Limitations

He trains like this: experiencing joy I will breathe in, he trains like this: experiencing joy I will breathe out.

There is a sense of the victory of oneself over things, and a sense of the victory of things over oneself. There is also a sense of being in tune with things, and that might be called "conquering illusion" or something like this.

"We encourage the research community to test our ideas in practice of various forms. Some ideas for paragogical design include: (1) Establish a group consensus for expectations/goals/social contract of the course and how each of them should be evaluated at its conclusion. (2) Have learners designate learning goals that they then commit to stick with. (3) Formalize a process for assisting peers (e.g. responding to questions, giving feedback on publicly posted work). (4) Develop explicit pathways for learner feedback to translate into changes to the learning environment."

He trains like this: experiencing pleasure I will breathe in, he trains like this: experiencing pleasure I will breathe out.

And, as a footnote, "bodily pleasure is described as bodily agreeableness and pleasure arising from bodily contact; mental pleasure is described as mental agreeableness and pleasure arising from mental contact." (Ānandajoti Bhikkhu)

These are the sorts of things we want: the fit of the hammer handle in the hand of the master carpenter, the positive camaraderie within a group whose social ergonomics are well suited to their task, the suiting of the words to the action and the action to the words of Prince Hamlet.

It doesn't always always seem to work like this. We are in mental and physical contact with a lot of limitations. This seems to go hand in hand with the world being full of relationships. In my own life: I figure I can say "I will put in 7 hours of work today on programming and grantwriting", but I also expect that I will be defeated by circumstances. Either something will come up in my work context, or else, supposing I'm successful and I manage not to get distracted, I worry that 7 hours won't be enough. I mean, even 7 hours today, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. This sort of thought is rather foundationless and the futility that I imagine constitutes the victory of the world over my ambitions, before I have even gotten off of the ground.

On the other hand, if I work with genuine effort, we might even say valiantly, for, say 5 hours instead of 7, and this happens again tomorrow etc., at least we have not declared a default victory to the world and to circumstance. The default and defeatist judgments are "suffering" in the Buddhist sense of the word, in this context.

The things we know about (Kant), and how much more the things that we experience, come in a certain context. Potentially a constructed reality that we exist in only to keep ourselves in check (PKD, "Time Out of Joint"). It is relatively easy to draw relationships between things on the ideational level, but more difficult to make precise sense of things on the level of experience.

How does a person get stuck with a defeatist attitude? How do they get unstuck? This is on the level of daily practice, though it probably also applies interpersonally and across time, when we look at the limits of knowledge or science or experience at any given point in time. It's not that these things are so horribly disappointing (unless one, for whatever reason, identifies with the sense of "flawedness" or "incompleteness"), there are just some things that we as humans don't know, can't do, etc.

There's the whole "glass half full, glass half empty" thing to consider here. The same things that might be considered limitations give a flavor or color to the world that we're in (actually define this world and its possibilities?). The sense of "defeat" is presumably just another local flavor, much like the sense of "joy" or pleasure.

What are we really in touch with as operating principles? There is something quite pleasurable about giving up an axiom or scientific truth, about taking an assumption that has been held for ages and seeing it go topsy-turvy. Particularly when we're talking about something that was always assumed to be a limitation but that is revealed not to be. So for example when looking at a social context with chagrin or with esteem, at something that either holds one back or pushes one on.

In any case it is the context in question that we respond to, often in a very automatic way.