theory-driven (/ theory-harmonizing-equilibriating) intuitive/​interoceptive nutrition and eating:

[This section was not written by licensed professionals and this is not medical advice. (ditto / same for the rest of the document)]

[Originally published [untitled twitter thread] : https://twitter.com/acesounderglass/status/1504591434707468316 [Last accessed: 2022-04-29] Reproduced here with permission.]

Recently I found myself not wanting to eat @MealSquares. I reflected on it and realized that it was pushing some nutrients ahead of others, and it felt worse to be deficient in only one thing than everything. So I went to look for the deficient nutrient.

Tried a bunch of stuff, and there's one thing that reliably restores my desire to eat mealsquares: V8 juice. This surprised me, because I thought canning destroyed nutrients. But it's extremely reliable, and nothing else works at all.

V8 also did that thing where it tastes mediocre but I persistently want it, which for me means it's addressing a nutritional deficiency.

V8 has three known nutrients in any quantity: vitamin C, vitamin A, and potassium. And the potassium is pushing the definition of present.

MealSquares should provide 100% of all of these, but I was clearly missing something, so I investigated.

At first I assumed the missing nutrient was vitamin C, which is the most abundant vitamin in V8, and degrades the fastest so there was a reason for my somewhat aged mealsquares to fall short. But vitamin C pills didn't work, and I rejected other foods that were high in C.

(some possibility the vit C pills have degraded, but they shouldn't degrade that badly)

Didn't want carrots so it seemed like vitamin A was out, although I should maybe test this more thoroughly.

That left potassium. You ~can't buy pills with any real quantity of potassium, so I can't test that way. But bananas seem nice, and @jimrandomh guessed potassium deficiency before I gave him any information. It's just his go to for deficiencies.

Yesterday I was midway through a V8 when suddenly I hated it and wanted candy very badly. A different nutrient was short. Turns out it was salt which I'm normally pretty abundant in and V8 isn't exactly lacking, but I had some salt and suddenly all the cravings went away.

I say the potassium pills don't have much potassium, but it's 2% RDV, and the V8 is only 6%. 3 pills is not an insurmountable number, so maybe I should just buy those.

And of course it could be a weird cofactor in the vegetable juice we don't know to track yet, that would be the most interesting answer.

After all that I was not only reliably eating mealsquares, but got vastly better about my pill vitamins, suggesting I was subconsciously trying to keep my nutrients in balance the whole time. So if you're mysteriously rejecting nutrients, consider looking for a defiency elsewhere

update: isolated KCl salt didn't work (in the sense of engendering a desire for mealsquares), trying vitamin A pills next.

*

Miscellaneous messy scratch notes (added by Mark):

"misc pith"

• I didn't try to try download the original reference, but anecdotally there was a study where they let toddlers choose from a wide array of foods over some time period. And the toddlers came up with really weird food combinations but converged on eating in a nutritionally complete way. (If someone sends me a citation I'll add it here.)
• Brunstrom, Jeffrey M., and Mark Schatzker. "Micronutrients and food choice: A case of ‘nutritional wisdom’in humans?." Appetite (2022): 106055.
• "Little bets" and "little experiments" are good.
• If I have a craving for "junk food," I try to figure out the craving components and satisfy them, but, if I can't figure it out after a few tries, I almost always err on the side of eating the craved junk food.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body [Last accessedL 2022-04-29]
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_amino_acid [Last accessedL 2022-04-29]
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_fatty_acid [Last accessedL 2022-04-29]
• Websites like https://whfoods.com/ and https://nutritionvalue.org/ have many-to-many crosslinks between nutrients and foods, with sorting by relative USA RDA amount, allowing for rapid hypothesis generation. [Last accessed: 2022-04-29]
• Superstimuli and "out-of-equilibrium" metabolic regimes can interfere with intuitive eating, etc., etc. Sometimes one has to creatively change meal timing or meal composition or amount or wait out diminishing insulin resistance over a few days to start getting better signals. Signals have to be sort of deconvolved and refactored. Psychological factors such as childhood food insecurity will affect all this, and working through those can change eating patterns and "weight set points." There is no steady state; the body's needs seem to tend to always be slowly drifting over time, even when not making big changes in activity level and so on. Food "tetris" can be ongoing but figuring out how to get all the b vitamins in various combinations goes a long way. Digestion is cognitive---what you read and provisionally learn about nutrition (the science is not... great at the time of this writing), does influentially comingle with interoceptive signals; error correction, all of cognitively, intuitively, and the interplay between them, is important. Energy metabolism (dietary and respiratory and with respect to immune system function) has ongoing interoceptive correlates, both direct and indirect. The immune system is partially cognitive. This process may dampen immune system overreaction over time.
• Some nutrients need to be in particular ratios (including macronutrients), so if you don't want food that you usually like, for example, sometimes you need more of something not in the food, and sometimes you need less of something in that food or elsewhere. There's probably a sprinkling of other insights / gotchas like this.
• meditatively working through waves of diffuse, low-key "food insecurity" (micronutrient, macronutrient, meal planning, parental ignorance) at the (a) sensory/phenomenological/interoceptive level and (b) cognitive level. // seem to be losing weight or changing body composition. // working through a thing seems to instantaneously resolve low-key macro and micronutrient cravings. // that wouldn't make sense but e.g. "objective dehydration" and "subjective thirst" are 2 separate brain systems that are phase-lag coupled. // I like the phrase "autonomic harmony." // For me, I didn't remotely have access to a lot of this kind of thing until thousands of hours of meditation had passed, at least. Some vagus-mediated allergy stuff was more quickly accessible. This stuff goes deeeeeeeeep [ https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1520806875297718276 Last accessed: 2022-05-01 ]
• Maybe whereever I talk about "radically concrete" and "post-conceptual" (or maybe elsewhere), I need to add something like "yes 'deterministic' but non-algorithmic, non-rule based, pre-conceptual, post-conceptual, post-pattern..", after something like Popperian or Deutschian something.
• [Update 20230410 (xposted in a couple places): I'm becoming more distrustful of one-shot (at least) taste stuff because I think my body is saying no to things, but if I put it in my stomach anyway, my body is like "oh, huh, interesting" after a few hours. Or like "no, what?!" but after a couple days (or even longer) my body is more on board. Gotta do outside view stuff too, which of course I was, but I'm more outside view than I was.]
• key path elements:
  • effortlessness
  • hereness [really, say, hereness-and-now-ness, but, still, not to reify]
  • nowness [really, say, hereness-and-now-ness, but, still, not to reify]
  • [not trying to change anythingness, including not trying to not try to change anythingness]
• everything not grounded and happening [within]in the experience of here and now is wrong
• nothing really can do, except be moved by """""""reallity"""""""" and that's already happening
• no behind me until I turn
• don't be afraid of old states and old practices cf. redo-to-undo; if "old practices" "come up" let them
• uncoupling preference from control, cf. "superstitious meditation" / inappropriate use of meditation [see typology of pain and suffering in terms of when to try meditation (experimental) Also see: superstitious meditation, muscle tension, and will
• the whole world is within you; the feel of the whole world is within you
• everything interfaces somehow with here and now
• X won't fall apart or even be set back if you put it down completely for a few days or even a few weeks
• experimental: deepest intuition that you can change things versus "things" "just" "inherently" "change"
• you can divide breathing into autogenic and volitional components, and more generally there's autonomic behavior (e.g. breathing in general and peristalsis and one's heartbeat, etc.) and like skeletal muscle or volitional behavior (and we can indirectly, it's relative) affect autonomic behavior, too. but, to abuse the term autonomic, even skeletal muscle is "autonomic or "spontaneous". in some sense there's no difference between autonomic behavior and like skeletal muscle behavior. in some sense it's "all autonomic" and coming to realize this is etc etc.
• "no heaven, no hell, no spiritual realm, no fantasy realm, no alternate timeline, no alternate future; 'resurrection' would happen here, where the past would always have happened"
• "just this universe; just this timeline" [as a frame] [cf. extreme value of counterfactuals and possible worlds, though]
• [meditation as] "awesome vs fantastical vs ordinary"
• generally won't lose place/​position and momentum on creative/​elsewhere/​elsewhen projects if spend time in here and now
• definitely some value in occasional rigorous classical retreat conditions (no phone, no internet, 0-2 books, nothing to do at all except meditate and exercise and chores and eat) for, say, a week or two every 1-2 years. and then lighter conditions for longer times, when possible, are also important (again if possible)---e.g. working only 0-15 hours per week for 2-36+ months with more meditation and self-care, every 1-4 years.
• sometimes the best thing to do is to not meditate or really not do anything at all, even if excruciatingly boring or stressful to "not be doing anything" or to "not be making progress"
• "You're going to lose." ht @RomeoStevens76
• re risks or at least planning ahead: potentially periods where can't do intellectual or creative labor or work including stuff you do for money---ideally would plan ahead for times can't program or write while all that is refactoring. eventually could become a bottleneck or inadvertently lose it and can't get it back until you go "through". can even be periods (usually more brief and intermittent) where can't do non-essential household chores, and so on.
• doing, receptivity, sympathetic arousal, parasympathetic arousal
  • super wrong: doing and undoing train motor / "belief" systems; receptivity trains perceptual system
• doing, undoing, receptivity
• "You don't win; but, nobody loses." [https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1667747604250128384; Last accessed: 2023-06-11]
• whole world changes with you (sense, feel, cosmology, metaphysics, future or lack thereof, etc. of the whole thing), for better and worse---liberation but also neurodegeneration or neuroinflammation or traumatic brain injury or aging, dying, etc.
• love and beauty [see also: enlightenment, sensorimotor processing, love]
• This should probably be expanded to a full section, soon. But there's this tension between, on the one hand, sort of "doing," even "efforting," even fighting or struggling, in daily life and also in case of illness, and so on. And, on the other hand, the more "spiritually usual," surrendering, letting go, etc. Certainly, it's ok to incline towards letting go, and so on. This is facilitative. But doing and even struggling isn't sort of a sign of moral or spiritual failure or something. It's natural to, when sort of hit by unknown unknowns or even sort of not-yet-known/​unknown knowns, to kind of flail. And that's the case whether ten minutes into meditation or thousands of hours. It's very hard to "generalize," so we're encountering newness all the time. In any case, generally, letting go happens after it becomes safe to let go. It's ok to struggle and we don't have to struggle not to struggle. Sometimes struggling makes all the difference, even if it incurs technical debt. Technical debt is often wholly or at least mostly good when paid eyes-open. As an extreme example, sometimes it makes sense, even though it's suffering-y or horrible, to puzzle out or track down some arcane treatment if you're sick. And other times it makes sense to just be patient. Sometimes it makes sense to do both. Slowly, over time, the tension or paradox between doing and surrender, striving and letting go, clarifies and untangles. Sometimes something was safe all along and sometimes something becomes safe, through spiritual practice, sometimes in very concrete ways, and the bodymind learns to takes care of itself, and then we let go. It's ok to test whether it's safe to let go, anytime, and also careful not to "struggle to not struggle."
  • """so you want to change things? how, to what, and when? / ok to want to change things, to want, to have preferences to prefer, but usually all wound up in self-perpetuating error propogation that goes deep
• re skill aquisition "on the cushion," as it were: couldn't ride bike night before, sleep on it, then sort of can for a few feet or even more, is possible to acquire high dimensional and complex real-time capabilities "on the cushion," given have collected data (and always have collected some data); will be imperfect, can be wrong. but not that differen than figuring out a math problem, or a key insight, away from computer or pencil and paper
• managing --> acquiring, [achieving, succeeding]
• sense in which there's no difference between (a) "autnomic nervous system" and "autonomic functions" and (b) skeletal muscle, volitional system, and everything else, in terms of consciousness, awareness, change, possibility
• related:
  • subtle/liminal vigilance/arousal that's "anti-relaxation", which is a different axis than alertness or poised-ness. So like "relaxation (as a good-positive, i.e. you want more of it) axis," "anti-relaxation (which is a bad-positive axis, i.e. you want less of it) axis," and "simple alertness or wakefulness or readiness or poisedness or in-moment capacity and activity (as a good-positive axis)" are all like separate axes that can change somewhat independently.
    • anti-relaxation reduces only through legitimate, credible, non-gaslighting, safe-to-look / hanging out in at-least-now-possible-threat territory. only safe to relax when actually-deemed safe to relax (or found a way for it to be safe), which only happens when actually happens; anything else layering, etc.
    • (less anti-relaxation may correlate with significant reduced need for sleep)
      • less anti-relaxation may correlate with reduced respiratory rate and depth; may correlate with less "extraneous" subtle muscle tone
  • near-sleep part of state space
    • cf. including yoga nidra type asleep-while-awake sorts of things, including while sitting up and just inclining towards that. (cf. awake cf. contra some traditions "subtle dullness" etc.)
• On previously tolerable or ignorable sensory stuff: [Original / Last accessed: https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1678448351216295936 ]
  • If things don't get stuck, ime it'll become more and more and more distracting and then right at its worst suddenly become "ignorable" again—like, you can pay attention to it, and it'll call your attention when needed, but otherwise it won't distract you. Same pattern each time. Will happen for again and again for different "facets" of sensory experience. Broad refactoring of sensory system into something overall better but with a bunch of "worse before better" in the middle
• allow "have no idea what's going on" to open up; let it come to you and hang out in it ; be good the parts / surface areas that have no idea what's going on, cherish them, be patient with them, and then you / they integrate over seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks and you have massive flexibility and capability gains. may mean realizing you were wrong about about your whole "shape," for the really big ones may involve big changes to how you conceive of bodymind, personhood, etc. also coming to terms, emotional weight, with believed (often fleeting) inability and incapacity and ignorance
• you're not in the universe, not moving around in the universe, the universe is in you, etc., etc., etc. (the better version of this); cf. phenomenological / conceptual reorganization that matters
• stop, wait, account for the unaccounted-for, where's the unaccounted-for in your actions, plans, goals, where's the magic, where's the will figure it out later, where's the pushed-away no idea? you DON'T have to solve it or dissolve it; you just have to account for it, when it's safe to account for it
• "independence always an illusion; only radical interdependence all the way down. acknowledging includes loss of individuality and separate self"
• Layering or micro-layering is when some change (a) now prevents some other thing (b) from changing until/unless (a) is undone or delayered. In that case, (b) is now (once again) labile/changeable. Layering and layers “stack” and can create complex structure. Eventually it can be safe for like everything to be labile and the system “updates” itself and takes care of itself, spontaneously, effortlessly, costlessly, more effectively and fine-grain-Lu and responsively than “you” can, etc., etc.
• "knowing what to do" (or "knowing exactly what to do") may have a similar "yellow flag" profile as "momentum" (could be fine or good but something to give lots and lots of extra scrutiny)
• elsewhere/​elsewhen/​otherwhere/​otherwhen/​there/​then/​goal/​planning/​action/​telos/​billiard-ball-in-three-dimensional-space/​/body-puppeteer--driven vs here/​now-driven / you're-in-the-universe--driven vs the-universe-is-in-you/"everything"--driven (in a manner of speaking, etc.)
  • the sense in which you don't move through space; space moves through you, etc., etc.
  • sense in which there is no "[right] over there"
  • sense in which there is no "way over there and [e.g. future] then"
• when in doubt take long, slow, reverie walks in safe, quiet-enough places and find a floor or a mat or a bed and roll around and do lots of stretching and extending and lengthening and curling into a ball and yoga-y things
• Stuff re-seats in “spontaneity,” —sometimes cutover is a bit confusing/rough—that is no longer needed deliberation/planning/prep, a sort of nothingness beforehand that can relax into and then right thing comes out / happens at right time e.g. with speech [in misc pith]
• "global indirectness" [wayfinding]
• something that transcends and includes, and critiques and deconstructs the body map
• no forward motion, no advancement, no achievement no completion no passage of time
• At late stages of efficient but somewhat out-of-order meditation, progress can actual bottleneck on pandiculation-type things, all over the body. As in have to wait for pandiculation to repeatedly manifest over hours or days before meditation proceeds (of defining meditation narrowly) /// when in doubt take a long walk! /// relax with arms over your head; try a position you haven't been in for a while
• very scratch note: Not xyz, (somewhat playfully) riding along in Robot spontaneous, no deliberate, willful, intentional actions —- can put in determinism section? Or even etc.; something to do when not much else is available or not sure what to do that sort of is trajecotoru aligning cf. determinism
• cf. “dystonia” and fatigue
• To prevent out-of-order tension stuff, sort of want eventually whole system sort of “inert” except for whatever’s needed to exhaustively find everything that’s been “left behind,” whether “narrow and deep” or “scattered and diffuse” or anything.
• From meditating to almost (temporarily) keep meditation from happening wayfinding without forward-ness, without becoming
• autonomic functions untangle given bandwidth/priority at the right times
• key multidimensional non-monotonic heuristics, loosely exhaustive: (a) effortless/​spontaneous action and (b) “resistanceless”/​resistance-less experience/awareness
  • [see also shinzen young and wu wei]
  • cf. "total surrender" [cf. safety]
  • "effortlessness" and "resistancelessness"
  • "advanced" (or whatever) pith instructions (work in progress)
• "lack of reference points" https://twitter.com/peak_valley_pea/status/1716500738841452941 [Last accessed: 2023-10-23]
• "I didn't know it could be that good, and it's too late or now impossible for that for me."
• 'Maybe, gently: Try to temporarily treat other parts of you as "completely drained of your volition." Disclaimed (and eventually reclaimed) volitionality. And then you can only make suggestions, requests, ask question, etc., across an "interface" presented by that "part."' https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1360399334068674562
• interdependence scratch notes:
  • Objects driven by world not self (nor other injected if it’s their self object)
  • Indulgence
  • Narcissism
  • Self-indulgent or interdependent?
  • “Having a thing” interfering with interdependence
  • Sort of “finish” or “complete”spending time on yourself and then attention and time outward doesn’t cost anything, sort of.
  • Plus love as solving puzzle of giving to get, and giving without dissolution.
  • Radical understanding of embeddedness all the way down produces new total life solutions
  • Reality sort of refactors as self unravels and reravels to afford this
  • interpersonal interdependence buddhism for westerners book
• flawed pith instructions draft:
  • Get out of the way
  • Let yourself be moved
  • Allow spontaneous effort
  • Help yourself out/help out the body (e.g. yawn, sigh, stretch)
  • Monitor/​choose [active] safety
  • Choose/​allow effortlessness
  • Choose/​allow surrender
  • Choose/​allow receptivity
  • Allow/​[surrender to] reverie
  • Suffer, enjoy, try to enjoy any suffering
  • Surrender unto death, worthlessness / what would it mean if you were not the most important thing? De-centering without devaluing / you are not the most important thing you are.
  • Don’t try to achieve, to accumulate, succeed, [sic]
• Fighting that the entire world is just this here and now
• Problems with keeping track of fantasy places in same manner as “real” places
• effective "arbitrariness" vs "rigid ego"
• (concern of absence or lack or missing something being a presence as such which now or eventually, directly or indirectly can be engaged with, etc.)
• not exactly re [...]: concern about lack or self-harm is a phenomenological presence as such which can [not always immediately] be interacted with directly or or indirectly. sovereignity-in-interdependence
• "Important to distinguish between never being bored & perpetually avoiding boredom. The former can be a patch on the latter. Being bored is like being confused; both are gifts to patiently, sometimes agonizingly, dwell in or surrender to on the way to smthg better. (Imo/ime ymmv!)" https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1729569406106136970
  • "deep attention" ; "'interesting' and 'boring'" ; [...]
• redo-to-undo cf. dependent origination / "reversing the chain"
• careful/​beware trying to use meditation to "have particular qualities," or, rather, "to become such a way for some goal and/​or/​including so as to think of oneself a certain way"; or at least not functionally routed through self-concept, ego, I, etc.
  • I achieve, I accomplish, I accumulate, I acquire, I own, I become, I am...
  • I will become..., I will X..., I did X, I was X, I used to X...
• entangled with the world, whole phenomenological field is you, etc., etc., indirect realism, etc., etc., sense in which you experience your model of the people not the people in themselves,,,
• look for ways you're reaching for the sense doors, e.g. the visual field,like you're "going out to" or "grasping" the visual field or things in the visual field, including words and video and etc.; instead, try "let[ting] the visual field come to you," "let go of the visual field," "don't need the visual field need to be anything in particular," "release all visual field projects or goals," and so on; cf. "water flowing downhill" and "be moved"; e.g. "relax the eyes," (eyes, eyelids, tongue, jaw, face muscles, back-of-the-head-back-base-of-the-skull, neck), be moved (with respect to these) and so on, and so on
  • ditto for more abstract "things" like~ "attention," "working memory" (not to inappropriately reify these, partially borrowing from cognitive science and sutta technical terms, vague handwave) and so on
    • also ditto for learning, remembering...
• falling backwards, whirlpool, "sensory whirlpool"
• As best I can tell, I sort of think that "regret" is just a signal that there's relevant learning left to be mined from past experiences, and as far as I can tell, it goes away when that learning is complete. / https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1552401919548788747
  • And any holding onto regret, or sort of spontaneous flares of regret, is part of all that. Like it's ok to (fiercely) regret until/​unless you don't, etc., etc. "If only!!!!!!!!!!" /
  • And I think there's a version of free-of-regret that is "clean" that really has hunted down all the like "you're fooling yourself that you're actually ok with that" and worked through everything of that nature. /
  • And it might look less like cutting losses and more like fully inhabiting one's own story, fully finding oneself, or something like that. That's been my experience so far fwiw. /fin
  • (lots (all??) emotions / feelings are maybe like this; and thoughts and...)
• Speaking super loosely, it seems like the body wants homeostasis & the mind wants enlightenment. Enlightenment is at the bottom of some high-dimensional energy well & the right experiences and meditation (also an experience) unstick from local minima. Enlightenment is “natural.” https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1716560634953818333
  • When conditions are right, again and again, the mind spontaneously drops irrevocably closer to enlightenment, just a little bit more each time, like something under the force of gravity, an invariance relation always true everywhere.
• Contextual goodness where context is one’s entire life, opportunity vigilance, vigilance cost is variable. The goodness of even the most felt good things (holy, sacred, sexy) sort of becomes radically contingent, instead of sort of fixed. Radically concrete instead of abstract but still think-about-able. No fixed goals no fixed good no fixed bad. cf. groundlessness and fluidity. #somethingwrongwiththis #maybesectiontodo
• Metaphysical Theory of evil (credit XX), theory of misfortune, (theory of a good death) (theory of judgment and punishment) theory of victimhood;;; for evil credit coherence therapy drop off; theory of good fortune, theory of success;;;;; telic theories vs causal theories??? Moral theories?? CF, relationship to consequentialism and desire and preference; arbitrariness, contingency, necessity… Possibility, impossibility permission; forgiveness, redemption, destiny, fate; meaning, sensibleness, meaninglessness purposelessness; fault, blame determinism;; guilt, shame, embarrassment, serves-you-right,
  • Theories of goodness, and how to protect against badness, and how to [...] goodness theories of evil, and how to protect against evil, how to protect against badness
• example "thoughtform": Near infinite Abrahamic judgment, pervading, all of time and space
• ideas, meaning and mattering (tradeoffs?), relationship between public and private ideas
• Can’t bypass ultimately "best do you think you can get," CF what you deserve and CF stuff worth but it’s going to Everything eventually. Deeper than lots of classical attainment stuff I think for most people and so on
• Every moment is the last, and it’s always the end of everything CF Snowpiercer; oh is at the end of all humanity, a split-second away, sort of; always, at least something for the last time ever and ever #somethingwrongwiththis
• universalizing (Naturalizing versus cf.) – – actually not that different than like any person in history, countless other people in history, and then somehow !!! that’s good instead of, or at least, in addition to bad; actually not that different from a analogous class of people in history; would’ve had to deal with that at some point if not now or something similar or analogous or close enough #maybesectiontodo
• Large scale, flow re-rotation, settlings and again and so on; late stage, large scale, metaphysical, re-factoring
• content warning example nihilism: This, probably for the last time that probably for the last time… where, previously in theory could have done again, and maybe start to be fair, you never know Nothing solves it. ends horrifically. negates all value negates all goodness. All solutions and solutions pieces collected throughout life fail. Nothing will be OK ever again. Not even that will help and not even that. Thought you were going towards something good at least on net, and it at least seems like that might not be the case.
• Words, sort of fail here, except for things, like it is what it is it is what it immediately reveals itself as it is to be and so on #somethingwrongwiththis #maybesectiontodo
• All thought, and goal and theory and religion at base is theories of the impulses and sensations of the body, guarding against predicting satisfying, protecting against e.g. with respect to sexuality and being slammed by it #somethingwrongwiththis
• Learns to self-regulate; learns to give to itself 100% #somethingwrongwiththis
• notice and allow the shape of the can't
• What are the nth-order effects/​consequences of X and are each of those good or bad, and therefore X is permitted, forbidden, necessary/​obligatory. #maybeaddtosection
• "unity" conceptions and misconceptions and transcendence [unity just a concept etc. etc. transcendence of form] these subbullets possibly particularly misleading / "wrong" cf. emptiness and nebulosity
  • "Don't presume to know what you're trying to do/​accomplish/​achieve/​complete" “may be inappropriate reification that ‘you‘ or ‘trying to do‘ anything, etc.“ the “whole thing” not just the i or the me separately but both together as a unified and covertly (or overtly or etc) #somethingwrongwiththis #maybesectiontodo
    • Ego presumptuously thinking it knows what the goal is
    • “Don’t know what the goal is” (maybe cf. halting problem)
    • Can’t [ultimateknow or presume to know
    • Inadequacy of immediate and mediate desires/preferences; revealed/actual “ultimate” goal (distal or immediate/​incarnate); Implicit (immediate, mediate, ultimate) goal behind the meditation goal; Effortless/​de-involvement to unravel ~cohere/reveal [~~~~false ~~~ultimate goals, constrained goals…]
    • Deeper and deeper [redo-to-undo-ing] layers of “goal-ing”, “angling internally” (“goals/plans/intentions figuring on”) and “meta-goal-ing” (figuring on to get better at goal-ing or to improve goals)
    • #somethingwrongwiththis
    • Simultaneous inside-outside view, input output deterministic reflective self-model cf. transpersonal—
      • What’s going to make this guy (gender neutral) happy? Vs what’s going to make me happy ; duty of care, or not [???”i” wants vs “me” wants] [What do I want versus what’s going to/will make this guy happy?]
      • related aurobindo
    • sensation-level like numinous rave bioluminescence
  • Unified counterfactual explanatory causal-historical tree [Sss] #somethingwrongwiththis
    • Answers Q: Why is that the case (w smthg further to be explained) [c..]
    • What are some possible reasons for why that would have been the case?
    • Why would have that been the case INSTEAD of THIS/​ACTUAL/​HERE/​NOW? —
    • For “in story” counterfactuals: …instead of “what happened in this/the story”
    • xxWhy wouldn’t have this been the case?xx
    • q
    • [an explanation for everything and everything counterfactual]..
    • —How did this come to be INSTEAD of this/​actual/​here/​now?
    • But can ground in inexplicableness inexplicable = art (cf. evocations) — luminous, self-apparent, and some sense of self explaining, but rather also rather not in need of explanation./​unnecessary etc.
    • “Don’t have to explain everything “ / explanation is communication tech and analytical tech but not itself reality
    • Language game, double-folded
• content warning nihilism adjacent: Nothing protects against impermanence. No way out, no later, all joy is here.And then, ironically, you can perhaps truly play for the first time. And also if you have more time for responsibilities, or whatever that enable play, because you are doing less things that are trying to do a perhaps impossible thing etc #somethingwrongwiththis
• Misconceiving/​misembodying, like you need to generate a feeling or imagery of immensity, in order to conceive of something big. The sort of optimization and correction of this is a similar thing to naturalization. Also, where the future is CF no elsewhere. No else when no self. These latter are sort of more broader conceptualization versions of kind of reconsider re-reconceptualization of phenomenology. Inc how goals phenomenologically, and work (dictated) #maybeaddtosectiontodo
• no elsewhere no elsewhen
• #sectiontodo I should be more explicit about what i mean by emptiness because it's such a translation of such a buddhist word and i use it a lot unlike lots of buddhist stuff. specifically phenomenological experience of emptiness and implications of it being a thing. i guess i do tie it to provisionality which is probably very orienting. also how nonstandard is this usage etc.
• “Filling in the kinds of things that could and could have been ok but were not ok”
• "instead of trying to find your way around the contraints or to break the contraints, try hanging out patiently with the constraints" --> "solving for freedom" #somethingnotquiterightaboutthis
• [[nonmonotonicity sharper e.g. 48 hours vs two months if "successful" outside trigger and "roll with it" vs inside wayfinding...]] [[ok to let driven by life]] [[re old conditioning doesn't mean it was bad or wasted time or that surface actions will be that different after]] [[balancing multiple infinities and tradeoff]]
• Belief in infinity or not and belief in objects or not I think are meaningfully upstream of a lot of the cultural scissor effects I see on the TL https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1754900125174878338
• Do not (“fully” or at all; depends) [trust] a meditation teacher (or whatever) who claims enlightenment (or whatever) if they have postural or movement stuff going on due to chronic muscle tension with no other organic cause. / https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1755202737078243710
  • Lindy-theory-wise, they likely have thousands of hours or years to decades of work left to do, and/or they’re stuck or actively making things worse, and their will be psychological and social/behavioral rigidity and blindspots lurking. /
  • (Ofc, don’t “fully” trust any teacher anywhere ever. “If something feels wrong, somewhere, even just a little, then something is wrong, somewhere, somehow.”)
  • (Blindspots, pre and post “layering,” ultimately, are relative to context and unknown unknowns. Everybody got blindspots in the limit, at minimum.)
  • > if they have postural or movement stuff going on due to chronic muscle tension // Even “just a little bit.” Yellow flag. // (Tho like a bit of stiffness when just getting up is ok or w/ever. Talking about chronically tight stuff that keeps coming back after stretching or massage.)
  • Fetters/​obscurations/​etc and stable/​persistent/​recurring physical muscle tension are common-caused (modulo electrolyte status, autonomic health, and some other things) https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1755227582558032007
• > Is it possible to fix chronic muscle tension with meditation? // yes but it can take on average thousands of hours and has to be tension that's purely or mostly "functional," not because of electrolytes, dysautonomia, nerve issues, etc. (this is my informal personal opinion, not medical advice, not diagnosis, etc., etc.) https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1755254409741701463
  • As an example, sometimes when someone is emotional, they belatedly realize their hand hurts, and they look down and see that they're making a tight fist and they didn't realize it. /
  • Then they relax their hand. One can imagine that some chronic muscle tension is like this except we've forgotten how to relax the muscle, so we can't just "relax the hand." That's "functional." Meditation is one way of "finding one's way back" to that forgotten how.
  • It can be hard to tell what's functional and what isn't, though it gets easier to tell over time, as little relaxations occur. Waxing and waning is also a good sign. But sometimes it's a non-functional situation or combination.
• autonomic nervous system (e.g. digestive perstalsis, heart rate and blood pressure, etc.) demand more and more "attentional bandwidth" at times before further reintegration
• relax your muscles, your attention, and your will or intentionality, at rest in all positions and postures and in motion and while doing things (but not in a way that gets in the way of doing those things) #todomaybepithoraux
  • crappy paraphrase of: https://x.com/tasshinfogleman/status/1754189050506809403
• snowball of ever-increasing legitmate/​earned/​witnessed/​evidenced trust/​faith in surrendering to spontaneous self-change
  • crappy paraphrase of timestamped youtube link at qt: https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1760659840391635193
• first approximation: "doesn't decrease intensity of things it decreases frequency of intense things"
• meditation as orientation (versus action) https://twitter.com/sarabollman/status/1762873832178696290
• muscular tension and "phenomenological obscurations" (I typically don't use this terminology, so ~twists, tangles, whorls, etc.) are deep-down ("under the layers") come to be realized as exactly coincident and coextensive, sort of https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1763576571531522142
• to flesh out later, somewhat separated by semicolons and maybe these would make more sense together in a different order: sensory nerve damage---sometimes can be disentangled from anxiety but still "bare wire" can intermittently ping; vagus nerve damage and endothelial and sympahetic damage---sometimes esp. blood pressure or breathing can have an "inherent" anxiety component so (after checking with doctor) can over time disentangle second arrow and have forebearance, and long-run can also eventually "compassionately love"/enjoy remaining suffering component; often will heal over a long time but not necessarily; sometimes regrown sensory neurons come back online but in a "layered" fashion and inject anxiety into system until delayered and reorganized; if a damaged nerve have to (re-)learn how to interpret so as know how to "engage" with respect to that phenomenology and everything else. letting self be drawn and general seeking effortlessness are almost always excellent heuristics for both "normal" sensory input and "damaged" sensory input. #todosectionmaybe maybe combine and refactor with related appendix content and type of intervention content (1) pain typology and (2) "and other things"
• equanimity does not imply lack of proactivity [hat-tip xx]
• deconvolve "default" trajectory and intervening trajectory / delta is "contribution" under "no fixed goal"
• effortless-compulsion to remember, sleep is for positive forgetting---gisting, essentializing, combining, compressing. meditation causes more efficient remembering and slowly enables positive forgetting while awake, synaptic renormalization and gisting while awake, cf. theta and delta; requires """attention""" [speculative] see also here
• cf. otherwhere and otherwhen---seeking "shiny happy people". positive aspirational and often do have to "leave behind" people who are bad for you, but can neglect "real people" and family, and etc., wisdom of knowing where to put resources, towards people who do and don't exist and who can come into being and can't and broadening possibility of fulfillment with wider range of people, here, now, interdependence, unraveling blindspots, cf. fake people and fictional people and fantasy people
• skillful nonmonotonicity of "allowing yourself to hallucinate" as an enabling condition to developing new perceptual-interpretive "capacities" https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1770525833188298878 [Last accessed: 2024-03-20]
• writing fiction might make you smarter, cf. "indulgence" / "write that novel," as it were, etc. https://x.com/esyudkowsky/status/1770898631824216241 [Last accessed: 2024-03-21]
• pithy pointing out instructions, what's the same about rendering "out there" and rendering "in here" https://x.com/stephen_zerfas/status/1772625210669416495
• "need" / "ethically" --- maybe strictly true for some def of need and ethically but something maybe a little cursed in original interaction ht xx / no everyday ethics or everyday ethos / morality except indirectly ???
• at-home retreats https://x.com/sarabollman/status/1781296499323769024
  • I like one-to-three five-hour blocks per day where something designated for an hour or so /could/ happen, but doesn’t have to happen, amidst eating or wandering outside or doing chores, etc. / the hour-ish (or 0-5 minutes or three hours) can be anywhere in the five-hour block. Like complete flexibility inside the “mere context / container” of the five hours. Back burner nudging oneself with a feather to sit down (or stand or etc) and meditate. Sort of working with the grain of the mind, letting the mind prepare itself in its own time, versus a rigid schedule
• meditation is usually though not always "smooth" and slow; life ca be sharp and sudden and that can be hard; some times one is more vulnerable than other times, ofc, ofc and that sucks / is hard too; interface of meditation and life, part of meditation, sometimes easier sometimes harder, element of risk
• scratch note wrt breath and breathing: Non-controlling and unpleasantness tolerance Including places / pockets that lead to simultaneous fast breathing and unpleasant non-physiological(?) air hunger
• "Have you tried gently “going into the sleepiness”? And then if you do fall asleep and wake up, gently going into the sleepiness again, and again, and so on? Instead of fighting, actively participating/surrendering. Maybe there’s lots and lots of importance “down there.” Ymmv!" https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1783332757562708435?s=46 [should be cross-linked to a slightly more in depth discussion elsewhere in this document]
• "have to trust yourself and then like don't trust yourself within yourself but like don't listen to other people telling you not to trust yourself"
• Bodymind structure/​state is subject to local/​immediate transformation rules and global invariance laws. https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1783658049372139782
  • What this means practically is that you can't meditate "in a particular direction" forever (a stereotyped and narrow meditation practice) without eventually causing behavioral, emotional, cognitive/conceptual, or muscular rigidity.
  • A meditation practice must eventually transcend any particular practice (and also must eventually eat itself until there's no remainder).
  • > eventually causing behavioral, emotional, cognitive/conceptual, or muscular rigidity.
    • *eventually causing /reversible/ behavioral, emotional, cognitive/conceptual, or muscular rigidity, albeit potentially "laboriously" or at least lengthily.
• I think this is getting at that some traditions think a particular type of (repeated) experience “cessation” is critical for enlightenment and other traditions don’t. (Kinda similar with jhana. I’m in the no-cessation-/no-jhana-needed camp, tho can be helpful for some people.) https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1786832276656890041
• acute illness or injury with respect to meditation can get a little confusing:
  • tl;dr: If intolerable or otherwise concerning, or just because you want to, it's ok to try to escape when that seems to be the right thing to do. If inescapable, ok to actively-self-caringly surrender to it and that, as best you can.
    • Longer thing:
      • For illness, injury, or anything, (a) when pain or suffering or discomfort or painful emotion is intolerable or concerningly intense (directly or because of knock-on effects), do distract, redirect, try to diminish, play tetris or watch tv, or otherwise go elsewhere (if you can). (b) If tolerable and seems good to tolerate, and can do so, then explore, surrender to, let go to, hang out with, enjoy, etc. [and if can't then try to stop trying completely, etc.] (c) If pain, suffering, discomfort, etc. is both intolerable and inescapable, alternatingly try to (c1) self-caringly surrender to it completely and (d2) also (first) try to indirectly mitigate through emergency or primary healthcare, research and self-interventions, interpersonal advice and support, etc.
• I completely obey my body’s tastes for things (unless I don’t have a taste for something—then I experiment until I do) and I also track everything in cronometer, as a sanity check and also for watching trends:
  • Sometimes for example my collagen or magnesium requirement/​taste will double for a few days and stuff like that. And I can watch the numbers and then see what change must have caused that. And sometimes it’s even more dramatic, like an illness will cause taste for saturated fat or a particular b vitamin to go through the roof for a few weeks.
  • I’m always hunting for deeper wellbeing levers, common causes that shift the equilibrium of the whole system in a more positive direction.
• weirdly, the most minimal evocation* of meditation, pre-enlightenment, is the evocation** of a "container," since first-pass both meditation & regular life have a sensory stream. // it could be sitting on a cushion, ringing a bell, setting a timer, or... putting on a (funny) hat... // ...*, ** I am not sure why I really wanted to use the word evocation twice. // > [both have a sensory stream] // I mean, what IS the difference between meditation and non-meditation, anyway? There IS one, but ultimately it's not conceptual and then not anything... // ...there is still something I personally struggle to put into words, here. // and then leaving the cushion, ringing the bell again, stopping the timer or letting it go off, or taking off the hat, to complete the container https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1796659531692363946 [has QT]
• fluid, "pre-anticipated" transitions [cf. synchrony or self-alignment] 1s transition, so see if can help it out and do in 0.5s, creates spaciousness for autopilot because you've done its job for it; where gonna get pulled next and can i get there first? truly doing what it wants as long as it does so it has space to reconfigure
• embrace / allow self-concept contradictions (to settle) (post-intolerability)
• While distraction and avoidance of leading edge intolerability and disregulation is totally kosher and awesome, those who have the misfortune of learning to successfully block suffering-as-such trade it for emotional-doxastic-behavioral rigidity somewhere else in the system—the inability to learn or change—very mechanistic; not metaphorical. It is a devil's bargain and not a long-run winning/not-losing strategy. (tweet brought to u by technical meditation small group discussion today) https://twitter.com/meditationstuff/status/1842265929327271950
• stay close to inability; don't "puzzle solve" away from it
• i find "often" that figuring out smthng that isn't written down anywhere involves undoing—learning/realizing that something previously learned/believed is wrong, by a sort of exhaustive process of elimination. sometimes this takes 100s (1000s) of hours, but it's so cool. // not always worth it, but highly leveraged when it matters // learning how to be this dogged without inappropriately or futilely perseverating is the same skillset as meditation https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1862692114607276340 [Last accessed: 2024-11-29]
  • note: unrelated to above misc pith
• ROUGHLY, meditation long-tail reduces the FREQUENCY but NOT the INTENSITY of emotional rxns (seeming intensity reduction is the uncoupling of previously simultaneous rxns) // YES: 10-10-10----10--------10-//---never again (after 5000+ hours) // NO: 10-9-8-7------6-------5-------etc. // huge confusion imo that makes people think meditation is not working in themselves and others, and why a huge 10/10 reaction out of nowhere after 6000 hours of meditation shouldn't be discouraging, etc. // and often there is an "extinction burst" near the end with lots of 10's. so like everything seems gone forever then at least one more huge freakout after some delay // last gasps also other sections // I maybe shouldn't have said "extinction burst" because that implies something that can be reactivated. It's actually memory reconsolidation—actually truly completely gone. The burst of increased frequency is because of "generator access" not behaviorist principles. My bad // There can be "bad copies" ("spreading") that have their own sub-generators, which can entail more complex dynamics than just a final thing. See my stuff for full-complexity model. https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1863321287080243505 [Last accessed: 2024-12-1]
• crowdsourced possible alternatives to term "emptiness" https://x.com/louisvarge/status/1863727823011098764 [Last accessed: 2024-12-03]
• ~unresolved epistemic contradiction causes loss of contact with the sensory now ; thus loss of contact with the sensory now indicates unresolved epistemic contradiction ("within" or "without" / "self" or "other"); thus test everything against the sensory now ; test for whether something distances from the sensory now
  • NOTE: The above is maybe as problematic as The Human Handledness is Already Success Principle (Human HAS Princple or just "HAS" Principle). Not to be taken too seriously or literally! I should still maybe remove the linked section or the above bullet from the document.
  • See also: if it/​something feels wrong then something somehow somewhere is wrong, plus restatements
• no one: // me [interocepting; every couple hours deliberately exposing myself to small amounts of antigen to trigger mild IgE allergic responses, to explore oral tolerance mechanisms & nervous/psychological regulation of the immune system]: the autonomic nervous system and the immune system are so cognitive https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1870899015895728134
• to do nothing = to idle --> do nothing meditation = idle meditation?
• Carr, Jennifer. "Deontic modals." The Routledge handbook of metaethics. Routledge, 2017. 194-210.
• People imply or even flat-out say: "You have literally infinite potential" / "You could do literally anything" / "You are infinitely malleable" --- which if you buy in (cf. impermanence and non-infinity) might be... firmly getting in the way of a bunch of things you really WANT to do, which don't have to be your identity, or the only thing you do, or a thing you have to do to the exception of other things, or a thing you have to do completely, well, or a long time, let alone forever.
• Just setting a timer is a most minimal meditation container.
• evil = unsustainable
• [via conversation; co-hat-tip with interlocuter] "there should be a voxel right there"---no! bodymap is nebulous and continuously shaped and has puzzle-/​layer-structure! fidelity and use and trade-offs and transformation time. continuous bottom-up (and top-down) reshaping. constrained, non-monotonic. "there is no body map" and/​but cf. motor and sensory neurons; cf. "separation";
• • [Last accessed: 2025-04-10]
    • https://x.com/qiaochuyuan/status/1910387224895688870
    • https://x.com/qiaochuyuan/status/1910383201148952601
    • https://x.com/the_wilderless/status/1910337934680838543
• • [Last accessed: 2025-04-10]
    • "I just continuously gently coax upwards my 3-week average of literally every single vitamin in Cronometer & listen closely for my body to tell me to back off on something. // Nothing that’s not an essential or conditionally essential nutrient has ever been good for me long term." https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1910025603568247077
    • ~"How do you know if you've had too much of something?"
      • Simple aversion to taking more, most often; others: tastes bad, headache, insomnia, muscle tension, stuff like that. Sometimes another nutrient “ungates” something else, and then a few days or weeks later taking more no longer causes symptoms, plus there can be a craving for it, on and off, for a few days or weeks, which might abruptly shut off or wax and wane https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1910059897699660046
      • Also histamine or “mcas” type reactions, that go away if you spend a few days or weeks on other vitamins, first https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1910135185007345669
    • "Nutrient meditation…: Right nutrients in the right order, in the right evolving pattern, with the right timing, in the right dose, in the right molecular form… …" https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1910060837873635812
• I just want to note as a perennial general PSA that I personally advise people not to use clickers/​tally counters as mind tech, fwiw. At first they seem like amazing psychotechnology, and they can indeed be locally very effective. But they risk accumulating very “sharp, tangled” karma that is difficult to untangle (though always possible in principle), that limits “meditative flexibility” in the meantime. I think the tradeoff is not worth it. People who don’t “go all the way” with meditation risk long term behavioral, emotional, psychological rigidity if they double down on using clickers, tally counters. // (Separately, other tech like setting a meditation timer as a “meditative container” seem fine. I still use such things. Not all tech is bad, etc.) https://x.com/meditationstuff/status/1921621068680188165 [more stuff in the replies. I made add some of it here, but some of it is very lossily compressed, as it were.]

end "misc pith"