[crawfordcomeaux]

After accidentally abandoning my likes/dislikes and disengaging disgust, my experience of music viscerally changed. I can enjoy all music now.

So much of it is conditioning, maybe all of it. There's conditioning around chords, progressions, dissonance, harmony, repetition, subjective ideas of what constitutes music, and so much more.

The only way to prove it isn't mere conditioning is to remove the conditioning and then evaluate.

[bambax]

This is so true -- to a point. One can still have likes and dislikes, provided it's their own.

[crawfordcomeaux]

"Provided it's their own"

What would be an example of if it's their own or not, and would it actually make a difference?

[djsavvy]

Love to hear this. How did you accidentally abandon your likes and dislikes?

[crawfordcomeaux]

Here's instructions for the practice I adopted. Note: how it's executed makes a difference. The initial acknowledgment of opposites (this will make more sense after reading the instructions) needs to be done compassionately, and not dismissively. There may need to be more steps at the beginning to, otherwise it's a little gaslighty. It worked great internally as is, and I think it may have trained callousness in me in the long-term when applied in relationships with other people.

So I did it by choosing to abandon all judgment and then reframing perspectives I heard using the words "like" and "dislike." The reframing always had in it "I can learn to enjoy everything."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29764591