extreme skill and extreme standards:

[NOTE: See also making sense (far reaches) [stub/​scratch] ]

It can be helpful to realize that you need to become a genius. You need to become brilliant. You will become brilliant, at least along some narrow dimensions, in the course of doing this thing. If you strive for that, relax into it, things will go more smoothly.

The level of skill and (mostly implicit) intricate knowledge that you need to acquire is shockingly high. It’s like you need to learn every single instrument in an entire orchestra, including the ones that, at least historically, very rarely get used, as well as how to be a conductor. But that’s what the protocol is for. The protocol helps you do that. But if you’re ready for that, you know what’s supposed to happen, then that can go more eaily.

Additionally, it can help to reach for words, phrases, and concepts like these:

• comprehensiveness
• systematicity
• exhaustivity
• flawlessness
• perfection
• no shims, no patches, nothing left behind, no subtle errors, no subtle jogs or * discontinuities or shear
• no stuff hidden under apparent flawlessness or smoothness
• no stable bypass, nothing left behind, no shortcuts

[And eventually you will let go of the above! Perfection-in-imperfection type stuff, aconceptual and post-conceptual type stuff. Letting go of "done" and "done-ness" and "finished" and "end" and "completion," etc.]

[No-goal, no-plan, no-view, no-position, no-escape, no-refuge, no-end, no-next, no-later, no-elsewhere, no-elsewhen, no-success, no-failure, no-purpose, no-point, no-good[~], no-bad[~], no-evil, no-self, no-choice, no-stability, no-completion, no-path, no-fruit, no-refuge, nothing-to-do, nothing-to-hold-on-to, no-stability, no-foothold, no-bootstrap, nondual, not-two, not-one...][no old life to get back to, no "getting back to it" [afterwards], no elsewhere, no other place, no world out there, no people, no hope, no fear, no remainder, nothing left over, no permanence, no refuge, no foothold, no fixing/stilling, no depending, nothing waiting for you [to finish], no fact of the matter, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide]

That is, it can be helpful to realize, at the finest grain, there’s no vagueness, no "mush," no "slop." The mind, in some sense, is shockingly lossless. Like, there’s compression, to be sure, but that compression is shockingly lossless.

You might think of the mind as made up of incompressible, inelastic, lossless, indestructible steel cables that are all very long and tangled together. And you need to untangle them and thread one-hundred percent of them all the way through their individual needle holes. And because of the nature of those cables it’s simply impossible to cheat.

Or, you might think of the mind is made up of one’s and zero’s, like a computer program or something. (And, luckily, there’s tons of parity checking.) And, by the time you’re finished, not even a single bit can be wrong. No bits left behind, not a single one.

You don’t have to be stressed about this, in the sense that the mind is going to lead you to all those needed untwists or bits left behind. In some sense, which is part of the whole point, the mind isn’t going to let you half-ass anything. That’s not how the mind works.

But the main point is that, the more you go with the grain of this, the more smoothly it will go. There’s a right ordering to everything, to be sure. And sometimes it’s going to suck.

But, if you know that you might indeed need sometimes spend five hundred hours going after one "bit," and indeed you might need to do that twenty times, that’s just part of the practice. That is the practice.

Again, the protocol will lead you to this level of conscientiousness and skill. The protocol (and the meta protocol and the meta meta protocol) and how the mind responds will lead you to find every last one of those bits, in some sense won’t let you do anything less, will help you be sure you’ve got them all. You’ll eventually get a taste for perfection, flawlessness, etc.

You’ll learn how to work at the finest grain. You’ll learn how to act with continuity, continuousness, without inappropriate gaps, jumps, jogs.

The protocol might start out feeling super clunky, not like meditation at all. But, over time, bottom up, it’ll look more and more like "classical contemporary noting" [sic] and concentration without support.

Go with the grain of this, not against it.

[NOTE: See also making sense (far reaches) [stub/​scratch] (Also pasted at top because important.)]