Jim Irving

@nickcammarata There's a saying, "the young practice hard. The old practice correctly." Also, the process of a strong ego dissolving looks like an ego trying hard and eventually giving up. If you've got a strong ego, then you should totally be increasing dosage until the effect is achieved

the "i'm going to be a competitive spirituality person, practice more than anyone else, max everything out" thing isn't how spirituality works at all, it's completely opposite the move you're supposed to do, and yet it often works anyway

Being a healer requires keeping your heart hard enough to do the work, and soft enough to want to.

@algekalipso How much of the time is just working on establishing a vocabulary? This reminds me of when we first got a sangha really describing the meditation practice. It was a long time before we got fast at it.

One interesting observation from the Computational Neurophenomenology workshop I attended in Austria last week was that for a 3 second experience, the interview might last 60 to 90 minutes. If you end at an hour mark, it's often the case the participant will feel like they haven't said enough about it. If you let it run through its course naturally it usually tapers off a little past 90. 45 minutes is definitely not enough, and 30 minutes is just getting started and covering the basics. å (example experience analyzed: you are told to eat a slice of lemon covered in sugar. in reality the slice of lemon is covered in salt. they tricked you. that's part of the experience. now tell us all about the three seconds where you realized you were getting tricked)

@exgenesis Bro Gene keys!

now that agents + social media + pkm is a hot topic I should pivot to what I'm actually enjoying rn which is reading the classics, using complex systems and active inference to figure out the mythic architecture of western civilization and figure out where the next brick goes

@nosilverv Pipe the image generation prompts to an llm. Don’t try using the image analysis ones. They’re comparatively trash

i now have made over 1000 pictures on midjourney. what's the best way to analyse them for my themes and so on?

@nosilverv Dude, you’re in it. Brunch used to involve show and tell

Ok I'm getting insane over claude & midjourney how do i find the local group of people who are vibecoding their lives

In Theravada Buddhism, Original Sin is environmental destruction and racism (DN27). We're not supposed to proselytize. But just in case you want to anyways ... It's a pretty strong selling point. What have the other religions got for Original Sin? Sex? Ha good luck with that.

Wound up seeing Racist Twitter, where you get these young guys preaching tribalism like it is a cool, new, rebellious countercultural movement. That people who look like you are better and more human is apx. the oldest idea. In Buddhism (see DN27) it's basically Original Sin.

@nickcammarata 8 fold path homie

they should invent a dharma that cures the first arrow too

@cube_flipper @danielmingram The intensity of the jhana scales with the unification of mind. Those two are not the same thing. Vipassana is generally less unified than the result of long-term samatha. That’s why they feel so different but technically a part of you is experiencing the same phenomena.

i have some amount of confusion around the way the word *jhana* is used. in @danielmingram's book (specifically in relation to j1-j4). *jhana* seems to be used to denote specific attentional modes (focused, diffuse, expanded, and panoramic), whereas *shamatha jhana* is reserved for the ultra-refined, hyper-concentrated version thereof? (extracts from The Fire Kasina, including a description of the consequences for the nimitta)

@dismaien I like the daoist interpretation of magnetic and dynamic. At their most essential, that's how they feel in the body.

femininity is preserved; masculinity is earned

@TylerAlterman The sage and the traumatized know when to keep their mouths shut. A persona is a simulation of a single face that hides many. Can't see all a diamond's facets from a single point of view.

When people are experts at compartmentalization, my first reads of them are super inaccurate. I will think "Bob is kind of cold" until I meet Bob drunk or dancing and it will turn out that Bob has a blazing furnace of a heart. Very disorienting!

@vikhyatk In the best of cases, it's people trying to improve their processes. In the worst of cases, it's indulging in arguing and virtue signaling at the expense of actually getting the work done.

how do you explain what a rationalist or effective altruist is to someone hearing the term for the first time?

@neats29 The big tweets are too noisy for actual exchange. The party is too loud to talk.

i am fighting back the algo by not liking viral tweets and liking low liked tweets more.

@isabelunraveled My body, and a lot.

who is bothering you lately and what are they revealing to you about yourself?

@exgenesis He should have played mini-shogi. If chess was a boxing match, mini-shogi is a knife fight in a phone booth

omg me

are you yin-ing son?

@cube_flipper This can happen due to eye dominance. You can manually shift the dominance in your mind and balance it out. Takes a moment to get the hang of, but I think it makes a difference.

oh actually that is interesting 1. make nimitta by staring at lamp with left eye open 2. put eye mask on and stabilise the nimitta 3. take eye mask off and look at wall 4. close left eye; nimitta disappears 5. close right eye; nimitta reappears

futzing around with this tonight

@tucker_peck They certainly didn't get there by respecting privacy or data custody.

Using AI as a therapist and hoping it's not just feeding you what you want to hear? Maybe OpenAI and Anthropic did not become 2 of the world's 3 most valuable private companies by putting your mental health first.

If there was a party game called "speed claude-ing", what would it entail?