Sure, there’s a sense in which you may want to get some intellectual understanding of what something is before you start doing it. But I wasn’t just developing an intellectual understanding of the things in order to figure out whether they were worth doing: I was already convinced that they were doing. Rather I was focusing on the intellectual understanding of the thing as a substitute for actually doing the thing.
Suppose I wanted to become a musician, so I spent all my time reading about biographies about musicians, studying research on the psychological benefits of learning music, and following discussions on forums for musicians. But not spending any time actually practicing the act of playing music, nor doing things like learning to read musical notation.
Yes, there may be some benefit to be had with the stuff that I’m doing. Maybe it will be useful for helping me determine whether or not I really want to become a musician. But if I decide that I do want to become one, and then think that by spending all my time doing these things I’m making major progress towards being a musician, then I’m just deluding myself.
Edited to add: And also, I might note… if the part of me that wants me to stay deluded realizes that by learning this “Looking” skill I might figure out the delusion, then it has an incentive to apply the same trick to Looking, and keep me busy reading about Looking and thinking about it intellectually, so that I never actually do it, and keep happily thinking that I’m both learning to Look and learning to become a musician. I’m not sure whether this is a thing that happens—it feels a bit too strategic and forward-looking for our internal parts to anticipate this kind of thing in advance of it—but figuring out this kind of thing after you’ve started to Look for a bit and the part then starting to sabotage it when it sees where Looking is leading to, that kind of thing I’m pretty sure happens. See: all the reports of people finding self-help techniques super-useful and exciting… and then mysteriously just not using them anymore.
Sure, there’s a sense in which you may want to get some intellectual understanding of what something is before you start doing it. But I wasn’t just developing an intellectual understanding of the things in order to figure out whether they were worth doing: I was already convinced that they were doing. Rather I was focusing on the intellectual understanding of the thing as a substitute for actually doing the thing.
Suppose I wanted to become a musician, so I spent all my time reading about biographies about musicians, studying research on the psychological benefits of learning music, and following discussions on forums for musicians. But not spending any time actually practicing the act of playing music, nor doing things like learning to read musical notation.
Yes, there may be some benefit to be had with the stuff that I’m doing. Maybe it will be useful for helping me determine whether or not I really want to become a musician. But if I decide that I do want to become one, and then think that by spending all my time doing these things I’m making major progress towards being a musician, then I’m just deluding myself.
Edited to add: And also, I might note… if the part of me that wants me to stay deluded realizes that by learning this “Looking” skill I might figure out the delusion, then it has an incentive to apply the same trick to Looking, and keep me busy reading about Looking and thinking about it intellectually, so that I never actually do it, and keep happily thinking that I’m both learning to Look and learning to become a musician. I’m not sure whether this is a thing that happens—it feels a bit too strategic and forward-looking for our internal parts to anticipate this kind of thing in advance of it—but figuring out this kind of thing after you’ve started to Look for a bit and the part then starting to sabotage it when it sees where Looking is leading to, that kind of thing I’m pretty sure happens. See: all the reports of people finding self-help techniques super-useful and exciting… and then mysteriously just not using them anymore.