depth-first vs breadth-first, the three marks, and some other stuff

Ok! This is still not as diplomatic as I want it to be. I have so much respect for other methods, and I am utterly indebted to them and to their practitioners. Now, taking that into account, here’s a slightly cranky thing. And, it’s in my usual uncareful style. This could be so much more careful about language, fielding likely objections, and charitably steel-manning alternative positions. But here we go.
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Ok, I rescind my claim that the three marks are merely pedagogical. [This is a claim I’ve made on private fora.] I have recently acquired what I believe are the “true apparent referents” of at least two of them. I think the language used to describe them is fine (no-self, impermanence).

Hasty toy model: If one imagines the mind as a landscape that can be gathered and ungathered into different conceptual configurations, some better than others, some “closer to the metal” than others, some deeper than others. Then the “true” three marks are quite deep. (Deeper means that, all things being equal, one will likely pass through more, rather than less, conceptual stages before reaching the deeper ones.) And, once you “gather” properly, you potentially “see through” that gathering, transcend it, on the way to pure awareness, or whatever.

I’ve taken, on net, a “breadth-first” transformation path, sort of shaving off large swaths of territory before descending a micrometer to shave off more. My path has been very “psychological.”

I now believe what Ingram did is pin-point, depth-first searches, over and over again. Each pin-point contact with a “tiny patch” of one of the three marks produced a cessation or fruition-like experiences. So, he sort of hardcore “reified” the three marks and went hunting.

People who go depth-first seem more likely to describe extreme “integration hardship” post punctate enlightenment-ish experiences. And they also do a syncretic collection of practices besides meditation, before and after they’ve felt like they’ve “finished.”

People who go breadth-first seem to not get very far or to lead gentle ok lives or to get really far after like thirty-plus years.

I could imagine some combination of breadth-first and depth-first being ideal. (These are abstractions, of course.) While my overall approach has been more breadth-first, I did a bunch of depth-first-ish things closer to the beginning. This mirrors the route of extreme dry insight to stack up supramundane insights, followed by much more concentration-style practices.

I think depth-first is going to tend to be problematic because of “improper-” or “over-reification,” smashing headfirst into inessential or dangerous parts of the state space as well as potentially terrible integration experiences.

And breadth-first is going to tend to problematic because of scattered “getting nowhere” or, worse, getting potentially lost in bad places for a very, very long time.

I like my approach because it introduces wayfinding concepts that are more general and more abstract than the three marks (or other dogmatic approaches), allowing for idiosyncratic and personalized wayfinding without sacrificing “sharpness.” Relatively speaking.

(Having just now encountered what I believe to be the “true three marks referents,” do I rescind my claim of being done, for some flavor of done? [I don not claim to be “done-done.”] Or do I wish I had been more trusting of the scriptures or, say, Ingram’s material? Not really. It would have been such a narrow journey, harrowing in different ways than my own. I’m not left cobbling to together many, many syncretic practices and frameworks to supplement “hardcore noting with provisional ontological commitments,” in order to continue making progress. Re, “done,” I’m hitting the three marks because there’s seemingly just not much left to do. It’s been by incidental process of elimination. And, afaict, my life wouldn’t have been better if I’d punched through sooner. Emptiness was most excellent, but these aren’t changing things too much. Maybe they are usually tangled together with a bunch of other stuff that makes contact with them much more intense/profound/freeing/positive. Not sure.)

While I don’t think they’re “merely pedagogical” anymore, they don’t seem different in kind to the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many mezo and almost-as-deep apparent referents that I’ve already come across.

Whether it’s psychological, supramundane, therapy, meditation, anything–it’s the same playing field. It’s all mind. Ken Wilber had a thing where one needs to get through X% of their shadow stuff in order to do the enlightenment thing, and, so, even though some people claim enlightenment is orthogonal to psychology, he disagreed. This take of his seems completely accurate in my experience. And, so, say, getting through 100% of one’s shadow, as it were, plus other technical debt, is equivalent to full enlightenment. But, completely running out of “three marks-ness” to process, being all done with the three marks, is just another waypoint on the path, and seemingly a somewhat flexible one as how much of that processing one does earlier or later. (I’m *not* saying “fully processing the three marks” is how, say, Ingram thinks of it. It’s a bit of a straw.)

So, again, all the cycles, the fruitions, the entering through through doors corresponding to particular marks, this seems to be an artifact of a particular wayfinding strategy, and one of the better ones, along several dimensions. And/but, as far as I can tell, fruitions, cycling, etc., aren’t necessary. Maybe a few are are sort of “incidentally necessary,” but in some sense “emergent” and not reflective of something perfectly essential to progress. This is sort getting into “vague hairsplitting” so I’ll stop here.

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https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1

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Edit/update: for intuitive evocativeness, maybe could call depth-first “supramundane-first” and breadth-first “continuous integration” or something.

badness-out-there / evil typology sketch

  • […]
  • wanna say something like:
    • (1) It’s possible to “villainize” a person/leader/community/experience, to project something bad/disgusting/something on it.
    • (1a) And that could be “manufactured” in some way, like the person doing the villainizing was looking for something to blame.
      • (There can also be a thing where a person feels “pressure” or is “rewarded” to be traumatized, by a community or parts of a community, to “perform” being traumatized and so on. They might not realize they’re participating in that. It still feels bad.)
      • (There can also be a thing where someone wouldn’t have been traumatized if everyone around the hadn’t made such a big deal out of it. Complicated community/person interactions, secondary survivors, secondary survivors without primary survivors, so many things.)
    • (1b) It could also be that something happened that one was just hugely not prepared for, whether someone “should”/“could” have done informed consent or not. And the mind will potentially make that thing BAD. (Sometimes someone should have warned you. Sometimes they couldn’t have, but in a ideal world they would have wanted to. Sometimes no one could have predicted, etc. This is sometimes just “temporarily destabilizing” and other times (“actually”) “traumatic” (1c).
    • (1c) Something could be “actually”/”objectively” traumatic (see below.)
    • (1d) It could also be the case that something extra-and-above was going on, something coercive, “evil,” etc. (see below).
  • Regarding (1b), I do think that, in some sense, everything is “grist for the mill,” “everything is metabolizable experience,” and so on. Sometimes a person/brain/mind gets blindsided. And it is what one makes of it. This is true for (1c) and (1d) below, too.
  • And/but, re (1c) I do think trauma is objective. It’s when the mind loses degrees of freedom because something is too painful, too unhandleable. This is “natural,” but it can be cumulative and costly. Because constraint begets constraint. And there is opportunity cost in clearing it up, which can be extremely hard. This can be from being hugely surprised or disappointed. And it can also be from abuse, neglect, etc. The latter sort of bleeds into (1d).
  • And then there’s “objective evil/badness” (1d). In this case someone, or a community downstream of someone, or “something in someone” is actively and creatively working against a person, trying to thwart them, tie them in knots [lose capabilities and degrees of freedom and problem-solving ability and creativity, act against oneself], cause them to have fewer good things now and in the future. This can be from myopic zero-sum competition, desperation, fear, “believing that something bad is good [e.g. destructive competition or nonconsenting sexual domination]. Usually the “evildoer” will have had something terrible happen to them in childhood, overtly or subtly, or they had an experience or series of experiences that they terribly misinterpreted, again possibly because a caregiver had had something terrible happen to them… (I believe the “tying in knots” thing is what Popperians or people who like David Deutch’s work would call coercion.) [Often evil will use language of “truth” and “goodness” and will deny, deflect, shame, blame, argue, “logic,” and stonewall. Sometimes that language will be sincerely felt/meant/believe (“on the surface”; or at least endorsed) and sometimes it will be insincere, or a combination.]
    • There are subsets of this, too.
      • (a) Sometimes the “evil” is reactionary, one-off or three-off or along relatively narrow dimensions. This could be an unsupportive significant other or one who’s crabs-in-a-bucket along a particular dimension. It’d be hard to always call this evil [of course both people could be doing complex, challenging, beautiful, subtle, overt shitty things], maybe it’s “being a culturally unprepared human,” but it bleeds into evil sometimes. [People can be mixed amazing and shitty, mixed empowering and evil. Gotta be strong or hopefully avoid when you can, try to fix them only in extremely narrow circumstances. Can be insidiously sucked in. Can become evil yourself.][I talk in my protocol doc about the “generativity of evil” and the potential subtleness of evil’s methods. This could be thousands of pages, of course.]
      • (b) And then there’s another kind of evil, one that’s more systematic, more planful, more plotting. This can be in the small or in the large. Narcissistic + schizoid + …
  • In any case, one the one hand, with respect to SOME of this, “a good meditation/trip/something is one you did.” (I think Shinzen Young says this for meditation, and there’s something very true, there.) At the same time, particular experiences or communities can be incredibly damaging to someone, in a way that can do harm for decades or a lifetime.
  • And, on the OTHER hand, I think it’s sometimes a terrible abdication of responsibility to put everything on the individual (“it’s *your* responsibility to…process this, extract goodness from this, to ask for what you need, to reject the bad, to figure out how the “bad” here is good…”). And this SOMETIMES firmly bleeds into “actual evil,” at least from a relative standpoint.

 

It’s possible to • work through blindsidedness, • empower individuality and independence, • heal trauma, • apologize and make amends for being a terrible person, • learn how to coexist, to synergize, to co-create in family or community or institution or project; • to fight to limit evil with the goal of eliciting reparations and transformation (or it’s a big enough world and can just walk away and do big, beautiful things, or quiet, intimate things (that might spread inexorably on their own, or not), elsewhere)

*

(And then there’s the thing where being terribly traumatized can be a massive learning opportunity and massively empowering if one has the contingency/tools/resources/freedom/privilege to work through it. Presumably sometimes the opportunity costs and (sometimes) long-term issues, e.g. physical issues that maybe don’t 100% heal(??), can still outweigh the benefits even when there is otherwise an abundance of resources. I’m not sure who would retrospectively or prospectively choose this route, but it’s a thing.)

(And then there’s nonarbitrary, still personal-yet-impersonal, maybe, transcendence beyond even the above…, your own meaning, your own everything, on your own terms, and perhaps beyond…)

Someone else’s take on a bunch of stuff in this space:

https://knowingless.com/2018/09/21/trauma-narrative/

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https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1

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meditation is not strength-training

I think the repetition/strength-training/functional-reserve model of meditation is pretty misleading. The mind isn’t a muscle. It’s better to think of it as a digital state machine that can self-modify its state transition function, even though this borrows from the dubious computing metaphor. The mind is not analog and not mushy. It is shockingly digital and lossless. Seeming muscle-ness is an abstraction on more fine-grain dynamics. To succeed, one must eventually engage with those dynamics as they are (of course, but models matter). “Strength training” causes people to accumulate a great deal of momentum and cruft that they then have to reverse and undo. I’ve heard stories of people who wish they’d had a better sense of “right effort,” earlier on.* I personally think it’s better to think in terms of puzzle-solving, test-check, and wayfinding right from the start.

An analogy I use is that the mind is made of a tangle of perfectly flexible, perfectly fluid steel cables that are also perfectly incompressible and inelastic. Maybe like cooked spaghetti or heavy rope, but “indestructible” or “unforgiving.” And you can reweave the cables but nothing can be created or destroyed. (This isn’t entirely true because experience tangles in new cable(s) and correct reweavings cause cables to losslessly become one [“elegance collapse”].] No escape but ultimately clear directionality in the space of play.

I think Donald Knuth has an essay somewhere about programming. And he makes an analogy that, when people first start learning programming, they think it’s like drawing, where, if you push harder with the pencil you get a darker line. I *think* the more recent idea of “programming by coincidence” is downstream of this essay. I don’t agree with everything in the essay, if I remember it correctly, but some of the metaphorical/analogical distinctions are great.

Yes, experimenting, yes playing, yes *learning*. But not guessing and hoping, or doubling-down, over and over again!

To back off a little bit, there is something to the “train the microscope then use the microscope.” There is “gathering” of content and method, over and over again. Behavior is, if not digital, then coherent–walking and talking and eating. Some behaviors are digital-ish, like speaking or writing, though they are waves in a preconceptual/postconceptual ocean. And/but/then/anyway it’s like the insights, the microscope(s), get perpetually rewoven through the entire system, while the system retains something of their character. This isn’t quite right, but I think it’s better than the strength-training analogy.

To back off a little bit more, I can imagine the strength-training analogy can be empowering and is a better model than “hapless, hopeless prisoner/captive of one’s own uncontrollable mind”!

But mind as collaborative puzzle-solving coconspirator (albeit with potentially miles and miles of terrible, torturous, self-reflexive, strange-loop confusion) might be better.

*Of the people in the wild who have succeeded or seem to be making inexorable progress, it does seem that “overshooting and correcting” does work. And the more likely failure mode is “not reaching escape velocity.” But, I think explicit wayfinding might be best thing. Not enough theory/data, yet. And, I don’t know how much selection bias is in my (contemporary) “historical” data.

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https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1

reprogramming vs hacking; software vs firmware vs hardware metaphor of enlightenment (345 words)

The below could be clarified and de-equivocated and de-contradicted tons and tons, but I thought it might be pretty useful for some people. “Enlightenment” isn’t “weird” or “unnatural” or “extreme” or a “hack.” It’s just currently an unusual thing for a person to do.

Fwiw, I don’t think of things in terms of overdriving brain region X, or replacing “what cognition” with “where cognition,” or “attenuating disinhibition circuit Z“… 
This is vague and metaphorical, but my position is that enlightenment is just ultimately pretty low-key (though highly stable) changes in software, not firmware (nor hardware). The body/brain in the relevant senses are just doing the same things they’ve always done. Same operating principles. Also, the firmware/hardware doesn’t need to be hacked or rooted in any way to get the new software to run.
All meditation is doing is tweaking the input (sensory) stream, fractionally improving the “quality” or “learning value” or “Bayesian surprise factor” (whatever, vague, toy model, here) of the incoming data, and that’s enough, a cascading bootstrap, to “naturally” reprogram the entire system, all things being equal. “Learning that meditation is a thing” is the beginning of that cascading bootstrap, seamlessly: There’s not really different data types. In one sense we’re just causal systems bopping around, and stuff is happening to us, and we do some processing and do stuff in response. 
There’s fractal activation energy humps, nonmonotonicity, but the system stably “likes” the new thing better, according to unchanging “bare metal”/genetic/hardwired values. No hacks, no going against the evolutionary grain, nothing like that. The system is lawfully, globally albeit nonmonotonically, “trying” to go in the direction it’s always been trying to go. (“Better predictions,” “better homeostasis,” something.)
Enlightenment is a “natural” outcome of correctly engaging a system that is “naturally flexible” all the way to the “bottom.” The bodymind is just doing what it’s “supposed to do” all the way through.
(Please pardon my overloading “natural,” as well as the telos and anthropomorphism.)
The neuroscience is still going to be super interesting. It’s just going to need another 50 to 150 years, imo. 

general interaction preference matrix (yet another)

This is yet another “interaction ontology.”

The below is a toy model, though I think bits and pieces hew pretty close to real things. The below can be further broken down into subcontexts like:

  • gross/subtle
  • verbal/nonverbal
  • endorsed/disendorsed
  • adult-self/child-self
  • sexual/nonsexual

And, each of A and B will have their entire own, complete version of all of the below. The one below is just A’s:

general interaction preference matrix

There will be healthy and unhealthy versions of all of these! And possibilities and and abilities and preferences and affordances can change over time!

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https://github.com/meditationstuff/protocol_1

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(Text archive of image contents:)

general interaction preference matrix of person A with respect to person B
A likes/dislikes (✓/x)
B ignores A (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x
B informs A (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x
B influences A (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x
A ignores B (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x
A informs B (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x
A influences B (in ways W for things T in contexts C) ✓/x

 

“against” stream-entry and multiple enlightenment axes

edit: a better title might be: ‘”against” stream-entry but not super-against multiple enlightenment axes but kind of but in any case definitely want to characterize all the aspects of enlightenment and good stuff can get along the way’

[chat transcripts:]

“against” stream entry:

some poking at “done” and “done-done”

[UPDATE: I have lightly revised this thing to make it more clear.]

[Follow-up to: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/arhat-no-self-nondual-done-ish-something-update/ ]

[Yay, “fighting!”]

[Previously Romeo and I were messaging about the pluses and minuses of making potentially premature [and potentially imprecise] attainment claims. The below happened near the end and seemed like a nice thing to make publish, with his permission. It’s way too terse but I think value can probably be extracted from it. Hopefully the beginning of many conversations with many people.]

[Romeo can be found here and other places: neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com]

Ingram’s “done” on at least one axis, circa 2012:

https://www.dharmaoverground.org/discussion/-/message_boards/view_message/2759757#_19_message_2718243

[I, Mark, think this axis is not super interesting and maybe even a detour. I don’t have centerless or agencylessness at this time, though I’ve gone through many, many flavors of determinism. My current thing is very atman dissolved into brahman but there’s still an atman. My identity remains in the small self, though “everything is mind” in some very, very excellent nondual-y sense. (I still believe in an “external” reality or “noumena” reality.)]

And notably, Ingram’s model above leaves out anything like trauma processing, skhandas(sp?), conditioning, etc. And, even though Ingram says he thinks morality is supremely important, I maintain it still feels bolted on in a really unsatisfying way.

My conception of done-done is something like “no technical debt”:

https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/technical-debt-meditation-and-minds/

This includes “no unprocessed trauma or negative conditioning,” “perfect behavior up to ignorance/bayesian surprise, etc.” etc.

And this may have centerlessness and agencylessness as attributes, but that’ll happen when it happens, if it does. I’m using global wayfinding that really doesn’t care about those details as such.

Oh, I really, really, really like Greg Goode’s done-done at the end of the below, though he leaves out trauma-/conditioning-type stuff, too, IIRC. Oy!

After Awareness: The End of the Path by Greg Goode

So, anyway, off the top of my head, my current situation [not “done-done”] is something like:

1. Still a few remaining fixed points in the system (but generally hugely fluid [think like honey not water]).
2. Still a decent amount of conceptualizing not seen through or dichotomy-unified (but fuck-ton “emptiness through and through and through.”
3. Radically fluid/deconceptualized “path/plan+goal” plus determinism plus identification with process versus “me desiring and trying to get particular things.” This is what led to my last blog post. So, I’m still acting on the basis of trying to get particular things, but those things are prereflectively seen as empty (though again I still believe in “noumena-reality” and that whole process is unfixed/deconstrained/fluid though not arbitrary and also empty)
4. Something radically different with “suffering.” (This has been stress-tested by one extreme life event, so far.)
5. I will add more things here if I think of them.

So, my conception of done-done is something like “you’ve radically run out of things to think about or meditate about (in a globally embodied, action-oriented, whole-mind, whole-body, whole-life, whole-reality sort of way)” until reality surprises you in a way that you couldn’t have possibly forseen, no matter how proactively and strategically meta you’ve thought and acted.” And this has baked into it something like experiential and moral perfection [again up to ignorance. such a person could still contingently do terrible things but it starts getting very, very unlikely]. Very high bar, etc. But not an insane thing to go after at all.

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Romeo
oh I’m also very curious what your take on tanha is at this point

esp since it differs from links of orig.
Mark
I think it’s possible to burn out or wear out a particular agonizing/suffering quality of thirst/craving/desire. Desire or motivation remains. At least as far as I could tell, this was pretty separable from everything else. Maybe there are deeper layers.

Long after I had that experience, I still suffered terribly.

For me, loss of identification with goal was the big suffering killer. Still desire, still goal, but identification moved to fluid though nonarbitrary process.

Fluid goal.

fwiw 🤷‍♂️
Romeo
dissolution of sanna around goal maybe

Romeo
thanks!
Mark
hmmm, not sure re sanna. doesn’t resonate but i don’t always get what a term is pointing at first pass, or nth pass, ofc

Romeo
I think in terms of funcitonal fixed-ness

functional*
Mark
yeah, ok.

Romeo
fixed points generate snarls around them as the network contorts to maintain something that isn’t true
Mark
yup, highly resonates.

i think something like once functional fixedness is basically gone you’re done [for some meaning of done]. like, things have a function at any given time, but if that function is fluid, then you’re in much better shape than someone who has fixed points.

and over X years you can move the entire system into something way better for your karma and life situation.

Romeo
I equate that with 3rd 😜
Mark
👍
done as in the done I recently blogged about. still base of the mountain.

yeah–well i say i’m at the base of the mountain in the blog post.

ingram is hella not done by my done-done defintions [edit for blog: I haven’t interacted with Ingram personally, and it’s maybe dickish to make terse public claims about him or anyone. Not sure. I do this a lot on my blog, and there’s maybe a much better thing, here, as I dig myself deeper.]

*defintion

*definition

Romeo
another frame is boundaries/boundary making has been pierced with 3 marks
Mark
done-done is all technical debt dispensed at a given time.

i’m quite far along that axis as well.

Romeo
which, come to think of it once it wraps back on itself might be done
Mark
i think the three marks are pedagogic and not ontologically interesting, fwiw

they heuristically map more than good models heuristically map

Romeo
with sufficient ‘purification of the tools themselves’ all of the dharma becomes ontologically uninteresting?
Mark
yes but it’s relative

“boundaries/boundary making” this does resonate fwiw. all conceptual dichotomies collapsed. i have a lot to do, here.

Romeo
I’ve been thinking the dichotomy collapse might be the referent of ‘fundamental ignorance’ in the discourses
Mark
hmm, not sure. could be. doesn’t resonate; haven’t seen it used enough.

could see that referring to a bunch of other referents

Romeo
ie the tendency of the mind to skip over the vast majority of experience in favor of end points, extrema, fixed points, point estimates, etc.
Mark
i think that’s something different. could be the intended referent, though.

Romeo
and then building reality out of those instead
Mark
most people’s cognition/perception is chaotic and fragmented. discontinuities of attention versus continuous traversal. i’m not sure that lines up tidily with various(?)technical terms that translate to ignorance. not sure. i’m no scholar i’m just handwaving, here.

Romeo
👍

Mark
hmm i feel like this conversation post tanha, inclusive, should get posted somewhere. do you think that would be good? on my blog?? your name on or off? would run it by you first either way. lemme know your thoughts, no rush

Romeo
yup all good, whichever feels good. no preference
Mark
very cool. ok i’ll send you the draft just to be sure.