but is it meditation? (a dialogue between J and Mark):

J

a couple more things that come to mind maybe for future versions. excuse the ramble-i-ness

do you think it could be useful/important to table set a little bit? something along the lines of (but not necessarily this, just something in this direction): this will likely feel different from previous meditation you’ve done, if you’ve done some. i think past versions had something like this. and kind of for the reason I mentioned in [...]: I could see people spending a fair amount of time trying to shoehorn this practice into their prior conception of what meditation practice is. i guess p2, p8, and p1 stand a good chance of addressing this directly without it having to be written out. i wonder how useful or not some making this explicit would be. :thinking_face:

and i also wonder if there’s some basic basic theory of mind that is good to mention right off-the-bat. it may very well not be a good thing, i’m not sure. here’s the kind of theory that might be good imo, for example:

`there’s like some kind of universal gradient/basin/attractor that the mind/brain is always, always, alway, always trying to fall down. one single direction, which might be why correct meditation works elegance, free energy minimization, dunno

or

how the mind is really smart in some ways, sometimes/often moreso than the "personality" (i might be butchering the thing but that’s how i remember it)

and lots of little related things like this

for example wrt to the above, knowing stuff like this has made it easier for me to trust that the right things are happening at times, or trust that my mind can do good things, and stuff like that. depending on the models of mind people are running on i could expect there to be a lot of self fighting and self flailing and not self trusting in ways that might be bad. for example, if you’re coming from a tmi practice you might believe that your mind is this thing you need to wrangle, that you know better than, stuff like that. little bits of theory like this could help people understand how the practice works, why it’s different than practice they’ve done before, and possibly have the needed faith to try it out for 100+ hours

J continues

The way I've been orienting to [this protocol versus other meditation protocols] myself recently is not through the meditation frame (though it is that and becomes that feel again eventually) but through the "going all the way to the bottom and from first principles as it were figuring out how to use a mind" frame, or something in the ballpark of that

It just cuts through a lot of the "is this meditation", or "am I doing the right thing" stuff, if you forget about meditation for a couple months and pretend it's not that, or something (At least in my experience)

I guess this is a bit of a tangent now

Mark

Cool. It is really different than [other] meditation [procedures] in a lot of ways. [...]

J

yeah. i definitely think it is meditation. i'm probably being critically unappreciative, but there's a way in which other meditations are more narrow/constrained and this stuff is still meditation but wholeheartedly takes on the whole mind and every part of it. maybe it's all the same in the limit or something.

the concern is that i think i probably spent something like 50 - 100 hours (total total total total total ballpark) trying to make [this protocol into] what i understood to be meditation, or at least hours where this was on my mind and undermining practice, in a way. and even afterwards there have been and has been threads in my mind like "huh this doesn't feel like meditation so i must be doing something wrong". of course i think a lot of this is par for the course and part of tacking towards good and tacking towards better models of mind and meditation. like why does it feel wrong? why is one thing more meditation than another? but maybe with the right upfront expectation setting there's a way to just nip the shoehorning in a bud and save people time

[...]

Mark

trying to make this what i understood to be meditation

how does that look? can you say more? want to innoculate (and i'm sorry)

J

so after like n years knowing about tmi and noting and related practices, i had implicit models about how meditation works. the general general shape of the model was something like: your mind is a tool/machine, and you need to make it sensitive tool/machine such that one day it can finally pick up on some details of experience that lead to insight. step 1) develop powerful tool [powerful experienced as stable in the case of tmi, and perceptive in the case of noting]. step 2) use tool to examine reality

importantly nowhere in this model was there a sense that meaningful progress was being made up until the point of insight

Mark

so like train tool/build microscope, then use microscope? does that simplify it too much?

J

nope that's pretty much exactly it

Mark

hmm k

J

i'm guessing this is common, but i'm not positive

Mark

i think ingram sort of implies this

J

and there was a model for what made a good microscope too

M

like if you just use your microscope enough

J

i think it was the model of what i thought made a good miscroscope that was especially problematic

Mark

so then ppl like spend 1000 hours examining the blobs behind their closed eyes

i think it was the model of what i thought made a good miscroscope that was especially problematic

say more?

J

sure. and eventually we should try to figure out why it is possible to have success with that metaphor. like, is it success in spite of the misconception? or is something else happening? [and ofc not everyone does have success and stuff]

Mark

like, is it success in spite of the misconception?

i currently think so

noting is close enough that people can slip into doing the right thing, especially with a teacher who succeeded

J

so as mentioned with both noting and concentration, even tho the skills are different, what a successful microscope looks like in both cases involves something in the ballpark of mindfulness or "with it ness" "with it ness" that builds up into long interrupted stretches of "with it ness" over time and so if you're doing one of these practices it's getting into one of these stretches that makes it feel like you're finally doing it right "fuck, i'm really with the breath." or "fuck, i'm really with these vibrations" something about sustained continuity of a thing over time seems to be the thing

Mark

so like almost indiscriminately maxing out continuous contact with bare sensations, sort of?

i guess that's what you said

J

yeah yeah that's in there too

and with this stuff, it doesn't seem like striving for uniterruptedness is important (until it happens on it's own), and it seems like there's plenty of room for non purely sense stuff too

Mark

(noting that i myself thought exactly all of this. pretty much exactly.)

yeah

J

and so it didn't really feel like i was developing a microscope

Mark

ah, ok

J

yeah. even people who ahven't meditated before often have a model as it being about "no thinking", or "staying with the present"-ness all of [that] is distinct from [this protocol]

(noting that i myself thought exactly all of this. pretty much exactly.)

oh cool! affirming yay

Mark

yup

J

Actually I just kind of remembered something funny. I remember at SFDC in the fall with Shinzen, you were telling [S] and I something like, "I think the updates that happen leading up to streamentry are as important as streamentry". And I remember internally thinking: "what do you mean updates before streamentry??" In quite a literal sense I thought streamentry was like a single belief toggling from off to on (preceded by no updates of significance).

I think this sort of all or nothing thinking is quite common.

[... I]t also bounced off in the most important way because I had no mental model of how practice could work that would have being patient, locally-oriented, not obsessed with the supramundane as being the correct strategy. The reaction was something like, "ok [...] that's very cool [...] but there's still this streamentry insight waiting for me out there and nothing will be good until that"

So yeah, in many ways, I think for many meditators and nonmeditators, a very big update will be that updates happen along the way and the mind gets better and more liveable along the way. and what a relieving update too. being super explicit and not at all sidelining this (as you're doing) will go a long way to that end.

For this all to work, for the claim that updates happen along the way to be credible, one need's a place for those updates [i.e. mundane insights] to live.

[...]

I'm sure all of [other] teachers would claim that "things are supposed to get better along the way, and if they're not, you're missing the point." But I blame their implied models of mind and implied models of progress! You can claim that "things are supposed to get better along the way" but if you're not providing the right model of mind/progress or otherwise really really emphasizing it, it's just going to bounce out of students brains and sound like hollow wishful thinking or something. So in summary heh: good models of mind and progress are super duper helpful and consequential to practice

[...]