Projection is the default and attending to something enough to actually *see* it, rather than seeing yourself projected on it, is an achievement.
I wonder if this is actually even a bigger deal than I thought — perhaps you can only recognize in others something to the extent that you've seen it in yourself: if you think you're exclusively motivated by Reasons, you'll assume others are too, etc…
There's a selection effect where you are only self-reflective when you're thinking, so you think that everything depends on thinking, but it's actually kind of like the fridge light: every time you open, the light is there, but that doesn't mean that the light is always on.
I’ve heard that in depression your fight or flight system triggers in response to sadness, and have seen people who feel overwhelmed by desiring so they must release themselves from it immediately. I wonder if we default have our wiring crossed and meditation “cleans it up”
Realizing the nature of resistance (and thus overcoming it)
Life when you're reactive:
Emotion:
Something has shifted in my experience where the whole sensory field is more “loose”, more “spacious”. Like everything together was packed together real tight but now there’s space, everything hangs together more loosely, sorta like going from solid to liquid.
An issue with meditation I never saw mentioned: it makes you suffer way less, true. But if you won’t adjust your complain threshold down proportionally then you’ll not ask for help when you really need it bc you don’t hit the threshold anymore!!
Identity is horcruxes: be mindful of where you stash ‘em.
So it turns out that if you can manage to not lose your shit and just stay with your sadness an angel will descend from the heavens to drink your tears and your sadness will "complete an arc" or "complete a process" or "move" and not be there anymore ????
We project our emotions to the world outside us and then… react to those very same projected emotions with either craving or aversion 😵💫
Discovering emotions is like discovering a dimension to experience you were hitherto wholly unaware of.
So, as it turns out, you can do various things (mostly in the form of consuming external input) to keep your "emotional throughput" the same — to make sure they are "constant", "consistent", "familiar" — OR you can drop those things and let them RIP! (Fascinatingly, to me, I do
Weird selection effect: sometimes as things get *better* there is less of something but that same contrast makes that you notice them more!
It (empirically) seems to be the case that when you intend to suppress your emotions they still come out but sideways in this twisted shardy form that is MORE painful (both for you and for everyone around you) than if you just didn't also because letting them flow transforms 'em
Often find that v many strangers start an interaction by being overly aggressive and that they double-down if you submit in any way. Rather you gotta go up to their level (but no more!) and then they treat you with respect/as an equal and calm down
When I meditate it's like I increasingly "lock" the outside "layers" so I can "play" in the "inner layers": body not moving, mind not drifting, etc. Then to "come back" I just unlock it all. Not too dissimilar from sleeping, I guess. But this has me wondering: am I default
This is how it feels to go from normal (attention focusing and fleeting in the first 3 images) to open awareness
This summer give yourself the blessing of self-love.
I'm sorry to say that in all likelihood what we think of when we think of "emotions" is mostly our (mental) resistance to feeling them.
This is what meditation does to you.
Dream, Lucid Dream
This is why you can't really tell what's going on with someone just by looking at them.
It seems to be the case that thoughts are "made" from the same "substance" they arise from
Being reactive = "The world should continuously contort itself to best fit me and my needs."
This exaggerates my experience, but it's directionally correct.
@_rad_o
Behold:
In meditation the content of thoughts doesn't matter nearly as much as the energy that's generating them.
Over time the mind becomes effortlessly and automatically tethered to the meditation object.
My experience is the former enabling the latter…
Manifesting…
Man is born into Nirvana, but everywhere he thinks himself into Samsara
Maybe a better way of expressing the same idea: how little do you need of an emotion to be present to accurately identify it?
The relationship between the light of consciousness and the unconscious in therapy vs in meditation according to Shinzen Young. (Burrowing a hole vs "lowering the consciousness waterline")
Increasingly thinking some people's concept of conflict is too broad, encompasses too much, makes insufficient distinctions.
Happy cow, unhappy cow. (It's a metaphor.)
Since lowering my reactivity there's a level of 'low' I never got back to. This means that the delta between the very best I feel and the most average is much smaller.
Going from living mostly inside your head to mostly outside your head is a very worth it, and extremely transformative, transition