mark's approximate practice timeline summary highlights:

(when I say "less than X hours," below (e.g. <20 hours) it's probably wayyyyyy less. I tried to do like a 90-90% confidence absolute ceiling)

qigong (Spring Forest Qigong) [~<80 hours] (1998?)
robert bruce's new energy ways [~250 hours????] (1998-2002?)
working visualizing the letter aleph with perfect clarity [~<40 hours]
mindfulness in plain english [<20 hours] (2002?)
select practices from the lover within julie henderson (<10 hours) (2003?)
breath counting zen-ish stuff [<50 hours] (2003?)
"just sitting" [~150 hours] (2003?)
"opening the hand of thought [<30 hours] (2004?)
ken wilber stuff (theory, shadow work, "unclenching", a tiny big of Genpo Big Mind stuff) (1999-2007?)
shinzen young (2006-2008) (<80 hours)
focusing, internal family systems therapy, shinzen young's stuff (<150 hours) (lots and lots of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience) (2008-2013)
coherence therapy (<50 hours) (2014)
(I read many qigong, tai chi, yoga, stretching, meditation, "energy work", eastern philosophy, western phenomenology books, ken wilber books, 1998-2015)
started blogging July 2013
super disillusioned with meditation, somewhere in here. it wasn't getting anywhere or "solving things cleanly". didn't really think of what I was doing as "meditation" until "re-double-down," a few bullet points below
western philosophy 2015
folding 2015 or 2016
dangerous, broken stuff kind of similar to main practice p1 and core transformation (2016-2017)
extremely dangerous (not worth it or necessary, in retrospect) thing involving language, application of the will, and a tally counter (IIED) (~200-600 hours?) (2017?) [stream-entry-esque experience]
extremely dangerous thing (not worth it or necessary, in retrospect) involving continuous long-running application of the will; beginning of terrible muscle tension (<200 hours?) (2018?)
main protocol v0 describing "pixels and voxels" [stream-entry-esque experience] [briefly obviously "cycling" on the progress of insight map, ty Daniel Ingram. re-doubled-down on "figuring out meditation"] (anything that was obviously cycling [as far as I could tell] completely and abruptly stopped as soon as I started doing the faintest hint of "global wayfinding" (somewhere v4-v20?) (2018)
stuff stuff (2)? 2017?-ongoing
main protocol v1 devolitioning, first main protocol document (2018)

First written protocol description:
[...]
Pure pixel-ish counterfactual queryable tower of Hanoi backchaining problem where can propose arbitrary x to see if work
Click-click; tinkering vs large-scale, make-it-so propagation..
Volitional-nonvolitional boundary, which can move
Whole-system; nay, whole-minvolitional-person(-to-me-right-now) dialoguing
Strategic claiming and disclaiming of volitionality. Like giving over an area to nonvolotiomality and then running volitional queries and requests in/on it vs trying volitional make-it-so

met JD, suggested perfect parent/paragon practice; Jhana Jenny (2019?)
main protocol v2 ???
main protocol v3 "taking a break"
main protocol somewher v4-v20?? first experience of clean solves of pretty much anything
"Alright things seem just about done, so on the order of 2000 hours is doable." Whoops. I thought I was "almost done" for like two years, before I shook off "thinking I was almost done." 2019-04-07 https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/07/2000-hours-to-full-classical-enlightenment-plus-risks/
initial github commit Nov 10, 2019 https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1
started compiling collaborator contributed preliminary/auxiliary practices Dec 9, 2019
v20-v100+ had to do massive cleanup of robert bruce's stuff and everything else. no prior practice particularly recommended
2020 switched from version numbers (v106 to just using github commit hashes)
May 2021 https://meditationbook.page/
2021 pith instructions and quick start
20211009 (somewhere 5000-10000 hours [7000 hours? 8000 hours?] of main protocol / global wayfinding [more entries continue below this extended entry]:

Mark L 7:50 PM
So I’m going to call the muscle tension done**, at least there’s no big twists/pressures left in the system, muscle-y or otherwise. What’s left is sort of fractal cleanup.
There’s alllllmost nothing “meditation-y” left to do, in general (phenomenologically, metaphysically[, deep childhood/prenatal refactoring]…). More and more things feel like “post-meditation,” which is maybe “embodied thinking.”
That said, I’m guessing probably a couple more small-medium size “shifts” at some point (like more Ingram-style centerlessness or agencylessness or smthg).
What’s next I guess is continued improvements in physical/social grace and like “life planning”/“embodied action” stuff. Post-meditation is meditation, no end in sight! But more interleaved with everything else (noodling, de-stressing, planning, writing, learning, integrating, “thinking”). (edited)

Mark L 8:01 PM
in addition the the “life niche proactive settling” stuff nearer the beginning, i’ve been poking at this, recently, the single lines “at least once sense in which” at the bottom https://meditationbook.page/#158da1

Some things that don't come through in the above, probably:

Before I was doing "global wayfinding" type things, it looks like I didn't put in that many raw hours meditating, and that's true. And/but, during that time, I did a ridiculous amount of reading and thinking (see bibliography). And then I meditated or tried stuff very, very "surgically." That is, I would read like a 200-600 page book, and then try stuff for five minutes, based on that book. During that, I'd learn some things. And then I moved on to the next 500-page book, and repeat. When I say surgical, I sort of mean nuanced or high-dimensional, like testing a very, very, very precise (implicit) hypothesis.

Like, not an 3-bit hypothesis "010", or something (so a selection out of an 8-option universe). But a hypothesis like "010100000101010100010101010101010101010100101010101010101010101010101010100000111010101010" (this is just an analogy).

Sometimes, when I felt like was really on to something (which could be fifteen minutes, instead of five minutes, or up to a few months), I would "travel in a straight line." That is, I would sketch a sentence or two of practice instructions (with maybe a bit of if-then structure, rarely a full-on diagram) and I would try to do just/exactly that. And/but, to do that, I would try it for a bit, then amend the instructions a bit, and so on. So it was sort of a local "funneling" feedback loop that would eventually stabilize into an "anchored" (by the iteratively edited writing or diagramming) practice. And again, I might still set it aside after minutes or days but sometimes (rarely) I'd play with a specific thing for months. These slowly become more nuanced and general, discontinuously, with big leaps in insight into what to do and how to schematize it. This is how I put it to myself (which I disendorse, now, and which I don't think is necessary or safe or desirable, but, for posterity:) "I create something and use it to travel in a straight line, until it breaks or I break. And then I revise the direction of that line based on what I learned." This was eventually too un-nuanced and too unsafe. It ultimately wasn't an effective way to navigate the territory, as it were. But to be fair, I did explore a pretty large space of practices, doing this. Over time, global wayfinding is sort of doing this, but safely, and with fractally nuanced curved lines.

Ramble/draft on the contemporary/classical term "purification": Something else important is that "contemporary meditative achievement" sort of puts the "psychological stuff" in the backseat and/or sort of separates it out into "purifications" (both related and unrelated to "insights") or something. I can't emphasize enough something like the "mediately all-to-all connected" nature of the (body)mind. What I mean is something like past, present, and future isn't necessarily all immediately available but it all directly or indirectly participates in the "now," either in an "unconscious pre-integrated" way or an "post-integrated kind of unconscious but also participating in the very being and seeming of the world." (Side note: And, this will be sort of hard to make sense of, but the very sense of the future itself [and plenty of other things] re-seat in emptiness.) I'm mentioning this because it's not excavation, it's not "purification," it's tacit, global problem solving via local operations. And/or/rather, purification (or a sense of being "more pure"/quiet/seamless/now) is not the method or a lead indicator but mediate or long-run result. Rather, what one is doing isn't purifying or navigating by using purification as feedback (or if so, indirectly and sparingly). Purification (immersive flashbacks, insight, de-conditioning and re-conditioning, increased wellbeing, decreased anxiety, metaphysical and existential ease, physical and social grace, a sort of sense of seamless smoothness or perfection [in some non-reified sense] of the phenomenological field) is a non-monotonic, global tower of hanoi problem, with a limited number of possible local operations, at each step. If a bunch of seeming "purification" is happening, there's no guarantee that you're not just somehow winding yourself up in a way that has to almost all be redone later. What's happening matters in terms of how it fits/integrates into the global context of everything that has happened or will happened; that's the context in which local navigation and local happenings sort of how to be (patiently, gently) "judged", and buddha nature always holds in that all "mistakes" are reversible. Any step is ultimately a step forward even if it turns out that mediately it was a "step back." All of this also applies to "insights." It's sort of like anything local only matters in the context of global integration, and sort of the only thing that matters (in some loose sense!) is global integration. And global integration proceeds by local operations, as in the "local operations" are the only "things" that can only ever be "done," one by one. (And/but not to over-reify, there's nothing thing-like cf. emptiness.)

Which is all to say, there's a way in which this document doesn't well reflect/exemplify alllllllllllllllll the object-level personal stuff along the "path." The hard stuff of personal history and life. But the personal stuff, and character (as it were, not to reify that), and action-in-the-world, is the path, not any of the flashy stuff, which, in the end, is just some bits flipped, somewhere, sort of.

Ah and one concern I have about rendering things as above is that it makes seem like there's this vast puzzle where changing one thing has all these ripple effects and everything has to be juuussst right. In some sense that's true in an intellectual and abstract sense, and some conceptions like that can potentially help with global wayfinding, but like the lived, "done" thing (or nonmonotonically in the right direction) is when ever more of the thing, you and all of it, takes care of itself, costlessly, effortlessly, and also ever more of the process itself takes care of itself, costlessly, effortlessly. So like anything that sort has to be maintained or "made to stick" is not the thing and not the way to get to the thing and the "done condition" is the exact opposite or high maintenence, high-touch. (But, to be fair, importantly(!) en route might demand a tremendous amount of resources/bandwidth/cognition/attention/unstructured time. For some people when all of this is "unpacked," "in flight," "in progress," it'll be sometimes hard to have a job/career/business/investing/anything, relationship, take care of kids, etc., where you need to be "on."

Someone close to me asked, Why do you meditate? Is it spiritual? Is it a job or a hobby? ...

(Nearer to the end is material that I didn't actually send to them as an answer, but most of the beginning I did.)

[...]

For me, meditation is deeply, deeply, deeply instrumental. It's always been meditation /for/. There are things that are intrinsically interesting about it, and it has become incidentally professional, and part of my engagement with it has been because I want to share the value with other people, and be around other people who have partaken in that value, and I would like that value to be disseminated more widely; but, yeah, it's instrumental.

What I mean by instrumental, or /for/, is that, all things being equal, I'd rather be doing other things, at least in a vacuum. (I mean I could see myself continuing to teach meditation, main-line or in a way ancillary to other goals, but it's never been my main goal.)

I originally got into meditation because I was (a) trying to heal/fix things and (b) to run away from things. But, once I saw the value (or I thought I did--it took a long time to unlock the "real" value), I set my sights higher, and it became a way to go towards things, a way to add things to my life.

And then I got really hurt, so it's sort of half to fix things and half to get things. I think of meditation as maximally oblique, concrete problem solving, or the thing one might do when nothing else works. There's also an issue of very high opportunity cost, because it's physically and psychologically risky, relatively unpredictable, sometimes involuntariliy requires prioritization, and is time consuming. So one might reach for it when solving problems in relatively direct ways fails.

This is sort of where some of the spiritual stuff does come in--meditation does eventually deeply touch metaphysical, existential, and cosmological issues. So meditation is sufficiently-as-oblique-as-needed, problem solving and problem dissolving. And that is why I do it.

It's, over a long period of time, made me more emotionally resilient, a better problem solver, increased my wellbeing, reduced my allergies, improved my sleep, improved my digestion, genuinely definitively answers many existential and philosophical questions, improved my writing ability, and it's sort of given me a long-run unshakeable... something--faith? certainty? but strange kinds that continuously eat themselves.

[...]

Importantly, there's a very high chance it takes over one's life for a while. Sometimes one can do stuff in the cracks, but it sort of uncontrollably makes itself first priority. And, sometimes one can't do stuff in the cracks, so there needs to be sufficient resources to cash in during those times. And, because of how the mindbody untangles itself, it's not unusual to feel like all is lost, at various points. There's a sense in which it undoes everything, in which one loses everything, though there's also senses in which that's not true at all.

In some ways, at least one of the following has to make sense for someone to engage in meditation, in the sense that I use the word, in no particular order:

(Please note, the below is off the top of my head, and I haven't thought it through very carefully.)

you are well-resourced, patient, and already relatively self-compassionate--and optionally maybe you're curious, risk-tolerant, and somehow (at least a little) hungry
you're at rock bottom and/or have exhausted all other options
you've started, and crossed some threshold, and the only way to be free of meditation is to ride it all the way to end (sometimes relatively front-loaded and efficiently, and sometimes as much in the cracks as possible

[...]
<<<

20220415:

([if I publish this elsewhere] I feel comfortable commoditizing this a little in part because it's exemplifying, and it happened many years ago, and my family doesn't regularly read my writing.)

Very big insight: "I can't (a) really love an intimate partner, or (b) really have friends, or (c) really connect, even if I try, so don't try too hard. [Context: This is a sort of bounded gloss; of course I have loved and connected and etc., but also, etc., in sweeping, total-life-trajectory-affecting ways] And that's because my grandmother died horribly of cancer, and it massively affected my mother, and I can't be like my mother having that experience with my grandmother. (I watched all this go down over a bunch of months when I was three-years-old-ish. I didn't see much directly, but I saw a tiny bit, and I experienced the change in my mother and her distraction.) The "gathering and realizing and glossing" of this, the former having taken from ages three-ish to forty-one and somewhere between 8000-10,000 hours of meditation, and the latter two a "final" few hours during a morning meditation, are sort of 90% of the work of integration and hanging out with three-year-old-to-forty-one-year-old me and reinterpreting and re-exploring and re-feeling for sort of constructive (non-)transcendence. More like constructive (re-)imminence.

Years ago, maybe of course, this was explored in therapy, maybe "100 miles out," with talk and EMDR and other modalities, over a few months. But it was too tangly, too inchoate, too something, to really get at, understand, illuminate, etc. There was something there, but it wasn't entirely clear there was a there, there, or at least how and how deeply it functioned. Maybe the-right-really-good practitioner would have made more progress.

Outside view, one could tell a story like the gloss above, one of many hypotheses, but to feel it resonantly, from the inside, in it's functional, actuating fullness, at the right time, in the right way, as it is then able to move; that's really something. Littler and bigger things like this, shallower and deeper, should keep happening throughout meditation practice, sometimes with many months between them. And "deeper and deeper," as needed, safely (or as safely as it possible).

First-pass, in terms of happiness and friendships and relating and intimacy---getting here was definitely worth the long hours, the opportunity costs, the relational and nth-order costs, the physical and financial and interpersonal risks, for me. Would gladly pay again, for what it's worth having already paid, and I'm still paying, to be sure.

[In terms of commoditization, if I publish a version of this elsewhere; maybe too high-context; "can your personal self-transformative practice do this? (many can, to varying degrees! and many interpersonal things can help! and/but for some parts of some of the very deepest stuff, etc., etc. sometimes maybe it might be worth sometimes, etc.]

[Life-affecting muscle tension did come back, up from a little present but not life-intefering, the above-as-a-twist-in-the-system clarifying, while approaching the above, and is now receding again, as best I can first-pass tell, to even lower levels. Will update if doesn't now smoothly dissipate utterly and completely. There could be even still a few more things. Recall, as best I understand it, it got so bad in the first place because of problematic things I did pre-p2 and pre-meta protocol.]

20220513:

I am finally jogging again, joy joy joy~~~~~~

Mark 2 minutes ago
Some muscle stuff did come back, though very unevenly distributed. Daily life relatively unaffected, though still couldn't go all out, and exercising was still hard / felt unsafe.
Even though all that, there were aspectual high-water-marks almost every day.

Mark 1 minute ago
And finally big drops again recently. I was jogging for months, months ago, but tension/pressure redistributed and made that bad.

Mark 1 minute ago
Now things are newly good but still with an on-and-off background of something feeling unsafe.

Mark < 1 minute ago
anyway jogging feels like flying. feels so healthy and good

Mark < 1 minute ago
metabolically and feeling into differential recovery rates across different muscle groups, lungs, cardiovascular system. i love this stuff.

and seeking "perfect" form, global optimum basin---non-impact, footfalls, glide, breath, floatiness---which can take weeks or months to find and even when you do it continuously changes as the above change at different rates

20220619:

See endlessness vs impermanence (scratch/stub)

The edges around everything are getting blurry, like sort of both blurry and turning in on themselves, or something. cf. boundlessness, endlessness, boundarylessness. But vis-a-vis non-infinity, non-eternalism, impermanence.

cf. no-things which was much earlier for me.

20220726:

[This doesn't feel quite accurate but better than nothing~] [Once again] I'm finding more pockets of metaphysical/cosmological phenological-belief-y bases-for-action, emotion, motivation, etc. Not this exactly, but kind of like meaning, intimacy, afterlife, this-life stuff, as entangled with day-to-day action and implicit (or explicit) long-term goals, interests, projects. More and more sort of [bodymindworld-phenomenological-everything] "don't know" replacing previously implicit "this is utterly how it is" and then losing that as carrot or stick, and then have to further and further "fall back on" or rely on the "the spontaneity of what's having happened as it's happening" [sic] as "basis" (for action and being) or something like that.

20220711:

See: void (nothingness, cessation(s), nibbana, nirvana [stub/scratch]

pre 20240426a:

lots of non-model-breaking meditation stuff, illness and no meditation for months, more non-model-breaking meditation stuff

pre 20240426b:

possibly want to add something here

20240426

For months and months prior up in there: Lots of jaw, neck, tongue, throat, sleep, breathing stuff (over many, many night and mornings—effortlessness, discomfort tolerance, patience, allowing, non-control, surrender, many somatic puzzles, “volitional unraveling puzzles,” always ultimately via effortlessness and spontaneity, and leading-edge lightest-gentle-touch-fear puzzles [ditto]). No history/evidence of childhood or adult sleep apnea though some childhood mouth breathing and childhood insomnia. Maybe some airway resistance syndrome? Partial mystery (because some of this has to be from the prior force-y stuff), so far, anyway.

20241015

From somewhere age(s) 2-5; "core personality stuff":

capitalism(?!),
skepticism / (epistemic) paranoia, calling bullshit, calling full of shit, knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism,
social warmth / belonging

20241107

Ken Wilber / Aurobindo --- overmind / supermind type stuff (not the first time; last time was in past year and I think I didn't record it) ; See maybe Wilber's Religion of Tommorow (maybe better discussion in earlier works, too). Note: Ken Wilber is not uncontroversial if you search around.

20241211

trying the ketogenic diet, at least temporarilly, finally, only with the help of lots of different powders said shamefaced-ly. lots less "[~very] subtle static," and other good things. i don't think it's making meditation faster, but it's interesting.
recently some sort of "hippocampal" integrations. doesn't feel like the final thing. spatial pathfinding, visual document navigation, learning, memory are all-ish the same thing-ish. vaguely. again doesn't feel completely correct or finished.
more self-is-leaving-out-world untwisting
some visual stuff over past year, as well as hippocampal thing and some other things feel like the beginning of sense-door integration (cf. centerlessness, etc.), finally
not doing anything different, same old (interesting / agonizing / etc.) practice; recent slight uptick in more explicit-ish meta-protocol-ish stuff versus last couple years, versus more spontaneous revelatory "oh this is next" or "oh this was wrong"

20241230

It's calmed down, now, for the moment, but the past few nights:

a strange almost-painful, almost-emotional pressure-y quality, additional strong (emotional) pain in the heart region, some actually painful burning, sensations going down the left arm, sensations going up to the jaw
- YES these are signs, including time of day, of either a) a heart attack or b) BROKEN HEART SYNDROME (google this), Takotsubo cardiomyopathy / takotsubo syndrome / stress cardiomyopathy (as per wikipedia, the names, not the symptoms), c) a "panic attack," though the symptoms are a little different. I am not a doctor and neither the preceding nor the below is medical advice.
- (Again, I am not a doctor, but, first pass, if you have these sensations, you should consider immediately having someone drive you to the emergency department or you should call 911 or the equivalents in your country.)
- Purely conversationally, I did not do the parenthetical, in part because I had moderately thorough heart workup a year ago, though a lot can change in a year and I had the workup for a reason. Again purely conversationally, there was not realllly any new pressure, nor chest squeezing, nor heaviness and also there was the absence of several other possible heart attack symptoms. Note: it's still possible to have a heart attack with almost no symptoms, and women tend to have a mild or atypical presentation. Again this is not medical advice and I have no idea what I'm talking about. The smart call would be for me to at least go in and get my troponin tested or something, maybe.
- What did give me the most pause was that the emotional quality of the pain was very similar to my 14-on-a-10-out-of-10-scale appendicitis pain many years ago, though, again, without the pain.
Anyway, the first time, I kept 50% meditating and 50% monitoring whether I thought I was having a heart attack. Now it's about 90/10.
Anyway, anyway, large-scale unwinding in the heart area, chest, and down my left arm picked up, and lifelong themes that have emerged so far are:
- belonging, worth, deservingness

20250107

(content warning) something from college (very large university and campus) involving alcohol and fraternities, two-way obsession, (most saliently) at least one incident of sexual assault, multiple people peripherally involved, I don't know, still sifting through the detritus, emotional devastation and anguish (re assault) and other sad stuff and peripheral knock-on unnecessary performative drama, that I was many degrees removed from and had almost no concrete, confirmable details about, yet apparently I was still somehow, someway in close proximity enough to write the above, and it seems it REALLY messed me up in ways my whole system tangled around again and again and again. truly huge structural "fixity," possibly life-path altering
"I am evil and have behaved in evil ways from other people's perspectives"
I/me/identity/being-the-type-of-person-who --- very classical vibes, "but how will I organize a large subset of behavior without 'I am this so I will do that'...?"

20250108

Very young and small and at a big (to me) party with lots of adults densely walking around with multiple rooms, and I was next to my own mother, but there was a kid maybe a little younger than me whose mother had just abandoned him and he was crying and terrified and looking around. And my mom was like "uhhhh, I wouldn't just leave my kid." A memory I've had before, once in a while, but it seems it tangled me up.

20250115

Some rigid / unresponsive never-agains in early childhood and middle school ; entangled with current striving
"trying to outrun myself each and every moment"

20250122

Lost a center if not the center. + "this will cease". Time will tell.

20250525

My EYE MUSCLES are meditatively refactoring and wearing corrective lenses interferes and I am like -2.5/-4.5. It’s been a few days, now, and I want to stop holding everything to my face and doing computer things on my phone.

The global structure of mind is really something. https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1925360991623082140

how come?

Idk too much Netflix while meditating? (I will update my book if I determine that) Or maybe this happens to everyone who wears corrective lenses 😬maybe not idk yet! If so maybe not a problem until very far into meditation; unclear! I was worried about this possibly being a thing tho https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1925383188689395851

20250604

ok eyes have chilled out atm

20260126 >>> Wow, “I desperately, desperately, desperately don’t want to be better than other people at anything I am remotely good at, because of how disconnective it would be. Everybody should in principle be able to be as good as everybody else at all the things. And everybody should actively and proactively collude(?) to facilitate that. [?…] Thus(?), if there’s nobody already teaching the thing better than I ever could, then I don’t want to learn the thing, let alone become good at it, unless I simultaneously learn how to superlatively teach it and simultaneously execute on teaching it while learning it, in a lockstep fashion. Given enough resources it should in theory be possible to teach anybody, anything, and there is a collective moral imperative to jointly acquire such/those resources for doing so.” Well, hmmm/butts.

20260509

Worked through all available substantial regret and longing some years ago. (Plenty of other amazing emotions to be had.) Finally uncovered or computed/constructed some more, and it tastes so sweet. In my experience, so much goodness to be had, here. Very, very exciting. https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/2053102135454072888

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