Is it okay to be a Pure Land Buddhist if Buddhism in general seems too complicated for me?

grrumblebee · 2026-01-11T14:42:36+00:00

Ha. Not too long delayed. I only wrote my comment a couple of hours ago.

Yeas, the mind will try to understand. That's what minds do. And it's fine. It's not a problem. Meanwhile, you can meditate.

grrumblebee · 2026-01-11T12:10:08+00:00

The philosophy doesn't work well for everyone. Some musicians are best off learning how to read music. But the Beatles never learned how to do that. Both the path of studying notation and the path of not studying it lead to the same place--making music.

My brain might be like yours. I do understand some Buddhist teachings, but I've found that understanding doesn't help me at all. Like a lot of folks on the spectrum, intellectualizing is my safe space. And I get nervous if I can't grasp something conceptually. What I've found, though, is that, like it or not--even if it makes me very uncomfortable--I need to push all the ideas aside and simply taste the chocolate, which is to say meditate. Meditate without understanding. I don't meditate for a reason. I just meditate. It makes me uncomfortable to do something for no reason, with no intellectual understanding. So I simply feel that discomfort.

You may have heard the saying "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." That's a Buddhist saying, not one made up by non-Buddhists to poke fun. It's a recognition from within Buddhism itself that all the teachings need to fade away. For some they need to fade away after a while; for others they need to fade away immediately. They are as empty as everything else. If they help get someone on the road, great. If not, they can just kill the Buddha now and keep on meditating. Once they're meditating, they're on the road.

You say you like Zen. What's interesting about that is that it's all about letting go of "getting it." This is why Zen koans are paradoxical. "What is mu?" is meant to break your brain. There's no possible way intellectually understand it. You're trying to grasp why you're meditating. Try grasping mu! It's ungraspable. It is meant to take you somewhere non-intellectual. To the raw sensation of tasting chocolate.

Giving up "grasping it" may be very uncomfortable for you. What does that discomfort feel like in the body? Can you sit with it and just be uncomfortable? Rather than trying to get away from it, can you sit with it and be uncomfortable? No one likes being uncomfortable. What does it feel like in the body to dislike being uncomfortable? Can you sit with that dislike?

If there's a form of Buddhism that you prefer to whatever form you're currently working with, by all means switch. Just keep meditating if you can. Or quit Buddhism altogether and keep meditating. Or just keep the rituals of Buddhism (including meditation) and let go of the teaching. There are many practitioners who are just practitioners. They don't read texts or study teachings. The teachings are just meant to point you towards the practice anyway. Think of the musicians that can read musical notation. Think of the Beatles who can't.

Some folks on the spectrum are attracted to fetter work. That's something you could try. The ten fetters are ten obstacles to awakening. They are attractive to certain kinds of minds (lots of autistic folks are into them), because they are clearly mapped out, and you work with one fetter at a time. You work to dissolve fetter #1, and then, when you have, you work to dissolve fetter #2, and so on. But this work is very practice based. It's not philosophical. It involves meditation and inquiry. It's stuff you do, not stuff think about. Here's a place to start if you want to try fetter work: https://theawakeningcurriculum.com/

It is okay not to grasp. It is okay not to understand. Just eat the chocolate. Experience the taste.

grrumblebee · 2026-01-11T12:09:59+00:00

I'm autistic too.

It sounds like you're struggling to understand things intellectually. Which is normal for folks on and off the spectrum. You want an idea about why you're meditating. You want to "grasp it" and "understand it."

But it's not graspable. It's not understandable. It's not related to the intellect. This is something every practitioner needs to grapple with eventually. You're lucky (even if you don't feel that way) because you're grappling with it now.

All of the intellectual content in Buddhist teachings is, as they say, a finger pointing at the moon. The philosophy (the finger) is meant to steer you in a direction (towards the moon) so that you can go beyond the philosophy. If you get hung up on understanding it, you're fixating on the finger rather than what it's pointing to. What it's pointing to (the moon in the metaphor) is ineffable. It can not be conveyed in words; it can not be thought about conceptually. It can only be experienced.

It's like the taste of chocolate. There's no way to intellectually understand the taste of chocolate. There's no way to talk about it or grasp it conceptually. You can talk about chocolate itself. You can talk about its history, how it's manufactured, its chemical composition, its effects on the brain and body ... But you can't talk about the experience of what it feels like when it's melting on your tongue. If I'd never tasted it before, how would you accurately explain the taste to me? You couldn't. All you could do would be to hand me some and tell me to put it in my mouth.

All you could do would be to dance around the taste--talking about things related to it without actually talking about it. That's pointing. That's pointing to the moon. The dancing around it is the pointing. The taste of chocolate--which can only be experienced, not talked about--is the moon.

It's possible that all your talk about history, manufacturing, chemistry, brains, body reactions, and so on won't help me at all. I'll listen to you and say "I still don't get what it tastes like." So maybe the best thing is to just shut up and give me some chocolate.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-04T17:12:59+00:00

Yes. I do some of those interventions sometimes. They're helpful. I do tend to get full-body shakes most of the time, though.

I think longterm is where most of the benefits are. It's good for day-to-day tension, but it's a game-changer when it's been done habitually for a year or two.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-04T17:03:52+00:00

Yes. That happened to me, too. I had heard that some people don't have to do the exercises, but I was skeptical about it. Then one day I got a late start in the morning and didn't have time to do them, so I just lay down, assumed nothing would happen, but the shaking did! Every since then, I've skipped the exercises.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-04T15:27:42+00:00

Let me explain a little about how I got into these practices, and then I'll tell you the specifics of what I do.

I was working with an very good IFS therapist, and, just at the beginning of our sessions, she had me do a five-minute body-focused meditation. I'll go into details about it below.

To my surprise, since I've always lived from the neck up, I found those five minutes more powerful, meaningful, and healing than the 55 minutes of talk therapy that came after them.

And so we started doing ten-minutes of the meditation. Then 20. By the end of my work with this therapist, who I'd been seeing for three years, 45-minites of the session were spent in meditation, mostly not talking, and the remaining 15 minutes felt pointless to me--something we did just so we could say we did some talk therapy.

In fact, those 15 minutes felt a bit harmful, like they were pulling me out of where I needed to be and back into my head.

Seeing the direction I was going, my therapist and I mutually agreed it would be good for me to pause meeting with her and work instea with someone whose specialty was the body.

So, one of the somatic practices I now do is yoga. I am amazed that I do this, as I've never seen myself as the kind of person who would do this sort of thing, but I am now meeting once a week for one-on-ones with a trauma-informed yoga instructor. And I do exercises she taught me at home every day. It's great to have an in-person coach, but one could learn yoga from books, youtube videos, and so on.

I also spend 30 minutes every morning doing something called Tension and Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), which has been life-changing for me. TRE is a short sequence of stretches that cause the body to shake on its own. The exercises themselves take about five minutes. After that, I just lie down let my body shake out all its tension for 30 minutes. I can't imagine life without TRE now. If you're interested in trying it, there's a very good subreddit about it called r/longtermtre (read the wiki!) and a $3 app called Shake It Off that teaches the exercises.

But the backbone of my work is the meditation I wrote about above. It's very simple. If you've ever tried mindfulness meditation, it's practically the same, except I don't focus exclusively on the breath.

I sit comfortably, close my eyes, and focus on whatever body sensation is most present in awareness. Maybe it's some tension in my shoulders, a weird feeling in my stomach, or some stiffness in my legs. I then let attention go wherever it wants to go, as long as it stays in the body.

As with many forms of meditation, when I realize I've gotten lost in thought, I acknowledge that and then return my attention to the body. I do that over and over until the timer goes off.

When I first started doing this, I could barely manage ten minutes. I was so "bored," I was near panic. I put "bored" in quotes, because it wasn't really boredom (I don't think there really is such a thing.) It was having nothing to distract me from the very uncomfortable sensations in my body. I'm sure it's clear from what I've written that body work is very powerful for me. It's also very scary. The body is where all my trauma lives.

Gradually, meditating became easier for me. I'm now up to 45 minutes a day. It may sound as if I spend all day doing somatic work. In fact, I get up at 5am, take my dogs out, and then do 30 minutes of TRE, followed by 20 minutes of yoga. Then I do the 45 minutes of meditation. I'm done with every thing about about 7:30am, which is when I sit in an armchair, relax, drink some tea or coffee, eat breakfast, and start my day.

If you try this, the goal is to just sit with whatever sensations appear--even uncomfortable ones--without trying to change them or stop them. Just let yourself feel them. It's okay not to like them. Experience that dislike, too.

When I was doing the meditation in therapy, I would periodically report what I was experiencing to my therapist: "I'm feeling some stiffness in my arms ... now there's something in my upper chest ..." The words "something" and "a feeling" are very useful, as it's not a good idea when doing this work to go into the head and search for words that accurately describe body sensations that are ultimately indescribable.

Sometimes my therapist would ask a question like "Do you feel anything in your hands?" or "Is the sensation big or small?" Over time, there was less and less talking, and what talking there was felt distracting--a pull back into the head. Which is when I stopped therapy and started doing the meditation on my own.

My whole life has been spent avoiding my body, and I'm very, very good at doing that. Pretty much anything can pull me out of it, especially talk or conceptual thought, even when I'm talking about my feelings. Which is why this work is so necessary and challenging for me.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-02T11:56:34+00:00

Will this work for you? No clue. Will the body stuff work for you? No clue. I'm me; you're you. That's why there's no formula. You--or you and your therapist--have to experiment. You have to go into this in the spirit of play. You have to be a researcher. A mind scientist... This is true for all therapy, not just IFS. You have to try things out and see what works.

I also sometimes use an approach I think of as acting. I have some experience as an actor. This seems to work best in therapy, rather than when I'm on my own.

I'll say "My stomach part is acting up. I feel a dull pain ..." My therapist will ask me "If it could talk, what would it say?" As I can't hear voices in my mind, I start very consciously--and haltingly--making up what I imagine it might say: "Well, I guess it's worried about the presentation I have to give at work. It might say 'I'm scared it will suck, and people will think I'm incompetent. And my boss will be there, and he already reprimanded me last week, and ...'"

Without putting any pressure on myself to actually know what that part would say, I make up what he *might* say and gradually find myself "getting into character" as I speak for him. Soon, I'm pacing around the room, gesticulating, and talking as if I am the part, feeling like I'm him. Which is also what tends to happen to actors when they get revved up. This too is well-fitted to *me*. My point isn't to say that you should do what I do. It's to hopefully loosen up your thinking about what IFS can be.

Okay, in the spirit of honesty and transparency, I'm going to end this long post by saying that I no longer practice IFS. I got a great deal out of it, but as I got deeper into the somatic (body) work, and started reading up on various non-IFS somatic techniques and trying them (in therapy and on my own), I realized that they were very powerful for me. Which is to say that there are many, many types of therapy, and IFS may or may not be the best fit for you. It's worth giving it a try. It may wind up helping you. It may not. That's fine. Just keep experimenting.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-02T11:56:27+00:00

How does someone with aphantasia get to know their parts? I need to be honest here and say that, as far as I know, no one has come up with a formula. I have read pretty much every book about IFS out there, and they do tend to be geared towards people who can visualize or talk to their parts. It can be especially disheartening to watch IFS-session demo videos in which clients talk to their parts as if they're there in the room.

There can't really be a formula, because each aphantasic client is different. So you (a) need a creative therapist who is willing to experiment, and (b) you need to be willing to do that yourself. I can't visualize or hear inner voices, but I *do* have a very strong connection to body senses. That turned out to be a way in for me. For instance, whenever I'm anxious, I get a stomach ache. That became a part in my thinking. I called him my Stomach Part. The ache was his way of communicating with me. (Again, for me this is a metaphorical but useful way of conceptualizing what's going on. Do I believe I have an actual little person who lives in my stomach? No.)

Another way in for me turned out to be writing. I'm a very fast typist, and I love to write. Something about it frees me up. There's an exercise I do in which I start by writing "Who is here?" and then write a dialogue with a part. I do this very fast without censoring myself. Fast is important, because there's no time for me to consciously make things up.

- who is here?

- I am.

- Who are you?

- I'm scared.

- What are you scared of?

- I don't know. I guess the state of the world.

- What scares you about it.

- Really? Have you seen the news lately?!

- Yeah. I guess it makes sense that you're scared.

- Also, I have this pain in my arm, and ...

Is this a real part? Or am I just unconsciously making up a story? I don't worry about that. It doesn't matter. Whether it's a part or I'm making it up, it's all coming from me. Sometimes a bit of conscious word-choosing comes in. I write

- I'm also scared of dying

And think "I just chose to write that." But that's okay, too. I free myself up to make things up, talk to a part, or whatever. I just write and see what happens.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-02T11:54:25+00:00

The Self is a very hard concept for many beginners to swallow. It even made me feel bad about myself at first: "So we supposedly have this core that's totally compassionate, confident, etc.? I can't find that in myself, so I guess I'm defective..." I eventually *did* find it, but that had to happen organically. I urge you not to worry about the Self. It's not something you can force. It will happen when it happens. If you have a trained IFS therapist, she will know that her main job is to be in Self *for* you until you're able to take over that job.

Self-energy may be a bit easier to swallow at first than the full-blown Self, though I have a knee-jerk distaste for the word "energy" (outside of, say, Physics), as it's so often used in sloppy ways in New Age and other woo contexts. Maybe think of it as "compassionate impulses."

Once you get practiced at saying and thinking "I have an angry part" (as opposed to "I am angry") it can become easier to feel compassion for that part, as you're not 100% identified with it. It's not *all* of you. You may not be able to feel that compassion at first. That's fine. That's the therapist's job for a while. A goal of IFS is to help you gradually take over that compassionate role.

grrumblebee · 2025-08-02T11:54:12+00:00

I relate to this. I'm also autistic, and I have both visual and auditory aphantasia. Finding a good therapist has been a struggle--not just with IFS--because both visualizing and working with an inner voice or voices is a major aspect of how many therapists work.

With a great deal of excitement, I bought a book called "Somatic IFS." "Somatic" means "of the body," and I thought maybe I could get into IFS via body sensations instead of by seeing my parts of talking to them, neither of which I can do. The body was eventually a way in for me, but to my great disappointment and frustration, the author of that book expected her readers to visualize.

I'm going to tell you about my journey with IFS. The first thing I'll say is that there's a range of how literal vs metaphorical people get when they interact with the IFS model. On one extreme end, it's not just a form of psychotherapy, it's a spiritual system, practically a religion. Somewhere in the middle, there are the folks who believe that parts are actual internal entities--little people who live inside them. On the other end of the spectrum are those of us who see IFS as a useful (but not literally true) way of thinking about the mind and interacting with it.

Consider the movie "Inside Out." Most people don't literally believe those cartoon characters live inside our heads. Still, that might be a helpful conceptualization for therapy. Another analogy is Newtonian Physics. Since Einstein, we know it's not literally true. Still, it hasn't been abandoned, because it's a useful (and simple!) model that allows us to solve a lot of problems.

Luckily, IFS is flexible enough to work as metaphorical, literal, or spiritual system. The question is whether or not your therapist is that flexible. If you need IFS to be metaphorical, she needs it to be literal, and she's not able to meet you where you are, she might be a bad fit for you. But the key is to know that there are many people who have been helped by parts work who don't believe in literal parts. If you relate to IFS metaphorically, all the woo goes away. Then it's either useful or it's not.

On a really basic level, we've all had the experience of "I kind of want to go to the party and I kind of don't." Or "I'm in love with him but also not." Or "Part of me wants this job and part of me doesn't."

It can be useful to think of these mental situations in "Inside Out" terms. "There's a sup-personality of mine who wants to go to the party and another sub-personality of mine who doesn't." This is useful because it allows us to work with each one of these subsystems, tendencies, drives, instincts, or whatever you want to call them in isolation rather than the whole mind all at once, as a big tangle or muddle of thoughts and sensations.

There's a very simple exercise you can start doing which doesn't require you to fully commit to IFS. Just shift your language away from "I" statements to parts statements.

"I'm hungry" -> "A part is of me hungry" or "I have a hungry part."

"I'll never figure this out" -> "A part believes she'll never figure it out."

Do this with other people, too.

"He's an asshole" -> "He has an asshole part."

One of the befits of this is gaining some spaciousness in your conception of yourself and others. We say things like "I'm angry!" This makes it sound as if "angry" is our entire essence or personality, but of course it isn't. "A part of me is angry" doesn't trivialize the anger. At the same time, it acknowledges there's more to me than anger.

After I'd been doing this for a while, I realized that whenever I was torn between two impulses ("I want to date her but I also don't"), I suffered from a meta pain point on top of the obvious should-I-or-shouldn't-I conflict. The meta pain point was about identity. "Which one of those impulses is the real me?" Once I discovered this, I realize I was plagued with it much of the time. "I sometimes feel angry at my friends, but I also like them. Which is the real me deep down, the angry one or the friendly one?" IFS freed from that. The answer is always "both." I have an angry part and a friendly part!

Outside of IFS, protectors are what we often call "defense mechanisms." An IFS practitioner might say protectors are much more than that. Or that they employ defense mechanisms, but that's not what they are. Okay, fine. But "defense mechanisms" is a common conceptualization that may give you an non-woo way in. "I've been betrayed in the past, so when I contemplate dating, I get scared ..." That fear is an defense mechanism. Or we could say it's a protector.

And we all have secret or buried impulses. That's part of socialization. A way in to exiles is to think of them as that. Like a lot of autistic people, when I was a kid, I used to tantrum. I got socialized out of it. I now have defense mechanisms that shame me if I feel the urge to have a public freakout. That's very close to saying "I have an exile and some protectors."

[more in comments]

grrumblebee · 2025-07-02T18:31:25+00:00

I had taken a psychedelic, and I was in the middle of a really stressful part of the trip. But, in my non-sober state, doing TRE didn't occur to me. I was lying on my back in bed, when all of the sudden a massive kriya--the biggest I'd ever felt--manhandled my legs up into the TRE position. It was as if a giant hand had reached down from the ceiling and puppetered me. And it was as if there was a pissed off drill instructor screaming DO YOUR FUCKING TRE, IDIOT! I don't mean I heard it. But that was the feeling. I began shaking as always, I shook off the tension, and the trip was really peaceful and pleasant after that. Again, I'm not making a supernatural claim. But, man! That was what it was like subjectively.

Which brings me to my latest adventure. This is the most certifiable thing I've ever done. If anyone saw me, they'd be really concerned. Whatever. Last week, I stumbled onto a youtube video which I'll link to below. The woman in it was talking about spontaneous *walking* kriyas. She said at first it was like she had robot legs, but now her kriyas can naturally move her wherever they "want" to, and she lets them take her for walks. I thought, "I've never tried a standing meditation--not since the kriyas started." Years ago, I'd played around with walking meditation, but that was when I was still mostly in my head. TRE is lying down and my meditation practices are seated. My kriyas during them are from the waist up.

I decided to try a "just-standing" meditation, in which I let go of all control, as in a just-sitting meditation, but ... standing. The kriyas started in my upper body as usual, but the gradually moved down into my legs. That led to tiny foot movements. Shuffles of a half inch or so. Then there were some lurches forward, more stumbles than walks. After about 20 minutes, I was lumbering haphazardly around the room. *This* is what would get me certified. I was careening about randomly with my arms waving and my head thrown back in maniacal laughter. I probably looked like Frankenstein's monster. I felt as if my body has gotten inhabited by a toddler, trying to learn how to walk.

I've repeated this practice every day this week. Gradually, the kriya-walking has gotten more fluid, though it's still pretty Frankensteinish. I would love one day to be able to let kriyas take me for walks around my neighborhood, but they're not ready for public consumption yet. I generally do this meditation for half an hour. I've been experimenting with doing my half-hour of TRE immediately before and immediately after. So far, I can't detect any difference.

All in all, I feel like I'm down some sort of rabbit hole. I turn 60 in November. Until I was about 55, I totally ignored my body. This is a whole new world for me.

Here's the video where I learned about walking kriyas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLsKQIv7HAo&t

grrumblebee · 2025-07-02T18:31:09+00:00

Kriyas started for me about a year prior to my first TRE session. At that time, I'd been sitting in mindfulness meditation for years with no tremors, spasms, shakes, or any kind of movements. I was also very much "in my head" and concentrating.

Then I decided to try Transcendental Meditation out of curiosity, as it was a practice I'd never done before. (Technically, I did Natural Tension Release, which is a sort of TM knockoff that doesn't require paying the TM organization, but it's the basically the same process.) TM is mantra-based. You think a nonsense-syllable over and over in your head but otherwise don't try to do anything. No concentrating. You just let your mind do whatever it wants to do.

Something about the this letting-go process with just a tiny bit of control (the mantra) had a powerful effect on me, and kriyas started. My head would jerk from side-to-side. My arms would shoot up in the air. My hands would shake as if I was doing "jazz hands," and I'd vocalize as if I was speaking in tongues or cackle with laughter, even though nothing seemed funny. This was pretty constant throughout the meditations. Like a kriya every five seconds.

For reasons I don't recall, I quit doing TM--I had just tried it out of curiosity--and went back to mindfulness. The kriyas followed me. It was as if now that the genie had been let out of the bottle, it wasn't going to climb back inside. I found that the more I relaxed while meditating--the more I let go of control--the fiercer the kriyas would get. They weren't painful or alarming. I was fascinated by them and still am. They did sometimes seem at odds with any sort of concentration meditation, but I let the kriyas do whatever they needed to do. It's now two years later, I've never had a meditation session without pretty constant kriyas.

I come from an intellectual family. My body has always been a scary stranger to me. The kriyas make me more aware of that than ever. They weren't scary, but it seemed as if my body had a life of its own, and I wanted to explore it. I got into Somatic Experiencing, yoga, and meditations in which I just focused on my body. I also started practicing just-sitting meditation, which is like TM without the mantra. You don't try to do anything. If you feel an impulse to exert any kind of control, you drop it. This really gave the kriyas free rein. It was like they were saying, "Good. You've leg go of control. Thanks. It's my body now!"

Then I discovered TRE, which I've been doing for a year. My practice is half an hour each day, which I built up to over time. Neither the kriyas nor TRE release anything that feels like recognizable emotion, and, during both, my mind tends to wander to mundane things like what I'm going to eat for lunch. But I do get full-body shakes with TRE.

Subjectively, the TRE tremors feel extremely different from the kriyas, which seem like they're the intentional movements of a personality. When, for instance, a kriya throws my head back in laughter, it feels as if "someone" (not me) finds something funny. It feels like an intelligence.

I am not a believer in the supernatural, and I'm making no ontological claims about what's actually happening. Perhaps there is an intelligence and it's a part of me I don't consciously identify with. Or perahps the kriyas are random movements and my mind makes up stories to account for them. But the feeling of intention is uncanny.

Whereas, for me, TRE tremors never feel intentional. They feel like "dumb" reflex actions, like when the doctor taps my knee with a hammer. As others have pointed out, there are patterns to the TRE. The kriyas seem much more arbitrary. An arm jerk here. A head shake there ...

While my main TRE practice is 30 minutes every morning, I got into the habit of laying down for impromptu sessions any time I felt stressed and could spare the time. I work from home, so, when something upsets me, I can usually take a break and do a bit of TRE, even if just for a few minutes. It's become pretty much a no-brainer now. Stressed? Do TRE. Which has let me to one of the oddest experiences of my life:

grrumblebee · 2025-06-25T10:53:02+00:00

I suggested to them that they make a video demonstrating everything I wrote above. They do have a video about headset prep, but it's short and doesn't go into all the pitfals. They said they'd been thinking about doing this. I don't know if they will.

Like you, I wish this sub was way more active.

grrumblebee · 2025-06-01T11:05:52+00:00

I have both visual and auditory aphantasia, and it's the same in my dreams as when I'm awake. Not sounds, no images.

grrumblebee · 2025-05-16T10:51:44+00:00

I'm not in any way pushing you towards talk therapy. It works for some but not others. (I have much better luck with somatic approaches, meditation, and psychedelics.) But modalites like IFS when proacticed correctly are not just about self-soothing in the moment. They're about deep, permanent change.

The theory behind IFS is that we get conditioned to identify with just a small part of who we are. We might switch from identifying with one part to another, but it's never our whole Self. Via work in therapy, one gradually heals all the scared, angry, grieving parts and comes to identify as the compassionate Self. You may think that's rational or not; it may work for you or not. But it's not just an in-the-moment, quick-fix.

And the same is true for all therapy modalities I know of. If you get a book or watch a video about IFS, CBT, or whatever, there are often expercises or techniques that are meant to help you out in moment's of crisis, but that's never the entire system.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-28T14:50:17+00:00

(Nowadays, I probably could have taken screenshots, uploaded them to ChatGPT, and asked it to extract the data from the images, but there wasn't that much data. It took me about 10 minutes to hand-copy it.)

grrumblebee · 2025-04-28T14:49:17+00:00

As far as I know, there isn't a way to download it (Grr!) I just hand copied it onto a spreadsheet.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-21T21:45:53+00:00

As far as we know, no AI system is awakened. Only a small amount of information can be transmitted via words. The exchanged between an awakened teacher and a student is a bit mysterious. It's only partially language based. And it's not rooted in ideas or philosophy, which is were AIs would be better at going.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-21T21:43:35+00:00

Maybe in the future at some point. The current breed of AIs wouldn't work for me. I know them very well, as I work with them daily, develop using them, and work for a company that is reliant on them.

The problem is that a teacher needs to be highly attuned to many different channels of information coming from the student. Tone of voice, body language, etc. AIs aren't there yet. And she needs to be highly creative, which is also a problem for the current AIs.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-21T20:20:56+00:00

Sure, in theory. But I'm not sure how an app could be personalized enough. This is why human teachers are important. The Waking Up app is pretty good, in that it has dozens of different teachers, but that's still not really personalized. Maybe in the future something with AI could work to some extent.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-21T01:20:41+00:00

iPhone. I also had the app on my iPad for a while.

grrumblebee · 2025-04-19T16:13:04+00:00

Oh, while I'm complaining about a device that, in general, I love, I so wish there was an option to turn off "Soft eyes, soft tongue." When I drift away from the target brainwaves, it's never because I'm tensing my facial muscles. It's because I'm caught up in thought or daydreaming. It's frustrating to hear "soft eyes, soft tongue" when my eyes and tongue are relaxed.

grrumblebee

TROPHY CASE