here are some excerpts from a book called thinking aloud by walter carrington that a friend showed me recently
i was really struck by this image, of the body as constantly trying to grant many contradictory wishes
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this is another funny situation where i think both phenomenological and technical language are appropriate because i think this is or can be built up into a magical lens on perceptual control theory, or something like that. still fuzzy on the details
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among other things the story it suggests about the relationship between magic and trauma is so interesting to me. some people kind of have to learn about magic as an adult because they already cast a lot of magic as a child and are dealing with the consequences
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sadly i don't have a link to a good explanation of PCT and i haven't even really tried to study it myself, but i can at least link to the inner game of tennis, which is lovely and very readable book covering what i think is related material
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inner game of tennis is like impro in that it's about something much broader than its stated subject material. it's written by a tennis coach trying to explain how he coaches people to be good at tennis and it turns out the answer is non-doing!
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actually gosh i'm just going to keep quoting from the beginning of the book because it's really well-written
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he gives a bunch of verbal instructions to his tennis students and it just tenses them up as they *try really hard* to follow all of them, vs. he demonstrates to them the desired behavior and asks them to imagine and then imitate it and it works perfectly
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an athlete in the zone is "out of his mind"; "more aware of the ball... not aware of giving himself a lot of instructions"; "it just seems to happen - and often with more accuracy than he could have hoped for"
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the picture i want to suggest with these excerpts + the previous one is that the body is capable of granting wishes with astonishing accuracy, but the flipside is that those wishes have to be specified with astonishing accuracy
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Just met husband’s mom. In the last few months she lost 30lbs, practiced yoga daily without a single miss, quit carbs, started learning English, and is now on her way to quitting smoking.
Her secret? Every day on commute she imagines her ideal future in vivid detail.
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even a quite long list of things that are bad and scary and disgusting and dangerous and that you should avoid at all costs does not make a great wish. it's an anti-wish; you've specified what you don't want but not what you want
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so, there's an idea i think i got from @Malcolm_Ocean, about a fundamental asymmetry between "approach" and "avoid" in high-dimensional state spaces: "avoid" is badly underspecified. there are many directions in which to run away from something
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which means, once again, say it with me now,
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focus your time and energy on what you want to see more of
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