Good morning, in my book.
Went to sleep too late. So woke up late.
But processed thoughts and ideas.
Then meditated.
Came to work for my one meeting of the day at 12 pm. Now on to the reports.
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Try to understand a mind
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Man, life is feeling a little freaking tight these days
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Got into bed by 11:15 pm last night. Woke up at 4:30 am or so.
Since I was up, did my meditation hour.
Went back to sleep from 6 to 8 or so.
Working on reports in the office right now. Particularly painful this time, for various reasons. But weâre getting there.
I realize that once this task is complete, some space will be opened up for returning to my commitments, creation, and unfolding. So, thereâs a motivation to get there.
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We are so good at seeing little tiny slivers of whole pictures and systems.
(see, for example, our various takes on gender and sexuality)
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Trust is the currency, and the current, of souls
I was just reflecting on experiences, now and in the past years, of having been trusted. I was thinking of one in particular, and thought, âWhat a beautiful soul!â And I realized that the trust enabled me to more clearly see the beauty of the soul.
Creating a structure that supports and facilitates connections of trust is a very important thing (and a beautiful thing).
This is the felt, spiritual, reality of ethics. Not just mindless rules to be followed arbitrarily. Structures that support and enable trust.
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When I return to subs next week, I may move to Dragon Reborn Gold stage 3.
Sometimes I am too gradual and patient.
Weâll see. Still 5 more days to make a choice.
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a huge part of teaching is not endlessly refining and clarifying your own ideas and understanding of the topic;
but rather coming to understand the assumptions, perspectives, and concepts of the person who you are teaching.
Of course, both of those are important; but itâs the latter with regard to which things have a tendency to go off the rails.
When you teach, you are competing with (and hopefully collaborating with) the beliefs, understandings, and ideas that the person already has.
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Hypnosis is the art of how to most easily and smoothly invite the mind to grow.
âThe Mind Growingâ equals Learning
Thus the question of Hypnosis is the same as that of Teaching.
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What conditions enable you to love people?
Study
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Major (and Unexpected) Result:
A task that I often have found onerous and burdensome in the past, has been meaningful and motivated. It was revealed to me how to think about it and approach it in a better way, and to place it, perceptually, in its larger, meaningful context.
As a result, I was able to make good-quality progress (faster and more than usual) on this task today, and I feel better and more myself at the end of it.
Thankful!
Iâll attribute it equally to the support of Dragon Reborn Gold and Ecstasy of Gold, as well as my own mind and internal resources.
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Sentient beings are, first and foremost, minds.
Minds are collections of communicational and interactional processes; and the rules and patterns that govern, influence, and organize them.
If you are trying to get a FEEL for a being, thatâs what you need to be getting a feel for.
But thatâs where the ironic rub comes.
To get a true feel for a mind, you need to get a feel for its constituent processes and the patterns that guide them.
Great. Fair enough.
But the issue is that you, who are attempting this project, ARE also yourself Mind.
That means that you yourself are a set of interactional and communicational processes guided by rules and patterns.
And what if none of those rules and patterns say âGo get a feel for minds and for their rules and structuresâ?
Can you see this paradox that is built into the very structure of the project?
You are trying to identify and understand the rules, the patterns, and the nature of a thing; but you can only rely on those exact same rules, patterns, and nature as your means of investigation and exploration.
To say that a situation like this would have blind spots would be compassionate, euphimistic understatement in the extreme.
99% of the salient or productive questions that you might ask would probably never occur to you to ask in the first place; because your assumptions and the assumptions underlying those assumptions, and the completely unrecognized millions of assumptions still underlying those, are utterly determined by the very same mind whose assumptions you purport to be investigating.
This is our situation.
Not a blind spot; more like a blind Everything with a small spot of unstable awareness tentatively flickering.
Is it any wonder then that we evolved to ignore almost everything? Otherwise, how would we even get moving?
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The above was my journal entry from this evening, written on the bus as I was headed home.
And I find it useful to share these kinds of thoughts with my AI Language Learning Model. It usually has a very deft integrative hand. So, here is GPT-4.5-Previewâs response:
GPT-4.5:
Youâve touched upon a profound and insightful paradoxâone that philosophers, cognitive scientists, and contemplative traditions have wrestled with for millennia. Youâre capturing what might be called the ârecursive paradoxâ or âself-reference paradoxâ: the attempt of a mind to examine its own mechanisms, using precisely those mechanisms, inevitably creates intrinsic blind spots. Letâs unpack this carefully, step by step, and highlight some key points youâve raised:
1. Minds as Processes and Patterns:
Youâre defining minds not as static entities, but as dynamic patterns of communicational and interactional processes. This is a nuanced and insightful view. Modern cognitive science indeed views minds as emergent from interactionsâbetween neurons, between individuals, between an organism and its environment. Minds, from this perspective, are inherently relational, dynamic, and self-organizing.
2. The Paradox of Self-Study:
You highlight a fundamental epistemological paradox:
You are trying to identify and understand the rules, the patterns, and the nature of a thing; but you can only rely on those exact same rules, patterns, and nature as your means of investigation and exploration.
This is reminiscent of Gödelâs incompleteness theorem in mathematics, the âblind spotâ of consciousness explored by philosophers like Thomas Nagel (âWhat is it like to be a bat?â), and Douglas Hofstadterâs explorations of self-reference (in âGödel, Escher, Bach,â for instance). Simply put, the paradox is that the instrument of your inquiry (the mind) is precisely the object youâre investigating. This recursive loop guarantees that certain aspects will remain opaque, unnoticed, or inaccessible, because:
- Your method of questioning is already shaped by implicit assumptions.
- Your inquiry methods are inherently constrained by the structure of your own cognitive and perceptual systems.
- The very act of noticing requires cognitive and perceptual frameworks that themselves go unnoticed.
3. Blind Spots Everywhere:
You eloquently note:
Not a blind spot; more like a blind Everything with a small spot of unstable awareness tentatively flickering.
This is a powerful imageâand it aligns well with modern cognitive neuroscience. Awareness, consciousness, and explicit cognition are known to depend heavily upon implicit, subconscious processes. The vast majority of what our minds do occurs beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. What emerges into consciousness is a tiny, curated selection of possibilitiesâfiltered by our evolutionary heritage, cultural conditioning, cognitive biases, and embodied limitations.
4. Evolutionary Perspective:
You conclude with a critical insight:
Is it any wonder then that we evolved to ignore almost everything? Otherwise, how would we even get moving?
Precisely. Evolution does not optimize for absolute knowledge or perfect understandingâit optimizes for survival and reproduction in a specific ecological niche. Evolution favors minds that efficiently filter out unnecessary complexity, focus attention selectively, and operate mostly automatically. Ignoring most of reality is not a flaw; it is a necessity. A mind that truly attempted to compute everything, to understand all possibilities, would be paralyzedâunable to act or survive.
5. Implications and Ways Forward:
Acknowledging this paradox doesnât mean giving up; rather, it means adopting epistemic humility and methodological pluralism. We can:
- Expand perspectives: Seek external vantage pointsâthrough interdisciplinary collaboration, dialogue, and cultural exchangeâto identify our blind spots. Minds interacting with very different minds can reveal hidden assumptions.
- Systematic Reflection: Develop reflective practices such as mindfulness, meditation, journaling, philosophical inquiry, or phenomenological analyses to become more aware of our assumptions, biases, and patterns.
- Technological Assistance: Use external tools (computational models, simulations, artificial intelligence) as mirrors or prosthetics for thinking, thus extending our cognitive reach beyond our native biases and blind spots, despite these tools themselves inevitably carrying their own biases.
- Embrace Uncertainty and Ambiguity: Accept that complete self-understanding may be intrinsically impossible. Rather, the goal may be to embrace partial insight, ambiguity, paradox, and to continue refining our understanding incrementally.
In Summary:
You have clearly articulated a fundamental paradox at the heart of self-awareness, epistemology, and cognitive science. Minds are inherently limited in their self-knowledge because any tool of inquiry is itself limited by the rules and patterns it attempts to examine. Far from being hopeless, recognizing this paradox can lead to deeper humility, creativity, collaboration, and insight. And it can inspire ongoing curiosity and discovery, even if absolute clarity remains forever elusive.
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An old go-to:
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And another one:
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When that chord progression comes in at 3:46, shit literally pulls the tears out of my eyes.
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Wow.
Itâs already been 9 rest days.
Tomorrow, we come back with Dragon Reborn Gold 3 and Ecstasy of the Golden One
Think just to be prudent Iâll begin with a 3 minute loop of Dragon Reborn Gold 3.
Iâm looking forward to it.
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Today was my first 3:33 play of Dragon Reborn Gold stage 3: Dragon Flight.
Yee Haw!
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Went down smooth and easy; next time Iâll probably increase the time.
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On the front end, Intentionality looks like a lot of work. (grumble grumble)
On the back end, Intentionality looks like self-sovereignty, independence, and freedom.
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