Debt in this article means that you have overdrawn on your resources and are now consuming more than you recover, store, or generate.
Predictive Debt
The brain is largely a predictive processor. It generates/predicts perceptions, thoughts and feelings (emotions). It does this to conserve energy and resources due to how expensive learning can be biologically. The brain needs a large number of calories and micro-nutrients to grow and to maintain proper homeostasis.
Thus, it “shorthands” and “shortcuts” complex relational contexts into intense predictive impulses in order to make certain survival actions quickly without spending time/energy on the resources needed for contemplation. This produces pros & cons, especially where language is involved.
The biggest issue is that over time, a human bio-system will become a network of highly charged (intense) shortcuts that are dis-connected from the context by which they are responding to. This means that Pain, Fear & Desire/Hunger signals become wired together in ways that do not allow for clear perception of context. There becomes less and less time and choice between sensation, perception and action.
Once enough highly intense priors are accumulated, an additional layer of defensive buffering is created in the form of narrative justifications. (This can be generalized as “the ego”.)
In order to prune the system of malicious-yet-protective shortcuts, one must engage mindfully (slowly, consciously, holistically) with purposeful confusion and interruption of the predictive mechanisms. First, in playful, low-stakes scenarios, and gradually moving into higher stakes scenarios.
What we have to understand about predictive processes (which is also relevant to understanding AI & Large Language Models) is that they are always referencing past interpretations in order to describe the present. Thus, they can never truly generate emergent phenomena. They can only appear to predict, but what they are doing is regurgitating and remixing past interpretive data and phenomena to create an approximation of the present which is always incomplete.
Therefore, prediction is always past. It is never present nor future located. It can never inhabit anything other than referential, incomplete delusions about the world.
Learning to bypass this predictive process and thus clear away predictive debt is a hallmark of certain forms of meditation, especially in the Daoist canon. It is becoming able to experience reality (time & space) directly with as few prior references and beliefs as possible, in order to experience reality freshly.
This fresh-perceiving gives rise to many states-of-perception and states-of experiencing and states-of-being that escape common linguistic capture. It is more akin to listening to virtuosic jazz improvisation than being able to memorize and comprehend socio-culturally pre-defined concepts about* reality.
*In emphasis, this word “about” is vitally important in recognizing your closeness or farness from perceiving reality. Perception and language that is ABOUT reality can never be that close to reality. They are always distancing and protecting effects.
The music is happening right there and then, right at that very moment. It doesn’t “become real” only after you have described it, categorized it, understood it and/or developed an opinion about it. The music doesn’t exist as an abstract concept. Yet your brain and its cultural coding are striving aggressively at almost every moment to engage with the music (as a placeholder for reality & phenomena) as a series of concepts through a series of concepts (we could call these filtration concepts lenses).
It’s only when one stops wasting energy and relaxes that one can experience the music directly without this meshwork of lenses that interferes with direct experience. This is the place where preferences can change, emerge or cease to exist altogether. This ceasing of preferences might be one of the hallmarks of nondual animism. It is the fresh interaction with phenomena without (or with less)pre-determined preferential behaviors.
A Pause
Some of you reading this are probably in a state of distress. Detoxing from neuro-colonization can be uncomfortable. Many of the procedures I have mentioned take some long-term planning, critical discernment and stick-with-it-ness to implement long enough to see a positive change. You may have to go through a lot of issues before things re-stabilize in a more natural configuration. You may not even know how colonized your mind is.
Here is the basic seed practice of the Story State Action System:
Remember that natural liberation is inherent and immediate. It requires no achievement. It is only our weaponized fictions that imprison us such as racism, capitalism, colonialism and salvationism.
Further learning on not being able to see the stories you tell yourself, pain and prediction, non-Western contemplative practices can be found here.
Housekeeping
Donation Links
venmo at dare-sohei
To understand your natal astrology as it pertains to yin or yang dominance on a spectrum, you can get a natal reading – 3 hours, $500 USD. More info here.
You can buy some one-off workshops at this link including an introduction to using Yijing for divination: https://www.patreon.com/c/deathclown/shop
For Premium Subs, there is no monthly lecture this August. Lectures resume the first weds morning of September for the Monkey Moon. July’s lecture was a “double” lecture due to the double goat moons.
I am concocting a poll type thing where i decide what to focus on for the next 12 months of lectures. I will still be doing the calendrical ganying, and i will be adding monthly pdfs for premium subs which i began to roll out for July’s lecture.
However, as things continue, I will be adding or focusing on some things depending on my health and what divination tells me. Some of the ideas currently are:
- Story, State, Action practices/micro-workshop sections wrapped up into the lectures.
- Monthly calendars of daily tongshu so that people can begin to learn how to “read” the data themselves over time.
Also, I am toying around lightly with the ideas of:
Story, State, Action micro-courses (which would be stand-alone courses not included in the monthly fee) that focus on certain themes such as:
- The Connection between Decolonization and Detoxing from Addiction.
- Story, State, Action for Chronic & Invisible Illness.
- Story, State, Action for Creativity.
All of these may or may not happen as my finances and health severely limit my capacity to produce content within a dystopian social environment.
[Feature Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash.]