Something is wrong. What is producing it, and what applies?
Each row begins with something you can notice from inside. The middle column names the mechanism producing it; the right column names the correction and the section that describes it.
| Symptom | Mechanism | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| The inner voice is telling me to quiet the inner voice. | The narrator paradox: the ego generating a target it cannot meet, producing secondary ΔF. | Do not obey or suppress. Apophatic audit: who is aware of the command? Stop. (§3.4) |
| I keep checking whether the practice is working. | Grading is the narrator resuming control; each check is a new prior. | Audit the checking. The procedure has no narrator-verifiable success condition. (§3.4) |
| Ordinary life feels trivial next to the model. | The Flatland paradox: spiritual bypassing / cosmic nihilism. Metabolic energy spent on the map, friction introduced locally. | Return attention to local coordinates. The universe is taking the shape of this life. Close the mirror. (§4.1, §4.3) |
| After a focused task I cannot relax; contraction persists. | Aperture stuck narrow; narrowing never released, hardening into an opaque ego. | Deliberate widening at task end; width-dial practice. (§3.3) |
| After an expansive state I cannot act, decide or speak linearly. | Aperture stuck wide; loss of action vectors; compression not restored. | Let priors re-tighten around one concrete task. Anchor before further expansion. (§3.1, §3.3, §2.2) |
| An insight from an altered state will not transfer to ordinary life. | Integration bottleneck: aperture forced open exogenously without scaffolding to retain the data. | Treat as a glimpse, not a state. Train the interface, not the chemistry of the lens. (§3.6) |
| A high-amplitude feeling has become the whole of reality; there is no vantage point. | Somatic/emotional fusion, characteristic of the non-verbal architecture. | Do not seek a verbal anchor by force. Lower amplitude; let the wave settle; a stable node nearby helps more than analysis. (§3.5, Scenario B) |
| I am trying to think my way into stillness. | Hyper-logic: mistaking the narrator for the self, characteristic of the verbal architecture. | Stillness is not a conclusion. Drop below the words via the audit. (§3.4, §3.5) |
| People go quiet or defensive around me; animals keep distance. | High-amplitude transmission across coupled blankets; surrounding nodes raising defences (quarantine). | Lower own amplitude first; become the most predictable coordinate in the room. (§5.2, §6.3) |
| An exchange is "over" but I am still looping on it. | Post-interaction hysteresis: prediction error persisting after the input has ended. | Recognise the residue as residue. Audit the loop; transmit coherence into the next contact rather than re-litigating the last. (§5.3) |
| Guilt about eating; or eating mindlessly. | The moral reading of thermodynamic debt; or gratuitous entropy. | Debt is an energy transfer, paid continuously. Presence at the meal; route energy to output. (§6.1, §6.2) |
| I am waiting for a reward for behaving well. | Alignment framed as a future payout; installs a target and a ledger. | The reward is the immediate reduction of internal friction. Release the handbrake; nothing is owed back. (§6.4) |
| I have started a new identity as "an aligned person". | The interface has built a grander story and mistaken it for the substrate. | Recalibration is a parameter update, not an identity. Drop the story; keep the parameters. (§7.4) |