practice preliminaries › timeline, mindset, trajectory, harm

a failure mode:

I’ve talked above about "intensity" and "really committing," but this can lead people into a very common failure mode. So this might be one of the most important subsections you’ll read in this entire document.

When people first start using this material, they might do a thing that could be called any of the things below:

magical button-pushing
excessive-faith meditation
superstitious meditation
"meditate-and-pray"

What these mean, and they all refer to the same thing, is to sort of be doing one’s best to follow the instructions maybe to the letter, but not trying to understand and enact the instructions to their very essence or core. Even if one is using the meta protocol, and the meta meta protocol, one can still be doing something like this.

It’s better to maybe pretend that the instructions are complete shit, a lossy telephone game, that’s pointing at a real thing (or is it), but something got hopelessly garbled. And, you want the value, but you should then interact with the instructions with the intention to find "the real instructions behind the instructions." This isn’t a new idea. But, even where some parts of this document are vague, some parts are crystal clear (in some sense), albeit hard to parse or initially interpret. And that (arguable) clarity can make it seem like "all one has to do is follow the instructions," which just isn’t true.

I tell people they would ideally create their own instruction document, that leaves out none of the essential complexity that this document is pointing to, but is entirely in their own words...

Without this section, I think the written instructions do eventually lead people to the "real instructions," but hopefully reading this will make that go faster.

I want to emphasize, though, that ALMOST EVERYONE inevitably starts with magical button-pushing. One shouldn’t be ashamed of this. Some percentage of people just won’t be able to help themselves. Not-being-able-to-help-it, to not do it, of course, is why we meditate in the first place. Finding one’s way to the real instructions, over tens or hundreds of hours, is just part of the thing.

Be precise, patient, and gentle.