from Nick | by Nick

A key step in being able to fabricate any sensory particles you want is realizing that everything you’re aware of is already fabricated, a mind render rather than the way things truly are. There’s nothing in principle stopping you from controlling the whole field of awareness

Luckily you don’t need to control the field. The badness in life comes from fighting the field, from resisting it, clinging to it, pushing away from it, etc. Warping the field hurts. If you have equanimity with all flavors of sensory particles there’s no need to control it

Purposefully fabricating high strength versions of the flavors you don’t like (eg sadness, anxiety, nausea) can be useful for building equanimity via exposure therapy. It will suck a few hundred times but then the nervous system stops fighting and the flavor no longer hurts

Equanimity seems to build non-linearly with flavor strength. Super intense purposefully cultivated fear handled with equanimity does more to build equanimity to it than years of experiencing it non-purposefully. Like a controlled burn vs a wildfire

The flavors we consider bad are only thought to be that way because they’re the ones our nervous system come pre-installed to fight with, to resist, to warp the manifold of awareness when it shows up, but the flavor isn’t bad if you learn to just let it arise and pass

If you let sensations shine freely things are okay no matter what they are t.co/XL06xVeB84

(Of course, with equanimity to all flavors the goal isn’t to hurt yourself, but to be freed up to help others, which is what the monk in the above photo was aiming to do via protest)

Another analogy is an immune system where we start out with lots of allergies. We can overcome these allergies via careful exposure (similar to allergy shots) until we simply aren’t allergic to things anymore There’s still fear, sadness, etc but we’re not inflamed by them

And if they’re ever too strong for your current level of allergicness and it’s too uncomfortable you can often choose to fabricate other particles in their place (joy, etc) that you’re less allergic to

If you’re allergic to peanuts (fear, jealousy, etc) being able to transform peanuts into fruit (joy, love, etc) is great. But there’s also something nice and beautiful about peanuts, and it’s better to simply not be allergic to them than only being able to tolerate fruit