Ok, bear with me.

Reality is a collection of sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings… and many many unnamed perceptions too. Vibes, energies… So I just wanted to establish that. That’s the reality that I’m talking about here when I say “reality”. (And then we have our words, descriptions, definitions and maps too of course, but that’s only secondary).

For the sake of my description let’s call that reality a dark basement room filled with 1000 things.

Attention is a flashlight in that room. It’s a dark room so where the illumination of that flashlight falls, you see, and where it doesn’t, you don’t.

That disk of illumination is your world. Everything outside it isn’t just unseen, it doesn’t exist for you. You don’t see it, you don’t have any kind of contact with it, maybe it exists within memory, or theory, but that’s just a ghost to you and fades quickly.

When you concentrate your attention, that circle of illumination shrinks. You have chosen one part of your illuminated disk of reality over the other and then that other stuff fell into shadow and disappeared. Now you have a new, smaller, disk of illumination containing only the important stuff.

This can be a temporary shrinkage or a more permanent one. The shrinkage is progressive.

One of our favorite things to concentrate upon is our thoughts. That’s where our plans, worries and theories reside so the attraction is obvious. It’s very easy to fall into the habit of chewing over your thoughts all the time. The latest engineering puzzle. Plans for lunch.

Spend your time doing that a lot, in your head all the time, and eventually the sights, sounds and feelings fade and reality becomes just thoughts. A story. Seeing is just a secondhand experience. Thoughts lead to more thoughts. The 1000 strange mysterious nameless things fade away.

And that’s just one common example. The dark cellar room contains 1000 other strange things too. The feelings of your body. What you saw and felt when you were a little boy.

What has been lost? What happens to my body when I stop paying attention to it? Where is that beauty and empathy I once felt? What is this alienation and apathy?

This is the creeping insanity.

I practice shikantaza meditation. It basically reverses it. I grow.

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This is actually pretty good

http://fleen.org/fluffy_cloud

Obsession is just the overt form of the disease.

Concentrate regularly on a thing, physical, mental or emotional, and it will produce the disease as well.

And that second form is hidden because the sufferer is not visibly raving. And they are embedded in a society filled with people that look much the same.

But don’t take my word for it. Study attention and its forms (direction, concentration, distraction…). Experiment with it. See for yourself.

Will do

I am describing the concentration of attention. Which includes a great ignoring. This is simple and obvious.

I am adding to that, habit. Unconscious action that is. Doing a thing while not aware that you’re doing it.

Which, when we put them together, gives us a kind of blindness.

If that blindness is unacknowledged then yes, that’s a kind if insanity. And it would follow that the more you concentrate the more insane you are.

If everybody does it (habitually concentrates) then yes, everybody is insane.

Is it necessary and unavoidable? I doubt it.

Am I being unclear here or just offensive?

Yeah that’s why I put it in quotes, because it’s a dumb term for what we’re looking for here.

Try just answering those 2 questions.

Or not, this is exhausting.

There’s a universe where we talk about it. Try that first.

You could try asking.

But we’re always trying to increase revenue and decrease cost. That’s biological. It’s a constant.

So enshittification and change for the worse look alike. So maybe conflate them

So the only thing free from this constant worsening is that which we give special attention to improving. (Ex : technology)

(It’s a strong argument for personal discipline. Chaos is the norm. Insanity is the norm. Rot is the norm. Etc)

Well I figured if you create more people then you create more customers. And with new frontiers comes new opportunities to dump product into taming that frontier (thus more sales of product). And if people die then the birthrate fills the hole and delivers new customers. And disasters function much like new frontiers.

Sounds like Cory is pointing fingers. Has any society ever curtailed our hunger for more? Harnessed that of the underclass. Gave free rein to that of the overclass. Yes. But never inhibited.

I guess things could be better if we avoided saturation.

Through death, disaster, expanding population or new frontiers

Do you not ignore everything else when you concentrate on a thing?

Do you not collect habits like a bumper collects stickers?

That’s my “proof”.

I think that farmers have been wiping out forests since forever.

I think the hoarding urge might be genetic. An expression of chronic anxiety.

This is where psychedelics and meditation come in.

The house of representatives is arguably a technology (or something like that. A shared machine?). Technologies are a special case. We’ve got big groups of people actively striving to improve them.

The casual, half-neglected “everything else” is the norm. Tragedy of the commons and progressively intensified exploitation of that commons is the norm.

Unless it is specifically protected and fostered it gets chewed to bits. The only thing that really protects it is keeping it out of reach (through lack of communication, transportation or whatever)

You need to put this in clear [JOKE] tags, otherwise they’ll never get it.

But once you read his words he’s got a foot in the door. Then he’s harder to ignore.

So maybe it’s harder to ignore fools on social media. Which would make social media a kind of fool-enhancer.

I guess this is where blocking comes in. But that seems drastic.