Episodios
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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.
Get full access to Meaningness at 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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