"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if you prominently link back to this original document, possibly warning that the version they are reading might be out of date.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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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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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.
*
See also: dark phenomenology and presence/absence conceptions
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[draft]
full title: some possible upstream causes of ordering errors
Things to keep on eye out for that can have a dramatic impact on suboptimal ordering choices (and also it's fine, it's structural, there's a sense in which there is no way to smooth things out and everything happens as it happens)!:
[note: some of these can be quite phenomenological and gathered and quite "p3-able"]
downstream:
for all = patience, should be quiet and smooth as silk if slow trickle
consider:
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You might ask, for maybe doing X, if not now, when? If the answer is never, this could indicate an ordering error or possibly an expectation that X is conceptually confused or will spontaneously be addressed, and so on. (This is also an auxiliary practice.)
messy comment from original notes:
look for not yet and make sure that the answer to when? isn't never sometimes turns out the thing dissolves and so when/never don't make sense. but other times this points to an ordering error if it's sort of a thing that one should sort of do eventually. if not never that doesn't necessarily mean "now" of course. maybe some other time. but if the never dissolves before that times comes, in that world where the thing is a thing, then that's probably net good.
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Mark 11:55 AM
Damn I just spent 40 min pulled into the fetal position with my wrists wanting to be precisely bent and turned inwards (lying on side with thick pillow under head). Will add to postures, maybe will save someone a little time
No interesting “content” came up. Have been with lots of prenatal stuff before though
Valence neutral too. Just hangin’ out, but it was a bottleneck
Lots of precise postural and movement stuff semi-often ofc. Just striking to me because so stereotyped. Not surprising ig but striking
What does being with prenatal stuff "feel" like?
non-verbal and often a strange and maybe an almost "a-sensory" quality. almost pure knowing and feeling with maybe a hint of touch/tactile and sometimes vestibular/translational/accelerational. also sort of "impressionistic-relational," sometimes--mom is there (and sometimes intuited father/siblings, all "not quite separate"). one often encounters content around "inside vs outside," "real vs not," "self vs other," sometimes very fundamental conceptual stuff. often associated with somatic refactoring in the perineum. and then post-natally but still preverbally there's very fragmented sensory memory, flashes of smell and touch and sight and temperature but very disjointed or out of focus. everybody's probably a little different though, etc., etc. (edited)
[...]
it's pretty infrequent that anything is sort of "gathered" enough for the above. usually it's diffuse and liminal. but sometimes it passed threshold and there's stuff like the above. maybe 25-50 times in X years? there will be one to twenty minutes of stuff like the above.
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be moved (and state) bottlenecks, in general:
The fetal position thing described above is an edge case, but fairly often the body will need to move a leg, shrug a shoulder, shake an arm, twitch a finger, and so on, sometimes once, sometimes hundreds of times (like five to twenty at a time, then you do other things for minutes, hours, or weeks, and then another five to twenty, and so on). It might seem like it'd be a little stressful to "find" these, since they can sometimes block progress along some dimension until you come across it. But, meditation sort of proceeds by exhaustive process of elimination. Eventually, you'll sort of be funneled to the right spontaneous, almost spontaneous, or participatory movements. Importantly, not all movements are "good," in some sense. Like, I wouldn't go hunting for movements. Some shaking, for example, is sort of "neutral"; it doesn't necessarily go anywhere. And some movements decrease slack somewhere in the system when they're done out of order and lower "undo slack." But, automatic or almost automatic movements that sort of don't have a "push" behind them, are often the right thing to participate in.
Sometimes these movements can be accompanied by 'inner space' experiences, or novel (or familiar) reverie, immersive flashbacks, "other reality pockets," and so on. But sometimes not--sometimes it's just sort of the movement of the body and nothing else. (And of course one can and likely will experience the aforementioned things without overt body movements, too.)
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See also:
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When weightlifting, there's only so much training one can do in a single day (and there are also weekly to fourteen day limits and even longer periodicity supercycles). One can't lift weights one hundred hours, in a row, and then eat and sleep for seven hundred hours, in a row, gain a ton of muscle, and then repeat. There are daily-ish limits after which one needs sleep (and food).
Brains (and the nervous system) aren't muscles, but there's something kind of similar going on, with meditation.
When one first starts meditating, one won't know what to do to produce efficient change, or even much change at all. (And, just to be clear/emphasize, producing efficient change involves a lot of non-effort and patience and surrender.) And then, over time, one gets better at producing change. (This is still not great wording.) And/but, at first, that initially constructive change will lead to grinding or jamming (if one unresponsively persists) sort of before even more fundamental limits get hit. Eventually generally avoiding grinding and jamming, via increased affordances and structural fluidity, one eventually learns to sort locally of max out an even "deeper limit," in a good and safe way, until the next time one sleeps. Doing this is sort of locally brushing up against a sort of "fundamental slack." Eventually, one learns to max out even this limit, in a few different areas, instead of maybe just one or two, almost in a widespread global sense, sort of sussing that out maybe over hours, until the next time one sleeps.
It's like there's "fundamental slack" and meditation eventually uses this up. And then sleep provides new fundamental slack for the next day. The more 90-minute cycles of sleep, the more new fundamental slack becomes available.
At first, this can sometimes be a little fraught. Like brushing up against it can lead to at least a little destabilization and/or almost narcolepsy. But eventually the system learns how to sort of max out this available change, while still apportioning exactly enough slack for doing, learning, interacting, in general, for other daily things.
There's a variable amount of meditation slack available, each day, it depends on day-to-day, in-flight structural features, as things unwind, move around, and settle. Sometimes it's a ton, even like twenty hours worth, but it's generally finite. Maybe every few months, for maybe many days in a row, there will only be five to twenty minutes of meditation slack available that day, until one gets another 4.5 to nine hours of sleep, and that's normal. Sometimes a twenty or ninety minute nap can unlock a lot more and sometimes not.
It may take quite a while to get a sense of this--for several years, one might not have the deftness, degree of fine-grain-ness / structural fluidity, something, to regularly bump up against this limit. And that's ok. It's a gradual process to kind of start bumping up against this limit (and to sort of suss out all available nooks and crannies that have remaining daily slack), and that's ok.*
While global wayfinding prowess is still developing, over thousands of hours (of including meta protocol-ing), it's a bit of a mixed blessing to be able to really use up daily slack, because it's not a guarantee that one won't be doing a mix of both undoing/untangling and tangling/entrenching. And it's ok if one is. It's a gradual process of moving the mixed ratio to more and more untangling/undoing.
So it's not even critical that one finds comes to get a sense for and regularly find their way to this limit. And again, it's not exactly the same thing as "having no moves to make that aren't grinding or jamming," though it's related--grinding or jamming is usually the next thing that happens once all "fundamental slack" is used up, though grinding or jamming can definitely happen long before that, too (and indeed is typically the thing that happens, if one persists unresponsively, and sometimes even if not--under unfortunate subterreanean momentum--before one starts reaching and getting a sense of this other limit).
"Grinding and jamming" is sort of just running out of local available "software moves" or not yet having some degrees of freedom or structural fluidity, speaking abstractly and too generally. And, on the other hand, this "fundamental slack" thing is sort of running out of available daily "hardware moves" or "hardware capacity."
Patience over days, and meta protocoling, can help sort out the differences and relationships between the two, and having a sense of the difference is definitely a useful input into global wayfinding (and, of course, global wayfinding applies both during and outside of "meditation," in whichever way that's narrowly, widely, or very widely defined, with "just lost in life," as an option, very withstanding.)
While it's not critical, one may eventually start getting a sense of this fundamental slack, and it does have some bearing on long-range efficiency over thousands of hours. And/but again, running up against this too soon, with too much "momentum"/pushing/forcing, before those sorts of things are long-run relatively untangled and integrated out of the system, can be a very problematic thing.
And, by the way, what is this phenomenon, neurologically speaking? I think it has something to do with local (high-dimensional) synaptic potentiation and depotentiation getting maxed out (or "minned" out). And then sleep (I forget which phase of sleep) does global synaptic renormalization [1], which makes those synapses available again. Sometimes it feels like it's "the same"** synapses getting maxed/minned out, over and over again, each day, over several days or even weeks, before things shift around to a new bottleneck. And sometimes it feels like sleep can only do so much renormalization, if there is that sort of a bottleneck, so those same synapses get maxed out again in like five to twenty minutes of meditation, sometimes in the early morning, if one starts meditating soon after waking up, while still in bed. And that's ok! Mediate bottlenecks happen.
What's particuarly interesting is how this phenomenon can be a thing, while, when it obtains, it's still possible to go about one's day and do various routine and important things. This says something about brains, and "load distribution," and "network"/"operational" dimensionality, and multi-network neuronal participation, and "content addressable memory," and malleability and ongoing spontaneous remodeling and didactic organisation [2], and structural fluidity, and all sorts of other things. (The previous list mixes scientific terms of art and my idiosyncratic usages particular to this document.)
And, sometimes it's too hard to have a "functional throughline," i.e. there's functional nonmonotonicity and one does need to stay in bed or only do light tasks, especially privilege withstanding.
In any case, bumping up against this "fundamental slack" starts to be a thing, and it's something one can kind of start planning around. If one bumps into meditation limits in just twenty minutes, a couple days in a row, then one might expect meditation will only be possible for twenty minutes the next day or two, after that, and so nonmonotonicity notwithstanding, one might plan more ambitious things in those next few days, to allow for more shifting and settling, more accumulation of fundmental slack (and non-meditative spontaneous reorganization!!!!!!!!!!!!), facilitated by novel, enjoyable, useful experiences, out in the world.
So this is one thing to keep an eye out for, in terms of meditative rhythms and day-to-day or week-to-week planning, of weaving meditation with other valued and "that's the whole point" sorts of things.
*
[1], [2] These terms, and others, are worth googling, on wikipedia, google scholar, and in other places. Quanta magazine has decent popular articles exploring some of the above, too. [Poke me and I'll get some more references, here, sooner or later.]
*Over time, one gets better and better at sussing out more places to "gently" use up additional fundamental slack, even after apparently having solidly run out (after which it's good to sort of gently stop on a dime, as best one can). So I don't mean to be too absolutist about this--sometimes it seems like everything is used up but then patient "non-meditation," for three hours, sort of floats up many more hours worth of things to do. This isn't too common, at least in my experience, but it's definitely also a thing. Usually it's better to just stop for the day. But if one has some spaciousness/slack, body-wise, and a relatively low degree of currently active "runaway processes," then sometimes, if one has a very light touch to sort of wait things out, without running into grinding, jamming, muscle tension, or other issues, then more useful degrees of freedom and slack becoming available, can be a thing. Again, this won't usually be the case, the better one gets at first-pass making use of what's available and the more structurally fluid, late stage, one is. But sometimes there's a little or a lot, with a very, very light touch and patience. The reason it's usually better to stop for the day is that there will be a tiny bit of slack left in the system, and that's sort of a safety buffer. If one kind of uses up that buffer, and then there's a bit of runaway momentum in the system, then inadvertently things can be pushed a bit too far, leading to muscle tension, and so on. And too little slack can kind of compound and make it find one's way out if runaway processes keep using it up, and so there's an increased change compounding issues and eventual high blood pressure, intracranial pressure, nerve impingement, and so on. So, it can be good to just let things go, depending on local concrete structural features of one's situation, at any given time.
**"The same" is in quotes above because maybe it is indeed the same physical synapses, maybe it's different synapses but the same pattern, as transferred through didactic organisation, and so on.
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A key guideline about "particular" or "weird" postures is that it can be a really good idea to keep track of what those have been.
So, for example, if you spend some time meditating curled up in a favorite chair, where you're sort of wedged in between the back and an armrest, and the armrest is really puffy and the cushion is really soft and deep, which facilitated the wedging, and the back of the chair is just the right angle and shape and height so you can kinda lean and also rest your head and relax almost completely or something. Or, you've got this great corner of your bed which is in the corner of your bedroom and you can kind of really nestle back in there against the wall. Or you can stand on this really great anti-fatigue mat for hours and kind of drape your arms over this countertop that's like the perfect height and just kind of half hang there.
So, I'm not saying I did anything like the above, well I did some things that are in the direction of stuff like that, on and off.
But, in any case, if you do do things like that, it can be important to sort of be able to semi-recreate them. It's important because of redo-to-undo. Redo-to-undo never has to be perfect (in some sense!), otherwise meditation wouldn't work at all, and redo-to-undo, remember, can be a combination of going out in the world and re-having (something in the neighborhood of) the original experience, sometimes over and over. And redo-to-undo, of course, can happen in meditation, which is especially important for the gazillions of experiences that can't be recreated in the world, because you're not that age anymore, or some of the people involved have passed away or moved to the other side of the world, or someone else lives in the house you grew up in, etc.
So, anyway, redo-to-undo can be "external" and "internal," as above. And/but, there's sort of something in "between" internal and external, which is the position your body is in.
That is, where your limbs are, whether you're standing, sitting, curled up in the fetal position, etc., all things being equal, will sometimes have no effect on redo-to-undo but sometimes will greatly facilitate or challenge redo-to-undo. All things being equal, it can often be helpful to be in body configurations that are similar to the body configurations that you were in when you originally had an experience.
But, there are endless exceptions to this—sometimes, often, maybe even usually, it's much easier to redo-to-undo with respect some super traumatic experience where you were running away from someone if you're curled up in bed under warm blankets or on a comfortable couch, or etc. But not always. As to when it's one or the other, there's some complicated relationship between will, effort, surrender, and physical action. In any case, wayfinding helps you find your way back to what you need to do, given what you can do, with respect to internal, external, etc. Do you act it out? Do you sit on the edge of your bed? Interleave the two? Mixed with what else, at the finest grain? Exactly how? It depends.
Very importantly, all this applies sort of recursively to meditation. Remember that meditation comprises almost inevitable error propagation as well as error correction. Almost certainly, because of the former, meditation involves "going back over" "old meditation," and that's maybe even the bulk of meditation. And so, being able to access old meditation postures can greatly, greatly, greatly facilitate future meditation.
And so, all things being equal, it can help to meditate in "neutral," "easily recreate-able," meditation postures like sitting on the edge of a bed, standing on a reasonably soft carpet, lying in bed without doing something too weird with pillows, etc. Because, what if your friend sells that weird chair in the common room or they move out? What if you move and your countertops are a different height? What if you're on vacation or on a business trip or on an extended visit with a friend or your long-distance intimate partner? And so on. You just kind of do the best you can, in any case.
What's going on here, though? Why do "weird" postures, especially ones that don't seem obviously connected to old experiences, why do they help and hinder? Some of it's going to be connected to prenatal and early childhood postures and positions and behaviors.
In general, what's going on, especially in meditation, as best I can tell, in part, is that postures, stances, etc., sort of create "(bounded) fluidity channels."
That is, any time you're sort of resisting gravity, there will be muscles, in combination with surface friction (floor, cushion, chair, wall), plus bones and joints, that are sort of creating your "antigravity situation." That "configuration" is what prevents you from falling over or collapsing to the floor or whatever. And, any muscles and joints not participating in that have degrees of freedom to move and contract and relax, and so on. Those muscles and joints that have more freedom will be doing the bulk of redo-to-undo, both gross or overt and subtle—that is, visible movements of the body or sometimes subtle or very subtle muscular "shimmering." That's sort of your fluidity-within-structure. There's even additional complexity in that even the muscles involved in structure can also "shimmer" albeit less easily and creatively, and, additionally, there can be fast and subtle "switching" and "trading-off" of which muscles are providing and structure versus fluidity, more "shimmering," if you will, and this also happens between muscles and also within the same muscle. So there can be this tremendously complex thing going on, and one tacitly becomes "better and better" at it.
Even so, and in any case, the choices and configuration and "details of the shimmering" are greatly, greatly, greatly influenced by the overt postural choices that one makes.
One might ask, great question, why not just lie in bed and completely relax, be fully supported by the bed so every muscle has the greatest freedom to "shimmer" or whatever? Well, it's excellent to have this option! It almost surely should be a thing you do at times, but, redo-to-undo, sometimes, often, is greatly facilitated by gross motor movements (which surely are woven with subtle shimmering, too, everything all at once), some of which you just can't do in bed, all things being equal, perhaps even if you get very creative. That includes some neck stuff, some torso stuff, lots of other things, etc. So sometimes you need to do gross or overt movements to "unlock" other stuff, some of which just can't be done in bed, or whatever—
—you need to use your "full athleticism" in addition to your "total creative problem solving" as part of global wayfinding and puzzle solving. (But what if you were in a car accident and you can't do things with your neck or back that you used to do a lot? What if you've had a limb amputated or you have a stroke and become partially paralyzed or have perceptual or cognitive or attentional stuff missing? Or you're recovering from an illness and super weak and low cognitive or physical stamina? Or you have post-viral brain fog? Your bodymind will still be able to figure out an alternative route, in the general case. Buddha nature in the technical sense. It just might take longer. You just do the best you can, and it's enough. The time savings can make it really worth it to get very, very, very creative, though, as best you can.)
So, in conclusion, try to avoid "weird" meditation postures and props and body configurations, on the front end, except when you really need them for inchoate early childhood and prenatal stuff, or if you (no judgment) did repetitive coping behaviors in the past or (also no judgment) previously doubled-down on earlier problematic meditation strategies. If you do do weird postural and prop stuff, try to take a picture or timed selfie or make a mental note or something to keep track of it so you can more easily find your way back in other contexts. Allow yourself to "be moved" to be drawn into weird and asymmetrical postures and positions, if you need them; don't resist them, generally, and let yourself find your way back to them or to new creative solutions. Reconstruct meditation props and meditation nooks with new furniture or exercise equipment or pillows if you don't have access to the original one(s) and it seems like it's net good to do so. And, as best you can, try to meditate in "neutral," relaxed, "floaty," "weightless," "balanced," "low-efforting," "effortless" postures, but don't be rigid or scrupulous (but also incline or surrender away from anything like pushing or forcing, except when etc.). And again all you can do is your best and it is enough.
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Ditto all the above for earplugs and no earplugs
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When one first starts meditating, like the first day, the first few months, longer, it's sort of chaotic. It's sometimes like no meditation session is like the next; the "landscape" you're "dropped into" seems different each time.
Over time, things become relatively more still and settled (but still appropriately labile and alive), relatively quieter and quieter, on average, more and more, lots of fractal tendrils of the state space are explored (and eventually they all need to be explored, cf. meditation proceeds by exhaustive process of elimination, and often many times, and in loosely the right-ish ordering, and without force, and things untwists, de-layers, and the whole thing flattens and thins and etc.)
So what can happen is one starts to get a sense of "picking up where one left off" each time they sit down to meditate (or stand up or etc.).
It's never exactly the same place (what does that even mean, etc., cf. impermanence), and it might be a rotating short list of "places," and usually things will still settle, shift, and move a bit, in good or neutral ways, in between meditating.
But things are just sort of long-run ever-less-chaotic and more sort of deterministic-feeling, foregone(?), softly and lightly inexorable (inexorable yet without force or managing and etc.).
There are still surprises, so many on and off surprises, of course. That's sort of critical, surrendering / falling into that, in any case, cf. effortless and spontaneity.
And there can still be jamming, getting stuck, needing to wait something out or sleep on it (see daily limits section). There can be accidental layering and need to sort of go back and redo.
There are still "last gasps" and "just as bad as it ever was"-type experiences, through and through.
Techniques, methods, moves, whatever you were doing will still stop working or only work once or only work intermittently, and so on. That's normal, through and through. Even when you've mostly let go of all of that, most of the time and you're sort of "just wayfinding," even if you do find yourself sort of back in the same "place", that doesn't necessarily, sometimes, often mean you can start once again "doing" the same thing you were doing when you were "there" last. Sometimes you can. And also "doing" might be non-doing, and undoing, and so on, of course.
But more and more it's sort of like walking a one-dimensional line, a one-dimensional curve along a high dimensional surface, or something, one (non-)doing, spontaneous, full-embodied step in front of another.
Even though this is a nice and confirmatory thing to keep an eye out for, I hesitated to write about it for a while, because, first, it's not necessary for one to experience this for there to be actual progress. But also, more importantly, people sort of naturally try to do the "wrong" version of this, and I didn't want to accidentally reinforce it---
So, "picking up where you left off" is a natural thing, you sort of find yourself-ish back in the same place. But you "shouldn't" try to "make" yourself come back to the same place, or you shouldn't try to "bookmark" your position or to "make stuff stick" (as discussed elsewhere). If you're sort of "seeking a ratchet" or trying to "make it impossible you'll 'backslide'", this is almost certainly layering and needle-threading. Instead, the "real thing" should be a loose, natural thing that sort of creeps up on you over time.
Finally, as with anything, while it's a nice heuristic to keep an eye out for, it's not always optimal. There can still sort of be challenging "bridgings" and "integrations" where you've kind of been in one area for a while and it's getting tighter and tighter, fewer and fewer degrees of freedom, and there's finalllllllyy a relatively broad untwisting and two surface areas come into contact with each other (many other things could happen too, and structurally not everyone will ever experience this). So then if a person hadn't sort of naturally found themselves picking up where they left off, again and again-ish over a long period of time, or had maybe found themselves doing that with a "longer shortlist," or had had a bit more varied experiences, then some periods of integration might have been smoother, less rocky, less nonmonotonic, less preceded by some jamming. A more balanced "approach".
But, generally, "picking up where you left off"-ish, relatively speaking, all things being equal, vaguely, generally, picking up vaguely in the neighborhood of where you left off, some of the time, can be an even nice, pleasant* thing that is sometimes noticeably more of a thing over time.
*
*I say "nice, pleasant," but ofc things can simultaneously and ongoingly be/feel very hard, too.
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impromptu dialogue between Q, MH, and Mark (so far):
(This might or might not get replaced or concatenated with something more expository at some point.)
Q
so this is a brand new thought:tm: and it's super abstract and I'm not sure how to describe it properly so it might be confusing but I'll try anyway: how confident are we that the global wayfinding protocol, viewed as a complex but ultimately gradient-descent-esque optimisation process, has the same convergence properties in people with moderately-fast cyclical hormone cycles compared to people without? (edited)
or to put the important bit of the idea a more sane way "hmm there might be theoretically important reasons why wayfinding might not work the same for women/afab/menstruators" (edited)
like in the schemes of the dynamical process that doing wayfinding creates, menstrual hormones are a really big perturbation and idk if the original protocol "main moves" have been carved out with that in mind?
or to look at a really specific part of this thought another way: it might be possible for someone to become "cyclically stuck"(?) with a looping monthly perturbation of underlying biochemistry (despite doing the 'right local thing' when averaged daily) and I'm not sure having the "right moves" for escaping from non-perturbed 'static' stuckness necessarily means you have the right moves for escaping a cyclical stuckness? (edited)
anyway idk if this makes any sense but it's coherent in my head lol
if this is actually a problem (not confident that the original protocol doesn't in fact handle it) it might be something solvable with something as elegant as a specific p# or aux practice that's only central if you have that kind of biochemical cycle
oh and to be clear: obv people have daily cycles and also yearly cycles and it's probably possible to get stuck on those too so there's also a implicit question(?) here about whether there's something time-sensitive about how the protocol functions (which is potentially true, right? on the short end it could be to do with there being some time cut-offs in the way that memory works, and e.g. the existence of the 5-hour memory reconsolidation window, on the long end possibly below a certain frequency a perturbation is not sufficient to disrupt convergence) (edited)
MH
I was just thinking about this today
I am definitely "cyclically stuck" at the menstrual cycle level and have been for some time
I think it's untangling a bit and I have a lot of thoughts that aren't words yet
Just noticing it might be doing something, to the point that it might be worth a note in the protocol about it?
Q
just searched the book for "cycles" and it doesn't look like there's anything in it at the moment
want to state (it might be obvious to everyone but it's important) that you can get cyclically stuck without perturbations too, just in a standard dynamical system way, but my intuition is that that's different in some important qualitative way from cyclically stuck with perturbations
:ohno: wait it's worse (more complex) than my initial instinct, cyclical perturbations can be really dysruptive to dynamical systems - can produce chaotic behaviour, or cyclic behaviour of seemingly-random other periods (c.f. swinging a paint can on a spring - trying to find a reference video) (edited)
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNbD3LH6/?k=1 [Last accessed: 2022-08-07]
TikTok | Michael Giblin
#stitch with @stevemould I couldn’t help but respond. #StepwisePrecession #ElasticPendulum #Pendulum #oscillation @thenullhypothesis #stitch with @stevemould I couldn’t help but respond. #StepwisePrecession #ElasticPendulum #Pendulum #oscillation ♬ original sound - Michael Giblin
(though a menstrual cycle is probably not quite as disruptive as a spring, springs have a proportionality element, but just intended to illustrate how disruptive simple things can be to dynamical systems)
jumping from describing possible problem to how we might discover a solution if there were a problem: if some elegant solution exists it probably lives in the space of "what's in traditional women's spiritual practices that aren't in traditional men's practices" - like if you did principal component analysis on women's practices and then subtracted the vectors that are common in men's practices then you'd have something close to being able to be distilled into at least the right auxiliaries to mitigate this?
Mark
[hmm this is rambly]
yeah this is cool and important imo.
so I for whatever reason have maybe not talked about cycles in the doc itself, but it's very a thing for people to "go back and forth" either via an exogenous or endogenous triggers (periods of minutes, hours, days, months, years). the protocol was very deliberately taking this into account---that is being able to inexorably, tacitly, find and unravel all bad loops and loopy karma-plus-life interactions, some of which can be years-long, even decades-long.
(i allude to this with returning with variation, "a little bit different each time," and so on---until one inexorably pops out but yeah, /regularity/ can uniquely fuck with dynamical systems.)
my intuition is that the protocol would ultimately work in menstrual cycle regimes. like what the protocol does is "massively ["backpropagated popout"] long-range prediction alignment-flow-participation across all states and state transitions" or something.
BUT, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be super confusing and challenging and distinctly rough along some dimension, for lots of people, in a way that I am not going to be especially attuned to. it's maybe of note that most of the women i've been around for most of my life have had really chill cycles. ([though] for whatever reason in the past ten years i've been around people with pretty intense cycles. it's interesting.) In general, I'm fairly even-keel myself---e.g. i don't have seasonal affective disorder, and I don't have a monthly cycle "ofc", or other stuff like that. i've been inside gazillions of different states because health and emotions but not necessarily with a strong monthly cyclical driver. dudes (or etc.) may have a subtler two-month cycle or something but dunno.
[to be continued]
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This is not medical advice, etc., etc., but it can be helpful to check your blood pressure, every so often, or even frequently, if you'd like. I'm talking about the objective X/Y, but you can absolutely play with getting (a bit of, or very clearly) a referent not only for how "hard" (and other things, there's a lot going on there) your heart is beating (the top number) but sort of also how generally "pressurized" you are (the bottom number).
One of the things that can happen in meditation is one can sort of lock on to something like "global sympathetic tone," which can facilitate meditation-y things, in some ways, but can drive up things like blood pressure and heart rate, in a way that's even kind of sticky. There is also "global parasympathetic tone," which can also faciliate meditation-y things. Of course, one wants a flexible, dynamic, contextually appropriate range, of both sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. And "global" is kind of a thing but also what the autonomic nervous system is concretely and fractally and specifically actually doing with sympathetic and parasympathetic input, throughout the body, is important, too. It's not necessarily helpful to deal in these concepts or this phenomenonlogy as such, but sometimes it is.
Anyway, sometimes it can be helpful to focus on blood pressure as such. Again, average and below average blood pressure is probably a good thing to have generally going on, but blood pressure should generally go up during exercise and for other reasons or situations too. Nothing applies absolutely, globally, universally.
Anyway, in addition to referents like heartbeat phenomenology and "pressure" phenomenology, because those can be vague and diffuse and can come and go because of attentional dynamics, layering dynamics, and how the brain is choosing to dial phenomenology, sensations, things up and down (which is influenced by meditation but attentional access to various things but is never guaranteed because of nonmonotonicity and tradeoffs), point being, it's not cheating, to, again, keep an eye on the actual blood pressure numbers, at the doctor's office or buying a home/device/phone cuff bluetooth thing (that probably super dated this section depending on what year you're reading this).
It can be very informative, educational to explore directly (indirectly, gently, careful of grinding and jamming, surrender-y) lowering your objective blood pressure and/or heart rate. "Make (gently) number(s) go down." It's also interesting when that's available and when it isn't, how long it takes, etc. (And having fluid autonomic arousal and calibration when you sit down, lie down, stand up, start to exercise is a good thing. System, arousal levels, attentional arousal, physiological arousal like water.)
As with anything, be careful of "trying to make lower blood pressure 'stick'," or anything like that. You want to indirectly, whole system-y find how blood pressure, and everything, can take care of itself, costlessly, effortlessly, over time.
Blood pressure predicts lots of longevity and health outcome stuff. To your health.
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Notes:
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See also:
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[This was a response to a very specific question, and it's not perfect, but it has some stuff that I've been meaning to express for a while. It may already be expressed in different ways in other sections, if you search in the document for "equanimity" without the quotes. It still deserves its own section. If you find other places in the doc that express the below, please let me know. I didn't have time to search down and read every instance, and I just wanted to get this in here in some form. The question was partially about "cultivation," including cultivation of equanimity.]
I sort of don't believe in general equanimity. To me it's sort of like equanimity is /always/ "typed," situated, lock-and-key, hard-thing-specific. So like you sort of need "the thing," "the inverse operation for the thing," and then like "context/catalyst/equanimity." But all three of those are sort of exactly matched to each other, radically concrete and unique, in the limit. Under equanimity/context/catalyst, the thing meets the inverse operation for the thing and the thing is undone with no remainder. Sort of. (Abstract model alert, but it can be experienced this way..)
And equanimity is sort of coextensive with safe to know, safe to look, safe to see, safe to just hang out with. And this facilitates the construction of the inverse operation in the presence of "the thing" if one doesn't already exist. Sometimes it's only safe to look if you've sort of already somehow constructed the inverse operation, or one-step-away, via contact with similar things.
So like, I could be totally wrong about this, but I think cultivation, conditioning, strength training is only for skeletal muscles, the motor cortex, and like the adrenals, or something. And it has no place for (body)mind. Sort of.
Directly overcoming resistance breeds technical debt that must eventually be paid, etc., etc.. Sometimes it's useful if it allows one to collect data for /something else/ but overcoming resistance by definition layers over the thing overcome. So it's only ever indirect data collection. Sort of. Like you learn that you won't die if you have intense experiences and the experience is less intense next time and/or you have more bandwidth for other things, next time.
I could be super wrong about something in here!
But I think /all/ discipline, grit, etc., must /eventually/ be exchanged for (safe) effortlessness, spontaneity, surrender. (And paradoxically, discipline and grit, etc., can live in spontaneity but first must be undone before so, or something.) And/but maybe lots of room for variation and weird twisty (then untwisty) oblique and net-skillful things in the middle. Not sure, not sure.
But yeah I think the cns is in some sense 100% type safe. Maybe it's both type safe and not in different senses tho.
Again I could be super wrong about something, here. Ridiculous degrees of bottom-up precision and specificity and light-touch-ness become more and more spontaneously manifest over time, with patience and care. Can still have smash-y things alongside that all the way to the end before smash-y-ness finally unravels. It still works. It's still enough.
There is some equanimity reuse, sometimes a lot, but usually have to make additional passes over it because it’s not quite right and eventually something precise has to happen. And/but/so/like there is a sense too in which the system does generally settles and calms, over time, but I think this is like idk 85% effect not cause and like 15% equanimity reuse that is still generating debt around the edges until finally that 15% starts shrinking to zero or smthg-ish.
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[This is another example of "lock-and-key" type stuff. The below is a response to a question about why moves, techniques, practices, etc., work for a while and then "stop working."]
I think it’s “just” the new technique “exercises” a degree of freedom that doesn’t otherwise get “touched” a lot, so there’s a lot of “overhang,” so a ton of stuff happens initially. But that “pocket” wasn’t very big & it’s not getting replenished, so quickly diminishing returns.
BUT, you’ve still learned a ton of stuff both from what you did and what happened that is definitely transferrable to next or future things. So it was still a critically valuable thing to do from “proceeding by exhaustive process of elimination.”
Some “moves” are more “productive” than other moves but sort of long-run all moves are equally valuable even if some particular one gets used even only once or even not at all if it inspires something that actually does get used. And some “moves” are used 500k times before “moves” as such get eaten up in radical aconceptual concreteness. Sort of sort of
It’s possible to “overuse” a move, blood from a stone, pull things tight in a bad way. But sometimes it just stops working or even you lose the feel of the levers of how to do it. And that’s perfectly normal. Or you it’s available for use like once every three months or smthg.
(Available in part bc lock-and-key conditions obtain.)
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("Autonomic" as in autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic including regulation of smooth muscle, organs, glands, hormones, digestion, immune function, healing, etc.)
Over time, sometimes intermittently and long-run eventually stably, oneself, the system, etc., has more “direct access” to autonomic functions, like heart rate, digestion, peristalsis, and more. It’s usually not like full-on skeletal muscle style “control,” there’s perhaps generally indirectness and vagueness, all things being equal, but it’s at least more in that direction than one would expect.
Usually pre all meditation, this level of "influence" is sort of buried, papered over, deep down, both (a) so we can't get at it and mess it up ourselves and (b) non-intimate outside influences can't mess it up either, too easily.
All of this is just an example: There's a chance that at some point you might have the (temporary!) experience of something rather dramatic, like having direct control over your heart rate, being able to dial it up and down. Everyone I've talked to about this found it rather unpleasant and stressful. (I did too.) Instead of this, you might that you're merely afraid of being able to control your heart (you have intimations that you might be able to), or you might feel like you have to manually keep your own heart beating. That latter is almost surely not true, even though it might feel that way, and you might find your attention magnetically pulled back to your heart, even though you'd rather forget about your heart and let it just correctly do its own thing. (If you're really concerned something's wrong, remember you can always get things checked out by the equivalent of of the emergency department or urgent care, etc., in your country of residence.) Anyway, if something like any of the above is going on, you might just be patient, as unpleasant as it is, and eventually you'll find both that your attention is elsewhere and also you're ok. (As one more example, things similar to some of the above can temporarily happen with breathing, cf. "Ondine's Curse.")
ANYWAY, generally, the kind of stuff doesn't happen at all, or it happens very briefly to the point of unnoticeably or unreflectively or, again generally, it's transient, generally harmless, and doesn't happen before you're ready for it to happen.
The PLUS side of all this is that on the other side, as interoception of viscera, and more, which most people are somewhat aware of, can become more and more integrated with everything else, and this leads to increased resilience and increased capacity for empathy, intimacy, self-care, self-awareness, and self-determination. There's just more and more costless bandwidth that means an experientially richer, experientially more full you.
To be fair, this can also look like a long tail of increased neuroticism, as things re-jigger as they're brought to light---the body can get more finicky about what it wants when it wants it.
And thereby one might find it harder and harder to "push oneself" in ways that they used to be able. The bodymind is having none of it, and this can be quite distressing if one is used to getting things done by pushing oneself.
But the flip side of this is sort of, long-run, increases in sort of "bottom-up grit"---self-alignedly the system can kind of settle into long-term projects, behaviors, goals over long-spans of time, that wouldn't have previously been possible. Especially at first, these may only be traceable in retrospect, and they come with hearty dose of "don't know what this is yet but I trust it," as well as a long process of bouncing around and re-jiggering.
It's sort of total homeostatic / telic integration, or something? ("Total" is too reified, as is integration; it might look quite haphazard, always evolving, always making mistakes and correcting, from the inside, and there's all sorts of mortality and meaning stuff to contend with, here, and more, but still.)
So this could be considered a sort of non-force-y "integrated grit," again not an increased capacity to push oneself, but more an ability to surrender to (even suffer into, especially initially) a perhaps sort of "ever re-settling" determination. Even, on the front-end you might not even like one's new choices, sometimes, at least just at first.
There's sort of ongoing, intermittent meta-modulation of autonomic self-regulating machinery, to some degree. And the rest of the time as it did, and as it should, as it will, it takes care of itself (while e.g. shimmeringly available as you, in some relevant sense, so you can have fun, create, strive, enjoy, relax, etc.
Some clarifications:
Again, this is not Ondine's Curse, and medium-run and further, it's not like “you” open up the access hatch, find the right knobs, on the right control panel, and fiddle with those knobs, and it's more like intermittent self-participating self-aligned spontaneous meta-modulation: it takes care of itself, always already having been prereflectively at your fingertips, as your fingertips, and sometimes it comes to awareness in a way that leads to its better taking care of itself, and then with that done "it" spontaneously then "leaves" awareness. (The whole system is long-run like this, cognition, everything, not just autonomic functions in particular. Stuff comes into awareness to be lightly sculpted in its self-modulation and then leaves again to do its own thing. Meditation / life isn't being aware of everything; it's being aware of what's fun, enjoyable, useful, etc. to be aware of, at the right times, in the right nebulous fractal sequential order, especially as things settle down long-run; more and more needs to be "tuned up"*** less and less, but any of it's always available if it does, as things change or new information comes in, etc.)
Also, maybe goes without saying if you're reading down here this is not pop mindfulness; of course you can deliberately check in and sometimes have good reason to, but the point is already-always-available pre-reflective accounting / input. Increased bandwidth, already costlessly a part of your phenomenal input. It's already a part of you. You don't have to do something "extra."
Notes:
* cf. taste is "cognitive" / cognitive, digestion is cognitive / "cognitive", defecation is cognitive / "cognitive', etc., etc.
*** translation note: tuned up, fixed, repaired, sculpted, massaged, corrected, helped, listened to(!)
See also:
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There’s a thing that people come to almost universally do, both spontaneously, in development, and often as a deliberate behavior.
It has sort of two forms. One of them looks maybe like a “pushing away,” and other maybe a “holding at bay.” Both of these occur “in the phenomenological field,” either through gross/overt muscular action or through more subtle mental/muscular action.
This is sort of experiential management or experience management.
I really, really, really don’t like the words “avoidance” or “resistance” because of their moral and self-coercive connotations and intimations, as well as the knock-on effects from that. I think this is partly the reason I haven’t written about this for so long. Another reason is that, because it sort of goes so “deep,” I wanted to have a better sense of those “deep contours,” or something.
Anyway, there’s good reasons to spontaneously “push away” or “hold at bay.” This is about self-safety, self-regulation, and proactive ordering of what to deal with, when.
It’s particularly useful as a baby--scared? Close your eyes, put your hands of your eyes, bury you face. This can be a really good strategy. It can be useful as a child or adult, too—hopefully just a little, tense your body, tighten your jaw, tighten your fists, get through the thing, reap the rewards. Sometimes this is just how it has to be. And, honestly, no matter how “enlightened” someone is, if they’re caught off guard enough, surprised enough, because they’re still proactively working through their backlog of the world, or because of unknown unknowns, they’re going to do something like this, too, though perhaps more superficially and it’ll dissipate more quickly with no remainder, all things being equal. This sort of thing is especially useful when subtle interaction goes awry--suddenly there’s foreign stuff that didn’t get comprehended, metabolized, filtered, “string escaped.” And it’s unfortunately not just passive but “active”; you don’t yet have immediate inverse operations that spontaneously unfold, also you’re in the midst of some real time, unfolding situation. If you have enough bandwidth, enough spaciousness, you’re already pretty untangled, you might do or find yourself doing something like what’s described further below. But it might just make sense to not just “hold at bay” but to “push away.”
This strategy, when prenatally, as a baby, or as an adult, while critically useful, has its downsides. First, it introduces a “double microtangle.” First, the “content,” the “sense impressions” or “inner experience,” gets a little bit “frozen in time” and “frozen in mindspace.” Maybe better, for the latter, is “embedded in mindspace.” If mindspace moves, it “moves with it,” but it’s a bit of a knot, a whorl, a wrinkle, a little reduction in slack and spaciousness that gets moved around. Second, the local “pushing away action,” itself, can get frozen along with or alongside the “content.” So, then, not only is the “content” kind of moving around in a slightly “coagulated” way [this word is kinda a gross; I don’t mean the gross connotations], but, so, too, somehow, is the “pushing itself.” For both of these, somehow, perhaps because of how the mind preferentially organizes “information,” like with like, compressiblity, “content addressable memory,” both of these microtangles tend to accumulate more microtangles. And, overtime, microtangles can become fractal macrotangles, experiential, perceptual, emotional, behavior rigidity, personality, and so on. This is just another way of looking at so-called “layering” (and samskaras). All of this, whether tangled, like this, or, later stage, very “structurally fluid,” layered or “flat”-ish, this sort of is the very being and seeming of the world, and your experiential/behavioral propensity in it.
Additionally, these sort of a “variable reinforcement” thing going on. Pushing away, holding at bay, they don’t always "work."--so you might try it paradoxically more often and more frantically. It’s not stochastic but it’s sort of causally mediated and moderated, steel cables, and all that. But, ultimately, “sensations can’t directly control other sensations,” so, all in all, this pushing away strategy sort of reifies a fundamental confusion about the phenomenological field, which has a tons of ripple effects throughout contingent (and malleable, and reversible) development of bodymind.
Again, it’s really important to be able to have this pushing away strategy. It’s protective against overwhelm, disregulation, something. To not do it, sometimes, would be disastrous.
But also, it can go from “normal problematic but medium-run ok” self-regulation to something very problematic if it becomes a deliberate part of a meditative strategy. You feel more stable, less emotional, less tossed about. Is this equanimity? Eventually, because the mind is finite, you sort of run out of slack, but it doesn’t feel bad or disastrous yet--now things are really stable; things are sort of coagulating against a wall. Now you’re building on bedrock; this is great. But then--because this is the opposite of structural fluidity, groundlessness--eventually comes the multidimensional rigidity, and potential confusion (because so much is so far from conscious experience), and perhaps then aggression, paranoia, who knows. One can get really, really, really good at pushing things out of awareness. And it can seem like a good thing for a long time.
The opposite direction is sort of “making it safe to real time experience more and more, as it’s happening.” This is eventual self-liberation or experiences, sensations known as they are, as they happen, and so on. There are a lot of technical terms for this with various shades of technical distinctions, I think. This is connected to where I write the below:
“And, so, over time, more and more, MERELY JUST HAVING THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE ITSELF completely replaces "cognition." [ https://meditationbook.page/#184 ]
(I’d say it a little differently, now, qualify it a little differently, now. I’ll come back to these in an edit.)
And so, to connect back to the above, as an alternative to "pushing away," you might, might, might, for example, lightly incline towards "lettings experiences be/happen just as they are, neither pushing away or facilitating"--but not as a pushy, self-moralizing, fetishized thing; just as an experiment (which might not even be available). Eventually, some of the time, it may come to be seen as, not a panacea, but the obviously best right thing to do, some of the time, and perhaps more and more (and other times, especially early on, as a terrible thing to do--and pushing away or facilitating or doing something entirely different and "far away" is the right thing to do). And long-run, quickly, immediately, anything like inclining/experimenting/expecting will be too heavyweight or will get in the way, and it'll be a thing that happens naturally, spontaneously, effortlessly, positive-no-degrees-of-freedom, no remainder when that "[prereflectivey, prospectively, spontaneously, as its [already] happening] makes sense [to the "system"]."
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preconceiving or direct reifying
Ok. But there is a danger, here, of unintentional gaslighting or self-gaslighting, not that different from self-moralizing or being open to shaming, about “avoidance” or “resistance.”
Whether you think you did it to yourself or it’s coming from outside (as it were), or both, it can be scary to think that “there’s stuff deep within you,” nebulously, that’s potentially affecting your behavior and causing you harm, and that, sooner or later, or RIGHT NOW, you have to do something about it.
And, it can be worse when one sort of tries to “make real” a theoretical description like this section. You might try to “directly find these tangles as such,” or something like that.
But remember, however your experience appears to you, that’s how your experience appears to you. If this section resonates with you and seems useful, great! If it’s concerning but you don’t know how to “operationalize it,” that’s ok--probably just kinda keep doing what you’re doing. And if you just keep doing what you’re doing, period, that’s probably the best thing, just kind of lightly keeping this sort of thing in mind.
The correct revelatory thing, is to just keep “practicing correctly,” as best you can, and sort of larger-scale personal and generalizable insights should sort of just fall out of that, in their own time. And so, as per usual, trust yourself, don’t reify practice instructions, as best you can. Write your own or just intuitively do your thing. And the sorts of things described above will take care of themselves, over time. And reading this might be fractionally useful, personally or coordinatively, in a community of practice, if held lightly.
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This is a complex topic, so these are just some brief thoughts, to start. I (Mark) personally have never used psychedelics. (I wanted to "figure it out for myself.") It does seem like there's overlap between what psychedelics do and what meditation does, based on many conversations.
I want to discuss two points. First, I write in the section "no one gets pixel-perfect possibilities" that there's sort of a "right place for everything," though noting that that "final ground state," loosely speaking, is stable, self-repairing, costless, effortless, "natural." It seems like psychedelics, with each use, sometimes, for some people, take a person vaguely, fractionally in this "natural" direction, but not precisely/exactly in this "natural" direction.
Second, I rely a lot on the idea of redo-to-undo. So, say, psychedelics (or other substances) don't take a person in quite the right direction; say they cause some "error propagation" (??confusion, delusion, distortion, confabulation??).
(I mention error correction and error propagation elsewhere in the document, not to inappropriately reify those two things/ideas, as per usual.)
Then, at some point, a la redo-to-undo, a person will need to recover aspects of the altered state (perhaps liminally, subliminally) in order to "clean up" or "correct" some things (dipping in over and over again, contiguous with returning again and again to all sorts of things, as sometimes generally happens in meditation). To the degree that psychedelic aspects are hard to return to, and so "redo" takes longer, this might extend a person's meditation timeline. (In any case, popping into or easing into and out of "altered" states is a part of meditation, whether or not someone has ever used substances, as mentioned in the section "states," and other sections.)
Some people may feel like substances are "experientially instructive," or are sometimes healing or make the journey better, irrespective of timelines, or are otherwise a "net timeline win."
I suspect that the long-term meditator may eventually generally find substances to be net disruptive, but possibly not, given aspects of "final ground state."
Again, I personally don't use, haven't used, and don't intend to use psychedelics or other substances (really, truly). And/but also, it's presumably not the end of the world if you do. And, also, don't do anything illegal, etc., etc. And, all that being said, a subset of people that I regularly interact with do systematically, regularly, or intermittently use mind-altering substances.
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Sometimes getting triggered can save time, whether that triggering is accidental, surprising, or even prospectively (and retrospectively) net undesirable.
Somehow, someway, the meditator will make it all the states/places in their bodymind state that they need to or want to, to have things change in ways that are nonmonotonically, retrospectively good. One doesn’t need an external trigger, in the limit, which is good because sometimes triggers aren’t available, e.g. a childhood context or friend or enemy who’s passed away or unavailable. (Often, though, too, something far removed from an original context has an element of, or enough of a similarity, to an original context/person/situation, to serve as a trigger or cause triggering.)
But, if triggers are available, sometimes they can cause really fast pinpointing and learning, if the meditator is ready. Sometimes, this will alleviate a bottleneck, and it’ll be doubly useful. Even if they’re not ready, it’s still data that will be useful later.
Whether intentional or accidental, getting triggered isn’t always safe, because being triggered can sometimes involve an increased propensity for destructive behavior. (Part of being triggered is sometimes not realizing one has been triggered, and then destructive things sometimes feel "right" or "justified," in the moment.
Being mindful of safety, sometimes it’s better to avoid being triggered, and sometimes it can be net-helpful to be triggered. And sometimes undesirable triggering can happen, and it can be useful, even if it’s partially or net-problematic.
Finally, "retraumatization" is a thing—being exposed to "triggers" too early can also cause net more "layering" and "compensation" and thereby make things take fractionally longer, on net. This can be discouraging if one didn’t intend to be triggered, but it’s normal to get triggered and retriggered, and it’s very possible to think one os being "re-traumatized," etc., but it’s actually net "redo-to-undo," and net progress. It can be hard to tell in the moment, and, in any case, getting triggered is par for the course, grist for the mill. It’s ok.
All that said, it can be fine good to systematically, actively seek out some triggers, some of the time, when you’re ready or as a careful (or accidental) experiment.
informal working definitions:
trigger ~= something that can or does cause an abrupt (negative) state change, or change to local, behavioral propensities, that doesn’t depend on the rest of the environmental context
trauma ~= bodymind state/feeling/content/material that’s needs extra steps to be safe to re-experience, that in its dormant/latent state is a bottleneck/dependency on other/further valued changes
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[This material is taken from a deprecated document and isn't strictly neccessary material; the ontology isn't quite right and isn't commensurate with the ontology in the rest of this document. But there's material here that could be woven into the rest of the document, perhaps in a later version, that would possibly enhance the document, for some people. So, it's being included, here for completeness and initial convenience. Overall, what's here is not a complete method, in part because it's not a method that can "eat itself," and in part because there isn't a global wayfinding aspect, and for other reasons, too. The below has been edited from the original version. Beware inappropriate reification, anchoring, magical button pushing, etc., etc.]
(0) Some Phenomenological Methods
This section details phenomenological methods. We’ll look at techniques for what to do you when you want to investigate experiences that are challenging to investigate, for various reasons:
We’ll talk about what to do when experiences go by too fast to examine.
We’ll talk about what to do when experiences are too complicated, messy, or vague to examine.
We’ll talk about a common mistake that’s made when investigating phenomenology.
And, we’ll talk about what to do when you don’t know what you’re looking for.
(1) Afterimages, Replay, Interference
[Note: Beware of inappropriate reification (or localization) of "felt meaning," "felt models," etc.]
The first thing to point out is the process of observation more generally. When you look, see, or notice something, there’s (arguably, sometimes) a very predictable pattern that then occurs.
First, there is your contact with the actual sensory experience. This is very, very brief. Almost immediately, your mind moves to phase two.
In this phase, you are no longer paying attention to the actual sensory experience, but you are instead paying attention to a sort of "afterimage" of the experience. This is what your mind actually collects and takes away from the outside world, and this is what you actually think about, make sense of, and reason about.
What is this afterimage like? It’s (maybe) composed of felt meaning, quasi-imagery, and often a felt model.
Regarding the parts of the afterimage, the felt meaning might represent what you experienced. If there’s a felt model, one of the "icons" in the model will be the "what" that you experienced; and maybe the model will be a model of the process that you think generated the experience (for example, what made the noise).
A good way to get practice at noticing afterimages is through paying attention to bodily sensations, especially proprioception. Where is your foot in space? How do you know? Can you separate the actual proprioceptive sensations from your phenomenological afterimage of the sensations? On and off, you could play with this for a few minutes, until you get bored.
Another way to get a sense of afterimages is to generate a short sound or some other sensory experience and then ask how you know it happened. For example, snap your fingers. Ok. How do you know you just snapped your fingers? You remember you did, right?
Unless you wait too long, part of the experience of that memory is the afterimage of you snapping your fingers. And, there’s often a special property of afterimages that you can play with: You can access the afterimage to more fully replay the experience that led to the afterimage. A replay is not available for some experiences and you might lose the replay for the experience if you wait too long before accessing it. Finally, even if a replay isn’t available, the afterimage may still contain some detail that you can inspect.
So, being aware of and using afterimages is one way that you can inspect subtle phenomena, especially phenomena that goes by very fast. When doing so, there are some caveats to be aware of.
First, it’s good to remember that the afterimage is not a perfect replica of the experience. It is a "tag" that the experience happened, that may contain or evoke some of the structure or phenomenology of the original experience. If you’re using afterimages to investigate experience, you have to make some effort to to separate out what the experience of the afterimage is versus what remains of the original experience.
Second, it’s important to note that afterimages will always have some conceptual contamination. Afterimages are part top down and part bottom up. That is, afterimages are partially composed of what you expect to see. That’s why you can be positive you just saw a bug skitter across the flow but when you look closely it was just some very suggestive dust caught in a draft. The afterimage is what your reflexes and emotions actually react to, and the afterimage is not the same thing as what was actually there. The way to partially get around this is to try to not have preconceptions and to try to take lots of careful observations of the phenomena.
Finally, there’s a subtler point, here. It seems to be the case that you may be able to "take" or "get" an afterimage only if you already have some inkling of what you’re looking for. That is, if you already have some hint of an idea or concept of what’s there. That doesn’t mean you have to have a name for the experience. And, it doesn’t mean that you’ve had to explicitly reflect, before, on some prior occasion, on having those sorts of experiences. I just means that somewhere in your mind there has to be some sort of... familiarity for the experience before you go looking or paying attention in general.
So, how do you get that initial experience, if you can only have the experience if you’ve had the experience? It seems to "bootstrap" slowly, by simply paying attention in the vicinity of what you’re looking for. You brain eventually, faintly discerns a pattern on the edge of experience, and you gain a creeping sense of familiarity that becomes clearer and clearer, until finally you can put your finger on it, haltingly describe it with great difficulty, and maybe finally name it as a thing or break it down into further parts.
In the next few subsections, we’ll give more tips that can help this process go faster. In any case, you’ll already have the capacity for afterimages for many interesting and valuable things, just by gaining tacit familiarity with them of the course of your life. For some of those things, you might immediately think to yourself, "Oh yeah, I recognize that. Maybe I should give it a name." For other things you’ll have a faint, barely-there sense of something, and it’ll take effort and concentration to bring it into focus without scaring it away by doing the wrong thing with your mind. (We’ll talk about "scaring things away by doing the wrong thing with your mind" in a subsequent section.)
Overall, when an experience is somewhat fast, contained, and almost gone before you look, afterimages are a great tool to investigate and get a clearer sense of it.
(2) Where / Spaces
[Note! Be careful about inappropriately reifying space! Let space go completely! Asking "where," narrowly conceived and mechanically executed, is a trap!]
Another challenge to investigating experiences is that they can seem too fuzzy, vague, diffuse, or too complicated. Like, there’s too much going on and you don’t know where to start. In contrast to afterimages, where you might have been able to grab something relatively discrete and contained, sometimes there’s just too much going on and there’s nothing (yet) for your attention to obviously focus on. You just can’t get a sense of the whole thing that feels precise and clear. What you can do in this case is ask where you’re experiencing things. Sometimes this, all by itself will be tremendously clarifying.
It seems to be the case that experience is organized into overlapping "qualia spaces." And, I really do mean spaces, like three-dimensional spaces, though some of these spaces don’t seem to intersect with normal three-dimensional space and some of these spaces seem to be "differently dimensioned" or more than three dimensions, if you can believe it. But maybe you’ll have that experience for yourself.
Some of these spaces seem to partially "interpenetrate" or "take up the same space" but each space feels slightly different and has different things in them. An example is that felt meaning and emotions sometimes seem tightly interwoven, where one spatially picks up right where the other leaves off. Other times, these two experiences don’t exist quite in the same place, like they’re coexisting but not interacting. In contrast to felt meaning and emotion, emotion is more likely to be felt "somewhere in the body" though it might not have quite the character of a bodily sensation. Emotion exists a bit more in a three-dimensional space that overlays on the more obvious proprioceptive body space, the feeling of the body that seems to live in normal three-dimensional space. Felt meaning and felt modeling don’t seem to exist in quite the same space, but those spaces can overlap.
Felt meaning, for me, at times, seems to live in an infinite dimensional, infinitely textured space that almost doesn’t interact with "normal reality" at all. (I maintain metaphysical neutrality in this document! I believe in brains and physics.)
Some things seem to be more "up and back" in my head, and, by "up and back" I mean some sort of "extra dimension," different than our usual three dimensions. See if you can tell if inner imagery exists in a different space than inner talk. Where do you experience each of these? That’s the question to keep asking. Where am I experiencing that? Where is that happening?
The point of asking where is that it separates out experiences that were seemingly diffusely mixed together. It clarifies them, as sort of a divide-and-conquer approach, as meditation teacher Shinzen Young might say. (I got the "where" idea from him.)
You’ll find that some experiences seem to wax and wane and travel according to their own agenda. Other experiences seem to be time-locked together. That is, the waxing and waning of two or more experiences arise and fall together, somewhat synchronously. Another thing you might find is that certain experiences closely follow each other in time, one after another, or the sequentially kick off with slight delays from each other.
All the above might initially seem hopelessly tangled together, but, by asking "where" it becomes possible to separate all these experiences apart and then understand and see how they fit back together in a dynamic unfolding. And, when separated out, it’s much easier to inspect each aspect of that separated experience, to better understand its composition and function.
When experience is vague or complex, ask "where..."
(3) Describing
[Note! Be careful about language, conception of "raw sensations" as such (or even "pixels" or "voxels" of sensation, and the relationship between the two! They're all great, but beware of inappropriately reifying them! Let it all go! "Describing raw sensations in space and time at the pixel/voxel grain," narrowly conceived and mechanically executed, is a trap!]
After you ask where, sometimes it can be helpful to incline towards "exactly verbally describing" (silently in your head) what you're experiencing, including "spatial relationships," and trying to "[locally] leave absolutely nothing out," whether what's under observation is quasi-static or dynamic, whether it's amorphous or something else.
(4) Secondary Attention
[Note! Be careful about inappropriately reifying "secondary attention." Exploring "secondary attention," narrowly conceived and mechanically executed, is a trap!]
[Note! Beware of inappropriately reifying attention and movements of attention! "Attention" (compare with perhaps experience, awareness, and lots of other things] is a trap! Maybe see section attention is not fundamental]
Here is an exercise you can explore that is, in some way, an analogy and in other ways points exactly to another phenomenological technique.
Ideally, look at something at least twenty feet away, though it doesn’t have to be. Looking out a window is best. This something should be small enough or far away enough that you can see the whole thing clearly, that you don’t have to move your eyes around to take it all in.
Now, with your foreground attention on that visual object, become aware of your entire field of peripheral vision. Notice how your eyes want to be captured by things in the periphery. Do your best to keep your eyes on the original object, and do your best to keep paying attention to it.
Now, while you’re gently, firmly paying attention to the original object, let’s go back to your entire peripheral field of vision. Notice that, even if your peripheral vision is sort of flat and blurry, because your main focus of vision is gently, firmly stabilized, you can still make out peripheral objects. If you’re looking outside, notice you can even "watch" or "track" walkers, cars, bikers, or birds go by in your peripheral vision.
Call your main visual object the object of foreground attention, or primary attention. Call your peripheral vision peripheral awareness or just awareness. Call your ability to track objects in awareness while foreground attention is occupied secondary attention. (The terminology of "attention" versus "awareness" is from the meditation teacher Culadasa. The concept of "secondary attention" is my own.)
With foreground attention occupied by one visual object, you can still track other visual objects with secondary attention.
Now, I will claim that you can do the same thing with any combination of visual or non-visual experiences, or "inner" objects.
For example, you can pay (primary) attention to a neutral object in your visual field and then explore your emotions with secondary attention. You can pay attention to a bodily sensation while exploring inner imagery with secondary attention. You can gently rest primary attention on felt meaning and or something else.
I will make the provisional claim that some experiences are only accessible via secondary attention and that secondary attention is a powerful phenomenological tool.
Now, some caveats. First, secondary attention is and is not an analogy.
Sometimes, secondary attention to "inner" objects and experiences feels exactly like the peripheral vision exercise. Other times, secondary attention feels more like a "flick," a "twitch," a nudge, more like a sidelong glance or a special gesture in "not-quite-three-dimensional space." Please don’t be misled by the analogy of secondary attention. Explore what works for you, and when, and why.
Second, some experiences seem to be on the border between being accessible by primary or secondary attention. For example, for me, experiencing felt meaning doesn’t seem to be quite primary or secondary attention for me.
Third, the analogy to peripheral vision would imply that "secondary attention" for inner objects is a space where you can just look around and pick out objects or experience for examination. Sometimes, especially after a bit of time spent exploring, it really does feel this way, like you can just look around and examine stuff at your leisure, like you can just "rummage around." Other times, the space of secondary attention seems "more than three dimensional," like you’re a two-dimensional flatlander on a plane that exists in three dimensions, and someone says look up and you have no idea how to orient in that direction. Sometimes secondary attention is like that; you don’t know how to look in a particular direction. (Patience can reveal the correct direction, sometimes. This will be discussed in a subsequent section.)
With the above caveats in mind, secondary attention can be a very useful idea to keep in mind. Whether or not there are some things you can only see with secondary attention, there’s another point to keep in mind:
Foreground attention is "loud" and "disruptive." That is, moving foreground attention around sort of "stirs the waters" or "drowns out" subtle activity. Or subtle activity changes into something else the moment you look directly at it. There are definitely times when keeping foreground attention very still or keeping its movements very delicate and slight can be very, very useful. And this is where peripheral awareness and secondary attention can really come in handy. Keep in mind that if you’re looking hard for a particular experience, the best way to find it might be by keeping foreground attention mostly very still and stable. This takes gentle practice, but being able to notice and gently influence the movement of attention is very worth it. This is a very important tip for being able to explore your mind.
[Note: One meditation teacher makes a very similar distinction to my primary/foreground and secondary/background attention. They call them attention and awareness, respectively. They have a great suggestion, and I'm adapting it and riffing on it a bit, that attention and awareness can kind of be "overlaid," so it's not just like concentric circles: Sometimes you'll want to "look through" one or the other, to see the other one.]
(5) Snapshots
[Note! Beware of inappropriately reifying attention, movements of attention, or "mental actions"! It's a trap!]
In a previous section I discussed afterimages as well as their limitation that you needed a glimmer of familiarity with an experience in order to be able to use them as a tool to investigate that experience.
In this subsection, I will discuss a particular tool which can help to get around this limitation. It partially makes use of the concepts of primary and secondary attention.
What you do in this technique is take a "snapshot" of a large portion of your awareness, in a relatively general and non-specific way. When in doubt, you can just "take a snapshot of everything," and your "field of view" will sort of take care of itself. This is a little bit like getting a very large afterimage. And then you can inspect it.
The way to do this is, at the moment of taking the snapshot, you keep your attention very still and incline towards gently stabilizing all of peripheral awareness, too. And in the same moment, you pay attention to exactly everything that’s there, no more, no less, without moving your awareness at all. There’s very much a sense of "catching yourself in the act."
This is hard at first, especially getting exactly the moment you want, and especially doing it without accidentally first moving your attention and messing up the landscape. It takes practice, and it can help to get good at exploring afterimages and using secondary attention, first.
If you incline your mind towards the experience you want, that experience will typically be more likely to happen repeatedly, even if you don’t quite know what you’re looking or how or where to look for it, and you’ll get more opportunities for snapshots.
There’s a bit of a sense of pre-deciding to take the snapshot or "instantaneously deciding," or "habitually, spontaneously" taking snapshots, at least during the time you’re exploring. That’s because any "deliberation" or "deciding" can obscure the very experience that you were trying to take the snapshot of. So you sort of just have to set yourself up and go for it, over and over again. And then you inspect the interesting ones.
This technique takes practice, but it’s very, very powerful. And it can come to feel very spontaneous and natural.
(6) Read-Off versus Inference
[Note: Beware possibly "artificial distinctions" between read-off and inference! Beware privileging one or the other! Beware mechanically executing either!]
[Note: One might make the analogy that "read-off" is "appearing," and "inference" is "seeming" or "knowing." Or, "seeming" is sort of a blend of both "appearing" and "knowing," or...]
In the previous subsections, we’ve discussed several techniques to aid in phenomenological exploration. Here, it’s worth emphasizing a distinction mentioned before, that between read-off and inference.
It’s worth keeping in mind whether you’re thinking about something versus looking at something just as it is. When you’re using phenomenological techniques, part of the time you’re going to be doing the technique and part of the time, maybe even most of the time, you’re going to be thinking hard and trying to figure out what’s going on and possibly how to describe it. And those two things are going to be mixed together in complicated ways, as you peek at something for a moment and then think about it, then maybe have a realization, and then peek again a few times between thoughts.
The mind is very, very prone to mistaking thoughts about a thing for the thing itself. (That’s not to say that thoughts about a thing aren’t very interesting in themselves, and you can directly investigate those as well!) And, the mind is very prone to get into very long chains of thinking.
This is fine! This is not meditation where you sometimes want to suppress parts of your experience. Better, here, to err on the side of letting experience do what it wants and then direction attention and making distinctions within that ongoing experience.
But, it’s worth checking that you’re spending enough time actually looking at what you’re investigating, and, also, that when you’re looking you’re actually looking.
Actually looking is read-off. Everything else is inference. Both are important, but don’t mistake the latter for the former. This requires ongoing vigilance, though it eventually becomes somewhat habitual.
If you get the answer through thinking about it, that’s inference. If you get the answer through, there it is right there, and I’m just reporting it, that’s read-off. Both are useful; know which one you want in any particular moment.
(7) Looking versus Seeing What's There
[Note! Beware of inappropriately reifying attention and movements of attention! "Attention" (compare with perhaps experience, awareness, and lots of other things] is a trap! Maybe see section attention is not fundamental]
[Note! Beware of inappropriately reifying attention, movements of attention, "brightening," "dimming," or "mental actions"! It's a trap!]
We've talked about primary versus secondary attention, and we've also talked about read-off versus inference. It's worth making one more distinction. All of these distinctions are pointing at a very particular way of exploring within yourself, and it's being emphasized because it can be very counterintuitive.
It can be dangerous to write so many words and to (try) to be so specific about what you might find when you look inside yourself and also how you might do that looking. That is, it's very easy to fall into the trap of looking versus seeing what's there. Daniel Ingram makes this distinction, perhaps in different words, in his book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha.
The idea is that the act of looking, the act of moving your attention around too much, will obscure the very things you're trying to see. And if you have expectations about what you're going to see, that will bias your attention to move, to try and catch in the act the fruit of those expectations. But, unless you have some familiarity with the phenomenon already, all you have to go on are words. And, words can be very misleading when don't already have at least some slight experience with the territory (which you might).
One of the ways to get around this is to try to keep investigating, as closely as you can, what's actually right there in front you, what you're actually experiencing right now. I don't mean in daily life, like, when you're eating an orange, though you can do that. I mean while you're exploring the distinctions and techniques in these recent subsections.
For example, find a neutral object, as in the secondary attention section, and, then, don't look for things, per se, but follow the instructions and see what happens. It's ok to take plenty of time amidst all that, to think about whether you're following the instructions right and whether you should deviate and experiment, and stuff like that. But, follow the instructions, and see what happens. Let experiences arise as opposed to going looking for them. Look at what you're experiencing right now, as opposed to going looking for more things to experience.
Eventually you might notice how everything outside the primary focus of attention wants to "dim." You might start to notice when the primary focus of attention is no longer the primary focus attention, even though your eyes haven't moved and the primary focus of attention is still right in front of your eyes. You might start to notice gentle tugs at your attention that you don't have to fully follow through with. You might start to notice what happens between moments of attention.
You might notice you non-specifically brighten "everything" in order to see these things happen. You could brighten or focus on specific things, even without moving your primary attention and obscuring phenomena. And you can non-specifically brighten, too, so as not to obscure anything with attentional movement, and, then inspect the afterimage, to get a better look.
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(This is a bit of a joke stub, but also it's serious and not meant to be flippant.)
"Be careful not to inappropriately reify inappropriate reification."
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[we use the example of "feet" a lot, but that’s just one example! we might have used hands, belly button, something. feet are a good heuristic thing to try, but it’s not a rule.]
N
[...]
I guess the next logical question would be [...]
Mark
Want to say something like I think there’s a pre-rational step that’s being missed
N
Say more!
Wdym by pre-rational?
Mark
You probably should pay attention to your feet a bunch or something versus trying to answer questions like [...]
maybe.
but something vaguely like that, maybe extensively
N
You think there's a frozen thing in the body that constrains reasoning and needs to be moved around a bit by correct placing of attention?
Mark
YES. but, a lot, not a little bit
N
Why won't reasoning work? The right answers simply won't pop up in my head or something?
Mark
reasoning for most people mostly happens in a "virtual machine" and there’s only a trickle from that down to preference changes, behavior changes, and goal changes, even if one comes up with "right answers." a failure mode is to keep collecting right answers indefinitely without them becoming a part of the "motivated seeming" of the world
N
In my mind reasoning isn't disconnected from behavioral change, ala critical rationalism
IME in any case where I see lack of progress, I can sort of clearly see why and what problems aren't solved yet
I've never been in a situation where my problem seems explicitly solved, but no behavioral change follows
Mark
That is true for some people, for some domains, contingently
In my mind reasoning isn’t disconnected from behavioral change, ala critical rationalism
do you mean all minds or just some minds, like your mind?
N
The latter, but I'd assume that they're reasoning incorrectly, i.e. missing important signals from the body or getting themselves in conceptual tangles without noticing
Mark
yeah
N
So maybe I got lucky with my mind, hehe
Or I'm just deluded
Mark
but incorrectly is a massive gradient, from extreme virtual machine to radical integration. almost everyone has a lot of confusions, at least at first
N
Do you have any reasons to believe that certain mental moves, e.g. look at feet, just plain don't work and are based on spurious data?
Mark
for some people doing that specifically will be the wrong thing to do at any given time. right thing right time in right order
that’s why there’s 500+ p/a practices, etc., etc.
N
Or, have you considered it?
Mark
considered what?
N
That they don't actually work
Mark
the meta-protocol is a schematization of error checking and meta error checking. it’s an ongoing consideration of whether such things don’t work
at any particular time for some particular person
N
I see, I see
But you don't have an explicit model that accounts both for the usually psychotherapy stuff and mental moves such as that, and can legibly translate from its language into their?
Or do you
Mark
sensory experiences sculpt the future propensities of the system. talk therapy is narrow sculpting that leaves out a huge range of possible experiences that can be used for sculpting
the mind is highly intertwingled such that feet are involved in reasoning, usually confusedly. gotta sometimes e.g. pay attention to the feet to use e.g. talk therapy, correctly
N
[...] how/why sensory experience of one's feet can be useful for sculpting one's higher-level behavior and goals and shit?
I understand the general idea
But I don't understand how experiencing one's feet could be useful for changing beliefs about the world
Feeling one's feet is very different from trying out new food and liking it, me thinks
In this sense feet seem irrelevant
To any major stuff
Don't understand how feet are involved with reasoning :(
Or can be
The way you talk about it is very different from the language/ontology I personally use to make sense of this area
Mark
one’s epistemic stack involves sensory experience of elbows, knees, voice tone, prosody, everything. all of it becomes the substrate for reasoning
Mark
to improve reasoning one sometimes needs to unpack some of the lower-level stuff that doesn’t feel "meaning-laden," like weird body sensations
N
So suppose a person feels their feet
And suppose she did it at the right time
What happens next?
An insight suddenly pops up in their head?
Or maybe weird sensations appear in some body part
Mark
they realize they were doing reasoning wrong, somehow, that was systematically biasing their conclusions. it’s usually not that direct but sometimes it is
usually it’s lots of small steps
that don’t seem to add up until the end
N
And when it's not direct, what happens is something like 'next time they do think, they're able to look at the problem from a slightly different perspective or something'?
Mark
that’s object-level, and that’s a thing too. but, meta-level, the reasoning system itself will work slightly differently, sometimes a bit worse before it’s long-run net better
N
Aight
And they could also maybe never experience anything meaning-laden throughout feeling their feet?
Mark
yeah, plenty of stuff stays non-meaning-laden, contentless [throughout]
N
But they find out that reasoning works a lil better (or worse) when they try it next time?
Mark
yup
N
Ohh
Fuck, these inferences are, indeed, hard to make
Mark
yes
N
Like unless the person is systematic, they might never notice the connection
Right?
Mark
even if reasoning works a little better, that doesn’t mean a conclusion is guaranteed to pop out in any particular thinking/feeling session, ofc
N
Yeah
Mark
Like unless the person is systematic, they might never notice the connection
yes exactly
N
You really need to put this into protocol
Mark
it’s ridiculously long-range/counterintuitive, all things being equal
N
It connects the right stuff
For me and probably certain people
N
Could it be that some people simply notice stuff like 'when I work out or do open awareness, I sort of can think better afterwards', and the model above explains why?
Mark
yeah
could you see if this existing section kind of says it:
"headyness"/"heady-ness"/"headiness"
N
I've read it, I think
And it didn't
Mark
ok
N
How does one start noticing patterns such as this? (e.g. look at feet now, see more progress later)
Mark
I think need to study a ton of people from the outside, or need a methodological bootstrap, from the inside.
N
How could studying people work?
Mark
the methodological bootstrap, for me, was p2 plus the meta protocol.
N
Like, it's so hard to notice it in yourself
Mark
wayfinding in methodology/theory space
N
How would it be easier to notice in others?
[delay]
Mark
i’m looking for the original Gendlin Focusing research study
N
Go on
Oh
Mark
they tried to figure out why some people made progress in therapy and others didn’t, and that’s how they isolated "focusing moves"
N
It has something about that
Yeah
I know
Doesn't seem like something that's possible for a regular Joe to do
Mark
and so my stuff, for example, could be considered a generalization of that original observation
N
Aight
What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?
Mark
Doesn’t seem like something that’s possible for a regular Joe to do
it is very freaky when it feels like "me or someone maybe couldn’t have figured out this important thing without outside stimulus"
very unpleasant, at first, at least for me
N
Does anything else matter, aside from looking when feel stuck?
Mark
What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?
has to do with deep contingent structure of any particular system based on experiences that person has had and prior attentional propensities
Mark
hard to explicate which is why personal global wayfinding can help
N
Wanna unpack 'prior attentional propensities'?
Mark
including possibly reads by people who are a bit farther on the journey
the experiences we have determine the structure of the system and the future propensities of the system
N
What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?
Wanna try unpacking the gears behind 'deep contingent structure of...'?
Mark
so the necessary order of refactoring of a system will depend on that causal history
N
What do you think determines the amount of time one needs to look at their feet? Like, why a lot or a little in certain cases?
Maybe with an example
Mark
it’s really hard to say. if someone ignored their feet a lot or spent a lot of time attending to their feet, at some point in their life. then, in meditation or whatever, they’ll probably need to spend a lot of time with their feet.
it’s like a collection of loosely coupled stacks, in the computer science sense. LIFO: last in first out, in terms of the order one needs to sort of touch stuff in to refactor
loosely coupled partial orderings
N
So from a subjective experience viewpoint, what mostly happens is just you staring at feet and nothing really happens while you're doing it
And you do it for a long time
Maybe regularly or at once
Mark
kind of. one can keep running navigational stuff like meta protocol, but there can be a lot of up-front uncertainty.
the "how" matters, too. things like top-down attending vs "letting feet come to you" and stuff like that. and might need to interleave many other things. could extend timeline if just forcefully tried to attend to something in a contiguous block. needs to be patient, gentle, curious, cautious, etc. etc.
N
Is it a linear thing? I.e. the less you looked at feet before, the more you gotta do it? What happens behind the scenes while you do it?
Mark
but yeah, it can take a long time before one gets a sense of whether "something’s happening" or not. it’s a very gradual increase in sensitivity and long-range wayfinding
i think it’s sublinear for any particular thing and superlinear globally
but still practically finite. a fraction of the time one has already been alive
N
^ don't understand sub/supra
Also would like to get an answer to 'what happens behind the scenes', if ok
Mark
so like if feet stuff was weird for five years, then maybe only need 500 hours of feet stuff and not five years of feet stuff
there’s a compression thing
but there’s still sort of a combinatorial explosion of pairwise e.g. feet interaction with other things.
lots of recursion
behind the scenes it’s like A comes into contact with B and yields A-prime and B-prime, and there’s like a huge number of these little interactions that have to occur and reoccur
N
What's ‘A-prime'?
Mark
A-prime is A but a little different
N
(prime, is that from maths?)
Ok
Mark
yeah
N
And A and B are beliefs or something?
Mark
beliefs, anticipations, synaptic potentials, something
N
Cool
And that happens unconsciously?
I assume
Mark
one can infer it sometimes from skeletal muscle changes, tingles, insights, and other phenomenological changes, but it can seem like nothing is happening sometimes for many hours
N
If something bubbles up to consciousness, then in what form?
Cool
Mark
insights, realizations, muscle tension changes, yeah
N
You have a list in the end of all stuff that could be useful to look through
Mark
yeah
N
Is there a way you can dissect that list? E.g. hands/feet usually are more useful, so try maybe starting with those first, but be gentle and self-aware etc etc
Mark
i think i give some rough heuristics somewhere
in various lists and more sections
N
Where?
Hm
Can't recall seeing that
Mark
extremities and stomach, not the head, are good places to experiment with, first. but too much can tangle further, etc,. etc.
N
Aight
N
Is there more info in those places in the protocol?
Mark
Is there more info in those places in the protocol?
i don’t do too much of this because it’s so personally contingent and blocky suggestions might cause people to ignore subtle stuff that’s not in my suggestions
N
Cool
Aight thanks
Oh
How can you notice that I need to e.g. look more at feet?
Is it something you infer from what I say and the types of problems I'm dealing with, for example?
Mark
If something feels stuck, wrong, etc., but usually hope to e.g. look at feet long before that.
N
Oh
Mark
Is it something you infer from what I say and the types of problems I’m dealing with, for example?
usually not object level problems, though sometimes, but general patterns, yeah
N
So in my case I don't feel like I'm completely stuck, more like 'it's moving too slow'. But I don't feel that I literally tried all I can and that my current way of dealing w stuff can't give me more progress atm
Is that why
You say that I should continue with what I do
And maybe eventually naturally exhaust the potential
Of what I'm doing?
Mark
Maybe!! But can be good to keep alternatives in mind, too, and maybe interleave a little bit, increasingly over time
N
But if I interleave, I won't be able to clearly notice that that's what's helping me
And I'll keep thinking that my method is working
Mark
There may be ways to do it while not confounding too much. Not entirely overlapping lead indicators.
But it’s a good point
N
Say more?
Re ways
Mark
you may notice different good things via your current way versus trying new things, making it possible to know where the good things are coming from
there will be some overlap, probably, but not complete overlap
N
Oh
Ok
Aight, cool
Thanks for doing this conversation!
Mark
you’re very welcome. thank you for your questions
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This post/section comes in a three parts, and, as a whole, it’s meant to explain and demonstrate similarities and especially overlap between practices that I write/teach about, as well as commonalities and overlap between all self-care, self-transformative, and spiritual or meditative practices and traditions.
It’s still in a draft/unfinished state–re-reading, it’s just really really dense with technical terminology, so it might seem convoluted (and it is a little convoluted), but I think it’s all sort of schematically there, for those who spend some time with it. And future drafts will unpack and explain and clarify and de-convolute.
I’m also unhappy that there’s still a bit of a “bite” in some places, and I want to soften that, too.
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This post/section depends on a few premises, so I’ll list them now:
(The below starts off very abruptly and densely, in the first premise, but if you kind of let your eyes glaze over on the first read, and just skim, it quickly gets easier to follow after a few paragraphs.)
The first premise is something like the “redo-to-undo” principle. The the redo-to-undo principle is something like, for a particular latent (high-dimensional, distributed) “patch” or “area” of bodymind “state,” i.e. the way the bodymind (latently) is–for that area of bodymind to change or transform, that area must be “redone” or “replayed” or “reactivated” or “re-evoked” or “activated.” After being re-evoked, it is labile, changeable, and it can participate in mutual transformation with other “bodymind” that is also concurrently activated. (And this implies that there is “doing” (and redoing) and “undoing.”)
The second premise is something like liberated mind, natural mind, ordinary mind is the same thing as “settled” mind. (“Settled” shouldn’t have a connotation of static or fixed. It’s still open, sensitive, responsive, (structurally) fluid. But just like water in a container, it can be at rest until stirred, and it can smoothly resettle if left alone).
The third premise is something like “connectedness of mind.” What this means is something like, if the mind is changed somewhere, then it’s like, from that change point, there are tendrils all throughout the mind, that either ever so slightly tug a little bit or every so slightly become more slack. And so, after ANY change in the mind, either through meditation (prior to “enlightenment”) or spontaneously (after “enlightenment”) [both very loosely speaking], a “global settling process” is kicked off, a perturbation, a reverberation, that ultimately touches at least some of the mind, and, in principle, in the most general case, needs/does touch ALL of the rest of the mind, sometimes many times, to reach global settledness.
The fourth premise extends the second premise and is something like, in addition to premise 2–a “liberated mind, natural mind, ordinary mind is the same thing as ‘settled’ mind”–such a mind is also a “fully untangled mind.” (And this implies that there’s such a thing as “tangling” and “untangling.” And, so, some “doing” is tangling and some “doing” is untangling (and some is neutral). And let’s say any/all “undoing” is net or mostly, if not entirely, untangling.)
The fifth premise is something like, explicit meditation instructions can only ever be incomplete, and can only ever partially specify what needs to be done for “complete untangling.” That is, they can’t fully specify all the things that need to be done in the technical sense. (In parallel, a teacher cannot fully specify all the things that need to be done, either. Of course, for explicit instructions, or teacher interaction, it can be a long, patient, extended text interpretation, or interaction, with multiple texts or teachers, to finally get all the pieces that one needs, to get all the rest of the pieces that one needs, through individual practice.)
Therefore, a personally adequately liberatory practice must implicitly contain the seeds that, through practice, self-generate all the things that need to be done, for that person, in order to be fully liberated, settled, etc.
And, a universally adequately liberatory practice (which doesn’t exist except empirically by degrees) must implicitly contain the seeds that, through practice, self-generate all the things that need to be done, for any person, to complete full liberation, settledness, etc. (Note, for completeness, that I think this is only asymptotically possible and also environmentally contingent.)
Note that anything that can be done, including nuances, shades, modulations of any particular “doable thing,” must be something either explicitly specified or “self-generate-able” by a universally adequately liberatory practice (UALP). Because, some person, somewhere, in imaginable principle, will need that particular thing, and it won’t necessarily be in their starting repertoire.
What the above means is that anything doable is potentially a part of practice, either as seeking out similar experiences one has had in one’s past (“environmental redo-to-undo”), or finding one’s way internally to original sense impressions (“memory redo-to-undo” [successful environmental redo are also memory redos]), or internally recreating missing experiences, when adequate, that one can’t have out in the world (because impossible, dangerous, unethical) and also never had in the past (“imaginal non-tangling ‘do'”)
And so anything non-tangling or untangling (and even things that locally tangle in the service of future untangling, cf. technical debt), is partial spiritual practice, including things that aren’t normally thought of as “spiritual” practice (by some people), like focusing or therapy, etc. (Some people will say, of course focusing and therapy are spiritual practice, and so on.)
And so the conclusion or punchline of all of this is that, I don’t think most lineage/wisdom traditions will claim that their path will work for “everybody,” so they’re not claiming universality or near universality. But, they might claim something like “generality,” as in “kinda completely works for some relatively large-ish reference class of people, and at least does some good things for an even larger-ish additional set of people.”
But, to the degree that a tradition says, “X isn’t a part of our path, we don’t do that, that’s not buddhadharma,” they are leaving out anyone who needs any of that doing or redoing, and are sort of “removing all doubt” that their path is not universal. Because, any path that leaves something out will then not work for all bodyminds/people, as it were, because of connectedness and other premises.
And, all of this is why I sometimes say “same playing field,” whether it’s vipassana, yoga, focusing, tantra, therapy, etc. None of those, narrowly specified, are complete and adequately universal spiritual practices, but they must necessarily “inhere” in any truly universal spiritual practice or path.
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So there’s sort of a “continuity” or “contiguity” between “mundane” beliefs and “supramundane” beliefs.
Before getting to that I want to just note that the idea of “belief” is problematic in a lot of ways, so maybe swap that out for anticipation, expectation, or perhaps “the very being and seeming of the world,” like how it appears, the prereflectively felt affordances and possibilities one has, and so on. And you can also swap out “beliefs” for “insights” or knowing, understanding, etc. (We can stop before adding “thoughts” to this; one can have knowing or understanding without thoughts, per se, verbal or otherwise. Even non-symbolic cognition, felt senses, and perhaps arguably even knowing, might be potentially left out or at least unnecessary, to backpedal a little bit. All of this has to interface with aconceptuality as well, which is beyond the scope of this section.)
So the claim that I’m making is something like “mundane” beliefs, or whatever, and “supramundane” beliefs, or whatever, are qualitatively and functionally the “same kind of thing,” and the only difference is sort of of a matter of degree along some particular axes that I’ll talk about in a moment. (Also, when I say the “same kind of thing,” this is all being written in a toy linguistic schema, and, in another sense, of course beliefs, knowing, etc., isn’t/aren’t thing-like, to the same degree nothing is thing-like and especially phenomenal stuff isn’t thing-like. But it’s just easier to talk about “things” and “somethings” when that’s good enough for local purposes.)
So mundane beliefs or stuff are things like your recollection or remembering of what you ate for breakfast, or the color of your car or your friend’s painted fingernails, or what someone said earlier, or what you think is going to happen tomorrow. This is sort of the relatively contemporaneous stuff that you use to navigate the world, and also semi-episodic (or not) childhood stuff and beliefs or guesses about the future, and so on.
And then supramundane stuff are the things that are “really deep” (and we’ll actually talk about “deep” in a moment) or “really phenomenological” or existential or metaphysical. Where there’s a sense that these things are qualitatively different because, when they change, something big or small changes about “the very being and seeming” of self, world, everything.
And, so, in a nutshell, I’ll claim that even “mundane” stuff is changing the very being and seeming of the world, just ever so slightly and barely noticeably, more “locally.”
Ok but why does the supramundane stuff sort of take so long (sometimes) to change and why does it sometimes feel so “big,” what is different about it.
We’ll need some conceptual pieces:
The first is something like “durational time attention bottlenecked updating,” and so the idea is that the whole body mind can’t change all at once (though any “single” change can be really high dimensional and touch many little things, all at once, but it’s still only the tiniest of a fraction of the “whole thing). So there’s a constraint on how much can change at once, and that sort of implies a “real time” constraint or that changes happen over real time. We can encapsulate this as something like change only occurs where “attention” goes, and “attention” is in scare quotes because I’m referring here to neither quite what we sort of phenomenally think of as our “attention” (for which many aspects of which sort of evaporate over long-term meditative practice) nor do I mean a pretty theoretical construct like in abstract cognitive science (and the neuroscience is outside the scope of this section). But, close enough for now, ok, anyway, you could think of like a spotlight of attention sweeping around, and stuff changes under the spotlight.
This metaphor of a spotlight is helpful, because sometimes changes that occur happen in a way that “goes on top of” other changes, and occludes whatever’s beneath. So the “light of the spotlight” can’t reach what’s underneath, and so what’s underneath can’t change, until the spotlight and surrounding stuff interacts with what is on top in a way that gets it out of the way. In summary, though, some changes can (reversibly) lock in other changes. And the thing underneath can’t be labile, can’t be changeable, malleable until “unlocked.”
Ok, and this “on-top-ness” or “locking” can be in layers. Like, whatever locks something underneath, can then have something go on top of that, which then locks that in place, and so on. So there can be these sort of very tall “microcolumns” or vast sheets of layers on top of layers on top of layers, like heuristically, hundreds of thousands of layers deep, and so on.
So this gives us the idea of “depth” (which is loosely correlated with a feeling of “inwardsness” or “inner space-ness” or “lower chakras” [cf. neural cord development], but don’t get hung up that! It’s a very loose and loopy correlation, that goes all over and within the body and beyond, and lower and inner unwind and untwist and evaporate into a positive phenomenal flatness and just-this-ness and isotropy over thousands of hours of meditative or spiritual practice).
Now, we’re sort of at least shallowly layering and delayering all the time, learning and unlearning, revising beliefs. Layering is fast and dirty and easy for the mind to reach for (but sort of takes slack out of the system and “uses up” “mind space” faster). And we do unlayer shallow stuff fairly easily, like if, ok, the color of our friend’s car or someone’s nail color, we realize, is more of an off-white (instead of gray, for the car) and a pink (instead of an orange; for our friend’s nails). But unlayering deep stuff takes a long time. Some of it is sort of working through no-longer-needed upper layers. And some of it is “structure preserving transformations,” that functionally keep the same beliefs/stuff but move it “off to the side” to expose deeper layers. This latter requires “slack,” and so the system has to figure out how to work through at least some things before doing structure preserving transformations. (It’s all a bit like tetris, metaphorically speaking, with the modification that you can sometimes move the topmost pieces upwards and re-place them, with fewer “holes” and also the right placements (“oh i really truly don’t need any of this, right here, anymore”) can make more space. And you can temporarily stack existing placements higher to get access to deeper placements.)
In any case, supramundane stuff tends to be at deeper layers.
Now, in addition to the dimension of depth, there is also the dimension of “tangledness.” Recall we can pretend attention sort of moves around like a spotlight, but also let’s say attention “strobes” or blinks. And each time attention is “on,” say that’s a “mind moment” or even a “snapshot” a photography picture (though not quite so static, of course). So attention is a series of mind moments. And let’s say, for an untrained mind, mind moments are tangled. That is, each snapshot has sense doors, “self-ness”/witnessing, motivational aspects like suffering, ontology, belief, relevance, all sort of tangled together.
And, say, some things are pretty “non-fundamental,” like they tangle into, say, 2% of mind moments. But, some things are “relatively fundamental” and they tangle into 80%-95% of mind moments. And, say, to have an insight about something, it has to be relatively more detangled or even completely detangled from everything else. When fully detangled, gathered, deconvolved, disembedded it can sort of be taken as object as such, can come into contact with other stuff in the mind as such, and get spontaneously transformed, metabolized, all sorts of things.
Untrained mind and non-meditating mind moments (pre enlightenment, or whatever) is at least lightly tangled or tangling, like at least 51% tangling. And during meditation (or post enlightenment, or whatever) mind moments are at least 51% to 99% untangling or untangled.
Now, stuff corresponding to the three characteristics (as well as other stuff, to be sure) are relatively much more deep and much more tangled than other stuff in the mind. Self, suffering, permanence/eternalism, perhaps at least one of them are found tangled into almost every mind moment–other stuff, too, not just these. And early childhood conceptual stuff can be even deeper, and childhood trauma can come pretty close to just as deep, too. (And, also, do they even EX-ist (exist) prior to detangling, gathering, etc.? Or might they latently SUB-sist (subsist)? There’s something conditioned-ly universal or quasi-universal going on, here. But this parenthetical is a suggestion to not overly reify the three characteristics or anything else in the mind as different or more special than anything else. But something cool is going on, here. Something can sort of starkly and conceptually “pop out,” in a way that might be really similar across people. And perhaps that has a particularly genetic/developmental basis or its a near-universal “psychological stopgap solution.”)
Some traditions are sort of “supramundane first” or “depth-first,” which still involves a great deal of mundane, slack-increasing, structure preserving transformations. A tremendous amount of mundane-involved delayering still needs to occur for “depth-first” practices. But, even given that, a tremendous amount of mundane work is still needed after things related to the three characteristics unravel (and other related stuff, cf. luminosity, and so on). And sometimes this can involve a lot of destabilization, integration sickness, and so on. And so someone might benefit from conventional therapy (or plenty of other stuff) after “going depth-first” because a lot of things will be left still unfinished, as it were. And some things will be easier, because so much will be untangled, and some things will be harder because lots layering might have happened, to move things out of the way, in order to go deep.
An alternative to depth-first is breadth-first. Breadth-first might spend a lot more time near the surface, at first, might sometimes look more introspective and navel-gaze-y, but inexorably, more and more on the surface will be dissolved or profitably settled and off to the side. And “descent” might be slower, but there will be much less to do after descent, and possibly less time will have been needed, overall, because, as mentioned above, depth-first can involve a lot of layering that eventually need to be delayered. And breadth-first tends to be relatively more unlayery, all the way through, and insights tend to be more fleeting in salience because they don’t have a lot of “integration debt” arriving in their wake, as it were. Notably, breadth-first can still be a really rough ride, maybe often almost as rough as depth-first, it’s hard to get around that. And I could see breadth-first sometimes being slower, for some people, depending on the ordering of some things around fine-grain-ness of action and perception as well as steady stick-to-it-ive-ness. But breadth-first might sometimes involve a bit less behavioral/psychological rigidity, which can sometimes come with a lot of excess practice-related layering. Breadth-first can be harder to get traction or good feedback loops, up front, though, because there’s initially so much optionality. And depth-first can sort of profitably “bunch up in time” or stereotype-ify some things, which can make some kinds of patterns of territory and meditative action easier to see. (Issues with breadth-first can be somewhat mitigated by instructions that have explicit global wayfinding as mentioned in part three.)
In any case, both breadth-first and depth-first are just two alternative ways to engage with the same territory, same playing field, as it were. But either are sort of an attentional “space filling curve” that sort of has to touch everything anyway, for complete untangling, complete deconditioning and reconditioning. And so there are plenty of paths/curves that are a MIX of breadth-first and depth-first, and since breadth-first and depth-first are just schematic abstractions, any persons particular concrete path will look like a nebulous, personalized mix of both, with maybe some overarching features or one or the other, or not at all.
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“Global wayfinding” is sort of how one finds just the right mix of breadth-inclined and depth-inclined in their own practice, really just concrete engagement with the territory that leaves behind and transcends any particular set of heuristic abstractions.
Very briefly, if one considers the bodymind to be in a particular “state,” at some point in time, call it state A. And there are future maybe possible better states like B, C, D.
Wayfinding is finding one’s way to those future states, not knowing, in advance, exactly what they are or how to get to them.
And global wayfinding is looking for future better states that have fewer and fewer tradeoffs, overall, compared to all other states, and sometimes necessarily passing through worse states to get there.
The relationship to main practice p2 is that doing or maintaining good things and stopping or preventing bad things (loosely and briefly speaking), cashes out as one way to directly do global wayfinding.
Each doing/maintaining/stopping/preventing slightly alters the system, moving from A, to A-prime, and so on. And one could replace p2 with an ever shifting constellation of practices from various traditions or the preliminary/auxiliary practices, and so on. In those latter cases, even those will probably give way to something ever-more sensitive and nuanced and personalized, beyond any sort of conceptualization.
Another reason it’s called “wayfinding” is because often the route is not direct. It’s twisty, with backtracking, “can’t get there from here,” and one must use care and sensitivity to gently avoid messiness or tangliness (long run) over time.
Many traditions/practices do have implicit or informal global wayfinding. For the latter, "what to do when" happens as the meditator moves between practices out of interest or practicality, or through discussions with peers or a teacher. For the former, the meditator gets better and better at "finding their way," during practice; they are less attached to particular instructions or the how of particular instructions, and are more and more nuanced, situated, specific, concrete, intuitive, spontaneous. And/but it can sometimes help to lightly, non-reified-ly, explicitly call out global wayfinding as a "thing."
q&a about global wayfinding
(Below, questions are indented and in italics, and my answers are in normal font.)
questions:
This was helpful for me to better contextualize with the protocol doc, but have some q's. It makes sense that each doing/maintaining/stopping/etc. will alter the system, but isn't that true for /any/ action regardless of whether you are "actively meditating" or not? Why is it that those specific actions (maintaining good or stopping bad) imply better wayfinding -- couldn't those also seem locally good, but actually be globally detrimental? (and vice versa, couldn't doing something seemingly "bad" be the best thing for you globally?).
If P2 is working because of cultivating goodness (and preventing badness, loosely speaking), then why would replacing that practice with other traditions (that seemingly(?) have nothing to do with goodness) work in the same way?
I get that in global wayfinding (in this context, or any context really), you can only act on the information you have, so it is obviously difficult to make the "perfect" decision from such a vast input space. So is "goodness" just the chosen heuristic here because its better/less disruptive than alternatives? Take a more rigid practice like noting for example, could you argue that noting is also global wayfinding where the heuristic you are optimizing for is sensory clarity as opposed to goodness (and therefore vastly limiting your input space for next steps)?
answers:
but isn’t that true for /any/ action regardless of whether you are “actively meditating” or not?
yes!
couldn’t those also seem locally good, but actually be globally detrimental? (and vice versa, couldn’t doing something seemingly “bad” be the best thing for you globally?).
yes! so they counterfactually would really [in some sense] be (globally) good and bad. there would be some mediate error propagation.
then why would replacing that practice with other traditions (that seemingly(?) have nothing to do with goodness) work in the same way?
things can be good and bad while not being directly conceptualized as such
So is “goodness” just the chosen heuristic here because its better/less disruptive than alternatives?
it starts out a heuristic but becomes more and precise and concrete (if imperfect) over time
it won’t “linguistically/phenomenologically/conceptually “seat well” [sic] with everyone, at first or ever, which is why there should be a lot of practices out there.
but goodness, held loosely in way that allows it to evolve as understanding grows, is a pretty special concept. it can be tangly at first though because of how metaphysically/ethically connotation-laden it is.
could you argue that noting is also global wayfinding
noting has implicit global wayfinding, or is general and fine grain enough to support implicit global wayfinding, which may be why it’s seemingly, empirically one of the more empirically effective practices.
heuristic you are optimizing for is sensory clarity as opposed to goodness
as a thought experiment, to the degree someone hewed rigidly to a sensory clarity feedback loop and only this feedback loop, they would eventually get stuck, because it’s an incomplete measure of progress. eventually error propagation and layering would dominate, imo.
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[ Draft self-forward (it's pompous and has other issues, to say the least):
This is an old blog post that is sort of the beginning of my thinking about a "unified theory of enlightenment" (which also has to harmonious with neuroscience, among other things, even if in a very different ontology). Overall, I've wanted a response to someone saying "there's different kinds of enlightenment in different lineage traditions, wisdom traditions, contemporary communities of practice, and so on." In contradiction, I would say something like, "There's only incomplete enlightenment and complete enlightenment." Of course, I'm certainly not the first person to say "my enlightenment is better than all these other enlightenments." And I'm certainly not the first person to, not just say that, but to also (try to) construct careful arguments that somehow refute other conceptions or enlightenment or show how they are imperfect or lacking something important. (I don't even have a careful argument, in one place, yet, as I'm writing this, though I hint at it in a bunch of places.) I think the stakes are pretty high, for a few reasons. First, one wants practioners to have an appropriate level of confidence and focus in/on a particular system--I say appropriate because different systems work better and worse for different people, loosely speaking, and one wants to only put the amount of time into a single system that makes sense, for them. And a good system should disclose when it's not the right system for a particular practioner (erring in some right direction of minimizing false positives and false negatives). Second, flaws in systems produce individual suffering and also damage communities. To the degree that a system can point out issues in individual practice, and point out issues in other paths or conceptions of enlightenment, presuming (challengingly!) tact, grace, and humility, then multiple communities of practice are elevated, and so on.
In all his, my general critique (and of course this critique is leveled by like every meditation system at every other meditation system) is that most other meditation systems "don't go far enough." For their "center of mass" of practioners, "people tend to get stuck" and/or the tradition becomes anemic and vague about far reaches and thus potentially fails at transmission to the next generation.
A meditation system or bodymind practioner should be able to operate on itself/themself and apply to itself and critique and meta-critique itself, comprehensively/exhaustively, and without remainder, thus transcending itself and pointing at groundlessness and like any and all of any other things behind the thing, unceasingly.
My conception of "better" doesn't guarantee the above (see that section in the document, noting nonmontonicity, multidimensionality, globality, etc.). But, the argument tht I haven't made yet is supposed to go something like, "tacking towards 'better' will produce 'subjective convergence'." That is, people pursuing their own aims/goals, on their own terms, in their own words, "correctly" will produce subjective convergence or similar high-level features to other correctly practicing practitioners, "from the inside,' along with, of course, optimized contingency perfectly-fit to the individual practioner, as well, that itself will still be imbued, infused with that high-level convergence. Rather, this is the claim, and then I still need to work out a good argument, or, rather, just an explanation for this claim, that isn't too circular. But analytic circularity (or something; someone slant-called this "platonicity") might be all that's needed, here, or all that's possible, in any case. (There can also be an appeal to latest and greatest neuroscience and physics, cf. very-high-dimensional energy landscapes, attractive basins, stable attractors, global minima/maxima, entropic dissipation, "teleodynamics", the relationship between telos and mechanism, and so on, and plenty more, over the next three hundred years, and beyond.)
(I just want to note, as I'll also note, in parallel, below, that words like "globality", "correctness", "convergence", "optmized", "perfectly-fit,"--let alone "platonicity," contra impermanence, non-eternality, groundlessness, etc., heh--are sort of problematically self-reifying, and I hope the reader will hold all this very loosely in their intrepretation and how these words do or don't affect practice. In some sense this is just toy schemas, just pedagogy, just [sometimes] skillful means, just etc.)
Some general qualifying and hedging:
The old blog post is immediately below.
[First posted: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/20/many-enlightenments-a-nonrigorous-position/ Last accessed: 2021-12-08]
[This is a heavily edited transcript. It’s not as organized or nuanced as it could be. It’s more like a position than an argument, for sure.]
[by enlightenment I mean a state or property of a mind versus an social/cultural/intensional [sic] construction. I think there are many of the latter, of course.]
Lots of people think that there are a bunch of different enlightenments. I actually strongly disagree with this. I think there are intermediate things that can be cultivated, and certainly different people will have a preference at least mediately for different things that they want based on what they think is out there, what they think they can get, and what they think is good/useful.
But, I tend to think that the mind is only trying to do one thing. I don’t know exactly what that is, but it’s probably something like predicting what’s going to happen next as elegantly and correctly as possible. Something in that space.
I think it used to be popular to model the brain as a heinous kludge, but I think that neuroscience is going to go in the direction of there being one fundamental operating principle for how the mind works. After all, in some sense animals or say especially humans have a fragmented telos, but in another sense the telos of a humans (and animals) is quite unified.
And that unity increases with training, etc. Importantly, people have different goals. But people’s goals can change, and there’s a question of how deeply those goals can change. And arguably, meditation or enlightenment are tools for changing desires/preferences/goals in a very deep way. So, what are the fundamental principles, neuroscientifically or phenomenologically, that underly the transformation of telos?
One way to look at this is using the concepts of goodness and “betterness.”
I think that, nonmonotonically, people can tack towards goodness or betterness in sort of a global way. Like, with dips and valleys and mistakes and backtracking, just aim for things being better and better.
Like someone might want to experience things as empty or someone might want to have less life problems, or realize that there’s no goal or one goal or lots of other things…
But, imagining people who’ve been doing the thing for forty years… I think that there’s a way in which people who don’t asymptote or who don’t paint themselves into a corner, or don’t get stuck, I strongly suspect that in the limit they will agree more and more about what the right thing to do is and what it looks like when it’s more and more “done”.
Like, the metaphor, there’s many paths up the mountain, but only one peak.
So, for the people who say there’s multiple enlightenments or multiple axes of development, I would imagine that, yes, that’s the case when one is say 5/7’s up the mountain. But 6/7’s, 7/7’s…
There will still be contingency in life situation, personal experience, and use of mind.
But, I think there’s this globally significant invariant or isomorphism at some level of abstraction, that does have a concrete referent, that is converged on at the highest levels of skill and attainment.
[Update: A part of this thread: https://twitter.com/Malcolm_Ocean/status/1119037981501853697 ]
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/no-one-gets-pixel-perfect-possibilities/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
There’s an intuition I’m working on conveying, which I think applies to [all transformative practices, including the preliminary/auxiliary practices], everything.
For those interested, maybe consider this color sorter:
http://jackxmorris.com/posts/color-sort
I would click on bubble sort. (I think this sorter doesn’t quite finish, but the analogy holds).
[If the website dies or the images get lost: There’s this big square, still image image that looks mostly an ugly gray, with faint heterogeneity in its pixel colors, little glimmers of color. You can click buttons that say e.g. "bubble sort." And, when one of the buttons is clicked, the pixels start to get sorted by an algorithm, and a columnwise rainbow starts to appear, filling the whole image, made up of only pixels that were already present, yet in an order that hid the potential rainbow. Finally, buggy-javascript-dependent, there’s a "perfect rainbow."]
There’s a low-key, leaky-abstraction sense in which there’s a real, true, final "pixel perfect" state of (body)mind, at the end of meditation. The abstraction leaks, in a bunch of ways, maybe, in that the mind doesn’t know or need to know, at the beginning what rainbows are, that they exist, that pixels exist, all sorts of stuff. And, there’s no perfect, no final end, no fixed goal, etc. And, from the inside, the process needs exploration, experimentation, creativity, and self-authority, not rote/mechanical color sorting.
But, sort of, in some sense, (a) pixel-perfect precision, and (b) something like really-there, absolute, objective patterning/ordering (like a rainbow)— analogously, analogously, analogously—are a thing.
My concern with circling, somatic experiencing, nedera, etc., is that they’re seductive in the ways that THEY PRODUCE EFFECTS unlike just about everything else that’s out there. They are true advances. I’m so grateful they exist.
And/but, long-run, they sort of trade off on local versus global. Like, they can make little rainbows (highly valued breakthroughs, changes, something) in some local area, while fucking up a bunch of shit outside that local area, sometimes, in ways that are hard to detect and realize.
(And it’s all fixable! It’s fine! Lossless rewind, long run. And, for any particular person, doing nedera or etc., is, for sure, the right strategic move for them, in terms of life situation or total path length, or whatever.)
But, almost no system seems to get this "pixel-perfect" thing.
(This is for sure not a denial of nebulosity, emptiness, etc. The "pixel-perfect" thing accounts for these. It’s just an analogy. It’s also beyond arhatship, though; it’s the deconditioning that continues, through proper practice, after arhatship.)
There’s sort of this belief, maybe, with all these systems, that "if I just keep going," either in a straight line or picking off issues, one by one, as they come up, then "that’s enough, that will get me what I’m looking for."
And there’s a sense in which that’s true:
The mind IS always working on heading in the right direction, unwinding, unknotting, etc. The mind is ALWAYS working on doing the pixel-perfect thing. That’s what the mind naturally, spontaneously does.
But.
I can’t speak well to other systems, except for local interactions I have with practitioners in them, small-n impressions. But, I think with respect to those systems, and certainly with "meditation" we see side-effects, muscle tension, distress, plus sometimes a belief that "it’s part of the process," or even "it’s somehow my own fault." To be sure, even when meditation goes perfectly, it’s usually a rough ride. But when things get rough, people often start mashing buttons harder, because of the intermittent really good stuff that happens in the roughness. But the roughness isn’t long-run costless, depending on what the person is trying to ultimately do.
In any case, there’s a loose mechanism, here, that I can point to, that’s one of the problematic things:
When someone does (a) any sort of reaching, pushing, forcing, scraping the bottom, and then (b) sort of pivots to doing something else, in the next moment, without "cleaning up," without "taking one’s foot off the gas"—that reaching, pushing, forcing, scraping tends to still be operative, in the "place that the person just was, e.g. attentionally.
It’s like a pushy/reachy/grabby/scrape-y process gets left behind, that’s sort of operating mindlessly and autonomously, in the background, underneath stuff, and it’s dragging stuff around, in weird directions, kind of warping the whole system over time, if left long enough.
And we all start out with "knots" and "slack" and/but these techniques, used unreflectively or not meta-systematically, eventually can start pulling those knots tight, which makes them long-run harder to unknot, and it leads to distress, behavioral rigidity, emotional suppression, and sometimes impulsive behavior or a diminished behavioral repertoire.
Often, especially in the beginning ALL SORTS of good stuff will happen, because the bodymind is exercising new degrees of freedom and really smart about grabbing value, and these techniques are cool and brilliant.
But, there’s also a sense in which they can and do make a mess, a mess that can keep getting worse autonomously, and they all have large tail risk, in my opinion. (So does my stuff, to be fair).
There’s still all sorts of reasons to do these things–to learn new degrees of freedom for the bodymind, to meet cool people, to learn from people with lots of experience. And, the benefit/risk often comes down to the actual person leading, facilitating, mentoring, as well as the actual other people attending the event, because of interpersonal vibe and nonverbal stuff.
And, when engaged reflectively, sensitively, responsively, meta-systematically, all of these tools, and/or the fine-grain best parts of them, have a place in personal practice, of course.
But so few people seem to really get this "pixel perfect rainbow" thing, and so I see SO FEW mentors or teachers who are, in my opinion, correctly balancing local with global, short-run with long-run, when interacting with clients, students, workshop attendees, etc. Frankly, I think it’s because they haven’t gotten far enough to realize that this "pixel-perfect rainbow thing" is even a thing. But they absolutely could. And I could be wrong about something, etc.
***
Addendum:
"Pixel-perfect" is pointing at a "real," nonmonotonic, asymptotic ideal, but it’s an abstract analogy that’s not necessarily pointing at what it feels like from the inside, including heading in that direction, at any particular time. One has to be careful not to pursue an unexamined, rigid sense of an abstract idea--one sort has to find oneself in the right places, almost accidentally, or, rather, bottom-up, indirectly, through correct practice, on one’s own terms, in one’s own concepts, as it were. And, regarding indirect and bottom-up (cf. "redo-to-undo"), one has to allow themselves to be anything--flawed, ridiculous, crazy, embarrassing, wretched, a failure, fantastical, childish, detached from reality, always more until/unless there isn't, radically patiently, anything--however oneself and others happen to be, right now, and now.
Finally, to emphasize, "pixel perfect" is an analogy for something that’s still structurally fluid, sensitive, responsive, creative, dynamic, vibrant, alert, proactive, anything...
*
Notes:
Again, said a different way, be careful of reifying what "pixel perfect" or successively moving closer to "pixel perfect" should look or feel or be like. Even more importantly, be careful of reifying or fixating on how to move toward "pixel perfect." Ultimately, "pixel perfect" is an idea; it's empty; the "how" of moving towards it has no essential pattern or essential nature or essential permanence or stability, only the radically concrete direct aconceptual remains and not even that, and any "how" or "doing" needs to eat itself with no remainder on approach, as it were. (And "how," "doing," and "needs to" are empty as well.)
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So, gosh, I'm not sure if I'm ready to write a nuanced treatment of critiquing a steelman of "renunciation." But maybe we'll see where it goes.
The specific topic of "renunciation" isn't the most important thing, here. I was looking to find an example where I could show the differences between its native framing and how I would critique and frame it from within my system.
But, in order to try to be fair, things get a little murky.
And, then I was going to use such a critique as a springboard to make a few other specific points.
Anyway, let's see where this goes.
So wikipedia defines renunciation like this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renunciation last accessed: 2021-12-08]
Renunciation (or renouncing) is the act of rejecting something, especially if it is something that the renunciant has previously enjoyed or endorsed.
In religion, renunciation often indicates an abandonment of pursuit of material comforts, in the interests of achieving spiritual enlightenment.
[...]
in Buddhism, the Pali word for "renunciation" is nekkhamma, conveying more specifically "giving up the world and leading a holy life" or "freedom from lust, craving and desires". <<<
On the nekkhama wikipedia web page, quoting verbatim from the Nissaraniya Sutta (AN 5.200), via (Thanissaro, 2000):
There is the case where the mind of a monk, when attending to sensual pleasures, doesn't leap up at sensual pleasures, doesn't grow confident, steadfast, or released in sensual pleasures. But when attending to renunciation, his mind leaps up at renunciation, grows confident, steadfast, & released in renunciation. When his mind is rightly-gone, rightly developed, has rightly risen above, gained release, and become disjoined from sensual pleasures, then whatever fermentations, torments, & fevers there are that arise in dependence on sensuality, he is released from them. He does not experience that feeling. This is expounded as the escape from sensual pleasures. <<<
(Importantly, even though I'm quoting a sutta, I am not a buddhist scholar, and I've skimmed maybe five suttas total in my lifetime. I'm not even completely clear on what a sutta is. I kind of get it. This is just to be clear where I'm coming from.)
I'll note that these are teachings from a particular time and place. And maybe something is lost in the translation. And maybe this isn't something the buddha actually said or something that he'd actually agree with. And I don't mean to particularly single out buddhism or early buddhism. And I'll note that, as far as I'm aware, some tantric buddhism advocates for sensory indulgence (and I do as well).
Anyway, from all this, I gather that a renunciate is supposed to:
(I'm assuming sensual pleasure is somehow either "external" or sexual, because I gather that things like jhana are supposed to feel good. So maybe is only supposd to avoid pleasure, or things that lead to pleasure that aren't "self-generated" or "self-fulfillable," that involve external dependencies or lead to increased dependence on external things, for fulfillment, satisifaction, happiness, etc.)
First, to try to give the above its due, I do think that meditative practioner, all things being equal, usually, needs to be ready to be alone a lot, possibly for hours, weeks, or months, at a time, at least. And a meditative practioner needs to potentially be ready to pay a lot of opportunity cost, both predictable and unpredictable.
Additionally, we don't always realize the effect of things on us, things we indulge in, or visual clutter, auditory clutter, electronic notifications, etc., until we temporarily remove them. And, sometimes, we feel much better, after we do. Or it's just surprising and we can make better, more informed tradeoffs, in the future, around when to forebear and when to invest time in decluttering or refining notification settings.
Additionally, sometimes we don't realize how insane or crazy-making an environment or social milieu is, or how bad an environment or social milieu is making us feel, until we at least take a break from that environment or social milieu.
Additionally, I think it's important and valuable to experiment with new behaviors, including simplfiying or altogether eliminating behaviors. There's a lot of good in reducing dependencies.
All in all, it can be extremely empowering, feel really good, to realize one doesn't need things that one was previously dependent on, especially if painful and often even if pleasurable or partially pleasurable.
By experimentally avoiding comfort or gently inclining towards pain (at least emotional pain and some kinds of physical pain that's indicative of non-transient damage) we can find experiences that directly or indirectly are sort of overall constructive and overall satisfying, in part because they imply a better personal future. Shinzen Young talks about the (acquired?) "taste of purification," which is sort of a combination of unpleasant and pleasant in a good and constructive way. (I think there are issues with this frame, which I'll indirectly address below, but there's something important, here, and I think this is an ok steelman, on its own terms.)
Ok, now, some things that bug me--
(1)
These are maybe instructions only for monks or nuns, who have separation built into their lifestyle, versus householders, parents, and other laypeople, in general. Also, some types of buddhism have an eventual "return to the marketplace."
I guess my point in here is something like people maybe sometimes overgeneralize or misapply renunciation instructions, suggestions, or heuristics outside their intended domain of application. I feel like there's a stronger point, but I'm not able to put my finger on it, quite yet.
(2)
We could make a distinction between first-order desires, which are maybe like, "I want X," and second-order desires, which are maybe like, "I want to want X," or, "I want to not want X."
(I'll note here that it might be good to have a more nuanced discussion that takes into account possible differences between wants/desires, preferences, goals, intentions, plans, impulses/urges, hopes/wishes/dreams/fantasies, actions, and possibly more, but I'm not sure, yet, if that would add to the discussion.)
(There is also grasping, craving, "thirst," which might be same thing or just related. There's certainly a there, there, at a fine phenomenological grain. One might say that desire minus craving is bare preference and that preference is good even if desire isn't, and that if one is alive then one must at least have preferences. But then if those preferences somehow motivate action then aren't those desires, whether that motivation and attendant doing is effortful/willful or spontaneous/effortless/in-some-sense-selfless-or-nondual? Or we could say the doing/action arises spontaneously in some sense without motivation, or, rather, the motivation is concurrent or coextensive with the spontaneous action/behavior and there's no (experience of) suffering, no separation, no division, and no acting against oneself, anywhere. Anyway, none of this is intended to be formal. I'm just playing with different schemas, with a nod to different phenomenological referents. Note that I think one can get pretty precise with those phenomenological referents--"that's got to be what that technical term means"--yes! often! but also I think those referents are ultimately nebulous and empty, and can be unprofitably fixated upon.)
Now, lots of claims. These claims may have no argument or only a sketch of an argument behind them, in this section. They at least rest, in part, on longer theoretical (and experiential) sections elsewhere in the document.
So I would claim something like, if you have a second-order desire, you still have the first-order desire, until you don't. And, I would also claim that, in the case of having a second-order desire of the "I want to not want" variety (and vice versa), the fastest way to change the first-order desire, when that change is immediately or mediately available, is to at least fully accept if not fully indulge the first-order desire.
The above pull-quotes doesn't necessarily conflate "renunciation" and "rejection." But, I'm going to strawman-assume that they do. And I would offer that, instead of renunciation as a mediate (means) or terminal goal (end), why not something like "transformation" as a mediate goal, and "no fixed goal" as a terminal "goal." And I would claim that the way to get "transformation" is through "acceptance" as opposed to "rejection." (There's more nuance, here, in that "acceptance" is "only when you're ready; only when it's safe, proceeding safe step by safe step, and that will be sufficient.)
Some reasons for these claims are something like, "we want what we want until or if we don't (even if we don't want to want it). And depending on how one, loosely speaking, deep-down experiences personhood, and how one believes one should relate to persons, both the first-order and second-order want are "you," all things being equal. (There are edges cases in the case of "not-me" type phenomena, described elsewhere in this document.)
And maybe the best way to relate to you is to somehow simultaneously honor all the "parts" of you, all at once. To do otherwise might result in "twists" or "tangles" or "rigidities" that preclude or retard further transformation, in general, in a compounding way. So, paradoxically, if one doesn't like something about oneself, the best way to change it might be to fully accept it, to gently explore how to be willing to have it, to be ok having it, forever ("maybe this is it").
There might be at least two reasons for suffering. The first might be something like acting against oneself. The second might be something like realizing that there are alternatives to suffering that work just as well or better, for getting what we want. (So this presupposes that suffering is an optional strategy, though at first in a deeply layered and karmically ingrained way.)
To a bunch of the above, one might argue that "there's no self to begin with" and that accepting the parts of ourselves that we don't like might entrench them. Not a direct answer to this, but I would claim that the self is another strategy, just like suffering, and that the best way to transform the self, possibly without remainder, is to accept the self, too. So one could think of disavowal, or self-disavowel, as a special kind of rejection, specifically a rejection of (parts of) the self. Additionally, in any case, one might (and likely does) have a first-order desire of wanting to have a self! All in all, the argument here is only sketchy, but once again I'll affirm the claim that acceptance is the way to go.
Acceptance is sort of a high-level idea. The details will be fine-grain, phenomenological, nebulous, personal.
But, it sort of entails indulgence. That is, acceptance of desire might be something like a combination of avowal ("this is me"--when that is in fact the case, subject to error or nebulosity) plus an intention to indulge when possible and safe, plus an intention to plan to indulge, when appropriate. ("Possible" and "safe" and "appropriate" are doing a lot of work, here, to be fair.)
Let's say that meditation teaches a person how to do non-layering indulgence. (This is coming out of nowhere and not a great formalism.)
Let's say something like the opposite of indulgence is (self-)suppression, and let's say that indulgence plus meditation leads to burn-off or integration.
And let's say burn-off and integration lead to unification (of self and will) and fludity. And let's say unification and fludity leads to burn-off (or circularly, integration) of will, which leads to effortlessness and lack of grasping, craving, and thirst. This is a draft. And it's gesturing vaguely and the phenomenological experience of all of this, as and how it happens.
A key piece of all of this is are the principles of "redo-to-undo" and "layering."
So "layering" is when one takes an action that adds something on top of that action, such that the propensity to take that action, in the manner that it's taken, in the related contexts in which it is "triggered" to be taken, becomes fixed. So layering is "layering over," "papering over," an action propensity with "something else." This usually puts the "trigger" of the action out of awareness, as well as the knowledge that it has been triggered out of awareness, except until after it's already been triggered, is already unfolding, and finally, in a way that prevents future changes (until delayering occurs). So there's some sense in which something can only change when its "mechanism" or "root" or "original sense impressions" are in awareness, and that can only happen when those original sense impressions are both "fully gathered" and "fully delayered." When something is fully delayered it is generally positively labile, changeable.
Layering can happen on top of layering, massive sheets and towers of layering, within the bodymind, that starts to look like twisting or tangling or wrapping around and through the bodymind.
Layering, in fact, is itself is a strategy, when we need to protect or hold in place a behavioral pattern. Layering comes at the cost of rigidity, narrowed action affordances, and a sometimes huge delay in changing those action patterns in the case one learns new information or one's circumstances change. One might have to do a great deal of delayering, over months, or years (10,000 hours!), in order to change habits of mind and action that have become contextually counterproductive.
A long-term alternative to layering is structural fluidity. Instead of layering to preserve action patterns, one sort of "melts all the ice" of layering, until there's just "water." The analogy doesn't quite hold because water is sort of structureless, but in partially or fully delayered bodymind the "fluid" has structure. And/but just like water (in gravity) can spontaneously and effortlessly take the shape of whatever container its in, a structurally fluid bodymind can spontaneously take the shape of whatever life situation its in (with attendant wellbeing) and inclusive of spontaneous proactive action to shape that life situation in accordance with desires and preferences.
Now, delayering only happens when trigger, mechanism, original sense impressions are finally in awareness (after above layers are delayered), and finally what also has to happen is a "redo" as part of that "exercised lability." Sometimes that's very overt and other times its liminal.
In any case, rejection prevents redo! This is why I think rejection and renunciation can lead to constraint, twists, tangles, fixedness, non-unification, fragmentation, self-deception, rigidity, a self-battle, and so on.
Some buddhist tantric traditions recommend indulgence and investment in life, along with meditation. This I think aligns with my view.
Renunciation maybe also doesn't really say what to do when, at a fine-enough grain. Sleep and micronutrients, at the right times, might make someone a better renunciate. With indulgence we might learn things, just as much as with some of the positive aspects of (temporary or experimental) renunciation l concede above. So renunciation is maybe one-sided, and a better thing might be a more balanced practice system of when to indulgence and when to gently, temporarily refrain from indulging (and what to do when indulging would be unsafe).
Back to first- and second-order desires, this mediately implies that a sort of desire tetris might be possible, even while fully accepting all of one's desires, at any given time, as best one can.
If there's acceptance then there can be juxtaposition, prior to burn-off or integration/unification. And juxtaposition allows the system to harmonize and compare things. (And rejection prevents juxtaposition from taking place. Note: It's ok to reject until or unless one doesn't! One accepts even rejection in order to eventually make acceptance instead of rejection safe. If we reject rejection that will cause fixation in the rejection! One might explore how it can be ok to reject something forever, and in eventual safe acceptance of that rejection then rejection potentially becomes labile towards acceptance.)
So we want what we want until or unless we don't. And we can come to trust that at some deep level we won't let go of things until we fully believe doing so is in our best interest. And, regarding a tetris of desire, in juxtaposition we can see that we only replace things anyway when they are as good or better than the thing we previously had. So all transformation sort of precedes by replacement that is "as good or better" at the finest phenomenological grain, and thus transformation is or can be safe and good, all the way down. I do think that one does ultimately let go of a lot of things because one sees that they turn out not to matter or to not be real. But that's part and parcel of "as good or better," rather "as good or better or didnt need it, didn't matter anyway, and here's why that's really ok." (There may be long experiences of pointlessness, and meaninglessness, and suffering in all of this, as part of transitions. But also generally, the system tries not to enter into those sorts of things, either, unless its safe and there's a good reason.) And all of this goes very well with indulgence--one of the best ways to realize one doesn't need something or it doesn't matter is to indulge it, and, to be fair, to try going with out, but the final burn-off will usually involve indulgence, so conceived, because of redo-to-undo (though redo-to-undo can happen via original sense impressions, as well).
Ok, but maybe some people really like the idea of renuncation. That's just what they want to do. They prefer a simple life.
I think that's fine as an end. We want what we want until or unless we don't. But I think some people confuse ends with means.
And a bodymind can't arbitrarily self-modify without limit (or much at all) in the sense that when one goes "against the grain" one can only do that by layering. And each bit of layering removes some slack from the system where slack is sort of the fluid tetris workspace. The less slack the harder/slower it is to change, and the harder it is to come up with local solutions and the less globally situated those solutions will be.
So somewhat circularly, this would imply sort of a natural grain of change towards something non-special, ordinary, natural, a groundless, structurally fluid ground state.
And I would argue that while all ends/goals are in some sense valid, and we shouldn't judge people for their ends/goals, there is some sense in which someone's ends can be more or less unified, integrated, groundless, structurally fluid, etc. (One reason to not judge is because the path can be very long and that usually there is a thread of extraordinary wisdom in the outside-view seemingly strangest and most convoluted of ends. They have local information that you do not, whether or someone seems to be acting in a destructive or stuck-in-the-past sort of way.)
So if there is something like an high-dimensional envelope of all possible bodymind states, where the surface of the envelope is bounded by running out of slack in that particular direction, except for the point on the envelope, that's a sort of attractive basin, that is a natural ground state, for that person, given that person's contingent life history and life situation (noting that there's no eternal god's-eye-view and that all this is groundless, empty, impermanent). And then we have a gradient and a way to have trajectories. And then we can look at the space of all trajectories through that envelope, and neither the envelope, nor the trajectories are arbitrary. And we can sort of look at where any particular senses of renunciation-as-end kind of fall inside or on the surface of that envelope. And we can also have a "space of all possible operations on bodymind" where successive application of available operations, at given points, move a bodymind through that state space. And we might have some idea of "counterfactual retrospective desire," like what someone would choose in some counterfactual world. Now there's a sense in which counterfactuals aren't real and that envelopes, etc., are a frame and possibly a coercive one. And all of this sort of depends on something like metaphysical or physical/genetic buddha nature. Anyway, there are other ways to look at this and this could be importantly wrong however interpreted, experienced, or conceived. But this is a frame.
And one might come to agree or quibble with something like at the bottom of everything i think is just sort of “spontaneous living, spontaneous life” that just is, as it is, nothing more to add or take away, but still always learning and growing, the bodymind in the deepest place is springs forward in wanting and patience and compassion and it’s clean and raw and sometimes painful but a wanting that’s in some sense utterly free of suffering and exists for itself as itself. so like ennui, despair, depression, catatonia, desperation, horror is always ultimately unnatural (yet fully acceptable when safe) and the natural thing is costlessly, effortlessly vivacious, [sometimes any of simple, noble, dignified, crazy, haggard, carefree, joyous, loving, peaceful, completely at peace, already dying, already dead, completely alive] hungry and fulfilled and curious and satisfied all at the same time, sort of, kind of. always asking, what if, maybe this is wrong, what’s fascinating around the next corner, what if..
Anyway there's lots of only-so-far-experientially motivated stuff, here, and lots of claims, and a bit sparse on arguments and explanations, but that may be just fine, depending on what this section is for and trying to do.
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Note: So things are most "stable" when a person is mostly "ice" or mostly "water" ("fluidly ground state stable") but when things are half-melted and big chunks of ice are breaking and falling, worst case, then that's sort of where nonmonotonicity comes in. Ideally "melting" is smooth and proceeds via surfaces from top to bottom, as it were. But this isn't always contigently practically possible.
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There are a few of my old blog posts that have some really good stuff in them, but they have a few thiings wrong with them, so I can't just paste them into this document/book. There's some ontology shear and I think some slight misleadingness in how they're written. Also there's lots of stuff in them I no longer endorse or I just think it's the wrong focus. Finally, I say things about other teachers and individuals, by name, and some of that's ok and some of that's not ok. So, until I figure out how to extract the good stuff, I'm going to link out to that material, here:
As I say at the beginning of each blog post:
(General content note: A lot of my thinking has really changed since the old days of this blog. There’s some weird, mean, and polemic stuff in there.)
(Titles only:)
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[Some of the style and word choice in this are callbacks to earlier in the interaction. At the time, I wrote this I thought it was sort of precisely calibrated to the situation, and net-constructive, but I'd do something different, today.]
"not about to engage with disagreements from people who can’t demonstrate that they’re anywhere close to my peers"
I didn’t have this ready-at-hand, yesterday, but I woke up with a bit more, a hopefully charitable and constructive critique, though still "twitter-superficial."
On the plus side, I think partly what’s going on, here, is "elitist gatekeeping," and/but I do mean this in the most positive sense. To try to take your perspective, "there’s something precise and precious, here, too easily diluted by newcomers and clueless ‘teachers,’ who inject noise into a wider community of practice, making it harder to find the real thing and to teach the real thing. There are times when it makes sense to manage the ‘noise level’ proactively and aggressively."
And, trying to take the perspective of a strawman subset of the pragmatic dharma space (not your teachings, specifically):
"There’s a concentration gold standard, an insight gold standard, a ‘done’ gold standard, a ‘morality/integration versus nonduality gold standard,’ and so on. And, if someone isn’t operating from something like this collection of ‘gold standard practices,’ ‘gold standard attainments,’ ‘gold standard distinctions,’ then chances are they are missing one or more of the most important things."
Ok, explicit perspective-taking over. (I’ll just use forceful language, now, to be expedient and concise. And, I’m going to refer to pretend "you guys.") As far as I can tell, you guys are shit at working with sankhara/samskara/formations. To be fair, you sometimes organize things by Wilber’s "Four Ups" to be less shit about this [which is a huge and amazing achievement], and most systems don’t even have something like that.
(Again I’ll be strawman and forceful.) But, again, you guys are shit with formations, and therefore your teachings around morality and integration are tragically incomplete and inadequate. As much as people are being protected by your adherence and promotion of your highest standards, people are also being hurt by your blindspots and methodological inadequacies around formations, conditioning, etc..
Noting-/noticing-heavy, three-characteristics-focused methods treat formations incidentally and haphazardly, but there is a highest rigor, precision, and relative finitude, available, for what you sort of dismiss as "pimping samsara." In fact, your methods, as elegant as they are, are full of errors and artifacts that often lead to integration sickness, unnecessary suffering, muscle tension, etc., even after "fourth path," however defined with the highest standard. That’s weird and tragic, but fixable.
In conclusion (short first pass, because twitter), I’ve tried to communicate above with a bit of a different style. Surely, I could have done so much better. And, of course you are busy and have responsibilities, and there’s no obligation to respond. But, I hope so much for something that feels less like rigidity, dogma, credentialism, triumphalism, around the edges.
Come on, bruh.
Again, I get the priors, but less rigidity, credentialism, triumphalism, please. From a distance, I think you might be missing something vast and critical, from within your own standards.
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It's important to have a model of progress that accounts for, nonarbitrarily, "anything could be happening at any time." Say things are sort of getting "easy and smooth" (or whatever), and it's been that way for a day or weeks, and then the next day things are choppy or distract-y, or whatever. That doesn't mean things have "regressed" or that progress isn't being made. Anything that the system has experienced in the past, thoughts, brain fog, depression, fear, anything--has to come up again sometime, in the course of meditation, because of the "redo-to-undo" "principle." Sometimes it'll be liminal, barely there, to be sure. Sometimes it'll be "in a "cradle/container" of "equanimity."" And, sometimes, something intense can/will come up that sort of takes over everything, like an immersive flashback or, less obviously, an old outlook or way of being, etc. It can also be very subtle, piecemeal things like "habits of mind." This can happen a lot, over thousands of hours. Additionally, sometimes very big intense stuff can happen, late in the game, because it took that long for there to be system-wide safety for that thing to to come up. (This could be the case, five to twenty times, or more, spaced out several months apart, as well as other possible patterns.) "The system makes it safe to look, and then looks, safe to have happen, then it happens..."
So, in any case, one shouldn't infer progress by what's happening in any particular session--"terrible" sessions may be extremely constructive sessions; sessions that don't feel like sessions at all (however conceived) may be extremely constructive sessions, and stuff like that could go on for months! But, actually, all things being equal, the right things had been happening, the whole time.
One sort of, as best they can, has to take into account the whole global history and context, in terms of global wayfinding, to get better and better at how to relate to and participate in any particular thing that's happening at any particular time, including being ok with being swept away, when that's the right thing to be doing, or anything in between, or nuanced variations of any of this, and so on.
*
It can be really discouraging when progress seems state dependent (“if only I were in that other state!“), but taking correct actions, as best one can, in any state, is the thing that metabolizes, over a long time, whatever state one happens to be in (and part of that is fully accepting being in the state, if/eventually/when it’s safe to do so).
Like, the state IS the very stuff of practice, not a thing in the background that conditions practice.
*
I sometimes say something like, “after hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of micro-experiments, little bets, something, as best you can, eventually you hit a wall, then you travel along the wall until you end up in a corner, and then in the corner there are no degrees of freedom, and then there’s only one way out, so you know what to do, and then you spontaneously do that, and this repeats.”
*
Finally, a sort of corollary to all this is that, since sometimes (heuristic or provisional) understanding precedes karmic burnoff, you might find yourself compulsively doing "miles and miles" of "knowingly the wrong thing," and that's ok! Burnoff/burn-off/metabolization/integration is happening. Miles and miles. Sometimes wrong turns and backtracking can be avoided, but, modulo that, there's no shortcuts, no skipping, no corner-cutting: ultimately the entire territory needs to be walked, and the territory spontaneously does what it does, until it doesn't. So if you're doing something "bad" (or multiple things) for like five hundred hours, each, that's redo-to-undo, that's just what needs to happen. (Wrong turns and backtracking are included in the "10,000 hours" thing.)
(And part of that will be doing meta-protocol-esque things to decide whether/which/where those miles and miles are entrenchment vs burn-off. That's ok, too, that's part of it. A seed of something in the spirit of the meta protocol, a seed of, hmm is this right, is enough for the at least 50.00000000001% [sic] burn-off versus entrenchment that will ultimately, cumulatively, do the thing.)
So miles and miles of "I'm doing it wrong" might exactly be miles and miles of precisely optimal progress.
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I’m not finished with this yet, but, as far as I can tell, so far, suffering is, always, 100% of the time, all of it, a malleable contingency. We have specialized pain circuitry. But pain and suffering are different, etc., etc.. And, as far as I can tell, we have an initial propensity to suffer, but suffering is not hardwired, at all.
That is, at some point, in the very first few moments of conscious, the bodymind system somehow makes the choice to suffer, because that’s the best option available, to keep things going.
We could call the result of each such choice a (reversible) commitment (in general).
And those (reversible) commitments to suffer, thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of little commitments to suffer, get “locked in,” layered in, by millions of not-necessarily-suffering-related commitments, on top of that. This is just all the rest of the karma of life, and/or the technical debt of life, non-meaning-laden, meaning-laden, and so on. Commitments to suffer beget commitments to suffer, and so on. And stuff piles on, on top of that, and mixed with that, holding the previous commitments mostly in place, accumulating mostly like that. Some things do reach something of an equilibrium, of adding and subtracting. And, sometimes these commitments are latent, or sometimes they’re triggered, activated, by internal undoings/rewinds, or internal or external events.
So, in any moment, if there is suffering, that suffering is the result of hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pre-reflective commitments, by the time we’re finally conscious of that suffering. It's like in each moment, every few tens or couple hundred of milliseconds, we live through, compute through, our entire life history, from the first moments, to now, and we're only conscious of the last bit. (And, that computation is malleable, reinterpretable, and so on; that's what meditation is.) So, certainly there might be stopgap, self-care, preemptive or management or mitigation strategies, with respect to that conscious suffering. But, if conscious suffering is happening, then there’s a sense in which it was inevitable, already in motion, tens or hundreds of milliseconds ago. (I say this not to demotivate self-care but to motivate self-compassion.)
Part of meditation is finding one’s way back to those first several million commitments to suffer. And that requires millions upon millions upon millions of undoings or structure-preserving-transformations, to solve, dissolve, to create slack and play, a new settling, and to “move things out of the way,” and, not the least of which, to continue to live one’s life, while finding one’s way back to all that original suffering (among plenty of other things).
And when one gets there, one has the optionality, maturity, reflectiveness to (spontaneously, intuitively) choose something different, perhaps again and again until it's effortlessly, costlessly just right. And it’s not wireheading, or ignoring life, or running away from life, or lobotimizing oneself. (There's a failure mode of blocking, numbing, self-suppression, twisting off, zombification; but, with proper application of things like the meta protoco, this is not that; it's the farthest thing from that.) It's not wireheading, because, the bodymind will only give up a particular commitment to suffer, if the mind has truly found something better to do instead, something as or more safe, as or more a sure thing, as or more effective, as or more vigilant, self-protective, proactive, self-caring, self-motivated, vital, alive, and so on. So when one gives up a little bit of suffering, one can be sure it’s really, truly safe to give up that particular little bit of suffering. And eventually it starts happening a lot. And perhaps it’s possible to find all of it, even accounting for the possibility of extremely dire health events, heart attacks, stabbings, whatever, and personal and intimate misfortune. Perhaps there is just courage, love, compassion, empathy, self-care, other-care, and so on. But no suffering. And if there hasn’t been suffering for awhile, but more is uncovered, there is no suffering in response to that suffering, and soon that suffering is no longer there, either. And so on.
(Importantly, someone might be moved to express anguish, pain, sympathy, something, from the very bottom of their soul. They might cry, they might display and experience(!) strong, contextually appropriate and ego-syntonic emotion, the felt right emotion for self or occasion. Not a zombie. Sensuous, feeling, alive, self-aware. But that’s not the same as suffering. Is anguish without suffering still anguish? Eh, details/words. Probably straightforward to work out when one gets there.)
*
Suffering goes down via/by many vectors, little by little and sometimes in (nebulous) stages. One is a sort of "self-reflexive uncoiling," or diaphanous "laying flat," almost like it was a "trick" of perception, and, sensation, including sometimes pain, remains but (there is) nothing left to suffer (this can be by degree, or piecemeal, or in stages, too); yet, even then, or along the way, there can sometimes still be I-ness or subjectivity, and that's fine! (((((((And all this can (generally) only (stably) happen when it's safe, by agreement, when it's really, truly safer, better than the alternatives, in terms of cares, concerns, safety, etc. ((((((((as in no shortcuts, no corner-cutting, have to go back, etc., etc., etc.))))))))))))))))))))))))
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scratch notes:
love was sort of an unchosen and alien process rewriting each us at an oblique angle to our other plans and goals. very strange! harmonization is ongoing! [image of misaligned grids]
Mark L 30 days ago one can be mistaken about its presence or absence, and it's not a monolith, it fluctuates and is influenced by experiences with the person and in the world
Mark L 30 days ago continually pursued and renewed and all that, but there's a deep driver, deep pair-bonding-ness, something that comes with it, as far as has been my (limited) experience (with love not with relationships in general)
Mark L 30 days ago if not soul lit on fire, then maybe "deep bond," "home-ness."
Mark L 30 days ago at least one restless thing comes to rest
"the" answer to otherwise zero-sum
perfect dynamic balance between vulnerability + resilience = humility + strength = learning and growing without dissolution or disregulation = love, somehow
"There’s something here that seems stable, settled, certain, able to metabolize anything without being disrupted or stained or corrupted. Incorruptible. Pure. Yet, it is sensitive, responsive, creative, awake, sentient, sapient; not stagnant, not ossified, it learns, it grows, it spontaneously and proactively seeks and acts."
reference: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/enlightenment-sensorimotor-processing-love/ [last accessed: 2022-03-27]
something "completionary," both in terms of intimate relating and community belonging or friendship and family cf. "deep ongoing rewriting of seeming and being and goals if previously absent" -- and yet can be missing or lost and can also be pathological versions cf. codepedency and loss of future opportunity. and yet. might be more a cultural or community problem. evil = absence of love? cf. good, bad, evil
cf. adversarial, game theoretic, warrior dimensions
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(may be inclusive of "autonomic harmony", muscle tone, handledness, cosmology...)
See also: autonomic harmony placeholder
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See also: wellbeing placeholder
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There's an important analogy, involving a ball of string or twine, which is all tangled and knotted and balled up.
Sometimes, when one is picking apart a knot on one part of the surface of the ball, it's actually pulling one or more knots tighter, somewhere else in the ball, because of course the whole thing is one single thread/string, and it's all connected.
The whole bodymind is like that, in one sense all-to-all connected, everything (perhaps mediately) touching everything else, and in another sense it's just one long, haphazardly space-filling curve.
And so sometimes locally positive effects in one place have locally "negative" effects, elsewhere.
And the way one might untangle a big ball of string is by putting some work a little bit here, a little bit there, sort of rotating through locations, not too much in each place, in eventually a more and more precise order (yet perhaps simultaneously a more and more forgiving order, too).
And/but, if someone focuses on one spot too much, sort of a "scraping the bottom of the barrel," or a "forcy excavation," or a "blood from a stone" attempt, that might pull other places really really tight. That's not the end of the world; it's never irreversible; no "damage" has been done (modulo, say, any associated muscle tension that could, very worst case, cause permanent nerve, vascular, or joint damage). While never irreversible, those "elsewhere places" become a bit like having to pick apart a really tight knot with one's fingernails (but it's not actually string, thread, or twine, it's like lossless, incompressible, limp-spaghetti-flexible, sometimes impossibly thin steel cables, so nothing's fraying or becoming ragged--it just takes a frickin' long time, sometimes, to undo knots that have been pulled really tight). [Extending/correcting the metaphor: And/ rather than picking at a tight knot, you want so much slack on everything feeding into the knot that it almost practically undoes itself, even though you sort of can't get any force by pushing on a limp rope. Otherwise picking at a tight knot just somehow, someway makes it tighter, maybe because you somehow need to hold onto something to manipulate it. And/but, if you're holding onto, fixing, reifying anything, then something, somewhere is suboptimal or has gone wrong or is maybe or maybe not being engaged in the right order.] So, to summarize, if you're somewhere tugging some loop open, creating slack, then maybe be careful, as best you can, that you're not pulling something else too tight, elsewhere--you sort of metaphorically want to still be able to get your fingers in there, you don't want loops elsewhere to get too small. What you do in one place affects other places, and so one ideally wants to order things with respect to globality versus possibly doing things to exhaustion in any one place.
That being said, "karmic momentum" is totally a thing. Sometimes it can be hard to not find oneself "scraping the bottom of the barrel," over and over again, even while sort of wondering if one is doing the wrong thing. That's ok, that's part of it too. [1]
As to how to know you might be pulling something tight? If you find yourself really "pushing," really "efforting," or even just thinking "almost there," "just a little more," there could be something like that going on. Other clues are obvious increases in muscle tension, or vague stirrings of muscle tension say in the lower back, shoulder, neck, or jaw, or feeling ever-so-faintly tighter, maybe temporarily, all over. [3] Often, "the last one percent (1%)" of something takes "a second 99%" distributed elsewhere throughout the bodymind. If you find yourself kind of looking at a remaining 1%, that's maybe even a bit of a yellow flag that something has gone wrong, somewhere--otherwise what you're "looking at" would have spontaneously carried through, flipped over, dissolved with no remainder, and there'd never have been "you looking at that" 1% left, remaining, as such (though still nebulous, of course). (Not to reify "you" and "that," late-stage, of course, of course.) A remaining 1% sort heuristically means there's at least one related tangle, somewhere. And stubbornly treating that 1% as a "thing," as it were is usually counterproductive. Heuristically, I would just immediately do something else albeit possibly related or not obviously related at all. All this regarding "specific things," is indirect, ambiguous and nebulously ordered, temporally discontinuous and non-linear! And of course "things" is held super loosely, as per emptiness and groundlessness. Things, percents, 1%'s--toy model.
If you're worried about not being able to tell if you're pulling something tight, it can be helpful to meditate on hard surfaces with minimal support. For example, you might meditate standing, with no socks, on a flat concrete or wooden floor. Or you might meditate lying down on a very firm surface with a very firm pillow or no pillow (on your side or back). Or you might sit on a wooden chair or edge of a table (feet on the floor) that is just a flat, horizontal seat without your back touching the back of the chair. Soft surfaces can sometimes hide small changes in the body, can dull some aspects of proprioception. And unyielding surfaces and greatly heighten bodily feedback loops and even tiny changes can become very salient. That said, unyielding surfaces can be very hard on your feet, other joints, your vascular system, etc., etc., etc.! And meditating on a soft bed with a soft pillow can be very powerful and effective--it's important to rotate postures (including props and contexts and surfaces), depending on what you need at any give time. It doesn't have to be concrete (though maybe try it sometime!) it could be a firm rug. It doesn't have to be a wooden chair, maybe it could be a cheap office chair with minimal cushioning. There's a gradient; these are just heuristics. I've spent most of my meditation on soft surfaces and firm surfaces and just a little bit of time on hard surfaces, especially when I really need to see what's going on for a bit. And again, soft surfaces help a lot in being able to better spend time with a whole different class of subtle sensations, and there's nothing wrong with plenty of coziness. It's worth mentioning, that, over time, one learns how to better and better protect the body while interacting with hard and unyielding surfaces--one becomes soft and floaty and fluid, which protects more and more the joints and surfaces and vasculature of the body. And that is very, very instructive too.
Finally, if one does find themselves "scraping the bottom of the barrel," how does one take a break or go do something else? Where's the elsewhere? The meta protocol and creativity protocol can help with this. In conclusion, you might try "something different" on any axis or dimension--I hesitiate to specify further, so as not to narrow down the possibility space. (0.000000000001% of the possibility space (or whatever) or "somewhere else" could be "external" things like shifting postures or taking a walk.)
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There's an analogy I use sometimes, where I say people start out as "mostly ice." That is, our bodymind "structure" is sort of "mostly frozen". It's kind of like only the surface of the bodymind is sort of continuously melted and re-frozen, or it exists right on the edge of water and ice. That surface is sort of where people typically learn, unlearn, and grow. But the "bulk of the ice," the "depth" of a person, mostly doesn't change. (This isn't a perfect analogy because there are tendrils and threads of "liquid" all throughout the thing.)
And so, meditation, over time, very slowly, helps the whole thing to "melt," to become water. Again, the analogy isn't perfect, because water or liguid is sort of "structureless." But, meditation doesn't make us forget, as it were. There's something lossless, recoverable. The thing that's now liquid isn't arbitrary; it retains its contingency or dependency on the past (while also in a sense transcending it but never cutting it off). So we could say there's "structural fluidity."
The nice thing about water (and structural fluidity) is that it "spontaneously knows how" to take the shape of its container--maybe a weirdly shaped vase or a bucket or a teacup or a cube with the top face missing. In the case of bodymind, the "container" is one's entire life situation--past, present, expected future. And "taking the shape of" is something like "emotional/behavioral alignment" with "the circumstances of one's life." Importantly, loosely speaking and to over-reify, this feels wholly good and correct from the inside, all the way down, radically endorsed. That is, nothing changes in this way unless, sort of, "you and the whole system" want it. It feels natural and correct in a "couldn't be otherwise" sort of way. And it's not passive acceptance; it's dynamic, proactive, alive engagement with the territory and everything, a spontaneous and proactive reshaping of one's environment. I don't mean to oversell this or over-reify it. This is sort of too clear-cut or even hyperbolic. It's very normal, natural, un-special, self-re-settling, just living. There's wellbeing! But also it's imperfect; it's lived. And life can be really hard, and bad things happen, and so on. These are just ideas, just words, flawed, making "this" too much of a "thing." And one might creep up on "it" by degrees, nonmonotonically, fits and starts, with a looooooong asymptotic "fat tail."
(Another way to extend the metaphor is talk about "surface areas" that are open/available/exposed to experience, open to the air, as it were. If someone is mostly "frozen," then, as above, there are sort of only thin surface layers that can change, in contact with the world. And those layers are sort of structurally constrained by everything beneath them, or at least what's immediately beneath them, and so on. It's like the whorls, whirls, patterns, fingerprints of that surface can only take particular shapes, can only make particular patters. Anyway, when things start to "melt," it's more like icebergs floating in water, then ice cubes, then slush, and so on. So, it's sort of like the surface-area-to-volume ratio changes, experience makes-its-way to (previously-)deeper "substrate," more easily. More is "exposed," immediately labile [and this only happens if and when it's safe]. The analogy isn't perfect because there's still "locality" in terms of what changes when, and things do and don't really speed up as the "pieces" get smaller. But anyway, the grain gets finer and finer and it can be a nice analogy. Thanks to a collaborator for participating in extending the metaphor in this way.)
(There's one more way to extend the metaphor which connects back to nonmonotonicity. I've mentioned this in another section of the document, too. When a person is mostly ice, and when a person is mostly water, things are relatively stable/"stable". But, in between, when things are melting, and maybe chunks are breaking off, falling, and splashing/crashing around, things can be pretty rough. Ideally, it'd be a "smooth melt" from like top to bottom, but it can be hard to manage and predict, as the system's just spontaneously doing as best it can, as it were, imperfectly able to know what's going to happen next (and perhaps it it were otherwise everyone would just already be enlightened, etc., etc.)).
So the above is sort of an exoteric way to talk about structural fluidity and life niches and things like that. But we can take it a step further. What follows sort of inheres in the above. Regarding the above, one might imagine "melting" involves refactoring of one's goals, plans, perceptual ontologies, action ontologies, preferences, general wellbeing, etc., all of that naturally settling into a new overall shape. Along with that, the very being and seeming of the world changes.
But it's worth emphasizing that everything is included. The past and present, time itself, space, personhood, metaphysics, the phenomenal world, the universe, logic, language, concepts, platonic-ish ideas (like perfection, infinity, eternity, ...), meaning, the "container that holds the water, itself,"" nothing is left out. We might metaphorically say there's nothing to stand on, anywhere. There's no ground. Or, there's no ultimate basis, no set of basis vectors, no fundamental LEGO pieces. There's a way in which everything, all of that, is self-complete, turning on itself, inverting on itself, and completely-self-complete itself, morphing, equilibriating in space, and therefore(?) sort of utterly interconnected and interdependent on itself, and self-relational and self-referential, in and of itself. (There are several ways/senses in which bodymind, world, etc., can be said to be interdependent, and this is just one of them.) So it's "all groundless," and all of this, all at once, is "groundlessness."
It can be kind of scary (or terrifying) and even infuriating, at times, a sort of "yes and even this." There's nothing stable, no perfect forms, nothing to hold onto--not ideas, not meditation instructions, not experiential states, not philosophies or ideologies or stories or beliefs or anything.
But again, the bodymind generally doesn't let go until it's safe to let go. (And please don't try to "make yourself" experience groundless or to try to see it. It just kinda happens over time, with correct practice. If you have to make it stick (or even just give it a little push it into place!), it's not the thing. But also if you find yourself trying to make it stick (or even just give it a little push it into place!), that's normal and ok!) Eventually one might see how it's actually safe and preferable and sort of radically stable in its liquidity. It's maybe more like slow syrup or something than water.
One might ask, what's the relationship between groundlessness and other things like emptiness, luminosity, bare sensations, etc.
Some messy thoughts: Regarding emptiness, I was equivocating a bit, above--is it e.g. "the universe" that participates in groundlessness or, sort of, "one's representation of the universe." I would say "yes, both" in sort of the sense that we only know about "out there" by what we experience "in here," and we might find, over time, that there maybe must be a sense in which anything "out there" must lack essence (and is thus impermanent, non-eternal, interdependent, and radically dependent/contingent on causes and conditions), must lack essential nature, and at the same time our representations thereof must indicate provisionality and nebulosity. And there's another sense in which there are no representations and no referents, anywhere--and this ties into luminosity (in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard.) This paragraph is a bit philosophically muddled and it gets some of the arrows wrong. Very compressed, just a confused taste. Bare sensations kind of connect up with all this in that, on the one hand, they're not a "special ontology," they're empty, conceived as such, just like everything else. And they're not really a resting place--we need coffee mugs and cars, not just patches of light and color and blips of sound, or whatever. But on the other hand, they sort of point the way out of "inner space," i.e. sort of a whole bunch of unnecessary, out-of-phase stuff (e.g. some senses of self-ing and thinking) that the bodymind is doing "in here," that is/are ultimately optional. (I use scare quotes, "out there," "in here" because ultimately there's no real boundary between "inside" and "outside,"" cf. nonduality, etc.; "In here" is sort of that which untangles and untwists and un-wraps and un-spikes, in participation with the changing of the very being and seeming of the world, and also the musculature, and...) And, bare sensations are sort of the "surfaces that glow," cf. luminosity and sort of that which is one-dimensional or flat manifolds, hanging in "empty(!) space." This is very gestural and maybe not super prominent in experience, cf. normal-ness, naturalness, ordinary-ness, etc. (Thanks to a collaborator for helping to elicit this.))
*
Notes:
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stub under groundlessness cf. emptiness and groundlessness and centerlessness
cf. "simulation" cf. "all representation"
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(this section intentionally has a nonsense name^)
cf. centerlessness
non-particularity / particularitylessness
non-privilegedness / privilegedlessness
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[some of these distinctions and some of these terms have some partial basis in conversations with other people]
Not to overly or inapproriately reify beliefs, "models," or "representations," but one could make distinctions between multiple levels of "belief":
At least the first two both have implicit and explicit components, toy-model-wise.
Conversational models are some mixture of what we believe/know (or believe we believe) and what we say, the language games that allow us to befriend, relate, work, play, etc., the entire social world. These are arguably not really 'beliefs", but importantly, there is overlap with all of this and our "deep-down sense" of what's really going to happen and what we'll "really do" when faced with various circumstances and challenges (cf. "action models"). But our conversational models and "action models" aren't the same thing, at least in the relevant pragmatic sense we're using, here. (And also there's ways in which social reality isn't other than just "physical" reality and reality-reality, to the extent that it's all empty and groundless and nondual, as you'll likely have direct and palpable knowledge of, at some point: "Nothing outside of this!" as sort of distinct from but related to "just this!".)
Thought models are sort of "what we believe we believe," what we tell ourselves, and so on. This is sort of an undermining frame. It's important to recognize that, in some non-trivial and non-facile way, we're doing our best and it's ok to believe what we currently and already believe at any given time. It's ok to just go with that, including our second guessing and anything. Anyway, there a sense in which there can be layers and layers of thought models all interacting though we're sort of only aware of the top level at any given time, but that top level is sort of constituted out of the levels below it. (There can also be different aspects of a person that sort of come to the fore at different times and in different contexts, sometimes subtly and sometimes to the point of being "fragmented" or dissociated or just manifold. Sometimes this is adaptive or it used to be.) Thought models will have some relation to conversational models; there will be overlap, but they aren't the same thing and they are also different from "action models."
Finally, there are action models. These are sort of in some ways only known through "revelation," what we "actually do" in a given situation at a given time. And they can be explored through the use of counterfactuals--what would you really do, given such and such situation. That counterfactual exploration can be yield more and less accurate insights, all things depending. Action models shade into the very being and seeming of the world, so of course there's some sense in which we sort of rest in our action models, as our action models, and/but/also they are almost or entirely coextensive with the ways in which we're already in action, already acting, already responding, before we even realize we're in motion. So there's both a sense of "of course we can know ourselves" (at least ever better and better, astonishingly so), in terms of self-legible, coherent, cumulative behavior, and also a sense in which action emerges as profitable surrender to spontaneous, holy mystery. "Acting directly from action models," loosely speaking, isn't always accompanied by effortlessness, to be sure, but when action is effortless and decisive and spontaneous then "these" are from where we're most deeply acting, what we're acting as, at that time, as it were.
It isn't necessarily the case, but because it's utlimately more elegant and efficient (all things being equal, in a vacuum), meditation, over thousands of hours, tends to bring action models, thought models, and conversational models into alignment, to reduce any separation or contradiction or hypocrisy or etc. between them. (And any contradictions within each level tend to become more and more reduced as well, reduced synchronous contention and increased intertemporal-consistency.) Additionally, all things being equal, a person will tend to proactively rearrange life and world to afford and reward the alignment between all these different levels of thought and "belief." That is, we may seek a life that allows us to act with integrity, in part because of it's non-trivial relationship with physical health and the experience of wellbeing.
There's a sense in which discourse and thought models sort of, over time, ultimately, get "reformatted" or "rewritten" in the "language" of action models. We still speak, write, and think, but there's a sense in which all these actions and "mental" actions and behaviors more directly come directly [sic] from a deeper place, more directly out of the seeming and being and (provisional/empty/groundless/inchoate) "just is-ness" of the "action" level.
This reformatting or rewriting could be called "naturalization." There's data in those action and thought models, there learning and enactment is correlated with reality, and it's like that data gets drained out, error-checked, rewritten, and fed into more direct action models. Sometimes one can almost feel it literally moving from the head, down the neck, and down into the spine. (That's not the only route, though, and there's neurophysiological reasons why it can sometimes feel like this. Also, the head is part of the body, too! Rebalancing, evenly redistributing, more than everything traveling downward.)
If someone is having trouble "acting," or is vascillating or stuck in their heads or etc., it may mean some knowledge is stuck in the unnaturalized state, as it were. Just because something is head-y or concept-y doesn't necessarily mean it's not naturalized--concepts can be "aligned all the way down" into action models--but it's a bit more likely that something is not naturalized.
I don't want to reify any of this too much. There's a sense in which these distinctions are artificial and can be misleading, but there's also senses in which there's a there, there, a palpable process, a real thing, as one processes more and more "technical debt."
Early or late in the meditation game one might be experiencing an expanse of phenomenology that's somehow meaning-laden and purports to represent the world, but you might (suddenly) have a visceral sense that "I can't act from that, there's no there, there, it doesn't connect," something. There's many different ways that you might have a sense like that.
There might be a loose dependency ordering:
Each former sort of needs to happen before the latter, and/but all of them are sort of asymptotic and shade into each other and are artificial distinctions. And also they are all sort of toy models that don't perfectly hew to the territory, as it were, and will in some ways be misleading with respect to doing the thing.
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In addition to "naturalization", one could also talk about "impersonalization" and "environmentalization".
This is imperfectly and incorrectly and incoherently gesturing at something: Impersonalization is something like "you run out of problems [in some sense] except for those than anyone would have in your current (life) situation," or "if someone 'enlightened' were airdropped into a (life) situation, they would only have the problems [in some sense] that anyone would have in that airdropped situation." This isn't quite right and doesn't quite capture it. It's sort of related to "nothing is personal," anymore, in the sense that "you don't take things personally" or "bad things that happen to you because of other people" aren't taken personally or "aren't about you," in the colloquial "this isn't about you," sense. In part, none of this is right because there's plenty that's still personal; you're still "this one," you still have preferences based on that state of your body, as it were, though there's less and less "necessary-though-optionally-very-fine internality". Some of this is has to do with working through so-called "attribution error," [1] as well as a better understanding of causality, """no self,""" determinism, etc. But these don't account for all of it. Anyway, this isn't quite right but there's something maybe in the galaxy of all this. Maybe it's like you start "tracking things impersonally," e.g. no longer as e.g. grudge, aggrievement, something that happened to you--though of course you remember that the thing happened and everything important about that, and the intimate, causal history of you, and how you felt and feel about it, but it's sort of "seated" or "stored" differently, more efficiently and dispassionately (and passionately) as a high-dimensional instance in a high-dimensional space, rather than "a thing that happened to you deeply entangled with your you-ness," or something. So it's sort of a "lossless formatting change" that makes storage and behavior more "efficient," as it were, which does to some degree change the very being and seeming and implications and appearing and knowing and your doing of the world, but it only happens if / when / how such a change would be safe and ok such that nothing one cares about is lost and that it's generally wholeheartedly and heartfelted-ly for the better.
The next one is "environmentalization," and this can happen in situated ways and by degrees, anytime: The analogy used by some people (in lots of contexts) is, if there's one door out of your apartment or hotel or whatever, and you need to remember to bring something with you when you leave, you leave that thing right in front of the door, to make it very, very unlikely that you'll forget it. Say it's a package or something. There's sort of a way that, over time, the entire world becomes like that package, so you don't need anything left "inside," your world is consituted and reconstituted by what's outside. You arrange yourself so that "the world" presents the right things at the right times in a way that's reliable enough, because your expectations are good enough or flexible enough or something, that you can offload tremendous cognition(?) to the environment, even as the world is dynamically occurring, that frees up a tremendous amount of internal resources. When I said you don't need anything left "inside," that's not quite correct. The "bodymindetc" still have (dynamic, fluid, state-less, thing-less) state, that's how you know how to seamlessly and proactive and fluidly anticipate and react to the world, moment by moment as it's happening, dancing with it, smoothly starting to move, breath, etc. in advance, so you're in the right place at the right time, and/but (a) bodymind mostly "settled" (while still shimmery, alive, positively irritable) and so not in consciousness, as it were, and (b) anything that needs to change is liminally, proactively fluxing in relationship to the environment in sort of a deterministic way. So like the world is still sort of determining everything but in an endorsedly relaxed way such that one can sort of surrender and let go into being moved by the (past, present, and provisional future) environment (modulo how time and everything is currently seated), because one has (spontaneously) arranged oneself, as it were, so that that is safe, efficient, (effortless, costless). Anyway, this might even overstate it, or it's maybe far reaches before this becomes really, really apparent, and it's not necessarily front-and-center. But it ticks up more and more, over time. (And it doesn't mean that you don't forget things sometimes, or make gaffes, or are physically or socially clumsy, or make bad or even impulsive choices, etc., etc., because the bodymind made a local, possibly correctable mistake or error, or nonmonotonicity, or an unknown unknown bubbled through the environment, or (anticipatedly or not) you're tired or low-resourced in a way that's hard to compensate, or you had a microstroke or whatever that's in the process of healing or getting refactored around or it can't be, or there wasn't enough resources, bandwidth to track the thing and it was too hard or costly or imminent to proactively anticipate that, or subject to unknown unknowns, or it was simply calculatedly safe to risk something slipping through the cracks...) Anyway, none of this is quite right, it's just gesturing in the direction of a trend that can just keep going and going and going in a way that's kind of sort of like this, though the words are very imperfect or even misleading. Bodymindworldetc participation.
All of this is of course related to "nonduality" (in maybe several senses of the word though not all) as well a the analogy of "you realize you're not a wave or a water drop but part of the ocean [and in some senses just "the [whole] ocean"]"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error [last accessed: 2022-02-06]
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(draft)
One thing that happens over time is the mind gets quieter. By this I mean there's sort of slowly less and less "reminding" and "prospecting" and "chattiness."
I don't personally particularly fetishize this; it's just kind of a thing that happens, a long-run sort of "global lead indicator." But even so, the mind is still sometimes very "loud"!
Like if there's a complex and stressful situation, even if the mind is generally fairly quiet, the mind might get quite remind-y for minutes, hours, days, or weeks, and that's fine!
Again, it's less about this being like an "absolute good thing" and, it's more like it's just like the (body)mind becomes more and more sensitively situationally responsive, based on current task demands and uncertainty, and so on.
The getting relatively quieter and quieter thing is related to how "merely just having the sensory experience itself" kind of more and more replaces cognition (not all cognition!) as things are dynamically, moment-by-moment arranged so that less and less "data" needs to get shipped around after experiencing it. (You can search for the quoted phrase elsewhere in this document.)
Another way to look at this is through the "package in front of the door" analogy. So if you have sort of a main front door that you almost always enter and leave from, say when you go to work or something, maybe your apartment door or your garage door or something, and you want to remember to mail a package. You can prop the package right in front of the door or even where the door meets the frame on the floor. And then the next time you leave it'll be quite hard to forget to take the package with you, because you naturally bump into it.
This is kind of how the (body)mind optimizes itself over time, more and more. Things are proactively arranged so they come to mind, come to hand, as it were, at the right times, "triggered" by the contexts in which those things are needed, fractal packages in front of fractal doors. So there's fewer "out of context" reminders needed. (Note: It's sort of up to the mind what's "out of context"---and/or stuff needs to come up when it needs to come up, for reasons that might not be clear and that's fine! Also, I personally still use text file (or whatever) todo lists and project lists and checklists, sometimes long ones, and contextual reminders, for what it's worth.)
This is all partially "internal" as above, inner packages in front of inner doors, and it's also external, too---
The bodymind sort of refactors itself learns to use the "mere immediacy of the world out there" as sort of sufficient to sustain the complexity of the "self" including that which refers to the non-immediate (e.g. long-term plans).
So, like, yes, "groundlessness," and/but to the extent there's any grounding at all, previously, one heavily makes use of muscle tension, fixed points, fixation points, self-reference, interoception, etc., to sort of "refresh all of one's being," moment to moment, and that takes a lot of bandwidth, as it were.
But, because there's sort of a way in which "the world out there," takes care of itself (not in a "myth of the given" sort of way), one can sort of come to learn, the whole system refactors itself over time, to sort of be able to use "the world out there" kind of in place of all that internal tension, fixed points, self-reference, interoception, etc. One can still do all those things! One just has more flexibility and optionality around doing so.
So like ambient sound, the light in the room, the table in front of you, your experience of the person next to you, these become refreshing, reconstituting, somehow sufficient to moment-by-moment evoke the whole of "you."
This is a slow process! The bodymind really wants to keep track of what it wants to keep track, and that's great; lots and lots of good stuff there, the stuff of "you!" It's looking out for "you!" It slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly and conservatively cuts over to using more and more "outside" stuff versus "inside" stuff, and it only does it litle by little when it feels safe, and it can take it back! And, in any case, more and more it frees up the fluidity of the "internal" world because the immediacy and relative "stability" of the external world does a far better job of "grounding" to the degree that the bodymind likes to make use of that in a relatively "deep," rather, pervasive way.
So again these are sort of structure-preserving transformations, this learning to use the "mere immediacy of the world out there"--- one might think the "world out there" is sort of too low-density or too low-complexity to somehow serve as "basis" for constitution of the complexity of the "self." But it's not! It's hard to explain (at the time of this writing). Nothing is lost in cutting over from rich interoception and nonsymbolic cognition to relatively more like tables, chairs, cooking food, etc. Again, interoception and nonsymbolic cognition can and are still happening, but sort of with less of a reliant, bandwidth-consuming tension!
One of the reasons all this is important is because meditation can sort of give you too much rope to hang yourself, as it were. Once a person gets more and more facility with self-transformation, that might naturally start relying more and more on "write access" to the inner world and start doubling down on inner reliance as opposed to outer reliance. At first it can seem like inner reliance is, well, the more reliable one, kind of "writing" more and and more detail and complexity into the warp and weft of the "inner world." This can be very compulsive and some of this is inevitable, at first---it can feel like tremendous progress and indeed value is created, insight, etc., that's sort of "written in to the flesh and density of the self," impressing fractal strings of knots into the phenomenology of the self as sort of a memory device. (Dangerous when carried to the extreme, and you can instead go all the way in the opposite, "completely" unknotting direction!---) You might sort of feel like this "inner writing" is more reliable because there's maybe this sense that you might come to "COMPLETELY CONTROL" the inner world---
---but, impermanence-wise, and no-self-wise, and groundlessness-wise you will ultimately find you cannot! You do still get to keep anything good that you've found or created or discovered, and so on, structure-preserving transformations (and see also "naturalization"), but the "right" move is to sort of, over time, more and more, to untangle and unknot, to let the whole fullness, emptiness, no-essence-ness of stuff exist in dynamicity and flow as sustained, refreshed, reconstituted by the effortlessness of the mere "external" world or at least in addition to the "internal" world (still nonduality, still groundlessness, etc.). This is bandwidth-freeing, slack-creating, fluidity-enabling, and so on.
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(draft, experimental)
This is a bit of an experimental section because there's an empirical component, in the meditator population, of how much it makes sense to emphasize this, depending on how likely people are to encounter things related to it. This section might be really good to have here in "far reaches" or it might be better in "lists and more" and/or also better operationalized in the auxiliary practices (possibly forthcoming).
Some people claim that one of the dimensions of "the far reaches of meditation," and perhaps also the most important one, has elements of centerlessness and agencylessness (no-watcher, no-doer). (See also "luminosity" / "in the seeing just the seen; in the hearing just the heard.") See Daniel Ingram here and elsewhere:
https://dharmaoverground.org/web/guest/discussion/-/message_boards/message/2718243 [Last accessed: 2023-02-17]
So there's some distinctions to make, and I feel like the conceptual ontology isn't quite right:
So say there's something like effort, effortlessness, willing, doing in addition to, say, "no-watching" and "no-doing." Perhaps we could say no-self = no-watching and no-doing, at least in this section. And then there's also karma or layering. And then maybe there's also deliberateness.
And then finally, currently, throughout this document, I make a big deal of effortlessness and non-pushing as really great heuristics. And/but, there are times when latent "effort" and "pushing" "come up," to integrate, metabolize, burn-off, etc., as part of redo to undo. And, it can even make sense to deliberately effort or "push" under limited circumstances, or so I've generally maintained. This also factors into my position around letting breathing untangle itself and take care of itself, rather than controlling the breath. And, finally, I make points about eventually the whole bodymind system takes care of itself.
And/but, at the moment, I think there can be a thing where everything is "fully luminous, nondual" AND there's also a self, so sort of a Ken Wilber transpersonal thing, maybe. And, also, in any case, lots of people have a self for a large part of their meditation practice at the very least. Selves are very useful.
So anyway, people have pointed out to me that there are times when "efforting" feels good and seems good, like at times while exercising, cardiovascular or weightlifting, etc., or playing sports or learning something, and so on. (Call this maybe "conditioning," cf. "deconditioning"---which refers to karma and layering and samskaras and etc., conditioning in the sense of conditioned propensities---whereas here "conditioning" is meant in the "get stronger muscles, increase aerobic capacity, increase neurological efficiency, etc." senses.) And some people claim that deliberate control of the breath, like breathing exercises or deep breathing, etc., can be long-run beneficial (as opposed to my claim that this is very, very prone to accidental layering). (Ditto for concentration practices, jhanas and jhanic factors and cultivating the brahmaviharas---my claim is these are very prone to accidental layering, very prone to being counterproductive even if practiced in some sense "correctly," though not all senses of correctly.)
Whether or not we take centerlessness and agencyless as a stable, long-run asymptote, (now-ish think) there's at least a mediate situation where there has to be something like "non-karma-generating deliberate action." So, like, it's at least deliberate or intentional or something, or it can be, even it isn't always---like, it's an agentic act or an act of the self, which could be bottom-up or shade into bottom-up (i.e., it arises spontaneously) but also it can be deliberately or intentionally done, non-spontaneously done (in some sense), top-down. And it might or might not qualify as "doing," depending on how conceived. And it might or might not have some "effort." And it might or might not have some "will." But, in any case, critically, there are versions of this that are either perfectly non-karma-generating, perfectly non-layering, or any karma or layering that is generated is immediately dissolvable in principle.
Like, it now/currently seems to me that there has to be something like "(deliberate/non-spontaneous/self-laden)doing" that is both deliberate and non-karma-generating, no layering, no technical debt, as an in-principle possibility. So that "admits," under some conditions and regimes and qualities, striving(?) during exercise and competition and play and learning and "conditioning" etc., including like pranayama and autonomic regulation/relaxation/heart-rate-variability-enhancing-type breathing, and so on. A lesser claim might be something like, long-run or locally, such things are net-de-layering but contain all of layering, neutral, and delayering within them---and I think that's generally the case, especially pre-far-reaches. But I'm making a "stronger" claim that under some long-run, if not even-longer-run, conditions or regimes that one can have a self AND take actions that don't generate karma, at least in principle.
Anyway, I'm still trying to tease apart some good-enough phenomenological combinatoric possibilities and (held loosely, concepts are fake) conceptual distinctions, because different people will experience some things in different orders, and it's relevant to practice in terms of reducing the likelihood of getting jammed up or being in unpleasant or debilitating territory for too long.
So, say, you have a post-viral syndrome or something really stressful happened and for whatever reason your autonomic nervous system is disregulated in a way that's due to unhappy neurons or glands or is otherwise sticky somehow, and your sympathetic tone is too high or something. Or, meditatively, you're in a situation where it seems like every available direction is "uphill" AND it truly, truly, truly seems like patiently waiting is not the right option. Then, in the autonomic nervous system case, it might make sense to do some sort of "balanced breathing" or something. And in the meditative case, it might make sense to do things like (I still don't like these wordings; not quite...):
(Perhaps when every direction is effortful or when all directions seem to involve uphill doing or pushing:)
In the meditative case, a reason why these distinctions or possibilities are important: So to partly summarize, "prior to far reaches, at least" heading in direction of X will be a combination of (a) delayering and burn-off and (b) suppression/pushing-away, the latter, (b), inadvertently because of implicit/unknowing error propagation. And then, eventually because of redo-to-undo, one has to constructively find/"raise" remaining latent X for burn-off, without also adding new X. So one sort of needs a delicate increase/find/raise for integration/burn-off/redo-to-undo instead-of/without also entrenching/increasing X. X might be effort, muscle tension, and other "bad" stuff, except that there might be such a thing as non-karmically-generating effort/self-ing and also general muscle tone and/or strong muscle contractions are part of life and living and exercise and etc.
Anyway, I think there are (greather than usual?) conceptual tangles, still, but there's something here.
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A thread that's kind of trying to articulate the long run, far reaches of meditation (and, inseparably, a life interleaved with meditation, and other transformative practice, & just living, hurting, enjoying, life itself), & why anyone might care to explore those far reaches.
Say there's "feeling," "form" & "function."
Feeling is how things are, subjectively/aconceptually/preconceptually, experienced "from the inside."
Form is the (felt) "conceptual structure" of thought & action.
And function is "action/motor output," actual human doing/happening.
Feeling is sort of prior to form and function, sort of the ground of those latter two. Form and function can sort of only be known as feeling, or, their being known is not-other-than feeling. Yet form "structures" in feeling." And function is structurally conditioned on form.
If feeling and form change, function must change. Yet very similar function(s) can have extremely different feeling/form. If feeling changes, form must change, yet very similar form(s) can have extremely different feeling.
So, you can have menches and sociopaths, and everyone in between, with lots of nearly the same "function"--walking, talking, eating, sleeping. They might all hammer in a nail in kind of the same way, but the inner "feeling" is extremely different.
And, of course so is function! Menches and sociopaths, will diverge in behavior in subtle and overt ways, which is why those labels juxtapose. But, the point is sort of that function is heavily constrained by environment/homeostasis/etc.
And feeling and form much, much less so.
(Though, the long-run "mutual perfection" (not to inappropriately reify "perfection") of feeling, form, and function ultimately mutually, positively constrain each other.)
(Saints and Psychopaths is a title of a book, by the way, cf. my riff of menches and sociopaths)
Here is a more concrete example of all this: (next tweet)
Water feels "wet," to a baby, a teenager, a plumber, a physicist, an installation artist.
But, that wetness is different for each of them.
Say, for the physicist, the form of hydrogen bonds, quarks, etc., inhere in the immediate feeling of wetness, its very being & seeming.
And, function inheres especially differently in wetness, for the baby, the plumber, the installation artist. They each have different affordances, different possibilities.
So, wetness, in embodied totally, and even in "raw sensation" feels differently, to each & any of them.
Meditation progress kind of goes (very, very roughly) in the order of:
And, this latter one is the most interesting to me.
Over years and decades, the very X of the world continues to change, where X =
appearing, seeming, being, knowing, feeling...
self, other, world; body, mind, environment...
life, death, goals, history, meaning, morality...
This radical and ongoing "refoundationing" of feeling, form, and function is what continues to interest me about meditation.
Anyway, I'll kind of peter out, here. These quotes seem relevant:
"The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
— Proust
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.”
— John Lennon
*
See also maybe: https://metarationality.com/bongard-meta-rationality
*
Emptiness very withstanding, it’s very hippocampal--more and more, less fragmentedly, more unfragmentedly, you know who you are (which one; this one; not that one or those ones), what you are (previously mistaken), where/when you are, with respect to the state of the world, the distant past, the far future. Again, this can only wholly happen, in emptiness, under nonduality/luminosity/etc., all of that affords settling, affords seeing (body)mind for what it actually is, and in that, or of that, or under that, all of that can reshape itself so as to “know where you are,” yet still, “not two, not one,” empty, nebulous, provisional, light, and so on.
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These could be the subjects of entire books (though they don't have to be; it's an implicit, self-dawning understanding, that takes care of itself; it's just "really deep and important" vis-a-vis all of this re sort of "global restructuring of mind" but that's a potentially misleading phrase (see "locality and concreteness" dialogue, elsewhere in document. also concepts in the pedagogical/bridge-building distinction breadth-first vs depth-first discussions, re "depth" and "tangledness"/"diffuseness"). See David Chapman's Meaningness stuff, too, again re the immediately below):
(Note: a sense)
[in no particular order]
at least one sense in which there's no such thing as language, never has been
at least one sense in which there are no abstractions, never have been
at least one sense in which there's no people, never has been
at least one sense in which the boundary or separation between all of "body" and "mind", "inside" and "outside," "self" and "world" are illusory (and other important senses in which they are not illusory)
at least one sense in which there is no ultimate, omni-commensurable ground truth/ontology/actuality/basis/reality, never has been ("groundlessness")
at least one sense in which sensations can't directly control or interact with other sensations
at least one sense in which [there's] "no escape" / [there's] "just this"
at least one sense in which each moment (~self;~self+world), each momentary [self-]constitution / [self-]re-constitution is “separate” [big air quotes around “separate”]
at least one sense in which "ought"/"goodness" is prior to, upstream of, "is", "ontology", "truth" (no conflation, here, re correspondance theory, nor any [necessary] commitment to that)
at least one sense in which nothing (no “thing”) is eternal, everything (every “thing”, “everywhere) (cf. “no objects anywhere”), is impermanent, non-eternal
at least one sense in which meaning, goodness, and badness only/exclusively lay between (and so while nothing is eternal, cf. above, neither is anything meaningless [cf. nihilism]) [also symbols, also reference ]
at least one sense in which aboutness ("intentionality"), including in the sense of "thinking about," tends to be confused, overused, a misapprehension of phenomenology and thinking, planning, designing, acting, writing, etc., and also it is not monolithic, not a single thing (and not to reify it in any which way)
at least one sense in which there is no single sense in which [sic] there is “existing/being”, “causes and effects”, and much more (unity, perfection, completeness, wholeness, nothingness, separateness, truth, reality, god's-eye-views, facts of the matter, beginnings, endings, everything…)
at least one sense in which we only experience representations
at least one sense in which all sensations (and/or objects or perception, appearances, seemingness…) are interpreted and there is no “given” perception whatsoever
at least one sense in which there is "phenomenal isotropy, non-particularity" (not exactly the same thing as Ingram's centerlessness (or agencylessness))
at least one sense in which any “[deliberate] action”--anything besides spontaneous, “pure” self-caringly “listening”--is a “cope,” in the most gentle sense, is not-listening to oneself, is not taking into account “ALL” “parts” of oneself
at least one sense in which love and service are the “ultimate” answer to the “reality” of personal suffering (in no way precluding possible fallibility, ongoing learning in part through unfortunate mistakes, uncertainties, impulsiveness, nonmonotonicity, and potentially causing harm through “ignorance in the guise of competent or wise benevolence,” etc.)
at least once sense in which there's no (long-run) need for suffering (and/but there's a way it's doing it's very best for you, possibly confused-ly, until it's no longer needed)
at least one sense in which "you" and "suffering" are "on the same side", like, you've been holding the "suffering control panel" all along, and there's a way to get access or authorization that's not suppression, not layering or papering over, there's just "pressing the off button, simple as [sic]" (realizing that "same side", and getting access, which is more like realizing you had it all along, that authorization, realization process is in part that whole-bodymind-complete, whole-meditation-complete, global wayfinding puzzle, involving self-compassion, self-alignment, self-kindness, self-wisdom, and is also intimately related to groundlessness). There are deeper and deeper and deeper layers of this.
at least once sense in which there's no (long-run) need for self-ing (and/but there's a way it's doing it's very best for you, possibly confused-ly, until it's no longer needed)
at least one sense in which nothing matters, including there being no ultimate judgment or consequences, no duty, no responsibility, no necessity no obligation, can just do what want (which is then paradoxically, constructively spontaneously meaningful, mattering enough, precisely and sufficiently)
at least one sense in which you are not an extensional body moving through a three-dimensional cartesian-esque space
at least one sense in which selfishness and self-servingness "all the way down" is ok and good
at least one sense in which experience, apparentness, seemingness, and more, is “empty,” like this: “what you ‘see’ is all there is; there’s nothing behind it” and “and even that too is empty”
at least one sense in which there are no things, as such; there’s nothing thing-like
at least one sense in which there are no generalities or (let alone) universals [/—nor universals]; there is only radically concrete and situated particulars (and of course at least one sense in which there are also no particulars)
at least one sense in which there are no infinities
at least one sense in which all there is now, is what’s now
at least one sense in which all this is is “just this.”
at least one sense in which you can, long-run, function just fine without an "enduring stable identity concept"; there is only radically concrete flux that sort of has no pattern to fall under an enduring concept
at least one sense in which nothing ends, including the sense in which “you will always have happened.” At least on sense in which “endings” (and lots of other things) are “negated without further implication” [See Mipham’s Beacon of Certainty]
at least one sense in which everything ends / at least one sense in which this ends [/ it's ending in each moment]
at least one sense in which everything is determined and couldn’t be otherwise
at least one sense in which everything is interconnected / at least one at least [sic] narrow sense in which there is no separation
at least one sense in which "being good," any of someone "being good" can only be ultimately effortless, costless, and, critically, spontaneous / "it's just happening" / "it just happens" / "that's just the way it is"
at least one sense in which there is no single, one most good and correct way to a express a particular truth
at least one sense in which there's no difference between an enlightened and unenlightened mind; at least once sense in which being enlightened changes nothing (and other senses in which lots of things change); and at least two senses in which there's no such thing as enlightenment (or meditation)
at least one sense in which there's no perfection. at least one sense in which perfect control, understanding, or certainty don't exist [adapted from David Chapman, mistakes mine]
[there should be an entry somewhere in here that teases out something about when something in the space of locality does [a lot] and doesn't apply]
at least one sense in which no difference / no boundary, between "inside" and "outside"
at least one sense in which everything is inside you, and/or/rather at least all experience
at least one sense in which the "the future", or one's experience of the future, is ultimately empty, groundless, and "liquid," at least for a time, in the sense in which it phenomenologically and functionally "re-seats" itself, where it lives, how it works..
at least one sense in which the past and future are "now"
at least one sense in which experience, sensations, perceptions, any experiencing self-illuminate, belong to themselves, are self-evident (see also luminosity and vividness) [Ingram: "The field lights up itself totally, without division, without restraint, without any barrier or gap, so disconnection is impossible."]
at least one sense, long-run, letting sensations be just they are is assures the best possible outcome and can trustingly rest into that (cf. self-liberating)
at least one sense in which "there is nothing outside of it" (cf. emptiness, nonduality, etc.)
at least one sense in which self and world are themselves interrelated, constructed interpretations “all” the way down
narrow sense in which (mere) understanding is all you need to do
at least one sense in which things which you thought were just “the world,” “how things are” actually turn out to be “you, also”, “map” (versus “territory”), “representation” (in some sense), not-arbitrary, still-dependent but non-arbitrarily malleable, changeable, something that flows according to ultimately spontaneous causes and conditions // self, goals, world co-arise together
at least one sense in which meditation, wayfinding, etc., have to undergo deep corrections, which involve de-entrenching, of deep concepts/ideas of meditation, wayfinding (which happens / can happen during the process of doing these), and one sort of has to correct out of the concepts or ideas of these entirely, with no remainder, long-run
at least one sense in which, long-run, there is "flatness," “no depth” / ?perfect-stillness / perfect determinism / like a reversible, liquid state machine that is driven by external inputs, driven by the "world," "the whole thing all at once", no need for "self-ing", in a good way
at least one sense in which there's no need for a particular kind of self-ing, self-reference, or a particular sense if “internality” (though interoception is still a thing)
at least one sense in which you are the (your representation of) the world, without remainder
at least one sense in which safety → surrender → “control”(+surrender) →/= alignment/participation
at least one sense in which, for those with, or who had, gender/orientation/presentation/role stuff, it’s self-"sorted", aligned, untangled, all the way down, beyond labels and concepts and "you know what to do," through and through, up to unknown unknowns, and so on (draft)
at least one sense in which (long-run) there's no watcher (cf. centerlessness; no observer, no center point) and no doer (cf. agencylessness; no controller, no-will-er) (Daniel Ingram formulation, mistakes mine; I also like "no particularity".)
at least one sense in which (long-run) there's a lining up, a synchrony, an in-phase-ness, a non-overhang, a non-folding or tucking, in the having of experience
at least one sense in which consciousness becomes non-choppy, non-discontinuous, non-jumpy, non-joggy, non-wrinkly/non-fold-y, non-depthy-y, and so-then "liquid" and zero-lag-phase-synced/paced parallel and reversibly (to some degree) most especially (in some sense) serialized (both experience and action, in some sense, at least in part, up to surprise and unknown unknowns)
at least one sense in which all stories (about the self or otherwise) are untrue/false
at least one sense in which awareness, experiencing is effortless, spontaneous, requires nothing to be done, just happens, is already happening
at least one sense in which at least once sense [sic] of the idea of "truth," acted upon, perfomed, communicated, coordinated around is a "consequentialist calculation," as sort of "groundlessly represented"
at least one sense in which bad isn't bad, that badness is permissible, that generally suffering is unnecessary because there's better things for the system to reach for, "preference is satisfying/enough" [cf. good and bad are not cosmic; they lie between; the cosmos/kosmos is in you]
at least one sense in which the whole cosmos, and all of time, "passes through,"" loops through your body, the whole phenomenal field, with a thought, and there’s nothing outside of you
at least one sense in which "thought" is a narrow confused version of something that can be done, or is spontaneous, throughout the whole phenomenological field and body
at least one sense in which there’s no such thing as before and after your death, and before and after your death properly reference or account for something experientially now (and empty, in the technical sense) and "the whole thing is groundless"
at least one sense in which stories, art, all media, all language, has no essence, is empty in perhaps a slightly counterintuitive or once removed manner, and is properly understood and whole-embodied-ly generated inseparably from audience-in—groundlessness
at least one sense in which the ((~whole) phenomenal/phenomenological) field "updates" itself, renews itself, spontaneously, effortlessly, costlessly [if you only (come to) let it]
at least one sense in which it's not your job to determine right or wrong, true or false, the facts of the matter, to judge or self-judge, to figure, to figure out, to be creative, to create; it's "spontaneity's" job; it's "groundlessness's" job.
at least one sense in which mind is nowhere and nothing, no such thing
at least one sense in which "inside" as well as "not just" "outside" becomes-known-to-be-such-that both are equally "objective" [yet each still empty] in the at-least-one-sense-in-which no subjectivity remains [in this sense or aspect "nonduality" could be considered, amongst lots of other things, sort of a "determinism upgrade"]
at least one sense in which "internality" is a learned strategy
at least one sense in which there is no fact of the matter that is not "ultimately" empty and nebulous and "spontaneous" i.e. not up to you per se
at least one sense in which you don't need to figure anything out
at least one sense in which there's nothing to figure out
at least one sense in which (a) there's no platonic, "looks the same from any angle," context-free knowledge in a vacuum; (b) everything learned is somehow learned for; (c) this learning just happens
at least one sense in which there's nothing that's not ok to experience
at least one sense in which everything is experienced for the last time
[temp catchall; draft] at least one sense in which, long-run, there's nothing left to do, nothing to be done, nothing left but death (in a good way; cf. parinirvana type things), impermanence and pattern are one, or rather everything is both "immortal" / "platonic" and impermanent / non-eternal (cf. emptiness is form and form is emptiness, cf. pattern and nebulosity, pace David Chapman's Meaningness, and cf. David Chapman's no god; no god's-eye-view) ;;;;;;;;;;;;; related: nowhere to go, nothing to do, never left, never were anywhere else, never could have, no discontinuity between before and "then your life will start, then you can do the thing", just this, this is is, no such thing as wayfinding, contra wayfinding, wayfinding should eat itself or it should never have been, cf. suffering, death, void / oblivion / nothingness / nibanna cf. never prospectivity recognized, never realized never not something [sic]
[more elaboration of determinism type stuff] at least one sense in which you are totally determined by your globality of inputs and self-inputs (cf. everything is empty, the experience qua the experience of it)
(see also: David Chapman's meaningness work; Daniel Ingram's work; Greg Goode's work)
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https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1485372260621946883
Mark @meditationstuff Jan 23, 2022
I'm now starting to strongly suspect that maybe the real enlightenment along the way is being able to have deep friendships with other men and to get married to the woman of my dreams and be best friends with her too (important: can your meditation system do that, if not, etc.)
(gender neutral)
[Edit: maybe better, still not quite right: capacity for romantic love and capability for profitably vulnerable friendships]
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1156923033023582208
Quote Tweet Mark @meditationstuff Aug 1, 2019
I am starting to strongly suspect that a good meditation system ultimately turns you into a horny extrovert with a lot of optionality around “need for cognition.” If your meditation system does not turn you into a horny extrovert possibly return it to the store and get a new one.
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1485372439869722628
Mark @meditationstuff Jan 23, 2022 Replying to @meditationstuff
still works
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1270733573151248384
Quote Tweet Mark @meditationstuff Jun 10, 2020
peepee poopoo
poopooo
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1485375866167300099
Mark @meditationstuff Jan 23, 2022 Replying to @meditationstuff
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1270793436623495171
Mark @meditationstuff Jun 10, 2020
untangle your Original Toilet Training Trauma, gain ten IQ points
epistemics are embodied
societal cringe-enforced taboo makes you dumb
scatological deep-dives make you smart. unraveling unspeakable fetishes contain ten IQ points each for the unlocking
I don’t make the rules
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1278696645568475136
Mark @meditationstuff Jul 2, 2020 Replying to
Imma gonna make poop and creepy fetishes cool (and safe and consensual and)
Q: How do you get rid of a fetish?
A: Figure out how to safely and self-acceptingly enjoy it so thoroughly and completely and efficiently that there's nothing left.
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1487879513316941832
Mark @meditationstuff Jan 30, 2022
starting to identify w the whole universe (srsly) in part implying no need to suffer in deepest & most "essential" way send tweet
also no to many worlds & yes to superdeterminism
(still yes to emptiness, groundlessness, luminosity)
i uh may not be taking questions at this time
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1486733769168011266
Quote Tweet Mark @meditationstuff Jan 27
Really clear that my version of physicalism/materialism is/was hurting me, but molecular and cellular biological thinking is so damn useful. Little machines and covalent bonds, etc., all the way down, rattling around, dissipating entropy far from equilibrium + predictive proc etc
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Stub.
cf. "you can be hurt"
cf. first noble truth in buddhism but not exactly
cf. shitpoast
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1512076885592748037
Mark @meditationstuff 2022-04-07
1/2
"I don't want to achieve happiness by not suffering; I want to achieve happiness by not getting hurt."
(Is this backwards? Is it?!)
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1512076886993563649
Mark @meditationstuff 2022-04-07
2/2
(After the, uh... problematic Wody Alln:)
“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”
*
Stub but quoted from another section for reference:
at least one sense in which "you" and "suffering" are "on the same side", like, you've been holding the "suffering control panel" all along, and there's a way to get access or authorization that's not suppression, not layering or papering over, there's just "pressing the off button, simple as [sic]" (realizing that "same side", and getting access, which is more like realizing you had it all along, that authorization, realization process is in part that whole-bodymind-complete, whole-meditation-complete, global wayfinding puzzle, involving self-compassion, self-alignment, self-kindness, self-wisdom, and is also intimately related to groundlessness). There are deeper and deeper and deeper layers of this.
(via:)
touchstones sort of leaving out or only weakly interacting with "wisdom" and morality ("at least one sense in which")
https://meditationbook.page/#158da1b
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Nihilism, pointlessness, meaninglessness, anomie, ennui, boredom, ghastly hopelessness or ghastly desperation, just waiting to die, can show up anytime. There are many versions and flavors and they can have different underlying structure and causes.
There's maybe a particular late-stage flavor, as, at deeper and deeper "levels," a person realizes that X, Y, and Z "just won't work," where "working" is perhaps something vaguely like stable and final access to safety, love, sex outside of death, decay, dissolution, neurodegeneration or time... And X, Y, and Z are plans and goals and reliances and religiousity and faith and fantasies and fulfillment of sexual fetishes and...
That's not to say with certainty and finality that, I don't know, immortality or souls or god or god tech aren't things---I mean they're probably not, but nothing is certain and all is empty and provisional (including all being empty and provisional). But likely you wan to rely on something, but you can't---don't take my word for it, of course; your experience might be different!
In any case, there's this subtler and subtler (sometimes very overt) sorting and sifting, "what about this," "what about that," "oh shit that won't work," "what about this?" And so on.
So there's sort of this increasing desperation or gallows-something, likely at this point arising in considerable equanimity or at least forebearance (otherwise it sort of wouldn't be safe for a lot of this to come up).
And, but, anyway, this is also sort of, at the same time, with a bit of a lag, untangling deeper and deeper dimensions or aspects of or in the rough bucket of "no-self" type stuff, "conception of stable durational identity" type stuff.
And then... [sic] (I'm still exploring how to write this last part.)
It's very connected to the below, taken from another section:
at least one sense in which "you" and "suffering" are "on the same side", like, you've been holding the "suffering control panel" all along, and there's a way to get access or authorization that's not suppression, not layering or papering over, there's just "pressing the off button, simple as [sic]" (realizing that "same side", and getting access, which is more like realizing you had it all along, that authorization, realization process is in part that whole-bodymind-complete, whole-meditation-complete, global wayfinding puzzle, involving self-compassion, self-alignment, self-kindness, self-wisdom, and is also intimately related to groundlessness). There are deeper and deeper and deeper layers of this.
(via:)
touchstones sort of leaving out or only weakly interacting with "wisdom" and morality ("at least one sense in which")
https://meditationbook.page/#158da1b
*
---don't take my word for it, of course; your experience might be different!
and also, worth repeating, it's ok to want to live forever, to fantasize about it, to want to be rich, invincible, young forever, powerful, safe in very specific ways, etc.
there will be conceptual and metaphysical confusions there, but that's what redo-to-undo and fantasy, and trying things out, and trying to get things, will help with. and lots and lots of it will not be conceptual and metaphysical confusions; it will just be good and nourishing and so on.
so "that won't work" isn't prescriptive. enjoy thinking about what you want (to work) and sometimes try to make it work(!), all the way down, for everything, as you are so moved, or not. that's how one gets fulfilling relationships, and that's how we got science and medicine and computers, at the very least, and who knows what's next...
*
See also:
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[based on very small sample sizes, speculative, work in progress]
0-6000 hours of practice---very contingent. some people will do more phenomenological and "supramundane" "depth" type stuff first. other people will be more memory, trauma, conditioning first. And then someone will sort of eventually switch to more of the other. eventually body stuff will start coming in.
around maybe 4000-6000 hours of practice on might see noticeably increased "autonomic harmony"---improved digestion and all things being equal increased wellbeing. some allergies might go away or go down in intensity. "emotional processing" and problem solving tend to get faster for mild to medium issues. the hard stuff and hardest of hard stuff will have thousands of hours left. one might find that "the stress response" somehow doesn't cut as deep; there's just not as much cortisol dumped into the system or something; something, somewhere remains at peace (while certainly plenty might not). "Equanimity" is sort of a poor abstraction; it's always contingent and contextual, but there's more and more of it.
if someone is around 6000-8000 hours of practice, I'm going to be looking closely for steady "untangling" phenomenology (cf. conditioning, trauma, life strategies). Whether this shows up as such will still be kind of contingent---it might look different depending on what practices they've been engaging in.
brief, loosely related notes on unknotting, untwisting, untangling
https://meditationbook.page/#151
around 8000-10,000 hours I might be looking for a sort of "nihilism pressure" around mortality stuff and a deeper and deeper sense of X, Y, Z... won't work, won't get me what I want, maybe especially related to "conceptual identity preservation" or some sub-aspects of self-related impermeanence
(Around 9000-11000 hours is kind of smoothing out and settling down, more predictable practice, any wild swings ("large-scale nonmonotonicity") are mostly gone, there's little to absolutely none overt/gross muscle tension, you're basically "structurally fluid in groundlessness" (always contingent any surprise situation being a possible exception), there's perhaps something loose and confident and snappy and gentle and smooth and flowing and aligned and not getting ahead of oneself and everything working together at just the right speed in just the right order (at least locally) if not yet entirely spontaneous and effortless about how your bodymind works, conceptual identity is mostly or completely untangled, you're kind of an expert meditator with still plenty to do.)
on groundlessness, a brief note
https://meditationbook.page/#158da1bhttps://meditationbook.page/#158da1a1a
if someone is around 10,000-12000 hours, I'm going to be looking for a sort of gradual lifting of nihilism for simplicity, peace, spontaneity
if someone is between 8000-12000 hours I'm going to be looking for groundlessness and a bunch of phenomenological/conceptual/metaphysical stuff:
touchstones sort of leaving out or only weakly interacting with "wisdom" and morality ("at least one sense in which")
https://meditationbook.page/#158da1b
Re morality, wisdom, love, consequentialism, at around 8000-18000 hours, if someone isn't in a fairly stable, loving relationship or at least general heightened capacity for pair-bonding in more complex communal-social situations (modulo deep aro-romanticism or a couple holdout love-gating extreme fetishes--under maybe 12000 hours, for the latter), I'm going to especially start wondering why. (It's not a thing for everyone, though.) Some people will finally mostly unconflictly decide they want kids if they felt they previously just couldn't. Ditto for valued, enjoyable, rewarding friendships (not just collaborations) and having enough money, at the very least (modulo privilege and all sorts of things---very contextual).
Somewhere between 10,000-15,000 hours I'll also be looking for a sort of non-nihilistic, loving consequentialism-in-groundlessness
on good and bad
https://meditationbook.page/#68a
Somewhere between 10,000-20,000 hours, modulo starting point, privilege, and loads of contingent shit, I'd expect to slowly see more and more wider focus on community, the world, legacy. Very contingent.
At 10,000-15000 hours this does start to get into "einstein shit" territory---the possibility of phenomenological-body-surface-shimmering through-and-through radical-refactoring-in-groundlessness fit-to-purpose --- so radical creativity, art, writing, game design, eloquence; first-of-first principles philosophical, scientific and technical work; crack open the universe moonshots, perhaps hyper-local or less-local statesmenship and diplomacy but this is maybe especially entangled in a lifetime of pedigree, who you know, etc. All of this is so dependent on starting conditions and everything-life-context, even while reaching for interdependent transcendence.
*
bits have flipped somewhere. you can check them, but they're just bits. so much has nebulously changed, nebulously clarified, nebulously refactored, nebulously smoothed, nebulously quieted, nebulously cleared. but there's something natural, ordinary, obvious, straightforward about it, something utterly normal about your experience. there's an easy competence, a lightness, a confidence, even while you're still arguing with your intimate partner or stressed about legacy, or money, or something. there's always something. has anything really changed at all? everything, everything; you've given up everything, lost everything, only to get it back, and everything has somehow changed, and yet somehow everything isn't the same but it's how it's supposed to be and that's somehow familiar to the point it can be hard to remember what's changed. and your mind works so differently but by the same deep-down rules it always has. and, and...
*
Or you might just be a poor, grumpy recluse, or in a cabin in the woods with your lover, or you might have a family in the countryside, or you'll get hit by a bus or a meteor or nuclear war or bioterrorism or you'll piss off the wrong people. And, at the time of this writing, general artificial intelligence, cryonics, longevity, rejuvenation are perhaps twenty to eighty years away????????? Even then and still there is oblivion and just this.
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20220619
>>> hmm, based on muscle dynamics and everything, I think I might be misconceptualizing ("phenomenlogico-misconceptualizing") something around
a) settling/unsettling/resettling
b) "done"-ness
c) non-infinity, non-eternalism, impermanence
d) boundlessness, endlessness, boundarylessness [no-things]
it's maybe something in the space of (at least the way in which I'm using the words), somehow there has to be boundlessness and endlessness but there still has to be non-infinity (and non eternalism)
so i'm trying to figure out (in the loosest and broadest sense of "figure out"), in meditation, if/where I went wrong somewhere. not sure if this'll be a running theme for a bit or if it'll evaporate in like a day. not yet sure if this is optimal progress or if i went way wrong somewhere halfway through or if there's even a there, there. cult stuff is still a confound but I think it'll get teased apart in a way that hopefully clarifies a bunch of stuff.
there may be some insight to be found, too, re (b) why I generally under-call timelines (even though timelines are hard in general) :crossed_fingers: i'll add a stub or a section soon, I think.
<<<
scratch notes:
done versus endlessness+noneternalism
endless, boundless, timeless w/o infinity or eternal?? [plus time still real in important senses ofc]
"no done" / "done" ofc is an eternalism
cf. centerlessness, agencylessness ; no watcher, no doer, etc. via Ingram
See also: * far reaches of meditation
20220620
Not immediately a "theme." For me, some things are more quick blips/"insights" and others sort of intermittently evolve in broad, multifaceted ways (e.g. emptiness, impermanence). Of course some things that were initially blips opened up into broader themes. (I think this is personally structurally contigent (with ofc patterns and themes across people and across history, because genetics, cultures, common human experiences, etc.) and doesn't mean too much.)
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[This is a hasty sketch to index/get down something in this space, because eventually, finally, maybe after a long time, this sort of thing starts to really sort itself out, perhaps partly like the below. In other words, meditation is eventually decisively revelatory about the sorts of things, below.]
Non-meaning-laden experience (which is still accompanied by knowing) is prior and constitutive of meaning-laden-experience. Meaning lives in between self and other/world. Meaning is entanglement between self and other/world. (Goodness and badness live between, as well.)
Preconceptual, luminous/vivid knowing “just is”; there’s a sense in which it’s utterly stark and clear and self-revealing. And/but retrospective apprehensive of this type of knowing is inherently ontologically nebulous, arguably in a slightly different way than the knowing of meaning-laden-experience is inherently nebulous. Ontological nebulosity “lives in” meaning which “lives in” the spaceless space, the relationship, the interaction between self and other/world. [Aboutness/intentionality...]
The ways the world is afforded to us, the way the world shows up to us, our ability to speak about the world, our spontaneous actions and intentions, and our reflective actions and intentions, are all downstream and ultimately constituted/provisioned (out) of our entire sensory/experiential history.
Our sensory/experiential history determines/constrains language, speech acts, the creation of texts, social relations (in some senses), social mechanisms, and so forth.
Meditation begets structural fluidity, and, through meditation, one can refactor the “arrangement” of their causal history, in a generally structure-preserving, (in some sense lossless), way to change the set of prereflective and reflective affordances and possibilities for meaning and action.
*
See also:
“a dialogue between N and Mark, on reasoning and pre-reasoning”
https://meditationbook.page/#157
"part 1: a brief layer/tangle model of mind, "parts," personality, groups, and (global) culture"
(and part 2)
https://meditationbook.page/#32
*
The above is goaded (in a good way) by:
https://twitter.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1412275263740682247
Me: “Man, I should have something like this in my document.” [in language commensurate with the rest of the document, even if usual equivocation, etc.]
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[Edited and elided and mangled for clarity.]
PK
Hey, Mark and I were talking about the "absolute agency" pattern in his work, and I thought you (DX) might have some things to add
DX
Oh yummy what’s that
PK
i had just written a kind of summary of the convo from my pov, so i'll paste that here:
PK
Okay. Maybe I can try and summarize / re-state the issues here
[4:46 PM] I'm making a few claims
[4:47 PM] (1) There is some kind of "absolute agency" pattern present in the protocol doc
[4:47 PM] (2) This pattern is a distortion, a samskara (I think of those as roughly referentially equivalent, though I'm perceiving more the "distortion" aspect here, i.e. the way this pattern is warping the rest of the fabric)
[4:47 PM] (3) This pattern is part of the "transmission" of the protocol doc (by "transmission", I mean roughly the same kind of transmission as you get face-to-face)
[4:47 PM] It seems like we're at least sort of on the same page on (1)? Like you agree that there's something there?
[4:47 PM] I'm not sure if you agree with me on (2)
[4:47 PM] (3) seems like a big point of disagreement. It seems like there you think that (a) to whatever extent this pattern is there, it's caveated enough (e.g., "all these descriptions are just words, you need to find their true meanings yourself") that the reader can have some choice around it. And (b) even if they pick it up, it's actually fine, bc as a practice it'll eat itself eventually anyway.
[4:48 PM] I kind of agree with (b) but I still think it's problematic to be transmitting not-ultimately-true patterns. And with (a), I do think the caveats help a lot to create the right overall frame and create agency / freedom there; but that they don't really change the transmission of the pattern.
DX
Ya this matches my first impression before reading mark's responses. The thing that feels specifically funny about it to me is assuming some singular locus of "what is good", eg for all the practices that are like "Do X if it feels good". Whereas for me the concept of a singular locus like that doesn't even make sense metaphysically - rather something more like a maybe-scale-free network of interlocking locii of good.
A funny thing is that it seems like there's basically two meditative paths I see professed a lot:
one that unifies will as I see yours doing - increasing the scaling factor of the network so there really is one huge locus that basically subsumes the rest (in a not necessarily violent way)
One that causes all the locii to be closer in scale to minimize ("coercive") power dynamics but such that they step on eachother minimally
If you're a fan of anime metaphors it feels very much like the difference between life fiber override and life fiber synchronization.
Multicenteredness is about recognizing multiscaledness of agency, existence of inner optimizers and other-optimizers in light of fuzzy boundaries, etc.
Eventually it becomes finer and finer until agency is a fine haze of microcenters all in distributed* alignment (edited)
I'm not sure what this means in terms of practice but there's definitely some implicit effect in assuming "good" has a referent in the traditional sense
traditional = logical denotation rather than dynamic mind-blob ecosystem
so maybe there's this thing where all the parts identify as "me" and it's fine to be inconsistent but then what do you do with the conflict? I've always found that to be a non-starter for p2 meta protocol which has made it hard for me lol (edited)
or like I do it playfully but feel like I'm missing some joke
PK
Like, if we take the wayfinding metaphor literally, the homunculus is like a little hiker looking around all the time and carefully picking his route
PK
and in my experience, sometimes that's just not possible
like sometimes things are just already so much in motion, that it's impossible to stop and get perspective (like a homunculus would like to)
Mark
Yeah and I just don’t disagree! Huge part of practice, cf a whole quarter of p2. And/but/though it feels like the weight of the document implies otherwise? A confusing/misleading tacit “should”, “you should always be able to do this”?
(I’m like, after all, any homunculus, watcher, the practice itself should eventually get, in some sense, eaten by itself with no remainder. But that’s fruit not path/practice. Should only happen if/when/how a person is ready, in/on their terms and concepts, from the inside. And trying to directly do that could get tangly. But over-reifying or over-homunculifying the practice could get tangly too. And to the degree that that’s not called out, to the degree it needs to be, that’s potentially on me.)
PK
hmm okay. yeah, somehow what i picked up from reading it was indeed, "you should always be able to do this". That may be partly just about language, hard for me to tell.
I do see now that p2 as written has a lot on allowing, as opposed to willing. But in my reading, what happens there is that the homunculus gets pushed up a meta level.
PK
Ah, perhaps if there's a homunculus, then it needs a goal or direction or something, and that's the role that "good" plays
DX
could you say more? Is it like: this is a useful strategy if you're already shaped like a mostly single big homunculus and it's fine because eventually it eats itself?
(but then what then?)
Mark
more like any parts that are looking for something to do, the protocol is something to do
and that something to do teaches those parts how to harmoniously interface with everything else, which sort of then teaches everything to harmoniously interface with everything else
PK
more like any parts that are looking for something to do, the protocol is something to do
huh actually i tried it on more, and honestly I can't see how this could work in a way that didn't feel like fabrication
may be a me thing though. like, at the relevant level, i don't think that any of me is "looking for something to do"
Mark
something to do / meditate / know thyself / experiment / try stuff / change / get something / become something / surrender to something / align with something / participate in something
I don’t mean it as anything more than if thirsty, and safe to drink, and harmonious enough to drink, then drink, for literal thirst. Basically same.
Or, also, “one is thirsty and just drinks” without conceptualizing as such, but then it’s still possible to profitably play with that, or nearby that, if there’s something dissatisfying, somewhere.
DX
If I frame it as looking for what's dissatisfying and remembering to allow stuff if I don't find it that feels a lot better. Something about how if something is dissatisfying for one part, it's a dissatisfaction for the whole system, which is not true of "good"
[Ed. but one could incorporate dissatisfaction into one's understanding of "good"!]
Mark
Part of it is that the ways in which one can’t do the things, at particular object-level times, in particular object-level contexts or regimes, is intended to demonstrate the ways in which things like willing (and other things) fail—locally, generally, and sometimes universally. And this gives potentially to certain senses of positive determinism, interdependence, groundlessness, etc., while still retaining (spontaneous) complementary agency which affords those insights.
but that could be explicitly called out better
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[Edited and elided and mangled for clarity.]
JD
from a friend (i thought is/was genius)
local is effective. effective is global
[...]
i think for me, there’s a way that concrete action feels separate from “abstract” results
like constantly this question of how i’ll do big things in my life
and it seems like the only action you can take
is kind of, on “atoms”
and is somewhat ordinary
so there’s like a seeming disconnect between the small (the playing feel)
and the big (what i seem to care about?)
i kind of feel this when i’m cleaning a room
desired outcome/vision: clean room
but, you can’t just like
wave a magic wand for that to happen
you have to, like, actually move things around
one by one
and there’s kind of a disconnect there
slow is smooth, smooth is fast
Mark
local is effective. effective is global
ok yeah, kind of a pithy expansion [or even pithier compression] of the global wayfinding ethos? or do you feel like it’s something different than that and cool?
JD
feels relevant to wayfinding too
exactly!
Mark
right yeah
Mark
more tho too?
JD
like, the only playing field you have
is “local”
the only playing field you can act on
and somehow somehow connects to a more global thing
im not sure if more
maybe less??
Mark
the only playing field you can act on
no yes exactly this
Mark
i think people get tripped up trying to take “global” actions but you can’t
sort of
JD
i think people get tripped up trying to take “global” actions but you can’t
rightt, yeah!
this was kind of the original insight for me
like, there’s kind of an abstract goal
happiness
a clean room
~ belonging ~
and so there’s kind of that abstract level
and trying to act in, perhaps like wanting to flip magic switches to get everything in those good abstract states
but all you have are local (time-bound?) moves
you have to have that phone call, move that object from place a to b
and like all the medtation stuff too
Mark
yup
JD
anyway
feels therepuetically equiv to the slow is fast line
it’s like a chill pill
but in a slightly different/space dimension
Mark
a deep/broad/multifaceted insight (but can only be locally/concretedly applied, heh)
JD
righttt, lol
[...]
JD
[...] i don’t think effective is necessarily the best verb
small adds up, adding up is (eventually) big
[Ed. final note: re "ordinary actions", yes! maybe "extraordinary" actions, too, in the sense of sometimes "subtle and/or high dimensional", but they'll still in some sense be local (speaking only about the current, relevant sense of "local"), finite, iterated (very loosely speaking). (And/or/also "concrete" ("no abstractions anywhere," or "abstractions have to be concretely engaged, if engaged as such"..."))
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if space is empty, and if time is empty, and "the phenomenological grain of experience" is empty, and complex/composite vs simple is empty, one might still play around with something like locality.
i want to say like “high-dimensional and distributed,” but still local in a sense?
maybe, say the bodymind is the size of planet earth, and made of like clockworks and gears, of many sizes, and sometimes someone is working on a very tiny part of the whole thing, like the gears inside a true-to-sized pocket watch. and sometimes that pocket watch is mostly inside it’s metal housing, which is seamlessly embedded in the planet-sized clockworks, but sometimes that pocket watch is somehow diffusely/thinly spread through the entire planet, though it’s still basically the same sort of pocket watch. in both cases, somehow, it’s still somehow local operations; all that’s available is local operations; you can only do what you can do, right there and then, with that small patch in front of you (which might be coalesced or diffuse; which might just look like surrender, letting go).
also, the pocket watch is precise little gears, pixel perfect precision, tweezers and tiny tools. but at the same time it’s shimmery, flickery, buzzy, nebulous, no such thing as gears, no such thing as pixels (of course).
and sometimes/often it’s coalesced or diffuse pocket watches, and sometimes it’s undulating waves or whooshes through the whole bodymind. (edited)
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[See also the section: extremity replay and creativity: panic, trauma, sexual arousal]
[See also the section: "subtle energy" and "energy work" and mental models]
Similar to the discussion on breathing, in section "breath," the muscular/glandular components of sexual arousal, orgasm, ejaculation, etc., have a volitional skeletal muscle component and (indirectly affectable) autogenic components.
A lifetime of action and intent (as well as improper use of breathing, attentional, "energy," and "tantric" practices) can layer and "convolve" volitional components with autogenic responses.
Eventually, as part of meditative practice, some people will want to work directly with sexual arousal. It’s a little bit different than working with breathing. Breathing is always available and somewhat gets deconvolved well mixed in with everything else. Because sexual arousal, tumesence, detumesence, is more of a state that is (fuzzily) entered and exited, there’s maybe a possibility of being a bit more deliberate and planful.
(There will of course always be creative interplay/synergy between volitional [and/or effortless/spontaneous] skeletal muscle and autogenic skeletal and smooth muscle responses, and everything else. Engagement with practices/protocols can sort of unlayer and refactor so that it’s the "right," unlayered, spontaneous, dynamic, sensitive, responsive amount [which of course also whatever it happens to be at any particular time].)
So, for any sexual phenotype, male, female, etc., this can look like slow, patient, intermittent light touch, and sort of letting that reverberate. If you’re experienced with main practice p2, you may sort of quickly get sense of how to approach this. You might, say, observe how any of your diaphragm, chest, core, perineum, glutes, etc., involuntarily contract upon touch, and how, little by little, that can be disentangled, refactored, perhaps reduced or perhaps just changed in good ways. And this will alter one’s experience of intensity and pleasure.
(Of course, "practice" should "eat itself" over time until it’s no longer needed, until there’s "just sex," or anything.)
Just as with one’s breathing, and of course anything and everything, mind and body, because of occlusive/compensatory layering, some things won’t change until lots of other things change, many of those things maybe seemingly "far away from sexuality," or not.
As with meditation proper, it can be good to explore different postures—sitting, kneeling, standing, laying down, because the muscle engagement profile will be so different. You can of course explore things with and without sexual partners. Another thing to vary is exploring with and without orgasm or ejaculation. I think it’s generally fine to never withold orgasm, if abstaining doesn’t feel right.
(This whole section mostly refers equally to men and women. With respect to semen retention practices that involve strong muscle contractions, I’m personally not a big fan, in part because they can cause damage or at least irritate internal, tissue and sphincters, even when timed correctly, and in part because they can potential facilitate layering that can work against global detangling. If you’re interested in such practices, it might be good to wait to explore until you have a good "p2 sense" through lots of detangling and delayering, but also experimenting sooner rather than later can be good in general.)
Finally, working with sexual arousal is especially an opportunity to explore, expand, disentangle, and "find your way back" to gender and sexuality that could be occluded, layered, or tangled, e.g., bottom, top, submissive, dominant, masculine, feminine embodiment/energy/stances/etc. (((((((This includes all of gender, presentation, orientation, "cultural role/orientation," "career role/orientation," "intimate relationship/romantic role//orientation role/orientation," "social role/orientation," "sexual role/orientation," having kids or not, attachment and pairbonding styles, monogamy / nonmonogamy / etc. style, kinks / fetishes / paraphilias, not to discretize or reify any of these things and / but they can go as deep as one's entire life and affect all of it, all the way through. There's a whole section waiting to be written about this parenthetical. In brief, people can have layers and layers of cultural stuff, "shoulds," stuff from other people, shot through with "developmental hardware things" bubblng and filtering up, all the way from the bottom, as it were, as well as multiple "whole system twists" around all of that. And, as part of meditation or anything, one can untangle, disentangle, metabolize, integrate all of that down to something like the "bare metal" which will always have situated, contextual, nebulous expression albeit perhaps a clearer and clearer set of patterns shimmering and shining through. As part of that one sort of refactors the nebulous "story of their life" (which is or perhaps becomes largely implicit, drawn upon in new ways, as needed) as all of this can run through all of that [sic], including other things like health, childhood experiences, notable and traumatic events, energy metabolism, revelatory social or cultural or private experiences, all of it, all mixed together, to perhaps be cognitively and experientially and behaviorally clarified (not to reify that or hold that up as a goal as such). For nonnormativity, one might find a patch or patches or dappledness or splash pattern of "chimerism" or "mosaicism" (to borrow those words) of "neurological genderedness," for which perhaps different parts of the brain hormonally or developmentally did or didn't first-pass reach some potential counterfactal-non-existent-god's-eye-view genetic or chromosomal or hormonal or endocrinologic(sp?) expression, perhaps, perhaps, as then experienced from the inside. And the meditative work is sort of, over time, unwhirling and unwhorling all those layers and twists and resting in all of that, as all that, luminously all that, just as it is, as nebulous and contextual part and parcel harmonized with living and life and choices and relationships, and the possible unfair choices and opportunities and privileges and disprivileges and surprises and insights and sorrows and regrets and joys that that comes with.)))))))) For some people this will incidental, especially though not necessarily when things are pretty normative, and for some people this will be critical.
For all of this, allow for breathing, movement, vocalization, and so on.
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Many people, deep, deep down (or at multiple "levels") are seeking an elsewhere, an elsewhen. They’re trying to step outside the universe, break the universe, step through a portal, step to another side, into books, movies, daydreams, somewhere else, another planet, another dimension, somewhere safe, somewhere beyond death, somewhere with adventure, somewhere with love, just somewhere else.
Sometimes this is from parts of us not quite understanding, for example, as children, what books, tv, and movies actually mean, how the relate to the world around us; that material "gets in" (and that can be fine and is normal). And, sometimes, this comes just as a strategy for being safe or just getting away from the banal, terrifying, mortal, crushingly boring "tyranny of the here and now."
These "portals" and other "places" are sort of instantiated through "inner space phenomenology" and "motor output" phenomenology that can introduce contradiction and contention in problem-solving and muscle/motor planning. And/but, in any case, these portals and places are also sometimes deeply sacred and meaningful.
There’s sort of a "double escape" thing that can happen—we sort of escape "towards" these other portals and worlds and dimensions (say, for safety, freedom, meaning). And/but, then we also sort of force ourselves "towards" some conception of "reality" or the "the real world" (also for safety—food, shelter, money—and sometimes this is where love and friends are, too, and sometimes not). So this introduces a sort of (fractal) "hitches" or "twists" or "switchbacks" in this system, where if we don’t go back and "recover," honor, allow, integrate, receive, surrender to those beautiful, meaningful, "other places" and the ways to get to them, then our attempts to "function" in "the real world," are kind of held back and stymied, to the point of muscle tension and more. This hitches takes modal/problem-solving "slack" out of the system, pull it tight, make things harder or slower or impossible-seeming. Further, beauty and meaning, being locked away in "other places," can prevent us from finding wonder, meaning, love, competency, safety, strength, intimacy, wisdom, gratitude, grace, power, joy, community, adventure in the here and now.
It’s a bit of a roundabout journey: Sometimes the way to "here and now" involves going to the farthest reaches of fantasy. Further, we have confusions about here and now (and death and nothingness and a paperwork and jobs and all sorts of things) that make here and now excruciatingly boring, painful, and scary. So, any instructions that look like "be here now" can be pretty problematic for some people, some of the time. It’s confusing result with journey.
Further, don’t take my word or anyone’s that "here and now" is good, or anything. We have to find our own way, which, again, might look like five years (or forever!) writing (erotic robot vampire) fantasy and science fiction. "Here and now" is empty, nebulous. "Reality" is empty, nebulous. "Just this" is empty, nebulous. In any case, you still have to find your own way, "subjectively through your own self and world." Which can take a long time and sort of be sometimes lonely and intimidating. But, that means you will not, cannot, must not leave behind anything you value, no matter how childish, cringe, weird, disgusting, beautiful, meaningful, sacred.
Structure-preserving transformations, that seek "wrong/erroneous/misdirected efforting," over many thousands of hours, are one way for someone to "eventually make their way all the way down" to the parts of ourselves that, for very good, though sometimes confused, but not to them, reasons, are trying so, so hard to be somewhere else, for beauty, meaning*, safety, and connection.
And then, after that, sometimes things are simple, quiet, easy, rewarding, engaging, exciting in ways you couldn’t have imagined before. (And also sometimes ghastly, tragic, excruciating, and so on! But, in some sense, all of this is yours to navigate on your terms.) Invariants such as love and gratitude may coalesce and shine through more and more.
***
[See also section: normalcy, crackpotty-ness, wisdom, craziness, competency [stub/draft] ]
[See also section: the scale analogy]
*"meaning" will be the topic of a future section
*
Cryptic note: balance, no momentum, across vast to ### slightest twist
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[See also section: don’t be here now]
Most people have a strong push towards "normalcy," making things be/seem/feel/appear normal.
Most people are heavily built out of "sociality," the deep building blocks of their world are somehow interpersonal.
Sometimes people are permanently or malleably-but-deeply-entrenched different, even if takes them some time to realize it or realize its significance (gender, orientation, thinking-style, class, race, beauty, childhood trauma and confusion).
Usually such people have then further bitten the non-normal bullet in some way, out of reflective or unreflective choice or desperation, because something already wasn’t working.
Sometimes those choices are inside of institutions and societal forms and other times not. And sometimes those choices can seem pretty crazy or at least costly-go-nowhere: writing fanfiction, conlanging, abstract math deep dives, philosophy, epistemics, rationality, biology deep dives, listing protein folds.
Sometimes some of these choices are intuited as "powerful," and sometimes they are, in part, where there’s a powerful component and also a perverse, evil, faustian, or go-nowhere component. Sometimes this is "in the means," and sometimes this is "in the ends," like someone wants to learn something (manipulation of ideas, math, language) because, deep-down, on some fantasy level, they’re hoping to break out of the universe or step into another, better dimension.
But, who are we to say that they’re wrong/misguided! It’s easy to make a dismissive, snap-judgment from the outside. And sometimes we have to, when choosing friends, lovers, community, and business partners. But, for example, it’s sometimes said that "hard science fiction is a spec"—this is sometimes true-ish and sometimes not at all, and/but it can be hard to judge the difference from the outside. Sometimes it’s go-nowhere fantasy and sometimes it’s inspiration for the author or a reader to do something astonishing. Better might be to make room for all of it, as much as is possible. Little personal and societal bets everywhere.
In any case, competence and excellence can come out of video games, modding, photoshopping, fanfiction, obsessive biology deep dives, physics deep dives, and so on. When it doesn’t, something is probably stuck, somewhere—the fantasy piece doesn’t get resolved and keeps pulling on the "real" stuff. But that can be resolved in a way that doesn’t kill meaning, joy, and/or the whole reason the person was interested in the first place. (And they, in many senses, must be the initial and final arbiter of that.)
Sometimes normalcy breeds excellence. But sometimes normal stays normal. Sometimes weirdness breeds go-nowhere (or quiet personal or communal joy) and sometimes weirdness breeds world-facing competence and excellence in institutions, discoveries, invention, constructive humanitarian outrage (or just smart life choices long before the world catches up, or you get the world to catch up). In any case, we need weird and we need "normal," too. We need all of it. And "fantasy" doesn’t automatically preclude competence and excellence. (And sometimes world-facing competence and excellence is built of out "fantasy," e.g. sometimes allegory or satire or hard science fiction changes the whole world.)
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Very, very, very loosely speaking, you can sort of model a person as a collection of (a) potential actions, (b) means, and (c) ends (goals). The (b) means are sort of intermediate goals and, in the right contexts, (a) potential actions are realized as actual actions that are carried out. And, via actions, we advance through our ends towards our goals. And, the whole thing is sort of contextual, multithreaded, interruptible, and continuously being sculpted as we accomplish things, are surprised, daydream and think, and so on. (It’s important to not inappropriately reify any of this—-means/end chains are nebulous and interpenetrating, do we even have goals at all, are there even things, is thinking a natural kind, and so on. Yes and no. What is the evolving experience of this for you, in relation to what’s written here? and so on.).
Through meditation (and lots of other things), bottom up, felt and found from within, nebulously, the whole means/ends goal system (not separate from just the phenomenological field and the seeming of the world itself) sort of becomes more elegant and strategic, more omni-adaptible-antifragile, more multifinal and equifinal, more internally/intertemporally consistent, and so on. Experientially this is directly tied to increased wellbeing and other things.
In the course of this, what we can realize, over time, is that some means have sort of been mistaken for ends. These means still feel right/good/intrinsic (or desperately or boringly necessary). [This could loosely be considered a type of "layer" using terminology from elsewhere in the document.] But, one could call these means "false ends."
We could maybe call some of them "false" (or frozen in time, or beautiful but no longer needed), but, in any case, we want what we want, and we do what we do, until we don’t. It’s ok to want what you want! There will be reasons, even if those reasons are somewhat confused or frozen in time. And we don’t know if they’re "false" until we do, though we may have inklings. And, even if so, there’s going to be deep wisdom or at least self love and care, that needs to be honored and accounted for, for the system to fully move forward without getting wrapped around itself. So that means we sort of should be careful to not self-undermine, to wholeheartedly, heartfelt-ly allow ourselves to want what we want as long as we do; filamentary or full-bodied parts of many wants will be very stable, and others won’t, in the long run. In some cases, in any case, one has to fully accept a want before it’ll loosen and transform, anyway.
Sometimes these "false ends" are very sensible, in some sense, and whatever value we’ve created from them sort of gets rolled up into new, better plans and preferences. Other times, these "false ends" are more obviously destructive [or it's a combination], but there’s still something we deeply want (and that we are moving towards or trying to move towards, whether real-ish or illusory-ish) and/or fear (and that we are moving away from or trying to move away from, whether real-ish or illusory-ish) in there, at least for a while, or many years.
In any case, it can take a long time, thousands and thousands of hours of meditation, for sort of nebulous means/ends chain refactoring, and large-scale system refactoring, until means and ends behind the "false end" sort of become accessible and "surface" in a way that allows them to be spontaneously or reflectively sculpted, refactored, solved, dissolved, and so on.
If someone is not a meditator, the more usual thing is that a person may painfully resign on getting something (because it seems too hard to get, part of which might be because it has childhood-conceived or fantasy elements that may be very challenging or impossible to realize). Or, a person singlemindedly pursues getting the thing (fantastical pieces or not) and maybe alternates between exhiliration and defeat, if it’s hard but feels maybe possible. At times when it seems like they won’t get the thing, they might be depressed or devastated, and their goals might refactor just enough to have a new line of approach, but a deeper "false end" might still remain that will keep "generating" more proximal "false means/ends."
If a person is curious about discovering personal false ends or is just generally trying to solve/dissolve their problems in pursuit of love, safety, wealth, anything, then progress is usually some combination of solving/dissolving problems, evolution of preferences, acquiring capabilities, deep changes in "beliefs," and the seeming and appearing of the world. And, it’s also sort of failing over and over again, and at times feeling hopeless--in ways that ultimately stimulate discovery of false ends! And this is one of the ways things become more consistent over time, often nonmonotonically.
Meditation sort-of-allows-one-to-sort-of "fail faster" through "problem dissolution" as well as raising ["internal"] contradictions and inconsistencies and contention (loosely speaking), that prompt crises of meaning, desire, and so on. (It’s faster because there’s sort of that relatively efficient "inner" process that’s also happening, in addition to the "external process" of bumping into success, failure, novelties, and challenges in engagement with the world. People who aren’t meditators (and other things like therapy, journaling, etc.) sort of only mostly get the benefit of "external" learning, and meditators also get "internal" learning.)
And so those crises of meaning, desire, and so on make it more likely that a person (or their "system") will "need" (or choose to, or be prompted to), sometimes through deep, internal "settling and resettling and process of elimination" to surface those "false ends" (or just confused, frozen in time, beautiful but no longer needed, and so on).
Sometimes "false end" discovery has to happen safely in its own time in a very bottom-up ordered way. And, other times, it can be helpful to incline towards this, through systematically "letting go" of "efforting" in a way that allows for more "bandwidth" to move towards "false end" discovery (and this is its own many-layered puzzle over time). Perhaps usually, in any case, overall, all of this is a liminal process at the finest grain that happens in its own time, through correct application of global method.
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I'm using "surface areas" here as sort of "exposed sensory surface areas that are the entryway to sensory processing." These "surface areas" are high-dimensional, they sort of have ontologies that they can accept or not accept, like they only accept sensory experiences of particular "very" complex shapes, which are multimodal. Or like they can only see some "objects" in the landscape and not others.
From the first moments of consciousness, we are sculpting our surfaces areas, spontaneously, in accordance with homeostasis and eventually, say, valence and psychological factors. We learn to completely hide surface areas, too, to twist them off, have the recede, bury them. We do this to self-regulate, to avoid pain, to shut away nascent outrage at coercion and injustice and powerlessness, to behave a certain way with respect to the outside world, to stay safe, to get needed things. The reverse of this is sort of just an effortless, costless, non-disregulating, "just this-ness," "ah, this is the outside, and it's safe to experience the outside".
This is, in part, at root, the domain of "attachment," vulnerability, care, self-acceptance, other-acceptance, self-compassion, other-compassion. Downstream of this is fetishes, kink, paraphilias, sexual fantasies, the ways we can and can't make money, the life choices we are and aren't willing to make, our choices around fiction books, tv, videos, movies, our aesthetics, the stories we tell or write, our relationships with parents, siblings, extended family, friends, intimate encounters and partners, ways we socialize (parties versus gatherings versus classes versus structured relating), whether we make friends at work, and so on, the ways we spend our time or are compelled to spend our time, even if inside or outside view it feels self-defeating or not constructive ("if only I didn't mind working at a high-paying job!").
Some of the above is gender-related and hormonal (though with tremendous malleability and possibility for harmony on top of and with respect to that), and even beyond what's in that previous parenthetical, there's even more malleability on top of that. One could say this is the domain of the incidental, accidental, arbitrary, contingent (of upbringing, of early experience, of being parented and socialized, prenatally and postnatally, and beyond).
Of course it's arbitrary in one sense and "couldn't have been otherwise" (and, so, "necessary" or "determined" in another sense--so more contingent/accidental than arbitrary (in the ways that contingency can stll have embedded necessity to sort of glue it all together; like, radical arbitrariness would have have neither contingency nor necessity; and contingency is sort of necessarily mixed with some necessity, sort of). "Many degrees of freedom, many different ways it could have been, in some counterfactual sense," is better than "arbitrary." And it's incidental in one sense and "downstream, massively compoundingly affected the entire course of one's life" in another sense: compounding self-direction and self-regulation and self-fulfilling life prophecies.
There's a delicate thing, here--there's nothing wrong with a bunch of these things (sex stuff, creative expression stuff), in a vacuum! And some hobbies or compulsions turn into careers or scenes, which result in money, friendship, learning, care. And other times, dimensions of these things, distort or warp, or narrow possiblities. They are rigidities.
And so sometimes, for some things, sussing all this out, making sense of it, telling the story, gathering and unraveling contingency, non-arbitarily, structure-preservingly, into something better that honors, and, critically, makes use of the past, is not discontinuous with the past--it can't be--is "long range"--it might take literally eight-thousand hours of meditation to understand why you can't have a normal job, or why you HAVE to write a novel, or you like the weird sex thing that's messing up all your relationships or why you can't not get angry with intimate partners for dumb things. And, in the meantime, the weird sex thing, or whatever, is critical, or writing the novel is necessary, for self-expression, for anything, which itself is a lifeline, soul nourishing, and so on. Incline towards writing the novel; you'll either be doing skillful redo-to-undo, or you'll end up with a novel, or both. Indulging, ongoingly, right up to the bleeding edge of safety and opportunity cost, is as efficient or more efficient than meditation, when combined with a little bit or a lot of meditation.
Perhaps the most important thing is that all of this goes all the way back to deep, deep, deep, deep vulnerability and care. It's like the small child who hides their eyes, and slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, haltingly, warily, fearfully, finally, they slowly open their eyes and look, and it's ok. And for an adult, they have twenty to five hundred things like that, small child selves like that, and it can sometimes take six-thousand hours before even one "small child within" is able to truly, patiently, non-pushily, safely look (which is the only way it ultimately works).
We seek out stories, media, aesthetics, scenes, creative projects, friendships that (hopefully) allow us to untwist and untangle. We seek out contexts where we can "unlayer" where we can expose parts of ourselves to experience and to be be seen, to experimentally allow ourselves to be touched. This is critical work, sometimes deep-down desperate work, that sometimes looks like it's doing nothing useful in the world.
It's unfortunate that some traumas (and lack of traumas) make us "more effective" in the world, at making money or acquiring power, and some don't. We can't all be Lady Gaga, both compelled and successful, nor would we necessarily want to be. It sometimes comes with tremendous suffering and uncertainty. It's not fair, too, sometimes compoundingly so, when someone can make a lot of money and then go find their inner child.
((((It's not always accidental, either, in that sometimes society will socialize certain traumatic things--it's less about the details than the "normative coordination." If everyone has the right lock-and-key traumas then society can function in a certain way.))))
((((There's an even worse thing that can happen, too--when we can't look at things, can't expose ourself to things, like a child hiding their eyes or the proverbial ostrich with its head in the sand, this eventually leads to "high-level blindspots"--things about people or the world that we just can't see. It starts out as early unfortunate attachment stuff (prenatally) and sensory stuff, leading to unfortunate interpretations and self-strategies.) And blindspots can make people narrowly more effective, until things blow up, because those people aren't paying attention to some considerations, making what they do seemingly more efficient and effective, until that lack of attention to considerations causes things to blow up. Sometimes it can take an entire lifetime, though--life isn't fair. They might never realize they have blindspots. Things might never blow up for them, or they never realize their pattern of ongoing blow ups and damage control for the spreading harm that it is. Blindspots tend to downstream involve inhumanity (lack of compassion) because the person with the blindspot doesn't see suffering or hid that suffering in themselves and so can't see it in others or even fosters it because "that's the way it should be" (because it leads to less net suffering, overall, as far as they can tell). And/or they don't recognize other people's personhood or identity or all sorts of things (not to inappropriately reify those concepts except to the degree that there's a pattern there. It gets worse in that blindspots can lead to actually seeing some things more seemingly "accurately," or at least a persuasive confidence about those things, but these things will also be ultimately shot through with distortion, can never be quite right, quite humane, because of the mediate all-to-all nature of the mind. Distortion somewhere will have distorting effects elswhere. There's a double-down, self-reinforcing, self-righteous nature to all of this--otherwise it would have unraveled itself in the person, long ago, all things being equal. Some bad behavior is damage control and other-gaslighting, but also self-gaslighting, too, or just plain fragmentation.))))
Anyway, much of this document, overall, sort of focuses in generalities and quasi-universals (not to inappropriately reify "universals"), principles, patterns, rules, laws (gesturingly), the existential, the metaphysical, the phenomenological, the autonomic, the muscular, the sensory, the cognitive, the subtle, personhood, "worldhood", the conceptual.
We might then call this section "psychological" and "emotional" and "especially deeply personal."
There's a way in which I feel like this section could be expanded to a length the size of the entire rest of the document. It's sort being written about closer to the end of first draft writing than the beginning because it's so hard to write about in a general way, because the very "true essence" of it is utterly radically personal. But this is a beginning of that.
*
Actually, a better and more accurate way to put this is that, from the beginning, I wanted to direct people towards the psychological and the emotional, I wanted people to know that they could reach those deepest, darkest, most self-intimate and vulnerable places. But, I also had the inkling of the many thousands of hours thing, for some things, for some people, and the patience and (naturally building) skill that would sometimes be needed. And so it's maybe more accurate to say that everything else in the document is meant to guide a person to psychologically and emotional stuff naturally and cleanly falling out of practice. And some people realize this right away, and/or they do so but it's still sort of patchy and incomplete, and maybe other people realize it much later. But in any case, the goal is sort of systematic and universal engagement with "everything in the bodymind," radically intimately and personally, on its own terms, maximally skillfully, i.e. wholesomely, self-compassionately, patiently, brilliantly.
Oh yeah, and I had the worry that focusing on emotional/psychologically stuff too early or directly would recapitulate all the usual problems of meditation, self-suppression and self-forcing in accordance with existing preconceptions, which is maybe almost inevitable, for some people, without the idea of global-wayfinding and thus the risk of behavioral and emotional rigidity and really bad, weird stuff, forestalled and incomplete progress, stuck in some weird, partially better, partially worse place, indefinitely.
And, so, anyway, in a cautious and roundabout way, the psychological and emotional (and many other things, too, for sure), the wholehearted, the heartfelt, the radically vulnerable and self-intimate, the deepest, darkest, most desperate places, yet with the most excitement, the most love, the most care, the most fulfillment, the most humanity, the most self-authorship, in potential; and that was always the point.
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This is a section about:
geas, spells, curses, evil eye, demons, objects, entities, ghosts, echoes, spirits, critters, egregores, aliens, servitors, siddhis, powers, ESP, psi, mediumship, shamanism, energy work, energy healing, prana, qi, chi, ruach, qigong, taichi, bodywork, reiki, intuitive healing, intuitive diagnosis, clairvoyance (clairaudience, clairsentience, etc.), angels, higher beings, possession, lower beings, higher selves, magic, magick, occult, voodoo, spirit guides, imprints, possession, riders, compulsion, bewitchment, ensorcellment, psychic rape, brainwashing, mesmerizism, animal magnetism
Most of the above could qualify as "supernatural," and most of the above somehow relates to other people or other "entities." Also, the above list is a mix of traditions and even a mix of perhaps "good" and "bad," though some traditions think almost all of the above are bad, or at least distracting. With respect to "supernatural" phenomena, different traditions may emphasis different distinctions:
Now versus later or never:
Contemporary meditation teachers sometimes mention "the powers", "the siddhis" as illusory or real-but-orthogonal to spiritual practice, either something to be ignored or avoided, or something to come back to, later, maybe: "If you meet the buddha on the road, kill him."
Sentient versus non-sentient:
Various occult and religious traditions distinguish between possession (e.g. by entities, ghosts, demons) and other kinds of not-directly-sentient spiritual and interpersonal effects.
Self versus not-self:
Very loosely speaking, maybe, shamanism (I’m not sure if all of indigenous, pre-contemporary, and contemporary) makes a distinction between "parts of the self" (e.g. "soul fragments"??) versus "curses," "darts," etc.
Contemporary, and relatively secular, Internal Family Systems therapy purportedly distinguishes between "guides" and "critters."
There are broad patterns or rules in all of these traditions for distinguishing between what’s what, what’s self and not-self, as it were, what’s false and true, and what’s good and what’s bad, and when, out of all of these apparent things. And these traditions have procedures and methods for what to do under various conditions.
***
I didn’t say this in the Culture section; but, here, I’ll straightforwardly assert that relatively high fidelity, "things" can apparently be "in your mind" but "not you."
(Is this a "pragmatic" claim or a "literal" claim? Yes, no, maybe, both, neither, etc.)
These sorts of "things," "information," "patterns," "objects," "influences," including those with "agency/will/intelligence" can, not always, but not unusually, be as apparently high fidelity as your own thoughts, feelings, sensations. (Regarding "agency/will/intelligence," this still includes simple, confused, and perseverative things.) And, what’s "you" and "not you" can be easily confused for the other. Just like, sometimes, some "parts" of you might feel like "I" and some "parts" of you might feel like "me" or "past me", etc.,, also, sometimes, you may, too, find what ultimately comes to be understood as "not me." (And, of course, some people do sometimes say things like, "This isn’t me. That’s not me." More on this, below.)
(And, of course, not all of you, or necessarily any of you, feels "part like." It’s not really accurate to say people are "made of parts.")
***
So, here we go. There are a bunch of nuanced points to be made, here, so do please read this section carefully and maybe more than once.
It will be outrageous or disappointing to some people that a claim like "in you but not you" is being made in this document, whether I handwave about "pragmatic" or "literal" claims, or not. It might help a little bit to note that, to some indigenous cultures, say, a light touch of wind or dust sparkling in a shaft of sunlight, can be ascribed agency and be conceived of as a literal spirit, erroneously or not, in some ontology and metaphysics. Suffice it to say, here, mechanism is a bit outside the scope of this section (and document), but phenomenology, usefulness, and reflective and prereflective conceptualizations-as-such, though, are in scope.
So, this section is not about "how could this even be a thing, literally or apparently?" It’s not about neurophysiology, information theory, signal processing, bandwidth, inverse problems, biophysics, sociology, superstition, cognitive biases, nocebo effects, confirmation bias, autosuggestion, confabulation, demand effects, cultural conditioning, religious conditioning, etc.
With that in mind, I want to acknowedge that, if you at least provisionally accept that "there is an existant, relevant phenomenon, here" you may immediately and prereflectively have opinions and reflexive inclinations for what to do about all this, and you might immediately start doing those things, right now or upon encountering what I might be referring to. You might be tempted to go right to treating these phenomena as superstition, culture, or sociology, and you might prefer to preemptively treat such phenomena as, say, biology, neuroscience, or physics, or at least "somehow natural."
("Somehow-natural" seems good; I, personally, more or less, believe that everything is lawful, natural, etc., and sort of can’t be otherwise, almost be definition, or something. And, I’m a fan of contemporary (and especially future...) physics and neuroscience. Say, forces, fields and nothing else, maybe.)
Anyway, the point I want to make is that some of what you do will be local and net error correction, but some things will be local and net error propagation:
It’s very important to do some form of overall process error checking, like with the Meta Protocol or something in the same spirit.
So, my advice then would be to go in without preconceptions, as best you can, in part because meditation is eventually going to "turn everything inside out," anyway. And, if you take my advice, safely letting go of preconceptions, to flexibly engage with these sorts of phenomena, is a process. Yes, say, physics, sociology, everything. But, also, maybe, temporarily, set physics aside to pick it up again, later. In any case, you’re going to believe physics differently on the far side, even though all the equations will be the same. Also, likely, much of you,"doesn’t believe in physics," right now. Childhood parts of you, as it were, will believe in god, monsters under the bed, etc. Additionally, "things" inside of you can believe in gods and monsters and might not believe in you.
To be sure, sometimes, there’s a gray area between, say, "a self-introjected parent" versus, sometimes, alien-ness or foreignness that is much more clear cut. But, you may eventually find that many things are much, much more clear cut than you might initially expect. Most people have at least a little bit of this sort of "not me" phenomena and some people have a lot.
As per the usual pattern, there can be a period of increasing confusion and problematic over-sensitization (which can last a very long time and potentially be very crippling) followed by things getting properly situated, comprehended, interpreted, filtered, and/or understood. This applies to both what’s "already in you," as well as "new stuff that you might pick up in real time." One’s "real time filters" often get worse, before they get better, as per how the bodymind sometimes needs to make changes.
Things get to make sense in the end, but they might not make sense in the middle, and over and over again.
More generally, for all this stuff, It can be good to have the goals of wellbeing (and safety), intellectual internal consistency (phenomenology, science, sociology, compassion, kindness, love), and understanding, while being open to suffering, inconsistency/contradiction, and confusion.
***
One might ask, why engage with this sort of thing at all, on any timeline? The answer is that "not-you" things, whether neutral, malevolent, or benevolent, "real" or "illusory," all things being equal, will typically, eventually, sooner or later, become a bottleneck on meditative progress. There will typically be a way in which they are subtly "against the grain" of one’s (body)mind and will eventually "get in the way." There’s some sense in which they need to be "metabolized" or "integrated."
Given that claim, this is a good place to explore some concerns and objections:
(1a/3) The concern of buying into a "demon-haunted world"—(1b/3) where, e.g. only one method, one cult can save you.
The above is from the title of a Carl Sagan book: "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark"
So, should you, in some sense, surely not in the Sagan sense, buy into a demon-haunted world? On what metaphysical, physical, psychological, or even moral grounds? You’ve got just one body and one brain, right? Right??? When and how does it make sense to treat things as "parts," let alone "parts" that are "not you." In what sense??? Via what causal history??? Via what mechanism???
This is maybe where most meditation writers get cagey. I try to almost never, ever, ever do the cagey thing, but I’m going to do it, here, at least in this version. Part of the issue is that one needs to sort of go beneath, underneath "all" metaphysical, physical conceptions, anyway, in some sense, regardless of what’s "really" going on. You’ll need to come to (provisional) conclusions for yourself, via engagement with your own process.
But, but, but, I want to reiterate a few things from the Culture section. There’s the pattern of another person or group somehow causing you to experience something unexpected and then using that to somehow claim intellectual, moral, or "health/safety" authority over you. Some cults out there will wait a bit, wait for you to get sucked in, before telling you something like, "you are not just broken but also filled with bad things, and you have to get them out or disaster or forever non-acceptance!" And whatever they tell people will be correlated just enough with that person’s experience that that person will both believe the cult and also think that the cult is their only option to get "clean" or "pure" or worthy of happiness, safety, intimacy, etc. It often works, at least in the West(?), because mainstream culture mostly doesn’t talk about these sorts of apparent phenomena—so being somehow exposed to these sorts of phenomena is immediately isolating and yet these people seem to know all about it, and they want to help... Yikes.
That being said, this document is intended for people who want to "go all the way," towards something that has to be reconceived during the journey. But, you don’t have to defer happiness, safety, intimacy while you’re doing it. It’s always the best mix and ordering you can figure out, as you go. And, of course, just because you’re reading this doesn’t mean you have to "do the document." As written in a few places, this document is a telephone game, and I hope people will take it apart and use it (or parts of it) on their own terms, on their own timeline. You don’t have to give up your intellectual, moral, etc., autonomy. There are additional external resources below that talk about these sorts of phenomena (some intended as "good" examples and some as "problematic" examples.)
(2/3) The concern of self-repression, self-suppression, self-alienation
So, again, it’s worth calling out, that any conceptualization of "in you but not you" can potentially lead to "self-violence." Recall, "in you but not you" is just words that you are actively interpreting. It might not mean what you think it means. You might come to prefer very, very different language or a very different way of thinking about all this. You might decide that the frame, here, is deeply contingent and generally inappropriate. It’s possible that I’m very wrong about something.
Here, I can only refer one to the meta protocol and main practice p2, to careful discussions with other people, and maybe engagement with additional resources. Be careful, patient, gentle and discerning, generally, as best you can.
A general point is that, even if you’re not sure whether something is "good" or "bad" (or "mixed"), whether or not you’re sure whether it’s "you" or "not you," at any point you can explore what’s good about it. You get to keep anything that’s good, no matter where it came from or how it came to be under consideration.
(3/3) The concern/horror/distate of purportedly "needing to" "integrate"/"metabolize" "everything."
So, we’re pretty far down in this section, and we sort of haven’t talked about the potential "horror" or all this, yet. I didn’t want to coercively suggest that all of this can be very scary. That said, it can be, and sometimes it transiently is, but, immediately or nonmonotonically, it can become very manageable and matter-of-fact.
Again, some people will barely encounter any of this, or won’t for a very long time, and other people will encounter a bunch of it, up front, and/or it will even be pretty central for a while, maybe getting bad or worse, in a bunch of different ways, before it gets better.
In any case, the main point of this subsection is to unpack these ideas of "integrate" or "metabolize" a little bit more.
By "metabolize" or "integrate," this doesn’t mean that you, in some sense have to either "keep" a bad or unwanted thing or, again, that you have to "give up"/"dissolve" a good thing.
It’s more like, perhaps, you get to appreciate the goodness and badness of things, as you come to understand those things better and better—until "influence" becomes mere "information" (as Ken Wilber might put it). I really like his concision, here: "Influence becomes information." (I think he was talking about the personal psychological shadow and not "objects" but it still generally applies.)
So, if something is "metabolized," it might be that all that’s left is a (nonreactive, nontraumatic) memory and/or the knowledge and confidence for how to deal with such things in the future. It could be more than that, too—e.g. some "bad" thing might be "brave," and you might want to keep some aspect of that braveness around or, more likely, even just use the inert memory of it as inspiration for your own braveness on your own terms. Or you might use something "bad" as inspiration for how to be the opposite of that. As discussed above, you can keep anything you want to keep, in the way you want to keep it, or it can just be the knowledge that something happened, likely "truly having made peace with that," on, say, truly your terms.
***
So, by "metabolization" or "integration" hopefully it’s clear that I mean something very methodologically specific (through very flexible, in the concretes) and also very contingently personal.
So how does one do it? As with anything else, it’s "just" engagement with main practice p2, the other main practices, auxilliary practices, as needed for inspiration, the meta protocol, your own interpretation of "how to do all this" that changes and improves, over time. As said in a bunch of places, it sort of all becomes "just doing one thing," simplicity on the far side of complexity, whether you’re working with "me," "not me," or often both mixed together, etc. Hopefully, this further discussion will make things faster and easier, though.
Doing something like "metabolization" or "integration" might be a very different conceptual/experiential/sensory, multi-step puzzle per thing to be metabolized. (If it weren’t at least a little bit of a puzzle, it would have already happened a long time ago, "automatically," probably.)
(By the way, as per "puzzle-like nature," just "willing" "Integrate!" or "Metabolize!" might seem useful or even seemingly effective, in the short-term, but, likely, much will have to be re-done. Again, recall, error correction versus error propagation.)
Do maybe remember that terms like "object," "thing," or even "ghost," "angel," "demon," can be misleading, of course. For you, your (body)mind, you might seemingly find those sorts of things in yourself as such, and/or/also, it might be more like a pattern, a shimmer, sensory patterns, more wavelike than particle-like, or person-like, as it were. But, it might indeed feel person-like. There can also be plenty of "disembodied" feelings, sentiments, urges/iimpulses, reactiveness, "beliefs," etc., that you ultimately come to understand as "not me," before then making decisions about what to do next.
Person-like, feeling-like (etc.), and pattern-like phenomena will likely need different interaction patterns, in the puzzle-solving sense.
Sometimes things that feel like "not me" will turn out to be "was me all along," disowned/repressed/suppressed parts of self, sometimes, e.g., soft and/or loving ("good") and sometimes, e.g., scared and/or violent ("bad").
And so sometimes things that feel like "not me" will be "actually from the outside." And there can be many subtypes of each, all of which might be best treated in very different ways.
(And sometimes things that you thought were "me" turn out to be "not me" or often an ultimately separable mix of both "me" and "not me.")
Each of these cases may take a bit of a different approach, and there might be many types/kinds/cases/mixes/subtypes of each.
Regarding "me" versus "not me" (versus even an initially mixed situation), and regarding the process of determining which is which, and what to do before or after provisionally determining that, here are the briefest of examples/analogies: You probably wouldn’t treat a friend (happy or unhappy), or a seemingly suffering stranger, necessarily, in a same way, though their might be deep guiding principles or values at any particular time. Sometimes with a friend, you’d be very open to letting them guide, or sometimes you might be firm, or sometimes it would be very undifferentiated. Sometimes with a stranger you might be particularly polite. Other times you might be particularly cautious or you’d have firm boundaries for when and how to interact. Sometimes people mislead, misrepresent, outright lie, or are mistaken about their own "true nature." You might or might not, initially or finally, interact on their terms or their frame. Or you might! And, of course, all of this might be quite nonverbal and very experiential (or, again, very "low level" and not with reference to person-like-ness at all, etc.).
It might seem initially complicated, but, ultimately, you’ll sort of transcend any particular mechanistic or stereotyped framework or set of steps!
You don’t need to memorize patterns, rules, etc.! You will bottom-up acquire them, implicitly or explicitly, in any case. It can be helpful to write things down, sometimes, buckets, lists, reminders, messy or organized. It can be helpful to try strategies in this document and to articulate/write your own variations in your own words. In any case, there is a simplicity on the far side of complexity. Eventually, there’s a real sense that you’re "just doing one thing," whether something is person-like, pattern-like, you, not-you, good, bad, safe, unsafe, etc. Eventually you’ll go/experiment/learn/succeed largely by "feel," "beneath" language and even concept or category.
And, you’ll make mistakes! Sometimes you’ll find that something you’ve been treating as "you" or "not you" is actually the other case, or it’s an initially mixed case that’s more complicated than you thought. Many people, most people, will have inevitable error propagation mixed in with error correction. Try not to have this happen, but it will(!!!!), and that’s ok. It’s ok to make mistakes, part of the 5,000-10,000 hours, or whatever, accounts for thousands of hours worth of mistakes and backtracking!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [sic]
Given the ways in which the mind is "lossless," even "propagated" and "entrenched" errors can be undone, unentrenched. Any "mistake" can be undone, whether from five minutes ago or back from within your prenatal first seconds of consciousness. (Yes; that may need to be a whole other section, in a similar style to this section.) This is (very) long-range wayfinding, and there will be wrong turns, and it’s ok.
***
There are maybe a few fairly general patterns that can pop up pretty often:
As per usual, there’s the general "making it safe to look and then looking."
There maybe is also "making it safe for this to possibly have been me all along and then being able to check."
There is also "making it safe to provisionally accept/allow the seeming felt goodness/attractiveness in this bad/evil/horrifying/distasteful/disgusting thing and then basking in that savoring that, for the purpose of coming to ultimately impartial conclusions." As discussed in the culture section, even if lots of bad stuff came along with it, "knowingly or unknowingly" (to some part of you), there will probably be something tempting, attractive, seemingly good, in there, too, that will need to be evaluated. The bodymind is very conservative and doesn’t want to throw away possibly good things, no matter how problematic the circumstances of encountering those good things! Preferentially, the mind will "detoxify" rather than discard.
***
Nearing the conclusion, anyway, again, some people will barely encounter any of all of this, or won’t for a very long time, and other people will encounter a bunch of it, up front, and/or it will even be pretty central for a while, maybe getting bad or worse, in a bunch of different ways, before it gets better.
But, on the other side, things will be simpler, safer (for self and others), with better boundaries and better filters, but not in a way that interferes with connection, intimacy, closeness.
And, you might find that you want to frame/conceptualize all of this in a very different way than the one I’m using, here. And, my pedagogical or actual frame, position, etc., will change in various ways, too.
***
A final rant, in a bit of a different tone, from some previous scratch notes:
The hardcore meditator, as it were, uses everything, ontologically/metaphysically commits to nothing, and steadily cuts straight to the heart of everything. Open mind—so as not to get stuck; meta protocols—so as to be able to navigate (or to be able to choose when not to navigate) in the midst of anything and everything. One could spend a lifetime researching or practicing occult things, or, in my opinion, spend "only"/only 4000-15,000 hours meditating (which is also an epistemological practice) thereby retrospectively and counterfactually obviating the benefits of any such occult practice and study, in my current opinion. I mean, it’s ok to poke around a bit, of course, as per interest, but it’s kind of bottomless unless one finds a way to credibly get the whole shape of it, likely from the outside (e.g. by meditating, at the very least).
As per the Culture section of the document, most of time, maybe almost all of the time, 99% of the time, it may be good to avoid spending really any time at all with anyone who claims special, deep, or correct knowledge about any of spiritual/occult/etc things, especially if divorced from straightforward, no-frills transformative practice.
(For that 1% of friends, peers, collaborators, teachers, mentors, it might be very useful or helpful to carefully engage, though. Recall, also, the Many Protocol, which is intended to harmonize with, complement and/or replace this entire space. Some percentage of meditators will go on to become nondogmatic healers, bodyworkers, shamans, etc. It might be good to do no more than dabble in those things until one is many thousands of hours into their meditation practice (4000 hours, 5000 hours, 10,000 hours, even). This whole space should maybe boil down into something elegant, simple, and error-checked, for you, and relatively personally and interpersonally safe, first.)
(And don’t become a "dark wizard." This will be tonally abrupt and harsh, using language that’s unlike any other in the document, but one could replace "dark wizard" with "predator" or "mind rapist." That noted, it’s ok to have coercive intimacy, sex, power fantasies! But also be mindful that, sometimes in very literal ways, such fantasies don’t live only in your head, and it’s important to keep that in mind, long-run. There’s, in some sense, nothing wrong with non-fantasy, actual "power," too, decontextualized. It’s neutral, in some sense. But, as far as I can tell, the only power that works in the long-run is power that is systematically contrite/repentant, systematically nonviolent, and that which safely, systematically empowers others, among other things.)
And, do maybe read the Culture section for more thoughts on ascribing blame, intention, intent, etc., if you experience these sorts of things, in or via your immediate or past environments. It’s tricky stuff, and sometimes people are "doing things" well outside of their awareness or reflective intent. And sometimes you’re the only one affected, or you’re the catalyst, or it was "only in your own head all along," or everyone bears some "responsbility"/responsibility, or a particular thing is good for some people and bad for others. And, other times, someone really especially did some sort of especially focused thing (occult, meditative), in the past, reflecitvely or not, which contributed to them doing something predatorial or coercive now (and they might be, at least initially, belligerently defensive, or horrified, or not). And you might find that that (partly) coercive person is actually you, or both of you, or some third party.
***
Further reading:
[Note that some of these I particularly don’t endorse or have very mixed feelings about. And some are provided purely for context.]
[Thank you to everyone who suggested some of these resources to me.]
Katz, Richard. Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung. harvard university Press, 1982.
Stephan, V. Singing to the plants: A guide to mestizo shamanism in the upper Amazon. UNM Press, 2010.
Earley, Jay. Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Inner Wholeness Using Ifs, a New, Cutting-Edge Therapy. Hillcrest Publishing Group, 2009.
Allione, Tsultrim. Feeding your demons: Ancient wisdom for resolving inner conflict. Little, Brown Spark, 2008.
Shamanic Depossession: A Compassionate Healing Practice 1st Edition. Mr. Peter
Fortune, Dion. Psychic self-defense. Weiser Books, 1967.
Mariani, Mike. American Exorcism. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/catholic-exorcisms-on-the-rise/573943/ Last accessed: 2020-05-08
Malaea, Marika. Catholic Church Attendance in Decline While Exorcisms and Exorcism Training is on the Rise. https://www.newsweek.com/catholic-church-attendance-decline-while-exorcisms-exorcism-training-rise-1469334 Last accessed: 2020-05-08
https://news.vcu.edu/article/The_centuriesold_practice_of_exorcism_is_on_the_rise_Why_now Last accessed: 2020-05-08
http://betsybergstrom.com/about/depossession.php ; https://www.google.com/search?q=compassionate+depossession ; https://www.google.com/search?q=betsy+bergstrom+compassionate+depossession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoshamanism
Scott, Derek. https://www.derekscott.co/2012/06/the-integration-of-spiritual-experiences/ Last accessed: 2020-05-08
"Why I No Longer Practice IFS Therapy" https://www.nadinemenezes.com/ifs-therapy Last accessed: 2020-05-08
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_cognition
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
[please read the section, "psychic" and "supernatural" stuff: what/how/how-not, before this section]
***
[The first draft of this, below, came out extremely "stilted!" The first few sentences and paragraphs are especially bad, particularly rough going, and it gets at least a little bit better, as you continue on.]
***
One could imagine a person having a "deepest" or "bare metal" or "enacted" understanding of things like individuation, individuality, identity, personhood, will, agency, autonomy, etc..
These (a) "deep understandings" of individuation, etc. might or might not well-correspond to, sort of, (b) intellectual concepts of individuation, etc.. So, we might talk about individuation, etc. while not "inappropriately reifying/fixatinging/relying" on any particular intellectual (or lived/felt) understandings of individuation, etc..
Additionally, we might talk about a "confusion gradient," about these sorts of things, from worse to better, again while also not inappropriately reifying/fixatinging/relying on something like that.
Less abstractly, one might imagine that, deep down, maybe in a few different sorts of ways, a person might not be able to tell "who’s who," or "who’s doing what," or even that there are multiple people instead of just a seeming "undifferentiated one thing." One might be able to imagine this or also, now (or eventually, in meditation) find their own "actually instantiated, personally resonant" things like this. Almost everyone has a scattered little bit of things like this, and some people have a lot.
(About all this stuff, one might ask, well, if there’s confused, then what might relatively un-confused look like? And, what about spiritual teachings around perhaps-related things like seamlessness, undifferentiatedness, interconnectedness, no-self, etc.? One might note that "apparently very enlightened" people still have "coherently differentiated" behavior, at least in some sense—that is, they can keep track of who knows what, when a new person enters a multi-person conversation; they can remember and use people’s names; open a checking account; drive a car, whatever. So one might imagine potentially ever-more-appropriate, all things being equal, lived synthesis of interconnectedness and differentiation, perhaps at a profoundly deep level.)
Continuing on, recalling from previous sections, that people can and do, for better and worse, end up with "patternness" of other people "in" them, and, allowing that confusions around identity, individuation, personhood, etc., can be "patterns" in this sense, confusions around individuation and identity tends be more "contagious" than other "kinds" of "patterns," all things being equal. That is, people can catch identity-and-individuation confusions, from each other, sometimes, and this is a bit more likely than catching other sorts of things.
One might see how this might be the case. Almost everyone has a little bit of identity-and-individuation confusion. And to any degree that "the medium is the message," and to any degree that identity-and-individuation confusion in one person might unilaterally or reciprocally exacerbate identity or individuation confusion in another person (even if "a little different," somehow), then one might see how identity-and-individuation confusion, in one or two (or more) people, might unilaterally or reciprocally be contagious or aggregative. (This is not a great or clear argument, but I’m going ot keep going.)
In fact, one might further hypothesize that all (or most, or lots of) cases of "stuff transfer," between people, might depend on or be enabled by, at root, identity-and-individuation confusions of one or both people. (And, as mentioned in other places, all of this can be accidental, deliberate, reflective, unreflective, endorsed, disendorsed, quasi-unilateral, mutual, etc.)
Further, one might imagine cascades of worsening identity-and-individuation confusions as well as "more object level" content, "beliefs," "goals," "plans," "cosmology," etc., kind of layered-ly building on each other. And, even if very fractionally, the more "relatively similar" two (or more) people became, the easier it would be for object- and meta-level confusions to ramify, and things could potentially get worse and worse, until some sort of equilibrium, if ever. (And, again, we don’t want to inappropriately reify "things" like beliefs, goals, plans, etc.)
An important principle in the above is that if one person has, some "belief" A, and another person has very similar "belief" A-prime, those "beliefs" are more likely to get mixed together ["A-double-prime"] in one or both people, perhaps in different ways, because it won’t be perfectly symmetric. And this can happen for lots and lots of "beliefs," etc., and, as above, this can facilitate even more mixture, etc.
(Sidebar: This is even more problematic in the case when "A" is "disavowed" or "ego dystonic" and [actively] layered-over. For example. if someone had a religious upbringing, and they, say, came to in some sense believe/"believe," say wholeheartedly or just a part of them, that sinners go to literal hell or that premarital sex will certainly, irrevocably destroy one's life. And say at age ten, or in high school, or in college that person didn't "dissolve" that belief, it wasn't fully examined, but they came to actively reject it, to actively push it away or push it down: "Of course I don't believe that. Ridiculous!" This is a very normal thing to happen. But if such a rejected belief is an "A" to someone else's "A-prime", they will still potentially mix--even if it's pushed down for the "person" it's often still "exposed to the air" in "the system" and/or the A-prime person will sort of [potentially completely innocently and unknowingly] "dig up" the other person's A, even if the A person isn't aware that this is happening. But post-mixing, the A-double-prime might or might not become salient to them and they might find it even more aversive than A and might redouble their efforts of pushing it all away. And so this can further "ongoingly actively cement" the A-double-prime as a mix, twist, constraint in the system that the whole system might tangle around. And this can happen for multiple A/A-double-primes. And a way out of this is something like, over time, slowing down, bleeding off the pushing away, finding/gathering one's way back to the mixing, finding inverses, complements, better "beliefs" than A-double-prime, A-prime, and A, untangling which belonged to whom [not necessarily needing to identify exactly where/whom A-prime came from], gently acknowledging that A-double-prime, A-prime, and finally A were a part of you, for a time, and all that was good and bad about that, including some far-flung implications about self and world and people, claiming all the threads of all of the A-'s that are good, letting everything else radically, concretely, particularly, and personally metabolize through complementation, inverse operations, acceptance, comparing with better things, realizing something deeper that dissolves the previous, all of these patiently, gently, more and more self-caring-ly, self-aligned-ly over time, and so on.)
And, ultimately, in a bad case, a person might end up having aggregated large "swaths" of "pattern" very far from their original beliefs or even very contradictory to lots of their beliefs, sometimes leading to muscle tension, emotional and behavioral disregulation, demotivation, "goal fragmentation," etc. (being careful, here, not to inapproriately reify things like "goal fragmentation," etc.).
That said(!), one might imagine this mixing to sometimes be relatively harmless or even a useful mechanism of group cohesion. (I can imagine it being contingently harmless and useful, sometimes.) But, at least some of the time, as per an earlier section, because this process is sort of "messy," and "confusion-based" (as claimed, here), any mixing will, over time, potentially create tangles and technical debt, as it were, for someone. So, while it might short-run be unnoticeable or positive, over time it can tend to gum up, jam up, limit positive and self-valued individual and group change, causing personal transformative arrest and group transformative arrest. Further, of course, of course, of course, additionally, individuals might prospectively, retrospectively, and god’s-eye-view, as it were, not want this mixing to occur(!!!), for any personal reason at all, including things like tangling or gumming up.
***
This can all be very tricky to talk about, for several reasons. (Note, when I say "talk about," here, I mean "talk about," in general, not about any particular concrete incident or ongoingly extended situation. Though, both sorts of discussions can be good. Importantly, any particular person might not want to talk about this sort of thing with any other particular person, for any reason at all, including the avoidance of any (additional) possible subtle (or not at all subtle) effects between those two people.)
(1) First, all this can be scary and weird. Sometimes people merely marvel at things in this neighborhood, "I became so close to my class/cohort/group, that I would have committed crimes with them or jumped off a bridge with them." And other times, it’s deeply upsetting and disregulating in a way that lingers—a person might feel diminished, disregulated, and violated, at a deep level (to say the least). So, especially when it’s "really obvious," but, also, really "alien," it can be tempting to deny that anything happened or to minimize its impact, and so forth. (It might be very healthy and productive to temporarily deny and minimize, etc., for some people some of the time. People have different coping and healing strategies.)
(2) Second, regarding belief A mixing with belief A-prime to yield belief A-double-prime, as mentioned above: There’s sometimes an effect of something like, "I’ve always believed "A[-double-prime]". (To imagine a concrete example, one person might want to talk about something concrete, in a constructive manner, or a coercive manner, or anything, and the other person might not want to talk, for any reason, well-motivated or poorly-motivated, reflectively or unreflectively, and they might use, the assertion, "I’ve always believed ‘A’" as support. And, they could always be quite right, and the other person could be reflectively or unreflectively gaslighting them, and so on. Hard. Tricky.)
(3) Third, people’s individuation and identity confusions can be "profoundly deep," indeed, they can go back to very early childhood, or earlier, and they can be cemented/reified/entrenched "ideologically."
"Ideological," here, means "beliefs plus plans" (as always, very loosely speaking) about how things should be, how things should go, how things should happen, locally, globally, cosmologically, etc. "And if they don’t or didn’t go that way, well, it’s nearly unthinkable, barely considerable, that it could go otherwise, even obviously impossible that it could go otherwise; it would be disastrous[, evil, universe-rending, something.]"
Ideological components [explicit, unstated, never stated, reflective, or fish-in-water] could be in regard to interpersonal care, intimacy, group dynamics, sexuality, consent, coercion, child care, elder care, autonomy, agency, etc.
People might explicitly defend their "ideological positions" by way of all sorts of things like "civilizational decline," atomization, ennui, conservatism, traditionalism, naturalness, empathy, "the current state or trajectory of the world," science, evolution, the march of progress, morality.
And those are all very good things to think/feel about, to explore, to defend, to act from, and so on. But, there’s a way such positions can "get stuck" and that stickiness can be traced back all the way to deep confusions about self, other, etc.
People can profoundly disagree, in very fine-grain ways, concrete ways, abstract ways, aesthetic ways about what’s good, ok, neutral, bad, etc. For some people, something X might seem downright critically good. For other people, that something X might seem downright demonic, locally or long-run catastrophic.
And, because such things can be so emotionally charged, as it were, people might strongly bristle at the intimation that their deeply held beliefs, cares, concerns, or some very narrow behavior, might have root in some "confusion," let alone a "childhood confusion" that is supposedly "maybe not immediately reflectively accessible[, even after thousands of hours of meditation, or whatever.]"
X is bad, X is good, X doesn’t exist and X-prime does, X isn’t a monolith, it’s actually A, B, C, D... And each those is bad, or good, or...
(And people can wrong, and very wrong, for a very long time. A long-term meditator might have stuff flip from good to bad or bad to good or one way and back again, after thousands and thousands of hours of meditation, and then still yet more thousands of hours of meditation. One might expect greater and greater convergence between people over time [depending on one’s current beliefs about objective truth, starting conditions, nature, nurture, relative truth, bottom up discovery, subjective and objective morality, path dependence, backtracking, reparability, losslessness, "one reality," and so on!]. And/but, this stuff is hard and the path is long! I personally think interpersonal convergence can be self-aligned, bottom-up, inexorable and strong, all things being equal.)
And, so, all this "emotional charge" can make it hard to talk about things like, say, "good-faith meta-cohesion" (or live-and-let-live!), let alone an exploration of ideas like individuation and identity confusion, let alone exploring those confusions over a long period of time, let alone doing so if/while problematic interpersonal effects are still happening, making it hard to interact in e.g. real time at all.
***
In conclusion, one could be thought of as sometimes having a scattering of "deep" understandings, and confusions, around individuation, individuality, identity, personhood, will, agency, and autonomy. These understandings and confusions ramify in ways that can sometimes have strong effects on interpersonal and group interactions, to say the least. And, over time, an individual can resolve more and more of these confusions, using tools like meditation, making it easier and safer to interact choicefully and flexibly and safely with other individuals and groups, or to avoid such interactions. A long-run meditator will have a deep, functional, enacted, integrated understanding of individuality and interconnectedness, all things being equal, though asymptotically and sometimes with abrupt reversals, along various dimensions, late in the game. And/but, over time, one might expect more and more fruitful, safe, constructive convergence around "goodness, safety, beliefs, plans, goals, agency, autonomy" between meditators, holding ideas about all such things, and all this, lightly.
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
[please read the section, "psychic" and "supernatural" stuff: what/how/how-not, before this section]
[cw: discusses abortion, miscarriage, and prenatal trauma]
[I’m indebted to a few collaborators for initial salience that a bunch of this was even a thing, and more.]
It’s maybe less controversial that, if one eventually encounters pretty much everything, including very early life stuff, that one will eventually come across things like surgeries under general anesthesia and traumatic medical or ritual events like circumcision (depending on decade born, where in the world, and parental culture.)
As a side note, it seems like people, the bodymind, actually is/are unconscious while under general anesthesia—there’s not some ultimately recoverable, intensely painful memory, or maybe even any sense of pain. It does seem like there’s maybe the faintest, diffuse shadow of pain and/or some mild "blurring" around the edges of the system, as it were. But this seems to be straightforward to clean up in meditation and doesn’t seem to heavily bottleneck people, as far as I can tell. It might be different for different people.
Anyway, regarding "everything," one might note that these are things that can happen preverbally and in the seeming "amnesia period" of early life events. So, one point, here, is that people do, in some relatively typically, fairly discretely sense, sometimes, have recoverable early life and preverbal memories. And these, quickly or eventually, are indeed recovered, re-experienced, and re-interpreted, etc., in meditation.
Such "particularly discrete" memories can have a strange, displaced, spatiotemporally odd, perspectivally odd, sensorily odd flavor/sense/character, as one might expect! (And, sometimes, they’re shockingly warm, intimate, etc., e.g. remembering being breastfed as a neonate.) The particularly vivid ones maybe tend to be fragmented and few. Mostly, this content might be subtle, "diffused," barely perceived undulation.
Now, more controversially, these preverbal memories extend back not just to early, postnatal experiences, but all the way back to prenatally, to one’s time in the uterus/womb, and even to the very first moments of consciousness. (It seems, as soon as the brain starts firing, and maybe even before, the memory system is doing its thing, and its fully contiguous out to adult experience. Thinking about how one might "design" learning and memory, maybe this is very elegant or hard-to-vary, evolutionarily speaking, and it’d be difficult to design some kinds of learning agents any other way.)
There’s a particular character to prenatal memories, maybe a few particular sub-feels, depending on how far along the nervous system and sensory system are, in development.
These feels and memories can eventually be raised, felt, experienced as a (relatively non-jarring) "flashback," re-experienced as such in meditation. And, one can realize that, for most people, the "prenatal feel of everything" tends to actually be a distantly felt but pervasive backdrop of one’s adult experience! So, something about the quasi-timeless, quasi-all-pervadingness of prenatal experiences lets such experiences maybe particularly persist and coexist with/in/as adult experience. And, one’s personal "prenatal feel" can contribute signifcantly to one’s "cosmology." (One eventually explores all this in meditation; it eventually just comes up, when it’s safe, a dialogue between different ages, "realities," etc. and there is eventual manifoldly endorsed harmonization, integration, etc.)
During the prenatal period is when we work out our first takes on individuality, self versus other, "personhood" (in some very rudimentary sense), agency, inside/outside/boundary/containment. Usually our first passes on these things will be quite "confused" in various ways, and those confusions can have downstream ramifications for sensemaking through our entire lives. Also, when things happen too intensely, too fast, too painfully, etc., we can paper over our old versions of early conceptualization and start working off of entirely new takes. This can put twists in the system with further, twisty, downstream effects. (All of this is eventually untangled in long-term meditation.)
Now, of course, prenatally, there is the mother—hormones, voice, body movements, heartbeat, and more. It seems many fetuses are aware of the mother and possibly conceptually/experientially undifferentiated with the mother. The mother, being partially separate, contributes both to successful differentiation, individuation, and conceptions of self versus other (and more), while also being a source of confusion about these things (and more).
***
Sort of continuing to take things in order of more and more intense and controversial, recall in a previous section about me/not-me confusions, how "mind stuff" from other people can be "in you," with highly counterintuitive (and controversial, and seemingly even impossible or confabulatory) fidelity, bandwidth, degree, amount, etc. This happens, too, between mother and child. And, surely, much of this is healthy and possibly even essential to development. (Just like postnatal babies need touch and attention, one wonders what counterfactual children of the future would be like, if grown in artificial wombs, meters or miles away from a parent, however humane and liberating that might be along lots of dimensions.)
Sometimes, aspects of the mother/fetus interaction can be problematic, in such example cases as the mother not wanting to be pregnant, not wanting the child to exist, not wanting the child to think or move, mistaking control for love, and so on. Those are sort of "easily imaginable, ‘just so’ story, cliches," easy to back-extrapolate and confabulate, say, in therapy. But, there seem to be consistent reports from meditators and other mind explorers that such effects/influences/memories are real and downstream effectual for the adult mind. There is a huge range of possible effects, beyond what one might guess—the mother’s conceptual confusions about self and other can affect a child, and so on. A child/adult might have a feel/anticipation/belief that they shouldn’t exist or that they’re bad, which can ultimately be traced all the way to the womb.
Assuming everyone is affected prenatally by their mother (and father, siblings, and more, by the way), it’s currently hard to tease out how often "bad" things happen, and to what degree. There might be selection bias (and, sometimes, confirmation bias and demand effects) amongst meditators. That is, someone who had particularly problematic prenatal experiences might be more likely to become a meditator. So, particularly problematic prenatal experiences might not be very common. I myself don’t have enough data, yet, about this.
In any case, it’s worth noting that the interaction between mother and fetus will be complex. A baby might only sort of interpret the most salient themes, but, even if, say, a mother is experiencing fear and disgust, she might well also simultaneously be experiencing love and care. So, even if there’s problematic regard, there could often be lots and lots of good things going on, too.
Further, fetuses, babies, people, everyone makes mistakes! Even if a mother is wholeheartedly loving (which would be superhuman!), a baby could still misinterpret something as too much attention, intensity, control, something. The baby just might be particularly sensitive or might have an unfortunate misinterpretation of something.
So, I’ll just note that this stuff is hard, life is hard, this stuff is subtle and barely talked about, and everyone’s doing their best, lots of good stuff happens, and sometimes bad stuff happens, too. And, all things being equal, all the bad stuff is retroactively correctable, in principle, with meditation and other approaches. To borrow an old saying, it’s never too late [for a meditator] to have a good childhood (and prenatal experience), as it were.
***
Ok, so there’s one more thing to mention, in this section, and that is miscarriages, abortions, and older siblings.
It seems to be the case that prior fetuses leave a "pattern," as it were, "in" the mother, that are conceptually/spatiotemporally/experientially localized to the womb. And, this pattern is durable/stable/lasting and can "picked up" and (mis)interpreted by subsequent fetuses.
Leading to the above, I (and other collaborators, who first made this phenomenon salient to me) have encountered multiple, first-hand reports of people, while in the womb, [proto-]fearing that they would have the same fate as a miscarried or aborted fetus, or, say, believing, confusedly, that they were an aborted fetus (and so were a sort of living dead zombie person), and so on.
My dataset is currently small, so I don’t know how many people who’ve come across such things, in meditation, have then verified them with their mother or through records. (I’m not saying that is or isn’t a good idea!) It’s partially confounded by how normal and common miscarriages are and how they sometimes go undetected.
(Interestingly, everyone so far in my dataset was firstborn, so I don’t know what it’s like to encounter prior patterns/traces of one’s older siblings as a fetus.)
***
This has been a difficult section to first-pass draft, because it could come off as mom-blame-y as well as sort of fatalistic, regarding far-reaching, possible harms in the distant past that we had no control over. And then there’s how unbelievable some of this stuff is, if one hasn’t experienced some aspect of it, firsthand. And, finally, there’s even the political/ideological and moral elements, regarding prenatal experiences and downstream effects.
(Regarding "proof" of all of this, beyond meditation, some mothers will be like "of course," as well as shamans, bodyworkers, healers, etc.)
Anyway, this section has focused sort of on the "bad/traumatic cases" because that’s what can tend to bottleneck and then saliently come up in meditation.
But, between mother and child (and father and other siblings and family members, both prenatally and postnatally), we also learn about love, compassion, warmth, safety, and much more.
Resources permitting, a mother, as a skilled meditator, might perhaps(???) work through remaining, prior womb patterns before conceiving another child. This could, of course, be outrageously stringent and costly. (And there might even be good reasons for not doing this that aren’t yet well understood. As always: meta protocol, etc.)
And, but, so, in any case, in principle, resources permitting, as I mentioned a bit above, minds are "lossless" in a way that allows for sort of "clean healing", clean reinterpretation, clean re-understanding from any badness, trauma, misinterpretation, etc., all the way back to the first moments of consciousness. So, whatever experiences someone has prenatally, this is sort of all accounted for in the "10,000 hour" estimate of how long-ish it takes for a hardcore meditator to sort of asymptote. All of this section is accounted in that time estimate. All of this comes up naturally and is handleable, if it does. And having skimmed this section, hopefully it’ll all go fractionally more smoothly.
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See also:
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[please read the section, "psychic" and "supernatural" stuff: what/how/how-not, before this section]
In terms of accumulating "patterns," and so on, from other people, it’s sometimes helpful to be on the lookout for things from various places. Sometimes things can be "directly" from another person; sometimes things can be "indirectly" from another person; and sometimes things are more "averaged," across people or timespans.
In the course of meditation, one might seemingly find things from the people and places below. It’s of course possible to imagine, confabulate, and to be wrong, even while one gains more confidence over time about what’s what. It’s good to hold it all provisionally. Sometimes things can be imagined or confabulated by other people, which are misrepresented as being from another person, place, or time than their actual provenance. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter whether it’s "actually" X (or how X got there), and sometimes it does! Sometimes one might want to explore or confirm or cross-correlate ("indirect") things with respect to family and history, and sometimes that won’t be constructive or it won’t be possible. Over time, one gains more facility with both provisionality and constructiveness, with respect to all this kind of stuff.
"Things" that you "find," which could be feelings, patterns, sentiments, impulses... can be abuse-related, trauma-related, violent, sexual, coercive, etc. One may well encounter positive things, too. Positive things tend to be less apparent because they’ve become more integrated, metabolized. Negative things tend to be more "coaleseced," "object-like," "thing-like," which is can make it seem like there’s more negative than positive, generally, even when that’s not the case.
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vibe/vibes (select definitions)
[...]
a sense or feeling about a person, place or thing
a distinctive emotional atmosphere; sensed intuitively.
feelings, atmosphere (from vibrations)
to agree with, like, or get along with
[... ] --https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Vibe (see many more)
vibing (select definitions)
"Vibing in this form is a way of expressing energy without being hyper or over exaggerating and the person typically just lets out all the energy in a calm manner"
"Radiating a distinct emotional aura that others can detect."
--https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=vibing (see many more)
Did/does my path have heart?
--Jack Kornfield, maybe
Did/does my path have vibe?
--someone
Did I love well?
--Jack Kornfield, maybe
Did I vibe well?
--someone
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Loosely and vaguely speaking, you’re not "done," (in the, also very loosely speaking, "necessary but not sufficient sense") until you, the system, something, at some level, somehow, explicitly or implicitly, reflectively or unreflectively, can tell the difference between:
and, also, the ways these are all both different/distinct and the ways in which these are all similar or the same, nondual, nonnonnondual, etc.
Importantly, "listening/talking" doesn't have quite the right connotations: So, also, again loosely and vaguely speaking, you’re not "done," (in the, also again very loosely speaking, "necessary but not sufficient sense") until you, the system, something, at some level, somehow, explicitly or implicitly, reflectively or unreflectively, can tell the difference between:
This borrows an analogy from software engineering, where (potentially malicious, externally supplied) data can be confused for safe, native code and then accidentally run as code (worst case without sandboxing or at least further downstream processing). If the data (strings) are escaped properly, nontrivially performed by the receiving software, then generally this can't happen. (Oh, another important distinction then is "sandboxing" versus "processing." Only the latter is really a viable strategy in the limit; it's ultimately more efficient and effective and safe,long-run.) To be clear, "information" is also "influence," in some sense, and that's good, cf. sensitivity/responsivity to self, others, and world! But these chosen terms are still pointing to an important distinction.
If not already, or if temporarily not, all of this can be more costless, effortless, automatic, mostly background, safe, seamless, not other than just being human, just being a person-in-relation, over time.
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https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1405870618751406081
"If one does IFS and parts work correctly then one be becomes less part-ful over time—parts integrate[, merge], fuzz, and blur, slip through your fingers, less each time you come back. When truly fully heard they are you and you are them and that more integrated self simply feels and acts~"
https://twitter.com/chaosprime/status/1150259062719811584
"a demon (or tulpa) is a semi-autonomous cognitive process running on one compute substrate and a god (or egregore) is a semi-autonomous cognitive process distributed across multiple compute substrates"
Addendum on parts: There's also the issue where "parts work" can be too "heavyweight," too "over-reifying," "karma generating, on net," depending on how it's done. A method, to be fully generally, needs to sort of be able to eat itself, at the finest grain, without remainder. And, arguably, parts work can't do that, depending on how it's defined. But, many people find it an extremely valuable entry point, at the very least, and it's also very powerful in a dyad, with a skilled facilitator. As per above, the details matter, how a part is conceived or experienced, how loosely the idea of a part is held, and how it appears, feels, experiences, and a many other things. Part language is used in the auxiliary/preliminary practices, after all. Things like IFS are very smart, if high-level abstract, about constraint/constraining/structural factors, like very few other things are. Anyway, as mentioned in a previous section, "partness" is on a spectrum from shimmery, pattern-y, liminal to more discrete and agentic (again, loosely held, and a one-dimensional spectrum is very over-simplifying, of course).
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[This section is an edited transcript.]
Okay. So I want to talk about sort of two separate axes of something like "individuation versus blending." And I think that these two axes aren't completely separable, but they can be distinguished. And I think that can be very profitable, because there's some stuff that is sort of emotionally charged around these sorts of things.
So the first axis is sort of cultural slash ideological. And there's this idea that, different cultures are sort of, the individuals in those cultures are sort of, more or less, blended or synced. Actually, there might be three dimensions, and I think I can break out all three without messing up the flow of this video too much.
But, first, some concrete examples, at least from ethnomethodological descriptions. I don't know how accurate these are, or how sort of colonialist/imperialist colored they are, but, there's descriptions of, let's say young men, of while they're hunting or something.
I've read descriptions of, how, the group of men, they're almost moving together as a single organism or a single entity without verbal coordination. And, maybe, without even necessarily necessarily looking at each other: one person is quietly pulling back the branches while the other person draws the bow.
And they walk, or are still, at the same time. And then, somehow, imperceptibly, pointing out various aspects of the landscape, to each other. And, there's some palpable sense, apparently, about how there's sort of, almost, romanticizing this a bit, and maybe blending different accounts, but almost a perpetual trance state or something. Where, the boundaries between different individuals are in some sense muted or absent.
From accounts like this, people are quick to point out things like, perhaps, a Western or modern kind of individualism or individuation isn't a foregone conclusion and isn't necessarily the best way for people to be. We, sociologically, talk about atomism or an atomized society, which is arguably facilitated by money and capitalism, etc., speaking loosely.
So, this spectrum between kind of blended versus individuated--people sometimes feel emotionally charged about that, if someone is seemingly advocating for one or the other. And so I sort of want to take this, and bracket it, and kind of set it aside, for a moment. We're modeling a complex thing as a spectrum. And, I don't want to put a value judgment on it, sort of at this time, and then we'll talk about the other dimensions, and then sort of talk about kind of how these dimensions can be related to each other.
And, so another dimension, and this is the new dimension that I'm adding, for clarity, is something like, how do the individuals actually think or feel about this from the inside? We can sort of observe the behaviors and note the synchrony or blendedness, whether homogenous or specialized. (I suppose atomization usually refers to social relations versus work relations. And I suppose there's maybe different ways to slice things when social relations and work relations are less distinct.)
In any case, we can look at what people are doing, behaviorally, and we can note the degree of seamlessness or unity, in some way. But, we could maybe imagine, on the inside people thinking and feeling about what they're doing in many different kinds of ways: "We are working alone, together.", "I'm working as part of a team.", "We are the same entity.", "All people have the same consciousness looking out from behind their eyes.", and so on. Some people might be working on a team, and some people might feel themselves to be sort of absorbed into a group consciousness, or agency, or will. People feel very strongly about these sorts of things, about what's desirable, what's allowed, what's impossible, what's primitive, and so on. It can be very ideological, religious, spiritual, emotionally laden. People care about what other people think and what other people think about what other people think. Some of these things, first-pass, might feel very profound, numinous, ultimate, or people imagine them to be. And some people find some of these horrifying.
And so again, not yet placing value judgements or whatever, at this time, let's put this second kind of spectrum aside.
Okay. And so there's another dimension. This is the final one of the three. And, this is dimension is kind of what the body, mind, brain system is kind of doing at the "bare metal," in terms of the prereflective, low level sensory processing, of self and other, of incoming sensory phenomenona, and that kind of thing.
So, this spectrum here, I will claim is something about, how well, how correctly, how skillfully--I'm sort of bleeding in "value language," here, or at least an objective-ish, scalar, fake measure, here, of how well any individual brain/mind system is identifying the type and origin of where various multimodal signals are coming from.
So, I think it's pretty uncontroversial, in neuroscience. I forget the technical terms and stuff, but it's a very big deal to the brain, whether the person's body initiated the action and attendant/caused sensory phenomena or whether something outside the person impinged on the body, for example whether a sound was because the person themself made the sound or whether the sound was because a tweig snapped, thirty feet away, in the forest.
Or, whether a person is touching themselves--this gets sort of factored out and ignored usually--or it's an ant, or a poisonous insect, or a snake is crawling on the person. So there's a huge, huge difference to the brain, whether the person generated a sensation, or, something, that was not the volitional will of the person, generated the sensation. And this goes all the way to did the twig snap thirty milliseconds before I put my foot down or thirty milliseconds after I put my foot down. Huge difference, survival-wise.
And, this goes into why people sort of can't tickle themselves and just a whole slew of really low level sensory processing stuff.
And, so, I have this kind of a metaphor, kind of not, where the brain is one percent hardware and 99% software. So I'll make the claim that, people not only vary, kind of, in how well they're making sense of incoming stimuli, and whether it's self or other, or self and environment. But, also, through training like meditation or etc., over long periods of time, thousands of hours, people can become massively better at incredibly deep, prereflective sensory processing and origin/cause determination.
(Side note: If people feel like they have a shaky or porous identity, or they have bad boundaries, this really does tend to correlate, with any individual being an exception, with causal/origin sensory processing. If people feel like they have a strong sense of identity and good boundaries, this really does tend to correlate with deep, preflective causal/origin sensory processing. We build our high-level ontologies and experience out of this low-level sensory processing. And meditation ultimately can refactor the entire stack.)
And, again, this is very physical, very fundamental--the system is relying on, the delta in transmission times between different path lengths in neural circuits, at an incredibly low level. But, even so, it's extremely, extremely malleable. Causality, timing, deconvolution, source identification are, deep down, just a really intrinsic part of what brains do.
Okay. So, now, all these three axes are interrelated, they're only weakly separable, and/but they can vary somewhat independently. So, a person can have really good, low level sensory processing, really good boundaries and identity, in the third axis sense. And, at the same time, feel really blended with a group, like they are an appendage of a supermind.
So, yeah, so the point, here, is something like, people sometimes get sort of upset when I talk about how there's this low-level axis of individuation that can be trained, or, better: de-confused. The value judgment comes from not just a sort of nod to "objectivity," which is very useful and powerful frame but also problematically entangled with authoritarianism, sometimes. But, the value judgment is especially because of a sort of "observational trend"--if you meditate, over time, you'll maybe find that your mind "wants" to make this third axis distinction more and more skillfully, that your mind is hungry for it, takes every chance to do it better. Somehow, this third axis is sort of just what a mind automatically, spontaneously does, when it's unimpeded, when nothing's in the way. (You certainly don't have to take my word for it, though!)
In addition, in terms of the "only weakly separable" thing, development along the third axis does affect people's experience and preferences along the first two axes. And development on the third axis improves people agency and choicefulness with respect to the first two axes.
Additionally, development along the third axis increases resilience to coercion, confusion, and exploitation along the first two axes, e.g. in cult (or cult-like) or charismatic environments or situations. Some types of coercive blending or charismatic influence fundamentally rely on self/other confusions of the third axis. (Modeling it more granularly, the third axis is more like a splash pattern, or layers of splash pattern, of relative confusion and relative "clarity," loosely speaking, all things being equal.) Charismatic figures, sometimes (whether they realize it or not) "reach for," exploit, third-axis confusions to create "exogenous" experiences of blending or to manufacture experiential evidence for particular metaphysical positions.
Again, a person who develops on the third axis, all things being equal, long run, will be more resilient and choiceful, and will be relatively less exploitable and coercible, all things being equal.
So I think that's a really important point to make.
So, the pastoral, romanticized, blended experience, caricatured, has both good and bad things to offer. And the western, modern experience, caricatured, has both good and bad things to offer. And, this is all a big simplification, but "third axis" development allows a person to move beyond caricatures and knee-jerk value judgments, about ways of being, and to choicefully engage in nuanced ways of being and to invite others to do so as well. "Third axis" development allows someone to draw their own conclusions about all three axes.
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[Originally published at: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/x-w-mark-2/spiritwork-personal-statement-and-manifesto-3000-words-draft/ [Last accessed: 2022-04-20]. I use the word "physicalist," with a nod to a particular audience (that is overlapping but not the intended audience of this book; but, "naturalist" might be better. Even that isn't quite right because naturalism under emptiness, nebulosity, groundlessness is better-better. But that was out of the scope of the below or not the right time, at the risk of over-reification.) Again, the below is sort of a manifesto-filter-sales-pitch to very, very, very positioned audience.]
tl;dr: No nonsense subtle interaction. Extremely patient, cautious, careful. If desired, can be scrupulously legible and interactive. Deep theoretical basis. Practical management of nuance, complexity, and long time horizons, informed by thousands of hours of personal meditation practice.
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“Spirit work”/“spiritwork” is intended to be a very general and non-appropriative term in the very general space of shamanism (cf. bodywork, “energy work,” etc.) Sometimes the terms “shamanship” or “shamanhood” are used, to reduce the implicature that “shamanism” is a single “thing.”
Spirit work could be things like cancelling the effects of a spell, or “depossessing” someone from ghosts or demons, or pointing out, or helping with, “blocks” in the “energy body,” and so on.
One could say that I do physicalist spiritwork, or that I am a “physicalist spiritworker.” What that means is that I believe there is a physical/material/neurological/etc. basis to things like “spirit” or “energy” (including qi/chi/ki, prana, ruach, etc.), and I believe there’s “nothing more than” the physical. (Some people will say, “of course!” Other people will give me a pitying look, for multiple reasons, and, in any case, all of these reactions are partly why I’m writing this.)
Note, believing in a physical basis to “spirit,” etc., has many meta-methodological and meta-theoretical implications, but it has, surprisingly (to me), very little impact on basic phenomenology, and the presentation, and high-level classification, of various phenomena: loosely but usefully speaking, spells are often still just “spells,” and so on.
I want to qualify the above by noting that my belief in “nothing more than the physical” still leaves open the possibility of local–and nonlocal–interactions and effects, that have not been characterized by science. And falling within that, I do leave open the possibility of something like “true psi.” (And, again, that would still be physical/material/natural/causal/etc.)
But, I’ve never yet needed to fall back on something like “true psi” as a last-ditch explanation for a phenomenon I’ve encountered. That is, I think that similar genetics and phenotypes, similarities in culture, human senses and human sensory processing, all together, can account for most everything “supernatural”:
I think just about everything seemingly supernatural is so far is explainable, without reaching, by relatively local interactions between people. And, importantly, this includes seeming nonlocal information transfer and synchronicities. For example, seeming nonlocal information transfer can happen through a long chain of people. And, seeming synchronicities may happen between people who know each other well, because they are actually pretty behaviorally/cognitively synchronized, even when they haven’t interacted for months or years–maybe they saw the same tv show or tweet, recently, which acted as an implicit, common-cause catalyst for a seeming synchronicity, three days later. There’s also the possibility of “birthday paradox” or “black swan” events—that is, coincidental and improbable things happen with high frequency, if the equivalence class is very general.
One might wonder about examples or seeming anomalies involving apparent high fidelity, fine-grain detail: not just, say, things like faint premonitions but, solo or shared, vivid, high-fidelity, informative, agentive experiences, like angels, demons, god(s), etc. And, you might ask, where do such vivid and detailed experiences come from; sometimes: “I couldn’t have imagined/invented/dreamed up that!” And, further, in the cases where aspects of those experiences were shared, whether vaguely or precisely, that can be even more shocking.
In those cases, we need to account for vividness/detail. And we need to account for “sharedness” or mutual fidelity–two or more people sometimes having had aspects of the same experience. And, we are operating under the assumption that the mechanisms are “relatively classically physical.”
We don’t have to look too far–we can appeal to some standard mechanisms, and then we can explore objections.
We have the human senses, human sensory processing, and the human brain, as a “substrate,” something to receive a “transmission.” And we’d also need information, a pattern, something to be transmitted. Such a “pattern,” an imprint, could be anywhere from simple and static to something complex, agentive, “active.” (As an analogy, something simple or inert could be like a text file, and something complex or agentive could be more like a [marshalled or serialized] running program, perhaps impressionistic, in some ways, and, in other ways, nearly as “digital” as actual software.)
Taking those building blocks, two general classes of objections come to mind: on the one hand “theoretical smell tests” and on the other “experiential smell tests.”
On the theoretical smell test side, a possible objection is that a real-time transmission of something “complex, agentive, high-fidelity, high-bandwidth” etc., between two people, may not seem information-theoretically possible, let alone information-theoretically plausible.
But, here we can turn to William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion.”
Whether a baby or an adult, we’re always making sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion that is the world—that’s what people, brains do—that is, very-high-dimensional, real-time, multisensory learning. Additionally, the sender and receiver are “active, responsive, intentful” even if semi-unreflectively: the receiver is, in some sense, trying to understand, and the sender, in some sense, is trying to be understood. And, there’s a lot of shared context, either cultural, or by virtue of just also being a Homo sapien. This makes meaning-making easier. Finally, in terms of bandwidth, there’s body language, gesture, posture, voice tone, prosody, timbre, and perhaps much more–a multi-channel medium serialized in chunks of somewhere between, I don’t know, tens of milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds.
On the experiential smell test side, a possible objection is that people aren’t, well, psychic, or at least not obviously so, in everyday life. (Or are they, depending on how you ask and how you pay attention.) Briefly, much of what we do, and don’t do, and much of what we sense or experience, isn’t immediately conscious or reflective, is not immediately volitional, and is highly, exquisitely contextual–i.e., what if there is no single “psi” phenomenon. I think all of these are plenty sufficient to make everyday experience—and, additionally, decades of laboratory research into psi phenomena (of varying quality)—ambiguous, hard to interpret, or hopelessly confounded or otherwise erroneous. It’s not a stretch to vaguely go along with “a lot of subtle stuff, that carries a lot of information, maybe A LOT of information, happens between people.
Finally, as to where vivid details can come from (“I couldn’t have come up with that!”), myth, lore, religion, popular culture, popular imagination, over many thousands of years, provides plenty of it. Woven through this is generational/cultural/familial trauma, depending on how defined and distinguished from the former. If one assumes these sorts of things can get passed around and along, between parents, children, and contemporaries, through culture and across generations, then this part follows pretty well.
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A general qualifying point remains:
Even if physicalist explanations do account for the full variety and range of supernatural experiences, one must still completely acknowledge their (sometimes) extraordinary personal impact, both positive and negative–sometimes profound, sometimes terrible.
It should rarely be the case that someone can use a physicalist explanation (though, fractionally more often, a psychological/sociological one) as part of a claim that someone “didn’t experience something” or that it shouldn’t have a big effect on them. (Stated slightly less convolutedly, it shouldn’t be the case that someone can ever claim someone else “didn’t experience something.”)
If someone had an experience then they had an experience. If someone has an interpretation of an experience then they have an interpretation of an experience. If the experience as such, and its interpretation, are having an ongoing effect or impact, then they are having that ongoing effect or impact. The experience is real. The interpretation is real. It happened, or is happening, and, in some flexible sense, it will always have happened. And one’s interpretation of what’s happening is happening, too, and it will always have happened. (The person of course may freely revise their interpretation ongoingly, and experiential memory is an active process, and so on.) In short, people get to have their experiences. That doesn’t mean you may or may night have an interpretation that “transcends and includes” their interpretation, but people get to have their experiences (and interpretations).
To expand on this, and/or, in any case, fixed explanations and interpretations, physicalist or otherwise, are potentially limiting. (The opposite of “fixed” might be “provisional.”) A person needs the freedom to allow for the possibility of angels, demons, magic, spells, curses, telepathy, gods, anything etc..
That’s part of freely making up one’s own mind, freely coming to one’s own conclusions.
And, this is a practical and theoretical claim—the mind cannot work properly, can’t reach better and better conclusions and plans, if it can’t transiently entertain and even belief just about anything. That’s part of the process. Part of the process of “belief sovereignty” (that also honors, say, interdependence and non-separation) is through transiently having really weird beliefs, sometimes. And, critically, if a person already believes something “weird,” then (potentially privately) self-acknowledging that belief is critical for the possibility of moving beyond that belief, whether that possibility is actualized, through further experience or movement of (body)mind.
The mind gets from here to there, to better beliefs, better beings and seemings of the world, sort of by (a) making it safe to traverse possibly partially incorrect or incomplete beliefs, (b) making that immersive traversal, and (c) finally coming to something even better on the other side. This applies not just to angels and demons, or anything, but to the currently underdetermined and patchy space of physicalist explanations, too! In short, the mind must be generally free to play—all of theoretically, practically, and normatively. And, one-on-one interactions and communities need to protect that freedom (this is especially a general, normative claim).
To be sure, not all explanations are equal, but one has to perhaps hold even their very best explanations lightly, even those that are seemingly very elegant, with great explanatory power, seemingly leaving behind no anomalous evidence, so far.
We’re all surely a little wrong, maybe “not even wrong,” in the “what” and especially the “how,” along a vast number of dimensions.
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All of the above was (somewhat) intentionally written to be a bit meandering, poorly signposted, dense, technical, and stilted, so that most people would stop reading partway through. I want to be careful not to fractionally increase the legitimacy of the whole space of spirit, energy, etc., stuff, because I think there’s potentially a lot of unprincipled and problematic things going on, out there. While I think it’s critically important, ethically and epistemically, that people are free to theorize and experiment and play and experience and offer each other help, the bodymindworld is large and there be dragons. Very tersely:
Some spiritworkers, bodyworkers, etc., try to produce big, flashy effects in people (to make it obvious that they’re happening or to otherwise perform), which is sometimes at the expense of people’s smooth, long-term trajectory.
Some spiritworkers, bodyworkers, etc., may seem to be extraordinarily, passively perceptive, but it’s not necessarily passive perception at all—the practitioners may be doing particularly active “sounding” or “ringing” or “reverberation” in your bodymind system, to evoke reads, accurate or not, and they may not disclose that they’re doing this, or may not be aware of doing it. And this can sometimes cause side effects.
Some spiritworkers rely on exploiting, increasing, or entrenching “self/other confusions,” in order to produce effects. And, so, those effects can be at the expense of long-term growth, in subtle ways.
I wanted to respect and appreciate all the things people are doing (because I, critically, partially, stand on the shoulders of all of that), while being noncommittal in a way that doesn’t generally legitimize any particular thing. Some practitioners aren’t tracking, or aren’t even a little concerned, about some of the above examples, or much more. And, my worry was that, in reading less dry versions of this, some small number of unsupervised people might be a little emboldened, or further emboldened, to try things and double-down on that trying, in unsafe ways. Of course, I always have to hold open the possibility that I might be missing big things, but the “long-run pattern of surprise” leads me to trust my current epistemic positions, and, in any case, I seek to systematically remedy all possible inadequacies.
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With all this talk of methods, practitioners, epistemology, risks, and so on, there’s the possibility of something simple, normal, and human being lost in the noise. Some people have warned against “tool-ification,” i.e. “making something into a tool.”
It’s worth noting that everyone has been swimming in all this stuff, these influences and effects, since their first moments of consciousness: prenatally, postnatally, last week, and so on. It’s the normal background hum of work, play, intimacy, caring, fighting, and so on. Things can be weird, sometimes, but, similar to meditation, there’s a general pattern of normal, to weird, to normal, for “all this stuff,” in general.
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In this work, I hope to be a part of a culture of rigor and humility, with respect to efficacy and safety.
There’s a way in which one’s “theory of mind,” metaphysics, beliefs, about “mechanism of action,” beliefs about how bodies and minds, and everything else, work, have an outsized impact on what happens and how it happens. And this has to be accounted for and meta accounted for.
I hope to be a part of a culture that is phenomenological and concrete, over ontologies, theories, and even heuristics, though all those are integral parts of the puzzle, too. And, even if, in some arguable or narrow sense, it’s “interpretation all the way down.”
I hope to be a part of a culture where practitioners are aware that particular approaches or methods can work, for thousands of hours, until they don’t. It can seem like something is going to “work all the way through,” but it doesn’t. And sometimes when something stops working, it’s a safe and smooth diminishment in returns, and sometimes it’s rocky and even dangerous. So, a radical provisionality and non-overcommitment is needed, at all times. The overall approach must be meta-theoretical, in the sense that it must account for all theories of what’s going on and why, including with respect to itself.
I hope to be a part of a culture that understands that unintentional effects, happening in a person’s blindspots (occluded, “subconscious”) are the norm, whether innocuous or harmful. And it’s the norm, normal, in part, because uncovering a blindspot can takes thousands of hours. But, even being normal, or especially given their normalcy–and even given the difficulty of uncovering them, or especially given the difficulty of uncovering them–I hope to be a part of a culture that prioritizes working through those blindspots, systematically, comprehensively, inexorably. And, in the meantime, people rely on each other, with humility and with awareness of the possibility of gaslighting, to point out potential and experienced harms, between practitioners, clients, teachers, and everyone. Normal to have. Normal to discuss. Normal to systematically and ongoingly work through.
I hope to be a part of a culture that refers and partially grounds itself in neuroscience, numeracy, research, research interpretation, biophysics, physiology, and so on. And, at the same time, embraces radical ontological provisionality and nebulosity, and groundlessness, as well as a radical creativity and openness, non-arrogance, interpretative charity, with respect to method and self-transformation, with respect to self and others. Strong opinions, well-founded positions, held flexibly and lightly—even “multischematic, interschematizable.” Even in this limited space, this could be a “show don’t tell,” section, and actually talk about some neuroscience. And/but, too, I want to be a part of a culture that is vigilantly aware of “dual-use” considerations, and participates in research and disclosure responsibly and with patient, systematic discretion.
*
Maybe it was pretty expected from the beginning, but I didn’t indicate at the top that this was also explicitly a sales page; I hoped people would read all the way through and not skim just for the sell. In any case, this document is also intended to be an advertisement, sort of positioning itself on the knife-edge between people who are experiencing interesting or problematic “supernatural” phenomena, and/but who are also open (maybe very open, and with relief) to working with someone who seeks scientific and causal mechanistic explanations, grounded in neuroscience, neurophysiology, forces, fields, information theory, a dash of biophysics. That knife-edge is not a lot of people, but you all are definitely out there, and this is the group of people I feel comfortable ethically working with.
Frankly, I have a gazillion things to learn, and a gazillion things I could be so much better at, but there are at least narrow ways in which I have personally mastered this space, over many thousands of hours of personal work, as well as communal experiences.
And, I can possibly help you with curses, spells, geas, ghosts, demons, egregores, possession, subtle body stuff, “individuation epistemics,” etc. This work is complex, incremental, and sometimes very slow. For completeness, you might also cautiously try healer, bodyworker, shamanic, neoshamanic, energy worker, exorcist, “compassionate depossession,” communities and services. For legal reasons, I’ll explicitly say that what I do is not those things, and I would be glad to compare and contrast with various things on a call, to the best of my knowledge.
Spiritwork with body contact, with touch, can be higher fidelity and higher bandwidth, and spiritwork without touch necessitates higher skill, but it can also be somewhat net safer, and it’s less complicated legally and interpersonally; so, no-touch is the norm, for me.
In closing, if you’ve read this far(!), please schedule a call with me, and I’d be happy to discuss possibilities for your situation. Many things can definitely be done over zoom, and/but, depending on our relative physical locations, sometimes I’ll recommend that you travel to me or that I batch travel to you.
Book here: [...]
P.S. Spiritwork is more intended for non-meditators and non-long-term meditators, because a long term meditator will eventually cover ALL(!!!!!) the territory of spiritwork, in their own personal practice. Any particular session of spiritwork can only touch “one percent of one percent” [sic] of what meditation can do over, say, ten thousand hours. (Though, for sure, sometimes, that one percent of one percent can have outsize ripple effects.) That being said, in some limited situations, I do offer spiritwork to meditators, and I do sometimes feel comfortable offering some degree of meditation spiritual/lineage/wisdom “transmission,” which is to some degree just chill-ly available/happening all the time. In a bunch of ways, the lines blur, and it’s all the same “stuff.” Please ask me about this, if you are curious/interested. And, in any case, I’d be happy to talk about any of this at length, in other booking contexts and often generally.
Book here: [...]
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[Credit to several people for some fundmental ideas in this as well as indirect and direct nudges that contributed to it getting written.]
They might be projecting, they might be gaslighting or manipulating, or there's been a misunderstanding, or maybe they just don't understand.
But, in any case, say one of your parents, a friend, an intimate partner, sibling, your abuser, your therapist, an enemy, your lifelong nemesis, a boss, a colleague, a mentee, an abusee, someone you just met--one of them says you're X, for some value of X, and it’s lightly to really bad. It's not a nice thing to say or it would be embarrassing or felt-to-be devastating, because of who said it, or because of the possible self-image or social implications, if it were felt-to-be true, if it landed. And, say, they say it cooly, or compassionately, heatedly, lovingly, bitingly, viciously, cold as ice, devastatingly, triumphantly, sadly, hopelessly, ironically, dramatically, quietly, cruelly, provisionally…
So yeah, lightly to really bad, like (in no particular order):
craven, cruel, mean, a bitch, a dick, stingy, weak, volatile, uncooperative, evil, pretentious, nosy, needy, overly sensitive, a little bitch, manipulative, judgmental, irresponsible, irrational, rigid, inflexible, inattentive, evasive, immoral, disorganized, defensive, controlling, unintelligent, stupid, uncreative, indecisive, weak-willed, disgusting, insane, scattered, desperate, myopic
Or it's like contextually cutting, faint praise, a veiled insult, or a little tonally or contextually mind-bending; it could be anything, depending:
idealistic, ambitious, analytical, disciplined, meticulous, objective, persistent, professional, princely, a rule-follower, traditional, studious, kind(?!), wholesome(?!), giving(?!)
(Given that some of the above are "good," this is a preview on good/bad reversals and groundlessness but not arbitrariness [modulo the groundlessness of that and the groundlessness of groundlessness] of all of this, discussed further below.)
Some responses (besides, “huh maybe, I’m so sorry if so," etc.):
That last one is especially important:
"Yes, I am, and that's good."
(e.g. it's good to be domineering, it's good to be strong-willed, it's good to be a little mean, it's good to be [a litttle] selfish...)
And there surely often is something good there. There are senses and nuances where it is good to be a little selfish, or assertive, or to look out for yourself, or to trust but verify, etc.
And that makes all of this a bit slippery, culturally.
Some things aren't good or bad. They're "just"/"merely"/"pure" norms. For example, it doesn't matter whether a country or a planet drives on the left or right side of two-way roads, as long as we collectively pick one. (And coordination and inertial costs, or hidden or local valid considerations, sometimes keep that choice from universalizing, if that even matters, but that's out of the scope of this section.)
Other things are contextual, or at least arguably so. One spiritual teacher makes a distinction between "yoga" and "tantra." In his terminology, yoga is about safety and healing. And tantra involves calculated risk-taking. Another example: Some workplaces or high-stakes environments arguably thrive on, or arguably can only successfully compete via exacting excellence, domineering hierarchical, uncompromising socialization, something. An intimate partnership would probably need different values. And, some workplaces or communities, too.
Sometimes proponents or critics of particular values are right and sometimes they're wrong, sometimes partially so. Sometimes they're right about their tragedy and contingency (cf. cartesianism, colonialism, imperialism, everyday workplace cruelty, social welfare programs, capitalism, workplace accomdations, affirmative action, co-sleeping, antinutrients), sometimes they're wrong, and sometimes partially so. Sometimes they're right or wrong about "naturalness," "inevitability," "objective constraints," "necessity," "objective morality,", "truth," "science," "reason," "empiricism," "faith." (see: oil, gas, energy, technology, natural law, carcinization, money, honor, face, dignity, fungibility, evolution).
Ideas like "duty," "obligation," "responsibility," "ethics," "morality" are intertwined through all of this.
All of this is modulo emptiness, nebulosity, groundlessness, contextuality, contingency, particularity, concreteness...
("Yes, I am, and that's good.")
In any case, let's say the individual is teasing all this apart for themselves. Let's say the long-run self-transformative practioner or meditator is teasing all this apart for themselves.
Across long-term structural fluidity, there might be intimation of sublime and subtle embodied ideas and ideals, that are nuanced and perhaps solve paradox after paradox, at least for a time, clarity in nebulosity.
And some general ideas, for people, about good and bad, better and worse, might be teased apart, heuristically, at the very least, never eternally, though never-say-never, and even then.
Perhaps, these loose, nebulous traits might get loose, provisional labels like
And/but again, unification or solutions to paradoxes:
And/but yet again, is there truly general capability? Fully general wisdom? Virtue with a capital V? In light of emptiness, groundlessness, surprise, unknown unknowns, nebulosity? No? Yes? No again? And yet?
*
But why does it take so long to realize how one is being a craven, foolish, arrogant, dismissive, contemptuous, mooching, soul-sucking, selfish, hateful piece of shit?
("Yes, I am, and that's good.")
Let's back up, for a moment...
Self-hatred is not long-run useful. For some people, it's net-useful until it isn't. No one chooses, for example, self-hatred, self-attacking, etc.
And let's be clear.
Radical self-compassion, self-kindness, radical self-alignment, radical self-care, self-warmth is maybe necessary/"necessary" for us to look at the "darkest"/darkest parts of ourselves.
This discussion presumes/presupposes that those "darkest" parts are there, but we're just kind of vaguely pointing. There's a there, there, but it's vague; it's nebulous. Not to overly reify any of this.
In any case, it's not your fault. It was never your fault. But it can be your responsibility ("response-ability," blah blah
But we can potentially come to pay a price. And that price is sometimes the shame, the embarrassment, the moritification of realizing that we are that belligerent, contemptuous, stonewalling person, or worse. That we are literal or figurative rapists, abusers, users, naggers, henpeckers, pot-stirrers, narcissists, manipulators, that sometimes we've caused tremendous, spreading, nth-order pain, to individuals, to communities, family members, intimate partners, that we might never be able to practically repay. For which there are no practical reparations, recompense, restitution, repair. Perhaps we can only pay it forward and/or wait for the possibility of communal judgment, for which there might be inadequate resources or care--you might not deserve such time and attention (though we all do, in some sense). Thus we are wretched.
We're, in part, in the realm of personality disorders, used informally--character armor, defensive mechanisms, narcissism, schizoid, borderline, the sorts of things that double-bindingly shock and horrify those around them, that cause some percentage of people around them to go a little bit or a lot insane, that ruin more lives than possibly their own, worst case.
And/but, again, let's be clear, radical self-compassion, self-kindness, radical self-alignment, radical self-care, self-warmth is maybe necessary/"necessary" for us to look at the "darkest"/darkest parts of ourselves.
This comes from structural fluidity, patience, time. (And help, and love; we'll get to that.)
*
Why don’t we see ourselves as others can obviously or eventually spot?
Our blindspots, our rigidity, our abuse, our manipulation, our selfishness, our ugliness.
We "hide" these parts of ourselves in, well, "parts," "contexts," "modes."
Sometimes we're actively hiding them, actively narrativizing them away. Sometimes it's pure fragmentation.
But, usually, when we're "in" them--sometimes it doesn't feel like anything, to be sure--and it usually feels "natural," though sometimes we can notice that we're "up," "aroused," perhaps a sense of glassiness or non-reality or... But, in any case, when we're "in" them, explicitly or implicity, “that’s the way the world is, this is how the world has always been, this is how I’ve always been, and it’s deeply and completely justified through and through, plain as day, forever and always (e.g. dog-eat-dog, or I'm justifiied to hurt you because you have or will hurt me)."
We might "lack the concept" as it were, of X (not that we should necessarily acquire it in the way the other person means). Or it might be counterintuitive because it's so different or far away from how we usually think of ourselves. Or it would imply disaster and thus "unthinkable". Or it seems to contradict how we are--"I just did all these good, helpful things!" (And we may have(!), and but also, in those very acts or separately...)
Someone who actually hates you enough or cares enough to tell you, let alone sits you down and tries a bit more to get you to get it, that you're being horrible--this is an incredible gift, incredible grace. Their behavior might be self-serving, gaslighting, manipulative and/or they love you so much... or at least they want you to stop hurting people. (And if you hurt people enough maybe you can get more help and attention......... We've been talking about this level of fucked up, in all it's manifold varieties, but it can be everyday normal and low-key. It's ok; most of us have been there, and we're all doing our best.)
If a parent or a mentor or a friend or an intimate partner finds a way to temporarily(!) forebear your stonewalling, belligerence, disbelief, they may indeed "just" love you, and that's grace; that's a gift.
Thus we are ennobled, dignified, albeit many things.
"...well, simultaneously, fuck you and thank you, I've surely never thought of myself as X, but [seconds, minutes, or days pass] outside view I could maybe see how that maybe kind of fits..."
*
You might ask:
What have people been telling me over and over again, that I've been auto-dismissing, insta-dismissing, insta-forgetting, insta-discounting, insta-explaining away?
How would your parents describe you if they were being completely honest and trying to help you in your worst moments?
How would your oldest friends describe you, amongst themselves after you hurt one of them or flamed out of an intimate relationship?
How would a brilliant and compassionate therapist describe you in their notes?
How am I wrong here? I must be wrong somehow. What can it be? How am I in the wrong?
--and the this has to be done in a way that's not self-crazy-making, not self-attacking, not overly vulnerable to gaslighting, manipulation, yet while also not leading to suspicion, accusation, paranoia...
*
And the payoff for all of this, so costly, sometimes risky (because, a la nonmonoticity, we might become even more monstrous, rigid, self-righteous, insensitive, fragmented, surprising, hurtful, for a time, along the way), is that we're just a little more able to hold down a job, stay in a relationship, enter a relationship, not fuck up a kid, not ruin a friendship, to be loved, to be respected, to be cared for, to be appreciated, to be able to walk away, to be able come back, to be able to apologize, to be able know the thing you want to know.
Possibly incredibly painfully, but in a life-saving way, provisionally acknowledging and unraveling a "dark thing" makes things better. Sometimes extraordinary and/or sometimes "merely" a better death.
And so, perhaps, over time, in fits and starts, some things change quickly and some things very slowly, ten thousand plus hours--your very moral/justificatory/theodicy-esque ontology of the world changes. Say, you realize what a horrible person you've been, for all it was not your fault.
Again, it takes time--all the way up and all the way down, no stepping into the same river twice, no such thing as universals, and yet more and more of every context or tragedy or crisis or surprise. And some versions may be a bit twisted at first until the nuance or additional good/bads need to fractalally flip or big ones need to as things settle and resettle and you learn and make mistakes.
Perhaps you become rather mild and nice, diplomatic, socially graceful, loving, with unmistakably a spine, a backbone, boundariess--so not weakness--until they get it, only as necessary, and, modulo conditions on the ground, maybe necessary becomes more and more infrequent with ever more skilful proactiveness, that's not "artificial", not "extra," but natural, graceful, relatively costless, effortless (if you've already bitten the meditation bullet). Or you become something bigger, bolder, vicious in a good way, scary in a good way, or all the above. There's not shortcuts to long-run high-dimensional spontaneous nuance.
Without self-abnegation, without disendorsed, without self-sacrificing (because the world partially turned you inside out for loved ones, for your children), without self-suppressing, without self-crazy-making.
And, not-too-long-run, maybe duh, if you've made it this far, it kind of comes part-and-parcel, perhaps (of course) it's not even because it's externally-imposed "good" or "right" but it’s inherent obvious and sensiblen, sort of. The very being and seeming of the world implies it.
It won’t be boring or costly (barely duty, responsibilry, obligation) because you “arranged” self and local world so your responses to it are right, they flow, socially and physically and morally and excitingly or peacefully graceful.
Again, possibly incredibly painfully, devastatingly embarrassingly ("how could I have even thought..."), but maybe in a life-saving way, a marriage-saving way, provisionally acknowledging and unraveling a "dark thing" makes things better, again and again or through and through. Sometimes extraordinary and/or sometimes "merely" a better death.
*
Our culture, community, our family, the last several thousand years, our workplace, our friends, in some ways they might just be so wrong about what's good and bad, wholesome or unwholesome, skillfull or unskillful. They might be right about so many things and wrong about other things. Often we are just wrong. Maybe it was all a big misunderstanding. This is the peril and promise of self-sovereignty, to be unmoved in the face of everything, while still being flexible, humble, vulnerable, strong, happy, sensitive, alive, a dumbass.
Often we are the narcissist, the schizoid, the user, the abuser.
And it's always changing, neverending, unknown unknowns, there is no ground truth, no god's-eye-view: norms, culture, science, coordination mechanisms, moral advances, surprises--there will still be ways in which good and bad changes, in which "good and bad reverse," fractally or large-scale--being a piece of shit, or not, is slippery, always. Nobility, character, dignity, virtuousness, is slippery, always. Structurally fluid, always. And it's all interconnected, not-separate, in the sense that such vague patterns and traits, your moral successes and regressions, are affected by how much money you have, your other relationships, the currency inflation rate. You are not separate. Nothing is separate including nothing. And finally these are all ideas to be thrown away, if they're not useful.
But there's a there, there, at least to the degree there's a there, anywhere.
And, as mentioned above, self-hatred, self-adversariality, conceptualizations of "resistance" and "avoidance" are fine if they're there (trying to push it away can be counterproductive) but long-run not useful. And self-compassion, self-kindness, self-alignment, self-warmth is critical and enabling.
***
Incomplete bibliography:
Peterson, Christopher, and Martin EP Seligman. Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Vol. 1. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Ackerman, Angela, and Becca Puglisi. The Negative Trait Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Flaws. Jadd Publishing, 2013.
Ackerman, Angela, and Becca Puglisi. The Positive Trait Thesaurus: A Writer's Guide to Character Flaws. Jadd Publishing, 2013.
https://meaningness.com/nobility [Last accessed: 2022-03-13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_ethics [Last accessed: 2022-03-13]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue [Last accessed: 2022-03-13]
***
Personal note:
One fairly compassionate and competent spiritual dude apparently literally said a few months or years before he literally ended up in some decently big scandal, “don’t ask if I’ll abuse my power, ask how and when”.
I just wanted to note that, sometimes having written stuff like the above prompts questions, sometimes not easily askable, of like "how far along is he?" Or like "is he just a little bit closer to "saintlness," bodhisattva-hood, or whatever, than the rest of us?"
Untangliness is long-run correlated with "not being a surprisingly dangerous piece of shit" but they are (incompletely!) separable. Monstrous distortions can persist for a lifetime, worst case.
Self and world are vastly high-dimensional, the future keeps unfolding, and groundlessness and non-eternalism mean there is no "perfect," final, unchanging, contextually universal answer to any situation. (((Though there's cool set of brilliant also imperfect toy ideas, though sometimes very useful, in math and philosophy like the golden rule, the categorical imperative, multi-agent based reasoning, Gary Drescher's subjunctive relations, as it were, and more. Globality and generality and abstraction and thought experiments can be pretty great. "What would literally anyone do, what should literally anyone do, in this situation?")))
One can just sort of do heuristically, hopefully, imperfectly, only-time-will-tell-and-maybe-not-even-then better and better, with any concrete situation being hopefully just an easy to resolve misunderstanding, but could also be uniquely, perversely disastrous, for perfect storm mundane reasons, deep personality/character tragedies, Shakespeare-grade suckitude, thunderous stupidity, "brain farts," "Freudian slips," tonedeaf-ness, contextual inappropriateness, shocking blindspots, hangups, young-adult-fiction melodramatic cringe (also tragic), outside manipulation or super-villainy, demonic possession, brain tumors, neurodegeneration, micro-infarct dementia, etc.
I assure you in many relevant senses I am selfish, craven, desperate, corner-cutting, self-serving-in-a-bad-way, just a dude (gender neutral), not playing n dimensional chess, am a horrifying terrible person either in general or uniquely monstrous just for you.
(And isn't writing this whole thing maybe just a little narcisstic, grandiose, detached?)
So yeah. Also neither am I implying that I've done or been some of the worst stuff mentioned above, but I've been in some pretty fucked up situations and have done some pretty fucked up things, as have a lot of "us" (generally speaking), though not all of us!
And finally, neither (a) is this a license to get away with doing shitty stuff, etc etc. and also (b) nor should I necessarily not be held to a higher standard or something--as I am the main writer of this thing and that can change how people relate to me and my conduct has different kinds of ripple effects because of that. So that's a thing.
***
Final postscript (I'll hopefully pick this up later):
On character and coordination: Is all of this where familial, communal, generational, societal, civilizational, planetary greatness comes from, perhaps? Great evil always lurks, perhaps…
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Hopefully without detracting from the gravity of what I'm writing about, I want to note that I am not a scholar or a historian, so there will be some inadvertent cherry picking and possibly howlers or just highly questionable assertions and inferences, not to mention history-writing winners, and all that. But, here we go.
Also, content warning, this starts out maybe a little dark, or at least gray, and then gets darker further in.
*
There is the "banality of evil"--everyday cruelty, neglect, professional sadomasochism, and "just following orders."[*]
There is also the "banality of good"--so the story goes, it's hard to refuse warmth to a hungry, cold community member, or to a stranger, at the the persistent request of a community member, if the hungry, cold person is standing right there outside your door. [*]
Of course, we have both of these capacities within us, and much more. They aren't points in a space, they're vague swaths in the space. And they're contingent on causes and conditions. Change the society, change the person's causal history, and something different counterfactually occurs.
Is there bias or directionality? Are both equally likely? Evil or good? A flip of the coin?
What is the essence or long-run emergence of the human condition? (For completeness, artificial and alien intelligence may need to be discussed in a separate section.)
I believe humans are long-run positive-sum.
(I could make a case for this, and I may suggest some things, but this sort of, at least partially, has to be found from the inside, anyway.)
"Long-run" suggest something problematic is going on in the "short-run": There is the anthropomorphized idea of "moloch" [1] or, more abstractly, inadequate equilibria [2]
The rough idea is that distributed, discoordinated, local incentives can produce stable, entrenched, bad globalities, and thereby stable, entrenched, bad localities. (I may have added or distorted something, here.)
Reasoning about equilibria also suggests that seeming utopias often have a hidden dark side, zero-sum coercion or exploitation, somewhere. (See perhaps the origin of the term utopia as well as tvtropes.com.)
It takes (a) serendipitious or deliberate advances in abundance or (b) serendipitious or deliberate advances in coordination, to truly, positive-sum break out of bad equilibria.
*
An example of problematic coordination, a combination of good and bad, might be Christianity. See perhaps Girard. Christianity yielded a "universal scapegoat" and an "all-encompassing goodness out there." These may have reduced war, facilitated trade, not to mention they're a source or deep meaning and coherence. One could also argue (as I believe) that these, at least the straw versions, are partially inappropriate reifications, to the degree they've been non-incidental in violence and oppression (arguably crusades, colonialism, imperialism, prejudice, etc.).
Another example of problematic coordination, could be just modernity itself, in the form of (somewhat unnecessarily comingled) reason, so-conceived mind/body dualism, and so on. To the degree that these ideas and situated behaviors are problematic, while producing extraordinary wealth and life improvements, they've arguably also contributed to the dissociation of "the big three," truth, goodness, and beauty, after Ken Wilber, and arguably contributed to atomization, ennui, anomie, and heavily falling birthrates.
*
I'm writing this draft in 2021 (2021-02-20). This will necessarily be written without historical perspective, in some sense, but I think the asymptotic limit of "doing good history" can be very good. I'm certainly not there, yet, in this draft--so this might age quite poorly or is even contemporaneously "cringe." (Again, I don't want to detract from gravity, but I want to lampshade that "cringe," in quotes, is cringe.)
To be tonally abrupt after the immediately above, the holocaust wasn't that many decades ago, and genocides have continued before and after. There's some chance that the United States dollar will continue to devalue, and that could be fine or produce instability. Bitcoin and decentralized finance are currently hot. There is a global pandemic. Vaccine technology has been a big, though arguably delayed success.
Now, what are the good futures?
Fully automated luxury [gay] space communism? [3,4]
Neopastoralism?
How might we get there? What are the challenges?
*
For context (and this could be accurate or incredibly not-even-wrong or overstated, either my paraphrase or the source material [5,6]), in ancient, net-zero-sum wider environments, tribes will:
*
One could say that civilization is the de-escalation of violence [*] through positive-sum coordination. Perhaps, the more positive-sum-ness there is, the more civilization (and adequate equilibria, etc.) and abundance there is. (I am mixing math [metaphors] with synthetic a posteriori descriptions and claims, but, first-pass.)
Since, I believe in humanity being long-run positive-sum, and since there is still resource competition today, I think we'll need to keep improving the causes and conditions that yield creativity and generativity, which yield more abundance and coordination and safety, which yield more creativity and generativity, and so on. (Technological advances, including possibly general artificial intelligence, will cause big improvements and big disruptions, along the way.)
If creativity and generativity are "circularly-causally-downstream" of (body)mind, then one could argue that at least one leverage point is "self-transformative technology," method, e.g. meditation.
But, e.g. meditation, and the sociological context that circularly-causally facilitates it, isn't good enough, yet, neither the "meditation technology" nor the "social technology." There is more to do.
***
Changing topics, slightly, depending on current technology and methods, the available mental/social milieu will sort of stochastically produce net-positive and net-negative "coordinators."
We could have sort of a sophistication axis and a good/bad access.
Low-sophistication and bad is warlords. High-sophistication and good is, say, buddhas and saints. High-sophistication and bad we'll call anti-buddhas.
I'll lampshade that this is extremely reductive. There are no clean examples of any of these, and coordination or governance isn't always "profitably monocausally reducible" to a single individual or a single class of individual.
I don't have enough historical background to comment, but Genghis Khan, the Roman Empire, the Qin dynasty, Alexander the Great, could be case studies of violent unification, for better and worse.
One might think things are a bit better than the above listed examples, in the age of democracy, Westphalian states, and globally interconnected economies, but there are still hot wars, proxy wars, cold wars, "cyber" wars, genocides, propaganda wars, covert and overt assassination programs, nuclear armament and disarmament, a general AI race, and so on. I'm using "war" a little bit too loosely, here, but I think the general point holds. To wit, there is still vicious, violent resource competition, globally, between great powers, perhaps with the possibility of disaster. (And there is also poverty at home and abroad.)
This can be extremely intense to think about. It usually creeps up on a meditator. In a developed country, it was maybe possible to not think about it at all, for the past few decades. But, maybe, history has started again (cf. "the end of history"). If they're not their already, one could slowly titrate "history" and "world" into their "very being and seeming of the world," over thousands of hours.
In any case, so those "coordinators" I mentioned several paragraphs above, in the age of distributed institutions, say there are sometimes people who are "central coordinators," who can remake institutions. (An institution, here, is a pattern of human activity that is somewhat independent of any particular human participating in that pattern of activity.)
Let's distinguish between "relatively rigid" coordinators and "relatively fluid" coordinators.
A relatively more rigid coordinator will have a more dense pattern of phenomenological/epistemic constraints, behavioral rigidities, behavioral/psychological/emotional entrenchment, unreflectiveness, "missing concepts," "'missing' emotions/capacities," and so on, very loosely speaking.
Note that even a "relatively rigid" coordinator, will still be relatively more fluid than a relatively non-central-coordinative person, because it's the fluidity that sort of allows a person to "transcend their distributed niche," in order to have the capacity to remake institutions. Though, that fluidity might sort of be a "forced, effortful, layery" not-really-fluidity, born of trauma, incomplete methods, or other contingency. Some people who are effortfully "fluid" become more and more spontaneously, effortlessly fluid over time.
The degree of rigidity and fluidity of a person (and their "fluidity trajectory") are dependent on personal causal history and self-transformative practice/method or life context.
Practices/methods/contexts can be things like professional training, insight meditation, concentration meditation, personal time and task management, philosophical training, other academic methodologies, and so on.
Arguably, a method that is not "fully-self-reflective-at-the-finest-aconceptual-phenomenological-grain" will eventually produce diminishing returns and eventually net negative returns. A method sort of, perhaps, has to be able to eat itself until there is no method and no other remainder, as it were. Anything less will have lots of benefits but will eventually entrench things like those in the loose, informal list above, repeated here: phenomenological/epistemic constraints, behavioral rigidities, behavioral/psychological/emotional entrenchment, unreflectiveness, "missing concepts," "'missing' emotions/capacities," etc.
(Trauma, misfortune, and intense life history will start a person off with more of the items in the above list and with a greater degree of any particular item, loosely speaking.)
Part of the reason a method sort of needs to be able to eat itself is that "method-ification" and "tool-ification" of "bodymind," making transformative practice "separate," making it into a "thing," is already really distortive and problematic, though sometimes, in a sociohistorical context, a net win, if that problematicity is accounted for.
Note, this is so hard. As far as I'm aware, just by way of an aside, there was plenty of politics, violence, assassinations in native Buddhisms, throughout history. Hindu contemplatives, highly enlightened, were often warriors, for better and worse, as far as I'm aware. And, people, even with good method, with have a few "deeply hidden/entrenched issues [see the list above]" that will need many years to be addressed.
*
Now, an "anti-buddha" (or whatever), can be very historically problematic. I'm using the rather extreme term anti-buddha because there's a sense in which they really actually "go against" the "metaphysical (non-)truths" that are revealed through correct meditative practice, and they can spread that "perfect antispirituality."
For example, first, in some meditative traditions, enlightenment involves navigating extremes between nihilism and eternalism, including "positive" non-reification, "positive emptiness," nebulosity, no-thing-ness, no-goal-ness, etc.
But, an anti-buddha (or a sophisticated warlord, cult leader, persuasive politician, etc.) will tear down other people's ideas with (a) weaponized nihilism and bullshit (in the technical sense) and will try to entrap people (deliberately or by hillclimbing what works) with "eternal" ideas, or "eternal versions" of ideas--god, nationalism, "the future," "necessity." Often, too, there will be apocalyptic imagery offering partial hope but with exhorted resignation on yet more things, producing a sort of aimable zombie hopelessness. (This sketch made some leaps and could be made more mechanistic.) Often they deeply believe in some of their eternalisms and others are insincere affectations, in some complex, shifty combination.
The way things can start, for a relatively rigid coordinator, is that a person can be missing things from childhood, can feel rejected, alone, confused, etc., so they might become fascinated with ideas or texts. If such a text has a thing to do then they might start doing it. And if it seems to help, they might double-down again and again.
This could be a sort of (unrecognized-as-such, except perhaps in retrospect) Faustian bargain anti-meditation, at least in part. It could a narrowly deployed "philosophical method." or dialectical method, or "figuring out what’s wrong with things," or a type of meditation, and so on.
If the method is very incomplete, then use of it might safely produce positive then diminishing returns without further effects.
If the method is relatively complete, but not complete enough, then this is the potential danger zone.
At some point, before engagement with a method, or during, the invidual may have acquired rigid fetishizations and goals.
A fetish is an ("eternal") stand-in, a "false idol," born out of seeming necessity due to confused nihilism, that sort of narrowly and myopically strips away or abstract details and adjacent features from something, and then the attainment of it seemingly promises safety and fulfillment, in some deeply, cosmically felt way. Note, fetishes are often harmless, sexual or otherwise, and generally the best thing to do with them is to enjoy them, and to meditate, the combination of which will eventually, maybe very long-term, self-alignedly evaporate them.
But "fetishes" are more problematic when they coercively involve people at scale. Problematic ones can be sort of "twisted eternal goodnesses," like creepily wanting to make everyone the same (or needing everyone to be the same), or needing people to be "unified," on some deeply warped and creepy "spiritual/cosmic" way. And externalities are ignored or downplayed or deemed "necessary" costs or collateral.
Anyway, a person will be rigidly pursuing fetishized goals (and also often have additional shadow or possibly coercive reproductive goals, that are somehow entangled with the other more surface fetishized goals).
And so if their method is relatively complete but not complete enough, it will help them get closer and closer to realizing seeming instantiations of the fetish/goal, but the method will also be causing them to "run out of mental 'slack', mentally/behaviorally painting them into a corner, pulling them tight.
Sometimes, the person's effectiveness to influence people and the world will go down, but they might still have enough effectiveness to do local damage at some scale. Additionally, they'll have often acquired even more behavioral rigidity and expanded "nihilistic holes"; they'll be even more fixated on their narrow goals, because of how the method was ekking out more solutions/effectiveness/etc. The plans can become more and more grandiose, involving "'noble' lies," "terrible necessities," and so on.
(Relatively rigid coordinators sometimes supplement an incomplete method with faith healers, "shamans," witches, bad occultism [which makes use of confusions between "reality" and illusion] and more. They can help a rigid coordinator squeeze out more slack in their method, eventually causing further rigidity. Sometimes, such healers, etc., are helping the person be less rigid, too. In any case, attendants/collaborators like this are something to keep an eye out for.)
As the person keeps applying their method, there can be a "sealing off," where critiques, outside corrections, pleas are fodder for smug, triumphalist dismissals and dehumanizations. ("People who are not overtly trying to become strong are weak, second class," etc.)
To the degree a relatively rigid coordinator successfully influences other people, aside from more overt violence, financial ruin, lost years, etc., there is something like, generally, "out-of-ordering" people.
With an incomplete method, a relatively rigid coordinator will encounter "seeming hard truths, too soon." That is, they'll encounter twisted versions of the truth (or they'll be too young to unconfusedly interpret what they're exposed to), so "kind of right truths", but with terrible implications for self and others. And then, they'll sort of force those "terrible, hard truths" on other people. To the degree that people are receptive, they might somewhat tie themselves in knots to sort of reify those "hard truths," and so those people may try to change "out of order," in self-harming ways.
The ideal thing would be to encounter challenging things about the world in graded ways that lead to up-front metabolization, integration, empowerment, etc. But the relatively rigid coordinator can sort of push people onwards, reflectively or unreflectively, intentionally or unintentionally, sometimes in a sort of blood-from-a-stone sort of way, and there can be terrible local costs or even ones that reverberate through history.
Finally, an anti-buddha might even be "anti-bodhisatva" because of expanding and exponentially compounding nth-order effects. I'm going to allude to "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff, discussed elsewhere in the document. But something analogous applies for just bog-standard "norm erosion" and "character erosion," by example. (Also I don't mean to imply that "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff has more than anything general and incidental to do with buddhas and bodhisatvas, materialist/physicalist/steelmanned, and/or idealized, and otherwise.):
Someone applying incomplete methods is more likely to have magnified and problematic "psychic"/"siddhi" stuff going on, which can lead to contagious fantasy/reality confusion as well as increased "psychic contagion" in general. ("Reality" is generally a fluid, personal thing, modulo non-inappropriately-reified "truth," all things being equal, but there can be particularly problematic possible confusion.) Then, if that person or anyone else in the environment, also has violent ideation, which would otherwise be private and known-to-be-non-real, people might pick up on the ideation, on some level feel like it's real, and this can lead to interpersonal escalating paranoia cycles and even physical violence.
*
In some sense, we all sort of want to be left alone to grow and play, to acquire wider ambitions, deeper intimacies, wider vistas, at our own pace.
But, sometimes, just like in the books or movies, a looming darkness or more local problem, can sort of force its way into a pastoral setting, sometimes from very slowly and initially from far off.
There are perhaps large-scale, secular trends, global boom and bust cycles [7,8], that are more likely to produce "buddhas" and "anti-buddhas," as it were.
The antidote to "anti-buddhas" is, well, say, "buddhas," but, rather, just in the sense that the maybe-historical buddha was allegedly the discoverer and purveyor of relatively better methods of self-transformation (all things being equal).
If an otherwise-anti-buddha encountered a compelling text or teacher, that had the quality of being relatively very hard to distort or warp or practice incorrectly, that was "relatively complete," in some sense, then they would be less likely to go "full anti-buddha."
(It may be the case that, if they aren't closed off enough, giving an anti-buddha recognizably better methods might cause them to viciously (in a good way) engage with them to become something that is no longer an anti-buddha. (There might be a transient period where they are temporarily more dangerous, and there could be some tail risk that they'd permanently become much more dangerous, if something contingently remained still "stuck.")
Additionally, anti-buddhas aside, transformative practices can directly help individuals become able to participate in the creation and renewal of institutions, for an ever-more-positive-sum world.
Good methods, directly and indirectly, can be used for deescalation and creation. And a fully complete method is, in some sense, perhaps, a very narrow range of things, indeed. (Though, it will include expansive reverie, long aimless walks, creatively, play, etc.)
*
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/sketching-alternatives-to-straw-realism-international-and-group-relations-draft2500-words/ Last accessed: 2021-02-20]
[This is a really compressed draft. Some stuff is introduced or "marked" really abruptly and isn’t given time to breath.]
I’m just pulling a bunch of this stuff off of wikipedia, quick first-pass, and indiscriminately mixing in... other stuff. If you’re a Great Power, don’t take advice from me about international relations. (<– Yes, this is a joke. –>) Just saying.
So let’s consider (my hasty conception of) a straw realist [1]. Jumping right in, you may have to re-read this or click some links, and I’m mixing wikipedia-grade international relations with crackpot psychology, the straw realist seeks to be the stably uncontested leader of a hegemon, because being the leader of a hegemon is the greatest personal/familial/tribal protection against (totalizing? [2]) subjugation or annihilation.
It’s probably a good idea to highlight the distinction between (a) the straw realist and (b) the straw hegemon. A hegemon can change leaders while remaining a hegemon. And, there’s at least two perspectives one could take when abstractly conceiving a straw hegemon. First, one could simplify things by conceiving of a (perfect/ideal/abstract/straw) hegemon as having a unified will/intention. But one could also profitably conceive of a hegemon as "fractal power relations all the way down to the level of straw realists." That is, one could conceive of a hegemon as being composed of straw realists vying for total power. In this latter case, in some sense, this "hegemon" is maybe technically no longer a (perfect/ideal/abstract/straw) hegemon. The left hand might not know what the right hand is doing. The "entity conceived as such" may act against itself at times or just kind of blob out, in a lot of wasted time/money/energy/trust/something, because everybody is sort of fearfully, myopically striving for total power. (Again, this is a straw conception.)
So, now let’s unpack and critique the "straw realist."
Again, the straw realist single mindedly seeks total power because they believe it’s the best plan for being safe. Note that the straw realist is a fearful pessimist and doesn’t believe they’ll ever actually be safe. They are resigned to deep-down, terrified paranoia, forever. But, even given that resignation, seeking total power is still the best plan under a tiniest sliver of hope for safety. The fear of a straw realist is perhaps a fear of psychological, social, and/or bodily annihilation, with no hope of salvation.
But! What if!
Sender criteria:
Receiver criteria:
Let’s call a person (or group) that has all of both the sender criteria and the receiver criteria a "straw enlightened person" (or group).
So! What if!
What if all people and thus all groups were straw enlightened? Then there would be nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative synergy! We could then solve suffering, health, coercion, energy, mortality, and existential risk! (Oops, circularities abound!)
"Ah ha!" says the straw realist! "But there is no button to push to have that! One way or another, we ended up with warlords and tribes, and then we ended up with global competition and great powers! Anarchy yields global competition and great powers! And I, the straw realist, will even admit that no one necessarily wants this! I might even admit that our very actions cause it! [3] But, there is no other way, because people are not naturally altruistic beyond family or tribe. Even ‘self-interested altruism,’ strategic generosity, grace, magnanimousness, isn’t really ‘intrinsic,’ isn’t really ‘sincere,’ and is unstable. And so we have the world today. At the bottom of everything is threat of violence and fear of suffering and death. That is what power is, threat or actualization of violent coercion, and it’s the only thing that matters."
There’s a lot of circularity and confirmation bias in the straw realist position directly above, but it’s good enough, for our purposes. (Heh.)
International relations theory has of course thought about all this stuff (and more thoroughly and completely than I have, that could go without saying). This blog post isn’t even a survey; there’s a gazillion concepts and buzzwords (and shibboleths) that I haven’t mentioned. Somewhat relevantly, here, there’s ideas like "decentralization" and "nonpolarity." These terms can be used very precisely within a particular paradigm, but decentralization might be something like spreading out power inside of group. And nonpolarity [4] might be something like power spread out between groups, to the point that no single group has particularly dominating power, along maybe a single dimension or net across all relevant dimensions. Decentralization and nonpolarity are critiqued in a straw realist paradigm, maybe using straw liberalism [5] as the containing foil.
Anyway, so, as we look at the world, at the time of this writing, we arguably don’t see hot wars (arguably, because proxy battles/wars [6] are a thing, if you know where/how to look). And, arguably, we do see, maybe, cold wars, depending on how the term "cold war" is defined. But... like... maybe things are chilling out, overall? Proxy stuff aside (and that’s a big aside), I think it’s at least (contentiously) argued that democracies don’t go to war with each other? And, roughly speaking, with some dips, poverty is being alleviated to a greater degree with each passing year?
So maybe things are "fine," modulo continued human suffering, and getting reliably "more fine," with each passing year?
The straw realist might say that all the "fine" and "getting more fine" is a veneer or at least very fragile: "At the bottom is fear, threat, and selfishness or tribalism, and everything is held together, barely, by bluff or commitment to credible violence, nuclear weapons, domestic police or peace officers, or otherwise: USA/Russia/China/whoever, these visions of the world are different–goodness and especially safety LOOK DIFFERENT to different powers, and irreconcilably so. Heck, deep-down, some people think the best way to ‘save’ the world is to ‘destroy’ it, first! So trust is naive. Nuclear weapons, space weapons, and unstoppable, undetectable micro-drone assassinations, that look like naturally caused death are all there is. [non-straw-realist/editor’s note: As far as I know, the latter micro-drones don’t currently exist and maybe can’t practically exist or be worthwhile.] And global warming, pandemics, fast global travel, and globe-spanning weaponry are only making things more fragile."
***
If one would like to gaze into the abyss, one can even dive into a deep well of fear and paranoia. One might even think they have only two choices, between (1) a "normal," intimate, safe life. (A powerless life???????? An ignorant life?????????) And then (2) some sort of abyss-gazing thing that, extreme worst case, accidentally gets themselves "disappeared," through maybe some impulse to act in the face of seeming-otherwise meaninglessness or feared-inconsequentiality.
And, so...
How do these questions get answered?
On the one hand, we are products of our environment: tv, influential peers and elders, google filter bubbles, one’s personal propensity to google...
We practically don’t even ever know there’s ever even a there, there, unless, sort of, someone points it out, hopefully in a gentle or uncoercive way.
[Side note: And, it’s good to ask, how does the person who does that pointing-out benefit from doing that pointing out, and from doing the pointing-out in that way, with that framing, in that context? And, it’s also good to go another layer up–who else, besides ostensibly you and the person doing the pointing-out, benefits from that person doing that pointing-out... As in, what led to that person being someone who does that pointing out? Causal history, years, decades, centuries, millenia back, grounded in relatively accurate conceptions of synchronic human nature.]
On the other hand, through the grace of serendipity, imperfect friends and mentors, that crazy google search, the spontaneous, inherent nature of our mind and will, there’s this other sense in which we are not products of our environment; we are something discontinuously more than the products of our environment, ever always striving towards transcendence of contingency and limitation, towards safety and wellbeing, perhaps in some causally consistent sense.
***
The way it can kind of go, is that some people are living an actually, truly, really good (enough) life. The whole world, at the moment, breaks down without machinists, truck drivers, automators, programmers, lawyers, doctors, stockers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, something. It’s not perfect, but, right here, right now, there are so many roles that are keeping the thing going. Sometimes it’s actually not that fragile, and sometimes it is. But all these roles are, at least in part, positively impacting other people, at least locally and partially. (And sometimes these roles are part of an actually, truly, really good (enough) life, and sometimes these roles are a part of life "led in quiet desperation." When life is hard, it’s hard; And, it often is. It just depends.) And/but, with these roles being enacted, the world keeps going, with a chance of getting to a better thing.
And then, for some other people, lots of people, it’s not an actually, truly, really good (enough) life: something is bad, somewhere. Maybe they determine that badness is in themselves, the world, or both.
And, as a solution to that badness, maybe they seek to escape or alleviate that badness, through, say, or spiritual enlightenment, or worldly power, or all sorts of less extreme things.
And some people find peace or intimacy or security along the way.
And some people might fall into an abyss, trying to figure out how they work, or people work, or the world works: One might get stuck, at least for a time, thinking that the world can’t work or the truth is too terrible. And, they might inadvertently, circularly be confirming to themselves the very seeming badness they wish to solve.
Sometimes, maybe often, people mistake childhood hurt or misinterpretation as the way the entire world works, the way the entire world must work, without remainder or alternative. And this straw trauma survivor is the straw realist.
But, through therapy, journaling, meditation, long walks in nature, friendship, intimacy–bottleneck can become process-in-context. Therapy, meditation, etc.–these are privileges, to be sure. They require just enough health, just enough money, just enough space, just enough time, if not an abundance, of all of these, and these things are unevenly distributed, and hard choices might be needed to determinedly acquire them.
***
Whatever the world is, what ever a life is, safe or unsafe, good or bad, desperate or secure–the heart beats, the lungs breath, gravity and oxygen and warmth and atmosphere persist and nourish, in this moment, and the next, and the next. In some sense, we will only ever know this.
So how do we live, in this world good/bad/safe/unsafe world, that, in any case, carries us in each moment of our lives?
We do so, perhaps, by just living, and, perhaps, also, self-transforming as we have time and as makes sense.
Only we can decide whether dark terribleness, is in us or in the world, and only we can determine how it got there in the first place. The is epistemic agency and also well-being agency. [7]
Is the world good or bad? Now or later? Is your life good or bad? Now or later? And do the answers ultimately depend on self or world?
In SOME nontrivial sense, maybe the only sense that ultimately matters, it’s up to you.
And what of international relations? Or inter-group relations? Escalations and security dilemmas? And impulsive, fear-driven violence that has already happened, tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, over and over again, personal and generational histories of trauma?
Can we all be straw enlightened people or groups? Is it too late?
There’s maybe a piece left out of the criteria above. I know they’re phrased awkwardly, but I chose the words pretty carefully, single pass, if you’ll look at them again. I’ve copied them again, here, exactly:
Sender criteria:
Receiver criteria:
Ok, but then, one more time, the straw realist says, "Well, I hate people, and/or I think your culture is disgusting, and/or the world must be burned to the ground to save it. Or, if I don’t think that, someone else will. So what of your ideals or beautiful aspirations? Violent power is what matters; violent power is security. And then the whole thing is just waiting to blow up."
So there’s maybe one more point to make, with the sender/receive criteria. (And, again, this is draft. There could be so many issues.)
The better one embodies the sender/receiver criteria, the safer it is to become recognizably and actually strong. You will be less likely triggered into doing impulsive, destructive things that are hard to take back, even if you have some capability to do so. You’ll be less likely to trigger other people into doing impulsive, destructive things that are hard to take back, even if they have some capability to do so. And actors with the propensity to lead with violence will think twice, because of credible capability or at least a carefully measured, adequate response. And, all the while, the sender/receiver criteria maximize the possibility for diplomacy, communication, synchronous de-escalation, collaboration.
The details matter, to be sure. Getting erroneously triggered doesn’t always feel like getting erroneously triggered. Seeing threat where there is or isn’t threat is deeply contingent and has to be meta managed by personal transformative practice or norms or formality, etc. Signs and signals are deeply contingent. Something that feels nonviolent to one party may initially feel very violent to another party (and actually be contingently violent). Something, somewhere, needs to be sensitive and responsive. Someone, somewhere will need to grow and change, and there can be strong initial disagreements about who/how/when/where. And the world is weird. There are dragons and surprises.
But there is always a way forward. You can have 200% responsibility, including making up for regrettable mistakes.
And, sometimes, the option space is very large and good, given enough time...
Some might find, through service or practice, the sense, compatible with materialism, physicalism, naturalism, in which humans are, deep-down, at the very bottom, spontaneously compassionate, kind, loving, while simultaneously being discerning and strong, in a way that allows them to interact closely and intensely with others, despite differences, in the service of valued mutual goals and live-and-let-live.
One might keep asking, what does the best safely reachable world look like? And, it might look very different from this one. And the way to get there might look very strange, while maybe necessarily being a path that is humane, non-authoritarian, and non-coercive, nonviolent while still self-recognizably requiring challenging growth and change for many. All the details matter; if you’ll permit me: we’re all paranoid, indignant humans, myself included. And there are real predators among us and within all of us, though they deserve compassion and a recognition of the sense in which this is not our true nature. And/but, while the stakes are real, in any case, so much is so good, now; and, in this exact very moment you are safe; and nothing is required of you; you have no duty, there is no judge; and that best safely reachable world might look very good, indeed...
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/04/23/karma-losslessness-developmental-stage-models-violence-world-including-ken-wilber-and-robert-kegan-draft-6000-words/ Last accessed: 2021-02-20]
[These ideas are not all my own. They draw from so many people, not all of whom are explicitly named below.]
[If you lose the thread a lot, it’s me, not you. This is a draft.]
To get things going, we’re going to mix a bunch of metaphors, here. First I’ll sketch two quick starter metaphors, then I’ll mix them, and then I’m going to mix in more metaphorical stuff as we go.
Metaphor part 1:
One can imagine the operation of the bodymind to be something like a huge, three-dimensional tetris game. [1] Normal two-dimensional tetris has tetraminoes, and, in this three-dimensional case, we have tetracubes. [2] (There is an actual videogame called Tetrisphere [3], although it works a bit differently than with descending blocks, as in two-dimensional tetris.)
Remember, in tetris, the goal is to free up space, for more incoming tetraminoes, by arranging currently descending tetraminoes, so that they, and already placed tetraminoes, disappear.
Metaphor part 2:
As we take actions in the world and have experiences, one could imagine that we (our bodyminds) are each something like a gas giant planet [4], like Jupiter or Saturn. There’s space. There’s a gravity well. There’s a three-dimensional center. Maybe there’s a small, rocky core, floating in the center of the gas giant, utterly dwarfed in scale by the size of the gas giant surrounding it.
Metaphors mixed:
Ok, so we’re taking actions in the world, and we’re having experiences, and one could imagine that every experience we have is a new tetramino/tetracube: There’s these shapes continually appearing in the atmosphere of that gas giant. And while we’re moving around in the world and thinking, shapes are slowly descending, and more shapes are appearing.
Another piece:
And now consider that every single tetramino is connected to every single other tetramino by strings. It’s a complete graph, where the tetraminoes are the vertices and the strings are the edges. As new tetraminoes get added in the far atmosphere, near the edge of space, those strings magically appear.
Another piece:
And now consider that all of this is happening inside of a cardboard box–the gas giant, the tetraminoes, the strings–that box is getting filled with tetraminoes, over time, as you move about in the world and think.
Ok, so just like in tetris, say as tetraminoes descend and touch down, far below, and more tetraminoes continue to descend, particular columns (or, in three-dimensions, regions) can start to stack up towards the sky.
So, in particular places, that cardboard box surrounding everything can start to bulge, in different three-dimensional directions. It’s not game over, but it can mean muscle tension, rigid behavior, increased blood pressure, stress, difficulty sleeping, irritability, and so on, because somehow this is all also the bodymind.
Another piece:
In this game, tetraminoes don’t disappear, they never disappear, but let’s say each tetramino, really, tetracube, can nest perfectly inside tetracubes of the same type, without taking up any additional volume. Let’s say there’s alway at least one "side" of a tetracube that is permeable. So, if one can move things around enough, to get enough strings out of the way, and one can line up two similarly-shaped tetracubes, then one can "shrink the number of tetracubes in play" and "create additional space" inside the box, by fitting one tetracube inside another. One could do this for thousands, millions of tetracubes, billions, over and over again across a lifetime.
This isn’t a perfect metaphor, because this is sort of potentially topologically impossible, given a "reified" complete graph, depending on the length or stretchiness of the strings. to do this "space creating" move an astronomically vast number of times, without getting things ever move tangled.
But pretend this can be done "perfectly" or "cleanly," indeed an astronomically vast number of times, and it is like a puzzle–you might be carefully rotating and nudging shapes for hours, weeks, months, finding little wins, even locally making more of a mess to find some of those little wins. And then maybe every once in a while, you get things lined up right, and vast three-dimensional spaces collapse into themselves, huge whooshes, perfectly, without messy remainder. But, very often, amidst those small, medium, and huge wins, there’s a tremendous amount of compensation and re-compensation going on: all the little tuggings you’re doing are tugging, fractionally, on every single other piece in the entire box. Locally wins might be causing columns to rise and bulging to happen on some distant region of the box, even faster than tetraminoes are falling in that part of the space.
So this is a vast, global, combinatorial optimization problem.
But the wins are highly nonlinear. somehow this metaphor relates to brain synapses, protein synthesis, axon potentials, and the physical movement of the body. But I want to give handwavey, metaphorical sense of scale. Say like the cardboard box is the size of earth, even though we were talking about gas giants. And let’s say that things can go from that box just bulging with tetraminoes, to huge wins shrinking the number of tetraminoes in play–from filling a space the size of the earth to filling a space the size of a basketball/football/soccer ball. Planet earth versus a sport ball. I’m just handwaving here, and maybe this is starting to get particularly misleading, phenomenologically speaking, but I want to give a sense of how much "compression" is possible. And, remember, the shapes fit perfectly. So it’s NOT like there’s a lot of "potential energy," like that basketball is straining to explode. It’s an effortless, stable, forget-about-it perfect fit.
One could say that this space-saving corresponds to elegance, simplicity, parsimony provisional "occam’s razor-ness" in, I’m just handwaving, here, say, (a) elegant "beliefs" (or how the world seems or appears) and/or (b) how the world appears, and/or (c) multifinal goals, and/or (d) elegant solutions to life’s problems, and/or (e) social grace, and/or (f) physical grace, and so on.
Furthermore, the process of "making space," "making room," this "puzzle-solving," can correspond to something like resolving inconsistencies, contradictions, contention. Theoretical elegance, informally (and maybe idiosyncratically) speaking, is something like "the greatest explanatory power, with the fewest number of theoretical elements, with the smallest number of anomalies (of which can perhaps generate those contradictions, depending on what’s "signal"/explained and what’s "noise"/anomaly.)" Anyway, theory-building can get very formal, and let’s say we’re still being metaphorical here. I’m talking about the version of this at "the bare metal," theory building, action planning, and so forth, as the spontaneous activity of mind, including with "raw phenomenological correletes."
(Another thing to keep in mind is that there cannot be arbitrary states changes. To get to a particular state, this system has to move through intermediate states, necessarily. No discontinuities. There might be an optimal path and maybe a series of necessary bottlenecks, but a bunch of other states could be explored or backtracked on the way from point A to point B (which will generally not be known or accurately conceived of in advance.))
Losslessness part 1:
Now, I want to emphasize something in particular about this metaphor–and that is its losslessness. All the strings are still there, somehow, all the nested shapes are still there.
And, in fact, while puzzle-solving, to make more room, sometimes we will need to unnest already nested tetraminoes to find new configurations that save even more space. Sometimes we’ll need to unnest vast numbers of them, over and over again, to figure out a different, more elegant global solution, as tetraminoes keep coming in.
Developmental stage models:
Ok, now let’s talk about developmental stage models. Ken Wilber has collated a bunch of these, and I think he personally refers to fulcrums and vertical development, among other things. There’s Jane Loevinger’s ego development, with Susan Cook-Greuter’s extensions. There’s Piaget, Carol Gilligan, Lawrence Kohlberg, Spiral Dynamics, Kegan, James Fowler, and so on. These tend to be psychologically flavored, edging into the so-called spiritual.
And then there’s stuff like Aurobindo’s work, that has maybe an epistemological-moral-spiritual focus. And this maybe edges into "cultural" stage models. And ditto Hegel. I’m just sketching; I’m going to get a lot of details wrong.
Meditation, spirituality, and developmental stage models:
The relationship between meditation and developmental stage models is somewhat contentious.
A lot of meditation teachers downplay or deny the relationship between meditation and adult development, perhaps in part because spiritual/meditation gurus can use claims about their own development for coercion of authoritarian purposes. And adult development, as a set of ideas, can greatly muddy meditation pedagogy, theory, and practice. It’s very helpful to keep meditation instructions, even meditation progress maps, as spartan and minimal as can be.
But meditation does seem to go through stages, so it seems natural to try to line up meditative stages, somehow, with developmental stages. Meditation stages might be something like, I don’t know:
(The above lines up a tiny bit, in places, with the classical stages/progress of insight, but that’s a tighter/shorter loop, as it were.)
Ok, anyway:
So there’s the elegance stuff from farther above (elegant believing/seeming, social grace, physical grace, multifinal goals and plans). That can sort of be arranged in "stages" or along a gradient.
And there’s the meditation stages immediately above.
And then there’s the adult developmental stages research constructs above.
I do think they’re kind of all the same thing, but I’m not just handwaving it all together. I want to connect it all to the metaphor above.
So the bodymind is vast, right? That tetramino gas giant thing. And there’s that highly nonlinear "elegancing," problem solving, something.
Ken Wilber talks about a person’s psychograph, being able to plot where a person is on along different, semi-separable lines of development: cognitive, moral, etc.
He notes that the cognitive line kind of bounds progress along the other lines (think something vaguely like IQ, maybe). I would call that line maybe "spatiotemporal phenomenological-conceptual grain" line. These are models, theories, metaphors. (Note that "IQ" and phenomenological grain are highly malleable, within-person. Remember that nonlinearity: planet earth to soccer ball sizes.)
I want to generalize "semi-separable" beyond just the "cognitive" line. Remember the complete graph of the tetraminoes. I want to add something like the concept of "slack" or "give" or "slop." The mind is anything but noisy or sloppy, once you really start paying attention. But, one can rearrange things a lot, as it were, before the cardboard box starts bulging. There’s enough slack for a person to be heavily developed on some lines and less developed on others. And there’s enough slack for a person to be pretty far on the meditation line but still be underdeveloped in other ways.
People like to say that there is no "general skill acquisition," that skill acquisition is concrete and situational, always. But, that’s clearly not true. People can learn how to learn, unlearn learned helplessness, and so on, all things being equal. There’s a sense in which this is just as contingent as any other "skill," but there’s clearly something more general or special about it too.
This is too quick and jumpy of a segue, but I would claim something in the space of "meditation" as being the "most special" of skills. It doesn’t have to be formal meditation: people who are flexible, proactive, and resilient might be uneven/fragile/lumpy in various ways and in various unfortunate contexts, but they’re probably doing something meditation-y, as I define it, somewhere in their minds and life.
the meditation paradox:
Ok, but do we even think of meditators as flexible, proactive, or resilient?!
Meditation teachers, sometimes, are held in esteem for their wisdom, compassion, social grace, or spiritual grace. Sometimes that list includes philosophical skill or administrative skill (e.g. running monasteries or entire religions).
But the meditation students?
There’s the cliche of broken monks. And don’t meditators often seem to be, maybe a bit more relaxed in some ways but maybe more anxious in others, sometimes?
So meditation is good(?) but meditators aren’t generally that impressive? A paradox.
I would point to at least three things:
To take all of these, briefly:
nonmonotonicity:
As we saw above in the tetris model, sometimes things have to be greatly unpacked before they can be properly repacked with incoming tetraminoes. There can’t be instantaneous and arbitrary new packings. There has to be intermediate states, and some of them can be problematic, some of the time, all things being equal. And all this happens in real time–weeks, months, years.
the state of meditation pedagogy:
Generally speaking, meditation instruction is just not good at efficiently moving people along on the general path towards more elegance, noncontradiction, noncontention. This is for many reasons beyond the scope of this post.
cultural disprivilege of meditating:
This somewhat connects with the bullet above. Efficient meditation is time consuming and money or relationship consuming–and risky–in terms of health and life counterfactuals. And there isn’t a lot of cultural support, depending on the culture. One could say something, here, about institutions, knowledge transfer, and so on.
contingent life tradeoff imbalance:
(This will be discussed below.)
meditation and stages redux and problems and solutions and power and the world:
Ok, paradox aside for the moment, grant me that some ideal form of meditation, in the limit, all things being equal, gets you things like better beliefs, plans, goals, behavior, and so forth.
What should or could this limit look like, ideally, a bit more concretely?
Tantra does talk about personal power, which might involve charisma. And, hopefully it’s the nonviolent kind. We’ll get to that.
Let’s talk about a "normal life" and then talk about some edge cases.
Say a person born into a normal life, whatever that is, contingently ends up being pretty good at the tetris game, relatively speaking. They had a childhood that didn’t tangle things up too much, and they had time and space to play, run around, stare at the ceiling, just enough, again, to be relatively pretty good at that tetris game. And so life happens, they’re exposed to opportunities, they contingently develop interests and skills, and have pretty engaging plans, friends, intimacy, family, etc. Problems come up, and they do ok puzzle-solving them.
Ok, next example, now let’s say someone does something which I’ll call "acquiring a linear ratchet." In this case, based on activity within and experience without, they can really good at the puzzle game in a particular region. This translates to some kind of skill in the world, albeit potentially fragile or brittle or highly contextually bounded. They might find this skill or region because something did go wrong/bad in childhood, so they’re desperately casting about, and they get relatively lucky. (Or maybe they got really lucky by just having a great mentor, without something really bad happening to them, to make them desperate.)
One could consider an ideal style of meditation to be a "most general or fundamental linear ratchet."
(Anyway, it may be that it’s more likely for (a) bad things to happen in childhood than there are to be (b) ok childhood’s with a decent supply of excellent mentors. So it may be the case that most people are casting about for a "linear ratchet" to compensate for their life situation or puzzle solving to be suboptimal in other ways, with problems compounding on top of problems.)
Let’s consider a few cases, one of having a bunch of problems and not encountering a linear ratchet. And then a few general cases of acquiring a linear ratchet.
So let’s say a person is traumatized, and their puzzle-solving system gets tangled up. They might have problems on top of problems–health problems, interpersonal problems, attention/learning/something problems, meaning/purpose problems, and so on. I mean, they might not be traumatized–this is also just life! Life is hard! Anyway, usually a person in this situation will be making hard tradeoffs. They might have great friends but their money situation is not what they want it to be. Or vice versa. Or money is going well but health is suffering. Or they have friends and money but they don’t have the time to figure out intimacy. And the cultural milieu will contingently make some things harder than other things, in general, or contingently, for that particular person.
Ok, now let’s consider a person, who got really tangled up, and so they’re desperately casting around, and they do find some kind of linear ratchet. Let’s make two straw categories, one focused on the world within and one focused on the world without.
So, taking the world within, let’s say this person latched on to philosophy, mathematics, programming, something, early on as a life solution, so it was intrinsically fascinating. They might traverse this line just enough to not make too hard of tradeoffs in their life: enough money, enough intimacy, and so forth. But let’s say that something is still just not quite working. So, because this is their main ratchet, they might double down, deeper and more abstract philosophy, more powerful mathematics, more esoteric programming languages. Let’s say this really starts to shear against friendships, or tenure, or the programming languages that are good for getting jobs. But, there’s just something so compelling there, for them. Sometimes this leads to a hobby on nights and weekends, sometimes madness, sometimes repeated breakthroughs that can be traded for money or other goods (sometimes this feels amazing and sometimes it feels like selling out or a terrible distraction).
And, if we take the other case, the world without, I haven’t studied the psychology of highly successful professionals, world leaders, and so on: Some of these people are quite "balanced," and we’ll discuss this more below. But, some of these people are trying to fill some void within themselves or to escape some pain, and so they ratchet, double down on acquiring influence, resources, and so on. This can be quite healthy, but it can also be very lopsided. Many influential people of course have shaped the world in mixed ways, enabling coordination and discoveries that have improved so many lives but at arguable cost, which we’ll talk about below.
A sketch of the meditation ratchet
Ok, so let’s say someone picks up an ideal form of meditation.
(I’m not saying my current stuff is in any way ideal, by the way. Maybe wait for me to be either really happy or really successful, or wait for version 500 instead of version 84 (the current version at the time of this writing). But, if you’ve read all the warnings and qualifiers, join us now!)
Anyway, let’s sketch a thing:
According to Ken Wilber, the impetus of stage development is encountering problems that cannot be solved at the current stage. "Mo money mo problems"/"Mo stages mo problems."
[I forgot to put this above, but I think there’s a few not terrible research papers that give support for people moving through some stage models faster if they’re meditators (or if they cross-train, e.g. they’re weight-lifters in addition to X.]
Ok, so if someone is going up in stages, they’re going to become more discerning, and they’re going to realize new and creative (and horrifying) ways in which their problems are not in fact yet solved.
And, if someone has accelerated this process through a quality meditation system, this is going to be even more pronounced. Recall the nonmonotonicity described above.
Recall that often a person is casting about for a ratchet because something kind of went wrong with their puzzle-solving system. Meditation is a pretty extreme ratchet, and it’s pretty hard to find quality meditation instructions. So, one might imagine that a person reaching for meditation, and then doubling down and seeking better and better meditation instruction might have a lot of trauma/something/X. (Again, it could also be the case that they lucked out in stumbling on quality instructions or mentors that they were able to trust and follow.)
Ok, so here’s a person who maybe had some bad stuff happen to them, and maybe reacted really impulsively to that bad stuff (because they didn’t know any better) and then those impulsive solutions begat even more difficult problems. Maybe they fucked up their life even more. And meanwhile their stumbling towards more and more effective meditation. And, if it kind of works, things are getting better. ...... BUT suddenly things are also getting worse! Because, correctly or incorrectly, they’ve ascertained that the world is even harder than they thought it was! More dangerous! More scary! At least seemingly!
(And so people can get stuck in sort of this valley of bad meditation, where they’ve gotten just far enough to make things seem even harder than they were before, and it’s overwhelming to figure out what to do next, because maybe they’re running out of money or relationship capital, and they’re thinking and acting suboptimally. This is really hard stuff.)
(By the way, I can definitely map my life to aspects of this, but I’m not just straight-up describing myself!)
So this gets into things like the horrors of the self, or the horrors of one’s goals, or the horrors of the world. Regarding the self, one might find themselves judging themselves, transiently, seemingly, as terribly, irredeemably bad/useful/evil/hateful/something. Regarding the horrors of one’s goals, one might find, transiently, seemingly, that one’s goals are too hard, too fantastical, too self-serving, too immoral, and so on. Regarding the horrors of the world, one might be struck, seemingly, transiently at how tooth-and-claw everything is: it seems like we did get pretty close to nuclear war, maybe. Assassinations do happen. People do get "disappeared." Individual people are more harmful than you previously thought possible, again at least transiently or seemingly. There is existential tail risk, for self and world. Also, there’s the problems of suffering, mortality, intimacy, eschatology, cosmology. Holy shit. Before, maybe you just didn’t have the resources to think about some of these things, or you were able to find solace in both healthy and unhealthy ways.
If you’re lucky this’ll be sort of punctuated, things will get hard/depressing/scary/horrifying maybe just a little, maybe a lot, maybe you’ll experience fear, paranoia, dysregulation, but it’ll be relatively brief, or it’ll come in waves but they’ll be relatively brief swells. An unlucky version is kind of racing along and then smashing into all this headfirst at very high velocity and then one can be less functional for a very long time, including physical sequelae. Sometimes, there’s a period where something is wrong, but you don’t know what, or you’re just experiencing physical symptoms like muscle tension, and you don’t know why, and maybe they’re getting worse and worse, and then finally you kind of figure out what’s going on. And then weeks or months later there’s a big whoosh and you know, not just what it was all about, but also things are much better. Sometimes it’s not that clean and there’s a whoosh but lots more to do. And sometimes there’s a big whoosh but you need like five more big whooshes, and you don’t know what they’ll be or how far out they are, and it’s really unpleasant and scary.
(And this sort of circles back to the "contingent life tradeoff imbalance" thing above. Perhaps, because someone is meditating in the first place, in some ways, maybe, they might be "much deeper in a hole" than the average person, on at least one major dimension, maybe. So, not just "mo stages mo problems" but "really big old problem," or several. Of course, this is probably better than many, many other life situations, in the relative sense. Maybe better to have a ton of money or no childhood trauma, maybe, sometimes, but to have, say, a huge, crippling, truly experientially horrifying life problem [maybe buried somewhere deep-down] and also having enough resources to meditate and to seek quality meditation instructions–that’s maybe a really good life on net, depending on how everything shakes out.)
There’s kind of a tragic thing, here. What I call the "last gasp."
One is sort of making it safe to re-experience things, as part of how meditation works. So often a person will re-experience at least a shadow of old bad things, things that they thought were long resolved, in the course of a great deal of meditation. (One trap is thinking that they’re not making progress because this thing has come up more than one time. It’s 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. And they stop crushing. But say they haven’t fully worked through the thing under the crushing. If something happens in the world to trigger them, 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 you’ll be in old destructive patterns, 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 they can be, and to make amends and reparations, if warranted, in a way that actually delivers.
The world part 1:
Ok, but somehow this meditation thing just keeps going, you keep going. Naturally, inevitably, you don’t have to force it, you start being able to grasp more and more of the entire world. Previously, the world was this big, incomprehensible thing. Or like you could gesture at aspects of it. Or you hated learning about history or something. But remember the elegance from above, that "compression." And, in your life, "smaller" (though no less important) problems are getting solved. Intimacy is sort of making more sense. Social situations have a cognitive ease they didn’t have before. There’s more space, more time, your mind is clearer. (This is on the order of 4000 to 10000 hours of meditation in, or even more.) The gazillions of little details you had to sort of keep track of by reminding yourself, over and over again, are kind of filed away, things are just more handled, out into the future, or not, but you kind of know how you’re going to handle them, so you can kind of just do cumulatively constructive things in the moment. And so your scope and time horizon expands.
To be sure, your life still might be kind of a mess, and you might be making risky tradeoffs, paying for past suboptimalities. Karma–we’ll get to that in a little bit. But there’s more wellbeing, more strategy, longer time horizons, more of the world taken into account, all things being equal, on average, on net.
More and more you might be thinking, how the hell can this all (the world) possibly work better? Especially in times of crisis, it can be clear that there’s no one running this damn thing (the entire world). To be sure, there are powerful interests. But, bad world-scale stuff happens all the time, that is, things happen that are at least seemingly against at least one powerful interest. So wouldn’t they have stopped the bad thing if they could have? The whole damn thing just isn’t working as well as it could be. People are still suffering and dying. And that doesn’t just hurt in some distant way. Maybe it’s directly relevant to you, in many additional intrinsic ways than was the case before. You don’t just want people to not be hurting (or you’ve worked through a bunch of very normal ways in which you didn’t care about people, and now you do) but you can also see logistics and supply lines and entangled economies. Again, you’re not jamming this stuff into your head, though you might seek it out, out of interest. But because you really did solve that crushing intimacy/sex/friendship/love tangle, and, separately, you now are the living aesthetic expression you wanted to be, and, separately, you’ve sorted the crippling shame stuff or gender stuff, and, separately, you don’t think you’re stupid anymore, your mind just works better in ways you thought were impossible, for you–so thinking a bit about the economy, paying a little more attention to the world, doesn’t feel like this horrible detour from everything you care about. It’s just a natural, costless, intrinsically kind of interesting thing to do. (For some people the economy might have been part of one of their ratchets, of course.)
To be sure, whether it’s the economy or clean energy or politics or whatever, you’ll be wrong about so much (as most people are, "experts" included). But your mind is just working differently, now. You’re more of sponge than you ever were and you’re metabolizing things, integrating things more than you ever were.
the world part 2:
Ok, so how does this damn thing actually work? There are deep fundamentals, at least at the moment(!), the spatial extent of the planet, human neurology and general biology, the speed of light, the shape of the continents.
Things of course have changed, though:
Any random person on the planet can craft a tweet with a nonzero chance that the most powerful people in the world will read it, seconds later. This is happening. The world is changing, more opportunities, more dangers (bioweapons, accidental pandemics, nuclear weapons are still a thing, mass authoritarian surveillance.).
Losslessness part 2:
One thing a meditator starts to realize is that the mind, is shockingly lossless, as per the metaphor way above. Again, the mind is shockingly lossless.
We can forgive, call truces, compensate, forbear, but we don’t deep-down actually forget. And that’s ok! People do fight and still have intimate relationships. And plenty of interpersonal problems do deep-down get solved. Everyone is striving for good things in community.
But the unprocessed or tangled stuff that’s still around, down there, if one is reaching for better and better things–it usually becomes apparent that generally there is more processing to do.
What I mean to say is that two people who have kind of made peace with each other, if one or both of them start meditating, lots of stuff is going to come up again.
There’s even another thing. This losslessness goes between familial generations and cultural generations.
Familial generational trauma and cultural generational trauma gets passed along, with shockingly high fidelity. For some people this is already intensely apparent. And, for meditators, this becomes even more apparent.
This is part of seeing into personal, familial, and cultural karma. And this perhaps matters more than it ever did before. Again, your viral tweet or tiktok might get seen by the most powerful people in the world, within seconds, minutes, or hours.
We are all affecting each other, all over the planet, more than we ever have before.
And, as if that weren’t enough, so the cliche goes, the past isn’t even past! Generation to generation to generation, parent to child, mind to mind to mind to mind to mind...
In no particular order:
Descartes mind-body dualism and epistemology of doubt and certainty–so much good and so much bad.
Alexander the Great.
Genghis Khan.
The machinery of the Roman Empire.
The Old and New Testament.
Colonialism.
Genocides all over the planet.
So many historical events.
All of this lives in us, with shocking fidelity, again, down to the neurons, if you will. If there are no survivors, it lives in the murderers. As a meditator one can investigate this fidelity. The past isn’t past. Our minds are made out of it.
Astonishing cruelty and violence, couched in righteousness or necessity or plain old callousness. Sure, cruelty was maybe "different" back then. But the past isn’t past.
Astonishing goods have been produced. We live like kings (highly unevenly distributed); we reach for the stars (yay, but if only fewer people were in poverty, on earth, though it’s my understanding that there’s on average less and less each year. Probably not this year, though.)
And in any case, all that violence is still there. It’s still here. We’re all reaping that karma, as we are born, grow old, and die.
It seems that all violence breeds global-scale karma. It lives in the survivors, and, again, it lives in the murderers, even if there are no survivors.
This violence doesn’t go away, and it breeds individual and global karma.
Some of this violence is "solved" with more violence, violence layered on top of violence layered on top of violence. Hot wars on top of hot wars, cold wars on top of cold wars, proxy battles on top of proxy battles.
Technological solutions create astonishing wealth and slack, freeing up people to do good things for themselves and for other people. Technology allows people to be nicer to each other. Technology makes it easier for people to find nonviolent solutions and to heal past violence. And/but technology also breeds new types of violence, of course.
Anyway, not really a cliche, when we work on ourselves, when we ourselves are less reactive, wiser, more forgiving, gentler, it really does ripple through the internet, and across the entire planet, at a sizable fraction of the speed of light.
There’s naive ways to think about this. Sometimes recycling bin does just get dumped in the trash, you know? Sometimes little private behaviors are not cumulative in the wider world. But more are, hugely more, because of internet publication and internet virality than they have ever been before, at any time in history.
Ok, so there are those "little" behaviors, more and more of which are more significant than they ever have been before.
Now what of the big stuff?
Tentatively, taking the longest of long views, and hopefully every time horizon in between, the only workable future may involve something like deep understanding of noncoercion and nonviolence.
If it weren’t the case that minds remember, generation across generation across generation, maybe some sort of terrible hard tradeoff would be justified? Another modern Alexander the Great or something? Some great unifier. I’m not a historian or sociologist (yet?), but imagine some great unifying force that produced tremendous collateral damage, deaths, something. (Maybe this just can’t happen because of how global supply lines work.) But, say, when it was over, somehow that violent authoritarianism relaxed, but coordination remained, and was enhanced, and so poverty (for those remaining...) was eliminated, and stably so. And science, and healthcare, and so on flourished.
But, I think the above won’t work? Because violence is remembered, whether it’s physical or psychological domination. Even if there’s no survivors, that violence is carried in the murderers, across generations, and it comes out again.
Tentatively, tentatively, tentatively, again I’m not a historian or a sociologist, I think solutions are going to look more like Martin Luther King, jr and Mahatma Gandhi than, say, the conquerors of old, or "impartial" big data. Maybe the next Gandhi will utilize big data, though, to get the words just right, though they’ll still be speaking from their very soul. (I don’t know the ways in which, e.g., Gandhi was controversial. I’m sure there are a lot.)
It’s scary stuff; they were both assassinated.
Eh, but there’s also a particular deep sense in which nothing is required of you, except that which you can do and that which you wholeheartedly and heartfelt want to do. And, heh, global surveillance might end up going both ways, centralized and personalized/federated. It might become practically or politically impossible for anyone to be assassinated or "disappeared" ever again. I don’t know.
In any case, re nothing is required of you, you literally wouldn’t have to worry about it until you were actually really worried about it, as it were: People exemplifying extraordinary ease and wellbeing (and the low-key winning at life that comes with) are in short supply and desperately needed. Be the change you wish to see in the world, and all that.
Under the present realities of suffering, old age, sickness, and death, perhaps learn diplomacy, forbearance, second chances, nontriggeredness, non-coercion, non-violence, self-care, compassion, the best most skillful, most intelligent, ever-improving, self-forgiving versions of these, until that’s what you effortlessly, costlessly, spontaneously, just are.
One step at a time, one mind moment at a time.
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
(when I say "less than X hours," below (e.g. <20 hours) it's probably wayyyyyy less. I tried to do like a 90-90% confidence absolute ceiling)
First written protocol description:
[...]
Pure pixel-ish counterfactual queryable tower of Hanoi backchaining problem where can propose arbitrary x to see if work
Click-click; tinkering vs large-scale, make-it-so propagation..
Volitional-nonvolitional boundary, which can move
Whole-system; nay, whole-minvolitional-person(-to-me-right-now) dialoguing
Strategic claiming and disclaiming of volitionality. Like giving over an area to nonvolotiomality and then running volitional queries and requests in/on it vs trying volitional make-it-so
Mark L 7:50 PM
So I’m going to call the muscle tension done**, at least there’s no big twists/pressures left in the system, muscle-y or otherwise. **What’s left is sort of fractal cleanup.
There’s alllllmost nothing “meditation-y” left to do, in general (phenomenologically, metaphysically[, deep childhood/prenatal refactoring]…). More and more things feel like “post-meditation,” which is maybe “embodied thinking.”
That said, I’m guessing probably a couple more small-medium size “shifts” at some point (like more Ingram-style centerlessness or agencylessness or smthg).
What’s next I guess is continued improvements in physical/social grace and like “life planning”/“embodied action” stuff. Post-meditation is meditation, no end in sight! But more interleaved with everything else (noodling, de-stressing, planning, writing, learning, integrating, “thinking”). (edited)
Mark L 8:01 PM
in addition the the “life niche proactive settling” stuff nearer the beginning, i’ve been poking at this, recently, the single lines “at least once sense in which” at the bottom https://meditationbook.page/#158da1
*
Some things that don't come through in the above, probably:
Before I was doing "global wayfinding" type things, it looks like I didn't put in that many raw hours meditating, and that's true. And/but, during that time, I did a ridiculous amount of reading and thinking (see bibliography). And then I meditated or tried stuff very, very "surgically." That is, I would read like a 200-600 page book, and then try stuff for five minutes, based on that book. During that, I'd learn some things. And then I moved on to the next 500-page book, and repeat. When I say surgical, I sort of mean nuanced or high-dimensional, like testing a very, very, very precise (implicit) hypothesis.
Like, not an 3-bit hypothesis "010", or something (so a selection out of an 8-option universe). But a hypothesis like "010100000101010100010101010101010101010100101010101010101010101010101010100000111010101010" (this is just an analogy).
Sometimes, when I felt like was really on to something (which could be fifteen minutes, instead of five minutes, or up to a few months), I would "travel in a straight line." That is, I would sketch a sentence or two of practice instructions (with maybe a bit of if-then structure, rarely a full-on diagram) and I would try to do just/exactly that. And/but, to do that, I would try it for a bit, then amend the instructions a bit, and so on. So it was sort of a local "funneling" feedback loop that would eventually stabilize into an "anchored" (by the iteratively edited writing or diagramming) practice. And again, I might still set it aside after minutes or days but sometimes (rarely) I'd play with a specific thing for months. These slowly become more nuanced and general, discontinuously, with big leaps in insight into what to do and how to schematize it. This is how I put it to myself (which I disendorse, now, and which I don't think is necessary or safe or desirable, but, for posterity:) "I create something and use it to travel in a straight line, until it breaks or I break. And then I revise the direction of that line based on what I learned." This was eventually too un-nuanced and too unsafe. It ultimately wasn't an effective way to navigate the territory, as it were. But to be fair, I did explore a pretty large space of practices, doing this. Over time, global wayfinding is sort of doing this, but safely, and with fractally nuanced curved lines.
*
Ramble/draft on the contemporary/classical term "purification": Something else important is that "contemporary meditative achievement" sort of puts the "psychological stuff" in the backseat and/or sort of separates it out into "purifications" (both related and unrelated to "insights") or something. I can't emphasize enough something like the "mediately all-to-all connected" nature of the (body)mind. What I mean is something like past, present, and future isn't necessarily all immediately available but it all directly or indirectly participates in the "now," either in an "unconscious pre-integrated" way or an "post-integrated kind of unconscious but also participating in the very being and seeming of the world." (Side note: And, this will be sort of hard to make sense of, but the very sense of the future itself [and plenty of other things] re-seat in emptiness.) I'm mentioning this because it's not excavation, it's not "purification," it's tacit, global problem solving via local operations. And/or/rather, purification (or a sense of being "more pure"/quiet/seamless/now) is not the method or a lead indicator but mediate or long-run result. Rather, what one is doing isn't purifying or navigating by using purification as feedback (or if so, indirectly and sparingly). Purification (immersive flashbacks, insight, de-conditioning and re-conditioning, increased wellbeing, decreased anxiety, metaphysical and existential ease, physical and social grace, a sort of sense of seamless smoothness or perfection [in some non-reified sense] of the phenomenological field) is a non-monotonic, global tower of hanoi problem, with a limited number of possible local operations, at each step. If a bunch of seeming "purification" is happening, there's no guarantee that you're not just somehow winding yourself up in a way that has to almost all be redone later. What's happening matters in terms of how it fits/integrates into the global context of everything that has happened or will happened; that's the context in which local navigation and local happenings sort of how to be (patiently, gently) "judged", and buddha nature always holds in that all "mistakes" are reversible. Any step is ultimately a step forward even if it turns out that mediately it was a "step back." All of this also applies to "insights." It's sort of like anything local only matters in the context of global integration, and sort of the only thing that matters (in some loose sense!) is global integration. And global integration proceeds by local operations, as in the "local operations" are the only "things" that can only ever be "done," one by one. (And/but not to over-reify, there's nothing thing-like cf. emptiness.)
Which is all to say, there's a way in which this document doesn't well reflect/exemplify alllllllllllllllll the object-level personal stuff along the "path." The hard stuff of personal history and life. But the personal stuff, and character (as it were, not to reify that), and action-in-the-world, is the path, not any of the flashy stuff, which, in the end, is just some bits flipped, somewhere, sort of.
Ah and one concern I have about rendering things as above is that it makes seem like there's this vast puzzle where changing one thing has all these ripple effects and everything has to be juuussst right. In some sense that's true in an intellectual and abstract sense, and some conceptions like that can potentially help with global wayfinding, but like the lived, "done" thing (or nonmonotonically in the right direction) is when ever more of the thing, you and all of it, takes care of itself, costlessly, effortlessly, and also ever more of the process itself takes care of itself, costlessly, effortlessly. So like anything that sort has to be maintained or "made to stick" is not the thing and not the way to get to the thing and the "done condition" is the exact opposite or high maintenence, high-touch. (But, to be fair, importantly(!) en route might demand a tremendous amount of resources/bandwidth/cognition/attention/unstructured time. For some people when all of this is "unpacked," "in flight," "in progress," it'll be sometimes hard to have a job/career/business/investing/anything, relationship, take care of kids, etc., where you need to be "on."
*
Someone close to me asked, Why do you meditate? Is it spiritual? Is it a job or a hobby? ...
(Nearer to the end is material that I didn't actually send to them as an answer, but most of the beginning I did.)
[...]
For me, meditation is deeply, deeply, deeply instrumental. It's always been meditation /for/. There are things that are intrinsically interesting about it, and it has become incidentally professional, and part of my engagement with it has been because I want to share the value with other people, and be around other people who have partaken in that value, and I would like that value to be disseminated more widely; but, yeah, it's instrumental.
What I mean by instrumental, or /for/, is that, all things being equal, I'd rather be doing other things, at least in a vacuum. (I mean I could see myself continuing to teach meditation, main-line or in a way ancillary to other goals, but it's never been my main goal.)
I originally got into meditation because I was (a) trying to heal/fix things and (b) to run away from things. But, once I saw the value (or I thought I did--it took a long time to unlock the "real" value), I set my sights higher, and it became a way to go towards things, a way to add things to my life.
And then I got really hurt, so it's sort of half to fix things and half to get things. I think of meditation as maximally oblique, concrete problem solving, or the thing one might do when nothing else works. There's also an issue of very high opportunity cost, because it's physically and psychologically risky, relatively unpredictable, sometimes involuntariliy requires prioritization, and is time consuming. So one might reach for it when solving problems in relatively direct ways fails.
This is sort of where some of the spiritual stuff does come in--meditation does eventually deeply touch metaphysical, existential, and cosmological issues. So meditation is sufficiently-as-oblique-as-needed, problem solving and problem dissolving. And that is why I do it.
It's, over a long period of time, made me more emotionally resilient, a better problem solver, increased my wellbeing, reduced my allergies, improved my sleep, improved my digestion, genuinely definitively answers many existential and philosophical questions, improved my writing ability, and it's sort of given me a long-run unshakeable... something--faith? certainty? but strange kinds that continuously eat themselves.
[...]
Importantly, there's a very high chance it takes over one's life for a while. Sometimes one can do stuff in the cracks, but it sort of uncontrollably makes itself first priority. And, sometimes one can't do stuff in the cracks, so there needs to be sufficient resources to cash in during those times. And, because of how the mindbody untangles itself, it's not unusual to feel like all is lost, at various points. There's a sense in which it undoes everything, in which one loses everything, though there's also senses in which that's not true at all.
In some ways, at least one of the following has to make sense for someone to engage in meditation, in the sense that I use the word, in no particular order:
(Please note, the below is off the top of my head, and I haven't thought it through very carefully.)
[...]
<<<
([if I publish this elsewhere] I feel comfortable commoditizing this a little in part because it's exemplifying, and it happened many years ago, and my family doesn't regularly read my writing.)
Very big insight: "I can't (a) really love an intimate partner, or (b) really have friends, or (c) really connect, even if I try, so don't try too hard. [Context: This is a sort of bounded gloss; of course I have loved and connected and etc., but also, etc., in sweeping, total-life-trajectory-affecting ways] And that's because my grandmother died horribly of cancer, and it massively affected my mother, and I can't be like my mother having that experience with my grandmother. (I watched all this go down over a bunch of months when I was three-years-old-ish. I didn't see much directly, but I saw a tiny bit, and I experienced the change in my mother and her distraction.) The "gathering and realizing and glossing" of this, the former having taken from ages three-ish to forty-one and somewhere between 8000-10,000 hours of meditation, and the latter two a "final" few hours during a morning meditation, are sort of 90% of the work of integration and hanging out with three-year-old-to-forty-one-year-old me and reinterpreting and re-exploring and re-feeling for sort of constructive (non-)transcendence. More like constructive (re-)imminence.
Years ago, maybe of course, this was explored in therapy, maybe "100 miles out," with talk and EMDR and other modalities, over a few months. But it was too tangly, too inchoate, too something, to really get at, understand, illuminate, etc. There was something there, but it wasn't entirely clear there was a there, there, or at least how and how deeply it functioned. Maybe the-right-really-good practitioner would have made more progress.
Outside view, one could tell a story like the gloss above, one of many hypotheses, but to feel it resonantly, from the inside, in it's functional, actuating fullness, at the right time, in the right way, as it is then able to move; that's really something. Littler and bigger things like this, shallower and deeper, should keep happening throughout meditation practice, sometimes with many months between them. And "deeper and deeper," as needed, safely (or as safely as it possible).
First-pass, in terms of happiness and friendships and relating and intimacy---getting here was definitely worth the long hours, the opportunity costs, the relational and nth-order costs, the physical and financial and interpersonal risks, for me. Would gladly pay again, for what it's worth having already paid, and I'm still paying, to be sure.
[In terms of commoditization, if I publish a version of this elsewhere; maybe too high-context; "can your personal self-transformative practice do this? (many can, to varying degrees! and many interpersonal things can help! and/but for some parts of some of the very deepest stuff, etc., etc. sometimes maybe it might be worth sometimes, etc.]
[Life-affecting muscle tension did come back, up from a little present but not life-intefering, the above-as-a-twist-in-the-system clarifying, while approaching the above, and is now receding again, as best I can first-pass tell, to even lower levels. Will update if doesn't now smoothly dissipate utterly and completely. There could be even still a few more things. Recall, as best I understand it, it got so bad in the first place because of problematic things I did pre-p2 and pre-meta protocol.]
I am finally jogging again, joy joy joy~~~~~~
Mark 2 minutes ago
Some muscle stuff did come back, though very unevenly distributed. Daily life relatively unaffected, though still couldn't go all out, and exercising was still hard / felt unsafe.
Even though all that, there were aspectual high-water-marks almost every day.
Mark 1 minute ago
And finally big drops again recently. I was jogging for months, months ago, but tension/pressure redistributed and made that bad.
Mark 1 minute ago
Now things are newly good but still with an on-and-off background of something feeling unsafe.
Mark < 1 minute ago
anyway jogging feels like flying. feels so healthy and good
Mark < 1 minute ago
metabolically and feeling into differential recovery rates across different muscle groups, lungs, cardiovascular system. i love this stuff.
and seeking "perfect" form, global optimum basin---non-impact, footfalls, glide, breath, floatiness---which can take weeks or months to find and even when you do it continuously changes as the above change at different rates
See endlessness vs impermanence (scratch/stub)
The edges around everything are getting blurry, like sort of both blurry and turning in on themselves, or something. cf. boundlessness, endlessness, boundarylessness. But vis-a-vis non-infinity, non-eternalism, impermanence.
cf. no-things which was much earlier for me.
[This doesn't feel quite accurate but better than nothing~] [Once again] I'm finding more pockets of metaphysical/cosmological phenological-belief-y bases-for-action, emotion, motivation, etc. Not this exactly, but kind of like meaning, intimacy, afterlife, this-life stuff, as entangled with day-to-day action and implicit (or explicit) long-term goals, interests, projects. More and more sort of [bodymindworld-phenomenological-everything] "don't know" replacing previously implicit "this is utterly how it is" and then losing that as carrot or stick, and then have to further and further "fall back on" or rely on the "the spontaneity of what's having happened as it's happening" [sic] as "basis" (for action and being) or something like that.
See: void (nothingness, cessation(s), nibbana, nirvana [stub/scratch]
lots of non-model-breaking meditation stuff, illness and no meditation for months, more non-model-breaking meditation stuff
possibly want to add something here
For months and months prior up in there: Lots of jaw, neck, tongue, throat, sleep, breathing stuff (over many, many night and mornings—effortlessness, discomfort tolerance, patience, allowing, non-control, surrender, many somatic puzzles, “volitional unraveling puzzles,” always ultimately via effortlessness and spontaneity, and leading-edge lightest-gentle-touch-fear puzzles [ditto]). No history/evidence of childhood or adult sleep apnea though some childhood mouth breathing and childhood insomnia. Maybe some airway resistance syndrome? Partial mystery (because some of this has to be from the prior force-y stuff), so far, anyway.
From somewhere age(s) 2-5; "core personality stuff":
capitalism(?!),
skepticism / (epistemic) paranoia, calling bullshit, calling full of shit, knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism,
social warmth / belonging
20241107
Ken Wilber / Aurobindo --- overmind / supermind type stuff (not the first time; last time was in past year and I think I didn't record it) ; See maybe Wilber's Religion of Tommorow (maybe better discussion in earlier works, too). Note: Ken Wilber is not uncontroversial if you search around.
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[Content warning: neuroticism, hypochondriasis, interaction with licensed medical and mental health professionals, anxiety, etc.]
[Written 25 days after initial symptom onset of first covid infection of some unknown strain of ofc unknown initial viral load in some particular health regime etc. etc.]
One of the challenging thing about advanced meditation is being more sensitive to subtle phenomenology of aging and illness and accidents.
Basically, you can possibly feel yourself dying years or decades out.
(I think there's a lot of "classical meditator lore" in preserved texts of advanced meditators knowing they're going to die tomorrow and stuff like that. (But selection bias, confirmation bias, what makes a good story, etc.))
And, you can possibly feel big jumps in aging, like, if you catch a bad viral illness, you can potentially feel if there's neurological involvement or if organs get unhappy.
Whereas before you might be like "I feel crappy," now you might be like "my heart is tired" or "my kidneys are struggling."
If something particularly strange or notable happen in phenomenology, you might be asking, "is this hardware or software" (neuronal damage or support cell damage) or just a response to particularly weird phenomenology or the triggering of an evolutionary program or a normal response to surprise and changed plans.
For example, if you are quite sick (or slightly sick) and feel anxiety or notice "new" delusion or unusual lack of capacity or other nonmonotonicity, is this because:
And depending where one is at in meditation, it can be stressful because you "notice more things," and there's more to think / "think" about regarding whether something is transient or the new normal, like how much you'll recover, and whether it's "full recovery" or you have "loss of reserve" that could lead to sudden and permanent loss of function because of a future accident or illness. And, at the time of this writing, because of the pace of scientic and medical advances, one can wonder somewhat about the relationship between illness, aging, prevention, and risk taking vis-a-vis rejuvenation, longevity, microstructural neurological repair (from e.g. vascular, fungal, viral, bacterial neurodegeneration), cryonics, etc.; at the time of this writing, not yet, not yet, not yet..)
You might jump to quite apt conclusions, and sometimes this is useful for making bold and proactive treatment decisions, and sometimes it's interesting to file away but there's nothing you can really do about it right there and then. But sometimes, often, the conclusions the system jumps to are just wrong---about cause, what's going on, severity, duration, permanence of illness, injury, or loss of capacity, and the long-term implications thereof. This is normal hypochondriasis and anxiety stuff, but it can be amplified because a meditator has more and more subtle phenomenology to interpret and work with. As with anything: often worse before better. I don't know if this is true, but there's a joke that doctors make the worst patients. One could make a similar joke about meditators being the worst patients, or something.
It can also be quite sobering, when, for example, an advanced meditator hasn't experienced some flavors of anxiety for decades, but then suddenly they have some generalized anxiety again (which can also be just plain interesting, for an advanced meditator!), first-pass, which one or more of the above numbered list is it from? It's certainly a lesson in impermanence and lack of control. In a lot of ways, sort of, an advanced meditator perhaps, sometimes(!), has "farther to fall" when misfortune occurs---"haven't had to deal with that since forever," which can also ~amplify a sense of sadness and loss or etc., even if sometimes one gets "back to where they were" (or not, or not at all) quite quickly and perhaps sometimes much faster than someone who is not a meditator.
And, again, one might notice a lot of "quite creepy shit" that other people would sort of lump together and not notice or think / "think" about so much, for better and worse. And again one might be wrong about what any of that implies, wrong about what's actually going on, with respect to lots of it or most of it, at least the first few times around.
But, as indicated in some parentheticals above, at the same time, being an advanced meditator can be an extraordinary boon, and in some ways it's arguably sort of the whole point of being a meditator, and it can be very gratifying to sort of battle test (not that it likely feels anything like battling or fighting, etc. etc.) and get or pleasantly exercise or indulge in or appreciate that payoff (perhaps even amidst feeling sick or scared or etc.).
So one good thing is adapting to and managing and minimizing further harm with ongoing chronic conditions; possibly sensitivity to the inputs is better and flexibility and adaptibility are better.
And another thing, especially, is that, in some sense, nothing really changes---for example, no matter what's going on, whether it's hardware or software, sickness behaviors or brain damage, or transient or permanent, or a chronic heart thing, or super transient, or intense or shocking, shaken to your core, bitterly disappointed, newly depressed, anxious, or whatever---
---there's just e.g. main practice p2 (or whatever) as a simplicity on the far side of complexity, or even on the far side of that if anything remotely like meditation has been eaten up with no remainder. As per usual, business as usual, nothing really changes, you still "know exactly what to do, even when you don't know what to do"; it's just global wayfinding. Whether you're "long range cleaning up" new weird phenomenology, or what the heck is this, or where is this going, or "is this "new" horrible thing (a) actually new or somehow (b) redo-to-undo," working through that, untangling provenance, constructing inverse operations, rewiring, whatever---which as per usual involves reverie, surrender, letting go, being lost in life---even if you have the misfortune of brain damage or a patch of your phenomenlogy is gone or is suddenly informing you that aliens are communicating with you and also you're Jesus and angels are talking to you, even if you're literally imminently dying, or whatever, it's all the same in a good way. A "user's manual" for everything or every situation, or whatever, "equanimous" or losing your shit or not, whatever you're into, whatever horrible-thing-or-not-sometimes-bad-things-are-or-lead-to-net-good-things is just happening to you, including when to throw away the manual and when or if to dig it out of the garbage.
And that's pretty great~
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Cosmological metaphysical (theological)
…………………. ……………..
Provisionality vs don’t know
emptiness, meaning, phenomenology
Sacred, holy, don’t know
(^provisionality and / but)
cf. good / bad in a consequentialist or "final"-end / ["final" end] sense ("final" in quotes because impermanence / non-eternalism / non-inappropriate-reification / groundless / groundlessness / (lack-of-)control ) --- re "ultimately" ("" <- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) don't-know / [don't know] / "who can say" sense (-- far reaches section)
?can safely consider / entertain anything
///////// ~~~ void as absence of qualities / attributes including both timelessness and impermanence
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???????????something-something worship, sacrament; key: performed without hope [and/but cf. "hell is the absence of hope" kind ???? unification of heaven and hell in the ~tineless or~ always-now sacred?]; distinguished from discipline; not motivated by hope or fear (or at least [or especially] "misplaced" versions) [cf. and/but assurances that everything will turn out alright / all right and/but etc.]
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20220711
So I had one or two "cessations" years ago, not be confused with like "whooshes" and "collapses." [I was obviously cycling (a la Daniel Ingram) slowly, over a few months each of the times, but that completely disappeared (or became undetectable) when I switched from methods that were a little like noting to more like p2 and the meta protocol.] And then like with the jhanas I kind of lost interest.
There's a particular, faintly retrospective-flavored quality that's becoming more prominent, interleaved with other things going on. It's very close to what it was like with the three characteristics (which I've only encountered briefly and intermittently as such)---a sort of very particular diaphanous "whoa that is/has been mixed in with everything". And that flavor is sort of becoming a thing again, and I think it's (going to be) related to proper relationship with "void" or "nothingness."
I'm reminded again of the "depth-first" vs "breadth-first"---where depth-first would sort of(!!!!!!) acquire deep knowledge of void by trying to phenomenologically touch void over and over and over again (depth-first or "iterated/iterative depth-first"), through cessations, up front, and then deal with everything else on the backend. And, alternatively, one can sort of go breadth-wise, letting things come up exhaustively and inexorably in some "natural" order, that eventually (and surprisingly efficiently; modulo meta meta wayfinding) encompasses everything any minimally adequate meditation system does and maybe then some.
So the expectation is something like, as with the jhanas (as best I can tell, so far), I will come to know everything there is to know about nothingness (rather a "proper" globally untangled conceptual-phenomenological-moral-existential relationship to nothingness) almost without ever having had a cessation (though not quite, in my case). And some people using my system might never have a cessation or enter a jhana-as-such (though be in plenty of bespoke altered states) but still get all the related things, completely if not stereotypically. (Nebulosity and emptiness and non-inappropriate-reification withstanding for all of this, etc., etc.)
We shall see! (probably)
(And of course, depth-first and breadth-first are idealizations, and everybody is a mix of things that are radically concrete and defy pattern matching, and whatever works, works!)
Note: nothingness and also relatedly mortality, oblivion, meaning, pointedness (vs pointlessness)
Note: What I'm calling "oblivion" is related to all this, but oblivion is sort of more the memory aspect, the loss aspect.
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At some point you may encounter in yourself something like "true evil". This could be "yours" or from "someone else" (or of course multiple someone else's) or especially a mixture.
After all the discussion in this document about "goodness" (however unfixed, nebulous, empty), or even absent that discussion, it can be profoundly dismaying to encounter something like this. It might have a sense of something like "truly" life-denying, "truly" "against."" It might or might not be exactly against your own happiness, that is it might be "for" things you ("evilly" or "villainously") want. But at least one possibly dismaying part is it's sort of "incompatibility with everything else," like there could be violence, harm, coercion "intrinsically"/"inseparably" in there that is "fundamentally incompatible" with other parts of you that love, want to collaborate, want to have good-faith relationships and life situation, and so on. So from even a purely practical perspective "being evil" (not necessarily "as such," here) might "not work" with a whole swath of other goals you also genuinely have, let alone an "essential" contradiction; but it's a life-level contradiction, at least. First-pass dismaying.
As with anything, working with this is something like, let yourself be as evil as is possibly safe and acceptable to all parts of you, as it were. (See the x-desires section. x-desires, fulfillment, transformation, discussion:) And so there's just the usual thing of safe to look, in its/one's own time, then can look when/if(_ever) ready, safe to accept, then can accept when/if(_ever) ready, willingness to have it or be it "forever", for an indeterminate amount of time, just like this---and then paradoxically in that it might or might not evolve.
(I've only dipped into it a little, but I was shocked by the relevance, and maybe every last bit of C.S. Lewis' writing on good(ness) and bad(ness) and evil is relevant and possibly useful, here. (ht xx) [It seems it's also sometimes very wayfindy.] Specific references welcome and I'll add them here.)
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As you're exploring fear of death and preferences to not die, it's important to also look for (wait for), gather, honor, explore any parts, layers, anything that wants to die, longs for death, wants to "experience" nothingness, "thanatos drive," any drive towards dissolution, ceasing, cessation, etc. This could come from "within" and "without," shallow or deep, etc. There might be, (parts of) you might be, longing for death, longing for it to end, hoping for, aiming for, or surrendering to, flowing into a death funnel, death cascade, always racing towards death, tumbling towards death, towards nothing.
And/but do note things like this, too, as well, things maybe a bit like: “There has to be something good about death otherwise death is intolerably bad.”
Let the parts of you that want to die and the parts of you that want to live find each other.
Explore the things that, as best you can currently tell, that make life worth it, that make life worth living [belonging stuff, intimacy stuff, gender stuff, sex stuff]---that you won't let yourself have or pursue.
at least one sense in which you cannot ever experience the infinite future which is always in the future (if you buy into infinities or at least one sense of the future); you can only experience right now
at least one sense in which anything [even with cryonics, longevity, rejuvenation technology] that's not flowing, tumbling, incessantly, ceaselessly, unerringly towards death and end, local finitude is in intellectual, cognitive, and behavioral error and suboptimality
[draft status: in need of editing, as per usual]
There’s ways in which the below is inconsistent, confused, and incomplete--it’s not the final word, I still have a LOT to learn, and nor could it ever be consistent and complete, in a deep, philosophical sense. It’s offered because it might be comforting and useful, for some people, as an interim touchstone, or it might help some good things happen fractionally faster, or it’s just interesting. As a recommendation, if you’d otherwise be inclined, don’t particularly try to "make any of this stick"; one sort of has to find their way to this kind of stuff on their own terms, and then you "don’t need to make it stick / don't need push it into place" as natural as trusting gravity.
*
So, many people take refuge in eternity and essentiality, and many people fear death, meaninglessness, and suffering. We encountered those sorts of things somehow already within ourselves, and/or we picked them up from culture, or we confused other people’s stuff with our own, in deep or subtle ways.
So let’s unpack all this a bit more and talk about pluses and minuses and antidotes.
*
So, IF there’s eternity (timelessness, outside-of-time-ness) then, this is a bit of an incomplete straw, but it kind of follows that everything that has ever existed does always already forever exist and that everything has a fixed, eternal essence. There’s a nearby and simultanously compatible thing, which is "sempiternity," which means something like "an infinite future" (infinite timefulness, and, maybe necessarily along with that, an infinite past).
Some problematic implications of eternity and sempiternity are that, in some sense, if anything’s wrong with your "essence," then, depending on how that works, there might be some sense in which it can never be fixed. You’ll be stuck with however you are, and if that’s bad, then that’s infinitely bad.
Additionally, everything becomes infinitely important, any choice has massive stakes, infinite stakes, because it could compound forever without relief. Death might not offer any relief. Anything that produces ("intolerable") suffering (badness, loss, failure, rejection, loneliness, judgment, uncertainty) is potentially (infinitely) catastrophic. Sure, you might have infinite time to correct your mistakes, but what if, by some chain of events, you find you permanently cannot?
*
Alongside eternity, as complements or alternatives, there’s also mortality, death, and nothingness.
Problems with these are things like, if death results in nothingness then potentially everything is nihilist and meaningless. And then perhaps there’s no basis for action (or happiness, joy, etc.), perhaps because everything is ephemeral, impermanent--we can’t take it with us, including ourselves, we lose it all, as if it never was, so what’s the point?
*
And then there’s fragility and uncertainty which sort of underpin the risks of eternity, mortality, and suffering, and kind of take the joy and spontaneity and enjoyment out of everything.
*
And finally, all these things sort of get tangled together in potentially inconsistent ways. For example, say death if isn’t, for example, conceived as pure nothingness; perhaps it’s unfortunately conceived as sort of potentially an "in-between" state, of maybe trappedness, loneliness, fear, failure, and suffering, and maybe that’s "eternal."
*
Ok, so what to do? Maybe just avoid thinking about all this as much as possible? What if you can’t not think about it?
All of the below assumes lots and lots of meditation (or luck/fortune/grace/etc.).
*
Some of the things that can happen over time are the following, and these are all sort of somewhat entangled together:
Sempiternity and especially eternity can come to be sort of deeply recognized as phenomenologically/pragmatically/epistemically inconsistent. It’s not that one can no longer work/think/model with conceptual and cosmological and mathematical infinity or plan for far futures, but some "literal or functional seating" of these ideas, in the bodymind, can be judged and rejected.
This is partly underpinned by insight into impermanence and/or/rather lack of essence and/or/rather interdependence, as in nebulous, empty, or provisional causes (laws), conditions ("starting" conditions), and spontaneity, through and through. Say it’s all just shimmering stuff or forces and fields or whatever, phenomena or noumena, on the border of differentiation and lack of differentiation. What perhaps follows is sort of a way in which anything like eternity or its implications becomes (literally?) ungraspable. (I might lose some physical or scientific or mathematical realists, here. See below for a tiny bit more on maps and territories and more.)
But isn’t there something like eternity or infinite time or at least vast time? What sort of does the work of that? What kind-of-happens-is-sort-of [sic] an "eternal now" which is sort of immanent, sort of aconceptual. This "eternal now" is very unlike the other "eternity" thing, which perhaps sort of "lived elsewhere." (This also involves a "‘positive’ nowhere to go," "just this"-ness.) It’s sort of a better fit for the whole system.
Sounds pleasant, maybe, but maybe literally false? And then what about meaninglessness and suffering and death?
Meaninglessness sort of gets handled by aconceptuality, fluidity, spontaneity, and provisionality. It becomes safe to rest in meaninglessness and pointlessness because there’s sort of something "beneath" them, so loss of meaning isn’t devastating and in need of scrupulous avoidance. And, further, one gains confidence that meaning is either inessential or is at least just always transient, because of systemic fluidity--one doesn’t get "stuck" that way, so it’s safer to go into, and there’s generally (nonmonotonically) something even better (more/different meaning) on the other side, and especially in the limit. (Spontaneity and provisionality will be further discussed below.)
*
Fragility, uncertainty, suffering, and death sort of get handled in a few ways.
Suffering has sort of both "practical" and "general" mitigations. Here we first talk about the "general" mitigation of sort of "no-self-y-ness." That’s not to say there isn’t often generally coherence and meaning, "self-ing," but if there’s a disruption of the self and/or "intolerable" suffering, there comes to be a deep way in which it’s "just happening" that doesn’t require a self. (This is sort of coextensive with "no things, including no self, never have/has been, never were, never will be." (More accurate might be "no stable, permanent, enduring things or self.") Like, if you are disrupted, then are you still you, there, suffering? Creepy? But, like, in a good/comforting way? And, further, at this point, the "whole system, self and everything" has become extremely good at sort of self-endorsedly "reconstituting" itself, if disrupted. One can kind of rest in an extraordinarily self-aligned and trustworthy spontaneity, because that spontaneity, over time, sort of comes to know just what to do.
With suffering kind of more handled, it can be separated out from death and nothingness. When nothingness is disentangled from various confusions, it becomes much less of a big deal. It’s sort of just like deep sleep (which is still admittedly freaky to think about, for some people); in both cases "you’re not there," and it’s fine while it lasts. It’s not like you’re there and trapped or there and can’t breath, and so on: it’s just nothing. And, so then "nothing" is especially not some sort of "experientially eternal" bad thing. So, again, much less of a big deal.
So then with suffering kind of more handled and nothingness kind of more handled, then death is kind of more handled--it’s the potential suffering leading up to death that can be super scary to think about, the ("intolerable") fear of (imminent) death and the dying, versus being dead (in the case that death is "experiential nothingness.") And, again, the spontaneous-no-self-just-happening-ness kind of helps with this.
Further, the "eternal now" can have a "soothingly deathless" feel. Sort of, as in, "if death is nothingness then you won’t know that you’re dead," so you’ll always only ever be alive, and if "now is eternal" then you’re immortal-ish, etc.
All of this is sort of positively entangled (and deeply related to) the "practical mitigation" of suffering, i.e. "deconditioning." People typically have a great deal of "cue-able" or triggerable suffering that gets worked through in the course of meditation. Prior to working through things, we are sort of uncontrollably, prereflectively, "already" freaked out by things before we become conscious of them. And so that happening less and less, for fewer and fewer things, is sort of part and parcel with the more general antidotes above.
*
But, like, you want things, and lots of people, all things being equal, prefer not to die, a lot, at the very least. If death becomes even remotely less of a concern, won’t people be less good or vigilant about avoiding death? And isn’t that kind of inconsistent and so isn’t that a good reason to fear death and uncertainty?
What kind of happens is a sort of "positive behavioral indifference" in that more and more things get handled and worked out such that "no matter what happens this is the best plan," "you’re fully up to date,’ in ultimately a deep and prereflective way. So, like regardless of whether you’re (uncertainly) going to die in five minutes or fifty years or one thousand years, your "plan" is intertemporally consistent with respect to all those contingencies. Given your context, limitations, uncertainties, knowledge, there’s both "nothing to change" and you’re fluidly "updating your plan" in each moment as more sensory evidence comes in. And so, you’re looking both ways before crossing the street, poking at life extension, somehow eating both healthy and deliciously, anything, in a way that fully accounts for your preferences. And "death" is kind of mostly-/semi-background handled in a way that doesn’t self-defeatingly loom large; it doesn’t suboptimally take up ongoing rumination time at the expense of other things; though, it might be innocuously and consistently threaded through things in a way that naturally comes up. All of this is perhaps one facet of "wisdom."
*
This might all be well and good but what about something like impingement or corruption. Like what about mind control parasites (toxoplasma gondii) or Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injury or whatever? What if I figure out a bunch of stuff about "eternity" and feel pretty good about that, but then I have a stroke and "lose" a bunch of it?
First of all, the brain is kind of holographic and reconstitutive. Maybe surprisingly, if stuff reaches a "ground state," versus a person trying to make stuff stick, even traumatic brain injury, all things being equal, doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of stuff is even transiently lost. And, even if "something" (loosely speaking) is lost due to physical or chemical insult, all things being equal, a "deeply settled meditative mind" will spontaneously work/flow towards rederiving/reconstituting what was disrupted (or will find something even better).
But, in any general case, life is messy and death is messy.
To be sure, people do have terrible brain things happen and, outside view, come through with unchanged personalities. But, sometimes a single microstroke will, outside view, radically alter a person’s personality or produce anosognosia, not to mention complexly related fatigue and anxiety (though, all things being equal, a long-term meditator does have a greater chance of "finding their way back," very very loosely and reductively speaking).
Nothing remotely guarantees health, wealth, a "good death," sanity, neurological integrity, a long life, immortality, "thinking real good," hot sex, whatever. And, at the very least, at the time of this writing, meditation doesn’t free you from having a physical brain, subject to decay, demyelination, amoebas, car accidents, or anything.
All that said, a lot of the "antidotes" above generally hold, even in these most challenging of "edge cases" or one’s concern about them. Deconditioning, over time, promotes constructive action and handledness of various contingencies, which obviates and "integrates away" unconstructive worrying. "Best plan"-ness allows for a rich, full life in the light of death, not self-limited by fear or accident (in relative relation to one’s beliefs about risks, tradeoffs, etc.) "No-self-y-ness" and "trustworthy self-aligned robust spontaneous self-reconstitution" helps with acute accident and illness and suffering. Lots of other metaphysical and cosmological and conceptual stuff gets refactored and cleaned up, over time, which mitigates all sorts of unnecessary suffering.
But, yeah, there’s still uncertainty and finitude (modulo dissolving into Brahman, as it were, and eternal nows)--no guarantees about anything.
So here’s yet a couple more globally interrelated things to throw into the mix: determinism and provisionality.
Eventually, through life and meditation, one might get a deep sense of determinism, that, in some sense (pick your cosmology and physics and supervenience and etc.), everything can’t but happen exactly as it has happened, is happening, and is going to happen, via causes and conditions, states and evolution laws (or something kind of like this, in your metaphysics). You are happening just as you’re going to happen, things are happening just as they’re going to happen, including your choices and everything. What’s exactly going to happen is just exactly what’s going to happen. This can be kind of both terrifying and ultimately soothing, by turns, a particular kind of loss of control. But, eventually one can comprehensively sort of align with it, participate in it, deeply, stably, with no remainder. And there’s a deep freedom in that.
Further, in that freedom, there is a certain provisionality. You really don’t know. Was what just happened ultimately good or bad? You really don’t know. What’s going to happen next? You’re "flowing forward," spontaneously, with respect to sort of your best guess as to what’s going to happen next, which itself is going to happen spontaneously; it, you and it and world, just keeps happening. But anything could happen next, maybe not with respect to the world out there (in some sense), but at least with respect to your current state of knowledge (in some sense). You just don't know. Falsely thin probabilistic tails give way to more appropriate, fat probabilistic tails. More and more, you come to be ready for more and more, the full distribution, not just part of it, your stance, your arrangement, appropriately, proportionally ready, costlessly, effortlessly. This is cosmic poise, cosmic opprtunism.
And so, then, amidst the sometimes ghastly, horrible, painful, sorrowful, there is curiosity, engagement, play, delight, participation, readiness: a bright-eyed, let’s see what happens next.
***
If you found anything above to be inconsistent or untenable or unsatisfying or false or unworkable, it’s just my own gestural snapshot of some interrelated things, and a low-dimensional projection into words, at that. Things will continue to unravel, settle, resettle for me over time. "Your thing," on your terms, which will, say, be a living, sensitive dialogue, ultimately not separate from the being and seeming and acting in and of the world, has to be legitimate and credible and consistent and/or constructively nebulous for you.
And it can dialogue with other people’s things/deals, too, in comfort, love, intimacy, support, frustration, outrage, solitude, community, all of it, as part of that. Hell and heaven, eternity set aside, are other people, and all that.
*
* Whoops, also, I didn't mean to imply that anyone has to sort any of this out, whether by meditation or anything. And, also, nothing special has to happen in meditation or etc.. This sort of stuff "just pops out", all things being equal, in the course of correct practice.
Notes for above:
journal entry during one of my retreats, where people are optionally keeping public journals, written months after the above
[This kind of becomes self-aware like somewhere in the middle. Like I knew I was going to post it more publicly.]
Mark L Today at 7:42 PM
It’s been a normal-weird couple months of practice, just kind of carefully, patiently, satisfyingly, and often quite unpleasantly doing the thing. Not much going on except body unpleasantness that keeps winding up and working itself out. And just in the last couple of days, as these things do, things have tipped over into “whoa things”
The past few months have been a lot of slow sort of impermanence/non-eternity kind of slowly infusing more and more of everything.
And then, just this morning, there’s been some FINALLY really extra deep no really extra extra especially deep psychosexual stuff that’s FINALLY come into view. FINALLY, /shakes fist at sky/, lol, etc., ugh
[content warning, death stuff, in thread]
Thread:
Mark L 7 minutes ago
And also last night and this morning sort of more glimpses, alignment with “oblivion,” nothingness, nibanna-esque/cessation-y adjacent type stuff. Why is it so sweet/refreshing/good? What the heck?
ramble I typed earlier:
There’s this whole fucking world and physics and shit and tens of thousands of years of human history and the universe and the stars and life extension.
And like kind of modulo suffering and horror I don’t want to fucking die, man, that seems really bad. So then like what the heck is this positive forgetting, oblivion, nirvana, why is it so good, refreshing, why is it such a relief? Why is it making everything better, making living more fun?????????????
I think it’s sort of like one can intellectually know that “nothing” isn’t scary, it’s just nothing. But we viscerally recoil from death and just, like, want to LIVE, man. I wanna have grand adventures and beautiful relationships and see the stars go out.
There’s also like this weird tension, too, with “acausal, steelmanned reincarnation,” or whatever. Like, life in a meaningfully transpersonal sense life DOES go on, even if you’re not there except you kind of are but aren’t but you are.
But still, quote by problematic person:
“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” —Woody Allen
But then like meditation lets you (sooner or later) systematically systematically engage with nothingness. And, like, in a way that completely honors that visceral recoil, that completely honors wanting to LIVE (the incredible, incredible sorrow, sometimes, often, of life on earth completely withstanding), nothingness just really isn’t that bad, or something? There’s this visceral knowledge of that, too. It maybe can just make so much ok. Everything becomes lighter. (And this isn’t even the only thing that happens, in relation to suffering as such. That’s a whole other thing, even.)
scratch:
"objective identity" / "you are a confluence of 'universe;" / any confluence will identify with it's identity as it were / any reconstitution as such will feel like "you" / let's see what it does, doesn't need anything o top of that or separate from that / not a soverign and crystalline soul / ...
Loosely speaking I still generally fear pain, suffering, and death (finitude, oblivion), my own and others; they’re still a problem, still bad, still sad, but there’s been a big uptick in something good.
At least part of it is that stuff I’ve intellectually played with, for some time, by indirect routes—--I sort of came to find a bunch of it having become deep in my bones. That last sentence is weird because I want to emphasize I didn’t sort of intellectually hammer any of the below in. It was more like I naturally came to realize these things in some gentle, clear yet still inchoate way, and then my (body)mind found nearby concepts for sensemaking and communicating around it. At the same time I think exposure to some of these ideas previously helped. But, the “essential” core of these would still be just as “solid” (nebulously, provisionally, always-imperfectly speaking, not the last word) thousands of years ago. Again I don’t have to “work” to “maintain” any of the below; it's just prereflectively there. I’m still spontaneously gently coming back to it, which lightly changes it, on and off in meditation, mixed in and interleaved with everything else, liminally interacting with and nebulously blending into everything else, all-to-all mutual co-infusing or something. And eventually it might become something quite different.
So here’s some of it, imperfectly rendered. You’ll probably have already thought of a bunch of it.
First, deep dreamless sleep has a lot of features of death: you’re “not there” (or at least you don’t remember any of it, modulo constant consciousness stuff, which I’m not actively pursuing though it might just gradually happen on its own)---you’re not there and it’s arguably “fine.”
You also generally don’t remember falling asleep. So similarly, like, for better and worse, generally speaking, with respect to death, you’ll never know you’re “gone”; you’ll already have-gone if you’re gone. (Dying might still suck, to be fair.)
Further, waking up from sleep is generally just as “fine”, “ok,” in-some-sense” gentle. So, anyway, going to sleep and waking up is in some sense am existence proof of like at-least-retrospectively-knowable “nothingness” that’s “ok.”
Some people have “cessations,” and this is another example of nothingness being ok. Also, some people have very temporarily fine-grain awareness at times and report (as I think do classical texts) that we’re “blinking out” (cf. bardo and other stuff) every few tens of milliseconds (???), every waking moment. (This will presumably correlate with some particular brainwave frequency.) I’ve only had a couple textbook-grade cessations way back near the beginning of getting back into meditation, and they didn’t leave a super big impression on me, and I’ve never tried to get my attention super temporally fine-grain (though my “attention” / “awareness” / whatever, here, is deft, fluid, and agile), it just hasn’t seemed to matter from a practice standpoint and something felt too prescriptive and force-y about those things, and / but to be fair these phenomena and apparent reports have been helpful intellectually and for wayfinding input purposes. (I’m curious to see if I eventually have more cessations or if it’s never a thing ever again. And sometimes my awareness does very infrequently sort of spontaneously pulse and speed up for a short period of time, sort of “on demand” or “just in time”, so I’m curious if there will be further developments there. Anyway these are additional examples of “nothingness that’s ok."
But what about “permanent” nothingness?
There’s been a sort of deepening of trust of something like “information-theoretic identity” (not to improperly reify “information theory” or “identity” and also as per usual math analogies are fraught).
So like, ever more deeply understood, I am a product of causes and conditions, and, there’s a profound sense in which of you have the “same” causes and conditions you get the same “me” out of that. This has been a staple of science fiction for a long time, of course, including canon or at least fanon with respect to Star Trek transporters and lots of hard science fiction. For me personally, there had been a remaining persistent intuition that “copies” of me would not actually be satisfyingly me to current me and also that I would want this me to persist. But something loosened around that. (Plenty of people work through this without meditation, but not me. And also don’t take my word about it that there’s something pretty good here, etc., etc.)
Part of the loosening was helped by the sleep stuff and cessation stuff and “mind moment” stuff above. But those don’t account for all of it. There’s something for-me-at-least-at-the-time-of-this-draft seemingly profound and inexpressible around something like pattern-in-a-larger-pattern? (This is like maybe a more realized version of some pretty profound feeling atman-dissolving-into-Brahmin-type stuff, "you are a drop of water seamlessly in the ocean and also you are the ocean" that I had relatively early on in meditation). And like there’s something about the “smaller” pattern that’s in sommmmmmme sense "immortal"? That’s not the same as mistaking it for having a “permanent” “essential nature,” pace Buddhism.
Ah, but couldn’t that pattern be lost forever? Well, this was also helpful: one science fiction book, there’s presumably others, Charlie(?) Charles(?) Stross’ Accelerando, that has this idea of (I might be taking liberties or drifting from the original thing) of like the phase space of all possible humans, and just sort of enumerating that and like even “printing,” making a copy or instantiating some or all of those all possible humans, some of whom would never have actually existed. (Shades of steelmanned Abrahamic resurrection, here, not an original observation, of course.) There’s a bunch of, uh, considerations here, like enumerabity, computibility, combinatorial explosions, “time slices” like what age do you print, what does something think just happened previously when they “wake up” and how do they feel about and understand what’s happening subsequently —there’s a lot of, uh, yeah, decisions, here. But there’s a lot of internal and cross-person coherence and consistency stuff and I think useful moral / ethical stuff, heh, that vastly reduce a vast space to something slightly less vast but still vast. Anyway this is a rich thought playground that can keep on giving, with respect to memory, more identity stuff, indeed “arhatship” and enlightenment stuff. Like you can print people who are enlightened, people who know they're printed from the get-go and simultaneously have a remembered past... Anyway-anyway, humans are in some sense finite in a good way. Anything finitely (albeit not necessarily practically) construct-able, even computably / enumerably so though maybe contra nebulosity, but I think some quantum computer scientists are not super worried about the “computibility” of physics either perfectly or to arbitrary precision, for whatever that’s worth) is sort of never lost.
Anyway there might be something incoherent in here or poorly based on bad not-even-wrong science takes, cf. combinatorial explosions and physical transformations that might take more energy than is currently available in the observable universe or something. But anyway this is a snapshot.
And so I want to emphasize that there’s still / always a lot of potential wiggle room in whatever weird “cosmology” you end up with—--it will “settle” and maybe satisfice over time but it remain labile, alive, sculptable in a good way, and also more internally consistent and coherent (not to reify consistent and coherent) and accounting for whatever data you encounter or throw at it. In any case it will be held lightly and it will serve you, you won’t be satisfied with it until and unless you are. And again it will be held lightly in provisionality and technical emptiness.
And again this is sort of subserved by ever deeper understandings of impermanence and “causes and conditions” and much more, gained through continued meditation.
And finally it's not just emptiness but a deeper and deeper understanding of “just this”-ness, “this is it”-ness, “nowhere to go”-ness, which somehow provides a way for one’s personal cosmology to become a servant instead of a master.
All of this, so far, has made me seemingly feel a whole lot more chill about "the whole shape of my life,"" grasped all at once-ish, cleanly and aware-ed-ly bounded by accident, stroke, heart attack, death—--felt-saner choices around who I associate with and how I spend my time, my interests, cares, concerns, envies, jealousies, aspirations, enjoyment, more practical about what’s within reach, yet more flexibly audacious in what grand risks I take and what I hold in my roster of “possible aspirations.” Even if longevity and rejuvenation and cryonic technologies become a thing, even if death is generally defeated and we can backup and re-print people, nothingness/void still “exists” and we still return to it ever-presently? Something profound and important would remain that would practically inform choices even then and this can be explored now, and / or / relatedly there are accidents, natural disasters, heat death of the universe or some future theoretical equivalent might be a thing. Again with each human uncertainty “marshaled,” brought to heel, nothingness / oblivion I think still “exists,” still demands a dialogue, still informs what it means to be a “sane”, mature, moral individual. And / but / finally / too a deep understanding of buddhist-style impermanence sort of "credibly guarantees," enough to leave the door open, at the moment, at least, that there’s nothing like “eternity”? Maybe “eternal recurrence,” in any case things keep changing, even cosmologically; like nothing is forever, including non-existence, especially if you are like finite-ly enumerable out of a space of possible humans or something. Anyway provisionality and nebulosity and emptiness and unknown unknowns currently leave a lot of wiggle room (in the map if not some territory, as it were), and eventually something relaxes, and more, and more.
This is new, so it'll probably change, but it's interesting:
In pretty quick succession (over like four or five days):
And shortly after I noticed something had moved:
Non-existence and nothingness (and/but neither yet/“neither yet nor…”, just concepts etc.) are sort of a bit more a (“)pleasant(”) and complementary alternative to existence, and/but there's still zest and appetite for fun and life and health and longevity and legacy behaviors, including moonshots hedged against other values.
So---interesting... Still some nihilism in there. Expecting it'll be something like once all confusions are untangled there was never a problem in the first place, etc., etc.
*
Regarding, "was never a problem in the first place," it's worth making a distinction between like intellectual beliefs and like anticipations/"aliefs", or one could just say particular parts might intellectually believe or bodily-knowingly-anticipate different things (including at different and deeper "layers," in the technical sense).
We might---just as an example---intellectually believe that death is "nothingness" or "nonexistence" or "unconsciousness" (or not, etc.), whether good or bad. But, in any case, other parts of us might viscerally anticipate things like "infinite loneliness, "infinite pain," "infinite coldness," "infinite paralysis," "infinite can't breath," too long, too lonely, too something, etc.
We're accumulating/computing/arriving at stuff about death long before object permanence and it really hits us that like something somehow is going on, there, like somewhere around age 4-8 on average in at least the west, and so we've got like a vast amount of stuff there already and then with each passing year just more and more and more on top of that, and so meditation-wise it can take a long time to get back there, a long time (maybe concurrently) for safe to look even when there, even if tendrils of it are accessible immediately.
And so through meditation all of this just keeps (slowly, eventually, then perhaps more and more) getting unlayered and detangled, stuff you didn't even realize was there (just like with say sex or gender and even more so)...
And again as per usual, you're not making yourself believe or not believe anything, "belief" is spontaneous (and "belief" is too reified). Just untangling, just process, when safe, patient, find what you find, nebulously non-thing-ing-ly little-by-little (again not in anyway* [sic] thing-like), and so on.
*for some reason "anyway" [sic] instead of "any way"
See also:
Mediately or directly related, depending:
Notes:
safe (or not) to be not conscious / not aware
safe (or not) to "not be there"
and so on
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I wouldn't exactly call emptiness "far reaches," but I'm adding it here for completeness. It's something that can be kinda intellectually understood pretty quickly, and I think one can get more and more of a hint of taste pretty early, and then maybe something unmistakeable as such (or not; it's ok) pretty soon, too.
But it is something that sort of has to be "brought" or "found" everywhere, and that takes time and even like 10,000+ hours in there will be more! There are maybe some qualitatively different aspects that will be encountered over time.
Some pithy things that might or might not be particularly phenomenologically evocative:
No referential or conceptual essence anywhere (but there's still a there, there, or is there cf. nebulosity)
Some pithy things that might be more phenomenologically evocative:
Something like what was previously experienced as territory comes to be experienced as is "in fact" map, as representation.
(Importantly, it's worth emphasizing that this goes way, way, way beyond intellectual understanding. Like I read about the map//territory distinction a gazillion years ago and was like "yeah, that's super useful and helpful and important" but there's a deeper more direct thing.)
(And further/alternatively there's still weird paradoxes and philosophical issues, here. The map/territory distinction is itself sort of a stepping-stone or toy. Fundamental dualistic issues and stuff.)
Anyway, whole swaths of seemingly “that’s just how it is, ‘out there’” sometimes become "this could be otherwise." cf. "modal slack"* or sometimes "fully evaporate." All in all what’s left is more and more “provisional,” held lightly, all things being equal and seen as “fundamentally” “nebulous” all things being equal.
See also David Chapman's "meaningness" material (see bibliography).
* not coined by me
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[much of this is extremely deprecated / inadequate but i'm going to leave it here at least for now]
I'm going to use "not two; not one," here, and I'm probably not using it right, but.
Ok, not two:
For some meditation systems this is maybe the thing, though I treat deconditioning and reconditioning (and radical, natural, ordinary structural fluidity, no /fixed/ goal...) sort of as the thing, where stuff like the below is inexorable, inevitable, part-and-parcel with full de-/re-conditioning and not something that has to be regarded as particularly special or salient. Like you sort of get it for free along with everything else. Anyway, though, in any case, it's pretty cool and is coincident or interwoven with phenonological-conceptual-emotional insights that do make things nonmonotonically/net better as things untwist in a good way as per usual.
So, first, back in the day, it's like there's sort of "two modes, magisteria, realms, realities, something." There's "out there" which is like "the external world" and there's "in here" which is like much of thoughts, emotions, imagining, etc. And you might notice that often (usually?) that sort of can't coexist? Like if you're aware of "out there" then "in here" sort of goes quiet, and if you're "in here," like thinking, daydreaming, in reverie, etc., then "out there" is not salient, and you might be navigating "out there" on autopilot. So again it's not just that there's like "two realms" but also, to some degree, they're sort of not in awareness together. (There might be more than two. Daniel Ingram's discussions of "out of phase" phenomena seem important, here. Like, one could maybe chop it up further into like "out there," "in here in phase," and "in here out of phase," or something. Or there's like a continuous or discrete gradient. Anyway.)
Anyway, what happens, slowly and sometimes abruptly, is that, more and more, and/or more and more often, "out there" and "in here" are sort of coarising in the same "space," and, further, just like you can sometimes take in like a visual or auditory scene "all at once," there's sort of a temporal and experiential simultaneity that's conditionally available that doesn't always cut across the previous inside/outside thing.
(Relatedly, I think it's very important to not try to "force" this or to directly strive for it. Kind of directly trying to see everything at once or to see your thoughts as objects or etc., if done directly, is sort of potentially reifying or entrenching "dualism" ("watcher," "doer") because you're sort of not "behind" the "attentional armature," yet, as it were. "Attention" is still too heavyweight; a "thing (to be done)" [even if spontaneously]; it hasn't eaten itself become lighter and lighter, it's lightest self, yet, sort of.)
So then there's the "(but also) not one" part:
I'm less clear exactly what's being pointed at here (and for better and worse I haven't read commentary in the relevant tradition) but this is maybe in part referring to something that's initially paradoxical-seeming but there's like increasing decorrelation (“separation,” “independence”) of "sensations" [but also increased knowledge of their interdependence or at least dependence on causes and conditions etc. etc.] and while there's this “separateness” or "separation" or "difference" there's still positive "indistinctness,"---so "not one"---and/but also "wholeness" or "completeness" or "unity" but not to reify any of that and also all of this is empty, nebulous, provisional, groundless, etc.
cf. "positionless position" cf. groundlessness and no /fixed/ goal(s)
*
say there's (a) non-automatized top-down managing and (b) automatized top-down managing.
and then there's (c) bottom-up spontaneity
interleaved, "you":
(1) de-automatize (b) top-down managing during/after which the system learns how to bottom-up (effortlessly) automatize the thing or refactor it or everything (existential, cosmological, metaphysical, mundane and meaningful solve and dissolve of seemingly or initially or heartfelt important and critical problems) such that that can be a thing for the bottom-up system to do. so (b) transforms into (c).
(2) sort of teach the bottom-up system how to do (a)'s job, or, one learns how to trust (b) and how to teach (b) to be trustworthy and when (a) didn't actually need to be a thing at all (e.g.) confusions, superstition
(3) and, the bottom-up system needs lots indirect of de-automatizing and re-automatizing, too, which happens in the course of all this.
(in the course of this you sort of learn even (a) and (b) are bottom-up (c), but. [sic])
the bottom-up system has vastly more capacity than the (a) top-down non-automatized and (b) the top-down automatized. eventually you / the system sort of run out of stuff that needs to be managed ((a) and (b)) because the whole system (top-down and bottom-up) working together figured out any of:
a bottom-up (effortless) solution via solving, refactoring, or realizing it didn't need to be (effortlessly) managed before or now, or that there's a better way (c)
eventually just run out of stuff to be top-down managed, which involves sometimes multiple near-global involutions and untwists and so-on. one sees that "doing" or pushing or managing or controlling involves a fluctuating narrowing of attention or darkening of the attentional/awareness periphery and involves sort of a "going into" like an empty (in the technical sense) inner space that isn't necessary or essential, sort of.
(in the course of this you find deeper and deeper and subtler and subtler pockets of doing, willing, pushing, controlling, managing, forcing, etc., through unwrapping and untwisting and unraveling and opening and exposing and so on. "deeper" is a little problematic as a term, sort of since ultimately it's all "surfaces," sort of, with little dips into pockets, sort of, but it's mostly exposing and letting things come to you versus like trying to get somewhere deep, also altered states are sort of the exception and not the norm though are on and off a part of this.)
thus, spontaneity, [non-deliberateness [in a good sense]], non-controlling, non-managing, but/though nevertheless still preference [in a good sense]
and also there's a series of phenomenological-conceptual-cosmological-metaphysical corrections, over time, including realizing that "you're the whole universe" rather, "you" are a phenomenological world model that models contains/models "everything". [thx to scott alexander for this formulation. he doesn't necessarily endorse even 0.000001% of any this or even that formulation, etc., etc.] [find where he says this, i'll have it linked in doc also elsewhere.]
also that "narrowing" or "going elsewhere" runs out or stops and the periphery (and everything/"everything") becomes the foreground, sort of, first-pass
and again all this takes on the order of 10,000 hours because of sort of the nebulous combinatorial all-to-all-ness as the system transforms globally via the what-there-is-right-now local[ly "raised"] and then fundamental rate limits on synaptic potentiation and depotentiation plus synaptic renormalization during sleeping, or something [see other sections for more on this]
*
scratch:
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cf. non-eternity
not to much to say here maybe at this time just that impermenence is kind of an extraordinary concept in it's depth and breadth which is revealed in fits and starts to sort of encompass ever-more over years
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stub/scratch.
compare with "objectivity"
*
vs
effortless, spontaneous, automatic, costless, peaceful, exciting, enjoyable…
*
(copied from eternity, suffering, death :) "objective identity" / "you are a confluence of 'universe;" / any confluence will identify with it's identity as it were / any reconstitution as such will feel like "you" / let's see what it does, doesn't need anything o top of that or separate from that / not a soverign and crystalline soul / ...
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Stub.
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There's a bunch of senses or concepts that could be called something like "evaluative organizing principles." They're all super useful but very cognitive, very "heady." And of course, and this is part of the point of the section, though this point has been made in many other places, when I say "senses," "concepts," "useful", this is not to overly reify any of this---there's no single, eternal, platonic X for any of the X below; they're all ultimately empty, partly in the sense that they mean something different in subtly-or-not-so-subtly different contexts, etc., etc. etc.:
(these are in no particular order, and it's not a complete list, and some of these stretch the edges of "the thing" depending on the thing, and etc., but stuff kind of like this:)
So again these are very "heady." But we're often deeply using things like these to socially and behaviorally and cognitively navigate. But to the degree they're sort of used in "eternalistic" ways, they'll eventually leady someone astray into muscle tension, suffering, reactivity, destructiveness, etc., loosely speaking, at least.
There's "something" "beneath" all these, or that like emanates all the "correct" versions of these. And that could be called like "natural constraint," or global natural constraint, or sensory-embodied possibility, or aligned spontaneity, or just spontaneity. And this is sort of the same thing as like a fully positionless position on like a fully groundless ground, or something like that. None of this is thing-like, etc., etc., etc.. But again the stakes are real to the degree anything is real, etc., etc., etc.. Eventually one might find their way to the way they're doing all these things, as they understand them, and being able to refrain or dissolving/untangling reliance, maybe(!) "none of that actually anywhere" leads to sort of "phenomenological-field-conceptual unlocking" and stuff which de-bottlenecks more stuff.
*
See also: extreme skill and extreme standards
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[“ultimately” radical and “complete”, endorsed, motivationally and behaviorally safe and good and practical, ego-syntonic] self-love, self-compassion, self-babying, self-alignment, self-acceptance, self-trust, self-safety, self-friendship, non-self-attacking, cf. general~ "deprecated" non-vigilance, non-accounting for future self-attacking-involved regret or self-coercion
(In no particular order:)
cf. nonduality
cf. unity [nebulous, non-reified, empty, non-eternal]
cf. wholeness [nebulous, non-reified, empty, non-eternal]
cf. completeness [nebulous, non-reified, empty, non-eternal]
cf. attachment (as in pop psych attachment theory)
cf. no-self, no doer, no witness, centerlessness, etc.
cf. fear of death
cf. self-hatred
cf. self-fear
cf. I-I, atman/brahmin
cf. “unified will” (mega scare quotes), one thing going in one direction [very misleading conceptually given no-self and nonduality and bottom-up-ness and “separation,” but there’s still something useful there on and off if held loosely etc. perhaps “apparent unified will” or something but it doesn’t feel like that on the inside in a not-bad-way? Anyway.]
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In the spirit of Daniel Ingram's (and others', of course) noting/noticing, or Shinzen Young's "subtle is significant", leave out nothing, including nothing (or is that misleading?!). Anything and everything is fair game, but even this can lead to inappropriate reification or ontological fixation.
You can't leave anything out and you can't speed-run it. There is/ no corner-cutting, shortcuts. Haste, hurrying, rushing are illusory. (And momentum is problematic.) For both/all of these, if they are there, you eventually have to go back and "clean up," and do so "perfectly." Nothing can be left out. (But also nothing is left out--and correct practice is enough to find it all. Something vaguely in the spirit of the meta protocol helps but also the system, as it were, wants to find everything, as it were, will spontaneously reach for everything, as it were; it always/already knows what to do, and you can long-run trust/rest into that.) All that said, as per usual, there might still be miles and miles of all these, (in part) because they were already previously there, latent in the sysem. So if there is ongoing attempted corner-cutting, ongoing haste, hurrying, rushing, etc., they doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong, and that doesn't mean you aren't proceeeding even optimally. Finally, there is one sense in which things can be a bit faster, which is, sometimes, things vaguely in the spirit of the meta protocol, good teaching material, and useful interactions can mean less wrong turns and backtracking. That's sort of the only thing can "speed things up," long term. But, I think those sorts of improvements will be potentially dwarfed by sort of just the raw practice time, as it were, that's needed. And those sorts of things can overtly or subtly send people in the wrong direction, too. And, also, ultimately, it sort of has to come from you, you have to ultimately be omni-self-generative. But, that is, deep-down, a spontaneously intrinsic property of the system, so that's ok. (Wrong turns and backtracking are included in the "10,000 hours" thing.)
change (even like when learning quantum mechanics or something) is "never" "merely cognitive"; there's "always" involvement of of "the entire motor plant."; and/which is always ultimately non-algorithmic, non-rule-based (cf. deutschian popperian critical rationalism)
comment from elsewhere re "happiness because you've flexibly and exquisitely handled your shit": yeah this is hard. because like, not necessarily, but probably, just as one example, people are going to eventually die, or friends or family will die. so like there sort of has to be refactoring of like metaphysics, identity, cosmology somewhere in there. so it's more like "solve" and/or dissolve your problems. and "handle all your shit" was sort of a polemic equal and opposite advice for people who wanted happiness independent of conditions, but it's possibly misleading in isolation. this is a thing i could be more clear on in the doc.
[...] might be worth mentioning that someone will get increasingly efficient and meta efficient at exploring the search space as they go, even as big as it is. "meditation proceeds by exhaustive process of elimination; and this is sufficient to do the job; it's enough", if not hit by meteor or bus, etc. etc.
[...] might be worth calling out how problematic "effort" is, as well as being careful to not "burn in" effort," and how tacking towards effortlessness (pushing with a feather and then even less" is an extraordinary heuristic (and yet still just a heuristic) for going in the right direction
There is a reflexive thing at the heart of suffering, but I think there’s maybe a few of these. There’s the suffering one, and then there’s a like “armature of attention” one, and then there’s a “sensations trying to control other sensations” one. The uncoiling of each of these (possibly still in progress) have felt qualitatively really really different. Like the “qualia feel” is really different, though they all have a very similar flavor of reflexiveness or loopiness, manifest in their (also similar-feeling) “uncoiling” or untwisting. Anyway fwiw (edited)
Er qualia-feel is really different but still all seamless something something, can-in-fact-get-there-from-here etc etc
The "armature of attention"-y thing is like the initial heavyweight unnecessary-ness of attention, the thing-ness of it that’s like going out to things and sort of curling back to look back at itself-ish, that’s entangled too much with subtle muscle activity that becomes lighter and lighter and "flatter and flatter" and like recedes backwards into itself, spreads out, sort of (cf. luminosity / in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard, etc., etc.) as it self-untangles. See also: attention is not fundamental. "Armature" is also evocatively mentioned one or two other times if search in doc.
Layering sometimes kind of feels like "pushing something away" (and sometimes that's the right thing to do! technical debt is sometimes useful! also, sometimes you can't help it!) scratch note: "not 'pushing away'/'pushing elsewhere' is sort of the inverse operation of layering. or like takes advantage of superficial layering lability"
"strong negative preferences" like "just hate X" can sometimes have interesting reasons **
noting isn't value neutral
(experimental note to self: Effortlessly notice — no-self, no witness, and non-registration)
X does not need to be managed, for often or usually or generally quite extreme, or extreme feeling, X
X takes care of itself. Don’t need to add anything. Happening now. Things change.
Don’t need to add anything. --> essence of non-escalatory
Happening now. / Things change. --> (.) Freedom?
20230514 Some possibly triggering pith stuff I'm currently using to get through hard things. Note: it's changing every day; this is just a snapshot or a notes file on a particular day; if you're looking for possibly useful stuff and something doesn't work for you or is triggering or doesn't make sense don't assume it's coming from a super wise place. I have so much to learn, and I'm still making gazillions and gazillions of "spiritual" mistakes.
"try to enjoy it;" "is there a way to do this with less suffering and more X"; "X does not need to be managed/escalated"; "[deterministic total] surrender to unfolding now; all is happening now including thoughts of future, etc."; "[ultimately, absolutely] can't predict the future"; something-something live in the now cf. friend-of-digestion meditation; "try closing eyes just for 20-30 min; that's all you have to do; don't have to try or make anything happen"; "just don't know; anything could happen"; "no escape even for people who are healthy, now. this is life."
Given this is going to end, for me and everyone, what's my goal? (sort of: what's balance or integration between acceptance/understanding and "fighting"/or proactiveness?) <--I'm still working on this one!
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[The below is (maybe of course) not intended to be "academic quality," of course, of course. It's gestural and speculative, reminiscient of the style of the rest of this document, but it's written for a very different audience, and the such a style doesn't work as well for "science-y" topics. I think parts of the below are fine and parts of the below I already wish I'd written in a different way. It was almost single pass, to get it done as quickly as possible, to have a stake in the ground for future correction or elaboration.]
[Originally published: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/e6wHMpALit7ECwBnA/meditation-and-neuroscience-some-odds-and-ends [Last accessed: 2022-02-09]]
[Originally crossposted: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/meditation-and-neuroscience-some-odds-and-ends/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-09]]
[About me: [...] I have a PhD in bioengineering, during which I did work with human clinical EEG (and also audited neuroscience and machine learning classes), but I'm not a neuroscientist, and I didn't run this by any practicing researchers before hitting publish.]
As an introduction, I wanted to just mention up front that I'm not going to talk about predictive processing, artificial neural networks, GPT-N, neural annealing, the free energy principle, jhanas, amygdalae, cerebella, agent-based models of mind, and a bunch of other stuff. Good stuff, though!
What follows are a sprinkling of popular and academic neuroscience references that have been resonant to me as a long-term meditator and meditation writer/teacher. I don't write a lot about neuroscience because it's paradigmatically changing too fast. So, instead, in other places, I try to to talk about meditation in a contemporary-yet-timeless way, hopefully future-proofed (using philosophical, folk, and mathy language). But, in the conclusion, here, I talk a very tiny bit about my vision for meditation instructions that are rendered in a neuroscientific ontology "all the way down."
I think meditation is a bit contentious in parts of the LessWrong community, out of concern for individuals and the wider community. I personally don't recommend that most people meditate, but I would generally like people to know that (I personally believe that) "there's a there, there," in the spirit of truth-seeking and because, for some subset of people (I claim!), it's really valuable. In the conclusion, I warn against "naively operationalizing" neuroscientific writing about meditation, and I list a bunch of peer-reviewed studies on meditative risks. Finally, I've left out a few possible sections that I thought were particularly tempting to "operationalize."
Finally, I wrote this all in one go, so that it would definitely ship, and it becomes progressively less coherent through to the end (I think).
A meta-representational level of organization and computation
According to wikipedia, "somatotopy" is the point-for-point correspondence of an area of the body to a specific point on the central nervous system. We know that amputation or deafferentation changes an organism's somatotopy and that these changes progress over time. It's relatively uncontroversial that parts of the brain can "rewire" themselves, to some degree, after organismal insult, so this is maybe not surprising.
It might be a little surprising how reversible these changes can be.
A 2008 paper [1] is titled, "Chronically Deafferented Sensory Cortex Recovers a Grossly Typical Organization after Allogenic Hand Transplantation." The abstract says,
"[d]espite limited sensation, palmar tactile stimulation delivered 4 months post-transplant evoked contralateral S1 responses that were indistinguishable in location and amplitude from those detected in healthy matched controls. We find no evidence for persistent intrusion of representations of the face within the representation of the transplanted hand, although such intrusions are commonly reported in amputees. Our results suggest that even decades after complete deafferentiation, restoring afferent input to S1 leads to re-establishment of the gross hand representation within its original territory."
It's just one paper, but there are nearby papers in "paper space." These results suggest that at least the sensory cortex maintains significant plasticity throughout one's entire life, or at least maintains latent plasticity.
Losing and reattaching a (new) hand is a very large change. What about the "changes" of daily life? The Atlantic reports on the phenomenon of "representational drift." [2] (There are links to the relevant papers, in the article.) For example, neurons that represent particular odors change over time ("in mice")—within a month, representations of the odor remain, but the representing neurons are completely different. This sort of phenomenon is found in several brain regions. Also, from older research, it's sort of a truism that expert skill execution recruits less of the brain (and fewer muscles). Together, these results suggest that, representations in the brain are simultaneously both continually in motion (copied, transferred) and continually being sculpted. (When I say "continually," perhaps this is during REM sleep, or perhaps it's when awake behavior partially recruits those representations, or maybe it's actually "continuously.")
For some possibly relevant mechanism, according to wikipedia, in 2007, evidence was first found for so-called "didactic organization," though this was predicted at least as early as 2001. [3] "Didactic organization is the ability of neurons within a network to impart their pattern of synaptic connectivity and/or response properties to other neurons."
Relatedly, a popular article [4] reports in vivo results ("in mice") showing that "the brain rotates memories to save them from new sensations." In summary, "some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. [...T]he brain rotates those representations to prevent interference [n.b. via 'orthogonal coding']." The article also reports on similar work with monkeys, but in this case it's orthogonal activity in the motor cortex, to separate motor planning and motor output. To emphasize, they claim it's the same neurons: "Experimentally sifting through the possibilities, they ruled out the possibility that different subsets of neurons in the auditory cortex were independently handling the sensory and memory representations."
These days, I think rapid switching network configurations are uncontroversial, and ditto for storing information in the same same networks at different frequencies, and I think the "darwinian nature" of the brain is fairly well accepted at the "neural level" and possibly the "direct representational level," i.e. representations in local competition for neural substrate.
But, to my mind, all the above suggests that there is a sort of "meta-representational level" that can shunt around and transform representations somewhat independently of particular neural substrate. (versus, say, "substrate-locked representations" Hopefully the distinction is clear. And also I haven't super stress-tested this idea.)
Meditation Interlude 1
These popular articles and this research caught my eye, because, as a long-term meditator, I sometimes have the visceral experience of almost a "raft" of representation (or a reusable computation) "detaching from somewhere" and "drifting" until it bumps into stable structure. This is hardly an argument for anything, and phenomenology doesn't have to provide intuition about neural structure and function, and in fact phenomenology is often quite misleading, but, for what it's worth, these experiences are what made the above material stand out to me, over the past few years.
There's also something important that the above leaves out--I haven't come across any nicely exemplifying research--and it's something like "substrate contention" or just "constraint." While, above, I suggested that there is a "meta-representation layer" that can ship around representations somewhat independent of neural substrate, the available "shipping routes" at any given time seem finite and non-arbitrary. To be a bit more clear, through analogy, meditation, to me as a long-term meditator, has much in common with sliding puzzles [5] and Tower of Hanoi-like problems [6]. Over weeks and months, there is tremendous flexibility. But, locally, far into meditative progress, there's often very few degrees of freedom (after using up some degree of "local slack.")
(And this implies local maxima and so one of the main functions of meditation and other self-transformative practices are for stepping backwards out of local maxima.)
The Brain is Meaning-Laden and Erroneous but not Noisy
I think "active perception" [8] and "active inference" [9] are fairly well known. In these paradigms, the organism is actively sampling the world and deliberately altering the sensory apparatus to more efficiently maximize information and falsify hypotheses (and perhaps minimize free energy and etc.).
I want to very loosely combine the above ideas with some interesting experimental results to make a bold, hand-wavey to counter a vague popular intuition that people often have about brains. That's all pretty vague. Let's begin.
[Content warning for several subsequent paragraphs: invasive animal research] A lot of sensory neural coding experiments are done on anesthetized animals. The animal is perfectly still and "unconscious" (or perhaps barely-conscious, with drugs titrated to get a requisite level of brain activity). And the animal is stimulated, somehow, for example visually or aurally, with a mathematically parameterized stimulus, while neural recordings are taken.
But, more recently, relatively more data is being collected from awake, behaving animals. Reported popularly [10], researchers found that, for example, "The visual cortex knew exactly what the animal was doing, down to the details of its individual movements." The article quotes a researcher not affiliated with the study who says, “Everywhere in the brain, it’s the same story. The movement signals are just really unmistakable.”
In a different article, the same popular publication reports on "aperiodic background noise." [11] In my own words, and this is more a speculative interpretation and hardly a summary at all, this "noise" may indirectly subserve representation or inference or it may directly represent, but, in any case, this "noise" may not be "noise" at all.
What do I mean by "noise," then?
Before writing this section, I went briefly looking for a very concise statement about the difference between error and noise with respect to a model. I found something good enough in a somewhat random post by an individual named Adriaan Peens-Hough. Thank you, Adriaan. [13 [sic]]
Adriaan says the following (bolding mine):
- the residual is the difference between the true phenomenon being studied and the model being employed to describe it.
- noise is that part of the residual which is in-feasible to model by any other means than a purely statistical description. note that such modelling limitations also arise due to limitations of the measurement device (e.g. finite bandwidth & resolution).
- error is that component of the residual that remains after accounting for the noise. according to the above definitions: a) noise and error are uncorrelated b) residual may be reduced by either reducing noise or by reducing error c) these definitions are compatible with the intuitive statements that "noise does not introduce bias" and "bias is a class of error". finally note that error can only be reduced by improving the model (either of the phenomenon or of the measurement process). however noise may be reduced by either improving the measurement device, or by improving the model fidelity.
Given all that terminology, I want to first-pass vaguely claim something like, "there is no noise in the brain; there's only model and error." I will expand on this a bit in the meditative interlude.
Meditation Interlude 2:
I think people sometimes experience themselves as sort of "messy" or "haphazard," say in behavior or belief. And popularly, we think of the brain as "wet and messy," a hunk of Jell-O. We talk of brain farts.
Say, Internal Family Systems and some other contemporary modalities (and old-school psychoanalysis--Freudian slips--to be fair). That is, in the popular consciousness, we have some conception that sometimes minds/brains/people do things for no reason, or at least no good reason, yet there's also the conception that we sometimes do things for "deep reasons."
After thousands of hours of meditation, I'm mostly on the "deep reasons" side. Or at least perhaps the "always reasons if not always deep ones" side. (Importantly, though, these reasons aren't necessarily first-pass or n-pass explicitly articulable; and I don't think "reasons" are a natural kind).
Instead of "reasons," maybe it's better to claim that sensory data is always "interpreted" or that almost all neural activity is nearly synonymous with interpretation.
I mentioned slider puzzles and Tower of Hanoi problems above.
To be sure, phenomenology can be buzzy, shimmery, sweeping. Attention can be choppy. "Thought" can seem fragmented, repetitive, loopy.
But the impression that emerges, at least for me, over thousands of hours of meditation, is of something the opposite of "mush" and instead something of "thresholds, criticalities, steel cables," something far closer to a Babbage difference engine than, say, a monkey mind or electrical impulses rattling around in Jello-O. Not springs and rubber bands, but gears and rods. The monkey mind is instantiated by the Babbage difference engine.
This is getting a big vague, be degrees, as I run out of steam. But: model error, not noise.
Source Localization and Epistemics
[This section is copied from a facebook comment I made [12]]
What are some examples of epistemic upgrades you'd predict [from meditation]?
This is very terse/schematic, but I predict improvements in:
(1) attribution and provenance
(2) reasoning
(3) transitive closure and de-contradicting of current beliefs
(1) attribution and provenance
(a) better attribution of the causal chain of an belief update and
(b) improved concepts/ontologies,
because (a-b) are causally downstream of improved source localization and separation/deconvolution of sensory phenomena [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect
(2) reasoning
Improvements in sensory processing are also improvements in reasoning, even though high-level reasoning processes might seem remote from low-level sensory processing. Here are some additional claims, with some loose argumentation:
Past sensory impressions/memory, in a sense, become/condition/sculpt the structure of current and future sensory processing which includes the reasoning process itself, which itself is partially a sort of "sensory processing" of "inner experiences."
So sensory processing, at the neurological level, is deeply entangled with high-level reasoning.
And so even high-level epistemic errors can be traced back to past or current sensory processing errors.
(3) transitive closure and de-contradicting of current beliefs
Claim: Past (and contemporary) sensory processing failures, even ones from decades ago, can be corrected, which can cause a cascade of conceptual/belief improvements, to old beliefs, as well as the bleeding edge of belief, in the present.
This process of correction involves re-processing old sensory experiences, which includes reprocessing prior experiences of the reasoning process itself, and thereby a refactoring of the reasoning process itself (again because of how experience becomes structure/process).
Because of "compression" and a strange sort of quasi-losslessness, it's possible in meditation to go all the way back to childhood traumas, very old epistemic errors, and so forth, in less total durational time than it took to live them. (cf. also the so-called memory reconsolidation literature) And that reprocessing cascades through the rest of one's belief system causing further improvements, upgrades, and so on.
I analogize meditation to paying off technical debt. [More sections in my doc:]
https://meditationbook.page/#181
I made a lot of inferential jumps in the above, for brevity!
(Miscellaneous) Interlude 3:
Finally, I want to talk briefly about representations, as such. Above I refer to representations as if they're "real things that exist that directly represent other things." I'm taking a strawman interpretation of my own writing above. In that vein, one could imagine an organism with a brain as something like:
perception --> update representations (beliefs/goals) --> action --> perception --> action...
In place of representation, I like "functional (stateless) computation."
That is, the "state" of the system is stored in "that which continuously, waterfall-style, without feedback loops, computes motor outputs from perceptual inputs." (In that scheme, the "flow of information" through the computation directly and continuously shapes the computational substrate to optimize the computation.
But of course we know there's feedback and feedforward in the brain, so it's not quite like this. But I want to strawman caution against inferring the existence of "representations as such" from symbolic behavior such as speaking, writing, and even thinking.
Conclusion and Caution:
So the goal of this piece was to highlight some relatively more contemporary results in neuroscience that have piecemeal stood out to me as a long-term meditator. In my main meditation writing, I don't talk much about neuroscience because neuroscience is in its infancy and it's currently difficult to write meditation instructions in a way that "directly operationalizes neuroscientific concepts." If I wrote a lot about neuroscience and meditation, it'd all be more and more obsolete with each passing year. So I've tried to future proof my writing by using folk, philosophical and math-adjacent concepts, in both gestural and precise ways.
Maybe neuroscientific concepts will never be the right ontology. Of course stroke victims and TMS research subjects can sort of learn to differentiate when precise local substrate is or isn't working. And I will say that, when I started meditating, I "didn't feel like a brain," but now the long-run shimmer and sweep of meditation, at the finest phenomenological grain, feels suspiciously like brainwaves (the frequencies are right) and subtle, very fine-grain aperiodic shimmering across the whole phenomenological field (pervasive during meditation but not while living life) feels suspiciously like the phenomenological correlates of synaptic potentiation and depotentiation as such. But, anyway, still, I'm not sure, and maybe "neuroscience" will always be the wrong level of abstraction for meditation
And, anyway, in any case, I dream of meditation instructions that are "neuroscience all the way down."
Caution:
The above (and here) serve as a bit of a caution, too. Willoughby Britton [*] finds a non-negligible percentage of severe sequelae in meditators, even for those under the supervision or ostensibly qualified teachers.
Neural state space is finite but vast. I currently guesstimate that it takes about 10,000 hours to walk the "whole thing" even just once, loosely speaking. I believe that being safe can be very counterintuitive and even "accidentally optimal" meditation can be a rough ride. For what it's worth, the above concepts and ontologies in this post aren't remotely like the ones I use in my writing and teaching about how to meditate. Please don't operationalize any of the above in terms of "bespoke meditation instructions" or please be careful if you do.
***
[*] Britton et al., and others, from her citations:
***
[1] Frey, Scott H., et al. "Chronically deafferented sensory cortex recovers a grossly typical organization after allogenic hand transplantation." Current Biology 18.19 (2008): 1530-1534.
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/the-brain-isnt-supposed-to-change-this-much/619145/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didactic_organisation [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[4] https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-rotates-memories-to-save-them-from-new-sensations-20210415/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliding_puzzle [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Hanoi [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_perception [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[10] https://www.quantamagazine.org/noise-in-the-brains-vision-areas-encodes-body-movements-20191107/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[11] https://www.quantamagazine.org/brains-background-noise-may-hold-clues-to-persistent-mysteries-20210208/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-07]
[13] Peens-Hough, Adriaan. (2016). Re: What's the difference between noise and error in a dataset?. Retrieved from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Whats_the_difference_between_noise_and_error_in_a_dataset2/56f2628340485479c609ec0b/citation/download.
***
some papers associated with the popular articles above, for precision and posterity:
Schoonover, C. E., Ohashi, S. N., Axel, R., & Fink, A. J. (2021). Representational drift in primary olfactory cortex. Nature, 594(7864), 541-546.
Libby, Alexandra, and Timothy J. Buschman. "Rotational dynamics reduce interference between sensory and memory representations." Nature neuroscience 24.5 (2021): 715-726.
Niell, Cristopher M., and Michael P. Stryker. "Modulation of visual responses by behavioral state in mouse visual cortex." Neuron 65.4 (2010): 472-479.
Kumar, Neeraj, Timothy F. Manning, and David J. Ostry. "Somatosensory cortex participates in the consolidation of human motor memory." PLoS biology 17.10 (2019): e3000469.
Vinck, M., Batista-Brito, R., Knoblich, U., & Cardin, J. A. (2015). Arousal and locomotion make distinct contributions to cortical activity patterns and visual encoding. Neuron, 86(3), 740-754.
Stringer, C., Pachitariu, M., Steinmetz, N., Reddy, C. B., Carandini, M., & Harris, K. D. (2019). Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity. Science, 364(6437), eaav7893.
Salkoff, D. B., Zagha, E., McCarthy, E., & McCormick, D. A. (2019). Movement and performance predict widespread cortical activity in a visual detection task. bioRxiv, 709642.
Drew, Patrick J., Aaron T. Winder, and Qingguang Zhang. "Twitches, blinks, and fidgets: important generators of ongoing neural activity." The Neuroscientist 25.4 (2019): 298-313.
Stringer, C., Michaelos, M., Tsyboulski, D., Lindo, S. E., & Pachitariu, M. (2021). High-precision coding in visual cortex. Cell, 184(10), 2767-2778.
Musall, Simon, Matthew T. Kaufman, Ashley L. Juavinett, Steven Gluf, and Anne K. Churchland. "Single-trial neural dynamics are dominated by richly varied movements." Nature neuroscience 22, no. 10 (2019): 1677-1686.
He, Biyu J. "Scale-free brain activity: past, present, and future." Trends in cognitive sciences 18, no. 9 (2014): 480-487.
He, Biyu J., John M. Zempel, Abraham Z. Snyder, and Marcus E. Raichle. "The temporal structures and functional significance of scale-free brain activity." Neuron 66, no. 3 (2010): 353-369.
Voytek, Bradley, Mark A. Kramer, John Case, Kyle Q. Lepage, Zechari R. Tempesta, Robert T. Knight, and Adam Gazzaley. "Age-related changes in 1/f neural electrophysiological noise." Journal of Neuroscience 35, no. 38 (2015): 13257-13265.
Donoghue, Thomas, Matar Haller, Erik J. Peterson, Paroma Varma, Priyadarshini Sebastian, Richard Gao, Torben Noto et al. "Parameterizing neural power spectra into periodic and aperiodic components." Nature neuroscience 23, no. 12 (2020): 1655-1665.
Schaworonkow, Natalie, and Bradley Voytek. "Longitudinal changes in aperiodic and periodic activity in electrophysiological recordings in the first seven months of life." Developmental cognitive neuroscience 47 (2021): 100895.
Wen, Haiguang, and Zhongming Liu. "Separating fractal and oscillatory components in the power spectrum of neurophysiological signal." Brain topography 29, no. 1 (2016): 13-26.
Maniscalco, Brian, Jennifer L. Lee, Patrice Abry, Amy Lin, Tom Holroyd, and Biyu J. He. "Neural integration of stimulus history underlies prediction for naturalistically evolving sequences." Journal of Neuroscience 38, no. 6 (2018): 1541-1557.
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)]
Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-map-of-meaning-in-the-brain-changes-ideas-about-memory-20220208/ [Last accessed: 2022-02-10]
Popham, Sara F., et al. "Visual and linguistic semantic representations are aligned at the border of human visual cortex." Nature Neuroscience 24.11 (2021): 1628-1636.
My commentary:
"no such thing as memory that's separable from everything else";"'naturalization/integration frees up memory/skill that's entangled with it's local context and makes it more globally available. but even then, there's sort of no such thing as memory that's separable from everything." another way to put it is that, there's a sense in which there's no domain general skills and domain general knowledge, but also a sense in which there can be. or, humans furiously generalize, but there's a sense in which that generalization is always "newly context specific." none of this is quite right.
Comment link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30287240 [Last accessed: 2022-02-10]
Summary: people who switch languages may partially lose access to skills and declarative they learned while speaking the original language.
Me: Meditation, etc., can more fully make available knowledge, capacity, skills that are entangled with prior languages but especially prior contexts in general. And meditation can help combine skill, knowledge, etc., from far removed prior contexts to facilitate generalization, error correction, etc., all the way up to (in some sense) fully global models that account for all so-far-encountered used-to-be-anomalies. There's a sense though in which even this is just a recontextualization. Like there's no way to escape "knowledge is behavior is entangled with environment and context", but in another sense it's relative by degrees, all the way up to global (which is partially overlaps with luminosity and is basically coextensive with paying off all technical debt. See also Plato's Camera by Paul Churchland.
[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 (super)section intentionally left blank. Scroll down for the contentful subsections!]
[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 I wrote this today, I would write it differently; originally at https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/03/29/crowley-chads-rationality-and-the-unification-of-will-3000-words/ [Last accessed: 2022-04-23]]
I’ve had the mixed fortune of various collaborators and other influences being into Crowley, Aristotle, Kant, etc. There are of course interesting connections because of historical causal links and also they’re all gesturing at reality and various aspects of it.
Crowley talks about the true will. Aristotle talks about the relationship between goods and the highest good. Kant talks about the good will and the highest good.
The felt reality of all this can be cooler and more direct–preconceptual, aconceptual, maybe “transconceptual” is better.
But “will” and “goodness,” etc., are extremely useful concepts.
We need to finally add the concept of wu wei: “‘inexertion’, ‘inaction’, […] ‘effortless action’, ‘no action'”. (I would add “no will,” etc.)
The above concepts are sort of involved in “agency.” I want to bring in “mechanism” as a foil, in the next section or two, and then we’re mostly not going to talk about mechanism explicitly, farther below.
There’s neat duals between mechanism and agency. Check out the table below.
When you poke too hard at “cause,” things get weird. Was there a first cause? (Yes, yes, physics and big bangs and singularities. But.)
When you poke too hard at “agency,” things get weird. What is a flesh and blood anthropomorphic or teleological agent really doing it all for? (Yes, yes, homeostasis and entropic dissipators and evolution. But.)
So, yeah, if you go “full reason” and you have causes, you maybe need a first cause.
If you go, full means/ends or purposes, you maybe need a final end or a highest good.
Two-column table [maybe only renders correctly in github-flavored markdown]:
| mechanism | agency [telos] | | --- | --- | | cause/effect | means/end | | Y is by X; Y is because of X; Y is from X; X causes Y; X causes Y, conditional on Z | X is for Y; X is for the purpose of Y; X is good for Y; X is good, for me, for Y; X is good, for me, right now, for Y; X is good because Y | | first cause (sempiternally or eternally) | final end; highest good |
Kant writes in his most famous stuff about contradictions or antimonies that reason can’t resolve. In his unfinished last writings, he gets stuck on the relationship between mechanism/cause and life/agency.
Rhetorically, maybe we just need better concepts (not to presuppose there’s any agreement or tidy basis for what a “concept” is). Physics, dynamical systems theory, neurophysiology, and Karl Friston will continue to plug away at this, hopefully with input from philosophy (not to presuppose there’s any agreement or tidy basis for what “philosophy” is).
One might think these weird reasoning edge cases are just for philosophers.
But, for people who are, say, working on becoming reasonable, consistent, good, happy, something, one actually implicitly or explicitly starts running into genuine philosophical issues pretty quickly. [Not to implicitly presuppose that “working on” these things is a good way to think about all of this.]
Maybe we want to live an examined life, or a consistent life, or a meaningful life.
And some people maybe sort of glide on through, aren’t tortured or are at least merely vaguely, implicitly stuck on this stuff. But, some people are tortured or at least super blah, like if they’re really getting snarled in their life and plans. And so they really try to sit down and work it out. But, again, reason itself can seemingly run into all sorts of weird issues.
So, what to do?
We’d sort of really, truly like our beliefs/plans/behavior to stand up to any rational analysis (modulo “rationality” in quotes, selective truthing and isolated demands for rigor, being wielded as “power over”). We want to be able to say (intertemporally) consistent things to friends, lovers, collaborators–maybe a few sentences, maybe tens of thousands of words over many years, as one (of many) mechanism(s) for coordinating with other people, intimately or group-scale or large-scale.
Anyway, but, so back to the will! People are pretty fragmented, for better and worse! We’re different things in different contexts, different things for different people. Even when we’re alone we’re pulled between A and B and C and D, and, in the next moment, between W and Q and R and S.
How do we be or become self-reliable? How can we count on our future selves? How can we count on our past(!) selves!?! How do we be reliable for other people? How do we stably or responsively or aspirationally have life traction, cumulativity, build and build?
Are we stuck with this the usual thing? Are we stuck with our brains using hyperbolic discounting, or some kind of scheduling algorithm, or circadian clocks, or behavioral conditioning, or reinforcement learning kludge hieararchies, or whatever? That we can’t escape? Once executive and attentional dysfunction, always executive and attentional dysfunction (normal, subclinical, clinical)?
Maybe some people get lucky, their weirdness or brokenness or obsession or contingent life tradeoffs perfectly fit some environmental situation, and then you get people, who are super distracted or super rigid, nevertheless becoming captains of industry or scientific geniuses or great leaders, sometimes beautiful through and through, usually with terrible character flaws or with terrible trade offs or skeletons in the closet. And most people are mediocre or “promising but fail to launch” (not to mention trapped in poverty) as it were.
So are we stuck with this? (I don’t think so, though it might be project of thousands of hours, and sometimes a risky one, yadda yadda, for long-time readers of this blog.)
I want to note some equivocation here, too. Sometimes we experience what might be called a conflict of the ego, like the “I” wants two different things or wants to want or wants to not want something. Sometimes the conflict may seem to be within the “me,” conflicts between impulses or urges. And sometimes the conflict may be between the “I” and the “me,” or even I and not-I, me and not-me. In any case, there’s theoretical and phenomenological and neurological richness, that I don’t want to gloss over, but is beyond the scope of this post.
There are straw “natural” ways or straw “rational” way to sort of explore (and maybe influence) the will system or the goal system or the action system, and so on. (And/but, remember those apparent deep contradictions in the use of reason, above.)
One will likely have encountered variants of goal hierarchies or goal (re)factoring, because hierarchies are super useful and/or you’ve seen them from self-improvement fad cycles.
Anyway, it’s possible to write down “goals,” to explore how some goals partially depend on other goals. And one can play with wording until it maybe feels resonant, and stable enough, and maybe one can find strategic wins, where proximal goals can be “multifinal,” can achieve multiple more distal goals all at once. (One can have “containment hierarchies” where a goal can be “instantaneously decomposed,” its attributes rendered more and more analytically clear, while preserving a shorter, higher level description that still refers to the goal. And one can have “temporal flows” that articulate the ordering of milestones or temporal dependencies or specify elements of a “temporally structured goal as such.”)
Goals have sort of a temporal or temporally ordered flavor. One can also do something similar with “goods,” can make a “goodness hierarchy,” which can have both imminent [sic] and transcendent flavors.
One could imagine that if they keep refactoring, they might go from something with tangles and inelegance, even hidden cycles, to a tidy, directed, acyclic graph, and one that’s easy to refactor as you learn, experiment, get surprised, and grow:
[Image: https://meditationstuff.files.wordpress.com/2020/03/gghier.jpg?w=1124 Two directed, acyclic graphs, one labeled "Goals" and the other labeled "Goodness". Each starts out with an inchoate scribbly blob at the root. Then there's an arrow labeled "refactor". Then there's sort of a new root. For the "Goals" DAG it says "ultimate goal". For the "Goodness" DAG it says "highest good." Then under each of these is sort of a "pyramid" made out of bubbles and arrows. Some bubbles have more bubbles inside of them. The arrows are pointing towards the root. For the "Goals" DAG the arrows are labeled "enables". For the "Goodness" DAG the arrows are labeled "is good for; is good because." There is a two-way arrow between the two pyramids that is labeled "complex relationship." In a separate section it says "Behavior is dependent on goals and goodness (homeostasis and hormones and physics...". There are columns, each labeled "context", and under the contexts each entry is titled "Action." [cf. David Allen's getting things done.]]
And then one can harmonize these with a plan, with action sequences or context/action lists, a la David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and so on.
I wrote a really long post that explores additional considerations and sort of pushes all this to the limit. It’s worth reading, even if I’m going to attack all of this in the next section:
One might even try to do a similar refactoring of their “beliefs,” a tidy, directed acyclic graph from evidence to conclusions, at least for “parts” of their mind.
There’s a lot of value, in all this, there is, though it might be more oblique than one might expect. Playing around with it can be very, very instructive. But it’s sort of cart before horse, in a lot of ways. Explicit reasonableness is downstream of finer-grain “implicit reasonableness” or “embodied reasonableness,” as we’ll see. (Some people will be like, “duh,” and some people will be encountering this for the first time.)
In any case, pretending we’re really going hard at the explicit thing, it can get really tangly. One can get bogged down in sort of subverbal tangles, ontological stickiness, limitations of local decomposition. Refactoring becomes a combinatorial explosion, a complex combinatorial optimization problem. And, it can often stay really intellectual, not touch something “deep,” something “real(?).”? Really digging into an exercise like this can sometimes be worse than doing nothing at all.
People might be lured to goal-refactoring and belief-refactoring, and so on, because it may seem to promise clarity, consistency, power, agency, something. Maybe it will give one an edge over people who don’t do things like this.
Of course, of course there’s something very good about focusing, introspection, felt senses, and so on. Go play with those things! They’re just adjacent to meditation, they can complement meditation. And the precision (and play) of words and symbols and diagrams do change people–journaling and therapy and talking to friends and story writing. And articulation and explicitness, either spoken or writing things down, is extremely useful for intimate and large-scale synergy and coordination. Use everything.
And/but, thought experiment, really grinding away, for hours and hours, trying to fit the mind and behavior into tidy boxes, with clear concepts and well-defined semantics for the arrows, and… Again, it’s instructive to explore doing this. And todo lists and simple goal touchstones can be a lifeline, to be sure, and more (and more) structure can be essential for teams or operations at scale, of course.
But, again in the small, almost everyone has “conceptual errors” in the relationship between words, formalism, etc., and feelings, behavior, meaning, future, phenomenology, etc.
And, so, when people “self-improve,” they do so under contingent misconceptualizations, and so most self-improvement also has a degree of error-propagation. And any technique that is not both globally comprehensive and error-correcting (and meta-error-correcting) will start to have errors start to crowd out gains, if pushed too far. And that looks like “akrasia,” muscle tension, etc.
The mind is vast (though finite) and it operates at a behavioral and inferential grain that is far finer (and faster) than words and boxes (of course). The mind uses powerful abstractions, too, to be sure, for acting, planning, and communicating. But, one might say that explicit abstractions are “leaky” and one might say that the “real” abstractions, that the mind is using under the hood, that are a lot harder to correlate with words, are sort of not leaky, in some sense.
Very, very, very loosely, what people are looking for, stated concisely, when they’re self improving, with “rational” boxes and arrows (or dance or breathwork), could be (and has been) abstractly described as something like, say,
Two-column table [maybe only renders correctly in github-flavored markdown]:
| mind | body | | --- | --- | | akrasia | muscle tension | | intertemporal self-consistency (contradiction-free) | contention-free sensorimotor planning |
We’ve sort of been talking abstractly about goals, plans, todos or actions, beliefs…
But, both jokingly and bitterly (and problematically), there are the Chads. (Orders of magnitude more problematically, there are the Stacys(?), I think?)
What of effortless confidence, naturalness, smooth action, decisiveness, spontaneity, physical grace, felt time abundance, eloquence, stability, character, virtue, sexiness, reliability, trustworthiness, joy…
We see flashes of something extraordinary. Sometimes these things are so achingly beautiful, so achingly desirable we have to run screaming, because the desiring and not-having might destroy us. Sometimes that desirable thing is an illusion or a misunderstanding, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want it, until we resolve the confusion or find something even really, truly better.
For all their partiality, we see flashes of things we want in actors and other celebrities, in the football players, cheerleaders, and CEOs.
More examples:
Mr. Rogers was just the same guy whether talking to kids or addressing governmental apparatus. Maybe that’s a little weird, but that’s an envious simplicity on the far side of complexity. I don’t know, Elon Musk is very problematic, but new, concrete physical things keep getting created in proximity to him (and in earth orbit) all the time.
There are people who step up in an acute or chronic crises, and relatively costlessly, because they are not burdened by life; they have flexibility and slack.
This one is problematic, but “people who should be ugly but instead it makes them even more attractive.” (Good skin care or makeup but also something else…)
There are people who competently keep their word (or good-faith, proactively renegotiate, etc., etc.), and you can ask for that promise, collaboratively negotiate that two-sided promise, because you know it won’t hurt them to keep it.
Orators and dancers.
On the fictional side, I don’t know, Captain/Admiral Picard’s idealism, clarity, eloquence, and compassion, even if embedded in plot armor. The DC-cinematic-universe Wonder Woman’s unhesitating, spontaneous, naturalized, radiant compassion. Astonishing, tiny moments in a host of indie movies and limited tv series. Any character who says or does just the right thing, is unhesitatingly already in motion, of and out of a natural response to circumstances, instantaneously already beginning to unfold, because that’s what they anticipatorily already are, deep-down to the very bottom.
See also:
What I’ve sort of been doing, above, is sketching out a “high modernist” straw self-transformation method, then maybe specifying the limitations of that in terms of how it fails to produce a “finer grain” thing. And then I’m listing all these examples that allude to that finer grain thing.
Do they seem to maybe not all be of the same type?
Is there a relationship between, for example, physical grace and being a captain of industry?
One might initially think there are tradeoffs, between chad-ness and certain kinds of success (even though there are probably [slightly more rare] “financially successful chad” memes). And maybe there might initially seem like a tradeoff between defensible analytical rigor and chad-ness. But, maybe upon further reflection, there’s no reason why this can’t be all in the same person, no?
(More examples of seeming tradeoffs: The brilliant scientist or artist is destroying their body and their relationships in order to create or discover. That person who can build empires, but it’s on top of skeletons. I can be respected but I can’t be beautiful. I can be desired for my body but not for my mind. I can have grand long-term plans but I can’t put time into physical grace.)
And, again, we can find people seemingly exemplifying these tradeoffs, everywhere we look. It’s really hard to find people who are excelling on all the dimensions we imagine (or it hurts too much to look). Or the only examples are fictional and misleading.
***
Ok, this is a rather shaky jump, but I want to make the point that, phenomenologically, world, future, and body are happening contiguously. Even the past, in some sense, as it were, is happening contiguously. It’s all happening, or being experienced, or being represented in the same experiential field, without boundary, as a whole, as a unity.
I’ll just say that this is suggestive of untapped synergy, untapped elegance. For someone who has grand plans (or intimate plans, or both) that are actually working, actually coming to fruition, that’s not just a property of the mind (of “beliefs” and “plans”); it’s concretely instantiated in their physical activity, while moving through the world, in speech, nonverbal behavior, and action (and even while asleep, if their sleep is particularly harmonious, restful, and restorative).
Diachronic is synchronic. The effects of the past and the potentiality of the future live in the present. And, one can make peace with their past and future, can be gentle and receptive with their past-that’s-not-even-past, can be responsive and aspirational with their future, in the present.
Anyway, so how to realize that possible synergy, that possible elegance?
Well, transformative practices that engage the body and mind as the unity they actually are, etc., etc.
So, let’s get back to “the will,” which can be more and more unified, say, in a chad-flavored, non-straw-rationality way (and the difference between 100 hours in and a few thousand hours in can be astonishing).
And/but, “the will,” is still sort of temporally linear, even if contextually multi-threading.
And the body has this vast parallelism.
The will keeps us safe, as best it can, sort of mediating between conflicts in that vast parallelism of the body, which one might find is the basis of conflicts in belief and plans, the basis of intertemporal inconsistency.
Perhaps low-level sensorimotor planning contention is (in some mediate or even immediate sense of “is”) intertemporal inconsistency. The sensorimotor loop, even with sometimes “delay” between stimulus and response, is intertemporal inconsistency, or lack thereof. The body is always acting. The body is always perceiving. In some sense there is never a gap between stimulus and response. There might be anticipation, though.
Anyway, as those conflicts become less and less, the will sort of relaxes over time. Vast parallelism of body, of considerations, of possible futures, becomes beautiful speech, beautiful movement, physical grace on the outside, time abundance on the inside.
The body or the mind is sort of this massively parallel fountain or jet of water or air. And you know how you can get a ball to sort of stick in that? Like a ping-pong ball in the jet of a hairdryer? [1, 2] When the will is coalesced or apparent it sort of dances on or coheres or or rides on or facilitates that parallelism, that expressed action, as a unity or a whole.
It’s kind of crazy that one can be wanting sex, beauty, world peace, salt, protein, consciously or unconsciously, as it were, at the same time, and in any case delicately boop a friend on the nose with a single finger, advocate for something in a telegram chat an hour later, and then maybe sprint across a field an hour after that.
Behavior is both consistently multifinal and coherently linearized, when everything is working right.
And this can feel (time) abundant, spontaneous, effortless, natural, from the inside.
But we must engage the right methods that, somewhat literally and somewhat metaphorically, operate at the proper grain and depth.
And then, with nonmonotonicities, periods of jumbliness, confusion, inarticulateness, demotivation…
…we might find our physical grace, the stability of our plans, the eloquence of our speech, the stability of our plans, the defensibility or our reasoning, the attentiveness of our intimacy, the strength and reliability of our promises…
…all inching up, improving, little by little, again nonmonotonically along all sorts of dimensions, but nevertheless inexorably and all at once.
***
https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1
***
P.S. Forgot to add this, should probably expand on at some point: (One doesn’t get to exactly choose what one’s “future unified will” will look like but you do get to be absolutely 100% ok with every infinitesimal thing that happens along the way.)
***
P.P.S. Update: I sort of tossed in wu wei at the very beginning, for oblique completeness, even though there’s a good distinction between “will” and “action,” and wu wei falls more in the action bucket. (Action would be another post entirely.) A reader notes that “De” would have been a better thing to toss in from Daoism, correlating the various conceptions of “will” in different systems. I don’t have enough experience with Daoism to feel comfortable making an edit above, but I wanted to note this somewhere!
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[If I wrote this today, I would write it differently; originally at https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/02/24/enlightenment-sensorimotor-processing-love/ [Last accessed: 2022-04-23]]
[gif: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/35/59/b6/3559b6576c1d97ce7761be610b860e1b.gif Repeating, moving image from the movie Moulin Rouge! a 2001 film. Christian (Ewan McGregor) is singing or saying to Satine (Nicole Kidman) "Love is like oxygen. Love is a many splendored thing. Love lifts us up where we belong. All you need is love." (I think these are the actual lyrics or dialogue?)]
Alright, let’s connect up a bunch of stuff:
So, I really like this simple model of a human system:
And, in time, this looks something like the below:
[…] → sensing → representing → doing → sensing → representing → doing → […]
So, one takes stuff in from the world, one does some processing on it, some changes to the world model, planning, goals occur, and system physically does something, sensing occurs, there’s some prediction error, repeat.
(By the way, sensing, representing, and doing map onto the three transcendentals. The good, the true, and the beautiful. Not an accident. Sensing = beauty, representing = truth, doing = goodness. An ideal or goal is to sense/experience/feel beauty, represent/know/believe truth, do/exemplify good.)
Something like that.
The human system is a sensorimotor system.
“Representing” above has maybe too static of a connotation. The thing in the middle is signal processing, sensory processing, signal and sensory transduction. The system is stateful, in a state at any particular time, to be sure. But, depending on what flavor of neuroscience you currently subscribe to, that state is, in some sense, reconstituted in each moment, reconstituted continuously (even accounting for physical protein synthesis, synaptic weights, dendritic and axonic connections, and the physical “locations” of atomic and subatomic particles (and forces and fields)).
The whole thing is “flowing” all the time. It’s a process, with whorls and eddies and feedback looks and strange loops and strange attractors and twists and coiling and uncoiling, etc.
The state of all of that, or, rather, the pattern of all of that, that river of which you can’t step into the same one twice, that’s what it feels like to be you. The feeling of that from the inside is consciousness. Now, of course, there’s lots we aren’t conscious of, and consciousness is a weird, narrow, evolutionarily contingent, low-dimensional projection of somethingsomething. But, no, consciousness is basically that flowing pattern from the inside, or at least a dynamic viewport. When consciousness feels like maybe a static, distant, far-removed thing, that’s more because of the epicycles and epicycles and stacks of virtual machines and reifications that people build up over time, because things are happening too quickly, too intensely, too confusingly. [See technical debt and layer theory.]
In terms of input and output, there’s a lot of things going on in parallel. The world is a blooming, buzzing confusion and one has all these pulsing glands and organs, and twitchy smooth muscle and skeletal muscle.
Despite all that blooming and buzzing and twitching, the system acts really coherently, relatively speaking. People might make poor choices in the large, but people walk and talk and move, in some sense, VERY COHERENTLY. The output of the system is relatively serialized, contiguous, smooth, flowing, and (I think some telos and anthropomorphism is appropriate, here, to balance causal mechanism) planful and goalful.
A related, more human-ish word for representation is “belief.” It’s a decent word, a decent concept. There’s something there. Belief is problematic in a lot of ways, too, though. People express their beliefs, but sometimes it’s just talk? People convince themselves that they believe things, but sometimes it’s self-deception? And sometimes, whatever people say or do in some moment, in some sense their “real” beliefs are revealed by how they actually act in mundane or challenging situations, with stakes and teeth? Sometimes these are referred to as discourse models, self models, and action models. (A “model” being a collection of beliefs, as it were.)
How is “belief” instantiated, anyway? What’s like the real thing, in some sense? Savvy self help and contemporary neuroscience sometimes like to talk about “expectations” instead of beliefs (not to mention free energy minimization and bayesian brains).
I like the word “anticipations.” We inhale before we speak. Be brace ourselves before picking up a heavy object, we shift our weight before stepping or dancing. Muscle length and tension is an ever-shifting, not just reactive but also anticipatory constellation. We’re doing this physical dance all the time. I hazard that what that feels like from the inside is “belief.” When we hear about something that happened on the other side of the world, or we read something in a history book, whether we’re sitting in a chair, or whatever, our hormonal and musculoskeletal system changes its stance, its configuration just a little bit. Our physical anticipation about what’s going to happen next, our readiness, changes just a little bit, fractionally. And, further, our sense of all of that is part of our sensory input into the next moment. I want to say something like stateful-yet-dynamic anticipation, is a critical piece of reconstituting belief in each moment, in some relevant sense is belief.
Ok, so “doing” or action is in some ways pretty straightforward, at least locally. One picks up a cup, kicks the ball, says “thank you.” (I’ll talk about plans and goals, as opposed to local actions, in a moment.)
So, if the idea of “doing,” is relatively clear and straightforward, we can look at what goes wrong. If the thing when it works is coherent, and serialized (even when doing sort of multiple things simultaneously in parallel), and contiguous and flowing (doing in one moment seamlessly flows into the next, tai-chi style), then what’s the thing when it doesn’t work?
Let’s call it “incoherence,” when parts of the motor system aren’t acting together. And let’s call it “contention,” when parts of the motor system are acting against each other. Let’s extend the time horizon a little bit from just local doing. If we extend the time horizon a bit, we can mention things like hesitation and perseveration. Bringing it back more locally, or connecting local muscle activity to plans and goals, we can straight-up talk about muscle tension:
Muscle tension is immediate/instantaneous/local contention in motor output due to mediate contradiction in sensorimotor planning.
There’s a way to connect picking up cups or getting food from the refrigerator to long-term plans. There’s some sense in which picking up cups and getting food from the refrigerator is the encoding of one’s long-term plans. The brain is router of present sensory experience, and that routing, those tubes take in, sense, the external world including one’s concrete muscular anticipations and ongoing actions, and use that for muscle output in the next moment. And, muscle output in the next moment is “planned” to be sensory input in the moment after that. There’s a way that the system is using its very output (in addition to exploiting its current state) to preserve its future state(s) (including plans and goals with respect to those future states.) Diachronic is always synchronic; the future is always encoded by the present.
Further, what’s going through the tubes/routing sculpts those tubes and routing. And if a system get a better and better “bare-metal” model of how its present-moment behavior conditions next-moment behavior as well as how present-moment behavior sculpts those tubes and routing, well, that’s more and more effective self-modification, from learning, to having better goals and plans, to enlightenment, etc.
Further, there’s this idea that movement is causally upstream of thought? That somewhere, our neck or tongue or eyebrows, or the movement of our neck muscles, affects thinking of even is thinking?
All of this gets closer to a non-annoying or non-frustrating use of the word “embodiment.”
Further related to all this, once one starts working through all those epicycles and virtual machines, belief, whether it feels “mind-y” or “muscular,” one can start playing around with contradiction in a very felt/conscious/bare-metal sort of way, perhaps in a logical/propositional sense, or in a very muscle-y and anticipatory sense, cf Descartes. I’m not saying (really) that that’s the best way to use one’s mind. But there are connections, there, between muscle contention and contradiction in belief/”belief” (or irrealis/counterfactual thought experiments or propositional, logical, theoretical, scientific models).
Ok, so back to that blooming, buzzing confusion. Experience can hurt us! That’s weird. We don’t like to think about that. But, bullies, accidents, health scares, scary movies, looking at a low balance in our bank accounts, someone saying the wrong things to us–experiences like that can fuck us up.
We want to be strong. Sensitive to the world but also in some sense unmoved by the world. Complicated.
Sensing, of course, is intimately tied to doing. And doing is tied to representation. One can think about different self-modification paradigms or techniques based on where the intervention is.
Exposure therapy works on changes through sensing. But there can be subtle teeth-gritting, white-knuckling, avoidance. Things like cognitive behavioral therapy work on representations. I’m just poking at some of the things that licensed mental health professionals tend to reach for. And then of course there’s focusing, IFS, coherence therapy, energy work, reiki, art therapy, sound therapy, meditation, etc.
Anyway, regarding what can go wrong or at least suboptimally, in the representation section we talked about epicycles, virtual machines, eddies, whorls, coils–in the tubes! And we can add to that representational/belief contradiction. And we can say that this produces contention in the muscles (and glands?!) all the way up to through planning and goals. (Or we can say planning and goals are in some sense encoded in the tubes and routing as well as in the muscles.)
The present physical state and process of the system are also its plans and goals. Ah, and the environment!
The state, process, and physical environment of the system are also its plans and goals.
Herbert Simon (he coined the term “bounded rationality” and did many, very important things) gives an example of an ant: Put an ant on a very complex surface, like a rug, and the movements of its legs become very complicated while remaining coherent. The complexity of the behavior is due to both the ant and the environment.
That’s cool, in that, it does hint that a lot of what a person is doing can be offloaded to the environment.
But, don’t we also want to transcend our environments? We are so vulnerable to them. Spending time with family or getting fired from a job or all sorts of things–those are “just” sensory experiences, but they can really, really, really, really mess us up. From babies to now, we are heavily constituted by our experiences, causally determined by them. We are who are were because of a bit of genetics and then 99% parenting and junior high and high school friends. And youtube and amazon. Our hopes and dreams are heartfelt and also sculpted by disney movies (and church, synagogue, mosque…).
In any case, we learn to protect our hopes and dreams, by avoiding situations, by subtle muscle tension, by action in situations (by distracting other people, etc.) Of course, we also accidentally avoid situations where we could learn and grow, realize things aren’t as sad or cruel as we thought, realize that we could have bigger, more beautiful, more quiet, more intimate, more anything goals. And sometimes things are so tangled up that we can’t take advantage of fortuitous local evidence, can’t see it even though it’s right in front of us. Tragic.
Anyway, so we’d like a balance. In some ways we want to be sensorily and environmentally independent or transcendent, to have stable and coherent goals and plans. And in some ways we want to be sensitive, open, to being wrong, to new experiences, to being surprised, to being able to prepare for possible bad things and beautiful and exciting and surprises.
Weirdly, this state of immanence and transcendence; openness and vulnerability yet strong and resilient; sensitivity and irritability (in the technical sense) without overreaction, impulsivity, or clamping down or armoring or avoiding; non-avoidance without force; staring at the sun without muscle tension or getting burned–
this seems to be the state of love.
Rather, love seems to be the answer.
One could boil it down as:
There’s something here that seems stable, settled, certain, able to metabolize anything without being disrupted or stained or corrupted. Incorruptible. Pure. Yet, it is sensitive, responsive, creative, awake, sentient, sapient; not stagnant, not ossified, it learns, it grows, it spontaneously and proactively seeks and acts.
The answer to all the questions, all the seeking, all the contradictions, may just be
love.
‾\_(ツ)_/‾ [originally there was just one shrug; i'm doing two so that at least one of them will render correctly]
‾\_(ツ)_/‾
***
https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1
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Paraphrasing a hacker news comment [1]:
Someone comments that they read an experiment a long time ago with liminally verbal kids. The kids learned a game involving a ball. Then, a year later, the researchers asked the kids to describe the game. Supposedly the kids that didn't know the word "ball," when they first played the game, didn't use the word when recalling the rules of the game. Citing anecdotal evidence, the commenter further writes "[...] immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. [...]"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30287240 [Last accessed: 2022-06-20]
(The comment was stimulated by this [2] article.)
[2] https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-map-of-meaning-in-the-brain-changes-ideas-about-memory-20220208/ [Last accessed: 2022-06-20]
(Also, somewhere in here, I typed this cryptic rant:)
me: "no such thing as memory that's separable from everything else";"'naturalization/integration frees up memory/skill that's entangled with it's local context and makes it more globally available. but even then, there's sort of no such thing as memory that's separable from everything." another way to put it is that, there's a sense in which there's no domain general skills and domain general knowledge, but also a sense in which there can be. or, humans furiously generalize, but there's a sense in which that generalization is always "newly context specific." none of this is quite right.
In reponse to [1]:
(L)
Does this imply that if you experience a thing and later learn what it's called you may not actually associate the two things in your head? huhhh
(H)
Definitely. If i learn a new word, i don't immediately connect it to all possible contexts where that word is applicable. Usually just one or two or a few
Mark
yes exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ramble/rant: it's not automatic. "generalization"/"integration" are learned behaviors, a bit different for everyone, and there is no single generalization/integration process. (and there sort of shouldn't be / there's no one thing that's integration(tm) and/or trying to "integrate everything" is potentially really dangerous. and doesn't make sense because it takes real durational time and trades off against other physical/mental behaviors
(D)
Similarly if you pick up some somewhat generalizable principle or bit of wisdom, you're not going to automatically deploy it in every relevant situation. cf. virtue ethicists talking about morality as habits
*
(comments used with permission)
*
A postscript could be something like, long-run, meditation implicitly, imperfectly optimizes integration, epistemic closure, creativity, etc. both those acts (loosely speaking) themselves as well as their interleaving with other life activities. So those things happen more efficiently and effectively, at more appropriate times and amounts relative to other life concerns, and so on.
See also:
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(a) let bodymind wander [baseline, glue that can hold it all together] 30s-5 min
(b) if notice your bodymind doing something "good," just be like "alright, cool" 30s-5 min
(c) if notice that could do/add something good, gently try [ok if bodymind does it for you], if can’t, gently take foot off trying gas completely. 30s - 5 min
(d) if notice bodymind doing something "bad," just be like "alright, that’s ok" 30s-5 min
(e) if notice that you could stop something "bad" that’s already happening, gently try [ok if bodymind does it for you], if you find you can’t, just be like "alright, that’s ok" and gently take foot of trying gas completely 30s-5 min
(f) if notice that you could stop something "bad" from starting, gently try [ok if bodymind does it for you], if you find you can’t, just be like "alright, that’s ok" and gently take foot off trying gas completely 30s-5 min
(g) if there’s something that you want to be different, and it’s good/safe/ok to do the following, try gently directly inclining, willing, intending towards that desired difference to be actualized. if anything feels gummy, jammy, bad, forced then gently take foot off trying gas completely.
(h) explore deliberate or participatory surrender, acceptance, letting go, somewhat as per (a)
(i) now patiently, slowly interleave (a)-(h) in a single practice, as you are so moved or as salience changes 30s-5min
Notes:
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***
Unintegrated scratch pieces:
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Don't do anything in particular. Puzzle-solve-ily, find your way to allow, just a little. Don't push things away*. Don't push**. Don't push past****. [When safe (and only when safe!), perhaps temporarily, experimentally stop resisting (if you can and it's ok if you can't).] Don't try to make things happen***, don't even (directly or even indirectly) try to change anything, even [sic; "even"], including not trying to not try to change things [sic]. Choose, turn towards, or surrender to effortlessness, subtler and subtler (...). [sic] Choose, turn towards, surrender to non-doing, subtler and subtler. Don't expect. Let things come to you. Let it/things happen ([inner] seeing, feeling, remembering, non-thinking, etc.). Let the "wrong" things happen (e.g. pushing) if they do happen---if you zero-step/immediately/non-directly can, [you might spontaneously choose to] stop them, if it's smooth, fluid, non-jam-y, non-bump-y, [at best, flowing, participating-ly] and if things don't/won't "pile up," but, for example, don't add pushing to try to stop pushing, or don't push away pushing, or don't push to "let things happen," or don't push "to allow," [or don't push "to stop resisting,"] and so on. [[for the previous and anything], If you try something and it doesn't smoothly happen, gently try to make sure you stop that trying completely, including then/with the trying to stop trying, no remainder, but it's ok if you can't and don't push to stop trying, and don't push away the trying or the trying to stop trying; let them happen if they don't participatingly release and they're still happening.] If you find pushing, etc., let [it] self-unravel, self-evaporate, if it does, and it's ok if it doesn't right then. Be moved. Sometimes help things out, help things over humps (but again don't push), sometimes. If something is "going wrong," for right now, redirect (e.g. attention)/do/choose/allow otherwise. If safe enough, optionally let yourself be pulled in; if not safe enough gently do/choose//allow something else. Be patient; non-wait (don't rush; non-hurrying; no haste; no corner-cutting; no-blood-from-stone-ing; no squeezing; no eking out just a little more; it doesn’t work; only spontaneous works; only-it-just-happens works; let fluidity and slack come to you). Enjoy. Allow. Relax. Experience. Just this. Nothing more. (Nothing less.) Stop when there's nothing left for today or things start to “tip/go too wrong," including "non-constructive flow." When in doubt, when possible, focus on nutrition, sleep, relaxation, de-stressing, distraction, socializing and support, and patience.
In the above, you can generally replace/alternate "pushing" with "managing." ; As best you can, "don't manage," subtler and subtler. (Also: not quite the same but nearby, "acquiring"; nearby: non-self-gaslighting)
*(...when safe)
**(...if you have the option not to)
***(...etc.)
****"Push past" means to force/push/get in front of something else maybe without regard to that thing/something else[-ness].
See also:
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Say there is PROACTIVE SELF-CARE (pushing, pushing away, forcing, managing, controlling, "forward-ing," deliberate doing, making, blocking, preventing, willing, deliberate doing, haste, rushing, completing, becoming...)
Say there is RECEPTIVE SELF-CARE (patience, surrender, non-interference, allowing, keeping company, hanging out with, letting be, going-along-with, even-enjoying, just-enjoying, participating-in, including, non-resistance, choosing...)
Say there is SPONTANEOUS SELF-CARE (spontaneity, positive-automaticity, non-extra-ness, nothing-added, just-this, inexertion, non-doing, non-controlling-attention, non-deliberate-awareness, non-exertion, non-efforting, ease, effortlessness, free-fall, fluidity, flowing, path-of-least resistance, being, non-becoming...)
Say there is (a) SAFE suffering, (b) currently UNSAFE suffering that CAN be affected, and (c) currently UNSAFE suffering that currently CANNOT be affected.
*
When there is UNSAFE suffering that CAN be affected, gently participate in proactive self-care.
When there is UNSAFE suffering that CANNOT be affected, gently participate in receptive self-care.
When there is SAFE suffering, gently DISCOURAGE (prevent, block, avoid...) NEW proactive self-care; AND, gently ENCOURAGE (allow, surrender-to, non-interfere-with, help-out...) OLD proactive self-care; AND, gently encourage receptive self-care, AND relax-into, allow, release-into, let-go-into, let spontaneous self-care reveal itself.
*
When safe (or whenever you want, etc.), forget these instructions; you will remember them if or when it's net-helpful.
When safe (or whenever you want, etc.), forget these meditation; you will remember it's a thing if or when it's net-helpful.
\end
*
Notes:
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Effortlessness, resistancelessness, unknowableness, safety
(ego and goal(s))
[goallessness, selflessness]
[knowinglessness, knowledgelessness, ditto understanding cf. figuring out][blankness, "deadness", [even no emptiness anywhere, no one left alive, yet luminosity, vividness, wonder?????]
[uncontrollability, uncausability][yet tremendous agency, figuring out, self-preservation, nothing left undone]
[un-ownability]
No mind whatsoever, no becoming whatsoever (but can get back?? if willing/able to give up completely?)[not blankness but nonregistration, no grasping, like a vivid mirror with no understanding or recognition whatsoever]
[no soul, no essence]
[no vigilance, no seeking, no self-reflection, no self-preservation whatsoever][and yet. say paradox? ]
[...]and selflessness used idiosyncratically and sort of literally
but yes reverie, not reverielessness! and yes dreams/dreaminess, not dreamlessness
*
(unexplainableness) but relative explanations and explanation games are excellent
unknowableness
inconceivableness
(unsensibleness) --- in the "makes sense" sense
*
(centerlessness, boundarylessness(, luminosity, etc.))
(agencylessness, watcherlessness) / "awarenesslessness" (cf. luminosity) (cf. e.g. Daniel Ingram, [...])
(ownerlessness / ownershiplessnes
(unsatisfactoriness)
non-infinity, non-eternalism, impermanence
d) boundlessness, endlessness, boundarylessness [no-things]
???un-remember-able-ness ("along what dimensions is it important to know I'm not encountering this for the first time and along what dimensions does it not matter?") [see also here]
*
See also:
Sort of in this genre (lots, I think):
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/technical-debt-meditation-and-minds/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
>>>
Technical debt (also known as design debt or code debt) is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
Technical debt can be compared to monetary debt.[3] If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy. Technical debt is not necessarily a bad thing, and sometimes (e.g., as a proof-of-concept) technical debt is required to move projects forward. On the other hand, some experts claim that the "technical debt" metaphor tends to minimize the impact, which results in insufficient prioritization of the necessary work to correct it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)
<<<
People have really been liking this metaphor, so I thought it would be good to explicitly call it out in a post. It’s not even really a metaphor; it’s just what’s happening.
When a mind is really surprised, or things are happening too fast, or something is just too hard, or a mind enacts ingrained bad habits, in all these cases a mind takes on technical debt in order to keep dealing with the world in real time. The more technical debt a mind has, the harder it is for that mind to solve problems moving forward, so technical debt begets more technical debt.
Technical debt is hard to pay off. Sleep hacks away it and normal problem solving hacks away at it too. For the most part, though, most people are steadily accumulating technical debt their entire lives. That’s why you can’t teach an old dog new tricks or whatever, and I’m suspicious that e.g. the first-language learning window is anything special at all. I think that window closes because of normal processes that are always at work. (And second and nth languages get literally laid down in different places in the mind/brain.) That’s more elegant than supposing there’s like a special language learning window.
One way to look at meditation is that correct meditation pays off technical debt faster than it accumulates until it’s all paid off. As far as I can tell, this is very related to why some traditions call the enlightened mind the natural state. All those invariant structures get shipped around or homomorphically transformed until everything is in the right place–all the gradients and attractive basins that are pushing or pulling all the time, all the things that a mind would want to do if it could only figure out how, that all gets to happen. As far as I can tell, minds are really only trying to do one thing all the time, somethingsomething elegance collapse in terms of a predictive world model or something.
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
Most meditative practices or at least most practitioners’ interpretation of meditative practices actually increase technical debt!
One can get all sorts of positive effects, for months or even years, but eventually things grind to a halt, the practitioner tangles themselves into a corner or piles just too much stuff onto too much stuff.
In particular there’s a right way and a wrong way to use the maps or descriptions of valued states.
If you’re like trying to directly see things as empty or you’re "trying on" spiritual perspectives or construals, or trying to get particular isolated things to stick, whether you succeed or not, you’re probably taking on technical debt.
You can actually get some number of really real attainments, not fake versions, at the expense of increasing technical debt. But if you want all the attainments, or you want to make it all the way, you have to do it in a direction of decreasing technical debt.
Are you increasing technical debt or paying it off in your practice? How can you tell?
[See the meta protocol.]
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/technical-debt-meditation-and-minds/#comment-1962 (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
I predict that someone very far along on the meditative path, who puts in the time to learn a second language or to polish a second language that they learned after early childhood, will end up with that second language "mixed in" with their first language. In other words, the fluently multilingual advanced meditator will have a more similar brain, in the relevant ways, to a "natively multilingual" person, someone who grew up speaking multiple languages, than other later-in-life bilingual or multilingual individuals.
It’s not automatic; you don’t get it for free by taking classes or something. You do have to do a special thing that looks more like meditation than study and practice, in addition to whatever else one normally does to learn a language (drill, immersion, etc.)
Generally speaking, correct meditation "puts things in the right places" in the brain. And generally you learn how to learn better (across hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of hours).
As I’ve gotten a taste for this, I have indeed thought about gaining "fluency all the way down" in a second or third language. It’s a very large time investment, though, some fraction of the total number of real-time hours of language use in one’s entire life thus far, because of how stuff gets laid down in the brain. And so I think the opportunity cost may be prohibitive. But it would be a finite amount of time, a non-insane thing that someone could reasonably do, and it’s on my maybe list.
There are lots of cool things in this space, for social interaction, sports, intellectual abilities, stroke victims, PTSD... Anything that you use a brain for... This stuff is very, very, very cool.
I currently believe that this works almost just as well for an eighty-year-old as a twenty-five-year-old meditator. The eighty-year-old may need a few thousand more hours to get to the bottom, depending on how learning and compression actually work, because they’ve been alive longer, but I imagine it’s pretty practically finite, all things being equal.
I believe that the ways in which some subset of eighty-year-olds (or forty-year-olds or fifty-year-olds or thirty-five-year-olds) are mentally X is often or even usually because of "technical debt" and not some sort of cellular senescence or something. I think the operating characteristics are the same from one acquiring one’s first couple of wired-together neurons until (a little after) medical death. I think that the "technical debt" explanation is more elegant because there are sharp-as-a-tack 80-year-olds walking around, and even a confused 80-year-old is doing astonishingly complex real-time learning with their mind, in every waking moment, that is not really different in kind from a baby’s mind. I claim.
See also:
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/07/10/technical-debt-and-inverse-operations/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
[Thanks to one of my collaborators whose questions stimulated this post.]
One could imagine a model of mind involving the accumulation and cancellation of technical debt. So, say, a person goes through life and has experiences of types A, B, and C, which add imprints of those experiences to their mind:
ABC
One could imagine experiences of these types accumulating further:
ABC
ABC
But, let’s say a person has inverse operations -A, -B, -C. Then, while meditating, or in the midst of life, that person could apply those inverse operations to pay off technical debt:
ABC -A
ABC
_BC
ABC
Let’s say the set of inverse operations, -A, -B, -C are enough for most life experiences. But, every once in a while something surprising and novel happens, like Z.
_BCZ
ABC
A person doesn’t have inverse operations for some things, so, all things being equal, over time, for an untrained mind, that person’s (body)mind will slowly accumulate technical debt over time.
Additionally, say a person goes on vacation or starts taking long walks, all things being equal, they will only ever be able to pay off so much technical debt, because they lack inverse operations for "deeper accumulation."
___ZQRS
DEF
GHI
...
In the example above, even if a person pays off all their ABC, they’re still slowly accumulating new technical debt, and they don’t have inverse operations for older and very old technical debt D, E, F, G, H, I... (And, they’ll encounter more ABC in life, so there’s sort of a dynamic equilibrium that people find themselves in, absent meditation or other transformative practice.)
(Recall, so-called "technical debt" reduces slack/creativity/flexibility in the mind and begets more technical debt.)
Ok, so, part of what meditation is, is discovering new inverse operations and building (sometimes temporary) infrastructure to support (and discover) more inverse operations.
So, an advanced meditator will be doing a tremendous amount of undoing, via a large collection of inverse operations, as well as plenty of creative doing, for learning and staging future learning, doing, and undoing.
And, the very advanced meditator will sort of have a fine-grain "omnidirectional undoer" running at all times, and will effortlessly, costlessly, fully embody something like that, such that all their actions are sort of fluid and flexible and (relatively) "karmically free," because all doing (and experiencing) is self-met with undoing, as needed. And, if something super surprising happens, and a lot of novel, not-yet-invertible accumulation happens, there’s a tremendous amount of latent skill that immediately starts puzzle solving for new inverse operations, as needed.
To the degree people don’t eventually get overwhelmed with all their stuff, everyone already has a lot of inverse operations, as it were, and everyone does get new ones, in therapy, journaling, long walks, talking with friends, and so on. Though, for most people, they are net accumulating technical debt versus net decreasing technical debt, over time. And, learning to meditate, eventually, tips the balance of accumulation versus not to the side of net decreasing (nonmonotonically), over time.
(Remember, local accumulation isn’t bad, in a vacuum; it’s extremely useful! Accumulation can be highly strategic for the purposes of future payoff, and so on.)
It can take a long time to sort of "phenomenologically align" with "undoing as such" to sort of knowingly, directly facilitate, participate, allow it as it’s happening. It’ll of course have always already been happening, to some degree, and it comes to happen more and more, unreflectively, prereflectively, and spontaneously, too. Eventually, it’s just a seamless, costless, creative thing that’s happening a ton, along with everything else in the mind, that the mind anticipatorily and skillfully inclines towards, as needed.
***
So the above is sort of simplified intellectual model, that leaves out stuff about "concrete sensory impressions," and much more.
And the "real thing" is felt, sensuous, embodied (and intellectual, and daydreaming, and getting lost in life, and everything).
One does more and more stuff that kind of maps-ish to the intellectual model above, by, well, meditating. Wellbeing, relief, insight can be clues of heading in the right direction, though plenty of clues feel pretty bleh, too, contextually.
Meditation is felt wayfinding, meditation is felt puzzle-solving.
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/08/17/merely-just-having-the-experience-itself-and-technical-debt-is-good-actually/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]
Pre-notes:
[Thank you to at least three different interactions amongst collaborators and students for inspiring this post and for some fun pieces.]
[This is a draft.]
[All my posts on "technical debt": https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/?s=technical+debt ]
[There is a P.S. at the bottom.]
I wanted to make sure that people don’t get too afraid of "accruing technical debt." It’s a leaky abstraction, for one thing, even though it really, really fits.
***
Trying out a bunch of things, having a ton of plates spinning, keeping a lot of balls in the air, being in a new job, a new relationship, a new hobby—these kinds of things will tend to accrue technical debt. Prior to having put in tons and tons of meditation time, there’s sort of just too much going on to easily "integrate" in real time (or in stolen moments, or on long walks, or in meditation), because integration, when needed, takes real time, and sometimes a lot of time.
One can tell they’re maybe accruing technical debt (accumulating karma, in another model) if they have to kind of use a bunch of willpower, or push through a bit, to show up for things or to get things done, some of the time—or, even if not being "pushy," if one’s "mental checklists" kind of go into overdrive.
There’s an arguable phrase in the software industry world, "always be shipping." Maybe, here, it’s something like, "always be living."
Part of having a good life is sometimes doing a ton of stuff, that gets really ragged around the edges, and/or you get really ragged around the edges. But, that’s ok:
Have all the experiences, so you know what’s out there and what you want!
There’s a real/fake way in which there’s always enough time—like, even if things feel crazy, if you were to sort of put everything on your calendar and just show up to everything, that would just work, in some abstract fake world, that ignores how minds work. Everything fits on your calendar.
But the mind doesn’t work like that, and you don’t work like that, and something would maybe break, somewhere, sometimes (demotivation, forgetting things, who knows). The felt complexity is sort of the "inelegances" bursting at the seams, the puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit because the bodymind hasn’t had time to kind of whirl it all around into settled-yet-shimmering elegance. Life sensemaking.
And, so, sometimes, one needs a break, a weekend, long walks, a full-on retreat. And sometimes one needs periods of their life where they’re doing less, or, say, putting e.g. meditation first.
But, when that’s not going on, maybe, then—"always be living."
It’s ok to bumble through, sometimes at max crazy complexity. Have all the experiences.
***
If one takes the meditation journey, which does require some time and space, during some periods, for various kinds of nonmonotonicities, including making it over various technical debt payback humps (this is is one place I sometimes equivocated-ly use the term "escape velocity"), then here’s what eventually happens:
There’s a simplicity on the far side of complexity—successive "elegance collapses" (though it’s, on net, much more incremental than dramatic "collapses;" it’s tiny changes over a very long period of time, with maybe a few big whooshes).
Most people, at first, have a few big "mind zones," two to five, at least: different, big parts of mind space, or, like, maybe everything "in here," and then everything "out there." (Also, here’s another thing, too, that’s barely a metaphor: minds are also composed of layers and layers of "virtual machines").
What happens, through meditation, is that the whole thing starts to integrate and unify (cf. nonduality). There’s just eventually just "one thing," and, rather than these "zones" having to spend a lot of time sort of translating back and forth across interfaces and impedance mismatch, with gazillions of buggy microservices all bumbling along, runaway processes spinning, with periodic reboots—over time, there’s just one single integrated thing, humming along.
Further, mind (bodymind, memory, something), becomes more and more "content addressable." [1,2] That is, the mind rearranges itself, more and more, so that "the right surfaces are exposed at the right times," and information is shipped to where it needs to go, more and more efficiently, with less and less hops and, so, less and less time needed.
(So there a way in which there’s dramatically less and less need for cognition, over time.)
And, so, over time, more and more, MERELY JUST HAVING THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE ITSELF completely replaces "cognition."
Experience is memory is integration is anticipation, loosely speaking.
Context switching, pre-prep, "post-prep," becomes less and less of a thing. "How do you do so much? / I never leave my meditation cushion."
And so when the monk returns the marketplace with helping hands, they are vastly less likely to accrue technical debt, because everything is operating more efficiently, in this simplicity on the far side of complexity.
In the steelmanned ideal, they’ll be able to do so much more—more responsibilities, more details, costlessly, effortlessly, easefully. (And they’ll be, proactively, both solving and dissolving that complexity along the way.)
And, if they do accrue technical debt, as everyone does, in the course of even a single day, they can pay it down much more efficiently, because of extreme practice and skill at omni-directional "refactoring," as it were.
When things are too fast, too intense, too surprising, in a bad way, or a good way, technical debt will accrue and that’s fine! Over minutes, hours, days or weeks!
It’s about having a good life, and that’s about having concrete, sensuous experiences, with other people, in all their messy contingency. And/but, one is more and more prepared for that, and it gets easier and easier, to just get lost in life in a good way.
***
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_memory
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array
***
P.S. What of the cliche of "broken monks?"
I’m claiming, long-run, meditation makes one more effective.
But, if meditation has been around for thousands of years, where are all the Gandhi-Elon-Musks [sic]? That’s a really long conversation, involving sociology and epistemic viciousness, but here’s part of it:
A key thing is multidimensional, relatively phase-decorrelated, nonmonotonicity. That is, things are getting better and worse along different dimensions and timescales, and, with enough complexity, something is always in a valley, some of the time: For a meditator in the middle of their journey, something’s always broken, at any given time, generally speaking.
And, if a system is relatively fragile, in a technical sense, that is, if, say, four out of five or five out of five pieces are working, then system output is 90-100, but, if only three or four pieces out of five are working, then system output is two or three, then you get "broken monks."
Instead of five, you know, substitute millions, and so on. Anyway, that’s one piece of this.
But, the whole journey is practically finite, and people do pop out on the other side, and so on. This is just a model, it’s messier than this, and there’s room for proactivity and slack, and so on, but most people will still have hard-to-predict, rough ride, in at least some places.
And this is part of why there can be claims of effortless complexity, while at the same time having broken monks, while at the same time keeping an eye out for Gandhi-Elon-Musks.
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There's a way in which the bodymind is like a "scale," or a "balance," an old-timey or ancient one, like the one Lady Justice is holding (lustitia, Justitia, Dike). There's two plates or trays, and you put something (or a bunch of somethings) with an unknown weight/mass/density/something, on one side, and you put something known, on the other side. And you manipulate one or both sides until the scales balance. Then you know something about the previously unknown side.
I'm going to talk about how the bodymind is like a scale, using the idea of a scale above, and I'll be progressively adding qualifiers and elaborations, and making connections.
First, I'd like to talk about what's on the scale. In the literal case, what's on a scale could be standardized pieces of metal, like bars or disks, or it could be beads, grain, powder, etc. For our bodymind scale, let's say it's "beads," little objects of similar size, shape, and weight. We're not seeking to measure anything, at least in the usual sense, with a bodymind scale. So these beads can go on both sides. And meditation (journaling, therapy, talking with friends, having experiences) moves beads from one side to other, say one or two at a time, in each passing moment, in either direction, depending.
What are the beads? They're something like memories, sense impressions, preferences, affordances, expectations, "beliefs," anticipations, muscle tone, something. This isn't essential to the analogy, but maybe each bead is unique, no two colors, or swirling multicolor patterns, on any random pair of beads, are the same. What is essential, to the analogy, though, is that, in the limit, the beads are not "fungible" or "perfectly exchangeable." For a literal scale, if two pieces of genuine gold had the same weight/karat/whatever, then you could exchange one for the other, and, all things being equal, no one would mind. Let's say all the bodymind beads are the same size, shape, and weight, the same density. But they aren't fungible. For this bodymind scale, even if there's "balance," even if there happens to be the same number of beads on each side of the scale, different combinations of beads on either side of the scale, even while balance holds, would be distinguishable. Or, rather, what's on either side of the scale matters.
(That "mattering" is intentionally left vague, here. But, let's say that, sometimes, a bunch of beads have to be exchanged between the two sides of the scale, even if the final result doesn't change the weight/balance of the scale much or at all. Incoming beads that are new and surprising can necessitate cascades of changes.)
Now, there's two ways that the scale can become more balanced. One is when more beads are added to one side or the other, and the other is when existing beads are moved from one side to the other. I'll say something like any activity is both adding beads and moving beads. Being out in the world, having (new) experiences, does a bit more adding beads than moving beads. And, say, meditating (and things a bit more like that), do a bit more moving beads than adding beads.
Ok, so why is "balance," why is having relatively the same amount of beads on each side of the scale interesting or relevant? This ties into the ideas of "layering," "technical debt," and the analogy of the bodymind being a sort of "tower of hanoi problem." (When we add more pieces to the main analogy, there will also be ties to the idea of structural fluidity, below.)
Recall, "layering" is the idea that some changes to the bodymind forestall other changes, and this happens at the microlevel which accumulates up to macroscale patterns/trends of personality, behavior, preferences, constraint. To complete the review, back to the microlevel, sometimes—for a change to occur somewhere in the bodymind, or if for something in the bodymind to simply become "agnostically labile"—something else has to change first. That "something else changing first" refers to de-layering. Layering generally "begets and accumulates" more layering, so sometimes (usually) changes to the bodymind involve lots of delayering, first.
Relatedly, recall that "technical debt," is borrowed from software engineering, which borrows the idea of "debt" from finance. The idea here is that if changes or additions to a system are made too fast or too disorganized, then future changes are both more likely to be disorganized themselves, and, critically, future changes become cumulatively harder and slower. For the bodymind, things that are too fast, too sudden/abrupt, too surprising, too painful, or that involve abrupt and durable context changes, are more likely to accumulate technical debt in the bodymind system. Paying off technical debt (which can involve risk and opportunity cost), refactoring the existing system, can make future changes ulitimately, potentially, easier, faster, safer, smoother, and more predictable.
Finally, relatedly, the "tower of hanoi" analogy is meant to indicate constraint, locality, and nonmonotonicity. (This is the puzzle where there are three pegs, as well as stack of discs of graded size, on those pegs. And, only one top disc can be moved at a time, and no disc can be moved on top of a smaller disc. And the goal is to move all the discs from one peg to another peg.) Constraint and locality mean that what's possible at any given time depends on the current state of the system, and future states depend on current states. Additionally, knowledge about other parts of the system is uncertain or at least not immediately available. And, the correctness/goodness/fit/something of local changes are globally dependent or depend on the state of some or all other "localities."
Here, "balancing the scale" is akin to de-layering, paying off technical debt, and simpler future "tower-of-hanoi"-like puzzles. The analogy of a scale is nice because it analogizes very well with something like "epistemic flexibility," "behavioral flexibility" (versus behavioral regidity), and so on:
That is, we want incoming information to "quickly tip the scale(s) in the right direction" [and/or/rather spontaneously facilitate a rapid multidimensional rebalance through dynamic trading between different dimensions to a new balanced (dynamic or not) equilibrium]. It's like, if someone hasn't been proactively, preemptively maintaining the contents of their scale, a new incoming bead might indicate that a bunch of beads on the left should be moved to the right, and vice versa. So that might take some time (hours, weeks). But, if someone's scales are already relatively balanced [and maybe arranged for "smooth, orderly flow"], probably the arrival of new bead necessitates only tiny changes. Or, thinking of the beads in sort of two big piles, on each side of the scale, the beads that need to be swapped between the two sides are more likely to be on the surface of the pile, rather than buried deep in the pile.
More generally, we want to sort of "arrange ourselves," "arrange our bodyminds," so that "incoming information" "does the right thing":
"Balanced scales" are related to scenarios 3 and 4. The "appropriate thing smoothly happens," whether "appropriate" is "small" or "big." Additionally, finally, scenarios 3 and 4 lightly imply reversibility, an ability to smoothly "return" to states that have (relatively path-preserving) features of earlier states, say, if new evidence was then followed by evidence that hard-to-anticipate-surprising-in-almost-any-world disconfirmed the previous evidence.
Now, I'd like to nuance or qualify the scale analogy, which actually might make some of the above make a bit more sense.
The first nuance is that it's not just two trays. If you look directly down on the original scale, it's not just a line with a circle (tray) at each end. But, let's say, looking down on our "nuanced" scale, it's almost like a spoked wheel, with many lines radiating from a center, and a circle at the end of each radii. This is to say, that the bodymind, or belief, expectation, anticipation, preference, affordance, etc., are very high-dimensional, nuanced. (And that such high-level things as "anticipations," not to overly or inappropriately reify any of these, are sort of bottom-up constructed or emergent out of the arrangement of beads over all the scales.) The beads can go a lot of places, and balancing is much more complex than just moving beads back and forth between just two trays.
The second nuance is that the scales/trays are fractal. Trays are composed of smaller trays, which are composed of smaller trays, and all those smaller trays have corresponding trays that they can be balanced with, and so on. So there can be small scale imbalances (or "balances") while there is a large-scale imbalance, and vice versa. (For these two nuances, it can be sort of helpful to imagine a three-dimensional or radially symmetric sierpinski triangle.)
The second nuance can be helpful to explain how someone can be a very flexible or fast learner (and un-learner and re-learner), in some domains, but very rigid or "can't teach an old dog new tricks" in other domains. Similarly, someone can be very flexible or easygoing about some things, and very rigid about other things, to the point that even an exploratory conversation is off limits. Whether someone is "generally balanced," or not, that "degree of balancing" can be inhomogeneous.
In any case, "fractal balancing of all the scales at all levels" is deeply related to so-called "structural fluidity," and "fit to life situation, including proactive reshaping of life situation" discussed elsewhere.
So, one can have some "analogical payoff in that "being balanced" is sort of "being poised" and able to relatively quickly or smoothly change weight, stance, direction in behavior, belief, whatever, in response to what's newly or surprisingly or lightly confirmingly happening around you, without getting more entrenched in old ways or overgeneralizing in a new direction, etc.. There are other ways the analogy is evocative or pays off:
There's something literally going on with gross/overt stance and muscle tone or tension (and more), with respect to how muscles are "loaded," and the relationship between muscles and behavior and belief (and/​better, the very seeming and being of the world). Lateral and anterior/posterior balance in muscle tone and tension, as well as in opposing muscle groups, is both a correlated proxy and literally related to the analogous "balance" discussed in this section. (At most general, it's maybe more like "appropriate balance," or something--there will at least be some strength, if not tone, differences due to limb dominance, and generally one's posterior chain is stronger than the anterior. Strength and/or separately-but-relatedly muscle size probably has some effect on resting and active/coordinated muscle tone/tension.)
Finally, I find this analogy to be very viscerally evocative when doing (ethical, consensual, legible) "subtle interaction" or "spirit work," "enegy work," "bodywork," etc., with another person. (Side note: all of the latter are élan vital, phlogiston, luminiferous aether, etc. At the time of writing, I have positions on mechanism, but I prefer subtle interaction as an agnostic and noncommital term of art.) There's a big difference when working with non-meditators versus long-term ("global wayfinding") meditators:
With non-meditators, there can be tremendous "imbalances" in how the system is "loaded" (not to mention twists and whirls/whorls, which is outside the scope of this analogy). It's like many pounds of wet sand are piled densely. In this case, there are at least two ways of working with that (loosely speaking, leaving out important considerations; these are high-level analogies). One way of working can be likened to running a gentle stream of water over the top surface of the wet sand, and that top surface then moves relatively easily, gradually exposing deeper layers which can then be moved easily too. Another way of working can be likened to "patiently leaning in, broadside" to the wet pile, from the side, with one's own "bodyweight," and if the pile isn't too big, and if one is patient and steady enough in their leaning, this will eventually produce movement. (((Again, this is not a guide for how to safely work with people—to strain the analogy, you don't want to overcommit in your leaning, and you don't want the pile to fall over, as it were—and in general I tend towards light touch, which is itself a high-level abstraction. Also, in general, "general heuristics, let alone rules, never hold" in that what matters are the radical and particular concretes; so yet another way to say it is that these analogies are descriptive not proscriptive.)))
But, for a meditator, all their "scales" will be relatively fractally more towards balanced (with sometimes still big imbalances), and dense areas are generally smaller, things are more generally already "broken up" (in a good way), and fluid, all things being equal. And so, light touches and (very) light leaning, are much more readily and quickly "snapped up," "taken up," actively used, directly affecting, and so on. It's easier to have a dynamic and interaction "conversation," with such a person's system (and/or with person+system!, and so on).
*
P.S. I think there are ambiguities, equivocations, and inconsistencies in these analogies, but, on net, I think they're more illuminating than confusing.
*
Balancing isn't just bilateral. There's also non-headyness/non-headiness (which is not no-head, except in the nondual sense of "having no head"). That is it's like the body is a dense or superficial lacework of potential rivulets and trickles, with an activation energy hump, and meditation, successfullly, iteratively gets things over that hump (non-forcily; it's its own path of least resistance, all things being equal, in the end), and then fractal rivulets or trickles follow gravity, in a little-by-little iterated partwise round robin, or in parallel, and the end result is sort of a "settled evenness" or "even settledness", like water in a container (while still sensitive, dynamic, alive) throughout the body(mind), all across the surface of the body(mind), where "everything" is distributed evenly, leveled, so no lumpiness, no clumpiness, no sharpness, etc. Late stage, when experiences are had, sprinkled in on exposed surface areas, when things are changed or added, there is matching up to zero-lag synced non-local accounting, balanced redistribution, elsewhere in the body(mind), or at least a quick iterated, durational reaccounting or redistribution, if anything even starts to get "lumped" or "sharp" or "unevenly loaded" or "unevenly distributed" (perhaps throughout the available "substrate", as it were, emptiness and groundlessness and nebulosity and provisionality, withstanding). Fully evened out, as it were, may be the same as no remaining technical debt [cf. also luminosity, vividness, centerlessness, etc.]
Furthermore, there's a way in which there's sort of ultimately balance between "inside" and "outside," though this is a bit different in which very loosely speaking "inside" sort of "dissolves" (though aspects of this are very late stage) or rather perfectly mixes with outside, in which outside is sort of suffused with inside yet also in some sense with inside there's no remainder. Or it's something like outside becomes composed of meaningful inside or... Or inside arises within outside or... or meaning and knowing sort of become part of outside or...
*
See also:
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[My (Mark's) responses are sort of messy and perfunctory and foreclosing. There's more nuance...]
PK
there's something i've been wondering about with karma, sort of about whether it should be understood as relative vs. absolute. So like, there are many hidden flows of causality, at least some of which can be discovered eventually. There are things we understand now as a society that we didn't in the buddha's day, for example how certain diseases spread. So say you're the buddha, and you feel like you've resolved all your karma. And then someone discovers germs, and tells you: "hey, remember that one time you had the flu? you didn't realize it, but you actually infected a bunch of other people too."
It seems like now there is something new to resolve / integrate for you.
Mark [replying later, single comment in thread]
yes things are only paid off up to the bleeding edge of unknown unknowns, at the limit, so big/sharp surprises can like fractionally un-enlighten you, sort of, though you pay it back of relatively optimally, modulo how world/system structure is impacted.
(See also the section "meditation indirectly discloses domain knowledge")
PK
Could we say that new karma has been created for you? even though it didn't result from any choice of yours per se, and it's not something you could have known about beforehand? (ETA: versus, you had karma but you just didn't realize it)
Mark [replying later, single comment in thread]
yeah. can’ t control everything. the more enlightened you are (as it were) harder it is to create karma, or “the less karma you have.” (some equivocation, here; or, just, karma begets karma and like an enlightened person still has “hawking radiation karma,” or something. so the world still has a chance of generating karma in an enlightened person if the world does something really surprising/“perverse” that couldn’t be predicted via like “transitive epistemic closure” from paying of “all” technical debt.
PK
(though maybe part of integrating this new information is investigating whether you could actually have figured it out beforehand)
so should we understand karma as relative to the information a person has (which bounds their resolving power)?
but then even with a bounded amount of information, you can often discover things by chewing on them more. so for a full karmic accounting, you should also include your choice to do so or not -- like maybe you were busy with other things
this is the part that makes me hesitant to talk straightforwardly about the "transitive epistemic closure" of all the stuff you know
Mark [rambly postscript a couple weeks later]
this is the part that makes me hesitant to talk straightforwardly about the "transitive epistemic closure" of all the stuff you know
Yes, exactly--chewing on stuff happens in real time, so everything is limited by tradeoffs and opportunity cost under uncertainty in finite time. You don't know exactly what you'll find out, if you chew on things, more, so there's sort of "predictive pre-computation" like an attempt to imperfectly get around the halting problem or to be one's own oracle. (Some of the previous credited to a collaborator; mistakes mine) And it can't be perfect in part because of the halting problem as well as unknown unknowns, knightian uncertainty, etc., etc. (speaking sloppily). So one sort of has to decide (the system spontaneously decides for itself), as best it can, about sort of whether to (embodied-ly) think some more [about X; nebulously speaking, with all sorts of other stuff nebulously interleaved], or to go collect more information, or to do something else (and maybe sort of be sifting through stuff in stolen moments or no the back burner or with other things mixed in, in reverie). And all of this is nebulous and a toy model. There are no beliefs, no "belief storage," no final ontology for those beliefs, there's no thinking, there's no epistemic closure, as it were. It's hard to talk about or to gesture, even vaguely, without being too reifying. Like there's a there, there, but no objective, same-for-each-person, "there," and it won't make sense for everyone to even remotely frame it this way, etc. And/but, over time, meditation, all things being equal, will cause people to "realize" things (hopefully embodied, "naturalized," eventually "all the way down," if that makes sense, that they hadn't realized before (and anything can be returned to and revised; realizations aren't ever the final word), that they had sort of "already had all the pieces," and no new "pieces" had recently become known. (And/but, since everything is sort of connected to everything else, loosely speaking, even seemingly unrelated things, like the warmth of sunlight or a light breeze or a "random" conversation or a bug bite, could have non-trivially [truly] contributed to that realization--even if said "realization" seemed wildly unrelated to all of that. (((In some sense, there are "no brain farts," there's no noise in the system, although there can be diffuse error and confusion, and that can be gathered, shipped around, integrated, error checked, consolidated (through being, breath, gesture, movment, meditation, just living)--and again these are all sort of toy conceptions of something that's shimmery, embodied, spontaneous, groundless, empty, and beyond conception.) And this thing can keep going and going, for a time...
*
So I suppose it could be said that a person can be "fully up to date" without processing "literally everything" (if that even makes sense) if they are "perfectly ok" with not processing particular thing X because they're focusing on something else that's more important. so one could be "completely enlightened" if in any particular moment they're ok with everything being unprocessed that isn't processed yet. (and these are all imperfect abtractions that kind of get messed up around the edges). And mediately, and even asymptotically, there will be plenty of "not yet", for all sorts of very good reasons. (Again, in important relevant senses, there are no "discrete things" and there is no "discrete processing of discrete things".)
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/meditation-indirectly-discloses-domain-knowledge/ (Last accessed: 2020-09-06)]
grateful hat-tip to an indirect collaborator for raising this issue and offering these quotes:
>>>
On a totally different tangent, the specific knowledge models basically state or imply that awakening will somehow magically provide hidden conceptual information about all sorts of specific things in life, such as the workings of particle physics, how to bring about world peace, who our disciples should marry, and the like. Some go further and state that enlightenment progressively brings complete omniscience, meaning the ability to know everything simultaneously about every single part and particle of the entire at least eight hundred trillion mile–wide universe.
[...]
While these might seem to some people like reasonable things awakened beings should somehow know, let’s include other things it might be good to know, such as how to create safe, inexpensive lithium ion batteries for electric cars, how to consistently beat the return of an S&P 500 index fund over the long haul, how to balance the federal deficit while providing everyone with outstanding social services and not raising taxes, how to instantaneously make every blue-collar Republican realize that they are voting against their own self-interest, and how to build a fusion reactor that is safe, inexpensive, produces enough energy for everyone on the planet, and has no radioactive disposal issues. When you consider these, the concept of specific knowledge gained by merely seeing the true nature of ordinary sensations begins to seem as ridiculous as it really is.
https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/Crit_Thinking.pdf
After more than 20 years of lamentation, exhortation, and little improvement, maybe it’s time to ask a fundamental question: Can critical thinking actually be taught? Decades of cognitive research point to a disappointing answer: not really. People who have sought to teach critical thinking have assumed that it is a skill, like riding a bicycle, and that, like other skills, once you learn it, you can apply it in any situation. Research from cognitive science shows that thinking is not that sort of skill. The processes of thinking are intertwined with the content of thought (that is, domain knowledge). Thus, if you remind a student to "look at an issue from multiple perspectives" often enough, he will learn that he ought to do so, but if he doesn’t know much about an issue, he can’t think about it from multiple perspectives. You can teach students maxims about how they ought to think, but without background knowledge and practice, they probably will not be able to implement the advice they memorize. Just as it makes no sense to try to teach factual content without giving students opportunities to practice using it, it also makes no sense to try to teach critical thinking devoid of factual content.
<<<
Ok. There is nuance that many meditation teachers don’t grasp, OR they DO grasp it, to a greater or lesser degree, but they are simply offering a precise, skilled, one-sided correction to people who think meditation will confer direct mystical knowledge on how to pick stocks, heal interpersonal relationships, or cure cancer.
So, there are TWO types of knowledge.
(1)
First, there is knowledge that is true, all the time, everywhere, such as the laws of physics, laws of mind, and phenomenology, as it were (the latter two loosely speaking). For these, any individual person has an extremely OVERDETERMINED dataset, by the time they’re maybe just weeks or a few years old. (It’s not the kind of physics data that will output quantum mechanics or string theory, but still.) This dataset is sufficient to yield insight into emptiness, the true nature of (body)mind, some aspects of physical grace, and, qualifiedly, almost-unconditional wellbeing.
Furthermore, insight into knowledge of mind, all things being equal, will boost IQ and general thinking skills! IQ is not hardwired, nor is "thinking," except for a slight limning of development and genetics. Intelligence is 99% malleable software.
The reason that "critical thinking can’t be taught," and the reason that the world isn’t filled with meditator-Einstein’s, is that gradual, and sometimes sudden upgrades in reasoning can take thousands of hours of not-McMindfulness, to yield fruit. The brain changes slowly. It takes on the order of 10,000 hours (yeah, that popularized-for-shaky-reasons number, but really) to "turn over the whole mind, for the first time," though plenty of stuff will contingently happen before that time interval elapses.
(2)
Now, there is also the second type of knowledge. In addition to what is always true, everywhere, as I put it, Ingram points out that pesky domain knowledge is a thing:
For a new human, aside from those universal types of data, mentioned above, that massively overdetermined implications, there all also true unknown unknowns, from that new human’s point of view.
But, setting aside, for a moment, those true unknown unknowns, there are also knowable unknowns, which are knowable through personal action (experiment) and inference (theorizing), as it were. [Edit 2020-09-06: Further, I should have made the point, here, too, that the "relative" world is massively overdetermined, highly self-correlated, and coherent, all things being equal, as well. It’s possible to know so, so much, from sparse, thin slices, if those slices used properly and sought out, as needed, as per below.]
To make an extended analogy, science was a civilizational upgrade for the acceleration of converting knowable unknowns to the known and for pushing out the unknowable to the "true bleeding edge" of "real" unknown unknowns, as they disclose surprise, or not, according to necessity and contingency.
So, analogously to civilizational-science-as-upgrade, now, for an individual, good meditation is, over time, like personal science (ultimately effortless, partially-implicit, costless), a bare-metal epistemic upgrade that improves that meta-bootstrapping process of ever more proactive and effective knowledge-seeking [Edit 2020-09-06: and evidence-using]. An advanced meditator (using a fully comprehensive system) will eventually be experimenting more, faster, more frequently, more effectively/constructively, less dangerously, with better implicit and explicit theoretical frameworks, to acquire raw data to feed into the [Edit: 2020-09-06 proactive and spontaneous] generation of personal moral and practical domain knowledge (and ever-better epistemics).
(I think meditation teachers hate to go anywhere near any of this, because fallible meditation teachers and sociopathic gurus, with necessarily imperfect meditation methods, make harmful mistakes ALL THE TIME. And, when someone gets hurt, it’s often way better to assume ignorance, blindspots, or myopic malevolence than to assume a teacher or guru is playing long-run benevolent, n-dimensional chess. So, yeah, suggesting that meditation teachers have domain knowledge can be very fraught, without also communicating how to assess a teacher’s domain knowledge, along particular dimensions. And that’s it’s own chicken-egg problem. So, sometimes, it’s better to not talk about POTENTIAL meta-bootstrapping meditative epistemic upgrades at all, if they’ll be unreflectively read into seeming advanced meditators. But, we do value the practical wisdom and physical grace of some meditation masters–so when people deny it’s a thing it all, it seems potentially contradictory and self-defeating, for a community.)
(conclusion)
To summarize, meditation is a vehicle for disclosing both absolute and relative (domain) truths.
And, one eventually runs out of absolute truths, to discover and align with.
But, our expanding light cone retains the possibility of truly surprising us, in very mundane ways, as well as very not-mundane ways, as things disclose across the "unknown unknown boundary." But, we can be ever-more-skillfully-poised, truly as best we know how, as best we can do, at any particular moment in our personal lifetime, or history, to facilitate and grab that possibly surprising data, the instant it appears, to wring out every last bit of de-fanged uncertainty, safety, joy, excitement, sociology, non-authoritarian governance, humane biomedical engineering, world peace, intimacy, and wellbeing it can offer. And meditation is especially suited to facilitate that poise, all things being equal.
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/09/17/human-epistemic-dynamics-and-phenomena/ Last accessed: 2021-03-05]
The most important element of an epistemic method (research method, knowledge generation method, theoretical method) is its capacity for producing solitary, systematic, inevitable, repeatable surprise.
solitary – In some sense, all you have is what’s in your mind. Books, documents, and websites are mediately helpful. Conversations, colleagues, and mentorship are mediately helpful. And then, some of the time, you should go be alone. Because, in some narrow, narrow, narrow sense, everyone is epistemically alone. So own it.
systematic – Does your method work all the time, on everything?
inevitable – Can you head-down trust your method to work, if you just keep going over hundreds or thousands of hours?
repeatable – Does it work again, and again, and again, and again...
surprise – Alone in a room, are you surprised over and over and over again? Epistemic surprise, bayesian surprise, if you will. Whatever. Holy shit moments, all by yourself, over and over again if sometimes, often, far between. Again: solitary, systematic, inevitable, repeatable surprise If your method has something like the above characteristics (and I just haphazardly made them up for the purposes of this post) then the next thing you need are gradients, or lead indicators, or error-checking, or mediate and immediate feedback loops, and meta-criteria (e.g. truth and goodness).
All the above, together, comprises that which is sufficient for long-range WAYFINDING.
For the best methods, wayfinding should still work, even when one’s ontology, plan, problem, and even goals are illegible or uncertain. That’s what wayfinding is for, to make progress through the fog, to make systematic and inevitable progress anyway, even when you’re not exactly sure what you’re doing or why you’re doing it.
When wayfinding is functioning, meta-epistemic patterns, epistemic phenomena, eventually become apparent:
The landscape of epistemic positions (space plus structure plus you-are-here)
Consider yourself moving through a landscape of peaks and valleys. Some peaks are higher than others. There are valleys between the peaks. Perhaps there is a highest peak somewhere in the distance. The peaks are local maxima–to get higher you have to first go down. The peaks represent, say, truthiness–they are relatively less wrong than everything else nearby.
Imaginatory Bleed; Modal World Bleed
You might think, no big deal, I’m over here, applying my method. Then there’s an epistemic landscape. Territory is territory, but I’m working with maps. I can work with multiple maps at the same time, multiple hypotheses at the same time, no big deal.
But, for some hypotheses, to consider that hypothesis is to live it. Some parts of the epistemic landscape walk you and not the other way around. [1] This can be minimized but not entirely escaped, cf. the cultivation of meditative equanimity in its most technical sense. And that minimization requires one to already be walking the landscape–you have to build the raft in the water. And there be dragons.
But it’s not a bug; it’s a feature
One might at first think that hypotheses bleeding into reality are the product of some evolutionary heinous kludge. But, there is selection pressure, efficient entropic dissipation, eros, something, in there.
"The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes."
― Marcel Proust
To see with new eyes is freedom; it is the capacity to not be trapped in one’s mind. (But it is also the capacity to be trapped in one’s mind. See below.)
People love philosophy, spirituality, pop science, and professional science because the best of it reshapes the very seeming and appearing of our world. There is a fundamental way in which the untrained human mind takes map to be territory. (Though, even when a trained human mind sees map as map [2], it’s still map. This might be part and parcel of what it means to be or have a mind at all, cf. representation in a technical sense.)
In any case, we want the mind to be able to change all the way down, we want the very seeming and appearing of our world to be malleable. This is what allows us to not only pursue truth and goodness but to live it, to actually live, feel, and behave in a world that is closer to the true one behind the noumenic veil, and to do it together with others in ways we care about and that feel good. This is what allows us to actually understand each other and actually live in the same world as other people.
(Note that this is, in part, a pedagogical post, and I don’t necessarily personally make any of these ontological commitments. And note that I’m mixing causal/mechanistic, telic, narrative, and anthropic reasoning all together.)
But there be dragons
Let’s get back to walking the landscape and then we’ll talk again about the landscape walking you.
Back to the landscape metaphor, we have these phenomena in the beginning and especially the middle of the journey:
local maxima – in order to be less wrong, in some cases, you must first be more wrong.
(valleys – if there are peaks then there are valleys and they take time to cross, milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks)
epistemic nonmonotonicity – sometimes in the course of being globally less wrong, over time, you’re very wrong, over and over again
epistemic traps (and near-discontinuities) – sometimes before you are right-ish, you are very, very, very wrong, in fact more and more wrong, over a long period of time (before, finally, either sharply or gradually, possibly with yet more nonmonotonicity, you are right or at least more stably less wrong
(for completeness, one might consider a higher-dimensional metaphor, higher-dimensional manifolds of epistemic positions, with not just peaks and valleys but saddle points along various dimensions, and so on)
And then, when the landscape is walking you (we’re considering, here, the beginning and middle of the journey; see more near the end of this post for later in the journey), some people get stuck:
(*) But first, on the good (non-stuck) side, as mentioned above, there can be "deep refactoring" of belief and perception. The can include "disembedding," "de-fish-in-water-ing." You never knew it could possibly be a different way, that there even was a "way," that could different, in the first place, along many, many, many dimensions. The very seeming and appearing of self and world changes. This can be so profound and good.
(*) And then, on the bad side, there can be shear and fragmentation–say we’re walking many parts of the landscape at once, with some in-parallel journeys at better positions than others. This yields "saint in some ways, psychopath in others;" "genius in some ways, crushingly superstitious or self-destructive in others.
(*) One might have whole-mind distortion, because "deep refactoring" is possible, sometimes the universe can be rending at the seams for months. And because how the mind sometimes contingently organizes knowledge, you sometimes just wanted to predict global hog futures, but instead reality is crumbling.
(*) There is also whole-body distortion, the way things are hooked up you could run into terrible muscle tension, digestive issues, headaches, and so forth, or worse.
(*) And then you’ve got your tropes, psychosis, paranoia, etc. Paper and string all over the wall? All over the room? It’s a trope because there’s something there.
Long-run Wayfinding
But let’s say your wayfinding is really good. You may then come to get a self-repeatable taste of these sorts of phenomena:
(*) elegance, parsimony, universality, exceptionlessness, perfection, beauty (cf as simple as possible, but no simpler)
(*) Hedgehog/fox [3] Chimaerism
(*) Provisionality – In these postmodern times, the above two bullets might seem reminiscent of the epistemic traps mentioned above. I do believe that there is a sort of optimal way to organize the mind. With good method, people eventually become more hedgehog-like as their worldviews become more and more elegant: fewer "load-bearing" theories and explanations but with greater and greater explanatory power, dissolving more and more anomalies. But, this flavor of hedgehog-ness is not entrenched. Even these elegant theories, even if, for this person, they, in part, comprise the very appearing and seeming of their world, they are still held provisionally. The key term here is provisionality. And the fox-like flavor is brought in with a "modal penumbra," perhaps organized, concentric clouds of possible worlds and perhaps not competing hypotheses but available hypotheses, for sharp cutovers. Other possible worlds are available for consideration, because maybe we are actually in those. And it’s both possible and safe to consider them.
(*) And, so, there’s a phenomenon of settling. (You might find this concept discussed in an obscure dissertation about Descartes.) For some particular topic or question, absent leaving your room, and possibly even then, you’ve currently exhausted all available evidence and thinking. It’s all been fed into the machine, and you have your best current answer, you’re done, until something relevant happens. Most people haven’t felt this truly done for now feeling; there are close things but they aren’t exactly it. It doesn’t mean you’re right (and it doesn’t mean you’re not accidentally entrenched) and it certainly doesn’t mean you’re manifold vulnerable to the the turkey problem [5] (there’s a more classic or original formulation of this I can’t find), to bleen and grue [6], and maybe you deem it not safe to act yet, or maybe you don’t have enough data to render your settled thing coherent, even though you’ve run out of stuff that’s relevant to bring in, but here you are. This can take hundreds of hours per thing, and sharply pursuing settling isn’t recommended (comprehensive sort of layering and leveling may be strictly better, generally), but it is a phenomenon. New information might mean you de-settle hundreds of things, so neither is it necessarily good to completely settle particular topics, patches, regions, things. It can also inappropriately presuppose an ontology or thingness when it is done in error.
(*) Hyperintensionality and goodness – Perhaps you disembed from language, in ways you fish-in-water didn’t know you could. Language becomes language games, even if truth and goodness are still a thing, or not. No improper reification, no improper or premature or entrenched ontological commitments, in the limit. And then, when map is mostly seen as map, and, sometimes before, with the right application of attention and submethod, /hyperintensionality/ affords new dimensions of truth and goodness. If "morning star" and "evening star" refer to the same star, then the meaning of morning star and evening star are different, yet their referring is co-extensive. The same thing works for propositions or models or theories. If you consider there to be something "out there," and you have a correspondence theory of the truth, and you (provisionally or not) subscribe to something like multischematism or directly unknowable noumena, then you can have overlapping patchworks of theories that in part perfectly, precisely if not accurately, cover the exact same part of the (provisional) territory. And this yields the possibility for equivalent truths (in the limit) that are more and less good. There is not "facts don’t have feelings." One’s choice of truth has moral weight. One can hold "degree of truth" constant, and "referent patch of reality" constant, while altering the dimension of goodness of that truth. Some truths are benevolent, some truths are evil, and there is everything in between. (Note: This is not the same as framing, privileging the hypothesis, and other reminiscent things. Those are real things, and this is also a different, real thing.) Some people saying true things, even critically important true things, are coercive assholes (of course). But, importantly, in the limit you don’t need those coercive assholes at all, because there will be truth that is just as good as their truth, or heaping tons better, that does all the same work and more, but is morally/ethically better in how it functions and operates in the mind and world.
Revisitation of the Demon-Haunted World [7]
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
And so, on the one hand, we have wayfinding that can potentially yield fundamental metaphysics, the distilled metalanguage that we use to do math and science, a sense of universal causal mechanism and law, naturalism [8], objective morality, and so forth.
Your method, in community, should at least superficially track, recreate, and extend physics, medicine, cosmology... You better be able to put people on the moon, cure cancer, predict black holes, invent/discover math and computation, first-pass explain the brain with the free energy principle, and so on.
And, so what of our demon-haunted world, superstition, evil eyes, normal human schizophrenia, everyday psychosis, angels, demons, god, gods, bicameral minds, pantheons, powers, siddhis, psi, psychic powers, clairvoyance, remote viewing, magick, enlightenment, enlightenments, talking trees, living streams, heavenly visions, heavenly spheres, the sublime, the awesome, the fantastic and erotic, succubi and incubi, chakras and subtle energy bodies, inner realms and higher realms, the horrific the gruesome, spells, curses, dreams, portents, gateless gates and stateless states?
We have thought-stopping, single-term dismissal:
brain farts, mental illness, "brains," evolutionary suboptimality/lack of selection pressure for X, (social) signaling, self-deception, superstition, folk theory, nonmechanistic theories or explanations, nonrigorous theories or explanations, "just so" evolutionary psychology, phlogiston, dormitive principles, vitalism, "sociology," "psychology," coincidence/birthday problem/black swan spaces (improbable things happen often), selection bias, survivorship bias, anthropic bias, etc.
Ok.
But have you checked for yourself? Are you sure? Can you be more sure and what are the potential and expected benefits, costs, and opportunity costs? How would you even do that? What would it even mean to check for yourself for some of the above?
The straw-dismissal of checking for yourself is something like, "you have to trust experts sometimes, you can’t walk on the moon for yourself, and recreate all the QM experiments for yourself, and investigate all the original historical documents for yourself, rigorously test all the supposed psi phenomena for yourself, etc." So there are relatively more and less trusted people and sources and social epistemology, and one can prioritize a limited amount of personal spot checking, and so on.
We’re all prioritizing, we’re all doing expert assessment, and we’re living and dying while we’re doing it, pursuing food, alone time, sex, relationships, kids, and the landscape is walking us.
But, say you had a method that you could do (mostly, sort of) alone in a room that left out nothing, that had to touch almost everything because of what mind are, how brains work, how knowledge is organized.
We are swimming in massively redundant information. Physical laws, fundamental metaphysics, the structure of consciousness, universalities, that which is exceptionless– they always already everywhere eternally and sempiternally run through the warp and weft of everything, at the very least by definition. There are some highly notable and liberating/emancipatory senses in which you already have everything you need. This isn’t exactly true, but it’s far more practically true than is immediately obvious.
Many of us long for an enchanted world. Some of us exhort to have joy in the merely real.
What if the merely real is enchanted?
Perhaps you would have to walk illusory hells and heavens, evaporatory visions and dreams, to find out. Perhaps some enchantments and ecstasies are transient and come with crippling opportunity cost. Perhaps you will burn relationships and money. Perhaps you will hurt the people around you, drive not only yourself insane but them as well, they end up on the street alongside you.
But maybe your life is or can be set up sufficiently that you can look for yourself, walk the heavens and the hells and the, ultimately, strange-ordinary and ordinary-ordinary. Maybe we can solve sociology-complete (cf NP-complete, AI-complete, mind-complete, economy-complete, world-complete) problems such that more people can investigate for themselves and everybody can take care of everybody.
Have you looked for yourself?
It starts with method. Excellence and mastery are worthy ideals.
Maybe everyone that manages to successfully look sees the same thing, and maybe some of those successful lookers figure out how to describe the view to those who can’t or haven’t yet made the journey, and maybe yet then we can all dwell together in truth and goodness and reality/actuality or at least do the absolute best we can, together.
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[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2021/02/14/epistemic-aesthetic-rigor-for-postrats-and-metarats-stub-post/ Last accessed: 2021-03-05]
[full title: epistemic-aesthetic rigor and systematicity and coordination for meditators, postrats, and metarats]
(There’s some extremely important ideas, here, pointed at without a lot of context and barely glued together. It’s a very first pass at a thing!)
Ok, so, say you’re on board with meaning/truth/etc. being some or all of multischematic, interschematizable, embodied, enacted, felt, intuitive, indexical, ostensive, intensional, hyperintensional, language game-y, innumerable, nonnumeric, gestural, vibe-y.
(Note: I also think math, logic, and computation are excellent and I use them like every day.)
Ok/so/but given original list above, sort of, what’s the gradient? Where’s the directionality? What is quality, here?
Sure, it’s/those are nebulous. But we can, sort of, sometimes, if we want, kind of gesture vaguely in the direction of having good "beliefs" in some sense, or "good science," or "good writing," in some sense—usefulness, insightfulness, depth, intricacy, elegance, transformativeness...
How might we generally tack towards that and how might we tack towards that tacking towards that?
Like, what’s the messy, living, breathing interface between sort of someone as they are, someone as they’re becoming, and like writing stuff down?
What if you want to vibe, and you don’t want to mess up your vibing, and you don’t want to sacrifice rigor in some deep sense, even if you don’t alway go "full reason," and you want your rigor, or your shitposting, to be infused with your vibe?
What might unlock that, very loosely speaking?
A toy hierarchical ontology:
Heuristic/gestural elegance, parsimony, simplicity, and more, in argument and explanation:
(I’m still fiddling with these ideas; there could be something really off, here.)
Now,
Nonequivocation:
Now, flirt with the problematic, problematically eternalist ideal of "nonequivocation."
Equivocation is using the same word for different things, including slightly different things. This can also be just poetic, gestural, normal speech.
Nonequivocation, quotations incoming, would be when you use the "same" word or phrase to "refer" to the "same" "concept" which "refers/applies" to the "same" "referent" in the "same way" "each time." [The "same" "sense" of a word "each time."] Or, when the "same"-ish sentence "refers" to the same "proposition," wherever it’s written multiple times in the same scope/namespace, whether it’s a premise, lemma, conclusion, subproposition, antecedent, or consequent.
Phenomena and noumena:
Maybe flirt with the problematic, problematically eternalist ideas of noumena as distinguished from phenomena, where noumena could be taken as a "limit case concept," "nearly empty," and so forth.
Globality:
Now, then, you can ask, is this more or less true? More or less wrong? A more or less good expression? A more or less bad expression?
So given all that, all that being said, how does one engage with all that? In my opinion, it’s often better, methodologically and wellbeing-wise, to engage with such forms indirectly and obliquely, generally through meditation and global wayfinding. (This is super cryptic, maybe; sorry.)
***
Further reading:
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[From a forum post I made. I think this is flawed in a bunch of ways, but it's a stake in the ground for something better.]
In my head I call this the "word salad" phenomenon, where one can read something and be like "that's just word salad..."
I think about this a lot because inferential distance makes "calling word salad" more likely, and it's maybe especially common in pre-paradigmatic domains.
Honestly, I see it a lot between meditators at all skill/knowledge levels, and, imo, it's often a good call. Sometimes it's a good call for part of someone's body of work and a mis-read for another part.
In general, I see it especially between "same-level" experts or autodidacts (again in pre-paradigmatic domains), as well as between non-experts and experts, in both directions. (The "expert" thinks "word salad" when a non-expert tries to convey something, and/or vice versa.) "Expert," here, could be replaced by advanced practitioner, unsocialized autodidact, crackpot...
I think the principle of charity is helpful, but also there's only so much time to evaluate claims.
When I'm evaluating something, I sort of run through a list of referents, concepts, relations, jargon/terms-of-art, equivocation, causality, implication in no particular order.
Have I ever encountered ANY of the referents before, as best I can tell? Are words being used in non-standard ways? Is the "language game" ostensive, assertoric, logical, mechanistic and/or all the above? Do the concepts and relations feel like they're "sufficiently high quality"?--how blurry are the edges? Are they of relatively small number? How elegant is the thing, overall? Do words change referents? Is referent-switching "doing useful work" or driven by lack of good vocabulary? What's the degree of causality or mechanism that inheres in the referent, or the degree of implication or argument that inheres in the writing?
Sometimes one has to eject or short-circuit the evaluation process. I use the above questions to do that. But, if I have time or there are outside-view reasons to give something a longer look, I try not to drop it until (a) I have an explanation of the generating process that gave rise to the statements or artifact I'm encountering (what is the sociological/epistemic causal history of this?), or (b) I have a more general explanation for which what I'm encountering is a limit case or edge case.
Because writing and speaking are "correlated with reality," even if tangled/confused, I think it's really powerful to "give word salad a chance," because people are exposed to different patches and trajectories of reality, and, modulo bullshit, it's never word salad from the inside. I think there's often net-alpha to be had, for the work put in, when someone is trying to communicate in good faith, and even when not.
(And it can create affordances to correct errors on both sides, can create a feedback loop for dispelling the curse of knowledge, etc., etc., etc.)
But, yeah, sometimes it's better to disengage or to put up a communal wall.
*
Terms of art:
*
"It’s just like u also have to grateful that something is pointing to a there, there, no u’re wrong not that one x30, that might otherwise get lost for another 3000-10000 years"
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1773737266931716535 [Last accessed: 2024-03-29]
'Most practitioners don’t go all the way and there’s a risk of forgetting there is an “all the way” or maybe worse coming to think a lesser thing is “all the way” and that becoming the new norm. And the traditions put a lot of time into distinguishing bt these cases'
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1773737266931716535
Ideally want healthy tradition (extremely careful knowledge preservation) and healthy avante-garde (nimble, contextually-aware knowledge reformulation and invention) and mixing between the two
https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1773739371834794224
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at least one sense in which there is no fact of the matter that is not "ultimately" empty and nebulous and "spontaneous" i.e. not up to you per se
at least one sense in which you don't need to figure anything out
at least one sense in which there's nothing to figure out
*
"But when people become enlightened or whatever, they often say they’ve “become one with the Universe”. This has always seemed dubious; even the obscure species of aphid we haven’t catalogued yet? Even the galaxies outside our lightcone?"
"I propose a friendly amendment: they’re noticing that most of what they are - the vast majority of their brain - is a giant predictive model of the universe. This model is big enough that they have lived inside it their entire life, with only slight edits from lossy sensory information that help fit it to the real universe. I’ve written about this before in the context of lucid dreaming - a dreamer safe in bed can apparently wander their neighborhood, seeing each tree and car and dog in detail approximately equivalent to waking experience. No astral projection is involved - they’re wandering around their internal world-model, which contains 99% of the relevant information, with real sensory information filling in the missing 1%. Once you stop obsessing over the character you’re playing, you notice the GIANT SUPER-ACCURATE WORLD MODEL TAKING UP 99.99% OF YOUR BRAIN and you think huh, I guess I’m the Universe."
---from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/janus-simulators [Last accessed: 2023-02-17]
(This is really great, though it's leaving out something I haven't articulated, yet. I've said something similar (still not the just-aforementioned unarticulated thing) above in this section and in one or two other places if you search for "kosmos" in the document and possibly elsewhere, too.)
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Consider a collection of evidence arranged as nodes in a computer science tree (in the technical / theoretical abstract data structure sense). Say all of that tree of evidence is already collected, sort of already in your (body)mind, based on previous experiences. But you haven't "integrated" some or any of it, yet. So you start experientially integrating it by "walking the tree," starting from the root. You can go from piece of evidence to piece of evidence along only fixed routes. If you want to get to evidence on a "far away sub-branch" you have to backtrack back some ways towards the root of the tree so you can pick a different branch going back down again somewhere else.
Say evidence is sort of already semi-arranged in a confirmatory way. Like if you start forming a conclusion, based on evidence you encounter, as you touch different nodes / pieces of evidence, as you go down away from the root along some route, this tends to reinforce the concluson you're already forming / holding. But if you'd made a different choice farther upstream, gone down a different "large branch" you might have been reinforcing a different conclusion. If you sort of integrate everything along / within a particular subbranch, when you finally backtrack and start going down different branches, you'll start encountering anomalies and disconfirmatory evidence or at least nuance for your original conclusion.
And it's only when you've walked the whole tree do you sort of eventually get to a fully nuanced and as-best-as-you-can conclusion (for now), that's sometimes pretty different than at least the first half of your evidence integration. "Worst case" (which is sometimes harmless), the eventual last couple pieces of evidence you recollect and integrate completely change the conclusion that you had had the whole previous rest of the time.
So mediate conclusions might be all sorts of things or in all sorts of directions depending the different routes you take, though the "final" (mega scare quotes) conclusion will the "same" once you've walked the entire tree, no matter the order that you touched the nodes.
For what it's worth I wouldn't reify the above too much; you might experience evidence, collecting, conclusions, recollecting, integration, backtracking, etc., in different ways, in some phenomologically-unique-to-you way, maybe not "as such," at all.
But in any case these kinds of experiential or abstract dynamics (which may not be surprising in the abstract) do come up quite a bit in meditation, in the short run and long run and very long run.
Over time, encountering this sort of thing in the big and the small, "conclusions" in general are held more and more lightly, more and more provisionally and strategically, and one gets more and more sensitivity to the likelihood that future evidence (already collected, or not) will change currently held positions (anticipations, predictions, expectations, beliefs, stances, embodiments, etc.). So one becomes more sensitive to the "sensitivity" of current results to future evidence, experiences, surprises, recollections, remembrances, encounters, etc.
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[Some anonymous expressed credit here.]
[The first couple paragraphs might not make sense on first reading..]
There's this really general thing in that our experiences are often "about" other experiences or "things in the world." I often talk about meaning-laden and non-meaning-laden sensations, where meaning-laden might or might not be somewhat felt-sense-y (cf. Eugene Gendlin) or unsymbolized thinking (cf. Russel T Hurlburt), but those can be too reifying; it's a lot more than any of that and a lot more are nebulous and often diffuse than that, etc. etc. (cf. also "intentionality" and "intensionality" in the philosophical technical senses, for better and worse)
Here, I'm especially but not exclusively on focusing non-meaning-laden sensations (but again also too meaning and meaning-laden-ness and out-there-ness and so on; really it's still about the whole seamless package of everything all at once; anyway.)
So anyway, examples: take curiousity, where you have a whole complex experience that includes feeling curious and potentially lots of other stuff; or confusion, where you have a whole complex experience that includes feeling curious and potentially lots of other stuff; anxiety, anger, other feelings..
This also especially-especially includes experiences that are about things but you're not sure what the "referent" is or you're not sure what it's about, or it's like something that has telos, that's unfinished, that might or might not be currently moving forward you don't know how to finish it. So like a worry that you're missing something, a worry or concern that you're leaving something out, a vague feeling that you've been bad but you don't know why, a vague intuition, and so on. Anxiety might be a good example, here, too, where there's often an uncertainty component (not to reify anxiety as one particular "thing" with particular rules and features and parts..) Curiousity is a good example here, too; curiousity is maybe sort of the "positive version" of anxiety along some axis. Or you have a particular very strong / intense feeling but you're not sure why you're feeling it. Or you have doubts, concerns, felt stuckness, etc. Or you're worried that you're going to forget something; or you're worried that something won't turn out ok.
Experiences that have "aboutness" could also be said to have "elsewhere-ness / elsewhereness."
So, one way to engage with these experiences is to let yourself (or to find yourself) drawn into, or already within, like whatever contingent, karmic telos is associated with those things, e.g. thinking, figuring, figuring out, pondering, wondering, imagining, worrying, coming up with contingency plans, calculating, arguing, etc.
As a brief aside, even if those sorts of things (thinking, figuring...) are somewhat heady, there is nothing wrong with that kind of headiness / headyness / head-y-ness! Also none of those things are automatically heady; all those things can happen too in very-far-along-in-meditation-very-embodied-etc. sort of way. But, anyway, even the heady versions are ok, for redo-to-undo purposes or just straightforwardly.
In any case, there's another thing that one can do (besides being telically carried along) that's sometimes useful and that is sort of exploring directly the experience itself that comprises the "phenomenology" of that particular aboutness as such, the direct "phenomenology" of that particular elsewhereness as such. (This might not make sense on first reading. There are sort of examples below.)
Please don't try to be too sharp or precise or narrow about this---this is nebulous and there's no there, there, exactly. It might be a little bit different each time and always vague and in motion and etc. So I'm not saying be messy or haphazard but I'm also saying be careful to not be tight or over-reifying in conceiving or doing or looking or etc. Be careful not to leave things out "well this is aboutness-ness and this isn't"---nah, just like make sure there's aboutness somewhere around there somewhere. And don't worry too much about whether you're really experiencing the aboutness "as such," and etc.. Loose, not narrow, not pre-conceiving.
It's maybe just a little bit of emphasis on a particular aspect of experience that's seamless and nebulously blending with all other experience.
Anyway, you might ask how do you know you're worried, how do you know you're worried about forgetting something, how do you know you're jealous, or what's the experience of jealousy. That kind of or quite usefully can point in the right direction. But in any case past the questions there's just the experience itself.
It'll maybe obvious right away how to do this, or it's something you've always done (and surely it is something that most people do for some things very often). This is likely something you do sometimes even if you don't think about it this way. If it's not obvious, it becomes more obvious over time as one's sense of emptiness and luminosity generally grow over thousands of hours. Even if you know how to do this it won't always be available (either in terms of "levers" or "bandwidth"), and it's availability or not isn't any particular indicator of anything good or bad, in general. Again, this is sometimes useful but it's not always useful even if it is available.
And so you might find exploring this, a little, nebulously, vaguely, as such might be useful. Maybe immediately or after a few minutes or days, if you give it some patience and space while still keeping it company, hanging out, etc.
Some pithy, cryptic notes to myself for this section:
"emotional judo etc. when things settle and still the emotion/feeling/concern itself is data/signal, etc."
"judo: "over time one's concerns and doubts and experience of stuckness itself become highly psychoactive friends" -- always a hook to find something to do, re concern, uncertainty, meta-concern, etc. [also enjoyment, etc. become critical parts of practice]"
re judo, every still small voice, every suspicion, still small voice yet, every doubt, meta doubt meta meta doubt, and so on (don't worry meditation is infinite-regress-busting)
“this is also in scope” “and this” ... "and this"
less “figuring” and more “feeling” because, long-run, feeling becomes a “first-class” object-level and meta-level participant/ component/ basis of groundless/ rational/ reasonable/ “cognition.”
like there's e.g. no second-guessing even when there's second-guessing because nothing is left out. so like generally (not always) all "negative" states are simultaneously in some sense positive states
Another way to think about this is "there's always something [there] to work with"; "if you're not done there's never not nothing there" (but sometimes, often, if there's not much too do or you can still be tapped out for the day, you should go take a walk, or whatever!) see e.g. (daily limits).
Eventually, sometimes, the observation itself directly leads to change, non-forcing-ly, spontaneously (but it typically doesn't start that way, closer to the beginning one's journey---there has to be lots and lots of structural fluidity for this to often be a viable option, but more and more....)--- cf. some instructions, techniques, practices work for some people but not others; but also matching degrees of freedom in redo-to-undo or smthg. In any case, there's sort of a reversal: problem dissolving / solving by making it safe to not know, to be wrong, to be stuck, to have no way forward, and the knowledge of that as such, spontaneous attendance to that experience as such, is then how the system "knows" what to do next, bottom-up, non-algorithmic, non-rule-based, not predictable in advance.
In summary, "aboutness is indirect in its aboutness" but "aboutness it itself as such can be directly investigated," loosely as a source of data or as a signal to the rest of the system's endogenous and spontaneous and long-range problem-solving. (not to reify direct or investigate or problem-solving, etc.)
As the system becomes more structurally fluid, this becomes more likely a thing to be useful.
More draft notes:
"Add to indirection is direct, exp itself is data judo"
"Any experience that’s about something else, reaching for some thing else reacting to something else. That has elsewhereness. SOMETIMES not all the time can. Sometimes better to engage towards distal thing etc. but if things are stuck or etc. sometimes."
"About is itself [sic] ultimately becomes a direct source of data or is adjacent / proximal to such [or a system impetus indirecty as such [sic]]. "
*
* The term "judo" here is used in the sense of "directly use its own energy 'against' itself," but here in an aligned and collaborative way with itself. so, "skillful use of what appears as such", sort of. Tai chi push hands has a similar ethos, maybe. These ("judo," "tai chi") are used here a bit in shallow and stereotyped way.
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Past interactions in relationship preclude and foreclose types of interactions and concrete interactions in the future, unless actions are taken to (re(?)-)open those possibilities. Meta-communication is a route, that complements other routes, to that (re(?)-)opening.
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An organism needs to be able to "randomly/arbitrary" experiment in order to generate data that becomes an input into learning.
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There’s the Silicon Valley bromide, "A’s hire A’s; B’s hire C’s." So there’s this awareness of entropy or degradation or something.
There’s a joke about how philosophers or academics in general produce "lesser clones" of themselves.
There’s a big deal, I think, in artificial intelligence around "artificial bootstrapping," as in, if and how and when is it possible to make something better in some way than its originator.
I think, generally, in the self-help world, an academic or a sharp independent will create a technique, and then people will popularize it. Sometimes the popularization will be recognizable as the original or the original will even be referred to. Sometimes it’s called by the same name, and sometimes this is endorsed by the originator.
And, other times, the popularization will have its provenance obfuscated. The popularizer will call everything by different names, usually water the thing down, make it much easier for people to grasp.
Sometimes this will even be an improvement, but, I think, also, sometimes nuance will be left out that means that people that encounter it won’t be able to use that instantiation to "go all the way" with the material. This can still be a net win if the user would never have known about the existence of the original material or they wouldn’t have had an on-ramp to unlock the original material.
But, sometimes, a couple worse things can happen. First, people can encounter the watered-down version and then think that the original version must be likewise deficient, even though they don’t carefully investigate the encountered original. (They might not know that it’s the original gold standard, or whatever.) Another thing that can happen is that no one will want to invest in the original creator popularizing their work, when they eventually want to get around to it, because "it’s already been done." I vaguely remember at least one concrete case of this.
The above paragraph is sort of looking at potentially bad outcomes at the level of individuals, consumers and the original creators. There’s system-wide potential negative effects, too:
This happens to some extent in academic science, there’s a proliferation of low-quality papers (this is due to possibly too much funding as well as perverse incentives and metrics). And, skilled researchers can identify quality lines of work and build on those, but less skilled researchers and scientists in adjacent communties have a much harder time weeding through all the crap. This might be isomorphic to the idea of a market for lemons, which is a notable economics paper. If I recall correctly, in a market for lemons (as in lemon cars versus cherry cars?), there’s no way to tell which are the lemons and which are the cherries (back in the day), and so there was no incentive to sell cherries, and the average quality of used car was very low. (I’m probably getting something wrong, here.)
Transferring this over to meditation-land. If there’s too many techniques to try because of low-quality and even well-intentioned popularizers and teachers, and say a person can’t efficiently weed through techniques until they find quality ones, because, for that person, it takes too long to know whether a technique is working or not—they might just not try to engage with meditation techniques at all.
At think wisdom traditions, meditation lineages partially solve this by investing a lot of resources into a small number of people and authorizing some of them to teach and appointing one as a successor.
This helps with succession and quality maintenance but is still vulnerable. It’s hard to be invulnerable to quality degradation. (Sometimes synthesizers or revivalists [or popularizers who choose wisely!] figure out or semi-invent things that are as good or better than the originals, at least along some dimensions.) People from the outside still have to figure out which lineages are actually good, and so there’s still a market for lemons problem, even if the lineage itself is doing an ok job of maintaining quality. And there’s the scaling problem.
Even though science has its issues, it’s partially solved some of these kinds of problems, at scale, with with good feedback loops "truth", empiricism, explicitness, etc. Again there’s a proliferation of low-quality papers. And, I think we’ve lost a good deal of our ability to train skilled scientists. But something was working ok for a while, and we’re still limping along, and science and technology are still progressing. (I’m ignoring the moral angle as well as opportunity costs, what could have been, in some neighboring world, here.)
One can do a similar thing with self-improvement and meditation techniques. That is, while meditation traditions have texts, there’s often secret knowledge, or keys to unlocking those texts, that could only be gotten in person. (Sometimes people can bootstrap, one way or another, into unlocking texts without forming an intense relationship with a teacher.)
That similar thing is to write better meditation manuals, and to keep improving them. Make them comprehensively explicit and conceptually clear. (My material has a long way to go, but it’s arguably pretty good. It seems like people do best when they’ve had some prior contact with other meditation techniques, and often it takes at least a tiny bit of question-answering with me, but some fraction of people on-ramp pretty quickly. And it’s my hope that skilled people will be able to de novo bootstrap with my material even if they have no contact with anyone who’s used it before, say if they find it on the internet somewhere.
There’s still all sorts of dangers, here. It’s a trope of people destroying themselves with found texts and people mistintpreting texts or teachers, going too far too fast or perversely misterpreting, becoming dark wizards, cult leaders, arch nemeses, and so forth.
But there’s something better, sometimes, about freely available, explicit meditation manuals versus esoteric knowledge mostly locked up in people. (Back in the day, by being esoteric, that’s how some traditions survived, I assume, making it possible for as to know about them and build on them. They kept the knowledge rare and valuable, so they could eat and keep the thing going. Hard problems, here. It sometimes also avoided the dangers in the above paragraph, probably, but the tropes still exist for a reason.)
In any case, I worry that my material will be cleaned up and popularized in a way that both dilutes it and actually harms dissemination, breadth and depth, for some of the reasons above.
More to say, and more to come, I suppose.
It’s partially hard because I want people to take apart the material and rewrite it, because that’s a good way to learn, maybe the best way to learn. And I do want people to improve on the material, to the point that it becomes unrecognizable, in part because it’s better that way or just that it’s equally good (or whatever) but the new language speaks better to a different group of people.
Often when people recreate something, they get it working just enough for themselves, whether they realize that’s what they’ve done or not, and they distribute it anyway, and this contributes to noise in the system, lemon markets, people thinking they’ve already seen better thing but it’s not worth it, and so on. (I think something like this happens in open source software, for some language and some domains. Also the forking, which is sometimes critically excellent and sometimes divisive, resource-draining, and community-killing.)
So I guess I’m asking something like, if you lightly reshape the material, link back to my thing. If you heavily reshape the material, either make it so unrecognizable (if that’s natural) that’s there’s sort of no brand or community overlap, as it were, so that more and more people can be reached without instead just confusing people. And, in any case, try to make it excellent, try to make it so that it takes people all they way from many, many, many different starting points. Make it as excellent, effective, and comprehensive as you can, and powerful enough to take many different people at different starting points absolutely all the way.
It’s my hope that we can make it really obvious who’s stuff is good, somehow cutting through all the noise. And then we link all the good stuff to all the other good stuff, and then people can choose from superb protocols that meet them exactly where they’re at. And somehow there’s just enough choice to benefit people, and low enough proliferation that there’s a very high signal-to-noise ratio.
This is a theoretical-technical-empirical problem—makes the instructions interpretable and excellent. And partially a sociological problem—guard the community from entropy and noise. And those two problems are interrelated.
Let’s try to have the right thing happen, and I also hope that my writing this doesn’t have a chilling effect, somehow. Let’s do the best we can to get supremely excellent material safely into as many hands as possible.
Maybe it’ll be a long time before people’s work diverges and competes with mine (in a good(!) way or a bad(!) way or both). Or maybe it’s coming up fast. Unclear, at the time of this writing.
See also, if twitter still exists when you’re reading this: https://twitter.com/swardley/status/1200193566749921280
Well, he probably wouldn’t mind if I just pasted it here:
Thread
See new Tweets
Conversation
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
Me : Gosh, your work is truly amazing.
X : Thanks. I'd like to make it more widespread like your mapping.
Me : That's easy. Just make it open, creative commons. People will ignore for years but don't worry.
X : What if someone steals it.
Me : They can't steal what you give away.
5:23 PM · Nov 28, 2019·TweetDeck
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Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
Replying to
@swardley
X : But wha if someone else makes money with it?
Me : That's good news. The more the better. You're trying to create a community, a space for your work to exist in. Do you seek irrelevance?
X : No
Me : Then open it up.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
·
22h
X : Can't I get some VC to sponsor or invest in me?
Me : You're more likely to get someone with capital to steal your idea, cut yourself out of a market and never expand it. Entire markets are lost over legal squabbles and attempts to "own" stuff ... see Unix.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : I wasn't around at that time.
Me : Oh, no problem. The entire future of the operating system was lost by a bunch of squabbling execs backed up by over enthusiastic lawyers, none of which could spell strategy let alone play it. This is a common story throughout history.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
·
22h
... into the mix, an "unruly" individual played an open source hand and asked for help. It was mostly laughed at, dismissed as lacking any business acumen and then won the world. It's another reasonably common story.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : Reasonably?
Me : Yes ... an open play doesn't exempt people from making utterly daft mistakes. See OpenStack and differentiation on APIs with AWS.
Simon Wardley #EEA #Labour
@swardley
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22h
X : I'm nervous about this.
Me : Well, that's a good sign. The numero uno of daft moves is to open by default. You're struggling with this question which means you're on the open by thinking path. Even my opening of mapping all those years ago had a plan but no guarantees
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[The below is a grateful response to https://twitter.com/riceissa/status/1565599182534381568 [Last accessed: 2022-09-02]. Angle brackets ">" indicate quotations from that twitter thread.]
[Corresponding twitter thread starts here: https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1565685229964218374 ]
good Q's. There is a bunch of discussion of conclusions~ for example,
* https://meditationbook.page/#touchstones-sort-of-leaving-out-or-only-weakly-inte
* https://meditationbook.page/#on-groundlessness-a-brief-note
These are in the "far reaches" section.
There are some sketches of "stage mappings":
* https://meditationbook.page/#crappy-timeline-guidelines
* https://meditationbook.page/#vague-sketch-of-progression-with-respect-to-emptine
In some ways, the entire document is intermediate conclusions, things to keep an eye out for along the way. At least originally, this was especially intended to be true in the "lists and more" section, though that section has metastasized.
https://meditationbook.page/#lists-and-more
ok this could be clearer and better organized but~
> 10,000 hours thinking about how to keep doing good, how to stop doing bad, etc.
Let's see. (@..., it might be helpful to people to unpack "thinking" a bit more in your doc. You do say "Thinking about and evolving your conception of good and bad doesn’t have to be a linguistic process [...]".) @... --
I consider meditation to be a (not strict) superset of thinking. Thinking, noodling, writing, brainstorming, arguing, etc., are incredibly useful but will generally ground out in contradiction, inarticulable premises and presuppositions, infinite regress, and so on. (Fwiw, one of the best attempts to take thinking to its absolute limit mighhhhhttttttttttttt be Mipham's Beacon of Certainty [1]. Kant and Descartes, via Aristotle, might be good examples of brilliant and illuminating attempts to wield thinking to its absolute limit but descend into misleading and irrecoverable failure modes, imo.)
https://www.amazon.com/Miphams-Beacon-Certainty-Illuminating-Perfection/dp/0861711572/
It's useful to have a superset of thinking, because enacting that superset changes the thoughts one can think, including the concepts that are available for thinking. Some concepts take thousands of hours to acquire (or correct) if one didn't already have them or had slightly confused versions. Some, even most, new concepts can be acquired from reading and thinking, of course---but not by everybody! If someone "just can't" acquire a concept, even with an excellent step-by-step guide or personal tutor, then meditation might be a (costly) next step to try, if deemed worth it.
> instead of just actually giving concrete theorems
I think it's important to note how different math is from other kinds of knowledge. Math is in some sense "synthetic a priori," to borrow from Kant. (This distinction is also in Descartes, unnamed, and probably other places.) Or, like, math is the closest thing we have to "eternal" or "perfect" or "platonic" concepts and relations. (I personal don't think math actually has these properties, but I still think math is one of the closest "thing" to having these properties.)
And because of this "eternal" or "platonic" flavor, it can be misleading.
The best example of seemingly "doing thinking like math" is maybe Spinoza's Ethics. In this he uses a "geometric method," like Euclid's Elements. But unlike Euclid's work, it's not about mathematical objects; it's about everything.
It starts with definitions and axioms and then rigorously argues for conclusions.
But, just as with math, the actual work of producing a rigorous explicit thought object isn't going to look like just writing down propositions and intermediate theorems. It's going to generally be messy, with lots of staring into space and rewriting.
> those who come later can learn the proof very quickly just by reading.
After the rigorous explicit thought object is created, especially a deductive one, is it possible to just read it and then have that knowledge?
Interestingly, some people believe Spinoza went to all the work he did, of making some of his writing rigorously deductive, was indeed for pedagogical purposes, as opposed to methodological purposes.
(Also interestingly, both Spinoza and Descartes have unfinished writing about methodology, how to do philosophy or thinking.)
I don't spend a lot of time reading rigorous mathematics, but I'm assuming that even trained mathematicians have to apply interpretive labor to understand new proofs, even in their own field. I would even guess that some rigorous proofs, far outside a particular mathematicianss domain of expertise, feel like "word salad," until they've played with some examples or even kicked around a physical system to acquire some intuitions.
Spinoza's Ethics, sort of the epitome of attempted deductive rigor, all things being equal, requires a tremendous amount of interpretive labor to understand and critique.
> (compress the exploration tree down to a single path down to leaf node).
All that being said, I agree that prior work, rigorous or not, does speed people along, so why doesn't my meditation manual thing do more of that?
Part of the reason is that Spinoza's rigor, Descartes striving for conceptual clarity, despite all attempts, (especially nonmathematical) language or concepts are inherently nebulous or "empty" (lacking essence)--see further below. Even when you detach "sign" (word) from "sense" (meaning), and are like cheese_1, cheese_2, cheese_3, drilling down to finer and finer distinctions and seemingly more and more elementary and foundational concepts, there's no there, there.
[In part because "enaction" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enactivism [Last accessed: 2022-09-02] ]
A more articulated example besides cheese_n is like, how does one define dog? A five-year-old, an untrained adult, a dog breeder, a biologist, and a physicist will all have different "concepts" or "senses" for dog, or will have different "conceptual clouds" for what a dog is, and will use overlapping and different words to evoke those concepts.
Classic which most people reading this will have already read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
I'm now having trouble contextually one-shot articulating something that maybe(???) summarizes as "there's an even deeper insight behind the slatestarcodex (SSC) articulation, that's just as important and at least as big of a jump from not grasping the SSC thing to grasping the SSC thing." And the words I usually use to gesture at that insight (that cloud of insights or whatever) are nebulosity, emptiness, groundlessness, aconceptuality, "unpatternability," etc., and these apply to the concept of concept itself, and so on, and these apply to themselves as well---the emptiness of emptiness, the groundlessness of the idea of groundlessness as well as groundlessness as such, and so on.
Here, I could metaphorically unpack these some more, as well as work out a progressive sequence of more nuanced metaphors, and so on.
Doing these unpackings is helpful to people, and there are popular versions of these. Unpackings generally get people there faster, all things being equal, and make it easier for people to "know it when they see it."
And I do this to some degree in the document. (See the "groundlessness" link above.)
But these unpackings also have failure modes. People can get the wrong thing or think they've got the thing when they don't, and so on. I think it's generally worth doing progressive unpackings anyway.
There's a deeper thing, though, that for lots of people, I'll claim, maybe empiricaly most people, the unpackings won't "click" until they've done a tremendous amount of preparatory work, basically to the point of "would have gotten the thing anyway, eventually."
One has to do the work, have the experiences, see the new lands, taste the tastes they've never tasted before, and so on. Good writing, analytical and phemenological, can describe tastes and smells and sights and sounds and experiences, but there are limits and good writing necessarily makes use of people's prior experiences (and ability to interpret language) to evoke those experiences.
Things get weird because people use language differently, like the interpretation and consumption of language is "seated differently" in people's perceptual / epistemological processing "stacks." And of course people are exposed to different words and experiences as they move through life, which is partly why some math and science teachers and textbooks work better for some people and worse for others (though one can still generalize some textbooks as generally better or worse than others, all things being equal).
Some textbooks have reams and reams of examples, from all sorts of different angles. And some math textbooks, for example, supply lots of "intuition fodder."
As mathematics textbooks become more advanced, all things being equal, they tend to have fewer and fewer examples, often until it's "just proofs." The reader is expected to supply their own intuition and motivation. I think this is partly for pathological reasons but also partly for compression and efficiency and ultimately technically rigorous and clear communication. Examples would make a paper too long or even in some cases (e.g. when mathematics-grade rigor wasn't available) confuse interpretations of the conclusions (even when those conclusions were somewhat loosely deductively triangulated from a bunch of different directions).
For something like meditative insight, where the "conclusions" are so "absolutely omnidirectionally encompassing," some examples would risk "closing down parts of the insight space."
Siegfried Englemann in his brilliant and limited "Theory of Instruction" calls this "stipulation" or "undergeneralization" (cf. overgeneralization)---in this case, in my words, the examples themselves, even as varied as they were, even as maximally different as they were, still produced inferential distortion because it wasn't possible to concretely "enumerate" enough of the example space. Too many degrees of freedom to practically do it.
So, instead, the ethos of my document relentlessly focuses on method as opposed to focusing on conclusions. To be clear, a mathematical or scientific conclusion is abstract and quasi-universal. But a meditative "conclusion" is about real-time perception and action and motivation, of which "thinking" is a part.
The idea is that by relentlessly focusing on method, supplying just enough "conclusion" for motivation and to guide intermediate action, one overcomes the problems of "can't think some of those thoughts yet," "haven't had some of the experiences required for language to be evocative enough yet," and "examples would actually distort the conclusions."
With respect to method, I/we actually did go all out on examples, in some ways. The appendices of the document are filled with 900+ and growing methodological degrees of freedom. It's necessarily somewhat messy and ad hoc, because everybody is coming from a slightly different place, but it will acquire some more organization, in time.
(There are sociological and safety reasons the document is somewhat maddenly sprawling, though with aspirationally clear top-level organization---on the safety side, I wanted to push people towards holistic interpretation, like I actually was going for not just a steep learning curve, but even something like a series of step-functions, or even just a handful of step functions, so that people would be less likely to hurt themselves through applying methods with partial understanding.)
In some ways the document might have the implicit premise of "thinking and rigor, or even commonsense pedagogy, aren't sufficient to convey the benefits and insights of meditation," which I guess is pretty bog standard esotericism or something.
(For what it's worth, I am obsessed with pedagogy, and, uh, I think my work has, uh, a lot of room for improvement. And/but, its current form is a result of a lot of imperfect, boneheaded, and sometimes really well-founded sociological, personal, and pedagogical tradeoffs. But... yeah.(!!!!))
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This appendix has only the names of the preliminary/auxiliary practices. For the full contents of the preliminary/auxiliary practices, see this appendix:
appendix 2: preliminary/auxiliary practices (full)
For information on what the preliminary/auxiliary practices are and how to use them, see this section:
preliminary/auxiliary practices
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This appendix the full contents of the preliminary/auxiliary practices. For the names of the preliminary/auxiliary practices, only, see this appendix:
[appendix 1: preliminary/auxiliary practices (names only)]
For information on what the preliminary/auxiliary practices are and how to use them, see this section:
preliminary/auxiliary practices
The practices:
If you happen to find yourself doing something, and you can stop doing it, and it’s ok or good to stop doing it, then allow this stopping to happen or participate in that stopping happening.
[This prelim/aux practice, and many of the others, are intended to be done while sitting quietly, but they can be adapted to other contexts.]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Deliberately, in ways that are ok or good and safe, attend to and be aware of, consciously experience, sensations as such and know that that’s what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
[Even or especially for "bad," "distracting," "unimportant" "incidental" stuff:] If it’s safe enough to do so, really play it up, get behind it, prime the pump, egg it on, [if applicable: reach for your best feel of that really being true, allow yourself to fall into the world where it is true], take that leap and ride the wave wherever it takes you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be, like, huh, that’s funny, huh that seems weird, huh why do/did I think that?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
To the degree you can allow yourself, to the degree you feel it’s safe or safe enough to be moved, to just find yourself doing/moving/vocalizing/twitching/acting/dramatizing/being/expressing/enacting/reenacting/feeling/dreaming/wanting/desiring/indulging, and to allow it to continue, to go with it, to go with the flow of it, do so.
comment:
e.g. shoulders hiking up and all manner of things --- you can gently participate, gently facilitate, gently help*; that's not always the right thing to do, but it often is.
*(but recommend against pushing, forcing, "making something go," etc., etc.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
As it is ok to be lost in movement, thought, or reverie. It’s also ok to be lost in sensation as it happens, e.g. in music or visual beauty or conversation or sex or other sensuality, etc. And it’s also ok if you can’t do this or it never (yet) happens.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
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Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus or e.g. experiment with “progressive relaxation.”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore ways to change your posture, relax your muscles, let your chest and torso and stomach soften, etc., in a way that facilitates feeling your feelings and body sensations more easily or possibly more intensely and to possibly have more sensations become present.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Deliberately seek out positively valenced feelings and/or other sensations. Deliberately seek out negatively valenced feelings and/or other sensations. Deliberately seek out neutrally valenced or unvalenced sensations.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore what you know. Explore your understanding of things. Explore what you expect. Explore your memories.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus; And consider writing by hand when you’re doing this.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Verbalize a maybe seemingly relevant maybe seeming truth / "truth". [sic]
comment:
Maybe gently repeat, let it go, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine or simulate something, involving the use of visual imagery, if possible.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Deliberately move your eyes, jaw, tongue, head/neck, glottis, lips, palate.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice, and possibly lightly influence subtle muscle activity and subtle sensation of the eyes, jaw, tongue, back of the neck, back of the head, glottis, lips, palate.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Interrupt or suppress thought or other mental activity, or catch it/them before it/they start(s) via (smooth/abrupt switching to) attending to things/objects or sensations or awareness of now or the present moment as such/being in the moment. Interleave or switch between thinking/imagining/reverie, interrupting thought, attending to locations on or in the body, and feeling your feelings.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Release the voluntary component of your breathing as much as possible and let involuntary breathing take over.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Interrupt, suppress, distract from, switch from an emotion, a response, a reaction, a feeling, an urge, an impulse, a craving/thirst, a thought, inner verbalizing, reverie, automaticity, movement, an intention, a train of thought, pursuit of a particular goal, a local plan, attention to a sensation...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pick a sensory object, e.g. a visual patch, and reflectively attend to it. Don’t just look; see. Don’t just touch; feel. Don’t just listen; hear, etc. Notice subtle or gross wavering or interjection.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus and notice subtle or gross wavering or interjection.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Incline towards in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Do something deliberately.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Consider or say something, anything new. Or experience what comes prior to that, liminally verbally or completely nonverbally.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find something that was true, meaningful, or coherent, that becomes untrue or nonsensical when you consider it anew or when reflectively considered for this first time.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Create or find a sentence, assertion, or statement with a blank. Incline towards filling in the blank.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pose a complete, well-formed question. You might right write it down and refine it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pick a well-formed question. Incline towards answering it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find and be aware of a batshit crazy, schizophrenic, ugly, mean, fantastical, from childhood belief or “seeming-ness” that you’d rather not have/believe/experience. For now, just allow it to be or see if it naturally changes.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice yourself talking to yourself, the reminding, convincing, suggesting, denying, etc. For now, just allow it to be or see if it naturally changes.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice other/alien/foreign/friend/enemy/parental/sibling/group/communal/cultural/global voices and impulses in you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice a “feared truth” (or the “shadow” of one), something that would be terribly bad or would have terribly bad implications or ramifications if it were (definitely/decisively/actually) true.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Agnostically, impartially, gently, infinitely patiently, non-coercively reason or dialogue with yourself.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Attend to a “random” spot on or in the body.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Attend to a “random” sequence of spots on and/or in the body, the sensory surround, or knowing or meaning or anything.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow words to come, ideally without presupposition or preconception. Let the bodymind talk to you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explain how something works to yourself, to a rubber duck, to another person.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
About something, ask, what explains this? How did this come to be, and, what’s going on, here?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
About something you’re doing/feeling/experiencing or you intend to do, ask, for what purpose am I doing this? For what purpose is this happening (to me)?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Try to put something inchoate into words. When you have some words, see if they fit, and see if there are parts which don’t have words for which you need to find more words.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See if you can find the right, single word for something.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See if you can find a place in you, on you, or outside of you where your sensations are subtle and fast-changing.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice where it’s hard to pay attention. Don’t force yourself to pay attention there, right now.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pick a problem you have and try to come up with a solution in any way that comes to you to try.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, and, whatever you need, try to give it to yourself, directly, right now, in the right way.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, and, whatever you need, try to give it to yourself, directly, right now, in the right way. And, try to take into account any felt age, how old the relevant parts of you feel, any feeling-of-being-there sense or memory.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, and, whatever you need, be the person that can give you the right thing, directly, right now, in the right way, and do so as best you can. And, try to take into account any felt age, how old the relevant parts of you feel, any feeling-of-being-there sense or memory. If safe, perhaps they know exactly what you’re thinking and feeling, and can respond exactly appropriately with exactly what you need.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Alongside what actually happened, imagine a better version of a memory. How could it have gone in some other world (that ultimately, downstream, might provide you with exactly what you need right now)? Let it be complementary to the original memory or experience in sense and fidelity. Explore what, in some other world, could have been the best possible age-appropriate you, immersively there, then.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Alongside something bad that actually happened, as best you understand it, how could you have avoided that? Or, how would that not have happened, had you only know... what?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine a conversation between two people, complete with possibly hazy setting and dialogue.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine you’re dialoging/conversing with someone, about whatever topics you’re drawn to.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore planning or your plans.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore goal setting or your goals.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore your physical or mental todo list(s) or explore what might go on one.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Concretely imagine how you’d spend a “normal ideal day.”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the objects and experiences of current and remembered
(a) thirst, craving, impulse, urge, appetite, motivation, “intrinsic motivation,” self-nudge, love, limerance, meaningfulness, hope, desire, longing, liking, loving, wishing, dreaming, lusting, wanting, desiring, needing, and
(b) that which is beautiful, wonderful, extraordinary, awe-inspiring, delicious, delectable, awesome, staggering, disarming, heavenly, divine, glorious, completing, be-all-end-all, the-whole-point, only-thing-that-matters, true-reason(s)-to-do-anything, elegant, sublime, hot, sexy, devastating-in-a-good-way, perfect, destined/fated/inevitable-in-a-good-way, satisfying, warming, fulfilling, relieving, engaging, likable, and
(c) that which is disgusting, evil, bad, hateful, gross, undesirable, horrible, terrible, unwanted, noxious, aversive, desperation-related, out-of-control-ness-related, dislikable.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore current inner conflict, the goodness, the badness, the endorsement, the disendorsement, the good but feels bad, the bad that feels good, the bad that should feel good, the good that should feel bad, what hurts so good, what hurts so bad, what you want to want, what you want to not want...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore current inner confusion.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Reassure yourself. Hold yourself. Be gentle on/to yourself. Talk to or treat yourself like you might a young child.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take deep breaths. Take it easy. Loosen up. Untense. Relaxxxxxxxx.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore what it’s like to “think” while attending to or moving attention through your body.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Make yourself a cup of tea. Go for a walk in the neighborhood. Read a book on a porch on a sunny day
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Trust that the thing that's currently/presently/ongoingly happening is the right thing. Trust that your body and mind know the best path forward. Follow its lead. Listen to its clues.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What is good or bad, right here, right now? What is going on, right here right now? What could be improved or better, right here right now? What could be tweaked or different, right here right now?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let them move, shift, expand, spread. Let it flow. Let it flow through you. Allow it (all). Surrender to it. Fully fall into it (if it's safe to do so)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Label (put words to) your experience. What’s happening? What's going on?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What is (presently, ongoingly) happening that is good or bad? What are you (presently, ongoingly) doing that is good or bad?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If it’s good to do so, lean-in-to/embrace the churn/uncertainty/not-knowing/intensity/confusion/ambiguity/unknowing/chaos/(meaninglessness?) of the ever changing flow of experience, whatever that might be or where it might go. Notice the aversion to doing so, and the impulse to retreat to the safe/reified/conceptual.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Welcome, allow, accept, receive, let in, make space for, give breathing room to ... whatever is happening in experience.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice: is there anything you are currently/presently/ongoingly avoiding or running away from? If so: would it be good to not do so? are you able to not do so? is it safe to not do so?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Steadily attend, for a prolonged period of time (but not too long), to your hands, your feet, or (particularly your lower) “chakras”, near the surface or in the depths of your body: root/perineum, (sacrum), genitals, tan tien/dan tien, navel/hara, solar plexus, heart...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What were you just thinking about, even if that thinking wasn’t in words? It was probably about something, real or imaginary.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Decide whether you’ll attend to sensations inside, on, or outside the body. Then do just that for a bit.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus. Change what you’re going to do, if you can (at this time). You might see if, unforcily, you can have the change be effortlessly, unreflectively stable, until you you fulfill it or it makes sense to modify it. (The change might be an addition, removal, or modification of an existing intention, plan, or goal.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Work on figuring something out. Or, do something besides, do you anything besides, figuring something out
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore whether you’re (a) altering your plans and intentions for changing the world or (b) altering your beliefs and desires to shape yourself to the world or (c) both, in this moment. (Note that (a), technically, is shaping yourself to the world as well.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore whether you can just directly go after something and have it, do it, be it, or achieve it. Or, are you planning, learning, preparing, etc. If you are doing the latter, why not the former?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus; explore how bad if feels (for whatever reasons); explore how good it feels (for whatever reasons).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine something in full, concrete detail, perhaps including first-person experience from a first-person perspective.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Follow the evolution of a desire backwards in time. “Float back” using a gradient of the feeling of that desire, the feeling of those times...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine what you would have wanted then had it been ok to elaboratively want it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice when thoughts or feelings come up that are against your “main forward direction.” Explore good and bad ways to interact with those interjections, e.g. ignore, befriend, tolerate, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine you’re giving your younger self exactly what they wanted and needed then; experience the “immersive feel” of this.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, across all times, places, ages, parts of you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, as if you are waking (to/)from a (lucid) dream.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Before taking a physical or mental action, see first if the body agrees, and abide by any disagreement.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
As a provisional alternative to trying to directly make something ok, through mind (thought) or action, try exploring the presuppositions and premises that make X not ok in the first place.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus. (if/when it’s safe and actually good to do so)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Decide whether you’ll explore sensations inside, on, or outside the body. Then systematically/comprehensively do just that for a bit.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus; do something completely different for at least three days, ideally without cheating/without exceptions.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
As best you can, have a quiet and stable mind. Examine the changing of sensations (perhaps investigating momentary in a single place or “place”) at the finest grain of detail.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Without forcing, write or type whatever comes to mind, keep going. Make the word count as high as you can. Free-draw, free-anything.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask what a part of you or a thing in you is. Ask what it’s doing. Ask what it wants, what its purpose is, what it’s for. Ask yourself what’s good for you about that part or thing being there doing its thing. Ask it what it has that you yourself want or need? Ask yourself what good thing is it doing for you? You might temporarily release/drain your own will from that part or thing, let it do or be exactly what it wants, pretending or making it so you can’t directly affect or control it; and, then, as above/previously, only ask questions and make and follow suggestions, requests, and counteroffers.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore what’s good (or useful or necessary), if anything, about bad things, including feeling bad or being bad, in general and for particular badness.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore if you can become soft where you are currently hard.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, that is, ask a question and use the answer to that question (or parts of that answer) in a new question, and repeat with that answer in a new question, and so forth.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look for beginnings and endings of presence (of experience) and absence (of experience). (ideally “minimally; without adding anything or taking anything away”)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look for stability and change
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look for how verbalizing, categorizing, symbolizing, organizing, listing, structuring, narrativizing, referencing might be getting in the way. See if you can temporarily set all that aside.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
When in doubt, choose the enjoyable option (and fully enjoy).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
When in doubt, choose the nonverbal/wordless option.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine how things might or actually be, even if you are uncertain as to whether those things are actually the case. Imagine more parts of the worlds you might be in.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine fantastic, near-realistic, and realistic worlds where all your problems are solved.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice when you’re “getting yourself” to do something versus it just happening. Notice when you’re “gearing yourself up” to do something versus just knowing you’re going to do it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find and dwell in safety, if only temporarily.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be insane; be crazy; be batshit insane.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be bad; be evil; be malevolent
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be gentle; be kind be; compassionate.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find a way to be safe enough, and then be dangerously out of control
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, “What’s good about that?” Ask, “What’s bad about that?”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be human; be imperfect; be flawed. (You can/could truly aspire to true perfection, but allow yourself to be what you are right now, say, which is inclusive of that aspiration.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find counterexamples to thoughts, beliefs, assertions, written content, things that other people say...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take person A’s perspective. Take person A’s perspective on person B’s perspective, and so on. Take person A’s perspective on your perspective. Take person A’s perspective on your perspective of person A’s perspective.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask yourself, “Who you are being right now?” Ask yourself, “Which one are you right now?”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Enter into something allowing it to be exactly as it is.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Would you treat a dear friend that way with respect to X? Treat yourself as you would a dear friend with respect to X.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Study particular sensations or knowing so as to figure them out.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Seep into yourself or into some sensations or keep some knowing company. Don’t try to change any of it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
describe what’s happening, describe what seems to be the case, describe what’s salient, describe what’s relevant
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Put knowing into words; what is relevantly coming up that you know right now, that you might not have known that you know?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
regard/construe all real time experience as bare sensations as such
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
explore how everything (or not) is just an expression of your mind (or not)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
(Temporarily or not) become X.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
List what’s relevant and maybe try to determine why those things are relevant.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Decide in what ways you’re in a temporary state right now.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Make it safe to feel fear and to know what you’re afraid of.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore taking intuitions seriously, including those for which you don’t have any obvious rational evidence (or whatever). Be psychic. Be clairvoyant. You can hold intuitions provisionally while you explore them.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask questions of distinct things in/of you: What are you? Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you come to be? How did you get here? What do you want? What would be good for you?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Back off, utter lightweight-ness: do the lightest most minimal possible version of whatever you’re doing or want to do or want to try.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be radically open to what might be true. Be unfiltered in your consideration of what might be true.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Hate until/if you don’t.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is X “shackles on” or “shackles off? [via Martha Beck’s Finding Your Own North Star and Steering by Starlight]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Feel or allow yourself to feel your desire, wanting, longing, preferring, taste, hoping, wishing, needing, craving, thirsting, hungering, lusting...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Remember/imagine (concretely) something that did/does/would make your heart sing (at least the first time or every time).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is that it? Is there more? Anything else? What is the next thing? And the next? How do I know that I’m done? How will I know I’m done? How do I know there’s more?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Run through all these practices to find ones that feel/seem good, currently. Run through all main practices to find ones that feel/seem good, currently. Try the meta protocol if you haven’t for a while. Try other collections besides ones in this document.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
How do you really feel right now? What deeper feelings are beginning to surface? What nebulous thing is going on at the edges of your awareness? The vaguer the better. Try to put it into words, or not.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Hold two or more different sensory streams in awareness at the same time, notice how they complement/corroborate/contradict each other. For example, while walking, pay close attention to what you see alongside sensations coming from the feet. Or while tapping a tabletop, pay attention to what you hear alongside sensations in the hands.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
To what end am I doing what I am currently doing? And why that? And why that? &c. Can be meta-applied as well: in the course of inquiring what one is doing & why, one may inquire as to what one is doing in inquiring as such, and why.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
À la V. Rao (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/11/27/patterns-of-refactored-agency/). Notice a thought or framing of some occurrence, and split/clump/invert/rotate/refactor the agency/will of whatever is involved. Some examples: “Those flowers are alluring” → “Those flowers want to be admired”; “I want to eat the doritos” → “The doritos want to feed me”; “I hate this traffic” → “This traffic jam is angry with itself”; etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Name the heretofore unnamed. Slice reality along a new axis.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Practice hygiene slowly, attentively. Brush your teeth; floss; brush your hair; shave; wash your hands/face; bathe; trim nails; apply ointments/lotions.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Eat slowly, attentively. Do you want another bite? Which bite do you want? How does it feel when you put it in your mouth, as you chew? Temperature, texture, flavor? What happens when you swallow? Can you feel your stomach receiving the food?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Examine the passage of time (perhaps while attending to a particular sensation, such as an ongoing noise, or perhaps not).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If it’s okay to do so, slow down in whatever you’re doing. Slow down more. And more. And juuuust a bit more.
Also: Take something you do in a split second and do it over 2-15 seconds.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Hug yourself. Touch yourself lovingly. Caress, rub, massage, hold. Which parts want attention? Let your body be an instrument of care for itself.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
To whatever degree(s) it’s good & safe to do so, allow yourself to fully and totally desire everything desirable, large & small, good & bad, immediate & far-reaching. Want it all.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
To whatever degree(s) it’s good & safe to do so, allow yourself to fully and totally release/forgo any and all desires. Accept this & now as sufficient and complete.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Interact with yourself, or parts of yourself, or what’s in you, only through a respectful interface; disclaim volitionality for what’s behind the interface. Drain your will from it. Temporarily treat it as not you. How can you affect it, now? What’s the right way to interact with it under these conditions?
Also: Do the opposite. Reclaim as makes sense, which might be an equal amount.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take a break from everything. Take a complete break. Totally rest, temporarily.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Listen for something faint and distant.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Try to hallucinate life-sized, three-dimensional people, appearing/existing around you in your present physical space, as a problem-solving tool, a general exploratory tool, for fun, for sexual fantasy.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imaginatively remove (and maybe put back) things from something you desire until you figure out the essence of what you desire in the thing.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
In what you’re experiencing right now, explore meaning-laden, phenomenology; explore meaningful phenomenology; explore valenced/unvalenced phenomenology (pleasant/unpleasant); explore the absolute, mediate, and immediate causes and conditions of phenomenology, explore the and immediate and mediate effects of phenomenology.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Feel the pain of lacking, the pain of not having.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the relationship between what you want (to do/have/experience) and what you, at least historically, *know* you *like* to experience. Explore the relationship between what you want to avoid and what you know you don’t like to experience.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine yourself with various extra resources, only one or two at a time (money, very nice clothing, healthy solid relationship)—what changes? How would things be different?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Temporarily pretend only this moment exists.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imaginatively/bodily/experientially give something exactly what it needs, exactly the relationship it needs, with the person/entity it needs (friend, parent), in the language and concepts it needs, with the emotions it needs, that that something can feel, experience, and understand.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what advice would you give a friend about this?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, could you do that? How would you do that? How would you solve that?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask something in you, that might not be you, what its job is, its goal, its purpose. Ask what it needs. Ask what’s good about it being there? Explore its felt goodness and badness.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, would it be bad if this/that/X weren’t true? Ask, would it be bad if this/that/X were true?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
State the inner conflict, state the contradiction, state the physical impossibility (such as “those two things can’t coexist in the same space or be done with these resources or go faster than the speed of light or teleport). Or just find it; you don’t have to state it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find the childhood and/or teenage parts of you that sparkle with wonder and joy and appreciate and enjoy them and embody them
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What are you intending, planning, willing, right now? What is your intention [with respect to X]?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what you could have done differently, along with some minimal other changes to a situation, so that X bad thing wouldn’t have happened? Or that would have made the bad thing ok?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Like a cat that just woke up from a long nap. Try while standing, lying down, or in some other position. Shoulders back, chest out, get on your tippy-toes & arch that spine, yawn, vocalize, release!
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice your current situation/trajectory, and connect as deeply as you can with how this situation/trajectory is (now & ongoingly) meaningful & valuable, what purpose it serves, what broader good(ness) it relates to, etc. In what ways is today good/meaningful/valuable? How does the goodness/meaningfulness/value of today connect to the goodness/meaningfulness/value of your entire life?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice momentary or ongoing conceptions of the past.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Notice momentary or ongoing conceptions of the future.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Are you (greatly or subtly) uncomfortable right now? Which sensations tell you that you are uncomfortable? Why doesn’t everything about right now feel great/fine/perfect?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let your attention be drawn places and maybe actively stay there for a bit once you get there.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Attend somewhere two-dimensional or three-dimension or n-dimensional or non-dimensional, specifically, for at least a brief time.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Do what you’re already doing but deliberately move towards going it liminally verbally or nonverbally.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have respectful curiosity and inquisitiveness for what happens to be in you or is a part of you, that you disagree with.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Some of the time, temporarily, concentrate (on something). Facilitate attentional capture.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Some of the time, temporarily, have a wide, open, fuzzy focus. Concentrate on everything or no-thing. Relax, do this minimally, minimally reactively, as minimally involved as you can.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Become aware of everything you can become aware of, in the “background,” while also attending to a “foreground” object. The background is in your peripheral awareness (cf. peripheral vision). Look both at and “through” the foreground object. Balance the salience of foreground and background so that they are potentially seamless in brief moments or stably.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look at something; look past that at “what’s really going on.”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
With the expectation that there’s something good and important, there, a wisdom of some kind: Ask would it be good to keep doing this bad thing? How would it be good to keep doing this good thing? Would it be bad to stop doing this bad thing? How/why would it be bad to stop doing this (at least partially) bad thing?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Attend for some time to each chakra, bottom to top, including genitals. Hara. Hands. Feet.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Move attention slowly through microcosmic orbit (loop around front and back of body from crown of head to perineum and back) in the direction [down the front, up the back; up the front, down the back] that feels most smooth.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is it bad to know [about] X, bad to understand [something about] X, bad to be able to see [something about X], bad to be able to tell something about X? If so, how did that come to be? Why? How do you know? How did you come to know?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Come up with a metaphor, simile, allusion, allegory, analogy, or story for a relevant thing that might be otherwise hard to put into words. In that, what’s the problem, in that language/structure/ontology? What could be added inside that language/structure/ontology/logic? What’s obviously missing when seen from inside that? How would manipulate that to solve the thing, strictly inside or that language/structure/ontology?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is this from me? Is this from you? Is this me? Is this you? Is this him/her/per/them?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Feel and relax your way into beneficial “somatic refactoring.” Let the body naturally and intricately change.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Exhaustively, but loosely, sensitively, being willing to back off or let go, explore the entire value of the body with your attention, little by little. If you can’t attend somewhere, don’t force attention into the area. Explore what feels good and bad about this and what seems good and bad about doing it in different places and a different times.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, can you do X/that? Can you fix X/that? Can you solve X/that? Can you handle X/that?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, how did that/X come to be?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask can you look to see whether that’s true or not? Can you find that out with what you already have? (If not, can you get more information if you need it? How? Can you do that? Will you do that?)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, for me, why do I want/choose/like/desire/pick/etc this/X versus that/Y. Which is better or worse? More good or less good versus each or the other?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask what does it/X/that mean?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Touch your body or feel into your body with ghost/energy hands.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Feel the fractures of reality. Feel how reality is broken.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look down through your neck into your body from the inside
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look at the back of your head from the outside without the aid of a mirror, phone, anything.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
No goal, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no escape, start or where you are, gateless gate, stateless state.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Temporarily stop trying to escape from exactly what’s happening, exactly how it’s happening, and exactly what it is that’s happening.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
“Collect” things in your awareness to pay attention to, and attend them sequentially or simultaneously.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be physically relatively still, but walk and move with your “ghost” body or “energy body.”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Accept that this is your life now or in fact always was.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Noticed that in this moment you literally cannot just directly and successfully choose to die.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Expand into the available space, “outer” or “inner.” Accept/become the available space, “outer” or “inner.”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Feel your “‘broken’ phenomenology”; rest in it, all of yourself with it, as it is.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If you find you can’t do something, explore how to phrase it conditionally:
(You might ask, why can’t I do this? How can I come to be able to do this? How did I come to not be able to do this? How do I know I can’t do this?)
can’t X while Y
can’t X when Y
can’t X until Y
can’t X since Y
can’t X where Y
can’t X because Y
can’t X without Y
etc.
Then, if it might be good to able to do X even while the conditions obtains, you might ask something like:
How might I be able to do X even while Y? What are some worlds where I might be able to do X even while Y? even when Y? even if it’s not Y yet? even if Y has since obtained? even if Y holds? even if Y? even without Y?
Or, if it might be good to not have the condition obtain so you can do X, you might ask something like:
If Y prevents: How might I not have Y obtain? Are there good worlds where Y doesn’t obtain? What might such a world look like? How might I know I were in such a world? Might I be in such a world already or how might I arrive in such a world?
If Y enables: How might I have Y obtain? Are there good worlds where Y does obtain? What might such a world look like? How might I know I were in such a world? Might I be in such a world already or how might I arrive in such a world?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is X “shackles on” or “shackles off? [via Martha Beck's Finding Your Own North Star and Steering by Starlight]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Exert yourself past a few layers of muscular and cardiovascular exhaustion, but not so many that you have to stop, to achieve a difficult goal.
comment:
This one needs refinement of scope and clarity, and also careful consideration of safety in the most literal ways. For me comes from climbing, hiking, alpinism: "Exert yourself past a few layers of muscular and cardiovascular exhaustion, but not so many that you have to stop, to achieve a difficult goal." I'm pointing at something that feels qualitatively different to me than HIIT-type pushing to failure. It seems important that there is a summit or whatever to get to (and come back from!) and what you are doing is ultimately unsustainable but will last you just the next hour/day/relevant medium term, and somehow you are doing a bunch of inference to figure out just how hard that means pushing yourself right now.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
(Allow/let yourself) dwell in unknowing/uncertainty/confusion.
comment:
cf Keats’ idea of negative capability (edited)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
a character whose traits are very different from the ones you typically embody; can happen either in private or in public; can be an existing character (e.g. gandalf) or an archetype (e.g. motherly woman) or something else entirely; how does your character move, think, speak, carry him-/her-/itself? what is different, when you’re this character, than when you’re not this character?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow yourself to transcribe your stream-of-consciousness as best you can.
comment:
can be centered on a topic/feeling/thought/idea, or unconstrained; find a pace that works & capture on paper as much as you can that enters your awareness — don’t worry about structure or coherency; then reflect on what you wrote, or not.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what are you grateful for, right now? How do you know you’re grateful? What does it feel like? What don’t you feel grateful for? What is it like not to feel grateful? What causes gratitude or non-gratitude? What is different about your relationship with [thing you’re grateful for] compared to your relationship with [thing you’re not grateful for]?
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Ask, what would the courageous thing to do be, with respect to X? How does it feel to [imagine] carry[ing] out courageous action? How does courage relate to fear? Without forming intentions to actually execute them, explore scenarios of enacting courage.
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Poop mindfully.
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Non-coercively do something you find uncomfortable or difficult (but which you will retrospectively endorse). E.g. take a cold shower; chat up a stranger; fast for a day; etc.
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Carefully listen to & feel your own voice as you speak in daily life.
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Consider [the idea of] death, as much as it is safe & good to do so. For instance, what is death? What memories, concepts, thoughts, and feelings arise in connection with the idea of death? Are you afraid of death? What would it mean not to be afraid of death? Can you imagine facing death right now? What specifically would be bad about dying right now? What about the deaths of others? Do non-living things die?
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Be broken, crushed, shattered, utterly defeated, crippled, collapsed, damaged, riven.
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To anything expressed by yourself or another, respond: “totally.“/”definitely.“/”100%.“/”right on.“/”yeah!”
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Notice when you flinch, turn away, shut down, distract yourself, change the subject, compulsively open reddit in a new tab, etc. Don’t try to do anything about the flinching, yet.
comment (a*)
See also: affirm nothing, flinch volitionally, explore cowardliness ...Do you really want these things? Or are you in fact too afraid to be a coward, now?
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Thus.
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Temporarily stop planning and just see what happens next, see what you do next, as much as that feels safe.
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Talk to yourself as if you were an elder or older, wiser version of yourself (edited)
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Search for new interpretations of X. X can be an interaction, an event, an image, a place, a concept, a memory, an intention, a feeling, etc etc. Can also be done by taking new assumptions along with X. For example, “how can i reinterpret that argument i got into, if i take the new assumption that the other person wasn’t trying to hurt me?” (edited)
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Go back to the drawing board, regarding X.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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What does it mean to meditate? What does it mean to meditate well/correctly or poorly/incorrectly? What activities/states/situations are incompatible with meditation? In what ways is your method of meditating self-defeating? What would improve the experience of meditating by 5%? by 500%? Would it be ok to never meditate again? why or why not? etc etc
comment:
[similar to meta-protocol] [similar to doing p1 with the concept “meditation”]
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Forgive that which it’s good to forgive. Forgive others; forgive yourself.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Gently and softly and dreamily track down tingles and non-tingles. (edited)
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Hold/be/embody both/all aspects of seeming contradictions within yourself. Dwell in contradiction/paradox.
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Completely check out. Play. Total nonvigilance, total vacation, deep-dive into hobbies, interests for minutes, hours or days. Notice if you can’t.
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Get lost in something. Lose yourself in something. Become absorbed in something. Forget about the world. Notice if you can’t.
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Arbitrarily (or not) make decisions, add constraints, give yourself less degrees of freedom, give yourself less breathing room, put stakes in the ground.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
comment:
a sort of in-joke. whenever someone’s having a bad time, [...] asks “have you tried enjoying it?”
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Give yourself the day off. Give yourself the day/night/hour/unit-of-time off.
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Respond to your questions, certainties, concerns, etc, with “maybe” “Oh my god I can’t believe X is happening. This will be terrible.” “Maybe” “Will it be good if I Y?” “Maybe”
comment:
Inspired by the Taoist farmer story
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Simply endure, allowing awareness and feeling as best you can, as best you can without shutting down, white-knuckling, teeth-gritting, but only if that’s safe.
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Notice your recurring dreams.
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List who or what you currently need permission from, even if you disendorse needing it.
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List what you’re not allowed to do, even if you disendorse even the entire frame of “not being allowed.”
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Pretend posture lies on a continuum from (A) comfortable fetal position to (B) standing tall and loose (or even walking slowly or ad hoc tai chi or qigong). See if it might be currently good to move more towards (A) or more towards (B), and do so if so.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Pay attention to the emotional/intention/timing/sensitivity/feeling content of communication.
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Pay attention to the words/phrasing/conceptual/structural/thought content of communication.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
comment:
For me & probably others, there is residue from the way I was taught to meditate, namely from instructions like “if you notice you’re thinking, return to the breath” or similar. There are some very tight hooks in my mind such that when I notice certain things, I immediately have some internal reaction. There are lots of them, but one which is probably pretty common for people who’ve tried pop meditation is: notice thought -> interrupt it & pay attention to something else.
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Thus.
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Taking solace in the exhaustiveness of the journey. Or, like, in non bypassing ways the thing you’re working towards is such a big exhaustive total something thing that a lot of things that stress you out currently are rounding errors ultimately or something or ok or something.
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Connect with the concrete details + felt sense of your ideal experience 3 years from now.
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Thus.
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Thus.
comment:
Or ask yourself, ‘can you ask for the thing you want/need?’ are you safe and/or able to do so?
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Thus.
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If shakes come, let them.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Experiment with avoiding “doing things with your mind” and avoiding “trying to have your mind be a particular way”
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no such thing as minds and you don’t have one, but everything else is the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no such thing as selves and you don’t have a self and aren’t a self, but everything else is otherwise exactly same as it is right now. what now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that the mind is “flat” or “just-in-time” or that the contents of awareness in some sense don’t exist until they’re constructed for that moment (making no metaphysical commitments about anything else).
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no such as inside and outside nor things inside other things, nor anything inside or outside anything else, but everything else is the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no such as boundary or separation, but everything else is the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that you never ever have to think another thought, but everything else is the same. What now?
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Gently, gently, temporarily, provisionally try on the idea that there are no people and there never was a person, but everything else is the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the the idea that there are no things, no objects, not even any stuff :scream: , but everything else is exactly the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no time, that it doesn’t pass, that it doesn’t exist, that it never did. but, everything else is exactly the same. What now?
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Provisionally try on the idea that there is no space, no spatial relations, no adjacency, no empty space, no things occupying space, no delimited volume, that these don’t exist and that they never did. but, everything else is exactly the same. What now?
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Explore if/that/whether you are one, in particular that you are this one. and not that one or any of these or those other ones.
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Consider the idea that you’re already dead but everything else is exactly the same. What now?
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Notice what happens or what you do in the split seconds before you “start meditating.”
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Pretend you’ve forgotten how to think. What now?
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Pretend someone doesn’t know how to think and you can show them how to think psychically, mind-to-mind--they can watch your mind do things, directly. what do you do with your mind to demonstrate thinking to them?
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Pretend someone doesn’t know how to meditate and you can show them how to meditate psychically, mind-to-mind--they can watch your mind do things, directly. what do you do with your mind to demonstrate meditating to them?
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Have two or more things happen in your mind simultaneously. also for gross motor movement.
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have two or more things happen in your mind sequentially. also for gross motor movement.
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Try on different vibes, different global (outward-experienciable) feels.
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Pretend other people can’t infer your inner state or know it in any way. Explore if you have any new or different affordances or insights while pretending this.
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Pretend no/not/negation (even nothingness) don’t exist. what now? [seriously] (edited)
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Trust what you observe, plain as day. Rest in what is obvious and veridical to you right now.
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If something feels wrong, even if you can’t put your finger on it or you can’t speak it, know that something must be wrong, somewhere.
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Thus.
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Remember all the ways people/books/websites/etc have asserted or implied what people are, what minds are, how minds should be used, what’s good and what’s bad, what’s true and what’s false, how truth works and how it must be found, how minds work and how thinking works, how thinking should be done, what’s good to do, what’s bad to do. Do you agree, disagree, or are you uncertain? What must you believe or disbelieve? What do you endorse or disendorse about this?
comment:
This stuff gets in, it gets reified, some portion of it’s good, some portion of it makes us rigid, blocks our truth-seeking, our creativity, our joy, our seeking. (edited)
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Thus, and develop a method to inquire/analyze/understand/orient around it (or not).
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Notice the ways that everyone is subtly or overtly pressuring each other all the time.
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Notice the ways that everyone is subtly or overtly supporting/encouraging/loving each other all the time.
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Have perfect, sensitive, intricate, painstaking, long-game patience. Pocketwatch watch-building and watch-repairing, where the gears are normal tiny size but the watch is as big as a moon, and different tiny parts on different sides of the moon might need to precisely co-vary, so you might need to go back and forth between them. Sprinkling colored sand, not geoengineering or even shoveling dirt.
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Remember the mind is big but you can practically get through it “all,” in a first pass, in a fraction of a lifetime.
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Provisionally assume X isn’t your fault even if it is now your responsibility
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Provisionally assume you will have to solve X completely deeply and fully.
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if you can unforcily and endorsedly put something off until later do so.
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Thus.
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Explore that so many things you might never ever have to solve because they’ll truly turn out to either not be a problem or that they never were actually a problem.
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Thus, or: offer compassion to yourself] thus, as genuinely as you can [but no more genuinely than that]
comment:
i have gotten a lot of mileage out of saying “it’s okay [...], you’re doing a great job” to myself, either spoken or written. but it seems to be important to actually express it in one way or another; i.e. simply thinking the thought doesn’t do nearly as much as writing or speaking to self does.
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Separate things that you really really do/don’t want to be true from what is/might actually be true.
comment:
might be a cleaner way to say this. like “earnestly, fearlessly sensemake”.
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Make a list of all the things that are good, and all the things that are bad. Be as nuanced or not as you like. Notice contradictions, omissions, & anything that doesn’t fit in either list.
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Make yourself comfortable. Prioritize comfort. Take actions one after the other until you feel totally and utterly comfortable, even and perhaps especially if it "doesn't feel worth it".
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Pay attention to how your level of activation changes as you move your eyes to different positions in xyz space.
comment:
Moving my eyes seems to cue different attention patterns to my body and near-body space. Something like linear search across x then y, then z seems to zero in on activating coordinates well. Fascinating. [See maybe: Kenny Dennis; Brainspotting]]
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Ask, what is the basis of this? What does this depend on?
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Thus.
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Ask, “who or what is calling X bad[/good]?“, or “X is bad[/good] according to whom/what?”
Ask, “with what is X’s badness[/goodness] in contradiction with?”
Ask, “what if X were good[/bad]? what about X is good[/bad]?”
Ask, “is it possible to have/do/be X in a way that is good[/bad]?” (edited)
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No good, no bad: provisionally assume that there is no such thing as good or bad.
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Thus.
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Embrace analog/aconceptual/preconceptual/transconceptual/nondigital experiencing.
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Thus.
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Tinker, experiment, see what happens, iteratively.
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Feel into experiential/phenomenological and visceral brokenness and uselessness.
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Ask, for who(m) and why? Ask, along what dimensions and according to what schema?
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Thus.
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Trust that this experience/moment you’re currently having/experiencing is in some sense, the right one. That there isn’t something wrong (in some sense) with the experience. Trust it’s rightness. Cf: relax, ease, acceptance, non-resistance,
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Feel the ground underneath you. Notice how little you have to do to be held, and how much support the earth can provide. Relax/ease into this support.
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Act/say/do/want/request/believe/assert/head-in-the-direction-of... just because you feel like it, even if you don’t have reasons, even if it doesn’t make sense, even if you don’t understand.
Don’t feel a need to justify or provide reason (to yourself or others). That which doesn’t make sense. That which you don’t understand.
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Thus.
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Purify yourself in water. Cleanse yourself in the wind. Feel the grounding of the earth. Warm yourself by/in the fire.
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Thus.
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Do/go/explore/play/incline/work breadth-first, broad and shallow.
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Do/go/explore/play/incline/work depth-first, narrow and deep.
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Incline toward thinking nonverbally — spatially, visually, conceptually, tactilely, kinesthetically, mathematically, musically, etc.
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Notice unconscious habits, body language, attitudes, thought patterns, behavioral patterns, vocal tone, speech style, posture, positioning, mood shifts, inclinations, desires, etc. Don't do anything about them, yet.
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In whatever domain you happen to be in, see if you can play. Notice if you can’t.
comment:
“Explore childlike playfulness” already exists in the prot. The two feel different to me.
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So, you just discovered/encountered/realized the truest truth [sic], or the most perfect plan? Before you rush off and buy those plane tickets, consider holding your discovery lightly, and keep going, keep turning the (relevant) crank(s). cf error checking, letting it flow/shift/change
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Realize that you are here, now, not there, then.
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Realize it’s concretely this, not abstractly that.
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Thus.
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Consider whether you are acting/deciding/doing/etc out of fear or love
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Explore how and when to safely and temporarily ignore; Explore how and when to safely and temporarily listen, with part or every fiber of your being, or not.
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Tired, sad, hungry, anxious, etc. – – ask how do you know [you are] (that) [right now]? How do you know, of things like that, what you are right now?
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Really commit to the taboo, illegal, immoral, frivolous, dangerous thing you want to do, to do/be/have/get/experience the thing. Start to plan, start to pre-enjoy. Start to figure out how to make it happen.
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Reach for your felt experience of these, with or without object.
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Remember, it’s ok to find that you’ve “been doing it wrong.” That means it’s working. That means you’ve been doing it right. And you are doing it right. Perhaps feel into this.
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Find your “can’t beliefs”: can’t do X, can’t learn Y, could never Z, could never in a million years do Q... These can be both “inability beliefs,” where you straightforwardly can’t do the thing (or so you belief, or right now but maybe not later) or “won’t beliefs,” like, you could but you won’t because of something else--too risky, too emotionally intense, too emotionally risky, etc. For all of this, it can get more subtle--can’t do X with my mind, can’t learn to program, can’t learn to factor these numbers. So, things from your past, too, say, maybe early in school or before school. It can all the way to “deep sensory processing” type things--“my mind won’t/can’t do that” or “no minds can do that.”
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Imagine good, bad, best-case, worst-case deathbed scenarios. What’s happening, who’s there, how do you feel about it?
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Explore the ways, whats, whens in which it does and doesn’t matter what other people think of you.
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When the time is right, revisit memory-laden objects, songs, movies, photographs, places, etc
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Call to mind your child (or future child, or friend’s child) having the exact same childhood you did. Every sorrow and hope. Fly on the wall for every challenge small and large.
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What changes? What would you do to figure it out from scratch?
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Ask, for a there a way to come for it to be safe to look?
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Ask, is there a way to come to something more good/better/nourishing/correct/I/me/myself than this?
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Ask, is this more real or less real?
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Ask, is this younger or older?
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Ask, is this good-forwards, good-backwards, bad-forwards, bad-backwards?
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Explore whether there’s something that seems more real, more causally upstream, more important than physical reality.
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Let it do/undo itself. Help it do/undo itself.
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What are your implicit and explicit world/self models? How are or aren’t they serving you?
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Ask, is there something deeper?
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Ask, is there something more underneath?
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Consider the unintended consequences of the things you do and don't do. Consider how you don't know what almost any of them are..
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Explore how to make it safe to feel (extreme, white hot, perseverative, repetitive) anger, rage, hate/hatred, outrage, disgust, fury (fear, envy, jealousy, horror) at specific/particular/concrete people in general or for specific/particular/concrete behaviors/actions/inactions/commissions/omissions, for seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks. Deem them as horrible and bad as they are, to you or in the absolute. Explore how to make it safe to not suppress this, to not talk yourself out of this, to not try to (prematurely or otherwise) forgive them, to not try to (prematurely or otherwise) understand them or walk in their shoes so as to humanize, empathize, etc. (You can surely do all those things, but also explore the former things, too.
comment:
People do things completely outside our expectations, sometimes outside our expectations of anyone, anywhere doing such a thing or being such a way. A natural response is potentially the emotions above. They might be more extreme or last longer and more repetatively than you thought possible or good. But allowing those emotions, when there’s enough wisdom/slack/space in the system, when it’s safe to allow those emotions, facilitates processing, model building, wisdom. On the other side of those emotions is wisdom--sometimes it’s forgiveness, sometimes it’s forbearance, sometimes it’s surgical competence, sometimes it’s love, and many other things. Can’t predict the specific shape of wisdom (I think; though it can be healthy/smart/good to try). (edited)
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Thus.
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Explore how to make it safe to be allowed to have your (patiently extended) reactions. [sic]
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Explore how to make it safe to not self-censor. Try not self-censoring (or as best you can).
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Pause all your feedback loops.
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Consider: how do you know everything isn’t going exactly according to “plan”? How do you know anything truly has gone wrong or is bad? (edited)
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(1) Try/explore broadband (fullband) listening/opening/entertaining, to the farthest reaches, at the finest grain (while still differentiating self and other). (2) Try/explore broadband facilitating/helping... (3) Try/explore broadband ignoring/keeping-out/relevancing/prioritizing/concluding, to the farthest reaches, at the finest grain.
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Temporarily provisionally assume/act as though language doesn't exist
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Explore having an open mind about particular things that come up (beliefs, assertions, certainties...), as they come up, one-by-one or otherwise: Might it actually be different than that? What might it be instead?
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Turn towards what you are and have been already effortlessly ongoing-ly aware of. (edited)
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Own your reactions, let yourself have your reactions to the degree it’s currently safe. If you have a backlog of reactions, let them start to come up, one by one, to the degree that it’s currently safe.
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Thus/Let yourself cry.
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Find and rest in the entirety of the “experiential envelope.”
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Explore whether you’re ongoing-ly trying to, right here, right now, instantly, instantaneously do/have/be something, someone, somewhere else, to have self or world be different in this exact particular moment or the one immediately next, and next.
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Let yourself always already be the entirety of the “experiential envelope.”
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Ask, where on or in your body or anywhere or anywhen have you not paid attention recently or since time long forgotten? Is there a way to safely, non-force-ily, safely incline there (or then)?
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Stand tall and balanced. What feels weird in your body?
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Say a thing is something. Perceive that it is not.
comment:
"whatever you say a thing is, it is not." (—Korzybski)
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Ask, what does your body think about what your mind is thinking?
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See what you believe about something. Ask, according to who/whom?
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Lightly experimentally intensify the (at least seemingly partially) bad thing e.g. sadness, muscle tension, etc.
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Stop what you’re doing and do anything wildly different than what you we’re doing on one or as many dimensions as you can.
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Ask why you won’t do X? I won’t do this because...
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Ask yourself, what is the overall thing you’re doing?
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Ask yourself, how are you doing what you’re doing?
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Thus.
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Total non vigilance, total vacation, deep-dive into hobbies or interests for minutes, hours, or days. Notice if you can’t.
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Get lost In something, forget about the world. Notice if you can’t.
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Try X on and accept it as if it were you, were deeply a part of you temporarily. How would that be ok if that were actually the case, in the world where that was actually the case?
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Explore how to have it be safe to believe the strangest truths--maybe they’re true or it’ll change to get more true over time, maybe the belief will be transient and something even better will come in time.. Explore how to have it be safe for the world to seem the strangest of ways, through-and-through. Maybe that seeming is correct or good, or it’ll sculpt to something better over time. Maybe it’ll be transient and something even better will come in time.
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Explore how to have it be safe to trust, to act on, or to merely openly entertain “radical intuition,” knowing without there being any seemingly reasonable or correct or even possible mechanism, basis in experience and/or method for a particular (or any) knowing, believing, seeming, expecting, acting, etc.
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Let yourself believe terrible truths or let yourself disbelieve terrible truths, in the service of reaching better, healthier, saner, more correct, more humane, more good truths. Believe, enter, embody, when safe, for the possibility of change and/or letting go.
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Thus
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Thus
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Ask, what do you want to see, hear, feel, touch, taste, smell, contemplate?
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Ask, what ability or play or way of doing this, if I had it, would solve this?
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Ask, how might I do this or come to be able to do this? What would I do here that would make this and/or everything around it doable or easier?
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Thus. See the good in/of X.
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Thus.
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Sometimes can be helpful (and sometimes counterproductive) to ask, is there are more direct or immediate thing? Why can't I just straightforwardly (do/be/have/go after) X, right now?
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Thus.
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Love. Or consider whether love, some form or type of love, or just love, is the answer to X.
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embrace precisely current but not necessarily future limitations, inabilities
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Enjoy your in-this-moment inabilties.
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Explore perfect temporal continuity/continuousness/nonfragmentation/smoothness/non-gap-py-ness of attention
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Break it into syllables. Say it syllable by syllable.
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Do subtle, barely perceptible things with body or mind.
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Explore the relationship between gravity, bone, and muscle.
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Incline toward "perfect posture". Incline toward your body's natural posture. What changes?
comment:
Not perfectly formulated, and for some reason I'm not totally thrilled with the concept behind this one. Maybe at least needs comment about how problems can be on either side — one's posture can be imperfect due to eg muscle tension; or one's idea of "perfect posture" can itself be imperfect. Maybe I'm not thrilled because reifying the idea of "perfect posture" could be harmful
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Thus.
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to the degree(s) to which it’s good to do so & in the way(s) in which it’s good to do so, make your body available for feelings, felt senses, urges, impulses, instincts, reflexes, whims, ideas, postural changes, movements, shifts, twitches, shivers, spasms, pleasure, pain, (dis)comfort, expansions, contractions, forces, energy, vibrations, waves, etc to come through & manifest.
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Stop holding your current posture. Stop holding.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Blend all your actions into one continuous smooth motion.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Be/cultivate/surrender-to patient/patience.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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For a practice "do x", don't do x.
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For a practice "do x", do not-x
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For a practice "do x", have x happen to you, or have it so you become such that x without acting in order to do so.
For a practice "do x", imagine that x is already the case
comment:
I'm thinking things like "imagine a string attached to the top of your spine and hanging down from it" or "imagine your shoulders moving away from each other". I'm not sure off the top of my head how those AT directions are phrased, I'll have to look back on them
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Incline towards / prioritize feeling over thinking.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
comment:
Story, narrative, etc. What’s underneath? What’s ‘deeper’? What’s below?
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Explore whether you can just directly go after something and have it, do it, be it, or achieve it. Or, are you planning, learning, preparing, etc. If you are doing the latter, why not the former?
comment:
An alternative name/stance for this practice is, “notice complex versus simple.”
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Ask not just what’s good about something, but also, what’s useful about it, compelling, attractive, persuasive, glorious, beautiful, perfect along some dimension, etc.
comment:
Compare with the practice of simply asking what’s good about something.
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Bask in the felt e.g. compelling nature of some bad thing.
comment:
Compare with the practice of simply asking what’s good about something.
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Try checking each (and every) possible change [you make] against everything. check everything against everything. Or how does absolutely everything [that’s [in/of] you] incrementally feel about what you’re doing? down to smallest part/pixel/voxel/intention/stake/impulse/doing/will/whatever. Check in, touch base, with all of you.
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try moving forward only when 100% of you is ok with the forward thing. if 100% of you is not ok then try a slightly or very different thing, which might be exploring the not ok-ness(es) or something else.
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explore attending to places in different repeating patterns, switching up the order in which you attend. cf microcosmic orbit, forward and backwards, as well as anything else.
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Play with attending to “everything in order” and then repeating, so everything in order, over and over again, while playing with what “everything” (what’s the whole? what are the parts?) and “the order” should be.
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Ask, in the next moment, should I unilaterally do something, should I listen to everything and then do something, or should I let everything move me?
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collect past resolutions, declarations, promises you made to yourself about behavior and the future
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Thus.
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Ask what’s the problem behind the problem? the need behind the need?
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Thus.
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Ask, how does that work? What's going on, here? What's this?
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Ask, what does it say? What is it saying? What would it say? (To whom, if anyone?) is there a one-sentence essence or distillation of that?
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Rub your face in a way that feeels good until you get bored. (Maybe wash your hands first.)
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Write down distilled/concise/summarized insights as they come to you, as sketches, first drafts. On a new line write a new version, or an addition, or anything. And so on. Maybe keep them all in a single document.
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Imagine the worst case, the worst outcome. Is it as bad as you thought?
Ask, what might someone be feeling in a case or situation like this? Might you be feeling that somewhere? Where? How?
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Ask, what would you do if x stopped, went away?
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Explore for and imagine the lived ideal version of the wanted thing in a/its context.
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Ask, what’s the causal chain that led up to this?
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Ask, is that a property of the map or a property of the territory?
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Ask, are you encodings in words or memory or being or...?
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Incline towards it being safe for it to take care of itself, no need for propping up.
Ask is there path where this doesn’t have to be propped up or managed, where anything in this space in some form can just take care of itself?
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Look for places where “if (could) only (just) X”.
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Jiggle jiggle.
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Thus. Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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What's happening in your mind? What are you doing in your mind?
What's happening in your body? What are you doing in your body?
What's happening in the world? What are you doing in the world?
comment:
I noticed that this is sort of a way i slice things when i query what's happening
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Explore how/whether/if you don’t know anything for sure outside this moment.
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Explore how/whether/if you don’t know anything for sure about the future.
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Make a whole-bodymind “self-interpersonal trauma cradle” where things can arise for which you can comfort and protect yourself.
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Explore how to not try to make yourself belief things. Explore how to not try to make yourself want things. (Or not believe or not want)
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To the degree that it’s safe, let yourself be wretched.
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To the degree that it’s safe, have a late-stage freakout and even later ones. Sometimes the worst is saved for last, or second to last, or...
comment:
It doesn’t mean you haven’t made all that progress.
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Intentionally suffer (gently) in various ways, dredge up suffering, (gently, aligned-ly, patiently) find, call up latent suffering, turn towards, catch, go into, facilitate suffering that is present or arises (non-physically, physically completely safely, with minimal drama and extraneous emotion).
comment:
One might add “inhabit,” or “dwell in,” but those seem to connote or imply or presuppose or “pre-conceive” (“too much”?) permanence.
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Thus.
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Have a solo or small-group suffering party.
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Have an intentional 24-7 suffering party (temporarily)
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If it’s safe, (try) give(ing) yourself permission to suffer (maybe implicitly/just so or for a (semi-)explicit block of now-to-future time.
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Be dramatic. Do the same thing but be non-dramatic while you’re doing it.
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Incline towards your present talking collaboratively to the present. (present-present)
Incline towards your past talking collaboratively to your past. (past-past)
Incline towards your future talking collaboratively to your future. (future-future)
Incline towards your present talking collaboratively to your past. (present-past)
Incline towards your present talking collaboratively to your future. (present-future)
Incline towards your future talking collaboratively to your past. (future-past)
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Imagine a fantasy ideal that would make everything ok. Try swapping in more realistic elements piecewise/partwise, to get closer to something you could really actualize.
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Ask, if X was done/complete/good/fixed would Y be done/complete/good/fixed?
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Ask, why might this/it/X not work/succeed?
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Ask, might it/X/this be otherwise?
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Ask, would it be bad to not believe this/X? Ask, would it be bad to believe this/X? Ask, do I have to believe this/X? Ask, do I have to not believe this?x? Ask, would it be good to believe this/X? Ask, would it be good to not believe this/X? Ask, would it be bad to not have to believe this/X? Ask...
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Does your body want to move into a particular posture, position, leaning-ness, curled-up-ness? If yes, see if you can help yourself get into that posture. Check periodically to see if there’s a new posture to move into, next.
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Explore large body movements of the extremities.
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Assume a friendly openness. Ask a part of you, or something in you, how can I help? What do you need? (You might also ask yourself, what does this need?) What would be good for you? What’s good on your terms (in all of that), and how can I help you get that?
Before moving on to something else, you might ask, what would make it ok for me/us/you/this to pause/end/stop exploring this (for now)?
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Assume an even worse version of the (seemingly?) bad thing that’s (seemingly?) true. Fill in all the cracks of the worse-/worst-ness. What would you do, how would you respond if this worse/worst case were true?
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Let yourself be a baby. Let yourself be prenatal. The reality of that, imagined or immersive flashback. Suspend disbelief. What was that experience concretely like, good and bad?
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Ask if there’s a part of you that believes the opposite (of this/X). Is there a part of you that believes that opposite belief, ongoingly, parallel, to the first part of you?
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[stub]
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Ask, might X be ok, instead of Y? What good things would happen if X? What bad things would happen if X?
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Try resting in how things seem vs how things feel vs how things appear vs what might be true or false vs what you know vs what you believe vs what you understand vs what you think vs what god would say is true vs what’s real vs what feels right vs what things look like vs what’s going on, here vs how you’d describe things vs...
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Ask, is this/X forward(s) or backward(s)?
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Ask, what do you long for, hope for, desire, want, care about, value, lust for/after, love—to do, be have, associate with, pursue, acquire, achieve...
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Let your be pulled into thinking about metaphysics, philosophy, epistemology, phenomenology, agathology, cosmology, eschatology, mereology, linguistics...
comment:
Sometimes, often, extreme, abstract meta can be a real, nondeferrable bottleneck. You might see if you can go concrete first, if you can defer that extreme, abstract meta. You might bring in the meta protocol. But, often you relatively can’t!
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Ask, what are alternative explanations, stories for this/X apparent thing?
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Gently incline towards experiencing fully concrete, episodic, experiential memories.
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List some options. Consider the pros and cons of choosing each option and not choosing each option. (So every option will have its own collection of pros and cons. And then you might juxtapose the pros and cons of pairs of options, and so on.)
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Expose yourself (carefully) to things that provoke extreme reactions. If you are accidentally or incidentally triggered, take advantage of it.
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Temporarily let yourself [come to] know (or understand) without dictating the why of how you know or the how of how you know. (cf. radically unstructured coming to know/understand.)
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What would it have been good to experience, at any point when you were younger, in the recent or distant past? How might that have gone? What was the experience, maybe sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, feel, meaning...
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Through memory, imagination, or imaginative riffs, trigger yourself, distress yourself.
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Feel ongoing and the bleeding-edge arising edges of impulses, urges, impellment, compellment, compulsion
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Slowly explore the surface and physical interiority of the body with attention. Don’t force attention to where attention doesn’t easily go or where it slides away. Let it go; it will surely open up later, and you will surely come back to it later, possibly effortlessly and costlessly folded into something else.
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be disgusting, be rotten, be foul
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thus
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thus, if you can
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thus
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thus
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experiment with noticing or becoming aware of [for example]
the space between you and the screen
the space behind you
the whole room, the whole building, different rooms in the building, the air ducts
the sky, the ground, subterranean matter/strata, the insides of objects/furniture, the insides of your body
the boundary of your spatial awareness, whatever it is
the past few moments
the next few moments
today, as a whole, with “now” contextually embedded in it
this year, as a whole, with “now” contextually embedded in it
the continuous arc of time that connected/connects a given memory to the present
the boundary of your temporal awareness, whatever it is
what is happening
what could be happening in a few seconds
what could be happening in a day
what could be happening in a year
the continuous arc of possibility that connects the present to an imagined future
the boundary of your awareness of possibility, whatever it is
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
imagine ways something could be slightly or radically different
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continue doing what you’re doing, but see if it’s good to involve some other part of your body in it
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let yourself, all parts of yourself, just like this, be loved by yourself or by another, real or imaginary
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let it be ok to be ashamed
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thus
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thus
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thus
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thus
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thus
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thus
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notice things people do to care for each other, even/especially unspoken, routine, small, mundane, subtle, or trivial things
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
subtly slowly carefully shift your posture, exploring all degrees of freedom therein
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changing as little as possible, move in a way that feels good.
comment:
use with care -- extremely psychoactive. Move either body or mind or both.
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recall yesterday and what’s good & bad about what happened yesterday
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consider tomorrow and what’s good & bad about what might happen tomorrow
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reflect on today and what’s good & bad about today
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seek out or summon pleasure, here & now, as something to study or to simply enjoy
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find a posture/position that feels good/better
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vocalize freely and spontaneously
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be wild, primal, animal
comment:
doesn’t necessarily imply/require being in a high-energy state. animals grieve, too, etc
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treat yourself to something nice. you deserve it!
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you did so many things next weekend! it was such a time. think of all the things you did and didn't do next weekend, and how you felt when they were happening.
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find a comfortable position and be perfectly still, for as long as it feels good
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notice, look for, or summon dormant energy
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move your body in a rhythmic way that feels good, for as long as it feels good
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thus
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without becoming attached to them, explore coming up with grand narratives to explain patterns and connections between possibly seemingly unrelated aspects of yourself, your life, your history, your plans, and your relationship to the world
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine yourself getting dropped into the world, naked and alone. What values/needs need to get covered? Imagine you covered them. What values appear next? At some point start adding new people to the world, one by one, and notice how this affects your value landscape.
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gently incline toward meditating or doing an/any aux practice while engaging in a physical activity like stretching, yoga, walking/jogging, or dancing
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Reverse “I must do X to get my mind state Z” to “How might I get my mind in state Y so that X is the natural thing to do?”
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Let yourself feel how it would feel to do the violence you already want to do.
comment:
Allow waves of anger, shame, doing-it-wrong, doesn’t-work-for-me, fear, sadness, satisfaction, arousal to cycle faster or slower than you expect. Allow false starts and false stops.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
thus
comment:
cf. "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone" - Blaise Pascal
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Thus
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thus
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Thus
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therapist/healer/coach/etc
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do X as cross training for meditation
comment:
Practice eating ramen. Train for eating ramen. Eat ramen while distracted. Sit back and gently attend to yourself as you let yourself eat ramen. Let the while of your being become the eating of ramen. God I hope Costco has ramen in stock
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
practice doing x. Train the doing of x.
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do x while distracted, remember how you did it. Sit back and gently attend to yourself as you let yourself do x. Completely immerse yourself in doing x/flow/your whole being becomes the doing of x
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thus
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thus
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thus
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While meditating or otherwise engaged in personal practice, ask for help. Who the ask is directed to may vary per your aesthetics and beliefs. Consider that you might be asking god, or perhaps the deeper parts of yourself, or perhaps no one, or perhaps...
Sentence stems could be: "how do I ...?", or "help me (with)...?"
E.g. "how do I be with this anxiety in a good way?", or "help me be with this anxiety in a good way", or "how do I solve this problem?"
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thus
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thus
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THUS, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE
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thus, with four-part harmony & feeling
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thus
comment:
disconnection from self, feelings, desires, other people, pain, memories, etc etc
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
let it be ok to hide, from others, from the world, or from yourself; let it be ok to escape, into a room or into your mind
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus
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what's good to think about? what makes it good? what's bad to think about? what makes it bad?
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Cut it out. Seriously, don’t do that. You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. Quit while you’re ahead...
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flip a coin. Heads is good, tails is bad. For every thought you have in the next minute, judge it accordingly. Ask yourself what difference that makes.
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if something is so (particularly internally) and you wish it weren't, speak to your resistance and say, eg: "I know you don't want me to feel worthless, but right now I do."
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thus
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thus, for as long as it’s good to be, wherever and in whatever way it’s good to be
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thus
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thus
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thus
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Notice the ways that you’re here, now. Notice the ways that you’re not quite here, or not quite now. Don’t try to change anything, yet.
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attempt to find a problem and observe that there are none
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give voice to the part of you that wishes things were somehow problematic.
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what makes someone your peer (your equal) or not your peer? what is the nature of your differences? what would it mean to be everyone’s peer?
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what’s your honest answer, the answer that you want to say, somewhere, but that you might not say to any actual person were they to ask?
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thus
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ask, what is there too much of? what is there too little of? what shouldn’t be here at all? what’s missing?
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imagine a (possibly alternate/parallel) world where everything is ok. go into it, feel it, be there.
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thus
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thus
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thus
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notice where you’re pushing. notice where you’re being [naturally] pulled.
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If I were on a drug right now, what would it be called? Is this a good trip or a bad trip?
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thus
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Make new versions of the lists in p3 and/or p8 for yourself, based on your own experiences.
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Gently, dreamily seek the best place/orientation/position for your attention, right now.
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Thus.
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Own your fucking shit: your problems, your grievances, your situation, your past, your feelings, your mistakes. They’re yours. Own them.
And while you’re at it: your achievements, your skills, your friendships, your future, your potentiality, your pride, your worth. They’re yours. Own them.
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Try confronting it in a very slow, easy, gentle way.
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Explicitly, provisionally taxonomize/categorize the relevant thing(s)
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Be fluid, supple, yielding.
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Thus.
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Consider the axis defined by what you’re doing (or trying to do) and its opposite. now go in an orthogonal direction.
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Play with and perfect your intention.
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stream of consciousness for doing — don’t think or plan, just [safely] act in the world, for a bit.
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Thus.
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Be generous and charitable, literally or metaphorically.
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Thus.
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Compose a last will and testament, even a brief or incomplete or inadequate one.
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Try befriending it.
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Directly ask, what might I be wrong about?
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Ask, what things do I seem to value that seem totally disconnected from the other things I value?
comment:
Main one I'm familiar with is "family".
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Consider the big picture, or a bigger picture.
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Thus.
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Deliberately do something that embarrassingly backfires or leads to an embarrassing or inappropriate response.
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Deliberately do something that leads to positive or satisfying results.
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Let your mind wander in whatever direction it wants to.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Thus and notice subtle or gross wavering or interjection.
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Thus.
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Thus.
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comment:
Be empathetic for example.
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Notice and allow for an influence on or by your thoughts and/or emotions.
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Experiment with losing control. Have it, enjoy it. Then, let it go.
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Thus.
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Ask what’s the origin of X/that? What’s the name of X/that?
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Ask, is it all of it?
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Ask to be balanced in your perspective. Can you see the good, bad, and ugly of X/that?
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Be a totality, or “everything.”
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Curiously, genuinely explore what happens if you try to laugh from your deepest place.
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If you’re not sure what your identity is, or if you’re not sure if you have an identity, try on some identities. Test them. See how they fit.
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Go meta, get curious about what’s going on inside you.
comment:
There are lots of ways i can know something, like knowing something consciously (i.e. thinking about it), knowing something implicitly like a word in a language that i don’t know consciously but know implicitly, or knowing something unconsciously like how i can know that i know how to type without actually being able to recall any of the details of how i learned how to type.
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Ask, is there something deeper than that?
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Ask, how might I undo this or undo its effects?
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Ask, what isn’t neutral about this?
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Imagine being a friend to yourself, following your footsteps, the path you took to get to where you are right now. Maybe that friend can point out, here’s the right decision, here’s the one you regret, here’s the thing you’ll be sorry about later, here’s the fork in the road, here’s the leap of faith you took, here’s the thing you should have said, here’s the way you got it right, here’s the way you got it wrong, here’s how you could have gotten it right.
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Ask, what are three other things like this?
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How do you experience the experience? How do you experience the experience of the experience?
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Ask, what is the wisdom you have that you can’t talk about? (That you are unable to say out loud.)
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Explore the difference between responding and initiating.
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Give yourself an error message.
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Imagine you/your self (or someone else) suddenly and without warning enters someone else’s mind. Imagine the sensation of that sudden entrance. What would you see, hear, feel? Was that terrifying? What about relieving?
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How are you in camouflage? What are you in camouflage from?
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What is the implicit or explicit model here? What would it mean/be like if that were to change? (Or to be obliterated?)
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Thus.
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Thus.
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Along whatever axes seem important, do the opposite of what you normally do.
comment:
reversed stupidity may not be intelligence but it is search
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Can you turn impossibility into possibility, even if it's with the knowledge you'd never do it?
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Incline toward noticing whether thoughts are “actively thought” or “passively/spontaneously arise”
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Ask, what are the implications/inferences?
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Ask, what are the presuppositions?
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Ask, what are the premises?
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Ask, what's the conclusion? What are the conclusions?
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Ask, what implies this?
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Ask, what causes this? Ask, what does this cause? Ask, what's going on, here, and, how does this work? Ask, where is the causing, starting, stopping, preventing, blocking, enabling? Ask, what exists, here? Ask, what's present? Ask, what's absent?
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Ask, as far as I can tell, right now, what is my most non-fear-based intrinsic motivation behind doing or wanting this?
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Ask, do you have an expectation of someone else being there? Ask, who else is there? Ask, how do you know the difference(s) between you and them?
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What's the immersive feel of the first experience you had that eventually participated as part of a collection of evidence for this/X?
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How old are you being right now? What are all the ages that you're being right now? What's the feel of all the different ages you're being right now?
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Thus.
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How are you doing any particular thing that you’re doing? Are there different ways? Is there an opposite way yet with the same intention?
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Thus, and instead of going there or making it happen, let it/them/X come to you.
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Gently, exhaustively, explore all of it. Anything left? Is that all of it? And again? And more? And more? Anything else? Is that all of it?
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What's the that to this this, or the not this to this this? With nothing in between? (Or, ask, what's the mutually exclusive and exhaustive list?)
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Without making there be discrete things, gently try to count and maybe list all the things. Allow any indeterminacy to be as it is. You might talk about that indeterminacy, but you don't have to.
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Gently count all the ways you're pushing. Don't try to force-dispel any nebulosity. Allow any indeterminacy to be as it is. For each one or any or all nebulous sense, you might ask if it's productive or unproductive.
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Ask, when did it/that/X start?
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Do X really, really, really, really slowly.
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What’s your first inclination with respect to what to do with X and/or what are you already preflectively doing with respect to X? You might gently distinguish between these two, if they're both present, and put an name to each or describe each.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what's the delta between then and now? What's the difference? What's changed?
comment:
"Then" and "now" can be milliseconds apart of years apart.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what are the known knowns? Ask, what are the known unknowns? Ask, how might I know the good to know, knowable, currently unknown, not-yet-knowns?
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Give up the "how" of how something needs to happen.
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Thus.
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Ask, is this/it/X necessarily connected or contingently connected?
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Ask particular patches, regions, surface, parts, interiorities, volumes of your body questions. What are you? What’s good for you? What’s happening here? Who are you? Who are you being? What do you want? How can I help you? Do you have anything to tell me? What do you need?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look down at a wide open field and “release your eyes” until you get that zoom/parallax effect that eventually fades or runs out.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
https://twitter.com/meaningness/status/1260943613833302017?s=21 (last accessed: 2020-08-31) “agendaless involvement in sensory fascination”
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Explore whether which words feel better: "will," "willing," "intend," "intending," "intention", ...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask yourself to show you the need in full.
a) imagine never getting the opportunity to have [thing] again b) imagine this thing not actually being the thing you need c) imagine not even wanting this thing, or needing it, and being fine
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Thus.
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Ask, why hasn’t this sort of automatically metabolized itself already?
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Ask, how might I make it safe to know it/this/X? Ask, how might I make it safe to understand it/this/X? Ask, how might I make it safe to look at it/this/X? Ask, how might I make it safe to be able to tell (if) X/it/this?
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Ask, how can I safely explore ways that dissolve or solve those bad things?
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Ask, what does it say that I’m having this experience right here, right now? Ask, what does all this (sense/content/everything) say about everything else?
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Thus, e.g., let your feet come to you; let your legs come to you, and so on.
comment:
This is in contrast to "going TO something" e.g. with your head, with your attention, etc.
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Patiently, gently wait, inclining towards and resting in the here and now, and let perhaps subtle things come to you, maybe from the periphery.
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Patiently, gently, maybe quietly wait, inclining towards and resting in raw/bare sensations, and let perhaps subtle things come to you, maybe from the periphery.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Patiently, gently maybe quietly wait, inclining towards and resting in raw/bare sensations, and let perhaps subtle things come to you, maybe from the periphery.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Patiently, gently maybe quietly wait, inclining towards and resting in everything, and let perhaps subtle things come to you, maybe from the periphery.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus. And, give up, fail, let go.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
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Put attention on/in specific spatial points/volumes/voxels inside and outside the body.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow the "external world" to become salient, e.g. sounds, or a particular sight or sound, etc., everything out there, as/while things might become quieter internally. Let it come to you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take a snapshot of an experience that's too fast, too transient, to explore direclty and then examine the snapshot.
comment:
You might anticipate or preemptively "hit the button" a little before you want the snapshot, metaphorically speaking, so as to account for a metaphorical delay in button press and shutter speed.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore things with "secondary attention," too.
comment:
Be careful not to inappropriately reify primary and secondary attention, awareness, etc.. Secondary attention can be analogous to peripheral vision. If one stably foviates on an object one can stably track things in peripheral vision. Similarly, if one somewhat stably maintains primary attention on something (or looks "through" a primary object, as per e.g. Culadasa, one can explore and track things in secondary attention (Culdasa's "awareness").
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Meditate without conceptualizing it as meditation. (cf. "anything but meditation")
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Explore how you might be conceiving of something erroneously, e.g. false dichotomies, binaries, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
For something that ended in the past, imagine a continuing future for that thing, where there was no ending. What happens next? And then? And then?
comment:
You might try this for relationships that ended.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
For different things you might do in the future, careers, lives, plans, explore the superficial and non-superficial similarities between them. In what shallow and deep ways are they similar, even if it's not immediately apparent?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is there a more direct way to get X? Can you just directly have that right now or proximally and if not why not?
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Ask, what are some concrete first steps to move towards this fantasy/ideal/desire/goal?
comment:
Sometimes exploring concretes will introduce concerns and contingencies that can "bleed into" fantasies, ideals, etc., making them seem less good or possible. Sometimes that's helpful and sometimes that's not! In either case, it can be good to be aware that that's happening.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, how does X lead to Y, in your plans and dreams? Ask, also, how does Y lead to X, in your plans and dreams?
comment:
Sometimes X and Y are too monolithic and circularly dependent, and exploring circular dependencies can cause helpful "ontological refactorings" in goals, actions, desires, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
For desires, goals, ideas, beliefs that you've acquired, that seem "grafted on" or in the "wrong ecology" or wrong landscape, ask, what's the real version of this? What's my version of this?
Further, ask, what’s deep-down truly good (feels good, actually wanted) about this for me?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Carry a fantasy forward--for past things and future things and dreams, that maybe ended early or didn't happen at all, especially things that you revisit or feel stuck, you might ask, what would/could happen next? And then? Is there a way this (version) ends or completes? How?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, can this all be brought into the same world?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what's happening 600ms before that? 200ms? 100ms? 50? 10?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what's happening in the first 10ms? The first 100ms?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See if you can give X to yourself, directly-ish, to yourself, from you to you, right now.
Or, if something Y is only getting you part of the thing you want, see if you can give *the rest* to yourself, to make up the difference.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the felt goodness of what it would be like to already have something that you want.
Explore the felt goodness of what it would be like to completely have something that you're only partially getting or only partially have, now.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently and/or imaginatively feel into the felt badness of not doing X.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, where does the causal history of these two things join in the past?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If you're "top-down, intellectually recalling" something. See if you might find a "bottom-up, immersive feel" for that same memory/event/situation/etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If you want something to change, explore how you might do something "upstream" that then naturally/effortlessly/spontaneously causes the more "downstream" change that you started with.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pay attention to what you're already paying attention to, reflectively or otherwise.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Bring breath, body, sounds, etc., to you, maybe so much so that sounds temporarily get drowned out.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take interest, boredom, and curiousity seriously.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore, watch, feel into what your mind is already doing, before adding/doing new things.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Treat meditation like learning to ride a bike.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Meditate like an athlete, a painter, like you're on vacation...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be gently, sensitively both loose and tall and relatively still. Find a way to gently do this for an extended period of time.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If it feels safe, talk about what the right thing to do is or feels like, in terms of personal practice.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Remain/be/become open to the possibility of miracles, instantaneous change/transformation/growth.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Try coordinating what you're doing with the breath, or pay attention to if/how what you're doing relates to or interacts with the breathing cycle.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what is the best order to do things in, assuming a best global order exists?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explain something [see p/a practice “explain something”], then explain it again using different words. considering “tabooing” certain key words (making them off-limits for the purpose of the explanation)
OR [see next practice]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explain something in a way you’ve never explained it before.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Deliberately seek out contention/conflict/resistance/against-ness [wrt X]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Stop. Take a break, or not. Start again.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what is the logical or most likely endpoint here, given everything i know?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Systematically recount moments/times/events(/places?) from your life. For example: every time you've had sex, every time you've had a piece of pizza, every relationship you've been in, every tree you've sat under, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See whether something in the body wants something: e.g. to squeeze the legs together, to raise an arm protectively or in preparation to stab down. Offer 1% of that, do the first millimeter or less, and completely experience that first millimeter. Notice how it feels and what if anything happens to the desire to do that particular thing.
comment:
Don’t overdo it: if doing so activated your system then only a little into it before resting. This is something like opening the “Print Queue” of actions that got added to the queue and were not carried out, either because they were inhibited or didn’t fire in time because something was happening too fast, or something came up before they could find their natural completion. There is a happy percentage (e.g. 1%) that might allow the print queue to clear out, without triggering whatever inhibitted the action in the first place and made it “stuck”.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Take note of concepts people talk about that you seem to be “missing.” Explore the ways you might not actually be missing them, or already have full or partial versions of the thing. Scratch: And over time, track how experiences you have or are having may be that thing
example: “everyone talks about love all the time but I don’t seem to have any!” Love, forgiveness, gratitude, the experience of “missing someone”, etc etc
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, which processes, rhythms, or movements are being obstructed?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Check to see whether the things you’re saying to yourself are empty justifications, and whether there’s something deeper and truer underneaeth.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore whether there are feelings and memories from the past that are “carrying real weight” right now.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let your body solve the parameter/combinatorial explosion; calculate with the body (with secondary concern/consideration/error-checking input from the mind)
comment:
...like water knowing the shape of a container as it’s poured in, or a thermose knowing whether to keep something hot or cold.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let both body and head “test/check for done”/yes/no/good/bad/etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the first X (10, 20, 50, 100, 500) milliseconds before something.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the first X (10, 20, 50, 100, 500) milliseconds of something.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the nebulous border between haven’t decided to meditate yet and having decided to meditate, at the millisecond level (or tens or hundreds of milliseconds).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore the nebulous (or not) temporal border between not (yet) meditating and now meditating, at the millisecond level (or tens or hundreds of milliseconds).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Seek and/or explore and/or work at a finer grain.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Consider that some particular change won't occur until something is perfect down to the bits, every single one and zero correct. Consider that some particular change won't occur until *everything* relevant to that change is in place, neither too few things there nor too many things. So, not, overshooting or undershooting, but the right particular, specific, concrete presences and absences, fractally, recursively. So not, "generally more or less," but "this and not that."
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
Are you experiencing felt physical safety or not? If not, why?/good to look at why?/make it safe to look and then look. Assess other levels: emotional safety, future safety, lingering past safety, security at all levels and beyond levels
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Incline towards the question "in what ways don't I trust myself?" Attend to what arises, and encourage yourself to trust yourself exactly as much as it makes sense to trust yourself.
comment:
A:
this has been v valuable to me. or rather, the way i initially interpreted it, which is instead of dismissing self-mistrust when it arises, validating/legitimizing it by exploring the reasons the mistrust actually "has a point" so to speak
B:
Yes! That's very much the intention for it I've been developing a whole framework based on this shift from dismissing to validating, and would love to hear as much as you want to share about your experiences with it Vital to actually building self-trust And applies on all scales, eg to other people, as well
A:
Yes! Totally. There’s an important tension here around “trusting our mistrust”
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
if it is safe and good to do so, and only to the degree it is safe and good to do so, manifest rage at self. roar. yell obscenities at self. vocalize any relevant parts' felt rage at you.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What's mine to do? What's not mine to do? What of the undone is mine to do next?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What's here? How does it want to move? Is there a reason it hasn't done that already, or is it safe to do the first speck of that movement?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
Meditator used hide under a blanket. It's not very effective.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine being followed around by a young, inquisitive child who is requesting clear and sensible explanations for everything you do.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine that your behavior is on display for a group of children in [age range], and that they'll be inclined to use your behavior as a model for their own.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
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Thus, perhaps out loud to yourself, perhaps out loud to another.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, maybe write it down, put it into words.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus, maybe write it down, put it into words.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Toggle between good and bad. Pure land and charnel ground. Toggle faster. Toggle slower.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What are the options, besides diving into the big feel directly?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a mortality/fragility party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a 24-7 mortality/fragility party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a uncertainty party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a 24-7 uncertainty party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a (no escape from) actually/really/truly caring/wanting/desiring party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a 24-7 (no escape from) actually/really/truly caring/wanting/desiring party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a paranoia party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a 24-7 paranoia party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a horror/terror/fear party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Have a 24-7 horror/terror/fear party.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, would it/that/X be fun?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, have you tried enjoying it?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
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Ask, what does body part X want?
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Ask, what within was the origin that gave rise to multiple X’s?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is there a way to look at it without looking at it? A way to circle around to to be indirect?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, is there a way to attend without pushing, and then to attend and then see if things come up on the periphery?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what is percent is new and adult and even “received”? What percent is “old/young/deep”?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See if you can place a light intention in whatever global way is good.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, does that feel like you or part of you or a state you were in or could have been in, at any particular age, in your past or in your life so far?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, if you had infinite time for self-care, if time stood still while you did that, when you were done, what might you concretely do next, after that?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Move “[subtle] energy” in and along your body (minimally and conservatively, though perhaps in a bunch of places.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what do you really/actually/truly want?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what if you were starting over, right now? If you were airdropped into a new life? What would you do differently?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Do auxiliary practices involving self-interaction, but especially nonverbally, "self-telepathically," "internal telepathic dialogue," "call and response," "giving yourself space, time to telepathically, nonverbally communicate back."
comment:
"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." https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360397644498165763
You can communicate "telepathically" with other "parts" of yourself. And they can do the same, to you and to each other. https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360398764301811713
Maybe, gently: Try to temporarily treat other parts of you as "completely drained of *your* volition." Disclaimed (and eventually reclaimed) volitionality. And then you can only make suggestions, requests, ask question, etc., across an "interface" presented by that "part." https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360399334068674562
not just images; *meaning*; feelings, etc. https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360399647823589376
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, in what ways, when, under what conditions, overall, now or in the future, where/how do I not trust myself?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Check in with parts of yourself. How are they? How do the feel about it/X/this? Can you check in even before a concern or objection is raised?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow an answer to a question you pose to yourself to come up. Allow a counterargument/rationalization/anything to that answer to (spontaneously) form. Gently make space for the original answer, even so, and keep it company.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
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Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Consider that you have a mostly squishy body that sloughs stuff off outside and in.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Explore ideas of “no escape,” e.g. maybe “can’t escape the physical universe,” “can’t escape the here and now,” etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let yourself, scenario by scenario, acknowledge the ways you’re already in personal, custom-built, made-to-order, bespoke hell.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
No! (Thus.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Do something (try to do something) or (try to) block/prevent something from happening, or stop something that’s already happening, with the lightest and most minimal possible “touch,” “with a feather.”
comment:
You might say something like, ok, I could do X if I really made myself, or overrode myself, or with 10/10 effort. But how about 8/10 effort? (Explore or refactor around that, for a bit.) How about 6/10? … How about 3/10? … How about 1/10? ( = “with a feather”) … How about 0.01/10?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Keep something company, hang out with it, spend patient time with it, without trying to change it, without trying to enhance it, without trying to make it go away. You might “surf” with, lightly ride any undulations, waxing and waning, ebb and flow, while doing this. (Compare with Ingram’s analogy: touch the surface of the [not necessarily still water], maintain contact with that surface; without letting the back of the hand get wet.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Try to get on the problematic thing’s side, in (maybe slight) part, as much as you can and is safe. This can on net make the bodymind “more whole,” and free up more slack, in a way that allows the problematic thing to become less problematic, on its own terms while self-respecting its own needs, in a way that is immediately or long-run better, but or integrative, for the whole. (Not to inappropriately reign any of these “things.”)
comment:
"loop back rotate around inside"
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what’s the best it could have gone? How’s the best it could have gone?
comment:
Alternatives: What’s/how’s the best (counterfactually, magically, all-things-being-equally) it [that past thing, etc.] could have otherwise gone?
Related: How can you complement all you can to yourself? How can you give all you can to yourself?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Enhance it, facilitate it, cause it, invoke it, provoke it, turn towards it.
comment:
Even if there's a dash of forciness, or tiny bit of out-of-order-ness, sometimes, maybe one of the last things you reach for, is directly causing the bad thing. This is in part because we can get in a rut, can be entrenching the avoiding some bad thing, and trying to directly (or semi-directly, or indirectly) cause the bad thing can illuminate entrenched and/or active "avoidance" that's preventing integration, burn-off--redo-to-undo. Probably previously, the avoiding, protecting, turning away was adaptive, necessary, that's the only option you had. But maybe you kept layering, entrenching, momentum-ing on top of that, even when it was good enough. And then, when it became safe to actually go into the thing, it is/was/will be necessary to work through all that layering that ended up on top. And sometimes, right near the end of that, to help you find the last of that layering, trying to somehow directly invoke the bad thing (remember it, cause it [e.g. muscle tension]) can be helpful.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Make it worse; facilitate it to be worse; cause it to be worse; provoke it to be worse; turn towards it in order to make it worse.
comment:
See comments for "cause the bad thing."
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
X = just, merely, only, mostly, or mainly; Y = sit, stand, or etc.; thus.
comment:
something something bare perceptual/motor loop, but groundlessness and “play,” in the “freely move” sense, so paradoxically, also, anything goes, whatever (wants to) happen(s) happens
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let the bodymind and everything (thoughtlessly) just be, let it spontaneously "update" itself though thinking and everything and anything can be a part of that.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
What would you have done (then and then and then, all those different times and so on) were you already completely structurally fluid, at that time?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow your attention/"attention" to be (fully) captured sometimes by light, phosphenes, moving or flashing blobs behind your closed eyes.
comment: This is in the neighbhorhood of the "be moved" preliminary/auxiliary practice (and many/several others).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what's (actually) going to happen? (with respect to some thing, situation, etc., X)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
At each point back then, what's the best (or better) it could have gone, in that "moment" or "situation"? And that other "moment" or "situation"? (backwards or forwards, maybe very discontinuously)?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
cf. "abandon all hope ye who enter here"
cf. hell is the absence of hope
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let/allow yourself to be(come) effortlessly, costlessly, always-already aware of effortlessly, costlessly, always-already being aware of what you are effortlessly, costlessly, always-already [being] aware of feeling/XXXXexperiencing (in the body and) everywhere (positively valenced, negatively valenced, and neutrally valenced, in no particular order).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus; Meditate passively; Just let it happen.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Visibly and audibly act out, demonstrate, model the thing you need or would need from someone else.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, where? Where is it? Where is this? Where am I experiencing this? Wheere in awareness is this? Where is my attention? Where would my attention be if I could attend to or be aware of this? Where can I find this? Where is this been all along?
comment:
I was cautious about adding this because these sorts of questions can problematically reify directionality and "space itself". But many people do find locational/spatial prompts very useful, and for many people they'll be very helpful for redo-to-undo prompting (which can happen without such prompting too).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, when is it? Try to anticipate it and catch it in the act. Try to do that minimally, without any "pre actions," see if you can smoothly, spontaneously rise to meet it (with minimal attention or i.e. mere/bare/luminous awareness) exactly as it happens, luminously, without armature or artifice.
comment:
And again and again, in same. This will eventually come from some place spontaneous, automatic, done-for-you, more riding a bike than planning the rocks you'll step on to cross a stream, and/but the bike is more like a laser pointer flicking around but also the laser pointer spot is liquid and continuous with everything, or something. This may never be particularly salient and may feel like something different to you or like nothing at all. Potentially misleading.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Release the clenched fist. Release the iron will. (when it's safe)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what was left out?
comment:
Alternative with slightly different intent/meaning:
Ask, what was unconsidered that wanted or would want to be considered?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask yourself, can you gently find a way to help it listen? Can you gently help it find a safely exposable surface area?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pick simple movement (repeatable or circular/"perfect-loop-able", isolated or full-body); or a posture; or line/paragraph to speak.
And then, pick one or some qualities you want (it) to embody (e.g. elegant, economical, graceful, beautiful, poised, relaxed, effortless…).
And then explore/experiment with doing/holding/being/saying it (the movement/posture/speech) with that quality, or (gently, indirectly) incline towards that quality or better versions of that quality.
Later, instead of a specific quality or qualities, try exploring it (the moment/posture/speech) (with) just (indirectly, gently) inclinig generally towards “improving”//"improvement"/“better” (on your terms, wordlessly or perhaps in your own (implicit or explicit) words.
comment:
* The movements, postures, speaking above should be a physical movements, "external postures," or out-loud speech---not a “mental action”, nor an “attentional/awareness action” (solely), nor “thought speech” nor maybe whispered speech. These have subtle pitfalls, so it's maybe better to let these be transformed, through and through, by other practices in the whole, wider document.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, what (other, additional) bad thing(s) will happen if you no longer had {bad thing}? If you didn't have the {bad thing}?
comment:
e.g. {bad thing} = muscle tension
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus; Or, surrender to better ordering [of [continuous] meditative-y events]. Allow a better thing to (streamingly, continuously) happen.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Pretend you have "all the time in the world," pretend you even have "infinite time," to do a thing, solve a thing, fix a thing, explore... What would you do differently, then? Is that or some aspect of that somehow useful, now?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let (the) "gravity" in/of body (and the whole phenomenological field) solve/compute it. Let the solution come from the spontaneity of something like water following gravity, bodymindworld settling//flowing luminously, naturally.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Allow specifics of sight, sound, or body to beceme salient. (in order)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Imagine things, sights, locations, landscapes, interiors, buildings, artwork, objects of extraordinary (realistic or fantastic or unearthly or etc.) beauty.
comment:
Explore, flash on the "raw" / "bare" sensory features, details of these. You might or might not sometimes try to (liminally) verbally describe some of this, or not at all.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
"Guessing" can help one learn how to use more of themselves, as they find their "guesses" are (almost) "right"(-ish) or useful way higher than chance.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let yourself continuously / repeatedly fuck up until something not fucked up happens.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
comment:
Also, act compassionately towards yourself, act lovingly towards yourself, pamper yourself, treat yourself...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Find the exits, the edges, the ways out, but don’t leave immediately. (Don't make yourself stay. Just hang out for a bit if you find you can, and it's ok.)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Release, temporarily, if you like, your grip on "reality": when safe, let yourself, allow yourself to not know what's real and what isn't.
comment:
And be careful about reifying "real" and "reality," in any case. In the best sense if probably means not what you think and less than you think, etc., etc. "Reality" is "empty," without essence, etc., etc., whether you think it's particles and forces and fields, the cosmological universe and everything else, dual aspect monism, panpsychic, telic, the pregnant void... etc. etc.
releasing grip on "reality" --- allow yourself to locally not know what's real and what isn't (and careful about reifying "real" and "reality," of course.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See also:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
See also:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Meditate in the wrong direction, the bad direction, in the opposite direction; do the wrong thing, do a worse thing. You might even (gently) try: Do the worst thing.
comment:
(sometimes bad is good)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently, patiently keep X around, at least for a while; don't try to first-pass make X go away.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look for extra bodyparts, like an arm or even a head. You might ask, who's arm is this? Who's head is this? and so on
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If it's safe, enjoy it---find the neutral, the pleasurable, enjoyable aspects, the not immedately bad, all of related to it, about it, and especially within it. Gently, gently, gently, maybe lightly even seek out enjoyment in it; let yourself enjoy it.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus. (in a way / manner that's ultimately constructive and good)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Ask, for maybe doing X, if not now, when? If the answer is "never," this could indicate an ordering error or possibly an expectation that X is conceptually confused or will spontaneously be addressed, and so on.
messy comment from original notes:
look for not yet and make sure that the answer to when? isn't never sometimes turns out the thing dissolves and so when/never don't make sense. but other times this points to an ordering error if it's sort of a thing that one should sort of do eventually. if not never that doesn't necessarily mean "now" of course. maybe some other time. but if the never dissolves before that times comes, in that world where the thing is a thing, then that's probably net good.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If it's safe enough to do so, enjoy the muscle tension---find the neutral, the pleasurable, enjoyable aspects, the not immedately bad, all of related to it, about it, and especially within it. Gently, gently, gently, maybe lightly even seek out enjoyment in it; let yourself enjoy it.
comment from original scratch notes:
enjoy, don't push away, keep company muscle tension --- find everything pleasurable, enjoyable, good, valuable within, about, related to it, and then bask, enjoy, etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Do what's experientially/phenomenologically not allowed.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Experientially/phenomenologically transgress.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Standing, let an imaginary string, anchored to the very top of your skull, sort of gently pull you up gently straight, erect, tall, and then sort of let your whole skeleton hang off of that string, or at least let everything hang off of your skull and spine. Check for tension, imbalances (front and back, side to side, higher and lower), "hmm that's weird or not quite right, maybe," throughout and across your body, and things like that. Use that information to continuously or subsequently decide or inform what to do next.
comment:
You can definitely do this sitting or kneeling, and you should do those too, if you are able, but I strong recommend generally exploring / playing with this standing, if you are able.
Pairs well with be moved.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Be "outside;" "Be here now."
Say, for example, when you're in a quiet room by yourself. Now you're in the room instead of "elsewhere" or "elsewhen." (stated maybe another way, of many ways, in a way, say, where, perhaps, something like "the reality or captivation of the inner world" sort of temporarily recedes)
(gently, let it slip when it wants to slip)
(nothing particular is otherwise required of attention, awareness, etc.)
alternatives: let your self be here, now. encourage yourself to be here, now. help yourself feel safe being here, now. ...
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Welcome (at-first-hidden) anxiety (if any).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Treat it (meditation) as infinite (no "done," [as per of course] but/nor even "asymptotic done;" cf./vs. impermanence, non-eternity).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Let meditation proceed as if by/as water flowing downhill, let/find it naturally, spontaneously doing its thing, all by itself, in spontaneous simplicity or complexity.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Try things like:
comment:
[...] in emptiness [...]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Consider or pretend or entertain that you have to be anxious about something, that you must be anxious about something, that surely you're anxious about something. Now---what perhaps might that or those something(s) be??? As one option, it's ok to just guess and see what comes up.
comment:
You can do this for things that seem "purely physical," too---e.g., pretend that this sharp, burning pain you feel in the left side of your chest (that, say, even, was so bad you got it checked out by a doctor but they couldn't find anything by sight, palpation, labs, or imaging), that, gently, provisionally, just for the sake of exploration and experimentation, has to be anxiety-related, must be anxiety-related, surely is somehow anxiety-related. Now---what perhaps might that or those something(s) be??? As one option, it's ok to just guess and see what comes up.
see also:
other examples:
Waking-up-at-3-A.M.-with-your-heart-pounding-type things, breathing-type things, etc., which can piggyback on, and amplify, mild or moderate (or intense) "real stuff" (or, not even piggybacking, they might even "completely unravel" leaving no "real stuff" behind whatsoever). Always get stuff checked out by a doctor when that makes sense, etc., etc., etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Surrender, let go, release, unbiased, any-which-way let your attention/awareness be pulled, let your attention/awareness perhaps alight on something, perhaps momentarily, as it pulls or fascinates, perhaps right onto, right through to, the next thing, stuff, anything, anything, anything,---and on,---and the next,---and on,---effortless, smoothly, any-directional, fractal reverse-or-zig-or-zag-if-needed, any-manifold, quick-changing liquid, flowing downhill like water, path of least resistance.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Deliberately redirect your attention, (away) from something that is tugging on, or would like to hold onto attention, to something else.
comment:
You might momentarily or briefly sustain this redirection of attention or simply let go afterwards and see what happens.
You might explore "reversibility," whether such redirection "does something" that can be "one-step undone." It's not necessarily a bad thing if not or if "it doesn't seem to work that way."
Redirecting attention could be "doing something else;" it's not limited to just/only "attending to something else."
The/which particular "something else" or "(doing) something else" in any particular relevant (pre-)moment might matter more, sometimes, and matter less, sometimes.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Add something that pulls attention to the environment, e.g. music, an open window, streaming video, netflix, an audiobook, a lightshow on the ceiling, etc.
comment:
This doesn't mean you should actively avoid the attentionally pulling thing, or that you should or shouldn't get lost in it or that you should or shouldn't enjoy it, or that you should or shouldn't "deconstruct" it, or anything, etc.
See also:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
This is a generalized version of surely anxious. Please refer to that auxiliary practice as well. So it's something like, this:
Consider or pretend or entertain that perhaps it must be the case, that it's surely the case, that there's something bad, or something bad happened, or somehow, somewhere you feel bad or awful or etc. about something that did happen, or is happening, or could happen, or might happen, or will happen, or may have happened, or is still happening, or will start to happen, or will cause bad things to happen, or can't be prevented, or will inevitably happen, as best you can tell, or feels terrible, or awful, or intolerable, or terrifying, or horrifying, or existentially despairing, in any case, as best you can tell. Now, gently, gently, gently, patiently, for short stints, with lots of breaks, over time, explore where, how, what, why, when, whither that might be.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
For the seeming-or-actually-intolerable seeming-or-actually [e.g. doom] thing (seeming-or-actually acute or chronic or terminal health emergency or thing; life situation; money situation; career or job situation; relationship or romantic situation; social situation), explore "maybe this it," no going back, everything different "forever," it will be like this "from now on," "irrecovable," "irreversible," "this is how things are and/or will be, going forward, no going back, not like the past," "this is how it is[, maybe]"---"maybe this is it."
[especially credit to several people for this formulation]
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently experiment with or try both:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
If felt-safe for you to do so, ask it to (temporarily) stop.
comment:
Try to request not demand. Might have to actually engage with it, fear of actually engaging with out-of-control-ness or something that might not listen or something for which asking might be a type error, or fear that it might say no initially or perpetually, or might not be "reasonable-enough," in some sense, or it can't or won't or doesn't (yet) know how (you can try to help it figure out how), or it won't be understand or care about why you want it to stop, or it won't know how to win-win synergize and negotiate across a longer time horizon (you can try to teach it; you can try asking what it wants and needs). And of course sometimes it's better to eat more protein or take a vitamin or something than to try to negotiate out of something downstream of a nutrient deficiency or that you are a little dehydrated or etc., etc., etc.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Don’t[/[lightly, reversibly] try not to] (directly) make it/that/anything (locally) worse.
comment:
Things might nonmonotonically get worse, and/or of course improve, in some pattern, locally or “somewhere else,” but in exploring this aux it’s not directly[/immediately] following as a result of something you’re doing, though it may be enabled/ungated spontaneously indirectly/indirectly [sic].
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Generate amd explore at least favorite one plausible and completely (or at least more) benign (alternative) explanation for some disturbing phenomenon or experience you’ve had or are having or for an inference or conclusion or prediction or expectation or assertion [that] you’re considering or that you’ve just drawn or are chewing on, pondering, fearing, or reacting to, or acting upon (or are possibly about to).
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently ask, is this/there/it/X an [[[actual/"actual"/actual-actual [sic]]]] [sic [sic]] emergency?
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently play with, as one of many options, gently refraining from meditation unless your jaw and mouth are naturally, lightly "magnetized" closed, taking care of themselves, and you're generally not really thinking about it, and maybe also your tongue is lightly "magnetized" to the roof of your mouth, gently taking care of itself and you're generally not really thinking about it.
You might exercise, or take a walk, and so on.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Gently ask/explore:
What is an as good or better alternative that doesn't involve [as much or any] suffering (and again is as good or better than the previous thing [e.g. that you were doing]? [= feel better]
Or, gently, gently, patiently, is there a better way that doesn't involve suffering?
Gently ask/explore:
What is an as good or better alternative that doesn't involve [as much or any] vigilance? (and again is as good or better than the previous thing [e.g. that you were doing]? [= free up resources]
Or, is there a better way that involves much less or no vigilance?
comment:
Ask what's good about the suffering as such-ish?
Or what's necessary about suffering as such-ish?
Or what's important about suffering as such-ish?
Or what is suffering as such-ish for for you?
What would be bad if anything about not suffering as such-ish?
Ask what's good about being vigilant as such-ish?
Or what's necessary about being vigiilant as such-ish?
Or what's important about being vigilant as such-ish?
Or what is being vigilant as such-ish for, for you?
What would be bad if anything about not being vigilant as such-ish?
Transcript shared with persmission:
"I guess suffering is really important to me. It let's me know that I'm alive. It justifies my craziness to other people and makes me less embarrassed about myself. It makes me hate myself less. It creates a surface area to be loved. It's diffficult for me to know how to be loved otherwise. I'm not sure I know how to relate to people if I'm not suffering. I'm not sure I know what people expect from me if I'm not suffering. I was going to say something about hating myself or hating life or something but it's more like punishing myself, punishing other people, and punishing the world for me not getting what I want. I do want to be unique and special and suffering with respect to not getting what I want confirms that I'm unique and special—and misunderstood. I'm just so sad about the things... I'm not sure what to do with the sadness and grief. I feel like I was promised these things; I don't know by who or whom or how. I deserve to suffer. I hoped I was going to outrun suffering or something—cutting edge of everything; maybe would go different for me [no control but can make choices]. There's no point of I'm not sufferig. There's no meaning if I'm not suffering. It's not real if I'm not suffering. Way to justify my "bad behavior" to other people. s[sense of entitlement/narcissism — felt owed and angry/furious weren't delivered / outrage / so angry, mean, entitled, spoiled, do want to hurt people]"
more:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Thus.
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Look around for some way to "automatically" quiet the mind. This won't always work, depending on what's going on in your life, if you're particularly experiencing a strong emotion or anxiety (though often even then), or when you last ate, or what you last ate, and how long ago, and so on.
Find something to gently pay attention to, that's safe to pay attention to; Sometimes it's something outside of yourself, like sounds; sometimes it's a bodypart or something interoceptive. You want to find something that draws you in a little bit, that's here and now. You might find if you do this that the mind becomes quiet and you find yourself in space, in a room or outside, in the now, where sight and sounds are clearer and your body is peaceful, nothing to do, really.
It's something of a matter of finding the right thing to attend to or also the right "how," so it could be a "move" different than "attending." For some time, I found "making friends with my digestion" to be useful; my digestive system, and being friendly and helpful towards it, even if it didn't need it, was a nice place to rest for a few moments. And what "works" for you might change over time. As with anything, be careful with button-pushing. Treat this as an experiment and something to play with, not something to rely on but certainly something you can try when it seems like it'd be useful.
*
You might find in this state that thoughts, thinking, mind arises in that spatiousness and quietness and experiential nowness, or somewhere proximal, and adjacent elsewhereness, almost with quasi-spatiality. [this line also elsewhere in document]
See also:
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
Temporarily make choices the lead to boredom.
(the boredom might be very unpleasant (or neutral or fun), but whatever valence isn't the main focus or any particular requirement)
[Click to go back to the corresponding entry in the "auxiliary names" appendix]
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This section is an appendix to main practice p1.
v3
p1_appendix-en-US.txt
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3191664/list-of-all-locales-and-their-short-codes
prior versions:
n/a
===
concrete sensory description
less sensory
address
untitled vertical list
untitled cf supposition theory, reference
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitle serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled mixed serial/vertical list
untitle serial list
untitled serial list
to resume, resumption
call, name, dub, label
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list
untitled serial list “even”
untitled mixed vertical/serial list
untitled mixed vertical/serial list
[untitled]
argument, argumentation, persuasion, evidence, deduction, explanation, reasoning
[untitled]
[untitled]
[untitled]
[untitled]
[untitled]
[untitled]
[untitled]
genus, species, definition, higher, lower, abstract, concrete, identity...
textual self-reference
conversational epistemic/valence markers
is:
bibliography (partial)
============
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_image_and_concept_definition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genus%E2%80%93differentia_definition
(*) Duží, Marie, Bjorn Jespersen, and Pavel Materna. Procedural semantics for hyperintensional logic: foundations and applications of transparent intensional logic. Vol. 17. Springer Science & Business Media, 2010.
(*) Naming and Necessity Kripke
(*) Reference and Existence Kripke
(*) General Semantics Korzybski Kayakawa
(*) Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein
(*) Word Order in English Sentences 2nd Edition 2016 Phil Williams
(*) The English Tenses Practical Grammar Guide 2014 Phil Williams
(*) Critique of Pure Reason Kant
(*) Friedrich Nicolovius, Königsberg. 1800. Immanuel Kants Logik: Ein Handbuch zu Vorlesungen (“Immanuel Kant’s Logic: A Manual for Lectures”). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kant, Immanuel, 1724—1804. Logic. Translation of: Logik, 1800. Reprint. Originally published: Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1974. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Logic. I. Title. B2794.L62E5 1988 160 88-3734 9780486117430 ## Copyright © 1974 by Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz. ## - - https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Immanuel-Kant/dp/0486256502/
(*) de re, de dicto, de se
(*) The Lexical Semantics of a Machine Translation Interlingua by Rick Morneau http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/lexical_semantics.html last accessed 20201021
============
(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
(*) Casagrande, June. It was the best of sentences, it was the worst of sentences: A writer's guide to crafting killer sentences. Random House Digital, Inc., 2010.
(*) Benjamin Opipari. “To Go Boldly Without the Bold (and Italics and Underlining and All Caps).” Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing 16.2 (Winter 2008): 131-138. [https://www.persuasivematters.com/s/BoldlyWithoutBold.pdf Last accessed: 2023-05-22]
(*) George Gopen. Sense of Structure, The: Writing from the Reader's Perspective. Pearson; 1st edition (January 8, 2004)
(*) Huddleston, Rodney D. and Pullum, Geoffrey K.. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. : Cambridge University Press, 2002.
============
tenses/aspects/modes/etc
Meanwhile, During that, Earlier, A bit earlier, Moments earlier, Seconds earlier, Months ago, Seconds ago, Now, And, then, now Just now, Then, Next, After that, Finally, Relevantly, also, Relevantly, additionally Relevantly, somewhat incidentally Unrelatedly, Before that, A bit before that, After that, A bit after that, Long before that, Long after that, since until while Presently, Previously, Subsequently, Afterwards, Beforehand, Resultantly, As a result, Accordingly,
Non-exhaustive, not entirely systematic, playing with compact argument forms:
Given or assuming A, if [it were the case that] X [had been Y], then [it would have been the case that] Q [would have been R]; but, since, instead, [it was the case that] X [was W], then, Q [was instead S].
Given or assuming A, If [it were the case that] X hadn’t been Y, then [it would have been the case that] Q would have been R; but, since X (in fact, basically, more or less) was Y, then, Q was instead S.
Given or assuming A, If [it were the case that] X hadn’t been Y, then [it would have been the case that] Q wouldn’t/would not have been R; but, since X (in fact, basically, more or less) was Y, then, Q was (in fact, basically, more or less) R.
Given or assuming A, if X were Y (full stop; or, instead of X currently being Z), then Q would have been R; but, instead, since, X wasn’t Y, then Q wasn’t R, and Q is (in fact, basically, more or less) S, instead.
Given or assuming A, If X weren’t Y, then Q would have been R.
Given or assuming A, if X had been Y, then Q can’t/couldn’t have been R (because M); and, since Q can (could have) only been R or S (not both; nor neither; again given or assuming A), then Q must be (have been) S.
Given or assuming A, if X had been Y, then Q can’t/couldn’t have been R (because M); and, since Q can (could have) only been R or S (not both; nor neither; again given or assuming A), then Q must be (have been) S.
Given or assuming A, if X had been Y, then Q can’t/couldn’t have been R, nor S, (because M); and, since Q can (could have) only been exactly one of R, S, and T (again given or assuming A), then Q must be (have been) T.
Given or assuming A, if it is [the case that] A (and it might not be), then it is (universally, necessarily, must be) [the case that] B.
Given or assuming A, if it is [the case that] A (and it might not be), then it is (generally) [the case that] B, except when [it is the case that] C.
Given or assuming A, If [it is the case that] X [does or did obtain; and it maybe doesn’t or didn’t], then [it is or will be the case that] Q.
Given or assuming A, If [it is the case that] X doesn’t or didn’t obtain, then [it is or will be the case that] Q.
Given or assuming A, if [it is the case that] X, then Q implies R; and, if Q implies R, we can say that, if Q, then R.
Given or assuming A, if [it is the case that] Q implies R, then P.
Given or assuming A, if [it is the case that] Q implies R, then S implies P.
modus ponens, modus tollens
If an A is P, then that A is Q.
It could have been the case [that X]; but it/that was not so/not the case. Had it been the case [that X]/so…
It could have been the case [that X]; but it/that was not so/not the case. Had it been the case [that X]/so…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterfactual_conditional
This is good/bad/adjective. ... I didn't mean to imply that the others were bad/good/opposite/etc. I mean this is especially good/bad/adjective.
This is better/comparative/etc.. ... I didn't mean to imply that the others weren't good/etc. I mean this one is even better/comparative/etc.
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Consider the mind to be made up of a large number of parallel (information) flows, or pipes, or tubes.
Countless numbers of these tubes all happening, all at once, is you.
Sensory information goes in one end of a tube (sensation) and immune system, hormonal, glandular, smooth muscle, and skeletal muscle activity goes out the other end of a tube (actuation).
(Sensory information flowing through the tubes spontaneously sculpts the tubes, spontaneously sculpts what’s happening in the tubes, spontaneously sculpts the length of the tubes, and spontaneously sculpts how the tubes are connected to other tubes. (There’s a way/sense in which the tubes, and interconnections, are all the sensory information that’s ever flowed through them.)
Tubes can be short and long.
A short tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, in a small number of milliseconds.
A long tube goes from input to output, sensation to actuation, taking hundreds of milliseconds.
In addition to normal input (sensory information; sensation), some tubes can incorporate information from other tubes prior to termination (actuation). And, in addition to normal termination (skeletal muscle, etc.; actuation), some tubes pass information to other tubes. Information transfer happens at junctions. [Note that this theory doesn’t have any "fully internal tubes" or tubes that are "sensation+internal" or "internal+actuation." A future theory might need to allow for this.]
When tubes pass information to other tubes, (internal) loops/cycles can form.
There is a shortest possible length of tube.
There is a shortest possible length of loop.
Below a particular tube length, there can’t be any loops.
Sensation alters tube lengths and junctures. (And actuation influences sensation.)
Some tubes pass through awareness. These are awareness tubes. If those tubes happen to have junctures with other tubes, then we can experience the sensations passing through those other tubes. (And, we can participate in our actuations via external loops.)
Tubes that happen to have junctures with awareness tubes are called junctured awareness tubes. Some tube lengths and junctures can only be modified or created when the relevant tubes are currently junctured awareness tubes.
When junctured awareness tubes are very short and contain no loops, then there is no self-experience, and "in the seeing there is just the seen," "in the hearing there is just the heard," "in the feeling there is just the felt," "in the doing, just doing," etc. There is just "what it feels like."
When there are loops in or proximal to junctured awareness tubes then there is self-experience. There is, partially, "what it feels like to be you."
Countless tubes at any given time are junctured awareness tubes, but most tubes at any given time are not junctured awareness tubes.
When loops are minimized there cannot be contention or compensation.
When loops are minimized there cannot be improperly reified concepts.
A state of minimal loops is primordial or natural (though not necessarily ordinary).
The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee constructive, good behavior. The minimization of loops correlates with but does not guarantee the absence of destructive, bad, unskillful, and evil behavior.
Contention can cause ill-health, accelerated aging, excessive actuation, and suffering.
Contention in junctured awareness tubes is experienced as logical contradiction and (sometimes extremely subtle) muscle tension.
Compensation can be locally elegant but is globally inelegant.
If someone has a problem, a loopless solution to that problem will not have any compensation. A non-loopless solution will have compensation. Compensatory solutions are much easier to find than loopless solutions. Loopless solutions are minimally costly in the limit. Compensatory solutions are locally costly. The greater the accumulated cost, the harder it is to find additional solutions. The lower the accumulated cost, the easier it is to find additional solutions, though the solution-finding process may still be lengthy.
An example of compensation is "I’m doing X which is bad but if I also do Y then it will cancel the bad effects of X."
Compensation is usually not perfect and so begets further compensation. An example of this is "I’m doing Y to compensate for X but Y creates a further problem Z so I must do R to compensate for Z but R also has a problem..."
Compensation is fractally self-similar. That is, micro-compensation produces larger-scale patterns of compensation. Examples of larger-scale patterns are tics, neuroses, hangups, blindspots, personality disorders, etc.
Compensation can produce occlusion. Occlusion is when tubes are not and cannot easily or quickly become junctured awareness tubes.
Large-scale compensation and occlusion produces personality layers. If experience happens too quickly, too surprisingly, or too traumatically than personality layers are more likely to form.
So, someone can have childhood confusions or uncertainties or inabilities and/or (by defintion unhealed) hurts and traumas, and, on top of those, have adult-style regulation. (That adult-style regulation will be crippled in many ways because of the excessive cost of compensation. That person might read lots of books on e.g. relationships, but, without delayering, their relating might remain laborious and "unnatural.")
Because of mimesis, love, power, and technology, compensation and layering can extend to groups, cultures, and society. There are global-scale cultural layers, in part produced through famine, colonization, war, etc., as well as locally adaptive but global maladaptive traditions of child-rearing, etc.
Individual and group practice can de-layer and de-compensate, solving problems without the use of compensation, until individuals, and even communities, or larger, are relatively natural. Again, compensation is necessary and adaptive. And naturalization only guarantees a subset of good things, with opportunity costs. It is only better, all (other) things being equal.
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Layering and occlusion can make it very hard to turn tubes into junctured awareness tubes. But, sensation and actuation, the inputs and outputs of tubes can’t be blocked. Sensation is always happening for all of a person’s tubes, at every layer. And actuation is always happening at the termination of every tube.
If an adult has childhood confusions or uncertainties or inabilities and/or (by defintion unhealed) hurts and traumas in their system, then this can be problematic because that childhood self can be triggered. And then that person’s behavior, in a particular situation, will have behaviors reminiscient of childhood, which can be inappropriate, maladaptive, or dangerous to relationships or livelihood. So this must be careful managed.
A person manages always-triggerable lower layers by reducing the scope of their lives (never entering particular situations), creating controlled situations (only entering situations that they themselves have carefully prearranged), managing attention in situations (carefully using actuation to manage the sensation stream), or arranging temporary compensatory sinks (teeth-gritting, white-knuckling, stomach-clenching, etc.). [An alternative, of course, if resources are available, is to take the time to naturalize layer after layer, to find noncompensatory solutions and thereby widening the scope of life.]
A person will have learned to manage some of their lower layers. But, typically, many layers (and "pockets") will not be well-managed. A further complication is that lower layers, while not always, tend to be occluded and so can be affected outside of awareness and those effects may be hard to infer from downstream, ramified experiences. In short, it’s possible for vulnerable lower layers to become traumatized or further traumatized. (A way to restate this is that tubes can be receiving input from the outside world, but that reception and its proximal downstream effects might be outside personal awareness (though potentially evident in behavior that's observable by other people), and distal downstream effects (eventually, in milliseconds to days) will be in personal awareness, though not connected to the relevant (maybe high-dimensional, thin-slice) "causes" from the world. Over time, a person gets ever-better at connecting inputs/causes to effects.)
It gets worse in that everyone, at all layers have both functional ontologies as well as remaining blooming, buzzing confusion (as per William James). That is, everyone has patterns of input that can produce hard to predict effects in the system. This is a further dimension of vulnerabilitiy.
To explain further, when we were at our youngest, while we have genetic predisposition towards certain types of interpretations, the world doesn’t come pre-given. We have to assemble feeling, sound, light, touch, etc., into appearances, inferred objects, causal relations, and proactive management of self and environment. Prior to this, and always alongside this, there is blooming, buzzing confusion. There is "static," "noise" limning the edges of experience and even shot through all of experience, the "feel of reality."
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And, so, this static, this noise, this blur that colors everything, and it comes in layers, there is some at every layer—this is the domain of shamans, of magick, of the siddhis, of the powers.
Western and so-called "universal culture" has factored away much of this blur into legible ontologies and compenstory pockets.
But consider, childhood fears—monsters, ghosts, etc. Consider cultural and religious—demons, hells, etc. Consider childhood extremity—terror, loss of control, disregulation, bullying, abuse, violence, hatred.
Also consider, adult desperation around money, poverty, power, status, sex (coercive fantasy and actuality in kinks, fetishes, and paraphilias), intimacy, belongingness, health, aging, sickness, and death.
Consider the desperation of infant, child, adult to affect the mother, peers, adults, the powerful, and vice versa. Consider the childhood insecurities and fears still layered into the adult narcissist, the adult schizoid, the adult borderline.
Consider how desperately, out of love and fear, how desperately people are trying to affect each other all the time.
Consider that what the brain does is make sense of blooming, buzzing confusion, to find signal in noise. Consider as well that those vast number of tubes. Consider our sensitivity to transduce single photons. Consider facial expressions, flickering of the eyes, body language, voice tone, timbre and prosody. Consider temperature fluctuations in the air. Consider subtle changes in air currents as we move our limbs. Consider those vast degrees of freedom as well as that sensitivity. Consider the heights of skill of say olympic athletes versus weekly joggers.
And then is it any wonder that hapless creeps, dark wizards, cult leaders... and healers walk among us?
[continues in section "part 4; Everyday blah, hapless creeps, dark wizards, and cult leaders"]
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If you start doing work on yourself, you’ll become more sensitive to a lot of things. And that sensitivity, initially, can make you more vulnerable to bad things than you’d otherwise be. That sensitivity can also make you become a more dangerous or harmful person to be around, initially. Over time, asymptotically, nonmonotonically, what you were vulnerable to, what used to influence you or cause disendorsed changes to you, becomes just information. And this information can be used to enhance safety for self and others. And your sensitivity and responsiveness, from ongoing meditation, and the knowledge that’s easier to acquire because of that sensitivity and responsiveness, can make you safer and safer for other people.
Additionally, you may more often find yourself in communities of practice, as you explore things like meditation, energy work, shamanism, or whatever. Communities of practice sometimes have coercive things "in the air," and sometimes communities of practice contain, or have adjacent, "dark wizards," and sometimes they are created, run, influenced, or ruled by "cult leaders."
Reading the sections below may help to minimize risks to self and others, in relation and in community.
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[continues from section "part 3; the demon-haunted world and science as a candle in the dark (as per Carl Sagan)"]
The mind is vast and occlusion is a thing.
On the surface, most people genuinely and authentically want to be good to people and to be better people. Almost everyone has at least a little vicious hatred, or ill-will or at least just reckless terror at lower layers. Those negative things will typically be latent in lower layers. But they can be triggered under the right circumstances.
And, upon being triggered, negative behaviors, both gross and subtle, will feel right, normal, appropriate, justified. And then that person will do obvious or subtle bad things.
The obvious stuff is bad enough, from glaring to shouting or even hitting. But the subtle stuff can be really bad, too. It can be coercive, soul-damaging—it can create vulnerabilities which beget further harm.
We all do things we don’t endorse. We all can cause subtle harm. And, if we had adult abuse in our past, sometimes we can do harm "above our weight class," and it’s very regretful.
The above few paragraphs describe the spectrum from everyday blah all the way to hapless creeps.
The is a worse level, which is that of the "dark wizard." For the previous level, the ability to do harm is accumulated incidentally and unsystematically. But, a dark wizard systematically cultivates the ability to influence people. This can be both "deliberate and unreflective/accidental," "deliberate and reflective."
For the "deliberate and unreflective/accidental" category, a good example of this is in relation some kinks, fetishes, paraphilias (and also "vanilla-sexual"). Some kinks are pure fantasy, some involve "consentual nonconsent," and some, usually disendorsed, involve the actualization of nonconsent, either incidentally or essentially.
Unfortunately, all of those cases can potentially produce unwanted effects in other people because, even for the pure fantasy cases, there can be "actualization bleed." And, often people have lower-layer material/"tubes"/etc that want to realize some "actual nonconsent," even if this is disendorsed by much else of the system. And even if this is compensated for at the higher layers. There can still be subtle, harmful effects between people via lower levels.
The situation is analogous for safety/control fantasies and revenge fantasies. (For the safety/control case, the person wants other people to behave in highly specific ways so that that person can feel safe. Often, this will be in childhood, parent-child, or religious ontologies.)
In all of these cases, sexual, control, revenge, the person is cultivating the thoughts, fantasies, beliefs, material, behaviors over time. There’s something building up over time and becoming more powerful, more effective, more insidious, even if unintentional.
It would be a much better world if people’s sexual fantasies stayed safely inside our heads, but unfortunately this isn’t always the case. And that’s pretty intense, but it seems to be true. The worst of this, here, is perhaps "community sexual predators" that are somehow "more effective or successful than they should be."
Moving on from "deliberate and unreflective," pickup artistrty (PUA), "business influence," and "persuasion" type books are in a gray area between "unreflective" and "reflective." The person is systematically cultivating something but the ontology is pretty intrisically low-key, relatively speaking, as compared to sexual stuff or what follows below.
In "deliberate and reflective" proper, these are people that are reading spellbooks or doing chaos magic or summoning demons or dabbling in curses and in any case deliberately seeking to influence people for personal gain. There are cringy and toothless versions of this, and there are very, very terrible versions of this. Remember, all of this has naturalistic explanations, but the layers of the mind reify things and we experience it as real. And it can drive up blood pressure and cause heart attacks and stroke, subtly or grossly reduce quality of life forever, drive people insane, tear communities apart, etc. And, all the while, there is gaslighting and self-gaslighting that that isn’t what’s happening.
Historically, and in some places contemporaneously, each village had a shaman to deal the intentional and unintentional, from blah to terrible, stuff happening between people and villages/tribes/etc.
Cult leaders will be discussed more below.
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A final note is that, if you’re trying to influence people at all, if you have any perceived need at all with respect to other people (belonging, care, money, intimacy, sex), unless you and everyone are in a tremendously high-resourced environment, and everyone is engaged in mutually creative synergy, then you’ve likely got at least some baby dark wizard going on, or some latent dark wizarding that could get triggered.
And if you’ve been cultivating, ruminating, working over, developing in/on/over anything that in some way involves thinking, other people, or influencing other people, then you’ve likely got something either full-on dark wizardy or something that could easily be converted over to dark-wizard-ness with the right push.
This section is not to normalize the above, though. ("Oh, he’s saying everyone is a dark wizard, ok, so it’s not that bad.") This section is a warning. In other words, if you don’t think you can’t have "things that are that bad" in you, or you don’t think things in you will bleed out into the world, or you are "good at mind stuff" or "good at ethical interaction," then you should probably be very careful. These are all surfaces areas for you to do unrelfective harm. And doing transformative practices can make things worse, in the short-term or for a long time.
If you see yourself as a helper or a healer, this is also a yellow flag. Often "helping" or "healing" can contain perversity, not just good but also harm. And the goodness makes it harder to see the harm.
There’s nothing to be ashamed of, here. Layering and misconceptualization or non-conceptualization mean that it can take time to find the bad stuff, sometimes years.
But given that it’s possible to hurt people in the meantime, one should be listen to people when they say you’re being weird, creepy, harmful, etc. (Sometimes it’s munchausen or gaslighting when people say they’re being harmed, but you have to do due diligence—it could be both partially not your responsibility and partially you doing harm. If you dismiss people’s concerns as not valid then that’s a red flag that you’re at least low-resourced and probably doing additional harm on top of the dismissal.)
You have to be ready to isolate yourself, to walk away, and sometimes you should let people excommunicate you. Sometimes, it will be the case that you were in an unhealthy environment, and you defending yourself is further hurting people around you. But "active" defenses mean you aren’t skilled enough yet. When the environment becomes "just information" as opposed to something that needs to be defended against then you can consider yourself skilled. At that point you won’t be "actively" hurting people in such an environment, but they could still experience your being there as harmful because of things in them that don’t want to be exposed, even passively via your side, to things in you. Sometimes it can take a very long time to figure out who’s doing or not doing what to whom, and it’s better to just not interact.
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Healers, bodyworkers, energy healers, reiki practioners, healing touch practitioners, qigong practitioners, exorcists, shamans, etc., can be great. Keep in mind that there is a vast range of skill. Some people are completely ineffectual. Some are very effective but cause both harm and good things at the same time. The rare individual with decades of (lineage?) training and experience is excellent. (And some "healers" are dependancy-inducing predators.)
Minds are vast, people have weird beliefs, and the mind makes it real. Healers work in different paradigms and so there can be ontology shear and effect shear. Healers might have different beliefs than you (and your mind) about what changes are good and bad, and when, and why, and how. Healers will have their own blindspots and malevolent layered intentions. Healers can sometimes pick up lots of bad stuff from people they’re trying to heal (or teachers that they’ve worked with) that they haven’t entirely cleared themselves. And then they can pass it on to you. And sometimes healers can have bad days where they’re mean and ill-willed.
If someone has been practicing for decades and you can talk to other people they’ve worked with who say good things, then they might be a good fit for you. If someone has seemingly produced miracles (they’ve gotten a stroke victim to walk again or otherwise given someone their life back) but they seem creepy to you, then it might be better to stay away. (Most reading this will not be in need a miracle that they cannot ultimately produce themselves, possibly on a faster timeline with less resources.)
Generally speaking, for serious meditators, there are very quickly diminishing returns for working with healers. Meditation is essentially self-sufficient, self-healing that "goes all the way," all things being equal. Sometimes a healer can get you out of a rut or help you deal with an acute issue. Often, maybe almost always, you’ll have to rework whatever they did, in the future. Maybe almost always, what healers do are just a temporary patch, for a serious medtitator. (For non-meditators a "patch" can be life-saving. Just different needs for different life trajectories.) So, sometimes it’ll be net good and sometimes net bad.
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It can be hard to assign blame and decide what to do. We all can have layered material that can be vulnerable in idiosyncratic ways. Someone can have a sex or revenge fantasy that they’re barely broadcasting, that wouldn’t affect 95% of people. But, when you’re in a room with them, it does awful stuff to your system. So who’s at fault? In this case mostly nobody, but there’s still the issue that you can’t be in a room with them. It might be both people’s responsibility to change. The person with the fantasy to figure out how it’s bleeding into the world a little bit. And you to figure out why it’s affecting you. But, for one or both of you, that could be hundreds of hours of work (though which will produce all sorts of collateral positive effects along the way), and one or both of you might not currently be systematic meditators.
It gets harder when the content is occluded—one person might be competely unaware that something is bleeding through or that it even exists. Or they might sort of know but reflexively gaslight that it isn’t happening. Or they might be very scared and angry that a) they might be hurting people or b) that their fantasy isn’t actually private.
To make things even more complicated, people can manufacture or play up harm. They can accuse people of not just being creepy but also being subtly harmful. And sometimes they’ll be right, but it will be low-grade harm, and sometimes they’ll be mistaken, but some part of them, reflectively or unreflectively wants it to be true because it would be convenient if it were true.
To make things even more complicated, often people who are vulnerable to what another person is doing will in some sense want to be affected, in part, by what the other person is doing. Usually what the other person is doing will have "good" parts and "bad" parts, and a person’s system will "unreflectively/subconsciously choose" to take the bad with the good, in order to get the good. This will usually be reflectively disendorsed—the "good thing" upon examination, will be confused, somehow—but can still, in some sense, be used to point to complicity on the part of the person being affected. [One way of becoming less vulnerable, by the way, is to make it safe to see what is or feels good about what’s happening, or the current thing in the system, and to find a healthier version of the attractive but disendorsed thing, which can replace the net bad package as well as the receptive surface] In any case, often the seemingly good thing will in some way have been sculpted to have that attractiveness/temptation, and so on, to make it more likely that people will be hooked by it. And often the person who has the attractive/tempting thing will (at least eventually if not immediately) reflectively disendorse it being that way, too.
This is all very hard.
There is an additional phenomenon of people believing that they are protected by their rationality, reaonabilitiy, belief in science, or strength of will. But, very often, such people will still be affected in occluded layers. And so their behavior will become more harmful, because they themselves have been harmed by something, but they will be resistant or unable to investigate this. And they might also further transfer bad things to other people; they might unknowingly pass bad stuff along. Such people are good candidates for interaction with a healer, if they agree to it.
Another problematic thing that can happen is, when someone becomes a systematic meditator, they can start decompensating in ways that influence occluded material. They might have cycles of increased desperation or neediness that bleeds through in problematic or intense ways. And people who are good-faith trying to become safer to be around, or just better people, can actually become more dangerous to be around for a period of time. This extends to communities as well. For a community of self-transformers, things can get much, much, much worse until things get better—lives can be ruined and communities can get torn apart, even as people just wanted to get better together. All the bad stuff can come out in insidious and explosive ways.
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Part of what makes this so hard is how long the timelines are. Self-transformation takes thousands of hours, and people’s patterns of vulnerability to each other are idiosyncratic. So if harm is occurring, it can take dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours to to sort out who’s doing what to whom and to fix it. And this is superexpontential the more people that are involved.
Sometimes people just need to stop associating, even if they were lovers, friends, or colleagues before starting to self-transform. And this can be tragic when a relationship or community has formed with the best of intentions. (But people do grow apart under "normal" conditions, too.)
Discussing all this stuff up front can help. Documents like this can help. Effective self-transformative practices like the ones in this document can help.
If one is exploring the many protocol with people (see further in the document), it can be helpful to start very, very slowly, maybe just five minutes per day for months, or to not do it at all with some combinations of people. Sometimes solo transformation only is a better choice for a community.
It can be helpful to just leave the room for five minutes, if something is going on, to metabolize it and maybe come back more resilient.
If you feel buzzing or tingling in your body, localized or not, or the air seems "thick" or "shimmery," or the reality of the room seems to become "less," that doesn’t mean something is bad is necesarily happening, but something is probably happening.
But remember the issues with witch hunts, manufactured victimhood, and determining harm. But also remember the reality of gaslighting. If something feels wrong, something is wrong, somewhere.
You can intend to know exactly what’s going on. And you can intend to have a solution that’s good-faith, good-will for everyone. Sometimes you’ll need to leave or have people leave. But hopefully you won’t. May the best thing happen for everyone.
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People often become more sensitive and more vulnerable at first, possibly for months or years. But eventually...
This is just a conceptual model. The reality of it feels different, maybe, sometimes. But the below is a good way to provisionally think about what happens for a late-stage meditator.
So the late-stage meditator is mostly de-layered, de-occluded. They have access to most of their stuff, and most of their stuff healed or grown up or a bit wiser. Two particular dimensions are important, here:
The first is the dimension of self-other confusions. We can pick up stuff from other people and think it’s ours, think that it is us. And this becomes actuation just like everything else in our system. That part of us literally thinks its an extension of the other person, it feels like the other person from the inside. Any part of us that’s a little bit confused about self versus other can acquire "otherness" at any point during our lives. Over time, the systematic meditator helps their parts realize who they belong to and to realize that they only have to be themselves. Those parts, all things being equal, become "invulnerable" to future otherwise potential incidents of self-other confusion.
(Remember, you’ll always be bathed in the stuff, all the time. But it becomes information instead of influence.)
The second dimension is that of goodness/badness inversions. Sometimes we think something is good when it’s actually bad and vice versa. And often it’s highly contingent and contextual as to whether something is good or bad. And somethings can benefit one person at the expense of another. And childhood parts and layers can be quite confused or jumbled as to what’s good and bad, especially in cases of neglect and abuse but where that person was still dependent on an adult for love and protection. This can ramify as goodness/badness/self/other/boundary issues throughout a person’s system. A person is much more vulnerable to coercion when they believe something is good for them that is actually bad for them. They will "receive" material, content, intentions, will from another person to placate them, to be loved, all sorts of things, that might locally seem good to an occluded part is in fact terrible for the system as a whole. Over time, the late-stage meditator becomes wise and that wisdom percolates through the entire system. And, over time, the late-stage meditator is less and less likely to make local, perverse tradeoffs involving acceptance of ultimately unnecessary influence from other people.
So self/other confusions and good/bad inversions can be abstractly considered as the main sources or enablers of subtle interpersonal disendorsed effects.
(You may wish to temporarily skip to "part 17; the quiet interaction and the beauty of subtle interpersonal effects" before moving foward.)
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Cult leaders are different. Anyone, including cult leaders, can change with luck and likely thousands of hours of work. But, a cult leader that’s a cult leader, right now, is different.
Bad things happened to them (very) early in life, or they responded to normal or bad early life things in particularly unfortunate ways. And then bad things accumulated on top of that. And now they are like this:
Most people aren’t trying to affect everybody like they’ll be affecting "peers" or "potential lovers" or "direct competitive threats" or "people who are the object of my sexual fetish". And it won’t be turned on all the time. But some people, e.g. cult leaders, want to "affect all humans all the time" in some way or some significant subset of that.
Not all effects have "teeth" in that there could be a superstitious element, like, the person is "doing a thing" like wanting people to die or be angry, and people are picking that up, but it’s not actually causing people to do that thing. Cult leader stuff will have teeth.
There’s an issue of "grain," like people do have filters, but if someone is phenomenologically skilled (into meditation, spirituality, magic, etc.), in some literal sense a finer grain will get through people’s filters and affect them in ways that are too articulated for the average person’s system to manipulate and fix or much more likely at least "encyst".
Some people claim special knowledge or authority about truth, goodness, power, sex, intimacy, connection, minds. And those claims might not be legitimate, but if the other person’s system believes them that makes it much more likely transmission will occur.
Finally, that seeming special knowledge about truth, goodness, power, meaning, etc., will in some way be instantiated in that person’s mind, but will usually be in some ways perverted, warped, or incomplete (even if seemingly clear, persuasive, attractive, and valuable). And prolonged contact with such a person can have a whole-mind warping effect, which would not be the case for someone who hadn’t developed such coherent-yet-still-perverse views.
FInally, some people are particularly schizoid or exquisitely walled off from the effects of sensations, somehow managing sensations such that they flow through a keyhole in order to preserve a fantasy reality of control, megalomania, (terror, fear), etc., sometimes hidden even from themselves. They might seem somewhat normal, if otherwise charismatic and/or creepy, but their minds will be arranged in a way that makes it very, very, very hard for them to responsively learn and grow, to understand the harm they’re causing and to all-the-way-down care about not hurting people or to realize, all the way down, that they’re even hurting people at all.
So charismatic cult leaders, or whatever, really are doing something especially bad.
If:
you find yourself tongue-tied, stupified, unable to argue with someone. And they’re charismatic.
And/or they make you feel sometimes incredibly good and sometimes worthless, like you and your entire life and anything you’ve ever done or will ever do again is worthless. Or that they are the only way to get X.
And if you do manage to argue, and they even don’t dismiss what you said, and even say it back to you in almost your own words, and it seems like they’re being reasonable, and something wrong still happens, you lose track of what you were going to say, or your "words get damaged," and you still find yourself tongue-tied, stupified, or ultimately unable to argue with someone.
Then, they might be a "cult leader."
They might have a magnetic pull on a person’s entire mind/belief/representational/behavioral system that causes a person to start layering. This might produce value in some ways but also produces a net global cost for that person’s system (usually). Prolonged contact might mean years of cleanup and significantly increased self-transformation timelines.
The will present themselves (overtly or subtly) as having extremely rare, or unique, critically valuable special knowledge, but, usually it’s a lie or it’s not worth it because it’s mixed with poison and detoxing before consuming is prohibitively costly.
A good self-transformation technique will typically endogenously generate sufficient value such that subtly and overtly authoritarian and coercive individuals can be in some sense ignored, at least for the purposes of acquiring the most precious things.
(Such individuals will claim to have such techniques, and will dribble out some initial value, but engaging in such techniques will likely ultimately be damaging and counterproductive. If you decide to collect "pieces" from such people, beware. Sometimes they will have stumbled on a special, rare thing. But it will be perverted in some way and will come at a price.)
It’s hard to overstate how much such an individual, one who, deep down, is relentlessly determined to control you and have you be a certain way, whether they realize it or not, can fuck up your life before you’ve realized it’s happened. Ten minutes with an individual like this can, worst-case, can mean hundreds of hours, or longer, to unfuck yourself.
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Because the subtle signs are harder to detect and sometimes can’t be detected immediately, here is an incomplete list of overt signs that you’re possibly in the presence of a cult leader:
See also:
Amor, Aleaxandra. Cult, A Love Story: Ten Years Inside a Canadian Cult and the Subsequent Long Road of Recovery. Fat Head Publishing, 2013.
Lifton, Robert Jay. Losing reality: On cults, cultism, and the mindset of political and religious zealotry. The New Press, 2019.
Kramer, Joel, and Diana Alstad. The guru papers: Masks of authoritarian power. North Atlantic Books, 2012.
* "tool-ification" is someone else's term, and I might not be using it correctly
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Of course there’s many ways to use the words below! The defintions given are partial, flawed, and idiosyncratic.
misleadingness -
It can be helpful to remember that someone can be misleading or deceptive without lying. They might very carefully only say things that are true ("selective-truthing"). They might very carefully only say things that aren’t quite relevant. They might say things in response to questions that aren’t actually answers to the questions asked. They might give special, private meanings to words and phrases that they can sufficiently defend at a later time as being what they really meant. They might say ambiguous things that can mean both something and it’s opposite, depending on later events or later clarification.
authoritarianism -
"the enforcement or advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom" [according to google]
Such advocacy, as mentioned above, can be both explicit and implicit. If explicit, there might be reasons given. If implicit, behavior will be presumptive. Reasons might involve appeals to the greater good or the need to make hard tradeoffs or for the (necessity of the) prevention of something highlighted as bad, either imminently or inevitably in the far future. Many other reasons and arguments can be given. Also: tragedy of the commons, volunteer’s dilemma, threat of anarchy or dog eat dog or inefficiency or...
One possible way to dissolve the seeming need for a blanket ideology involving overt or covert authoritarianism might be to get very concrete about "what would actually happen" in various particular, realistic scenarios, involving specific people, groups, or places.
coercion -
a person causing another person to unresponsively lock in stable or escalating patterms of mind or behavior, usually in a way that has utility for the preson doing the causing.Iif a person is coerced, then that person will have resources bound up in executing, elaborating upon, or being prepared to execute the mechanical behavior. The person will be less creative, less generative, less able to flexibly use environmental opportunities to changes and grow, relative to the degree they have been or are being coerced. [I threw this definition together, and there are cleaner, more self-consistent ones out there.]
A related concept is the usual "learned helplessness," where a person has now has new "waiting steps" such that they’re dependent on occurences outside of themselves in order to move forward on various things.
This is one route that these sorts of things can be facilitated:
idolatry -
One might grant that goodness is objective, real, in some sense.
But, one might claim a fixed, "exteriorized" defintion for that good thing. "Goodness is X." "Goodness is righ there." "Goodness is this." "Goodness is in this." "Goodness has object-ness or thing-ness."
A possible correction is to consider that irrespective of any objective dimensions of goodness, it still must be subjectively, fluidly found, by route of a personal, unfixed path. One could take this as provisional and explore, over time, whether it has validity, including even the concept of "goodness" itself and/or the various/many senses that that word might have, inclusive of related useful concepts/words/ideas, and so forth.
maximization -
appeals to or capitalization on insecurity or paranoia ("never enough") by evoking ideas, images, or promises of "infinity," "hugeness," "foreverness," "everythingness," "all of it," etc." (as either carrot or stick)
pascal’s mugging (idiosyncratic interpretation) -
"I (may have) rare or unique things/goods of great value that you won’t be able to get anywhere else, ever, forever, if you don’t stick around or do as I say."
stipulation -
Stipulation is very useful tool when playing with arguments, thought experiments, and ideas. ("Stipulate, let, grant, given, say...") Here, I mean something more narrow.
There’s a pattern where someone will offer reasonable assumptions, and then narrowly follow the implications of those assumptions, while implicitly denying that any other reasonable assumptions are possible or that there’s even potentially another, better activity to be doing at all.
For example, one might say, "The world consists of agents who have goals." A bunch of implications would follow from that, and it seems reasonable as a starting point for discussion. But what of resources, nature, the material versus procedural nature of those goals, the implications for whether those agents have experiences or not, and the relevance of that or not, in the discussion, and so forth. (not to mention, for this example, considering e.g. humans to be agents who have collections of goals gets philosophically problematic very quickly, but, again, can be stonewalled or gaslighted as the only reasonable starting point for a large class of communicative contexts)
Besides "stipulation," other words for this might be "frame control," "schematic dominance," "framing," "out of sight out of mind," "what you see is all this is..."
An extreme version of this is foundationalism, according to wikipedia: "Foundationalism concerns philosophical theories of knowledge resting upon justified belief, or some secure foundation of certainty such as a conclusion inferred from a basis of sound premises." This is a very useful frame! But engagement with explicit premises as an activity as such is not the only way to interact or to seek truth or goodness or etc. And/but, the implication might be that any other activity is worthless, dangerous, immature, etc.
Stipulations can build up in the environment, can become implicit, omnipresent, and also interjective—it might become a norm that some people can add new stipulations at any time (whenever it’s convenient for them) and other’s can’t. And this is way to control discourse and behavior.
Another thing that can happen is "matching," where people’s perceptions and behavior tend to gel around explicat assertory statements, cf confirmation bias and/but with respect to behavior and perception as well.
more -
This list and the entries under each current item are very incomplete!
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Timelines are very long. Meditative practice can take thousands of hours to make substantial progress. Real progress is "de-layering," but many seemingly good practices and produce a combination of layering and de-layering.
Even "fully de-layering" is insufficient because a person must also acquire lots of real-world knowledge about how to be good and safe for other people. And that real-world knowledge has to be "propagated throughout the system."
Becoming good, safe, and effective is a life-long journey.
If a teacher is doing something weird, it’s usually the case that they have a blindspot or hangup. It’s unlikely that they’re playing n-dimensional chess.
Good teachers can still have buried malevolence and sex stuff that even they aren’t aware of. Unburying and working through all of it will typically take someone thousands and thousands of hours, even if they have a practice that is doing very little initial layering.
But, "asymptotic perfection" is something good teachers and any serious practioner should be aspiring to, in my opinion.
Mistakes, blindspots, and fuckups should be expected, though. And if someone is doing something weird, that you’re vulnerable to, you might want to check back with them every few years instead of sticking with them and experiencing quite a bit of harm, before you realize it, that you ultimately have to undo to make further progress.
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Generally but not universally, de-layering, or at least not adding layering, is good. Layering is still good as a stopgap, when things are happening too surprisingly, too fast, or in some other unhandleable way, for a particular person.
Remember, layering begets more layering, and, the more layering a person has, the harder it is for that person to make further valued changes to their mind/self/behavior/etc., all things being equal. De-layering creates more optionaity for change, and faster change, all things being equal.
If a person is short-term "forcing themselves into a shape" or "trying to be or act in a particular way," at the expense of long-term growth, then that is, more or less by definition, layering.
The more a person can "just be themselves" around you, the less likely it is that they will be layering around you or layering in preparation for interacting with you. This is not universally true—a person can, for example, be layering all the time (almost everyone is, in some way), or layering before interaction with anyone, not just you, and so on. So, trying to have it be that a person can let their guard down around you, be unreflective around you, etc., will usually be at least neutral for them, relative to their baseline, and possibly good for them. One could describe this as a "low-stakes" interaction or a "safe" interaction.
There is a failure mode to the above, which is you overtly or explicitly communicating that you are safe or being seemingly safe, but, actually you are being unsafe because of subtle or overt coercive effects.
In subtle ways, you might be wishing (or "needing") that they would change their behavior, either in interaction with you or in other contexts, and that could subtly bleed through.
You might not even be aware of that wishing or needing, but if it’s safe for them to tell you that they’re experiencing it, then that’s really good. If you are aware of it, then, sometimes, often, it’s better to call it out, to explicitly note the problematic things that you’re doing, to create mutual knowledge. Sometimes, after that mutual knowledge is estabilshed, then it’s better to just end that particular interaction.
Talking about "truth" and "goodness," as such, can sometimes feel like the implication that the person needs to "change now" or "be different now." Any model or ideal or goal or concept or principle, etc., can be used as a hammer, and might be, even if a person disendorses doing so to themselves.
This can be less likely to happen if the interaction is truly low-stakes.
Interactions can become high-stakes when one person has something rare, hard-to-get, unique, and valuable or even perceived to be critically good or necessary by the other person. Then that other person is especially likely to try to be a particular way to get that value.
A situation can be made more low-stakes for that other person by good-faith and competently trying to either get that person that thing, or to show them how they can get it themselves, or to show them that it’s not actually valuable or real, or to show them that they are mistaken about its rarity or difficult-to-get-ness, and so on.
The more you can obviate yourself in the other person acquiring value, then the more low-stakes the interaction is.
Low-stakes interactions are more likely to be creative, in that both people can work together to do something even better for each other, and everyone, than they could alone.
There are of course issues of low resources (time, money, etc.), coordination costs, entrenched beliefs or preconceptions, excessive ill-will, preconceptions, etc., that it make it hard to have noncoervice, low-stakes, and creative interactions with another person. Sometimes, often, it can require tremendous preparation, over years and years, to arrange self and world to interact with other people noncoercively. But you can do your best, wherever you are on that journey, and it’s worth it.
One final pithy thing, if you’re looking for a quick-and-dirty way to try to know whether you’re being coercive versus, say ethically persuading, is you can ask, whether, functionally, you are influencing a person or informing them. Of course, seeming informing can actually be influencing, and vice versa. But I have found it helpful to check whether I’m influencing (bad, in this usage) or merely information (good, in this usage). If you need a person to respond in a particular way then there’s a real, stringent sense in which you cannot ethically interact with them, at least along that dimension, and more work is required on your part. If you have optionality, power, freedom with respect to X (or they do, or you both do) then the interaction becomes ethical with respect to X. Sometimes this can happen upstream or obliquely. For example, if both people have lots of money or other resources, then there’s less of a surface area, very generally, for either person to "coercively need" each other.
Of course, it’s nice to be needed, or is it? It’s maybe safer to be needed, in the short term. But true safety likely comes from flexible, creative interdependence, trust and reliance and skill versus brittle, inflexible (i.e. layered!) coercion.
Other people’s intelligence, skill, compassion, and love keep us safe, not them being forced into a narrow range of behaviors around you. Of course, people can locally disagree about what’s safe and good, and people can not realize how they’re being harmful, and people can be manufacturing victimhood or engaging in net-destructive self-healing strategies, and so on. So, ideally, as many people as possible are collaboratively and synergistically engaging in effective self-transformative practice and resource acquisition and distribution, etc.
In any case, if someone doesn’t need to layer in your presense, then they can grow in your presence. And, if this is mutual, then you can grow together.
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It’s best to consider the powers, the siddhis, the effects as not cool. They can become a thing in communities of practice. And they can become an ugly, escalatory, ruinous thing between practitioners. One or both people can do disendorsed, yet still hate-filled, tremendous harm to the other or to people caught in the crossfire.
(This is a bit of an overgeneralization, but: People uncontrollably (or deliberately) reach for the powers when they have social skill deficits, or they’re very afraid, or deep-down they’re resigned and feel helpless and hopeless. Otherwise, they would have already backchained to something collaborative and onstructive, both non-verbally smooth/friendly and explicitly clear, and they likely wouldn’t have found themselves in the triggering situation in the first place.)
If something especially subtly weird is going on, there is minimal to be gained from toughing it out, being seen as strong, by self or others.
And it can be very counterproductive to try to early-on become "invulnerable" to subtle interaction effects. (One is always vulnerable in the sense that we are bathed in it all the time, all things being equal. We can however transcend it, have unconfused, good information processing around it, to let it flow through us as "just information," "just background," etc.) Done too early, before enough meditative skill, trying to become "invulnerable" will produce additional layering, increase timelines, and not do much for becoming less vulnerable.
If negative effects are detected, try to separate early and often. Try to reduce incentives for unnecessary interaction (e.g. record talks or publish summaries so not everyone needs to be present).
Try not to hold grudges as this can increase meditation timelines. But, so too, if you are feeling strong negative emotions towards someone, don’t self-gaslight yourself into believing you’re not or that you shouldn’t.
And, you can just leave. You can find meaning elsewhere. You don’t need what they’re selling if it’s a group situation.
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(You may wish to read "part 10; the late-stage meditator in community" before this section if you’re skipping around.)
Over time, interactions between two trained individuals or one highly trained individual and other untrained individuals become relatively gentle and quiet, noncoercive, barely there. Interaction effects gently and liminally enhance intimacy, connection, etc.
(Remember, you’ll always be bathed in the stuff, all the time. But it becomes information instead of influence.)
Brave individuals might use intense interaction effects for training purposes, relating purposes, sexual purposes, etc. All is permitted, as it were. But I imagine most people will have no need or desire for such things, whether they’re leading quiet lives or doing big things, or doing both.
Sometimes, not all of the time, you can just walk away from shit like this.
All that said, sometimes communities become infected, and then one must engage with all this stuff in order to protect the community from the worst of what’s described above (harm to individuals or community dissolution). A community can need boundaries and sometimes "sterilization" or "clean room" approaches. That is, some communities may need skilled shamans*, some of the time.
But if a community hasn’t been "de-layered, de-compensated, cracked open" and there currently aren’t any "dark wizards" in or on the edges of the community, then it’s probably best to leave things well alone. Group practices** that can influence the boundaries between people should be used very sparingly and carefully. They are not games and even sporadic experimentation can have consequences. See the Many Protocol in this document. The Many Protocol should possibly only be explored when there is at least one highly-skilled practioner in the group (thousands of hours of effective practice).
*Stephan, V. Singing to the plants: A guide to mestizo shamanism in the upper Amazon. UNM Press, 2010.
**Katz, Richard. Boiling energy: Community healing among the Kalahari Kung. harvard university Press, 1982.
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Horrible things have happened to individuals, often in childhood. Violent abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, extreme coercion. There is religious terror around hells, devils, demons. Terrible things happen to parents and grandparents, too, and that will affect the kids. There is also medical and death horror, we see relatives suffer and die in front of us or we walk in on dead bodies. Even if onself or relatives ultimately survive it can still be very tulmultuous. And there is cultural horror—slavery, extreme racism and bigotry, colonization, imperialism, genocides, holocausts, world wars, ancient curses, ancient gods, etc. All of this is rattling around in people’s minds and between minds, brought forwards through the centuries and decades. The skilled meditator will systematically work through all of this and their own stuff, over time. But there’s a lot and it takes a long time. In the meantime, one is exposed to it, in the water, as it were. And if something gets decompensated, cracked open in a group environment, then it can cause problems for multiple people.
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Say there’s "wisdom" and "antiwisdom." Antiwisdom is childhood stuff that's hurt and confused, hidden away, nevertheless trying to affect self, others, and world.
Sometimes antiwisdom desperately seeks power, out of a combination of fear and grandiosity.
Sometimes this kind of power-seeking-antiwisdom masquerades as wisdom. When this happens, this power-seeking-antiwisdom gaslights, like, "we are bravely accepting power, to fix things or to do good," and things like that. It's gaslighting because this power-seeking-antiwisdom has reflective or unreflective, mixed or ulterior motives, e.g. exploitative self-enrichment or facilitating coercive dominance and/or sexual opportunities.
(Note, wisdom might sometimes say things like "bravely accepting power", too. So it can be hard to tell when antiwisdom is at play, just from surface words, alone.)
Besides power-seekig-antiwisdom, there is non-power-seeking-antiwisdom. Antiwisdom that is not seeking power can be irrationally hypersensitive to antiwisdom that is seeking power, especially when that power-seeking-antiwisdom is doing so by masquerading as wisdom, as above.
I say irrational for two reasons; one because the reaction to power-seeking-antiwisdom isn’t always targeted or constructive; any reaction to power-seeking-wisdom might be disproportionate, accidental, scorched-earth, disendorsed or accidentally involve collateral harm, or not involve compassion or routes to rehabilitation or redemption for that power-seeking-antiwisdom. (Some of this can be understandable, sometimes! A reaction that is targeted and measured and compassionate and constructive is a high bar—it involves wisdom!)
Power-seeking-antiwisdom (PSA) can use "irrationally hypersensitive non-power seeking antiwisdom" (NPSA) against itself by pointing out disproportionate, untargeted, or non-compassionate actions of NPSA with respect to PSA.
The second irrationality is that NPSA can sometimes mistake wisdom for antiwisdom, that is, it can be "irrationally paranoid" by seeing antiwisdom even where it is not, or can mismatch/misidentify/swap some seeming of wisdom and antiwisdom in the same person.
Non-power-seeking-wisdom can have an unboundedly aspirational relationship to wisdom and even power. That is, there are still ways in which NPSA (non-power-seeking-antiwisdom) could actually technically be "seeking power" (though that may be just to try to constructively engage with PSA or to just otherwise become safe from PSA.) And, finally, to reiterate an aside, above, wisdom and antiwisdom, including power seeking and non-power-seeking antiwisdom, and so on, can exist in the same person. (These are all too-simple abstractions, in any case.)
So, there are times when non-power-seeking-antiwisdom has to be multiple times as good/skillful as power-seeking-antiwisdom:
Non-power-seeking-antiwisdom has to learn how to distinguish (a) wisdom from (b) gaslighting, power-seeking-antiwisdom, sometimes in the same person. (Power seeking antiwisdom may not care to make some nuanced distinctions and so will have "more resources," more bandwidth, even on top of power it’s already acquired.)
Non-power-seeking antiwisdom ideally must learn how to contain, to distance from, and/or to rehabilitate power seeking antiwisdom. If the latter, one has to be less coercive than the power-seeking-antiwisdom, in order to not recreate/perpetuate it in a new form, which can involve seeking towards an ideal of "full noncoerciveness. And this has to be done in even in the face of bad examples and race-to-the-bottom attractors.
In short, sometimes non-power-seeking-antiwisdom sometimes might incline towards becoming wise, becoming wisdom and even "power-seeking-wisdom" or powerful wisdom.)
Note, even possible constructive inclinations (of non-power-seeking-antiwisdom possibly striving to become wisdom or power-seeking-wisdom) can be perversely coopted and exploited by power-seeking-antiwisdom, by somehow inclining people instead towards unhealthy versions of power or false wisdom: "we must be strong to combat evil or irrationality, and/but we must do so through self-sacrifice, self-martyring, and self-abnegation: it’s supposed to hurt." (Or they’ll say it’s not supposed to hurt but subtly "vibe" or imply that it is supposed to hurt: a subtle vibe-y, gaslighting double-bind.)
In any case, non-power-seeking-antiwisdom may sometimes seek wisdom and even power, in some way that is not self-sacrificing, not self-abnegating, not self-martyring, that is, not in a way that is just yet more, different, (self-)coercive power-seeking-antiwisdom in disguise, and so on.
To be sure, sometimes, often, wisdom consists of just maintaining boundaries and/or leaving a situation (or finding a way to leave the situation and doing so, if leaving isn't immediately possible). And part of wisdom is knowing or coming to know when that’s the right thing to do. And sometimes that's straightforward and sometimes that's complex. Outside perspectives, when possible, can sometimes be helpful.
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Remember all the above is just a theory of convenience, a story. Find your own truth. Don’t inappropriately reify any of this or take my word for it. Good science is still true. Planes still fly. Government still do the thing they do. Computers compute. Stuff that’s true is simultaneously true. Give yourself time to integrate new, surprising stuff into a unified worldview. It will take some time.
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I am workshopping an idea of “superdeception” and "superdeceivers." It's not a great name; it's a little cringy. I might pick a different name later.
A superdeceiver might make use of any or all of pretense, lying (including lies of comission and lights of omission), deception, misleadingness, misdirection, equivocation, prevarication, reframing, paltering [1], and bullshit [2]. Some of the previous are of course vague or overlapping, while some are pretty specific. And some of these can be used for neutral or even constructive purposes, and inadvertent use of some them doesn't necessarily mean someone is causing harm or is a "bad person."
In any case, I think a superdeceiver is especially someone who has the following traits:
(a) They are someone who has a relatively increased degree of fragmentation, compartmentalization, separation between any “modes”/“personalities”/“states”/"parts"/"selves"/"ways of being" And this allows such a person to lie/“lie” more smoothly and with greatly reduced “tells” or "leakage," sometimes down to effectively, (non-)detectably zero, during any particular instance. They can sometimes appear "completely" sincere, confident, contrite, emotionally injured, and so on. [Note: Philosophy and psychology have written about self-deception and "leakage," as other places to look for more on this.]
(b) They are someone who makes use of something like, other individuals' beliefs of the form, “if they were lying they would never do X, let alone Y”, in that the superdeceiver privately expends extraordinary resources in order to then in fact do/perform/display at least one Y, or two, and to maybe throw in a sprinkling of X's, to boot.
A superdeceiver comes in two main types, though any superdeceiver can be a mix of both, and there is a necessary relationship between the two. These types are "unknowing, natural" and "knowing, synthetic, reflective":
The unknowing, natural superdeceiver might experience themselves as charming, persuasive, charismatic. They are "naturally" chameleonlike, changeable, smooth. They are more likely to "really deep down believe" the things that they're saying and to "really deep down feel" the things they seem to be experiencing--for both, at least in the moment that they're saying them or feeling them. They are relatively unaware of their other parts or states, or their current one, "as such,"" or of their contextual "activation" and "deactivation." They are relatively unaware of thought, believed, or spoken contradictions, hypocrisy, apparent self-deception. And/or, these are ignored or rationalized away, from their current vantage point or state. Further, if other's press the issue, they may intensify misdirection, with lying, paltering, or belligerence or tacit threat. They are perhaps fractionally relatively more likely to experience paranoia or have a persecution complex, to have the experience of being a victim or being treated harshly or unfairly, while they're self-believed to be "well-intentioned," "just doing their best," "having perhaps taken regrettable and unintentional but not-too-bad harmful actions." (Regarding the experience of unfair persecution, this is especially when the weight of their caused harms eventually incites others to publicize perceived harm or to pursue remedies and reparations). (This can be exacerbated because people who've been harmed may focus on relatively more legible harms, or desperately or inadvertently round off harm to something more legible, in a way that isn't quite accurate, because of the ambiguous, vague, or nebulous nature of how they've been harmed, at least as they experienced it. So a superdeceiver might rightly point out that they never committed some specific harm, intentionally or unintentionally; but, first-pass, it's equally likely that the superdeceiver is, in their own mind, reframing, reconceiving, ignoring details, forgetting, or simply deceiving themselves about what actually happened, with possibly no awareness that this is happening.)
The knowing, synthetic, reflective superdeceiver sets aside deliberate time to reflect on and plan how to persuade and influence. They are perhaps fractionally more likely to be malicious, vindictive, malevolent, vengeful, hateful. They might self-style themselves as a planner, a strategist, and might even idolize fictional supervillains (but ironically or only partially, of course). Contradictions and hypocrisy are relatively more likely to be somewhat reflected upon and tolerated, though outwardly denied and minimized, for their utility in getting out of situations where they're accused of harm or for the purposes of securing trust. They'll both partially, sometimes kind of know, and kind of not know, that they're doing what they're doing, in different contexts, relative to contexts in which they're "being a different part" or "in a different mode."
Importantly, a superdeceiver may have a mixture of multiple unknowing parts, showing different sides in diffrent contexts, with perhaps at least one knowing part. Importantly, if there is at least one knowing part, then perhaps by definition, there "must" be at least one unknowing part, spontaneously or reflectively deployed, for damage control and influence.
Most people are just not prepared to encounter superdeceivers, to encounter traits (a), (b), or (a)+(b), in the wild. And, when it happens, perhaps one or two things will happen:
(1a) A person will be influenced by a superdeceiver in a way that's up to extremely "reality distorting" or "[experience of] reality damaging." Someone might be quick to point out that people experience "reality" in different ways or that their can be multiple conceptual schemas or lens/frames to interpret the world. What a superdeceiver is doing is distinct from merely offering different lenses in that those lenses will usually be "shaped" so that they don't admit anomalies or edge cases into those lenses, and those lenses will contain some fractional or large percentage of outright fabrication. And then this is doubled-down upon, when questioned, or questioning is headed-off. So the cumulative effect is a kalleidescope of distortion and self-distrust on the part of the person being influenced, which might cause suffering and take a long time to untangle.
(1b) Additionally, there may be a mismatch between what a superdeceiver is saying and what they're doing or vibing, including a mixture of requests, bid, warnings, invitations, refusals, and so on. And this can be confusing, crazy-making, or jamming, or can elicit compliance or curbing that can last for a long time into the future.
(2) A person might also be very hurt on the meta-level. Some people don't have any expectation of such a level of reflective or unreflective deception, so it can be shockign and destabilizing when it they finally realize it's happening (which can take a very long time to come to terms with), and while it's happening, and during the period of coming to terms, there can be a lot of subtle or overt suffering, in the tacit and perhaps eventually explicit sensemaking. Even when a person believes or is aware of ("bad-faith") adversariality or competition in the world, or even malevolence or hatefulness, or callousness, inhumaneness, or disregard, that can sometimes be only abstract, and a concrete encounter can be just as destabilizing as in the naive case, and potentially more so because they believed themselves inoculated against being susceptible, or more resilient to harm than they happened to be, or it simply "wasn't the way they thought it was going to be," in the concrete particulars. It might take a while for it to be recognized as an instance of what it was. This can be existentially, metaphysically, morally destabilizing in the "human nature", "personhood", and "how the world works" senses.
(3) Finally, beyond emotional harms (and, maybe less frequently, physical harm), there is possible financial impact or other resource impact, a sudden or creeping betrayal or unfairness/"unfairness" or dashed expectation, that produces a highly asymmetric or even opposite-sign payoff for the superdeceiver, or at least an absence of consequences (at least for a time, or ongoingly), at the expense of the person being deceived or misled.
All-in-all, it's usually a mixed bag or a net negative, for the person being influenced or deceived.
So, what are some things to watch out for? (And how should one take this phenomenon or schema/lens? I'll only discuss the first thing, here, though all of these are important.)
If someone checks off a lot of trust boxes or gives of a lot of seemingly costly or hard-to-take trust signals or signs ("X's and Y's"), perhaps in a short period of time, this is sort of a yellow flag, ironically or paradoxically. The shortness of time might or might not especially be a tell, in that someone who didn't have a perhaps short-term end or goal, for another person, might more naturally or incidentally space out spontaneous or situationally appropriate trust signals, in a truly semi-incidental way. A shorter timeframe will be preferred by a superdeceiver, because there's less opportunity for others to witness "tells," "leakage", or anomalies.
Additionally, if a person seems particularly smooth or charismatic, this can be a yellow flag, as well. Sometimes the "seamlessness" of the smoothness or their complete lack of vulnerability (maybe only realized in retrospect) is a tell. But smoothness seamlessly combined with vulnerability can also be a tell, perhaps in the seamlessness.
All in all, their are no perfectly reliable patterns. One might suggest watching the pattern of a person's behavior, over time, as eventually a pattern of leakage, tells, or anomalies will eventually start to surface. But this can also be dangerous because sometimes being close enough to eventually observe such a pattern can also cause cumulative harm to the observer, during that time. There will be something attractive about the superdeceiver, real or apparent value, so it can be a hard call, sometimes, as to whether to approach or avoid, and how much. If the individual creates time pressure (to commit or go away) or there are subtle or overt behavioral requirements for being in their presence or to get things from them, either enforced by them or a group, tacitly or overtly, then that can be a yellow or potential red flag.
The "Superethicist"
In addition to a superdeceiver, one could also talk about a "superethicist", with both a "synthetic" type and a "natural" type.
The synthetic superethicist will have a preoccupation with ethics, morals, consent, and they might police the behavior or those around them. The synthetic aspect sort of also means semi-"explicit" or semi-"articulated", so a lot of this will be in words and discrete actions. And this actually has a similar effect to offered lenses/frames of a superdeceiver--anomalies might be hard to account for, important details might get ignored. There might be a mismatch between saying, doing, and vibing, with, say, some destructive obliviousness and/or self-serving-ness, somewhere. So even a well-intentioned superethicist might have a destabilizing effect on other people.
And, so a synethetic superethicist is almost synonymous with a flawed superethicist.
The other type, the "natural" type, is a bit closer to "just human-ing", "just being human with other people" but since most people have hangups and blindspots, even someone who's extraordinarily non-self-abnegatingly compassionate, self-aware, other-aware, will of course likely have blindspots and limitations. That is, they'll have some "fragmentation", some lack of integrity, something, at least in some contexts or under some pressures, and that's ok.
Finally, it's not uncommon for there to be a superdeceiver in the guise of a superethicist.
Conclusion, Community, and Shadow
We are all like the above categorizations, at least little bit. Through self-transformative practice and non-coercive community, we can become less fragmented, more integrated, more consistent in a good way, have more integrity.
Something to keep in mind is that people who are particularly fragmented, may be particular drawn to self-transformative practice, because of how such practice can help, whether they realize that that's the (partial) reason, or not. But because meditation timelines are long, meditation communities are sometimes home to a higher proportion of self-deception, fragmented, hypocritical people than in other contexts. Sometimes this is partially quite reflected upon and sometimes not. Sometimes the reflected upon portion makes it harder to see the remaining shadow. Sometimes talking about shadow as such drives actual shadow even further into hiding.
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Notes:
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What might (and could) we do together that’s better (more good), for everyone, than what we might do apart? What might we do together that’s better than what we might do apart? What might we do together that’s better than what we’ll do apart?
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auto-commentary from an online forum / email list:
Re “myopic, selfish desperation” and the whole “the creativity of evil” section. I’m not saying evil is good because it’s creative. That section was me, first-pass, trying to personally wrestle with how some (at least initially seeming) good, valuable, useful things can come from “evil” people and situations, and how does one make sense of that, and act with respect to that. If someone who’s caused a lot of harm also produces value, like, duh, that happens, but it was surprisingly jarring, to me, to finally see up-close, concrete examples, and then when is it ok to make use of that value, how do we recognize the value without de facto endorsing the harm, and how do we act towards people who produce some combination of harm and (at least seeming) value. (Maybe all the seeming value is illusory or is too laced with poison to be long-run useful, though, and so on.) I think now I would maybe say this discussion was too abstract to be useful, and articulated along the wrong joints, and one instead has to look at the concrete particulars and nth-order effects of those concrete particulars. All of this writing is due for an update.
Generally, a lot of that whole sequence was intended to be a bit of an exoteric stopgap, for harm reduction. Ditto for other earlier sections that talk about objective truth or goodness.
But every few sections, in the earlier sections, I try to mention at least some of emptiness, groundlessness, non-eternalism, and how all of that is supposed to ultimately come out of practice, over time. (I’ve been going back and adding more of those qualifiers.) The document sort of has a deliberate gradient from (a) [hopefully qualified] exoteric to (b) “explicit esoteric,” running from beginning to end.
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safety = resolution of problems + mind autonomy
safety + creativity = joy
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THIS IS AN EARLY DRAFT.
[NOTE: This document hasn't had the most basic of editing, yet, so there may even be places that leave out a "not," or something that completely reverse the meaning of a sentence.]
Because knowledge and know-how of subtle interaction can be esoteric and multifariously fragile, and because assymmetric knowledge can be especially harmful, it eventually seemed like making available material like this would at minimum do net more good than harm. This document is highly opinionated and is not for everyone. It should be held lightly, un-reified, held in a phenomenologically agnostic way, etc. This is an imperfect work in progress.
For the majority of people, the majority of the below just won't apply or won't be relevant.
A collaborator noted, "there's a kind of 'it all adds up to normality'* thing that I need to do in order to metabolize this stuff." I agreed, and replied, "we’ve been swimming in this since the first moments of consciousness (and, developmentally, technically even before), and since we were born, and we’re swimming in it everyday, and it is and has been and will be like 99% all ok, business as usual. as with lots of stuff, normal than weird than back to a new normal on the far side of weird. it’ll /make sense/, will find its proper sense and contextualization."
* 'it all adds up to normality' is via the author Greg Egan. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/adding-up-to-normality [Last accessed: 2023-01-23]
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When A receives relatively more passively from B, that is with fewer active components, this is safer for B, all things being equal.
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A can actively or passively receive from B in order to use what has been received to unethically tailor further sendings to send to B. This process can be deliberate and conscious, automatic and conscious, or automatic and unconscious.
Sending can cause harm to the receiver. Active receiving can cause harm to the sender.
Because sending can be automatic, we can harm people without intending to. Because sending can be unconscious, we can harm people without realizing it.
Because receiving can be unconscious, we can be harmed without initially realizing it.
Because harm is relative, perspectival, and karmically conditioned, even if conscious for both people, and because sending and receiving are ultimately intuitive and interpretative, and thus error-prone, as with anything, a sender and receiver may disagree about whether someone or something has been harmful or whether harm has occurred.
Automatic (or unconscious) sending is highly contextual, conditional on environmental factors and interpersonal dynamics---the difference between a sending occuring versus not could come and go in seconds. Often sending and receiving won't be conscious for one or both people, and so recognition of sending or receiving having occurred will be delayed, and this makes things even more tricky.
Sending and receiving can happen in parallel within and between people. That is, two people might be sending on multiple "channels" and receiving on multiple "channels," simultaneously, punctate-ly or ongoingly.
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The range of complexity, detail, aptness, appropriateness, and safety for others, of what you can send, is limited or constrained by your current mental models and karmic backlog.
mental models = "beliefs", anticipations, expectations, stances, predictions, intuitions, feelings, knowing, understanding, "cosmology," "metaphysics," theories of mind, theories of perspective taking, theories of culture, theories of "energy", "magic," "spirituality," theories of body, healing, harm, etc., etc., etc.
The degree to which receiving is safe for you, and the degree to which you can receive with breadth, accuracy, and fidelity, is short-run limited or constrained by your current mentals models and karmic backlog.
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Do keep in mind that sending and receiving aren't "unnatural." We gestate and are born and grow up already swimming in it. It happens in parallel with verbal and nonverbal communication, voice tone and prosody, body language, vibes, everything. It's a natural part of intimacy and care.
Harm from subtle interaction, if any, is usually on the order of everyday social and intimate harm, intentional and unintentional, such as curtailing body language, cutting remarks, veiled insults, and so on. Call this "everyday harm." ("Everyday harm" can tremendously affect the trajectory of a life, of course.)
"Greater harm," is usually on the order of, and correlates with, any badness of family secrets and familial and generational trauma, narcissism, neglect, physical and sexual abuse, etc. ("Greater harm," can potentially entail tremendous suffering and tremendously affect the trajectory of a life.) This is by degrees. One could probably make a distinction between "everyday harm" and "greater harm" which would be on the order of, and correlate with, for example, any badness of a generally loving but tense relationship with one's parents, and things like that. There are probably more useful distinctions, here.
Additionally we could label some things "extreme harm." Unintentional or intentional/knowing predatory actors are rare, but they are much less rare in spiritual communities, communities or practice, ideological communities, cults, etc., and possibly other contexts. Predatory actors can potentially cause anything from "everyday harm" up to "extreme harm," which are things like relatively persistent psychosis (subtle or overt) and physical sequelae including cardiovascular disregulation and death for vulnerable people, speaking informally.
For some more detail about mechanisms of harm, and more detail on how to protect oneself and others, see sections above and below. Note that most people are generally resilient to everyday problematic subtle interaction.
The nature of the document may make it seem like the phenomenon is less embodied than it actually is.
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(It's important to emphasize that even in sort of the unusual worst cases of unintentional or intentional harm or just massive and unfortunate vulnerability of a receiver, through no one's fault, it's, at least in principle, generally speaking, possible to "make a full recovery," even after decades and even from things that happened when one was extremely young. While of course there are physical and physiological and neurological correlates to sending/receiving harm/"harm"/etc., it's not the same as, say, physical scar tissue. The mind, generally speaking, sort of doesn't "scar," in principle; the (body)"mind" [sic] sort of in some sense being "all software," can "heal completely," where suffering and trauma (informally speaking) become non-traumatic memory, information, meaning, etc. Again, this is true, in principle (cf. buddha mind, in the technical sense) for things that happened when one was very young, too. Though, in practice, that might take tremendous dedication and resources that aren't necessarily available. But there is tremendous room in between, healing/"healing" by degrees, if nonmonotonically, and it's all an asymptotate, anyway, in any case.)
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An active imprint can be simple or sophisticated. Think a computer virus, a biological virus, a biological parasite, or biological cancer. Think even distributed things like botnets. They can try to actively change the receiver, to become more deeply embedded, to hide, to pretend to be something or someone else, and so on. Active imprints are more rare but are relatively more common in some spiritual communities and communities of practice. Usually, there will be some element of relying upon or degrading a person's sense of self and other.
One might distinguish an problematic active imprint from a "spiritual transmission." An ideal spiritual transmission might be consentful, humble/provisional, displaying its own limitations and provenance, never hiding, self-disassembling leaving no remainder after its work is complete, etc. There are probably many other and better desiderata. This author is not a big fan of spiritual transmission.
Pathological listening can be accidental or a traumatic response; a part of someone might come to feel/believe that they have to keep a port open, to listen, because that's how the world works, that's how they get love, that's how they stay safe or protected, that's how they know what to do, that's how love works and must work, etc.
How to close ports is discussed further below.
I sometimes use this analogy, sort of borrowing from that old psychology experiment/demonstration:
a "port" is sort of a possibly transitory, high-dimensional perceptual-ontological capacity. um, like the basketball/gorilla video. if you're looking for the gorilla amongst the people playing basketball, you see the gorilla. the "gorilla port" is open. if you're not looking for the gorilla, even though it's right there, you probably won't see the gorilla--the gorilla port is closed. some ports will be flashing open and closed in contingent and interdependent ways, like some ports might only be open when a family member is around or right after one sneezes, and only for 300 milliseconds, and so on.
Part of cleaning up imprints is coming to understanding when something is even an imprint in the first place. And that involves coming to have a better and better reflective sense of one's own formatting in order to distinguish it from the received/imprinted formatting of other people.
Part of this process is coming to be able to re-gather, untangle and trace back and reconstruct threads of causal history. (To be sure, much of this process is spontaneous and intuitive and cannot be rushed, forced, etc. This involves learning enhanced error-checking which is itself a process that is spontaneous and intuitive and cannot be rushed, forced, etc., and certainly is not infallible.)
Causal threads that can be generally traced back all the way to first moments of consciousness are identifiable as "self." Causal threads that are "not self" will have a more proximal past endpoint which will the durational sensational entry of the imprint via a particular port.
(Talking about "self" and "other" sort of "in" awareness or bodymind is sort of complex or tangly with respect to agency, identity, invidualism, personhood, phenomenology [phenomenology of self??? phenomenology of other???], and more, from a sort of nondual perspective and probably for other reasons, too. Untangling all this is part of the work of all this and it takes a long time.)
Generally speaking, tracing back imprint causal threads to port of entry IS coincident with the identification and closing of the port, or a big step of the way there. Further, this IS the untangling of belief and behavior influence of an imprint, and so on. Further, the process of finding one's way back to a port is also sort of the "rewinding" of the influence of an active imprint (if it was active), or a big chunk of it rendering remaining cleanup relatively straightforward if still extended in time. And it's coincident or coextensive with understanding or some insight.
(Note that tracing back and untangling is made possible by a sort of practical losslessness property of the bodymind and by buddha nature in the technical sense.)
A port can be semi-permanently closed or one becomes choiceful (if still generally intuitive and automatic) over whether/when that port is open or closed.
Error-checking improves over time: people will have a shifting constellation of ports open all the time for self-talk and self-feedback. the better a person's error checking, in general, the more likely they'll reject spoofing attempts or accidents. this involves things like sending confirmation signals (TCP vs UDP?), subtle timing changes, "statistical anomalies," "parity bits," stuff like that. not everyone does all the error checking that's potentially available, and not consistently for every port or in every context.
Stated differently:
one way to engage retrospectively with subtle interaction effects:
if one is exposed to someone who's "doing a thing" (knowingly or unknowingly), you will experience this through (a) conscious component and (b) an unconscious subtle component.
the conscious component can be broken into (a1) overt/gross aspects and (a2) subtle aspects. The latter will be discussed below.
(a1) is thiings like body language, voice tone, voice prosody, spoken words. These condition or create context which affects one's own high-dimensional "stance." i.e. they might act motherly, fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, etc., which might make you more receptive on a subtle level. these sorts of archetypes are just one example. another example is that they might very confident, which again might make you more receptive on a subtle level, and so on.
In any case, you will be mostly generally aware of (a1) but, by definition, you'll be less likely to be aware of (b), the unconscious subtle component. However, if it's afffecting you at all, a "part" of you is aware of it; in fact, a part of you is conscious of it. And that means a part of you is "recording," not just remembering it, but "recording" it, or patches and splashes of it, the "stuff that got in," as it were.
Over time, the stuff that's recorded, sort of "spreads out," at least a little bit, through one's own system, like a drop of ink dispersing in water. Usually this is passive, but sometimes, it's active, like what got in is trying to spread itself. This latter case is more rare, but it's possible. Also, passive diffusion might be fairly limited. In any of these cases, it can affect your beliefs, behavior, emotions, memories, a tiny bit or a lot. Often it's just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit.
So one procedure to deal with this is to sort of "re-gather" or "find one's way back" to the original, previously unconscious, but nevertheless sensory impressions of the moments in time where stuff registered, or got in. So again, there's a sense in which "what got in" was registered "consciously but in an unconscious way," and one is inclining towards making that "unconscious consciousness conscious," if that makes sense... There could be better terminology, here.
So one gently inclines towards remembering what actually subtly happened, in some sense. There will be a time course to this. A rule of thumb is that if the last exposure to the person was a month ago, then it'll take about a month to "find one's way back" to the subtle sensory impressions of that last exposure. If the very first exposure to that person was six months ago, then it'll take about six months to find one's way back to first exposure. These are just rules of thumb. Sometimes it's shorter and sometimes it's longer.
Importantly, this "direct gentle inclining" doesn't always work; maybe it often doesn't work. Over time, the system can form tangles and loops and knots, where direct inclining can pull knots tighter. If one experiences some sense of "grinding" or "jamming," or muscle tension, one should stop "inclining" for that day and try again the next day. Sort of "forcing" can layer on additional karma, making it harder to eventually find one's way back to the target sense impressions. Generally, the whole thing should ideally feel sort of effortless and inevitable, more like floating back than hiking back, more like surrender than will.
Often, surrender will feel scary, and for good reason. So part of this is sometimes doing indirect things to make it safe for the original impressions to come up, before accessing those original impressions. They'll potentially often be hidden or walled off or "encysted" in the first place, because they were having a bad effect on the system. This limits diffusion to some degree but can make it harder to find one's way back. Patience is important. The rule of thumb above includes time needed to "find a way for it to be safe to look."
Elegantly, efficiently, importantly---finding one's way back, is generally coincident with "cleaning up" the effects of the other person on one's system. That is, something about finding one's way back, is coincident or at least correlated with implicitly coming to understand "causal history" and "provenance," which is coincident or at least correlated with "deconvolving" the effects of the other person from one's system. So "influence" becomes "understanding" and "memory." Or "influence" becomes "mere information."
Further, "finding one's way back" (all the way) is generally coincident with "closing the open ports," or "increased discernment of those ports"---that is, if one finds their way back all the way to the original sensory impressions, that is generally coincident with gut-level, deep-level, viscerally, know-how-level understanding the "deep mechanics" of "how the stuff got in," which gives spontaneous, deep, automatic inuition for how to not have it happen again in the future.
So cleaning up one's system and reducing vulnerability are all part of the same action of "finding one's way back," are all part of the same action of "understanding in one's bones" what happened.
Further, one is more likely to convert (b), the unconscious subtle component to (a2), conscious subtle aspects of an interaction. That is, one will be able to feel the subtle sensory-physiological aspects of how the person is knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or accidentally, causing subtle effects and "imprints" in your system.
That is, "finding one's way back," not only cleans up one's system and reduces vulnerability, but it also confers increasing ability to detect subtle effects in real time. And this latter ability also reduces vulnerability.
To be clear, "stuff maybe getting in" happens in a really high-dimensional space. Finding one's way back to stuff doesn't guarantee more stuff won't get in, from other people or the original person. If the original person does something slightly different (or a lot different) then more stuff can get in during a future exposure. This is normal. Stuff usually gets in, even when one has a lot of experience.
But, it's less and less likely, the more someone has worked through the backlog in their own system. Over time, more and more generalization occurs. And, one can get better and better at realizing things are happening in real time and then can prioritize cleanup over the next 24-72 hours. Then, stuff isn't diffusing through one's system for months; it's just hours. Further, real-time detection is correlated with real-time "filtering" or real-time "knowing it just as it as," and is thereby far less likely to produce unwitting diffusion at all. In other words, even as it's experienced, it's known as "sensory" and "information" as opposed to self-other confusion or metaphysical/magickal/miracle/faustian temptation.
Reduction in vulnerability is ultimately the work of many years, or at least a few years. Overgeneralized receptivity and self-other confusion goes all the way back to prenatal experience. Over time, one can find their way back all the way to prenatal experiences, thereby correcting self-other confusion between self and mother, the mother's imprints of previous fetuses, subtle interaction with siblings and the father outside the uterus, early childhood experiences, and so on.
And more and more, subtle interaction becomes (instead of exploited self-other confusion, spoofing, handshakes, codependence, temptation/coercion pacts, etc., etc. etc.!!!)---gentle limning of interpersonal interaction, for intimacy and play and healing and teaching.
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P.S. again, direct inclining is fraught! gentle, patient indirectness is almost always better, all things being equal, at least in my experience. real-world doing tends to be a mixture of both until fairly far along meditation-wise.
What was previously influence of an imprint, a naive, or credulous engagement, or active credulous engagement with an imprint, typically habits learned prenatally and in childhood, becomes mere information, inert, "memory safe" (to borrow again from software engineering). It's just data, and you can choose to do whatever you want with it, anything or nothing.
String escaping doesn't fully generalize, but it greatly generalizes. And even when stuff "gets in", after much experience with port finding and synchronic integration, and so on, it gets caught much earlier, and so on.
an imprint is "just" sensory memory with some associated interpretation. like remembering snatches of light and wind and sound from taking a walk earlier plus maybe what that implies for the weather later that day. but you might not have those sensory impressions easily recoverable but you do remember the feeling/inference of impending rain. meditation/resilience involves "finding one's way back" to those original sensory impressions and reinterpreting them or realizing that other interpretations are possible besides "rain," = capacity for error checking and accumulating hypotheses without needing to auto-commit to the most likely one, etc.
One thing to keep in in mind is that inappropriate sending maybe or maybe not tends to have a bit more "not conceptualized as such" and a bit more "this is how things should be" than inappropriate receiving.
That is, sometimes a port is open because a person has a confusion about who is who, that is they might think they're receiving from themselves or impersonally receiving from the universe. And also sometimes a port is open because a part of the person "believes"/anticipates/expects/etc. that they need to keep that port open, because that's how the world works, or that's how they get love, or that's how they stay safe, or that's how love works and how love must work, etc.
With inappropriate sending, there can be similar things---the sender might think they're "just thinking" or "only talking to themselves" or "just being innocuously persuasive or innocuously charismatic" or "impersonally dialoguing with the universe" or "being willful with respect to the world," etc. Inappropriate sending maybe empirically tends to be slightly more likely to come from something other than self/other confusion or not really be conceived of as anything like "sending" at all.
Further, rather than "this is how the world works," maybe tends to be a bit more of a thing with inappropriate sending. "This is how love, intimacy, connection works or should work." There might on average be a bit more of a sense of entitlement, generally non-malicious.
Someone being told that the might be doing inappropriate sending (versus receiving) might be just a little bit more defensive, angry, etc., on average, because they might not have any sense that they're doing anything at all, let alone possibly being problematic for some of the people around them. And again they might not be; someone or some people around them might be inappropriately receiving. And most likely there's probably a mix of inappropriate sending and receiving. As always, one wants to be careful about witch hunts and victim blaming! Hard! Especially when tracking down inappropriate receiving (open ports) and inappropriate sending can be the work of hundreds or thousands of hours for the individuals involved!
Though, sometimes it's possible to catch things early. It can be very, very, very helpful to arrange or facilitate "freedom of movement" when people are first meeting. If something weird seems to be going on, if one party chooses to leave the room for thirty seconds to five minutes and then comes back, that can give everyone a chance to sort of combobulate. It's MUCH, MUCH, MUCH easier to sort of metabolize and parse and learn how to "string escape" retrospectively versus concurrently/synchronously. And iteration might work even better; and so collecting a bit of data, face to face, for 0.2 to five minutes, than drifting off for a bit and then, repeating this, coming back a few times, for about the same-ish amount of time (sort of mingling, with an affordance to like go outside, go down the hall, go to the bathroom, get away completely), can often help a bit to "nip in the bud" sort of accidental and cumulative footholds (where things potentially get even worse each time you (have to) interact with a person) that would then otherwise take a lot longer to sort out. (not at all or a few hours or a couple days versus weeks to months, or longer, worst case)
This term is a bit vague and may be used an some neighboring ways, too, but for here I'll try saying that a handshake is when the sender and receiver are speaking the same actively and dynamically negotiated language, making relatively high-fidelity, high-bandwidth communication possible. What's being received has needs fewer steps to be integrated, including zero-step, and, generally speaking, if not zero-step, the integration steps have sort of been pre-decided by the receiver as part of the the negotiation of the communication language.
As with ports, which are dynamic and high-dimensional, "language," here, is used in a similar way.
Note that handshaking can be relatively quite one-sided. Sort of "positive" and "negative" handshaking are discussed in subsequent sections.
(During a handshake it's assumed that the "sender" is also themselves doing a tremendous amount of receiving.)
Even if the sender achieves a noncoercive or consentful handshake, in a spirit-work type situation, the sender still has a lot of work to do (ideally costless ane effortless, long-run) to avoid or minimize harm while striving to participate in something net good.
The sender must keep an eye out for any increases in self/other confusion on the part of the receiver. As part of the handshake, the sender might gently point out where self/other confusion is happening. This has to be compatible with the receivers metaphysics, cosmology, understanding of agency, mind, body, personhood, identity, etc.. If that compatibility or ethical harmoney can't be quickly established, then there might not be a good fit between practitioner and client. Prior to the handshake being released, the sender might do a final check for increased self/other confusion. Ideally the sender sort of leaves the receiver in the same or better "self/other shape" than they found them.
The sender also needs to keep an eye out for something like "reliance". As a subset of self/other confusion, the receiver might come quite quickly to rely on sort of periodic sendings from the sender as part of their cognitive or general regulative process. Ideally ongoingly, and prior to ending the handshake, the sender should be gently pointing out where reliance has almost began or has begun, to help the receiver maintain regulative sovereignty. Certainly transient quasi-reliances are part of the sender being hopefully helpful, but the receiver shouldn't lose track of provenance. When non-reliance isn't "clean" then there are sort of "ragged regulative rough edges" left behind in the receiver after the handshake that are hopefully spontaneously slowly cleaned up by the receiver over the next few minutes, hours, and days. Ideally, though, the receiver shouldn't have to do any cleanup and spontaneously cleanup isn't guaranteed. (Do note that co-regulation can be perfectly normal and fine in families and between intimate partners and friends, and so on! This is sort of a matter of cultural and personal preference. Some people are relatively regulatively autonomous or choiceful which generally does not limit intimate interpersonal subtle interaction. In any case, though, co-regulation is probably generally not appropriate in "spiritwork"-type situations.)
Another thing that can happen might be termed "interstitialing." In doing spiritwork, while the sender tries to do as much passive receiving as possible, there are times when active receiving is helpful. In those cases, the sender should be careful to not leave behind "pass-through instrumentation" or "scaffolding" in the receiver. Ideally the sender won't use any of this, and perhaps the more skilled the sender is the less likely it will be helpful. But, in any case, the sender should clean all this up before disengaging the handshake.
All in all someone doing something like spiritwork should default to, err on the side of being non-interfering, non-interruptive, like smoke, being a passive resource that receiver actively makes use of on their own terms. And ideally the spiritworker would "teach to fish for themselves,"* to help the receiver claim and enhance various and any and all capacities, including triangulation and generativity at the finest grain of the most exquisite patience, and so on.
(*"give someone a fish, they eat for a day; teach someone to fish, they eat for a lifetime,"" etc., etc., etc.)
Overall, a handshake should be generally co-disengaged (or with the sender very sure) with the receiver, consciously or unconsciously, getting to do their own safety checks and possibly requesting a few more seconds or minutes of the handshake for any self-cleanup before disengaging.
Overall, overall, the sender should as best they can display provenance, provisionality, uncertainty, fallibility, to be as legible as possible, to communicate in terms of suggestions and options---that don't forclose options not listed or an entirely different frame---
A handshake can also start light or liminally, during which a predator or an abuser might make promises or offer things (understanding, acceptance, spiritual knowledge, etc.) in order to convince the receiver to co-facilitate a deeper handshake.
Then the sender might offer at least partially the illusion of having given such things as well as further lies, and so on. Some of this will be relatively more in the receiver's formatting, but often there will some initial material that's easier for the receiver to interpret, then some translation instructions, and then potentially a tremendous amount of material that's in the sender's formatting, which the receiver unfortunately credulously embeds or starts to integrate, which can create a vicious cycle of opening more ports, further credulousness, and so on.
In this case, it's like the sender is playing something on a loop, very loudly, or with just enough variation that it's hard to ignore, and even though it's in a foreign language, some eventual receivers can't help but start to try to automatically, spontaneously puzzle out the language of the sender, which could take minutes or days. And if whatever the receiver eventually puzzles out has enough (usually false or twisted) promises, including claims of rarity, uniqueness, value, etc., the receiver then might open ports and participate in a handshake.
"especially speculation: ports can't be targeted universally because they are too high-dimensional, they have to be discovered or negotiated. but you can certainly mess up someone's cognition and autonomic nervous system by broadband broadcasting noise. also, if there's a gorilla wandering around long enough then most people will eventually see the gorilla, even if they'd rather not. and they might start believing the gorilla is real and not just a person in a gorilla suit [or at least come to unreflectively account for it as part of the milieu, to take it as a given]."
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Be careful of reifying or "fixing" on metabolizing, integration, port closing, triangulation, generativity, self, other, string-escaping, any seeming technical term or jargon or word or word usage in this material, including the phenomenological "look and feel" or it as well as initial and subsequent impressions and experiments and workhorsing of "how to do it." These don't have an essential or fixed pattern; what's beneath them or what they "apply" to or their intension [sic] can change; the "how" of working with these or moving towards things, how that feels, what "you" "do,"" has no essential pattern or essential nature or essential permanence or stability, only the radically concrete direct aconceptual remains and not even that, and any "how" or "doing" needs to eat itself with no remainder on approach, as it were. (And "how," "doing," and "needs to" are empty as well.)
Again, from the beginning:
For the majority of people, the majority of the below just won't apply or won't be relevant.
A collaborator noted, "there's a kind of 'it all adds up to normality'* thing that I need to do in order to metabolize this stuff." I agreed, and replied, "we’ve been swimming in this since the first moments of consciousness (and, developmentally, technically even before), and since we were born, and we’re swimming in it everyday, and it is and has been and will be like 99% all ok, business as usual. as with lots of stuff, normal than weird than back to a new normal on the far side of weird. it’ll /make sense/, will find its proper sense and contextualization."
(* one-many vs allergy transfer / communicable allergies)
(all apply to both subtle and explicit dynamics)
From main:
From culture appendix:
[Go up to this appendix' line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
Below are group scenarios or personal thought experiments. Even ones that seem metaphysically naive, unlikely, or impossible to you will likely have value to explore.
Note: I have literally never participated in a LARP or even a TTRPG. I used to play MTG and online MUDs, though, for what it's worth. At the time of this writing, I haven't tried these yet, so I don't have a good sense of who or when things below might be useful or what the psychological risk-reward-cost ratios are like. The "Pocket Guide to American Freeform" (see below) and many, many other resources may have suggestions for safety and other decision criteria. Maybe especially read a discussion of the idea of "bleed," and possibly lots of other things!
The general use case for these is that death is generally "tucked away" in modern society, until a friend, family member, or yourself gets really sick or suffers other misfortune. It sort of feels like this is to the point where it's difficult to set up external and internal contexts where one can explore all your current "stuff" around death. The scenarios below are intended to make that easier. Additionally, meditators are maybe more likely to run into "death stuff" sooner, metaphysically, existentially, and so on. Maybe that's why they started meditating in the first place, whether they knew it or not. And given modern society's sometimes-relation to death (ignore it; squish it into a corner) that can be alienating, from pop culture or local culture, whether you're secular or quasi-religioius, or religious. So the material below is perhaps potentially facilitative for elements of "cosmological synch," belonging, etc.
Again, even ones that seem metaphysically naive, unlikely, or impossible to you will likely have value to explore.
LARP = Live Action Role-playing
See:
(On first reading, you might skip to the scenarios below.)
There are at least X different types of "death" and Y different "postmortems" that you can use; maybe choose these before you start a round or use a dice rolls to pick during the round:
Types of death:
(With the exception of insta-death, you can carry on conversations and do whatever during all this. The dice rolls being distracting is a feature, not a bug, etc. One might have a game master or another player do the rolls for you, though, depending on what you all decide.)
Postmortems:
(Not all the scenarios below use the death mechanics above.)
One of the group has recently had a near death experience (choose who). They're safe now and on the mend, and it's unlikely that there will be future complications, or it was a near-miss and they didn't get hurt at all. It's been a couple days, weeks, or months, and they're still pretty shaken, and they are or aren't overtly showing it. Now you're all hanging out together.
Further options:
Further options:
Instead of getting away with it mostly scott free, their health has been really compromised. Everything's different from here on out; could be years, and statistically it will (or won't be), but nobody's sure, yet.
One of the group is dying (choose who). It's been months and now they're in hospice. You're gathered around them.
Options:
Further options:
You're a family or a group of friends (choose your roles). Someone has recently died (not a player). It's been a blur of solo logistics, and funeral stuff, and you're all together for the first time with nothing to do.
You're a group of friends or family or extended family or family-in-laws at a rural or low-tech location. (Say camping or a long drive up in the hills.) Getting help would take at least an hour or many, many hours, so there's no real chance of a life-saving intervention. Without any warning, someone has a sudden health crisis. Use one of the death mechanics above. You can also have a meta saving throw, where they were choking and almost die or it turns out to be something really painful but obviously not dangerous in retrospect.
You're in some strange situation (dystopia, hostage, something) where exactly one of you is going to die, though the characters don't get to choose who, and the characters (as opposed to potentially the players) don't know who it will be in advance. Decide together who will die ahead of time or have a mechanic that will choose any of you randomly. Decide whether it will happen at a known or unknown time. Use one of the death mechanics above.
In this scenario, you're all going to die and there's a known death order. You die one by one and the group of remaining alive characters grows smaller and smaller.
You're in a dystopic situation or there's been an accident and poison gas or radiation is slowly killing all of you and there's no hope of escape. Possibly with a delay for more role-playing, initiate the long-extended prelude mechanic for all of you.
There's been a global accident or disaster, and all other humans are dead except for your small group. You have enough food and shelter to sustain everyone indefinitely, and for whatever reason there's no status or sexual competition, and you're all sterile. You have decades ahead to live, if you choose to stay alive, and there will never be more humans.
You're a group of friends at the end of the universe and the end of time. How that works cosmologically, metaphysically, and existentially is ill-specified. Say, there just isn't anything more or anything more to do, and nothing more is going to happen. You're free of that burden. And you're hanging out. Maybe you're doing a retrospective on your lives and everything that's happened.
You're a group of friends in a locally safe situation, and a new universe is definitely about to begin that will completely erase this one (what that means for all of you, metaphysically and existentially is uncertain or ill-specified, but you're going to die, and you know this). You know there will be more, but you won't be a part of it. (And whether you ever were at all, whether you ever will have been at all, and how that works or doesn't work, is ill-specified, or, as players, you can discuss the "real" or "fantasy" (meta)physics of this!)
You're in a time period where some or all of longevity, rejuvenation, or cryonics are not yet workable technologies, but they perhaps might be in the proximate future, but possibly not in time for all of you or some of you. Choose lifespans for everyone, maybe two people who'll die in ten years, two people who'll die in twenty years, and so on, so there's a good spread and some people are close together for time of death. Then choose decades where possible technologies will become available, that have some overlap (or no overlap) with character's chosen lifespans. That certain knowledge is meta or only known with certainty from the player perspective. Then decide how certain or uncertain the (player-)characters are for when those technologies will become available. Some characters can be much more certain than others. Now you're all in a group, discussing timelines and uncertainties and how you feel about that and how you are and will live your life under those uncertainties. (You can of course switch to talking about your really-real positions on all this, too, but as a group be clear about whether you're exploring fantasy and thought-experiment space or whether you're exploring more close-to-home positions, or both, etc. (First draft 20230301.)
Further options:
Some or all of these technologies have arrived are are relatively mature (with consistent geopolitical and economic and sociological implications). Now, run some of the other scenarios in this document as if that were the case. So, sort of a LARP within a LARP. There may be ways to conceptually simplify this! Basically, what changes and what stays the same, in a world where cryonics or longevity+rejuvenation are mature technologies?
You or your entire group definitely died, and now you're alive(?) again in a different place. It feels either "real" or "heavenly" (or hellishly). Things seems relatively safe at the moment and you have plenty of downtime to reflect on your situation.
You're a group of beings or future humans who aren't quite immortal. Your probability of death, lightly abstracted, is a well-understood and well characterized distribution. You've lived for eons, and, statistically, it's "overdue" for one of you to die.
You don't know when, down to the second, but the culmination of a disaster is imminent. (Shockwave? Gamma rays?) You're all going to die fairly instantaneously and without immediate warning.
Your friends, or your friends and your intimate partner (choose roles), are hanging out in the next room while you're napping. You (choose who) suddenly wake to a feeling of doom and pain and pressure in your chest. You can't tell if it's your heart or your spleen or what. For whatever reason (surprise, sleepiness, pain) you can't even call out for help and then after 10-60 seconds you can. The pain subsides to ambiguous levels such that you begin to doubt something had even been wrong. You can say or shout something to the people in the next room.
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This appendix was originally called: "appendix 7: jhana and yoga nidra for long covid (and other things) (draft, incomplete, experimental)"
(What happened to jhana and yoga nidra? For a while, because of some structural stuff in my practice, I had a mild increase in credence that I'd have to do some more explicit and canonical jhana-esque stuff, but it never fully materialized and practice was business-as-usual; I never got around to really playing with it. So I once again downgraded my credence. I.e., I still and moreso think that at least a large chunk of people won't need to ever spend time in anything that checks the boxes of canonical light or heavy jhanas. But, as always, I still think practioners do/will navigate into and out of lots and lots of "bespoke altered states" in the course of practice. Things "getting weird" isn't necessarily a good thing, but it often is, cf. positive and negative lead indicators. The precise details are the thing. Things in the spirit of the meta protocol can help with provisionally deciding with something is good, a nonmonotonicity (near-term bad but long-term good), or "just bad". For a restatement of this see the resolution of: temporary note 20230413)
I think I may slowly shape this into something more fitting for it's current title: working with near-unconsciousness, falling asleep, drifting into and out of sleep, and brief memoryless wakings (changing positions during the night, early morning coziness, etc.), etc.
You may sort of get "pulled" in this (liminal consciousness, etc.) direction, maybe a few times, or just once or never. It might be like temporary narrowing down to "no degrees of freedom except 'towards unconsciousness' or 'up and back towards nothingness' ", stuff like that.
(I'll write something about cessations, fruitions, extended cessations, nirodha samapatti, "cycling" type stuff eventually. This has mostly or all sort of been in sort of in the same category as jhana for me. Had a couple experiences, wasn't that interesting, plenty of other stuff was as or more interesting and also more frequent, seemingly not critical for anyone but maybe useful or low-credence-perhaps even a karmic bottleneck for some minority subset of people. Wayfinding will almost surely bring someone to it and through it without them having to seek it out or read about it, but couldn't hurt at all to do so, all things being equal, modulo possible layering that would have to be undone later (not necessarily a bad thing cf. positive technical debt), and I would encourage people to seek information or teachers if they're interested, but it's not something I teach or am qualified to teach. [this paragraph duplicated in one other place])
So you don't have to set out to work with it explicitly; it might not even be immediately available for that, but it's ok to look for it.
When in doubt (and 99% of the time), let sleep be (enjoyable)sleep, etc.
*
Again this appendix used to be called "appendix 7: jhana and yoga nidra for long covid (and other things) (draft, incomplete, experimental)", and I'm not very far along in reworking it.
*
Preliminary note: If there's anything useful below, it's probably going to be much more important or at least as important to focus on the basics, i.e. properly time nutrition and properly timed adequate calories and sleep. It's always that way for me. Not medical advice: electrolytes, theory-driven (/ theory-harmonizing-equilibriating) intuitive/interoceptive nutrition and eating, metabolic traps with respect to meditation:, nutrition
*
According to a least one recent peer-reviewed paper [~20230311], there are maybe rough "clusters" of long covid symptoms. One cluster is maybe characterized by breathing difficulties (tight chest, painful chest, the experience of respiratory depression), insomnia, and anxiety (and things maybe common to other clusters like low-energy, brain fog, fatigue, and post-exertional malaise).
Zhang, Hao, et al. "Data-driven identification of post-acute SARS-CoV-2 infection subphenotypes." Nature Medicine 29.1 (2023): 226-235.
[^I haven't looked at this paper yet nor updated the paragraph above, but this is what I was thinking about that was mentioned to me.]
The above and what follows is not medical advice. Underlying conditions can look like long covid and be exposed by long covid. Please see a doctor if you have concerning symptoms to rule out and treat everything you can. Additionally, please look into diet, supplementation, peer and family support, the latest research, online communities of practice, everything, as you have desire and energy for. And this is an experimental, incomplete, and draft document.
At least at the time of this writing [~20230311], I'm not a huge fan of jhana, though I think at least "ad-hoc" and "bespoke" altered states are very important for meditative progress.
That said, breathing, sleep, and anxiety issues seem maybe tailor-made for jhana potentially being helpful, as sort of attractor states for useful feedback---jhana can potentially increase safe tolerance for hypoxia and hypercarbia, help to untangle snarls in autogenic and volitional breathing patterns, possibly be relatively more restorative than other states, in some ways, when sleep is hard to come by or other activities are too mentally or physically exertional, and, importantly, generally may help the autonomic nervous system gradually learn a larger felt "envelope of safety" so that it relies less on adrenaline and catecholimines as safety responses.
(I'm not a buddhist scholar or a meditation scholar, but it's my impression that, in addition to a synergistic meditative tool, jhana was used classically as temporary relief from challenging mental and physical experiences.)
Do note, any sort of "deep" state, as well as some kinds of structured breathing, may be useful along the above dimensions as well. So it doesn't have to be jhana or this material that you turn to or anything at all. And, things like choiceless awareness and really any meditative tool can potentialy be useful for sort of untangling (old and new) disordered breathing, explore deep safety, over time, and so on.
Any powerful tool can tangle as well as untangle, so it's important to be patient and gentle and experimental, if you're unsure of something and low on resources, to turn to other tools or to take a break and just rest as best you can or watch netflix, if you have the brainpower, and so on, or call someone just to talk, if it's not the middle of the night, or call a friend on the other side of the world if it is---better to stop and wait and see than to possibly tangle further.
Learning jhana should sort of be "(almost) always downhill, always path of least resistance, always gently inclining or surrendering towards effortlessness." Will and effort are yellow flags, grinding and jamming are yellow flags. If there is resistance there is force hiding somewhere and vice versa, so the goal is sort of to never feel resistance and to sort of gently back away and try something else (maybe a very slight change) if there's even the initial ghost of resistance.
Anxiety can be very "physiological" and it can also be sort of very "specific," and it can also be mixed. See here for additional ways to explore anxiety:
There can be many meta-reasons for suffering:
*
Generally, the ability to enter jhanic states is entangled with gently, over time, getting one's entire life in order, and doing that in the right, gentle, no-rush order. You are sort of in a partnership with your bodymind to negotiate together the safety of entering jhana (as well as learning how to do it). So, if you are sitting down to practice, and you're five minutes in, or zero minutes in, and suddenly you find yourself doing chores (or surfing the internet), or reminded of something you need to do, those might be exactly the right things to do or the right thing to be reminded of. Untangling all, and what to do when, and when to think about or remember things or do things, and in what order, is part of the process of learning.
It's important to mix in other tools and no tools, as needed.
Possibly helpful books (incomplete):
Brasington, Leigh. Right concentration: A practical guide to the jhanas. Shambhala Publications, 2015.
At least at this time, I don't actually teach jhana and I am neither classically trained or qualified to teach jhana. Please seek the advice of experienced jhanic practioners and teachers as makes feels right to you.
One could make a distinction between, on the one hand, white-knuckling and teeth-gritting, and, on the other hand "actually looking." This is not a moralizing distinction. One only "actually looks / actually sees" when it's all-the-way-down believed-/felt-safe to do so. That is real looking, made out of tiny little steps of progressive real looking, one after another, and it is spontaneous and effortless; it just happens, it happens for you.
You can definitely take actions, help, around the edges, you can gently encourage, keep-company, suggest, nonverbally, or dialogue, or gently, provisionally, surrenderingly, participatingly negotiate or bargain with the bodymind. You can do things bobbo initiate gentle proximal experiments; gently, temporarily, experimentally, briefly, temporarily, maintain ground within a zone of tolerable discomfort or tolerable uncertainty. "If it's safe, if it's not mean, if it's not self-hateful, if loving, let it hurt, let it scream, the horror happens... ...and see what happens." let horror, let the self-acceptable possibility of disaster unfold...
That last mile, that last moment just happens, though, when it's ready. It's sometimes just fine, pleasant, sometimes really scary, really unpleasant, sometimes even hellish, on and off, until then, and then "oh" or "oh!"
This isn't just an "internal" thing---sometimes it can be unhelpful to read up on things, to google "<horrible thing> reddit," without the quotes, heh, and sometimes it can be helpful (oh, that is a good [horrifying!] explanation, but, maybe, and I'm a little closer to understanding, maybe") and sometimes it's a mixed bag or it's initially uncertain. But, generally, knowledge is power. If something is scary, long-run, it can often be helpful to read about it, to learn from other people's experiences, etc. If one is going "external" (and for "internal," too), ---epistemic hygiene--- yes people who have the worst of it never post or never come back, but also people for whom things went just fine ...
Notes for incorporation:
Prospective and retrospective engagement when you're there with what happens when you're not there.
Just a little, just a little, too much is too much, there is always a little less ever slighter
The implications, the expectations
Participating in that
Oh. Oh.
Titration, just to the edge. You'll accidentally go past at first, too far at first, too much at first, that won't work, then back, then just a little (you won't know how at first), then just a little, there's the edge, that's not too much, learning occurs, there.
Apologies if I generate some insight porn here but it ends up not being the best way to look at this. There's lots of lindy (time-tested) material out there.
The way I'm thinking about this right now is something like concentration involves "some things not coming up." For that to happen, the system needs to deem that to be "safe." (And when I say "system," I don't mean to imply "essence" or anything "extra," or, with respect to "deem" that there's necessarily anything like "belief" or "deliberation" or "decisionmaking" going on.)
Given something like "layering theory" where "layering" is something like a change that blocks some underlying lability where that change has to be undone (delayered) for the underlying thing to become labile again, one basically want to accumulate non-layered reversibilities, where they system can choose to not attend to something but in a way where it's easy to once again attend to it, at the right time, as needed. If it's possible to attend to it, once again, at the right time, as needed, then it's safe to not attend to it. And so if you a bunch of those are accumulated in parallel, then whoosh, state change (e.g. a concentration state).
Now accumulating all those parallelizable safe reversibilities is a puzzle, hence tower-of-hanoi.
Exploring full range of motion (every joint through every degree of freedom, against gravity carefully within tolerance) can help to rebalance the autonomic nervous system.
Here is a way to categorize practices (that may leave out lots of things; I haven't thought about it too much; this is quick and dirty, and I think it borrows from at least two people, including Shinzen Young and I think someone else). Also, it maybe leaves out or conflates a bunch of distinctions like "top-down vs bottom-up," maybe some stuff like "attention vs awareness," "intermediate goals and attainments vs the whole point," what the point even is, and things like that:
"note"/"notice"/"participate-in":
And then one last one might be "experience less/nothing," and loosely I think that's a big chunk of the value in the jhanic state space and maybe doesn't necessarily need some or all specific jhanic factors or jhanas to get all the value, maybe:
Really, both of this are sort jhana-/jhanic-esque:
As mentioned above, there's sort of more layery and less (and less, and less) layery ways to explore these, in an integrated fashion. It may be that some things can only be redo[ne]-to-undo[ne] by exposing subtler and subtler phenomena, untangled from other phenomena, and it can make it easier to find one's way there (cf. bespoke altered states), but having useful frameworks around all this, e.g. aspects of this section and traditional and contemporary jhana maps.
So, anyway, one is sort of letting things come up and sort of asking for "not this, right now; not that, right now," more and more subtly and more and more pervasively, relaxed, but alert, but not too alert, and loose, and etc. I haven't borrowed the phrase "subtle dullness" from other systems or used it anywhere in this whole document, because of the inherent "error correction" in main practice p2 and the meta protocol; I've said it's fine to meditate while falling asleep, etc., because of as-needed error correction over time, if ever needed. But, this might be the one sort of space where a more delicate balance and harmony between relaxedness and alertness may be important. I'm still not employing the concept "sensory clarity" or "vividness" (in a particular sense), here, because I'm concerned that's too reifying.
Anyway, for "not this, right now; not that, right now," this sort of needs patience, participation, and subtle negotiation. It's sort of a life-complete (cf. NP-complete) sort of thing, for it to be safe to temporary let go of experiencing things, because you and the rest of the (body)mind trust that it will come back at the right time in the right way, when needed. So that's a subtle, ordering and planning and integration and refactoring process that can take a long time, and meditation in other ways, working through things all through the mind, and handling life stuff, and sufficiently living life, as a part of you knows that's the whole point, is part of all that. As per usual, even with all this, here, in some sense, not "meditation then" but "meditation and", even if you're on retreat or something. Anyway, generally speaking, we err on the side of letting things come up so as to work through them, so as to not layer or incur technical debt which might accrue enough to block further progress and which will need to be paid off eventually, anyway, in any case.
Unlike with lots of meditation (and I usually suggest it's good to let go of order, because of natural ordering inherent in contingent bodymind structure) or aspects of meditation; here, you're sort of having a even a "goal" or, rather, at least a direction in mind, a bit more mediately than "be enlightened" or "have good or better things happen". But, that's sort of distinct from having any particular local or mediate expectation and also it's important to let one's conception and understanding of the goal be fluid and loose and integrative or untangly or refactor-y with other things.
Sometimes meditating amidst illness is useful (in general and/or for the illness) and sometimes it's better to redirect and wait. It depends on the illness (i.e. present symptomology and timecourse) and it depends on the meditative regime (i.e. what you're doing in meditation).
Whether long covid (etc.) or having intermittent issues (such as extreme insomnia) or freakouts about sleep (and unconsciousness and nothingness and lack of control and uncertainty and death) as an advanced (or intermediate or beginning) meditator, there are some things that can potentially help.
(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]
But, aside from the parenthetical, here's the thing:
It can be helpful to try to stay as awake as you possibly can while working to enjoy comfortable relaxation as best as you can. So you snuggle up in bed and try to get comfortable and then enjoy that comfortableness, such that it is, as best you can. And as you practice, you'll be able to steal some bandwidth for reverie. And then, one thing that can happen is that adrenaline and weird symptoms can start to flare up, such as twitching, vibrating, anxiety, mouth, jaw and breathing stuff (if you're dealing with dysautonomia type things), and if that does happen, try to become more awake! while still being as relaxed and comfortable as possible, while minimally rearranging and managing weird body stuff as needed, including larger movements if needed. So being more awake can calm down weird rough cutover stuff, or kind of let that stuff exhaust itself, and being relaxed and comfortable (and eventually a dash of reverie, as you get used to doing this, over time) is just nice, and eventually sleep takes care of itself. And if it doesn't, you're relaxed and comfortable, or at least relatively comfortable, and that gives the body and mind some slack for non-trivial rejuvenation. And for extreme insomnia (post-viral, psychological, chronic pain, etc.), you can do this through the entire night, through light (or not light) sleep, through microsleeps, taking breaks to go pee or snack or whatever. Possibly still very unpleasant but "active" and workable.
So again: Try to stay as awake as you can while laying in bed (in a position you could sleep in) as "actively" relaxed and comfortable and enjoying as you can. When in doubt, try to be ever more awake while still relaxed and comfortable, eyes closed if safe, and err on the side of more awake! Small or large movement is ok. As you get good at this, mix in more and more interesting or enjoyable reverie. And let sleep, or not, take care of itself; not your problem or your job.
A few weeks into the beginning of when I had long covid, I had new-onset anxiety and "hyperadrenergia" or "hyperadrenaline" as well as sleep-onset "breathing stuff." (For me, breathing during sleep was/is fine; it was just the wake-sleep transition that was a little rocky. This is not uncommon, is my understanding.) Months later, if there's any sleep-onset breathing stuff, it's just a simple (although unwanted) "gently coming back awake," but, at the time, it was accompanied by primal terror and heart palpitations ("I'm not breathing." / "I'll stop breathing if I fall asleep.") There was also some intermittent vagal/gastrointestinal respiratory stuff that sometimes did transiently stop my breathing in my sleep, which further complicated things... Not a good time; understatement. But, anyway---I write elsewhere in the document that the (body)mind learns to find its way to "bespoke" altered states as needed also that meditation ultimately proceeds by exhaustive process of elimination.
Eventually, a few months later, I started getting intermittently drawn "towards unconsciousness" during meditation, and I had the option of "helping out" a bit, even while it was very aversive. When safe, I would dip "down there," and I found raw primal terror. I've only taken a few dips; it's just been a couple days; get two or three opportunities each meditation session. With each dip, there's been like five percent less terror each time.
Now, the question is, would the jhanas make it easier or smoother for people to make their way to "places" like this, if needed? I'm mostly not a fan of in training specific meditative skills because I don't think such skills really generalize, except in retrospect. But? And, how many people need to "go down there" to such places(???) kind of like(???) this---there might be no place and each "thing" like this is pretty unique and "far away" from the others. And how much "stuff" tends to be down there, for people? How usual or unusual is it? And/or, again, are jhanas just a really different part of the state space? I still haven't played with jhanas enough to personally have good answers here. The last time I played with the first and second jhana, many years ago, they were not in this "direction" but perhaps the higher ones. Also how does so-called subtle dullness factor in, here? They may yet be a different (or a few different) parts of the state space.
Jhana does teach people how to stay upright in very altered states of concsciousness and that alone could potentially be helpful to some people for when not meditating in bed (and not meditating in bed, meditating elsewhere besides in bed, long run, should be at least, I don't know two-thirds of meditation time? Three-quarters? Fifty percent? Dunno.).
Some open questions.
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Notes:
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TODO: rename / refactor / dissolve this appendix into relevant places
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
(See the Death LARP appendix, too, which currently has a more complete treatment.)
Below are group scenarios or personal thought experiments.
Note: I have literally never participated in a LARP or even a TTRPG. I used to play MTG and online MUDs, though, for what it's worth. At the time of this writing, I haven't tried these yet, so I don't have a good sense of who or when things below might be useful or what the psychological risk-reward-cost ratios are like. The "Pocket Guide to American Freeform" (see below) and many, many other resources may have suggestions for safety and other decision criteria. Maybe especially read a discussion of the idea of "bleed," and possibly lots of other things!
The general use case for these is that poor health is generally "tucked away" in modern society, until a friend, family member, or yourself gets really sick or suffers other misfortune. [...]
LARP = Live Action Role-playing
See:
todo
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[Quality (truthfulness), Quantity (informativeness), Relation (relevance) and Manner (clarity)]
Why did/didn't you tell the truth/lie/irony/humor/understate/overstate?
Why did/didn't you say more/less? Why did/didn't you repeat that/what was already known? Why did you add more? Why did you "take back" or "refute" that here and now? What was left unsaid? What was said that in some sense didn't need to be said or said again or emphasized?
Why did you say this here and now (or then)? Why didn't you say that here and now (or then)? Why didn't you say something else here and now (or there and then)?
Why did you say it in that way? Why didn't you say it in that way? Why did you just say that? Why didn't you just say that? Why were/weren't you more/less straightforward? "Why didn't you just say that?"
*
For any sentence, assertion, clause, phrase, word: as opposed to what? Why this and not that? (And why is that important?)
*
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
Verbally expressing feelings is sometimes vague communication, but it is also very high bandwidth communication; because, a feeling is a summary of a huge amount of embodied information. (A feeling could be said to be a part of a view, position, perspective, or stance, which could all be said to sort of be the same thing.)
(Verbal expression can include "paralinguistic markers such as prosody, tone, or pitch, as well as nonverbal cues like hand gesture, facial expression and eye gaze.")
Sometimes when you express your feelings to someone, that other person might feel like you're being presuming, accusatory, or demanding (or they themselves might somehow feel unheard), which can sometimes cause them to become angry or defensive; it might cause them to be "triggered."
Maybe of course, we are all responsible for our own feelings and behavior, and of course you probably or usually don't mean to be presuming, accusatory, or demanding, and they might be reading things into what you said that aren't there—maybe you weren't being presuming, accusatory, or demanding at all, of course—and in any case, you really want to feel understood or you really want them to change their behavior (depending on what you're expressing feelings about).
In any case, when people are triggered (and you might be triggered, too!), it makes it harder to communicate, and sometimes we say things that we regret, and results of communication are sometimes worse or even net negative.
If we can speak in a way that doesn't trigger the other person, then maybe we can get better results from communicating. But, of course, not only do we not want to trigger the other person, we want to be understood and we want something to be different. Usually, if we feel heard, we're willing to listen to the other person and to examine our own behavior, too.
Sometimes communication "methods" can be helpful guides to expressing something, because they can sometimes help to avoid communication pitfalls, as long as we can actually say everything that's important to us from "within" the method or at least alongside it.
Stick with me, here—I used to think that communication methods were too rigid and didn't allow me to express what I actually wanted to say. I wanted to say what I wanted to say how I wanted to say it, and anything less was inauthentic and damaging both to myself and even to the relationship.
But sometimes what seems to be rigidity is not knowing how to use the method properly. And, sometimes a method ultimately makes it easier to get exactly what you want. (And, often in an intimate relationship part of getting exactly what you want is your intimate partner getting exactly what they want, too, or both of you working towards getting what you mutually exactly want, together, is even better than what either of you could come up with individually.)
So, anyway, consider the "I-message" or "I-statement." Apparently in the 1960's Thomas Gordon coined this term. The idea, I think, without doing a deep dive into his material, is sort of that if you the reader focus on yourself when making a statement, the other person is less likely to be triggered, because it's about you and not them. But/and, nevertheless, for a lot of reasons, there's enough information in an I-message to further facilitate communication.
From there, I think, we sort of get to the modern "I feel" statements, which understandably come with a lot of eye-rolling and frustration, at times.
Consider this generic and sort of humorous but heartfelt sentiment, "I feel like you’re wrong and bad, and you should feel bad, and you should stop doing the thing you’re doing" [or start doing something, depending]
I feel like I’m being ... I feel like I have been ... I feel like I will be ... I feel like I’m going to ... I feel as if I had been ... I feel as if I will be ... I feel as if I were ... I feel as if I were being ...
I felt ... I felt like I was being ... ...
I would feel ... ...
I would have felt ... ...
By then / but, I would have been feeling...
I’m e.g. worried, concerned, afraid… [that] I’m going to feel… ... < I’m e.g. almost sure [that] I’m going to feel… ...
[I used to feel…]
I would have been going to feel X if it were not the case that Y were to have been going to Z (future imperfect conditional(???) from joke meme)
"I-message" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-message "paralinguistic markers such as prosody, tone, or pitch, as well as nonverbal cues like hand gesture, facial expression and eye gaze" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony [Last accessed: 2023-11-01] "prosodic stress" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_(linguistics)#Prosodic_stress [Last accessed: 2023-11-01] "do-support" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support [Last accessed: 2023-11-01] "implicature" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature [Last accessed: 2023-11-01] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication#Criticisms [Last accessed: 2023-11-01]
when to not be vulnerable or forthcoming cf. nvc stuff, could dig up those articles/critiques
Implicitly:
Right now
Yesterday when we were interacting
Frustrated, morally outraged, dubious, wronged, impotent, injured, violenced,
little, small, hurt-able, judged, aimless, confused, no-idea-what’s-going-on
See also: https://integrationbyparts.substack.com/p/i-feel-like-youre-an-asshole
Factoring out “you” and “judgmental labels”; zooming out to whole they-system:
“I feel like you’re being a moron.”
Becomes:
I feel upset, frustrated, boundary-violated, irritated, incredulous [by what’s happening right now]
Specific:
What’s happening right now; better: all this that’s happening now
What happened earlier; even better: when we were interacting earlier, I felt
General:
Situations like yesterday; situations like earlier
Flat, hard, wounded, forlorn,
weak, shy, powerless, caught off-guard, small, disgusting, vulnerable
(Epistemic: confused, etc.)
“I’m confused” = you’re an idiot or otherwise bad or a poor communicator, etc. disgusted
Confused, flabbergasted, incredulous, surprised, dumbfounded, dubious
“Further upset by how all this is going”
haughty, arrogant, self-righteous, self-satisfied, smug, vindicated, vindictive, aggressive, condescending
cf. xxxxx xxxxxxx in xxxxxxxxx xxxxxx for example feelx: [cf. xxxxxxxx xxx] unattractive, unfavorably comparable, uncomfortable, intimidated, ugly, unworthy, lesser, gross, squirmy, smelly, forever worse, unattaining-able. Cf. xxx xxxx xxxxx
Frustrated, morally outraged, dubious, wronged, impotent, injured, violenced,
little, small, hurt-able, judged, aimless, confused, no-idea-what’s-going-on, impotently sexual or like too-young-but-sexual,
too tall, too wide, too short, too ugly, etc.
I (maybe; non-exclusively/among-other-things) feel…
It seems like you perhaps among other things, maybe feel…
I hear you say that you feel…
=========
effective "arbitrariness" vs "rigid ego"
cf. like total flexibility sort of in dissolution etc.
Frame ontology what happened, what’s happening here, why is it happening
noncommittal
Finest-grain agreement/disagreement, compliance/non-compliance, commitment/non-commitment. “No momentum / non-coercible, non-self-shoulding.” Neither hardened nor buffeted.
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
Possibility cloud
The gap between stimulus and response
What else might be going on
What else might be happening here
Dwelling in that
Counterfactual repertoire…
Alternative explanations
Noticing anomalies huh that’s funny
Where other else might be
Safety and non-habit in order to dwell there
Where the world hasn’t yet been reconstructed
“The causal” maybe
Ironically very frustrated and triggered by people who aren’t…
Interpretations of listy scenes with red herrings…
Max out possibilities for parallelism, parallel structure… actually something to talk about
For all sentence types or something… cf. X main sentence types idk…
Ey was or appeared [to be] or seemed [to be]…
[what was the double thing…]
These are perspectives? Views? Alternative explanations? Alternative ontologies and descriptions!
[[[[Maybe perhaps possibly probably]]]]]
cf. likelihood…
… a dog or a rabbit…
Might have shifted in eir seat, or maybe ey was…
The hallway (or was it a corridor) was dark or it was dreary or it was luminescently lit or it was all of the above…
Productive ambiguous and multiple plausible interpretations or…
the reversible; the uncommitted, the not-overcomitted, the "well, maybe"
Perhaps there, or elsewhere, or nowhere [there] was or wasn’t a maybe-it or maybe-"its" or no one or nothing at all.
something or someone or nothing it-ish, or it-like, or it-esque, or maybe-it, or almost-it, or not-exactly-it or nothing or no one at all.
And in or around or on that place (or elsewhere or nowhere or with respect to nothing place-like) or all of these or some of these or none at all
Perhaps nothing happened at all, or: … … or perhaps nothing happened at all or something else [happened].
One or the other or perhaps both, or something else, [or all possibilities], or none or neither or something else and else yet again
Perhaps maybe some might call it a… but others might call it a…
Maybe anything else or everything else or nothing at all or not even that
Maybe here or there or elsewhere or anywhere or nowhere or somewhere
X makes sense or exists; X doesn’t make sense or exist or is meaningful, etc.
X and not X, depending on…
So maybe X or maybe not X. Perhaps X if Y; Perhaps not X if ? (Z? Not Y? Question the if??
nothing, nothings, and nothingness
*
This barely-there-there-and-gone-whisp[er]-of-feeling feeling. (Apparently feelings are not things.)
This non-relation(ship) relation(ship); this relation(ship) that’s a particular type of absence of a relation(ship).
chair-oid, chair-esque, evidently having the function of a chair, vaguely-chair-like, chair-like, ambiguously chair-ish,
The thing was recognizable and recognizably itself.
It was not a person and not-not a person.
The thing that is intended (by e.g. you and me) to directly represent this other thing.
The non-thing-like thing was not-[exactly-]walking in the not-really-a-place.
(These things are the same thing.)
cf. something De dicto / de re / de se
*
Continuing to go up in abstraction until get like “event” (vs e.g. conference which as all wrong connotations). “Event was too generic to describe it”… <— but also need character to have a reason to be thinking this..
*
*
cf . versus etc
A type of Intension.. How to find, point out, create, summon, demonstrate, instantiate, or exemplify the extension
*
cf. versus etc.
bibliography scratch:
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
perspective, view, stance, cf. gesture cf. anticipation cf. """"""belief, beliefs""""" cf. """"""model, models"""""
Bob [in X circumstance] WOULD think feel say that “but then the words/concepts aren’t subscripted, so…” still in originator concepts..
the dog ran
Bob’s the bob’s dog bob’s ran
Bob would say that a dog, which is for him a form of…
Bob thinks (which for him is a strange tacit knowing) that dogs (which for him are…) pivot (which for him is////means…) across X (which for him is…); Bob thinks that dogs pivot across X.
*
I can see someone.
Someone can see me.
Someone can see us (and I might not necessarily see them).
Someone can see that person seeing us.
"An integral calculus of primordial perspectives" in Excerpt C: the ways were are in this together (of Kosmos Trilogy 2, unpublished) by Ken Wilber
Appendix II: integral post-metaphysics ["gigagloss"] in Wilber, Ken. Integral spirituality: A startling new role for religion in the modern and postmodern world. Shambhala Publications, 2007.
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The Transpersonal Actor: Reinterpreting Stanislavski by Ned Manderino. 1989.
[Go up to this section's line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]
Messy list of mostly very academic references I found helpful (directly or indirectly) for narrative writing. cf. redo-to-undo, among other things. Compare with p1 appendix, see regarding x-desires, and other sections, too.
(Lots and lots of duplication of entries, at the moment.)
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contents:
Based on some remaining sticky stuff, I have increased my credence a bit (from nearly zero) that 4th jhana might be really important to "go all the way."
So, possibly, the right thing to do is to only meditate outside jhana for the purposes of becoming able to achieve 4th jhana, then do nearly all meditation from there on in 4th jhana. And then all other heuristics and everything else from my doc still applies (e.g. you can achieve jhana in a problematically layery way; you can layer in jhana, etc.)
The reason I'm wondering this, is that, because of the way that jhana may uncouple some body maps, it may permit certain reconfigurations much more flexibly than would otherwise be possible if someone was sort of in a more "normal" state and had all their body maps coupled up for going about doing stuff in the world.
Relatedly, this would make me less "gotta play with all the postures" and more chill about gently maintaining a more "correct" meditation postures, rather, "neutral" meditation postures, for correct refactoring and distributing of "stuff" through the entire body map, because this would be more flexibly workable, maybe, in jhana. However, prior to achieving 4th jhana, someone should then use whatever creative and weird meditation postures they needed, in that world. Maybe!
Credence from like 1% to idk 5%, so far, but I think I'm going to investigate. I'll update doc if I substantially change my mind about the importance of jhana.
*
Further, I'm updating more on the dangers of meditating in "comfortable" postures, at least, that don't have good feedback loops, like cushy chairs and stuff that have "give" which makes it harder to know how muscle tension and things are redistributing through the body.
I may add more about this too. I have some investigating to do!
*
If you have strong opinions about any of this, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Please email me at meditationstuff at gmail dot com.
*
See updates to this note: temporary note 20231023:
*
This is a bit of an anti-climax. Beyond an initial inkling over a couple weeks, I never really got a "go signal" to seriously reach-surrender-incline-wait for jhanic states---"no, don't do that, that's still definitely the wrong direction."
And it turned out that a super-duper logjam really did just need a lot more time and patience of both "business as usual" practice and many months of synaptic renormalization (i.e. sleep), and the stuff that wasn't moving did progressive unfold/move, in fractional waves over the course of another few months.
So, at least for me, nothing extra-special was needed, and I've still only spent like maybe ten minutes of practice time in a state that had I think all the checkbox qualities of the first jhana and also maybe ten minutes of practice time in a state that had I think all the checkbox qualities of the second jhana. (And then I think I've written elsewhere that the the fizzy, buzzy, bliss-y exhilaration was boring and structureless and felt like it pointed in the wrong direction of where I wanted to go. That was eighteen-ish years ago, I think. And more recently I experienced some infinite-ish/boundaryless space and consciousness, though flavored with a bunch of other stuff, including some third-person-perspective-ness, on and off for a few days. So anyway, I've experienced all sorts of temporary "altered states" that seemed integral to progress, but 99.9% of the time they haven't seemed particularly jhana-y, and I wasn't trying to get into any of them per se---my "wayfinding" practice took me into and out of them---so, anyway, I don't think most people ever need to cultivate jhana, all things being equal, though of course it may be extremely beneficial or helpful to some people. I generally nudge people away from it if they're not sure or ambivalent as to whether they should explore it, and if someone expresses some interest or curiousity in it I encourage them to explore it. But I still don't teach it, and I'm not qualified to teach it, etc.
*
(I'll write something about cessations, fruitions, extended cessations, nirodha samapatti, "cycling" type stuff eventually. This has mostly or all sort of been in sort of in the same category as jhana for me. Had a couple experiences, wasn't that interesting, plenty of other stuff was as or more interesting and also more frequent, seemingly not critical for anyone but maybe useful or low-credence-perhaps even a karmic bottleneck for some minority subset of people. Wayfinding will almost surely bring someone to it and through it without them having to seek it out or read about it, but couldn't hurt at all to do so, all things being equal, modulo possible layering that would have to be undone later (not necessarily a bad thing cf. positive technical debt), and I would encourage people to seek information or teachers if they're interested, but it's not something I teach or am qualified to teach. [this paragraph duplicated in one other place])
/end temporary note
I'm getting closer to changing the previous jhana temporary note (immediately below). Less and less credence that "light jhana proper 1-4" is necessary in general or in principle (and especially not "jhanic mastery 1-8") but perhaps it's practically critical for a subset of people; not sure---it would be nice to really clarify that. I do think that people who would benefit a little or a lot from jhana will be drawn to it (in my stuff/"framework" e.g. via p2 and the meta protocol, or anything, bottom-up, etc.). I think I hopefully mentioned somewhere that a very long time ago I investigated the first and second jhana, experienced some fizzy exhilaration and then effortless maintenance a couple times and got bored with it. More recently, based on landscape and trajectory, I thought I was maybe about to start spontaneously entering and spending at least, I don't know, one hundred hours, or a month or two, in fairly canonical jhana-esque states, with maybe some gentle inclining from me, but that never really happened except for the initial week or so of "distantly around the edges," and I moved out of that regime. In any case, back down to around 1% credence, as per above (below), but still not zero. That said there's a little bit more nuance to be said around altered states, that is all here in the doc as best I can tell but maybe could be gathered a bit better into one place and slightly clarified. This includes some material that's in what's currently labeled: "appendix 7: jhana and yoga nidra for long covid (and other things) (draft[...]". If you're interested in jhana, based on skimming, I'm guessing a decent place to start, written-resource-wise, would be "Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas" by Leigh Brasington, but I'm not sure. I think if I were starting now, I would, regardless of my gender, pick one male-ish presenting jhana teacher and one female-ish presenting jhana teacher, and go from there.
I think the way I've been using "10,000 hours" is maybe still an underestimate. And my current estimate is now like 17,000-23,000, maybe. That said, I might want to keep 10,000 but increase the right-tailed variance or something a lot more. Just not enough data at this time about what's sort of empirically typical given distribution of bodymindworld structures in the world crossed with the material in this book (book thing). I need to go back over my own timeline and some vague published timelines and some sparse colleague and cohort stuff. And then I have to update all the places I use 10,000 hours. And then hopefully at some point it'll make sense to more carefully collect data over a decade from like 10-100+ people and publish that.
Now that this 500k+word thing exists, which will continue to get cleaned up, one of my main interests now is increasingly the relationships between 1) "right view" and 2) nonmonotonicity and 3) minimalism and how to get people the smoothest possible (non-stalling!!!!!) ride with the least intellectual investment. So that is going to be a long-term thing for me and my writing and teaching, maybe.
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Update 20231024: Possibly clarifying in general: "I don't teach or practice jhana, and I mostly don't refer to primary source suttas, but I have HUGE respect for original systematic technical jargon and translations. This is cool: WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JHĀNA & SAMĀDHI PUBLIC DRAFT (10 FEB 2022)" "What You Might Not Know about Jhāna & Samādhi (PUBLIC DRAFT).pdf" https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gT1rCJ3K4Hk_1cOAVi0CO6TSRLbvzcuX/ [Last accessed: 2023-10-24] https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1716851001423016257
*
See the resolution of: temporary note 20230413
/end temporary note
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