deep okayness seems to be tractable and it is my favorite interest
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pop buddhism will say desire is the root of suffering and meditator nerds will say no actually it’s more precise to say tanha is the cause of dukkha
but it’s really more like “it turns out that if you look really closely (helpful to have some amount of concentration and relaxation) then you notice that you’re doing a certain kind of clenching like 10 times a second and you notice it feels bad in a certain way but it’s such an automatic reflex that it’s kinda hard to stop doing it but over time you do eventually do less and less of it and you go through these radical surprising improvements in certain aspects of mental wellbeing (you might even say poetic things like whoa now i feel like i am held in gods hands 24/7 and it was all about accepting the present moment and letting go and now i feel radically better but also interestingly i still have lots of normal emotional issues and im still a normal human in many ways but i feel radically fundamentally okay now in a way that just wasnt shining through before) — and idk why it’s like this but yeah it seems to be reproducible bc u kinda hear very similar stories from everyone who has spent thousands of hours deliberately training specific mental skills to get better at increasingly subtle versions of accepting the present moment (i.e. what u might call an advanced meditator)”
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pop buddhism will say desire is the root of suffering and meditator nerds will say no actually it’s more precise to say tanha is the cause of dukkha
but it’s really more like “it turns out that if you look really closely (helpful to have some amount of concentration and relaxation) then you notice that you’re doing a certain kind of clenching like 10 times a second and you notice it feels bad in a certain way but it’s such an automatic reflex that it’s kinda hard to stop doing it but over time you do eventually do less and less of it and you go through these radical surprising improvements in certain aspects of mental wellbeing (you might even say poetic things like whoa now i feel like i am held in gods hands 24/7 and it was all about accepting the present moment and letting go and now i feel radically better but also interestingly i still have lots of normal emotional issues and im still a normal human in many ways but i feel radically fundamentally okay now in a way that just wasnt shining through before) — and idk why it’s like this but yeah it seems to be reproducible bc u kinda hear very similar stories from everyone who has spent thousands of hours deliberately training specific mental skills to get better at increasingly subtle versions of accepting the present moment (i.e. what u might call an advanced meditator)”
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@TVachaW also wrote a useful counterpoint to address some of the problems with my tweet’s perspective, see here!
Meditation absolutely can give you a sense of fundamental OKness, whilst the rest of your behavioural-motivation system goes more or less untouched.
You absolutely can use it to continue pursuing our society’s default consumerist-hedonist-materialist goals with more ease and less grabbiness.
You can do all this without ever examining the underlying desires, motivations, values, intents, behaviours, and ethics that originally put all the grabbiness in motion.
Doing so can be a worthwhile goal in its own right and help people live much happier lives.
That’s all great.
But to think this is the fundamental goal of Buddhadharma is drastically wide of the mark.
Then to think this is actually a *more advanced* view than what Buddhadharma is driving at represents levels of hubris rarely seen outside 21st century Bay Area culture.
The thing is, contrary to what the QT’d post below says, none of this is what the actual “advanced meditators” who dedicated their lives full time to nothing but spiritual practice for decades report (ie those who founded and have preserved the traditions).
Such people for thousands of years have reported that there are much deeper layers to practice, where one’s entire system of intent, motivation, desire, values, ethics and behavioural tendencies get utterly transformed.
It’s not just a case of continuing to live by Californian consumerist-materialist values but being less grabby-grab whilst you go about it.
It’s ultimately about having insights that fundamentally shape your entire view of what is desirable, what is valuable, what the good looks like, how you should behave, how you should treat others, what is worth wanting, what your fundamental identity is and even what life and death themselves are, as well as what lies beyond death.
There’s a reason why the Buddha didn’t just return to his awesome pleasure palace after his enlightenment and simply get back to consuming experiences but with less grabby grabness or with a “fundamental OKness” whilst he did it.
@corbindreams - I don’t mean to be disrespectful to you. You’re a talented writer and I enjoy some of your writing on meditation. Some of your descriptions of the phenomenology of meditation - including some in this post - are illuminating. But what you are describing here is absolutely not the end point of the Buddhist project(s), much less a more advanced distillation of it.
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everyone talks about how to meditate but no one talks about how there’s actually a lot of prerequisites to even be able to sit down quietly in the first place w/o feeling an extreme need to actively numb yourself with an external coping mech like phone or food or romance or work
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“tanha is the cause of dukkha” is a statement that is still rly loaded and the vocab has so much overhead
“tanha” - the meditator nerds are making the claim that this is not some vague philosophical abstract thing about “desire” or “attachment” and we’re actually saying like oh if you look really closely there’s some specific observable mental event happening, like just as observable as eye saccades or smth like that, and it has some kind of grabby flinchy graspy clenchy quality to it
“is the cause of” - this is a mechanistic causal claim, it seems kinda true but i feel like it’s overconfident and can turn some people off (especially if you dont agree on the definition of the “dukkha” that the tanha is causing), and so instead of making this kind of claim i think its just better to say the story that is actually behind that claim (“when you look rly closely at that 10-40hz grabbygrab reflex, it seems to hurt a lot for whatever reason, and when you stop doing it then it turns out you get some rly rly rly crazy improvements in some aspects of mental wellbeing, and this seems to have been reproduced many many times”)
“dukkha” - when you lessen the 10-40hz grabbygrab reflex, there’s some particular sucky quality of your experience that goes away too. its not negative emotions that go away (those are really beautiful), its also not physical pain that goes away (youre still a mammal with a nervous system), but like there’s some particular sucky quality of your experience that goes away
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> Injuries are a part of high performance athletics was a hard pill for me to swallow
> Spirituality is probably unique in the degree to which untrained people think that they can become world class without professional guidance. Your don’t see the gap nearly as easily as in sports. In sports you quickly realized there’s levels to the levels to the levels. And the gap between physical ability and understanding is stark. But the shape of consciousness and how it holds tension is much more easily obscured by the intellect - so there’s much more room for self inflation in spirituality.
They hate to see it but many of these things are just part of the territory. Injuries are a part of high performance athletics was a hard pill for me to swallow. Bypassing is a part of spirituality, as are the patterns of attracting more traumatized or obsessive ppl. Not really a dig even, just means they’ll be more fragmented or hold beliefs strongly bc of localized intense emotional avoidance (depends on specific make up). Part of the territory same way injury is part of sports. Requires developing discernment and following ur brain and gut And heart etc etc.
Spirituality is probably unique in the degree to which untrained people think that they can become world class without professional guidance. Your don’t see the gap nearly as easily as in sports. In sports you quickly realized there’s levels to the levels to the levels. And the gap between physical ability and understanding is stark. But the shape of consciousness and how it holds tension is much more easily obscured by the intellect - so there’s much more room for self inflation in spirituality.
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mfw when i use 100 meditation/therapy techniques to see that it's possible to be productive without a thousand acts of internal micro-violence
> I thought all of this stuff I was doing was the kind of stuff your average grown-up had to do in order to be not hopelessly neurotic
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> Amateur radio enthusiasts are now aiding with communication.
whoa
Radio and television communications across New York City have been severely hindered because the television and radio antenna on the North Tower has been rendered inoperable by the fire.
Amateur radio enthusiasts are now aiding with communication.
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i feel so mentally bloated after scrolling on twitter/instagram or just in general repeatedly being on my phone hmm like not just “oh im craving my phone” and not just “im using it to avoid bad feelings” but also whoa i feel so mentally bloated like there’s 100 different tetris effect virus mental affordances that seep into my mind from shortform content and it feels very similar to when im physically bloated after eating superstimulus chocolate, like it doesnt necessarily feel terrible it just feels messy and bloated hmmm
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i am feeling a lot gratitude for all the generosity and support ive received from the meditation research community over the past 12 months
it has been a full year since i madly and irresponsibly fell in love with this, and i just came back from a retreat to top it off before going back to school for a final year of undergrad :)
ive been interested in “how we can feel deeply okay” for a long time, but it was a year ago that i was binge-reading romeo’s and nick’s writing about the micromechanics of tanha.
for better or for worse, that really nerdsniped me and convinced me that this is a worthwhile question that i could dedicate a lot of love and friendship to exploring and sharing this stuff, like oh maybe it’s possible to make genuine progress here and figure out the micromechanics here to make Feeling Deeply Okay dramatically more accessible!!! and we can share this with people and explore cool ways of talking about it!!!
anyway, in the past year i have made so many friends in this space and they have been so helpful in teaching me so many lovely things… i have grown so much in the past year and i could not have done it without the support of the greater benevolent conditions that i am surrounded by and held in
i have also met a lot of my heroes and it turns out they are just silly weirdos too LOL. it turns out that remarkable work is often done by unremarkable humans who just cared a lot
im not yet really sure what research means for me. i think research often gets a really serious vibe, like we’re just optimizing and trying to grind to get straight to the answer… but recently i have also been leaning a lot into being a lover and an enthusiast! (like, i love it! i love it So Much! and i am so enthused! this is my favorite interest and it is sooo near and dear to me! we can be happy about this!!! im reminded of how rob burbea talks about the qualities of mindfulness… like acceptance, patience, nonjudgmentalism, attention… “if you think about all those qualities, they're actually qualities of love.” the same is true of research!!)
i just wanna tag some people here that have been so supportive (in one way or another…) in the past year —
@nickcammarata
@RomeoStevens76
@nosilverv
@MiniUlisse
@KanizsaBoundary
@nopranablem
@bjtoomey
@meditationstuff
@jhanatech
@stephen_zerfas
@chrislakin
@maxkshen
@teddypresent
@blissbrah
@algekalipso
@AlexKrusz
@visakanv
@AskYatharth
@carmenleelau
@Zihan_Wu218
@desertgodhead
@MatthewSacchet
@johnsonmxe
and im sure there are so many others that i am forgetting right now! thank you all!
im very excited and hopeful and optimistic for many more fun and loving explorations :)
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