Becoming Zero
Reset your emotional and conceptual anchors
Imagine that your instinctive response to any action or thought is neutral. You don’t see anything as good or evil, nor do you react emotionally to what people say and do. No political decision can make you eager or uneasy. Sounds pretty cool, doesn’t it? If you want to reason about something from first principles, you need to clear your head from stereotypes and emotional attachments before that.
Embodied emotions
First of all, we need to exercise how we perceive and manage our emotions. One tried way to do that is to explore what bodily sensations they cause. Bring to mind an emotion that you are currently having or just think of any if you’re not emotional at the moment. It could be a positive emotion, such as joy or gratitude, or a negative one, such as anger or sadness.
Take a moment to observe the emotion without judgment. Notice the physical sensations that are associated with it. Try to experiment with it: massage the parts of your body that are connected to the emotion, or do some push-ups and see how it’s changing, or stand still for a couple of minutes and monitor how your body reacts.
It should be a free-flowing exercise, with no specific instructions. Just experiment a lot with your emotional state and get a better grasp of what and how you feel.
Nullification
Your thoughts and feelings can be mapped to abstract geometric spaces. Or probably they cannot but let's assume for simplicity that they can and that those spaces are just common Euclidean spaces. A visualization is worth a thousand words and we don’t need to be precise since we can develop felt senses through incomplete analogies.
The goal of this exercise is to help you see your thoughts and emotions as areas in such a space and learn to navigate to the origin of it. Another purpose it serves is to help you categorize and distinguish purely conceptual ideas from emotions, and to develop a better understanding of how those categories get interwoven and how to disentangle them.
Okay, let’s begin! I’ll refer only to emotions in the following list, mostly for clarity but also because it’s usually easier to map emotions to a low-dimension space and then apply the acquired felt sense to the space of concepts.
Start by closing your eyes and taking a few deep breaths. Abandon all distracting trains of thought and focus on the exercise.
Imagine an empty 2- or 3-dimensional space in your mind. This is where your emotions live. More realistically, each dimension would represent a separate emotion (and you can go with this if you want to) but it may be more comfortable for most of us to see emotions as “bubbles” floating in that space.
Pick an emotion you can summon on a whim and draw a bubble for that emotion. It may be cloud-like, thicker at the core and softly dissipating toward the edges. Whatever you like about rendering the details, really.
Now, draw a point floating in the space somewhere outside the bubble. It will represent your current emotional state.
Slowly move the point towards the bubble and start powering the emotion of choice on its collision with the bubble. Tinker with it, move the point around and adjust your feelings accordingly. Do that for a couple of minutes.
Repeat steps 3 through 5 for several more emotions.
Once you’re confident with shifting your emotional state, move the point to the intersection of coordinate axes. While at that location, you should disengage from all your emotions and float in the most neutral state you’re capable of. That should feel more like meditation at this stage.
Mastery comes with practice so don’t despair if it doesn’t click right away. After you grasp it somewhat for your emotions, try doing the same for opinions. Probably the best way to exercise it is to realize a spectrum of political stances in your head and learn to disengage from those, as well as adopt foreign ones for a fleeting moment. Imagine similar bubbles or clouds for the radical left and right mindsets for starters, and then try to sympathize with them, try to instigate a “member of the tribe” feeling. Gradually add more unorthodox ethea and try to taste what it’s like to be a bearer of those. Then again, disengage from everything by finding the mental state that doesn’t paint any particular idea as a right or wrong one.
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