We're living in Myra's timeline.

2020-06-03T01:01:23Z

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed."
-- William Gibson

Back in 2012 or so, as part of Replay Value AU, Zuki and I embarked on a worldbuilding project we called "Gritstuck". The idea was to extrapolate Homestuck's concept of a "pre-scratch" and a "post-scratch" world -- the post-scratch Earth being the result of the manipulation of the pre-scratch Earth to create much more competent Sburb players, at the cost of the stability of the rest of the world, and create a story about the players who came from such a world. To build this dystopia, we linearly extrapolated what we were seeing on the news at the time: political gridlock culminating in the election of a president in 2016 who finished eroding civil rights to nothingness, wealth inequality built up to Gilded Age levels, enormous shantytowns in major cities, the police brazenly patrolling the streets in full military gear attacking journalists and medical professionals, omnipresent digital surveillance making resistance terribly, terribly dangerous, Occupy on the streets and Anonymous on the web. The year we set this in was 2020.

Every single one of these things has come true. (Though I hadn't expected the pandemic, too.)

To build the characters who lived in this world, we learned about anarcho-communism and horizontal organization, about the kind of ideals that it would take to pull hope out of this situation. I consumed as many internet articles from the Left as I could get my hands on, followed /r/anarchism for much of a year as a sort of participant-observer process, and began to think. Really think. Why is our society shaped like it is? And what would a better world look like?

For a while I was trying to write this up as some sort of Sburb story. For another while I was trying to write this up as a novel. Eventually I gave up on trying. But one of the characters Zuki and I built for that setting - Myra - has remained a metaphorical voice in my head. She helped push me to face my PTSD, challenged my instinctive responses to seeing homeless people, made me watch how I interacted with the people I saw when I was in public assistance offices.

I've never been bold enough to follow in her footsteps. I can't. The shape of my childhood PTSD means that when an authority figure yells at me, I am crumpled on the floor, crying with incomprehensible early developmental terror, saying anything they want me to say. I'm not out there with the marches because I would be an active liability. So I write, like Marat in the bath. (Though hopefully without the advocating mass executions part.)

In 2016 I felt betrayed and afraid, because the election felt like it had plunged us into her timeline. But now in 2020, I'm oddly calm about it. This is what our world is now. The only thing we can do is live in it.

comments

Mindfulness has been plucked out of context

2019-07-26T07:05:32Z

This is mostly Theravada.

As a practicing Buddhist (...still having trouble getting used to that phrasing), I've been asked about things like "why is meditation so unbelievably hard?" and "what do you think about the Marines teaching mindfulness to soldiers?" and "what is with alleged yoga teachers, who are supposed to practice equanimity, getting into gigantic arguments about whether a camera perspective is patentable?"

To me, these kinds of things seem to stem from meditation being removed from its sociocultural context/religion/belief/thing.

Mindfulness meditation was originally just for monks. It was not (generally) supposed to be used by people who still have to live in the world. (Though I wish to add the caveat that there are cases where it is genuinely useful for people who are not monks - for example, borderline personality disorder is significantly helped by mindfulness.) The ones that are actually designed for normal people to be able to practice, like yoga and loving-kindness, have been removed, and this lack of context is hurting the usefulness of meditation in general.

So, there are two levels of context-plucking I want to address here:

1: Yoga was supposed to be entry-level meditation

A lot of people have serious trouble with sitting meditation - whether due to bad teachers, ADHD, or being from the modern world where everything happens all the time. The practice of just staying in a place focusing on your breath and not moving even when it becomes uncomfortable is difficult. And people knew this in antiquity! That's why yoga originally existed - to be an on-ramp that makes meditation tangible. You can focus on doing something, and work your way gradually over to focusing on more and more specific things.

Now the thing is, you don't have to do literal yoga to get this sort of training. I was in swim team for many years, where I was taught to closely focus on the position of my body to perfect my technique and form. This achieved roughly the same effect. (Swimming, like yoga, also involved paying a lot of attention to when and how to breathe. You know, because my face would be underwater.) I've observed that most other solo sports can also do this if pursued for long enough.

2: Most people were supposed to practice a specific type of meditation called loving-kindness

There are several different kinds of meditation. Breath meditation is the one that you almost certainly know about. Meditating on mantras, or via yoga, is also well-known. And some people swear by meditation soundtracks like music or nature noises. But you can meditate on other things too - visual images like flickering candleflames, or specific feelings like love.

Loving-kindness meditation is a type of meditation focused on selfless love - the thing the Greeks called agape. There are instructions for precisely how to practice it elsewhere on the Internet, so I won't go into massive detail, but here's the gist of it: You take the feeling that someone close to you should be happy and free of suffering, and practice slowly extending it towards yourself, and towards larger and larger groups of people, and eventually the world. (This is a practice that can and will take years.)

Loving-kindness increases the happiness setpoint. It fosters empathy. It is actually possible to practice without cutting yourself off from improving yourself and the rest of the world. By all rights, loving-kindness ought to be the type of meditation that is taught to people at large. But it's not.

So, I leave you with a question:

It is very interesting that the type of meditation that teaches empathy was left out of Western imports.

Who did that? And why?

comments

OJ

We're living in Myra's timeline.

Mindfulness has been plucked out of context