I’m pretty sure these people don’t think that what they are doing “borrows from” hypnosis or trance or suggestibility hacking or mesmerism or whatever words you want to use for it.
Their emotions are high, caused by skillful intentional actions, and involves a general dynamic of “playing along” with numerous secondary “critical cognitive faculties” seemingly disengaged. Their focus is on their own feelings, and how their feelings feel, and so on. It isn’t that they don’t notice what’s directly happening to (and inside) them, it is that they notice very little else.
Maybe that’s great. Being in religions seems empirically to be somewhat positive for people?
Maybe the preacher there has studied hypnosis and optimized things for trance states… but I don’t think that would been required for him to be interacting with more or less the same basic mechanisms in people’s cognitive machinery.
Those mechanisms are not particularly exotic or hard to mess with, but they cut directly to “goal-content integrity” and so caution is appropriate.
Willing to update that ‘hyponosis’ is actually more common and easy to do than I previously imagined.
That said, my point still stands.
If Circling involved intentionally trying to hypnotize people, even without calling it hypnosis, I would expect its training to include SOME kind of incentive toward “you’re doing good Circling IF the people look a certain way, or are taking your suggestions, or are feeling lots of emotion.” (When I see someone making this assumption—that good Circling is about feeling a certain way or avoiding negative emotion—I often try to correct them.)
There is no directive toward getting people to cry, getting people to play along, getting people to amplify their emotions, etc.
The directive is often to become more aware of your surroundings and the other people, as well as your feelings, thoughts, sensations.
I have seen Circling leaders—if someone is going into overwhelming emotion or getting sucked into something—pause and try to keep the level of awareness high, so the person doesn’t just automatically get sucked in without making a choice.
I want to flag that I am pretty confident that I’ve heard circling facilitators boasting about having had people cry during circling. I don’t think it’s an explicit directive, but it does seem to be something that at least some value or interpret as a sign of deepness.
There is no directive toward getting people to … amplify their emotions
The directive is often to become more aware of … your feelings
This seems like a pretty subtle distinction.
Won’t “And how does that make you feel?” or “And where do you feel that in your body?” frequently amplify the feeling?
Like, maybe something was below the level of my conscious awareness (or was on the edge of my awareness), but now my attention has been directed towards it, so it’s been ‘amplified’ to take up more of my awareness.
Not saying that’s a bad thing, just that it does seem to me like it would fit the description of amplifying a feeling or emotion. Curious whether what I described matches your model of what’s going on.
There are lots of dials you can play with, basically.
One of the dials is moving your awareness around.
One of them is being close/face-deep in a felt sense or distancing from a felt sense. Gendlin calls this smelling the soup—putting your face in the soup is very close, and not being able to smell it is far.
Another is deliberately amplifying an emotion. It involves, e.g. playing a memory in your mind so that the emotions triggered by the memory increase. With corresponding amplification in body reaction (faster breathing, etc).
My model is something like, moving my awareness around can ‘open the door’ for an emotion to come through (like I’m inviting it to speak). And sometimes I open the door, and the emotion is loud (I start crying, say). Sometimes I open it, and it is quiet (I don’t feel much, even when my awareness is on it). I don’t see this as the same as amplifying the emotion.
I can successfully be aware of my feelings and NOT feel them very much. Whereas, if I am aiming to amplify my feelings, I will know I’m succeeding if I feel them more. Different success criteria.
If I’ve been ignoring my emotions or pushing them down for a while, I imagine they’ll be louder when I open the door. This feels like a common dynamic.
I think I see you calling explicit attention attention to your model of cognition, and how your own volitional mental moves interact with seemingly non-volitional mental observations you become aware of.
Then you’re integrating this micro-experimental data into an explanatory framework that implicitly acknowledges the possibility that your own model of yourself might be wrong, and even if it is right other people might work differently or have different observations.
I think that to get any sort of genuine, reproducible, safe, inter-subjectively validated meditative science that knows general laws of subjective psychology, it will involve conversations in this mode :-)
Etymologically, “meditation” comes from the latin meditari, “to study”.
To make a “science word” we switch to ancient greek, where “meletan” means “to study or meditate”. The three original “Boetian muses” were memory (Mnemosyne, who often is considered the mother of them all), song (Aoede), and meditation (Melete)… so if a science existed here it might be called “meletology”?
A few times I’ve playfully used the term “meletonaut” to describe someone whose approach to the field is more exploratory than scholarly or experimental.
If I hear you correctly, in your cognitive explorations, you find that you can page through memories while watching yourself for symptoms of high “adrenaline” (by which I mean often actual adrenaline, but also the general constellation of “arousal” including heart rate and sweaty skin and probably cortisol and so on).
And then maybe when you think of yourself as “aware of your feelings” that phrase could be unpacked to say that you have a basically accurate metacognitive awareness of which memories or images cause adrenaline spikes, without the active metacognitive awareness itself causing an adrenaline spike.
So if someone accuses you of “causing feelings” you can defend yourself by saying the goal is actually to help people non-emotionally know what “causes them to have emotions” without actually “experiencing the feelings directly” except as a means of gathering emotional data.
I think I understand the basis of such defense, and the validity of the defense in terms of the real value of using this technique for some people.
My personal pet name for specifically this exploratory technique (which can be performed alone and appears to occur in numerous sociological and religious contexts) is “engram dousing”.
The same basic process happens in the neuro lingusitic programming (NLP) community as one step of a process they might call something like “memory reconsolidation”.
It also happens in Scientology, where instead of self reported adrenaline symptoms they use an “e-meter” (to measure sweaty palms electronically) and instead of a two person birthday circle they formalize the process quite a bit and call it an “audit”. In scientology it is pretty clear they noticed how great this is as an introductory step in acquiring blackmail material and gaining the unjustified trust of marks (prior to headfucking them) and optimized it for that purpose.
Which is not to say that circling is as bad as scientology!
Also, apostate scientologists regularly report that “the tech” of scientology (which is scientology’s jargon term for all their early well scripted psychological manipulations of new members) does in fact work and gives life benefits.
With dynamite, construction workers could suddenly build tunnels through mountains remarkably fast so that trains and roads could go places that would otherwise have been economically impossible. Dynamite used towards good ends, with decent safety engineering and skill, is great!
But if someone wants to turn a garbage can upside down, strap a chair to it, and have me sit in the chair while they put a smallish, roughly measured quantity of dynamite under it… even if the last person in the chair survived and thought it was a wild ride and wants to do it again… uh… yeah… I would love to watch from a safe distance, but I think I’d pass on sitting in the chair.
And more generally, as an aspiring meletologist and hobbyist in the sociology of religion, all I’m trying to say is that engram dousing (along with some other mental techniques) is like “cognitive nuclear technology”, and circling might not be literally playing with refined uranium, but “the circling community in general” appears to have some cognitive uranium ore, and they’ve independently refined it a bit, and they’re doing tricks with it.
That’s all more or less great :-)
But it sounds like they are not being particularly careful, and many of them might not realize their magic rocks are powered by more than normal levels of uranium decay, and if they have even heard of Louis Slotin then they don’t think he has anything to do with their toy (uranium) pellets.
Scientology is basically about telling people not to react to stimuli and suppressing them. It’s about exercises like being able to say the same sentence for an hour at the same tone of voice without having emotional triggers that disturb the voice.
Practices that are about connecting with the felt sense and giving that felt sense the space to show up and bring any emotional trigger to the forefront do on an important dimension the opposite of what the Scientology tech does.
And then maybe when you think of yourself as “aware of your feelings” that phrase could be unpacked to say that you have a basically accurate metacognitive awareness of which memories or images cause adrenaline spikes, without the active metacognitive awareness itself causing an adrenaline spike.
Being aware of your feelings and being aware of what causes them are two different issues.
As far as Circling goes Circling (as I was taught it) is mostly not about having feeling because of memories or images but feelings caused by the interaction with the other people in the Circle.
Modeling feelings as adrenaline spikes is a bad model and would be a different one. Feelings are not represented by people as high/low adrenaline states. Fear of excitement are both states with with adrenaline but they feel quite different and a person who confuses them isn’t “aware of their feelings” and profits from a practice like Circling or Focusing to learn to get better in touch with their emotions.
That video triggers some strong emotional response in me (disgust, aversion), and it seems that video is likely to feel weird to most LW viewers, one way or another. As in, the video’s perspective is one of a voyeur or an observer to something strange, alienating, and possibly bad.
I don’t want to fight this battle if it involves bringing in videos that engender strong positive or negative reactions. (Especially given we’re not Circling here, which is an arena I’d feel more comfortable bringing in emotions. As it is, I find that video manipulative in the current context.)
I would have much less objection if the video were replaced with a verbal phrase or description.
I’m pretty sure these people don’t think that what they are doing “borrows from” hypnosis or trance or suggestibility hacking or mesmerism or whatever words you want to use for it.
Their emotions are high, caused by skillful intentional actions, and involves a general dynamic of “playing along” with numerous secondary “critical cognitive faculties” seemingly disengaged. Their focus is on their own feelings, and how their feelings feel, and so on. It isn’t that they don’t notice what’s directly happening to (and inside) them, it is that they notice very little else.
Maybe that’s great. Being in religions seems empirically to be somewhat positive for people?
Maybe the preacher there has studied hypnosis and optimized things for trance states… but I don’t think that would been required for him to be interacting with more or less the same basic mechanisms in people’s cognitive machinery.
Those mechanisms are not particularly exotic or hard to mess with, but they cut directly to “goal-content integrity” and so caution is appropriate.
Willing to update that ‘hyponosis’ is actually more common and easy to do than I previously imagined.
That said, my point still stands.
If Circling involved intentionally trying to hypnotize people, even without calling it hypnosis, I would expect its training to include SOME kind of incentive toward “you’re doing good Circling IF the people look a certain way, or are taking your suggestions, or are feeling lots of emotion.” (When I see someone making this assumption—that good Circling is about feeling a certain way or avoiding negative emotion—I often try to correct them.)
There is no directive toward getting people to cry, getting people to play along, getting people to amplify their emotions, etc.
The directive is often to become more aware of your surroundings and the other people, as well as your feelings, thoughts, sensations.
I have seen Circling leaders—if someone is going into overwhelming emotion or getting sucked into something—pause and try to keep the level of awareness high, so the person doesn’t just automatically get sucked in without making a choice.
I want to flag that I am pretty confident that I’ve heard circling facilitators boasting about having had people cry during circling. I don’t think it’s an explicit directive, but it does seem to be something that at least some value or interpret as a sign of deepness.
It’s evidence that something interesting is happening, and like most such things, is tempting and dangerous to Goodhart on.
This seems like a pretty subtle distinction.
Won’t “And how does that make you feel?” or “And where do you feel that in your body?” frequently amplify the feeling?
Like, maybe something was below the level of my conscious awareness (or was on the edge of my awareness), but now my attention has been directed towards it, so it’s been ‘amplified’ to take up more of my awareness.
Not saying that’s a bad thing, just that it does seem to me like it would fit the description of amplifying a feeling or emotion. Curious whether what I described matches your model of what’s going on.
There are lots of dials you can play with, basically.
One of the dials is moving your awareness around.
One of them is being close/face-deep in a felt sense or distancing from a felt sense. Gendlin calls this smelling the soup—putting your face in the soup is very close, and not being able to smell it is far.
Another is deliberately amplifying an emotion. It involves, e.g. playing a memory in your mind so that the emotions triggered by the memory increase. With corresponding amplification in body reaction (faster breathing, etc).
My model is something like, moving my awareness around can ‘open the door’ for an emotion to come through (like I’m inviting it to speak). And sometimes I open the door, and the emotion is loud (I start crying, say). Sometimes I open it, and it is quiet (I don’t feel much, even when my awareness is on it). I don’t see this as the same as amplifying the emotion.
I can successfully be aware of my feelings and NOT feel them very much. Whereas, if I am aiming to amplify my feelings, I will know I’m succeeding if I feel them more. Different success criteria.
If I’ve been ignoring my emotions or pushing them down for a while, I imagine they’ll be louder when I open the door. This feels like a common dynamic.
I really like this comment!
I think I see you calling explicit attention attention to your model of cognition, and how your own volitional mental moves interact with seemingly non-volitional mental observations you become aware of.
Then you’re integrating this micro-experimental data into an explanatory framework that implicitly acknowledges the possibility that your own model of yourself might be wrong, and even if it is right other people might work differently or have different observations.
I think that to get any sort of genuine, reproducible, safe, inter-subjectively validated meditative science that knows general laws of subjective psychology, it will involve conversations in this mode :-)
Etymologically, “meditation” comes from the latin meditari, “to study”.
To make a “science word” we switch to ancient greek, where “meletan” means “to study or meditate”. The three original “Boetian muses” were memory (Mnemosyne, who often is considered the mother of them all), song (Aoede), and meditation (Melete)… so if a science existed here it might be called “meletology”?
A few times I’ve playfully used the term “meletonaut” to describe someone whose approach to the field is more exploratory than scholarly or experimental.
If I hear you correctly, in your cognitive explorations, you find that you can page through memories while watching yourself for symptoms of high “adrenaline” (by which I mean often actual adrenaline, but also the general constellation of “arousal” including heart rate and sweaty skin and probably cortisol and so on).
And then maybe when you think of yourself as “aware of your feelings” that phrase could be unpacked to say that you have a basically accurate metacognitive awareness of which memories or images cause adrenaline spikes, without the active metacognitive awareness itself causing an adrenaline spike.
So if someone accuses you of “causing feelings” you can defend yourself by saying the goal is actually to help people non-emotionally know what “causes them to have emotions” without actually “experiencing the feelings directly” except as a means of gathering emotional data.
I think I understand the basis of such defense, and the validity of the defense in terms of the real value of using this technique for some people.
My personal pet name for specifically this exploratory technique (which can be performed alone and appears to occur in numerous sociological and religious contexts) is “engram dousing”.
The same basic process happens in the neuro lingusitic programming (NLP) community as one step of a process they might call something like “memory reconsolidation”.
It also happens in Scientology, where instead of self reported adrenaline symptoms they use an “e-meter” (to measure sweaty palms electronically) and instead of a two person birthday circle they formalize the process quite a bit and call it an “audit”. In scientology it is pretty clear they noticed how great this is as an introductory step in acquiring blackmail material and gaining the unjustified trust of marks (prior to headfucking them) and optimized it for that purpose.
Which is not to say that circling is as bad as scientology!
Also, apostate scientologists regularly report that “the tech” of scientology (which is scientology’s jargon term for all their early well scripted psychological manipulations of new members) does in fact work and gives life benefits.
With dynamite, construction workers could suddenly build tunnels through mountains remarkably fast so that trains and roads could go places that would otherwise have been economically impossible. Dynamite used towards good ends, with decent safety engineering and skill, is great!
But if someone wants to turn a garbage can upside down, strap a chair to it, and have me sit in the chair while they put a smallish, roughly measured quantity of dynamite under it… even if the last person in the chair survived and thought it was a wild ride and wants to do it again… uh… yeah… I would love to watch from a safe distance, but I think I’d pass on sitting in the chair.
And more generally, as an aspiring meletologist and hobbyist in the sociology of religion, all I’m trying to say is that engram dousing (along with some other mental techniques) is like “cognitive nuclear technology”, and circling might not be literally playing with refined uranium, but “the circling community in general” appears to have some cognitive uranium ore, and they’ve independently refined it a bit, and they’re doing tricks with it.
That’s all more or less great :-)
But it sounds like they are not being particularly careful, and many of them might not realize their magic rocks are powered by more than normal levels of uranium decay, and if they have even heard of Louis Slotin then they don’t think he has anything to do with their toy (uranium) pellets.
Scientology is basically about telling people not to react to stimuli and suppressing them. It’s about exercises like being able to say the same sentence for an hour at the same tone of voice without having emotional triggers that disturb the voice.
Practices that are about connecting with the felt sense and giving that felt sense the space to show up and bring any emotional trigger to the forefront do on an important dimension the opposite of what the Scientology tech does.
Being aware of your feelings and being aware of what causes them are two different issues.
As far as Circling goes Circling (as I was taught it) is mostly not about having feeling because of memories or images but feelings caused by the interaction with the other people in the Circle.
Modeling feelings as adrenaline spikes is a bad model and would be a different one. Feelings are not represented by people as high/low adrenaline states. Fear of excitement are both states with with adrenaline but they feel quite different and a person who confuses them isn’t “aware of their feelings” and profits from a practice like Circling or Focusing to learn to get better in touch with their emotions.
In the state in which Circling happens, people do notice what the other people in the circle are doing and what they are experiencing.
In addition to the primary perception that you listed there’s a lot of attention on the secondary cognitive faculty of relating in Circling.
That video triggers some strong emotional response in me (disgust, aversion), and it seems that video is likely to feel weird to most LW viewers, one way or another. As in, the video’s perspective is one of a voyeur or an observer to something strange, alienating, and possibly bad.
I don’t want to fight this battle if it involves bringing in videos that engender strong positive or negative reactions. (Especially given we’re not Circling here, which is an arena I’d feel more comfortable bringing in emotions. As it is, I find that video manipulative in the current context.)
I would have much less objection if the video were replaced with a verbal phrase or description.