Thanks for trying to model it a bit more mechanistically. I think you're right that unfolding leans receptive & bottom-up, while thinking leans active & top-down.

But there's a bit more in what I'm trying to bake into "unfolding":

• Unfolding requires both bottom-up and top-down work. e.g. I am choosing to look at this specific area of my life right now (top down), but once tuned into it, I drop the narrative and notice what is actually there (bottom up)
• The mechanism that distinguishes real unfolding from random mental drift is salience/felt-sense. In addition to "let disconnected patterns surface" there's also "notice where there's emotional charge/tightness/aliveness, and investigate THAT specifically." 
• The telic dimension of unfolding is an attempt to tie together top-down and bottom-up thinking. Why am I doing what I am doing - not just in this moment, but in my life in general? What is on the frontier? How can I tune into what is worth putting my attention towards?
  • This aspect of things is incredibly personal. One answer to "what is worth putting my attention towards" is "the highest x-risk cause in the world" (thinking). But that's not necessarily attending to the contextual/personal aspects of one's situation (unfolding what this situation means in relation to everything else in your life) .

Maybe this is contained in your point already and I missed it. If not, hopefully this helps add a dimension!

Thanks for the insightful comment! There are a few good points I want to highlight here:

• Unfolding is emotionally powerful and can lead to the "highest clarity of mind in recent memory"
• Yet it's difficult to make real progress with unfolding
• Backsliding / not making progress can lead to a negative feedback loop where "repeated inaction makes you feel like a failure"
• Taking action quickly is a good way to not backslide

I think this correct, and there are two things I want to add to this to help connect these ideas to a bigger picture of healing over time:

The first is about the correlation of wellbeing and insight. You describe speaking to a friend and finding "elating and motivating" possibilities. One part of this is that putting two minds together helps with unfolding. But there's also the fact that being with someone socially feels great and charges emotional batteries. Being in this well-resourced place allows looking at problems and seeing new possibilities, and having the emotional bandwidth to believe its possible to act in new ways. I.e. agency and wellbeing go together; stuckness and anxiety/depression go together.

So the trick, really, is to create a positive feedback loop over time of increasing wellbeing --> more insight --> more action --> greater agency. 

The second is that there is meta-skill in learning to remember and act on the insights of unfolding. A friend described it through the following metaphor: 

You're walking down a street and fall into a pothole. This is something that has happened to you before, many, many, times. 

1. Eventually, you learn that you can get out of the pothole on your own. This is amazing, and you're surprised that being in or out of the pot is a choice!
2. Eventually, you learn that you can use the same techniques to get out of the pothole each time. This gets faster and faster, and while some holes are bigger than others, you're gaining confidence that falling into a pothole isn't the end of the world.
3. Eventually, you learn that you can avoid potholes and not fall in at all. Over time, potholes become less and less frequent (and at this point when you fall in, you get out very quickly). 
4. Eventually, the road becomes so wide that that majority of your life is pothole-free. 

These are "stages" (bigger, more permanent shifts) rather than "states" (momentary elation / inspiration). 

Your examples are good because they show what it looks like to kick off the healing feedback loop of going up stages. And they also imply what can happen in the opposite case, of the destructive feedback loop of stuckness/pain. 

Thanks Gordon! "Balancing the humors" is exactly right.

I think the frames give some broad macro-direction on how to direct one's practice.

They also give micro-direction. Are you feeling increasing levels of stress and numbness? Get some Heaven. Are you feeling caught in the weeds and unclear why you were doing what you were doing? Maybe too much Mechanics, and you've lost touch with both Heaven and Hell. Feeling motivated but confused on how to make a difference? Time for a plan, pragmatic steps, measurement, mechanics.

It's been a nice compass for me.

It was held at a standard conference centre in Kudanshita.  This one is completely on me/Katrina as the ops team! We bought our own equipment last minute and should have instead used the venue's, or bought better equipment. 

Thanks for the helpful context! We had intuitions in this direction but its nice to substantiate it with these examples. Do you speak any Japanese / have you considered joining the Japan AI Alignment slack channel? You may have a useful perspective to deconfuse conversations there if/when ontology gaps arise.

Thanks for the question. "Conference" might be the wrong word. 

RIKEN, one of the top research institutions in Japan, held a (AFAIK) whole-company event that same weekend. My understanding is that ARAYA did a public sweep of events but didn't learn about this conflict until a few weeks after the date had been set and we sent out invitations.  While some RIKEN members attended our conference, others who expressed interest declined ("I would have attended but...").  Asking key participants ahead of the conference about the date probably could have avoided this.