Meaningness Podcast

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1. Creating conduits between the visionary realm and the actual world from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   May 7, 202622 min

   Transcript Introduction [00:00] ​Most of this podcast is a recording from a retreat Charlie Awbery and I led a month ago. I’m adding a short introduction here now, to provide background context, so you can understand more of what we presented then. So first, tantra is the branch of Buddhism concerned with energy , and therefore with action . Energy is the potential for action . You can’t have either without the other. Tantra is still sometimes misunderstood as being all about sex. There’s a lot of energy and action in sex, so tantra can work with that. But there’s energy and action in everything we do, so tantra can work with everything in our lives. In all Buddhisms, one acts for the benefit of others. However, most just help you develop good intentions. Tantra calls the bluff on that. Without energy, intentions are flaccid piety. Tantra says, “Okay, that’s nice. What are you actually going to do for other people and how?” And it has answers. There are many different styles of beneficent activity. Tantra personifies them as yidams , who are mythic people, rather like gods, who represent particular kinds of energy . This retreat was sponsored by Evolving Ground , a contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist community we abbreviate as eG. eG teaches several different yidams , and therefore several different styles of benevolent energy, and beneficent activity. We wrote a post about that two weeks ago, titled “ Yidam: extraordinary relational possibilities. ” You might want to check it out for more background explanation. One style of beneficence is nobility : the wise, creative, and just use of power . In eG, we take the yidam Gesar as inspiration for noble activity. Gesar is the mythic warrior-king-sorcerer-god-hero of a vast Tibetan epic . We practice Gesar with a text, called a sadhana . A sadhana is the manual for a structured meditation ritual, which you can practice individually or in a group. Part of the ritual is reading the text out loud, and then doing the things it describes. The Evolving Ground sadhana is titled Good King Gesar . It’s written in flowery pseudo-poetic language, as is traditional. In the retreat recording that follows, I explained particular bits of the text; and quoted it in places. Gesar was the king of a place called Ling. Our retreat was held in a gorgeous remote mountain valley in Scotland. As you will hear, that is also Ling. One last thing: the transcript of this podcast on Substack includes numerous hyperlinks to explanations of uncommon concepts. If you are confused by missing background, or want to learn more about some point, you could follow those. Also, the transcript has numerous illustrations which can help visualize what we are talking about. And so now… let’s catch a ride to Ling on the back of the garuda of outrageousness! The actual world is the mandala of the deity [04:04] One of the things about this sadhana that is unusual is that it is emphasizing the actual world as the mandala of the deity. Mandala is the Sanskrit word for kingdom. It literally means circle, but it means kingdom. There is the visionary world, and there’s the actual world; and these are both real, in some sense. Tantra forms the connection between the visionary realm and the actual world. You become the connection between these two. You can think of the central channel as a conduit that connects the energy of the actual world and the energy of the visionary realm, and they flow through you . You can get lost in the visionary realm. I recommend avoiding becoming a spiritual person, because this means being lost in the visionary realm , and trying to un-see the actual world as much as possible. And this makes you ineffective! Because if you’re going to act in the actual world, for the benefit of other people, you need to have a accurate vision of what is going on , and how it works. On the other hand, if you are stuck in the actual world and you are trying to un-see the visionary world, then you’re caught in a kind of mundane materialism that lacks vision ; that is not directed toward some… better future? That’s actually putting it in a bit of a materialistic point of view, but: some kind of pure vision of what is possible . I think “possibility” is the right word for this. So, a lot of Tibetan material… they were isolated in monasteries, and they got lost in the visionary realm a lot of the time. The Gesar material is, I think, an attempt to make this connection of the actual world of a very difficult political situation, at a particular time, at a particular place in Tibet, where action needed to be taken: for the benefit of people who were caught up in civil wars and religious strife. There needed to be a connection made between that mundane, difficult situation and a vision of what was possible instead. And the possibility was: a Good King . Mipham , who did a lot of this work, was an advisor to the king at the time. And he wrote a book called The Just King , which is a book of advice to the Crown Prince of Derge, which was a major kingdom in the area; who did become king. This is a form-oriented sadhana. It’s an action-oriented sadhana. And I think it’s why Mipham did what he did, which we’re reworking here. It’s that action was required, form was required, at that time. And Tibetan Buddhism had kind of gone off into fairyland, and he was trying to pull it back down to concrete form; reality. The cavortings of awareness unleashed [07:34] So all of this stuff is: the cavortings of awareness unleashed. And partly that’s to emphasize the fact that we’re speaking in the visionary realm here, and you don’t want to concretize this as something that’s actually existent in some sense. But also, there is the practice in tantra of seeing everything as illusory in some sense. And this is bringing the visionary realm and the actual realm into correspondence. And when you do that, things you see in the actual realm take on a visionary quality , and become somewhat unreal and transparent and shape-shifting. And that can become psychotic, if you’re not maintaining also the connection with the concrete specifics of how stuff actually works. This is the trick of tantra : making that connection without losing yourself in either realm. And being able to superimpose them, to employ the logic of vision and the logic of actuality as appropriate; simultaneously, ideally. So, “cavortings of awareness unleashed” is this sense of sacredness , and slightly unreal quality. Jan: I have a question about “cavortings.” I checked it in the dictionary and it means, like, “play” basically? David: Yeah, energetic, bouncing around kind of play. Jan: What was the “leash” then? David: Um, unleashed from mundanity. From being lost in ordinariness. When you’re leashed to ordinariness, you can’t see sacredness . You can’t see the electric qualities of actual things. Ideologies are demonic attempts to escape from actuality into some vision [09:38] David: The section “Displaying confidence in actuality,” I said last time: this is in the place of the refuge. “ Taking refuge ” is displaying confidence in actuality. That’s this sense of, “Okay, I’m actually in this actual-world situation . And that is what I’m confident of.” Mara showing a mystic vision of perfection is the failure mode of trying to escape into the visionary realm. The actual world is the charnel ground . It’s civil war, in that case. Do ask questions! Splendid! Yes? Sasha Vezhnevets : Um, when I yesterday was going through it, I also had another way of interpreting the “vision of perfection”? David: Mm-hmm? Sasha: As kind of: an ideology, not necessarily related to mysticism or religion, but any sort of ideology that imagines perfection? David: Yeah. Sasha: I mean, for me, the “mysticism” would be communism; something like that. That’s what was more familiar growing up, but there’s no lack of other ones. So what you think of that interpretation? David: Yes. Sasha: And monastics, we can have academics, and that choice— Steph : Or any rule-based system, or any framework, if you take it as the main, or the only, framework. David: Yeah, thank you. That’s exactly right. There’s a section in here about Gesar… Let’s see… Your horse-hooves trample the compulsions of demonic egregores ! Your werma-arrows riddle the promises of delusional enthusiasms ! Your prajña -sword eviscerates the certainties of fixed ideologies ! This is addressed at exactly that. Dzogchen has a meta-systematic view of Buddhism [11:20] David: This is kind of eG-specific. It’s the meta-systematic view that any fixed system is actually demonic , and needs to be slaughtered. Once you’ve chopped the head off the demon, you can raise it from the dead and have it serve you. This is a very traditional role for Tibetan sorcerers, to subjugate demons and force them to serve the dharma. My work on meta-rationality , and other things that I’ve written, are relevant here, and being echoed in the sadhana. Dzogchen , uniquely in Buddhism, is meta-systematic ; and says, “Here are all these different Buddhist systems; and here’s how they’re useful, under what circumstances, for what purposes do you apply this Buddhist system; and here’s how it’s limited, and actually not a full story, not actually correct.” I think that’s part of the attraction of Dzogchen, for me and for Charlie and for others: that sense of “No fixed system; but systems are actually very valuable.” And we’re practicing a particular system in doing this; but there’s nothing sacred about this sadhana; or fixed as “this is the thing to do.” It’s a thing that has a particular function. We got this partly from Ngak’chang Rinpoche , who got it from Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche . I don’t know where Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche got it. I mean, he got it from the Kunjé Gyalpo , I suppose. Or his teachers. Victory over aggression [12:59] David: I’m just gonna go through this and babble, but please ask questions. That was a very illuminating question; thank you, Sasha! I act for the benefit of friend and foe alike. That’s central for the Gesar mythos: that a warrior is willing and able to kill , when that is absolutely necessary; but does so without anger, and without aggression, but simply out of a sense of “this has to be done.” “I wish it didn’t have to be done, but I’m now going to kill you because that’s what has to be done.” I find, to be more concrete about it, that when I’m in conflict with somebody… I mean, this sounds nice and, and I’m not nice, and I don’t really advocate niceness as such. But, looking for both how can I benefit the person, but also how can I actually take their side in a conflict, is really helpful. It doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. It doesn’t guarantee that either of us will wind up happy in the end, but by and large, it improves the interpersonal situation. Adult stage theory and Buddhist tantra [14:18] David: There’s several bits of eG-specific language in here. One is: Lead me into the autonomy of self-authorship, And my distinctive manifestation of nobility as self-possibility. These are eG terms, partly taken over from adult stage theory , which has worked its way into a tantric sadhana! Charlie : They’re directly relevant to the eG path, the ninefold path, as well. “Self-possibility” is the sixth in that set, and “personal autonomy” is the third; and those two are directly related, vertically. So, personal autonomy is the form aspect of the base; self-possibility is the form aspect of the path; and then powerfulness is the form aspect of the result, in that eG nine way. Ling is in Scotland and Colorado, and distills the nectar of the gods [15:14] David: In terms of this emphasis on the actual world in this sadhana, this is Ling. This is a magnificent place. Thank you for bringing us here, Steph! But you can see here the: grassy plains replete with iris and columbine. Apostol : Are there, like, esoteric wrinkles there? David: Yeah, everything in here is covered in esoteric wrinkles! Apostol: So why those? David: Why the iris and columbine? That’s esoteric in the sense that it’s coming out of personal experience of particularly sacred places in mountains. The iris is a reference to a sacred place in the Sierra Nevada, where Charlie and I lived for a decade. The columbine is the State Flower of Colorado. They’re spectacular blue flowers. Um, so… Where is it? Um, skipping ahead a few pages: The wind of attention parts the gray mist of nebulosity, Revealing a sunny upland meadow of Ling. There is a principle in tantra, that everything is everything else. No! Sorry! Everything is something else. There are monist religions in which everything is everything else, everything is actually the same as everything. Tantra is highly specific. It’s really interested in the complexity of details. And so: menstrual blood is emptiness. These are the same thing, and they’re also the sun; and so on and so forth. There are these systems of correspondences, where each thing is a series of other things. This is the Kingdom of Ling; but also the Kingdom of Ling is about 25 miles west of where we live, in the Rocky Mountains. Charlie and Steph have both been to that particular place in Ling, which is “replete with iris and columbine.” It’s at about 11,000 feet. It is spectacularly beautiful. And there is a stream that flows through it. The path that I’ve taken with Charlie and Steph, the stream that flows through there eventually works its way down through a series of spectacular canyons, drops about 6,000 feet onto the plane. The last canyon is called El Dorado Canyon, which is unbelievable. It’s got sort of 2000 foot walls. And, there’s a Scotsman who fell in love with an American, and married her and moved to Boulder, Colorado, which is where this stream eventually flows through, on its way out to the Mississippi River. He was trained as a distiller, and on moving to the US needed to find some kind of employment; and founded a distillery , making a Colorado version of Scotch whiskey. And this distillery has won all kinds of awards for best American whiskey. People who do whiskey think that the water is very important. That’s what gives the whiskey its character. So the water for that whiskey comes from El Dorado Canyon, which is where this stream that comes down through the Kingdom of Ling, replete with iris and columbine, which we visited. So this whiskey is actually Ling whiskey, because things are other things! And we will be, in the wang , making ritual use of amrita . Amrita is the drink of the gods in Indian mythology, and that is understood as alcohol in tantra. We will be making use of amrita from Ling. Charlie: Did you bring some? David: Yes. Charlie: Good! We are always in Ling, Gesar’s kingdom [19:46] David: Uh, “Ling.” “Ling” is interesting because “ling” is simply the Tibetan word for “a place.” Ling is in Kham , which is the area that is at the border between China and Tibet, and for a long time was claimed by both China and Tibet as being part of them. Um, and the people who lived in Kham were like, “No, we’re independent of both of you, go away.” But the word “kham,” which refers to this particular area, simply means “region” in Tibetan. So Ling is a kingdom in Kham, which means it is “a place in the region.” So Lingtsang Gyalpo , I have explained to you, was the last king of Ling. He was the last king of a kingdom called Ling. But it just means “place.” He was the king of a place in some region. And very often Gesar is referred to as “Ling Gesar.” He is the Caesar of some place: Ling. And it’s actually historically unclear whether he existed, but if he did exist: like, which place is it that he was the Caesar of? It might have been Lingtsang ; the people who live in Lingtsang want to claim that it was there, but it’s not clear. So in some sense we are always in Ling. Wherever we are, that’s Ling. So you take Gesar with you, and you take Ling with you. Emily: Is “Gesar” actually cognate with “Caesar,” or is that a coincidence? David: It’s believed by Western scholars to be cognate. As the Roman Empire expanded, the satraps and peripheral kingdoms… as the Empire collapsed, they declared themselves to be “Caesar.” So the Kaiser of Germany, that’s Caesar; and the Tsar of Russia, that’s Caesar; and the Gesar of Ling, that’s the Caesar too. In what are now the –Stans were Buddhist kingdoms, at one time; and the rulers there called themselves “Caesar.” And they had a lot of cultural exchange with Tibet, until they were taken over by Muslims. This is a public episode. 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2. Meaning: lost, or muddled by metaphysics? from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Apr 28, 20261 hr 2 min

   John Vervaeke’s Meaning Crisis and my Meaningness address similar issues in similar frameworks. Yet there seem significant differences! Andrew Conner pinpointed some in his insightful essay “ Is the ‘meaning crisis’ a real loss? ” Coincidentally, he was visiting Charlie Awbery and me at the time, so we were able to discuss it in person, and recorded a video of our conversation. In addition to that, this post includes a section of links to relevant discussions elsewhere, assembled by Andrew; and a transcript in case you’d rather read than watch. A follow-up post, going live next Saturday, explains bits I botched during the recording and we deleted from this video. It’s about ways metaphysics muddles our thinking, feeling, and acting. And, about how we perceive sacredness in the actual world—such as in a salt shaker. Relevant discussions elsewhere Primary sources * John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (AftMC): YouTube playlist · series home · community transcripts * David Chapman, Meaningness * David Chapman, Meta-rationality * Andrew Conner, Is the “meaning crisis” a real loss? Chapman’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Eternalism : meaningness.com/eternalism : the stance that meanings must be perfectly definite * Nihilism : meaningness.com/nihilism : the mirror-image stance, that since meanings aren’t perfectly definite, they don’t exist * The complete stance : meaningness.com/meaningness : recognizing meaning as inseparably nebulous and patterned * Nebulosity and pattern : meaningness.com/nebulosity * No world beyond the actual one : https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it * Stances trump systems : meaningness.com/stances-trump-systems * Materialism (as stance) : meaningness.com/materialism * Textures of the complete stance : meaningness.com/textures-of-completion · wonder · curiosity · humor · play · enjoy-the-dance · creation * Vision, Instruction, and Action (Chapman’s PhD thesis, lightly revised) * Vividness : vividness.live · Approaching Vajrayana * Nobility arc : table of contents Vervaeke’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Relevance realization : Vervaeke, Lillicrap & Richards (2012), “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” J. Logic and Computation 22(1): Oxford Academic · open PDF * Four P’s / Four Ways of Knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory): Henriques overview · Vervaeke & Mastropietro, revised 4P paper * DIME / Ecology of Practices (Dialogical, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment): Vervaeke Foundation EoP page * Reverse-engineering enlightenment : AftMC Ep. 36 and Ep. 37 * The sacred as inexhaustibility : AftMC Ep. 35 develops it; Ep. 50 ties it together * Cultural grammar : AftMC Ep. 38 * Serious play : AftMC Ep. 17 (Gnosis and Existential Inertia) Developmental psychology, cognitive science * Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self (1982): Harvard UP * Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994): Harvard UP * The frame problem : SEP: Frame Problem * McCarthy & Hayes (1969) : “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence” (origin) * Dennett (1984) : “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI” (philosophical generalization) Miscellaneous * Adjective ordering (“clear blue sky” vs “blue clear sky”): Cambridge Grammar: order of adjectives · Wikipedia: English adjective order (the so-called “royal order of adjectives”) * Bronze Age / Late Bronze Age Collapse : Bronze Age · Late Bronze Age collapse Transcript [Caveat: Generated by “AI,” inaccurate and in places misleading.] [00:00:00] David: I thought maybe it would make sense for you to start by introducing your project here, what it is that you’re trying to do and why. And some background on John Vervaeke’s general project, because people may not be familiar with that. [00:00:29] Andrew: So I encountered your writing and his writing around the same time. I would guess about five to six years ago. It was kind of a time where a lot of things were breaking for me, and so I found them both incredibly useful. John Vervaeke recorded a 50-hour lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and you have written many partial books, which are probably far more than 50 hours of reading. In my mind they’re a little bit interleaved, and I found both of them very useful. Recently I wanted to figure out how your ideas interact. They’re both about the word “meaning” and different aspects of it. I think that both you and him have a diagnosis of what’s going on, and I wanted to understand how you saw each other’s ideas. I think I have a decent idea of the way you disagree, but you can correct me. [00:01:46] David: So I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. I read a few of his academic papers, and I watched, I think, two episodes of the 50-hour meaning crisis series. Then I read a lot of blog posts from other people about his work. So I have a quite diffuse sense of it. Something you mentioned when we were talking about this earlier is that he has developed his ideas in further directions, or maybe even a different direction, since the meaning crisis series. And neither of us, I think, is very clear on quite how he’s gone. I thought it’d also be good to say that the Meaningness book I started working on 25 years ago, and I worked most of the ideas out during a six-month period when I was staying with Rin’dzin, who’s now Charlie, my now spouse — Andrew: Congratulations. David: Yeah, it’s great to be married to Charlie. On her kitchen table while she was off at work. This was when she was living in Bristol in the UK. So that book doesn’t really reflect my current understanding. It’s not that I disagree with anything or that I think it’s wrong, but there’s another 15-plus years of development since I put it on the web, which was in 2010 or 2012 or something like that. So we have two out-of-date understandings. [00:03:58] Andrew: Try to merge two out-of-date understandings, right. And see how they go. So I had written a tweet thread that may go out as a tweet thread, or maybe this conversation, or something like that. Perhaps we could go through it. I can kind of summarize. I think it’s useful to speed-run his ideas. Maybe you can interject with your background. The overall shape of his lecture series is that it’s a little bit entertaining. If you like watching him lecture, then it is an entertaining thing to watch. If you’ve never encountered the ideas, there’s a lot of learning. He’s knitting together thought from eastern, western, different branches of philosophy in very pleasant ways. One way of looking at what he’s doing is this intellectually entertaining sort of thing. I think that understates what his goal was, but there’s intellectual understanding there. The first half is largely a history lesson and the second half is largely cognitive science. Maybe we could go through a little bit. Would that be good? [00:05:22] David: And maybe I’ll throw in random, incoherent interjections periodically. [00:05:28] Andrew: That’d be great. That’s what we signed up for: David Chapman random interjections. I think looking back at his work, one of the fundamental things I realized is he believes we have lost something. [00:05:43] David: So I’ll interject right at the beginning. I think maybe I’ll get to the substance of my objection a little later, but I think we haven’t lost something. I think we probably disagree already at this point. I think we’ve gained an enormous amount. We have enormously more sophisticated ideas about meaning, and how it works and what it is and how to work with it, than at any time in the past. And the whole history that he tells — it’s great that he’s telling that history. It’s important to understand the history, to understand how we now understand meaning. But we’ve actually just accreted a whole lot of extra stuff. And there’s nothing that we’ve lost. A little later, I’ll get back to why I think he thinks that, and why I disagree. [00:07:00] Andrew: So if he approaches from “we’ve lost something,” it makes sense to do two things. One, that motivates understanding: well, how did we get to where we are now? So that motivates the history lesson. And then it motivates what he perceives as the solution space. How do we recreate the thing that we’ve lost? His idea is that around the Bronze Age, no one was worried about finding meaning. Meaning is all around us. It’s within the substrate of culture and nature, and it existed in the interplay of relationships and that kind of thing. Then you have this innovation that occurred across the world in many places that he calls the axial age, where metacognition developed — second-order thinking. Because of that, a separation of here and the divine emerged, and you see this separation in religions. You see it in religions that don’t exist anymore, and in current religions: we are here in the dirty realm of existence, and there is this pristine, divine existence that’s separated from us. Our goal is to figure out how do we connect to that thing. Both connect to it while we are living here, for divine inspiration and purpose and meaning, but also when we die. So there’s a story there about the afterlife. His story is that because of this, a lot of psychotechnologies were developed to try to meet this need of bridging the separation. So there’s meditation, dialectic, prayer, ethical discipline. All of the philosophies and religions develop from this. He would include shamanic medicine and that kind of thing, a way of tapping into this divine that is hidden from us. So we had three different orders that emerged. From what I can tell, the Middle Ages tried to recreate everything in the axial frame as stably as possible. He has three orders. The nominal order gave coherence — the universe is rationally ordered by logos, God, something like that. A normative order gave significance — there’s a hierarchy of value that’s available to us. And narrative order gave purpose. That’s history moving from creation through fall to redemption. A lot of this is Christian-inspired. Nominalism broke first because the scientists started doing what scientists do and started poking at the universe. And if the universe is just names, mental labels attached to things, then rational order just became arbitrary. You’re not getting a rational order from on high. The Reformation had God’s will as primary, so salvation comes through faith, and so you are starting to lose the other orders as well. You had less need for institutions, and these institutions were the things that were cultivating wisdom. The scientific revolution killed the universal telos, and the external world is purposeless matter in motion. So that’s his “fall.” Then the philosophers had their go of it. Descartes formalized the mind/matter split. The self is severed from the world. All meaning was relocated to the subjective side. Kant said we can never know the thing in itself. Romanticism tried to decorate everything, but it’s an absolute mess. So it doesn’t work. If we can’t touch reality, perhaps Will can. And so you have these cultural wills that assert themselves: communism, fascism, nationalism, that kind of thing. Where we find ourselves now is basically a system that had fallen apart. The Bronze Age had a stable system. Around the Middle Ages, a somewhat stable system. And we’ve basically deconstructed that second stable system. I’ll pause there. That’s the history side. [00:11:18] David: I think this history is really important. I also, in the Meaningness book, have a history that mostly covers the late 1800s up to the present . And it’s the same story. And this is standard-issue intellectual history. I don’t know his version of it, but I assume he’s following the standard story. I follow the standard story. And then I think we have somewhat different diagnoses of what to make of that. We were talking yesterday or the day before about why history and understanding history is important. We are heirs to an enormous amount of ideas that we’re mostly not even aware of. We just take them for granted. We may not even know that we have the ideas. Thought soup. These ideas actually are wrong. And the fact that we have the ideas without knowing we have the ideas, and they’re wrong ideas, that’s very significant. They distort the way that we are. In order to undistort our way of being, to return to some natural state, it is helpful to find out what the ideas are that we have without knowing it. I think Vervaeke uses the term “cultural grammar.” Andrew: Yeah, that sounds familiar. David: I think that’s nice, because grammar is something that we use constantly, and unless you’ve studied linguistics, you’re mostly unaware of the grammar that you’re speaking. It is shaping the way that we communicate without our being aware of it, and we can make it explicit. An example, which is sort of a famous example in English — there’s grammatical rules. When you have adjectives piling up in front of a noun. A clear blue sky. [00:14:17] Andrew: Yes. Like, why does “clear” go before “blue”? [00:14:20] David: Exactly. A blue clear sky — I mean, a lot of them actually just come out incoherent. It would just be wrong. A blue clear sky is not the same thing as a clear blue sky. This idea comes from Aristotle. Nobody knows this, but we are obeying a cultural grammar according to which things have essences and have accidental properties. And this is completely wrong, and it distorts everything. So I’ve gone off on a side ramp. [00:14:53] Andrew: This is what we’re here for. I can do the little speed-run. The second half of his lecture series is basically knitting together what the solution space might look like. He’s coming from the frame of “we’ve lost something, we need to restore it.” Let’s understand the things we have lost, and let’s just recreate those things. He uses two primary tools from cognitive science to motivate this. One is relevance realization, which has connection to the frame problem: how do we know what is relevant in any situation? We’re taking in so much information, and it’s almost like affordances just reach out to us. Things have affordances in a way that is kind of mysterious to us right now, and it’s still mysterious to AI. It’ll probably become very relevant as AI is operating in the real world: how do you actually pull relevance from a system in a way that is meaningful? [00:16:07] David: This is what my PhD thesis was about. So Vervaeke and I are sharing a lot of cognitive background. We’re actually working with mostly the same set of ideas. [00:16:21] Andrew: It’s lovely, because the two of you diverge and then come back. So he calls this relevance realization. He has a story of how this works, but in general you have this tension between overfitting and underfitting, and the human mind is trying to find this balance between the two. He highlights here that relevance is not a property of objects. If you’re looking for meaning in life, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re not gonna find meaning in life. Relevance is the dance between interactions. The other tool he uses, which I think sticks in a lot of people’s brains from his lectures, is his four P’s — four ways of knowing. He basically creates these categories that largely is pointing to: there is more than propositional knowledge. We can make propositions about things, and a lot of our left-brainy world really likes propositions about things. But there are very obvious ways of knowing that aren’t propositions. So he has the procedural — that’s knowing how. The perspectival, which is knowing what it is like. And the participatory, which is knowing by being. You can kind of think of a hierarchy from the propositional all the way through to the way of being. If you try to establish your meaning normatively through propositions, it’s very weak, because propositions themselves are pretty flimsy. You’re not gonna find meaning there. Largely you’re gonna find meaning in this embodied sense of involvement. So those are the two tools he uses. Any thoughts? [00:18:21] David: From a cognitive science perspective, I think his account of how relevance realization works is probably wrong. I don’t think that’s very relevant to the meaning crisis, so I won’t go into that. I really like the four P’s. The propositional versus procedural is standard in cognitive science going back to forever, but putting in the participatory and perspectival, I like that. Andrew: It’s one of the things that stuck with me: hey, when you find yourself being very literal about things in the propositional, look another way. It’s just very useful. [00:19:12] So he takes these two things. Relevance is coming from this process that’s occurring, so something feels relevant to us, thus meaningful to us, through this process. And there are these other ways of knowing. How do we cultivate both of these? How do we tune them? How do we shape them? So he creates this framework called DIME, which is basically a four-legged stool that recreates what we’ve lost. If you were to look back, what did these people have? They had elements of this four-legged stool. Practices. The four practices are: dialogical, which is basically mind experiencing mind in the external, to work through self-deception in some way. You have to interact with the world, you have to interact with other minds, debate them, that kind of thing. There’s the imaginal, which transforms perspective. He uses the phrase “serious play.” He thinks we’ve lost play — David: I love that phrase. Andrew: — and that we should be seriously playing. He has quite an elaborate construction of what the imaginal is doing in our world. The mindful — this is meditation practices. And embodiment. For him, I think this is Tai Chi, but any kind of movement practice that trains bodily foundation. [00:20:44] David: So, a question. He has the Bronze Age where meaning was a non-problem, and then in the axial age it becomes a problem. These practices sound to me like axial age practices. So it’s not the case that these are the way that in the Bronze Age, meaning was a non-problem. These were ways in which the axial age tried to overcome their failure to be like people in the Bronze Age. And it didn’t work in the axial age, so why should we believe it would work now? [00:21:33] Andrew: That’s a great point. I don’t know his account well enough about why in the Bronze Age meaning didn’t need these practices. It could be something along the lines of: metacognition had not fully been developed, and to do these practices you need some layer of metacognition. And so I think if you’re subject to your experience, in some ways you avoid some of the flaws as well. I’m guessing, to some extent. Do wild deer out in the mountains have meaning problems? No. Well, it’s because they don’t think about their situation and their lot in life, and they’re not looking for cosmic significance, I assume. I hope not. So now I get to — I think I’ve bastardized Vervaeke by compressing 50 hours into 15 minutes. Then I summarize your beliefs, following the same arc. Maybe it’d be better coming from you. So what’s the diagnosis? What went wrong, if anything? [00:23:00] David: Well, this is where my story now is probably somewhat different than it was when I wrote the 10% of the Meaningness book which is actually up on the web. I think you say later: well, Vervaeke believes in philosophy, he thinks philosophy is good. I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. And in my view, Vervaeke has a lot of respect for them, devotion for them, that I don’t share. I think the cultural grammar that we have is largely descended from the ancient Greeks trying to solve problems with inadequate tools, and their problems were ones we don’t have. But we’ve got the kind of bric-a-brac, or residue, a lot of broken

3. You can just bless things from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Apr 4, 20267 min

   Transcript ​You can bless things. It’s easy! You can do this! You just go around blessing things . You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a fancy hat (although the hat might help). This is a non-denominational practice. It’s not particularly religious ; you can be of any religion, or no religion. There’s no prerequisites. It’s easy! You just do it. This is a practice of perception, of appreciation, of connection, of expanding benevolence. It’s not a metaphysical practice. The point is your intention, not the effect that it might have on whatever it is that you’re blessing. I normally do this silently, but for this video I’m going to do it out loud, which feels kind of dorky, but this way you can hear what I’m thinking. When you do it, you can do it silently. I found the practice is embarrassing at first, even if you do it silently; but if you overcome your embarrassment, it becomes ecstatic. Bless this place. Bless this trail. I, personally, bless this place. Bless everything here. Bless the flowering trees. Bless this house. May it keep its inhabitants safe and comfortable. Bless this amazing purple plum tree. Bless these willows. Bless the creek. Bless the petals. Bless the sun. Bless the sky, the clouds. Bless the creek, bless these new green leaves, bless last year’s dead leaves, the petals on the surface of the creek. Bless these fluffy white flowering shrubs. Bless the shrubbery. Bless the shrubbers. Bless last year’s dead grass; bless this year’s grass, just starting to come up. Bless the path. The path that takes us from the base to the result, and delights us along the way. Bless my feet that carry me on the path, my legs that support me, the ground that supports me. Bless gravity! Bless these birds. Bless the cottonwoods that are just starting to get leaves. Bless the contrail. Bless these plums. Bless these three plum trees, each individually. Bless these dandelions. Bless this fruit orchard. Bless the fruit that will come from the fruit orchard. Bless those who planted the fruit orchard. Bless those who will enjoy the fruit. Bless the carpet of petals on the ground. Bless the forsythias. Bless the dog poop bag. No, it’s gloves! Bless whoever thoughtfully put the gloves in a place where someone might find them again. Bless those who clean up after their dogs, bless their dogs, bless the love they have for their dogs. Bless the warmth of the day. Bless the wind, the breeze, caressing my skin. Woo! Bless the bunny. Hello, bunny! Bless you, bunny! Two bunnies! Bless you both. Bless this manhole cover, that is undoubtedly doing something important. Bless… Danielle Amanda Quillman Heilmann, who died in her twenties, with a ginkgo leaf. Bless her memory. Bless those who remember her. Bless them for providing this bench. Bless the bridge. Bless the bridge makers. Bless the Continental Custom Bridge Company. Bless the solidity of the iron. Bless everything made of iron everywhere. Bless the sound it makes. I bless the neighborhood. I bless this house. I bless the people who live in this house. I bless their future. May they always know happiness. Bless this place. Bless all phenomena here. Bless all beings here. Bless all beings everywhere now and forever. Bodhi. Svaha. So mote it be. ​ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

4. You can’t sell enlightenment from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Mar 31, 202613 min

   Transcript (ish) Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by; that I love most. It’s extraordinarily compelling and exciting and beautiful. It’s in some sense the basis of pretty nearly everything that I write. It has several serious problems, though. One is that you can’t sell it. And this problem is nearly fatal . Every religion has to have some economic basis. This is something we resist in the West; going back to Martin Luther, whose slogan was “Every man his own priest.” His idea was that everybody (every man at least) should be able to read the Bible in his own language, and understand it. Then he should form his own direct relationship with God, without a priest intermediating. This is a very attractive idea! It eliminates the class of religious professionals, who had become corrupt and parasitic in Europe at that time. The problem is, this doesn’t actually work . Most people are not capable of being their own priests. Not any more than most people are capable of being their own plumber. DIY religion sounds great, but hardly anyone can make it work. You need professionals to do the job. So, in many Protestant denominations, there’s a “pastor” role which is officially definitely not a priest, but performs most of the same functions in practice. Buddhism is also a religion that needs religious professionals. In Asia, there were professional Buddhist clergy. And, in Asian cultures, there were various economic arrangements that made it feasible to support a class of religious professionals. Those depended on cultural patterns that we don’t have in the West. The main one, monasticism, mostly doesn’t work in the West, despite attempts. This is a big problem for Buddhism in the West. On the one hand, we want, and actually need, full time professional teachers. But we don’t think we ought to pay for them. And it’s not clear what the payment model should be. So we’ve mostly followed the pastor model, from Protestantism. That has worked pretty okay, although not ideally, in many cases. It doesn’t work for dzogchen . But the Asian models didn’t work for dzogchen, either! The problem is, dzogchen has nothing to sell. At least, not in its original version, which is the one that I care about. That’s sometimes called “pristine” dzogchen. Later, dzogchen got modified, repeatedly over centuries, to overcome this problem, along with several other genuine problems with it. So Tibetans added things that you could sell, but those actually messed it up, I think. You can sell secrets, but dzogchen isn’t secret One thing you can sell is secrets. So Scientology, if you keep going with it, at each level, you pay much more, and you get told the next chunk of the secrets. But all of the secrets of Scientology eventually came out, and you can find them on the internet for free. In Tibet, they tried this model, and supposedly dzogchen was extremely secret. That pretense was retained until dzogchen came to the West, and then the store got given away. So now you can find the whole thing on the internet. The original version of dzogchen simply told you what enlightenment is and what it’s like. And that’s extremely simple. It’s two or three sentences, maybe. And it’s not easy to sell two or three sentences! And also, they’re no use, because they don’t make any sense. What is enlightenment? What’s it like? If you understand the brief description, you say, “yeah; yeah, that’s what it’s like.” And if you don’t understand it, there’s no further explanation possible. You can ask questions, and the answers may sound interesting, but usually they don’t help. I have a post about this, called “ A non-statement ain’t-framework .” It explains why you can’t explain dzogchen. What actually happens is: if you meditate in certain ways, quite a lot, eventually you start to see it. And then, at that point, the two sentence explanation can suddenly make sense. So you could try to sell this secret, but it’s useless, and people would feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth. And anyway, it’s on the internet! In Tibet, secrecy mostly didn’t solve the economic problem either. So the way they addressed it was to add more things to dzogchen which you can sell . Two of them are methods and entertainment . You can sell methods, but dzogchen has no methods You can sell a method for getting to enlightenment. In Tibet, tantra is considered the main method for getting to enlightenment. So you can sell tantra. Tantra has many complicated methods , and it takes a lot of in-person instruction to learn those methods, and you can charge for the expertise and labor of teaching them. So that works for tantra. (I should say that in Buddhism, as in Christianity, it’s mostly considered gauche to put a straightforward price tag on religious services. So instead there are implicit norms and deniable negotiations. I can see good reasons for this, but on the whole I find transparent arrangements more copacetic.) There’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris. Anyway, this doesn’t work for dzogchen, because it doesn’t have any instructions. Because it’s not a path. It’s not a method. There is no method. It’s just a description, of enlightenment. Once you’re enlightened, you don’t need a method. “Dzogchen,” in Tibetan, means “full completion.” It’s what you get when you’ve completed tantra. You don’t need any instructions at that point. It’s like: there’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris. So, to make dzogchen saleable, a whole lot of methods got added to it, which (in my view) violate the spirit of the thing, and are actually a step backward. The methods are kind of dzogchen-flavored, but they’re essentially tantric methods. And tantric methods are great. I love tantra! But it’s not dzogchen. And it’s missing the point. Student: How do I get enlightened? Teacher: You already are. Student: No I’m not. Teacher: . . . Student: Everybody is doing these way-out esoteric mystic things and getting enlightened. Tell me how to do that! Teacher: [sighs] OK, first you need to stand on your head… You can sell entertainment, but dzogchen isn’t entertaining Another thing you can sell is entertainment. Most people in Medieval Tibet didn’t have internet access, so there wasn’t enough entertainment to go around, and that created demand for something better than watching yaks chew their cud. So rituals, which had been genuinely religious, were recycled as entertainment. Those became the main form of public spectacle in Tibet. And lots of extra foofaraw was added to these religious rituals, to make them more entertaining. Primarily, this was done with tantra; but once you’ve started adding methods to dzogchen, you can do the same thing, so you can have big public dzogchen rituals. That is actually a contradiction in terms, again in my view. If pristine dzogchen could be said to have any rituals at all, they take about two seconds, and are improvised one-on-one on the spot. But that’s not something you can charge for. And because dzogchen had the reputation of being the fanciest kind of Buddhism, the idea was it must have super-duper rituals. So a dzogchen ritual was something very special that you would pay a lot of money to go and see, and it would be highly entertaining; or you’d hope it would be. That subsidized the actual work of dzogchen professionals, so maybe it was a good thing. But it’s dishonest. Dzogchen is still available, despite its unsellability So, where does this leave us, here and now? It leaves us with the main forms of “dzogchen,” the ones widely taught and practiced, being diluted, adulterated with tantra. Maybe you could even say corrupted. And that’s fine, if you understand that’s what you are getting. They are probably great for what they are! I don’t know, I haven’t tried them seriously. Tantra is great, and tantra that’s pretending to be dzogchen is probably extra good! It’s just, there’s a conceptual confusion here, and it’s a motivated confusion, and this results in a lot of incoherent explanations, and duplicity, maybe even a kind of sleaziness in the relationship between teachers and students. I said that the unsellability of dzogchen was nearly fatal. But fortunately, the original, pristine thing is still available. In fact, it’s much more available than it ever was in Tibet, or at least than it had been in hundreds of years, because there’s no longer any attempt at secrecy. But if you want it, you need to know what you are looking for. And you aren’t going to get it on its own—unless for some reason you can understand the two-sentence explanation when you find it on the internet. No one can sell it to you, so it only comes as part of a package deal. You can get full-strength, unadulterated dzogchen from someone who mostly teaches tantra, yet maintains a clear distinction between the two. You can get it from someone very holy, with a gold-embroidered hat, who drops the two sentences in the middle of a days-long lecture series on archaic Tibetan metaphysics. You can get pristine dzogchen from a professor in a Western university classroom, who gives you the straight dope in an off-hand way while lecturing on Buddhist history. You can get it from an informal meditation teacher. That’s probably the best bet! You might get it from a crazy street person in a Starbucks, who trades it for your building her a web site. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

5. The unaltered state from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Mar 24, 202614 min

   Many people in the West pursue meditation in order to experience altered states. Meditation is sometimes considered a safer alternative to taking psychoactive drugs, with roughly similar effects. The jhanas are altered states of consciousness, for example. Buddhist tantra also produces diverse altered states, using various methods. In Western Buddhism, the usual idea is that enlightenment itself is a special kind of experience. It’s an altered state of consciousness, also in the way that psychedelic drugs can produce altered states. This is roughly consistent with some traditional Buddhist ideas about enlightenment, although not others. For example, in some tantric systems, the endpoint of the path, enlightenment itself, is said to be the simultaneous union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Those are often explained more-or-less as altered states of consciousness. Then tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, including ultimately that union. (There are other explanations of tantra that are more metaphysical; less psychological.) I don’t want to denigrate altered states, in any way. I think they can be fascinating, enjoyable, meaningful, and useful. However, the branch of Buddhism I care most about, dzogchen , denies that enlightenment is an altered state. In fact: Exactly the opposite! Enlightenment is the unaltered state . The dzogchen word for enlightenment is “rigpa,” which is defined as the natural state. You might say it is the state in which you are not altering your mind. Nearly all the time, we are in an altered state, which is called samsara . Samsara is the state in which you are constantly poking at your mind in order to get it to behave better—instead of leaving it as it is, in its natural condition. So you might suppose that rigpa is the special state in which you don’t do that. But this is actually wrong. Samsara is also nirvana. It too is enlightenment. It is also rigpa. The thing is, rigpa is always present. It’s not something you produce. Rigpa is not something you produce, because it’s always already there. It’s something you notice. Or don’t notice. Dzogchen is not like tantra. It has no methods for getting to enlightenment . From dzogchen’s point of view, tantra’s attempts to produce enlightenment are impossible and absurd. It’s like trying to get to Paris from Notre-Dame Cathedral. You’re already there! You are right at the center of it! Just look, and you’ll see Paris all around you! Everything you can see is more Paris! Rigpa’s present, regardless of what state you are in. Samsara is nirvana, because rigpa is there, even when you’re samsara-ing. You, personally— you —are fully enlightened, right now . Maybe it doesn’t seem like that? An alternative term, that’s considered more or less equivalent in Tibetan Buddhism, is tamalgyi shepa , which literally means “ordinary mind.” So, rigpa is ordinary mind, which is the ultimate goal of dzogchen, which claims to be the ultimate form of Buddhist practice. Tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment … In my experience, tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment. It’s certainly the exact opposite of meditation! A typical basic meditation instruction is: whenever you notice that you are thinking, let go of it, and return to open awareness. My recipe for efficient tax preparation is: whenever I notice I am aware, squash that, and return to Schedule 8849 line 2 column h, trying to force it, by narrowing my thinking, to equal Form 1099-B Box A. This is miserable. It’s probably a better example of samsara than the dramatic torture scenarios you can read about in scripture. At least there’s energy in those! But rigpa is there, just the same. Or so I am told! I don’t recommend my anti-meditation recipe as a religious practice. It’s better if you can meditate while doing your taxes. I can’t! When you stop samara-ing, it’s easier to notice rigpa. The samsara is a bit of a smokescreen. There’s particular circumstances in which it’s difficult to samsarize. They are ones in which rigpa might become obvious. Sacred texts have a standard list, which includes things like sneezing, orgasm, dreaming, dying, fainting, stubbing your toe with a sudden pain. In each of these experiences, it is more difficult to do samsara, so you may have a recognition of rigpa. It could become obvious. It’s difficult to think. Thinking is totally compatible with rigpa, but it tends to obscure it. Each of these experiences might also be considered an altered state of consciousness. That’s not the rigpa, but altered states make it easier to notice. Remember, though, that rigpa is ordinary mind; it’s the same when you are coming and when you are doing your taxes. Unfortunately, each of the things on the standard list has some difficulty that make it not particularly easy to find rigpa there. Easier than when doing taxes, but not easy . Sneezing, for example, is extraordinary. There’s a moment when you know you are going to sneeze, and there’s a unique, overwhelming itchy tickling feeling that pervades your physical body, subtle energy channels, and mind, and you can’t think, and rigpa is right there —and the whole thing lasts only a fraction of a second, and then you immediately lose it. Similarly, fainting, orgasm, and sudden sharp pains may last only a little longer. Tantra has esoteric techniques for prolonging these. That’s one of the points of sexual tantra. If you prolong and intensify orgasm, there’s more likelihood that you will notice, in the middle of it, “Ah! there’s rigpa here.” This may be difficult to arrange, though. Pain might be easier, but it’s difficult to have intense enough pain for long enough without injuring yourself. There are esoteric methods for that too, but generally people would rather have an hour-long orgasm than an hour-long torture session. The problem with dreaming and dying is that they make you stupid. You get caught up in some compelling, illusory drama which distracts you from your intention to recognize rigpa. Again, there are esoteric techniques, but they are difficult. Dying is supposed to be the best and most important opportunity for recognizing rigpa. That’s what the so-called “ Tibetan Book of the Dead ” is about. Unfortunately, though, you don’t die very often, so you don’t get a lot of practice. People in hell don’t realize how lucky they are The exception is if you’re in hell. According to Buddhist metaphysics, after you die, which realm you get reborn in depends on your emotional state. If you are angry, you get reborn in hell. Some of the Buddhist hells—there are several Buddhist hells—some of them are so lethal that you die almost immediately after rebirth. So you are born in hell, and get sliced to bits by whirling knife blades, or crispy-fried in boiling oil, and you die two seconds later. If that makes you mad, you get sent straight back. So being in hell is actually a great opportunity for dzogchen practice, because you’re dying every few seconds. Countless opportunities to recognize rigpa! People in hell don’t notice how lucky they are, because hell is unpleasant. It’s the same problem as with prolonged pain. It makes you stupid, and you forget to practice. Everybody in hell is stupid. Don’t go to hell. It’s a stupid place. So tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, I guess you could say. The point is not the altered states for their own sake. Well, maybe. As I said, tantric theory says enlightenment is the union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Why is that enlightenment? I mean, it’s nice. You don’t suffer, I guess. The point of enlightenment as originally conceived was to stop suffering. And if you’re experiencing clarity, bliss, and emptiness, then you’re not suffering, which is nice for you. Rather like orgasm. It’s kind of difficult to do samsara in these states. From point of view of dzogchen, the value of the state is that it makes it exceptionally easy to recognize rigpa. I think some people would say it is rigpa, but I’m not necessarily convinced. Rigpa is ordinary mind, remember! It’s easiest to find rigpa when your mind is clear and sharp, but you are not distracted by thoughts or bad feelings. That’s not necessary; rigpa is there when you are obsessing about the awful thing someone said about you at work, or you’re short on sleep and your brain feels full of glue. But it helps. Meditation helps notice rigpa So there are particular types of meditation that tend to produce that clear, undistracted state of mind. It’s pretty ordinary. You probably wouldn’t call it an “altered state of consciousness”; it’s not like taking drugs. However, “clear and undistracted by bad feelings or thoughts” is pretty much the same as “clarity, bliss, and emptiness!” Except you haven’t turned the volume up to eleven . That makes it safer and easier than esoteric tantric methods. Or drugs. It might be slower; tantra is fast but dangerous. Supposedly fast, and supposedly dangerous! I think both are often exaggerated. “Meditation” is not all one thing. Most types of meditation aren’t about this. They don’t aim for it, and probably won’t help. You will probably need many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of practice of the type that does—and it’s still easy to miss the point. It helps to have someone checking your progress, and redirecting you if you get a bit off course. You need to know what you are trying to notice, and until you’ve seen that a few times, you don’t notice it, even though it’s right there all the time. Even right now! As you are listening to this! It’s rigpa! Pure obviousness Rigpa has been called “pure obviousness.” [Holds up an eggplant] This is rigpa! [Rings a bell] This is rigpa! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

6. Personal experiences of sacredness & community from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Dec 6, 202553 min

   A facilitated discussion of how the participants find sacredness in the actual world —and in community. This Vajrayana Q&A session is an Evolving Ground online discussion I co-hosted with Jared Janes . You can get some sense of the eG style here. We don’t go in for “dharma talks,” much less lectures. All our meetings, both in person and online, are highly interactive, mainly created in the moment by the participants. There’s a transcript below. But first: several announcements! I’ll co-host the next Vajrayana Q&A on Saturday, December 13th , 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. That will actually be the last one, too! Don’t miss it! It’s free! Instructions for how to join are included here . Starting in January, the Vajrayana Q&A series will be replaced with the monthly Evolving Ground Q&A, co-hosted by Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes . It’s free to all eG members. Membership is also free; you can join here . Also starting in January, Charlie and I will begin a new monthly online meeting series in a similar format. The first one will be on Sunday, January 11th, at 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. You can join via Zoom with this link . Charlie and I are scheming up a new collaborative project for 2026. It’s not about Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s based in several other topics we’re both excited about—like personal development , pro-social entrepreneurship , and cultural upgrades through nobility . We are aiming to provide better ways to learn and engage in meta-systematic practice . We’re in early planning stages, and would love to hear what excites you! We’re happy to discuss, or answer questions about, any of the subjects we write or speak about. If you post preferred topics, questions, or reflections here, it’ll help us know what to concentrate on in the session, and we’ll make sure to cover as many as possible. Transcript [“AI” generated, lightly proofread, may contain egregious errors] David Chapman : This is a Q&A, so primarily it’s an opportunity for participants to ask questions, and that can lead to discussion. I can answer some questions, but that’s not exactly the point here. When there’s a break in the flow of questions, or if nobody can think of anything, then I can talk about what I’m doing at the moment, which is writing about sacredness without metaphysics . Sacredness as an interactive, situated, in-the-moment activity or perception, rather than some kind of abstract thing involving a lot of conceptual stuff. So that could be a topic if nobody has questions, but I’m hoping that everybody has brought some burning question that we can all discuss. Chris, you’re grinning like you might have one. Chris : Well, I wouldn’t say I came with a specific question in mind. I mostly, I haven’t come to an eG meeting besides the weekly sits in a while, but something on my mind right now, it’s kind of a general topic. So I’m related to eG, I’m in a local Shingon group with a teacher, and also I was born a Christian, and the difference in terms of community, locally speaking, where I am at least, but I think in a lot of Western places period, is there’s a real Christian community; and connections, and the impacts of that, that have at least trickled down from that religion, and then the associated practices and communities. And I’m curious about, as Buddhism moves into the West, it feels like the practices, the technologies are one thing, but then there’s this whole thing that I think, at least partly, we’re working on here. But I’m just curious about, as a Western practitioner born into a Christian tradition, who’s primarily practicing Buddhist traditions for the past 15 years or so, is there a happy meeting place for those two traditions, and what might that look like, and how do I not get burned at the stake? David Chapman : It sounds like there’s two questions there, maybe one is some kind of happy union or coexistence of Buddhism and Christianity possible, and the other is one about the nature of local in-person community. Regarding the second, I think it’s something that Buddhism in America has been spotty about. There are groups that are quite like a Christian congregation in the degree of closeness and mutual support. That’s relatively uncommon, and I think that’s something of a weakness. Buddhism in the West has been presented as individualistic, in a way that it is not in Asia. That’s a Westerly distortion or invention, and probably serves important needs for some people who don’t want the social aspect of religion. And maybe that’s what makes Buddhism attractive for a lot of Americans, but it also can be a big lack. I wasn’t raised Christian and have never been part of a Christian congregation. I can’t speak to that part. Maybe someone else here could. I’m looking at Max. Max Soweski : I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking about this recently because I did grow up Roman Catholic, and I was the most serious little Catholic boy you would have ever met. I was very, very devoted in a way that probably came off as kind of annoying to a lot of people. The thing that I was reflecting on recently is that in the Catholic community that I grew up in, there was a sense of community, sometimes of people coming together, but it did not often feel very sacred. It did not often feel very much connected to our practice, which was to bring us closer to God, at least ostensibly. And it really was not until eG that I found a community of people where it was possible, in group settings, to have that connection to sacredness and to do that together. And so I’m not quite sure what to do with these two things, or even how much this pertains to your interest, Chris. Basically, we would do like potlucks and get like the kids together for Sunday school and stuff like that. But there wasn’t a whole lot of ecstatic union with God happening in group settings. David Chapman : And do you experience… I mean, that ecstatic union with God is, I guess that’s yidam practice for us. Do you experience something in eG that is that combination and what’s that like? Max Soweski : I do. I mean, I think that the yidam practice, specifically the Gesar sadhana that you created, David, is a good example of in a group setting. So just a bunch of people coming together in a room, doing the sadhana together. What it’s like is very intense, very connective. I had the sense of really being connected to the people that were practicing this with me, both in terms of like, we’re all bringing something into being together. There was that sense. There was a sense that we were participating in something that was naturally available together. All those things that I just mentioned were notably absent from my upbringing in Roman Catholicism. I mean, again, ostensibly that’s what all of it’s about. All of these teachings, all of this catechism, all of these rule sets are meant to systematize that contact. And yet it seemed totally absent as I was growing up. And it seems very present in eG to me. David Chapman : I’m completely foreign to Christianity, but I find the descriptions I’ve read of charismatic practice, of Pentecostalism, any other denominations of that sort, seem intriguingly similar. And it’s interesting how kind of low status that is considered by middle-class, upper-middle-class American Christians. It’s like embarrassing and ignorant and somehow. Max Soweski : Last thing I’ll say about Roman Catholicism. That is exactly the sense that I had growing up in Roman Catholicism is that it was somewhat embarrassing to be too enthusiastic about your spirituality, even at church or even like in discussions with other religious people, which to me seems like just a total bug, actually. I don’t find that that’s a very good thing. David Chapman : Stephanie, you have your hand up? Stephanie Droop : It’s very different in the UK. At least some people I know. So I come from that kind of born again charismatic Christian family that you mentioned. And my parents and two of my brothers still go to church. And I’m always quite admiring and envious of the community they have. They have such a strong, big, like—all ages, cool young people, fashionable people, and they’re all really professional and middle class and successful people. So I haven’t been to a church service for a very long time, but theylove it. They have their kind of ecstatic union stuff, but then they also then go and have a fire pit on the beach and a barbecue and pray there. And they’re all kind of very touchy-feely with each other. They really help each other out for everything. They move each other’s houses and look after kids and stuff. And they just love each other’s company. They do all their fun hobby stuff together. They have whiskey appreciation, they get drunk, they brew beer, they’re always outside. They’re always having fires and they’re doing all the stuff, the same stuff that any other normal fun person does. And they’re always touching each other, hugging each other, and they’re just a really nice bunch of people. Like there’s no drama, agro. They just seem to love life and appreciate life and be really doing it quite well. And like attending to the whole question of building community in a very wise and skillful and kind of interesting way. It’s just that there’s Christianity underneath it all, which is a little bit, you know. So, it’s definitely not that they’re kind of ashamed of it. I even think it’s a little bit, a tiny bit class based; but the other way from what you were saying, that it is only middle-class people and educated people. And if ever anyone working class joins the church, I’ve kind of sometimes worried a little bit that, that they were a little bit hoodwinked into it by thinking, “Oh, if I joined this church and follow these people, maybe I’ll get a nice house.” But the leadership class of the church are aware of that, and they try to diffuse it, and try to make sure that doesn’t happen, because we’ve talked about that. I mentioned that, and they agreed and said it was a problem, and that they had to be aware of it and stuff. So they’re very warm, empathetic and open people in general. Chris : Yeah. I suppose that kind of everything people have said kind of clarifies my question back to Vajrayana. Is there an element of, not necessarily elitism, but, kind of a more fine filter, that maybe will—in terms of the West not having this foundation of? You could say like folk Buddhism, that, in terms of that experience, that very nice experience I would say, Stephanie, you’re discussing in terms of community. Is there something about the filter of Vajrayana, or even just Buddhism, that maybe naturally leads to social forms in the West that are just going to be the way they are now? David Chapman : I think the social forms of Buddhism in America, I can’t speak for the rest of the West, are quite varied. And that’s partly dependent on which flavor of Buddhism, but it’s also, I think, just a matter of the particular social group the Sangha. There is a kind of elitist intellectual strain in American Vajrayana, which does go back to Tibet. But there’s also Ngak’chang Rinpoche, who was my teacher and Charlie’s for a long time, he really emphasized that this is not about class. He considered himself to be working class. He very actively encouraged working class people to be involved, and also encouraged the kind of close-knit community that we’ve been talking about. I think that worked sometimes and failed other times, and that has a lot to do with the particular individuals involved, probably more than anything doctrinal. I know many of us are involved in creating local community for eG. Yetsal is very much creating local community in the Boulder-Denver area, Ari in the Bay area, others elsewhere. Maybe that’s a bit of a work in progress, but my impression is that it’s quite highly functional for some people here. Chris, where are you physically? I don’t know. Chris : I’m in Vermont and, and I might say very lucky to have access to a Shingon teacher. Just total luck, I suppose. David Chapman : So is there a community around that teacher or is it more individual? Chris : So, Jim Sensei is the teacher here. He is the senior North American student of Ajari Tanaka, and Hokai Sobol is a senior student in Europe. So it is Mandala. People are from all over, there’s people in Canada, people spread out over North America, who are a member of Mandala Vermont . But more people local in Vermont, at least that I have engaged with. People are moving to Japan, or living in Japan, and you can go on pilgrimage in Japan. And so it’s three continents, I suppose not bad, but it’s a pretty small, tight knit group from what I understand so far. I’ve only been a member for about a year or so. David Chapman : I’m writing about sacredness without metaphysics, as an immediate interactive experience. Jared and I were talking just before we started this session. There is a super moon currently, a full moon where the moon is at its closest to the earth and it’s exceptionally large and bright. It was full a couple of nights ago. Charlie and I went for dinner and a drink to our favorite brewpub. And when we got there, the moon was just above the horizon, which makes it look much bigger than it normally does. And it just kind of was like, and, and we both got out of the car and just stood and stared at it for a couple of minutes, because it was, well, an experience of the sacred. And something I find really interesting is cross-culturally, there are certain things that are pretty reliably regarded as sacred. There’s the sky, there’s things that appear in the sky, like the moon and the sun. Mountains are very often regarded as sacred; big odd rocks; trees, particularly old, unusual looking trees. I think, even for people who would never say that they regard trees as sacred, it’s easy to see which trees somebody else might regard as sacred. So I’ve got a couple of pictures here. [Shows them.] This is an absolutely beautiful, huge tree. And this is another huge tree, which is kind of ugly actually. I think one of these is obviously sacred and the other one is obviously not. I think it’s this one that is sacred. And there’s a crowd of people. This is a tourist attraction somewhere on the East coast. And people come and look at it and, and they say, “This is mesmerizing, it’s spooky.” And many of them are probably good Christians, and the idea of trees being sacred might be anathema to them, but they respond to that. And so there’s a sense in which sacredness is not subjective and it’s something that we see and do spontaneously. There’s another example I found. So this is from a blog post . I’ll stick it in the chat. Just about every hill on West Ardnamurchan [apparently somewhere in Scotland] has some sort of cairn at its summit. This one is on Creag an Airgid , the Silver Crag. When we come across one, each of us dutifully adds a new stone, but without really thinking about why we do it, other than that perhaps it will bring us good luck. So sometimes we add an extra one and think of someone in hope that it’ll bring them good luck too. I think I’ve got a picture of this cairn. Mountains are regularly experienced as sacred, and the cairns on them are experienced as sacred. It’s just a very natural thing to do when you get to the top of a mountain to put an extra stone on. I think people do that without thinking about it, but it’s meaningful in some way. So I think another, another thing that’s natural to do, but that is embarrassing, Throwing pennies into fountains! You can bless things. You don’t have to have any special qualification to bless things. You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a funny hat. You can just go around blessing things. You go to a place and it occurs to you, you just think, “I bless this place.” You could say it out loud. You could think about what that means, what you hope for it, but in a conceptual way, just kind of vision of uplift. And this is a natural sacred activity, that I think people do without thinking about it. But if you did think “this isn’t something I’m supposed to be doing,” why not? I wonder if any of this, I wonder if any of this resonates and what experiences you’ve had that it might bring to mind. Vinod Khare : Yeah. It’s interesting because I’m reading, uh, this book called, uh, How God Becomes Real . David Chapman : Yes! I was reading that while writing this. Vinod Khare : Okay. What comes to mind is that there is a counterpoint to what you’re saying. So I can see what you’re saying that there are certain places, things, activities that kind of have this spontaneous feeling of sacredness. But what comes to mind is that we can also make things sacred. So if I look at Hinduism in India, for example, both of these ideas exist. There are places, shrine cities, that are considered to be sacred and they are kind of special. You get something there that you don’t get elsewhere, but at the same time, you can go to a village and there’ll be a completely ordinary tree. And the women in the village are performing rituals with that tree. So it’s sacred for them. Right. And it has been made sacred by the performance of this ritual, perhaps over generations. So that’s something that I see in my own life as well, in terms of practice, that you can experience something as spontaneously sacred, or you can deliberately go and make something sacred. Like one practice I did in my Zen days was just making the mundane ordinary, right? Zen people love to like wash dishes mindfully, do the laundry mindfully. And so that was a deliberate practice of evoking sacredness in everyday activity. And sacredness can go away. That was another thing that came up, a lot of what I see in India, for example, just because of the crowds and the bad maintenance of the shrine, for example, a lot of places have lost their sacredness, right? So that can, that’s another aspect. David Chapman : Jan, you have your hand up? Jan : Yeah, I, this resonates a lot. In a way, there’s both, as you were saying, David, this sense in which some things are objectively, interculturally sacred. And then also like the Vinod, what you were saying reminded me of the story of the Buddha’s canine tooth. You can also make random anything sacred, through repetition and practice. What came to me was this image of, you can pour holy water over anything, but if you pour it in a bowl, it’ll stick around more easily than just on the street. Yetsal : I feel like because of all my practices that I have found sacredness in things that I didn’t even expect to be sacred. I think that’s because there’s a lot more awareness and appreciation for very simple things. But they have this sacredness to them, then they get, yeah. I’ve noticed that happened a lot with practice. David Chapman : In this piece I’m writing, I’m emphasizing the possibility of finding sacredness, for people who, I’m sort of writing for STEM rationalists, who have rejected the concept because it doesn’t objectively exist. And for them, the idea that it is possible to find sacredness at all might be revelatory, if it’s presented in a way that strips off the metaphysics that usually goes with it. For practitioners, it’s explicit in Buddhist Tantra that one aims to perceive everything and to interact with everything as sacred. And perhaps that is also the Zen approach that Vinod was speaking of, I don’t know. I was thinking about this in relationship with the distinction between Tantra and Dzogchen. In Tantra, because it’s kind of artificial, it’s method-based, it’s making things happen, so you can ritually cause something to be sacred; and that’s tremendously valuable. And you’re trying to get to the point where everything appears sacred through effort and method and repetition and so on. Whereas in Dzogchen, things appear as sacred or they don’t appear as sacred, and whether or not they’re sacred isn’t particularly clear, and all of that’s just fine, s

7. Dzogchen Street Preacher #0: Kadag from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Nov 18, 20251 min

   “Dzogchen Street Preacher” is the overall title for a series of performance pieces I planned in 2009. This extremely brief one, “Kadag,” was meant to introduce the whole thing. I was on the verge of recording them when there was a mundane emergency that took all my time for a year. When I had the opportunity to work again, the Meaningness book seemed more important. But less fun! There’s a bit of slack in my life now, and yesterday I decided to take a few hours to record this one. That was fun , and it’s a way to salvage a tiny piece of a project I put a ton of love and attention into, long ago, when I was a different person than I am now. The video might somehow stand on its own, and communicate something … but explanation might help. Kadag Kadag is a key term in Dzogchen , the branch of Buddhism I’m most influenced by. The usual translation is “primordial purity.” That may be misleading. Kadag is the recognition that nothing is impure —and therefore nothing is pure, either . Purity is a metaphysical distinction, not something found in the actual world. “Primordial” is meant to communicate that. In the video, I substituted “evenly.” The point is that nothing is more pure than anything else, because this is a nonsense concept from the beginning. So what? When you recognize kadag, you recognize that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world . There are no spiritual, existential, or cosmic problems. Only practical ones, which you can address practically, instead of metaphysically. Then you don’t have to wring your hands about the supposed Problem of Suffering. Suffering is not a Great Evil , it’s just a thing that happens. So it is actually possible to enjoy everything . There also is nothing fundamentally wrong with you . You are not impure, stained by original sin, inadequate, or rotten at the core. You are just fine—just as you are . In Dzogchen, the non-method for recognizing kadag is trekchöd . Kadag is not a Pollyanna-ish attitude. There are many things we don’t like and want to change. And that is good! Let’s do it! Street Preacher The frame-story for the “Dzogchen Street Preacher” series is a personal alter-ego in which I’m that. Dzogchen teaching is usually overburdened with Tibetan religious decorum and status-hierarchy nonsense, so it’s tiresome and intellectual and reaches nearly no one. The idea that I could stand on a street corner and rant at passers-by about Dzogchen is entertainingly ridiculous. But it might also be effective, and therefore important? I admire people who have the courage and charisma to do this: Although I have reservations about both his message and some aspects of his delivery! While I was recording this, some homeless people politely asked what I was doing, and kindly offered to move the garbage bags full of their possessions out of the way. I explained, and politely declined. It adds to the atmosphere of primordial purity, I think, although I didn’t say that. I didn’t preach at them, because that would have been rude. I think. Western Buddhism My former Buddhist teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, loves the culture of the cowboy-era American West. There’s layers of meaning in that, and how it relates to Vajrayana. One aspect, though, is a pun. “Western Buddhism” is often what Consensus Buddhism called itself. There was a consensus that “Western Buddhism” was becoming a thing, and that it was the right thing; and yet a lot of wrangling in Consensus Buddhist publications about what it was, and what it should be. That was all quite silly and quite distasteful; but now it’s all ancient history , and no one cares anymore. But—what would “Western Buddhism” mean, if it was a thing? Obviously, Western Buddhists should dress like this: That’s from a Vajrayana Buddhist retreat on a horse ranch in Montana in 2004. We all dressed as Western Buddhists, and rode horses up into the mountains, and shot single-action 1880s-style revolvers at paper targets, and had wrathful empowerments in the evenings. It was on this retreat that my now-spouse Charlie Awbery and I got together. In the picture, that’s me on the left. It’s a Sangha friend on the right, not Charlie. I think Charlie took the picture. Anyway, that was a daytime Western Buddhist outfit, for riding and shooting. In the evenings, we were more elegant. Specifically, I wore the same outfit that appears in the video. Ngak’chang Rinpoche was amused by it. It looks like a cowboy-era priest’s get-up. He teased me by calling me “Preacherman”; and I rolled with the joke. It was ridiculous, of course. Being a priest was as far from my concept of myself as anything possibly could be. In the last year, I have somehow inadvertently transformed into my most-distant self-possibility: acting as a tantric Buddhist priest, performing the religion’s central ritual role, with gods and miraculous transformations and all that razzmatazz. Life is very strange. Especially when you are Western Buddhist. Outtakes I filmed this on the spur of the moment. I had planned to draft Charlie as camera crew, and also to do a bunch of voice work and practice runs beforehand; but Charlie was at a conference in LA and it was possibly the last day of the year when the weather would cooperate, so I just did it . I did nine takes, but couldn’t check whether any of them were any good, for boring technical reasons, and was afraid they might all be lousy. I’m reasonably happy with how it came out, although I think I could have done better if I’d been able to review the first few takes before continuing. Anyway, some takes are quite different from others. I thought you might be amused to watch another couple. And maybe you can tell me which of the three you like best! I wonder if I should substitute one of these for the one I chose to put at the top of this post. What do you think? Which do you prefer? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

8. Maps of Meaningness from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Nov 4, 20251 hr 51 min

   Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning. Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements : partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one. Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts! In this post: * The Making Of : demons and the idiot * Sections and topics in the video, with timestamps so you can find them * Further reading: books &c. we refer to, with links * “AI”-generated “transcript” (not safe for human consumption) Demons and the idiot This podcast has been years in the making. Our attempts were incessantly obstructed by malicious demons , who don’t want you to see or hear it. Eventually this became comical, although also frustrating. To be fair to the demons, progress was also frequently obstructed by an idiot . Namely: me, David. I fumbled the technology repeatedly. After finally getting to record the conversation, I applied “AI” to remove pauses and “ums” and such. This improved the audio track, but makes the video extremely jerky . Also, I used “AI” to make it appear as though we are looking at the camera when we weren’t. An uncanny, demonic appearance results. And, because I am an idiot, I did this irreversibly. Sorry about that! Next time, I will perform extensive exorcisms and protective rituals. And also learn how to use software before inflicting it on Jake’s invaluable contribution. Or leave the editing to him; he’s a professional ! Sections and topics 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:05 David summarizes Meaningness (his book): it’s about the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. 00:05:01 The intellectual lineage of Meaningness is mainly the same as that of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning . However, David draws on Vajrayana Buddhism where Peterson draws on the Western tradition, particularly Christianity. 00:07:48 Nihilism , as explained by Nietzsche and as in Buddhism, is a key topic for both of us. Psychological lineages: German Romanticism, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Robert Bly. 00:10:54 Jake summarizes Peterson’s project and intellectual lineage. The catastrophes of the twentieth century . Recovering the mythic mode as compatible with rationality . Envisioning positive futures and preventing nihilistic ones. 00:20:59 The history of the gradual collapse of meaning. Tradition, modernity, postmodernity: communal/choiceless, systematic/rational, and postrational/nihilistic modes. 00:32:20 A future that combines the advantages of different historical modes of culture, social organization, and psychology, avoiding their disadvantages. Subdividing the past century: totalitarianism, countercultures, subcultures, atomization. Those abandoned, in order, nobility, universality, rationality, and coherence. We can restore all of those, but not as absolutes. 00:43:32 Jake explains Peterson’s somewhat different take on the same historical periods. Rationalism and modernity as the result of encountering alien cultures. 00:53:02 Jake explains Peterson’s “universal grammar” of myth in the Western tradition: Chaos is the Great Mother, Order is the Great Father, the Divine Son mediates between them. Peterson maps this onto twentieth century history. 00:56:43 David explains how Vajrayana Buddhism’s understanding of emptiness and form is fascinatingly similar to Peterson’s account of chaos and order, and also quite different. This may account for our fundamentally different attitudes, despite sharing much of our intellectual backgrounds. Personifications of chaos in Babylonian and Buddhist mythology: Tiamat and Prajñaparamita are the same goddess, viewed in radically different ways. 01:05:06 Positive and negative aspects of the characters in Peterson’s mythology. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the Divine Son (a theme we return to later). 01:09:55 Our shared lineage in “4E,” interactionist cognitive science , and our rejection of rationalism. Heidegger, situated activity, Gibson, affordances, rigpa in Dzogchen. The frame problem in AI research, and how David (and others) resolved it in the late 1980s. “You see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning.” 01:23:09 How the Ancient Greeks rejected the mythic mode and invented rationalism , as an eternalistic response to a nihilistic crisis. How Nietzsche finally diagnosed the failure of rationalism, and realized that would lead to another nihilistic crisis. His rejection of the delusion of a supposed True World, more real than the apparent one, in Twilight of the Idols . 01:34:07 Peterson’s account of Christian soteriology, and its justification for social action. Buddhism’s lack of a social vision. Social vision is a form of purpose . Rationalism has no account of purpose. You have to go to myth for that! 01:39:19 The influence of AI planning research on Peterson’s thinking. My debunking of that (with Phil Agre, influenced by Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus) in the 1980s. Francisco Varela’s reformulation of subplans as micro-identities in micro-worlds. 01:47:28 Self-sacrifice as essential in identifying purpose: in the Western tradition, and in Buddhism. 01:50:56 Demons subjugated at last! Credits roll. Further reading: books &c. we refer to In the order we refer to them in the podcast, explicitly or implicitly: * Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning * David Chapman, Meaningness * Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power * Jordan B. Peterson, “ A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2-6 ” * Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self * Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow * Jordan B. Peterson and Joseph L. Flanders, “ Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict ” * The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship * David Chapman, “ Fundamentalism is counter-cultural modernism ” * David Chapman, Meaningness and Time ; includng “ How meaning fell apart ” * David Chapman, “ The mythic mode: from childhood, throughout life ” * Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge * David Chapman, “ Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness ” * Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage * Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man * David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “ Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity ” * Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason * James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception * Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols * David Chapman, “T his is it! ” * David Chapman, “ Charnel ground ” * Jordan B. Peterson, “ Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity ” * George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior * Philip E. Agre, “ Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI ” * Jamgon Mipham, Gesar: Tantric Practices of the Tibetan Warrior King * Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “ Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity ” * Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions * David Chapman, “ Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction ” * Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I * Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How “AI”-generated “transcript” This is inaccurate and actively misleading in places. I wouldn’t recommend reading it. It’s mostly so people can find it in web searches. On the other hand, it’s often unintentionally hilarious, so there’s that. [Update, 16 November 2025 : Andrew Shade Blevins kindly fed the original “AI” transcript through a script that uses ChatGPT to fix things up. The result may possibly be even more inaccurate, having gone through two rounds of “AI” distortion, but it certainly reads better! So I’ve replaced the original version with his.] [00:00:00] Jake Orthwein: The occasion of this conversation, much delayed but long anticipated, is just for you and I to get a chance to talk about your work, of which I’ve been an enormous fan for, I don’t know, seven years or whatever it is now. Maybe more. We’ve decided to frame it as comparing your work to Jordan Peterson’s, both because of Jordan’s significance in the zeitgeist and because he has worked on similar problems, but also because the differences between the two of you are illuminating. [00:00:50] David Chapman: Well, we’ve been talking about this for years and years and planning to do a podcast, and there’s been demonic obstruction. Like every time we go to record, something goes wrong. [00:01:02] Jake Orthwein: Very nearly food poisoning deterred us as well. [00:01:05] David Chapman: Right. I thought maybe I would start by just giving a short overview of what I think the Meaningness project is. It’s a book. There’s a website, which is meaningness.com, confusingly. There’s also meaningness.substack.com, which is a different thing. Meaningness.com is the book. It is meant to be a self-help manual for relating well with meaning, and I think it’s important that I don’t see this as an intellectual project. It’s a practical project. The Meaningness book explains ways of relating to meaning that work and ways of relating to meaning that don’t work. The ones that don’t work make you miserable and ineffective or cause you to cause trouble for other people. The ways that do work ideally make you joyful and creative and productive, and this is better, so it’s better to do the better things. That’s what the book says. I have a style of understanding and explaining which starts from the abstract and general and works towards the specific, and a lot of what’s on the website is quite abstract and general. Because I know that other people have different styles of learning, I’ve put in some specifics near the beginning. There’s a tendency to misunderstand Meaningness as philosophy. And philosophy is taken to be an intellectual thing that’s interesting as opposed to practical. And I really want the Meaningness book to be practically useful. We’ve been talking for quite a while about the ways in which my interests and work and style are similar to Jordan Peterson’s and different. I’ve dressed up in Jordan Peterson’s style today because I thought that would be funny. He always wears something like this, and I actually really like that. So I’m doing that today. But my writing, my thinking style is similar to his as well. There’s an underlying theme that goes through everything that I do, which is the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. Nebulosity is the aspects of the world that are fluid, constantly changing, impossible to pin down, indefinite. Pattern is the aspects of the world that are solid, enduring, well-defined, structured. Everything is some of both of those things, so they’re inseparable. This isn’t a metaphysical thesis; it’s just if you consider things in the world, that’s how they are. And you just look and you see. The underlying idea in the Meaningness book is that we tend to try to pull those apart and deny one or the other somehow, and that’s because nebulosity—we think we don’t like it. We think it is constantly undercutting us because we can’t get complete understanding of anything because it’s changing out from under us all the time, and therefore we can’t get control, and therefore we can’t make things go the way that we want them to go. They go some other way instead. So we’d like to impose structure or pattern on everything, and that doesn’t work because we can’t do it. And then when we try to do it, it fails, and it would be better to go with the flow. That’s the whole message of the book, and then there’s just a whole lot of applications of that. This is very interestingly similar to one of the fundamental themes in Jordan Peterson’s work, as you’ve pointed out repeatedly. We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations about this. Chaos and order are fundamental for him. And those are not quite the same, but very closely related. [00:05:01] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, I think the way they’re not quite the same is very interesting. It accounts for much of the difference in your styles and approaches. When you get into the details of like what exactly the difference would be between nebulosity and pattern, or even emptiness and form, which is one of those frames you’re taking on to talk about nebulosity and pattern, it’s not quite the same thing as chaos and order, even though they sound very similar. You mentioned that you don’t see it as an intellectual project. There are intellectual sources to it, and I remember it was very illuminating for me after encountering Meaningness and having some Buddhist and a little bit of cognitive science context. So I sort of could orient, but it also felt very sweet, generous. And what is this? It’s a very novel presentation. And then working my way through your appendix for the reading page, starting to piece together this whole set of lineages that then make the text make a lot more—I’m not even sure it makes it make more sense because you do try to make it stand on its own without the baggage of philosophy, but it put it in context for me in a way that I didn’t have before. So maybe you could say something just about the intellectual lineage that Meaningness sits in, even if it’s not intellectual in itself. [00:06:18] David Chapman: Yes. I do draw on a lot of sources. I do footnote them. It’s spooky reading Jordan Peterson’s work because we are mainly in the same intellectual lineages and drawing on the same sources. [00:09:39] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, that’s actually a surprising omission. I’ve sent you that one clip where Jonathan Pageau brings up Kegan to him and he doesn’t quite latch onto it, which suggests to me that he’s not super aware of that despite the fact that he himself is doing psychoanalytic and constructive developmental synthesis in his work all the time. You clearly mentioned you’re in the lineage of Carl Jung. That’s somewhat surprising to me. Is Robert Bly the person you’re putting there or, ‘cause he— [00:10:05] David Chapman: He’s my main entry point into that, yes. [00:10:08] Jake Orthwein: Okay. Okay. I remember you having some kind of suspicion toward Jung. Maybe it was all the selfie language or the romanticism. But I wouldn’t have situated you in his lineage as obviously. [00:10:18] David Chapman: Well, yes, he is in romantic lineage, which means that he overemphasizes emotions and feelings and stuff inside your head relative to the outside world. And I think that’s a big mistake. But in the past century, he’s the person who was most influential in the understanding of the mythical mode of myth, dreams, fantasies, obscure images, and that’s tremendously important for me. [00:10:54] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So maybe since you’ve just laid out how you see both the project and the lineage of Meaningness, I’ll say something about how I see Peterson’s and I think probably throughout the conversation I’ll do the Peterson foil just ‘cause I’m familiar with that work. So he is very consciously responding to the problem of nihilism as framed by Nietzsche. He sees the risk of nihilism much more strongly than you do, which also influences how he frames the events of the 20th century. So you don’t quite frame it as a nihilistic catastrophe. You say that people were worried about a nihilistic catastrophe, but much of what was happening was actually a defense against the threat of nihilism, for example, through totalitarianism. And Peterson, he would view that through the nihilistic lens of the loss of the prior meaning system. But in Maps of Meaning, which is pre-fame Peterson, and it’s him at his most systematic and comprehensive, he very explicitly was saying he was plagued by nightmares of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, which is when he began writing it. [00:11:57] Jordan Peterson: I found myself suffering from two things. One was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction. And they’re very affecting dreams. [00:12:09] Jake Orthwein: That set him on this adventure to understand how it could have been possible that we’d find ourselves in such a situation. [00:15:54] David Chapman: Yeah. That point about the mythic mode being oriented to action, that’s, I think a piece that’s missing in Jung, and I think it’s terrific that Peterson picks up on that. [00:16:07] Jordan Peterson: This is one of the things that the psychoanalysts, I think didn’t get quite right, although Jung touched on it in his later work. There’s not, all of you isn’t inside your head. And for the psychoanalysts, a lot of the work that you were doing on yourself was on your, on the relationship, say between your conscious and your unconscious mind, but tremendous amount of that was sort of inside your skull, so to speak. But the phenomenologists, the phenomenological approach enables you to start reconceptualizing the psyche as something that extends beyond you and, and always will. And so that you can work on its reconstruction at any level of analysis where your own nervous system is signaling to you that there’s a problem. [00:16:56] David Chapman: I’m less concerned with totalitarianism, medieval, and the wars of the 20th century than he is. And that’s just a matter of, I guess, personal interest. I mean, it’s not like those things aren’t tremendously important and globally there is a worrisome turn towards authoritarianism that may develop into totalitarianism. I’m more worried about that now than I was a few years ago. It’s interesting. Peterson’s dream. We’re almost the same age. We grew up in similar circumstances, and I remember as a kid having dreams of streams of bombers on the horizon flying toward me, and I could see what was about to happen. And this is something that was very alive in everyone’s mythic understanding at that time. This was really gripping. My parents had a very half-assed nuclear fallout shelter in the basement. This was a normal thing to do. So, yeah, I feel that, and there’s lots of people who worry about potential catastrophes and there’s a lot fewer people who think about what could we really like to have happen? And that’s much more difficult. And I’m trying to grope my way toward positive future visions. I don’t hear that in his— [00:18:28] Jake Orthwein: In his mild defense, I mean, I think he is trying to do that a lot more now. It takes a different shape, certainly than it would for you. It’s much more explicitly Christian, or at least Christian inflected. I don’t know if you’ve seen this ARC thing that he recently founded. It’s his answer to the World Economic Forum. ARC is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s a big conference that’s all about positive visions for the future. Especially I think in its early years, it’s got a lot of, here’s what we don’t want, we don’t want the damn postmodernists, you know, blah blah blah. But its mission statement is at least about forging positive visions for the future. So I think he’s trying there. David Chapman: That’s really good to hear. Jake Orthwein: Yeah. The one interesting point about the Cold War background—I wrote about this at one point—but at some point I realized that part of the reason I got the sort of bug of your work, and to some extent Peterson’s also so much, was because of, like, 9/11 as a similar sort of foundational event. I was very young. But much of my teenage years were coming into more and more consciousness of whatever context produced 9/11, and 9/11 was also this return of history moment from a sort of sense that those kinds of things had ended that I had in my childhood. And just this problem of like, why do people—at that point I would’ve framed it as—beli

9. What's the connection between gender and meta-rationality? from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

   Jun 26, 20258 min

   Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta -rationality? Transcript: Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality ? David: I had never thought to ask that! The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana , how there’s often a sequence of: female-coded, male-coded, non-dual. Charlie: Mmm. David: And meta-rationality is analogous in some ways to non-duality in Buddhism . So maybe it is also… it is a little farfetched, but could be analogized to transcending gender; or being— I really don’t like the word “non-binary,” but we haven’t got a better one. Charlie: Mm. David: One of the things that is important in Vajrayana is practicing a yidam of the opposite sex. Not exclusively, but that is part of the path: to step into a new alien possibility that shakes up your attachment to the fixed identity that you have. So, female is analogized with emptiness, and you go from emptiness to form, which is analogized with male, and then to the— Charlie: Right, so, David: —non-duality that is— Charlie: Yeah, so I wanted to pick up on that, and say that you’re starting with the feminine, in Buddhist tantra you’re starting with emptiness , and that is connected to wisdom. And then the male aspect: you’re connecting to form, to compassion. And then the non-duality : to the inseparability of both of those. And interestingly, in our culture, fluidity is more female-coded. And I wonder now whether the move into meta-systematicity, and beyond highly systematized thinking, is actually difficult, and one of the ways that it’s prevented, possibly, is that for men, moving out of that rigidly defined, very easily legible way of being looks and feels like a move toward “more feminine.” And because things are so clearly segmented culturally and socially, it’s very difficult for guys to do that. David: Yeah. It’s not a coincidence, presumably, that the tech industry has an awful lot of—a preponderance of—male participants. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: Because this is basic gender psychology: that men are systematizers. Charlie: Say more about meta-rationality, in terms of our social circumstances, and gender. David: Well, I mean, before you can move into meta-rationality, you have to have mastered rationality. And to the extent that that is seen as masculine-coded, that could be an obstacle for women. Empirically, in the research done in the 1970s and '80s, many more men moved into what Piaget originally called “stage four,” which is the rational, systematic way of being, and that actually caused huge trouble at the time. There’s a famous book by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who was a researcher in adult developmental theory , called In a Different Voice . I read it at the time it came out, which must have been early eighties? I thought it was brilliant then. Now it is hard to know why it seemed brilliant. Basically she just rejected the whole paradigm of rationality being a stage. And said: okay, maybe for men that’s how it works. But for women, there’s a different series of stages. And this was seen at the time as a breakthrough in feminist theory. Now the ways that people understand gender politics, that would be unacceptable; to say there’s separate hierarchies for men and for women. But that was very exciting at the time. But in her system, women never got to rationality! That just was, that’s a male thing. So, because meta-rationality does require rationality as a prerequisite, in terms of gender one would expect that one would find fewer women being meta-rational. Charlie: Hmm. David: However! As you’ve pointed out, there is then a move away from the rigidity that is masculinely coded, and in a direction which might be understood as toward more of a center position, a non-duality of the genders, at the meta-rational level. So maybe once women have accomplished rationality, which certainly a great many do, it may very well be that it’s then easier for them to move to the meta-rational stance. I don’t know. The problem is, this whole field, as an academic discipline, was abandoned in the wake of Carol Gilligan’s work! It just became too politically hot to handle. And so we have no empirical data on any of this. We’re just kind of guessing on a basis of anecdote. Charlie: Mm-hmm. So the whole field originally was centering around a relationship with rationality; and it came out of, and in conversation with, the rational tradition. I came at it via systematicity rather than rationality. And for a long time I actually thought of the field as being about systematicity; which is strongly connected to and related with rationality, but is not the same. And it seems to me that if we understand the stages in relation to systematicity, not only in relation to rationality, that there’s a lot more space there for understanding, for example, “stage four” in Kegan ’s terms; understanding that as being about a relationship with systems. And when you look at it from that perspective, there are many ways in which a female-coded relationship with systematicity could be drawn. I’m thinking about some of my female clients and how a lot of the work that we do together is about systematizing emotional experience, systematizing boundaries and perspectives. David: Yeah. Piaget was a cognitivist, so he thought rationality was what was there. I think Kegan, a big part of his contribution was in extending that to systematicity in the relational and emotional domains. And my most recent post was about the fact that tech people (who tend to be male) tend to systematize in the work domain before they learn to systematize in the emotional and relational domains, and then they need to catch up. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: And it’s not surprising that for women, they might do the relational and emotional domains first. And I gave the example of high level sales executives, who do have a very systematic understanding of relationship. And a lot of those people are women. That’s a much more evenly split. Charlie: Hmm. I didn’t realize that. David: It would depend on the industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disproportionately women. Charlie: Mm-hmm. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

10. Priests and Kings from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 30, 202512 min

    The common civilizational pattern of a separate priesthood and aristocracy casts light on current political dysfunction. This video follows “ Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness .” You might want to watch that one first, if you haven’t already. These are the first two in a series on nobility . There will be several more. Subscribe, to watch them all! Transcript Many successful civilizations have two elite classes . They hold different, complementary, incommensurable forms of authority: religious authority and secular authority. This usually works reasonably well! It’s a system of checks and balances . Competition and cooperation between the classes restrains attempts at self-serving overreach by either. I think this dynamic casts light on current cultural and political dysfunction . At the end of this video, I’ll sketch how it has broken down in America over the past half century—perhaps not in the way you’d expect! In following videos, I’ll go into more detail, and suggest how we might respond. Archetypically, historically, and allegorically First, though, I’ll describe the dynamic archetypically, historically, and allegorically. Archetypically, the two elite classes are the priesthood and the aristocracy . They hold different types of authority (and therefore power). Priests hold authority over questions of virtue . They claim both exceptional personal virtue and special knowledge of the topic in general. On that basis, they dictate to everyone else—both aristocrats and commoners—what counts as goodness in personal life, and in local communal life. Kings, or more generally a secular ruling class, hold authority over the public sphere. They claim to exercise their power nobly . They may consider that’s due either to innate character, strenuous personal development, or both. That would justify a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, and authority to dictate the forms of economic and public life. This typically leads to an uneasy power balance. The two classes need each other, but also are perpetually in competition. Priests provide popular support to the aristocracy by declaring that they rule by divine right—or proclaim that the gods are angry with aristocratic actions, so virtue demands opposing them. Priests reassure aristocrats that they, personally, will have a good afterlife—or warn of a bad one when they don’t do what priests say they should. Priests depend on the aristocracy for most of their funding, for protection, and for favorable legislation. The aristocracy can increase or decrease that, or threaten to. It’s extremely difficult for either class to displace the other entirely. Things generally seem to go better when they cooperate. Especially when priests are, in fact, reasonably virtuous, and the nobility are reasonably noble. Otherwise, they may collude with each other against everyone else. Sometimes, though, one side or the other is dominant, and subordinates or even eliminates the other class. Theocracy , in which priests usurp the role of secular rulers, does not go well. Priests try to increase their authority by inventing new demands of virtue. In the absence of secular restraining power, there is no limit to this. Most people do not want to be saints. When priests seize secular power, they unceasingly punish everyone for trivial or imaginary moral infractions. This is the current situation in Iran, for example. It’s bad for everyone except the priests. I expect it is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually there comes a coup, a revolt, a revolution, and the priests get defenestrated. (That’s a fancy word for “thrown out of a window.”) Secular rulers taking full control of religion also does not go well. A classic example was Henry VIII. He rejected the Pope’s supreme religious authority and seized control of the Church . He confiscated its lands and wealth, dissolved its institutions, and summarily executed much of its leadership. He was able to do that through a combination of personal charisma; the power and wealth that came with kingship; and the flagrant corruption of the Church itself, which deprived it of broad popular support. After clobbering the Church, Henry’s reign, unconstrained by virtue, was arbitrary, brutal, and extraordinarily self-interested. Economic disaster and political chaos followed. Henry was succeeded by his daughter Mary, England’s first Queen Regnant. She used her father’s tactics to reverse his own actions. She restored the Church’s wealth and power through brutal and arbitrary executions. For this, she was known as “Bloody Mary.” She was succeeded by her younger sister Elizabeth I. Elizabeth re-reversed Mary’s actions. She established the new Church of England, designed as a series of pragmatic compromises between Catholic and Protestant extremists. Elizabeth was, on the whole, a wise, just, prudent, and noble ruler —which demonstrates that the archetype of a Good King has no great respect for sex or gender. Likewise, the reign of “Bloody Mary” demonstrates that women are not necessarily kinder, gentler rulers than men. How modernity ended, and took nobility down with it Allegorically, archetypically, such colorful history can inform our understanding of current conundrums. You might review what I’ve just said, and consider what it might say about American public life in 2025. Now I will sketch some more recent, perhaps more obviously relevant history. On the meaningness.com site, I have explained how modernity ended, with two counter-cultural movements in the 1960s-80s. Those were the leftish hippie/anti-war movement and the rightish Evangelical “Moral Majority” movement. Both opposed the modernist secular political establishment, on primarily religious grounds. Both movements more-or-less succeeded in displacing the establishment. Revolutions can be noble. I think the 1776 American Revolution was noble. It was noble in part because the revolutionaries respected the wise and just use of legitimate authority. They accepted power, and ruled nobly after winning. The American counter-cultural revolution two hundred years later refused to admit the legitimacy of secular authority. Its leaders instituted a rhetorical regime of permanent revolution. For the past several decades, successful American politicians have claimed to oppose the government, and say they will overthrow it when elected; and, once elected, they say they are overthrowing it, throughout their tenure. This oppositional attitude makes it rhetorically impossible to state an aspiration to nobility. You can’t uphold the wise and just use of power if you refuse to admit that any government can be legitimate. Nobility, then, was cast as the false, illusory, and discarded ideology of the illegitimate establishment. In the mythic mode, we could say that everyone became a regicide: a king-killer. After a couple of decades of denigration, nearly everyone forgot what nobility even meant , or why it mattered, or that it had ever existed outside of fantasy fiction. Secular authority in the absence of nobility Secular authority persisted, nonetheless. What alternative claim could one make for taking it? There are two. First, there is administrative competence. This was an aspect of nobility during the modern era, which ended in the 1970s. “Modernity,” in this sense, means shaping society according to systematic, rational norms. Developed nations in the twentieth century depended on enormously intricate economic and bureaucratic systems that require rational administration. One responsibility of secular authority is keeping those system running smoothly. Both counter-cultures rejected systematic rationality , as a key ideological commitment. However, it was obvious to elites, inside and outside government, that airplanes need safety standards, taxes must be collected, someone has to keep the electric power on. A promise of adequate management was key to institutional support from outside elites during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That kept a new establishment in power. However, it lacked popular appeal. Managerialism is not leadership, which is another aspect of nobility—one that more people more readily recognize. And, as modernity faded into the distant past, beyond living memory, later generations failed to notice that technocratic competence matters : because we will freeze or starve without electricity. Accordingly, virtue has displaced competence in claims to legitimate authority. Initially, this came more from the right than from the left. The 1980s Moral Majority movement aimed for secular power, justified by supposedly superior virtue. Some American Christians explicitly aimed for theocratic rule . However, for whatever reasons, the left came to dominate virtue claims instead. They gradually established a de facto priesthood: a class of experts who could tell everyone else what is or isn’t virtuous. Initially it claimed authority only over private and communal virtue; but increasingly it extended that to regulate public affairs as well. In some eyes, it began to resemble a theocracy. It did increasingly display the theocratic characteristics that I described earlier. And, in punishing too many people for too many, increasingly dubious moral infractions, it overreached; and seems now to have been overthrown. Regicide and defenestration, OK; but then what? This religious analogy was pointed out by some on the right, fifteen years ago. I think there is substantial truth in it. However, I think they are terribly wrong about the implications for action. I’ll discuss that in my next post. If the ruling class is neither noble nor even competent, but can claim only private virtue, then metaphorical regicide (or defenestration for the priesthood) is indeed called for. That’s justified whether their claims to virtue are accurate or not. Whichever opinion about trans pronouns you consider obviously correct, holding that opinion does not justify a broad claim for secular authority. But… now what? Perhaps there is some noble prince in waiting, biding his time, cloaked in obscurity, like Aragorn, rightful King of Gondor? More likely, some commoners will need to reclaim, re-learn, and rework nobility. As did Frodo, son of Drogo, “a decent, respectable hobbit who was partial to his vittles.” Maybe… that should be you! As I’ve pointed out before, you should be a God-Emperor . Maybe now is a good time to get started on that? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

11. Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 28, 20257 min

    Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide. Nobility is the proper matter of politics. Transcript Sermonette Nobility is the dark matter of society. The pull of dark matter holds galaxies together. Without it, stars would spin off into intergalactic space. Nobility holds societies together. Without nobility, societies disintegrate. Once, the now-dark matter of nobility was brilliant, and shone throughout space. With nobility, society grows strong, prosperous, decent, and glorious. But it was eclipsed, obscured by virtue, and now it is invisible. The gravitas that held society together is ebbing away. Bits collide, and fragments are flying off into intergalactic space. Virtue cannot hold society together. Rule by virtue is theocracy, which engenders repression and revolt, which engenders collapse. Tyranny also cannot hold a society together forever. It saps the strength of society, and engenders corruption, which engenders collapse. Distinguishing nobility from virtue Okay, so this is a sermonette; so it had to start with some sort of religious-sounding cosmic nonsense. I will speak more plainly for the rest of this. I want to distinguish nobility and virtue, as two quite different types of goodness. I think there are many types of goodness, and much trouble results from trying to assimilate them into a single kind. In particular, much of our current social, cultural, and political trouble stems from having subordinated nobility to virtue. This is not about the words . I’m not going to say that “nobility” and “virtue” really mean certain things, or should mean those things. Rather, I want to point at a distinction; and these words are the best I can find for these two types of goodness. I think my use more-or-less lines up with the usual understandings, but both terms are vague in common usage, and may overlap. For example, nobility, and its constituent characteristics of wisdom, justice, decency, and magnificence, might all be counted as virtues. Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others. Nobility is using whatever abilities we have in service of others. Nobility is seeking to fulfill our in-born human potential, and to develop all our in-born human qualities. By “virtue,” I mean roughly the currently popular understanding of “ethics.” Or, it would be more accurate to use the slightly archaic word “morals.” Whereas nobility is a quality of public actions, virtue is a matter of private life. Virtue inheres in having good mental contents: you think, feel, and say good things. It manifests also as qualities in private relationships—“private” including one’s friends, family, and immediate community. Nobility is not virtue. It does not require virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don’t always coincide. You can be a morally bad person and yet act nobly. You can be a morally outstanding person and act ignobly, through cowardice, ignorance, or incompetence. Virtuous actions are not necessarily or typically noble, although they may be. Neither nobility nor virtue are intrinsic or immutable character traits. They are developed through intention and effort. Developing either does not necessarily develop the other. Nobility does not require authority or position. Power is capability for action. Authority and position can give power, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Nobility is a quality that anyone can possess, regardless of position. We can all aspire to nobility. We all can be noble. We all are noble sometimes. We can aspire to be noble more often, and more effectively. Nobility as the proper matter of politics Nobility is a topic that I’ve been wanting to write about for twenty years now. I have an enormous quantity of notes and sketchy drafts. It’s become clear that I will never write that up, because there’s too much of it. I am hoping that this new format—which I’m calling “radio sermonettes” to poke friendly fun at myself—will make it possible to chop the topic up into bite-sized pieces, to make key parts of what I have to say available. These may also be more accessible for you than my usual long-winded, somewhat academic-sounding book chapters. Nobility is the essence of politics. Nobility concerns the right use of power, which is the proper matter of politics. And yet, nobility is a temporarily lost possibility. At the same time it is the essence of politics, it is not political in the current sense. Nothing I will say is concerned with what is the correct form of government. In particular, I am not advocating an aristocracy; that is an absurd anachronism. I am not advocating any other sort of autocracy, or authoritarianism. Nor will I discuss right versus left; this is not about that. Nor do I advocate political centrism. Much less will I discuss any specific political issue, nor political parties, elections, or whatever is the current scandal in which someone said something they weren’t supposed to. Rather, I will discuss what nobility is; how we lost it; and how we might restore it—both as individuals and as a society. I will discuss the history of how nobility was lost. And because the form of nobility that last existed is no longer adequate for current conditions, I believe we need to construct a new conception of nobility, a new practice of nobility. As a practical matter, I will suggest activities informal groups or organizations may employ to promote the development of nobility. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

12. What is stage five (like)? from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 26, 202535 min

    A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. Transcript What is the right question? “Stage five” is a concept in adult developmental stage theory . That is—or used to be—a branch of academic psychological research. I think it may be very important . But stage five is somewhat mysterious. It’s not clear what it is. Before asking “what is stage five?”, there’s several other questions one ought to ask. Starting with: “ IS stage five?” I mean, is this even a thing? Or is it just some sort of psychobabble woo? Why should we believe in this? And then, what sort of thing is stage five, if it’s a thing at all? What is a stage, actually? How do we know whether something is a stage or not? How many are there? Which are they? These are skeptical questions one ought to ask if you’re interested in adult developmental stage theory. Especially if you use it, or are considering using it. I’m not going to address them at all now! That’s because the academic literature on this sucks. The answers available are vague, and they’re not well supported by empirical research. So I’m setting all this aside for now—although I plan to come back to it. An exciting interdisciplinary scene Instead, I’m going to give several answers to “ what is stage five?”, as if this was a clearly meaningful question. I’m going to give several because different theorists describe it in different ways. That’s because they came to adult developmental stage theory with different intellectual frameworks, from different disciplines. In the 1970s and '80s, there was a really exciting scene , mainly at Harvard, in which researchers from different fields and departments were trading ideas about this. Their different ideas seemed similar in important ways, but they also had major disagreements, reflecting their different lenses. So, were they all actually talking about the same thing, like the blind men and the elephant? Or were they actually describing quite different things, all of which they called “stage five” for inadequate reasons? Unfortunately, academic research in this area ended almost completely around 1990, probably for political reasons. And that means that at about the time that they were starting to do really good scientific tests of whose ideas were valid, if anyone’s, the whole thing just ended. So we don’t know. I’m mostly going describe my own understanding of stage five . It’s is generally consonant with that of many researchers in the field, but also somewhat eccentrically different. That’s because I came to the scene with different background knowledge than anyone else. Everyone in the field starts from cognitive developmental psychology, and particularly Jean Piaget’s four-stage theory of children’s cognitive development. His fourth and final stage he called “formal operations.” He thought the essence of that was the use of propositional logic, a simple mathematical system. Later researchers extended Piaget’s stage four to systematic rational thinking in general. Piaget explicitly denied that there could be any stage five, because he somehow thought propositional logic was the highest form of cognition. Starting in the early 1970s, researchers found that here are further, more powerful forms of cognition. They exceed not only propositional logic, but systematic rationality in general. Or, so the researchers thought; and I agree; and that’s what we call “stage five.” I come to this with backgrounds also in cybernetics, ethnomethodology, existential phenomenology, and Vajrayana Buddhism. And those have shaped—maybe distorted—the way I understand stage five. * From cybernetics , I understand developmental stages as patterns of interaction of an organism and its environment. The typical framing of cognitive psychology is in terms of representations held in an individual mind; I’m skeptical of those. * From ethnomethodology , I am skeptical that we even have “individual minds.” Or, at least, I think this is a misleading way of understanding ourselves. Our patterns of interaction are manifestations of our culture and our local social environment. They are not primarily personal. * From existential phenomenology , I am moved to investigate what being in a stage is like . “Being” is the existential part, and “what is it like” is the phenomenological part. I’m influenced particular by work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized the role of the body, and of active perception, in experience. * And from Vajrayana Buddhism , I take the habit of seeing all phenomena in terms of the interplay of nebulosity and patterning. Nothing is either entirely definite or entirely arbitrary. We are nebulous and patterned; everything we interact with is nebulous and patterned; the interactions themselves are nebulous and patterned. Unfortunately, the insights each of these four disciplines are notoriously difficult to express in plain language. Cybernetics communicates in mathematics; ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology use long made-up words and abnormal sentence structures; Vajrayana is transmitted in ritual and poetry, not prose. I’m going to try to describe stage five as an experienced interaction , as a way of perceiving and acting, rather than theorizing about supposed mental structures, as cognitive psychologists do. I’m going to do my best to speak plainly, but describing the texture of experience is going make me come out, I’m afraid, sounding like a stoned hippie! After I babble a bit, I’ll summarize briefly some descriptions of stage five from academic cognitive scientists. They may be talking nonsense, but at least they sound sober. What stage five is like So what I’m going talk about is a visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience , and that’s especially difficult to talk about. It’s easy to talk about thinking, because that’s already largely in words. And I think a distinctive feature of stage five is that it is not so much about thinking in words. What I’m going to describe is not a mystical experience, not hallucinating, not a special state of consciousness. It’s really difficult to express what kind of thing it is. What I’m hoping is that you may recognize some of it, remember having been that way. I think these are experiences that anyone can have, “at” any stage, if that’s even a meaningful thing to say. What may be distinctive about stage five is that they become more common, and that you gain more skill in being in these ways. So the first aspect of what I want to talk about is what I call “ the open field of activity .” Imagine that you are in front of, looking out on, a plane; a landscape. And there’s all this stuff happening on this landscape. Like, things are emerging out of the plane, they’re popping out of the ground, and they dance around. They maybe change color, they bump into each other, and then they subside back into the field. These are the “happening things.” In this quasi-metaphorical description I’m giving, these are not generally physical objects. They are matters that call for care, or that impinge as relevant to your concerns. Sometimes these seem to be coming at you from all directions, tasks, interruptions, people emoting, public events, and you may feel embattled, and this can be overwhelming. I think this is an experience that everyone has had, this feeling of stuff coming at you , metaphorically. And that can give a sense of what sort of description I’m trying to give. In a more characteristically stage five experience, you have panoramic vision over the whole field of activity. Your view is from outside, and above. At the same time you can see accurately extremely fine details of these emerging phenomena. It’s like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass at the same time. So you see the forest and you see the trees. And you see the leaves on the trees, and the caterpillars walking on the leaves on the trees! So you don’t get lost in the details, and you don’t get lost in space. Another aspect of this is that you are not detached, you’re engaged. The experience of stage four can be like looking at the world through a heads-up display. So there’s a transparent piece of glass that has projected on it engineering diagrams, or an org chart, that is telling you what you are seeing, and categorizing it and representing it. This is the experience of stage four. At stage five, you can still do that when it’s useful; but more typically, you’re actually looking directly at the world, you’re perceiving without an interposed representation. You can still, when it’s useful, turn the heads-up display on, and use some kind of rational system, some systematic ontology, for perceiving, conceptualizing the world. That can often be very useful; and stage five can do everything that stage four can do. But you also have, like, a little clicker wheel, so you can choose different heads up displays, different representations of the world in different conceptual schemas. You can use different frameworks for perception, and you can actually look with multiple ones simultaneously. This is a very characteristic aspect of stage five. In stage five, caring about lessens; caring for increases. You are intimately involved in the details of the field of activity, because you care for them. It’s more like tending a garden than like building and operating a machine, which is the experience of stage four. It’s more nurturing, less controlling. At stage four, you relate to everything in terms of “What does this mean to me ? What do you mean to me? What can I do with this thing?” Although, a garden is still pretty top down; like, you decide where to put which rose bush, and you put some tulips over here . Maybe a better metaphor would be taking responsibility for a plot of woodland that you nurture. So you make sure that there’s adequate water in a drought. You clear out diseased trees. You build brush piles to provide habitat for small mammals. Foresters do this. They pile up dead branches, and rabbits or weasels, or I don’t know what, live in there. This metaphor of “nurturing” might sound nice . And that’s not really the point. Part of caring for a plot of woodland is uprooting invasive plant species. It’s setting traps for pest animal species. It’s building a fence around the plot to keep out wild dogs. If 30 to 50 feral hogs break through the fence, a semi-automatic rifle might be called for. The next aspect of stage five I’d like to talk about is what I call “ becoming the space .” And this is a sense that your self, your awareness, becomes fused with the field of activity, the space within which everything happens. So in some sense, you feel like you are doing everything that occurs in the field of activity, because you are the space. And at the same time, you’re not doing anything, because you are just the space. You are not any longer an isolated individual in your head who is doing the thing: one thing, and then the next thing. It’s a continuous flow of activity, that is interaction across all of the participating entities, human, and material, and information technology, or whatever. This sense of extending through space—you also feel decentered in time , and like you extend through time. So you become aware of your place in history, and that you are in the middle of a lineage of people doing things, thinking and feeling and being, in ways that are shaping you now . This can extend centuries into the past, centuries into the future; but also just years, or any period of time. And just as with the spatial metaphor—where you’re seeing all the details, you’re getting this really close-in look, and you’re seeing the whole picture— With time, you’re both… You’re much more present, in the now . In stage four, your time is structured. It is scheduled. You have deadlines, you’re doing this, and then you’re doing this and you know what’s going to happen next. The stage five experience of time is of being here now without the structure. It’s also the experience of being across centuries, because you’re not separate from those who have gone before. They are being you, and you are being the future; all of the people who come after you. There’s a quote from Abraham Maslow that I find really moving. He said: I had a vision once, at Brandeis University. It was at commencement. I had ducked commencement for years, but this one I couldn’t duck; I was corralled. And I felt there was something kind of stupid about these processions and idiotic medieval caps and gowns. This time, as the faculty stood waiting for the procession to begin, for some reason there was suddenly this vision. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was as if I could imagine very vividly a long academic procession. (This makes me cry, actually.) It went way the hell into the future, into some kind of misty, cloudy thing. The procession contained all my past colleagues, all the people I like, you know, Erasmus, Socrates. And then the procession extended into a dim cloud in which were all sorts of people not yet born. And these were also my colleagues. I felt very brotherly toward them, these future ones. It’s the transcending of time and space, which becomes quite normal. Robert Kegan, who’s one of the foremost theorists in this area, says that in his data set, he finds that nobody really gets to stage five until age forty. You have to have had decades of experience in order to begin to get this sense of one’s extension in time, of being the past and being the future at the same time. And maybe it’s not until you get to forty that that really sinks in and shapes you. This sense of the diffusion of oneself, of being extended, being the space, leads you to experience “me” as being one of the things that happens within the space of activity. So “me” is just one object among all these other happening things. It’s not that you stop having a self, it’s that the selfing is an activity that happens within the space that you are. And lots of different kinds of selfing activity may arise from the field, and dance around, and then submerge again. And this is very funny ! It leads to a sense of humor about oneself. You can’t take yourself seriously if you’re just this little dancing puppet. So you’re much less bothered by people’s negative opinions about you, because the “me” is not an especially significant thing in there. So you’re freed up to play . It’s serious play, because you do care for the whole field, but you’re not identified with outcomes. You are aware of risks; you take sensible actions. You may be unhappy when things go badly, but it’s not saying something about you so much anymore. Within the field of activity, because you are seeing through multiple lenses, there’s a lot of scope for paradox, for contradiction, that you’re seeing in different ways simultaneously. And this is really funny, and enjoyable, because contradiction is no longer a problem. You can integrate both sides of a contradiction, without needing to resolve it in favor of one side or the other; because these are both valid ways of looking at things. So that was me sounding like I’m on drugs. Academic accounts I’m going to now briefly talk about a series of academic characterizations of stage five. It may actually be helpful to see how each of these descriptions is incomplete or inaccurate; so one can understand what stage five is in terms of what it isn’t, quite. Similarly, a lot of the standard explanations of stage five are in terms of what it isn’t; namely, stage four. As you’ve heard, it’s really difficult to describe stage five in its own terms. And as you move toward a new stage, or are not yet firmly embedded in it, it’s actually a lot easier to look back at the previous stage, and say “not that,” than to look forward, or down or around, and say, okay, this is where I am now, and this is how it is. This is on top of the problem that stage five, unlike stage four, is mostly not about explicit representations, which are easy to verbalize. The term “ stage five ” itself is really a “what it isn’t” description: namely, it isn’t stage four; it’s something else. It’s good as a term, and I use it a lot, because it’s basically meaningless. It doesn’t try to tell you what stage five is, and so that leaves it as an open space of possibility; where a bunch of these other academic terms are trying to nail it down, in a way that doesn’t seem to be all that helpful. Calling it “stage five” does drag in Piaget’s stage theory, which is definitely questionable. “Is there actually such a thing as a stage?” This is a question! And using the term “stage five” prejudges that; so I actually also like to use other terms, which don’t prejudge that. I use the term “ fluid .” This is good primarily by contrast with stage four, which is really marked by its rigidity, its dualism. Stage four is about “ this , not that ”: sharp distinctions, logic. There’s a couple of problems with the term “fluid.” One is that it could describe stage three, which is also non-rigid. Another is that a fluid is homogeneous and undifferentiated, and stage five isn’t that. So the term “fluid” might point toward what I call “monism,” the “All Is One” idea; that is definitely not what stage five is about! Stage five, we saw, is intensely attuned to details and differences, as well as the big picture. The first term for stage five was “ post-formal. ” That is defining it in terms of what Piaget had said stage four was, namely formal. There’s a quote here, from a review article: Various theories arose, which were based on the assumption. The distinctive characteristic was the acceptance and integration of various, at times incompatible, truths; which were highly dependent upon context, and upon the way in which the subject perceives them; without the subject needing, as in stage four, to look for and find a single truth. Such theories provoked great enthusiasm in the scientific community. I think that is a relatively accurate description of an important aspect of stage five. “Post-formal” points to a rejection of propositional logic, which goes all the way back to Aristotle. It’s the logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle; that every statement is either absolutely true or absolutely false; and that’s something that stage five critically rejects. This is not a new idea. So, one of the first terms applied to stage five, in the 1970s, was “ dialectical ”; and this is going back to Hegel, who is not my favorite person. But we do have to admit that Hegel had a bunch of ideas that were wrong in detail, but in general trend turned out to be really important and correct in some ways; and one was his rejection of Aristotelian true/false logic. And that’s what “dialectic” is supposed to be about. It’s taking multiple frameworks and aiming for a synthesis, or at least working with the contradiction, without trying to resolve it. Another early term besides “dialectical” that was applied to stage five was “ reflective .” This is good because it describes the way that stage five stands apart from systems and can take this view from above and around; not being locked into a system, but looking outside on top of it; and being able to intervene in systems from outside. This isn’t, however, really unique to stage five. Kegan says that each stage is in some sense a theory of the previous stage. So stage four is a theory of stage three. Relationships are the substance, or a critical part of the substance, of stage three, and they’re not thematized. You are in relationships. Stage four is a theory of relationships. It structures relationships, and you have to reflect on relationships. So reflectiveness is not actually a distinctive feature of stage

13. Stage five is nothing special from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 19, 20258 min

    A nine-minute radio sermonette. I think I may be doing a bunch of these. Subscribe to get all of them! Possibly I’ll create one every day or two ! And maybe you don’t want that many emails? So I could post these as Substack Notes , and collect them into emailed posts, sent once a week maximum? What do you think? Transcript In the 1970s, researchers in cognitive developmental psychology discovered something that may have great practical power ; and is underappreciated, I think. The researchers applied Jean Piaget’s four-stage model of childhood cognitive development to college students and other adults. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is formal rationality, and the researchers found, first, that many adults are not able to reliably think systematically, rationally, or formally. This may not come as a surprise to you, but it did to them at the time! It contradicted Piaget’s beliefs. More importantly, the researchers found that some adults, after mastering rationality, went on to develop a further form of cognition, which they called post-formal ; or meta-systematic; or stage five . Stage five is less about problem solving, which is the essence of stage four, than about problem finding, choosing problems, and formulating them. And stage five often applies multiple or unexpected forms of thought, when in complex, nebulous situations. By contrast, stage four tends to unthinkingly apply some supposedly-correct rational method, disregarding contextual clues that some other approach might work better. I’ve written quite a lot about this , because I think it’s critical now for cultural and social progress, as well as personal and intellectual development. However, while I said that stage five seems underappreciated to me, it may also be over -appreciated, in a sense, by some people. There is a tendency to sacralize it; to treat it almost religiously. This is a pretty common misunderstanding! Achieving stage five does not make you special in any way. It’s not sainthood, enlightenment, ultimate wisdom, or any other sort of perfection. Making stage five sound special is misleading and unhelpful, because it puts it out of reach. It suggests that only super-duper-special people could ever be that way. But, in fact, it’s an unusual but feasible way of being. You don’t need to be something special to make the transition from stage four to stage five. You don’t need any expectation or intention of becoming something special. Those are obstacles, actually! Because specialness is a metaphysical idea. So, thinking that stage five is something ultimate leads you to try to reach it through spiritual, philosophical, metaphysical means, almost by magic, where you think that it’s going to descend on you out of the sky. And this doesn’t work! You can work towards stage five in a practical way. It’s not something that just happens to you because you’ve gotten to be sufficiently meritorious. You actually have to do the work . And doing that unlocks new capabilities, even before you can consistently inhabit the way of being. Before you’re “at” stage five, you can begin to do the thing . So, I wonder where this wrong idea, that this is a special, almost religious achievement— where does this idea come from? It seems to be a natural human thing to harbor a hope for ultimacy: for a possibility that we can transcend the mundane world; that we can become special, elevated above this ordinary place. And making stage five special, sacred in a secular sense, seems to be a manifestation of that hope. To be fair, there are genuine similarities between stage five and some Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment. Stage five does involve a partial melting of the imaginary boundary between yourself and everything else. You realize that you are in constant interaction with your circumstances, and that you and your environment are constantly reshaping each other, so your experience of self and time and space expands. This is not, however, an experience of not having any sort of self. It’s rather that you encompass a broader and more precise vision of the diverse details of the world. You may come to find that you have different selves in different situations . And at first this may seem frightening, fake alienating, or confusing, like which is the “real me.” But, with growing confidence, you find that you can step into dissimilar, unfamiliar contexts, and become whatever they need. This fluidity of self is always a work in progress. It’s never perfected, but it’s a capacity that you can develop increasingly. I think that to be useful, or even meaningful, developmental theory needs to be based in detailed, realistic observation of actual people engaged in actual activities. For stages one through four, the Piagetian program, that’s been done extensively. But when it comes to stage five, there’s much less of that than I would like. And this makes me quite uncomfortable in talking about it, because we are really relying to a significant extent on personal experience and anecdata. Sometimes when people recognize that stage five is a merely mundane capability, they want it to be metaphysical. And so they posit some stage six, or even a hierarchy of further stages, as leading to a metaphysical perfection of what it means to be human, and to transcend being human even, maybe. This gives rise to metaphysical speculation, rather than empirical investigation. And there’s a lot of nonsense in the adult developmental literature as a consequence. That said, there are quite a few down-to-earth, practical, empirical studies of stage five in the academic literature. Less than I would like, but we can draw understanding and inspiration from those that have been done. ​ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

14. Fivefold confidence from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 17, 20258 min

    Emptiness, form, and the Big Bang 𐡸 How understanding creates students 𐡸 Buddhism outside institutions This short video explains two stanzas from the Evolving Ground invocation liturgy. The first is an origin myth, and the second explains the prerequisites for successful Buddhist teaching. Each reworks traditional themes and scriptural motifs in a contemporary worldview. The video is extracted from a recording of an Evolving Ground Vajrayana Q&A session. I host those monthly, and they’re free for all Evolving Ground members. Membership in Evolving Ground is also free. Transcript Origin myth, metaphysics, physics Primordial chaos and eternal order: Quantum flux and unified field: Emptiness explodes into form: Diversity and unity emerge. I would say this text is simultaneously extremely traditional and also extremely untraditional. There’s an order to it, which is emanational. “Emanational” is the idea that everything comes from emptiness, and there are successive waves of manifestation out of emptiness. Emptiness is perfectly simple, and form emerges through, initially, energy; and then form. And this can have a metaphysical interpretation, and that’s very traditional. I don’t like the metaphysical interpretation. The first paragraph is just very slightly snarky in this way. It is saying: traditionally we have the emanation from emptiness, and this is a little bit metaphysical. This is an allusion to the big bang, in current physics. And this is a sort of a slightly snarky commentary on, look, if we have to have an origin story, let’s have one that is modern Western understanding instead of this thing; but at the same time , it’s being the traditional emanational story. So it’s, it’s kind of doing both things at once! Fivefold confidence Because emptiness and form exist, time and place come into being. Because receptive awareness exists, understanding comes into being. Because understanding exists, students come into being. Because students exist, teachers come into being. The fivefold confidence is traditionally called the “five perfections” or the “five certainties.” It can be taught in a variety of quite different seeming ways. I will briefly sketch a religious or metaphysical interpretation, a practice interpretation, and a pragmatic interpretation. The five things are the time, the place, the teaching, the— traditionally, the word is “retinue”— the students; and the teacher. So there’s those five things, and the religious way of presenting this is that every Buddhist scripture begins with that : “Thus have I heard: Once the Blessed One was teaching at Raja Griha on Vulture Peak Mountain,” yada yada yada, this is the way scriptures begin. So it’s setting the place and the time and the teacher. It’s like, “together with a great gathering of bodhisattvas.” This is the Heart Sutra version. There’s who’s there, and then what the teaching is, and the whole rest of the scripture is what the teacher said on this particular occasion. In Tantra, the teacher is a Sambhogakaya Buddha. That means a Buddha made of energy. And the retinue is a group of enlightened supernormal beings. And the place is some kind of fairyland. And the time is eternity. The tantric Buddha is timeless and is speaking to us right now in this instant. One can find that inspiring, and it makes sense of the structure of a scripture. The practice of this is a practice of pure vision. This is describing a gathering, in which teaching occurs. We can practice seeing each other as being fully enlightened divine beings. And this makes the teaching more feasible. The pragmatic interpretation is that in order for a real life down-to-earth practice session on Zoom to be effective, these are the five conditions that need to be in place. And for you to participate fully and effectively, it’s helpful to be confident in each of those five factors: that you are in the right place, at the right time, with an adequate group of students who you feel copacetic feelings for; and the teaching is one that is relevant to you, and that will make sense, and maybe (at best) be inspiring. And the teacher has some sort of basic idea of what they’re talking about, which is dubious in my case. Time and place come into being “Because emptiness and form exist, time and place come into being.” That’s just the pragmatics of mundane reality. But because we have some appreciation for what “emptiness and form” means, this is a place and this is a time where we can explore that. Understanding comes into being “Because receptive awareness exists, understanding comes into being.” Before it’s meaningful to engage in a session like this, you need to have some kind of pre-understanding of why this is attractive and interesting and relevant for you. Students come into being Because that pre-understanding exists, that is what means that you are a participant. (The word here is student.) Teachers come into being “Because students exist, teachers come into being.” Uh, this is simultaneously traditional and untraditional. In institutional Buddhism, somebody gets designated as a teacher by, and blessed by, an institution. And they’re told, yes, you’re a teacher. But! In Tibet, it’s also very traditional for people to gather around some person just because they seem to know what they’re talking about, and maybe are inspiring in some way. And then that person winds up being drafted , essentially, as a teacher. So that’s the sense in which, because students exist, teachers come into being. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

15. This is it! from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 14, 20257 min

    A seven-minute radio sermonette. Transcript This is it! We’re actually here . I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can hear my voice. I’m in a place. I’m in this world. You’re in a place. You’re in a room, you’re out walking, you’re driving in a car, and you can see what place you’re in. We are in the actual world . There are people of a religious or philosophical bent, they say, no, this isn’t the real world . We’re not really here. Everything we see is an illusion. Or, this is a garbage world. We’re stuck here, but the real world is somewhere else. It is quite different and it is much better. The “real world” might be somewhat unimaginable. We can have some fantasies about it, but what we do know, they say, is that it is perfect! This is a vision that is attractive when it seems like this world is no damn good. The message that this is a garbage world then becomes really attractive, and we want a way of escape to some other, better world. So this is an idea that is just absolutely part of our basic way of being, and we’re imaginatively living in some fantasy land a lot of the time. We’re not actually willing to admit that we are here . The only reason for thinking that there might be some better world is the sense that life couldn’t be so unfair that we’re stuck here in a world that is completely meaningless, worthless. It is dust and ashes. It’s garbage. The idea that there is some other better world is obviously false . And so there’s a way of reacting to that, which is to say, yeah, we have to face up to the fact that this is all there is. “Is this all there is? Yeah. This is all there is. So I guess we have to make the best of it.” This leads to a kind of brutal materialism , in which we imagine, okay, the world is actually meaningless, but we evolved to like some things and dislike some other things. And so, we haven’t actually got any choice here. All we can do is try to get as much of the stuff we like as possible, and accumulate it and consume it. And try to get rid of as much of the bad stuff. This isn’t even hedonism. I mean, hedonism would be better than this! This is a grind. Hedonism is a kind of carefree enjoyment of sensory pleasure where you can get it. This kind of materialistic outlook is actually joyless. So this fantasy that there’s a better world leads to the fantasy that this world is meaningless and ordinary; and that all that is possible is engaging with it in an ordinary way. It’s like: Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Is that all there is? “Yeah, that’s all there is,” this materialist view says. And that’s completely wrong. Because the world isn’t ordinary. The world is absolutely extraordinary. The actual world, not this imaginary fantasy world. The actual world is incredible. It is just amazingly beautiful. If you look around wherever you are. There’s colors, there’s shapes, there’s things happening. There’s plants growing here, and there’s these books that are such incredible colors! And we don’t want to see that, because the extraordinariness is threatening. It could be overwhelming. The beauty is overwhelming. The possibility of joy is overwhelming because it can be taken away at any moment. And the horror , the amount of absolute terror and suffering that is going on in the world, we just don’t want to deal with any of that. It’s just too much. And so we unsee it. And we know yes , flowers are beautiful. Okay, yes, everybody knows that. And yes, you can look at flowers and they’re nice. And we also know there’s horrific wars going on with people being bombed and mutilated and dying in the street and living in absolute terror. And that’s somewhere else . “Let’s be in the ordinary world because the extraordinary world is too much to deal with.” So we narrow our scope of vision to what’s immediately on our plate... Taxes are due tomorrow , we’d better stick to taxes. There’s nothing more ordinary than taxes, let’s face it. “And that’s life.” So we shut out the actual world and live in a different fantasy world, not the fantasy world of the perfected philosophical utopia, or religious enlightenment or something. We live in the fantasy world of ordinariness. It is possible to start poking holes in the cloak of unseeing we put in front of the world, and to let a little light in, so that suddenly the intense red and blue of these books shows up as something remarkable and not just, “oh yes, that’s a book.” Then we don’t have to live in the ordinary world. We can live in the actual world, which is extraordinary. Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. It’s changed my writing from a surprisingly expensive hobby into a surprisingly remunerative hobby (but not yet a real income). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

16. Rigpa and ethical nihilism from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Apr 11, 20257 min

    Rigpa is Dzogchen’s word roughly equivalent to “enlightenment.” But what is rigpa, actually? And what does it imply for ethics? A conversation with Varun Godbole . This is a clip from the monthly Q&A I host for Evolving Ground , a community for contemporary Vajrayana practice. Participation in the Q&A sessions is free for Evolving Ground members, and membership in Evolving Ground is also free. Our next Vajrayana Q&A is tomorrow, Saturday April 12th, 2025! Transcript That’s rigpa Varun: I’m still not sure I understand what rigpa is or why you would want it. Which is, which is like, um, yeah. Would you, would you be willing to, like, talk— David: Oh, you look like you’re enjoying yourself? Are you enjoying yourself? This isn’t a trick question. It’s just a straightforward one. You’ve got a big grin! Varun: I, I’m enjoying the absurdity of the question itself. It’s like, yeah, these practices—for reasons I don’t understand, but I’m doing them anyway—towards a goal I can’t comprehend or understand! But, I guess it’s fine, and I’m doing it anyway, with a bunch of people that are cool, whose company I enjoy, for reasons I don’t know. And I don’t know, there’s like an element of absurdity that just comes to my head when I ask this question, and I can’t help but laugh at it. David: Yeah. So that’s rigpa. Varun: What? David: That’s rigpa. Varun: What? David: So the element of absurdity and, and, and finding the humor in this situation. There’s rigpa. Varun: Right. I don’t know how to react to what you just said. David: Perfect. Varun: Right. So is this it? I’m enlightened? Is that, is that, is that what you’re saying? Is that, is that right? David: Yeah. Everybody’s always enlightened. And rigpa’s kind of noticing that, and finding the absurdity in an ordinary situation, and enjoying that is… That can cut straight to it. Isn’t that just nihilism? Varun: But isn’t that— if I pull this thread too much, isn’t that just nihilism ? David: Why? Varun: Because… I don’t know, isn’t it good to do good things? David: Yeah, it is. Varun: But how will I know what’s good? If it’s just all vibes, then aren’t I just like doing whatever I want, effectively? David: Ah… right. Um, Varun: Isn’t that— David: This is, this is a different question! Um, If you start from the absurdity and the enjoyment, then you won’t be doing what you want. You’ll be spontaneously acting beneficially. Varun: Yeah. So this is what I have trouble with, right? I’m acting spontaneously, but how do I know it’s actually beneficent? David: You don’t. Varun: But then… David: I mean, you can never know whether what you do is going to be beneficial. I mean, one should be sensible, and sensitive, and understand basic ethical principles. And no amount of that is ever going to guarantee that what you do is not going to be harmful or hurtful. Um, there isn’t any framework within which we can find certainty about anything , but in particular about benefit. We can develop the intention to be beneficial, which is what Bodhisattvayana is about. Bodhisattvayana is about developing that heartfelt sense of wanting everybody to be well. But that doesn’t mean that you’re actually going to be able to do anything about it. It doesn’t mean you’re never going to hurt people. You will. Varun: I see. So rigpa isn’t really about normativity in some sense. David: Absolutely not. Yes. Varun: Okay. That’s really helpful. It seems like, I think, I think what I struggle with, with rigpa, right, is: I don’t know how to square that with this idea that I want to engage in ethical behavior, but I may self-deceive myself about whether I’m being ethical or not, in various ways of the word self, like the term self-deception. David: Mm-hmm. Varun: And if I understand you correctly, what I’m hearing is that rigpa isn’t really about, like these Dzogchen practices aren’t really about ethics . David: Not at all. Absolutely not at all. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

17. The incomparable value of being wrong from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Jan 28, 202558 min

    What is learning math good for? — Robert Kegan and “meaning-making” — Existentialism’s error — Narcissism and tyranny — How can we avoid radical relativism? — My experience of teaching This is the video from my January 2025 monthly AMA (“Ask Me Anything”). As a cine auteur , for previous AMA recordings, I have insisted on the director’s cut , editing both the video and text transcript carefully, out of respect for viewers, listeners, and readers. The CFO of the studio, Nebulonic Media Productions Inc., put his foot down this time. It takes more than two full days for me—the creator and director of the thing!—to edit the hour’s recording. He says they can’t afford that anymore. They want efficiency, they want me to ship product , they want — blah, blah, blah, business-speak . I am an artist , I said! No, he said, you are employed as a media professional, which means optimizing yadda yadda , and don’t you forget it . So this is management’s cut. They made an intern run the video through “artificial intelligence,” and he pushed a couple buttons, and it cut out some “ums,” and it generated a transcript that bears nearly zero resemblance to what I said . It’s a travesty. (Let me know what you think!) Thanks to all who participated! And specifically to Nicolai Amrehn , Fatima Ali , Vinod Khare , Peter , Max H , Jared Janes , COPONDER , Adam Tropp , and Mike Travers , for posing and/or helping answer questions. There’s an embarrassing error in this at 6:48. I meant to say that US GDP is around $35 trillion (actually $29 trillion in 2024), but said billion. It was Bill Gate’s fortune that was (at the time) around $35 billion. Sections 0:00 Max Langenkamp ’s Reader’s Guide to David Chapman 1:00 Evolving Ground book club: Pema Chödrön 3:23 What is learning math good for? 4:34 You can check many public claims with a little math 8:59 Learning what it means to be wrong lets you appreciate formal rationality 11:50 Mathematics is the ideological basis for the modern world 16:43 How does meaning ness differ from meaning- making ? 19:24 Robert Kegan and "meaning-making" in educational theory 21:28 Existentialism's error : subjective theories of meaning 26:07 We can't be special . We shouldn't be ordinary . We can be noble . 30:35 Heidegger , authenticity, and being-toward-death 35:38 How can we avoid radical relativism? 47:02 The meaningfulness of programs, programming languages, and programming paradigms 52:47 Hope for more sensible governance 54:19 Approaching Vividness : new course, now in beta 56:15 My experience of teaching : thank you! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

18. When the proof comes as white light and angels from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Dec 30, 202421 min

    The felt experience of mathematics — witchcraft and black magic — “Shut up, kid!” — what is a real number? — shocked and embarrassed — clouds all the way down — a choir of angels singing — painting Cthulhu’s third eye on the walls of our mathematics and science departments Video from a monthly live Ask-Me-Anything! The transcript is below. The web page adds fun illustrations, and a wonderful comic strip, as mentioned in the video! But first, how to join us next time: It will be Sunday, January 26th, 9 a.m. Pacific Time . To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already. It helps me a lot if you pose questions ahead of time, so I can prepare a bit! You could post them as a comment here, or you can put them in the chat thread. Transcript The book Mathematica , by David Bessis Big series of questions from Tobin Davis-Jones in the web chat, which I found fascinating because it connects with something that’s personally very important for me. His questions are, and observations concern, or are sparked by, a book called Mathematica by David Bessis. He began by asking if I’ve read that. I haven’t. A number of people have recommended it to me, and said “this is going to be relevant for you.” I read a bunch of reviews and boy, it sure is relevant for me! I gave a copy to my spouse Charlie Awbery for their birthday, which was a couple weeks ago, and they’ve been reading it and raving about it. So I’m planning to borrow it when they’re done. Envisioning: the felt experience of mathematics Tobin says, “Students of rationality often complain that the symbols on the page of rationality are impossibly dull and intimidating. Bessis says that that’s because we neglect to explain that there’s an associated living internal experience of imagination and intuition that is required to really understand and apply formal methods.” Yes! Part Three of my meta-rationality book is supposed to go into this in a lot of detail. If you go to the metarationality.com site and find Part Three, which is called “ Wielding the power of meaninglessness: Taking rationality seriously ,” that has a sketch, currently only, of what I’m going to be saying about this. For lack of a better word, I call this process of “imagination and intuition,” I call it “ envisioning ,” because it is similar to mental imagery, but it’s not the same. It has a kinesthetic component. There’s a wonderful piece by Terry Tao, who’s one of the greatest living mathematicians, about how when he was trying to understand a particular difficult piece of mathematics, he was rolling around on the floor , his whole body, feeling the effect of some mathematical function. There’s a great quote from Einstein about this, where he says, um, it’s partly sort of visual, but it’s partly… propriostatic, proprio… that word! So you’re actually grabbing the mathematical objects, and you’re doing things with them. Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. It’s changed my writing from a surprisingly expensive hobby into a surprisingly remunerative hobby (but not yet a real income). I’ve thought a lot about this. I was a math undergraduate. I saw people struggling with this. And for a lot of them, the problem was, and I found this really difficult myself. I got better at it. But translating between the symbols and the really felt experience of the mathematical dynamics, the objects in motion? Tobin asked, “Is this part of meta-rationality?” I categorize it in the book as being part of what I call “ advanced rationality .” Advanced rationality comes when your cookbook of methods that you were taught runs out, and you have to confront this situation without any definite method. And envisioning becomes particularly important at that point. Envisioning is also really important in meta-rationality, but I think it’s not necessarily part of meta-rationality as I use that term. Is the stage theory of development correct or necessary? Tobin asks, “You tend to position meta-rationality as a discrete stage that comes after rationality. Must there be stages?” This is an excellent question. This is controversial in the literature on this topic. I have a draft webpage about this. It’s fairly high priority. I want to get to it sooner rather than later. This stage model is just a model. Like all models, formal and informal models, you have to apply it intelligently in a particular situation, and bear in mind that its applicability is always an imperfect fit; there’s some nebulosity. And be aware of the ways in which the model can mislead as well as illuminate. The stages aren’t really discrete, they do shade into each other, and whether they’re even meaningful for a particular purpose can vary. Tobin says, “Or, can meta-rational thinking be incorporated into teaching and learning even when a student hasn’t yet mastered rational techniques?” Well, I think full mastery is not necessary, but you need to have basic proficiency with a chunk of rationality before you could be meta-rational with regard to that chunk. And meta-rationality particularly comes into its own when either you’ve got a choice of rational systems you might apply; or you can’t find any, and you have to create a new one from scratch. So there’s some amount of proficiency with rationality that’s needed first, but certainly this envisioning thing is something I think we could and should be teaching much earlier and much more. Mathematics is witchcraft and black magic There’s a quote here from Mathematica : The more I advanced, the further I dove into the heart of mathematics, the more I learned to master the techniques that facilitate deep understanding and creativity, the more it began to resemble witchcraft and black magic . Well, here at this point, my ears prick up in a big way! Because I have practiced witchcraft in Wicca before I became a Buddhist, and black magic is a big part historically of Vajrayana , which is the style of Buddhism that I practice. I’ve got a whole website called Buddhism for Vampires , which is essentially about that, and it’s sparked by my horror at realizing that this very nice religion that I was practicing, which is all grounded on taking a vow to always benefit all sentient beings— how can black magic be a part of that ? This is a big question. So I’ve got a website about it. And wow, this connects with mathematics ? Mathematica , the book, goes on: Descartes thought that mathematicians guarded their secrets for fear of losing their prestige. The real explanation is undoubtedly more trivial. Mathematicians are simply afraid of being called insane. I’ve got another explanation which I will suggest. I’m not sure about this, but if you admit that you’re doing black magic when you’re doing mathematics, maybe that could be a bit embarrassing or problematic. So, yeah! “Bessis describes many truly great mathematicians who, when pushed in private, describe their methods in mystical terms: whispered by God, visited by spirits in dreams, communing with the universe, third eyes and sixth senses.” (Sixth sense is envisioning, I think!) “These ways of thinking produced undeniable results, and yet there isn’t a place in our current rationalist culture for that kind of language.” Yes, I’m constantly down on rationalism for being an inadequate, incomplete, wrong story about how rationality works, and Part Three of the meta-rationality book is my alternative story about how mathematics works, and about how rationality works: science, engineering, mathematics. “These are brilliant mathematicians with real results trying to tell us something about how their brains do rationality.” Yes, it’s not what you get taught in the STEM curriculum , which teaches you rationalism, which is a basically religious theory of rationality, which is unhelpful. I observed this a lot. I did an undergraduate degree in mathematics and then I did a PhD in computer science; while I was doing that, I took a bunch of graduate level math courses. So I saw a lot. There’s my own experience of doing mathematics, and other STEM subjects. I went on and I did a lot of molecular biology, and then worked in a chemistry company. So I saw how people do rationality, and I have the experience of doing rationality, and the rationalist story is inadequate. The taboo against talking about what mathematics is With regard to math in particular, there is a very unhelpful taboo against talking about what it is like and how we do it. And I gather that’s what Bessis’ book is about. So I’m really excited to read that. When I was a math undergraduate, I’d often put up my my hand to ask a question in class. I wasn’t trying to be difficult, but I’d ask, “What is this thing? What are we doing here? How does this work?” And the answer was always, basically, “Shut up, kid!” And my fellow math undergraduates weren’t willing to talk about it, really, either. There’s a particular moment that I remember vividly, as a turning point for me. I was in an introductory analysis class , which… when you do calculus, the calculus class is all lies. The things they tell you aren’t true; they’re simplifications, which is good pedagogy. They’re directionally correct, but every single statement has… the reality is much more complicated. And the analysis class, you basically just go back over the whole of the calculus curriculum, and do it over again with fewer lies. So it’s about real numbers, which is what calculus is mostly about. And I put up my hand, and the professor called on me, and I said, “So, uh, I don’t, um, what is a real number?” And the professor actually looked kind of shocked and flustered. And he paused for a minute to kind of collect himself, and then he said, “Well, if this was a foundations class , this is a sort of question we might address, but this isn’t, so we’re going to go on.” I was like, “Well, hold on a moment. Um, I’ve had that answer before, a few times, and I kind of, I’m taking analysis because I thought this would tell me the foundations of calculus, that we would get real here and explain what was going on. And, um, but so apparently I need to take the foundations class. In this department, at this university, which is the foundations class?” And then he looked shocked again. He said, “Well, maybe there’s something in the philosophy department… yeah, they don’t do one either. Um, you could go to Harvard, you could see if they have one.” (I was at MIT at the time, and MIT and Harvard students can take each other’s classes.) So he didn’t know where you could find out what a real number was. He probably didn’t know himself! He was shocked and embarrassed, and then hurriedly went on with what he wanted to say about whatever it was. So I decided, at this point, I wasn’t going to get any answers. And I went to the library and dug around, and spent a couple of days there, and got the— Yeah! Dan Dapper says “ Dedekind cuts .” I got the official answer, which satisfied me at the time. There’s two official stories about what real numbers are, which are Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences, which are really interesting! They’re also kind of wrong. And when people realized at the beginning, early 20th century, that this doesn’t actually work, there was a major crisis, and it kind of looked like mathematics might just completely fall apart. I’ve got a page on meaningness.com called “ How rational certainty collapsed ,” which is about what happened then. And the reality is, if you look for foundations for mathematics… People go into mathematics thinking they’re going to find absolute truth, and if you dig deep enough under those supposed absolute truths, you find it is clouds. There is no foundation other than clouds. It’s clouds all the way down. And I think a lot of mathematicians have read about this, and they realize there’s something scary there; and this is another part, probably, of why there’s a taboo about real talk about what math is, because it’s on sand, or clouds. I’m ranting. Blinding white light and angels I’ll tell one more story, which is relevant to the mystical aspect. This was some years later. I was in a graduate-level seminar on Kolmogorov complexity, which is, uh, you may have heard of Solomonoff induction. Kolmogorov complexity is essentially the same idea with a slightly different formalism. There’s a third version of it due to Gregory Chaitin. They all had more or less the same idea at the same time. This is fascinating stuff. There’s a problem set, homework assignment, that had like five questions on it maybe, and the day before I had done problems one through four, which were not too difficult, and problem five I didn’t get done. And so I started in the morning working on problem five. I was working on that all day, nonstop. To do mathematics, you really need to focus, and if it’s a hard problem, you need to focus continuously, without interruption for long periods. So it was like late afternoon, early evening maybe. I hadn’t gotten anywhere. It was really frustrating. And then suddenly I had, I received this insight. It was a really big deal. I actually can’t remember this. I think I was in the room that I shared with Mike Travers , who’s in our session here now! Um, sitting at the desk there. I have the diary entry from it, which is all I know, but the diary entry said this insight came to me as blinding white light and a choir of angels singing. I think that must be metaphorical? I don’t think that was my literal experience, but it was the best I could do to communicate something that felt really important to me as a spiritual experience. And once I had this, I had to translate whatever this felt sense of the insight was into the symbols on the page that I could turn in as a homework assignment. But the experience was the thing. So I think we should talk about these things! You know, it’s sort of embarrassing to say “I had a mystical experience.” It makes it sound like it was a big deal, but it was just a homework assignment. I wasn’t proving anything new. I was being dumb. It shouldn’t have taken me all day to do this. Let’s tell those taboo stories about mathematical experience! Tobin asks “When thinking of someone such as a young scientist in the making, how can we help that person to make sense of such stories?” Well, I think we should just tell them. I mean, you can find some of these stories. I’ve been collecting them to put into Part Three of the meta-rationality book, but they’re few and far between! People are… it’s a taboo because it’s embarrassing . It’s like talking about your personal experience of sex. Several people said this to me. And, you know, I’m more willing to talk about my personal experience of sex than most people are. So I lack some kind of inhibition; that makes me willing to talk about math. I think we should try and explain as best we can, even though these experiences are not very effable. They’re a little bit effable. I mean, just being able to say you have to translate between the symbols on the page and some kind of internal experience: that may be something that a lot of people are missing. When I saw people struggling with math, I think in a lot of cases it was because they didn’t know even that they should be making that translation, much less how. I don’t know how to teach how to do that, but I think we could try to draw our experience? We could paint it? In a 2019 tweet thread, I asked how we can help each other break the code of silence. “A podcast series? A public, recorded virtual conference/workshop? A subreddit? A dedicated web site?” That thread was a follow-on to this one , about the experience of “envisioning.” There were many interesting replies, too! What is your experience of envisioning like? Or other felt experiences of doing rationality? Please leave a comment! I think we all have the sense that we’re bad at it. There’s a passage from Richard Feynman, who was one of the greatest physicists of all time, and one of the ones who was most willing to talk about what it is like. Not very willing! But he’s got a passage where he talks about his experience of what I call “envisioning,” and he kind of dumps on himself. He says it’s “a kind of half-assed semi-vision thing.” And the “semi-vision” is right because it’s also “motoric.” There’s a passage from Einstein where he says it’s got this motor aspect to it, of moving things. But, you know, Feynman was embarrassed to talk about his experience of this! So, we should all admit to feeling, “Uh, you know, I’m embarrassed to talk about this because I don’t think I’m very good at it.” And I felt like I didn’t quite have what it would take to become a professional mathematician. And I think that was partly a suspicion of “Yeah, I’m actually bad at that .” I was actually much better at the symbols on the page. I can do that. That makes me more like a computer scientist than like a mathematician. So Tobin asked, “Can we embed those experiences in a kind of meta-rational understanding?” Yes. Part Four of the meta-rationality book, which I’m struggling with now, is supposed to do that. “Do we need to invent new, more polite terms for this kind of thing?” I invented the word “envisioning,” because it’s a little more polite than “this half-assed, semi-vision-like thing.” Rationality is embarrassing because it’s freaky! Not respectable! “Or should we just use the old freaky ones?” Well, let’s try both ! We’re not talking about this at all. So we can talk about it lots of different ways and see what works for people. “Should we paint third eye symbols on the brutalist walls of our mathematics and science departments?” Yes! Let’s do that! I’m reminded of, again, in the undergraduate house that I shared with Mike Travers, who’s here now. There was a very talented artist who was our roommate also. We were in a four person room. He painted a comic, in which there was the third eye symbol, from a dollar bill, in a pyramid. And we were reading this book called Illuminatus! , which I’ve written a webpage about somewhere. I recommend it. It’s freaky! There’s the tentacles of Cthulhu along the bottom of the pyramid, and he had a hand coming out of the bottom of the pyramid, pointing at the tape of a Turing machine, with cabalistic symbols on the Turing machine tape. And I just loved this, and I wanted to paint it on the corridor wall of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. I think it would have been fantastic. So yeah, let’s do that kind of thing. Let’s make explicit that what we’re doing is freaky. Rationalism is all about trying to make rationality acceptable and respectable. And it really kind of isn’t. The cartoon, by Dave Mankins Mike Travers put me in touch with Dave Mankins, who drew the comic strip I exclaimed over in the video. It’s titled Mens et Manus , “mind and hand,” which is the official motto of MIT. Dave has kindly given me permission to reproduce it here, under the CC-BY-NC-SA license. It originally appeared in 1981 in Link , an MIT student newpaper we both wrote for. ( Link was founded by our friend Brewster Kahle , who later founded the Internet Archive , sharing the same ideals.) I hadn’t seen this in forty-three years! It’s just as fun as I remember it! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

19. Myth, adult developmental stages, and entrepreneurship from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Nov 28, 202444 min

    How thoughts work — goddesses at the origin of philosophy — inspiration in adult development — how myths transform society and culture — Spock and Jimi Hendrix — entrepreneurship, purpose, and value Video from a monthly live Ask-Me-Anything! How to participate next time , and more info: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/myth-adult-development-entrepreneurship Unexpected connections Everything is connected to everything else; and this is very inconvenient! It’d be much tidier if everything would stay in its own box. But, it’s also fascinating and wonderful how things connect. And we’re going to see ways in which my recent posts, and the questions, and my random rambling are going to tie together in ways that I find unexpected, and really kind of cool. My “bad brain” joke, and the nature of mind I made a series of jokes about my “bad brain.” My bad brain decides what I’m going to write, because it gets really excited about something or other and says, we’re writing that! And I say no, that’s dumb, and there’s no good reason to write that, I’ve got too many things to write already; and my brain says, nope, nope, we’re writing that! And I’m like, yeah, you write that! But usually my brain doesn’t, so_ I_ have to write it, and this is really quite annoying! This is a joke. And, I got some feedback from people who I think didn’t quite get the joke. And I was talking with my spouse Charlie Awbery , who is a meditation teacher, and they said, “Well, this is a joke which you get if you meditate; and if you don’t meditate, maybe you don’t see the point of the joke.” The point of the joke is: when you start meditating, you have the idea that you’re gonna, like, clear your mind and concentrate, and all of the stupid mental junk will go away. And the first thing you discover is, you can’t do that. You try to do that, and all these thoughts keep happening. The traditional phrase is “monkey mind.” It’s like, you know, a mischievous monkey that is jumping around, and getting into trouble and turning everything upside down, and pulling things out of where they’re supposed to be, and throwing around, and creeping up behind you and pinching you, or biting you, and it’s quite painful. Your thoughts are like that. You think, okay, there’s something wrong with me. I had no idea that this is happening in my mind. You start to realize in ordinary life that this is happening too. As you meditate more, you realize that this is just what minds do . It’s the natural function of mind, and as you let that be, the monkey calms down. Some of the time. But thoughts keep arising. The type of meditation that I do, that my spouse Charlie teaches, it’s a non-goal to make that stop. Because the goal is the natural state of mind. So, when I complain about having a bad brain, it’s, it’s this monkey mind phenomenon. And this is just funny because this is how minds are. This is everybody’s mind. Some people misunderstood me as saying that there’s something defective about my brain, and that’s probably true, but it’s not what I was joking about. I wasn’t complaining that I have some kind of mental health problem or something. It’s just, I get excited about things. And then I’m moved to write about them. And this sense of there’s me and there’s my brain— is a kind of joking metaphor for this sense that we’re not some unified individual with control over our own thoughts. We don’t have control over our own thoughts for the most part. That’s not how it works. Philosophy is bad because it pollutes our thought soup And this is a main part of why philosophy is bad . Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuring things out. But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re thinking thoughts, but actually the thoughts are just happening, and they’re ones that we’ve picked up. And the ones that are about meaning, purpose, value, ethics, the traditional subjects of philosophy: these are thoughts that somebody had twenty-five hundred years ago, who was completely out to lunch and wrong about everything, but they slipped into the culture, and they’ve been repeated, for millennia, with slight variations; and then they come up in awareness, and we think they’re our thoughts. And we’re thinking bad thoughts that don’t actually make any sense, and we don’t notice because we don’t see how thinking works! Encouraging community Right, so I’ve been writing about why philosophy is bad , and I wrote that I have very mixed feelings about this, because this is one of my bad brain’s projects, and I’m not sure it’s actually a good thing to be doing, and I’m not sure if I’m going to continue. But it drew a lot of attention and comments, which suggests that it may be an exciting topic that is worth pursuing, or it may just be that it’s rage bait, or some kind of bait that is drawing people, in a way that’s not healthy, and I should drop it like a hot potato. I’m not sure about that still. However, one thing that’s exciting for me is seeing how, uh— Used to be, the comments on my posts were addressed only to me, but there’s increasingly conversation among people with each other, on my posts. And that seems like the beginnings of an emerging community around the kinds of things I write about. And that’s something I want to encourage! I decided that would be a project for this year, at the beginning of the year when I was doing my annual planning. And I mentioned in one of my monthly roundup posts that I was going to do this, and several people said No no, that trades off against time spent writing the real stuff, and we want you to write the real stuff. Not create community, because who cares about that! Well, I do care about it. I hope you’ll come to care about it too. So I think it is worth putting some of my time into, even though it is really time-consuming. I spent essentially all day yesterday answering comments on the most recent philosophy post. How myth got mutated into metaphysics About that post: there is something very weird in the middle of it , when suddenly there’s all these dramatic illustrations, and weird bits of text that don’t seem to connect, and what is that about? I find this very interesting. There’s something emerging there, that I haven’t completely got a handle on yet. It’s starting to assemble itself, and this is the sort of impersonal nature of thinking. I don’t— I don’t do the stuff that supposedly I do. It just arises in mind. And, you know, I can, sometimes it’s a lot of work, sometimes I can guide it some, but primarily it’s an autonomous process that is impersonal. I’ll come back to this, because this really relates to the questions from both Vinod and Nick. If you follow the links in that weird bit with the dramatic irrelevant illustrations, you’ll get some hints about what’s going on there. This is about myth, and mythopoesis, and the emergence of metaphysics out of myth. I’m gonna say just a little bit about this. This is going to come out , I think, as a thing . It’s now a bunch of semi-connected thoughts, but I’m going to give you a through-line, I think , that is the outline of the story. So in the beginning , there was Tiamat. Before the heavens and the Earth, there was Tiamat who was the waters of the ocean, and she was chaos . This is in the Mesopotamian myth cycle called the Enuma Elish . The word that’s translated “chaos” in the Enuma Elish, and the Greek word chaos , do not mean what “chaos” means in English. It means unformed . So the world was unformed, and Tiamat mated with Apsu, who was the fresh water of the rivers, and she brought forth the heavens and the earth, and the trees and the greenery, the animals, and monsters. She is the mother of everything. She is also the devourer and the destroyer of everything. Hesiod. He’s not counted as a philosopher, he’s kind of a proto-philosopher. He systematized the Greek myths, and he addressed them to questions that subsequently became called the philosophical questions. Uh, G-M-L comments, “This sounds a bit Discordian.” Yes! There’s a very clear connection there. Hesiod’s myths are partly a retelling of the Enuma Elish — I think, and it’s not just my opinion. Thales counts as the first philosopher, for some reason. His main doctrine was that everything is water. Tiamat is water, and the origin of everything. Parmenides, who is right at the cusp between myth and metaphysics, he rode a magical chariot into the watery underworld and met a goddess, and she gave him philosophy . Zeno was his student, who codified Parmenides’ understanding as a series of logical proofs. Plato’s main work, I mentioned, was trying to make sense of this. Plato was concerned with forms . Remember, chaos is “unformed.” Nagarjuna is the origin of Mahayana philosophy. He was concerned with the relationship between form and emptiness, which is the unformed. Where did he get his stuff? He got it from water demons, snake demons. The philosophy that he espoused concerns what’s called Prajnaparamita, which is the “perfection of wisdom.” “Wisdom” in Buddhist philosophy means the recognition of emptiness. And Prajnaparamita, emptiness, chaos, is personified as a goddess. So, if you look at that weird middle section of my “ Philosophy Doesn’t Work ” , which is about myth and metaphysics and how they relate, what I just said may make that make more sense. Inspiration in adult developmental stage transitions Nick Gall has a series of interesting questions in the preliminary chat, which are about inspiration, and self-transcendence, and stage five in adult developmental theory , and how these relate to each other. They draw on an academic article that I haven’t read, and so I may not be able to address all of what he wanted to hear. Inspiration is tremendously important to me, and I hope you can hear in my incoherent rambling about ancient philosophy and dragons that I’m inspired by this. It’s really exciting for me at the moment, trying to make sense of this, and the material is drawing me. This is highly meaningful to me in some way that I don’t really fully understand yet. So I’ll come back to inspiration in a moment, but stage five in adult developmental theory… I’ll say some things about it, but this is something that nobody understands very well. There’s very little scientific study of it. The whole thing may be really pretty off. I can speak from my limited understanding and my limited personal experience. I think at the moment that’s all anybody can do. In general, stage transitions involve both a push , which is a repulsion for your previous stage, and a pull , which is an inspiration drawing you toward the next stage. So you start to understand the limitations and failure modes of your previous stage, and you become disgusted with it, and that pushes you away, and you may find yourself in chaos: in an unformed space in which nothing is fitting anymore, and that can be terrifying. It can be depressing. Nihilism is an eruption of emptiness, or chaos, into awareness that you can’t deal with. Hopefully, you manage to avoid that, because as you move away from the previous stage, you start to get a view of the next stage, that is glimmering in the future ahead of you, and this is inspiring, and pulls you forward, even though you don’t understand it yet and you can’t quite see it. So in the three to four transition, you become sick of your social community, because everything is emotional drama. And people are constantly having these insane feelings about nothing that make no sense. And it’s impossible to get anything done because everybody is distracted by some relationship thing . And not doing what needs to be done. So you’re driven away from that. And then you start to see, "Oh! Well, you know, if we had some clear responsibilities here, and if we had some coherent ideas about how we were relating to each other, such that we would reliably get along, and be able to work together, and not have constant drama, and if everything actually made sense , because there were some clear categories that things fit into, that would be much better! And that’s the inspiring vision of stage four that pulls you forward into this rational, systematic mode. Then at some point you realize the limitations of that, that it’s very rigid, that you’ve put yourself in a box, and you’ve become an isolated individual. You’re trapped in your system of rationality. You have become a machine, a robot, going through the motions, executing a program, and it’s dead, you know, the life has gone out of it, and then you may go into a stage 4.5 nihilistic depression , where you realize that doesn’t work. But again, there’s chaos. Without rationality, there’s just chaos, and you’re tossed about on this black sea of unformed nothing! Stage five and self-transcendence And then you get the vision of stage five! And that pulls you forward and it’s inspiring. Nick quotes some sections of my piece called “ The Cofounders ,” which is about how the entrepreneurial cofounders of a tech company… That the relationship between them develops from stage four to stage five. And the bits he quotes are from stage 4.8, which is the point where you’ve got the inspiration, you’re most of the way there, you can’t quite consistently be in a stage five way. So what happens at stage five? Nick talked about self-transcendence; and I’m a little wary of this word “transcendence,” because this sounds like philosophy, it sounds specifically like early 19th century German philosophy; and philosophy is bad, and early 19th century German philosophy is kind of exceptionally distasteful in a lot of ways. However, in each of these stage transitions, according to Robert Kegan’s version of this theory, there is what he calls a relativization of an old self, and the emergence of a new self. The old self becomes an object within the space of the new self. And that could be seen as transcendence; I don’t like the word, but it’s the same, maybe the same idea. I don’t know, I haven’t read this article. Stage five is different from the others in that the new self is not a self in the same sense. Each of these selves are structurally different, but the self at stage five is non-personal. You “become the space.” It’s very hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re on acid. Within awareness, everything is arising. Whatever is happening, is happening. And that is not separate from you. And this is not some kind of non-self exactly, it’s not that your self disappears, it’s just that yourself becomes a collection of stuff that appears on essentially the same basis as everything else within this space. You understand yourself as a space, not a box. You know, a self is the box. We’ve got some stuff in it, and everything else is outside. And at stage five, that just opens out. Nick comments that “‘Self-transcendence’ comes from psychology. For example, Maslow’s highest level wasn’t self actualization, it was self-transcendence.” I read Maslow a couple of years ago. I was really impressed! This was a book that was popular when I was a teenager, and people thought it was great. And it sounded kind of dumb. But I read his book and I was very impressed with it. I recommend giving some possibility to checking that out. So this self-transcendence into stage five relates with that impersonality of mind, which you can discover in meditation. Mythopoesis And it relates to the process of mythopoesis. There’s a famous, very influential essay by Tolkien, called On Fairy Stories , which is about mythopoesis, which is the creation of myths. Hesiod, who I mentioned, is sort of the original for mythopoesis. He apparently collected a lot of different Greek myths from around Greece, and systematized them into a coherent story, which then became canonical. Tolkien, I think, understood himself to be doing mythopoesis on an individual basis. It was Middle Earth: The Lord of the Rings , The _ Silmarillion_, it was his creation. Which is true in some sense, obviously. But in general, mythopoesis is a social, cultural process that is not personal. This bizarre story that I told you with a lot of Greek people in it, and goddesses, feels quite impersonal to me. I should say I actually got partly interested in this because Jordan Peterson is obsessed with Tiamat. I think he’s obsessed with Tiamat in a quite different way, but I was contemplating his lectures on this, and that was part of what got me started. Myths transform can society So Vinod Khare asks, “In what ways do you find myths useful for people today? You’ve written extensively about the utility of myth for personal transformation. What other usefulness do you find in the mythical mode of thinking?” I think it is tremendously important for developing culture and society; and Tolkien very much felt this. He was creating a new origin mythology for England, which he felt didn’t have the kind of myths that the Celts did, and the Finns did, and of course the Greeks. So, lot of it came out of his experience of the First World War, but he wanted to create something that was going to be transformative for England. I want to create something that can be transformative now for whomever, and myth is a way to do that. Myth operates at this watery, deep, underground level, that is primal, and tremendously important and inspiring, even if it makes no sense . And yet it makes sense in this mythical mode, not in the rational mode. And I said in that “ Philosophy Doesn’t Work ” piece that the mythical mode and the rational mode are not in conflict. The rationalist Greeks got the idea that these are in conflict, we need to get rid of the myths because they’re not true , and we need to replace them with rationality, and from that they created metaphysics, which was a disastrous mistake in my view. Myths and fantasy and science fiction “What similarities and dissimilarities,” Vinod asks, “do you find between ancient, well established mythical entities such as Zeus or Vajravarahi, and more modern, contemporary mythical entities from Hollywood or fantasy novels. Are they on an equal footing, in some sense? Or not?” There’s a related question he asked, which is “What kind of fiction do you like to read? What value, if any, do you find in reading or watching fiction, besides enjoyment for our day to day lives?” So, I do read and love fantasy fiction, with dragons and heroes and witches and creepy underground stuff; and I think it is the modern expression of the mythical mode. Oh, Vinod says, “This makes me think of how the myth-making of Golden Age science fiction ushered in much of the technological progress later.” Yeah! I mean, that stuff was tremendously inspiring. I just caught the end of the golden age when I was a kid, which was in the steam age or something. Heinlein was an enormous inspiration for me, and I went into artificial intelligence because of Heinlein novels. I think that is a form of modern mythology. I think that sword and sorcery novels— I mean, a lot of them are junk, because 95 percent of everything is junk, but the best of them tell you something about human possibility that I think is really important. Yidam practice, Spock, and Jimi Hendrix Vinod asks, “How similar is yidam practice”— That is a tantric Buddhist practice of, relating to, and perhaps becoming, a deity. I wrote about this somewhat obliquely in a recent piece called “ You Should Be a God-Emperor ”; there’s also a more straightforward piece on Vividness about this. “How similar is yidam practice to considering ‘What would Spock do?’ That one is actually personal. I spent my teenage years regularly trying to imitate and embody Spock, who is my favorite Star Trek character. The effect, I think, was emotional dissociation, and getting really good at technical subjects, a

20. Vajrayana, Ultraspeaking, and adult stage transitions from Meaningness Podcast, opens in a new tab

    Nov 9, 202420 min

    Following our earlier conversation about Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana , we add adult developmental stage theory to the mix: three transformational frameworks in synergy. We recorded this when Charlie was in Berlin on a Chinese martial arts retreat. Charlie had had been away from home for more than a month, after teaching several Vajrayana retreats in New York. The video signal was not good, so this is audio only. Transcript Charlie: I was thinking about the kinds of changes that occur through this kind of practice that we’re talking about, changing ways of being and communication; and how that can be seen through a lens of adult development as well, which is something that you and I are both very interested in, that I’ve trained in as well. I think both Ultraspeaking and Evolving Ground have the potential to facilitate development from what you might call a socialized mode into self-authorship ; and for some, from self-authorship into self-transforming mode . Or at least to play a part in that developmental journey. David: Just to interrupt, the modes you’ve just described are the ones labeled three, four, and five in many systems , like Robert Kegan’s. Charlie: Yes, that’s right. So in socialized mode , one of the characteristics of finding yourself in that way of being—which we all do in certain contexts—is a heightened concern with how others might think of me, or more emphasis on fitting into an external, accepted, rightness or role, like that is the right role , and it would be wrong to behave contrarily to that. So these are different ways in which a socialized mode can constrain a way of being. And Ultraspeaking facilitates exploding through that, because you can practice putting aside what other people think of me, you can become more and more aware of how you constrain yourself by concern for what other people think, and practice stepping into a mode of not worrying so much about that. And in Evolving Ground, we do the same thing in our personal autonomy module, with very different exercises, very different practices of awareness. We may bring some self-reflection practices, or pair work into that, but we’re doing the same thing. We’re facilitating this move away from, limiting concern with “How do I look to other people? What what are other people thinking of me here?” Having the confidence to simply say it how it is, or express what’s going on internally without having to fit in. So that is one way that the move from more socialized into a more self-authored, more self-principled, self-confident, autonomous way of being is facilitated through both those methods. And then, from self-authored, as you move from a self-authored, or in the Kegan framework that would be a stage four way of being, which is very systematic, predictable in some ways, you know what you’re going to say, you got it all planned out. Now, if you approach Ultraspeaking and you’re in that way of life, it can be very challenging to have that sense of certainty uprooted in a good way, actually put yourself on the line and go into a situation where you, you cannot be certain how you’re going to do, or what’s going to crop up on the timer, or it can really help just push a little bit beyond that almost over-certain, overconfident— David: I saw that when I did the brief taster course. There were some people who really wanted to give a talk, with a series of bullet points, and they were going to do that no matter what. And at some point, they broke through, because they realized that actually was not going to work given the format, right? And they had to do something different. Charlie: It’s so interesting, because the way that that happens experientially is you realize you have— I had the experience of, “Oh! People experience me-in-that-mode as somewhat kind of disconnected.” And I felt that disconnection myself. I felt almost like a glitch with reality. It’s like the jigsaw piece, you think that everything’s fitting in very neatly. And suddenly you have this new perspective that, “Oh, I’m imposing my thing on reality. I’m like, I’m doing my thing .” And all of that melts away. It doesn’t have to be like that. And that is the move from structured, systematized imposition on the world into a more fluid, interactive way of being . That, that is very moving indeed. Very moving. I, you know, I can feel myself choking up now even thinking about how opening and liberating that is. It is moving. You know, I’ve seen so many people go through that kind of transformative process, both with Evolving Ground and with Ultraspeaking. David: I see that also in what I do , a lot of tech people who at some point realize that their rationalism and their principles and their certainty about how things are and should be— it can crumble and be devastating , but it can also just be a, “Ahhh…”— Charlie: Yeah. David: —a letting go, a relaxation, a realization that things are much bigger than you had thought, and much more excitingly vivid than the world view in which everything fits together neatly in some jigsaw puzzle that you learned in computer science undergraduate courses. Reality is, is, is so real and, and so— Charlie: Squishy. David: Yeah. Well, it’s squishy and it’s got sharp pointy bits as well, and it’s— Charlie: Yeah. David: You just want to lick the whole thing! Charlie: That’s very tantric . David: I mean, I use the word “ nebulosity ,” which is a step beyond squishy. It’s just cloud-like. And then there’s almost nothing there; but yet it kind of swirls around in patterns sometimes. If you’re actually walking through fog, it’s not uniform, it’s ultimately squishy, you can usually not feel it at all. Charlie: Yeah. Squishy has a playfulness to it as well. When I look back over my own change, and actually how difficult that was at times, the hard stuff came first. The walking through fog and the, uh, the, I mean, the drop into awful, awful, uh, loss of some sense of meaningful communication. That was the, the fog-like experience that I, I kind of sort of knew that I would move through that in some way. And, you know, we’re talking about, uh, an experience from years back way before, um, Evolving Ground and Ultraspeaking, but the fog-like quality of that — cognitively, but not only cognitively, it just in experience, like literally one day to the next, not, not having any clear direction or way forward. All of that came before the playful capacity to dance with whatever happens and, you know, “whichever way it goes, may it go that way ,” and moving into the more vivid, vibrant— uh, I’m being metaphorical here, but it actually felt that way as well. David: Yeah. I think we might do a whole podcast on this, if you’re up to it at some point; but in terms of adult developmental theory, I would characterize what you went through as a classic stage 4.5 nihilistic confusion , depression; and it was remarkable seeing, being with you through that, and seeing how it went. And I was trying to be as supportive as I could, with limited ability. I think. Charlie: Well, also we were on separate continents for a long period of time. David: A lot of it. Yeah, right. Yeah. Charlie: Yeah. And you were, you were core support for me through that process. I, I intentionally self-isolated, I think as well. David: Yes. That’s why it was difficult. And I think that’s a very natural thing to happen at that phase. Where you have understood that you can no longer be how you were, but you can’t yet see what the next better possibility is. At best, you’re very confused. At worst, one can be very depressed; and a lot of what I do is trying to help people through that. Charlie: Same here, now. A lot of my coaching ends up facilitating that process. Hopefully, you know, I don’t think it has to be depression, and actually I wouldn’t characterize my own process as depression, so much as just misery . I was just really , really unhappy for a long time. Which is not the same as depression. David: Mm hmm. Charlie: And even in that I enjoyed localized contextual experience. And I think that actually is how I moved through that as well. David: Yes, that is how you get out of it. Find things to enjoy. Even if they don’t seem meaningful in a larger context. And then you find the meaning in those, and then that spreads. Charlie: Yeah. David: We tried to record a podcast about helping STEM people deal with this, more or less. Charlie: Right? Yeah, we did. And we did do a recording, right? We did record it. David: It didn’t work out very well. We’ve gotten better at this process, although I need to do a lot more Ultraspeaking practice. Charlie: It’s nice when we’re in the same room, you know, not just the same Zoom “room,” but the same physical room. David: I miss you. Charlie: I miss you. It strikes me that’s actually quite a funny thing to say when we’re here in real time together. I miss your physical being. David: Well, it is not the same. We spent a lot of years of our relationship being forced to be on different continents by circumstances, and we didn’t even have, you know, Zoom then. It was… Charlie: We both enjoy being together, and being alone together. If you don’t enjoy your own company, and if you can’t enjoy being alone, then there’s always going to be some kind of neediness in communication with others in relationships that you build over time with others. So one of the practices that I’ve been suggesting to people: “What’s the longest you’ve been on your own for?” That also is an aspect of the whole move from socialized or stage three mode into the stage four, self-authoring mode. There’s some sense of self confidence, self trust, self reliance, that actually I don’t think it’s really possible to have, without having experienced liking your own company. You can partially experience autonomy and authorship without knowing that, because you can have a confidence in your own principles, or a confidence in differentiating self. But unless you’ve really leaned into that extreme of possibility in terms of socialized context, then there’s some experience that is not yet known there. Now I’m thinking of a parallel with the Four Naljors practice. Opening Awareness facilitates moving into an experience of “emptiness” or “spacious clarity,” which is at an extreme end of the range of possibilities: nothing going on in mind. It’s like you really move into experiencing something separate and distinct, in order to get a flavor for what that is. And then with Moving Awareness, you’re moving into a very different experience, in order to get a sense of what is distinct there. I am so going off on tangents! David: Well, there’s a parallel here. The move into emptiness, and the move into being alone; and then the move back into form, but with the recognition that it is empty: this is like the Ox Herding pictures , which is a classic Zen metaphor. You first you go on the path of emptiness; you go looking for emptiness; you find emptiness. And then you bring emptiness back to the town. The metaphor for emptiness is the ox. You bring emptiness back into the town and you reenter society. So that motion is the motion of the Four Naljors also. Charlie: Right. Right. David: And it is the experience of solitary retreat; and that experience of returning to society after you’ve done intensive retreat can be very disorienting, and the natural thing to try to do at that point is to return to habits, and snap back into your former way of being as quickly and thoroughly. Sometimes you can’t; it depends on how intensively you’ve been practicing. If you’ve been practicing really intensively for a long time, you can’t . Everything breaks down, and you can’t actually fulfill your habitual role anymore. There’s an intermediate position where you’re not snapping back into the role and you’re not unable to cope, but you see how you’re being, and how the world is, with new eyes, because you no longer are applying habitual interpretations to everything constantly. Charlie: Right. And so you see your interactive patterns coming back online, and you watch that, or you experience that happening with a new kind of awareness. We’ve had a lot of conversations with people post-retreat, in especially Vajra Retreat in Evolving Ground, where that re-enculturation— Because each group retreat has its own culture, and its own intentional culture as well. And the move back into wider society can be a difficult integration. It can be a marvelous integration as well, but it’s not predictably so. We do a lot of work on how to move into that process. And now I’m thinking back to our conversation about moving from self-authoring certainty into that fog, of nebulosity and meaninglessness, and how that in a way is parallel too. There’s a similar move there. Suddenly the ground is taken out from under you, and then as you come back into new meaning-making, you’re finding your way somehow. You cannot fit back into old habits. You can feel yourself grasping at that, and it doesn’t work. And so something new has to come online. Anything else before we…? David: No. Yeah, no, I think we’re done. I’m glad you’re enjoying Berlin. Charlie: Oh, yeah. Oh, I love Berlin. Oh, wow. I’ve just been wandering around today, just going to different parks and walking to the center and Museum Island. Oh, god, it’s beautiful. Really enjoyed it here. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe