Near as I can tell, this appears to be the best place to post this, but redirect it to a more specifically appropriate board if I'm missing the right one. I don't see anywhere dedicated to personal intros or descriptions of personal practices.
Anyways, let me start with some background before getting into the thick of it. I became extremely absorbed in metaphysical case study research during high school. In particular, my specialty is in childhood past-life memory cases as studied by Ian Stevenson and his successors. Very soon upon getting heavily involved in the field, I figured out that this phenomenon is exactly what it appears to be, and the need for more proof has passed. The research needs to progress toward understanding of process, and most of all, practical implementation of the findings. It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or a metaphysical scientist, to imagine how the discovery of a full-scale metaphysics including reincarnation could radically transform everyday life as we know it. If you need a hint, finally having the antidote to mortality is kinda just the beginning of the potential here.
From there, I decided that I needed to take up a rigorous personal practice to internally align myself optimally for the task of making use of reincarnation to the fullest capacity imaginable. No other goal could possibly be as important or valuable as this, so there's no rational justification not to invest the maximum possible effort toward it. But while I certainly want this serial reincarnator lifestyle for myself, my path is at its core one of power for the sake of everyone; the concept of bodhisattva is the best comparison I've come across for the targeted endpoint of it. My ultimate goal is to use my future attainments to inspire more people to take up my efficient-reincarnating methods.
My resulting preparatory practice, as it stands now, is unusually hardcore. It is conducted on a constant basis regardless of what else I'm doing; it does not and cannot leave my mind. I find it to be equally penetrant in my awareness regardless of whether I'm otherwise occupied or not. Above all, there is nothing gentle about it. I have no use for self-kindness toward a self that isn't real. Only will is real, and I prefer to enforce my will with violent intentions. My method is best described as a form of psychosurgery, charged with seeking out fetters and defilements and silencing them. It is basically designed to turn me into a ruthlessly engineered machine of uncompromising metaphysical efficiency, a truly, eternally restless entity. I lay it out here to ask if I could improve it to effectuate this function even better.
Upon discovering Daniel's work on the path of awakening which, he claims (and I'm sympathetic), manifests in parallel forms across all sorts of practices, I saw that mine seems to be some sort of insight practice. The three characteristics are front and center in it, to be sure. All of them are almost tautological to me. However, it adopts some radically different attitudes toward them than either the Buddha's or Daniel's, in service to a very different objective from theirs. It definitely doesn't progress through to the end of the path, as those late stages are way too far gone to serve my purpose. Rather, I suspect that it stops at the stages that are most conducive to its aims and cultivates them to a perverse perfection. But it also goes places I've never heard any contemplative practice dare to tread, so it probably steps outside the established maps entirely at points.
Here's how it conceptualizes and navigates the 3 Cs, for your consideration:
Anicca: Probably the most orthodox approach is taken toward this one. It's the least complicated of the three to begin with. Things don't truly last, no matter how hard you hold on. It really just is what it is. Its relevance is heavily amplified from the extreme longtermist perspective of this practice, though. Impermanence is truly experienced to the fullest over the geologic timescales I plan on, as I know nothing I hold dear is going to last longer than a drop in the bucket relative to that abyss of time. So the right outlook is simply to embrace impermanence and become one with it, never being unable to adapt to change. In an ironic twist, this makes one a sort of island of persistence in the midst of the ocean of transience. Thanks to anatta, a perfectly coherent internal continuity can be maintained, possibly indefinitely, without necessarily preserving any one aspect. You, too, can be Theseus' ship.
The only type of change that's anathema to the practice is any sort of hard discontinuity of knowledge between physical lives or discarnate inter-lives. This is strictly speaking a fetter, an attachment preventing absolute equanimity toward anicca, but we don't want to measure up to abstract ideals, we want to do effective practice. The entire point of it is to stabilize and perpetuate the concrete firsthand metaphysical process knowledge that many reincarnated children display. A practice is not effective if it attains equanimity with what renders it ineffective. If this practice doesn't abhor such hard discontinuities, it isn't much of a practice at all, because the discontinuity prevents any further development of the practice.
Dukkha: "Remembah, boyz, dere ain't no such thing az enuff dukkha! Wut we need iz MORE DUKKHA!"
That about sums it up, with a fittingly Orkish delivery for a practice that's brutal yet cunnin'. You didn't hear that wrong, MORE dukkha. HERESY! First thing, I'm not a masochist who wants life to suck. I don't think "suffering" is a good translation of dukkha, because we colloquially define that word as "severe pain or sorrow to a point that impedes normal functioning". That, obviously, is not one of the characteristics of all experience. How I read it is in the sense of "dissatisfaction, struggle", which absolutely is, and I know that firsthand. In my first thread here, I described my earliest experience of existence in-utero, in which this sense of imperfection was utterly absent. I was truly satisfied, such that I could not imagine the very concept of wanting. That's adukkha. It does exist, but no longer can once a being has been exposed to external reality. But while I know for a fact I can never escape the dissatisfaction, I cannot help but keep up the endless struggle to satisfy. And you don't need to have prenatal memories to feel like you're perpetually lacking something, always want more than you have, never feel complete. Everyone does. That is dukkha. It is all existence. The struggle is real. Resistance is futile.
I wouldn't have it any other way. Wait, what?!
A central refrain in the field of reincarnation case research (henceforth RR) is the theme of "unfinished business". People come back, and retain past-life memories, to fulfill some desire left unrequited from the first life. This is one of the most robustly demonstrated findings in RR. It could be construed in karmic terms, but is really just basic psychology. In fact, RR has reduced the entire concept of karma as an operative force in metaphysics down to unremarkable human psychology. I agree with this interpretation. My innovation of this "unfinished business" axiom is to give myself unfinishable business, and as much of it as possible. My practice not only attains equanimity with dukkha, but goes where mortals fear to tread and embraces dukkha. It seeks to understand what causes me the most dukkha, the most deeply unsatisfactory, unceasing craving, and lean all the way into it. True total satisfaction is not real; temporarily perceived satisfaction is anathema. At the bottom of it, dukkha is a driving force. It is the creative power behind all reasons to go on forever. It is the killer of rest. There's no rest for me. Only wrath.
Anatta: First of all, the inane physicalist bastardizations of anatta that are popular in modern times are low-effort frivolity that does a great dishonor to the actual profundity of the Buddha's teaching. I will not debate this point.
Anatta deserves its full due consideration in the context of the metaphysical structure it operates alongside. At the bottom of it, what it's about is the impossibility of empirically identifying anything we can call a self. The deeper we inspect whatever we want to identify with a self, the more we understand it can't possibly be a self or part of a self, because that thing could change completely or have been different to begin with, and you wouldn't be any less you. Every single thing you identify with a self could simultaneously be different than it is, and you'd still be just as much you. I didn't even have 99% of those things yet before I was born, but I was still 100% me! What we think of as a self is a construct as entirely artificial as the idea that a specific ship once belonged to Theseus. We are individuals, and thanks to metaphysical science, we know we'll remain individuals. But what makes us so is unknowable to us.
My practice directly confronts the illusion of selfhood, but doesn’t abandon it as something undesirable or useless. It does reject the conventional single-lifetime social identity. But it emphasizes that realizing the fundamental truth of anatta renders the self-construct infinitely malleable, enabling it to be commandeered and repurposed to incredibly useful ends. With regard to surface-level identity, my method is to identify only with features that aren't bound to the circumstances of a particular life, and can easily be carried over to the next, so as to construct a self that stays stable at least over the short term of centuries or millennia.
But of course, anatta runs much deeper. I know that nothing I can observe is me or part of me, it's just pieces of non-self information in orbit around whatever actually makes me a unique instance of consciousness, and those orbiting pieces can thus be manipulated in a directed and detached manner. As such, I also reject the notion that human nature is immutable; the only traits that are truly fundamental are those which are necessarily common to all possible entities. However, as with surface identity markers, these lower-order traits can be reorganized to ones that are more optimized for stable reincarnating, all thanks to my best friend anatta. As with my other best friend dukkha, my practice not only attains equanimity with anatta, but is deeply indebted to it for its instrumental adaptations.
All the above makes up at minimum a very significant proportion of how my practice works, and I think this is a good place to leave off. It clearly uses the tools of insight practice, by my assessment, but is much more about instrumentalizing said insight for a unifying purpose than insight for its own sake, and explicitly sanctions use of extreme force to impose its devices on me, because the objective is of unparalleled importance. Hopefully I wrote it all in a way that makes sense.
Is there any way I could configure it more efficiently, in the opinion of the experienced readers here? What would you do for a personal practice if your ultimate goal was turning yourself into a reincarnating Terminator?
