Meaningness Podcast

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

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 five.  One develops into stage four by conceptualizing the limitations and failure modes of stage three.

There’s another problem with the term “reflection,” which is it is typically taken to be a cognitive operation. It’s thinking about, and this is actually deemphasized in stage five. I mean, certainly, in stage five, you do all kinds of difficult thinking; but that’s not the distinctive substance of it.

Other terms that are applied to stage five in the literature are “relativistic” and “contextual.” This could also describe stage three, which is similar to stage five in some ways. There’s a stage three attitude of “everybody’s opinion is equally valid, because everybody has their own experience”; and that could be understood as relative and contextual. Stage five is relativistic and contextual, again, relative to stage four.

“Meta-systematic” is a term that I use, and that other theorists in the field use. It is, again, a way of talking about this ability to see things in multiple ways simultaneously. But as a term it’s problematic, because it suggests that’s all you’re doing, and it centers systems. Stage five is not primarily about systems, in the way that stage four is. Stage five uses systems, sometimes, when they’re useful. But that’s not, again, its substance.

There’s another problem here, which is that “meta-systematic” suggests a system of systems. This is a very common misunderstanding. Stage five is not itself a system; is not a system of systems. Understanding how a superordinate system can subsume and incorporate another system within itself: that just gives you another system. This is a stage four recursive operation. It’s not stage five. What one subsumes systems within, at stage five, is the space, the field of activity. Systems appear as entities that pop out of the ground, they spin around, and they go “flomp!”, back into the ground.

The term “inter-individual” is used in Kegan’s book The Evolving Self as the term for stage five. It points towards this decentering of one’s self. But it again leaves intact the idea that there are distinct selves; that stage five is again about how selves relate to each other. And in stage five they interpenetrate in a way that they don’t at stage four; and they are structured in a way that they aren’t at stage three. But, at stage five, selves are not the thing; and this is I think, a limitation in Kegan’s understanding.

In his later book, In Over Our Heads, he used the term “self-transforming.” Again, this centers “self” as the key thing. It also has the problem that each stage represents a fundamental transformation of selfing, a very different mode of “self” occurring, than the previous one. So transformation is an aspect of every stage; or every transition, at least. I think he’s pointing to the fact that at stage five, transformation continues, and it’s a deliberate act; and that is actually true and important. But again, the self is not the key thing, I think.

At stage five, because the self is no longer an entity, there isn’t a coherent thing that could act to transform itself. Rather the delocalized patterns of activity, which we think of as selfing, continue to transform, not through the action of the self on itself, but through interaction with everything in the context, the situation, the field, the space of activity. That’s what accomplishes the transformation.

I’m sounding like a stoned hippie again.

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

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.

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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

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

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

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 meaningness 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

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!

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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!

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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, and infrequent explosions of anger, which is exactly what I would expect from taking on Spock as a yidam.”

This is a wonderful story! Thank you, Vinod.

I think asking in a conceptual way “What would Spock do?” is not completely in alignment with the traditional practice of yidam, which is non-conceptual. It’s important in some ways that it’s non-conceptual. But otherwise, I think, yes, this probably is meaningfully similar.

My former teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, had a similar story about this, which is, he had a poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall. Ngak’chang Rinpoche was an aspiring blues musician, and so this poster of Jimi Hendrix was like the thangka, the religious icon of the deity. And he said that you put this on your wall, and then you adopt the mudra of the yidam. So the mudra is the kind of bodily posture and gestures of the yidam. And the Jimi Hendrix mudra is: terrrrlzlzlzlp! So, he became a semi-pro blues musician, and was quite successful at that for some years. So maybe that worked for him.

Hollywood mythology

Vinod mentions Hollywood; and a lot of Hollywood stuff is quite explicitly drawn from mythology, in a somewhat degraded form, and sometimes that seems kind of vile. But I think a lot of it works because it is mythology. And when it’s good, it’s good partly because it’s bringing myths to life, and making them [THUMP!] They hit you in the chest. And that’s what myths should do. If it’s some story that you’re reading without any emotional impact, then there’s not much point in that!

G-M-L in the chat is mentioning the Dune films. I actually haven’t seen those. Charlie, my spouse, watched them and was excited. I loved the Witcher series on… Netflix, I guess? And the video game Witcher 3, Charlie and I both played that through, before watching the TV series and found it very affecting. The Witcher is a tantric sorcerer, sort of? Doing the things that a tantric sorcerer does, and we’re like, yeah, this is tantra!

And the Lord of the Rings movies were, for both of us, quite impactful; because again, Tolkien was deliberately engaged in mythopoeisis.

My experience of entrepreneurship

Maybe I’ll go on to Steph’s questions, which are about entrepreneurship, and purpose and value in major life projects. Steph said that I’ve started a company, “Can you tell us more about that?” I will, but I asked Steph for what in particular might be of interest, and why she was asking. She said “It’s all in the vein of what should I do with my life.” And there’s a series of questions she asked, and her path to entrepreneurship is strikingly similar to mine, so it’s possible that the analogy may be somehow interesting.

I’ll say a little about mine first. I got fascinated by artificial intelligence due to reading Heinlein novels. And I went and got a PhD in artificial intelligence. Toward the end of that, I realized that it was a dead end field that was not going to progress, and there was no point in continuing with it. And AI couldn’t answer the questions that I came to it with, which was questions about the nature of mind. Which I’ve gotten to have better answers to through practicing meditation. And other ways.

Then I had a Ph. D., and what do I do, because I’m not going to do AI research? I had a existential crisis of purpose. What is my purpose in life now? My purpose has been artificial intelligence for 20 years. And that’s just a dead end. Along the way, I got extraordinary programming chops, and thought, okay, how do I use those to do something else? And I wanted to do whatever was going to be of greatest benefit.

I thought something in the area of medical research and health seemed like a good bet. And I went into computer stuff in pharmaceutical research, which is about inventing new drugs. I did that at a small, very screwed up company for a few years; and then started my own, even smaller company, that was successful enough that I was able to retire, in 2002, I think.

Entrepreneurship, and purpose and value in major life projects

So, what does that have to do with Steph’s questions?

Steph asks “I’m asking about startup life because for some reason that’s a direction that’s really hot for me at the moment.” Yeah, I mean, I found entrepreneurship inspiring. There is a draw, because it’s creating something that is completely new, and you’re really up against reality there. It’s not conceptual; I mean, concepts play some role, but you’re actually creating a thing, and you have to become the space. As founder, you are the space within which the company happens. That can drive people into stage five, and my piece called “The Cofounders” is basically about that.

Steph says, “I’m on an incubator scheme, getting a lot of support and encouragement. I’m finding a natural, buzzy fit in this early stage.” That sounds great! The incubator hadn’t been invented yet when I was doing this, I think.

Steph says, “But it’s all froth.” That doesn’t sound so great! I think Steph is maybe expressing some question of whether the apparent purpose is real. And that’s a question I am constantly asking myself, and always have been, because purpose is nebulous, and there’s never going to be a definite answer.

Steph says, “I’m going to keep developing and validating my idea”; even with some uncertainty she expresses: “I can’t decide how committed I am to the lifestyle. I want purposefulness more than anything, but I also don’t want to sacrifice down time. I don’t want to work more than 46 or so hours a week.”

Yeah, that’s tough… I’m not sure it’s realistic to found a company in 46 hours a week. I wouldn’t say it can’t be done; I don’t know. I routinely worked seventy hours a week, often more. My spouse, Charlie, is a founder now of a small organization that’s growing rapidly, and Charlie works routinely seventy hours a week, sometimes more. And it is brutal. That’s just a realistic fact about this.

But, if you have a one-person business, and you’re not aiming to grow rapidly… Managing people is very time-consuming, but an individual, solo business might very well be done in 46 hours a week or less. And there may be ways to run a more substantial business as a normal sized job; I don’t know.

Within eG, which is our community, that Charlie and Steph and a number of others of you are in, there are quite a number of entrepreneurs who have been through this process, and might be available as a resource.

What is software expertise best used for?

Steph says, “The other issue is more fundamental. It is: what questions are computational methods best suited for? I’m fairly deep into computational cognitive science,” as I was, “but it’s become clear that computational modeling is not the best tool to study the human mind,” which is what I figured out in about 1989, which was a great disappointment!

“I got into it because I was fascinated by the riddle of the mind, but I now see that, this was just an expensive toy case for me to study to learn computing”— there really are surprising analogies here, Steph! “Now that I have my programming, statistics, and probability, I want to leave ideas of the mind for meditation, and instead find an application for the methods that I learned. I’m a generalist.”

Yeah, I think being a generalist is critical in entrepreneurship, because you have to do everything in the beginning. The founders are also the people who assemble the furniture, and who talk to lawyers, and raise money, and deal with people’s personal crises, and get the health plan in place, and you have to be a generalist to be willing to do that, and if you’re not willing, you’re not able.

“Surely I must be able to use it now for good, but what and how?” Very good questions!

“I have some ideas for causal modeling in health tech, like some reasoning tool for normal people to quantify how many minutes they’d need to run to offset eating a donut, and keep diabetes at bay for the same amount of time, that sort of thing.”

I think this is a great space to be in! I don’t know any specifics. There is a member of the eG community who founded, grew, and recently sold a similar-sounding company, that was a personal health metrics startup. He might be willing to talk to you. I’ll check with him, and put the two of you in touch if he’s up for it.

I wish I could be more specific for stuff, but I’m out of that, all of those fields, and things are quite different now than they were almost thirty years ago, when I was doing this.

Founding a startup is a mythopoesis

I’m finding another connection, which is: A successful startup is a myth. The idea initially is probably completely unrealistic, but it’s inspiring. It has an emotional impact and to be a successful founder, you need to inspire people with the myth of the company.

At some point that can become dysfunctional. The famous case—and it’s in this space!—is Theranos, which was a startup founded on an inspiring myth of dramatically cheaper, more convenient blood testing, or medical testing in general, which could have a huge impact. And the founder inspired employees, and venture capitalists, and the press. And the myth was brilliant, and inspiring; it’s exactly the sort of thing that I would want to do, and it sounds like the sort of thing that Steph would want to do. The problem was it wasn’t true.

At some point, the myth has to draw reality to its vision, and bridge that gap.

It maybe relates to this idea of meta-rationality, and stage five perhaps, being, in part, about the interplay of different modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. In the meta-rationality book, I talk about reasonableness and rationality; but the mythical mode is another one that I don’t talk about in that book. But connecting rationality, which is reality-based, with myth is what a founder does.

Philosophy is a disaster for the same reason Theranos was

I’m just making this up as I go along! Thoughts are thinking me! I don’t know where this stuff is coming from.

So, Elizabeth Holmes was the founder of Theranos, wasn’t able to do that for whatever reason.

And I think the Greek philosophers also failed. All of philosophy is downstream from their failure to bridge rationality and myth. Rationality was new, they didn’t know how to do this. They observed that the myths were false, like Theranos’ medical tests were false. They said, “Okay, we don’t want to do that. That would be wrong. So we’re going to get rid of the myths, and just be rational, and address the subjects of the myths with rationality instead of myths.” And that’s what philosophy is; and it doesn’t work.

Décalage: slippage and lag

There’s a question here: “Can you talk more about the transition from stage 3 to 4 to 5 in the sense of how you can be in different stages at different parts of your life? I feel I may be at stage five in my professional life, but transitioning between 3 and 4 in relevance to spiritual friendship and community.”

Unfortunately, I can’t see who asked that, so I can’t credit, and this is an excellent question. This is a key question. I think it’s the key question in adult stage theory, which does throw the whole thing into question.

Technically, it is called décalage, which means slippage between domains of life. Professional life and personal life, or interpersonal life, are different domains of meaning. And I think it’s actually extremely common for one to experience and operate at different stages in these different domains; and that can cause a lot of trouble.

For technical people, it’s extremely common to be at stage four, and even to be moving forward out of stage four cognitively, while still being stuck back at stage three, or dragging oneself from three to four, relationally.

I think there’s a valuable possibility there, which is to reflect on the way that you are in the domain that you’re more advanced in, and try to find analogies between that and the domains in which you are lagging. There are structural analogies between these domains, such that stage four in the relational domain is structurally similar to stage four in the cognitive domain, or the professional domain. So if you can bring those into correspondence reflectively, that can be a powerful way of accelerating development in domains where you may feel a little stuck.

Companies and cults

Nick Gall is asking, “This passage from ‘The Cofounders’,”—that’s the piece I wrote—“strikes me as gesturing towards company myth-making: ‘Some said the company was turning into a cult, and we lost a few of our best people. It was a calculated risk. Most stayed, and some say the training has radically improved their lives, outside work, as well as in it.’”

Yes! So, “turning into a cult”: that is related to company myth-making.

Robert Kegan, whose version of adult stage developmental theory is the one that’s most influential for me, and for many people… I think it’s his most recent book, was a study of three different companies that tried to actualize his theory. One of them was Bridgewater, which is a gigantic investment company that is uniquely successful financially; and within the financial industry, it is widely regarded as a cult. It has a sacred text, which was written by the founder, and it has weird ritual practices.

And for outsiders, the big question is, was this company incredibly successful because of this bizarre off-putting mythology? Or, is that just an accident, and it was successful for some other reason? I don’t know the answer to that. There’s some discussion in Kegan’s book, that is very interesting, but I think not very illuminating, to be honest.

Relational stage four: professionalism

The bit about “most stayed, and some say the training has radically improved their lives, outside work as well as in it”… I get contacted very often by people in technical management who say, “The people that work for me, they’re STEM educated, they are cognitively at stage four, possibly even beyond, but they are operating in their relationships with their colleagues and with me at stage three; and this really is causing a lot of trouble. How, how can I encourage these people to move to stage four interpersonally?”

Stage four interpersonally in a company context is what we call “professionalism,” and this is something that… I think it’s become much more of a problem than it used to be. It used to be understood that if you were a “white collar worker,” you had to behave in certain ways, and relate to your coworkers in certain ways. And due to cultural changes, that requirement is no longer feasible. But having everybody in a company that’s trying to get work done relating to each other in stage three ways is really very difficult, and causes all kinds of interpersonal problems, but also, concrete problems in not getting the work done.

Consensus Buddhism is stage three

Uh, Apostol says, “For me, the transition from three to four in spiritual community was triggered by a total failure to get my needs met at a stage three community. I realized it was a structural problem.”

Yeah, that’s really interesting! My critique of a lot of modern spiritual communities, particularly what I call “Consensus Buddhism,” which is kind of the “nice” version of Buddhism, is that it is stage three; it is unstructured; it’s about relationships and emotions. That’s all great stuff! But it has its limitations, and depending on where you are personally, this may not work for you; and it sounds like for Apostol that didn’t work, and moving into a community with more structure was helpful.

Have a great holiday! See you in a month!

Okay! This has been great. Thank you for showing up! We’ve got 45 people currently. Probably some people have dropped in and out. It’s a great turnout. It’s wonderful to see some familiar faces, many familiar faces, and some new people. And I’ll be doing this again in a month or so. Have a great holiday.

See y’all!

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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.

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