Slevin's journal

[Slevin]

Meditation update:

I can make it back to similar interesting states. I'm not sure if they are nonduality per se or something equivalent to it, but my personal model of felt experiences of my mind while meditating seems to find 5 or 6 layers behind the one I "pretend" runs everything cognitively on a daily basis, and that is just 5 or 6 qualitative equilibrium states where I end up and the ego or whatever is my awareness processor has a difficult time being there. This leads me to a more interesting cognitive model of my own awareness, where it seems like ego emotional responses are felt on the "top layer" but sometimes effect down the layers.

I've stopped trying to make it deep after half a week or so of trying to dive through every day. Its a weird added ego layer to the meditation that I feel like moves me from wanting to be in the moment and be here and be counting, to trying to be in a specific state that is percieved as "better" or "higher" or something like that. I.e. pushing on a results driven method instead of a process driven method, when the logic / value system behind me meditating was to be more mindful and have a better understanding of myself in different states and places (cognitive self understanding, especially as they relate to daily states and emotions). So I stopped trying and just focused on the practice. This is how I function the best and have the best discipline and results anyways (process driven over results driven). Meditation still tends to be a much more pleasant and fulfilling experience still after a week and a bit has passed now, and only _some_ of that should be attributed to the fact that I always meditate in the direct morning sunlight .

[Slevin]

Money update:

My March Income (after tax):
10400

March Spending:
Total: 4634
Mortg + HOA: 3131
Non house related: 1503
naive SR: 55%
My NW: ~249,500
Household NW: ~600k

Considering I own the house as a speculative investment that I can live in for the time being, the math gets much weirder and I don't really wanna do it. Especially since the house value jumped up 20k this month. Read some threads on here on some dumb ways of dealing with it. I mostly just consider that money as straight savings as house value >> money input on a yearly basis. This says questionable things about long term value and health of markets and such, but this would push SR to something like 86%.

So *real* SR is probably somewhere between 55% and 86%, depending on how you want to do the math.

Super expensive month. Went on 2 trips to CA, one for a wedding and one for a funeral. This felt really bad to me ecologically, and it blew up expenses a bit, as I had to pay for flights + a hotel for 2 nights for the wedding, and then flights to SF for the funeral. Too much money blown on eating out and such while we there, about $150. And when we were out at my partner's parents place, I grabbed coffee for her parents from the local coffee shop as a small token thank you for letting us stay with them for the week. That put a hole in my pocket as well, but still much less than even the food we were given while we were there (even if we contributed a bunch of our chef skills to making delicious meals as well, my partner's mother is a very very top notch home chef), not to mention room and board with one of the most beautiful views in the north bay.

Monetarily I'm finding I'm just so content with life in this weather and mental state I just don't really want to buy consumer goods anymore, except quality food, and quality maintainance items for maintaining life stuffs. And small amounts of spending to spend time with friends and prep them food / etc. So we will see how spending trends in the next few months.

[Scott 2]

I learned the hard way - when faced with unexpected expenses like that, don't fight it. Let the experience be what it is. Doing otherwise is too disruptive to relationships and creates large barriers for future growth. Instead of frugality being viewed as a path to freedom, it becomes a punishment.

You navigated the situations well, IMO.


Re: meditation

As I understand it - a dual model of spirituality separates the divine from everything else. We strip away layers to come ever closer to the divine. An implication, is that all manifest life is suffering, because it is separate from the divine. By definition, higher order consciousness can only be approached by stripping away these layers, so it can only be experienced within a practice. At the highest level, you have stripped away the part of you that experiences, so your manifest form will never truly experience divinity.

Sad. A logical conclusion is to welcome death. One of the reasons they tell people to be careful with spiritual practice.

A non-dual model frames things differently. Rather than thinking of consciousness as layers, we can think of them as threads woven in a tapestry. By stilling the body and mind, we are quieting discordant energy. This allows us to experience energetic balance, emitted from the divinity woven within us. The non-dual challenge, is to allow this energy to resonate through all threads of our consciousness. We express the divinity from within, carrying it in our every action, reflecting it into the world.

As we move in harmony with divinity, we are able to recognize it as manifest in all things. The natural response to divinity is love, so we act in from a place of love at all times. A series of desirable behaviors and traits naturally emerges from living in this place. An implication - our spiritual practice is merely a vehicle to remove ignorance. Once we know divinity, we can experience it all times, in all actions.

So - the non-dual theory is effectively a wrapper of the dual theory. They're saying - you dual guys are halfway there, now bring that feeling from your spiritual practice back into the world. Live there.


For me personally, the non-dual model holds a lot more appeal. It's what I draw upon. I am admittedly far from an expert.

One meditation class I took - the teacher would encourage us to meditate for brief intervals throughout the day. I now understand he was guiding us to constantly operate from a state of energetic balance.

[Slevin]

I learned the hard way - when faced with unexpected expenses like that, don't fight it. Let the experience be what it is. Doing otherwise is too disruptive to relationships and creates large barriers for future growth. Instead of frugality being viewed as a path to freedom, it becomes a punishment.

You navigated the situations well, IMO.

Yeah, thank you, I appreciate the reassurance from you as well. And it may have come across differently in the earlier post, but I'm not upset about them happening. Just noting that some of the costs could have been slightly altered or avoided, but I'm not gonna "cheap out" on my gf's parents for obvious social reasons (I want to be in good social standing with them as they are close to my partner), and they usually cover more stuff without even asking. And when we went to LA for the wedding, we mostly ate (delicious) indian and asian food, which tended to be cheaper (and more plant-based friendly by default).

A non-dual model frames things differently. Rather than thinking of consciousness as layers, we can think of them as threads woven in a tapestry. By stilling the body and mind, we are quieting discordant energy. This allows us to experience energetic balance, emitted from the divinity woven within us. The non-dual challenge, is to allow this energy to resonate through all threads of our consciousness. We express the divinity from within, carrying it in our every action, reflecting it into the world.

Emphasis mine. I think there's too much mystic jargon wrapped in this for me that I want to try to shed / remove to fit better in my worldview model (sorry if this offends you if I try to strip away. Just assume I want to understand a "current-me-level" collapsed sub-system of the thing, which may eventually lead to how you understand it) . Attempted translation: think of the layers of consciousness available to your mind as a moment as threads in a tapestry. No understanding of "discordant" energy from me here... Trying to show which threads are weaving on their own instead of in the pattern? Or if we change the threads to a waveform packet argument, some waves add in phase with the larger waveform and some waves are adding out of phase with the larger waveform. And quieting everything maybe lets us look at whats subtracting from the overall waveform of our added consciousness patterns and re-examine it and try to put it right in the pattern? I read "divinity" as "higher states of consciousness" as well, which I understand as "having more of a positive and warm outlook on each and every creature and seeing how much positivity / boundless warmth and connection to the world can fill each moment"?

For me personally, the non-dual model holds a lot more appeal. It's what I draw upon. I am admittedly far from an expert.

One meditation class I took - the teacher would encourage us to meditate for brief intervals throughout the day. I now understand he was guiding us to constantly operate from a state of energetic balance.

That makes sense. Try and occupy the more balanced state more often, eventually leading to trying to embody it entirely. I'm not certain I want to exist always in a more warm cozy state (when I'm warmer / in a nicer state after meditation, some of my analytical knife's edge is calmed down a bit and it can annoy me when I'm trying to solve a complex and difficult problem) but I see the appeal to someone who believes it is "embodying god / the ultimate abstraction / etc".

[Scott 2]

No offense taken. I interpret spirituality as a heuristic model, rather than an immutable truth. Within the models I know, what is left after you strip away the layers of self, is seen as divinity. Some yogic traditions define that as everything. I think some Buddhist traditions define that as nothing. From what I could gather, the practical impact on lived experience is the same. So I tried to let go of my preexisting connotations of god or the divine, and instead approach the concept from within the context of the model.


One layers model I liked is the Koshas. Here's one yogi's take:

https://www.carola.yoga/new-blog/yogic- ... the-koshas

The tapestry analogy is sometimes used instead of the nesting doll analogy, to emphasize that they are all parts of an integrated whole.


In terms of energetic balance, one model that's made sense for me is the gunas. One yogi's take:

https://www.vedanet.com/the-three-gunas ... ciousness/

What's important isn't the terms, but the concept of finding clarity through balancing opposing forces. Ideally, that happens at every level of the koshas. Meditation helps.


The deeper you go down this rabbit hole, you learn there is no single definitive practice. As many models exist as spiritual leaders. They all head in the same general direction. Applying multiple concurrent frameworks is probably counter productive, but the temptation to cherry pick what resonates is strong. Since I don't have spiritual aspirations, I stopped at adopting the common themes. My lived experience is hardly woo-woo, despite the jargon above.


It's funny you mention occupying a balanced state inhibiting problem solving. This was a huge issue for me when I was working. Two things were happening:

1. My meditation or yoga would drift to a low energy state. Call it overly parasympathetic, tamasic, too relaxed, whatever. I wasn't finding energetic balance. Early on, I confused meditation with relaxation.

2. More often - I did find balance, and in that balance, I could clearly see I had zero belief in what I was doing. This was the bigger problem and lead me to largely diminish my yoga practice, towards the end of my career.

What I didn't experiment with, was using agitating meditation or breath work, to force myself into a sympathetic (Rajasic) state. I think it's possible that may have helped with forced problem solving. I used caffeine and alcohol as crutches instead.


While not working, I'm finding it is possible to problem solve from a balanced state. The difference being, I believe in and want to be solving the problem. I'm not doing tricks for money. Think all the single pointed focus of meditation, but directed entirely at the problem. It's powerful.

There's a whole segment of yoga focused on this type of spiritual work - finding your dharma. The Bhagavad Gita being a seminal text. I found Eknath Easwaran's translation and commentary accessible. Along the lines of no definitive model - English language translations of the spiritual texts reflect bias of the translators. As do commentaries. So if you got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from the Hare Krishnas, it's a completely different take then Easwaran's.

I've found spirituality annoyingly subjective. Those who promise a single coherent truth, tend to have a biased agenda.

[daylen]

I'm not certain I want to exist always in a more warm cozy state (when I'm warmer / in a nicer state after meditation, some of my analytical knife's edge is calmed down a bit and it can annoy me when I'm trying to solve a complex and difficult problem) but I see the appeal to someone who believes it is "embodying god / the ultimate abstraction / etc".

In Buddhism, supposedly samatha is the mind calming part and vipassana is the analytical part. Corresponding roughly to right hemispheric modulation and left hemispheric modulation. The mind can be thought of as two bundles of waveforms separated by a hemispheric communication channel. Each hemisphere terminating into/as a body of nerves. Samatha enabling the right bundle to extrapolate nerve terminations into "phenomenology" or "seeing the whole of a situation or object". Vipassana enabling the left bundle to interpolate nerve terminations as structures/functions that specify transitions between parts of the whole situation/object.

That is my hunch anyway for a coarse interpretation.

[chenda]

There's a whole segment of yoga focused on this type of spiritual work - finding your dharma. The Bhagavad Gita being a seminal text. I found Eknath Easwaran's translation and commentary accessible. Along the lines of no definitive model - English language translations of the spiritual texts reflect bias of the translators. As do commentaries. So if you got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from the Hare Krishnas, it's a completely different take then Easwaran's.

Dr Nick Sutton has just published a new translation and commentary on the Gita, and gives an overview of the various different interpretations which have been made on it over the years. Sutton's work is highly academic but very accessible and readable.

'Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be...'

[Slevin]

No offense taken. I interpret spirituality as a heuristic model, rather than an immutable truth. Within the models I know, what is left after you strip away the layers of self, is seen as divinity. Some yogic traditions define that as everything. I think some Buddhist traditions define that as nothing. From what I could gather, the practical impact on lived experience is the same. So I tried to let go of my preexisting connotations of god or the divine, and instead approach the concept from within the context of the model.

There's a whole segment of yoga focused on this type of spiritual work - finding your dharma. The Bhagavad Gita being a seminal text. I found Eknath Easwaran's translation and commentary accessible. Along the lines of no definitive model - English language translations of the spiritual texts reflect bias of the translators. As do commentaries. So if you got a copy of the Bhagavad Gita from the Hare Krishnas, it's a completely different take then Easwaran's.

I've found spirituality annoyingly subjective. Those who promise a single coherent truth, tend to have a biased agenda.

Yeah my general issue with these "only subjective" areas of exploration (meditation, mindfulness) is that many of these things are not "agreed upon" or "visible", so its difficult to tell what usually works (and who has experienced what I am talking about), and then becomes rife with abuse and is difficult to sort out people claiming knowledge between people who "know their shit and embody it" from "faking and using this to abuse power / people / etc". As you say, there is some general agreed upon-ish direction. Hopefully that leads somewhere interesting

[Scott 2]

Mathew Remski wrote a sobering book about the abuse that emerges, using Jois's Ashtanga yoga community as the example:

https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/books/wawadia-main/

Outside of the shysters and predators, there's a transference / counter transference dynamic that emerges. Students mistakenly attribute the benefits of their spiritual practice to the wisdom of their teacher. Placing the teacher on a pedestal creates an exaggerated a power dynamic, which confuses the teacher's sense of self. Very easy for that to get out of control. It's one of the reasons I chose not to pursue yoga teaching as a hobby. It's especially common that male yoga teachers get caught in this dynamic.


I haven't read Sutton's take on the Gita. I was drawn by the academic approach for awhile, but drifted away around 2017. My turning point was the book "Roots of Yoga". The authors survey essentially every historical text they can find, on a variety of spiritual topics. It's tremendously boring. I realized what we get in the west is a cherry picked subset. So even if the translation is rigorous, there's still a contextual bias. Heck - even the Gita is pulled from the Mahabharata. Nobody reads the other sections.

I decided the academic rigor was another example of one group's approach to spirituality. Instead of insisting upon the pretense, I became more interested in what other people do, what works for them. I want to drive the car, not build one. I could see returning to deeper study when I'm older.

[chenda]

So even if the translation is rigorous, there's still a contextual bias. Heck - even the Gita is pulled from the Mahabharata. Nobody reads the other sections.

Yes although everyones interpretation will necessarily reflect bias, that is unavoidable. Sutton does a good job in indentifying this.

It is depressing just how scandal ridden modern spirituality has become. As you say, the Guru-disciple relationship, heavily emphasised in Eastern traditions, seems problematic, particularly when transplanted to western culture.

I recall some good advice I once heard from a Sufi. Would you trust your guru as a babysitter? If not you should probably find a better one.

[Slevin]

Sometimes I think most people would be better off just sticking to the religion they were raised in, perhaps combined with a broader academic understanding of other religions.

I noticed you edited this out; sorry to bring it back for a moment but I think its an interesting point. I think the issue with that is the fish + water parable. If you don't move from the religion you were raised in, I don't think you can understand the embodied abuses already built in. Similar to most abusive relationships (which seemed so good and meaningful until you were outside of them) I think you usually need to take that step back to understand how you are being abused. So paradigmatic-ally I think everyone should take a step back for a moment in young adulthood (erm, this is hard. I think its dependent on a certain adult developmental context where you could recognize this, but that wouldn't be locked down to an age or anything). This would probably be cohesive being done in parallel with what you are saying as well, in gaining an academic understanding of other religions and maybe some of their issues as well.

Moving context of abusive relationships and needing to take a step back; I actually think that's a really interesting take on consumerism and a no-buy period as well. That you are being abused by the culture you are embedded in (i.e. the businesses and people around you don't have your best interests at heart), and that a no buy period is you taking a step back to re-evaluate how that relationship feels to you. I like the description because I think many people have been in the abusive relationship dynamic at least in some point in their lives, so its easier to relate to and seems less "conspiratorial" / etc.

[Slevin]

Mathew Remski wrote a sobering book about the abuse that emerges, using Jois's Ashtanga yoga community as the example:

https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/books/wawadia-main/

Outside of the shysters and predators, there's a transference / counter transference dynamic that emerges. Students mistakenly attribute the benefits of their spiritual practice to the wisdom of their teacher. Placing the teacher on a pedestal creates an exaggerated a power dynamic, which confuses the teacher's sense of self. Very easy for that to get out of control. It's one of the reasons I chose not to pursue yoga teaching as a hobby. It's especially common that male yoga teachers get caught in this dynamic.

Well now that you say this I've definitely done this as well (though in a different context than spiritual teaching). Really really interesting point / principle to watch out for.

[jacob]

I think the model presented in The Listening Society, which "everybody is reading these days", explains or at least talks a lot about these problems [of misunderstanding or "disunderstanding" each other intersubjectively]. The model differentiates between three variables: complexity (stage), subjective (state) ranging from "hellish despair" to "enlightened unity", and depth (the range of experiential subjective states).

(Methinks Hanzi should also have included a depth for MHC... we could call it range instead of depth. It's often hard to accept or even conceive that some humans may have much lower complexity. Their nonsensical reasoning is often perceived as 4D chess when in reality they turn out to be simpler than the average 5th grader. This is difficult to see (Overton impedance) when both code the same or use scaffolding to pretend. We like to give everybody the benefit of the doubt. Much of modern society is arranged for that effect. People who know 100x more do not automagically get 100x the platform or significance.)

On the TLS map, I'm high-complexity (I dare say that w/o being too conceited), medium-state, but about as deep as a kiddie pool (I score in the 4%-percentile in terms of neuroticism on the OCEAN).

Conversely---here's the kicker---spiritual gurus are high-state (by definition!), often high-depth (and towards the lighter and more spiritual side) but can easily be medium- or even low-complexity. If so explanations of the [spiritual] experience can tend towards the simplistic ("It was wonderful. Pure bliss. I lack the words and the ability to arrange them... but hey, very very wonderful."). This in turn makes it a lot easier for non-gurus to either fake it using non-complex but impressive-sounding language (also see quantum woo) or believe they've achieved it because the simple explanations could easily fit something they've experienced($). I mean I've felt wonderful on occasion, but that doesn't mean that I've had a life-changing unitive experience.)

($) E.g. realizing that there's something beyond the ego has not done for me what it did for Eckhart Tolle.

With MHC, it's much more clear when one human out-complexifies another. With subjective experiences, there's no way(*) of telling whether someone out-states someone else. Even if someone is not deliberately faking it, it would still be impossible(?) to verify whether they actually experienced a high state or just thought they did.

(*) You've probably seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFFMtq5g8N4 ... which at least convinced some from the academic circles (likely high complexity but medium-state) that "there's actually something there".

Scott2's explanation of duality vs non-duality is better (more compatible with my kind of thinking) than what I've seen from many a guru's writing. I'm really hoping that some day an NT will write up a guide to spiritualism complete with maps and diagrams. We already have enough 200 page long NF flow-state writings about the One becoming the Many while Ascending and Transcending...

[chenda]

@Slevin - yes that's a very good point. It increasingly common think for people to leave their childhood religion disillusioned with it and go on lengthy spiritual searches. But then some return to their childhood religion in later life. Hopefully with a better understanding and relationship with it.

@jacob A lot of your writings are increasingly going over my head (not a criticism, I think I just lack sufficient intellectual bandwidth) but this blackboard lecture complete with diagrams explains it all well - if that's what you are looking for?

https://youtu.be/F0dugc4TrlE

[jacob]

So paradigmatic-ally I think everyone should take a step back for a moment in young adulthood (erm, this is hard. I think its dependent on a certain adult developmental context where you could recognize this, but that wouldn't be locked down to an age or anything). This would probably be cohesive being done in parallel with what you are saying as well, in gaining an academic understanding of other religions and maybe some of their issues as well.

Everybody ought to TRAVEL FOR REAL. Traveling is mostly thought of as a way to see new cultures, etc. but I think a more useful (maturing/developing) form of travel is to see your own culture (short for lens, framework, ..) from the perspective of another culture rather than just seeing another culture close up from the perspective of your own. The former develops depth (transcending), the latter only width (translating). The former is second person. The latter is but first person with more experience.

Many ways to do this. It does require immersive learning, but it doesn't necessarily require booking a plane ticket.

For example, in Danish high schools, religion was(is?) mandatory in the senior year. Unlike earlier years (Denmark has a very watered down state religion but no establishment clause) where religion was taught to render students conversational in terms of various traditions like Christmas and Easter, religion is now treated from a third person perspective using text analysis and historical context. This new lens (postmodern perspective on traditionalism) causes some students to rethink their previous beliefs, just to put it mildly.

Other new lenses may simply be seeing your own country (ethnocentric) from the perspective of the citizens of another country. For example, how does South America (3rd person) perceive NATO (1st) in the ME (2nd)---this is most easily learned by moving there and talking with other 3rd persons. It can even be done w/o ever leaving one's couch (e.g. https://osf.io/jrw26/ ).

I think the renaissance man attitude is very valuable in terms of this kind of "lensic" travel. I'm wondering whether I'm actually undervaluing how useful being a polymath actually is. This was my original approach to Stoa PiR. Maybe I should revisit that approach. It may be less trite/pretentious than I thought.

[Slevin]

@jacob Maybe there is an interesting thread in suggesting that lensic bias is a limiting factor to developmental growth, and by moving frames or lenses more often (abstraction or context growth of Chomskian idea to always read many news sources to encounter less information bias), is accomplished more easily in the Renaissance Ideal (multi-faceted definition of self through many "job" lenses, "hobby" lenses, "relationship" lenses, "academic" lenses, etc) provided you already have the capacity to define yourself through multiple lenses. Maybe it will grow the idea of lenses even if you don't have it? (Study / references needed)

Nordic Ideology suggests a six-sided definition to capital through talking about types of inequality, maybe this is a good starting point to start hedging where to start building these "skills". They might be "wrong" absolutely but I think the index is relatively "good enough" and broad enough to be useful. In the book they are suggested as "economic", "social", "physiological", "emotional", "ecological", and "Informational". So maybe the "less complex" explanation of the renaissance man can be someone who has a deep level of knowledge in one pursuit / skill in each of these categories (skills will be cross categorical by definition, but explicit details and kinks can be ironed out later). It may be that the most "value" is gained at a certain multiple of skills in one category, as they would eventually give you multilensic looks and understandings of the world from each type of lens. And it might be that the hexa- or dodeca- lensic bias might be enough to start scrubbing away much of the inherent built in single lensic (or lower dimensional lensic) bias of the embodied culture and allow one to operate / embody a more integrated life path. Given that time is a finite resource to humans, probably there is an upper limit on usefulness as well.

[daylen]

Perhaps I am opening a can of worms in the wrong place, but I am experimenting with my own childish Fi (while translating into an Fe-heavy context). I suspect Ti and Fi users view and pursue "spirituality" rather differently. A Ti user is going to be less cautious of who is teaching them and an Fi user will tend to personalize their path based upon what they perceive as authentic teachers.

Ti users having the attitude of "if I were wrong it would only take one argument and that argument could come from a bumper sticker, a parrot, GPT-3, or a woo-woo guru half way across the world". So, when the logical narration of the "self" is seen to be indefinitely inconsistent, it is rather natural for a Ti user to accept the stark "change" in how they process reality [nearly] immediately. Then, the "realization" will slowly spread throughout their waking lives to mesh into less logically-dominated arenas. In the meantime, some knowledge can be dangerous, and so some students/teachers will inevitably "go off the rails" with lazy evaluation and interpretation. I can't say I am immune to this.

It would appear to me, and I am most certainty wrong, that Fi users would either 1) be indefinitely turned off by an accumulating stockpile of inauthentic perceptions that seem to touch the "spiritual way of sense-making" and 2) if engaged with spiritual teachers/traditions would then tend to discount the role of traditions in honing a logical scaffolding that enabled the context to exist in which Fi could be comforted(?) by bite-sized Te lessons.

(?) I am sure there is a better word or perhaps this leads down a rabbit hole of emotional finesse.

As I am skeptical if I will ever really understand what it is like to make the adolescent -> adult Fi transition (without background Ti maturity), I wonder if Fi users can ever really understand what an adolescent -> adult Ti transition is like. Perhaps this would help shine light upon why certain paths in the spiritual domain(*) tend to go awry without much hope at reconciliation. After all, we are talking about all problems, including life and death of the self. Surely some toes will be stepped on in the process.

(*) and others to a less intense degree.

[Scott 2]

Conversely---here's the kicker---spiritual gurus are high-state (by definition!), often high-depth (and towards the lighter and more spiritual side) but can easily be medium- or even low-complexity. If so explanations of the [spiritual] experience can tend towards the simplistic

I'm really hoping that some day an NT will write up a guide to spiritualism complete with maps and diagrams.

Another possibility here - spirituality is simplistic, but people hate the answer. Similar to spend 20% of your income for 5 years. The essence of my yoga can be distilled to:

1. Use poses or breath to establish energetic balance - steadiness vs. ease
2. Apply that skill via meditation, to still the mind
3. Operate from that balanced state in daily life

That's it. Everything else is scaffolding to make the simple more accessible. The meditation teacher I had - his entire message was: sit. You'd ask all these questions. Do I focus on the breath? Do I visualize something? He'd respond "well, if sitting isn't enough, you could do that".


In my experience, the high complexity folks are drawn to academic spirituality. They take a very mechanical approach to unraveling the concepts. The challenge being - texts have both a historical and cultural context. A lot of it comes off as sex obsessed or down right crazy.

- The Hatha Yoga Pradipika devotes at least a chapter to the male seed as the root of spirituality, along with detailed instructions for progressive retention exercises. Things like using the male organ to pull mercury back into the body.

- The Yoga Sutras have a chapter dedicated to the super powers bestowed by yoga practice, along with instruction not to use them, as it will derail the path to enlightenment. Abilities like psychokinesis and clairvoyance.

- The Gheranda Samhita approaches the entire energy balance conversation via symbolization of the male and female genitalia. It's a full book about the Yoni and the Linga. The book is then referenced in just about every "serious" modern yoga book. I wonder if the referencing authors read the text.

So you can get the distilled, objective interpretations. But they are intertwined with necessary conversation about culture and history.

[Slevin]

Another possibility here - spirituality is simplistic, but people hate the answer. Similar to spend 20% of your income for 5 years. The essence of my yoga can be distilled to:

1. Use poses or breath to establish energetic balance - steadiness vs. ease
2. Apply that skill via meditation, to still the mind
3. Operate from that balanced state in daily life

That's it. Everything else is scaffolding to make the simple more accessible. The meditation teacher I had - his entire message was: sit. You'd ask all these questions. Do I focus on the breath? Do I visualize something? He'd respond "well, if sitting isn't enough, you could do that".

I like this explanation, as my entire current approach is just to sit with myself every day. And that's it. So I don't have to chase some endless goal that nobody can really tell me what it is or why. Simple but somehow not easy. Though it is possible that other skills are learnable under this state, or at some point "just sitting" becomes not enough. I just chose a short time (10 mins) as the minimum. I have bells every 5 minutes after that, and my new method is just to sit as long as I want, and if I go past the last bell, I add one more.

Perhaps I am opening a can of worms in the wrong place, but I am experimenting with my own childish Fi (while translating into an Fe-heavy context). I suspect Ti and Fi users view and pursue "spirituality" rather differently. A Ti user is going to be less cautious of who is teaching them and an Fi user will tend to personalize their path based upon what they perceive as authentic teachers.

I would have to agree with you to a good extent, whereas I want to "think it out" and am relatively annoyed when no thinking framework exists / is present / etc to logic against, but a Fi user would want to "feel it out" and would therefore just be okay getting into it and seeing how it feels. I think you are maybe Fe'ing the Fi user when you say they want an authentic teacher? As the Fe would want to see someone who they think is authentic in their knowledge (ie knows how it feels), but the Fi would be fine feeling about it themselves? Does that track?

[daylen]

Within the framework I favor, which tends to track quite well with the community surrounding cognitive functions:

Fi: feeling it in
Fe: feeling it out
Ti: thinking it in
Te: thinking it out

In combination, Fi pairs with Te to feel what is thought out loud, and Ti pairs with Fe to think about what is felt out loud. Authenticity is typically linked more with Te-Fi in that Fi already knows what it feels and seeks to maintain an internal emotional balance and if the source of thoughts being referenced originate in an agent or community with emotional disarray, a red flag pops up. In contrast, Ti already knows how it thinks and seeks to maintain internal consistency even if that means throwing off internal emotional balance. Fe then acts as a counter weight to that logical system or paradigm that will send up red flags if everyone around seems to be emotionally imbalanced from the implementation of that logic.

To more directly respond to your questions: Fi may not value having an authentic teacher explicitly though they surely have an implicit caution system for detecting emotional imbalance in those they listen deeply to. Fe is more apt at assessing the general emotional state of a room/crowd/community, whereas Te is better suited at judging whether an agent is in a position to know something based upon Fi projections of what it is like to walk in that agents shoes. Yes, at the end of the day, Fi is just fine feeling about it themselves.

Let me know if that helps. I can provide examples or additional polarities if desired. These explanations may also skew a bit in tone depending upon where they are in the stack (i.e. how they are prioritized).

Bonus: Fe users tend to be more expressive emotionally so they can gauge the feeling cascades around the room(*). Fi users tend to be more deadpan in a group setting. Though, this would vary significantly based on context and T/F ratio.

(*) Did people laugh? Did they get my logic? Did I offend anyone?