Who (mis)translates the (mis)translators?
Unclenching, Part 4.3: Clenching on "clenching"
This post is part of a series.
During a recent conversation about how best to situate the use of "clenching" with respect to existing knowledge and terms, Cube Flipper mentioned an uncanny parallel with the Buddhist concept of taṇhā, and suggested I read Romeo Stevens’ post (mis)Translating the Buddha.1 It was my first encounter with his writing, and the first time I really engaged with any writing about meditative practice.
Stevens explains how the conventional Western translations of Buddhist psychological terms are largely ill-chosen—even harmfully so.2 He gives revised definitions for some terms from the Pali canon, a major text of Early Buddhism. He emphasizes that these terms refer to identifiable mental events—and not to vague metaphysical energies, like we might mistake "impermanence".
Tanha is the cause of Dukkha. Understanding Anicca and Anatta inclines the mind toward Nibbana by removing the Upadana that maintains the creation of Sankharas.
The above sentence full of Pali terms is about detectable mental events within the stream of physical sensation, feeling tones, mental talk, and mental image that makes up moment to moment experience. If something sounds weird it's just that you've never reified it before because it goes by very fast (10-40hz range). Meditation is about training the mind to be able to notice these more subtle events and then instructions for noticing certain things about the causal relationship between these subtle events and how good your moment to moment experience really is. The purpose of meditation is not to become a really good meditator, to experience certain cool temporary states (though some are helpful), etc. But direct insight into the basic building blocks of your experience.
I recommend reading through the entire post. Let’s walk through some parts of it and relate them to what we’ve already seen in this series: clenching, or robustening, or predicting too hard.
Before we begin, we’d better start by considering whether different people will even experience the same kinds of mental events. Are some things shared universally, and already waiting to be discovered in the workings of each of our minds? Or are they created like self-fulfilling prophecies, as patterns that meditators incept in themselves under the influence of culture and memes? How consistent is human phenomenology?
I haven't had much time yet to digest the terms we’ll discuss. How might they refer to things I've already noticed about the movements of my mind? Do some of them refer to things I've never noticed? Maybe. I guess I'll have to meditate more. Will I notice which new things I create that weren’t there before?
I’m not sure. For now, I remain confused. I’m writing this to draw my current understanding and confusions out of my thoughts and into words.
Which brings us to one more preliminary moment of skepticism. Remember that we tend to take on technical debt? We’re impulsive about pushing through, enduring pressing encounters by any means, more than pausing for perfect abstractions and boundless innovation. We pile on OK solutions that work well enough for now—and the more we’re stressed or uncertain, the harder we lean into the mess of good-enoughs we already have, patching and patching them instead of stopping to untangle and rework them.
Well, we’re also that way with words and ideas.
There’s danger in using language to talk about mental events that precede language, and in trying to find object-like handles for parts of mental processes that are the very basis for how we even perceive objects.3 When we use an idea to get a handle on a concrete thing that isn’t exactly that idea, we’re reifying. And especially when we give our ideas names and build them into stories, they can take on stable lives of their own, even if the real stuff we first wanted them to describe isn’t stable in the same way.
Sometimes we lean a little too hard, stubbornly steamrolling the subtlety of reality beneath our too-solid story of it.
A lot of the confusing stuff in buddhism is trying to talk about these direct insights. e.g. 'grasping' isn't talking about a cognitive understanding but rather a direct perception of an automatic mental move that happens in the pre-conscious perceptual stack (at least pre-conscious prior to a bunch of work). Buddhists do this because sometimes, if a person is ready, you can speed things up by just pointing the thing out rather than waiting for them to figure it out all on their own. […]
I do think that this has resulted in ambient memetic immunity of the same type hypothesized by Scott Alexander and others about why new psychotherapy methods work for a while and then seem to stop working. People get some sort of idea of what all these experiences are supposed to be and as a result ignore actual moment to moment sensation.
- Romeo Stevens, “Dukkha: created vs discovered”
Sometimes you can make prophecies come true by faking it. But if you really want insight into the workings of your mind, you can’t keep dressing them in stories. Your actual mental events are not your firstborn ideas of those events, nor your second attempt, nor your hundredth.4 Eventually your perceptions and ideas and words may reach the right kind of nuance and freedom and interplay that they can do good work to relate some of your inner movements, but that’s secondary to finding out what those inner movements look and feel like. If you lean too hard on any particular story about what meditation is, or who you are, you’ll “acquire an identity” that might stubbornly block what you’d otherwise feel. And each time you do feel something new, if you’re really excited to name it and hold it and handle it, beware the little trap you might build for yourself.
The investigation you do into your own experience has to be a real investigation, and not one in which you are highly confident about what there is to find. i.e. people feel like they're meditating wrong if their experience doesn't seem to match whichever map they are using.
- Romeo Stevens, “Dukkha: created vs discovered”
Of course that doesn’t mean you can or should abandon words and ideas completely. Just don’t grasp them so quickly, or hold them so tightly. Don’t flee so fast from confusion.
And when I say you're dreaming, I'm dreaming too. So if you were to 'agree' with these words as right, I would name that nothing more than a way of offering condolences for the demise of their strangeness.
- Zhuangzi, Ch. 2 (trans. Ziporyn)
Well then, let’s go. Here’s Stevens' explanation of taṇhā (emphasis mine):
taṇhā is usually translated as desire or craving but this is wrong and misleading. taṇhā is more literally translated as 'fused to' or 'welded to' [all bold emphases are mine]. It immediately follows the mental moment that you zoom in with the attentional aperture on something. It could be that a flower or an item on the shelf at the supermarket captures your attention, or you turn your head to catch more detail as you pass by an accident on the road. Many hundreds of thousands of such events take place in the course of a single day. With most of them attention then relaxes and makes space for the next thing. But with some small proportion you find the mind doesn't quite 'unclench' from the object or some aspect of the object. This tension aspect is why it is sometimes translated as ‘grasping’ which is closer. Imagine something you aren’t finished with being pulled out of your hand and you tensing your fingers to resist.
As I read this for the first time, immediately as my eyes landed on 'unclench', I experienced tunnel vision. I hadn’t seen anyone use my word like that before. That old ugly thought, "I'm not original!", reared up as suddenly as it hadn't in a while. It wouldn't let go for a few minutes. I could hardly see past it. I was clenching!
I realized that though taṇhā might not be identical to what I'd been calling "clenching", the kinds of stuff described by the two terms at least had to be intimately connected.5 So taṇhā was part of what I was experiencing in that very moment!?
Absurdity quickly rose to undermine the unpleasant discord.
A moment later, there was only joy.
Since then, I think I’ve noticed taṇhā on a very short subjective time scale when there are sudden unexpected sounds during meditation. Across the room, something makes a small but sharp popping sound, and it also pops in my awareness for a fraction of a second. I notice my attention collapsing onto the sound—there’s a literal feeling of spatial compression of awareness toward the sound source—only to instantly release again, shortly followed by the conscious recognition that (typically) the source is not a threat. I think this contract-relax sensation was there all along—discovered, not created—I just didn’t note it as clearly, and hadn’t named it.
Next up is upādāna. Stevens says that upādāna immediately follows taṇhā (is it a continuation of the same mechanism?) and that it involves processing potential aspects of a vibe/object and filtering out the ones that feel the least stable or pleasant:
Upadana is literally translated as ‘fuel’ but also is used in gardening metaphors to mean seeds as well as having connotations around ‘pulling towards oneself.’ I already alluded to why this is an important concept with the idea of maladaptive strategies that generate their own fuel. Upadana is a mental event that immediately follows Tanha. It can be thought of as the opposite of Equanimity. We instinctively pull or push away aspects of mental objects/representations that we do or don’t like. We try to ascertain the aspects of objects that are stable, controllable, satisfying so that we can own, or associate with those aspects. We ignore or try to push away aspects of the objects that make us feel hopeless, helpless, worthless, empty.
“Follow the good and stable vibes” makes sense as a view from inside a greedy process of active inference: we try to immediately isolate what we think we can reliably observe or predict or enact, so we can start leaning into it. We impulsively search for a model to go harder with, or our behaviour can’t quickly be made robust. But this opportunism leaves us with a reduced, patch-like solution. Any details or aspects that are excluded because they seem unpleasant at the moment may then count as outside interference from the perspective of the simplification that emerges, for as long as we stick with it. What counts as "outside interference" to a child pulling on a finger trap? Anything other than pulling.
The process of taṇhā-upādāna happens over and over across many moments, constantly grasping for simplifications. The longer-term result is that all the simplifications become organized into structures called saṅkhāras:
Sankhara can be translated as either 'that which has been put together' or 'that which puts together.' […] If Upadana is a seed, then Sankharas are the warped houses we build out of the twisted lumber that grows. Living in these poorly made houses we don’t understand why we are miserable. To speak less metaphorically, a Sankhara can be thought of as a collection of mental events put into a story about how the world is.
I might also refer to saṅkhāras as fetishes—in a very general sense—or simply my bullshit. They’re expressions of the mess of my technical debt; evocations of structures in my mind that force it to move predictably; the constitutions of tyrannical little governments.6
Together, my saṅkhāras form a kind of toxic ecosystem in which all my simplifications—no matter how individually limited—are granted niches that mutually support each other, and influence the outcome of the next round of taṇhā-upādāna in a kind of vicious cycle.7 And when I try to fix one part of the ecosystem, I risk destabilizing the rest, which scares me away from even trying.
The way we speak about our identities revolves on our saṅkhāras. That doesn’t mean our identity-words don’t point roughly in the direction of something real (or even innate) about us. But our handles on ourselves are likely to be simplifications. Leaning into them carries the usual risks of over-robustening—including a blockade on further growth. Clenching is immobilizing.
Next we have dukkha:
Dukkha is usually translated as suffering, which sort of works but misses important stuff. A more literal translation is 'a difficult emptiness.' Approaches, even quite effective ones, for dealing with the suffering of life were already in existence at the time of the Buddha. Both schools that preached constant absorption into pleasurable meditative states, and schools that preached a doctrine and practice of 'non-duality.' Both of these approaches survived, became mixed up with Buddhism, and today there are schools claiming to teach Buddhism which actually teach these methods. These methods do in fact decrease suffering, but they are only partial solutions. Both because they are reliant on maintenance of certain states and ways of being, and because while they deal with suffering caused by the immediate senses, you are still left with a more fundamental suffering related to feelings of emptiness or, Dukkha's other translation, 'worthlessness' and related feelings (nihilism etc. in the west). You've encountered this for yourself if you've experienced something cool during contemplative practice but then had a kind of 'so-what?' moment. The sense that this experience, while interesting and probably a temporary respite from your worries, hasn't actually addressed the core problem. People especially have this coming back from retreat. If this were just considered on its own, without the teaching of the antidote, this might be called worthlessness, that it seems like things are never satisfying and thus nothing has any value.
Perhaps I'd also call dukkha disappointment, or “needing resolution”. It's what happens when taṇhā and the rest fail to hold their ruse together—which is inevitable! All models are wrong.
If you dream of drinking wine, in the morning you will weep.
- Zhuangzi, Ch. 2 (trans. Ziporyn)
Dukkha is the discord or bad vibes that result from a partial vibe collapse. Partial, because if the vibe fell away completely, if the amnesia were total, would an unpleasant contrast remain? Dukkha leaves you hanging.
Why? Well, I suppose taṇhā can persist even after the shattering and invalidation of the vibe it grasped and (through upādāna) distilled. We cling to the broken pieces as if we could put them back together if we squeezed long and hard enough. As if we could escape the finger trap by pulling hard enough. As if there’s no time to step back and learn or feel anything better right now.
A central insight is that dukkha really is inevitable—that “good vibes only” is a farce. We impulsively push unpleasantness away. We try to filter it out of existence. But this only prolongs and insinuates the conditions for our suffering. Across countless moments, our impulses commit us to a hidden and vastening mess. And when we see a flash of the mess, our quick-patch solution may be to ignore it altogether—to be “in denial”.
Take the specific meditative practice of trauma work8: you stir up repressed bad vibes, then diffuse, dissolve, accept their contents back into yourself. This works very well sometimes. It kind of makes sense, if you think of dukkha as something that becomes memorized, and that the conditions for a partially collapsed vibe9 may be stored long-term. We generally try to avoid recalling such vibes, because it’s immediately unpleasant—the regret that we’ve already failed to resolve that unpleasantness, at least once. If you’ve ever been suddenly struck by a cringey memory of your past, you know what this feels like. Trauma work says: stop dwelling in denial. Bring back that bad vibe with a vengeance. But don’t clench on it like usual. Don’t try to force a resolution until the pain “forces you” to hide it away again. Stop treating it as Other, as outside interference. Send it love. Accept its contents back into yourself. Unclench, let the broken pieces fall apart into their surroundings. This becomes easier when the surroundings are a warm, clean blanket of pleasant harmony, like concentration practices can bring.
If suffering were truly just coming in from the outside [link is mine] in thousands of different forms (i.e. the way things seem on cursory inspection) then we wouldn't have much hope of a single intervention helping us. Nor would we be confident in any such intervention since some new form of suffering can always show up. But if suffering is a result of something we're doing, then if we can figure out how to stop doing that, the suffering stops. Which we can confirm for ourselves in moment to moment experience.
Dukkha is part of existence. Thinking otherwise leads into delusion. No story, no saṅkhāra, no bullshit will spare us from any and all bad vibes. No model makes predictions perfect enough that it can avert any and all mismatches between conception and reality. By witnessing and accepting dukkha, we can escape the trap where we make bad vibes worse by impulsively trying to suppress them.
In Buddhist psychology, dukkha is one of the “three marks of existence”, along with anicca and anattā. What’re those? They’re the truths we witness and accept when we escape the traps of two other sources of delusion: nicca and attā.
Nicca is our tendency to believe that things could or should be maintained to our satisfaction. This is an identifiable mental event in how we reify an object or concept. Ignoring the very ephemeral nature of moment to moment experience in favor of only noticing those aspects which do occur as stable. Spotting it for yourself is very powerful. If this were just considered on its own without the teaching of the antidote it might be related to feelings of hopelessness. That there is no hope of maintaining the conditions that lead to things we like. Thus, the flow of positive and negative experiences are undependable, indefinite in duration, intensity, and frequency. That our hopes of forcing them to be stable with our mind will be in vain.
Nicca is a kind of reassurance that prevents unclenching—the relaxation of taṇhā, and the deconstruction of saṅkhāras. I think I've felt nicca in my self-soothing reaction to anything that seems to threaten my enjoyment of a favourite or newfound word or vibe, even after the enjoyment’s gone twisted.
Atta is a little hard to translate, we can translate it as more like a verb or more like a noun (Pali is weird). If we see it more like a noun it might be translated as ‘essence’ and if we translate it like a verb it might be translated as ‘to take/have control/ownership of.’ Together we have the notion that if something has a real immutable character or ‘essence’ to it that we understand, then we can really control it and that this control won’t be subject to change.
If upādāna pursues reduced essences across the narrowing process of taṇhā, and nicca is a kind of compulsive moment of reassurance that coaxes us to follow through on the pursuit, then attā may be the moment those essences are acknowledged by a central coordinator of action, "the self". It’s the impulse to seize agency by wielding the essences: I’ve found this tool. Now it serves me! But is it really a tool at all? Does it serve? Or am I taking on technical debt, just as soon as the form of the essence seems sufficiently solid that I might manipulate it—because I really like the idea of having a new tool? Stevens uses the example of Maggie’s fake steering wheel in the intro to The Simpsons, which brings her the illusion of control.10 We pretend useless things are tools because playing with them feels nice. Maybe they were useful for a moment, once. Maybe they’ll be useful again sometime. And maybe I’m having too much fun, pulling on a finger trap.
To put it cutely, all too cutely: taṇhā says “this”, and upādāna makes it “this”. Nicca says “this is fine”. Attā says “this is mine”.
By noticing that nicca and attā ultimately cause more pain than they solve, we begin to want to escape them—to accept anicca and anattā. Anicca: no, things won’t always stay this way. Existence does not abide unchanging. The classic translation of anicca is “impermanence”—freedom from the delusion of permanence. It’s the unclenched state we want to approach in mindfulness practice: refusing to partake of those hits of reassurance that’d delay an expiring vibe from giving way to whatever comes next.
And anattā:
Anatta is to point out the error in [attā’s] way of seeing things. The point is to notice the mental event that represents objects or concept as though they could or should be inherently or essentially controllable/ownable. If this were to just be taken on its own without the teaching of the antidote it might be called helplessness, that things are without the possibility of being controlled. We use the mind to falsely pretend we are more in control than we are.
We can look for essences or simplifications, and sometimes they may even be locally useful. But when we itch and we push to wield and to control them, we commit to a narrowed vision of causality, which before long will be revealed as a mere caricature of control.11 Anattā is refusing to partake of the impulse that grasps an essence in the active hand of attention, as if that essence must be a tool because I need to act.
Our brains12 keep something like a body schema, a model of our body in space that helps us to coordinate how we move.
The inner movements of our attention are kind of like the movements of invisible limbs. So, analogous to the body schema, we may also have an attention schema that helps coordinate our attention. An attention schema is meta-attentional—it attends to attention.
Nicca and attā seem to have a reflective or meta-attentional flavour. Taṇhā happens first and continually—it’s always beginning to narrow my attention onto some thing, and the next thing, and the next. Sometimes taṇhā lingers on something and proceeds into upādāna, which is stabilized by nicca and attā events that happen “on top”: It’s OK that I keep attending to this—it feels correct. And: it’s useful that my attention is narrowed in this way—see how things are in control?13 Maybe these nicca and attā events arise from contractions in the meta-attentional mechanism, and perhaps they evolved because they make the grasping movements of the “limbs of attention” more locally robust.
Intelligent reflection is useful, but it’s also open-ended and distracting. It’s not enough to narrow my attention onto some shortlist of movements or actions. There needs to be a way for an action to gain traction, to “move up the stack” and win me over, so I can commit to something actually executable—even while I might be considering multiple courses in parallel.
Do nicca and attā contribute to behavioural robustness by “protecting” my narrowed attention from the “outside interference” of overthinking, which would distract me from faking it and forcing my way?14
How much of what I'm saying is bullshit—an evocation of an unrefined saṅkhāra? I haven’t meditated very much by meditator standards—a few hundred hours, at most. Am I just reifying clumsily, because I haven’t had enough experience with the feelings themselves? Being picky about words, because I haven’t smoothed out what’s underneath?
Is there something of nicca in the urges I feel to keep using "clench", because I like its vibe? Something of attā in my residual sense of ownership of "clench", and my violated feelings of originality?
Am I clenching on "clenching"?
At least a little, I think. But I'm not so worried. I understand that my understanding must be flawed. And “clenching” is the best word I’ve found for this thing I’ve seen. Maybe I’ll learn of a better one.
We can't go entirely without better models and better words. The Buddha certainly didn't go without them. Totally falling apart forever contradicts the very spirit.
The answer to muscle spasms isn't never contract a muscle again. The answer to taṇhā isn't abhor the slightest bit of attention.
Taṇhā happens easily, automatically, continually. And it’s the springboard for the whole twisted circus. To live freely and gracefully, we should know its opposite.
Nibbana is generally thought of as an exalted state of being that is free of all suffering, all desire, etc. etc. It […] leads to people assuming that Buddhism is wireheading. The best translation of Nibbana (for the purposes of practice) IMO is ‘cooling down.’ If we think of the above strategies as a sort of tensing, a sort of effortful exercise, a sort of heating up if you will, then we can contrast it with untensing, non-efforting, cooling down and relaxing. The simplest way to think of this is that Nibanna is the opposite of Tanha. Often translated as the mind ‘inclining towards relinquishment’ (of that which was grasped). The nature of this experience is relief. And here it means not only relief from the particular stimulus that was stressing us out, but the (normally experienced temporarily) relief from compulsive grasping, the relief from wanting things to be other than they are, relief from the belief seemingly pressing down on us that we need to act just for things to be okay. A kind of happiness that comes from a halting of believing that we need to get happiness by arranging things to match up with mental projections.
So nibbāna is “keeping unclenched”. It looks like not immediately and impulsively pulling on the next finger trap you encounter, by assuming you’ve already got it figured out (I know how to pull!) only to ignorantly commit yourself to even more mess and stress and ignorance.15
Importantly, to escape the basic clenching of taṇhā, I need to escape the meta-attentional clenching that stabilizes the consequences of taṇhā through upādāna. So, a real awareness of the errors of nicca and attā is essential to nibbāna.
But what if I want to be stubborn, to “[arrange] things to match up with mental projections”? Will nibbāna make me passive? Will I stop noticing evil in the world, because I’m able to find “a kind of happiness” regardless? I don’t think so. The short, rough explanation is that the impulsivity of stress is one of the great amplifiers of our collective evils, just as it is the amplifier of personal suffering. Stress narrows our vision onto our mere survival. It rationalizes our insensitivity to our insensitivity. Freedom from the insistent, insidious urgings of stress finds us in fluid action, not with no action.16
People in the left tail of neuroticism become more functional [with practice], not less. Their fear of becoming even less functional is a stability defending meta-aversion to modifying things they think are keeping them alive. In the high-threat mode, everything is flagged as a potential threat, including exiting the high-threat mode.
- Romeo Stevens, “Core Transformation”
For most of history, death stalked close behind relaxation. The fear of unclenching still lurks in the reflexes and precedents of our biological bodies. But letting go is a prerequisite for growth and freedom!
Of course, we don’t want to abandon everything. And we cannot leave behind all saṅkhāras—all mental framings or dispositions. But we can untangle and refine them so they lean less crude, compulsive, and fetishistic.
We'd like to find ourselves more optioned and free. Less constrained, convulsive, and clenchy. The miserable don't wish first and merely to end their lives. But when the trap seems inescapable…
Romeo wraps up his post with an excellent synopsis of the whole ordeal:
By default, the mind becomes stuck to mental representations that have more to do with our desires than how things really are. This leads to aversive experiences of emptiness, hopelessness, worthlessness, helplessness when we bump into evidence about how confused we are. We come up with plans for avoiding these experiences, but these plans don’t really work, leading us to repeatedly encounter flashes of the undesired experiences. Our response is to try to push on the plans even harder, which doesn’t work. But once we get wise to this process we can incline in the opposite direction, pushing less hard on experience. The relief from doing this wakes us up to the idea that we’ve been fueling the above vicious cycle and live in a house built from these sorts of knots of confusion. Instead of trying to hold the house together with constant maintenance while simultaneously trying to find the exact right decorations, we start tearing down the house. We discover that the very idea that we needed an unchanging, beautiful house that definitely belongs to us was just another of the confused knots. House building, maintenance, and dwelling becomes just another human activity that can be engaged with or not as is convenient. As these activities were previously taking up huge amounts of our attention and resources, we find ourselves much more relaxed and able to enjoy things. Because others still live within the paradigm of seeing everything as related to houses, they are inclined to perceive you as living in a shiny spiritual house, and try to figure out which sets of maintenance activities and decorations will grant them these ‘spiritual’ advantages.
My use of "clenching" arose in the context of literal muscles, of motor control and reaching experiments. Soon, I realized its value as a metaphor. Its meaning was already so close to being shared by us in the right ways. It makes sense that others thought to use it, too.17
I'm no longer so afraid of being unoriginal.
I’m simply here, learning to relate.
Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.
In the next part: brains and dynamical systems.
I'm no expert in Buddhism. I'm hardly even a novice on its language and practices. I've read little, consisting mostly of scattered and confusing Wikipedia articles. But as I've recently discovered, the course of my introspection has converged anyway on something like Buddhist psychology.
Much of the difficulty apparently has to do with the original Pali having been translated through Sanskrit, then into English by Sanskrit scholars. Stevens also mentions that the Buddha predicted Sanskrit would be a problem. But the Pali canon wasn’t written down for hundreds of years after the Buddha’s death, so I'm not sure…
Except in the trivial case where the mental event is the idea itself, of course.
My current understanding is that taṇhā refers to only a subset of the patterns in the world that collectively are examples of the behavioural principle of robustening, which is what I’ve been metaphorically referring to as contraction, and (in excess) clenching.
Taṇhā is a particular subjective experience of attentional narrowing, that has a robustening character through the essence-distilling of upādāna and the coaxing and wielding of nicca and attā, which we’ll discuss shortly.
But there are other processes or mechanisms that also have a robustening character, as we’ll see later in the series. Some of these occur in the brain but their influence on felt mental events may not be identical to taṇhā’s. They might not even directly influence those events. Others aren’t local to a single brain or mind, but emerge socially and intersubjectively.
I think I prefer to use contraction/clenching for the more general class of phenomena, of which taṇhā is an important example.
An example would be thinking of things in terms of victims and oppressors. Thinking like this tends to make people angry, it tends to make them feel helpless, and it doesn’t tend to point them to causal levers they can pull to improve their situation. Observing that they don’t seem to be able to help themselves, turning any resources offered into louder amplified shouts of how miserable everything is rather than improving things, other people tend to turn away from helping them. This further fuels the world view. In Buddhist psychology, the victim-oppressor mindset is called the Hell Realm because it is considered a particularly nasty maladaptive strategy. Not only because it is miserable for people caught in it, but because it reinterprets signs explaining how to get out as tricks, attacks, etc.
Maybe upādāna has a Bayesian updating flavour. The evolution of taṇhā is fueled based on the saṅkhāras we already have, and this process also draws the consequences of taṇhā back into saṅkhāras. Say the saṅkhāras are priors that might be updated—but they can only be updated with evidence that is sensible with respect to them. Thus our priors inform how we simplify our perceptions, in order to update our priors.
Also shadow work, though what “shadow” means may be a little confusing:
There are memories that are charged with unpleasant emotions, and much trauma work revolves around discharging these emotions. But this isn't the shadow. The shadow is about what wasn't present. Because there was abuse in the home, you never felt safe. There was an emotional experience you didn't have that also affected you. This can be much harder to see. […] Likewise, those big, bright, positive values have shadows. The person who presents to you as caring a lot about honesty may have been burned by liars.
- Romeo Stevens, “A Brief Note on Trauma Work”
Or, an unresolved prediction error.
Ever notice how adults are mostly resigned to sit still on an airplane for hours, but five minutes after it arrives at the gate some of them are already losing their minds? The proximity of deplaning brings a sense of impending agency—as if paying really close attention to what’s happening at the front of the plane would make the people ahead of you exit any sooner.
I could go further and claim that existence is a process, which no essence of ours will capture absolutely. Unless of course we’re powerful enough to doctor everything we can see with good vibes, for all time. Well, does the winner exercise their right to utterly tile the universe with their favorite patterns? Could such an exercise possibly end well, even for them?
Yes, the brain is part of the body, and maybe some of the schema isn’t just in the brain. I speak this way out of convenience... and accept a little technical debt.
I don’t mean that people literally think these words. This is just an attempt to externalize.
See also analysis paralysis. Though in some contexts, maybe it’s robust to be immobilized by indecision.
It can feel scary to stop pulling on something you’ve always pulled on. Am I making a mistake? I’ve survived so far without stopping pulling!
When one experiences a lessening of Tanha, the objection “but what if by stressing out just a bit more some great non-linear results would have been realized in your life that were totally worth it!” starts to sound like “but what if being tense at all times just happened to be exactly what kept you from getting hit by that random bus?” I’m not totally positive but I think this mostly hinges on the following dynamic. You currently experience obstacles in the course of pursuing some goal as stressful. In order to generate the necessary energy to overcome the stressor you generate a mental construct that causes you to suffer even more if you don’t overcome the stressor. So when people imagine a decrease in mind created stress, they imagine only the secondary motivation-hack stress going away after which they will become useless in the face of any mild obstacles in life (just go with the flow, man!). Instead what happens is that both kinds of stress decrease at the same time. We do have informal interviews with people in very high functioning roles such as doctors and engineers, who experienced major meditative milestones and had some concerns along these lines, only to go into work on Monday and be surprised that their performance was perfectly fine.
If Buddhists have been historically passive, might that have more to do with a historical lack of opportunity and skepticism, than there being some inherent passivity to not being pathologically stressed all the time?
Since first being surprised seeing it used by Romeo Stevens, I’ve noticed at least two other contemporary practitioners using the term occasionally: Mark Lippmann and Sasha Chapin. Mark’s website implies he encountered “unclenching” in the work of Ken Wilber sometime between 1999-2007. Looking around a bit more, it seems the exercise/image of clenching and unclenching the fist has been around for a while in Buddhism, but I’m not sure where it originated.