u/Noise-of-the-Spheres

Heard my colleague recommend smoking cessation for a healthy problem. Very usual in this line of work. She quit almost a decade ago, I quit a few years ago right after awakening. It's what follows that makes me squirm.

"You just need to put willpower in".

I didn't step in, but I know willpower is part of the problem. Bateson spent years researching alcoholics anonymous and realized part of the self-destructive spiral of addiction is being trapped in a competitive relationship with oneself, trying to exert control or willpower over themselves. The advice you usually get is what perpetuates the problem, the vision of the individual as a separated "Ego" detached from the whole system of existence.

The most effective thing AA does, according to Bateson, is the surrender, admitting impotence. This allows ourselves to become integrated into the whole ecological system that surrounds us. It's not the passivity that wins but the holistic view.

There is no way for man to be separated from nature, Spinoza noted.

"Forget about willpower. Throw the pack into the trash. None of this is your fault."

This over-reliance on personal agency and responsibility is the scourge of our time. Useful lies in service of power. Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand and all the devils.

When did this idea start? Of severing us all from our environment to justify punishment?

When this lady comes back six months later, lungs like charcoal, it will be very pleasant to say "I told you so" and stop worrying about human suffering by placing it under the label of "deserved".

At least in knowing, one can adjust their strategy. And hopefully produce some desirable results like kicking a bad habit.

There are other forces at work, but this is one of them.

Our societies do not feel cold and inhumane because of the inherent brutality of biological existence. They feel this way because the management of systems of power breeds dehumanization. Decisions affecting millions become a spreadsheet: individual lives blur into numbers, and people become like ants in a terrarium. The system selects for people who can tolerate the abstraction. Rewards it. The reality of you being human is even an obstacle.

If you are Jeff Bezos, you cannot make decisions about your employees' bathroom breaks while identifying their needs as fully human as your own. If you are Elon Musk, seek fixing their “bad programming” with a brain chip. They're NPC's, you're not erasing anything important. If you are Sam Altman, of course he can replace your job with a machine, you're not as real as the machine is!

Every fortnight, some spiritual idol discovers Vedanta or some other esoteric text and reinterprets it into a doctrine in which the “I” is the only thing that truly exists and everyone else becomes an appearance in consciousness. Literally, no follow-up required. This is what gets whispered into Donald Trump's ear since age eleven, so we can blame narcissism seven decades later on the darkness of his soul. A remarkably convenient metaphysics for a world already organized around treating people as resources. It's very hard to go to Epstein Island if you think of those young girls as people. Good thing you've been awakened!

The collateral damage is the ordinary person who comes around here, for whom empathy and community and belonging are probably valuable assets, gets their solipsistic delusion reinforced to their detriment. The disease of the ruling class trickling down where wealth doesn't.

And there is no point playing whack-a-mole with bad apples. Even the spiritual idol has a monetary incentive behind. You could remove every single bad actor from the scene —fix their wrong beliefs, reinstate their empathy, have them resign in shame and disgust, vomiting around the staircases in their way out— a new batch would replace them all, a new spreadsheet would open. The machine that produces monsters is itself produced. The machine that produces machines is not so easily targeted.

There are other forces at work, and they will keep playing out. It would just be nice if we weren't one of them.

The study part of the practice sometimes feels remarkably similar to meditation.

The mind wanders while the eyes keep reading, and is gently brought back. It wanders into problems that need solving, focuses on small pains, invents some urgent need, and tries to convince you to get up. Again, it is gently soothed and brought back.

After a while, the self disappears into the stream of words. It is replaced by an external force: a parallel reality of narrated thoughts experienced as sensations, a virtual stepping out of one's own shoes to live as something else, someone else, or no one else.

I wonder whether the practice of reading has somehow prepared me to understand meditation better, or whether meditation is instead seeping into my reading habit, revealing aspects of it that I had never noticed before.

Capitalism rests on an idea about human nature: that people are naturally competitive, selfish and greedy, then builds a society around that idea.

If survival is competitive, people become competitive. If livelihood depends on productivity, productivity becomes part of our identity. If everything has a price, people learn to evaluate everything. If we can lose it, we hoard it. People's goals and values align themselves with what's demanded of them in society. Those who fail that adaptation slip through the cracks and disappear from the picture.

Capitalism describes a human being, builds institutions that produce that human being, and then points to the resulting behaviour as proof that it was right. The fiction makes itself real.

This creates an obstacle to awakening because it is difficult to distinguish the self from the roles and desires the system produces. We experience competition, productivity and value as though they were simply human nature. We retroactively rewrite history to make it feels as if it has always been this way, a constant struggle for survival and reproduction. Like assuming economies before money had to be relying on barter.

That we are who we are is an already self-fulfilled prophecy.