the reason I'm still not trying meditation/jhanas is because it still feels like wireheading to me
something feels "wrong" about being happy for reasons totally disconnected to my life
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something like this is my crux, if I believed it I might feel differently
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I wish someone told me earlier that “bad things” eg physical pain, sadness, anxiety, don’t actually have to cause suffering or even be bad. You can still get the signals perfectly clearly and do something about them without it making your life worse
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i think i have this idea of a tension between doing stuff 'in my head' (eg metta) vs Actually doing stuff in the world
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Replying to @visakanv
I (used to?) have intrusive thoughts about whether I was a good person
I felt sad that I wasn't as good a person as I wd like to think of myself as
so happened I did stuff helpful to other ppl I cd specifically point to (when these thoughts arose) and it reduced significantly
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at the risk of being too fortune-cookie about it, metta doesn't happen in your head
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if you mean something about embodied processing that still counts as internal to me
if you mean something about changes in how you interact with other people then that's cool (and independently valuable) but feels a bit orthogonal to the axis I was worried about maybe
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hmm sort of both, and i feel a little bad for not clarifying. partly i mean something about the heart rather than the head, and partly i mean the part where you beam the love to other people happens in "the space between you"
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that space isn't separate from the world. idk if i can really explain this, i also don't really do metta. it's not separate from the world in the same way your relationships with other people aren't separate from the world
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hmm i don't really like these responses i wrote, i can't tell if i'm actually engaging with your real objection at all :/
maybe i'll ask a question instead: so is the tension between doing stuff in your head vs. in the world like, you could just sit in a room thinking happy thoughts about people but meanwhile those people are outside the room living their lives and you aren't directly helping them?
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yes exactly
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