how bad does it have to get?:
[...] Today at 10:45 AM
[Question/comment wondering if it might be possible to never have to "go into badness," that, in principle and possibly even in practice, whether there’s always a better option, and then there would be value of reminding people of that over and over again in the world where it’s true.]
Mark 34 minutes ago
I think it will be exquisitely personal/idiosyncratic/contextual, depending on the fine-grain details of that person’s mind. Generally, there does seem to be an at least micro-redo-to-undo, mitigated or made safe by equanimity and various other preparatory things. Agreed that wording and preconceptions will have significant influence on "how bad things are," though.
I do somewhat less qualifying in the document, or a different pattern of qualifying, because a lot of stuff sort of "comes out in the wash" with hundreds or thousands of hours of meditation. And the meta protocol is also intended to help people correctly orient around interpretation of the instructions. I certainly am not fully accurately calibrated and if I had more resources I would likely qualify more. There is a lot of gentleness in the prelim/aux practices that is elided in the more terse main practices.
Mark 31 minutes ago
There is also, I suppose, "the law of equal and opposite advice"--some people will shy away too much from discomfort. And of course some people will flagellate themselves. I think, long-run, it’s very good to be able to "go into badness"--this becomes ever more safe and constructive/productive over time, generally, I think. cf. "equanimity"
Mark 31 minutes ago
ever-less looping and piling on over time
Mark 27 minutes ago
Sometimes (often) "a better thing" just isn’t locally available and one has to "keep going through hell." Other times a precise (and possibly necessarily personalized) reminder that something better is available makes a colossal difference. And calibrating how and when to remind or not will be somewhat empirical, given patterns of students, though of course deep principles could be elicited.
[...] 19 minutes ago
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Mark < 1 minute ago
I will note that there’s an important question here of how "soft/safe/gentle" [not to conflate gentle and safe but they are correlated] meditation can be in the limit. If we understood this better, and I hope to, plan to, intend to, in collaboration with others, it will make meditation accessible to a much wider range of people, in a much wider range of life circumstances. If someone could trust that nothing particuarly terrible could happen or that it would happen predictably, then it would be more likely they could do work/career/money and relationship/family things while being a serious meditator. And that would be a much better world. This is an open area of research and an extremely important area of research. Safety and effectiveness (including consistency, monotonicity, ease of starting, initial palatability and interpretability, ideoloogical non-clashing, minimizing negative musculoskeletal involvement, minimizing "temporary trauma," ease of talking about with other people, everything.
[...] 10 minutes ago
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Mark < 1 minute ago
One way to resolve possible contradictions somehow involving badness being good is to make the distinction between something feeling bad and something being bad. That is, one might accept that feeling bad can sometimes be good. Further, to equivocate, one might accept that feeling bad can sometimes straightforwardly feel good! (Some people will say, of course! cf. "hurts so good," painful pleasure, massages, erotic pain, etc.)
The deeper thing, here, is something like "goodness" and "badness" are words and a person’s concepts of goodness and badness will contextually, contingently, and idosyncratically apply to, and in the context of, complex phenomenology and knowing that will be a complex mixture of valenced and unvalenced experience. And those concepts and that phenomenology and the relationship between the two will change as life and meditation progresses.