One of my moderation rules forbids discussion of Buddhism by default.
Since there was a big old section on meditation in this post, and the type of meditation I described is pretty specifically shikantaza from Soto Zen, I'm designating this here thread as the place where people can talk about Buddhism-related stuff if they want to, just this once, as a treat.
I don't promise to participate. My other moderation rules still apply.
I've been, independently, trying to level up my Original Seeing (my, and probably most rationalist's, weakest link in OODA looping). I don't think I have any insights worth sharing here, you seem to be far ahead of me.
But you've brought up shikantaza ("just sitting"), which still gets a chuckle out of me: My head canon is that Original Seeing, Naturalism, Unseeing, but also Buddhism and Stoicism, all point at roughly the same thing in concept space. That is, I suspect Buddhism did, before people made a religion out of it. I suspect the same happened to Stoicism. I haven't bothered to analyze Christianity and other religions, they might not fit in that well.
I've come to that head canon because the implications of a high level of Original Seeing all point towards practices seen in both Buddhism and Stoicism. Not that I have attained high level, but I have enough to see where it's going. Shikantaza itself is hilarious, because with all the sports-team like traditions in Buddhism, I imagine that one guy going "guys, you can figure all this out on your own just by sitting", which is also how the Buddha did it originally, supposedly. If you figure things out for yourself, you probably don't need any traditions to guide your exercises. If you don't figure things out for yourself, you won't get a lot out of going through the traditions.
To bring it back: I suspect both Buddhism and Stoicism to be "fake" versions of Original Seeing, "fake" as described above.
I ordinarily do not allow discussions of Buddhism on my posts because I hate moderating them. I haven't worked out what exactly it is about Buddhism, but it seems to cause things to go wonky in a way that's sort of similar to politics.
Also, my way of thinking and writing and doing things in general seems to bring out a lot of people who want to talk about Buddhism, and I want my work discussed mostly on its own terms, without it being immediately embroiled in whatever thing it is that tends to happen when people start talking about Buddhism.
I like the "making fake things real” section and think it'd make a good short standalone post. (I also like how it's used here in this context)
I do notice I might be at risk for "trying to make a fake-thing-real, and ending up with still a fake thing" (or at least if I had read about the advice in school, I might have ended up doing that)
I am suprised at what you meant by "squinting" at the story. I now wonder if after querying my intuitions, I too quickly cut them apart and analyse their anatomy, leaving them a dead thing. That does not look like the process, your process, of curiosity.
There are two especially hard-hitting concepts in this story: "distraction" and "crucial". So at this point, I thought for a while about "distraction".
In my notes, I seem to be sort of turning the concept around and around, as though trying to see all the sides of it, or to memorize its shape. I asked a lot of questions, such as "Where does distraction come from?” and, “Is it something with a positive force, like a draw to think about something else? Or is it merely an absence, a failure to focus on the intended subject?"
The main point of these questions was to activate my curiosity and familiarize myself with the sensation of it. Some questions burned brighter than others. By dwelling on this “squinting” process, I learned to feel my desire for understanding as it interacted with my thoughts around “distraction”.
I'm wondering if there are analogues of physical necessity. Perhaps mathematical necessity. There's a particular feeling you have when you get a proof-idea, but it doesn't seem quite as forceful to me as considering the constraints I can feel when considering how to get up from my chair. Though I think that's focusing on the wrong thing. Maybe the feeling you get when you look at a theorem and think that it could be no other way? I'm trying to think of examples which feel something like the sense of physical necessity and I'm not getting anything near as strong.
What about social versions? Well, I think there are two senses that might qualify: the sense that you're acting out a role, and the sense of social pressure distorting your thoughts. I think the latter is a closer analogue as it feels more like my thoughts are moving on rails carved through social forces. These thoughts feel like they're weakly coupled to my world model but strongly associated with people I respect, movements I identify with etc.
Oh, that reminds me of another possible analogue: actions or thoughts that fit your identity. This might even generalize the social role/pressure options. Example: somtimes investigate things that contradict my world-view because the idea that it would be unvirtuous not to do so sucks me in. And that sure looks like it is about what kind of person I view myself as.
Side note: I wonder what life would be like if every action was guided by necessity. Would it feel like being in a flow state? Those states feel like following a pointer to the next possible thought or action, constantly. But following arrows isn't the same thing as being constrained, so I think not.
At the outset of any naturalist study, original seeing and curiosity are paramount. If they’re already present—and they aren’t crowded out by other concerns, such as a desperation to solve your problem as quickly as possible—then you can dive right in. Otherwise, some deliberate cultivation is needed.
Where did I stand with original seeing and curiosity, at the beginning of this study? I was pretty low on both.
There was this whole coherent concept, “hug the query”, handed to me from the outside by a clear and well-written essay that did not leave me feeling confused. I could tell there was something in there that I wanted to engage with, somehow; but for the most part, my understanding was relatively inert.
If I wanted to transform that seed of interest into a study that was live, growing, and really mine, it was going to take some work. As I said in the introduction, I had to forget what I already knew so I could see it all again, this time entirely for myself.
Methodological Note
There is a skillset that I call “making fake things real”. I’m not sure that’s a good name for it; it’s just what I call it inside my own head.
Imagine you’re in middle school, and you’ve been assigned a group project. You and the three other people at your table have to make a poster about the Ottoman Empire.
Does this project matter?
No. Of course it doesn’t.
I mean sure, maybe we could argue a little bit for the value of knowing history in order to predict the future, or developing social skills, or learning endurance and tenacity in the face of the pointless tedium you will inevitably face in your future nine to five. I even hear that graphic design is still a marketable skill (for now).
But let’s be real. The reason you have to make a poster about the Ottoman Empire is that your teacher has a list of topics the state requires her to cover with you, and she has to fill your time somehow. She probably does not care about the Ottoman Empire any more than you do. She’s just keeping you busy until the bell rings.
It seems to me that in this situation, you have three kinds of strategies to choose from.
1. Fake→Fake
2. Fake→Fuck Off
3. Fake→Real
Fake→Fake: In one type of strategy, you accept the fake thing, and you do something fake with it. This might mean reluctantly, grudgingly participating in the project, dragging your feet and putting in the bare minimum, but ultimately fulfilling the requirements as stated. You got a bullshit assignment, you made a bullshit poster, nothing matters and nobody cares.
Or, it might mean roleplaying a model student, making a beautiful poster full of Interesting Facts™, and thereby ensuring that your streak of straight As is not interrupted. That is a different kind of bullshit, and in a way it’s worse: Nothing matters, nobody cares, and nobody notices.
Fake→Fuck Off: In the second category of options, you reject the fake thing entirely. You do not make the poster at all. You boycott.
I took this option a lot in school myself: I refused to do homework, refused to take timed tests, refused to let adults who were dumber than me determine how I spent my time and attention. They thought I had ADD, but in fact I had integrity.
(Also autism.)
There’s something beautiful in the boycotting approach. Refusing to do fake things prevents the degradation of your motivational integrity. If you never force yourself to do something soul destroying, then perhaps your soul will never be destroyed, and every single thing you do will be genuinely worthwhile.
It’s tremendously costly in practice. You will likely fail classes, get grounded by your parents, struggle to hold a job as an adult. Still, I think it’s an admirable way to live.
Fake→Real: There is also a third type of strategy: You accept the fake thing, and then make something real out of it.
Fake→Real is a lot harder to access. It’s tricky to make even the very first steps toward it. Plus, if you do it a little bit wrong, you’ll accept the fake thing and then fool yourself into thinking you’ve made something real out of it, and you’re right back in the worst kind of Fake→Fake, the kind where nothing matters and nobody even notices.
But I imagine that if you can consistently do it right—if you can master this strategy—you’ll never be stuck with a bullshit assignment ever again. You’ll be some kind of authenticity alchemist, a fountain of creative purpose that takes in dumb group projects about the Ottoman Empire and outputs models of geopolitical impact, sensitivity to architectural beauty, and an interest in the Silk Road that will lay the foundation for your future career as an economist. You’ll do this unfailingly, no matter what bullshit ends up in front of you.
I am not a master of making fake things real. I still boycott bullshit at least as often as I transubstantiate it. I still sometimes find myself dragging my feet through paperwork, or going subtly wrong and rationalizing my actions so they seem worthwhile when deep down I know that they’re not.
But I can do it at all, some of the time. And in my experience, it tends to be way better than either of the other types of strategy.
“Making a fake thing real” was the challenge I set for myself in this study.
It wasn’t such an extreme case as a busy work assignment in middle school. I wasn’t handed something fake, exactly. But what I held was nowhere near real enough to fuel a naturalist study, not without some alchemy.
For one thing, I was embarking on a study originally intended not to satisfy some burning curiosity of mine, nor even to solve one of my personal problems, but to “demonstrate the naturalist method”, simply because that was the next step in my larger project. I thought it would be cool if my demos provided useful companion resources to pre-existing rationality material, and I settled on “hug the query” somewhat whimsically.
Additionally, these ideas I was working with—"closeness to the issue", "the screening off theorem", "hug the query"—they were dead words on a page, the empty skin of someone else’s thoughts shed as he slithered across a website years in the past. Learning from someone else’s writing always poses this kind of challenge, to one degree or another.
“Catching the Spark” is a procedure for shining original seeing and curiosity at arbitrary topics. I’ve never made a concerted effort to lay out what I know of how to make fake things real; but I think “throw original seeing and curiosity at it systematically, relentlessly, until it starts to change” is a big chunk of the skillset.
So that’s how I started this study. I opened up “Catching the Spark”, read the instructions, and followed them.
Catching the Spark
A quick summary of the process: Catching the Spark begins with story articulation, which gets you grounded in your intuitions about a topic. You then “squint” at your story, examining your intuitions piece by piece. Finally you reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, and choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward.
When working with text, I often try highlighting the bits that jump out at me, so I can feel into them and get a sense of why I seem to care. That “jumping out” is an indication that my own interests and priorities have found a potential interface.
This works even if a certain phrase makes me angry or sad. If I feel anything at all while reading, it means that somehow, for some reason, I care. There is realness hidden somewhere behind every fake thing. Emotions often indicate crenulations in the facade.
In "Hug the Query", the part that most jumped out was:
"In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible."
As I read back through this sentence, I looked for a felt sense of what seemed important about it. I offered some phrases to the felt sense, and found a few that resonated: “the heart of the matter”, “driving straight at”, “not getting distracted”, “cutting straight to”, “intimacy”, “nothing in the way”, “clarity”, “staying in touch”.
I wove those phrases into a story statement, tinkered with that statement for a while until I found something that more or less fit my felt sense of "what's important here", and ended up with:
I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.
(It later turned out that this story was a bit off. That’s ok; it was only meant to be provisional, something to work with.)
There are two especially hard-hitting concepts in this story: "distraction" and "crucial". So at this point, I thought for a while about "distraction".
In my notes, I seem to be sort of turning the concept around and around, as though trying to see all the sides of it, or to memorize its shape. I asked a lot of questions, such as "Where does distraction come from?” and, “Is it something with a positive force, like a draw to think about something else? Or is it merely an absence, a failure to focus on the intended subject?"
The main point of these questions was to activate my curiosity and familiarize myself with the sensation of it. Some questions burned brighter than others. By dwelling on this “squinting” process, I learned to feel my desire for understanding as it interacted with my thoughts around “distraction”.
I deviated from the standard instructions in the middle of “squinting”. There was an obstacle I needed to pause and contend with, one that turned out to afford my first phenomenological snapshot for the study.
My obstacle, which had been showing up all over the place at that time, was postpartum hormones. I’d given birth a month and a half earlier, and things were not as usual inside my head.
It was so hard to think straight. Whenever I put effort into directing my mind in any way at all, I found that I was tied up in agonizing knots of anxiety and self doubt. More than half my cycles were going toward coping with the neuroticism, rather than toward my intended topic. “Will I ever be able to think again?” I ruminated, intrusively, incessantly. “Will I ever truly return to work? Is my work even any good at all? Is the entire project completely hopeless? Am I hopeless?”
Sometimes when I’m trying to use my brain in a certain way, it insists on pursuing some other activity instead. Here, I was “trying to make progress on my project”, but my brain insisted on engaging in anxious rumination. In such moments, I tend to get a lot of mileage out of giving up on control, while carefully watching whatever thoughts and experiences result. So that’s what I did next. I stopped “trying to work”, and just sat there staring at a blank wall for a while, watching my mind do whatever it was that seemed so important to it at the time.
Methodological Note
I suspect that I have somewhat underemphasized this tool in my writings so far, because I do not think that the anglophone world is currently experiencing a dearth of praise for mindfulness meditation and the like. Nevertheless, I do consider it a critical tool, one of tremendous practical power if you know when and how to use it.
Here is my one-page cheat sheet on how and when to stare at walls.
How
Find a wall and sit down in front of it. It doesn’t have to be a wall, but best if it’s something pretty boring. It can be the back of your eyelids, if you like that better.
Stare at it. Do this in a comfortable-ish position so you don’t need to move around too much.
Daydream. Or ruminate. Or listen to the birds. Really, it doesn’t matter what your mind is doing. You don’t have to try to make it focus on something, or settle down, or do anything in particular. Your main task here is to sit down and shut up. That’s all that matters.
Watch what happens. Notice what your mind does when you’re not trying to make it do particular things. When you’re not trying to focus, or study, or hold a conversation, or clear out your notifications, or follow a book or a podcast. Watch what your brain brains all on its lonesome.
When you’re done, you can write some things down if you want to. This part is optional, but it’s helpful when you want to remember some of what your mind did while left to its own devices.
When (An Incomplete List)
When you’re trying to focus on something, and part of your mind keeps trying to do something else instead. Why at this time? Because you’ll gain information about what it is your mind is trying to do instead, and possibly why it’s trying to do that thing, which might inform your decisions about how to use your cognitive resources. Also, sometimes your brain will just do whatever it’s been trying to, and then it will be done, and your conflict will be over.
When you’ve just received jarring news, and you feel jangled. Why at this time? Because it gives all your brain stuff some space to integrate updates and settle back down, reducing how much gets shoved in closets or swept under rugs.
When you’re struggling to get your thoughts in order. Why at this time? Because applying more pressure can lead to traffic jams, while this is like widening the road.
When you’re about to plan your day. Why at this time? Because knowing what sort of state your mind is in that day can help you choose more appropriate activities.
When you’re about to have an important or difficult conversation. Why at this time? I’m not quite sure. Something about arriving at the conversation having just been who you are independently of the other person, maybe.
Now and then. Why? For the heck of it. Idk man, does it seem healthy to you for a human brain to be constantly directed by external pressures during literally all of its waking moments? Didn’t it evolve to like, contend with boredom, sometimes? To wait for fish to bite? This isn’t a reason, it’s just a hunch. The other list items are better than this one.
After about twenty minutes of staring at a wall, I got a snapshot of a moment that seemed particularly relevant to my study. Here is what I wrote afterward, to record the experience.
Log Excerpt
I ended up turning my attention toward whatever's going on with this "trying to work" thing. What I found is that I felt I’d been "missing the point", or something.
I was aware of an internal conflict, and the conflict was over something about "doing my work or not doing my work". There were various things underneath each of those options, such as "never being able to do work again", "being shit at what I do", "giving myself time and space to recover when I go on a trip", "recognizing that I went to the grocery store today and that throws me off", "making excuses", and some other stuff.
I did not address any of that directly. Instead I... well, the way it actually worked in my head was extremely kinesthetic and proprioceptive, which much of my thinking is. I sort of felt myself becoming a river that flows in underneath the wall of conflict. I think I was recognizing "none of that is the thing itself". It was a very soft feeling, soft like releasing, soft like letting go, the petals as they open, the pillow as it cradles the head. Soft flowing underneath the hardness of the conflict above, moving past all of that toward... what? "Toward anything else", is my immediate response. "Toward whatever is on the other side of the wall."
I don't know what is there, on the other side of the wall. [That is, I don’t know what “hug the query” is, yet.] I don't know what it is or what it means, I don't know what I'll find. But anything real to be found is beyond the internal bickering over concepts of work, duty, worth, expectations, promises, ability. I got past myself.
But how did I know that I was "missing the point"? That's the biggest question here, right? The biggest question of "hug the query". How do you know what to hug? Or how do you know what constitutes hugging, and what doesn’t? How can you tell when you're distant from the thing you want to stay intimate with? How can you tell when you're looking toward what is crucial, and when you're "distracted"?
I was making a guess, that I was "missing the point". I could have been wrong, of course. But whatever I perceived, I think it was a pretty reliable signal that "this is not in direct connection to what I care about here". Yes, maybe I am "not capable of doing work". That might be true. But I'm not here to "determine whether I can do work". I'm here to lay my body alongside some particular thing that I want to learn about. If I "cannot do work", then yes, perhaps I will fail to learn the thing. But it's better to try to learn the thing, than to try to determine whether I can learn the thing.
Looking back at this first snapshot from the other end of my study, I have a story about what was going on. I wasn't yet able to reflectively recognize, or perhaps even directly perceive, the phenomenology of "closeness to the issue" that I can now take as object and notice fairly reliably. But I think I must have felt what I now think of as "darkness in my chest", the feeling that corresponds to "distance from the issue". And in response, I managed to navigate away from that experience of distance.
Choosing My Quest
After this pause for meditation and phenomenological photography, it felt right to me to return to the official structure of “Catching the Spark”. It was time to “choose my quest”; time to find a conceptual crux in the form of a question that would kick off my study.
To feel my way toward a question like that, I first reconnected with my felt sense of the story, "I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial." I wrote:
Log Excerpt
It's like a snail reaching one antenna out from beneath its shell. Like some small and soft creature extending a probing tentacle from beneath the safety of the rock they're hiding under. Vulnerable, sensitive, soft, raw, alive. I think that's half of it.
The other half is actually hard and sharp. Like a razer, like a laser, like the tip of an arrow that's just split another arrow lengthways on its trip to the bullseye.
I would like to know where I feel each of these in my body, so I can find them more easily later. The vulnerability I feel from three inches above my belly button to the middle of my chest. It's like a glowing ball, and it comes with a forward cautious restrained reaching motion. The cutting laserness I feel... in multiple places, I think? In the "pit of my stomach" like a tungsten sphere dropped into a pond, sinking immediately with no delay straight to the bottom and settling several layers deep in the silt. And in my chest and head, a buzzing excitement, a feeling of forward energy, piercing like a bayonet or a spear.
(Remember that “glowing ball” somewhere between my belly button and my chest. I later talk about “chest luster”, which I think is probably the same sensation.)
Holding these feelings against the various questions I'd written down, I chose, "What's going on with distraction?" This became my quest.
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