There’s the premise that having a few painful experiences this week means the retreat was on balance bad for me, whereas in fact its long-term effects are unknowable. And at the base of this narrative lie the most basic kinds of premises: simple perceptual judgments such as “This buzz-saw sound I hear while trying to meditate is bad.” And this kind of meaning, which seems so firmly embedded in the texture of things, isn’t, in fact, an inherent feature of reality; it is something we impose on reality, a story we tell about reality. We build stories on stories on stories, and the problem with
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