Meditation and upgrades are not a guarantee of a better world. They are just a guarantee that you will reprogram your sim, either gradually or explosively.
You need to be careful what seeds you plant before you start to water them.
The first noble truth about impermanence needs to be central to what you choose.
If you plant seeds of greed, you will become empty inside and will hurt more when things inevitably decay.
If you plant seeds of beauty you will view yourself as ugly and become disgusted at your visage as the years go by.
If you plant seeds of productivity you will never feel that anything you have done is enough, and in an age of AI you will die very quickly.
If you plant seeds of competition, you will always need to be the best, and that just won't happen.
None of these things are sustainable.
This is why people say the only path to enlightenment is the path of the buddha: because that is the path focuses 100% on the elimination of suffering.
The way you eliminate suffering is by eliminating greed.
You eliminate the need to always have things, including a version of your self, which will inevitably pass on.
You eliminate the need to always be number one because nobody will be champion forever.
You eliminate the need to make people happy as a criterium for your own joy because that simply wont happen.
What you do is you create your own moral framework and you plant it deep.
You look at what causes you suffering, and how it is impermanent and transient, and you plant the reality of that transience deep.
I got into such a pickle because I was doing all my unwitting zone-2 meditation while always focusing on self-betterment, success, and people-pleasing. This became a feedback loop; I can’t tell you how crippling my RSD was toward the end.
It took a full encounter with nibbana to change this conditioning precisely because the programming was so ingrained.
I have to stress that this conditioning would have made me kill myself within the year if I had not managed to re-write it.
You need the ethical framework.
Once you plant a seed, there is no guarantee you will be able to remove it.
Good news: there are plenty of ethical frameworks out there to choose from. They are just covered in religious jargon.
Here’s where your favourite LLM could come in useful - to the core teachings. But make sure you give yourself a weighting of 1.0, or you’re going to be people-pleasing forever.
If you want something super simple, check out my ‘morality’ rule on the fundamentals page.
These fundamentals, and the pairs from the Buddha, are how I fixed my broken programming.
Now I am building on that to cultivate things further. I still have desires and irritability and various other fetters. But this is what the buddha said to expect.
This is why I am translating his teachings over on the neobuddhism page.
B-man said that total enlightenment comes in four stages of removing algorithms. I think there may be significantly more. And I think if you’re cautious, you never even need to encounter nibbana to end up in a perfectly nice and happy world.
Be careful what seeds you plant.
The bad ones only hurt you.
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