meditation ideas I resist

Generally I think the dharma is deeply true and that meditation done right is healthy and potentially very beneficial. But I struggle sometimes with things that meditators either say, or that I imagine them saying. This is a place to record things that turn me off of (some concept of) the dharma.

The goal is to see the dharma more clearly, to help me get unstuck, and to document a process that might make sense for others like me. I'm sometimes scared that if I 'let go' of resistance to some idea, then I'll forget what it was about the framing that originally turned me off, and then be less able to help others who struggle with the same thing. So I hope this exercise will simultaneously help me let go of resistance, while preserving the understanding that the resistance is maybe unskillfully clinging to.

(Jul 19 2024)

belief in an optimizing force:

• the body and mind do have the capacity to heal themselves to some extent
• and to the extent that love is an innate capacity of consciousness and an attractor state within it, there are forces pulling us towards connection and peace and joy
• this doesn't mean the body has perfect wisdom. it doesn't mean that your craving for food A and aversion to food B is always correct or healthy to follow. the body probably is running a reasonable learning algorithm based on the subtle felt experience after eating those foods. and that learning algorithm might tend to be a better guide to things than the available sources of external health advice. but that learning algorithm will be necessarily imperfect, because
  • it is operating on incomplete information about the underlying states of things (its map can never be the territory). we have pretty good interoception but there are negative health effects we can't feel - arterial plaque, DNA damage,
  • it will necessarily bias towards short-term outcomes because that's the only plausible learning signal. if something takes a long time to hurt you (e.g., poisoning from heavy metal buildup) it becomes impossible to disambiguate it as the cause from all the other things that happened during that time period
  • there are so many possible confounding factors and not enough data to properly disentangle them. maybe you decided tomato soup was gross because your grandma always made it with some ingredient that made you sick, and you misgeneralized that tomato soup in general is the problem.
  • there is an experiential feedback loop where the learning algorithm is training on its own output: if you expect to have a bad experience with something, that will tend to be self-fulfilling, which reinforces the negative expectation. so we can get trapped in aversion loops (big ones like depression or even small ones like thinking you don't like a certain food because it grossed you out once as a kid) in which what gets learned is not a reasonable representation of the uncolored experience.
• and so ultimately it will be possible to do better than your learning algorithm in some cases - science will be able to measure things more precisely, disentangle precise causes and mechanisms from much more data, remove confounding with randomized controlled trials, measure long-term effects,
• this certainly doesn't mean that whatever happens in the world is part of a greater plan where we don't need to interfere
  • if we do interfere, then almost by definition that becomes part of the plan. so this view doesn't constrain our action at all
  • love / consciousness can be an optimizing force but it is not the only optimizing force. there are others that work against it --- reproductive fitness doesn't care about conscious valence, and ultimately neither does entropy. some world states have a lot more suffering than other world states. to the extent we have agency it's a moral duty to work with our whole effort (only right effort, but all of it) to push towards the good (less-suffering) states.
• 'self-trust' is certainly required insofar as we always only ever have our own experience; doubting it is futile since there is nothing else we can possibly trust. but it's important to be discerning as to what it's actually telling us. our body's intuitions about foods are just sensations in themselves, not necessarily the final say on the food's healthiness. following them is not a bad heuristic but we should be prepared for intuition to be wrong sometimes, and be willing to override it when we have good system-2 reasons to suspect that it is.

(Nov 05 2023)

"everything is perfect just as it is"

• there is just so obviously a sense in which this is not anywhere close to true.
• it's a very unhelpful thing to say on its own. the person hearing it is missing the understanding of in what sense you mean it, and inevitably they will misinterpret and draw the boundary in the wrong place to include some of the obviously-false sense, which they will naturally resist.

"thinking is bad", or the idea that eventually in meditation the thoughts quiet and this is desirable

• see also, planning
• it's important to me to be able to think. that's how humanity wins. this gets at the tension discussed under mindfulness below.
• I think Nick Cammarata and others have posted that we just see how many of our decisions are made without explicit mental talk anyway, and that most mental talk doesn't go anywhere useful, so we're better off saving it for situations where it's called for.

"existence is suffering"

• this is such a negative view. I actually do largely agree with this in a relatively strong way (negative utilitarianism), but I think most people see their lives as mostly good, and of course I would also like to see my life as mostly good, so I don't want to hold onto the idea that it's suffering.

"peace" or "stillness" as a final goal

• classic teachers wanted the peace of the monastary, the pasture, even the grave. if you think that suffering is the only sort of thing that can happen, it makes sense to want nothing to happen.
• I want the peace of the whirlwind. I want a great storm of important things happening, creating great benefit, and to be able to stand at the center, seeing and guiding it all with perfect clarity and calmness.
• This is a sort of inner peace, but it definitely doesn't require worldly peace. And it's almost more like peace in the sense of being un-conflicted than peace in the sense of stillness, although there is a certain kind of stillness involved.

"planning is bad", better to live in the present

• e.g.
• there is a real, deep point here that some planning is pointless rumination, driven by worry but not actually helpful.
• and in general it's just true that you need to move at the speed of system 1. you're called to be in the world at every moment, most of which can't be explicitly planned.
• I think the middle way is that "plans are useless, but planning is essential" (see no plan survives contact with the enemy).
• I still find that I often need to plan what to say, eg how to open a conversation, even though I 'know' or at least wish that it would be possible to be more spontaneous. The need for planning is partly driven by a fear of doing/saying the wrong thing, maybe. But the way that gets expressed is that unless I plan, I literally don't know what to say. I feel unable to just 'say whatever comes to mind' because nothing actually comes to mind; I'm just stuck. I think/hope that at some point I will get past this, and maybe have more insight into planning as a result?

"no preferences"

mindfulness / broad attention

• generally it's seen to be better to be 'mindful' or aware of as much as possible, not to let attention 'collapse' onto a thought or a sensation.
• but don't we have limited cognitive resources? if I want to spend all my processing power on thing X, shouldn't I want thing X to fill as much as possible of my experience?
• I think the idea is that a lot of our processing resources are 'dedicated'. No matter how narrow we are, the visual cortex will continue to process visual input, our bodies will continue to process sense data, we will continue to have emotional reactions to things, etc. If we exclude these things from consciousness, it doesn't redirect their processing power to other things, it just means we lose awareness of how this processing power is being spent and what conclusions it's reaching.
• But there's clearly at least some tension here. It's hard for beginning meditators (including me) to just 'watch thoughts' in their full glory, because watching the thoughts usually prevents them from forming, or at least from articulating to their full extent. I see fragments of thoughts; my thinking gets stupider. It feels like the "watching" is taking up some of the resources that would otherwise be allocated to the thinking.
• Now, it may be possible to be fully mindful while thinking at high capacity (and that sounds like a skill worth developing). If so I think it would be because it's not the "watching" that uses resources so much as "trying to watch". In an equilibrium where the watching happens automatically, it doesn't take any resources to maintain.

"emotions are felt in the body"

• this one I basically believe now, but I didn't used to. Clearly some people felt emotions in the body, but for me they were purely mental.
• this one has the potential to feel like an attack - if someone says it, but I don't notice emotions in my body, then it means there's something wrong with me

NameRedacted said a thing that could be on this list: "the experience you are having is exactly the experience you need" (or "is exactly right" or something to that effect).

But adds the caveat: "there are lots of ways in which this is not true, but the way in which it is true: there's the juice."

And that's a useful (if also not fully satisfying) way to think about lots of these meditation ideas. There are many senses in which they're not true. But they're not intended as things to be blindly accepted. They are invitations for discernment, puzzles: in what way is this true?