a note on force (plus a brief mention of "redo-to-undo"):

[minimally edited placeholder transcript] I want to call this a brief note on Force. I've made it pretty clear in different places to not be forcy. And I don't think I'll define forcy, here. But, there's something about getting something to happen, something about threading a needle in a way that feels potentially bad. (Though it might only feel slightly bad! It might feel like necessary-tradeoff progress. Try to avoid needle-threading in the first place! It might almost never be worth it, if avoidable. Try to figure out or incline towards why it’s happening in the first place versus something cleaner.) There's potentially a sense of effort. It can be extreme, subtle, or somewhere in between.

But let’s say needle-threading has already happening. Force has already been used in the system. (Usually there’s some, or even a lot, even if there’s been minimal needle-threading. [And then, by definition-ish, there will have been force, if there has been needle-threading.] Force is often a strategy that gets used, in any case, maybe prior to even having started to meditate.)

There's a thing that the mind does, which is, in order to sort of do something for the last time or in order to sort of undo something, the mind kind of like replays it or re-does it, that one last time.

So if a person is shying away from force completely, but there's already force in the system, then there's a way in which it will be harder for that remaining force to get undone.

So sometimes it's important to surrender to or to go into that what is generally "not supposed to do," (in this case, force) so I don't want to say like globally don't be forcy. But sometimes subtly or not so-subtly ease into forcing, or already existing forcing, or allow latent or hidden forcing to appear.

And this "going into," or "allowing," or "surfacing," is for the purposes of sort of self-liberating that remaining forcing or dissolving it or undoing it or undoing its leading edge.

So this is nuancing on top of the general but not universal principle of avoiding forciness or forcing. (And this "redo-to-undo" principle/heuristic also more generally applies. See p2 for more pith pointers to this.)

Note on needle-threading or threading the needle: One can use needle-threading as sort of a neutral term, and there can be good versions and bad versions. Neutrally, the term is intended to invoke a sense of "‘correctly’ navigating a narrow path forward." Good versions might be careful, gentle, precise that lead to ultimately stably expanded optionality. Bad versions are sort of "carefully, precisely making a globally-net-negative tradeoff, making seeming local progress but also ultimately making more work than if had done something different." This latter version might sometimes feel like "doing something that’s alongside or causing joint-grinding muscle tension, somewhere." Use of the meta protocol can help to determine whether a good version or bad version is happening or if it might be better to be doing something else entirely. [The opposite of needle-threading might be "breadth-first-ing" [cf. depth-first-ing, too]. Both/all can be good, for various reasons, at different times.]