from Nick | by Nick

Meditation over the long term tends to flatten the difference between “good” feelings and “bad” feelings, but not in a dead or numb way You’re curious which sensations will spark into being next, but you don’t care as much what flavor of sensations they are

One marker of if the flattening is wholesome or not is sensory clarity (bc wholesomeness requires less competing attentional processing). When sensations shine into existence they should be high resolution and beautiful If it’s numb & low sensory clarity something isn’t right

really what’s happening is that a subtle ~0.1s operation called tanha was causing the thing you didn’t like, dukkha, and once you learn to stop doing that all flavors of sensation become delicious but it takes a long time to learn not to do tanha, so it happens gradually

It’s counterintuitive that there’s only one thing we don’t like (dukkha) that we can just take out, but it does seem to be how things work it’s like an allergen. Like learning that you’re not allergic to cakes, cappuccinos, etc just lactose, and you can learn to take it out

Dukkha is hard to talk about because most people haven’t felt it as a thing by itself, but it’s closely related to viscosity in sensory experience, and (temporal) asymmetry, it’s full and heavy and it feels bad