teaching and learning and creating and relating (meditation and anything) › embodied learning

the scale analogy [draft]:

There's a way in which the bodymind is like a "scale," or a "balance," an old-timey or ancient one, like the one Lady Justice is holding (lustitia, Justitia, Dike). There's two plates or trays, and you put something (or a bunch of somethings) with an unknown weight/mass/density/something, on one side, and you put something known, on the other side. And you manipulate one or both sides until the scales balance. Then you know something about the previously unknown side.

I'm going to talk about how the bodymind is like a scale, using the idea of a scale above, and I'll be progressively adding qualifiers and elaborations, and making connections.

First, I'd like to talk about what's on the scale. In the literal case, what's on a scale could be standardized pieces of metal, like bars or disks, or it could be beads, grain, powder, etc. For our bodymind scale, let's say it's "beads," little objects of similar size, shape, and weight. We're not seeking to measure anything, at least in the usual sense, with a bodymind scale. So these beads can go on both sides. And meditation (journaling, therapy, talking with friends, having experiences) moves beads from one side to other, say one or two at a time, in each passing moment, in either direction, depending.

What are the beads? They're something like memories, sense impressions, preferences, affordances, expectations, "beliefs," anticipations, muscle tone, something. This isn't essential to the analogy, but maybe each bead is unique, no two colors, or swirling multicolor patterns, on any random pair of beads, are the same. What is essential, to the analogy, though, is that, in the limit, the beads are not "fungible" or "perfectly exchangeable." For a literal scale, if two pieces of genuine gold had the same weight/karat/whatever, then you could exchange one for the other, and, all things being equal, no one would mind. Let's say all the bodymind beads are the same size, shape, and weight, the same density. But they aren't fungible. For this bodymind scale, even if there's "balance," even if there happens to be the same number of beads on each side of the scale, different combinations of beads on either side of the scale, even while balance holds, would be distinguishable. Or, rather, what's on either side of the scale matters.

(That "mattering" is intentionally left vague, here. But, let's say that, sometimes, a bunch of beads have to be exchanged between the two sides of the scale, even if the final result doesn't change the weight/balance of the scale much or at all. Incoming beads that are new and surprising can necessitate cascades of changes.)

Now, there's two ways that the scale can become more balanced. One is when more beads are added to one side or the other, and the other is when existing beads are moved from one side to the other. I'll say something like any activity is both adding beads and moving beads. Being out in the world, having (new) experiences, does a bit more adding beads than moving beads. And, say, meditating (and things a bit more like that), do a bit more moving beads than adding beads.

Ok, so why is "balance," why is having relatively the same amount of beads on each side of the scale interesting or relevant? This ties into the ideas of "layering," "technical debt," and the analogy of the bodymind being a sort of "tower of hanoi problem." (When we add more pieces to the main analogy, there will also be ties to the idea of structural fluidity, below.)

Recall, "layering" is the idea that some changes to the bodymind forestall other changes, and this happens at the microlevel which accumulates up to macroscale patterns/trends of personality, behavior, preferences, constraint. To complete the review, back to the microlevel, sometimes—for a change to occur somewhere in the bodymind, or if for something in the bodymind to simply become "agnostically labile"—something else has to change first. That "something else changing first" refers to de-layering. Layering generally "begets and accumulates" more layering, so sometimes (usually) changes to the bodymind involve lots of delayering, first.

Relatedly, recall that "technical debt," is borrowed from software engineering, which borrows the idea of "debt" from finance. The idea here is that if changes or additions to a system are made too fast or too disorganized, then future changes are both more likely to be disorganized themselves, and, critically, future changes become cumulatively harder and slower. For the bodymind, things that are too fast, too sudden/abrupt, too surprising, too painful, or that involve abrupt and durable context changes, are more likely to accumulate technical debt in the bodymind system. Paying off technical debt (which can involve risk and opportunity cost), refactoring the existing system, can make future changes ulitimately, potentially, easier, faster, safer, smoother, and more predictable.

Finally, relatedly, the "tower of hanoi" analogy is meant to indicate constraint, locality, and nonmonotonicity. (This is the puzzle where there are three pegs, as well as stack of discs of graded size, on those pegs. And, only one top disc can be moved at a time, and no disc can be moved on top of a smaller disc. And the goal is to move all the discs from one peg to another peg.) Constraint and locality mean that what's possible at any given time depends on the current state of the system, and future states depend on current states. Additionally, knowledge about other parts of the system is uncertain or at least not immediately available. And, the correctness/goodness/fit/something of local changes are globally dependent or depend on the state of some or all other "localities."

Here, "balancing the scale" is akin to de-layering, paying off technical debt, and simpler future "tower-of-hanoi"-like puzzles. The analogy of a scale is nice because it analogizes very well with something like "epistemic flexibility," "behavioral flexibility" (versus behavioral regidity), and so on:

That is, we want incoming information to "quickly tip the scale(s) in the right direction" [and/or/rather spontaneously facilitate a rapid multidimensional rebalance through dynamic trading between different dimensions to a new balanced (dynamic or not) equilibrium]. It's like, if someone hasn't been proactively, preemptively maintaining the contents of their scale, a new incoming bead might indicate that a bunch of beads on the left should be moved to the right, and vice versa. So that might take some time (hours, weeks). But, if someone's scales are already relatively balanced [and maybe arranged for "smooth, orderly flow"], probably the arrival of new bead necessitates only tiny changes. Or, thinking of the beads in sort of two big piles, on each side of the scale, the beads that need to be swapped between the two sides are more likely to be on the surface of the pile, rather than buried deep in the pile.

More generally, we want to sort of "arrange ourselves," "arrange our bodyminds," so that "incoming information" "does the right thing":

Scenario 1: A person had a traumatic experience, long ago. And each time they encounter something that overtly or subtly reminds them of that experience, they become newly upset, for a time, with little change in intensity.
Scenario 2: A person encounters a relevant and surprising pieces of information, and it haphazardly cascades through their system, with various "beliefs" flip-flopping back and forth, for some time, before things sort of uneasily settle, with a penumbra of contradictions, overgeneralizations, and incomplete "inferential/transitive closure." And the next piece of information might kick off yet more haphazard flip-flopping cascading all throughout the system. And, generally, they can sort of easily be sniped or "nerd-sniped," sometimes distressingly, intrusively so, by incoming information or experiences.
Scenario 3: A person encounters evidence that is mostly confirming of their current beliefs, and so their bodymind system is briefly, lightly sculpted, say, "priors," lightly adjusted, and little else happens.
Scenario 4: A person encounters a decisively credible and surprising piece of information, that is relevant to large swaths of downstream dependencies. And, so, smoothly and relatively automatically (which is not the same as "unconsciously"(!), a wave of change (locality withstanding) moves through their system, with relatively little flip-flopping and mediate inconsistency (nonmonoticity withstanding), and with relatively complete inferential/transitive closure. (And under bounded rationality, since systemic changes take real, durational time [i.e. locality!/temporality!], these smooth changes can be smoothly delayed or temporarily preempted or interrupted, if something else is more important, and then smoothly resumed to completion at a later time.)

"Balanced scales" are related to scenarios 3 and 4. The "appropriate thing smoothly happens," whether "appropriate" is "small" or "big." Additionally, finally, scenarios 3 and 4 lightly imply reversibility, an ability to smoothly "return" to states that have (relatively path-preserving) features of earlier states, say, if new evidence was then followed by evidence that hard-to-anticipate-surprising-in-almost-any-world disconfirmed the previous evidence.

Now, I'd like to nuance or qualify the scale analogy, which actually might make some of the above make a bit more sense.

The first nuance is that it's not just two trays. If you look directly down on the original scale, it's not just a line with a circle (tray) at each end. But, let's say, looking down on our "nuanced" scale, it's almost like a spoked wheel, with many lines radiating from a center, and a circle at the end of each radii. This is to say, that the bodymind, or belief, expectation, anticipation, preference, affordance, etc., are very high-dimensional, nuanced. (And that such high-level things as "anticipations," not to overly or inappropriately reify any of these, are sort of bottom-up constructed or emergent out of the arrangement of beads over all the scales.) The beads can go a lot of places, and balancing is much more complex than just moving beads back and forth between just two trays.

The second nuance is that the scales/trays are fractal. Trays are composed of smaller trays, which are composed of smaller trays, and all those smaller trays have corresponding trays that they can be balanced with, and so on. So there can be small scale imbalances (or "balances") while there is a large-scale imbalance, and vice versa. (For these two nuances, it can be sort of helpful to imagine a three-dimensional or radially symmetric sierpinski triangle.)

The second nuance can be helpful to explain how someone can be a very flexible or fast learner (and un-learner and re-learner), in some domains, but very rigid or "can't teach an old dog new tricks" in other domains. Similarly, someone can be very flexible or easygoing about some things, and very rigid about other things, to the point that even an exploratory conversation is off limits. Whether someone is "generally balanced," or not, that "degree of balancing" can be inhomogeneous.

In any case, "fractal balancing of all the scales at all levels" is deeply related to so-called "structural fluidity," and "fit to life situation, including proactive reshaping of life situation" discussed elsewhere.

So, one can have some "analogical payoff in that "being balanced" is sort of "being poised" and able to relatively quickly or smoothly change weight, stance, direction in behavior, belief, whatever, in response to what's newly or surprisingly or lightly confirmingly happening around you, without getting more entrenched in old ways or overgeneralizing in a new direction, etc.. There are other ways the analogy is evocative or pays off:

There's something literally going on with gross/overt stance and muscle tone or tension (and more), with respect to how muscles are "loaded," and the relationship between muscles and behavior and belief (and/&#8203better, the very seeming and being of the world). Lateral and anterior/posterior balance in muscle tone and tension, as well as in opposing muscle groups, is both a correlated proxy and literally related to the analogous "balance" discussed in this section. (At most general, it's maybe more like "appropriate balance," or something--there will at least be some strength, if not tone, differences due to limb dominance, and generally one's posterior chain is stronger than the anterior. Strength and/or separately-but-relatedly muscle size probably has some effect on resting and active/coordinated muscle tone/tension.)

Finally, I find this analogy to be very viscerally evocative when doing (ethical, consensual, legible) "subtle interaction" or "spirit work," "enegy work," "bodywork," etc., with another person. (Side note: all of the latter are élan vital, phlogiston, luminiferous aether, etc. At the time of writing, I have positions on mechanism, but I prefer subtle interaction as an agnostic and noncommital term of art.) There's a big difference when working with non-meditators versus long-term ("global wayfinding") meditators:

With non-meditators, there can be tremendous "imbalances" in how the system is "loaded" (not to mention twists and whirls/whorls, which is outside the scope of this analogy). It's like many pounds of wet sand are piled densely. In this case, there are at least two ways of working with that (loosely speaking, leaving out important considerations; these are high-level analogies). One way of working can be likened to running a gentle stream of water over the top surface of the wet sand, and that top surface then moves relatively easily, gradually exposing deeper layers which can then be moved easily too. Another way of working can be likened to "patiently leaning in, broadside" to the wet pile, from the side, with one's own "bodyweight," and if the pile isn't too big, and if one is patient and steady enough in their leaning, this will eventually produce movement. (((Again, this is not a guide for how to safely work with people—to strain the analogy, you don't want to overcommit in your leaning, and you don't want the pile to fall over, as it were—and in general I tend towards light touch, which is itself a high-level abstraction. Also, in general, "general heuristics, let alone rules, never hold" in that what matters are the radical and particular concretes; so yet another way to say it is that these analogies are descriptive not proscriptive.)))

But, for a meditator, all their "scales" will be relatively fractally more towards balanced (with sometimes still big imbalances), and dense areas are generally smaller, things are more generally already "broken up" (in a good way), and fluid, all things being equal. And so, light touches and (very) light leaning, are much more readily and quickly "snapped up," "taken up," actively used, directly affecting, and so on. It's easier to have a dynamic and interaction "conversation," with such a person's system (and/or with person+system!, and so on).

P.S. I think there are ambiguities, equivocations, and inconsistencies in these analogies, but, on net, I think they're more illuminating than confusing.

Balancing isn't just bilateral. There's also non-headyness/non-headiness (which is not no-head, except in the nondual sense of "having no head"). That is it's like the body is a dense or superficial lacework of potential rivulets and trickles, with an activation energy hump, and meditation, successfullly, iteratively gets things over that hump (non-forcily; it's its own path of least resistance, all things being equal, in the end), and then fractal rivulets or trickles follow gravity, in a little-by-little iterated partwise round robin, or in parallel, and the end result is sort of a "settled evenness" or "even settledness", like water in a container (while still sensitive, dynamic, alive) throughout the body(mind), all across the surface of the body(mind), where "everything" is distributed evenly, leveled, so no lumpiness, no clumpiness, no sharpness, etc. Late stage, when experiences are had, sprinkled in on exposed surface areas, when things are changed or added, there is matching up to zero-lag synced non-local accounting, balanced redistribution, elsewhere in the body(mind), or at least a quick iterated, durational reaccounting or redistribution, if anything even starts to get "lumped" or "sharp" or "unevenly loaded" or "unevenly distributed" (perhaps throughout the available "substrate", as it were, emptiness and groundlessness and nebulosity and provisionality, withstanding). Fully evened out, as it were, may be the same as no remaining technical debt [cf. also luminosity, vividness, centerlessness, etc.]

Furthermore, there's a way in which there's sort of ultimately balance between "inside" and "outside," though this is a bit different in which very loosely speaking "inside" sort of "dissolves" (though aspects of this are very late stage) or rather perfectly mixes with outside, in which outside is sort of suffused with inside yet also in some sense with inside there's no remainder. Or it's something like outside becomes composed of meaningful inside or... Or inside arises within outside or... or meaning and knowing sort of become part of outside or...