fwiw my thing isn't like a productivity strategy it's just what my body has always done when i let it do what it wants, if it didn't i wouldn't try to make it do that
the way to soften the sense of self is to see it's a knot in your head, likely literal muscle tension. when you see that it's hard to unsee it, and then the question of "what is this for" goes away, things just happen, there's no this this is for. you're freed from the question
my answer to the thiel question is that I think bugs and trees and stuff may in a sense be more alive than we are, bc felt-aliveness is a function of valence and sensory strength, and those may anti-correlate with organism complexity bc they aren’t nearly as regularized
I feel ethically better eating steak from an a+ farm than eating vegetables. The steak funded the existence of a cow at a good farm vs funded some veges, and I’d rather be a cow than a carrot
there are still flavors of experience but they’re mostly non-emotional. There’s sounds, tastes, touch etc. but no strong reaction to them, you’re not in your body hearing a song you’re in the song itself (it’s self aware). When fully present with something reactions are dimmed
theory: therapy has marginal return to burning karma (phenomenological contractions) bc you’re doing things manually one at a time focused on stories and content, and at some point you’ve burned through the easy wins
meditation has exponential return to burning karma, bc over time you’re using awareness and equanimity (universal solvent for contractions) to dissolve it. When the arrow of attention goes away as you become more centerless this process is parallelized across all areas of your body and across all of time as the difference between meditation and life dissolves. And as the contractions get dissolved, awareness in some sense gets stronger and more decentrali
I like@RomeoStevens76’s threefold training model for this (http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2021/03/threefold-training.html) ngondro afaik (not tantra expert) like shine a concentration practice in this diagram. I get why they do that, sharpen knives before using cooking is good for both efficacy and safety
I think part of this is westerners focus on their breath too much. The sutras barely mention breath meditation (anapanasati) but they talk endlessly about relaxing, lovingkindness meditation, and forgiveness, the scriptures are all about chilling out, which I think is way better
Most people are motivated by unwholesome fuel (anger, craving, regret etc) and can theoretically clean things up and replace it with cleaner fuel (compassion, love, fun etc) that’s just as strong. The problem is cultivating good fuel is 10x harder than removing bad fuel
My preferred translations of tanha and dukkha are fast-grabby-thing and evil-vibrating-blob
Makes it obvious what kind of thing to look for to see them. Translations like clinging & suffering make them sound like abstract ideas. They’re not, they’re fast subtle mental movements
are autists failed empaths whose natural sensory clarity was so high they had to turn off all the most salient channels (looking at eyes, empathy, love, etc) and invest all their processing into lower human-saliency things like math as a way to cope with constant overwhelm
maybe it’s not that they couldn’t love but they loved so deeply it scared them
(bc sensory clarity : equanimity ratio off, but you can maybe recover this bc you can train equanimity to be arbitrarily high, like the monk on fire)
on getting to jhana
have you tried out the wider awareness concentration practices? Eg filling your body with jhana, like how rob burbea describes it, rather than pinpoint attention like brasington does it. I prefer the wider awareness stuff now personally