preliminaries and vacations; conceptualization as such:
Someone comments (slightly edited):
"I’m very interested in the demarcation between meditation and not-meditation (with respect to the instructions not ‘feeling like’ meditation. Can you just basically meditate all the time, by this system, unless you have something else to focus on in specific (job, a game, movie, in-depth conversation, whatever?)"
Answer:
It matters how you think about what you’re doing, how you explicitly or implicitly, reflectively or unreflectively, conceive of what you’re doing, while you’re doing it.
There’s a main practice, below, where one of the components is surrender, reverie, etc. Just as in that practice, where it’s ok to let go, to be lost, to forget, to daydream, to be in reverie, it’s also ok to get lost in life.
So when you’re working, playing, socializing, relating, it’s probably often better to just do that. (Maybe this changes, little by little by little, as one gets very far along, and there are practices, one described below, where it’s possible to explicitly practice with someone. But, 99% of the time, maybe, when meditating, meditate, and, when living, just live.)
Meditating of course happens in an environment, air conditioning, kitchen appliances in the distance, wind, traffic, machinery, conversations in another room. So meditation takes the environment into account. But there’s still sort of a difference between meditating in an environment and living (in an environment), until there is no difference, which never has to be forced.
***
An electronic dialogue (slightly edited):
[...]
Mark 15 minutes ago
to be fair, the protocol doc is me collecting 15,000+ [now 250k+ words] words of highly detailed things to remember, for myself (and others). so there’s that. [in order to eventually "forget" it], to not need it, for it to become an inert pedagogical tool to share with others (edited)
[...]
Collaborator 15 minutes ago
i have some new thoughts on the protocol doc
Collaborator 15 minutes ago
nascent thoughts
Collaborator 14 minutes ago
i think you’d agree fwiw ...
Collaborator 14 minutes ago
[that] like for a (small?) percentage of minds [the protocol document] will drive them crazy
Mark 13 minutes ago
i’m more inclined to think this than in the past
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
[A long time ago I read a] quote [that] was like, "a meditator will choose the protocol that feeds their neurosis"
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
definitely not saying this is always or even usually the case
Collaborator 13 minutes ago
but like, i can see the ways i’ve gotten stuck * inside * of the protocol
Mark 13 minutes ago
... ...and then hopefully a protocol is good enough to eventually deconstruct that neurosis... ...
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
sigh
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
hopefully
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
i think eventually maybe
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
but there might be faster ways
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
jumping into deep ends
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
going to wild parties
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
^ not so much that last one
Collaborator 12 minutes ago
but you get the point i think
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
which isn’t exactly true
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
i’ll still be following the protocol
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
at least the most important ways
Mark 11 minutes ago
would say that this conversation, this being verbalized, is evidence of protocol at least partially working
agreed that some things will be hilariously ridiculously faster for some people.
"if i’d only done X first" is also kind of a thing. i’m guessing that X usually wouldn’t have had the same effect if it came first.
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
but like, i can see the ways i’ve gotten stuck * inside * of the protocol
but have to deconstruct several layers of how i baked it into my mind
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
partially yeah sure
Collaborator 11 minutes ago
but like wouldn’t have gotten there with just protocol
Mark 10 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
this needs to be more explicit, yeah. it’s near top of list.
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
like i think i have to forget the protocol kind of to proceed
but can’t forget protocol when inside of the protocol
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
or something like that
Mark 10 minutes ago
yeah
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
*for some people some of the time (edited)
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
like i still think protocol is Right [Editor: Ahhhh! I’m trying to point in the direction of something Right, "under emptiness."]
Collaborator 10 minutes ago
and maybe even Ultimate [Editor: Ahhhh! I’m trying to point in the direction of something Right, "under emptiness."]
Collaborator 9 minutes ago
but like it’s more clear to me how i’ve gotten trapped inside it and it’s assumptions (possibly the assumptions I gave to it)
Collaborator 9 minutes ago
and like how i might just need to go sing and roll in the grass and stuff for a couple months [kind of ..., not exactly ...]
Collaborator 8 minutes ago
protocol feels very platonic to me
Collaborator 8 minutes ago
or at least my understanding/interpretion of it
Mark 8 minutes ago
the way i’m thinking about it right now is there’s sort of micro-redo-to-undo, which can often be done in the context of main practice p2, conceptualized as such.
and then there’s also sort of macro-redo-to-undo, which can easily involve forgetting about the protocol for a few months to go have desired experiences and experiments. and both may be very necessary. and needing to do that one to twenty times, big macro orbits that forget about the protocol completely and then maybe pick it up again later [added later: or for sure finding a practice system that works better for oneself and ideally transcending particular practice systems right off the bat or one already did so long ago or sooner or later]. (edited)
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
fwiw i don’t think i’ve found anything that you’d disagree with perse
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
like you’ve always given room for going off and doing wild experiments
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
and so maybe i haven’t listened
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
but but
Collaborator 7 minutes ago
at the same time
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
i think there’s some assumption baked into the whole approach/attitude/mind life of protocol (and creator? maybe??) that’s leaking out here
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
some worldview, ontology, something something
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
maybe
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
or maybe just my (mis)understanding
Collaborator 6 minutes ago
not clear
Collaborator 5 minutes ago
nap time
Mark 5 minutes ago
like i still think protocol is Right
and maybe even Ultimate
I think the protocol captures something pretty well, albeit, abstractly. but everyone will interpret and reify the conceptual homomorphism in like a slightly different place in their mind. and sometimes may need to indulge discontinuities, like complete vacations, in order to pick it up again in way that’s seated more fortuitously.
Mark 4 minutes ago
i think there’s some assumption baked into the whole approach/attitude/mind life of protocol (and creator? maybe??) that’s leaking out here
for sure, inevitably, even though tried to maximally abstract that out. the vibe of the whole thing. will be my contingencies baked in a various ways. this convo one way of mitigating that to some degree.
Mark 3 minutes ago
@Collaborator Can I paste this into protocol doc with some light editing? Will remove some stuff at beginning of thread.
Mark 1 minute ago
Have been looking for a way to introduce the "healthy orbiting" idea. There’s also "pre-orbiting" where a person does a bunch of other stuff first, evaluating and comparing and maybe eliminating alternatives and complementary practices, as well as maybe refactoring life situation, while only lightly poking at doc, before really digging in. And that can be in stages or back-and-forth, plenty, too. And that’s fine and good.
Mark 1 minute ago
"healthy orbiting and pre-orbiting"
Mark < 1 minute ago
And for some people, there will be something much more direct than analytically deconstructing and insourcing a !5,000+ word document. Or they should do that first for X months or years and then fiddle with the document if they get stuck or something.
[Added later: In the dialogue above, it feels like I was trying to toe some line between holding firm on one or more particular points (for better and worse) and being defensive, and I maybe was a bit too (feeling) on the defensive side. I want to honor and affirm something like, for some people, this document could potentially be "problematically sticky" in a way that it might have been better for them to never encounter the document at all---surely that's true, at the very least in principle, in at least edge cases for both meditators and non-meditators.]