👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt
with each visit you probe deeper, investigating various corners, finding new ways to access it, harness it. but eventually you hit a wall; there doesn't seem to be anything else left. it's just you in there; and then it hits you, that mb, mb that's the last thought to dispell
you continue regularly visiting the peace within the stillness, finding it easier to dispell all the clamoring thoughts, deepening the well w/ each session; you find that more of it makes it back w/ you, feeding back into your practice. you become curious about what this peace is
nothing, but that very same stillness you first found, only more pure, deeper, more peaceful than you imagined yourself capable of feeling
and when you come back out from the depths, you find some of that peace came back with you, keeping you balanced w/o any conscious efforts
you make a practice of closing your eyes, breathing, visiting this stillness regularly, as you try to understand what it is thats happening within the confines of your mind; one by one, you methodically you identity these threads & let them go, until eventually there is nothing
you discover that the stillness is much busier than you expected! that its full of bouncing thought fragments, sensations clamoring for attention, typically drowned out by your conscious narrative, but when you tune it down, they all come out to play. you're surprised & confused!
eventually you get curious about the stillness itself, not just what it can offer you, and you try probing it, shifting your awareness into its bounds; you find that it helps to close your eyes & breathe as if you were practicing asana, to get in the right headspace, so to speak
eventually you find yourself being more equanimous in the face of your daily trials, no longer as triggered by events that previously would have set you off; you notice this stillness available to you in every moment, from the boardroom to the bedroom, there for you to access
learning how to generate & access this place of stillness in your mind shows you how much control you have over your body, your perception, and your life; if this pain isn't going to kill you, mb the next won't either. over time, this leads to downregulation of reflexive response
this teacher encourages you to "breathe" space into the gap between stimulus & response, to consciously harness your breathing to change the subjective experience of the message's urgency; when you do this, it feels exactly like your mind opens up to spaciousness, room to breathe
learning how to do this is one of the primary lessons of asana, and sets the stage for the next limb, pranayama, ie the breathing practice, as it is w/ control of your breath that you gain awareness of, and power over, the autonomic processes governing your instinctual responses
my favorite yoga teacher likes to say during the more difficult asana that "pain is a message your body sends to your mind", & you can choose what to do w/ that message; react instinctively, or dismiss it, reassuring your body you know what you're doing, that you're not in danger
---
RT @michellehuang42
finally condensed some thoughts into a chart depicting one of my main learnings from my vipassana meditation practice: the ability…
https://twitter.com/michellehuang42/status/1430340537752571907
a relationship one chooses intentionally, rather than being forced into out of necessity, is fundamentally more meaningful and desirable. choosing someone is a much stronger signal of love than just being around them
---
RT @s_r_constantin
@QiaochuYuan "Civilization is the process of setting man free from men", completely unironically.
The freedom to be *alone* and the freedom to *choose* your companions are two sides of the same …
https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1430171968695947264
green pill would allow me to start an uploading business by eating brains and recreating them digitally
I'd use the massive profits to cure my inevitable kuru
only problem would be scaling and uploading myself but I'm sure we'd figure it out with time
---
RT @GarrettPetersen
Choose!
https://twitter.com/GarrettPetersen/status/1430010806050066449
this likely would need to develop organically & locally, as we lack any real society-wide cultural coordination mechanisms which haven't been co-opted by institutions
what sort of coming of age ritual would you design? how would you determine if a youth has achieved adulthood?
many forms such a coming of age ritual could take, but the essential nature of it should be one that peels back the lie-to-children narratives and open their eyes to the truth of the world, the ugly violent nature of existence, induct them into the great project of civilization
I've been thinking it would be good for us to develop a more explicit coming of age ritual/gate than simply graduating from high school, something closer to the Amish Rumspringa or vision quests. mb if every kid had to work in a factory or on a ship, the discourse would be better
the immense scale of modern supply chains is a double edged sword in how they make themselves invisible, allowing people to never think about how their goods get to them
this has the unfortunate effect of enabling naive politics to develop unquestioned
---
RT @pee_zombie
this is exactly it, for me; everywhere I go, all i see is the enormous complexity of our supply chain, the massive feat of social engineering a globalized industrial …
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1331092174071623680
such people inevitably betray their naivete when they handwave away such concerns under the guise of "people are fundamentally good but capitalism makes them bad"
this is almost worse than those who *wink wink* wouldn't want most people to die off ofc, but if it happens, oh well
many well-meaning leftists often propose radical restructurings of society and the economic system, grounded more in kumbaya-and-friendship than any real semblance of a plan for how to keep all these people alive, fed, and healthy; presumably they hope it will just work out?
the quiet part (sorry robot) is that this pattern extends to political ideologies; if ur vision for a utopian future doesn't address the mundanities of supply chains, ur either lazy, stupid, or aspiring to a Malthusian genocide of the vulnerable, which is fine, but just admit it
---
RT @eigenrobot
if you write some kind of speculative fiction and want to portray a tyranny but kind of skimp on describing its economy apart from gesturing …
https://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1430156362441396227
