OLD LINKS BELOW
Nexus State Theory – A wrong turn.
How this Work is like Science – Some similarities between this theory and science.
An Introduction to Scripts
Three Rivers – Three “rivers” or approaches to society: fear, collaboration, and liberation.
Scripts – How everything is related to scripts and scriptlessness.
Scriptlessness Without Scripts – A few approaches to scriptlessness.
The Origin of Scripts and Scriptlessness – Where scripts and scriptlessness come from.
Exercises
The Self Scan Exercise – An exercise about identifying one’s thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, history, values, and control.
Meditation – Focusing the attention in order to let go of thoughts and to see stories about oneself in a different way.
Connection Exercises – Things to try in order to get better at connecting.
Music and Nature – A list of further exercises.
It is tempting for some intellectuals to gravitate to the mind, where they may be more skilled. However, valuing the body has health benefits as well as egalitarian benefits.
One goal of the body / mind balance is to regulate emotional valence and arousal. Valence means feeling positively or negatively; arousal means feeling energetic or relaxed.
Meditation or mindfulness is an activity that takes us out of our mind and into our body while relaxing us. It contributes positively to valence (by reducing the suffering that comes with overidentification with our thoughts). It is relaxing because it involves sitting quietly or moving slowly. It is related to the body in the sense of breath (conventional, breathing meditation) or feet (with walking meditation).
Exercise is an activity that also takes us out of our mind and into our body while arousing us. It contributes positively to valence, too. It seems likely that the needed balance between exercise and meditation depends on whether a person generally feels over-aroused or under-aroused. I also suspect that both meditation and exercise do not simply provide regulation in that moment (with exercise arousing us only for the next 30-60 minutes, let’s say) but rather provide a pattern that our mind and body can make use of as needed.
Dereificationis a philosophy where one is conscious of the fact that one’s thoughts can be misleading. This may not be in the sense of being literally false; it can also be in the sense of being unhelpful. For instance, one can feel extreme despair over something that has really gone wrong – yet the despair is not warranted because the problem is out of our control and/or not as serious as we think. Dereification has the effect of taking us out of our mind, yet putting us right back in our mind. (We let go of one set of thoughts but return to another set of thoughts.) As such, it can be helpful, but fundamentally does not shift us on the body/mind axis.
Mentalization is another word for dereification. Another way of thinking about this, however, is that mentalizing and dereification can be consequences of meditation and exercise, rather than just a kind of philosophy. In Vipassana meditation, we focus on our thoughts and realize that they are not real. We might think of this as entering ink mode – where we see that the words on the page are “just ink” and are not real.
Nexus State Theory 