environment and subtlety; (more) risks and rabbit holes:

[editing note: needs at least some editing to tighten up the point being made and for run-on sentences, at the very, very least. may go for more concrete examples, later, too, along a bunch of dimensions.]

As you dissemble and reassemble your idiosyncratically built up sensory processing system, as it were, choice about where and when you meditate can matter, more some times and less other times, over the long run, sometimes for idiosyncratic reasons and sometimes for more general reasons. Over time, you must come to be able to make good choices about when to modify your environment (time/money/mental/interpersonal cost-permitting) and when to leave it alone (time/money/mental/interpersonal cost-permitting), whether during meditation or just in daily life.

So, environment-wise, systematically or opportunistically, it can be good to try many different things, and to try to discern what makes differences if there are seemingly differences:

• inside structures
• outside of structures, outside
• different structures/buildings
• different rooms in structures/buildings
• different locations in rooms
• different times of day: sunrise/dawn, sunset/dusk, noon, middle of the night, early morning hours, early evening
• city, suburbia, rural areas, countryside
• sea level, high hills, mountains
• different humidity, air pressure, temperature
• on boats and airplanes
• by rivers, lakes, oceans
• different soundscapes and vistas or lack thereof
• different weather conditions
• soundscapes and vistas and lack thereof

You can also get a lot of cheap variety if you’re doing walking meditation, indoors or out and about.

The claim is not that you must spend the time, money, and mental energy for exotic meditation experiences, definitely not that. And, surely, over time, you you want to be able to meditate effectively (and live fully) under a sufficiently wide range of conditions.

[Some environments might be good every once in a while to maybe get unstuck, but are not necessary, and can be prohibitively costly to do regularly: anechoic rooms, flotation tanks and other sensory deprivation chambers, etc. I’ve played with a couple of these a few times, but in no way relied on them. It seemed like a good idea to include them for completeness.]

But, all sorts of weird, counterintuitive things can matter over the short and long run, so it’s good to experiment. At least some of the variables are cheap to manipulate, and other variables can be manipulated opportunistically.

You’ll start to notice subtler and subtler things, which will afford data that might sometimes be interpreted "superstitiously." So, this is also yet another channel to explore and refine your epistemics, self-beliefs, meditation-beliefs, and cost/opportunity-beliefs, and to generate explanations of apparent influences on your practice, which you might find to be real or illusory, over time, and which you might become more and more robust to, over time, if they are real. (You might also transiently become more and more affected by them, which might be why they became more and more salient to you in the first place, whether for "superstitious" reasons, or not, which would not be unusual, and depends on idiosyncratic factors.)

In any case, sometimes it’s a very, very good idea to meditate when weird right-now distracting or unpleasant environmental stuff is going on. And other times, it’s more productive to seek out different conditions for meditation.

This is yet another area where you may go a little crazy before you go saner than you were before. And, trying to arrange one’s environment, because of believed/experienced effects, those effects may or may not actually being long-run problematic, whether one is meditating or living life, can become costly in way that, for people without the time and money, can be a net life negative.

In response to an earlier draft of this section, a collaborator writes:

[A]

[...]

You may discover that obvious and non-obvious stimuli have a distracting [or otherwise right-now-believed-to-be negative] effect[s....] And also, you may discover that some of these are chronically present in your environment, which you were not aware of, and you may become convinced they're bad for you, and please don't fuck up your life.

[...]

To expand on the don't fuck up your life part, some well-intentioned gaslighting may be in order. Point out meditator's pain which not really about the position of your leg, point out that even ordinarily you will sometimes find a sound intolerable that you live with otherwise, point out that you are already inhabiting the world including these aspects and removing yourself from that comes with trade-offs (morality is the first teaching etc)

[...]

By the way I think you really do have a tightrope to navigate here because one of the unique things about this system and this community is all the [...] baggage it comes with, positive and negative. Assuming that any sort of spiritual practice will make you start acting like a crazy weirdo for a little bit, I find it much preferable that it goes in the direction of buying an air quality monitor or talking about primal sleeping positions and doing things in the spirit of [...] weirdo optimizations rather than [...]

Like I blew $200 on that [air quality monitor] and now I wonder about brain damage when [...] lights a scented candle

But otoh it's nice to get a ping to crack a window sometimes instead of being distressed that I'm just not feeling smart or energetic today

Mark 1:15 PM

yeah.

it’s true. both. i think all of it can get integrated and sort of a costless choice to light the candle or not, open the window or not, but possibly crazy in middle and some people won’t have time/money/something to weather the crazy and it won’t be net good for them.

[A] 1:16 PM

Yeah, exactly

Eat less carbs when it's a cheap option because it is legit better, but still outperform when you're on a pasta-based diet

Learn what is orthorexia vs just being right

Mark 1:29 PM

Yeah. One of my ex’s knew me for a health nut and was shocked when I ate a huge Snicker’s bar in front of her. And I was like, well, a few of these will be like they never happened, and, I didn’t have time to cook, and, I know it won’t make sleepy and also I won’t be hungry for hours, and if I eat it all at once and then eat normal food later then it won’t contribute to insulin resistance. And I know I’m going to get some magnesium and potassium (etc.) later, and they have much lower trans fat than they used to, and peanuts are poison but only if you eat a ton for like a whole week or two, and...

And she was like, oh, [aspirationally] reality-based.

And I guess this generalizes to every single damn choice ever. (edited)

[...]

"now you have n+1 problems before you have n-1 problems" or something.