Had a dream a few days ago.
There were tigers. And they were no joke. Was hoping I would not get killed.
Eventually, I ended the dream because it got to be too much for me.
I remembered this song that I wrote. Can’t believe it was 8 freaking years ago.
Hunter’s Moon
…And I wait up for Hunter’s Moon
…And I wake up for Hunter’s Moon
(I think) I relate to music almost entirely as a technology for calibrating subjective states.
that’s what it is for me.
Hey, @Fractal_Explorer, bumping one of your joints right now.
I Just Want To Vibe |o|
It’s a little closer to my New York, late-night in car, FDR Drive, House music vibe.
resisting sleep these days.
not energetic.
just like something’s clogging the pipes.
The water level won’t sink beneath a certain point.
I’ve met about 5 or 6 deadlines in the past 3 weeks. They just kept coming.
But I have one more, and this one…
am unsure about meeting it.
I will give it my shot.
I’m gonna call this a synchronicity haha. When I picked up making music again this past weekend I was playing around with some presets and I found chord stabs that inspired me. My next track after this one was gonna be another house track. High energy good vibes. Which kind of goes along with what you wrote there about calibrating subjective states. I’ve been stuck in melancholic stuff for a bit now and knew there was a broader range to express in me. Just needed to clear out some blocks.
Okay, it’s another day, so, here’s another perspective (which, at this point, we’ll acknowledge that you’re not really asking for anymore 
)
The way you feel is, indeed, a mixture of neuroendocrine responses
At first, people allow those responses to be triggered and driven by external circumstances, habit, and basic instinctual programming
But
You’ve been exploring the above three observations for some time now through your training, @Yazooneh . So, in this regard, your training already constitutes a type (or a ‘subset’) of so-called “meditation”.
From this perspective, TRAINING involves changing and overcoming certain aspects of Old Programming; and choosing and internalizing certain kinds of New Programming.
The “computer” being programmed, in this case, is your neuro-endocrine processes.
At first, you program it, for the purpose of achieving certain valued outcomes. For example, the ability to push through physical hardship, the ability to focus and apply physical force or mental determination or aggressive intent, and so on.
But if you TRAIN long enough, it’s natural to get a little curious about the underlying system that is being programmed.
If you use Microsoft Word for long enough, at some point you may think, “ 
what the heck is this computer, actually? What else does it do?”
At that point, you’re in.
Whatever you do to explore that question is (at least to some degree) “Meditation”.
It’s the motivation behind exploring the question that makes it meditation; more than the particular method of asking the question.
The methods you use will evolve as your knowledge, data, and vistas continue to grow and evolve.
But the process of exploring the question(s) is what makes it meditation.
At times there will be the inhale of (only seemingly) passive attention and contemplation. At other times, there will be the exhale of active intention and effort.
On the surface, these can look quite distinct and different from each other.
In actuality, they both contribute to the overarching RESPIRATION of meditation. Together, in alternation, they form one breath.
What unites them is that integrating question behind them.
So, when you run for 30 minutes, in cold or heat, pushing your body to box for the whole time; that is meditation.
And when you sit, stand, walk, or lie down, in calm, searching equanimity, witnessing the processes that comprise your experience, that is also Meditation.
Meditation with Subs today: ~9:50 to 10:50 am.
Now we move.
my friend I felt that answer on many levels, thank you. I’d love to spend an hour a day reprogramming the computer in my head to it’s most efficient form.
I guess i am doing that during training, meditating, and this is why focusing power is required. I’d like to spend an hour a day meditating in preparation for my next meditation which is training.
I salute your determination in explaining this concept to me despite what seemed like me absolutely not understanding, i admire that
Don’t allow your value as a person, as a man, to be based on the fact that another person looked at you and saw an opportunity.
EGO is not meant to be the ruler of your life.
EGO is meant to be a beautiful, priceless, amazing tool and helper that is used by the ruler of your life.
As long as EGO is running your life, you are a slave. You may be a smiling and well-fed slave, but you’re still a slave.
Also:
Do not try to “destroy the EGO”. That’s stupid.
You go on an enjoyable road trip with your faithful dog. Getting a bit sleepy after a long morning of driving, you pull into a roadside rest stop to take a brief nap. When you wake up, you find that the car is in motion. Your dog is sitting on your lap driving the car. You note with amazement, (in the first 20 minutes as you’re coming to terms with this discovery), that although your dog is somehow managing to drive the car quite competently, he keeps changing direction to follow squirrels, female dogs, or fast food restaurants.
“Wow”, you say.
But now, it’s time to take action.
What do you do?
Do you now pull out your registered firearm and murder your beloved dog?
Why the hell would you do that?
Just move him over to the passenger seat. After all, he freaking likes it over there. Loves to feel the wind on his face while you drive. And, while you’re at it, give him some doggy treats. Because that was an amazing accomplishment he just made. He drove the damn car!
But now that you’re awake, it’s time for the rightful driver to take over. Your dog, as brilliant as he is, will be able to help in so many other ways. Your sense of the big picture is better than his, and he’s really much happier as a competent assistant.
You don’t need to destroy your ego. Just use it; and use it properly.
And now for something completely different…
Have you checked out VST instruments at Sonic Charge? Their Microtonic Drum Machine can create rhythms (and I think there is even a library rated as best to worst of such automatically generated rhythms [Patternarium]).
Also SampleScience has some interesting samples and VSTs.
If I pray for strength and big muscles, God is going to send me a gym membership, good training programs, and motivation and encouragement to use them.
Was feeling pretty tired and burdened by around 7 pm today.
I hadn’t meditated in this morning so I ended up doing it at almost 8 pm.
It really helped.
I think that with my sub stack, I’m now really kicking into Growth Phase. I’m getting opportunities to build the results that I’m seeking.
Today’s meditation was one of those that just felt extremely smooth.
Just sharing. I have no monopoly or ownership over this concept. You’re likely to explore areas of it that I have not seen. (I think you already are actually.)
Here’s another part:
There’s a thing in meditation where you may notice that you don’t actually know anything.
It’s more like you’re pretending to know. And that actually works quite well enough.
Ideas, perceptions, beliefs are like shapes drawn in the dark with a fast moving light.
We call this ‘drawing of shapes’ knowing and experiencing.
You see and appreciate the shapes that your consciousness is making.
And that seeing and appreciating is ‘meditation’.
In meditation, in life, in evolution and development,
things wear out, they settle down.
there’s an alternation between phases: leaps of excitation, and subsequent calmings down into more stable configurations.
For example:
In the course of contemplating, you inevitably experientially encounter the existential void of Nothingness.
You panic. Everything you know and love is under threat, or ‘is not real’. The panic is followed by depression, loneliness, and so on.
And then…
The panic, which in the end, let’s be honest, is really just You, starts to ‘wear out’. You “realize” that the void is fine; quite natural. And, in fact, it’s been there the whole time, even before you experienced it.
After your initial ‘Crisis of Evolutionary Leap’, you start to calm down and have a look around. The world is still there, apparently. And you’re noticing interesting features of it; features that you once overlooked.
And now, forgetting all about your previous panic, you begin to look back, wistfully, at your “amazing awakening experience”. You tell others how incredible it was and encourage them to do the same thing. Depending on your temperament, you might even become a ‘Spiritual Teacher’.
And life goes along, in this new version,
Until….
“oh no. another Crisis!”.
Time for you to ‘lose everything’ again.
Which really just means, time for another excitation phase, in which you get yet another briefest of glimpses of what is Beyond or Outside of your current frame.
“Oh God!”
”I was so wrong!”
”Now I really see!”
“My whole life was a lie!”
”What am I going to do?”
And then….
Things calm down again.
And so on. And so on.
The beating of a heart.
The expansion and contraction.
The loss and the gain.
It’s sustaining our lives.
Q: What’s happens after you die?
A: Hold on a minute; I’m still working on answering, ‘What happens while you’re alive’.
I started this stack 3-5 months ago, but I feel like it’s still very much in the Seedling phase.
It’s very interesting.
Since starting my stack, my work has become much busier, and at the same time, it’s also becoming more compelling and meaningful. There was always about 35 percent or so of my job that felt meaningful to me. Basically, the human interaction parts. Hearing people’s ideas, communicating my own, facilitating their experiential learning and subjective processing. But the other parts of my work often felt frustratingly irrelevant.
That ratio is changing unmistakeably.
More parts of my work are feeling interesting, compelling, or motivating. It doesn’t feel like magic or some television commercial. It’s happening organically, with lots of gripes and growing pains along the way. Nevertheless, the shifting is evident, and it’s amazing me.
I’m feeling more connected to more parts of my work than I did before. It still feels like there would be a long way for me to go before I felt Easy Competence. So, yeah, not like magic. But I’m aware of growth happening, and I have to admit, it’s growth that was not really happening at this rate in the preceding 11 years.
Yup.
In the past 2 weeks or so, I’ve been feeling the Carpe Diem Ascended functionality taking a major leap forward. There’s this weird undercurrent of enthusiasm to handle and resolve meaningful tasks. It’s been almost like when you put soap into dirty water, or shine light into a smoggy room. I could equally feel pleasure and non-pleasure at the same time. Which I find kind of amusing.
I’ve been playing the custom with Carpe Diem Ascended since August 12. So, it’s been pretty much exactly 5 months.
So, this also addresses one of the experimental questions of my current approach.
If you play, 3 maxed-out (i.e., 20-module), Terminus2 build ZP customs, what happens? How do things unfold?
There are other factors to consider too, of course.
For one thing, Carpe Diem Ascended has a lot of heavy lifting to do in my case. So, we could expect a somewhat slower process. Either way, though. I’m feeling it now, and it only opens the question: I started my 2nd custom in September, and my 3rd on October 1. So what will be happening in those areas over the next 3 to 6 months.
Time will instruct.
[Addendum] Another pretty clear factor, now that I think about it, is that on 31 December 2022, I started using ZP v2 upgrades of my 3 customs. This lines up quite well with (you guessed it) the ‘past two weeks’. So, it’s also possible that ZP v2 is making some of the difference that I’m noticing now.
Such a beautiful way to describe the ego. I agree with you, but I do think there is something like ego death. Idk if you have ever experienced it (I assume you did, seeing your spiritual posts lol), but to me, it feels like something is dying inside. Like it’s fighting from within. Being very angry at nothing and that starting to weep and feel sadness. After that, I feel relief, and then the cycle repeats.
So yeah, trying to kill or destroy the ego makes no sense, but there is something dying IMO.