introduction; getting over the hump; text interpretation:

There’s an ongoing project of collecting all the reasons why people bounce off of the document, plus corresponding supplementary information:

1. The document does require text interpretation. Even if it was written in clean, grammatical prose, it would still need to be incrementally parsed and interpreted. It does need to be studied. Lengthy explanations would lose the "cutting at the joints," in the document, where every word is included for a reason. Eventually, I do want there to be a softer entry. But that might be separate from the document itself. This does mean there are "startup costs" and initial cognitive overhead.

2. The main practices do need to be learned incrementally. It’s not possible to just pick them up and start doing them. Even after one can "hold an entire practice in their head," the doing of it will still evolve substantially over time. So, there is additional cognitive overhead and a learning curve or even learning cliff, here, too.

3. The main practices might initially seem not like meditation. But, they do asymptote at something that superficially looks like noting practice and shamatha without support. But, this is approached in a bottom up way, as opposed to a top-down way. (As a longer discussion, I currently think canonical concentration practices as well as things like metta being used as a concentration practice, are ultimately counterproductive, because their top-down nature sends a person off sharply on a direction that hasn’t been properly error-checked. And, I currently believe a person will have to do a lot of backtracking, given my understanding and experience of how the mind works.)

4. Some of the auxilliary/preliminary practices might seem suspiciously non-meditationy, like cognitive behavioral therapy or something. One of my goals was to combine the best of "western depth psychology" with the best of meditation. Lots of meditation practioners and teachers do have crushed or unresolved trauma and behavioral issues. The so-called "purifications" do a bunch of the work of western psychology, but they don’t go all the way, hence the somatic issues, sex scandals, and behavioral blindspots of lots of meditators. One can think of this practice as supercharging the purifications, making them much more comprehensive and thorough. At the same time, the practices do produce an experience of emptiness, and, asymptotically, nonduality. These practices go all the way to the very end, and then some. There is further discussion of this in this later section:

"but is it meditation? (a dialogue between J and Mark)"

5. My current best estimate is that these practices, even taking into account learning time, achieve various "classical milestones" maybe 1.2x to 2.5x faster than traditional practices (which I think takes somewhere between five and thirty years, of course towards the lower end if all goes smoothly and/or full-time-ly). Maybe. I’m still working this out. And, I expect speed gains and payoffs continue to accrue cumulatively and compoundingly. We shall see. In any case, this does continue to be an investment of thousands of hours. And, some payoffs come late in the game, while some payoffs to occur steadily. And there are still risks to be worked out and improved upon.

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A, a collaborator, says:

>>>
My 30 second version for a[n...] introduction is:

This document contains meditation instructions, and some things you may want to be aware of before starting or in the middle of a meditative journey.

Some instructions and signposts are (probably) necessary, as figuring it all out on ones own is a tall order. Still, there is a sense in which you will have to "figure it all out on your own," anyway, instructions notwithstanding. Receiving any instructions causes problems, as people try to "do the instructions" instead of "do the thing." This document contains one stab at a "minimum effective instruction set" — use as though "some assembly is required" where "some" means "this document and your interpretation are two ends of the most difficult game of telephone yet devised, and there’s no way it was written correctly or interpreted correctly on the first n tries."

It starts by exploring in what way talking about "the end of the path" is coherent (or not). Then there are some notes on culture and other topics, and then the instructions and additional information are included after that.

Do the thing, and good luck.

[...]

this document and [the reader's] interpretation are two ends of the most difficult telephone game devised, and there’s no way it was written correctly or interpreted correctly on the first n tries

[...]

Might replace "do the thing" with "handle all your concerns, bottom up" or [something like that].
<<<

("Telephone" or "the telephone game" or "Chinese whispers" is game where players whisper a message, from person to the next, until the last person finally says the final received message out loud, and the first person reports the original message. There is almost always a nearly inevitable (and humorous) difference between the first and last message, due to all sorts of possible reasons for successive transmission error.)

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I'll finally add that this document aspires to be more and more radically complete, over time. It's already quite comprehensive, along maybe all necessary dimensions, but more and more detail and clarity (including cleaner prose and smoother on-ramps) could be added, for a long time. Having an extremely experienced teacher readily available will maybe always be a massive accelerant, but my ideal would be to completely obviate the need for a teacher--I'd like future people to be able to completely reconstruct the practice, and succeed at it, even one thousand years from now (2020), even if the living, person-to-person lineage gets broken, i.e. if everyone using this document dies. That would be sad and likely people would change a lot over one thousand years (cf. biotech and neurotech), but it's likely this material would still be valuable, indirectly or quite directly, just as it is, right now.