appendix 14: resolved (usually) temporary notes
contents:
temporary note 20230413:
Based on some remaining sticky stuff, I have increased my credence a bit (from nearly zero) that 4th jhana might be really important to "go all the way."
So, possibly, the right thing to do is to only meditate outside jhana for the purposes of becoming able to achieve 4th jhana, then do nearly all meditation from there on in 4th jhana. And then all other heuristics and everything else from my doc still applies (e.g. you can achieve jhana in a problematically layery way; you can layer in jhana, etc.)
The reason I'm wondering this, is that, because of the way that jhana may uncouple some body maps, it may permit certain reconfigurations much more flexibly than would otherwise be possible if someone was sort of in a more "normal" state and had all their body maps coupled up for going about doing stuff in the world.
Relatedly, this would make me less "gotta play with all the postures" and more chill about gently maintaining a more "correct" meditation postures, rather, "neutral" meditation postures, for correct refactoring and distributing of "stuff" through the entire body map, because this would be more flexibly workable, maybe, in jhana. However, prior to achieving 4th jhana, someone should then use whatever creative and weird meditation postures they needed, in that world. Maybe!
Credence from like 1% to idk 5%, so far, but I think I'm going to investigate. I'll update doc if I substantially change my mind about the importance of jhana.
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Further, I'm updating more on the dangers of meditating in "comfortable" postures, at least, that don't have good feedback loops, like cushy chairs and stuff that have "give" which makes it harder to know how muscle tension and things are redistributing through the body.
I may add more about this too. I have some investigating to do!
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If you have strong opinions about any of this, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Please email me at meditationstuff at gmail dot com.
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See updates to this note: temporary note 20231023:
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Resolution:
This is a bit of an anti-climax. Beyond an initial inkling over a couple weeks, I never really got a "go signal" to seriously reach-surrender-incline-wait for jhanic states---"no, don't do that, that's still definitely the wrong direction."
And it turned out that a super-duper logjam really did just need a lot more time and patience of both "business as usual" practice and many months of synaptic renormalization (i.e. sleep), and the stuff that wasn't moving did progressive unfold/move, in fractional waves over the course of another few months.
So, at least for me, nothing extra-special was needed, and I've still only spent like maybe ten minutes of practice time in a state that had I think all the checkbox qualities of the first jhana and also maybe ten minutes of practice time in a state that had I think all the checkbox qualities of the second jhana. (And then I think I've written elsewhere that the the fizzy, buzzy, bliss-y exhilaration was boring and structureless and felt like it pointed in the wrong direction of where I wanted to go. That was eighteen-ish years ago, I think. And more recently I experienced some infinite-ish/boundaryless space and consciousness, though flavored with a bunch of other stuff, including some third-person-perspective-ness, on and off for a few days. So anyway, I've experienced all sorts of temporary "altered states" that seemed integral to progress, but 99.9% of the time they haven't seemed particularly jhana-y, and I wasn't trying to get into any of them per se---my "wayfinding" practice took me into and out of them---so, anyway, I don't think most people ever need to cultivate jhana, all things being equal, though of course it may be extremely beneficial or helpful to some people. I generally nudge people away from it if they're not sure or ambivalent as to whether they should explore it, and if someone expresses some interest or curiousity in it I encourage them to explore it. But I still don't teach it, and I'm not qualified to teach it, etc.
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(I'll write something about cessations, fruitions, extended cessations, nirodha samapatti, "cycling" type stuff eventually. This has mostly or all sort of been in sort of in the same category as jhana for me. Had a couple experiences, wasn't that interesting, plenty of other stuff was as or more interesting and also more frequent, seemingly not critical for anyone but maybe useful or low-credence-perhaps even a karmic bottleneck for some minority subset of people. Wayfinding will almost surely bring someone to it and through it without them having to seek it out or read about it, but couldn't hurt at all to do so, all things being equal, modulo possible layering that would have to be undone later (not necessarily a bad thing cf. positive technical debt), and I would encourage people to seek information or teachers if they're interested, but it's not something I teach or am qualified to teach. [this paragraph duplicated in one other place])
/end temporary note
temporary note 20231023:
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I'm getting closer to changing the previous jhana temporary note (immediately below). Less and less credence that "light jhana proper 1-4" is necessary in general or in principle (and especially not "jhanic mastery 1-8") but perhaps it's practically critical for a subset of people; not sure---it would be nice to really clarify that. I do think that people who would benefit a little or a lot from jhana will be drawn to it (in my stuff/"framework" e.g. via p2 and the meta protocol, or anything, bottom-up, etc.). I think I hopefully mentioned somewhere that a very long time ago I investigated the first and second jhana, experienced some fizzy exhilaration and then effortless maintenance a couple times and got bored with it. More recently, based on landscape and trajectory, I thought I was maybe about to start spontaneously entering and spending at least, I don't know, one hundred hours, or a month or two, in fairly canonical jhana-esque states, with maybe some gentle inclining from me, but that never really happened except for the initial week or so of "distantly around the edges," and I moved out of that regime. In any case, back down to around 1% credence, as per above (below), but still not zero. That said there's a little bit more nuance to be said around altered states, that is all here in the doc as best I can tell but maybe could be gathered a bit better into one place and slightly clarified. This includes some material that's in what's currently labeled: "appendix 7: jhana and yoga nidra for long covid (and other things) (draft[...]". If you're interested in jhana, based on skimming, I'm guessing a decent place to start, written-resource-wise, would be "Right Concentration: A Practical Guide to the Jhanas" by Leigh Brasington, but I'm not sure. I think if I were starting now, I would, regardless of my gender, pick one male-ish presenting jhana teacher and one female-ish presenting jhana teacher, and go from there.
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I think the way I've been using "10,000 hours" is maybe still an underestimate. And my current estimate is now like 17,000-23,000, maybe. That said, I might want to keep 10,000 but increase the right-tailed variance or something a lot more. Just not enough data at this time about what's sort of empirically typical given distribution of bodymindworld structures in the world crossed with the material in this book (book thing). I need to go back over my own timeline and some vague published timelines and some sparse colleague and cohort stuff. And then I have to update all the places I use 10,000 hours. And then hopefully at some point it'll make sense to more carefully collect data over a decade from like 10-100+ people and publish that.
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Now that this 500k+word thing exists, which will continue to get cleaned up, one of my main interests now is increasingly the relationships between 1) "right view" and 2) nonmonotonicity and 3) minimalism and how to get people the smoothest possible (non-stalling!!!!!) ride with the least intellectual investment. So that is going to be a long-term thing for me and my writing and teaching, maybe.
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Update 20231024: Possibly clarifying in general: "I don't teach or practice jhana, and I mostly don't refer to primary source suttas, but I have HUGE respect for original systematic technical jargon and translations. This is cool: WHAT YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT JHĀNA & SAMĀDHI PUBLIC DRAFT (10 FEB 2022)" "What You Might Not Know about Jhāna & Samādhi (PUBLIC DRAFT).pdf" https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gT1rCJ3K4Hk_1cOAVi0CO6TSRLbvzcuX/ [Last accessed: 2023-10-24] https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1716851001423016257
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Resolution:
See the resolution of: temporary note 20230413
/end temporary note