Having read Ingram's Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (MCTB) clarified for me that key features on "path" are artifacts from persistently blocked info flows seekers are specifically advised to ignore. The description of 3 characteristics is clear enough for me to feel like I can articulate disagreement:
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Jargon and Attachment
Lacanian demande misattributes existential confusion as object-level needs. Adorno's jargon reifies object-level needs as the fundamental human condition. Demande is jargon.
Continue readingHoney Butter and the Grain War
Ate a bunch of butter topped with raw honey and salt yesterday, and I feel just fine today. Increasingly impressed by Dave Asprey, who seems to hold an unusual posture with respect to health that involves just orienting towards value, not picking sides.
Paleo / low-carb / carnivore cluster is biased towards hunter-gatherer autonomy, against agricultural norms and social control, macho, individualistic. Vegan / puritan / low-fat / Kellogg cluster ends up promoting rules that favor people with compliant metabolism. Butter is very clearly an agricultural food, but has the desirable performance and health attributes that the *logic* of paleo/keto/carnivore points towards. Honey violates crude versions of this logic but empirically is just good. Noticing both as good requires equipoise.
Continue readingSelf-Criticism vs Self-Blame
"There is nothing wrong with you" is a helpful but false statement from within a frame that reifies personal wrongness. But we can just decompose personal wrongness into its components!
Continue readingInner Ring as Adversary
Inner rings, as described in CS Lewis's eponymous lecture, structurally orient around a kind of evasiveness. In this Twitter thread, Venkatesh Rao somehow evades something extremely explicit and basic in Lewis's description, but correctly criticizes Lewis for his own kind of evasion of a sort of apex inner ring.
Continue readingFloating into Awareness
Finally getting something out of sensory deprivation float tank time. Most recently went in for 90m, spent first 30-45 minutes just paying mindful awareness to my defense mechanisms anxiously craving reference points, and then I started spontaneously exploring range of motion for my left arm, gradually adding integration with other motion. This is a LOT like my experience of solo MDMA trips. I don't think I could do this work without prep work in Feldenkrais's modality (most value coming from solo ATM practice from his book, and most of the rest from a single guided-meditation session from a top Guild instructor.)
Continue readingWho controls the vertical? Who controls the horizontal?
Recently I've been investigating a phenomenological distinction between two different kinds of vision.
The first is horizontal, peripheral, reactive, associated with "shifty-eyed" lateral eye movement, evasive behavior, functioning socially as a sort of stimulus-response machine, treating bids from others as a kind of social threat to be either hidden from or deflected by making the appropriate response. Herd and prey animals have widely spaced eyes, the better to see threats from many angles. Call it Epimetheus.
The second is more vertical, centered, involves activation of the area around the "inner/third eye," has better lookahead both visually and mentally, and can have active preferences and intentions around the future. It feels "taller," like it sticks out more. Call it Prometheus.
Prometheus is photopic, Epimetheus is scotopic.
Continue readingCivil Law and Political Drama
The purpose of this essay is to clarify to YOU, the mind reading this essay, your relation to law, your characteristic blind spot around adversaries, and what sorts of processes are competing for attention in the humans you’re instantiated through.
Continue readingChildhood Memory
It feels almost like my childhood was a mashup of the movie It,* and Never Let Me Go.**
I've been coming to terms with just how much of my childhood self is inaccessible to me. Last night I had an apparently deeply triggering conversation with a childhood friend. Afterwards, a more recent friend managed to clarify the extent to which I had simply lost access to my perspective as a child.
Today I made some progress, and got some detail on things like:
There wasn't a binary compartmentalization between books (real) and mundane life (fake), there was some kind of more complex thing going on where I was conditioned to let reality slide out of focus for my intellect so that I could implement a Pass As Normal procedure. Passing As Normal isn't actually an opinion about reality, just a behavior.
My friends and I were definitely aware that something was wrong with the grownups, but it somehow didn't feel available to discuss the problem directly. We were being kept in this locally humane setting by adults who were trying to be kind to us now but definitely expected us to eventually go and participate in the world that had dimmed their inner light.
Continue readingD is for COVID
We now have an RCT for megadoses of vitamin D as treatment for diagnosed cases of COVID-19 infection. According to Chris Masterjohn's summary:
Continue reading50% of the control group (13 people) required admission to the ICU. Only 2% of those in the vitamin D group (one person) required admission to the ICU.