My primary goal now is to avoid sub-waterline fatigue state by never ever shifting my Circadian smoking and eating Zeitgeibers. It seems to be going well; I’m sleeping at sunset and waking an hour or two before dawn. I paid my painful debt from the 00:00 Sunday evening deadline-induced bedtime without further fuckups and am recovered.
I’ve also improved the meditation a bit further. It’s already linked to breathing; linking it to the heartbeat as well gives it a much stronger, more immersive rhythm. This especially improves social performance. It’s essentially biofeedback on your two primary indicators of alarm/relaxation. Which means that your internal rhythm is internally set rather than susceptible to outside influence. Which means you have a strong frame. It also feels better, provides better focus, etc.
I also wanted to find a way to cut down on my light reading while stuck in the sub-waterline fatigue state. Ideally I should be resting instead of reading. But I have no willpower to force myself to rest, and the book trance draws me in.
The simplest right action I can execute in such a situation is to close my eyes. Doing so makes meditation easier and more powerful, negating some of the fatigue. This needs to be an automatic habit; otherwise I won’t have the willpower to trigger it while fatigued. So I decided to permanently make having eyes a privilege, one revoked whenever meditation falters. I had discarded all my hand koans, but I felt this one was worth printing across the knuckles: “eyes” “priv”.
In a similar vein, I think “koan” is now a counterproductive misnomer. My koans were about identity resonance and coping with pain. The meditative techniques I’m using now are completely about the chains of discipline. They contain no linguistic identity content whatsoever, because any linguistic construct will create edges of dissonance, never capable of embodying the still/flowing pool/stream that is the real self – to use words to describe what words can’t.
More to the point, I am not doing this to feel better, or look better, or be cooler, or avoid pain, or even do the right thing. None of those motivations work; they introduce polluting eddies. Discipline is a pure act of will, done for its own sake, because the alternative is pure crap. So the name I call it is the reason I’m doing it: “Doing Discipline”. I figured this was worth putting on the hands, a D on the top of each hand.
The improvements give me much better resistance to fatigue-induced procrastination, though I’m by no means immune. I doubt that’s possible, though I hope to see continued gains as the eyes-closed habit becomes ingrained. Ironically, the elimination of secondary aims coincides with their fulfillment, as the social performance is now exactly as desired.