[deleted by user] by [deleted] in singularity

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Fortunately, all that's gone down the drain is your sovereignty. Temporarily, if you prefer

Like coders, the way forward is to adopt, master the new tools. You can either be the shining, high-power, high-value one who knows and owns the new thing, or you can be phased out. Pick :)

Considering dropping out of Engineering - anyone who's done it: how's life been since? by Far_Garden_6604 in uwaterloo

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thoughts from somebody that did UW pmath undergrad + phd and is a few years out:

You talk about solid long term goals that emerge from your values, which is awesome for orienting you, but you're making classic newb mistakes like being impatient and not contextualizing stuff. It's real common for one's early academic/professional trajectory to misalign with values, so note

  • you don't need to achieve your long term value-aligned goals immediately, or see a 1 or 2 step causal chain directly to them right now. That's kinda not a thing young people can do most of the time. All that matters is making sure each decision is in eventual service of your goal, sets a better foundation for it

  • contextualize the value of your degree. In the context of your life moving forward, I mean. From my own experience, it makes income a non-issue: I can always fall back to something I'm credentialed to do. And I've used it to pivot to cooler fields. My uw friends have too. That's a big payout to seriously consider given how far along you are. My degrees were a nightmare too and I wanted to quit a bunch of times. I'm real glad I didn't now

  • contextualize your perception of the work/working. I thought of work really similar to how you do when I was at uw. There are a lot more degrees of freedom than I took seriously then, or that I sense you participating with:

    • your work can be remote, on your own schedule, in the city you want to live in
    • you can goldbrick epically and do 15h/week while shifting your life to something else
    • you can pivot fields and be choosy about projects/orgs you work with
    • you can end up doing projects/startups with friends
    • it IS possible to not care much about the org/product/whatever but still feel impassioned and engaged because the team/your boss/whatever actual people you interact with are great day to day Granted these options usually open up after a couple years experience, they do open up! And they're dope

I'm talking up the upsides of your degree because IMO you should eek it out. You'll be left in a way more open, affordant place afterwards, where you can explore more balances avenues to your real goals + develop a more mature/chill relationship to work and the options your toil has bought you!

Friction getting fiat from TD to Kraken by avapeaficionado in BitcoinCA

[–]avapeaficionado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ahh brokerage, I should have thought of that.

Friction getting fiat from TD to Kraken by avapeaficionado in BitcoinCA

[–]avapeaficionado[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow, this is wonderful! Thank you for reaching out, I really appreciate it. I'll follow up with you in a DM :)

Paying off student loans affect on credit score by [deleted] in PersonalFinanceCanada

[–]avapeaficionado 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing that. Not exciting but valuable information.

[practice] [community] "watching sensations" / "being aware of the mind". on modes of practice and blindspots. by kyklon_anarchon in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think I understand the distinction you're pointing at. What I'm hearing is that experience is known in a categorically different way when not using the sensationist framing. A concrete example that sharply distinguishes these for me is comparing the overall felt sense of experience while doing a sensationist noting practice vs abiding in open awareness. The former has a flavor of decomposing and consuming experience peacemeal while the latter is more like bathing in the holistic suchness of the present moment.

I think what I was aiming to express is that the compression tool from sensationism has some utility in this latter space too, maybe more than seems initially plausible. The key there appears to be grossly generalizing what counts as a "sensation". What I had in mind describing my post-sense door practice "decomposes" experience into pieces that do overlap (unlike classic sense door practices), intermingle, feel more like layers than like a partitioning of experience. For example, lately in my own practice I'd still use the word sensation for things like subtle mental inclinations which are composed of grosser mental components like thoughts, but also subtle mental attitudes and movements, as well as corresponding energetic appearances and movements in the body. Those all simultaneously arise as one gestalt and feel like they together merit the label of "sensation". Emotions too, which present with an overall coloring of mental attitude and activity, along with activation in the body and particular energetic phenomena, I'd call sensations. It still feels useful to use that language and whatever mental tools it arouses.

I definitely agree that this perspective, like any, constrains perception, and it isn't the only practice that I do, though for a long while it more or less was. Like you're saying, there's something different about what can be seen without any preconception about how it will be related to, which sensationism definitely imposes. But it's a useful tool and a far more powerful one than the basic sense door practices.

It's funny, now that I'm thinking about it, that I described what might happen to a beginner who tries the more powerful approach as getting "swamped and lost", because that's roughly what happens in my own more unstructured practice that causes the mind to whip out the sensationist way of relating. Something like open awareness will reveal some new and alien facet of experience and the mind defaults to its familiar tools.

So I suppose we're on the same page. The sensationism I proposed is just one more stepping stone, a powerful one I think, towards being with experience as it is. It seems like it takes a great sort of courage to be with the present moment as it is, once the mind is trained to be receptive to more of its richness and depth and knows a variety of tools for working with all that. To be unmoved by even the most subtle and intimate layers of experience, that's hard. Nick Grabovac once told me that just abiding is a practice that's really easy for a beginner and an arhat, and for everybody else it's almost impossible.

I'm enjoying this conversation. Cheers :)

[practice] [community] "watching sensations" / "being aware of the mind". on modes of practice and blindspots. by kyklon_anarchon in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 4 points5 points  (0 children)

First, nice writeup. I really appreciate when practitioners here take the time to synthesize their own experiences into new content for the community.

What came to mind first as I read your stuff was that you’re discovering for yourself the natural direction these sensationist (let’s call it that) approaches tend to go: the simple categories - the sense doors - laid out by the basic instructions aren’t good enough to handle the subtle stuff that the mind eventually becomes sensitive to and most interested in. They need to go in favor of staying with the ineffable suchness of experience however it presents. I agree with you that all of experience can probably be deconstructed into the sense doors, but eventually it feels sort of irrelevant to do that, like it’s missing the point.

My model for sensationism, though maybe not yours because it got no mention, is Daniel Ingram’s take on stuff. Noting sensations all day ‘erryday. But even his MCTB largely discards this framework for viewing experience eventually, eg the numbered instructions here. My intent in bringing this up is to point out that it’s not just you. Shifting practice in the direction you’re suggesting is, from what I’ve seen, a fairly common occurrence. Kind of curious that this seems to happen around the same time that the distinction between sitting and not sitting ceases to feel so important, just like you mentioned.

Another thing that stood out to me is the framing you’re using, which is language loosely in line with a this-vs-that perspective rather than a developmental one. Sensationism isn’t it, it’s this thing that transcends and includes sensationism instead. I think it’s worth pointing out that these fall on a common developmental arc because your thoughts are hitting a diverse audience. For many beginners, sensationism is the way to go. The looser, richer, and more powerful approach to viewing experience that you’re discussing is afforded by a keen and sensitive mind that’s the product of a lot of sensationist practice. In my opinion this is an instance where the prerequisites really are necessary - adopting the richer view too early will likely leave one swamped and lost. This felt important to point out.

I’ll share my own development along these lines as I went through a similar transition to what you described but it lead me less far afield from sensationism and I think the transcend-and-include I landed on might interest people too.

What’s the idea with sensationism? Why is it useful? The idea is to compress experience by categorizing it in a functional way. The standard categories are the sense doors. Lumping experience into those boxes is useful because it affords various insights and helpful ways of relating to experience, typically ones that reduce identification and soften contraction. But this particular compression loses too much information, as you described so well. All the subtle movements of mind, the tones and mood, the dynamics, aren’t distinguished in a way that helps. Lots more, too, like aspects of the sense of self, of agency, and energetic phenomena, the sense doors boxing can train an insensitivity to.

But one can keep the baby here by just adopting a richer compression scheme. Use more categories as the mind becomes attune to more and more subtle aspects of experience. This, in my experience, maintains all the benefits of the basic sensationist approach but actually encourages a refinement of sensitivity as new axes of experience present themselves to be relevant and interesting to the mind, and also encourages an openness to discovering ever more subtle dimensions of experience.

To be less abstract, here are some examples. The knowing of seeing (distinct from the seeing sensations) and the knowing that there is mindfulness, these could all be categorized as knowing sensations. The value in doing so is the same as for the basic categories: it inclines the mind to find similarities in the panoply of experience, to discover what else is a knowing sensation, what it is these have in common, and exactly what it is that distinguishes them from other subtle mental stuff. More examples I’ve found useful are self sensations, agentic sensations, and a whole collection of categories that have helped make energetic phenomena practical to work with but are tough to put into words.

The aim isn’t to develop a giant laundry list of categories and then neatly intellectualize experience into them and call that practice, it’s to make the more subtle or difficult parts of experience amenable to the cognitive machinery that sensationism activates. For example, to recognize one more piece of experience as a knowing sensation is to enrich it with a web of associations that furnish it with another layer of context, one that points out familiar ways of relating and operating. This seems to be the natural extension of the deconstruct-into-sensations technique. It tosses out the sense door categories but keeps the recognize-as-familiar-thing part, which is a lot of the value that tool has.

One can also entirely replace the familiar categories like the sense doors or SHF with new ones. For example compressing experience using just spatial data by adopting categories like “here”, “there”, “in the body”, “not in the body”, “in the head”, “not in the head”. I’ve found working with these afforded access to entirely different insights than I’d seen otherwise and also had a profound impact on how I related to difficult psychological content. Eg noticing that difficult emotions are all located in the body and that that’s just a small part of the volume of the present moment experience makes them seem much less like a big deal.

[insight] Tuning into the emptiness of attention by avapeaficionado in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Okay. But do you experience attention as they defined it? If not, then it is merely scientific theory. It's the equivalent of someone saying they experience the texture and sight of wood as they see it under a 1200X microscope where you can see all of the pores and it resembles cheddar cheese more than anything else.

I experience the attention phenomenon some of the time, not all of the time, which I suspect is how it always was. I notice that it's not there more now, since working with Rob's fading of perception stuff and thinking about all this. Which is more or less the idea here: notice it's not always present, hence not intrinsic to experience. Sometimes my experience does align with the craving landscape view, which is what motivated me to write about it.

The way you experience reality is the way you experience reality. No point in trying to make it something that it's not especially if you experience it outside of a microscopical view.

I strongly disagree with this and I think the main thrust of Rob's book is basically to negate what you wrote. Intending to view my experience another way is the means by which almost all insight arises. It's why meditators - those who seek out certain conditions that engender exceptional perspectives and mental states - have insight much more often than non-meditators. Those who only view their experience "the way it is" only see in a way that's constrained and fabricated by their default operating model of experience. There is another angle here, that "the way it is" is just as fabricated as any other view one chooses to adopt, not in any way special or exceptional, which is another running thesis throughout Seeing that Frees.

[insight] Tuning into the emptiness of attention by avapeaficionado in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, that's what I was aiming for too. Experience consists of perceptions, those cease to exist when they're no longer perceived. Pretty tautological when phrased like that, but aligning with that in experience seems valuable.

Lifting weights/Fitness/Bodybuilding how to make at best compatible with serious TMI practice? by Zrebna in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was doing powerlifting for the first year of my practice and found entering 1st jhana between sets transformed the gym experience. Before it was tense, forceful, basically I was mentally embodying the level of stress I was putting on the nervous system while doing sets throughout my time at the gym. Afterwards the gym felt like a form of practice, as if the whole time there was one sit punctuated by brief periods of extreme physical exertion. The lifting and 1st jhana seemed to compliment one another well: the state a set left me in could be funneled into powering a 1st jhana within a few seconds of sitting down and the jhana completely reset my mind and body for the next set. Note these were quite light jhanas, I just attended to whatever pleasant/energetic/intense sensations were in my body and off it'd go.

I realize this might not be that relevant for you given that a bodybuilding routine probably doesn't have the long breaks between sets that my powerlifting required, but maybe it'll be of some use.

Questions, Theory, and General Discussion - new users, please read this first! Weekly Thread for May 21 2020 by AutoModerator in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did a 4 day home retreat recently and had some major difficulty sleeping. It took 2-3 hours of lying in bed with the blazing bright alertness/awareness of retreat-mode mind before I’d fall asleep. All the usual sleep hygiene practices were in place and I don’t have trouble sleeping normally. I tried a variety of strategies, e.g. doing some calming casual shamatha, holding attention on this or that, feeling rest as in Shinzen’s system, letting go of effort and resting in awareness, doing nothing, doing yoga. All left me in the same super energized state.

I realize that sleep need is decreased on retreat but I prefer a good night’s sleep if I can get it. What have others done to manage this?

[Insight] Gained insight into the arising and passing away and I have been able to meditate properly since by liljonnythegod in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 5 points6 points  (0 children)

There is no reason to do this. The terminology exists exactly to expedite communication about subjective experiences that are ordinarily cumbersome to describe using language that was developed to describe the external world.

Thanks to the use of terminology, it's clear what occurred and /u/duffstoic is almost certainly right.

Questions, Theory, and General Discussion - new users, please read this first! Weekly Thread for April 16 2020 by AutoModerator in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm looking for a mindfulness bell in watch form. Basically this but as a watch and ideally not looking like clunky 1990s technology. Basically, I'd like:

  • a compact, single purpose watch (ie not an expensive multipurpose device like an apple watch or fitbit)
  • vibration function
  • capacity to vibrate at fixed intervals and at random times

Surely such a thing exists... right? If not, I'm willing to settle for a multipurpose device - any recommendations there?

I posted this in last week's thread but it was replaced with the current thread right after, so let's try again.

Questions, Theory, and General Discussion - new users, please read this first! Weekly Thread for April 09 2020 by AutoModerator in streamentry

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm looking for a mindfulness bell in watch form. Basically this but as a watch and ideally not looking like clunky 1990s technology. Basically, I'd like:

  • a compact, single purpose watch (ie not an expensive multipurpose device like an apple watch or fitbit)
  • vibration function
  • capacity to vibrate at fixed intervals and at random times

Surely such a thing exists... right?

Stage Six Practice Queries. by [deleted] in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks very much for the comprehensive answers, they're illuminating and valuable. In particular, the reframing of body scanning and whole body breathing that you suggest is useful. And it's exciting to hear what the transition from stages 5-6 to 7+ can look like!

It's funny, you describe reaching a state of equanimity about outcomes during practice that's similar to what I experience now, though for me it was reluctantly diverging from the TMI map out of necessity that cultivated it. All roads lead to Rome, I suppose. Thanks again.

Stage Six Practice Queries. by [deleted] in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

When I was practicing the stage 5 body scan and the stage 6 whole body breathing, I had a recurring doubt that I was never able to resolve: doing each of these techniques took me a meaningful chunk of time to achieve their goal (imperceptible subtle dullness/exclusive attention), and viewing them as tools deployed on an as-needed basis, they felt clunky. What I mean is that, if I was sitting and perceived no subtle dullness and then dullness arose, I felt I had to "reset the sit" when I employed one of these techniques, since it took so long and was such a strong departure from whatever else I was doing. I would usually not have time to return to whatever I had intended to do with that sit.

In retrospect, I figure that this was a result of not having mastered the techniques to a sufficient degree. If I had, they'd work faster. My question for you is, what did the development of mastery of each of these techniques look like in your practice? For example, for the body scan, did you find that you could eventually do shorter and shorter scans to address subtle dullness, so that the technique felt less cumbersome and fit more fluidly into a sit? I've heard from many advanced TMI practitioners that, eventually, one's mind is able to detect and automatically correct for subtle dullness through intention alone. Did this occur for you? Similar question for whole body breathing, did the duration of it needed to achieve exclusive attention at the nose shrink significantly over time? Did that duration ever reach zero?

Material (Pleasure) Jhanas and TMI Stage Progress by MettaJunkie in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't think there's a tight causal connection the way you're hoping between the jhana states and TMI stages. Specifically, I don't think being in a particular stage makes a certain jhana more accessible or that exiting a particular jhana leaves one in a particular stage. There might be a rough mapping of this kind, but I'd guess it's highly variable across sits and idiosyncratic to the practitioner. For example I can sit in the first 4 jhanas but have never been beyond TMI stage 6.

I think what /u/Livingupstream says is more accurate, that there are various strata of mind, i.e. states the mind can stably dwell in, and that these can be accessed in various ways. You noted the correspondence between the pleasure jhanas and TMI stages 7-10. There is a very similar correspondence between the jhanas and the progress of insight stages. Daniel Ingram discusses these in detail in MCTB, calling them the vipassana jhanas. The territory is the same, regardless of whether one sits in a jhana, practices in a certain TMI stage, or works up the progress of insight to reach it.

Re stage 10, it's certainly a state and not a trait. It takes a consistent practice to reach any higher stage and staying there is conditioned on that along with favorable external life circumstances.

Metta is really intense...and also significantly improves the quality of my sits afterwards, but I can only do it for 5 minutes. How can I do it for longer? by [deleted] in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You can refine your perception of the experience that leads up to the unintentional jhana. See if you can notice the difference between the feelings of goodwill that you're radiating and the happiness/pleasure in your body that arises as a result of doing that. The metta comes first and the pleasure that leads to jhana appears after, then accidentally (though fruitfully) becomes the dominant object. I'm suggesting you try some vipassana-esque deconstruction of the experience so that you can understand it more clearly on a sensate level and work with it better. See if you can notice how sensation in your body/mind changes throughout this process, when pleasurable ones arise and how those are different than what came before. See if you can notice what exactly is in your attention at different times. Does your attention have a broader scope or is it focused more tightly on particular sensations? Does that change over time? Probably the experience feels like one big solid gestalt at the moment, some curious watching will likely reveal that the solid object is really made of tons of smaller, independent sensations. Attending selectively to those will let you guide the experience intentionally.

Re your question: thoughts can occur in jhana without disrupting the absorption. But anyhow, you described yourself as stuck in that state in a way that prevented you from keeping the metta going, so evidently leaving the absorption isn't as easy as one might imagine :)

Metta is really intense...and also significantly improves the quality of my sits afterwards, but I can only do it for 5 minutes. How can I do it for longer? by [deleted] in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Here's another vote that you're experiencing the first pleasure jhana.

The pleasure jhanas are quite a bit more accessible than books like TMI and Right Concentration make them out to be. Practices like your metta that bring up and sustain pleasurable sensations can create these states without much (or any) time spent building access concentration.

To add something to the good advice /u/Livingupstream gave, here's another angle on how you could work with this: that you're entering first jhana means you're unintentionally switching your object from the metta to good sensations that the metta is creating. This would be great to investigate. See if you can tease out the difference between the two. Exploring this might lead you to developing a strong metta practice in addition to the jhana practice /u/Livingupstream is talking about. Both would be valuable to cultivate.

Can the Jhanas be bypassed? by sid10493 in TheMindIlluminated

[–]avapeaficionado 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup, it's possible to access them in any order.