(How) does this decrease anxiety and increase awareness of peace? ✌️

 
What is this good for? Why do I care? Why did I bother sharing that with y’all?

I think it’s extremely helpful, but for whom? Aren’t I deconstructing the self that wants help?

The shape of my argument for this recognition goes:

1. Awareness must be present for any consideration. As long as we are, it is constant.
   • Experience of awareness allows us to see the self (rather than thinking about awareness, which maintains a self as primary thing doing the thinking about).
2. A self appears within awareness, not as awareness. 
3. Awareness sees that selves are always changing. Eg: The self I think I am is more of a “selfing” that requires constant effort to create and maintain.
4. This fluidity makes it obvious that selfing is not the primary identity, and this can’t be unseen.
5. Efforting to maintain selfing as if it were primary and static feels off and therefore is energetically expensive (like pretending to believe someone who’s lying).
6. Eventually this expense is unsustainable so the effort eases. (Sometimes this is a years long process that starts by doubling down on effort; this can be intense but burns the effort energy faster).
7. Effort at “selfing” produces asymmetrically ‘negative’ subjective states such as anxiety; relaxing the selfing then structurally relaxes the anxiety.
   
   

What’s left? Here’s where it gets weird and cool. We don’t have to make any claims as to "who" is experiencing the peace, just that it notably increases, reliably, compared to before.

It’s not clear if there’s a self to ‘experience’ peace or if the self got reimagined to something much bigger. Either way we’re still aware of “things”; peace is one of them that becomes more obvious when less effort goes to selfing, controlling, protecting, defending. I think this suggest that peace is a quality of awareness.

With love, Jordan