Episoder
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“What do you think you’re doing? And, um, why?”
This is a recording of a Substack live video AMA (“ask me anything”) session I hosted two days ago.
Around fifty people attended! I enjoyed it, and hope everyone else did too.
We had a preliminary discussion in the subscriber chat, which was very helpful for collecting questions and getting the conversation started.
I’ll do these monthly, for as long as there is interest. To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already:
You also need the Substack mobile app (iOS or Android):
The next live AMA session will be Saturday November 23rd, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time; noon Eastern. If you have the app open then, you’ll get a notification with a button to join.
I’ll open a preliminary chat thread on the 20th.
Transcript
I’m moved by how many people are showing up here. This is really great. Many people who, who I recognize and many people who I don’t know yet.
This format, the technology is less interactive than, for example, Zoom, which might be better. I thought I’d give this a go, partly just because it’s easily available, and partly I would like to support Substack. This is a new technology that they’re trying out. I really like Substack. I want them to succeed. So, giving this a trial run for their sake is a little bit of what I’m doing here, although it’s not the main thing.
I will dive in at the deep end. Benjamin Taylor asked a number of very hard questions, along with giving some very nice words of support, which I really appreciate— both the hard questions and the words of support. They could probably boil down to something like, “What do you think you’re doing? And, um, uh, why?”
And this is very hard because I don’t know, I don’t have, I don’t have good answers here. So, the first question is, “Is this one overall project, or many different projects?” And that’s a very on-point question.
And the answer is, it does feel to me like one huge project, because I have only one thing to say, which is: things go better when you don’t try to separate nebulosity and pattern. It’s very tempting to try to do that, because we don’t want nebulosity. We do want pattern to deliver control and certainty, so that you would know what to do, and have some confidence that things are going to go well. And that can never be guaranteed, because of nebulosity. So it’s good to always bear the nebulosity in mind.
This is a pattern that, it’s, it’s a phenomenon that is found in every domain of human experience and endeavor. So, uh, each of the many writing projects are looking at how this theme of pattern and nebulosity plays out in that realm. For example, the meta-rationality book is about how taking nebulosity into account is necessary for outstanding work in the domain of rational work.
So that’s the overall project. Um, embarrassingly, that means I’ve left a very large number of unfinished applications of that central theme in different areas.
Benjamin asks, “What are you hoping to achieve overall? Indeed, how do you see your job, role, or identity as a public intellectual?” Relatedly, Xpym asked, “How important do you see your own work in the grand scheme of things? Does humanity seem likely to figure out and widely adopt the complete stance?” (The complete stance is what you get if you don’t separate pattern from nebulosity.) Uh, “Is humanity likely to figure that out and figure out meta-rationality anytime soon? If I stop contributing tomorrow; if I don’t stop.”
I have no idea. I, I find this very difficult. Well, I find it very difficult because I, in a sense, because I don’t try. I really don’t have much in the way of identity as far as my work goes. I, I do the work and I try to do it as well as I can, as much as I can, and I try to make it as useful and interesting as I can. But like what is my role in that? I mean, it’s just that the writing happens and, and in some ways I’m not really involved, and I don’t form an identity as an intellectual or a writer or it’s, it’s not, I don’t know, I said these questions were difficult, I, I, and that I can’t answer them, so, but you know, maybe my non-answer is actually the best thing I can do here.
I want the work to be as useful as possible, and I think some of the ideas are important. They’re not necessarily original to me. I’m not sure anything that I have written is actually original. Uh, a lot of it is just repackaging ideas from particular academic literatures, or other sources, in ways that make them accessible. So in a sense, I’m a popularizer. Um, there’s probably some original synthesis in there, but I don’t, I mean, if I, if you’re an academic, you need to be really clear on this is my contribution. It’s mine. And I’m not interested in that.
I’m trying to read the chat as we go along here. Mike Slaton says: “It’s interesting that someone can know me from Twitter, vampire fiction, technical writing, a podcast, or this.”
Yeah, this is an attempt to feel out how I can be most useful and how the ideas, if they do have some value, can be most broadly disseminated in a way that they can be taken up and put to use.
”Some updates on the status of the websites, the AI book, the substack, etc. Are all the sites still active projects? How am I currently prioritizing them? What sorts of things might you expect to do when?”
The AI book is finished, it’s published. The website is, has the full text of the book along with some other related essays. I may write more about AI, in which case I would put it on that site. At the moment, I have nothing to say, because nobody knows what’s going on. It’s very confusing.
The other websites are all works in progress that— I think I’ve added something to each of the websites within the past year or so, and I expect I will keep doing that.
At the beginning of this year, I said, okay, I want to finish something. I’m going to concentrate on the meta-rationality book. I will finish that by the end of the year. I will do nothing else; when I have time to work, I will just work on meta-rationality.
Around about May, I realized that I was neglecting large parts of the readership by doing just that, and that it would be better to continue interleaving. So there’s been a lot of Vajrayana material that I’ve posted on Substack recently.
Um, also I realized this in the last month or so that the meta-rationality project is not going as I hoped. I had a detailed plan. Part of the plan was it would be no more than 200 pages. And at the rate that I’m currently going, it would be enormously more than that. So either I need to step back and do a much more superficial treatment; which might be the right thing, although I feel like a lot of the ideas really probably can’t get across without a lot of explanation and examples.
The other possibility would be to say, okay, this is a many-year project, like the Meaningness book, and I will just keep plugging away at it, and pieces will come out incrementally. I don’t know which of those is the better approach. I’m going to be trying to think about that hard over the next month or so.
All of the current writing goes on Substack. That’s because Substack has better distribution than my own websites. That’s partly because I used to promote my own websites via Twitter; that works less well than it used to. Substack is working well for me. My intention is that the writing that is part of one of the projects for which there is a website, I will copy back from Substack onto those websites, when I get around to it, or it seems appropriate or something. I haven’t done any of that yet, but that is the plan. So the websites are not abandoned, even though Substack is where all the writing has gone over the past year.
I can talk about my writing process, and that gets to several of the questions that were in the chat previously. Um, we have to talk about my brain. I have a very bad brain. I, I have ideas that are rationally worked out and very sensible about what I ought to write, and I have plans and outlines and priorities. And, I don’t get a, I don’t get a say in this. I mean, I can make plans as much as I like, and what actually happens is my brain does what it wants to do. So, I will be working on the meta-rationality book, which I think is serious and important and, uh, um, you know, might be very useful for a lot of people.
And, my brain gets some idiotic idea, like, “You really ought to write about the Dalai Lama’s piss test for enlightenment.” And I say “No, that’s, that’s ridiculous! Uh, this is a completely silly topic.” And my brain says, “Well, that’s what we’re going to write about.” And I say, “No, no, we’re writing about meta-rationality; it’s important.” And my brain says, “Nope, I’m writing about the piss test.” And it goes off and does that, and I don’t get a choice.
The weird thing is that those are often the things that are— go viral and become most influential. For example, “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” was… it’s essentially a footnote. It’s a long footnote to an unwritten section of Meaningness and Time. And the section of Meaningness and Time that is unwritten is actually important. And “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” is an offhand observation that my brain suddenly decided: today, that’s what we’re writing. And it took about three hours, and that’s probably my best known piece of work. So, and “The Piss Test,” it’s this little entertaining piece of nothing that increased the Substack subscribers by about a third in the course of a week.
So maybe my brain’s a lot smarter than I am, and I should just let it do whatever it thinks is best. I feel like it’s important to be disciplined and follow a plan, but, uh, but I don’t get a choice. So, you know, what happens is what happens anyway.
This relates to a question from ruby, about my approach to note taking. Uh, this is part of my writing process in general. This is kind of embarrassing. My approach to note taking is plain text files. My brain gets an idea. It says, “We need to write about this.” And I say, “no, that’s dumb.” It says, “no, we’re writing about that.” Um, and so I say, “Oh, all right,” I create a text file for that, I give it a title, uh, I stuff a couple of sentences from my brain into it, and then I try to forget about it. And over time, it accumulates notes from my background reading; uh, citations from academic literature, quotes from people’s blogs, um, and then bits of outline, bits of draft text. And these can accumulate for… there’s some files like that which are 20 years old, that pop out 20 years later. More often it’s a few years, sometimes it’s a few months.
Uh, sometimes my brain gets an idea, and insists on writing the whole thing right now, and then, then it comes out that day. But those are things that are in some sense trivial.
The note files are not cross referenced, they’re not in any fancy, uh, something like Obsidian, which looks really cool, and I like the idea, but I feel like, um, I, I, I don’t want to be administering my notes, I just want to stuff stuff in there and get it out of my head, and then I come back to it years later, and then that thing comes out.
Excellent question. Disciplined note taking is undoubtedly a good idea, and I don’t do it.
Frazer Mawson— thank you for all these questions, I really appreciate the questions, they’re great. “Will we ever get a Meaningness book? I’ve actually never made it to the end because I find reading books on my computer screen so painful!”
This is a hard question I don’t have an answer to, like all of these questions. So the Meaningness book is— there’s an outline; what is on the web is maybe 15 percent of what the outline says is supposed to be there, which means, obviously, I’m never going to finish it because I’ve been working on the Meaningness book, and putting pieces on the web, since 2010. Right, I’m doing about 1 percent of it per year, so it would be finished in the year, uh, 2110. I may live that long, but it will take some medical advances, which are… uncertain. So, uh, the whole book is not going to happen, probably!
I have thought that it would be good to extract from it pieces that could stand alone as a paperback or a Kindle book. People very often do ask for that.
I made the AI book into an actual book as an experiment, partly to see how much interest there actually is in a official book as opposed to a website. The answer is, there are less than a little less than 250 copies of the AI book in existence as a official book, as opposed to the website. Anything I post anywhere gets upwards of 2000 readers, probably. It’s hard to translate web analytics into actual readership. But it seems like there, in the case of that book, it’s less than, like, a ten to one ratio. And that would not be worth the amount of effort and time it takes to turn other things into finished books.
However, I finished the text of the AI book in February 2023, and put the whole thing on the web. I had intended that, immediately afterward, that would become a paper and Kindle book. I got quite sick then and was sick through most of 2023 and really didn’t, I wasn’t able to work, uh, until December. And I spent December turning the, uh, AI book text into a finished book. So that took a month. Uh, I don’t think it was worth it for 250 copies, but, because there was that long delay, maybe anybody who wanted to read that material had already read it on the web. And if there was actually new stuff that went into a book, people would want to read it in book form.
I don’t know how to gauge that. I periodically do polls on how many people would want to read a finished book. Uh, the answers are, are not interpretable. One possibility that came to mind while I was contemplating this yesterday is to run a Kickstarter. A Kickstarter, the model is you pledge a certain amount of money, and if enough people pledge that money, then a project happens. And, if not, then you get your money back. A Kickstarter, which said, okay, if a thousand people will pledge the price of a book, whatever that is, you know, twenty dollars or something, uh, that means there’s enough interest that it’s worth actually making a physical book, and I would go ahead. So if that seems like a good idea that you would want to go ahead with, then please let me know.
Chris asks, “I’d be interested in details on your sitting practice. Uh, how long you aim to do it per day, how you structure it, how you keep it fresh and alive, how you keep going with it. I’m struggling to fit mine into a hectic family life. Looking for inspiration. Thank you!”
Uh, thank you, Chris. I probably shouldn’t answer this question. I’ll do my best. I don’t feel I’m an expert on meditation. I don’t teach meditation. I write about Vajrayana theory. To an extent, I very tentatively have been teaching Vajrayana theory. So I would ask these questions of a meditation teacher who knows what they’re doing.
But I will say, my own practice is very undisciplined now, and I don’t recommend that. Everybody says it’s important to practice every day and to practice for a set amount of time. I’m not sure that advice is always good. If you can manage it, especially as a beginner, it is really good. Um, when I was a beginner, which is… a long time ago… I’m still a beginner. I’m not actually very good at meditation, which is why I don’t teach it, but when I was starting out, I aimed for 45 minutes a day and managed that most days. I was running a technology company at the time, so somehow it was possible to fit that in along with the 70 hour work week that I had. My life, personal life has been really chaotic in the past 15 years, and my discipline has disintegrated. So now it is very much a matter of, sometimes I’m inspired and I do it and sometimes I’m not.
I think the inspiration is key. And if you think that you want to meditate more, finding that inspiration, looking at what your motivations are, thinking about times when meditation seemed valuable, thinking about why, thinking about where you hope it may take you, and being reasonably concrete about that, and not thinking about “Enlightenment,” because who the hell knows what that means. Think concretely about what you want. And then think about “How will my meditation practice support that.” That is probably what’s going to take you forward. Again, I would recommend talking to somebody who knows what they’re talking about.
So I’m looking at the chat here… Benjamin Taylor asks good questions. “What was the tech company I ran?”
It was a, um, an informatics company for management of certain kinds of chemical information in the pharmaceutical drug discovery industry. I happened into that because I’d been doing AI, and AI was at the time at an impasse. There was no progress possible, as far as I could see. And I also was increasingly thinking that AI, if it did make progress, it would probably be a bad thing, which on the whole is still my belief. So I didn’t want to continue with AI.
But I had these technical skills and I thought, “What can I do that’s actually going to be valuable?” And applying those in the pharmaceutical drug discovery area seemed like one of, it seemed like the thing that I could do that would be most useful and practical. So that’s what I did.
Govind Manian asks, “I would be very interested to hear you talk about where Vajrayana and adult developmental theory need to be, to meet the current moment, and what’s challenging about getting there.”
That’s potentially three different questions. There’s what does Vajrayana need to do? What does adult developmental theory need to do? And there’s, uh, the question of a synthesis there, which I think is possible.
Regarding Vajrayana, first of all, I would say this is a question for my monthly Vajrayana Q&A, but really that question is maybe better addressed to my spouse, Charlie Awbery, who, um, co-founded an organization called Evolving Ground, which is devoted to exactly this question, of working out a contemporary interpretation of Vajrayana that meets current needs. Govind and Charlie are good friends, so, uh, I, this is, this is advice that Govind doesn’t need, but that everyone else or some other people might find useful: talk to Charlie.
Um, adult developmental theory is very influential for, for myself and also for Charlie. Uh, we talk about it a great deal, and we do see a lot of opportunities for synthesis between that and Vajrayana, and are actively working on that.
For the theory itself, what I think is really important at this stage is somebody to do some good science. Because we’ve got a lot of theory that’s all very interesting, and there’s a lot of anecdotes. I can give personal anecdotes. Lots of people can give anecdotes saying this is really helpful. But we don’t have solid data, which should not be very difficult to get. But somehow somebody with enough background in psychometrics, academic psychology of development, somebody needs to do the work.
That probably needs funding, which is probably difficult to get from standard sources. Uh, if anybody has money burning a hole in their pocket that they want to use to support some kind of science, thinking about how that might happen could be something to do.
I want to know whether the theory is true. What parts of the theory are true? What parts of the theory are off somewhat? Overall, I think it’s true and important, but it would be really good to demonstrate that, partly just to make it more widely known and accessible. This, this is a, an academic psychology research project.
There’s a lot of metarational work here to be done, which is problem identification. So, what, exactly what questions are we trying to answer, and that, that question is inseparable from what methods can we use to answer those questions.
I mean, the most interesting question for me is what interventions can help people through stage transitions, and I’m particularly interested in the stage four to stage five transition, which is from rationality to meta-rationality, or from, uh, a systematic way of approaching life into a fluid, interactive way of approaching life. That’s what I’m most interested in. Figuring out exactly what the academic research question there is would be a lot of work.
Um, I’m afraid I don’t know how to pronounce this name. It’s E G E M E N, Egemen, perhaps. “After reading the stuff that you published, I started exploring, finding my own way. Instead of learning, reading, consuming, and taking advice from others. Is this hubris or freedom? How should one strike the balance between the subjective feel on how to approach meaningness, meditation, and Buddhism, and under which circumstances should one take advice instead?”
Uh, these are excellent, very difficult questions. This is a question coming from a stage five point of view. It’s a meta question, of how do I… how best to approach the object level? Everything in, at the stage five level, has to be responsive to purposes and circumstances, and it’s going to be, in this case, very individual. So I can’t give generalized advice about this.
Um, I think that the statement of the question is excellent, because it points at this in terms of there being a balance, um, between doing one’s own experimentation and having some trust in one’s own ability to make sense of things; and also recognizing that we’re all fallible, and sometimes advice and mentoring are extremely important. And, uh, going back and forth between those, and through experience, learning where it’s time to seek advice, uh, this has to be somewhat a matter of feel. There aren’t any definite guidelines or principles possible here, I think.
james asks, uh, “You said that you don’t regard yourself as a philosopher because philosophers use methods that you do not use. I find this very puzzling, because I regard the primary and original method of philosophy to be verbal, verbal argumentation. Simply making good arguments for beliefs and approaches to life. Something that you (meaning me) certainly do a lot of.”
This is in reference to an offhand note I posted on Substack the day before yesterday, I think, um, which got a lot of responses, mainly hostile, um, because I said that philosophy is bad. I do believe philosophy is bad and we should stop it. Uh, That’s partly a slightly trollish statement. Because it’s trying to get a rise. Because I want to understand what people think is valuable about philosophy. That is, non-academics. I mean, academic philosophers have their own ideas about this, but there’s a lot of people who find value in philosophy, and I don’t fully understand what’s going on there, and I think there’s an important misunderstanding that I would like to elucidate; but I haven’t located exactly what the misunderstanding is.
Um, I’m not sure whether to write about this. It’s a big topic that I don’t understand very well yet. It could be another book project, and I don’t want to do another book project! I want to finish at least one of the ones that I’ve already got underway! But maybe there’s some way of doing something much smaller that would still be useful.
Argumentation is very important in some parts of philosophy, maybe not all of them. Continental philosophy in the past half century has not been interested in argumentation, and I think it was right to make that move. Continental philosophy in the last half century has a lot of serious defects, but I think that was a correct move.
I don’t make arguments for beliefs, for the most part. I’m not interested in that. And that’s because at the meta-rational level, we’re not seeking the truth of propositions. Because what truth means is contextual, it’s purpose dependent. This is the opening of the meta-rationality book: “Is there any water in the refrigerator?” “Yes.” “Where? I can’t see it.” “It’s in the cells of the eggplant!” Was that true? I mean, in some sense, yes. And in some sense, no. So, the question at the meta-rational level is what do we even mean by truth in, in, in, in, a particular circumstance for a particular purpose; and is truth even a question of interest?
It may be much more important to make good distinctions, for example; and distinctions aren’t true or false. Uh, they are illuminating in a different way. The value of distinctions is also recognized within philosophy. I’m just using that as an example of something where you shouldn’t really argue that a distinction is right. You argue that a distinction is useful for certain purposes. And that’s not really a truth claim as such, or it’s not a philosophical truth claim. I mean, the way you do that is by pointing at specific examples of, here’s how that distinction turned out to be useful in this situation. That’s what I try to do. So the meta-rationality book is illustrated with people introducing new distinctions, for example, and how that played out as being useful in some practical way.
Ludwig Yeetgenstein— it’s a reference to Wittgenstein, who’s one of the philosophers who’s most influenced me— says, “I got interested in your writing via Meaningness. At some point later, I read some of Hubert Dreyfus writing on AI and was pleasantly surprised to see you cited there. I realized then that I didn’t actually know anything about your professional background in AI work. Can you give a summary of your background before you got into your current phase of writing?”
Um, I’m old enough that I’ve done a lot of odd things. When I was a kid, uh, I was interested in “the mind.” I’m no longer interested in the mind. I’m interested in thinking, but I don’t think minds have very much to do with thinking. But as a kid I was interested in the mind, and so, uh, cognitive science was just really getting underway when I was a kid. So I was really excited by that. There was this synthesis of cybernetics and artificial intelligence and linguistics and neuroscience and anthropology, and all these disciplines that seemed to have something important to say about the mind.
Also I, I loved computers. I, I, I still love computers, although I also hate them. So I, went and did a PhD in artificial intelligence. I did academic work in that field that was influential at the time. It’s all long since forgotten, so I have no academic credentials.
In the course of that, I, I realized that AI was a dead end because it had this basis in rationalism, which is Hubert Dreyfus’ critique of it, and I understood at a certain point that he was right about that, and I, uh, with my collaborator, Phil Agre, we tried to work out what would a non-rationalist approach to artificial intelligence be, and we had some success with that. Dreyfus wrote an interesting paper called “What is Heideggerian AI, and how it would have to be more Heideggerian to work,” or something like that. And it was basically about our work. Dreyfus, for those who don’t know, was a prominent critic of AI. He was a professor of philosophy at Berkeley. He was probably the foremost scholar of Heidegger of his era. I didn’t know him well, but I regard him as one of my important teachers as well as influences.
So then I, I mentioned earlier, I decided AI was a dead end. I went into the pharmaceutical industry to apply what I knew there. Uh, I did that for a few years and decided that was a dead end. I was getting more and more serious about my Buddhist practice. I retired and, um, my plan had been to practice full time… -ish. I thought I’d be also writing something. That didn’t work out as expected. But I did learn an enormous amount, so it wasn’t time wasted.
The Meaningness project actually came out of that. It originated as an attempt to make sense of the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness and form, which is an academic subject within Buddhism that is enormously complicated, enormously obscure. And I thought, well, “I can write up a popular version of this that will make sense to people and that’ll be valuable.” And, uh, you know, that turned into this unfinishable, gigantic book about everything. So, that’s something about my background.
Chapter23 asks, “I’d love to feel the differences between meaningfulness and Integral or metamodernism.”
Oh, that’s a good question. I know it’s a good question because I’m not exactly sure what the answer is. I think there, there is a lot in common there. There’s an essay on the meaningness site called “I Seem to be a Fiction,” which is kind of about my relationship with Ken Wilber’s work. The joke is that I may have been fictionalized as a character in one of his books. I don’t know whether that’s true, but it would make sense if it were true. So it’s partly just, that’s a good joke. Uh, um, but partly it’s trying to sort out what do I think about his work and um, I, I kind of gave up at a certain point. There’s a crossover, but I’m not getting a good answer here.
Mike Slaton says: it’s very difficult to navigate my work because this, it’s scattered across six or more websites. And it, it all is, because there’s one overarching theme, it’s all cross linked. Uh, and it’s… I’ve been writing it, when I can, for, uh, fifteen years now, ish. So, Mike says, “I would never have known about Francis Schaeffer, who was an evangelical theologian who was influential mid 20th century, how he, in some sense, tried to do what I’m doing.”
Yeah, that was a weird and exciting discovery. And I wrote it up just because it was weird, and I, you know, I like weird things. It amuses me.
” The culture war,” Mike continues, “is so confusing and hard to understand.” Yeah, I mean, I find it confusing and hard to understand. And in 2016, when I wrote that, I was that was sort of top of mind for me. Um, I still think about it a lot. I still have a lot of draft essays about the culture war. And I think I have some things to say that are different and might be useful.
But, you know, there’s so much written about the culture war. And there’s so much danger of audience capture. There is so, people have such strong feelings that they want to argue, and I, I’m not interested in arguing, it’s, it, uh, so, you know, I, if I say anything about the culture war, I’ll just put something out there and not try to argue it.
This is not a good way of building an audience, but, I, there’s a podcast coming up which is about the relationship between my work and the work of Jordan Peterson when he was an academic psychologist, before he became a cultural warrior. Uh, there’s a lot of connections between our, our intellectual work when he was being an academic psychologist. Um, and then he became a culture warrior, he was captured by his audience, and that did not go well for him personally, I think, as well as probably his attempt to intervene in the culture war was at most partly successful, but maybe actually counterproductive. So, that’s a cautionary tale for me, personally.
Max Soweski says, “What do you make of the bifurcation between ‘me’ and ‘my brain,’ with conflicting priorities? I have the same thing, like there’s a current of desire I can tap into that often feels separate from me and seems threatening, scary, or unintuitive.”
Um, yeah. Uh, I mean, life is weird. Uh, brains are weird. They, they, who knows what, what they’re up to. Um, you know, I have this complicated relationship with my brain that is— Yeah, it works out well enough on the whole. Uh, I, I wish it was more obedient, but maybe it’s better that, uh, I give it free rein. On the other hand, if I gave it free rein, then there’d be this outpouring of ridiculousness, and that would be entertaining, perhaps, but maybe not so valuable.
I think my brain does things it enjoys. And I think it’s important to be both useful and to enjoy yourself, and to help other people enjoy themselves by producing things that are enjoyable, that are fun, that are weird, that get you thinking. So, uh, so I, I try to combine those, and I do the boring stuff and my brain does the fun stuff, and maybe it works out for the best.
So, um, we’re basically at time here. Uh, I want to thank all of you for participating. I’m really, uh, pleased that so many of you took the time to show up, um, and for the excellent difficult questions, many of them somewhat embarrassing.
Please let me know what you think about this format. Would you like me to do this again? Is this broadcast only format— I’m a little unsure about that. Let me know what you think. And also, any advice or thoughts you have about how this went and what you’d like to see in the future, that would be great.
Thank you all, and, I hope to see you again, um, maybe in this format, or maybe elsewhere. So long.
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Military use of Buddhist Tantra helps explain why it is so weird
I extracted this seven-minute video from my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. In that session, we discussed the weirdness of the Buddhist Tantra we have inherited; and how it evolved as a series of adaptations to diverse, extreme historical contexts. Practices that made sense in India or Tibet a thousand years ago don’t make sense now, because political, economic, social, cultural, and military conditions are different.
Understanding which aspects of Vajaryana addressed which historical conditions can help us choose which parts we want to make use of ourselves. For example, the city-destroying ritual of the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra is probably no longer worth bothering with.
However, understanding historical changes in military applications of tantra partly explains how monastic Buddhism displaced other sorts in Tibet. This matters because monasticism is mostly not appropriate for our current conditions. Recognizing that its dominance depended partly on outmoded military considerations may confirm that our rejection is sensible.
Transcript
I can tell a ridiculous story if you like?
In 1967 or 1968, there was a gigantic anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon. I think it was, at that time, the largest political demonstration that had ever been in the United States. And it was organized by a coalition of hippies and new left activists, and they decided to have a ritual in which they would, through the positive vibes of everybody present, they would levitate the Pentagon.
They negotiated with the Department of Defense. They wanted to raise it 300 feet into the air, and the negotiators from for the Department of Defense, there was a hard negotiation and they whittled it down to 10 feet. The hippies were not allowed to levitate the Pentagon more than 10 feet off the ground.
So, when the day came, there was this enormous celebratory anti-war thing, and everybody sat in a circle around the Pentagon and chanted Om, and had good vibes, and were aiming at raising the Pentagon. So those were the nice, peaceful magic users.
There was also a small contingent, and I think it may only have been one person, who was Kenneth Anger, who’s a known avant-garde filmmaker, who is also an occultist, who discovered that in the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra, which is one of the key tantras of mahayoga, which is one of the tantric yanas, there is a ritual for destroying an enemy city when you’re at war. You do this ritual and the buildings all just collapse.
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Ultraspeaking trains you in confident, effective speaking; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.
Vajrayana trains you in confident, effective action; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.
We find them startlingly similar, although one offers courses in a consequential everyday competence, and the other is an ancient Indian religion.
This thirty-nine-minute video records a spontaneous, mostly-unplanned conversation between Charlie Awbery and David Chapman.
Charlie is an Ultraspeaking coach, currently leading the Fundamentals Level Two course; and co-founder of the Evolving Ground Vajrayana meditation community. David writes about Vajrayana at Vividness, and has written previously about his brief Ultraspeaking experience. We are married, and co-teach Vajrayana sometimes.
Ultraspeaking’s Fundamentals course trains you to let go of trying to sound polished or professional while speaking, in order to communicate confidently and naturally, which connects you with your audience emotionally. That means being fine with “um”s and silences and restarts and garbled syntax. Your audience doesn’t care about that—they care about you!
Accordingly, when David edited the video, he left all that in—where he’s usually edited his videos to “sound more professional” with constant cutting.
Effective conversation, and also effective professional presentations, depend almost as much on eye contact and body language as on what is said. Although this recording is available as an audio podcast, you will find it more engaging, and it will make better sense, if you watch the video, at meaningness.substack.com/ultraspeaking-and-vajrayana.
Transcript
Charlie: So you were shy about recording a game, and you said you didn’t want to record a game.
David: Yeah, I’m feeling better today than I was. Uh, we could try it and, uh, see what happens.
Charlie: I’ll go into coach mode and, uh, share my screen with you and… What’s your favorite game?
David: So I haven’t done any of these in six months, so I don’t remember what any of them are. I think the one that is, uh, a whole series of three second prompts was, was fun.
Charlie: Autocomplete, rapid.
David: Yeah.
Charlie: I’ll put it on fairly slow too. Let’s give you 15 rounds so you can get into it. All right.
David: I said, “I don’t want to do this!”
Charlie: Yes, you did.
David: Okay, coach!
Charlie: That’s, that’s contrary. That is totally contrary to the spirit of Ultraspeaking.
David: Right.
Charlie: You can spontaneously leap into it. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The whole point is that you should make a mistake. Otherwise you’re not at your edge, right? You’re not pushing yourself beyond your usual capacity.
But anyway, this is a warmup. So off you go.
David: Ready, set, go!
Rolling windows down is like cash because you have to peel them off.
Paper is like a dentist because you can clean your teeth.
DNA is like artificial sugars because it’s sweet.
Blue cheese is like sweating because it’s salty.
Meeting your soulmate is like building a bridge because it’s a connection.
Staying up late is like plumbers because, I don’t know!
Time travel is like alcohol because it’s disorienting.
A judge is like…
A puzzle is like babies because they’re annoying.
Toothpaste is like breathing because you put them in your mouth.
An engine is like beards because it’s um.
Breaking your phone is like fear because it’s horrible.
Shame is like reptiles because they’re scary.
Underwear is like tipping because they’re annoying.
Anxiety is like friendship— bleagh!
Charlie: You haven’t done it for six months. Not bad. You didn’t end strong. You did, you did a bleagh at the end. So, do you remember one of the tenets is “end strong”? So it doesn’t matter what you say, you end with a good, strong line.
And “staying in character” is you, um, you stay in the mode, you don’t break out of what you are saying or, or delivering. So you would not let your inner critic come in. So you don’t comment on yourself like, uh, that was bad, I’m doing terribly or, uh, got it wrong again. Or, you know, you never step out of that, uh, that mode of just going with the flow, whatever’s going on inside.
How was it? It looked fun.
David: Yeah. I mean, it is inherently fun.
Charlie: Yeah.
David: Because I haven’t done this in six months and, you know, I only did this introductory taster course and have been meaning to go back to Ultraspeaking ever since, but I have not had the time to do that. Uh, I, I was planning to do a bunch of the games to prepare for our recording today, and I got violently sick two days ago and have recovered this morning.
Charlie: I’m glad you’re feeling better. And you know, it may be, uh, it may be better that you’re unprepared. From the Ultraspeaking perspective, a lot of it is about being willing to step into the unknown, and sometimes preparation goes against that. But you can over-prepare for things or, uh, try to follow a set of bullet points or something like that, and then find that you’re actually not, uh, not alive in the speaking in some way.
David: Yes, that was my experience when I did a lot of public speaking, for work and for school, that it’s definitely possible to over-prepare, and sticking closely to a script is a real mistake. Uh, on the other hand, when you want to deliver a bunch of specific content, then having the right degree of familiarity with that is helpful.
Charlie: If you’re familiar with your content, then you have this bow and arrow technique that Ultraspeaking teaches in, I can’t remember where, it’s probably the Professional level course that we teach this. It’s that you set yourself a direction and you can meander all over the place so long as you’re heading in roughly that direction.
You can tell stories, you can go off on a tangent, you can, go with, uh, something that you hadn’t thought, and you can connect with your audience at the same time as still heading in that direction.
So the arrow is the way that you’re heading. It’s your main point, your one key point or whatever it is. And then your bow is the heading off in that direction, doing all of the embellishments or finding different things to include.
David: I thought we might start by talking about how we found Ultraspeaking and first did it and what happened.
Charlie: That’s a good idea. Yeah.
David: It’s a bit difficult to remember because this was three years ago, something like that.
Charlie: 2022 was when I did my first course in February, 2022.
David: There was, uh, leading up to that, there were several months when various friends of ours were really excited about it and had done it and, um, we both found it intriguing and I wanted to do it or at least was considering doing it, and I didn’t have time, and you went ahead and did do it. And it was amazing for you, I gather.
Charlie: Surprisingly, I had not, uh, I had not expected to have the kind of breakthrough and personal, um, I think I would call it personal transformation that happened during that first Fundamentals session. Five weeks, the Fundamentals course is five weeks. And then I immediately did the Fundamentals course again because I had such a good time doing it. I loved it.
But it was week two of the Fundamentals that I had what I would call a breakthrough in understanding something experientially in my speaking, and it’s very difficult to put a finger on exactly what that is, what happens.
One of the promises that Ultraspeaking makes is, we will, we will give you a breakthrough. And they keep to that promise and follow up with each individual, and hundreds of people now, hundreds of people I have seen have that experience, and go through that same transformative process as I did.
David: I think that’s remarkable. It’s personal for me in a way. Partly from my own brief experience with Ultraspeaking, but more from just seeing from the outside how dramatically you changed. And you didn’t talk about it at the time, but I could just see that something major had happened that your whole way of being really changed.
I think for me, I sort of saw, I only became aware of it gradually over a period of a small number of weeks, but it was only that. I guess for you, it was just at a very specific time.
Charlie: There was a moment, there was a moment in a cohort, in a single rep that I remember, um, that was a turning point. I think a lot of people do have that, uh, instantaneous realization, which is, we were going to talk about how this is similar to Vajrayana in some ways, and, uh, instantaneous understanding, something just clicking, uh, that experience of suddenly finding myself in flow, telling a story.
I don’t think I had ever, ever in my life told, consciously decided to tell a story before. And it hadn’t even crossed my mind that that’s something that I could do. And, you know, maybe many people do naturally do that. Certainly I didn’t, at all. And having the experience of being in that and telling the story, and suddenly understanding something that had not been clearly seen previously. I hadn’t seen it myself, that I had a very strong public/private boundary. There were certain things that I would think not appropriate for public speaking, and other, uh, a kind of presentation mode, and a way of speaking to an audience that was appropriate or was congruent; and that there was a, um, set of experiences or a way of being or a private mode that I had that really was very, very private as well.
And just experiencing that boundary come crashing down, it was like a, it was like the floodgate. So not in ter— not, uh, you know, I wasn’t crying or, uh, or anything. It was much more sort of energetic, high energy, uh, fun experience for me, for, for others. It’s an opening up of a deep vulnerability. I think those things go together as well.
But it was like the, like, uh, a water pressure having built up on a dam and then that just pushing, like cascading and everything suddenly flowing. And it was very exciting, really exciting and very funny. And, you know, everybody in the pod was laughing, and we were just having a good time. So I remember that moment very well indeed.
But I think that was, that was a point in a gradual change that occurred in my speaking as well. Because there are lots of techniques. Ultraspeaking isn’t, eventually, a technique or a set of techniques. It’s, it’s far greater than that, but there are tenets, there are techniques, there are many, many, many practice methods that you can engage with.
And as you go through that process, then something in your demeanor, your way of being, your capacity in different circumstances, comes online.
David: Overall, I think what is most interesting for Ultraspeaking for me is its usefulness as a means of personal transformation or personal development, and I’ve seen that in you.
Charlie: Those two are not the same, you know. I want to interrupt there.
And this is another way that it is fascinatingly, uh, parallel to Vajrayana. Within Vajrayana, there’s, uh, uh, tension between developmental path, progressive path, linear step by step; uh, and the transformative path, which is you, you go through and include, and find a more expansive, uh, more inclusive, uh, way of being in the world. This is very Buddhist Tantra. And Ultraspeaking, from my perspective, Ultraspeaking is about including more and more and more in your speaking.
It’s not rejecting. It’s not saying, Oh, you, you’ve got to do this one thing and you mustn’t say “um,” and you mustn’t do, you mustn’t have your, uh, you know, the, the very kind of public speaking style where you’ve got to be, um, in speaker mode. And I’m going to tell you a story. And we’ll start with this way. And I’ll use my hands and, you know, go into very professional speaking mode.
And it’s not about doing this thing and not that thing. It’s about how much more range do you have? How much more energy can you have than your usual range? What else can you include? More and more and more.
And in the Opening Awareness book that I wrote, that’s one of the tenets that we have in meditation practice as well. You don’t cut off certain parts of your experience. You become more aware, more attuned to what is happening in your sense fields, in your experience, visual field, in your, in your, everything you can hear in the sensation in your body, in everything that’s going on around you.
So Ultraspeaking is more connecting like that.
And that, that is akin to the transformative approach in Vajrayana. And yet, at the same time, it’s very clear that you can say, Oh, last week, uh, I was a bit shy about doing that sort of communication; now, I feel really quite confident with it. And six months ago, I wasn’t, uh, I wasn’t able to speak in a more conversational tone. I still had a little bit of a performative mode going on and, uh, I seem to have been able to drop that. And then if I look a couple of years ago, Oh, I didn’t know how to pause. I wasn’t even comfortable with silence.
Like, how many people are uncomfortable with silence in, in a conversation? Even just with friends, you know. It’s extraordinary. Week three of the Fundamentals is actually quite challenging for many people. It’s my favorite.
David: That one is about silence?
Charlie: Yeah, it’s about pausing and silence, and I ended up running some workshops for Ultraspeaking on pausing, confidence and pausing. And that comes very naturally to me, maybe because of having spent so many months in silence? Enjoying, enjoying my own company.
David: That’s in the context of meditation retreats.
Charlie: Right.
Actually, let’s, let’s do a game, why not? Do my favorite game.
So Snowglobe trains you to take a breath and relax.
David: Do you want to contextualize these games a bit, to explain what a game is and how they function, in terms of, uh, Ultraspeaking, or do you just want to go into this?
Charlie: I think it will become clear through a demo. Ultra, the Ultraspeaking app has a number of different games and they’re all set up to help you practice, through multiple reps, one particular method or aspect of speaking.
So Snowglobe is set up to facilitate pausing, breathing, while you speak.
Sitting in a tea house on the top of a mountain with a view over the sea into the distance.
I can hear sounds from many, many, many miles away. They’re very faint.
Sweating buckets. I have been sitting here for hours. I mean hours. There are flies buzzing around. It’s, it’s intense. I can feel drips down my body, but I’m not moving.
I’m not moving.
I can think of so many experiences like that. And there’s something about sitting in discomfort over many hours. Suddenly, it pops. Something changes. And the idea, the very idea of being uncomfortable doesn’t exist anymore. It’s weird.
Charlie: And there’s nothing, nothing except vividness, vastness, intensity of sensation and the present moment. And it’s beautiful.
I wish that for everybody.
That was a little bit perform-y.
And I think it’s quite good to be able to push yourself a little bit into that edge of, uh, of putting on a show for others in a little way.
And yet that was also for me, uh, very sincere. I was talking from my own experience and remembering, reliving a moment, going into what that actually was like, and doing my best to speak from that experience.
And that kind of dropping in, tuning into an experience, and speaking from that place: that was one of the ways that I experienced a real breakthrough in being able to connect with people that I’m speaking to.
So I think there are many ways in which it’s possible to say, oh, there are these parallels with Vajrayana, like silence. Being comfortable with silence, being comfortable with uncertainty, not knowing what on earth is going to pop out of my mouth next. I don’t know! I never know these days. I don’t care.
David: That was, I think, the aspect of Ultraspeaking that was most salient for me, was the experience of spontaneous action, where the action is actually the speech. That, spontaneous action is considered to be, in a sense, the pinnacle of accomplishment in Vajrayana, from the point of view of the Dzogchen branch of Vajrayana at least.
It’s… spontaneous action is a expression of the recognition of: everything is transparent and unreal, and at the same time, everything is solid and extremely real, and because you have both of those at once, you can act in the real world on the basis of “This is solid and real, and this situation needs something that’s going to come from me”; and at the same time, because it’s the whole thing is a, you know, a movie that is playing and fundamentally, you know, just a joke, then you act without needing to have a whole kind of commentary and elaborate theory of what you’re doing and planning and preparation. You just do what’s needed.
Charlie: One of the ways that that works, I think, both in Vajrayana and in Ultraspeaking, is that your mind just clears. You’re not preempting. What am I going to say? What are they going to say? What am I going to say?
And we wrote together that piece “Relating as beneficent space.” That is coming at the experience from a different direction. It’s clearing your mind and then being able to drop into the present and not have all of the chatter going on. An effect of Ultraspeaking is that it drops you into that experience, because you very gently, very carefully can put aside your inner critic, your, “Oh, what are they going to think of me? What is, um, what am I going to say here? How am I, how am I sounding to everybody else?” But all of that, you can drop it because you’ve got the confidence to just be with whoever you’re speaking to, whoever you’re with.
So Ultraspeaking, I think comes at that spontaneous, uh, communication, spontaneous action in context, from the perspective of speaking.
In Vajrayana, one way of categorizing is mind, speech, body. A lot of what I’ve been doing in the recent, um, stuff that I’ve been creating for Evolving Ground, the Liberating Shadow, a lot of that is coming at it through body first. And only after experiencing that spontaneous activity through embodied interaction, first of all on your own and then embodied interaction, only then do you start bringing voice online.
So there are these different windows in, I think, or different routes that end you up in a pretty similar place.
David: That theme of confidence born from the courage of, which I have manifestly failed to display here, but I did when I, I did a, an introductory taster course, um, six months ago in Ultraspeaking, which was an extraordinary experience for me. And I have been meaning to go back ever since.
The confidence of being able to do those games that that you get from, from just doing it, and from getting feedback from a cohort of, of people who are also discovering that they can do things that seem impossible. There’s a kind of buoyancy that also comes with specifically… I’m thinking of some particular tantric practices from Vajrayana that produce that same kind of buoyancy, in my experience.
Charlie: Actually this is reminding me that, um, that I think that’s highly intentional in Ultraspeaking and in Evolving Ground. And we have the same intention to create, uh, an optimistic, positive, supportive, holding environment, a community, we call it in Evolving Ground, it’s a “community of practice,” and we have very explicit norms of being, ways of communicating.
We have, um, how to skillfully disagree, we have, uh, engaging with doubt, we have, uh, curious skepticism. These are all norms that have come about organically through, um, being meta to, and being aware of our interactions, patterns of interactions, and dialing in those that really work well, to be supportive for people in their practice. So we’ve done a lot of that conscientiously in Evolving Ground, and there’s a very similar, it’s not, not quite the same, but there’s a similar atmosphere.
I love that word. There is an atmosphere of communication in the two communities that I think is really complimentary. So a lot of people from Evolving Ground, because I’ve raved about Ultraspeaking so much, people have gone from Evolving Ground into Ultraspeaking, and have become coaches now as well, which is fantastic.
And then people from Ultraspeaking have come into the Evolving Ground community, and have just fit immediately into the community group dynamics, because of that similarity.
And what I want to say about it is that there, there is a, there’s a supportive, positive mode of feedback. One of the ways that we describe that in Evolving Ground is: “There are no rules.” There’s kindness and there’s awareness, and you bring those into your support, so that if you’re critical, you do that in a way that is positive and helpful. It’s, it’s inclusive of more, rather than don’t do this, don’t do that. It’s much more about, uh, and what else I want to see, or something else you might consider.
The similarity between the two communities, that they’re very complimentary. And Evolving Ground, as a community of practice, we have created a sandbox environment, which you can step into and try things out, and practice a mode of being, a way of being, without having to take that with you immediately into high stakes situations, or have it as a personality, or a, this is something that I have to do on a permanent basis, or whatever.
So there’s this sense of creating almost like a method box, or a, uh, a trial place. Again and again and again and again, we do it in Zoom rooms, we do it in our different monthly gatherings, we do it on all of our events. It’s a safe, supportive, testing environment.
Ultraspeaking does the same thing. You have small pods. The coach to student ratio is amazing. It’s usually one coach to three students, and we go into breakout rooms and often the students are also giving— participants, I should say, are also giving feedback to each other, so you get very good at testing things out, in reps with each other. So there’s a similarity in methodology there that I think is really effective. Really effective.
So we’re talking about something completely different in Evolving Ground. We’re talking about maybe, uh, tantric practice or, um, or engaging with our Fundamentals path, or whatever it is, but we have a very similar way of, way of enculturating a particular kind of interactive dynamic that works. It works beautifully.
And you see people transforming as well in that. People changing over, uh, over years through friendships that they’ve made, through practices that they’re engaged with together.
So actually in Evolving Ground, we had an Ultra Tantra apprentice group all of last year, and it’s still continuing into this year, which was apprentices, eG apprentices who have done Ultraspeaking, and are talking about and bringing their Ultraspeaking experience into Evolving Ground, and looking at the similarities.
Like for example, we had a whole session on yidam practice. In some way, yidam is a formalized, traditional way of stepping into something different. A structure is externally provided, you step into it, and you simply become that. Now a lot of the Ultraspeaking games are doing that for speaking. You’re following a timer, you’re given a topic, and off you go. You’re stepping into being confident and talking about pickles, or whatever it is. And if, if you can feel confident talking about pickles in the fridge, or any topic that’s given to you, then you begin to find that confidence in relation to whatever your context is.
And tantric practice is a lot about confidence in context, about coming from a spaciousness that means you’re kind of comfortable in your own skin. You can be in any context, it doesn’t matter how difficult or unusual.
Life is full of unknowns, and there’s something about the spaciousness that comes from Buddhist tantric practice that I have experienced is similar in the Ultraspeaking context as well. It facilitates relaxing because you’re okay with silence, you’re okay with space, you’re okay with going with the flow.
Actually, a lot of the, uh, the topics are quite funny and, uh, and enjoyable in the Fundamentals. And then you have the Professional level course, which I think is really much better to do that after you’ve done the Fundamentals. And in the Professional level course, you get thrown some really quite challenging uh, presentation topics.
One of the things that, uh, PL1, that’s the Professional Level One, ends up doing, and I don’t want to preempt anyone’s experience here, but you, you basically are put on the spot and you have to give a presentation, a five minute presentation, uh, off the top of your head with only a few minutes to prepare.
And that is very, very good practice. I didn’t like it at all the first time I did it. It was all over the place. It was an absolute disaster. But I’ve gotten a little better at that now.
David: I had a thought about why practice in communication, and developing the ability for communication, is particularly functional as a method of personal transformation. And from a Buddhist point of view, one is what one is in interaction. There isn’t a solid, separate, continuous, defined self. And there’s, there’s an accumulation of habits, which are sort of what we think of as self. In, in spontaneous communication, you’re not being driven by those habits as much, because you are responding to the interaction and you’re nodding at me in a way which suggests I can go on here. And, and, and what I say is, is spontaneously relevant.
Charlie: Right. So the, the phrase that I use for that is that your, your center of awareness is in the space of interaction. Very often when we’re communicating, our center of awareness by habit is inside our head. And culture, and psychology, and everything that we’ve learned since we were knee high to a grasshopper, is training us to be inside our head. And to worry about what is going on inside our head. And if we can train ourselves a little bit to let that drop, and move into the space of interaction, so that that is where our attention is, and that is what we’re interested in, and that is where our, uh, possibility where the center, yeah, the, the space of possibility is, what is happening here now, rather than everything that’s going on inside. It’s quite freeing. It’s really liberating.
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The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being.
It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably.
I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the recording of my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. It includes my ten-minute introductory explanation, a participant’s questions about it, and answers from me and from Jared Janes.
I offer these live Zoom gatherings monthly: answering questions, and maybe asking some, and leading discussion. The next one is October 12th. These are sponsored by Evolving Ground, the Vajrayana practice community co-founded by my spouse Charlie Awbery. The sessions are available only to eG members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to Saturday the 10th you’ll get the zoom link.
If you have questions about this discussion, you could ask them in a comment here on Substack—or attend the next Q&A!
Transcript
David: I’m going to begin each of these Q&A sessions with a little talk. Partly this is in case you haven’t got any questions, you could ask about whatever I blather about. But that’s not necessary at all. You can completely ignore my little talk and ask me whatever is most exciting for you.
I’m going to talk this time about the relationship between the theory of Vajrayana and the practice, and why understanding the theory is actually important; and how in order to understand the theory you need to actually know something about the history, which is kind of tedious because there’s an enormous amount of the history. But the practice doesn’t always make sense unless you know about things that happened many centuries ago.
Practice questions are often the really burning ones, where you really want an answer, because you’re a bit stuck in your practice, or you’re a bit stuck in your life even, or you see some opportunity. You can kind of see it, but there’s a doorway and you’re not sure how to access it. And you’re like, “Okay, I know that’s there. But how do I get there?” That can be highly motivating. And you so hope that if you ask the question, you get a good answer, then you’ll be able to move through that door.
Theory questions often are really dry. You have some kind of a jigsaw puzzle and there’s a missing piece. You know, there’s a missing piece in the theory and you just want to know, “Okay, what goes in this hole?” And that kind of question… I mean, I like that kind of thing. It’s less vital than something that’s coming out of practice, but it’s still good to understand what those gaps are.
I said last time that Vajrayana has a crystalline logic. And that is what makes sense of the theory, but it also is an enormous mess of contradictions and conceptual confusions. And that’s why maybe having this kind of a Q& A session can be helpful.
Traditional teachers of Vajrayana can’t see this, usually, and they can’t really help sort out these things. It’s like, if you go on a long vacation, you’re away from home for a couple of weeks, you come back and you suddenly realize your house is a god-awful mess. And you didn’t see that before, because you were living inside it, and it’s just how things are. The Tibetans live inside the system. They don’t stand outside it, so they can’t see what a mess they’ve got. Because it’s home, it’s sacred, you don’t question it.
There are exceptions. There are some exceptional Tibetan lamas who’ve been able to see the whole thing, understand the logic, and explain it to Westerners. Without that, we would be completely lost. So we have to be very glad that there are a few who are able to do that.
We wouldn’t know what the point was without that explanation. It would just be this vast mass of esoteric practices, which, like, “So what?” The point is not an intellectual one. Primarily Vajrayana practice actually follows the theory closely. And the theory, in the case of Vajrayana, the theory is just a theory of the practice. It’s not a theory of life, the universe, and everything. It’s not a philosophy. It’s not trying to explain where the universe came from or something. This is a religion that is just about the practice.
That’s where the theory bites. If you don’t understand the theory, you can’t really understand the practice. You can take practice instructions and put them into practice, and that may work somewhat, but usually the practice instructions are really condensed. There’s a lot of not-said stuff, of details.
And if you have a teacher you work with closely you, you can just try to do what the instructions say. And go to your teacher and say “I tried this and it didn’t work. What am I doing wrong?” And do that over and over again. But not everybody has a teacher. The teacher is not always available. You don’t want to be bugging them all the time.
If you understand the theory, you can actually see those details. You can work it out for yourself: why the practice works, how it works, and what the point is; and then you can fill in the details for yourself.
You might get that wrong. You want to go to your teacher and say, “I didn’t really understand this, but on the basis of theory, I thought, okay, probably it’s like this. So I did that and it seemed to work. Did I get it right?” And your teacher says, “Well, yeah, kind of, but you know, if you want to walk on water, this practice is efficacious, but you need the pontoons as well.” Or whatever.
The other thing is that the theory tells you the why. Why you would want to be practicing, what the point is. This is easy to miss, because there’s just this mass of details, and the point isn’t explained.
And so, as an example of a common misunderstanding of the why, people think Vajrayana is a collection of methods for accessing weird states of consciousness, which are exciting. And the practices do often put you into weird states of consciousness, but that’s not the point. And people can spend years, having weird hallucinations or whatever, and think that’s the point. And that’s a sidetrack that you could waste all of your time on, instead of actually following the path toward the point.
Because the theory is a theory of the practice, the two of them illuminate each other; the more practice you do, the more sense the theory will make. The more you understand the theory, the more sense the practice makes.
Confusions come from the fact that the religion had to repeatedly adapt to new circumstances. And because the whole thing is sacred, the scriptures are the literal words of enlightened Buddhas living in the sky, you can’t say, “Well, that was then, this is now.” You have to innovate by pretending that the old texts say what you want to say, which is appropriate to what you think the current circumstances are.
And the thing is, people have different ideas about what the right thing is for current circumstances, or they’re in different circumstances. And so there’s all these divergent interpretations of what the scriptures really mean. And then people argue about this; and without the historical context, there’s no logic to the arguments. It’s just, “Well, what it really says is this!” “No, what it really says is that.” It’s like, well, somebody said it said this because that was addressing a particular problem, at a time, with a reasonable understanding.
I’d like to read a quote from a recent Substack post by Rob Horning. It’s about the importance of open ended curiosity in computer science research; and how the big picture understanding which you get with that curiosity relates to all the details. He said:
If you don’t know how to navigate a discipline’s canon, if you can’t map it, situate different resources ideologically, recognize disputes and contested points, recapitulate the logic of different arguments from different points of view, then you probably don’t know what you’re talking about, regardless of how much information you can regurgitate.
This, I think, applies very much to Tibetan Buddhism. There’s people who have read a huge number of books, or have been to endless boring dharma talks with fancy teachers, and they’ve assimilated all of these esoteric details, but they don’t actually know what the fundamental principles are, and how everything fits together.
I would include a lot of the fancy Tibetan lamas in that. They know how to regurgitate a lot of information. And I, it’s really arrogant for me to say this, but they don’t actually know what the point is.
So this is why the history and the theory matter. To fully understand your own practice, you need to know how to navigate the canon, how to relate competing religious claims to these old conflicts, that really mattered at one time but are now irrelevant. You see why the practice is as it is in the light of that.
So, yeah, that’s enough, blah, blah, blah from me. If I was a traditional teacher, I’d go on for another couple of hours because that’s the way they do things. I’m perfectly happy and capable of doing that, but. Instead, let’s have some questions.
Ask me anything!
Alta: This is Alta, I’m not on camera, but there’s some things that I’d love to hear you explore a little more. One I think about how, in psychotherapy or some modalities for personal development, healing, change, we’ll say conceptual understanding is the booby prize! Because, especially when it’s about how we are living, it’s about changing how we be, our emotional experiences, how they’re expressed, our reactivity. So that’s one: just, “Huh! How much conceptual understanding is necessary.”
Then the other part is, in the somatic work and tradition that is mostly where I live, we do a lot to try to communicate, emphasize, encourage people to understand the principle of a given somatic practice, so that then they are able to pursue or experience or identify that principle in other things.
So let’s say there’s a principle of deepening awareness of what’s happening at the level of sensation, and we do that through something called centering; but you could do that through a body scan, or you could do that taking a walk . There are other practices that get to the same point.
Is it possible inside of this methodology, which has a whole lot of what I would call decoration, right? Is it possible to reduce things to core principles? Or do you mean that understanding is both of the social context and historical context in which something evolved, plus the theory of the overall path.
David: Right. These are excellent questions, which very directly address what I wanted to communicate.
It’s true. I think the point that the conceptual understanding is the booby prize is very applicable to Vajrayana, and it is often missed. And there’s a lot of people who approach it intellectually, and they do a huge amount of book learning. And that’s just missing all of what’s important. No matter how much book learning you have, it’s pointless unless you’re doing the practice, and getting the results of the practice; and the results of the practice are to change your life: to change your experience subjectively, but more importantly, to change the way that you are in the world.
So, yes, the intellectual understanding is a booby prize if it’s there without the rest. The value of it is only to support the practice, because the theory is a theory of the practice.
Unfortunately, because Vajrayana is such a mess, that hasn’t been sorted out really well by anybody, some amount of the intellectual understanding, I think, is really important just in order to make sense of the practice.
The second question was, is it the case that there are fundamental principles, that are relatively simple, that make the practices make sense, and then the details of the practice, are not that important? And I think you said it was decorative, which is exactly right. “Ornamental” is actually a common word used in describing Vajrayana.
And that is… it’s just delight: in the complexity, the vividness, the colorfulness of the world, and of creativity, that somebody who really has done a lot of the practice and understands it, can create new material that is alive and beautiful and complicated and ramifies in all directions. Tantra just revels in that, but when you’re coming to it new, all you see is, “There’s so much of this stuff. What is it all for?” And that’s again where the theoretical understanding of the principles is helpful, in seeing what is beautiful ornamentation, decoration, and what is really at the core of it.
There’s also one other point you made, about there being multiple practices with much the same effect, and that is very true in Vajrayana. There’s endless practices, and in some sense, they’re all just pointing at experiencing the inseparability of emptiness and form; clarity, bliss and emptiness; duality and non-duality. Everything is just pointing at that. These are non-separate. It doesn’t matter what you do. I mean, it’s just ridiculous kinds of practices, but they’re all pointing to that.
Alta: Thank you. That, that is so helpful. Especially that, there’s a way that when we think about art, right, that part of what’s so glorious about it is that it’s, in a sense, non-utilitarian. It’s just, it just is. And it’s this, effusiveness of the human existence. And in a way that, that gives me another way to think about what I was calling decorative or the ornamental, that it’s that celebration of the multiplicity of form, right?
It’s not like, yeah, we’re just going to celebrate it, and therefore not in a sense, utilitarian. It isn’t the point. It’s the, it’s part of the result.
David: Yes.
Alta: OK. Gotcha.
That’s helpful. That’s enormously helpful. I might actually then make it through that book.
Jared: I was going to say too, one thing that I do appreciate about the multiplicity, that took some time to move into, is just that personal fit and aesthetic preference, and just vibe of practices. Because there’s such a vast variety of things, it makes it— there’s an abundance of possible ways of engaging in practice, and everybody’s different.
And if you look around long enough, people are going to find their “Ooh, yeah, this is my, this is my vibe; but that, that teaching seems a little dry for me; or this one’s a little overly ornamental, and I like it a little bit more essentialized, or this one’s, ‘Ooh, so much heart here.’”
The multiplicity also, I think, affords for a lot of people to make informed personal decisions about the types of practices that most resonate with them as well, which is fun. And the fact that they all are pointing at the same principle, as David said, is a reassuring punchline.
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There’s a wrong idea about the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.
Spiritual suffering is unnecessary, though. I have the recipe for eliminating it, and it works.
An audio recording of my long answer to a question, in a live Q&A session organized by Jessica B. three years ago. (Thanks Jess!)
Monthly Q&As
I’m doing Q&As like this monthly now. I don’t usually go on at such length! The next one is Saturday, September 21st, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific.
Links
Web links for some topics mentioned:
The “complete stance” acknowledges the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. It’s formally analogous to some Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment, in which you recognize emptiness and form simultaneously.
Meaningness: the book. It’s free online, only about 20% written, and apparently useful in its current form.
Vividness, my take on Vajrayana Buddhism
Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen
“Meeting Naropa’s Dakini”: an improbable story, on my site Buddhism for Vampires, that is as true as I could make it. In the audio, I misremember the title as “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini”; she appeared to both Tilopa and Naropa (as well as to me).
Marpa, founder of the Kagyü School of Tibetan Buddhism
The charnel ground and the Pure Land. In the recording, I refer to the Pure Land as “the god realm,” which is inaccurate. In some versions of Buddhism they’re more-or-less the same thing, but not in Vajrayana.
“Misunderstanding Meaningness Makes Many Miserable”: In the recording, I say that Meaningness does not address suffering in general, only spiritual suffering specifically. This web page explains that briefly.
The book offers a method for ending what could be called existential, cosmic, or spiritual suffering. The whole book explains the method, with periodic, increasingly difficult summaries. The first is “Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning.”
“The novel that I wrote the first quarter of” is The Vetali’s Gift. It’s now about 40% done, and free online. Maybe I will finish it before I die.
The scene in which “the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly” is “Love and Death.”
Transcript
Jess: What does it look like to feel shock, despair, et cetera, and still maintain the complete stance?
David: Right. I can give a Buddhist answer to this and I can give a Meaningness book answer to it. There’s a connection, and they’re also not the same thing. So you’ll get some sense of that, maybe, out of my two different answers.
So, some versions of Buddhism make a big deal out of suffering and say that Buddhism has the answer to suffering, and that if you do Buddhism right, then you won’t suffer. That might be true; I don’t know. I’m pretty skeptical. In the traditions that I’ve practiced Buddhism in, that’s not really the line. And my experience— I don’t have an experience of not suffering. I would say that meditating and practicing Buddhism does seem to lessen suffering and it changes your relationship with it.
I’ll tell a couple of stories that are relevant, and then do a theoretical thing.
So, my former teachers, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen, about 10 years ago their sixteen year old son got tongue cancer, which is a really unusual thing.
His tongue was surgically removed, which was horrifying. Unfortunately, they didn’t catch it early enough, and it metastasized, and he died slowly over the next nine months or so.
I wasn’t there for this, so this is second hand; but what people who I know well said about what they observed was that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen were obviously devastated. And that it was as horrifying for them as it would be for anyone. And at the same time that there was a clarity and spaciousness and acceptance in the way that they dealt with the situation, practically and also with their own suffering, that seemed extremely unusual.
They’re as much a candidate for enlightenment as anybody that I have known personally. And I don’t think they didn’t suffer.
This echoes a story. The most recent thing I wrote was called “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini,” which is about a story of the founding of the most important lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyü lineage. The lineage chant, it begins: “Great Vajradhara, Tilo, Naro, Marpa, Mila, Lord of Dharma Gampopa,” et cetera, et cetera. There’s Tilo, Naro-pa, Marpa. My story was about Tilopa and Naropa. Naropa was the one who met the dakini, who I met in a Starbucks in San Francisco 1300 years later. His primary student was a Tibetan named Marpa. Marpa founded this most important branch of— politically most important branch of Tibetan Buddhism. (It’s not the one that I primarily practice.)
Marpa, when he was in his fifties, his son, who was about thirty, died of some illness, and his son was going to be his successor, carry on the lineage. Instead, the chant goes, Marpa, Mila; Milarepa was the continuation of the lineage.
When his son died, Marpa spent weeks being miserable and crying and wailing and making a big fuss and being miserable. And people said, “Oh, Marpa, we thought you were enlightened. Why are you miserable? You’re supposed to have gone beyond suffering!”
I think his answer was basically “f**k off!” I can’t remember. You know, there’s some sort of a story about what he said. But again, the point is, he’s regarded as one of the most enlightened people in Tibetan history. So, your son dies, you’re going to be miserable for a few weeks!
And it’d be, you know, if enlightenment meant that your son dies horribly and you say, “Oh, okay, whatever. You know, what’s for lunch?” It would seem like there was something wrong, actually.
So, I think there’s a wrong idea of the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, you know, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.
On the other hand, there’s this sense, that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen apparently manifested, of having space around the suffering, having clarity about the suffering, and not inflicting that suffering on everybody else. Meditation seems to tend to do that for you, just kind of automatically; but there are specific practices that are relevant to that.
One that I’ve written about is a pair of practices. They’re written about as separate practices, but I recommend taking them together, which is the charnel ground and the god realm. And the charnel ground is the practice of viewing all experience as an absolute nightmare. And if you see everything as an absolute nightmare, an extremely claustrophobic situation in which you can’t escape horror, that can open out into a sense of freedom in the middle of a nightmare, because there is no hope of escape.
It’s the sense that somehow what is happening is wrong, and it shouldn’t be like this, and if things were different, and blah, blah, blah, blah. That line of thinking is not helpful. It’s extremely natural, I do it all the time; but to the extent that you can let go of that kind of thinking, that’s a productive way of dealing with negative valence.
The paired practice is the god realm, which is one of seeing everything as perfect just as it is. That reality can’t be improved upon, and that the seemingly horrifying aspects of experience are actually— There is a kind of crystalline perfection to things playing out the way that they do, however that is.
Neither of these are a Truth, but as a way of seeing, they can be helpful ways of dealing with experience.
So that’s a Buddhist answer. The Meaningness answer is related, although not so colorful.
First of all, the Meaningness book explicitly doesn’t try to address most forms of suffering. It’s only addressing kinds of suffering that are caused by misunderstandings of meaning.
The kinds of suffering that it addresses are ones where we make things mean something extra on top of whatever they naturally do. Suffering is naturally meaningful to us; that’s just how human beings are. It’s the addition of cosmic meaning, or spiritual meaning, on top of the suffering, that makes it worse than it really needs to be. And the practices in that book are ones of talking yourself out of adding on those extra things that aren’t necessary.
So these are two takes on the same approach, but very different flavor.
When my sister was dying— she had metastatic cancer also— I was sitting at her hospital bed, and there was blood pouring out of her mouth, because when you’re in the late stages of cancer, your gums bleed.
And, there’s this scene, in the novel that I wrote the first quarter of, where the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly, and there’s blood pouring out of her mouth. And I, you know, I was sitting there with my sister, and blood was pouring out of her mouth. H. P. Lovecraft, a master of writing horror fiction, said the problem with writing horror fiction is that the things you wrote about start coming true.
And I was watching my sister dying, and I thought, “Oh! This is the scene that I wrote five years ago in my novel. This is really funny!” And, being willing to let go of the meaning of “This is how I’m supposed to feel about watching my sister die,” and being willing to say, “Oh, watching my sister die, this is really funny!” — that sort of humor in the face of horror. And you also can feel wonder and joy at the same time as, “Oh my god, there’s blood pouring out of my sister’s mouth!” So that was the first thing.
And then the second thing is, being willing to feel whatever the negative emotion is clearly doesn’t necessarily— it doesn’t make it any less negative, inherently. It may make it more acute. But again, not adding extra stuff on allows you to feel it more clearly. And there is a transformational value in that clarity of negative emotion. When we add extra meaning on top of negative emotion, it blurs and blunts it— which can be a coping strategy that is valuable when it’s overwhelming and more than we can deal with. But just feeling whatever the sadness or pain or horror is, as straightforwardly as possible, can change the way you relate with the negativity in a positive way.
A more interesting question is whether you can actually eliminate spiritual suffering. I think the answer to that is yes, because I think I have done that. I’m prone to depression and I suffer in lots of ways. The kinds of questions and problems that the book is about I found agonizing in my twenties, maybe my thirties. And I just don’t have any trouble with those anymore. So, I could be fooling myself in some way, but I think it probably actually does work.
Depression is a not-very-good way of dealing with suffering. It’s a tempting way, because it works somewhat. It’s a way of dulling yourself to the pain. And then, you know, you don’t feel the pain so much, but it’s not, it’s not actually a good way to be. It’s one of my typical ways of dealing with pain and trying to dull it. There’s lots of other ways that are not-good ways of dealing with pain. Drinking a lot, for example. If you drink a lot, it actually kind of works. Or if you overeat, it actually kind of works. But these are not good ways of dealing with pain. Depression is another not-good way of dealing with pain.
Depression is a way of dealing with any kind of emotion that’s too intense, by just turning the master volume knob on your existence down, and slowing everything down and muting everything. And the problem is, you can’t mute the bad stuff without muting the good stuff. So you wind up in a space where everything is gray. And then the gray gets to be darker and darker gray.
And then somehow you have to pull yourself out of that by finding some little bits of color and you have to be willing to let those in. You say “Yeah, everything is horrible, but I do like blueberry jam, and I’m enjoying this blueberry jam on toast.” And that just admits a little bit of light, and when you’re depressed, you don’t want to do that! You want to just cut everything off and say everything is uniformly bad. If you’re willing to let a little bit of light in, then you can work your way out of the depressive spiral.
I’m sorry, that was an incredibly long answer to a very simple question. If I answered all the questions with a half hour long rant about things that happened thirteen hundred years ago, we probably wouldn’t get very far.
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We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures.
David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.”
We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate doctrines and practices, but those are not the point. The point is effective beneficent activity, enabled by liberation from fixed patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.
Vajrayana can be subdivided into Buddhist tantra and Dzogchen. Both include multiple, non-ordinary, centuries-tested ways of transmitting the way of being. Tantra uses elaborate ritual methods, such as abhisheka/wang/empowerment, which David described briefly in “You should be a God-Emperor,” and which we discuss in this podcast episode. Dzogchen relies on obscure non-instructions, as in “A non-statement ain't-framework.”
Traditional Vajrayana demands particular patterns of teacher-student interaction that in the podcast we describe as “gross.” They rely on dominance/submission dynamics, and we don’t believe they work well anymore. Charlie has developed an alternative approach, discussed in the podcast. (Also in “The learning relationship in contemporary Vajrayana” and “How to learn Buddhist tantra.”)
The podcast is a recording of a spontaneous conversation, in which David sought and received advice from Charlie on how to be as a teacher.
Transcript
David: We have these discussions that are really animated and exciting, and usually about 30 minutes into them when we’re more or less done, we say, damn, we should have been recording this.
Charlie: How many times?
David: Yeah, this happens every few days. And this time, 20 minutes into one of them, I said, okay, let’s stop, drop everything, and try and record something, and see. But we’ve now got the context of 20 minutes of animated discussion of a topic. And if we go back over it, it’s not going to be the same, but maybe we can talk about it a bit to introduce it, and then there was some stuff I was going to add on, and that was the point where I thought, okay, maybe we can record that.
Charlie: I remember the conversation starting when you expressed some discomfort around finding that people were beginning to be sycophantic or adulatory or have some response to your writing recently that triggered this reaction of discomfort of, well, can you say more about what that was?
David: Yeah, having started writing on Substack has changed the way I think about relating to an audience in ways that I don’t really understand very well. I want to get a better understanding of my side of the relationship with the audience. And also, what is functional for readers or listeners. And you know, what can I do that’s most useful? And I was seeing that some of the pieces I’ve written recently, and the most recent piece was the God Emperor piece, have gotten a lot of attention in ways that I’m not really completely comfortable with. There’s a sense of: I don’t want to be writing clickbait, I don’t want to be sensationalistic. With both that and The Piss Test, which also went somewhat this way, I wasn’t intending, or mostly not intending to be sensationalistic. I was just trying to explain a thing. There’s bits in there that are kind of deliberately over the top, but that’s just a normal part of how I communicate.
I worry about a number of different dynamics. One is that I might get sucked into writing that kind of piece rather than the much more serious things, and I think the more serious things are more important. Those are the ones that I really want the readers to take onboard. I’m worried about audience capture, where one gradually becomes a caricature of oneself in response to an audience liking a thing and then you do more of that thing and then your audience drifts into being more and more one sided of, they just want that entertainment; and then, you know, you can wind up being stupid.
I said I was uncomfortable with a lot of things, not that it was going to stop me, but that I need to think it through. And one of them is a discomfort with some people going over the top on the fan thing. And you asked me why that’s uncomfortable for me and partly it’s just being autistic and awkward, and not really wanting to be seen in some ways. I said I fear the possible ego inflation that could come with people going on about “Oh, you’re so great,” and some people do that, not a lot, but sometimes it’s kind of over the top. It’s partly how that makes me feel, but it’s more of this sense that they’re putting themselves down by doing that. Sometimes! I mean some people just genuinely offer appreciation, which is very genuine. And I think for them, that’s good. It may make me uncomfortable, but that’s not significant. But I think some people debase themselves in some kind of effort to maybe communicate genuine appreciation? Possibly in some cases it’s manipulative.
And you’d given me a lot of good advice, but we had gotten to talking about the way this functions in traditional Vajrayana, which both of us find really off -putting and just gross.
There’s this social norm of, I mean, it’s called devotion, but it’s, it isn’t devotion. It’s usually fairly fake, and it’s this hyper-effusive adulation combined with this dominance and submission dynamic. You know, I was just writing about master and slave morality. That was my jumping off point for the God Emperor piece, although mostly I just said this is stupid, but people do that. People are behaving like slaves to the lama and that’s just, it’s gross.
Charlie: It’s predictable, it’s very prescribed, it’s the same from one person to another. That’s one of the ways that it’s different to appreciation, which is usually very personal and specific.
David: I’ve been trying for eight years to move into a teaching role. You very kindly have provided a venue for me to start doing that, which is happening the day after tomorrow. So that brings up questions about what is my role? As something like a teacher. You’ve been working with this question for yourself for, well, decades, but especially since forming Evolving Ground four years ago?
Charlie: Yeah.
David: Yeah. You said a little about how you’ve handled that and how you’ve changed the way do it. And how we both feel that avoiding the traditional teacher-student dynamic that comes in Vajrayana, that’s gross. We don’t want that. And yet, there are some aspects of that that are functional and I was suggesting to you a few days ago that, in fact, you have separated yourself from some of the functional parts of that role in order to avoid the dysfunctional parts, and I was encouraging you to pick up a bit more of the functional parts. But you said you wanted to speak about sycophancy in general and how you think about that and how gross it is?
Charlie: Well, so, there’s the whole question of role or not role, or whether, we individually relate to what we are doing as role, and the extent to which we might step into a role.
In Evolving Ground it’s very explicit that role is a fluid concept, and there are some structures that people can move in and out of, including in the in the learning experience. And in the providing, the teaching, the mentoring, whatever. One does not take a fixed role and that is it, always that role in that context.
So there’s a different way that role, and relationship with role, is being offered and explored. But for me personally, it’s not so much about role anymore. It’s much more about how am I in this particular situation with this particular person or this group. What is the dynamic here?
So it’s a question of reading. It’s like I would read a room or a group dynamic or an interaction, and then be responsive in that situation. So it has much more of an immediate question around way of being, or response, than it is a general question for me now.
One of the reasons that we both left traditional context was because of that dynamic. Because the predictability of it makes it very dead. It’s actually just not interesting to be in circumstances that are that prescribed, and that people are behaving in a very particular way that is not coming from their individual experience, or it’s so boxed into a way of expressing that it’s very samey.
David: I think of Jordan Peterson as a cautionary tale that— I don’t know what happened with him, but it seems that the pressure of his being guru to millions of people somehow caused severe trouble for him. And I’m not going to be guru to millions of people for lots of reasons, but on a smaller scale that is a potential long term concern.
I’m much more concerned for the person doing the fan thing in a way that seems unhealthy for them, and I would like to find a way to be such that they don’t feel, whatever the motivation is for doing that, they don’t feel that they want to or need to do that, because it’s not actually good for them.
Charlie: Wouldn’t want anybody going over the top here.
David: Yes, god forbid anybody go over the top about tantra!
Charlie: Oh, no.
David: That’s right out in tantra.
I would be interested, if you’re willing to talk about it, you said that you have taken various tacks on this in Evolving Ground. You’ve changed the way that you are in a teaching situation, as a matter of skillful means in addressing some issues like this. And then I wanted to say, hey, I think actually, you may be partly missing the mark, or going too far in that— particularly in the context of transmission, is where this came up in an earlier conversation a few days ago, where I feel that something in this region is importantly functional. And when sane traditionalists talk about there being no substitute for the tantric lama, and the whole thing can’t function without that, they’re talking about transmission. And maybe we need to delete this section; it’s a sensitive topic. I think, based on something you said a few days ago, there may be an opportunity for you to relax certain things that you have set up as off limits for yourself, for very good reasons.
Charlie: There are a number of themes. There’s charisma, which is quite topical at the moment, so it could be interesting and useful to talk about that. There’s power, which overlaps, and is not the same. There’s transmission…
So I’ll say something about what I’ve practiced with, how things have changed it a little bit. I appreciate you wanting to see more of what you know I have done in the past, and I’m capable of: around that stepping into a particular way of being that is very conducive to atmosphere and to transmission.
I’ll say something about that in a traditional context: there’s a particular kind of dynamic, it, it involves a way of being that is supported by the structure of a traditional context, in that anyone who doesn’t fit into that immediately deselects themselves, or is deselected by the group.
So there is an intense focus. And a coherent atmosphere, that can be found very quickly in a traditional context, because of that setup. And a key aspect of that setup is the lama in the center of that mandala of interactions, everybody’s attention on the lama. And the lama behaves— this is really very much more tantric than a Dzogchen style, to be honest. The lama behaves in a way that— It might be called charismatic. There’s a lot of direct relating, maybe eye contact; aspects of interaction that would normally be associated with social dominance. So, examples of that: long staring eye contact beyond what would be a conversational norm. Unwavering.
Often people will call it “presence.” It’s just so easy to do that. It’s so easy to cast your spell on somebody so that they become subdued into awe. And of course that functions, in that context.
At this point I am confident that it’s possible to transmit, in the traditional sense, transmit the experience of being in non-ordinary state, or being in a different way of being, interacting in a way that is highly non-ordinary, and beneficial and conducive to extraordinary experience, and extraordinary things happening.
And I think it’s possible for that to occur without the power-play. And in fact, often what is confused as transmission is the power aspect of that, and the dominance and submission. And of course it does work, but then the people who are operating in that context think that it is the same thing. They believe that in order to get the juice, we’ve got to go into this mode. You even hear people talking about going back to a particular lama to get the thing and to get that experience. And there’s a kind of hypnosis that comes along with that.
It’s an extraordinary experience. I mean, I’ve certainly had that myself, and it makes a lot more non-ordinary mind state accessible, but the question that I’ve had and that I, I’m pretty confident that I’ve answered now, is that it ought to be possible to— if you can access that kind of a state, open presence of awareness, let’s call it, it ought to be possible to access that in different contexts, without relying on the crutch of being back in that context with that person, with those people.
And so a lot of the work that I do in my one on one, or in different group contexts, is ensuring that, when something extraordinary happens, that it’s also embedded into that experience, that it is entirely possible to find it in different circumstances. And a lot of the methods that I’m developing are in order that that can be possible. So that’s the transmission part of the traditional context, and how it could look and feel very different.
And the charisma that is connected with that. And, you know, there’s a lot of discussion recently, which is really quite interesting around, well, what is charisma? And often I think charisma is confused with that power, to hold attention, hold— traditional word— hold the mandala, only through that social-dominance way of being. And actually, what’s really interesting is being able to do that when that isn’t there. That’s exciting. The very predictable, go into a retreat setting and be in the presence of this person who’s really stepping into a role, and behaving in a guru way, being the guru; actually that just personally to me that doesn’t appeal. I can do that, and I know well enough now that just I don’t like that. It’s something to do with seeing how much that limits the potential of other people who fall into that mode. I don’t think it’s any particular person who could fall into that. It’s just circumstances. You know, something can just happen in certain circumstances that make that possible. And it is so extraordinary when you have that experience that you can see why people get stuck in it.
David: A very funny thing happened. Well, it’s funny for me.
Charlie: What was that?
David: Very funny thing happened earlier today, which is you said to me, you said, “You are much more traditional than Evolving Ground.” And I was like “Me? I’m more traditional?? I thought I was the least traditional explainer of Vajrayana on the planet!”
Charlie: No you’re not! That’s so funny!
David: You know, there’s people giving me all kinds of flack for, you know, I have no right to speak about Vajrayana because, you know, you’re not doing the whatever. So that that was very funny.
But I want to come back to— In the “God Emperor” piece, I wrote about abhisheka, wang, as it traditionally was; and that’s not the way anybody does it now. But wang is a ritual that is orchestrated by the lama, is centered on the lama, and there is a decorum around it. The participants need to understand what is expected of them very clearly. They need to understand— well, often they don’t. I mean, very often in wang, nobody has any idea why they’re there; but ideally they should understand clearly what’s going on, and why they’re there, and what their role is, such that they will receive the transmission.
And part of that is— so I think this may be, you know, where I’m more traditional, and you’re going to reject this. Part of that is visualizing the lama as the yidam. For me, that was highly functional. And the ritual decorum around how one relates to the lama, for me was highly functional, just in the context of wang. Otherwise, a lot of the time it seemed fake, forced, unnecessary, and not actually good for anybody involved.
Charlie: Oh yeah, I totally agree. I mean, for me, in the empowerment, the formal empowerment situation, that was very moving, sometimes very moving indeed.
David: For the sake of listeners, wang, abhisheka, and "empowerment" are three different words for the same ritual.
Charlie: So yeah, I would use the English and I’d just say formal—
David: —formal, formal empowerment, formal transmission, right—
Charlie: transmission or empowerment, yeah. And those circumstances, if you are open to just stepping in to the structure and the experience of ritual, that can be very transformative and moving and beautiful. It can be a beautiful experience.
David: So I don’t know if you are avoiding doing that out of personal discomfort?
Charlie: How do you mean, in Evolving Ground? We’re just not quite at that point yet. We have formal tsok. We have a chöd practice. We have various group rituals.
But the whole way of relating to ritual and bringing a meaningful, alive, electric ritual experience into being— that takes a long time. You know, for a start, you have to have a group of people who have spent years together already, bonding and having a shared language and shared context of interest and practice. And that’s why we say we’re a “community of practice.”
There is that base now, there are those connections and friendships. The first group ritual that we had was January 2022, and we’ve been building on that, building on that experience, but the— yeah, we just haven’t gotten around to having the formal empowerment there yet.
But yidam practice: we have Evolving Ground yidams now. I mean, you can’t have an empowerment without a yidam, right? So you have to have, you have to have the
David: you have to have
Charlie: have to have
David: yidams.
Charlie: Yidam first.
Also, we have very consistently been constructing everything from perspective of Dzogchen understanding and framework and view. And that means that there is a particular flavor to the practices that come into being. And empowerment isn’t the first thing that you would set up and create, when you’re working from that perspective.
David: Right. Well, I’m thinking more about transmission in general, when there is some ritual element to it. And, one of the things I often say is, I actually have no idea what you do! You put it nicely that my relationship with Evolving Ground is nebulous. And my standard joke is that my official Evolving Ground title is Sangyum, which means the lama’s wife. So I, you know, I don’t know what you do. Maybe—
Charlie: Well, a lot of what I do is very personal as well. So, you know, in some sense you wouldn’t, and other people don’t, because the relationship that I have with one person is not the same as, or exactly the same as the relationship that I have with another.
And, we do have plenty of group contexts. But you know, in a way it would be better to ask other people what I do.
David: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.
Charlie: I guess?
David: Well, maybe I should don my anthropologist hat and interview a bunch of Evolving Ground students to find out.
Charlie: Yeah. And I don’t think it’s, you know, this isn’t false humility. It’s: a lot of what I do is seeing the possibility space, and seeing and encouraging the potential in some very serious and experienced practitioners in Evolving Ground.
There was a lovely story, today actually. I was with Tanner. So we were having this conversation about a sudden shift that he experienced in relation to talking to people about politics. He had been getting to this point where he had opinions, but it was really important to be honest in those opinions, and take them and share them with family and with his friends. And he was getting into these heated, really quite painful discussions, and falling out with people, and relationships were getting very difficult. And he spoke to Ari, who is a long term practitioner and apprentice in Evolving Ground. And he said, “Oh, Ari just said this one thing, and everything changed from that moment.”
I said, “Well, what, what did he say? Amazing! I, you know, tell me.” And he said, “Oh, he said ‘Really pay attention to the care more than the opinion. I tend to just be more focused on care than what the opinion is.’ And everything just shifted and changed.”
So there’s a context that, because of the relationships within Evolving Ground, there’s this ongoing discussion and conversation. So it’s much, much more of a continued conversation that gives rise to that kind of transmission.
David: Right. Yeah, I mean, it seems consistent with Dzogchen, and I guess maybe I’m just thinking about empowerment because I wrote about it a few days ago. I think you have said before that transmission typically in Evolving Ground is one-on-one.
Charlie: Not necessarily now, because we have so many group retreats now that a lot of— vajra retreat in Evolving Ground I’ll always start by giving— we’ll have a talk on atmosphere. I say a lot about what it is about an atmosphere that is coherent, not disparate, that can give rise to everybody being on the same page, a shared awareness. And when you’re in that space, that’s electric. It’s an amazing experience, when you know, and everybody knows, everyone in the same room is aware in the same space of awareness. And you can’t really have that if people are off doing their own, you know, some people are chatting in this corner and that corner.
It’s like when you have a dinner party and there’s a small enough group that everybody’s having the same conversation. That is such a different experience to everybody sitting, talking to the person next to them. And some people are talking to the other people down there, and then there’s just this very different kind of atmosphere.
It’s not that there’s anything wrong or right with either sort of atmosphere, it’s simply that when there is a shared experience of awareness, then all other kinds of shared meaningful experience can come online. But you need that atmosphere first.
So we teach that. We look at, well, how does that happen? What is it that gives rise to that kind of experience? How do we facilitate that as a group?
And then transmission occurs, through the ritual, through spontaneous stuff that happens in those circumstances.
David: Cool. I have often wished that I was involved with Evolving Ground, much more intimately, from the beginning, but I haven’t been able to due to circumstances.
We actually started out talking about sycophancy, and how the traditional Vajrayana setup demands it, as well as encourages it, and you have found ways of not encouraging it, or actively disencouraging it; and it might be useful for me, because we started out this conversation with my saying that that was making me a bit uncomfortable, and making me think about how do I relate to my audience on Substack. And if I’m starting to teach, how do I feel and think about this, and what can I do to be helpful in discouraging artificial sycophancy.
Charlie: You just relate to them as an adult. You know, if somebody goes into, you know, makes themselves small for whatever reason, you simply just continue regarding them and talking with them and, and seeing them as an adult, and as capable, responsible, interesting, delightful person that you want to understand and connect with.
David: That sounds easy. Good. In that case, probably I should stop being concerned.
Charlie: Say more?
David: Something I learned in business is that as an executive, your personality defects are multiplied by the number of levels of hierarchy below you. If you’ve got five levels of people below you, any personality defects you have are going to get blown up fivefold. And that means if you’re going to be operating at that level, you really need to sort out your personality defects. And a lot of people don’t, and you know, there’s a lot of psychopathic CEOs. I think the same thing happens with any kind of status hierarchy. it happens pretty clearly with a significant number of Tibetan lamas who go off the rails. They would be fine being a town priest, but, when they have millions of followers, they get themselves in deep trouble.
Charlie: Do you think of yourself as having defects that you need to be careful about?
David: Yeah!
Charlie: What are those?
David: What are my personality defects? In some ways, I fundamentally just don’t care about people. I have dedicated my life very seriously to the benefit of other people. I just about always try to be kind and decent in interactions. There’s exceptions, but usually I manage that. But there is a level at which I just don’t actually care. So that’s one thing.
I have the standard kleshas, if we want to use Buddhist terms. I do have a tendency to grandiosity, which you’ve seen me joke about a lot, but I think you haven’t actually seen me in that mode because I’ve been hiding in a cave for 25 years.
Charlie: I have totally seen you in that mode.
David: Oh, I see. All right, fine. Right. So yes, ego inflation is a real danger for me, and there’s a lot of things that I have chosen not to do, for precisely that reason. Before I was involved with Buddhism, I was involved with Wiccan Neopaganism, which is actually tantric and it’s actually modeled on Hindu Tantra, although officially it isn’t, but that’s where a lot of it comes from.
And just because nobody else was doing the job that needed to be done, I gradually effectively transitioned into a guru role. People wanted that from me. I could do it. And having not gone at all far down that road— I was, I don’t know, 26, 27, 25. It was very clear to me that this was nuts. I was utterly unqualified for this role, and nobody should be looking to me for what they were looking to me for. So I just left.
Charlie: So how does that connect to your big inflated grandiose ego?
David: Well, I could see that there was, I mean, I it wasn’t an actual possibility, but it was a hypothetical possibility that I could have rolled with that. And, you know, I can in fact be very charismatic. I’m not sure you’ve ever seen that.
Charlie: I think I’ve seen that, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can think of certain circumstances, yeah.
David: So, I mean it wasn’t a real temptation, but it was a hypothetical temptation, and that was bad enough. And again, there was a point where I was suddenly famous in artificial intelligence, and I had fans and groupies, who were being sycophantic and adulatory in ways that I thought were quite inappropriate. I had a lot of reasons for leaving artificial intelligence, but being uncomfortable with that probably was number three.
When have you seen me being charismatic?
Charlie: When you wear a business suit. And you move into a different way of being.
David: That’s interesting.
Charlie: So you’re quite different when you’re in that mode. Often it involves— when you’re wearing different clothes, actually. So when—
David: Clothes make the man! That is tantric principle.
Charlie: Times in Montana when you were behaving in a very magnetic way. So, I associate charisma with the two Buddhakarmas, magnetism and the power one, destroying, those two. And there’s a mode of being that is very direct and clear, that I do think is charismatic. And I think it’s not associated with the more common social dynamics that, once you can see those, they just become really tedious, and just uninteresting. And yeah, there’s something very different about a way of being that is clear and present and commanding, but not commanding of any particular person for anything. It doesn’t need anything.
I had a lot of conversations with Barine around need and perceived need. She’s had a lot of experience with different teachers in very different contexts, and something she really picks up on when somebody is needing the energy from the audience or the students, for their own sense of well being, or sense of being important or status or whatever it is. And it’s so obvious.
It’s also really obvious when you just don’t need something from people. And that can be frustrating for some people.
David: One of the things that has impressed me about some of the lamas that have impressed me is exactly that sense that that they— well, I think it’s actually maybe related to the sense in which I don’t care about people. It’s that I don’t actually need anything from anybody.
Charlie: Well, I was going to ask you when you said that: What do you make of the contradiction of “in some way, at some level, I don’t care about other people at all, and I have dedicated my whole life to other people?”
David: Yeah. I think I said that partly because I don’t feel I understand it very well. Maybe this is self-congratulatory. I do think it’s related to the sense that I don’t need people to be any particular way or do anything. Maybe it’s the opposite of narcissism? Being narcissistic means that you constantly need the reinforcement and… I was about to say I’m indifferent to it, but we started out with my saying that in some ways I’m actually actively uncomfortable with it. Maybe that’s out of a fear that I am also narcissistic as well as anti-narcissistic. That I am, historically have been, prone to ego inflation. It doesn’t seem to happen anymore, so maybe after six decades I’ve grown up a little bit, I don’t know.
And you did say that you had modified the way that you taught in the first— I think you said it was in, like, in the first year or so of EG— in order to deliberately discourage that, and I said that I wanted to know how you had done that, and I don’t think you’ve answered yet.
Charlie: Well, I went out of teacher mode, I stopped giving presentations. All of the early recordings of eG, they’re just me blathering on for like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, just giving a presentation, teaching a thing. It’s the closest that we had been to “giving a dharma talk.” I never give dharma talks now. I might— five minutes, ten minutes maximum, give an introduction to a topic if it’s not something that we’ve talked much about before or spent a lot of time on.
Usually I will teach in the way of having conversation, and eliciting experience, encouraging people to talk about their own experience, and hearing about their experience, and asking questions and responding, such that something will just arise in context. And I might— some kind of rant will arise or something that might seem to be useful given where the conversation is going.
It’s not that there isn’t teaching and learning happening, but it’s much more fluid. We have this phrase “the learning relationship,” and it’s much more that the attitude is one of “what is there to learn here?” Not “what is there to explain?” And if you simply have that holding attitude, everything changes. The method changes, the method of transmission changes, the method of interaction changes. And it becomes much less “Here is an expert giving a talk”; people retain only about 5 percent of that anyway. And it’s much more interesting, it’s much more alive for the people engaged in that topic, because they’re actually relating whatever it is to their lives.
I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but it’s not the way that it’s usually. I do think, I really do think Evolving Ground has developed its own style in this area.
And each of the gathering types are very distinct, they have their very own particular method or mode of interaction that is not the same across the board. So, for example, we’ll have one that is much more a Q&A circumstance, where everybody in the room is invited to give their answers from their experience, from their practice. Or, another one is much more of a deep dive where one person is exploring their practice, facilitated by others there. So there are these different modes that have naturally grown, and it’s much more interesting, I think.
David: So I have a couple of questions about that. Maybe I’ll ask all the questions at once, so I don’t forget them and then you can forget them instead! One is, How does this relate to discouraging dysfunctional sycophancy? And the second one isn’t a question, it’s more of a comment, which is that I assembled a “dharma talk” out of your doing that thing, and turned it into this video presentation about tsa lung in Dzogchen, which I think is great, and has about a thousand views on YouTube so far. So I’m not the only person who thinks it’s great. So possibly I have misled everybody about what you do, but maybe giving dharma talks might actually sometimes be useful. The third thing is, when you suggested that I start doing a monthly Q&A, I think one of the things you said was something roughly along the lines of “You’re much better at giving boring theoretical and historical explanations of boring stuff—”
Charlie: Sure I didn’t say exactly that.
David: “…and doing a traditional boring dharma talk…”
Charlie: although it is true.
David: So I, I will bore everybody to death with these things.
Charlie: Well, we’ve been looking for a guru.
David: Right, well if drafted I will not serve.
You know, I think I’m good at answering boring questions with boring answers. More seriously I’m good at giving conceptual explanations of things. It’s a different mode than what you do, that is also useful for some people and—
Charlie: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the context. There are contexts in which I will give much, much more theoretical framing, and answer questions theoretically. It depends. The monthly regular gatherings tend to be more personal experience oriented. The book club sometimes can be more theoretical. But courses, and certain classes and retreats, there’ll be much more of that, providing some historical context, or teaching on the principle of something, or giving a little bit of a framing, or a theoretical, much more of a kind of “talk” style. So I do do that, sometimes, certainly not averse to that in some congruent context.
What was the first question that you asked?
David: How does this mode discourage sycophancy?
Charlie: Oh, because, it isn’t simply, let’s everybody share experience here. There is an, element of inviting people to bring their experience. And that does provide an interesting context for what arises from that. Usually there is a lot of riffing on that, such that it’s not simply a “let’s all share our feelings” and it’s much more considered than pure expression. Many people are contributing. I mean, if you were going to be sycophantic, you’d have a hard job, because you’d have to like, be keeping up, like it would really difficult because because everybody is shining. Everybody is actually very interesting.
And the more that you bring out people, to their edge, of their practice or their life experience— because we’re always relating it back to life experience— the more that somebody gets into that zone where “actually, this is something I really don’t quite understand about how I can work with this, or what this is, or what’s going on here,” then it’s interesting.
If you’re inclined to sycophancy, it’s a very difficult context to manifest that in, because, you know, our community norms are that we’re encouraging skillful disagreement, we’re training curious skepticism, we’re, you know, these are baked into the nature of the interactions. So that’s one reason.
Another reason is that nobody is there giving an expert opinion and “talk.” And therefore there isn’t a reference point on which to glom your sycophancy.
I want to have more conversation about charisma, or even if we don’t call it charisma, you know, there really is something that can happen in interactions that is very powerful. And it would be easy for— I don’t know whether we want to keep this on the recording at all or not— but there are moments in which I can choose to be powerful, and that isn’t a problem for me, and I can just move into that mode, and execute, or provide what is needed. Certainly, at this point in Evolving Ground, I still don’t do that very much at all. I might do it occasionally, in individual circumstances, or very small group circumstances. It’s too easy for me.
I don’t think the reason that I don’t do that is because it’s easy. It’s partly to do with fit. That kind of mode really does work very well with people who are more inclined towards making themselves insignificant. And, to the extent that people do tend to do that in Evolving Ground, I want to encourage the opposite. I really encourage people to see their difference, to see how they’re autonomous, to have that as their base. That’s our base for the Fundamentals, one of our bases, and it’s important for entering into any tantric practice: that you’re quite adept at knowing your own boundaries, knowing how to be different, being able to express difference, autonomy. All of the things that go wrong in traditional contexts would not go wrong, if people had available that capacity to self-distinguish. And set aside from difficult or unhealthy group dynamics.
So we’re very actively encouraging that mode, and it is somewhat contrary to that to move into a mode that is easily powerful and conjuring with atmospheres and interactions. Those two things do not sit easily together. So I tend to just be a little cautious around that.
David: Yeah. Just conceptually, a very interesting question, if you have a group of self-authored, confident, self-contained people, how to structure a ritual atmosphere, which can actually draw on that, and that empowers a different kind of ritual atmosphere, where there’s a sense of, “Okay, everybody here is actually powerful, and knows they’re powerful, and therefore together we can do magical things.”
Charlie: That’s the question that we’ve been answering, basically. And it works. And it’s amazing. And we have had circumstances that speak to that desire and that necessity, and we’ve had enough circumstances that answer that, and provide for that, that we know that, yeah, we’re, we’re doing that now.
David: That’s what you’re doing. You’re confident you can do that, yeah.
Charlie: Yeah. That’s what we’re doing in the, in the small group ritual retreats, like the chöd retreat that we just had in New York.
David: Cool.
Charlie: It is.
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Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life.
The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact.
Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments
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I discuss the intellectual history of interactions between Buddhism and cognitive science, prompted by a blog discussion of doubts about modern meditation systems.
There’s not many intellectually interesting people in the world, and they all talk to each other. They’re in very different fields, working out the same set of ideas in different contexts. But any intellectual era has a fairly limited number of major, significant new ideas that everybody’s working on.
If you’re going to be part of the zeitgeist, you need to figure out what are the ideas that are actually significant in this era.
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Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship.
I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional legibility (30:19), understanding the performance of epic poetry (32:27), a fun side-quest (36:49), and how meaning itself fell apart (38:25).
There’s a pretty-good AI-generated transcript available via a button, if you view this in the Substack app or on the web.
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This is about my self.
It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting.
This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece.
That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I failed in my attempt to record it, so I reworked it as a text essay. Now I'm trying again!
If you are reading this, and missed that it’s also a podcast, you can listen to it by clicking the start button in the box at the top of the post. Or you may prefer reading!
Another thing I've learned from reader feedback is that my writing is often too abstract. Examples can make it easier to understand, more vivid, more memorable. Personal examples are better because they seem closer, more real. Actually, I've realized all this about eleventy nine times, but it's somehow hard for me to put into practice. Now I'm trying again!
So. This is about my self and how I understand and relate to it. If your self is something like my self, maybe you will find it useful. I'm still pretty confused about selves, but I've been trying to figure it out for sixty-something years, and maybe I've learned something.
The word "self" is not well-defined. We have a strong sense that we know what it is, but the many theories about it seem to have wildly different understandings. Or perhaps they're talking about quite different things using the same word. What is included and not included in "the self" varies dramatically, and so do ideas about what sort of thing it is, and how it works. And also, recommendations for what you should do with it are all over the map.
Although: nearly everyone agrees that selves don't work well. So you need to improve or fix or replace or get rid of yours. I'm now somewhat of an exception, as will become apparent toward the end of this recording.
I'll describe four different ways I've related to my self. I'll describe each with an analogy: with engineering inanimate machines; with organizational leadership; with internal conversations; and finally, letting go of trying to understand and control my self, and allowing curiosity and playfulness instead. To make them memorable, I've given each a symbolic representation: a steam engine for understanding my self as a machine; a tech startup company for managing my life; a podcast for internal conversations; and a dust devil for the fourth, playful approach.
Each approach, each model of what a self is, offers particular benefits, and has particular limitations, risks, and downsides. Depending on the situation and my purposes, one may seem most appropriate.
I learned these four approaches in sequence, after discovering limitations in the first, and then the second and third. I've pretty much abandoned the first, the self-as-machine view, but I've retained all the other three as often-useful ways of being.
I suspect this particular sequence is common, at least for people like me who have a pragmatic, engineering-like outlook on life.
You'll recognize the first three approaches, which come from engineering, management, and psychotherapy. However, I apply them in a somewhat unusual way. I emphasize perception and action over mental contents such as thoughts and emotions. I'll explain how that works in the different approaches separately, but it's the same shift in emphasis in each case.
I find this reframing works better, for me at least. It's also in accord with my theoretical understanding of how we work, how our selves work. I won't go into that much here, but if you know a little about my work in AI and cognitive science, you'll recognize the influence or similarity of views.
The fourth approach is influenced by Dzogchen, an unusual branch of Buddhist theory and practice; by ethnomethodology, an unusual branch of sociology; and by phenomenology, an unusual branch of philosophy. Concepts in those fields may not be familiar. So this fourth approach may not sound like anything you have heard before. I may not be able to explain it well enough to make sense. Or, it may come as unusually useful news.
I think it's the most factually accurate understanding of selfing, but it's often not easy for me to put into practice. I would like to say "This is the answer! Do this!" but I can't say that with complete confidence; not from personal experience. Sometimes it's great, though!
The steam engine: self as machine
The first approach starts by saying "I know how to engineer machines to work better; I can apply engineering understanding to fix malfunctioning ones—so why not do that with my self?"
We don't think, feel, or do the things we want our selves to, so how can we intervene? Like why do I keep doing this stupid thing, I know it's stupid, how is my mind or brain broken? Why do I eat too much? Why do I freeze up and stammer on dates? Why do I pretend to agree when people at work say crazy, wrong things. Surely better understanding of why my self insists on betraying me will let me fix it so I get better control!
I chose the steam engine as a symbol for this, because that's the key invention that set off the Industrial Revolution, which was the most important event in human history. Steam engines were the focus of engineering practice for a century of the field's development. It's natural that analogies between selves and complicated steam engines, with boilers and condensers and gears and valves and pressure governors, were common in psychology during that period. Nowadays, analogies with computers or computer programs are more common.
Anyway, you can consider your self as a machine whose mechanisms you can learn or discover, and that will empower you to improve it. This is a science-y and engineering approach. You try to introspect about how your mind operates. You may also draw on theories from neuroscience and cognitive science.
This is tempting especially for STEM people: I mean "science, technology, engineering, and math," the acronym: STEM. It's tempting because of the three rationalist, eternalist promises: that you can gain certainty, understanding, and control. You can just make a machine behave.
It certainly was tempting for me! So I gave in to temptation whole-heartedly! This is a big part of how I got interested in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I hoped for a significant synergy between my attempts to solve my personal problems and my intellectual interests. It's much of how I tried to make sense of my self, and to fix myself, in my teens and early twenties.
I eventually got a PhD in the field. Somewhere half way through graduate school, I realized that we have absolutely no idea how either the brain or the mind work, much less how they relate to each other. And the kinds of models people were using in AI and cognitive science couldn't possibly be true, a priori. This made me extremely angry. I made a huge nuisance of my self by going around saying that these fields are all made-up nonsense. I'm still angry, and still doing that, and people are still annoyed!
Running out of steam
The self-as-machine metaphor is limited and can be harmfully misleading. Because: we don't work like machines; at least not at the level of description we care about. I don't mean we run on some kind of non-physical woo. It's that we don't work like steam engines, or other mechanical devices, and we don't work like computers or computer programs either. Also not like the algorithms that, for publicity purposes, get called "neural networks," although how they work is almost perfectly dissimilar to brains.
In terms of personal application, the self-as-machine approach usually doesn't work well, because we have quite limited introspective access to our mental mechanisms, or possibly none at all. We can only guess at what they are doing by looking for patterns in their outputs. Also, the models from neuroscience and cognitive science are either at the wrong abstraction level—knowing about neurons is unhelpful—or too inaccurate to provide useful guidance. Engineering works only when it's based on solid science, and the science of people is not solid at all. In fact, it seems to be mostly wrong.
As a computer science student, specializing in AI, it was natural for me to think about trying to fix my self when it did dumb things, or when it got emotionally stuck and refused to do anything at all, as "debugging." This didn't work. The methods I could use to debug a computer program don't have good analogs when I was trying to change my self. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get access to my own code, the way I could read the code of a program. I mostly also couldn't get access to intermediate results or the details of my runtime state, the way I could with a software debugger or just print statements. All I could find with introspection was that somehow thoughts popped out of nowhere. I could often force them in particular directions, on a moment by moment basis, but that's not the same as debugging the underlying machinery.
More seriously, the "debugging" metaphor suggests that if your self isn't working the way you want, it's because of "bugs": meaning localized functional defects. That rarely seems to be the case. Trying to find them often led to analysis paralysis. I spent the second half of my undergraduate sophomore year, and then again the whole second year of graduate school, ignoring what I was supposed to be learning and obsessing instead over my supposed self and what the heck was wrong with it.
I knew what I ought to be doing, but applying more force to my self backfired. I don't believe in "willpower," at least not when dealing with my self. All it did was generate resentment and even greater unwillingness to work. Maybe your self is better behaved!
For some people, this failure of rationality for self-understanding can lead to losing faith in rationality itself, and into post-rationalist nihilism. I was dumb enough that it wasn't until my fourth year of graduate school that I finally realized rationalism is wrong, and had my post-rationalist nihilistic crisis. That's a different story.
Anyway, contra the "debugging" metaphor, I think unsatisfactory selves are usually better addressed globally. Dare I say: "holistically," although that's a word I usually shun. An overall improvement in the texture of your way of being seems better to aim for. And that's what the fourth approach, at the end of this recording, is about.
What you can change locally are your routines, your habitual ways of doing specific things. You can debug those. I find that usually the best way is with external aids. I need something to remind me to do differently whatever it is. A yellow sticky note telling me to turn off the stove when taking dinner out of it, for example. Or, my to-do software reminding me to lift weights once every few days.
Startup: self as system
This is a good transition point! I've mostly given up on trying to understand how internal mental processes work. Instead, I aim to improve what I do. I mainly use external aids for that, instead of thought. Thinking is difficult. I'm bad at it. It's unreliable. External tools are better.
You can systematize your activities so that your self operates like an understandable machine, even though its underlying mechanisms are unknown and quite different. Or maybe it's better to think of it as rational organizational management. You can use your self as a smoothly-operating bureaucracy.
So this is what I'll call the "startup company leadership" approach.
This is similar to the steam engine approach, in being rational and systematic and aiming for predictability and control. It's different in that it completely lets go of trying to understand the underlying mechanisms.
It also lets go of trying for complete predictability and control. It's a "startup" rather than a big bureaucratic corporation, because in reality your personal life is always going to involve fairly frequent, significant events that are out of your control. Unpredictable chaos. That includes both unexpected disasters and unlooked-for opportunities. You need to ride the wave, or shoot the rapids. You need to be willing to constantly improvise and innovate in response to changing circumstances.
But, in this approach, you are also constantly putting rational systems in place, to manage what can be managed, so you get some predictability; and your attention is freed up to deal with the big, unexpected, difficult stuff, so you don't get bogged down in trivia and routine hassles.
In following this approach, I structure my life. I choose to act according to principles, policies, plans, procedures. I delegate routine decision making to machines—literal ones, computers, but also personal policies that I can carry out almost mindlessly.
This approach includes the domain of "productivity hacking." For example, I use a task management app, inspired by the book Getting Things Done, called Things.app. It runs on all Apple devices. It's great! I recommend it! I keep an awful lot of balls in the air, and rarely drop any, because Things.app tells me what I need to do.
I make spreadsheets to figure out what I want to do, and to track what I have done. I use a pomodoro timer app to keep my thoughts focused. I automate lots of chores using software—some that I've written, but I also use many cloud services to take care of tedious stuff like paying bills and scheduling meetings. I make plans, using software tools or just writing in a text file; and I execute on them. Sometimes, I do explicit expected value calculations to make decisions.
This is called "rationality," and it's better than sliced bread! I am a true believer! This works much better for me than the steam engine approach, and it seems to work better for most other people I know, or read first-hand reports from.
I shifted from trying to fix my broken mental machinery to engineering my life: the ways I do things. That often means thinking somewhat differently, like "how do I automate this so the world can't throw problems like it at me again," instead of "how do I deal with this particular breakdown here." But the main thing is not thinking but action. The thinking just fits around and supports that.
Rationalism and system failure modes
I'm a true believer in rationality; but—as you may know—I'm down on rational-ism. By rationalism, I mean not just thinking that rationality is great. I mean overestimating its power and importance, and claiming that it's always fully adequate, and the only good way to be.
In the domain of selfing, rationalism is mistaking systematizing your self, turning it into a smoothly-running institution, for the whole story. It's a good thing to do, it's efficient, but it has limitations.
The world is nebulous: unboundedly complex; largely unknown, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable. Systems can work only by excluding and ignoring almost everything. We make systems work by putting them in a box. Inside the box, we force everything to work according to some simple formal model, some idealization of certain aspects of the world. We wall off this little domain, and shield it from the chaotic weirdness of reality, so inside we can more-or-less get the certainty, understanding, and control that rationality promises.
Systematizing has some typical failure modes. One is that events not included in the formal idealization can break through the shielding and interfere with smooth functioning; or in extreme cases wreck the system entirely. On a small scale, my schedule often gets disrupted by an unexpected obligation landing. Major life events can be more dramatic. I had things going pretty well a decade ago, and then, roughly simultaneously, my father, mother, and sister got slow but terminal diseases, and I spent years taking care of them pretty much full time. The plans I had made for my own life, for my writing work, became suddenly irrelevant; and the stress left my self in a state of long-term disrepair once the crises were over.
The shielding around a system keeps unwanted influences out. If you are operating inside it, the walls of the box also prevent you from seeing out. Anything that doesn't fit the system's form becomes effectively invisible. This can lead to missing out on significant, unexpected opportunities. On a small scale, I periodically find that I have become a slave to my task management app. I've turned into a robot, executing the tasks it says I have to do today, oblivious to the burgeoning life that surrounds me. Sometimes it's best to revolt and spontaneously make art, or wander around a botanical arboretum. To-do list be damned!
On a larger scale, I wasted most of my effort for a few years helping a religious organization grow, because I was sticking to a plan that was increasingly obviously going to fail. I was only vaguely aware, during that period, of several other things I could have been doing, missed opportunities that in retrospect would have been better for me and for the world.
What I call "meta-rationality" involves stepping outside a system, to get a view of it from above and around, to better see how it relates to its context, and how its operation is going overall. It's the antidote to these failure modes.
Podcast: self as talk
OK, enough of that, let's go on to the third way I relate to my self. I'm going to symbolize this approach as a podcast. I'll explain specifically why in a bit, but a podcast is a conversation; it's talk, and my self is somewhat that.
This general approach is shared with many psychotherapeutic theories, which understand self in terms of self-talk; as internal dialog. This is at least partly true; more true than the analogies with machines. Silent language is much of what thinking is, for most people. (Supposedly there are exceptions.) And thinking is at least part of what "self" is usually taken to include.
Psychotherapeutic practice is similar to the steam engineering approach in hoping that discoveries about processes will give us control over our selves. In most current psychotherapy systems, though, there's been a shift from trying to understand the mechanisms that generate thoughts and emotions to their content. This is good because we have nearly zero access to the mechanisms, but we have pretty good access to mental contents. So the information we're working with is significantly more reliable.
Not perfect, though. Mechanistic mind models are clear-cut, whereas thoughts and especially emotions are pretty squishy, or as I say, "nebulous." So the amount of understanding and predictability and control that we can hope for is much less. Still, this view of self as internal talk is not only partly true, it's also often helpful.
There's approximately sixteen billion different theories of psychotherapy. I'll discuss two of the currently most popular approaches: rationalist, cognitive ones, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, called CBT for short; and ones that describe the self as a collection of "parts," such as internal family systems, or IFS.
I don't have any official experience with either. The small amount of therapy I've had personally was back in the paleolithic era. It was "eclectic," meaning the therapists were just making things up as they went along and hoping something would work. It didn't, not for me.
So instead, I read a bunch of psychotherapeutic theory, and did some graduate-level coursework in it, even. I did get a lot of insight into my self that way. That insight helped, and made my life better.
So I do believe that using psychotherapeutic models of mind to try to understand yourself, with or without the involvement of a therapist, can be valuable. That's true even if the theory itself is not especially true. It could be valuable as a practice, even if its model is completely false.
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In fact, I think the psychotherapeutic models are all quite wrong, factually. They are not how things work, at all. But treating your self as if it worked these ways can generate accurate, actionable insights that lead to positive changes. Psychotherapeutic models of self can also generate harmful distortions and outright delusions, and wind up making everything much worse. I've seen botched courses of psychotherapy actually making victims crazy and wind up hospitalized.
Rational psychotherapy and its limitations
Therapy styles such as CBT inherit from rationalist cognitive science the idea that actions are caused by thoughts. It adds the idea that emotions are mostly also caused by thoughts, not by external circumstances. These ideas are partly wrong, which matters, as I'll explain. But they're also somewhat true, and often useful.
People go to therapy mostly because they have emotions they don't want, or keep taking actions they know are harmful. So in cognitive therapy styles, you check to see whether your thoughts are true. It turns out lots of them aren't. The theory says that is due to what it calls "irrationality." If you replace your irrational, false thoughts with true thoughts, then you'll get the emotions and actions you want to have, instead of the bad ones you get now.
This has sometimes worked for me! In my twenties, I often thought "I will never get a girlfriend," which was extremely depressing. It also wasn't true. And there was lots of evidence it wasn't true, like, you know, a series of girlfriends. Nevertheless, I stubbornly persisted in this belief. For years. Until I gave in and admitted it wasn't true. And that was partly due to reading about CBT. And then I did the things you do to get a girlfriend. Then I was depressed much less often, yay!
CBT is straight-up rationalism, imported from the rationalism of mainstream cognitive science. It's appealing to STEM-ish people, like me, for the same reason as the "self as steam engine" approach. It's the comfortable rationalist idea that if we can get true knowledge, we'll get control—over our selves, in this case.
We aren't steam engines, but we also don't run on rational logic, and we shouldn't. And the ways we aren't rational are often not irrational at all. We are non-rational in other ways, which often work better than rationality. I discuss some of them in my meta-rationality book.
A main error of rationalism is treating "the mind" as a closed container full of mental things: thoughts and emotions and beliefs and desires and stuff like that. Implicitly, "the mind" is treated as connecting with the world only rarely and briefly. In the extreme, in psychotherapeutic theorizing, you had some childhood experiences, and that is what formed your self, as a set of beliefs, fixed thoughts, and you've been stuck with it.
Psychotherapeutic models lead you to take thoughts and emotions more seriously than you already do. Taking them as your self, taking them too seriously, believing that they are what matter most, is often what causes your trouble in the first place.
I find that what I do matters more than what I think or feel. It's not actually true that thoughts determine actions. Most of what you do is a straightforward response to what you perceive. You can see what to do, and you do it.
The rationalist view admits in passing that you get inputs sometimes, and you output actions sometimes, but the theories are mostly about what happens "inside your mind," effectively in isolation. That's where all the action is. It's about internal processes. The self sorts thoughts and emotions from one drawer into another, or rubs two together to make new ones. So if you keep doing things that don't work, rationalism says it's because the machinery is malfunctioning—not because you are in a situation that doesn't support you in doing what does work.
Taking mental contents too seriously is harmful if it obscures reality, if directs effort and attention away from just looking and seeing what you are doing and what sorts of situations lead you to do that. It risks your coming to believe what you think. You shouldn't believe what you think... much of it is wrong. CBT is right about that! But it's usually better to look and see than to think harder.
For example, I have often used rational analysis of my thinking to explain to my self why am stuck. Sometimes that causal explanation has been compelling enough to dissuade me from attempting to change. I lost the second half of my sophomore year to agonizing about not being smart enough to do serious mathematics. But I wanted to do serious mathematics! But I was not smart enough! But I really really wanted that, so I was not going to do anything else! I was paralyzed! But I couldn't get un-paralyzed because, rationally speaking, this was an unsolvable conundrum! Rationally, I should be paralyzed!
Man, that was a miserable waste of time.
Another thing. Obsessing with your mental contents is called "rumination" in psychotherapeutic jargon. It's found to be counter-productive, especially in depression.
Rumination makes you think you are figuring yourself out and working toward solutions, but it's actually making things worse. Rumination, by focusing inward, and by emphasizing what isn't working, is inherently depressing. I'm very familiar with this. Going over and over my thoughts and feelings, trying to make sense of them, literally makes me stupid. It has a cognitive dampening effect; my reasoning gets slower and slower, and increasingly faulty. Gradually it grinds to a halt, without my noticing, and then I really am stuck! Turning inwards to try to solve problems inhibits the accurate perception and effective actions that actually help.
Ruminating, as an approach to trying to fix my self, comes from an implicit belief that the self's machinery is made out of thoughts and emotions too. That suggests that it has to fix itself by doing the same things it always does. But if you are stuck in a deep hole, the first thing is to stop digging. A completely different approach is required.
What I find works, instead of trying to figure my self out, is to turn my attention outward, to open my self to the concrete specifics of my situation, and to take practical action. Doing anything is better than ruminating. Figuring out the best thing to do just prompts more rumination, which may never end. Doing a sub-optimal, or ineffective, or even counter-productive thing at least gets me out of my head.
The CBT theory of emotions is that they are caused by thoughts. This violates common sense, which says that you feel bad when something bad happens, and good when something good happens. I think that's more nearly true. And that's good news, because it suggests that if you make good things happen, you will feel better. I'm still an engineer, you see! We engineers are in the business of making good things happen! I believe in this!
Improving the situation is likely to improve feelings more than trying to bully emotions into better behavior through understanding and controlling. For example. The one time I had something vaguely like a Real Job, I came into conflict with my boss, who I thought was treating me unfairly. He demoted and side-lined me. To be fair to him, I had behaved badly, due to uncontrolled emotions. To be fair to me, he was narcissistic and probably psychopathic. I spent another year at that company, stewing over it, trying to understand my bad emotions and his, and to fix mine up somehow. It made me miserable. Then I decided I wasn't cut out for jobs, and started my own company instead, which was a great improvement. Not everyone can do that, but if your working environment is making you miserable, changing jobs is probably a better move than psychologizing.
Irrational emotions, ones that don't respond accurately to good or bad things happening, can sometimes cause trouble, but they're mostly not meaningful other than as momentary energy. They are like the weather: they come and go, often for no discernable reason. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings wrong in Patagonia. Strong emotions can make you do stupid things, so it's good to know what emotions you have, or may have soon, so you can choose not to act on them.
I have irrationally strong feelings of duty to others. I feel compelled to prioritize other people’s desires and tasks over my own. This is dysfunctional. I keep rediscovering this, and then somehow forgetting it. Rereading my diary a few years ago was eye-opening, because I found that this had come as a revelation, a massive new insight into my self, about once a year.
Since then, what has helped significantly is translating the insight into my external self management system. Stuff I actually want to do goes into my planning documents and Things.app with high priority. Too often I ignore that anyway, but it's helping. Again I think what matters is action, and external supports for action like Things.app, more than theories about how my self works. Apparently I'm incapable of changing my self, but I can change what I do.
Parts of my self
Thinking in language is often called an "internal dialog." A dialog involves at least two people. CBT doesn't include that in its model, as far as I know, not of how your self works, although of course therapy sessions themselves are dialogs.
My experience of thinking is that it's usually talking at someone. Usually they are ghostly, not fully formed, barely there other than as a vague listening presence.
Often, I'm talking at my self. But it's not my same self. It might be my Bad Self. I'm reprimanding Bad Self for doing stupid things and having unworthy desires and unhelpful emotions. That means "I" am Good Self. I can't be Good Self without Bad Self to yell at.
Nowadays, I try to observe the attitude that motivates the style of talk. Following the details of what I say to my self may be less significant than asking "is this a good way of interacting with someone who is acting like that?"
So... this is another turn. First, we had a turn from mechanism to content; this turn is from content to texture. I ask "actually, who am I talking at here? why them? what I am I trying to get them to do, and how would they respond?"
There's usually an audience for my internal dialog. Much of my thinking is lecturing, delivering an explanation to a shadowy classroom. That's you, right now! But it's really me. I'm trying to figure something out for myself, but imagining explaining it to you is the best way to do that!
Forgetting there's an audience may lead to mistakes. Informally, I hope to publish something on Substack roughly weekly, which would make this recording a week late. A week ago, my spouse Charlie and I recorded a conversation about the different ways we help unstick stuck STEM people. That's a large part of Charlie's work, and of my work. It was animated and fascinating for us. Unfortunately, we somehow overlooked the implications of it being a podcast episode. To count as a success, you would have to understand it. With decades of shared context, Charlie and I talk in a private language of jargon from several fields. We can allude vaguely to esoteric concepts and understand each other without explanation. No one else could possibly have followed our recorded discussion.
I’ve been intending to record audio monologs for several years. I’ve tried several times and failed. This is the first I’m reasonably happy with. What do you think? How is the audio quality? Is my voice annoying, or OK?
What I realized in retrospect is that a podcast isn't a conversation; it can't be. It's a stage play, a simulacrum, a theatrical performance of a conversation. That's why I am using "podcast" as the symbol for this approach to relating to myself. I find myself performing, and then may interrupt the performance.
I've noticed that when I'm being Good Self scolding Bad Self, there's a third person in the room. Am I really Good? I can't be sure unless there's a judge to confirm my Goodness. My diatribe against Bad Self plays to an imaginary audience, the authority to who will rule in my favor and declare that I am justified in beating my self up.
Why is that part of my self in that role? I might turn to the judge and ask "Who are you? Why are you here? What's your agenda? Who appointed you as an authority?"
I don't know much about Internal Family Systems therapy, but this seems to be in line with its general method. It's natural to regard one's self as having parts. "Part of me wants to go to the concert, but I'm tired and another part of me just wants to go to bed early." If you feel an internal conflict, you could treat these parts as full-fledged selves and put them in dialog with each other. If you encourage them to be civil, maybe they can work out a compromise.
It may be useful to stabilize these parts. It's not just a vague momentary impulse that wants to go to the concert, there's a regularly-appearing character "Party Self" who's always up for a good time, and there's "Stick-in-the-mud Self" who's boring and just wants to be comfortable at home alone. Then you can develop complex enduring relationships with these imaginary people.
I've mostly avoided this. I'm wary of it. I don't believe this is how selves work, although apparently you can mold yours into acting as if they do. Applying a theory that is relevantly wrong can lead to bad results. The danger is getting lost in a complicated fantasy world populated with drama queens, in simulacra of emotional conflict. This can result from taking the theory much too seriously, and concretizing "parts" as truly existing, rather than as a useful fiction. It seems to me likely to make things worse, rather than better.
These may be risks of amateur self-therapy. I don't know, maybe a good therapist understands all the limitations and failure modes I've discussed, and can help clients work around them.
However, a secret about IFS came out recently, which is that many prominent advocates, supposed experts, believe their patients are parasitized by literal demons, which require exorcism. This is crazy talk.
I hold all theories about selves lightly. All models are wrong, even if some are sometimes useful. When I use a model, I try to maintain awareness of what's actually going on, to prevent the theory from obscuring accurate self-perception.
Leaf devil: self as interaction
OK, now the fourth and last way I relate with my self. I'll start with the symbolic analogy.
The chemical engineering department at MIT, where I was a student, is in a modernist building in the shape of a 3-4-5 triangle. So one corner is a concrete knife edge. Very peculiar. I used to stop there to eat my lunch, sitting on a long rectangular concrete planter. It's in a walkway between the chemical engineering building and the biology building. The odd angles of the closely-packed many-story structures often channeled an intense wind through the walkway, and the planter was put there to break up the gale. I think.
But interrupting the smooth flow of the wind created vortices. And in autumn... there is a dust devil. Or, I should say, a leaf devil. The swirling wind picks up the fallen leaves in a mini tornado, sucking them way up in the air. At the height of the season, maple leaves, brilliant red and gold, swirl up in a tight column, a dozen feet into the air, four feet across. It's magical! Memorable! Mesmerizing! It's glorious like nothing you have ever seen!
I would play with it, feeding it extra leaves, or it would happily pick up whatever I gave it, crumpled up scratch paper maybe. How much could I stuff in there?
If I stepped into it, the whole thing would collapse, dropping leaves all around me. That was cool but also slightly disappointing: wouldn't it be more fun to stand at the center of the tornado, gesturing like a wizard, levitating the world?
The leaf devil is not a thing. It's a pattern of activity. It comes into being only when conditions are right, and then subsides. It depends on the physical form of its surrounds, but it has no fixed form itself.
This is the way I try to relate to my so-called "self" now. It's not a thing; it's a dynamic pattern of activity. Or, rather, unlike the leaf devil, I have many different patterns I self with. Different circumstances call forth different patterns, different "selves," different ways of being. How I am on a zoom call with a mentee, how I self, is different from how I self when talking with my spouse over dinner.
This helps makes sense of the wildly different concepts of "self" proposed in different psychologies. What does it include and not include? Paying close attention to ways I use the word in different contexts, I find that I too conceptualize it in quite different, inconsistent ways.
You could say we have many selves; but since none of them are definite things, just nebulous patterns of interaction, there can be no specific list of which selves I have. Then it is tempting to say "there is no self, really," as in some Buddhist metaphysics—and also in some Western philosophies. Which might be true in some sense, but in most cases it's not a useful way of understanding what's going on. "I do selfing in different ways when interacting with different situations" is more accurate.
Or, maybe better still, I can say that I have a different self in every moment. There's a Dzogchen practice of taking literally Heraclitus' maxim: "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." The Dzogchen practice frames this in terms of the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth. "I," my "self," die and am reborn in every second, into a different world. This is astonishing! I am a new person, opening my eyes and beholding a fork for the first time in my life! It's like nothing I've seen before, it glitters, it undulates, it's pokey and scary and delicious! I can hear a plane passing overhead, growling—I've never heard anything like that—it's unprecedentedly irregular; ominous yet pleasing!
You and I are in constant contact with a vast and endlessly complex and fascinating worlds, featuring especially other people. We are constantly acting in it, and with them, and so we are constantly being re-formed by this involvement.
My self is not a fixed machine. There is no self—in that sense. I switch from a noun to a verb, or a quality: "selfing," or "selfness." Selfing is nebulous, emergent, transient but recurring patterns of interaction with circumstances. Selfing is spontaneously called forth in the moment, prompted by perception.
"Not a fixed machine" doesn't mean "runs on non-physical woo," nor that what we do is random or arbitrary. There's a brain involved, which provides some stability. The traditional rationalist view is that the brain generates actions autonomously, or that minds decide what to do; but this is false, as a matter of simple causality. What I do right now depends on the situation I perceive right now, which is also somewhat stable. There's two sides to the interaction that are both causally involved. The leaf devil is also an intermittent but somewhat stable pattern. (Apparently it's still going, decades after I left MIT!) It's brought about by the interaction of the wind, the weird geometry of the buildings, and the maple trees dropping their leaves in response to the changing seasons.
For many listeners, this will not be a familiar view, unlike the systematic and psychotherapeutic approaches. If you find it intriguing, and would like to learn more, the show notes link to several essays and a book.
This understanding of selfness is unsettling because it undercuts fantasies of control. It contradicts the rationalist ideal of a unitary subject, with free will to make decisions. That's infeasible, because activity is always a dynamic, improvised collaboration with nebulous-but-patterned otherness.
How much influence I can have, short of perfect control, varies, of course. And how much control I try to exert varies. Sometimes going with the flow is best; sometimes applying force to make things go my way is best. This is tricky to get right. I'm still learning. Probably I'll never stop learning, never get it consistently right. I think this is a skill that demands awareness. It's easy to go one way or the other out of habit, and that risks missing opportunities or causing needless friction.
Learning to be more comfortable with the ambiguity and unpredictable fluidity of selfness has taken hard work, attention, some courage, and—when I can manage it—good humor. When I can do it, allowing nebulosity of my self frees me from neurotic self-obsession, and increases the effectiveness and enjoyability of my relationships.
My book Meaningness describes six textures of experience which manifest when I allow fluidity in selfing. They are: wonder, open-ended curiosity, humor, play, enjoyment, and creation. I hope those came through in my description of the leaf devil! On a good day, I regard my self with wonder, open-ended curiosity, and amusement; I play with it, enjoy it, and help create it.
Opening awareness meditation
I started to understand selfing this way intellectually by reading phenomenology and ethnomethodology, as I mentioned at the beginning of this recording. But making it real began with meditation, of a particular sort taught in Dzogchen, an unusual branch of Buddhism.
Different types of meditation have different methods and different results. The currently mainstream ones in America turn you inward, often using strong concentration on a single focus. They were originally actually designed to cut you off from the world, and if you go hard at them, that's what happens. Ideally, you lose all contact with reality, and then "discover" that you have no self. That's because selfing is an interaction, and it stops happening if you don't let the world play its part. No wind, no leaf devil.
Dzogchen meditation turns outward, toward the world. Perception opens up toward reality's vividness, its intensity, its richness, revealing the six textures of experience, starting with wonder. When I get up from my sitting cushion, I often find that the scent of meditation lingers, and I can engage the world with greater curiosity, humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creativity.
This may sound a bit elevated. As a practical matter, what you do is mostly responding to a concrete situation. If you want to act more effectively, you need to perceive the situation more accurately. I find that Dzogchen-style meditation leads to insight into what I do, in what sorts of situations. This contrasts with the inward-turning styles of meditation, which supposedly reveal the causal mechanics of mind. I don't believe they do; I find their theories implausible.
Meditation lets me take my self much less seriously, and then it becomes much less of a problem. Also my thoughts and emotions and beliefs and desires. It's useful to know what those are, to see them clearly, as they appear in meditation. I don't want to be compelled by them into doing counterproductive things. Just sitting with emotions, allowing them to appear and pass away without having to react to them, or trying to manipulate them into better behavior, is perhaps the most valuable aspect of meditation for me.
Further resources
* The Meaningness book's page on selfness is a short explanation of my understanding of it.
Also on Meaningness:
* Textures of the complete stance
* Open-ended curiosity
* Wonder
On Vividness, my site about Vajrayana Buddhism:
* Your self is not a spiritual obstacle
* Spacious freedom
* Relating as beneficent space about spontaneous activity
* Beyond emptiness: Zen, Tantra, and Dzogchen
My spouse Charlie Awbery's book Opening Awareness is about a Dzogchen style of meditation. You can read the first two chapters for free on the Evolving Ground website.
In the book itself, the two chapters "Emotional Turbulence" and "Spacious Involvement in Life" are especially relevant.
Also see Charlie's Taking Vajrayana into every relationship.
Part One of my meta-rationality book explains why rationalism, and rationalist cognitive science, are wrong.
I've found a video of the leaf devil by Building 66, the chemical engineering building at MIT. It wasn't taking full form on the day this was filmed, mostly just swirling the leaves in a circle on the ground, but you can see some being lifted a few feet near the end. I wasn't sure whether it would still be there, decades after I left MIT, with new construction in the area, and was glad to see it still going.
Scott Alexander's review of the book The Others Within Us illustrates some dangers of taking mental contents too seriously. The book is about IFS therapists thinking they've found literal demons parasitizing their patients.
This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe -
Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast!
It is about how to learn to be kind.
I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions.
Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here.
The making of
This is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had repeatedly agreed to podcast, and occasionally made half-baked attempts which didn’t quite work. This time we prepared, used proper equipment, and it came out well.
We thought a spontaneous, natural-sounding conversation would be better than a scripted one. We each wrote bullet points before starting, and deliberately didn’t share them with each other. The conversation is fluid and fun. However, we circled around the topic, and perhaps never quite hit the mark. Next time, we’ll merge our lists of bullet points and put them into a coherent overall plan before starting.
Something I forgot to explain: what the guy in the elevator said was a humorous and insightful comment on the situation itself. It was neither self-deprecating, nor at his companion’s expense. It was friendly and droll.
Humor, both in the sense of pointing out a funny aspect of a situation and in the sense of “good humor,” is often a skillful form of kindness.
Image: (CC) a4gpa
The Black Goat podcast episode “Kindness in Academia,” which we discuss, is here. The bit about introversion being an obstacle to kindness starts at 33:20.
Transcript
David: I suggested this topic because I feel like I would like to be kinder than I am, and I find being kind sometimes difficult, and I think there’s a number of reasons I find it difficult. And I suspect that there’s a meaningful number of listeners who find themselves in this same position.
Charlie: Hmm. That is really interesting for me to know. I didn’t know that.
David: About me?
Charlie: Yeah.
David: Oh.
Charlie: I didn’t know that you find being kind difficult, and it’s kind of funny because when I was making a few bullet points for this conversation— I’ll read the very first thing that I wrote. You’re going to laugh. “There’s an idea that kindness is difficult, that it’s something you have to work hard at. I think that’s wrong.”
David: Right. Well, I think this may contradict the lived experience of many people, including me.
Charlie: Hmm. Well, so do you want to say [00:01:00] more about what it is that you find difficult? What goes wrong? Why is it difficult?
David: Well, there’s a podcast I re-listened to this morning with Simine Vazire, who is one of my heroes. She’s a leader of the academic psychology reform movement, which was in response to the replication crisis, but also in response to lots of other problems.
And the title of the podcast is “Kindness in Academia,” and she and the other discussants are talking about ways that one can be kind in academia, but there’s this short section that I find really touching, that is quite raw on her part, where she says I would like to be much more kind than I am.
And the obstacle for me, [00:02:00] she says, is that I’m so introverted. And, in order to be kind, you often have to break through a, maybe even extremely thin, but a slight layer of interactional business as usual. And so she says she’s constantly buying gifts for people because, you know, “Oh, yes, so-and-so would really like this,” and then she doesn’t give it to them because it might be awkward for them because they might feel obligated or, giving somebody a compliment, like they could take it the wrong way.
Charlie: Goodness.
David: And I feel that way too, maybe not quite as extremely as she does.
Charlie: Do you have something similar going on? Do you want to buy gifts for people or buy gifts and then not give them?
David: No, but there’s times when giving a compliment— I mean, I’ve gotten a lot better at this, to be honest. I’m partly [00:03:00] recalling how I was in past, but it’s still sometimes— It’s awkward to do things for people if they might feel some kind of unwanted reciprocal obligation, or you think this is something that the person would want, but actually they don’t, and maybe you misread that.
Charlie: So let me reflect something back to you and see whether this is accurate from your perspective. It sounds to me like there’s an equivalence between between kindness and doing something for somebody, or giving somebody something, even if that’s a compliment.
David: Well, no, actually, in my notes, I have a list of various sorts of things that are not the same as kindness, which can be confused with it, and generosity is one of them.
Generosity can often be kind, but a lot of kindness isn’t particularly generous. [00:04:00] Often it costs you nothing to be kind, and then it’s just a matter of choosing and remembering to do it.
Charlie: Yeah, I agree. I agree. So, I’m curious that the examples that you brought there are all to do with giving and generosity. And the example from Simine as well.
David: Right, yeah, I think I was following her lead.
Charlie: Yeah, well that’s very interesting because that connects to one of the things that I’ve perceived, I’m not 100 percent confident about this, but I think that this idea that kindness is difficult is mixed up with the idea that it has something to do with giving, generosity. Also that it has something to do with a kind of feeling that you have to cultivate or nurture towards others in [00:05:00] order to be kind.
David: Yes.
Charlie: And I think that’s wrong, too.
David: Yes, right. My list of things to distinguish kindness from are: niceness, generosity, compassion, empathy, warmth, charm, and good feelings, and being ethical. Each of those is interestingly not quite kindness.
Charlie: Not quite the same, but I think there are connections.
David: Yes.
Charlie: Some of the connections are significant.
David: Yes.
Charlie: So I would want to say that when I think about what kindness is, I always come back to an attitude that the kindness is based in, and I think there’s a generosity comes into that attitude. There’s a kind of an attitude, a base attitude of just simply wanting the best for everyone, sincerely wanting that wanting others to experience happiness and [00:06:00] enthusiasm and love for life and joy and peace, and it’s easy to get caught up in a worry about “Oh, can I be kind? Will I be kind? Am I doing the right thing to be kind to this person?” And that isn’t— that’s an extra layer. It’s an extra layer on top of the very simple interaction that there is underneath things.
And that concern is really all about “How do I look? How are they gonna think about me? Am I gonna do something daft and ridiculous and silly?” And the more that you can not worry too much about that, the more likely it is that you can relax into a kindness attitude, I think. I have done so many ridiculous, idiotic, silly things. I don’t worry about that anymore. I really don’t. We’re human beings. We’re going [00:07:00] to be calibrating with some kind of trial and error. I think it’s okay to recognize that and to take risks. So a lot of the fear around kindness is tied up with being afraid of taking risks.
David: Yeah. That makes sense to me. The phrase “kindness skills” is a framing that I’m kind of guessing that you would probably actually reject; and I have mixed feelings about that myself.
Charlie: I prefer “kindness attitude.”
David: Yes.
Charlie: I do think there are some skills involved.
David: Ah, all right, good.
Charlie: However,
David: We’re not completely disagreeing.
Charlie: Yeah. I mean, what are kindness skills for you?
David: Well , I think this is interesting in a somewhat broader context of… the kinds of [00:08:00] people that we both tend to attract and advise have a technical mindset, in which the way that you are good at something is by having a set of techniques that you have mastered. And that is at best limited and it interferes with spontaneity, which is, I think, probably critical for kindness; and taken too literally, you can try to rely on gimmicks or little tricks that you can play that you hope are reliably going to constitute kindness and make people like you or something, which is exactly the wrong attitude.
Charlie: This is really interesting because I think there are hacks. I really do think there are hacks that can help you get into the zone or the space that is going to result in being kind. [00:09:00] And I’m just thinking about this because those, the kinds of hacks, and I will come to some of those, but the kind of things that I think work , they’re actually not about interaction per se.
Whereas you might think that the kindness skills are going to be in the fields of interaction, but actually they’re more about setting up the space and the attitude and even the intent. Whereas the interactions are what can happen spontaneously and maybe need to happen spontaneously in order to change the habitual patterns that you might have, whatever those are, like maybe shyness, or reluctance to take the risk of saying something different, or to do something that is obviously unconventional, or whatever it is.
David: Yeah, you use the word “scaffolding” to refer to various hacks. In your meditation [00:10:00] teaching, you talk about scaffolding as techniques that are kind of dumb tricks, but they actually do prepare you to do the actual thing. And it seems to me that communication skills and social skills actually are a thing. And those can be scaffolding toward a more spontaneous and natural form of kindness. It’s a certain kind of “fake it until you make it” thing going on.
Charlie: Yeah. I think that can be a part of it. Kind of hacks that I’m thinking of— We have a whole Evolving Ground gathering recording on this which is around kindness rituals. It’s like a little reminder, like a mantra that you can bring to any situation that you’re finding challenging or difficult you can just relax. “What do I want for them?” Oh, yes. Yeah. Remind myself, oh, “I [00:11:00] want them to feel okay. I want them to be less stressed. I want them to enjoy life.” We tend to forget those real basic mutual desires.
Like, finding what is it that we all want here. Whenever you have, say a, I dunno, a difficult team meeting or a group interaction, which is causing some problems because people want very different things. Just remembering. Just remembering that, well, actually, we all want to have an outcome that is going to be the best for the team, or we all want to have, to feel okay by the end of this interaction, not to feel “Oh god, that was awful, I’ve got to go, you know, um—
David: Throw up in the bathroom.
Charlie: Right. And simply remembering that can just provide some space.
David: So is the ritual just that remembering, or is there something that you could do to sort of remind yourself?
Charlie: You can have like a little [00:12:00] phrase that you bring, like for example “How can I be generous?” or “Where is the space here?” Or whatever your personal little phrase is, “Remember I want the best for them.” Yeah, just something that you can just say to yourself. Another really practical kindness ritual that somebody came up with was that every time they go out the front door, or every time they’re going into a familiar situation like a conversation with a friend or moving through the door into the workspace, they say a little thing to themselves; or they just stop, breathe, relax, and then move on. Just tiny simple little things that, really, they’re all about awareness, going to awareness, reminders.
David: See whether this makes sense: I have the sense that kindness can depend on refusing to take [00:13:00] meanings seriously. That you’re aware of social expectations but you’re not bound by them, and you are aware of the meaning that somebody else is putting on what is happening, or has recently happened, or what they think might happen. You’re aware of that meaning, but you don’t consider it fixed. And also you don’t take seriously your own construction of the meaning of whatever is happening. So that creates space for spontaneity.
Charlie: I think that’s interesting. It’s quite complex. The phrase that I’m not so sure about is “taking seriously.” And first of all, there are really complex [00:14:00] knots of different sorts of meaning in any one situation. So there’s that.
“Not taking seriously” I think is your way of describing the emptiness of form, like the nebulosity of pattern or whatever, and I think it could be misunderstood.
David: Yes, I think it’s not a great phrase.
Charlie: I think I always take another person’s meaning-making very seriously, but I don’t regard it as Truth. I might see it as their truth, or I might talk with them about that and ask, “Is this a Truth? Are there other ways of looking?” Or whatever, depending on circumstances. So I think I know what you mean by “not taking it seriously,” but I would say something like having a looseness around the fixed meaning, or the understanding of the meaning, or even having a willingness to explore that [00:15:00] kind of meaning. And that in itself can, if you can do that for yourself and you can help other people do that , that can be really an act of kindness.
Again, I’m not sure about this phrase, I’ve been questioning it myself recently, but the phrase that I always used to use is “meet somebody where they’re at,” and by that I don’t necessarily mean stepping into and embodying the same space as them, and the same meaning-making, but acknowledging what that meaning-making is, and just getting it clear as well, because it’s very easy to misunderstand or to get that wrong.
So I’ll quite often just check with somebody: “Have I understood this? Have I understood what you’re saying?” And rephrase it in a different way just to check that what I thought I heard was what I was hearing; what they were saying.
David: Yeah, also in my notes, I said [00:16:00] that “Simply understanding and articulating where the other person is at can very often be a great kindness, because people very often don’t feel like they are understood.”
Charlie: And that can also just be a huge relief. You know, just provide some space. Like, hang on a minute! We don’t even have to go full steam ahead along this particular track that we’re already setting in motion here. We can just go a little bit meta and just stop. That is a relief sometimes.
David: So, I want to get back to this tension between some sense of being naturally and spontaneously kind, which “is great work if you can get it,” my first Buddhist teacher used to say. But that often doesn’t feel possible. I actually started thinking about this whole line of inquiry… We were together actually, must have [00:17:00] been well over ten years ago, in Bristol, we had this lovely flat on the water. And, we got in the elevator.
Charlie: Oh yeah. Oh, I remember this.
David: As we got in the elevator, this other couple walked in. And she was really angry with him. And she was going off about, he always does this and he never does that and da, da, da, da, da, and you just did this thing, which means that… And he said this thing, and I wish I could remember it, because it was so perfect. He just said this thing, which acknowledged her upset completely, made it clear that he understood what this was about, and did not take responsibility. He didn’t give in to her complaints. He didn’t take responsibility for it because he [00:18:00] obviously believed, and made me believe, that this was not a legitimate complaint, but he didn’t say, you’re making an illegitimate complaint. He said this thing that made her feel completely understood, and then she calmed down, and we got out of the elevator and went our separate ways, and then I forgot what he said!
I’ve been regretting this for like 15 years now, because that was so skillful.
Charlie: Was it the actual words that were skillful?
David: I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know because I can’t remember them. But at the time I felt, “Damn! I wish I could do that! I wish I had the skill that he, the interpersonal skill that he has that made that possible for him.” And I’ve sort of ever since been thinking, “Whoa, how do I gain kindness skills? Well, like, what even is that? Like, what was he doing there?” I did feel that he, that he had something. He wasn’t just “ being himself” or something. He had some [00:19:00] understanding of how to deal with this situation that I would have wanted to have.
Charlie: Yeah, to succinctly respond in a way that was, rather than escalating the emotional investment and spiraling, was actually providing some space around that. I remember the circumstance very well because I remember having a whole conversation after that about “How do you do that??”
David: Uh huh. So how do you do that?
Charlie: Well, in Evolving Ground we talk about it as confidence in spaciousness and spacious clarity.
If you have that spacious awareness when you’re in interactions with somebody, whatever usual habitual hooks are thrown your way, or whatever interactive, manipulative patterns are around, there’s nothing for them to grab onto. It’s space. It can’t be pushed around [00:20:00] and pulled around or whatever. It’s just there.
And that is actually incredibly reassuring in heightened interactions. I think it’s reassuring for other people as well. It could be a little frightening. It could be a little frustrating maybe as well. So there’s no guarantee that it’s all going to work out. We’re so wound up in these interactive patterns in which we’ve learned that if we can just simply get that person to respond in the way that we think they should respond or that we’re used to, that everything will be okay.
So I think the process of learning to undo all of that can be painful and difficult and challenging. But it’s worth it.
David: I think there’s two failure modes that are opposite. One is the idea that there’s a bag of tricks that you can use to be kind. The opposite [00:21:00] wrong idea, like, there’s this common piece of dating advice which is “Just be yourself!” And for some people that could actually be useful if it lets them be spontaneous in a way that they feel inhibited from. But for other people it could be totally counterproductive.
Charlie: Actually really bad advice.
David: Yeah, terrible advice. If they are consistently running some pattern that isn’t working.
Charlie: Like, for example, if you are on the autism spectrum and you’re “naturally,” in inverted commas, disagreeable, spiky, and grumpy most of the time.
David: I don’t know anybody like that!
Charlie: No, me neither. [Laughing] “Just be yourself!”
David: Grrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Charlie: [Laughing]
Yeah.
David: So it’s a [00:22:00] different self. It’s finding the emptiness as opposed to the very solid self.
Charlie: It’s finding who you can be. And it’s also not a balance. And I think it’s a real mistake to think that, oh, there’s some kind of equilibrium or some balance between agreeableness and disagreeableness, or— it’s more like you want to step into a way of being that is both appealing and a little frightening, maybe, and is not entirely yourself. You’re stepping into a possibility. It’s like a self possibility. It’s not beyond the bounds of what you can understand as being possible as a way of being, but it’s not simply going along running the same patterns, especially if that hasn’t worked, or if you’ve felt isolated because your interactions haven’t worked out so well, or whatever it is.
David: [00:23:00] I’m just amused and reminded, you used the word, the phrase self possibility, which is sort of your code phrase for translating “yidam”—
Charlie: Yeah, it’s not exactly yidam practice. Like, yidam is a very specific method. So self possibility is one of the nodes in the Fundamentals Journey in Evolving Ground, and it’s influenced by yidam, and you could say it’s the most general and informal mode of yidam practice. It’s more like, what it would be like if there weren’t yidams in yidam practice.
David: Right. Yeah.
Charlie: But there’s definitely an influence there.
David: Right. What made me chuckle and reminded of was the observation that we’ve made, but many people have made, that when you’re doing a lot of yidam practice, you suddenly become magnetically sexually or romantically attractive to practically everybody.
Charlie: Right. [00:24:00] Or, something changes in the way that you are, it’s not even necessarily romantic or sexual, it could be to do with capacity, or the way that you’re shining or powerfulness or you’re suddenly able to fluidly move through difficult circumstances in a way that you were not able to previously.
So something changes. Something changes. Yeah. Mind you, you need a hell of a lot of yidam practice before you get there. You know, there has to be a pill you can take that would do it better!
What we’re talking about here is stepping into form in a way that is not self-prescribed. The form is arising from something that is actually coming outside of yourself, and in self-possibility, that’s from the interactive circumstances. So there isn’t this predictability of [00:25:00] quality, or characteristic, or fixed demeanor that you would have with very specific yidam practice. It’s more that you’re allowing the interactive circumstance to shape and mold the response. And that does require some confidence to try something different.
Or, be open to the circumstances giving rise to something completely unpremeditated.
David: This actually gets right at what I was wanting to discuss next, which is “Buddhist ethics,” one of my bête noires. It keeps talking about compassion and the cultivation of compassion. And, I think this is a Dzogchen point of view: that compassion isn’t a special thing that needs to be cultivated by some kind of technique. It’s something that is just completely inseparable [00:26:00] from awareness.
Although I have to say, I did a lot of tonglen practice at one time, which is a practice of cultivating compassion, and I did find that transformational.
Charlie: What do you make of that contradiction?
David: Well, I guess it’s scaffolding, is the only sense I can make of it. But I think that’s the canonical explanation: that practices like that are path aspect, where Dzogchen is fruition aspect.
There’s something about Buddhist ethics, which I wrote a whole series of essays about how wrong it is, it has this attraction, which is— coming back to our original topic— people want to be more kind, find it difficult, and don’t know what to do. And so any set of guidelines— and the Buddhist ethics keeps saying compassion, compassion, compassion, which is [00:27:00] easy to confuse with kindness— if you have some sort of guidelines and practices that supposedly develop this, then I think there’s a very natural and healthy, wholesome desire to pursue that, because we, well, speaking for myself, I do want to be more kind.
And I think a lot of the Buddhist discourse about that goes slightly off track. And especially the Westernized Buddhist ethics is more than slightly off track.
Charlie: I agree with what you’ve said. I think there’s often an assumption in the cultivation of compassion that it is necessary to feel compassion, to have the experience, the felt sense of compassion, open heart, warm heart towards another in order to be kind. And I don’t think that’s true.
David: You can just choose to [00:28:00] be kind.
Charlie: You can choose to be kind. You can feel annoyed, frustrated, angry, wretched, miserable, depressed, grumpy, whatever—and simply choose to be kind. And that is possible. You may find it difficult , you may find it not your usual way of being, and not quite know how to do that, but it is possible.
And if you set that as a way that you want to be, then it’s more likely that you’ll be able to. Very often there’s an implicit assumption that, oh, if I’m feeling grumpy, then it’s okay to lash out at somebody else or just snark, or go off and be huffy, or whatever it is. And if you simply set yourself a standard and say, “Well, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be like that. I’ll do my best to separate out, have some space between the way that I’m feeling [00:29:00] and the way that I am towards other people.” That’s a good start in itself.
There’s also this confusion between morality and kindness. And that gets all mixed up with being a good person. Being morally right. There’s something in that that must be hugely reassuring. It’s about, if I simply just do this thing again and again and again and again, I’ll be a good person.
David: Yeah.
Charlie: Unfortunately, I don’t think it really works like that.
David: Indeed. I mean, that’s my—
Charlie: It didn’t work for me.
David: You’re still not a good person. Despite all the hard work.
Charlie: I’m definitely not a good person.
David: I mean, that’s my basic gripe about Buddhist ethics. I think that it’s actually a bunch of stuff for looking like [00:30:00] a good person. And looking to yourself like you’re a good person; you’re your own most important audience for your playing the good guy character on screen.
Charlie: So there’s some kind of payoff there. There’s some kind of payoff about being morally superior to others who haven’t quite gotten it yet. How do you notice that in yourself? How can you see yourself doing that?
David: I don’t know of any trick or technique; I think just being aware is all that I know to do.
Charlie: Maybe it’s a phase that we go through. I’ve certainly been morally superior at times.
Actually, there’s something interesting here: it’s something to do with finding a system for the first time. People who find the thing that works for them, and it’s like a revelation, and it’s just so fantastic, and you want everybody else to know [00:31:00] that. And you want everybody else to see how amazing this thing is because it’s changed you, and they should do it too, and this is a very, very natural progression away from…
I guess you could see it in a Kegan stage framework: you could see it as just coming out of socialized mode, maybe? You’re beginning to see the value of how a system can work, and mold and change things, such that you can be bigger and better, and more skillful, and have more capacities than you were able to previously. And so there’s this sense of “It’s the one true thing!” And then you want to put that onto everybody else. Maybe that is where some moral superiority comes from.
A way that that can help with kindness is understanding that, especially as you get a little older, and you’re [00:32:00] moving into your 30s, your 40s or whatever, you’ve been through that.
David: Yeah, you can see other people do it and cut them slack for it, even though it’s incredibly annoying.
Charlie: You can actually just really enjoy their enthusiasm. You can enjoy their love of this thing. Be like “Wow, that sounds amazing! Tell me more! I want to hear about it!”
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