LESSWRONG
LW

All of lawrence-wang's Comments + Replies

Toolbox-thinking and Law-thinking
lawrence-wang40

Is there a meaningful difference between a Toolbox thinker, and a Law thinker who is "careful to understand the context and the caveats: when is the right time to think in Law, how to think in Law, and what type of problems call for Lawful thinking"?

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4Kenny
Sure; any particular Toolbox Thinker might not have 'Law Thinking' in their toolbox for one.
Kenshō
lawrence-wang10

Kegan's model?

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Kenshō
lawrence-wang10

I see. Having now briefly read about Korzybski on some web pages, I'd venture to say that consciousness of abstraction is a very sophisticated way of organizing what you do and say when you're not Looking.

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Kenshō
lawrence-wang20

Since we're talking about the behavior of comment threads, I hope you won't mind me mentioning here that I would love to be able to collapse a comment from below its nested replies in addition to the top of the comment. I'm finding that I often am scrolling down a chain of nested replies to see if anything new has been added, discovering that nothing has, and then scrolling up to collapse.

EDIT: never mind, that's what the green bar is for! I just hadn't seen any new comments yet :D

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Kenshō
lawrence-wang10

Do you count your personal identity and history as abstractions?

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3Richard_Kennaway
All of our experience is a hierarchy of abstractions, built from the lowest level of sensations, those coming from outside that hierarchy (whether outside our skin or not). "Consciousness of abstraction", btw, is a term of art with a specific meaning, coined by Korzybski. It's googleable, although I didn't see an individual web page specifically about the topic.
Kenshō
lawrence-wang50

Interesting. One of the terms that is used in Buddhism is "ego-identification" -- this is the belief that all of my perceptions come through a specific physical body, and therefore I am this body. I'm probably oversimplifying, but my understanding is that this belief should be understood to be erroneous, and actually seeing through and letting go of this belief is a major milestone. It occurs to me now that ego-identification is a kind of perceptual chunking, perhaps the most fundamental one.

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Kenshō
lawrence-wang10

You may find it worthwhile to read Loch Kelly's book Shift Into Freedom. It's a relatively quick and easy read and teaches a style of practice oriented around "small glimpses" which don't take much time. It doesn't focus on developing concentration, which it sounds like you have a lot of already.

Reply
Kenshō
lawrence-wang00

The fact that you recognize you have unresolved stuff that drains energy is actually evidence in favor of you having what Val is pointing at. It's much better than being completely unaware of it or believing that it's just how the world is.

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4ChristianKl
I'm not trained in a Buddhist tradition but have gathered my experiences about elsewhere. I have a lot of mental model for various related phenomena. I have had a meditation experience after which I thought: "I think I have experienced the phenomenological basis on which karma is build." but I never had a proper Buddhistic teacher. Getting your mind "clean" is an essential part of the Buddhist way and my mind is at the moment anything but "clean". Take the mental state of presence that Buddhist monks who have meditated very long have where they don't have the startle response (besides the Buddhist monks psychopaths also often don't have the startle response). You need a certain level of mental cleanness for that, that I don't have. Given what I knew about Val before his development before his enlightment experience, I think it's plausible that Val has this. From my perspective it's plausible that this is part of what Val means with Kenshō. While we are talking about this. There's a concept of the "distinction of completion" that I think comes from the Landmark Forum. If anybody here was at the Landmark Forum and can talk in their language I would be very interested in talking.