It makes me sad that we treat it like a binary (“are you in love”) rather than a feeling that varies many orders of magnitude in strength, which is it. It’s so powerful and beautiful. It can cause you to kill or override nearly any other base instinct. Not many things can do that
I fully believe that anyone who hasn’t tried to purposefully cultivate and grow theirs is capable of more of it than they imagine today
And if you want to push way past any of your normal programming honing love to the higher magnitudes then pointing it in the direction you want may be the best way to do it. But it’s playing with fire, which is why I think simple unconditional self-love is the best ~harmless use
unconditional being the most important part, bc it doesn’t incentivize any specific action. When the magnitude is so high incentivizing any action is dangerous, as doing any action too much is usually bad
Strong unconditional love will override any previous weak conditional love
I think when done the most safely it permanently resets pre-cognitive self-affection and self-compassion, removes self-attacks, and increases mood and well-being in general, without changing much else or incentivizing specific things parts of you think will earn your love
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think it’s good to turn up the valence unless you have a strong reason not to
The amount of cultures that don’t believe this is true — eg only turn up the valence if you “earned it” — is rather surprising to me. It doesn’t feel like it should be controversial
I think an excitement-bias (technically “arousal”) is probably good too, but I believe it less strongly. Excitement leads to action and action-bias is surprisingly fruitful over the long term because even small increases in exponents go a long way. Also excitement is fun
Panic qualia is a good time to practice what clinging and letting go feels like, partially since you’re not really capable of much else then and partially because it’s like an exaggerated version of what’s normally happening, easier to feel
I used to have panic a lot and would feel the positive feedback loop building and eventually became okay with it and would feel and study it while it was happening. When I stopped being scared of the exponential increase it mostly stopped happening (still does, but v rarely)
I think a silver lining of panic disorder is that it gets you very used to feeling short term exponential positive feedback loops. These are the same loops you want to exploit to get to intensely positive or loving or blissful stares in meditation, metta, jhana, etc
It’s insane how much science is out there that we can just learn whatever
School << spending a thousand hours browsing google scholar following your curiosity
And like 50% of all authors across recent papers in every field will respond to short thoughtful questions you have almost instantly if you write a good email
karma is a bs metaphysical claim
oh wait closed individualism is totally wrong maybe that’s what he meant
no he was pretty specific it’s bs
wait no it’s a phenomenological claim
wait no it’s a metaphor
no it’s bs
no i think it’s a phenomenological claim (I am here)
(Oh wait there’s no he it’s a bunch of interpreted texts later written by a group. Oh wait no if you strip away 80% of it, you’re back to basically one he again. Oh wait)