Spiritual RationalityBlog

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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.

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 to 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 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)
    • Knotted, overlapping, impacted, or snarled 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 and losslessness, as concepts together, are then partially analytical distinctions, but also theoretical ones which bear on what the structural constraints are (see more below), and 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 not in a way which ever 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, both 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.

Gesturally, some examples:

  • Dissociation, generally “active dissociation” (see link)
  • Resisting specific beliefs
    • Eg. affirmations, secondarily practices like CBT, etc., also often more stereotypically neurotic or “rigid” patterns of pushing down thoughts/beliefs
  • Blockages
  • Internal demands for positive affect, productivity, presentable-ness, etc.
    • (Though, not all such are exactly layering.)
  • Often, spiritual practices of “cultivation,” especially often those framed as “cultivation of virtue”

The claim here, at least implicitly, and claims which rhyme with this are often made by hippies as well, is that “by default” (oy) there are flows of information through a person’s psyche which are afforded by attention, emotion, energy, thought, belief, expression, etc., and that layering structurally disrupts some or many of those flows. Then, often both “traumatic content” and just information are not able to come to the surface, and are stymied in participating in “the conscious mind.”

Moreover the claim is that layering is always adding a compensatory structure, and that occluded or obscured generators are still structurally and causally present, even if apparently introspectively absent, or only present at the fringes.

Note this is subtly mixing both descriptive and normative claims, about the structure of human minds, and about what configurations are desirable, “original,” correct, or inevitable. Again I’ll return to these questions later. This is obviously besides big questions I discuss later re introspective epistemology.

Again I want to stress the point that layering by no means mostly operates at the level of “belief” or “thought,” rather Mark claims it operates on ~all features of phenomenology. On belief in particular, often there are layering structures which occlude the existential impression of some experience, which otherwise would have had a diffuse influence on perception, verbal claims, or introspectively superficial “beliefs.”

These structures again very commonly centrally revolve around somatic patterns which occlude the somatic instantiation of felt meaning. Some reports involve finding layering structures which are exclusively somatic, with no apparent “content,” imagery, memory, etc.; on the other hand there are many reports of patterns which initially present """cognitively""" or behaviorally, which are found to be tightly woven in with blockages or other somatic layering structures.

Different forms of dissociation are together probably the most common form of layering, in my anecdotes. Very commonly layering structures block or hide some channel or slice of meaning, and so a swath of emotions becomes unavailable or invisible, eg. grief or anger becoming apparently absent, among other adjacent flavors of trauma smells.

Often layering is partial or incompletely effective, my sense here is that eg. some shapes of sexual fetishism, and paraphilias otherwise, come from partially layered sexuality twisting itself to fit around some layering, and spilling out the sides. Similarly, IIRC I’ve seen reports of anger which is blocked from its direct expression, which finds expression and influence indirectly, eg. in self harm or (sometimes simulated) sexual violence, but also eg. tilting thought and expression, and constricting or distorting the expression of positive regard, affection, etc.

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 here4 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 Eliezer5 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 tantric6. Again see more below.

More context on shadow

Context here which might be missing for some people: one of the spiritual/therapy frames du jour is what’s known as “shadow work.” This gets variously distorted in different contexts, but centrally this means “unraveling blindspots and idiosyncratic conniptions by turning towards and working with things that are untouchable, disgusting, unspeakable, rude, etc.”

Shadow work in the yoga bourgeoisie sense above is substantially older, but one of the most influential books in that space at the moment is still Existential Kink by Carolyn Elliot.

Complex tangles

Very often structures of tech debt can become impacted, with various countervailing partially overlapping strata of content and layering. Some debt might be almost completely chronically blended, and often in multi-level contention with other parts, with multiple pieces snagged and pulled taut.

Anecdotally this seems to be the modal case for adults when they come to practice. This is distinctly contrary to eg. the 2010’s era Hollywood depiction of therapy, where perhaps some curmudgeonly guarded person finally comes to therapy, holds out for a while, and then spills their guts and is healed. This sort of never seems to be the case in (my analysis of) my anecdotes, and afaict is contrary to the data. This shape of impaction and congestion is also contrary to almost all of the usual advertising materials for therapy.

Repeating a bit, this is a very common shape, and speculative etiology, which certain kinds of practitioners report finding:

  1. Some persistent clump of content which is intense or intolerable
  2. Layering, obfuscating or dissociating from 1.
  3. Imbalance, or emotional/relational “absenses,” due to both 1. and 2.
  4. Further compensatory structures, eg. trying to perform the absent emotion/behavior/etc., or to route around it
  5. …Further somatic tangles from many competing energies and blockages in all of the above

This kind of pattern might present at the beginning of someone’s practice as nebulous difficulty and dissatisfaction with some aspect of relationships, or often only in terms of visible second-order effects of that, etc., and then several of these clusters interacting, etc. etc. To be fair this is a bit exaggerated, but I’ve definitely seen reports of tangles just like this.

The above is just one specific common shape, and “complex tangles” comprise a broad category of high-dimensional Chinese finger traps: the apparent direction “out” of some quagmire, apparently directly pointed towards “resolution,” ease, etc., pulls the snag tighter—but then the snag is being yanked in half a dozen more directions, and balled up inside more netting, etc.

Well, this is starting to sound like a proper crazy person. The claim here is that people often have these kinds of tangles very much under the surface, not available to introspection for some time, while meanwhile muddlng through well enough.

This is in some sense the flipside of the claim re mediocre outcomes for therapy and intensive meditation progress: wayfinding says that most people are in illegible quagmires, and that without dredging up the contents, all the way to the bottom, progress will either be modest, and more a matter of adding cope and “adjustment,” or will only get someone caught worse in the tangle. Furthermore wayfinding claims that intensive practice which doesn’t address the hairball will stall and founder.

Where various shapes of blockages or dissociation obscure swaths of meaning, feeling, and volition, wayfinding claims that healing or awakening will be incomplete, and that provisional progress will entrench existing distortions, and exaggerate imbalances.

For example:

  • Often the part/parts which initiate or motivate practice are fueled by desperation, perhaps with the person’s circumstances, or with the uncooperativeness and dysfunction of the system as a whole. Under these circumstances, practice often raises the hackles of various “protector”7 parts, and in response the initiating parts will double down with greater discipline or finesse, often with an internally performative veneer of “compassion.”
    • Often these represent bizarre contradictions, a surprising common shape I’ve seen is of people with parts fueled by self-hatred, wielding “self love” to try to beat themselves into some desired shape.
  • Attempts at embodiment which route around existing blockages, often further sealing off the unintegrated regions, perhaps because the current configuration of embodiment is too fragile or shallow to be able to integrate them.

Some kinds of tangles are almost purely solipsistic and internal. There are many reports of formations of energy in deadlock, with apparently no content underneath; sometimes these are reported as being felt to literally spatially/geometrically “unwind,” among other variations. Often these are very subtle, or at least apparently sensationally extremely subtle, until they suddenly begin to move.

Some shapes of complexity rely on some “cursed” cluster of feeling and belief. Often these buttress a snarl such that it is specifically held in place and can’t be extracted or resolved; this is the distinguishing feature of cursed material.

Gesturally:

  • Needing to be put together, OK, or not needing help, in order to feel accepted or safe; or vice versa, sometimes needing to be suffering in order for people to relate to you, or that one can’t be happy if others are suffering, etc.8
  • Various shapes with masculinity in particular9 (in at least some cultural contexts) requiring eg. performance of bravado, pain tolerance, non-vulnerability, etc., and making entertaining vulnerability even internally unacceptable.
  • Many kinds of political ideologies, sometimes religions, construct questioning the ideology as evidence of moral failure, degeneracy etc.
    • There’s some adjacent or looser sense with sexual ethics in some religions, eg. reports from people who nominally no longer believe in some religion still experiencing a lot of shame or anxiety, and finding them un able to extricate themselves from the views of their old religion.

Refactoring

See also the sections on healing in other models.

Refactoring, also from software jargon, refers to the process of restructuring a piece of software, resolving or paying off technical debt, by coordinating large-scale and local architectures in order to account elegantly for the current requirements and functionality.

There are a variety of disanalogies with refactoring in the software sense, to “refactoring” in the context of wayfinding; you should regard the term as more like an arbitrary piece of jargon, but it’s still a term that Mark uses and a helpful handhold.10

Refactoring in wayfinding again overlaps substantially with therapy and healing models, but including quite a lot largely absent from those. Descriptions in Mark’s book also venture deep into the territory of reports from weirder contemplative practitioners, esoteric bodywork, etc., and bleeding into awakening, variously antinomian mystical systems, etc. A big part of Mark’s claim here, which I discuss more below, is that the domain of awakening is contiguous with that of ordinary experience, and that the processes which lead to awakening are largely the same as those of refactoring “mundane” psychological material.

Where wayfinding’s understanding of refactoring intersects with the domain of variously conventional therapy models, much of the sense of “content,” and many of the motions are largely the same as those I described in the sections on healing and introspection. Broadly: finding exposed surfaces of the bodymind, turning the crank on metabolism, and arriving at more robust equilibria.

What distinguishes wayfinding here is how it regards dependencies, complexity, and gridlock.

Dependencies and gridlock

Illegible dependencies

Nonmonotonicities

  • 2026-09-07 also actually look over my notes below, now
    • 2026-09-11 I probably need to read all of my notes carefully before finishing outlining this whole section

[illegible dependencies. probably I will have to talk about this later, this maybe goes in like “lineages, teachers, and pedagogy” or something]

[but here’s the big difference, here’s how it understands blockers. note also therapy models sometimes track blockers and sometimes don’t, they have to account for complexity at least a little, like, it’s not a monotonic paydown etc.]

[and then cul-de-sac]

[ where wayfinding’s understanding of refactoring interacts with the ]

[something about like, it sort of encompasses everything, it’s happy to steal from everything, tho this is also common in a lot of people’s practice among western hippy something therapy ppl as well]

[and then move into an example] [maybe something about anger, but like, you were sort of cucking yourself the whole time, and the robust solution is etc.] [or maybe you are tucking energy away elsewhere, and oh man it all unfurls]

[ also something somewhere about like, exploring positive content, exploring all the interstices of the mind, what the contents of value are; so not to privilege negative content tho that’s a big part of it.

and actually like negative is complicated. so often it’s like stuckness wrt good things, in some sense also in many views “negative content” means like, there is an underlying aspiration and generator of goodness etc, [so coherence therapy etc here] ]

[sorry what do I want to communicate here so yes it’s about fractal blah blah, both sliding block puzzles and spring steel puzzles. maybe pick up sticks actually

hm

yeah

]

[>[that’s a big part of why this distinction matters. so to very unfairly stereotype, the “simple” healing mode for this case might prescribe a bit of controlled catharsis, a heavy dose of equanimity, and maybe loving-kindness meditation to… uh, sorry, try to be nicer? ] [again, this is unfair but I’m actually only exaggerating a tiny bit from cases I’ve seen.]]

spring steel puzzles here

And, in fact, while puzzle-solving, to make more room, sometimes we will need to unnest already nested tetraminoes to find new configurations that save even more space. Sometimes we’ll need to unnest vast numbers of them, over and over again, to figure out a different, more elegant global solution, as tetraminoes keep coming in.

https://meditationbook.page/#karma-losslessness-developmental-stage-models-viole

you cant unwind complexity by wishing it like the claim is basically you can’t cut the gordian knot

sliding block puzzles and then cul-de-sac

eh: [Re “quagmires,” there are reports (I see this more commonly among wayfinding associated people, but peripherally in other circles) of structures which look like:]

  • sometimes ppl model dissociation as basically one dimensional, like, you just need to get grounded bro, you just need to get strong, but actually it’s both densely structured and non monotonic, and worse yet you often can just like push down into more groundedness, but it’s sort of ignoring the parts structure that generated the dissociation.
    • but yes it’s not just one axis
    • anyway yeah ppl imagine strength is one axis. and like even hypertrophy isn’t exactly one axis but it might be, for a given muscle, but “strength” across the whole system is kind of a complex property and is substantially skill loaded
    • and yes, mark uses exactly this metaphor
    • sorry and to repeat, yes, sometimes ppl sort of refer to energetic capacity as though it were almost like the fully naive model of “strength”, this is also what you find sometimes re “equanimity”
      • maybe actually instead there should be a top level section that’s like “structure and one-dimensional-ness” or osmething. like I don’t like that phrasing but yeah, this doesn’t fully fit into tech debt actually. so maybe this is the next section, or maybe this sort of just folds in and out
    • and then yes, I expressed it as like, it’s more like efficiency of an engine, or efficacy of a vaccine maybe, it’s tightly structured mechanistic structure and there’sa lot of dense causal structures convening on one gross effect that we do meeasure
    • “groundedness is not a magic linearly augmented virtue”

[actually this is bad. like the thing I need to evoke is more like, no I’m stuck I can’t xyz, but like there’s no sort of clean way out]

there are successive layers, and layers can get impacted over time, debt gets complicated. [presumably this sort of goes right before the section on 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.

[something like “to continue on the evocative exmaple I gave above”]

[This kind of shape, whether multiple compounded snarled brambles of layering, or simpler structures, if still often intense and overwhelming, is ]

[that’s a big part of why this distinction matters. so to very unfairly stereotype, the “simple” healing mode for this case might prescribe a bit of controlled catharsis, a heavy dose of equanimity, and maybe loving-kindness meditation to… uh, sorry, try to be nicer? ] [again, this is unfair but I’m actually only exaggerating a tiny bit from cases I’ve seen.]

[what about weirdos? how common is this? how do I make these concepts more accessible?] [indeed I think this kind of “layered with unresolved compensated generators” is very common]

  • I think I’m gonna talk about somatic tangles much more here.
    • “beliefs are full stack"

"Structure-preserving transformations”

Wacky phenomenology

Complexity and losslessness

The fundamental claims of wayfinding are:

  1. The mind is lossless with respect to volition, affect, and phenomenal structure.

  2. There are conditions under which some features will simplify and unify, or separately “release,” and sometimes “turn inside out.” (“refactoring”, more below)

  3. Modification of these structures under any other conditions adds more cruft or twistiness (“tech debt”) around them, but cannot collapse or destroy them.

  4. Awakening amounts to a deep refactor of many features of the mind.

  5. Proximal reconfigurations are possible which achieve some or many features of awakening, but which are rolled in with or even entrench tech debt.

And then, as a normative claim:

  1. Complete and flawless refactoring is “correct” in a robust sense, and a “truer” expression of human value than endebted forms of awakening.

Perhaps that stands on its own but I’ll talk about these some more.

and so this is the basic crux of wayfinding with (most) therapy systems, with basically all? traditional spiritual systems, again sometimes those have some of this in part though often they really really don’t, they very explicitly contradict this and some have this partially, or have it strongly but not fractally, or have it strongly but leave out a bunch of swaths of weirdness, like weird somatic stuff, weird body-world-map stuff, etc.

[and then yes, under what conditions does it collapse, what are the rules of transformation, what produces debt or not, so so “structure preserving transformations”. note that not all debt is due to adding cruft, there’s “simple” debt] [check if I actually communicated that in the debt section] [and then refactoring, again see just below]

and then well, if this is true, [obviously you can’t [obviate] complexity, the propensity to complexity, and the extant complexity, inheres in the substrate. ]

[a bit more about “true”, probably be like, “very briefly here’s mark’s schtick here, but I discuss this here and here]

[and then lead into structure preserving transformations and spend more time on that.]

  • 2026-09-03 Wayfinding fundamental claims should also briefly be like, I don’t necessarily buy this totally. Also link forward to my takes on wayfinding etc
  • I will talk about awakening below

Wayfinding and awakening

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

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. ↩

  4. Having nothing to do with wayfinding, but in its terms. ↩

  5. Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2007. Terminal Values and Instrumental Values ↩

  6. I’m using ‘tantric’ here in a slightly abused sense, to mean something like “using taboo-breaking as a gateway to transformation, mysticism, and the sacred.” Note I don’t mean New-Age sex practices, see this footnote for a discussion of Western Neo-Tantra. ↩

  7. The term here in IFS jargon, the claim here is that many people have an arrangement involving a traumatized vulnerable part, and a separate protector which tries to prevent the first from being triggered, etc. ↩

  8. Stolen directly from the wayfinding book, here and here. ↩

  9. Obviously this has all changed, especially over the last century, lots I could say here, etc. I do feel like the shapes for femininity are not fully symmetric, I don’t feel like I understand this, definitely… ↩

  10. So I mean, he doesn’t actually use it that often, but it’s the most convenient way to talk about this process given the way I’m explaining everything here. ↩