Serious meditation on covid booster as a case study of bigger issues

There are MANY times in this life when performing a small task offers us a chance to learn much larger and important lessons, if only we are open and aware ("conscious"?) enough to see what lessons are offered. For me, this morning [2AM-3AM], in a higher regular meditation time, I feel a duty to pass on SOME of the many lessons which result from thinking about a simple task I will do later this morning: getting a third pfizer covid shot, which I scheduled yesterday (with help from my wife). [I Posted this 6 hours ago on a serious covid discussion list and on two lists studying human consciousness. A key covid guy encouraged me to repost it here.] First interesting part: I had not planned to get the third shot so soon. Coming back to the US from two or three weeks in Greece, mainly revisiting ancient history, I have a lot of important catchup work to do. I was planning to do the catchup stuff first before any kind of covid stuff. But we are grateful to a neighbor who is unusually well-informed about such things, who passed on links first to the report showing less than 50% effectiveness of the shot after 6 months in preventing covid, and then a more radical reduction just a month later. Second: I still have work to do in controlling my own emotions. Thanks to our neighbor, I did look more closely at emails in my gigantic inbox from Arlington county on scheduling vaccinations. I navigated enough to see a link to a close place, a Harris Teeter we visited in past years, and start to schedule an appointment. But a badly designed web page were bad enough to unleash negative hormones, and I was giving up, until my wife calmed me down, took charge for awhile, and reminded me of alternatives, like the nearby Safeway we visit much more often anyway. (Just as close as the Harris Teeter, but the web sites did not know that.) And so at 11AM, I should be there. I feel strange announcing that when I know weird things can undo almost any plan these days, but it LOOKS inevitable this time. Third: the booster shot policy issues in the US are a great case study in public administration, where people work hard but fail to live up to the kinds of standards of rationality and efficiency we should all have learned, following the great work of John Von Neumann, important to policy in bigger and riskier areas like climate, internet policy and human potential, the three areas I have committed to try to help more this month (really, since 2019). (( Side comment: I also see new work on real physics, as in Yeshua's new experiments, as being far more important than covid, as part of these priorities)). Standards of rational and efficient policy include the question: WHY are many of us now offered a third pfizer shot as the only option, when Moderna might be just as good or better for the booster shot? THAT question deserves very serious analysis by folks who know enough to approach it rationally. But for myself, I have lots of thoughts about that serious question, but even more thoughts about how I myself have my own special pattern of connections and dharma and whatnot, urging me to focus much more on those other priorities I mention. I DON'T want to dedicate too much of my OWN limited time and energy to covid. But this issue itself is a beautiful case study in rational first person experience and decision making, more important as a case study than as a thing in itself. It reminds me of another lesson: how many people, people WITHOUT special dharma for covid, waste too much time or energy either fighting covid risk or fighting against reasonable, easy precautions (like the shot I will get this morning). Why do humans waste so much energy in neurotic ways like that? This is ever so basic to real scientifically grounded understanding of human consciousness as it works in reality!! That is worthy of a long discussion on both of the consciousness lists I cc'ed here, but advances in internet company policies make it more difficult to to get you links to important, quick straightforward explanations!! And it is a very big question in any case, based on the connections between issues studied in human psychology (from Freud and Jung to folks like Losscher and Vaillant) and ojr new mathematical understanding of the brain (as in Amit's conference last week, for which recordings will be announced this week). Some of us understood the basic principles of intelligent or conscious systems many years ago, but the issues of neuroses and local minima in human brain development, and then higher creativity, took more years to get a fix on, even just the aspects based on mundane brain function. My slides last week included a nice new flow chart explaining key aspects of what we learned in the paper by Werbos and Davis, easy to find via scholar.google.com if you know about advanced search (as you all should!). That in turn is a reminder that folks who pretend to be omniscient gods on earth really need to work especially hard (as we all should!) to strengthen mundane "first order sanity", as explained in the suite of three papers I published in 2019, linked to from werbos.com/religions.htm. One hour ago, meditation told me to get this down NOW, before I get distracted by other things, but now I will go back to bed, after one small thing on another track... Best of luck, Paul [P.S. It took me an hour to write this, but it covered only about 15% of about 10 minutes in midddle of night meditation. That is typical, except that it is usually between 4AM and 7AM that I get to the highest state I get to in normal life. TRAVEL is different because it offers special new connections in meditation, usually in daytime because that is when we travel. But in Varkisa beach, near Athens, one night, it worked just as well there.]