In a recent post, Frost extolled the masculine scowl. A badge of independent, rebel manhood. But what is it? And why doesn’t an ingenopath do it? Today I learned.

The ingenopath recognizes the rights and claims of everyone and everything as absolute, leaving literally nothing for himself.

The scowl is a freedom from commitment to anything save one’s inner integrity. It is the dangerous, unpredictable freedom of a man. Nature’s bright red markings on a poisonous insect; the rattle of Gadsden’s “Don’t tread on me”. The indifferent strength of strong personal boundaries that irresistibly attracts women.

Though my commitment to the koans was as deep as I could make it, this commitment was still divided. I still recognized other commitments. These diluted my personal integrity, my personal boundaries. Which, paradoxically, reduced my ability to fulfill those secondary commitments.

The commitments I still recognized, overmind commitments, were such things as keeping one’s word, romantic obligations, duty to employer.

I decided I wanted to blow them all off (in the psychological sense) and be emotionally committed solely to the koans – solely to integrity.

So I did. I wrote the ten letter word “commitment”, one on each knuckle.

Now external stress, dissonance, anxiety etc from those sources doesn’t touch me. The overmind no longer has those excuses to kick into gear. It is simply the koans – the glass that breaks the surface tension of the ocean beneath. I am unpredictable, dangerous, and I don’t give a shit – without compromising my ingenopathic core.

Every good fortress needs a gate, an opening, even a weak point. So saith the 7 Samurai. MindOS agrees that the personal boundary must be porous – neither wholly open nor shut.

While my inner hand koans have remained stable and unchanged, the outer have evolved.

On the wrist, I’ve put BedrocK, divided over the two wrists: Bed | rocK.

This symbolizes my successful implementation of the holistic self-tracking, experiment-management, and regimen adherence health system I put into place. It relies upon the hypothesis-result scientific method that first taught man to overcome his innate tendency towards self-deception, focused information management, and rapid iteration. I believe the model is an excellent fit for many areas of human endeavor. In any case, this regimen/habit/system is the bedrock upon which my life is built. Without it, each day is a hellish slog through slate-flavored molasses, and no progress beyond survival is possible.

Then there’s the knuckles. Originally I had “commitment” there. Yet that didn’t quite have the right undertones. Too defiant, too stressing, too specific.

I replaced it with “ocean glass”, the overmind-stilling effect of the tri-symbol koan system. But this was slightly too introspective, solipsistic.

Then I tried “ocean time”, a reference to Zelazny’s “Star Vigilante” novel, meaning the slowed time-perception of a cyborg-enhanced human. My interpretation made it a combined meaning, the “ocean” in “ocean glass” remaining unchanged, but the immersion in the Now no longer primarily focused on just the inner world.

Still something was missing. Pain or loss was not being directly recognized, and this built dissonance pressure eventually. Very mild – just enough to make me procrastinate instead of working when tired.

I decided this outer layer needed a gate. Just as a penetration of the tri-symbol layer by pain or loss is an unacceptable breach, so the outer layer must be porous to it. I added “0″ between “ocean” and “time”.

“0″ symbolizes the truth that one has nothing – externally, that is, outside the self. It subsumes all loss within this truth, contextualizes individual episodes of loss within the greater whole, blunting their specific impact, yet without denying them. It creates vulnerability and sensitivity to potential or actual negative external stimuli, which is necessary for engagement, without risking core integrity. It makes external sources of joy more keenly felt, by eliminating any delusion that they are already possessed or assured.

Every good fortress needs an opening.

I could now work when tired, even if external negativity existed, and I lacked the internal fire to defy or interpret it away. Mild sadness was now also a productive state.

Goals are stupid, as I’ve explained before in great detail. My new “predesplan” paradigm, the correct replacement for goals, will prove this once and for all.

Not only goals, but also desires are stupid. What do I want? Dumb question. I want a hot feminine pliant attentive girlfriend. Two would be better. I also want solitude, which conflicts with the girlfriend(s). I want a huge bank account and steady income, but also free time and fulfilling work. More conflicts. I want lots of things. But what price am I willing to pay for any one desire? How do mutually conflicting desires trade off against each other? As soon as I define a desire, make it explicit, remove the context of price and tradeoffs and degrees of completion… it becomes wrong. It no longer reflects my true value matrix.

Plans are also stupid. Creating a plan invites one to rip a giant whole in the fabric of one’s existing habitual patterns. Secondly, a plan typically aims at a single desire or goal, and thus is myopic and suboptimizing. Thirdly, a plan doesn’t account for feedback and iteration, which makes it blind. Through a stubborn sense of commitment, one tends to follow a plan to an holistic outcome worse than the initial state. Worse, one often refuses to recognize that the outcome is worse, due to the cognitive bias commitment induces.

Recently, I did something right. I used an experimental framework to rapidly fix several errors in my regimen that were costing me huge losses in health. To do so, I had to disprove a strongly held belief in my mental model.

I named this health experiment+tracking method BedrocK. It gave me hope and a sense of control. Then I started thinking about how to apply the same process to other life domains. I realized that creating goals, naming desires, and sticking to plans had always created great cognitive dissonance for me. Perhaps a more congruent and explicit paradigm could eliminate this. So I drew a map of the abstract elements of the BedrocK process.

I will explain the diagram in a moment. But first I must address the beginning of all action – my desires. The desire matrix of an individual is not simple, but complex, like the demand matrix of a national economy. There are many possible configurations, many gradients of quality, many tradeoff relationships.

As I meditated on this, I realized that pursuit of any single desire was likely to create unacceptable tradeoffs in the matrix. In fact, it was very difficult to articulate ANY piece of this demand matrix into written words. What could I say about it that was absolutely true, and thus wouldn’t lead to suboptimization?

Did I even need to articulate something? In large measure, no. The subconscious processing mode unlocked by my koans was well equipped to handle this sort of rich, fuzzy complexity. Yet some degree of articulation was necessary for the construction of an hypothesis-result experimental iteration process – to combat cognitive bias and ensure forward progress.

In a national economy, prices serve to communicate information about the contextually-rich supply-demand matrix in a compressed, efficient manner. That option is not available within a single individual’s psyche. What could I do instead?

I reflected on my recent health achievement. A very simple, easy, free change in my regimen had lead to vastly improved health. The value of the new status quo clearly dominated that of the old status quo. Thus while the entire matrix cannot be described, one point on its possibility space can be be determined to dominate another.

This may or may not be “technical” dominance, in the sense that every measure of value has improved. But it is at least holistic dominance, in the sense that there is no doubt that B is superior to A.

Tim Ferriss recommends mapping out in detail the lifestyle one wants to achieve. This is wrong, because it fails to factor the costs and tradeoffs of that lifestyle, and further assumes that wants are static. By contrast, now I had a clear and accurate method for stating my desires. Predictively, I need simply target a fuzzily-defined B that dominates A. In post-facto analysis, I need merely honestly ask myself whether B dominates A. That is enough to determine whether an experiment succeeded or failed.

Thus, the statement, “I want x, y and z” is wrong. Rather, it is always, “I intend to move from point A to point B for x price with y method, because B’s value will dominate A.”

Next let’s tackle the diagram. As I meditated, I realized that the status quo has two elements – one’s map and one’s process. One’s map is a combination of conscious beliefs and unconscious expectations and attitudes about the world and potential worlds. One’s process combines one’s systems, habits, and freewheeling style when operating outside of either.

In general, it’s good to process, refine and enlarge one’s model with information management. It’s also good to make explicit and standardize one’s habits to reduce variance and friction. But both of these activities can be taken too far. They are not the primary generator of value, but a support activity. Cyborganize takes care of these support activities for me.

To some extent, therefore, one’s habits and model are self-improving. Free immersion in execution will improve one’s mastery. Wide reading will improve one’s model. However, these gradual cumulative benefits lack a crucial ingredient – hypothesis-result testing.

The reason the scientific method is so powerful is that human beings are masters of self-deception – by design. We are meant to propagate genes in a tribal paleolithic environment, not to maximize personal value in a modern economy. Our emotions and cognitive processing architecture hijack rational self-interest to achieve the genetic reproductive imperative.

A model is only true if it predicts. Hypothesis-result tracking forces accountability on the model. A human will do anything rather than be wrong, even alter his values to fit the bad results of his plan. By forcing accountability to flow to the model, one preserves the integrity of one’s values, and rapidly iterates one’s model closer to truth.

Thus the iterative experimental scientific method can generate outsize results, acting as a star shell flare during the night combat of human unreason. Suddenly the grey forms of advancing infantry stand out in naked relief, and are easily gunned down.

Next, the hypothesis. That’s easy when the domain is health. More health is better. Perhaps for some decisions one considers certain tradeoffs such as time and energy spent exercising, or cost of supplements, but even these are not excessively complicated. However, when one starts to consider questions of career, business, social and lifestyle design, the tradeoffs become quite complicated. One therefore needs a more robust paradigm.

At the basic health level, a hypothesis contains a plan which modifies the existing routine slightly, and a prediction on the results. The desire is clear – better health. But in overall life, the desire is no longer clear. More money? Or more sex? Or better sex? Or better relationships? Or more satisfying work? You can pursue one by sacrificing the others.

Thus, rather than a goal or a single desire, we must seek a point B that dominates the status quo point A. We must consider desire in the general sense, rather than focusing on a single particular desire. Thus the components of an hypothesis are (general desire) + plan + prediction.

When the experiment has run and it’s time to evaluate the truth or falsehood of the hypothesis, we do not ask, “Did I achieve desire X (e.g. rent a Ferrari)?” But rather, “Did B dominate A on my personal value matrix (Are the attention from women and feelings of status worth the price in time, money, liability, extra work, etc)?”

Thus the desire component of the hypothesis never changes. Just as the desire component of the health hypothesis is always to improve health, so the desire component of the life hypothesis is always to find a B that dominates A on the personal value matrix.

This may seem repetitive and obvious, but to me it is tremendously clarifying. It tells me what I should be doing. There are so many, many options. Previously I had no universal rule to sort them. Now I do. Work is a game of imposing my value matrix on the world, by finding the next dominant point through experimental iteration.

Next, the experiment. It should be as small a change as possible, to eliminate conflating variables, yet be expected to produce a large positive result. In general, the more you can stabilize your routine and environment, the more certain you can be that the experiment is responsible for the change in results.

Last, the tracking. It must be lightweight enough to be sustainable. The act of tracking itself should create value, to ensure adherence. It must be sufficiently comprehensive to yield clear results during the analysis phase. This may require tracking fuzzy variables – 1-5 rankings work great. Lastly, it should be standardized to the extent possible. But realize that statistical methods exist for converting fuzzy data into hard results. Lots of fuzzy measurements are better than a few precise but incomplete ones.

When one has a result, one can use it to update one’s model and routine. It is a hard datapoint in a sea of speculation. The faster one can accumulate these iterations, the better.

And that is the Austrian economic + scientific method way to improve your life.

In many ways I’m like a factory whose reactor has been offline. The bots scurried around improving designs and machinery for a decade, but everything awaited core spinup. Thanks to the trialstream scientific approach, core spinup is achieved. Now factory systems are coming to life – systems unrecognizable from what existed on the floor 10 years ago, the last time it was running.

With the reactor (health) safely running in trialstream mode, I next turned my attention to implementing trialstream in the next life domain. I immediately faced three big theoretical questions:
1. Which domain first?
2. How to adapt the health method to a different domain?
3. Where to begin a new trialstream?

I also faced three practical questions:
1. How to disambiguate overlapping domain boundaries?
2. What is the right balance between fuzzy comprehensiveness and lightweight adherence?
3. What kind of hypotheses and experiments can I run for social and income?

For a while, I flailed about in this sea of interrelated question marks. Finally I found solid land – the simplest way to begin a trialstream is by tracking what’s already happening. This is the first discipline. After a bit of tracking, with condition 0 raw data recorded and the default process exposed, one can then design trial 1.

The mere act of tracking reduces susceptibility to emotionally driven self-misperception and its attendant disadvantages. It thereby increases one’s feeling of self-efficacy, an important component of confidence and well-being. It corrects psychological blind spots and strengthens the sense of personal narrative. This telos gives added vigor and enthusiasm to action.

The immediate need for tracking was in the social domain. I’d begun making outings, in response to emotional pressure in the evenings for social contact. This was partly a new desire brought by health, and partly a need that had gone unmet due to poor health and overwork. In any case, it was now possible and imperative to address the void, before I’d be able to apply stable focus to income generation.

I found a good rhythm of an outing at sundown for ~2 hours that fulfilled the need and provided a stable cheap, repeatable experiment with inherent value. I figured I could combine it with learning Chinese to fill any dead interstitial time, so I’m out nothing but cab fare at worst.

Next, database design. It’s easy to sperg out with social tracking, and try to build some ridiculous interlocking web thing. For the first iteration, I eschewed that and focused on a fuzzy performance tracking style inspired by my health setup, with heavy emphasis on broad inputs and KPI’s, rated 1-5. Plus a few objective metrics to keep things honest. For results, I combined general emotional fulfillment/enjoyment with platonic (networking included) and PUA metrics. I made two tables, a daily one and an outing-specific one, since I view outings as particularly suitable for trialstreaming. A little puzzling and the overlap ambiguity was sorted, although I’m sure it’ll refine itself over time.

I don’t really have a social hypothesis/prediction experiment running now. Just a tracking awareness feedback loop. However, I am running an informal experiment, with very good initial results.

In truth, my hand koans are optimized for working in isolation. I realized recently that there is no way to reconcile this meditative mode with the social mode. They have completely different demands. So I gave up trying to create one koan system that works for both, and started a new koan stream on the underside of my wrists purely for social contexts. This severely stripped down version is as follows:

left wrist underside:
Tongues
CFC K (means Conidence/Faith/Commitment in Koans, ie undoubting immersion in them)
SVM (means self value matrix, a way of expressing self interest in terms of an economic demand matrix)

right wrist underside:
trialstream
sigma (the sociosexual rank I can aspire to and/or emulate)

Doing this clarified to me that koans have always been a kind of informal experiment. When I encountered dissonance and poor performance, I modified the koans to achieve a better fit. For now, I’m content to let social stay in organic free-flow. After all, I need do very little to fill the social deprivation void. I am not yet looking for outsize success.

The domain I AM looking to push aggressively is income. I completed the basic tracking setup, a separate database table. The fundamental input metric is timergy (time plus energy), rated 1-5. This obviates onerous time tracking. At the moment, the main output metric is SVM, a measure of expected dollar value plus fulfillment. I will add a non-daily table to track income/period for different sources, supported by automatic calculations for inputs and outputs, when it becomes relevant. That way I can simply drop in e.g. a monthly paycheck from YNAB, enter the date range and source, and auto-calculate the associated inputs and SVM. (A high SVM and low dollar income from a particular source might indicate a hobby, not a business.)

For now, the timergy daily tracker is simply telling me where I’m investing, and how much I feel I’m getting back. This produces greater time-value consciousness, and is worth the minute or so it takes to fill in per day.

As an ingenopath, I have massive social, income and executional blind spots. This meta-experiment is intended to correct those cognitive maladaptations. My health ordeal forced me to recognize my shortcomings by drastically reducing my cognitive abilities, self-perception, and emotional stability – rendering me unable to solve the puzzle until I fixed my blind spots. Naturally, it seems wise to apply the same method to other domains. We’ll see how it goes.

UPDATE:

I’ve just noticed that the social koan mode is also effective during the low-energy state right as I stop working and transition to going to bed. I often face a depressive lull then as I try to shift activities. So perhaps the social mode is actually simply a lower intensity mode. Which suggests that the deepsock problem is actually one of two modes – the overpowered reflective mode, and the rough and tumble low-focus mode. Retitling”social” mode to “low-focus” mode will make appropriate switching easier.

Brothers of the Sphere of Man, I hereby depart you. Nay, stay me not – though a single oak-scented tear doth glint my rugged cheek! For I am but a loony-toon marshmallow, and can no longer bear the slings and arrows of outrageous perspicacity.

It started off cool. Forney’s article semi- killed it. If anyone else “leaves the manosphere”, it’s going to be eye rolls and “oh come on”.

Really? You left? To where? You’re a man, you’re writing about the same shit, ergo you didn’t go anywhere.

It’s very simple. The manosphere wasn’t popular, so it was pure. Then it became a little bit popular, and lost purity.

Well, it was never pure. In the beginning, Ross Jeffries.

The point is, there’s a perfectly good word differentiating “man” from “not-man”, and that word is “faggot”. The manosphere needn’t disband over a couple of faggots. That in itself would be a faggot move. The correct move is what men have always done in response to faggots – shaming, belittling, calling out, bullying, persecution, etc.

The reason these “leaving the manosphere” articles have been good is not because of the Parthian but the shot. I can’t figure out why they’re running away, but I do enjoy the shooting.

And run where? Did anyone ever join the fucking manosphere? I missed that pledge of allegiance. It’s a genre, not a party. Stop with the category errors. Confucius says rectify the names. Don’t leave the manosphere; out the faggotsphere!

Of course Tucker Max is a self-promoting weasel; but hey, he’s a good writer with popular appeal. Look at his face; it’s what he was born to do. He will draw many; some will learn he’s a fraud and be led back to the source.

I’m glad pig-Forney decided to shit-wrestle with the muck-fearing SM and D504. That was much overdue. I rejoice as a white knight, in fact, that Laura Grace Robbins has been vindicated against her persecutor. Posting the pic was so perfect; a psycho cunt surfing the Wall with a lantern-jaw, writing hyena clit diddles to beta lickspittles. I heard of but never read either. Let the echo of their humiliation be the last whisper of their fame.

The challenge is a fundamental male ritual. Anyone who cannot answer it lacks the requisite testosterone or integrity, and in either case can get the fuck out. The way to maintain group integrity is not to LEAVE when infiltrators and weaklings inevitably arrive, but to keep the level of internal challenge high enough that they cannot survive.

Otherwise you will always be building things to enrich your inferiors. And that’s a faggot move.

We now return to barking at moonbeams.

[this is just a waypoint on the road to the system's final form]

In the mind there are only two things: concepts and emotional energy (hereafter referred to as simply energy). Action is downstream of both, and even if the signal is sent, it may not be obeyed. Thus it may be ignored.

One may view the mind as a three stage system – input, processing and output of CE (concepts/energy).

The flow of CE through the three part system has three possible conditions – blocked, turbulent and adaptive.
1. Blocked: blindspot/shutdown/delusion
2. Turbulent: anxiety, intermittency, circularity
3. Adaptive: desired performance

The goal of my koans is to correct my phenotypic and cultural maladaptations at all three stages.

The expansive koan system on the topside of my hands is for reflective deep processing, ie for the processing stage of the mind. The lightweight koan system on the underside of my wrists is for the social mode, for heavy output and input and light processing, for heavy energy throughput and light conceptual throughput.

A newly added koan goes through stages – epiphany, refinement, settling, ?deletion?. My “sigma” under-wrist koan moved from epiphany to refinement and became “sigma direct”.

I reflected on Vronsky in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and on Vox’s descriptions of the sociosexual hierarchy. A distinguishing feature of ALPHA is directness. But what is the psychological analogue of this external behavior?

I realized that it is the unfiltered expression of the processing architecture’s form. Not anything else. ALPHA expresses the full range of human behavior – this is the only rule it truly follows. Or, if that is not true, then it is at least rule that I was failing to follow, that was holding me back.

Various conditions led me to avoid social directness. Deepsocket ingenopathy and cultural confusion caused core vulnerability and maladaptation that necessitated the exercise of caution and erection of protective barriers. Later, desperate and painful circumstances gave additional reason for caution. Koans fixed the core vulnerability and maladaptation, and right action mitigated the unacceptable risk.

It is an enjoyable experience, a major revision of my interpersonal style, and coupled with fuzzy SVM, means I will have to inductively relearn what my social priorities are. Things that I previously enjoyed I may no longer desire, and things I previously eschewed I may now enjoy.

Fuckers add it on the boats before freezing the catch. Sodium Tripolyphosphate = STP. A preservative that makes seafood look more appetizing and increases water retention (more weight = more $$). Up to 2% STP content for the USA, I read somewhere. I’m sure in China it goes higher.

I’m allergic as fuck to it, as I already knew. But what I didn’t realize is, it’s in damn near all seafood, and rarely ever labeled. 90% of supermarket shrimp in the US contaminated, according to a random internet commenter. I downloaded a helpful government pdf giving guidelines to shrimp boats on how to use it, so I can believe the saturation is that high.

Thanks. Let’s throw an artificial salt-like chemical in ALL OUR FOOD. Thank you for that.

I’m betting that’s why I react strongly to some brands of shrimp and not (or less so) others, why I had to stop eating scallops, etc etc. In fact, I bet it explains a lot of people’s seafood allergies.

At lower STP levels, it’s a milder reaction. For a while I missed it completely, and thought I just had to control circadian rhythm, portion size and meal timing better. Nope, overeating, sleep disruption, and willpower reduction were all upstream symptoms of low-grade STP poisoning. I was uselessly chopping heads off a hydra.

Not eating seafood isn’t an option. Without the minerals, hellooo malnutrition.

The question is, how to get non-STP seafood? I could grind out slow, annoying, strength-sapping tests until I found a brand with relatively less. Sounds fun.

Or, I could try live seafood, the only kind that doesn’t have STP. About my only option is the live shellfish they have in wet markets. If it ain’t crawling around, swimming or breathing, it’s been frozen, and it’s been soaked in STP before freezing. (Or something worse.)

I’m limited to low fat as well, which means most fish are out. So it’s just the shellfish. Hafta buy them in shell, still squirming.

Could this be it? Could I finally be done? The data says shrimp is my last trouble spot…

My psychological suffering at the trough of this biological cycle is much less than before, thanks to completed koans. But I’m still, shall we say, cut off from God. And at the low point, I still struggle to do any work beyond the absolutely required.

Once more into the breach.

Thanks to a power outage, I consumed some spoiled shrimp meat and went down again. At least, that’s what I think happened. Alternatively, I can only eat the juice of the farmed live shrimp, not the meat. Alternatively, both juice and meat are irritating: the meat extremely so, the juice mildly so. Next week’s experiment will clarify. In any case, mineral depletion and continual exposure to varying levels of TPP are solved.

Being sick, I had the opportunity to test my koans again in a fatigued, low-willpower, suffering state. Could I maintain work ethic? No.

The wattage is so dim in those circumstances, no current can be wasted. No resistance can be permitted. The slightest dissonance is fatal.

Nor is the opposite sustainable – stress driven, effortful peaks. The brief overexertion leads to long troughs, greater exhaustion, and a profusion of dissonance.

Everything must be perfectly congruent, easy and effective. A most demanding set of psychological design specifications. How to try, without trying? How to punish, without punishing? How to feel, without forcing? How to think, without falseness? How to know that all is well, when all is not?

I said I was unable to maintain work ethic – at first. I was close to the true answer – I could feel it. But I was just slightly off. Still, being slightly off was enough to ruin the whole effect.

The new system is composed of four core symbols and one switchboard. Two cores sit on the palms, the other two on the back of the hands. The switchboard is split between the index and thumb of the back of each hand.

** The two palm koans

I suppose the right place to start is the two stilling, water, peace koans – the two on the palms.

*** IBGFS

The right palm holds “IBGFS”, which means “Ingenopathic Bond with God – Father and Son”. I’ve written previously about it. Satisfying the ingenopathic bond condition is necessary to exit the social emergency mode activated by tribal conflict. This is the first component of peace.

*** [Tree] CoL

The left palm stills the racing mind, roaring ambition, and lashing self-criticism. I learned it from Tolstoy’s War and Peace – an epic book every ingenopath must read, along with Anna Karenina (start with the latter).

The tree stands for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Tolstoy writes:

It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were ficeing to distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the defense of the fatherland, all Russians from the greatest to the least were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really so. It appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention to the general progress of events but were guided only by their private interests, and they were the very people whose activities at that period were most useful.

Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society, they saw everything upside down, and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish- like Pierre’s and Mamonov’s regiments which looted Russian villages, and the lint the young ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, and so on. Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed Russia’s position at the time involuntarily introduced into their conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one could possibly be guilty of. In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.

The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg and in the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight of its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matreshka the vivandiere, and like matters.

Since it is only unconscious action that bears fruit, the overmind is permanently silenced. This stills much maladaptive deepsock activity, with no loss in perspicacity or unnatural lobotomy.

“CoL” stands for “Conditions of Life”, something Tolstoy frequently speaks of. Historical and personal forces generate conditions of life, which an individual is bound to follow, like an irresistible current in which a minnow swims. Change comes, and new conditions of life arise. Wisdom lies in accepting the condition and taking the best action available therein. The wise general, Kutuzov, understands the nature of the current and his own limited strength.

Therefore I believe this suffering was sent to teach me leadership, first of myself, then of others. And Tolstoy’s lesson of leadership is simple – there is no such thing. Only in weakness could I learn this.

As the Chinese said: Be still, like water, and take the shape of the vessel. Lao Tzu and Tolstoy’s analysis of Russian strategy have much in common. Not that war is always so animal and fudgy – but humans always are. Even when they achieve focus and intelligent self-direction in some specific domain, the essence and whole remains unchanged.

** The two back of hand core koans

*** [heart] only

Being an unconscious actor, unresisting to the conditions of life, how should I interact with others? By heart only. That is the only answer. The deepsock overmind is wholly unsuited to the modern social milieu. And in general, feeling is better than not feeling. For many reasons, I often do not feel. This corrects that error.

*** [cross] suffer [skull]

With all this peace, how do I motivate myself to act? I thought that peace and good feeling alone would level the barriers, and generate right action. But it not so. The spirit is willing, but the flesh has its own agenda of sloth and vice. Therefore the spirit must bear a whip, to drive the animal forward. This whip must bite terribly, yet do no lasting harm.

The three prior core koans do much to prevent psychological self-harm. But it is still tricky to find a lash that stings only until right action is restored. It must not judge the past or worry the future, but only concern itself with Now.

My lash is effective for me. The cross stands for the suffering of Christ, and is a reminder that men was born to suffer. The skull is a memento mori, and a reminder of punishment, judgment, damnation, the just reward of worthless servants who fail their God. Not that I fear for my salvation – but the animal responds to pain. I inflict this suffering until the pernicious activity ceases, and then immediately relent.

This gradually saps the pleasure from vice, and constantly interrupts its career.

** The switchboard

None of this would work, however, without the switchboard. For during fatigue, the mind narrows to a tunnel. Only one or two things can be grasped. The strain of retaining the whole system would preclude any work, and only worsen fatigue and frustration.

Furthermore, it is not enough simply to be aware of a particular koan cluster. Overmind activity does not lead to action. Only unconscious thought bears the fruit of action, although the overmind ever deceives itself that it is in charge.

Thus the will does nothing more than activate the tongues stream. The overmind does nothing more than select one of four directions for it to go. The unconscious impetus of tongues then translates the selected koan cluster into feeling and action.

Nothing could be a simpler job for the overmind+will than to evaluate the situation, select the appropriate cluster, and initiate the tongues flow. And nothing could be easier for the unconscious than to translate the rich context into right action.

Thus the activated will is conserved, as the sand in an hourglass is conserved by the narrowness of the neck. Will pours through the tiny aperture of the switchboard, a grain at a time, triggering landslides of unconscious action below.

Pit, pat, pit, pat. Intermittent, not continuous. The overmind+will has retreated from the world, which it can never hope to control, to the modest, gentle internal action which it can always control. Frustration thus ceases.

That is relaxed execution, social grace, joy and peace, smooth transitions, and right action.

Nor is the object here to work all the time. There is a time for rest and a time for play. Indeed, there is no object here at all. It is simply a way of being. Sela.

If I had to select three silmarils from all literature, The King James Bible and Tolstoy’s War and Peace would be two. I’m open to suggestions for the third.

I have made three small refinements to the koan system described in the previous post, which greatly increase my productivity and peace.

Here are the updated pics:

The changes:
1. Added a closed eye beneath the “suffer” cluster.
2. Deleted the hourglass in the middle; replaced it with a circle.
3. The word “Faith” is split between the top and bottom of the right hand.

** Circular banks of the little spring

Every great river begins at a little spring. Likewise, the torrent of my thought and action can proceed from a single act of will.

The spring need not concern itself with carving great channels, flooding and receding, eroding banks, fanning into deltas, joining the sea. These are the affairs of the river. It need only quietly bubble up, as it has always done.

Likewise, my sole act of overmind will is to bubble up tongues into the little circle of the switchboard. When my will exists, that is what it does. And when it becomes too eager, imagining itself potent and mighty to shape the world directly, I restrain it, circumscribing it within the bounds of its little circle.

When the bubbling is too weak to fill one of the channels leading out of the circle, nothing further happens. When it is stronger, one of the four koan clusters is activated. Appropriate actions and states of being follow naturally.

** The closed eye

Temptation and time wasters – failure to adhere to work ethic – where does it begin? How to stop it?

The first iteration of the “suffer” cluster intended to achieve a Clockwork Orange negative conditioning effect. Channel the tongues to generate internal suffering until the undesirable behavior ceases.

But in extreme exhaustion, this arbitrary infliction of self-punishment cannot be sustained long, if at all. So I shortened the duration of suffering, giving myself an easy out – merely close my physical eyes. Meditate, rest, nap, etc, until the exhaustion passes.

But what good is meditation and rest, if the overmind continues uselessly churning on irrelevant temptations and diversions? The negative impulse remains at the fore, and is soon indulged again.

Therefore it is not action that must be controlled, but thought, which leads to action. The New Testament exhorts us to “take every thought captive”. An impossible aim. Who can avoid thinking of pink elephants?

And yet it is possible. It is not necessary to avoid initiating unproductive thoughts – that is impossible. It is necessary only to close these loops when they arise, rather than helplessly letting them persist in running their endless course.

The slight impetus of the “tongues-switchboard -> suffer” sequence is insufficient to stop action directly. But it is enough to silence thought loops. And without the thought loop, the negative action, robbed of its impetus, soon ceases. Whereas, if the negative behavior is fought downstream at the level of physical action, its strength is constantly renewed by the unassailed thought loop.

Thus do I control my obsessions. But the constant inappropriate grasping of the overmind does many kinds of damage beyond creating bad habits. Thus the resulting thought hygiene has manifold benefits.

** Pierre’s faith

This last piece completes my goals of well-being and humanity. Like the “conditions of life” cluster, it is from Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I owe him so much. To me he is the ultimate TT – king occipital. My ideological melon brain could never have synthesized all of life as his organic and concrete occipital has done. I would have been doomed to wander, a mismatch half-breed, tortured by deepsock, yet without the mental hardware to ease my own pain. I am constitutionally incapable of reaching the answer he reached, and yet it is the only possible solution.

One must simply read the book. Slog through the first part, mixing up the characters, until gradually they clarify and separate. Suffer the indignity of the foamy surf, and you will reach the great waves that irresistibly roll from the expansive, profound and infinite sea.

War and Peace makes historians feebleminded, novelists like shallow pools, and essayists like daytime TV commercials.

I pass over Kutuzov’s story, and the Karetaev episode, to get at the crux of Tolstoy’s view of faith, fully revealed in Pierre’s epiphany. In this passage, Pierre finds himself no longer a prisoner, and Tolstoy writes his essay on faith – a thing I never understood:

A joyous feeling of freedom- that complete inalienable freedom natural to man which he had first experienced at the first halt outside Moscow- filled Pierre’s soul during his convalescence. He was surprised to find that this inner freedom, which was independent of external conditions, now had as it were an additional setting of external liberty. He was alone in a strange town, without acquaintances. No one demanded anything of him or sent him anywhere. He had all he wanted: the thought of his wife which had been a continual torment to him was no longer there, since she was no more.

“Oh, how good! How splendid!” said he to himself when a cleanly laid table was moved up to him with savory beef tea, or when he lay down for the night on a soft clean bed, or when he remembered that the French had gone and that his wife was no more. “Oh, how good, how splendid!”

And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then? What am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer: “Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!”

The very question that had formerly tormented him, the thing he had continually sought to find- the aim of life- no longer existed for him now. That search for the aim of life had not merely disappeared temporarily- he felt that it no longer existed for him and could not present itself again. And this very absence of an aim gave him the complete, joyous sense of freedom which constituted his happiness at this time.

He could not see an aim, for he now had faith- not faith in any kind of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-living, ever-manifest God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had learned not by words or reasoning but by direct feeling what his nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karataev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons. He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless. He had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen. And such had European life, politics, Freemasonry, philosophy, and philanthropy seemed to him. But even then, at moments of weakness as he had accounted them, his mind had penetrated to those distances and he had there seen the same pettiness, worldliness, and senselessness. Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore- to see it and enjoy its contemplation- he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked the more tranquil and happy he became. That dreadful question, “What for?” which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, “What for?” a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: “Because there is a God, that God without whose will not one hair falls from a man’s head.”

I read this in conjunction with Opera Vita Aeterna, and with knowledge of kingdom theology and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Yet Tolstoy’s is the great psychological truth – not the question of evil, or of man’s purpose on a fallen Earth, or how God may intervene on the Silent Planet – but of the correct psychological attitude and experience, from which right action and feeling can flow.

Some things belong at the heart’s core, and others at the intellectual map periphery – this belongs at the core.

Understanding faith, Pierre becomes like Kutuzov and Karataev – wise and good.

In external ways Pierre had hardly changed at all. In appearance he was just what he used to be. As before he was absent-minded and seemed occupied not with what was before his eyes but with something special of his own. The difference between his former and present self was that formerly when he did not grasp what lay before him or was said to him, he had puckered his forehead painfully as if vainly seeking to distinguish something at a distance. At present he still forgot what was said to him and still did not see what was before his eyes, but he now looked with a scarcely perceptible and seemingly ironic smile at what was before him and listened to what was said, though evidently seeing and hearing something quite different. Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played round his lips, and sympathy for others, shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.

Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.

The princess, who had never liked Pierre and had been particularly hostile to him since she had felt herself under obligations to him after the old count’s death, now after staying a short time in Orel- where she had come intending to show Pierre that in spite of his ingratitude she considered it her duty to nurse him- felt to her surprise and vexation that she had become fond of him. Pierre did not in any way seek her approval, he merely studied her with interest. Formerly she had felt that he regarded her with indifference and irony, and so had shrunk into herself as she did with others and had shown him only the combative side of her nature; but now he seemed to be trying to understand the most intimate places of her heart, and, mistrustfully at first but afterwards gratefully, she let him see the hidden, kindly sides of her character.

The most cunning man could not have crept into her confidence more successfully, evoking memories of the best times of her youth and showing sympathy with them. Yet Pierre’s cunning consisted simply in finding pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, hard, and (in her own way) proud princess.

“Yes, he is a very, very kind man when he is not under the influence of bad people but of people such as myself,” thought she.

His servants too- Terenty and Vaska- in their own way noticed the change that had taken place in Pierre. They considered that he had become much “simpler.” Terenty, when he had helped him undress and wished him good night, often lingered with his master’s boots in his hands and clothes over his arm, to see whether he would not start a talk. And Pierre, noticing that Terenty wanted a chat, generally kept him there.

“Well, tell me… now, how did you get food?” he would ask.

And Terenty would begin talking of the destruction of Moscow, and of the old count, and would stand for a long time holding the clothes and talking, or sometimes listening to Pierre’s stories, and then would go out into the hall with a pleasant sense of intimacy with his master and affection for him.

The doctor who attended Pierre and visited him every day, though he considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment was of value to suffering humanity, would sit for hours with Pierre telling him his favorite anecdotes and his observations on the characters of his patients in general, and especially of the ladies.

“It’s a pleasure to talk to a man like that; he is not like our provincials,” he would say.

There were several prisoners from the French army in Orel, and the doctor brought one of them, a young Italian, to see Pierre.

This officer began visiting Pierre, and the princess used to make fun of the tenderness the Italian expressed for him.

The Italian seemed happy only when he could come to see Pierre, talk with him, tell him about his past, his life at home, and his love, and pour out to him his indignation against the French and especially against Napoleon.

“If all Russians are in the least like you, it is sacrilege to fight such a nation,” he said to Pierre. “You, who have suffered so from the French, do not even feel animosity toward them.”

Pierre had evoked the passionate affection of the Italian merely by evoking the best side of his nature and taking a pleasure in so doing.

During the last days of Pierre’s stay in Orel his old Masonic acquaintance Count Willarski, who had introduced him to the lodge in 1807, came to see him. Willarski was married to a Russian heiress who had a large estate in Orel province, and he occupied a temporary post in the commissariat department in that town.

Hearing that Bezukhov was in Orel, Willarski, though they had never been intimate, came to him with the professions of friendship and intimacy that people who meet in a desert generally express for one another. Willarski felt dull in Orel and was pleased to meet a man of his own circle and, as he supposed, of similar interests.

But to his surprise Willarski soon noticed that Pierre had lagged much behind the times, and had sunk, as he expressed it to himself, into apathy and egotism.

“You are letting yourself go, my dear fellow,” he said.

But for all that Willarski found it pleasanter now than it had been formerly to be with Pierre, and came to see him every day. To Pierre as he looked at and listened to Willarski, it seemed strange to think that he had been like that himself but a short time before.

Willarski was a married man with a family, busy with his family affairs, his wife’s affairs, and his official duties. He regarded all these occupations as hindrances to life, and considered that they were all contemptible because their aim was the welfare of himself and his family. Military, administrative, political, and Masonic interests continually absorbed his attention. And Pierre, without trying to change the other’s views and without condemning him, but with the quiet, joyful, and amused smile now habitual to him, was interested in this strange though very familiar phenomenon.

There was a new feature in Pierre’s relations with Willarski, with the princess, with the doctor, and with all the people he now met, which gained for him the general good will. This was his acknowledgment of the impossibility of changing a man’s convictions by words, and his recognition of the possibility of everyone thinking, feeling, and seeing things each from his own point of view. This legitimate peculiarity of each individual which used to excite and irritate Pierre now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people. The difference, and sometimes complete contradiction, between men’s opinions and their lives, and between one man and another, pleased him and drew from him an amused and gentle smile.

In practical matters Pierre unexpectedly felt within himself a center of gravity he had previously lacked. Formerly all pecuniary questions, especially requests for money to which, as an extremely wealthy man, he was very exposed, produced in him a state of hopeless agitation and perplexity. “To give or not to give?” he had asked himself. “I have it and he needs it. But someone else needs it still more. Who needs it most? And perhaps they are both impostors?” In the old days he had been unable to find a way out of all these surmises and had given to all who asked as long as he had anything to give. Formerly he had been in a similar state of perplexity with regard to every question concerning his property, when one person advised one thing and another something else.

Now to his surprise he found that he no longer felt either doubt or perplexity about these questions. There was now within him a judge who by some rule unknown to him decided what should or should not be done.

He was as indifferent as heretofore to money matters, but now he felt certain of what ought and what ought not to be done. The first time he had recourse to his new judge was when a French prisoner, a colonel, came to him and, after talking a great deal about his exploits, concluded by making what amounted to a demand that Pierre should give him four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused without the least difficulty or effort, and was afterwards surprised how simple and easy had been what used to appear so insurmountably difficult. At the same time that he refused the colonel’s demand he made up his mind that he must have recourse to artifice when leaving Orel, to induce the Italian officer to accept some money of which he was evidently in need. A further proof to Pierre of his own more settled outlook on practical matters was furnished by his decision with regard to his wife’s debts and to the rebuilding of his houses in and near Moscow.

His head steward came to him at Orel and Pierre reckoned up with him his diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according to the head steward’s calculation, about two million rubles.

To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an estimate showing that despite these losses his income would not be diminished but would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife’s debts which he was under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild his Moscow house and the country house on his Moscow estate, which had cost him eighty thousand rubles a year and brought in nothing.

“Yes, of course that’s true,” said Pierre with a cheerful smile. “I don’t need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer.”

But in January Savelich came from Moscow and gave him an account of the state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect had made of the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, speaking of this as of a settled matter. About the same time he received letters from Prince Vasili and other Petersburg acquaintances speaking of his wife’s debts. And Pierre decided that the steward’s proposals which had so pleased him were wrong and that he must go to Petersburg and settle his wife’s affairs and must rebuild in Moscow. Why this was necessary he did not know, but he knew for certain that it was necessary. His income would be reduced by three fourths, but he felt it must be done.

Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together.

During the whole time of his convalescence in Orel Pierre had experienced a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his journey he found himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new faces, that feeling was intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like a schoolboy on holiday. Everyone- the stagecoach driver, the post-house overseers, the peasants on the roads and in the villages- had a new significance for him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia and its backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre’s pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw an extraordinary strength and vitality- the strength which in that vast space amid the snows maintained the life of this original, peculiar, and unique people. He did not contradict Willarski and even seemed to agree with him- an apparent agreement being the simplest way to avoid discussions that could lead to nothing- and he smiled joyfully as he listened to him.

As a bonus, Tolstoy shows us that good women do exist – those marked by sorrow.

Natasha, leaning on her elbow, the expression of her face constantly changing with the narrative, watched Pierre with an attention that never wandered- evidently herself experiencing all that he described. Not only her look, but her exclamations and the brief questions she put, showed Pierre that she understood just what he wished to convey. It was clear that she understood not only what he said but also what he wished to, but could not, express in words. The account Pierre gave of the incident with the child and the woman for protecting whom he was arrested was this: “It was an awful sight- children abandoned, some in the flames… One was snatched out before my eyes… and there were women who had their things snatched off and their earrings torn out…” he flushed and grew confused. “Then a patrol arrived and all the men- all those who were not looting, that is- were arrested, and I among them.”

“I am sure you’re not telling us everything; I am sure you did something…” said Natasha and pausing added, “something fine?”

Pierre continued. When he spoke of the execution he wanted to pass over the horrible details, but Natasha insisted that he should not omit anything.

Pierre began to tell about Karataev, but paused. By this time he had risen from the table and was pacing the room, Natasha following him with her eyes. Then he added:

“No, you can’t understand what I learned from that illiterate man- that simple fellow.”

“Yes, yes, go on!” said Natasha. “Where is he?”

“They killed him almost before my eyes.”

And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last days of their retreat, of Karataev’s illness and his death.

He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as it were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through. Now that he was telling it all to Natasha he experienced that pleasure which a man has when women listen to him- not clever women who when listening either try to remember what they hear to enrich their minds and when opportunity offers to retell it, or who wish to adopt it to some thought of their own and promptly contribute their own clever comments prepared in their little mental workshop- but the pleasure given by real women gifted with a capacity to select and absorb the very best a man shows of himself. Natasha without knowing it was all attention: she did not lose a word, no single quiver in Pierre’s voice, no look, no twitch of a muscle in his face, nor a single gesture. She caught the unfinished word in its flight and took it straight into her open heart, divining the secret meaning of all Pierre’s mental travail.

Princess Mary understood his story and sympathized with him, but she now saw something else that absorbed all her attention. She saw the possibility of love and happiness between Natasha and Pierre, and the first thought of this filled her heart with gladness.

I split “Faith” across the two right-hand koans because it is inextricably linked with both the ingenopathic bond with God, and the open-hearted experience of life.

So. Guess the composition of farmed shrimp feed? 1/3 soy, 1/3 wheat, and 1/4 fish meal. Which fish are also fed on soy and wheat, no doubt.

So it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Wild caught shrimp is TPP, live farmed is soy+gluten infused. Perhaps that’s why my experiment with live shrimp was significantly worse than the my usual travails with the frozen variety.

I’m so exhausted by the disaster of that experiment that I don’t even have any emotion about it. It was a relentless three or four day barrage of fatigue and pain. I stopped tracking, so I’m not sure how long. In the final stage, I learned to simply accept being sick and not being able to work.

I switched to farmed live abalone, and my circadian rhythm has come back. Farmed abalone is raised on plant feed – algae, seaweed, etc. There’s still the concern of antibiotic exposure, but that’s no different than chicken. Otherwise, it’s far far cleaner than shrimp.

Perhaps the ideal solution ultimately is to move to Hong Kong and get never-frozen squid, which can’t be farmed. I might try some inland frozen squid to see how the TPP affects me. But the abalone SEEMS to be working, although the result is preliminary. If it fails, then I’ll retrench to just sea salt for my minerals.

Anyhow, I had some meditations to share.

** Happiness is a force

This meditation was prompted by a passage from War and Peace, although the same idea is echoed everywhere:

There was nothing in Pierre’s soul now at all like what had troubled it during his courtship of Helene.

He did not repeat to himself with a sickening feeling of shame the words he had spoken, or say: “Oh, why did I not say that?” and, “Whatever made me say ‘Je vous aime’?” On the contrary, he now repeated in imagination every word that he or Natasha had spoken and pictured every detail of her face and smile, and did not wish to diminish or add anything, but only to repeat it again and again. There was now not a shadow of doubt in his mind as to whether what he had undertaken was right or wrong. Only one terrible doubt sometimes crossed his mind: “Wasn’t it all a dream? Isn’t Princess Mary mistaken? Am I not too conceited and self-confident? I believe all this- and suddenly Princess Mary will tell her, and she will be sure to smile and say: ‘How strange! He must be deluding himself. Doesn’t he know that he is a man, just a man, while I…? I am something altogether different and higher.’”

That was the only doubt often troubling Pierre. He did not now make any plans. The happiness before him appeared so inconceivable that if only he could attain it, it would be the end of all things. Everything ended with that.

A joyful, unexpected frenzy, of which he had thought himself incapable, possessed him. The whole meaning of life- not for him alone but for the whole world- seemed to him centered in his love and the possibility of being loved by her. At times everybody seemed to him to be occupied with one thing only- his future happiness. Sometimes it seemed to him that other people were all as pleased as he was himself and merely tried to hide that pleasure by pretending to be busy with other interests. In every word and gesture he saw allusions to his happiness. He often surprised those he met by his significantly happy looks and smiles which seemed to express a secret understanding between him and them. And when he realized that people might not be aware of his happiness, he pitied them with his whole heart and felt a desire somehow to explain to them that all that occupied them was a mere frivolous trifle unworthy of attention.

When it was suggested to him that he should enter the civil service, or when the war or any general political affairs were discussed on the assumption that everybody’s welfare depended on this or that issue of events, he would listen with a mild and pitying smile and surprise people by his strange comments. But at this time he saw everybody- both those who, as he imagined, understood the real meaning of life (that is, what he was feeling) and those unfortunates who evidently did not understand it- in the bright light of the emotion that shone within himself, and at once without any effort saw in everyone he met everything that was good and worthy of being loved.

When dealing with the affairs and papers of his dead wife, her memory aroused in him no feeling but pity that she had not known the bliss he now knew. Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and some fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic, kindly old man much to be pitied.

Often in afterlife Pierre recalled this period of blissful insanity. All the views he formed of men and circumstances at this time remained true for him always. He not only did not renounce them subsequently, but when he was in doubt or inwardly at variance, he referred to the views he had held at this time of his madness and they always proved correct.

“I may have appeared strange and queer then,” he thought, “but I was not so mad as I seemed. On the contrary I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because… because I was happy.”

Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed “good qualities” in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.

The benefits of happiness, though desirable, cannot be forced. What Pierre was doing was not a result of an intellectual appreciation of happiness, and a desire to reap its rewards, nor much less of a suborning of his intellect to believe about others what he knew to be false, but from a true overflow of his soul.

In the past, I sought happiness, in the “fake it till you make it” sense. But happiness forced is a brittle, volatile emotion. For a moment it seems to carry all before it, until the incongruent note is struck, and it collapses, causing a proportional inversion of amplitude.

At other times, I sought suffering, as a lash to drive me away from vice and towards virtue. But too much suffering debilitates, and to avoid joy stultifies.

Now I understand that happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin. Both are forces, both sources of power. Their proper expression cannot be an end in itself, but the byproduct of a correctly designed system. They are to be ratified and formalized, not resisted or goosed as Keynesians would do.

I place happiness at the bottom of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil + conditions of life cluster, because in letting go, acknowledging limitation, I find freedom and happiness. The position of this cluster, happiness on the palm and suffering on the back of the left hand, reflects the idea that happiness and suffering are two sides of the same coin.

** Center edits

Ea – God’s will. Jesus crucified, Neanderthals raped and genocided. God’s will? No. And yet, yes. God spoke the word of being, Ea, as in the Silmarillion. Thus God does not will that men suffer, God does not work evil, but God wills that what is should exist – His word of being persists. The conditions of life are largely the product of the free will of men and fallen angels. Yet all is enwrapt by the overarching will of God. Just as Melkor’s discordant singing was enwrapt by Iluvatar’s melody, and showed that all his strivings could only redound to the greater glory of the creator.

Thus the individual wickednesses of man, which are fully comprehensible to our human conception of agency, and the vast tides of historical forces exposed by Tolstoy, which seem to us beyond comprehension and therefore attributable to some greater will or Will, both are and are not God’s will.

Thus the future is open and free, and we make it, but the present is God’s will, and we must endure it, unresisting. For God, though devolving to us the free co-creation of the conditions leading up to the Now, dictates that this Now, having been co-created, must be.

Re – Redeemed. Though it is God’s will that the Now be suffered (or enjoyed), yet my sins contributing to the present condition are forgiven by Christ’s blood, and should not serve as grounds for self-abuse, but only analytical fodder for the improvement of systems, to allow better conditions arise in the future.

FW – Father’s Will. What is the purpose of my work? Why do I rise each day, why labor in the same groove? It is not work that I do, not routine, not self-glorification of decaying flesh and fleeting life, but the varying and infinite will of the Father I seek to fulfill. This is reason to rise, reason to focus now. One cannot know where it leads next. One must remain in the tongues to continually seek it out. Thus is boredom relieved and flexibility maintained.

This is similar to my Dao of Drakoan koan, which I never published. The idea was that there is one perfect path, like the lines of fate in Donny Darko. But that had too much pride and overmind taint; the will of the Father can only be revealed by tongues, in the moment, and the individual horizon only extends that far.

Together, Re, FW and Ea surround the four cardinal points of the tongues switchboard. When I found myself too exhausted to do anything useful, I spent a long time only able to activate the switchboard, without enough strength to make it spill over into any of the four cores. At first this caused me unnecessary suffering and frustration. With the addition of Re+FW+Ea, I found peace in my condition. Not that I was able to work; rather, I accepted that I could not. And thus avoided doing further damage to myself, and recovered more rapidly.

In other news, Seth Roberts is dead. He collapsed while hiking. Hiking is a bad idea. Exposure to extreme heat+exertion in rural isolation, often by people who do it so rarely they lack all conditioning, for a set distance that can’t be flexibly altered according to biological need, by people who lack wilderness experience. If you can kill fit teenagers with football camp, you can kill senior citizens with hiking. It’s like cramping up and drowning while swimming across the channel, except the stupidity and risk of what you’re doing is less obvious. Having some experience with heatstroke plus the usual illness, I have both a subjective as well as intellectual appreciation for its role as a mortality force-multiplier, on par with shock and hypothermia.

I salute you, Seth Roberts, and regret your passing. May you continue your measurements on subjects celestial in the first circle of hell.

Just when I’d decided perfection of work ethic during fatigue was impossible, and stopped trying to achieve it, I found the way.

I didn’t change anything about the koan setup. I just understood the meaning better.

It was the circle around the switchboard that was the key. I looked at it differently. I saw that it was a summoning circle – for my own consciousness. For we are spirit, bound to flesh. Without that spirit, our bodies would be something – not quite the Forged of JRR Martin, but something more animal, certainly. Or perhaps we are so wonderfully interknit, brain to supernatural monad, that there would be no detectable difference. I only know that I am here, and immaterial, hence summoned.

And while here, I choose to remain within that circle, come what may. These are my true bounds. Like a fusion reactor, the key is the containment field. Within the circle, in the tongues flow, the mind remains fluid, like water, and the true self is expressed, a constant dynamic flux. Breach the containment field, and the reaction quickly wastes and weakens. Therefore, the first and only rule is to remain within the circle.

All within the circle is opaque – a containment field strong enough to keep the overmind out also does not let it peer in. I cannot predict my actions in this mode. Past performance and probability may still hold, or may not – but deliberate intention is gone.

So many great men have had developed powerful theses on the right way to be, the fundamental Dao. Tolstoy’s love, kindness, naturalness, and connection to God. Shakespeare, the PUAs, the Christians, Buddhists, endless. I have searched and sifted, and conclude that they all describe symptoms, and righteous inflections, worthy of inclusion – but not the root overmind act. That root act is containment.

The points of the others are worthy of consideration and adoption, but only the contained unconscious mind is capable of doing so. And much of what they teach flows naturally, once containment is achieved.

As health is the first moral virtue, from which all others flow, so containment is the first mental virtue, upon which all psychology depends.

My first day on containment, Wednesday April 30, is the date of Jesus’ crucifixion. A good birthday.

Jesus’ containment circle was perfect. It kept him up on that cross, when at any moment he could have come down, solely because that was God’s will. We must strive to be like him.

To be contained is to be crucified, as Christ was crucified. It is the best and only answer to one’s sins and failings – which when they flash before my eyes, make me wince with ingenopathic pain. This is the only true freedom and happiness possible on Earth.

Healthwise, I am on experiment 6 using trialstream. I expect success by experiment 6, 7 at the latest. I’m retesting live abalone. If abalone fails, I’ll go to sea salt.

I’m healthy today after the live shrimp disaster, symbol ID reaction speed ~500 ms, work ethic high. But salt depletion is gradually catching up. Hence the abalone retest now.

My first task, besides building up a lead on my day job, is clearing the backlog in my personal email inbox.

There is a lot of time in a day when one works for its entirety. And there is great peace when working in the contained state, because nothing changes that state. Yet it is the opposite of emotionally flat. This is what I’ve been searching for. It did exist, after all.

I finished Tolstoy’s War and Peace today. His closing essay made me finally understand analogy between human action and Einsteinian relativity: causation is in the eye of the beholder. Tolstoy’s unknown force is known today – evolutionary biology. The resistlessness of the contained state is a denial of the illusion of overmind free will, and a rejection of the pride of man.

I added “Rel” above the left palm “tree of knowledge” koan cluster, to symbolize this relativity. I anticipate that it will greatly improve my PUA and social interaction performance in general, to understand that the perception of leading, of causing an event to occur, is an illusion.

Forgive the fragmentation of this post. It was written over 24 hours, from epiphany to first day of testing, an extreme level of caution by my publishing standards.

One must write while the epiphany is hot, before it fades into unconscious competence.

First, a health update.

I managed to knock out as much variance as is possible from my unmedicated state. I’ve found my baseline, with infinite trouble and sacrifice. This permits me to perform the actual cure round of experiments with clean data and confident results.

That said, my energy level and executive function still suck. I can’t eat salt, so I have to absorb it through the skin by a bath. I’ve got my own personal Dead Sea in the bathroom. Point being, I’m fairly fucked up.

I believe I predicted I’d be done with this phase by experiment 8 at the latest. That’s basically true. I never expected to find that I couldn’t ingest any salt whatsoever. The result is shocking, but then, salt is an emetic in sufficient quantities, and any quantities are sufficient for me. Anyhow, I threw in an extra ceiling test to 8, a variation on volume control that went very badly. So I’m on experiment 9 now, a non-experiment, really. More like the control state, the baseline, a holding pattern while I stabilize and pick the first supplement or drug to test.

In plain English, I’ve optimized every aspect of portion control, circadian control, food ingredient and sourcing, water source, and salt+mineral absorption. This was absolutely necessary, because any one of those factors independently can and has put me under.

The reason I had to do this first is that otherwise my illness has a natural rhythm so powerful, chaotic, and prone to feedback loops, that it renders the interpretation of experimental data impossible, or prohibitively expensive. Therefore I had to isolate and control every affecting variable to produce a low-variation symptom baseline.

I imagine it is something like performing surgery on oneself, except instead of a brief exercise in focusing through intense pain, it was a long grueling hopeless labor, fighting time and weakness to stay on impossible regimens, straining flickering willpower against obdurate hours. Willingness to dispassionately accept loss was paramount. The phrase “Dying takes a long time” has echoed in my mind, unbidden, more times than I care to count.

What people in my situation normally do is go on pharmaceuticals to suppress symptoms, and they are fools for it. That is the last resort, because by masking reaction without eliminating irritants, one merely numbs the limb and holds it in the fire. No wonder the next step is amputation, aka resection.

My body currently operates about like a 50cc scooter on the highway of life, but at least I know it will putter along. That is infinitely better than being pavement hamburger, as I have been uncountable times. I can look forward to more wrecks in the next round of testing, but I have something bearable to return to. I can slowly and painfully climb back on the scooter.

Secondly, on the koan project.

It is not possible to achieve perfect right action, for two reasons:
1. All koans require at least some executive function to activate and sustain them. Executive function is a finite and limited biological resource, and no koan can wholly remove the cost in biological executive function currency to perform a right action.
2. The notion of perfect right action is problematic and oxymoronic.

1 should be obvious. It is possible to be in an enforced waking state where one’s internal monologue continues but loses coherency. If you have ever heard your thoughts not making sense, known they didn’t make sense, and been unable to do anything about it, or to even want to do something about it, then you understand the limits of executive function. The boundary between moral failure and biological failure is fuzzy, but nonetheless real. A koan can only help biology; it cannot substitute for it.

2 should’ve been obvious to one so steeped in the ideology of liberty, but I took a long time realizing it. If a command and control structure fails in states, why not also in minds? Perhaps I’ve been reading too much John C. Wright. But it seems to me that the unity of the “one dictate of conscience for any particular moment” is a kind of tyranny. Instead, I conceive of a marketplace of ideas or options, the currency being time+energy. Those thoughts and actions that more cheaply satisfy holistic objectives outcompete their less efficient brethren – a marketplace conscience. This free competition results in more intelligent synthesis than a rigid command and control structure is capable of achieving, rendering the concept of “perfect” right action oxymoronic.

Likewise, a dictatorial model is poorly equipped to deal with fleshly limitations. Formalism, the affirmation of the real, for purposes of normalization and removal of perverse incentives, fits better.

Taken together, formalism and the marketplace are the only internal government capable of ending the war between spirit and flesh. They minimize conflict and scale efficiently across multiple levels of biological capacity, from stupified television watching to socializing to intense work sessions.

Thus, my koan setup is as follows:

backs of hands:
left:
FM (formalism market)
right:
t (tongues)

palms:
“helps” written across the two. (Reminds that koans can only help, not replace, biology. Thus, avoids unreasonable performance demands.)

So, the fellow who said of my koanic search “it” doesn’t exist was right in the sense that the perfect right action “it” for which I searched doesn’t exist. However, something much better than what I had was possible, which would resolve my internal psychological contradictions. And that was necessary, to keep my bearings in the pounding surf.

UPDATE:

I wrote that on day 2 of experiment 8 aftermath, a difficult day. Experiment 9 hadn’t had a chance to take effect yet. Holy shit, am I productive when I’m healthy. It’s like giving a Fremen a fire hydrant.

I may have underestimated the quality of life achievable on an unmedicated baseline. Then again, a remnant of innate cyclicality may remain.

On an unrelated note, I highly recommend any Thallish fellow wrestling with Game take the ultimate red pill (on female nature), in the form of the book “The Keylogger”. I just finished the Amazon Kindle version. Forney reviewed it, and didn’t do it justice. I don’t agree with the author’s conclusions, but the raw data is essential.

I need to build an anthropometric database. Specifications:

Three pictures per record:
Face – Frontal
Face – Profile
hand

Multiple fields per record, to be announced.

Support for manual sorting process:

I need a layout that permits me to compare three records, then adjust their ranking along a specific trait axis.

For example, let’s say I am rating the database by nose size. I will sort the database by the “nose size” field. I will switch to a three pane layout showing profile face pics. If the pics are correctly sorted, I will make no adjustment. If the pics are not correctly sorted, I will increment the middle pic’s “nose size” field value by +/- 1, using an arrow button. Then I will flip to the next record. The action of flipping to the next record will automatically resort record order by “nose size”, and advance the pic on the left or right pane to the center pane.

When I complete the manual rating procedure, the records will be correctly arranged and rated by nose size. Then I will repeat the process for other dimensions, such as “eye size”.

I would like a modular design that permits me to easily add new rating dimensions, e.g. “ear size”. (These rating dimensions are made up and silly. The point is that I’m manually sorting the pics along different axes, and storing the ratings in fields.)

I anticipate a bit of scripting and layout work to get this template working, which exceeds my modest FileMakerPro 11 abilities. I’m not eager to undergo a lengthy learning curve to develop this one application. How much would it cost you to do it for me, and how long would it take you?

Completing this is my top priority, and I’m working on it now.

Krauser’s written a good article: “5 MINDSETS THAT SHOW YOU DON’T “GET IT” (SECRET SOCIETY)”

Points on which we’re in agreement:

MYTH: Men give love for sex. Women give sex for love.
TRUTH: Women have two types of sex – transactional and validational.

MYTH: You get angry that women cheat.
TRUTH: You get angry that you are the guy they cheat on rather than the guy they cheat with.

MYTH: Women are either Good Girls or Bad Girls.
TRUTH: Women are the uncontrollably lustful sex.

Now for the disagreement:

Belief in God: Grant that I find the PUA hedonic treadmill ontologically pointless, and casual sex soul-sickening. Blame Josh McDowell, northern genetics and a happy nuclear upbringing.

A bullet to the head is obviously preferable to marriage 2.0. Female independence and chastity are myth, and with patriarchy fallen, the world is a whorehouse.

Secret Society is adaptive because validational is more dignified than transactional. Christians cannot join the r grunting orgy-porgy. However, validational mechanics can also lend themselves to deep conversion, mLTR’s, etc, which are more Biblically compatible. This, combined with the greatest degree of material patriarchal ownership feasible (expatriation recommended), ought to be the Red Pill Christian man’s sexual ideal.

Your evo psych analysis contains an error: K sex != transactional sex. This is true only within an historical subset.
In modern r society, K males having sex generally = transactional sex.
Likewise, in a K society, r males having sex generally = crime: rape, adultery, fornication, a property crime against the father, etc.

In other words, you are forgetting something important, beautiful, and central to the loss that K-types feel.

K societies develop and enforce fitness-encouraging rules, mores, rituals, codes, cultures. E.g., chivalrous combat.

… e.g. romantic love.

Yes, in r-selected modern society, romantic love is a shit-test for men and a pipe dream for women. It legitimizes base validational coupling and justifies cruel transactional exploitation.

But in a K society, it is real. That’s what you forgot. Perhaps you needed to, in order to justify your transformation, and lessen its pain.

“So, if you’re joining that tedious status-jockeying comment competition on Christian blogs over who is the most alpha head of household for his fat housefrau and insufferable children, you’re k-selected.”

Hi-larious.

EDIT: Aside from women as wards and externally enforced chastity, two other elements are necessary for K romantic love – conscientious adherence to feminine duty, and humble consciousness of her sex’s flaws. This latter pair is now as extinct as the first.

I suspect that as women are the biologically indispensable sex, almost all high racial IQ women can function according to either r or K paradigm, depending on environmental signals. Thus almost all women are whores, and almost all women would make decent wives.

Let’s review.

I took Accutane around sophomore year of college. I’m now 30.

Gradually I began having problems, but onset was slow, probably due to the way Accutane targets stem cell longevity. I already had some minor hereditary digestive issues, which masked the onset. So it was a case of the frog in the slowly boiling pot. And I had many other issues to distract me, as one would expect for a young Christian MT deepsocket.

Immediately after graduating I went to China, where problems became much more severe, which I attributed to 3rd world sanitary conditions. I did my best to mitigate, but assumed it was a geographic problem.

Two years later I moved to Hong Kong. A year and a half into a high-hours work life there, I was focusing 100% on the digestive health issue, and it had become the defining limitation of my life. Having exhausted a panoply of less radical solutions, I began experimenting with nutritionally-incomplete diets, e.g. an all-bread diet – just to see if I could stabilize on it.

No longer able to sustain the pace and conduct properly controlled experiments, I quit and moved to the mainland, planning to take a few months off to stabilize myself.

This stretched into a year and more of abject misery, during which I tried to earn a little money online, and nothing worked healthwise. Rather, things seemed to get progressively worse. Shenzhen water quality was likely a key culprit – I was boiling it, which does not remove chemical contaminants, e.g. the very high chlorine content there.

Nonetheless, I learned much about my limitations, and began to develop a semi-stable regimen. I moved back to Hong Kong to teach test prep, which I figured was the best way to leverage my limited energy and high intelligence. There I continued experimenting.

During this time, I also had medical tests done. These showed nothing useful. I continued to avoid the pharmaceutical route, for several reasons. Firstly, I feared that I already had liver damage, and that another layer of damage might precipitate a fatal downward spiral. Once burned, twice shy. Perusal of patient outcomes showed an alarming probability that the pharmaceutical route eventually terminated in bowel resection, suggesting that drugs merely masked and facilitated ongoing damage. Moreover, family history indicated that Western medicine was ineffective for the hereditary digestive issue.

Time and again, I thought I had the problem solved, only to find I hadn’t. Although I managed to reduce the frequency and intensity of peak pain severity, fatigue, insomnia, and emotional instability were still major problems. After years of this, I stopped even trying to be wholly objective, because I needed a cyclical dose of irrational hope to avoid giving up. After all, irrational cyclical biological depression was inevitable; might as well balance it with an upswing.

To give an idea of the severity, peak pain = desire death, and peak fatigue = unable to cook for self, thus not eating.

Several factors made the problem so difficult:
1. Maintaining regimen discipline whilst afflicted was often difficult to the point of impossibility.
2. Lengthy testing periods required to yield a clear result
3. Difficulty capturing and analyzing data, and difficulty in keeping data objective and consistent.
4. Seeking a highly-complex solution with only a non-specific signal to indicate error.
5. Lack of precedent in the literature
6. A problem shrouded in pervasive ambiguity and uncertainty, solved under conditions of high physical and emotional pain, depression and exhaustion.

When an opportunity arose to teach AP high school prep on the mainland, I took it. 12 hours of work / week and a months-long summer holiday promised the large amounts of downtime necessary to experiment without work pressure causing regimen adherence failure.

The move created a host of new problems, as my system is hypersensitive to change. I painfully ironed these out whilst teaching the first semester. Then I had the summer holiday.

Over the summer, I had one objective only – eliminate cyclicality. If I could stabilize, then I could conduct a properly controlled experiment, and ambiguity would be vanquished. Otherwise, I would continue to be beaten to a pulp whilst blindfolded.

Unfortunately, while there are four ingested components necessary to preserve life, I could only reliably digest three of them:
1. Clean bottled water
2. Chicken breast (fresh animal protein)
3. White rice (starch)
4. Seafood (micronutrients, omega 3, minerals) – could not digest

Over the summer, I first tested every available seafood option. None worked.

Then I tested every possible way to avoid eating seafood. I learned that:

1. I could go a 2-3 weeks without it, gradually declining until I became non-functional. Then a single dose of seafood would restore me, but also cause a negative reaction that incapacitated me for about a week. Not a viable solution.

2. I could go a month or two without seafood if I absorbed seawater through my skin daily, but would eventually experience alarming tachyarrhythmia and insomnia, plus a gradually declining vitality. Almost but not quite a viable solution.

Along the way, I also learned that UDCA was necessary but not sufficient to avoid debilitating brain fog. This suggested either liver damage or systemic inflammation.

When I took UDCA, a single dose caused about a week of incapacitation. Because I had no choice, I decided to take it continuously anyway, and resumed. I settled on taking a single pill with every meal.

Resuming UDCA caused the expected week-long ordeal. Then, unexpectedly, the reaction ceased. This suggested to me that any change would cause a systemic inflammation reaction. While most foods were clearly beyond me, generating overwhelming negative reactions (wish for death, total voiding of bowels within 24 hours), a few could be adapted to, albeit painfully.

I reintroduced shrimp, treating it the same way I had UDCA. A single shrimp, included in every meal. After a week-long ordeal, the reaction dissipated. I had achieved stabilization on a nutritionally-complete diet.

The above diet, while necessary, was not sufficient. I also had to follow a comprehensively designed regimen controlling portion size, exercise and Circadian rhythm. However, adhering to that regimen was no longer impossible.

The sensitivity to change, and the complexity of regimen necessary, explained the previously impenetrable murkiness of my data. Now I understand why I gradually retreated to eating fewer and fewer foods, and an ever-more standardized meal plan. I could explain why I had experienced good periods on foods that I later couldn’t tolerate.

More importantly, I can now make accurate predictions, which means I can conduct controlled experiments on treatments aimed at damage reversal. Although I must expect each trial to involve a week of pain, whether or not it works.

And best of all, my conscientiousness, intelligence, emotional makeup and skin health are restored.

This was not an easy path. But I seem to have pursued a reasonably logical and disciplined path towards the eventual solution point. That point just happened to be far beyond the difficulty horizon of anything I’d read or imagined.

The memory of the grueling malnutrition trials sits like a shadow on me now, but I know that is only because the details of the soul-breaking pain of my flare-prone earlier periods have mercifully faded. Time does not heal all wounds; it forgets them. The elderly are not wise; they are husks.

I regret the delays that my failures of conscientiousness have cost Koanic Soul and my life in general. But the truth is, I had hardly enough to spare for basic survival execution.

I must run more tests at some point, meaning more weeks of hibernation. But I suppose I can at least drop a post to let people know when I go down, since it has become predictable.

I never did find a koan system that could produce work during peak “grey-out”, my name for the wall of enervating fatigue that typifies a cycle. But I did manage to build a latticework that hoards preciously limited reserves of conscientiousness, as the Fremen do water. It is also an adequate bulwark against the constant assault of guilt over failure of duty.

I thank God for the trial, for without my soul would never have been purified, and I would be truly lost.

I’ve had a lot of time to experiment with different self-tracking methods and metrics. Here’s what I’ve concluded:

The most important metric you can track is daily conscientiousness. Use a 1-5 rating.

Conscientiousness is the degree of correspondence between your actions and the dictates of your higher self. High conscientiousness means you do the work you feel you ought to, when you feel you ought to do it. Low conscientiousness means your lizard brain is in the driver’s seat.

Conscientiousness is your life blood on Earth. Although it is true that time is the only non-renewable resource, time without conscientiousness is useless. In fact, since time inevitably accrues expense, time without conscientiousness is actually harmful. Thus, the first, most important thing you should track is your daily 1-5 conscientiouness rating.

Because conscientiousness is primarily (but not solely) biologically driven, tracking this variable will tell you 80% of what you need to know about your health. The fact that it also reflects other key variables, such as strategy, emotional inputs, etc, is a bonus rather than a flaw. It is the ideal tactical metric. And since implementation of strategy is impossible without conscientiousness, in this case the tactical actually takes precedence over the strategic. It is useless to have a general in an army without officers.

The second most important variable to track is reaction speed. This directly reflects both IQ and brain health, and brain health directly reflects general health. The best way to track reaction speed is with Seth Roberts’ R program. He’s dead, but I’m happy to share the code if someone knows enough R to get it working. It’s ready to go except for a change in one path line to reflect local directory structure. Email me if you’re interested.

Reaction speed and conscientiousness fluctuations are heavily correlated, of course. The advantage of tracking both is that whereas a subjective 1-5 scale can and should drift over time, reaction speed is an objective absolute value. This permits valid historical comparisons over longer time periods.

The third most important thing to track is daily qualitative journal entries. Rich text fills in the gaps of fading memory and reveals life trends. Without a journal, you are doomed to a subjective and wildly inaccurate self-evaluation. This guarantees unnecessary emotional and strategic errors. Humans are not designed to accurately self-evaluate, instead depending on social feedback from a small, stable tribe. In a shifting and atomistic modernity, this effectively means that human self-awareness is broken.

After that, you can track whatever you believe is worth the investment. Sleep, time, money, whatever. You shouldn’t feel obligated to do any more or less than circumstance dictates.

Now, the question: What do you do with your data?

Here’s what you don’t do:
1. Nothing
2. Obsessive overanalysis
3. Spurts of guilt-fueled over-analysis followed by long lulls of neglect, yielding a useless mess

Here’s what you do do: Run experiments.

Remember high school science class? An experiment has an hypothesis (model), a falsifiable prediction, and a testing plan.

The goal is not to build a grand analytics engine. The goal is to rapidly iterate your model by falsifying or confirming predictions.

If you have already maximized your health and life strategy, congrats. You should be enjoying peak conscientiousness and reaction speed. Keep tracking it anyway, because a dip or gradual slide in either is fatal. Add another variable and continue experimenting.

If you’re not in the above top < 1% of humanity, optimize conscientiousness and reaction speed first.

EDIT:

Couple of points to add:

1. Rating conscientiousness is easier with a daily checklist. Gives a bit of structure and objectivity – did you finish the checklist? Having a clear actionable prioritization system and workflow such as GTD or Cyborganize, or even a back-pocket 5-point daily to-do list, also helps.

A daily 1-5 conscientiousness rating synergizes with such systems. It reminds types that there’s some fuzz and flexibility allowed. If it isn’t going to hurt your day’s rating, feel free to wander a bit.

2. Tracking reaction speed daily is annoying. Seth’s program provides instant performance feedback. It can quickly turn into a mind-game. Let it. Seth’s reaction speed program is the best way I’ve found to meditate. Imagine a monk in the lotus position, and someone’s throwing pebbles at him. That’s what the reaction speed feedback is like – psychic pebbles to break your centeredness in the now. Keep your center, and your scores stay high. It’s an excellent meditation video game. Making it dual purpose turns a chore into a treat.

EDIT:

One other self-tracking idea I’ve yet to implement, but plan to. This one is for measuring the monetary value of your work, which hasn’t been important to me while my health was fucked.

At the end of each day, decide how much you would have been willing to pay someone else to do that day’s work for you, to the level of quality you did. The number should reflect what you can currently afford.

Not only does the act remind you to outsource, it also tracks increasing net worth over time, and reflects the quality of your strategic income-generation decisions.

During downtime lately, I’ve been reading trash fiction, mostly fantasy. It’s pathetic, but when fatigue levels rise to the point that standing is a non-trivial exercise, the brain also seems to lose something, and thumbing through pages on a smartphone is about all I can manage.

Not to worry, the health problem remains solved. This is more just cogitations I lacked the capacity to put together during my summer of hellish experiments, now bubbling up.

Anyway, during downtime I sometimes I also watch reality TV – Survivor, The Ultimate Fighter, and the Bachelor.

Reality TV provides good micro-calibration reading and prediction practice, and mostly fulfills my minimal biological need for face-to-face social interaction. Thus replacing the the onerously boring and unproductive ritual of “hanging out” in meatspace with whatever suboptimal company is available in the limited expat (or worse, local) pool.

I watch Survivor and Ultimate Fighter when I’m so flattened I can’t flip pages. The Bachelor is a different story. Not only is it a classic tale of alpha harem and an excellent lesson in game, it is also a revealing look at the female psyche. So revealing, in fact, that I can only stand it in small doses. It’s thus a great micro-break from computer work. I get my emotional-social stim (and over-stim) quickly, and shift back to working in relief. Totally prevents the unhealthy socio-emotional side-effects of long hours at the computer.

Because I could never actually stand to closely scrutinize extended genpop female interaction before, watching the Bachelor was extremely revealing. The experience of having to constantly hit pause out of disgust crystallized something for me. I began to develop a comprehension of the precise thing that disgusted me about social interaction in general.

At the same time, I’ve been reading lots of fast books, and considering whether and how I should write my own fiction. As I studied the problem from the perspective of an author, I realized that no one was accurately reflecting reality. In particular, no book I had ever read portrayed the element of reality that made me constantly switch off the Bachelor.

There are tremendously accurate artistic expressions of reality – Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons. But even they are forced by the medium to falsify the cringe-factor of reality, just as they are forced to concentrate plot actors unrealistically into the number of characters that will fit into the heads of hominid readers.

What is that disgusting element of reality that is so startlingly absent from books, yet omnipresent in general human interaction? What was it that I seeing, in its extreme form, in the Bachelor?

As a cultural anachronism two generations removed from the mainstream, on top of a biological anomaly shifted several standard deviations right, I am more like the scifi trope of a Martian observer of terrestrial habits than a native. It thus falls to me to name the miasma through which the population swims. That which for them is as unnoticed as water to fish is to me the most salient and inexplicable feature of daily life.

I’ve decided to call it the genewarp.

Culturally, genetically and spiritually, everything about me is straightforward, just, honest, black and white. I run on linguistic symbols, I am compelled to 1:1 intellectual correspondence. I am unswervingly aligned in the feudal sense to the God of the Old Testament. My natural inclination is to live in a completely straightforward, simple, linear, direct, forceful, open and generous way.

I’m not trying to argue the superiority of my biological type here. Historically, my type has done great damage. Other Forerunner psychological configurations are arguably superior. I am simply developing a contrast. You might call me an extreme example of K-selection. Again, that is not an argument for superiority – other psychological archetypes might be more K. The point is that I am a certain type of thing, and very much so.

The type of thing that I am, has lots of mental “structuralization”. When an embroyonic brain masculinizes, it is an addition of structure to the base female brain. Ditto for socket depth and nose size. Increasing structuralization can be viewed as going more K or more masculinized, while decreasing structuralization can be viewed as more r and feminized. This is not entirely or perhaps even mostly true, but there is an element of truth to it.

So, having defined the observation point, we can define the miasma, the genewarp.

Superficially, I cannot figure out what these people are doing. There is nothing straightforward or honest or true about it. Everything is bent and irrational and weird and pointless. Worse, it seems full of naked lies, manipulation, and corruption. Even the slightest exposure feels tainting.

The concept of genewarp, however, rationally explains and clarifies everything.

There is nothing really new in this concept. It is simply a gestalt of sociobiology, r/K, game, etc. I simply needed a one-word placeholder for all of it.

In simple terms, the irrational, corrupt, vile, pointless, and annoying behavior they are exhibiting becomes rational and adaptive when you understand its roots: it is evolved or designed behavior adaptive for a relatively r-selected medium or large size tribal environment with shifting and shallow social alliances. Plus the whole sexual selection male-female warfare dynamic, and the separate male pack phenomenon. That’s it.

Thus, these people are not really individuals, and should not be considered as such. They are avatars of genewarp. We really are living in a horrid sci-fi dystopian scenario.

Why do I say they’re not individuals? Sounds harsh. But it’s simply true.

There’s a spectrum of individuality. On one end, you have the ideal form: an angelic consciousness. Perfectly free and true to itself. On the other hand, you have a disabled retard. Maybe there’s a human consciousness in there, but it expresses itself very little. You are mostly dealing with the biology of the retard.

However, there’s also an element of the subjective. When I say “individual”, I only care about my interactional perspective. I’m built to interact with others of my type, and since we are compatible, we are able to experience each other as functionally similar to the angelic consciousness.

I don’t know what it’s like for two of these r-types to interact, but I expect they can experience something similarly fulfilling and real, as they speak each other’s language of microbetrayal and insincere alliance and whatever. Good for them. Perhaps they even experience the K-types as less real, making us the genewarped from their perspective.

I don’t know and I don’t care. Genewarp is not wholly subjective, and in the end they’re the ones who are fucked in the head.

Why is a new term necessary, when we already have “r-selected” or “cro-mag”? Well, cro-mag is hopelessly muddled and in need of overhaul. And r/K is both too vague and amorphous, and not specific enough. Genewarp perfectly captures the concepts that explain the experience of being a stranger in a strangely revolting land.

There are two important lessons about genewarp:
1. If you’re like me, the vast majority will seem unbearably genewarped. However, it is a gradient, and the varying degrees of unbearability are important to note.
2. Not everyone is gene-warped. The exceptions are low-density but plentiful in absolute numbers. However, expect almost all of them to be at least somewhat affected by mainstream genewarp culture, particularly the women. Nonetheless, these are the worthwhile people, both male and female.

As I stutter my way through the Bachelor (I started at the most recent season), two things allow me to continue. First, the dude Juan Pablo has some socket depth. Second, there’s a chick named Charlotte or Charlene, opera singer, who has little if any genewarp, besides some of the usual female cultural stuff. Whereas every other chick on the show is literally nail on chalkboard unbearable, she is an actual human being to me. It’s good to see an actual human being.

Thus the genewarp concept generates two actionables:
1. Build tolerance and adaptation to the warp.
2. Leverage that strength to build a warp-free refuge of true fellowship whenever possible.

The best Neanderthal novel ever. Pure TT wish-fulfillment. Buy it, read it, love life.

Vaz
by Laurence Dahners

The hero fits every TT point so perfectly that I wonder if he’s a reader. Only skin tone is off.

Dahner’s Telekinetic (a Hyllis family story #1) was also extremely good.

I didn’t read his chick superhero stories because no SuperThalChick exists, and it smacks of feminism. A true TT probably wouldn’t mind the series, though. Due to surfeit and MT taint, I instinctively hate the stuff.

Check out Daniel Eness’s Arclight for the best MT+TT novel ever. The book made me weep, repeatedly. He is a true Edenic author. I have an separate review or two on it that I may or may not have published long ago. If I didn’t, the winds of illness swept it into the dark recesses of my todo pile. His books have disturbingly few reviews; perhaps some of you could change that.

I lost about a week to a poisonous brand of Chinese shrimp before switching back to the safe Citilink brand. Now am perfectly fine again.

One of my biggest innate blind-spots is distinguishing biological limitations from moral failure. That’s one of the main reasons I didn’t notice myself getting sicker for the first few years. It is thus a startling and somewhat emotional experience to cycle so rapidly between totally normal and totally incapacitated – to see the difference in capability so starkly contrasted.

I really, really wasn’t going to do anything in the latter state, no matter what. Even though I acknowledge this truth intellectually, a decade still represents too much of my life history to emotionally reevaluate. Attempting to do so gives me a severe case of identity vertigo. Not that the realization would have done any good back then. I simply could not have accepted my actual degree of incapacitation while it still bound me. It was ultimately less painful to blame moral failure, and believe I was capable of more. I could never have been patient enough to believe the truth and simply wait until I uncovered a solution.

On the bright side, I really have no clue what I’m capable of now. I don’t think I’ve had fully powered mental faculties and work ethic since puberty changed my digestive tolerances. And even if I did achieve flashes of full power in my pre-Accutane days, I certainly didn’t have the benefit of the last decade and a half’s reading and experience. All I know is that all the previously challenging things I’ve done while healthy have been absurdly easy and trivial.

Anywho, I plowed through a lot of very enjoyable fiction during the week. Thanks Amazon. Damn my ebooks bill.

Here’s another fun one for the MT’s, but be forewarned, it’s absolute trash:

Fimbulwinter
by E. William Brown

For less trashy hilarity with general appeal, I highly recommend

Hard Luck Hank: Screw the Galaxy
by Steven Campbell

The first three Alex Verus books also weren’t bad, before feminism in the guise of a female protagonist ruined things.

I made it through two books of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series before getting disgusted for similar reasons. But I can’t recommend it. I kept waiting for the shrouds of mystery to part and display glory, but the shrouds only contained more identical shrouds.

The Iron Druid series lasted significantly longer – I enjoyed books 1-6. Killing off the Morrigan killed the series.

The Broken Empire series was a tour de force. Mark Lawrence is part of the new generation of writers, men to be reckoned with. Mother Internet is deprogramming literary minds, Amazon nourishing their bodies. Glory comes again to the West. Read everything he writes.

Jim Bernheimer’s two D-List Supervillain novels were enjoyable light reading. Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International series is always good for that as well. We all know and trust Vox Day’s fiction.

Maurice Druon’s Accursed Kings series was excellent, and reveals the source for JRR Martin’s incompetent and flaccid cribbing of stolen grandeur. John C Wright is a lesser literary genius, the highest honor accorded to anyone in this post.

Jim Butcher is a craftsman’s craftsman, his remarkable skill reliably if barely edging out intermittent blue pill menstruations. Codex of Alera may be an exception, but Dresden Files is recommended.

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth is gloriously dark, somber, and apocalyptic in a manner reminiscent of Awake in the Night Land. The key is to understand that the wizards are a pathetic devolution of mankind’s former magical engineering prowess. Cugel the Clever is hilariously cynical. I remain wary of his other works, suspecting anti-Christian bombast and a surfeit of cynic’s poison.

Howard’s Conan the Barbarian is an awkward cartoon, a single braying note that quickly tires, a testament to the truth that modern literary technique truly has grown in sophistication. Henry Haggard’s She is a startling reminder that early light fiction can still kick ass.

T. Jackson King’s Vigilante Series starts strong in book one before hamsterbating into oblivion.

Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and I am Charlotte Simmons are required reading for understanding contemporary America. I should read his other books, but needed a break from his sub-genius schtick. Nevertheless, there is more gold to be mined there.

The Sandman Slim series is barely acceptable fun that peters out after book 2.

Maybe I should give Larry Correia’s realistic novels a shot; so far I’ve restricted myself to his scifi and fantasy out of an irrational prejudice against the unfantastic. I’m afraid to venture into stupid counterfactuals and cardboard conservative manifestos. If you value your intelligence, stay away from Tom Kratman. He may be on our side, but he’s a midget standing on the toes of giants.

John Ringo is a horrifying pervert writing right-wing fanfic that somehow also manages to be blue pill.

Seth Skorkowsky’s Damoren was an enjoyable debut, and I look forward to more. Howard Taylor’s Extraordinary Zoology was a rip-roaring ride that is everything D&D fiction should be.

Michael J Totten’s Resurrection turned to horrid feminist dreck, at a point annoyingly past the preview. That’s the kind of thing that earns books 1 star reviews.

Steven Blackmoore’s Dead Things puts the “man” into Necromancer, and contains perhaps the most epic warning against marriage in all literature.

Will Wight’s Traveler’s Gate trilogy teeters on the brink of blue pill excess and creative stagnation, leaving me undecided whether to continue with book 3.

James Islington’s The Shadow Of What Was Lost appears to be the debut of another new-breed author – a non-allegorical Christian mythos. I am excited for book 2.

Paul Dale’s The Dark Lord’s Handbook is devastatingly funny and will hurt your diaphragm as much as Hard Luck Hank. Read in isolation to avoid embarrassment. Where Hank is about economics, negotiation, power and absurdity, the Dark Lord is unabashedly red pill on gender, power and morality, and lampoons tropes.

These have been my companions through many dark weeks; while my body starved and rioted, they kept my spirit warm.

My one shrimp per pot plan proved sufficient for sedentary productivity. However, this week my incredibly light work schedule began again. Although I could perform at peak during the few hours of work itself, the standing and walking depleted my reserves, incapacitating me for the rest of the day, interfering with regimen adherence, and preventing muscle recovery.

I stuck it out for as long as possible to stabilize the data point, then risked increasing the shrimp dosage to normal levels. Immediately I was able to sleep deeply, complete muscle recovery, and gained much sharper mental acuity. It appears I am not at risk for the massive inflammation/fatigue reaction that accompanied both general shrimp reintroduction and the switch to the bad shrimp brand. This gives me a reasonably strong hope that any adverse gut reaction will be temporary or nonexistent, and that I’ll be able to stabilize at a normal level of shrimp consumption. Which would put me in full compliance with minimum human nutrient intake requirements. Or, it could blow up in my face and put me down for a week, jeopardizing my job.

I have to write these things down as they happen, before I know whether they will work, otherwise I lose them.

I had an interesting epiphany last night. I’ve been reading lots of light fantasy. The intricacies of author-invented magic systems seems to paralell my own koan experiments. I was mildly frustrated because my koans still couldn’t overcome fatigue incapacitation. So I formalized the problem.

Under fatigue, focus becomes slippery. Imagine an xy plane with the origin as the target in the middle representing productive work. Focus slides to left, right, up, down, always off target. The will to drive it back on point is almost nonexistent.

I named my goal: as long as I am conscious, I should adhere perfectly. This helped, because I could skip intermediate stages and consider only the extreme case – the point right before unconsciousness. At this point, willpower should be effectively zero and slipperiness should be 100%. Mental capacity, the ability to hold deliberate ideas or thoughts, should thus be zero. The only thing left of me at this point would be consciousness itself.

Therefore, I was startled to realize, any koan system would be too bulky to fit, much less maintain. By a simple thought exercise, I had eliminated every koan system I had ever tried.

So, what COULD I do at that point? Only one thing: be conscious. Whereas every other koan system had tried to contain something within the sphere of consciousness, this one would simply accept that consciousness was a point of zero volume, and reinforce that point.

This description is just a metaphor for what I was doing. I guess reading all those different magic systems, specifically the descriptions of the wizards concentrating to actually use the system, gave me some inspiration for what I was doing. Plus all the meditation crap I’ve read over the years.

Anyway, it worked. I started adhering even though I was fatigued. Furthermore, it seemed frictionless, and I didn’t lose it even when drifting off to sleep – something I’ve never done before, that I can remember.

I don’t think of this as a koan at all – it’s more like a pre-koan state. I still need and want my hand koans to define and channel emotions, identity, thoughts etc at stronger mental energy levels.

I think this might also answer the riddle of changing vs unchanging koans. The pre-koan doesn’t change. The koans do change, as the psyche evolves and grows in response to the environment.

I don’t really understand why reinforcing consciousness should produce right action. Perhaps it’s like this: the koans permit the overmind to deliberately shape the undermind (unconscious), but only during periods of higher mental acuity. During lower mental energy states, only the pre-koan is possible. Reinforcing the undermind with the pre-koan ensures the true expression of the undermind into action, and does so very efficiently.

Thus, when mental energy is too low to support the koan system, attempting to use it backfires, wasting the energy available without creating any productive action.

I think that makes sense.

EDIT:

One more thing is necessary to complete the pre-koan state. I was doing it unconsciously last night, but forgot it this morning.

The heart, not the mind, supplies the impetus of will. Activating the pre-koan state requires only the tiniest whisper of will, but that is still not zero. Negative affect can sap well-being until no will is left. When fatigue is high and energy is low, it takes very little negative affect to accomplish this.

The solution is a subliminal background of tongues, emanating from the heart. This is in addition to the pre-koan. A whisper of will into the unmuddied subconscious is all it takes.

What causes laziness? The lizard brain. When well fed and comfortable, we are inclined to take it easy. This is a disaster in modernity.

In a boring routine or an unchanging environment, we are programmed to shut down and conserve mental energy. This is a disaster in modernity.

We have lost or distorted almost all of the cues to which we are designed to respond, outside the brief period of insulation within a nuclear family during childhood.

What’s the good news? None of this evolutionary programming is very smart. The lizard is dumb. Daedalus’ maze can hold the the minotaur. You can make the lizard brain walk in a circle with a koanic mandala.

All this time I’ve been trying to find one structure that works. I totally missed the point. I’m building a maze to keep a lizard moving, not a work of Gaultian architectual perfection.

Without movement, the mind shuts down and turns off. Hedonic adjustment. Anything gets filtered out and ignored eventually. Unless you make it a circle… a repeating experience longer than the lizard’s attention span.

I feel like a bioengineer trying to design a human, who’s just encountered the idea of a circulatory system. Of course you can’t get anything done while everything’s static! At best you have a perfect corpse.

I’ve decided the label “pre-koans” sounds stupid and inaccurate, so I’ll go with proto-koans. They’re more formless and certainly non-verbal. Those are the low-energy baseline. Then the hand koans are more defined, use words, and are for overmind and higher energy use.

Individually, either koan type will eventually fail, a victim of evolutionary countermeasures. But when used together in an alternating pattern, they form a circle that the lizard is too stupid to escape.

Interestingly, both the proto and hand koans are dynamic, though in different ways. I’ll expand on that later, after testing.

Mother Nature really, REALLY doesn’t want to give up the keys to the mind-vault. But I swear, I will get in. Anyhow, this trick was probably inspired by that necromancer who distracts ghosts with palindromes and small countable objects.