May 10. With the weather getting warmer, I'm going barefoot as much as possible. Last night I dreamed that I was in some kind of office and realized that I'd forgotten to wear shoes, so I was trying to go discreetly outside to put my shoes on and come back in.
Suddenly I understand what's going on with kids who dream they're naked at school. Just as I know there's nothing wrong with not wearing shoes, they know there's nothing wrong with not wearing clothes. The dream is about being in an insane world, a world full of rules that you can't reason out from anything practical or ethical -- you just have to learn the rules one by one, and there's always a fear that you'll get a big one wrong. It's not a shame dream -- it's a Kafka dream!
May 12. Yesterday I ate some cannabutter and noticed, and not for the first time, the simple and difficult solution to depression and motivation. My inner dialogue, on the boundary between conscious and subconscious, is extremely inefficient, like a clunky machine that half the time works against itself. So it's just a matter of going in there and fixing it, which requires moment after moment, hour after hour, month after month, of practicing metacognition.
That's one reason I think sitting meditation is overrated. Of all the stuff in your head that needs to be fixed, most of it will never come up when you're trying to do nothing, only when you're going about your normal day, so that should be the main focus of inner attention. Gurdjieff was saying that more than a hundred years ago.
I also want to point out that the practice of metacognition has to be completely non-judging, because if it's even a little big judging, you fall into a recursive loop: judging yourself for judging yourself and so on.