The quiet art of attention

As much as I love the sentiment, these sorts of pieces (written or verbal) always contain contradictions, usually important ones relative to the claims.

These contradictions (?) may be rooted in the reader’s assumptions about the world: the writer says A and B, but to the reader B implies (not A) because of their world view. In short they might not be actual contradictions.

This might seem very vague but a discussion on something so first-person as the mind is ripe for that kind of thing.

Which is resolved with dialogue. If the contradictions are brought up.

For me contradictions are unavoidable when speaking about the mind. Usually the aim is not to give you specific objective truths, but to evoke something in your mind that feels evidently true to you. That is why usually the most effective communication tools that are used are metaphors. And communicating that way correctly is very very difficult. That means that most of these sort of pieces are going to be very bad... But I actually think that this one is not that bad

> For me contradictions are unavoidable when speaking about the mind.

"It (seems like it) is my opinion that {some opinion}" has very few ways of going wrong, and has the side benefit of reminding one that they're dealing with a subjective map, which is in part the goal of most authors of such pieces, imho anyways.

I think mindfulness gang could up their game.

> Which is resolved with dialogue. If the contradictions are brought up.

In my experience noting contradictions usually leads to evasive memes and anger/unhappiness.

It's a writing choice at the end of the day. If you have to spend so much time reminding people that this is your opinion, you're going to get the same criicism of pacing and meandering that any other fruity prose does to people who want to get straight to the point.

Sometimes you just need a footnote in your profile of "thoughts are of my own" and to not worry about the peanut gallery.

If one follows this general approach (most do in my experience), contradictions may indeed be (metaphysically) unavoidable.

Then mum’s the word.

Cutting off access to an entire region of potential upward utility...perhaps permanently if no one is willing to fight the consensus.

I don’t understand what you are saying.

Contradiction is socially disruptive, and ignored/policed quite thoroughly, denying access to Humans of pretty substantial portions of reality which is instead represented by illusory proxies/heuristics.

You’re talking in riddles even more than the most hermit mindfulness practitioner.

An example: if religion shut down early practitioners of science, do you believe humanity would have missed out on any valuable knowledge?

Or, how about if science had only received 1% of the total funding it has?