lists and more › far reaches of meditation (no particular order [yet])

eternity, suffering, death:

(1)

As you're exploring fear of death and preferences to not die, it's important to also look for (wait for), gather, honor, explore any parts, layers, anything that wants to die, longs for death, wants to "experience" nothingness, "thanatos drive," any drive towards dissolution, ceasing, cessation, etc. This could come from "within" and "without," shallow or deep, etc. There might be, (parts of) you might be, longing for death, longing for it to end, hoping for, aiming for, or surrendering to, flowing into a death funnel, death cascade, always racing towards death, tumbling towards death, towards nothing.

And/but do note things like this, too, as well, things maybe a bit like: “There has to be something good about death otherwise death is intolerably bad.”

bonus auxiliary practices:

wanting life and death:

Let the parts of you that want to die and the parts of you that want to live find each other.

worth living, won't let:

Explore the things that, as best you can currently tell, that make life worth it, that make life worth living [belonging stuff, intimacy stuff, gender stuff, sex stuff]---that you won't let yourself have or pursue.

bonus "at least one sense in which":

at least one sense in which you cannot ever experience the infinite future which is always in the future (if you buy into infinities or at least one sense of the future); you can only experience right now

at least one sense in which anything [even with cryonics, longevity, rejuvenation technology] that's not flowing, tumbling, incessantly, ceaselessly, unerringly towards death and end, local finitude is in intellectual, cognitive, and behavioral error and suboptimality

(2)

[draft status: in need of editing, as per usual]

There’s ways in which the below is inconsistent, confused, and incomplete--it’s not the final word, I still have a LOT to learn, and nor could it ever be consistent and complete, in a deep, philosophical sense. It’s offered because it might be comforting and useful, for some people, as an interim touchstone, or it might help some good things happen fractionally faster, or it’s just interesting. As a recommendation, if you’d otherwise be inclined, don’t particularly try to "make any of this stick"; one sort of has to find their way to this kind of stuff on their own terms, and then you "don’t need to make it stick / don't need push it into place" as natural as trusting gravity.

So, many people take refuge in eternity and essentiality, and many people fear death, meaninglessness, and suffering. We encountered those sorts of things somehow already within ourselves, and/or we picked them up from culture, or we confused other people’s stuff with our own, in deep or subtle ways.

So let’s unpack all this a bit more and talk about pluses and minuses and antidotes.

So, IF there’s eternity (timelessness, outside-of-time-ness) then, this is a bit of an incomplete straw, but it kind of follows that everything that has ever existed does always already forever exist and that everything has a fixed, eternal essence. There’s a nearby and simultanously compatible thing, which is "sempiternity," which means something like "an infinite future" (infinite timefulness, and, maybe necessarily along with that, an infinite past).

Some problematic implications of eternity and sempiternity are that, in some sense, if anything’s wrong with your "essence," then, depending on how that works, there might be some sense in which it can never be fixed. You’ll be stuck with however you are, and if that’s bad, then that’s infinitely bad.

Additionally, everything becomes infinitely important, any choice has massive stakes, infinite stakes, because it could compound forever without relief. Death might not offer any relief. Anything that produces ("intolerable") suffering (badness, loss, failure, rejection, loneliness, judgment, uncertainty) is potentially (infinitely) catastrophic. Sure, you might have infinite time to correct your mistakes, but what if, by some chain of events, you find you permanently cannot?

Alongside eternity, as complements or alternatives, there’s also mortality, death, and nothingness.

Problems with these are things like, if death results in nothingness then potentially everything is nihilist and meaningless. And then perhaps there’s no basis for action (or happiness, joy, etc.), perhaps because everything is ephemeral, impermanent--we can’t take it with us, including ourselves, we lose it all, as if it never was, so what’s the point?

And then there’s fragility and uncertainty which sort of underpin the risks of eternity, mortality, and suffering, and kind of take the joy and spontaneity and enjoyment out of everything.

And finally, all these things sort of get tangled together in potentially inconsistent ways. For example, say death if isn’t, for example, conceived as pure nothingness; perhaps it’s unfortunately conceived as sort of potentially an "in-between" state, of maybe trappedness, loneliness, fear, failure, and suffering, and maybe that’s "eternal."

Ok, so what to do? Maybe just avoid thinking about all this as much as possible? What if you can’t not think about it?

All of the below assumes lots and lots of meditation (or luck/fortune/grace/etc.).

Some of the things that can happen over time are the following, and these are all sort of somewhat entangled together:

Sempiternity and especially eternity can come to be sort of deeply recognized as phenomenologically/pragmatically/epistemically inconsistent. It’s not that one can no longer work/think/model with conceptual and cosmological and mathematical infinity or plan for far futures, but some "literal or functional seating" of these ideas, in the bodymind, can be judged and rejected.

This is partly underpinned by insight into impermanence and/or/rather lack of essence and/or/rather interdependence, as in nebulous, empty, or provisional causes (laws), conditions ("starting" conditions), and spontaneity, through and through. Say it’s all just shimmering stuff or forces and fields or whatever, phenomena or noumena, on the border of differentiation and lack of differentiation. What perhaps follows is sort of a way in which anything like eternity or its implications becomes (literally?) ungraspable. (I might lose some physical or scientific or mathematical realists, here. See below for a tiny bit more on maps and territories and more.)

But isn’t there something like eternity or infinite time or at least vast time? What sort of does the work of that? What kind-of-happens-is-sort-of [sic] an "eternal now" which is sort of immanent, sort of aconceptual. This "eternal now" is very unlike the other "eternity" thing, which perhaps sort of "lived elsewhere." (This also involves a "‘positive’ nowhere to go," "just this"-ness.) It’s sort of a better fit for the whole system.

Sounds pleasant, maybe, but maybe literally false? And then what about meaninglessness and suffering and death?

Meaninglessness sort of gets handled by aconceptuality, fluidity, spontaneity, and provisionality. It becomes safe to rest in meaninglessness and pointlessness because there’s sort of something "beneath" them, so loss of meaning isn’t devastating and in need of scrupulous avoidance. And, further, one gains confidence that meaning is either inessential or is at least just always transient, because of systemic fluidity--one doesn’t get "stuck" that way, so it’s safer to go into, and there’s generally (nonmonotonically) something even better (more/different meaning) on the other side, and especially in the limit. (Spontaneity and provisionality will be further discussed below.)

Fragility, uncertainty, suffering, and death sort of get handled in a few ways.

Suffering has sort of both "practical" and "general" mitigations. Here we first talk about the "general" mitigation of sort of "no-self-y-ness." That’s not to say there isn’t often generally coherence and meaning, "self-ing," but if there’s a disruption of the self and/or "intolerable" suffering, there comes to be a deep way in which it’s "just happening" that doesn’t require a self. (This is sort of coextensive with "no things, including no self, never have/has been, never were, never will be." (More accurate might be "no stable, permanent, enduring things or self.") Like, if you are disrupted, then are you still you, there, suffering? Creepy? But, like, in a good/comforting way? And, further, at this point, the "whole system, self and everything" has become extremely good at sort of self-endorsedly "reconstituting" itself, if disrupted. One can kind of rest in an extraordinarily self-aligned and trustworthy spontaneity, because that spontaneity, over time, sort of comes to know just what to do.

With suffering kind of more handled, it can be separated out from death and nothingness. When nothingness is disentangled from various confusions, it becomes much less of a big deal. It’s sort of just like deep sleep (which is still admittedly freaky to think about, for some people); in both cases "you’re not there," and it’s fine while it lasts. It’s not like you’re there and trapped or there and can’t breath, and so on: it’s just nothing. And, so then "nothing" is especially not some sort of "experientially eternal" bad thing. So, again, much less of a big deal.

So then with suffering kind of more handled and nothingness kind of more handled, then death is kind of more handled--it’s the potential suffering leading up to death that can be super scary to think about, the ("intolerable") fear of (imminent) death and the dying, versus being dead (in the case that death is "experiential nothingness.") And, again, the spontaneous-no-self-just-happening-ness kind of helps with this.

Further, the "eternal now" can have a "soothingly deathless" feel. Sort of, as in, "if death is nothingness then you won’t know that you’re dead," so you’ll always only ever be alive, and if "now is eternal" then you’re immortal-ish, etc.

All of this is sort of positively entangled (and deeply related to) the "practical mitigation" of suffering, i.e. "deconditioning." People typically have a great deal of "cue-able" or triggerable suffering that gets worked through in the course of meditation. Prior to working through things, we are sort of uncontrollably, prereflectively, "already" freaked out by things before we become conscious of them. And so that happening less and less, for fewer and fewer things, is sort of part and parcel with the more general antidotes above.

But, like, you want things, and lots of people, all things being equal, prefer not to die, a lot, at the very least. If death becomes even remotely less of a concern, won’t people be less good or vigilant about avoiding death? And isn’t that kind of inconsistent and so isn’t that a good reason to fear death and uncertainty?

What kind of happens is a sort of "positive behavioral indifference" in that more and more things get handled and worked out such that "no matter what happens this is the best plan," "you’re fully up to date,’ in ultimately a deep and prereflective way. So, like regardless of whether you’re (uncertainly) going to die in five minutes or fifty years or one thousand years, your "plan" is intertemporally consistent with respect to all those contingencies. Given your context, limitations, uncertainties, knowledge, there’s both "nothing to change" and you’re fluidly "updating your plan" in each moment as more sensory evidence comes in. And so, you’re looking both ways before crossing the street, poking at life extension, somehow eating both healthy and deliciously, anything, in a way that fully accounts for your preferences. And "death" is kind of mostly-/semi-background handled in a way that doesn’t self-defeatingly loom large; it doesn’t suboptimally take up ongoing rumination time at the expense of other things; though, it might be innocuously and consistently threaded through things in a way that naturally comes up. All of this is perhaps one facet of "wisdom."

This might all be well and good but what about something like impingement or corruption. Like what about mind control parasites (toxoplasma gondii) or Alzheimer’s or traumatic brain injury or whatever? What if I figure out a bunch of stuff about "eternity" and feel pretty good about that, but then I have a stroke and "lose" a bunch of it?

First of all, the brain is kind of holographic and reconstitutive. Maybe surprisingly, if stuff reaches a "ground state," versus a person trying to make stuff stick, even traumatic brain injury, all things being equal, doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of stuff is even transiently lost. And, even if "something" (loosely speaking) is lost due to physical or chemical insult, all things being equal, a "deeply settled meditative mind" will spontaneously work/flow towards rederiving/reconstituting what was disrupted (or will find something even better).

But, in any general case, life is messy and death is messy.

To be sure, people do have terrible brain things happen and, outside view, come through with unchanged personalities. But, sometimes a single microstroke will, outside view, radically alter a person’s personality or produce anosognosia, not to mention complexly related fatigue and anxiety (though, all things being equal, a long-term meditator does have a greater chance of "finding their way back," very very loosely and reductively speaking).

Nothing remotely guarantees health, wealth, a "good death," sanity, neurological integrity, a long life, immortality, "thinking real good," hot sex, whatever. And, at the very least, at the time of this writing, meditation doesn’t free you from having a physical brain, subject to decay, demyelination, amoebas, car accidents, or anything.

All that said, a lot of the "antidotes" above generally hold, even in these most challenging of "edge cases" or one’s concern about them. Deconditioning, over time, promotes constructive action and handledness of various contingencies, which obviates and "integrates away" unconstructive worrying. "Best plan"-ness allows for a rich, full life in the light of death, not self-limited by fear or accident (in relative relation to one’s beliefs about risks, tradeoffs, etc.) "No-self-y-ness" and "trustworthy self-aligned robust spontaneous self-reconstitution" helps with acute accident and illness and suffering. Lots of other metaphysical and cosmological and conceptual stuff gets refactored and cleaned up, over time, which mitigates all sorts of unnecessary suffering.

But, yeah, there’s still uncertainty and finitude (modulo dissolving into Brahman, as it were, and eternal nows)--no guarantees about anything.

So here’s yet a couple more globally interrelated things to throw into the mix: determinism and provisionality.

Eventually, through life and meditation, one might get a deep sense of determinism, that, in some sense (pick your cosmology and physics and supervenience and etc.), everything can’t but happen exactly as it has happened, is happening, and is going to happen, via causes and conditions, states and evolution laws (or something kind of like this, in your metaphysics). You are happening just as you’re going to happen, things are happening just as they’re going to happen, including your choices and everything. What’s exactly going to happen is just exactly what’s going to happen. This can be kind of both terrifying and ultimately soothing, by turns, a particular kind of loss of control. But, eventually one can comprehensively sort of align with it, participate in it, deeply, stably, with no remainder. And there’s a deep freedom in that.

Further, in that freedom, there is a certain provisionality. You really don’t know. Was what just happened ultimately good or bad? You really don’t know. What’s going to happen next? You’re "flowing forward," spontaneously, with respect to sort of your best guess as to what’s going to happen next, which itself is going to happen spontaneously; it, you and it and world, just keeps happening. But anything could happen next, maybe not with respect to the world out there (in some sense), but at least with respect to your current state of knowledge (in some sense). You just don't know. Falsely thin probabilistic tails give way to more appropriate, fat probabilistic tails. More and more, you come to be ready for more and more, the full distribution, not just part of it, your stance, your arrangement, appropriately, proportionally ready, costlessly, effortlessly. This is cosmic poise, cosmic opprtunism.

And so, then, amidst the sometimes ghastly, horrible, painful, sorrowful, there is curiosity, engagement, play, delight, participation, readiness: a bright-eyed, let’s see what happens next.

***

If you found anything above to be inconsistent or untenable or unsatisfying or false or unworkable, it’s just my own gestural snapshot of some interrelated things, and a low-dimensional projection into words, at that. Things will continue to unravel, settle, resettle for me over time. "Your thing," on your terms, which will, say, be a living, sensitive dialogue, ultimately not separate from the being and seeming and acting in and of the world, has to be legitimate and credible and consistent and/or constructively nebulous for you.

And it can dialogue with other people’s things/deals, too, in comfort, love, intimacy, support, frustration, outrage, solitude, community, all of it, as part of that. Hell and heaven, eternity set aside, are other people, and all that.

* Whoops, also, I didn't mean to imply that anyone has to sort any of this out, whether by meditation or anything. And, also, nothing special has to happen in meditation or etc.. This sort of stuff "just pops out", all things being equal, in the course of correct practice.

Notes for above:

An unintegrated fragment from an edit of an older section, that had different goals, that I want to re-work in a way that's seamless with this section: "Remember, you’re probably going to die. Remember that the universe may experience heat death. Remember that, in some sense, death and heat death are in some sense just ideas and concepts."

journal entry during one of my retreats, where people are optionally keeping public journals, written months after the above

[This kind of becomes self-aware like somewhere in the middle. Like I knew I was going to post it more publicly.]

Mark L Today at 7:42 PM

It’s been a normal-weird couple months of practice, just kind of carefully, patiently, satisfyingly, and often quite unpleasantly doing the thing. Not much going on except body unpleasantness that keeps winding up and working itself out. And just in the last couple of days, as these things do, things have tipped over into “whoa things”

The past few months have been a lot of slow sort of impermanence/non-eternity kind of slowly infusing more and more of everything.

And then, just this morning, there’s been some FINALLY really extra deep no really extra extra especially deep psychosexual stuff that’s FINALLY come into view. FINALLY, /shakes fist at sky/, lol, etc., ugh

[content warning, death stuff, in thread]

Thread:

Mark L 7 minutes ago

And also last night and this morning sort of more glimpses, alignment with “oblivion,” nothingness, nibanna-esque/cessation-y adjacent type stuff. Why is it so sweet/refreshing/good? What the heck?

ramble I typed earlier:

There’s this whole fucking world and physics and shit and tens of thousands of years of human history and the universe and the stars and life extension.

And like kind of modulo suffering and horror I don’t want to fucking die, man, that seems really bad. So then like what the heck is this positive forgetting, oblivion, nirvana, why is it so good, refreshing, why is it such a relief? Why is it making everything better, making living more fun?????????????

I think it’s sort of like one can intellectually know that “nothing” isn’t scary, it’s just nothing. But we viscerally recoil from death and just, like, want to LIVE, man. I wanna have grand adventures and beautiful relationships and see the stars go out.

There’s also like this weird tension, too, with “acausal, steelmanned reincarnation,” or whatever. Like, life in a meaningfully transpersonal sense life DOES go on, even if you’re not there except you kind of are but aren’t but you are.

But still, quote by problematic person:

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” —Woody Allen

But then like meditation lets you (sooner or later) systematically systematically engage with nothingness. And, like, in a way that completely honors that visceral recoil, that completely honors wanting to LIVE (the incredible, incredible sorrow, sometimes, often, of life on earth completely withstanding), nothingness just really isn’t that bad, or something? There’s this visceral knowledge of that, too. It maybe can just make so much ok. Everything becomes lighter. (And this isn’t even the only thing that happens, in relation to suffering as such. That’s a whole other thing, even.)

(3)

scratch:

"objective identity" / "you are a confluence of 'universe;" / any confluence will identify with it's identity as it were / any reconstitution as such will feel like "you" / let's see what it does, doesn't need anything o top of that or separate from that / not a soverign and crystalline soul / ...

(4) New: 20221030

Loosely speaking I still generally fear pain, suffering, and death (finitude, oblivion), my own and others; they’re still a problem, still bad, still sad, but there’s been a big uptick in something good.

At least part of it is that stuff I’ve intellectually played with, for some time, by indirect routes—--I sort of came to find a bunch of it having become deep in my bones. That last sentence is weird because I want to emphasize I didn’t sort of intellectually hammer any of the below in. It was more like I naturally came to realize these things in some gentle, clear yet still inchoate way, and then my (body)mind found nearby concepts for sensemaking and communicating around it. At the same time I think exposure to some of these ideas previously helped. But, the “essential” core of these would still be just as “solid” (nebulously, provisionally, always-imperfectly speaking, not the last word) thousands of years ago. Again I don’t have to “work” to “maintain” any of the below; it's just prereflectively there. I’m still spontaneously gently coming back to it, which lightly changes it, on and off in meditation, mixed in and interleaved with everything else, liminally interacting with and nebulously blending into everything else, all-to-all mutual co-infusing or something. And eventually it might become something quite different.

So here’s some of it, imperfectly rendered. You’ll probably have already thought of a bunch of it.

First, deep dreamless sleep has a lot of features of death: you’re “not there” (or at least you don’t remember any of it, modulo constant consciousness stuff, which I’m not actively pursuing though it might just gradually happen on its own)---you’re not there and it’s arguably “fine.”

You also generally don’t remember falling asleep. So similarly, like, for better and worse, generally speaking, with respect to death, you’ll never know you’re “gone”; you’ll already have-gone if you’re gone. (Dying might still suck, to be fair.)

Further, waking up from sleep is generally just as “fine”, “ok,” in-some-sense” gentle. So, anyway, going to sleep and waking up is in some sense am existence proof of like at-least-retrospectively-knowable “nothingness” that’s “ok.”

Some people have “cessations,” and this is another example of nothingness being ok. Also, some people have very temporarily fine-grain awareness at times and report (as I think do classical texts) that we’re “blinking out” (cf. bardo and other stuff) every few tens of milliseconds (???), every waking moment. (This will presumably correlate with some particular brainwave frequency.) I’ve only had a couple textbook-grade cessations way back near the beginning of getting back into meditation, and they didn’t leave a super big impression on me, and I’ve never tried to get my attention super temporally fine-grain (though my “attention” / “awareness” / whatever, here, is deft, fluid, and agile), it just hasn’t seemed to matter from a practice standpoint and something felt too prescriptive and force-y about those things, and / but to be fair these phenomena and apparent reports have been helpful intellectually and for wayfinding input purposes. (I’m curious to see if I eventually have more cessations or if it’s never a thing ever again. And sometimes my awareness does very infrequently sort of spontaneously pulse and speed up for a short period of time, sort of “on demand” or “just in time”, so I’m curious if there will be further developments there. Anyway these are additional examples of “nothingness that’s ok."

But what about “permanent” nothingness?

There’s been a sort of deepening of trust of something like “information-theoretic identity” (not to improperly reify “information theory” or “identity” and also as per usual math analogies are fraught).

So like, ever more deeply understood, I am a product of causes and conditions, and, there’s a profound sense in which of you have the “same” causes and conditions you get the same “me” out of that. This has been a staple of science fiction for a long time, of course, including canon or at least fanon with respect to Star Trek transporters and lots of hard science fiction. For me personally, there had been a remaining persistent intuition that “copies” of me would not actually be satisfyingly me to current me and also that I would want this me to persist. But something loosened around that. (Plenty of people work through this without meditation, but not me. And also don’t take my word about it that there’s something pretty good here, etc., etc.)

Part of the loosening was helped by the sleep stuff and cessation stuff and “mind moment” stuff above. But those don’t account for all of it. There’s something for-me-at-least-at-the-time-of-this-draft seemingly profound and inexpressible around something like pattern-in-a-larger-pattern? (This is like maybe a more realized version of some pretty profound feeling atman-dissolving-into-Brahmin-type stuff, "you are a drop of water seamlessly in the ocean and also you are the ocean" that I had relatively early on in meditation). And like there’s something about the “smaller” pattern that’s in sommmmmmme sense "immortal"? That’s not the same as mistaking it for having a “permanent” “essential nature,” pace Buddhism.

Ah, but couldn’t that pattern be lost forever? Well, this was also helpful: one science fiction book, there’s presumably others, Charlie(?) Charles(?) Stross’ Accelerando, that has this idea of (I might be taking liberties or drifting from the original thing) of like the phase space of all possible humans, and just sort of enumerating that and like even “printing,” making a copy or instantiating some or all of those all possible humans, some of whom would never have actually existed. (Shades of steelmanned Abrahamic resurrection, here, not an original observation, of course.) There’s a bunch of, uh, considerations here, like enumerabity, computibility, combinatorial explosions, “time slices” like what age do you print, what does something think just happened previously when they “wake up” and how do they feel about and understand what’s happening subsequently —there’s a lot of, uh, yeah, decisions, here. But there’s a lot of internal and cross-person coherence and consistency stuff and I think useful moral / ethical stuff, heh, that vastly reduce a vast space to something slightly less vast but still vast. Anyway this is a rich thought playground that can keep on giving, with respect to memory, more identity stuff, indeed “arhatship” and enlightenment stuff. Like you can print people who are enlightened, people who know they're printed from the get-go and simultaneously have a remembered past... Anyway-anyway, humans are in some sense finite in a good way. Anything finitely (albeit not necessarily practically) construct-able, even computably / enumerably so though maybe contra nebulosity, but I think some quantum computer scientists are not super worried about the “computibility” of physics either perfectly or to arbitrary precision, for whatever that’s worth) is sort of never lost.

Anyway there might be something incoherent in here or poorly based on bad not-even-wrong science takes, cf. combinatorial explosions and physical transformations that might take more energy than is currently available in the observable universe or something. But anyway this is a snapshot.

And so I want to emphasize that there’s still / always a lot of potential wiggle room in whatever weird “cosmology” you end up with—--it will “settle” and maybe satisfice over time but it remain labile, alive, sculptable in a good way, and also more internally consistent and coherent (not to reify consistent and coherent) and accounting for whatever data you encounter or throw at it. In any case it will be held lightly and it will serve you, you won’t be satisfied with it until and unless you are. And again it will be held lightly in provisionality and technical emptiness.

And again this is sort of subserved by ever deeper understandings of impermanence and “causes and conditions” and much more, gained through continued meditation.

And finally it's not just emptiness but a deeper and deeper understanding of “just this”-ness, “this is it”-ness, “nowhere to go”-ness, which somehow provides a way for one’s personal cosmology to become a servant instead of a master.

All of this, so far, has made me seemingly feel a whole lot more chill about "the whole shape of my life,"" grasped all at once-ish, cleanly and aware-ed-ly bounded by accident, stroke, heart attack, death—--felt-saner choices around who I associate with and how I spend my time, my interests, cares, concerns, envies, jealousies, aspirations, enjoyment, more practical about what’s within reach, yet more flexibly audacious in what grand risks I take and what I hold in my roster of “possible aspirations.” Even if longevity and rejuvenation and cryonic technologies become a thing, even if death is generally defeated and we can backup and re-print people, nothingness/void still “exists” and we still return to it ever-presently? Something profound and important would remain that would practically inform choices even then and this can be explored now, and / or / relatedly there are accidents, natural disasters, heat death of the universe or some future theoretical equivalent might be a thing. Again with each human uncertainty “marshaled,” brought to heel, nothingness / oblivion I think still “exists,” still demands a dialogue, still informs what it means to be a “sane”, mature, moral individual. And / but / finally / too a deep understanding of buddhist-style impermanence sort of "credibly guarantees," enough to leave the door open, at the moment, at least, that there’s nothing like “eternity”? Maybe “eternal recurrence,” in any case things keep changing, even cosmologically; like nothing is forever, including non-existence, especially if you are like finite-ly enumerable out of a space of possible humans or something. Anyway provisionality and nebulosity and emptiness and unknown unknowns currently leave a lot of wiggle room (in the map if not some territory, as it were), and eventually something relaxes, and more, and more.

(5) New: 20231217

This is new, so it'll probably change, but it's interesting:

In pretty quick succession (over like four or five days):

partial resolution of a sense of being somehow "irrecoverably separated" sort of from the world that had been growing for months and which had become quite extreme
sort of untangled to a really surprising "thoughtform" of the Jewish god, sort of Judgment inescapably, sort of fractally and inescapably, vastly pervading ("inner"?) space, as well as my everpresent and continued failure to meet the standards of that judgment
beginning of resolution of difficulty looking at screens, composing text, and some aphasia, and more, at first perhaps seemingly wholly long covid related, but worse over past few weeks
a lot of pretty extreme old age, sickness, and nihilism with respect to death and possibly stable non-consciousness, etc.
beginning of the resolution of a sort of vertigo when seeing or imagining depictions of "mega objects," like stuff on the scale of or (much) bigger than the earth, including interstellar objects and fantasy stuff. scratch notes; this stuff was mostly fun and interesting before, except for black holes being unsettling: "related to time space scale, distance. Sort of preceded by also megalophobia, microphobia, black hole, and interstellar stuff and fantasy size and scale stuff for weeks"

And shortly after I noticed something had moved:

Non-existence and nothingness (and/but neither yet/“neither yet nor…”, just concepts etc.) are sort of a bit more a (“)pleasant(”) and complementary alternative to existence, and/but there's still zest and appetite for fun and life and health and longevity and legacy behaviors, including moonshots hedged against other values.

So---interesting... Still some nihilism in there. Expecting it'll be something like once all confusions are untangled there was never a problem in the first place, etc., etc.

Regarding, "was never a problem in the first place," it's worth making a distinction between like intellectual beliefs and like anticipations/"aliefs", or one could just say particular parts might intellectually believe or bodily-knowingly-anticipate different things (including at different and deeper "layers," in the technical sense).

We might---just as an example---intellectually believe that death is "nothingness" or "nonexistence" or "unconsciousness" (or not, etc.), whether good or bad. But, in any case, other parts of us might viscerally anticipate things like "infinite loneliness, "infinite pain," "infinite coldness," "infinite paralysis," "infinite can't breath," too long, too lonely, too something, etc.

We're accumulating/computing/arriving at stuff about death long before object permanence and it really hits us that like something somehow is going on, there, like somewhere around age 4-8 on average in at least the west, and so we've got like a vast amount of stuff there already and then with each passing year just more and more and more on top of that, and so meditation-wise it can take a long time to get back there, a long time (maybe concurrently) for safe to look even when there, even if tendrils of it are accessible immediately.

And so through meditation all of this just keeps (slowly, eventually, then perhaps more and more) getting unlayered and detangled, stuff you didn't even realize was there (just like with say sex or gender and even more so)...

And again as per usual, you're not making yourself believe or not believe anything, "belief" is spontaneous (and "belief" is too reified). Just untangling, just process, when safe, patient, find what you find, nebulously non-thing-ing-ly little-by-little (again not in anyway* [sic] thing-like), and so on.

*for some reason "anyway" [sic] instead of "any way"