Meaningness Podcast

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.TranscriptCharlie: 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 expe

“What do you think you’re doing? And, um, why?”This is a recording of a Substack live video AMA (“ask me anything”) session I hosted two days ago. Around fifty people attended! I enjoyed it, and hope everyone else did too.We had a preliminary discussion in the subscriber chat, which was very helpful for collecting questions and getting the conversation started.I’ll do these monthly, for as long as there is interest. To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already:You also need the Substack mobile app (iOS or Android): The next live AMA session will be Saturday November 23rd, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time; noon Eastern. If you have the app open then, you’ll get a notification with a button to join. I’ll open a preliminary chat thread on the 20th.TranscriptI’m moved by how many people are showing up here. This is really great. Many people who, who I recognize and many people who I don’t know yet.This format, the technology is less interactive than, for example, Zoom, which might be better. I thought I’d give this a go, partly just because it’s easily available, and partly I would like to support Substack. This is a new technology that they’re trying out. I really like Substack. I want them to succeed. So, giving this a trial run for their sake is a little bit of what I’m doing here, although it’s not the main thing.I will dive in at the deep end. Benjamin Taylor asked a number of very hard questions, along with giving some very nice words of support, which I really appreciate— both the hard questions and the words of support. They could probably boil down to something like, “What do you think you’re doing? And, um, uh, why?”And this is very hard because I don’t know, I don’t have, I don’t have good answers here. So, the first question is, “Is this one overall project, or many different projects?” And that’s a very on-point question.And the answer is, it does feel to me like one huge project, because I have only one thing to say, which is: things go better when you don’t try to separate nebulosity and pattern. It’s very tempting to try to do that, because we don’t want nebulosity. We do want pattern to deliver control and certainty, so that you would know what to do, and have some confidence that things are going to go well. And that can never be guaranteed, because of nebulosity. So it’s good to always bear the nebulosity in mind.This is a pattern that, it’s, it’s a phenomenon that is found in every domain of human experience and endeavor. So, uh, each of the many writing projects are looking at how this theme of pattern and nebulosity plays out in that realm. For example, the meta-rationality book is about how taking nebulosity into account is necessary for outstanding work in the domain of rational work.So that’s the overall project. Um, embarrassingly, that means I’ve left a very large number of unfinished applications of that central theme in different areas.Benjamin asks, “What are you hoping to achieve overall? Indeed, how do you see your job, role, or identity as a public intellectual?” Relatedly, Xpym asked, “How important do you see your own work in the grand scheme of things? Does humanity seem likely to figure out and widely adopt the complete stance?” (The complete stance is what you get if you don’t separate pattern from nebulosity.) Uh, “Is humanity likely to figure that out and figure out meta-rationality anytime soon? If I stop contributing tomorrow; if I don’t stop.”I have no idea. I, I find this very difficult. Well, I find it very difficult because I, in a sense, because I don’t try. I really don’t have much in the way of identity as far as my work goes. I, I do the work and I try to do it as well as I can, as much as I can, and I try to make it as useful and interesting as I can. But like what is my role in that? I mean, it’s just that the writing happens and, and in some ways I’m not really involved, and I don’t form an identity as an intellectual or a writer or it’s, it’s not, I don’t know, I said these questions were difficult, I, I, and that I can’t answer them, so, but you know, maybe my non-answer is actually the best thing I can do here.I want the work to be as useful as possible, and I think some of the ideas are important. They’re not necessarily original to me. I’m not sure anything that I have written is actually original. Uh, a lot of it is just repackaging ideas from particular academic literatures, or other sources, in ways that make them accessible. So in a sense, I’m a popularizer. Um, there’s probably some original synthesis in there, but I don’t, I mean, if I, if you’re an academic, you need to be really clear on this is my contribution. It’s mine. And I’m not interested in that.I’m trying to read the chat as we go along here. Mike Slaton says: “It’s interesting that someone can know me from Twitter, vampire fiction, technical writing, a podcast, or this.”Yeah, this is an attempt to feel out how I can be most useful and how the ideas, if they do have some value, can be most broadly disseminated in a way that they can be taken up and put to use.”Some updates on the status of the websites, the AI book, the substack, etc. Are all the sites still active projects? How am I currently prioritizing them? What sorts of things might you expect to do when?”The AI book is finished, it’s published. The website is, has the full text of the book along with some other related essays. I may write more about AI, in which case I would put it on that site. At the moment, I have nothing to say, because nobody knows what’s going on. It’s very confusing.The other websites are all works in progress that— I think I’ve added something to each of the websites within the past year or so, and I expect I will keep doing that.At the beginning of this year, I said, okay, I want to finish something. I’m going to concentrate on the meta-rationality book. I will finish that by the end of the year. I will do nothing else; when I have time to work, I will just work on meta-rationality.Around about May, I realized that I was neglecting large parts of the readership by doing just that, and that it would be better to continue interleaving. So there’s been a lot of Vajrayana material that I’ve posted on Substack recently.Um, also I realized this in the last month or so that the meta-rationality project is not going as I hoped. I had a detailed plan. Part of the plan was it would be no more than 200 pages. And at the rate that I’m currently going, it would be enormously more than that. So either I need to step back and do a much more superficial treatment; which might be the right thing, although I feel like a lot of the ideas really probably can’t get across without a lot of explanation and examples.The other possibility would be to say, okay, this is a many-year project, like the Meaningness book, and I will just keep plugging away at it, and pieces will come out incrementally. I don’t know which of those is the better approach. I’m going to be trying to think about that hard over the next month or so.All of the current writing goes on Substack. That’s because Substack has better distribution than my own websites. That’s partly because I used to promote my own websites via Twitter; that works less well than it used to. Substack is working well for me. My intention is that the writing that is part of one of the projects for which there is a website, I will copy back from Substack onto those websites, when I get around to it, or it seems appropriate or something. I haven’t done any of that yet, but that is the plan. So the websites are not abandoned, even though Substack is where all the writing has gone over the past year.I can talk about my writing process, and that gets to several of the questions that were in the chat previously. Um, we have to talk about my brain. I have a very bad brain. I, I have ideas that are rationally worked out and very sensible about what I ought to write, and I have plans and outlines and priorities. And, I don’t get a, I don’t get a say in this. I mean, I can make plans as much as I like, and what actually happens is my brain does what it wants to do. So, I will be working on the meta-rationality book, which I think is serious and important and, uh, um, you know, might be very useful for a lot of people.And, my brain gets some idiotic idea, like, “You really ought to write about the Dalai Lama’s piss test for enlightenment.” And I say “No, that’s, that’s ridiculous! Uh, this is a completely silly topic.” And my brain says, “Well, that’s what we’re going to write about.” And I say, “No, no, we’re writing about meta-rationality; it’s important.” And my brain says, “Nope, I’m writing about the piss test.” And it goes off and does that, and I don’t get a choice.The weird thing is that those are often the things that are— go viral and become most influential. For example, “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” was… it’s essentially a footnote. It’s a long footnote to an unwritten section of Meaningness and Time. And the section of Meaningness and Time that is unwritten is actually important. And “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths” is an offhand observation that my brain suddenly decided: today, that’s what we’re writing. And it took about three hours, and that’s probably my best known piece of work. So, and “The Piss Test,” it’s this little entertaining piece of nothing that increased the Substack subscribers by about a third in the course of a week.So maybe my brain’s a lot smarter than I am, and I should just let it do whatever it thinks is best. I feel like it’s important to be disciplined and follow a plan, but, uh, but I don’t get a choice. So, you know, what happens is what happens anyway.This relates to a question from ruby, about my approach to note taking. Uh, this is part of my writing process in general. This is kind of embarrassing. My approach to note taking is plain text files. My brain gets an idea. It says, “We need to write about this.” And I say, “no, t

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit meaningness.substack.comThis video is for paying subscribers only. There’s a brief “teaser” for free subscribers that ends in in a cliff-hanger. This comes in the “too much fun!” category of paid posts.Military use of Buddhist Tantra helps explain why it is so weirdI extracted this seven-minute video from my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. In that session, we discussed the weirdness of the Buddhist Tantra we have inherited; and how it evolved as a series of adaptations to diverse, extreme historical contexts. Practices that made sense in India or Tibet a thousand years ago don’t make sense now, because political, economic, social, cultural, and military conditions are different.Understanding which aspects of Vajaryana addressed which historical conditions can help us choose which parts we want to make use of ourselves. For example, the city-destroying ritual of the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra is probably no longer worth bothering with.However, understanding historical changes in military applications of tantra partly explains how monastic Buddhism displaced other sorts in Tibet. This matters because monasticism is mostly not appropriate for our current conditions. Recognizing that its dominance depended partly on outmoded military considerations may confirm that our rejection is sensible.TranscriptI can tell a ridiculous story if you like?In 1967 or 1968, there was a gigantic anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon. I think it was, at that time, the largest political demonstration that had ever been in the United States. And it was organized by a coalition of hippies and new left activists, and they decided to have a ritual in which they would, through the positive vibes of everybody present, they would levitate the Pentagon.They negotiated with the Department of Defense. They wanted to raise it 300 feet into the air, and the negotiators from for the Department of Defense, there was a hard negotiation and they whittled it down to 10 feet. The hippies were not allowed to levitate the Pentagon more than 10 feet off the ground.So, when the day came, there was this enormous celebratory anti-war thing, and everybody sat in a circle around the Pentagon and chanted Om, and had good vibes, and were aiming at raising the Pentagon. So those were the nice, peaceful magic users.There was also a small contingent, and I think it may only have been one person, who was Kenneth Anger, who’s a known avant-garde filmmaker, who is also an occultist, who discovered that in the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa Tantra, which is one of the key tantras of mahayoga, which is one of the tantric yanas, there is a ritual for destroying an enemy city when you’re at war. You do this ritual and the buildings all just collapse.... The rest is for paying subscribers only ...

Ultraspeaking trains you in confident, effective speaking; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.Vajrayana trains you in confident, effective action; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.We find them startlingly similar, although one offers courses in a consequential everyday competence, and the other is an ancient Indian religion.This thirty-nine-minute video records a spontaneous, mostly-unplanned conversation between Charlie Awbery and David Chapman.Charlie is an Ultraspeaking coach, currently leading the Fundamentals Level Two course; and co-founder of the Evolving Ground Vajrayana meditation community. David writes about Vajrayana at Vividness, and has written previously about his brief Ultraspeaking experience. We are married, and co-teach Vajrayana sometimes.Ultraspeaking’s Fundamentals course trains you to let go of trying to sound polished or professional while speaking, in order to communicate confidently and naturally, which connects you with your audience emotionally. That means being fine with “um”s and silences and restarts and garbled syntax. Your audience doesn’t care about that—they care about you!Accordingly, when David edited the video, he left all that in—where he’s usually edited his videos to “sound more professional” with constant cutting.Effective conversation, and also effective professional presentations, depend almost as much on eye contact and body language as on what is said. Although this recording is available as an audio podcast, you will find it more engaging, and it will make better sense, if you watch the video, at meaningness.substack.com/ultraspeaking-and-vajrayana.TranscriptCharlie: So you were shy about recording a game, and you said you didn’t want to record a game.David: Yeah, I’m feeling better today than I was. Uh, we could try it and, uh, see what happens.Charlie: I’ll go into coach mode and, uh, share my screen with you and… What’s your favorite game?David: So I haven’t done any of these in six months, so I don’t remember what any of them are. I think the one that is, uh, a whole series of three second prompts was, was fun.Charlie: Autocomplete, rapid.David: Yeah.Charlie: I’ll put it on fairly slow too. Let’s give you 15 rounds so you can get into it. All right.David: I said, “I don’t want to do this!”Charlie: Yes, you did.David: Okay, coach!Charlie: That’s, that’s contrary. That is totally contrary to the spirit of Ultraspeaking.David: Right.Charlie: You can spontaneously leap into it. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. The whole point is that you should make a mistake. Otherwise you’re not at your edge, right? You’re not pushing yourself beyond your usual capacity.But anyway, this is a warmup. So off you go.David: Ready, set, go!Rolling windows down is like cash because you have to peel them off.Paper is like a dentist because you can clean your teeth.DNA is like artificial sugars because it’s sweet.Blue cheese is like sweating because it’s salty.Meeting your soulmate is like building a bridge because it’s a connection.Staying up late is like plumbers because, I don’t know!Time travel is like alcohol because it’s disorienting.A judge is like…A puzzle is like babies because they’re annoying.Toothpaste is like breathing because you put them in your mouth.An engine is like beards because it’s um.Breaking your phone is like fear because it’s horrible.Shame is like reptiles because they’re scary.Underwear is like tipping because they’re annoying.Anxiety is like friendship— bleagh!Charlie: You haven’t done it for six months. Not bad. You didn’t end strong. You did, you did a bleagh at the end. So, do you remember one of the tenets is “end strong”? So it doesn’t matter what you say, you end with a good, strong line.And “staying in character” is you, um, you stay in the mode, you don’t break out of what you are saying or, or delivering. So you would not let your inner critic come in. So you don’t comment on yourself like, uh, that was bad, I’m doing terribly or, uh, got it wrong again. Or, you know, you never step out of that, uh, that mode of just going with the flow, whatever’s going on inside.How was it? It looked fun.David: Yeah. I mean, it is inherently fun.Charlie: Yeah.David: Because I haven’t done this in six months and, you know, I only did this introductory taster course and have been meaning to go back to Ultraspeaking ever since, but I have not had the time to do that. Uh, I, I was planning to do a bunch of the games to prepare for our recording today, and I got violently sick two days ago and have recovered this morning.Charlie: I’m glad you’re feeling better. And you know, it may be, uh, it may be better that you’re unprepared. From the Ultraspeaking perspective, a lot of it is about being willing to step into the unknown, and sometimes preparation goes against that. But you can over-prepare for things or, uh, try to follow a set of bullet points or something like that, and then find that you’re actually not, uh, not alive in the speaking in some way.David: Yes, that was my experience when I did a lot of public speaking, for work and for school, that it’s definitely possible to over-prepare, and sticking closely to a script is a real mistake. Uh, on the other hand, when you want to deliver a bunch of specific content, then having the right degree of familiarity with that is helpful.Charlie: If you’re familiar with your content, then you have this bow and arrow technique that Ultraspeaking teaches in, I can’t remember where, it’s probably the Professional level course that we teach this. It’s that you set yourself a direction and you can meander all over the place so long as you’re heading in roughly that direction.You can tell stories, you can go off on a tangent, you can, go with, uh, something that you hadn’t thought, and you can connect with your audience at the same time as still heading in that direction.So the arrow is the way that you’re heading. It’s your main point, your one key point or whatever it is. And then your bow is the heading off in that direction, doing all of the embellishments or finding different things to include.David: I thought we might start by talking about how we found Ultraspeaking and first did it and what happened.Charlie: That’s a good idea. Yeah.David: It’s a bit difficult to remember because this was three years ago, something like that.Charlie: 2022 was when I did my first course in February, 2022.David: There was, uh, leading up to that, there were several months when various friends of ours were really excited about it and had done it and, um, we both found it intriguing and I wanted to do it or at least was considering doing it, and I didn’t have time, and you went ahead and did do it. And it was amazing for you, I gather.Charlie: Surprisingly, I had not, uh, I had not expected to have the kind of breakthrough and personal, um, I think I would call it personal transformation that happened during that first Fundamentals session. Five weeks, the Fundamentals course is five weeks. And then I immediately did the Fundamentals course again because I had such a good time doing it. I loved it.But it was week two of the Fundamentals that I had what I would call a breakthrough in understanding something experientially in my speaking, and it’s very difficult to put a finger on exactly what that is, what happens.One of the promises that Ultraspeaking makes is, we will, we will give you a breakthrough. And they keep to that promise and follow up with each individual, and hundreds of people now, hundreds of people I have seen have that experience, and go through that same transformative process as I did.David: I think that’s remarkable. It’s personal for me in a way. Partly from my own brief experience with Ultraspeaking, but more from just seeing from the outside how dramatically you changed. And you didn’t talk about it at the time, but I could just see that something major had happened that your whole way of being really changed.I think for me, I sort of saw, I only became aware of it gradually over a period of a small number of weeks, but it was only that. I guess for you, it was just at a very specific time.Charlie: There was a moment, there was a moment in a cohort, in a single rep that I remember, um, that was a turning point. I think a lot of people do have that, uh, instantaneous realization, which is, we were going to talk about how this is similar to Vajrayana in some ways, and, uh, instantaneous understanding, something just clicking, uh, that experience of suddenly finding myself in flow, telling a story.I don’t think I had ever, ever in my life told, consciously decided to tell a story before. And it hadn’t even crossed my mind that that’s something that I could do. And, you know, maybe many people do naturally do that. Certainly I didn’t, at all. And having the experience of being in that and telling the story, and suddenly understanding something that had not been clearly seen previously. I hadn’t seen it myself, that I had a very strong public/private boundary. There were certain things that I would think not appropriate for public speaking, and other, uh, a kind of presentation mode, and a way of speaking to an audience that was appropriate or was congruent; and that there was a, um, set of experiences or a way of being or a private mode that I had that really was very, very private as well.And just experiencing that boundary come crashing down, it was like a, it was like the floodgate. So not in ter— not, uh, you know, I wasn’t crying or, uh, or anything. It was much more sort of energetic, high energy, uh, fun experience for me, for, for others. It’s an opening up of a deep vulnerability. I think those things go together as well.But it was like the, like, uh, a water pressure having built up on a dam and then that just pushing, like cascading and everything suddenly flowing. And it was very exciting, really exciting and very funny. And, you know, everybody in the p

The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being. It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably.I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the recording of my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. It includes my ten-minute introductory explanation, a participant’s questions about it, and answers from me and from Jared Janes.I offer these live Zoom gatherings monthly: answering questions, and maybe asking some, and leading discussion. The next one is October 12th. These are sponsored by Evolving Ground, the Vajrayana practice community co-founded by my spouse Charlie Awbery. The sessions are available only to eG members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to Saturday the 10th you’ll get the zoom link.If you have questions about this discussion, you could ask them in a comment here on Substack—or attend the next Q&A!TranscriptDavid: I’m going to begin each of these Q&A sessions with a little talk. Partly this is in case you haven’t got any questions, you could ask about whatever I blather about. But that’s not necessary at all. You can completely ignore my little talk and ask me whatever is most exciting for you.I’m going to talk this time about the relationship between the theory of Vajrayana and the practice, and why understanding the theory is actually important; and how in order to understand the theory you need to actually know something about the history, which is kind of tedious because there’s an enormous amount of the history. But the practice doesn’t always make sense unless you know about things that happened many centuries ago.Practice questions are often the really burning ones, where you really want an answer, because you’re a bit stuck in your practice, or you’re a bit stuck in your life even, or you see some opportunity. You can kind of see it, but there’s a doorway and you’re not sure how to access it. And you’re like, “Okay, I know that’s there. But how do I get there?” That can be highly motivating. And you so hope that if you ask the question, you get a good answer, then you’ll be able to move through that door.Theory questions often are really dry. You have some kind of a jigsaw puzzle and there’s a missing piece. You know, there’s a missing piece in the theory and you just want to know, “Okay, what goes in this hole?” And that kind of question… I mean, I like that kind of thing. It’s less vital than something that’s coming out of practice, but it’s still good to understand what those gaps are.I said last time that Vajrayana has a crystalline logic. And that is what makes sense of the theory, but it also is an enormous mess of contradictions and conceptual confusions. And that’s why maybe having this kind of a Q& A session can be helpful.Traditional teachers of Vajrayana can’t see this, usually, and they can’t really help sort out these things. It’s like, if you go on a long vacation, you’re away from home for a couple of weeks, you come back and you suddenly realize your house is a god-awful mess. And you didn’t see that before, because you were living inside it, and it’s just how things are. The Tibetans live inside the system. They don’t stand outside it, so they can’t see what a mess they’ve got. Because it’s home, it’s sacred, you don’t question it.There are exceptions. There are some exceptional Tibetan lamas who’ve been able to see the whole thing, understand the logic, and explain it to Westerners. Without that, we would be completely lost. So we have to be very glad that there are a few who are able to do that.We wouldn’t know what the point was without that explanation. It would just be this vast mass of esoteric practices, which, like, “So what?” The point is not an intellectual one. Primarily Vajrayana practice actually follows the theory closely. And the theory, in the case of Vajrayana, the theory is just a theory of the practice. It’s not a theory of life, the universe, and everything. It’s not a philosophy. It’s not trying to explain where the universe came from or something. This is a religion that is just about the practice.That’s where the theory bites. If you don’t understand the theory, you can’t really understand the practice. You can take practice instructions and put them into practice, and that may work somewhat, but usually the practice instructions are really condensed. There’s a lot of not-said stuff, of details.And if you have a teacher you work with closely you, you can just try to do what the instructions say. And go to your teacher and say “I tried this and it didn’t work. What am I doing wrong?” And do that over and over again. But not everybody has a teacher. The teacher is not always available. You don’t want to be bugging them all the time.If you understand the theory, you can actually see those details. You can work it out for yourself: why the practice works, how it works, and what the point is; and then you can fill in the details for yourself.You might get that wrong. You want to go to your teacher and say, “I didn’t really understand this, but on the basis of theory, I thought, okay, probably it’s like this. So I did that and it seemed to work. Did I get it right?” And your teacher says, “Well, yeah, kind of, but you know, if you want to walk on water, this practice is efficacious, but you need the pontoons as well.” Or whatever.The other thing is that the theory tells you the why. Why you would want to be practicing, what the point is. This is easy to miss, because there’s just this mass of details, and the point isn’t explained.And so, as an example of a common misunderstanding of the why, people think Vajrayana is a collection of methods for accessing weird states of consciousness, which are exciting. And the practices do often put you into weird states of consciousness, but that’s not the point. And people can spend years, having weird hallucinations or whatever, and think that’s the point. And that’s a sidetrack that you could waste all of your time on, instead of actually following the path toward the point.Because the theory is a theory of the practice, the two of them illuminate each other; the more practice you do, the more sense the theory will make. The more you understand the theory, the more sense the practice makes.Confusions come from the fact that the religion had to repeatedly adapt to new circumstances. And because the whole thing is sacred, the scriptures are the literal words of enlightened Buddhas living in the sky, you can’t say, “Well, that was then, this is now.” You have to innovate by pretending that the old texts say what you want to say, which is appropriate to what you think the current circumstances are.And the thing is, people have different ideas about what the right thing is for current circumstances, or they’re in different circumstances. And so there’s all these divergent interpretations of what the scriptures really mean. And then people argue about this; and without the historical context, there’s no logic to the arguments. It’s just, “Well, what it really says is this!” “No, what it really says is that.” It’s like, well, somebody said it said this because that was addressing a particular problem, at a time, with a reasonable understanding.I’d like to read a quote from a recent Substack post by Rob Horning. It’s about the importance of open ended curiosity in computer science research; and how the big picture understanding which you get with that curiosity relates to all the details. He said:If you don’t know how to navigate a discipline’s canon, if you can’t map it, situate different resources ideologically, recognize disputes and contested points, recapitulate the logic of different arguments from different points of view, then you probably don’t know what you’re talking about, regardless of how much information you can regurgitate.This, I think, applies very much to Tibetan Buddhism. There’s people who have read a huge number of books, or have been to endless boring dharma talks with fancy teachers, and they’ve assimilated all of these esoteric details, but they don’t actually know what the fundamental principles are, and how everything fits together.I would include a lot of the fancy Tibetan lamas in that. They know how to regurgitate a lot of information. And I, it’s really arrogant for me to say this, but they don’t actually know what the point is.So this is why the history and the theory matter. To fully understand your own practice, you need to know how to navigate the canon, how to relate competing religious claims to these old conflicts, that really mattered at one time but are now irrelevant. You see why the practice is as it is in the light of that.So, yeah, that’s enough, blah, blah, blah from me. If I was a traditional teacher, I’d go on for another couple of hours because that’s the way they do things. I’m perfectly happy and capable of doing that, but. Instead, let’s have some questions.Ask me anything!Alta: This is Alta, I’m not on camera, but there’s some things that I’d love to hear you explore a little more. One I think about how, in psychotherapy or some modalities for personal development, healing, change, we’ll say conceptual understanding is the booby prize! Because, especially when it’s about how we are living, it’s about changing how we be, our emotional experiences, how they’re expressed, our reactivity. So that’s one: just, “Huh! How much conceptual understanding is necessary.”Then the other part is, in the somatic work and tradition that is mostly where I live, we do a lot to

There’s a wrong idea about the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.Spiritual suffering is unnecessary, though. I have the recipe for eliminating it, and it works.An audio recording of my long answer to a question, in a live Q&A session organized by Jessica B. three years ago. (Thanks Jess!)Monthly Q&AsI’m doing Q&As like this monthly now. I don’t usually go on at such length! The next one is Saturday, September 21st, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific.LinksWeb links for some topics mentioned:The “complete stance” acknowledges the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. It’s formally analogous to some Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment, in which you recognize emptiness and form simultaneously.Meaningness: the book. It’s free online, only about 20% written, and apparently useful in its current form.Vividness, my take on Vajrayana BuddhismNgak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen“Meeting Naropa’s Dakini”: an improbable story, on my site Buddhism for Vampires, that is as true as I could make it. In the audio, I misremember the title as “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini”; she appeared to both Tilopa and Naropa (as well as to me).Marpa, founder of the Kagyü School of Tibetan BuddhismThe charnel ground and the Pure Land. In the recording, I refer to the Pure Land as “the god realm,” which is inaccurate. In some versions of Buddhism they’re more-or-less the same thing, but not in Vajrayana.“Misunderstanding Meaningness Makes Many Miserable”: In the recording, I say that Meaningness does not address suffering in general, only spiritual suffering specifically. This web page explains that briefly.The book offers a method for ending what could be called existential, cosmic, or spiritual suffering. The whole book explains the method, with periodic, increasingly difficult summaries. The first is “Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning.”“The novel that I wrote the first quarter of” is The Vetali’s Gift. It’s now about 40% done, and free online. Maybe I will finish it before I die.The scene in which “the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly” is “Love and Death.”TranscriptJess: What does it look like to feel shock, despair, et cetera, and still maintain the complete stance?David: Right. I can give a Buddhist answer to this and I can give a Meaningness book answer to it. There’s a connection, and they’re also not the same thing. So you’ll get some sense of that, maybe, out of my two different answers.So, some versions of Buddhism make a big deal out of suffering and say that Buddhism has the answer to suffering, and that if you do Buddhism right, then you won’t suffer. That might be true; I don’t know. I’m pretty skeptical. In the traditions that I’ve practiced Buddhism in, that’s not really the line. And my experience— I don’t have an experience of not suffering. I would say that meditating and practicing Buddhism does seem to lessen suffering and it changes your relationship with it.I’ll tell a couple of stories that are relevant, and then do a theoretical thing.So, my former teachers, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen, about 10 years ago their sixteen year old son got tongue cancer, which is a really unusual thing.His tongue was surgically removed, which was horrifying. Unfortunately, they didn’t catch it early enough, and it metastasized, and he died slowly over the next nine months or so.I wasn’t there for this, so this is second hand; but what people who I know well said about what they observed was that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen were obviously devastated. And that it was as horrifying for them as it would be for anyone. And at the same time that there was a clarity and spaciousness and acceptance in the way that they dealt with the situation, practically and also with their own suffering, that seemed extremely unusual.They’re as much a candidate for enlightenment as anybody that I have known personally. And I don’t think they didn’t suffer.This echoes a story. The most recent thing I wrote was called “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini,” which is about a story of the founding of the most important lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyü lineage. The lineage chant, it begins: “Great Vajradhara, Tilo, Naro, Marpa, Mila, Lord of Dharma Gampopa,” et cetera, et cetera. There’s Tilo, Naro-pa, Marpa. My story was about Tilopa and Naropa. Naropa was the one who met the dakini, who I met in a Starbucks in San Francisco 1300 years later. His primary student was a Tibetan named Marpa. Marpa founded this most important branch of— politically most important branch of Tibetan Buddhism. (It’s not the one that I primarily practice.)Marpa, when he was in his fifties, his son, who was about thirty, died of some illness, and his son was going to be his successor, carry on the lineage. Instead, the chant goes, Marpa, Mila; Milarepa was the continuation of the lineage.When his son died, Marpa spent weeks being miserable and crying and wailing and making a big fuss and being miserable. And people said, “Oh, Marpa, we thought you were enlightened. Why are you miserable? You’re supposed to have gone beyond suffering!”I think his answer was basically “f**k off!” I can’t remember. You know, there’s some sort of a story about what he said. But again, the point is, he’s regarded as one of the most enlightened people in Tibetan history. So, your son dies, you’re going to be miserable for a few weeks!And it’d be, you know, if enlightenment meant that your son dies horribly and you say, “Oh, okay, whatever. You know, what’s for lunch?” It would seem like there was something wrong, actually.So, I think there’s a wrong idea of the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, you know, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.On the other hand, there’s this sense, that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen apparently manifested, of having space around the suffering, having clarity about the suffering, and not inflicting that suffering on everybody else. Meditation seems to tend to do that for you, just kind of automatically; but there are specific practices that are relevant to that.One that I’ve written about is a pair of practices. They’re written about as separate practices, but I recommend taking them together, which is the charnel ground and the god realm. And the charnel ground is the practice of viewing all experience as an absolute nightmare. And if you see everything as an absolute nightmare, an extremely claustrophobic situation in which you can’t escape horror, that can open out into a sense of freedom in the middle of a nightmare, because there is no hope of escape.It’s the sense that somehow what is happening is wrong, and it shouldn’t be like this, and if things were different, and blah, blah, blah, blah. That line of thinking is not helpful. It’s extremely natural, I do it all the time; but to the extent that you can let go of that kind of thinking, that’s a productive way of dealing with negative valence.The paired practice is the god realm, which is one of seeing everything as perfect just as it is. That reality can’t be improved upon, and that the seemingly horrifying aspects of experience are actually— There is a kind of crystalline perfection to things playing out the way that they do, however that is.Neither of these are a Truth, but as a way of seeing, they can be helpful ways of dealing with experience.So that’s a Buddhist answer. The Meaningness answer is related, although not so colorful.First of all, the Meaningness book explicitly doesn’t try to address most forms of suffering. It’s only addressing kinds of suffering that are caused by misunderstandings of meaning.The kinds of suffering that it addresses are ones where we make things mean something extra on top of whatever they naturally do. Suffering is naturally meaningful to us; that’s just how human beings are. It’s the addition of cosmic meaning, or spiritual meaning, on top of the suffering, that makes it worse than it really needs to be. And the practices in that book are ones of talking yourself out of adding on those extra things that aren’t necessary.So these are two takes on the same approach, but very different flavor.When my sister was dying— she had metastatic cancer also— I was sitting at her hospital bed, and there was blood pouring out of her mouth, because when you’re in the late stages of cancer, your gums bleed.And, there’s this scene, in the novel that I wrote the first quarter of, where the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly, and there’s blood pouring out of her mouth. And I, you know, I was sitting there with my sister, and blood was pouring out of her mouth. H. P. Lovecraft, a master of writing horror fiction, said the problem with writing horror fiction is that the things you wrote about start coming true.And I was watching my sister dying, and I thought, “Oh! This is the scene that I wrote five years ago in my novel. This is really funny!” And, being willing to let go of the meaning of “This is how I’m supposed to feel about watching my sister die,” and being willing to say, “Oh, watching my sister die, this is really funny!” — that sort of humor in the face of horror. And you also can feel wonder and joy at the same time as, “Oh my god, there’s blood pouring out of my sister’s mouth!” So that was the first thing.And then the second thing is, being willing to feel whatever the negative emotion is clearly doesn’t necessarily— it doesn’t make it any less negative, inherently. It may make it more acute. But again, not adding extra stuff on allows you to feel it more clearly. And there is a transformational value in that clarity of negative emotion. When we add extra meaning on top of negative emotion, it blurs and blunts it— which can be a coping strategy that is valuable when it’s overwhelming and more than we can deal with. But just feeling whatever the sadness or pain or horror is, as straightforwardly as possible, can change the way you rela

We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures.David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.”We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate doctrines and practices, but those are not the point. The point is effective beneficent activity, enabled by liberation from fixed patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.Vajrayana can be subdivided into Buddhist tantra and Dzogchen. Both include multiple, non-ordinary, centuries-tested ways of transmitting the way of being. Tantra uses elaborate ritual methods, such as abhisheka/wang/empowerment, which David described briefly in “You should be a God-Emperor,” and which we discuss in this podcast episode. Dzogchen relies on obscure non-instructions, as in “A non-statement ain't-framework.”Traditional Vajrayana demands particular patterns of teacher-student interaction that in the podcast we describe as “gross.” They rely on dominance/submission dynamics, and we don’t believe they work well anymore. Charlie has developed an alternative approach, discussed in the podcast. (Also in “The learning relationship in contemporary Vajrayana” and “How to learn Buddhist tantra.”)The podcast is a recording of a spontaneous conversation, in which David sought and received advice from Charlie on how to be as a teacher.TranscriptDavid: We have these discussions that are really animated and exciting, and usually about 30 minutes into them when we’re more or less done, we say, damn, we should have been recording this.Charlie: How many times?David: Yeah, this happens every few days. And this time, 20 minutes into one of them, I said, okay, let’s stop, drop everything, and try and record something, and see. But we’ve now got the context of 20 minutes of animated discussion of a topic. And if we go back over it, it’s not going to be the same, but maybe we can talk about it a bit to introduce it, and then there was some stuff I was going to add on, and that was the point where I thought, okay, maybe we can record that.Charlie: I remember the conversation starting when you expressed some discomfort around finding that people were beginning to be sycophantic or adulatory or have some response to your writing recently that triggered this reaction of discomfort of, well, can you say more about what that was?David: Yeah, having started writing on Substack has changed the way I think about relating to an audience in ways that I don’t really understand very well. I want to get a better understanding of my side of the relationship with the audience. And also, what is functional for readers or listeners. And you know, what can I do that’s most useful? And I was seeing that some of the pieces I’ve written recently, and the most recent piece was the God Emperor piece, have gotten a lot of attention in ways that I’m not really completely comfortable with. There’s a sense of: I don’t want to be writing clickbait, I don’t want to be sensationalistic. With both that and The Piss Test, which also went somewhat this way, I wasn’t intending, or mostly not intending to be sensationalistic. I was just trying to explain a thing. There’s bits in there that are kind of deliberately over the top, but that’s just a normal part of how I communicate.I worry about a number of different dynamics. One is that I might get sucked into writing that kind of piece rather than the much more serious things, and I think the more serious things are more important. Those are the ones that I really want the readers to take onboard. I’m worried about audience capture, where one gradually becomes a caricature of oneself in response to an audience liking a thing and then you do more of that thing and then your audience drifts into being more and more one sided of, they just want that entertainment; and then, you know, you can wind up being stupid.I said I was uncomfortable with a lot of things, not that it was going to stop me, but that I need to think it through. And one of them is a discomfort with some people going over the top on the fan thing. And you asked me why that’s uncomfortable for me and partly it’s just being autistic and awkward, and not really wanting to be seen in some ways. I said I fear the possible ego inflation that could come with people going on about “Oh, you’re so great,” and some people do that, not a lot, but sometimes it’s kind of over the top. It’s partly how that makes me feel, but it’s more of this sense that they’re putting themselves down by doing that. Sometimes! I mean some people just genuinely offer appreciation, which is very genuine. And I think for them, that’s good. It may make me uncomfortable, but that’s not significant. But I think some people debase themselves in some kind of effort to maybe communicate genuine appreciation? Possibly in some cases it’s manipulative.And you’d given me a lot of good advice, but we had gotten to talking about the way this functions in traditional Vajrayana, which both of us find really off -putting and just gross.There’s this social norm of, I mean, it’s called devotion, but it’s, it isn’t devotion. It’s usually fairly fake, and it’s this hyper-effusive adulation combined with this dominance and submission dynamic. You know, I was just writing about master and slave morality. That was my jumping off point for the God Emperor piece, although mostly I just said this is stupid, but people do that. People are behaving like slaves to the lama and that’s just, it’s gross.Charlie: It’s predictable, it’s very prescribed, it’s the same from one person to another. That’s one of the ways that it’s different to appreciation, which is usually very personal and specific.David: I’ve been trying for eight years to move into a teaching role. You very kindly have provided a venue for me to start doing that, which is happening the day after tomorrow. So that brings up questions about what is my role? As something like a teacher. You’ve been working with this question for yourself for, well, decades, but especially since forming Evolving Ground four years ago?Charlie: Yeah.David: Yeah. You said a little about how you’ve handled that and how you’ve changed the way do it. And how we both feel that avoiding the traditional teacher-student dynamic that comes in Vajrayana, that’s gross. We don’t want that. And yet, there are some aspects of that that are functional and I was suggesting to you a few days ago that, in fact, you have separated yourself from some of the functional parts of that role in order to avoid the dysfunctional parts, and I was encouraging you to pick up a bit more of the functional parts. But you said you wanted to speak about sycophancy in general and how you think about that and how gross it is?Charlie: Well, so, there’s the whole question of role or not role, or whether, we individually relate to what we are doing as role, and the extent to which we might step into a role.In Evolving Ground it’s very explicit that role is a fluid concept, and there are some structures that people can move in and out of, including in the in the learning experience. And in the providing, the teaching, the mentoring, whatever. One does not take a fixed role and that is it, always that role in that context.So there’s a different way that role, and relationship with role, is being offered and explored. But for me personally, it’s not so much about role anymore. It’s much more about how am I in this particular situation with this particular person or this group. What is the dynamic here?So it’s a question of reading. It’s like I would read a room or a group dynamic or an interaction, and then be responsive in that situation. So it has much more of an immediate question around way of being, or response, than it is a general question for me now.One of the reasons that we both left traditional context was because of that dynamic. Because the predictability of it makes it very dead. It’s actually just not interesting to be in circumstances that are that prescribed, and that people are behaving in a very particular way that is not coming from their individual experience, or it’s so boxed into a way of expressing that it’s very samey.David: I think of Jordan Peterson as a cautionary tale that— I don’t know what happened with him, but it seems that the pressure of his being guru to millions of people somehow caused severe trouble for him. And I’m not going to be guru to millions of people for lots of reasons, but on a smaller scale that is a potential long term concern.I’m much more concerned for the person doing the fan thing in a way that seems unhealthy for them, and I would like to find a way to be such that they don’t feel, whatever the motivation is for doing that, they don’t feel that they want to or need to do that, because it’s not actually good for them.Charlie: Wouldn’t want anybody going over the top here.David: Yes, god forbid anybody go over the top about tantra!Charlie: Oh, no.David: That’s right out in tantra.I would be interested, if you’re willing to talk about it, you said that you have taken various tacks on this in Evolving Ground. You’ve changed the way that you are in a teaching situation, as a matter of skillful means in addressing some issues like this. And then I wanted to say, hey, I think actually, you may be partly missing the mark, or going too far in that— particularly in the context of transmission, is where this came up in an earlier conversation a few days ago, where I feel that something in this region is importantly functional. And when sane traditionalists talk about there being no substitute for the tantric lama, and the whole thing can’t function without that, they’re talking about transmission. And mayb

Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life.The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact.Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments 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

I discuss the intellectual history of interactions between Buddhism and cognitive science, prompted by a blog discussion of doubts about modern meditation systems.There’s not many intellectually interesting people in the world, and they all talk to each other. They’re in very different fields, working out the same set of ideas in different contexts. But any intellectual era has a fairly limited number of major, significant new ideas that everybody’s working on.If you’re going to be part of the zeitgeist, you need to figure out what are the ideas that are actually significant in this era. 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

Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship.I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional legibility (30:19), understanding the performance of epic poetry (32:27), a fun side-quest (36:49), and how meaning itself fell apart (38:25).There’s a pretty-good AI-generated transcript available via a button, if you view this in the Substack app or on the web. 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

This is about my self.It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting.This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece.That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I failed in my attempt to record it, so I reworked it as a text essay. Now I'm trying again!If you are reading this, and missed that it’s also a podcast, you can listen to it by clicking the start button in the box at the top of the post. Or you may prefer reading!Another thing I've learned from reader feedback is that my writing is often too abstract. Examples can make it easier to understand, more vivid, more memorable. Personal examples are better because they seem closer, more real. Actually, I've realized all this about eleventy nine times, but it's somehow hard for me to put into practice. Now I'm trying again!So. This is about my self and how I understand and relate to it. If your self is something like my self, maybe you will find it useful. I'm still pretty confused about selves, but I've been trying to figure it out for sixty-something years, and maybe I've learned something.The word "self" is not well-defined. We have a strong sense that we know what it is, but the many theories about it seem to have wildly different understandings. Or perhaps they're talking about quite different things using the same word. What is included and not included in "the self" varies dramatically, and so do ideas about what sort of thing it is, and how it works. And also, recommendations for what you should do with it are all over the map.Although: nearly everyone agrees that selves don't work well. So you need to improve or fix or replace or get rid of yours. I'm now somewhat of an exception, as will become apparent toward the end of this recording.I'll describe four different ways I've related to my self. I'll describe each with an analogy: with engineering inanimate machines; with organizational leadership; with internal conversations; and finally, letting go of trying to understand and control my self, and allowing curiosity and playfulness instead. To make them memorable, I've given each a symbolic representation: a steam engine for understanding my self as a machine; a tech startup company for managing my life; a podcast for internal conversations; and a dust devil for the fourth, playful approach.Each approach, each model of what a self is, offers particular benefits, and has particular limitations, risks, and downsides. Depending on the situation and my purposes, one may seem most appropriate.I learned these four approaches in sequence, after discovering limitations in the first, and then the second and third. I've pretty much abandoned the first, the self-as-machine view, but I've retained all the other three as often-useful ways of being.I suspect this particular sequence is common, at least for people like me who have a pragmatic, engineering-like outlook on life.You'll recognize the first three approaches, which come from engineering, management, and psychotherapy. However, I apply them in a somewhat unusual way. I emphasize perception and action over mental contents such as thoughts and emotions. I'll explain how that works in the different approaches separately, but it's the same shift in emphasis in each case.I find this reframing works better, for me at least. It's also in accord with my theoretical understanding of how we work, how our selves work. I won't go into that much here, but if you know a little about my work in AI and cognitive science, you'll recognize the influence or similarity of views.The fourth approach is influenced by Dzogchen, an unusual branch of Buddhist theory and practice; by ethnomethodology, an unusual branch of sociology; and by phenomenology, an unusual branch of philosophy. Concepts in those fields may not be familiar. So this fourth approach may not sound like anything you have heard before. I may not be able to explain it well enough to make sense. Or, it may come as unusually useful news.I think it's the most factually accurate understanding of selfing, but it's often not easy for me to put into practice. I would like to say "This is the answer! Do this!" but I can't say that with complete confidence; not from personal experience. Sometimes it's great, though!The steam engine: self as machineThe first approach starts by saying "I know how to engineer machines to work better; I can apply engineering understanding to fix malfunctioning ones—so why not do that with my self?"We don't think, feel, or do the things we want our selves to, so how can we intervene? Like why do I keep doing this stupid thing, I know it's stupid, how is my mind or brain broken? Why do I eat too much? Why do I freeze up and stammer on dates? Why do I pretend to agree when people at work say crazy, wrong things. Surely better understanding of why my self insists on betraying me will let me fix it so I get better control!I chose the steam engine as a symbol for this, because that's the key invention that set off the Industrial Revolution, which was the most important event in human history. Steam engines were the focus of engineering practice for a century of the field's development. It's natural that analogies between selves and complicated steam engines, with boilers and condensers and gears and valves and pressure governors, were common in psychology during that period. Nowadays, analogies with computers or computer programs are more common.Anyway, you can consider your self as a machine whose mechanisms you can learn or discover, and that will empower you to improve it. This is a science-y and engineering approach. You try to introspect about how your mind operates. You may also draw on theories from neuroscience and cognitive science.This is tempting especially for STEM people: I mean "science, technology, engineering, and math," the acronym: STEM. It's tempting because of the three rationalist, eternalist promises: that you can gain certainty, understanding, and control. You can just make a machine behave.It certainly was tempting for me! So I gave in to temptation whole-heartedly! This is a big part of how I got interested in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I hoped for a significant synergy between my attempts to solve my personal problems and my intellectual interests. It's much of how I tried to make sense of my self, and to fix myself, in my teens and early twenties.I eventually got a PhD in the field. Somewhere half way through graduate school, I realized that we have absolutely no idea how either the brain or the mind work, much less how they relate to each other. And the kinds of models people were using in AI and cognitive science couldn't possibly be true, a priori. This made me extremely angry. I made a huge nuisance of my self by going around saying that these fields are all made-up nonsense. I'm still angry, and still doing that, and people are still annoyed!Running out of steamThe self-as-machine metaphor is limited and can be harmfully misleading. Because: we don't work like machines; at least not at the level of description we care about. I don't mean we run on some kind of non-physical woo. It's that we don't work like steam engines, or other mechanical devices, and we don't work like computers or computer programs either. Also not like the algorithms that, for publicity purposes, get called "neural networks," although how they work is almost perfectly dissimilar to brains.In terms of personal application, the self-as-machine approach usually doesn't work well, because we have quite limited introspective access to our mental mechanisms, or possibly none at all. We can only guess at what they are doing by looking for patterns in their outputs. Also, the models from neuroscience and cognitive science are either at the wrong abstraction level—knowing about neurons is unhelpful—or too inaccurate to provide useful guidance. Engineering works only when it's based on solid science, and the science of people is not solid at all. In fact, it seems to be mostly wrong.As a computer science student, specializing in AI, it was natural for me to think about trying to fix my self when it did dumb things, or when it got emotionally stuck and refused to do anything at all, as "debugging." This didn't work. The methods I could use to debug a computer program don't have good analogs when I was trying to change my self. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get access to my own code, the way I could read the code of a program. I mostly also couldn't get access to intermediate results or the details of my runtime state, the way I could with a software debugger or just print statements. All I could find with introspection was that somehow thoughts popped out of nowhere. I could often force them in particular directions, on a moment by moment basis, but that's not the same as debugging the underlying machinery.More seriously, the "debugging" metaphor suggests that if your self isn't working the way you want, it's because of "bugs": meaning localized functional defects. That rarely seems to be the case. Trying to find them often led to analysis paralysis. I spent the second half of my undergraduate sophomore year, and then again the whole second year of graduate school, ignoring what I was supposed to be learning and obsessing instead over my supposed self and what the heck was wrong with it.I knew what I ought to be doing, but applying more force to my self backfired. I don't believe in "willpower," at least not when dealing with my self. All it did was generate resentment and even greater unwillingness to work. Maybe your self is better behaved!For some people, this failure of rationality for self-unders

Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast!It is about how to learn to be kind.I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions.Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here.The making ofThis is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had repeatedly agreed to podcast, and occasionally made half-baked attempts which didn’t quite work. This time we prepared, used proper equipment, and it came out well.We thought a spontaneous, natural-sounding conversation would be better than a scripted one. We each wrote bullet points before starting, and deliberately didn’t share them with each other. The conversation is fluid and fun. However, we circled around the topic, and perhaps never quite hit the mark. Next time, we’ll merge our lists of bullet points and put them into a coherent overall plan before starting.Something I forgot to explain: what the guy in the elevator said was a humorous and insightful comment on the situation itself. It was neither self-deprecating, nor at his companion’s expense. It was friendly and droll.Humor, both in the sense of pointing out a funny aspect of a situation and in the sense of “good humor,” is often a skillful form of kindness.Image: (CC) a4gpaThe Black Goat podcast episode “Kindness in Academia,” which we discuss, is here. The bit about introversion being an obstacle to kindness starts at 33:20.TranscriptDavid: I suggested this topic because I feel like I would like to be kinder than I am, and I find being kind sometimes difficult, and I think there’s a number of reasons I find it difficult. And I suspect that there’s a meaningful number of listeners who find themselves in this same position. Charlie: Hmm. That is really interesting for me to know. I didn’t know that. David: About me? Charlie: Yeah. David: Oh. Charlie: I didn’t know that you find being kind difficult, and it’s kind of funny because when I was making a few bullet points for this conversation— I’ll read the very first thing that I wrote. You’re going to laugh. “There’s an idea that kindness is difficult, that it’s something you have to work hard at. I think that’s wrong.” David: Right. Well, I think this may contradict the lived experience of many people, including me. Charlie: Hmm. Well, so do you want to say [00:01:00] more about what it is that you find difficult? What goes wrong? Why is it difficult? David: Well, there’s a podcast I re-listened to this morning with Simine Vazire, who is one of my heroes. She’s a leader of the academic psychology reform movement, which was in response to the replication crisis, but also in response to lots of other problems.And the title of the podcast is “Kindness in Academia,” and she and the other discussants are talking about ways that one can be kind in academia, but there’s this short section that I find really touching, that is quite raw on her part, where she says I would like to be much more kind than I am.And the obstacle for me, [00:02:00] she says, is that I’m so introverted. And, in order to be kind, you often have to break through a, maybe even extremely thin, but a slight layer of interactional business as usual. And so she says she’s constantly buying gifts for people because, you know, “Oh, yes, so-and-so would really like this,” and then she doesn’t give it to them because it might be awkward for them because they might feel obligated or, giving somebody a compliment, like they could take it the wrong way.Charlie: Goodness. David: And I feel that way too, maybe not quite as extremely as she does.Charlie: Do you have something similar going on? Do you want to buy gifts for people or buy gifts and then not give them? David: No, but there’s times when giving a compliment— I mean, I’ve gotten a lot better at this, to be honest. I’m partly [00:03:00] recalling how I was in past, but it’s still sometimes— It’s awkward to do things for people if they might feel some kind of unwanted reciprocal obligation, or you think this is something that the person would want, but actually they don’t, and maybe you misread that. Charlie: So let me reflect something back to you and see whether this is accurate from your perspective. It sounds to me like there’s an equivalence between between kindness and doing something for somebody, or giving somebody something, even if that’s a compliment. David: Well, no, actually, in my notes, I have a list of various sorts of things that are not the same as kindness, which can be confused with it, and generosity is one of them.Generosity can often be kind, but a lot of kindness isn’t particularly generous. [00:04:00] Often it costs you nothing to be kind, and then it’s just a matter of choosing and remembering to do it. Charlie: Yeah, I agree. I agree. So, I’m curious that the examples that you brought there are all to do with giving and generosity. And the example from Simine as well. David: Right, yeah, I think I was following her lead. Charlie: Yeah, well that’s very interesting because that connects to one of the things that I’ve perceived, I’m not 100 percent confident about this, but I think that this idea that kindness is difficult is mixed up with the idea that it has something to do with giving, generosity. Also that it has something to do with a kind of feeling that you have to cultivate or nurture towards others in [00:05:00] order to be kind. David: Yes. Charlie: And I think that’s wrong, too. David: Yes, right. My list of things to distinguish kindness from are: niceness, generosity, compassion, empathy, warmth, charm, and good feelings, and being ethical. Each of those is interestingly not quite kindness. Charlie: Not quite the same, but I think there are connections. David: Yes. Charlie: Some of the connections are significant. David: Yes. Charlie: So I would want to say that when I think about what kindness is, I always come back to an attitude that the kindness is based in, and I think there’s a generosity comes into that attitude. There’s a kind of an attitude, a base attitude of just simply wanting the best for everyone, sincerely wanting that wanting others to experience happiness and [00:06:00] enthusiasm and love for life and joy and peace, and it’s easy to get caught up in a worry about “Oh, can I be kind? Will I be kind? Am I doing the right thing to be kind to this person?” And that isn’t— that’s an extra layer. It’s an extra layer on top of the very simple interaction that there is underneath things. And that concern is really all about “How do I look? How are they gonna think about me? Am I gonna do something daft and ridiculous and silly?” And the more that you can not worry too much about that, the more likely it is that you can relax into a kindness attitude, I think. I have done so many ridiculous, idiotic, silly things. I don’t worry about that anymore. I really don’t. We’re human beings. We’re going [00:07:00] to be calibrating with some kind of trial and error. I think it’s okay to recognize that and to take risks. So a lot of the fear around kindness is tied up with being afraid of taking risks. David: Yeah. That makes sense to me. The phrase “kindness skills” is a framing that I’m kind of guessing that you would probably actually reject; and I have mixed feelings about that myself. Charlie: I prefer “kindness attitude.”David: Yes. Charlie: I do think there are some skills involved. David: Ah, all right, good. Charlie: However, David: We’re not completely disagreeing. Charlie: Yeah. I mean, what are kindness skills for you? David: Well , I think this is interesting in a somewhat broader context of… the kinds of [00:08:00] people that we both tend to attract and advise have a technical mindset, in which the way that you are good at something is by having a set of techniques that you have mastered. And that is at best limited and it interferes with spontaneity, which is, I think, probably critical for kindness; and taken too literally, you can try to rely on gimmicks or little tricks that you can play that you hope are reliably going to constitute kindness and make people like you or something, which is exactly the wrong attitude.Charlie: This is really interesting because I think there are hacks. I really do think there are hacks that can help you get into the zone or the space that is going to result in being kind. [00:09:00] And I’m just thinking about this because those, the kinds of hacks, and I will come to some of those, but the kind of things that I think work , they’re actually not about interaction per se.Whereas you might think that the kindness skills are going to be in the fields of interaction, but actually they’re more about setting up the space and the attitude and even the intent. Whereas the interactions are what can happen spontaneously and maybe need to happen spontaneously in order to change the habitual patterns that you might have, whatever those are, like maybe shyness, or reluctance to take the risk of saying something different, or to do something that is obviously unconventional, or whatever it is.David: Yeah, you use the word “scaffolding” to refer to various hacks. In your meditation [00:10:00] teaching, you talk about scaffolding as techniques that are kind of dumb tricks, but they actually do prepare you to do the actual thing. And it seems to me that communication skills and social skills actually are a thing. And those can be scaffolding toward a more spontaneous and natural form of kindness. It’s a certain kind of “fake it until you make it” thing going on. Charlie: Yeah. I think that can be a part of it. Kind of hacks that I’m thinking of— We have a whole Evolving Ground gathering recording on this which is around kindness rituals. It’s like a little reminder, like a mantra that you can bring to any situation that you’re finding challenging or difficult y