A Journey of Mindfulness--the Remaking of Life in Midstream.

[Scott 2]

I take "mindfulness" to describe a state of being aware of what feelings, thoughts, and sensations that one has. If this is [the correct definition]

I would add a present centered attention - not more than a couple seconds forward or back, no inner monologue. Or at least, feeling based rather than language based.

[jacob]

I should have said "one currently has". A metaphor would be reading the instrument panel of the sensory, emotional, and thinking components of the mind-body.

(One thing I didn't mention is that it is apparently also [very] normal to experience a separation between the mind and the body---often like the mind is being carried around in the head as it is sitting on top of the body. This is common enough that even philosophers see a distinction between the mind and the body, alternatively matter vs soul. Aka a duality. I find this a strange notion because I do not experience it like that. However, I can see how duality as a concept would follow insofar one experience things like that.)

[7Wannabe5]

My take away from where I sit is that while unitive people are relatively harmless, they don't seem to offer any insight into the universe---at least not to this physicist; they don't seem to have any unique problem solving ability; they're not particularly productive---but rather unproductive even. As such, pursing meditation towards that particular state seems like a weird trap rather than "the next evolution of man's mind".

The holistic or unitive level, like the post-modern and post-Faustian levels, is more commentary or "purification" of previous "productive" paradigms. Kind of like after somebody like Toby Hemenway creates a lot of different successful permaculture projects at Level Yellow, and then he thinks "Oh, the whole world is already a permaculture project." (but at some deeper level than I am able to convey.) The next "productive" level beyond this does not exist yet and may be dependent upon AI to provide planetary level dynamic systems analysis, or something like that but beyond that which I do not comprehend.

[IlliniDave]

Our psychology likely changed as we evolved from being primarily fruit, tender leaf, and insect eaters to incorporating sedges, succulents and roots into our diet, to also including scavenged and hunted marrow and meat into our diets, but that in no way entails a disruption of our ability to forage fruit in a more tropical environment where it is more constantly available.

Based on my understanding of archeology is that if we had ancestors that hung around in trees and ate fruit all the time they came prior to homosapiens, who evolved allegedly on savannas away from the rainforests and nearly all surviving archeological evidence points to the importance of hunting animals as at least a cornerstone in our diets. But I suppose it's like religion. I get my truth from a certain body of evidence through the lens of certain scholarly interpretation, and others select their truth from competing evidence and interpretations. We can agree that variety on diet is important, so maybe it's best to leave it there.

[bookworm]

I like your basic framing @jacob. Gives me a lot to reflect on and consider.

while unitive people are relatively harmless, they don't seem to offer any insight into the universe---at least not to this physicist; they don't seem to have any unique problem solving ability; they're not particularly productive---but rather unproductive even.

Maybe it's a coordination problem. Let's say that 1% of the population have access to unitive state U for 10% of the day. (For the rest of their day, those people are busy surviving, interacting with other people who live in consensual dualistic reality, assuming that such people are basically stable in personality, capable of integrating such insights, and are not confined into mental institutions.) Most likely, such people are dispersed and are unlikely to encounter each other "in the wild". When they try to express their ideas, they will likely be misinterpreted because others are not in a position to hear what they are saying since language is based on consensual reality and it starts to take on different meanings in U. For the most part, they decide to shut up and go along to get along. Even if they do manage to get together, the ability to act from U is limited by stability of U (and so typical conflicts are likely to ensure).

One possibility is that some cultures had a higher percentage of the population (>1%) with longer access periods to state U for (>10%) and were able to use unitive state to solve social problems. Maybe some communities form a subculture (small but punching above its weight) where this kind of decision making solves group problems and has some broader societal effect. Perhaps this will be a possibility in the future if more individuals begin to reach higher stages under whatever framework (not implying that higher levels necessarily require being in touch with U).

I am speaking from the perspective of someone who has sometimes accessed U, although not reliably. I find these states life enhancing, useful for goal orientation, and sometimes even in community to a limited extent (Quaker/Buddhist practice for me). But as I am ultimately focused on ERE1, I am uncertain how important it is to pursue these things at the moment. Probably others could speak to them in more detail / with more experience to how they use U in their personal life and in relation to others.

Side note: there is a lot of Green resistance to talking about these states at all which is widespread in communities which support practice. It creates a kind of flattening/neutering of meditation that I perceive as damaging to its actual usefulness in the world. At the same time, Green language is also useful for getting people into the practice at all.

[daylen]

Permaculture or permaproduction is incoherent. There has always only ever been dynamoculture or dynamoproduction realized and personalized through conscious unity.

[IlliniDave]

Small Happy Surprise

I received a handful of new biomarkers from Function Health this morning, which included the first few numbers from my lipid panel.

My LDL went down quite significantly (for me), from 158 a year ago to 118 last week.

I've never had LDL that low. It's still out of range for Medicine 2.0, above optimal for Function Health's Medicine 3.0 assessment. Also for the first time my TC/HDL ratio fell to "within range" (Med 2.0) and slightly above optimal (Function's Med 3.0). I don't think that's a particularly meaningful calculation--most of the Medicine 3.0 crowd I follow tends to favor Triglyceride/HDL ratio. But so far my TCL, triglyceride, and HDL numbers haven't populated so I can't calculate it yet. The inference I'm drawing from the TCL/HDL calculation is that my HDL did not decrease too much.

I'm inclined to think two things are at play.

First is that it appears I'm starting to turn the corner in terms of liver health. It's been improving since I started lifestyle mods with that in mind, but this was the first time that everything measured in the Med 3.0 optimal zones (I've been back in Med 2.0 range for a while). I'd convinced myself that my liver wasn't functioning optimally in it's role of sweeping up the leftovers from fat (primarily body fat) metabolism. I spend a good bit of time in mild dietary ketosis.

Second is that I've become a zealous avoider of seed oils for the last several months.

Those two (liver health and seed oil avoidance) might be correlated.

As a bit of a statin skeptic at this moment I'm glad I'd stuck to my guns and continued to experiment with giving my body the tools to fix itself.

The only other relevant variable I can come up with off the top of my head falls under the liver health category, which was to swap out some of the liver support supplements I was taking (e.g., milk thistle, turmeric) for a regimen to support glutathione, which included a liposomal glutathione supplement and things like methyl folate and methylated B12 to boost endogenous production. I made that change when I began sipping kava in the evening on a quasi-regular basis since in high enough quantities (which I think I'm below fwiw) it's known to deplete glutathione in the liver.

Still much to come on the lipid panel. Even though I have a good degree of confidence that the path I'm on is the right one for me and my forward-looking health goals, I still stew over the lipid numbers. It's hard to undue decades of passive programming that cholesterol is uniquely bad despite a lot of active attempts to reprogram based on strengthening evidence that the so-called cholesterol hypothesis was, at best, a giant oversimplification.

[7Wannabe5]

@daylen:

Yes! And this is also indicative of why we are near term likely to somehow encompass and transcend (and/or thoroughly fulfill) the paradigm created by the human* thus described and celebrated by Mario Vargas Llosa in "The Call of the Tribe" :

He was sickly, rather plain child, and before he was known for his wisdom he was known for being extraordinarily absent-minded. One day the driver of the coach coming from London discovered on the outskirts of Kirkcaldy a solitary figure walking in the middle of the countryside far from the town. He stopped the coach to ask Mr. Smith where he was going; disconcerted, Adam Smith acknowledged that he had been so lost in his thoughts that he had not noticed how far he had strayed.

See also Nate Hagens recent interview with Will Marshall, founder of the Benefit Corporation, Planet Labs, and the increasing ability to map and interpret (with AI) carbon flow on the entire planet down to around 3 meters granularity.

*Clearly, he (INTP) would have been diagnosed with ADHD if born in 21st century. It's sad to note how tolerance for wandering about searching for bright fruit in your mind is still not well tolerated in our theoretically increasingly liberal societies. Everybody is supposed to be alert to whatever boring activity/conversation is going on in their immediate physical vicinity at all times. Although, protection of the Shaman (or the Shaman class) is also a human practice as ancient as the advent of burial rites (see also "The 6 Hidden Patterns of History", Hanzi Freinacht, Chap. 2: Rain Dance Conquers the World.)

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave:

Money and health/fitness provide a great deal of optionality. However, when somebody is observed working towards increasing focused optionality, the question that remains open is roughly "Towards what purpose?" Not that the purpose need be particularly grand, I mean "Towards maximizing my remaining days spent enjoying myself fishing." seems to me to be an adequate answer. Also, I will acknowledge that one human's "means" is often another human's motive. For example, I am often mystified when humans question the purpose of reading books; as if it's not an activity worth doing if it won't make you wealthier or physiologically healthier. Although, I suppose it could be argued that at core the purpose of increased optionality is ultimately the expensive task of "reproduction", however abstracted.

[Scott 2]

My LDL went down quite significantly (for me), from 158 a year ago to 118 last week.

That's a huge drop. My zone 2 experiments only took 25 points off.

You added muscle and resistance training. That's a big lever IMO.

[IlliniDave]

@IlliniDave:

Money and health/fitness provide a great deal of optionality. However, when somebody is observed working towards increasing focused optionality, the question that remains open is roughly "Towards what purpose?" Not that the purpose need be particularly grand, I mean "Towards maximizing my remaining days spent enjoying myself fishing." seems to me to be an adequate answer. Also, I will acknowledge that one human's "means" is often another human's motive. For example, I am often mystified when humans question the purpose of reading books; as if it's not an activity worth doing if it won't make you wealthier or physiologically healthier. Although, I suppose it could be argued that at core the purpose of increased optionality is ultimately the expensive task of "reproduction", however abstracted.

I ponder that to-what-end question sometimes, at least the health and fitness part of it*. Answers tumble out readily enough I don't even catalog them. I'm increasingly coming to reject the notion that there is meaningful distinction between mental and physiological health/fitness, so reading a book is lifting weights, and lifting weights is reading a book in my amateurish faux Zen non-duality mindset. Having had the experience of the proverbial boiled frog as I drifted into a state of objectively poor health without explicitly noticing it and expending a good deal of energy to climb out of the pot (including a good amount of both reading and weightlifting**) one of the most striking things, and obvious one if you think about it, is how much better I feel on an ongoing basis (I'm fundamentally selfish, obviously). And if the way contemporary civilization has hijacked it is set aside, feeling good is nature's reward for advantageous behavior.

It does seem that beneath it all DNA operates in a way to project itself into the future so I'd guess you have the gist of it that, underwriting any motivation some living creature has, replicating itself is front and center. Among living creatures humans excel at adaptability. That adaptability is expensive, and doesn't make sense in the absence of optionality. Seeking optionality and thereby making the expensive adaptability a usable asset for the purpose of survival and procreation makes a certain sense.

*The financial part falls in the category of what's done is done, no use worrying about it now.

**I don't see them as substitutes for one another, but as distinct levers that both need to be pulled to reach any candidate optimal state I am interested in pursuing at this time.

[7Wannabe5]

I'm increasingly coming to reject the notion that there is meaningful distinction between mental and physiological health/fitness

Yes, I definitely agree in the sense that my Daily Happiness Tracking Experiment revealed that my former practice of "hiking for at least an hour in natural setting" each morning was the activity most correlated with my Daily Happiness Level, and the more moderately active practice of "working in garden at various tasks" only similarly served if I engaged in it for around 4 hours. OTOH, running on treadmill for X minutes is more like taking a stimulant for me, only improves my mood for maybe a few hours, rather than for the whole day. I'm not sure whether this is because there is nothing like "nature" or "garden"* in the gym and/or that the moderate exertion over longer period is more mood enhancing for me.

I also agree that beyond "simple average daily happiness in the moment**", your following observation speaks more towards attainment of "purpose", "fulfillment", "aesthetic/psychological depth/richness."

I don't see them as substitutes for one another, but as distinct levers that both need to be pulled to reach any candidate optimal state I am interested in pursuing at this time.

For example, brain and brawn and a bit of money would be needed to fulfill the life purpose of climbing a mountain in search of a rare species of plant. I suppose the reason why I hold "reading" to be superior to "weight-lifting" is that depth and breadth of reading also informs perspective. It's more frightening to me that a full third of U.S. adults read at 10 year old or below level and more than half haven't read a book in the past year, than that a majority are also couch potatoes. If given a strict choice, "I" would prefer the company of grouchy well-read couch potatoes over that of happy functionally illiterate fitness-fiends, even though my personal history of fairly frequently hooking up with "smart for a jock"*** might indicate otherwise.

*the presence of "nature" or "garden" making the activity also towards serving the purpose of meditation or spiritual practice for me.
** the study that tracked this with a large number of humans found that "conversation with peers" was also a top in-the-moment happiness booster.
*** otoh, my personal history of also fairly frequently dumping "smart for a jock" types after I suck their brains dry of interesting conversation and also witness all their exhibitions of novel-to-me skills might offer better evidence.

[IlliniDave]

... I suppose the reason why I hold "reading" to be superior to "weight-lifting" ...

You're taking my statement way too literally, and doing so obfuscates the point. "Weightlifting" was just an example of a modality of physical activity that promotes the health of the body, and fwiw something I have not done as a fitness pursuit in more than 10 years. And it's no surprise at all to learn a person that flexes her book reading muscles as readily and frequently as Arnold Swarzenegger flexed his physical muscles would deem book reading superior to weightlifting.

My philosophy is both mental "exercise" and physical "exercise" are necessary to reach any sort of optimum holistic state of being I am interested in pursuing, both in their own rights and in their usually underestimated interconnectedness and mutually reinforcing benefits. There are many, many ways for those to be put into practice, separately and in concert. I don't judge either to be superior or inferior in general. YMMV.

[7Wannabe5]

@IlliniDave;

Oh, we are fairly close to being on the same page. For instance, I believe that both are thoroughly necessary in order to achieve Transcendent Sexual Union and/or Euphoric State When Happening Upon the Coyote Beneath the Ghost Trees While Hiking or Thoroughly Contented State While Squatting Among the Warm, Fragrant Strawberries, or The Reason Behind Why I Am Currently Such a Huge Fan of Doechii (which might be simple admiration of ability to spit smart words while simultaneously exhibiting strong dance moves, unbelievable breath control and core strength required along with NeFi cleverness with language, humor, musical intelligence, and emotional expression.)

OTOH, maybe not so much Pure Delight of Reading a Great Book in the Splendor of the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library System. I think I could likely still enjoy that if somebody wheeled me in at age 97, especially if they also wheeled me over to a good bakery afterwards. So, maybe the question is how long/hard to pursue physical fitness optionality towards possibility of Transcendent Sexual Union vs. when to switch over to final content with being wheeled into Library/Bakery mode? For better or worse, I do feel like 60 is at least a bit too early for final Library/Bakery mode, because even putting the possibility of achieving Transcendent Sexual Union to the side, I still have a list of simpler, stuff-I-would-have-also-enjoyed-at-age-10 goals such as "making pottery from clay I dug out of the earth myself" or "breeding a new variety of vegetable" and also all the possible, theoretical fun Grandma stuff on my list. (I currently find myself completely exhausted after spending a day teaching the 3 year old group. Like I can barely drag myself home before collapsing. It's kind of like live action Whack-a-Mole, because one second you are attempting to stop one of them from hitting their "friend" over the head with a truck and the next second you are running the one who obviously is about to pee on the floor to the bathroom, etc. etc. etc.)

[IlliniDave]

That's a huge drop. My zone 2 experiments only took 25 points off.

You added muscle and resistance training. That's a big lever IMO.

That's a good point, Scott. I don't recall running across any evidence that resistance work specifically affects blood lipid characteristics, but plenty that it comes with a breadth of metabolic benefits, and my belief was that metabolic dysfunction formed the roots of my lipid profile looking other than ideal.

Actually, I suspected the nutrition changes I made in support of the increased emphasis on strength training might cause those numbers to look a little worse. Still haven't got TCL, triglyceride, and HDL numbers yet.

25 points still gets you in the efficacy range of a single generic statin. Nothing to sneeze at. I wonder if the benefits of resistance training and Zone 2 are additive when it comes to lipid profiles, even though from a performance perspective they work against each other a little?

[Ego]

Wow! Congratulations on the LDL drop. It could also partially be a function of your emphasis on gut health. Increased soluble fiber, and whatnot. Great news!

[Scott 2]

I wonder if the benefits of resistance training and Zone 2 are additive when it comes to lipid profiles, even though from a performance perspective they work against each other a little?

I believe they promise improvements via different mechanisms, and so should be additive. While there's conflict at extremes, I find moderate volumes of each complementary. I can handle way more strength training volume when my cardio is good.

Lipid profile metrics are tricky, in that a minimum score is not necessarily an optimal score. My lowest LDL numbers correlate with my lowest Testosterone readings. I get better overall labs having eggs every day, ensuring my vegetarian diet offers saturated fats and cholesterol. Pulling back from more extreme endurance volumes (4h+) seems to help as well. While LDL goes up a bit, HDL does so even more.

[IlliniDave]

Wow! Congratulations on the LDL drop. It could also partially be a function of your emphasis on gut health. Increased soluble fiber, and whatnot. Great news!

Thanks Ego. I believe you are correct. With all the recent information The Algorithm has cast my way concerning the growing body of evidence establishing the role the state of the gut has in determining cognitive and emotional health (or degradation thereof) I feel pretty comfortable now in assuming that the gut is a pretty major player in all aspects of health, head to toe. I don't know of a direct mechanistic connection with serum cholesterol, though. Of course that doesn't mean it's not there. A reductionist view of the gut might be that it's job is to allow useful good things to enter the body while keeping bad things out, it stands to reason that improved efficiency in that role ripples everywhere.

It occurred to me last night that I really don't know why my lipid numbers got out of whack and I probably never will. I didn't respond to quasi-keto regimens in the expected way, nor to a regimen skewed heavily towards plant-based nutrition. Either would produce token improvements over a quasi-SAD regimen. And by out of whack I don't mean simply that my total cholesterol was above 170 or LDL was above 70 or whatever the current statin-dispensing thresholds are, more that the overall mix seemed to be disordered. After turning all the nutrition knobs I knew to turn without seeing much change I started thinking about other things, namely inflammation driven by systemic stress (more of the physiological variety, but I couldn't rule out psychological), and because it's so central to cholesterol, some sort of liver dysfunction.

I wish I had data with the granularity I get from Function Health going back a decade or more. As it is, I know that a year ago, roughly 15-16 months into the quest, my inflammation markers weren't particularly bad, and my liver enzyme levels had improved a good bit from 12/2023 and prior, but weren't optimal. So I'm leaning towards more robust liver health being the driver of change. That said I've yet to encounter any authority arguing that improving liver health is a direct knob for cholesterol profile, and I'm way out over my skis as the saying goes. I'm one of those people who is susceptible to occasionally "seeing" patterns and correlations where there are none.

And I should add that I still don't have the rest of the lipid panel results, so all I really know at this moment is LDL has gone down. Since it has historically been a stubborn parameter for me, I'm doing some assuming that I'll see some arguably favorable movement in closely related parameters.

Your thought combined with my prior line of speculation reminds me of Robert Lustig's little mantra. "Feed your gut. Protect your liver."

And I have to keep reminding myself that undoing decades of IR and related metabolic degradation isn't like flicking on a light switch. I may only be seeing the necessary passage of time since I first got the goes-intos in order for more complex systemic improvements to manifest, rather than any more recent tweaks being the driver being a magic bullet.

[IlliniDave]

I believe they promise improvements via different mechanisms, and so should be additive. While there's conflict at extremes, I find moderate volumes of each complementary. I can handle way more strength training volume when my cardio is good.

Lipid profile metrics are tricky, in that a minimum score is not necessarily an optimal score. My lowest LDL numbers correlate with my lowest Testosterone readings. I get better overall labs having eggs every day, ensuring my vegetarian diet offers saturated fats and cholesterol. Pulling back from more extreme endurance volumes (4h+) seems to help as well. While LDL goes up a bit, HDL does so even more.

Yep, I'm loosely aware of the U-shaped curve that exists when you look at all-cause mortality (rather than focusing on CVD alone) versus and LDL or TCL. Too little is as deadly as too much and it seems like a balancing act of trading off between potential CVD risk and other causes. Cholesterol is quite a useful substance overall, and simply blocking it's production when the body deems it warranted doesn't seem like a great idea to me, and is my primary objection to statins. And when you take cardiovascular "fitness" towards the extremes the longevity benefits diminish or disappear. I'd imagine the same is true for strength training also. Optimum is likely found in the both/and rather than the either/or. One of the things I heard Peter Attia talking about recently was lack of quantification of the bottom line risk to higher protein consumption versus that of sarcopenia in all cause mortality. Essentially, how would we want to trade between an amount of degradation in markers thought to contribute to healthspan versus the risk of a debilitating fall or injury in the out years initiating a rapid decline/demise. Gotta love complex systems where there's usually not a simple direct answer to anything.

My testosterone went up a little this time. I'm still just barely below what Function Health defines as the optimal range but well within standard reference ranges. I'm hopeful that what I'm seeing as far as LDL reduction is a reduction in what I'll call broken LDL--LDL that the liver should be pulling and recycling into new lipoproteins but maybe is unable to. If my total cholesterol has fallen too much below 200, I might start to get concerned I'm starving my hormone and immune systems of the tools they need.

Another interesting thing I ran across last night while trying to learn more about LDL is that a study not too many years back looked at some geographic population and determined the the lowest incidence of CVD deaths in this population (obviously a generally older cohort) occurred in the subset with the highest LDL and lowest VLDL. The guy I was listening to was a guy named Ben Bikman who has a longstanding series called The Metabolic Classroom. His specialty is fat cell biology and metabolic function, but he's pretty well versed in all facets of metabolism and only occasionally touches on cholesterol, and it was just a reference to a paper he'd seen, so I don't know what the limitations of the paper are.

[IlliniDave]

Over the last few days I've spent some time contemplating 'mindfulness' in an attempt to be a little more precise about what it means to me as it seems that it can mean different things to different people. The take on it that seems to resonate the most with me is the fairly simple idea of reining in, or at least calming, my mind so that it's present in the here and now. Doing so tends to transform work into play, where play is simply being rather than restricted to the mindless pursuit of relatively shallow fun. Seems like a great concept, but one that's much easier said than done.

Despite the difficulty I feel like I'm making some baby step level progress in rewiring my brain, especially now that a few weeks has gone by and I'm not trying so hard. It's a subjective assessment. I feel less susceptible to small surges of angst. Angst probably isn't the best word. What I mean is low level feeling of unease that don't necessarily break through to incessant stream of conscious brain chatter, but as I make efforts to disassociate from some of that, they were there, and when I notice them and search for their origins, they tend to dissipate.

One thing a quest for mindfulness and parasympathetic dominance has not done yet is make substantial changes in sleep characteristics. Despite having for a second time made a good faith effort to bring myself "in range" in that regard, my sleep behaves like a largely independent actor. I seem to proceed through alternating phases of arguably better and worse sleep that last 3-5 months and don't seem to correlate to the calendar seasons. I've done enough to convince myself that it's not some sort of nutritional imbalance, nor do to lack of a consistent diurnal/circadian rhythm. There's not even a strong correlation to my daily activity level other than maybe a small connection between activity and deep sleep. So I'm about to the point where I'm going to put my quest to be a super sleeper up on the shelf. Other than apparently being a demographic outlier, I don't seem to display any of the symptoms of chronic sleep issues or conditions they tend to exacerbate (generally, many of the chronic "lifestyle diseases"). Oura will still collect it's data for me and I'll probably check in with it on a roughly monthly basis, but otherwise I think my investigating and problem solving energy will be better spent otherwise.

I do intend to continue experimenting with developing a mindfulness practice and biohacking my way towards a minimization of stress that originates in the mind, if for no other than I believe it's indisputable at this point that stress from even mild brain neurological dysfunction is very tightly and bidirectionally coupled with the ol' meat suit, which I depend on to maintain a decent quality of life.