Meditation has some weird side-effects. They're not particularly predictable, nor is there a good science for explaining them.
I've lost any ability to be frightened by horror movies, and don't suffer imagination-based aftereffects either. Weird.
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It would be fair to ask how I can claim that's related to meditation, and obviously I can't prove it.
But I notice the number of situations where limbic responses go bone deep are decreasing. The system seems to modulate itself more actively.
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There is also a large extent to which emotional responses are trained and modelled, moreso than authentic.
You are acting out a script. "I'm scared, and this is how scared people act." Only, that part is just a story. Without it, there are only some sensations. Sometimes.
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I don't know if horror stories have ever really invoked anything else than a sensory thrill, a mild catecholamine spike.
But, from when I was a little child:
"Oh, you'll be terrified reading that!"
"You'll have nightmares!"
"You will be scared of those things now!"
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It's difficult to formulate just how many of our behaviors are formulaic, shallow, self-reinforcing.
What goes in initially percolates, permutates, grows. When the initial response is blunted, the whole response is blunted. But when it's amplified...
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Even weirder, this seems to work almost by category.
Things that don't prompt self-reinforcing reactions for me:
- Moderate hunger, thirst, tiredness or physical discomfort.
- Pain
- Manufactured extreme emotion (news, horror, religion)
Many other things still do, however.
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My experience and understanding so far seems to be that mediation's effects on emotional habits is anisotropic: some patterns are easier to let go of than others, and can be very different in individual basis.
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Yes, that's been both my own intuition and something my more experienced teachers have intimated as well.
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For in my case, it has become easy to be with the unpredictability of life (e.g. year ago I didn't think I would be living in Taiwan); but the negative emotionality which keeps me fat is really, really sticky.