Here's an idea that might be interesting/useful that I would like to start a discussion around - does it make sense to think about meditation techniques in terms of associative vs disassociative?
I was reading Hume, and he talks about how the mind relates things, and he generally gives three ways it can do it 1. spatially 2. temporally 3. cause and effect (but then 3 basically gets eaten up by 1 and 2 later in the book). Which at first made a lot of sense, like if you're getting a stream of events it seemed that the only way to make "new knowledge" about the system is connected things in that stream of events (association). But then the flip side of association is dissassocation, and that reminded me of this random paper I found years ago (Meditative in-action: an endogenous epistemic venture) where the guy basically argues that the brain is a trying to do something called "surprise minimization" (so generate a prediction of the world and then minimize the prediction error) and what can happen is this model can "overfit" to reality, and shikintaza is forced underfitting in the model to "be more accurate" (disassociative unlearning?)
But this dualism does seem somewhat there in different meditation techniques. Like Mahasi Noting is just straight up association, right? Like its basically training ourselves really well to get good at labelling everything and noticing everything (insight practices in generally seems kind associative, because they are reifying to deconstruct in a way) vs the whole family of techniques that are "just vibe" based.
I'm not sure if this is a good way to conceptualize anything though, so I'd love to hear peoples thoughts
