Abstract Fairy

Much of communication is hard and obscurantist because we've all agreed to pretend that the relevant layer is *actions* when it's actually *intentions.* Bob is a Very Bad Person who does evil stuff while using therapy-speak words like "setting boundaries" and "feeling attacked." Alice then criticizes the concept of boundaries, saying that it's just a tool for people to avoid responsibility for shitty behavior. But this isn't actually a problem with boundaries. Bob just wants to be a shitty person. He will turn *literally anything* you give him towards the goal of being a shitty person. Every technique or method or action will be morphed, shifted, edge-cased, and straw-manned into a shape that allows Bob to pursue his actual goals because that is what it *means* for something to be a goal. Be magnanimous and forgiving -> "Bless your heart"(fuck you) or "I'll pray for you"(also fuck you) Ensure user safety(They are safe) -> "Ensuring user safety"(don't do any wrongthink or things that might get the company sued) I need space(time to collect myself) -> "I need space"(I am punishing you with withdrawal with plausible deniability) Being humble(being humble) -> being humble(show off that I am a better person than you by being more humble) In all of these cases, the persons *actual intention* is one which their culture has build systems to suppress the expression of. This works in a sort of shoddy, half-baked way. The intention always was primary. I mean think about what an action is in the first place, it takes you from one state to another- the only way you would ever even generate an action is if you were trying to navigate to some specific state, a goal. Every system or technique or set of laws you build to suppress an intention WILL be twisted to fulfill those intentions again. The only way to stop this behavior completely is to just stop having the intention, which, well, easier said than done.

Good writing doesn't just transfer information, it crystallizes the author's way of perceiving the world into the text. Readers then inhabit that crystal and learn to replicate it within themselves. Good writing can be truly transformative in this way, showing you whole new modes of being. It's tradition across most modern religions to memorize large sections of their holy text for this reason. This can also be very very bad if said author is miserable and hates you. You're not inhabiting just the good, you're inhabiting all that they are.

People always say you “visualize” when manifesting because being into manifestation is correlated with being good at visualization, but it doesn’t actually matter. Afaict visualizing is just a good way of generating a felt sense, which is the main driver*. I’m nearly aphantasic, manifestation still works super well for me. You can use words to make a felt sense(prayer), or sounds, or smells, or external irl symbols you’re looking at, or you can work with a felt sense raw. You can even read someone else’s writing and then attend to the felt sense generated by that! I’m pretty sure this is part of what’s going on when people chant a sutra continuously, you’re attuning your mind to the felt sense embedded in the writing. It’s inverse gendlins focusing. Instead of generating words/images from bodily sensations you’re generating bodily sensations from words/images.