This is why I questioned @Failed_Buddhist with "words, words, words"!
One of the clearest shifts I've had is to lose interest in talking about practice. It sometimes sticks as a habit, but it feels very not rewarding.
"What is your experience like?" is the only question left.
Conversation
If someone describes any sensory underpinnings e.g. of an awakening to me, I instantly know if I am familiar with it.
Jargon is both unhelpful - because it's used in different-but-similar ways - and disguises experience and the lack thereof alike.
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language is sometimes helpful for practice, even for relatively experienced practitioners, because it should guide you to experiences you haven't had. And experiences are a bit of a trap: the pursuit of states can be a problem.
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I'm not talking about the pursuit of states, and I don't think we're talking about the same point in a broader context either.
But that's my bad with the way I formulated it.
I'm saying I find long, jargon-filled philosophical discussions to be less than helpful, mostly.
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If you do stick mostly to one method or discipline, so that it comes to dominate your thinking around certain terms, I think you can do more talk.
For me, I've spent too much time dipping my feet in other people's lakes to do that. My brain is a brambled thicket of associations.
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If anything, I've now been retreating, drawing boundaries around my practice, hemming it in - so that I can talk about it more in the future.
But the sort of discussion we get into on Twitter, where people are coming from 5 different lineages and methods, is flawed.
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Actually clarifying to myself what I wanted to do with my practice, and what effects I'm looking for, has been tremendously helpful.
And it's probably made me a bit more difficult to talk to, because I can see that most contemplative practice is just not for me. Which is fine.
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just not for you "now". We'll see.
The paradigms and maps around cultivation can be very useful. They're just very hard to understand and disentangle.
But then, understanding and disentangling paradigms is pretty much my life's work. So, yeah...
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Yeah, well, am saying that I have a specific thing that I'm trying to do and I'm narrowing my practice a lot towards that.
When I say me, I just mean this dude having this conversation with you now. I am not buying into some more rigid sense of permanence, here.
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And yes, for me it's mostly been a question of narrowing the influence - operating within one paradigm, say, with some extra outside perspective.
I have minor, medium or in some cases major attainments in at least six or so different contemplative frameworks. Not important now.
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I could pursue a Stoic model, a Theravadin model, a Zen model, a magickal model (of two paths), or even a shamanic model of enlightenment.
But I know which issues pushed me into pursuing all of these, and so I'm now able to discriminate between them. Once I go there, we'll see.