Thousands of years ago, the Greeks determined that παν μέτρον άριστον, or alternatively, that virtue is a golden mean. Despite the fact that Western culture has at least superficially internalized the idea — the average Joe on the street likely reflexively concurs with squiggly formula — there are still cases in which we would profit from remembering it. As it turns out, it's sometimes non-trivially difficult to know the directionality of our immoderacy.

Some claim that there are exceptions to this principle; many of these people appear to be guided by ideology. Cynically, we might guess that this is because locating the Good (whatever that means) at the extremes makes developing zeal relatively more urgent than learning discerning, and that this improves the memetic fitness of the ideology. Charitably, it's because the Good doesn't need defenders when it's moderate, and so ideologies only accrete around moral questions with extreme answers.

I tend to be a pessimist. That didn't stop me from trying meditation; not at first, anyways.

Meditation (and "mindfulness" more generally) has become quite popular lately — and perhaps rightfully so. In a milieu characterized by frenetic emotionality and vanishing attention spans, vipassana has a lot going for it. I wasn't interested in the health benefits, though. I felt perfectly content with my emotionality and attention. Instead, I wanted to become a psychonaut — sans the illegal drugs.

I'd hobby-read psychology for about a decade, beginning with Julian Jaynes at age 15 or so. The Origin of Consciousness is a hell of a book to read when one is first learning to chart the territory of the mind. Like any bookish teenaged boy, there was plenty of Nietzsche in the early years as well. I've come to appreciate both writers' limits, but I suspect my prior on the radical mutability on the human mind — and excitement toward the prospect of psychonauting — has yet to fully update downwards. This is meant to explain what's to come, but you can also read it as a caveat.

Meditation did not promise to turn me into a blond beast. But it promised a change, and that was interesting enough. I expected a sort of training grounds of self-modification: strategically trivial, large reference class, obvious results.

I was disappointed to find it to be somewhat easy. I don't have an internal monologue and typically have thoughts arriv...

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