Meditation (Day 140)

Prep (0845)

Today, I will do the prep both off and on the cushion. Yesterday went very well with prep on cushion, but I think having something to reference to verify I remember all the things I want to prep with is also good. So pre-prep prep, as it were.

Motivations:

• Practice intentionality
• Subdue distractions
• Unity of mind
• See how far the stages take me
• Overcome the illusion of self

Intentions for the day:

• Eyes closed
• Settle posture in prep and set the intention to sit still
• Before starting to focus on meditation object, cultivate joy
• Immediately notice and correct for subtle dullness (stage 5 intention)
• Body-scan to increase mindfulness (stage 5 exercise)
• Develop a clearly established scope of attention (stage 6 intention)
• Completely ignore all subtle distractions (stage 6 intention)
• Move, grow, and shrink the scope of attention throughout the body (stage 6 exercise)
• Especially ignore posture distractions

Distractions to look out for:

• Body-scan
• Posture
• Lower back
• Shoulder
• Swallowing
• Planning
• Meta
• Politics
• American Horror Story
• Reflection
• Timer
• Labeling
• Cardcaptor Sakura
• Wife
• Cat
• Outside

Post-Meditation (1000)

Introspective awareness is almost like a muscle I can keep tense. It staying tense for the whole session (and really at all times) is basically the goal. There's no real extra energy required to do this, it's just not wired to stay that way yet.

Though, because it's like that more often, there are other capabilities I can exercise. I believe one of them is the peripheral introspective awareness. Which is my mind grouping the subtle distractions together. Now, watching this too closely is a mistake, I think. As then it becomes a lot like labeling. Though perhaps that's a sort of paranoia.

In any case, my endurance for ignoring subtle distractions as they show up does still wane by the end. It's interesting the parallel to gross distractions coming in at the end. But the breath is still quite vivid, as far as I can tell. I'm just not quite as capable of reminding myself to focus exclusively on the meditation object. Perhaps growing and shrinking and moving the scope of attention when I notice this is a good idea. I resisted the temptation today as I considered it itself to maybe be a distraction. Eventually, I did do it, and it seemed to help, but maybe doing sooner is better.

Dream

Intention (2243 the night before)

I will WBTS. I will write down my dreams. I will wake up at 0630. Thank you, me.

Wake-Back-to-Sleep (logged at 0357 this morning)

Feels like I was having an abstract dream. Potentially related to exercise. I believe my current hypothesis is such dreams are "processing" dreams. My mind is wiring things together and making me better at the thing.

Let's remember a narrative dream next.

Falling into Politics

I am on top of some building. I am dissing Trump with some other people. I fall off the edge of the building. Still alive, I am too injured to get up on the ground below. I can hear news narration about what happened to me.

Donald Trump is the first to find me. He tries to hide me behind MAGA merchandise that he's trying to sell. I have enough strength to put it out of the way.

Some women come and save me. One asks me if I can stand and I tell her I need help to get up. They both support me, me in the middle with my arms over each of them. I gingerly take each step as we move.

They take me to their political headquarters. They say I should run and use my run-in with Trump as political fodder. I'd rather campaign for someone. I end up talking to someone who is running.

That's all I remember.

Wake (logged at 0640 this morning)

Woke up at 0630, remembered dream, and did a WBTS at 0357! Success! There was this strange bit where I thought I remember two dreams, but looked and the first dream was already written down, but on going to write the dream above, there was no other dream written down, and I can't remember more than one dream.

Did I dream looking in the journal? I did a reality check before writing in it, but not one before that memory of me looking in it.

Pre-nap (1343)

Feel like lucid dream coming soon. Reality check habit triggering more and more. Dreams remembered nightly again, I think. WBTS back. Would be nice to have a really solid "watch myself fall asleep" experience again as well. But lucid dream doesn't have to be WILD, can be DILD.

Feeling real good. There's a synergy between past, present, and future me. There's still some habits to iron out, but I feel them coming along.

Post-nap (1405)

Interesting sensations:

• Feeling of gravity pulling in different directions (as if I'm standing on my hands for example)
• Not knowing where my hands are or how they are resting (they were lightly clenched in my pockets)

Tried to really see an "apple" and I don't think I did, but it was the only thing in color in the visualization.

Felt the warmth spread over my body as the nap ended, but it had trouble seeping into my feet. Could really feel my feet and toes. Control over scope of attention really improving (thanks to meditation).

Experimental (Notion Organization)

Okay, so I am going to try out saving my writing in a Notion database called "Misc Writing". I thought this would be annoying, but the idea is that the "title" of each page is a paragraph. I can then tag each paragraph with the kind of content I think it is (if it's interesting enough to tag) and then later on I can read, in chronological order, all my writing of a certain tag.

My thinking is that my blog post ideas will have their names as tags. And then I can initialize a blog post with a linked database of misc writing that filters only on that tag. Once I feel I've written enough to edit it into something more, it can become a blog post.

I can also more easily explore my old writing via tags, maybe? We'll see what happens.

This should also mean that I can just start writing a new paragraph at any given point without having to make any space for it, and just make sure I tag it.

This may be an okay way of doing the zettelkasten method (as far as my limited understanding of it goes).

It'll also be pretty easy to find the context of a sentence from its created timestamp. Hmmm... this could be quite interesting.

And I have verified that this setup copy-pastes into my diary pretty well, so neat! Note: I have tagged each paragraph here with "Experiment", "Zettelkasten", and "Notion Mutation".

I wonder how Notion handles exporting this setup.... (I'll tag this thought with "Idea" to come back to later.)

Ooh... yes. I like this. (This will not be tagged. Also, I'm going to stop noting how I'm tagging things.)

Though, now it may be time to really confront the purpose of these daily diary posts.... I really don't need to have them anymore. The few people who read this... well, the ones that matter (no offense if I don't know you) I would probably get more out of some sort of regular call with them, if I don't do that already (and I don't for at least one of you).

So weird to maybe just stop.... Well, I'm going to do this until this weekend, at least, to capture anything I do in my diary that I may want to replicate here. For instance, I tag each post still. I can do the same thing in Notion.

Lastly, I'm going to want to really verify I can export and have all my stuff from Notion. Not sure how exporting Notion databases works.

Anyways, I really need to stop writing now and stretch and go to bed.