Update, I pinged him on Twitter and he said that people getting jhana on retreat and then thinking that the path is about getting ‘back to that’ is very common, instead of the person pursuing insight practices that lead to day to day changes Rather than peak experiences.
romeostevensit
Karma: 9,072
I don’t have theistic beliefs but have found prayer useful.
This is oddly different from what he said in person. Also he wrote the first edition of mctb also about twenty years ago now, so I wouldn’t be surprised if his opinion is different from his thirty year old self.
I don’t think you need to take any of the Buddhist claims seriously, just do your own investigation. I think it’s much closer to something like ‘people take instrumental goals as terminal, then twist themselves into knots over this error’.
Ingram has actively hunted for any jhana hunters for twenty years and hasn’t found any. The reason why becomes obvious once one gains a bit of insight into why/how jhana works. Though it’s trickier to describe.
I think letting go of desire is a terrible description of the insight. I still feel like a normal person, I just suffer a lot less. There’s a tendency to overestimate the magnitude of changes in their close aftermath. It takes a few years before the mountains truly are mountains again.
More objective psychometrics like neuroticism and the reports of friends, family, partners.
They’re coextensive/parasitic on virtues, virtues being hard won compressions of lots of contextual information about how to prioritize and behave for min-maxing costs and benefits in a side-effect free way. Since virtues are illegible to younger people who haven’t built up enough data yet, values are an easy attribute substitution.
Imaginal worlds, escapism. Video games, tabletop gaming, fantasy movies and books, comics and anime, collecting things, model building or mechanically intricate things.
Puzzle games and real math are pretty non central examples of nerdy interests in my ontology. I think of nerdy interests as fake compression, they provide a simpler world with a working memory number of variables to optimize instead of the mess of the real world. Results can be knowably optimal etc.
In both examples: 2 degrees of freedom, two pieces of information. The information is sufficient to restrict one of the degrees of freedom (to within some bound in the second clustering example rather than precise).
Due to diagnostic ambiguity, a lot of the solutions don’t generalize, which is anathema to the nerdy interest tick in my experience.
More generally, dealing with the arrow-of-time loopiness problems by expanding the time window to contain the causal process in question. I would guess this epicycle introduces more complications than it solves sometimes though, requiring a block universe model in some circumstances (UDT related?).
Several dozen people now presumably have Lumina in their mouths. Can we not simply crowdsource some assays of their saliva? I would chip money in to this. Key questions around ethanol levels, aldehyde levels, antibacterial levels, and whether the organism itself stays colonized at useful levels.
I would appreciate a version of this post that evaluate dangers. This post uses a lot of fear mongering language that I don’t feel helps me calibrate as someone considering the product.
Generally: in maneuver warfare you seek to make your opponent spend more energy per unit of reaction/movement than you do, wearing them down or putting them in a position of weakness.
People should focus way more on things that make them better partners because they make you a healthier more rounded person and way less on idiosyncratic dating market dynamics imo. When you climb the health hill you meet others also climbing the health hill. When you climb fake hills you meet others climbing fake hills.
Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner’s experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doing the counterintuitively difficult emotional work of learning to ask for it instead of resenting their lack of mind-reading.
Creating space in which your partner can be vulnerable to expose their real preference (e.g. sexual preferences). Both men and women have a pretty hard time with this (especially any gender-narrative dystonic preferences) and often have had some pretty hurtful rejections in the past from other unthinking young people.
Then there are things that people present as if they are relationship obligations and try to avoid the emotional maturity of having them be explicitly discussed requests instead of tacitly held/resented demands. Such as coddling their coping mechanisms while not being allowed to acknowledge that you are paying costs to accommodate them (or you doing this to them).
Men often wind up in the valley of bad emotional sensitivity where they think that going into these sorts of things will make them unattractive/feminine (see: gender-narrative dystonic), mostly because they haven’t had solid models of masculine emotional space-holding from their fathers and older male peers, modern age siloing isolates people from a lot of feedback from older people at every stage of life. They don’t have a context in which to train the first awkward 100 hours of these skills. I think this is often why people report things like circling being very helpful.
Oh yeah, food banks for sure!
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