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meditation on the other hand make sense even outside spiritual context as a way to clear the mind, just relax and chill, or w/e both prayer and meditation however suffer the same noise : signal ratio of a history of derivative understandings providing "helpful guides"

meditation, because of its lower barrier to entry requiring no historical text or history, is like javascript in that it has a higher noise : signal ratio *some try to combine the "best of both worlds" by using "meditation" in some specific religious context. cue fancy sanskrit

prayer and meditation then often become similar to the original "solution" of rounding up the blind men and interviewing them it is a desire to avoid "wrongness" by leveraging the minds of others b/c being wrong together w the experts doesn't feel so badhttps://twitter.com/a_yawning_cat/status/1411555942777298945 …

the original act of "listening to god" is lost. one does not perform the Most Important Act of Listening by going to a neighborhood coffee shop for the christian snake jazz background music and happy background vibes of friendly chatter

in this sense, going to "find myself" by solo hiking the appalachian trail makes more sense you find yourself by getting lost. by throwing away all the keys you've gathered, preserved, collected, documented, and mind-mapped into a roam database

same for the frazzled housewife who wants to travel far and exotic she falls trap to the same "leave behind all my flat earther brothers" trap and has to drag along her entire family she travels to get away from the voices to find her OWN voice. but the voices follow

and here is the thing about finding your own voice ever notice how every thought that arises only appears in consciousness because "You" listened to it? if "You" are always doing the listening... then what is always doing the speaking?