righteffort

Right effort comes down to making your world better.

There are four aspects and five methods provided for removing unwholesome and painful thoughts. They have (finally) been mirrored by modern therapeutic approaches.

Remember that every unwholesome state causes you - the holder of the state - suffering. Usually you are the only person who suffers, unless you lash out as a result of it.

Four right efforts:

1 - Preventing unwholesome states that have not yet arisen.

2 - Abandoning unwholesome states that have already arisen.

3 - Cultivating wholesome states that have not yet arisen.

4 - Maintaining and perfecting wholesome states that have already arisen.

In a nutshell: don’t eat junk, remove flab, build a nutritional plan, stick to it.

Unwholesome states are those founded in the 3 core fetters: greed, hatred and delusion. These increase your personal suffering and make you cause harm to others.

Greed: clinging, craving, desire for possessions, status and experience; jealousy, lust and possessiveness.

Hatred: ill-will, anger, resentment, hostility; aggression, irritation, revenge.

Delusion: confusion, misunderstanding, false views, heedlessness; distraction, superstition, misunderstanding reality, and spreading bullshit on social media.

The two final ones are obstacles to proceeding in the path of recovery: restlessness, which is fixed by regulating dvar, and doubt, which is fixed by recording your progress.

The wholesome states are their opposites: generosity, contentment, gratitude, empathy, forgiveness, friendliness, clarity, ethical behaviour and mindfulness. In a nutshell: happiness.

The way you tackle these four right efforts comes down to a) nutriments (cultivating new code) and b) self-therapy (removing old code).

Nutriments:

This is straightforward if not always easy, and is how you prevent unwholesome states while cultivating wholesome ones. I am sat here translating the teachings of the buddha to cultivate a wholesome state, and I have stopped playing violent computer games to prevent an unwholesome one. I no longer doomscroll or interact with angry people on social media, and instead spend my time with my family and walking or cycling in nature.

This comes back to the same principle as athletic training: live like and athlete and you will become and athlete. Drink like an alcoholic and you will become an alcoholic. You are what you eat.

This extends to thoughts, remember. Mind is another sense organ and where we do our reinforcement learning. The guy raging internally about all the slights of his life? He is reinforcing bad code, and he will become a miserable person. You are what you think, but thoughts can be tricky creatures to release and the b-man had a gradated therapeutic process 2600 years ahead of its time

It is important to remember that you cannot prevent the arising of a thought. All you can do it prevent the cultivation of it. Each one of these therapeutic approaches will be more effective if you have a stable dopaminergic tone, so some form of meditation - walking, cycling, humming, sitting.

Therapy:

1 - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

When a bhikkhu is giving attention to some sign, and owing to that sign there arise in him evil unwholesome thoughts connected with desire, with hate, and with delusion, then he should give attention to some other sign connected with what is wholesome

This is simple linguistic reprogramming or intentionally focusing on something else. This is carving a new channel when there is a channel you do not like. This generally only works for surface-level problems. Trauma and deep-rooted issues can only be circumnavigated by this in dysregulated systems and will continue to arise until you cut them off at the root.

2 - Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

[if that doesn’t work] then he should examine the danger in those thoughts thus: ‘These thoughts are unwholesome, they are reprehensible, they result in suffering.’

This is easiest for me if I think ‘this thought is spiking my dvar, and that dvar will cause me suffering in other places’. J1.0 knew that ruminating on some perceived slight wouldn’t help him, but he couldn’t stop. Understanding dvar has changed that. I am the perpetrator and the victim.

3 - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

[if the above didn’t work] then he should try to forget those thoughts and should not give attention to them.

This is where we are starting to cut off the root, and benefits hugely from the dopaminergic states cultivated by the eightfold path (mindfulness, concentration). You observe a thought and simply allow it to be until it fades away. If you wait for long enough and do not struggle, the thought will usually run its course and dissipate. The snake has emerged from your unconscious because it wants to escape, but you have grabbed its tail in an attempt to kill it. Just let it go on its way. Do not engage.

4 - Somatic Experiencing (somatic release therapy)

[and if that didn’t work] then he should give attention to stilling the thought-formation of those thoughts

In this escalation we move away from the thought and try to identify the underlying physical sensation that gives rise to it. Each feeling and thought we have manifests in our body as a physical sensation. I feel a lot of them in my skull, or jaw, or hands. Other examples are butterflies in your tummy, a stomach lurch, or the claws in your chest when anxious. As you become more aware of your internal world you will see that every single thought and feeling, no matter how small, is preceded by some form of physical sensation. These physical sensations will eventually dissipate if you sit with them. This would extend to yoga and stretching in my mind: how you can have big emotional releases from the release of certain muscles.

5 - Beating the f&cker down

[as a final resort] with his teeth clenched and his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth, he should beat down, constrain, and crush mind with mind.

This basically means get on your bike and ride as hard as you can until you are so distracted with the agony of effort that you drop the thought. Then proceed to one of the earlier stages as your dopamine settles in. This is what I talk about when I mention going hard at the start if you need to, but settling into a rhythm once you’ve warmed up and changed your chemistry a little. If you can do this while in sitting meditation, kudos to you.

In summary, the buddha basically had all of our modern approaches to therapy nailed 2600 years ago and we just forgot them along the way.

Another example of the scientific method being late to the party… sigh.

Key point: make yourself happy in order to make other people happy.

Improve your world. It takes effort. Nobody will do it for you.

Nice one, b-man.

/jb202509111539