I have to confess I hate introspection, it's one of those things I'd rather be doing pretty much anything than.
More or less like exercise, I only engage in it because I self-consciously know it's good for me and I will eventually be glad I did it. I've had to develop some specific introspection-akrasia techniques, for instance doing it conversationally (as when someone "asks a luminous question" around here) lowers my resistance to it quite a bit.
I've often been advised to keep a journal or diary, and I periodically try it and eventually quit. So instead, I jump at the chance to answer questions like the above, and often try to save my writing to a local hard disk. I'll often reread what I wrote some years back, and assess what kind of progress I've made.
Sadly I was a poor recordkeeper prior to 1997, there are some conversations I had with creationists on BBSes in the early 90's that I dearly wish I could find now. I have a pretty much complete and continuous record of my email archives from 1997 onwards; in 2004 I started freewriting as an alternative to journaling and have saved all such snippets since; and of course now that we live in the Google age there are cases when I use Google to ask my past self what it thought about X.
Recent techniques I've picked up include Dual-n-backing to track WM progress, I'm waiting for the right time to try and use some of pjeby's stuff, I've used some PUA tricks as suggestions on what to look at in myself. I'm getting interested in this "status" thing though, so far, mostly confused at what people say about it.
My experience with MBTI seems to track Alicorn's, I use it mostly as a "foil" to construct a richer picture of who I am. One thing that it's helped me with is notice that some times I just don't feel like being with people, on such occasions I'll just tell whoever I'm around that "I need some cave time" and that helps me be OK with it. That's supposed to be an Introvert thing, although I've also noticed that my thinking tends to be Extroverted, that is, I think better in conversation, and tend to know things more solidly after I've explained them out loud. (Writing helps, but not quite as much as conversation. OTOH after some conversations I lose interest in writing stuff up.)
I wonder if my scoring as an F on the online MBTI might be as a result of explicitly concentrating on expressing my feelings in recent years. (Of course it could also be that MBTI has low reliability.) If so, I probably should work on the Sensing vs Intuitive distinction, but I have no clue how to do that; it already feels as if I'm paying as much attention to data as I can.
I measure my "real" progress by how successful I feel my life is, and I can't complain: for a while now I've felt like I should take more risks because I'm not failing often enough. I'm aiming at increasing my income a fair bit in the coming years, by moving into a more entrepreneurial position now that I'm comfortable freelancing. (I guess "perceived rate of success or failure" is a C-category observation.)
"Saturate" is good advice, many little things help a little, there are few big things that seem to help a lot.
Thanks, helpful.
Curious how you use your own mail logs. I've never found them helpful other than showing people that yes, they really did say that possibly stupid thing.
WM performance seem generally important but it's largely just a tool that helps many activities and does not seem in the same category as Alicorn's series. Did I miss something?
Which PUAs did you find helpful - I am married with 3 and not interested in reading their literature for its intended purpose (though I read the Game, it was interesting and well-written). I'm willing to read them f...
Sequence index: Living Luminously
Previously in sequence: Let There Be Light
Next in sequence: Lights, Camera, Action!
Affect, behavior, and circumstance interact with each other. These interactions constitute informative patterns that you should identify and use in your luminosity project.
You may find your understanding of this post significantly improved if you read the second story from Seven Shiny Stories.
The single most effective thing you can do when seeking luminosity is to learn to correlate your ABC's, collecting data about how three interrelated items interact and appear together or separately.
A stands for "affect". Affect is how you feel and what's on your mind. It can be far more complicated than "enh, I'm fine" or "today I'm sad". You have room for plenty of simultaneous emotions, and different ones can be directed at different things - being on a generally even keel about two different things isn't the same as being nervous about one and cheerful about the other, and neither state is the same as being entirely focused on one subject that thrills you to pieces. If you're nervous about your performance evaluation but tickled pink that you just bought a shiny new consumer good and looking forward to visiting your cousin next week yet irritated that you just stubbed your toe, all while being amused by the funny song on the radio, that's this. For the sake of the alphabet, I'm lumping in less emotionally laden cognition here, too - what thoughts occur to you, what chains of reasoning you follow, what parts of the environment catch your attention.
B stands for "behavior". Behavior here means what you actually do. Include as a dramatically lower-weighted category those things that you fully intended to do, and actually moved to do, but were then prevented from without from doing, or changed your mind about due to new, unanticipated information. This is critical. Fleeting designs and intentions cross our minds continually, and if you don't firmly and definitively place your evidential weight on the things that ultimately result in action, you will get subconsciously cherry-picked subsets of those incomplete plan-wisps. This is particularly problematic because weaker intentions will be dissuaded by minor environmental complications at a much higher rate. Don't worry overmuch about "real" plans that this filtering process discards. You're trying to know yourself in toto, not yourself at your best time-slices when you valiantly meant to do good thing X and were buffetted by circumstance: if those dismissed real plans represent typical dispositions you have, then they'll have their share of the cohort of actual behavior. Trust the law of averages.
C stands for "circumstance". This is what's going on around you (what time is it? what's going on in your life now and recently and in the near future - major events, minor upheavals, plans for later, what people say to you? where are you: is it warm, cold, bright, dim, windy, calm, quiet, noisy, aromatic, odorless, featureless, busy, colorful, drab, natural, artificial, pretty, ugly, spacious, cozy, damp, dry, deserted, crowded, formal, informal, familiar, new, cluttered, or tidy?). It also covers what you're doing and things inside you that are generally conceptualized as merely physical (are you exhausted, jetlagged, drugged, thirsty, hungry, sore, ill, drunk, energetic, itchy, limber, wired, shivering? are you draped over a recliner, hiding in a cellar, hangliding or dancing or hiking or drumming or hoeing or diving?) Circumstances are a bit easier to observe than affect and behavior. If you have trouble telling where you are and what you're up to, your first priority shouldn't be luminosity. And while we often have some trouble distinguishing between various physical ailments, there are strong pressures on our species to be able to tell when we're hungry or in pain. Don't neglect circumstance when performing correlative exercises just because it doesn't seem as "the contents of your skull"-y. SAD should be evidence enough that our environments can profoundly influence our feelings. And wouldn't it be weird, after all, if you felt and acted just the same while ballroom dancing, and while setting the timer on your microwave oven to reheat soup, and while crouching on the floor after having been taken hostage at the bank?
All of these things are interdependent:
So don't just correlate how they appear together: also note cause and effect relationships. Until you've developed enough luminosity to detect these things directly, you may have to fall back on a little post-hoc guesswork for connections more complicated than "I was hungry and thinking about cheese, so then I ate some cheese". Additionally, take note of any interesting absences. If something generally considered sad has happened to you, and you can detect no sadness in your affect or telltale physical side effects, that's highly relevant data.
These correlations will form the building blocks of your first pass of model refinement, proceeding from the priors you extracted from external sources.