Quest : Transparency of Mind

[Note 1: This is highly tentative: the entire idea, as well as its framing. I’m sure my thinking about both will change a whole lot over the next few weeks. But ‘ya gotta staat sumwhre’ , so, this is my starting point. For now.]

[Note 2: What I have in mind is basically a mega-quest. Much likely, it’s somewhat unhelpful to frame this as a single quest. In practice, I need to and am breaking this whole thing up into many sub-quests (of which many deserve the name ‘quest’ all on their own). However, it can be valuable to know ‘what you’re in for’ (oh, my dear utopia); for reasons of motivation, prioritizing and in order to not lose sight of the bigger picture. The way I want to break up this mega-quest is still ‘under construction’ - some thoughts, however, are are outlined below.]

[Note 3: This mega-quest can be tackled from many different sides. I haven’t yet reached very high levels of clarity in my thinking about this, so I wouldn’t at all be surprised if these notes will appear fairly incoherent or confusing to readers (that aren’t me) at times.
I myself remain uncertain about a bunch of things myself: Most of the ideas, concepts and delineations are still fuzzy; the nodes, links and interactions are complex; the model is very (too?) extensive; even if this wasn’t the case, I still have a long way to go until I will be actually good at communicating my ideas effectively.
However, I want to make progress on all these fronts and hope that, with some more work, it will become clearer what I want and how I want to get there. That’s why I’m writing this down.]


(1) Rationale

The quest:

  • Train the transparency of my mind;

  • Build a granular awareness of what my mind does, instance by instance

Why?

This will allow me to:

  • ‘see’ more of what is going on, e.g. see where I’m ‘going astray’ in my thinking/doing, identify common patterns of my cognition, notice shoulds, flinching, rationalization, other S1-information, possibly build a taste for blind spots;

  • build better theories and hypothesis about what is happening and why, experiment with interventions (techniques) to examine their utility and reliability and improve/tailor them to me/different circumstances;

  • create affordance to deal with mental states (e.g. confusion, overwhelm, anxiety, resistance, impetus, impatience, excitement, ...) and eventually increase agency


Some vague handles (ignore this if you are not me):

  • A rationality meta-skill

  • “Illuminating the dark room I call ‘my mind’”

  • Working best with “what is”

  • Handling emotions, and mental states

  • Clarity - In-Self (?) - Agency - Power

Concretely, what I want to get out of this:

> Bottlenecks

  • Fuzzy mental states I don’t know what to do with; lack of mental and emotional clarity

    • A) Decreasing the quality of my thinking and my productivity  

      • 1 - blacking-out, shutting down, over-contraction (as opposed to clear, luminous, spacious thinking)

        • Note: I don’t know what is going on/what this is about, and thus cannot reliably identify helpful interventions; the lack of understanding triggers strong resistance with and frustration about the ‘status quo’, which impedes my thinking even more.  

      • 2 - I cannot adequately channel the available resources towards moving towards my goals/what is valuable to me

        • Note: mental states come with different sets of resources attached to each of them. Sometimes, it is hard to optimally channel these resources into something that is valuable to me.

    • B) Hampering my ability to communicate effectively (i.e. making ideas and/or myself understood);

    • C) Compromising my ability to connect

      • Note: confusion leading to pulled-backness, overshadowed by confidence signaling; self- and other-aloofness (‘emotional vitrine’); not being able to ‘give of myself fully’

      • Note: Connection and opportunity to be authentic as a key resource and key bottleneck

    • D) Causing distress, frustration, self-rejection and decreasing my subjective well-being

  • My brain obscuring part of itself which increases the risk of my decisions to be non-optimal (one-sided, i.e, relying on incomplete information; or skewed, i.e. weighting different pieces of information inadequately)

> Desirables:

  • Creating a granular map of my mental states (and their resource profile) to

    • Counter resistance (‘understanding’ helps with acceptance), which allows to:

    • Build affordance to

      • a) work with best the resources I have and/or

      • b) extend the resources available in the next moment

    • Eventually: increase agency (which is the key resource for me to attain my goals)

  • Mind transparency

    • Track mental moves, instance to instance → key meta-skills to rationality (epistemic and instrumental)

      • Note: ‘map of noticing’

  • Clarity of mind

    • Most of the value I can contribute comes from intellectual work; clarity of mind is key

    • Related, important faculties :

      • Free thinking (important for idea generation, re-conceptualization, prioritization, …)

      • Full commitment (key to getting great things done, and a lot of them)

  • Intention setting

    • I seem to have some aversion against setting intentions explicitly (I, de facto, never do it). I do think that there are often good reasons for this aversion, and I don’t think this is my key bottleneck. But increasing the faculty to set intentions and follow through on them when this is appropriate seems valuable. (Essentially, I think I could get some of the things I am getting now, but cheaper.)

    • Moreover, I have the intuition that digging into why I am not setting more intentions, more explicitly might bring to light some interesting insights.  

    • Note: different types (willpower-based, policy-based)  and sizes of intentions (life-goals vs TAPs)

  • Agency

    • More of this, more often!

    • My current theory: there are very few things to increase agency directly. It seems that it is the fruit I hope to harvest from training all the faculties outlined above, or in the map. Like an emergent faculty from raising the waterlines of many other faculties.

    • Agency + Clarity = what I want (?)

  • Authentic, well-calibrated confidence (?)


Some thoughts on what comes after (next, but also related, quests):

  • Wide Presence vs./and Self-Connection

    • > How can I combine two skills I have somewhat separately but not simultaneously?

      • Social manager: wide presence and meticulous tracking of the social space (the ‘script’) and all its actors (their ‘roles’)

      • Self-connection/In-Self: being in connection with me, with “what is”, authenticity, source of clarity and power.

        • Precise attention/full presence: being in connection with another person

      • Note: Up to now, these two faculties have appeared to be at odds with each other. (I.e. I can be in ‘wide-presence’, but lose the connection to myself. And I can be in ‘precise attention’ and ‘fully present’ with another person, but tend to forget about everything around me and even on other people that are (theoretically) part of the interaction.)
        I have an intuition that this doesn’t have to be this way, and I might just be getting some part of this wrong. Hence, I want to figure out whether I can combine these faculties, use them simultaneously.  

    • > How to increase my agency in these situations (e.g. altering, guiding, breaking the script)?

      • In my experience, in the case of social space, high levels of ‘seeing’ (social manager) doesn’t directly translate into high levels of agency (here, the faculty to alter the social space/script). I wonder what is up with this (Guess 1: my levels of seeing are not high enough or still demand too much resources in the moment that I cannot also think about how to act upon what I see. Guess 2: too much ego/identity involved in the situation, i.e. I’m constraining myself. Which would link to getting better at being ‘in-self’ in every instance.)

  • Extraordinary Teams

    • > How to reliably create and foster extraordinary/outstanding teams?

    • I suspect this might be a highly effective intervention point.

      • Few notes on the underlying rationale:  In many cases, it’s the success of teams, not individuals, that matters. The value of a extraordinary teams is bigger than the sum of its parts. The higher the complexity of a task, the more specialists cannot be successful where teams can be (i.e. non-linearity of combining skills). We should focus on creating highly effective teams, instead of highly effective individuals.

    • I also suspect that I (and my team) might be comparably good position to work on this.

      • Combining my training in (individual) rationality and our experience with deliberately crafting a highly effective team; plus the exposure and connection to a handful of other individuals that are thinking about similar things.

    • When scaling individual rationality/performance to collective rationality/performance, we are faced with new challenges and opportunities. I think there is a lot to be learned and figured out in order to overcome these challenges and really tap into the full potential a strong team can offer.



(2) Quest mapping

This map will still change a lot. I expect to change things on it within 30’ from posting this.

[I want a better way to share this!]

[I want a better way to share this!]


(3) Sub-quests

An overview of required Mastery:

  1. Focusing

    1. Product: Concept Map of Phenomenology/Mental States

    2. Explorations of Focusing

  2. Noticing

    1. Product: Concept Map of Noticing

    2. Explorations of Noticing

  3. Acceptance

    1. Handle: Work with “what is”

    2. Also: Let go of Resistance

  4. Affordance

    1. Handle: sitting on the top of the hill, from where I can decide which side I want to slide down

    2. Note: ‘affordance’ doesn’t seem to me to be a skill in itself, but a place to reach (not more than an instance, where all options are open); the related skill would be ‘building affordance’, my current theory predicts this to be the same as ‘noticing + acceptance + internalization’)

  5. Internalization

    1. Handle: reducing ‘wanting to wants’ to ‘wants’; internal value-alignment (?); moving from intellectual understanding to emotional understanding

    2. Note: I haven’t yet very consciously experimented with internalization techniques (eg. core transformation, propagating) beyond deep intellectual examination that sometimes leads to S2 updating.
      However, I know that I have performed very deep ‘internal operations’ on my S2-understanding in the past, although not under an explicit framework. Given what sort of believes I have internalized by pure will-power in the past (very low entropy ones), I might have an above average capacity to internalize believes (notes: correlates with strong will, determination, stubbornness, high conscientiousness, control) .
      This is a double-edged sword, though, and I have been cut in the past. Probably one of the main reasons why  I have (both consciously and unconsciously) distanced myself a lot from the sheer levels of discipline I had lived up to throughout my teenage years. After a significant detour (swing-back of the pendulum), I am again slowly approaching a, what seems to be, more optimal equilibrium in terms of discipline. It seems promising to make this a conscious and explicit process.  

  6. Intentions

    1. What intentions to adopt? (crucial)

    2. Try - Commit - Follow-through

  7. Presence/Attention

    1. Energy management: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual

    2. Skill: concentration/focus + awareness (loosening my grip)

  8. TAPs

    1. Combination of ‘Noticing + Marker + Intention’

    2. Actually Try (?)

Supportive skills/practices:

  • Meditation

    • Introspection

    • Metta

    • Acceptance / Loosening my grip / Letting go of stress (counter default)

    • Concentration/focus, presence

  • Engaging my senses

    • Concentration/Focus, presence

    • Self-connection

    • Loosening my grip

  • Micro intentions

    • Overtraining

    • Also: (self-)transparency, bravery, facing “what is”

  • Conceptual clarity (mapping, writing up)

  • NVC framework

    • Acceptance, giving from the heart

    • Clarity: observation, feeling, needs, request; responsibility

  • Authentic relating

    • self-connection/self-transparency

    • Communication; broadening my vocabulary for mental states

  • Letting go / Loosening grip (mental move)

    • Clearing space

    • IDC/IFS/multi-agent discourse

    • Kindness

    • Playfulness

    • Acceptance

  • Committed engagement

    • Setting intentions

    • Face what is, let go of flinching  

  • Epistemic Rationality

  • Empirical Rationality


(4) Plan of action to obtain mastery:

I will treat the ‘plan of action to obtain mastery’ individually for each of the above mentioned sub-skills. Somewhere else. Some other time.

Tennessee Valley, California, May 2019 - Aliens

Tennessee Valley, California, May 2019 - Aliens