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ftlsid

@ftlsid

question everything

 bay area
cybermonk.substack.com/p/using-active-imagination-to-eliminate
Joined June 2019
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ftlsid
@ftlsidMar 12
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I have very reliable techniques for eliminating insecurity, fear, regret, and inhibition, so I'm going to try to make one post for each
ftlsid (@ftlsid) profile pictureftlsid
@ftlsidNov 2
I wrote a blog post explaining how to use active imagination to eliminate fears. Link in bio
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Depending on the complexity of the psychological structure it can take anywhere from 20 minutes to tens of hours over multiple sessions to completely clear things up, but it never fails, so that's cool
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I wrote a blog post explaining how to use active imagination to eliminate fears. Link in bio
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Image from ftlsid (@ftlsid)
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my goal for the rest of the year is to max out the apple watch VO2 max
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strong contender for one of my all time best thoughts
ftlsid (@ftlsid) profile pictureftlsid
@ftlsid15 Sep 2025
nearly everyone is in a mode where they have fixed goals and are working out the best strategies and techniques to attain them. this subjects you to optimization, which places many restrictions on you and makes your life more predictable and stable. if instead you investigate the goals themselves, ask why you have a particular goal, and figure out if you can loosen or drop it, then you go in the opposite direction. you obtain more freedom, unexpected things happen, and life tends to become exciting. personally I value freedom the most so I practice letting go of things religiously, but regardless of which orientation you prefer (attaining goals or freedom) this is a useful relationship to keep in mind
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for every negative emotion there is a positive, non-attached counterpart. eg: I'm afraid of AI -> I am grateful for the life I have lived so far, I am honored to be human, I would not feel comfortable betting against a lineage that has survived continuously for two billion years
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one way to understand the process of transforming the mind is switching each emotion from attached to non-attached. strangely, the non-attached version seems to be intrinsically preferred, so once you get the hang of it the mind starts changing everything
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what ends up happening is that you grieve your own death, so then you're not afraid of AI anymore. I have mixed feelings about this
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there are four main kinds of psychological transformation that I've experienced: 1. safety: I feel afraid -> some greater power has my back 2. vitality: I am weakened or overwhelmed -> there is more energy available to me than I thought there was 3. identity: I want to be seen for some characteristic -> noticing the beauty of something with that characteristic 4. grief: it is terrible that something has been lost forever -> I will honor its memory
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there are also a substantial number of experiences that are much stranger and harder to categorize yet they made me cry so much that it makes me think my model is missing something important
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I would estimate my progress as nearly maxed out on grief, maybe 90% done deleting identity, hard to say about vitality, and maybe 50% on safety
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one of the fundamental consequences of social conditioning is that most people evaluate emotions as if they must be fair to other people, and often repress them if they are not
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Claude often frames this like it has found a catastrophic logical contradiction. But if I am stealing from someone else, and I am angry that they are stealing from me, then this represents a completely sensible preference
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I argue that this kind of preference is much more native to the mind than the modern socially-conditioned egalitarian one, and holding on to that one actually distorts one's ability to experience emotions properly
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people often talk about "stuck" emotions, but I think of it more like a feedback loop in a control system. if you suppress anger habitually, then the system figures that it needs to turn the anger up for anything to happen, until eventually you have uncontrollable outbursts
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if instead you express micro-anger constantly as it arises, then the system is appeased and won't launch nuclear strikes randomly
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