ardacigin

After developing some introspective awareness with body awareness and breath practices I've detailed in my previous posts, you will eventually come across a point in your practice where body awareness - filled with distinct moving, changing or stable sensations - starts to get in the way of your spiritual development. 'Getting in the way' means you are better of exploring the less solid aspects of the body after a certain point of practice. This is the exact point where the pacification of the sensory systems of your brain is the key to progress as outlined in Culadasa's book 'The Mind Illuminated'. Pacification of the Senses: From Bodily Sensations to Physical Pliancy Pacification of the senses comes from consistently ignoring normal sensory information presented in awareness. This is NOT the same as suppression. Ignoring sensations simply mean focusing your attention on the meditation object BUT not boosting body awareness as a natural part of your practice. Allowing attention to exclusively attend to the breath sensations at the tip of the nose and nothing else. Eventually, the sensory sub-minds (which include aches, pains, pleasures, sense of weight etc) stop projecting that content into consciousness at all. This is similar to 3rd jhana/ 4rth jhana, but it also delves deeper into the unconscious recesses of your psyche due to unification of mind. When this happens, it means the sensory sub-minds are unified around a common intention not to interrupt the focus of attention to the breath, resulting in complete pacification, effortlessness and physical pliancy. --- Once the bodily senses are fully pacified, there will be a dramatic change during meditation in how you experience ordinary bodily sensations, proprioception, and the mental image you have of your body. Before pacification, when meditating, we’re usually quite aware of many tactile and other bodily sensations: pain in muscles and joints, burning and pressure where our body touches the cushion, temperature sensations, and pressure and touch where body parts contact each other or our clothing. However, when the senses are completely pacified and physical pliancy arises, we cease to be aware of all these sensations. Instead you may feel as though your body is completely empty inside—that there is nothing more than a thin membrane or shell at the surface of your body, from which all sensations have disappeared. You’ll have little more than a vague awareness of your body occupying space. This corresponds to when attention stabilizes effortlessly for long periods of time to the breath at the tip of the nose. Pacification of the senses will reinforce effortlessness. ---- Short version: After enough body awareness and introspective awareness develop, ignore all bodily sensations and exclusively focus on the breath sensations to pacify senses. Why Is This Important? Eventually, you will have to do longer sits to delve deep into certain insights or start insight practices. You can't do that without physical and mental pliancy. You've heard about a yogi who can sit for 4 hour SDS with ease. Well, they are not using some magic trick. They are also not brute-forcing a smile in a state of resistance. They've completely pacified sensory sub-minds and unified the mind. One of the effective ways of doing that is explained in this post and my prior techniques. Physical pliancy and meditative joy come quickly and easily for some, but slowly and arduously for others. Physiology and genetics may play a role, as do differences in temperament and psychological disposition. If you are an entrepreneurial go-getter type of individual, the process will be more torturous and harder than someone who is laid back and chill but also firm when it comes to following instructions. Physical, mental, and emotional health are also factors, which can be addressed through diet, exercise, good work and recreation habits, and appropriate therapy, if necessary. However, the biggest obstacles are often the hindrances of aversion and agitation due to worry and remorse. How we condition our mind on a daily basis has a powerful influence over these hindrances, and practices that purify the mind can be extremely helpful. -- Much love, Arda

@Leo Gura As you are doing contemplation and observation at the peak of the 5 Meo session, your perception, at its core, can not fully shake off the following assumptions: (everyone's default unconscious worldview). These are the foundation of all your motivations, beliefs and actions. 1- I'm a separate entity, a Self, in a world of other entities. 2- My emotional states - happiness and suffering - depend intimately on the interactions between myself and the other entities/objects/environments. 3- As a self, I rely on my manipulation and survival skills to influence these interactions to satisfy my cravings in the hopes of satisfaction where my happiness will be maximized and suffering will be minimized. --- All 3 of these assumptions are false delusions of the mind. As you investigate reality at the peak of a psychedelic session, you might think that this worldview is completely broken and fully integrated by all unconscious sub-minds to re-organize their worldviews. The problem is that only %5 of mind system is 'online' so to speak to receive the insights and integrate them. The rest 95% is still completely oblivious to whatever wisdom that arises in a psychedelic session. That's why no actual stickiness overlaps to your life when afterglow ends. The same 3 assumptions above continue to pervade your life, perceptions and understanding of life. Then you focus on a memory trace, a feeling of the peak 5 meo state to remember these insights, thinking they actually transform you. These assumptions are not going to revise themselves by spending the rest 99% of your life in unconsciousness. There lies the problem with the 'mainly psychedelic user, little to no meditation' style of spirituality. And there are many other assumptions and contemplation points you need to work on after dealing with these.

I'm seeing a common pattern in all spiritual students these days (which includes most of my students). 'I've done lots of psychedelics. I have been meditating for a few years with relative consistency. I do have solid experiential glimpses of some of the insights spiritual teachers talk about. But I feel like no progress has been made 99% of any given day. No access to clear understanding and truth. My normal state of consciousness even after meditating is extremely poor. I don't know what to do and I'm starting to get sick of this perpetual cycle my mind dwells in.' First of all, let's get the essential ingredient out of the way. If you are working with wrong intentions, techniques and can't execute them exactly as the instructions ask you to, then you won't get anywhere even after 40 years of meditation. Make sure you get this right. It is the first step. But let's assume you do understand the instructions and know what exact skills you are developing and aiming for; so now what? The understanding of how the process of meditation unfolds - having some baseline skills - by itself, won't result in deep transformation. Potential for backsliding exists in each moment without permanent awakening. It is definitely a challenging aspect of this journey and you should smell the roses if you arrive at 'I can finally do this meditation thing. It actually unveils the illusions of my mind' but once that is circumvented, you need to actually do HOURS of high-level meditation back to back to consolidate insights, strengthen awareness and integrate the truth to each and every activity you enjoy doing. Absolute understanding will already integrate and consolidate the spiritual insights into daily life. But that process requires some nudging in the right directions via cultivation of healthy mental habits: The reduction of craving and self-perception. Also, contemplation will be needed in the future for further exploration. To do that, you cant 'half-ass' the training. Only after 4-8 hours straight high level practice daily will you start moving the needle and creating some inertia. ---- I'm a fairly laid-back guy and maybe some of the instructions I give may appear too 'rigid' or 'disciplined'. That is because to get any of the benefits of this path, you need to apply yourself. But you need to do this process with a smile on your face. After developing the baseline skills, you will have EXTREMELY high levels of motivation to meditate in each moment, in each activity. In fact, you'll sacrifice time you'd prefer indulging in your most enjoyable hobby to meditate more and enhance consciousness. After arriving at that pioint, keep riding the momentum and practice HOURS back to back each day. Go deeper and resist the temptation to rest on your accomplishments. You'll be glad you did. Hope this motivates some of you who are stuck in a rut. Maybe more attention to detail must be given by teachers letting students know how much they are missing out on by dwelling in 'normal' states of consciousness distorted by countless mental illusions. Much love, Arda

This is not only highly unlikely but filled with potential misunderstandings for anyone who is on the spiritual path. If you are trying to advocate for 'effortlessness' of practice, this is not the right way to do it. I hope you understand 'letting life flow and stopping this meditation business' is basically 99% self-deception for all meditators. Your life continues as before and huge backsliding occurs very quickly. Your self-perception is almost always maintained. And since you no longer have a spiritual practice, you can never hope to integrate insights to any significant level.

All enlightened people (who've tried them) needs to give some credit to the usefulness of psychedelics. Downplaying it too much from an insight perspective is not a good idea. But there are many people who drop their 'sober' practice thinking psychedelics are end-all be-all. They get allured by the insight-peak experience combo which arises in many sessions. You basically need a way to consolidate these insights. Work on them. Chew at them. Get a deeper grasp on them that buries each insight into all aspects of your life. Depth doesn't go vertically only. It also goes horizontally. In this sense, Peter's words are wise and should be listened to by all psychedelic users.

Great way to put it. As a meditator, your job is to see even when you form and hold intentions, there is no do-er and 'you' were always getting in the way of this elusive 'effortlessness'. That understanding, however, requires deep introspective awareness + insight into no self which is why you are meditating to develop these skills. So don't just sit on the cushion, rationalizing 'do nothing' thinking it is helping you going deep. More likely, for most people, it can be a waste of time unless you understand what I've written above intuitively.

On top of this, I see crazy levels of benefit in Shinzen's visual field techniques you can utilize in daily life. In Culadasa's term, he is stabilizing attention on the visual field (or letting it move around) while developing introspective awareness of sensations and mental states. The exact skills you need to maintain mindfulness in daily life. Even when the attention constantly moves around in daily life; that introspective of awareness of sensations and feelings are maintained and tied into the understanding of no-self, impermanence and suffering. This transformation is slowly but surely understood. Getting a little taste of all 3 characteristics while eyes open in the world absolutely transforms many assumptions and starts a new tier of spiritual development. So regardless of skill, doing almost any visual field technique is extremely important. Especially for us westerners who don't spend 12 hours eyes closed to develop introspective awareness.

@JonasVE12 Let's not fully blur the lines between 'egoic forceful trying with desire and aversion' to 'setting and holding intentions with your mind' which is how you actually improve in meditation and create a good balance of concentration and awareness. Letting go strategy helps you to see that there is no do-er. It is advanced. Prior to such awareness developing, nudging your mind to stabilize attention and expanding awareness is the first step. And such a practice will allow the OP to improve his practice tangibly. In fact, right after this, going for self enquiry will extremely fruitful and is my key recommendation for people at that stage. Letting go of 'effort' develops that understanding. But not right now when the meditator doesn't even have proper full body awareness, understanding of mind and some level of inner joy and pleasure.

Well, let me rephrase everything that any psychedelic user can relate to: 'Imagine experiencing LSD for the rest of your life on demand' That LSD turns into DMT and then 5meoDMT as decades go by with continuous practice. You have no understanding of what you are missing out on by not taking meditation seriously.

The bitter truth is that mind and brain is such a complicated system is that their deep transformation requires mindfulness + emotional training + purification + sustained positive feedback loops + holding of clear intentions etc. Now you can try to do all of this process in 30 mins sit daily but that is not realistic when the rest 23 hours of the day is spent in pure unconsciousness of the truth. To make this process work, you commit to hours of deep meditation back to back and actually ENJOY the process of doing so. See, I think we need to step back a bit. People misunderstood the starting point of this article. You can't decide to meditate 4-5 hours both informal and formal continuously in any given day when each time you sit to meditate, your mind feels bored, resistant and unable to figure out how to actually be more conscious aka the natural state of all beginning meditators. The initial challenge is to develop enough consciousness in short bursts of training (30 mins - 1 hour), training attention and awareness to work harmonically, strengthening the ability to stay present and to know the states of the mind (frustration, boredom, joy) and to take correct mental actions with clear intentions to disrupt this habitual cycle. This simple process I've described above is already insane levels of training to your mind, strengthening conscious energy and power even if for mere 15 mins to do continuously. The problem is that you want to do that, but you simply don't have the skills yet to do it. Once your meditations arrive at this quality, you'll have an intuitive feeling along the lines of: 'Wow! Meditation is EXTREMELY healthy for my consciousness. It actually allows me to see consciousness for what it is, reducing self-perception at a greater level each sit. Literally truth is slowly unveiling in each moment at a deeper level. Im also suffering A LOT less and experiencing a LOT more joy and pleasure.' Then you spend some time doing your favourite activities with normal habitual forces (without mindfulness) and then introspect: 'My life is just incomparably better with mindfulness. What the hell was I doing? The obsessive quality of the mind is such a clear roadblock. It is better to integrate more of my formal session quality to cooking, jerking off and watching tv shows' That is where continuous multiple hours a day practice (both formal and informal) will get you to the next tier of development. You can have the same realization as a complete beginner but that won't take hold and signal enough parts of your complicated mind to change your perceptions and attitudes regarding meditation. You will want to love meditation but 95% of your other sub-minds won't be convinced. See, there is no actual alternative here. The alternative is spinning your wheels for 20 years, half assing meditation and literally having close to nothing at the end of those 20 years. Whatever emotional trauma you fear you need to face while committing this training (going on a retreat, disciplining yourself etc) is nothing compared to potentially lost 20 years you could utilize being more conscious of the truth. After a while, zero disciplining of any kind will be necessary. Your mind wont even process information like you used to. Absolute effortlessness will pervade each moment but until then, the so called 'self help' discipline will help you push through certain resistances until they don't. Thats when you make the switch to other methods that are useful and just keep on going. See, this process is fun. Your mind currently struggles so much with 'What the hell should I do in meditation' that you suck out all aspects of interest, joy and curiousity of the training that only pure torture is left. A feeling that your own mind generates and gets in the way of its progress, making the training 100x harder.

Informal daily practice included in 8 hours. Ideally, you need to meditate continuously from waking up to going to bed.

@Striving for more I suggest viewing meditation as something you could have been doing as you were writing this post. An operating system that will enhance all future moments. With that attitude, your desire to get pragmatic results in 6 months max will dissolve into 'How can I practice each moment to develop the necessary skills and ACTUALLY enjoy my life?' With that intention, your spiritual training will begin on a healthier foundation.

Equanimity is absolutely essential. The way you develop is through both samatha and insight techniques. They develop equanimity in different ways. Samatha trains the mind to generate and sustain pleasant sense percepts, get into flow states and strengthen concentration + awareness. Insight allows for the deepest recesses of the psyche to reprogram itself based on no-self, impermanence, emptiness, causal interdependence and non-craving. The result is ever-increasing depth and breadth of equanimity.

In this post, I'm going to help you figure out why the moment-to-moment experience of your daily life, activities and behaviors have seen no improvements or changes after years of meditation. Then I'll provide you with a technique you can practice in formal sessions and bring it to daily life. This transformation requires deliberate daily practice and effort. You won't find much value here if you are looking for magic tricks. ---- Contrary to common understanding, meditation is not actually about cultivating exclusive attention (concentration) to a particular object. That is one aspect of the practice you can do for the development of certain skills. That's it. A more central part of meditation is the development of metacognitive awareness, equanimity, joy and their sub-skill - whole body awareness. We'll focus on these aspects and try to spread the concentration muscle to the whole body with breath sensations. But before we get to that, we need to understand why this is important. Ask most meditators and they will mostly tell you that it is about generating focus to a particular object. Rather than approaching the practice from a narrowing of attention, let's start with a more solid foundation. As you contract attention to an object in daily life, it collapses awareness of everything else. When you are watching Game of Thrones, the unconscious mind system doesn't see much value in projecting the sensations of the couch and the feeling of hedonic comfort that currently lies in your posture. It bypasses and filters all that information to make your life simpler. It is easier to focus on Game of Thrones that way. Well, it looks that way at least. See, regardless of whether you naturally filter these sensations or not, the unconscious mind needs to project something to the conscious awareness. Unless you are mindful in the process, what you are going to experience will be annoyance, boredom, striving, grasping and discontent. All of these mental reactions have a deeper source you can completely yank out after years of practice BUT first, you need to develop the skills which will enable you to do that. Our default option was to bypass and filter as much information unrelated to the task at hand. Well, let's practice not doing that and allow more sensory information to be generated in the entirety of mind and body. Instead of collapsing awareness with concentration, let's strengthen it. ---- Experiencing the Whole Body with the Breath: Very-Lite Jhana System It’s possible to become an advanced meditator by just focusing over and over on the breath at the nose and ignoring subtle distractions until they fade away, but that can take a very long time. Learning to enhance awareness each time it collapses can be a torturous process. Experiencing the whole body with the breath is a faster and more enjoyable method that makes it much easier to completely ignore distractions. This practice involves clearly defining then gradually expanding the scope of your attention until it includes sensations related to breath throughout the entire body all at once. Make sure that you are not dealing with lots of sleepiness or dullness prior to engaging in this practice. Try to remain as alert as possible. Fortunately, this process will enhance energy levels and develop conscious power in the long term. The method itself builds on the body-scanning practice you learned in Stage 5 in Culadasa's book 'The Mind Illuminated'. 1- Just as with the body scan, you first direct your attention to the breath at the abdomen. Then, making sure that peripheral awareness of the breath at the abdomen doesn’t fade, you shift your attention to a particular body part, such as your hand. Define your scope of attention to include that area only. Then further refine your scope to include only the breath sensations in the hand. Ignore all other sensations by excluding them completely from attention, but let them remain in peripheral awareness. Next, move to another body part, perhaps the forearm, and do the same thing. Each moment of attention should include a very strong intention to focus clearly on breath-related sensations and to exclude everything else. What is important in this process is to enhance awareness of hedonic feelings. Even if you focus on breath sensations in a particular location, that will either feel pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. There is no other option. So, let's add a flair of vibrancy, joy and pleasure to the process. 2- As you experience (and generate) changing and flickering sensations to various parts of your body, smile physically and try to experience the exact same sensations as more pleasurable and exciting. You don't want dryness to pervade your mind and body. Serene, changing and pleasurable breath related sensations are starting to be experiened in arms, legs, forearms,head. In each in-breath and our-breath. 3- You are not constricting attention to the breath at the nose just yet. Keep the awareness open and after you are comfortable with this process, try to feel changing and pleasant sensations in the whole body. Not in particular locations. Feel it more holistic as the awareness and pleasantness spreads to the whole body along with clear changing sensations in various parts of the body. You will lose some of the resolution power from before but this time the object is the entire mind and whole body. This process is going to train conscious power to the next tier of strength. 4- Finally, bring the attention to the breath at the tip of the bose WHILE continuing to experience the whole body, pleasure and changing sensations in various parts of the body. Now you are also investigating in-breath and out-breath while step 3 activates at full force. This will add another layer of training for your conscious power circuits. Make sure you don't lose joyfulness, pleasure, relaxed ease and happiness in any of instructions. Awareness of mental states is a key part of mindfulness and can't be discarded. When feelings of annoyance, impatience etc arises, re-generate some ease with smiling and relaxation of tense muscles. --- Do this practice everyday in formal sessions. But how am I going to bring it to my actual life? You are going to intend to bring this whole body open awareness while watching Game of Thrones, playing the piano, and eating. When you fail and get obsessively focused on an activity, strengthen the whole body awareness again and re-train your mind to maintain it while doing these activities. In all activities, this awareness can be practiced. There are no exceptions apart from sleep states. Whenever you feel things are so hard and require so much effort, just remember the ease and pleasure in whole body awareness and try to replicate that mental state again as you are washing the dishes. ---- Hope this helps. I suggest doing this system of training for 30-60 days straight. With many hours of formal and informal deliberate practice per day. (2-6 hours) Then the results will speak for themselves. Much love, Arda

Here are my thoughts. I've just seen this person here and watched a few more of her videos to understand her better. Some of her realizations are legit. Her self view seems to have significantly dropped. Which is the most critical insight for the 1st stage of awakening. If she is not a stream-enterer already, she is almost there. The key issue seems to be lack of practice, too much craving and obviously her traumatic reactions to spiritual truths. She seems better adjusted and integrated certain things in her later videos. Depersonalization has significant overlap with stream entry. If the mind doesnt recoil with trauma and maintains some sort of spiritual practice, stream entry is right around the corner.

Piti is important but not required. In samatha vipassana style of training, piti is how the mind slowly releases its tension, develops some pleasure, joy and as a consequence, equanimity.

@_Archangel_ Hi there, You can easily have these persistent piti sensations (energy, movement, flickering sensations) along with some level of pleasure and joy in any stage of the practice. But that doesn't mean you are stage 8+ for example. Definitely use the open awareness, pleasure, joy and piti to strengthen mindfulness. Make sure breath attention doesnt chip away at your pleasure, piti or anythin else. Keep peripheral awareness at MAX for whole body while stabilizing attention. Gross distractions will get eliminated after your awareness develops further. Dullness is an habitual issue that will also resolve itself when more conscious power is available to the mind. Body awareness is key. Dullness means your awareness collapses. Do the technique I've described here. It will help you. It is a stage 6 technique but still, practice it with clear intentions and a joyous attitude.

I've just written a post that attempts to answer some of your questions in detail. Hope it is helpful

Great to hear again from you, Ethan Your absence was felt. Amazing schedule. Sounds like you are having progress. I'm also covering some new ground. I'll share it soon with the forum. Keep it up and let us know how things are going.

Deep and systematic chess mechanics are valuable to understand for survival and spiritual integration. If you are a chess player like me, then you'll enjoy this analysis a lot more. The last few weeks, I've been analyzing and playing chess at a deeper level than I've ever done in my entire life. Not only it has improved my game but it also transformed how I view inter-personal relationships, circumstances and how spirituality fits into the messy play that is survival. The Core Principles of Chess #1 - Understand The Opponent's Weaknesses & Potential Lines of Attack If you think you can ace the game of life by playing the same 'We are all one and it is all love' move at every opportunity, then you'll struggle finding appropriate answers to complicated problems life inevitably throws your way. How do you exactly deal with a narcissist when it is so close to you that you can't run away? A spiritual variant may suggest turning the other cheek. Well, that strategy has its pros and cons. If done with repetition, it is a potential weakness for habitual abuse from the narcisst. If you constantly get into feverish arguments, then it will produce craving and chip away at your own conscious power which might be invaluable for the next line of insult the opponent has prepared for you. In daily life, we are constantly confronted with direct personal attacks, open weaknesses one could potentially undermine in the face of these threats and normal-looking circumstances that require some level of manipulation for better survival odds. Spiritual integration to this principle is really tricky and requires elegance. In chess, the main intuitive strategy is to make sure you are directly or indirectly attack and increase threats to opponent's soldiers while minimizing weaknesses from your own soldiers and positional structure. Beginner chess players are not only terrible at seeing weak pawn structures and pin-fork opportunities, but also leave undefended pawns and soldiers constantly. Whenever someone insults you in an argument in a personal way, just like in chess, multiple answers are technically viable. You can methodically answer in a spiritual or egoic paradigm. Let's look at how these methods differ into completely unique variants within themselves based purely on context. Sometimes showing your teeth and being confrontational (which appears unspiritual initially) can be the most appropriate and effective strategy. It all depends on how finely you execute the response and how its potential consequences are formed by the opponent's circumstances. Sometimes, it is much better to be gentle but coy which directs the unconscious more effectively in certain circumstances. This dynamic brings us to the next principle. #2 - Understand How Deeply Attacks and Defenses are Formed Within Contextual Relationships Having a tough talk with your child after he abuses alcohol to run away from his problems might have a more beneficial effect when he is confronted with a similar circumstance as an adult. That is what is called a direct response. You directly address the problem at hand. You do something about it. However, this approach generates multiple new problems you need to address immediately. First of all, direct responses are always the most obvious and easy to counter moves. Your child usually knows that you won't be too happy about his alcohol problem. He knows that you will try to attack him personally and give him a long and boring lecture about the dangers of alcohol. He has an automatic defense mechanism for such attacks: 'My father never quite understands why I drink alcohol. He doesn't use it so he has no idea how transformative it can be in social circumstances and how it helps me to reduce my social anxiety.' In chess, unless you address the core reason why the opponent does what is does, you'll always take a beating. As a father, you need to show your child that you CAN use alcohol. It is a not poison, per se on judicial use. But its potential for addiction is high especially when you are using to reduce your social anxiety which helps when you are picking up chicks. If this intention is formed towards the child and if you can show an alternative coping method that he can potentially pursue, then you will break all the defenses and create a deeper connection. All of a sudden, the 'opponent' you had to work against starts to become an ally you can work with. Sometimes leaving any attack completely unanswered immediately reduces its potency. Sometimes a response is warranted but its sheer subtleness might be enough to dispel the opponent's main strategy. Just because Knight is threatening to take your Queen doesn't mean you need to passively defend and make a move with your Queen. Look for potential counter attacks. If the King is in a vulnurable position, go for a check. If the opponents Queen is out in the open, threaten it! Passive defense is usually never used in master levels of chess. And there is a good reason for that. As a chess master, your mind focuses on potential defenses that not only defends your soldiers and positions but also generates some level of threat in the same 1 move. In fact, that is how Queen sacrifices are a thing. You lose the battle but win the war. What to do in what circumstance and seeing the unique variants of attack and defense is crucial for a healthy egoic structure on the spiritual path. #3 Lose Battles for Better Positional Advantages One of the best examples of this principle is Henry Atkins' incredible game with Jacobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIk020EyO_4 Give it a look and come back to read again. From a purely mathematical and computer sense, the more able soldiers you have on the battlefield, the more potential attacks you can make and better defend your weaknesses. However, this is merely a generalization. In chess, you win the game by check-mating the opponent's King. The King is not a strong soldier. It can only move in 1 square diagonally and horizontally. Also, the moment it is attacked by threats, it needs to move on a safer plane. Since the King has a predictable moving pattern, you can sacrifice some of your lightweight soldiers (Pawns) to better develop your remaining soldiers (Queen, Knigt, Rook and Bishop) for what is called Positional Advantages. You can exert pressure on The King's movement patterns or its defending pawns which is usually enough to crumble the opponent's lines of attack. When the opponent is holding out for dear life with a well-established defense, you do an all-out attack to exert more pressure. Purely mathematically speaking, you are losing. The computer tells you that there are too many soldier sacrifices for any useful line of attack. But depending on how synergy is sustained with these remaining soldiers, there can be virtually no defense after some point in the game. Understand that in life, making certain sacrifices are necessary to obtain certain rewards. The causes and conditions unfold in an exponential and unpredictable manner. By seeing the bigger picture and making strategic sacrifices, you can gather goodies and advantages that are seemingly impossible from the average Joe's worldview. Understand that impulsive intentions are not always the best strategic move. It all depends on whether the sacrifice will be worth it in the long run. Meditating 1 hour a day is certainly a sacrifice. But its potential reward if applied with diligence is higher than most other time commitments you have. ----- Try to view life from these chess principles. Your understanding of how it applies directly to your own life will be enhanced. Don't just play it to have fun. First have fun and then see its deeper systemic principles. What are your thoughts Much love, Arda

I've been meditating for about 6-7 years. I have tangible and significant benefits from it. I suggest reading Culadasa's book 'The Mind Illuminated'. I also suggest cultivating happiness and joy at every opportunity. After getting some proficiency in TMI book, try to practice jhanas. I understand how hopelessness can arise when no perceptible change happens when you are years into meditation. Instead of thinking meditation as another chore you have to do, think of it as a practice that will enhance ALL aspects of your life and hobbies and reduce your resistance to external events. If that is not occuring in the big picture, go back to the drawing board and modify your techniques. Then continue practicing with resolve every day!

These are my notes on Bio-Emotive Framework which is pioneered by Doug Tataryn. I'll be adding a lot of my own teachings and techniques. This is a highly advanced shadow work practice that I recommend to people who are in intermediate-advanced levels of spiritual training. A beginner meditator has little to no tools to understand and contact the processes required to do bio-emotive work. The Essence of Bio-Emotive Training: 1- Any intense, inter-personal encounter that is not fully experienced and expressed in 3 modalities - emotional, intellectual, experiential - will become a part of your sense of self and core worldview, instead of something that unfolds in consciousness or something that happens to you. --- Alexithymia means 'no word for emotions', a dysfunction where individuals who suffer are unable to experience and express their emotions (both intellectually and spiritually). Mr. Spock or Data from Star Trek would be considered a good example of a person with alexithymia. Psychologists and researchers of alexithymia estimate that just under 10% of the general population suffers from alexithymia. Alexithymia is highly correlated with many mental health conditions and also co-occurs with a number physical health conditions. ---- Let's be frank here. All of us, to various degrees, are suffering from alexithymia. Try this: Next time you are talking to someone who is upset by something, ask them (assuming you have a close enough relationship) how they are feeling. Most people will talk all about the event, who did what, who said what, how mad they are, etc. 'She did this, She said that. Then she went to bring up that event from the past, that got me really triggered and then I said...' etc If they do get past just describing the behavioural details of the event, most people tend to use words from one of these three categories: General Activation Words: e.g. Upset, distressed, frustrated, anxious, mad, etc Cognitive Counterparts: e.g. Confused, worried, concerned, etc Behavioural Metaphors: e.g. Pissed off, trapped, heavy, feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, etc None of these perceptions and techniques are productive or effective in the following recovery process. ---- How to do Bio-Emotive Practice: 1- The Emotional Examination Seldom will people use feeling words, like “I feel rejected”, or “used”, or “inadequate”, etc to describe how they are feeling about the interpersonal relationships or events that happen to them in life. - First of all, you examine the sentence or the idea that rattled your psyche to generate fear, sadness, anger etc. to the situation and then describe your emotional knee-jerk reaction as accurately as possible. This is usually said by another person or it can be your own ideas rising up from the unconscious mind. Let's say somebody told this to you in this in an argument - 'You might think you are better but you are actually a useless arrogant selfish fuck!' The emotional reaction in the intellectual form: 'I felt inadequate and hurt with anger and tints of sadness'. - To do this properly, examine multiple traces of your past experiences and childhood which imprinted 'an emotional impression' to your mind where your worldview and perception were significantly altered. Ex. Someone with a perfectionist attitude needs to examine his childhood where his elementary teacher said 'You can do much better than that' to his painting where that response has generated a shift in self-perception and dissolved into causes and conditions where the OCD and perfectionist dysfunction was slowly formed in the next 10 years. Then go deeper into the emotion and make sure no other key-emotion rests at the core of it. Then make the sub-emotions as clear as possible. For example, you can do the identification of core and sub emotions in the following way: Core emotion: The feeling of sadness where I feel powerless and insignificant. I feel that nobody pays attention to what I say or do! Sub-emotions: Anger and rage whenever someone doesn't listen to what I say or command me to do something in an authoritarian way. After this initial imprint of idea and emotion is clearly seen through your past experiences and after you poinpoint the core emotion, the energetic and emotional pull of the trauma is reduced and the emotional mind is experienced more fully. (But not completely, yet!) --- This is merely a healthy emotional integration of the event. We still need to address 2 more modalities of conscious processing to complete the bio-emotive training - Intellectual and Experiential. 2- The Intellectual Examination: The intellectual expression involves 2 steps: 1- External: Your forming of words, intentions and relationship with this person regarding the event that happened. If possible, you talk with this person. How well can you express the true emotions you've felt to this person without activating emotions constantly. 2- Internal: Your systematic and contextual understanding of the causes and conditions that lead to the argument or event with this person. This includes: - Why this debate and argument came about and in what environmental conditions. - How you've used your mind and emotions to interpret this person's words and actions. How this mental state and perception directly influenced your reactions and response. - How you've viewed other person's mental state, emotions and thoughts at the time. How they really felt and thought after the fact. The most important: - To what degree have you been able to COMPLETELY let go of your own worldview and conditioning which allows you to completely see the perspective of the other person? If not, it is time to do this entire mindful review and intellectual analysis to make it really clear why you and this person felt the way they felt and said the words they said. 3- The Experiential and Spiritual Examination: The spiritual examination has 2 key components to it. 1- The Complete Experience of The Emotion: In meditation, stop 'down-regulating' negative emotions with joy and happiness (which arises as a result of your continued practice) and allow mental states of sadness, anger, fear and anxiety to express themselves fully pertaining to the event that disturbs you. All forms of conceptual analysis regarding the event are put to rest. We have already allowed ourselves to do that with the intellectual examination above. This will be a purely emotional observation. Give yourself the space to feel the negative sensations pertaining to your core emotions above. In meditation, allow yourself to feel the dukkha and suffering of wanting things to be different than what they are and find the dissatisfaction regarding the event. Remember the event, visualize it briefly and come back to pure emotional feel space. - How do feelings and sensations arise in my body? - Are they stable or moving? Permanent or Impermanent? - What location do the feeling expresses itself and what emotions arise in my mind? - Chest? Stomach? Legs? Head? - Anger, Sadness, Anxiety, Fear ? - What sort of texture the discomfortable sensation arise with? - Pressure, smoky blurry myst, heaviness, blocky discomfort? Try to have as much equanimity with sensations as possible and allow each aspect of the experience to fully express themselves. 2- The Insight Perspective: Focus on 3 characteristics of the experience above: 1- Impermanence: If the sensations are stable looking, encourage yourself to see more of the arising and passing away of micro sensations and 'movingness' of sensations as a whole. 2- Craving: Realize that your suffering and dissatisfaction come about due to wanting things to be different than what they are on a momentary basis. Try to open up to each moment of experience and accept it without wanting it to change. 3- The Sense of Self: Realize that the self-narrative is your own making. Also, try to see there is no seer or observer to these negative sensations in a state of reduced craving. Attach less 'I'm experiencing...' mindset to changing sensations as they unfold. This will generate equanimity and tranquility and allow for your trauma to resolve itself with continued practice. You don't do this process once or twice but many times. As much as you need. ----- This entire process is my re-working of bio-emotive framework taught by Doug Tataryn. Hope you get value from it. Much love, Arda

A Zen Master lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening, while he was away, a thief sneaked into the hut only to find there was nothing in it to steal. The Zen Master returned and found him. “You have come a long way to visit me,” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.” The thief was bewildered, but he took the clothes and ran away. He thought: 'What a buffoon. At least, I got away with these clothes.' The Master sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.” ----- A solid understanding of systems theory + a practical spiritual integration of its primary principles is essential for the investigation of truth. In fact, for a life dedicated to greater understanding, fulfillment and happiness at the deepest level. As you view reality through the lens of systems theory, you'll see avenues you have yet to explore in your spiritual journey. It is a forever open feedback channel that is left within the system until your last breath. Spoiler Alert: Your entire mind/body system and reality structure is expressed within the core principles of systems theory. Here are some of my explorations and studies into systems theory. The Essence of Systems Theory 1- Understand the Key Harmony of the System Before you disturb the system in any way, watch how it behaves. If it’s a piece of music or a whitewater rapid or a fluctuation in a commodity price, study its beat. If it’s a social system, watch it work. Learn its history. Ask people who’ve been around a long time to tell you what has happened. This guideline is deceptively simple. Until you make it a practice, you won’t believe how many wrong turns it helps you avoid. Starting with the behavior of the system forces you to focus on facts, not theories. It keeps you from falling too quickly into your own beliefs or misconceptions, or those of others. It’s amazing how many misconceptions there can be. People will swear that rainfall is decreasing, say, but when you look at the data, you find that what is really happening is that variability is increasing—the droughts are deeper, but the floods are greater too. It’s especially interesting to watch how the various elements in the system do or do not vary together. Watching what really happens, instead of listening to peoples’ theories of what happens, can explode many careless causal hypotheses. Every selectman in the state of New Hampshire seems to be positive that growth in a town will lower taxes, but if you plot growth rates against tax rates, you find a scatter as random as the stars in a New Hampshire winter sky. There is no discernible relationship at all. Starting with the behavior of the system directs one’s thoughts to dynamic, not static, analysis—not only to “What’s wrong?” but also to “How did we get there?” “What other behavior modes are possible?” “If we don’t change direction, where are we going to end up?” And looking to the strengths of the system, one can ask “What’s working well here?” Starting with the history of several variables plotted together begins to suggest not only what elements are in the system, but how they might be interconnected. And finally, starting with history discourages the common and distracting tendency we all have to define a problem not by the system’s actual behavior, but by the lack of our favorite solution. - The problem is, we need to find more oil. The problem is, we need to ban abortion. The problem is, we don’t have enough salesmen. The problem is, how can we attract more growth to this town? Listen to any discussion, in your family or a committee meeting at work or among the pundits in the media, and watch people leap to solutions, usually solutions in “predict, control, or impose your will” mode, without having paid any attention to what the system is doing and why it’s doing it. 2- Explore Your Mental Models Clearly (After Direct Experience) When we draw structural diagrams and then write equations, we are forced to make our assumptions visible and to express them with rigor. We have to put every one of our assumptions about the system out where others (and we ourselves) can see them. Our models have to be complete, and they have to add up, and they have to be consistent. Our assumptions can no longer slide around (mental models are very slippery), assuming one thing for purposes of one discussion and something else contradictory for purposes of the next discussion. You don’t have to put forth your mental model with diagrams and equations, although doing so is a good practice. The more you do that, in any form, the clearer your thinking will become, the faster you will admit your uncertainties and correct your mistakes, and the more flexible you will learn to be. Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems. 3- Respect Data & Information Channels Information (both conceptual and non-conceptual) holds systems in harmony whereas delayed, biased, scattered, corrupted or missing data can make feedback loops malfunction. For instance, decision makers can’t respond to information they don’t have, can’t respond accurately to information that is inaccurate, and can’t respond in a timely way to information that is late. I would guess that most of what goes wrong in systems goes wrong because of biased, late, or missing information. If I could, I would add an eleventh commandment to the first ten: Thou shalt not distort, delay, or withhold information. You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams. You can make a system work better with surprising ease if you can give it more timely, more accurate, more complete information. 4 - Attend to What is Important, Not What is Immediately Perceivable and Quantifiable Our culture, obsessed with numbers, has given us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. Think about that for a minute. It means that we make quantity more important than quality. If quantity forms the goals of our feedback loops, if quantity is the center of our attention and language and institutions, if we motivate ourselves, rate ourselves, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. You can look around and make up your own mind about whether quantity or quality is the outstanding characteristic of the world in which you live. Pretending that something doesn’t exist if it’s hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You’ve already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So don’t fall into that trap. Human beings have been endowed not only with the ability to count, but also with the ability to assess quality. Be a quality detector. Be a walking, noisy Geiger counter that registers the presence or absence of quality. No one can quite define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t directly experience and radiate them, if we dont point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist within the social reality the system is based on. 5- Generate Feedback Policies Within Feedback Loops President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately, he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn’t understand feedback. Let me explain: Carter was trying to deal with a flood of illegal immigrants from Mexico. He suggested that nothing could be done about that immigration as long as there was a great gap in opportunity and living standards between the United States and Mexico. Rather than spending money on border guards and barriers, he said, we should spend money helping to build the Mexican economy, and we should continue to do so until the immigration stopped. That never happened. This is a failure of feedback policy. You can imagine why a dynamic, self-adjusting feedback system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy. It’s easier, more effective, and usually much cheaper to design policies that change depending on the state of the system. Especially where there are great uncertainties, the best policies not only contain feedback loops, but meta-feedback loops—loops that alter, correct, and expand loops. These are policies that design learning into the management process. 6- Value the Good of the Whole Remember that hierarchies exist to serve the bottom layers, not the top. Don’t maximize parts of systems or subsystems while ignoring the whole. Don’t, as Kenneth Boulding once said, go to great trouble to optimize something that never should be done at all. Aim to enhance total systems properties, such as growth, stability, diversity, resilience, and sustainability—whether they are easily measured or not. 7- Listen to the Wisdom of the System Aid and encourage the forces and structures that help the system run itself. Notice how many of those forces and structures are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Don’t be an unthinking intervenor and destroy the system’s own self-maintenance capacities. Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there. Get a feel for what to play with and what to allow its maturation process to unfold at its own pace. 8- Locate Responsibility Within the System & Open its Feedback Channels That’s a guideline both for analysis and design. In analysis, it means looking for the ways the system creates its own behavior. Do pay attention to the triggering events, the outside influences that bring forth one kind of behavior from the system rather than another. Sometimes those outside events can be controlled (as in reducing the pathogens in drinking water to keep down incidences of infectious disease). But sometimes they can’t. You need to accept that. And sometimes blaming or trying to control the outside influence blinds one to the easier task of increasing responsibility within the system. “Intrinsic responsibility” means that the system is designed to send feedback about the consequences of decision making directly and quickly and compellingly to the decision makers. In a sense, the pilot of a plane rides in the front of the plane, that pilot is intrinsically responsible. He or she will experience directly the consequences of his or her decisions. Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe. It could mean that neither insurance companies nor public funds should pay for medical costs resulting from smoking or from accidents in which a motorcycle rider didn’t wear a helmet or a car rider didn’t fasten the seat belt A great deal of responsibility was lost when rulers of a nation who declared war were no longer expected to lead the troops into battle. These few examples are enough to get you thinking about how little our current culture has come to look for responsibility within the system that generates an action, and how poorly we design systems to experience the consequences of their actions. 9- Always Stay a Student Systems thinking has taught me to trust my intuition more and my figuring- out rationality less, to lean on both as much as I can, but still to be prepared for surprises. Working with systems, on the computer, in nature, among people, in organizations, constantly reminds me of how incomplete my mental models are, how complex the world is, and how much I don’t know. That’s hard. It means making mistakes and, worse, admitting them. It means what psychologist Don Michael calls “error-embracing.” It takes a lot of courage to embrace your errors 10- Embrace Complexity Let’s face it, the universe is messy. It is nonlinear, turbulent, and dynamic. It spends its time in transient behavior on its way to somewhere else, not in mathematically neat equilibria. It self-organizes and evolves. It creates diversity and uniformity. That’s what makes the world interesting, and that’s what makes it beautiful. There’s something within the human mind that is attracted to straight lines and not curves, to whole numbers and not fractions, to uniformity and not diversity, and to certainties and not mystery. But there is something else within us that has the opposite set of tendencies, since we ourselves evolved out of and are shaped by and structured as complex feedback systems. Only a part of us, a part that has emerged recently, designs buildings as boxes with uncompromising straight lines and flat surfaces. Another part of us recognizes instinctively that nature designs in fractals, with intriguing detail on every scale from the microscopic to the macroscopic. That part of us makes Gothic cathedrals and Persian carpets, symphonies and novels, Mardi Gras costumes and artificial intelligence programs, all with embellishments almost as complex as the ones we find in the world around us. We can, and some of us do, celebrate and encourage self-organization, disorder, variety, and diversity. Some of us even make a conscious moral commitment of doing so. 11- Expand the Time Axiom One of the worst ideas humanity ever had was the interest rate, which led to the further ideas of payback periods and discount rates, all of which provide a rational, quantitative excuse for ignoring the long term. The official time horizon of industrial society doesn’t extend beyond what will happen after the next election or beyond the payback period of current investments. Don't make the same mistake. In a strict systems sense, there is no long term and short-term distinction. Phenomena at different time-scales are nested within each other. Actions taken now have some immediate effects and some that radiate out for decades to come. We experience now the consequences of actions set in motion yesterday and decades ago and centuries ago. The couplings between very fast processes and very slow ones are sometimes strong, sometimes weak. When the slow ones dominate, nothing seems to be happening; when the fast ones take over, things happen with breathtaking speed. Systems are always coupling and uncoupling the large and the small, the fast and the slow. When you’re walking along a tricky, curving, unknown, surprising, obstacle-strewn path, you’d be a fool to keep your head down and look just at the next step in front of you. You’d be equally a fool just to peer far ahead and never notice what’s immediately under your feet. You need to be watching both the short and the long term—the whole system. 12 - Defy the Disciplines In spite of what you majored in, or what the textbooks say, or what you think you’re an expert at, follow a system wherever it leads. It will be sure to lead across traditional disciplinary lines. To understand that system, you will have to be able to learn from—while not being limited by—economists and chemists and psychologists and theologians. You will have to penetrate their jargons, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their particular lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses. They won’t make it easy for you. But you can do it. Seeing systems whole requires more than being “interdisciplinary,” if that word means, as it usually does, putting together people from different disciplines and letting them talk past each other. Interdisciplinary communication works only if there is a real problem to be solved, and if the representatives from the various disciplines are more committed to solving the problem than to being academically correct. They will have to go into learning mode. They will have to admit ignorance and be willing to be taught, by each other and by the system. It can be done. But, ego gets in the way if not careful. 13- Expand the Boundary of Care - Empathy - Compassion - Love Living successfully in a world of complex systems means expanding not only time horizons and thought horizons; above all, it means expanding the horizons of caring. There are moral reasons for doing that, of course. And if moral arguments are not sufficient, then systems thinking provides the practical reasons to back up the moral ones. The real system is interconnected. No part of the human race is separate either from other human beings or from the global ecosystem. It will not be possible in this integrated world for your heart to succeed if your lungs fail, or for your company to succeed if your workers fail, or for the rich in Los Angeles to succeed if the poor in Los Angeles fail, or for Europe to succeed if Africa fails, or for the global economy to succeed if the global environment fails. As with everything else about systems, most people already know about the interconnections that make moral and practical rules turn out to be the same rules. They just have to bring themselves to experience that which they know. --- Hope you get value from this post. Let me know your thoughts. Much love, Arda

My 'self-hood', perceptions, assumptions and most importantly, the truth behind reality. But any system theory behind any subject you enjoy as a hobby is also a fun practice to do. I like analyzing video games like Last of Us Part 2 and Red Dead Redemptions 2 where the end product becomes an exquisite art form for people like me. Those experiences require lots of analysis and introspection to extract their beauty. Here is my spoiler-free post you can read here: I invested in Ethereum but my understanding of systems theory does not exempt me from making bad decisions (although it reduces the odds). Thats a great motivation right there

Try Leigh Brasington's jhana instructions in his book - the right concentration. In simple terms, just try generating pleasurable sensations in the mind and body and sustain attention on it until it amplifies. When lost, try again. I use smiling to reinforce this process but eventually, you won't have to move a single muscle and joy and pleasure will pervade your mind and body. Not initially, but after some proficiency and unification of mind is attained. Start today :))