you know "this process will take twenty years maybe" is pretty discouraging if you're 35 and an american
(reading meditationstuff and feeling existentially hopeless)
Conversation
speaking for myself, i have barely done any of mark's explicit practices, but i found reading his words and conceptualizations of what is going on in practice extremely helpful and i think they've sped up and made more coherent stuff i was already doing
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i think you can sort of disregard the timeline stuff first pass and just dip your toes into whatever parts of the doc feel exciting. for me one of the most exciting parts first pass was actually his description of "evil" (now in an appendix)
also i noticed the timeline stuff brought up a lot of weird implicit beliefs i had about age and what sorts of things are and aren't possible in your early 30s, late 30s early 40s, late 40s, etc. which can itself become the subject of practice
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i think the only hard constraints are around fertility, esp. for women, and other than that there's probably a lot more joy and freedom and possibility in those age ranges than i think or used to think
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