All right, since I was told on my very first, and abortive, discussion thread that I should post a larger summary or excerpt of the link I had on there if I wanted to comport with LW’s norms, let me do that here instead (since my karma is now too low to make another discussion post).
So I’ve written a long article summarizing a life philosophy which asserts the significance of a certain kind of meditative self-expression for grasping human freedom and understanding the significance of pain and suffering in human life.
Any LessWrong readers interested in thinking about the meaning of life, meditation, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, art, or in better understanding and handling their own minds should be interested.
Here is the largest excerpt I could post without the comment being rejected as too long:
The next time you stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself, take a moment to become curious about exactly what the pain is like. What exactly does it feel like? Is it stabbing? Does it radiate? Is it blunt or sharp? Does it come and go? Is it cold or hot? Does it remind you of someone, or something, or some place?
As soon as you suspend the pain in your mind, the pain immediately changes. It becomes interesting. Like Keanu Reeves might stop a bullet in the air in The Matrix, you stun the pain by paying it conscious attention and then examining it like a scientist or artist might. It becomes fascinating. And then, as you describe it, its character changes more and more. It becomes sharp, specific, and beautiful. It might still be pain, but still, even as pain, it is no longer painful in the same way. Now it is a jewel. You see within it organization, ideas, intelligence.
Through the process of reflection and then expression, we can transform pain into beauty. This is true not just of physical pain, but of all pain, and indeed, of any experience. This is the essence of human freedom and power.
The most interesting and fundamental question in the world is what we’re doing here in this life. What’s the point? I spent years thinking about this question — going through psychology and western and eastern philosophy, and asking this question over and over.
I think I have an answer, at least a certain kind of partial answer. It’s certainly not totally original. Yet it is not often seen, not often heard.
My problem is how to explain it in words. I have tried many formulations on paper and in my head and none of them seem quite right. So I’ve decided to share several of them with you here, and hope you get the point. I’m trying to indicate a sensibility about the world — a way of relating to it, of seeing it, of dealing with it. What I’m trying to say cannot be wholly communicated in words (though can anything?). I need you to get the feel of it, to have the shift in perspective without which none of this will really make sense.
There’s a zen story about the monk who points to the moon. And the disciple keeps looking at his finger. ‘No, no, up there!’ the monk tries to say, but the disciple cannot understand the concept of pointing. That’s the kind of barrier I feel I’m up against.
Let me give you another example: to someone new to wine, wine tastes like wine. Maybe red wine tastes like red wine, and white wine tastes like white wine. To someone who drinks a little more, and thinks about what they drink, perhaps they start to identify sour and bitter, dryness and acidity. But to the wine connoisseur and critic, the vocabulary and the experience expand. They start to be able to detect and name notes of musk, florality, and minerality. They distinguish the taste of the wine at the front of the palate from the taste at the back. They comprehend the history and the heritage of the wine, its lineage in the soil, the effect of the sun and the rain on the grapes that made it. They taste and appreciate the various nuances of fermentation.
For the connoisseur, the wine unfolds into a much more complex, in-depth experience. It happens not just because the person drinks a lot of wine, but because they pay attention, and because they analyze the wine, and come up with labels, and break down and express their experiences.
The same way the experience of the wine reveals layer after layer with increased attention and thought, so too can the same general idea apply to life. Any particular experience you’ve had without thinking about it you’ve barely even lived. It passed by and vanished, and you missed a lot in it, a lot like a rookie misses almost everything interesting in the wine she’s tasting. If you take an experience of yours, pay it attention, and express what it is like, you will find that the experience starts to refine itself. It becomes complex, multi-layered, rich, fascinating, interesting, beautiful. It ceases to be one big blob and starts to become a multitude.
This revelation of layers of intelligence, of pattern but also of chaos—interesting chaos—is the reward for this expression.
Expression is the key.
Mere observation is not enough. Simply remembering an experience is not enough. You just remember the same pale, shallow memory you had before. But if you remember an experience and then 1) think deeply about it, 2) try to honestly and originally express exactly what it was like for you, and 3) put this expression in some form (music, poetry, film, or even just a few sentences in your journal) then 4) that will allow you to see the experience in a new light. It will force you to choose the important aspects of the experience. Those aspects of the experience will come into focus. Like a near-sighted man putting on glasses for the first time, the experience will become dramatically sharper.
Of course, expression inevitably distorts. Even a good map is partly wrong. It is still illuminating. A map has to distort and simplify to be useful. Similarly, every expression breaks down experience in a way that is partly wrong. One kind of expression will highlight certain facets of an experience; another expression will highlight other facets. Experiences can be expressed in an endless variety of ways.
This sensibility I’m trying to communicate results in the appreciation of “subtlety.” To a casual listener of music, when someone plays a key on a piano, they hear it as a single note. To a musician or a music critic or an audiophile, though, the note has at least three parts. The first is the attack, when the key is struck and a tiny hammer literally pings against a tight string inside the piano. The second is a middle portion of the note. The third is the decay, as the note fades. Each of these is different. And in fact even within each of these parts the note changes. Expression is like an instrument that allows you to see the worlds within every world.
Observing and expressing any experience streams down beautiful ideas that allow you to see it in a new way. The experience discloses connections to other experiences, patterns within it, intelligence.
To appreciate the finer and finer details of these changes — to see distinctions and discern refinement where once there was only sameness — is the spirit of subtlety. It is to see not just a thing but the presence of the space surrounding that thing. It is the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony.
It is the spirit of not trying to overwhelm with a simple rush of pleasure, but to see deeper and deeper and quieter and quieter parts of something. It is why John Cage created an entirely silent piece — he wanted to make a statement about this spirit of subtlety, that looks for the shyest and most reluctant details. It is the spirit of, when you’re hungry, not just gobbling up food, but making food that tastes good, and then, looks good. Taking your time to do that prolongs the hunger, but then allows you to explore that hunger in a more and more elegant, artistic way.
The Magic Equation: Desire = Pain
And if you want to see these subtleties, desire is crucial. You do not fully control your mind anymore than you fully control the weather. You are at all times in a mental landscape, and the most important feature of this landscape is desire. We always want something — or perhaps to avoid something — and this focuses and defines our attention. We can use this desire as the starting point of our attention and expression.
Desire, which unfulfilled is the same thing as pain, is what allows you to appreciate anything. So the connoisseur realizes that desire is a precious thing. It should not be used up too early. It is what allows you to be interested in something. As soon as you’ve had an orgasm, interest in sex decreases. It is the desire for sex, the ache, the hunger, that can motivate you to explore subtler and subtler realms of sexuality: to be interested in those realms. And that is why celibacy shows up so often in the world’s mystical traditions. It provides the motivation to seek sexuality not in physical bodies, but in knowledge and contemplation. The subtlest sexual objects are ideas.
The artistic mindset I am trying to communicate sees emotional or physical pain — unfulfilled desire — as a precious, specific energy that we can capture like a firefly in a jar, to follow its spirals and whirls. We can use it by investigating the desire itself. The desire is an experience. We can attend to it, note its intricacies.
This essay is nonsense. There’s an easy trick for analyzing writing like this: As you read, mentally remove all of the emotionally charged words and connotations and see if the argument still makes sense. When we get rid of all the flowery language here, we end up with (admittedly uncharitable) things like, “Humans can think about pain and other experiences and use these thoughts to create art that others find pleasurable” and “By paying close attention, you can gain more understanding of complex things (e.g. wine tasting).” None of this analysis even mentions the actual, causal reasons human beings suffer, or established theories about coping with suffering and creativity. As a result, I don’t see anything particularly insightful or useful.
Absolutely. To start with, I give a simple concrete suggestion in the first paragraph above about how to deal with physical pain.
Another concrete suggestion might be: any time you feel annoyed or angry, express in words exactly what the annoyance or anger is like, using metaphors, and going back and forth between your words and your experience to make sure you’ve captured the experience in as accurate and original—or non-cliched—a way as you possibly can.
A broader way to say the same thing might be: focus on those experiences that cause you emotional disturbance and express them, as accurately and as originally as possible, into an artistic medium of your choice (words, music, painting, whatever), using metaphors appropriate to that medium to convey what your experience is like.
If you do that, my contention is that you will find that your negative experiences bear within them a wealth of beauty.
There’s more to it than that, but those are a couple of concrete suggestions.
Constructive suggestion: Write more like this, less like what you posted about.
Substantively, I think one could substitute any emotion or sensation and get the same advice. Thus:
Had good sex? Write a poem exploring the feelings you experienced—it will enhance the positive experience of the sex.
Which I expect is true. But pain is generally no fun, and it isn’t clear that you think avoiding pain is worth the effort.
When I stub my toe, I’m not doing something wrong by first choosing to figure out why I stubbed my toe and what to change to avoid that in the future. And once I’ve done that, I’m not sure I have time to do what you suggested.
The reason I write like I do above is that I’m giving a philosophical vision, not a series of concrete suggestions. I’m trying to explain why suffering exists generally, and how humans have freedom not just in spite of—but because of suffering.
Of course you are right that you can express anything and possibly enhance it. But I don’t necessarily think that self-expression always alleviates pain, and I don’t think enhancing positive experiences is its point either.
What I think it does is something different. It opens up an aesthetic dimension of experience.
Let me give you another example. You watch a sad movie and are totally absorbed by it. Then you remember that it’s just a movie. And you start to think about and notice the acting, the cinematography, the set design, the costumes, the writing.
Now that doesn’t make it any less of a sad movie. It remains tragic. But it opens up aesthetic aspects of the movie-going experience.
Or to take your example of sex. Thinking closely about experience of “good sex” might actually reveal it to be, upon thought, not so good sex. So your memory of it, once you become more critical, might actually become more negative. So it need not enhance your experience.
What it will do, regardless, is deepen the aesthetic facet of the experience, deepen your appreciation of the complexities of it.
The reason I write like I do above is that I’m giving a philosophical vision, not a series of concrete suggestions.
In this venue, philosophical vision that doesn’t have implications for personal choice and behavior is not valued, which might partially explain your prior negative reception.
That said, I’m not sure you need concede that you have no suggestions for folks. You seem to be suggesting that “deeping appreciation of the complexity of experience” is something worth doing, and you have some thoughts about how to do that.
Yes, focusing would be related, and it certainly seems like an excellent technique, but it’s not quite the same thing. Focusing is particularly oriented towards bodily sensations, whereas I’m talking about experiences in broader terms, including but not limited to the body. Focusing is also a bit more passive (waiting for thoughts to occur to you) and less oriented towards art & expression. Focusing is also more oriented towards words, whereas I talk more broadly about other means of expresion. And of course the underlying philosophical frameworks are also different.
What you suggest has the benefit of improving one’s eloquence and accuracy in conveying experience.
What you suggest can turn the unproductive to the refreshingly inspired productive.
These suggestions need no philosophical support, lest another challenge the assumption they are inherently desirable. Simplicity of expression carries with it persuasion, for the reader can decide themselves whether they want the effects; pre-emptive arguments can turn them away.
Beware signing any written agreement you haven’t read or understood.
I have flouted this advice almost every time I installed software or signed up to a website over the last couple decades, and AFAICT I have never had much trouble as a result.
This is reminding me of the Enneagram. The idea is that people have basic habitual ways of relating to the universe—all the standard ways (the Enneagram has nine of them) are useful but incomplete, and all of them can go bad or be refined into something very valuable.
Accurate perception is important, but so is action.
All right, since I was told on my very first, and abortive, discussion thread that I should post a larger summary or excerpt of the link I had on there if I wanted to comport with LW’s norms, let me do that here instead (since my karma is now too low to make another discussion post).
So I’ve written a long article summarizing a life philosophy which asserts the significance of a certain kind of meditative self-expression for grasping human freedom and understanding the significance of pain and suffering in human life.
Any LessWrong readers interested in thinking about the meaning of life, meditation, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, art, or in better understanding and handling their own minds should be interested.
Here is the largest excerpt I could post without the comment being rejected as too long:
The next time you stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself, take a moment to become curious about exactly what the pain is like. What exactly does it feel like? Is it stabbing? Does it radiate? Is it blunt or sharp? Does it come and go? Is it cold or hot? Does it remind you of someone, or something, or some place?
As soon as you suspend the pain in your mind, the pain immediately changes. It becomes interesting. Like Keanu Reeves might stop a bullet in the air in The Matrix, you stun the pain by paying it conscious attention and then examining it like a scientist or artist might. It becomes fascinating. And then, as you describe it, its character changes more and more. It becomes sharp, specific, and beautiful. It might still be pain, but still, even as pain, it is no longer painful in the same way. Now it is a jewel. You see within it organization, ideas, intelligence.
Through the process of reflection and then expression, we can transform pain into beauty. This is true not just of physical pain, but of all pain, and indeed, of any experience. This is the essence of human freedom and power.
The most interesting and fundamental question in the world is what we’re doing here in this life. What’s the point? I spent years thinking about this question — going through psychology and western and eastern philosophy, and asking this question over and over.
I think I have an answer, at least a certain kind of partial answer. It’s certainly not totally original. Yet it is not often seen, not often heard.
My problem is how to explain it in words. I have tried many formulations on paper and in my head and none of them seem quite right. So I’ve decided to share several of them with you here, and hope you get the point. I’m trying to indicate a sensibility about the world — a way of relating to it, of seeing it, of dealing with it. What I’m trying to say cannot be wholly communicated in words (though can anything?). I need you to get the feel of it, to have the shift in perspective without which none of this will really make sense.
There’s a zen story about the monk who points to the moon. And the disciple keeps looking at his finger. ‘No, no, up there!’ the monk tries to say, but the disciple cannot understand the concept of pointing. That’s the kind of barrier I feel I’m up against.
Let me give you another example: to someone new to wine, wine tastes like wine. Maybe red wine tastes like red wine, and white wine tastes like white wine. To someone who drinks a little more, and thinks about what they drink, perhaps they start to identify sour and bitter, dryness and acidity. But to the wine connoisseur and critic, the vocabulary and the experience expand. They start to be able to detect and name notes of musk, florality, and minerality. They distinguish the taste of the wine at the front of the palate from the taste at the back. They comprehend the history and the heritage of the wine, its lineage in the soil, the effect of the sun and the rain on the grapes that made it. They taste and appreciate the various nuances of fermentation.
For the connoisseur, the wine unfolds into a much more complex, in-depth experience. It happens not just because the person drinks a lot of wine, but because they pay attention, and because they analyze the wine, and come up with labels, and break down and express their experiences.
The same way the experience of the wine reveals layer after layer with increased attention and thought, so too can the same general idea apply to life. Any particular experience you’ve had without thinking about it you’ve barely even lived. It passed by and vanished, and you missed a lot in it, a lot like a rookie misses almost everything interesting in the wine she’s tasting. If you take an experience of yours, pay it attention, and express what it is like, you will find that the experience starts to refine itself. It becomes complex, multi-layered, rich, fascinating, interesting, beautiful. It ceases to be one big blob and starts to become a multitude.
This revelation of layers of intelligence, of pattern but also of chaos—interesting chaos—is the reward for this expression.
Expression is the key.
Mere observation is not enough. Simply remembering an experience is not enough. You just remember the same pale, shallow memory you had before. But if you remember an experience and then 1) think deeply about it, 2) try to honestly and originally express exactly what it was like for you, and 3) put this expression in some form (music, poetry, film, or even just a few sentences in your journal) then 4) that will allow you to see the experience in a new light. It will force you to choose the important aspects of the experience. Those aspects of the experience will come into focus. Like a near-sighted man putting on glasses for the first time, the experience will become dramatically sharper.
Of course, expression inevitably distorts. Even a good map is partly wrong. It is still illuminating. A map has to distort and simplify to be useful. Similarly, every expression breaks down experience in a way that is partly wrong. One kind of expression will highlight certain facets of an experience; another expression will highlight other facets. Experiences can be expressed in an endless variety of ways.
This sensibility I’m trying to communicate results in the appreciation of “subtlety.” To a casual listener of music, when someone plays a key on a piano, they hear it as a single note. To a musician or a music critic or an audiophile, though, the note has at least three parts. The first is the attack, when the key is struck and a tiny hammer literally pings against a tight string inside the piano. The second is a middle portion of the note. The third is the decay, as the note fades. Each of these is different. And in fact even within each of these parts the note changes. Expression is like an instrument that allows you to see the worlds within every world.
Observing and expressing any experience streams down beautiful ideas that allow you to see it in a new way. The experience discloses connections to other experiences, patterns within it, intelligence.
To appreciate the finer and finer details of these changes — to see distinctions and discern refinement where once there was only sameness — is the spirit of subtlety. It is to see not just a thing but the presence of the space surrounding that thing. It is the spirit of the Japanese tea ceremony.
It is the spirit of not trying to overwhelm with a simple rush of pleasure, but to see deeper and deeper and quieter and quieter parts of something. It is why John Cage created an entirely silent piece — he wanted to make a statement about this spirit of subtlety, that looks for the shyest and most reluctant details. It is the spirit of, when you’re hungry, not just gobbling up food, but making food that tastes good, and then, looks good. Taking your time to do that prolongs the hunger, but then allows you to explore that hunger in a more and more elegant, artistic way.
The Magic Equation: Desire = Pain
And if you want to see these subtleties, desire is crucial. You do not fully control your mind anymore than you fully control the weather. You are at all times in a mental landscape, and the most important feature of this landscape is desire. We always want something — or perhaps to avoid something — and this focuses and defines our attention. We can use this desire as the starting point of our attention and expression.
Desire, which unfulfilled is the same thing as pain, is what allows you to appreciate anything. So the connoisseur realizes that desire is a precious thing. It should not be used up too early. It is what allows you to be interested in something. As soon as you’ve had an orgasm, interest in sex decreases. It is the desire for sex, the ache, the hunger, that can motivate you to explore subtler and subtler realms of sexuality: to be interested in those realms. And that is why celibacy shows up so often in the world’s mystical traditions. It provides the motivation to seek sexuality not in physical bodies, but in knowledge and contemplation. The subtlest sexual objects are ideas.
The artistic mindset I am trying to communicate sees emotional or physical pain — unfulfilled desire — as a precious, specific energy that we can capture like a firefly in a jar, to follow its spirals and whirls. We can use it by investigating the desire itself. The desire is an experience. We can attend to it, note its intricacies.
Read the rest of it...
This may be overly harsh, but:
This essay is nonsense. There’s an easy trick for analyzing writing like this: As you read, mentally remove all of the emotionally charged words and connotations and see if the argument still makes sense. When we get rid of all the flowery language here, we end up with (admittedly uncharitable) things like, “Humans can think about pain and other experiences and use these thoughts to create art that others find pleasurable” and “By paying close attention, you can gain more understanding of complex things (e.g. wine tasting).” None of this analysis even mentions the actual, causal reasons human beings suffer, or established theories about coping with suffering and creativity. As a result, I don’t see anything particularly insightful or useful.
I’m not sure what essay you read. Even my very first paragraph doesn’t fit into this framework.
Assuming what you said is true, can you give a concrete example in one sentence what I should choose differently than I do now?
For example, I would draw from my experience as a lawyer to say:
Absolutely. To start with, I give a simple concrete suggestion in the first paragraph above about how to deal with physical pain.
Another concrete suggestion might be: any time you feel annoyed or angry, express in words exactly what the annoyance or anger is like, using metaphors, and going back and forth between your words and your experience to make sure you’ve captured the experience in as accurate and original—or non-cliched—a way as you possibly can.
A broader way to say the same thing might be: focus on those experiences that cause you emotional disturbance and express them, as accurately and as originally as possible, into an artistic medium of your choice (words, music, painting, whatever), using metaphors appropriate to that medium to convey what your experience is like.
If you do that, my contention is that you will find that your negative experiences bear within them a wealth of beauty.
There’s more to it than that, but those are a couple of concrete suggestions.
Constructive suggestion: Write more like this, less like what you posted about.
Substantively, I think one could substitute any emotion or sensation and get the same advice. Thus:
Which I expect is true. But pain is generally no fun, and it isn’t clear that you think avoiding pain is worth the effort.
When I stub my toe, I’m not doing something wrong by first choosing to figure out why I stubbed my toe and what to change to avoid that in the future. And once I’ve done that, I’m not sure I have time to do what you suggested.
The reason I write like I do above is that I’m giving a philosophical vision, not a series of concrete suggestions. I’m trying to explain why suffering exists generally, and how humans have freedom not just in spite of—but because of suffering.
Of course you are right that you can express anything and possibly enhance it. But I don’t necessarily think that self-expression always alleviates pain, and I don’t think enhancing positive experiences is its point either.
What I think it does is something different. It opens up an aesthetic dimension of experience.
Let me give you another example. You watch a sad movie and are totally absorbed by it. Then you remember that it’s just a movie. And you start to think about and notice the acting, the cinematography, the set design, the costumes, the writing.
Now that doesn’t make it any less of a sad movie. It remains tragic. But it opens up aesthetic aspects of the movie-going experience.
Or to take your example of sex. Thinking closely about experience of “good sex” might actually reveal it to be, upon thought, not so good sex. So your memory of it, once you become more critical, might actually become more negative. So it need not enhance your experience.
What it will do, regardless, is deepen the aesthetic facet of the experience, deepen your appreciation of the complexities of it.
In this venue, philosophical vision that doesn’t have implications for personal choice and behavior is not valued, which might partially explain your prior negative reception.
That said, I’m not sure you need concede that you have no suggestions for folks. You seem to be suggesting that “deeping appreciation of the complexity of experience” is something worth doing, and you have some thoughts about how to do that.
Have you heard of Focusing? It’s a psychological system based on that premise.
Yes, focusing would be related, and it certainly seems like an excellent technique, but it’s not quite the same thing. Focusing is particularly oriented towards bodily sensations, whereas I’m talking about experiences in broader terms, including but not limited to the body. Focusing is also a bit more passive (waiting for thoughts to occur to you) and less oriented towards art & expression. Focusing is also more oriented towards words, whereas I talk more broadly about other means of expresion. And of course the underlying philosophical frameworks are also different.
What you suggest has the benefit of improving one’s eloquence and accuracy in conveying experience.
What you suggest can turn the unproductive to the refreshingly inspired productive.
These suggestions need no philosophical support, lest another challenge the assumption they are inherently desirable. Simplicity of expression carries with it persuasion, for the reader can decide themselves whether they want the effects; pre-emptive arguments can turn them away.
I have flouted this advice almost every time I installed software or signed up to a website over the last couple decades, and AFAICT I have never had much trouble as a result.
upvoted for politeness. Still didn’t want to read more than a couple paragraphs due to craziness. Sorry.
I appreciate the politeness.
For what it’s worth, I did not detect any craziness in the first section of the essay.
This is reminding me of the Enneagram. The idea is that people have basic habitual ways of relating to the universe—all the standard ways (the Enneagram has nine of them) are useful but incomplete, and all of them can go bad or be refined into something very valuable.
Accurate perception is important, but so is action.