--- title: "Spiritual Rationality" canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org" pages: 56 --- # Spiritual Rationality {#top} *The complete text of the book at https://spiritual-rationality.org, as one markdown file, in reading order. Every page is also available on its own: swap `/book/` for `/md/`, drop any trailing slash, then add `.md` — so https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/phenomenology-somatics/ is https://spiritual-rationality.org/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt* ## Notation {#notation} Source notation, not standard markdown: - `::gloss[…]` — definition of the heading above it. Invisible on the site; it is the hover card for links to that heading. Read as a definition. - `::gloss[…]{#id}` — defines a term holding its own anchor. `#id` is the link target; the block below is what it annotates. - `::nogloss` — heading deliberately has no definition. - `:::note[…]` / `:::info[…]` — callouts (MyST/Docusaurus admonitions). Footnotes are GFM. Heading anchors are GitHub-style slugs, written out as `{#id}` in the combined files. ## Contents {#contents} - [Introduction](#introduction) - [Metaphysics](#metaphysics) - [What, and Why, Metaphysics?](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics) - [Ways of Seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) - [Reification](#metaphysics-reification) - [Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism) - [Good, Right, & Wrong](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology) - [(Mis)use of Language and Rhetoric, re Rightness](#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness) - ["Real"](#metaphysics-real) - [Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement) - [Culture, Trauma, and Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics) - [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma) - [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) - [Trauma Smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) - [Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) - [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture) - [Burdens of Meaning](#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning) - [Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice](#practice) - [Spiritual Practice](#practice-spiritual-practice) - [Somatic Phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) - [Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices](#practice-practices) - [Meditation](#practice-meditation) - [Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")](#practice-introspection) - [Content, Healing, and Integration](#practice-healing) - [Criticizing Somatics-and-Trauma Models](#practice-healing-criticizing-trauma) - [Other Models of Healing](#practice-healing-other-models) - [Mysticism and Awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening) - [Paths and "The Path"](#practice-paths) - [Transformative Practice](#practice-transformative-practice) - [Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding) - [Contextualizing Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding-introduction) - [The Global Wayfinding Model](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) - [The Depths of Insanity](#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity) - [Disruptions in Life and Practice](#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities) - [My Takes on Wayfinding](#wayfinding-my-takes) - [Spiritual Truth](#spiritual-truth) - [Metaphysics re Phenomenology and Spiritual Practice](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) - [Lopsided Masters](#spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters) - [Schools, Teachers, and Transmission](#spiritual-truth-schools-teachers-transmission) - [Gnosis, Inference, Deference, & Confabulation](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) - [Wrong Practice](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice) - [Spiritual Truth](#spiritual-truth-truth) - [Rationality](#spiritual-truth-rationality) - [Goodness](#goodness) - [What is Axiology?](#goodness-what-is-axiology) - [Metaphysics and Axiology](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology) - [Harm](#goodness-harm) - [Metaphysical Harms](#goodness-metaphysical-harms) - [Sex](#goodness-sex) - [Conclusion](#conclusion) - [Spiritual Rationality](#conclusion-spiritual-rationality) - [Appendix](#appendix) - [Empiricism re Therapy Efficacy](#appendix-therapy-efficacy) - [The Garden Of Eden](#appendix-garden-of-eden) - [Specific Claims from Specific Traditions](#appendix-specific-claims) - [Whose Buddha?](#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography) --- # Introduction {#introduction} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/introduction — also at `/md/introduction.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `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 associated 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. I sit somewhere between these two ideologies, 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 {#introduction--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 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 {#introduction--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](https://www.readthesequences.com/), [David Chapman](https://meaningness.com/), [Rob Burbea](https://hermesamara.org/teachings), and [Mark Lippmann](https://meditationbook.page/). I also owe a debt of some kind to my time with Sanghananda. 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. --- # Metaphysics {#metaphysics} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics — also at `/md/metaphysics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics--`.* *In this chapter:* *Metaphysics* is these days an unfortunate word, but in some sense it remains the most fundamental subject to all inquiry: - [What, and Why, Metaphysics?](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics) Metaphysics is of particular interest in trying to understand phenomenology and spiritual experiences. I discuss some aspects of phenomenological metaphysics: - [Ways of Seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) - [Reification](#metaphysics-reification) I then discuss properties of many metaphysical systems, and certain errors in those views: - [Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism) - [Good, Right, & Wrong](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology) - [(Mis)use of Language and Rhetoric, re Rightness](#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness) - ["Real"](#metaphysics-real) Lastly, people have many different beliefs about metaphysics, and it's quite unclear how to determine what's right, or to come to consensus: - [Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement) --- # What, and Why, Metaphysics? {#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics — also at `/md/metaphysics/what-why-metaphysics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--`.* >This isn’t abstract, because this affects the whole texture of your sense of existence. The whole sense of meaningfulness in your life, the whole vision and feel of what your life, existence, and practice is depends on what you believe is real and or [sic] not, and what’s not real. How are we going to know? How are we going to decide?[^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--questioning-awakening] [^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--questioning-awakening]: Rob Burbea, 2014. [*Questioning Awakening*](https://hermesamara.org/resources/talk/2014-11-12-questioning-awakening) There's some trouble here because the word 'metaphysics' is too often these days basically used by cranks, and in any case there isn't a standard definition, but the definition I'll use I think covers most of the modern usages pretty well. Anyway, it's not definitive and I hold it lightly. I'm going to define metaphysics as the combination of ontology, cosmology, axiology, and epistemology. **Ontology**: what exists, and what it means for something to exist. **Cosmology**: what is out there, including in the far reaches of time and space. **Axiology**: what is good and right, what matters, and how important this or that is. **Epistemology**: how we can know.
One way of conceiving of these is that they are the fundamental human hyperpriors. The point here being, we have priors over what kinds of evidence we expect to observe, top to bottom, and how we plan to (or, implicitly, naively, will) update, with respect to our world-models and our goals and values.
I'll give some illustrative examples to try to make this concept feel more tangible. In various systems of Christian metaphysics, we get something like this: - Ontology: souls, God, magic (or at least, whatever is responsible for miracles) - Cosmology: Heaven and Hell, sometimes also Purgatory; time beginning from Genesis - Axiology: obeying God's will, salvation as the highest good, virtues like faith and charity; Sometimes also God's will as *defining* the Good - Epistemology: scriptural and church authority, divine revelation through scripture and prayer In some sense this is a bit of a caricature, or at least an exaggerated description. In practice I don't think almost anyone actually uses solely this metaphysics. I expect that, even in the traditions that teach it, eternal damnation is not that salient on most days of people's lives, for all but the most devout. Similarly, the demands of family and community, let alone ordinary personal satisfaction, are probably not constantly being practiced as devotion to God, etc. etc. To be clear, in general, one's explicitly endorsed metaphysics isn't necessarily all that's going on, and in practice I think *everyone* is using a messy collection of competing perspectives. (In particular also, of course, "Christianity" isn't one thing, etc.) Let's take rationalism. Again not to caricature, as rats are a diverse bunch, but these are pretty common features: - Ontology: physicalism, computation as the basis of consciousness, sometimes a kind of mathematical platonism by way of Tegmark - Cosmology: many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, deep time both forward and backward, potential simulation hierarchies - Axiology: consequentialism, usually utilitarianism, often longtermism and certain kinds of techno-optimism, sometimes priority on reducing suffering - Epistemology: Bayesianism, reductionism Interestingly I think rationalists tend to be quite a bit more "devout" than probably 98th percentile Christians in the US, and I know many people who are actually just whole-hog on basically the picture I drew above. This one is faintly less fair, but here's an attempt to describe the standard coastal liberal worldview, perhaps as of 15 years ago: - Ontology: Material reality is primary, consciousness emerges from brains, social constructs are "real but not really real," abstract concepts like rights and democracy have a kind of quasi-reality - Cosmology: Big Bang, evolution, progress as a general historical pattern, often has a kind of vague, hazy scientistic picture - Axiology: Individual autonomy, harm reduction, fairness/equality, tolerance of difference (except intolerance), personal growth/development - Epistemology: again "science," but more in a social/institutional sense, trusting experts and consensus rather than direct engagement with method; strong separation between "subjective" domains where personal experience is authoritative and "objective" ones where it isn't Ordinarily we might call all of these "worldviews," which is fair enough, but a large part of the point of calling them each a metaphysics is to note a. how they're all fairly tightly interwoven, each aspect buffeting what kinds of inferences can be made with respect to the others, and b. that they're often *totalizing* in a sense. Even from the contemporary liberal view, they can regard contrary perspectives from afar (especially those from a [fargroup](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/27/post-partisanship-is-hyper-partisanship/)), but it's really quite difficult to deeply engage with ideas that majorly challenges these principles. Yes yes, before you call me snooty or a hypocrite, I have a metaphysics too, and I'm absolutely vulnerable to this totalizing quality. That's really the point here, and that's why it's so important. It's somewhere between exceedingly difficult and impossible to escape to clutches of metaphysics in general, and I need to be able to talk about what properties a metaphysics has, and what consequences that has for inferences made under it. The point of discussing metaphysics is not to sneer at people for believing things, at the very least not *for believing things whatsoever*. Mostly, I mean to say: these systems of beliefs exist, indeed they have such and such properties, and they affect perception and cognition. Let me also say definitively: the details of one's metaphysics **matter**. *Surely*, it's of great consequence what is valuable, *surely*, it's of great consequence what's real, *surely*, etc. etc., complete the litany however you like: physical death, heat death, childrearing, purpose, rebirth, free will, love, quantum many-worlds, simulation hypothesis, moral truth, other minds, time's arrow, on and on. To some extent this is foreign from the modern secular malaise of hardly-even-believing-anything, but even from such a perspective it should be clear that *if you actually believed* in some distinct metaphysics, then yes! that would have really substantial consequences on how you lived your life, how you related to others, and what would appear important and real and worth investing in. I should also say, the modern secular view nonetheless involves a metaphysics, even if it's mostly invisible to us because it's assumed so broadly everywhere now. Perhaps, and this question will weave in and out of the whole book, for some of these questions there doesn't exist, and in principle *can't* exist a "right" answer. Often these questions are deeply personal and idiosyncratic, and in principle a person, or a mind in general, could choose one thing or another without contradiction. See [Good, Right, & Wrong](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology) for more on this question.
Secular western metaphysics is taken for granted, but is very modern, and often cartoonish There are two points here: 1. Many of the details of the default secular worldview are extremely modern. Included in these would be things like the social institution of science, specific models like evolutionary biology, the Big Bang, human rights, and current estimates for the age of the universe (~1.4·1010 years), which all came to consensus quite recently, some of these less than a century ago. To be clear, *modern* doesn't unreliable or faddish, but simply recent in history. These ideas which we take for granted *were simply unknown* to past generations in Western culture, let alone in world culture cross-anthropologically. - I think there's something pernicious with all of these about consensus shorn of historical context. - Perhaps, we could say, "this perspective is one that a human mind can experience (as indeed I am experiencing it) and the view has consequences in terms of the vague background intuitions I have, what seems salient to me, and what kinds of inferences I'm likely to make." - Some very important questions are still uncertain even in cosmology, eg. heat death. 2. The Big Bang is probably a cartoon story in your mind. If you're not at least a highly competent amateur physicist, I'm going to bet that you understand very little about modern scientific cosmology. Not only do you likely not understand the model, you also probably have no idea how the consensus came about, what contrary theories or data exist, etc. etc. - To be clear, this *definitely* includes me. - Same goes for evolution, which is indeed mostly not understood even by the "general educated public." - This is also ignoring that humans mostly can't perceive magnitudes like 1010. - Included in this would even just be "science," which I think in the popular imagination and discourse amounts to not much more than a priestly class who perform magical rituals which produce knowledge by basically inscrutable means.
## The thicket of views {#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--the-thicket-of-views} We can analyze metaphysics from a propositional, epistemic, or phenomenological angle. I think the phenomenological level ends up being the most revealing, and I think the propositional is where we can easily get caught and make no progress at all. >"Vaccha, the position that 'the cosmos is eternal' is a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion of views, a writhing of views, a fetter of views. ..." [^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--thanissaro] [^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--thanissaro]: [MN 72](https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.072.than.html), trans. Thānissaro 1997 >"Whereas some recluses and brahmins, while living on the food offered by the faithful, engage in wrangling argumentation, (saying to one another): 'You don't understand this doctrine and discipline. I am the one who understands this doctrine and discipline.' ..."[^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--bodhi] [^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--bodhi]: [DN 2](https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/dn/dn.01.0.bodh.html) trans. Bodhi 2010 While I hardly take an orthodox Buddhist angle here, this is clearly an ancient problem. I'm also not clear that I have a solution to this problem, but I'm glad to say that strictly staying at the propositional level is seldom generative. That's part of the point of this whole book: it's not clear in principle how to tell what's true, or what to even make of what one sees or learns, let along how to come to consensus, when it comes to metaphysics! (And, in practice, this kind of discourse usually gets nowhere.) Indeed, this is a very familiar kind of doctrinal bickering between schools. ### No universally compelling arguments {#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--no-universally-compelling-arguments} ::gloss[Eliezer's argument in *no universally compelling arguments* is that for any given argument, where one mind finds it compelling, another mind could find it wrong, and that of course in practice arguments are not compelling to all humans.] Following Eliezer, I agree that there are no universally compelling arguments[^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--eliezer-1]. This is to say, in principle if one mind thinks or perceives one thing in a specific context, another could simply "choose" something else, or the opposite. This is not to say that therefore nothing is real or true; we humans will continue to ~all agree that 2 is bigger than 1, and that on earth if you drop a marble from a building it will fall, and these models and predictions seem to continue to be consistent and predictive. [^metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--eliezer-1]: Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008. [*No Universally Compelling Arguments*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PtoQdG7E8MxYJrigu/no-universally-compelling-arguments) However, among humans there is a riot of differing metaphysical perspectives, and it's not clear that consensus is possible. There are so many different contradictory perspectives about what's true and real, that I suspect it might be *in principle* impossible to reach consensus. I suspect that human minds are flexible enough, and that there won't be a stable basis on which we can construct a "correct" answer for most of the content of metaphysics in general. (Cosmology is mostly only an exception here if you accept a ~"scientific" epistemology, which is also not guaranteed.) There's so much diversity in what is valorized that I don't think that there's going to be an inescapably "correct" answer, in the way that we find for mathematical or empirical questions, again my suspicion is that human minds are simply too flexible here. Largely the same goes for ontology as well. Regarding the flexibility of value, I'll discuss all of this in more detail in the section on [axiology](#goodness).
Digging in a bit here My *suspicion* is that metaphysics is going to be underdetermined. In some ways this is a challenge for my whole project, though mostly what I'll argue for, in the rest of the section on metaphysics, is that we don't have a "correct" metaphysics, and that likely there in principle cannot be one. I feel pretty confident that the basic biologically determined ontological priors are adapted to get human-sized objects mostly right without too much superstition, but that we don't come baked in with stable intuitions about whether a machine can be a person, or what it means for something to be "dirty," or even, classically, whether an object always remains the same one over time. The following few sections will discuss this problem, among others. See especially ["Real"](#metaphysics-real).
A lot of public discourse actually happens between people who have incompatble systems of metaphysics. Seen this way, it's *obvious* that they can't make any progress: perhaps, because they don't have means to make changes to their metaphysics, but at least because they're trying to argue over claims that are downstream of their metaphysics, without surfacing their underlying metaphysical differences. ## Epistemic consequences of metaphysics {#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--epistemic-consequences-of-metaphysics} More productively, we can notice that a person's metaphysics will affect what inferences they make. This is both subtle and overt. Of course, rationalists might have explicit models about evolutionary psychology, but there's often also a tendency to see all interactions in terms of some imagined notion of the incentives of on some prehistoric evolutionary african savannah. We might imagine here also beliefs about literal miracles, versus faint inklings of providence and the hand of God. Metaphysical beliefs are the greatest of the geological forces shaping the so-called "salience landscape." I would say here, we can never do a totally neutral search over the space of hypotheses, we *start* searching for an explanation with some opaque, implicit assumptions about what kinds of explanations might exist, and where to look for them. ## Phenomenological metaphysics {#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--phenomenological-metaphysics} ::gloss[*Phenomenological metaphysics*, refers to the phenomenological construction and consequences of metaphysics.] Firstly, just to clarify: phenomenological metaphysics could probably mean either "metaphysics *with respect to* phenomenology" (as in, what is consciousness, qualia-based theories of value, etc.), or "the phenomenology of metaphysics," and I'll be talking about the latter here, though the former will come up again in the section on spiritual practice. Perhaps more than on one's epistemics, one's metaphysics has a huge part in shaping the contents of one's phenomenology. Ordinarily, one doesn't *see* perceptions, they rather constitute what we experience as real. As we experience them, they are usually *out there*, rather than *in here*. I could say that we see *through* perception, or at least *with* perception. It's not even that, propositionally, we say "ah well that object which I hypothesize to exist in some 'reality', based on its appearance to me, I would categorize it as x"—a sentence no one has ever said in earnest—rather indeed we *experience it* as a member of that category. That simply *is* a dog, or worse, that sex act simply *is* disgusting, etc. Sometimes a perception is uncertain, but the *quality of being uncertain* is usually clear as day. My impression is that children basically know this, at least about other people. Alice sees x this way, Bob sees it that, they both experience their perception as utterly real, and I see it yet differently. "Obviously, their perceptions are just perceptions" (and then perhaps) "whereas mine are *actually* real." Borrowing from the language of Internal Family Systems, I'll say that perceptions are more "blended" the less easily we can take them as object or try on another perspective. Usually, our basic metaphysical assumptions are so blended that they're simply stuck to our faces, to mix metaphors. We often usually *can't even see them as assumptions*, even if we have some flexibility with perceptions of eg. beauty or disgust. "I have a body", "I am looking out of my eyes", "the ceiling is up", or even "this person is separate from me," these are so real and so ever-present that they're somehow both invisible and utterly stable and solid. One's metaphysics shapes "the very being and seeming of the world." Evocatively, we can compare here the standard image someone in the throes of mania, seeing CIA agents or angels around every corner. Even in ordinary, non-pathological cases this can nonetheless be quite stark. An ok example, though this also isn't *quite* metaphysical, would be reports of travelling from the dead of winter to a tropical country, that life and experience seem to open up entirely, that the possibilities for connection and flourishing become obvious where before they seemed only imaginary. It's been difficult to situate rich humane meaning in modern scientific cosmologies, and indeed we can say that there's some attraction to placing humanity, which most people regard as being the locus of meaning and goodness in the universe, as the *cosmological* center, in countless creation myths through Galileo, and still to this day in many fundamentalist religions. This kind of "existential seeming" is where spirituality becomes relevant. This is also where a lot of "woo" comes in, though unfortunately often through "hyperstitional" views and practices, which I think are mostly harmful. --- # Ways of Seeing {#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing — also at `/md/metaphysics/ways-of-seeing.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-ways-of-seeing--`.* A *way of seeing* is an orientation or a pattern of relating (whether to a physical object, a person, a symbol, etc.), which gives rise to some cluster of emotions and perceptions. This is one of the basic concepts in how Rob Burbea taught and explained meditation, which is where I get it from. That definition is quite abstract, so I'll try to make it more concrete. Reading a math textbook, one might notice any of these, or any of these might be salient at one time: - Mathematical arguments - Relationship to other mathematical theories - Typography and design - Physical presence as an object - Context within the author's life These are all pretty mundane, but any of them define a pattern of salience and attention, as well as emotional and subtler perceptual qualities. Religious and sacred objects, for those steeped in a given tradition, will arouse various emotional, perceptual, and behavioral qualities. These might be static or dynamic: here I'm thinking of the way the Torah scroll is taken out of the ark and held in the air, and presented to the congregation who sing for it. Other traditions have many different patterns of embodied, dynamic relations of sacredness with particular objects, or with the architecture of a temple, etc., which again embody and arouse a way of seeing which is practiced with respect to that object. Sometimes ways of seeing can be aroused with respect to inert symbols: - The swastika - Pop culture icons - Sexual/taboo symbols, eg. the Ring of O Ways of seeing might be embodied in personal relationships: - How a parent sees their child - How someone views a loved one's grave - Relationship with an enemy or abuser Often ways of seeing reflect an experience or perception about one's place in the universe, or one's felt sense of status and power. The phrases below each express a relational quality between self and world, particularly the social world: - "I'm on top of the world" - "I'm at rock bottom" - "The world is against me" - "I'm on another level" Even plainness or emotional neutrality is a way of seeing, at least of a sort. *** Note, though we might describe a way of seeing by a phrase in English, ways of seeing are generally non-propositional, and they're not necessarily about specific thoughts one might have. In fact, a way of seeing often has nothing to do with words at all. A way of seeing is a particular perspective, stance, or position in relationship which brings out or arouses some shape of meaning with respect to an object, situation, person, etc. Ways of seeing often work by amplifying the salience or emotional resonance of certain parts of experience over others. In any of the above examples, there's a detail and richness of meaning which is more or less the *manifestation* of the way of seeing at play. Phenomenologically, this might include feelings in the body, images, perception of situational awareness, or felt qualities of affordance for movement or body positioning, to name a few qualities.
I claim that perception and "belief" or "ideation" are much more contiguous than people usually imagine This is hard to argue for definitively, though I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding their heads at this section. You can believe me or not, but here's at least some gesture at what I mean by this: Taking visual perception in particular, I think there's something much more subtle going on than we usually think. I claim that "what something looks like" is often ~"mostly" determined by what we believe about it, than its actual physical structure. We have of course the adage, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," etc. My impression from my own meditation practice, and reports from some meditation teachers, is that "mental imagery" is often more subtle than we usually notice, and more like contiguous with ordinary visual perception. There's a spectrum here. Near one end might be purposefully overlaying perceptions onto "external" visual perception, eg. "seeing" how a chair would look in a room that one is decoarting, while looking around with the eyes still open. Perhaps in the middle would be something like a rock climber "seeing" routes. On the far end, I've heard claims from meditation teachers to the effect that, with the eyes closed, if one doesn't construe one's body as a body-shape, that body sensations will be experienced by default as occurring on the surface of a sphere. (The interpretation here being that proprioception is more like visual than somatic, despite being so *apparently* somatic.) Visual perception here is just one example. Most of what I want to say here is that I think in every domain of perception there's a much more dynamic relationship between perspective or stance, and apparent perception, than we usually notice or think possible. I'll claim that there's quite a lot of "give" in perception in general, and that this is exactly where ways of seeing function and are manifest.
There will be more discussion about this in the [section on practice](#practice), but I'll touch on it briefly here. There is a huge swath of practices which involve giving rise to particular emotions and and perceptions. Among these: - "Prayer" - (This evokes some Hollywood image but in my mind is much more general) - Deity Yoga - Briefly, this is a cluster of practices which involve visualizing a deity, sometimes in front of oneself, or sometimes with oneself *as* the deity - Many meditation practices - Many feature cultivating "equanimity," or sometimes cultivating a perception of un-reality or weakened importance for objects, emotions, etc. - A large swath of western "therapy" practices - This can range from eg. analyzing beliefs and feelings and practicing new ones (a la CBT), to perhaps on the other end, visualizing perfect parents and "taking on" their care as a new emotional basis (IPF) --- # Reification {#metaphysics-reification} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/reification — also at `/md/metaphysics/reification.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-reification--`.* The [OED entry](https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/161514) for ‘reify’: > transitive. *To make (something abstract) more concrete or real; to regard or treat (an idea, concept, etc.) as if having material existence.* Here’s about how I use the word: > *To make a perception, feeling, belief, or conception more real, solid, or salient, by any means.* I would say perception and belief are often downstream of our metaphysics. The definition from the OED describes one common kind of reification, which I'll discuss in more detail [later](#metaphysics-real). I'd also distinguish between *propositional* reification and *phenomenological* reification, which of course are often intertwined. Propositional reification often takes the form of constructing a model or principle to be taken as the basis for reasoning or acting with respect to some domain. Some examples: - Social contract theory - "The scientific method" - Utilitarianism - Scriptural inerrancy - Medical diagnostic criteria - Design frameworks - The divine right of kings, or historically in China, the mandate of heaven Note, sometimes these can be used manipulatively, but often they're clarifying and generative. A model can be a useful set of assumptions for thinking about a messier domain. Furthermore the concept is even more generic: we might say that physics is "highly reified," (in the sense that it claims that all physical phenomena are constructed out of an exact list of simpler ones) but this is not to say that it's necessarily mistaken, confused, or harmful. On the other hand, reification is more salient when it's being made *inappropriately* as a cogntive or discursive move, and so I'm more likely to talk about cases that are problematic or contentious. In some sense, any concept is at least a little bit reified. Even just to bring a concept to consciousness enough *to consider it at all explicitly* is to reify it, among the kaleidoscope of ways that we could see something. This is great, this is helpful, this is how thought and perception work whatsoever, but also reification is a quality that can lead us to become confused. Reification is probably necessarily "reductive," that is, it takes something complex and reduces the apparent complexity. If we take *this* theory or *that* perception as more real than another, then whatever complexity which is captured by the second is at least less salient, if not eclipsed entirely. (I unfortunately waffle between this sense of reification as "taking a reductive view" and the one at the top, of "making a perception more apparently real", and so might be a bit unclear at times. I usually want to refer to this whole broad cluster of motions, without needing to be too precise.) Phenomenological reification overlaps with propositional reification in many of the specific examples. Still, we can usefully highlight the experiential, perceptual, and emotional aspects.
![old crone / young woman](/img/My_Wife_and_My_Mother-In-Law_(Hill).svg)
One nice example is the classic old crone/young woman image. Some people will get "stuck" in one perception, but many people can actively switch between them. At one time, generally people can't see *both*, we can only perceive one; while we pereceive the old woman, she *becomes real*. Obviously, both perceptions are something like "latent," and neither can be *more real* than the other, but we've *reified* one. (Fwiw, I think this point still applies even if you can see both at the same time.) This is sort of an easy example, but what's more interesting is all the stuff that's so much stickier. Ordinarily we take a feeling, or a [way of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) as straightforwardly real, leaving out all the other ways we could see or feel about something. ## (In)appropriate (De)reification {#metaphysics-reification--inappropriate-dereification} | | appropriate | inappropriate| |--|--|--| |reification | | | | dereification| | | So there's a 2x2 here, and I'll gesture at what's in the different boxes. ### Inappropriate reification {#metaphysics-reification--inappropriate-reification} ::gloss[*Inappropriate reification* refers to perniciously taking something as real and stable which should be provisional.] "Inappropriate reification" I get mostly from Mark Lippmann, and is a distinction I haven't seen much elsewhere, though it rhymes with some concepts in Zen. (Yes, sorry, and not even pop Zen either.) Mark often uses the concept to refer to someone prematurely, or perniciously, taking something as real or stable which "should" have just been provisional. Often a person might notice that x seems to cause y, and become convinced that x always causes y, or that if y is true then x must be, etc. Some concrete examples: - "If I sit in this posture, then I'll get concentrated in meditation" - "Since strength training fixed my knee pain, all joint problems must be due to muscle weakness" (I don't even think this is a strawman, I expect that some people believe things like this) - "I feel ashamed as a person because of what my mother said to me as a child" Eg. in many examples from the first list of propositional reification, often inappropriate reifications take the form of reifying a particular perspective as absolutely, or *exclusively* real, when in fact it's only a helpful set of assumptions, or it's oversimplified. Sometimes I also want to say that something is "overreified," meaning something like that it's been taken as "more real than is appropriate" (but not to say that it's not real or important at all). ### Appropriate reification {#metaphysics-reification--appropriate-reification} Like I said, reification is helpful, and even basic human functioning relies on it, I'm thinking here say of object permanence. I would say that phenomenally constructing stable distinctions is probably the basis of perception whatsoever, and so is certainly good, useful, appropriate, etc. Unfortunately, however, just about everything beyond that is going to be contentious. I'm thinking here of big notions of Justice, Truth, Beauty etc., maybe also one's "Path" or "Destiny." Even things like cleanliness, politeness, and correctness are non-obvious, at least at the margin. ### Dereification, in general {#metaphysics-reification--dereification-in-general} ::gloss[*Dereification* is making a perception, feeling, belief, or conception less real, solid, or salient.] A very common form of dereification is literally telling someone "that's not real". Some dereification occurs """naturally""", likely everyone is familiar with waking up from a dream and the reality of the dream dissolving as they come to. Often, there's learning and slow decay that happens naturally, as one way of seeing something replaces another. Dereification is a important aspect of traditional Buddhist models, and maybe marginally in some other traditions. Sometimes, derefication is even *[quite reified](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81)*, and seen as the goal of the spiritual path! Reports of meditation-induced dereification often include descriptions like "cutting through" or "teasing apart" perception and phenomena in general, either resulting a phenomenon appearing as flimsy or thin, or in its ceasing altogether, up to and including body, mind, and world. ### (In)appropriate dereification? {#metaphysics-reification--inappropriate-dereification-1} Obviously, these will also be pretty contentious. Many people (likely most reading this book) think that God is not real, and should not be taken as real, but would be aghast at the idea of regarding the love for a child as "not real." I won't say more about this here, much of what I'll discuss in the sections on [practice](#practice) and [axiology](#goodness) will be about this question. --- # Eternalism, Nihilism, and Nebulosity {#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism — also at `/md/metaphysics/eternalism-nihilism.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--`.* Eternalism and nihilsm are two poles of a tendency in relationship to either domains of meaning or systems of meaning. Eternalism seeks to stabilize and [reify](#metaphysics-reification) a model or [way of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing), whereas nihilism seeks to destabilize and dereify. I get these concepts from David Chapman; they come originally from at least a specific lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, though I suspect his interpretation is a bit modern and idiosyncratic. *Eternalist* views see some domain of meaning or reality as stable, fixed, undeniable, or singular. Some examples: - Justice, as determined by eg. divine command, or "natural law" - Positivism, which tries to construct logic as an undeniable and flawless basis for all knowledge - *Soulmates* as a feature of many folk fantasies or perhaps even "theories" of romantic love - *Purpose*, as a story for the goal and value of a particular human life, eg. "I was put on this earth for a purpose" - Souls as the basis and substance of human personality and identify Unfortunately I sound pretty unsympathetic here, but it's hard to treat these sympathetically because (from my perspective) they're so obviously confused, or just empirically or even logically false. *Nihilist* views construct a domain of meaning as unreal, insubstantial, or irrelevant: - Atheism, generically, both denies *cosmologically* the existence of God, but also usually regards divinity, ritual, and sacredness in general, as meaningless or harmful. - Views such as that one's legacy is meaningless, because in the future one will be dead, so therefore one's legacy is "not real" or "not meaningful" to oneself - Many formulations of moral relativism which maintain that moral beliefs are of no consequence with respect to one another, and often that morality itself is basically meaningless or inconsequential - Similarly, some forms of epistemic relativism which effectively deny that "knowledge" can exist whatsoever - Views to the effect that human meaning and value are actually meaningless because they are believed to be based in biological processes While all of these examples are given *propositionally* because this is a written medium, the more interesting aspect is something like *perceptual* or *existential*. These kinds of views, most of them more or less [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing), have intuitive, phenomenological effects, besides whatever arguments or ideologies they cause us to deploy or ally with. Also, to clarify, 'eternalism' doesn't necessarily refer to stability in time, rather it means something more like "utterly fixed in meaning." Similarly, 'nihilism' doesn't here just refer to the view that *everything* is meaningless and pointless, eg. "existential nihilism," but more to views that specific things are. Nihilist views say something like, "I shall not care about this," whereas eternalist views say "I shall care unceasingly about this." They both try to admit no wavering in the perception of meaning. Eternalist views are often about constructing stable, unambiguous *justifications*, whereas nihilist views often say, "there can be constructed no stable justification for this, therefore you get nothing at all." ## Nebulosity {#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity} ::gloss[*Nebulosity* is a property of concepts, of being indeterminate and fuzzy, which is usually contraposed with them still being structured and meaningful at the same time.] Eternalism and Nihilism, in this model, are ways of creating stability in the face of *nebulosity*. Chapman gives two standard examples to illustrate what nebulosity means: - "Nebulous," literally "cloud-like": clouds are a real phenomenon, but blend indistinguishably into each other and into the background sky. Up close, or *inside* a cloud, like in an airplane, it's unclear if the cloud even exists, and it has no apparent boundary at all.[^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chapman-clouds] - How many pebbles are in a bucket? Well it depends on what counts as a pebble, since there's probably some grit and sand in there as well, and of course grit and pebbles are really the "same" thing, just of different sizes. There isn't quite a "correct answer" except for a specific purpose.[^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chapman-pebbles] [^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chapman-clouds]: David Chapman. [*Meaningness*](https://meaningness.com/nebulosity) [^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chapman-pebbles]: David Chapman. [*Metarationality*](https://metarationality.com/pebbles) Those are excellent examples but I want to stress that nebulosity is much more general. Often we're talking about ontological (and eventually axiological) nebulosity. For example, even physical quantities which seem quite certain and definite are not necessarily so simple, and sometimes were unknown until recently in human history: - Mass is generally understood to be definite and clear, up to the accuracy of the measurement. This is correct, but if you put two objects in someone's hand that are similar in mass but different in density, and ask which is heavier, most people will pretty consistently *feel* the denser object to be heavier. If I recall correctly, this is true up to substantial differences in mass, holding the difference in density steady. - This is also ignoring that units of *weight* are defined as a force exerted on an object by a particular gravituational field, rather than an intrinsic property (mass). People say, everything is "lighter" in the freefall of an orbiting satellite—wait what? I thought weight was definite? etc. - Mass is a fine concept, and often more useful than what we now regard as either derived or compound units like weight and density, but it's not obvious that human-scale perceived weight "needs" to be the same as mass. - Temperature, up to around the 18th century, was taken to be too confusing and variable to be reduced to a consistent measurable quantity. Perceived temperature is also a function of wind chill, humidity, air pressure, and the person's physiological state, even though we can now measure temperature quite accurately.[^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chang-inventing-temperature] - Indeed, "how hot is it out" has much more to do with perceived temperature than physical temperature. - Even things like "boiling point" and "freezing point" are actually fairly nebulous. Water will evaporate *faster* at temperatures well below boiling point at a given pressure, and very clean vessels which provide no nucleation points can avoid approaching a rolling boil well above boiling point. Similarly for the freezing point, highly purified water in a very clean vessel can stay liquid decently far "below freezing." [^metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--chang-inventing-temperature]: Hasok Chang, 2004. *Inventing Temperature*, pp. 8-11 Concepts like the borders of a country, GDP, unemployment rates, and of course race, are much more nebulous than temperature and mass. This is of course letting alone those like "freedom," "love," or "democracy." I would claim that nebulosity is much closer to the fact-of-the-matter of human concepts and meaning, namely that they are substantive, meaningful, and worthwhile, while also ambiguous, uncertain, and seldom sharply defined. I would claim that all of the examples above of eternalist and nihlist views are at least partly true or real, or true in some sense, but a. usually not in an exclusive sense, and b. in a sense which blends indistinguishably into other, apparently "contradictory" perspectives. To elaborate a bit on some of these, at least specifically from my own perspective: - I believe there are, relatively speaking, justice and injustice, and that they are meaningful and important, but I don't believe that they are "mind-external" in the way that physics is, and I don't believe that they were given or defined by an intelligent creator. I also think justice is substantially culturally bound, even though I still feel strongly about notions of justice which other cultures, present and past, would disagree with. - I believe there is profound intimacy and "real," sometimes earth-shattering, romantic love, but that it's contingent on circumstances and personal history, and that it's limited in time, at least to natural lifetimes but perhaps much shorter, ie. that perhaps romantic love is both "real," and "not meant to last" past the length of time needed to raise children, or even less. - I don't believe in a cosmological God, but I believe that divinity and holiness are "real" in a sense such that throwing them out is something like "wrong" or "mistaken," and that it's often "correct" to construe something like God, at least in some culturally specific context. The point here is robust agnostic of these specific cases. I'm trying to describe structures which we might want to, or do often, describe as though fixed and definite, but which I think are in fact unstable and nebulous, while still "real" or substantial. ### Nebulosity and comprehensiveness {#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity-and-comprehensiveness} I want to pick on a specific confusion I see all over the place, in philosophy in general, and especially among rationalists. Models are *lossy*, or as people often (mostly wrongly) repeat, "wrong." Many models are presented by their authors, explicitly, as comprising some useful heuristics, or some set of generative assumptions; these can however be *mistakenly* taken as comprehensive and authoritative by someone who isn't paying enough attention. (See [inappropriate reification](#metaphysics-reification--inappropriate-reification).) That's a boring case but still a common failure mode. Examples that come to mind are eg. psychiatric diagnosis again (where, specifically as described by the DSM, the diagnostic categories are not regarded as necessarily forming natural kinds), perhaps also speciation in both biology and linguistics. Even concepts like covalent vs. ionic bonds are actually continuous, on the same dimension! In these cases the model is presented as lossy but is still predictive in a range of contexts. More interesting are cases where it's ambiguous or uncertain whether a model is comprehensive. My understanding is that the modern posture taken in physics is something like, "(because of the failure to yet synthesize QM and relativity) indeed, something about these models is wrong and we're pretty confused, nonetheless they're extremely predictive in the domains in which they're regarded as predictive, and so you should absolutely not expect to be able to achieve physical effects contrary to the existing models." (Perhaps with some exotic theorized exceptions like vacuum collapse, etc.) What's remarkable *metaphysically* and culturally about physics is that it's referred to outside of academia as singularly authoritative and comprehensive, which is not even the posture taken *by actual physicists*. My point here is not to take a jab at physics, or to claim that some metaphysical gymnastics will let you perform miracles—I have no such expectation. My main gripe here will be with respect to theories of value, but I think the point applies for all of metaphysics: If you have a model or a theory, at what point can you say, "indeed, this is a satisfactory reductionist account of this domain, and in fact not lossy, up to the resolution specified by the model," as opposed to "this is predictive but known to be lossy"? What reason do you have to believe the ontology you chose accounts for all of the behavior observed in the actual domain? I don't think this point is marginal. I see this mistake being made constantly, even by fairly sophisticated people, namely of too readily taking an ontology or a broader model as comprehensive before that has been demonstrated. Probably, considering that even physics, the reductionist domain par excellence, is not quite "done", we should be pretty skeptical of any claims to have completed a reductionist account of any other empirical domain! Two examples which I'm going to harp on throughout this book: - Everything that intersects with the study of the mind. Again, often researchers at the actual leading edge are much more parsimonious in their claims, but the point is well enough made anyhow. - It seems like quite a lot of people take the computational theory of consciousness as a fait accompli, even still to this day in the absence of a materialist account of consciousness! (Note that I mostly expect CTC to win.) - I often see utilitarian and decision-theoretic models being deployed as a fundamental theories of value. It seems to me that decision theorists have largely skipped the work of justifying that you *can even* reduce human value to a consistent utility function. Worse, in many cases they recognize that human value is not consistent (in this narrow sense) and go on merrily with their philosophizing. In these cases I want very strongly to say "hold up there, who ever said that was comprehensive?" To be clear, however: sometimes one has a research program, and indeed it's very useful for a person or group to pursue some set of assumptions while they still remain provisional. That's not what I'm objecting to. Often I think one should be asking something like, "is this the kind of domain where we're going to get a nice comprehensive account, or is our intuitive ontology made out of so many heuristics and kludges, and if you try to hammer it into something flat and consistent you'll just be throwing out important functional aspects of what's normally regarded as the domain?" I'll also say, even in domains in which I expect a comprehensive model is possible, it will be at a much higher resolution than that at which people are yet trying. Think of the riotous complexity of infectious diseases, which (my impression is) we having fairly straightforward models of at this point. People have of course been trying to understand disease for the entire history of our species, and we were working with *almost complete nonsense* for a large category of diseases until less than 200 years ago, and the picture continues to get messier and more complex as we learn more. --- # Good, Right, & Wrong {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/rightness-ontology — also at `/md/metaphysics/rightness-ontology.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-rightness-ontology--`.* :::info[This perspective is not quite meant absolutely] There's no way to jump into meta-metaphysics without assuming some kind of metaphysics! I [argue later](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement) that we mostly don't have frameworks for resolving metaphysical disagreements. Even for those whose metaphysical beliefs don't agree with the assumptions I make here, I still will say that you can notice what distinctions these arguments make, which I'll be coming back to throughout the book. I also think these arguments aren't quite airtight and are more to gesture in a direction. Still I think one broadly speaking can't really "get away with" making arguments, under most systems of metaphysics, that are fallacious under this model. For moral realists in particular, I dig into a weaker form of this argument near the end of this section. ::: There are a variety of contexts in which people invoke concepts like "true" or "right" or "good," whether implicitly or explicitly. Quite a bit of reasoning about this is straightforwardly *incorrect* because conflates different kinds of *rightness*.
My stance here is broadly spacious, personal, and flexible. I don't think you ought to feel or perceive what I do. A main thread throughout this book is that what's good and right and beautiful is going to be highly spacious, and allow for a great deal of flexibility in personal temperament, sensitivity, and aspiration. *On the other hand*, there are many claims that are made about what's right which are from what I can tell, metaphysically or factually *wrong*, and I want to criticize them very clearly.
## A sketch of an ontology of rightness {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--a-sketch-of-an-ontology-of-rightness} ::nogloss I'll say again, this is a sketch, it gestures in a direction, but it's not quite an airtight argument. In addition, this isn't trying to be an exhaustive ontology of "rightness", but is trying to point out one important dimension on which certain kinds of claims can vary. ### Mathematical and logical truth {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--mathematical-and-logical-truth} In some sense we can start here with mathematical truth. Theorems are true in a solipsistic universe of meaning, they have no *certain* referent in the physical world, they are "true" only within their axioms and laws of inference. This doesn't make them weak, it in fact makes mathematical truths extremely robust. Mathematical statements are true insofar as they are *logically necessary*, that is, that they *cannot but* be true, as a consequence of their assumptions. Mathematical truths are however often conflated with empirical claims, facts, etc., and I want to distinguish them very clearly. ### Empirical {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--empirical} Empirical claims, including either variously "bare facts," models with some assigned credence, or predictions about future events, all of these are constructed with respect to a physical (or at least external, etc.) world. These always have the shape, "one, or some, external objects, have a property or relationship, which (at least in principle) can be observed." Empirical claims need to be *demonstrated* to abide by some logical or mathematical representation. Really there are quite a few subtypes here, which I won't go into. In general, though, I would say that empirical claims are "compound" with respect to mathematical propositions external or physical phenomena. When we talk about things having properties, sets of objects, shapes, numbers, and the like, we're engaging in fundamentally mathematical thinking. Don't be mistaken, empirical claims are completely ordinary. Even though I'm expressing it in technical language, this is all humdrum and everyday: "Joe was upset today", "I broke my foot", "Lettuce isn't very filling," "I think Russia won't invade Ukraine," and so on, these are *empirical* claims. ### Evaluative {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--evaluative} ::gloss[*Evaluative* claims are those which say "this is preferred," or "given these criteria, this is preferred." They add an evaluative function on top of an empirical claim.] *Evaluative* claims will either look like "this is (dis)preferred" or "given a specific set of criteria, this is preferred," depending on whether they are stated in absolute or qualified terms. Evaluative claims are built on top of empirical ones, adding an *evaluative function*. Some examples: - "You played the song wrong," or especially "I played a wrong note" - "That was a great move" (in a chess game) - "That business decision was a mistake" - "This painting is gorgeous" - "Avocados are gross" - "AI should not xyz" Let's say, within evaluative claims, there's going to be quite a few subtypes. Among these, at least, we're going to want: - Conformance, whether strict or relative, to a specification - Optimality or fitness under a utility function or a loss function - A utility function or a loss function, for this purpose, is just a function which maps an input, whether a physical object, an idea, a strategy, etc., to a number. We can then rank inputs by the value of their output, eg. a machine which produces more widgets per hour, or which uses less fuel per mile, etc. - One special subtype would also be optimality or fitness of a *strategy*. The concept of an evaluative function is very general; basically, we need to be able to distinguish *the object under consideration* from *the criteria used to evaluate it*. Mathematically, we can use different kinds of functions with different properties for the sake of comparison and choice. In practice, most people don't think of evaluative reasoning mathematically, and might balk at being asked to actually assign a number to some object or another. "Yes, this soup was delicious, but no it's not a matter of numbers!" etc. Nonetheless we can, broadly speaking, say that evaluative judgements conform to some mathematical structure. For example, if between objects A and B, either one is "better," or they are the same, then we have what's called a total ordering over evaluations. (It's important to note that many evaluative judgements define what's called a partial ordering, rather than a total ordering. Eg. if asked which was better, the paintings of Michelangelo or the music of Stevie Wonder, most people would say "apples and oranges!" etc. Some evluative functions are binary and don't define an ordering, and there are probably more nuanced cases as well.) Evaluative claims can be said absolutely, or qualified. An absolute evaluative statement will usually not refer explicitly to an evaluative function. Evaluative claims can on the other hand be qualified in such a way that they become empirical claims which contain reference to an evaluative function. I would claim that it's basically *meaningless* to refer to something as "good" or "bad" without a specified evaluative function. In practice, of course, eliding the evaluative function from an utterance like this is perfectly fine in a lot of contexts, and the point here is not to be the language police. *At least* I would say, we can notice when someone is making an evaluative claim, and notice that they are using an evaluative function, usually implicitly, and surface that distinction. **One cannot make an evaluative statement, and then claim that it is true absolutely and *without reference to an evaluative function.*** If someone says, "this is the best car," we can ask, "good according to what?" Hearing an evaluative statement without an evaluative function should (I'll claim) be as strange as hearing a comparative statement without a point of reference: "this car is 50% better!"—better than what? There is a sense in which one can say "indeed, a kilo weighs more than a pound," and assume that this ought to be basically utterly compelling to any sane person, but one *cannot* in general say "this thing is bad" in quite that same sense. Evaluative claims are often understood to be *matters of taste*, that is, even if the evaluative function is left out, there's an understanding that people will vary and feel quite differently about food, music, etc. Sometimes this is a polite mask over quite a lot of judgement, but often no one has anything at stake, one simply doesn't like licorice, or noir movies, and has such preferences without thinking those things are wrong or bad. On the other hand, the speech act of making an evaluative claim also often serves to, socially, make those who don't use the speaker's evaluative function dumb, low status, or evil, or to do the opposite for those who do. For example: - "Rap music is garbage" - "People who voted for [candidate] are idiots" - "Homosexual sex is an affront on God" - "Modern art is pretentious bullshit" Other kinds of evaluative claims are implicitly claims about strategic choices, broadly speaking. These make claims at the same time about what goals one *should* have (again, what evaluative function one should use) and that a particular strategy rates poorly under their evaluative function. These usually take the form of prescriptions, implicit or explicit. For example: - "Carbs are bad for you" - "You should finish college" - "Regular exercise is what your body needs" - "It's important to learn a second language" Often these are less problematic; we can make some plausible assumptions about what values people *do* have, and say something to the effect, implicitly, of "assuming, as is true for almost everyone, that you want to be energetic, mobile, and feeling good on a day to day basis and into old age, exercise is indeed vital." Nonetheless prescriptions like these often sort of "cheat" by presenting a strategy as an unalloyed good, and leave out a specific person's desires, and especially their constraints. Once again, it is simply *incorrect* to say "this is a choice that should be made irrespective of all goals." That said, notions like "goals" and "values" can often be myopic or shallow. These can change, and changes are often regarded as "truer" or "better." I think there's a lot of real substance to this, and that there's big questions here. I talk about this in depth in the [last major section of this book](#goodness).
More detail on the metaphysics of empirical and evaluative claims There's a useful sense in which "empirical" claims are contiguous with evaluative statements. I would say here that one's ontology is convolved with one's goals or values. The notion here is that there is no sense in which an ontology can be defined, or maybe "would be defined," absent some values. More confidently, in at least *most* cases an ontology and some goals are defined together at once, so whether something "is" a member of a category has mostly to do with what you're using that category for. In this sense, still, there's in most contexts at least a meaningful difference of degree between most empirical and evaluative claims, where the axis in which they vary is something like "how commonly shared the ontology is"—which even for empirical claims obviously is seldom 100% among humans, and sometimes quite a bit less. Again, in addition, see [no universally compelling arguments](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--no-universally-compelling-arguments). Modern psychiatric diagnosis is of course the standard counterexample here of what's presented as though it were ontologically straightforward, like *most* medical diagnoses, but is highly convolved with a specific set of goals, namely treatment, primarily pharmacological, and usually defined in terms of "difficulty coping" or similar. To be clear, I actually think the DSM (the standard diagnostic manual in the US) is doing a pretty good job here, given the various constraints and pressures. I think the main problem with psychiatric diagnoses are people who think they're something they aren't. (IIRC in Quine's work there's another expression of a very similar distinction, namely of observations being "theory-laden.") In this sense, my point that evaluative claims without an evaluative function are meaningless (really, a type error) also applies to empirical claims; we would have to say something like "under this epistemology" to be more absolute in our empirical claims. Indeed, I've sort of [already said as much](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), that the epistemology we use affects what we think is real and true. Still, there's obviously a pretty large difference of degree between empirical and evaluative claims. Maybe I can't say "speaking an evaluative claim as though it were empirical is a type error" but nonetheless, I'm going to put my foot down and say that conflating the two is confused and often harmful. I think, given a shared frame, that it's broadly fine to make evaluative claims authoritatively, but that in domains where the evaluative function is contested, speaking as though the evaluative function is definite, or shared among all speakers, or actually just-as-real as empirical truths, is a kind of metaphysical and memetic harm. [I also discuss](#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness) how these harms are perpetuated. Finally, I'll talk [later in more detail](#spiritual-truth-rationality) about the sense of empirical truth that I use and think is broadly helpful and appropriate, as well as limitations of that model. (And, for what it's worth, [I end up endorsing](#metaphysics-real) a kind of weak epistemic and ontological anti-realism.)
### Moral {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--moral} Moral claims are a confusing point, and I'm not sure where I stand on them. In a meaning-reductionist view, moral rightness is purely just an evaluative claim; I'm not fully on this side. Part of the emotional, imaginal, and memetic power of moral claims comes from them being made absolutely. Taking morality purely as object often makes it thin and tawdry. Nonetheless I believe that morality is a property of minds, and not of the mind-external universe, despite the [claims of many religious traditions](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism), and even some secular moral realists. (Relatedly, see [no universally compelling arguments](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--no-universally-compelling-arguments).) Briefly: moral realism is from my perspective usually something like [eternalist](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism) window-dressing on real, legitimate, and vital moral sensibility. In any case, moral truths strike one as more important and less flexible than optimization, efficacy, or beauty—and certainly not just a matter of personal opinion or taste. Murder is wrong! Rape is wrong! Torture is wrong! (I'm pretty sure I really mean that. I've never witnessed these things myself but I'm pretty confident that if I saw them in front of me, I would be very disturbed, regardless of whether I would have the courage to do anything.) But, there's moral contention! Many people in the world have believed, and still believe, that homosexual sex is evil, while many people in the liberal west thing it's just fine. And so on for countless other examples. For now, I'll say, I still think that strictly speaking these are evaluative claims, and are constrained in their "objectivity" (read, maybe: "pure inescapability") in the same sorts of ways. I also think that this doesn't actually need to weaken their emotional weight, at least in general. (Often it does in particular, for moral claims that have been taken as more real than they ought to have.) I'll say as well, there's moral change if not moral progress. There's at least maturity, attunment, and alignment with one's deeper truth. The obstructions to our virtue and goodness can be cleared, and we can have truer apprehension of what is good and right. I think some moral anti-realists refuse this—I don't, and I think moral growth and moral insight are real and important, I just don't place them in an eternalism. I'll discuss [at much greater length](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology) how metaphysics relates to and interacts with various kinds of moral claims. Among other things I talk about why believing that morality exists in minds doesn't necessarily imply or require moral nihilism.
What should moral realists take from this? For died-in-the-wool moral realists, there's a few points I'll stress: 1. It's not clear *which* domains of evaluative claims are under the purview of your ultimate moral reality. Obviously we've come and gone on this point culturally, eg. regarding apostasy, lots of details of sexual ethics in particular, capital punishment, etc. Maybe you can say "indeed, there's some moral uncertainty, but certainly murder is wrong." I'll grant you that, but this brings us to the next point: 2. Even if we assume moral realism, you *still* have to demonstrate that any particular moral claim is true. Furthermore, the means by which we do moral investigation and discernment are mostly the same anyhow, namely introspection and debate. I have the same apparatus for ascertaining moral truth whether moral realism is true or not, my mind and my heart. So then, we're largely back where we started: there's moral uncertainty, and the metaphysics is ambiguous and difficult to determine, except insofar as you believe you have perfect gnosis of moral truth. (Some may or may not want to count prayer as separate from introspection. Separately, even if your moral epistemology rests on a textual tradition, there's still an enormous amount of moral uncertainty due to hermeneutic problems, in which case the above still applies. If you think your epistemology and tradition of biblical interpretation are unassailable, then I suppose I can't convince you of much.) 3. Everything not covered by your moral theory is subject to the limitations of evaluative claims in principle that I've laid out. You can't *really* trick someone into not wanting something that they do, at most you can either bully them into denying their own feelings, even to themselves, *or* you can cause them to notice what's good or bad about something, using their own discernment.
## Opinions, matters of taste, and ways of seeing {#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--opinions-matters-of-taste-and-ways-of-seeing} ::nogloss One of the important questions in judging some claim will often be "is this domain, or this type of evidence or argument, applicable to the kind or degree of rightness being claimed?" For example, some questions are really a [matter of taste](#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--taking-a-specific-example-confusions-regarding-aesthetics). Or, even if there is an "objective" structure which distinguishes one thing from another, like that something is more complex, precisely tuned, or difficult to achieve, *still* you might just actually enjoy the simpler thing more, and your preferences can't meaningfully be said to be "wrong." I would say that a nearby category would be [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing). I wouldn't call these a *matter of taste*, but it seems like, various *consistent* ways of seeing, while powerful and deeply felt, can't really be distinguished as "wrong" or "right," but more like "helpful," or "appropriate," or "clarifying." This obviously confuses matters even more about moral claims. I still have intuitions along the lines of "no, murder really is wrong, that's not just my feelings"—but this is a real question for me. However, there are cultures and legal systems in which eg. honor killings are acceptable and legal. I'm mostly fine with saying that they're wrong too, but it's often not clear what really counts in here, and I still don't think we are [able to determine or adjudicate](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement) this meaningfully. --- # (Mis)use of Language and Rhetoric, re Rightness {#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/rhetoric-rightness — also at `/md/metaphysics/rhetoric-rightness.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--`.* There's a common kind of rhetorical trick, in which someone sneaks an [evaluative claim](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--evaluative) in, like "a wolf in sheep's clothes," as though it were certain and absolute. They then carry on to convince those listening of something which they couldn't argue for if it were clear that this claim isn't *true* in the same way, or with the same force as *stabler* kinds of truth. Colloquially there are quite a few different words that are used to refer to different kinds of evaluative statments. From a technical perspective, a musical performance might be described as "wrong" or "poor," variously on the basis of strict adherence to the specification (the written piece of music) and of the performance's expressiveness, beauty, etc. Optimality and fitness often take quite a few adjectives, eg. "beautiful," "delicious", or for that matter "sexy," but also of course just "good" or "best." Strategic fitness in particular is often described as "right" (as in, "the right choice"), "smart" (same) or "effective." "True," even when used consistently, means something fairly different for mathematical claims as it does for empirical ones. We also commonly use the words "right" and "wrong," though never "false" or "incorrect," to describe evil, sins, or moral failings. Again, without becoming needlessly pedantic, we can *notice* that there are differences between different kinds of language for different kinds of rightness, and that words have a prototypical meaning. **I think that one can "cheat" rhetorically by using one set of language which brings in intuitions about the strength and stability of one kind of rightness to bolster a different kind of claim.** Furthermore, I'd say this isn't just about manipulative rhetoric, often the language a broad culture uses to describe one kind of *rightness* implicitly conflates it with another, eg. "this is the truth" (of a spiritual teaching). Evaluative claims are often spoken with the same tone and language as empirical or logical claims, and as though they had the same "inescapability." There are contexts in which you can reasonably say "these are pretty much just the facts of the matter," which serve to say, ostensibly, "you ought to be compelled to believe this, due to the kind and strength of evidence for it." I believe it is usually inappropriate to present evaluative claims as though they have this same kind of compelling force. I think people are sensitive to this kind of ruse only *to some extent*. I see quite a lot rhetoric, broadly in the context of morality and values, which makes this move and meets with no open objection. I'll make here a moral claim: in the same way that it's wrong to deceive someone about some *facts*, whether by straightforward falsehood or by manipulative rhetoric, it's also wrong to cause them to believe evaluative claims using the sorts of rhetorical abuses I've described. Insofar as you respect the discernment, autonomy, and agency of the people you're speaking to, you should make evaluative claims transparently, and let people decide on their own two feet. Now, there's nuance, and there are exceptions. The more that a frame is shared within some community, or the more that there's effectively consensus about what evaluative functions to use, the less it matters if we leave the evaluative functions out when making evaluative claims. It would be ridiculous to call it "rhetorically abusive" for a religious order, within its own community, to simply have shared assumptions about what is good and right. Nonetheless I think there's something pernicious about the "unknown knowns" of ideology and metaphysics, where the entire evaluative frame remains tacit, even if it's not contentious. And then, what should we do when the evaluative frame *is* contested? Descriptively, when talking to others that one trusts and respects, people will generally surface the evaluative function as contentious. "In my opinion," "I've been told that," "the experts say x, but I'm not sure," and so on. I don't have a smack-down argument, but my sense here is that insofar as we want to cultivate a productive, healthy discourse, this kind of nuance and openness with respect to ambiguity and contention is broadly what we should be striving for. (I'll also say, there's some rabbit hole here about socializing children, for which I just don't have an answer. One way or another, children will absorb moral intuitions, some of this is embodied and demonstrated, but a lot of it is also taught explicitly, and it seems pretty much impossible to try to teach precepts to children in a way that's nuanced with respect to a broader cultural discourse.) One last piece: often people conflate, implicitly or explicitly, different kinds of evaluative claims. In particular often claims about what strategies are effective end up transmitted culturally in terms of morality, obligation, and sin. I'm thinking here about many people's relationship to exercise, diet, parenting, "financial health," etc. This will also be an important distinction to keep in mind when we talk about [spiritual practice](#practice). ## Taking a specific example: confusions regarding aesthetics {#metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--taking-a-specific-example-confusions-regarding-aesthetics} ::nogloss *First: the point here is to say, "here's a nuanced case of misunderstanding the role and strength of certain kinds of evaluative claims." When we get to talking about [spiritual truth](#spiritual-truth-truth) later, I'll return to this question, of what kinds of *truth* and *correctness* apply when talking about morality, goodness, spiritual teachings, etc.* In music we have the concept of a "wrong note." A piece of music, as written or as transmitted in an oral tradition, defines a particular sequence of notes for certain lengths of time, and of course people constantly make mistakes and simply play a different note than what is expected. This sense of "wrong" is fine enough, and indeed in many contexts in music we just want to play the piece as written, or at least as written and interpreted within the bounds of the tradition. In fact in those contexts everyone will basically agree as to what "wrong" means, and what counts as a "wrong" note. However, this evaluative function is only suitable in some contexts and not others. In jazz, many of the rules are relaxed, not into chaos but into a denser and richer structure. You will literally find jazz musicians saying that there's no such thing as a wrong note.[^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--jacob-collier] [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--victor-wooten] In jazz improvization, if you play a wrong note, you can just about always recover it into a "right" note, with enough skill. Separately, much of the history of Western classical music, from Bach until Schoenberg in the early 20th century was a progressive elaboration and *subversion* of established structures. Most of the classical composers you know made their name by doing things that were "wrong" at the time, in tasteful and beautiful ways. This tendency can get arbitrarily wacky, see again Schoenberg's atonal work, free jazz, microtonal music, and even harsh noise[^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--nil-admirari]. [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--jacob-collier]: [Jacob Collier](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meha_FCcHbo) [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--victor-wooten]: [Victor Wooten](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biunavwAl_w) [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--nil-admirari]: [OPN](https://open.spotify.com/track/4HvCNpSDFZk2vQytT16CB6?si=b4f3524b34344dff) Here's a marvelous quote on the subject from Plato[^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--plato]: >Thus their folly led them unintentionally to slander their profession by the assumption that in music there is no such thing as a right and a wrong, the right standard of judgment being the pleasure given to the hearer, be he high or low. By compositions of such a kind and discourse to the same effect, they naturally inspired the multitude with contempt of musical law, and a conceit of their own competence as judges. [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--plato]: Plato, *Laws* [700e ](http://www.euphoniousmonks.com/platomus.htm), trans. Hamilton & Cairns 1961 It seems obvious to me that there's something quite confused about this take. Maybe we can argue about good or bad taste, but "right" and "wrong" (note that another translation[^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--plato-2] gives "as a thing without any standard of correctness") don't even *make sense* to me to apply to music. I would say that the goodness or rightness of music is a "matter of taste," that there *isn't going to be* something like a "right" answer, in the way that we find with mathematical or empirical claims. [^metaphysics-rhetoric-rightness--plato-2]: Plato, *Laws*. [700e ](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0166%3Abook%3D3%3Asection%3D700e), trans. Bury 1967 This is a nice example to dig into because, I expect, almost everyone reading this will agree that Plato is doing something confused here. This is not just to say that he's mistaken about some empirical fact, but that his metaphysics is deeply confused, and perhaps *wrong*. (Even if you believe that some people just have atrocious taste in music, it's still hard to argue that music can be "right" or "wrong" in a very strong sense here. If you disagree, imagine, as an example, if someone said that burritos were "wrong." Fine as hyperbole, but if this is said fully in earnest, clearly it's gotten something *wrong* metaphysically.) More generally, we can ask, "in this domain, what kind of rightness do we observe?" In particular if we're concerned with evaluative claims, again, "what kind?" Is this a matter of taste? Is this about what choices are strategic, given some set of goals, but where the goals are "up to" each person? Do we believe that something is good or bad in a more stable sense, like morality (if we believe in morality as stable at all)? To be clear, even in the weakest sense, to say that something is a *matter of taste* is not to say that it *doesn't matter*. A piece of music might be utterly lovely or even gobsmacking, even if I'm confident in saying that I'm no more "right" in finding it so than the people who don't, or that anyone can be "compelled by the evidence" to find it lovely, the way that they ought to be *compelled* by a mathematical argument. --- # "Real" {#metaphysics-real} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/real — also at `/md/metaphysics/real.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-real--`.* Quite a lot of jousting goes back and forth about what is "real." I will claim that the determination of some phenomenon as "real" is often a stand-in for questions like "does x matter," or "should we pay x any mind." Furthermore, I'll claim that the fact of the matter is nuanced enough that often whether something is "real" doesn't *really* help us answer these questions. ### *How an algorithm feels from inside* and *disguised queries* {#metaphysics-real--how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside-and-disguised-queries} ::nogloss I'll bring in two concepts from Eliezer: how an algorithm feels from inside[^metaphysics-real--eliezer-1], and disguised queries[^metaphysics-real--eliezer-2]. [^metaphysics-real--eliezer-1]: Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008. [*How An Algorithm Feels From Inside*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-algorithm-feels-from-inside) [^metaphysics-real--eliezer-2]: Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2008. [*Disguised Queries*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg/disguised-queries) Most concepts are [nebulous](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity), but still track real structure in the world. Human intuitions about membership in a category often construct membership as an *extra fact*, besides all of the facts about an object's properties. In the proverbial "if a tree falls in the forest, but no one is around to hear it," there are two properties which are normally tightly correlated, namely an event causing acoustic vibration, and it causing aural perception/experience, that have been decorrelated. This question is sort of about asking, "but did it really make a sound?" as though there were a question left to ask, besides the two component phenomena. Yes vibrations, no perception, simple as. To be clear, I don't think anyone is actually vexed by this question, but it's helpful to lay it out very precisely, because indeed I see this exact mistake being made with respect to this class of problem in general. Another example: are viruses alive, or for that matter [prions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion)? Viruses do not have a metabolism and can't reproduce outside of a host, but do contain genetic material, and do evolve. Prions are much simpler, they are misolded forms of ordinary proteins, they don't contain genetic material, and they only reproduce by causing normal proteins to misfold. Again, we might ask, "but are viruses really alive?", as though there were a meaningful answer to this question, beyond the facts of which properties they have in common with most kinds of life, and which they don't. We can construct a category in such a way that marginal cases are strictly speaking not members, but we haven't really *learned* anything by this. There is a large diversity of observed biological systems, and gerrymandering "life" to exclude some of them hasn't told us anything new about the ones we excluded, nor would it to arbitrarily choose to include them. In Eliezer's explanation, his claim is that we might imagine choosing one algorithm (or really, data structure) or another to represent some concept, and that the intuitions that humans have, in which this "but is it really?" question arises, would happen in some kinds of representations and not others. As well, these kinds of ontological intuitions are constructed in his view out of cognitive algorithms, and that the intuitions are "what the algorithm feels like from inside of it." ::gloss[A *disguised query* explicitly contests category membership, in order to argue for something else, eg. that something is dangerous, good, or reasonable.]{#metaphysics-real--disguised-queries} Eliezer's claim in *Disguised Queries* is that questions like "is x in category y" are often stand-ins for "is x dangerous," or "is x reasonable," or "is x important." A category is presumably predictive of some other properties, besides those that define the category. Often people will haggle over whether x should be included in a category, *in order* to be able to determine that we should infer some other property about x. For example, we could (well, at least in principle) imagine someone trying to argue that Gandhi was a criminal—which is absolutely true, strictly speaking! Of course, our imagined speaker here is really trying to argue that Gandhi was dangerous, or immoral, or whatever. This is a silly example, but this is *absolutely* a move that people make with respect to categories like racism, violence, and terrorism. These kinds of questions are called "disguised queries," since the real question which is being debated is disguised by a question about where to draw a boundary. Let's assume, though we don't necessarily need to assume this, that the reality described by physics is stably "real" in a straightforward sense. I'll make a few claims: - There's a fairly large diversity of phenomena which we call "real" (or at least which we *regard* as real) that are [ontologically](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics) very different from physical reality. - Many of the details of physics are quite counterintuitive, and the deepest questions about what's "real" are still contentious in physics. - Physical solidity (as in, of wood or stone or bone) is quite a bit subtler and stranger than ordinary human-scale intuitions about "solid matter", though my understanding is that the popsci schtick that matter is "mostly empty" is somewhere between oversimplified and false. - Famously, the cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics is *still* contentious even in academic physics. Furthermore, both interpretations currently in the ring get openly metaphysical, and in either case are quite contrary to day-to-day intuition. - I don't believe that there's an account of what's "real" which includes far-flung notions like romantic love, money, status, mathematics, or music, that doesn't also end up including a pretty wide swath of meditative and spiritual experiences. - Perhaps, we can hypothesize various grades, or at least a diversity of disjoint types of *reality*, which is broadly the stance I like, but then we end up with "real" as something either much weaker or much narrower than people usually want it to be. (Also, gosh, wtf, *multiple realities?* Is that really how far we've stooped?) - In any case, this doesn't really help, because there still doesn't end up being space to argue that all this spiritual stuff is just "not real." I want to be very clear here: I am not claiming that nothing is real, or that reality is completely socially constructed, or that everything which we call "real" has the *same* ontological status. I am claiming that "real" is both nuanced enough and diverse enough ontologically that it *must* admit spiritual experiences, one way or another.
And what about this assumption that physics is real? Look, if we're going to throw that out then you're just *really* screwed. More seriously, if we don't assume a basis of reality like "physics," then whatever sense of reality we're working with is yet weaker, and so my broad take is even stronger. I suppose this obviously leaves out gnostics, or various "mind-only" or "mind-first" metaphysicses. I'm not really writing for those people, but in any case I think they're already going to agree with some claim like "reality is more nuanced and ontologically fussy than modern secular metaphysics would like."
Let's take some specific problematic cases: - **Math**: There have been a variety of theories with respect to the ontological status of mathematics, over millenia. Math seems both more inescapable than physics, but also completely intangible. We can *imagine* (and, it's now often hypothesized) worlds with different laws of physics, but we largely *can't* imagine "worlds" with different arithmetic, or calculus, or topology. - **Music**: Is music real?—sorry, wait what? Since when is music even the kind of thing that can be real?—well, we care about music, we devote quite a lot of economic productivity to it, we argue about what music is right, and some people dedicate their lives to the practice of it. For most people it's often much more salient and powerful than math or history or certainly theories of physics. On the other hand, it's not quite like most things we would ordinarily call "real." It's just sounds, often without words, in some pattern, how could that matter? How could that possible mean anything? - **Love**: Yes yes, "true love" and all that; but in any case, once again, is love real? What would it mean for it to be "real"? Sometimes people feel bamboozled or manipulated by love, and there's certainly deception and fraud presented as though it were love. On the other hand, love, whether romantic, familial, love of one's country, etc., seems like one of the most important forces in world. People will give their lives for it, they'll work themselves to the bone for it, etc. etc. etc. Love is also richly imaginal: tied into fantasy, imagery, and elaboration that are both *more* salient, powerful, and motivating than what's actually in front of our faces, but also never quite present "in the here and now." - **Money**: The value of money is certainly "[rational](#spiritual-truth-rationality)" in a clear sense: macroeconomic shenanigans aside, you can generally expect that you will find a counterparty willing to accept your dollars for most kinds of transactions. Still, money isn't quite just "made out of physics," or at least not *just* physics. There's a large, only-somewhat-centralized cooperation in the construction of a coordination mechanism, which relies on expectation across the network that the rest of the network will continue to exist, and continue to behave largely the same. Of course, money is quite real! Money is incredibly salient and powerful, almost anywhere in the world. So we have both a very high degree of indirection, and something to the effect of "social construction," which is meanwhile quite "real," in the sense of "important, and worth worrying about." So, again, if a tree falls in the forest, but there's no one around to hear it, is it real?—sorry, again, there's a variety of properties, some in common with other things which we take as real, some not, and no extra fact about whether it's *actually* real. ## Ontological and spiritual commitments {#metaphysics-real--ontological-and-spiritual-commitments} ::gloss[An *ontological commitment* is an attachment to some account of what exists, which fixes what can matter at all.] An [ontology](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), among other things, serves as the framework through which we understand what exists, and what *can matter at all*. Descriptively, most people have commitments to particular ontologies: moving from one ontology to another often inspires a fear that what one now understands to be real and will become meaningless, wrong, or harmful, and vice versa. This is often correct! One metaphysics will often, in fact, [reify](#metaphysics-reification) or valorize notions which are fake or irrelevant in another. These kinds of ontological commitments might be made by way of organized religions, ideologies and philosophies, or may be cultural and implicit, idiosyncratic, and even completely unspoken. Some examples would be things like reductionist materialism, Karma[^metaphysics-real--karma], Heaven and Hell, souls and spirits, and even persistent personal identity. [^metaphysics-real--karma]: This is usually left out of bowdlerized Western Buddhisms, but Buddhist Karma traditionally amounts to something to the effect that the goodness of actions is ontologically/cosmologically basic. I think it's a bit hard for us to appreciate both how weird and how intense such a perspective would be, if fully taken on. To be clear: this list is not to say "these are utter nonsense, and everything that flows from them is wrong." Rather, mostly I want to inspire some sort of ontological flexibility and a skepticism of over-reified systems of metaphysics. (Still, as an empirical claim about cosmology, I'm pretty confident that Heaven and Hell are not real.) Most of the point here is to say, a. that the ontologies that people use are largely *unjustified* (though in the [next section](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement) I'll get to why this is so hard), and b. that in general, these domains are nebulous enough that there isn't going to be a singular, stable ontology on which to build all of our theories of what matters or is worthwhile[^metaphysics-real--real-meme]. [^metaphysics-real--real-meme]: [Chat, is this real?](https://x.com/forthrighter/status/1802708371725852909) The naive view which says "physics!" or "science!" [in response](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism) to questions of ontological nebulosity simply can't make these problems go away. But, still, there are things which aren't real! Certainly, there are lies, and there are dreams, and there are hopes that do not come true. Often, scientism and atheism maintain a commitment that entertaining many [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) is "wrong", since these are "not real." Except, again, a. what's real, but more importantly, b. how have you determined that the collection of ways of seeing that you use are correct, or the only ones that should be used? Now, my real question is: what should we make of both claims and experiences of prayer, meditation, psychedelics, mysticism, etc.? I think these are real questions, I mostly don't have a clear answer. One of the main claims of this book is something like, "actually, I still don't have a clear answer, but it's definitely not any of these." Note that I'm not claiming that eg. those who report talking to God are definitely talking to a persistant physical being etc. etc. Mostly, I think these experiences often have very substantial existential value, and can't be excluded. However, determining which are baloney and which are actually worthwhile is much harder. [I discuss this more later](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation). (Though, I do have a very small probability on some spiritual reports having a straightforwardly literal ontological/cosmological interpretation. Again, [I discuss this more later](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation).) I'll note, that if I say, "well, there's something interesting going on metaphysically with respect to spiritual stuff," this isn't yet to say that you should regard it as important or valuable, but just to say that it can't be flatly determined to be not real, just by writing it out of your map. I'll discuss this all in much more detail in the section on [spirituality and spiritual practice](#practice). ### "Real" and "True" {#metaphysics-real--real-and-true} ::nogloss One last bit here: I'll claim that "true" is nuanced in basically the same sorts of ways as "real" above. What's true? Just mathematical theorems? What about very high confidence predictions, from scientific theories? What about just *high* confidence predictions? And, which theories, or is it mostly about their being socially acceptable, and endorsed by the current priesthood? What methods are even acceptable for determining what's true? What does it mean, if anything, for introspective or spiritual claims to be true? --- # Metaphysical Disagreement and Determination {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/metaphysics/metaphysical-disagreement — also at `/md/metaphysics/metaphysical-disagreement.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--`.* There's quite a lot of disagreement about metaphysics in general, if not explicitly by that name, and about subjects downstream of metaphysics. I've perhaps *never* seen productive discussion about these topics. I have some ideas about why. Some claims in this section: 1. Metaphysics matters. 1. It matters if you're wrong about metaphysics. 1. We do not have frameworks for doing metaphysical discernment, either personally or communally. 1. This should give us pause. ## Metaphysics matters {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--metaphysics-matters} I've already said this in the [introduction to this chapter](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), but I'll elaborate on it some here. Large classes of beliefs are downstream of metaphysical ones. These beliefs might be professed, or carefully reflected upon, or just simple and grounded and so intuitive that they're completely invisible. This really matters: **these beliefs determine our seeing, feeling, and acting in the world.** Metaphysics is also not optional. There is no neutral perspective which is totally agnostic of metaphysics. One has a metaphysics, or at least some vague collection of metaphysical intuitions, whether one would like to or not. In fact, if you didn't have a metaphysics, you would be unable to learn, to infer, or to want. Even some of the wackier pie-in-the-sky consequences of various metaphysical systems are relevant to your ordinary life and experience: most likely you want to keep living tomorrow, and you wouldn't want an alien to take over your body, or for your body to keep operating but for your conscious experience to end. You also probably expect that your life will end, likely after less than a century, but even if you expect human life extension to succeed, then you still probably expect that your consciousness will end at least due to heat death of the universe. Both transhumanism/futurism and Buddhism have claims that affect all of these, and one way or another you have to grapple with that, even if just to say "eh, I'm not gonna take this seriously, don't bother me about it." If personal identity is confused or not real, that matters enormously. If rebirth is true, that matters enormously. Conditional on cryonics and mind upload succeeding, those matter enormously for how you live your life today. As philosophical or empirical claims, you can dismiss these, but you can't claim that the metaphysics of minds, for example, is irrelevant or not real. (Personal identity is probably the strongest one here, since it matters on a moment-by-moment basis, not just some decades from now when you die.) Metaphysics is also very mundane. Though we highlight metaphysics mostly when it gets wacky, it's also just part of the warp and weft of [ordinary experience](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics--phenomenological-metaphysics). More saliently, also, metaphysics is especially fundamental (if subliminal) in the ways we understand the value and purpose both of our own lives and of all life, the universe, etc. Lastly, lots of object-level debates often have upstream disagreements about metaphysics. Some obvious examples here would be abortion and trans rights. To a decent extent these debates can be understood as mostly being symbolic contentions between two tribes, *however* there I think are [real disagreements](#metaphysics-real--ontological-and-spiritual-commitments) about the metaphysics of life and birth, and of gender and sex. Both of these are inherently [nebulous](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism), and each side has declared a determined, correct metaphysics here, while mostly not surfacing the metaphysical questions here, as such. #### Weakly contra the Durkheimian hypothesis {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--weakly-contra-the-durkheimian-hypothesis} I'll discuss this [more later](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology), but briefly: one hypothesis which we might have for stories about cosmology, value, truth, etc., is that they mostly serve as loci of social coordination. In this hypothesis, we might say that both the ostensible epistemic content (the specific claims about the world) and the axiological content of religious and mythological stories is sort of "beside the point," and instead these exist to provide a story about which a community can agree, and which can be used as a basis for people to understand their roles and responsibilities, for them to come to consensus, and to strengthen their social bonds. We might also want to say that there are lots of equally functional stories about what's good and right, at least at the level of high-level social outcomes. I think this is only partially correct. I'd say, yes, to a large extent the epistemic content is arbitrary, and on some important dimensions you'll probably get similar outcomes for a wide range of metaphysices, or at least that most of the variance is not explained by the metaphysics. However, the metaphysics a society uses still has real consequences on outcomes we care about, and certainly on apparently psychological weighty subjects. We might imagine one culture which says that its warriors will be remembered for their glory and honor, or another which says that they will live forever in heaven. Perhaps they both have similar levels of social cohesion, and similar levels of bravery from their soldiers. But come on, obviously I personally should care if I actually expect to live forever in heaven as reward for my valor—and in any case I should be seriously questioning if it's good to incentivize war at all. I'd also say that the extreme perspective in this direction is a kind of nihilism: human beliefs and moral intuitions are really just selected for reproductive success, and locally speaking are socially incentivized to align with some or another power structure, so why are they meaningful at all? What obligation do I have to any moral expectations? Again I will discuss this [more later](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology), but briefly I'd say: you almost certainly don't actually believe this. You still don't want to die, you still want love and safety, and you'd still be horrified at seeing yourself and your family tortured. On the other hand, some kind of "meaning maximalism" is probably also wrong. Sometimes, those particular inclined to consistency and piety will draw out all of the consequences of a metaphysics and take them deadly seriously. I'm thinking here of everything from Anarchists to Jihadists to Effective Altruists. I think this ends up biting the bullet on all kinds of mundane value and meaning that we probably shouldn't want to throw out. One take here is that a metaphysical claims and stances are more heuristic than absolute. The point being, they can stand for a sort of considerations, without being "taken literally." For example: often we plainly talk about something being "bad for your soul", without really worrying about the metaphysics, to correctly point at a worthwhile set of considerations for what might also be called "moral injury" etc. I like this take, but I still think this doesn't really solve the problem. We actually still have the same question, namely, how do we apply some big collection of lossy heuristics to themselves, to arrive at even just *better* or *worse* answers for pressing questions and tradoffs. This is still very difficult and confusing. ### What does it matter if you're wrong? {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--what-does-it-matter-if-youre-wrong} With some caveats, I think it matters quite a bit if you're wrong about metaphysics, [for various senses of "wrong."](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology) First, some ways in which it matters less: My impression is that by default cultures broadly, and people individually, don't develop a very sophisticated metaphysics. In my thin reading of anthropology, and particularly the anthropology of religion, it seems like the criteria for admission into a folk metaphysics are something like, "is it resonant," "is it simple enough that the culture can transmit it," and "does it not grate too much against existing sensibilities." Shooting from the hip, it seems like almost all folk metaphysicses I've ever read about are unsophisticated in ways that generally rhyme with one another.[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--resonance] [^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--resonance]: "resonance go brr," or something. Folk metaphysicses are also often blatantly inconsistent, or they consist of some funny hodgepodge of systems which explicitly contradict each other, eg. many local shamanic systems in Latin Americae which overlap culturally with Catholicism, or the same more marginally with Islam. Even many attempts at careful, systematic metaphysicses often contain straightforward logical errors[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--aquinas]. [^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--aquinas]: Thomas Aquinas, in his [Argument from Degrees](https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/source/aquinas3.asp), argued that because beings can vary in perfection, there are degrees of perfection, and because (he sort of implicitly supposed) there must be a maximum, there must be a perfect being. IIRC Euclid's Elements contains a proof of there being no highest prime, it also seems trivial to just be like "dog but why does this set have an upper bound?" And yet, the world goes on, people go about their lives, and society remains moderately functional—with whatever problems there are smelling more like "politics" or "economics" or "violence" than metaphysics. We might also say, "look, there's lots of ways of coordinating society, every society will think itself *good*, and often *the best*, why quibble over their stories about ultimate value?" Or perhaps, "So, lots of people believe funny things, they pray to funny gods, but they're mostly having a good time, so what does it matter?" More strongly, we might also say, "even when people have been killed ostensibly due to religious differences, probably this has more to do human tribes warring than it does anyone's professed metaphysics." I think this these are all right, and nonetheless I think you still can't get away from metaphysics mattering. As long as you still care about death, as long as you still care about whether your experience is real and not a dream, or as long as you feel that torture or rape are abhorrent, you still care about metaphysics! (Or at least, you are about distinctions which are downstream of metaphysics, and so therefore in some sense you also "automatically" care about the upstream considerations.) Insofar as you believe in and care about things which would be repudiated by a different metaphysics, **you must care about your metaphysics, and you must care about getting your metaphysics "right,"** since indeed the contradictory metaphysics must be something to the effect of "wrong." ## Metaphysical discernment and determination {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--metaphysical-discernment-and-determination} I am not aware of any frameworks or models which allow one to meaningfully investigate and come to determination about metaphyiscs. Even for a person working privately and only trying to figure out what's right, I'm aware of no process of metaphysical discernment which converges to consistent and correct answers across different people, in the way that math or empirical disciplines can. (That is, without effectively just picking the answer from the outset.) Looking at the diversity of systems of metaphysics around, I don't see any way for them to interface, to be falsified, or to find concrete points of disagreement which could cause a believer to change their mind. This is partly because metaphysical beliefs are often unjustified, or worse *unjustifiable*, but also because the [domains of metaphysics](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics) are inherently quite [nebulous](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity). I'll go through each of the domains and describe some places where what seems clearly defined becomes hazy and confused. I want to be clear that in each domain of metaphysics, I don't believe that metaphysical nebulosity lets you get away with whatever you like. My main argument here is that if you look carefully, with an eye for nebulosity, the parts that are actually pinned down are frustratingly narrow, and that just about everything that relates to meaning and value is left flailing. Furthermore, all of these flailing pieces are *most of what really matters*, and we don't have frameworks for trying to inspect on intuitions and reflect, which would allow us to arrive at anything like *correct* or *satisfying* answers. I haven't seen a presentation of a particular metaphysics which doesn't end up saying much more than just "because I said so." #### Cosmology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--cosmology} This might seem the most concrete, empirical, falsifiable, and stable, but still I think there are problems and a frustrating amount of nuance. There are indeed stars in the night sky, there's red-shift, there's the cosmic microwave background, and there are modern theories of cosmogenesis, the many-worlds interpretation, and even Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--tegmark]. These range from flat, undeniable, and plain-to-the-naked-eye, to highly indirect but still well substantiated, to speculative and unfalsifiable. [^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--tegmark]: This is usually glossed as "all mathematical objects exist, the physics and starting conditions of our universe being one of them." See the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis) Modern cosmology, for whatever uncertainty there is at the highest level, is presented as basically empirical and well substantiated, and broadly as having made traditional, pre-scientific cosmologies completely obsolete. However, cosmology in almost all cultures (as I understand) has functioned less as an empirical theory of a natural phenomenon, as it has as a *story* to structure the place of humans in the universe, our responsibilities to each other, and our responsibilities to the symbols and sacred principles of a given society. I would call this the *[imaginal](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice)* (yes, not *imaginary*) aspect of cosmology. Another way to say this is that the imaginal aspect of cosomology conveys [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) which are often tightly integrated with the rest of a metaphysics. To be clear, the traditional imaginal stuff is often stupid, insane, and harmful—I'm not being a naive hippy, saying "ah yes you should trust all traditional religious systems, they contain deep wisdom that the hyper-rational west has lost." I'm also not saying that it doesn't matter that the ostensible epistemic content is wrong. The distinction I'm making here is that, descriptively, cosmologies have *mostly* been about the imaginal aspect, rather than a concrete empirical theory. Indeed, the stars couldn't be interacted with, and until about the 16th century couldn't really be inspected more closely, besides perhaps tracking the planets carefully, or recording comets. Nor, for that matter, can we really "do" much even with modern scientific cosmology. Even modern scientific cosmologies still do have imaginal consequences, though exactly what is not clear. Sometimes this gets turned into stories like "we are the universe understanding itself", and sometimes it's something like "we are puny and irrelevant and the universe is fundamentally uncaring." Another cluster of popular modern ones have the shape of a kind of futurist manifest destiny. In any case, the empirical claims will sort of "automatically" be used to construct an imaginal world. Often they are much more than that: if you watch the TV show *Cosmos* (either the original or the new ones), astronomy and scientific cosmology is taught by way of the hagiographies of famous scientists. There's awe, and glory, and maybe even sacredness in it; the cosmos stands for the valorization (and justification) of scientism. I'm not going to contest the actual empirical claims of scientific cosmology, though I do wish that popular discourse was more conscious of the uncertainty *in the discipline* of a lot of these models. The real question to ask here is: **what story should we tell about the history and fate of the universe, and our place in it?** As I'll be asking throughout this book: what ought we want to valorize? What ought we censure? Note that this is not really about nebulosity with respect to the actual empirical claims as it is about meaning. Whatever certainty the relevant physics and astronomy support doesn't help us answer these questions. Furthermore, I don't think that ways of seeing can really be [said to be "right,"](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--opinions-matters-of-taste-and-ways-of-seeing) rather than they might be helpful or miserable or lovely. I would say also that the imaginal aspect is in many ways more important than the empirical aspect. Most people, insofar as they care about cosmology at all, do not care about specific models of physics but indeed mostly about how it makes them feel, and what story they feel that they're embedded in. Even the most staunch atheist can't really *escape* the imaginal consequences of their cosmology, as an important part of how their narrative world is structured, among other packages of meaning and narrative as well. I would say also that some traditional cosmologies often have a fair bit besides bathwater in them, and I think secularism has probably too hastily rejected all of them. Now you might say, "wait, but you just said it matters if it's wrong, but now you're saying it sort of doesn't matter if the cosmology isn't really literally true?" I would say, yeah, it maybe doesn't matter if a cosmology is correct as in "literally true", and so it would perhaps less so be "[wrong](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology--a-sketch-of-an-ontology-of-rightness)" as "harmful" or "bad." But then, perhaps moreso, it surely matters if our cosmology is wholesome, and helpful, rather than harmful or destructive. #### Ontology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--ontology} As with the others, ontological nebulosity doesn't let you go full Humpty Dumpty[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--humpty-dumpty]. Of course, in principle, you could define words however you like, and you could lump together this or that category, but it still wouldn't cause there to be some real structure in common with those. Often, we might start out with some set of intuitions about what kinds of things exist, and then by investigating them more closely, it becomes obvious that our prior intuitions were confused, and that there isn't much negotiation that's really possible about whether the earlier folk models were correct. Some obvious examples here might be the germ theory of disease, or the atomic structure of matter. [^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--humpty-dumpty]: From *Through the Looking Glass* by Lewis Carroll: >[Humpty Dumpty] “And only one for birthday presents, you know. There’s glory for you!”
>“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’” Alice said.
>Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
>“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
>“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” But, very much, most categories are really more like messy clusters, and our intuitions, whether they're "baked in" biologically (eg. lots of brain structures for identifying human faces) or learned, often balk or throw up their hands when faced with the complexity in the actual domain. This often matters quite a bit: when is a person alive, or dead? (Is this person really a woman?) Again I would stress here that an ontology is a property of a model, or a view, rather than a property of the domain, perhaps (with some nuanced) with the exception of whatever phenomena are really "at the bottom" of physics. I'd mostly like to avoid openly political subjects, but of course I have to talk here about gender. A popular argument from the pro-trans side (leaving aside that 20 years ago public-facing pro-trans rhetoric was mostly pesudobiological and gender binary-ist, "born this way," "female brain," etc.) has been that even biological sex is pretty nebulous. To my understanding, as a matter of biological fact, even if you wanted to construct a totally gender-essentialist, binary-ist ontology, there are still quite a few edge cases in the real domain, namely basically "intersex" people. (You could, on the other hand, just declare intersex people to be abominations, or even non-intersex trans people, and the actual biology doesn't preclude that.)[^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--trans-nb] [^metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--trans-nb]: FWIW I'm somewhat confused when the gender discourse came to be about non-binary people rather than binary trans people. It seems like the anti-trans side is upset about both but I feel like recent political actions (I suppose this dates when I'm writing this section) are superficially about non-binary people, and I'm not sure when or why that changed? Broadly, often, people like to assume that the ontology used by "scientists" is comprehensive, authoritative, and exclusive. Again you'll find this in medicine, you'll find it hawked in both directions with respect to gender discourse, genomics, intelligence research, economics, etc. Often these "scientific" ontologies are some weird amalgamation of a few generations of scientific theory, vague folk theory, and dumbed down explanations for public consumption. My impresison is that in many cases the real literature acknowledges quite a bit of nuance, despite what the general public thinks "the science" says. In any case, well, often an academic literature is just working from an oversimplified model, which may or may not be predictive, but which in any case is collapsing quite a bit of nebulosity. #### Epistemology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--epistemology} I'll be yet stronger here: I think if you're failing with respect to the standards of [epistemic rationality](#spiritual-truth-rationality) I think you're almost certainly wrong. I'll discuss this more, but broadly speaking, if your beliefs make predictions that are generally or usually wrong, those beliefs are again [something like wrong](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology). This can happen if you've made too strong of inferences on the basis of weak evidence, or if you've just made stuff up. And again, there have been debates about what counts as knowledge at least since ancient Greece, and while a lot of these arguments seem either confused or irrelevant, I'll claim that there are still some real questions here. A weaker point is that to some extent I think the debate about the many-worlds interpretation is really an epistemological question. My stronger claim is that I think we still don't really have epistemological theories that can account appropriately for [gnosis](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation). Briefly here: there are a number of different kinds of meditative experiences reported in different traditions, which are described variously as "waking up" (as though one's experience before had been a dream, or like sleep), or of awareness of an all-pervading consciousness, or also of knowledge of past lives, whether one's own or others. These experiences which are generally reported as revealing deep truths about reality or meaning, sometimes apparently straightforward and sometimes said to be ineffable. To be clear, some of this I think is bs, and some are probably falsified in the first place. However, a lot of these I think are probably *legitimate*, but very confusing to grapple with or to know what to do with, either from afar, or personally (from my very limited experience). #### Axiology {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--axiology} This is where I'm most confused, and this is what most of this book is about. The [last chapter](#goodness) of this book will discuss this all in detail, but briefly: I don't believe that we have any *explicit* principles in common for understanding what goodness is, and I think there are real gulfs between the notions of value in use across the world. Many cultures today think it's good and appropriate to beat children, to execute homosexuals, to practice self abnegation, to torture animals, to associate sexuality with taboo and shame, etc. etc. (Feel free to fill in whatever you would find horrifying, and conversely to fill in whatever *those* cultures would find horrifying about you.) There is a shallow modern liberal perspective which tries to ignore these sorts of differences in conceptions of value. I think this only works, insofar as it does, because immigrants mostly fairly quickly assimilate. I think most people don't quite understand cultural diversity and would often be horrified by lots of things that go on regularly in other cultures, just as they would likely be horrified at many things in your society. A person, embedded in a given culture, might be bothered by specific practices, or might chafe at this or that hierarchy, but seldom do we have the time and space to ask "ok, but what's actually good? what's *really* good here, and what's actually just a mess?" I'll claim broadly that our current configuration has [very serious problems](#culture-trauma-memetics), and that it's very difficult to distinguish the *appearance* of cultural progress from status quo bias and cultural myopia. But also, it seems like there's love and beauty and lots of both mundane and transcendent goodness. I have a sense of what's probably the right direction here, but mostly a lot of uncertainty. Most of what I want to communicate in this book is a deep uncertainty about the nature of goodness, but without inclining towards nihilism. My thesis is basically, "there exists goodness, I feel very strongly about that, and still I'm quite uncertain what's really good." ### Communal metaphysical discernment {#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement--communal-metaphysical-discernment} Of course, if one can't come to determination privately, how can we communally? I actually have very little to say here. [I'll discuss more](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) about how I think ideas and values diffuse, and how they're negotiated culturally. What I would add here is, I think that in practice most people are just kind of muddling through, and that in some ways this can allow for a kind of "communal discernment," as ideas diffuse through a culture, but that this is subject more to constraints about memetic *fecundity* (that is, reproductive fitness) than constraints about deep goodness or rightness. --- # Culture, Trauma, and Memetics {#culture-trauma-memetics} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics--`.* *In this chapter:* "Trauma" as a concept in general, a common shape of model about its causal structure, as well as important heuristic signals of trauma in others: - [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma) - [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) - [Trauma Smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) *Memetics* as the basic mechanism of cultural transmission, and some on the interaction between culture and trauma: - [Memetics](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) - [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture) Culture and memes as often burdensome psychologically, and difficult to shake off: - [Burdens of Meaning](#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning) --- # Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--`.* :::note[*Epistemic status: more like "my impression" rather than "established consensus"*] This section is also largely under-cited, and flat empirical claims are mixed in with some inference on my part. ::: The word 'trauma' is often contested politically, which I mostly want to sidestep. I'll explain first some context about the history of the word as I understand it, and then the cluster it's used to refer to in the psychiatry and therapy literatures. See also some context on [nebulosity](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity). There are some messy ontological and methodological problems in trying to analyze trauma. In contemporary rhetoric, 'trauma' often stands as a [disguised query](#metaphysics-real--disguised-queries) for a question like "who deserves privileges and accommodations because they have suffered." More deeply, whatever notion of trauma we use relies on some assumptions about what constitutes pathology and harm. Broadly speaking, 'trauma' refers to persistent *pathological* changes to psychology and behavior that arise as a consequence of adverse experiences, as well as the experiences themselves. That is, despite the language of "post-traumatic *growth*," positive changes that arise from adverse experiences are regarded as quite different from what we would normally be inclined to call trauma, and are treated as desirable, and even sought out deliberately. In this section and the next several following, I argue for a few claims, some basically orthodox/normative and some disputed but fairly common in the circles I run in: - Trauma is [the result of](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) unmetabolized adverse experiences (though not all such result in trauma). - There are many milder forms of trauma, and there's a broad swath of "[trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells)" that look like trauma. - There's a smooth gradient between, on one end, the causal structures and symptoms of PTSD proper, and on the other a lot of things which constitute normative socialization [in many cultures](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture). ## Defining trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--defining-trauma} 'Trauma' in Greek literally means "wound," and is still used in that sense in physical medicine. My understanding is that all of the modern usage of the term in a psychological context comes through Freud, himself drawing from an earlier German psychiatrist who believed that "hysteria" was literally due to an injury to the uterus. Because of the modern interface of medicine, law, and power, psychological trauma in contemporary discourse is often understood narrowly in terms of psychiatric diagnostic criteria. There's some substantial confusion here, because the model which the DSM (the standard psychiatric diagnostic manual in the U.S.) uses is explicitly meant to track clusters of symptoms that will likely be tractable to similar interventions, but not necessarily to track natural kinds, let alone sharply defined causal mechanisms.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm] The criteria for PTSD approximately match the stereotyped image of victims of war, genocide, rape, etc. These involve, briefly: a. flashbacks, intrusive memories, or reactions to associated triggers, b. avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma, c. persistent emotional distress, alienation, or anhedonia, and d. persistent emotional dysregulation, stress, and fear.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM] These may be attributed to acute intense disturbing experiences, or more chronic and sometimes less intense experiences.
More on diagnostic categories and criteria for trauma in contemporary diagnostic manuals The DSM and the ICD (the International Classification of Diseases) use very similar definitions for PTSD, and have a very similar list of adjacent stress or trauma-related disorders. While I don't take these definitions as singularly authoritative, I think they're informative as models developed by people earnestly trying to describe and work with this domain, as well as carrying quite a lot of authority, for those who put stock in that. The ICD (but not the DSM) also has an adjacent category known as *Complex* Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, which involves the same criteria as PTSD, plus distinctly strong feelings of shame and worthlessness, and severe difficulty sustaining relationships.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD] (Note also that therapy organizations which have been advocating for the diagnostic status of CPTSD believe that it's something like "responsible for" a large swath of very specific diagnostic categories in the DSM. IIRC the definition they use is different and less restrictive than the one in the ICD.) Even in the ontologies of the DSM/ICD, there are several other categories of trauma-induced disorders with different symptoms, which are somewhat weirder and less stereotyped, eg. Reactive Attachment Disorder and Disinhibited Social Engagement Disorder. Note again that the ontology of the DSM is constructed in order to identify clusters that will be amenable to similar sorts of treatments, often just on the basis of their overt symptoms, rather than necessarily in terms of their underlying causal structures.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm] The resolution at which psychiatric treatment is applied broadly speaking can't track the underlying causal structures, which might be unknown, highly multi-factored, or highly varied. The techniques of psychiatry are often very "try stuff and see what sticks."
[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--DSM]: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition*, pp. 271-280 [^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--ICD]: World Health Organization, 2025. *International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision* (ICD-11). [6B41 Complex post traumatic stress disorder](https://icd.who.int/browse/2025-01/mms/en#585833559). [^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--scott-dsm]: See Scott Siskind, 2020, [*Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics*](https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/ontology-of-psychiatric-conditions-taxometrics/) on psychiatric criteria as defining arbitrary thresholds for continuous distributions, and on the goals and constraints of the DSM. See also Awais Aftab, 2025, [*You Aren't In The DSM*](https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/you-arent-in-the-dsm) for context on the history of the DSM and the goals and constraints of its editors. "Psychological" as opposed to *psychiatric* models often revolve around detailed inside-view theories of the causal factors responsible for dysfunction, which are empirically much weaker, and which psychiatry usually avoids.[^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker] Note also that "psychological" models are willing to use far more flexible admission criteria, rather than psychiatric models, whose diagnostic criteria are often defined in order to have thresholds at large magnitudes of impairment. This is to say that diagnostic criteria often have more to do with contingencies of the modern medical-legal-insurance context, rather than reflecting some sharp boundary in the domain. [^culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--psychiatry-weaker]: (This is sort of a simplification, my understanding is that psychiatric theory does include these kinds of sketchier inside-view models also, even if diagnostic manuals avoid them.) In these slightly-less-orthodox models of psychopathology, trauma is regarded as an important causal factor in (and pretty straightfowardly correlated with) a variety of different disorders, eg. Anxiety and OCD. This is all a very long-winded way of saying, "trauma is not resticted to just whatever the DSM says." There's obviously then, a big question: within the broader category of "psychological changes that come as a result of adverse experiences," what intuitions can we appropriately apply from the more clear cut "trauma" of the diagnosable-PTSD sort, vs. milder and subtler kinds of changes, in particular re whether they are desirable, and whether they should be regarded as a kind of harm? I'll refer to this question as "what should count as pathological?" For now I'm going to leave this question up to the judgement of the reader. I'll try to just describe what's actually in the various reports, anecdata, and actual data, and I'll discuss next [a particular model](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), and then [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells). I'll discuss this question again partially vis a vis [introspection ](#practice-introspection) and ["healing" practices](#practice-healing) and in detail [near the end of the book](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology). ## Models, reports, and anecdata {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--models-reports-and-anecdata} ::nogloss All of the components of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD (and I left out some detail) are reported in various combinations and severities due to adverse experiences. There's also a variety, both in the normative psychiatric models/ontologies and more "extensive" psychological models, of other kinds of "trauma-induced" pathologies that don't just look like PTSD. Some broad clusters here include exaggerated (to extremes) neuroticism, self-centeredness, neediness, etc.—basically ordinary, if undesirable, tendencies in human psychology in general. Again, there are milder forms reported that seem to be caused by traumatic experiences, which don't necessarily qualify by official criteria. There are three important (non-exhaustive) clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature (note these are not quite standard terms): ::gloss[*Distortion*, *rigidity*, and *dissociation* are the three main clusters of traumatic symptoms reported in the therapy literature which I focus on.]{#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--trauma-clusters} - **Distortion**: patterns of variously intense kinds of psychological "lopsidedness," dysfunction, or "distortion" which are claimed to result from abuse or neglect. - **Rigidity**: an intense need to maintain one's behavior, appearance, or sustain positive regard from others in very specific ways, for fear of rejection or some projected memory of violence - **Dissociation**: numbness, dissociation, and deficits in emotional development - (See more on the [phenomenology of dissociation](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation).) Therapy manuals are rife with reports of these sorts of cases, of course aligned very nicely with the views of the given therapy modality or school. The stereotype of at least a modern genre of these stories usually goes something like, "I realized that my exaggerated, dysfunctional, neurotic behavior was the result of unresolved trauma. As a child [*and the stories are almost invariably about childhood trauma*] I learned those emotional and psychological patterns as a defense mechanism, but now I am able to heal that trauma." I'm sort of uncertain quite how to take this evidence. It seems to me that schools of therapy often have dodgy epistemic standards, and my impression is that the best "evidence based" therapy actually doesn't work all that well, in the sense of producing robust recovery, etc. (I discuss this more [in an appendix](#appendix-therapy-efficacy).) One plausible model for what's going on here, which I like, is that the effectiveness of therapy is contingent on extreme levels of skill and intuition on the part of the therapist. This level of skill would be difficult to transmit, measure, and document carefully, leading to a pretty severe regression to the mean in each generation of some school of therapy. See [more on this subject](#spiritual-truth-schools-teachers-transmission). Nonetheless this is decent evidence against the accuracy of these models. Still, my sense is that this broad shape is probably substantially right. Some evidence that contributes to my sense here: - IIRC the correlation between eg. ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) scores and dysfunctional adult outcomes is pretty strong. Similarly, again IIRC, for other quantitative measures of the correlation between trauma and dysfunctional behavior. - We have lots of quite tidy evidence about the structure of trauma responses in the extreme cases (actual PTSD), that traumatic psychological adaptations are something like "specific" and "structured," (as in, specific to the details of the trauma, and shaped in a way that reflects it) rather than resulting in someone being only diffusely disturbed. - It seems basically plausible that we shouldn't expect this to be specific to extreme cases, and while the evidence from therapists is sketchier and less robust, it still seems pretty substantial to me. - This broad claim, that adaptations to traumas are structured with respect to the shape of the trauma, aligns with my own introspection and with introspective reports I take seriously. - Note that I think most introspection is mostly nonsense, see [more about introspection and confabulation](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation). In the broader definitions used in the therapy literature, trauma is not just restricted to experiences of intense fear or horror, but also often of experiences of grief and mundane tragedy. Commonly reported as well are chronic, low to medium-grade experiences of alienation, rejection, humiliation, etc. Reports of the dissociation cluster often come with healing stories, to stereotype, of discovering some great pit of fear, anger, sadness, etc., which the person reports they were "protected from" or which was "held at bay" by the previous dissociation. They then report "processing" those emotions, and recovering the ability to experience some greater breadth of emotions, body sensations otherwise, or of newfound ease and comfort with social interactions. These reports also usually include variations on the some themes: - Recollection or "discovery" of like, something in the genre of the breadth/depth of grief from some incident or chronic adverse experience, and of contortion of their psychology wrt this - Commonly, recollection of child abuse, long suppressed - Recollection/discovery of unusual or proscribed proclivities, stereotypical stories here are from trans people, queer people more broadly, from the BDSM community, etc. - Less commonly, discovery of "held" grief/fear/etc. around the location of a previous physical injury, chronic illness, or body part associated with past embarrassment or shame (See more on such "[openings](#practice-healing--opening).") The broad thrust of these reports, both in the very modern modalities but also going back at least to Freud, is of discovering a lot of stuructured, highly "semantic" psychological content associated with gross psychological dysfunction or "offness", exagggeration, distortion, etc. A similar cluster that's often reported includes patterns like tendencies towards hyperfocus or obsession, the apparent absence of normal desires or appreciations (this overlaps with dissociation), compulsive nonconformism, unusual superstitions, etc. Again, this entire category of evidence is fraught. Many of these reports observe patterns similar to [culture-bound disorders](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) where people have experiences of neurosis, grief, etc. in line with very *specific* patterns in their culture, and often in accord with some changing zeitgeist of eg. Western therapy culture. Therapy reports are also problematic because they're heavily primed, even where a therapist is skilled and not setting a narrow frame, clients often come in with a particular image of what healing "should" look like, and will enact that. [I'll discuss later](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) my sense of what constitutes *real* or *trustworthy* introspection, though broadly this is pretty hard to justify in an "objective" way. Still, I think as a broad shape these are very real phenomena. Introspective reports from solo-practitioners, meditators, etc., including anecdotes I've collected, overlap substantially with those from the therapy literature, but more varied and probably more dubious. Again I think these are *often* not trustworthy, but are an important source of evidence as well. Some of the weirder stuff here is also actually attested in the therapy literature, eg. encounters with demonic entities which entered one's psyche during a traumatic event, so-called "genital armoring," or experiences of accessing ancestral or past-life traumatic memories. --- # The Structure of Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/structure-trauma.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--`.* :::note[*Epistemic status: speculative, with some meaningful evidence*] ::: The image that one might get about trauma based only on the criteria for PTSD is that it's mainly about symptoms of emotional *dysregulation*. I think this is too narrow, especially for [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells). One view that I like says that trauma is something like an *exaggerated* and overly restrictive response to real fear, horror, and grief. It seems like in general, mammals, at least, learn on a kind of "emotional" basis, as in, following gradients of valence and emotion. This often follows some thread of curiosity, satisfaction, or pleasure, or their opposites. This can be gentle and slight, or can also take the shape of abrupt reorientations in response to acute, intense valence, whether positive or negative. IIRC both of these are observed pretty straightforwardly in primates, dogs, rats, etc. Perhaps, some people are capable of learning in a "neutral," "technical," or "clinical" way from experiences that for others are strongly valenced, but descriptively this kind of emotional imprinting is how things usually go for most people, for experiences of extreme danger, joy, etc. Organisms in general also need to be highly sample-efficient when it comes to danger: you don't get many chances to almost die, or almost lose your leg, and you want to *really* learn your lesson from near misses. Humans can also transmit various kinds of dangers culturally, besides the much slower and coarser transmission of genetically encoded instincts that lots of species have. Still, cultural transmission is generally pretty low-resolution compared to the full reality of some threat, and even if people have internalized that something is dangerous, when they actually suffer some harm they likely won't be "prepared" for it emotionally. So then, each such event is a big deal, and often one both overcompensates, and does so on a way that becomes very difficult to roll back. Besides this, there is also so-called "negative trauma," basically trauma that occurs due to the *absence* of some experience. The prototypical case here would be childhood neglect. Now, "neglect" usually correlates with, and often has a connotation of, other kinds of adverse experience, but there seems to be a real effect where a child's environment is not overtly abusive, but there's an absence of parental warmth and care which leads to both "pychodevelopmental atrophy" as well as patterns of negative emotion etc., that are more stereotypical of trauma. ## Blending with the view {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--blending-with-the-view} Besides just for sample efficiency, updates about negatively valenced outcomes probably "ought" to influence our feelings and [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing). While spirituality has some bearing on this, under normal circumstances it's going to be something like "appropriate" to temper one's sense of rightness, comfort, and emotional safety with respect to the real circumstances in the world. Barring the far reaches of [spiritual attainment](#spiritual-truth-truth), if you know that your brother is suffering, or that you might lose your job, this probably should be integrated into your affective sense of the world. Again, descriptively, this is usually how things go. There's a tendency for these emotional updates in response to traumatic experiences to get deeply ingrained in the default ways of seeing, often in ways that become all-but-invisible. Reports from meditators, who often have richer introspective access than most, often go something like, "yeah it just *felt* like the world is fundamentally horrible and unsafe, and that colored everything I saw and interacted with"—and many such variations. Again, these reports can come from eg. survivors of genocide, but also (and sometimes with similar language) from those who've experienced totally mundane personal tragedy, familial estrangement, etc. A very stereotyped example here would be eg. from victims of bullying over many years, who report that their experience of being low-status, shameful, etc. seemed to be simply "part of the world," or so much a part of the world that it was invisible until the burden sloughd off. I'll refer this kind of phenomenon as cases where trauma is highly "*blended with the view*." PTSD proper is partly also about when a person sort of keeps "triggering themselves," but that's less what I'm talking about here. There also seems to be something especially pernicious about negative valence, where it's self-sustaining in a way that positive valence generally isn't. Maybe, we can view [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening) as an experience that's *so positive* that one never needs to feel bad again, but this at least isn't what happens to most people when they fall in love, or win the lottery, or whatever. ## Emotional/Psychological Metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--emotionalpsychological-metabolism} Related to all of this is the concept of *metabolism*. For most kinds of negative experiences, and even sometimes for very intense ones, there's a variety of ways that the experience/emotions/"content" etc. can be [integrated](#practice-healing). Two tentative glosses on "integration" here might be: a. robustly and maturely understood, and weighed appropriately with respect to the rest of one's values, and b. no longer acting out a traumatized, injured response, having a mature relationship to the reality of some experience. So, let's say, a child experiences a let-down and is utterly distraught about this, but with time comes to a more mature relationship with success and failure, at least in degrees. Not to make a blithe comparison, but probably the same is possible with respect to loss, safety, humiliation, etc. There are familiar stereotyped reports about "learning from" the loss of a loved one, of a kind of maturity and richness and flowering that comes from it, or through it, etc. Part of the experience of metabolism, in the caricature both of childhood let-downs and of gut-wrenching grief, involves some intense emotionality, tears, "catharsis," etc. This accords with the reports I generally buy, whether anecdotes from joe-off-the-street, meditators, and from therapy manuals. It's salient here to note that adults, and stereotypically, especially men, often have lost this kind of catharsis as a regular feature of their lives. Perhaps, sometimes this can be because they're already "highly integrated" in this domain, but from my perspective this is an indicative trauma smell. To be clear, a lot of what looks to me like "correct" or "robust" metabolism happens on its own, and is not necessarily loudly emotive at all. There's some cluster of evidence that trauma, and maybe especially "small-t" trauma has more to do with not feeling safe socially in a negative experience. I'll [discuss more](#wayfinding) about subtler and more unusual kinds of metabolism. There are very common reports of low-grade chronic anxiety, malaise, ennui, and even gross psycho-social dysfunction "unraveling" directly causally due to intense catharsis. Just the same, reports of healing experiences from both "classical" and "small-t" trauma do often actually look pretty much like stereotypical cathartic metabolism as well. There are however reports of kinds of very advanced metabolism that are "rarified," and might be silent or invisible from the outside. ## "Correct" metabolism {#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--correct-metabolism} ::nogloss *See also some discussion of [correctness, in general](#metaphysics-rightness-ontology).* This all leaves out what the "goal" or "resolution" or "end state" of metabolism ought to be. This turns out to be a larger question, which I discuss as it relates to [psychology](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) broadly, [spiritual practice](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice) in particular, and [meaning/value](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology) in general later. I'll discuss here what some of the considerations are, as it informs what I consider to be trauma smells. First, there exists real suffering, violence, and injustice, besides which at least mortality seems to be basically inviolable. Most people are by default only sort of *vaguely* aware of the reality of suffering that they haven't experienced, and it seems to be difficult not to come away disturbed from facing horrors up close. Even very "personal" trauma of humiliation and abuse might be less profoundly disturbing just to witness but is still quite distorting psychologically to actually receive. It's obviously not sufficient to say "well, those who haven't experienced such suffering represent some kind of *truer* untraumatized state"—there's real suffering which such a person hasn't really updated on. It seems like we want some notion of "maturity" or "integration," something to the effect of "wisdom despite, or through, suffering." So the question is sort of, what does maturity look like, and what is "false" maturity? (Or perhaps, trauma is just a ratchet, and you can only be dirtied or injured by it.) A traumatized person has in some sense a thesis about what is safe to do, think, or feel. Agnostic of whether this is "correct" or "appopriate," broadly speaking it's in any case an adaptation to some adverse experience. An integrated perspective has to meaningfully take into account the full reality of the adverse experience in the first place, and not just by "faking it" and trying to [say magic words](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) which are not *existentially real* for you, nor by [dissociating](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation), or by just ignoring the subject. So again, mortality. As far as I can tell, you and I are both going to die. If you learn your death is imminent, just learning that will probably be quite intense and painful, but you ostensibly already know that's coming. Have you faced that? What would it mean to have faced it? There are lots of spiritual/existential perspectives about death which largely look [wrong](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice) to me. Again, I'll [discuss later](#spiritual-truth-truth) what a "correct" perspective would have to include here. --- # Trauma Smells {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/trauma-smells.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--`.* I'll use the word "trauma smell" to refer to a big cluster of things which, well, *kinda smell like trauma*. The term is a (shallow) riff on a concept from software engineering. This term is helpful to refer to a lot of stuff that looks like trauma, but which is both uncertain in particular and also [nebulous](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity) in principle. I've [already said](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma) that trauma is nebulous, but still I'll talk about some distinctions here. At mininum, I probably want to reserve the word 'trauma' at least for phenomena that are caused by some experience, rather than due to something like underlying natural variation. It's then often unclear what we're actually looking at. There's quite a lot of variation which we still probably want to call "pathological," both in medicine outside of psychiatry, and in psychology/psychiatry. "Natural" variation and adverse experience also interact, of course. For a lot of what I'll describe as trauma smells, these are ambiguous whether they're caused by adverse experiences, or "only" "due to" "natural variation." In any case, my regarding something as a trauma smell means that I believe that I have enough evidence more broadly to regard that phenomenon as *likely* caused by some adverse experience, even if it's not definitive in any given case. More broadly for pathology, lots of nebulosity here. So, is aging pathological? Once again, see [disguised queries](#metaphysics-real--disguised-queries)—to a large extent this question is either unhelpful or irrelevant, but it's fine to say "well, this seems bad, and it has some causes, and it's preferable not to have it," and leave aside the [metaphysical question](#metaphysics-metaphysical-disagreement). In any case, re trauma smells, there's quite a lot of stuff that sure looks pathological, and which looks like it has its cause in adverse experience. Partly also, "trauma smells" doesn't quite rely on assumptions about the etiology, mostly I'm saying "here's a big cluster of things which smell bad, and which seem to be pretty common." [As I said](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma), the word trauma often stands as a disguised query for "what deserves special privileges," but I'm not trying to make some rhetorical move by using the word here. That's part of why I'm using this silly word "trauma smells," and that's also why a lot of my friends often literally use the word 'stuff' rather than try to litigate this or that as trauma. ## Smells in particular (not exhaustive) {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--smells-in-particular-not-exhaustive} ::nogloss First, two methodological points here. One, these are in general something like "heuristically informative," or maybe just only weak to moderate evidence. Partly they're also a useful cluster to be able to talk about, regardless of how strong of evidence they are for "trauma proper," or whatever. Secondly, these mostly come from vibes-level, "energetic" (see below) intuitions on my part; though not just mine, and I expect my meditator friends are mostly nodding along at this section. There are [three main clusters](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--trauma-clusters) of traumatic symptoms and trauma smells, namely: distortion, rigidity, and dissociation. I'll weave in and out of talking about each of them. One grouping of trauma smells, which cuts acoss the three clusters: how readily is a breadth of [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) and of ways of being available to a person? What kinds of psychological factors and states do they have access to? What seems to be forbidden to them? - Do they have access to a breadth of both positive and negative affect? - to ease and relaxation? - to dreams and hopes? - to excitement and exuberance? - to devotion and sacredness, agnostic of the source? - to love and intimacy? To sexual arousal? - to feel fear? - to feel anger? - Do they find it okay/safe to behave in a full range? - to sing and dance? - to dream and to hope? - to *be* angry? - to be loud? - to be harsh and unkind? - to *show* fear? - to feel or show weakness? - to feel or show strength? These are all very common and fairly indicative trauma smells. Often when something is "forbidden" to a person, rather than them explicitly saying "oh I can't do that," "I mustn't do that," etc., they will encounter internal resistance when they incline towards some way of being, *or* they will find that domain of meaning blank, empty, irrelevant, or they'll say that they "never got it," "never experience that," etc. There's at least some evidence of extreme positive affect within "natural variation," or more often extreme lack of negative affect, eg. those with the FAAH OUT mutation (leaving aside some nuances here, and maybe some conflicting evidence). There are of course lots of reports from mystical traditions of people having variously "conquered" or "purified" anxiety, anger, lust, etc. I'll [talk later](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice) about whether I think this is even good or desirable, agnostic of whether the reports are accurate. In any case, even in the 98th percentile case, if someone reports "I don't experience xyz," for things broadly in the list above, I think that's a moderate to strong trauma smell. Adjacent to this, my intuition is that in general the full breadth of human meaning should something like "work," for most people. Again when some domain "doesn't work" for a person, that is, that they seem restricted in the breadth of meaning that they're able or willing to access, that's a trauma smell. Sometimes this looks like a person having foreclosed that domain, regarding it as certain that it will only give rise to negative valence, or will certainly give rise to negative valence in the long term. Often this is not salient to the person themselves, and so it appears in their experience as again simply unavailable, blank, etc., rather than negatively valenced, without substantial [introspection](#practice-introspection) or [healing](#practice-healing) work. In particular, commonly reported among meditators and [practitioners](#practice-spiritual-practice) otherwise are stories like, "I did lots of meditation for a while, and then discovered in some domain which had previously been unavailable, or which bothered other people but which didn't bother me, that I had some structure [obscuring](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) it, and now I have access to that domain in a way that's rich and intense," whether pleasant or unpleasant. Trauma smells can also sometimes be associated with positive valence and affect, in some different forms. This can both mean that positive valence specifically arises, but more saliently that a person experiences a need to present positive affect: - Generically, "I must have positive affect," "I must be cheerful, positive, etc." - Intense need for positive input in ways that seem out of whack. (distortion) - Intense need for approval - Intense need for reassurance - Intense and exaggerated sexual drive, so called "hypersexuality" - Often, that a person feels a need to sustain effort to achieve some otherwise normal affect, relationship, etc. - Demands/requirements for things about gender performance - This is obviously contentious. There's obviously some range of third-wave feminist views here which see gender in general as a widespread cultural trauma. I'm sympathetic to some substantial chunk of this take, though it's not clear how far it goes. - In any case this can be variously extreme, and the strongest versions feel like pretty clear trauma smells. - Similarly demands for things about class or intelligence One note re hypersexuality: to be clear, the baseline is that young people, and really people in general, are pretty fucking horny, and that both the desire for sex and especially the experience of sex are quite intense. Again, nebulous, but what I'm referring to is something like the extremes of "socio-sexuality." In many of these cases, "must," self-demands, etc. don't necessarily mean that a person will insist that they must, if asked, which is a pretty transparent trauma smell. Often "must" (whether "must do" or "must not") can be experienced as "inconceivable," "impossible," or again unavailable or opaque. In a different but similar shape, a person might have some affect or way of seeing that's always "online," in a way that's insensitive to the external circumstances, whether positive or negative. Additionally, a common shape of trauma smell takes the form of being unable to notice or learn from evidence that some behavior is not necessary, is ineffective for its nominal goal, or has negative consequences for others. Another form of this is being unable to notice that others do or don't hold one in positive regard, or that some plan or fantasy is unrealistic or impossible. Again this can be positive or negative. A common explanation for the cause of this sort of thing, which I mostly buy, is that these are due to a some tight knot of contraction with respect to an unresolved trauma, which has sort of "metastasized" into an object level goal or fantasy. Still, this shape is maybe moderately weak evidence of an "actual" underlying trauma, but is still an important kind of trauma smell. ### Briefly on energy signatures and vibe reads {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--briefly-on-energy-signatures-and-vibe-reads} *See [much more](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) on "energy," and more broadly on the somatic correlates of trauma smells, in a mostly metaphysically agnostic frame.* In addition to overt and fairly legible qualities like the ones I described above, there's a broad class of trauma smells which are "energetic." *Energy* is among other things used to refer to (what I would regard as) the perceived quality of a person's emotional, psychological, and sometimes physiological state. Energy is also believed by many people to be something like ontologically distinct and stable, existing outside of perception. Energy is variously also regarded as being the perceptible reflection of a person's [somatic phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics). Again note that the more energy-credulous believe that the perception of energy is more like directly apprehending some pervasive energetic stratum. I'll say seriously: if any of this turns you off, please read the page linked (both are to the same page) above. Anyway, conditional on one agreeing that the relevant perception *occurs*, I think this is at minimum pretty useful analytically. One angle on this might be: we don't really have a robust ability to externally inspect a person's emotional/psychological state *except* through our naive mammalation (and I suppose specifically primate) emotional perception, and "energy" refers to the phenomenology of that sort of perception, agnostic of its ontological status. FWIW some people claim to be able to do this sort of thing purely "analytically" but I'm somewhat skeptical, and I mostly expect these are post-hoc explanations on top of energetic perception. I'm still basically a materialist here, and I expect that whatever the perception is based on shows up on a camera, as indeed you can perceive someone's energy through video or photograph (or even voice recordings), but that the energetic gestalt is a much much richer intuition pump than all of the fine-grained movements, postural qualities, affective patterns, etc. that might be able to be described "objectively." In addition, reports of energetic perception *of others* often line up pretty well with reports of internal perception of somatic phenomenology; separately this all lines up with my experience fairly nicely. There are pretty out there reports that I get into in the page linked above, which I mostly don't take very seriously. For those who are sensitive to energy, there's commonly reported a variety of energy "signatures" correlated both with various clusters of trauma smells, as well as with officially diagnosable trauma. Below are some energetic qualities which are common trauma smells: (not necesarily aligning nicely with the lists above) - Fragility, frailty, or thinness - Baseline fear and activation, also contriction or tightness in general - Exaggerated, played up charisma, warmth, or humor - Note that sometimes this is a result of conscious deception, but sometimes it's more like an energetic contortion. - As a trauma smell, it's informative if there seems to be ease in their charisma, and conversely if there seems to be activation in that quality—some people are just flamboyant, gregarious, and charismatic, which is not by itself a trauma smell, imo. - Resistance in a person's baseline energy, and especially in specific moods or relationships - Does their [system](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-the-system) seem to be fighting itself? - Ease that seems in contradiction with other qualities in their energy - Eg., "okayness that doesn't seem to be okay" or "relaxation that seems tight." - Exaggerated social dominance or submission - [Blockages](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockage) in general - This can look variously either like dissociation or blankness, *or* like contraction or contortion Some energetic qualities which are sort of anti-trauma smells: - Groundedness - Robustness - Richness, both of positive and negative valence, and both high and low activation One important point to stress: negative valence, and energetic contraction *in the moment* are not really trauma smells at all. An important heuristic for me here would be something like, "does this seem to be a context-appropriate negative valenced response?" (agnostic of whether it's "healthy" or "adaptive") vs "does this seem to be a baseline part of their energy, and does it feel contorted or blocked?" ## What informs categorization as a trauma smell? {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--what-informs-categorization-as-a-trauma-smell} So I'll repeat, much of this is intuitive, "on vibes," though informed by the reports and claims of many practitioners and teachers I've encountered or read. I'm personally definitely getting both false negatives and false positives, but I'm fairly confident in this broad shape. In any case, more specifically my basic heuristic for inclusion is, "does this seem to correlate with undesirable consequences of adverse experiences?" and more specifically "does it smell like everything else I currently regard as trauma-like?" The point here is not to say that "untraumatized" people are simply right, and have everything in order psychologically and spiritually. [There's real content](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma--correct-metabolism) that trauma relates to, which an un- or at least just less-traumatized person might be ignorant of, willfully or not. Nonetheless, looking at the broad patterns of variation and distortion present in known-to-be-traumatized people, it feels fairly straightforward to say, "hm, yes, this seems to be off, or wrong, from the way that a human mind an experience feels like it *ought* to be." The claim here is also not that the median person in a given culture (or median worldwide? whatever that would mean?) is untraumatized, but just that comparing the median person to a variety of different sorts of traumatized people is informative about what sorts of effects trauma has, and what the directions of variation are that trauma leads to. Additionally, if you look at evidence from a culture that seems to carry a low [traumatic load](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture), and notice how that culture as a whole as well as its members individually are different from other cultures and their members, I think that's especially informative about what a relatively untraumatized psychology looks like. ### More on natural variation, "neurodivergence," and pathology {#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--more-on-natural-variation-neurodivergence-and-pathology} "Well, maybe they're just neurodivergent!"—so, I think first off there's better and worse versions of this take. A lot of the "claim," or at least rhetorical stance of "neurodivergence" is that some kinds of pathologized psychological variation should be regarded as something like natural variation, and therefore not pathologized. Once again, see [disguised queries](#metaphysics-real--disguised-queries). Narrowly as a kind of rhetorical/discursive move, my response is 👎. I think some versions of this take are fine, and some are nebulous, which is often absent from the discourse, and I'm mostly fine with this distinction in principle. Obvious examples here of things previously pathologized and now regarded as natural variation would be left-handedness or (with some holdouts still) homosexuality. Once again, nebulosity, blah blah, and I think this applies to eg. autism at least to some extent. Still, this kind of discursive stance is trying to resolve the harmful [memetic](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) effects of pathologization, by mostly-arbitrarily defining some protected category out of pathology. Hence my 👎. I largely endorse destigmatization but I don't believe you can usefully determine pathology by fiat. Now, I think a better question would be: *pathology* aside, how do you know if some psychological cluster is causally downstream of adverse experiences, vs. endogenous, and specifically maybe genetic? This is I think a much more interesting empirical question, and I don't have a great answer here. On vibes: most of the pathologized "neurodivergence" correlates with enough of the psychological, behavioral, and phenomenological patterns of really-probably-actually-trauma, including also life histories of lots of adverse experiences! Additionally, there's some sparse introspective reports that some kinds of "neurodivergence" can be ~"healed." --- # Memetics {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/memetics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--`.* A *meme* is a piece of cultural information, and memetics is their study. Memes include everything from written language, to manufacturing techniques, individual songs, and religious rituals. Memes have properties that make them similar to organisms, in particular to a variety of species that require hosts. These include parasites, bacteria, viruses[^culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--viruses] and even technically mitochondria. Host-dependent organisms may be helpful, harmful, or benign for their hosts. [^culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--viruses]: *Technically* not organisms. Memes reproduce, mutate, and are selected like ordinary biological organisms, though through different mechanisms. Memes are also subject to different selective pressures from biological organisms. Memes, of course, will die out if they don't reproduce. A meme's fitness is determined, among other things, by its transmissibility, persistence, the effects that it has on its host, and by how it competes with other memes in its niche. Memes live in, or run on, human minds. They feed off of mental and emotional energy, and they compete with other memes for attention, or "mindspace." Many memes can coexist, both in a single human mind and in a larger culture, and often exist in a kind of ecology. A "memetic monoculture" would die very quickly, a human culture can't consist *singularly* of weaving baskets; people need a reasonably large collection of practices, skills, relationships, and institutions to survive. Memes often come in complexes or "memeplexes", perhaps comparable to "colonies" or "herds." Below are some important kinds of memetic competition. Memes will starve or die out under various conditions: - If they can't feed, meaning that their individual hosts stop practicing them or remembering them - eg., traditional crafts dying out, or secularism eroding religion - If their lineal transmission is stifled, hampered, or forbidden - eg., children no longer wanting to learn a minority language, or a practice becoming illegal or taboo - If they explicitly conflict with other memes - This can go different ways, and sometimes conflict can be energizing and sustaining.
Memetic survival and reproduction strategies In particular, there are a number of strategies available to memes, like there are to biological host-dependent organisms: - Gut microbiota are ~impossible to get rid of without modern antibiotics, and are *helpful* to the fitness of their hosts. They are usually transmitted by mothers to their children, and are about as resilient as their host populations are. - Memes like "shoes" or "agriculture" or "money" probably belong here. - Some kinds of infectious agents are *endemic* within a host species. This can either mean that most members of the species are infected for most of their lives (like HSV-1, which >50% of adults have) or that the agent moves around a larger population, being eliminated by individual members but often returning, like the common cold. - The former is maybe comparable to superstitions, and the latter maybe some kinds of harmful dieting fads. - Some kinds of infectious diseases often kill their hosts, but are highly transmissible, eg. bubonic plague, maybe less so COVID. - Probably suicidal terrorism isn't really an instance of this? There are more possible examples, but I don't want to strain the metaphor too much. In any case, the reproduction strategies and lifecycles of memes are varied and often not comparable to infectious organisms at all. One interesting parallel with biological reproduction and memetic reproduction mechanisms is lateral gene transmission. Bacteria (among others) can share genetic material "laterally", not just asexually but between two living members of different species. Memes, and especially memeplexes can integrate content from others, rather than by direct inheritance, eg. Doc Martens boots being created as a work boot and adopted as a punk fashion symbol, or traditional Western militaries integrating strategies from insurgency movements. Besides lateral transmission, memes have other interesting kinds of reproduction and evolution, eg. memeplexes can merge with others, like in syncretic religious traditions.
## Egregores {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--egregores} The term *egregore* is used to refer to super-organisms or collective entities formed of many people. Egregores form when people see themselves and their community (understood broadly) as a cohesive identity, capable of collective action and needing protection. These can include religions, ethnic groups, corporations, social movements, etc. Egregores can often overlap with others, or might be contained completely within another larger one.
Egregores can be seen as eusocial memetic superorganisms The metaphor here goes as follows: multicellular organisms contain separate cells with their own metabolic structures cooperating to form tissues, organs, and a larger organism. In particular, most individual cells are not gametes, and individually their direct lineage will end when the entire organism dies, regardless of if the organism successfully reproduced. Then, eusocial species (like bees) form large cooperative colonies where most individual members (workers) do not reproduce, even if the colony is successful and propagates. Egregores are like eusocial colonies *of memes*, not composed exactly of the human hosts, but composed of memes and existing in the collective mind-space of humans. Similarly to cells and worker bees, the memes will shift around, die, and be replaced, even while the larger super-organism (the egregore) keeps going, surviving both all of the individual human hosts and the memetic cells. cell:multicellular organism::eusocial individual:eusocial colony::meme:egregore
Egregores are mostly "immortal" (in the biological sense, technically "non-senescent"), and like individual memes they can reproduce "laterally," as well as merging with other egregores. They do sometimes experience mitosis, but they don't usually reproduce sexually. Egregores having something of their own identity, and "want" to persist, often despite the consequences for their host members, eg. stereotypical harmful cults. Egregores can slough off both component memes, and sometimes hosts. Sometimes these are flushed out like dead cells, but egregores can actually use controlled cellular death to *strengthen* the larger organism—almost every religion has its martyrs. In an extreme form of this, egregores can often "outlive" whatever nominal organizing principles they represented at the time of their founding. Very common and powerful egregores in modern times are those constructed in terms of some ideology or religion, but often those egregores can persist despite an almost complete change in the contents of the ideology, whether by hostile takeover or by drift. An egregore can also sometimes persist through a complete turnover of its human members. Nonetheless, egregores are still usually at least moderately cooperative with their hosts, and many are quite positive. In any case the basic pattern seems to be necessary for human survival and reproduction, unlike mostly solitary species like bears or spiders. It's important to note that egregores don't need a particularly "coherent" ideology to function, and likely in the ancestral environment, and still in some parts of the world, egregores were structured mostly around kinship and diffuse communal recognition, without need for an ideology to justify them. A lot of the content and structure of ideologies has more to do with sustaining an egregore than being particularly adaptive beyond the functioning of the egregore, let alone "right" or "true." A particular shape of society often has some kind of homeostatic property to persist in that shape, among other things because on average it has been selected for having such properties, with those that weren't having died out. ## For better and for worse {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--for-better-and-for-worse} Broadly speaking, both memes and egregores are selected for (as in, differentially survive and reproduce) having properties that do not need to be closely aligned with our values personally or communally. In the metaphor: smallpox could persist for millenia despite being an obvious drag on productivity and wellbeing, but remained endemic until the development of modern vaccinology. More specifically, because memes and egregores "live in" or "run on" human minds, they can leverage all sorts of patterns of belief and feeling to justify and protect themselves. These justifications neither need to be aligned with the effects of those memes on their hosts, nor again even be "true" or coherent. In particular, often the contents of a [metaphysical system](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), or individual metaphysical claims, are part of the buttresses and defense mechanisms of memes and egregores. *The fitness or persistance of a meme does not necessarily have much to do with its wholesomeness or helpfulness for its human hosts.* A meme, memeplex, or egregore can't be *too* toxic for its hosts, lest it die off with them, but like many endemic infections it can be a major burden on the health and wellbeing of the host species while still allowing them to carry on. Sometimes this kind of burden can be seen as a kind of "excess" or "miscalibration", but often the toxic effects of infectious agents are part and parcel of their reproductive strategy (both for biological organisms and memetic ones). Memetic agents can use a variety of tactics to promote transmission, and to "feed". These are mostly built on normal human social/emotional intuitions: - Anger and hatred, whether directed at an individual person, a hated group, etc. - Shame, in many forms: original sin, sexual shame, hygiene, economic- and class-based (in either direction), etc. etc. - Anxiety and urgency, both re specific outcomes, but often just diffusely - Personal pride - Group loyalty, whether ethnic, religious, national, etc. - Loyalty and devotion to the Good, righteousness, etc. - Devotion to God or deference to the sacred - Protectiveness and care for privileged groups or symbols: "women and children," "under-privileged groups," etc. - Personal and collective responsibility - Taboo, disgust, or peevishness Briefly, some illustrative shapes of powerful memeplexes that I observe in the current culture: - A large memetic cluster around work productivity, ambition, achievement, and "impact" - Several competing memeplexes around sexuality - Some of these deploy shame, and some deploy shame-upon-shame, as in "it is shameful to shame others for their sexuality" - Climate doomerism - This often deploys both personal shame and responsibility (eg. food waste, or fast fashion, re the climate crisis), hatred of those who are seen as perpetuating ecological destruction, etc. Note that the claim here is neither that memes and memeplexes are *wrong* in principle, just for being memes and having memetic properties, nor that they are harmful just because they are memes. Indeed, lots of memes are both highly fit and basically positive. Rather, I want to point out *that* these are memes, which are transmitted in a population *by means of their memetic properties*. I think that impulses like patriotism can often be prosocial, but more often are harnessed by systems of power, and are used to foster enmity and conflict. Similarly, devotion, familial love and responsibility, Justice—all of these are honorable impulses but are *also* major "disease vectors" for harmful memes. I'm harping on the harmful aspects because they're more salient, especially in the contemporary memetic ecosystem. Broadly speaking I want to communicate a perspective like, "memes that you may identify with or hold dear are not *necessarily* doing you good, and noticing their *construction* as memes can let you see them more clearly, determine what ways of seeing and being are healthier and more wholesome and robust." On egregores more specifically, one important pattern is that egregores as organisms "feed" off of, or are made stronger by conflict with other egregores. As an egregore becomes less salient, it starves and dies, but when its members are riled up, their loyalty, care, and urgency with respect to the memes that make up the egregore are strengthened. Some salient examples of this kind of process are the countless religious and ethnic conflicts in history, which are often extremely costly for both groups, but which certaintly strengthen the egregores involved! Often these are between groups that from a distance seem extremely similar, eg. the Hutu and Tutsi, or Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. ### Cursed {#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics--cursed} Some memes and memeplexes have shapes which I call *cursed*. Cursedness often involves some pattern in which a person is "trapped" by a meme: eg. that they're threatened by some terrible (often symbolic) outcome, that a memeplex or community is the only source of truth or goodness, or that the person's values, autonomy, or discernment are undermined or dismissed. More pernicious examples often trap people's perspective in a narrow view, without needing some extreme thread of apocalypse, eternal damnation, etc. Eg., pathologization can often "trap" neurotic or [traumatized](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) feelings as "wrong" or "not real," denying such a person from *really* investigating, feeling, and [unraveling](#practice-healing) them. Conversely, sometimes views which try to *contradict* cursed memes sort of "have the meme inside of them" too. Eg. body positivity often has a kernel of fatphobia inside of it, such that the fat-hatred and fat-shame has to be *covered over*, rather than resolved or healed. (I discuss patterns like this [much more](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) later.) Body positivity often also has to deny the real health consequences of obesity, and so altogether ends up carrying a crumpled, distorted version of the cursedness *of* fatphobia inside of it. --- # Culture, Taboo, and Trauma {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/culture — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/culture.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-culture--`.* Human cultures in general transmit [memetic](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) packets to their members, including patterns which might be called [traumatic](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), or which at least [*smell* like trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells). First, regarding the term *cultural trauma*: I often find this term distasteful, and it's especially often deployed politically by factions I dislike, and to make arguments I don't endorse. For anyone reading who has similar reflexes, I'd ask that you assume I'm trying to be precise, and making do with a word that's *good enough* for a moderately subtle concept. In the extremes, most people are basically sympathetic to a notion of a diseased and traumatized culture which is able to perpetuate itself, the example par excellence perhaps being endemic patterns of violence (and very saliently, sexual violence) in prisons. Not to try to generalize inappropriately from that case, I think that there are many patterns of (less extreme) cultural trauma which are pervasive in extant cultures. There are three main clusters here that I'll discuss: - **Taboo** as a highly general pattern, and often functioning as a kind of "cultural traumatic payload" - **Adaptation** to traumatic environmental conditions - **Self-traumatization**, that is, of a culture upon its members ## Three main clusters {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--three-main-clusters} ### Taboo and superstition {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--taboo-and-superstition} ::nogloss I'll use the word *taboo* to refer to a broad cluster of patterns in human cultures which I suspect rely on the same or overlapping psychological mechanisms. This includes a lot of what might be included as norms, superstitions, or sometimes generically just "cultural practices." Taboo in this sense forms a kind of primal human social technology, which provides a distributed mechanism to "succinctly" communicate information about low probability negative events. In some modern theories, taboo is seen as a low-resolution cultural pattern which encodes knowledge about danger or risk, but perhaps distorted or [over-reified](#metaphysics-reification). Salient examples here might be taboos against incest, or different kinds of taboos around cleanliness, feces, etc. Let's say: human children come with very little knowledge, and our species is specifically adapted for long childhoods rich with learning. Children are both vulnerable and quickly become capable of exposing themselves to risk that outstrips their understanding of the world. There's often a steep tradeoff between capability/curiosity/intelligence on one hand, and sensitivity to risk on the other. In a species like ours, cultures need to be able to transmit *densely* the risk associated with various strategies or behaviors, and in a general way which can be applied to a wide range of dangers in the environment. (Note that people feel that children and especially adolescents are too risk-taking, and this is somewhat true but it's not quite what I'm talking about—I mean things like, small children don't yet understand that stoves or knives or busy streets are dangerous.) Under such a regime, the packets communicating different kinds of dangers have to a. *strongly* convey some danger, even at risk of exaggerating it, b. be very likely to be kept and transmitted to the next generation, and c. be understood by both children and unsophisticated adults. The tendency then is for such packets to be very simple, sharp, and often indeed to be exaggerated over time. Note the claim here is not "taboo is meaningless and only harmful" but rather just, "taboo looks to be the mechanism of a very low-entropy communication system, both very valuable, but often resulting in goofy or problematic output." Broadly speaking, there are many systems of taboo (as understood above) which have shapes in common with what I've referred to as [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells): sub-clinical patterns of behavior, perception, and experience which *appear* to be caused by unmetabolized adverse experiences. Some examples: - Taboos against sexual contact between young people, or contact at all between the sexes - Taboos against emotional expression, eg. weakness, fear, sadness, etc., and especially crying - Taboos against specific words or specific kinds of expression (loudness, anger, etc.) - Taboos against specific foods, or specific rules about when food becomes impure - Taboos against specific eye contact patterns (eg. avoiding direct gaze with authority figures) - Sexual shame, body-shame, taboos against nudity, etc. - Menstruation taboos, virginity/purity taboos - Taboos around feces that regard it as disgusting or shameful to be heard to fart, or especially to be seen defecating - Perhaps, face and honor as reified constructs To be clear, there are structurally pretty similar patterns which are functional, and there's lots of overlap between functional and "superstitious" patterns. I'm sympathetic to theories that these are something like "holdovers" or "overreaches" from functional patterns in a given time or place, compare with eg. proscriptions against drinking cold (ie., unboiled, disease-ridden) water. Relatedly, this still runs into the same questions I discussed in [the section on trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells), that identifying something as traumatic is nebulous and ambiguous, because indeed lots of things are dangerous or harmful and *should* be avoided. For what it's worth, there are spiritual traditions which see even eg. taboos around feces as a kind of burden, ignorance, or confusion, and some hypermodern western schools with similar spins on taboo in general. ### Adaptation to exogenous conditions {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--adaptation-to-exogenous-conditions} Premodern agriculture probably fits nicely as a mostly exogenous social configuration which would have been traumatic for its members: people often went hungry or at least under-nourished for substantial portions of the year, they lived in fear of bad harvests and famine, and they were conscripted into an intensity and monotony of labor that excluded most of the breadth of human flourishing. Two caveats: obviously such societies were *practicing* agriculture, and so this isn't quite an exogenous cause, but generally agricultural societies couldn't really just choose to move to another form of economy. Also, some of the burden of premechanized agriculture would have been due to theft and waste by feudal elites, but my impression is that wasn't quite *most* of the problem. Depending on how we draw the boundary of "one" society, another relatively exogenous pattern might be equilibria of violence between groups. This might include retaliatory personal violence like blood feuds, but also recurring war, as has been endemic in our species for at least thousands of years. In the epicenters of wars, we can probably reasonably assume clinical levels of trauma in all parts of society. Both direct exposure to violence, and the threat of violent disruption to one's livelihood, of one's land being taken as spoils, etc., should likely have been traumatic for most people. Such societies are likely to [reify](#metaphysics-reification) eg. martial virtue or submission to violent cultural imposition like forced religious conversion. One more: coal mining communities adapt to the unhealthy and unsafe conditions that men working in mines are subject to, and to their likely early deaths, whether from collapses, explosions, or black lung. This affects both the psychologies of actual miners, but also their families and the communities as a whole, who understand that at least the lives of men will likely be harsh and short. Similarly, such communities will likely reify this as good or at least unavoidable. ### Self-traumatization {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--self-traumatization} "Exogenous" above is nebulous but at least worth contrasting with relatively more "endogenous" patterns, which are much more like *culturally specific* and *contingent*. On the far end, the prototypical cases would probably be Female Genital Mutilation and Chinese foot binding. The basic shape here is that a society something like "actively" embodies a pattern which traumatizes its members, and especially that they see this as good, desirable, virtuous, etc. My understanding is that adult women saw[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--saw] these practices as good, so it's not quite *simply* a matter of eg. men directly and knowingly subjugating women. [^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--saw]: Re FGM, still, *see*. These are some of the most extreme cases, but I'm more interested in the less glaring ones. Broadly speaking I'm interested in circumstances where normative socialization in a culture involves techniques, experiences, etc. that we would at a personal level call "abuse" or "neglect" and whose effects parallel those of [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) when observed at a personal level. I'm especially interested in contexts where that's still the case in our culture today. It's salient here to look at changing cultural standards of abuse over time. Restricting it to American culture, as recently as 70 years ago it was commonplace to hit children, and *my sense*(?) is that it was more common to verbally abuse children, to compel them with threat of force to all kinds of activities, etc. I don't have definitive evidence here, but it should be at minimum *plausible* to say, "well, when people are subject to these experiences as individuals, at least in our modern culture, on average they get trauma or at least subclinical trauma-like effects, so it's reasonable to suppose that those effects should also apply when people in a culture as a whole have them, and vice versa for the absence of those experiences." On vibes, collected anecdotes, and based on some sparse data I've seen, if you look at cultures that are more openly abusive by contemporary Western standards, they indeed look more traumatized by the criteria I describe as trauma smells! The most salient example to me here is East Asian culture (very broadly), which seems pretty obviously more dissociated and rigid than Western culture, on average. (Obviously, aggregating over large and diverse groups, etc., but the point still stands, assuming my sense is correct. Also, [see below](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--weird-developmental-psychology-otherwise) re my take on cross-anthropological considerations for this question.) There are theories which suggest that trauma is less about the specific content of an adverse experience, as much as rejection and isolation in that experience. In these theories, having a traumatic but *normative* socialization results in better outcomes on average than trauma *while isolated*, which is very often reported in Western clinical psychology. I think this is probably moderately true, but I still think my claim is broadly correct, that classically traumatic adverse experiences, when practiced by a culture in general, result in trauma smells. Besides patterns of overt *abuse*, I'm especially interested in ways that cultures transmit baseline trauma-smelly affective and relational stances. In particular: a. there are patterns of basic affective/dispositional transmission, and b. there are patterns of social shaming, rejection, and exclusion which can be extremely steep, enough that I'm inclined to refer to them as a kind of cultural trauma. #### Affective cultural transmission {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--affective-cultural-transmission} Cultures seem to be able to transmit, besides specific practices and institutions, also (in the aggregate) baseline affect and disposition. Eg., high social trust, optimism or pessimism, tendency towards depression and neuroticism, conscientiousness, or availability of intimacy and vulnerability. In the subtlest cases I'm not mostly inclined to call this trauma, but the more intense cases have pretty characteristic trauma smells. In addition, while not really trauma smells, baseline optimism, felt-social-safety, etc. obviously contribute to some broader skewedness of a given culture, on average. Some obvious extreme cases here would be eg. patterns of pessimism and neuroticism among Ashkenazi Jews, Puritan theology of original sin and suspicion of pleasure, and pervasive fear and self-censorship in the former Soviet Union. Even more relevant here are patterns of [negative trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma): trauma incurred in the *absence* of a developmentally "necessary" input, eg. parental warmth and affection, safety, play, etc. Again on vibes, collected anecdotes, and some sparse data, there seem to be in the aggregate broad cultural patterns of atrophy or at least diminished sensitivity to a variety of ways of being, in culturally distinctive shapes. #### Shame and social rejection patterns {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--shame-and-social-rejection-patterns} Firstly, my sense is that there's a basic fear of social rejection in humans, which in productive cases leads to conformity and prosociality, and in more neurotic cases leads to anxiety and paranoia. Sometimes people will argue that this is a kind of "fundamental human trauma"—I'm open to this perspective but that's not quite what I'm getting at here. Beyond that kind of baseline prosocial conformism, some cultures have constructed patterns of intense shame and rejection. In extreme cases, this can incentivize and valorize suicide or intra-familial murder, ie. *Seppuku* and honor killing, to restore honor. It feels to me... mostly unreasonable to even have to defend a position that this is a kind of cultural trauma. More specifically, I want to say that the culture (and therefore its members) carry a traumatic and exaggerated fear of, *and* inclination for, social rejection. Another angle on this pattern would be eg. (relatively) high rates of suicide in elite schools, attributed to stress and overwork, and both fear of, and actual academic failure. Again it feels reasonable to assume that the differential rates of suicide signal an underlying hightened fear of failure and rejection in that cohort as whole, which is an indicative trauma smell. Again here there are much less extreme cases which are more interesting. Even if they don't lead to murder or suicide, there are patterns in many cultures of greatly elevated inclination for, and fear of, social rejection, and associated patterns of anxiety and rigidity. My sense is broadly that a. the propensity of a society to deploy shame and rejection, b. the intensity of conformism and social rigidity, and c. corresponding trauma smells, are all fairly strongly correlated. Examples that come to mind are the modern culture of Korea, elite society in Britain historically and perhaps still, or stereotypically, modern American corporate culture. ## WEIRD, developmental psychology otherwise {#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--weird-developmental-psychology-otherwise} ::nogloss So there's an obvious critique of this perspective, that a. in principle this is culturally *chauvanist* or maybe "myopic" (prioritizing culturally specific notions of health and especially "spiritual health") and b. more specifically that results from Western psychology don't generalize outside of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. I think this critique is basically correct as far as it goes, but I still stand by my schtick as mostly directionally correct, and pointing to a real cluster. Re a., my perspective is certaintly different from lots of traditional and culturally specific conceptions of "spiritual health," and it's at least partially aligned with the contemporary liberal zeitgeist, but I don't feel like I'm aping the Western dogma here. More interestingly re b.: it sure *seems like* the basic [shape of trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma) in general happens across all human cultures, though some seem to be either more susceptible to it or (more sympathetically) at least more *forthcoming* about it. Obviously, different cultures relate to and cope with their cultural trauma differently, and it also seems like cultures can express and *foster* neurotic and traumatized patterns in very specific ways. See later on [culture-bound disorders](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation). Again, the specifics matter: my claim here is moderately sparse, namely that there seems to be cultural trauma in broad strokes, but is mostly agnostic with respect to any specific psychological model, like popular schticks based on developmental psychology, or especially "childhood developmental trauma" as the source of most of abnormal psychology. (It seems like the exciting claims of developmental psychology mostly haven't been borne out in the data[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--harris] even for Western culture, and almost certainly not cross-anthropologically.[^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--lancy] I'll add that I still think that something in the direction of negative trauma should apply in general across human cultures, and I would be very surprised if this were actually *just* a cultural pattern.) [^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--harris]: Judith Rich Harris, 2009. *The Nurture Assumption* [^culture-trauma-memetics-culture--lancy]: David F. Lancy, 2014. *The Anthropology of Childhood* I'm less clear if trauma smells all line up, and I expect those to be more culturally specific. Still, based on my understanding I'm quite confident that there have to be behavioral and [energetic](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) consequences of trauma etc., and my depiction of "trauma smells" basically just tries to gesticulate at a bunch of clusters of those. --- # Burdens of Meaning {#culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/culture-trauma-memetics/burdens-of-meaning — also at `/md/culture-trauma-memetics/burdens-of-meaning.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--`.* :::note[*Epistemic status: riffing, partially vibes based, but seems very real to me.*] ::: Meanings and views can be harmful or at least burdensome to those receiving them. People, overwhelmingly in my circles, but perhaps very broadly in modern culture, are carrying a bewildering tangle of competing views, motivations, and felt responsibilities. [Memes](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics) are subject to selection pressures which are decorrelated with human flourishing and spiritual integrity. Cultures can become diseased, and perpetuate their disease indefinitely, or carry harmful patterns which are only partially functional. That said, it's not clear what "functional patterns" would mean in this context, in particular, there are many configurations of culture which are functional in the sense that they stably perpetuate a relatively robust society, even if they are needlessly costly to their members, or otherwise spiritually corrupted. Indeed, this is part of the question which this book poses: what patterns, practices, and views are oriented towards truly wholesome and spiritually upright lives and cultures? Sometimes these harmful patterns are deeply structural, but some are relatively coincidental, and decay or fizzle out given enough time, or contact with another culture. Eg., many cultures have beliefs about cleanliness re food, excrement, or especially sex and menstruation which are lost relatively rapidly upon contact with western norms (though often displaced by other harmful norms about cleanliness from western culture.) Often cultural contact stresses many of the basic patterns of social organization, so very saliently there are often major changes in the structure of family, economy, and political power during periods of intense cultural contact, both, yes, in the context of western colonialism[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--colonization] but also otherwise. [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--colonization]: Western colonialism is obviously extremely relevant to this discussion, and in many casess anthropologists and historians have had to do a lot of work to try to reconstruct what pre-colonial cultures were like, but this shape seems to be true of many other phases of contact in human history. [Spiritual practice](#practice-spiritual-practice), especially in styles adjacent to the trauma-healing-and-personal-growth memeplex, often has a very intense relationship with this dynamic. Sometimes practice and community are seen as explicitly oriented toward cultural change (whether insular or global), and very often they're seen as oriented towards personal freedom from dysfunctional, harmful, or spiritually depraved patterns culturally. These have various antecedents historically across cultures, and even the "shedding the insanity of the default culture" schtick seems to have been present well before the modern period, saliently in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra.[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra] [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra-not-healing] [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra-not-healing]: Though, in a very different frame from the modern hippy one. [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--tantra]: Not to be confused with Western Neo-Tantra, see [this footnote](#fn-practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra). Practices and systems of belief which are meant to be comforting and liberating often transmit a memetic packet of very mixed spiritual integrity, at least from my perspective, and in general pairwise between most perspectives and any other. Often these are some coincidental hodgepodge which happens to have been reified by the tradition, but often the helpful and harmful qualities are interlocking, or two sides of one coin. Eg., many traditions of faith and devotion can provide both clarity of purpose and a relaxation of fear and anxiety, *in the same motion* as infantilizing their members and diminishing their capacity to think critically and with autonomy.[^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--devotion] Similarly, views meant to inspire discipline, rigor, and uprightness often use patterns of shame and internal self-abuse to achieve them, resulting in an obvious kind of [lopsidedness](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells) among their practitioners. [^culture-trauma-memetics-burdens-of-meaning--devotion]: Some people would disagree with this example at least in principle, and believe that faith, surrender, and devotion are possible with no epistemic content whatsoever. Worse, from my perspective, many memes explicitly intended to be empowering or healing on net mostly just tangle a person further, rather than assisting them in untangling thoroughly. (I discuss this dynamic in [much more detail](#wayfinding) in a later chapter.) Memes don't necessarily form a coherent ecosystem. This is both because a culture's collection of memes isn't particularly well optimized, even in very small traditional cultures, and because in the modern memetic environment our minds are the competitive battlegrounds for many egregores and orphaned memes, which are not selected for being cooperative with one another *inside* of their hosts. So, people end up with an incoherent mess of beliefs and feelings which are often tugging in every direction, and which may not admit any clear way to synthesize across them, to try to become sane, etc. Many cultures have something to the effect of a "memetic immune system," which can help keep the roiling mess in check. However, most such immune systems, besides being only partially effective, are basically just conservative—the point here being that they are structured to protect the existing equilibrum, and are not oriented towards truth, wholesomeness, [integration](#practice-healing--integration), etc. I discuss what I see as a desirable goal for practice [in a later chapter](#spiritual-truth) as well. By default however, with the weak and incomplete kinds of immune systems that most people learn, one ends up vulnerable to infectious agents which implant desires, prescriptions, and anxieties, without concern for their effects on their hosts or the hosts' communities. (Keep in mind of course that memes, like viruses, are incapable of malevolence, which of course doesn't render them harmless.) There's a kind of sensitivity and care that's possible here, which, *I'll claim*, it's good to cultivate in interacting with others. While I think *information* per se is much more neutral (eg. just learning that a perspective exists, etc.), in general my stance is to try to track what the effects will be on a given person of some memetic packet I might send, and to try to be careful to what their goals and constraints are, even interacting casually. I want to mark this claim explicitly, and I strongly endorse that you, dear reader, should do your own discernment here. To be clear, both this whole section and really the whole book are in some ways an intense memetic object, but, hopefully, they're oriented towards helping people unravel, and empowering their autonomy and discernment, on the whole. --- # Spirituality, Phenomenology, and Practice {#practice} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice — also at `/md/practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice--`.* *In this chapter:* "Spiritual" practice in broad strokes, and some important related phenomenology: - [Spiritual Practice](#practice-spiritual-practice) - [Somatic Phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) - [🔨 Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices](#practice-practices) Meditation, introspection, and healing, each intertwined and often laden as concepts: - [Meditation](#practice-meditation) - [Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice")](#practice-introspection) - [Content, Healing, and Integration](#practice-healing) - [🔨 Criticizing Somatics-and-Trauma Models](#practice-healing-criticizing-trauma) - [🔨 Other Models of Healing](#practice-healing-other-models) *Awakening*, mysticism, and "the spiritual path": - [Mysticism and Awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening) - [🔨 Paths and "The Path"](#practice-paths) Lastly, contextualizing transformative practice in modern secular culture more broadly: - [🔨 Transformative Practice](#practice-transformative-practice) --- # Spiritual Practice {#practice-spiritual-practice} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/spiritual-practice — also at `/md/practice/spiritual-practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-spiritual-practice--`.* I broadly speaking agree with the take that "religion," "spirituality," and "spiritual practice" are not really natural kinds anthropologically or psychologically, and that the modern Western conception is contingent on the specific history of the western church, its relationship with European states, etc. More specifically, my sense is that various societies have constructed a boundary between "religion" and the rest of society in different ways, or not at all, and that the underlying patterns of human behavior and experience seem much messier, and overlapping with politics, philosophy, "science," etc. Nonetheless I'll at least want to make some kinds of distinctions, so I'll refer to a few broad clusters here, with quite a lot of overlap. These definitions aren't unusual but are slightly idiosyncratic: **Religion**: the practices and beliefs of organized spiritual communities, usually as part of a larger organization, and especially those with organizational hierarchies and explicit dogma. **Spirituality**: the domains of meaning relating to the sacred, devotional practices, mysticism, and ultimate existential meaning. **Mysticism**: the practice and experience of non-mundane reality, altered states, theophany, and transcendence. Sometimes also includes **esotericism**, which usually refers to mystical symbolic systems, especially when culturally marginal or restricted only to those initiated. **Transformative practice**: practices and theories of psychological and spiritual *development*, inclusive of eg. prayer, Western therapy, often "mystical" practices, rites of passage, and sometimes even secular training regimes like those used by militaries. I'll describe each of these in a little more detail as I conceive of them, how they relate, and what claims various traditions of each of them make. ## Religion {#practice-spiritual-practice--religion} Religious traditions, moreso those larger and more organized, and especially the so-called "world religions," generally consist of a. dogma and a community of believers; b. sacraments, and often initiation; and c. communal rites. (As it happens, Buddhism doesn't really fit this mold, especially b. and c., but it's so anodyne even in Asia, and irrelevant politically everywhere else, so this is often ignored. Hinduism at least historically is also much messier or leakier with respect to the identified community of believers, since there was no such thing as "Hinduism" until the British Raj, and smaller sects were sometimes porous.) Religious dogmas (again at least among "world religions") almost invariably define a [metaphysics](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), defining an axiology with respect to a particular cosmology and ontology, generally featuring some kind of life after death, a God or gods, angels and spirits, and supernatural abilities or miracles. They very often feature a soteriology, seeing the current world as incomplete or fallen, and either having a heaven, salvation, or an escape from this world. They also generally prescribe practices, covenants, and social structures for upright communities to maintain, lest a bad outcome occur, usually in whatever life is to come after this one. Those traditions most importantly revolve around [devotional practice](#practice-practices--devotion): practices which involve scripted or spontaneous performance of submission, devotion, and adoration to a deity, spirit, or saint. These practices are generally meant to be [imaginally](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice) rich, bringing a person into a [way of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) in which they feel they *are really* communing with a spirit or deity. Often, the sense of [the Sacred](#practice-practices--the-sacred) includes religious paraphernalia or specific holy sites, but most importantly includes the communal-imaginal space created by a religious community. Devotional practice often involves an important aspect of *faith*, or what's sometimes called "[hyperstition](#practice-practices--hyperstition)." On the gentler side, these practices can range from personal [prayer](#practice-practices--prayer), communal devotional rites (often surprisingly similar, in the broadest outlines, to familiar Western Christian church services), to Jihad, religious crusades, matyrdom, or extreme acts of pious self denial. Reports from practitioners in these traditions almost all describe them as ecstatic, joyous, deeply heartfelt, and profoundly meaningful. More specifically, devotional practices are often an overwhelming part of how religious people apprehend goodness, often acutely being some of the most important experiences of people's lives, or a steady source of positive emotion throughout theis lives. (Obviously, many religious people, especially in modern times, experience their religion more as a very socially important institution, but not quite as "the basis of their apprehension of all meaning" or whatever.) Some religious traditions nominally view devotional practice as a kind of duty, hopefully joyous, but that knowledge of goodness comes through the dogma itself, whereas many others view spiritual practice as *the gateway* to knowledge of ultimate meaning, and often to direct communion with God. The latter stance shades into or whole-hog becomes mysticism ([see below](#practice-spiritual-practice--mysticism)). See also later on [gnosis](#practice-mysticism-awakening--gnosis). "World religions" are generally the output of a process of [memetic evolution](#culture-trauma-memetics-memetics), and the most fecund religious memes have tended toward these features, generally prioritizing legibility and transmissibility, usually in the form of universalism. On the other hand, so-called "folk religions" and sometimes "shamanic traditions" are much less systematized if at all, this group is such a various and riotous mess that it's hard to say much about in general. Anyway, my impression is that veneration, obeisance, and appeasement of spirits are very common features, while dogma is much weaker if present, and stories of ultimate existential meaning are often absent. Broadly it seems like "world religions" didn't invent the sacred, but probably *did* invent (or they might prefer "received") universalist religious cosmology. ## Spirituality {#practice-spiritual-practice--spirituality} There's fairly little that's *in* "spirituality" that's not in religion, but spirituality is a particular angle on the same broader cluster, which excludes many structural features of religions as institutions. One take here might be that spirituality is the personal, relational aspect of this cluster, whereas "religion" makes salient the structural and institutional features that are present in the spiritualities of most humans alive today. More generally, 'spirituality' usually has the connotation of "sacralized transformative practice" or "sacralized / magicalized practices of connection with self and mundane meaning." Often, in the modern California style, one can be "spiritual but not religious," but also even a devout religious person's spirituality isn't necessarily coterminous with the orthodox view in their religious tradition. Moreover, if we widen spirituality, as some anthropologist and sociologists do, to mean just practices of private and communal creation of spaces of sacredness and devotion, then we end up including practices and communities structured around national or ethnic identity, brotherhood, civic responsibility[^practice-spiritual-practice--jan-6], and definitely stories about the long term future of our species, whether good or bad. These often evoke similar emotions and [imaginal-relational stances](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice) as more stereotypically "religious" practices. I'm in this case basically down with the [Durkheimian hypothesis](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology), that religion, spirituality, and the Sacred exist more as stories that allow human communities to coordinate and trust each other, basically orthogonally to their being *true*, or the specific claims they make. [^practice-spiritual-practice--jan-6]: I remember being both taken aback and touched by a video of a capitol police officer on January 6th, addressing some of the er, "rioters"? "demostrators"? who had gotten into the floor of the house, saying "you know this is the most sacred place?" I'll add that maybe on average, spirituality is more likely than "religion" to include things like mundane beauty, family life, food-as-spiritual-practice, etc. etc. In any case, I don't think there's a *fundamental* distinction here. I should say also that both the word, etymologically, and the concept of 'spirituality' as distinct from 'religion' are pretty modern (maybe 16th century), and *quite* modern in the "spiritual but not religious" sense. Still, it's useful to be able to refer to this concept and distinguish it from religion, when that's meaningful. ## Mysticism {#practice-spiritual-practice--mysticism} ::gloss[*Mysticism* is the practice and experience of non-mundane reality, altered states, theophany, and transcendence.] Mysticism is yet more nebulous and yet more varied than the dogmas of "world religions." Very broadly mysticism is concerned with experiences of self-and-world which are very different from ordinary daily experience. Maybe a good definition would be the mystician is about [gnosis](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) of "spiritual reality." Reports from what I would categorize as mystical traditions and practitioners, often include (hardly exhaustive): - Visions (usually experienced as intense and phenomenologically encompassing) of angels, hell, other planets, the far future, etc. - Extremely altered states of attention and perception, sometimes leading to very strange experiences of self-and-world - The body as unreal, paper-thin, jumbled, or absent - Same, for the world - Same, for "the self," "me," etc. Sometimes also appearing to be contiguous with the external world - This one people have a big hardon for, and it's often reported as an utterly profound change in their life, and even the most important experience in their life. - Speaking to or witnessing God, gods, spirits, "entities," etc. - I would regard these experiences as distinct from visions, they're broadly usually crisp, vivid, often interactive, and "live," rather than reported as more timeless, recollected, or "futuresight." - "Union with" God or the universe - Knowledge of the ultimate truths of reality, meaning, or value - Eg. knowledge of past lives and the cycle of rebirth - Intense bliss states, sometimes bliss-beyond-pleasure, leading into dissolution and transcendence - Intensely hellish states, including images of horrors, sometimes seemingly contentless intense pain, etc. Common techniques used to achieve these experiences include: - """[Meditation](#practice-meditation)""" - We might include under this physically active but "meditative" practices, eg. Tai chi or Asana Yoga. - """[Prayer](#practice-practices--prayer)""" - Fasting, deprivation, intense sensory experiences otherwise (usually unpleasant but sometimes pleasant), sometimes called "shamanic ordeal" - Deliberate alteration of the breath, often extremely fast or slow, sometimes more precise control interacting with [somatic phenomena](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) - Psychoactive drugs, obviously including traditional and modern psychedelics, but also sometimes marijuana or even some forms of tobacco - Rhythmic and hypnotic practices, eg. mantra, drumming, chanting, or some kinds of dance There are also many reports of mystical experiences occurring spontaneously, with no prior practice or experience, as well as after many years of practice but during downtime, on a walk, or in response to some utterance from a teacher. There are also many reports of these experiences or qualities of perception [creeping up](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism) on a person over a long period, eg "one day noticing that there just isn't much self around," etc. ## Transformative practice {#practice-spiritual-practice--transformative-practice} ::gloss[*Transformative practice* includes practices and theories of psychological and spiritual development, from prayer and therapy to rites of passage.] Lots of traditions and communities are concerned with the development and transformation of their members' attitudes, perception, experience, behavior, etc. This includes of course institutional religion, but also of course modern psychotherapy, militaries, penal systems, marginally (but in a real way) educational systems, and much weirder more culturally marginal groups otherwise. The goals, techniques, and outcomes of these groups are so varied that it's also hard to say much in general here. Still, these often include: - Most of the practices described under religion and mysticism above - Ordeals which are meant to arouse more capacity, bravery, or intensity from a person than they were previously capable of - Practices and experiences meant to lead to changes in values or orientation, eg. "scared straight" type of stuff, but also intense positive experiences, eg. some kinds of outdoor education for delinquent teenagers, or some kinds of communal religious practices; perhaps some aspects of hazing and military training - Explicitly trying to counter or cover over undesired mental qualities, eg. many things that describe "changing one's thinking," but also eg. most of the techniques of Alcoholic's Anonymous - """[Introspection](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation)""" - Various angles intending explicit catharsis, whether "structural" (that is, introspective), "purely [somatic](#practice-phenomenology-somatics)," or more unusual variations Modern Western schools of transformative practice often have a priority on introspection, or sometimes a kind of, er, "extrospection" aided by a therapist, oriented specifically towards what's often called "insight" (not that this is really one thing). --- # Somatic Phenomenology {#practice-phenomenology-somatics} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/phenomenology-somatics — also at `/md/practice/phenomenology-somatics.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-phenomenology-somatics--`.* Both hippies and traditional spiritual lineages have some big fetish for *somatics*, by many names, and mostly for good reason. Saliently, most of the reports of somatic phenomenology from both sets of sources are (afaik) all-but-unattested in academic psychology, and to a decent extent seemingly absent or at least pretty shallowly understood in Western culture in general. Briefly, there are a variety of reported phenomenological patterns which are experienced as sensations "in the body." Reports here vary from simple but amorphous feelings often reported in association with positive emotion, to complex, bizarre and incredibly rich. I'll use the word *somatic*, or *somatics*, to refer to this kind of phenomenology, agnostic of its relationship with eg. physiological mechanisms. Some assorted reports, evocative of the breadth of the space: - A wide palette of sensations variously described as flowing, tingly, buoyant or heavy, or as though one is feeling a magnetic field - This is often called *energy*, and the space or stratum within which it "occurs" is often called the *energy body*. ('Energy' is also used to refer to a variety of other phenomena, [see more below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy).) - Nebulously felt happiness or positive feeling otherwise, with no salient location or boundary - Emotions identifiable as spatially localized clusters of sensation, with specific felt flavors or tones, as well as sometimes common movement patterns. - Knots, dislocations, or regions of contraction in the energy body, sometimes very subtle - These are often called "blockages." ([see below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization)) - There are also common reports of blockages dissolving, unraveling, or exploding due to "healing" practices, most often into intense negative emotion. ([see more later](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings)) - Specific reports of localized centers of sensation in the body, with specific semantic associations - IIRC there's a few different mostly unrelated traditions of such systems, but in the most common cluster of such systems in the West, they're known as *chakras.*[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--hareesh-chakras] Cf. also meridian systems, some of the "subtle body" systems, etc. - Claims of psycho-somatic effects causing gross (medically identifiable) illness, in rare reports including up to cancer (!!)[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--psychosomatic] ([see below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization)) - Acute states of intense pleasure, bliss, or profound peace, reported as more intense than sex or drugs, arising at least initially from ordinary body sensations - Variously, extremely fine sensitivity to specific emotions, both in oneself and others. - Specific patterns of somatic resonance, both re very specific qualities and patterns of sensation, and very specific locations ([see below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--meaning-and-resonance)) - "Profound and subtle wrongness" - Persistent sub-personalities with emotions and attitudes substantially *separate* from that of a person's experienced personality, usually localized to specific parts of the body - (Often called "[parts](#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly)," but also "critters") [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--psychosomatic]: Just to be clear, I'm pretty sure the cancer stuff is bs, but some subset of these reports I expect are basically real. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--hareesh-chakras]: As it happens the systems from which westerners learned about chakras were *prescriptive* rather than *descriptive*, and there are a variety of different systems with different numbers of chakras, different associated colors, geometric symbols, etc. See Hareesh, 2016. [*The real story on the Chakras*](https://hareesh.org/blog/2016/2/5/the-real-story-on-the-chakras) I try to stick to a narrowly *phenomenological* frame in the presentation here, but many of these reports are couched in terms of this or that metaphysics, which I also try to depict accurately. To be clear, I don't necessarily hold a "sensation only" view of somatics, nor am I married to [materialism](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), but I've gone a bit out of my way to describe the phenomenology here in a way which isn't in conflict with materialist-reductionism. ## Meaning and resonance {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--meaning-and-resonance} ::nogloss Somatic phenomena correlate strongly with other kinds of "states of mind," and their presence, contours, and progression seem to track much better the details of the underlying generators of psychological states than signals like "thoughts," *whatever those are*, lol. More broadly, reports from people who talk about somatic phenomenology at all, with a few important exceptions, place it at the center of apparent existential meaning. (To some extent this is some elaboration on my part, often people draw the boundaries differently, or reify certain aspects over others, but still this is a very common feature.) Reading or talking to people who leave somatics out of meaning, for me, it can feel like they've stretched and flattened the domain, and they're only able to analyze the silhouette. The exceptions are also telling actually: the main one salient to me would be reports from meditation masters of things like ["a peace beyond feeling or perception."](#practice-mysticism-awakening) Describing this explicitly both feels embarassingly simple, like pointing out that feet each have five toes, or that the sky is blue; it's also apparently necessary, often such basic features of phenomenology seem to be news to many people! (I'm also a bit embarrassed to say that a lot of this would have been news to me before I had engaged seriously with "spiritual practice.") We have some familiar expressions in English to describe these phenomena, eg.: - "heartwarming" - "gutwrenching" - "hair-raising" - (Yes, this one refers to a gross physiological response, but also a somatic one.) - "sickening," just generally - "cold blooded," also "hothead," maybe peripherally "red blooded" - perhaps "struck a chord" (of an ideology etc.) Note that some people take this kind of language to be poetic or purely metaphorical, whereas for others it's obviously referring to completely humdrum somatic phenomenology. Again I'm confused how to talk about any of this, partially just because it seems embarrassingly *simple*, but also is surprising or contentious to some people! Some more concrete reports, again mostly gestural and not comprehensive: - Distinct patterns of somatic activation correlating with, or often constituting, specific emotions - Eg. fear, affection, sexual arousal, fatigue, etc. having distinct patterns of somatic phenomenology, as well as there being quite a lot of variation within each of those. - Reports from random lay people of these phenomena tend to be coarse, low resolution, and use stereotyped emotion words. Reports of the finest/most skilled introspection, by my sense, tend to be extremely rich, detailed, and particular. Note the point here isn't about the *words* used to describe these phenomena, indeed, usually advanced practitioners don't really care to try to describe any of this stuff in words. - Variously, somatic phenomena seeming to "contain" emotions or psychological content, or that content seeming to "reside" in parts of the body. - Energies seeming to have been "trapped" or "locked" in some part of the body, and then being suddenly released or suddenly becoming accessible to attention - One common group of reports here describe clusters of sensation seeming to "know" things which are apparently news to the person experiencing them. Often these reports include these clusters being able to "speak" into the person's inner monologue, or arouse internal visual imagery, and "explain" or "communicate" aspects of the person's psychological landscape which were previously not introspectively available. - A person's apprehension of eg. a social situation, and the affordances of their role, being reflected somatically. - Often reported to be surprisingly high fidelity, so often the feelings are reported to vary and track a lot of detail in the person's perception of a situation. - Note this is distinct from eg. their body language per se, though it seems to have some feedback loop with body language. - Their internal experience and external expression seeming to flow back and forth, so eg. felt spaciousness vs. claustrophobia seeming to be reflected in visible behavior - (Unfortunately this is a *different* phenomenon which some hippies also call energy.) ### Resonance {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance} ::gloss[*Resonance* refers to felt sensations arising in response to some perception, eg. shifting waves of feeling in response to music, or subtle irritation in response to a whining fan.] *Resonance* is usually used to refer to somatic phenomena which arise seemingly directly in response to some perception or input. Most often these are relatively distinct sensations, though not necessarily spatially localized. Some common features of reports which use this language: - Emotional responses to music - Felt psychological-archetypal "alignment" with a fictional character or political narrative - Felt (especially strongly felt) introspective truthiness - Used to describe the experience of "receiving" energy or emotions from another person - Distinct sensations in response to eg. individual piano notes struck, or a buzzing fly - "Hitting" or "reaching" some localized cluster, which may not have been available as a distinct sensation previously, arousing distinct emotions or more unusual sensations (Note it became fashionable to say "that resonates with me" as a slightly California way of expressing "I agree with that" or "that seems right", which mostly 🤮 lol. In any case this is usually narrowly not descriptive of a referent in the sense above.) Resonance, frustratingly, is used to refer to wide enough different phenomena, under different [ontologies](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics), that it's not even always clear what phenomenology a person is trying to describe when they use the term. [See also below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) re surprising/unusual metaphysics used in descriptions of energy. ### Attunement {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--attunement} ::gloss[*Attunement* refers to variously rich and fine *sensitivity* and *receptivity* to another person's emotional or psychological state.] *Attunement* most often is used to describe either a state or experience of fine sensitivity to another person's experience or state. Centrally this is described as being deeply connected or especially "in sync," though sometimes two people might be highly attuned while in conflict. Often the word is used comparatively, eg. to describe states of more or less attunement. Attunement generally involves rich *receptivity* to another person's emotional/psychological state. Attunement, both on the "giving" and "receiving" sides, is often described as coming with fairly distinct phenomenology, eg. changes in perception described maybe variously as "bright," "vivid," and "grounded." ## Embodiment {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--embodiment} ::gloss[*Embodiment* refers to integration between the physical body, attention, and somatic phenomena.] *Embodiment* usually refers to the domain in general, and relative qualities, of integration between the physical body, somatic phenomena, and attention/consciousness. Unfortunately again, frameworks which make reference to this concept are often inconsistent in their ontology and the causal theories under which they understand these phenomena; the frameworks themselves also of course vary, so 'embodiment' is one of the least definite terms in this section. While the term is used varyingly, most often when someone says "this person is more or less embodied" that means "they have more or less introspective access to somatic phenomenology." A few major clusters of reports here: - Feedback loops between posture, psychological state, and some kinds of resonance - Eg. specifically open/closed/proud/etc. postures being *elicited* by some corresponding emotions, and of those emotions being aroused or amplified by adopting those postures - Postures like the above (though in various and conflicting ways) freeing access to somatic phenomena - Particular meanings associated with particular postures, eg. penitential postures, bowing, boastfulness, aggression - (It's unclear how much this is culturally patterned, it seems likely that some of these are arbitrary cultural symbols, but eg. both aggressive and high status body language seem probably substantially native to our species.) - Practices using the body, and especially using the body in coordinated, full-bodied, and high-skill ways, contributing to more robust access to somatic phenomenology - Also regulation, sensitivity, and sometimes broad "wisdom" etc. - Salient examples here (at least in my circles) would be Tai chi, "Yoga", and various martial arts traditions.[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--tai-chi] - Note there seems to be some "coming apart at the tails" here, so eg. MMA fighters are highly embodied in some ways but also seemingly dissociated in others, and broadly speaking not very [integrated](#practice-healing). - Models of body practices vis-a-vis embodiment highlight variously: coordination and proprioception, fluency in the full range of motion, and access to and comfort in extreme portions of the ranges of motion. - Some reports also highlight body practices being "grounding," which usually means something like "bringing one into calm, alert clarity." - Experiences of somatic integration/body practices/somatic phenomena being central to "healing" broadly construed - See immediately below re [dissociation](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation) and [re releases](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization), also see later [re healing and somatic openings](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings). - This is *often* reported as being about sensational intensity, cf. Thummo, Wim Hof method, Ashtanga Yoga, sussokan, sauna/cold plunge etc. - Again there are common reports of body practices leading to somatic openings, leading to positive changes in perception/attention/mood etc. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--tai-chi]: Yeah yeah Tai chi is historically a martial art but welp meh. There's a large group of claims that extremes of skill and development in embodiment lead to wisdom, spiritual achievement, or spiritual insight. Reports of highly developed embodiment often include fluent, rich, whole body somatic awareness, which some people claim to have passively at all times. Similarly there are common claims that especially *primitive* (perhaps, low-abstraction?) cultures are much more spiritually robust, which is tied to the claimed robustness of their embodiment. #### Locus of attention/self {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--locus-of-attentionself} There are a variety of reports of surprising changes in the locus of attention, or (separately, but overlapping) where "the self" is experienced spatially. On the far end, and familiar in popular culture, would be out-of-body experiences. My impression is that most people in western culture experience "themselves" as existing behind the eyes, somewhere near the middle of the skull, and attention as *pointing outward* from that location. Reports of changes of the locus of self describe experiencing that "they were" coming from, or located in, their chest, or belly, or IIRC sometimes their whole body at once. I've also seen hippies claim that there's major cultural variation here, with people in many "traditional" cultures in general experiencing the self closer to the core of the body. Usually in the same breath is some objection that westerners are dissociated, "in their heads," etc.—note that "in one's head" is not centrally used as a description of the locus of self/attention, and is often also metaphorical. (See some [more below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation).) This is also where people use language like "staying in the body"; most often this means something like "persisting in attending to the experience of the gross physical body and energetic phenomena." Again the claim here is usually that attention is one of the main inputs to energetic metabolism and movement ([see below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization)), and that habitual disinterest in or aversion to somatics is something like pathological. ##### "Heart-centered," etc. {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--heart-centered-etc} Relatedly here one encounters language of "heart-centered" practices, this is used to mean variously: literally attentionally centered around sensations in the center[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--center] of the chest; associated with emotions of compassion, tenderness, love, also sometimes grief, regardless of their spatial locus; *behaviors* associated with care and intimacy, agnostic of somatics; and sometimes ideologies which brand themselves in terms of the above. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--center]: Indeed, the physiological heart is off-center, but energetic phenomena uh "culturally" associated with the heart are generally reported in the center of the chest. Cf. also "speaking from the heart," usually this refers to some feedback loop between attention, resonance, and various energetic centers ([see below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy)), with thought and expression. #### "Bodymind" and "the system" {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-the-system} ::gloss[The terms *the system* and *bodymind* are used to refer to all of "mind," "body," "feeling," and more, all interacting and influencing behavior and experience.] Peripherally here: many writers in this space are averse to the connotations of "mind" in modern western culture, in particular as distinctly *disembodied* (see section below), and so prefer using terms like "body-mind" (or *bodymind*, and some similar terms[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--heart-mind]), which evoke some cohesive causal network of valence, affect, perception, etc. Similarly also "the system"[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--plural] or "my system" are used to mean something like "the mind, body, and whatever else that doesn't quite catch ontologically, coextensive and interacting." Part of the implicit distinction here is that often decisions and perceptions are [experienced as](#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly) happening [outside of](#practice-healing--integration) the "self," or completely outside of awareness, perhaps, uh, "subconcious," etc. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--plural]: Ok so unfortunately there's a subculture of people with DID etc. (AFAIK, the diagnosis which mostly displaced "multiple personality disorder"), who want to distigmatize their experience of multiple personalities with stable identities etc. I can't recall exactly their jargon, but sometimes they use language of "a system" to mean "a single person with DID," this is *not* the sense in which I'm using 'the system.' [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--heart-mind]: Also sometimes "heart-mind" as a translation of 心 (zh. *xīn*, jp. *shin*), very occasionally pl./skt. *citta*. Note these are all overlapping but not coterminous etc. ## Dissociation {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation} ::gloss[*Dissociation* refers broadly to states in which a person is unable to feel some or all sensations in the body, and unable to introspect on them.] *Dissociation* broadly refers to states and long-running configurations distinguished by the absence of somatic phenomenology, or of somatic phenomena being introspectively unavailable. Dissociation is often used almost as an antonym of embodiment, though in some uses eg. "dissociated" is meaningfully distinct from "disembodied." Like the rest of these concepts, 'dissociation' is used to refer to a variety of different actual phenomenological patterns, and under different causal theories. I would distinguish here between quite a few clusters of experiences reported, each overlapping: - "*Active* dissociation" - Poor introspective access to somatic phenomena in general - Poor skill with emotional language for describing one's emotions ("alexithymia") - Low resolution introspection, or not finding sensations distinct - Low salience of somatic phenomena attentionally - Depersonalization/derealization - Using entertainment to distract oneself (eg. I sometimes hear "I'll just watch youtube to dissociate") *Active* dissociation (my ad-hoc term, sorry) is most often what *I* mean when I say "dissociation" generically. Usually most reports and models which use the term 'dissociation' are implicitly drawing on an intuition about active dissociation, even if they're focusing on other clusters. Parts of the body from which a person is dissociated are often described phenomenologically as "blank," "invisible," or "plain," but also "grey" or "fuzzy." Sometimes dissociation is more attentionally or somatically active, eg. some region or object seeming "squirreley" in attention or being very difficult to focus on, a person becoming exhausted when attending to something, or abruptly finding themselves thinking about something unrelated or occupied with eg. sexual fantasy, food, etc. My sense is that dissociation tends to be chronic and continuous, but is also commonly reported as acute, eg. in response to a specific trigger, and acute dissociation can be either spatially/sensorally localized, or "global," as in, very little feeling is available anywhere. Often active dissociation is not quite categorical, so at a given location *some* sensations are available, or sensation in general is muted, rather than that all somatic phenomena are absent there. These sorts of reports obviously most often come from practitioners who also report having "broken through" or "unraveled" dissociation elsewhere, such that the phenomenal character of dissociation is salient to them. Sometimes there's reported subtle qualities to the relevant qualia that smell like one is dissociated, rather than a flawless blankness. The boundary where the blankness starts is also often salient, once one knows what to look for. There are countless reports of practitioners *becoming* sensitive to somatic phenomena where previously their body was blank besides coarse sensations of touch, hunger, or pain. Reports of, uh, "de-dissociation" or "re-embodiment" often include big releases ([see more later](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings)), and in particular often access to sensations with strong associated meaning, both negative, eg. anger at particular people, fear associated with specific memories or images (sometimes, distinct images but fantastical, or certainly not a real memory, etc.), and positive, eg. care and affection, sexual arousal, etc. Sometimes these reports describe gaining access suddenly to proprioception and interoception which was previously dysfunctional or absent for a person. Models of active dissociation generally present that a person, or "the mind," (or whatever) is "trying" to prevent the arising of some phenomena in consciousness, because they are "believed"[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--believed] by part of the mind to be intolerable, or unsafe, *or* even that the meaning or information associated with those phenomena would be dangerous if allowed to propagate across the rest of the mind. Indeed, many reports of re-embodiment involve a person suddenly finding a certain relationship unmanageable, or unmanageable without having to reveal a lot of information, newly stand up for themselves, renegotiate roles, etc. etc. Dissociation has some relationship with "repression," which as a concept usually assumes a particular psychological model of a *kind* of dissociation. I'm not a huge fan of the concept, I think it's too culturally laden, and I don't endorse the model it comes with. [See more later](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) for my perspective on these and related patterns. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--believed]: "Believed" is subtle here, and sometimes more or less ontologically problematic, and often not presented with that language. Anecdotally, active dissociation correlates moderately with dampened affect, body language, and expression, and both weaker and sparser access to positive emotion. (See [below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--humbug) re claims from individuals who report having no salient somatic phenomena.) Separately, some people have variously weak or low resolution introspective access to these phenomena, find somatic phenomena indistinct or *low-salience* in their experience, *or* have difficulty communicating about their internal experience, especially putting words to specific emotions. Again, poor introspection is sometimes called "dissociation," and often an important feature of reports of personal journeys with healing etc. Active dissociation *and* poor introspection are strongly correlated with trauma (see [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells)), and in particular *confabulatory* introspection is a very indicative trauma smell. Anecdotally, though, it seems like some people have something like low salience to somatics, and poor introspection, but without most of the usual consequences of active dissociation, so I think these are meaningfully distinct. I'll add here that my impression is that eg. small children often have poor somatic introspection, in the sense that they can't necessarily *name* what emotion they're feeling, and that the sensations themselves might not be salient, but they are still loudly emotive, move their bodies readily and joyfully, etc. (And indeed, most authors who talk about dissociation *never* describe children in general as dissociated, etc.) Perhaps relatedly, there are some claims that dissociation (usually more in the sense of "low salience" or "poor introspection," but sometimes active dissociation) is caused by "intellectual" cultures/personalities/practices (sometimes described as being too much "[in their heads](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality)"), and sometimes the entire cluster of both personality and culture, of "intellectual, abstract-oriented, low salience to somatics" is called "dissociated." I think this is pretty technically sloppy, and this sort of claim is usually overstated, but the correlation does seem weakly true in my anecdotes. Variation in somatic sensitivity sometimes looks, in my current sense, either distinctly like a distinct trauma smell (whether over- or under-sensitive), like natural *"genetic"* variation, or like some sort of "natural variation of development, symbology, and psychology." However, in many specific cases, whether a broad culture or an individual, I'm confused quite what I'm looking at—and while there are a lot of models that are confident about a specific way dissociation works and looks in general, I haven't seen any that didn't seem overreified or simplistic. Lastly, psychiatry sometimes uses the term 'dissociation' broadly for what's now more often called "depersonalization" and "derealization"—clusters of symptoms where a patient experiences themselves, or the world around them as "fake," "unreal," or "fictional." Depersonalization/derealization is an interesting phenomenon itself, and often *does* correlate with dissociation in any of the other senses, but is quite distinct. ## Energy {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy} ::gloss[*Energy* refers to a few different kinds of patterns of somatic sensation and perception, including emotions, *vibes*, and buzzy-tingly-magnetic waves (sometimes called *qi*). Sometimes these are understood as a pseudo-physical substance.] *Energy*[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--qi-meridians] is most often used to refer to three main clusters of phenomena, only loosely related: 1. Qi (and related) 2. Emotions, as well as subtle somatic phenomena otherwise - as distinct sensations - the underlying generators of those sensations, in such models - behavioral affordances and biases when sensations are present 3. Perceived qualities (often, "vibes") from a person, group, or space, which *have a substance* and reside or are present in those people etc. I often equivocate between all three senses under this term, though for me personally qi is the *central* referent of "energy," and the other two feel maybe like Western corruptions of the concept. There are a variety of reports in which the phenomenology of the energy body (moreso in sense 1 than 2, and seldom sense 3) is experienced as defying the physical body, and of the energy bodies of different people (or even eg. trees, the earth, etc.) interacting: - The energy body extending beyond the physical body, and practitioners being able to purposefully extend it further, perhaps as far as a meter - (This while still being felt as "contiguous" with the body, so this is separate from reports of "astral travel.") - "Penetrating" into another's energy body - Being able to "directly perceive" the contents of another person's energy body, at extreme levels of detail - Relatedly, some claims of people being able to perceive physiological states at extreme resolution, eg. being able to detect the state of the spleen from touching a person's hand - Some people having powerful energetic fields with specific flavors or tones - Being able to extend or toss around energy "balls" or "missiles" toward another person, which they can perceive and which affect them - Several separate strata of somatic phenomena, IIRC some systems having up to four *Qi*[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--qi-meridians] (pronounced like "chee") refers to a cluster of phenomena, to repeat, described as flowing, tingly, buoyant/heavy, or "magnetic." Qi, in the traditions that teach it, is often but not always explained to be something to the effect of a *substance*, which flows through the body, between people, and sometimes even plants or the earth. Qi is often explained to both be able to impart some kind of force, in the sense that it can lift, pull down, or push limbs, objects, or people. Some practices eg. of cultivation and sensitization to qi involve moving the limbs *only* by manipulating energy, or sustaining postures for long periods; reports here describe that the posture seems to be sustained "by energy alone," specifically with claims that such a posture would not be possible to maintain "by use of the muscles." In these systems, the free and healthy flow of energy within the body is regarded as vital for health, and often the cultivation of energy is regarded to confer social and spiritual power. In some systems, qi is associated with a specific subtle *anatomy* of "energy channels" or "meridians."[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--qi-meridians] [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--qi-meridians]: Regarding the translations of 氣 (*qì*) as "energy" and 經 (*jīng*) as "meridian," *Traditional Chinese Medicine* (Unschuld, Paul 2018) insists that both of these are due to projections and misunderstandings on the part of a particular western author (Soulié) in the early 20th century.

Unschuld gives *qì* as "vapors" (p. 125), which tracks nicely with all the other senses of that word, [see Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B0%A3#Chinese) (and the entry [in Japanese](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%B0%97#Japanese)).

I've found conflicting claims about the history of the translation of 'meridian,' so Unschuld gives *jīng* as "warp thread," (p. 31) and insists that "meridian" was due to a misinterpretation on Soulié's part, on the basis of Chinese models (I take this to mean medical mannequins) with *jīng* painted vertically (p. 125). OTOH, Wiktionary gives *jīng*, in addition to "warp" (and a number of unrelated senses), as part of compounds for [longitude](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B6%93%E5%BA%A6#Chinese) and [longitude line](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%B6%93%E7%B7%9A#Chinese) in modern Chinese—I didn't figure out when those terms date to, or if those are some backtranslation to rhyme with *our* use of 'meridian' for qi channels... (Note that the reading 'qi' comes from Mandarin in particular, and my description here somewhat conflates a variety of models in different East Asian spiritual traditions. I know much less about eg. *prana* in South Asian yogic traditions, my impression is that the phenomenology matches substantially but incompletely, and the metaphysics is somewhat different.) Energy in the sense of *subtle somatics* (referring to sense 2 above, for lack of a better term), refers to some munged combination of what in *my* ontology are narrowly different types, usually implicitly presented under some metaphysics which accounts for their being joined. The ontology of energy in this sense usually combines the sensation per se with its perceived/modeled *substance*, and often with the attentional/motivational/perceptual correlates of both. Energies are generally regarded to either create a tilt in the mind toward certain behaviors, perceptions, etc., *or* to have such inclinations "themselves." This sort of model usually subsumes what's understood colloquially as a "mood," along with some subtler phenomena. It's usually claimed that the motivational inclinations that correlate with the presence of some energy still occur or have force, if subtly or """unconsciously,""" even when the energy is completely unavailable introspectively. Usually in these ontologies, the substance is taken as "self-sustaining"[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--pratitya], either as subsisting in the space of qualia and phenomenology, or as a substance on a parallel stratum to physical substance, broadly comparable to that claimed of qi. (This sort of makes a false distinction between two kinds of ontologies, in practice there's a bunch of variety to the metaphysics under which these phenomena are understood, variously precise, etc.) Eg., in the crudest versions of this, a phenomenon, approximately coterminous with the sensation, is regarded to "cause" effects in the physical body and on other people. [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--pratitya]: *Mumble mumble* "co-arising," I'm still not sure I understand this entire model, but in any case many hippies do take energy as something like a "self-sustaining substance." The particular sensations of subtle somatics are largely covered by my description under resonance [above](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance). Broadly this category is more open, and often also includes the kind of phenomenology included under qi, as well as others. Subtle somatics are also reported to change in feeling-tone, to move, bloom, flutter, and decay. In many models, energies are regarded to something like *need to* move in order to properly decay. Often they claim that "healthy" energetic systems (that is, the energy bodies of people who are very "energetically healthy," etc.) are most of the time very fluid, supple, and receptive. See more re [blockages immediately below](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization). *Vibes* is probably the least precise concept here, but still relevant both in the loose popular jargon around energy, and as a feature of human perception and cognition. 'Vibe' is often used by people completely outside of spiritual discourses just to refer to the perceived affect or social posture of a person, piece of media, etc. In the more extensive sense, vibes are understood to be a *substance*, like that of energies in the "subtle somatics" sense of energy, which is sustained and resides in a person (or etc.), and which is perceptible off of them. Peripherally here: sometimes "frequency" (as in, "on a higher frequency" but also eg. of someone one appreciates or agrees with, "on the same frequency") gets used in some way that rhymes with some senses of energy here. To be honest, I've yet to see a consistent use of this term, for it to even be worth disentangling carefully. Anyway, 'frequency' is often used to describe an attuned connection with another person, or sometimes the spiritual-affective purity of a belief/person/practice, among other varied and metaphysically dubious senses. ### Blockages, releases, and somatization {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization} ::nogloss (From here on, I'll only be discussing senses 1 and 2 above.) ::gloss[A *blockage* is a site where energy is reported as stuck, knotted, tight, or hard.]{#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockage} There's a wide range of reports of energy (qi or subtle somatics more generally) becoming "blocked," "stuck," or "knotted"; the site at which this occurs is most often called a "blockage." Blockages are often described as "tight" or "hard," but there also can often be localized dissociation at a blockage, with subtler sensations. Blockages are quite often claimed to cause overt physical muscle tension, and sometimes more surprising symptoms. There are many reports of chronic tension being released when some energetic blockage is cleared, and specifically of the phenomenology of some tension "unraveling" seeming to clearly align with corresponding releases of gross muscular tension. Both energies in general, and blockages especially, are regarded often to be visible in a person's body language, resting facial expression, posture, range of motion, etc. Stereotyped reports here might be eg. a habitual slouch being associated introspectively with protection of a knot of fear, such that standing upright might bring up the stuck energy, and that when the energy is resolved the posture automatically resolves itself. (See [more on this later](#practice-healing--energy-work-and-energy-healing).) In some of these models blockages are regarded as an extreme case of the pervasive pattern of energetic *resistance*. Resistance describes the felt "force" of one energy opposing another, or sometimes of the underlying field or substrate resisting the presence, flow, or movement of some energy. Resistance is often described as "dense" or "solid," and generally uncomfortable, whether subtly or profoundly. ::gloss[A *release* generally refers to an acute event where energy is able to move, often associated with tension or a blockage loosening.]{#practice-phenomenology-somatics--release} *Releases* are generally acute events where some clot of tension or blockage loosens, and the trapped energy is able to move. The term is also sometimes used more in reference to the sudden movement of energy, agnostic of a specific blockage. Note also, tension is sometimes described as "evaporating" or "burning off" over weeks to years, rather than in a distinct release. There's two ish clusters to reports of energy releases: - Soft, flowing, buzzy, or tingly, often with no distinct "feeling tone" - Broadly speaking the same phenomenology as that of qi, though IIRC there are sometimes differences; some teachers refer to both as just "energy." - Gushing, coursing, emotionally intense, often chaotic, sometimes very pleasant or very unpleasant - Some practitioners insist that chaotic and unpleasant releases are due to resistance remaining in the path of some energy. In the "buzzy" kind of release, there are many reports of the energy body, whether localized or across the whole body, slipping into a mode of spacious, gentle, flowy non-resistance. Sometimes these kinds of releases are described as "dissolving" some energy or sensation. What's maybe more surprising are countless reports of this kind of release happening with intense physical pain dissolving into buzzy energy, or even the perception of one's body, the surrounding space, etc. "breaking up" phenomenologically. (Sometimes this is reported to occur across multiple sense modalities, so even eg. vision and hearing "breaking up" or "dissolving." I have to admit I'm not personally familiar, and I have trouble imagining.) Reports of the "dense and valenced" kind of release vary in terms of how much energies are reported to flow smoothly. In some reports from so-called [meditation](#practice-meditation) "masters," their baseline energetic phenomenology is so spacious as to be unperturbed by acute fear, pain, etc. arising in the system, such that all energies are able to "effortlessly arise and fall away." This quality is often referred to as energetic *capacity*, under a model where greater "capacity" corresponds to the ability to experience a wider palette of more intense sensations without resistance, contraction, or blockage. More generally, many models present the dense-and-valenced type as being more or less fluid, smooth, and pleasant according to how much somatic resistance there is elsewhere in the system, *in the way* of the "natural" or "necessary" path of some energy. Again in the most extreme reports, it's claimed that the unpleasant character of most "unpleasant" phenomena is almost entirely a *consequence of resistance*, and that at high levels of some kinds of somatic/spiritual development, sensation per se can be arbitrarily perceived as neutral, invigorating, delicious, etc. Regardless of the limiting case, there are many reports of developing or accessing greater ease and flexibility with sensation, such that some phenomenon which was previously met with a good deal of resistance and discomfort is experienced mostly as flitting or ticklish. Somewhat *separately*, both kinds of energetic releases are associated with gross muscular movement. This variously appears as faint or very large waves or jolts of tension or contraction, often shivering or shaking, and sometimes thrashing. There's also some relationship between the motor expression of a release, and associated chronic muscular tension, often nearby, though also often recruiting many more networks of muscles or further bodyparts as it moves. Again, in the extremes of skill and energetic capacity, releases are generally meant not to cause gross muscular movement/contraction, or at least for it to be much subtler, and much less frequent. This quality of "resistance vs spaciousness" (keep in mind that there's more complexity underneath that dichotomy) is in general a salient feature of discussions of somatic phenomenology, and of somatic development. I've yet to find a satisfying explanation of exactly the nature of the interface between the physical body and blockages, especially why some kinds of blockages cause gross dysfunction and others not. IIRC, I've found some pieces of explanations that eg. muscular contraction and resistance also *constricts* the flow of energy, and that a person's "body-mind" will be "intuitively" or "automatically" trying to manipulate energy, but will usually just take advantage of the coarsest level it can find, in many cases muscular. #### Somatization {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--somatization} *Somatization* (and some variations) is a term used in psychiatry to refer to patterns of physical symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, in particular in many cases with physical symptoms understood as being an *expression* of psychological distress.[^practice-phenomenology-somatics--somatization] [^practice-phenomenology-somatics--somatization]: See: American Psychiatric Association, 2013. *Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition*, pp. 309-313, also see [Scott Alexander](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/are-woo-non-responders-defective) on this briefly.

Note the DSM's categories and criteria here mostly make salient *distress* about illness, but eg. see the discussion about culture-bound disorders on 313 for some context. My impression is that psychiatry hasn't arrived at a consensus model for what's going on with these cases, and still considers the kind of description of "blocked energies" pretty dodgy. Briefly here, I'll say that the symptomatology of somatization seems to align *often*, but not always, pretty nicely with many reports of physical correlates of energy blockages, and again there are many reports from energy workers, meditation teachers, etc. of having been able to fix these sorts of problems by resolving "underlying" energetic problems. By my sense, blockages severe enough to cause this kind of somatization would usually reflect both fairly extreme trauma, and pretty intense dissociation. I mention this mostly because I've seen people explicitly confusing somatic phenomena, which are unfamiliar to them, with somatization, which they recognize as happening to them only when things get *really* bad emotionally. ## Humbug! {#practice-phenomenology-somatics--humbug} ::nogloss See also a much longer discussion in the section on [metaphysics re phenomenology](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality). I sometimes encounter people who say something like, "I don't have this sort of phenomenology, therefore indeed it's not universal/innate, therefore your model is wrong somehow." First off, and this is kind of an unfair move discursively: the people who say this seem to have both pretty strong [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells), as well as having [other correlates](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation) of just poor introspection in other ways. So, while this is cursed to say, and indeed I mostly don't say it to those people directly, I largely want to say, "look, this tracks with the rest of my model, sorry"—I would be very surprised if I met someone who didn't have any trauma smells, but reported no somatic phenomenology. Unfortunately, this is also still a reasonable objection in principle, and I both don't have a smack-down argument for such people, and I have a very small probability on this being in the same sort of natural variation as aphantasia seems to be. So, no more claims here, but just recognizing "yup, that's an objection." (Again, see the section on [metaphysics re phenomenology](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) for discussion of more objections, like "what if these *experiences* are just artificial?") --- # Misc. Features of Spiritual Practices {#practice-practices} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/practices — also at `/md/practice/practices.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-practices--`.* The below isn't even remotely trying to be comprehensive, but this is I think an important angle on some common features both in spiritual traditions and in human experience in general. ### "Practices"? {#practice-practices--practices} *Practice*, or especially *practices* evoke discrete activities performed deliberately, with time set aside for them specifically. Obviously I'm including that, but I'm using the word in a broader sense here, that's fairly common among at least Western meditators. Often practice includes attitudes and qualities of mind that can diffuse into other activities or non-activity or just-hanging-around. Even when pretty distinct, practice can also occur spontaneously, eg. countless reports of falling into meditative states during ordinary activity, or into prayer or devotion. ## Imaginal practice {#practice-practices--imaginal-practice} ::gloss[*Imaginal* practice refers to exploration of clusters of meaning and feeling, usually associated with internal sensations of visual imagery, touch, movement, and sound.] *Imaginal* practice as a concept I get through Rob Burbea, though he didn't originate it. Firstly, yes, *imaginal*, not *imaginary*, though there's certainly some overlap. Imaginal practice concerns exploration of and relationship with *images*. Images in this sense are patterns of [resonance](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance) in relationship with, usually, internal images, as well as internal sensations of touch, movement, sound, etc. Images might be deliberately evoked, or organic or spontaneous. For example, with respect to sexual and romantic fantasy, a person might experience images in a variety of ways: - Spontaneous, sometimes intrusive reverie, of a past lover or a current crush - These can often be phenomenally intense and rich, not narrowly restrictected to *visual* imagery but including rich internal touch sensation, etc. etc. - Often these are extended and engrossing - Sex dreams - *Deliberately* evoked fantasy, in the context of masturbation - Most often this is consciously "controlled," though often control is nebulous, and sometimes such fantasies are experiences as playing out "on their own." - Brief flits of internal imagery and feeling - Extended extemporaneous romantic storytelling in one's mind, eg. often stereotypically done by teenage girls in our culture Again, these are often quite rich phenomenally, and despite the unfortunate name they usually aren't even *mostly* about visual imagery. Broadly speaking I would say imaginal practices involve an exploration of the resonances that a person's relational/affective attitudes define, most saliently in the absence of "real" (physical, enacted) experiences that would align with them. Imaginal qualities are often diffused into a broader set of practices, and may not be elicited deliberately in isolation. Eg., in a broad sense storytelling is usually concerned with *images*, certainly rather than purely linguistic, storytelling is about evoking images and their resonances. Even fairly technical discussion can include a kind of imaginal backdrop, eg. I see old discussions of transhumanism, even when they get pretty far in the weeds, as an expression of yearning, excitement, and anxiety, and an *imaginal* negotiation of those feelings. Imaginal practices from world traditions and independent practitioners are often much weirder. One common cluster of reports is of images "taking on a life of their own," where they have access to wisdom that the person feels they don't possess, or even that they have access to specific knowledge that a person did not have access to themselves. Eg., there are countless reports of people calling upon the memory of a beloved relative, and finding that the image speaks back with creativity and spontaneity which is felt not to be "invented" or "orchestrated." Similarly with many traditional religious practices of communing with spirits or deities, the entities in question are commonly reported as experienced as independent, spontaneous, and real. Many traditional spiritual systems will construe these experiences [metaphysically](#metaphysics) as real in the sense that those entities are actually independent, have their own experiences, persist outside of your practice, etc. etc. Some modern hippies (as did, [as it happens](#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography), some 19th century German philosophers) similarly claim that one can tap directly into a cosmic wisdom through these and other practices. I'm pretty confident these are all false, and I'll [talk about this again](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) later. One more cluster I'll mention briefly is known as "deity yoga" (not anything about physical postures, that's afaict mostly a modern innovation within "yoga"). Some of what's known as deity yoga is not so dissimilar from forms of prayer that will be familiar to Westerners. The more interesting forms include eg. Yidam practice in Tibetan Buddhism, and I believe there's some similar stuff in Hindu Tantra and some kinds of modern Western esotericism. In Yidam practice, the practitioner visualizes themselves *as* a deity, usually with an involved collection of symbols, but importantly feeling and seeing as the deity would. The [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) of these deities are supposed to be bizarre or alien (Tibetan Bodhisattvas are quite weird), but advanced Yidam practitioners are meant to take on these ways of seeing in their more ordinary experience. I think this points to what the broader space of imaginal practice can be. I'll also mention here, imaginal practice isn't necessarily positive or pleasant, and many traditional and modern imaginal practices are quite the opposite, eg. literally imagining capital-h-Hell, or reflecting on and empathizing with the suffering of factory farmed animals. ## Prayer {#practice-practices--prayer} ::nogloss I would regard almost all prayer as different kinds of imaginal practice. In particular most prayer as taught in eg. Western Christianity is a framework for working with a particular set of images in a deliberate way. This kind of prayer usually involves a pattern of usually performative external action alongside internal motions, including eg. internal speech, deliberately arousing specific emotions, or much subtler moves. The role and attitudes of prayer can often be self-gratifying or transactional. However, many traditions teach prayer as a practice of "meeting" and entering into relationship with an [energy](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) (more relevantly, see [re resonances](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance)) or image, and this is the kind of attitude often reported from the most serious practitioners in these sorts of traditions. Such images are often reported to take on a shape that a person *doesn't* want, whether to make demands of them or to show things they flinch away from. To be clear, sometimes people can have a kind of masochistic or at least self-punitive attitude towards prayer, and in this sense prayer can be an upside-down kind of self-gratification, where a person will fairly consciously control or puppet the image to tell them what think they should hear. As with imaginal practice more broadly, most traditions construe these experiences metaphysically as "literally real," or something close enough. Agnostic of the metaphysics, or at least even in *my* metaphysics, there's a distinction that's important to track here, with respect to a. the resolution and detail of the image, b. its richness, and c. its flexibility or dynamism. In particular, I most *trust* (in some sense) reports of prayer which seem spontaneous, alive, sensitive, etc. as opposed to "scripted," stereotyped, etc.—even if I don't believe in the metaphysics in which they're presented. Note that many reports which I "buy" are thin or nebulous when it comes to any *visual* aspect, but which are very rich and dynamic relationally/emotionally/etc. ## Devotion {#practice-practices--devotion} ::nogloss The term *devotional practice* is used to refer to a broad collection of practices and models across traditions, broadly speaking oriented towards surrender and devotion to a figure, symbol, etc. Devotion is usually a large aspect of prayer, but the two are only partially overlapping. The central stereotype of devotional practice is the performance of gestures, affect, and utterances associated with fealty, reverence, or submission. These can often combine performance of both the "attraction" (love, admiration, etc.) type of status as well as the "aversion" (fear, anxious submission, etc.) type. Besides straightforward deities, commonly this involves veneration of spirits, ancestors, saints, etc. There are also subtler objects of devotion: while "original Buddhism" almost certainly contained Buddha-worship as a fundamental feature, some later schools innovated on this pattern to include devotion *to the path* as more fundamental than Buddha-worship. There are reports eg. from Orthodox Christianity and some Hindu schools of a kind of "devotion without an object." Imaginal practice and prayer as convergent features of religious traditions is mostly unsurprising to me, but it's somewhat confusing the extent to which devotion in particular is a *very common* feature in especially "world religions," though probably not a universal feature of world human spirituality. ## The Sacred {#practice-practices--the-sacred} ::gloss[*Sacred* describes something as set apart and special in a positive sense, often touching upon the highest value.] Again there's a broad cluster here, which perhaps doesn't form a natural kind. *Sacred* as an adjective narrowly describes something as set apart and special in a positive sense. Obviously, more generally, sacredness is connotatively and imaginally rich ([see above](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice)) within a given culture; in particular in English, 'sacred' is in a semantic field with 'holy' and 'mystical,' and also often brings up connotations of "magic" or "supernatural." The concept of *the sacred* refers to the domain generally of that which is held sacred. Some contemporary writers use this term as a neutral, generic concept to refer to patterns in human culture, *or* as a sacralized object itself, eg. one sometimes hears lines to the effect of "they are depraved who reject the sacred." There are a number of cultural patterns of "setting-apart" which I'm more or less inclined to call "sacred" or "a practice of sacredness." Most centrally, in my usage, sacredness distinguishes that which touches upon the highest value, or the nature of value—though I'll note it's unclear to what extent this is a coincidence of modern Western culture or not. One point which I'll toss in here is that it seems like the usual perception and depiction of the sacred that I find... perhaps across cultures, to the extent I've dug, munges at least 3 aspects which I would want to distinguish, namely: a. the socio-spiritual quality of set-apartness, b. the value of the set-apart object in and of itself, and c. the, uh, "cultural-symbolic extra-spiritual shininess" that they perceive *with* it. ## Hyperstition {#practice-practices--hyperstition} ::gloss[*Hyperstition* is a deliberate attempt to modify one's own beliefs, emotions, and perceptions.] *Hyperstition* refers to deliberate attempts to modify one's own beliefs, emotions, and perceptions. ## Magic {#practice-practices--magic} --- # Meditation {#practice-meditation} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/meditation — also at `/md/practice/meditation.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-meditation--`.* What the fuck is "meditation"? Geeze, what a mess. One particular source of confusion is that within a given school, they'll refer to some of their practices *as "meditation"*, which is fine enough, but this often makes it sound like that's what meditation is *in general*. I've often heard people say "but I was taught that meditation is xyz" rather than "but I was taught to meditate by doing xyz." This is obviously also separate from schools often teaching that other practices are fake, wrong, or bad. In Latin *meditātiō* meant "thinking" or "reflection"[^practice-meditation--wiktionary], in St. Ignatius's usage (writing in Spanish in the 16th century) it referred to practices of explicit "mental" reflection, presumably involving verbal thought, etc. I'm not clear on when it was first used to translate *jhāna* (*dhyāna*), which while also complicated as a term itself, was in any case used in Indian languages to refer to rather different practices. [^practice-meditation--wiktionary]: [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meditatio#Latin) This should be obvious, but people often forget: we're often working with practices and concepts from other cultures, which importantly literally use words from different languages! Two cultures might cut the world up very differently, especially for culturally specific practices, etc. etc. Another major source of confusion here is that each of a. the actual experiences, b. the actual doing of some practice, and c. whatever the *intended* target is, are not the same as the instructions that are given to students. In particular people often conflate whatever the practice instructions are, especially for basic preliminary instructions, with "what meditation is." This is also besides the fact that people are seldom actually achieving what they've been told—which sometimes isn't possible, and sometimes isn't even meant to be possible! (To be clear, you can obviously go off on your own and do whatever you want, but maybe what you arrive at isn't really helpfully called meditation, and in any case narrowly you might not be doing "meditation" as far as the tradition you started in is concerned.) In practice, in Buddhist monastic traditions, a student would almost always be working closely with a teacher, and the instructions given from the teacher would change constantly depending on whatever was actually happening in their practice, in many traditions frequently completely throwing out or contradicting previous instructions. I know less about other traditions but this broad shape is common, where at minimum there isn't *one thing* called "meditation," (or whatever word, in whichever language) but there's a bunch of stuff, which may not have distinct names, and one's instructions and choices change in response to external and internal circumstances. Also, traditionally, at least in Buddhism, a student would likely have thousands of false starts, dead ends, etc. etc., before finding their feet, and even then they would probably overhaul their sense of what the thing *really is* several times over. Whatever they were taught as a novice, let alone what they *understood*, was likely quite different from what a "master" would be doing, even if they're still sitting quietly in a hall or in the forest. It's also interesting to note here that in the original Buddhist canon[^practice-meditation--canon], practices are described in surprisingly little detail, almost all explanations basically skipping from "a monk should sit at the foot of a tree" to "and then here's what happens in a particular deep meditative state" or "and here's a big list of themes you might reflect on." Also, the practices taught by extant schools in Asia either were heterodox when those schools were founded, or were reconstructed in the last ~150 years; I talk about this more [in an appendix](#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography). [^practice-meditation--canon]: In reference here of course to the Pali canon, but IIRC this is true of the corresponding parts of the Taisho Tripitaka (unfortunately "tripitaka" there includes another 2k years of books lol). Not sure about the versions the Tibetans have. There's a bunch of stuff in Christianity which we might call meditation—is that right? Does it really matter? Most of these practices have traditional names, and the ones *traditionally* called meditation we actually wouldn't likely call meditation in its modern usage. Others, eg. Hesychasm (sometimes translated as "the way of inner stillness,") are actually surprisingly close to traditional "meditative" practices from India and China, but to me it seems mostly irrelevant whether we call these meditation. Besides, a lot of modern usage of "meditation" in reference to Christianity seems to have basically taken the long way round, *by way of* Western pop versions of Eastern spirituality... which is fine, I suppose, but feels very "have your coastal progressive spirituality cake and eat it too." (And then of course, the same argument for Judaism, or Islam, or whatever.) I don't *really* care, and my friends and I don't even use the word 'meditation' that much, but still. My sense in general is that there's a bunch of practices, some are very similar and some very different, and it's usually more helpful either to call them by their traditional names *or* just generically as "spiritual practices," etc. *** For all of the subjects below, in a given context (as in, reading a given book or talking to a given teacher), I'd recommend distinguishing: a. which specific tradition we're talking about, b. what the instructions are, c. what the *ostensible* goal is, d. what other practitioners are actually doing with their mind/body, and e. what the reports are of "success" (often not the same as the goal). Generally, with each item below, it's good to assume that the word is used to mean a variety of different things by different people, and that almost none of them mean just one thing, in the broader jargon. To be clear, as well, my conception here is at least a bit nonstandard and opinionated. ## Mindfulness {#practice-meditation--mindfulness} With 'mindfulness', at minimum I'd want to distinguish: 1. Specific practices (or often more like aspects of practice) from traditional systems which are *translated* as 'mindfulness' 2. 'Mindfulness' in eg. Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) 3. 'Mindfulness' a la vague progressive health culture Briefly, these might be glossed (somewhat unfairly) as: 1. "Attentiveness, generically" 2. "[Body awareness](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) + equanimity, with a dash of dissociation" 3. "2., but watered down to be more amenable to suburban moms and bureaucracies"
Quite a bit more detail 1: 'Mindfulness' in this context derives from a translation of Pali *sati*, "recollection," from the late 19th century. In the canon, *sati* refers to something like a quality of attention to be developed, and as a major input to spiritual achievement and progress. The canon is much more concrete here than it often is, but still much less than modern teachers: broadly speaking *sati* is used to refer to a quality of attentiveness, likely with some quality of contiguity of memory in the recent past. IIRC 'mindfulness' (n., as opposed to 'mindful', adj.) was almost unattested in English at this point, with one or two examples from some Bible translations, but has obviously caught on like wildfire, though mostly since MBSR. I think this is a great translation, but I bring up the etymology to again stress that even if we know what a word means ordinarily *in English*, when it's used as a translation of a technical term, we should generally assume we *don't* know what it means. *Sati* probably also means something like "elicitation" or "reflection," eg. if we go by the *satipaṭṭhānas*[^practice-meditation--satipatthana], a lot of these don't make a ton of sense if *sati* just means, well, "mindfulness." [^practice-meditation--satipatthana]: [DN 22](https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/DN/DN22.html), trans. Thānissaro 2000. The introduction in the page linked in the same footnote[^practice-meditation--satipatthana] has a bit of context as well on the term having been reinterpreted in the West. 2: MBSR, as I understand, came about as an attempt by Jon Kabat-Zinn to make some subset of Buddhism that would be legible and inoffensive to mainstream American society in ~1980. "Mindfulness" in his usage doesn't map cleanly onto any traditional concepts, but broadly it's sort of a handful of satipatthanas, with an extra emphasis on equanimity, and not much of a path. Mostly probably helpful enough, but important to distinguish from *sati*, especially because a noticeable subset of eg. Americans now think that meditation == MBSR, which, oy. One thing I want to add here: "mindfulness meditation" as an expression would probably have made sense to the original compilers of the Buddhist canon, but is a strange construction if you're familiar with the canon. Besides, what's actually taught by that name would likely have seemed confused or maybe even mostly unrelated. IMO that's fine, you can just do new stuff, but if someone uses "mindfulness" in this way that means you're definitely not looking at an orthodox source, and likely you're looking at someone who isn't familiar with the orthodox primary sources at all. (I actually can't remember if the original MBSR materials used the term "mindfulness meditation", I think they didn't? I feel like that term is from a generation or two later and often means someting more like "just body scanning with a dollop of concentration.") 3: I'll just add that I've noticed that 'mindfulness' in the broader culture now often means "body awareness, maximally generically," or in many cases "any traditional spiritual practice, if sufficiently secularized and watered down" (eg. dance sometimes being referred to as a "mindfulness practice", or "mindfulness" in therapy curricula as a catch-all for spiritual practices taught to clients.)
Note however that mindfulness, as described above, *doesn't* sound at all like "concentration" practices: ## Concentration {#practice-meditation--concentration} ::gloss["Concentration" is the western catch-all for *samatha*, *jhāna*, and *samādhi*, referring to practices and states of acuity and absorption, as well as some altered states.] In the context of western post-traditional meditation culture, "concentration" is used as a translation variously for all of *samatha* (*śamatha*), *jhāna* (*dhyāna*), and *samādhi*, as well as a generic bucket for similar practices originating outside of Buddhism[^practice-meditation--jhana]. I won't go into much detail about each of these, but mostly this is to say the schema in the canon doesn't line up with most modern conceptualizations, though the canon also doesn't line up with the models used in later schools of Buddhism. [^practice-meditation--jhana]: Traditionally, actually, jhana is regarded to have predated the Buddha, and that he was taught it and later refined/integrated it into a larger curriculum. Broadly speaking, so-called "concentration" practices are aiming to a. cultivate mindfulness (~in the first sense above), b. achieve meditative states of (relatively) high acuity and absorbption, and sometimes c. achieve intense or unusual altered states. This is a huge rabbit hole, but I'll just mention that often people think that "mindfulness" (in any of the three senses) is basically equivalent to concentration; I think this is false both as a claim about the traditional models, and as a claim about how people's meditation practice usually develops. My sense is that they're less strongly correlated than people often think, and people can sometimes get fairly far in one while the other remains weak. Instructions and reports, from across many traditions, often involve (among many others): - Persistent, deliberate application of attention - Cultivation of specific energies, to try to achieve specific states of mind (somewhat, [see below](#practice-meditation--energy-practices)) - Cultivation and exaggeration of various emotions or feelings, but often quite varied, eg. intense urgency, calmness and deep relaxation, anxiety, or intense pleasure - By the same token, purposeful diminution of undesirable energies or states - Note that in some schools this can be very "cool" or aloof, whereas other schools are energetic and even passionate. Contemporary western meditators often tend towards coolness and drowsiness. - Repetitive movement, dance, drumming, or recitation of a short text or single syllable I'll note here that I have an unusual perspective on concentration, which I'll discuss at some length in the [next chapter](#wayfinding). Among westerners, especially those new to meditation, concentration evokes something narrowly "mental" (whatever that means), often specifically evoking a sensation of pseudo-*visual* attention, pointing as though *from the eyes* to a point in the body, even when eg. "attending to sensations in the body" with the eyes closed. I go into the complexity here [in more detail](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) later; just briefly, meditation is often not like this! I was once told by a Zen monk, that he had been taught that "meditation is something you do *with the body*." [See also below](#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices) re dynamic, *moving* body practices, used as meditation. (To be clear, this distinction varies somewhat in different extant traditions, and while eg. many of the practices described in the Pali canon align with this, it's not actually cut up this way, etc.) ## More on altered states {#practice-meditation--more-on-altered-states} As a broken record, I'll say again: "altered state" doesn't mean all that much, the term is used in varied enough ways that it's hard to say something consistent about the whole group, and it probably doesn't quite track a natural kind. In any case, yes, there's some broad swath of """states of consciousness""" (same problem with that term as well) which are familiar and within some range of ordinary experience, and there's, well, quite a bunch outside of that. Very briefly, some common features: - Altered or extremely intense experience of emotion - Bizarre combinations of emotion - Seeming ability to *directly* experience others' emotions - Note that with many of these, and this one especially saliently, many people report some variation of this at baseline, and are shocked that other people don't experience the world this way, etc. etc. (I'll also just note that these people still sometimes report states where this kind of empathy is much more intense than usual for them.) - Altered perception of normal phenomena: - Time moving extremely slowly or quickly - The world seeming to move under oneself while walking (rather than that one is moving) - The world, or individual objects seeming unreal, thin, or completely foreign - Perceiving the world (especially *seeing*) from outside one's body - Visions, sometimes hallucinations, - In some? reports, visions are described as "real" in a different way from ordinary experience, in any case I have the sense that people experiencing visions aren't quite "mistaken" about what's real in their physical surroundings, in the way that people having "hallucinations" might be. - FWIW I've also had experiences on psychedelics where I had stable physical-seeming visual hallucinations which I knew in the moment to be not real and was lucid about etc. This is to say I'm not sure what separates "hallucination" vs "vision" but they do seem pretty different, anyway. ## Purposeful modification of perception {#practice-meditation--purposeful-modification-of-perception} ::nogloss *See also: [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) and [hyperstition](#practice-practices--hyperstition)*. There's some cluster here, though this is my least standard category on this page. With substantial overlap with the other categories, these involve either trying to elicit, cultivate, or attenuate specific patterns of perception, usually oriented towards a fairly concrete intended state. For example: - Seeing some or all objects (broadly construed) as disgusting, unreliable, or valueless - Seeing some or all objects as holy, shining, or perfect - Cultivating positive regard, compassion, etc. - Attending to objects in such a way as to cause the perception of that distinct object to fade or break up - This is sometimes called *deconstruction*, some schools call this *vipassanā* (*vipaśyanā*). More broadly these are usually regarded (within these traditions) as trying to either realize the "true" perception (not quite how it's presented, but obviously confused [in my view](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism)), cultivate a more wholesome perception, or lay the ground for [insight](#practice-mysticism-awakening).
Vipassana, deconstruction, and "the way things are" Just as an initial note, *vipassana* also means at least three things, in this case I mean both Burmese vipassana (and -esque) deconstruction, but also sort of adjacent deconstructive techniques across Buddhism, maybe peripherally in other traditions entirely, though I'm much less familiar. Unfortunately this sense isn't really orthodox, but sort of has the most cachet among those that use that term.[^practice-meditation--vipassana] [^practice-meditation--vipassana]: Ok so in fact Goenka calls anapanasati "*vipassanā*" which is pretty straightforwardly wrong, but yes, now that's actually the thing most people have heard of, if they know the word 'vipassana' at all. Boohoo, Mahasi Sayadaw wasn't a lot more orthodox either but I'm less annoyed by calling that stuff vipassana. Deconstructive practices in particular are usually explained as arriving at a perception that's "more real," and often as "the *only* real perception"—I'm confident this is basically wrong in principle. One point here Burbea harps on often, to say that the perception of some phenomenon *as empty* (in that metaphysics, something like, phenomenally constructed, and contingent on mind as a causal input) is also empty. I'd make a separate point that views with less fabrication can't be said to be "more real," any moreso than than atoms are more real than horses. Maybe this is right *except* for nirvana in most models, but this is such an obtuse definition of real that it's not that meaningful, and probably misleading. Blah blah, if I were awakened maybe my stance would be different. (Except, oy vey, oy vey.)
(*See also about inquiry practices [below](#practice-meditation--misc-analysis-inquiry-etc), which often get lumped with vipassana, but don't belong here.*) ## "Meditative" body practices {#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices} ::gloss[*Body practices* use the body as the site of meditation, from slow walking meditation to Tai chi and "yoga."] Many traditions make use of "body practices," broadly construed this could include everything from placid walking meditation to "martial arts", not *totally* far off from Hong Kong kung fu movie fantasy. Walking meditation, for example, is sometimes taught as very calm and slow, even so slow (perhaps one step every 5-10 seconds) as to be hypnotic and engrossing—easy to see as similar in quality to stereotyped seated meditation. Walking meditation is also sometimes taught as relatively casual, but still within a regimented meditative context; IIRC some traditions teach walking meditation as almost a march, complete with synced group chanting. Monasteries in many traditions structure physical activity and work as meditative, and sometimes work is exaggerated, prolonged, or totally constructed as an excuse for "meditative" movement. These can sometimes be arbitrarily slow and methodical, or physically intense and invigorating. More broadly are practices like Tai chi, Chi Gong, or Zhan Zhuang, which besides involving cultivation and sensitization to energy ([see below](#practice-meditation--energy-practices)), most directly consist of finely choreographed sequences of body positions and their transitions, or just statically sustaining difficult standing postures, in the case of Zhan Zhuang. These bleed into other body practices which I'm less inclined to call *meditation* per se, but which are contiguous with "meditative" practices phenomenologically, and both interesting and an important part of some traditional[^practice-meditation--yoga-traditional] systems of spiritual training. Central here is obviously Asana Yoga; there's a variety of more exotic practices in Tibetan traditions that I know a lot less about. Very commonly, many traditions include some simple forms of movement into their ceremonies, eg. prostrations, as well as using these sorts of movements as extended practices in their own right, eg. at one time in Zen it was not uncommon for a young monk optionally to perform 10,000 prostrations, perhaps over some weeks. [^practice-meditation--yoga-traditional]: I've found some conflicting evidence as to the historicity of Asana Yoga, and of the continuity of modern lineages of Haṭha Yoga (IIRC, from which extant schools of asana are largely supposed to derive) with historical traditions. My current sense is that modern asana systems are probably <150 years old, with a lot of innovation in the last 100, but that there *were* some intensive physical yogic practices in India historically *anyway*, and some at least in nominally the same lineages that modern asana schools are supposed to derive from.

~~I can't recall the sources, but relevant keywords here as trailheads will be "ashtanga yoga" and "hatha yoga pradipika."~~ *see below:*

*Edit 2026-01-28*: I did some more reading on this recently and the above is broadly correct based on claims in Mark Singleton, 2010, *Yoga Body*; and Elliott Goldberg, 2016, *The Path of Modern Yoga*. The tl;dr here is that almost all extant schools of Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) go through one teacher in the early 20th century, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who adapted some existing indigenous exercise practices (which were never part of any yoga school) along with more traditional haṭha yoga practices, probably inspired substantially by some western currents in physical culture at the time, and maybe borrowing pieces wholesale.

There's more context, and there were people earlier both modernizing haṭha and doing versions of Sūrya Nāmaskar, though not yet being called yoga, but Krishnamacharya was probably the main point of synthesis; the more important point is that MPY has not *nothing* to do with historical haṭha but is a major break from it, and directly informed by western competitors, in the context of Indian nationalism.

I haven't been able to get an answer on what energy practices Krishnamacharya was teaching, and how closely these correspond to historical practices, or same for say Ashtanga Vinyasa (founded by one of Krishnamacharya's top students)—this seems like the more important question, as far as I'm concerned if there's a direct lineage re the energy stuff I'm down to just call this totally legitimate innovation within the tradition. In any case a lot of anglophone MPY doesn't teach energy stuff much at all anyway, so this is all muddied. (Also this seems to different from Foxen's claim, which I haven't read carefully yet.)

*Edit 2025-12-05*: I haven't read most of this book yet but I recently found Anya Foxen, 2020, *Inhaling Spirit*, which is a history of western yoga, and which claims confidently that most of the physical techniques, posture sets, etc. in modern yoga schools are derived from a series of related western traditions, and were variously either dressed up in ancient Indian garb later, or were folded into existing yogic traditions/techniques but from a western lineage. Asana is... complicated enough as a community and a concept that I won't try to break it down here, besides that I don't feel I understand it, actually. Briefly, in many modern schools (read: Western, or at least something like "adapted under the influence of Western modernization"), asana practice again consists of a choreographed sequence of postures and transitions, in many cases uncomfortable, intense, or even psychologically demanding, combined with energy techniques which are intended to purify the system. Some western asana schools are also much slower, gentler, and incline more towards relaxation and ease. Asana is centrally at least a kind of mindfulness practice, ostensibly practitioners are maintaining attention on the body as they move through each pose. Indeed, the less westernized schools usually insist that asana is meant to require fine attention and [embodiment](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--embodiment) to *work*. Besides just "mindfulness," many more intensive Yoga practitioners report some kinds of altered states, energy releases, etc., like those reported in more advanced levels of stereotypical seated meditation. Many schools also teach asana as being used in tandem with meditation, understanding the two to be mutually dependent in a system of practice. Even in the traditions most centrally organized around silent, seated practice, movement practices are still seen as contiguous with the rest of intensive spiritual practice, eg. IIRC there are reports of sudden awakening experiences occuring while performing prostrations[^practice-meditation--prostrations]. [^practice-meditation--prostrations]: I mean, also while performing all sorts of normal activities as well. ## Energy practices {#practice-meditation--energy-practices} ::gloss[*Energy practices* cultivate, manipulate, and develop sensitivity to *energy*, often in order to clear or purify the *energy body*.] *See also about [energetic phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) in general*. Energy practices involve sensitization to, and cultivation and manipulation of *energy*. Again please see the section linked above for a detailed description of the concept of energy. I mentioned above a number of such practices (Tai chi, Chi Gong, Zhan Zhuang, secondarily Asana Yoga), but more with respect to their gross physical aspects. Very broadly these practices are understood in their traditions to work partially by the energetic effects of the purely physical parts of the practice, but more importantly by purposefully, directly moving or clearing energy, purifying the energy body. Some are gentle, slow, and very progressive, whereas others are sensationally loud, uncomfortable, and intense. This is a large and diverse group, but for example some common specific practices involve circulating energy in specific patterns while moving through some energetically "robust" sequence of postures, and using the energy to move through the pattern of movements. Some energy practices also occur seated, or just the same lying down. Energy practices in stillness often have similar phenomenology to those practiced with movement, and some practices are taught first in movement and then transition at higher levels of skill to being primarily about the movement of energy, agnostic of physical movement. Again some seated energy practices are described as intense, invigorating, and sometimes very uncomfortable; *sometimes* these might be obviously perceptible to an outside observer, eg. clenched muscles, shuddering, etc., but often a practitioner will be perfectly still besides the cycle of breath, while they experience energy which is firey, roiling, or chaotic. ## Misc: analysis, inquiry, etc. {#practice-meditation--misc-analysis-inquiry-etc} ::nogloss This section is a bit of a grab-bag, though the practices and qualities I'll mention here each rhyme with one another somewhat. What I'm calling "analytical" practices mostly includes practices involving analysis of either the active phenomenal contents of experience, or of the causal structures generating specific patterns in experience. These often are oriented towards what's known as "deconstruction," which broadly involves some combination of a. cultivating perceptions of objects and processes as made of parts, b. separating those parts in perception, and c. inclining towards the phenomenal dissolution or decay of those parts of of sensations altogether. Adjacent here are also what's known in some western meditator circles specifically as "insight"[^practice-meditation--insight-vipassana] practice, from what I understand this means something like, "cultivating specific [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing), either to cultivate flexibility of the mind with respect to perception in general, or to lay the ground for spiritual insight." [^practice-meditation--insight-vipassana]: My understanding is that in this context "insight" is meant as *calque* of *vipassanā*. Other translations I've seen of *vipassanā* with respect to the canon are IIRC "discrimination" and maybe? "seeing through" and "penetrating analysis." See also the dropdown in the section [above](#practice-meditation--purposeful-modification-of-perception) for some more on vipassana. Less common, but surprising relative to some stereotypes of meditation, are also so-called "logical meditations" in eg. Tibetan Buddhism, which attempt to achieve insight, altered states, or specific qualities of perception by use of ostensibly rigorous *logical* analysis, eg. of an object's ultimate metaphysical un-reality, etc. *Inquiry* practices are adjacent as well, which most generally involve posing a question, and sometimes either struggling actively with the question, or letting it percolate through the mind. The most stereotyped instance would be koans in Zen, usually presented as paradoxical (or sometimes seemingly nonsensical) puzzles or questions. As I understand, koans are meant to be "solved" by achieving specific altered states, as in, each koan implicitly defines a state which is meant to be achieved by the practitioner, and from which the question or problem can be easily "answered". Inquiry practice in the "percolate through the mind" sense is often presented as using states of concentration, or altered states otherwise, to ask a question in a way which is uniquely existentially bright and vivid. Commonly also these practices are claimed to afford or give access to kinds of intuition and intelligence generally not available by ordinary reflection and thought. Broadly speaking, this cluster is oriented towards what's known as [insight](#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening) (unfortunately a different sense from "insight practice" above)—a term which ranges from "sudden understanding, in approximately the colloquial sense" to "gnosis of spiritual truth." ## Briefly on transformation, insight, and gnosis {#practice-meditation--briefly-on-transformation-insight-and-gnosis} *See also the following sections on [healing](#practice-healing) and [insight and awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening)*. "Meditation" (and whatever similar practices) in most traditional systems is understood as oriented towards spiritual *insight* and *transformation*. This is taught and practiced under a variety of models, but most often is meant to be achieved either by gradual cultivation of positive qualities, *or* the attainment of gnosis by means of altered states. In the case of gnosis, personal transformation is usually explained to occur because of some combination of a. newly seeing behaviors or objects as undesirable, faulty, or worthless; b. newfound peace, joy, and compassion; and c. most centrally a fundamental reorientation to value and goodness. Some traditions are basically whole-hog on "ultimate gnosis" as the only spiritual goal, but most include some combination of discipline, positive cultivation, and provisional insight as vital features of "[the spiritual path](#practice-paths)." Some contemporary western teachers often teach modern healing practices in combination with, or as part and parcel of meditation practice. From what I can tell this is almost entirely a modern innovation, which I [discuss later](#practice-healing-other-models--content-in-traditional-systems). ## Misc other considerations {#practice-meditation--misc-other-considerations} ### Meditation and posture {#practice-meditation--meditation-and-posture} Probably the singular defining stereotype of meditation is a person seated cross legged (🧘!), and people are often pretty confused about how "meditation" either traditionally or in general relates to posture. Most traditions whose practices we call "meditation" do use cross-legged postures seated on the floor, but many or most of them also use a variety of other postures, including reclining. In the most orthodox[^practice-meditation--canon] Buddhist canon[^practice-meditation--agamas], there are strictly speaking four "postures": sitting, standing, walking, or lying down. See also above re [movement practices](#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices). [^practice-meditation--agamas]: I didn't go check but this is the kind of thing that parallels really nicely in the Chinese Agama collection, so I'd be surprised if it weren't orthodox at least with respect to that *canon*, if not the extant traditions, and I'd guess the Tibetan canon(s?) also. Many contemporary western meditators conflate meditation with some notion of a practice of austere discipline, and in particular see bearing, and hopefully *transcending*, the discomfort of sitting upright on the floor for long periods, especially for westerners habituated to chairs and couches, as a display of virtue. I'd say here something like, I'm not gonna yuck your yum, but mostly I'm 👎 on this, and I also think this is quite a bit confusing matters, spiritually speaking. ### Meditation vs. prayer {#practice-meditation--meditation-vs-prayer} So, first off, *who cares*. In any case, most relevantly, there's quite a bit of overlap in the phenomenology of at least some reports, both from intermediate practitioners as well as in the extremes. Eg., there are reports of awakening that sound very similar, from practitioners doing canonical "meditation" practices, to those from others in completely unrelated traditions who describe their main practices as being those of "prayer" etc. A lot of this is contingent on whatever specific definitions we use, which again, *who cares*, though yes I did define prayer [in a certain way](#practice-practices--prayer) before. There are eg. some modern schools which teach this or that and call it "prayer," eg. IIRC some protestants (and maybe some catholics?) teach what they call "centering prayer," which is pretty straightforwardly just meditation. All good, as far as I'm concerned, tbc. The more interesting point here is that based on all the reports I've seen, it sure just seems like the space of possible states-of-mind is just large, and the space of possible spiritual practices is large. And so naturally you end up with lots of overlap between coincidental groupings, etc. --- # Introspection (and some "Transformative Practice") {#practice-introspection} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/introspection — also at `/md/practice/introspection.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-introspection--`.* Compared to the previous section on [meditation](#practice-meditation), I'd say introspection is quite a bit more illegible, mysterious, inscrutable, and idiosyncratic. For this reason I'll start with a methodological and ontological discussion, which will also serve to broaden the aperture of what introspection does or ought to include, and will run into discussions of specific mental motions, "techniques," etc. Apparently, there is experience, agnostic of a "mind" (and I [really am skeptical](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) of a lot of the intution that "mind" draws in), what we experience changes over time, and there are patterns to the "contents." Some of this is variously attributed to the procession of an external world, and some is usually attributed to some persistent generators of experience "on this side" of experience, again agnostic of the metaphysics of self or mind that a person uses[^practice-introspection--unusual-self]. [^practice-introspection--unusual-self]: To be fair actually, maybe not fully agnostic, as some people report some even more unusual metaphysics or phenomenology of self-and-world, eg. in altered states or as a result of [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening). And so, presumably, there's something to the effect of "states of mind" and "contents of experience," and, really more confusingly, there's something about *consciousness* or *attention*, or something. In any case, people often have beliefs and models about their experience, and can *"inspect"* their mind, and will report on all of this. Already we're in deep shit here. What's this consciousness thing? Is it about reflection? Why is reflection the thing that distinguishes experience? (Indeed, it seems like I can have experience without reflection... or wait, but how would I know? etc.) Qualia? Do we really have any idea what qualia are? I'm not taking this angle as a pointless stoner-thoughts jerkoff, but because I think stories about introspection, and especially those about what sorts of introspection [produce reliable knowledge](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) or not, are profoundly laden with assumptions about its causal structure. Again, I'll discuss more about the variety of systems of [metaphysics applied to phenomenology](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality), and their problems, later. However, I want to able to say really tightly, "ok, there is certainly a domain here, as best as I can be agnostic about its shape or inputs." ## Various reports of introspection {#practice-introspection--various-reports-of-introspection} The central, stereotypical notion of introspection in modern western culture involves something about "turning inwards" (often evoking closed eyes, with a stream of "mental imagery"), sometimes highlighting [somatics](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) in attention, and most often discursive thought which "inspects" or especially "analyzes" experience and memory. Common reports otherwise, of introspection (and related) in secular western culture: - Contemplation on one's memories, and especially coming up with explanations for the generators of one's emotions and behaviors - Often this is under a specific set of psychological theories, also often under direction of a therapist. - Often also, this is more like "trying to adjust or reframe perception and emotion, in order not to be disturbed by something." - "Journaling," which I might gloss for many cases as something like "telling stories to oneself, in writing, in a personal and emotive way' - Contemplation of emotions, whether active or elicited in response to memory Often introspection is sort of inscrutable and idiosyncratic, such that people can't really describe what it is they're doing when they "introspect," or at least the broader culture doesn't really have a vocabulary for it, and so people's descriptions end up bespoke and illegible. Most often people's intuitions about cognition revolve around the common phenomenology of deliberate application of *effort* to a question, or at least almost always "thought" is associated with a sensation that one's self is "doing" the thinking, in each moment. I'll note here that there are also fairly common reports of these qualities of *effort* and *doing* ceasing at times, or even ceasing altogether as part of [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening), usually along with claims that this phenomenology itself is also constructed or "fabricated" by the mind, and doesn't really track the underlying causal structure of thought and insight. This is a helpful place to start from to broaden the scope of "introspection." In particular, there's a fairly wide breadth of reports of experiences at least *adjacent* to, and pretty relevant to, introspection, which *don't* involve direct application of attention. First as an intuition pump: most people are familiar with the experience of working on a problem, whether a math problem, creative project, or interpersonal issue, really *working* on it consciously, not coming to a solution, and then having the answer come to them suddenly during some other activity, or especially upon waking. So the claim here is, "something something, the """mind""" is able to perform computation on subjects *outside of conscious attention*." There's fairly common reports here of various spiritual, meditative, or introspective practices producing some kind of, uh, *output*, without application of attention to the subject, and often immediately preceded by something unrelated, or by eg. meditation on the breath. Often also, these reports describe phenomena which result in internal changes, and which are available to attention, but are undirected and spontaneous. - Very commonly, [spiritual insight](#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening) occurring suddenly, spontaneously, and again without application of attention to the contents of the insight. - Sometimes meditation teachers will describe eg. [concentration practices](#practice-meditation--concentration) as "laying the ground for insight to occur spontaneously." - "Dreamwork," ie. practices of both interpretation of dreams but more saliently here psychological *transformation* which occurs during dreams - [Energetic openings](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) which settle and reconfigure the "body-mind," leading off powerful changes in behavior and perception, very often specifically described as not under conscious control or intervention - Sometimes these are even reported to *require* non-control to proceed. - These can be [sometimes sudden and sometimes very gradual](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism). Furthermore, often these are regarded as being unavailable to or separate from the "part of the mind" which uses verbal thought, meanwhile these reports usually describe a rich flow of intuition and *"knowing"* within the "body-mind". Introspection has a complicated relationship with movement, play, augmentation, self-modification, etc. Many practices aren't necessarily presented as "introspective" by that name, and include some messy combination of something like *modification*, and *observation* or *investigation*. We might want to restrict 'introspection' to "just observation," but boy golly, if ever there was a domain where observation muddied the objects being observed, this would be it. Below is some evocative palette of other common features of introspection and introspective practices: - Prompting and asking questions - Often "answering" these questions (so something like, "just answering as one would if asked directly"), but also often "waiting for an answer to come," very often reported as coming in feeling and images, rather than words - Reframing, deliberately telling stories, and eliciting or cultivating specific perceptions - (This is one of the central clusters within "transformative practice, but adjacent to introspection.") - Exploring personal [resonances](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance) - Eg. of aesthetics, but also often [imaginal](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice), archetypal, maybe something like "relational-affective," etc. Stereotypically, many kinds of artistic practice are deeply introspective in this sense. - This will probably annoy someone here, but eg. dance is for many people intensely introspective, moving through patterns of somatic resonances etc. - [Prayer](#practice-practices--prayer) and communing with spirits, depending on how we conceive of them - So even for those who construe prayer as literally-communcating-with-a-literal-being, there's often a substantial quality of exploring relational-affective postures with various figures. For those who construe prayer in a ~materialist frame, which I mostly do, then even moreso this belongs here. - Exploration of just about everything described in the previous section on [somatic phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) #### Partswork, briefly {#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly} ::gloss[*Partswork* refers to practices that work with *parts*, persistent subpersonalities with distinct or conflicting motivations.] *Partswork*, also *parts work*, refers to a cluster of practices oriented around working with *parts*, generally understood as something like "persistent subpersonalities with distinct or conflicting motivations." Partswork by that name originated with Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy, IIRC in the late 80's, but those concepts, and similar practices, have branched much further. The IFS model has a fairly tight schema of parts with relatively stereotyped relationships. IIRC later systems sometimes describe different or more granular schemas, but often do away with most of the details of the IFS model, describing more organic or nebulous dynamics of relationships between parts. Some derivative systems also describe parts as permeable and ephemeral, where IFS mostly sees them as relatively stably persistent, though capable of evolving. Reports from practitioners here centrally feature discovering structurally reinforcing patterns of internal emotional reaction between different parts. Stereotyped patterns here might be eg. one part which feels fearful, lazy, or alone, and another part which reacts to that, and berates "the person" (again, with varying phenomenology reported) or that part. Another stereotyped pattern reported would be eg. parts which hold clusters of emotion or sensation at bay, or which hold a certain social posture in order to "protect" other parts, or the person altogether. Most of the partswork reports describe that these patterns present initially introspectively opaquely, or often with no clear introspective access to (what they later regard as) the underlying dynamics, but only in terms of gross effects in behavior or motivation. While I think partswork is a very generative frame, and I myself, and lots of people I know, have gotten a lot of value out of it, it's very unclear to me to what extent it tightly tracks the """underlying structure of the mind,""" as opposed to the reported phenomenology being *constructed* to align with the framework, when someone practices under it. Along the same lines, it's also not clear if it's an invariant in human psychology in general, or an artifact of modern western culture.[^practice-introspection--weird-invariant] I'll discuss this more re [metaphysics and phenomenology](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) and "[introspective epistemology](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation)." [^practice-introspection--weird-invariant]: Note that some hippy healer types claim that these kinds of models *are* particular to western culture, and that historical, uh, "traditional" cultures would largely never have had these kinds of problems. ## Introspection, thought, self-models, and "the unconscious" {#practice-introspection--introspection-thought-self-models-and-the-unconscious} ::nogloss Many of those examples are moreso of *transformative practices*, or at least the fruits of such practices, but they're very informative for making inferences about the structure of the mind, even if they're not quite centrally "introspection" per se. Along with this, it's helpful then to distinguish between, say, "internal exploration" and something like "propositional verbal modeling." So, often the image we have of introspection is of a process of primarily deliberative verbal reflection and contemplation, which ostensibly directly (?) produces knowledge about oneself—I want to widen a lot from this. A person, in general, has experiences throughout their life, and their ongoing internal and external reactions in life are a kind of elicitation of the structure and contents of the "mind." Variously, *existential impressions* are left by different experiences, and the content of these impressions are elicited in different contexts. What's only somewhat unusal about these kinds of weirder introspective practices is more just that they're deliberately internally elicited. Often, introspective practices will use language as a "handle" or "hook" into the mind, agnostic of, or playful with, the *truthfulness* of some utterance. Salient here would again be Gendlin's Focusing, which is a practice in which a person uses verbal prompts and verbal investigation to introspect, checked *against* their [resonances](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance). A friend of mine also describes what he calls "existential trolling," which uses deliberately provocative or contentious prompts, to check for internal resistance or objection. Insofar as someone is concerned with producing accurate and truthful models, they can actually do that modeling in parallel, or even separately, from their main introspective practices, which can be much wackier[^practice-introspection--magick]. In general though, introspection (or *whatever*) is very often oriented towards change and catharsis, *or* a kind of "existential knowing," really agnostic of almost any epistemic claims about the structure of the mind. (There's still problems there, which [I'll discuss later](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice).) In fact, robust introspective practices in the circles I run in very commonly will take many tacks at an individual question or issue, and triangulate what's going from the variety of conflicting or at least multifacted internal responses. So, these practices often have a flow of back and forth between the nominal "answers" which some technique elicits (whether explicitly in words, or otherwise), and one's sense of the underlying generators. [^practice-introspection--magick]: So the extreme here being the large cluster often called "magick," which I'd gloss, maybe unfairly, as something like "incantations using arbitrary systems of symbols, for resonance, personal transformation, and enacting agency" I'm harping on this point about introspection besides verbal "investigation" also to highlight what I think is confused in a variety of conceptions of "the unconscious," and how those relate to something like "introspective accessibility." So, saliently, often one person might have some emotional dynamic which they are aware of only in terms of its effects, but which they regard as "unconscious," where another person (or the same person, after some time) might say "no no, I recognize the same process in myself, and I have vivid introspective access, it's just not necessarily verbal." (And, for that matter, it's not always clear what "verbal introspective access" might have meant, anyway.) Often in particular this is substantially about developing fine internal sensitivity; again for more on this see the whole page on [somatic phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics) for descriptions of a lot of the relevant kind of sensitivity. Very relevant here also will be reports of [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening), which while not quite central to "introspection," are still clearly about insight into the structure of one's experience, though usually claimed as of experience in general. Part of the question I'm weaving in and out of here, which I'll [discuss more later](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation), is about what kinds of introspection produce useful or reliable knowledge. Often cultures, personalities, or systems of metaphysics that prefer verbal contemplation over other kinds of introspection, hold views approximately to the effect of "correct knowledge comes from careful modeling, hypothesizing, and experimentation, and 'direct knowing' is suspect." *It's a bit hard to address this broad group of objections, and any specific argument I make would likely sound like a strawman to anyone individually. Anyway, if you are at least sympathetic to the above depiction, maybe take this as gesticulating, and try to infer what my version of this argument would be for your specific case.* Firstly, I'd say this creates a bizarre separation with oneself. The unfair depiction, which I think really is accurate to some people, is shaped like "*I* am the part of the mind which performs the investigation, whereas the *rest* of my mind is the part I do investigation upon, and which is separate from *me*." More importantly, though, I'd say that introspection needs a kind of raw *contact*, and that verbal contemplation, especially upon memory, is really more like "theorizing," rather than properly *investigating* the domain. Again see [more discussion of this later](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation).
More on this point I think that some people take introspection to be bunk, because *most "introspection" they ever observe* is basically *confabulation*. So while in principle I might buy something like, "verbal contemplation, hypothesizing, and experimentation" as a model for understanding the mind (at least at some level), in practice the "sit and think about it" kinds of "introspection" often come very quickly to some kind of explanation... and then just stop there. The introspection-skeptical I think are often tracking this dynamic, and conclude, "nah bro, that's bs."
One last point here: introspection again sterotypically is something basically private, quiet, and which usually happens in stillness. Perhaps this isn't *centrally* "introspection", but broadly speaking I'd say that *enacting* one's values, or self-image, or whatever, is just the same contiguous with just "touching into them." So the examples I gave above re say dance are decent ones here, but more generally *embodying* one's values in the world is often both an expression of *and* part of an investigation into one's values. There are many reports of people being engages in a process of transformation and self-exploration over many years, some of which happens privately and quiety, and some of which happens very much in public, and yet with many revisions and turnings-over. (And also, not to reify "values" here, but this point is inclusive of identity, [mystical-transcendant wisdom](#practice-mysticism-awakening), wacky [somatic content](#practice-phenomenology-somatics), and everything else.) --- # Content, Healing, and Integration {#practice-healing} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/healing — also at `/md/practice/healing.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-healing--`.* :::note[*Epistemic status: opinionated, non-consensus, but mostly descriptive*] I present here a somewhat opinionated cross-section of reports and models in this space. I'll describe a critique of these perspectives in [the next section](#practice-healing-criticizing-trauma), after that I'll contrast them with [other perspectives](#practice-healing-other-models). I'll also discuss models that I [endorse more strongly](#wayfinding) later. ::: *See also: [Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma), [The Structure of Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-structure-trauma), [Trauma Smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells), and [Culture, Taboo, and Trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture).* I defined trauma earlier as something like "pathological changes in psychology as a result of adverse experiences." In this section I'll talk about broadly something to the effect of the *ceasing* of dysphoria and dysfunction, and centrally of the *removal* or *resolution* of their generators. This of course already relies on some assumptions about a. the identification of some pattern as undesirable and usually pathological, and b. its etiology. There's nuance with each of these which I leave implicit here, I discuss some of this more later re "[introspective epistemology](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation)." ## Psychological content {#practice-healing--psychological-content} ::gloss[*Psychological content* refers to psychological, somatic, and existential residue left by adverse experience.] Most models here use some notion of *generators* (never by that name), namely usually of some disruption or intrusion which is regarded as causally upstream of some psychological changes. I'll refer to the generators involved in sustaining traumatic changes, at least in my own conception, as *psychological content*, sometimes *material*, and especially just *content*. So, "content" here presumes a model, though thankfully it's wildly less laden than 'trauma.' The stereotyped story goes like this: - Alice has a traumatic experience, eg. has an abusive relationship. - She is disturbed in general for some time, and continues to feel fearful towards men indefinitely. - She "processes" these experiences, this is stereotypically cathartic and emotive, especially including revisiting specific memories and feelings associated with her disturbance. - Her previous disturbance has ended, and she is able to hold a more "mature" relationship to herself, male peers, and potential future partners. In this kind of story, Alice's ongoing disturbance is *due to* some content which needs to be "processed," and the disturbance ceases once that content is "worked through." The reports of the phenomenology associated with this kind of story align nicely with this notion of content. In particular, these reports often describe that some feeling, or bolus of [feeling-and-belief](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--meaning-and-resonance), was lurking underneath the surface level traumatic responses, which can eventually be relatively cleanly excised, resolving the entire traumatic pattern. (See more below re [metabolism](#practice-healing--metabolism) and [releases](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings).) To be clear, reports of this kind of "underlying clump of content" often don't mean that a person is continuously in distress, or that there's continuously available loud sensations in that clump. Often some cluster of feeling might only be available when elicited or triggered, or might be available to introspection usually only as a [blockage](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockage). In any case, in these reports and models, there is a generator which *persists*, agnostic of the specific phenomenology, or how sensationally active the somatic correlates of the generator are. Note that often the surface level presentation of some psychological content might be [fairly subtle](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells), and that the metabolism of content, while *often* intensely emotive, can also be progressive and relatively gentle. This is not the only kind of story one encounters being called "healing," and many stories about trauma and healing will take features a la carte from various models in the broader culture. I'll discuss various different models in use and in the discourse throughout this section, and ones I'm [less sympathetic to](#practice-healing-other-models) separately. Note also that these sorts of "models" are much more like intuition pumps for practitioners (and often for eg. therapists) rather than nice predictive causal models in the sense we would use ordinarily in "science." ## Metabolism {#practice-healing--metabolism} ::gloss[Psychological/somatic *metabolism* refers to the processes by which experience arises and ceases, and specifically of residue being cleared or "processed."] Most of these models refer implicitly or explicitly to a notion of psychological or emotional *metabolism*, also commonly eg. "processing emotions." Indeed, let's say, one has a varied palette of emotions or moods, and correlated clusters of perception and behavior. And, distinctly, emotions pass! Emotions and "psychological states" clearly have something to do with external circumstances, but also with our relationship to them. In any case, most often, emotions arise in response to some circumstance, and then decay or are replaced, variously organically, smoothly, abruptly or chaotically. This sort of process is stereotypically glaring when observing children, who can be inconsolable one minute, and peaceful or excited literally the next minute. Adults still have this basic pattern of arising-and-decay, and it's very difficult to imagine what a person would be like if they were missing either half of that cycle. Besides someone being *aroused* more readily or more intensely, some people often *hold on* to emotions for longer than others. As well, some emotions are more intense or sustained, and decay with greater difficulty. Many modern western theories of trauma and healing make claims along the lines that trauma is due to *interruption* in the natural process of emotional metabolism. The claim here often goes like: "when things are going well, disturbance, regardless of how intense, passes through the system with enough time. What distinguishes trauma is that for whatever reason this process fails or stops, and the disturbance forms a cyst of dysphoria which festers and inflames the rest of the [body-mind](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-the-system)." Often in these sorts of models, emotional metabolism is believed to require some appropriate social-emotional context; stereotypically this is described from the perspective of a child, and so the corresponding "healthy" context is connection with a warm and compassionate caregiver. (See also briefly re some [empirical critiques](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--weird-developmental-psychology-otherwise) of this sort of perspective.) Also common here then are claims that this context can be reenacted (in some sense) with a therapist performing some narrow subset of the role of a caregiver, or of a person being able to "reparent themselves," simulating this kind of social-[energetic](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) quality "internally." Similarly there are reports from eg. fairly traditional religious adherents of getting this quality[^practice-healing--orthwein] from eg. worship of Mary[^practice-healing--lazarus], or Guan Yin. [^practice-healing--orthwein]: See also from [Jake Orthwein on Twitter](https://x.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1636599327257948164):
My first experience of doing IPF directly gave rise to the intuition that attachment-related injuries are in fact basic injuries of existential meaning, experienced (in theistic terms) as alienation from god
(I had some similar experiences spontaneously, while working with the [image](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice) of a Bodhisattva.) [^practice-healing--lazarus]: There's an amazing series on Youtube of interviews with a Coptic Christian monk, originally from Tasmania and now a hermit in the Sinai desert, [Fr. Lazarus ElAnthony](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5mgNHV-EAk&list=PLFF0AE2889CB3EA46&index=21). He has some nice reports of his practices of Mariolatry, though he's perhaps not *fully* traditional as he wasn't raised in the church, but I've found similar reports from more traditional Orthodox Christian sources.

(Unfortunately the playlist is a bit messed up, so this link starts at "season 1", but the sequence is sort of out of order.) A common claimed causal history for these interruptions is parental absence, or weak or absent parental [attunement](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--attunement), but interruptions to emotional metabolism are meant to be possible under a variety of other circumstances. Commonly reported here are: - Cases where emotional expression is restricted or punished in a household or broader culture - Cases of social rejection more broadly, especially when not "offset" by an open and welcoming social context for that person elsewhere - Cases where a trauma is unspeakable or is refused by a person's family or local community, eg. very often in cases of rape - Acute trauma otherwise, especially under chaotic circumstances where there is no stable safety to be found for some time Furthermore, a very popular claim in some pop-therapy circles, as well as among western meditators and broadly "spiritual" types, is that modern western culture is ~uniquely bad with respect to affording metabolism. First off, this smells more like an instance of the "Garden of Eden," (see [an appendix](#appendix-garden-of-eden)) rather than a plausible empirical claim about the distribution of emotional health and robustness in historical or "traditional" cultures. Still, this touches on a central theme of this whole book, about the relationship between culture, "health," and spirituality. I'll [discuss later](#spiritual-truth-truth--culture-and-spiritual-truth) some specific aspects of this question. Some common reports of the phenomenology of emotional metabolism: - Nebulously felt relief - [Energy](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy) (in sense #2 linked) moving - Sometimes reported as moving through specific or predictable contours of sensation - Sometimes, releases or movement of qi (see link above) - "Catharsis" - This is the term I'm using for the standard stereotyped loudly emotive, often vulnerable, kind of metabolism. - Sometimes reported as moving through a specific *sequence* of emotions or views, at least when metabolizing whatever specific emotion etc. - Nebulously felt or perceived *reorientation* of meaning and social-energetic posture ([see below](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings)) - Often this is present as a feature, but by itself I wouldn't quite call this metabolism. - Specific images or memories being elicited, and arousing strong emotions associated with them - Bigger or more intense releases ([see below](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings)) "Catharsis" stereotypically is not just about vulnerable and loud emoting, but usually distinctly about emoting which results in relief and satsifaction. Sometimes "healing" gets used to mean this sort of catharsis *without* reference to any model of the ceasing of generators of dysphoria, or else with a very weak sense of such a model. Broadly I think this is basically not an appropriate use of the word 'healing.' Often in this context people will talk about "processing emotions," I'll say this is used to mean at least half a dozen different things, some of which I wouldn't call metabolism at all, and usually used without any clarity as to the phenomenology it's supposed to refer to. In any case, *often* it means some combination of the above. Also, often "processing emotions" means something more focused or deliberate, rather than passive or ambient. It's also not clear to me what the relationship is between catharsis in this sense and metabolism more broadly. I've occasionally encountered claims that metabolism *requires* loud catharsis, though my sense is that this isn't even clearly true for small children, let alone for adults—though this might be directionally true, or helpful [as a prescription](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality--practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views) relative to the ordinary *performance* of adult emotional regulation. ## Releases and openings {#practice-healing--releases-and-openings} ::nogloss *See also [Somatic Phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics), especially the sections on [dissocation](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--dissociation) and [blockages and releases](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockages-releases-and-somatization).* ::gloss[An *opening* is a shift in behavior and felt affordances, where some way of seeing or being becomes available.]{#practice-healing--opening} *Release* and *opening* have somewhat overlapping usage; the former broadly speaking refers to somatic releases, whereas the latter can refer to the same but more centrally refers to shifts in behavior and felt affordances or optionality in behavior, life choices, etc. I won't mostly repeat descriptions of the phenomenology of somatic releases, see sections linked above. For "openings", reports that use this language often revolve around energetic, "psychological," and behavioral shifts downstream of a variety of kinds of "healing" (often also not using a "healing" frame, however.) Most often this involves specific [ways of seeing](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) and ways of being becoming available where they were previously flat, thin, aversive, or absent. Common features of reports of openings include, again overlapping with the reports of releases: - Discovering and disrupting somatic patterns, sometimes described as eg. "contraction" or "collapse," which block off the normal or desirable flow and expression of some energy, eg. confidence and verve, sexual desire, vulnerability, etc. - Some domain of meaning or swath of emotions which had been made *under*-salient or overly thin (something like, "phenomenally [dereified](#metaphysics-reification--dereification-in-general)"), newly becoming richly available - Changes in the weighting or salience of various domains or affordances in one's life and experience; very often softening some previously hyper-salient domain, eg. specific work relationships, expectations of achievement, or burdensome responsibility to family - Local or global relaxation of chronic somatic tension, both gross muscular tension and subtle energetic tension - Changes in affect and manner perceptible to ordinary friends and family, often described as eg. gentler, richer, more confident, or *brighter* Behavioral changes associated with openings, in reports which use that language, are generally not associated with some discrete "decision" or verbal reflection, but are often indirect, unexpected, and progressive. While some of the most popularly advertised healing systems often claim clean and simple stories of metabolism and openings, many reports from practitioners who I take seriously are *much* more complicated, indirect, messy, and unpredictable. I'll discuss this [in much more detail](#wayfinding) later. Often both openings and releases come with a step down in dissociation, whether local or global; sometimes changes in dissociation can either precipitate openings or conversely can be caused by them. Changes in dissociation can be pleasant or painful, ranging from soft, gentle, lovely (if often still sad), to chaotic and violent, eg. reports fairly often describe screeching, blood curdling pain, or wracking sobs. Openings are also sometimes chaotic *and* pleasurable, and many other surprising variations. Releases and openings are often reported to be disruptive to a person's relationships and general functioning, at least for periods of time. Where some pattern of restriction and dissociation was load-bearing, perhaps because it eg. held some intense negative emotions at bay, or because it allowed a person to remain amenable to people in their existing relationships, removing it can add chaos to that person's life or lead to the collapse of some relationships. (This is a more common report than one would expect just based on the, uh, "marketing materials" for spiritual and transformative practice. I discuss this [in more detail later](#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities--nonmonotonicities).) Even when not expected to be disruptive to this extent, many models which make reference to "openings" prescribe that a person has to capitalize on an opening, and something like *actualize* it in their relationships and agency in the world. Actualization can be more or less functional and healthy, but even healthy cases can still be disruptive, and healthy cases are broadly contiguous with those of major disruptive openings. At least sometimes reported here are things getting very intense, and often very weird. Among these: - Revealing, at least to oneself, long-held snarls of motivation, or tucked away obsessions with some taboo - Bizarre and horrifying imagery of violence or body horror, eg. of violence done to oneself or others - What's sometimes called "shamanic sickness"—prolonged pseudo-physical illnesses caused or at least *opened up* by healing practices, rather than resolved by them - "Critters," energies or extra-personal psychologies found implanted or lodged in one's [body-mind system](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-the-system) - (Adjacent, also "entities," AFAICT this refers to what are reported as "external minds" found in a person's body-mind) See more on [this cluster specifically](#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity) later. While this domain seems like it must be "native" for humans, this whole broad *flavor* of report (openings in general, and maybe weird stuff especially) feels pretty modern, in my mind dating maybe to the 80's. Still I think it's right in broad strokes, and not a coincidental innovation of whatever recent culture. While conceived of very differently, IIRC I've found many of these contours reported, at least here and there, in traditional and historical sources cutting across traditions. ### Energy work and "energy healing" {#practice-healing--energy-work-and-energy-healing} ::gloss[*Energy work* refers to practices, "internally" or "externally" on another person, of variously unwinding, adjustment, cultivation, transmission, or manipulation of *energy*.] *Again, see also on [energy](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy).* Reports of releases are *stereotypically* intense, and indeed the easiest experiences to tell stories about are the intense ones, but many releases and movements of energy are subtle or even quite faint. Much of the work leading up to and surrounding big releases is described as more like subtle and intricate. As well, some people report that their practice is basically progressive and gentle with no major hiccups, or at least *mostly* so. See more later on [gradualism and suddenism](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism). This sort of "intricate" healing practice is distinctive of what's most often known as *energy work*; also adjacent here is *energy healing*. Energy work generally includes practices, both "internal" (by one person on, or *in* themselves), and "external" (by a healing practitioner on a client or, ugh, *patient* or whatever), working with phenomena under both qi and subtle somatics (see link above for energy). External energy healing practices most often involve touch, sometimes massage, sometimes with application of a good deal of force, but most often with just very gentle and light touch. These are generally reported to be mostly about movement and interaction of energy in the healer's body-mind with the client's, and indeed some schools teach healing practices which involve no touch at all, and may be practiced anywhere from a distance of a few inches from the client's body, to across a continent.[^practice-healing--reiki] [^practice-healing--reiki]: Just have to toss in here, the "across a continent" ones really do boggle the mind, and I'm basically just like nah bro about these claims. Also to clarify, this isn't even like "can be done over the phone," sometimes the claim is literally like, "I can tune in to their energy body from any distance and do work on them from where I am." Internal practices are usually explained to work on similar principles, and often with similar or tightly aligned reports. Many schools teach some combination of both, usually with a healing practitioner being required to be adept in internal practices in order to practice *on* clients. Most centrally, at least to my mind, both internal and external energy healing practices feature qualities phenomenologically of spacious attention and "coaxing." The former means something like "co-attention," or eg. there's commonly claims that the attention and energetic *space* of a healer affords a client's [system](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-the-system) to soften or move as needed.[^practice-healing--business] The latter means something like gently inclining the system to unravel or release—even when applying a fair amount of physical force via massage, my sense is there's generally here a quality of gentleness or "careful energetic attunement," eg. as opposed to "energetic contradiction" etc. [^practice-healing--business]: Sometimes I describe this as "letting the system do its business." There are some claims here that the energetic system of a healing practitioner can convey some information to a client about what energetic/somatic affordances exist, or a way of being with energy already arisen, *or* to impart a specific energy which is absent or unavailable for the client. Any of these will sometimes get called "transmission," or "a transmission," which unfortunately means a few other things in other contexts as well. Unfortunately, "energy work" also refers to healing practices with something of the opposite quality, namely purposefully, forcefully moving energy, or adding some energy to the system in an effort to budge the configuration this way or that. See also here briefly re [energy practices](#practice-meditation--energy-practices), in that context moreso with respect to "meditation." The extreme end of this I would describe as trying to *blast* the system with energy, reports of these sorts of practices (eg. many kinds of "breathwork") describe being overwhelmed with energy, pushing out or rapidly clearing most other sensations or emotions present. Adjacent to this category are also practices to the effect of purposefully putting the system under "energetic stress," so adding some energy that's intense or difficult to be with, or in physical postures which are energetically challenging, and working with those. There's a wide range here, most of which I'm not that familiar with. ### Releases and verbalization, "nominal content" {#practice-healing--releases-and-verbalization-nominal-content} *See also on [introspection and verbalization](#practice-introspection--introspection-thought-self-models-and-the-unconscious).* Releases and openings often have a complicated relationship with nominal content, and especially verbal expression. Again, the stereotyped Hollywood image of cathartic healing involves some very straightforward correspondence between felt emotion, emotional expression, "underlying generators" (usually implicit), verbal introspection, and verbal *expression*. In practice, in the reports *I* take seriously, every linkage in this network can be distorted, opaque, inverted, or completely obfuscated, including to the person introspecting. By my sense, often verbal expression is confabulated, larped, or improv'd in the moment, and some expression might be [resonant](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance) partially, but still felt strongly. More generally, very very commonly in the therapy literature, and in reports from modern solo "healing" practitioners, the presenting symptoms and reports can have fairly little to do with the content of the underlying generators, as evaluated much further along in some healing journey. Correspondingly, the same is true for someone's apprehension of some disturbed or dysfunctional pattern, as well as both their private stories about it *and* their expressions about it, regardless of how emotive or strongly felt. Separately, there's also often a feedback loop between openings and expressions: in many reports, openings will lead to shifts in self-understanding, which might precipitate some big verbal expression, and conversely there are surprising or momentous verbal expressions which precipitate big releases. (All of this is agnostic of the "accuracy" or truth value of any particular verbal expression.) ## Integration {#practice-healing--integration} ::gloss[*Integration* refers to processes which result in psychological robustness, maturity, and non-compartmentalization.] *Integration* refers to processes oriented towards, and relative outcomes of, something like psychological robustness, maturity, and non-compartmentalization. I feel actually a bit unclear about this concept and more sparsely read here, but it's still pretty fundamental, and I have some useful to say. Most often I see this term used to refer to what I might very loosely want to distinguish as four features: 1. Somatic integration 2. Mature relationship with traumatic experiences 3. Mature and robust relationship with taboo subjects 4. Lack of inner conflict Related to all of these, 'to integrate' often gets used to mean, very generally, "to allow psychological/emotional learnings to percolate," or "to synthesize new perspectives and orientations from something one has learned." More centrally, integration is used in the context of reports of discovering and reworking "dys-integration" (my term), or "dyscoordination" (oy, sorry) across the body-mind. Reports here often describe unraveling the compartmentalization or even shunning of [parts](#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly), swaths of the body, [domains of meaning](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--smells-in-particular-not-exhaustive), etc. The claim usually made by practitioners making these reports is that harmonious, functional behavior, social relating, and existential grounding all rely on communication and coordination throughout and across parts of the mind. Often the claim is that proper integration causes parts and emotional patterns to re-cohere, contributing to a fluent, "whole" experience of self and being. #### Somatic integration {#practice-healing--somatic-integration} *Somatic integration* broadly is used to mean a. somatic healing, mostly the same as the kinds of practices and experiences described above in [releases and openings](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings), and b. re-[embodiment](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--embodiment), most often in the context of a., with a priority on integrating somatic phenomena with the rest of attention and experience. Sometimes this means a variety of different kinds of [body practices](#practice-meditation--meditative-body-practices), which might be explicit "bodywork" or energy work, or might mean explicit attentional + physical embodiment practices, eg. Tai chi etc. More broadly the notion here is usually about developing the relationship between attention, emotion, and somatics to be more "whole," more cooperative, fluent, etc. #### Mature relationship with traumatic experiences {#practice-healing--mature-relationship-with-traumatic-experiences} This often means largely something like "healed," but with a specific priority on again something like robustness and maturity, often a gloss here might be "robustly and thoroughly healed." The claim here is often something like, "there exists incomplete healing which still has distinctive trauma smells, as distinct from a completed healing process (which we call 'integrated.')" Usually the trauma smells here would be a very exaggerated sensitivity to the possibility of harm in some domain, or a disgust or rejection of that domain in general, or a tendency to have one's hackles raised with respect to that domain or with respect to one's relationship with it. In contrast, an "integrated" relationship with some trauma is often depicted as "grounded" or "clean," even if there's a much deeper sensitivity and care for that specific kind of harm. This is sort of presumptive of the answers to some spiritual questions, and often these claims are overstated as far as I'm concerned, but I think this is directionally right. #### Robust relationship with taboo {#practice-healing--robust-relationship-with-taboo} ::nogloss *(Again see some [context on taboo](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture--taboo-and-superstition) in general.)* The take here is usually something like, taboos in general create a kind of internal flinch or censorship, and that while relatively functional, especially for a society as a whole, this is still in a way "incomplete" or "brittle." Eg., taboos against feces often both track real concerns re disease risk, but also construct a reified cordoned-off domain of the world, at least for many people in many cultures. So then the claim is that this is psychologically distortive, and that even if one still practices hygiene re eg. disease transmission from feces, the structure of taboo around it "needs to" be integrated, in this sense. And then, the claim here is broader, so feces is easier to explain because the taboo is relatively weaker and simpler, but I've seen many claims from practitioners about similar harmful knots psychologically/​spiritually/​somatically with respect to eg. a variety of kinds of taboos against sexuality, politicized taboos, etc. More "dys-integrated" here would include reports, which are common from at least some kinds of practitioners, of exaggerated, contorted, or inverted relationships with taboos. The central example here (if contentious) would be at least some kinds of kink/BDSM, which I'll [discuss later](#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity). This kind of integration is also often connected to other kinds of internalized censorship (regardless of my using the word 'taboo' for this subsection.) Eg., many cultures strongly censure both gross physical violence but also overt aggressive verbal expression, and there are many reports of people needing to unravel and "integrate" trauma-smelly patterns around controlling impulses to anger and violence. This type of practice, very broadly, is often known as "shadow work." #### Lack of inner conflict {#practice-healing--lack-of-inner-conflict} There are many reports of practitioners coming to serious contemplative practice due to intense internal conflicts, or discovering these in the course of their practice. Reports here look like: - Being one's own slavedriver, especially to strenuous internal objection - Persistently punishing oneself for some undesired behavior - Struggling with some undesired behavior and constantly falling off the wagon - Feeling trapped in a relationship and wanting to express discomforts or objections, but always holding back - (This could be understood as more of an internalization of the punishments of an abuser or abusive dynamic, but is still relevant here.) And then integration in this sense means the relative absence of this quality. Note while they're sort of contiguous, this kind of pattern is meaningfully separate from ordinary negotiation of competing goals and desires. Snarls involving internal conflict can get seemingly arbitrarily weird, see [some context on partswork](#practice-introspection--partswork-briefly), and more later on [weird patterns](#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity) discovered in practice. --- # Criticizing Somatics-and-Trauma Models {#practice-healing-criticizing-trauma} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/healing/criticizing-trauma — also at `/md/practice/healing/criticizing-trauma.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-healing-criticizing-trauma--`.* --- # Other Models of Healing {#practice-healing-other-models} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/healing/other-models — also at `/md/practice/healing/other-models.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-healing-other-models--`.* ## Secular western therapy {#practice-healing-other-models--secular-western-therapy} ## Content in traditional systems {#practice-healing-other-models--content-in-traditional-systems} ::nogloss ## Misc. {#practice-healing-other-models--misc} ### "Positive" healing {#practice-healing-other-models--positive-healing} ### Somatics *only* {#practice-healing-other-models--somatics-only} --- # Mysticism and Awakening {#practice-mysticism-awakening} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/mysticism-awakening — also at `/md/practice/mysticism-awakening.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-mysticism-awakening--`.* I'll use the term *mysticism* to refer primarily to traditions and practices of transcendence and gnosis, and secondarily to contact with the supernatural. There isn't quite a consistent definition in the broader discourse, so this definition is very slightly opinionated.
More on the term *mystic* The term 'mystic' comes from the Ancient Greek *mystikós*, probably from *mýstēs*[^practice-mysticism-awakening--oed-mystic], originally referring to an intiate in ancient "mystery religions," which were secret (at least in the sense that their practices were secret) cults in Ancient Greece and Rome. *Mýstēs* itself is from a word meaning "shut," and further both "hidden" and "secret." The term was used by Pseudo-Dionysius, an early church father writing in the 6th century, in describing a theology and practice of union with God, drawing on an earlier Greek pagan mystical tradition.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--dionysius] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--oed-mystic]: [OED](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/mystic_n?tab=etymology) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--dionysius]: It's maybe contentious whether Pseudo-Dionysius was drawing his whole theology from Neo-Platonism or if it was an innovation within Christianity, and maybe even whether 'mystical' came directly from either the mysteries or Neo-Platonism at all. See Louis Bouyer 1963. *The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers*, pp. 406-407 In practice, both in academic work and in modern mystical writing, 'mystical' is used in varied enough ways that it doesn't communicate a lot narrowly, out of context. This is obviously letting alone the colloquial usage which doesn't mean a lot more than "magical" and "spooky." In general it tends to mean something like "union with God," or "gnosis of ultimate reality beyond ordinary apprehension", but this bleeds into what's more often known as "occultism" which usually revolves around ritual magic and interpretation of symbols. "Mysticism" is also often used to refer generically to the practices and experiences of altered states or even just unusual perception, achieved by religious or spiritual practice, or psychedelics.
Unfortunately, "mysticism" gets invoked variously explicitly by name, or by vibes, in a variety of contexts, to describe a variety of experiences with messy or dubious relationships to one another. Agnostic of the use of the term 'mystical,' especially by someone making a given report, what characterizes experiences in this cluster is, in my view, basically the interpretation of some experience as disclosing otherwise hidden knowledge about reality, [the sacred](#practice-practices--the-sacred), or the nature of value. In particular, I've encountered lots of reports of similar experiences of eg. being profoundly moved by beauty or connection, which some people experience as mundane, and others as *transcendent*, or as *more real than normal reality*. These latter reports tend to bring in qualities common of eg. ecstatic religious experience, and tend to cluster with reports of mystical experiences otherwise, agnostic of the specific inciting experience. More broadly, there are a variety of reports where a person has an experience which is profoundly [resonant](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance), which they will [reify](#metaphysics-reification) and [sacralize](#practice-practices--the-sacred), and which in turn they will interpret as a kind of *gnosis*. ## Gnosis {#practice-mysticism-awakening--gnosis} ::gloss[*Gnosis* is used to refer to the experience of attaining "direct knowledge" of spiritual truths which are hidden or of fundamental existential import.] *Gnosis* refers to experiences of attaining "direct knowledge" of hidden spiritual truths, most centrally those of fundamental existential import. Some smattering of reports here: - "Union with the divine" - Direct apprehension of the causal structure of phenomena and experience - "Sacred geometry"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--sacred-geometry] - (Something like, perceiving existentially fundamental and divine truths in certain geometric diagrams) - Non-duality - Modern reports here describe this as experiencing the phenomenal field as contiguous and undifferentiated, so that there is no separation between "me" and "that," but traditional sources I believe construed this differently. - "Infinite love" - Apprehension of one's "self" as thin or fabricated, or the self disappearing temporarily or permanently [^practice-mysticism-awakening--sacred-geometry]: Oh man sacred geometry, still can't tell if based or cringe. (Note of course that I'm trying to construct a category for experiences reported across a wide variety of traditions, most of which don't originate in the West, and certainly don't use the term 'gnosis.' That said, there are western monks in eastern lineages who gladly translate traditional texts and formulas using 'gnosis,' so it's hardly an innovation or overreach on my part.) A distinction which some authors make here surrounds the phenomenal quality of these experiences, in particular with respect to how *fabricated* the experience is. "Fabrication" in this context refers to relative qualities of something like *phenomenal construction*. The way this would be explained by some Buddhist authors is that ordinary experience involves many strata of perception, interpretation, and reaction, and that even beneath many layers of fabrication, the experience of eg. visual sensation whatsoever still contains or is convolved with a substantial degree of *intention*. Note that this sort of model of fabrication as presented is distinctly Buddhist, but that distinctions not unlike this are still present in the work of many authors who don't make reference to "fabrication" explicitly whatsoever. So, to elaborate, the feature here that's often understood to distinguish true gnosis is something like being "phenomenally rarified," namely, that gnosis is only of something directly present (sometimes "immanent") in reality and experience, rather than something theorized which someone has elaborate thoughts about, regardless of how convincing. There are a variety of reports which are sometimes touted as gnosis, or of some similar degree of mystical profundity, which I largely don't take seriously because they smell too much like "I had some really cool thoughts in some altered state, and it felt gobsmacking and sacred." Certainly those experiences are marvelous, having had some myself, but I'm prioritizing gnosis as among other things having a specific phenomenal quality, because I think that's probably a decent signal for its quality as evidence about the true structure of experience and value. I'll discuss considerations re [mystical and introspective epistemology](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) later. There's a wider swath of altered states and peak experiences also reported as a kind of gnosis. By my sense, these tend to be more contiguous with both ordinary religious practice and "secular" peak experiences, and distinguished mostly by intensity *or* by the story which a person tells about the experience afterwards. *Very* often, reports of gnosis claim that the gnosis itself is "ineffable," where they explain further they'll usually say that the experience is completely nonverbal but moreso often that it cannot be understood *in words*, or even can't be *understood* at all, because it exists in a realm of experience outside of thought or human apprehension. I'll toss in here that I think this is partially because of a lack of shared language, but also that partially what they're tracking is probably that they can't communicate the phenomenology of the experience to someone who hasn't had the experience themselves. Based on my sparse reading of primary sources in a few schools of Buddhism, *even in Zen* it seems like they totally can build up language around this stuff, but that the descriptions are inscrutable to a person without the gnosis. One kind of failure mode which you'll hear about from traditional masters, maybe most distinctly in Zen, is something like "*imagining* oneself into false gnosis." So the claim here is that some naive practitioners will read about what some mystical experience is supposed to be like, imagine what that experience would be like, and then end up fabricating an experience with that shape, which doesn't correspond at all to the original referent. A friend of mine[^practice-mysticism-awakening--friend-of-mine] claims that upon achieving two specific attainments in the Theravada "four-path" model[^practice-mysticism-awakening--four-path], both times he returned to the standard formula for that attainment in the canonical texts, and where the depiction previously seemed poetic and sort of meaningless, it then seemed like a clear and precise depiction of the experience he had just had. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--four-path]: See some more detail [in an appendix](#appendix-specific-claims). [^practice-mysticism-awakening--friend-of-mine]: And it's interesting that I haven't heard this depiction from traditional sources, but it strikes me as probably right. To be clear, I'm slicing things up here in a somewhat opinionated way, with respect to my sense of what traditions and what *kinds of experiences* are "reliable" or "trustworthy," but still largely aligned with claims made by traditional masters and described in various traditions' mystical texts. Still, there are reports that are relatively similar to the ones I hold up as reliable but don't quite qualify, and contiguous with reports that I think are basically horseshit and hardly more meaningful than reverie. ## Spirits, visions, and communion {#practice-mysticism-awakening--spirits-visions-and-communion} There are vanishingly few traditional mystical and contemplative lineages from which we don't have reports of meeting with spirits, angels, ghosts, demons, etc. Even in modern western lineages with very secular branding, among those which actually teach awakening (see [below](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening)), there are still reports shared about such phenomena, here and there in hushed tones and oblique references. Sometimes contact with spirits is reported as mostly [energetic](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy), sometimes they appear as a stable visible figure who speaks clearly, sometimes they speak *through* a person, sometimes they're visible only in glimpses, or sometimes their presence is inferred indirectly. Relevant here of course would be pervasive reports of encounters with God (*gods*, as well), in prayer and otherwise. These reports are often less clear about the phenomenology, or even keep quiet about the details of the phenomenology. In any case, sometimes these encounters are reported as clear visions with a moving and speaking figure, sometimes a quiet *knowing* in response to some question, or sometimes distinctly heard speech from no visible physical source, among other kinds of reports. Specifically reports where God communicates mostly by speech sometimes describe the quality of the voice as liminal between "internal audiation" and the quality of a normal physical voice heard in person. Third here, and of course overlapping with the first two, are what I'll loosely refer to as *visions*. Sometimes I might want to distinguish visions as something like "vivid and intense visual scenes, usually understood not to be causally entangled with one's presence and physical body," as opposed to eg. hallucinations, reverie, astral projection, dreams, or visualizations—but in practice there's flow between most of these, and I'll use the word 'vision' to refer to all of them. Each of these three tend to be highly stereotyped within a culture and tradition, but often also with idiosyncratic and bespoke spins, or fairly novel. It's not clear to me if more generally there's convergence across human cultures, or if apparent convergence is due to cultural contact, or that when you dig into the details, specific practices and institutions are much less similar. Eg. my impression is that with "shamans" (a modern term, regardless of the etymology) the broad outline of "spiritually attuned healer who can contact the supernatural world" is convergent across cultures, but the details of the metaphysics or the form or behavior of spirits doesn't seem to be.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--heaven] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--heaven]: N=2, "supernatural overworld" == "good/righteous place," which is interesting (so Abrahamic and Chinese, but I'm not sure if there's more). "Underworld" == "bad place" I'm actually not sure repeats outside of the West, and it seems like wasn't present in Judaism before contact with European culture?

I feel like the six realms in Buddhism sort of fits this mold but sort of doesn't, it's actually not clear if the deva realms are in the sky, and the hell realms are hot but it's also not totally clear if they're underground? No idea about various Hinduisms etc. Some traditions view it as a spiritual gift or attainment to gain access to the supernatural world, whereas others seem to view it as by default available to all classes. This is variously reified, so some traditions are all-in on contact with spirits, often with those specially spiritually initiated (eg. African-derived syncretic religions in the Caribbean and Brazil, probably some South American shamanic traditions), while others view it as interesting but peripheral (Buddhism) or usually evil (Christianity, somewhat Judaism and Islam). Some western hippies also make a big deal about contact with both spirits and ancestors, these tend to be more often of the "pure energetic presence" type. Secondarily here are also some kinds of "soul journeying" (cf. also western neo-shamanism), these are stereotypically extended visions induced by trance or drugs. These obviously interface with and feed back into the rest of the culture, as well as ordinary "superstitions" (such as this is a meaningful distinction). It's unclear to me to what extent western culture has lost access to the supernatural, or to altered states, compared to premodern cultures in Europe, or to "traditional" cultures cross-anthropologically. More specifically, I probably want to distinguish between something like a. more pervasive or vivid superstition, in the sense of "beliefs about the supernatural, in an otherwise humdrum life," vs. b. more pervasive experience of actual "contact" with the supernatural and altered states, etc. I often though find claims of the latter, that life in some documented cultures was teeming with enchantment, most people spoke to spirits, etc. In any case, in the modern West, altered states and the supernatural mostly only fall in the cracks of hearsay and "belief," rather than day-to-day experience. I'm also unclear about this re contact with God in prayer, part of my uncertainty here is that I haven't heard of (though haven't really looked for) evidence about how vivid and alive lay prayer really was in say the 17th century, let alone the 7th; today it seem to be on average mostly perfunctory and rote, even for the relatively devout, and where it is alive it's moreso deeply [resonant](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--resonance) rather than enchanted and mystically salient. ## Awakening {#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening} ::gloss[In the West, *awakening* refers variously to large persistent changes in a person's existential apprehension of the world.] *Awakening* is a calque of the word *bodhi* from Pali/Sanksrit, literally "the event of waking from sleep." 'Awakening' is used in a variety of discourses to refer to experiences of large changes in one's spiritual and existential apprehension of the world, as well as the persistent changes downstream of these experiences. In the context of the various Buddhist canons and traditions, *bodhi* is understood to refer to the final goal of spiritual practice (usually, but not always, "freedom from suffering"), or proximal degrees or stages towards that goal, in a variety of specific models. The term "awakening," in the context of Buddhism, among other traditions, is used because upon awakening, it's as though a person has "woken up," where previously they were asleep. In the context of, let's say, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality," especially in English, this term is pretty overloaded, and used in reference to a bunch of different experiences under very different models which only overlap or rhyme. Related to this overloading, there's a substantial diversity of claims made by different traditions about what kinds of spiritual achievement are possible, and what the goal of intensive spiritual practice should be. (Related here also is obviously the word 'enlightenment,'[^practice-mysticism-awakening--enlightenment] which many contemporary teachers avoid because it brings in some inappropriate intuitions, but which is also often used to refer to many of the same experiences in these traditions.) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--enlightenment]: [OED](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/enlightenment_n?tab=meaning_and_use#5441399) gives 'enlightenment' in the sense of "being brought into greater knowledge," and then of "higher spiritual knowledge" starting in the 17th century; first attestation for separately "age of enlightenment" and "Buddhist awakening" at almost the same time (1825 vs 1836). One more difficulty here: at this point it become really cumbersome to mark explicitly each of a. reports from practitioners (and maybe to separate say, those that I believe vs. those I think are real but exaggerated or overinterpreted vs. those I think are hogwash), b. both myths and concrete claims presented by traditions, and c. practice *instructions*, including where the instructions come bundled with a view. (I talk about [the last kind later](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality--practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views).) Unfortunately I'm going to mix these together, so the descriptions below should be taken somewhat more lightly than usual. I'm also at best a peripheral fan of these traditions rather than attained in any lineage or even an amateur scholar of any tradition, and I'm piecing things together haphazardly, but I believe the gestalt here is correct. Some evocative sweep of claims and reports of awakening across traditions: - Permanent freedom from all kinds of suffering and dissatisfaction - Apprehension of one's phenomenology as entirely fabricated - (Sometimes this really is presented as "fake and un-real," but usually the metaphysics here is more subtle or else much wackier.) - *Apprehension* of the world as flawless and divine - Many variations on this, eg. "as an emanation of the godhead" - A variety of flavors of theistic awakenings, eg. residing in love and communion with God - "Realization of one's true self" - *Energetic* "awakenings" - Freedom from all kinds of illness, or even immortality - Spacious, plastic vividness amid unreality Obviously there's quite a bit of overlap here with gnosis, and often gnosis is understood as the actual direct achievement of awakening, or of an intermediate stage. Broadly speaking awakenings are distinguished as a. comprising some fundmental shift in one's existential posture; b. being *unmistakeable*, that is, being basically discrete, irrevocable, and certain; and c. being robust and generally not degrading or rolling back. The main outlier in this list, which I included partly just for completeness under the term "awakening," is "energetic awakenings." Some traditions, many of them variously called "yogic,"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--yogic] conceive of the goal of practice specifically in terms of large changes in [energetic phenomenology](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--energy), with *downstream* changes in perception and behavior. (Note also that most "yogic" traditions, insofar as they contain a concept of awakening, mostly have a more stereotypical south-asian-dharmic-religion meditation-and-transcendence schtick.) [^practice-mysticism-awakening--yogic]: Sorry, I still actually feel confused about what this term means and its history, I might come back and add more later. The short version here is "yog***ic***" often now means something like "physical and energetic cultivation," even outside of the context of recently south-asian lineages, *despite* the fact that originally *yoga* strictly meant something like "spiritual practice" somewhat generically, or at least a swath of lineages with many different kinds of practices and views, as far as I understand. I've tried to dig into this a few times and gotten stuck in the weeds, and I'm confused how modern this usage is, but haven't gotten to an answer. Sometimes eg. orthodox Buddhist awakening reports describe major energetic shifts as well, though not with a *ton* of overlap with reports from the energy-first yogic schools. Some lineages and schools, which don't situate awakening as centrally energetic, still view the *training* regime leading up to awakening as centrally somatic, and sometimes make heavy use of [energy cultivation practices](#practice-meditation--energy-practices).[^practice-mysticism-awakening--rinzai] Also, some Hindu contemplative lineages include intense mystical-somatic initiations, either narrowly as part of initiation into an order, or as a distinct stage toward awakening. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--rinzai]: I've intermittently encountered reports of awakening in Rinzai Zen in particular which seem to conflate intermediate awakenings with big energetic [openings](#practice-healing--opening). I'm kind of confused what's going on there, and I'm not clear enough either about the models they're using or the details of the phenomenology to really have an opinion. Some western hippies will also use language like "erotic awakening,"[^practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra] some of this is explicitly couched in mystical and especially spiritual-emancipatory language. I'm not enough clear on the details of the practices but from what I can tell this *probably* doesn't belong under "awakening," though I assume it's profoundly transformative for some people, etc. etc. [^practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra]: Ok so I have to mention Western Neo-Tantra here at least briefly.

My understanding is that Western "Tantra" dates to the late 19th century in San Francisco (!!!) from a like spiritual-conman-magick-enjoyer type named [Pierre Bernard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bernard_(yogi)); Hareesh believes he basically made up ~all of the details of his sexual magick practices, see Christopher D. Wallis, 2013. *Tantra Illuminated*, p. 440 (page number in the pdf, I read this in print but don't have it on dead trees.) I also read *somewhere*, but I can't find the source, that Bernard's informant probably wasn't actually initiated in sexual tantric rites, so the rest must have been Bernard's guesswork or invention.

Note that Chapman [is very insistent](https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/tantra-sex-romance-novels) that (at least *Buddhist*) Tantra *totally* involves sex, and this can't be bowdlerized without just lying about the contents of the canon.

I'm not clear (and I think Hareesh isn't either) on where the lineage of modern Neo-Tantra communities starts, including if they actually start with Bernard, but in any case my impression is their practices have nothing to do with traditional Tantric lineages.

*That said!* this doesn't really matter, I'm fine with people inventing new practices, but I think it's very important to a. distinguish lineage clearly, and just say explicitly "I figured it out myself" when that's the case, and b. not exaggerate about what's on offer or advertize something as more profound than it is, in particular re using "awakening" language where it oughtn't apply.

One last piece, sometimes "tantra" is now used to mean... mindfulness? Or maybe "mindfulness wrt sex" but often just mindfulness, which, oh my god that's astonishingly fucking whack. Awakening, across traditions, generally includes or causes major changes in perception, affect, and behavior. Most often it's claimed that awakening confers outstanding virtue, in particular the claim usually being that either access to transcendent joy/love/etc., or freedom from the burdens of ordinary human *experience*, allow one to give and work intensely, and adapt easily to exceedingly difficult circumstances. Many traditions also specifically refer to or frame awakening as *liberation*. (This claim is not unsubstantiated but is at best very mixed, which I [discuss later](#spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters). Separately, it's not clear how much of this is just due to ordinary extreme tails in piety and discipline, *before* awakening, and indeed anyway many hagiographies describe masters as already in the tails before their awakenings.) Many traditions also maintain that upon awakening, or at least auxiliarily to it, one gains various supernatural powers. It's interesting to me that the set of powers is *relatively* consistent across traditions, though very likely this is just convergence for "what sorts of magical powers sound cool to humans in general." Commonly these are clairvoyance, clairaudience (hearing at a distance), bilocation, walking through walls, various healing powers, and some kinds of telepathy. Similarly, variously awakening or progress towards it is often regarded to result in the spontaneous arising of visions, and to confer the ability to communicate with spirits, etc. Some traditions also maintain that *complete* awakening confers omniscience. More broadly, weaker claims of transformational effects from a variety of traditions often include (generally in accordance with the theology and soteriology of the tradition) unwavering faith, unusual degrees of compassion and care for others, and either imperturbable positive affect, or the absence of negative affect. The "no negative affect" schools broadly claim variations of a. that the structure and fundamental relationship to phenomenology has changed, such that no dysphoria arises, b. that as a direct consequence of a., the [generators](#practice-healing) of dysphoria wither and cease, and c. that healing occurs more organically as part of practice generally ([see next section](#practice-paths)). One particular variant of interest here are schools which claim that the *generators* of negative affect and unwholesome motivation don't necessarily cease, but that because of a. above, they are not dysphoric and therefore do not affect motivation or cognition. This point is somewhat of a crux for questions about how spiritually upright and [integrated](#practice-healing--integration) masters are, and which again I'll [discuss later](#spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters). In many traditions, awakening is understood as (or, in some cases at least, *I see it as*) a change in relationship to [views](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing), both in the abstract and at a fundamental phenomenological level. However, among these traditions there's quite a lot of variation, with different schools, even within Buddhism, sometimes holding opposite views, and *sometimes* reporting ~opposite phenomenology from awakening. In some cases this looks something like achieving a *specific* view (a very common shape, especially for fringe schools, or innovators outside of a lineage), whereas others explain awakening as being about freedom *from* views. The latter often still implicitly or explicitly contain a packet of specific views, however. Some examples from prominent schools: - Viewing the world as fundamentally depraved, or without value - Viewing the world as fundamentally perfect and beautiful - Viewing the world as fundamentally neither-pure-nor-impure - Again, viewing all phenomena as contiguous, and often inter-permeating - (Many variations on this, but views like this are often called *non-dual* in English.) - Again, viewing the self as phenomenally constructed - Experiencing one's choices as impersonal, or out-of-one's-control - Again, viewing all phenomena as unreal or something like "phenomenologically contingent" - (Sometimes *all phenomena* in the sense of "all features of experience," and sometimes in the sense of "all things," taken ontologically) - Experiencing the world "unmediated" by views, or somewhat separately "without fixed views" - Mostly separately, also, "directly experiencing the unfabricated" - Experiencing oneself as the same as or contiguous with God - Viewing each phenomenon as mutually containing all other phenomena[^practice-mysticism-awakening--hua-yan] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--hua-yan]: Idk I am most like, 🤯😕🤷 about hua-yan, I basically assume I don't understand it at all but gotta include it here lol. *See more in the [next section](#practice-paths) about the phenomenology of awakening, and paths and stages of spiritual development in different traditions.* There are many recurring motifs, or at least *rhyming* claims, across traditions—these are interesting both when attested across different established traditions (say, reports from Judaism or Christianity aligning with those from Buddhism) but also from independent practitioners outside of any lineage. Some of these seem to me very clearly like at least closely related experiences, but others I'm confused how to categorize. Note that some of these traditions don't construe these experiences as quite "awakening," and may have no comparable concept, but seem them as ("just") deep mystical experiences. Interestingly also, some traditions present some state as the completion of the spiritual path, which aligns (from what I can tell, and IIRC) very very closely with states which other traditions see as valuable, but only *proximal* attainments.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--ein-sof] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--ein-sof]: Well, one example I have in mind would be the Ein Sof in I think what's called the sequence of "emanations" in at least some (??? gosh I wish I had more context) version of Kabbalah, looks, also based on the rest of the sequence, like it's probably just jhana 8. (Someone call me out on this one, I'll edit this footnote.)

A friend of mine also thinks that a bunch of traditions have third path, but don't have fourth, where fourth path is relatively unique to at least some schools of Buddhism. ### Briefly on awakening and metaphysics {#practice-mysticism-awakening--briefly-on-awakening-and-metaphysics} Referring to the list of views above, note that these are mostly from different schools of Buddhism. Already it's interesting to notice that there's this much diversity within the at least nominal structure of awakening across different schools. My impression here is that historically there's been combinatorially many weird variations of both [metaphysics](#metaphysics) and mystical views, which of course go hand-in-hand. In certain ways, if you squint, perhaps the actual underlying theology is the same and these schools just vary in the superficial metaphysics through which that liberation is accessed. If this is true, then the core that remains seems pretty sparse. (Some people I think overstate how much there really is in common across traditions, cf. "the perennial philosophy.") I'll discuss some re diverging traditions more [in an appendix](#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography). In general, awakening will be construed under some metaphysics, and in general almost all awakenings are shaped with respect to, or perhaps *of*, the metaphysics under which a person was practicing. (This point is opinionated on my part but I stand by it.) The most central example here for me is gnosis of dependent origination in various schools of Buddhism: the meditator is meant to perceive the underlying causal structure of the arising of phenomena, understand it and its faults, and thereby attain liberation. Saliently, these reports, at least in the Pali canon, but somewhat also in modern reports, *also* come with knowledge/visions of past lives, sometimes of oneself and of others.[^practice-mysticism-awakening--past-lives] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--past-lives]: Apparently this is debated by some modern western scholars, specifically re how *original* these actually were in the canon. Trailheads here are Jurewicz, and separately Gombrich, and critiques of them. (I haven't mostly read any of this carefully, but I'm aware peripherally of the debate.)

In any case, the canon does say this (as I understand it), and these lineages do produce these reports, so my point is still well made even if we found out that "in fact" """original Buddhism""" didn't contain past lives at all, or that they were never meant metaphysically. My impression is that similar reports, with respect to the alignment of some apparent gnosis with the metaphysics that a practitioner was *taught*, are basically the norm in traditional religious mystical lineages. So (vibereads, and not very well read), same is true for a variety of monastic/contemplative Hindu lineages, same for Orthodox Christianity, and same for Teresa of Avilon I *think* (but *not* for Saint John of the Cross, who was her student). Not sure about Kabbalists here though I've never heard of (well, when would I have?) some wisened rebbe having some serious ass deconstructive gnosis and then being like "whoah, fuck the orthodox metaphysics actually."[^practice-mysticism-awakening--prophets] [^practice-mysticism-awakening--prophets]: I feel like most run-off prophets and innovators I've read about don't totally buck the metaphysics, just twiddle some knobs and name themselves messiah. The only two examples I have here (again, shallowly read) of people working within an orthodox contemplative tradition and then dropping the metaphysics upon some gnosis are Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century and Bhikkhu Buddhadasa in the 20th. Plausibly Gnosticism is an instance of this, though IIRC the historicity of the primary sources is contested?

Also note here, I have the vague sense that some traditions, even if they have a strong metaphysics implicitly, have it less reified and are more open to the devout messing around here. Orthodox Christianity, despite what I said in the source of this footnote, IIRC does *seem* to be an example of this in the extremes of intensive monastic practice. (This is *somewhat* of an opinionated take on my part, but I'll stand by it. I continue to be confused by people saying that the metaphysics either doesn't matter much or that different awakenings are basically the same, this just seems plainly false on the basis of the actual reports from masters identified as such within the various traditions, as well as the theologies presented as definite by traditional teachers. Note also, this is *at least* partly about transmitting a view *along with* a set of practice instructions, which I [discuss later](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality--practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views), as part of the whole chapter trying to make sense of [varying mystical theologies](#spiritual-truth).) One last point here: some traditions have "awakening" type stuff, and treat it as holy and perhaps supreme as practices and attainments, but *meanwhile* have a separate soteriology which doesn't require mystical practice to satisfy or achieve. This is in contrast with the East Asian and South Asian mystical mold, where the soteriology is usually the same as the satisfaction of the contemplative path. --- # Paths and "The Path" {#practice-paths} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/paths — also at `/md/practice/paths.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-paths--`.* *See also on [meditation](#practice-meditation) and [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening).* Quite a few contemplative lineages make reference consistently to concepts like *the spiritual path*, literally using the word for 'road' or 'path' in the source languages. In some modern western usage[^practice-paths--dao], this is expressed variously as just "the path" or also "one's path," "*my* path," etc., also "the x *way*," and other variations. [^practice-paths--dao]: With antecedents in, of course, Daoism, but also by way of Chinese Buddhism. Even where it's not reified as a metonym for "spiritual practice," still quite a few lineages use metaphors of roads, often with a destination, to represent the development and trajectory of a spiritual practitioner. Some traditions also tend to reify *the* spiritual path as a sacralized object of its own. Among other variations, paths are often understood as some combination of a. a relatively discrete sequence of developments or attainments, and b. a diffuse collection of virtues and practices which are developed. The latter tends to be the perspective of non-awakening lineages, but sometimes of awakening lineages as well. In the former "discrete sequence" category, these understand the major milestones in advanced mystical practice in terms of crystalline insights or stages, usually with each being a direct dependency of the next. (Though IIRC some have a slim tree structure, rather than just a sequence.) Others, from what it seems to me, rely on an implicit model of the dependencies for spiritual development, but are softer, mushier, or more *ineffable* in their presentation; nonetheless, many reports from this category rhyme with the former. Others are yet less systematic and may not track dependencies much at all. These often understand spiritual development as a basically progressive augmentation of devotion, piety, and spiritual purity, but in some rarer cases they just refuse the notion of a path of practice which can be controlled or predicted at all. (Again in these last cases I suspect that a teacher or advanced practitioner is sensitive to the causal factors of awakening in such a lineage, even if they refuse any predictable model.) In general, all of these still rely on practices of cultivation and discipline, and even the most "discrete sequence"-type schools generally teach a long path of the development of faith, virtue, and usually concentration or energy, leading up to spiritual insight. Many lineages will specifically stress the development of both faith and ethics as a hard dependency for advanced spiritual development. Even traditional mystical lineages which aren't quite oriented towards awakening seem to have equivalent requirements, so eg. a member of a broader religious community would have to be visibly very serious about piety before being initiated into a mystical order. Sometimes these requirements look more like "moral uprightness," but allow for a relatively ordinary lay life, whereas many schools, even for lay practitioners, insist on fairly intense practices of renunciation, and see these as basically fundamental to spiritual progress. Some schools, of course, see awakening as only possible to achieve as a monastic, or their tradition's equivalent role.[^practice-paths--monastic] [^practice-paths--monastic]: Many many traditions have the pattern of "a special role for spiritual devotees/adepts, with a variety of restrictions which everyone else is not subject to," in reference to monastic traditions, in English, "everyone else" is usually "laypeople." This distinction has been constructed in basically arbitrary ways in different cultures, eg. there's quite a lot of overlap between the structure of "monk" and that of "shaman" in many cultures, so I'm including that here as well.

(Some traditions, eg. Orthodox Christianity and IIRC Catholicism also, also have priestly ordination separate from monastic ordination, for example.) Saliently, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality"[^practice-paths--bad-name] largely does without the development of either. Nonetheless at least some of us seem to get by without them, and there's certainly quite a few such practitioners who seem to get to advanced stages of insight according to some traditional models. [^practice-paths--bad-name]: Boy do I wish I had a shorter name for this cluster. I'll note here that there's some discourse about scandals in eg. contemporary eastern lineages transplanted into the west—it seems likely to me that this can be attributed substantially to just some background rate of sexual abuse and abuse of power in many contexts, and especially in religious ones. Still, it's sometimes claimed this is a result of lopsidedness in western spiritual culture, or just western culture more broadly. I'll also note here that IIRC in the Pali canon, there's reference to the possibility of "wrong insight" or "wrong awakening" *specifically* due to inadequate development of virtue. So again, most traditional paths, explicitly or implicitly, contain a combination of a. stages of cultivation, b. a discrete sequence of insights, and often c. relatively discrete stages of energetic or spiritual development. With each of these, but moreso b. and especially c., it's understood that the transitioning events are largely out of the control of a practitioner or their teacher, with some complicated process process of learning and insight which may crystallize suddenly. See [below](#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening) re insight, and [after that](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism) about these abrupt shifts. Sometimes stages or transitions can be profoundly disturbing or painful, one sometimes encounters language like "dying the great death," or depictions of certain stages of awakening as ripping out one's entire existential grounding. Note that disturbances are also often reported over long stretches, or intermittently, over a single "stage," etc. Saliently here also, in *some* cases profound disturbance due to exogenous circumstances can be a boon to spiritual development, eg. some reports of people achieving awakening while imprisoned or being tortured. Some schools (and really these are the ones I take most seriously) are clear about two related points: 1. that there exist many false starts and provisional or incomplete awakenings, and the path is long and windy; 2. that temporary, fragile views are not true awakening. Re 1.: in these schools it's taught that overwhelmingly, a student's initial apprehension of a practice, teaching, theme, or inquiry will be wrong or confused, and that in fact most of the work of meditation consists of being bewildered or exasperated by the teacher's instructions, or the difficulties in their application in practice. Many schools which don't have this quality strongly, still understand practice not to be a smooth trajectory upward, but that it often has intense swings up and down, including having to go back and relearn basics, etc. (In many cases this isn't explicitly taught, but is ambiently known in the practice culture.) (In a much gentler form, the practice system which I'll discuss in the [next chapter](#wayfinding) is sort of windy-bewilderment maximalist, which is interesting to compare here.) Re 2.: Most traditional schools which teach awakening are pretty insistent that awakening is among other things distinguished by being *irrevocable*, as in, that it is a truth which cannot be unseen, and does not roll back. In these traditions, a relatively immature student might try to reify a temporary or fragile state which looks *kind of* like awakening, but teachers are careful to track if it's the genuine article, in part by this criterion. That said, some lineages allow for lower awakenings that are described as "glimpses", though these are usually regarded to result in a kind of irrevocable spiritual *inclination* from then on. Some traditions also discuss *wrong* awakening, usually less in the sense of "fragile," but more often in the sense of "incomplete" or "a dead end," though also sometimes as "an apparent [gnosis](#practice-mysticism-awakening--gnosis), under a metaphysics which the tradition rejects." In particular, there's meant to be a variety of kinds of apparent insight, which are not the final goal of practice in that tradition, and which do not lead to it. ## Training regimes {#practice-paths--training-regimes} There's some difficulty here in trying to make generalizations across diverse traditions, or trying to evoke what all a given tradition involves in so little space. Besides that, I personally have mainly practiced in one specific community, and my sense of the details of other traditions are often scrounged from anecdotes or inferred from reports and traditional texts. So, this section is looser and more opinionated, I'm trying here to get at my *sense* of the meat-and-potatoes of contemplative practice, and how that relates to awakening. Most mystical lineages place either monastic or reclusive[^practice-paths--eremitic] practice as central in the spiritual path. Even those lineages open to laypeople (or those in cultures with no such concept) very often use periods of intensive practice, and often seclusion. Distinctly, all of these rely on a practice *container*,[^practice-paths--container] meaning a context and shape of living which constructs and supports a pattern of spiritual practice. Most often practice is understood as overwhelmingly shaped by the container, and sometimes the container is seen as part and parcel of practice. [^practice-paths--container]: I believe, a very modern term. [^practice-paths--eremitic]: The fancy Greek term here is *eremitic*, which is a nice trailhead into Orthodox Christian monasticism. There's some features which show up surprisingly often[^practice-paths--robes] in traditional kinds of practice containers, both long term monastic and short term: - Celibacy, or at least temporary abstention from sex and masturbation - Chanting and repeated recitation of texts - Sleep deprivation, and especially rising very early - Extended periods without speaking - Demanding relationships with an abbot or teacher - Various restrictions on behavior, most often restricting access to ordinary entertainments, but sometimes extensive and somewhat arbitrary systems of rules, regimented schedules, etc. [^practice-paths--robes]: This is neither here nor there, but I continue to be confused if the "poverty, chastity, robes" thing is a real convergent evolution, vs. just one or two original innovations that became really popular. I'm almost certain that the South Asian version of this is independent from the Christian one, but I can't tell of neo-taoists were already doing this when Buddhism got to East Asia, and it seems like "poverty and robes" happened in Islam in a few places, and Islam is sort of consciously never-monastic, which... something? Again I feel overindexed on """world religions""" here, mostly just noting that I'm confused.

(But also, something about convergent evolution for shamanism having some stuff in common with the cross-cultural pattern of monasticism, but the latter being more like, "a community, institution, and a monastic discipline." ... again, confused here.) Again, even lay lineages very often use *periods* of intensive spiritual practice, as well as using many of these sorts of features while maintaining normal responsibilities to one's household, etc. Some modern western practitioners try to shoehorn practice into a normal lay life with an hour of meditation in the morning, anecdotally this seems to very seldom get very far on its own, and is very commonly augmented with periods of "retreats,"[^practice-paths--retreat] whether alone or organized with a community. ("Retreat" unfortunately evokes something like "spa day," in western meditator circles this always means "moderate length period of intensive discipline and practice.") That said, the most accomplished western teachers usually have had substantial periods, often cumulatively years, of monastic or pseudo-monastic practice. [^practice-paths--retreat]: I encountered a claim somewhere that this pattern was specifically an innovation IIRC in Burmese vipassana, as an attempt to construct some form of lay practice which would be legible to Protestant colonial authorities. (I thought this was from Chapman [here](https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation) but it appears not. I'm still pretty sure I read this, I just can't find the source. In any case in the Pali canon there's no reference to anything like short practice periods, so eg. there's the vassa but that's three months, and was never meant for laypeople, etc.)

I tried to look into this once and I couldn't figure out if *sesshin* in Japanese Zen is modern as well. I feel like I've never seen reference to it in indigenous sources before the 20th century.

(Japanese Buddhism in general seems to have been heavily burdened and distorted by some attempt of the Japanese state to cowtow to the West during the Meiji Restoration in the late 19th century. The monasteries, which at that point were the largest landholders in the country due to a millenium of grants from patrons, were stripped of their properties, Buddhism was banned for 20 years, and when it was unbanned, IIRC, monastic orders were ~required? to reorganize so that monks would marry and become temple priests after a period of training, rather than keeping vows of celibacy.) This is substantially just about the time investment and focus needed to get results, but in traditional contexts it's often conceived of as removing oneself from unwholesome or spiritually disruptive parts of the broader world. Beyond just reclusion and renunciation, asceticism is a distinctly common feature of mystical lineages, in varying intensity. Less extreme examples include long fasts or secondarily sleep deprivation. Among more severe kinds of asceticism, very common features are putting the body in intense discomfort, we of course have the phrase "wearing a hair shirt" in English in reference to such a practice by Christian monastics historically, but purposefully causing pain and discomfort for spiritual purposes is attested in traditions all over the world. Of specific interest here is a distinct fetish on the part of a variety of eastern mystical lineages for transcending pain associated with sitting still for long periods, anywhere from an hour up to 24 hours straight, in the extremes.[^practice-paths--amputation] [^practice-paths--amputation]: I wasn't sure if I wanted this in the main body of the text, not that it matters much: there's some Hindu lineages that have traditions of elect devotees undergoing amputation without anesthesia, or other acts of extreme pain for the sake of discipline and devotion. Many traditional lineages, though not all, use regimented schedules, often with the entire waking day scheduled hour by hour. Many traditions with looser or no schedules still teach that monks should be diligent, resolute, and specifically *continuous* in their practice throughout the day.[^practice-paths--through-day] [^practice-paths--through-day]: So obviously I'm thinking of a bunch of Buddhist schools here, but I also have in mind Hesychasm in Orthodox Christianity, and I have a vague sense of mystics in western Christianity having this sort of schtick also. In practice many traditions soften these kinds of expectations over centuries, or it seems they're mostly aspirational, or achieved by only the most devout. Reports from western lay teachers who claim attainments (usually construed in the schemas of Eastern traditions, though note not just Buddhism) often include periods in their lives of very intense and disciplined practice, along with periods of laxity. Note that "disciplined" often doesn't include all of the strictures of full monastic discipline, which also actually varies a fair bit, but nonetheless. Occasionally, some teachers describe mostly being lax and spacious in their practice, and this affording transformative effects. ## Insight, openings, and awakening {#practice-paths--insight-openings-and-awakening} ::gloss[*Insight* is a discrete shift in perception or relationship to experience, often experienced as newly *understanding* or *seeing* reality.] In Buddhism especially, awakening is very often precipitated by what's known in modern terminology as *insight*. More broadly, there's a wide swath of reports from mystical and contemplative schools of distinct shifts in experience and behavior, both abrupt and progressive. ([See below](#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism) re the last point.) Many of these are conceived of as [awakenings](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening), or as intermediate stages towards awakening, but many are also seen as important developments but separate from awakening, or are in lineages which do not teach awakening or have no comparable concept. Insight, by that name, is most often characterized by discrete shifts in perception or relationship to experience. Often these are experienced as newly *understanding* or *seeing* some feature or structure of reality or experience, hence the name.[^practice-paths--vipassana] [^practice-paths--vipassana]: Note the term is used in a mostly separate sense in the context of "insight meditation," see the footnote on vipassana [in this section](#practice-meditation). [sometimes insight is progressive, or at least the effects claimed by reports which use the term insight are sometimes also reported as blooming slowly over months or years.] [again, see more below] ## Specific practices {#practice-paths--specific-practices} *See also all of the practices I discussed in the sections on [meditation](#practice-meditation) and [features of spiritual practices](#practice-practices), as well as, maybe secondarily, the contours described in the sections on [metabolism](#practice-healing--metabolism) and [releases and openings](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings).* [so again, practices of discipline, cultivation, and devotion] ## Gradualism and suddenism {#practice-paths--gradualism-and-suddenism} ::gloss[*Gradualism* and *suddenism* are opposing perspectives re the achievement of awakening, namely whether it occurs progressively or discretely.] ## Misc {#practice-paths--misc} --- # Transformative Practice {#practice-transformative-practice} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/practice/transformative-practice — also at `/md/practice/transformative-practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `practice-transformative-practice--`.* *Transformative practice* is sometimes used as a modern generic term for all of the practices described so far in [this chapter](#practice). It's also useful for describing a greater breadth of practices, techniques, and [views](#metaphysics-ways-of-seeing) used in the context of everything from compulsory education, to addiction treatment, adult development, faith healing, etc. etc. I want to highlight two points here: 1. The pervasiveness of transformative practice, and its deeply intertwined relationship with extant cultures and institutions 2. The complexity, depth, and richness of the domain, in contrast with the relative paucity both in the models and the phenomenology reported in the context of almost all secular transformative practice ## Everybody's into transformative practice {#practice-transformative-practice--everybodys-into-transformative-practice} --- # Global Wayfinding {#wayfinding} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding — also at `/md/wayfinding.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding--`.* *In this chapter:* - [Contextualizing Global Wayfinding](#wayfinding-introduction) - [🔨 The Global Wayfinding Model](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model) - [🔨 The Depths of Insanity](#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity) - [🔨 Disruptions in Life and Practice](#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities) - [🔨 My Takes on Wayfinding](#wayfinding-my-takes) --- # Contextualizing Global Wayfinding {#wayfinding-introduction} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/introduction — also at `/md/wayfinding/introduction.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-introduction--`.* Global Wayfinding is a model of transformative and mystical practice developed by Mark Lippmann. Wayfinding has been a keystone of my practice for some time, and is near to my heart in many ways. Broadly I'll discuss wayfinding in its own terms, and generally attempt to be descriptive, but I'm marking here explicitly that I'm opinionated about it in a way which makes it difficult to be as objective as I'd like. The main source for Global Wayfinding is [Mark's book](https://meditationbook.page/), he's also written some on Twitter, and I'm partly also informed by some personal communications. The full title of Mark's book's is *Meditation from Cold Start to Complete Mastery, a Manual of Global Wayfinding Meditation*—quite a mouthful. In the community around his writing it's often referred to just as "the protocol" (unfortunately) or "the wayfinding doc." Mark's book is by far the least accessible document I've engaged with seriously, it's some thousand pages of collected DM conversations, one-off twitter threads, email responses, and lengthy, often unedited, jargon-laden blog posts, compiled into a single meandering web page. I often describe it as either having the scent of a programmer's manic 3 AM journals, or of late 90's internet schizo manifestos, a la [Timecube](https://web.archive.org/web/20100927183411/http://www.timecube.com/). Meanwhile, his writing is also drenched with gentle care, precision, and an incredibly fine attunement to the full richness and complexity of human experience. Mark's work feels like the clearest and most incisive model I've encountered in the entire space of therapy, meditation, and transformative practice. I don't flatly endorse the entire model, but I think it's sensitive to several large classes of failure modes in spiritual practice which I've seen depicted at best sparsely and incompletely in both traditional and very modern practice systems, or more often not at all. Mark personally is actually much more hinged than my description of his writing would suggest, and as I've engaged with his writing carefully it's become clearer and more legible to me. However, many people I've spoken to who've tried to dig into his work, even eg. friends with strong backgrounds in both STEM and meditation, have balked at the presentation and style, and totally bounced off.[^wayfinding-introduction--lore] My goal here is to make Mark's ideas legible to a more general audience, and especially those with less patience to try to make sense of the wayfinding book directly. [^wayfinding-introduction--lore]: It feels worth mentioning that the deep lore in many discourses are often illegible like this, from analytic philosophy to art criticism to mystical writers in traditions from East to West. ## Outline of the model {#wayfinding-introduction--outline-of-the-model} Briefly, global wayfinding is presented as a holistic synthesis of [awakening](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening) and [integration](#practice-healing). Wayfinding attempts to account for all of the phenomena usually included under "healing" or "integration," along with classical awakening and mystical insight, all *under one roof*, and understood as coextensive and dependent on one another. In my understanding, the basic claims of wayfinding are: a. that the territory and material of "[psychological content](#practice-healing--psychological-content)" is the same as that of [transcendence, mysticism, and gnosis](#practice-mysticism-awakening), b. that *robust* and thorough awakening has a strict dependency on robust integration, and c. that integration often works with intricate, idiosyncratic knots, all of which need to be brought into wholeness for full spiritual-somatic-mystical realization to be possible. More specifically, in comparison to wayfinding, most [practice systems](#practice-spiritual-practice), from traditional contemplative models to modern therapy modalities, tend toward provisional or *local* solutions both for [spiritual attainment](#practice-mysticism-awakening) and for the [resolution or cessation](#practice-healing) of undesired qualities. In general, wayfinding claims that psycho-spiritual issues are most often intricately *global* in the "body-mind," and cannot be *buffed out* or papered over locally. Mark's writing constantly returns to describing patterns of [trauma](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma) and psycho-spiritual [material](#practice-healing--psychological-content) recruiting and constructing disparate patterns of perception, attention, thought, [somatic phenomena](#practice-phenomenology-somatics), etc. etc., which, often organically and spontaneously, will be coordinated and unraveled in the process of the underlying [generator](#practice-healing--psychological-content) resolving and ceasing. The descriptions of unraveling in the wayfinding doc are often, maybe characteristically, "full-stack"—as in, they may end up spontaneously deconstructing and reformulating everything from specific personality traits, to visual perception, cosmological views, sense of self, etc. An important piece which Mark often harps on is a deep [ontological](#metaphysics-what-why-metaphysics) uncertainty and flexibility that develops in the process of wayfinding. In particular, the claim is broadly that the final settled state of some process of healing and unraveling will not be predictable ahead of time, and that often surprising aspects of experience are brought into that process and reconfigured during it. These kinds of phenomena are hardly *absent* in other systems of [transformative practice](#practice-transformative-practice), but wayfinding is uniquely maximalist about this whole "global phenomenal psychological unraveling" schtick. My sense is, and Mark also claims, that there are some instances of spontaneous *global wayfinding* occurring in traditions which do not use such models, often, or maybe especially, from innovators or outstanding practitioners within those schools. Other systems again often do include variously *local* wayfinding, under variously reified frameworks, but also some schools are clearly similar to the wayfinding ethos in many ways. The most important claim of wayfinding here, as far as I'm concerned, is that insufficiently *global* wayfinding, or especially non-wayfinding kinds of psycho-somatic-spiritual practices, will in general snarl parts of the body-mind in tighter and more complex knots, which will eventually block all further progress, or which will at least continue to contort or tilt the mind. This is an important *empirical* claim which distinguishes global wayfinding from every other model of transformative practice I'm aware of. I think at this point we have at most weak to modest evidence for it, and even then ancedotally the wayfinding practitioners I'm in contact with don't really seem to be healing all their trauma, or all getting enlightened, or whatever. However, the baseline long-term efficacy for transformative practice more generally seems to be pretty meagre, so altogether it's not clear to me how wayfinding compares. I'm excited both for better *data* to get collected, and for wayfinding to come into conversation with more mainstream or popular teachers and practice systems. Wayfinding then situates mystical insight, "liberation," and most of the usual fare of contemplative practice in the same frame as it uses for healing and integration. Mark's claim here is broadly that meditative insights will arise largely *spontaneously* as a result of the same techniques which lead to the correct unraveling of psycho-spiritual content. (I'll note that Mark is often careful about invoking the notion of 'correctness,' but I'll use it here.) Lastly, wayfinding is unusual in how it construes the goal of practice. In the same way that wayfinding views spiritual attainment as contingent on robust integration, it also views the end goal of meditation and transformative practice as ultimately harmonious and fully aligned with the full breadth of human experience, aspiration, and care. In particular Mark stresses that wayfinding is meant to be *ultimately* in service of the fullness one's personal and idiosyncratic goals and values, eventually informed and held by mystical insight. Again this is not totally dissimilar to some other systems, but wayfinding is almost uniquely maximalist in both its radical ontological spaciousness and in its (intention of) complete synthesis of awakening and integration. ### Risks {#wayfinding-introduction--risks} Mark makes quite a fuss about risks associated with intensive meditation practice, sometimes in extreme terms. I'm a bit confused about the tone he takes here, though it's probably at least directionally right relative to what most of the modern meditation literature in English looked like until relatively recently, which was basically singularly positive and optimistic (at least about the prospects of practice.) There are some loud warnings (eg. [here](https://meditationbook.page/#risks-maximally-cautious-warnings-directives-first-)) at the beginning of the wayfinding book, as well as considerations and reference to risks strewn throughout. Some of the risk addressed is specifically as a possible inciting stressor for psychosis, for those with psychosis risk, and a large part is in reference to a large class of disturbances and disruptions in intensive spiritual practice. I discuss the latter [in more detail](#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities) later. There's been some broader discourse in the last fifteen years or so about tail risks in intensive spiritual practice. My impression is that this was something of an open secret in serious meditation communities, but became more public partly directly in response to Daniel Ingram's work, and then maybe secondarily the work of Cheetah House. Again see the section linked immediately above for more on this, but I'll say briefly that Mark's models of meditation disruptions and tail risk seem to be noticeably different from those I've seen in most of the contemporary discourse, or even those discussed in monastic communities. I'm still actually confused about how these models all relate, and my sense is that the actual data we have is yet too sparse, and for a variety of reasons I don't endorse the frameworks used by traditional teachers in diagnosing or avoiding these kinds of harms. More generally I'm to a large extent agnostic about whether most people in particular should engage in this kind of practice, my goal here is *largely* to communicate about what models and anecdata are around, and leave people trailheads should they want to pursue practice for themselves. --- # The Global Wayfinding Model {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/wayfinding-model — also at `/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-model.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-wayfinding-model--`.* This section discusses the most important parts of the global wayfinding model in more detail. *See [previous section](#wayfinding-introduction) for initial context*. ## Losslessness {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--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.[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--loss] 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. [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--loss]: 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. 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 version[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--any-sensory] 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. [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--any-sensory]: And Mark does seem to be making really extreme claims, so eg. [here](https://meditationbook.page/#body-self-trust-sensory-processing-meaning) "the mind is practically lossless (in that any distinguishable sensory memory can be ultimately recovered)" 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,[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--well] as well as almost all modern therapy systems. [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--well]: 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. 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](#practice-healing--integration)" 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](#practice-phenomenology-somatics), which is a very common pattern of *technical debt*. ## Technical debt {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--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](#practice-healing--metabolism) and [integrated](#practice-healing--integration). 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](#wayfinding-my-takes) on wayfinding, and on [this question very broadly](#spiritual-truth-truth). - 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](https://meditationbook.page/#ordering-matters-order-matters) "million-moves long, ten thousand hour combination lock" to describe practice in his system. - Most adults have substantial outstanding technical debt. - [Awakenings](#practice-mysticism-awakening--awakening) 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](#spiritual-truth-truth) 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](#practice-healing--psychological-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](#practice-healing--metabolism) as a more complex structure of debt is unwound, so this ordered list here is sort of in reverse order of how [practice](#practice-spiritual-practice--transformative-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](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma--models-reports-and-anecdata) and [trauma smells](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--smells-in-particular-not-exhaustive). - (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](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--layering)) - 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](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--complex-tangles)) - 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 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](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--structure-preserving-transformations)), 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 {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--layering} ::gloss[*Layering* refers to structural contortion, dislocation, and suppression used to achieve a specific configuration of psychology and behavior, at the expense of integration.] *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](https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/08/03/david-deida-shell-layer-theory/) 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](#practice-phenomenology-somatics), with common patterns in their presentation and in [their resolution](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings). 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](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--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](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--blockage) - 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](#spiritual-truth-truth) these questions later. This is obviously besides big questions I discuss later re [introspective epistemology](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation). 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](#practice-introspection--introspection-thought-self-models-and-the-unconscious), or introspectively superficial "beliefs." These structures again very commonly centrally revolve around somatic patterns which occlude the [somatic instantiation of felt meaning](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--meaning-and-resonance). 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](#practice-healing--releases-and-openings) 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](#culture-trauma-memetics-trauma-smells--smells-in-particular-not-exhaustive). 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 {#wayfinding-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](#culture-trauma-memetics-culture) par [excellence](#practice-healing--robust-relationship-with-taboo), 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 here[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--wayfinding-taboo] 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. [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--wayfinding-taboo]: Having nothing to do with wayfinding, but in its terms. 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 Eliezer[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--terminal-values] 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](#goodness-sex) 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. [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--terminal-values]: Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2007. [*Terminal Values and Instrumental Values*](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5ucT5ZbPdhfGNLtP/terminal-values-and-instrumental-values) 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](#practice-phenomenology-somatics--bodymind-and-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, perhaps ultimately resting on need for connection and grounding, and presumably desire for sex. - (Again [see more](#goodness-sex) 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](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--refactoring), 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. 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 *tantric*[^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--tantra]. Again [see more below](#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--refactoring). [^wayfinding-wayfinding-model--tantra]: 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](#fn-practice-mysticism-awakening--neo-tantra) for a discussion of Western Neo-Tantra.
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.
[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] Many practice systems regard content as like little bits of nutshell in an otherwise pleasant gruel; wayfinding's central thesis, imo, is that content is more like - [ ] 2026-07-22 So the thing about debt and losslessness is like, one way to express this, is that content isn't just sort of like little bits of nutshell in and otherwise pleasant gruel. Rather, it's tightly structured and tightly *raveled* in itself etc 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] ### Complex tangles {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--complex-tangles} ::nogloss 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.] - [ ] I think I'm gonna talk about somatic tangles much more here. - [ ] "beliefs are full stack" [ Re "quagmires," there are reports (I see this more commonly among wayfinding associated people, but peripherally in other circles) of structures which look like: 1. Some persistent clump of [content](#practice-healing--psychological-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 trying to perform the absent emotion/behavior/etc. 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... To be fair this is a bit exaggerated, but I've definitely seen reports of tangles just like this. ] ## Refactoring {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--refactoring} ### "Structure-preserving transformations" {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--structure-preserving-transformations} ::nogloss ### Wacky phenomenology {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--wacky-phenomenology} ## Wayfinding and awakening {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--wayfinding-and-awakening} [something like, and then awakening pops out for free? etc] ## Painting some pictures {#wayfinding-wayfinding-model--painting-some-pictures} --- # The Depths of Insanity {#wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/the-depths-of-insanity — also at `/md/wayfinding/the-depths-of-insanity.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-the-depths-of-insanity--`.* --- # Disruptions in Life and Practice {#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities — also at `/md/wayfinding/wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities--`.* ## Nonmonotonicities {#wayfinding-wayfinding-disruptions-nonmonotonicities--nonmonotonicities} ::gloss[😠😠😠???!? cmon mark, are you just trying to be illegible here] 😠😠😠???!? cmon mark, are you just trying to be illegible here --- # My Takes on Wayfinding {#wayfinding-my-takes} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/wayfinding/my-takes — also at `/md/wayfinding/my-takes.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `wayfinding-my-takes--`.* --- # Spiritual Truth {#spiritual-truth} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth — also at `/md/spiritual-truth.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth--`.* *In this chapter:* - [🔨 Metaphysics re Phenomenology and Spiritual Practice](#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality) - [🔨 Lopsided Masters](#spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters) - [🔨 Schools, Teachers, and Transmission](#spiritual-truth-schools-teachers-transmission) - [🔨 Gnosis, Inference, Deference, & Confabulation](#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation) - [🔨 Wrong Practice](#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice) - [🔨 Spiritual Truth](#spiritual-truth-truth) - [🔨 Rationality](#spiritual-truth-rationality) --- # Metaphysics re Phenomenology and Spiritual Practice {#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality--`.* ## Practice instructions, fake models, and views {#spiritual-truth-metaphysics-phenomenology-spirituality--practice-instructions-fake-models-and-views} ::nogloss --- # Lopsided Masters {#spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/lopsided-masters — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/lopsided-masters.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-lopsided-masters--`.* --- # Schools, Teachers, and Transmission {#spiritual-truth-schools-teachers-transmission} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/schools-teachers-transmission — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/schools-teachers-transmission.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-schools-teachers-transmission--`.* --- # Gnosis, Inference, Deference, & Confabulation {#spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/gnosis-confabulation.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-gnosis-confabulation--`.* --- # Wrong Practice {#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/wrong-practice.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-wrong-practice--`.* ## Thou shalt not disfigure the soul {#spiritual-truth-wrong-practice--thou-shalt-not-disfigure-the-soul} --- # Spiritual Truth {#spiritual-truth-truth} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/truth — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/truth.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-truth--`.* > *Na hi verena verāni,*
> *sammantīdha kudācanaṁ;*
> *Averena ca sammanti,*
> *esa dhammo sanantano.*[^spiritual-truth-truth--dhp] [^spiritual-truth-truth--dhp]: [DhP 5](https://suttacentral.net/dhp1-20/pli/ms?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin) >*Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.*
>*By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.*
>*This is a law[^spiritual-truth-truth--dhamma] eternal.*[^spiritual-truth-truth--rakkhita] [^spiritual-truth-truth--rakkhita]: [DhP 5](https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.01.budd.html), trans. Buddharakkhita 1996 [^spiritual-truth-truth--dhamma]: This is maybe neither here nor there but I just want to point out that *dhamma* (skt. *dharma*) is problematic even in the original. IIRC *dhamma* means variously a. law (inviolable property of the universe), b. teaching, c. phenomenon (subjective arising), and d. *thing* (!!). Anyway some translators choose "teaching" here. (Also several more, eg. *duty*, in some Hindu contexts.) What would that mean? What does [true](#metaphysics-real--real-and-true) mean, in general, or in this context? ## Culture and spiritual truth {#spiritual-truth-truth--culture-and-spiritual-truth} ::nogloss --- # Rationality {#spiritual-truth-rationality} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/spiritual-truth/rationality — also at `/md/spiritual-truth/rationality.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `spiritual-truth-rationality--`.* --- # Goodness {#goodness} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness — also at `/md/goodness.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness--`.* *In this chapter:* - [🔨 What is Axiology?](#goodness-what-is-axiology) - [🔨 Metaphysics and Axiology](#goodness-metaphysics-axiology) - [🔨 Harm](#goodness-harm) - [🔨 Metaphysical Harms](#goodness-metaphysical-harms) - [🔨 Sex](#goodness-sex) --- # What is Axiology? {#goodness-what-is-axiology} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness/what-is-axiology — also at `/md/goodness/what-is-axiology.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness-what-is-axiology--`.* --- # Metaphysics and Axiology {#goodness-metaphysics-axiology} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness/metaphysics-axiology — also at `/md/goodness/metaphysics-axiology.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness-metaphysics-axiology--`.* --- # Harm {#goodness-harm} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness/harm — also at `/md/goodness/harm.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness-harm--`.* --- # Metaphysical Harms {#goodness-metaphysical-harms} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness/metaphysical-harms — also at `/md/goodness/metaphysical-harms.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness-metaphysical-harms--`.* --- # Sex {#goodness-sex} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/goodness/sex — also at `/md/goodness/sex.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `goodness-sex--`.* --- # Conclusion {#conclusion} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/conclusion — also at `/md/conclusion.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `conclusion--`.* This chapter reiterates and elaborates on the main thesis of the book. *In this chapter:* - [🔨 Spiritual Rationality](#conclusion-spiritual-rationality) --- # Spiritual Rationality {#conclusion-spiritual-rationality} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/conclusion/spiritual-rationality — also at `/md/conclusion/spiritual-rationality.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `conclusion-spiritual-rationality--`.* *Spiritual rationality*, in my view, is composed of three main considerations. I want a spirituality which satisfies all of them, and I believe you should too. It should be: **Sane**: truthful, accurate, not mistaken or false about the world or the contents of our minds, and furthemore conducive to sane communities and sane societies. **Effective**: able to achieve the goals it advertises, and both calibrated and honest about how successfully it can do that. **True** (perhaps, **right**, perhaps also just **good**): true to ourselves and to our values, both not denying our values or trying to "transcend" them, but also able to discard chaff, confusion, and ignorance about the nature of experience and value. Moreso, deeply beautiful and aligned with goodness, as best as we yet understand it. This list is not necessarily comprehensive, and I'm not quite happy with any of these words, but they'll do for now. Once again, as I've said over and over, see also [nebulosity](#metaphysics-eternalism-nihilism--nebulosity). *** --- # Appendix {#appendix} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/appendix — also at `/md/appendix.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `appendix--`.* This chapter has supplementary essays on specific topics which didn't fit in the main body of the book. - [🔨 Empiricism re Therapy Efficacy](#appendix-therapy-efficacy) - [🔨 The Garden Of Eden](#appendix-garden-of-eden) - [🔨 Specific Claims from Specific Traditions](#appendix-specific-claims) - [🔨 Whose Buddha?](#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography) --- # Empiricism re Therapy Efficacy {#appendix-therapy-efficacy} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/appendix/therapy-efficacy — also at `/md/appendix/therapy-efficacy.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `appendix-therapy-efficacy--`.* Oy vey. --- # The Garden Of Eden {#appendix-garden-of-eden} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/appendix/garden-of-eden — also at `/md/appendix/garden-of-eden.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `appendix-garden-of-eden--`.* There are a variety of theories, stories, and fantasies which I'll refer to as stories of the *Garden of Eden*. These stories revolve around a reconstructed past which was vastly more spiritually wealthy: more peaceful, wholesome, trusting, integrated with the earth, healthy in diet, etc. As fantasies or [imaginal](#practice-practices--imaginal-practice) background, I have no real objection, but as actual depictions of the past, I believe these are broadly false. Furthermore, insofar as we're concerned with actually trying to understand our own species, and especially what ought to be possible for the future, we should not be using stories like these to guide us. I have a few claims here: 1. The lives of most humans who have ever lived have been uncomfortable, difficult, vulnerable, and often brutal, much more than we in the 21st century West usually imagine. 2. The kinds of stories about the history of our species which circulate in pop discourses, especially in hippy circles, are very often based on a combination of sparse anecdotes and fantasy or imaginative elaboration from anthropological and archaeological evidence. 3. While "traditional societies" are well adapted to their contexts in many ways, many features of their cultures look more like a random hodgepodge—some of them delightful or curious, and many dysfunctional or harmful, but mostly just not particularly well optimized for *anything*. Beyond these, my claim is that from my (sparse) reading of anthropology, I haven't seen evidence of societies[^appendix-garden-of-eden--contact] which display overwhelming spiritual integrity, righteousness, or robustness. In general, ethnographies feel like they're describing the inheritors of a lineage of adaptation, trauma, dysfunction, ignorance, and authentic human spirit, muddling through with what they have at hand. [^appendix-garden-of-eden--contact]: Mostly I mean before contact with the West, but largely the same after also. ## How bad was it? {#appendix-garden-of-eden--how-bad-was-it} ## Pop-spiritual pseudoanthropology {#appendix-garden-of-eden--pop-spiritual-pseudoanthropology} ## Adaptation and optimization {#appendix-garden-of-eden--adaptation-and-optimization} ## It is our birthright to adapt and be joyful {#appendix-garden-of-eden--it-is-our-birthright-to-adapt-and-be-joyful} --- # Specific Claims from Specific Traditions {#appendix-specific-claims} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/appendix/specific-claims — also at `/md/appendix/specific-claims.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `appendix-specific-claims--`.* --- # Whose Buddha? {#appendix-whose-buddha-historiography} *Page: https://spiritual-rationality.org/book/appendix/whose-buddha-historiography — also at `/md/appendix/whose-buddha-historiography.md`. Anchors within this section are prefixed `appendix-whose-buddha-historiography--`.*