farther to fall and sometimes just plain wrong:

[Content warning: neuroticism, hypochondriasis, interaction with licensed medical and mental health professionals, anxiety, etc.]

[Written 25 days after initial symptom onset of first covid infection of some unknown strain of ofc unknown initial viral load in some particular health regime etc. etc.]

One of the challenging thing about advanced meditation is being more sensitive to subtle phenomenology of aging and illness and accidents.

Basically, you can possibly feel yourself dying years or decades out.

(I think there's a lot of "classical meditator lore" in preserved texts of advanced meditators knowing they're going to die tomorrow and stuff like that. (But selection bias, confirmation bias, what makes a good story, etc.))

And, you can possibly feel big jumps in aging, like, if you catch a bad viral illness, you can potentially feel if there's neurological involvement or if organs get unhappy.

Whereas before you might be like "I feel crappy," now you might be like "my heart is tired" or "my kidneys are struggling."

If something particularly strange or notable happen in phenomenology, you might be asking, "is this hardware or software" (neuronal damage or support cell damage) or just a response to particularly weird phenomenology or the triggering of an evolutionary program or a normal response to surprise and changed plans.

For example, if you are quite sick (or slightly sick) and feel anxiety or notice "new" delusion or unusual lack of capacity or other nonmonotonicity, is this because:

1. a normal and transient part of "sickness behavior" triggered by the release of cytokines
2. slightly altered neuronal behavior because of elevated temperature or inflammation
3. neural or support cell apoptosis or necrosis because of viral infection that crossed the blood/brain barrier
4. a not-yet-bubbled-up re-evaluation of health, priorities, plans, short-term or long-term, because you're surprised at how sick you feel
5. "secondary correlation" because sickness phenomenology or behavior took you to places you don't ordinarily go, so a bunch of meditation-y stuff is happening, including nonmonotonicity, that's sort of a second-order effect; but it's hard, at least at first, to separate out from what's "direct sickness" vs indirect, knock-on etc.

And depending where one is at in meditation, it can be stressful because you "notice more things," and there's more to think / "think" about regarding whether something is transient or the new normal, like how much you'll recover, and whether it's "full recovery" or you have "loss of reserve" that could lead to sudden and permanent loss of function because of a future accident or illness. And, at the time of this writing, because of the pace of scientic and medical advances, one can wonder somewhat about the relationship between illness, aging, prevention, and risk taking vis-a-vis rejuvenation, longevity, microstructural neurological repair (from e.g. vascular, fungal, viral, bacterial neurodegeneration), cryonics, etc.; at the time of this writing, not yet, not yet, not yet..)

You might jump to quite apt conclusions, and sometimes this is useful for making bold and proactive treatment decisions, and sometimes it's interesting to file away but there's nothing you can really do about it right there and then. But sometimes, often, the conclusions the system jumps to are just wrong---about cause, what's going on, severity, duration, permanence of illness, injury, or loss of capacity, and the long-term implications thereof. This is normal hypochondriasis and anxiety stuff, but it can be amplified because a meditator has more and more subtle phenomenology to interpret and work with. As with anything: often worse before better. I don't know if this is true, but there's a joke that doctors make the worst patients. One could make a similar joke about meditators being the worst patients, or something.

It can also be quite sobering, when, for example, an advanced meditator hasn't experienced some flavors of anxiety for decades, but then suddenly they have some generalized anxiety again (which can also be just plain interesting, for an advanced meditator!), first-pass, which one or more of the above numbered list is it from? It's certainly a lesson in impermanence and lack of control. In a lot of ways, sort of, an advanced meditator perhaps, sometimes(!), has "farther to fall" when misfortune occurs---"haven't had to deal with that since forever," which can also ~amplify a sense of sadness and loss or etc., even if sometimes one gets "back to where they were" (or not, or not at all) quite quickly and perhaps sometimes much faster than someone who is not a meditator.

And, again, one might notice a lot of "quite creepy shit" that other people would sort of lump together and not notice or think / "think" about so much, for better and worse. And again one might be wrong about what any of that implies, wrong about what's actually going on, with respect to lots of it or most of it, at least the first few times around.

But, as indicated in some parentheticals above, at the same time, being an advanced meditator can be an extraordinary boon, and in some ways it's arguably sort of the whole point of being a meditator, and it can be very gratifying to sort of battle test (not that it likely feels anything like battling or fighting, etc. etc.) and get or pleasantly exercise or indulge in or appreciate that payoff (perhaps even amidst feeling sick or scared or etc.).

So one good thing is adapting to and managing and minimizing further harm with ongoing chronic conditions; possibly sensitivity to the inputs is better and flexibility and adaptibility are better.

And another thing, especially, is that, in some sense, nothing really changes---for example, no matter what's going on, whether it's hardware or software, sickness behaviors or brain damage, or transient or permanent, or a chronic heart thing, or super transient, or intense or shocking, shaken to your core, bitterly disappointed, newly depressed, anxious, or whatever---

---there's just e.g. main practice p2 (or whatever) as a simplicity on the far side of complexity, or even on the far side of that if anything remotely like meditation has been eaten up with no remainder. As per usual, business as usual, nothing really changes, you still "know exactly what to do, even when you don't know what to do"; it's just global wayfinding. Whether you're "long range cleaning up" new weird phenomenology, or what the heck is this, or where is this going, or "is this "new" horrible thing (a) actually new or somehow (b) redo-to-undo," working through that, untangling provenance, constructing inverse operations, rewiring, whatever---which as per usual involves reverie, surrender, letting go, being lost in life---even if you have the misfortune of brain damage or a patch of your phenomenlogy is gone or is suddenly informing you that aliens are communicating with you and also you're Jesus and angels are talking to you, even if you're literally imminently dying, or whatever, it's all the same in a good way. A "user's manual" for everything or every situation, or whatever, "equanimous" or losing your shit or not, whatever you're into, whatever horrible-thing-or-not-sometimes-bad-things-are-or-lead-to-net-good-things is just happening to you, including when to throw away the manual and when or if to dig it out of the garbage.

And that's pretty great~