The Global Wayfinding Model

Layering, shadow, and losslessness

Sexuality in particular is a theme I’ve kept returning to, and is central (though often tacit) in Mark’s writing. Sexuality is really the taboo par excellence, and turns up again and again in reports from practitioners in modern Western therapy/adult development/alternative spirituality cultures. Sexuality is no less salient in “traditional” cultures, and I’m not aware of a religious tradition which doesn’t involve a substantial system of taboos and rituals surrounding sex and gender.

A very common take here⁵ is that some structures of taboo around sexuality lead people to layer over it in general, or from some associated energies or aspects of its expression. Again these come up often in healing/transformative practice reports as a stuck energy or calcified blockage which at some point unravels in the course of practice.

I think it’s instructive to look at the relationship with sexuality in renunciative or uh “semi-renunciative” traditions. This of course means celibate monastic traditions, but I also think of much of Islam or socially conservative forms of Christianity and Judaism, which may be variously pro-sex within marriage, but strongly proscribe any sex outside of marriage, and generally all masturbation or erotic fantasy.

In many cases they explicitly teach this as a persistent struggle and temptation, especially for men, that must be fought vigorously and faithfully. Layering, right there!

The distinction here is that they don’t (mostly) teach that desire for proscribed sexual expression will usually wither and cease with appropriate devotion, or that it can be cleanly excised; I claim this is a straightforward instance of losslessness.

There’s a concept which Eliezer⁶ calls a terminal value (there’s a variety of other names in other discourses), which refers to inexorable, atomic values of an agent. Sexuality is in some respects a mixed case here, partly because of menopause/low testosterone/etc., but also because of asexuality. I’ll discuss sexuality, including asexuality, in more detail later, but the point is still easy enough here that the overwhelming majority of humans continue to desire and usually pursue sex regardless of their culture’s beliefs about its propriety, or their meanwhile doggedly trying to subdue or erase it.

In some respects this is begging the question, if you’re unconvinced re sex then feel free to consider this case only evocative.

Again, the claim here (agnostic necessarily of sexuality in particular) is that some structures and patterns of affect/perception/behavior are something like “inherent,” such that attempts to remove them arbitrarily will fail because the system treats them as inviolable.

A slight generalization of this point also applies for what are called instrumental values. These are goals or values which are, indeed, instrumental with respect to other values, presumably forming some chain or network which grounds out in terminal values, for whose sake the instrumental ones were adopted.

Any given example might be contentious or nuanced, and these examples are obviously contrived, but gesturally:

• Desire for money
  • As instrumental for status, or power, or ease
• “Finally have that conversation with Josh”
  • Perhaps grounding out in some combination of need for connection, integrity, self-esteem, or love
• Not crying in front of one’s parents
  • Perhaps ultimately instrumental for love and safety
• Craving a specific taboo sex act
  • Perhaps intermediately involving structures around shame, and perhaps ultimately resting on need for connection and grounding, and presumably desire for sex.
  • (Again see more in the section on sex.)

(There’s more I could say about regarding these proposed corresponding terminal goals as prototypical, but won’t here.)

So, the more general claim is that instrumental values in general persist in the system, except for specific conditions under which they can collapse, unify, or “resolve.” I’ll discuss this more below, but briefly the claim here is that instrumental goals will specifically decay if their fundamental goals are handled, accounted for, or, ugh, “integrated.”

The obvious other exception here is decay: naively, presumably, there are decades-old intentions and fantasies which one has forgotten about, and surely many old grudges which really no longer hold any meaning. I’m not clear quite how far he goes, but Mark is pretty maximalist about the claim that old content in general persists. Indeed, there are many reports from practitioners of, in the course of practice, dredging up childhood vows or teenage anxieties and shames, which were otherwise completely absent from their day-to-day experience, but which were discovered still at the root of many behaviors and psychological knots.

This broad shape, of persistent generators, occluded or stymied but still tilting behavior and experience, is a decent, if nonstandard, angle on what’s usually meant by shadow: tabooed realms of one’s psyche, whether idiosyncratic or societal-level taboos, which continue to show their influence.

Part of the trouble here is that shadow and taboo are functional, and often vital for relatively peaceable community. Eg., taboos against the use of violence, especially lethal force by civilians, surely, presumably, do actually contribute to society being more stable and more functional. So, to return to sexuality, one objection to this perspective, or a steelman of a class of objections, might be that taboos and restrictions on sexuality are functional and necessary, “the sexual revolution failed,” etc. The general form here would be “x taboo is a safeguard against real harm, and tearing it down exposes practitioners and society to risk.”

In principle I’m sympathetic to this kind of argument, and in particular ambivalent, but distinctly the claim re layering is structural re human minds, and mostly values-agnostic. In my view wayfinding is not fundamentally antinomian, but it is, I’m so sorry, basically tantric⁷. Again see more below.

Specific debt

Many traditions, as well as modern practice communities, insist that some aspect of practice, or specific practices, have a strict dependency on a particular relationship with oneself, a pattern of belief, some threshold of discipline, some spiritual posture, etc. “Debt” here is a little presumptive, indeed I claim that most of these kinds of dependencies are generally tech debt, but the distinction works fine agnostic of any of my or wayfinding’s claims.

Sometimes schools insist on these as dependencies in effectively those terms, however often they are functional but tacit requirements, or function as filters for participation in a community or for engagement with some set of practices. As with the other kinds of dependencies, often this looks like, as people shop around for practices, they will try out some move and find that it doesn’t work, doesn’t resonate, or that some part of their system rejects it quickly.

In terms of being filtered in, often this looks like a practitioner finding a tradition which has either a very similar, or else an interlocking, shape of debt to them. Eg., evocatively, a practitioner might double down on a large cluster around emotional repression, in a tradition which either teaches repression or assumes an orientation of repression. I talk about this type of pattern more later.

Skill

In isolation, “skill” evokes top-down manipulation, where in the context of wayfinding it means something bottom-up, spontaneous, and variously integrated. I discuss this more later, but to say a bit more here: a lot of practice instructions popular in Western meditation contexts incline towards, or directly prescribe, cultivating some sort of “distance” between the meditating self and the rest of experience, where the former explicitly tries to finely shape or control the contents of experience, often explicitly in contradiction with its generators.

In wayfinding the relevant notion of skill is more like fluency, sensitivity, and coordination. Eg., you are presumably skilled, in an ordinary sense, at walking, in a way that you had to learn and which babies and toddlers are learning. You have to coordinate sensory information from different modalities, proactively attend to certain features when things might get more dodgy, (relatively) gracefully orchestrate many muscle groups etc. etc.

Regardless of wayfinding, the practices taught in a variety of schools often have dependencies on a degree of fluency and sensitivity, and in more endebted schools indeed on top-down control, before they are able to work sufficiently.

Refactoring progress

In the long term, refactoring is at least meant to lead to greater integration; this will mean greater fluency, spaciousness, ease, and communication across different parts of the system. People will of course start practice with different degrees of integration, and importantly, integration is highly nonlinear.

Relative integration progress often means things get worse locally, as in, more dysregulated, more dysfunctional, etc. This can happen over short and long timescales, eg. an afternoon deep in the muck, up to sometimes months or years of one’s mind being deeply broken (see more and more, below).

Dependencies on integration, whether explicit or tacit in a given school, might require relative degrees of global integration, or often in other cases requiring specific things to be relatively integrated, while allowing or even assuming other kinds of debt.

Meta-progress

Mark doesn’t have a specific term for this, and this distinction is AFAIK largely unique to wayfinding. The notion here is that practice often involves inadvertently going down wrong paths which incur more debt, but which were sort of “unavoidable” from one’s starting position, and which are informative about the shape of the space.

Mark’s claim is that doing wayfinding, one will take many wrong paths that have to be meticulously backed out of, often pursuing some long thread of integration or purification while a big chunk of experience or intention is left out, and that in the process of those pieces getting reintegrated, much of the earlier work has to be unwound.

The distinction here is that this fixing-but-oh-it’s-still-broken-actually is in general just integral to wayfinding, and that one might make an enormous amount of “meta-progress,” without on net actually fixing any concrete problems.

Once again, particular moves or practices can have dependencies on meta-progress, so not just on relative apparent integration, but on something like “how far along someone is in their particular process of winding and unwinding.”

Illegible dependencies

Especially where a dependency is tacit in a tradition, it can often be illegible, both to students and to teachers.

A given teacher might then address a flailing student in various ways, some traditions might weakly track these kinds of dependencies but attribute them to “karma”; some might attribute stuck progress to simple personal failure, lack of effort, etc.

Some traditions track dependencies more implicitly, and this may be more or less obscured under their understanding of gradualism vs suddenism. Often the way this is understood is that in the course of practice the system does a lot of gradual but opaque work, and that dependencies (most often not conceived of in comparable terms) are satisfied through lots of work “behind the scenes,” that is, outside of the direct focus of attention and intention, in a given practice.

Still, this is a domain with rampant Works On My Machine™ and one-weird-trick-ism. This pattern seems to be particularly common among individual practitioners teaching outside of a lineage, which I discuss more later.

While doing wayfinding, one isn’t necessarily explicitly tracking dependencies, the distinction here is that the model says that lots of practices, content, etc. are gated on relative integration and on meta-progress, and that not tracking them can lead to wasting tons of time or working oneself into cul-de-sacs.

(I’ll note here that Mark severely underweights skill as a dependency, at least in his explanations. He discusses it in general as a major aspect of wayfinding progress but much more often refers to debt as the cause of strict blockers, rather than skill. I suspect this is more particular to him, that at a given point in his practice he was almost always overloaded on skill rather than integration.)

Gridlock

The depiction of complex tangles above is basically a stereotypical presentation of gridlock in the system. Often people come to practice in configurations with enough contention that there is no apparent affordance for anything to move, and every salient move encounters resistance, or with overwhelming resistance to the suggestion of something like spiritual practice altogether. Sometimes this kind of resistance is loud and uncomfortable, but often it’s subtle or basically invisible—many people quietly bounce off of a given practice, or of practice altogether.

Despite the image I evoked above, a person whose system is in gridlock isn’t necessarily apparently distraut, rigid, etc. Not seldom, people have (superficially) relatively normal behavior and affect, but with a configuration with very little play or flexibility.

Some traditions lean into resistance: the expectation, and explicit instruction, is that practice will continually have to push against ingrained “habits” of the mind, and will involve some amount of discomfort and resistance for quite a long time. Indeed, often in traditional contemplative contexts, the practice of a novice is mostly that of obedience and devotion. Generally these traditions don’t meaningfully model either appropriate matching (sometimes modern teachers might throw in “well, these practices aren’t for everyone”), or the structure of dependencies, at least not explicitly.

When a practice “doesn’t work,” or when it gets stuck, often both practitioners and lineages take one of two tacks: either using more force, or more finesse. In Mark’s view both of these options are debt-accruing: because of lossleessness, given some structure present in the mind, routing around it can’t resolve the underlying generators, which will in general adapt to the pressure being applied against them. More specifically, for example, where some structure was “trying to” function as a buttress, attempts to remove it arbitrarily will lead it to dig in its heels or muster more resources to be able to hold its ground.

The claim which Mark makes along with this, is that the system can never enter a perfect deadlock, that the “ultimate” structure of the mind is inclined towards healing, wholeness, truth, etc. (See more below.) Note also that real gridlocks in city streets are also never perfect deadlocks, and that ultimately there exists slack somewhere at the periphery, and the system eventually unclogs.

Besides force and finesse, sometimes people can variously budge the system, and many practices consist of more like targeted and sustained budging. This is also not robustly effective, nor even trying to resolve generators, though often these sorts of practices use the language of “healing” anyway. These are usually ultimately ineffective for similar reasons, because you’re pushing against an elastic structure, not a plastic one, that is, a structure which bends back into its original shape once force is removed, rather than one which stays put once molded.

More succinctly, Mark’s claim is that one can’t unwind complexity by forcing, cutting, or routing around material, but that the system always has enough slack to be eventually unwound. In general in wayfinding, much of the time is spent understanding the contours of the system, and searching for these labile surfaces where the slack is.

(To some extent here I’m conflating between elasticity/losslessness in general, with gridlock in particular, but these have a lot in common and are both illustrative about wayfinding as whole.)

Independence and globality

Much of this rests on a claim about the independence¹² of various structures across the mind, both at the level of substrate, and at the level of content and debt.

Again in comparison with other theories and with established traditions, wayfinding is on the extreme, in this case in how entangled various structures are understood to be. In particular, wayfinding claims that a. all structures across the bodymind are connected or in some sense “contiguous,” b. ~any structures are potentially tied up in a given cluster of debt, and c. that in practice for most people coming to spiritual practice, debt is rolled into the great majority of generators of the contents of experience.

I use the word ‘independence’ here to mean that two structures can be “worked on” flexibly independently of one another; restated then, wayfinding claims that at least in situ, structures are seldom independent.

Reports here again often look like, “I had some clump of material which was largely intractable, I did many other apparently unrelated practices and worked with very different material, and then the clump opened up and became tractable, to my surprise.”

Often intractable material might have had some degree of play, or might have undergone apparent “transformations” several times, but in each case eventually regressed, or reassembled itself into a more pernicious form.

There are two metaphors here which I like, neither is an exact fit but they’re both striking, in the direction of this shape:

Rubik’s cube

This one isn’t as familiar to everyone:

A cube can end up in a state which looks very nearly solved, but which requires visibly scrambling most of the cube to get to solved. I won’t go into the dissimilarities with some exact details of Mark’s claims, but this is evocatively much closer to his understanding of what “correct” practice means and looks like, except that the possibilities of configurations of a human bodymind is much much larger, and that often much of the state is obscured “from the camera,” so to speak.

In fact with an actual Rubik’s cube, there’s some flexibility, and there are many similarly efficient paths to the goal, and a given move only touches 40% of the cube. In general though, most of the blocks quickly become entangled in the cube’s current state, and so any sequence of moves attempting to resolve a “twist” (like the twisted corners above) needs to be concerned with global coherence after that sequence.

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Hence global wayfinding.

And again, Mark’s claim is that most of the state is deeply entangled, and in fact in a less flexible way than a cube, in particular that there is a relatively narrow path towards global coherence, which is overwhelmingly unique and particular to a given person.

One point I want to clarify here: this sort of might sound like one would end up fretting about messing things up and scrambling things further. As I’ll describe more below, Mark’s claim here is that some perfect sequence is both unknown and unavailable from ~any starting position, and that it’s basically expected that much of a practitioner’s time is unavoidably spent a. exploring, and b. backtracking.

Refactoring and trauma smells