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appendix 5: subtle interaction

[Go up to this appendix' line in the Full Table of Contents][Go to the Partial Guided Tour (in the Quick Start Guide)]

THIS IS AN EARLY DRAFT.

[NOTE: This document hasn't had the most basic of editing, yet, so there may even be places that leave out a "not," or something that completely reverse the meaning of a sentence.]

Because knowledge and know-how of subtle interaction can be esoteric and multifariously fragile, and because assymmetric knowledge can be especially harmful, it eventually seemed like making available material like this would at minimum do net more good than harm. This document is highly opinionated and is not for everyone. It should be held lightly, un-reified, held in a phenomenologically agnostic way, etc. This is an imperfect work in progress.

For the majority of people, the majority of the below just won't apply or won't be relevant.

A collaborator noted, "there's a kind of 'it all adds up to normality'* thing that I need to do in order to metabolize this stuff." I agreed, and replied, "we’ve been swimming in this since the first moments of consciousness (and, developmentally, technically even before), and since we were born, and we’re swimming in it everyday, and it is and has been and will be like 99% all ok, business as usual. as with lots of stuff, normal than weird than back to a new normal on the far side of weird. it’ll /make sense/, will find its proper sense and contextualization."

* 'it all adds up to normality' is via the author Greg Egan. See also https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/adding-up-to-normality [Last accessed: 2023-01-23]

Say there is sending and receiving.

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Sending can be both deliberate and automatic (or all of deliberate and automatic and mixed). Receiving can be both passive (having no sending components) and active (having sending/"sounding" components). Both sending and receiving can be conscious and unconscious.

When A receives relatively more passively from B, that is with fewer active components, this is safer for B, all things being equal.

Ethical sending maintains or enhances the distinction between self and other, through a display or embedding of provenance or accurate causal history.

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Unethical sending confuses or degrades the distinction between self and other, and/or hides or lies about provenance or causal history, and/or relies on automatic or unconscious receiving.

A can actively or passively receive from B in order to use what has been received to unethically tailor further sendings to send to B. This process can be deliberate and conscious, automatic and conscious, or automatic and unconscious.

Sending can cause harm to the receiver. Active receiving can cause harm to the sender.

Because sending can be automatic, we can harm people without intending to. Because sending can be unconscious, we can harm people without realizing it.

Because receiving can be unconscious, we can be harmed without initially realizing it.

Because harm is relative, perspectival, and karmically conditioned, even if conscious for both people, and because sending and receiving are ultimately intuitive and interpretative, and thus error-prone, as with anything, a sender and receiver may disagree about whether someone or something has been harmful or whether harm has occurred.

Automatic (or unconscious) sending is highly contextual, conditional on environmental factors and interpersonal dynamics---the difference between a sending occuring versus not could come and go in seconds. Often sending and receiving won't be conscious for one or both people, and so recognition of sending or receiving having occurred will be delayed, and this makes things even more tricky.

Sending and receiving can happen in parallel within and between people. That is, two people might be sending on multiple "channels" and receiving on multiple "channels," simultaneously, punctate-ly or ongoingly.

Some might argue there are senses in which self, other, causality, distinctions, confusion, consent, etc., don't make sense from an interdependent, "absolute," or nondual perspective, or within some ethical or moral frameworks that conceive in extremes, infinities, timelessnesses, or eternalisms, but the relative inheres or subsists in the absolute, and vice versa. Also, there is no "absolute" from a nondual perspective, etc. Thus, ethics and caution are important, and there is no escaping "karma," in its most "steelmanned" sense.

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Sending and receiving are limited or constrained by your current mental models and karmic backlog, in other words, say, you are limited or constrained by what you believe now and what's happened to you in the past.

The range of complexity, detail, aptness, appropriateness, and safety for others, of what you can send, is limited or constrained by your current mental models and karmic backlog.

mental models = "beliefs", anticipations, expectations, stances, predictions, intuitions, feelings, knowing, understanding, "cosmology," "metaphysics," theories of mind, theories of perspective taking, theories of culture, theories of "energy", "magic," "spirituality," theories of body, healing, harm, etc., etc., etc.

The degree to which receiving is safe for you, and the degree to which you can receive with breadth, accuracy, and fidelity, is short-run limited or constrained by your current mentals models and karmic backlog.

Improving mental models (through experience and increasing embodied know-how) takes weeks to months to years and simultaneously untangling, untwisting, delayering personal karma, samskaras, triggers, unwholesome knee-jerk impulses, etc., takes on the order of ten-thousand (10,000; 10k) hours and beyond, and is potentially greatly facilitated (I would say virtually required) by self-transformative practices such as global wayfinding meditation and other systems. Improving skill and safety at sending and receiving has practically no lifetime limit even if limited in principle.

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Discussion of unconscious sending and receiving can be paranoia-inducing and witch-hunt-inducing.

Do keep in mind that sending and receiving aren't "unnatural." We gestate and are born and grow up already swimming in it. It happens in parallel with verbal and nonverbal communication, voice tone and prosody, body language, vibes, everything. It's a natural part of intimacy and care.

Harm from subtle interaction, if any, is usually on the order of everyday social and intimate harm, intentional and unintentional, such as curtailing body language, cutting remarks, veiled insults, and so on. Call this "everyday harm." ("Everyday harm" can tremendously affect the trajectory of a life, of course.)

"Greater harm," is usually on the order of, and correlates with, any badness of family secrets and familial and generational trauma, narcissism, neglect, physical and sexual abuse, etc. ("Greater harm," can potentially entail tremendous suffering and tremendously affect the trajectory of a life.) This is by degrees. One could probably make a distinction between "everyday harm" and "greater harm" which would be on the order of, and correlate with, for example, any badness of a generally loving but tense relationship with one's parents, and things like that. There are probably more useful distinctions, here.

Additionally we could label some things "extreme harm." Unintentional or intentional/knowing predatory actors are rare, but they are much less rare in spiritual communities, communities or practice, ideological communities, cults, etc., and possibly other contexts. Predatory actors can potentially cause anything from "everyday harm" up to "extreme harm," which are things like relatively persistent psychosis (subtle or overt) and physical sequelae including cardiovascular disregulation and death for vulnerable people, speaking informally.

For some more detail about mechanisms of harm, and more detail on how to protect oneself and others, see sections above and below. Note that most people are generally resilient to everyday problematic subtle interaction.

This document is less phenomenological, and somewhat abstract, to make it less [sic] accessible, for general safety/caution reasons. This may change in the future with milieu and culture shifts.

The nature of the document may make it seem like the phenomenon is less embodied than it actually is.

This document currently doesn't discuss neurobiophysical mechanisms because of dual-use concerns. This may change in the future with milieu and culture shifts.

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Say that receiving generally involves receiving an imprint or involves an ongoing handshake. An imprint generally has formatting that isn't native to the receiver. That is, different individuals generally have a native, personal "formatting" or "language" of their personal "information." (Think like a computer filetype or extension, or the type of formatting of an HDD or SSD.) Individuals can learn to read or interpret imprints with non-native formatting. This can be a general skill or can more narrowly apply to particular individuals.

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Imprints can be barely a whisp or can be complex. Loosely speaking, the "same" inprint received over a longer period of time, or received multiple times, can increase its fidelity or complexity. Imprints can be passive or active. A passive imprint is like an unopened computer file---it can be neutral, helpful, or harmful, depending on how it's interacted with by the receiver. An active imprint is like an already-running computer program and is more likely to have effects on the receiver. The thing in/by the sender that becomes an imprint in the receiver can be unintentionally crafted or intentionally crafted, and intentionally or unintentionally sent. An intentional sending can have unintentional components.

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A passive imprint can be left alone, embedding, integrating/metabolizing, encysted, or sometimes activated. An imprint that is left alone will still generally somewhat naturally embed, slightly integrate, or encyst over time (as stated above). Even an imprint that is left alone can still have small or dramatic effects on the belief or behavior of the recipient. Most of the time, effects will be absent or negligible. Integration/metabolizing plus error-checking is perhaps the best outcome and has an expanded discussion below.

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An imprint that is left alone will still generally somewhat naturally embed, slightly integrate, or encyst over time (as stated above). Embedding is leaving the imprint mostly as-is, but learning its language and having a translation layer and kind of using it relatively seamlessly with one's own stuff; this reduces the chance of structural issues that could eventually involve behavioral rigidity or physical sequelae. Encysting, when possible, reduces the chance of belief and behavior influence at the expense of increasing the chance of structural issues that could lead to behavioral rigidity or physical sequelae. Encysting doesn't involve learning the language of the imprint.

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Integration is to some degree learning the non-native language of imprint and translating that material into one's native format without leaving behind explicit remnants of the original imprint. This can be done partially or fully. Note, importantly, the original imprint is still recoverable because of a sort of practical losslessness property of the system.

(It's important to emphasize that even in sort of the unusual worst cases of unintentional or intentional harm or just massive and unfortunate vulnerability of a receiver, through no one's fault, it's, at least in principle, generally speaking, possible to "make a full recovery," even after decades and even from things that happened when one was extremely young. While of course there are physical and physiological and neurological correlates to sending/​receiving harm/​"harm"/​etc., it's not the same as, say, physical scar tissue. The mind, generally speaking, sort of doesn't "scar," in principle; the (body)"mind" [sic] sort of in some sense being "all software," can "heal completely," where suffering and trauma (informally speaking) become non-traumatic memory, information, meaning, etc. Again, this is true, in principle (cf. buddha mind, in the technical sense) for things that happened when one was very young, too. Though, in practice, that might take tremendous dedication and resources that aren't necessarily available. But there is tremendous room in between, healing/​"healing" by degrees, if nonmonotonically, and it's all an asymptotate, anyway, in any case.)

In any case of left alone, embedding, integrating, encysting, there is another parallel or coextensive sense in which the imprint will spread/diffuse over time through the system and also, all things being equal, get layered over (for an untrained individual). What this means that the longer an imprint has been in the system, the longer, all things being equal, it will take to sort of re-gather or reconstruct it. Because of buddha mind and practical losslessness, it's, in principle, always possible to re-gather, detangle, delayer, etc., an imprint and error-check and integrate it.

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Most imprints are passive but some are active.

An active imprint can be simple or sophisticated. Think a computer virus, a biological virus, a biological parasite, or biological cancer. Think even distributed things like botnets. They can try to actively change the receiver, to become more deeply embedded, to hide, to pretend to be something or someone else, and so on. Active imprints are more rare but are relatively more common in some spiritual communities and communities of practice. Usually, there will be some element of relying upon or degrading a person's sense of self and other.

One might distinguish an problematic active imprint from a "spiritual transmission." An ideal spiritual transmission might be consentful, humble/provisional, displaying its own limitations and provenance, never hiding, self-disassembling leaving no remainder after its work is complete, etc. There are probably many other and better desiderata. This author is not a big fan of spiritual transmission.

There is something that could be called "pathological listening." All things being equal, prior to training, most everyone, but not everyone-everyone, has some pathological listening. What this is is sort of "imprint-ifying" ambient barely-sending or doing active receiving to evoke sending in other people to collect unintentionally sent imprints. (Note that a knowing or unknowing predator or abuser can cause or coerce someone into becoming a pathological listener.) Sometimes, further, the pathological listener might then interpret or find a way to "run" an otherwise passive imprint in a way that causes it to seemingly behave like an active imprint.

Pathological listening can be accidental or a traumatic response; a part of someone might come to feel/​believe that they have to keep a port open, to listen, because that's how the world works, that's how they get love, that's how they stay safe or protected, that's how they know what to do, that's how love works and must work, etc.

Receiving happens through ports. A port is a dynamic, contextual, high-dimensional surface area. That is, ports open and close contextually, depending on a receiver's mood, where the receiver is (school, one's childhood home), who the sender is or reminds them of (a family member, an authority figure), depending on what someone is saying, etc. The opening and closing of ports, generally speaking, is highly unconscious and automatic. Finding and closing perpetually open ports that "shouldn't" be open is potentially the work of thousands of hours of meditation.

How to close ports is discussed further below.

I sometimes use this analogy, sort of borrowing from that old psychology experiment/demonstration:

a "port" is sort of a possibly transitory, high-dimensional perceptual-ontological capacity. um, like the basketball/gorilla video. if you're looking for the gorilla amongst the people playing basketball, you see the gorilla. the "gorilla port" is open. if you're not looking for the gorilla, even though it's right there, you probably won't see the gorilla--the gorilla port is closed. some ports will be flashing open and closed in contingent and interdependent ways, like some ports might only be open when a family member is around or right after one sneezes, and only for 300 milliseconds, and so on.

Integration/metabolization is the process of translating non-native formatting into native formatting. There can be naive and credulous integration but there can also be integration with error checking. One could distinguish credulous integration (call it also synchronic integration) with "(relatively) complete integration" (or diachronic integration) which is more likely to involve error-checking and is distinguished by understanding the provenance and downstream and upstream causal history of the imprint and its effects. (Understanding = sort of having a tacit generative causal model of the incoming sending)

Part of cleaning up imprints is coming to understanding when something is even an imprint in the first place. And that involves coming to have a better and better reflective sense of one's own formatting in order to distinguish it from the received/imprinted formatting of other people.

Part of this process is coming to be able to re-gather, untangle and trace back and reconstruct threads of causal history. (To be sure, much of this process is spontaneous and intuitive and cannot be rushed, forced, etc. This involves learning enhanced error-checking which is itself a process that is spontaneous and intuitive and cannot be rushed, forced, etc., and certainly is not infallible.)

Causal threads that can be generally traced back all the way to first moments of consciousness are identifiable as "self." Causal threads that are "not self" will have a more proximal past endpoint which will the durational sensational entry of the imprint via a particular port.

(Talking about "self" and "other" sort of "in" awareness or bodymind is sort of complex or tangly with respect to agency, identity, invidualism, personhood, phenomenology [phenomenology of self??? phenomenology of other???], and more, from a sort of nondual perspective and probably for other reasons, too. Untangling all this is part of the work of all this and it takes a long time.)

Generally speaking, tracing back imprint causal threads to port of entry IS coincident with the identification and closing of the port, or a big step of the way there. Further, this IS the untangling of belief and behavior influence of an imprint, and so on. Further, the process of finding one's way back to a port is also sort of the "rewinding" of the influence of an active imprint (if it was active), or a big chunk of it rendering remaining cleanup relatively straightforward if still extended in time. And it's coincident or coextensive with understanding or some insight.

(Note that tracing back and untangling is made possible by a sort of practical losslessness property of the bodymind and by buddha nature in the technical sense.)

A port can be semi-permanently closed or one becomes choiceful (if still generally intuitive and automatic) over whether/when that port is open or closed.

Error-checking improves over time: people will have a shifting constellation of ports open all the time for self-talk and self-feedback. the better a person's error checking, in general, the more likely they'll reject spoofing attempts or accidents. this involves things like sending confirmation signals (TCP vs UDP?), subtle timing changes, "statistical anomalies," "parity bits," stuff like that. not everyone does all the error checking that's potentially available, and not consistently for every port or in every context.

Stated differently:

one way to engage retrospectively with subtle interaction effects:

if one is exposed to someone who's "doing a thing" (knowingly or unknowingly), you will experience this through (a) conscious component and (b) an unconscious subtle component.

the conscious component can be broken into (a1) overt/gross aspects and (a2) subtle aspects. The latter will be discussed below.

(a1) is thiings like body language, voice tone, voice prosody, spoken words. These condition or create context which affects one's own high-dimensional "stance." i.e. they might act motherly, fatherly, brotherly, sisterly, etc., which might make you more receptive on a subtle level. these sorts of archetypes are just one example. another example is that they might very confident, which again might make you more receptive on a subtle level, and so on.

In any case, you will be mostly generally aware of (a1) but, by definition, you'll be less likely to be aware of (b), the unconscious subtle component. However, if it's afffecting you at all, a "part" of you is aware of it; in fact, a part of you is conscious of it. And that means a part of you is "recording," not just remembering it, but "recording" it, or patches and splashes of it, the "stuff that got in," as it were.

Over time, the stuff that's recorded, sort of "spreads out," at least a little bit, through one's own system, like a drop of ink dispersing in water. Usually this is passive, but sometimes, it's active, like what got in is trying to spread itself. This latter case is more rare, but it's possible. Also, passive diffusion might be fairly limited. In any of these cases, it can affect your beliefs, behavior, emotions, memories, a tiny bit or a lot. Often it's just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit.

So one procedure to deal with this is to sort of "re-gather" or "find one's way back" to the original, previously unconscious, but nevertheless sensory impressions of the moments in time where stuff registered, or got in. So again, there's a sense in which "what got in" was registered "consciously but in an unconscious way," and one is inclining towards making that "unconscious consciousness conscious," if that makes sense... There could be better terminology, here.

So one gently inclines towards remembering what actually subtly happened, in some sense. There will be a time course to this. A rule of thumb is that if the last exposure to the person was a month ago, then it'll take about a month to "find one's way back" to the subtle sensory impressions of that last exposure. If the very first exposure to that person was six months ago, then it'll take about six months to find one's way back to first exposure. These are just rules of thumb. Sometimes it's shorter and sometimes it's longer.

Importantly, this "direct gentle inclining" doesn't always work; maybe it often doesn't work. Over time, the system can form tangles and loops and knots, where direct inclining can pull knots tighter. If one experiences some sense of "grinding" or "jamming," or muscle tension, one should stop "inclining" for that day and try again the next day. Sort of "forcing" can layer on additional karma, making it harder to eventually find one's way back to the target sense impressions. Generally, the whole thing should ideally feel sort of effortless and inevitable, more like floating back than hiking back, more like surrender than will.

Often, surrender will feel scary, and for good reason. So part of this is sometimes doing indirect things to make it safe for the original impressions to come up, before accessing those original impressions. They'll potentially often be hidden or walled off or "encysted" in the first place, because they were having a bad effect on the system. This limits diffusion to some degree but can make it harder to find one's way back. Patience is important. The rule of thumb above includes time needed to "find a way for it to be safe to look."

Elegantly, efficiently, importantly---finding one's way back, is generally coincident with "cleaning up" the effects of the other person on one's system. That is, something about finding one's way back, is coincident or at least correlated with implicitly coming to understand "causal history" and "provenance," which is coincident or at least correlated with "deconvolving" the effects of the other person from one's system. So "influence" becomes "understanding" and "memory." Or "influence" becomes "mere information."

Further, "finding one's way back" (all the way) is generally coincident with "closing the open ports," or "increased discernment of those ports"---that is, if one finds their way back all the way to the original sensory impressions, that is generally coincident with gut-level, deep-level, viscerally, know-how-level understanding the "deep mechanics" of "how the stuff got in," which gives spontaneous, deep, automatic inuition for how to not have it happen again in the future.

So cleaning up one's system and reducing vulnerability are all part of the same action of "finding one's way back," are all part of the same action of "understanding in one's bones" what happened.

Further, one is more likely to convert (b), the unconscious subtle component to (a2), conscious subtle aspects of an interaction. That is, one will be able to feel the subtle sensory-physiological aspects of how the person is knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or accidentally, causing subtle effects and "imprints" in your system.

That is, "finding one's way back," not only cleans up one's system and reduces vulnerability, but it also confers increasing ability to detect subtle effects in real time. And this latter ability also reduces vulnerability.

To be clear, "stuff maybe getting in" happens in a really high-dimensional space. Finding one's way back to stuff doesn't guarantee more stuff won't get in, from other people or the original person. If the original person does something slightly different (or a lot different) then more stuff can get in during a future exposure. This is normal. Stuff usually gets in, even when one has a lot of experience.

But, it's less and less likely, the more someone has worked through the backlog in their own system. Over time, more and more generalization occurs. And, one can get better and better at realizing things are happening in real time and then can prioritize cleanup over the next 24-72 hours. Then, stuff isn't diffusing through one's system for months; it's just hours. Further, real-time detection is correlated with real-time "filtering" or real-time "knowing it just as it as," and is thereby far less likely to produce unwitting diffusion at all. In other words, even as it's experienced, it's known as "sensory" and "information" as opposed to self-other confusion or metaphysical/magickal/miracle/faustian temptation.

Reduction in vulnerability is ultimately the work of many years, or at least a few years. Overgeneralized receptivity and self-other confusion goes all the way back to prenatal experience. Over time, one can find their way back all the way to prenatal experiences, thereby correcting self-other confusion between self and mother, the mother's imprints of previous fetuses, subtle interaction with siblings and the father outside the uterus, early childhood experiences, and so on.

And more and more, subtle interaction becomes (instead of exploited self-other confusion, spoofing, handshakes, codependence, temptation/coercion pacts, etc., etc. etc.!!!)---gentle limning of interpersonal interaction, for intimacy and play and healing and teaching.

*

P.S. again, direct inclining is fraught! gentle, patient indirectness is almost always better, all things being equal, at least in my experience. real-world doing tends to be a mixture of both until fairly far along meditation-wise.

Over time, after closing many ports and tracing many imprints back to their source, an individual learns something analogous to "string escaping" or "input sanitization" in software engineering.

What was previously influence of an imprint, a naive, or credulous engagement, or active credulous engagement with an imprint, typically habits learned prenatally and in childhood, becomes mere information, inert, "memory safe" (to borrow again from software engineering). It's just data, and you can choose to do whatever you want with it, anything or nothing.

String escaping doesn't fully generalize, but it greatly generalizes. And even when stuff "gets in", after much experience with port finding and synchronic integration, and so on, it gets caught much earlier, and so on.

an imprint is "just" sensory memory with some associated interpretation. like remembering snatches of light and wind and sound from taking a walk earlier plus maybe what that implies for the weather later that day. but you might not have those sensory impressions easily recoverable but you do remember the feeling/inference of impending rain. meditation/resilience involves "finding one's way back" to those original sensory impressions and reinterpreting them or realizing that other interpretations are possible besides "rain," = capacity for error checking and accumulating hypotheses without needing to auto-commit to the most likely one, etc.

Unwanted receiving happens through inappropriately open ports, generally speaking. There's sort of an analogue to inappropriate sending. One finds inappropriate sending in a very similar way to finding inappropriate or unwanted receiving, as discussed above (cf. finding one's way back, generally).

One thing to keep in in mind is that inappropriate sending maybe or maybe not tends to have a bit more "not conceptualized as such" and a bit more "this is how things should be" than inappropriate receiving.

That is, sometimes a port is open because a person has a confusion about who is who, that is they might think they're receiving from themselves or impersonally receiving from the universe. And also sometimes a port is open because a part of the person "believes"/​anticipates/​expects/​etc. that they need to keep that port open, because that's how the world works, or that's how they get love, or that's how they stay safe, or that's how love works and how love must work, etc.

With inappropriate sending, there can be similar things---the sender might think they're "just thinking" or "only talking to themselves" or "just being innocuously persuasive or innocuously charismatic" or "impersonally dialoguing with the universe" or "being willful with respect to the world," etc. Inappropriate sending maybe empirically tends to be slightly more likely to come from something other than self/​other confusion or not really be conceived of as anything like "sending" at all.

Further, rather than "this is how the world works," maybe tends to be a bit more of a thing with inappropriate sending. "This is how love, intimacy, connection works or should work." There might on average be a bit more of a sense of entitlement, generally non-malicious.

Someone being told that the might be doing inappropriate sending (versus receiving) might be just a little bit more defensive, angry, etc., on average, because they might not have any sense that they're doing anything at all, let alone possibly being problematic for some of the people around them. And again they might not be; someone or some people around them might be inappropriately receiving. And most likely there's probably a mix of inappropriate sending and receiving. As always, one wants to be careful about witch hunts and victim blaming! Hard! Especially when tracking down inappropriate receiving (open ports) and inappropriate sending can be the work of hundreds or thousands of hours for the individuals involved!

Though, sometimes it's possible to catch things early. It can be very, very, very helpful to arrange or facilitate "freedom of movement" when people are first meeting. If something weird seems to be going on, if one party chooses to leave the room for thirty seconds to five minutes and then comes back, that can give everyone a chance to sort of combobulate. It's MUCH, MUCH, MUCH easier to sort of metabolize and parse and learn how to "string escape" retrospectively versus concurrently/​synchronously. And iteration might work even better; and so collecting a bit of data, face to face, for 0.2 to five minutes, than drifting off for a bit and then, repeating this, coming back a few times, for about the same-ish amount of time (sort of mingling, with an affordance to like go outside, go down the hall, go to the bathroom, get away completely), can often help a bit to "nip in the bud" sort of accidental and cumulative footholds (where things potentially get even worse each time you (have to) interact with a person) that would then otherwise take a lot longer to sort out. (not at all or a few hours or a couple days versus weeks to months, or longer, worst case)

Sending plus receiving sort of exist on a continuum between analog and digital. Closer to the analog side we have imprints that tend to be formatted in the language of the receiver and tend to be more embedded and encysted. Passive reception is closer to the analog side. Analog, here, means something like less symbolic, more needing to be interpreted. For better and worse, achieving digital sending and receiving involves something that could be called a "handshake" or the relatively ongoing maintenance of a handshake.

This term is a bit vague and may be used an some neighboring ways, too, but for here I'll try saying that a handshake is when the sender and receiver are speaking the same actively and dynamically negotiated language, making relatively high-fidelity, high-bandwidth communication possible. What's being received has needs fewer steps to be integrated, including zero-step, and, generally speaking, if not zero-step, the integration steps have sort of been pre-decided by the receiver as part of the the negotiation of the communication language.

As with ports, which are dynamic and high-dimensional, "language," here, is used in a similar way.

Note that handshaking can be relatively quite one-sided. Sort of "positive" and "negative" handshaking are discussed in subsequent sections.

A noncoercive or consentful handshake, say for "spiritwork," etc., will involve a minimization of active receiving on the sender's part, and will involve the sender consentfully requesting a handshake or consentfully teaching the receiver how to handshake, even in the case where the sender is interacting with unconscious receiver ports.

(During a handshake it's assumed that the "sender" is also themselves doing a tremendous amount of receiving.)

Even if the sender achieves a noncoercive or consentful handshake, in a spirit-work type situation, the sender still has a lot of work to do (ideally costless ane effortless, long-run) to avoid or minimize harm while striving to participate in something net good.

The sender must keep an eye out for any increases in self/other confusion on the part of the receiver. As part of the handshake, the sender might gently point out where self/other confusion is happening. This has to be compatible with the receivers metaphysics, cosmology, understanding of agency, mind, body, personhood, identity, etc.. If that compatibility or ethical harmoney can't be quickly established, then there might not be a good fit between practitioner and client. Prior to the handshake being released, the sender might do a final check for increased self/other confusion. Ideally the sender sort of leaves the receiver in the same or better "self/other shape" than they found them.

The sender also needs to keep an eye out for something like "reliance". As a subset of self/other confusion, the receiver might come quite quickly to rely on sort of periodic sendings from the sender as part of their cognitive or general regulative process. Ideally ongoingly, and prior to ending the handshake, the sender should be gently pointing out where reliance has almost began or has begun, to help the receiver maintain regulative sovereignty. Certainly transient quasi-reliances are part of the sender being hopefully helpful, but the receiver shouldn't lose track of provenance. When non-reliance isn't "clean" then there are sort of "ragged regulative rough edges" left behind in the receiver after the handshake that are hopefully spontaneously slowly cleaned up by the receiver over the next few minutes, hours, and days. Ideally, though, the receiver shouldn't have to do any cleanup and spontaneously cleanup isn't guaranteed. (Do note that co-regulation can be perfectly normal and fine in families and between intimate partners and friends, and so on! This is sort of a matter of cultural and personal preference. Some people are relatively regulatively autonomous or choiceful which generally does not limit intimate interpersonal subtle interaction. In any case, though, co-regulation is probably generally not appropriate in "spiritwork"-type situations.)

Another thing that can happen might be termed "interstitialing." In doing spiritwork, while the sender tries to do as much passive receiving as possible, there are times when active receiving is helpful. In those cases, the sender should be careful to not leave behind "pass-through instrumentation" or "scaffolding" in the receiver. Ideally the sender won't use any of this, and perhaps the more skilled the sender is the less likely it will be helpful. But, in any case, the sender should clean all this up before disengaging the handshake.

All in all someone doing something like spiritwork should default to, err on the side of being non-interfering, non-interruptive, like smoke, being a passive resource that receiver actively makes use of on their own terms. And ideally the spiritworker would "teach to fish for themselves,"* to help the receiver claim and enhance various and any and all capacities, including triangulation and generativity at the finest grain of the most exquisite patience, and so on.

(*"give someone a fish, they eat for a day; teach someone to fish, they eat for a lifetime,"" etc., etc., etc.)

Overall, a handshake should be generally co-disengaged (or with the sender very sure) with the receiver, consciously or unconsciously, getting to do their own safety checks and possibly requesting a few more seconds or minutes of the handshake for any self-cleanup before disengaging.

Overall, overall, the sender should as best they can display provenance, provisionality, uncertainty, fallibility, to be as legible as possible, to communicate in terms of suggestions and options---that don't forclose options not listed or an entirely different frame---

Unfortunately, there are times when handshakes can be coerced, and this can be learned. One way to do this is through what might be termed spoofing. Here, spoofing means pretending to be someone else or pretending to have characteristics, that lead to a voluntary handshake by the receiver but under false pretenses. An example would be taking on subtle motherly or fatherly or other familial qualities causing the receiver to spontaneously and unconsciously open ports which were established at a very young age. Spoofing can involve port scanning, looking for open ports through a combination of analog sending and active receiving, which is coextensive with "rolodexing" which is the would-be handshaker iteratively, rapidly "trying on" many, many different qualities (mother, father, friend, brother, sister, grandfather, authority figure, and so on) to try to get the receiver to open ports, while potentially actively adapting and nuancing their selections and subselections. This can also of course involve overt qualities like posture, voice tone and prosody, word choice, etc. Spoofing and rolodexing can both intentional and unintentional, conscious and unconscious, deliberate and automatic, etc.

A handshake can also start light or liminally, during which a predator or an abuser might make promises or offer things (understanding, acceptance, spiritual knowledge, etc.) in order to convince the receiver to co-facilitate a deeper handshake.

Then the sender might offer at least partially the illusion of having given such things as well as further lies, and so on. Some of this will be relatively more in the receiver's formatting, but often there will some initial material that's easier for the receiver to interpret, then some translation instructions, and then potentially a tremendous amount of material that's in the sender's formatting, which the receiver unfortunately credulously embeds or starts to integrate, which can create a vicious cycle of opening more ports, further credulousness, and so on.

A handshake can sometimes eventually be coerced out of pure analog overwhelm, as well (over minutes, hours, or repeated encounters).

In this case, it's like the sender is playing something on a loop, very loudly, or with just enough variation that it's hard to ignore, and even though it's in a foreign language, some eventual receivers can't help but start to try to automatically, spontaneously puzzle out the language of the sender, which could take minutes or days. And if whatever the receiver eventually puzzles out has enough (usually false or twisted) promises, including claims of rarity, uniqueness, value, etc., the receiver then might open ports and participate in a handshake.

"especially speculation: ports can't be targeted universally because they are too high-dimensional, they have to be discovered or negotiated. but you can certainly mess up someone's cognition and autonomic nervous system by broadband broadcasting noise. also, if there's a gorilla wandering around long enough then most people will eventually see the gorilla, even if they'd rather not. and they might start believing the gorilla is real and not just a person in a gorilla suit [or at least come to unreflectively account for it as part of the milieu, to take it as a given]."

Continuous received analog sending, even if uninterpreted, and received non-native formatting, even if untranslated can still be especially weaponized, if that formatting is sort of intended to be maximally uninterpretable---i.e. very difficult or challenging to construct translation layers and inverse operations for, then it sort of lends itself to be encysted which, over time, increases the chances of behavioral, preference, emotional, cognitive rigidity in the receiver and physical sequelae.

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Finally in the worst case you've got something like "full-on deliberate, dedicated anti-inductive" sending, which would be something like active spoofing while simultaneously attempting to be very difficult to model, which could be partially preprepared/preoptimized by analyzing passively received imprints of the target. With again, worst-case outcomes, being something like delusion, psychosis, suicide, fatal heart arrhythmia, high blood pressure, stroke, etc. As best I can tell, though, there maybe has to be an unusual fit between sender and receiver, and prolonged contact, before anything like this would be possible and even then it's unlikely to go that far. One would expect something closer to like some transient confusion and a headache, in the average case or this already unlikely scenario.

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Some more drafty notes from some time ago: It can be very hard to process/metabolize/integrate something while it’s still going on. Almost by definition, if something isn’t pretty quickly (seconds to minutes), or at least smoothly (over hours or days), integrated, it’s somehow at least benignly "mismatched" with the cognitive operations needed to integrate it. (That’s not completely true, though--stolen moments during brief respite or “code switching” and maybe tricks using parallel processing. There are other things, too, I suppose.) It’s ridiculously easier, at least for me, to integrate something, if one can get away from the thing, even for a few minutes (or hours). Stepping out of the room a couple times, for a few minutes, e.g. at some function where it's otherwise hard to get away, can reduce later integration time to a couple days instead of a couple weeks, or etc.

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Again integrative fluidity and closing ports ("don't care") and string-escaping ("that's just sensation known exactly as it is without remainder") does not generally preclude intimate subtle interaction and social tenderness.

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Integrative fluidity, and processing old imprints, and de-encysting, and finding inverse operations, and seeing the lies in predatory and abusive imprints, and closing ports, and not being coercive oneself, and harmonizing all this with more usual overt communication channels, and deconstraining around sending and receiving (if desired) is a long, long, long process. Gentle unlimited patience makes it go smoother and faster. And most people don't need to bother with any of this, unless they feel like the need to or they just want to.

Be careful of reifying or "fixing" on metabolizing, integration, port closing, triangulation, generativity, self, other, string-escaping, any seeming technical term or jargon or word or word usage in this material, including the phenomenological "look and feel" or it as well as initial and subsequent impressions and experiments and workhorsing of "how to do it." These don't have an essential or fixed pattern; what's beneath them or what they "apply" to or their intension [sic] can change; the "how" of working with these or moving towards things, how that feels, what "you" "do,"" has no essential pattern or essential nature or essential permanence or stability, only the radically concrete direct aconceptual remains and not even that, and any "how" or "doing" needs to eat itself with no remainder on approach, as it were. (And "how," "doing," and "needs to" are empty as well.)

Conclusion

Again, from the beginning:

For the majority of people, the majority of the below just won't apply or won't be relevant.

A collaborator noted, "there's a kind of 'it all adds up to normality'* thing that I need to do in order to metabolize this stuff." I agreed, and replied, "we’ve been swimming in this since the first moments of consciousness (and, developmentally, technically even before), and since we were born, and we’re swimming in it everyday, and it is and has been and will be like 99% all ok, business as usual. as with lots of stuff, normal than weird than back to a new normal on the far side of weird. it’ll /make sense/, will find its proper sense and contextualization."

See also:

From main:

From culture appendix:

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