Subliminal Talk

Difference most definitely noticed.

New journal for the new version, since that's Shannon's preference. I usually lean toward reporting well after having started the sub, since I'm more about tracking the past that's actually happened than about prematurely hyping the future awesome that may not, but there's too much to report already:

• Auto-config seems to work. I know my instincts and my internal progress bars. This is not them. After the first loop, I was certain of the listening schedule that I should run, and it was neither by way of my usual signposts nor by posted loops/days. I'm going to delay the use of my progress bars once again, but I really want to explore this unfamiliar certainty of scheduling. (Taking full responsibility on deviating from the instructions.)
  
• Calm is appearing as instant-on/instant-off. Can't begin to guess to what others are experiencing, but, for me, stress and tension vanish while I'm listening. When the last loop ends, the weight of the world returns. I'd love to try sleeping while listening, but logistics preclude that.
  
• Dreams have been more involved and complex, but they're still not scary. Still lacking in zombies and action film motifs, but they always are. It's more about solving what would ordinarily be stressful situations, just at a slightly more social level than my daily life involves.
  
• On the first night, I'd had a sensory experience similar to my first night on E2, years ago. On the first night of E2, I'd had a feeling of being held down underwater, as if a current were washing over me. With OF v2's first night, I'd had a strong mental image of my anxiety (played, curiously, by a frenetic fraggle) whooping and bouncing off of the walls, floor, and ceiling of a cage. Both events had occurred at the precipice of sleep. With E2, it'd been while listening, but, with OF v2, I'm not listening during sleep. Multiple plausible interpretations come to mind, but I don't consider any one uniquely correct.
  
• As with v1, fleeting opportunities are still being taken, and the decisions continue, thus far, to be good ones. Interestingly, in the past, I've skipped several choices that, even when backed by trustworthy data, seemed too rushed, and, if I'd observed them in others, I'd have considered acting on that sort of hastiness to be prompted by the fear of missing out. Now, between v1 and v2, I've been appreciating that, for better or worse, some choices simply have a narrow window of opportunity and that seizing such a moment, when visible, isn't necessarily prompted by fear, just limited availability.
  

In general, there's a strong sense of certainty on v2, albeit only about very specific things, but it quenches doubt in ways that make ASC and SE's increased certainty seem tame to me by comparison. No idea if fears are being removed, but I do like how OF v2 feels to run.

I won't be surprised if any or all these things fade in the coming weeks as new thoughts/feelings become familiar/normal. But it's still an interesting start.

Additional observations:

• Friday was a day of extreme exhaustion. Nothing to do with holiday stresses, since it's not my holiday. It was the closest seen (in the execution of any version of OF) to tiring myself out with execution, but cherry-picking the result that you've been told to expect doesn't automatically guarantee cause and effect. It happened once over five months, and a single exhausted day doesn't suddenly mean that a version of OF is responsible. Nor is Overcoming Wakefulness the actual goal of the sub. I'll concede that cause and effect might be possible, just not irrefutable.
  
• Had a dream that nudged one of the big fears. Not unheard of, but a glimpse of one of the big ones (possibly the biggest) may mean that this one's finally made it close to the menu. Not necessarily onto the menu, but... maybe, I don't know, into the pantry? Can't say that I'm looking forward to that battle, especially given its emotional complexity, but living on the other side of it would be liberating. Alternatively, if that battle doesn't actually take place while on OF, I won't be surprised either, as it's not why I'm running OF, but, in the meantime, it does make for a convenient mile marker.
  
• Dreams got even stranger. One about dismembering superhero and supervillain action figures like they were voodoo dolls (fictional mythology style, no offense intended toward anyone's real-life culture or traditions) because the "real" ones were expected to arrive? Another where I was experiencing already-dead family members dying again, but, this time, they were doing so in my presence, almost contagiously or sequentially? Not my usual.
  
• Unfounded sadness, tears, etc. Like on E1/E2. Did not encounter it on OF v1. How much of it is circumstantial and how much is sub-related is unclear.
  

This run's no longer reminding me of my E2 ride and is quickly beginning to remind me of my run on the original UD. During that run, I'd felt like I was progressively discovering that I was a repository for toxins. Now, it's as if I'm recognizing that I'm a repository for horrible imagined outcomes. There's a familiar revival of not liking the dirtbag who's apparently always existed beneath the person that I think that I am -- who, in turn, is already a person that I think less of than others do. Shining light on the parts of myself that I hide from myself (self-preservation?) always seems like a humbling journey.

The depth of emotional introspection is something that I haven't felt during these subs in a while. I can no longer say that I like how I feel on OF v2, but I can still say that I appreciate its effectiveness. I'm also unsure why my dream framing during IML subs seems so rooted in mid-to-late 20th century media studios (Hammer, Hanna-Barbera), but it may just relate to my childhood TV/movie/comics immersion, back when the ideas being revised were originally formed.

Still holding to the personal listening schedule that'd seemed to assert itself on day one of v2. No extra loops, no extra days on/off. Just consistency.

Haven't posted in a while, mostly because I'd been a bit too preoccupied with getting in my own way. (As a reminder, I'd previously taken and continue to take full responsibility for having deviated from the standard listening instructions.)

Unfortunately, I'd forgotten that humans are adaptive organisms, that the "only constant" is change, and that even cruise control (before the past decade or two and the existence of self-driving cars, at least) required frequent manual intervention and readjustment.

Without realizing it, I'd expected the auto-config module and the set-it-and-forget-it directive to mix smoothly, and, not unlike my experiences of ignoring my instincts on OF v1, I'd ended up ignoring both auto-config readjustments and my own instincts after the first day:

1. When auto-config seemed to suggest an initial listening pattern, that pattern worked very well for the first 2-3 cycles.
   
2. When auto-config seemed to suggest downshifting so soon after those first few cycles, I mistook it for resistance and stubbornly refused to decelerate.
   
3. When my own instincts started throwing up "over-listening" indicators (I'm one for whom "carpet-bombing" on 5.5G+ either backfires noticeably or has little effect), I mistook it for normalization of the initial positive effects and continued to trust the original auto-config scheduling.
   
4. When various unrelated aspects of my life kept throwing the phrase "Too Much Too Soon" at me, as if it were "Bad Wolf" in a 2005 sci-fi TV series, I still failed to connect the dots, clinging to "It's just a forced march, like E1" while enduring the increasingly miserable/uncomfortable spiral downward.
   
5. When circumstances finally disrupted the original listening pattern, execution quickly improved, and I regained enough clarity to put the ignored puzzle pieces together. To clarify: I'm not underdoing my listening now; I was just overdoing it previously.
   

The first lesson that I've taken from all of this is that, if I follow auto-config, set-it-and-forget-it may need to become forget-it-until-you-need-to-reset-it. Readjustments, for me at least, may be necessary sooner than expected, especially if I haven't even finished my initial calibrations on a brand new sub.

The second lesson, the one that I keep failing to learn, is that ignoring my instincts regarding sub scheduling doesn't provide very good results.

My instincts didn't disagree with auto-config's presumed initial scheduling (since they typically require more sample data than the new impulse needed), and they'd even seemed to agree with auto-config's possible rescheduling. Whether I'm trying to set a good example or exhibiting curiosity about a new tool in the toolbox, it would probably serve me well to ensure that, in both cases, listening to myself remains a higher priority. Otherwise, it might be a little too similar to going on a road trip and deciding to use the windshield only as a means of reclassifying the stopped car in front of me as a speed bump.

Still, mistakes are an integral part of the learning process. I'd rather grow from what I'm learning than punish myself for not already knowing it.

Autoconfig causes the program's optimal usage patterns to be determined for you by your subconscious and the reported to your conscious. It can't be that if you're executing, that your instincts will disagree with it, because it will be your instincts reporting it to your conscious mind.

When you start a sub like OF, it will initially encounter a specific level of resistance, which, if it is used correctly, it can overcome. After that causative fear has been dismantled, the variables will naturally change. You may encounter another fear underneath it that requires even more exposure, or you may find that what remains is not best served by the amount you need to overcome the previous fear. So autoconfig will then report the necessary adjustments. It can go down for legitmate reasons, but this is genuinely confusing for everyone. So don't blame yourself too much for thinking it was resistance.

I am working on making it clearer for the conscious mind what is going on. But congratulations on being self aware enough to understand what happened, and learn from it.

And I think that's a lot of where I'd gotten tripped up. What I'd seemingly identified as the auto-config communicates very differently (more directly and predictively) than the methods and timing already/previously in use by my instincts (more indirectly and real-time).

Thanks to your explanation, I now understand that these two distinct messaging methods were coming from the same source, like a voicemail message behaving very differently than a text message. Their function, intention, and medium create inherent differences, and those differences would naturally lead to respective deviation between the "interfaces" --  even if the underlying message had been been nearly  identical.

Even if that weren't the case, I've been taught repeatedly by the reactions of co-workers that it's often easier for someone to continue to relate to a familiar interface than a new interface, even if the newer interface is simpler, clearer, more expeditious, and more objectively intuitive than the older one.

Encountering confusion while acclimating to a new tool, even if the new tool is more useful or powerful, isn't terribly unexpected, and that does seem to describe what happened.

And I'm overdue for a few more observations again, I think. This week's stand-out volunteers (with a lengthy amount of elaboration) have been:

• Encountering more fearfulness and less emotional self-control than usual. On the surface, that might seem like the opposite of what I'd want, and, for all that I know, it may be exactly what it seems. But, that possibility aside, it's no less plausible that the increased fearfulness could follow directly from the outcomes of decisions that I'd never have risked making before (in other words, fearlessly choosing metaphorical room B might result in new scares that room A was never capable of hosting) and that the reduced self-control might be a side effect of facing my emotions more directly (taking down filters that I originally put up out of fear). Or a handful of other potential explanations, such as regressing and finding a creative way to excuse it.
  
  Either way, I'm not rushing to the superficial conclusion that 6 months on 2 OF versions is making things worse, even if my mid-process results might seem to paint that picture. Two things that look the same from the outside may be very different on the inside.
  
  
• Still not feeling any more freedom than I'd felt before I'd started. As before, I'm not proclaiming loyalty to any one explanation. It could relate to baseline adjustment, incremental progress, or only a short distance covered. Or it could be because OF's suggestions are encouraging me to max out my efforts. Or because my standards, if not my expectations, keep me at arm's length from that freedom, feeling perpetual (if not verifiable) certainty that there's always more ground that could be covered. Or because of the Covid restrictions or my previous health-related limitations. Or, or, or.
  
  Plenty of answers, but, in the end, I have no idea which ones contribute the most. I know that there's a tendency to want a single, simple cause that explains everything about the effect, but effects are often a conglomeration of several contributing factors. So, in absence of wiser options, I'll fall back to persistence and process of elimination over time (if determining a cause is even necessary -- I suspect that it isn't), and I'll keep my mind optimistic that the process will get me closer to where I want to be, even if I never reach an imagined ultimate destination where I've finally run out of road.
  
  
• Continually being hit on the head with the irony in how much of what I have feels taken away by others insisting on what I "must" acquire instead. Or, more simply, I'm even more irritated than usual by the overused "everybody does/is/has/etc" being offered as a reason for me to do/be/have/etc. Throughout my life, I've made numerous decisions not to do/be/have numerous things (certain relationships, property, tools, territory, etc that others consider ubiquitous, mandatory, and desirable), as I find happiness in their absence, not their presence. One man's trash, everybody else's treasure.
  
  While unwanted intrusions into my material "needs" by others' values isn't even slightly new, my tolerance of it has been hitting new lows. To be clear, given recent popular controversies that I'd rather not mention, this lowered tolerance is about others invading my private choices, not about others encouraging public responsibility. My annoyance comes from the relentless expectation that I make choices that don't really benefit my life or anyone else's (with "everybody's doing it" as the only reason), not from health/lifestyle suggestions that have multiple (albeit debated) reasons behind them.
  
  And what's actually nagging at me is that I feel as if I'm being pressured to remove value from the few things in life that do matter to me and reassign that value to whatever cultural fad excites the supposed majority. Especially when there's more than enough value to go around. If I'm not presuming to tell others what they need (when I have no way of knowing what's right for them, specifically), I don't understand why I'm undeserving of reciprocal respect. To the best of my knowledge, what little I value isn't harming me or others. Not sure if this irritation relates directly or indirectly to OF (maybe a DRS-related suggestion?) or if this is just a pressure point that's aching more while under the increased stress of an OF run.
  
  
• Doing less "homework" before making decisions. Don't like this change much, as I'm reflexively reading it as increased carelessness and depleted work ethic, not fearlessness. And I have curiosity, passion, ambition, and several other motivators in my utility belt, not just fear, so reducing fear, unless it had been supporting mistake-aversion, needn't be all that demotivating on its own. Either way, adequate research has historically been how I've made more informed decisions and has, as far as I'm aware, reduced the negative impact of wonky interpretations and conclusion-jumping.
  
  Of course, the easy counter-argument against preparatory information-gathering, one which doesn't necessarily outweigh its benefits, is that so-called "informed" decisions may also be misinformed decisions. There can be a lot of difficulty in establishing the veracity of said information (beyond testing directly or indirectly, followed by success and failure), and the information's source may be incorrect, no matter how reputable or trustworthy I subjectively find them to be.
  
  It's (hopefully) safe to say that humans, even the most trustworthy of us, are fallible and may be likely to be wrong more often than we're right. As far as I can tell, we're frequently learning something new, re-learning what we thought we knew, or stubbornly refusing to learn or change what we think that we've learned already, often bragging about which one it is and "helpfully" trying to impart information to (read: foist our imperfect beliefs on) others that, in a more objective sense, isn't guaranteed to be helpful. To me, it's like saying, "This is what I'll eventually be wrong about in the future, but I'm definitely right about it today." That's why, even in my postings here, I try not to qualify things with more certainty than they've earned.
  
  But, to return to the counter-argument, more information can't easily be relied upon as being wholly true, wholly false, or a clearly-defined mix of the two, so being more informed doesn't necessarily increase accuracy as much as it increases perception of accuracy (or certainty of what isn't necessarily certain?). If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that people, both individually and collectively, appear to have an impressive capacity to blur the lines between facts themselves and their personal interpretations of (and conclusions about) those facts and what they supposedly mean. One blinding example of this seems to be when people cite sources, as they often do, to support conclusions not actually found within those sources, merely extrapolated (sometimes, very poorly) from their contents or, worse, from their title or abstract alone.
  
  Still, having more information ahead of a decision can improve the outcome, assuming that the person possesses more skill at critical thinking than at they do at demonstrating the Dunning-Kruger effect (a concept whose own supporting study has been debated as misinterpretation of the facts). In any case, doing more homework before making a decision can still confer benefit to a skilled critical thinker, even if it can also mislead an unpracticed one, and, whether I'm one or the other, increasingly skimming through the prep work doesn't really feel like a positive step. Even provisionally.
  

OF v3's imminent arrival seems like a great excuse to wrap up my v2 journal. It's been 9.5 months of OF in total, roughly 4.25 months on each version.

After barely updating 2 OF journals, it seems that there's little value in me starting a third. Running OF's been too vague for me to describe in any real detail.

Not sure if I'll be running any version of OF beyond the full year, as MHS should really be my highest priority, but ending my OF run before giving v3 a shot doesn't make much sense to me. Instead, I'll keep going for a bit longer, if only to see what might happen while running v3 and to get a taste of 5.75.7G.

So, a final list of observations about v2:

• Both v1 and v2 coincided more with clearing out fear-related excuses, beliefs, and other impediments, as well as taking more risks, than with clearing fearful behaviors, reactions, and responses. I make the distinction only because, to my surprise, there's apparently been a distinction there to make. Fears standing in the way of the proactive have become fewer, but fears provoking the reactive are either unchanged or possibly even worse.
  
• More on v2 than on v1, I've felt as if courage is an ever-decreasing option. To clarify, I'm defining "courage" as the willingness to fight fear in the face of fear while still experiencing the fear. Previously, I'd felt as if, on a per-fear basis, I'd had four options across a blurry spectrum: have no fear, remove fear, proceed despite fear, and surrender to fear. On OF, it's seemed as if options 1, 2, and 4 grew and option 3 shrank.
  
• In the past, I've achieved obstructed goals through circumvention of fear, but, more recently, I've noticed myself prioritizing the complete removal of the obstacle above achieving the original goal. I get that any permanent removal of the fear would prevent long-term future obstruction, but, in the near term, insisting on removing (not bypassing) the obstacle results in goals being deferred when they could be completed. Yeah, I could overlook a short-term hit as temporary growing pains, but 1) nothing about OF has been short-term, and 2) my goals' deadlines aren't always at my discretion.
  
• Been thinking about fears that may be supported by a "point of no return" and the mind/body's reliance on homeostasis. Been wondering if FOMO-like fears may partly derive from a need to preserve re-calibration, wanting to be able to right the tipping canoe before the point where gravity's made stabilizing it impossible without external intervention. As adaptive homeostasis, not as immutability, envy, disappointment avoidance, etc. To cherish the unguaranteed choice to pause, slow, readjust, or take a step back while still possible, before the choice's number of options reduces to 1 (or 0).
  
• On a bit of a learning kick lately, while also finding more creative inspiration. Making random technical advancements in my work, although they're so disconnected from each other that they're more distraction than progress. Curiosity (one of my stronger positive motivators) has increased, but, so far, it's been so disorganized and haphazard as to be of limited short-term value, even if the cumulative knowledge will eventually benefit me in the future.
  

And that's pretty much what I'd had left to say about v2. Onward to v3, I guess. Once it's available, that is.

Since I'd never kept a public v3 journal, leaving a quick epilogue for my v1-v3 journey in my v2 thread seems like the most natural way to cap off my OF run.

I'd spent 11 months on v1-v3. They were fine. Never felt completely fearless, but my goal was fear reduction, not action-movie psychology, superpowers, or bragging rights. Mostly, I'd felt calmer under stress, but more stressed under calm. Often seemed externally anxious while internally fine and externally fine while internally anxious. Yeah, it's contradictory (at least, superficially), but it's also zerosum, so I'm neither jumping for joy nor getting upset over it.

Did I change at all? I think so. Was it for the better? In some cases. Was it for the worse? If so, not exclusively. Were the changes all because of OF? OF wasn't the only influence on my life, and it'd insult the other aspects of my life to disregard them. But it'd seemed to make a significant contribution nonetheless.

What specifically changed? Well, imaginary outcomes appeared to be the common target during all 3 versions. On one hand, I've been less hindered by them. On the other, I've been so stuck in the rut of the present moment that I'm barely preparing for anything that isn't an imminent problem.

That's led to a lot of "flying by the seat of my pants" or "juggling plates" -- which isn't really the way that I like to do things. If I don't think about putting up a safety net until I'm already mid-plummet, I've waited too long to plan sensibly. Yeah, prioritizing today over tomorrow allows me to stay more aware of fleeting opportunities (or potholes) in the present, but it's equally gotten in the way of preparing for the future. So, by my count, yet another zerosum.

Several fears were either left untouched or only slightly improved. Further down the priority list, I'm guessing. I know myself far too well to declare complete fearlessness at each improvement and then re-declare it again and again, month after month, as if I don't know what "complete" means. Still more left to do.

Did I need more loops or days on? I really don't think so. I took very few days off, ran at higher-than-instructed loops in general, added even higher-loop days occasionally, and ran hybrid for most of all three OF versions. If anything, I probably should've given myself more days off than I'd taken.

Why not keep running OF for another year or three? Life. The pandemic delays were what afforded me any time to run OF at all. My highest priority right now is to overcome the health issue that's made my home uninhabitable to me for nearly 2 years. So, while I generously gave OF nearly a year that I didn't really have to spare, I've gone back to MHS. As originally planned, on schedule, not as an escape tactic or because anything sudden or unexpected forced my hand.

Unfortunately, even after a week's break from OF, MHS 5.75G was more turbulent than it'd been on my previous 2 runs. More time between subs was probably needed. A sub that had been blissful/comforting in 2020 has now become stressful/fear-inducing in 2021, and there's not even any FRM to stir up fear/stress.

So far, when compared to my previous MHS 5.75G runs, my 11-month OF run hasn't made my current MHS run into a "smoother ride" by any definition. And my previous MHS runs were staggeringly beneficial, so that's just weird. Every listening day on MHS now leads to wrecked sleep. That wasn't the case before.  For the moment, I'm chalking it up to inter-sub turbulence and just giving it some time.

That is absolutely turbulence. The latest gen subs do need time to fizzle out. A week is the absolute minimum, and if that's what you did, I'd say 2-3 is better for long term use of a single program.

But as the MHS dominates the remnants of OF it will smooth out.

(07-18-2021, 06:40 PM)Shannon Wrote: [ -> ]That is absolutely turbulence.

Thanks for the corroboration.

It'd certainly seemed like the most reasonable explanation. Still, since this type of turbulence was so unfamiliar, a "reasonable" explanation, based entirely on the familiar, could easily have been using the wrong reasoning. The newest subs are still very new, and I respect that I'm no expert on my responses to them.

(07-18-2021, 06:40 PM)Shannon Wrote: [ -> ]The latest gen subs do need time to fizzle out.  A week is the absolute minimum, and if that's what you did, I'd say 2-3 is better for long term use of a single program.

But as the MHS dominates the remnants of OF it will smooth out.

Yeah, I'd only waited a week before returning to MHS, although I'd kept the loops low and days off high, since I was leaving so little time after a long run. A month gap is my usual, even after shorter-length sub runs, and I still wanted to take it easy on myself. 6 loops on day one would've been too much too soon.

This coming Thursday will have been 3 weeks since ending my OF run, and it's only just started to ease up a little. But I'm getting there.