Why don’t you care for the “looking” framing anymore?
Also, do you have an example of: “getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference”.
Would a central example be someone focusing on trying to become popular, not realising that it is only instrumental towards feeling positive about themselves?
do you have an example of: “getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference”.
Would a central example be someone focusing on trying to become popular, not realising that it is only instrumental towards feeling positive about themselves?
I wouldn’t say that’s a central example. But I think it’s a good one. Simple, clear, easy to access.
A much bigger and more central example to me is death. Most people don’t seem to have clearly seen their own mortality. They’re thinking about their own deaths like a Cartesian agent (i.e., not embedded — like the Alexei robot in this post). They know death happens to everyone eventually, and that it’ll happen to “them”, but it’s almost like they’re talking about a video game character from the outside. Like “Yep, at some point my little Mario figure there will stop when we turn off the gaming console.”
Something really big shifts when folk get a terminal diagnosis. It’s not just “Oh, I thought I had years, but now I have months/weeks/etc.” There’s a grappling-with that’s hard to convey to non-terminal folk. “The end” becomes subjectively real. Like “Oh shit, I’m going to experience this from behind my eyes, inside this skin.” It can feel very lonely and alienating, both because of the existential horror of the situation, but also because it becomes super clear how others are running strange scripts that just don’t make sense.
I include most immortalists and transhumanists in this. I’m not talking just about “Are you taking practical actions to deal with your mortality?” I mean that there’s a deep existential thing to grapple with. Even true immortals would have to orient to it: If you never ever die, then that means you’re facing eternity. That’s like something from behind your eyes.
(This is something even the literalist Christian mythos doesn’t properly address AFAICT: Great, you go to Heaven. Then what? Do you feel time passing? What’s that like? Goes on literally forever? Or does it… fade away at some point? Or do you leave time when you enter Heaven — in which case what’s the subjective experience of that? This isn’t just abstract philosophy. It’s a damn meaningful question!)
It turns out that most things don’t matter in the face of this. The whole thing with deathbed regrets amounts to “I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner and take it seriously while I still had time.”
But it’s not something you’re likely to really get just by listening to elders and taking their advice. “Work less, connect with family more.” That’s good, and you’ll be grateful for that in the end! But you won’t understand why until you’ve really truly seen your own death clearly.
To the degree you do, it just won’t be tempting anymore to work instead of connect (for instance).
But that’s a really huge example. Maybe one of the biggest. Maybe maybe the biggest.
I do think the “Oh, I don’t actually care about being popular” thing you suggest is pretty good. It has the right quality of “Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it, and I’ve been seriously wasting my time on this.”
I just wanted to flesh this out a bit, to hint at the scope.
Why don’t you care for the “looking” framing anymore?
I’m honestly not sure. Something sits wrong about it. Some initial stabs at the intuition are:
It feels too binary. Like you’re either Looking or you’re not. That doesn’t seem right.
I think it might be several skills/senses folded into one. Or maybe something like a sense generator. (Lots of folk have trouble with conscious interoception, and that can be changed over time via a move I might have called “Looking” before.)
In practice, the relevant thing to develop seems to be something like capacity to receive the information rather than forcing oneself to seek it. I think intentionally seeing something beyond the usual ontology (“Looking”) emerges naturally from being both willing and capable, once you know what direction to point your attention in.
But the overall feel is something like… the whole thing makes it sound pompous. Like “Oho! Here’s this special magical skill!”
I mean, it is. It’s quite potent. I’ll sometimes mythically refer to this as “Mage Sight”, or break it down into subtypes of Sight (like Spirit Sight or Prime Sight).
But I think something screwy happens when there’s a social tone along the lines of “I see something you don’t! ’Cause I’m bothering to look at all!”
Even when there’s some truth to that, it’s unkind. It doesn’t honor the reason why the person hasn’t pointed their attention there yet.
Also, in many cases I can just say “You want to see? Okay. Look here, then here, then here.” And something clicks for my listener. Sometimes.
So, no reason to make the act of looking there something special. It’s just perception.
Also, in many cases I can just say “You want to see? Okay. Look here, then here, then here.” And something clicks for my listener.
I assume the “here”s are placeholders for some specific things you would be saying to a particular listener. Can you give some examples of things that those places have held?
Can you give some examples of things that those places have held?
Sure. I’ll give just one for now. These take a while to name in writing, at least they way they occur to me.
Here’s a recurring one: I’ll be talking with someone in a coaching session, and I’ll pick up on how they’re “adding extra”.
This is something that’s easy to point out in live conversation or over video but I find tricky in writing. It’s a tone thing. If I look at the cup next to me and note “This is a cup”, I’m simply noting. There’s nothing extra. But I can add extra with an emotional tone of “I keep this cup next to me to hydrate myself, because I take care of myself, which is something GOOD I do.” I think this is easy to hear with some practice even if the words are identical (“This is a cup”).
Usually when someone is adding extra, they have some unrecognized pain. Most of the time this pain roots down in a universal thing — something I’ve come to call “the pain of duality”. It’s a basic split from something core. It’s roughly the same in everyone best as I can tell, but each person sort of holds and experiences it in their own way.
So when I see someone adding extra, and they’ve asked for my guidance, I’ll sometimes guide them to awareness of this core pain:
“Here it seems to me that you’re saying XYZ [like “I need to finish my thesis”], but you’re also adding something extra. It occurs to me as a tone of ABC [usually like there’s something wrong with them, or that their value is based on something external, or that something is existentially wrong]. There’s nothing wrong with that. I just imagine it’s uncomfortable. Do you see what I’m pointing at?”
We do some calibration, and I adjust based on their feedback (like if I was missing them in some key way). Then if I still see this core pain in them and they agree I’m seeing them clearly, on to the next step:
“Okay. Now, for me, in this spot I tend to feel PQR [something like “afraid something will go wrong if I don’t take care of this task”]. But that’s how the energy feels when it hits my thinking. Underneath that is something wordless. More like a creeping feeling, like reality itself is unsafe or unreliable.”
The point here is to give an example of what it means to feel the energy behind something in consciousness. If my first example doesn’t click for them, I’ll give a few others.
Usually they either notice the core pain or adjust my perception of them. More often the former. It tends to result in a direct kind of seeing, the same way you can directly “see” the feeling of your tongue in your mouth: it’s somehow more unmediated than thoughts about the thing are.
When I wrote Kenshō I might have called this “Looking at your soul pain”. It’s about seeing more directly instead of just thinking about mental models of the thing.
I just think that reifying Looking does something odd to this process. It’s just noticing what you experience when you look where someone is pointing. Even if that someone is yourself.
Hopefully that’s somewhat clear. With more time & effort I might have come up with a simpler example. (“Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”)
Thank you. This is cake! And not only cake, but a cake I have tasted before, although perhaps made to a variant of the recipe. I’m familiar with people adding on their own “stuff” to the things that happen. Personally, I would put less emphasis on their emotional reaction as the thing of importance than whatever they are believing in that moment, that the emotion is a reaction to. If the reaction is dysfunctional, unearthing the beliefs and tracing them to their origins in past events can be helpful in dissolving it.
Why don’t you care for the “looking” framing anymore?
Also, do you have an example of: “getting better at attending to what matters to you, instead of attending to what you think matters to you, when there’s a difference”.
Would a central example be someone focusing on trying to become popular, not realising that it is only instrumental towards feeling positive about themselves?
I wouldn’t say that’s a central example. But I think it’s a good one. Simple, clear, easy to access.
A much bigger and more central example to me is death. Most people don’t seem to have clearly seen their own mortality. They’re thinking about their own deaths like a Cartesian agent (i.e., not embedded — like the Alexei robot in this post). They know death happens to everyone eventually, and that it’ll happen to “them”, but it’s almost like they’re talking about a video game character from the outside. Like “Yep, at some point my little Mario figure there will stop when we turn off the gaming console.”
Something really big shifts when folk get a terminal diagnosis. It’s not just “Oh, I thought I had years, but now I have months/weeks/etc.” There’s a grappling-with that’s hard to convey to non-terminal folk. “The end” becomes subjectively real. Like “Oh shit, I’m going to experience this from behind my eyes, inside this skin.” It can feel very lonely and alienating, both because of the existential horror of the situation, but also because it becomes super clear how others are running strange scripts that just don’t make sense.
I include most immortalists and transhumanists in this. I’m not talking just about “Are you taking practical actions to deal with your mortality?” I mean that there’s a deep existential thing to grapple with. Even true immortals would have to orient to it: If you never ever die, then that means you’re facing eternity. That’s like something from behind your eyes.
(This is something even the literalist Christian mythos doesn’t properly address AFAICT: Great, you go to Heaven. Then what? Do you feel time passing? What’s that like? Goes on literally forever? Or does it… fade away at some point? Or do you leave time when you enter Heaven — in which case what’s the subjective experience of that? This isn’t just abstract philosophy. It’s a damn meaningful question!)
It turns out that most things don’t matter in the face of this. The whole thing with deathbed regrets amounts to “I’m sorry I didn’t see this sooner and take it seriously while I still had time.”
But it’s not something you’re likely to really get just by listening to elders and taking their advice. “Work less, connect with family more.” That’s good, and you’ll be grateful for that in the end! But you won’t understand why until you’ve really truly seen your own death clearly.
To the degree you do, it just won’t be tempting anymore to work instead of connect (for instance).
But that’s a really huge example. Maybe one of the biggest. Maybe maybe the biggest.
I do think the “Oh, I don’t actually care about being popular” thing you suggest is pretty good. It has the right quality of “Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t un-see it, and I’ve been seriously wasting my time on this.”
I just wanted to flesh this out a bit, to hint at the scope.
Hopefully that made some sense.
Thanks, that’s useful.
I’m honestly not sure. Something sits wrong about it. Some initial stabs at the intuition are:
It feels too binary. Like you’re either Looking or you’re not. That doesn’t seem right.
I think it might be several skills/senses folded into one. Or maybe something like a sense generator. (Lots of folk have trouble with conscious interoception, and that can be changed over time via a move I might have called “Looking” before.)
In practice, the relevant thing to develop seems to be something like capacity to receive the information rather than forcing oneself to seek it. I think intentionally seeing something beyond the usual ontology (“Looking”) emerges naturally from being both willing and capable, once you know what direction to point your attention in.
But the overall feel is something like… the whole thing makes it sound pompous. Like “Oho! Here’s this special magical skill!”
I mean, it is. It’s quite potent. I’ll sometimes mythically refer to this as “Mage Sight”, or break it down into subtypes of Sight (like Spirit Sight or Prime Sight).
But I think something screwy happens when there’s a social tone along the lines of “I see something you don’t! ’Cause I’m bothering to look at all!”
Even when there’s some truth to that, it’s unkind. It doesn’t honor the reason why the person hasn’t pointed their attention there yet.
Also, in many cases I can just say “You want to see? Okay. Look here, then here, then here.” And something clicks for my listener. Sometimes.
So, no reason to make the act of looking there something special. It’s just perception.
I assume the “here”s are placeholders for some specific things you would be saying to a particular listener. Can you give some examples of things that those places have held?
Sure. I’ll give just one for now. These take a while to name in writing, at least they way they occur to me.
Here’s a recurring one: I’ll be talking with someone in a coaching session, and I’ll pick up on how they’re “adding extra”.
This is something that’s easy to point out in live conversation or over video but I find tricky in writing. It’s a tone thing. If I look at the cup next to me and note “This is a cup”, I’m simply noting. There’s nothing extra. But I can add extra with an emotional tone of “I keep this cup next to me to hydrate myself, because I take care of myself, which is something GOOD I do.” I think this is easy to hear with some practice even if the words are identical (“This is a cup”).
Usually when someone is adding extra, they have some unrecognized pain. Most of the time this pain roots down in a universal thing — something I’ve come to call “the pain of duality”. It’s a basic split from something core. It’s roughly the same in everyone best as I can tell, but each person sort of holds and experiences it in their own way.
So when I see someone adding extra, and they’ve asked for my guidance, I’ll sometimes guide them to awareness of this core pain:
“Here it seems to me that you’re saying XYZ [like “I need to finish my thesis”], but you’re also adding something extra. It occurs to me as a tone of ABC [usually like there’s something wrong with them, or that their value is based on something external, or that something is existentially wrong]. There’s nothing wrong with that. I just imagine it’s uncomfortable. Do you see what I’m pointing at?”
We do some calibration, and I adjust based on their feedback (like if I was missing them in some key way). Then if I still see this core pain in them and they agree I’m seeing them clearly, on to the next step:
“Okay. Now, for me, in this spot I tend to feel PQR [something like “afraid something will go wrong if I don’t take care of this task”]. But that’s how the energy feels when it hits my thinking. Underneath that is something wordless. More like a creeping feeling, like reality itself is unsafe or unreliable.”
The point here is to give an example of what it means to feel the energy behind something in consciousness. If my first example doesn’t click for them, I’ll give a few others.
Usually they either notice the core pain or adjust my perception of them. More often the former. It tends to result in a direct kind of seeing, the same way you can directly “see” the feeling of your tongue in your mouth: it’s somehow more unmediated than thoughts about the thing are.
When I wrote Kenshō I might have called this “Looking at your soul pain”. It’s about seeing more directly instead of just thinking about mental models of the thing.
I just think that reifying Looking does something odd to this process. It’s just noticing what you experience when you look where someone is pointing. Even if that someone is yourself.
Hopefully that’s somewhat clear. With more time & effort I might have come up with a simpler example. (“Sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.”)
Thank you. This is cake! And not only cake, but a cake I have tasted before, although perhaps made to a variant of the recipe. I’m familiar with people adding on their own “stuff” to the things that happen. Personally, I would put less emphasis on their emotional reaction as the thing of importance than whatever they are believing in that moment, that the emotion is a reaction to. If the reaction is dysfunctional, unearthing the beliefs and tracing them to their origins in past events can be helpful in dissolving it.