
***
I want to invent a new word, "teleohomeostasis." We don’t really need a new word, because people know that homeostasis can involve future-oriented and goal-oriented cognition and behavior. (And "telos" can be naturalized in various ways in a mechanistic universe.) See Derek Denton, Terrence Deacon, Karl Friston, Robert Rosen, Anatol Feldman, Alicia Juarrero, etc.
But, I want a new word because "diachronic is synchronic" (as the above authors say or allude to in various ways):
Any system’s "representation" of the future is somehow encoded or latent in its present structure.
Depending on how that "representation" interacts with "felt wellbeing," there ideally shouldn’t be a felt paradox between "good now" and "good later;" there shouldn’t be a paradoxical dissonance or a paradoxical suffering.
Maybe this paradoxical suffering is just our evolved, hardwired human nature, until we start messing with it, with nth-generation CRISPR and Neuralink.
But there are these weird hints that maybe it’s not hardwired at all. We "doth protest too much," maybe, in that ANTI-wireheading of, "I don’t want JUST/MERELY FEEL GOOD (unless maybe I’m transiently utterly dysregulated and desperate and despairing); I want things to ACTUALLY BE GOOD."
And when things tick towards being ACTUALLY GOOD, our FEELING GOOD is often only a few hundred milliseconds behind. (Sometimes it’s a slow dawning.) And note again that interoceptive feeling/wellbeing is intimately tied to (teleo)homeostasis. Hmm.
(Note that that "tick towards actually being good" can be because you realized a problem wasn’t actually a problem, and so was DISSOLVED (from inference on prior data or new incoming information) or you figured out a clean solution (or were handed one), and so was SOLVED (from chewing on available solution pieces/capacities, or friend/family/ally/deus ex machina). Both SOLVE and DISSOLVE will work, importantly.)
So, anyway, there’s both this seeming paradox between feeling good and having things be good. And, also, there are these strange links between things being actually good (or getting better) and feeling good.
I’m going to state some principles, now, mostly without justification, which resolve this paradox. I’m partly not giving justification because I’m still working out some palatable/credible/true/"true" reasoning. And I’m partly not giving justification because these principles are self-discovered in meditation. Stay tuned for perhaps more details in future blog posts.
(1) Suffering is not a hardwired, fundamental motivator. It’s actually a stopgap, emergent motivator. There’s no (intrinsic) suffering "at the bottom."
(2) Peak wellbeing is not only compatible with peak performance, peak vigilance, and peak contingency planning, but peak wellbeing is coreferential(?), coextensive(?), perfectly-co-something with peak performance, peak vigilance, and peak contingency planning.
wellbeing/well-being ~= the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy. (google)
(3.1) The Human Handledness is Already Success Principle (Human HAS Princple or just "HAS" Principle):
(handled ~= stably controlled, managed, dealt with)
In terms of felt wellbeing, the bodymind doesn’t differentiate between:
(3.1a) "already/currently have stably got it"
(3.1b) "going to definitely stably get it"
(3.1c) "utterly self-believed utterly already perfectly DOING MY BEST to get it, given truly all that is known, that accounts for literally the whole universe, everything, up to true-event-horizon-bleeding-edge-of-disclosure of previously-genuine-unknown-unknowns"
(3.2) Put another way, if the bodymind believes it’s acting on the best plan to get something (everything), where "best" includes fully error-checked and fully meta-error-checked, this already feels like total success (with no wire-heading-flavored guilt/dissonance).
(3.3) One elaboration is that the hardest most bleak situations can potentially feel like a (seemingly paradoxical, if one hasn’t experienced it) "real-stakes-vacation-adventure."
[end indent]
Something like the HAS principle can maybe be used to explain some things (though plenty of objections could be raised, and additional pieces would be needed to make it airtight):
(a) People put themselves in danger, like free-climbing, to incline towards artificially actualizing the HAS principle. (One would need to be much more precise and elaborated about my anti-wire-heading statements above, to nail something, in here, with respect to potentially outside-view-pathological environmental simplifications and stakes-raising.) And/or, "best plan" can be clarified to explicitly include self-ignorance and mental contingencies under personal "unknown unknowns.")
(b) Valued stories maybe exemplify the actualized HAS principle. A protagonist-environment fit that, nearing the climax, narrows down to an utterly clear best plan and glory, whether success or failure (though success is preferred).
[Note / added later: I've learned that at least a couple people (so probably more) have been hurt at least a little bit by my explication of the so-called HAS principle above --- I've been thinking about maybe taking it out of the document; some people were sort of taking it as "well I'm doing everything I can; I should feel ok; but I don't feel ok so I should 'doing everything' [sic] harder or somehow get myself to feel ok." This might not be quite right. But in any case, it wasn't doing something good for some people. I wrote it, at least in intention, as sort of mostly a long-term reassuring, asymptotic thing; it takes a long time for "the system" sort of "all way down," "breadth and depth," to kind of asymptotically fully self-interactively come to self-trust through and through that shaded-out-to-all-parts-at-a-finer-and-finer-grain that all-and-whole-thing-prereflectively [sic] is self-caring-ly, self-compassionately, self-trusting-ly, spontaneously-just-is doing its best. That it's an asymptotic, non-monotonic process that generally takes care of itself over time through wayfinding meditation. So the HAS principle generally-ish isn't a "tool to apply" or even a "functional lens," if that makes sense. And, to be fair, some sections in this document are kind of ambiguous or equivocating about sort of whether they're written as theory, phenomenological description, or practice suggestions or instructions. This last point is mentioned in at least one other place; I think maybe in the dialogue with (N).]
***
So self-discovering and self-aligning with the principles above, and I’ve said things like this a bunch of times, is like a circa 10,000-hour Tower-of-Hanoi, constrained-evolving-state-space problem, involving arranging and rearranging millions of Tetris tetraminoes and LEGO bricks the size of quarks, or whatever.
(I’m not done with all this, and "done" probably fluctuates because one keeps acquiring new capacities (which raise the bar for what the "best plan" is), identifying new challenges/unhandledness via those new capacities (which also raises the bar), and also previously-truly-unknown-unknowns [relative to one’s local knowledge and all meta-meta-proactiveness] keep disclosing from the other side of the "event horizon." But, take this blog post for what it’s worth!)
So like the only shitty things, as I’ve said before, are that meditation is a privilege and luxury that requires some minimum amount of resources (some combination of time, money, food, shelter, relationships). And, the journey can be pretty terrible and seem like it’s taken everything from you, to the point of hopelessness, despair, and confusedly impulsive and risky/destrucive behavior. And there are physical health risks, too. And things feel sometimes/often hard and sad in the meantime; life is hard and sometimes/often sad. And, it’s worth acknowledging, as always, as an aside, that not everyone wants to or "should want" to meditate–life is pretty good for a lot of people, and/or they’re doing the right thing for them that might not look like meditation.
Anyway, we humans have a low-dimensional projection/representation of literally the entire universe, the entire Kosmos, inside of us. And meditators go over that with a fine-toothed comb, anyway. So let’s make meditation more accessible as part of that error-checked and meta-error-checked WORLD-WIDE-HUMAN-COLLECTIVE best plan, not to mention world peace; post-scarcity technological and health/longevity miracles; humane, millenia-long moon-shots, light-cone shots; and like VR Netflix or something.
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/06/22/ok-ness-and-cosmology/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-06)]
[Longer title: "ok-ness and wellbeing, cosmology, metaphysics, eschatology"]
[I’m indebted to a few people for some of the prior heavy-lifting and thinking in this post. Mistakes mine.]
[I apologize for the minimally edited choppiness of the prose below.]
*
If you had to pick being in one of the scenarios below, which would you pick? You can modify them as you’d like; it’s not a forced-choice:
(A) Let’s say you’re a billionaire with smart, kind, loyal friends. And, we could just keep piling it on: Say you’re part of a post-scarcity economy in an endlessly stable political climate. Say poverty has been solved; say crime and personal safety have been solved. Say friendly general artificial intelligence has been solved. Say the long-run destiny of human values and morality are well-understood and it’s humane and exciting. Say the fate of the universe is now understood, and there’s a way out. Say we can now enumerate and (re-)print out all possible humans—--past, present, and never-before-existing, who would want this for themselves under the conditions they would want it. (There is nuance here around what age if they lived a whole, long life, what do they remember in the previous instant or what do they understand to be the case, etc., etc. Impermanence, no-self, no-essence, etc., all holds, etc., etc.)
(B) Or, let’s say you’re old, sick, alone, and homeless. Sad, scary, tragic stuff. And let’s say, somehow, tragically, something just escalated and escalated: There’s people who really hate you and want to really hurt you, or worse. Dark, ugly stuff.
(C) Or, let’s say things are pretty ok: good job and friends, interest and engagement, maybe a family and kids, and, to be sure, you’ve also got fears and regrets, about intimacy, money, meaning, health, the economy, the political climate, family members... But, overall, not bad, not bad.
***
First, I want to note that shit happens. We make mistakes, we get hurt, we run out of time, we realize we were wrong, people disappoint us, we disappoint ourselves, we disappoint and hurt other people, we have life surprises, health surprises, we hope, we fear, we dream, we get confused, we chase false idols, we get in car crashes or hit by buses. Life can be hard and painful, whether we have money and friends and health and safety, or not, world-scale projects, or not, cosmic meaning, or not, and regardless of whether many other desirable factors, all things being equal, obtain, or not.
Noting that, all things being equal, there’s still a way that things can be ok (if things are not currently ok). And this ok-ness is extremely, extremely specific and simultaneously also very general. (Cringe, cringe; this isn’t going to take the usual route; keep your hands and feet inside the blog post. To be sure, in any case, this ok-ness isn’t a thing.)
As the cliché goes, there’s indeed a sense in which you don’t need anything outside of yourself for this ok-ness, everything you need is already in you. And, also, there’s a sense in which this ok-ness takes resources—money, food, shelter, time, space, relationships, knowledge, something.
There’s a few broad failure modes that can happen when seeking this ok-ness (if you decide to do so, and it’s ok if you do or don’t, or start and stop, or take a break and pick it up again, later. In no way is it separate from "normal ok-ness.").
(*) One failure mode is seeking to achieve things that are very specific, very concrete, very hard, and very far away in time. (That’s not to say seeking to achieve such things is bad, just that it can be a failure mode of being ok.)
(*) Another failure mode is avoiding here, now, and everything, deferring everything, including the experience of this very moment, until you’re definitely, completely, one-hundred-percent stably, forever ok. And then you can enjoy right now and relax around people, right now. (This is the "meditation is a valueless slog right up until the instant before enlightenment, and any benefits of meditation are incidental to attaining enlightenment and facilitating them in any way might even make enlightenment take longer or make it impossible to obtain/acquire/achieve" model. This is the "separate thing" model.)
Ok, so, sometimes though, what has to happen, in order to be ok?
Even if things are/seem very not ok, sometimes just a little bit of "grace" is enough. You find an amazing therapist, you find out you didn’t get the recessive genetic disease, a long-lost relative left you enough money to keep you on your feet. Something that you thought would be hard is just easy.
Sometimes it takes a little more than that, or a lot more. You might ask, what’s the hit-it-with-a-sledgehammer option, hit it with a planet, hit it with a galaxy, when it seems like nothing else is working?
This is sort of the meditation option, though plenty of things can feed into that, like e.g. therapy, Alexander Technique, and all sorts of things. (A good meditation system will indicate and incorporate intersubjectivity and movement, in any case. But also a good meditation system will sort of "play nice" with all the other good stuff and people and offerings in the environment that don’t quite line up with the meditation system itself.)
Ok, so what does meditation do, anyway? Why can it sort of be a global option, even if not necessarily the most efficient one (time- and resource-wise)?
There’s a common misconception that meditation sort of makes you ok with whatever’s going on. This is concerning to people who want to be motivated by what’s going on, because they care about what’s going on (and what’s going to happen next), because they want to enjoy it or change it.
(There’s certainly a failure mode of meditation, to add to the two "being ok" failure modes above, which is causing oneself to be narrowly or broadly unresponsive to broad slices of self and world.)
Anyway, there’s a correction to this misconception that meditation makes one ok, regardless of what’s going on, that is, ok independent of conditions. Nuh-uh. More correctly, meditation makes one (long-run!) "well-fit" to conditions, regardless of what they are, and it’s the "fittedness" that yields ok-ness.
(One might ask, well, what if I’m in a crashing plane or being tortured or a loved one just got hurt or... Well, yeah, those things are bad. Things can be too intense, too fast, too uncontrollable... A meditation master will still claim, though... And you can explore the limits for yourself, too, in a "natural experiment" fashion, with hints along the way and better and better models of what’s to come.)
So, actually, the outcome of meditation is extraordinarily concrete, extraordinarily concerned with the concrete details of one’s life and future. (Though, this isn’t sort of a laborious, forced "mindfulness." Plenty will be unreflectively automatized: If there’s details, sensory details or otherwise, that you’d prefer to not get lost in, that’s generally going to be an option.) There’s things you want to get and there’s things you want to avoid, same as it always is.
So, CONCRETENESS. That’s piece number one.
You’re always going to be living your life. That’s what lives are:
"If[!] you’re going through hell, keep going [as long as you’re applying some sort of Meta Protocol, i.e. going in the right direction]"
And, I like to combine the above with this extraordinarily deep statement/insight:
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end." —John Lennon
So, anyway, you keep going and going, putting in the meditation time, and maybe your rigid, impossible future starts to unravel, and you maybe encounter piece number two: EMPTINESS.
Emptiness could also be termed, in my usages, nebulosity, indirectness, luminosity, etc.
When you started, mountains were mountains, physics equations were physics equations. Now, what the heck are mountains? What the heck are physics equations? What is anything?
But, this isn’t nihilism; emptiness isn’t arbitrariness. There’s an implicit/inexplicit lawfulness, a lawful evolution (though even this sentence and its meaning are empty.)
And, further, emptiness is only one side of a coin. The other side is form, structure, territory, actuality, noumena... (That’s depending how you slice all those concepts; there are more precise and consistent ways to render some of this.)
And, in any case, emptiness is only the beginning.
Because the next thing that starts to happen is that emptiness starts to chew up everything. And that includes things like the following:
existence, nonexistence, awareness, nothingness, somethingness, death, mortality, furniture, eternity, will, determinism, goodness, realness, necessity, contingency, duty, responsibility, obligation or lack thereof, freedom, goals, final ends, big bangs, big crunches, heat deaths, simulations, singularities, infinities, time, space, relativity, mortality, cryonics bets, the tides of history, the near future, the far future, quantum gravity, the Planck scale, harm, suffering, sanity, heaven, hell, afterlife, resurrection, eternity, outside-of-time-ness, causal history and final end of everything
***
One maybe (relatively) unobjectionable claim is that the human bodymind/brain/system/something has a low-dimensional representation of literally everything inside its "unknown unknown" boundary. We contain (represent) the entire universe. (Re "representation," one could potentially make an argument for something like distributed cognition or question where the representations live or how they’re encoded, enacted, etc.)
For now, again, maybe you’ll grant me that we literally hold (a low-dimensional, variable-fidelity representation of) the whole (multi/uni)verse in us, including our goals, fears, contingency planning, uncertainties, problems, etc.
I’ll further claim that, whether due to properties of consciousness minds, agency, darwinian evolution or entropic dissipation under this universe’s physical constants, something, there will sort of be some finite set of necessary "pieces" that all people are tracking, within that representational unity/totality.
This tracking will be sort of a mixture of explicit or reflective musings, from imagination, religion, fantasy, and science fiction, as well as implicit/inexplicit, practical "doing models" that have built up, "organically," bottom-up, over time. That will all sort of be mixed together, explicit, inexplicit, and entangled with the environment. And there will be adult stuff as well as childhood stuff, including very young childhood stuff and stuff picked up from other people. For example, you might have a bunch of heaven and hell stuff, which might be initially surprising, if you come across it, but less surprising in retrospect. Depending on your very-young childhood background, there could be miles and miles of heaven and hell stuff, maybe some sort of omniscient and/or omnipotent enabler of timeless intimacy or connection, as well as, say, depending on what you were reading as a teen or later, a future "Omega-point" situated in a manyworlds multiverse, and so on, all side-by-side or "scattered throughout" one’s mind.
And maybe there’s a "beginning of everything" and an "end of everything" and a "timeless/eternal ground of all of that," and so on.
Point being, the system may not be consistent (well, there are degrees), but the system is reaching for consistency, and there’s a particular kind of envelope or closure or unity that kind of enfolds or connects all this stuff into one unified thing. Sometimes it’s very fragmentary, but there’s going to be thin threads that maintain connection, somehow. (What happens in organic brain damage or neurodegenerative disease is an interesting question, but if a person is awake and behaving even a little bit coherently then there’s a probably shocking "unity"/"totality" for any of that to be happening at all.)
One could call all of this COSMOLOGY (and metaphysics and eschatology).
So, anyway, CONCRETENESS is sort of the unignorable sensory ground, though still a heavily interpreted datastream, from the "outside world," the thing that pokes you with sticks and surprises you, even if you stop believing in it. EMPTINESS is sort of the liquid ground that makes change possible. And COSMOLOGY is sort of the interpretive representation or encoding or explanation of the whole enchilada, as well as what you should do about all of it, how you should act, how you are acting, what the plan is.
So, in my gestural division, once again, there’s CONCRETENESS, EMPTINESS, and COSMOLOGY.
There’s sort of something sometimes terribly embarrassing, confusing, or scary about cosmology. Cosmology is just as scary, maybe even more scary, than concreteness. Yeah, you might run out of money, or get hit by a bus, and/or die. But, of course, what happens after that?And/or, what does it all mean? And, even if you live? What’s going happen, long-run? What if you get sucked into an interstellar black hole? What happens to your cares and concerns and the people you love, from your perspective?
It can be confusing and embarrassing to the degree how much cosmology matters to functioning in daily life. Plenty of people believe in god. And plenty of people believe in a future eschaton, divine or machine. And some people believe in heaven or the Tao or the multiverse. Or they believe in all of the above, all semi-implicitly mixed together, coming from various ages and sources and thinking and imagining. And, often we’d prefer to believe ("endorse" believing) in one of these over all the rest. (And often that preference is leaving out a bunch of "functionally necessary" features, and something else necessarily, constrainedly needs to pick up the slack, in sort of an explanatory-unity-or-comprehensiveness-over-explanatory-consistency, or something. And it won’t budge, it won’t effortlessly flow, otherwise.)
While money and health, concretes, can be super stressful, it’s sort of the cosmology that "tortures" us, as it were: If we’re, I don’t know, beings of light going to heaven, and we’re here to learn, then a bunch of worldly suffering isn’t as big of a deal. (Or "nonexistence" isn’t stressful, or it is.) So, as it usually goes, part of us may even believe that we’re beings of light (or in a benevolent simulation, or going to be cryonically or state-space-exhaustively resurrected, or whatever). But other parts of us do NOT. And, so money and health are stressful, and there’s also this sort of "cosmological shear" on top of that, the tension between mediately contradictory cosmological components.
***
So, the reversal, here, is that the fruits/goal meditation is not sort of being ok with whatever is happening or whatever you believe, independent of the details.
In fact, the fruits of meditation, usually mostly implicitly, are radically embodied (concreteness) and radically cognitive (cosmology). (Emptiness, which, in some sense, is the other side of the coin of concreteness+cosmology, is also in some sense a discovered cosmological component, as well as something experienced concretely.) Emptiness does facilitate equanimity, which is sort of, say, an interaction between concreteness, emptiness, and cosmology, which makes change and (transient or stable) unknowing safer and safer, as equanimity "grows." Equanimity does sort of become a "more and more powerful container of safety," but it’s, in some sense highly contingent/situated/specific, built out of progressively handling more and more, and more and more skillfully, in a deeply implicit and wise way. So, it’s not detachment but is instead concretely engaged wisdom under emptiness, etc., etc.
So, in any case, all of this is sort of one way of looking at why meditation takes so long—in order to sort of not be "tortured" (as it were, or whatever) by the concrete, sometimes one must refactor one’s entire cosmology, and I think this is pretty typical, because we don’t really get to choose our cosmologies, at least on the front-end. And so there’s a lot that’s very fine and also a lot to clean up, down/in there. And usually this has a combinatorial or recursive or iteratively recurrent complexity, of enacting the dependencies to make something safe to look at, and then looking, and then retracing and juxtaposing along high-dimensional path constraints... (And this is sort of inseparable from refactoring one’s phenomenology, and so usually nonduality, centerlessness, etc., pop out, too.)
***
And so, eventually, mountains are just mountains again, physics equations are just physics equations, again.
But, like, is there a right answer? Heaven and hell? God? Superdeterministic quantum gravity multiverse? Yeah, sure, up to your personal, bleeding-edge unknown unknown boundary. And, you can fallibly tack towards it.
And, in doing so, you may find that concretes get lighter, wellbeing increases, it becomes safe to not know, and also you do know, but you can say less. I’m not saying you’ll be able to write down novel physical laws or crack open the universe with the right intonation and gesture. But, you’ll be more comfortable with exactly what is, and where you are in it, in part because suffering and sort of even meaning are sort of limit cases of when things go wrong, and, because of grace, buddha nature, evolution, etc., sorting out all this stuff, under emptiness, under ockam’s razor, under unknown unknowns, is shockingly, generally doable, all things being equal, and it makes things progressively more and more ok. (Human minds have stunning epistemic abilities, if bootstrappingly used "correctly.")
And things become more and more stable, too, while remaining sensitive and responsive to new knowledge, new neuroscience, new physics, new interpersonal surprise:
It can take a lot of work to try to remember that, say, god is infinite and you’re a being of light (or that you’re experiencing focal bias, or whatever), when, say, your bank account balance is low.
But, in meditation, you’ll sort of be tacking towards a global convexity that doesn’t need to be maintained.
More and more, self and world just are, the world is just right there, just as it is, nothing to change, no effort, and, more and more, it’s fine/good/ok.
It’s partly fine/good/ok because that fine-ness/good-ness/ok-ness hasn’t made you unmotivated, reckless, nihilistic, careless. In fact, you’re more safely effective, in part because you’re more careful, more patient, more decisive, more peaceful, more ambitious, more compassionate, more impassioned, maybe even more afraid (in some sense, because it’s fundamentally safe to be afraid) while being simultaneously more equanimous and chill and good-feeling. There’s a deeper thing: sort of less everything and more everything at same time. Sort of "normal" but more "liquid." It’s a "this too shall pass" kind of thing, but, again, one that is harmonious with situated action, in a (relatively more sensible) cosmos. Anyway, none of this is quite right, but I’m pointing in the direction a thing. All in all, you’ll still fully proactively seek what you want and avoid what you don’t want, and what you want and don’t want will be more liquid but not arbitrary.
Refactoring your cosmology (as per your bodymind, your felt wellbeing) can be a huge, lengthy, overwhelming (implicit, liminially cognitive, felt-sensory) project. It’s an insane project, a crazy project, hard to grasp as a whole, on the front-end. ("Better not to start; if you start, better to finish.") You maybe should only start after you’ve talked to a therapist, a doctor, made a big, experimental life change, and/or you’ve accidentally already started. One wants methods that are sort of simple enough to actually consistently engage in, while "correct enough" to sort of "work eventually no matter what," all things being equal.
(But, in a sense, none of this is separate from what you’re already doing, which is just living your life. Some stuff is "deep" and "stuck" but, some "quite cosmological" stuff is getting sculpted all the time, when making a meal, when journaling, when spending time with friends. No separation.)
In any case, let’s say you’re systematically applying a method. And then... "impossible" problems, unexpectedly, unbelievably, are solved and dissolved, one, after another, after another (maybe with very long gaps and low-lows in between each solve), all things being equal. And after several wildly different "impossible" problems get solved or dissolved, you start looking at the remaining problems with more and more suspicion and patience (and excitement).
Anyway, probably some of this rendering is terribly misleading, so don’t take my word for any of it.
Wellbeing and enjoyment are good guides, as well as patiently, gently easing into, say, "intolerable" horror, if you happen to come across any. (There will probably be at least a little bit.) Remember, the whole point of all of this is something like wellbeing, enjoyment, self-alignment, and whatever follows from that. Maybe things are already pretty chill. Ask someone who’s pretty chill what their life philosophy is, and they might tell you about their pretty reasonable thing that works for them, even if it wouldn’t work for you.
Duty, necessity, obligation, should, responsibility, effort, sacrifice, and hardship are not red flags, but they are yellow flags, at the very least. The dashboard can/could/"should" be green, and/but you might have to refactor your whole cosmology to get there, and, while this is very doable, all things being equal (money, food, shelter, health, future money, technique, withstanding) that doable-ness shouldn’t be misinterpreted as one of those shoulds. No gods, no masters, no point (except your own), as it were.
And the "end" result is sometimes described as things like "fearless simplicity," "carefree dignity," effortless, costless, natural, etc. The WEIGHT OF ALL THAT COSMOLOGY, doesn’t "weigh" anything at all, isn’t a thing at all; it’s just your effortless being, the very flexible, fluid prereflective seeming of world, lighter than a feather.
***
(P.S. As for myself, I’m not "done," by the way! Plenty still to do, but it’s been a relatively smooth and "meta-predictable" ride, for a very long while, etc., etc. At some point, you run out of "meta-surprises," and you always, always, always know what to do next, as far as I’ve been able to tell.)
P.P.S. "Cosmology" includes stuff like how does personhood work, how do (body)minds work, what is intimacy, what is connection/"connection", etc.
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/11/14/seamless-hyphenation-draft/ (Last accessed: 2020-11-15)]
Sometimes people who are not novelists, bloggers, entrepreneurs, management consults, programmers, parents, financiers, CEOs, politicians, scientists, traders, consultants, models, etc., find that they want to become novelists, bloggers, entrepreneurs, management consults, programmers, parents, financiers, CEOs, politicians, scientists, traders, consultants, models, etc.
Sometimes it seems doable, or one can do some low-cost experimenting to see what it might be like; one has enough time, enough savings, few enough obligations. Though, sometimes it seems like that ship has sailed–too little time, too little energy, money, health, youth, something.
(All of this applies to not only "career," "income," "impact," something. All of this also applies to things like wanting to be cool, loved, loving, confident, etc., too.)
In any case, I think people often oscillate between, on the one hand, excitement and optimism about becoming something different, and, then, on the other hand, at least at the extremes(!), a sense of resignation, futility, or despair.
People do change their lives, all the time, of course. People accidentally find their niche, or have an epiphany, or a catch a break. Something "just starts working." And/but, people also have the intuition that some kinds of big life changes can be quite hard, can realistically take years or a decade, and often involve some kind of safety net, which might just be youth; or parental support; or savings from a former, high-paying life; or hard-won, opportunity-costly knowledge about how to be frugal; or a tremendously supportive community, or other significant resources.
In any case, a question one might ask, is how might someone systematically become something/someone different? (And what are the pitfalls and paradoxes involved in that!?) And, here, for the moment, we’re at least temporarily setting aside questions of food, shelter, money, opportunity cost–just, what are the gears-level things that need to happen, for true, deep, change, on the level of, say, "deep bodymind"?
Those gear-level things are somewhat outside the scope of this blog post, but there are at least two reasons that change of this kind is so hard. One is at least counterintuitive, and the other is at least paradoxical.
The counterintuitive thing is just how much, how expansively, how seemingly heterogeneously the things are, that sometimes need to change, for a person to change. One typically doesn’t have a model, a feel, a sense, of what all these things might be. They all fit together at "the level of mind," but teasing them out, semi-explicitly, can look pretty weird. It’s maybe stuff like this:
The above items aren’t mutually exclusive, though they’re arranged somewhat in order of expansiveness or inclusivity. You might note that I phrased it above as these items themselves need to change. That might seem kind of weird–the "universe" needs to change, for you or your life to change?
What I really mean is that your "model" of "the universe" needs to change, rather, the "very preflective seeming" that is, in part, your "physically embodied, moment-by-moment anticipations" that somehow involve "the universe," that need to change. (One’s "model" could be the reflective, explicit part of that.)
People change, all the time, for much less. But, sometimes, the whole universe needs to change.
Items in the list above might be counterintuitive for different reasons, but I want to focus, in particular, on "personhood."
People often have the experience, even when they kind of like the different parts of their life, of all those parts not quite fitting together. Something is bursting at the seams. But, their life goes on, their relationships continue, maybe indefinitely, their career continues, maybe indefinitely. So, it’s not exactly the "external" roles and obligations that are bursting at the seams, they just keep happening, steady state, but instead one’s "sense" of all of it, one’s embodied feeling, sense, deep-down planning, the constellation of sensory anticipations and physical actions that make up them doing all of that:
Somewhere there’s a little bit of shearing, a little bit of grinding, a little bit of jamming, and so there’s some stress, some shortness with loved ones, some muscle tension, ongoing "unsurprising surprise," because something, somewhere isn’t able to learn.
For there to be, instead, costless ease, a seamless life, sometimes a person’s very concept of a person needs to change, maybe subtly.
The way this goes, is, usually, a person’s intuitive concept of all the ways a person can be becomes more expansive, the basis vectors change, and then a pin is dropped, on the map: YOU ARE HERE...and perhaps you could be THERE. The voice can be soft. The reconfiguration profoundly shocking. This is sometimes on such a low, low level–the sensemaking of the blooming, buzzing confusion–it changes.
So that’s the counterintuitive piece; now, there’s the paradoxical one.
We’ve all heard things like this before, "what you resist, you’re stuck with."
There’s such danger in "deliberate, systematic, directed," change. First, where we’re pointed is usually somehow incorrect, some deep error of conceptualization or misunderstood personal preference, ignorance about the personal goodness/badness/possibility of the thing. That’s usually fine, when one starts with little bets as well as care, to mitigate overcommitment! (Granted, the bigger and more monolithic the decision is, the higher the potential stakes. College majors and career decisions, I hear you.)
Second, though, and this one is killer, "directed change" can sometimes mean away from something, in this case, parts of yourself, and this can be disastrous. So instead of away from yourself, you must somehow, at least first, if not forever, move towards yourself:
For you to become anything else, anything truly new, for you, you must somehow, simultaneously, become ever more yourself, in some sense, as you always, already, now and forever were, and will forever be.
And this is sometimes terrifying, the feeling of fucking cruel, cosmic joke. What if one hates oneself, seemingly irrevocably and irreparably? Sometimes: self-disgust, cringe, shame, horror–all of which, that you will always have been, written into the past, written in stone. Who wouldn’t, sometimes, want to reflexively try to smash all that out of existence? A bifurcation, a discontinuity, at least a forgetting, by you and everyone else–and then, finally, you can start to live your real life.
But no. That’s not how it works; that’s not what minds are. Usually, maybe, probably always, for the deepest changes, at least, you have to go back, all the way, for all of it. [Note: "Going back," can also become a top-down, smashy thing, if one isn’t careful............]
It turns out, in the end, in the end, in the end–that it’s ok. All the things you thought and did, your causal history goes through structure preserving transformations–the feel of it gets to change, almost nothing is what you thought it was, no matter what it was and is. It’s ok.
***
A bit of a tonal change, here:
I thought young kids often spontaneously hyphenate their aspirational professions? (I thought this was more of a thing, but google is failing me.)
Update: Commentators, mostly on twitter, have submitted these, to me:
Here’s some more, maybe tongue-in-cheek, though pretty indistinguishable from those above; this online article** suggests (additional) grown-up versions:
And, here’s even more, quick-imagined by me; I think lots of people crave a sort of heterogeneous seamlessness:
To be sure, sometimes having a "hyphenate" career or life (or multiple jobs) is an act of desperation.
But, modulo resources, privilege, and more, and often even then, with the right tools and avoiding counterintuitive and paradoxical failure modes, why not?
To be sure, as well, you may have to walk through hell and give up far more than you ever thought you’d get in return, and what you finally end up with may look nothing like you thought it would, and that might be heartrending on the front end.
But you may end up with a seamlessly satisfying life.
***
*https://www.fatherly.com/love-money/the-2017-imagination-report-what-kids-want-to-be-when-they-grow-up/ [last accessed 20201114]
**https://www.popsugar.com/smart-living/What-Multi-Hyphenate-Career-45742128 [last accessed 20201114]
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If you have the time and money, I don’t know, maybe find a good therapist (one in 1000-10,000), go get therapy or psychoanalysis.
If your friends are into interesting practices, go explore with them.
Everything can be integrated. Live your life, have all the experiences (as makes sense), read all the books. Learn all the options and the degrees of freedom. The practices in this document are intended to both be load-bearing and to fill in the cracks when something better isn’t available.
There’s some narrow sense in which these practices can "do it all," get someone all the meditation-y goodness, heal trauma, alter preferences and behavior, increase wisdom, increase moral intelligence. These practices are ideally an absolute bootstrapping foundation that can fill in any missing cracks. It can be worth it to clocks thousands and thousands and thousands of hours on these practices alone. It can be worth it to be narrowly hardcore with these practices.
But.
Use everything. Use all of it. There’s better and worse, and choices matter, but, ultimately, late-stage, end-game, there’s no relevant distinction these practices, any other practices, and life itself.
Lots of solo time is needed, and sometimes solo time is the only thing available, but someone who’s having a rich variety of experiences with a rich variety of compassionate, intelligent, interesting people will progress (possibly) faster (and possibly more safely), all things being equal.
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I’ve rewritten the below a few times. It still feels like a very early draft, and it could be rewritten one hundred more times.
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So there’s this partially open-ended thing that you can do with the bodymind. And it takes time, thousands of hours. There’s a part that can’t be compressed, sort of the raw thing you’re working with, the way your mind is, right now, in all its complexity, that has to be worked all the way through. And then there will be contingent things that will make all of that go faster or slower.
If someone is older, they’ll have more raw stuff to work through. [The following sentence is long and hard to parse, and I apologize.] I suspect, for, say, someone who’s, I don’t know, between eighteen and thirty years old, with no really perverse trauma that can confusingly mix good and bad together, for example childhood sexual abuse, who’s really good with working with documents and a teacher, maybe they could start to asymptote around 6000 hours. Maybe. There are still unknowns, here. I suspect something more realistic, for someone between eighteen and forty-five, is anywhere from 8000-12,000 hours. Maybe!
Every problem you encounter may seem like it’s the deepest last problem. But there will be another, and another, maybe with a delay but inevitably, until there isn’t. So plan for this, in resources (time, money, relationships), possible break-taking (to make money or friends), opportunity costs, etc. One can’t predict using timelines, or plan using timelines—one has to just assume it’s going to take 10 years 20 years even if it only takes 1.7 years. This can potentially be hard and risky, depending on available resources and opportunity costs, and likely or possible sequelae. This paragraph will be at the end of the next section as well.
I sometimes say that all of this, for some degree of "asymptotic done-ness," with optional plenty more to do, across a lifetime, takes roughly, on the order of, 10,000 hours.
Below is a discussion of the use of the number "10,000."
[...]
Mark:
the "[10,000] hours" thing may end up being problematic for a lot of people. [i do think it's a pretty good rough estimate; i chose that number carefully and i'm tracking data, as it comes in, to see if that estimate should be updated, and/but,] i just wanted to convey something about the seriousness of the investment, how long bad patches can be, and how counterintuitively long it can take to get certain benefits.
but like if people don’t meditate while falling asleep or waking up bc it’s hard to start and stop a timer, ahhhh. all sorts of goodharty stuff is possible, leading to too much grindy meditation and too little ad hoc meditation
collaborator1:
I also recently found the 10k number VERY helpful to get oriented (see "in an hour maybe you can cover 1% of 1%") so for me "Estimating" to get a sense of scale seems good for me right now, and "Tracking" seems hilariously bad
collaborator2:
@collaborator1 the 1% of 1% thing as expectation management and setting small goals / making sure I am not pushing too hard has been super helpful to me.
collaborator1:
!! Right: although they superficially seem the same (pointing at the scale of the endeavor) there is a huuuuuuuge difference in flavor between "in a given hour I can expect to cover 1% of 1% of what’s down there" versus "oof, lotta hours, gotta start churning them out - gotta do more hours"
The former encourages me to "push" or "force" a LOT less, to be WAY more patient
The latter makes me impatient
"This is a slow, gentle unfolding. It thrives when given breathing room, time, and space" versus "This is gonna be a herculean raw accumulation of effort."
"I am going to a meditation retreat so I can put in a bunch more hours" (latter) vs "I am going on retreat so I can give this process so much slack, so little pressure; allow it to bloom, to rest, to unfurl into the time abundance"
... I think this mood more or less is my practice, right now. The entirety of it
[...]
collaborator1:
Mooore musingssssss. Given that the timescale is "in" the state of the system (how tangled it is), and it "wants" to unfurl, my job is to make space where it could unfurl
So I win every time I clear space and time where I could meditate or whatever
Every time I’m not enforcing some constraint that’s incompatible with doing a little bit of untangling/unfurling right then
Even if I - even if "the system" - chooses to do "something else" with that time/space (edited)
Sometimes I end up going kinda deep on some interospective sifting, but sometimes I end up doing art or cleaning or something, that’s all good
[...]
collaborator3:
What’s the benefit of keeping track of how long you meditate for?
How is it not just an overhead?
Does it help anything? (aside from research, e.g. Mark would want to estimate how long it might take for the sake of people adopting his approach)
Mark:
for me, as a very, very rough guide of "where one is at" so it doesn’t feel like a vague infinity. it matters less if someone can "just tell" the time spent is good and valuable, but, even then, a very rough hour guesstimate can help someone gently persevere when/if things sometimes feel endlessly hard.
with current data [2020-12-03], "10k hours" seems like a good heuristic for a "first-pass tour of all the possible surprises and neat/terrible stuff before things mostly ongoingly chill out"
a GENTLE, loosely held, completionism thing, I think, can help, too, hour count-wise, if it doesn’t become goodhart-y and grind-y, for people who are particularly interested in "going all the way," for whatever that individually means to them. though whatever that means to them, individually, could come in/"finish" way under or over 10,000 hours. (and, 10k or not, in any case, some people, long-run, will be doing things across a lifetime, along a complex spectrum of priority and investment.)
[end discussion]
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[editing note: noting that the discussion just added above maybe confusingly tone clashes with this section]
One of the things that’s hard is that, I suspect, for most people, doing the thing will either consume their lives or they’ll get stuck. There’s the saying, "Better not to start. If you start, better to finish."
Some people will try to fit all this into the way their life currently is, their job, their relationships. That might work, meditating one to three hours per day, with more on the weekends, and intensely a few times per year. (But, again, see above how long that’ll take, calendar time, given the raw number of hours needed to asymptote.) One possible outcome of this is that they won’t notice many things changing. And that’s a safe tolerable outcome. But, if that person gets into some hard stuff, they might not have the "habitual intensity" to get themselves out. And they may get stuck in a state that’s hurting themselves, people they care about, and possibly many people that they incidentally come into contact with in their daily lives.
So there’s a certain safety in "really committing." You don’t have to do that in the beginning. You can ramp up slowly over six to twenty-four months, maybe, to see if you really want to do this thing. Maybe. We don’t have enough data, yet. This section will change as that data comes in. Be very careful about experimenting, to figure out whether you’re in or you’re out. Don’t accidentally get too far. It happens.
An important part of the that "really committing" is not just knowing that you’re going to put in a lot of hours. That other part is something like "cognitive burden" or "cognitive momentum." It often or even usually won’t look like normal "figuring things out," though it very well might, but your mind is going to be occupied solving problems of types its never, ever had to solve before. And, to make progress, this is sometimes going to be going on "in the back of your mind" when you’d potentially rather be, say, making money or enjoying or strengthening relationships. One person described it to be as "whole self demanding" as another full time job or another primary relationship. So, even if one doesn’t meditate for three days or something, that "job-ness" or "relationship-ness" in terms of how the mind is processing beneath the surface (or not) doesn’t go away.
A few paragraphs above, I mentioned, "they may get stuck in a state that’s hurting themselves, people they care about, and possibly many people that they incidentally come into contact with in their daily lives." Being "really committed" also involves trying to have life flexibility to sometimes dial the intensity up even more, to move through harmful states faster or more smoothly. Other sections will talk a bit more specifically about the possible harms to oneself and other people. But, if something like that is going on, one wants to be able to ideally isolate themselves for as many hours or days is necessary to get to something better. That’s going to put a strain on relationships, depending on how complete that isolation should be. It’s better to have kids after one or both people get on the likely far side of all of that.
This paragraph is in the section above, too: Every problem you encounter may seem like it’s the deepest last problem. But there will be another, and another, maybe with a delay but inevitably, until there isn’t. So plan for this, in resources (time, money, relationships), possible break-taking (to make money or friends), opportunity costs, etc. One can’t predict using timelines, or plan using timelines—one has to just assume it’s going to take 10 years 20 years even if it only takes 1.7 years. This can potentially be hard and risky, depending on available resources and opportunity costs, and likely or possible sequelae.
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I’ve talked above about "intensity" and "really committing," but this can lead people into a very common failure mode. So this might be one of the most important subsections you’ll read in this entire document.
When people first start using this material, they might do a thing that could be called any of the things below:
magical button-pushing
excessive-faith meditation
superstitious meditation
"meditate-and-pray"
What these mean, and they all refer to the same thing, is to sort of be doing one’s best to follow the instructions maybe to the letter, but not trying to understand and enact the instructions to their very essence or core. Even if one is using the meta protocol, and the meta meta protocol, one can still be doing something like this.
It’s better to maybe pretend that the instructions are complete shit, a lossy telephone game, that’s pointing at a real thing (or is it), but something got hopelessly garbled. And, you want the value, but you should then interact with the instructions with the intention to find "the real instructions behind the instructions." This isn’t a new idea. But, even where some parts of this document are vague, some parts are crystal clear (in some sense), albeit hard to parse or initially interpret. And that (arguable) clarity can make it seem like "all one has to do is follow the instructions," which just isn’t true.
I tell people they would ideally create their own instruction document, that leaves out none of the essential complexity that this document is pointing to, but is entirely in their own words...
Without this section, I think the written instructions do eventually lead people to the "real instructions," but hopefully reading this will make that go faster.
I want to emphasize, though, that ALMOST EVERYONE inevitably starts with magical button-pushing. One shouldn’t be ashamed of this. Some percentage of people just won’t be able to help themselves. Not-being-able-to-help-it, to not do it, of course, is why we meditate in the first place. Finding one’s way to the real instructions, over tens or hundreds of hours, is just part of the thing.
Be precise, patient, and gentle.
See also:
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/01/20/meditation-is-not-strength-training/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-06)]
I think the repetition/strength-training/functional-reserve model of meditation is pretty misleading. The mind isn’t a muscle. It’s better to think of it as a digital state machine that can self-modify its state transition function, even though this borrows from the dubious computing metaphor. The mind is not analog and not mushy. It is shockingly digital and lossless. Seeming muscle-ness is an abstraction on more fine-grain dynamics. To succeed, one must eventually engage with those dynamics as they are (of course, but models matter). "Strength training" causes people to accumulate a great deal of momentum and cruft that they then have to reverse and undo. I’ve heard stories of people who wish they’d had a better sense of "right effort," earlier on.* I personally think it’s better to think in terms of puzzle-solving, test-check, and wayfinding right from the start.
An analogy I use is that the mind is made of a tangle of perfectly flexible, perfectly fluid steel cables that are also perfectly incompressible and inelastic. Maybe like cooked spaghetti or heavy rope, but "indestructible" or "unforgiving." And you can reweave the cables but nothing can be created or destroyed. (This isn’t entirely true because experience tangles in new cable(s) and correct reweavings cause cables to losslessly become one ["elegance collapse"].] No escape but ultimately clear directionality in the space of play.
I think Donald Knuth has an essay somewhere about programming. And he makes an analogy that, when people first start learning programming, they think it’s like drawing, where, if you push harder with the pencil you get a darker line. I think the more recent idea of "programming by coincidence" is downstream of this essay. I don’t agree with everything in the essay, if I remember it correctly, but some of the metaphorical/analogical distinctions are great.
Yes, experimenting, yes playing, yes learning. But not guessing and hoping, or doubling-down, over and over again!
To back off a little bit, there is something to the "train the microscope then use the microscope." There is "gathering" of content and method, over and over again. Behavior is, if not digital, then coherent–walking and talking and eating. Some behaviors are digital-ish, like speaking or writing, though they are waves in a preconceptual/postconceptual ocean. And/but/then/anyway it’s like the insights, the microscope(s), get perpetually rewoven through the entire system, while the system retains something of their character. This isn’t quite right, but I think it’s better than the strength-training analogy.
To back off a little bit more, I can imagine the strength-training analogy can be empowering and is a better model than "hapless, hopeless prisoner/captive of one’s own uncontrollable mind"!
But mind as collaborative puzzle-solving coconspirator (albeit with potentially miles and miles of terrible, torturous, self-reflexive, strange-loop confusion) might be better.
*Of the people in the wild who have succeeded or seem to be making inexorable progress, it does seem that "overshooting and correcting" does work. And the more likely failure mode is "not reaching escape velocity." But, I think explicit wayfinding might be best thing. Not enough theory/data, yet. And, I don’t know how much selection bias is in my (contemporary) "historical" data.
*
"In a real and important neuroscientific sense, repetition will potentiate synapses, increase total number of synapses, synchronize neurons, increase brain volume, and so on. And, state/behavior, etc., will become more/less likely. But—" / but, even still, this is a misleading way to think about long-term mind training. Short-term & medium-term it’s maybe ok. But, long-term, local optimizations trade off against global state & entrench medium-scale maxima. Long-term meditation, at least, is not strength-training. https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1783510728604844464?s=46
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Along with "intensity" and "really commiting" and "magical button-pushing," is sort of "creeping unreflective desperation and unresponsiveness." Often we start meditating because, whether we can put our finger on it or not, something is terrible, horrific somewhere. There is something really, really, really, really bad. And, the first impulse of the mind, in some sense, once the mind gets just enough knowledge to start making changes to itself, is to reflexively, in some sense, run as far away from the bad thing as it possibly can.
And that running away, paradoxicaly, tragically is exactly the wrong thing that ultimately needs to happen. (That’s often the case but not always. Sometimes the "running away" is the only way the mind can pick up tools to finally turn around and come back.
In any case, whether it’s good or bad, that running away will sometimes freeze not just that deep dark bad thing (or, usually, a bunch of deep, dark bad things) but will "freeze" a whole bunch of other things as well.
That is, a meditator can become more rigid, more neurotic, more belligerent, more unresponsive, more "unspiritual" before things turn around. And some of that rigidity might not go away for until the meditator is close to the "very end." Or it’ll painfully come and go in ways that are distressing to both the meditator and the people around them, hopes and expectations dashed, over and over again.
So, this section is both for caution and expectation setting but also to possibly make it a bit less likely that something like this will happen. Judicious use of the meta protocol and the meta meta protocol will help.
*
Another way to look at all this is, at a very different level of abstraction, "don’t even try to make yourself a certain, very specific way. And, even more so, don’t ever try to move forward without understanding why you’re not already that way." Beware, beware, "I should just be able to do X..."
*
It might be helpful to explore further where some "shoulds" partially even come from. This is one possibility:
We model what we "should" be able to do, now or eventually, in part based on observations of other people, especially people that we sort of tag as "peers."
One issue with this is that we sometimes then "[...] compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel" (attributed to Steve Furtick?), and the discussion below applies a bunch to this as well.
But, what I want to focus on is something like "inferred 'mental actions'" (both the whole thing and the subphrase 'mental actions' each have quotes around them).
So what happen is that we don't just emulate other people's overt behavior and routines, as best we can figure out what those are, such as their workout habits, practice habits, apparent uses of "reasoning" or "logic," their athletic, artistic, or musical form, etc., but we might also infer sort of "what they're doing with their mind," and then we try to do that too. (Of course, in a bunch of senses, there isn't real "mind" or even "bodymind", cf. "no mind anywhere," etc., etc., etc., and that indeed is part of the problem, too.)
So, we sort of pair external and internal actions, in mimicry of people around us. Sometimes this works great! But in general it's very difficult to know what other people are "doing" with their "minds," and there are even /some/ senses in which this isn't even possible. And/but, even if we couldknow what they're doing, it often won't be right for us.
--oh, all things being equal, experts probably are doing similar things with their minds (See Herbert Simon's Protocol Analysis!), and, indeed, world class performers (and often mediate performs) are probably using sort of the same brain networks--
But people usually don't start out that way. Trying to do expert-y things or peer things, right off the bat, or ever (depending on initial interpretation!) might not mesh well with the "regime" one's mind is currently in! It's not just that language, at the very very very least for beginning meditators, is sort of seated differently for everyone, and we interpret language use differently, sometimes wildly differently (say when we're not just inferring, but someone even describes what they're doing, explicitly or implying, and we try to do the same), but that, sort of, to a first approximation, "everything" is seated differently between different people. Everyone is sort of running their own constellation of "(embodied) (body)mind functions." And/but, of course, of course, there are "supervenient" or "supervening" isomorphisms and homomorphisms between people, especially amongst peers, and within cultures, and within workplaces!!! But, sort of, the underlying "layering structure" is often different, the "sub-functions" are often different(, the "concepts" are often different), the precise, dynamic constellation of brain network/substrate is often different, and so on. I'm maybe actually overstating it a bit; there's actually quite a bit of convergence in how people "use their brains," say if you look at a bunch of right-handed males of the same age who all speak the same language, for various tasks (and so on), with fMRI or EEG or something. Tons of phenotypic homology leading to "functional homology." But there's also plenty of divergence, too. There's still lots of software divergence on top of that hardware, and there's often at least a little (genetic and developmental) hardware divergence, too, or a lot.
People who have some especially non-normative very-soon-after-the-first-moments-of-consciousness "first concepts" or people who have subtle or not-so-subtle neurological divergence, are maybe often going to have a bad time trying to emulate people as children, tweens, teens, and adults for at least some narrow set of things that would otherwise make use of what in this case is non-normative sub-functions or "substrate." In the former case, when it's "just" software, then that's sort of, for better and worse, "fixable" (bad choice of words), I think, with the usual... ten thousand hours of meditation. With neurological divergence, I think, it might sometimes be hard to ultimately do some synergistic collections of things that some people to be able to seamlessly do (like someone who is good at a bunch of sports)--a person with some non-normativity might (initially painstakingly) indeed get to the point of costless, effortless skill (that, too, doesn't interfere with other skills) with one sport but not have a lot of tranfer to other sports, or something.
But, at least at first, often, something is not "going the same way" as it does for lots of other people. And where things can go unfortunately worse is when someone "doubles down" on, potentially conceptually ill-posed, inferred mental actions. And then if one doesn't seem to be getting the same result (even when sometimes all that's needed is patience), that can lead to "shoulding," as in, "this should work!"
And that can potentially lead to forcing and self-hatred strategies that can get really layered in. But of course these-all can also be undone, with time! But it can get very compounding; layers on layers with possible mostly normal "phenotype" at the bottom or something more neurologically divergent, sometimes.
But in any case, even in cases of "divergence," as best I can tell, "buddha mind" still applies, meaning self-acceptance, structural fluidity, etc., etc., etc., etc., is fully available. "It won't be the life you 'thought you wanted' but it will be fully retrospectively be the life you do want, or that frame will be completely dissolved." Sometimes it might be a bit of a longer road, though, because a greater likelihood of lots of "switchback layering." That said, for better and worse, I think such people are often more likely to both pick up meditation and then take it all the way. Opportunity costs, there, but also extraordinarily good stuff that lots of people wouldn't otherwise get to experience and live.
So again, incongruence / incongruity between sort of one's own subtrate or regime, with respect to what one is cueing off of other people, can lead to compounding layering with potentially shoulding, leading to forcing and self-hatred.
As a first pass, one might explore what "mental actions" they're inferring off of their interpretations of "what other people are doing" and whether that is potentially really gumming things up. This will generally help a little bit also be sort of "out of order" for most people because of how deep this stuff can go.
Ultimately, one will sort of deconstruct "mental," "action," "other people," etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., undo layering, find bottom-up strategies with respect to pursuit of settled-but-fluid, non-fixed goals, which will synergize with more and more self-acceptance, self-care, more strategic "inner" and "outer" behavior, and so on. And perhaps most importantly, one will have increasing self-knowledge, to better evaluate the usefulness of other people's provisionally inferred strategies and to better be able to immediately and fluidly begin to adapt them or discard them with respect to one's own situation.
[Note: I'm unhappy with some of the vibe and deep conceptual stuff in this sub-section.]
*
Again, be precise, patient, and gentle.
*
See also:
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[NOTE: See also making sense (far reaches) [stub/scratch] ]
It can be helpful to realize that you need to become a genius. You need to become brilliant. You will become brilliant, at least along some narrow dimensions, in the course of doing this thing. If you strive for that, relax into it, things will go more smoothly.
The level of skill and (mostly implicit) intricate knowledge that you need to acquire is shockingly high. It’s like you need to learn every single instrument in an entire orchestra, including the ones that, at least historically, very rarely get used, as well as how to be a conductor. But that’s what the protocol is for. The protocol helps you do that. But if you’re ready for that, you know what’s supposed to happen, then that can go more eaily.
Additionally, it can help to reach for words, phrases, and concepts like these:
[And eventually you will let go of the above! Perfection-in-imperfection type stuff, aconceptual and post-conceptual type stuff. Letting go of "done" and "done-ness" and "finished" and "end" and "completion," etc.]
[No-goal, no-plan, no-view, no-position, no-escape, no-refuge, no-end, no-next, no-later, no-elsewhere, no-elsewhen, no-success, no-failure, no-purpose, no-point, no-good[~], no-bad[~], no-evil, no-self, no-choice, no-stability, no-completion, no-path, no-fruit, no-refuge, nothing-to-do, nothing-to-hold-on-to, no-stability, no-foothold, no-bootstrap, nondual, not-two, not-one...][no old life to get back to, no "getting back to it" [afterwards], no elsewhere, no other place, no world out there, no people, no hope, no fear, no remainder, nothing left over, no permanence, no refuge, no foothold, no fixing/stilling, no depending, nothing waiting for you [to finish], no fact of the matter, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide]
That is, it can be helpful to realize, at the finest grain, there’s no vagueness, no "mush," no "slop." The mind, in some sense, is shockingly lossless. Like, there’s compression, to be sure, but that compression is shockingly lossless.
You might think of the mind as made up of incompressible, inelastic, lossless, indestructible steel cables that are all very long and tangled together. And you need to untangle them and thread one-hundred percent of them all the way through their individual needle holes. And because of the nature of those cables it’s simply impossible to cheat.
Or, you might think of the mind is made up of one’s and zero’s, like a computer program or something. (And, luckily, there’s tons of parity checking.) And, by the time you’re finished, not even a single bit can be wrong. No bits left behind, not a single one.
You don’t have to be stressed about this, in the sense that the mind is going to lead you to all those needed untwists or bits left behind. In some sense, which is part of the whole point, the mind isn’t going to let you half-ass anything. That’s not how the mind works.
But the main point is that, the more you go with the grain of this, the more smoothly it will go. There’s a right ordering to everything, to be sure. And sometimes it’s going to suck.
But, if you know that you might indeed need sometimes spend five hundred hours going after one "bit," and indeed you might need to do that twenty times, that’s just part of the practice. That is the practice.
Again, the protocol will lead you to this level of conscientiousness and skill. The protocol (and the meta protocol and the meta meta protocol) and how the mind responds will lead you to find every last one of those bits, in some sense won’t let you do anything less, will help you be sure you’ve got them all. You’ll eventually get a taste for perfection, flawlessness, etc.
You’ll learn how to work at the finest grain. You’ll learn how to act with continuity, continuousness, without inappropriate gaps, jumps, jogs.
The protocol might start out feeling super clunky, not like meditation at all. But, over time, bottom up, it’ll look more and more like "classical contemporary noting" [sic] and concentration without support.
Go with the grain of this, not against it.
[NOTE: See also making sense (far reaches) [stub/scratch] (Also pasted at top because important.)]
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If you start inclining towards the very faintest beginnings of crippling muscle tension, nerve root impingement, intracranial pressure, intraocular pressure, then you’ve left something out. There’s a memory or a "bit" missing, somewhere. Engage the meta protocol and meta meta protocol and the preliminary/auxilliary practices and outside resources, if necessary, to go and find it. Ideally, do these things long before there’s even the faintest hint of muscle tension, etc. It’s much, much easier for any of that to creep up on you than it is to dispel it.
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Along with that extreme skill and extreme standards, there’s also something needed like courage or bravery.
In some sense, everything you thought you knew about everything is going to be wrong. Things are going to seem pretty normal on the far end, but, holy shit, in the middle, sometimes.
Your deepest assumptions are going to be questioned, and you’re likely going be absolutely shocked, at least a few times.
And some things are going to creepingly seem like horrible, horrible, intolerable "truths" at least at first. Or you’re eventually realize you’re mistaken, or you’ll eventually realize it’s not actually that bad.
But, there’s probably going to be away in which "everything is taken from you," sometimes figuratively or at least psychologically (or even spiritually; or even literally, if understandably but tragically parts of your life get fucked up).
Bravery. Courage.
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Beware of decompensated impulsiveness. Don’t cheat on your significant other. Don’t blow up at your friends. Don’t create situations where you need to be saved. Don’t be dramatic. And/but, be exactly as dramatic as you need to be but no more.
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Holy shit, a lot of warnings here, about things that can go wrong. It’s important to keep in mind, and this has been a lifeline for me, and it’s true, the mind is ultimately reversible. Any "mistake" or mistake the mind has made, whether it was in the first moments of consciousness or a dumbass (as it were; or completely innocent) thing you were doing for two thousand hours in the course of meditation. The mind will ultimately untwist its way to that thing, raise that thing, backchain all the necessary prerequisites, complete those, and then correct the thing. And that’s whether you’re eighteen or ninety. All you need to do is practice correctly, to responsively, methodically, intelligently, intuitive crank. Meditation works because this is what minds are. This is what minds do and this is what meditation does and that’s why we’re doing it.
Error propagation, meditating (or just living) in a way that incidentally or systematically spreads and ramifies errors throughout mind, experience, and behavior is just a thing.
But meditation is also systematic error-correction, problem-solving and backtracking.
Meditation is global wayfinding.
Meditation is not, say, "strength training" or a "faith exercise" (although surrender and faith play a part).
Meditation is unlocking an intricate puzzle box.
Meditation is global wayfinding.
Meditation is wayfinding.
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The words “good” and “bad” are used a lot throughout this document. In some sense, the entire document is built around these words--and, of course, not just the words, but what they might mean, loosely held.
But what do they mean, in this context? And why words with such baggage, such laden connotations (sometimes religious, moral, parental, self-policing, etc.)?
The words "good" and "bad" were chosen, because, even though their connotations are problematic, most all other words that were considered didn’t have quite the right denotations.
A few words that were considered for “good”: valued, useful, wholesome, skillful, wise... You could probably come up with a few much better ones, but, for my part at least, none of them really captured the sense that I was looking for. I even considered using (nonce? neologism? slang?) words like “yay” and “bleh” in place of “good” and “bad.”
But, ultimately, by “good” I just mean good. And by “bad” I just mean bad. By dropping the quotes in that previous sentence, I just did a particularly language-y thing, like I'm pointing to one specific there, there. Am I? Is there?
So, yeah, by dropping the quotes, that’s not to essentialize or eternalize good and bad, to fix and crystalize their meanings, to point at something enduringly real or existing, to point to them as something outside of you, or something eternal and authoritative. But that’s not to say that they don’t mean anything either, that it’s all meaningless or nothing or nihilism, that there isn't anything there. No no, on the contrary, "goodness"/goodness in particular can be an incredibly powerful concept (not to inappropriately reify concepts as such, either--and it's less: "concepts"--and more: "the very transparently, seamlessly appearing being and seeming of the world, through and through, without remainder). And, regarding that "power," not the least of which because of the perhaps singular way it can keep pace with a person's untwisting and untangling. Wrestling with "goodness" ("true goodness," "actual goodness," "really real goodness"--not to inappropriately reify "true" and "actual" and "really real" is perhaps singularly productive. Maybe. Another way to put it, and this is problematic too, is "what do I actually really truly all the way down wholeheartedly, heartfelty want just because I want it? Kind of, sort of.
What I’m pointing at, too, here, is something like,
“nth-order consequentialism across all time horizons, immediate, imminent, proximal, distal, and everything between, before, during, and after” (not to inappropriately reify TIME, eternity, sempiternity, now, anything--this is just a schema, just words)
That was a messy mouthful. Slightly shorter is "nth-order consequentialism across all time horizons." This is just my gloss, my handle.
(Added later: Consequentialism that understands nth-order effects of means (i.e. the ends "justify" the means only if you take into account all the ends of all the means // if you think that's impossible do note that you're already imperfectly doing it as the basis of all your behavior! and one can come to do it better over time, which is wisdom // this post brought to you by my being upset at how the word consequentialism is getting thrown around atm. also i am not a moral/ethical scholar though // "that you're already imperfectly doing it as the basis of all your behavior" this phrase should be taken as shitpost-grade. // hmm, there's a causality/telicity equivocation in here // More discussion, here, including replies: https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1592974670894026752 [Last accessed: 2022-11-21] // Anyway, I'm trying to point at something like [tacitly!!! effortlessly, spontaneously, always-already, globally-being-knowing, being-as-knowing-as, sort of] knowing the consequences of one's behavior, including such that there are "no" unaccounted-for externalities (up to "true" phenomenological-edge-and-beyond unknown unknowns), at all time horizons from immediate to "???" (impermanence / non-eternity applies) and this takes durational time but is simultaneous costless, effortless, etc., and even all this eats itself with no remainder in spontaneity, etc. So maybe consequentialism is a misnomer or at least has problematic connotations, because far from "the ends justify the means" I'm saying the exact opposite of that.... e.g. even things even that "no one will ever find out" still have karmic effects in the (body)mindscape sense, but nor am I saying be rule-bound [cf. nebulosity, emptiness, etc.] or scrupulous, and so on, and so on.)
To say more, it's something like, just, given this, in front of me, what’s going to happen, "exactly" what's going to happen (holding that loosely, not clenching around that or fixating on "exactly," it's just words) and is that good or bad, all of it, the whole of it, local-in-the-context-of-global? (not to inappropriately reify "global")
Again: just, relative to these different choices, or, loosely speaking, possible worlds, what's now/then going to happen, and is that outcome, or those outcomes, plural, or this/that unfolding future good? (not to inappropriately reify "future")
Good and bad are sort of only meaningful relative to local choices and short- and long-run outcomes, and what-could-have-happened-otherwise's, sort of.
And, then, in light of all of that, "good" and "bad" is a HARD thing to judge, to discern, to evaluate, to predict, to intuit! You could tie yourself in knots, trying! Though, at the same time, we’re doing it all the time, reflectively and unreflectively, through and through. Arguably, it's a thing you're not doing at all, or is it, or isn't it?
To make the point in a different way, there’s a daoist story, where seeming good and bad get reversed, over and over again:
I don’t remember exactly how the story goes, but maybe a farmer loses his most valued horse (bad?), but then the horse comes back, followed by more horses (good?), and maybe the farmer’s son breaks his leg training one of the new horses (bad?), but then the son doesn’t have go fight in a horrific war being waged for questionable reasons (good?), and perhaps the son is still crushingly, devastatingly ashamed for not fighting (bad?), but it engenders in him a thoughtfulness and sensitivity that puts him on the road to wisdom, which is valued by his peers, community, and potential intimate partners (good?)... And then maybe more seeming good and bad follows from that? And so then were all the prior events good or bad? Or both? Or neither? Maybe the story goes something like that.
Anyway, good and bad is sort of blurry, relative, conditional, dependent, interdependent, nebulous, provisional, uncertain. So, not eternal. But also not meaningless: good and bad might still be wholehearted and heartfelt, it’s ok to care, it’s ok for it to matter. But the use of these words isn’t intended to be moralizing and you aren’t being god’s-eye-view judged.
So, yeah, good or bad? It's hard to know, to tell. I've said in other places, sometimes good doesn't feel (completely) good (or feel good at all) and sometimes bad doesn't feel (completely) bad (or feel bad at all), or what's going on is mixed, or uncertain, and so on. (In any case, with respect to "X doesn't necessarily feel X," you should still trust yourself, as best you can! This isn't meant to be undermining! One can only just do their best, as best they can! And it's enough!)
But, again, you sort of have to judge, discern, evaluate (or you don't have to at all, truly, just let go, just surrender, too, over and over again). At first this might be a little too “head-y,” a little too intellectual, but it’s really meant to be intuitive, too, whole body, whole everything, felt, the global context of bodymindworldpastpresentfuture [sic]. That is, you sort of have to take into account what happened before, what’s going to happen after, what’s all going on now. The local sort of only makes sense in a global context. "Is/was 'this' good or bad or etc.," is not, generally, a (successfully) myopic question, though sometimes (often?), temporarily, you are just doing the best you can in a locally myopic and narrow vacuum, and that's ok. That's part of the process.
Anyway, all that said, sometimes, it’s just sort of too much, at too fine a grain, sometimes too fast (or at least ever-changing, ever-shifting). Like, say you’re doing something, or something happened, or there aren't any "things" that you can currently pick out of anything, or things keep changing, and then, in all that, of all that... is/was that good or bad?? It's ok, especially and first, and any time, if you sort of feel like you're playing continual catch-up, like the river is flowing too fast or slipping through your fingers. It's ok, any time, to float, to just go with the flow. Things will become clearer and "temporally appropriate bottom-up action" will "rise to meet the right things at the right times", more and more over time.
And, it’s ok, especially at first, and often, even late-stage, to just not know, over and over again, to be uncertain or to even have no idea whether “something” (perhaps blurry, fuzzy, shimmery, nebulous as it is) is “good” or “bad.” There can be pockets of "reconsidering," "not knowing," "unknowing," sometime really distinctly, sometimes brief and small, sometimes big and lasting for seconds, minutes, hours or days, in the beginning, middle, and lates stages of practice. When you find these pockets, that's gold--if safe, if it's the right time, if it's good to do... hang out with them, keep them company. You may find you're pressed up against them. And through all that...
Part of it all, is eventually getting to the point of having a real sense of what to do (not to inapproriately reify "real" or "sense")--and this is through experimenting, learning, watching, waiting, again—letting go, letting things happen. It's a process. And, the knowledge (loosely speaking, not to inapproriately reify knowledge) that grows, the wisdom, the discernment is local and global, object and meta, specific and general, precise and heuristic, always provisional.
Over time, bit of pieces of the (what's good and bad [to do, start, stop, maintain, facilitate, gently temporarily prevent, gently temporarily block] sensemaking, can explicated, verbally articulated, sometimes, sometimes even in abstract, general, architechtonic ways--rules, methods, theories, procedures, protocols.
But the real thing-behind-the-thing is implicit, inexplicit, nebulous procedural knowledge, implicit how knowledge. Meditation is more like riding a bike (or driving a car or jogging) than writing an essay or giving a speech. (It's a very complex, multidimensional bike, to be sure, though ultimately simple on the far side of complexity.) In the end, deep down, you don't quite know how you're doing what you're doing, even as you gently ease towards mastery. Somehow, somehow, the experimenting, the trying, the noticing, the letting go, yes even the thinking!, the figuring!, becomes skill and confidence, over time. In that unknowing and provisionality is simultaneously an unshakeable faith (in the positive sense), an unshakeable trust, in grace, in something, perhaps.
Anyway, especially, what "good" and "bad" mean or don't mean, to you, will and "should" evolve, over time, as you engage in the practices in this document. Sometimes they will semantically saturate, sometimes, you will realize your conception of something was too narrow, to head-y, not embodied, not em-world-ed, was leaving something out, was maybe not wholehearted and heartfelt and complete and something, as you thought (not that those words or anything have to resonate with you, personally). You will find errors and misconceptions and mistakes, on your terms, and the meaning of good and bad will change. And sometimes, of course, you'll go by how things feel and not even be thinking about good and bad, as such, at all, even unreflectively.
In any case, then, good is sort of every-always "seemingly maybe 'good,' in the appropriate sense, as far/best as you can currently tell, provisionally, maybe, at least right now," and bad is sort of ever-always "seemingly maybe 'bad,' in the appropriate sense, as far/best as you can currently tell, provisionally, maybe, at least right now," and/or/also you can reject the ontology, such as: "there is no good and/or bad, there is (just) X [and Y]," where X [and Y] is what works for you.
*
P.S. As far as I can tell, the very immediate and local and situated "doing" of meditation does ultimately harmonize pretty well with explicit ethics, steelmanned golden rules, categorical imperatives, subjunctive and counterfactual coordinative simulations of other agents, timeless decision theories... even if the "joins" are sometimes implicit and nebulous. It's pretty cool. And, I don't even really see a contradiction between consequentialism and virtue ethics, either... And so on...
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The mind is vast but practically, nonmonotonically, asymptotically finite.
Have you been cranking?
cranking = enacting regular and routine progress; doing the thing
idealized cranking = correct use of the different parts of this document at the correct times, responsively, personally as you concretely work with and through your individual mind
Have you been cranking?
You might also see the "gentle on-ramp"/"onramp" section elsewhere in the document as well as the "meditating by coincidence" section.
Also, some people are turned off by the "crank"/"cranking"/"turning the crank" metaphor. Another way of looking at is with a "learning to play music and playing music" metaphor: The preliminary/auxiliary practices are like playing the scales. The main practices are like playing from sheet music (with personal interpretation). And then after that is improvisation, jazz, riffing, creative, experimental, joyful--maybe "getting somewhere" (cf. "global wayfinding") and maybe not, depending on how conceived and you proceed, on your terms, but the system is changing and changing, always slowly and sometimes quickly.
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Someone comments (slightly edited):
"I’m very interested in the demarcation between meditation and not-meditation (with respect to the instructions not ‘feeling like’ meditation. Can you just basically meditate all the time, by this system, unless you have something else to focus on in specific (job, a game, movie, in-depth conversation, whatever?)"
Answer:
It matters how you think about what you’re doing, how you explicitly or implicitly, reflectively or unreflectively, conceive of what you’re doing, while you’re doing it.
There’s a main practice, below, where one of the components is surrender, reverie, etc. Just as in that practice, where it’s ok to let go, to be lost, to forget, to daydream, to be in reverie, it’s also ok to get lost in life.
So when you’re working, playing, socializing, relating, it’s probably often better to just do that. (Maybe this changes, little by little by little, as one gets very far along, and there are practices, one described below, where it’s possible to explicitly practice with someone. But, 99% of the time, maybe, when meditating, meditate, and, when living, just live.)
Meditating of course happens in an environment, air conditioning, kitchen appliances in the distance, wind, traffic, machinery, conversations in another room. So meditation takes the environment into account. But there’s still sort of a difference between meditating in an environment and living (in an environment), until there is no difference, which never has to be forced.
***
An electronic dialogue (slightly edited):
[...]
Mark 15 minutes ago
to be fair, the protocol doc is me collecting 15,000+ [now 250k+ words] words of highly detailed things to remember, for myself (and others). so there’s that. [in order to eventually "forget" it], to not need it, for it to become an inert pedagogical tool to share with others (edited)
[...]
Collaborator 15 minutes ago
i have some new thoughts on the protocol doc
Collaborator 15 minutes ago
nascent thoughts
Collaborator 14 minutes ago
i think you’d agree fwiw ...
Collaborator 14 minutes ago
[that] like for a (small?) percentage of minds [the protocol document] will drive them crazy
Mark 13 minutes ago
i’m more inclined to think this than in the past
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
[A long time ago I read a] quote [that] was like, "a meditator will choose the protocol that feeds their neurosis"
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
definitely not saying this is always or even usually the case
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
but like, i can see the ways i’ve gotten stuck * inside * of the protocol
Mark 13 minutes ago
... ...and then hopefully a protocol is good enough to eventually deconstruct that neurosis... ...
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
sigh
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
hopefully
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
i think eventually maybe
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
but there might be faster ways
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
jumping into deep ends
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
going to wild parties
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
^ not so much that last one
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
but you get the point i think
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
which isn’t exactly true
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
i’ll still be following the protocol
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
at least the most important ways
Mark 11 minutes ago
would say that this conversation, this being verbalized, is evidence of protocol at least partially working
agreed that some things will be hilariously ridiculously faster for some people.
"if i’d only done X first" is also kind of a thing. i’m guessing that X usually wouldn’t have had the same effect if it came first.
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
but like, i can see the ways i’ve gotten stuck * inside * of the protocol
but have to deconstruct several layers of how i baked it into my mind
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
partially yeah sure
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
but like wouldn’t have gotten there with just protocol
Mark 10 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
this needs to be more explicit, yeah. it’s near top of list.
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
but can’t forget protocol when inside of the protocol
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
or something like that
Mark 10 minutes ago
yeah
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
*for some people some of the time (edited)
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
like i still think protocol is Right [Editor: Ahhhh! I’m trying to point in the direction of something Right, "under emptiness."]
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
and maybe even Ultimate [Editor: Ahhhh! I’m trying to point in the direction of something Right, "under emptiness."]
Collaborator 9 minutes ago
but like it’s more clear to me how i’ve gotten trapped inside it and it’s assumptions (possibly the assumptions I gave to it)
Collaborator 9 minutes ago
and like how i might just need to go sing and roll in the grass and stuff for a couple months [kind of ..., not exactly ...]
Collaborator 8 minutes ago
protocol feels very platonic to me
Collaborator 8 minutes ago
or at least my understanding/interpretion of it
Mark 8 minutes ago
the way i’m thinking about it right now is there’s sort of micro-redo-to-undo, which can often be done in the context of main practice p2, conceptualized as such.
and then there’s also sort of macro-redo-to-undo, which can easily involve forgetting about the protocol for a few months to go have desired experiences and experiments. and both may be very necessary. and needing to do that one to twenty times, big macro orbits that forget about the protocol completely and then maybe pick it up again later [added later: or for sure finding a practice system that works better for oneself and ideally transcending particular practice systems right off the bat or one already did so long ago or sooner or later]. (edited)
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
fwiw i don’t think i’ve found anything that you’d disagree with perse
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
like you’ve always given room for going off and doing wild experiments
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
and so maybe i haven’t listened
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
but but
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
at the same time
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
i think there’s some assumption baked into the whole approach/attitude/mind life of protocol (and creator? maybe??) that’s leaking out here
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
some worldview, ontology, something something
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
maybe
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
or maybe just my (mis)understanding
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
not clear
Collaborator 5 minutes ago
nap time
Mark 5 minutes ago
like i still think protocol is Right
and maybe even Ultimate
I think the protocol captures something pretty well, albeit, abstractly. but everyone will interpret and reify the conceptual homomorphism in like a slightly different place in their mind. and sometimes may need to indulge discontinuities, like complete vacations, in order to pick it up again in way that’s seated more fortuitously.
Mark 4 minutes ago
i think there’s some assumption baked into the whole approach/attitude/mind life of protocol (and creator? maybe??) that’s leaking out here
for sure, inevitably, even though tried to maximally abstract that out. the vibe of the whole thing. will be my contingencies baked in a various ways. this convo one way of mitigating that to some degree.
Mark 3 minutes ago
@Collaborator Can I paste this into protocol doc with some light editing? Will remove some stuff at beginning of thread.
Mark 1 minute ago
Have been looking for a way to introduce the "healthy orbiting" idea. There’s also "pre-orbiting" where a person does a bunch of other stuff first, evaluating and comparing and maybe eliminating alternatives and complementary practices, as well as maybe refactoring life situation, while only lightly poking at doc, before really digging in. And that can be in stages or back-and-forth, plenty, too. And that’s fine and good.
Mark 1 minute ago
"healthy orbiting and pre-orbiting"
Mark < 1 minute ago
And for some people, there will be something much more direct than analytically deconstructing and insourcing a !5,000+ word document. Or they should do that first for X months or years and then fiddle with the document if they get stuck or something.
[Added later: In the dialogue above, it feels like I was trying to toe some line between holding firm on one or more particular points (for better and worse) and being defensive, and I maybe was a bit too (feeling) on the defensive side. I want to honor and affirm something like, for some people, this document could potentially be "problematically sticky" in a way that it might have been better for them to never encounter the document at all---surely that's true, at the very least in principle, in at least edge cases for both meditators and non-meditators.]
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
If you are coming to these practices from many hours of other practices or another lineage, it can be sometimes helpful to deliberately and exploratorily interleave your old practices with new ones, prior to a bootstrap of greater and greater intuition for what to do when and how. (This might be on a timescale of seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks. It just depends.)
"Sharp cutovers," where a person leaves an old practice behind, for a new practice, and never touches the old one again, can lead to problems, in part because a person will have to touch the old practices (or their results), again, eventually, in order to make continued progress. And, it's sometimes easier to do that sooner rather than later. (See, in part, the idea of "redo-to-undo," later in the document, as well as the idea of "layering.")
It's like the old practice, depending on how much "undoing" you were already doing, has built up scaffolding, built up more each time one engages the practice. And, it takes some fraction of that time, in the future, to take down that scaffolding (while keeping the benefits). If one switches over to doing a new practice, too soon or too completely, it can leave scaffolding behind that eventually gums things up, later. (Though, you will have the opportunity to clean things up, then, at that later time, of course; it just might be at greater expense. Or(!), you'll have much more experience in the future, and it's much better to just wait to go back (and you may spontaneously find yourself there when it's time, in any case). It all just depends.)
Note also, anyway, that many people should just keep doing something in the space of what they've been prevously doing, for a time, or on and off. The "meta framework" of this document smoothly admits any and all practices (see the preliminary/auxilliary practices, main practice p2, etc.) Many people import practices from other lineages or find those practices already in the document, in some same, similar, or otherwise nearby form. (Eventually one moves beyond "practices" to just step-by-step, concrete, fine-grain doing, a la radically unstructured global wayfinding.)
So, if things feel fine, or going back and forth is confusing and "grindy" it's (maybe very) ok to just cautiously go ahead and trust your felt/intuitive sense of what to be doing (which could be new things or old things or creative mixes or amalgams of the two). This is, at least, just something to keep in mind. You'll eventually return, somehow, to the things you've already done, maybe liminally, at least once, and usually many times.
In any case, it can be helpful to keep in mind that some people are sometimes inclined towards "sharp cutover(s)" in a possibly problematic way.
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[editing note: needs at least some editing to tighten up the point being made and for run-on sentences, at the very, very least. may go for more concrete examples, later, too, along a bunch of dimensions.]
As you dissemble and reassemble your idiosyncratically built up sensory processing system, as it were, choice about where and when you meditate can matter, more some times and less other times, over the long run, sometimes for idiosyncratic reasons and sometimes for more general reasons. Over time, you must come to be able to make good choices about when to modify your environment (time/money/mental/interpersonal cost-permitting) and when to leave it alone (time/money/mental/interpersonal cost-permitting), whether during meditation or just in daily life.
So, environment-wise, systematically or opportunistically, it can be good to try many different things, and to try to discern what makes differences if there are seemingly differences:
You can also get a lot of cheap variety if you’re doing walking meditation, indoors or out and about.
The claim is not that you must spend the time, money, and mental energy for exotic meditation experiences, definitely not that. And, surely, over time, you you want to be able to meditate effectively (and live fully) under a sufficiently wide range of conditions.
[Some environments might be good every once in a while to maybe get unstuck, but are not necessary, and can be prohibitively costly to do regularly: anechoic rooms, flotation tanks and other sensory deprivation chambers, etc. I’ve played with a couple of these a few times, but in no way relied on them. It seemed like a good idea to include them for completeness.]
But, all sorts of weird, counterintuitive things can matter over the short and long run, so it’s good to experiment. At least some of the variables are cheap to manipulate, and other variables can be manipulated opportunistically.
You’ll start to notice subtler and subtler things, which will afford data that might sometimes be interpreted "superstitiously." So, this is also yet another channel to explore and refine your epistemics, self-beliefs, meditation-beliefs, and cost/opportunity-beliefs, and to generate explanations of apparent influences on your practice, which you might find to be real or illusory, over time, and which you might become more and more robust to, over time, if they are real. (You might also transiently become more and more affected by them, which might be why they became more and more salient to you in the first place, whether for "superstitious" reasons, or not, which would not be unusual, and depends on idiosyncratic factors.)
In any case, sometimes it’s a very, very good idea to meditate when weird right-now distracting or unpleasant environmental stuff is going on. And other times, it’s more productive to seek out different conditions for meditation.
This is yet another area where you may go a little crazy before you go saner than you were before. And, trying to arrange one’s environment, because of believed/experienced effects, those effects may or may not actually being long-run problematic, whether one is meditating or living life, can become costly in way that, for people without the time and money, can be a net life negative.
In response to an earlier draft of this section, a collaborator writes:
[A]
[...]
You may discover that obvious and non-obvious stimuli have a distracting [or otherwise right-now-believed-to-be negative] effect[s....] And also, you may discover that some of these are chronically present in your environment, which you were not aware of, and you may become convinced they're bad for you, and please don't fuck up your life.
[...]
To expand on the don't fuck up your life part, some well-intentioned gaslighting may be in order. Point out meditator's pain which not really about the position of your leg, point out that even ordinarily you will sometimes find a sound intolerable that you live with otherwise, point out that you are already inhabiting the world including these aspects and removing yourself from that comes with trade-offs (morality is the first teaching etc)
[...]
By the way I think you really do have a tightrope to navigate here because one of the unique things about this system and this community is all the [...] baggage it comes with, positive and negative. Assuming that any sort of spiritual practice will make you start acting like a crazy weirdo for a little bit, I find it much preferable that it goes in the direction of buying an air quality monitor or talking about primal sleeping positions and doing things in the spirit of [...] weirdo optimizations rather than [...]
Like I blew $200 on that [air quality monitor] and now I wonder about brain damage when [...] lights a scented candle
But otoh it's nice to get a ping to crack a window sometimes instead of being distressed that I'm just not feeling smart or energetic today
Mark 1:15 PM
yeah.
it’s true. both. i think all of it can get integrated and sort of a costless choice to light the candle or not, open the window or not, but possibly crazy in middle and some people won’t have time/money/something to weather the crazy and it won’t be net good for them.
[A] 1:16 PM
Yeah, exactly
Eat less carbs when it's a cheap option because it is legit better, but still outperform when you're on a pasta-based diet
Learn what is orthorexia vs just being right
Mark 1:29 PM
Yeah. One of my ex’s knew me for a health nut and was shocked when I ate a huge Snicker’s bar in front of her. And I was like, well, a few of these will be like they never happened, and, I didn’t have time to cook, and, I know it won’t make sleepy and also I won’t be hungry for hours, and if I eat it all at once and then eat normal food later then it won’t contribute to insulin resistance. And I know I’m going to get some magnesium and potassium (etc.) later, and they have much lower trans fat than they used to, and peanuts are poison but only if you eat a ton for like a whole week or two, and...
And she was like, oh, [aspirationally] reality-based.
And I guess this generalizes to every single damn choice ever. (edited)
[...]
"now you have n+1 problems before you have n-1 problems" or something.
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How to engage with movement? One could think of movement as falling into these categories:
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All of the ways of engaging above can be helpful at different times, with varying degrees of "stringency."
Subtle movement, aliveness, poise (sometimes!) facilitates meditative progress!
Allowing only subtle movement (so suppressing one-off overt movements) can make very subtle things more salient.
Allowing one-off, overt movements can help the system get (move backwards) over (incorrect) "humps."
Structured repetitive movement is sometimes good for getting the benefits of movement as well as keeping the mind just a little bit occupied, in a good way.
Unstructured repetitive movement (e.g. a long walks) tends to draw people into reverie, daydreaming, etc., in a good way.
***
In general, urges and impulses to move can be deferred, but there’s usually something there that needs to be expressed, eventually, at least liminally. So it can be good to think of suppressed urges or impulses as debt that eventually needs to be paid off. Sometimes it can be good to hold movement in abeyance, to allow important subtlety to become salient. But, sometimes, it’s better just to "move now" because you’ll eventually need to "move later," anyway.
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Structured repetitive movement can be thought of as an optional investment that doesn’t always net pay off. It takes time for such movements to become relatively automatic, such that they can be interleaved with meditation in a way that doesn’t clash and jar with meditation (or thought). For some people, it’s worth the investment, as a sort of delimiting container for meditation, where the movement helps to move things along and there’s just enough room for variation to get over state-space humps. For other people (perhaps most people?), such a container isn’t necessary and can add significant complexity, over the long-run, that isn’t worth it.
***
Unstructured repetitive movement (e.g. long walks) tends to draw people into reverie, daydreaming, etc., and sometimes people find this initially unattractive if they’re "trying to meditate," but sometimes reverie and daydreaming are the most important thing to be doing. People need almost as much unstructured reverie time as they do "meditation time," at least long-run, in order to "go all the way." Meditation masters take long, aimless walks, with no particular relation to their (body)mind, as long and as often as they have time for, and it’s unwasted time; it’s time well spent, in terms of their values and goals and hopes and dreams, as it were. If you do take long walks, a key piece is "nonvigilance," and so just make sure you’re in a safe environment, where you can naturally "space out." People are generally ok, if they’re undistracting strangers at a distance or just passing you on the trail. Cars can be more loud and disruptive, depending, even if you’re safely on the sidewalk.
If it’s hard to "sit down to meditate" or meditation has lately been "immediately going wrong" (in some very loose sense!), then often the right thing to do is to just take aimless walks, for hours and hours. One can also leave open blocks of time to do random chores at home and kind of slowly "back onto the cushion" and hop right back off again if things become problematic.
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You should be continually cycling through different meditation postures, to vary the kinds of feedback you’re giving your system. This reduces risk, including the risk of muscle tension issues. You might sit and stand in a single day. Or you can sit for three days, stand for two days, be in bed or on the couch for a day, etc. Never trade increased muscle tension for "progress." It’s not worth it. I personally meditate pretty equally sitting, standing, and lying down (I might do one of these for several days in a row then switch). I do less walking (while "meditating-meditating," but see below) and yoga asanas. Sort of unrelatedly, but I wanted to add it somewhere, I also alternate earplugs versus no earplugs, blanket(s) or no blanket(s), sleep mask or pitch black room versus bright room or open space, eyes open versus eyes closed, laying on back, laying on my right side, laying on my left side, etc.
Favorite meditation postures/combinations (unordered): sitting, lying down back/sides, Zhan Zhuang / standing, walking, running/jogging, yoga asanas, eyes open/closed, earplugs +/-, eye shades / complete darkness / pitch black +/-, netflix, amazon video, facebook, twitter, watching blog stats
Ah, also like "erect kneeling", knees on something padded, and otherwise "standing" straight. (If I'm doing standing meditation and my feet start to hurt, I switch between standing and this type of kneeling.) Different postures change salience of different feedback loops. Safer.
Others: leaning with back (butt) against low things like countertops where everything above the lean is unsupported/erect. Leaning back against walls. Finally, sometimes facing wall bracing with hands.
In additional to variations on normal standing, one might also alternate one foot on the floor while simultaneously one foot on a stool or chair. One could also add chairbacks, broomhandles, or canes. So one could get many of the benefits of standing but with a lot of extra help for stamina or taking the pressure off the lower back or particular joints or anything, depending on one's current biomechanics. Sometimes anti-fatigue mats are good for joints and feet and other times bad. It can be good to alternate different floor surfaces. But sensitivity and internal self-correction is/should be the main feedback loop. For example, even if one usually wears shoe orthotics and has poor circulation, unless against doctors orders, one should likely explore meditating barefoot on rock hard surface, for at least tens of seconds to a few minutes, at a time. Unforgiving surfaces are extremely instructive, in their feedback, for the subtle modulation of muscle and posture, over time. Maximizing comfort, for sometimes extending meditation time or for freeing up attention for other things, is also important. All the postures, for accessing different types of feedback and affordances.
more distinctions: sitting without back support, sitting with back support (still erect), and hella slumped in some comfortable couch or chair in some long-term comfortable way. always mix with erect/unsupported sitting and standing!
more distinctions: sitting on a hard, very flat (parallel to ground, no tilting) surface; sitting on a very firm but nevertheless soft surface (like a big memory foam block)...
Sometimes you may find yourself drawn to particular, idiosyncratic "finger mudras," as well as leg crossings, and/or arm crossings.
Also, E Tai Chi (https://www.amazon.com/Tai-Chi-Basic-Book-Simplest-ebook/dp/B01MREOH1P/ ...), custom/ad hoc tai chi, and custom/ad hoc yoga asanas
[Also: ad hoc "internal martial arts" rearranging your weight, rearranging your stance, rearranging your relationship with gravity, rearranging your physical anticipations...]
Also, sort of "upright fetal position", maybe in the corner of a big chair or couch, with one’s back against the armrest and leaning to the side against the back. I am more likely to stay awake in this position if I’m tired but I can still drift in and out of sleep while meditating, and it’s a different kind of balance than laying in bed.
Also, custom/ad hoc device assisted stretches
Also, ad hoc dancing, bouncing, rocking, fidgeting, stretching, yoga pretzels...
Earplugs can enhance sensitivity to subtle muscle movement and body creaking in head and neck and elsewhere but make sure meditate plenty without earplugs, too.
Long-sleeve clothing, pants (vs shorts/skirts) or blankets reduce subtle air current and temperature changes on skin which can make it easier to attend to other things. (So, sometimes this is good to do and sometimes it’s better to be exposed to the elements.)
Long-run, retrospectively, you might have spent equal time sitting, standing, and laying down while meditating. Sometimes it’s good to switch every day or every hour.
On twitches and posture and readjustments—
Long walks while daydreaming or in reverie could be considered a posture—wandering aimlessly around in safe environments, where you don’t have to be "on," is also very important, ideally for hours and hours!
Another postural thing to vary: Surfaces from very hard concrete to very soft for standing, sitting, and laying down, for very different kinds of feedback. For lying down: both on back and side, with and without a pillow. You might look into "natural sleeping postures. Firmer head or neck pillows can give better feedback for spotting creeping muscle tension or having it not arise in the first place."
You should check to make you’re not losing flexibility or that certain physical movements (or patterns of attention) aren’t becoming subtly unpleasant or aversive. Also, barbell weight training and bodyweight exercise is good, too, as another way to check for whether something is off, e.g. if some exercises become aversive or you’re losing strength or less able to transmit power through structure.
If you do unfortunately run into some of the warned-about muscle tension, the below can be helpful. I’d imagine one would only experience likely one of these or zero:
For hand/finger cramps/clenching, a stress ball or a wadded shirt can be helpful to grip or to prevent joint compression.
Laying down with a cradle of pillows can give the neck something to support or push against.
For jaw tension, you might bite down on something or use a mouthguard, some things will better and worse for your teeth and better and worse for jaw alignment.
Generally, if an irritated joint wants to move, having things to squeeze, press against, or slide against can slow things down, reduce currently problematic degrees of freedom and/or increase feedback through resistance or friction.
Generally, hard surfaces (e.g. a meditation bench without a cushion or a wood floor when standing) give very good postural and proprioceptive feedback. Soft and comfortable surfaces can make it easier to "go inside oneself," when that makes sense, and it often does!
Traditional meditation postures, all things being equal, can help one protect the neck, and are a good combination of sort of "hard" and "soft," depending on one's body type, and so on. And sometimes a traditional posture can be modified with a chair or a bench, and so on.
In summary, it’s good to be able to meditate sitting or standing tall, but it’s also good to be able to arrange your environment when/if that’s the best thing, too.
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More:
[book recommendations: feldenkrais awareness through movement, anatomy trains yoga, starting strength, becoming a supple leopard]
Some takes on "perfect meditation posture:"
"Perfect posture" should be explored for the possibility of maximal useful feedback and safety.
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See also:
Scratch notes to integrate above:
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Maybe also see resolved temporary note: temporary note 20230413
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Some traditions place great importance on the breath, as an aid to concentration, as a source of interesting observational data, as a way to affect thinking and emotions, as illustrative of the border or lack thereof between doing and non-doing, and more.
Additionally, some traditions place great importance on proper breathing, e.g. abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing, and more.
The methods in this document don’t place great importance on the breath, allowing the breath to correct itself over time. Sometimes it’s ok to deliberately attend to the breath and sometimes one’s attention (or etc.) will be magnetically drawn to the breath. Sometimes attention to the breath will be effortless and non-interfering, and sometimes attention to the breath will seem to "stop" or dysregulate the breath. Sometimes it’s good to gently and deliberately avoid attending to the breath or to forget about the breath as best one can, to let it settle down. And sometimes one might not think explicitly about the breath or "foreground" (or even "background") attend to breathing for a very long time, and this is fine. Sometimes breathing will be heaving or hitching, and this fine. Sometimes, one might briefly feel like they can only breath deliberately or that they can’t breath at all, and so on.
Long-run, one might barely reflectively attend very much or not at all to the breath, for thousands of hours or indefinitely, or at least do so only as much one might attend to anything else, generally, with respect to body, mind, and environment, etc., "in" the entire "phenomenological field."
Over time, all things being equal, with "right engagement" and right "non-engagement," breathing will tend to become ever-more-subtle, over time. This subtlety will be reflected in the barely perceptible use (or non-use) of all breathing muscles, from diaphragm, stomach/belly, chest, shoulders, and more. Sometimes the subtlest changes in posture are all that’s needed for "breathing."
What’s happening, here, is that breathing has "volitional" components and an "autogenic" component. And, over time, "volitional" components can get habitually convolved with the autogenic components, leading to overbreathing and other kinds of disregulated breathing. Through meditation, volitional components can be "deconvolved" out of breathing, leaving mostly just the autogenic component, which, generally, can take care of itself. (Note that this untangling, "deconvolving," may involve much of the rest of the system, too, so attention elsewhere than to the breath, may have long-run positive effects on breathing, and so on. It’s a global sort of puzzle, where breathing is only one piece and is indirectly affected, sometimes, by the rest of it.)
Deliberate or stereotyped attention to the breath, breath control (e.g. emphasizing inhalation or exhalation, or panting, belly breaths, even chanting, etc.), over hundreds of hours, can "tangle in" volitional components that need to eventually be untangled. (Sometimes this can be strategic, though, on a person-by-person basis.) Tingly lightheadness, needing to pee very often, issues with throat smooth muscle tone and sleep, can be signs that one is generally overbreathing, because of breathing’s connection to kidney function, autonomic regulation, and more. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise, such as jogging and sprinting, can short-term improve breathing issues, via effects on blood-gas CO2 tolerance. But, long-term, one must deconvolve volitional components from the breathing, as part of the global meditation puzzle.
Note: "attention," "foreground," "background," "in," "phenomenological field," are used very loosely in this section and are not technical or ontological commitments
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Quick extra note: Sometimes spontaneous breath holding (or suppressed breathing without closing the glottis) can be a thing. And sometimes panting (rapid, shallow or deep breathing) or can be a thing. And a feeling of "chest tightness" can be a thing. And a feeling of "air hunger" can be a thing. And "gasping" can be a thing. And a tight glottis can be a thing. And a "collapse throat" can be a thing. And a plugged-for-no-reason nose can be a thing (one or both nostrils, or alternating). These factor into the discussion above. All of these can happen for physiological reasons (and those physiological reasons can happen in the course of meditation!), and they can all also happen from encountering pockets of "psychological memory," as it were. You might get any of this checked out by a doctor, none of this is medical advice, etc., and whether you do or don't do that, you might heuristically incline towards surrender, effortlessness, and letting it happen, as per the discussion. Slow walking, brisk walking, jogging, and sprinting, when possible (or equivalent---arm bike, swimming, stair climbing, etc.), can all be helpful for rebalancing the physiological side. The lower intensity ones, just picking one, might be done for forty minutes per day. The higher intensity ones might be done every three to eleven days, depending on what feels right. They arguably each affect a slightly different metabolic and respiratory regime.
Again this is not medical advice but on the physiological side (versus the psychological or emotional side):
(note that the above doesn't mean you should do anything different in your practive re effortlessness and surrender. a general heuristic is to let the system rebalance itself, including "being moved," being breathed, etc., but, again, you might want to check with a doctor for some things.)
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Finally: shoulder breathing? chest breathing? diaphragmatic breathing? (and posture? e.g. chest up and out? shoulders back? or everything neutral?) generally, all things being equal---let the body(mind) figure it out. best breathing under neutral conditions, after everything is mostly untangled might be fairly imperceptible with a tiny bit of coordinated muscle activity from both chest and diaphragm. and it'll be very responsive to any changes in physical or metabolic activity level. "belly breathing" is probably oversold, in my opinion non-medical opinion.
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Generally, when all is well, the jaw is "magnetized" shut (teeth not touching or very lightly touching), or the tongue is "magnetized" to the room of the mouth, and breathing through the nose is effortless and barely perceptible (because breathing rate and volume are in dynamic equilibrium and therefore nose turbinates open). And of course breathing rhythms can change during exercise and emotional arousal, and also the mouth still might be open for thousands of hours in meditation, for all sorts of good reasons, though again will very long-run magnetize lightly closed, all things being equal.
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And / but also see e.g.:
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20230706 Bit of an update, here: Fully untangling volitional and autogenic breathing is important but then the volitional aspect of the breathing muscles, in interaction with autogenic component, and the rest of posture, movement, carbon dioxide and oxygen, and the skeletal muscles is still important. Just as movement of other skeletal muscles facilitates meditation, redo-to-undo, etc., the breathing muscles (diaphragm and multiple in chest, shoulders, also including neck, throat, jaw, tongue, palate, etc.), as well as breathing itself, can be an important part of further meditative untangling as well as ultimately participate in karmically free action. So, sometimes it makes sense to deliberately do things (as well as "be moved," of course) with the breath, etc., including deliberately inhaling or exhaling, infinitesimally or more than that, with all sorts of subtle variation in muscle activation patterns, and to affect carbon dioxide and oxygen, and so on, and lots of other things. See other sections about CO2 tolerance, and so on.
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See also:
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
Some traditions emphasize cultivation of altered states, residing in altered states, and/or mastery of altered states.
This meditation system doesn’t place particular emphasis on altered states and is of the position that systematic cultivation is unnecessary. Intermittent, gentle facilitation of potentially spontaneously arising altered states can be important, though. Through application of method, a meditator may spontaneously "stage"/"prepare" for entry into an altered state, "pop into" the state, "do whatever’s necessary" in that state, and quickly or eventually "pop back out." This can and will eventually, naturally, and spontaneously happen in the course of meditation and doesn’t need to be deliberately cultivated as such. It’s of course generally fine to incline towards interesting or attractive states (perhaps checked against something like the meta protocol) and it’s of course fine to explore and experiment with concentration and tranquility practices.
Deliberate engagement with concentration and tranquility practices can sometimes "burn in" (reversibly!) habits of mind that eventually need to be undone for further progress, which can be a lengthy process. Sometimes light (or even moderate) deliberate cultivation can be strategic, on a person by person basis—many of the preliminary/auxiliary practices suggest concentration-/tranquility-like things to try and experiment with. That being said, there’s a right thing, right time, right way, right dose, gently, sensitively, responsively (with plenty of room for error and backtracking) ethos. And much or quite all of engagement with "altered states" can happen spontaneously and naturally, in the course of practice.
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See also:
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Maybe also see resolved temporary note temporary note 20230413
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
[This section refers to main practice p2, which is discussed in detail at a later time. One can still get a lot out of this section before encountering a full description of p2.]
There’s a particularly notable imbalance that may arise from modernity, which can be lengthy and counterintuitive to correct. And that imbalance is something like "being too in the head," "acting from the head," "living, thinking, being, etc. ‘from the shoulders up’ or even ‘the jaw up’."
Correcting this isn’t as simple as paying more attention to the body or trying to be in the body. Doing body things "out of order" or "monolithically" can even tangle things up more: "Right thing, right time, right place, right order, at a finer and finer grain."
The protocol as written (well, including this section or not), especially inclusive of the meta protocol, is intended to work as a proper antidote to headiness, implicitly, inclusively, as part of the practice progression as a whole, nothing more to say or add.
But, for some people, saying a little more may be very helpful. The protocol document, as a written/typed document, is, of course, verbal and even hyperanalytical, even if it’s very often pointing at something very undifferentiated, experiential, and sensual. So!—Even more words are written, here, as a corrective to that. :-)
For example, there’s a way that p2 can be initially be done "too much in the head," too conceptually, "too-conceptually-tangly." Note that p2 DOES account for this; p2, the other main practices, and the meta protocol do account for this. p2, itself, can and does undo its own potential headiness, all things being equal. But, again, some people might be greatly accelerated or have reduced (physical, or otherwise) sequelae by taking this section into account.
Some people will naturally do/interleave p2 "whole body" (whole everything) and some people, at first, won’t be able to do p2 except for in the head.
Meditation is ever, always, already with the whole body, of course (and mind, and everything)—all of experience, the entire phenomenological field and "envelope."
Some traditions particularly emphasize this, on the front-end; they explicitly say, "meditate with the body, not with the mind." This goes beyond even attending to the body or "body scanning," and is more things like these: "active sitting," "active ‘just’ sitting," "just sitting," meditation through posture, meditation exclusively through continuous postural adjustment, meditation through breathing and continuous effort and non-effort with respect to breathing, and so on.
I would consider these pith instructions incomplete (and the above is a straw and is not intended to refer to any particular tradition). But, in any case, instructions with this sort of flavor can be an overlooked dimension of much contemporary practice. Do explore them; they should probably get added to the preliminary/auxiliary practices (a bunch of them already are).
Again, p2 is "all-inclusive," pre-conceptual, post-conceptual, trans-conceptual: body, mind, bodymind, head, heart, concept, quality, etc.
And, don’t be TOO concerned about headiness—every meditator in modern culture will rightly spend PLENTY of time in the head, or flickeringly returning to the head, half-second by half-second, one-hundred-milliseconds by one-hundred-milliseconds, maybe interleaved with other things, while using these practices—e.g. as part of "do-to-undo" or "redo-to-undo." That is, the head ("mind, muscles, and more") is needed for untangling the head! Trying to do it just with the body will long-run cause more tangling.
So, one shouldn’t avoid the head or be afraid to spend time in the head, as it were. These are just words, the meta protocol and one’s intuition should be a bottom-up guide. And the "lists and more" section breaks down the "landscape" or "playing field" in many different ways, including a great deal of body phenomenology. There are, of course, many relevant preliminary/auxiliary practices, too.
In any case, use words to go beyond words. Use the head to go beyond the head. Don’t let words limit you, or cautions and corrections using yet more words, and so on. And also don’t be afraid of words, and so on. Traverse and/or allow everything, right time, right order, right grain, which is to say, what ever happens, or is happening, is part of the practice.
***
Below are notes from a call with a collaborator (jd), with further maybe-helpful corrections to the potentially "felt verbal/intellectual vibe" of parts of the document, for some people:
possibly useful things for people, from retrospective experience:
possible danger of too much willing too soon [Mark: I actually [now] use willing very [sparingly] and I had to clean up a lot of incorrect willing.]
possible danger of neurotically heady good/bad in use of p2 ("p2" carried out in the head, what a trap, hard to detect from the inside)[...] [Mark note: [...] Mark "broke out" of headiness eventually by seeing how the headiness eventually failed and failed, sort of came to a point and then "moved along the wall" until—" nowhere to go but "body," sort of. Or body cracked open eventually and inevitably.]
over-ontologization of experience--classifying experience in terms of doings, willings, good, bad, can lead to a kludgy thing - headiness—can carve out experience in a weird way
maybe good to emphasize lots of surrender, don’t even call it meditation. a lot less doing. [Mark note: I personally eventually got stuck doing [ONLY] surrender and non-doing.]
[...] [Mark: p2 eventually becomes, "minimally-ontological" and whole-body or whole-body-available[...]]
time in nature, return to immediate and physical, "skipped level [1]," went back to fundamentals and being. unplugging—more space, time, less urgency to do things with mind. naturally drawn back into own experience. concern though about running away or shoving problems where harder to see or is this a maneuver that let look at problems that actually ready to solve. [Mark note: people like shinzen think that unplugged situations might naturally draw people into meditative states, sun on the water, wind in the trees, alone in a cabin, etc. maybe indigenous people are [more] natural meditators, [sometimes] cadence it creates, the example it sets. [Mark: higher quality data [in nature], or data that’s less weird and edge-case-y; modernity is a very weird data set. in nature: better stream of data about how reality and mind actually work.]
try to do everything as physical as possible; very healing. if were having a crisis, but the trees are just chilling, not having a crisis, and that’s important data. or hanging out with community; it’s happy; there’s food and water.
civilization is a lot and facebook is a lot and dealing with 2000 people is a lot. and if didn’t master the earlier version of the thing, the more immediate, animal, physical, primal thing then it’s hard. paraphrase: maybe sometimes need to (partially) go back and relearn primal thing maybe for first time[Mark: maybe this is why monasteries exist though monasteries aren’t nature. maybe a lot of people have to sort of rebuild the basics.] small community in nature
arriving at all this was confusing because didn’t seem like what mark was doing. [Mark: makes sense. all seems right to me and I’ve done a ton of just wandering around, maybe not in remote nature, but away from people, in parks or where I knew that I knew nobody even if there were people around 20-50 feet away, and i knew it was completely safe so I could just space out[, be in reverie or landscape-absorbed] for hours.]
See also:
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At some point, maybe incidentally, or quite centrally, or somewhere in between, you may encounter phenomena that correspond to something like subtle energy, qi, chi, ki, ruach, prana, fuzzing, buzzing, tingling, vibrations, etc.
Loosely speaking, you might find that you can do something like attend to it, move it, push it, pull it, accumulate it, dissipate it, circulate it, store it..
You might find that it’s somehow related to muscle tension, physical (as opposed to "energetic") sensations," or subtle muscle activity, or "somatic refactoring," or "autonomic activity," or glandular or vascular activity, or muscle tone changes, fascial changes, myofascial changes, body map changes, "phenomenological field" changes, sensory re-saliencing/re-factoring, etc., etc., etc., etc.
You might or might not eventually also start encountering phenomena that could be called knots, tangles, twists, coils, gates, blocks, blockages, complexes, closures, etc., etc. etc.
And you might naturally, or because of things you’ve read, want to untwist, unblock, open your "channels," "meridians," "energy centers," etc., etc., etc.
An important thing, here, is that you must, over time, go beyond any particular models, theories, etc., of (a) "what is" and (b) "what to do," to engage with the territory on your own terms with your own sensuous feedback loops.
It’s important to have agnosticism, an experimental attitude, care and caution, if you decide to do anything systematic (and "systematic" itself shouldn’t be inappriopriately avoided, too, cf. "cranking"!), and, in any case, to have open/modifiable/responsive ontologies and open/modifiable/resonsive methods.
You may be aware of historical concepts, in natural philosophy and physics, such as phlogiston or luminiferous aether. These are ideas that, over time, gave way to more contemporary theories about combustion, oxidation, electromagnetism, etc.
Similarly, you may find that "subtle energy," "movement," "accumulation," "circulation," etc., etc., etc., not to mention "attention," are useful initial pointers to, or hooks for, phenomena. But, these ideas may eventually get in the way.
That’s not to say that the experiences themselves, should be dismissed, ignored, downplayed, etc. It’s just that they’re part of a wider playing field, of all meditative and experiential phenomena, where local things can affect global things, and vice versa. All of spatial, sensory, temporal, meaningful, seemingly non-meaning-laden, seeming, knowing, etc,. etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., are all part of seamless playing field.
Consider, if you’re experiencing something like an "energy block" (or etc.), should you ignore it, push/pull/attend to it, deliberately push/pull/attend somewhere far away—in or on the body or even in the environmental surround? Should you not "push/pull/attend" at all? Should you do something "cognitive" instead? Or move your body? Or take a walk? Or talk to a friend? And so on, and on, and on, and on. It is sometimes the case that systematic "energy work" is far more tangling than untangling. And, engaging with "exactly that territory" may not ultimately look like "energy work," at all, depending on how so conceived. It just depends.
Sometimes local "untangling" will cause adjacent or global "tangling," because, in some sense, "everything in the bodymind is somehow connected to everything else," so one has to account for global effects in all local choices. "Local" has to be done in an order that leads to a global outcome, so one might revisit "localities" in complex interleavings and interweavings and so on, and localities themselves will mix and blur, etc., etc., etc.
Just as it’s often better to think of meditation as precise puzzle solving, versus "general strength training" ("puzzles versus muscles"); it’s generally better to think of "energy work" as a subset or seamless interleaving with meditation, and so again, as precise puzzle solving, versus "general energy cultivation," or etc.
Always guard against inappropriate reification (including inappropriate reification of "inappropriate reifiication"!) and "magical button pushing/mashing," via general intuition and things in spirit of things like the meta protocol. [sic] And, in any case, this "stuff," too, is not separate, not special, in some sense, with respect to the whole meditative enterprise.
*
See also:
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for my part, i want people to experiment, or systematically engage with, anything that calls out to them. my thing here is aim for people having "unified models" of the "entire playing field," so they don’t feel like they have to "master meditation" and "energy work" and "magick" and "trauma processing" and... I’m hoping people will understand that it’s all the same playing field, and that the entire playing field can be seamless mastered, transformed, something.
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[For this draft, if any single sentence doesn’t make sense, it’s probably ok to skip that sentence and keep reading.]
Deciding when to self-trust can be hard. Frameworks like the Meta Protocol can help. (The meta protocol will be discussed, soon, in a subsequent section.) In addition to protocols, procedures, etc., it can help to think about various dimensions of knowing (and perhaps understanding, and perhaps other things) as a sort of backdrop to self-trust.
One could consider knowing (intuiting, etc.) along at least two axes:
The first axis is pointing at something like "knowing where it came from or how it came to be," knowing the causal history of how you came to know something, as it were. One can imagine "a knowing," knowledge, insight, something, sort of just appearing in the mind, and you don’t know where it came from or how it got there. One can also imagine, having (or being able to construct) a rich history of all the experiencing and evidence and thinking/figuring/inferring/something of how you came to know/feel/believe some particular thing. This history might be verbal or nonverbal, partial or complete, sequentially accessible or felt "all at once," sparse-symbolic or richly felt, or a mixture of any or all of these, all at once.
(Note that the "causal history" of some of your knowledge can be very different than, in no particular order, (a) your "current best argument," either the one you feel like you probably could produce, verbally, at least in bits and pieces, if pressed, or (b) the rich, felt anticipations in your body that are, well, the embodiment of that knowing, or (c) what you might tell yourself about that knowing that you wouldn’t necessarily share with other people, or (d) other phenomenological aspects of that knowing not specified in (abc). To summarize, your current and future states, are different than your previous states, and your current and future states can have different representations (or at least present lack thereof of those representations) of previous states, in degree and type/kind.)
The second axis is maybe a bit more self-explanatory—was the route to that knowing more or less symbolic? Is it’s current form more or less symbolic?
More symbolic routes of knowing might be things like thinking, "figuring," calculating, inferring, abducting, deducing, writing.
"Medium-symbolic" routes of knowing might be things like verbally describing, "iconically imagining," simulating, running thought experiments, sketching and drawing on paper. (Perhaps: "multischematic")
Less symbolic and non symbolic routes of knowing could be things like feeling, sensing, perceiving, gnosis, direct knowing, direct awareness, "expanded awareness," "listening/feeling for the subtle, distant, faint, interconnected," intuition. (Perhaps: "innumerable, ineffable, inchoate")
Both axes (1) and (2) could perhaps be very loosely, messily, and jointly summarized along a single axis from unconscious to explicit:
***
At least in modern times (for some very loose and general definition of modern), we have a habit of privileging explicit knowing and explicit justification. If we don’t have explicit knowing and/or explicit justification (or we don’t feel like we can produce it, or at least bits and pieces of it) it might be harder for us to self-trust (as well as it being harder to navigate the familial, social (and professional) worlds...). We might lose track of goals, lose track of reasons, forget desires, not act on goals and desires, and so forth. We might be more indecisive and act less consistently.
But, the basis of self-legitimate and self-credible self-trust (including, e.g. trusting that we can wield argumentation/justification if/when we ever need to) starts in the prereflective and the intuitive. Consider, the prereflective and intuitive are what choose to wield (explicit) argumentation, even if the producing, wielding, or consuming) of argumenation are things that modulate the prereflective and implicit. One could say that self-trust is constituted by the entire experiential field, which takes into account the present state of the self as well as past, present, and future of self and world.
***
We can learn to value and to legitimately and credibly trust the implict and intuitive more and more over time. Importantly, even if the provenance of some knowing isn’t "directly accessible," features of the knowing itself can be used for indirect accessment of value, correctness, etc. (This assessment itself can be intuitive, prereflective, "in a flash," though it doesn’t have to be. "Nonsymbolic regress" does bottom out, even when symbolic regress does not.)
Importantly, nonsymbolic knowing tends to come with relatively less explicit provenance, but nonsymbolic knowing does tend to come with more rich phenomenology, even when it doesn’t "experientially display" its provenance, all at once (and sometimes it does). And that rich phenomenology can still be "used" or experienced in a way that allows one to learn how to properly treat/engage/regard that richness with respect to behavior. And that treatment might be reflective or unreflective/prereflective—"already in motion before you even realize it" turns out to be retrospectively valid, much of the time, and more and more.
The felt, the implicit, the intuitive can be subject to (implicit or explicit) critique or error-checking, just like the explicit. And it can therefore it can be a basis of self-trust.
One can start with little bets, little tests, or just patience to see how an intuition or feeling evolves. You can start with things that are relatively costless, local, impactless, safe.
***
There are a lot of "negative feedback loops" when playing with intuitive knowing (and correctives will be discussed below).
When one first starts exploring intuitive knowing, one might treat it "almost analytically," in a way that’s sort of just as "slow and exhausting" as with more explicit knowing. So it can seem not worth it, because it’s "like explicit knowing but even more fragmentary and one can tell even less about what’s going on."
It can go in the other direction, too—one could accidentally sort of "turn on the tap," and get flooded with urges, impulses, sensing, illumination, something, that’s overwhelming, far too much, that one doesn’t know how to shut off, let alone interpret or trust.
Part of problem, here, is that there’s sort of a whole additional dimension to all of this, that gets overlooked, because it’s so counterintuitive and time-delayed.
While overlooked, it’s sort of also a cliche at this point: And that is... the body.
***
So, regarding the body, there’s yet another way to slice things:
The line between (2) and (3), nonsymbolic knowing and meaning-laden sensation is a bit blurry. Also, it’s worth calling out that symbolic knowing doesn’t exist without nonsymbolic knowing (and perhaps meaning-laden sensation) somehow being present, simultaneously.
In any case, the entire discussion above, in this section, so far, has been loosely referring to (1-3) but not 4. And, people typically ignore non-meaning-laden sensations unless they’re particularly salient—hunger, thirst, pain, sensuous stretching, sexual pleasure, orgasm, etc. But, the rest of the time, we don’t pay attention to body sensations very much. (One could further subdivide (1-4) according to whether their "valence" is (a) pleasant/pleasurable/attractive versus (b) unpleasant/noxious/etc versus (c) neutral...but things complexify when considering "hurts so good" phenomena, from delayed-onset-muscle-soreness, after exercise, to BDSM.)
Attending to non-meaning-laden body sensations might feel like a waste of time, annoying, or even terrifying if it draws someone into the "here and now," and they don’t want to be there, for whatever reason.
(I want to call attention to a particular concern that people sometimes have, when body sensations are discussed. People sometimes wonder if they’re going to get the advice (or have it unspoken but heavily implied) that they’re supposed to walk around paying attention to body sensations for the rest of their lives in some "mindful" but distracting and even pointless-feeling way. Don’t worry, that’s not where we’re going with this.)
In any case, let’s talk theory, for a moment. I’ve been using the word "sensation" loosely. One might also use terms like apprehension, perception, and interpretation and so forth. Let’s be a little more careful, here. One could imagine a human "sensory processing pipeline" starting with "raw perception" or "raw sensaton," that’s perhaps almost immediately processed and interpretated (or, even, is never "uninterpreted, in some sense), and then that "data" participates in higher- and higher-level "processing," perhaps while still being "non-meaning-laden," and then, at some point, through perhaps some opaque process, this "sensory data" tips over into participating in "meaning-laden inference and knowing" (whether unconscious or conscious).
Provsionally assuming some kind of pipeline like that, I want to offer an immediate correction, which is something like, non-meaning-laden sensation and minimally-symbolic knowing, or some sort, are paired, almost instantly, at the beginning of the processing stack. Almost as soon as there’s sensation, there’s rudimentary (or not) knowing about that sensation, even if we’re not consciously aware of it. (This may be quite a bit different than, say, one of Daniel Ingram’s schemas, that may look superficially similar, just FYI.)
So, this may make immediate sense because, there’s plenty of sensation and noise going on, all the time, only a small portion of it making it ("all the way up") into consciousness, for example if it’s (maybe subliminally) surprising or about something possibly dangerous. And that sort of "meaning-laden" decision-making needs to start before it’s conscious. We learn over time what to filter from consciousness and what to promote to consciousness, and this is getting sculpted in real time, all the time, and the sculpting process itself (or at least its real time effects) are sometimes unconscious and sometimes conscious. (I might say "sometimes unreflective" and "sometimes reflective," depending on how we’re precisely using all these words, and whether something can be "conscious" without our being aware of it or at least remembering being aware of it, and so on, and so on.)
Ok, so, again, anyway, there’s this (massively parallel) "pipeline" that has both a non-meaning-laden and a meaning-laden component much earlier than is typically consciously obvious.
And, let’s add a few more pieces:
A qualifier: When I say "any" stage of the pipeline, there may still be some prior "never conscious" stage of sensory processing, of course, especially looking at the neurophysiology, but it sure can practically feel like one can be directly conscious [being philosophically loose, here] of the very first wiggle of one’s sensory neurons, ear hairs, retina, etc., and anything "after" that.
Another qualifier: "Raising" and "lowering" isn’t "separably direct;" it’s a highly constrained "puzzle" over the course of thousands and thousands of hours. For example, to raise "piece" X, when might need to raise and lower thousands and thousands of other "pieces" in a complex order, in order to "get to" X. And raising and lowering can seem very indirect—it’s "tied" to "the movement/change of attention/awareness" in nonlocal ways. That is, "attending" to something, somewhere may influence raising and lowering "elsewhere."
Another qualifier: "Raising, lowering, depth, up, down, etc." not to mention "pieces, pipes, parts, branches" are all leaky abstractions or a less-well-differentiated complexity. There’s some sense in which the brain and/or mind is, not only massively parallel, but also "flat" (and/or its activity is simultaneously reconstituted, all in parallel, in a periodic pattern). Don’t sort of inapproriately reify any of this! Phenomenology-first, as it were!
In any case, for whatever reason, the non-meaning-laden components of the sensory processing pipeline tend to be more salient to us, especially when we’re deliberately paying attention to sensations, making paying attention to sensations often seem dumb and pointless.
***
But, provisionally given the above, we can see that body sensations are already, in some sense, meaning-laden, even if they don’t seem to be, and body sensations heavily influence meaning-making (of course, but perhaps much more so than is initially intuitive). Further, body sensations, in some sense, influence the sensory processing pipeline itself as well as the process of meaning-making itself—what we even might usually think of as hardwired cognition or even hardwired intelligence, itself. Body sensations are the first step in sort of sculpting and meta-sculpting everything, all the time. Very little is hardwired—I always say the mind is 99% software and 1% hardware, metaphorically. I’m not doing a good job of unpacking it in this section, but, in some sense, our minds are nothing more than all the experiences we’ve ever had—and through memory and imagination we can have any experience. And, add two more pieces: the mind is practically lossless (in that any distinguishable sensory memory can be ultimately recovered) and that the mind is simultaneously "utterly malleable" (even while being lossless!). And, so then, the degrees of freedom for a mind are just cosmologically vast, with no prior way of thinking/feeling/behavior set in stone. Note that cosmologically vast doesn’t mean arbitrary or unconstrained! The "envelope" is nevertheless highly, highly constrained and going from state to state is exquisitely path-dependent, as mentioned above. This gives gods-eye-view-predictable-and-repeatable meditation journeys, with a wide variation in concrete details and asymptotic well-fittedness to whatever situations people might find themselves in.
***
So, in any case, paying attention to body sensations is important. But, there are some practical "buts."
First, one shouldn’t necessarily focus exclusively on, say, "body" sensations, or, rather non-meaning-laden sensory inputs or sensations of any kind. The entire experiential envelope participates in the sensory processing pipeline, as it were (including feedback loops, whether non-meaning-laden, obviously meaningful/knowing or not)—
The order in which one does everything matters. There will be tremendous interleaving of "attention"/awareness in different "locations" (from body to meaning to etc.) typically, but not always, at a finer and finer grain.
Second, paying more attention to the body is sort of a phase (which could be repeating, which could be sort of periodic, spiraling, nonmonotonic). It’s sort of like, most people are "in their heads," and have sort of "built up body awareness (or lack thereof)" suboptimally. And, so, there will be a period of "re-attending" to things (body, memories, sensory field) in the right order, which will refactor the pipeline, including awareness of sensations, cognition, meaning, everything. And, during that refactoring, a bunch of things can become salient that sort of "need" to temporarily become salient, because of path-dependent change, and, over time, things will sort of "reflow," and most body sensations (and other sensory processing) will once again become relatively less salient, and/but everything will be working better, from sensory processing to cognition.
So, it’s less "I need to pay attention to the body much more, and for the rest of my life" and more, "I need to carefully, correctly, perhaps extensively but in the right way and the right order, pay attention to the body so as to be able to forget (and enjoy) the body when I want to, along with all sorts of other good things, happening." And, it’s less "top-down attending" and more "obliquely doing whatever’s necessary to have body attention be prereflective and automatic in ways that it’s not already but could be."
***
So, this was ridiculously roundabout, but, the basis of self-trust is not just in intuition (which can’t get trapped in infinite regress, among other things) but in the body (and sensory field). Attending to the body, in the right way and in the right order (interleaved with other things, including reverie and plenty of thinking), eventually refactors intuition, making it prereflective, broadband, and powerful, and also refactors even the intellect (as well as preflective sensory processing and much more). This includes more and more resolution of inconsistencies, contradiction, contention in behavior, antcipation, cognition, "belief," and more.
In some ways, self-trust is the resolution of just enough inner conflict and the acquisition of just enough (inner and wordly) skill that one is confident that they can resolve and acquire all the rest, in a way that’s safe enough and good enough for themselves and others.
And part of that, and only part, is very counterintuitively attending to the body (and plenty of other things) for an accumulating thousands of hours, where it may initially seem like almost nothing is happening at all, and for long stretches after, even after some things do start happening. And, with tools like the meta protocol (or in the spirit of the meta protocol), one can more quickly bootstrap confidence and self-trust that the process is working. And that self-trust can quickly extend to other areas of life and self-trust in general. (And experimenting and living in the world is of course also an important component of [gaining] self-trust as well part of the whole point.)
Something not explicitly noted in the above, but implicitly there, is that, at least locally, the mind is always spontaneously doing the right thing. (Choose some evolutionary, physical, or cosmological theory, here.) And the mind can net-globally do the right thing, too, especially if context and preconditions are set up just a hair on the side of sufficiency. And this is why, with a few inputs, just a little "grace" (which is usually bad and good mixed together) like mixed-bag mentors/"mentors" and/or mixed-bag meditation instructions, the whole mind (and one’s entire life) can kind of unwind and rewind itself in retrospectively and prospectively desired and endorsed ways. And this sponteneity of (body)mind, is the ultimate basis of self-trust.
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J
a couple more things that come to mind maybe for future versions. excuse the ramble-i-ness
do you think it could be useful/important to table set a little bit? something along the lines of (but not necessarily this, just something in this direction): this will likely feel different from previous meditation you’ve done, if you’ve done some. i think past versions had something like this. and kind of for the reason I mentioned in [...]: I could see people spending a fair amount of time trying to shoehorn this practice into their prior conception of what meditation practice is. i guess p2, p8, and p1 stand a good chance of addressing this directly without it having to be written out. i wonder how useful or not some making this explicit would be. :thinking_face:
and i also wonder if there’s some basic basic theory of mind that is good to mention right off-the-bat. it may very well not be a good thing, i’m not sure. here’s the kind of theory that might be good imo, for example:
`there’s like some kind of universal gradient/basin/attractor that the mind/brain is always, always, alway, always trying to fall down. one single direction, which might be why correct meditation works elegance, free energy minimization, dunno
or
how the mind is really smart in some ways, sometimes/often moreso than the "personality" (i might be butchering the thing but that’s how i remember it)
and lots of little related things like this
for example wrt to the above, knowing stuff like this has made it easier for me to trust that the right things are happening at times, or trust that my mind can do good things, and stuff like that. depending on the models of mind people are running on i could expect there to be a lot of self fighting and self flailing and not self trusting in ways that might be bad. for example, if you’re coming from a tmi practice you might believe that your mind is this thing you need to wrangle, that you know better than, stuff like that. little bits of theory like this could help people understand how the practice works, why it’s different than practice they’ve done before, and possibly have the needed faith to try it out for 100+ hours
J continues
The way I've been orienting to [this protocol versus other meditation protocols] myself recently is not through the meditation frame (though it is that and becomes that feel again eventually) but through the "going all the way to the bottom and from first principles as it were figuring out how to use a mind" frame, or something in the ballpark of that
It just cuts through a lot of the "is this meditation", or "am I doing the right thing" stuff, if you forget about meditation for a couple months and pretend it's not that, or something (At least in my experience)
I guess this is a bit of a tangent now
Mark
Cool. It is really different than [other] meditation [procedures] in a lot of ways. [...]
J
yeah. i definitely think it is meditation. i'm probably being critically unappreciative, but there's a way in which other meditations are more narrow/constrained and this stuff is still meditation but wholeheartedly takes on the whole mind and every part of it. maybe it's all the same in the limit or something.
the concern is that i think i probably spent something like 50 - 100 hours (total total total total total ballpark) trying to make [this protocol into] what i understood to be meditation, or at least hours where this was on my mind and undermining practice, in a way. and even afterwards there have been and has been threads in my mind like "huh this doesn't feel like meditation so i must be doing something wrong". of course i think a lot of this is par for the course and part of tacking towards good and tacking towards better models of mind and meditation. like why does it feel wrong? why is one thing more meditation than another? but maybe with the right upfront expectation setting there's a way to just nip the shoehorning in a bud and save people time
[...]
Mark
trying to make this what i understood to be meditation
how does that look? can you say more? want to innoculate (and i'm sorry)
J
so after like n years knowing about tmi and noting and related practices, i had implicit models about how meditation works. the general general shape of the model was something like: your mind is a tool/machine, and you need to make it sensitive tool/machine such that one day it can finally pick up on some details of experience that lead to insight. step 1) develop powerful tool [powerful experienced as stable in the case of tmi, and perceptive in the case of noting]. step 2) use tool to examine reality
importantly nowhere in this model was there a sense that meaningful progress was being made up until the point of insight
Mark
so like train tool/build microscope, then use microscope? does that simplify it too much?
J
nope that's pretty much exactly it
Mark
hmm k
J
i'm guessing this is common, but i'm not positive
Mark
i think ingram sort of implies this
J
and there was a model for what made a good microscope too
M
like if you just use your microscope enough
J
i think it was the model of what i thought made a good miscroscope that was especially problematic
Mark
so then ppl like spend 1000 hours examining the blobs behind their closed eyes
i think it was the model of what i thought made a good miscroscope that was especially problematic
say more?
J
sure. and eventually we should try to figure out why it is possible to have success with that metaphor. like, is it success in spite of the misconception? or is something else happening? [and ofc not everyone does have success and stuff]
Mark
like, is it success in spite of the misconception?
i currently think so
noting is close enough that people can slip into doing the right thing, especially with a teacher who succeeded
J
so as mentioned with both noting and concentration, even tho the skills are different, what a successful microscope looks like in both cases involves something in the ballpark of mindfulness or "with it ness" "with it ness" that builds up into long interrupted stretches of "with it ness" over time and so if you're doing one of these practices it's getting into one of these stretches that makes it feel like you're finally doing it right "fuck, i'm really with the breath." or "fuck, i'm really with these vibrations" something about sustained continuity of a thing over time seems to be the thing
Mark
so like almost indiscriminately maxing out continuous contact with bare sensations, sort of?
i guess that's what you said
J
yeah yeah that's in there too
and with this stuff, it doesn't seem like striving for uniterruptedness is important (until it happens on it's own), and it seems like there's plenty of room for non purely sense stuff too
Mark
(noting that i myself thought exactly all of this. pretty much exactly.)
yeah
J
and so it didn't really feel like i was developing a microscope
Mark
ah, ok
J
yeah. even people who ahven't meditated before often have a model as it being about "no thinking", or "staying with the present"-ness all of [that] is distinct from [this protocol]
(noting that i myself thought exactly all of this. pretty much exactly.)
oh cool! affirming yay
Mark
yup
J
Actually I just kind of remembered something funny. I remember at SFDC in the fall with Shinzen, you were telling [S] and I something like, "I think the updates that happen leading up to streamentry are as important as streamentry". And I remember internally thinking: "what do you mean updates before streamentry??" In quite a literal sense I thought streamentry was like a single belief toggling from off to on (preceded by no updates of significance).
I think this sort of all or nothing thinking is quite common.
[... I]t also bounced off in the most important way because I had no mental model of how practice could work that would have being patient, locally-oriented, not obsessed with the supramundane as being the correct strategy. The reaction was something like, "ok [...] that's very cool [...] but there's still this streamentry insight waiting for me out there and nothing will be good until that"
So yeah, in many ways, I think for many meditators and nonmeditators, a very big update will be that updates happen along the way and the mind gets better and more liveable along the way. and what a relieving update too. being super explicit and not at all sidelining this (as you're doing) will go a long way to that end.
For this all to work, for the claim that updates happen along the way to be credible, one need's a place for those updates [i.e. mundane insights] to live.
[...]
I'm sure all of [other] teachers would claim that "things are supposed to get better along the way, and if they're not, you're missing the point." But I blame their implied models of mind and implied models of progress! You can claim that "things are supposed to get better along the way" but if you're not providing the right model of mind/progress or otherwise really really emphasizing it, it's just going to bounce out of students brains and sound like hollow wishful thinking or something. So in summary heh: good models of mind and progress are super duper helpful and consequential to practice
[...]
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Some meditation systems emphasize the importance of practicing in the midst of daily life or making daily life part of the practice.
As opposed to "firewalling" practice, or practicing in a carefully delimited box and forgetting about it at other times, it can be helpful to reflect or feel into past or future practice in stolen moments. And, it's certainly ok to do a little bit of practice, self-reflection, gathering oneself in those stolen moments or otherwise interleaved at other times.
But, generally, it can actually be good to not mix practice with the activities of daily life. As in, it's ok to practice when praticing and to just live when living.
The ultimate goal of the practice is sort of to "get lost in life" (safely, constructively, endorsedly), anyway.
And practicing in daily life or using daily life activities for practice is sort of adding something extra to life, an extra thing, extra metacognition, something. And this can interfere with spontaneous, constructive action.
It can be better to use practice to alter the "upstream causal factors" that indirectly trickle down to affect experience and behavior and choices, in daily life.
So practice does, short-run and long-run, affect daily life, of course.
And, eventually, practice sort of eats itself:
The lines between practice and daily life do blur, do mix.
There becomes just one seamless thing, with context dependent, manifold evolving qualities, whether "on the cushion" or off.
So/but, anyway, here, in this practice system, we're sort of coming at this blurring/mixing, indirectly, from the practice side, rather than top-down trying to mix practice and daily life directly.
Importantly, doing any of the practices is X% finding new things to do and/but Y% finding ways you're already doing these things, and, of course, eventually it's X+Y% the practice doing you, or finding yourself naturally slipping into the practices, or participating in the practices, or participating in life and the practices, all at once, and/or simply, eventually, perhaps thousands and thousands of hours in, there's just life, just this.
*
Addendum / update:
There's some nuance here. This will be a partial restatement of the above with maybe a tiny bit more.
I do think it's especially ok and good to take "stolen moments," "quiet moments," to collect oneself amidst relatively continuous activity.
buttt, if one is sort of adding or mixing meditation into things, then that's maybe potentially problematic. The first-pass reasoning-ish is that the eventual goal is to sort of be "lost in life with no remainder," anyway, then adding or mixing meditation is sort of the opposite of that, unless locally strategic somehow.
But, buttt, butttt, redo-to-undo, sometimes, can be greatly facilitated by contextual cues or triggers. In some sense, there is no other time to "meditate" except "in life," whether amidst activity or in a quiet room. of course, a quiet room with minimal likelihood of interruption is very facilitative, too! This is especially the case when in-life contextual cues or triggers for things are hard to come by or "the real thing" is too intense, demanding, continuous to safely admit anything but doing that thing. In those cases retrospective and prospective engagement can be better, or altering the context or intensity of the thing if at all possible.
And, buttttttt, in any case, if meditation-y things naturally come up in the midst of other activities, that can be great! In any case, if you (simply) find yourself doing meditation-y things in context, if what's happening feels natural, relatively costless, etc., then that's probably or often fine and good!
Anyway, some nuance, and qualifying here^.
[Thanks to a collaborator who helped prompte teasing out these distinctions a bit more.]
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[This section was partly inspired and came out of discussion with collaborator k.]
It’s ok to try to or to explore applying meditation to concrete or proximal problems. You might meditate/will/think/feel/etc. towards their being solved or dissolved, directly, in the context of your practice.
In the course of that, if something starts to grind or jam, just make sure you sort of notice this as quickly as possible, and then "take your foot of the gas," gently, fully stop trying, in that particular way you were trying, before you try something a little different or very different. (This helps to reduce the possibility of a "runaway proliferation of activity" or "leaving scaffolding or activity behind." It’d be fine if you do leave stuff behind, and/but then you’d likely have to clean it up later, someway, somehow. And that’s fine, too; it just might cause handleable but undesirable problems in the meantime—it can increase the chances of some of the things in the "risks" section happening, in the worst case.)
And things will probably grind or jam, within seconds or minutes, for an early- and middle-stage meditator, because of the nonarbitrary, structural relatedness of everything "in" the (body)mind. If things weren’t all intertwingled and dependently interrelated (at first) then one wouldn’t need to meditate! Problems would just sort of spontaneously unravel, solve, and dissolve themselves. (And they often do already! And, you don’t notice it! Because, it’s just spontaneously, effortlessly happening for lots of possible problems and desires and hopes and goals that never need to become problems and desires in the first place! That’s just what the mind does and is trying to do, in some sense, all the time, for everything, anyway. Sometimes it just needs a little help on the front end, and that’s what meditation is.)
Meditation is for things. Meditation is concrete/proximal problem solving, though sometimes the solution involves going very oblique, very indirect, up to and including one’s entire cosmology, metaphysics, and the very seeming and experiencing of the world. And things can get rocky when that’s happening. But, sometimes, to solve a very important, concrete problem, that’s what one ends up needing to do.
Part of why the concrete/proximal problem solving aspect of meditation is deemphasized or dismissed is because direct problem solving not only kind of tends to quickly grind or jam but because usually the "energy" or "directionality" of that problem-solving activity is what’s causing or perpetuating the problem in the first place.
There’s a way in which that’s almost tautological or analytic (in the analytic versus synthetic proposition sense): The problem-solving activity, if crystalized as such, must somehow be trapping or preventing solution pieces inside of itself, in some sense. Otherwise, the problem would have never become a problema in the first place, in some sense—it would have somehow been automatically, spontaneously, effortlessly handled at some point in the past. So, while/when a goal or problem-directedness is fixed/frozen/crystallized, problem solving potentiality is sort of trapped within it. But, if that goal or problem-directeness can relax, let go, recede, lose momentum, become fluid, then those solution pieces can be released and sort of mix profitably with the rest of the space, and then suddenly (or gradually/eventually) the solution might become clear or the problem might dissolve.
So trying to solve some problems "directly," and trying to solve problems directly with meditation, can sort of be a trap. But, it’s ok to play with it, and try, because solving and dissolving problems is kind of the point, whether it happens directly or indirectly.
Note, of course, "dissolving problems" can be a huge space of coming to want different things over time because "you and your bodymind" decide those things are much better than the things you wanted before, intrinsically, or because lots of knock-on problems just sort of fall away.
In the meantime, and forever, it’s ok to want money, mansions, anything. It’s ok to want whatever kind of life you want, and it’s ok to want your life to feel however you want it to feel. (The "endless non-end non-state" can be exciting, engaging, passionate, interesting, playful...)
The ways in which you’re "hey wait a second," to any of the above, are part of the inputs to meditation. If you’re concerned "enlightenment" or mansions or money won’t make you safe or happy, then, through meditation, you might turn towards having merely "enough" money (which might be a little bit or might be billions), and being the kind of person that can participate in every more stable and expansive intimate care relationships. And politics. Who knows.
Even if embodying "no-self" and nonduality (or whatever), the system will still be moving towards homeostasis and procreation (all things being equal) across all time horizons, and all sorts of things interrelated with those.
It’s ok to try to get specific, concrete things, and it’s ok to try to use meditation to get them—especially as one gets farther along, as the system becomes more and more nonarbitrarily fluid. And sometimes, when directness doesn’t work, the right thing to do will be to let things go, to incline towards indirect, oblique, provisional, noncommital openness, when one can, to facilitate the solving and dissolving of one’s problems, in ways that couldn’t be appreciated, pursued, or conceived, ahead of time.
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For the first few days weeks or months, it can be good to stick to 2-20 minutes per day, slowly working up to 40-60, 40-90 minutes per day. (Eventually, sometimes, you might meditate many hours in a single day, with plenty of stretching, changing positions, and so on.)
During that initial time, if anything is "grinding" or "jamming," or there's growing muscle tension, it can be good to stop immediately and to explore again, slightly differently, the next day. The bodymind is learning about safety and so on.
If one finds that they can only do 2-15 minutes per day, that's ok! If one takes a few days or weeks (or months) off, that's ok!
If you find you "can't meditate," any of, "you find you're not making time to do it," or, "there's theoretically time to do it, but you 'just can't,'" or, "you're sitting/standing/laying down to do it, but then, while there, you're 'not meditating'"--that's ok! There will be life situation reasons, front-loaded opportunity-cost-balancing reasons, bodymind "pre-preparation" reasons, and so on. (You might re-read the "preliminaries and vacations" section, above.)
Troubleshooting "can't meditate" is very large topic, beyond the scope of this section. But, it can be good to know that it's normal and that possibly (likely!) a lot of good things are happening, and need to happen, before/between when one is regularly meditating. (Briefly, briefly, briefly, this is an infinitesimal sliver of a suggestion, that ellides any deep structure, deep reasons, and it, for sure, won't work for everyone, and that's ok--there can be helpful things like "more gently backing onto the cushion," as it were, different ways to gently ease the bodymind system into it, that sort of thing.)
Eventually, eventually, eventually, there can/may/will be periods of time where meditation is sort of a black hole, that will suck up all available time. In those periods, it'll be easy to meditate for hours and hours, and you'll even lose time. So, if one "wants to be meditating more (seemingly efficiently)," then one will eventually get the chance! (This can, of course, be quite disruptive, too, and one should do their best to life plan for this, even though that can be quite challenging.) It is intermittent and temporary, if/when it does happen, though it can come in blocks of weeks or months.
***
As time passes, prior to having a good, intuitive sense, there's the question of "how long should I meditate"? (Why did I say "40-60," "40-90," above, in particular?)
It can be helpful to consider "local settling dynamics" and "unpacking and (re-)packing" dynamics, as it were, as well as distinctions between particular kinds of momentum.
One could think of there being one kind of "'bad' momentum" and two kinds of "'good' momentum."
(Note, it can be hard to distinguish between (a) good momentum, (b) bad momentum, and (c) good and bad momentum mixed together. That's ok, that's normal, part of meditation is a reduction of the "bad" to a clean zero over a patient hundreds and thousands of hours.)
"‘Bad’ momentum" is/are things like potentially automatized (reversibly so!), unresponsive, possibly overly enthusiastic or indiscriminate e.g. "pushing," "forcing," etc. which can "leave behind scaffolding" and especially "leave behind occluded runaway processes," both of which "have to be cleaned up later," and, in the meantime, can cumulatively lead to muscle tension, longer timelines, and other problems. All of this can include an attitude of "trying to get stuff to stick" or "trying to get stuff over humps to make it stay there," to "trying to lock in gains." Ahhhhhh!!!!!! (Long-term, meditation is sort of about "positive disassembly" and structural/structure-preserving fluidity--not trying to stably make oneself any particular way. The "bodymindenvironment" should sort of take care of ways of being for you, as it were, ever more, over time.)
And, then, by contrast, two "good" practice states, are, like, (a) and (b):
(a) "pre-zone" or "non-zone" meditation: anything one does is progress, in-principle--long-run, cumulative, data, learning, incrementality, even including, especially including, during long stretches of 'seems like nothing is happening'" [and this even also includes, too, experiences of "bad momentum"!]. Note that, some of the time, sometimes most of the time, hundreds or thousands of hours, "pre-zone" isn't pre-anything. It's just "normal daily meditation!" And this can be true ten hours in or 10,000 hours in.
(b) "in the zone" or "'good' momentum."
"'Good' momentum," emphasis on momentum, is a bit of a misnomer. The word "momentum" is used because being in these states can feel like there is especially fast, smooth progress happening. And/but, first, misnomer-wise, there's a sense in which smooth progress is always incrementally happening, no matter what, as per (a), no matter whether it's two-steps-forward-one-step-back, long, wrong turns, "seems like nothing's happening," or anything.
And, second, misnomer-wise, the dynamics, at a fine grain, aren't precisely "momentum-y;" it's very much more, just, that, "the right, specific things are happening," full stop. That is, top-down or spontaneous/bottom-up, or, of course, both, what's happening is generally measured, concrete, specific--sometimes patterned, sometimes globally unique—personal-causal-history-lock-and-key, more like puzzle-solving and not painting nor stirring. (To be sure, though, puzzle-solving can still be long-stretches of shimmery, flowy, fuzzy, buzzy, fizzy, rippling, vibrate-y, waft-y, etc., experiences! The language is hard to get right.)
So, how do these distinctions relate to "how much and how often"?
There is a thing where the bodymind, all things being equal, as one becomes more experienced, in a single meditation session or "superblock" (maybe fuzzy around the edges!!!), is that one sort of goes through this sequence:
The bodymind (w) prepares itself to make "deeper" changes ("entry"), perhaps for long minutes or hours, (x) makes/allows/explores "deeper" changes ("momentum"), perhaps for long minutes or hours, and then (y) prepares itself to stop meditating and to get on with the day/evening ("wind-down"/"safety") (for minutes or even hours). Also, there's something like (z): post-meditation--while doing other things, the bodymind can still be rearranging itself to facilitate further non-meditation activities ("local post-meditation settling dynamics").
In the sequence above, (w; "entry") can tend to have the flavor of (a) "pre-zone/non-zone," above--patient incrementality, where it can be somewhat harder to tell what's going on. And then (x; "momentum") is more likely to be (b), being "in the zone."
(The stages/states of (w) and (x) do, all things being equal, eventually somewhat kind of blur together, over hundreds or many thousands of hours, with any particular day or stretch being an exception. Eventually, all things being equal, "long range proactive precomputation" sort of reduces context switching dynamics (and context switching costs), more and more, over time. But, (x; "entry") and (w; "momentum") flavors, as more distinct, can be especially prominent, in the beginning.)
So, finally, punchline, there will still be cumulativity, traction, even if one doesn't do the following(!), but one can sometimes make more efficient progress if one meditates more than forty minutes in a single session. (Forty minutes seems to be the magic number for lots of people, in terms of "paying the cost of entry," as it were.)
Further, if possible, having a day, or a weekend, or a week, with fewer interruptions and responsibilities, can also facilitate sort of "extra-meditation supercycles" of multi-day super-"entry" and super-"wind-down," as a larger container for meditation (and long walks, and anything). Leaving plenty of time for super-"wind-down" can be a large "retrocausal" boost to meditation efficiency/effectiveness because it makes it safe to "go deep" (because there's plenty of time to "come back").
*
Note! If things grind or jam, etc., before forty minutes, then one is doing plenty with what's currently available (and it's better if one can stop well before grinding or jamming), and one, ideally, can gently explore, over time, how to not have that happen in the first place!, because grindy/jamminess can sort of problematically accumulate before the bodymind gets very good at fully cleaning it up and/or avoiding it entirely. Additionally, if one meditates well over forty minutes, remember one can generally move around, change postures/positions, stretch, etc., quite a bit without "disrupting momentum."
AND, ONE SHOULD NEVER DIRECTLY TRY TO DIRECTLY [sic] "GET INTO" (w; "momentum")! THAT'S SORT OF HOW ONE IS MORE LIKELY TO ACCUMULATE "'BAD' MOMENTUM.":
WHETHER ONE IS IN (w), (x), ETC., ONE IS STILL, IN SOME SENSE, DOING THE SAME THINGS, THAT IS GENTLY, SOFTLY, PATIENTLY, ETC. WORKING THE PROTOCOLS, OR WHATEVER: THERE CAN BE A SEAMLESSNESS AND ULTIMATELY A SORT OF "META JUST DOING ONE THING" (at least while practicing) THAT HOLDS/APPLIES ACROSS ANY PARTICULAR STATE/STAGE/PHENOMENA. So, one's only responsibility is gently inclining towards executing gentle, impeccable practice, nothing more, nothing less, and, in some sense, things just happen on their own, can only happen on their own, when the time is right.
Depending on one's current life situation, e.g. current life-partner expectations/agreements, life/family/etc. responsibilities/obligations--in addition to meditation for e.g. forty-plus minutes, it can be helpful to meditate right when one wakes up, without even opening one's eyes, to take advantage of "sleep lability." And, it can be helpful to meditate in the hours before bed, and while falling asleep.*
(*as long as one is, in general, making use of something like the meta protocol, meditating while falling asleep doesn't turn one into a sloppy meditator or put one at risk of entrenching "subtle dullness" and stuff like that.)
Note: To emphasize again, plenty of cumulativity is still possible, long-run, in fuzzily bounded sessions and under forty minute sessions. And good things of course happen prior to the forty-minute mark in longer sessions. Over time, one can get a better and better sense of whether one or multiple shorter sessions are "worth it" on any particular day, if that's all one has time for. And, a "session" is a nebulous, "fake" construct, a leaky abstraction, and forty minutes could be zero/five/twenty/sixty/eighty/120/.../etc. minutes, on any particular day, and so on, all things being equal.
Note: In some ways the distinction between pre-zone and in-the-zone is real or at least useful or apparent; and, in other ways, it's a "fake" and/or artificial distinction, riding on an underlying continuity or complexity. And, pre-zone versus in-the-zone will be different for different people at different times. There won't necessarily be a sharp felt/experiential distinction between the two, or even a vague one, on any particular day or in any particular session, or even ever-ish--someone can feel like they are almost always or even always "pre-zone"/"non-zone", and that's normal and ok, too, and doesn't necessarily mean things will be slower or different in any particular way, in terms of progress or trajectory, for them relative to other people.
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UPDATE 20241123 (this section needs to be edited)
why all the new pN????????????? Like 40+???????????
just sort of elaborating, clarifying while [at the time] in the throes of acute neurodegeneration and dysautonomia [upside down smiley] [[from long covid, not a meditation injury]]. it sort of all flows from p2, but might make the journey smoother/safer to see things elaborated out for some people. i might eventually try to refactor it all down to a smaller number again, tweak the emphases on everything, put more of the essence of latter stuff into lower numbers.
these days i'm sort of suggesting people kinda of explore them starting from both lower numbers and higher numbers and moving towards the middle, and that's not yet reflected here [in this section]
see also the various pith instructions (and etc., etc.), etc.
remember that some pN are sort of experiments to realize that the instructions fully or partly "don't work" or are somehow impossible
/UPDATE
This is a very, very, very, very rough breakdown of how you might use your time while practicing. It could be more granular, and all the percentages could be tweaked more. Note that each "level" adds up to 100%. For example, it’s ballpark suggested that p2 might be 80% of 72% of your total practice time. Or, stated more imprecisely, if you’re doing the protocol proper, explore doing lots of p2. These percentages may change as we learn more. For example, the ballpark suggestion for doing the meta protocol might go down or up. Also, in the beginning you might spend much more time on the preliminary/auxiliary practices, and so forth. These are intended to be the very-long-run breakdowns.
Important: It’s normal to "orbit" this document and the practices, to read this and put it down for a while, or to do the practices and then do other life things for a while. There are many paths up the mountain and many often necessary "detours," which aren’t detours at all, of course.
Alternative note: A future draft of this should maybe include percentages for "lost in life, including maybe forgetting this document even exists" as well as doing all sorts of random things for oneself that don't immediately seem to have any connection to meditation or this protocol. Though, that might get too complicated or so inclusive it become less useful as a rough guide.
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(0) Notes
(1) Interleaved or Retrospective Evaluation of Happening and Doing
(2) Solo or Dyadic Tight Feedback Loop
*
Notes: how/manner/way
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so, a quick rephrase of the meta protocol:
evaluation of happening and doing:
[they comment further:]
I think I’m getting a better handle on "right place, right time." it’s interesting how the definition of "good" shifts according to some kind of need, even when I don’t know what the need is
there’s this all-inclusive okay-ness thing but so many fine-grained variations in what kinds of "good" and "bad" and "locally vs. globally good-or-bad" are available or necessary in any given moment
[...]
there’s something like...the whole system keeps shifting around the definition of "good" (placeholder for the real thing), different "senses" of good/bad/?? seem useful locally at different times, but there’s definitely Something I’m moving towards...but I can’t actually pin that thing down
like, moderate confidence that all of the different "flavors" of "good/better" and "bad/worse" are integral to the thing, but no verbal/explicit? knowledge of what the Big Thing actually Is
or, well
a lot of me/"the bodymind" seems to have an answer here. and actual knowledge about what the thing is. but the part of me that explains it to myself and can actually explain it to other people is like ??????
where before it was like I was getting some kind of representation or map of good/better/bad/worse/??, it feels like a whole bunch of Knowing and Not Knowing has opened up around the territory and it is...resistant to representative explanation/maps
or, just not compatible with them
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[minimally edited placeholder transcript; 1:1 message reply] I want to do something like not over or under sell the meta protocol, like, one thing that's important is that one should sort of also apply The Meta protocol to itself so sort of a Meta Meta protocol, and I'm sure there's better and worse ways to kind of weave it into the meditation practice itself.
I know that it's as you know, it's sort of written as like a separate thing, but you picked up immediately—I’m doing the same thing where I'm sort of naturally weaving the spirit of it into the main practice itself in terms of—that was not under selling it—but there's also a thing about not overselling it.
I've recently hammered: meta protocol, meta protocol, meta protocol. I think that's right, and I did say, like, "If non-forcily available" because it can be a thing that’s not good for the mind to do at particular times. And I think that'll be like pretty obvious; the mind just sort of won't be able to do it or it'll feel forcy or effortful so one shouldn’t, just like everything else.
It shouldn't be forcy, as with the main practice. One is interpreting the instructions and applying them in contingent idiosyncratic ways at least in some ways. So this is where the Meta Meta thing comes in.
As with the main practice, let go, hold it loosely, experiment; don’t prematurely reify ontological elements or commitments that seem to be implied by the text.
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Note: No practice is intended to assert/hide/entrench/embed ontological presuppositions. Assume all practices, as explicitly written, are metaphysically//existentially//pedagogically//phenomenologicaly/linguistically flawed, incomplete, broken, and ultimately in need of discarding, going beyond, or dropping completely.
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The preliminary/auxiliary practices are sometimes useful to explore before and concurrently with the main practices, especially main practice p2.
These practices won’t take you all the way and can even tie you in knots, but they can get things going and sometimes unstick things. They are presented in no particular order.
Consider creating for yourself and/or submitting your own preliminary/auxiliary practices for inclusion in this document. Submission could be very useful to other people. If you wished that it had been here, instead of you needing to discover it, or you just think it’d be useful to other people, please submit. Preliminary practices are intended to be unsystematized, ad hoc, a little bit vague, brief, and jargon-free. Ideally they are titled with a short, imperative phrase, but that isn’t necessary. Your submissions will be indicated by your initials or pseudonymous initials (please choose/indicate).
[People besides me who've submitted preliminary/auxiliary are credited with parenthetical initials. Sometimes other people help with significant curation as well, including (h) and others. If a parenthetical initials contain an asterisk, then the original submission has been lightly modified in some way.]
Don’t take these too seriously. Don’t reify them. They might or might not point to deep, metaphysical truths. If they happen to, it’s probably not in the way you initially think. You might or might not have to intermittently throw some or all of these away, forget them, in order to make progress.
You don’t have to do all or any these. Eventually you’ll throw almost all of them away, or at least they’ll be essentialized and seamlessly convolved with so much.
Something being in a preliminary/auxiliary practice isn’t committing to any particular ontology. Take these as experiential games, brief playful experiments (and not buttons to press and mechanically keep pressing), dialogues between words and experience, physical or mental action and result.
Because the preliminary/auxiliary practices are an ad hoc, open-ended list, the current set of practices became too large to be manageably contained in the current document.
See
for a bare list of the current names of the preliminary/auxiliary practices. You can skim this list quickly for ones that look interesting.
See
for the actual preliminary/auxiliary practices.
Contemporary meditators sometimes dismiss the preliminary/auxiliary practices (and sometimes, based on this, the entire document/protocol), because they seem "too intellectual" or "too conceptual." There's a few things to say, here. First, experimenting with versions of these that do sometimes tend to be too "top-down," too "heady"/conceptual/intellectual, at first, can help the system learn how to do "bottom-up"/automatic/spontaneous versions. Many of the p/a practices are pointing at phenomena that spontaneously precede insights.
Contemporary meditators sometimes also dismiss preliminary/auxiliary for being "too therapeutic." If meditation is the total transformation of (body)mind, then anything is fair game and potentially relevant, and ordering matters. Sometimes a meditator will be "stuck," then go talk to a therapist about something seemingly unrelated, and then be "unstuck" in their meditation practice. To the degree that a meditator can be "unstuck" "on the cushion", their practice will precede more systematically and efficiently. It's all the same system, and "mundane" insights can bottleneck "the big stuff" as viewed through traditional maps or contemporary lenses.
All that being said, sometimes the long list of preliminary/auxiliary practices can just seem paralyzingly overwhelming. "Do I have to do them all?" No! Explore the ones that look interesting or resonant. You will generalize from these. If you get bored or you're not "stuck," don't use them. The idea is to do just enough that you begin to generalize towards finding new degrees of freedom and the right high-dimensional, deeply personal and situated things to do, on your own. Eventually the mind becomes fully self-generative and "omni-directional." The preliminary/auxiliary practices are intended to facilitate that bootstrap, not to be a laborious and exhaustive set of practices that need to be completed before moving on.
An analogy used elsewhere is that the preliminary/auxiliary practices can be thought of as playing the scales, as in when learning to play a musical instrument. It's not a perfect analogy, but it might be a helpful one. One doesn't play all possible scales and one doesn't want to mistake the scales for sheet music performance or jazz. Though, sometimes, they're an excellent and helpful/healing/something thing to do.
Most people aren't exercising all the degrees of freedom of their minds--there's a way in which it can be hard to see all the different things one might do in any particular moment. (The "all you see is all there" bias.) Lists like can help people to fill out their "missing degrees of freedom." Almost everyone has a speckle pattern of blind spots, for things they could do but don't spontaneously think of doing, at times where it'd be helpful (e.g. in daily life, or in reflection, or while journaling... or while doing p2!)
Further, "generalization" runs "deep," to ever-finer things one might do with ever-finer nuance and variation. Again, one eventually goes "beyond" the preliminary/auxiliary practices, though even "meditation masters" will dip back into the list, every so often, for all sorts of reasons.
(Degrees of freedom and fine-grain-ness have relationships to the classical concept of "pliability.")
Finally, for any given person, sooner or later, they will experiment with a preliminary/auxiliary practice and find that it's jarring, grindy, disruptive, something. Not all practices will be net good for people at all times, and plenty will be potentially detrimental. (Maybe only a tiny, different fraction of them will be useful for any particular person.) As one progresses in meditation, less and less "top-down" or "random" "mental actions" (not to inappropriately reify anything of that) will be useful! It's ok to put preliminary/auxiliary practices down and never pick them up again (or to never try some of them at all, ever), and so on.
Meditation is global wayfinding. Everything you do changes you. Have every degree of freedom at your disposal in the service of better and better--the right things, in the right order, a the right time, ultimately beyond reason and conception (though reason and conception are still good, before, sometimes during, and after).
If the list is overwhelming, the meta protocol can help bootstrap intuitive navigation and selection of practices, from the preliminary/auxiliary practices and of course what to do, when, with respect to the entire protocol. It's ok to choose randomly and experiment. There is time. It's included in the "10,000 hours."
Again, the preliminary/auxiliary practices are sometimes useful to explore before and concurrently with the main practices, especially main practice p2.
***
Addendum:
In a similar vein to the above, some people have that the tweet below is one-pithy-way-to-express-one-way-of-how-one-might [sic] explore bridging practices that seem more cognitive, therapeutic, top-down, etc., with more "traditionally meditation-y feeling/seeming" practices:
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360397644498165763
"If you're solo working w/ Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS; e.g. w/ the Self-Therapy Jay Earley book) or Feeding Your Demons (see appendices in the back of both books), & they've come to feel laborious or heavyweight, you can do them NONVERBALLY & SELF-TELEPATHICALLY, too."
See also:
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Unlike the preliminary/auxiliary practices, which are ad hoc and open-ended, the main practices are designed to be a seamless unity, a seamless, closed set. As with the meta protocol, the verbal rendering of the "main practices," in this document, could be considered one possible schematization out of many. That is, there are multiple ways that the main practices could be validly rendered into words, using maybe completely different (or overlapping) words, for each rendering. As always, it’s important to keep in mind that this entire document is a telephone game, pointing at bodymind practices, progressions, and ways of being that are "beneath" words. That being said, one hopes that this rendering (eventually), and other renderings, are in some sense "relatively losslessly complete." That is, this rendering and other renderings will hopefully retain (point to) the same amount of "essential complexity," without loss of important and unifying detail and sense. Ideally, each rendering of the main practices would be, in some sense, a "complete, seamless, closed set."
"Complete" (successfully rendered so, or not), conceptually or otherwise, note, though, that different people will use different main practices in greatly different proportions, time-wise, e.g. many people may spend much more time with p2 than the others. And, something like the meta protocol, or the "real thing behind it," your intuition, should be the final arbiter of what one could/"should" be doing at any given time, as per usual. No magical button pushing, here, or anywhere. By exploring each of the main practices, and engaging the meta protocol with respect to them, you must come to implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, understand their interrelationship and appropriate usage, for yourself, on your terms, in your own concepts and words. You must find the "real" practice(s), the correct thing(s), behind the words below.
All that being said, some people have taken a preliminary stab at pithy glosses for each of the current main practices, as a way to remember what they are and as a way to bootstrap an understanding of how they might fit together and support each other. At a later time, I will work out how to explicate more of the principles behind their design.
Example glosses by a collaborator (br):
Another collaborator (d) offers these relationships:
I think of p3 as more inviting, each point modifying or coming after the first; and p5 as keeping things that are already there still. p3 to me is more about turning up new things and p5 is about stilling turbulence
For p3, parts or feels can be threatened by knowing they will immediately become subject to p2 immediately upon being grasped
For p5, you can turn up things and create turbulence so that everything is moving so fast it becomes so slippery that you can't do anything about them.
My response to the above collaborators:
p3 is yeah sort of maybe (very) slow, soaking concentration-flavored noting practice, that self-generates new noting labels over time
p1 is more conceptual grain and fluidity than anything else
p5, very loosely, yeah could be considered a "continuous"/"indiscrete" [sic] version of p3, but it teaches a bunch of different things than p3, too, around stability, change, "grasping" (maybe in non traditional sense) and control
p3 is also a different take on "learning how to not change things" (as well as the limits of that) versus p2 which is more change oriented (though right thing right time)
p6 is sort of a "continuous"/"indiscrete" [sic] version of p2
p7 also has a bunch of relations to different "halves" of p2
Another collaborator (h/H) notes:
[p3 is] like an antidote to (what seems to me to be) the strong doingness/acting-upon-ness of p2
***
In general, as mentioned in other places, if things feel stuck or "jammy," or things become "forcy"/"force-y", it can be good to change which main practice you’re doing, to switch to a preliminary/auxiliary practice, to engage the meta protocol or meta meta protocol, to change postures, to take a walk, to take a break, to do the most minimal, personal thing in the (meta) spirit of the meta protocol, etc.
Finally, H notes:
>>>
i’ve recommended the prot to several people now, and i notice that each time i do i include some kind of disclaimer/warning about the language of especially the main practices. like "don’t think too hard, don’t spin your wheels trying to understand every caveat & get it all in your head at once." i’m not sure it’s best to do that, but i want to sort of encourage people to sit with it even if it is overwhelming or doesn’t make any sense in the beginning. "just let it wash over your subconscious" <-- problematic phrase maybe & i haven’t actually said that to anyone, but it’s kind of what i’m thinking
<<<
The current renderings of the main practices are below.
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[Gently, conservatively, cautiously, patiently will that you become (incline towards becoming) someone who uses the practice regularly and effectively to achieve the goals of the practice.]
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[old names: Elemental Analysis, Comprehensive Elemental Analysis]
(1) Incline towards producing one of
(2) Get down (think or write down) as little or as much material as comes easily, even just a single relevant word or phrase. (And you can also patiently compose and/or revise as you go, or set up an outline structure to fill in, or do lots of messy freewriting, or a combination...)
(3) Choose, from the material you produced,
(4) Lift it out, while remembering its context, and you might put an equals sign to the right of it.
(5) Now, on the righthand side of the equals sign, say the same thing using more words than on the left side of the equals sign. It’s ok if you produce something partial, imperfect, or nothing.
(6) Now, you might return to the original material for more content to repeat the exercise, or take something from the zoom/expansion/analysis you just did and zoom/expand/analyze further.
(7) Feel free to refactor, revise, expand, reboot the original material as much or as little as you’d like.
(8) For anything you produce, be willing to throw it all away, plan to throw it away, be willing to forget for something better in the future. Don’t push, don’t force, don’t strain. Let the whole thing go. Let the whole thing move and flow.
(9) You can also, and this is recommended just as much as the above, create new wholes. For example, if X = M + R + T, and, Y = Q + G + V, then take, say, R and G. And, do this: "Z = ? = R + G." Now, what is "Z", what is that "?" between Z and R+ G? In other words, instead of putting things on the left hand side of the equal sign and then putting more things on the right hand side of the equals sign—instead, first put things on the right hand side of the equals sign and then put fewer things on the left hand side of the equals sign. Find new wholes and larger contexts. You might find wholes contained in larger wholes contained in larger wholes...
(9b) You might play with this template:
[this/these] whole(s) Y is/are/contain(s)/= [this/these] parts M[, F...] + "just exactly/precisely [this/these aforementioned]/and nothing else"
That is, M and F are known; you have some words for them. Now, what is Y? What are some words for Y?
(9c) Another kind of inverse is adding a subscript to the word on the left hand side of the equals sign and then looking for definitions for the other subscript. For example, you might have "suffering =" and maybe before you even try to fill in the right hand side, you might do:
suffering_1 =
suffering_2 =
suffering_3 =
and so on.
You might ask, what is everything I could possibly mean by this word (or phrase) "suffering"/X?
In this way, the word "suffering" can become more detached and flexible from the underlying language, while at the same time making each use of the word more precise. The subscripts do not have to be numbers; they can be anything that helps to differentiate which meaning/usage/sense of the word that you mean. That might be times or durations or conditions and so forth. [See also General Semantics for more on the idea of "indexing."]
(10) Also, consider intensional multischematism. For example, you might say that the same M can be referred to by single word R and single word H. That is R and H have different meanings/intensions but they refer or point to the same thing or set of things. Further, R = G + H + T and X = V + W + Q. That is, (G + H + T) and (V + W + Y) each have different meanings, but correspond to R and X, respectively. Further, you might notice that, say, T and W, while using different words and meaning different things, in fact refer to the same thing(s), have the same extension. Another way of saying things like this is that the concept M, or that which directly represents M, or
Example a: This M and this K are the same (thing). [not just the same type of thing.
Example b: All Gs are also Hs.
[note that the above is ambiguous as to whether X, Y, Z, etc. are "bound" or "unbound" for any given X in the language/wrting above]
Examples:
Places likely worth investigating:
Further notes:
Final note:
This could be woven in better with the rest of the practice and likely will be in subsequent versions. As per usual, beware of inappropriate reification and inappropriate eternalisms. Do treat all this as multischematic and interschematizable language games. How you use language now, how language is "seated" for you, now, may not be how you use or seat language in the future. Hold it all lightly, playfully. If something is grindy or jammy, let it go. Private language is useful in the ways it's useful and not useful in the ways it's not useful. Plenty (wordlessly holds up flower, here) is tacit, implicit, inexplicit, nonsymbolic, etc. Language is what happens between people. (another flower, here)
Final final note:
Main practice p1 has an appendix in this document.
Yet another brief sparse note:
Language is bodymind-"full stack" or "bodymind-complete", or even bodymindworld-"full stack" or "bodymindworld-complete. And, there's a practically "infinite" number of language games, in the Wittgenstein-ian Philosophical Investigations sense. Language use can of course be both self-directed and other-directed. Language use nebulously shades into "thought", verbal self-talk, and non-symbolic cognition, and all of these nebulously shade into, and mix with, (all) other phenomenology. It's all nebulous, and it functions and is "phenomenologically seated" differently between people. (Remember, 99% software and 1% hardware.) That's not to say that language use is arbitrary--it's definitely not--there is an envelope of tradeoffs constrained by the physical body and brain, but there are large degrees of freedom. People using the same words may have very different things going on "under the hood," so to speak, with ultimately different behavioral (and etc.) implications. Through high quality self-transformative practice, one's relationship to language in general may subjectively converge, in some ways. When people talk about language, when people use meta-language, and talk about concepts, meanings, referents, intentions [sic], intensions [sic], aboutness, reference, definitions, etc., it's important to guard against inappropriate reification. Meta-languages are themselves nebulous language games that nebulously shade into other language games and nebulously enmesh with all other behavior and experience. Over time, self-transformative practice allows one to wayfind through "where language games come from", which is coextensive with the bodymindworld system. And that can mean that learning new language games, whether other's or one's own inventions, happens on the same timescale as other meditation-y things, which is over thousands of hours. But one might get an itch that there's something new that can be done with language, or a new way to writes stories or give voice to ideas, or to express oneself. Self-transformative practice, over time, unlocks extraordinary capacity for self-renewal and exploration, beneath culture, in pursuit of what one wants, which transforms in tandem with language, which can end up yielding art and progress and paradigmatic shifts, and so on. In short, p1 is just one language game.
*
[Go to appendix 3: main practice p1 appendix (usa english; "en-us"]
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(New, see also: manipulation-themed pith instructions)
(Note, compare with: p32 (effortlessness))
Background intention:
Will Instructions Part 1:
Will Instructions Part 2 (the "opposite" or "absence" or "antidote" of/to will):
Action Instructions Part 1:
Action Instructions Part 2 (the "opposite" or "absence" or "antidote" of/to action):
Notes:
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Notes:
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*
Notes:
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*
Rambling scratch note: One might expect a practice, here, instead of, or alongside, the above, that's something like "allow/accept things to be just as they are," but in my experience it's a bit more instructive to try to actively stabilize things and to see how and when that fails (plus perhaps other more direct things, for some people). Regarding "for what’s good to and you can and it's not bad to," immediately or eventually, the "for what (and when)" will be, long run, never. That is, active stabilization will give way to effortless flux (which has a certain restful clarity/stability). But aiming at that directly seems less productive than sort of aiming at indirectly, but having the distinction somewhere in back of mind and acknowledging when it happens, bit by bit. And, also, very important point, there will already be tremendous stabilization actively and latently in the system, already--so exploring intentional stabilization (or especially importantly, also, letting it bottom-up come to the fore) is critical for the redo-to-undo process, though it can show up in many different conceptual/ontological/liminal/nebulous ways and not necessarily some or any sense of "stabilization as such," however labeled.
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*/
Rambling scratch note: Notice how and when the above practice jams or grinds, when it's better to instead do something else, something not conceptualized as such, as the above, and when all of that gives way to something effortless, spontaneous, costless, not conceptualized as such or above. [The previous applies to all the main practices.] Better, likely, to let this happen over time than to aim at it directly or conceptualized as such.
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*
Rambling minimally edited scratch note, may especially contain errors: This is sort of a letting go, arbitrariness, fluidity practice, not that letting go is always safe or makes sense, and not that it's always or often possible, and not that arbitariness is a goal or even possible, in a sense. Optionality and fluidity sort of yield "positive/good couldn't be any other way," eventually, in any case. But one might imagine "effortlessness" practices and "acceptance" practices, in place of this one. But, for "letting go," "effortlessness," and "acceptance," especially the first one and the last ones, I think aiming at them directly is likely to engender "insta-resistance," for some people. (And, really, with global wayfinding, "resistance" is sort of a signal that something has gone wrong, or someone should never really encounter resistance unless it's already in the system and then encountering it is via redo-to-undo. In any other case, "if can't/won't--then don't; that is, some different, safe, possible "can," will come later. And so the appearance resistance should sort of only be from something previous and latent or from karmic momentum still in the system. Note "should"/"shouldn't" doesn't imply "not ok." Resistance, if it appears, is ok! It's just that resistance isn't meant to be overcome. Instead, backtrack.) In any case, "letting go" is something to play with, and true letting go only really happens when the system finds something even better, and in that case never-have-to/never-need-to-until-want-to,-until-it-safely-spontaneously-happens-all-by-itself. So, here, the term "letting go" is a bit more local, experimental loosening or experimenting or exercising or playing with perhaps micro-slack, micro degrees of freedom. And then "acceptance" as a practice seems pretty bad--what if you don't want to accept something? That then seems like a recipe for layery resistance and self-disalignment. You don't have to accept anything. It's a problematic concept, I think. Let the bodymindworld refactor [around you] so that acceptance is never needed. Better is "just-is-ness," maybe, and that sort of takes care of itself, through correct practice, over time. Because of redo-to-undo, or just because you want to or need to, because something matters and you care--it's ok to fight, ok to want, and of course ok to prefer, and so on. So that's sort of why there's no "acceptance" practice. All of that sort of takes care of itself in better "concepts" or however a person finds the right thing for themselves. Sort of subjective convergence by finding one's own way on one's own terms. Finally, I think effortlessness (or sponteneity) is more fundamental, but it's still maybe better used as a lead indicator than a practice or even a direct goal. There's something very, very, very, very, very important going on with seeking out (or finding or simply noticing, over time) where "effort" or "efforting" is occurring (sort of perhaps "doing+will+wanting something to be different") but this might be better sort of conceptualized/coalesced/found "bottom-up", which is why effortlessness is mentioned a lot, throughout the document, but it's not a main practice as such. It's a lead indicator, to be sure, and has attendant potential affordances or pre-affordances, and/but it's also more fruit than path, in some sense. Sort of.
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(There will be a right way and a wrong way and a right time and a wrong time to incline towards answering any of these questions.) If can ask in a way/manner/sense that’s good, and it is good to ask at/during the time of asking through the interval of (possibly) answering or partially or fully answering:
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Explore what your "normal ideal day" would be like, do this imaginatively, generatively, "concretely immersively." That is, as best you can, experience it as if you’re actually there, in the first person, in real time, in full sensory and perspectival detail, including inner experience.
So, this includes, but is not limited to, your thoughts, feelings, everything, successes, failures, ease, challenges, rote tasks, fun tasks, texts or artifacts you’ll write/create or consult as you’re doing so, the reactions you get, how people respond..., how you feel, who will be there..., includes experiences of planning, expecting, anticipating..., remembering, thinking (content of those thoughts), beliefs, willing, doing..., how you feel in your body from first person, how you think about your body, what you want the whole world around you to be like, how the whole world works, your past accomplishments, you expectations of future success, your imminent experience of the past, present, and future.
This is not a concentration exercise. It’s ok to do it partially and imperfectly. Planning and reverie and (seeming) off-topic-ness are ok.
See if you can minimally effortfully do this, with as much allowing as possible. If anything gets stuck or jammed, let go and try something different. No forcing.
Let go as you do this. Allow what you thought you wanted to change endlessly (if it does). Also, try not to impose on what you want. What you want right now is what you want to the degree that it’s safe to want it. What you want can change to the degree that it’s safe to want it right now.
Again, experiential/sensory/qualitative, first-person concreteness is what’s key to this practice. Concreteness.
Additionally, with respect to "ideal," above, also consider "intrinsic motivation," what is "intrinsically motivating." (The use of this phrase is intended to capture a certain pre-reflective ease, excitement, interest, and drive and is not intended to be a theoretical or ontological commitment.)
Also, holism is key to this practice, at least as something to keep in mind. The experience you’re exploring is a slice of an entire life, a slice of an entire universe, moments in an entire consciousness. Holism. Unity. Wholeness. Unifiedness. Seamlessness. Simultaneity. All together, all at once.
If you find that the concreteness is "too much detail" in that you "don’t care" about certain details and would prefer thinking more abstractly, see if you can fill in that "don’t care" (non-)detail with something concrete, and then see if you can fill in that detail with something intrinsically motivating. You don’t have to keep it. You can let it go afterwards. "You have to fill your days with something."
You might find you can’t do parts of this or can’t do any of it at all. You might be blocked or cut off or cut out. This might be because you have the experience of being not allowed, or too selfish, or what you want is too childish, impossible, immoral, evil, pathetic, hurtful, dangerous, too hard, to risky, imaginary, a fantasy.
If that’s the case, just do the best you can. You might try, for each objection, to see if you can correct or handle that objection. If you cannot, just let it go for now; choose another practice and come back later, as with all the practices. Here you can also mix in practice [p2], the willing/doing practice.
Finally, all the above is the canonical, main practice. And/but, you can also try similar things with "the rest of the day," e.g. when you wake up you can concretely explore your ideal rest of the day. You can do something similar for "tomorrow" and finally "goals" and "milestones" if those sorts of things are in your felt ontology.
*
Also good: "perfect institution" or being cared for perfectly by an institution or directly by a group of people or by / also a bureaucratic process
*
A collaborator also suggests:
How is this day already perfect? How might you look back on this as already perfect in many years' time?
*
And/or/similarly/additionally, especially for interpersonal interactions:
What are your radically concretely particular "raw" "bare" "immediate" "sensory-level" sensation-desires (not to reify any of the previous) with respect to, say, ideal interpersonal interaction and scenarios (intimacy, sex, friendship, ...) --- so, e.g. sight and sound and so on? What's desired, undesired, critically avoided, don't-care? These are shaped-and vice versa by the attendant implications, expectations, [feelings,] what-would-happen-next, nth-order consequences and effects along all dimensions, etc., of those would-be (or happened once perhaps in part and hopefully again, thin or thick slices of possibility) and so on. So let there be an interplay between the imaginatively/experientially concrete, and next, and the abstract, as you explore that imaginative sensory stuff that you want (and don't want, and etc.), that perhaps you ideally really truly want to realize, or do you, or don't you, and let the particulars fluidly flow as you explore them, let go while also letting yourself want exactly what you want as you want it and then maybe it's different in the next moment as it all imaginatively and experientially unfolds or or not, vividly or quasi-imagery, or just-known, and so on, and so on. Skip time, have little "flashbulb" moments, let yourself slip into reverie; this isn't a "rigorous" practice.
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This practice might be called "minimal unit partially ordered imaginative/generative concrete planning." That is, in some sense, it is a planning practice.
Explore what you want and what you might do by imagining/generating immersive, concrete experience, as if you’re fully living it, in two subsequent moments. And repeat.
first person concrete experiential qualities in —> first person concrete experiential qualities out
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[p11 gloss: "Stop meditating. / Stop X"]
Gently stop(/block/prevent) meditating, completely, either immediately, if you can, or durationally incline towards this (if it seems good enough, safe enough, etc., to do this). And/or/rather, continuously "don't meditate." And, then, see what spontaneously, ongoingly remains, even so. That is, see how/if meditation (or anything) continues, if/when you've completely stopped meditating, any/all of which might be good or beyond goodness.
Other options and formulations (one at a time! not all at once!):
Notes:
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The full/complete official practice-ish: "Don't try to change anything, including not trying to not try to change things. [Neither try to prevent change/happening/etc., nor try to not prevent change, and so on.]" [sic]
Broken down a little bit and phrased a little bit differently:
Try to let things be and happen and change as they are without [you yourself] trying to make anything different in each moment, and the next. If you find yourself trying to do that ("Try to let things be and happen and change..."), that is itself trying to change things, but don't try to change that...
[Neither try to prevent change/happening/etc., nor try to not prevent change, and so on.]
Change will still happen, cf. impermanence, etc.
notes:
When you exploring trying to not change anything, for a time, maybe find yourself intermittently noticing ways you're trying to make things different, pushing, pushing away, managing, forcing. What can effortlessly take care of itself? And then what happens? And now? Also, does trying have to have any pushing in it; can trying itself be effortless and weightless? What would that back then have been like (or just right now, and now) with buddha mind?
See also:
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Full/complete pith practice instructions: (Effortlessly) be aware of being aware.
Be aware of awareness itself as such
Be aware of being aware itself as such as itself as such
scratch note:
cf. boundless, centerless, etc. --- taking whole phenomenological field as (boundless, centerless) object
scratch notes:
not a panacea, direct path sort of ignores or makes implicit/tacit all the delayering (and deconditioning) and reconditioning that needs to take place before actually works.
scratch note:
the higher main practice numbers not to indicate it's the final practice, best practice, most advanced practice, only true practice, etc.
resources (in no particular order; I mostly endorse Greg Goode's material but not sure if this is the best resource for the above; didn't think hard about whether a good idea to recommend the others and haven't read more than a couple pages of the Spiro one):
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Full/complete pith practice instructions: (Effortlessly) be here, now. Or, find yourself here and now.
notes:
scratch note:
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(Effortlessly) emphasize (and/or err on side of) receptivity (or openness/vulnerability [to being changed by experience, environment, self] (over doing (and effortlessly guarding against or deeply implicit or explicit fixed or presupposed goals) or presupposition in general (and receptivity can optionally include fluid/nebulous/empty questions and fluid requests (fluid asker and fluid answerer and fluid answering and fluid answer and fluid requester, fluid requestee, fluid response, and so on.) [most parentheses not closed at this time]
Miscellaneous (may be split out into a pX):
nothing left to do, accept X when safe, open focus, allow the periphery
Notes:
temp:
[nowhere left to go]
see also:
scratch note:
the higher main practice numbers not to indicate it's the final practice, best practice, most advanced practice, only true practice, etc.
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gloss: "'patiently relax' (maybe sometimes: diaphragm first)" / or "global (re-)balancing"
Relax completely, including the breathing muscles; focus on relaxing the diaphragm, and all other breathing muscles, and everything, in that priority order, except, minimally, for anything needed posturally, for whatever posture you're in (e.g. seated, standing). (Alignment with gravity, if possible, can also reduce use of postural muscles---) but, let yourself drift slowly towards contortion, if the body is atttracted into contorted positions. Eyes can be open or closed.
Breathing may come to feel faster or deeper at times, and that's ok. Gently, indirectly incline towards breathing less (but see caveat below) in rate and depth/volume, and smoothly, balanced-ly, indirectly because the driver comes from the relaxed diaphragm (and other breathing muscles). You might breath solely using the diaphragm and that's fine. Generally, let autogenic breathing (versus volitional breathing) fully take over.
Let attention, etc. drift to the diaphragm, etc., as per above; let it find you; don't force or push it there, etc.; try for karmically free action.
Finally, let meditation or non-meditation happen in background; drifting in and out of reverie is okay.
in that priority order
Overall, overall, [sic] top priority is not (just) muscular/respiratory but also mental/emotional/attentional/"awareness-al" relaxation (--> perhaps, wellbeing/ease/balance, rather), including as much "omni-directional 'anti-'relaxation (energy, tone, arousal, alertness, doing, attending, aware-ing, letting-go-ing, surrendering, breath...)," as/when needed to facilitate that relaxation (well not "anti-" because synergistic; or, say, "balancing" though that's too separating and still oppositional, and etc.... situationally-complementary?). (So, let go of the diaphragm thing if it gets weird, and just consider breathing as a whole gestalt; or, let go of breathing entirely, except perhaps intermittently or as needed, and just explore relaxation as a whole gestalt, etc.)
*
say, versus "global wayfinding" --> (instead:) "global balancing, in the now" / "global momentary balancing" / global moment-by-moment-continuous balancing". sort of finer-/finest-grain, subtler-/subtlest-grain (or whatever) main practice p2 with emphasis on right here and now in each each-simultaneity-within-as-moment-all-at-the-same-time-ish-ness-ish [sic] vs moment-by-moment (not to over-reify "moments" or time or etc.) and/rather for sure minimally-and-balanced-disparate-local-sequential and correcting for some of the "getting somewhere in the future and not here"-ness problematicness of the "global wayfinding" metaphor
*
*
(Inspired by:
)
See also:
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If safe/non-force-y:
Surrender to [some] relevant senses of misfortune, loss, aging, decay, sickness, loss-of-//non-control, not knowing, uncertainty, neuroinflammation, neurodegeneration, sleep disturbance, dying and death.
*
You might be exploring how to integrate the above with e.g. acting on the basis of the possibility of (e.g. suffering, dying, or being "irrecoverably" diminished before---) e.g. in your lifetime disseminated breakthroughs in longevity, rejuvenation, or sufficiently comprehensively competently benevolent artificial/machine general-/superintelligence, etc. etc. In light of some of this---
*
You might also additionally explore surrendering to impermanence, oblivion, "discontinuity," finitude, limitation, non-infinity, non-eternity, incompleteness, non-perfection.
*
It's important to not inappropriately reify ANY of the above, cf. emptiness, provisionality, including "surrender", "death," "acting on the basis of," any of it. Cf. "just don't know," "emptiness," weird far future stuff that finitely enumerates all possible humans that would want to be resurrected each in some particular desired "starting" state, if you're into that sort of thing. Also Russian Cosmism, panpsychism, something-something wavefunction of the universe, omnibenevolence, """quantum immortality,""" losslessness, just really any number of things. Possibly helpful: "You just don't know [what happens,]" and so on.
*
Something may or may not remain [somatically felt as] true/"true" but, in any case, over time, one will relax into better, and better, and better ways of relating to that thing maybe being the case (e.g. less "reactive", because one finds their way to stable, anti-fragile, "normal," "ordinary," non-hacky dominating "strategies", just better in all ways, e.g. less reactive, clear, calm, relaxed, and/yet net more effective along most or all dimensions.)
*
And/but/also, careful of self-gaslighting in any direction, cf. emptiness, provisionality (e.g. ok-ness of death, goodness of death, badness of death, belief in X after death, ok-ness of X after death, various "solutions" being good or bad, etc.
*
Another possible rendering: If safe, surrender to the [likely possibility of] death [being a thing of some sort], what[ever] that means to you, right now, inevitable, provisional, empty, and so on.
*
phrases that may or may not be useful:
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Explore the it-ness-in-itself-ness / it-as-itself-ness / self-evident-ness of sensations, especially-but-not-exclusively with respect to "self" related sensations and/or/also what Bruce Mangan calls the "nonsensory fringe of consciousness" ("(non-)sensory," here, being "not the typical/traditional sense doors.")
I sometimes call this/these “back-and-beside-and-behind” phenomenology, or even "just over the shoulder," sort of peripheral-vision-esque by analogy, sort of inner space, sort of locational but not, sort of "out-of-phase" (as Daniel Ingram might put it) and so on.
You might also be sort of detecting sometimes a sort of "sliding" or "slush" or "slack" between "awareness" and "contents."
There might also be a bit of "whole-field" / "all at once" type stuff or dynamics or like at least an interplay between something like "big awareness" and "small awareness." (cf. contraction and expansion, not-two, something something)
(cf. also "luminosity" ; "in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard")
It might be helpful to explore things like "perfect-no-doing-interaction" or "awareness-in[-momentary-]stillness." Or, don’t try to make it different, see it for what it is, find the “sensate source of inference, the sensate source of mediate knowing”
You can probably get a taste of all this anytime, but you might find this “works” "better" when “not much left to do,” little layering left, and so on. But also can be helpful to explore a bit or a lot if things are stuck in some way. Ok to try front-loading, at best will have safely temporarily diminishing returns, but can jam in its own way, too, so be careful, etc. Ordering, ordering, ordering, etc.
Another """trick"""(...) is sort of lean into the analogy of peripheral vision as one way to start getting a sense of this kind of stuff. So, you might try something like this: Maybe look out the window if there's a little bit of activity out there, pedestrians or squirrels or something. Pick something stationary to pay attention to in the foreground, like mailbox or lamp pole, and notice something like that you can see things in your peripheral vision, like a hopping bird, that can stay in your peripheral vision, if you keep-ish the original thing in the foreground. So, for vision, if you move your attention to things in your peripheral vision, those things sort of become the new foregrounded thing. But, for sort of general "back-and-behind" or "out-of-phase" or "peripheral" phenomena, trying to foreground them sort of causes them to "disappear." So there's sort of subtle-peripheral-looking-while-gazing-into-the-middle-distance-in-momentary-stillness-sort-of -thing. Anyway, one sort of naturally, unconsciously stumbles on this and it becomes natural and not-weird and normal and smooth, and it evolves over time, like you'll sort of be guided to this kind of out-of-phase-wrinkle, all things being equal, and it'll unwrinkle, long run (and this isn't as weird as it sounds, it's sort of the smallest, subtlest-scale version of structurally pervasive wrapping and twisting sorts of things, but this might be one way to sort of find your way there more quickly. If this makes no sense or seems hard or seems jammy in some way you'll likely slip into it naturally, more and more, at the right time, and so on.
None of this has to be perfect or necessarily even particularly exhaustive (as such / in itself / or/and whatever). Just play with it, experiment with it, as you get stuck or it calls to you or you fall into it.
*
*
*
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Practice pith gloss: Be aware of everything.
Or, be aware of the whole phenomenological field at once, but without forcing it and with surrendering and participating in the dynamics of all this.
So, every sense door, every modality, all interoception, so-called "nonsensory fringe", and....
"It" (the "whole" "thing") might not be "flat" or (quasi-)"spherical"; it might be messy, involuted*, and so on (or is that still flat?, and so on [sic]). It might be unbounded.
There will be dynamics; say, have some care to not try force or resist any dynamics; rolling with what happens will likely get you more "more moments" [sic], not to reify moments, and not that more moments or more of the "field" at once is necessarily better. "Getting it perfect" is not not not [sic] the goal of the practice.
It's ok to take time to do other things, other practices amidst this, as you're called to. This "practice" is just the baseline default while you're doing it.
Regarding much of the above, said a different way, one wants doing this practice to be as minimally karma-generating / minimally layering as possible (as with other practices; mentioned explicitly here because of it's relatively more prescribed nature than some. Of course, one wouldn't be doing it if it weren't locally, or even better, long-run, net-delayering, of course, of course.)
As with other practices, this is not a panacea, and it can just as easily jam depending on the when (including interleaving dynamics) and the how (how interpreted, what's contingently in or out, so conceived or structurally contingently) ; quasi-spatial awareness is only one of the very large number(less) things that the (body)mind can do / non-do. Is this, is or isn't this, front-end exploring stuff like: "you're not in the universe; the universe is in you?" How does that overlap or not? Depending on where you are in your practice?
Cliched but: Let yourself be with what's actually there, right then and there, versus what you think is there or should be there. "Parts" of the field might pop in, like your back or an involution*, which might flicker between being an "in" or "three dimensional" or being "flat." (Not to reify space.) Don't try to make anything any particular way, etc., but you can play around.
*
If non-layery, you could gently non-verbally ask "what am I missing, what am i leaving out," but roll with dynamics and don't push anything, etc., etc. Again goal is not to "get it all" or "get it all at once." Flow into locality or etc. as etc.
*
I've avoided adding this one until later because of issues with over-reifying or "stipulating" as Seigfried Engelmann would put it (and other things) .
*
*I am using the word "involution" completely wrong. I want it to mean sort of a depression or pocket but I don't want to use those words. Invagination is maybe exactly the right word, but I didn't want to use that word either.
*
see also:
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Surrender (in)to unconsciousness; surrender to/as effortless, spontaneous consciousness/awareness. In this, you're not /trying/ to be UNconscious, but neither are you resisting unconsciousness, and neither are you trying to be conscious, awake, etc. This is not by fiat; this is only when safe; gently explore or fall into ways to make it safe, which might paradoxically involve finding non-effortful ways to be both more alert and more relaxed, at the same time, sometimes, and sometimes not. It's ok to fall asleep; you don't have to explore this while falling asleep; again it's ok if you do fall asleep. You might especially explore this when you're both sleepy and awake at the same time, etc., etc. Under/within the context of this main practice, it's ok to experimentally and exploritorily indirect facilitate various things, help things out, slip towards path of least resistence, unwinding, p2-style and p16-style, etc.
Scratch experimental pith notes:
See also:
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(draft)
Consider the possibility of your experiencing fully delayered, self-aligned*, ego-syntonic*, quasi-“unconditional,” effortless, spontaneous, unmanaged, non-twisty, imperfect, life-embracing, life-indulging happiness* and joy* and satisfaction*.
* = empty* and impermanent* and interdependent* but not unreal*, like, not a consolation prize or a cope, though potentially coexisting with uncertainty, sorrow, loss, and grief (though probably less than you’d think at various points or not what/which/where you thought, also provisionality, provisionality, provisionality, and assume I’m (Mark) massively wrong and pathologically confused somehow and don’t take my word or frame about anything as per usual etc etc etc)
Still getting the wording on this one right. Might add or delete some stuff.
cf. Buddhism of course. Go Buddhism! --- "nibbana with remainder" (nirvana) / "happiness without conditions" stuff (compare w Buddhism's conditioned happiness, too)
Scratch notes:
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sort of: don't try to escape [or grasp] sensations*** you're already having [when safe, when ready; selectively, at first, or ongoingly, ]
*
*
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Exploring, allowing:
no choice, no optionality, no free will, no free won't no space, no freedom (and how that’s ok though maybe a little claustrophobic and slow-growing surprising and frustrating at first)
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Allowing, welcoming:
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Non-suppressive-ly, non-push-ily, allowing-ly, non-layer-y-ly, find the natural, ordinary, self-stable, global stillpoint; find global stillpoint---the part/configuration of state space where all [subtle, change-causing, self-changing] processes, movement, “momentums”/momenta are still [in the not moving sense], quiet, absent, or in balance. Allow for things/stuff/oldness/newness to come up, to bloom/sift out of increasing stillness or initial, temporary moments or patches thereof. This might at first feel like balancing on the head of a pin, or painstakingly balancing many interrelating balance-scales simultaneously, or other things. It may feel very un-natural on and off, while/before becoming more natural (not because you're getting used to something but because you're finding the under-already-naturalness..) Gross/overt body movements are ok, departures from stillness and surges and brief and prolonged periods of non-stillness and intensification of [subtle] movement (or whatever), along the way, are ok.
*
Along the way: You may find yourself in quiet stillness, you may find yourself "just in the room" (or "just outside"), you may find thoughts diminishing, you may find I-ness, diminishing.
Draft: /////// ~Don't get stuck on any particular movement, asdfasdfasdf local//balance/global, local/global, local/global...
*
See also:
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Practice pith gloss: "Rest in grace."
The way I'm using "grace" is sort of borrowed and adapted from Buddhism and Christianity and other places.
It's sort of the recognition that enlightenment, the path, whatever, is a product of causes and conditions such as reading about Buddhism, or coming across my stuff on twitter, or getting a link from a friend, or seeing a poster or an ad for a meditation retreat for the first time. And of course it's something one can self-stumble upon too and it's "real" independent of e.g. Buddhism, or whatever, so there's that very-loosely-speaking independent existence sense, but, here, is like a radically contingent sense, even if possibly overdetermined.
So like there's some sense in which "enlightenment," etc., is utterly and completely out of your control, always has been, factors you don't control and you never controlled, and so on, in some sense.
And it can become safe to rest in that, and, at first, hints of this might have a trapped, scary feeling (or even more than that), and over time it can become safe that it's intrinsic nature is one of legitimate safety and freedom (and always was, etc., etc.)
*
My initial scratch notes:
[Intrinsic i personal goodness or benevolence, higher power, disinterested non-malicious, impartiality] [ed. note: depending on current cosmology, something in here might be useful]
Grace, progress, “enlightenment,” meditating at all, meditating being a thing as such, for better and worse, massively/completely dependent on hearing about it somehow, somewhere, as it were, being exposed to the idea sort of ish solely depends on hearing about the dharma, it’s about the inputs (nature and nurture and adult nurture) and you don’t control those and you never controlled those Determinism type stuff can be cool or terrifying but sort of gets transformed over time into legitimate safety and freedom (and always was, etc, etc)
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explore already enlightened (or already whatever)
"always already"
cf. grace, nothing you ever do will do it, has to be already sort of. Paradoxically, nothing you’ve ever done or will ever do will make you enlightened (or make you whatever)
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stainless mirror, moonlight on (~still) water
Sort of anything that’s not “out there”
Ownership, credit, authorship, pride...
Stainless mirror (includes kinesthetic, interoceptive, proprioceptive!!!!) vs self-ing and/vs subtle movement (loose categories, what’s in and out, but a lot can go bc actually layering and constraint! Global puzzle)
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[[When safe,] let/allow yourself [to] be [completely] at the mercy of "the process."
(Alternate: When/where/"how" safe, progressively, iteratively, comprehensively surrender.)
scratch:
Notes:
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Non-mindfully explore suffering itself.
Or, Non-mindfully explore suffering/bummer[1] and pleasure/fuck-yeahhhhh/fuck-yessssss themselves.
Non-mindfully here means to do so on net without reifying or strengthening a “witness” or a separation between experience and experiencer.
(---when safe, when not just an exercise in “self-torturing”! That is sometimes, in some parts of the "space," may have to de-layer for thousands of hours before this is constructive! Probably a little helpful immediately in lots of places but not comprehensively helpful immediately. All other meditation-y things and main practices and personal self-management and self-care and self-distracting strategies are always ok!!!!!!)
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gloss: gently experiment/incline towards meditation serves life; sort of no more [or less and less] mediate "meditative goals as such" whatsoever [if you ever had these anyway]; no "ongoing management through meditative" whatsoever
[eventually naturally unravels until "just in the cracks," anyway, or "spontaneous and not separate from movement, 'thinking,' etc."]
e.g. if meditating makes some things better for a bit then get worse until meditate again; then, if/when/“how”/as safe, don’t meditate as a strategy, during which the some things might get (maximally) worse and worse and worse (advanced "moves" needed: cf. surrender, at mercy, etc., etc., etc.); so like if meditation is a periodic antidote, explore not using meditation in that way, or in any way that makes something "temporarily better,” for a few days or weeks (or hours or minutes) [momentary exceptions or experiments as makes sense, etc.].
this is for (finally) working through that (maybe) (pernicious) have to do something special or some little "oomph" ("push," something) to begin meditating, no matter how small. no oomphs in the limit; totally seamless transitions
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Release effort / Release "I-fort" ; puzzle-solve / seek safe-all-the-way-down-and-global effortlessness.
seek effortlessness / incline towards effortlessness
Notes:
Related / see also:
Notes:
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I am-ness / I am X [specific person] / I am being X [specific person]:
Explore X's, specific people known to you, personally and from afar, who you are, sometimes or all the time, "being." (Credit to a collaborator for part of this formulation.) You can do this "self-telepathically," verbally or nonverbally or liminally verbally or with quasi-imagery or just-knowing and so on. You're maybe sort of looking for your own personal "I am" or "I am [your name]" and then, "who else, who also, pretty similarly to just like that."
If this isn't possible or safe it may
trans. Personal container, still not entirely clear. Generally OK to patchwork be other people in addition to yourself along the way to being something else. Stuff routed through ego, routed through self-concept, routed through I am. Can untangle. Who all are you being right now? Including yourself. Credit to someone for this question. Acknowledging and allowing that you are being them, when safe. Desire, aversion, safety, and safety acceptance.
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dwell in inability, let go of all skills, let go of all ability to plan to know to discern to intend and carry out deliver it planned. Skillful complicated things become entirely useless, if safe and safe. Let yourself have no idea what you’re looking at. There’s some technical term for this in the suttas. If you’re inclined to fight, it try not to fight it when safe as per usual. Or what to do with it. Possible very very large nonmonotonicity for most people and huge one for some very basic stuff like bills and looking at screens and other stuff. having support becomes really important
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have no expectations (for something good and/or to happen, depending)
notes:
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explore the goodness of wishing things were otherwise. Explore the goodness of if you had perfect control over your life.
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have optionality around, trying to make sense of anything. Verbal, liminally verbal, nonverbal, non-symbolic cognition, felt sense, etc..
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let yourself be (")attentionally(") pulled by the autonomic nervous system / let the autonomic nervous system participate in priortization:
for example Follow the breath all the way down to the bottom as low and down long as it wants to go. Might be unpleasant or even scary, especially in cases of Covid type things (wait until well out of acute, probably), but air hunger generally won’t hurt you part of surrender and resistance business and so on and non fighting and so on. Cross-link CF blending. Or, rather let yourself be pulled without resistance or fighting, releasing effort. Not medical advice talk to your doctor
for example digestive stuff
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Let go of meditation needing to feel like anything (in particular)
Let go of meditation needing to feel like anything (at all)
*
Incidental note: if you're skimming all the main practices, have you skimmed all the pith instructions?
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[See also: superstitious meditation, muscle tension, and will]
A collaborator (mh) notes:
I find myself mentally replacing much of the "will" or "intent" language in the protocol (particularly p2) with something like "invite" or "permit," both of which feel like "cleaner" versions of doing something volitional (cleaner=less mental baggage).
**
Another collaborator (jd) notes (paraphrased):
Regarding doing, willing, etc., and different understandings of the underlying concepts, the ontology of course being imperfect to begin with, there can be a distinction between more volitional doings and less volitional doings. And, there’s a way in which doings can feel more and less willful, from effortful to having a "nondoing" flavor. And, there’s an important distinction between the two: I can do a very topdown, or willful, willing or doing or there can be bottom-up doings, that are just kind of happening on their own. And there can be more bottom-up intention [will] as a companion to willing. And they feel very different. I’ve been inclining more towards surrender, but there’s still been a lot of doing going on. More precisely, I’m less and less the one doing the doings, in a way that happens more easily and on its own. And the word I’m using is "allowing," or I’m allowing it. The doings are allowed, somehow, and maybe being lightly facilitated by me. It’s not like the practice is missing doing, it’s just light and gentle. [...] Where I got stuck was doings and willings that were more an exercise of will versus allowing that was more bottom-up.
*
I note/respond:
the p2 language has [and has had, for a long time] "allow" and "participate" on the backend, but, yeah, this is coming up more with people. [One reason I haven’t emphasized top-down versus bottom-up, in the main practices, is that the distinction, eventually, in some sense collapses. Or, the line gets ever more blurred, or it very saliently moves. Some of the preliminary/auxiliary practices intentionally have a bottom-up flavor, e.g. "be moved." Also, the baked-in emphasis on ability/can/can’t hopefully gives a flavor of circumscribing problematic top-down-ness. All that said,] I’m wondering if there could be something more explicit [or front-loaded, in the main practices, to help good things happen maybe sooner]. so instead of:
will/intend/[...] :: ~surrender ... "allow or participate in that happening"
do :: undo ... "allow or participate in that happening"
maybe should be more like:
will/intend/invite/permit/facilitate [...] ::surrender [...] "allow or participate [...]"
do/non-do :: undo [...] "allow or participate [...]
reminding myself the current structure of p2:
2 main parts will/do,
each with two subparts will/surrender, do/undo,
each with three subparts: good/bad/can’t
**
notes on a couple takes/facets metaphysics of causation:
**
I offered another partial schema, that maybe doesn’t front-load or specially emphasize "bottom-up" but is more explicitly balanced about this:
**
Another collaborator (rv), tweets the below:
https://twitter.com/nosilverv/status/1377214273471008775
>>>
Language is stupid.
Proof:
"Not doing X" equivocates between the following:
If you understand this you understand Alexander Technique.
FURTHERMORE:
"Doing X" equivocates between the following:
If you understand this you understand Wu Wei.
MEANING:
You can have whole ass (effectively) philosophical schools spring up and develop immense literature and practicum to teach you something which isn't a priori obvious for no reason other than living in between lapses of language.
THEREFORE, language is stupid.
Q.E.D.
<<<
(incorporated inline, with permission)
*
[I would add, in addition to active and passive, there is sort of a third between them, "participation," after another meditation teacher.]
*
20221017 [c. xx]
volitionality is sort of a separate axis
very very messy:
re main practices:
the idea is sort of to infrequently(?)/sometimes(?)/experimentally(?) only enough to redo-to-undo, which could be a lot, to make sure the system knows about them, sort of. and then ideally the system does them spontaneously, bottom-up, as needed, more and more. and deliberateness itself can kind of become spontaneous.
this isn't broken out super well in my system and that's why there's a section on alternative schemas in the doc, to try to get at some of this the bottom-up type stuff.
it's almost like there's:
or something
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[stub]
Sometimes, especially somewhere near the very beginning, or eventually, it seems like nothing's happening, or nothing's working, or nothing's changing, or things are just as bad, or things are changing but nothing's actually getting better, or absolutely nothing is happening at all.
In these times, maybe counterintuitively, it can be helpful to incline towards doing ever-less, not more. Trying and experimenting and "thrashing" can be loud. They can make it harder to detect subtle and new (to you; or old) [SUBTLE] CONTEXTUAL POSITIVE LEAD INDICATORS.
(cf. [subtle] contextual negative lead indicators; contextual means "the same thing" [not to iappropriately reify 'same' and 'thing'] might be [i.e. locally] positive in one concrete instance and [i.e. locally] negative in another concrete instance, e.g. a month or 300 milliseconds later, and it might change back and forth)
These [subtle contextual positive lead indicators] might be things like subtle, distant puffs of relief, subtle, over-the-shoulder, was-already-there-at-least-in-the-moment-before memories or insights, subtle changes in muscle tension, and so on. And, it can also be very counterintuitive things or things that maybe feel bad but are actually in the right direction, slight changes in the "pattern of pixels" (not to inappropirately reify any of that), maybe a little patch in a region of bigger "pixels." Or voxels, or definitely don't inappropriately reify anything like pixels, voxels, space, time, etc., anything.
More: right-there-over-your-shoulder-there-all-along-at-least-for-a-little-bit creeping sense of something, a faint dreamy, dreamlike dawning around the edges, little phenomenological glimmers in strange inner spaces, little bits of somatic/muscle refactoring, faint, distant puffs of "relief," somatic tingles...
So, it's important to explore how to "take the foot off the gas," sometimes, in times like these, to make it easier to detect and discern and find SUBTLE POSITIVE LEAD INDICATORS (which won't necessarily feel good, but "feels good" is an excellent heuristic).
You might in particular explore the "do less" preliminary/auxiliary practice. It's not a panacea and, in my opinion, it generally won't take people "all the way," as per this whole document, but it's a good thing to explore while being careful of tangling or counterproductiveness, perhaps via the meta protocol.
Over time, one can use patterns and meta-patterns to approximately predict aspects of the future.
>>>
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1301623971323015168
[...] over time, one learns patterns of subtle lead indicators allowing navigation across larger & larger nonmonotonicities, to months of hardness where you're barely 51% sure, if that, that you're doing the right thing. it's fallible but practically doable, cf. buddha nature, etc. [...]
<<<
An example of the the above is knowing that even though things actually feel worse, you're 51% confident that something better is on the other side.
Another example is, suddenly, you seemingly know less about something than you did before, but you stably rest in this, you don't claw back to knowing, you rest in this new unknowing (because you're confident that it's ok to do it, safe to do it, and you can do it), for seconds, minutes, many minutes, or a day or two, and you come out the other side, better off, knowing more or knowing differently.
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Intructions:
Notes:
*
See also:
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[(strategy flavored; mutual epistemics flavored):]
A move M could be in the context of conversational or other local, real time interaction. Or a move M could be composite and part of a long-term plan. So, a move could be right here and now (or soon), taking place, once initiated, in a single moment or across a small number of contiguous moments, or a move can be planned for future, as part of a global strategy, or anywhere in between. And the number of people considered can be from n=2 to n=billions.
Less obvious moves, in addition to particularly other-directed moves: "non"-moves, receptive moves, waiting patiently moves, self-care moves, time out and stopping temporarily or for a longer duration moves, being-helped moves (e.g. free-associating, saying what’s most bad, saying don’t feel safe disclosing X, saying prefer not to do X without explanation or apology), listening quietly, going with the flow of what the other person is doing...
And, to be sure, we’re "moving"/"move-ing"/making-moves continuously and contiguously. We can’t turn it off. Any "non move" is a move.
It can be helpful, when doing the many protocol with new people, to start with just five minutes at a time, maybe trying five minutes just once in a single day, then five minutes again or ten minutes the next day, and so on. If it’s not working, don’t force it! Just do solo meditation or some other group activity.
It can also be helpful to start very far apart! Everyone ten to thirty feet away from each other! And then move in slowly over minutes or even days.
alternative presentation:
alternative presentation: [yay = good; bleh = bad] "Many Protocol" (Last updated: 2019-09-06; 09:19 CDT)
[See some interesting definitions in Appendix 2]
(1) Let there be A and B, which comprise a group G. A is a single person. B could be a single person or multiple people.
(2) Person A considers a move M. M can be (a) physically verbal, physical nonverbal, mental, or even (b) a "non-move that’s still a move." Examples of (a): a verbal observation, verbal question, a verbal request, a quizzical look, a shrug, eye contact... Examples of (b): thinking about what to say, waiting patiently, waiting patiently with an open mind, leaving the vicinity temporarily... Moves can be complex, that is, moves can be made of submoves that are simultaneous and/or sequential in time.
(3) Now, say, something can be "yay" or "bleh" for someone. And, something can be believed to be yay or bleh for someone, by someone. And, two or more people, at a particular time, might disagree as to whether a particular something is yay or bleh (for someone or in general). Also, say, for our purposes, that there’s a fact of the matter or a ground truth, that that particular something is actually/truly (contextually, for a particular person at a particular time) yay or bleh, with no other possibilities. And let those possibilities be possibilities for M. That is, we can have a big list (exactly 64 items) of things that could be the case for M, where only one entry/line in the list is true at a particular time. That list is in Appendix 1.
(4) Now, so, person A selects and makes the best move M they can make, in consideration of as many moves as they have time to consider, and in consideration of the 64 possible classifications of moves (in Appendix 1).
(5) So, now, the move has been made, and results have obtained. And, now, everyone in G implicitly or explicitly chooses a new A and B(s). Now, go to (1) or (6).
(6) If things are moving smoothly and slowly, then, at any particular time, with perhaps some periodic indeterminateness, there is only one A and everyone else is a B. If things are moving smoothly and more quickly, then everyone is simultaneously, at the same time, at all times, both an A and B. Now, go to (1).
appendix 1:
appendix 2:
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[(persuasion flavored)]
Can I cause people to know what’s good for me? Can I cause people to understand the synergy of reciprocity? Can I cause people to long-term coordinate with me? Can I give people a reason to long-term coordinate with me? Actually these are all superfluous or they are abilities that follow from the original ability lay down..
Good for everyone and everything. Strategically helping; recognizably good cascades...
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[(after Leibniz)]
What is the best of all possible worlds? How do I/you know? What does this imply for my action?
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[(after Kant’s Categorical Imperative)]
What would anyone ideally do in my exact situation?
If a random person were perfectly airdropped into my exact being and situation, what is the best thing they could do?
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[(mutual knowledge)]
You know that I know that you know that X is good.
You know that I know that you know that Y is bad
I know that you know that I know that that same X is good.
I know that you know that I know that that same Y is bad.
We have mutual understanding that X is good.
We have mutual understanding that Y is bad.
Notes:
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(*) If something feels bad, then something is bad, somewhere, somehow, and it’s ok to completely stop any particular thing, or the whole thing, at any time, smoothly or abruptly, if that’s what feels right. (If something has changed for the worse, it’s ok to reverse or revert, to walk anything back, too, if you want to, that you don’t like or find you don’t like, when you find it’s time to do so, immediately or later.) If in person, you can leave the room any time. If online, you can turn off your mic, turn off your speakers, turn off your video, etc.
(*) Moment by moment, sensitively, responsively, patiently:
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow lead, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow lead, and you can stop or not start leading in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow follow, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow follow, and you can stop or not start following in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow coerce, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow coerce, and you can stop or not start coercing in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow resist, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow resist, and you can stop or not start resisting in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow phase-lock, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow phase-lock, and you can stop or not start phase-locking in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s good for both/all of you for you to somehow desynchronize/decorrelate, in some somewhat particular way or not, and you can do so, start doing so or continue to do so; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
(**) If, as far as you can tell, it’s bad for both/all of you for you to somehow desynchronize/decorrelate, and you can stop or not start desynchronizing/decorrelating in that way, do that; top-down or bottom-up, actively or passively, do, allow, surrender, release, participate in that happening. If you know or find you can’t do any of the relevant ones of those, incline towards completely stopping any of your trying to do so, for those relevant ones for which you can’t, at least for just right now.
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[Original twitter thread starts here: https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1514378080600694789 (Last accessed: 2022-04-14)]
Super hot take. First-pass, there seems to be some really important differences between meditation and interpersonal processing.
I'd like to first make a distinction between something like (a) "inner feeling" and (b) emotions(tm)/feelings(tm). 1/23
"Inner feeling" is so, so, so important in meditation, of course: valence, interoception, proprioception, the body, etc., etc., etc. So important, as are a bunch of other things.
But I've long been confused/surprised by how little emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) seemed to useful, at least to me.
I mean, for sure, sometimes it's really important and useful to be like "I'm sad(tm)," "I'm afraid(tm)," "I'm joyful(tm)," etc.
Emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) is a bit of a strawman/strawperson. Eugene Gendlin, for example, points people to the perhaps particularity and situatedness of emotional experiences---this sadness, this fear. And certainly, Gendlin's Focusing can e woven into meditation.
But something still felt weird to me. I think I'm starting to put my finger on it. For starters, even if somewhat "Gendlin-ized," emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) are quite (a) conceptual, (b) vague, and (c) global. And again sometimes those attributes are quite useful in meditation.
But, meditation tends to be most effective when it's aconceptual, precise, and local. These are just tendencies---meditation really does ultimately encompass everything, all of it, sort of. So these are just tendencies.
There's another piece to add---someone observed to me that, at least in their experience, people who self-described as (advanced?) meditators tended to seem to them as being very bad at Circling, a type of interpersonal processing. 7/23
If at least somewhat true, that seemed kind of confusing to me. I think a part of Circling is saying how you feel in the moment. (I've only done a tiny bit of Circling.) Speaking just for myself, I'm think I'm pretty good at saying how I feel, in terms of emotions/feelings:
No problem---easy access, feel inside, rattle them off. Authentic. Done.
But there was still something stiff, maybe---it never really made sense to me to reach for that as a practice. Of course I talk about my feelings to people I'm close with.
But honestly I hadn't really noticed a pattern in what that was doing, interpersonally. It was just another felt-important thing to do, sometimes, for understanding and connection. I didn't really see something systematic there, even though I was often moved to share/listen.
And, again, emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) didn't seem particularly useful in meditation, even though meditation is very feeling-ful and emotion-ful, in terms of deconditioning, shadow, parts-like things, and so on. So meditation is emotional/behavioral/cognitive processing...
...but not directly emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) ??processing?
Ok, but, so why are emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) so useful for interpersonal processing? Why does pop culture and pop therapy focus on them? Why does (I think) Circling focus on them?
I think the very things that make them heuristically (but not always) iffy for solo meditation---(a) conceptual, (b) vague, and (c) global---make them extremely useful for high-bandwidth interpersonal communication and processing.
Talking about emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) is a fast way to communicate a tremendous amount of information about what's happening in oneself to another person.
And/but, in solo meditation, meditators almost seem to train themselves out of describing things conceptually and globally. NOTE: This is not the same thing as repression/suppression, which is a failure mode of meditation.
Even if not repressing/suppressing, talking about emotions(tm)/feelings(tm) is not something a meditator learns to value, at least for the purposes of meditation, even when meditation is very sensuous, emotional, feeling-ful.
It makes sense to describe low-level experiential/feeling-ful/emotional dynamics & patterns to a meditation teacher or meditation peer.
But those moment-by-moment descriptions maybe aren't all that useful during interpersonal processing with a peer or someone you're close to.
But it seems like emotions(tm)/feelings(tm), which are conceptual, sort of socio-culturally conceptually constructed, a la Lisa Feldman Barrett, are maybe extremely useful for working through contemporaneous conflict and some old interpersonal stuff.
(And I think just as meditators dip into emotions(tm)/feelings(tm), Circlers & friends/partners working thru hard stuff will sometimes (often) dip into moment-by-moment experiential dynamics for things that are sometimes otherwise hard to conceptualize/verbalize in any other way.
So anyway, even while working through lots of hard stuff with other people, and even while talking about other people's inner experiences and my own, I think I was maybe missing something about emotions/feelings.
The (tm) was sort of dismissive but useful for the distinction above between like (a) rich, moment-by-moment radical concreteness [no-(tm)]and (b) socio-cultural-conceptual concept/label/origin/manifestation. [yes-(tm)].
And the latter is maybe much more useful and high bandwidth and productive than I realized, even while I wasn't doing terrible interpersonally (...most of the time) in not systematically reaching for them.
So---systematically reaching for feelings[(tm)]/emotions[(tm)] [, and hopes/wishes---outside the scope of this thread,] in concert w a few different ppl (for whom I'm grateful for in prompting me thinking abt this) has been vry interesting so far. 23/23
I just wanted to add that feelings(tm)/emotions(tm) do straightforwardly come up in meditation, of course, of course! (and more to be said here as well...)
...
sorrow
longing
joy
...
24/23
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This section is a stub.
Notes:
"The eternal soul theory of mind/identity holds a lot of trauma in place"
A few of these sections are sort of "less clear" in some ways than the main practices. Those are sort of "noncanonical" in some sense. I’m not sure how to slice and dice all this yet
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This section is a stub.
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1519122227073011718
2022-04-26
"Starting to suspect that the most straightforward way to make friends with small groups of people, cutting through any and all other complexity, is just to regularly feed them meals prepared by your own hand (can rotate but keep cooking for them until rotation). Deep smthg here."
"bunch of privilege-y things, here, wrt to hosting, but creatively surmountable, usually, I think"
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People are generallyyyyyyyy are well-intentioned and doing the best they can, acting as constructively and benefit-of-the-doubt-y and “meta” as they can. Like wouldn't both people sort of take beteen 50%-200% responsibility, as it were, for trust building and mending, and so on? So why do couples (or friends, etc.) “fight-fight” [sic]? Like sometimes fight bitterly, condescendingly, perversely, stubbornly, cuttingly, even a little maliciously, etc.?
People run out of resources (one or both people do, for local or external reasons)
So one or both people "snap" or act destructively wrt a local situation (because acting destructively maybe somewhat worked in (distant-)past contexts)
Those actions, what happened, is then superficially narrativized and apologized about, etc. One or both people make up as best they can.
But the local thing was dependent on a deeper, in some sense, “more actual” thing.
But-but that deeper thing either isn’t safe to talk about for one or both people and/or isn’t conceptualized/gathered/articulable/understood enough yet for one or both people.
So things start building up again until another "snap,"" which might be a little worse or a little better, maybe alternating or slowly or abruptly getting worse each time.
Finally there’s a "critical snap"/“crisis snap” where either the couple separates (exhausted from repeat or ongoing “drama” or “villainization” of the other person) or one or both people do-or-die are locally resourced enough or locally prioritized enough or can reach deep enough or have chewed on things enough or become safe enough that at least one “level” deeper things can finally be articulated
If the latter is possible then there’s a round of admitting, conceding, revealing, explaining with respect to earlier and ongoing grievances, harms, disappointments, insensitivities, entitlements
And thereby the couple acquires more slack and ease to keep going, and/or more clarity around whether to separate
So a challenging or dramatic relationship is sort of a race between
(a) more surface-level exhaustion and “burn-in” or one-sided or mutually destructive patterns (overload / snapping dynamics) and
(b) cycles of fluid mutual error correction of deeper interpersonal stuff
Ideally, couples, over time, go "deeper and deeper" to root causes and fluidly reorganize the relationship around understanding, healing, and synergy and collaboration.
And (b) above, and "deeper and deeper" are facilitated by slack, patience, downtime, self-care, self-transformative practice, therapeutic consulting, temporary changes-of-context, etc. All the good stuff.
These patterns can be sort of scale-free/fractal—“supercycles” of grievance to crisis/critical buildup can be 3-6 months or longer. “Supersupercycles” can be 1-5, 1-10 years.
Resolving disappointments, grievances, harms closer in time to their origin will smooth out these cycles, at the very least, and may make room for "deeper and deeper," because there’s less time for “layering on top,”--there's fewer or “chiller” “fights” that are actually "really" in some sense about a deeper/earlier thing (and again one or both people don’t realize that yet--and so the "generator" of the fighting isn't resolved, and the fights repeat or new fight topics are found, and things stay the same or get worse.)
Resolution speed is sort of a function or prior baggage/karma/projection/trauma, slack/resources, and de-layering/conceptualizing/articulating “ability.”
I put “ability” in quotes because it’s over-reifying. There’s no rules, no algorithms, no one-size-fits-all "skill," and a light touch and humility and provisionality and collaborativeness are key. And creativity, problem-solving, empathy, systems creation (e.g.chore lists etc etc etc) and etc.
More resources and slack can be created for each other by doing chores for each other, taking ownership of monkeys [1], and making each other’s lives easier as much as possible.
A “non-dramatic” relationship might be termed harmonious and peaceful and/or harmonious and exciting.
Aren’t relationships supposed to be easy? I’m not sure. I think maybe early relationships are supposed to be easy or easier, at least,-—if things get hard/"toxic" maybe better to bow out, seek perspective, and so on? But maybe as people get older the stakes get higher, more to loose (and e.g. children might be in the mix) and there’s fewer degrees of freedom. And maybe love is deeper. And then a challenging romantic relationships is (sometimes) worth putting in lots of work, at the expense or possibly relatively less important things. (Ideally one is resourced enough to do everything.)
Shades of gray and nebulosity and partialness wrt all of this. Not necessarily clear-cut and might be other dominating dynamics.
[1] e.g. https://hbr.org/1999/11/management-time-whos-got-the-monkey
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non-momentum, non-reactivity —> still receptivity + omnidirectionality — in conversation and interaction
Spontaneously (non-censoring, non-deliberately, non-reflectively, non-doing-ly, non-thinking-ly, non-filter-ing-ly), nonviolently, benevolently AND Add to many prot: Don’t act guskin book, impro book, all book recs from emo book, religion of tomorrow book, Clint fuhs thing, excerpt C, gigagloss appendix, cook grueter 2 things, else? After the honeymoon, after the fight [representational transference shadow stuff???] Philosophical investigations
What if I want to do/say/express that I want / dont want to e.g. fuck, violate, harm, love, or do something shameful, embarrassing, illegal, antisocial
see x-desires and
***
Safe/unsafe good/bad ok/not-ok necessary/permitted/forbidden green/yellow/red for them to:
do, don’t, may, please:
***
bib:
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A few of these sections are sort of "less clear" in some ways than the main practices. Those are sort of "noncanonical" in some sense. I’m not sure how to slice and dice all this yet
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So, I suspect the way it goes is, there will be something both so bad and so difficult to change that a person tries everything and then becomes a systematic meditator.
And then a person it meditating and all sorts of things start to get better, but, highly disconcertingly, the deepest worst stuff that can barely look at or can’t look at it all seemingly starts to get worse.
And then finally, finally, finally, finally, finally hundreds but likely a thousand or two thousand hours in, or more, that very worst thing uncoils. (With sometimes intermediate mini-uncoilings.)
I think the combination of intermediate very hard things getting better (when nothing else was really touching them) combined with short- and long-range nonmonotonicities. "So much getting better! So much getting worse?!" makes all this very confusing even if you sort of know what’s going on.
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[...]
revert = return to a previous state
knowing = experiencing assertoric and implicational representational content or associated recorded sensations
understanding = experiencing ontological/existential and causal representational content or associated recorded sensations
action for X = something that is volitional or potentially volitional for X.
good = "just good" or goodness/meaning/significance/purpose/value or good for goodness/meaning/significance/purpose/value
will = will(/intend/plan) [that P]; do something volitional that alters expectations for future in a specific way
acting/doing/do = do/act/cause/maintain/enable/incept/start/prevent/block/stop/end/facilitate/retard/stabilize/change/think/know/sense/feel/have part in/querying/asking/wondering/imagining/storytelling/narrating/what-if-ing/solving/solutioning/what-would-they-do-ing/questioning/assessing/judging/evaluating/participate/push/pull/attend/image/envision/visualize/interrupt/preempt/interleave/substitute/switch/meaning-making/meaning-dissolving, [language-ing, say-ing, word-ing, verbalizing, phrase-ing, sentence-ing, meaning-ing,] experimenting, waiting, observing, interrupting, moving, stabilizing, tuning, sounding, querying, testing, assessing, aligning, rearrangeing, ideating, simulating, gesturing, projecting, anticipating, predicting, expecting [X]/X [note: this is the do/action "evocative-suggestion-laundry list"]
denying = willful disbelief in some such or thus manner/sense/way in opposition to some belief or seeming in something in some such or thus manner/sense/way
convincing = willful belief in some such or thus manner/sense/way (possibly) in opposition to some belief or seeming in something in some such or thus manner/sense/way
willing = [not exactly] planning/intending/directly-make-it-so-ing
willing = [not exactly] currently intending to make it so; to make X Y
[...]
awareness = [~~~that which contains "there it is as such"]
knowledge = [~~~like not a direct phenomenological correlate as such but may be corresponding quality/concept in awareness. more of a "seeming" flavor versus an "appearing" flavor]
[...]
emptiness ~= [phenomenology of that which was map-confused-for-territory is map; seeming referent is actually representation and has no essence/essential nature, "hanging in [spaceless/empty(!)] space"]
nebulosity ~=
luminosity ~= [in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard]
centerlessness ~=
phenomenal isotropy, phenomenal non-particularity ~=
(no-)doer/agencylessness ~=
(no-)watcher/no-witness ~=
vividness ~=
groundlessness ~=
negation with no implicature/implication
uncaused//separateness/separation/non-connection (cf. though interdependence)
spontaneity
interdependence
effortlessness
costlessness
...
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("bodymindworld" ht twitter)
Sensation and representation and belief and expectation, how are all these related? It can be hard at first to experience things like "sensational imprint as such" or "representation as such" or both at once or are they two sides of the same coin? The analogies below are wrong but possibly evocative...
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There will be thousands of things that are hard to "look at." For any particular thing that you can’t look at, you won’t be able to look at it until you can. Your mind figures eventually figures out how to make it safe to look, and then you find yourself looking or you remember to look and you find that this time you can figure out how to do so.
Usually the way your mind figures out how to make it safe to look will be necessarily roundabout and indirect, in a way that you couldn’t have planned or directed in advance. So it goes.
Nevertheless, it can sometimes be helpful to make a list of the classes of things that are hard to look at, as a way to help your mind more quickly get it’s bearings. Below is a messy sample list of the kinds of things one might classify in one’s mind as "avoidy" or "attention-redirecty."
Again this is a hard thing to do willfully, and one shouldn’t do it forcefully, but it can be helpful to keep in mind "(self-)cornering", as in "nothing left to do but look" and "surfing up the terribleness gradients", using experiential badness as a way to prioritize and navigate. Sometimes badness will come up that seems tangiential or in reaction to what you’re doing, but, in fact, it’s directly related, and in some sense should be prioritized.
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If only one could make a list of what needs to be attended to, and then one could just go through the list. Unfortunately, people’s ontology and ordering for what’s good to do when will be idiosyncratic and complex and evolving and ultimately (often) very fine-grain
But, it does matter what you do when, and that’s part of wayfinding. But, when you just don’t know what to do, you can be systematically experimental. This helps at least somewhat to keep from systematically leaving something out.
Sometimes you might experimentally want to increase the rate and depth of breathing, if breathing has become too subtle to offer certain kinds of systemic feedback.
also: the subtle movements of your eyes, the subtle movements of muscles in the back of your head and neck, subtle movements of the tongue and jaw, glottis, lips, palate.
states can be important too: sexually aroused, not sexually aroused, desirous of sex, not desirous of sex, possibly various states of emotional arousal
Finally, here are some ways that people systematically leave things out; as best you can make sure to not be systematically avoiding anything, of course with fast moving mind (belief/expectation/thought/imagination/feared possible truths and outcomes, etc.) and sensation stuff, but also old injuries, unsettling or unpleasant sensations around permanent pins or staples from old surgeries, scars (injury or cosmetic), genital circumcision, feared body stuff (cancer? precancer? did i fuck up nerve/ligament/tendon permanently? etc), phantom or feared teeth and jaw stuff, unpleasant "wrong, nervy" stuff. or maybe you don’t like your hands or feet or stomach or thighs or something. don’t avoid.
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don’t skip anything, don’t bypass anything, don’t force anything. don’t double-down, you’re probably missing something somewhere else. if you accidentally force, reverse it as soon as you possibly can. rare, weird, unusual, surprising, or uncommon stuff matters. it could be a clue to a systematic avoidance or a bottleneck. eventually you have to touch everything in every way, think "everything," believe "everything," do "everything", remember everything, often from multiple angles, over and over again, in the right global order, though with plenty of room for backtracking and mistakes. every good thing, every bad thing, every trauma, every childhood terror. it’s finite. don’t do so any session indiscrimately; and catching small details can save dozens or hundreds of hours, tiny (or large) unexpected body locations or depths from particular angles or along particular paths, far removed from each other in partially repeating, complex orders; the right turn or surrender to memory or thought or reverie—spending hours painstakingly untangling (local or distributed) X is worth it and necessary, interleaving doing that with large excursions to elsewhere in body and mind may help you find what’s "secretly" blocking that untanglng. sleeping, watching tv, conversing, throwing yourself into experience may offer clues to what to do next. it’s finite.
"slow is smooth: smooth is fast", blah blah
So sometimes things can look a lot like "contemporary classical noting practice." [sic]
Test "relevance, ordering, importance" hypotheses; challengea assumptions, e.g. interoception vs exteroception, etc.
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I mean something like if there’s “meditation moves” A, B, C…:
(A, B, C, etc., are actually pretty good first-pass "moves," out of a large space of mix-and-match, combinatorial possibilities, but, over time, "moves" will become more and more "shimmery," high-dimensional, maybe local/small/isolated (or not), pixel/voxel precise (not that pixels/voxels are "real" or necessarily useful, of course--nebulous all the way down!), and radically personal. And of course there's the surrender-y, bottom-up, spontaneous, it's-just-happening-to-you component.)
For someone, they should do AEDCCGFGF…. But someone else should do EEEABCJJE…., and so on. But if the first or second person did DDEDDEFQ…, that wouldn’t be as good, and so on. Each person's "evolving personal move" list, and the order in which they apply those moves, matters.
Like each person has a god’s-eye-view perfect ordering, million-moves long, ten thousand hour combination lock, and it matters, for meditating efficiently and not getting horribly tangled up. Because of buddha nature, there’s in some sense no mistakes and/or all mistakes are recoverable, and making a gazillion “mistakes” is fully accounted for in 10k hours, or whatever. But the exact radically concrete thing a person is doing in any moment, and the order that they’re doing those things in, “perfectly structurally matters.”
If someone should do ABABABABA…, then if they do AAAABBBB, instead… that won’t work. It’ll eventually tangle them up.
Like there’s plenty of slack, all things being equal, but no magic. It’s mechanism, almost like gears, bits, steel cables, all the way down, and those steel cables can’t magically pass through each other. There’s only one way to unwind the machine. (Eventually more and more and completely it spontaneously self-unwinds.)
(And also nebulosity and emptiness and groundlessness, and there is no god’s eye view, and there are no bits or steel cables or A, B, C, D, and this is a model and the “real” A, B, C, D are intimate and concrete and fine grain and etc.)
So when someone is “doing a practice,” like investigation, noting, concentration, anything, the first thing I ask to myself is, short run, is it doing more good than harm, for them? And second, is it, over time, going to self-bootstrap into a practice that self-modifies itself and ultimately eats itself, that can clean up every last prior misconception and mistake, recursively, and work itself out of the most entrenched and gnarly tangle at the finest grain?
(Not to inappropriately reify harm, self-bootstrapping, self-modification, “eat itself,” “clean up”, mistake, recursively, entrenched, gnarly, tangle, and grain..)
*
Note: The above may seem super top-down, but it's sort of a corrective on other pespectives on meditation. Main practice p2, loosely speaking, is 25-50% "surrender," "let it happen," etc. For more qualifiers, search elsewhere in this document for "homunculi" (without the quotes).
*
Something to possibly play with a couple times:
You might ask, what's the very last thing [you'll look at]? Is it possible to do that now? Not that you necessarily should or can, and not to inappropriately reify "last," "thing," etc. This is just something to play with to try examining deep implicit assumptions, that might be a little useful a couple times, depending on where language and any number of other things are currently at.
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When you’re "doing things" in meditation, with what are you doing it? Your muscles? Your mind? Your phantom/ghost hands? Subtle or gross eye activity? Your jaw? The muscles in the back of your neck? The muscles in the back-base of the skull? Are the big motions or small motions? Sweeping or perfectly still attention? Vague or pin-point precision? Two dimensional, three dimensional, or conforming to a surface?
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one can of course will changes in life situation and that can be really good
the will stuff explicitly in the practice is (obviously? not obvious at all?) intended to largely be in relation to the practice. some of it will be life goal stuff and intention stuff and planning stuff because of how all that is "imminent" in the mind.
indeed, specifically things like "have this resolve without the use of force in a way that I retrospectively endorse" <-- and keep error checking and tweaking the thing behind the words (and refining the words) "have this muscle tension go away in a way that doesn’t fuck up something somewhere else" and there’s a very feely/modulatory quality to it, error checking the willing as feedback starts to come in, ways the willing isn’t achieving or heading towards the right thing, so somehow the "how" or the "endpoint" of the willing has something wrong with it
I’ll usually explicitly will something for brief periods, tweaking it as a I go, and then drop it when I eventually understand how it’s problematic or it’s done enough work that doing something else practice-related is higher-value.
I’ll also examine what I’m already implicitly willing, what I’m already implicitly trying to have happen, because it might be problematic. I might be pushing against something that’s not ready to move, or I might be trying to achieve something problematic out in the world, in the what, how, when, or order. there might be something better to mediately will that gets the same thing or better distally.
>>> Jonathan [8:24 AM]
[...] for better or worse i have distinctions like (quick and nonexhaustive list):
possibly helpful theoretical distinctions
practice diaries:
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[minimally edited placeholder transcript] I want to call this a brief note on Force. I've made it pretty clear in different places to not be forcy. And I don't think I'll define forcy, here. But, there's something about getting something to happen, something about threading a needle in a way that feels potentially bad. (Though it might only feel slightly bad! It might feel like necessary-tradeoff progress. Try to avoid needle-threading in the first place! It might almost never be worth it, if avoidable. Try to figure out or incline towards why it’s happening in the first place versus something cleaner.) There's potentially a sense of effort. It can be extreme, subtle, or somewhere in between.
But let’s say needle-threading has already happening. Force has already been used in the system. (Usually there’s some, or even a lot, even if there’s been minimal needle-threading. [And then, by definition-ish, there will have been force, if there has been needle-threading.] Force is often a strategy that gets used, in any case, maybe prior to even having started to meditate.)
There's a thing that the mind does, which is, in order to sort of do something for the last time or in order to sort of undo something, the mind kind of like replays it or re-does it, that one last time.
So if a person is shying away from force completely, but there's already force in the system, then there's a way in which it will be harder for that remaining force to get undone.
So sometimes it's important to surrender to or to go into that what is generally "not supposed to do," (in this case, force) so I don't want to say like globally don't be forcy. But sometimes subtly or not so-subtly ease into forcing, or already existing forcing, or allow latent or hidden forcing to appear.
And this "going into," or "allowing," or "surfacing," is for the purposes of sort of self-liberating that remaining forcing or dissolving it or undoing it or undoing its leading edge.
So this is nuancing on top of the general but not universal principle of avoiding forciness or forcing. (And this "redo-to-undo" principle/heuristic also more generally applies. See p2 for more pith pointers to this.)
Note on needle-threading or threading the needle: One can use needle-threading as sort of a neutral term, and there can be good versions and bad versions. Neutrally, the term is intended to invoke a sense of "‘correctly’ navigating a narrow path forward." Good versions might be careful, gentle, precise that lead to ultimately stably expanded optionality. Bad versions are sort of "carefully, precisely making a globally-net-negative tradeoff, making seeming local progress but also ultimately making more work than if had done something different." This latter version might sometimes feel like "doing something that’s alongside or causing joint-grinding muscle tension, somewhere." Use of the meta protocol can help to determine whether a good version or bad version is happening or if it might be better to be doing something else entirely. [The opposite of needle-threading might be "breadth-first-ing" [cf. depth-first-ing, too]. Both/all can be good, for various reasons, at different times.]
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Some traditions, as almost the whole of their entire instructions, say something like "incline towards non-effort, effortlessness, even including this inclining."
And, that's it, that's the instruction. There's ways in which this sort of cuts to the heart of everything. The connection between this and main practice p2 is something loosely like:
effort ~= will + do
effortlessness ~= surrender + undo
And, indeed, long-term practice of p2 looks like more and more of the latter and less of the former.
So can you just tell someone "incline towards non-effort [...]" and leave it at that? Instead of, say, handing someone a huge document, like the one that this section is a part of? Sometimes!
It's not quite that simple, in that simple instructions usually come with a community and teacher. And, simple instructions can sometimes get lost in the whirlwind, or it's hard to remember to use them, or it's hard to maintain legitimate credence in their usefulness. And it can get experientially/intellectually tangly--it can be hard to align the simplicity of such instructions with frothy, reactive experience, that "actively responds" to one's interpretation of instructions. Hence, this entire document, as one possible practice framework.
Effort as such isn't much seen elsewhere in this document, though it's there in some places, so it seemed like a good idea to include an explicit topical section on it. Some people will find effort to be a clean and elegant experiential concept, and may put it to use at some time or another.
One last connection to other parts of the document: "Force" might perhaps be "effort + effort" or "effort on top of effort" or "effortful effort."
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[See also the section: "technical debt and inverse operations"]
A dialogue:
S
I cannot confidently say that I have an undo mechanism, since I only sometimes think that I get it (the tech debt article helped but I read it a while ago and don't feel as confident in my understanding as I did when I first read it). How would one know? What is the subjective feeling of undoing something, concretely? What are the exact steps? The closest I can think of is how in exposure therapy, you expose yourself to the frightening stimulus in such a way as to break the undesired response.
M (not Mark, not necessarily the same M as in other dialogues and sections)
Here's one reference experience I had: Through meditation and psychedelics I've occasionally felt like I "returned to a previous save point" in some domain, and I could recognize that long ago I made a certain choice of how to go forward, but I now have a choice once again
This is my best referent for undoing for now
From what Mark says I suspect it can be a lot subtler tho
Actually a subtler example: i re-learned how to squat over the last few months, and I ran into over and over assumptions about the "right" way to do it or what I "knew" about what would happen if I did it differently. Those have steadily dissolved and been replace by new knowings (which are also moer correct AFAICT)
Mark
There’s ways in which "undoing" is so general that it’s sort of a (useful!) empty concept. I’m starting to also use "finding your way back [and then doing something different]," too.
Any time someone changes their mind or revises a belief or skill, some initial "undoing" has occurred. Meditation eventually facilitates very deep undoing, but it’s all the same continuum.
(Undoing is related to "memory reconsolidation," in the technical sense. Rather than "adding more compensation," something old actually becomes labile and then truly changes (while preserving memory and value).)
P
hmm, realizing that Mark’s notion of "general undo" really doesn't make sense to me. i think because it's like, how could i know that there wasn't something good in the thing to be "undone"? There's a sense where everything that happens, feels like it's "mine to integrate". And I don't know how to grok "undoing", but it feels like it would be disclaiming that responsibility, and giving up on something
undoing = getting rid of, and it feels wrong to get rid of something that could be good
M
[Ed.: See also the section: "technical debt and inverse operations" for more on "general undo"]
something is preserved, like the doing and undoing has been meta-recorded. something is latently, implicitly/"costlessly", recoverably preserved, even in "undoing"
and just generally, unless it’s really truly truly truly truly safe to let go of something, the system won’t let go of it. ultra conservative. maximally conservative.
H
to me, undoing feels like it's necessary in places where I'm sort of "locked into doing". Like part of me is stuck in 3rd gear (or neutral, or park, or..) and to undo is to free up the stick shift so the car can drive fluidly again
this metaphor might be incomplete and/or wrong in a bunch of ways but i like it
***
Notes:
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Mark 1 day ago
have you ever heard of so-called "programming by coincidence" i think from dykstra? he’s kind of a dinosaur and it’s not the right thing to write careful proofs for one’s code before coding 99% of the time. but there’s a nice thing in there, something like: maybe hope yes experiment but don’t guess? kind of? sort of going for exact knowledge of what does what. or to know that if one does X, given this context, within 7-31 hours Y will happen, inevitably. sort of.
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Sometimes parts of the mind believe they will fail, even when, say, the rest of the mind believes in, say, trying and hope and best-effort. Sometimes the way to help that part of the mind is to "fully go into it," to (temporarily) fully and completely believe that part, be that part, in such a way that you really believe that you will fail, or that you have failed, even forever. This sometimes does not feel good (understatement) and can be scary, especially the first time, and possibly every time (in the likely case that multiple parts of the mind believe that it will fail). But, in that "fully going into it" that part of the mind ultimately relaxes, updates, realizes all the goodness around it and comes to believe that it in fact will not fail. Sometimes you have to fully become something (bad) to become something else (good) even if it temporarily takes you over. Remember that you don’t have to go into something until and if it’s good and safe to do so and only when you in fact can do so. So don’t necessarily, say, try to up front find all the places and ways that you will fail and then, say, try to fully believe that you will fail in that way. Engage p2, the meta protocol, etc. Right time, right place, right manner, etc. (All of the same goes for failure, failing completely, giving up hope, failing forever, forgetting completely, and other seemingly scary, bad, or permanent things.)
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[...] Today at 10:45 AM
[Question/comment wondering if it might be possible to never have to "go into badness," that, in principle and possibly even in practice, whether there’s always a better option, and then there would be value of reminding people of that over and over again in the world where it’s true.]
Mark 34 minutes ago
I think it will be exquisitely personal/idiosyncratic/contextual, depending on the fine-grain details of that person’s mind. Generally, there does seem to be an at least micro-redo-to-undo, mitigated or made safe by equanimity and various other preparatory things. Agreed that wording and preconceptions will have significant influence on "how bad things are," though.
I do somewhat less qualifying in the document, or a different pattern of qualifying, because a lot of stuff sort of "comes out in the wash" with hundreds or thousands of hours of meditation. And the meta protocol is also intended to help people correctly orient around interpretation of the instructions. I certainly am not fully accurately calibrated and if I had more resources I would likely qualify more. There is a lot of gentleness in the prelim/aux practices that is elided in the more terse main practices.
Mark 31 minutes ago
There is also, I suppose, "the law of equal and opposite advice"--some people will shy away too much from discomfort. And of course some people will flagellate themselves. I think, long-run, it’s very good to be able to "go into badness"--this becomes ever more safe and constructive/productive over time, generally, I think. cf. "equanimity"
Mark 31 minutes ago
ever-less looping and piling on over time
Mark 27 minutes ago
Sometimes (often) "a better thing" just isn’t locally available and one has to "keep going through hell." Other times a precise (and possibly necessarily personalized) reminder that something better is available makes a colossal difference. And calibrating how and when to remind or not will be somewhat empirical, given patterns of students, though of course deep principles could be elicited.
[...] 19 minutes ago
[...]
Mark < 1 minute ago
I will note that there’s an important question here of how "soft/safe/gentle" [not to conflate gentle and safe but they are correlated] meditation can be in the limit. If we understood this better, and I hope to, plan to, intend to, in collaboration with others, it will make meditation accessible to a much wider range of people, in a much wider range of life circumstances. If someone could trust that nothing particuarly terrible could happen or that it would happen predictably, then it would be more likely they could do work/career/money and relationship/family things while being a serious meditator. And that would be a much better world. This is an open area of research and an extremely important area of research. Safety and effectiveness (including consistency, monotonicity, ease of starting, initial palatability and interpretability, ideoloogical non-clashing, minimizing negative musculoskeletal involvement, minimizing "temporary trauma," ease of talking about with other people, everything.
[...] 10 minutes ago
[...]
Mark < 1 minute ago
One way to resolve possible contradictions somehow involving badness being good is to make the distinction between something feeling bad and something being bad. That is, one might accept that feeling bad can sometimes be good. Further, to equivocate, one might accept that feeling bad can sometimes straightforwardly feel good! (Some people will say, of course! cf. "hurts so good," painful pleasure, massages, erotic pain, etc.)
The deeper thing, here, is something like "goodness" and "badness" are words and a person’s concepts of goodness and badness will contextually, contingently, and idosyncratically apply to, and in the context of, complex phenomenology and knowing that will be a complex mixture of valenced and unvalenced experience. And those concepts and that phenomenology and the relationship between the two will change as life and meditation progresses.
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[ht MO for pushing on this]
The phrase: "better not to start; if you start better to finish"
The phrase unpacked:
Some people have the option to not start or to stop. "Starting" is something like entering a regime where "bad things" (in some loose sense) are more likely to (spontaneously) happen.
If someone chooses to keep going or has no choice, it’s important that one prioritizes sort of acquiring the tools to "go all the way," or "to finish."
"Finishing" is something like entering a regime where "bad things" (in some loose sense) are less likely to (spontaneously) happen. Things chill out, eventually, even though there can still be big swings very late in the game. Even so, things get safer, more stable, more predictable, in general, especially in the limit.
The reason that it’s important to prioritize sort of acquiring the tools to "go all the way," or "to finish" is that, if something bad happens (speaking loosely and generally), then getting through that is more likely to be shorter and safer, if someone has previously made that prioritization.
That is, sometimes it’s better to acquire tools and commitment to get through bad things before those bad things happen, because it’s harder to do that during the bad thing. And, that’s sort of the hedging implicit in the "better not to start" part of the phrase.
"Better to finish" is sort of shorthand for "sort of make the commitment to keep going so as to frontload acquiring the ability to keep going, when things get hard, because then the hard things will be more likely to be shorter and safer."
And then "better not to start" is sort of saying "that frontloading above is a lot of commitment, so if you don’t have to make that commitment, yet, consider retaining the option of not making that commitment as long as you can, as best you can, if you still have that option."
*
Note:
"Bad things" is loosely pointing at real possible stuff, for some people, but "bad things," as such isn’t pointing at some real thing, de re.
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_dicto_and_de_re [Last accessed: 2021-05-22]
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Sometimes old stuff will "come up" (come into awareness). Sometimes it will be obvious that it’s coming up to "burn off" (become stably absent) and other times this won’t be obvious (or it needs to come up but it’s not yet time for it to "burn off."
The general principle is that sometimes the mind needs to at least partially re-experience something bad in order to make sense of it or fully metabolize it so better things can happen in the future.
(Also, sometimes the mind, in the course of problem-solving puts together things in novel (and not entirely correct) ways that are temporarily scary [terrifying] or otherwise bad [horrible].)
Sometimes this old or new stuff will be quite experientially extreme:
e.g. panic attacks, derealization, depersonalization, automaticity, edging into fugue states, air hunger, traumatic sleep paralysis, distorted phenomenology, fragmented phenomenemogy, weird feeling ness, strange feeling ness, re-living or de-novo inventing medical scares, feel like dying, feel having a stroke, confusion (from low blood sugar or a bad trip or transient psychosis for whatever reason), "brain not working, "mind not working," "feel like you’re going [permanently] crazy," "can’t think straight," "feels like I’m dying/I am dying," seeming or sense or awareness of critical wrongness, "sleep or dream wrongness like vision or consciousness are distorted during dreaming, altered states of consciousness from fevers or infections or metabolic or digestive or etc illness or fatigue or brain fog, or weird transient consciousness-altering bloodflow hiccups for whatever reason, childhood night terrors or sleep disturbances or panic attacks, suicidal ideation, suicidal impulse/urge, fuzziness, fogginess, unreality, static, chaos, dissolution, dreaminess, drowsiness, liminality, (partial) loss of mental control or unified will, medical scares or realities for yourself or friends or family, feel like you’re (re-/newly-)experiencing a traumatic event or someone else’s if you witnessed it or helped by e.g. calling 911 or emergency services in your country, or overheard, or inferred, etc. —so go to the e.r., have a friend talk you down, see a doctor about risk factors. If you’re experiencing an extreme event, usually it’s just a mind thing and sometimes it’s a stroke, heart attack, etc. [Feeling out of control can sometimes come with very aversive feelings but being feeling of control isn’t inherently bad and doesn’t necessarily lead to bad outcomes. It can lead to good outcomes especially if that out-of-control-ness is burning off.]
When it’s safe, and usually it will be, you can learn (and likely need to learn, slowly, slowly, slowly, precisely, to enter into these states and transform them from the inside.
I’m not a doctor but if you’re experiencing sudden and intense pain then go to the emergency room. If not then just depends.
Sometimes the right thing to do is to not just let it be but to even facilitate whatever it is:
The right/good thing to do might be to go into fuzziness, into fog, into unclarity, temporarily and possibly for long minutes or hours, again and again. This can be extremely counterintuitive when you’re, say, seeking crystalline clarity or whatever turns out to be good (for you, in your concepts, mediately or ultimately).
Sometimes what comes up will at least partially feel good but might often feel in some ways unwanted or problematic:
An example of this is sexual fantasy and sexual arousal. A heuristic is that, if safe or sufficiently not costly, it’s usually good to indulge the fantasy, imagine the scenario, read the erotic story, write the erotic story, search for the pornography, etc.
If there is an impulse/urge to act out something sexual, to actualize something, then it just depends whether it’s good to do that. The heuristic, here, too, is that if it’s safe and sufficiently not costly to do so then seek the experience. If there are unsafe or costly elements then it can be better to work with the fantasy/desire/planning experience as such rather than working to consummate it. There will be many good and redemptive things in there to untangle, to get them separately from a sexual encounter, or you might come to find that wanting (and/or getting) the/an inherently sexual thing is, partially or wholly, temporarily or stably, good to get and that you should work on creating a context in which it’s safe and wholly good to get the thing or part of the thing mostly or partially just as it is.
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Elsewhere, I say that "indulgence plus meditation," when possible, is the fastest way to transform desire. (This is pre-supposing that there's something "bad"(?!) about some particular desire. More on that later.)
I say that indulgence makes sense when doing so isn't prohibitively (or even a little, depending) too dangerous, too financially costly, too opportunity costly.
But what about desires for things that are (endorsedly or dangerously) illegal, non-reifiedly unethical/immoral, or otherwise physically or emotionally violent or coercive?
(Let's call such desires, for lack of a better term, "X-desires.")
Is there still something that can be done, somehow, with respect to indulgence?
Let's say there's "levels of fulfillability":
Often, a desire is "composite" and is composed partially of, say, non-X-desires and sometimes also X-desires. Also, often a desire can be partially satisfied by a mixture of fulfillment types 1 and 2.
So, if a person:
(a1) indulges the non-X parts of their desires, and (a2) indulges only available fulfilability of type 1 and type 2, for the relevant X parts of their desires, and (a3) refrains from fulfilability type 3 of X-desires, and (b) gently inclines towards total self-acceptance and generally works their preferred meditation system (and all other resources that are available to them)
then (a) and (b), working together, possibly taking years, will lead to the transformation and evaporation of X-desires--or, rather, desires that one chooses to never actualize--sort of semi-indirectly and from the outside.
That is, eventually, all things being equal, a person will no longer have those X-desires.
Stated a different way, even if you have a seeming unshakeable and hardline desire, whether pretty innocent (but problematic) or a full-blown X-desire, you can come to no longer have that desire even without ever having directly fulfilled it, even with the principle of "redo-to-undo," withstanding (and even when you've previously "done," in the redo-to-undo sense. There will ultimately be enough "replay" even if you never directly re-actualize a past behavior).
Now, four important points:
First, it's ok to scenario-craft and "lawyer" it out, in your head! (This sort of heavily mixes with fulfilability types 1 and 2.) And so this can be both for fantasy indulgence, which may yield considerable satisfaction, but also to try mixing fantasy and real-life considerations, in various combinations, as a problem-solving strategy, to see if you can find your way to something being not actually an "X-desire" at all (as we've defined it, here). Maybe you're wrong about it being an X-desire--maybe it's actually safe, ethical, legal, whatever, as you globally understand such things, not to reify "globally".
Second (and really this is one of the most important points and maybe should have gone last) you may (likely for lots of things) find that having or fulfilling a particular desire just ok, or that it's been ok all along, or that you can arrange self, life, and/or world for it to be truly, stably good. Maybe it's ok to write that novel, or the weird sex thing is both fine and even wholesome, and you'd been looking at everything completely wrong. Maybe writing that novel and doing that weird sex thing aren't hurting anyone and, not only that, but will save the world, or whatever, etc., etc.
Third, for completeness, as I've mentioned elsewhere in the document, it's possible for even unrealized wants, desires, urges, impulses, etc. to somehow hurt people around you. This is sort of the "subtle interaction" domain. It's possible. It's something to keep in mind. But it's an edge case; it's unlikely, all things being equal.
Fourth, you might in fact be concerned that you'll hurt someone through actualization of an X-desire, and that thinking or feeling about X-desires might increase the likelihood of that. In these cases, one thing you might try to do is make distinctions between all of these:
Modulo "subtle interaction," only (d) is the problematic one--except to the degre that exploring (a), (b), (c) might make (d) more likely. So you might then carefully meta-explore the degree to which exploring (a),(b), and (c) does or don't actually make (d) more likely. And then only do any of what is both helpful while erring on the side of not increasing the chance of (d).
Of course, talk to someone if your credence of risk of harm to self or others, absent that talking, crosses a generously cautious threshold. And of course you can talk to someone long before then, if it seems like it might be helpful. (But, be scrupulously careful that someone doesn't mistakenly think you're a risk to self or others in the case that you're definitely not. This could be expanded on, a lot.)
With some interlocutors, it's possible to choose different levels of detail and abstraction, for ease and comfort with discussion. You might ultimately talk straightforwardly, concretely, and plainly with someone, but you can also often talk abstractly or vaguely, or even metaphorically, but potentially still very productively, while maintaining select privacy. You can sort of meta work that out with some people, on the fly.
In conclusion, X-desires aren't the end of the world or a meditation or self-transformation showstopper.
The reason for all this odd lawyering, hairsplitting, and even any brinksmanship (erring on side of safety) is because it's so important to be able to think and feel within oneself, if and when it's safe to do so, which it usually is. And sometimes it's really, really helpful to talk with other people, too, though it's not critically necessary, in principle.
And sometimes distinctions like all the above can facilitate all this.
In any case, too, it's also very possible that "safe-to-look, then look," etc., can nebulously, fluidly happen just fine without anything like all the stuff above. This is just one optional way to optionally schema it all out. [sic]
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Conversation partner [paraphrased]: Often one is wrong about what one thinks one wants, and maybe it's better to "try to figure out your preferences" less and better to "try things" more.
Mark: Yeah. Or just, or just sort of continually kind of keep aligning with like, how they're revealed personally. Um, I think, yeah. You know, trying to predict them and make sense of them is also really good because if someone invests like a lot of costly resources in something that is gonna change in two years, but they don't know it's gonna change in two years. (Or someone isn't sure enough of what they want that there's not enough endogenous motivation to get any traction and the time passes without any cumulativity---sometimes this is good! Things are building themselves only obvious in retrospect; not time is wasted, etc. etc., but sometimes counterfactually (in some sense) something better (in some sense) could have happened even while it's ok if / that it didn't.)
Like, that's like, maybe like regrettable if the person could do something about it, but like, first pass, you know, if it's not too costly, like, you know, I'm, I'm always like just sort of indulge, indulge, indulge. Yeah. You know, if it's not hurting anybody and stuff like kinks, fetishes, paraphilia, lifestyles, uh, you know, um, like it's, it's there for a reason.
Like until it's not, if ever, and, you know, maybe it's software, maybe it's hardware. Like you sort of don't know until it changes. If it does and, or if it continues to evolve. Even if it continues to evolve. You don't know if you sort of gotten to the bottom of it.
Conversation partner [paraphrased; composited]: Sometimes I don't know (what I think I) want, so I can't (even) perform little, low cost experiments to get a better sense of whether to invest more into getting those things, to feel more motivated about going after them (if more than one step) or to one-step indulge them.
Mark: When people talk about their goals or wants or desires or preferences or second order preferences, you know, desires about desires, preferences about preferences, that thought and language activity around such things is only going to, uh, will have some relationship usually to like, kind of what like the real underlying preferences or whatever are, but it will be like imperfect. So like if someone is kind of theory building like around like what they want or what they're going to want or like what they want to want, it's like, that's something that a person can get better at over time---
---in part because like the whole kind of cognitive apparatus learns to get like better and better signals from like, the rest of the thing. And the whole thing kind of integrates like more and more. Um, and so like, I think at least, at least for me, like, I think, I think there's this continual process of error checking where it's like, you know, maybe I want this or I don't even know what I want.
And then like you ideally, you know, you would sort of try to run like a little test. Cause sometimes like you do just sort of need more data or like serendipity, um, like, so it's like you can sort of keep looking for. Uh, anomalies or counterexamples kind of already available in the system. It's like, well, maybe I want this, but then it's like, well wait a second.
Like, uh, maybe I want this. Um, but it's like, last time I did something kind of like that, I actually didn't quite like it for these reasons. Or like, you know, here's another time where I thought I really wanted something, but then when I got into that situation, It was less good than I thought.
That can be initially discouraging, like, I never right about what I want---but one can get better at predicting to the point where felt desires become more and more endogenously motivating, because one has sufficient confidence in those felt desires to be moved by those felt desires.
That is, if one doesn't like something they thought they would, it's like, what are the reasons for that? Um, so like, I'm, I'm, I'm sort of saying this in a very intellectual way. Like, I think, I think like that that figuring process becomes like less and less analytical and more and more embodied. Um, but it's like the system can mine its past data more and more effectively over time.
[And the system can, um, get better and better at like, finding cheap, safe experiments to run, to collect more data about the self. So it's like, it's like the experience of having preferences or desires or whatever is sort of co-enacted or like built with the system. Like as the system is running, like desires and goals are not platonic, they're not out there, they don't just exist in a vacuum.
And our interaction with our experience of desire and preference is in some sense not the exact same thing as like our, like, already living in the moment and having experiences. Um, so there's like a really complicated relationship of like, between what we actually find ourselves doing and how we actually find ourselves feeling about that, and then versus like what we think is gonna happen versus like our internal exploration of like what we think is gonna happen and what we want.
Um, but like all that can like sort of get better and better and better, and more integrated, uh, over time. Um,
[...]
Mark: I I mean, in cases where it's costly, like to actually go out and do stuff, I think, I think the right thing to do is to kind of like sort of float back and like let scenarios and thoughts and related kind of like play out.
Like Yeah. Uh, there will be ways in which it's wrong or detached from whatever, but also like if it's too costly to go run little experiments, reminiscience and reverie is sort of all you have and then you just do the best you can. Or, or some combination.
Conversation partner [paraphrased]: And conflicting desires?
Mark: Um, over time, like, I think that can get kind of worked out more and more. Um, there's, there's usually gonna, you know, I think, I think once one resolves some pair of hard trade offs, unifies the paradox, like, uh, you know, there's sort of like, uh, they'll sort of always be more, sometimes harder, sometimes easier, sometimes just more, um, there'll be new, new problems, new conflicts, just cuz the life situation continues to evolve.
Um, you solve one thing and it creates a new set of problems or whatever, uh, and, and one sort of learns to anticipate that over time and like that, that's like fine, it's still better than the thing that was there before or so, yeah.
[Most of the above also applies to so-called "beliefs", anticipations, predictions, stances, expectations. It's often? usually? not super useful to kind try to reflectively articulate / explicate what you "believe," same as with "what you want" or "what your goals" are, but sometimes it can be very powerful or at least useful to messily scribble down things or to explore in words (sentences fragments or longer), as long as it's held lightly, written lightly, spoken lightly. It serves you; you don't serve it, etc. Sometimes there are tricksy ways to phrase things, like "what am I actually going to do?" but I think this only gives so much more mileage and risks pulling things too tight.]
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There's sort of a bunch of ways people can relate to "inner phenomenological space" (not to imply that that's a thing that everyone will experience or experience as such).
Sometimes we're using it as a "place" to push away bad things, a strategy learned long ago, deep down, in both contemporaneously useful and problematic ways. [4]
And, other times, on the surface, or deep down, be trying to use it as an attempted gateway to elsewhere, or elsewhen, outside the universe, knowingly fictional, spiritual. [1]
Sometimes that's sort of "push," we just want to escape, and sometimes it's sort of "pull," there's something there we want; it's a refuge.
Elswhere in the document, I've talked about the importance of indulging, whether "internally" or "externally." [1],[2] I talked about why it can be good to indulge "bad" things. And, in terms of indulging maybe-good things, I encouraged people to "write that novel," or to at least try starting.
I wanted to talk about that a bit more, here.
Again-ish, we might try to "inner-push-away" "obviously bad" things, like bad memories or fears about the future, until/unless it's safe not to. And we might try to push away "things that feel good that are [maybe or definitely] bad," because they are pleasurable but perhaps feel shameful or embarrassing or unworkable or betraying or immoral or dangerous or harmful, and so on.
And then we also inner-push-away even things that feel, in part or whole, really, really good, safe, joyous, beautiful, anything. There could be aspects that feel [maybe or definitely] bad, too, like, say, coercive or extreme (or whatever) sexual elements, but, in any case, the whole thing is still, somehow on-net-or-of-course good. It's a refuge, a place of safety, a place to go, a place of distraction, a place where all the good things are, in some sense wholly endorsed, cosmically good, reassuring, maybe even more real than real, the realest thing, the most important thing, perhaps fiction that's truer or better than real life, or the most excellent mary/marty sue thing, or it has elements of past tv, movies, comic books, video games, etc., or enjoying tv, video, and video games, right now, are part of taking refuge.
We might push these things away because sometime told us that we have to "be in reality," or "face hard truths," or we want to "be real," or we're "wasting time," or to be an adult (or we're shamed into it). Or maybe pushing these things away was just critical for survival. Pay attention to what was going on around you or get bullied or hurt or you'll crash the car. Go out and make real friends or be alone. In any case, refuge was somehow maladaptive or we learned to resist it, whether it was or wasn't.
We might also push these things away because they're not "spiritual enough," something doesn't feel enough like "spiritual or exalted" states, or not weird enough, OR(!) it's not the present moment; it's not bare attention or something, it's not "be here now.""
So, all things being equal, because of redo-to-undo and inverse operations in other parts of the document [2a], I say reverie, indulgence, etc., are important (and it's important to indulge and daydream in the right order and un-force-ily, too, or one sort of can layer "new forced fantasy" on top of "confused be real" on top of childhood "actual fantasy good.")
That could be sort of aimless and formless and nebulous and liminal, just kind of enjoying what comes up as you meditate, allowing yourself to go on fantasy or daydreamy tangents (or whatever, many, many things, it'll look different for everyone).
And, but, so, here we go:
You might be called to "refuge", with greater and greater specificity and precision. And this is where it can can kinda get especially interesting. (This has parallels with the "even worse before even better" stuff that can happen with "badness.")
So, say, internally, we start getting better and better at "tool building": finding the right moves, spontaneously, nebulously, flowingly, costlessly. Like imagining people, and counterfactuals, and causal histories, and perfect parents (not to reify any of this and not to imply that it's not or can be spontaneous, unplanned, unconceptualized, nebulous...) And then: some of that externalizes, sort of like, for example, "be moved," another preliminary/auxiliary practice. (And, indeed, preliminary/auxiliary practices help to bootstrap this whole process or self-generating all the tools you need, when you need them, until of course the whole idea of moves and tools are discarded if they ever even were a thing in the first place, of course). [5], [6]
There's sort of further externalization: Analagous to "bad triggers," where sometimes, when it's safe, and when one is ready, it can be efficient to pair meditation with seeking out the bad thing, when possible. And then here on the good side, it can be efficient and powerful to watch childhood movies, visit childhood haunts and vacation spots. This isn't critical or remotely practical for everyone (especially if a childhood haunt no longer exists or is a thousands of miles away!). Meditation is indeed especially for when it's impossible, dangerous, or costly to recreate or return to "external" stuff. But it can sometimes efficiently help when it's available.
But even beyond all that, there's another thing: In the course of your meditation practice, you might find yourself becoming more interested or even obsessed with creativity or self expression, old skills or habits or entirely new mediums. So when I said "write that novel", that was part of this, maybe you've always wanted to and you're starting to want it more, or it's sort of come out of nowhere.
But maybe you don't know how to write, sing, paint, draw, 3d model on the computer, program video games. And, say, you start reading and watching videos to figure it out. Now you have at least TWO crazy, time-consuming projects, AT LEAST: meditation and writing a ten-book epic fantasy series or programming a triple-A video game all by yourself or you want to write a multi-season screenplay.
It's ok to let yourself move towards these things. It's part of the meditation process; it synergizes with the meditation process. (Taking time out from meditation to do this kind of stuff can be way faster than just meditating, though if you can squeeze in both, not necessarily on the same day, that's probably often best.)
So maybe you're moving towards a career or creative expression you've always wanted, or what's happening is that you're constructing ever more sophisticated tools to return to your refuge, to elaborate it, experience it, share it, something, or both.
There can be some thrashing and cycling, as you pick up and put down different mediums, tools, pixel art software, interaction fiction parsers, youtube creator courses, and so on. You think you want to write a novel, but you don't know how, so you start and stop five times, or it becomes grindy, reminiscient of meditation, so you have to stop for months, but you still want to do it.
Anyway, this won't happen for everyone. Maybe you started meditating because you wanted to stop messing around on social media, so you could earn enough money doing something fulfilling (or just learn to be ok with a "normal" job) and have a family. Or you wanted to get better at relationships. And even though you might be able to turn the creative thing into money (which happens!) or the creative thing involves lots of complex characters which may allow you to explore many dimensions of relationships and relating (yes!), there's still a part of you feeling like this is even worse and you're now getting pulled farther from "the real thing."
It's generally ok to sort of muddle along, get pulled along, and especially to not beat yourself up about half-finished and twenty not-even-started projects that don't get past the watching instructional videos stage, that are laughable in terms of charging money for them (which might be not a part of it at all, for e.g. online fanfic communities, or it's strategically important, or the possibility of making money is how you justify doing it, to yourself). As you try to figure out how to instantiate your vision, to find FORM and STRUCTURE to render it, express it, feel it, share it--that's sophisticated redo-to-undo scaffolding, inverse operation(s) scaffolding, that you're sort of being squeezed/compelled towards, for better and worse, at the very, very, very least*. [7] Many mediums are really hard, and sometimes there's venues to share your shitty initial stuff and have an amazing time doing it, and sometimes not. In any case, this is global wayfinding bleeding out into the world, as it should, with possibly some nonmonotonicity "out in the world" around money, relationships, etc., (modulo emptiness and groundlessness).
"Make sure you have a life that you want to 'wake up' to" includes kind of working through all of "cosmic refuge," too, whether through (half-)writing stories just for yourself, or sharing erotic fanfiction with a community, or writing post-scarcity science fiction to inspire yourself and others, or really actually inventing technology in a lab or at a startup.
This is sophisticated global wayfinding, (re)do-to-undo bleeding out into the world, maybe temporary scaffolding that's especially "sifted back into the self" and then dropped/metabolized, or that which begins to proactively shape the world around you, or both.
*
And, so, anyway, let yourself be moved into weird postures and weird creative projects, until maybe, eventually, there's nowhere to go, you never left, your refuge is everything and everywhere, you have tremendous safety and capacity and joyousness to do things in the world (or whatever), including taxes and chores and intimacy and childcare, and still you might want to watch epic fantasy tv with friends, for all sorts of fun, heartfelt, wholehearted reasons, or work on tech in the garage, or write digital symphonies, or grow old or young with someone you love, and/or have some grandkids, and/or be a founder/CEO, or be a tiny part of 20,000 employee (bio)tech company that just slightly on net is making the world a better place, or (even) better (and better). And also suffering, and also misfortune, and...
*
*
Further notes:
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[...] one gets to keep lots of the things (beauty, skill, "power") but the refuge part kind of becomes less and less satisfying and like building on quicksand or a treadmill even though one sort of tries harder and harder and like refuge in some "inner space" kind or ultimately evaporates or becomes refuge in everything? (but never have to ever give up any good or safe thing until/unless want to?)
the way i'm using refuge (when not with "everything") here, is sort of phenomenological/conceptual/embodied error wrt where the safety is, sort of, though it works until it doesn't. and when it works it really works and there's nothing wrong with cultivating it i that sense. but with time, meditation, seeing its inadequacy, then sort of meditating while trying to shore it up is the very thing that positively dissolves it and frees up resources for true freedom, handledness, safety. but anything in it or associated with it gets to be cosmically good and the transformation of it, of time, participates in future handledness amidst luminosity/just-this (too get maximally jargony)
tbc, pursuing compelled creative projects (or anything) is often the exact thing one should surrender into as best as they can harmonize it with rest of life
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Sometimes it’s good to use postures such as sitting without back support or standing, in order to avoid falling asleep (see the posture section for more postures and thoughts on postures). But, it can be extremely profitable to meditate while curled up comfortably in bed both while falling asleep for the night, right upon waking up (without even opening one’s eyes), and also during the day. One can drift in and out of meditation, sleep, and reverie (sleep and reverie could be conceived as falling under the surrender portion of p2 but don’t have to be.).
One could imagine that meditating in liminal states could lead to "bad form" or meditating incorrectly. But, I have found this to not be the case, at least empirically. It seems to be the case that this protocol is specified both precisely enough and generally enough that meditating and drifting (reverie) and sleeping seems to be extremely valuable, especially when often, sometimes, or eventually mixed with meditation in other postures. (Update: It can be a bit of an additional challenge to "go back and get or work with" previous stuff you did in near-sleep, but it may be that most people will have to kind of hang out in near-sleep, in more awake altered state, anyway.)
*
[This could be its own section or a more prominent note; plus could maybe use a crosslink to posture and ("altered") states and synaptic renormalization section:] Separately, it's very powerful to drift in and out of sleep while meditating, e.g. across a lazy morning, and to start meditating, to go straight into meditating, right when one wakes up without first opening one's eyes. Something about darkness or low light, and not immediately exposing oneself to light, does seem helpful re some kind of endogenous "flexibility." cf. perhaps lingering REM factors or something. And sleeping can "recharge" diminishing slack (when that type of "recharge" is an available one. So sometimes going to sleep early (and so then waking up early but not getting out of bed, and then doing the meditating in and out of sleep thing) can be very strategic. Other times it makes much more sense to get up and take a walk in the sun or to go make money, and so on and so on and so on. Just depends on current "meditative regime." [Search phrases: nap, naps, napping]
*
Re dream yoga and "constant consciousness" and stuff like that--I haven't particularly bothered with any of it. None of it has seemed necessary. It can be fun to meditate in lucid dreams (and in non-lucid dreams) but it doesn't seem especially critical. Intuitively speaking, I don't particularly recommend trying to have more lucid dreams (some people eventually find it exhausting and can't turn it off), but it's of course fine to have fun when they do happen. I figure if some kind of constant consciousness (i.e. subtle tacit awareness even through deep dreamless sleep) is nice to have or is part and parcel of the thing then it'll develop pretty naturally on its own. My impression is that this can only develop over 10-30 years.*
*[[[It's interesting to think about what this degree of "flexibility" means neurologically, cf. learning; sleep; consciousness; the apparent "unity" of consciousness in a philosophical, phenomenological, technical sense; synaptic renormalization; thalamus; brainstem; delta waves in waking and deep, dreamless sleep...]]]
Note that metaphysically speaking, for what it's worth, I'm aware of at least one third-hand report of someone claiming constant consciousness who still self-reported having a time skip when undergoing general anesthesia for surgery, so I don't particularly expect anything particularly non-neurological or extra-physically-supramundane to happen by this route. But if you're curious to see for yourself, go for it! Provisionality! Please set aside anything that feels curtailing to wonder, exploration, experimentation. Weird non-local stuff? Maybe! "True psi"? Maybe! It's very important, all things being equal to hold things loosely and to be open to strangeness. (But be very, very careful with respect to contexts and people who would profit from your openness--see culture appendix.) In any case, plenty of "supramundane" stuff to be had, still (see "far reaches of meditation" section) and plenty of other weirdness and coolness (see "subtle interaction" section). I just think at least 99% of it is (sometimes counterintuitively) low-key physical / classical / neurological / normal-biophysical / exquisite multi-sensory fusion, with a dash of clever hans, sociological factors, and confirmation bias at the edges in the worst-best case; and in any case "natural" but still meaningful, profound, cool, and sometimes profoundly gratitude-inspiring. (And of course, at the time of this writing, science doesn't understand consciousness as such, the standard model of physics is incomplete, and neuroscience is in its infancy. But still we can kinda rule out perpetual motion machines, etc., etc.)
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For myself, based on prior actions and "karma," I've encountered a collection of a series of [sic] intermittent puzzles where a few things together have to be (mostly) surrendered and lightly coordinated at the same time. It's something like this:
Some breathing-related muscles want to tighten which feels creepy and restrictive, so have to figure out how to feel safe letting that happen.
And that, re creepy and restrictive, does indeed then generate a sort of combination pseudo air hunger and anxiety(?). And [yet] /that/ sometimes causes a series of “quick breaths” (sometimes with the originally involved muscles and sometimes yet other muscles), if you can figure out how to allow them, which are some sort of good redo-to-undo and/but actually heighten the pseudo-air-hunger and anxiety while they’re happening. Have to figure out how to feel comfortable letting these happen, the quick breaths and the pseudo air hunger and anxiety(?) that they heighten.
Also periods of not breathing [during this] that will eventually lead to [also/additionally] [safe but] “real air hunger.” Have to figure out how to breathe (or allow breathing) “around” the tight breathing muscles so that they’re not disrupted from whatever they are wanting to do. AND, have to /not/ breathe “around” if the quick-breaths are the thing that want to be happening INSTEAD; let THEM be responsible for all breathing if they’re happening.
Kind of have to LET this whole aversive, evolving process-complex FORM and then evolve and sort of have to minimally-actively (as effortlessly as possible) help it maintain itself while staying out of its way and breathing around it when needed, again without getting in its way, without disrupting it, so it can move through its whole thing. And first you unintentionally disrupt its formation a bunch of times but you’ll always get another chance immediately or eventually and you just do the best you can.
(These are often deeply layered! It may be several thousands of hours before you encounter something like all this, or it may take some time before all the parts gather together so it's recognizable as such. That doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong at all. It's just the long-run "ordering of [the undoing of] the layer structure".)
(Sometimes there can be additional some or any of jaw, mouth, neck, throat, tongue, etc. wanting to settle into or let be helped or gently stabilized into a particular complex, evolving-dynamic-equilibrium muscular configuration, position, set of dynamic tensions, too.)
(Not everyone will have stuff like this! It's really dependent on prior everything. Might be like pretty close to a "worst case" type of thing---and they're untangleable! In practice and in principle bc buddha nature, etc., etc.)
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Sometimes things like sleepiness can be pleasant and luxurious, and other times they can be a source of great stress. These can be from childhood fears that were never fully worked through ("If I sleep, the monster will get me.", night terrors, sleep paralysis) to adult illness or sleep trauma ("If I sleep I'll absolutely definitely certainly stop breathing", "If I sleep my blood pressure will do weird things.", "If I'm tired that means I'm getting worse."
Here are some related things that don't exactly fit under "hypoarousal," but that's the word that came to mind, first-pass: sleepiness, drowsiness, fatigue, tiredness, weariness, weakness. (It's my understanding that sleepiness and drowsiness are closer to "could easily fall asleep" / "can't keep eyes open", and fatigue is more "don't have the physical or mental energy to do things", and weakness is e.g. "can't lift this thing.") Sometimes fatigue, etc., are more normal, and sometimes there are extreme or pernicious versions related to acute or chronic conditions.
Anyway, none of this is medical advice; talk to your doctor*, and/but then what?
Often such states are avoided, resisted, fought, or at least "managed" ("feeling sleepy is scary or morally bad") and, if there's "karmic stuff" "in" these states, then they can eventually bottleneck meditative progress. Even some meditation systems seem to suggest avoiding some of these states (cf. "subtle dullness"), but some of those very same traditions limit sleep on retreats. I have some suspicion that facilitating access to some of these states is one of the reasons that sleep is traditionally restricted on retreat.
Anyway, there is some "trick" or "balance" with respect to working with ("in"?) states like sleepiness, and so on; there's some combination of how some (not all) of these states are intrinsically somehow less "alert," or etc., but nevertheless some alertness, arousal, or wakefulness can nevertheless be brought into it. Sometimes it's as simple as sitting with an unsupported back, like on the edge of a bed, and letting yourself get really sleepy, but you don't fall asleep because you're upright and you'd fall over, and that causes a perfect blend of really sleepy, almost dozing, but also alert in some precise, narrow way, and meditation proceeds. So that's one piece, that balance.
And then the other piece is first, potentially fear, concern with respect to the state (concerns about intrinsic harm or what it further implies about e.g. health, longevity, etc.), and then, second, the potential avoidance, resistance, superstitious layering action, fighting, paradoxical arousal, and management with respect to the state.
I don't mean to gaslight: there are chronic conditions with respect to sleep and fatigue (either causally or correlationally) that will statistically shorten lifespan somewhat (with any individual being an exception), sometimes due to heightened risk of acute events (whose likelihood nevertheless remain quite low in an absoslute sense). And, there are rare acute situations where it makes sense to only sleep one sleep cycle at a time and then be upright a bit, and so on.
And/but, generally speaking:
And, so, part of meditation is untangling all that. And sometimes this is mostly just patient intricacy, and sometimes it can be "merely" terrifying and other times quite physical. If you had night terrors as a child or were (or are) terrified of sleep paralysis, then immersive terror might come up, along with altered breathing, and so on (not always, not for everybody). If you had an illness where you were so congested that you did wake up a few times coughing or choking, or something like covid or untreated sleep apnea, where you didn't understand what was happening or even if you did, under uncertainty, where breathing or throat activity or sensations were altered---you might find then that in meditation your throat and tongue and breathing want to do all sorts of sometimes quite intense things, a bunch of times, over days, to work out any subtle or overt or latent management that is potentially no longer needed. Sometimes throat closing, and so on, can be to the point of causing some air hunger. Generally speaking, you can take breaks---you can do a lot of this stuff a little bit at a time and it'll still untangle just fine. Check with your doctor if you any concerns about mild-moderate affects on breathing, blood pressure, or anything, and so on. (And also, things like the gentlest versions of Buteyko breathing, which can itself be medically contraindicated, can reduce edge-case air hunger.)
In addition to meditation, it can sometimes help to collect self-credible information, to alleviate concerns that something medical might be going on, based on what your concerns are. You might request an at-home sleep study to see that your oxygen or breathing or heart rate are fine. If you have a consumer all-night device, you might dig up a study that says it's quite normal for blood oxygen saturation to be around 91%, give or take, for 10% of the night, and so on. You might end up doing an in-clinic sleep study. Any of these can have their own issues, like time or financial expense, diminishing returns, or ambiguity (like if you get an in-clinic sleep study, do you sleep on your back or your side, it's just one night, etc., etc.) The point is something like, gently, patiently, whether you come to the conclusion that everything is locally fine, through meditation alone, or you collect additional information, through your own research, or working with a doctor, and other professionals, and add its interpretation into the mix, you're sort of gently, patiently, working through everything all the way to the unraveling end, until things turn inside out, it's safe to let go, etc.
It's a combination of objective and subjective that in any cases sort of "grounds out" (nevertheless alive, responsive) in something like ultimate uncertainty combined with something like "skillful surrender" and release and relaxation, which isn't always fun (understatement), but is a way to self-compassionately endure hardship, in a way that harmonizes proactivity, patience, surrender, self-care, and so on. Sometimes you have to just wait or be truly be like (for whatever reason), "well, I guess I'll die," and other times there's something to do, "I can always relax; I can always self-care as needed; I can always manage if warranted; or, I can write down something to do a little research on, tomorrow."
*
It can be hard to know where to put time and attention. Maybe a sort of abstract not-case-study would be kind of illustrative. None of the below is medical advice; it could sort of be considered like a fictional metaphor that might or might not line up with the real world in some ways. (The below isn't me and is not a composite of people I know, but it's inspired by a couple tiny pieces from my life in a couple places and even tinier pieces from people who would not mind my borrowing, and is combined with further imperfect research.)
So say you wake up gasping a couple times from deep sleep or you have dreams where your can't breath, and then you do wake up and it's hard to breath, and you're groggy and you find it terrifying, and you're afraid to sleep. Let's say the first time or even couple times, you have a massive panic attack, but anyway your heart's going crazy so you have someone drive you to emergency care or you even call an ambulance. And you feel terrible, but they can't find anything wrong, so they say talk to your primary doctor and maybe hint that you should get treatment for anxiety, one way or another.
So then your doctor is like sure, here do an at-home sleep study and a 24-hour heart monitor. And you do that, and there's maybe one irregularity that could just be an artifact. So you get referred to a sleep clinic and eventually do an in-clinic sleep study, and they're like "well it's not like classic obstructive sleep apnea, and we didn't see any of the gasping thing, but there's little microarousals, maybe, and maybe a CPAP would help."
And so you know that lots of people find a CPAP utterly life changing, and also lots of people can't tolerate it, and also you'd prefer not to have to get used to one or travel with one and what if your intimate partner thinks it's weird and loud.
And then you go down an internet rabbithole and it loops like these Buteyko breathing people claim that it helps with sleep, and some of their reasoning makes sense, but some of it seems contradictory, and also there isn't a ton of evidence or even negative evidence, but some people swear by it. And also there's growing evidence that tongue and throat exercises can help with sleep stuff quite a bit, but would that have any impact in your situation. And also CPAP can even cause central apnea in a percentage of people even while it improves obstructive sleep apnea. And also there's this inspiratory resistance training that has a lot of anecdotes of improving sleep and sleep breathing. And vitamin b1 and choline, and so on. And also there's new non-CPAP devices but are they even available yet.
And/but also, you did have a ton of fears around sleep as a kid, and maybe that's finally coming up in meditation, and what is this weird choking sensation that's even been getting worse during the day, and what if there's something wrong with my vagus nerve, and is there even a test or treatment for that, and...
#
Ok, so the point of the above is that someone might have a lot of fears from childhood, and also meditation is maybe stirring things up, and also someone might have real "medical" stuff going on, but also it's uncertain whether the medical establishment has something to offer that does more good than harm, and also that might require some research and decisions that are not costless that also affect loved ones (both the time to research as well as impacts of decisions), and also there's some stuff one might try at home, but that also requires time and research and might get scoffed at by medical professionals (which might or might not matter, if it's even useful to tell them) or might be concerning to one's partner, and also the whole thing might be a transient meditation thing or a combination or a synergy of a physical thing and a meditation thing, and also there's a lot of fear around it, and it's greatly affecting sleep which is making everything worse, and that's affecting money or career or relating, and so on.
And sometimes all one can do is sort of muddle through---some combination of epistemically vicious non-meditation proactiveness, patience (self-care, investing in relationships), and meditation (which feeds into epistemics and also is its own clarifying and unraveling). And, of course the latter, but also the former two, are compatible with surrender but can also take time away from meditation, and it's complicated.
*
Not medical advice, talk to your doctor, involve loved ones, and it's complicated. Or, in lots of cases, again just an example, you just feel like you're choking a bit during meditation, on off, for a few weeks, or your feel simultaneously really drowsy and panicky at the same time, and kind of panickingly surrender into that, on and off, as skillfully as you can, and then you kind of work through all that and it's not really a thing again. This section is sort of meant to encompass both ends of the spectrum, like some weird throat or breathing or sleep stuff that goes away on its own, very a thing, on the one hand, and then going down the medical rabbithole (at least touch base with your doctor), on the other hand.
*
Scratch notes:
See also:
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Re how to "let go" of looming, worrisome stuff that one doesn't necessarily have a lot of control over (and really with respect to letting go anything; this is sort of fully general):
"I think one is holding on bc a part of oneself still senses (correctly or incorrectly) there are things one can do to continue to mitigate, and once one has really done everything they can do (taking into account creative solutions, real limits, opportunity costs, and any mistaken ability to influence, etc.) then the bodymind completely puts it away until new information comes in or there's an intermittent maintenance action that needs to be taken."
See also the "HAS principle," and there's a bunch of stuff that works kinda this way, cf. being willing to have bad stuff "forever" actually loosens it, and stuff like that.
All of this is easier said than done, though. Sussing out where one really does have fine-grain or overt actions they can take or realizing they actually don't is non-trivial and nebulous---a real meditation project that might be bottlenecked on an arbitrary number of other nebulous things. And coming to know and accept bad stuff (or not!) can be the work of many thousands of hours.
So there may well be interim solutions, stopgaps, shims, positive / constructive coping, etc. And of course action in the world, seeking help, omni-anything, 100% as seamless part of all this.
*
[lightly edited:]
this can get tangly and pushy, sometimes better to do ice cream and video games, etc., etc., etc., but sometimes it can be good to really dialogue: how can i help, can you help me clarify your concern, how can we work together?
or just honoring, with tremendous charity, the part(s) of you that are like "hey this really, really, really, really contemporaneously real-time matters" ---
can sort of prime the pump:
"yeah, there really is a tiny chance of [X], yeah I might want to take a sub 15-minute action wrt to [Y], yeah i do really want to understand [Z] and there really is minute-by-minute signal on my twitter feed, even if it's noisy and high variance" (just drawing from current events)
can meet things like twitter, news sites, etc., over and over again with good-faith self-charity "hi self yes this is really important to you/us, let's do it together, i see you, i'm with you" can really facilitate integration sometimes.
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Mark 8:55 AM
More questions welcome and please poke for different kinds/styles of answers if there’s something better
Mark 9:03 AM
It’s not universally true, but, generally, "forcing," "powering through," or "needle-threading in order to keep going and going" should be avoided because these can create puzzles that need to be laboriously undone later to make further progress.
If something seems like it’s "jamming" or "grinding," I would halt that prelim/aux exercise and engage the meta protocol to see if that illuminates a better thing to do. The meta protocol itself can jam, in which case one can do lighter and lighter versions of the meta protocol (as described in the meta protocol section), or do the "meta meta protocol" (apply the meta protocol to itself), or browse through the document and choose something else to do, as per intuition (such as other prelim/aux practices or one of the main practices), or take a break and do something different and/or fun. (edited)
Mark 9:12 AM
For intuitions, to my mind, meditation is less like strength training and more like a single [many-typed, many-peg] Tower of Hanoi-type puzzle, if that makes sense. Long-range, global [maximum] wayfinding through a multidimensional, nonmonotonic space. (edited)
And the [open set of] prelim/aux practices reveal new dimensions of movement and new feedback loops, to be fed into the global wayfinding engine [automatically and by application of the meta protocol]. (edited)
And then p2 is the enactment of global wayfinding which includes upgrading itself en route, interleaving handoffs to other practices for indirect upgrades, and finally undoing and self-transcending itself.
Mark 9:33 AM
Not universally, but generally, increases in muscle tension (including subtle, slow-growing) and contortions of face and posture mean it’s important to cut over to or at least interleave the meta protocol. An "uncoiled" posture such as sitting without back support, or standing, can make it easier to detect increases in muscle tension (though reclining and supported postures should be used, too, for decreasing incidental factors).
Shaking, twitching, emoting, vocalizations, and large movements are sometimes necessary and sometimes "self-distraction" (and sometimes a mixture). The meta protocol can be engaged to sort though and piece apart what should be allowed and encouraged and what should gently be disengaged or blocked.
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What is goodness? What is badness? What is good? What is bad? What is good for you? What is bad for you? What does "good" mean to you? What does "bad" mean to you? Morally good, ethically good, personally good, good feeling? For you? For others? Morally bad, ethically bad, bad feeling? For you? For others? Usefulness? Value? Worth? Worthiness? Helpfulness? Spiritually? Practically? Partially good? Partially bad? Generally/contextually good? Generally/contextually bad? Universally good? Universally bad? Wholly good? Wholly bad? Mixed good and bad? More good? Less good? More bad? Less bad? Better? Worse? Best? Worst? [why not in meta, p/a, main practices and instead in lists and more is left as exercise to reader. Cam of course play with in relation to any of p/a, main practices (including p1) meta, and so forth.] doing good vs being good vs having good vs experiencing good. Doing bad vs being bad vs having bad vs experiencing bad(ness). Intrinsic/essential/inherent goodness vs extrinsic/secondary/acquired/contextual goodness. Intrinsic/essential/inherent badness vs extrinsic/secondary/acquired/contextual badness. Goodness of form. Goodness of mode. Badness of form. Badness of mode. Goodness as an attribute. Badness as an attribute. Subsistent goodness. Subsistent badness. Where and what and how and when and why and for what purpose is goodness? Where and what and how amd why and when and for what purpose is badness? What causes goodness? What causes badness? When is goodness an effect? When is badness an effect? When are goodness and badness neither a cause nor an effect? Is felt goodness always good? Is felt badness always bad? Immediate goodness. Mediate goodness. Immediate badness. Mediate badness. Direct goodness. Indirect goodness. Direct badness. Indirect badness. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. Acting good. Acting bad. Appearing good. Appearing bad. Somehow good. Somehow bad. Artificially good. Artificially bad. Naturally good. Naturally bad. Stably good. Stably bad. Tending (toward) good. Tending (toward) bad. Historically good. Historically bad. Historically mixed. Eventually good. Eventually bad. Highest good. Lowest good. Highest bad. Lowest bad. Initial good. Initial bad. Final good. Final bad. Good for X. Bad for X. Good for X for Y. Bad for X for Y. Structurally good. Structurally bad. Independently good. Independently bad. Dependently good. Dependently bad. Separably good. Separably bad. Inseparably good. Inseparably bad. veridically good/bad, certainly good/bad, illusorily good/bad, apparently good/bad, good before/after/at/when/during/while X, bad before/after/at/when/during/while X, good now/later, bad now/later, lower good, higher good, net good, net bad, "too good," "too bad," "infinitely" good, "infinitely" bad, permanently good, permanently bad, contagiously good, contagiously bad
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Is this me? Is this you? Is that me? Is that you?
I am you, and you are me, and we are we.
No.
This is almost me, similar to me, but it is not me.
That is almost me, similar to me, but it is not me.
While plausibly me, this was historically never actually me.
While plausibly me, that was historically never actually me.
I am not you, and you are not me, and we are not we.
I am me, and you are you.
She is not him, and she is not you, and he is not her, and he is not you.
I am not him, and I am not her.
I am me, and you are you, and I am not you, and you are not me.
And, we can be we.
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[This is an experimental section by (q). It's not intended to be complete or final, and they don't have any particular intention to return to it, at time of publishing. In terms of whether this is "canon," or something or whatever, some of these I resonate with and others aren't quite the way I would've written them. And I might or might've resonated more with some of them at some times in my practice and less or not at others. But some of them make me go YES, and I thought it would be powerful and provocative for people to read through and ponder them, in their sort of "combinatoric completeness". -M]
some basic directional orientation moves:
in some sense:
In a similar but not identical sense:
and also
and yet
and complicatedly
and carefully noting that:
and also
more on "being" good/bad:
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[(so-called "Litany of Gendlin")]
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
—Eugene Gendlin
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Latest update heh 20231123:
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1727683530128322840
I’m sort of MAYBE first-pass self-convinced now that 3 square meals a day is bad & ppl are meant to alternate FEAST-maxx (as many meals as it takes to fill tanks) & FAST-maxx. Key piece is normal diet doesn’t have enough B vitamins & electrolytes+minerals to do it. Maybe.
I am sort of late to the party because it’s taken me this long to solve to solve my fasting intolerance. In my defense masterjohn is on another level and it took him a very long time to solve his deal.
[Tbc by feasting I mean eat like it’s your job for 1.5[or 0.75]-4.0 days.]
[tbc tbc once in ballpark listen to one's body re starting and stopping feasting/fasting regimes]
how do you get your electrolytes and minerals?
LMNT and brain forza super fast and magnesium and algae/d3/k2 calcium and oatmeal and orange juice and dehydrated sweet potato and dehydrated fruit and a bit of vegetables
And like a partial dose of a kresser style multivitamin that goes over the USA rda
To taste/tolerance for all of this
Cronometer synergizes well with intuition if ignore suggested amounts of everything and use as intuition pump
And unfortified gluten-free brewers yeast Mark
squash/zucchini for even more potassium
And high-quality marine collagen
[...]
It seems like nutrient replete fasting might be the body’s least stressed state
*
[Note 20230416: This section is maybe pretty deprecated. For example, I'm a much bigger fan of well-formulated multivitamins and smaller, more frequent meals (under some conditions) than I used to be.]
I am not a doctor or other kind of licensed health professional, and this is not medical or nutritional advice.
If you are lacking mental or physical stamina for meditation, you might try adding butter and/or MCT oil to your diet. (Some MCT oils have three different lengths and some just have two lengths. Sometimes just two lengths is advertised as "better" in some way, but I felt like I was getting some kind of weird metabolic deficiency on the two lengths variety. That last longer length chain seemed to really be good to have in there, for some reason, at least prior to adaptation, which I didn’t try to do.) Less likely to be helpful, but depends, you might try adding a bit more cheese or other animal saturated fat to your diet. (Each will have different chain length profiles.) You might also try adding a bit of choline, which can take a few weeks to month for you to notice any difference.
If you’re not, consider jogging or other aerobic exercise to you life, 2-5 times per week for 40 minutes, minimum, to avoid fat metabolism disfunction. You maybe should probably get your cholesterol checked periodically, too.
You might also consider adding non-rancid flax seed, some good source of sulfer, and/or some quality source of collagen.
You might also switch to all slow-release carbs, to even out insulin. The steadier energy release is, the less you’ll have boom and bust mental energy before and after meals. You want super-steady energy release for hours and hours. If you have insulin resistance, your body will release fuel from storage too slowly, and you’ll have to rely more on proximity to meals for meditation enablement.
If you have insulin smoothed out, your food craving system will be smarter, and you should generally indulge food cravings for weird food, as best you can.
If you’re eating fewer, larger meals, be careful with your kidney’s and liver.
Consider a multivitamin in powder form or in many pills per day, so you can titrate. I know multivitamins are supposed to do nothing or be detrimental, but you might find subdoses to be seemingly very helpful.
[Update 20230410 (xposted in a couple places): I'm becoming more distrustful of one-shot (at least) taste stuff because I think my body is saying no to things, but if I put it in my stomach anyway, my body is like "oh, huh, interesting" after a few hours. Or like "no, what?!" but after a couple days (or even longer) my body is more on board. Gotta do outside view stuff too, which of course I was, but I'm more outside view than I was.]
[Update 20230614:]
*
Chewing food down to "microscopic" pieces, and thoroughly mixing it with saliva before swallowing, can potentially make a big difference if you have an autoimmune condition, allergies, other inflammatory conditions, or a digestive condition. Saliva has "pre-digestive" enzymes that can break down carbs, fats, and protein, which greatly facilitates downstream digestion, and the more contact food has with mouth mucosa, the more opportunities there are for "oral tolerance" mechanisms to downregulate immune response to harmless food epitopes, over time.
*
A small and conservative amount of exogenous digestive enzymes, once in a while, even just for a single meal, can sometimes somehow kickstart or reboot exogenous digestive enzymes (maybe increases supply of building blocks for endogenous enzymes or fortuitiously tweaks feedback loops) and stomach acid if digestion is disrupted and gets into a bad cycle by illness or stress or other factors.
*
Electrolytes (e.g. sodium) and hydration, affect appetite and digestion quite a bit.
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[This section was not written by licensed professionals and this is not medical advice. (ditto / same for the rest of the document)]
[Originally published [untitled twitter thread] : https://twitter.com/acesounderglass/status/1504591434707468316 [Last accessed: 2022-04-29] Reproduced here with permission.]
Recently I found myself not wanting to eat @MealSquares. I reflected on it and realized that it was pushing some nutrients ahead of others, and it felt worse to be deficient in only one thing than everything. So I went to look for the deficient nutrient.
Tried a bunch of stuff, and there's one thing that reliably restores my desire to eat mealsquares: V8 juice. This surprised me, because I thought canning destroyed nutrients. But it's extremely reliable, and nothing else works at all.
V8 also did that thing where it tastes mediocre but I persistently want it, which for me means it's addressing a nutritional deficiency.
V8 has three known nutrients in any quantity: vitamin C, vitamin A, and potassium. And the potassium is pushing the definition of present.
MealSquares should provide 100% of all of these, but I was clearly missing something, so I investigated.
At first I assumed the missing nutrient was vitamin C, which is the most abundant vitamin in V8, and degrades the fastest so there was a reason for my somewhat aged mealsquares to fall short. But vitamin C pills didn't work, and I rejected other foods that were high in C.
(some possibility the vit C pills have degraded, but they shouldn't degrade that badly)
Didn't want carrots so it seemed like vitamin A was out, although I should maybe test this more thoroughly.
That left potassium. You ~can't buy pills with any real quantity of potassium, so I can't test that way. But bananas seem nice, and @jimrandomh guessed potassium deficiency before I gave him any information. It's just his go to for deficiencies.
Yesterday I was midway through a V8 when suddenly I hated it and wanted candy very badly. A different nutrient was short. Turns out it was salt which I'm normally pretty abundant in and V8 isn't exactly lacking, but I had some salt and suddenly all the cravings went away.
I say the potassium pills don't have much potassium, but it's 2% RDV, and the V8 is only 6%. 3 pills is not an insurmountable number, so maybe I should just buy those.
And of course it could be a weird cofactor in the vegetable juice we don't know to track yet, that would be the most interesting answer.
After all that I was not only reliably eating mealsquares, but got vastly better about my pill vitamins, suggesting I was subconsciously trying to keep my nutrients in balance the whole time. So if you're mysteriously rejecting nutrients, consider looking for a defiency elsewhere
update: isolated KCl salt didn't work (in the sense of engendering a desire for mealsquares), trying vitamin A pills next.
*
Miscellaneous messy scratch notes (added by Mark):
"misc pith"
end "misc pith"
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(experimental)
right tool for right job, wrong tool can make worse. some things look like other things but at root are the other thing. meditation can't directly fix some things that might initially seem like they can directly be fixed by meditation. (instead time, nutrition, medicine, physical intervention, etc. is needed.)
the "error mode" is sort of creatively-but-superstitiously doubling down on an unfortunately "pushy" (layering) meditative action that is believed/hoped to fix something that then sort of systemically "piles up against" or "wraps around" the thing that can't actually fixed with meditation, taking slack out of the system, leading to muscle tension eventually, and ultimately needing to be fixed/untwirled eventually to make further progress.
that said, there is a "phenomenological interaction boundary" between the thing that can't be directly/immediately fixed and "everything else," and the rest of the system can be "untwirled" with respect to the not-directly-fixable thing. and new illnesses and nerve injuries can make new focal points suitable for local and global untwirling/commensuration with respect to the new thing, though sometimes it's better to wait to see what happens for days, weeks, or months because if the new thing heals completely then the system will want to rebalance back to the way it was before (feels on the inside like usual-ish "things that can be done / things that could happen / potentiality," possibly with significant "bubble-up delay" and has objective correlates [1]). could also split the difference. also, generally, these explicit decisions matter less and less the more spontaneity in the system there is.
[1] neuroscience and meditation, odds and ends [2022-02-09] "[...] It might be a little surprising how reversible these changes can be. [...]"
see also:
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Warning: This section is experimental and should be approached with caution if you have live existential/cosmological/eschatological/metaphysical issues or live mania, paranoia, or possibly other things.
In no particular order: deaths of parents, significant others, children, other family, natural disaster, solar flares, pandemics, war, invasion, food insecurity, authoritarian surveillance states, violent feuds, systemically messed up and flawed healthcare, accidents, nuclear war, phishing, failure of cryogenic preservation if you go that route or being tortured and unable to die when you wake up until some very large energy source runs out, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, chronic fatigue, physical disability, nation/state/country failure, sudden death, cancer, stroke, agents of power knowing exactly who you are and the uncertain threat of them coming to harm, kill, or take you away (in front of significant others, children, or other family of friends).
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These are rhetorical or koan-ish sorts of questions (more phenomenological than mechanism-related, neuroscientific, causal, or even-ish teleological):
How do you move your body? Or how does your body move? Or if you can make your hands heat up or stop hiccuping or deliberately open up your nasal turbinates or stimulate intestinal peristalsis, how do you do that? Or, if you're a yogi(ni), how do you temporarily stop your heart (more like subtle atrial fibrillation, maybe, but anyway). What about entering nirodha samapatti or something? Or old research studies of people stimulating their immune system? Do you do these things "directly"? (and what does that mean?) Or "indirectly"? For example, if your breathing slows, that raises CO2, and that can cause your nasal turbinates to open up, and that's something that you can do deliberately/intentionally/consciously; or, you might not realize you're doing it, if you're "concentrating" or something. Or is, e.g. weight loss, when it works, "all technical," the right combination of macros, micros, timing, etc., and then it happens by itself; or is there a mental component, or both, and when is that a false dichotomy, and so on.
Anyway, what are all the ways you directly or indirectly cause (or not) something bodymind-related (or otherwise) to happen? Or the ways in which things just happen? (This is also rhetorical or koan-ish.):
There's, loosely speaking, with overlap and vagueness, intention, intending, will/volition, deliberate action, bottom-up action, spontaneous happening, "participation," intercessory prayer, asking the universe, doing magic, trigger-action plans, commanding yourself, and so on, and so on.
And, like, as a hypothetical, non-presupposing example, do you "momentarily" "intend," as an example, or do "you" "maintain" an "intention" in the "background" or "foreground" or does "something else" "take over" or do you "set it and forget it" or return intermittently or regularly to it, like ringing a bell, or something. And what about in the far reaches of meditation? Does the "intending self" sort of "eat itself with no remainder"? Or, what's "really going on"? And/or is that ineffable? And, aren't self, body, mind, bodymind, etc., empty in the technical sense? How does that all fit together?
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The point of all the above is something like, over the course of our lives, we build up a lot of assumptions about how the bodymind moves and functions and acts upon itself, and so on. And, in meditation, those assumptions can be magnified or doubled-down-upon, before they're eventually corrected, and dimensions that persist longer, before they're corrected, can lead to things like muscle tension.
As an example, leaving aside the ethics of the original experiment, which I haven't thought through at the time of this writing, and, so the story goes, B.F. Skinner would have pigeons peck buttons that would light up in order to receive food. But, when the button lit up, it wouldn't always dispense food. So, the pigeons would sort of develop these elaborate behavioral dances, before, after, and between pecks, as, perhaps, they tried to figure out they connection between their behavior and how to get food to actually dispense. In some sense, arguably, the pigeons were acting "superstitiously." Here, that would be something like "acting erroneously or elaborately on the basis of incorrect or hopeful beliefs about the relationship between cause and effect."
So, a lot of human behavior, down to really subtle levels can be "superstitious," in some sense. Or, a lot of what we do, even when it does work, can have a lot of "extra" stuff that comes along with it, that can come before or after the thing that actually does the thing or concurrently. Or, the thing that actually does the thing can be really indirect and almost incidental with respect to how we're (trying) to produce the effect, consciously and unconsciously.
And a lot of what meditation is "raising" and working through all that superstition, including presupposed ontology, along with a lot of initial "error propagation" and "doubling down" and making things worse, sometimes a lot worse, along some pervasive and subtle dimensions, before those dimensions get better and better.
So, here's a simple, toy model:
Say, first-pass, you're composed of an (a) "I" and (b) a "me." Or (a) "self" and (b) "parts." Or something like that.
A lot of problems are caused by clashes or confusions between (a) and (b). Say that one is trying to take the other's jobs. Or one is trying to become infinitely or perfectly strong and to clobber or completely control or even erase the other. Or one believes it or the other is the only "true" one and that the other is an illusion. Or one or even something else is trying to "merge" the two or treat them the same. And so on. (You of course may find that interacting constructively with parts causes them to become less and less part-like and more and more integrated or that "I" and "me" do or don't eventually dissolve into awareness or centerlessness or agencylessness or something, or sensations can't directly affect other sensations, etc., etc., and/but empty isn't the same as illusory, and so on and so forth. In any case, models are useful for as long as they're somewhat phenomenologically resonant or usefully evocative.)
So, you might provisionally assume or play with the idea that there's an "I" and "me" or an "I" and "parts" or "self" and "parts," and so on.
And whether it's "I" interacting with "I" or "I" interacting with "parts" or "parts" interacting with "parts," or the world or univesre (cf. "asking the universe," cf. your current tacit or explicit beliefs about how the bodymind works or your cosmology and so on), you might distinguish between things like:
Or, more simply, are you "telling" or are you "asking"? And can the other part safely say "no"? Can you or the asking or telling part safely hear a "no"? And/or are you or the asking or telling part going to try to make it happen anyway? (cf. pushing and forcing and so on)
And if you/"I" can safely hear a "no," and the "me" or other part can safely say no, and there's not habitual "trying to make it happen, no matter what," then there's a possibility of dialogue or negotiation, which could be heavyweight and verbal (and one can always play with that, even in far reaches, for pockets of redo-to-undo or as a fluidly settled thing), and/but can get more and more liminally verbal, nonverbal and self-telepathic, subtler and subtler untanglings and refactorings and resortings and more and more and finally ever-always spontaneous. (And even this toy model is too reifying. The full space is something like all the auxiliary and main practices and beyond, not just "negotiation," but this is a potentially very helpful and useful toy (and actionable, depending on regime, loosely speaking) model.)
So, cf. global-wayfinding-aware and with respect to subtler and subtler tangles, are you being superstitious about voltionality or your capacity to directly cause? Say, are you confusing "I" with "me"?
Are you asking or telling? Who (or what) is asking or telling? And to whom (or what)?
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Notes:
See also:
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[See a physiological note at the bottom, too.]
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Untrained operation of the mind is relatively more Spreading, than Gathering, of Relevance.
(Trained operation of the mind is relatively more Gathering, than Spreading, or, perhaps, rather, there’s a nuanced, sensitive, responsive, situated, contextual balance.)
Relevance is original sensory impressions.
Spreading is sort of, loosely speaking, following implications to reach conclusions, increasing transitive closure.
Gathering is sort of, loosely speaking, regathering spreading, reevaluating relevance, and refactoring (relative or deep) premises and presuppositions.
One property of a mind is unresponsive (occluded, inaccessible, layered) Momentum, with respect to spreading.
Sometimes relevance-to-be-gathered is arranged relatively nearby. Sometimes relevance-to-be-gathered has Outliers, that is far away, long-range relevance. This can be things like, say, an early childhood experience, or, say, a traumatic experience from any time in one’s life, that was somehow unique or isolated, and, so far, seemingly irrelevant to most things.
Momentum, in long-range interaction with not-yet-gathered outlier relevance, causes tangling, twisting, or even iterative wrapping. (It's almost like one's current "location," at one "pole," and the long-range relevance, at another "pole," creates a bar, an axis, a line segment, through the system. And then, unfortunately/unluckily, things can twist and wrap along/around that axis.)
Eventually, momentum is bled off, integrated, metabolized, harmonized. And, eventually, long-range relevance is finally gathered.
Once essentially ALL relevance is gathered, with respect to some nebulous something, the system can, (loosely, relatively speaking) somewhat sharply, re-conceptualize, re-preference, re-plan, re-expect--that is complexly (perhaps) lock-and-key Pivot to new, niche-fit intentionality around that relevance, and sort of now re-spread, anew, from that relevance. (Premature pivoting attempts, perhaps via momentum, are sources of twisting.)
(Twisting, tangling, wrapping eventually accumulates into noticeable muscle tension.)
Regathering, untwisting, etc., nonmonotonically releases/relaxes muscle tension. Sometimes completed or near-completed gathering-into-relevance is accompanied by immersive flashbacks and/or insight.
The above is somewhat simplified, and doesn’t go into “safe to look then look,” contextual equanimity, “inner space,” or lack thereof, "motor output contention," "immediate/mediate/long-range contradiction," and more.
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I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice (assertions below are personal experience and opinion even if stated more generally, etc. etc.), but it can also be good to keep an eye on your diet or supplementation, e.g. especially magnesium but also, in relation to magnesium, potassium, calcium, vitamin D and K2, etc. They all kind of balance and rate limit and sometimes absorptively compete with each other, so if you perturb one you potentially have to keep an eye on the others. (Generally, I try to let my sense of taste sort things out, and I try to stick with food over supplements, but, for all sorts of reasons, such as challenge getting enough of something in one's diet, of course, it can make sense to supplement sometimes.) Magnesium (plus maybe to a slightly lesser degree potassium? or vice versa, even, depending on which is rate limiting) is maybe sort of a regulator of "global muscle tone," and all other contingent variations of muscle tone and tension maybe kind of ride on that. So if you feel generally tense that might be something to explore, too, to de-confound: For me, when I increased my magnesium a bit, there was almost a whole-body "writhing" of muscle, across the entire surface of my body, reducing and rebalancing tension everywhere while still somehow like fractally preserving muscle tone ratios between different areas, or something. It seemed net good, maybe a little bit more (non-critical) "global slack" to work with, meditatively, though it introduced some initial confusion because the feedback from the landscape was a little different.
Very not medical advice, but, to my knowledge, some supplements are relatively safe (magnesium, I think!) and some supplements may increase all-cause mortality risk (I think! Though perhaps not if paired with other things like vitamin K2 and vitamin D or something). Personally, at least at the time of this writing [20230306], I supplement magnesium, for example, but try to only get calcium through diet, for example.
Also very not medical advice---for supplements, I sometimes play with powdered forms to see if my taste buds arrive at a reasonable-seeming preference, so that I can somewhat or completely offload tracking to my body. "Chewable gummies" work better, in some sense, because they'll have a distinctive flavor for which the body can learn an association between nutrient and flavor really fast. But gummies often contain a lot of sugar or whatever other weirdness. So, powders---they can be a bit tricky because they're so dense and so the body temporarily "saturates" if you put some on your tongue (careful of repeated applications burning your tongue---you can also of course mix with a liquid and this all still mostly works) but then if you wait thirty seconds to ten minutes, you'll find that you might be able to repeat this many times (body: "sure I'll have some more") until the final time you try, after a delay, the body is like, "nope, I'm good, for a longer while, now." Please note this is potentially annoying and time-consuming and has all sorts of pitfalls, so sometimes you might just want to pop capsules, etc., etc., depending. Please make sure you're not accidentally taking too much if you play around with powders and liquids and taste (ditto capsules and pills, still, too), and again this is not medical advice.
But this all seemed worth mentioning, in case it's useful to someone else.
Also, because of genetics, childhood dietary experience, and other factors, not everyone will have a reliable sense of taste/feel/desire for every nutrient, and not everyone will be able to learn a reliable sense of taste/feel/desire for every nutrient, for how much they want over the course of a day. So relying on numbers is certainly ok, too, if it seems like it might be a good idea to get more of something, through either diet or supplementation. Talk to your doctor, etc., etc.
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See also:
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Another lens on muscle tension and other things is "somatization." I'm using this term here non-clinically and informally, and this is not medical or mental health advice. I'm also using the term a little "slant" from its technical context. I also like to use the word "physicalization," but I think that's idiosyncratic.
The basic idea is that "psychological stuff" can show up as "body stuff." This has been a cliche for decades or maybe since pre-history, but it's still absolutely shocking at times.
Somatization can look like muscle tension, pinched nerves, sleep disturbance, breathing disturbance, chest pain (in all sorts of weird point and manifold configurationa and different kinds of sensations), weird heart stuff, chills, panic with respect to sensations or physical symptoms, and so on. Somatization interacts with viral and bacterial illness, post-acute sequelae (e.g. "long covid") and physical trauma, the latter four which can weirdly amplify the former and further confuse and confound things.
If you have a new thing, depending on what's happening and your judgment, you should consider calling a triage line, or calling the equivalent of 911 in your country, or having someone drive you to the emergency room/department, or going to urgent care, or making an appointment with your doctor. Generally, all things being equal, consider getting stuff checked out by a licensed professional, then consider somatization.
Sometimes somatization just happens; it just creeps up on you over minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.
But, you can reduce the chances of it if you keep an eye out for "making-X-happen-ness"---for breath holding, quasi-deliberate exhalation, quasi-deliberate inhalation, holding an inhaled breath, holding an exhaled-breath state, quasi-deliberate "subtle inner pushing" within or along the surface of the body, clenched jaw, contorted facial expression, contorted neck and shoulder positions, force-y use prayer beads and tally counters, and things like that.
(Note: Spontaneous sigh and yawns, small ones, big heaving ones---it's probably ok to gently help things like these get over the hump, as it were, if they need a tiny bit of help. The body wants to do it, and you're helping out. [This applies to some redo-to-undo body movements, too, sometimes many, many times.] At sommmmeeee point it probably blurs into force-y, like really grinding them out, kinda, or something. But this is one case where if the line is a little blurry, I think I'd err on the side of helping along yawns and sighs. Usually the line won't be blurry, though!)
Note, generally, the above are things to try not to do, but, if, at some point, you've already done a bunch of these things, possibly for an extended period of time, then it's ok and probably often or usually good to do them again, to allow them to come up and to happen again, sometimes to gently help that happen, as part of redo-to-undo!
You might not remember whether you've done a particular thing in a past, so you might not be sure whether it's ok to "redo-to-undo" it, but effortlessness and spontaneity, sometimes with a little help, generally indicate redo-to-undo, that the things you're doing are good to be doing, and, as per usual, pushing or forcing generally indicate entrenching/entrenchment. So, if it wants to happen, versus you're kind of almost doing it to get something to happen, and it can be a little mixed and blurry, you just do the best you can, it's probably at least net redo-to-undo.
Sometimes, as part of redo-to-undo, something (doing, happening) seems spontaneous and effortless, and, so, "good to do or good that it's happening"---for a time, "but" then after a time we find that it's not spontaneous in that somehow, somewhere we've been pushing, clenching, something "there" all along, to make "that" go, and then, "oh," you let go of that pushing, clenching, something. That's normal! That's part of the process! It's working!
Stated a little differently, it's probably ok if-it’s-as-if “stuff” is spontaneously "flowing" from one place to another, just as an example of one thing that can be happening (and is it really "flowing" or whatever, but anyway) but if you’re “pushing” stuff to---or into---somewhere else, to like “make something go,” to “make something work,” to “make something happen,” that’s likely problematic.
The classic, imagining a string attached to and lightly tugging your head and spine to the sky, like a plumb line, chest maybe slightly expanded or simply neutral, shoulders neutral or ever-so-slightly forward or back, your vertebrae stacked liked dinner plates, skull perfectly balanced on your stacked spine, everything balanced on your perfectly angled pelvis (in a chair, on a cushion or etc.) can be helpful for reducing the chance of somatization. [The posture description might be shit. Check other descriptions and look at pictures and there are probably a few schools of posture.] If you "go out of alignment" then the posture takes more work, so that's a feedback loop. If something starts to tense, you're more likely to feel it, because you're sort of hanging there. You want your jaw kind of neutral too. And finally you want a cushion or seat that is as firm as possible while still being completely comfortable, to further maximize feedback. If you can't do some of these things for whatever reason, you just do the best you can.
Again, because of redo-to-undo, if you've spent a ton of time outside a neutral meditation posture, i.e. living your life or meditating in all sorts of positions, or inevitably having done some pushing and contorting at some point, it's ok to deviate from neutral postures for seconds, minutes, days, hours, weeks, months, years redo-to-undo purposes!
I sort of think of there being "directness" and "aboutness." Like directness is "non-immediately-meaning-laden sensations" and aboutness is like meaning-laden-sensations, "knowing," felt-sense-y type stuff, and so on. The boundary between directness and aboutness is blurry and the relationship between the two is inchoate, perhaps in principle.
Importantly, I think generally speaking, while directness and aboutness are highly related, the relationship can be pretty indirect, and often is; generally, aboutness isn’t in the directness, if that makes sense?
Like, in desomatization, what can happen is that, like, in the fractional conversion of directness to aboutness---
---there might be, it might feel like a surge of anxiety or panic or overwhelming existential despair, paranoia, traumatic memories, and other things, and also of course positive insights and realizations, that kind of takes you over for a split second (or longer)---
---so like it's happening before you realize it's happening; it's already (just now for for a bit been) happening---
---that comes from a place you didn’t expect, where maybe you didn't even know there was a there, there, again before your realize it's happening---
---and it’s not immediately obvious that there was any connection at all to what was just immediately happening, i.e. meditating or meditative-ish reverie or doing chores or something in reverie (sometime in the past second, thirty seconds, or hour or something) even though they followed so closely (or relatively closely) in time.
So like something like that, to compress all that it could be just kind of a surge of something, like a surge or whoa or another emotion, with a dash or insight or understanding, maybe some memory about something that was hard or didn't seem hard at the time.
For unpleasant desomatization, generally nobody likes to feel anxiety or panic or etc., but generally the system does its very best (not to reify "the system," etc., etc.) to make it felt-safe-enough for it happen and only then it happens. And somatization at the extremes can become debilitating or even dangerous. So sometimes somatization is necessary for coping, trading off psychological to the physical. It can be absolutely necessary when we don't have the time or tools or support or knowledge or money or safety to immediately hold or experience or be or feel or work through things meditatively or psychologically or etc., alone, with friends, parents, therapists, etc. But, generally, eventually, you want to de-somatisize for physical health and safety and for psychological/spiritual/life flourishing in light of impermanence.
Sometimes: "Oh, I'm doing that, and, even though I know that, I can't stop." Or, or finally, "Oh, I'm doing that, and I can stop, and I have spontaneously stopped."
Recommended:
See also:
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[Editing note: parts of the below are maybe tonally off, still; also general editing]
We could make a distinctions between
Something to keep in mind, in my current, never-enough-data opinion, if someone says something like that they no longer suffer, or they no longer experience anxiety (and other things), even or especially if they've been meditating like thirty-to-fifty years, at least 50% of the probability mass or whatever should be on that they have been somatisizing for decades (and there will be extraordinary achievements in there, too, generally, of course, sometimes "free and clear" (in some sense..) and again sometimes devil's bargain).
if someone says
(This absolutely includes me, by the way. I'm still paying off big mistakes I made many years ago, and there's probably plenty more I'm not yet aware of.)
It's just that meditation can be so hard; one generally wants to hold the hypothesis, gently, that somatization (and, more generally, layering) is/are taking place, all things being equal, somehow, somewhere, perhaps steadily cumulatively, including often for very advanced practitioners, and holding this hypothesis is for self-protection and discernment with respect to extraordinary claims that others make and also personal error-correction processes, regarding oneself.
Maybe good to emphasize, that’s not to say if a meditator has obvious or reported health problem that they are necessarily somatisizing. For example, long-term health problems could have driven someone to meditation, even at a young age, etc., etc., or it's chance, other misfortune, etc.
Other reasons for positive claims besides somatization and extraordinary achievement are mediate fortune (not necessarily good fortune in that sometimes mediate challenges can counterfactually reduce otherwise tremendous suffering later, e.g. gaining experience with the medical system and self-care and healthy habits for a medium-bad health thing, thereby avoiding or greatly ameliorating at least one much worse health thing later, for oneself or another; also, becoming more empathetic and compassionate with respect to other's suffering). And finally, there's, generally, grace, though extraordinary achievement is a subtype of grace and doesn't have explanatory power, in a vacuum.
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The connotations are sort of tonally off, but meditation is very much a "giving someone enough rope to hang themselves" sort of thing. I think someone said "meditation will amplify the neuroses you already have" (at least at first?).
Basically, I think, people stumble upon the sort of push-away (--> somatization) maneuver, and layering in general, and think that it's doing something good enough to sort of double-down on (because bad feelings, etc., fractionally, iteratively go away when it's used), and, especially when one is a beginner or intermediate meditator, it can take 100+ hours or a few thousand hours, to notice something is going weird and maybe often not know why. Further, there can be large-scale somatization tangles, where a previous, latent somatization stint, even if no longer actively accumulating somatization, starts causing problems because of how it's getting tugged on or wrapped around, but it can take a long time to "get to it" because of delayering ordering, and so things could get worse for hundreds or thousands of hours before they get better, worst case. Besides somatization-type-things, there's also behavioral, cognitive, preferential, and emotional rigidity-type-things, that can happen from lots of layering, in general, mentioned elsewhere in this document, and those dynamics apply here, too.
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In any case, real change comes from, when safe, not even exactly inclining or going towards, though that's often gently ok (if no grinding or jamming), but something more, like, hanging out with; keeping company; being patient with; low-pressure, loose, ok to drift away for a (long) time, almost incidentally "staying with," when you do; neither moving towards, nor moving away; not amplifying nor facilitating, nor pushing away, nor trying to reduce or diminish, if safe; let it/things/all come to you, relax and let go as best you can, arrange yourself to let the body move you... This patient, patient, in its own right revealed order order, un-rush-able, undoes it self, takes care of itself, comes to you, sometimes scary, sometimes soft, somethings big smears and sometimes the tiniest, most intricate things, encountering, encountering, encountering.
(Daniel Ingram, when writing about equanimity, says something like "front of hand and fingers in contact with the water, maintains contact as the water undulates, back of the hand never gets wet." (I think that's not exactly what he said, but. It might be a classic analogy, or something he formulated, not sure.)
takes care of itself, comes to you
And, of course, still, sometimes, you're trying stuff, experimenting, playing with auxiliary practices, main practices, reading, exploring teachers and systems, and finding the ways in which you've already been doing that thing or already know how to do that thing, in a way that's just right for you.
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Say that, suffering, as such, in a vacuum, is bad, but not all contextual suffering is bad (you're the final arbiter), and you're not bad to/if you suffer.
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To be clear, somatization is a subtype of layering. That is, de-somatization and pre-de-somatization involves ordering and delayering to "get to the right place" (if it's not already 1-step away) and then also during the de-somatization / delayering process, too. Sometimes you'll do some de-somatization, and then you need to wait minutes, hours, or days for other stuff to delayer possibly "quite far elsewhere" then more de-somatization in the "previous place" becomes available, and this can repeat. So, if someone has kind of been somatisizing (and layering) for X years, or they did a bunch and then successfully stopped (maybe without realizing that they had been doing it then that they stopped), it might take months or years to delayer enough that that particular desomatisizing can begin. Not always, though. It depends on the layer structure in the intervening years and it's possible that nothing got layered on top of that particular stuff when they stopped doing it.
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Theories of the body and / or hypochondriasis can hide somatization not like in a morally bad way but sometimes you can think a body or brain thing best has a body or brain explanation but sometimes those sorts of things unravel in a "purely meditative way" and you were sort of wrong about the proper type of explanation for it (and that's ok). Like something that felt "thoroughly and obviously neurological" was like a phenomenological-conceptual thing that got stretched to its limit and bottlenecked somehow before it meditatively unraveled. Ditto for digestive stuff, breathing stuff, and so on. But check with your doctor etc. etc. and electrolytes and vitamins and etc. matter.
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It's important to have good CO2 tolerance, for a bunch of reasons. You want the body to not "blow off" too much CO2 (carbon dioxide). We can slowly lose CO2 tolerance over time if we "over breath," that is breath too fast or deep for our current level of metabolic output. Meditation untangles breathing and makes overbreathing less, over time, in general. But, even still, "anxietating," butt-in-chair stressful knowledge work, low-metabolic disease states, etc., can make losing CO2 tolerance more likely.
One way to improve CO2 tolerance is to do various kinds of breathing exercises---note that most breathing exercises might blow off too much CO2. You want breathing exercises that somehow involve net slowing the breath, pausing the breath, emphasizing exhalation somehow in duration or volume, or making the breath more shallow, somewhere across the whole pattern. Inhalation of relatively lower-CO2 air is what decreases the concentration of CO2 in the lungs and in the blood. Also, none of this is medical advice.
One example, perhaps: "For a time, lightly modulate the breath so as to come to feel warm and good and relaxed and safe."
BUT BUT BUT, by far, if possible, the absolute very best way to have good CO2 tolerance is to be physically active, if that's at all possible for your body, even a little bit.
Because, structured breathing exercises can potentially tangle up the breathing rhythm (and maybe other things), even though I'll concede gazillions of people do regular breathing stuff. See also: breath. If you do do structured breathing stuff, I personally recommend doing it many hours before bedtime, to allow the breathing rhythm to sort and settle through the day.
Back to physical activity, I find that slow and even relatively brisk walking doesn't quite do it for me, but that will be enough for a lot of people. A light mix of jogging (durational heightened CO2) and/or sprinting (CO2 spike) might be better. You might adapt as possible for ability/disability, dysautonomia, and ME/CFS. Talk with your doctor, in any case; not medical advice. Prior to untangling the breath, I needed to do something every 3-11 days. When I'm sick or sedentary, I need to do more, or even a walk is better than nothing if I've been super sedentary, for whatever reason.
Meditators might be relatively prone to losing CO2 tolerance in the early and intermediate stages of meditation if the are more still and quiet, while the breath is still untangling, and thereby possibly "overbreathing," over the course of hundreds and thousands of hours, than their usual previous habitual behavior. Making sure to exercise, somehow, every few days, more for some and less for others, in addition to a meditation practice, should completely prevent this, as best I can tell.
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[especially not edited]
Not medical or nutritional advice, etc., etc.; definitely talk with your doctor about weird gotchas and blood pressure and kidney stuff. But it is said that lots of people don't get enough potassium, magnesium, even sodium. (Calcium? More?) This is a very personal thing, as some people maybe do fine with less, and some foods or supplements agree with some people and not others. And some electrolytes aren't safe to supplement longterm and others aren't safe for people with kidney disease. For what it's worth, I've found that meditation "gets stuck" less (whatever that means---I sort of don't believe in meditation getting "stuck," though "jamming" or "coiling" or "it seems like nothing's happening," yes, so I'm using "stuck" here in a really weird way, see creativity protocol and other places for like "when nothing seems to be happening for days, weeks, or months"), again gets stuck less, when my body is "loaded" with plenty of potassium, magnesium, and sodium (and etc.). So if you're "stuck in a weird rut," (again, "stuck?" "rut?"---I don't mean "nonmonotoncity" but "rut") you may find you're eating way less sodium than you could be, or almost no potassium, and so on. Careful with your blood pressure with sodium, but maybe consider really trying to meet something around 100% of like the USA RDA (maybe try to work up to it over a week and see what happens). Careful with your kidneys with potassium, ditto, here, too, and so on. You could try to hit like 60% with supplements and get the rest from food, modulo fast food re sodium, and so on. Careful to balance electrolytes, in general, as one makes another safer or taste better, or something.
The following is very personal speculation and not medical or nutritional advice: this is sort of cliche I guess, and I kind of knew this, but recent personal experience has driven home that even if something is somewhere in the "reference range," via a blood test, it might, for some things where this matters, and not other things, be low in the body tissues (because the tissues are a storage tank to tightly control blood levels), and something being on the low end of a reference range can be mild-moderate evidence for low in the tissues. And if something gets low in the tissues, the body might pull all sorts of horrible-feeling tricks to try to continue to keep things tightly controlled in the blood. I think sodium is especially an important upstream enabler, to keep an eye on and to make sure you have plenty of (and, well potassium too and other things) because sodium increases fluid retention, which means there's a larger interstitial and intercellular "storage tank" for just about everything, including water soluble stuff that especially doesn't have a good way to stay in the body long. As long as your blood pressure is ok or good, you want a "big tank," I think--not 100% sure on that, though. And there could be blood pressure nonmonotonicities on the way to expanding your tank size, or something. You might talk to your doctor about whether temporary increases in blood pressure, if any, are safe for you, and how to properly monitor, and etc. Wild speculation on my part, not medical advice, etc.
Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolyte#Physiological_importance [last accessed: 2023-03-23]
*
2023-03-24 Speculation: ok so by rut above, I meant in part---I had really bad muscle tension from pre-wayfinding, pre-meta-protocol, pre-main-practice-p2 dumb things I was doing, plus some really bad trauma mixed into that and desperately layered and tangled over, understatement, and that plus maybe not getting enough sodium, and it's like the muscle tension and tangles I'd gotten myself into, plus again maybe low sodium, almost like deflated me like a balloon. And it's almost like I've needed to re-inflate like a balloon, increased tissue and blood volume, slowly, over weeks in order to finally completely untangle. Possibly some blood pressure non-monotonicity in here, too, though confounded by post-acute covid sequelae stuff. Still ongoing. In retrospect I'm going to judge whether more sodium was actually necessary or if it just helped. I would like to think that, like with many other structural situations, there can be large body changes (like losing a limb or losing mobility in a joint) that don't necessarily preclude fully untangling---of course, technical buddha nature always in principle (as best I personally and meta-personally can tell, for my part, fwiw) but things can be harder in practice. Anyway, this is a weird maybe-thing with electrolytes and a (hopefully) rather extreme and unusual circumstance. I will report back.
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Stub: to be clear, muscle tension that's slowly increasing and takes a long time to fade (and usually doesn't completely fade unless something significant is changed) is usually a bad bet, though sometimes returns or comes up in a good way if one had already previously made that bet. BUT, semi-voluntary, temporary muscle contractions (longer than "twitching"), as well as stretching or pandiculation (semi-involuntary stretches) are fine and often a good sign. If involving the eyes, do be aware that strongly or sharply looking upwards can apparently increase risk of retinal detachment. Gentle "eye circles," that don't max out eye range, might be done, perhaps three to five times around, in each direction, every one or two days, might lightly condition and stretch the optic nerves and decrease risk of retinal detachment. (I personally had a bunch of eye involvement, twitches, movement, salience, but never very strong or extreme eye movements. Since looking up with mouth open and tongue extended is a yoga stretch or asana, this might be something that happens to some people in a stereotyped way.) ]
See also:
involuntary movement, semi-involuntary movement, kriyas
https://meditationbook.page/#148a
"subtle energy" and "energy work" and mental models
https://meditationbook.page/#80
a brief and incomplete theory of muscle tension risk in meditation
https://meditationbook.page/#147
breath
https://meditationbook.page/#77
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(I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice. This is speculative. This is an incomplete and experimental draft.)
(cf. jaw head neck) / (cf. "unwinding lift")
*relatively or absolutely too much branched chain amino acids is bad (though bcaas are still essential amino acids)
*ah, branched chain amino acids --> competing out tryptophan --> reduced serotonin --> messing with melatonin = why my "circadian rhythm was spinning-clock-hands in freefall" when I was consuming too much pea protein. a bunch of large neutral amino acids compete with tryptophan to enter the brain, and tryptophan is the lowest concentration amino acid in protein-rich foods. [1, 2] sometimes it's better to eat carbohydrates by themselves to absorb more tryptophan into the brain because of how it changes relative blood concentrations of amino acids, and to time alternation of protein and carbohydrates over hours. [3] exercise can also elevate tryptophan relative to other amino acids in the blood because of differential use of amino acids. [4]
UPDATE: primates might work pretty differently than rats:
Grimes, Michael A., Judy L. Cameron, and John D. Fernstrom. "Cerebrospinal fluid concentrations of tryptophan and 5-hydroxyindoleacetic acid in Macaca mulatta: diurnal variations and response to chronic changes in dietary protein intake." Neurochemical research 25 (2000): 413-422. APA
*
[1] Richard, Dawn M., et al. "L-tryptophan: basic metabolic functions, behavioral research and therapeutic indications." International Journal of Tryptophan Research 2 (2009): IJTR-S2129.
[2] Choi, S., DiSilvio, B., Fernstrom, M. H., & Fernstrom, J. D. (2009). Meal ingestion, amino acids and brain neurotransmitters: effects of dietary protein source on serotonin and catecholamine synthesis rates. Physiology & behavior, 98(1-2), 156-162.
[also] Fernstrom, J. D., Langham, K. A., Marcelino, L. M., Irvine, Z. L., Fernstrom, M. H., & Kaye, W. H. (2013). The ingestion of different dietary proteins by humans induces large changes in the plasma tryptophan ratio, a predictor of brain tryptophan uptake and serotonin synthesis. Clinical nutrition, 32(6), 1073-1076.
[also] Fernstrom, J. D. (1988). Carbohydrate ingestion and brain serotonin synthesis: relevance to a putative control loop for regulating carbohydrate ingestion, and effects of aspartame consumption. Appetite, 11, 35-41.
[also] Choi, SuJean, et al. "Meal ingestion, amino acids and brain neurotransmitters: effects of dietary protein source on serotonin and catecholamine synthesis rates." Physiology & behavior 98.1-2 (2009): 156-162.
[also] Wurtman, Richard J., F. Hefti, and E. Melamed. "Precursor control of neurotransmitter synthesis." Pharmacological reviews 32.4 (1980): 315-335.
[3] [in rats] Fernstrom, Madelyn H., and John D. Fernstrom. "Brain tryptophan concentrations and serotonin synthesis remain responsive to food consumption after the ingestion of sequential meals." The American journal of clinical nutrition 61.2 (1995): 312-319.
[4] Young, Simon N. "How to increase serotonin in the human brain without drugs." Journal of psychiatry & neuroscience: JPN 32.6 (2007): 394.
newer / stated differently:
(Not medical advice: One pretty important thing is to make sure your protein has a relatively high ratio of tryptophan to leucine, isoleucine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and valine, i.e. tryp/(leu+iso+phe+tyr+val) approximately by weight is more than good enough. The ratio may be way more important than the total amount of tryptophan. So, just as an example, dairy or salmon is better than beef is better than pea protein (if I recall correctly), and nuts like cashews and possibly some fruits and plantains (careful with stimulating coconut oil if plantain chips) may be even better than salmon or dairy, even though they have much less protein. I don't supplement with straight l-tryptophan because it might be dangerous if you have any immune stuff, or even in any case, and anecdotally is physiologically confusing for the body. Also, after your last bite, it can take as long as 3.75 hours for serotonin and melatonin synthesis to begin, and, not critical at all, but the body prefers to ideally be synthesizing many hours in advance, like 8-10+ hours in advance is even better. Alternatively, if you do have circulating amino acids already, eating carbohydrates->insulin can differentially shunt already circulating tryptophan into the brain. So ~zero hours instead of 3.75, but there has to be already-circulating tryptophan to do this and a larger ratio of tryptophan to those other amino acids is still better.) [this paragraph can be found elsewhere in document, too]
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(stub)
Sometimes one can emphasis "solve" too much which can lead to "coiling." It can be good to balance "solve" with "dissolve."
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I generally like to sleep with earplugs, sleep mask, a completely quiet room, etc., if I'm sleeping alone. And then I typically meditate or daydream to sleep.
This kind of backfired when I was dealing with some new chronic (well, prolonged) pain and illness stuff, when my body became very loud. Absolutely, gentle engagement with my body during that time helped with autonomic rebalancing that eased symptoms and definitely negotiated down a bunch of pain and intensity. So that was good. But, my tendency towards engagement sort of backfired when there were things that weren't going to resolve or that I wasn't going to be able to work through in one night before sleep or even one week.
So I had to reverse a lot of sleep habits: Still, shades down and no blue light, but I wore no sleep mask and I added some yellow, orange, or red light in the room. No earplugs, and I added a little bit of white noise or mechanical noise (like a humidifier or a quiet fan).
In general, I think a dark room is better for melatonin and I think all things being equal the less noise the better**, but adding a little bit of external sensory stimulation subliminally took exclusive attention off the interoceptive body (which is generally fine/fun, all things being equal) and facilitated sleep in the presence of (temporarily chronic and relatively pretty loud) unhappy body stuff.
* Not medical advice, but protein with tryptophan in small, frequent meals, or protein with tryptophan in the reduced presence of other competing amino acids, as well as light exposure in the morning and noon, as well as no blue light or blue-blocking glasses after sunset, can also help with melatonin production, etc., etc.
** And indeed, environmental noise can temporarily interfere with some types of meditative refactoring. It's a good idea to find ways to vary environmental noise because different noise qualities can get in the way of different meditative things. Of course, one wants to engage with environmental noise and vibration, too, at the right times, which itself is a driver of sensory refactoring and resilience. See other environment sections in the document. And if one sort of isn't doing meditative-y things before or after sleep or between bouts of sleep in the middle of the night, then this potentially doesn't really matter, anyway.
See also:
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[Credit to a few people for a few ideas herein.]
In some cultures or social milieus, there's sort of a feeling, a vibe that anything reminisicient of "inability," "can't," "lack of capacity," "lack of capability" is definitely somehow bad.
"From the outside," that might be something perhaps like "excuses and procrastination are shameful and weak," or, perhaps, "not being team player, being a downer."
"From the inside," there might be a reasonable concern that dwelling on "can'ts" and "won'ts" might somehow be a self-fulfilling prophecy, somehow self-curtailing, settling, giving up, or possibly even dangerously demotivating, given one's life situation or circumstances. A rule might be gisted like "you shouldn't admit to limitations even to yourself," let alone coworkers(?), authority figures(?), peers(?).
"you shouldn't admit to limitations even to yourself"—-with respect to other people, sometimes that's the right call. With respect to oneself, it's a functional strategy, for some people, sometimes, in the short-term.
But, (possibly very) long-term, this becomes problematic:
Because, the experience of direct, felt, visceral, "can't," "no idea how," "confused," "lacking in capability," "completely lacking in know-how," means that you've fully unlayered and exposed a labile surface area--which means that it can now change, learn, and grow directly. (Sometimes stuff is stuck around it, maybe long chains of stuck stuff, so those all might have to untangle first, but in a vacuum, it can now change, learn, and grow directly.)
It's long-run critical to patiently "bring to the surface," untwist, find, find one's way inside, feel into, these patches, pockets, voids, "don't know" voids, sparse models, sparse content, sparse (surfaces) areas, childhood (surface) areas, patterns, propensities. (Often, maybe usually, the best way to do that is through surrender and allowing and patience.)
Unfortunately, one thing that can happens when we first realize the "power" of meditation is that we start furiously "building," "adding," "creating," etc. (to the detriment of the above [1,2] --- that is, untwirling and exposing and then being patient for "truly bottom-up fill-in" is generally (almost always) the right thing to do versus "[active] building" in or on top of). But we're usually not doing that building in quite the right "place" in the bodymind (see previous parenthetical).
Initially, there can be plenty of slack for what we build to kind of move around and settle, to find better "places." But, places that are shut away can't participate in this shuffling, and places that are shut away can sort of become fixed points, fixed/stuck places that then get "wrapped around" which, over time, takes slack out of the system and makes future changes slower and more complicated. [3] Eventually one has to find one's way all the way back. (There are can be suble and overt lead indicators that something is going wrong, like learning becoming effortful or increases in muscle tension.)
In some sense an exposed surface area is almost definitionally not a fixed point. And no fixed points, no constraints, very, very, very, very loosely speaking, sort of can participate in "unlimited slack" (in part because they can be sort of ongoingly revised, cf. redo-to-undo, in kind of ongoing global harmonization [qualifying that global is always local changes]).
So why is this so hard? Or why don't we automatically do this? Well we do! But for the hardest, deepest, oldest stuff, sometimes we need lots of meditation.
These places get sealed off or buried or pushed away in the first place because, for whatever reason, they (rightly or wronging, temporarily, transiently, or challengingly) inability seemingly implied something really, really, really bad, say, even "critically bad," unthinkable, beyond the pale. Perhaps not knowing how to do something (seemingly) implied being socially ostracized, or ending up homeless, or losing one's romantic partner, or permanently losing out on a lucrative career, and so on.
Given that, or the distant memory or impression of that, the bodymind might not let oneself find one's way back to that inability or not knowing (or that vulnerability, immaturity, lack, lack of safety, cluelessness, simple youth, innocence, something).
So the first step is sometimes "pre-handling all possible outcomes," all possible worlds, including the ones where one never learns how to become able to do that thing (and this can be and often is, wholly tacit, wholly patiently implicitly already handled). Once "any world is ok," then it's harmless to expose that surface area.
Easier said than done, of course! And that's why one might need thousands of hours of global wayfinding, and that's ok. Often it's not pre-handling all possible outcomes, but one kind of slider-puzzles in that general direction, solving all sorts of things along the way. Sometimes problems dissolve instead of get solved, etc.
Of course, the irony is that deeply, gently, patiently dwelling in inability is usually the fastest way to acquire the ability. There's a deep and direct phenomenological/functional thing, here, but, more conventionally, it gives us permission to be dumb, at least in our own heads, to be silly, to be stupid, to experiment, to play. Sometimes this goes along with it being safe to ask questions to expose our likely transient and temporary inability to other people. That can be a tremendous accellerant, if safe.
Sometimes it's lots of other stuff besides pure inability, pure don't know, don't know how. Sometimes there's "can't tell," sometimes there's "won't", and much more. Sometimes there's long chains and skeins and threads and twists, all throughout the system, a great deal of the bodymind, that one has to untangle, unthread, untwist (often effortlessly, spontaneously, over hours and months and sometimes years). This is "impossible" ("insoluble") problem territory, though likely actually solvable and if not solvable then dissolvable.
(And sometimes it comes with transient emotional and behavioral aspects, sometimes easy to spot, sometimes things that take you over completely, that can last a couple seconds, ten minutes, more rarely an hour or a day---ancient freakout, ancient out-of-control-ness, impulsivity, impulsivity-with-teeth, everything-is-bad, I'm-fucked, and so on. One gets better at safely managing things like this as they come up, though often it comes up before we're aware it's come up, and sometimes contexts, environments, and support can help. Some more gentle and expansive things, surface areas, can take days or weeks, or longer, to sort of "integrate" or "fill-in," which arguably is never complete. The less "active" this is, the more deeply, exquisitely patient and receptive this process is, probably the better.)
(Again, it can be hard, again and again. Because say you're almost really good at talking with people in almost all situations, but there's a few ways in which your approach is disastrous. Finding your way to something better might mean finding your way back to a wide, hidden space that doesn't know how to talk to people at all. So suddenly you're finding yourself flailing in situations that would have previously been easy and fun; because you've found your back to this older place. But that older place almost always has much more potential than your newer, mostly better yet somehow sharply limited thing. So if you can wait it out, and often this is very important because not doing so can bottleneck future progress, eventually that older place of not knowing will sort of spontaneously, slowly, patiently gently start to learn, and eventually, too, it will be able to make use of all the newer, more recent stuff that it wasn't able to make use of at first, and eventually you'll end up with something overall more effortless that has all the benefit of what you'd most recently been doing but with fewer and fewer of that things flaws. So, long-run, you get to keep everything good that you've got, plus even better things, making use, too, of that older, bigger more flexible place that had been sort of sealed away---better after that initial nonmonotonicity, all things being equal[, modulo aging, misfortune, etc., etc., etc.])
*
Often a big piece of all the above is self-warmth, self-compassion, self-alignment, and, indeed, self-acceptance, loosely and generally speaking.
There's the paradox mentioned above, where self-acceptance can be scary because it can sometimes initially dangerously feel like that would be self-curtailment or giving up. Self-acceptance and self-curtailment can be untangled (not to reify either of those). One can be self-accepting and still have love, fire, passion, excellence (more and more self-defined, in any case, in part because one becomes less and less afraid of accidently moving their own goalposts or pegging excellence to false idols, as it were)--this is something perhaps like "sovereignty."
There comes to be a sort of earned self-confidence an ease--that doesn't necessarily mean every problem as initially conceived will be solvable; problems will redefine and flow and get discarded for better ones. Though, capability does go up and up. Not insta-capability--that's often a fantasy, but the ability to steadily move towards ever-nuancedly-redefined competence and success, as challenges present themselves, no matter the all-in-all conditions on the ground (though, rather, completely taking into account all conditions on the ground), including proactive renegotiation with intimate partners, community-members, etc.
All in all, all of this, can sometimes be glossed as "becoming more yourself." This is sort of paradoxical and equivocating, but it points to something delicate and important.
When we try to be other people, out of desperation, jealousy, envy, etc., there's typically something that subtly goes wrong. It's ok to learn from other people, of course, to experimentally emulate, etc. But when we try to become other people, that's often problematic.
But when we become accepting of ourselves, over time, non-self-hating, non-self-attacking, slowly, slowly, then we can become exactly who we are and ever more ourselves. We can become more ourselves, ever more. And, in the end, it always turns out to be something way, way, way better than the (often illusory) thing we saw in that other person, the non-obvious tradeoffs that they were making, the things that they don't actually get to have, and so on.
And again, paradoxically, becoming more ourselves isn't settling but in fact is "getting exactly what we want," paradoxically, never perfectly, amidst sorrow and loss and hardship, but also better than we could have possibly imagined, tailored just for us, and by our own hand, in radical self-alignment, in participation and surrender with the world.
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[Note: This section has, relatively, a bit more of a not-quite-right, "toy model" feel than other sections, on average. Some nuance and exceptions are dropped around the edges. Some statements could be better hedged/qualified. The model down't quite hew to the territory, and so on.]
"burn off" and "integration"
The phenomenology can be a bit different for each of these, but they are both loosely equivalent.
The gist of these is something like:
burn-off/integration ~= "activity that (previously) needs to be conscious, then instead becomes appropriately automatized (and 'unconscious')"
An example is when one is reminding oneself to do something later in the day, over and over, in one's head. This reminding is "pre-integration." But, if the mind figures out how to "automatically be sure that you will do the thing, later in the day," then the reminding stops. So, pre-integration, the mind is loud, for some thing. Post integration, the mind is quiet, for that thing, because the mind is sure enough that it will be automatically handled. "Burn off" is like integration but there's nothing further in the future. It's just a thing that's no longer needed, and the mind figures out how to no longer need it.
suppression
The opposite of burn off and integration is something like "suppression." This is where something is sort of made unconscious, but without resolving the underlying thing, so it's still there kind of potentially gumming things up.
With integration/burn-off, it's sort of like what was conscious has been positively transformed into something that no longer needs to be conscious. With suppression, something is no longer conscious, but, sort of, no transformation has occurred; that something has just been sort of papered over.
Usually, when someone first learns to meditate, they're doing maybe 50% burn-off/integration and 50% suppression (or even much more of the latter than the former). When someone becomes very skilled at meditation, they're doing, long-run, with some qualifying, 100% burn-off/integration and 0% suppression. Doing a lot of suppression, at first, for even thousands of hours, is very normal, and part of the process of learning to meditate. Some people will naturally do more or less, when starting out, and anyone may have intermittent periods of heightened suppression. Suppression isn't bad, per se. Sometimes it's intermediately helpful. It's only "bad" if that's the only thing one is doing.
All that said, that way it can be problematic, is that there's sort of only a finite amount of "room" for suppression, only so much "slack" for suppression. After too much suppression, things will ultimately lose steam and meditative progress will potentially get stuck and slow down. (Worst case is behavioral rigidity, muscle tension, and potentially even more extreme things.) On the other hand, integration and burn-off, actually make more space--integration and burn-off let meditative progress continue and continue.
(By the way, suppression is a form of "technical debt.")
unsuppression
If something got much better during meditation (like e.g. "self attacking" was very frequent but became infrequent or nonexistent), but then it starts to get worse again, this can actually be a good sign.
Because, it can mean that previously suppressed things are becoming unsuppressed.
If something is suppressed, unsuppression is necessary for burn off or integration to ultimately occur: the mind can't go directly from suppressed to integrated--there has to be an intermediate step of things being unsuppressed and conscious. And then, from consciousness, integration or burn off can (eventually!!) occur.
It's hard to tell, at least at first--sometimes despair, fragmentation, etc., can mean one is doing something wrong.
But, especially if what's coming up is reminiscent of things previously experienced, and especially if there was a previous period of not too much happening, and especially if one isn't pushing/forcing, and especially if there isn't any muscle tension, then things "getting worse" can actually be positive signals. It's unsuppression. And, tentatively, cautiously, one should keep doing whatever it is that they were doing (sensitively, responsively).
Note that brain fog, lack of focus, distraction, moods, impulsive states--ANYTHING that can be consciously experienced!--can be the kinds of things that get suppressed and unsuppressed.
Integration, burn-off, suppression, unsuppression, etc., are very general dynamics.
*
Note: Not all "getting worse" is due to unsuppression, though, often (though not always--see next note), "getting worse 'again'" is due to unsuppression. "Getting worse" can also be due to, in some sense, "error propagation," uncovering old trauma (this is kinda unsuppression and kinda not, cf. "undo" and "gathering" and "finding one's way back," phenomenological shearing, realizing/inferring things on the basis of what one already knows, subtle (or overt) accumulation of evidence, planned/strategic or unplanned/unpredicted nonmonotonicity, and more. (Some of these overlap; and a few of these, including suppression, sometimes, coudl fall under "error propagation.")
Note: Sometimes seeming "getting worse again" actually isn't that, actually isn't suppression+unsuppression. There can be "copies" of stuff (or nearly the same or distantly similar) strewn/spread/sprinkled through the (body)mind. (These copies get made for all sorts of practical and problematic reasons.) So sometimes encountering something similar, at a later time, is not unsuppression but encountering a copy or a "spread." (In either/any case, it doesn't mean you've done anything wrong. Copies are sometimes error propagation but are often made for good reasons at the time or their creation. It's not necessarily good to "collect all the copies" into one thing, or to refactor near similarities and differences into more distinct ontologies. Suppression may have been a good idea at the time, etc.)
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[This section was meant to be a brief contrast and addendum to a previous section, but it turned into a bit of kitchen sink, not quite hanging together, even though it's still short.]
[Note: This section has, relatively, a bit more of a not-quite-right, "toy model" feel than other sections, on average. Some nuance and exceptions are dropped around the edges. Some statements could be better hedged/qualified. The model down't quite hew to the territory, and so on.]
In another section, integration was contrasted with suppression. If something is integrated, it's "samskaras" are (relatively) fully worked through. That little, integrated "patch" of "stuff" (very, very loosely speaking) is deconditioned, fine-grain structurally fluid, and "settled." It remains sensitive, responsive, alive, nebulously interconnected with everything else, but there's nothing more to be done (with it), right now.
(I use the word "deconditioned," in the above paragraph, and that's a bit of misnomer--deconditioning, in some sense, is always also reconditioning, though potentially very qualitatively different in grain, possibility, valence, everything. And reconditioning [sic] can continue for one's entire life, long after it no longer makes sense to talk about deconditioning [sic]. that is reconditioning continues long after deconditioning is relatively complete, loosely speaking.)
So, in any case, we can speak of (a) suppression and unsuppression, and we can analogously speak of (b) the settling of integration, as well as unsettling (and resettling).
As noted in a previous section, if something that was suppressed is then unsuppressed, dispositional propensities come back with it (and some subset of those propensities don't even go away, and, worse, they get stuck as long as there is the related suppression.
If something that was integrated/settled then unsettles, at worst there can be some nonmonotonicity, very generally speaking. At best, things are just perhaps limned a bit more with subtly shimmering potentiality, sometimes with attendant original sensory impressions and evolving insight.
(And it barely makes sense to speak of or reify all this as "it"s, "somethings", "things"--all this "stuff" shades into nebulous, inchoate, aconceptual, etc., in a good way. The language is just easier, when speaking of "something" or "patches,", etc. One must be careful to avoid inappriopriate reification, including inappropriate reification of inappropriate reification, etc..)
Why would "settled" things need to unsettle and resettle? When settling first starts to occur, its "done for now-ness" is very local. The system doesn't have much of a sense yet of "how it all fits together," doesn't have even the beginnings of a costless, effortless, implicit, embodied, felt sort of "map" of the global landscape. And, there are sort of mediate or latent contradictions, inconsistencies, tensions, paradoxes, contentions sort of spread throughout the "landscape of bodymind." (Also, settling that is merely local will always have subtle "flaws"--gossamer threads, tangled through, or molecule-thin sheets, overlaid, that prevent settling from fully completing. [Note: This parenthetical isn't quite right.])
As progress continues, "patches of settling" start to grow and sort of eventually encounter "disharmonies" or "impedance mismatches" in relation to "adjacent" "encroaching" patches. These might be disharmonies in plans, strategies, solutions, compensations, intentions, skeletal muscle motor plans, interpretations, hormonal regulation, energy metabolism calculations and plans, nebulous interleaved and multithreaded means-ends chains (and loops!), metaphysical incompatibilities, and so on.
Globally resolving all these disharmonies, asymptotically and nonmonotonically, over time, is astonishingly and recursively (and nebulously) combinatorial. It's an NP-complete problem. And it's also astonishing that it's asymptotically solvable! (And it's never FULLY complete because of ever more proactive action in the world, which uncovers surprises at the very bleeding edge of unknown unknowns. We seek learning, seek true surprise, and that surprise "invalidates" some fraction of settledness, necessitating at least a limning of ongoing unsettling and combinatorial resettling, over time. And that's ok!)
This is intimately related to so-called buddha nature--everything in/of bodymind is interconnected, and constituted, through life experience, in such a way that its all harmonizable in principle, in some sense no matter what. For any bodymind, in principle, there is necessarily an existing sequence of constrained and nonarbitrary operations that yields enlightenment, or whatever.
Also related to all this is finitude--the extent/expanse/structure of (body)mind is finite, in a good way, which affords strategies such as process of elimination, and making "all" the recoverable mistakes, as a really, really big part of all of this.
In addition to process of elimination, the other thing that starts to happen is "precomputation." For reasons really, actually, interestingly related to the halting problem, in computer science (really), the (body)mind can't know exactly what's going to happen next, based on operations with respect to itself. But, it can imperfectly approximate this knowledge, and it can get asymptotically better and better approximations of what's going to happen next. (These ideas were developed with a collaborator, with some critical pieces originating with them, and all mistakes with respect to those pieces are mine.)
Over times, local settling instead becomes more and more global settling, as local wayfinding becomes more and more global wayfinding, over thousands and thousands of hours. And, in that process, there's a tremendous amount of unsettling and resettling.
Importantly, you don't (and can't) sort of "hold the globality in your head"--you are the globality, as it were. All you need to ever do, is make local operations as best you can (doing, undoing, "nondoing," top-down, bottom-up, surrender, etc.), and those local operations become more and more appropriately global situated, sequenced, etc. You can only ever make local operations, as it were. You can only do whatever you can locally do. And that is enough. It just gets more and more surefooted, over time, with plenty of not knowing, sometimes for days or weeks or months, and including fundamentally.
I hestitate to say that everything ends up in a "harmonious unity," "one thing going in one direction." These descriptions can be very "heady," very intellectual, very abstract. Wayfinding, settling, unsettling, resettling is ultimately nonverbal, ultimately proceeds on the basis of procedural knowledge (sometimes interleaved with explicit knowledge). And milestones related to wellbeing, locuslessness, "sensational/'out there' computation," and potentially "centerlessness" and "agencylessness" (depending on your personal experience of how everything shakes out), not to mention knowing what to do even when you don't know what to do, inner peace, handledness, love, no inside/outside, one taste, nonduality, wisdom, etc., not to mention plenty of pain and sorrow, are maybe better ways to think about this, outside of these schemas and toy models.
In any case, in addition to the long-run, less optimal dynamics of suppression and unsuppression, there is also long-run integration/settling, unsettling, resettling.
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One is sort of making it safe to re-experience things, as part of how meditation works—eventually a re-experiencing is sort of the "final burning off of the (conditioning of the) thing." So often a person will re-experience at least a shadow of old, bad things, over and over again, until not again—things that they thought were long resolved, in the course of a great deal of meditation. (One trap is thinking that one is not making progress, because this thing has come up more than one time. It is progress! That’s just how the mind works.)
But there’s another thing that’s more problematic: If a person was crushing down a bunch of stuff, let’s say they then stop crushing. But say they haven’t fully worked through the thing(s) under the crushing. If something happens in the world to trigger them, around those now uncrushed things, like they see their old girlfriend or whatever, they might have a more extreme, more impulsive, more destructive reaction, in that particular case, than if they hadn’t ever meditated:
Behavior, belief or the very seeming of the world, and its attendant justification, will become live again, seem like the right thing to think/see/do.
And then they’ll/you’ll be in old destructive patterns, transiently, as bad or even worse than when those initial patterns were getting laid down. And then it’s maybe doubly regretful because this "last gasp" can go by fast. It can be embarrassing, especially if one is a self-styled advanced meditator. And if only you’d gotten to that old stuff, metabolized it, before being triggered. One just has to be as careful and meta-careful and meta-meta-careful and responsible with and around other people as one can be, and to make amends and reparations, if warranted, in a way that actually delivers, that takes into account all this. Not your fault, yet no excuse, all at once; it’ll be ok, but you can’t morally rely on that, etc.
Last gasps can be discouraging ("I thought I had made progress on this, but it seems like I've made no progress on this! It's been ready to blow all along!"). But, actually, you have been making progress all along: The mind can be very digital and all-or-nothing, sometimes. That is, "15%" progress can still be "100% problematic reaction." "85% progress" can still be "100% problematic reaction." "99% progress" can still be "100% problematic reaction."
And, but, finally, "100% progress" yields, sort of suddenly, almost digitally, "0% problematic reaction."
Sometimes "99% progress" can mean, unfortunately, "120% [sic] problematic reaction," because all "compensatory layering" or "counteractive layering" has been removed, in preparation for integration, metabolization, harmonization (i.e. the drop to 0% problematic reaction). Thus, "last gasp," "worse than ever."
But if one realizes that this can be a thing, one can be more careful about the possibility of last gasps (though usually one shouldn't avoid triggering contexts entirely/completely--they help with processing), and one can be less discouraged (or not discouraged) if a last gasp still unfortunately occurs, in a problematic way.
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So there's some finer-grain distinctions that can be made, that maybe fall under the umbrella of nonmonotonicity, or not even.
So can be sort of "pure 'negative' redo-to-undo" where old, unpleasant or problematic stuff, is just coming up as it's integrating, metabolizing, juxtaposing, burning-off, etc. (Sometimes it's yours, sometimes it's from other people, as it were, and so on.)
And there can be the usual "triggering" after delayering and decompensating (see the "last gasps") section, where surface areas get exposed, and where compensatory behavior, temporarily, or stably, as part of a larger improvement, got removed first, and so a person can get "triggered" in ways that they long ago used to, maybe a long time ago, or even in new combinatorial ways that they've never experienced before.
And there can be fractally and high dimensionally "heading in the wrong direction" (which technically, widened perspective, is the right direction, etc., etc.)
And there can be sort of "pure nonmonotonicity" (this is a catchall, cop-out bucket--there are additional better distinctions to be made, here) where stuff is just moving around and sort of transiently, complexly suboptimal, along the way, and that can show up in a myriad of ways.
So, finally, the main topic of this section, there's at least one more other thing that sort of has to do with something like "inferential transitive closure", or "epistemic closure."
Even though there is no real corner-cutting, haste, rushing, etc., etc., there's still that sense in which one is paying off "technical debt" faster than the overage, random person (who might be net-accumulating technical debt, quickly, or very very slowly). That paying off faster than average is, loosely speaking, is what meditation is, in some sense.
And part of that paying off, which is also constructive, is reaching new conclusions (not to inappropriately reify "new" or "conclusion(s)"--"a conclusion" can ring like a bell, sometimes, at least a first, but it is a nebulous non-entity, etc., etc.) about self and world, and so on. (See also the section: "meditation indirectly discloses domain knowledge".) These new conclusions are usually temporary waystations for something even better, and then even better, though eventually (thousands of hours), there will be nebulous, shimmery settling, more and more, sometimes with big changes, always ready to be awash in change, whether from within or without.
And, these "new conclusions" include insight into new risks and threats, new unhandledness!--
--sometimes you did kind of had an inkling before, but you just didn't have the bandwidth to deal with it; or, rather, it was obviously better to deal with what was in front of you, first, instead of this inkling, maybe for years. But, because of meditation (and etc.), over time, you now have more spaciousness and bandwidth because more things are handled, in general, or the ordering of things to do is rejiggering, in general, so stuff that was filed away for "later" is now getting reconsidered as possibly a thing that needs to be dealt with sooner, maybe; or, it really is something that really wasn't on your radar, yet, at all, but, through meditation (etc.) you "put two and two together," and now it is; or, now, the gory details of it, or the "threat surface area," is hitting you in much greater detail: spaciousness means that inkling has gone from inkling to vivid or just big. Sometimes this will creep up on you just after you've done "something," in relation to it, maybe something that you've done multiple times before, but now it belatedly gets tagged as "risky," "bad," something, and it's too late! You're already done it!
And so maybe you freak out, modulo available equanimity (which can be very context-specific, so isn't always a great abstraction).
And this can happen all over the place, these new and newly considered "threats," problems--it might seem to yourself or to the people around you, that, over time, you're getting steadily MORE neurotic, anxious, something, rather than less. Or there's bursts of extremity that maybe weren't happening before, or are now happening with greater frequency. (Now, it can mean that practice is proceeding in an unbalanced way, or it is just this phenomenon, being discussed here in this section.
All in all, you're finding//realizing, even compulsively sussing out, more problems (and maybe knock-on causing even more problems, in reaction to all that) faster than you're solving them.
Maybe it goes without saying, or it's important to note that seeming new (or old but more salient) risks or threats or problems might not be "real"! (Of course.) You, of course(!), can be super wrong about a thing being a thing or at least being a thing that locally or relevantly obtains. Intimations of threat can kinda coalesce, creep up on you--you just don't know yet, whether it's a problem, but a yellow light on the dashboard is going off or a red alert is sounding, because there's at least a provisional chance of "really bad." It can be stuff where it can make sense, be "reasonable," first-pass, sometimes, maybe, depending, or not at all, to be anxious or scrupulous about, like air quality, are the schools good, cooking food thoroughly, safety while driving, where your kid is at, inflation, lead paint chips, your future happiness, getting fired, race relations where you live, natural disaster preparedness, intimate relationship things, etc. In these cases, such things might be utterly, reasonably handle-able or sometimes, often, non-issues, but you just had never personally accounted for it, in some deep down way, that can then lead to feeling of anxiety or urgency, and potentially lead to impulsiveness or haphazard plans. It might not be a problem at all, never was, as partly evidenced by other people around you not freaking out about it, but sometimes other people can be wrong (or they are in fact behaving quite rationally or reasonably, even if they don't have good explicit reasons, as it were).
Some things can be or feel especially hard before insighs, refactions, realizations, whatever, around emptiness, groundlessness, impermanence, non-externality, and a decent amount of fluidity and confidence that somewhere somehow this is going to solve or dissolve or at least the absolute best thing to do is to roll with it. (Of course, as you have seen or will see, extreme problem after extreme problem, each practically maximally different than the last one, eventually, will start to solve and dissolve, or something, as meditative progress continues (even as some things are worse than ever, or getting even worse, until they're not, all things being equal)).
You'll be sorting through what you can and can't control, what's reasonable to do, based on expected value and risks and costs, and relatively to sort of your whole current cosmology and value system. Some people might "collapse" into temporary helplessness or hopelessness. Some people might incline a bit towards "heroic responsibility" (for better or misguidedly) or just plain megalomania and/or meddling/busybodying, including, via some route or another, entitledness, melodrama, and/or demandingness, for a time.
It can take months or a lifetime for some of this stuff to play out, with maybe a lot of initial flip-flopping in the first ten thousand hours, especially, etc., etc. Of course there is emptiness, groundlessness, fluidity, etc. Many of these "new problems" will be solved or dissolved, because of concrete solutions, because of metaphysics (as it were, dissolution thereof), because of the "Human Handledness is Already Success Principle" (the name is tongue-in-check; see elsewhere in the document)--that is, you've really, truly, all-the-way-down done everything you can about this, right here, right now, and so on.
So, anyway, all in all, there can be this period where you might feel kind of alone, as you're newly sorting out new-to-you considerations about the world, deciding what to do about them, if anything, where it maybe feels pretty urgent and salient to you, but those problems are just not top-of-mind for the people around you. And this can lead to friction if other people had expectations of you, for your time, attention, behavior, work, intimacy, something, or they're just generally in a different headspace, for better and/or worse.
And so, in the meantime, as with general nonmonotonicity and anything, you sort of have to manage as best you can. That can include timing meditation strategically, which sometimes (often) isn't possible, being extra careful about "problematic momentum" (which is maybe usually problematic) talking to people in your life, as best you can, about why your headspace seems to change for now external reason or why you're having disproportionate reactions to things, keeping these sorts of dynamics in mind as best you can, and so on.
And, over time, as per in part the whole point, you'll become more and more chill. Just like with "last gasps," these sorts of super-long-range inferences, plus regular input of the bleeding edge of true unknown unknowns, sometimes there can be big "unhandledness spikes" very late in the game.
And/but, all things being equal, over time, they will be met with more and more grace and equanimity.
And the flip-side of all of this is wisdom. You become more constructively anticipatory, more poised, more proactive, your time horizon extends and extends, you do more little things now that have maybe big effects later (and ignore a gazillion other little things that don't matter, and you don't beat yourself up when you're not sure), and this is all gentle, costless, effortless, fluid, compassionate, non-inappropriately-reifying, careful, socially graceful, harmonious with others.
(And sometimes a life like that will look like activism, politics, megaprojects, and sometimes it'll look like mentorship or being a good parent or playing videogames in a quiet part of the world, or something. Lots of important things happen with a generational lag, and family generations (and values) can be dynastic and exponential, so sometimes full-time teaching and parenting is maximal leverage, for world and/or just self, even when large technological changes are sweeping the world, etc., etc., etc.)
So, in conclusion, sometimes, freaking out about weird shit and being wrong about a bunch of stuff, and being kind of out of synch, in a bunch of ways, with people around you (until a long-run dynamic harmony, all things being equal, though not guaranteed, or context switch), means you're chewing through things, and extrapolating, maybe clumsily and especially error-ridden, especially at first, and you manage it as best you can, and this is the road to wisdom (and wellbeing and lots of stuff)...
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In meditation, sometimes one might go through periods of having involuntary movements (as distinct from sort of finding oneself sort of involuntarily inclining into different postures or body positions, and also as distinct from muscle tension, but/though all of which have pretty similar deep causes).
Involuntary movement can be arm movements, hand movements, head movements, shoulder movements, full body movements like arching of the back, eye movements, pretty much anything. Sometimes vocalization is a thing. Sometimes it's repetitive rocking or turning, sometimes it's more isolated and intermittent twitching or jerking.
Sometimes it can catch one by surprise and so be quite involuntary. Other times, because it's more rhythmic, one can incline towards gently, experimentally suppressing or quelling it, but as soon as one sort of semi-forgets about it, and attention goes a bit elsewhere, the movement will start up again, for a time.
As with lots of phenomena, questions that come up a lot with involuntary movement are, (a) is this a thing (for other people or in general)?, (b) what's causing this?, and (c) is it good or bad? (or, is it an indicator of progress?).
We'll mostly only focus on the latter question, here, though the other questions may be partially answered somewhat incidentally.
As an answer to "is it good or bad," as a general theme in this book, the answer, here, too, is, it depends.
(a) Sometimes movement is part of "redo to undo," and so it's "good." This can include some repetitive-seeming movements.
(b) Sometimes movement that is sort of repetitive means something is "stuck," like the body is trying to "compute out" something with movement but it can't quite complete the calculation. In this case one might consider this "neutral" or "bad." (As per usual, big scare quotes on "bad.")
(c) Sometimes movement, repetitive or otherwise is because other parts of the system are getting "squeezed" and so the movement is sort of "pressure release." I think in these cases, this is more likely to indicate entrenchment/burn-in, or at least loss of slack elsewhere but with a twist still remaining, and so this is "bad."
(d) Sometimes movement that looks a lot like (previous) (b) or (c) is actually (a). That is, one starts out with movement that's stuck or entrenching, but, in seconds, minutes, hours, or months, the system figures out how that that prior movement was counterproductive, and so repeats it to undo whatever the suboptimality was.
But, as per usual, it can be hard to tell which of these is going on at any given time, in part because it can often be a mixture of one or more, including all four, going on at once.
Do note, not all suboptimal movement needs to overtly redone as per redo to unto. There can be "liminal redo to undo" even when movements were very large and overt. That said, some overt movement, for some people, will eventually need to repeat itself, intermittently over weeks or months, at some point during the three to five to seven to ten to twenty to thirty years of the path (depending on how much time or resources a person has to meditate and how amenable one's system is to high temporal density practice, on average, etc.). Sometimes this is just a little bit and sometimes it's an almost "exhaustive" replay, though not necessarily all at once. It might come and go over months or even years.
In terms of generalities:
So, in general, maybe, if someone is experiencing a tiny bit of movement, fairly regularly, then this is a weak positive lead indicator.
If someone is experiencing a lot of movement early-to-intermediate, I consider this a weak indicator that someone might benefit from exploration of their models of practice.
If someone is experiencing a lot of "high-amplitude" movement "late" in their practice, in a meditation system that doesn't have something vaguely like global wayfinding, I consider this maybe a medium indicator that their practice took a wrong turn somewhere and they would have a decently long way to go, still (and maybe still heading partially in the wrong direction with a lot of momentum, as it were--and I'd then also be on the lookout (especially but not assuming it's necessarily definitely there, or anything, and it might not outside-view/observationally useful, in any case) for possible behavioral/cognitive/emotional rigidity or suppression and other issues such as lots of reduced slack). And not to reify or pass judgment on on of this, in a vacuum, all of this subject to outside-view provisionality and the limitations of anemic, vague, or abstract concepts, and, etc.)
If someone is experiencing a lot of low-amplitude movement (and maybe a tiny bit of high-amplitude movement); (especially that maybe keeps coming back but is interleaved with lots of other things), medium-to-late in practice, in a meditation system that has something vaguely or explicitly like global wayfinding, I would consider that a neutral-to-positive indicator, and first-pass assume that their practice was going fine, and I wouldn't be especially worried or find it remarkable or even notice, at all, if they had counterfactually reported no movement.
In any case, there are exceptions to all of this. It'll depend very much on the contingencies of that person's system, including earlier life experiences and the types of practices they might have previously engaged in.
In general, over time, nonmonotonically, movement becomes less and lower amplitude, more shimmery, people general become more still when not overtly moving, though not in a suppress-y way (and, for what it's worth, late stage, at the time of this writing, I change positions all the time, for comfort and self-care, and I jiggle a leg a little bit, or whatever, if I'm a bit too much in caloric surplus).
See also:
"subtle energy" and "energy work" and mental models
https://meditationbook.page/#80
a brief and incomplete theory of muscle tension risk in meditation https://meditationbook.page/#147
breath
https://meditationbook.page/#77
clarification on muscle contraction and stretching versus chronic muscle tension
https://meditationbook.page/#147a0
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Through movement, postures, pressure points, vocalization, and/or breathing, it can be possible to cause the experience of strong sensations in any or all of the perineum, lower abdomen, spine, crown of the head, and brow. Different people might experience this in partial or more complete and stereotyped ways. I personally haven't experienced this, and I tend to think it's a pretty extreme out-of-ordering. In some practice systems and supportive contexts it might be fine, though. I would loosely model it as placing a lot of "pressure" on the system to change, or as creativng a very strong sensational feedback loop. Though, if this had accidentally occurred, for me, I would have used it as feedback loop in the sense that I would heuristically treated a reduction of sensation as more likely to be on the right track, all things being equal. As with muscle tension (described elsewhere in this document) or anything, taking possibly stereotyped action, to narrowly increase the sign of any particular sensation or set of sensations, or as part of any single narrow feedback loop, can potentially take slack out the system in a way that can make it harder to experimentally navigate or backtrack and thereby potentially significantly increase meditation timelines rather than shortening them.
There's nothing super special about sensations in any of these areas, all things being equal, versus sensations anywhere else. They're meaningful, there's certainly correlative structure with respect to body and mind, it's not arbitrary, but, still, they're only meaningful, only generally so, insofar as sensations anywhere else are meaningful.
To be fair, the perineum is a bit special in that it loosely tends to correlate with early in life "stuff," and so on, and later in life tends to go up the spine, and so on, but these "top down" models should be treated cautiously, and the important thing is exquisitely sensitive personal global wayfinding at the finest sensational and temporal grain (speaking loosely, without reifying sensation, temporality, grain, etc.). And the perineum and spine and brow and etc. will intermittently be involved and/lor liminally involved all the time, as much as anything, etc.
See also:
ordering matters / order matters
https://meditationbook.page/#129a
"subtle energy" and "energy work" and mental models
https://meditationbook.page/#80
a brief and incomplete theory of muscle tension risk in meditation https://meditationbook.page/#147
breath
https://meditationbook.page/#77
involuntary movement, semi-involuntary movement, kriyas
https://meditationbook.page/#148a
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The use of language is relatively "full stack," it's a more total "bodymind act" than lots of other things, with real-time speaking even more so. There's a bit of a hierarchy from:
Because of this full stack-ness and how meditation is multidimensionally nonmonotonic, as in lots of a least little things are at least a little "broken" at any given time, midway through the journey, it's not uncommon for meditator language use to be "disrupted" or temporarily unavailable (except in an extreme emergency and sometimes even then(. This might be for minutes or hours or even days, on and off.
Sometimes this is a pretty blanket thing and other times it's more localized to particular topics, situations, or people.
Note that this isn't an agoraphobia type thing, though of course that can be a thing, too, but literally a physically can't form words (though often they're still thinkable, though very not always). Sometimes it's a can't or sometimes it's somewhere between "can't and won't though still often wanting to or at least feeling like it'd be locally expeditious".
In particularly sucky fashion, this can include a meta component of "not being able to talk about not being able to talk."
If this is too often or goes one for too long or it hasn't been flagged in advance to intimate partners and etc., it can be as bad as catastrophic for relationships. (Just reiterating that not everyone will experience this "can't talk" thing.)
It seemed important to note this phenomenon here. It might be good to warn friends, family, intimate partners, etc., well in advance before you've ever remotely experienced such a thing, to help them understand what it (doesn't) mean(s) and so on. It might be helpful to write out post-its before hand though sometimes even pointing counts as "talking" and so is unavailable to the system.
More to be said, here.
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[first draft written with thumbs on the phone, a bit repetitive or confusing in places until edit]
All the warnings and all the wayfinding might imply a certain “responsibility.” [1], [2], [3]
"Well if you get into trouble it’s your own damn fault, you made your bed now lie in it, told you so."
First it's worth noting that even when a great deal of progress has been made stuff cam come up with 100% intensity even when 80-99% “done” with that stuff. It can be very digital. [5]
But more to the point in this section, cf. all the warnings at the top of the doc and elsewhere, cf. the whole idea of global wayfinding [4] (and cf. homunculus issues [6]), all of this can make it feel like: / “if you’re suffering or overwhelmed, especially if it’s “big” )and also if it’s medium or small), "it’s your own damn fault and you should feel bad, guilty, ashamed." /Or , all the warnings and all the wayfinding might imply a certain “responsibility.” / "Well if you get into trouble it’s your own damn fault, made your bed now lie in it, told you so."
But, it could be my own bias and blindspots, but because of redo to undo and nonmonotonicity, I think things are almost always kind of bad, at least a little around the edges, and sometimes extremely bad, though I think this is person dependent.
Maybe if one precisely hews towards precisely understood and pointed out things (via teachers or books), like “do this first,” with respect to emptiness or lovingkindness or compassion or ethics or relationships or prostrations, or theory, or “view”, or concentration, then a lot of the hard stuff can be softened or shortened. (Or even/especially, do this global wayfinding thing with this meta protocol!!!!) I’m skeptical, because of tue precise ordering and wayfinding that some people need, I imagine at least some people would “grind or jam” if they tried to perfectly “prepare the ground,” first. But maybe traditions that have been around for thousands or years are onto something. I'm not sure, at this time, excepting that I've seen a lot of problematic missteps in at least some purported continuations of old traditions.
Are contemporary traditions that emphasize equanimity, sweetness, and relief lying? I don’t think so, in the sense that so many things get palpably better as well as a growing (correct, in my experience) sense that things can get better and better and better still. That's the whole point, etc., etc., modulo one is also opening onself to future pain, as part and parcel of that.
But, as mentioned in other sections, the very hardest things can get worse and worse before they finally get better, for months or years, and the very bad thing that perhaps may have (sublminally or not) inspired you to meditate in the first place, as mentioned elsewhere, may get worse and worse for the whole 10,000 hours before you relief.
“New bad” can seem to be a thing too, not just old bad that you kind of knew about or half knew about. Maybe it's latent karma you weren't aware of or something you picked up through subtle interaction, when you temporarily became extra sensitive, while a bunch of stuff was refactoring? Over time you’ll sort of forensically tease out the causal history of all these things. That’s a critical and semi-spontaneous thing that happens over time.
But, in the meantime, a contemporary teacher notes how at least several of their students experienced “unimaginable suffering.” (I’ve experienced this, too, though prior to version one of the protocol and so also prior to usage of the meta protocol.) What the heck? Did this not make it into the sutras? Are contemporary teachers and students doing something wrong? Unclear at this time. The end result, modulo good global wayfinding, implicit or explicit, is still the same (groundlessness, deconditioning, etc.!), at least.
Anyway, in any case, a main point: there’s always going to be at least one relevant sense in which you didn’t do anything wrong and you’re not doing anything wrong.
But, you might say, “Well I saw this coming, I should have known, other people warned me…” (if only; could’ve, would’ve, should’ve…)
Yes and no.
First, it’s ok to regret and review, that’s part of the learning, refactoring, integrating process for much of the path. And it’s ok and sometimes really, really good to explore the best version of what could have been. Something really deep there.
Second, it’s also ok to take refuge, sort of, in “determinism”: gonna do what you’re gonna do, what is happening is what was going to happen.
It’s nuanced, this isn’t fatalism or abnegation of responsibility, or victimhood, and exploring/reviewing counterfactuals (not to reify exploring/reviewing and counterfactuals) and also determinism can be freaky until/unless it isn’t.
(And like yeah “if only you had/hadn’t”—but maybe not, this might’ve been much better than something else! (There's that old taoist story where a seeming good thing leads to a seeming bad thing leads to a seeming even better thing leads to a seeming even worse thing leads to...)
(There’s also important point mentioned elsewhere, that you may have a sense you’re doing something wrong for hundreds of hours, because momentum, karma, redo-to-undo burnoff, and that might well be optimally executed practice, no other alternative.) [7]
Anyway, hard to say whether a better thing could have even happened, maybe stably same-ish outcome even given a lot of perturbations or even sharp counterfactual, very ok to retrospectively and prospectively explore though, and/but/also, because of causes and conditions (not to reify those, either), what’s happening is what’s happening, and now, and now, and also it’s ok to escape from that into reverie, and so on, and so on. Consider: not your fault.
*
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If I’m ok, I won’t be able to connect with the people who are not ok, and lots of people are not ok, and I need to be able to connect with them. So, I don’t want to be actually ok.
If I become ok I’ll lose everything that makes me actually good and me. Not being ok makes me safe, compassionate, empathetic, and sensitive. I like being those things, and I can only be those things if I’m not ok.
People won’t see who I am if I’m actually ok (because actually ok isn’t who I actually am), and it’s critically important that people see who I actually am.
I can’t actually be ok because then no one will love me. People will only leave people who aren’t completely ok, because such people are safer, more compassionate, more empathetic, more reflective. Only people who aren’t ok can actually know each other. Only people who aren’t ok can take care of each other. I can only be taken care of, when I need it, if I’m not ok all of the time.
I’ll be struck down if I’m actually ok. Being actually ok isn’t safe. Being actually ok makes one a target.
If I’m actually ok, I will have to do things that I don’t want to do, that I’m ideologically and constitutionally against doing. I don’t know any other way of not doing and not having to do those things than not being ok.
Being ok is against my belief system/ideology. Being not ok is what makes people good. Being not ok is what makes people transcendent. Being not ok is an act of transgressive power.
Furthermore, it’s not ok to bask in the goodness of not being ok. Given that I’m not ok, it’s also not ok to fully enjoy not being ok. It’s not ok to enjoy how being broken is incredibly delicious.
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If I'm not ok, I'll be a burden on everyone else around me. Being not ok taps the finite well of others' patience and care. Being not ok is a social currency I can't afford to spend.
People won't love me if I'm not ok. People only love those who are put-together, reliable, composed, and healthy. If I stop being ok I'll stop being lovable.People won't accept who I am if I'm not ok (because falling apart isn't something I'm allowed to be), and it's critically important that I remain acceptable to others.
I'll be abandoned if I'm not ok. People only want to be with those who have it together and who don't need too much. Only people who are ok get to keep their relationships.Being not ok is a moral failure. Being not ok represents a surrender to weakness. I have to be good and strong, and being good and strong means being ok.
If I'm not ok even for a moment, everything will unravel and my life will come undone. There is no space between "completely ok" and "complete collapse." I must maintain okayness or risk total disaster.
Being not ok would be shameful and embarrassing. It would mean I've failed at the basic task of holding myself together. Everyone else manages to be ok; being not ok would mean there's something wrong with me.
I’ll be taken advantage of if I'm not ok. Being not ok isn't safe. Being not ok makes one prey to others.
Being ok is what makes me valuable to others. By being ok, I can play a role and have a place in the world. If I stop being ok I'll become unnecessary and lose my place.
Being ok is the price of admission for existing in the world. If I'm not ok, I lose my right to take up space, to have needs, to be seen. Not being ok is a luxury reserved for people who have earned the right to fall apart.
To be not ok is to admit that all my efforts at self-improvement have failed. It would mean that everything I've done to improve my condition has been a waste of time and that I have nothing to show for my effort. It would mean facing the possbility that I am unfixable.
The world needs me to be ok. My family needs me to be ok. My future self needs me to be ok. There is too much depending on me for me to ever be not ok.
Furthermore, it's not ok to question my okayness. Given that I must be ok, it's also not ok to examine how exhausting this is. It's not ok to acknowledge how being constantly ok is incredibly lonely.
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It can be tempting to "reify" "space" as such and "sensations" as such, to "feel space," to "point to sensations in space or in the body," the raw sensory experience as such, the shimmering/blinking "voxels," the "pixels" in extreme fine-grain detail.
Yes! Do this! if you’re drawn to it. This might be essential to do for at least a little bit. Let interest, intuition, meta-protocoling guide you. But, in some sense, "sensations as such" are no more/less real than chairs or tables. "Space itself" is is concept-laden, meaning-laden, and no more/less real than chairs or tables.
There are maybe subtle traps in "trying to make space real," "treating space as real," "pointing to things, extensions, volumes, manifolds" precisely in space or in the the body, and so on. This can lead to tangling, twisting, knotting. But a little bit of exploration like this (or a lot, depending on the person) can lead to untangling, untwisting, unknotting. It’s very contingent, what concepts, moves, etc., will be helpful, deliberate or spontaneous.
"Space" and "working with space" can be an excellent metaphor but is maybe not a good basis of practice. But for some people, some of the time, it might be a metaphor that very cleanly gives way to emptiness. It just depends.
And of course try to not to "reify" "reification," "inappropriate reification".....
(All of this pretty much applies to "time", as well.)
[See also: https://twitter.com/quotidiania/status/1367900435013644290 [Last accessed: 2021-03-05]]
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[There might be some erroneous or missing "nots" in here. Like some "signs might be flipped" or it's fine. This hasn't gotten a single editing pass, yet. Pure draft.]
It's maybe helpful to distinguish between something like "early-/mid-stage raw/bare sensations," on the one hand, and something like late-stage, post-conceptual, luminuous, non-dual sensations, or something.
(To be clear, at the time of this writing, I don't particularly continuously hang out with/in the latter, as such, though I visit, and I don't have much "inside" to speak of, fwiw. There's a question of what experience is like for late-stage practitioners, in general---I notice that at least some people who've been practicing for 20-30+ years, who do credibly describe nonduality-esque things and luminosity-esque things, tend to hedge with things like "when," "sometimes," "not all the time". And this parenthetical actually dovetails nicely with the below.)
Ok, so raw/bare sensations are emphasized by some practice traditions, sometimes especially with respect to the body, sometimes especially with respect to "the outside," and so on.
I have some concerns about this---I think they can become a trap, especially when they're overly reified and "ontologized," or something. This could be contemporary categorizations like "touch," "sight," "sound," etc. Or more five-element type stuff like heat/cool, pressure, wetness, etc. There's also pleasant, unpleasant, etc. This can even be an issue with free-form noting (which I think often does semi-converge to a smaller collection of notes with fuzzy boundaries, with notes sort of entering and leaving the main collection, very, very loosely speaking).
(This is related to my cautions around over-reifying space and even time. In the case of space, cf. emptiness and nebulosity, for example, and just as an example, it can be helpful to play with the idea of sensational pixels and voxels, but also there are no pixels and voxels of sensation, or even "pinpoint notes or noticings," though this can be a helpful mode.)
Anyway, I want to make a further distinction between "inferred ontology," "high-level ontology" and "bare sensations." An example is something like, respectively "hearing a bird," "seeing a bird," and "hearing the tone, prosody, melody of birdsong as such."
Or, seeing dappled water rippling in a sunlight stream versus the actual glint of reflected light.
With these distinctions, my first point is something like, at least in some senses, there's actually not that much difference between a "high-level percept" and a bare-sensation percept or a "pinpoint percept." (THough in another sense there is; see below.)
Rather, maybe, conceptualizing or "applying a concept" (not to over-reify these!!!) to a high-level percept isn't that different than conceptualizing a "bare-sensation percept." Rather, maybe, "bare-sensation percepts" are "also a construction." The high-level percept (or unseen inference) is more likely to be "sensorily multimodal" and the the bare-sensation percept is more likely to be sparse-modal or uni-modal. But, something similar is happening, in both cases.
Some systems emphasize the difference between sort of the "real sensation" and then the "mental or reflected sensation, image, etc." with maybe then an additional step of "applying a concept" and then maybe additional cognition or thought on top of that. And somewhere in there is maybe a registration of pleasant or unpleasant or neutral and more elaborated emotions are somewhere in the stack too. And there's grasping and thirst, etc., somewhere in there. There is something very generally like this going on! But it's nebulous and I think shouldn't be overreified. And I don't know if it's "genetically hardwired" or more of just a tendency. I don't think one needs to investigate this as such. The untangling mostly takes care of itself and doesn't need to be conceptualized in various particular ways according to various systems. It's inherently nebulous (and empty), in any case.
Anyway, there's another thing, here, which is something like, there's "knowing" all through the stack. Like there's always a pairing of sensation and knowing, that starts out bare and simple and "close to the outside" and sort of merges with other sensations, increasing in complexity, until "bird!"" or "skyscraper!". And we can sort of refactor "the porthole of awareness" to view different parts of this cumulative process---when we view different parts of the process that little "step" refactors, untangles a little bit, something. It's sort of the same mechanism whether low-level percepts or high-level percepts. A lot of meditation is (spontaneously, non-deliberately) sort of refactoring the "high-dimensional porthole", sort of "raising and lowering" stuff into and out of that viewport so it all can be "sunshined" or juxtaposed for spontaneous blending and rearrangement, and so on, very loosely speaking.
Anyway, I'm sort of contradicting myself. On the one hand, the conceptualization of all this should be held very lightly, not tightly, not made heavily into parts and thing-like-ness. But, on the other hand, at the same time, yeah there's something different about different "sense doors" or whatever, versus pain, versus valence, versus etc. There are sometimes-profitable conceptual distinctions, there's a there, there. The "qualia-feel" is different, etc., presumably relating to types of nerve fibers, mammalian neuroanatomy, cortical maps, and whatever.
And on the one hand, there's nothing special about bare sensations; there's just one more "conceived object," whether done so explicitly or implicitly. But on the other hand, there is something special about bare sensations.
I guess the confused point I'm trying to make is something like this:
Bare sensations becoming salient is a positive lead indicator. But don't get stuck on bare sensations. And it's always ok to go back to them. And all this happens naturally if held lightly. Ditto for sort of grain and speed.
Be careful about forcing bare sensations because that sort of builds an attentional armature that eventually has to be taken down with no remainder, anyway. The system wants to experientially-spatially-temporally take things apart as a deep-foundational thing, but once that work is done the system likes to go back to high-level percepts. (And the system reserves the option to keep going down to refactor the deep sensory stack as needed, as more errors need to be corrected or more elegances are found for that particular person's anticipations and needs and lifeworld. So "depth" or "near the beginning of the sensory stack-ness" can for sure be "re-gathered" or slowly progressively refactored at any time or is done slowly-continuously, one sort of has to maybe move a bunch of stuff out of the way and then move that stuff back.)
I say "ditto for speed," above and it's also the case for "pinpoint-ness"---attention, awareness, something will naturally speed up, strobe, focus, as needed, usually it's very brief, if one is properly executing global wayfinding.
Anyway, there's a sense in which the whole sensory processing stack---sight, sound, etc., "knows how to spontaneously refactor just right" and at some point in the meditative journey there's especially a lot of this and then it calms down and then there's much less, but there can be periods of lots again and there's always a trickle.
I don't mean to say it's completely spontaneous, there's stuff to do, though in some sense it is, and/but in any case "participation."
Maybe the pithy-est thing to say is just bare sensations as such becoming temporarily salient is a positive lead indicator, all things being equal, but doesn't need to be forced and doesn't need to be held onto.
This is also contra-mindfulness in the sense that one wants most things to be unconcious and automatic, just not the wrong things, in the wrong ontologies. And meditation is about refactoring what's unconsious and automatic by temporarily de-automatizing things, which makes some stuff shittily unignorable, transiently and temporarily, in fits and starts, but then, generally speaking, things re-automatize and become unconscious again, in a better way. And the system learns over time to move things around such that things that are more likely to need to be de-automatized and re-automatized, in the future, are sort of arranged "closer to the surface." So it's sort of like refactoring a software code base for easier maintainability, in addition to optimizing it for performance and correctness. And/but note that there is no free lunch in the sense (in the computer science / machine learning sense) in that peformance and correctness are relative to anticipated purpose and anticipated landscape, as it were!
And this does cash out, all things being equal, as kind of getting to hang out in the world you want to hang out in, or with the sensations and higher-level experiences that you want to savor and enjoy, with TONS of stuff being handled automatically. And then the system more and more learns to proactively unpack and refactor stuff as needed, and better and better before it's needed but not too soon---optimal bodymind refactoring reordering, perhaps in the cracks of life, while falling asleep, while waking up, while taking walks, while noodling, while meditating, which could be inclusive of all those things and for lots of people is [but as per usual I would say don't mash meditation into daily life stuff that it doesn't felt-naturally-spontaneously blend with, ok to just live, that's the point anyway, etc. etc.].
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Back to the parenthetical way above, just as with bare sensations, I think "cool non-dual and luminosity stuff" is a positive lead indicator but not something to be fetishized or over-reified nor something that one should "try to get to stick."
I sometimes say, a bunch of bits have stably flipped, somewhere, and I can go check and be like, "yup, they're still flipped" but otherwise my experience is pretty normal, natural, ordinary, something. Usually-but-not-necessarily, an oozing tendency towards quiet, clear, peaceful, well-being-full but possibly all over the place because of life stuff that couldn't (yetttttt) be completely proactively, meta-meta-meta-meta handled (lots of mundane things and especially interpersonal things) or something came out of unknown unknown territory.
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Added later:
ok, so to clarify again, for both "bare sensations" type stuff, early-to-mid-to-late on the path, and for "supramundane" type stuff, like hanging in emptiness, luminosity, nonduality, centerlessness, doerlessness, watcherlessness, etc., etc., etc.:
for all of these types of experiences, they're sort of keyhole or bottleneck or eye-of-needle or passthrough experiences (in an effortless, spontaneous, just happen sense).
on one side of the keyhole you've got deconditioning, deconstructing, dissolving problems, de-automatizing, deprogramming, (redo-to-)undo, de-functional-fixedness-ing, de-fabrication, and so on.
on the other side of the keyhole you've got reconditioning (in a good way), reconstructing (in a new way), solving problems (with reduced constraints), re-automatizing (better), reprogramming, new-do / non-do, creativity and invention, non-layery fabrication [all of this happens more "flatly" (in a good way), more isotropically, more structurally fluidly]
so, if all is sort of going well, all things being equal, keyhole, bottleneck, eye-of-needle, passthrough, pivot point experiences are sort of brief, fleeting, transient. you go there, you need to go there, but you don't stay there. mountains become mountains again, afterwards, as it were, just a little bit different / better, but normal, ordinary, etc.
you go there, sort of fractally, from different angles, at different degrees of "completeness" and "depth" and return there periodically, in temporally extended mixes of cycles, subcycles, supercycles.
So, "bare sensations" and "supramundane experiences" are positive lead indicators but are not something to strive directly for, are not something to hold onto, and are not "the thing."
The thing is sort of knowing things, self and world, everything, just exactly as they are. (That's one way to put it, anyway.)
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Some language drawn from here but the video is not an endorsement of my position:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg3cQXf4zSE [Last accessed: 2022-11-05] The Bayesian Brain and Meditation by Shamil Chandaria
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(1) There’s sort of a way in which experience accumulates or "tangles up" from the perineum to the crown of the head, over a lifetime. This may have something to do with ontogeny/phylogeny/something of the neural cord/crest, etc., in prenatal development. Around the perineum can be especially tangly. Around the neck can be especially tangly too.
(2) Part of untangling things is something like applying "structure preserving transformations" to "safely move things out of the way" so one can "metaphorically peer deeper and deeper down into the system," as if one was above the head looking down into the neck, down through the volume of the body. It can be like the center of a square of tissue paper is placed on top of the perineum, with a dab of glue securing it to the perineum, and then the tissue paper is "crumpled and twisted upwards through the volume of the body. And so what’s described here is gently untwisting and uncrumpling the tissue paper to expose that anchored part of the tissue (and finally then even that can flow, sort of).
(3) Knotting and tangles can feel like knots and tangles, but also "seams," pockets, bags, crumples, etc.
(4) Unknotting, untangling is a combination of directness and indirectness. The "knot itself," not to "inappropriately reify" a "knot as such," while of course being spatially/experientially nebulous, dynamic, might seem to be localized or semi-localized in "body experience" and/or "inner space" and/or muscle tension and/or some or all of these. And/but, it can be helpful to consider there to be thin tendrils reaching diffusely basically everywhere. So, sometimes, one might focus too much sort of on "the knot itself," but untangling will likely involve a tremendous amount of time "very far away" from the knot. It can be good to balance directness and indirectness. And, of course, these are "leaky abstractions," and "puzzle solving" will ultimately be radically concrete, engaging with the specific, particular details of one’s own life history, mindbody, bodymind, etc.
(5) In addition to "within the body" or "within inner space" (or pocket worlds, or pocket realities, suffusing or entangling with "the world out there," and so on), one might also explore the surface of the body. It can be as if bedsheets or very-high-surface-area, thin parachute material is wrapped around the body again, and again, and again, including through the body, multiple times. This is to give a sense of just how wrapped and tangled things can be. And this can be pretty normal, over a few decades of living! And then meditation is partly a painstaking unwrapping, untwisting of these wrappings and wrappings, slow, shimmery, tingly, undulation or buzzing over large surfaces areas. Just another way it can be like, of many, on and off or over extended periods of time. And so, "untangling" something "seemingly very small," say, in the perineum, or the face, or the neck, etc., might involve sort of unwrapping football-field-amounts of sensation, material, something, to kind of "get all the way down" to unwrapping that small twist. That is "everything" was kind of involved in that small twist.
Note: when I say "unwrapping bedsheets," it's sort of like it slides along the surface, like all this is happening in cylindrical or concentric layers, layers of surfaces, multiple simultaneously layers of cloth sliding against each other in different directions, mostly, until there's only a single layer, and not like sort of "big-unwrapping-ness-es out into space around the body," or something. Just metaphors, though relatable to sensation and experience, sometimes.
[thank you to a collaborator for giving me an opportunity to articulate a chunk of this]
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Everybody does "attention" and "attending" differently. There’s sort of a sense in which there’s "only awareness" and "attention" is an illusion. Some people "attend" in a very "heavyweight" way, much "comes along with it." And some people attend more lightly.
Often, "attention" is "too tangled up" with "other things," and this can be a bottleneck. "Untangling" makes "attention" more "light."
The way to untangle attention [from other things and even completely] is no different than untangling anything else from anything else (muscles, imagery, knowing; see other sections). It’s all bodymind, all experience.
[See also: https://twitter.com/eating_entropy/status/1367920780823044097 Last accessed: 2021-03-05]
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(epistemic status: not exactly, maybe too extreme, needs more qualification, at least, and, but, etc.)
"Internal" action, "mental" actions, perhaps (but not exactly*) even "subtle" actions are essential until they’re not (if ever) but there’s a sense in which perhaps all such actions are inherently jammy, grindy, frictiony, contradictory, contentious somewhere deep down. As in, any action that doesn’t stabilize or move the (")physical(") body, smoothly, coherently, is perhaps in some sense wasteful or ultimately superfluous.
*This isn’t quite right because perhaps something like "inner space" transforms, thins, becomes re-known (cf. "just this" and luminosity**). But that doesn’t negate fantasy, imagination, play, shared dreaming, the positive (inner) spaces between (us). And/but/though/also, there’s senses in which thinking ("mental" action, mental effort) ultimately isn’t needed for any of that***. ("Ultimately," as in eventually, because mind stuff is sometimes for sure needed until it isn’t.)
**"in the seeing just the seen, in the hearing just the heard"; centerlessness, agency-less-ness (not saying these are necessarily good, necessary, inevitable but sketching out the space)
***see section: merely just having the experience itself, and, technical debt is good, actually
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Something to keep in mind is that some phenomenology is relatively more prone to being "misinterpreted" or "misconceptualized," still not committing to any particular thing when using the words "phenomenology," "mistinterpretation," "misconceptualization," etc.
In particular, phenomenology that is "dim," "dark," "black"(!), is not just harder to "see" than gross/overt/bright/clear/something phenomenology or even subtle/low-intensity/low-magnitude that’s not "black." It’s, again, more prone to being misinterpreted/misconceptualized.
"Very dark" or "black" phenomenology sometimes contributes to people, in part, locally, isolatedly, in some part of their "system," "believing" that they’re nothing, or that they’re dead, or that nothing’s there, or the phenomenology itself is nothing, or there’s a black hole "there" that one might get sucked into, and so on.
It might be worth noting that "black" phenomenology is still phenomenology! It’s still present!
As a caveat, this doesn’t mean all "black" phenomenology is "safe" or "harmless" or "the same" as all other "black phenomenology." I mean, it’s definitely safe in some absolute sense, but don’t interact with it mechanically or unresponsively, as per usual! Possibly engage in things like the meta protocol in inclining towards what to do! There’s still a sense in which bad/"bad" things could be lurking/hiding in "the black," in "the dark" (or in bright stuff, too), depending on all sorts of factors.
Again, please don’t "fix"/"stabilize" the meaning of pretty much any word in this section (or in the entire document), but there’s a thing, here.
Additionally, given some relationship between quality and conception, there’s a related thing with conceiving presence and absence.
For example, it’s important to distinguish between (a) not X, (b) the absence/lack of X, (c) the presence of the representation of the absence/lack of X, and so on. Making a light, local distinction between something like "experience" and something like "concept." Conceptualization or experience of the lack of X, which, in some sense, technically, is presence, not absence, may be accompanied by dim, dark, or black phenomenology. (Again, not all dim, dark, or black phenomenology is "the same.")
Example:
lack of belief and/or lack of disbelief is not the same thing as "active/present" disbelief, which might be some combination of feelings, thoughts, "phenomenology," sensations, etc. And some of that might be very dim, dark, or "black."
Note:
There are parallels, here, to "unvalenced" phenomenology and memories. (vs "valenced" as in phenomenology/sensations that is/are directly positive/pleasurable/good or negative/noxious/bad/etc or, more loosely, sensations or experiences that are associated with such.)
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See also:
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(draft)
Sometimes it's almost like phenomenology (experience, "content," sensation...) can almost be taken as like a "boundary condition," almost like something not to be experienced but like something that circumscribes the limits of experience. It's almost like it's encouraging a "sliding off," almost like an "everything but this" flavor. It doesn't have an "avoidance" flavor, though. It's most just like a neutral, overlooked, "this is out of bounds and also it creates the bounds."
For both "boundary condition"-like things and "avoidance" (that's a problematic concept), I don't recommend "pushing" to not slide off, sort of. It's maybe more like a "not losing track that it's there"-feeling, but also not pushing to keep track. The implication here is that, yes, generally speaking, eventually experiencing the seeming boundary condition as an experience as such (as well as experiencing things to be (at first) avoided, too) is good; but, again, the key thing is eventually, at the right time, in the right order, when it's safe. For avoidance-type things, it's more about safety (which cannot be rushed or corner-cut, generally). For a seeming boundary condition, it's more just knowing that there's a there, there, or knowing where or how to look, as it were. Because of structure and layering, there's precursor to this that generally can't be skipped, like there is no "there," there, until there is, or until there is again. In any case, sometimes "(almost) everything but" is needed to sort of triangulate, and other times "everything but" is at least partially on ordering error. And in any case one can sort of, when finally available, kind of allow for a bottom-up influencing of ordering to finally hone decisioning and prioritize experiencing the seeming boundary condition as such and that can often unravel a lot of things and de-bottleneck, because it can be so pernicious. And thereby a lot of stuff can get wrapped around it.
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Also, "when it's safe" can sometimes be an ordering error, too, in the sense that phenomenology can sort of mistaken as like "base structure," like, "if I touch that something bad will happen in a very general or mind-y way," but this can be in error, too, and actually it's safe to experience as such, sooner rather than later. But plenty of things can be very premature and destabilizing so it's best to trust the concern first and explore very carefully if or when that's even quickly possible. The bodymind might not itself be ready in any case, so it won't even be an option. Bottom-up-ness withstanding, etc., etc., not to imply ultimate separation between bodymind and "you."
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See also:
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(draft)
So this is a heuristic (not a rule, take with a grain of salt, one size does not fit all, etc etc)
When meditation is sort of going downhill, in a good way, in the sense of like water flowing downhill, spontaneous---so there's all of:
So it’s sort of like you're on a water slide and the water slide has forks in the road, as it were.
(That would be weird and dangerous, though, for a literal water slide with like "forks," because people would hit the “angles” between the forks sometimes. So maybe here it’s more like train track forks where the track switching happens in plenty of time before the train actually gets there. So, ok, the water slide rejiggers so that when you go down a fork it’s smooth and you’re not going to hit anything.)
Anyway, in this case, where you’re going downhill, and you have choices, heuristically, it can make sense often to choose/steer/incline continuously in the direction of increasing (or at least momentarily stable/"stable") badness, unpleasantness, horror, shame, muscle tension, whatever the thing (or things is/are), etc.
Loosely speaking, ordinarily, not in this case of (abc), you might sometimes have to push or at least “do” to incline towards badness (when bad/"bad" stuff is not already spontaneously arising, of course). But when you don’t, as in the case here, it’s a great opportunity to potentially find your way to redo-to-undo badness without incurring technical debt, and in fact this is possibly long-run necessary to process “everything.”
This, here, in the case of (abc) is also potentially useful/good when you’re sort of doing long-run triangulation and de-bottlenecking when things are kind of “gooey,” and/or/also like there are a lot of inchoate choices, or there are sort of discrete tangles/strands but they're very "thick" and ropey and yet flexible and also you sort of "can't see very far ahead at all," and, when that’s the case, “downhill in the direction of increasing badness” is potentially one of the most efficient things you can do in terms of (typically fractionally) reducing overall timeline, because of how additional untangling can sort of sometimes tumble out for free over time, as part and parcel.
Some things to watch out for is that going downhill can (a) shade into, turn into subtle pushing, so an increase in structural karma/technical debt, as you sort inadvertently, sort of subliminally at first, "try to keep things going," or (b) can uncover latent or previously layered-over pushing and forcing. In the first case, heuristically, you then want to back off because there’s now that non-downhill component, not to mention the likely layering. In the latter case, where it’s sort of uncovered versus added, it sort of depends---you sort of have to try to discern whether that uncovered pushing is now (a) burning off, letting go, integrating, etc. or (b) whether it’s entrenching or layering. Even in that latter case it just depends, but sometimes in the latter case it’s good to do/go something/somewhere else or to get up and take a walk, or to take a nap, etc.
Finally, even though downhill often feels good and correct, and often is the right thing to be happening, one should always sort of treat any kind of "momentum" with at least low-key caution, because potential partial error propagation and subtle layering of, sort of, the momentum itself which can pull things in a weird direction, over time, even when not meditating. Generally one wants momentum to kind of be eating itself continuously as its happening, kind of in the best case. But long-run all kinds of other things work too; technical debt is sometimes necessary and useful, etc., etc.
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See also:
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There are times in which the phenomenology of chaos, dissolution, distintegration can seem very "functionally real," like "going in that direction" IS dissolution, disintegration, chaos, madness, destruction, being eaten alive, and so on.
There is a sense in which this has to be trusted. Generally, you can't and won't do something, e.g. "go towards," unless it's somehow "safe enough" "to the system."
So like it's not safe until it is. No pushing, no forcing, etc.
But it can be helpful to sometimes keep in mind that what SEEMS like ACTUAL chaos, dissolution, disintegration, destruction, fundamental disregulation ISN'T, in the sense that it's an interpretation of phenomenology that is known to be transparently real and actual but in fact that interpretation is sometimes in some sense false.
That is, a little more patience, a little more hanging out, a little more self-subtle-interaction in just the right way, the (semi-)spontaneous solution to a dynamic inverse problem, sometimes reveals that such "believing," "knowing" about that functional phenomenology was in fact in error. What seemed even metaphysical or cosmological or in some sense "real," was in fact "just" phenomenology. (Of course in some sense there is neither "just real" nor "just phenomenology.")
This feels sort of weird to write because often, when the above kind of applies, it's often not "one step away," like sometimes that chaotic or disintegrative phenomenology needs to be not-quite-touched and circled back to for hundreds of hours before the system "finally realizes" that it's safe to sink into or it in fact wasn't in some sense safe and those hundreds of hours were needed to construct the right "equanimity cradle," to edge up to the right alterations in sense of cosmology and metaphysics and finally something new happens.
So it's not just a matter of "oh, it has to be "just" phenomenology, no problem (and again nothing is "just phenomenology," it's sort of all de facto for something, it's not epiphenomenal, it's somehow causal even if sometimes or often confused, trust and indulgence and face value is usually the way to go and impatience or tough love is almost, in my experience, never the way to go), it's, like everything, structural, but sometimes written sections like this can make the navigation of such deep structure smoother.
And then eventually, after hours or hundreds or thousands of hours, then, in a relatively short amount of time (and sometimes more than once, a bunch of times with variations, spread out in time): "oh, safe, relief, untangling, I was wrong about that, I know how to engage with that, I have engaged with that, unraveling", or not, etc.
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See also: dark phenomenology and presence/absence conceptions
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