July 29th, 2021
- #2tweet QT this and comment on ways in which the hemispheres gif is good & bad
- this video is very instructional but could mislead someone into thinking that most cult dynamics arise out of people intentionally doing this sort of thing, as opposed to a lot of very similar things arising from people sincerely trying to do what seems best in the world whether that's a worldly purpose or a spiritual one
- relatedly: the paradox of trying to transcend thinking that rejects other thinking
- a friend commented this in a group chat and I don't per se agree with it but it points at something really important about frame override & blindspot feedback is hard (but possible!)
- > if a relationship feels 100% safe maybe you’re the threat
- something like "priors are way higher on you doing something that causes the other person to be unable to express concerns about you than that there don't exist any points of tension"
- the meanings here ofc hinge tremendously on what "safe" means in both a conceptual and an embodied sense
- conceptual ~= what does "safe" imply?
- embodied ~= how do you know you're safe?
- from Mark Lippmann (as paraphrased by Qiaochu, I think)
- (search "feels wrong" on meditationbook.page for elaborations)
- > And part of the way you get to this thing involves like, practices, like there are times when you do like awareness kind of meditation, there are times when you do other weirder practices I don't know about, there was like martial arts practices and stuff like that. But you're not doing practices literally all the time. You're like doing practices, and also just living your life. And I think there's something good about that distinction.
- Upstart had a thing like this in March 2019
- I forget what the articulation of it was exactly but it was something like "the thing you're doing as your animal creature is just doing what feels good to you and the people around you" which points at a kind of effortless just-live-your-life quality (and reminds me now of both "let the soft animal of your body love what it loves" and of deQuincy's description of preconquest cultures)
- and then there's simultaneously an anthropological perspective from which you might notice patterns in what seems to be working and not working, and seek to untangle those, but even as you're doing that, it still doesn't involve trying