# wringing clothes ###### (a letter to Chet Richards) So a little progress update on [“wringing clothes”](https://www.facebook.com/artem.grinblat/posts/10158039562623556), which is a technique that entails a double focus on both the purpose of the present moment and on the implicit orientation. --- I now think of “wringing clothes” as a kind of alternative to OODA loop. You see, OODA loop is not very practical as a technique. It is too complex to employ for moment-to-moment decisions (which I think you've also mentioned, citing that pilots don't "use" OODA during the fights), and what's more, decisions to a large degree happen automatically, *before* they are consciously registered (cf. Left-brain Interpreter, cf. Change Phenomena 2012 Kev Sheldrake), so to match the OODA theoretical side with a side that is practical - we need a technique that's oriented towards improving the *automatic* decision-making process! There's an interesting example in martial arts of influencing the automatic decisions: chi! Chi can be seen as a *metaphor* that allows a martial artist to think, not in terms of manually controlling their muscles, but in terms of setting a *goal* and having it achieved automatically. "*The skill consists in directing the energy, or chi, through intention, and the intention then directs the body. The aim is not to use the body directly, with brute muscular force, but to use the will to direct the energy, forming a sensitive feeling of movement; then the physical movement follows*" (Sheldrake, Ways to Go Beyond) The “wringing clothes” is similar in that it doesn't try to manually operate the OODA loop but instead invests the psychic energy (focus, attention) in the decision-making process (on the opposite sides of it, purpose of present moment and implicit orientation). Using it for the last month I'd say it's a viable self-hypnosis technique, showing good results. Previously I was using the plain OODA loop for that, repeating the “*Observe, Orient, Decide, Act*” mantra (repeating stuff as a way to use self-hypnosis was popularized by Émile Coué) now I use a simpler “*Moment, Orientation*” mantra, it's shorter and it includes the important “orientation” bit which was missing from the plain OODA version. Using self-hypnosis to channel the psychic energy (to direct the cathexis) that way - considerably improves the decision making ability, in my experience. --- “*Feelings are intrinsically about something: making it possible for an organism to gravitate towards states of at least good and preferably optimal life regulation*” (Man, Damasio, 2019, Homeostasis and soft robotics) It naturally follows from the “wringing clothes” technique, from delegating the decision-making process to the extended computational capacity of preverbal cognition, that decision making begins to (re)align with the bodily feelings and emotions, leading to the so-called "embodied cognition". Good decisions now match good feelings and emotions, bad decisions are naturally troubling, and the negative emotions are now helpful in overcoming the obstacles. > Many thanks-- I think you're on to something. Obviously decision conflict can be a big problem, even fatal -- perhaps most famously the Mann Gulch disaster (https://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/rid=1255442493375_13600551_21670/Mann%20Gulch%20Disaster%20(Weick).pdf) This exercise of affective networks and of working hand in hand with them should really help with the critical situations such as the Mann Gulch disaster. When the decision making is disconnected from the emotions, a critical situation might easily result in emotions "breaking the dam" and overriding cognition. When the embodied cognition is practiced, however, it goes both way: as we learn to listen to emotions, we also learn to influence and direct them. A person who practices embodied cognition should thus have an easier time recognizing the early onsets of an emotional crisis and “surfing” it. --- > “I knew I had to transform Alcoa,” O'Neill told me. “But you can't *order* people to change. That's not how the brain works. So I decided I was going to start by focusing on one thing. If I could start disrupting the habits around one thing, it would spread throughout the entire company.” > Keystone habits start a process that, over time, transforms everything. These quotes from Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit highlight the value of having something simple, something one can form a habit of, in order for the desired changes to occur. The “*Moment, Orientation*” self-hypnosis mantra has certainly fit that bill for me. And I'd be curious to hear of other “chain reaction” habits that people use to practically employ OODA loop. > “We were basically ceding decision making to a process that occurred without actually thinking” Per what I call the “optimization principle” both people and organizations tend to replace *thinking* with habitual routines. To a degree this might be a result of how we allocate psychic energy: by focusing solely on the end results, for example, we're cutting the psychic budget from the very *thinking* that is needed to get us to said results. The habits are a part of such a budget, where thinking has to [compete](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_constraint#Individual_choice) with other budget outlays. The habitual invocation of the OODA loop might thus help us retain the ability to think.
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Example unpacking a thought with AI.

8/15/2023
2022-12-11

As the “will” and the “word” are separate words, we would usually think of them as different. But there might be a “sunk” or hidden spectrum connecting the two. Thus repeated patterns would often offload into the basal ganglia habits, kinetic energy of motivation. A word picked by “system two” is picked up then by “system one”. Namely, the words are not just passive thinking implements, but are backed also by the unconscious processes formed around them. As Yeats suggested, this connection between a word and a Force can span past a local brain box and into the patterns shared throughout collective consciousness. This sheds some light onto the surge of power experienced by some at the mention of a powerful name, such as of Jesus Christ.Per Ezra Pound, “A god is an eternal state of mind”, and as such we can compare it with a habit that gained some power through repetition. “We went too far to give up who we are”. Sheldrake suggests that the physical laws are such habits, and so a force of a god can be compared to that of a physical law. This might be what Zelazny was intuiting through the evocation of a Pattern in The Chronicles of Amber.“In My Father’s house are many dwelling places” (John 14:2) we can read as: there is space, in collective consciousness, for the cognitive processes constituting the Kingdom, and the movement into those “dwelling places” hints of the accumulation of such processes.That is, a simple combination of letters, such as the “Jesus Christ”, can be a bookmark or key into entire cluster of minds mingling around it, and into kinetic power bound in such a cluster. But a large power can be a blunt tool. That is, it can cancel itself out. Can be a power of a car wreck. (cf. “Swan, Pike and Crawfish”). Thus the power of the word “Father” includes the power of forces which might oppose each other (words “Jesus” and “Satan”, or “good” and “evil”, are typically seen as such opposites). “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste” (Mat 12:25), and that is the kingdom of Father / Abraxos. Immense and impassive power of a “Not-I” in Chuang Tzu. Or to draw another analogy, Death / Time / Cronus conquers everything: a good and an evil would equally be consumed by it. Like the wise man of Chuang Tzu, Death has a varied taste (Revelation 3:16).

2/5/2023
abundance mindset (or violence)

the Kingdom of Heaven is led by force and the violent are seizing it (Mat 11:12) I think that in 3-74, at the height of despair and fear and grieving I stumbled into the Kingdom, stumbled around for a while and then stumbled back out, none the wiser as to how I got there .. Now I don’t see or understand anything. (Exegesis) Both Dick and a couple of other authors point towards a general personality failure and psychosis being at times instrumental in unlocking shamanic experience. In our case, there was never a problem, and we didn't approach the Kingdom with our hand stretched out, as a beggar, but rather from the position of force, and out of a scientific curiosity about the borders and experiences we'd reach through a combination of hypnosis and magickal beliefs (as opposed to the scientific reductionism we've been familiar with). Our hacker-like persistence in this can be in turn compared with monastic tradition, of achieving spiritual experiences through “goal-directed striving” rather than passively or by accident. But we are likely going much further with this in terms of N-of-1 on-demand reproducibility.

2/5/2023
2022-10-21

“The harvest is the end of the age” (Mat 13:39). It is often the assumption that --- nAI, bible ------- the end of the world will be a final battle, or a grand apocalyptic event. But what if it is a gradual process, like the decline of the empire, or the death of a marriage? What if, instead of a war, there is a process The “age” (αἰῶνός) could be the one of Pisces, or simply of a technological paradigm. --- nAI, bible -------

10/22/2022
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