"...I am worried that learning patterns of thought suited for a place where one is always safe is actively bad if I ever want to return to the material plane where that is not the case." 

"I think there are some patterns of thought that would be bad for that, but mostly - habits are not just a variety of skills for situations, with none of them better or worse than others. Healing is not just learning the habits for a safer world, it is also learning how to notice your own needs, and what it feels like both to listen to and to ignore trauma-based instincts, and how to tell when you're pushing yourself and when you're harming yourself. People who get very good at the things Nirvana tries to teach are able to spend most of their time trying to save people from eternal damnation and usually failing. That doesn't come from a habit of expecting things to be okay, or of deluding yourself about how bad things are, or of deliberately not-thinking about things, or of surrounding yourself with gentleness. The skill it requires is also one that would serve someone who fights wars, I think."

"That...makes sense. I do want to be able to do that - I was trying, before, to be able to live in a world with many awful things and not give up. I - am not really sure what it means, to be able to tell if something is harming me, separate from whether I think it is bad?" 

"Some things are bad but not in a way that interferes with your ability to form predictions about the world and act on your goals and make sense of the things that happen to you. And some things are bad in a way that interferes with predicting and acting and sense-making. If I try a fancy flying trick at high speeds in a rock canyon fall badly and break my wing that will be annoying, but it will not interfere with my ability to predict or make sense of the world. If you broke your wing right now I think it would interfere with your sense-making, since you are trying to predict that you won't come to random harm, and since it'll feel less possible to do things that you care about doing."

"- Honestly I think that if something bad happening interferes with my ability to form accurate predictions or make plans that will work, that is a very stupid cognitive error to be making and I should do something less stupid instead." 

"Hmmmm, what does 'stupid' mean, there?"

Mhalir mulls on that for a moment. "It is - objectively recognizable as a mistake, to anyone assessing it from the outside? It would cause me to be more wrong rather than less, it is...the opposite of learning from experience, in a sense, if observing something causes my model of the world and my ability to achieve my goals to be worse rather than better." 

"I think it is a mistake and one that people get better at avoiding as they heal. But - it's very hard, in a world that keeps hurting you, to build the skills that might let you escape the hurt."

"Why?" 

"Well, it's hard to learn to swim when you're drowning. Because the immediate panic about how you are not getting enough air and your head is sinking below the water is going to take priority over skill formation or reasoning things out or anything like that. - this is both an example and a metaphor."

"I...think that makes sense. But I was not usually in situations of immediate panic, before, I did make time to practice skills and reason through things. - I did not always get it right, but..." 

"I think there is a lower-level version of 'immediately panicked' that everyone in the Material world and many people in most of the Outer Planes is subject to almost all of the time, and that has similar kinds of effects to being actively drowning, though of course to a lesser degree. It is the state of - fundamentally not believing that you are safe and loved no matter what you do, and fundamentally not expecting anyone to catch you if you make mistakes, and so being alone, at the edges of your strength, without even any way to imagine things being different than that."

For some reason Mhalir is suddenly, overwhelmingly sad, and his thoughts tug to Carissa; he remembers her fear, and how much he wanted her to be less afraid...

"I - mean - that is how reality works? It does not generally catch you if you make mistakes, and in the world I come from, there is nobody to catch you when you die, either, you just - cease to exist and are gone forever. And the only way to change that is to become strong enough that you will not fall. And then try to catch everyone." 

"Yes. That is how lots of places are. And so everyone is almost drowning all the time which makes them not very good at learning to swim."

"Nirvana is not like that. There are things to catch you if you fall. You are not alone. And once you have learned to swim then you will be more effective even if you are plunged back into the world where everyone is slightly drowning."

This gives him a slightly clearer conception of what he needs to do, Mhalir thinks, but still not much of a map for how.

"I think you are saying that there is a kind of being scared and not feeling safe that is - like drowning and panicking about it, it makes one less able to reason or learn things? And so my mind would work better and I would make fewer mistakes in reasoning if I were less scared in that way?" 

"I think so, yes. Talking about minds is hard, though, and there isn't a good vocabulary for it."

"That is inconvenient." Sigh. "Is there standard advice for how to be less scared here." 

"Sometimes it is a good idea to do things that are just a tiny bit scary, so that you can start to train the expectation that those things will go well and not go badly. Sometimes it's a good idea to talk about what scares you, in a lot of detail, what is the worst thing that might happen and what feels like the likeliest thing that could happen and what would make the situation feel safe."

"The worst thing that might happen is...if Asmodeus wins the war between Heaven and Hell, and uses Wish to kidnap Aroden to Hell so he can destroy his soul forever, and then resurrects me so he can interrogate me and destroy me as well, and Carissa too, and - if the Andalites betray the peace treaty I wrote up as soon as I am no longer there, and win the war with my people, and everyone who matters to me is either gone forever or has lost everything they care about, and I cannot - fix things - because I do not exist anymore..." 

"That does sound like about the worst thing that could possibly happen. Does it feel like - there ought to be something you could do that would make it under your control -"

"- I... not starting from here, I do not have enough levers, but - if I had been smarter, before–" He cuts off. "Nevermind, I thought of a worse thing that could happen. If Rovagug escapes while the other gods are distracted and then destroys the entire universe, that would be worse." 

"- yes, that would be!"

Now Mhalir is feeling very overwhelmed by the weight of possible-awful-things that could happen, and the smallness of his current existence, and - it doesn't feel logically coherent, that he could ever feel safe in a world where that remains true. 

He curls up very small again and says nothing.