a brief note on effort:

Some traditions, as almost the whole of their entire instructions, say something like "incline towards non-effort, effortlessness, even including this inclining."

And, that's it, that's the instruction. There's ways in which this sort of cuts to the heart of everything. The connection between this and main practice p2 is something loosely like:

effort ~= will + do
effortlessness ~= surrender + undo

And, indeed, long-term practice of p2 looks like more and more of the latter and less of the former.

So can you just tell someone "incline towards non-effort [...]" and leave it at that? Instead of, say, handing someone a huge document, like the one that this section is a part of? Sometimes!

It's not quite that simple, in that simple instructions usually come with a community and teacher. And, simple instructions can sometimes get lost in the whirlwind, or it's hard to remember to use them, or it's hard to maintain legitimate credence in their usefulness. And it can get experientially/intellectually tangly--it can be hard to align the simplicity of such instructions with frothy, reactive experience, that "actively responds" to one's interpretation of instructions. Hence, this entire document, as one possible practice framework.

Effort as such isn't much seen elsewhere in this document, though it's there in some places, so it seemed like a good idea to include an explicit topical section on it. Some people will find effort to be a clean and elegant experiential concept, and may put it to use at some time or another.

One last connection to other parts of the document: "Force" might perhaps be "effort + effort" or "effort on top of effort" or "effortful effort."