What I feel is different is that the Way provide a mean for systematically findind this underlying should and explaining it from the inside.
I notice that I am confused, because I’m not at all clear how Nate’s conceptual model would have helped me find the body-memory of my mother screaming at me about some deadline as a child. In contrast, using the Work to surface my objection to not doing something led me to that memory in a few minutes without me needing to do any particular analysis, consequentialist or otherwise.
This isn’t to say that his approach is wrong, just that it’s incomplete. Notably, it doesn’t provide any guards against confabulating your “explanations” of what your thought process is. When you use analytical reasoning to understand yourself, the answers are often wrong because the thing that is actually causing your response is rarely based on any sort of analysis, rather than simple pattern matching. (In the specific example above, my brain was pattern matching “important thing I’m supposed to do → stress about it, don’t allow yourself to do anything else, and call it taking things seriously, or else you’re a bad person”.)
Finding patterns like this requires observation of what your body and mind are doing, while disengaging from attempts to logically “explain” things, since patterns like these trivially hijack your analytical reasoning (e.g. by tricking you into defining what you’re doing as “taking things seriously” rather than “freaking out”).
I notice that I am confused, because I’m not at all clear how Nate’s conceptual model would have helped me find the body-memory of my mother screaming at me about some deadline as a child. In contrast, using the Work to surface my objection to not doing something led me to that memory in a few minutes without me needing to do any particular analysis, consequentialist or otherwise.
This isn’t to say that his approach is wrong, just that it’s incomplete. Notably, it doesn’t provide any guards against confabulating your “explanations” of what your thought process is. When you use analytical reasoning to understand yourself, the answers are often wrong because the thing that is actually causing your response is rarely based on any sort of analysis, rather than simple pattern matching. (In the specific example above, my brain was pattern matching “important thing I’m supposed to do → stress about it, don’t allow yourself to do anything else, and call it taking things seriously, or else you’re a bad person”.)
Finding patterns like this requires observation of what your body and mind are doing, while disengaging from attempts to logically “explain” things, since patterns like these trivially hijack your analytical reasoning (e.g. by tricking you into defining what you’re doing as “taking things seriously” rather than “freaking out”).