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Finding a Trailhead

 I find that in myself too. I am very future looking: left to my own devices, I spend my time thinking about the future, not the present or past. The risk is that I spend so much time thinking about the future, I fail to take the actions necessary to realize it. So, I agree. Let us seek to climb the mountain together: each of his needs his own Tao, his own path, but I think it helps to have fellow travelers. Where I stumble is this: what are the different paths available to us? I believe each of us needs to form our own path, but are their archetypal paths we can study for inspiration on our own? Reflecting on it, the paths I can think of are (not mutually exclusive, and I made these up, so take with a grain of salt): Path of Philosophy: Reading and listening to great scholars and thinkers in this space, thinking it through ourselves Path of Reflection: meditation and internal reflection on key topics Path of Experience: living the principles in our everyday life Path of Pilg...
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Paths Up the Mountain

 In his TED talk , Shi Heng Yi tells the story of a man who wants to climb to the top of the mountain. In preparation, he asks travellers at the base which path they took and what they saw at the top. On learning of each path, the man finds some reason why that particular path might not work for him. Ultimately, he decides having heard all of their stories that he no longer needs to make the climb himself as he already knows what he'll find there. In this parable, I see quite a few warnings to myself personally. I, too, often find it easier to survey the many approaches to an endeavour (particularly one as daunting as looking for enlightenment) than to actually undertake the arduous journey that might lead me to achieving it. Also, I often satisfy myself that by reading about the experiences of others I have a pretty good idea of what the end goal is and thus have not lost much in not jumping in. It might be nice then, if we are to pursue this journey of self-improvement, to pick a...
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Homo Deus

The value-based and policy-based distinction isn't one I'm familiar with, but it makes total sense to me. Two very meaningful ways of assessing progress. I think my usual mindset aligns more closely with policy-based, but with some distinctions. My goal is usually to push the limits of my potential. I don't really care about comparisons to others (and when I do find myself caring, I try to stop). I want to be better than I was yesterday or last year, which I think aligns to your policy-based, but my mental model is that I have a certain amount of potential inherent, and I try to use it and develop it as much as possible.  In other words, I think I blur the two together a bit. My 'value-based' is about achieving my maximum potential: if I'm at 100% of what I could possibly achieve, that's a win. It doesn't really matter whether my 100% is more or less than someone else's. Of course, the problem is I have no real way to know what my potential is, and s...
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Ex Machina

When you are training a reinforcement learning system, there are two broad approaches: value based and policy based. For value based, you try to get the system to understand the value of each action in each state so that it has a running estimate of "how well it's doing". For policy based, you simply ask the machine at each point in time how it could do better, but don't expect it to be able to evaluate how well it's doing in any absolute sense. For the past few days, I've been debating which of these two methods I should adopt at present. I've been feeling a bit lost from a value perspective, I don't really know how well I'm doing in any absolute sense. However, I can see before me lots of directions for improvement. It's tempting therefore to take a policy based approach: "I don't know where I am, but I do know how to do a bit better". (Parenthetically, let's expand on the specific strategies we each use for this type of thi...
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Cultivation

 I have no definition of enlightenment. As I gestured at in my last post, I think it has something to do with realizing what matters and what doesn't matter; and that a vast amount on which we spend time in our lives doesn't matter. Realizing it not just in the sense of being able to say it, but to truly feel it. Your point about a deeper connection to the world seems important too: that is something that does matter, I think.  On the other hand, the link to physical exercise troubles me. It's certainly possible that's enlightenment, but if it is simply exhaustion making you care less about things, then to my mind it is not. Enlightenment, I think, isn't just about not caring about what doesn't matter (which, temporarily, could result from exhaustion) but also caring deeply about what does. Let me try another angle. I tend to believe that competition is fundamentally important to self-improvement. When done well, it can push us to be better, to improve, whether ...
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Locus

In your last post, you touched on enlightenment. I wonder if you have some definition for it? How do we know what it means to be enlightened? Is it something we'll know when we see? I ask because I'm genuinely unsure if I have the vocabulary to discuss it. In my own experience, the closest I've come to feeling what I'd considered "enlightened" was on the Camino de Santiago, as I walked to exhaustion each day in deliberate reflection. I attribute this feeling of enlightenment to attention, as again you touched on last time. Indeed, during the walk my locus of attention overlapped almost completely with my locus of control. I needed only to concern myself with the walk to the next town, all else dropped away. This entailed a reduction in ego, which I think allowed me to experience a deeper sense of connection with the world. As I sit here typing, struggling to find the words to describe the implications of this, I am led to that selfsame quote "The tao that...
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Pilgrim

 Your post is so rich - I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps first to say that yes, let us discuss offline a quotidian address 2.0. :) Your distinction between true progress and experienced progress is an interesting one, and one that rings true to me. If we are progressing, but lack the contextual supports to make us feel we are, is our solution in part a change in mindset? A different way of seeing our lives and world, a new way of counting those markers? I have been reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I find esoteric in the literal sense: I can't read it intensively, rather I scatter my attention across the page and see what leaps out at me. I suspect I could read it again and notice totally different things. It is a mix of philosophy, religion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and storytelling. Still, it has led me to reflect on enlightenment - what is it? It seems to me a common thread across many conceptions is that the enlightened realize that mos...
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