Aaron

Sanity = Lucidly climbing up & down the branches of abstraction A big source of confusion I spot in people is when they get stuck attending to reality at stifling levels of abstraction; either by going too complex or too simple, and not being able to scale to a different level when that would get them out of a confuddlement. "Everything is Yin and Yang! No, it's all One! No, it's neither, it's non-dual! But my five family members are coming over for dinner and I need to remember to buy 14 items at the supermarket, and calculate my taxes. And my brother is probably going to bring up politics which is so overwhelming complicated! But it's all One..." So many minds get stuck trying to figure out the forest, when maybe what they really need to do is look at the individual trees. Or sometimes they need to get down to ground level and pick through the dirt, or sometimes take a bird's eye view of the canopy, except they're stuck or don't realise everything else has moved on. The mind chunks and fuses reality all the time - you may have noticed. But how much have you really noticed, and how much flexible control do you have over this process? At least become lucid of it. I have found that by recognising this feature of mind, and becoming better at navigating strata of abstraction, my sense of clarity and sanity has gone way up. Great spiritual development is to be able to nimbly both reach lower on the levels of abstractions - all the way to zero* - AND be able to hold onto higher and higher levels of abstraction, extending our consciousness capacity, before we project to infinity (aka 'more than I can make sense of'). [This is what we'll be exploring in my meditation group tomorrow.] *I dare say that most meditators never get to true zero, only a cloudy one(ness).

Intergenerational trauma has a huge amount of momentum, like a freight train barrelling down through people’s lives. If you’re even somewhere along the way to stopping this in your lifetime, you should give yourself a huge amount of credit.

I’m still new to Claude Code, but it’s been a huge unlock for me as a non-technical user. Here are the most valuable, non-generic things I’ve learned so far: