Judgement keeps you from connecting.
tfw u think ur done w ur emotional clean up
What “popping out” feels like:
two ways to relate to your feelings
CPM but instead it’s observations per minute so you can ran more OODA orientation per unit time and thus steer to goal faster (this applies for everything)
Meditation is just this, over and over: discovering subtler and subtler “stresses”, flipping them, repeating…
It seems to me that "Jhanas" are presented as something "out there"/"beyond"/"otherworldly".
I've found it useful to think of them this way: imagine you're in a stressed out state (let's call it 'Jhana -1). Then you sit and do whatever you do to relax. You're now normal (let's call that 'Jhana 0'). Whatever it was that you did to go from -1 to 0 keep doing that: congratulations, you are now in Jhana 1.
Talking to GF and she had this model where people have "full views" into a bunch of areas but don't see other areas at all (emotions, spirituality…). I told her I think most people have a "societal lens" that gives them a partial, "socially-approved", view into a slice of each area. (And that this is fine and good as it scales. Well, not good, but at least won't get you killed. Those that wander off are at risk of dying, either literally or metaphorically [egoically])
Emotional experience when you fight it vs when you just let it wash over you
There really is something about doing reactivity practice on all the stuff that comes up during work…
QC suggested that perhaps, sometimes, you don't need to painstakingly disassemble complex machinery that is (or was put) inside you and that, perhaps, you can merely dissolve it using the brahmaviharas and you know I had to take a stab at animating it…
Imagine that your experience changes such that THE FABRIC OF REALITY ITSELF is at all moments, from all angles, beaming to you: everything is OK
Once you develop the "taste for purification" reactivity falls faster and faster and, with that, well-being rises as fast!
I wonder if this "fundamental okayness" applies not just to you, or to relations, but to time and space (nigh in a buddhist sense, craving & aversion always being craving and aversion for elsewhere or elsewheren…)
"shifting the overton window"
My belief is that this idea is an artifact of joy being something people are looking for. You gotta welcome *everything* to have joy, yes, but the same goes for any/every emotion.
Two ways to react when there’s a negative update, and their consequences:
If fear more than you yearn, you dampen your whole being. If you yearn more than you fear, you turn up the volume on everything.
Everything is exactly the same yet everything is different…
what do you get if you put together the ideas that 'cracks are how the light gets in' and that 'you gotta break your heart 'til it opens'?
This:
Low-key hilarious that the ego "generates", that the ego "actively seeks", the conditions of its own annulment:
Kowalski, enhance
If you expect people to reject you then they will, more than they would otherwise, but it won't sting as much as you expect it.
If you expect people to fw you then they will, more than they would otherwise, but it will sting more when they don't.
The choice is yours.
You can default disregard thoughts and you'll disregard fake bs, rationalization, rumination, cope — but also some true insights — OR you can err on the side of taking all your thoughts seriously and you'll capture all the true insights BUT ALSO will fret over some fake bs.
(Perhaps the latter is where the "tortured genius" archetype comes from?)
If you let your tears reach your heart you might witness your sadness become gratitude
Attention can (and does!) often spend a lifetime seeking outside itself. Unless it's lucky enough to have a genius idea…
It has often been my experience that, in doing something, there are necessary "side things", in the "background", and that they, often, eventually become the new "main thing"
EXTREMELY IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THIS
I thought the end of the seeker was the end of the path but it might very well be the beginning 😅
Real.
Feels like I earned some sort of in-real-time "metacognitive awareness" where I'm constantly tracking my state and if it is NOT very good that means something is wrong (I'm tensing/resisting/avoiding/bracing/clenching…) and those mark intervention points to DROP doing that
It seems to me that (modulo us surviving AI) the fusion of Effective Altruism and Western Pragmatic Dharma is "priced in" given that they share so many adherent. So I went ahead and sketched what that could look like.
if it's 10 minutes away, you walk. if it's 20, you drive and arrive in 5: i.e. sometimes worse is better. most men lead lives of quiet desperation. some have it so bad they off themselves. Others, by luck, grace or merit, find Buddhism and, therein, bliss.
POV: I finally discover the guys who's responsible for all my dukkha
News soon…
"Feel sensations, disregard narratives"
I was in Noble Silence and my thoughts became really objectified. Then I had an insight: what if I just… drop these?
We all begin life "enmeshed". Hopefully, over time, we learn how to differentiate so that we can become truly *inter*dependent.
Was in Noble Silence (not meditating but going around) and this literally happened: went from having auditory thoughts to having imagistic thoughts of people speaking… but no sound!
I love AI
What it looks like from the outside when you remove the first big cause of your suffering:
You can "melt" your mind into your heart (Highly recommended)
POV: you find what you've been searching for all your life
POV: You're getting into the first Jhana
mfw it was never about water…
What it feels like to go from ordinary mind (a particularly low valence instantiation of it) to glimpses of awake awareness to "breaking through" to it
Sometimes reaching a goal requires not hacking away at it directly and, even, getting seemingly further away from it first…
I think this is part of a new relationship to "negative"/hellish states where they're not braced against and so can be quite interesting, I guess like pain for S&M people. "Let me just go into the pits of Hell for a quick refreshing dip…"
Obsessed with the idea of doing a "Dark Jhana" retreat — a retreat you go to *purposefully* feel worse/hellish states
It's all about THE ENERGY with which you say it which is DOWNSTREAM of your beliefs/conceptual distinctions: can you separate THE ACTION from THE PERSON and criticize THE ACTION without calling into question the worth of the person? Or even criticize THE PERSON without calling
This is so obvious in retrospect… You are not a neutral observer outside the world looking in, you’re in the world, it “bites back”, it’s reflexive, especially the social world, OF COURSE how you engage with it changes how it responds!!!
FUCK
People don’t react to what you say (content) they react to how you say it (i.e. the ENERGY with which you say it)
It takes a lot of self-emptying before your thoughts reflect what is, rather than what you are
What it feels like for your window of emotional tolerance to grow: intolerable emotional experiences still present themselves, over time, less and less and less and less…
Increasing "negative capacity": the amount of sludge is the same but you're bigger, it doesn't overflow, you don't get overwhelmed…
Removing added karma, visualized:
I used to think complex or rich emotional experiences were necessarily overwhelming but no, it turns out you can have complex or rich experiences that are perfectly tolerable…
How it feels to be inside the castle of thoughts you have crafted // How it feels to look back/down at it once you’re outside it
Working before / Working now
Bro who the FUCK is kvetching about fearing "losing productivity" from meditation or insight or whatever this shit is crazy productivity up 10x or smth with "no effort", with "nothing happening inside"
Literally metaphorically going from this to this
I made it! I got to the end! I'm done meditating! Hold up…
Before my second big reactivity drop my days felt very discontinuous as emotions shifted A LOT from one activity to the next. Now they're more or less always the same all the time with tiny variation so everything feels continuous, flowing. Both "gearing up" and "winding down"
Saw this on my Substack comments and you know I had to.
Biking? Jhanas? Yes.
Being less reactive doesn't mean you don't notice external insults. You do. You just don't mind them as much. They don't "cut" as deep: you have "thicker skin".
Everybody knows about cold showers as a way to learn what "bracing" or "clenching" is (I hope)
Lots of alpha in deliberately bracing against WARM showers as well, this really drives home that goodness/badness is in clenching, NOT in the experience
Sorta like this
Light is needed most where it’s darkest. (This is sometimes called “eating the shadow”)
I imagine reactivity as a threshold function and less reactive people as having faster decay rates.
A “sense of a foreshortened future” (the phenomenological hallmark of depression) versus the sense that “all is possible”
Someone said, about meditation, that the last 1% makes 99% of the difference. Fractally so. And I hated it! It made “the end” infinitely far! But it’s true. Had a (second) big drop is reactivity and gf says it’s like I’m an entirely new person.
Projection is the default and attending to something enough to actually *see* it, rather than seeing yourself projected on it, is an achievement.
I wonder if this is actually even a bigger deal than I thought — perhaps you can only recognize in others something to the extent that you've seen it in yourself: if you think you're exclusively motivated by Reasons, you'll assume others are too, etc…
There's a selection effect where you are only self-reflective when you're thinking, so you think that everything depends on thinking, but it's actually kind of like the fridge light: every time you open, the light is there, but that doesn't mean that the light is always on.
I’ve heard that in depression your fight or flight system triggers in response to sadness, and have seen people who feel overwhelmed by desiring so they must release themselves from it immediately. I wonder if we default have our wiring crossed and meditation “cleans it up”
Realizing the nature of resistance (and thus overcoming it)
Life when you're reactive:
Emotion:
Something has shifted in my experience where the whole sensory field is more “loose”, more “spacious”. Like everything together was packed together real tight but now there’s space, everything hangs together more loosely, sorta like going from solid to liquid.
An issue with meditation I never saw mentioned: it makes you suffer way less, true. But if you won’t adjust your complain threshold down proportionally then you’ll not ask for help when you really need it bc you don’t hit the threshold anymore!!
Identity is horcruxes: be mindful of where you stash ‘em.
So it turns out that if you can manage to not lose your shit and just stay with your sadness an angel will descend from the heavens to drink your tears and your sadness will "complete an arc" or "complete a process" or "move" and not be there anymore ????
We project our emotions to the world outside us and then… react to those very same projected emotions with either craving or aversion ????
Discovering emotions is like discovering a dimension to experience you were hitherto wholly unaware of.
So, as it turns out, you can do various things (mostly in the form of consuming external input) to keep your "emotional throughput" the same — to make sure they are "constant", "consistent", "familiar" — OR you can drop those things and let them RIP! (Fascinatingly, to me, I do
Weird selection effect: sometimes as things get *better* there is less of something but that same contrast makes that you notice them more!
It (empirically) seems to be the case that when you intend to suppress your emotions they still come out but sideways in this twisted shardy form that is MORE painful (both for you and for everyone around you) than if you just didn't also because letting them flow transforms 'em
Often find that v many strangers start an interaction by being overly aggressive and that they double-down if you submit in any way. Rather you gotta go up to their level (but no more!) and then they treat you with respect/as an equal and calm down
When I meditate it's like I increasingly "lock" the outside "layers" so I can "play" in the "inner layers": body not moving, mind not drifting, etc. Then to "come back" I just unlock it all. Not too dissimilar from sleeping, I guess. But this has me wondering: am I default
This is how it feels to go from normal (attention focusing and fleeting in the first 3 images) to open awareness
This summer give yourself the blessing of self-love.
I'm sorry to say that in all likelihood what we think of when we think of "emotions" is mostly our (mental) resistance to feeling them.
This is what meditation does to you.
Dream, Lucid Dream
This is why you can't really tell what's going on with someone just by looking at them.
It seems to be the case that thoughts are "made" from the same "substance" they arise from
Being reactive = "The world should continuously contort itself to best fit me and my needs."
This exaggerates my experience, but it's directionally correct.
Behold:
In meditation the content of thoughts doesn't matter nearly as much as the energy that's generating them.
Over time the mind becomes effortlessly and automatically tethered to the meditation object.
My experience is the former enabling the latter…
Manifesting…
Man is born into Nirvana, but everywhere he thinks himself into Samsara
Maybe a better way of expressing the same idea: how little do you need of an emotion to be present to accurately identify it?
What it feels like to acquire concentration in meditation (by unifying the "sub-minds" around the same intention)
The relationship between the light of consciousness and the unconscious in therapy vs in meditation according to Shinzen Young. (Burrowing a hole vs "lowering the consciousness waterline")
Increasingly thinking some people's concept of conflict is too broad, encompasses too much, makes insufficient distinctions.
Happy cow, unhappy cow. (It's a metaphor.)
Since lowering my reactivity there's a level of 'low' I never got back to. This means that the delta between the very best I feel and the most average is much smaller.
Going from living mostly inside your head to mostly outside your head is a very worth it, and extremely transformative, transition
141 pieces · 2025–2026