Miguel Mayher

Instead of calling the stuff you do everyday a routine, call it a ceremony. Makes it sound special.

Flew out to the Amazon today to interview some indigenous shaman about a local tree that they say has attained enlightenment. Hearing some fascinating stories and being shown some mind blowing things. The world is a magical place.

One of the best ways to increase your agency is learning how to see life in higher resolution. To understand why, we have to understand what it is that gets in the way of agency. The opposite of agency is compulsion - actions we perform reactively, seemingly against our will. Compulsions largely fall into two categories: resistance and grasping. In general, automatic resistances and graspings fall downstream of low resolution perceptual processing. That is, the mind labels what is actually quite a complex and constantly changing set of sensations with a simple, unchanging tag such as "good" or "bad" or "pleasant" or "unpleasant". It is only once a certain group of dynamic, granular sensations have been reduced to a simple "good" / "bad" that the compulsive reactivity takes place. It works something like this: Complex dynamic sensations > labelled "bad" > automatic resistance Or Complex dynamic sensations > labelled "good" > automatic grasping The best way to break this chain is to start processing our sensations and perceptions in higher resolution. What this means is staying in contact with the actual moment by moment changes of the sensations / perceptions *prior to* them being labelled into simple binaries like "good" / "bad" / "pleasant" / "unpleasant" etc.. If we can stay in contact with reality at a high frequency rate, we will always notice constant changes and fluctuations to any given sensation or perception. This makes it harder for the mind to arbitrarily group any set of evolving sensations into a simple label. Not just "good" or "bad" but even labels like "hot" / "cold", "comfortable" / "uncomfortable" and so on tend to break down upon high resolution analysis. eg a "hot" sensation when we tune into it at a high frequency reveals a fluctuating experience of temperature that usually even has discernable split-second gaps between each moment of temperature-sensation. It may sound like a very abstract skill but it turns out that when we are paying close moment-by-moment attention - and when we increase how many moments we notice in a given timeframe - it is a lot harder for the mind to collapse into the low resolution labels that are the breeding ground for reactivity and involuntary action. Not only does this lead to greater agency and freedom, but it also gives us greater sensory clarity which allows us to perceive more beauty and vibrancy in our day to day lives.

There’s a certain type of argument against God that I often hear from Buddhists, which I find unconvincing. The argument essentially seems to be that because there is no stable sensation / perception / field of consciousness etc findable in our minds that corresponds to God, God cannot exist. But - even assuming that is the case - why should God be assumed to be something that’s represented substantially in our minds? Why couldn’t God be a function rather than a substance? In Mahayana Buddhism, they teach that under conditions of maximal awareness, the default functioning of the universe is pure compassionate love and wisdom. What could be more divine than that? What higher intelligence than compassionate love could we hope for the universe’s default operating principle to be? And it certainly accords with my experience of the contemplative path. That when I am able to release craving, aversion and ignorance, compassionate love spontaneously emerges as the default functioning without any need to create or design it. People might object something like “OK, but that’s not a *personal* God.” But then, according to Buddhist theory - what is a person? A person is not a substance but a function. A person is essentially just the way a certain set of phenomena unfold. So, what makes the default loving compassionate functioning of reality any less of a person than the karmically driven functioning of a human person. “OK, but it’s not a God that punishes and rewards,” could be the next objection. But again, according to Mahayana theory - and according to my own experience - the degree to which we suffer is essentially determined by the degree to which we either divert from this compassionate wisdom function or conform to it. When we release craving, aversion and ignorance, we default to the compassionate-wisdom function and we don’t suffer. When we hold onto craving, aversion and ignorance, we limit the scope of that function and we suffer. On a practical level, this isn’t meaningfully all that different to reward/punishment on the basis of adherence to or denial of this divine function. Really, all the things that feel truly important about God are all features of the universe. A loving intelligence is the default functioning of the universe and the degree to which we conform to it determines the degree to which we suffer in the world. It’s a pretty similar story to the God story. It’s why I think the Tibetans were able to design a complete path to enlightenment that revolves around building a relationship to a divine humanoid figure that represents wise compassionate default functioning of the universe. It’s also why, as a Buddhist, I often find more common ground spiritually with Christians who earnestly have live their life on the basis of a faith in a force of universal love, than I do with the type of Buddhist who envisage themselves to be living in a universe of dead matter that operates on blind and arbitrary principles.

Even bigger irony of getting rich is that everything expensive isn't that much better than when you paid normal for it Many things are even worse (most expensive luxury hotels are guaranteed worse than regular simple hotels, I know I tried most of them now) The real reason you wanna get rich is not to buy expensive things It's so that $1M invested gives you 3% to take out every year with no risk, which is $30,000/year Which you can use to travel for $1000/mo on a shoestring budget forever without having to back to some desk job with a shitty boss Aka FREEDOM