commercialization and distribution

From twitter:

• (0a) I’m having a low-key, exploratory, commercialization networking call, with respect to my stuff, and it inspired me to try to make some bullet points with respect to context and key, counterintuitive constraints.
• (0b) Note! I ran out of time to edit this, so there’s super-compressed and maybe cramped and cryptic tweets jammed into this thread, but I figured better to get it out the door.
• (1) Key insight: The mind is more malleable than contemporary psychology and, arguably, even contemporary contemplative/meditation communities of practice currently believe. I like to say the mind is 99% software, 1% hardware.
• (2a) The space of this malleability is large and multidimensional, but it’s not arbitrary; it has directionality. That directionality, taken to its conclusion, in the “positive” direction, yields something like (a) wellbeing and (b) “creative, proactive, fit-to-context.”
• (3) Some features of “creative, proactive, fit-to-context” can be “outside view guessed,” and planned for, but also must be “individually found, from the inside.” This is sometimes a demanding, fraught, counterintuitive process.
• (4) It’s also a lengthy process, say on the order of 10,000 hours. My suspicion is that this cannot be shortened without very large advances in neurobiology. The speed limit is simply the speed limit of “learning,” involving protein synthesis, downtime, sleep, etc.
• (5) Good things happen during that 10,000 hours, but one can’t count on any particular good thing on any particular timeline or ever. That is, part of the process is NOT “having NO goals” but self-alignedly releasing the need for most any PARTICULAR (object-level) goal.
• (6) “No particular (object-level) goal” is fundamental to the process, because bodymind change is “path constrained.” It can only proceed by gaining “slack,” through finding increases in optionality, through “releasing particularities,” little by little.
• (7a) (It’s important to emphasize “non-arbitrariness,” as “no particular goal” might seem nihilist, on face. Actually, though, while not “particularly” constrained, the system is “abstractly constrained,” by one’s self-sovereign determination of “what’s good.” It’s complicated.)
• (8a) Somewhat more incidentally, not only are goals “non-particular” (and dynamic), or “fluid but not arbitrary,” but so is ultimately ALL perceptual/representational/behavioral ontology. The system (un-)commits to “no particular thing, anywhere.”
• (8b) Yet, simultaneously, the system is somehow (aconceptually? preconceptually?) *radically concrete and particular*.)
• (9a) Because of this sort of “global lack of particularity,” a value proposition might be: [see next tweet]
• (9b)
  This process, in some sense, will cost you everything (all things) and give you nothing (no things).
  But, to be a bit paradoxical or contradictory, you will get general wellbeing and wisdom. The ongoing tax on that is being fully open to everyday pain and even suffering.
• (9c) (Wellbeing, wisdom, pain, suffering, etc., how all that works, is outside the scope of this tweet thread.)
• (10) Regarding commercialization, the process is so hard and so personal, even though there are near-universal, highest-level features. It’s hard to generalize and streamline a 10,000-hour personal journey.
• (11) Of course, so far, I *have* tried to generalize and streamline (though not commercialize!) the process, with my writing, most recently as ongoing work on a 100,000-plus-word “meditation protocol document,” which people are putting to use.
• (12) So far, I’ve mostly punted on money/commercialization, with an open-access promise, because there’s a way in which meditative progress is, in my current understanding, complexly facilitated or retarded in a “full-stack, culture-complete” sort of way.
• (13) One aspect of “full-stack, culture-complete” are the “dynamics of exclusionary stratification”: [see next tweet]
• (14) I find people get really sensitive about commercialization, though not in the way you might think. (note: I’m not subtweeting anyone or referencing particular private conversations, here).
• (15) There are maybe sentiments of how else could modern distribution-at-scale work but through commercialization or stratified monetary gatekeeping, that I’m actually limiting net access & adoption by not (yet) somehow having a high-status, ambitious, exponential business model.
• (16) There are maybe sentiments that I’m playing too low-status, that I must insufficiently ambitious, and so on.
• (17) But, my ambition is, in fact, global and multigenerational. It’s just that, memetic fidelity, antifragility, and multigenerational adaptability (without memetic perversion? memetic corruption?) is hard.
• (18) And, we’re still learning, what the thing is that we, hopefully non-rigidly, don’t want corrupted in the first place.
  And/but, I/we could be wrong about risks and rewards, which I why I’m engaging with critique and feedback and suggestions, at an accelerating rate.
• (19) I think the (maybe) grumbling is a really good sign. It means people perceive value and want to participate in network effects with respect to that value.
• (20/20) Anyway, more and more, I’m looking to what’s next, with this work and more generally. I’m also interested in governance, DeFi, AI, and much, much more. So this is all swirling around, all together, in a good way.
• *
• (*) No particular fixed goal(s), no fixed ontologies (perception, representation, behavior), structural fluidity, might sound kind of chaotic and tangly, and it can be like that, at first, in a waxing and waning pattern.
• (*) Eventually, across thousands of hours, things become generally quiet, still, and settled, while remaining proactively, creatively sensitive and responsive, as the world turns and true, limit-case unknown unknowns present themselves.
• (*) It’s sort of the best of both worlds–on the one hand, relatively settled stability, perfectly suitable for pursuing adaptive, stable, very-long-term goals, contingent on the state and path of the world and everything, and, on the other hand, a capacity for continual growth and change, the pursuit of novelty and knowledge, adaptability to misfortune, and the passion and engagement and equanimity and appetite for all of it, whether quiet intimacy, the scope of the whole world, or both, or something else entirely.