Ah- thank you. In retrospect what seems like "the obvious thing" to me is not always so.
I'm glad you liked it :)
I always wondered why, at the before-Christmas battle, Hermione didn't give her wish to Sunshine to incentivize them to work together instead of defecting and turning traitor (that is to say- make the wish for sunshine and announce it before the battle.) I think it was the obvious course to unite the army, and it was the obvious Hermione thing to do. Did she fail to do this just because Dumbledore got to her first, or was this a true blind spot on her part?
It looks like it's difficult to wear with glasses. Do you have any ideas for adjustments that might make them fit better?
I had a related (and admittedly somewhat strange) experience to this. I had a dream in which I was given a koan and told to use it to seek enlightenment. When I woke up I wrote down the koan and decided to meditate on it. I gained some wisdom from it, but I also noticed that I was starting to feel empty. Not a peaceful one-ness kind of empty- just empty empty. I realized that if experienced anything like ego death in my present state, it would go very, very badly. It seems counterintuitive, but knew I had to find myself before I continued on the path- to find myself before I lost myself, if that makes any sense. It's as if in order to reach transcendence, there had to be something worth transcending.
If it helps anyone suffering from existential fear, I'm very glad I put it out here.
2Thank you! I'll work on that and see if I have any other questions.
"(I typically closed my eyes briefly and generated a small pleasurable feeling.)" - could you explain a little further how to do this? I'm not good at this at all and I think it would be an extremely useful skill for me. Apologies if you've answered this elsewhere.
"Future progress is a part of current human values" of course- the danger lies in the "future" always being just that- the future. One would naturally hope that it wouldn't go this way, but continuously putting off the future because now is always the present is a possible outcome. It can even be a struggle with current models to get them to generate novel ideas, because of a stubbornness not to say anything for which there is not yet evidence.
Thank you for that criticism- I hadn't necessarily given that point enough thought, and I think I am starting to see where the weaknesses are.
There was no special connection to the truth in this koan. It was actually a little lame- just my brain pattern-matching. But pattern matching can do some odd things things. I won't reach enlightenment with this koan- I've already followed it as far as it will go. It was "where is your voice located." It's a very "if a tree falls in the forest" type of koan, but I learned just a little from following it in its expected loop.