Once you've peeled through the mental atmosphere of noisy noise, the mental crust of agitated grasping and recoiling (and accumulated sense of burden), and the mental mantle (heh) of fake dramatic narratives hypnotically repeated 10,000 times per day, you finally reach the core.
Not the core of truth, which is described in links at bottom, but the seat of your psychology. The glowing ember fueling whatever residual drama, agitation, and noise remain after all that spiritual practice. The charge is live, albeit weakened. And it's this:
A silent sense of indeterminate dread.
Yup, that's it. Thanks for playing. Please leave the cave in the same condition in which you found it as a courtesy to the next ascetic moving in. Let us know if you took anything from the minibar.
The human mind, being intrinsically creative (it literally lives to spin up loads of Something out of nothing, aka Rich People's Problems), won't linger in indeterminacy. So it gets to work fabricating stories to account for (and, counterproductively, amplify) the silent indeterminate dread.
Those stories are obsessively repeated (mantle!), leading to agitated grasping and recoiling and accumulated burden (crust!), and the entire structure off-gasses a dense halo of exhausting mental noise (atmosphere!). Absolutely none of this is significant or useful.
Undertaking the lifelong process of peeling it all back, diving even into the indeterminate unconscious kernel of dread, I eventually pinned down its original moment of installation. It's what I posted about a few days ago: the familiar childhood icy dread-maker "This will go on your permanent record."
That was my pellet.
Upon realizing this, my impulse was to chalk it up to new car anxiety. A child doesn't want scratches on his shiny new paint job! But after a decade of gestation, I realize that's not quite it. Rather, it's the notion that there even is a permanent record. That we're living not freely. It’s all closely gauged against some absolute yardstick. There are stakes, and - sorry we forgot to inform you - the clock is already ticking.
Playfulness is a childhood indulgence, kid! Grow up and start stockpiling stress and building out the above-described mental structure! We're not roaming. We're in lanes, vaguely delineated, and crossing a line will bring vague, undefined consequences. Do not trust your instincts! Even if you're innately kind, well-intentioned, bright and doing cool stuff, that's nowhere near good enough! It's not only insufficient, it's existentially insufficient.
The notion of a "permanent record" would never occur to a child, because it's false. It's absurd. It's a neurotic grown-up construct....but, alas, kids buy into it. The moment they hear this, it all flips, and they're fucked. They're on their way to building out a drearily exhausting and comically unnecessary mental planetary layer cake.
Yes, I realize not all kids hear that specific phrase, and not all who hear it are traumatized. But some similar virus eventually infects them from the dysfunctional adult world, implanting an enduring kernel of silent indeterminate dread. I'm not trying to account for all instances here. This isn't one of my ambitious grand integration theories. But it’s enough to provoke thought and consideration, and to justify your monthly subscription cost.
To finally come around to my point, there's a concept coming into vogue called "false urgency". I think it points at the same thing, but without all the layers of context I've had to laboriously machete my way through. Here are a couple of links to get you started in case you're curious:
Where Have You Created False Urgency?
Important and Urgent
I don't find either particularly insightful, but your mileage may vary. I think there's a category error in ignoring the cognitive layers and assuming this to be just another mental process. I believe it's far deeper. Dread/"false urgency" is tectonic; underpinning all the rest. Maybe not in all cases, but in many, and certainly in mine.
The guy pushing this, Shawn Blanc (an interesting fellow who's done lots of cool things for Mac computing), seems to be drawing other conclusions similar to mine, but in a much more stripped-down way. For instance, compare my 1600 word posting "Resting is Not Real" to his 102 word posting "Counterfeit Rest vs True Rest". I think/hope I offer nutrition along with the greater length (and fwiw I only came across that posting of his just now, while browsing his backlog), but it's good to see someone navigating similar waters with a different approach.
But in terms of his Focus Academy thingee, please don't take a course to learn to reframe. Just reframe. Knowledge requires arduous learning, while reframing is a genie blink (more). A smartphone feature you forgot you possessed.
As noted, the above wasn't an account of spirituality. It's using spiritual framing to spelunk human psychology. People normally view spirituality through a lens of psychology, but this went the other way.
The following links turn the telescope back around to contemplate who we are rather than how we think (sorry, Descartes, but they're different things):
Spirituality in 33 Words
An Epistemological Dialog on Awakening
All posts on spirituality
All Posts on Karma Yoga (here's an explanation of what that is, and here's what karma is).
The notion of a "permanent record" would never occur to a child, because it's false. It's absurd. It's a neurotic grown-up construct....but, alas, kids buy into it. The moment they hear this, it all flips, and they're fucked. They're on their way to building out a drearily exhausting and comically unnecessary mental planetary layer cake.
Yes, I realize not all kids hear that specific phrase, and not all who hear it are traumatized. But some similar virus eventually infects them from the dysfunctional adult world, implanting an enduring kernel of silent indeterminate dread. I'm not trying to account for all instances here. This isn't one of my ambitious grand integration theories. But it’s enough to provoke thought and consideration, and to justify your monthly subscription cost.
To finally come around to my point, there's a concept coming into vogue called "false urgency". I think it points at the same thing, but without all the layers of context I've had to laboriously machete my way through. Here are a couple of links to get you started in case you're curious:
Where Have You Created False Urgency?
Important and Urgent
I don't find either particularly insightful, but your mileage may vary. I think there's a category error in ignoring the cognitive layers and assuming this to be just another mental process. I believe it's far deeper. Dread/"false urgency" is tectonic; underpinning all the rest. Maybe not in all cases, but in many, and certainly in mine.
The guy pushing this, Shawn Blanc (an interesting fellow who's done lots of cool things for Mac computing), seems to be drawing other conclusions similar to mine, but in a much more stripped-down way. For instance, compare my 1600 word posting "Resting is Not Real" to his 102 word posting "Counterfeit Rest vs True Rest". I think/hope I offer nutrition along with the greater length (and fwiw I only came across that posting of his just now, while browsing his backlog), but it's good to see someone navigating similar waters with a different approach.
But in terms of his Focus Academy thingee, please don't take a course to learn to reframe. Just reframe. Knowledge requires arduous learning, while reframing is a genie blink (more). A smartphone feature you forgot you possessed.
As noted, the above wasn't an account of spirituality. It's using spiritual framing to spelunk human psychology. People normally view spirituality through a lens of psychology, but this went the other way.
The following links turn the telescope back around to contemplate who we are rather than how we think (sorry, Descartes, but they're different things):
Spirituality in 33 Words
An Epistemological Dialog on Awakening
All posts on spirituality
All Posts on Karma Yoga (here's an explanation of what that is, and here's what karma is).
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