## Global wayfinding meditation Recently I've been exploring various meditational practises from neo-Twitter such as Guided Trance traps, Kriya meditation, Nondual meditation etc. It's all stemming from my perspective that to experience spirituality, we need to break down every part of any religion that we are following, and chew, digest and systematically assimilate all those fundamental blocks that have resonated.[[Spirituality is religion in first principles | Spriituality is nothing but religion in first principles |]] I recently came across this rather online note on Global Wayfinding Meditation titled 'Meditation from Cold Start to Mastery' by a guy named Mark. The length of this manual was rather long, similar to the length of Dostoevsky's [[Crime and Punishment]]. It was also written in an obstruse and impenetrable language with a lot of warnings and disclaimers about the risks related to the potential misuse of this form of meditation. After making sense of this practise through some commentaries by the blog [Autodereify](https://autodereify.me/) and [Sasha Chapin on Substack](https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/review-meditation-from-cold-start), I've been able to get some basics right about Global Wayfinding meditation. The purpose of this practise is to "asymptote", to reach a state not of perfection, but smoothly approaching perfection. You can never be perfect. But you might potentially be asymptoting to it. GWF (Global Wayfinding Meditation) calls mind the "software" which is being rewired by changing our experiences with everything, including the deepest things like our sense of self and the sense of this world. The meditation system can be broken down into these seven parts — **Try to keep doing good.** **Try to start doing good.** **Try to not start doing bad.** **Try to stop doing any bad that you are currently doing.** **Think about and evolve your conceptions of good and bad.** **Seek out novel data to cover your blind spots.** **Reflect on the entire system, including this part.** This seems absurdly basic but might get extremely complicated as we iterate on these tenets each and everyday for years, and years at a stretch. "Each iteration is just another iteration, just as open to change and evolution as every previous iteration" You are exploring each and every part of your brain and evaluating if you're doing good or bad. As children we might have formed entrenched opinions about what's good and bad and might have shut them off. This is an attempt to shackle all those predefined norms and update your firmware. The important thing here is that our conceptions of good and bad are not perfect. They are likely to evolve and change over time. **It's a form of reasoning to iteratively getting your idea out and work with them until they perfectly express what you feel, think and believe.** Now, on the surface, the previous sentence might sound like those trite, plithy 'self-help' speak often found on Insta reels such as 'Be Yourself' , 'Think positive' etc. To me, it did strike a deeper chord. I've been currently evaluating my conceptions of love, marriage, relationships, #parenting, consensual sex and various other notions. With all my interesting in diverse topics such as extraterrestrial agriculture, design thinking or even Nichomachean ethics, I've not been able to recapture the same delight and curiosity for what I consider good and bad. I've myself to blame in thinking about these topics for granted and not really reevaluating them based on my newer experiences. The meditative life involves frequently asking these questions over and over again. Even evaluating if those questions are effective/accurate/helpful. And even evaluating if those questions around those questions used to evaluate are helpful. Mark calls it the 'Meta protocol' and the 'Meta Meta protocol'. While scrolling through, an unexpected answer to a very frequently asked question on 'Why meditate' caught me by surprise. According to GWF, the main reason why we meditate is to overcome our ['technical debt'](https://www.productplan.com/glossary/technical-debt/) . This term is borrowed from the software industry where the tech team takes actions to expedite the delivery of a particular piece of the project which later needs to be refactored. In other words, it's the result of prioritizing speedy delivery over perfect code. Pushing the speedy code is often a good idea, but it might come with its consequences later on — such as bugs, version updates and other fixes. Coming back to GWF, and how technical debt relates to meditation, it's something you have, you just don't know it maybe. You should probably address it. Once you have taken care of your technical debt., it would be easier to live a good life. > "Once you've taken care of your technical debt, it'll be easier to have a good life, which is what we're aiming for ultimately.The goal of the practice is to have a good life, in the most broad and ordinary sense, on your terms, in your words, in your frame, or in no frame. That might look still, quiet, and intimate. That might look big and beautiful. (That might or might not include a good death.) That might look superficially normative and be quite nonnormative under the hood and in the cracks." It's a strikingly crisp encapsulation. For example — (a) You learn to live up to the expectations of your high agency parents and that has a **technical debt** — you don't have an inherent sense of worth or even inherent existence. (b) In your new demanding role, you learn how to schedule your time, and owing to this **technical debt** you have difficult time doing deep creative work, or enjoying a vacation since unstructured, unscheduled work somehow feels wrong now. (c) You have faced a lot of rejection in your life, turning yourself into an interesting person — you speak effluently, have multiple friends and potential partners. However, this technical debt makes you peg your self worth to this. When you're alone in the room, you sometimes wonder when people might see beyond the polished facade you had taken effort to build. [^1] Technical debt is whatever bad there is in your good strategies, and whatever good there is in your bad strategies. This is perhaps why we should meditate. Normal answers from most of self-help spiritual guides tell you that you'll become an Awakened being, you'll get less stressed out, you will become more efficient at work — you will be more loving. GWF addresses overcoming tech debt as an asymptote to perfection. Most of the meditation systems are depth-first. You plunge, deeply into, say — learning how to concentrate on our breath with heroic clarity. However, the GWF approach is to be breadth-first. Do little things mindfully. Explore all those small intentional changes in your thinking. All those different states. A million different steps to know how you function. **Footnotes** [1]: McCloskey, H. (2021, September 2). Technical Debt. Retrieved September 10, 2022, from Productplan.com website: <https://www.productplan.com/glossary/technical-debt/> ‌