"false ends" (messy first draft):

Very, very, very loosely speaking, you can sort of model a person as a collection of (a) potential actions, (b) means, and (c) ends (goals). The (b) means are sort of intermediate goals and, in the right contexts, (a) potential actions are realized as actual actions that are carried out. And, via actions, we advance through our ends towards our goals. And, the whole thing is sort of contextual, multithreaded, interruptible, and continuously being sculpted as we accomplish things, are surprised, daydream and think, and so on. (It’s important to not inappropriately reify any of this—-means/end chains are nebulous and interpenetrating, do we even have goals at all, are there even things, is thinking a natural kind, and so on. Yes and no. What is the evolving experience of this for you, in relation to what’s written here? and so on.).

Through meditation (and lots of other things), bottom up, felt and found from within, nebulously, the whole means/ends goal system (not separate from just the phenomenological field and the seeming of the world itself) sort of becomes more elegant and strategic, more omni-adaptible-antifragile, more multifinal and equifinal, more internally/intertemporally consistent, and so on. Experientially this is directly tied to increased wellbeing and other things.

In the course of this, what we can realize, over time, is that some means have sort of been mistaken for ends. These means still feel right/good/intrinsic (or desperately or boringly necessary). [This could loosely be considered a type of "layer" using terminology from elsewhere in the document.] But, one could call these means "false ends."

We could maybe call some of them "false" (or frozen in time, or beautiful but no longer needed), but, in any case, we want what we want, and we do what we do, until we don’t. It’s ok to want what you want! There will be reasons, even if those reasons are somewhat confused or frozen in time. And we don’t know if they’re "false" until we do, though we may have inklings. And, even if so, there’s going to be deep wisdom or at least self love and care, that needs to be honored and accounted for, for the system to fully move forward without getting wrapped around itself. So that means we sort of should be careful to not self-undermine, to wholeheartedly, heartfelt-ly allow ourselves to want what we want as long as we do; filamentary or full-bodied parts of many wants will be very stable, and others won’t, in the long run. In some cases, in any case, one has to fully accept a want before it’ll loosen and transform, anyway.

Sometimes these "false ends" are very sensible, in some sense, and whatever value we’ve created from them sort of gets rolled up into new, better plans and preferences. Other times, these "false ends" are more obviously destructive [or it's a combination], but there’s still something we deeply want (and that we are moving towards or trying to move towards, whether real-ish or illusory-ish) and/or fear (and that we are moving away from or trying to move away from, whether real-ish or illusory-ish) in there, at least for a while, or many years.

In any case, it can take a long time, thousands and thousands of hours of meditation, for sort of nebulous means/ends chain refactoring, and large-scale system refactoring, until means and ends behind the "false end" sort of become accessible and "surface" in a way that allows them to be spontaneously or reflectively sculpted, refactored, solved, dissolved, and so on.

If someone is not a meditator, the more usual thing is that a person may painfully resign on getting something (because it seems too hard to get, part of which might be because it has childhood-conceived or fantasy elements that may be very challenging or impossible to realize). Or, a person singlemindedly pursues getting the thing (fantastical pieces or not) and maybe alternates between exhiliration and defeat, if it’s hard but feels maybe possible. At times when it seems like they won’t get the thing, they might be depressed or devastated, and their goals might refactor just enough to have a new line of approach, but a deeper "false end" might still remain that will keep "generating" more proximal "false means/ends."

If a person is curious about discovering personal false ends or is just generally trying to solve/dissolve their problems in pursuit of love, safety, wealth, anything, then progress is usually some combination of solving/dissolving problems, evolution of preferences, acquiring capabilities, deep changes in "beliefs," and the seeming and appearing of the world. And, it’s also sort of failing over and over again, and at times feeling hopeless--in ways that ultimately stimulate discovery of false ends! And this is one of the ways things become more consistent over time, often nonmonotonically.

Meditation sort-of-allows-one-to-sort-of "fail faster" through "problem dissolution" as well as raising ["internal"] contradictions and inconsistencies and contention (loosely speaking), that prompt crises of meaning, desire, and so on. (It’s faster because there’s sort of that relatively efficient "inner" process that’s also happening, in addition to the "external process" of bumping into success, failure, novelties, and challenges in engagement with the world. People who aren’t meditators (and other things like therapy, journaling, etc.) sort of only mostly get the benefit of "external" learning, and meditators also get "internal" learning.)

And so those crises of meaning, desire, and so on make it more likely that a person (or their "system") will "need" (or choose to, or be prompted to), sometimes through deep, internal "settling and resettling and process of elimination" to surface those "false ends" (or just confused, frozen in time, beautiful but no longer needed, and so on).

Sometimes "false end" discovery has to happen safely in its own time in a very bottom-up ordered way. And, other times, it can be helpful to incline towards this, through systematically "letting go" of "efforting" in a way that allows for more "bandwidth" to move towards "false end" discovery (and this is its own many-layered puzzle over time). Perhaps usually, in any case, overall, all of this is a liminal process at the finest grain that happens in its own time, through correct application of global method.