Published on October 28, 2025 4:41 PM GMT
I was doing the online version of the Jhourney retreat where they try to teach you the jhanas (narrator: he did not learn the jhanas). Part of what wsas taught was to work on your curiousity, which I chose to practice noticing surprisal.
It's ~impossible to predict low-level details of vision. I can predict high level details ("oh that car will still be there in the next time step"), but not low level details ("oh the exact colors and texture will be like this").
This also extended to hearing (specifically the exact fluctuations of sounds) and same w/ my body sensations. So these modalities made a good warm-up or "easy mode".
The meditation retreat was a mostly silent retreat with an expected ~10 hours of meditation a day (some days I did 14), so mid-way through, I was very "concentrated" (ie more unified in my attention/desires w/o effort).
This made it easier to be surprised about more subtle things like the movements of my attention. This all came to a head when I took a shower.
I was there, being amazed and surprised at the exact shape, texture, colors on the water droplets on the metal parts of the shower, when I became surprised about my intentions and actions in the next few moments.
How can I be in charge of my intentions if I'm surprised by them?
This caused a shift, which felt kind of sad. I thought I was the one running this show, but that ended up being just a facade.
source
I went on a walk afterwards, still kind of sad about this. But then I realized I wasn't just the little brother who has no control, I was the entire system. I was the ego, the body, the environment [1]which felt like a much better conception of my sense of self!
I had a good rest of my walk, found some pretty rocks, and went to sleep.
When I woke up, I was back to my normal self, lol.
Shift Be Sudden
This seemed to be a validation of Steven Byrne's Intuitive Self-Models which I mostly read from Scott's review.
Just like your mind can only see the rightside-up-stairs (w/ a blue wall closer to you) or the upside-down-stairs (w/ a green wall closer to you) (but never both of them at the same time), you can also suddenly shift from a viewpoint of being little brother, to being the full system.
Actually, Multiple Fixed Points
Well, I didn't go straight from ego-in-control to "I am the whole system and universe", there was a good 15 minutes where I was just ego-but-no-control. This seems like an important point for people meditating to know! It would honestly suck so much to be stuck in the ego-but-no-control, which I think this is where having a community of mediators and common philosophy would help.
This also puts into perspective the examples of people killing themselves after a Goenka retreat (ie A silent, 10 days of body-scanning meditation).
When she signed up for the course, she was her usual happy self, but ten days later, someone from the center called her parents to say they needed to come and get Megan because she was “confused” and in no condition to drive. The family found her in an incoherent state, refusing to make eye contact with them and repeatedly telling them they were “just a projection” and not really there. On the way home, she tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of the car. They drove her straight to a hospital that had a psychiatric ward and although she seemed to make progress during her stay, she was never herself again.
Ten weeks after the retreat, she leaped from the Norman Wood Bridge, falling 120 feet to her death.
Although, I'm sure there are other problems that can arise from meditation as opposed to [not knowing how to transition to a good fixed point], such as having too high of a level of concentration and then focusing on negative sensations unskillfully.
Wait, I thought Enlightenment was Forever
Ya, I don't really know. We can define capital-I "Insights" as ones that stick and "insights" as temporary ones, but that's boring semantics.
IIRC The Mind Illuminated had a theory that insights only propagate to the extent that you are concentrated (or maybe a better word: "united" or "opposite of scatter-brained"). I think this is pointing towards an important point that our values/drives/thoughts are locally activated heuristics, so you can only update them when they activate.
This "can only update when activated" makes sense, but it's hard to square w/ being more together-concentrated. Let's dig into what I mean there:
"I feel torn" means you have conflicting desires.
"Together-concentrated" means you don't.
If you imagine your mind as a bunch of sub-agents making bids on potential next actions, then being together-concentrated means there are less and less conflicting bids.
I get that maybe your "sit in a comfortable position" or "need to scratch itches" heuristics will come up in a meditation setting. Maybe even a "think about what we're gonna have for lunch", but there's so many of them, even ones on how you interact w/ old friends you haven't seen in years. Why would they come up as well?
Maybe it's just a majority of sub-agents, such that when you [go visit your parents and act the same as usual], you'll be able to update then??
Do you Want to Be Ego-less?
Not "ego-less" but "viscerally knowing my ego isn't in charge of what it thinks it's in charge of". I'm also not confident that this was the same thing as stream-entry/enlightened/etc.
But would I be okay w/ that more "I'm the system" state? Ya, I think so. It was pleasant. I didn't interact w/ others but I was kinder to a bug so maybe I'd be kinder to my loved ones. And if it happens again, I won't stay very long in the "ego-but-no-control" state.
- ^
I was the younger brother, the older brother, and the game system
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