Introduction

Mystical and contemplative spirituality has in the West come in, out, in again, out once more, and (no really) back into fashion again. This time around it's with a veneer of scientism, with its concomitant confusions. Even the most "cutting edge" practice and theology among Western Buddhists is sloppy on the metaphysics, usually ineffective, and sometimes harmful.

This critique doesn't just apply to Buddhists of course, but I'm poorly equipped to talk about Sufis or Hasidim or the New Age, though I think my arguments do apply in general.

From the other side of the aisle, so to speak, I see those allied explicitly or just ~ energetically ~ with "Rationalism" as making mostly the obverse mistakes. This crowd generally relies on a narrow and overly reified metaphysics, and often have a shallow capacity for introspection.

The unholy love-child of these two ideologies is where I find myself, buffeted by, to me, what looks like insanity on both sides. I'd like to build up a framework to bridge the various discourses I've got some toes in, and which can hopefully contribute to meaningful cultural progress, such as that's possible at all.

I'll try to lay out what I think "right answers" can and can't mean in this domain, and I have some ideas about the direction in which we'll find right answers, or come to stop looking for answers to wrong questions. I don't believe I've answered almost any of my own questions in particular, but nonetheless I believe it can be highly generative to say "not this, not that, none of these."

Claims

I'll make some more concrete claims at the outset:

I think that almost everyone making strong claims (positive or negative) about spirituality is overconfident and usually making metaphysical errors. Often people willfully come to false beliefs about themselves and the world, or dismiss clear evidence about the breadth and depth of experience.

Despite what is said in either direction, I think it remains that we don't have dispositive evidence about a large swath of claims about enlightenment, consciousness, or even rebirth—though I'm still quite skeptical of most of them.

I am not aware of frameworks or theories that are adequate for bridging the gap between spiritual and physical phenomena in a way that does justice to either, nor for distinguishing "correct" or "better" lineages or claims. My suspicion is that this will boil down to some fundamental metaphysical-epistemological problems, for which there may in principle be no singular, definitive answers. There will however be provisional, humane, pragmatic answers.

Both folk and academic apprehensions of goodness, beauty, purpose, human meaning, etc., seem usually introspectively shallow and confused, as well as wrong and harmful. Traditional spiritual systems seem both very much onto something in this respect, and also insane and stuck in ruts in quite varied ways. All of these seem to be contorted variously by cultural trauma and confabulation. The best depictions are indeed often poetic and rousing rather than concrete, but there's so many of these and they're so conflicting that they can't make any concrete prescriptions. My suspicion (and prejudice) is that the "correct" synthesis is going to be quite spacious and allow for a great deal of particularity and idiosyncrasy, but that it will distinctly exclude most of the answers floating around these days.

Lastly, I think most spiritual traditions, and unfortunately most cultures in general, propagate memetic, epistemic, and metaphysical harms. Sometimes these are good choices under harsh tradeoffs, but I believe that we've largely obscured what "good" can or ought to mean, and we need cultures of spiritual practice that are able to bear or transform the costs of shedding preference falsification, dissociation, and submission as fundamental cultural and spiritual techniques.

Influences and inspiration

This book is an attempt at a synthesis of the perspectives of four authors, in a way which is absent in the discourse. These are: Eliezer Yudkowsky, David Chapman, Rob Burbea, and Mark Lippmann. I also owe a debt of some kind to my time with Sanghananda¹.

Most of all, I have huge appreciation for Mark. None of this would be possible without his work, and in some sense I see my book as an introduction, or a "popularization" of his work.

Footnotes

1. IYKYK ↩