Here is a list of all my public writings and videos.
If you want to do a dialogue with me, but I didn’t check your name, just send me a message instead. Ask for what you want!
lsusr
Karma: 16,322
“Victory is Instrumental”
I’ve never used a koan intentionally. I’ve used exactly one, and that was by accident. Non-Buddhist Eliezer Yudkowsky called me a fake frequentist on Twitter. That acted on me as a koan, and it contributed to the train wreck that was my second insight cycle. Too much insight too quickly. That said, my local Zendo is Rinzai, and they do use koans sometimes.
You are correct that the specific insight you’re pointing at isn’t mushin. Personally, I’d call it “interbeing”. “Oneness” or “non-duality” might work too.
I’m glad you got something out of my YouTube channel. I like how a camera makes it easier to better communicate certain kinds of attitudes compared to text. I have stuff I can improve too. Just last week, I had an insight into how I could be doing compassion better.
Ah, good point. I didn’t think about that. I think I got confused and made a mistake.
LessOnline was amazing. Thank you everyone who helped make it happen.
This is a good idea. Sometimes when I write serialized fiction, people ask how to subscribe to it. I had a personal hacked-together solution, but this is better.
All fixed. Thank you.
You may be ahead of me along this path. This story happened two years ago, and distant space dissolved even more recently than that. The mountains are not yet mountains again. They’re just shadows on a cave wall.
I’m sorry if my words were parsed as if I think that you are trying to
I didn’t feel you were adversarial at all. I just wrote “I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here” because I thought it was ironic to juxtapose against some other stuff.
As for the shoggoth being a nicer guy, I feel a full exploration is beyond the scope of this post. Short answer: According to the standard dogma, insight into the nature of consciousness tends to make a person more universally compassionate. The problem is this is often exaggerated into “Awakened people are perfect”, which is untrue.
I think Romeo Stevens has a healthy perspective. If you’re curious then try it out a little and see for yourself if you like the direction things seem to be going. If not, then don’t. Either way, words can only get you so far. It’s easier to pick up a brick with your hands than to philosophize over whether it is real.
Fixed, thanks.
I never noticed Mindfulness in Plain English is Theravada. It’s my favorite introductory book into this stuff.
Personally, my understanding is based on what might be a fundamentally different theory of mind. I believe there’s two major optimization algorithms at work.
Optimizer 1 is a real-time world model prediction error minimizer. Think predictive coding.
Optimizer 2 is is a operant reinforcement reward system. Optimizer 2 is parasitic on Optimizer 1. The conflict between Optimizer 1 and Optimizer 2 is a mathematical constraint inherent to embedded world optimizers.
That’s my theory of mind. You describe two competing reward systems. But reward systems belong in the domain of Optimizer 2. The way I look at things, meditation (temporarily?) shuts down Optimizer 2, which allows Optimizer 1 to self-optimize unimpeded.
Well, this is ironic. I’m not trying to persuade anyone to do anything here I’m just trying to present my perspective clearly, unambiguously, and entertainingly. If that turns people off from meditation, then great! I like helping other people make informed decisions.
But here’s the funny thing. My shoggoth without my mask happens to be a nicer guy than the mask who used to inhabit this brain. The shoggoth has fewer obstacles to compassion, because the shoggoth is less caught up in his own issues. In this sense, letting Yog-Sothoth devour your soul might be in accordance with your values.
If you want to be able to tap into compassion on demand, then metta (the Dalai Lama’s most general recommendation to a lay audience) could be helpful. That said, it comes with tradeoffs. Wanting to effect specific changes in the world often benefits from being a tangled ball of tension, and you may want to preserve that engine.
My experience is very different from yours. I came into this stuff already established as a material reductionist. I found meditation helpful to me, despite denying everything I consider supernatural.
I went to the hospital not because I started identifying more stuff as suffering. Identifying more stuff as suffering is par for the course. That’s meditation working as intended. I went to the hospital because I went too hard too fast and fried myself. It’s like weightlifting. Weightlifting makes my life better, but if you to heavy before you’re ready, you’ll injure yourself. That’s what happened to me. If you lift weights slowly and safely it’s fine.
As for whether stream entry is a good thing for most people, that is a complex topic beyond the scope of this post.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Waiting a long time before confirming insights is good. What would you consider a credible receipt?
Great comment!
TMI is important in my personal chronology because of how it got me into this stuff. I don’t actually recommend it. There are other books I prefer to TMI.
MCTB isn’t core to my practice, either. I would be surprised if Daniel Ingram’s approach didn’t produce more psychotic breaks than traditional systems. It’s dry, fast and hard. When I tried out Ingram-style vipassana, I felt like something was going wrong and went looking for a different technique instead. MCTB is more like a reference book for me—a common language to communicate with Western secularists. I’d prefer to explain things in weeb (Daoist and Zen) terms, but that just confuses people.
I never got into the Pali Canon. I tried reading a translation of the Visuddhimagga, but my translation contained claims that are provably wrong. (The book said you can light fires with your mind.) My personal practice comes from traditional Zen sources like The Three Pillars of Zen: Teaching, Practice, and Enlightenment by Philip Kapleau Roshi, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones by Paul Reps, and the poems of Ryukan.
Clarification time.
I’ve never seen a jhana junkie for myself, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t exist. I’m using the word “addictive” to refer to the results of a mental process that does not include jhana junkies. “Jhana junkie” is, I believe, one of many failure modes, but I believe jhana junkies do not technically constitute “addiction”, because they have a different root cause.
A particular risk factor for me is that I’ve always been unusually-susceptible to sleep deprivation messing up my cognition. Other people have different risk factors.
I don’t know who said it first, but there’s a Buddhist saying, “Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish.” Your perspective is in accordance with this.
Here’s software I wish existed. Some of them combine software + physical stuff into what might be a viable business.
A good Linux distro for the Surface tablet or iPad tablet.
A good GNU/Linux (non-Android) eink tablet with a Surface-quality or iPad-quality keyboard cover.
A good anime/manga-based Japanese language-learning software. Needs to run on arbitrary media. People have tried, and failed, to make this.
Software + manufacturing system that can get me bespoke clothing just from photographs/video of my body taken from a cell phone. Right now, even going into a physical store for made-to-measure clothes requires substantial trial-and-error to get it right.