preconceiving, direct reifying [draft]:

There’s sort of three main types of sections in this document. These are something like the following:

• theoretical model sections
• practice instructions
• phenomenological descriptions

At the time of this writing, it’s not always obvious which kind of section a particular section is, and some sections are a mix of these three sections.

Because “the very being and seeming of the world” can be fluid, the boundaries between these section types (or prose types) can be nebulous, too.

One possible problem with “theoretical model” sections is there can be a temptation to try to “directly see the model in the world,” sort of like a direct overlay versus like a loose analogy. And this sort of shades into something like what I call “preconceiving” or “attempted/​direct reifying.”

The latter is something like knowingly or unknowingly almost trying to “make it real, as such” where “it” refers to the ontology or dynamics of some particular theoretical model section. This is similar to Daniel Ingram acknowledging that meditation maps can sometimes predispose practioners to experiencing an facsimile or imagined or fabricated version of a meditative experience. Though, as best I can tell, he and I both believe that the value of maps and models, at least in general, outweigh the risk of this failure mode.

For meditative phenomena, it’s a bitttttttt more clear cut. One either had the “real” meditative experience or they didn’t, albeit perhaps partially or faintly, or something.

For theoretical models, it’s a bit more nebulous. For my part, I authored models the way I did because the writing was experientially resonant and evocative for myself and hopefully for readers. And, as previously noted, the very seeming and being of the world, while not arbitrary, is conditioned and malleable. While I do think there’s a pretty clear (if loopy!) gradient towards something “truer,” “less mediated,” something. Anything along the way (and asymptotically “forever”) that works for you, works for you.

And so if something, at times, seems more usefully theoretical, and, at other times, seems more usefully “phenomenological,” and sometimes the distinction is nebulous, great! (And if something isn’t resonant at all or seems actively bad for your practice and experience, it’s ok to set it completely aside, temporarily or indefinitely. That’s partly why there’s a lot of writing from a lot of different angles [though hopefully well-organized and not too redundant].)

So holding stuff loosely, experimentally, provisionally is good, as well as self-authoring your own stuff, explicitly or intuitively--which you’ll naturally do more and more until that eats up everything, including itself, with no remainder, long run, as it were, in some sense.

So, yeah, analogies, metaphors, touchstones, experiments.

And so then, the more problematic thing is “systematic direct reifying” where you’re sort of trying to continuously spray theoretical models everywhere, to tile everything with how you think it should be or how you think it should be experienced, based on what you read in this document or from other sources, teachers, etc. This will inevitably happen a little bit, but try not to do this! Hold stuff loosely and provisionally and experimentally. Let yourself see what you see versus what you think you should see or what was written down somewhere. Heuristic cautions are "effort", "pushing." Heuristic good signs are, generally, costlessness, effortlessness, and things "coming to you," "arising or becoming apparent on their own." (With exceptions to everything because, in part, of how the mind sort of untangles itself!)

Whether you read this before starting practice or only later, you may still eventually find that you’ve been trying to “direct reify” your intepretation of material in this book or from other meditation books or teachers or via/​with other experiences from long ago, and you may find you’ve been doing that for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of hours, or for much of your life.

And that’s ok!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!​!

The mind has a natural tendency to do this, for some people, some of the time, even when we're expecting it, to some extent. It’s accounted for in the “ten thousand hours of practice” thing. Much of that ten thousands hours is sort of backtracking, and that still falls under the ten thousand hours. It’s accounted for. So not fifteen thousand hours composed of ten thousand hours of doing the thing with another five thousand hours mixed in, just ten thousand hours of meditation, which includes backtracking. (Of course, ten thousand hours is itself is a rough heuristic and it’ll be different for different people and ten thousand hours isn’t the end; it’s just roughly when things kind of settle down a bit and become a bit more predictable).

I’m kind of rambling about ten thousand hours in the previous paragraph because it can be helpful to consider that there are no shortcuts--rushing, corner-cutting isn’t really possible. One sort of has to “walk the entire mind,” every little nook and cranny and tiny seam. That’s how the mind and meditation work. Good meditation writing and so on will help reduce some backtracking, but really things mostly proceed by exhaustive process of elimination (which works because bodymind is finite in a good way!).

So noting there are no shortcuts, as it were, just patient (as best one can) practice, “slow is smooth; smooth is fast”—-well, not fast, in this case; it’s incredibly slow, but smooth is a smoother ride--but, anyway, noting there are no shortcuts, just shimmery, delicate work, something fizzy and buzzy and spontaneous and sweeping, sometimes just delicate, this might lessen the pressure to fall into trying to “direct reify.”

And, finally, if you do find yourself doing something like “direct reifying,” it might have been going on already for thousands of hours or a lifetime, and might still continue for thousands of hours, even if you know it’s happening!, and that’s ok. That’s part of the de-entrenchment, burn-off, metabolization, integration, redo-to-undo process. Even if it’s “wrong,” in some sense, the fact of it happening at any particular point isn’t itself wrong. It’s just happening beause of prior causes and conditions, and that’s ok. (Some of this language is being used out of order and will make more sense after reading future sections.)

Anyway, all of this applies to this written section, itself, too. Try not to take this section too seriously or to worry too much about whether you’re doing it right, and so on. Different meditation systems, depending, might not have to worry about this sort of thing at all. Different meditation systems sort of need different cautions or lack of caution, because of all the other explicit and implicit elements of the system, and how they all work together, in general, and how they work or don’t work for any particular individual. So do hold any particular system lightly, including this one.