I spontaneously enter altered states, regularly & briefly, as needed, as part of my practice, but I’ve never cultivated jhana, except for a little experimenting, years ago, to make sure I could get into the first couple. Buzzy exhilaration & bliss just weren’t that interesting.
Conversation
Replying to
It's pretty implicit/tacit. Sometimes you're sort of in a metaphorical corner and the only/right way out is an altered state. Sometimes it's more "wavelike," a cascade of perceptual refactoring including body, world, everything. /
1
1
11
Sometimes more state-like—something, somewhere is needing a slower refactor, and that's tugging on all phenomenology, proprioception, body awareness, "everything," in some weird way, for seconds, minutes, or tens of minutes.
1
3
Replying to
Just got back from 3 days hanging out with semiconductor engineers, and your description sounds interestingly close to discussions of low-level discussions of iterating on that stuff
Replying to
it's very much a slider puzzle or tower of hanoi problem—finite substrate, not a lot of free space to "spread out and play," local moves determined by context, can't get there from here, sometimes in the weeds flipping individual bits, parity checks throwing inconsistent states
6

