---
title: "Spiritual Rationality (minimal edition), part 8 of 8"
canonical: "https://spiritual-rationality.org"
pages: 29
---

*Part 8 of 8, minimal (headings, emphasis and prose only) edition — “Paths and "The Path"” through “Whose Buddha?”. Previous: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min-7.txt. Whole edition in one file: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms-min.txt. Index: https://spiritual-rationality.org/llms.txt*

# Paths and "The Path"

*See also on meditation and 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, this is expressed variously as just "the path" or also "one's path," "*my* path," etc., also "the x *way*," and other variations.

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.

Saliently, "western post-traditional contemplative spirituality" 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.

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 re insight, and after that 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 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, 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

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 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*, 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.

There's some features which show up surprisingly often 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.

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," 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.

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.

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.

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

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 re the last point.) Many of these are conceived of as awakenings, 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.

[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

*See also all of the practices I discussed in the sections on meditation and features of spiritual practices, as well as, maybe secondarily, the contours described in the sections on metabolism and releases and openings.*

[so again, practices of discipline, cultivation, and devotion]

## Gradualism and suddenism

## Misc

# Transformative Practice

*Transformative practice* is sometimes used as a modern generic term for all of the practices described so far in this chapter. It's also useful for describing a greater breadth of practices, techniques, and views 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

# Global Wayfinding

*In this chapter:*

- Contextualizing Global Wayfinding
- The Global Wayfinding Model
- The Depths of Insanity
- Disruptions in Life and Practice
- My Takes on Wayfinding

# Contextualizing Global Wayfinding

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, 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.

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. 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.

## Outline of the model

Briefly, global wayfinding is presented as a holistic synthesis of awakening and integration. 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" is the same as that of transcendence, mysticism, and gnosis,
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, from traditional contemplative models to modern therapy modalities, tend toward provisional or *local* solutions both for spiritual attainment and for the resolution or cessation 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 and psycho-spiritual material recruiting and constructing disparate patterns of perception, attention, thought, somatic phenomena, etc. etc., which, often organically and spontaneously, will be coordinated and unraveled in the process of the underlying generator 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 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, 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

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) 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 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

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

*See previous section for initial context*.

## Losslessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

## Technical debt

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

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

There are a bunch of claims here:

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

Some broad categories of debt, not necessarily exhaustive:

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

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

Debt *often* has unmetabolized gross content at the root, but not always, or in some cases at least not in a way which ever becomes distinctly available. Some kinds of debt are purely perceptual, cognitive, or somatic tangles without much valence or emotion. Again, see the sections below.

### Layering

*Layering* refers to structural contortion, dislocation, and suppression, used to achieve a specific configuration of psychology and behavior, generally at the expense of integration.

(Unfortunately 'layer' evokes discrete strata *occluding* others, which was ish how it was meant in the model Mark originally took the term from, but it's meant more loosely and broadly in Mark's usage.)

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

Gesturally, some examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#### Layering, shadow, and losslessness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More context on shadow

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

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

### Complex tangles

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

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

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

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

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

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

- [ ] I think I'm gonna talk about somatic tangles much more here.
- [ ] "beliefs are full stack"

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 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

### "Structure-preserving transformations"

### Wacky phenomenology

## Wayfinding and awakening

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

## Painting some pictures

# The Depths of Insanity

# Disruptions in Life and Practice

## Nonmonotonicities

😠😠😠???!? cmon mark, are you just trying to be illegible here

# My Takes on Wayfinding

# Spiritual Truth

*In this chapter:*

- Metaphysics re Phenomenology and Spiritual Practice
- Lopsided Masters
- Schools, Teachers, and Transmission
- Gnosis, Inference, Deference, & Confabulation
- Wrong Practice
- Spiritual Truth
- Rationality

# Metaphysics re Phenomenology and Spiritual Practice

## Practice instructions, fake models, and views

# Lopsided Masters

# Schools, Teachers, and Transmission

# Gnosis, Inference, Deference, & Confabulation

# Wrong Practice

## Thou shalt not disfigure the soul

# Spiritual Truth

*Na hi verena verāni,*
*sammantīdha kudācanaṁ;*
*Averena ca sammanti,*
*esa dhammo sanantano.*
*Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world.*
*By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.*
*This is a law eternal.*

What would that mean? What does true mean, in general, or in this context?

## Culture and spiritual truth

# Rationality

# Goodness

*In this chapter:*

- What is Axiology?
- Metaphysics and Axiology
- Harm
- Metaphysical Harms
- Sex

# What is Axiology?

# Metaphysics and Axiology

# Harm

# Metaphysical Harms

# Sex

# Conclusion

This chapter reiterates and elaborates on the main thesis of the book.

*In this chapter:*

- Spiritual Rationality

# 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.

# Appendix

This chapter has supplementary essays on specific topics which didn't fit in the main body of the book.

- Empiricism re Therapy Efficacy
- The Garden Of Eden
- Specific Claims from Specific Traditions
- Whose Buddha?

# Empiricism re Therapy Efficacy

Oy vey.

# The 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 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 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.

## How bad was it?

## Pop-spiritual pseudoanthropology

## Adaptation and optimization

## It is our birthright to adapt and be joyful

# Specific Claims from Specific Traditions

# Whose Buddha?