Mike Burr - log

[bio] [mind] "Enhanced" meditation

My theory, which I will not fully describe nor defend is that your "feelings" are a process that goes roughly as follows:

We discover "meditation".

Destructive ruminant thinking universal and timeless. Many, many times throughout history, independently, folks have come up with all manner of "meditation" whose job, at its core is to derail this train of thoughts and leave you with a snowy blank screen (for once! for chrisake.)

And note that we haven't discovered the meditation yet. They're all different kinds of brain hacks of varying quality.

There are whole branches of medicine, and whole parts of medical education (coursework and institutions) devoted to: Hey, how can we elicit this state? How can we enhance it? What are other ways we can do this? ...

I wonder if there are more direct ways. If we have a conveyor belt of unhelpful thoughts coming in and wrecking our day [reminder: all of this could be wrong], why not look for ways of derailing that conveyor belt, by any means necessary.

WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE

This may amount to saying "Hey, why don't we also try using drugs and surgery in trying to improve one's mental health?", and that's nothing new.

I'm just beatboxing here.

If thoughts go from cold storage to "making me so goddamn mad" [or glad, sad, yadda yadda], which they appear to definitely do, at least in me, why not look into the why and how.

I don't need any fancy particle accelerator to know that all-too-frequently, some

memory* from my past will pop into my conscious train of thought and some how or other kill my buzz. This will happen today, tomorrow, and every day for a long time comein'. And the same is true for you [Again, send fan mail if you think this part is wrong. I'm kind of using it as an assumption after all].

Hopefully we agree that

There is necessarily a lot of fuzzy talk here. I'm using words wantonly.

If all this is happening, there must be a kind of mechanism.

Can we understand it? If we have a big, complex mechanism that picks a random memory and sends it to the mainfraime sometimes, maybe we can ask?

:shrug: