equanimity, no such thing and lock-and-key stuff:

[This was a response to a very specific question, and it's not perfect, but it has some stuff that I've been meaning to express for a while. It may already be expressed in different ways in other sections, if you search in the document for "equanimity" without the quotes. It still deserves its own section. If you find other places in the doc that express the below, please let me know. I didn't have time to search down and read every instance, and I just wanted to get this in here in some form. The question was partially about "cultivation," including cultivation of equanimity.]

I sort of don't believe in general equanimity. To me it's sort of like equanimity is /always/ "typed," situated, lock-and-key, hard-thing-specific. So like you sort of need "the thing," "the inverse operation for the thing," and then like "context/catalyst/equanimity." But all three of those are sort of exactly matched to each other, radically concrete and unique, in the limit. Under equanimity/context/catalyst, the thing meets the inverse operation for the thing and the thing is undone with no remainder. Sort of. (Abstract model alert, but it can be experienced this way..)

And equanimity is sort of coextensive with safe to know, safe to look, safe to see, safe to just hang out with. And this facilitates the construction of the inverse operation in the presence of "the thing" if one doesn't already exist. Sometimes it's only safe to look if you've sort of already somehow constructed the inverse operation, or one-step-away, via contact with similar things.

So like, I could be totally wrong about this, but I think cultivation, conditioning, strength training is only for skeletal muscles, the motor cortex, and like the adrenals, or something. And it has no place for (body)mind. Sort of.

Directly overcoming resistance breeds technical debt that must eventually be paid, etc., etc.. Sometimes it's useful if it allows one to collect data for /something else/ but overcoming resistance by definition layers over the thing overcome. So it's only ever indirect data collection. Sort of. Like you learn that you won't die if you have intense experiences and the experience is less intense next time and/or you have more bandwidth for other things, next time.

I could be super wrong about something in here!

But I think /all/ discipline, grit, etc., must /eventually/ be exchanged for (safe) effortlessness, spontaneity, surrender. (And paradoxically, discipline and grit, etc., can live in spontaneity but first must be undone before so, or something.) And/but maybe lots of room for variation and weird twisty (then untwisty) oblique and net-skillful things in the middle. Not sure, not sure.

But yeah I think the cns is in some sense 100% type safe. Maybe it's both type safe and not in different senses tho.

Again I could be super wrong about something, here. Ridiculous degrees of bottom-up precision and specificity and light-touch-ness become more and more spontaneously manifest over time, with patience and care. Can still have smash-y things alongside that all the way to the end before smash-y-ness finally unravels. It still works. It's still enough.

There is some equanimity reuse, sometimes a lot, but usually have to make additional passes over it because it’s not quite right and eventually something precise has to happen. And/but/so/like there is a sense too in which the system does generally settles and calms, over time, but I think this is like idk 85% effect not cause and like 15% equanimity reuse that is still generating debt around the edges until finally that 15% starts shrinking to zero or smthg-ish.

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[This is another example of "lock-and-key" type stuff. The below is a response to a question about why moves, techniques, practices, etc., work for a while and then "stop working."]

I think it’s “just” the new technique “exercises” a degree of freedom that doesn’t otherwise get “touched” a lot, so there’s a lot of “overhang,” so a ton of stuff happens initially. But that “pocket” wasn’t very big & it’s not getting replenished, so quickly diminishing returns.

BUT, you’ve still learned a ton of stuff both from what you did and what happened that is definitely transferrable to next or future things. So it was still a critically valuable thing to do from “proceeding by exhaustive process of elimination.”

Some “moves” are more “productive” than other moves but sort of long-run all moves are equally valuable even if some particular one gets used even only once or even not at all if it inspires something that actually does get used. And some “moves” are used 500k times before “moves” as such get eaten up in radical aconceptual concreteness. Sort of sort of

It’s possible to “overuse” a move, blood from a stone, pull things tight in a bad way. But sometimes it just stops working or even you lose the feel of the levers of how to do it. And that’s perfectly normal. Or you it’s available for use like once every three months or smthg.

(Available in part bc lock-and-key conditions obtain.)