the foundation of a good life is very simple:
- make fewer decisions from fear
- make more decisions from love
the difficulty lies in the constant forgetting
It's the funniest thing to have this 5mo baby stare lovingly into your eyes as you're holding her, smiling and pooping away in your arms, and it's one of the most magical and wonderful moments in my life so far. Like who could have predicted that was possible
2/ Real brains can predict each other. If your model is a good model, it should fit right into that population — mappable to and from real brains, using the same transforms real brains need. We call this the Principle of the Inter-Animal Transform Class.
@jonnym1ller Especially the closer you get, because when you don't know the exact day, you've done all the prep and cleared the agenda and everything starts to feel very slow motion... Until it's suddenly the opposite. Event Horizon is really accurate. Hello from 2.5 months on the other side
Baby just turned 2 months old! Everyone said children are under rated. I thus thought that meant they were fairly rating and now I'd know what to expect.
But no. Babies are under rated. An indescribable peak experience, all throughout.
Jhanas: love the difficult emotions, welcome them into your experience, enjoy the relief afterwards
Parts work: allow difficult emotions to embody themselves, interact with them with the same compassion you'd interact with your child, learn from them, express and feel gratitude for them
Fetters: keep sitting with the difficult emotions, experience them distinct from the thoughts that trigger them, learn to treat them as just a natural process that occurs within you, that happens to you, not something that necessarily needs to be triggered by thoughts or the outside world.
All of them circle around attention.
I suspect that training better attention greatly speeds up the healing process
probably half the people I’ve worked with were bottlenecked by sudden mind wandering when difficult emotions arose
Having wrestled deeply with searching for fulfillment over the years, this resonates well and is way simpler than the complicated formulas I was modeling
It’s possible a shared secret among mystics everywhere is that loving — the verb more so than the noun — is the essential and trainable skill for a fulfilled life.
Hard to escape the poetry.