entrenchment and active occlusion (layering); shoulds; pitfalls of inferred "mental actions":
Along with "intensity" and "really commiting" and "magical button-pushing," is sort of "creeping unreflective desperation and unresponsiveness." Often we start meditating because, whether we can put our finger on it or not, something is terrible, horrific somewhere. There is something really, really, really, really bad. And, the first impulse of the mind, in some sense, once the mind gets just enough knowledge to start making changes to itself, is to reflexively, in some sense, run as far away from the bad thing as it possibly can.
And that running away, paradoxicaly, tragically is exactly the wrong thing that ultimately needs to happen. (That’s often the case but not always. Sometimes the "running away" is the only way the mind can pick up tools to finally turn around and come back.
In any case, whether it’s good or bad, that running away will sometimes freeze not just that deep dark bad thing (or, usually, a bunch of deep, dark bad things) but will "freeze" a whole bunch of other things as well.
That is, a meditator can become more rigid, more neurotic, more belligerent, more unresponsive, more "unspiritual" before things turn around. And some of that rigidity might not go away for until the meditator is close to the "very end." Or it’ll painfully come and go in ways that are distressing to both the meditator and the people around them, hopes and expectations dashed, over and over again.
So, this section is both for caution and expectation setting but also to possibly make it a bit less likely that something like this will happen. Judicious use of the meta protocol and the meta meta protocol will help.
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Another way to look at all this is, at a very different level of abstraction, "don’t even try to make yourself a certain, very specific way. And, even more so, don’t ever try to move forward without understanding why you’re not already that way." Beware, beware, "I should just be able to do X..."
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It might be helpful to explore further where some "shoulds" partially even come from. This is one possibility:
We model what we "should" be able to do, now or eventually, in part based on observations of other people, especially people that we sort of tag as "peers."
One issue with this is that we sometimes then "[...] compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel" (attributed to Steve Furtick?), and the discussion below applies a bunch to this as well.
But, what I want to focus on is something like "inferred 'mental actions'" (both the whole thing and the subphrase 'mental actions' each have quotes around them).
So what happen is that we don't just emulate other people's overt behavior and routines, as best we can figure out what those are, such as their workout habits, practice habits, apparent uses of "reasoning" or "logic," their athletic, artistic, or musical form, etc., but we might also infer sort of "what they're doing with their mind," and then we try to do that too. (Of course, in a bunch of senses, there isn't real "mind" or even "bodymind", cf. "no mind anywhere," etc., etc., etc., and that indeed is part of the problem, too.)
So, we sort of pair external and internal actions, in mimicry of people around us. Sometimes this works great! But in general it's very difficult to know what other people are "doing" with their "minds," and there are even /some/ senses in which this isn't even possible. And/but, even if we couldknow what they're doing, it often won't be right for us.
--oh, all things being equal, experts probably are doing similar things with their minds (See Herbert Simon's Protocol Analysis!), and, indeed, world class performers (and often mediate performs) are probably using sort of the same brain networks--
But people usually don't start out that way. Trying to do expert-y things or peer things, right off the bat, or ever (depending on initial interpretation!) might not mesh well with the "regime" one's mind is currently in! It's not just that language, at the very very very least for beginning meditators, is sort of seated differently for everyone, and we interpret language use differently, sometimes wildly differently (say when we're not just inferring, but someone even describes what they're doing, explicitly or implying, and we try to do the same), but that, sort of, to a first approximation, "everything" is seated differently between different people. Everyone is sort of running their own constellation of "(embodied) (body)mind functions." And/but, of course, of course, there are "supervenient" or "supervening" isomorphisms and homomorphisms between people, especially amongst peers, and within cultures, and within workplaces!!! But, sort of, the underlying "layering structure" is often different, the "sub-functions" are often different(, the "concepts" are often different), the precise, dynamic constellation of brain network/substrate is often different, and so on. I'm maybe actually overstating it a bit; there's actually quite a bit of convergence in how people "use their brains," say if you look at a bunch of right-handed males of the same age who all speak the same language, for various tasks (and so on), with fMRI or EEG or something. Tons of phenotypic homology leading to "functional homology." But there's also plenty of divergence, too. There's still lots of software divergence on top of that hardware, and there's often at least a little (genetic and developmental) hardware divergence, too, or a lot.
People who have some especially non-normative very-soon-after-the-first-moments-of-consciousness "first concepts" or people who have subtle or not-so-subtle neurological divergence, are maybe often going to have a bad time trying to emulate people as children, tweens, teens, and adults for at least some narrow set of things that would otherwise make use of what in this case is non-normative sub-functions or "substrate." In the former case, when it's "just" software, then that's sort of, for better and worse, "fixable" (bad choice of words), I think, with the usual... ten thousand hours of meditation. With neurological divergence, I think, it might sometimes be hard to ultimately do some synergistic collections of things that some people to be able to seamlessly do (like someone who is good at a bunch of sports)--a person with some non-normativity might (initially painstakingly) indeed get to the point of costless, effortless skill (that, too, doesn't interfere with other skills) with one sport but not have a lot of tranfer to other sports, or something.
But, at least at first, often, something is not "going the same way" as it does for lots of other people. And where things can go unfortunately worse is when someone "doubles down" on, potentially conceptually ill-posed, inferred mental actions. And then if one doesn't seem to be getting the same result (even when sometimes all that's needed is patience), that can lead to "shoulding," as in, "this should work!"
And that can potentially lead to forcing and self-hatred strategies that can get really layered in. But of course these-all can also be undone, with time! But it can get very compounding; layers on layers with possible mostly normal "phenotype" at the bottom or something more neurologically divergent, sometimes.
But in any case, even in cases of "divergence," as best I can tell, "buddha mind" still applies, meaning self-acceptance, structural fluidity, etc., etc., etc., etc., is fully available. "It won't be the life you 'thought you wanted' but it will be fully retrospectively be the life you do want, or that frame will be completely dissolved." Sometimes it might be a bit of a longer road, though, because a greater likelihood of lots of "switchback layering." That said, for better and worse, I think such people are often more likely to both pick up meditation and then take it all the way. Opportunity costs, there, but also extraordinarily good stuff that lots of people wouldn't otherwise get to experience and live.
So again, incongruence / incongruity between sort of one's own subtrate or regime, with respect to what one is cueing off of other people, can lead to compounding layering with potentially shoulding, leading to forcing and self-hatred.
As a first pass, one might explore what "mental actions" they're inferring off of their interpretations of "what other people are doing" and whether that is potentially really gumming things up. This will generally help a little bit also be sort of "out of order" for most people because of how deep this stuff can go.
Ultimately, one will sort of deconstruct "mental," "action," "other people," etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., undo layering, find bottom-up strategies with respect to pursuit of settled-but-fluid, non-fixed goals, which will synergize with more and more self-acceptance, self-care, more strategic "inner" and "outer" behavior, and so on. And perhaps most importantly, one will have increasing self-knowledge, to better evaluate the usefulness of other people's provisionally inferred strategies and to better be able to immediately and fluidly begin to adapt them or discard them with respect to one's own situation.
[Note: I'm unhappy with some of the vibe and deep conceptual stuff in this sub-section.]
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Again, be precise, patient, and gentle.
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See also: