🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️

Enlightened via Groundlessness, but, like, hyperanalytical. 10k-20k+ hours like water flowing downhill

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

• meditation stuff (≈free)
• meditation+everything ($1500/hour*)
• legacy (same/ask/etc.)

https://t.co/vpMGwKDgP1

(*expensive in part because working on other projects right now)

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

If I do some heavy explosive lifts I get a calcium craving a few hours later 🤔

[Richard @PGC1a_RB]

https://t.co/D2wuonJthU

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Like clockwork my urge to exercise returns six weeks after a protein subunit vaccination @diviacaroline

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Still probably somewhere between 20/400 and 20/200 in best eye, but they're still clearly improving. I can notice a difference maybe every seven days. It seems to improve slightly for 1-3 days and then seems to plateau for like 2-4 days. Idk. This is so weird.

Difference is semi-objective because I can eventually start clearly counting items on new lines on the eye chart even if I can’t make out what the letters are yet

I would kill to like get some kind of quantified eye MRI like once per week for two years to see exactly what's happening structurally.

Not holding my breath but it would be insane if you could take an adult to 20/15. V v v v v interesting optically/physiologically, and evolutionarily speaking.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Good poast

[Vacha @TVachaW]

I've noticed that there are two quite distinct ways people on here use the word "awakening", which would benefit from disambiguation.

Roughly they are:

1. Persistent Non-Dual Experience (PNDE)

On the Persistent Non-Dual Experience Model, awakening is defined in terms of the phenomenological structure of a person's conscious experience.

A person is awakened on this model if they have a shift that causes them to permanently perceive their field of experience as centerless, without a sense of agent / doer and with no subjective sense of self.

It is primarily a description of how their field of experience is subjectively organised and makes little reference to their behaviour, motivations or intentions in the world.

2. Traditional Buddhist Awakening

By contrast, the Traditional Buddhist model of awakening typically involves maximally eradicating craving, aversion and delusion as motivating forces in our life.

It certainly causes a change in how the person experiences the world, but it also speaks to a fundamental shift in their intentions, motivations and ways of behaving in the world.

An awakened person on this model is not recognised merely by internal self-reports of non-dual experience.

Rather, they are at least part recognised by how they behave in the world and what motivates them.

Such a person ceases to be motivated by desire for having certain experiences (especially sense experiences) or accumulating wealth / status.

Instead they become maximally motivated by awakening itself, helping others awaken, and acts of compassion and generosity.

3. The Value in Disambiguating The 2

There is currently a somewhat antagonistic relationship between advocates of these two models.

The Traditional Buddhist will often dismiss the value of the Persistent Non-Dual Experience model.

Whilst the advocates of the Persistent Non-Dual Experience model will say that the Traditional Buddhist model is either impossible, no different to PNDE, or something that only had relevance for some past, long-ago time.

I think both of these perspectives are wrong however.

I believe that shifting to a Persistent Non-Dual way of experiencing the world subjectively can have tremendous value in supporting the path towards Traditional Buddhist Awakening.

Breaking through into Persistent Non-Dual Experience eradicates a tonne of suffering and provides a lot of support for transforming our motivations, intentions and behaviours in the world.

Meanwhile, I think the Traditional Buddhist Awakening model still has huge relevance to people today and is not the same as simply attaining to PNDE.

Many people who attain to PNDE still frequently behave in ways that demonstrate a continued self-oriented intent and self-oriented motivation in the world.

This speaks to the fact that the "self" in the Buddhist sense can still be operational even when subjective experience doesn't contain a sense of center, agent, doing or subjectively felt self-sense.

It also doesn't seem to automatically cause a reorientation away from being motivated by certain experiences and sense pleasures towards exclusively being motivated by awakening and compassion.

Furthermore, from a whole society perspective, it is very valuable to everyone when there are beings who are minimally motivated by self-oriented goals and maximally motivated by compassion and awakening.

Whereas, there is much less value to other people when there are some beings who organise their perceptual field in non-dual ways, but continue acting in self-oriented ways.

So, attaining to PNDE certainly does not lack value - neither in general nor on a Buddhist path. On the contrary, it is in my view intrinsically valuable for the reductions in suffering it yields for the individual and it also provides support for Traditional Buddhist Awakening.

But it should also not be equated to Traditional Buddhist awakening, and we should also not dismiss the value or existence of Traditional Buddhist Awakening.

Understanding that PNDE ≠ Traditional Buddhist Awakening helps us see that there is much, much more path ahead after PNDE has been attained.

It also helps ensure that the notion of spiritual awakening isn't just limited to a certain subjective way of experiencing the world but also to our intentions, motivations and behaviours in the world.

The latter qualities impact a lot more people.

So if we truly believe that the sense of a separate self is an illusion - and therefore we understand that other people's suffering is as important as ours - then it becomes quite easy to see why attaining to PNDE is the beginning of the path towards spiritual awakening rather than the end point itself.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@ze_rusty Is unfiltered UVC a concern?

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@shostekofsky Maybe different effects, but constrained by global invariants. Better meditation systems interact with those global invariants directly, and walk/descend natural global gradients.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Meditation properly conceived is more like bubblesort than weightlifting or building a microscope and then using it, though there is some value to these other analogies, too

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@breckyunits @poetengineer__ In the distant past, I read another brief piece where someone swears by this for their productivity. I will try to find it.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Dated old-school neurophenomenology guy

Plato's Camera: How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals

by Paul Churchland

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

My meditation system is designed with knowledge of neural nets. On the philosophical side, Plato’s Camera is a pretty ok book. I have a relevant neuroscience section w references in doc (not a lot bc neuroscience is still too young). I forget if I included any math references.

[Josh Whiton @joshwhiton]

it's wild (and hard to remember) that every psychology you've ever heard of... Freudian, Jungian, CBT, IFS, EMDR, positive psychology, flow-states... was established without knowing about neural nets.

after studying many of them, as well as having a background in comp-sci and being front row and in deep with the advent of AI, it's so clear now that:

people are made up of lots of neural nets.

these neural nets respond to their perceptions with thoughts and feelings, in an attempt to get us to do (or not do) what they want.

these neural nets vary in size and complexity and their ability to perceive or process information, resulting in behavior and impulses of varying intelligence.

the neural topology or architecture of the self can be reshaped and optimized (and many of the old psychologies all had valid angles on this) for greater intelligence and better performance.

our understanding of the self as composed of neural nets becoming more widespread, should usher in new psychologies and greater effectiveness of existing psychologies, with the potential to better understand, reprogram, rewire, and optimize the human mind and being.

so just as computer programming and writing and speaking are merging into one, psychology and neuroscience and programming or architecting human neural pathways will also begin to merge.

another reason why I'm very bullish on the human substrate.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

This is also in https://t.co/LQJFWR87xa and there are a lot of other sections that come at this from additional angles

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

https://t.co/CZyx5lzJWS

There’s an intuition I’m working on conveying, which I think applies to circling, bio-emotive/nedera, somatic experiencing, vipassana, concentration, kasina practice, core transformation, IFS, the preliminary/auxiliary practices in my stuff, everything. >

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@pat_the_dentist @interesting_aIl This was funnier in my head

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@pat_the_dentist @interesting_aIl Just gotta be blunt about this one

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

🎢

[Hormeze 𐤄𐤅𐤓𐤌𐤉𐤆 @hormeze]

To say further; i have become over the years quite skeptical of popular framing of things like shinzens 'taste of purification' or 'kundalini channeling' as well as ' trauma purging'. While it is indisputable that some forms of release are helpful I am concerned that a lot of it is not. Even when cathartic, a lot of the fireworks seem more like tazing a frog than taking a shit.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Relevant to meditation stuff as it were

[ainsley 🏳️‍⚧️ @witchwounds]

nono im not weirded out. im weirded in. please, go on.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@RomeoStevens76 five elements and nutritive element and stuff like that?

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

Re “body scanning”: I think too reifying, of body and ultimately “attention” itself. There’s no complete/gapless/continuous/platonic set of pixels/voxels to be found/uncovered, “if only u were a better body scanner.”

Body map can, somewhat indirectly, be ***VERY*** improved/unsnarled over thousands of hours, but it’s ever-always fluid like honey and resists conception, and continually prioritizes & deprioritizes local resolution under global constraint.

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

@ArtirKel I know this probably took a lot of work, “slop” or not!

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

meditationslop

[José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente @ArtirKel]

@RomeoStevens76 @meditationstuff Need to add "the body" to this unhinged meme

[🎃 Mark 👻 🟡⚪️🟣⚫️ @meditationstuff]

In my current selfish “got mine” era, I continually forget how doctrinally/exoterically different the “not what the Buddha actually said” schools are, including my stuff (which is fairly tantric/tibetan, I think(?), all things being equal)

[RomeoStevens @RomeoStevens76]

@meditationstuff various abidhammas could be read as reifying a platonic set of pixels/dhammas that are 'really real.'