(General content note: A lot of my thinking has really changed since the old days of this blog. There’s some weird, mean, and polemic stuff in there.)

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>> […] needing to be practice focused rather than conceptualized or philosophized about […] <<

yeah i need to be more nuanced about this. like, mental models are extremely important, if only in order to differentiate between “correct” and “incorrect” meditation (mega scare-quotes), not to mention all other consequential, discriminatory behavior. sometimes hair-splitting makes the critical difference. but there’s this parable about building a raft to cross a river then carrying that raft on your back for the rest of your life. don’t want to carry the raft after you’ve already used it; don’t want to gold-plate the raft before you use it. i think of transformative practice as building, using, and discarding an unending series of rafts… an unending series of boot-strapped mental models and concurrent execution of behaviors within the context of those models (which bootstraps the next model)…

deliberate transformative practice iterates models faster; sitting around and thinking without action (reality testing, physiological and neurological transformation) does not. that’s why I read and think but then force myself to craft a worksheet and fucking execute; lather, rinse, repeat…

it gets really deep, though… my mental models have explicit representation of behavior governed by explicit models (rule-governed behavior) versus non-representational feedback loops (environmentally-contingent behavior). that is, my maps include maps of map making, map following, off-map navigation… that is, my maps are composed of dynamic, reflexive, participatory, metacognitive symbolic-nonsymbolic, representational-nonrepresentational bridged, self-dissolving, self-reconstituting strange-loops :-D, and meditation helps you bootstrap, refine, build, bleed, surrender into, surrender as maps like that…

cf. perhaps, perhaps, in no particular order: