Yeah, this is basically how I squared it with Val’s version, too. A few other examples:
The koan thing: I haven’t really done koans, so this might be wrong, but I’d guess that the intent is something like: as you are thinking about the koan, Look at the way that your mind represents the koan and how it struggles with trying to solve the paradox; see if those representations give you any hints about the nature of the answer. (One may note that the experience which triggered my “kensho” was by itself an attempt to answer a paradox, and maybe you could formulate it as a koan, something like “what do you do when you let go of doing”, or whatever.) Certainly I’ve felt like meditation experience has given a slightly better intuition of what exactly it is that koans might be hinting at, though again, I haven’t really tried working with them.
Val also talked about Looking as a way to see the intelligent social web, which also sounds like it’s something directed at the outside not the inside. But after reading his post, I’ve spent some time paying attention to things like… what kinds of narratives and roles do people’s words and positions feel like they are taking, and does my own mind feel like it’s trying to push others into narrative-shaped boxes. The answer was yes. In particular, I started getting the feeling that some of the conflicts I’ve been having with an ex, were because we’re more intimate than friends but more distant than lovers, in a specific way that leaves my brain confused about how exactly I should behave around them; and as a result, one part of my mind has been trying to solve the issue by pushing them away and another part has been trying to solve it by getting closer to them. That’s something that I observed in myself by Looking, but which kind of behavior generalized to the rest of the population would easily get you the kind of social-web stuff Val was talking about. Also, some playing around with me intentionally adopting roles as in the Mythic Mode, and seeing how they influence my behavior and thought patterns, etc.
Yeah, this is basically how I squared it with Val’s version, too. A few other examples:
The koan thing: I haven’t really done koans, so this might be wrong, but I’d guess that the intent is something like: as you are thinking about the koan, Look at the way that your mind represents the koan and how it struggles with trying to solve the paradox; see if those representations give you any hints about the nature of the answer. (One may note that the experience which triggered my “kensho” was by itself an attempt to answer a paradox, and maybe you could formulate it as a koan, something like “what do you do when you let go of doing”, or whatever.) Certainly I’ve felt like meditation experience has given a slightly better intuition of what exactly it is that koans might be hinting at, though again, I haven’t really tried working with them.
Val also talked about Looking as a way to see the intelligent social web, which also sounds like it’s something directed at the outside not the inside. But after reading his post, I’ve spent some time paying attention to things like… what kinds of narratives and roles do people’s words and positions feel like they are taking, and does my own mind feel like it’s trying to push others into narrative-shaped boxes. The answer was yes. In particular, I started getting the feeling that some of the conflicts I’ve been having with an ex, were because we’re more intimate than friends but more distant than lovers, in a specific way that leaves my brain confused about how exactly I should behave around them; and as a result, one part of my mind has been trying to solve the issue by pushing them away and another part has been trying to solve it by getting closer to them. That’s something that I observed in myself by Looking, but which kind of behavior generalized to the rest of the population would easily get you the kind of social-web stuff Val was talking about. Also, some playing around with me intentionally adopting roles as in the Mythic Mode, and seeing how they influence my behavior and thought patterns, etc.
Yep. I feel understood.