Things Worth Reading - "The Distracted Mind" by Adam Gazzaley
I've staggered the release of my review of this book until next week. I am still not satisfied with it. I can resolutely recommend it to anyone interested in how social media use disarm even the best of us from effective action in the real world.
As readers of this Snrubstack know, I am highly critical of social media use. And the associated thinking that something is happening when it isn't or isn't as much as we think. I say this as a fellow addict.
While its utility is reasonably straightforward, its overwhelming negative consequences for most users shouldn't be flippantly cast aside, as they often are.
In the past, I've approached my criticisms of social media and the various associated online counter-cultures as a potent form of self-delusion. I built this case from a psycho-physiological perspective. I was needlessly absolutist in retrospect, but for better or worse, strong rhetoric is necessary to get the point across.
Then this book came along. From it, my picture of the physiological impacts of social media use has expanded dramatically to include a neurophysiological point of view.
For counter-culture and effective action in life, being cognisant of such things is essential. However begrudgingly, my fellow addicts and I should take stock of such evidence since we are non-rational instinctual creatures. For this reason, twatter or instalame requires exceedingly disciplined use if Gazzaley is right, lest the life-diminishing features quickly take hold and f^ck us hard.
With this in mind, and my prior judgements being too absolute (or not), I could not deny that while taking various measurements of people using social media (myself and others), users show severe depression in what I would call vital markers.
In those articles, I only transposed such metrics with how much social media people use on average. I suspect in our circles, these numbers are far beyond what's shown in the below graph. Keep in mind this is just social media, not including computer use:
As I explained last week, living a self-directed, conscious life and developing free-space time requires a "right view" of us as genuinely biological beings, possessing drives outside our control and purview.
To me, vitality describes the energetic constitution of a biological being and its ability to act in space with vigour.
The energy itself stems from vital functions that are usually subconscious and regulated by environmental chance. Rarely is the unconscious made conscious, and so rarely do we have any control over these forces.
In this context, Gazzaly provides an excellent neuro-phys/evo-psych argument for how digital life is diminishing us and our ability to achieve our aims. We are so easily distracted because our minds are designed to be easily distracted.
Online "movements" or "posters" should be wary, particularly in thinking that posting in and of itself is a super-effective aim-achieving life-enhancing practice. Worse yet, the feeling that it is doing something may be covering up something far more sinister than many of us would be comfortable admitting to:
An un-vital boredom with life.
Anyway, more on that next week.
A little word on Relaxation Setup - Nowhere to Hide
I had an interesting question from a subscriber last week. They asked, "Doing bodywork requiring me to lie down to complete it, how soft should the things I'm lying on be?
I like this kind of question because it shows the person is not only doing the work but starting to think about the subtler parts of it. As an autistic fanatic, questions like this betray greater understanding than any overarching grand theory ever will.
In short: How you lie down, in whatever posture you are utilising, depends on the particular exercises you're undergoing during that session.
Aside from this obvious advice, my general rule of thumb is as follows:
For relaxation, work with minimal movement, something like a full body scan, or perhaps breath-work where you're not dropping body parts using gravity. The optimal surface would be a relatively thick yoga mat on some carpet. A small pillow should be enough to rest the back of your head on - nothing too large or soft, just enough to keep your spine straight.
If you're dropping legs or arms in a more active way, I always suggest a mattress, but one that is relatively firm. Something like a futon is a good idea. Using a harder mattress or futon ensures the practitioner won't hurt themselves, which would render the session a rather silly one should it happen. But you also won't indulge too much in softness or be too comfortable, resulting in sleep. And this helps you notice tension, which helps with staying present.
A more rigid surface for relaxation is good for several reasons besides preventing injury. Firstly, you don't want to allow yourself anywhere to hide. You want to be fully aware of your tensions and structures, including those of your back, which get missed on very soft beds.
The less leeway you leave for imagination, the better. Fostering an excellent strong focus on what is happening is critical. Although sometimes uncomfortable, this will ironically help the relaxation process, in the long run, to be more effective. It will also assist you to remain present. In contrast, a sinking mattress may lead to sleepiness or dullness, which is not what relaxation exercises are about.
The same logic applies to more active bodywork styles. Thus something like a relatively firm futon, one not hard enough to hurt yourself with, is a good idea.
Bodywork, overall, is about not hiding from yourself. The challenge is to always be present and aware; thus, anything you can to promote this enhances your cause.
As I stated last week, it is about allowing. Allowing gravity to straighten you out or show you how you really are.
I will not elaborate further.
Zoomerist Dualism and Non-Dualism
Her: "I'm sorry, can I ask you (how to do x again)? My brain isn't working."
Me: "What do you mean your brain isn't working?"
Her: "My brain it's spinning today, I have no idea what it's doing, but it won't remember stuff."
Junior Zoomer Talent Acquisition at work & Victim of Cartesian Dualism
I've never been a fan of the term non-dualism. Non-Duawawity. Nerdy.
I've also disliked a great deal more any reference to Cartesian dualism as a theory. In short, I see dualism and the philosophy surrounding it as a great mistake and misapprehension. It stems from an intrinsic ignorance of what awareness is. It exposes itself as a by-product of our false claims of a concretised words-based consciousness as the basis for awareness.
(In last week's "Ghey-I newsletter, I made a case for why this is a genuinely retarded view).
Consistent duality is a feature of acculturated misunderstandings and delusions arising from wrong-emphasis in childhood. Wrong-emphasis is a physiological and, thus, perceptual miscomprehension of our capacities as biological beings.
Non-dualism is, in our language of opposites, the antithesis of this concretised misapprehension. This means there is a non-subjective and tangible experience pointed to by this term. This is not an experience of reality in the same way as...maybe one would lung a joint or snort a disco cookie and have a state occur. It is the experience of reality as it is, in which language base consciousness is its subordinate.
For these reasons, the term is popular in Buddhist circles, describing the supposed collapsed experiential state between subject and object. It's wrong to say this is only available to mediative branches of Buddhism. Many non-meditative schools have rationally deducted this from a purely philosophical perspective, something few Western philosophers have managed. Aside from David Hume of Pyrrho, as far as I'm aware, anyway.
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world."
― Douglas Harding
Although there are many schools with many variances in emphasis on how far one goes with non-dualism and its implications, it's right to say that Buddhists generally deny that there is such a thing as dualism to start with.
Dualistic consciousness is a type of ignorance that leads us to misunderstand how we see things as they are at every moment. From here, the experience of self and the so-called defilements arise. Defilements and ignorance cloud this more primordial awareness, yet it isn't really there. This sounds like a bunch of commie gobbledygook, without a doubt, but bear with me because I can attest to the truth of this experientially.
Scienctwats, particularly neuroscientwats, have begun increasingly discard Cartesian dualism and associated dualistic or materialist philosophies. Using a mathematical basis, some now assert the world as we see it is essentially illusory - and beyond it is timeless formlessness which is naturally entirely beyond our ability to comprehend conceptually, aside from mathematical models. A new maths.
According to them, reality as it is contains some type of timeless, spaceless geometrical property that undergirds and leads to the reality that our naturally selected sense apparatus constructs. Whatever this place is, however, is timeless and not subject to the laws of physics since the laws of physics are selected for by Darwinian evolution and subject to the limitations of our sense organs. Herein lies supposed physics paradoxes and things we feel we cannot understand. It's more that we're just not meant to get it. Dualistic consciousness is also a feature of this evolved apparatus. Do we have the ability to drop it and see beyond?
(Incidentally, I don't know if anyone else has done psychedelics, but its always geometry and fractals re. their theory above)
In short, that dualistic consciousness, the feeling of being in here and something else out there, is a derivative of Darwinian natural selection.
I suggest reading Donald Hoffman because the hard mathematical case is increasingly emerging that backs up the phenomenological assertions of the ancients.
So, whatever the case, it's pretty obvious we have evolved to have some experience of dualism, and you'd be silly to deny it has utility. We can all agree on that.
From this experience and coupled with the European propensity for extreme theorising and language use, we received the model of Descartes and Cartesian dualism.
As a culture at large, they and we have sought to codify this experience as a model to prove objectively how things work. To reify this state of mind as what is going on in totality.
To be fair, Descartes wrangled with many of the implications of his work.
It is understandable because simply as a matter of our perceived experience, we tend to see ourselves in terms of something in here and something out there.
The implicit assumption: we are a receiver or data centre that receives something objective outside ourselves. This receiver tends to be located behind our eyes. It's a personality or soul bubble that exists outside of time and space, and is imprinted with objective experiences, to which it, unaffected by the causality around it, is free to choose what will happen next.
So here I will here stake my claim - that the truth of non-dualism is that it shows you, empirically, what is really going on. It is a primordial way of seeing, perhaps from a more ancient and all-encompassing source of intelligence. Something much more extensive and all-encompassing.
The experience of dualism, its derivative philosophies and their assumptions are overblown and unnecessary, resulting from an acculturated perceptual bias towards this "way of seeing". Many of our biggest problems result from this biological tension- which is why these problems rarely make sense to us but make sense to one steeped in Cartesian dualism.
I say here that dualism, and more particularly, the feeling of subject-object consciousness, is not objective in the way we think. In fact, it is the smallest part of the totality of perceptual capacity that defines the hominid experience.
This experience of non-duality is also tied in with Anata - or selflessness.
If there is no centre to experience. There is just experience, then where is the self that is experiencing the thingness of everything as separate to experience?
The answer is that in a non-dual consciousness, there is no trace of a self. Self, therefore, is a feature of dualism as a cultural habit that is a little out of control.
David Hume, a man who the religious tekshualists and Twitter midwits consistently try to diminish despite being utterly unworthy of doing so whilst not understanding the man's true genius, definitely understood this.
Perhaps it came to him in a delirium of drunkness and overconsumption - I don't know. Jay Garfield does an excellent job of analysing this part of Hume's work, which ties in with my thesis:
"Hume's view, we often use words that we think have meanings, but which in fact do not. So, he thinks that when we used the word self…this core that is neither identical with the mind nor with the body, but which possesses mind and body. And he thinks that that simply makes no sense whatsoever, hence that the idea that we have or are selves is not even false, it is just gibberish. To wonder about the nature of the self, he thinks, is like talking about round squares and wondering what colour they might be.
We're much better off reducing the self's power over us. One way we can do this is through the pursuit of non-dual experience.
Resting in the flux of sensations and energies that lack a centre, all personage, thereby eliminating any silliness regarding "me self is in here and me body is here and i is in de body, and de stuffs is out here u c, sinple".
The something in here is independently acting on things out there without itself being impacted, at least not ultimately. This is to say, we feel as if the thing in here is relatively free from the great web of causality; it maintains a kind of unblemished separateness as a thing.
Scientific materialism, mind & body dichotomies, Cartesianism, non-reductive physicalism - the list goes on in how various thinkers have attempted to deal with the so-called problem of duality and how unity could possibly arise from "opposites". And above, I have explained how this is going to be resolved.
And these confusions are why I increasingly prefer bare-bones, scientific explanations and living in newness. Living without reason is true power.
Dualism is collapsable with practice. A dateless gate. Not walking onto a balcony because you think a glass door is closed when it isn't.
It is phenomenologically collapsable. You can see through it; therefore, it is an experience instead of a language problem to be resolved.
In reality, conscious experience is without a centre, without a homunculus pulling levers.
It isn't that your brain isn't working today; it is the experience of retardation and incompetence with no centre of processing centre -nothing more.
In this space, we see that everything is co-dependent; nothing exists in and of itself. It is a primordial soup of sensation and energy with border and self-definition. The Giant Spiritual Onion folding in on itself and outwards forever, falling away as soon as it flashes into existence.
Importantly, there is no experiencer.
This is all just the totality of experience.
There is only experience and no experiencer.
Reading a book, a theory, or getting on a plane, phenomenologically speaking, are all species of experience with no experiencer.
Imagine that for a second.
Experience with no experiencer, with no do-er.
Now you're seeing the incomprehensible dance of life, at which the enlightened zen masters burst into uproarious laughter.
We need to integrate this seeing into ourselves for there to be any hope.