p26:

Practice pith gloss: "Rest in grace."

The way I'm using "grace" is sort of borrowed and adapted from Buddhism and Christianity and other places.

It's sort of the recognition that enlightenment, the path, whatever, is a product of causes and conditions such as reading about Buddhism, or coming across my stuff on twitter, or getting a link from a friend, or seeing a poster or an ad for a meditation retreat for the first time. And of course it's something one can self-stumble upon too and it's "real" independent of e.g. Buddhism, or whatever, so there's that very-loosely-speaking independent existence sense, but, here, is like a radically contingent sense, even if possibly overdetermined.

So like there's some sense in which "enlightenment," etc., is utterly and completely out of your control, always has been, factors you don't control and you never controlled, and so on, in some sense.

And it can become safe to rest in that, and, at first, hints of this might have a trapped, scary feeling (or even more than that), and over time it can become safe that it's intrinsic nature is one of legitimate safety and freedom (and always was, etc., etc.)

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My initial scratch notes:

[Intrinsic i personal goodness or benevolence, higher power, disinterested non-malicious, impartiality] [ed. note: depending on current cosmology, something in here might be useful]

Grace, progress, “enlightenment,” meditating at all, meditating being a thing as such, for better and worse, massively/​completely dependent on hearing about it somehow, somewhere, as it were, being exposed to the idea sort of ish solely depends on hearing about the dharma, it’s about the inputs (nature and nurture and adult nurture) and you don’t control those and you never controlled those Determinism type stuff can be cool or terrifying but sort of gets transformed over time into legitimate safety and freedom (and always was, etc, etc)