The Global Wayfinding Model

This section discusses the most important parts of the global wayfinding model in more detail.

See previous section for initial context.

Losslessness

Losslessness is a concept from information theory, it describes a representation from which an original input can be reconstructed perfectly, that is, without any loss of information.¹ In the context of global wayfinding, Mark often claims that the mind, (barring traumatic brain injury etc.) is basically lossless, variously with respect to memory, at least of formative events, but more importantly with respect to its volitions, affective conditioning, and values.

First off I have to note explicitly that I expect the strongest version of this claim must be false. I haven't discussed this with Mark, but etc. etc., the maximal version² would flatly contradict most of what I'm vaguely aware of about the literature on human memory. Even with claims outside of wayfinding of eg. recovering traumatic memories, I expect these are a mixed bag: some of these are definitely fabricated under suggestion from therapists, some I expect are straightforwardly real, some mixed, etc.

To some extent I'm less interested in the claim about memory per se, and more interested in the claim about values and emotions. The latter I see as a fundamental crux between wayfinding and certainly all traditional contemplative lineages I'm aware of,³ as well as almost all modern therapy systems.

The basic claim here is that, as a general property of human minds, let's say "volitional-affective structures" basically cannot be squashed, erased, or ripped out, and that those structures persist after even apparently effective attempts to do so, but now something like "swept under the rug."

(By volitional-affective structures I mean something very general, so inclusive of eg. triggers, attachment bonds, felt status and social posture, tribal/religious loyalty or devotion, "trauma" very broadly, also basic social/emotional "needs," sex drive, etc.)

This is not to claim that these structures never "naturally" decay or change, my understanding of Mark's claim here in general is that minds have organic, "integrated" conditions for relinquishing values and intentions, as well as conditions under which they will be suppressed and collect as conflicted, unintegrated cruft in the body-mind, which is a very common pattern of technical debt.

Technical debt

Technical debt (often tech debt) is a concept from software engineering, where it refers to (among other things) common patterns of cruft and fairy-dust-and-duct-tape style complexity which tend to accrue in software systems over time. In actual software, tech debt is most often incurred when features are quickly tacked on, without respect to the "structural integrity" of the program—metaphorically one could imagine a house with an extension built on stilts jutting through the roof of the original structure, and with holes in the floor covered up with carpet.

The metaphor of debt here is that tech debt represents engineering work which has been postponed to the future, which both will eventually have to be "repaid," and which continually impedes ongoing engineering work, hence on which an organization "pays interest." Tech debt is basically pervasive in real world software, and Mark's claim is that the same is true in human minds.

There are a bunch of claims here:

• Ordinary life experiences often leave residue which something like "needs to be" metabolized and integrated. Until metabolized they distort one's own, robust relationship to oneself, a domain of experience, an individual person, etc., and remain an encumbrance until thoroughly integrated.
  • Note that this is at least partially normative and partially descriptive, viz. descriptively there exists metabolism, and there exists something that looks like more "extensive" metabolism, which is what wayfinding consists of, but why this is desirable or correct is more nuanced and maybe underdetermined. See more on my takes on wayfinding, and on this question very broadly.
• Tech debt compounds, in particular, various kinds of debt can build on existing strata, and more complex or entrenched patterns of tech debt both make new debt harder to pay off, and more likely to accrue in general.
  • Sufficiently snarled or compounded tech debt can make all integration impossible, manifesting in eg. meditation practice becoming stuck, or rigidity and stuckness in affect/perception/behavior in general.
    • (Mark is pretty extensive about this claim, eg. he thinks that cognitive decline associated with age is substantially about accrued debt.)
• Some kinds of metabolism occur organically, but compounded debt is often intractable to default metabolic processes or at least a person's existing skills.
  • Many kinds of debt get paid off (that is, resolved, "healed," processed, etc.) in normal life and with normal levels of introspective/meditative skill, eg. during sleep, stolen moments of reflection, sharing with others, etc. However, many patterns of debt are too complex or too intense, and so they will usually fester indefinitely.
• Thorough integration is often hyper-idiosyncratic, fractal, and irrevocably particular to a person's specific shapes of tech debt, and that skipping this particularity blocks future progress.
  • Eg. Mark uses language like "million-moves long, ten thousand hour combination lock" to describe practice in his system.
• Most adults have substantial outstanding technical debt.
• Awakenings can be, and in practice often are, rolled in with pre-existing structures of debt. Furthermore, many apparent awakenings are entirely contingent on particular patterns of debt, often specifically inculcated by a given lineage.
  • In any case, depending on how one construes the goal of spiritual practice, in wayfinding, "complete" or "correct" practice eventually requires unwinding all debt. See more later on this.
• Similarly, there are some kinds of apparent healing and integration possible which are built on and entrench existing technical debt, even if they have a similar contour and result to "correct" practice. Also similarly, in the wayfinding model, these proximal or incomplete kinds of integration eventually need to be unwound as well.

Some broad categories of debt, not necessarily exhaustive:

1. Content at the surface
   • This would be more like straightforward grief, horror, fear, anger etc., along with associated thoughts/imagery/etc.
     • (So re the stylized depiction of content in the link above, here by "content" I mean more like the "gunk" that's excised and uh "emoted" out, rather than more ingrained patterns of belief, perception etc.)
   • Often content comes to the surface as a more complex structure of debt is unwound, so this ordered list here is sort of in reverse order of how practice commonly progresses.
2. Encysted unmetabolized content, usually with downstream behaviors and perceptions
   • Central here will be examples I discussed in the sections on trauma and trauma smells.
   • (Note that strictly speaking behavior itself is not debt, but generally speaking trauma-smelly behavior/perception is generated by some debt etc.)
3. Gross and subtle layering (see below)
   • Briefly, compensatory or occlusive structures, often added on top of types #1 and #2 above.
     • (Note that trauma smells are often specifically layering)
4. Complex tangles (see below)
   • Impacted, snarled, overlapping, or knotted structures of volition, intention, affect, and perception.

This list of course in great part overlaps with other models, and anyway these models are all at least substantially describing the same territory of healing and transformative practice. Tech debt as a concept is then partially an analytical distinction, but also a theoretical one which bears on what techniques we expect to work.

In particular, many practice frameworks look at some "problematic" set of behaviors etc. in a practitioner, and prescribe practices which implicitly view the generators as simple or flat, whereas for the same cases, wayfinding will often predict that the generators are complex and snarled, with a lot of debt to be unwound before getting to the heart of the issue.

Debt often has unmetabolized gross content at the root, but not always, or in some cases at least in a way which never becomes distinctly available. Some kinds of debt are purely perceptual, cognitive, or somatic tangles without much valence or emotion. Again, see the sections below.

Layering

Layering refers to structural contortion, dislocation, and suppression, used to achieve a specific configuration of psychology and behavior, generally at the expense of integration. (Unfortunately 'layer' evokes discrete strata occluding others, which was ish how it was meant in the model Mark originally took the term from, but it's meant more loosely and broadly in Mark's usage.)

These kinds of "contortions" can be spatial, and very often specifically somatic, with common patterns in their presentation and in their resolution. However, layering, and debt in general are not just somatic, and Mark is often insistent that meaning, being, and perception are all interwoven, with debt sometimes worked all the way down to the visual quality of space, the boundary of the body, object permanence, etc.

Complex Tangles

This is really the bread and butter of wayfinding, more specifically making these patterns salient is what most distinguishes wayfinding for me from other practice systems.

Refactoring

Wacky phenomenology

Wayfinding and awakening

[something like, and then awakening pops out for free? etc]

Painting some pictures

Footnotes

1. Er, rather, that the encoding doesn't lose any information, if the encoding is lossless then indeed there is an inverse function blah blah blah. ↩

2. And Mark does seem to be making really extreme claims, so eg. here "the mind is practically lossless (in that any distinguishable sensory memory can be ultimately recovered)" ↩

3. So the exception here is plausibly some theories of karma kind of end up equivalent to this claim. Mark actually uses the term 'karma' a lot to mean something like "tech debt + conditioning," this feels like an annoying misuse of the term and I don't think is close enough to the traditional models for it to be appropriate. Anyway, the crux here with traditional systems is really more about tech debt + losslessness rather than losslessness alone, but this flowed better. ↩