March 5th, 2023
- inspired by Awakening from the Meaning Crisis ep 13
- I like 4 ennobling/enabling provocations for the noble truths
- I find Vervaeke's frame that you should feel threatened by dukkha to be clearly lacking the NNTD insight, which is interesting since he obviously knows way more dharma stuff than me
- he also talks in terms of the eightfold path as a way to "cultivate a counteractive dynamical system" which, I mean, is going to tend people towards more tangles afaict, since that's what counteractive strategies tend to do
- some initial thoughts on how I would articulate the noble truths (cribbing a bunch from Vervaeke)
- 1. any intelligence / adaptive system that gets separated from wholeness will tend to get tangled in self-destructive knots, which entrap us
- ~ the universe will outwit you if you try to outwit it
- (how does this relate to unsatisfactoriness? ah yeah, you can never statically win while holding yourself separate from the whole)
- 2. origin: dukkha is caused by tanha
- adaptive entropy is caused by fixating on conclusions/outcomes
- distrust is caused by partiality
- (is this actually synonymous, or is it a different thing with a similar structure?)
- 3. ending: the downward spiral implies an upward spiral if you can figure out how to turn around
- and it's always right here and you're never fundamentally stuck
- 4. path: How we get there 😛
- sorta-more-generally, full-fractal buy-in
- or in other words, the obstacle is the way
- re the Eightfold Path, I'm not assuming there have to be exactly 8 of these. it's a nice symmetry, but so is 9, whatever
- I like the idea of "right" as in "upward-spirally"
- Vervaeke says that "right" in the sense of "right livelihood, right understanding" etc is not right like moral righteousness but he is more like right-handed and that makes me think of upward and downward spirals and maybe the thing is being pointed out is being on the spiraling facing the right way as opposed to the left way
- ugh I just looked up eightfold path on wikipedia and it's a bunch of very specific bullshit including the need to become a mendicant
- fuck that shit. won't scale at all
- > So when I say, “Bring attention to this,” it means experiencing what is actually going on when you are doing these things—experience what is going on in you when you are talking; experience what is going on when you are moving (that’s “right action”), experience what is going on when you are working.
- mmm this has a lot of resonance with my emphasis on first-person research & trust as truth in first-person
- > And it’s an exploration. I heartily encourage each of you to explore—what does right effort mean for me? Because the synonym for effort in Buddhism is enthusiasm. And when you feel enthusiastic about something, you pour your energy into it, and you’re pouring your energy into it in a good way. So it doesn’t have any of this Victorian nose-to-the-grindstone, stiff-upper-lip, grin-and-bear-it quality. And so there’s a very interesting exploration of what prevents me from being able to engage this activity with enthusiasm. That’s a very, very interesting inquiry.
- I fucking love this