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Lately, I’ve had a handful of people ask me about my meditation and introspection practices. This has served as a nice jumping off point to think back on my progress and results, as well.

The core of my efforts has been meditation — starting with concentration/samadhi practices and now mostly focusing on insight/vipassana practices. I started messing around with it about 7 years ago as a 10-minute daily practice following a New Year’s Resolution (wow, sometimes they do work!). It was a sufficiently low hurdle that I was able to keep that up very consistently but about 2 years ago I reflected and noticed not much was changing — this made me curious. I started digging into the literature — everything from esoteric Buddhist texts introducing annapanna to Ingram introducing noting — which led me to the conclusion that 1) I would need to put in more effort if I wanted to see more interesting results and 2) sitting around with my eyes closed and my mind wandering half the time doesn’t do much good. I started ramping up to 30 minutes a day and then eventually 60 minutes a day, and gradually things began to feel very different. I would experience weird stuff. I started noticing changes in my day-to-day experience of reality as I walked around and did things.

Eventually, through the recommendation of a friend who was quite a bit more experienced than me, I explored further in technique-space. Shinzen Young’s See Hear Feel had better “handles” for me to grab onto than Ingram’s noting practice and this led to some nice immediate progress. I was also tipped off to Culadasa’s book before it was released and dove into it immediately. This was the best text I have encountered in terms of step-by-step help to go from 0 to enlightenment, without fluff or esotericism or the overwhelming intensity of Ingram. I also did a 10 day Goenka retreat which, while giving off a bit of a culty vibe, was an overall awesome experience and led to huge progress in my practice — I also went from practically no knowledge to being quite proficient in his body scanning practice.

I’ve continued a daily practice which is currently at around 30-90 minutes a day in a single morning sit and occasionally has peaked around 2 hours a day. Since the Goenka retreat I’ve also put a lot more emphasis into trying to maintain mindfulness constantly while going through my day — mostly doing See Hear Feel. Currently, I rotate through a mix of Culadasa breathing, Young’s See Hear Feel, Goenka body scanning, and then I usually finish my sits with compassion Metta and/or Tonglen.

After meditating, I will spend 5-10 minutes journaling. This practice has changed a lot over time, including anything from writing a summary of my previous day to answering various sets of journaling questions/prompts. Over time, this began to feel aversive and “like work”, so recently I have switched to something more unstructured: focusing on strong feelings that bubble up in the moment or upon reflecting on the last and upcoming day, looking for what feels alive/exciting and what feels dead/aversive. I’ve also started spending about 10-20 minutes right after journaling to practice using Gendlin’s Focusing technique (get the audio book, it’s 60 minutes and all you need!) to decompose some problem or anxiety that I am able to identify and thereby gain incremental insight. I’ve been using some variation of Focusing sporadically for years, but starting to deliberately practice it daily has gotten me to naturally turn to it far more often throughout the day.

In terms of actual changes to my experience from all this stuff, well, it’s kind of hard to explain. I think the meditation has had large phenomenological effects. The world feels brighter, my body is constantly buzzing with energy, I can quickly and precisely identify feelings, emotions, moods and dissect them into parts. I can experience a lot of pain without it really bothering me all that much. My feelings and emotions are objects that arise, that I can interact with and use if I want them to, and that disappear when I don’t need them anymore (for the most part). This is starting to happen more consistently with my thoughts, as well. When navigating through the world, I’m able to see in finer grain detail the frame-by-frame patterns of stimulus and response that I’m carrying out, and more and more I am able to intervene and change patterns in precise spots. I am certainly not perfect, as you know, although these powers are growing over time and feel a bit magical.

My introspection practice has also gone a long way in helping me transition from Robert Kegan’s adult development framework stage 4 to being most of the way to stage 5. Starting/running a business and managing people was huge for this, as well as studying morality and ethics in the abstract as well as for concrete issues, but I don’t think it would have happened very easily without the concentration and clarity that have developed for me from meditation, or the personal gaps/oversights that journaling and general introspection practices can identify. I feel like my identity has mostly dissolved and this has left me feeling airy, fast, and powerful. I see the potential for growth everywhere. I see the tremendous value that comes from adopting many ways of seeing and can flit between them more fluidly.

What is going on when we’re judging the believability of an actor’s performance? Where does this sense of the authenticity, or realness, of feelings come from? In what sense can a feeling be manufactured?

The simple answer is when our big (physical) movements are reliably reflective of our internal felt state — the obfuscated micromovements — we consider our behavior coherent and authentic. We’ve developed all kinds of heuristics that subconsciously seem to classify whether someone’s “outward” presentation of affect is corresponding to what they are probably feeling on the “inside”. But I think there may be something more going on, as well. Not only do we want to know whether someone’s behavior is coherent with their felt sense but also we are interested in how reliably the emotional affect and corresponding action is going to be triggered by similar situations in the future. We are interested in perceived durability or reliability.

The fundamental question which becomes crucial to answer to ensure survival for a social organism is:  When I’m in trouble in the future, how likely are you to not only feel compassion but act on it in a meaningful way to help me? This matters because we are all resource constrained. We have finite time, money, and energy. We can’t be there, in any useful sense, for everyone at once.  Sometimes the thing we want to do, for some people the easy and natural thing to do, is to feel and show compassion for anyone that seems to need help. But in some sense, and in a way that seems to set off the inauthenticity detector for many people, this seems inauthentic. The detector may be doing useful work here. Even if someone can and frequently does feel compassion all the time for everyone and acts upon it in the moment, you are subconsciously (correctly) realizing that, while providing momentary relief, this person is likely to be unreliable in the future if you require a more substantive intervention than empathy. Whether we like it or not, useful and reliable relationships are necessarily bound together with some amount of specialness, exclusivity, and scarcity. Making it appear otherwise can lead to trouble.

In trying to make sense of Hoel’s theory of “causal emergence”, summarized here, I get stuck thinking about the semantics. What is a cause? What if we taboo it, similarly to how e-prime taboos “to be” verbs? The reductionist approach seems to focus on the events which seem to be the beginning of a chain of events which lead to the event in question. This is something like an attempt at pure objectivity. Alternatively, the causally emergent approach seems to seek the best predictor for a given event — the thing that provides the most information — and then treats that as a “causally emergent, ontologically real” thing that “actually exists”. Scary words. I do like this idea of gesturing towards the inherent limits of human subjectivity — we are limited by what we can observe, which appears inherently subjective. Furthermore, there are limits of computability, and maybe even something like comprehensibility. What value is a reductive theory of the universe if we lack the tools to apply it at the scales we care about? We don’t try to catch baseballs with quantum mechanics, in the words of a friend. An explanation that is true, in some sense of the word, is not necessarily useful.

What causes a set of dominos to fall over? A reductive model is forced to explain the physics back to the beginning of the universe. A causally emergent model may be willing to model it back to the point where local complexity is maximized (or something like that, *waves hands around*): the mind of the nearby human who was feeling restless this afternoon. What causes humans to act? Models can be built here, too. We can tease apart the best predictors for a given event: when they had their last meal, environmental cues, genetics, etc. Is this the actual cause? Depends on what you mean…

When we move following a pre-established path, we call this habit and it feels automatic. Barring interruption, these movements will be carried out in response to the stimulus they have tended to follow in the past. On the other hand, deliberate path creation seems to require the application of will. What’s that? Here is a funky hypothesis. Willpower is what it feels like when new desire paths are being traversed. For this to be successful, it seems to require a combination of holding the path in attention and for its prospective traversal to feel sufficiently emotionally appealing. I’m not sure how emotional appeal works but perhaps we can black box it: given a set of perceptions and the patterns they activate within the mind, some emotional affect is experienced (good vs bad vs neutral, along with an intensity [1]).

We can imagine ourselves typically defaulting to follow what we normally do in a situation where our attention is occupied with something else (a memory, an unrelated thought, etc), e.g. I normally follow the paved sidewalk. Changes in behavior in response to an identical stimulus tend to be enabled only when attention is applied, e.g. I’m in a rush and notice that cutting across a lawn will reduce my journey length even if no formal path exists there. This willed and deliberate change in behavior is only possible when we can feel that a sufficiently emotionally-salient and emotionally attractive benefit may result from the change. What does this say about habit change? To deliberately form new paths — habits — we usually need to be ready to attend to the sensory experience that we want to trigger the desired new path while simultaneously holding the emotionally charged prospective outcome in attention. If I hypothetically want to stop smoking a cigarette every time I leave my office, I need to prepare myself to attend to the triggering stimulus — leaving the office — as well as the emotionally charged prospective outcome — I need to imagine myself getting lung cancer 30 years later and focus on what that would feel like.

This would suggest a strong link between the ability to control the movement of attention and the plasticity of habits.

The studies of consciousness and quantum physics probably have very little to do with each other, and very little in common, with the exception of appearing chock-full of paradoxes. “Light is both a particle and a wave! When I look around at the world, there is an observer sitting in my head — but where?!” Why do we tend to struggle to speak clearly about these things? Perhaps the way we speak — down to the individual words we use — muddles things more than we realize. One potential culprit is the verb “to be”, along with its many forms of “is, are, were, was, am, be, been”. Usage of these verbs does not always cause problems but they often too easily allow for making claims about the world that obscure underlying experience (how we come to know) and make unwarranted — and unnoticed — logical leaps. Rather than “Light is both a particle and a wave” we can try to say “Light behaves like a wave when measured using instrument X, and behaves like a particle when measured using instrument Y”.

In Science and Sanity, Alfred Korzybski — along with his presentation of general semantics — suggests a ban on the usage of “to be” as an antidote to “demonological thinking”. He calls it E-prime (English Prime) — a new form of the English language. This proposed restriction on language serves to counterbalance a common, comfortable, and confused way of seeing the world: as a collection of neatly separated objects who each have some “core essence” or ideal form — Aristotelian essentialism. By speaking more precisely about how we come to form beliefs and being more careful about making logical leaps in speech, we may slowly improve how we think (a weak form of Sapir-Whorf). It may help us better accept the nebulosity around us.

This post was written in e-prime

Is the character of our experience purely a function of our attention and, if so, what determines it? Can we experience a mood subconsciously and what would that mean? My friend Scott brought up an example of someone who appeared happy from external physical cues but was surprised to hear that when asked about it. What is going on there? It seems like some part of our mind may be reacting to physiological stimulus yielding behavior that we pattern match to specific emotions, while another part of our mind may be experiencing something else entirely. It is unclear whether attention is rapidly moving back and forth between these experiences of a different character or whether our “background” mood is somehow “coloring” our attention-moderated foreground experiences — perhaps these are two ways of saying the same thing.

When a background emotion is aversive, such as sadness or grief, we often find ourselves seeking to drown it out with a positive stimulus — the proverbial sad person eating ice cream on the couch. Alternatively, you can have different “processes” within the mind fighting over large physical movement rather than merely internally experienced qualia (small movement). A poker player in an intense hand will be physically displaying a mixture of excitement/fear driven by his primal emotional response to the expected win or loss — anything from an elevated heart rate to a nervous tic and vocal changes. At the same time, his reasoning process will be trying to command attention towards trying to counteract these emotional signals — it predicts them to be self-defeating. The subjective experience is one of a battle for stabilizing attention — a feeling of tension or contradiction.

Differentiating between mind (thought) and body (physical action) can often be misleading. Consider collapsing both of these into the concept of movement. Small movements tend to happen within the mind — mere thought. Larger movements begin to have a more immediate impact on the surrounding environment — displacement of our body in space and the imprint of our language onto surfaces. It seems larger movements tend to dominate smaller ones — our thoughts are derailed far more easily when we move through, and interact with, the world than when we sit quietly with our eyes closed. Dissolving the distinction between thought and action can be useful for understanding habit — the familiar paths that we default to moving along. The domination of larger movements over smaller ones is quite evident when I try to change a habit. Strategizing about how to do it and thinking about my desire to do so seems to have little immediate effect. The surest way to perform habit change is to repeat the physical movement of the body associated with it, in the appropriate context, over and over. Even with a rebellious or wandering mind, it seems the creation of the path with the repetition of the larger movements wins out and the smaller movements begin to follow along over time.