deep okayness seems to be tractable and it is my favorite interest
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meditation is able to relieve stress by a surprisingly huge amount but it's hard to explain this bc the common misconceptions are either "smth smth panacea, it cures all problems and you get bliss 24/7" or "smth smth basic mindfulness, just a tiny bit less anxious"
you never get true infinite bliss but you do get very surprising improvements along some dimensions of mental wellbeing which are worth sharing and talking about
one analogy i often like to use here is:
- imagine that your everyday level of anxiety/neuroticism is 10x more than what you have right now (or just imagine the most anxious person you know, or someone like that, maybe like let's say very frequent panic attacks or very frequent anxiety attacks or something, etc)
- then imagine that you did something that relieved that anxiety back to what you might call a "normal healthy level" (like let's say you did meditation or therapy or medication or friends or finances or something, and you stopped unnecessarily worrying about things, now you only worry as much as a "normal healthy person")
- at this point (even *without* crazy meditative progress) you might say something like "whoa so much of my previous emotions were mostly just unnecessary tension!" or like "whoa so much of my previous sense of self was just me worrying about things!" or like "whoa im able to see things so much more clearly now!"
- ((at this point, you will still feel sadness/grief about things, you will still care about friends, you will still be angry when something needs protection. you will still have many emotions (maybe even a bigger emotional range) but it will just be a lot less neurotic and a lot clearer/vibrant/brighter/calmer with less friction, because your level of anxiety is now only a "normal healthy level" instead of an extreme level. and you will probably be super thankful that you are now a lot less stressed, but you also might just start taking it for granted bc this is now just what you're used to nowadays.))
- now imagine most people you know are still at that 10x extreme level of anxiety and you're now at a "normal healthy level". you'd probably feel pretty passionate about telling people that they can stop feeling anxious all the time! the solution won't solve all their problems and make them infinitely happy forever, but they will stop being super duper stressed with all their panic attacks that are super crippling to their life. they'll still have normal human problems and human emotions, but they just won't have all their crazy anxiety attacks anymore that derailed their life
- then, now imagine that this situation hypothetically continues even further: you find out that this anxiety reduction stuff is actually able to go further, like you find out apparently your idea of "normal healthy level of anxiety" is actually someone else's "extreme 10x level" so you decide to progress a bit further and reduce your anxiety even less. again, you still have all the normal emotional range (maybe even more emotional range) but you again say things like "wow my previous self was mostly just tension / wow my previous emotions were mostly just tension / wow [...]"
- now imagine this happens *multiple* times, you keep reducing your anxiety drastically from an "extreme level" to a "normal healthy level" and then you keep finding people who are actually less and less anxious (while still being able to act effectively in the world, still care about people, still have a range of emotions, etc)
- this is the claim of many meditators! (and then they document it with many interesting phenomenological descriptions and poetic descriptions, etc)
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"Dude, like if you can't even feel regulated sitting beside an imaginary perfect ideal attachment figure, then why the hell did you expect that you could feel regulated sitting alone with yourself, your imperfect judgy self who kind of doesn't even like you?"
Imagine hiring a coach who hated you. This is what it’s like to attempt to coach yourself on self-rejection
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people don't tell you when you feel safe, the rest of the meaning stuff comes for free.
i don't believe society has a meaning crisis. i believe society has a basic safety, love, and esteem crisis
-- @AskYatharth
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more:
> people don't tell when you feel unsafe, the highest level of meaning from any philosophy book is still going to feel disembodied and uneasy
> people don't tell you that feeling of being numb all the time has a name, and the name isn't "meaning crisis", it's "safety crisis"
source: x.lingyaoai.com/AskYatharth/status/174…
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what if you're really adhd/cptsd and you wanna try becoming productive but willpower doesn't seem to work, so you research what are the prerequisites to being productive, and you realize that emotional management seems to be important (bc youre avoiding your most important work bc it gives you the most extreme panic, for wtvr reason), so you research what makes people good w their emotions and you find meditation/therapy - but you can't really meditate or even relax properly for like 5 minutes without feeling overwhelmed, so you try to figure out wtf is going on there, and you end up debugging a large amount of your self-hate w/ some emotional exercises and that makes meditating easier, but you still get overwhelmed by trying to relax, so you try to keep figuring out WTF is going on here, and eventually you land on this hypothesis that fixing insecure attachment seems to be an incredibly important thing that makes therapy/meditation a lot easier (bc it's one of the first things you develop that skews how you see the world and how you see yourself, like apparently you develop a representation of "is the world safe" and "what happens when i need something" when youre 0-12 months old before you develop the narrative memory system at 2-4 years), and you hear that one exercise that is really effective for this is imagining fictional ideal parent figures who gave you incredible safety, attunment, soothing, delight, and support, and so you try this exercise and it feels like you're finally processing this huge backlog of rage and sadness and frustration that wanted to come out and was clogging up everything (including the productivity) and you are optimistic that this might work and might solve your biggest bottleneck to working hard on good things
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one way of explaining the surprisingly huge effects of meditation on stress relief:
-imagine that your everyday level of anxiety/neuroticism is 10x more than what you have right now (or just imagine the most anxious person you know, or someone like that, maybe like let's say very frequent panic attacks or very frequent anxiety attacks or something, etc)
- then imagine that you did something that relieved that anxiety back to what you might call a "normal healthy level" (like let's say you did meditation or therapy or medication or friends or finances or something, and you stopped unnecessarily worrying about things, now you only worry as much as a "normal healthy person")
- at this point (even *without* crazy meditative progress) you might say something like "whoa so much of my previous emotions were mostly just unnecessary tension!" or like "whoa so much of my previous sense of self was just me worrying about things!" or like "whoa im able to see things so much more clearly now!"
- ((at this point, you will still feel sadness/grief about things, you will still care about friends, you will still be angry when something needs protection. you will still have many emotions (maybe even a bigger emotional range) but it will just be a lot less neurotic and a lot clearer/vibrant/brighter/calmer with less friction, because your level of anxiety is now only a "normal healthy level" instead of an extreme level. and you will probably be super thankful that you are now a lot less stressed, but you also might just start taking it for granted bc this is now just what you're used to nowadays.))
- now imagine most people you know are still at that 10x extreme level of anxiety and you're now at a "normal healthy level". you'd probably feel pretty passionate about telling people that they can stop feeling anxious all the time! the solution won't solve all their problems and make them infinitely happy forever, but they will stop being super duper stressed with all their panic attacks that are super crippling to their life. they'll still have normal human problems and human emotions, but they just won't have all their crazy anxiety attacks anymore that derailed their life
- then, now imagine that this situation hypothetically continues even further: you find out that this anxiety reduction stuff is actually able to go further, like you find out apparently your idea of "normal healthy level of anxiety" is actually someone else's "extreme 10x level" so you decide to progress a bit further and reduce your anxiety even less. again, you still have all the normal emotional range (maybe even more emotional range) but you again say things like "wow my previous self was mostly just tension / wow my previous emotions were mostly just tension / wow [...]"
- now imagine this happens *multiple* times, you keep reducing your anxiety drastically from an "extreme level" to a "normal healthy level" and then you keep finding people who are actually less and less anxious (while still being able to act effectively in the world, still care about people, still have a range of emotions, etc)
- this is the claim of many meditators! (and then they document it with many interesting phenomenological descriptions and poetic descriptions, etc)
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corbin retweeted
you never get true infinite bliss but you do get very surprising improvements along some dimensions of mental wellbeing which are worth sharing and talking about
one analogy i often like to use here is:
- imagine that your everyday level of anxiety/neuroticism is 10x more than what you have right now (or just imagine the most anxious person you know, or someone like that, maybe like let's say very frequent panic attacks or very frequent anxiety attacks or something, etc)
- then imagine that you did something that relieved that anxiety back to what you might call a "normal healthy level" (like let's say you did meditation or therapy or medication or friends or finances or something, and you stopped unnecessarily worrying about things, now you only worry as much as a "normal healthy person")
- at this point (even *without* crazy meditative progress) you might say something like "whoa so much of my previous emotions were mostly just unnecessary tension!" or like "whoa so much of my previous sense of self was just me worrying about things!" or like "whoa im able to see things so much more clearly now!"
- ((at this point, you will still feel sadness/grief about things, you will still care about friends, you will still be angry when something needs protection. you will still have many emotions (maybe even a bigger emotional range) but it will just be a lot less neurotic and a lot clearer/vibrant/brighter/calmer with less friction, because your level of anxiety is now only a "normal healthy level" instead of an extreme level. and you will probably be super thankful that you are now a lot less stressed, but you also might just start taking it for granted bc this is now just what you're used to nowadays.))
- now imagine most people you know are still at that 10x extreme level of anxiety and you're now at a "normal healthy level". you'd probably feel pretty passionate about telling people that they can stop feeling anxious all the time! the solution won't solve all their problems and make them infinitely happy forever, but they will stop being super duper stressed with all their panic attacks that are super crippling to their life. they'll still have normal human problems and human emotions, but they just won't have all their crazy anxiety attacks anymore that derailed their life
- then, now imagine that this situation hypothetically continues even further: you find out that this anxiety reduction stuff is actually able to go further, like you find out apparently your idea of "normal healthy level of anxiety" is actually someone else's "extreme 10x level" so you decide to progress a bit further and reduce your anxiety even less. again, you still have all the normal emotional range (maybe even more emotional range) but you again say things like "wow my previous self was mostly just tension / wow my previous emotions were mostly just tension / wow [...]"
- now imagine this happens *multiple* times, you keep reducing your anxiety drastically from an "extreme level" to a "normal healthy level" and then you keep finding people who are actually less and less anxious (while still being able to act effectively in the world, still care about people, still have a range of emotions, etc)
- this is the claim of many meditators! (and then they document it with many interesting phenomenological descriptions and poetic descriptions, etc)
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dan brown was onto something, safety seems so important and misdiagnosing a need for safety seems to create a lot of retraumatization..?
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oh my gosh if your parents are not attuned to your proper developmental skill tree (brutely asking hard challenges of you that you are not actually capable of yet) --> then you may probably reenact this to yourself (smth smth willpower "corbin, why arent you just doing [thing that you arent actually able to do yet]") --> high expectations and low success rate --> retraumatization
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pop buddhism will say desire is the root of suffering and meditator nerds will say no actually it’s more precise to say tanha is the cause of dukkha
but it’s really more like “it turns out that if you look really closely (helpful to have some amount of concentration and relaxation) then you notice that you’re doing a certain kind of clenching like 10 times a second and you notice it feels bad in a certain way but it’s such an automatic reflex that it’s kinda hard to stop doing it but over time you do eventually do less and less of it and you go through these radical surprising improvements in certain aspects of mental wellbeing (you might even say poetic things like whoa now i feel like i am held in gods hands 24/7 and it was all about accepting the present moment and letting go and now i feel radically better but also interestingly i still have lots of normal emotional issues and im still a normal human in many ways but i feel radically fundamentally okay now in a way that just wasnt shining through before) — and idk why it’s like this but yeah it seems to be reproducible bc u kinda hear very similar stories from everyone who has spent thousands of hours deliberately training specific mental skills to get better at increasingly subtle versions of accepting the present moment (i.e. what u might call an advanced meditator)”
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@TVachaW also wrote a useful counterpoint to address some of the problems with my tweet’s perspective, see here!
Meditation absolutely can give you a sense of fundamental OKness, whilst the rest of your behavioural-motivation system goes more or less untouched.
You absolutely can use it to continue pursuing our society’s default consumerist-hedonist-materialist goals with more ease and less grabbiness.
You can do all this without ever examining the underlying desires, motivations, values, intents, behaviours, and ethics that originally put all the grabbiness in motion.
Doing so can be a worthwhile goal in its own right and help people live much happier lives.
That’s all great.
But to think this is the fundamental goal of Buddhadharma is drastically wide of the mark.
Then to think this is actually a *more advanced* view than what Buddhadharma is driving at represents levels of hubris rarely seen outside 21st century Bay Area culture.
The thing is, contrary to what the QT’d post below says, none of this is what the actual “advanced meditators” who dedicated their lives full time to nothing but spiritual practice for decades report (ie those who founded and have preserved the traditions).
Such people for thousands of years have reported that there are much deeper layers to practice, where one’s entire system of intent, motivation, desire, values, ethics and behavioural tendencies get utterly transformed.
It’s not just a case of continuing to live by Californian consumerist-materialist values but being less grabby-grab whilst you go about it.
It’s ultimately about having insights that fundamentally shape your entire view of what is desirable, what is valuable, what the good looks like, how you should behave, how you should treat others, what is worth wanting, what your fundamental identity is and even what life and death themselves are, as well as what lies beyond death.
There’s a reason why the Buddha didn’t just return to his awesome pleasure palace after his enlightenment and simply get back to consuming experiences but with less grabby grabness or with a “fundamental OKness” whilst he did it.
@corbindreams - I don’t mean to be disrespectful to you. You’re a talented writer and I enjoy some of your writing on meditation. Some of your descriptions of the phenomenology of meditation - including some in this post - are illuminating. But what you are describing here is absolutely not the end point of the Buddhist project(s), much less a more advanced distillation of it.
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everyone talks about how to meditate but no one talks about how there’s actually a lot of prerequisites to even be able to sit down quietly in the first place w/o feeling an extreme need to actively numb yourself with an external coping mech like phone or food or romance or work
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