It’s just a little bit stunning to look back and think we’re experiencing the beginning of a century—the sort of century historians talk about, with discrete events (such as covid) which historians can talk about. This should not be surprising, of course, but I think there’s a little part of me that was still thinking of things from the perspective of the early 00s, wherein it’s only possible to say anything about the shape of this century in the form of predictions. But now we’ve been through the oughts, and the teens, and we’re already partyway through the twenties.
I’ve been thinking lately about different sub-selves at different time-scales. This includes experimenting with taking on very different perspectives. Your description of the quest for enlightenment as specifically the quest to slay Moloch resonates with many of the experiences I’ve been having.
A long-latent self will wake up (meaning, specifically, a pattern of activations which I rarely use, and which therefore hasn’t been updated recently). It will look around and typically find its surroundings pretty alien. The old patterns will often lash out with some kind of big all-encompassing criticism of my current life, for example, that I’ve gotten unacceptably old and adult-like (but this varies widely; I’m giving a flavor). Another self might wake up to defend things, EG an adult persona. I might identify with one or the other more strongly, but in any case, some mental strife might ensue.
I have learned to enjoy this, because it gives me an opportunity to “fold in” more of myself. I have found that most of my mental states, however harshly they condemn each other, can agree to let explicit reason be the judge. For example, I explicitly think that it makes sense for an adult to be more adult-like than at earlier points in life. This isn’t a deep judgement about whether specific things are OK or not OK, but it is a workable provisional judgement. Meanwhile, it also makes sense to examine specific self-criticisms in more detail, to see whether they hold the seeds of improvement.
Examining my own thought-processes in this way, I have come to believe that lots and lots of mental habits use adversarial strategies. For example, when a person doesn’t want to hear about bad consequences of their plan (eg, doesn’t want to think about how the junk food is bad for them), I think there’s usually an adversarial plan-protection strategy being employed.
Why would we be so adversarial toward ourselves and others?
I think the answer is basically “your thoughts grew up in a bad neighborhood” metaphorically (and also literally in many cases, since your family and friends and teachers all use adversarial thinking strategies too, which are often out-to-get-you).
For example, plan-protecting strategies are not employed out of some kind of self-malice. It’s very reasonable: you have a plan which you currently think is good; you know that you could abandon that plan if you lose your belief in it; therefore, protect that belief.
This reasoning only makes sense if other thoughts might adversarially cut down your plans, but hey, “who doesn’t have doubts? Everyone struggles to avoid these negative cycles sometimes.”
In other words, your thoughtscape is a low-trust environment, or has been at times in the past. This leads to low-trust strategies. But low-trust strategies help to propagate the low-trust environment.
And of course, all of this happens between people as well, and the two levels interact with each other a lot.
So the approach I am taking is to try and set up a halfway reasonable internal conflict resolution system. Any feeling of mental struggle (hopefully) catches the attention of explicit reason, which then attempts to resolve it. I don’t think Explicit Reason is the only possible choice; different versions of this kind of practice could select different reasoning modes. What is important is that the chosen reasoning mode be (1) relatively well-trusted across your possible mental states, so that you’ll still happily turn to it when you’re in a pretty weird state; (2) readily accessible from a wide variety of mental states, so that you can turn to it; (3) reliable/stable in the sense of usually arriving at the same answers when asking the same question; (4) finally, actually decent at coming up with strategies to solve problems.
Obviously similar to the buddhist idea of using suffering and unsatisfactoriness as the springboard for progress.Strife practically means there is a better way which you are close to learning. This gives me some confidence in my own mental stability, as well, since I have a planned response to feelings of spiraling out of control, which has actual positive associations (and positive feelings can themselves help). Although I can’t really say whether this protects me from panic attacks or other extreme states in practice (I have only ever had one real panic attack, and it was relatively mild).
In sociopolitical terms, a court system is better than a feuding-family system; and every trial adds to the existing body of precedent, saving computational work on future decisions.
From my limited knowledge, this approach seems a bit outside of buddhist practice. I was wondering if you’d have any comments about it. For example, I’ve accused buddhists of noticing that adversarial plan-protecting strategies are rampant, and as a response, blaming the planning faculties themselves (hence the idea that you should have no goals in meditation, the idea that desire is the root of suffering, the goal of extinguishing desire, etc). I would instead blame their “poor upbringing” and try to “teach my planning mechanisms some manners” (ie, get them to stop holding the knife out front all the time, then get them to stop holding the knife behind their backs all the time, then get them to set down the knife entirely on occasion...)
It’s just a little bit stunning to look back and think we’re experiencing the beginning of a century—the sort of century historians talk about, with discrete events (such as covid) which historians can talk about. This should not be surprising, of course, but I think there’s a little part of me that was still thinking of things from the perspective of the early 00s, wherein it’s only possible to say anything about the shape of this century in the form of predictions. But now we’ve been through the oughts, and the teens, and we’re already partyway through the twenties.
I’ve been thinking lately about different sub-selves at different time-scales. This includes experimenting with taking on very different perspectives. Your description of the quest for enlightenment as specifically the quest to slay Moloch resonates with many of the experiences I’ve been having.
A long-latent self will wake up (meaning, specifically, a pattern of activations which I rarely use, and which therefore hasn’t been updated recently). It will look around and typically find its surroundings pretty alien. The old patterns will often lash out with some kind of big all-encompassing criticism of my current life, for example, that I’ve gotten unacceptably old and adult-like (but this varies widely; I’m giving a flavor). Another self might wake up to defend things, EG an adult persona. I might identify with one or the other more strongly, but in any case, some mental strife might ensue.
I have learned to enjoy this, because it gives me an opportunity to “fold in” more of myself. I have found that most of my mental states, however harshly they condemn each other, can agree to let explicit reason be the judge. For example, I explicitly think that it makes sense for an adult to be more adult-like than at earlier points in life. This isn’t a deep judgement about whether specific things are OK or not OK, but it is a workable provisional judgement. Meanwhile, it also makes sense to examine specific self-criticisms in more detail, to see whether they hold the seeds of improvement.
Examining my own thought-processes in this way, I have come to believe that lots and lots of mental habits use adversarial strategies. For example, when a person doesn’t want to hear about bad consequences of their plan (eg, doesn’t want to think about how the junk food is bad for them), I think there’s usually an adversarial plan-protection strategy being employed.
Why would we be so adversarial toward ourselves and others?
I think the answer is basically “your thoughts grew up in a bad neighborhood” metaphorically (and also literally in many cases, since your family and friends and teachers all use adversarial thinking strategies too, which are often out-to-get-you).
For example, plan-protecting strategies are not employed out of some kind of self-malice. It’s very reasonable: you have a plan which you currently think is good; you know that you could abandon that plan if you lose your belief in it; therefore, protect that belief.
This reasoning only makes sense if other thoughts might adversarially cut down your plans, but hey, “who doesn’t have doubts? Everyone struggles to avoid these negative cycles sometimes.”
In other words, your thoughtscape is a low-trust environment, or has been at times in the past. This leads to low-trust strategies. But low-trust strategies help to propagate the low-trust environment.
And of course, all of this happens between people as well, and the two levels interact with each other a lot.
So the approach I am taking is to try and set up a halfway reasonable internal conflict resolution system. Any feeling of mental struggle (hopefully) catches the attention of explicit reason, which then attempts to resolve it. I don’t think Explicit Reason is the only possible choice; different versions of this kind of practice could select different reasoning modes. What is important is that the chosen reasoning mode be (1) relatively well-trusted across your possible mental states, so that you’ll still happily turn to it when you’re in a pretty weird state; (2) readily accessible from a wide variety of mental states, so that you can turn to it; (3) reliable/stable in the sense of usually arriving at the same answers when asking the same question; (4) finally, actually decent at coming up with strategies to solve problems.
Obviously similar to the buddhist idea of using suffering and unsatisfactoriness as the springboard for progress.Strife practically means there is a better way which you are close to learning. This gives me some confidence in my own mental stability, as well, since I have a planned response to feelings of spiraling out of control, which has actual positive associations (and positive feelings can themselves help). Although I can’t really say whether this protects me from panic attacks or other extreme states in practice (I have only ever had one real panic attack, and it was relatively mild).
In sociopolitical terms, a court system is better than a feuding-family system; and every trial adds to the existing body of precedent, saving computational work on future decisions.
From my limited knowledge, this approach seems a bit outside of buddhist practice. I was wondering if you’d have any comments about it. For example, I’ve accused buddhists of noticing that adversarial plan-protecting strategies are rampant, and as a response, blaming the planning faculties themselves (hence the idea that you should have no goals in meditation, the idea that desire is the root of suffering, the goal of extinguishing desire, etc). I would instead blame their “poor upbringing” and try to “teach my planning mechanisms some manners” (ie, get them to stop holding the knife out front all the time, then get them to stop holding the knife behind their backs all the time, then get them to set down the knife entirely on occasion...)