Ep. 8 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - The Buddha and "Mindfulness"

Study Notes
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topic

discussion

https://discuss.bevry.me/t/2019-08-17-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-8/851?u=balupton

2

my notes

  • 3:30 - the different needs we have, those that are solved from a ‘having’-mode, where we want to control our environment, and our ‘being’-mode, organized around becoming something, such as falling in love, mature, or becoming virtuous.

  • 4m - you can be in ‘modal-confusion’ where you are attempting to accomplish something (such as ‘maturity’) from within the incorrect mode, and getting nowhere with it.

  • 5m - Siddhartha being in the palace is a mythological representation of being stuck in ‘having’-mode.

  • 5:30 - ‘That’s why it’s a myth. BECAUSE it has important ramifications (relevancy) for us right now.’

  • 13:30 - Siddhartha abandoned his wife and children, pointing out that ‘the moral life’ sits upon something deeper. All prior responsibilities can be rendered meaningless if you’ve lost meaning. Morality sits upon your life being meaningful. Meaning to life is more than just living a moral existence.

  • 17m - self-denial is still as much within the ‘having’-mode as self-indulgence. It’s just a negation, and still framed in the same way.

  • 21m - ‘Sati’ is a remembrance of what it was like to be in being-mode. When you return to a place in your history and feel ‘ah, this is what it was like to be me back in that time.’

  • 29m - we reinforce modal-confusion by not being clear on the distinction of having and being mode. Such as being clear of the difference between ‘training’ and ‘explaining’.

  • —I want to set about working on my character every day, as Vervaeke brought up, but do no know how to go about doing that.—

  • 31m - the students of the ancient world could use mnemonic-location to memorize speeches that’d last up to 6 hours. (This isn’t a description for how memory works, but a tool to change how we memorize things)

  • 41m - the ‘mindfulness feature-list’ (missing it’s ‘eidos’ and how to turn these into a schema):Being present, Non-judgement, insight, reducing reactivity. The first two are states that can be entered, the latter two are results that can be achieved.

  • 43:30 - by asking and answering the questions of the connectiveness and relationships between the states with each other or their results do we start to gain a ‘structural-functioning’ of the thing, its eidos.

  • 48m - to practice paying attention to something is not an external act of force upon yourself, but an attempt to renew your interest in a thing by exploring all its unique details.

  • 50m - Attention IS like a spotlight in certain ways, in that it optimizes the salience of the object, but it misses what the ‘optimization’ actually is and how it leads to insight.

  • 51m - For certain things, like walking, you can do simply in reference to itself, others, like ‘practice’ you can only do in relation to others. ‘Practice’ is the optimization of ‘How you do the thing’ in the efforts to gain greater skill in that thing.