I've combined meditation and parts work (like IFS) and the results are, well, bizarre. I taught myself to notice little mental threads that run like computer programs and just drop them:
“Amazingly, when I mentally labeled them as ‘part’ they disappeared like a soap bubble popping. When I discovered this I started furiously typing notes on my phone. After a few minutes I noticed a lot of tension around typing, looked at the part that was typing, said ‘Part’ and it dissolved so thoroughly that the phone fell out of my hands and my head slumped forward.”
This feels like putting down a rock I forgot I was carrying, every single time.
I know I'm seven years after Kaj, but it's a complete victory for multi-agent models of the mind from where I'm sitting. I started digging into historical mentions of the mind as multiple and found examples going all the way back to ancient Egypt and through the entire history of clinical psychiatry.
A lot of groups take the mind as many for granted, but I wanted to write a clear explainer that's very accessible so I wrote the linked essay.
Epistemic status: first-person phenomenology
I've combined meditation and parts work (like IFS) and the results are, well, bizarre. I taught myself to notice little mental threads that run like computer programs and just drop them:
“Amazingly, when I mentally labeled them as ‘part’ they disappeared like a soap bubble popping. When I discovered this I started furiously typing notes on my phone. After a few minutes I noticed a lot of tension around typing, looked at the part that was typing, said ‘Part’ and it dissolved so thoroughly that the phone fell out of my hands and my head slumped forward.”
This feels like putting down a rock I forgot I was carrying, every single time.
I know I'm seven years after Kaj, but it's a complete victory for multi-agent models of the mind from where I'm sitting. I started digging into historical mentions of the mind as multiple and found examples going all the way back to ancient Egypt and through the entire history of clinical psychiatry.
A lot of groups take the mind as many for granted, but I wanted to write a clear explainer that's very accessible so I wrote the linked essay.