This is not a blog.

I mainly use Substack to post draft sections of books. Several different books, on apparently different topics! This is probably confusing!

And since Substack is meant for blogs, it’s not set up to make it easy to find your way around, even once you know how I’m using it.

I’ve created a new Topics page that should help!

Its opening line is:

Wild diversity with a unifying theme.

Not to keep you in suspense, the unifying theme is:

Things generally go better when you don’t try to separate nebulosity and pattern.

Since both nebulosity and pattern appear everywhere, I write about many topics: meta-rationality, software, Vajrayana Buddhism, adult development, romance, nobility, society, the mythic mode, philosophy, and health.

To be honest, I created the page partly because even I couldn’t find things on the site! I hope it helps you too.

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Current mitigation methods are inadequate. Better alternatives are available and necessary, but expensive.

An incident last week prompted this post.

OpenAI deliberately built an advanced cyber attack AI. It escaped containment and hacked its way into the computers of another AI company, called Hugging Face, in order to read secret information. According to some estimates, the technical sophistication of its attack was at a level more typical of state cyber warfare agencies than routine cybercriminals.1

Full details are not yet public.2 Simon Willison’s write-up is clear, brief, and level-headed. The implications are disputed; some opinions contradict what I say here.3 To keep this post short, I’ll skip addressing most complexities and counterarguments.

My book Better without AI is about “moderate apocalypses.” These are possible AI-driven disasters that are less catastrophic than “doom scenarios” of human extinction. That makes them less fun to discuss. They are still plenty bad, and so deserve extensive consideration. However, preventing them would be boring and expensive. So, these unpleasant “moderate” possibilities are mainly ignored.

Doom scenarios often feature a malevolent AI developing superhuman cyber attack capabilities. It grabs control of computers for its own use, gains access to secret information, controls communication channels, and takes over critical civilian infrastructure or military systems. OpenAI’s system did the first two of those things in the current incident.

Hostile states maintain contingency plans to use cyber attack capabilities to take over your country’s electrical grid, interbank transfer network, or military command and control systems. Recent advances in AI makes it seem increasingly probable that they would succeed. This could escalate globally to a “moderate apocalypse.”

Everyone has opinions about what AI will be able to do by when. No one’s are meaningful.4 You certainly don’t need mine. Instead:

This is about current technical capabilities that may prevent or ameliorate some bad outcomes. Everyone is ignoring these opportunities, out of short-sighted expedience.

“Develop and mandate intrinsic cybersecurity” is a short explanation I wrote four years ago.5 I’ll summarize it here, but suggest you could read it there as well. It’s only a thousand words.

To prevent AI disasters, there are three basic approaches:

1. Make the AI want to not do bad things, so it won’t.

2. Put it in a box, so it can’t do bad things, even if it tries.

3. Harden the things it might attack to make them less vulnerable.

The first is called “alignment.” Heated metaphysical arguments circle around whether an AI system can have its own desires, be malevolent, or act autonomously. This is unhelpful for this context. For cybersecurity, it doesn’t matter what AI systems “want” (if anything). People and organizations have goals, can be malevolent, and some will use the best AI technology available to take hostile control of others’ computers.

Boxing won’t work. OpenAI’s cyber attack system getting out of its box is an example. Plausibly OpenAI was negligent in building the box, and someone else could have done better. However, such boxes use the same technologies as in current cyber defense, which are definitely inadequate. Also, deliberately unboxed “open weight” AI systems are freely available. Their development lags the most advanced technology by only a few months. Preventing catch-up seems unlikely.

That leaves cyber defense: protecting networked computer systems from intrusion.

The difficulty here is that nearly all software is inherently and unfixably insecure. It’s built using technologies that are known to make it impossible to write secure programs. And it is written with little or no concern for security.

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So the current cyber defense approach is to put software armor between the internet and the programs you want to protect.

The problem is that, although the armor is forged with the intention to make it as secure as reasonably feasible, it’s built with the same inherently insecure technologies. Also, the armor is extremely complicated, and inevitably has chinks in it.

This favors offense over defense. An attacker only has to find one hole in the armor, and then they gain access to everything inside. The defender has to try to fill all the holes. Consequently, as I wrote in 2022:

Internet security is mainly fictional. Almost daily there’s a news report about a major corporation or government agency that has been penetrated by human hackers who have extracted sensitive personal data of millions of people; or which has been shut down by a ransomware or DDOS attack.

This has persisted because:

Accountability for cybersecurity failures is nearly nonexistent. Organizations whose security policies and implementations were glaringly deficient, and whose systems were hacked, harming millions of innocent people, nearly never suffer significant penalties.

A few months ago, leading AI companies panicked. They put top priority on advancing cybersecurity capabilities. They offered exclusive access to their most powerful systems to “good guy” organizations, to give them a lead in creating defenses over enemy attackers. Project Glasswing was bellwether for this effort.6

It’s certainly better than nothing. However, the asymmetry in difficulty between defense and attack makes me think it is only a partial stopgap. Cybersecurity capabilities are unavoidably “dual use”: valuable to attackers as well as defenders.

There is a stronger alternative. Specific technologies can create computer systems that are intrinsically secure. Ideally, those can ensure that all parts are secure themselves, rather than hiding the mass of insecure software behind a patchwork of thin protections.

These are not pie-in-the-sky. They are well-understood, and in regular use in some practical applications. “Develop and mandate intrinsic cybersecurity” lists them, with links to explainers elsewhere. (I would now add to its list type-safe, memory-safe languages. I omitted those as too obvious to mention; their use is widespread and routine. However, they are usually avoided in security-critical software, because they run slower.)

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I advocate adopting these technologies broadly and immediately. I imagine four objections:

• It is too late

• It wouldn’t work

• It would be too expensive

• Nobody can tell me how to program!7

I’ll sketch counterarguments for each.

Better late than never

Everything I’ve said in this post, and said years ago in “Develop and mandate intrinsic cybersecurity,” has been obvious for decades. Cybersecurity experts have been warning about this for approximately ever. What’s happening this month may be the first explosion in a rapidly-unfolding disaster. Or not.

It may be too late to put intrinsic security in place. Maybe the stock exchange or the nuclear arsenal will get pwned next week. Maybe there’s two years before that could happen. Maybe it never will. We don’t know.

For decades, infectious disease experts warned that a novel respiratory virus would cause a catastrophic global pandemic, and everyone was like “well, I guess we’ll worry about that when the time comes”. Authorities refused the simple preparations that could have significantly lessened the death toll, the cultural disruption, and the economic disaster.

FFS, get started now!

Likely to mitigate at least some damage, and maybe nearly all

“Intrinsically secure” does not mean “absolutely secure.” There always remain gaps between theory and implementation. Human error can also neuter otherwise-perfect security; and humans do occasionally make mistakes.

Perhaps sufficiently advanced AI could find and exploit the gaps easily. We don’t know. However, known technologies can, at minimum, make that much less likely.

In the mean time, imperfect but significantly improved security would be greatly beneficial, even if cyber attack capabilities never advance beyond this month’s level.8

A better way to use AI in cyber defense

Project Glasswing, and similar efforts, are using AI systems to find and fix security holes in existing programs. That’s valuable as an emergency measure.

It should also be possible to use AI systems to accelerate the difficult and expensive work of writing intrinsically secure replacements. Although few programmers know how to do that now, AI systems could easily be trained to assist. With that, the seemingly daunting and overwhelming task may be quite feasible.

The place to start is with the “armoring” placed between critical systems and the internet. The TCP/IP stack, firewalls, web servers, database APIs, codecs, and so on. Anything with a string buffer. There’s finite quantities of that stuff. Everyone uses the same ones, so they only need to get rebuilt once, not separately for every software system.

The experience gained from that effort should further accelerate working inward, to harden the “business logic” of the most important application software.

Less expensive than a moderate apocalypse

This will cost a lot of money.

• Technologies for developing inherently secure software are more difficult to use. Few programmers know how. Training will be expensive.

• The amount of existing insecure software that needs replacement is extremely large.

• Secure programs are slower than insecure ones, so everyone will need faster computers for equal performance.

• The best security requires a different sort of hardware than is in current use. Although not inherently more expensive, it is not currently commercially available, due to lack of demand.

Adversaries taking down the electrical grid, gaining persistent control over the New York Stock Exchange, or disabling military communications in wartime would also be expensive.

Probably much more expensive.9

Funding and mandates

This won’t happen unless powerful organizations make it happen. AI companies deserve credit for spending billions of dollars this year to make a start. That includes both internal software development and grants to allied external organizations.

They have alerted business groups and governments. Large companies and government agencies are scrambling to react to the immediate threat. That is good.

They also should plan their transition to inherently secure technologies, and get started implementing that now. That will include instituting mandatory internal policies and spending a lot of money.

For governments, it may also include external regulatory mandates. Strengthening and enforcing penalties for allowing security breaches will be a minimum first step.

“HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true, with nearly perfect certainty. This knowledge has great practical importance.

“What does ‘true’ mean in this case?” sounds like a dumb question:

“HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true because HIV is the cause of AIDS.

Here’s the thing, though. You may not know this…

HIV is defined as “various unrelated viruses that cause AIDS.” And AIDS is defined as “various unrelated diseases that are caused by HIV.”1 Substituting equals for equals, “HIV is the cause of AIDS” means:

Undoubtedly true. But nearly meaningless! And it says nothing about either HIV or AIDS.

There would seem to be some sort of a problem here.

Suddenly, the question “so, then, what does it mean that HIV is the cause of AIDS?” seems pressing. And, if even its meaningfulness is called into question, asking in what sense it could be true also doesn’t sound so stupid anymore.

The situation is highly unsatisfactory logically, but it works perfectly in practice—for specific reasons I’ll explain in this post.

I began In the Cells of the Eggplant with this very problem, in its first chapter:

What do “truth” and “belief” mean? That sounds like an ivory-tower philosophical puzzle. Most such questions can’t be answered, and “correct” answers, if they existed, wouldn’t make any practical difference. However, wrong ideas about “truth” and “belief” have large practical consequences, so getting a better understanding is important.

Believing true things matters. “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true, and figuring that out has saved tens of millions of lives. Some politicians, religious leaders, and “alternative medicine” advocates said they “didn’t believe” HIV is the cause of AIDS. On that basis, they blocked HIV prevention and treatment, causing hundreds of thousands of horrible, unnecessary deaths.

We’ll find that the sense in which “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true is more complex, fascinating, strange, and consequential than you’d probably think. I’ll explain the relevant biology in detail—and I suspect you will be surprised! There are practical medical and public health consequences to this unexpected sense.

“Epistemology” means ways of working with truth, belief, and knowledge. In the material world, there are only sort-of truths. Due to pervasive nebulosity, there are very few absolute truths, if any. Meta-rational epistemology provides a toolkit for working with sort-of truths, beliefs, and knowledge.

This post is a case study in meta-rational epistemology.

“HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in some sense. Which sense? What sort of truth is that?

• “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is not a subjective opinion. We can be almost perfectly certain it is true, on the basis of overwhelming factual evidence, with no meaningful room for doubt.

• However, it’s also not objectively true, intrinsically true, or absolutely true. It’s true only relative to particular situations and purposes. It’s true only “in some senses.” We’ll see that it’s scientifically uncontroversial that, for some critically important purposes, other things are the cause of AIDS.

The discovery that HIV is the cause of AIDS was a scientific triumph. That relied extensively on rational methods. Still, the fact itself lacks many distinguishing aspects of rationality: objectivity, precision, generality, abstraction, and conformity with formal logic. Meta-rationality was critically necessary during the discovery, and for understanding now specifically what “HIV is the cause of AIDS” means.

The same is true of all scientific knowledge, to varying degrees. This post provides examples of how that works in practice.

The first two sections explain how “HIV” and “AIDS” are purpose-laden, contextual categories, not objective ones. (This will surprise you!) Whether something counts as HIV or AIDS is ultimately a matter of functional resemblance. It is therefore a meta-rational judgement, not something that can be decided rationally and objectively. These sections also explain why the categories have to be defined in terms of each other.

The most important word in “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is cause. What does that mean? This may seem obvious, but it’s not. Philosophers have tried to explain, and totally failed. Scientists generally assume (without thinking about it) that they understand causality, but they don’t.

Much of the post explains a meta-rational understanding of causality. “Cause” is not one thing, but a diffuse collection of nebulous thought-forms, causal schemas.

Selecting which sort of rationality to apply, for particular purposes in particular contexts, is a key meta-rational skill. In this case, different causal schemas explain different aspects of HIV/AIDS biology. Overall these add up to the “cause” in the overall sense of “HIV is the cause of AIDS.”

To understand how “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true, one must know a bit how HIV does cause AIDS. Reading this, you will learn about biological mechanisms I find surprising and fascinating! I hope you do too.

(High school biology is enough background to understand all the main text. I’ve put some more technical material in footnotes.)

A final section points out explicitly how the scientific details we covered provide concrete examples of key meta-rational themes.

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Discovering dismay had been unnecessary.

Mostly all I can remember from the 1976 Bicentennial was that it was a Really Big Deal. I was too young to understand the meaning, which is probably why I’ve lost all the details. But everyone started getting excited a couple years before it started, and there were elaborate preparations leading up to it, and it was huge. I do remember that!

So about two years ago, I started looking forward to the 250th. I looked around on the web, and nothing much seemed to be happening yet. And then again a year ago. And I checked in occasionally, feeling increasingly baffled and disappointed. I wondered vaguely whether this meant I should do something, instead of expecting it to be delivered to me?

And then it seemed that many people were against the whole thing. I felt increasingly dismayed! Culminating a week ago, when I found out that my home town had actually canceled July 4th outright.

Determined to celebrate anyway, I headed this morning to the nearby village of Niwot, less sophisticated and cynical than Boulder.

I had a wonderful time.

So did everyone else. So many happy people!

I love America. Many of the “yes, but”s are valid, of course. And yet: it was only after the parade was over that I realized, slightly amazed, there was a complete absence of “yes, but”s during the event. There are times for those, and this was not one of them.

I feel a responsibility to care for America. This post is a “yes, and” to the “yes, but”s.

The event made me feel a little ashamed not to be part of something like this:

Niwot is farm country, in part. That is not my natural habitat, but it doesn’t seem alien, and certainly not sneer-worthy.

You’ve probably already read several highly sophisticated takes on the politics of this day. What it all means, and how everything is on fire because of the Bad Tribe, and the author’s clever strategy for fixing it.

I haven’t got anything like that. Just some pictures that make me glad.

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That’s a baby goat she’s carrying:

I dressed patriotically for the occasion, and ate a hotdog. I don’t remember when I last ate a hotdog, but 1976 is a pretty good guess.

It was really good! I was surprised! If you haven’t eaten a hotdog since 1976 either, try it! You’ll like it!

If it’s not too late, and even if it seems hokey or somehow politically incorrect, I encourage you to go enjoy the 250th.

Have a wonderful time! 🎉 🎇

This post illustrates the meta-rationalist understanding of rationality using a relatively simple example: ways we use probability theory.

It is a follow-on to “The parable of the pebbles,” an even simpler illustration of how rationality works in actuality.

Most of the second half of Part One of the book, starting with “Probabilism,” explains how the rationalist explanation of probability is wrong. This section sketches the meta-rationalist alternative. It’s also a warm-up to the discussion of meta-rational statistical practice in Part Five. That is much more complicated!

This is a section of the Meta-rationality book. It’s cross-posted from there.

Probability theory is formal, not rational

Rationality makes use of formal methods, but it is not just that. Part of what “formal” means is “not about anything in particular.” The number 37 is formal: it doesn’t specify 37 what. It is inherently meaningless, which is what gives it such power. “37 sheep,” on the other hand, can be rational and meaningful; not merely formal. More generally, mathematics is formal but not rational (in the reasonably standard sense I’m using that word).

“Probability theory” is formal, but not inherently rational (in this sense). It is a simple1 set of formal rules for manipulating numbers between 0.0 and 1.0. Those are referred to as “probabilities” in probability theory, but in the math itself they’re just numbers. They aren’t special or distinguished from other numbers in any way. So “probability theory” itself isn’t about anything. You can call 0.2792348 “a probability,” but unless you say what it is the probability of, it’s just a number.

This isn’t a defect in probability theory! It’s a beautiful mathematical system. It can also provide great practical value, when applied appropriately, in some situations, for some purposes. As we saw in “What probability can’t do,” inappropriate application can cause disasters.

How the rationalist misunderstanding is attractive

The promise of rationalism is certainty; and through that, control. For millennia, the promise was explicit. Rationalisms claimed that, with gradual intellectual progress, eventually everything could be known. Then utopia would be possible through complete control. That fantasy collapsed in the early twentieth century, with catastrophic social and cultural consequences.

Probabilistic rationalism offers a second-best fantasy: that there is an optimal way of thinking and acting in the face of uncertainty. Although we can never know anything for sure, we can use rules of evidence to increase justified confidence. Specifically, probability theory is the Correct set of rules of knowledge. Using it, we can gradually approach Truth more and more closely, and gain increasingly reliable control.

This “probabilism” systematically confuses uncertainty with probability. It makes the unthought assumption that if there’s uncertainty, there must be a Correct number to put on it, and you can use some definite method to determine what that is. This assumption is pure metaphysics. It is a matter of faith, whose basis is no more than emotional comfort.

A main cause of uncertainty is ontological nebulosity: the inherent indefiniteness of the actual world. It’s not just that it is difficult, or even impossible, to gain certain knowledge. It is that there are no absolute Truths about clouds, eggplants, dance moves, or bank runs. For rationalism, that is emotionally intolerable. So the rationalist reflex, when encountering ontological nebulosity, is to misunderstand it as epistemic uncertainty. Then one can say “no problem, at least not in principle: we know how to deal with that, probability theory ftw!”

Then probabilism assigns a special, unique role to probability theory as as the thing which connects other formalisms, such as physical theories, with the actual world. This is wrong for two reasons.

• First, probability theory can’t do that. It’s a formal system of rules for manipulating numbers. It has no method for relating those to anything in the actual world.

We mostly can’t and don’t use math to assign probabilities. Instead, that requires circumrationality: concrete activities in the actual world, not a formal system. We get probabilities by counting things, by watching and seeing things, and by poking at things to find out what happens. We get probabilities by asking people things and arguing with them about things. We get probabilities by understanding things, for example with causal or mechanistic models.

• Second, we relate numerous other formal systems to the actual world without using probability theory.

“The parable of the pebbles” uses the natural numbers {0, 1, 2, 3, …} as its example. The shepherd relates those to sheep by putting pebbles in a bucket.

In fact, in the parable, he uses the natural numbers themselves as a way of coping with uncertainty! Namely, his not knowing whether all the sheep are in the fold until he counts them.

Interpretations of probability theory

Circumrational methods are nebulous: indefinite, various, complicated, unreliable, improvised, and unenumerable. That makes rationalism’s fantasy of an optimality guarantee impossible.

When confronted with nebulosity, rationalism retreats from the actual world into the imaginary metaphysical world. Everything there is an Ideal Platonic Form: perfectly definite, so that there are really truly true Truths about it. Then rationalism pretends the actual world is the metaphysical world.

Probability theory, in rationalist fantasies, is not just a random bit of math that is sometimes useful. It is a foundation of the ultimate structure of Reality. Probabilities, rationalisms insist, are not just numbers, as I asserted earlier. They are special metaphysical entities with a special role.

Rationalisms, however, disagree about what that role is. There are half a dozen dueling metaphysical theories, called “interpretations of probability theory.”2 These are impossible nonsense, if taken as metaphysics.

However, we will see that they can be understood instead as categories of circumrational work. As such, they may be useful guides for action.

According to metaphysical interpretations, probabilities are inherently of things. Interpretations differ as to what sort of thing they are of: individual events, types of events in sequences of similar ones, or beliefs, for example. They also differ as to where the probabilities live: in individual objects, general physical laws, specific mechanisms, or individual people’s minds.

Probability theory began as an analysis of gambling with six-sided dice. The probability that a rolled die will come up showing three pips is 1/6 ≈ 0.16667. What does that mean, and why is it true?

The common sense interpretation is that this is a fact about dice. An individual die has this “propensity” as an intrinsic property.

This is often the most practical way of understanding probability. What is the probability that my toothbrush will stop working soon and I’ll need to buy a new one? That’s a fact about that specific toothbrush, whose switch is getting flaky.

But, like, how is this supposed to work? Where inside the die is the propensity hiding, and what sort of thing is it? This interpretation is often the most useful in practice, but it’s not compatible with physics.

Analysis using Newtonian physics might yield the 1/6 probability in virtue of the physical, cubic symmetry of dice. Here the probability is the consequence of general physical laws. Each side is identical to the others, and there are six, so each has a 1/6 probability. This is elegant!

However, it holds true only if the rolling of the die is truly random. What does that mean? It is difficult to define “random” other than in terms of probability itself, making the analysis circular, and so probably unhelpful. Nevertheless, this way of understanding is also often useful, so long as you have some other basis for taking a process as random.

Also, very few situations in which we use probability involve physical symmetry, so it is not often useful in practice. Even individual dice are not perfectly symmetric. In actuality, the probability is not exactly 1/6; just very close to that.

You could find out what the true probability is by rolling the die a million times, counting how many of times it showed how many pips, and dividing by a million. More generally, if you repeat a process identically many times, you can get probabilities by counting outcomes.

On the “frequentist interpretation,” this is not just how to discover the probability. It’s what probability means; what it really is. This pragmatic interpretation is frequently useful in technical practice; in statistical quality control for manufacturing, for example.

However, it works only when you can repeat a process many times, identically. That is usually expensive when it is even possible. In many situations where we use probabilities, it is not possible even in principle. What is the probability that you will die in a freak eel accident on Friday the 13th of April, 2029? Either you will or you won’t; you can’t repeat the experiment the next day.

Back to dice. Newtonian physics isn’t random; it’s deterministic. In principle, you could predict the outcome of a die roll with perfect certainty if you knew exactly how fast it was spinning in which direction, how far above the tabletop it was, the table and die’s quantitative elasticity and coefficients of friction, and so forth. But you don’t know.

According to the “Bayesian” interpretation, to say that a die roll is “random” is not stating a fact about the world, but about your mind. “Random” means that you are ignorant.

Nevertheless, I can say that it’s awfully unlikely that I’ll get shocked to death by an electric eel, and pretty likely that I’ll need a new toothbrush soon. I’m somewhat ignorant, but I can bring relevant evidence to bear. There are no electric eels where I live, I have only ever seen them a couple times in public aquariums, and I haven’t visited one of those in decades. I have a super vague memory that their shocks are rarely fatal? On the other hand, a couple weeks after my last toothbrush’s power switch started flaking, it wouldn’t turn off no matter what I did. The noise was annoying and I had to leave it in the garage overnight to run down before chucking it in the E-waste box.

The Bayesian theory says that “awfully unlikely” and “pretty likely” are really numbers, or at any rate should be treated as numbers. If I knew the numerical probability that I would go boating in Guyana on that fateful day in 2029, and the fatality rate for eel shocks, and a slew of other relevant factors, I could calculate my probability of death. However, I can’t guess even to within an order of magnitude, and that is common in cases of uncertainty. Unfortunately, the Bayesian interpretation has nothing to say about how to get your numbers! So it’s useful only in certain atypical sorts of situations.

“Interpretations” as categories of circumrational work

Many rationalists take the interpretations as mutually exclusive alternatives. Arguments about what probability “really means” are often bitter. This is generally true of metaphysical arguments, because metaphysics is pure fantasy. Each metaphysical interpretation is nonsense; none of them are True. Mathematical systems have no inherent meaning, in the sense of interpretability outside mathematics itself. Unconstrained by evidence, disagreement proceeds by content-free vituperation.

However, I’ve pointed out how each interpretation can be understood instead as describing a pragmatic category of uses. We can choose when, whether, and how to apply a mathematical system in the actual world. In this alternative understanding, none of the interpretations is True, but each can be a useful way of thinking and acting in some contexts for some purposes. (To be fair, most rationalists do recognize this, implicitly in their technical practice at least, even if not explicitly.)

Rationality requires circumrational work, as well as formal calculations. In our earlier example, integer arithmetic is not inherently about anything in particular. It has many practical uses, all of which involve circumrational work which relates numbers with aspects of the actual world, such as sheep. The type of work can be highly varied: dropping pebbles in a bucket, counting out loud, or gluing a digital-optical device in place and connecting it to your wifi network.

You can also maintain any of several quite different sorts of relationships between numbers and things. For example, using natural numbers as “cardinals” treats the items counted as interchangeable. For financial purposes, it may only matter that you own 37 sheep, and it doesn’t matter which ones. Alternatively, you can use natural numbers as “ordinals”: you assign one to each sheep as a unique label that distinguishes it. Sheep #17 is looking poorly; you need to remember to check on it tomorrow morning. Ordinal usage also establishes a priority relationship. If you always want to sell your oldest sheep when you go to market, numbering them individually at birth would do the trick.

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The “interpretations” could be taken as describing broad classes of circumrational ways of getting numerical probabilities. “Meaning is use” is a meta-rational maxim.3 The frequentist interpretation recommends counting things. The Bayesian interpretation recommends gathering heterogeneous bits of evidence to combine their significance.

Actually doing that can be complicated and difficult. The interpretations give little guidance. Instead, this is a matter of circumrational methods, transmitted within communities of practice. Often those are informal, and sometimes tacit. Sometimes they are highly technical and laid out in detail in procedure manuals.

As in relating numbers with sheep, different interpretations of probability describe different sorts of relationships between numbers and uncertain things, useful for different sorts of purposes. The nature and function of “fair coins have a 0.5 probability of coming up heads” and “the probability that my toothbrush will die tomorrow is .047502” are quite different.

Meta-rational choices when using probability theory in the actual world

Using probability in technical work is typically not meta-rational. The meta-rational question is: In this situation, what ways can we use probability to get work done that’s valuable for our purposes? That’s rarely asked. Instead, you adopt the methods of your community of practice, without considering whether they are a good fit.

You do “what is done” in your subfield of chemical engineering, investment management, or experimental psychology. You collect the data in the way people doing that kind of work do it, and you feed it to the same statistical routine everyone does. If you did something different, your boss and peers wouldn’t know how to evaluate it. They would reject your project proposal or journal submission. Anyway, presumably there’s some good reason for the standard methods, which got worked out by someone famous years ago, and it’s not your place to buck against the system.

This is efficient so long as there is a good reason it works. “Shut up and calculate” is often right; but wrong in cases where meanings are unclear and consequential. When a community of practice loses meta-rational contact with actuality, catastrophe can ensue: as in the science replication crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis.

Meta-rationality asks:

• What do we mean by “probability” here? Specifically how do these numbers relate to the actual world?

• Are the ways we’re getting them reliable? Are better circumrational methods possible here?

• What are these probabilities of? Are those the best things to consider probabilistically? (“Events” and “beliefs” are not objectively-given items. You have to choose which nebulous phenomena to treat as those for analytical purposes.)

• Do these probabilities mean what we want them to? What inferences are we drawing from them, and why do we think that’s valid?

• Are the actions our formal analysis recommends sane, all things considered? What risks might it be overlooking?

• Can probability theory help us do the actual thing, or are we just performing rationality theater? Is it is the best approach here, or is some other way of dealing with uncertainty better?

The answers to these questions are matters of meta-rational judgement. Skill in answering depends on numerous, diverse considerations, maxims, and methods. There are no generally correct answers, and no generally correct methods for getting answers.

Metaphorical use of “probability”

This is common in everyday talk, including by people who have no formal knowledge of probability theory.

“Are you going to the party tonight?”

“Probably not.”

Such uses are perfectly cromulent in many informal contexts, even though what they mean is highly nebulous (and certainly not numerical).

People who do know probability theory often use its technical terms informally as well:

“You know that Lisa is going?”

“Oh! Ah. Hmm. Updating my priors!”

“Updating priors” is a technical term from the Bayesian interpretation. It’s used here metaphorically, to mean “Now I’m thinking about changing my mind, and going after all!” This is fine as a joke, or as in-group slang, or as a reminder to oneself to consider the matter further.

It can become dysfunctional if you refuse to admit that it’s metaphorical. If you pretend you are using probability theory when you’re just waving your hands, and start doing the calculations with numbers you just made up, you may get spurious confidence in meaningless results. Acting on that may be a big mistake.

What you are actually doing when “waving your hands” to “update your priors” is interesting and worth investigating. It’s mostly not currently understood. I recommend an excellent Twitter thread by exploring these points.

A current highly-consequential example is “p(doom).” This is an enjoyable party game in which everyone sits in a circle and announces their estimate of the probability that artificial intelligence will soon kill all human beings. Then all participants perform a Bayesian update, and go around the circle again giving their new numbers.

The numbers announced by famous, highly-placed experts in artificial intelligence vary wildly, and after many years have not converged, despite the party having gone around the circle many times. This suggests that something is wrong. Maybe lots of people with mathematics PhDs are failing to perform the simple arithmetic correctly? That seems quite improbable.

Or else, probability theory is not the right tool for the job. These numbers are, in fact, meaningless. They have nearly no relationship with reality, and actions based on them are likely to go badly. I’ve discussed this in “New evidence that AI predictions are meaningless” and “How not to predict the future.”

There’s a couple of ways this goes wrong. One is obvious. AI doom scenarios are stories in which a series of events occur, culminating in robots killing everyone, or an AI-engineered virus killing everyone, or whatever. Given probabilities for the individual steps toward doom, you can do a trivial calculation to get the probability of doom itself. But there’s no good way of getting the probabilities of those prerequisites.

A less obvious problem is that many different paths to doom are imaginable (plus probably ones we haven’t thought of yet). Unenumerably many factors are relevant to the probability of each step in each path. The most serious p(doom) analyses consider only a handful. As explained her own “How not to predict the future,” the subset of factors you take into account radically affects your p(doom), even holding their individual probabilities constant.

Relevance is a central issue in meta-rationality. Choosing which factors to include in a probabilistic analysis is called “making a small world idealization.” (I explained those in “The probability of green cheese”; Hickman has a fine general discussion in her most recent post, “What we’re looking at and what we’re paying attention to.”) A small world idealization is always necessary, implicitly or explicitly, when using probability theory. It can be done more or less skillfully. When it can’t be done well, probability theory is worse than useless.

So what’s up with all the experts giving wildly different values for p(doom)? Many of them seem not to have done any math at all! (Probably because it’s obviously pointless.) Instead, their numbers are based on feels alone.

In practice, p(doom) means “how worried I feel, as an embodied emotion.” This is conceptually interesting, as another “interpretation” of probability theory which has been overlooked by philosophers!

It’s analogous to the Bayesian interpretation, often described as “strength of belief.” That “strength” is vaguely assumed to be a bloodless number in your head somehow. But often confidence and conviction, doubt and incredulity, are embodied sensations in your chest or gut. Then “probability” lives in there, not in your head.

Most people would agree that human extinction would be quite bad, and therefore worth putting some effort into avoiding. The uncertainty is consequential; but probability theory is not a good way to address it. My book Better without AI suggests pragmatic alternatives.

Alternatives to probability theory

Sometimes using probability theory works. Sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes there’s a better alternative!

Sometimes when I say this, probabilists (friendly but puzzled, or hostile and dismissive) ask:

OK, so what alternative mathematical system do you advocate?

The implicit assumption is that any alternative must be some similar formalism. That’s partly due to the systematic confusion of uncertainty and probability. It’s also partly because probabilistic rationality is misunderstood as only the formal part, because that’s all that gets taught explicitly.

Cox’s Theorem says there can’t be any similar alternative to standard probability theory. (I wrote about this in “Probability theory does not extend logic.”) So this can’t be the right question to ask in uncertain situations in which probability theory isn’t working well.

Probability theory is way of solving a type of formal problem that may not accurately model the type of real-world uncertainty you face. If you can only make up numbers, you are probably in this sort of situation! You don’t need a different solution to this formal problem. You need a different understanding of your real-world situation.

Rather than asking “Why does probability sometimes not work,” ask:

• Why does it work, when it does? (“Because it’s formally correct” is a wrong answer.)

• What real-world conditions make probabilistic methods likely to work well enough in practice?

• When and how can one ensure that those adequacy conditions hold?

• For instance, how can we alter this particular bit of the world to better fit probability theory?

• What other, non-probabilistic approaches to uncertainty might work better here?

These are meta-rational questions. Some answers to the last one include:

• Reengineer the situation to reduce uncertainty

• By shielding equipment, for example

• Prefer actions whose outcomes are less dependent on what you are uncertain about

• Or whose failure modes are the least bad

• Anticipate as many plausible outcomes as seems feasible and prepare contingency plans for dealing with them if they happen

• Or, if none of them are catastrophic, wait to figure out how to cross the river until you get there

• Or, just don’t go there

There’s a huge amount to say about each of these. The specifics depend on the type of situation you are in and what you are trying to do. They may be extensively technical. So, no general explanation is possible!

However, Part Four discusses many of these in moderate detail.

There’s a memorable letter from Richard Feynman to his wife, written from a gravitational physics conference.1 When I read it, I cracked up, because I had written strikingly similar ones to my girlfriend Liota, from AI conferences. Although, his didn’t make explicit comparisons with BDSM:

I am not getting anything out of the meeting. I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments, this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed here that I get into arguments outside the formal sessions (say, at lunch) whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to tell me about his “work” [...] There is great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other.

“Every field is equally stupid and corrupt.”

Here’s the first page of one of my conference letters:2

Liota will star in my “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst” series. That’s about personal transformational through romantic relationship. She’s the lesbian feminist sadomasochist anthropologist witch.

We wrote hundreds of thousands of words to each other. Feeling responsible for rereading all that is one reason it’s taking months and months to write about her. I’ve also sometimes found it too emotionally intense, and put it aside to cool off for a while.

Valuable insights for other domains

I learned a tremendous amount from Liota. Most is not relevant to “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst” and won’t appear in that story. I’ll write about some elsewhere, such as this post.

Learning how to experience dominance and submission dynamics as enjoyable, explicitly negotiated play yielded valuable insights for other domains. Like academia.

From the viewpoint of BDSM, it appears that everyone unconsciously plays out the same dynamics in everyday interactions. All. The. Time. It’s pervasive! But unrecognized, because it is not explicit or negotiated. And that makes it generally unpleasant and not enjoyable for most participants most of the time.

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“Academic meetings are largely about domination.”

I wrote that to Liota from another conference a few weeks later. One page ends:

Sessions are bone-crushingly boring, as always.

And why? Because they are lousy BDSM scenes. The next page:

This was very bad behavior on my part, and I’m embarrassed by it. To be fair to myself, I don’t think it’s true that I kept thinking up more and more outrageous things to try to get people to believe. Either that was making fun of myself, or I was already embarrassed, and exaggerating to try to bully myself into cooling it.

It did get worse, though. At a conference a year later, I showed up in gay leather fetish gear. I sat next to a woman whose flirtatiousness I enjoyed and reciprocated. We folded paper cranes together during a small session, ostentatiously ignoring the speaker and other participants. That was much more fun!

But it was sufficiently bad behavior that I suddenly snapped out of it. I realized I was being a total dickhead. Everyone was either too intimidated or too kind to call me on it! And so, in that instant, I was done. I was out. I finished my thesis write-up and bailed.

“It bothers me that this is all covert.”

The next page:

From afar, my impression is that academia is different now. It’s been “feminized,” many say. Overt domination is no longer rewarded, or even permitted. Women typically wield power-over differently, although sometimes just as brutally.

“What’s really fun is when I can play with someone intellectually.”

The letter continues:

I married Charlie Awbery for that. (Among other reasons.) Charlie is the only person I can reliably play with intellectually.

“I don’t know how that connects with [sadomasochism]3”: Liota was my teacher in that domain, and I was still trying to understand the basics.

My relationship with Liota started because I couldn’t imagine how anyone could find hurting someone, or being hurt, erotic or enjoyable. I was intellectually curious! Here is a profound contradiction to my worldview, and here is someone who embodies it! How could I not be fascinated?

Liota proved a wonderful intellectual playmate. Among other sorts.

“When I adopt someone else’s mindset for a while, it can be exhilarating!”

“When someone will let me show them how to think in one of the ways I like, I get to watch them seeing the world through my eyes. Luscious!”

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“Reluctance to think new thoughts comes from misunderstanding beliefs vs. ways of thinking.”

“Beliefs aren’t worth diddly; what matters is ways of thinking.”

That is a central theme in my recent meta-rationality work!

Reading our correspondence, I’m taken aback at how fully-formed most of my ideas already were in 1988. Much of my current writing tries to explain what I already understood well back then. It makes me wonder if I’ve progressed intellectually at all!

Ought I not to have had some new ideas over the past forty years? This is one way my research for the Liota story has been emotionally difficult.

“Students become ‘slaves’ to an intellectual mentor.”

(Sharing our appreciation of other women was an aspect of our relationship.)

“An extremely dominating, combative fellow is trying to show how stupid & wrong the last two speakers were.”

To be fair to the commentator, the previous two speakers had been talking nonsense. But (if my memory is accurate) his critique was off-target, because he took for granted the mistaken, rationalist framing of the conference. As well as being generally dickish. On the other hand, he was saying some of what I was thinking, which was generally dickish.

I may no longer be able to think new thoughts, but I am a little more tolerant than I was in my twenties.

“These people can’t tell the difference between the world and their idealizations of it.”

That’s the fundamental failure mode of rationalism. Evidently I’m still on about the same misunderstandings I was so irked by forty years ago.

In 1988, AI had been mostly stuck for a decade. I elided a portion of the quote from Feynman’s letter. Here is its middle bit:

The “work” is always: (1) completely un-understandable, (2) vague and indefinite, (3) something correct that is obvious and self evident, but a worked out by a long and difficult analysis, and presented as an important discovery, or, a (4) claim based on the stupidity of the author that some obvious and correct fact, accepted and checked for years, is, in fact, false (these are the worst: no argument will convince the idiot), (5) an attempt to do something probably impossible, but certainly of no utility, which it is finally revealed at the end, fails (dessert arrives and is eaten), or (6) just plain wrong. There is great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising.

All this was true of artificial intelligence research in 1988, too. In 2011, I wrote about that in “I seem to be a fiction”:

[AI] seemed to be going very well up until about 1980, when progress ground to a halt. Perhaps it was a temporary lull? Ironically, by 1985, hype about AI in the press reached its all-time peak. Human-level intelligence was supposed to be just around the corner. Huge amounts of money poured into the field. For those of us on the inside, the contrast between image and reality was getting embarrassing. What had gone wrong?

What had gone wrong was rationalism:

Human being is not a matter of calculation. People are not isolated individuals, living in a world of dead material objects, strategizing to manipulate them to achieve utilitarian goals. We are always already embedded in a web of connections with living nature and with other people. Our actions are called forth spontaneously by the situation we find ourselves in—not rationally planned in advance.

Liota’s reply: sadomasochism is play, not real life

“An archaeological record, as if anyone would care.”

A few months later, she wrote:

I miss her now too.

Rereading our letters, I find myself falling in love with her again.

Texts with Charlie yesterday:

Our relationship didn’t work in the long run, and couldn’t have, for many reasons. Among them that she was a hardcore lesbian sadomasochist, and (despite my best efforts) I was barely either. Dakinis can be unavailable in many unexpected ways.

My reply to Liota’s blue letter:

The story of Liota will be about my learning how to have a rational romance. Perhaps our archaeological record will prove valuable in that regard. Perhaps some readers will care.

The post illustrates aspects of meta-rationality with a detailed case study: how I chose a software framework for my personal web sites.

The recent rise of coding agents has made the tech industry suddenly recognize the value of meta-rational competence in product design and system architecting. However, that is usually termed “taste”: mysterious and ineffable.

What does “architectural taste” actually consist of, in software development? The answer here partially generalizes to meta-rational judgments in other, dissimilar fields.

Some themes the post explains, using a concrete example:

• Meta-rational judgment may include rational evaluation, but must go beyond that.

• It addresses inherently nebulous situations that may contain unknown unknowns: critical factors you don’t know exist, or have chosen to overlook in order to reduce complexity.

• Consequently, unlike in rational evaluation, there are no reliable methods, and no correct or incorrect answers. Nevertheless, many rules of thumb and understandable processes may prove valuable. And, a judgment may be wise or unwise, with good or bad consequences.

• Much of the task of software architecting is figuring out specifically what the task actually is. Rationality is about problem solving, and architecting is mostly not that. Meta-rationality includes problem finding and problem defining.

• Nebulous contexts and purposes have no definite descriptions. We use meta-rationality to understand a murky situation within which a problem may emerge. This requires “dual vision,” simultaneously microscopic and panoramic. In software architecting, that mediates between a zoomed-in view of the intricate assemblage of technical details on the one hand; and on the other, a big-picture understanding of the context in which the software will be used, the purposes for building it, and the overall shape of the system.

• Meta-rationality works with statements “true in the specific sense relevant for this context and purpose.” Those “sort-of truths” are all that are available in nebulous situations. This contrasts with “really truly true truths,” which rationality relies on.

• “Taste” and “intuition” are thought-terminating cliches. We use them as excuses to avoid diligence in making meta-rational judgments. That work is often critically important, but emotionally uncomfortable because there are no reliable methods. Nevertheless, individual cases can usually be demystified, and justified with straightforward explanations after the fact.

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This post aims to give a sense of what meta-rationality is, using this concrete example. That can be helpful before going on to a more general and abstract explanation. It is not intended as a practical guide to choosing web frameworks. However, if you want to learn that, it does show the shape of the task. That may help orient you for more detailed discussions.

This is a part-paid post: there is a paywall about halfway through.

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The case study

In 2020, I rebuilt all my web sites1 in a different software framework, Django. At the time, I wrote briefly about why I did that, and why I chose Django. This is a much more detailed account.

It makes a good case study because:

• I have used software architecting as a major source of examples for explaining meta-rationality overall. Framework choice is a main piece in architecting.

• As AI coding agents increasingly take over routine rational programming, meta-rational architecting is becoming a much bigger part of software development. So this is a newly valuable topic. Newly, because traditionally software architecting has been invisible, denigrated, neglected, overcontrolled, or wrongly rationalized.

• I can explain my process in the space of a single long post. My web sites include unusual features, so I couldn’t just use standard, unmodified software. Nevertheless, the sites are much less complex than the “enterprise applications” I’m mainly using for examples elsewhere.

Web frameworks: background explanation

So, first, what is a web framework? (You can skip this section if you already know!)

A web page, as you see it on the screen, assembles dozens of elements. These are drawn from many different data sources, and most pieces undergoes several transformations before the final assembly. For example, the main text of pages on metarationality.com is stored in Markdown, an easy-to-write format. When you look at a page, that gets translated into HTML, the difficult-to-write format which web browsers need.

Most web data transformations are pretty much the same on most web sites. Rather than writing new software code for each site, developers reuse standard programs: frameworks.

A web framework has three functions. It includes code for retrieving data from common source types. It provides many common data transformations. It acts as an overall “traffic director,” herding data objects through a maze of “pipes” connecting the transformers.

For common web site types, a sophisticated framework can do much of the work, so you don’t need to write much code of your own. Additional functionality fits into the framework as “plugins” that you connect into the existing plumbing. In a typical web site, some functionality is provided by framework, and some by plugins written by someone other than you. You may also need to write custom plugins for unusual features.

Choosing a framework is a key step in software architecting. Most technical decisions are downstream from this. That is, your choice of framework strongly influences all others, so it’s getting it right is crucial:

Architecting such a system involves a series of decisions that commit a software development team for many years (the typical lifetime of a software system). These decisions are nearly irrevocable; it is difficult to change the architecture part way through building a system, much less after people start using it. If you get it wrong, you probably have to throw the whole thing away and start over.

Several dozen web frameworks are available. They are all similar, but each is enormously complicated, and they differ in details that may prove critically important. Choosing well is not easy!

Do I even need a framework?

Before starting this project, I had been using the web framework Drupal for several personal sites. The version of Drupal I was using had become obsolete, and was no longer supported. I had planned to upgrade to a new version. This new “version” was a total rewrite, with a different architecture, intended for different purposes. “Upgrading” would mean completely rebuilding my sites using a dissimilar system which shared the same name. I spent several days starting to do that, and found that new-Drupal was a major pain to deal with, and not a good match for my needs. Some other web framework might well be better for me.

First question: Did I absolutely need a web framework? For most personal web sites, you don’t. You can use a “hosted site builder.” That runs on a computer someone else takes care of. They set up all the software, and you don’t have to know how that works. You create your web site by pushing buttons on their web site.

My web sites are unusual in several ways, so this was not possible. For example, they are structured as “books,” with a nested structure of parts and chapters and sections, and provide various tools for users to find their way around. They also provide glossary pop-ups for unusual terms, so I don’t have redefine them each time I use them. These features are not provided by hosted site builders. They are not even provided by web frameworks; I had to write software code for these and other features. On reflection, I wasn’t willing to give up on these.2

Rationally, a requirements spreadsheet

“Requirements” are purposes for software. The seemingly-rational approach is to ask people what they need a program to do. I have written extensively about reasons that may not work, and why a meta-rational approach may be necessary.

In this case, I mainly wanted to duplicate existing functionality, which I was mainly satisfied with. Over more than a decade, I had gradually figured out what I needed, adding features as I realized they would make complex sites easier to navigate. So the rational “requirements gathering” approach worked for me at this point, although it is often inadequate.

That made the process unusually simple, which is good, because it makes this case study relatively simple. It also omits some important aspects of meta-rational judgment, as a result. However, this post isn’t trying to be a thorough explanation of that topic; just an illustration to give a basic sense of what “meta-rational judgment” means.

I began by reviewing all the exiting features, including stuff provided by Drupal, by plugins written by other people, and by code I wrote myself to provide functionality not available elsewhere. I also reviewed a file I had kept, of features I wanted to add eventually, but had not yet gotten around to.

I identified 71 features. I made a spreadsheet with a row for each. I assigned three priority levels, commonly used in “requirements analysis”: MUST, SHOULD, or MAY.

Then I was ready to add a column for each candidate web framework, so I could see which ones provided which required features. Wikipedia has a gigantic table of this sort. Here’s a small piece of it:

Ideally, some framework might do everything I needed; but given the unusual site structure, that seemed unlikely. So it would be a matter of finding one that did as much of what I needed as possible, especially the MUST and SHOULD items, to minimize the code I’d have to write myself.

This was extremely rational. I made a similar spreadsheet when I last chose what car to buy, and the answer popped right out.

In more complicated versions of this general decision method, you convert all entries in the table to numerical scores of how well a candidate meets a criterion. You assign a numerical importance weight to each criterion. You sum row score × weight for each column to get an overall score for a candidate, and pick the one with the best total. This can work well, in some cases.

Rationality is good. As far as it goes.

Rational research and evaluation meet nebulosity

So my next step was to collect a list of candidate frameworks. I spent a day searching the web for information. alternativeto.net is often useful. I found sites that provided statistics on what fraction of the entire web used which framework. I read posts on Reddit, Hacker News, and blogs.

(Nowadays you’d use a chatbot for this, but that wasn’t a thing at the time. In fact, for a relatively simple project like this, a chatbot might give good advice about which framework to use, and explain why! For more complex projects, a process similar to the one I used, although more extensive, would still be necessary.)

While assembling the list, I realized that filling out a full table with dozens of web frameworks checked against 71 requirements would be a huge job.

A general principle of meta-rational choice is to try and eliminate as many alternatives as possible with as little work as possible. In the framework I’d created, missing any MUST requirement might count as reason for elimination. However, I knew some MUST items, such as the glossary pop-ups, were unlikely to be provided by any framework. I expected to have to write the code for those myself.

Moreover, many important criteria were not feature requirements. A framework should be evaluated in terms of many other concerns. Fortunately, I could treat several as “one strike,” whereby I was able to rapidly eliminate most candidates. Some were:

• Mainstream: widespread usage probably implies adequate quality

• Stable codebase: frequent major changes imply labor-intensive upgrades

• Reasonable infrastructure requirements: for instance, running only on Windows meant a hard no

• Not too buggy; especially, not plagued with frequent security failures

• Well-supported: maintained, documented, updated

• Sane architecture

• Open source, so I could read the framework code to understand how it worked, and so I could fix bugs in it myself

• Produced by a stable, functional social culture

• Planned future versions would remain suitable for my purpose

These criteria boiled the list down to a handful. For instance, Drupal had just failed:

• Stable codebase: the new version demanded an extensive, difficult upgrade

• Functional social culture: interpersonal conflicts and cultural disagreements had driven key developers to leave

• Purpose: the new version was intended for building massive “enterprise systems,” where previously it had been for individuals or small organizations

• Arguably, it also failed not too buggy and sane architecture

Cells in my spreadsheet had seemed, at first, to need only yes/no entries. Either a framework provides site search functionality or it doesn’t. I soon realized that many criteria were not so simple. Does a framework have a “stable, functional social culture” supporting it? How could you evaluate that? (Many involved with Drupal might disagree with my assessment.) How would you go about finding out? How much effort is it worth putting into that? What does “stable, functional social culture” even mean?

This is extremely nebulous. That doesn’t mean it’s not critically important; it is. Nor that it is purely subjective; many participants agreed with my concerns about the Drupal development community. It does mean that an objective rating on a scale of 1 to 10 would be impossible.

Many other important evaluation criteria are also nebulous, to varying degrees. For example: performance, reliability, code quality, maintainability, ease of extension. Some of these can be quantified, which may be helpful or not. Performance metrics, for instance, are hard numbers, but meaningful only relative to endless details of how a system is used in practice. That implies they must be interpreted meta-rationally: in context and relative to purposes.

Even “does it have feature X” is quite nebulous! Many frameworks I looked at “had” most of the features I needed, but were still inadequate. For example, a feature might be too buggy to use. Or, a framework might provide only a simplistic version, missing most of what you’d expect it to do. For instance, finding only exact matches to page titles does not meaningfully count as “site search functionality.” Discovering how well a supposedly-provided feature actually met my needs often required reading the documentation closely, and in many cases reading the code as well.

Rationality is mainly useful for Solving Problems. I use capital letters here to indicate that these are more-or-less formal objects, abstracted from an actual-world situation. That may be an informal problem, or a curiosity, mess, or opportunity. In this case, I did have a problem, which is that the organization that provided the software my web sites ran on had desupported it without a delivering a usable alternative. Dealing with that turned out to be a mess. That is: an actual-world situation which was nebulous enough that creating a formal abstraction was infeasible.

Rationally, in this situation one would like the Problem to be “find the best framework for these web sites.” (As always, I am using “rationality” to mean “systematic methods for reasoning,” and not in the broader sense of “any sensible way of thinking or acting.”) A rational Solution would be a provably true statement of the form “X is the best framework for those sites.” Finding a Solution is infeasible, because “best” is not merely unknowable, but inherently ill-defined.

Some provably true statements may be relevant: numerical speed test comparisons, for example. However, whether and how those are relevant is a meta-rational question, not one of rationally-determined truth.

Choosing a web framework, it turned out, isn’t a Problem. Rather, there was a somewhat nebulous, contextual purpose: “rebuild my sites using some other software.” That delivered me into a mess.

My rational approach to choosing a framework was inadequate. Finding out what does “best” even mean, in my specific situation, was much of the job!

Meta-rational judgment

As I wrote in “When to get meta-rational”: meta-rationality is most obviously useful when rationality fails.

The rest of this post explains how meta-rationality works in evaluation and judgment, using examples from my web framework choice process to make it concrete and specific.

• Much of the task was figuring out what the task was! Not just how to do it. I had to repeatedly consider: what would count as an adequate judgment process?

• My process circled back and forth between a broadening technical understanding of details and a deepening big-picture understanding of the context and purpose. This gradually resolved a chicken-and-egg paradox: I needed details to assemble a big picture, but I needed the big picture to make sense of the details.

• Starting from ignorance, I had to begin with an unsystematic exploration of possibilities. That revealed unknown unknowns; often, unwelcome surprises! These forced revisions of my understanding. However, they also expanded my conceptual vocabulary for evaluating frameworks.

• I carried out increasingly directed informal experiments to check and extend my understanding. There is no bound on how much exploration and experimentation I could have done, so I had to reason about how much work to put into what.

• I reasoned about how and whether to use rational methods in framework evaluation. Many framework properties are nebulous yet critically important. It’s meaningless to quantify them, yet possible to make defensible judgments that take them into consideration.

• Most statements can only be true “in some sense.” Specifically what does it mean for a framework to “be secure” or “provide site search functionality”? I needed to interpret such claims relative to my purposes. Contextual interpretation increases the accuracy of inference: in this case, assessment of adequacy for specific uses.

• The meanings of representations change as context and purpose change. My interpretation of entries in the spreadsheet transmuted as my evaluation process progressed, even when their literal contents remained unchanged.

• My final judgment was between two leading candidates, Django and Rails, which were on a par in purely technical terms. My choice between them was partly aesthetic, yet unambiguous. This might count as “a matter of taste,” but it was not at all mysterious, or “intuitive.” I explain specifically how I made that choice, and how it was justified on the basis of pragmatic considerations.

• All judgments can only be provisional, because what choice means is nebulous. However, at some point it may become effectively irrevocable. I chose Django, put a lot of work into it, and then discovered that might have been a mistake! I considered backtracking to re-evaluate alternatives—but didn’t.

• Meta-rational judgments can never be correct or incorrect, by rational standards. However, I think I did get the answer right. And I think my choice has been vindicated by history. (Including a cool animated bar chart!)

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Meta-rationality usually involves consideration of masses of detail, so any case study will be somewhat hefty. This write-up omits much of the complexity of even this relatively simple example. Nevertheless, it is quite a long post.

The rest is somewhat more than you have read so far. It’s for paying subscribers only.

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Transcript

Introduction [00:00]

​Most of this podcast is a recording from a retreat Charlie Awbery and I led a month ago. I’m adding a short introduction here now, to provide background context, so you can understand more of what we presented then.

So first, tantra is the branch of Buddhism concerned with energy, and therefore with action. Energy is the potential for action. You can’t have either without the other. Tantra is still sometimes misunderstood as being all about sex. There’s a lot of energy and action in sex, so tantra can work with that. But there’s energy and action in everything we do, so tantra can work with everything in our lives.

In all Buddhisms, one acts for the benefit of others. However, most just help you develop good intentions. Tantra calls the bluff on that. Without energy, intentions are flaccid piety. Tantra says, “Okay, that’s nice. What are you actually going to do for other people and how?” And it has answers.

There are many different styles of beneficent activity. Tantra personifies them as yidams, who are mythic people, rather like gods, who represent particular kinds of energy. This retreat was sponsored by Evolving Ground, a contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist community we abbreviate as eG. eG teaches several different yidams, and therefore several different styles of benevolent energy, and beneficent activity. We wrote a post about that two weeks ago, titled “Yidam: extraordinary relational possibilities.” You might want to check it out for more background explanation.

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One style of beneficence is nobility: the wise, creative, and just use of power. In eG, we take the yidam Gesar as inspiration for noble activity. Gesar is the mythic warrior-king-sorcerer-god-hero of a vast Tibetan epic. We practice Gesar with a text, called a sadhana. A sadhana is the manual for a structured meditation ritual, which you can practice individually or in a group. Part of the ritual is reading the text out loud, and then doing the things it describes.

The Evolving Ground sadhana is titled Good King Gesar. It’s written in flowery pseudo-poetic language, as is traditional. In the retreat recording that follows, I explained particular bits of the text; and quoted it in places.

Gesar was the king of a place called Ling. Our retreat was held in a gorgeous remote mountain valley in Scotland. As you will hear, that is also Ling.

One last thing: the transcript of this podcast on Substack includes numerous hyperlinks to explanations of uncommon concepts. If you are confused by missing background, or want to learn more about some point, you could follow those. Also, the transcript has numerous illustrations which can help visualize what we are talking about.

And so now… let’s catch a ride to Ling on the back of the garuda of outrageousness!

The actual world is the mandala of the deity [04:04]

One of the things about this sadhana that is unusual is that it is emphasizing the actual world as the mandala of the deity. Mandala is the Sanskrit word for kingdom. It literally means circle, but it means kingdom.

There is the visionary world, and there’s the actual world; and these are both real, in some sense. Tantra forms the connection between the visionary realm and the actual world. You become the connection between these two. You can think of the central channel as a conduit that connects the energy of the actual world and the energy of the visionary realm, and they flow through you.

You can get lost in the visionary realm. I recommend avoiding becoming a spiritual person, because this means being lost in the visionary realm, and trying to un-see the actual world as much as possible. And this makes you ineffective! Because if you’re going to act in the actual world, for the benefit of other people, you need to have a accurate vision of what is going on, and how it works.

On the other hand, if you are stuck in the actual world and you are trying to un-see the visionary world, then you’re caught in a kind of mundane materialism that lacks vision; that is not directed toward some… better future? That’s actually putting it in a bit of a materialistic point of view, but: some kind of pure vision of what is possible. I think “possibility” is the right word for this.

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So, a lot of Tibetan material… they were isolated in monasteries, and they got lost in the visionary realm a lot of the time.

The Gesar material is, I think, an attempt to make this connection of the actual world of a very difficult political situation, at a particular time, at a particular place in Tibet, where action needed to be taken: for the benefit of people who were caught up in civil wars and religious strife. There needed to be a connection made between that mundane, difficult situation and a vision of what was possible instead. And the possibility was: a Good King.

Mipham, who did a lot of this work, was an advisor to the king at the time. And he wrote a book called The Just King, which is a book of advice to the Crown Prince of Derge, which was a major kingdom in the area; who did become king.

This is a form-oriented sadhana. It’s an action-oriented sadhana. And I think it’s why Mipham did what he did, which we’re reworking here. It’s that action was required, form was required, at that time. And Tibetan Buddhism had kind of gone off into fairyland, and he was trying to pull it back down to concrete form; reality.

The cavortings of awareness unleashed [07:34]

So all of this stuff is:

And partly that’s to emphasize the fact that we’re speaking in the visionary realm here, and you don’t want to concretize this as something that’s actually existent in some sense. But also, there is the practice in tantra of seeing everything as illusory in some sense. And this is bringing the visionary realm and the actual realm into correspondence. And when you do that, things you see in the actual realm take on a visionary quality, and become somewhat unreal and transparent and shape-shifting. And that can become psychotic, if you’re not maintaining also the connection with the concrete specifics of how stuff actually works. This is the trick of tantra: making that connection without losing yourself in either realm. And being able to superimpose them, to employ the logic of vision and the logic of actuality as appropriate; simultaneously, ideally. So, “cavortings of awareness unleashed” is this sense of sacredness, and slightly unreal quality.

Jan: I have a question about “cavortings.” I checked it in the dictionary and it means, like, “play” basically?

David: Yeah, energetic, bouncing around kind of play.

Jan: What was the “leash” then?

David: Um, unleashed from mundanity. From being lost in ordinariness. When you’re leashed to ordinariness, you can’t see sacredness. You can’t see the electric qualities of actual things.

Ideologies are demonic attempts to escape from actuality into some vision [09:38]

David: The section “Displaying confidence in actuality,” I said last time: this is in the place of the refuge. “Taking refuge” is displaying confidence in actuality. That’s this sense of, “Okay, I’m actually in this actual-world situation. And that is what I’m confident of.”

is the failure mode of trying to escape into the visionary realm. The actual world is the charnel ground. It’s civil war, in that case.

Do ask questions!

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Splendid! Yes?

: Um, when I yesterday was going through it, I also had another way of interpreting the “vision of perfection”?

David: Mm-hmm?

Sasha: As kind of: an ideology, not necessarily related to mysticism or religion, but any sort of ideology that imagines perfection?

David: Yeah.

Sasha: I mean, for me, the “mysticism” would be communism; something like that. That’s what was more familiar growing up, but there’s no lack of other ones. So what you think of that interpretation?

David: Yes.

Sasha: And monastics, we can have academics, and that choice—

: Or any rule-based system, or any framework, if you take it as the main, or the only, framework.

David: Yeah, thank you. That’s exactly right. There’s a section in here about Gesar… Let’s see…

This is addressed at exactly that.

Dzogchen has a meta-systematic view of Buddhism [11:20]

David: This is kind of eG-specific. It’s the meta-systematic view that any fixed system is actually demonic, and needs to be slaughtered. Once you’ve chopped the head off the demon, you can raise it from the dead and have it serve you. This is a very traditional role for Tibetan sorcerers, to subjugate demons and force them to serve the dharma.

My work on meta-rationality, and other things that I’ve written, are relevant here, and being echoed in the sadhana. Dzogchen, uniquely in Buddhism, is meta-systematic; and says, “Here are all these different Buddhist systems; and here’s how they’re useful, under what circumstances, for what purposes do you apply this Buddhist system; and here’s how it’s limited, and actually not a full story, not actually correct.”

I think that’s part of the attraction of Dzogchen, for me and for Charlie and for others: that sense of “No fixed system; but systems are actually very valuable.” And we’re practicing a particular system in doing this; but there’s nothing sacred about this sadhana; or fixed as “this is the thing to do.” It’s a thing that has a particular function.

We got this partly from Ngak’chang Rinpoche, who got it from Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche. I don’t know where Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche got it. I mean, he got it from the Kunjé Gyalpo, I suppose. Or his teachers.

Victory over aggression [12:59]

David: I’m just gonna go through this and babble, but please ask questions. That was a very illuminating question; thank you, Sasha!

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That’s central for the Gesar mythos: that a warrior is willing and able to kill, when that is absolutely necessary; but does so without anger, and without aggression, but simply out of a sense of “this has to be done.” “I wish it didn’t have to be done, but I’m now going to kill you because that’s what has to be done.”

I find, to be more concrete about it, that when I’m in conflict with somebody… I mean, this sounds nice and, and I’m not nice, and I don’t really advocate niceness as such. But, looking for both how can I benefit the person, but also how can I actually take their side in a conflict, is really helpful. It doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. It doesn’t guarantee that either of us will wind up happy in the end, but by and large, it improves the interpersonal situation.

Adult stage theory and Buddhist tantra [14:18]

David: There’s several bits of eG-specific language in here. One is:

These are eG terms, partly taken over from adult stage theory, which has worked its way into a tantric sadhana!

Charlie: They’re directly relevant to the eG path, the ninefold path, as well. “Self-possibility” is the sixth in that set, and “personal autonomy” is the third; and those two are directly related, vertically. So, personal autonomy is the form aspect of the base; self-possibility is the form aspect of the path; and then powerfulness is the form aspect of the result, in that eG nine way.

Ling is in Scotland and Colorado, and distills the nectar of the gods [15:14]

David: In terms of this emphasis on the actual world in this sadhana, this is Ling. This is a magnificent place. Thank you for bringing us here, Steph! But you can see here the:

: Are there, like, esoteric wrinkles there?

David: Yeah, everything in here is covered in esoteric wrinkles!

Apostol: So why those?

David: Why the iris and columbine? That’s esoteric in the sense that it’s coming out of personal experience of particularly sacred places in mountains. The iris is a reference to a sacred place in the Sierra Nevada, where Charlie and I lived for a decade. The columbine is the State Flower of Colorado. They’re spectacular blue flowers.

Um, so… Where is it? Um, skipping ahead a few pages:

There is a principle in tantra, that everything is everything else. No! Sorry! Everything is something else. There are monist religions in which everything is everything else, everything is actually the same as everything. Tantra is highly specific. It’s really interested in the complexity of details. And so: menstrual blood is emptiness. These are the same thing, and they’re also the sun; and so on and so forth. There are these systems of correspondences, where each thing is a series of other things.

This is the Kingdom of Ling; but also the Kingdom of Ling is about 25 miles west of where we live, in the Rocky Mountains. Charlie and Steph have both been to that particular place in Ling, which is “replete with iris and columbine.” It’s at about 11,000 feet. It is spectacularly beautiful. And there is a stream that flows through it. The path that I’ve taken with Charlie and Steph, the stream that flows through there eventually works its way down through a series of spectacular canyons, drops about 6,000 feet onto the plane. The last canyon is called El Dorado Canyon, which is unbelievable. It’s got sort of 2000 foot walls. And, there’s a Scotsman who fell in love with an American, and married her and moved to Boulder, Colorado, which is where this stream eventually flows through, on its way out to the Mississippi River. He was trained as a distiller, and on moving to the US needed to find some kind of employment; and founded a distillery, making a Colorado version of Scotch whiskey. And this distillery has won all kinds of awards for best American whiskey. People who do whiskey think that the water is very important. That’s what gives the whiskey its character. So the water for that whiskey comes from El Dorado Canyon, which is where this stream that comes down through the Kingdom of Ling, replete with iris and columbine, which we visited.

So this whiskey is actually Ling whiskey, because things are other things! And we will be, in the wang, making ritual use of amrita. Amrita is the drink of the gods in Indian mythology, and that is understood as alcohol in tantra. We will be making use of amrita from Ling.

Charlie: Did you bring some?

David: Yes.

Charlie: Good!

We are always in Ling, Gesar’s kingdom [19:46]

David: Uh, “Ling.” “Ling” is interesting because “ling” is simply the Tibetan word for “a place.” Ling is in Kham, which is the area that is at the border between China and Tibet, and for a long time was claimed by both China and Tibet as being part of them. Um, and the people who lived in Kham were like, “No, we’re independent of both of you, go away.” But the word “kham,” which refers to this particular area, simply means “region” in Tibetan.

So Ling is a kingdom in Kham, which means it is “a place in the region.” So Lingtsang Gyalpo, I have explained to you, was the last king of Ling. He was the last king of a kingdom called Ling. But it just means “place.” He was the king of a place in some region. And very often Gesar is referred to as “Ling Gesar.” He is the Caesar of some place: Ling. And it’s actually historically unclear whether he existed, but if he did exist: like, which place is it that he was the Caesar of? It might have been Lingtsang; the people who live in Lingtsang want to claim that it was there, but it’s not clear.

So in some sense we are always in Ling. Wherever we are, that’s Ling. So you take Gesar with you, and you take Ling with you.

Emily: Is “Gesar” actually cognate with “Caesar,” or is that a coincidence?

David: It’s believed by Western scholars to be cognate. As the Roman Empire expanded, the satraps and peripheral kingdoms… as the Empire collapsed, they declared themselves to be “Caesar.” So the Kaiser of Germany, that’s Caesar; and the Tsar of Russia, that’s Caesar; and the Gesar of Ling, that’s the Caesar too. In what are now the –Stans were Buddhist kingdoms, at one time; and the rulers there called themselves “Caesar.” And they had a lot of cultural exchange with Tibet, until they were taken over by Muslims.

The ways we think about important issues of meaning, such as life-purpose and sacredness, are limited by mistaken metaphysical ideas.

In fact, our everyday ways of thinking and talking and acting in mundane matters are also distorted the same way!

This is true for everyone, including those who know absolutely nothing about philosophy, because these ideas form fundamental structures of our whole way of being.

I’ve called this “thought soup,” which the Meaningness Glossary explains as:

the incoherent mass of disconnected fragments of dead ideologies that survive in popular culture as ways of talking, and therefore of thinking and feeling and acting: clichés, bromides, plot points and story arcs. Its metaphors and intuitions powerfully influence the ways we relate to meaningness, in ways we’re never fully conscious of.

John Vervaeke uses the terms “cognitive grammar” and “cultural grammar.” As I say in the video, this is a great metaphor, because our communication is fundamentally structured by grammatical rules that we’re mostly unaware of. By analogy, we don’t know that we don’t know the ways our culture structures and limits our thinking, feeling, and activity.

There are no essential or accidental properties.

It turns out that literal, linguistic grammar encodes some of the cultural, cognitive grammar. The example I explained with Andrew was adjective ordering in English. (This was mainly in the bit we had to delete from the video. The remainder runs from about 12:00 to 15:00.)

“Big red rock eater” sounds right; “red big rock eater” is jarring. According to the official rules (that nearly no native speaker knows) it’s outright ungrammatical. Nevertheless, “red big rock eater” could be grammatical in context. However, it means something different.

A “big red rock eater” means a red rock eater that happens to be big, whereas a “red big rock eater” is big rock eater that happens to be red. In the latter case, the implication is that there are two kinds of rock eaters, little ones and big ones, which are “natural kinds”: categories based on how things really are, not just our understanding of them. Being big is essential to belonging to the category of big rock eaters. They start out big, and can’t turn into small rock eaters. On the other hand, a big rock eater might be any color, or change color over time. Redness is not an essential property of a red big rock eater; it’s an “accidental property.”

If you look at the rules for English adjective ordering, the ones closest to the noun are more-essential properties, such as their intrinsic category and the material they are made from. Color is a bit further away. The ones furthest are accidental, such as size, because that often changes as things grow. Anything that changes is a mere accident; essential properties are immutable. (According to mainstream metaphysics.)

The ways we relate to everything are infested with the wrong idea that there are essential and accidental properties. For example, Meaningness discusses “confused stances” according to which everyone has essential, intrinsic purposes, which define who they really are and what they really should do. We don’t actually have those, and the implicit belief that we must causes an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering.

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The main advance in philosophy over the past hundred years has been the gradual realization, and then reluctant admission, that there are no essences. In the dimension of purpose, this was the thrust of existentialism: that purposes are merely accidental, and therefore can be chosen arbitrarily. This is also wrong, and also causes great suffering.

More broadly, it became apparent that the foundational metaphysics we inherited from centuries past, which shapes our everyday patterns of activity, was wrong.

This is what the “meaning crisis” mainly consists of, I think!

Everyone now feels how metaphysics has conclusively failed, even if they have no explicit knowledge of it. This is postmodernity: we can no longer believe any of the Big Stories About Life, The Universe, And Everything, because they rest on metaphysical ideas that we now instinctively discount.

We feel a constant lack of fit between our unthought cultural assumptions and how things are. We can’t escape the uneasiness this brings, since we haven’t yet reworked our cultural cognitive grammar to accommodate a better understanding of meaning, and of other fundamental metaphysical terms like “category” and “property.”

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This is also much of what the culture war consists of!

For example, I’ve used this lens to explain the culture war trans battle. Are transwomen essentially women, who only superficially appeared to be men before transition, due to an unfortunate accident of birth? Or are they essentially men who have been surgically mutilated to alter some accidental characteristics while leaving their male essence unchanged? Or is sex entirely accidental, and everyone is just whatever sex they happen to “present as” on a particular occasion? If you know the details of any particular case, an actual person, it’s clear that all those metaphysical positions are untrue and unhelpful.

More generally, categorizing properties as either essential or accidental is only useful in some contexts for some purposes. This artificial distinction was invented by Aristotle in an attempt to fix Plato’s wrong theory of sameness and difference. In practice, Aristotle’s version is only occasionally useful in understanding specific differences and similarities. It is mostly conceptually incoherent, and is never capital-T True.

Metaphysics is only ever credible when you deliberately un-see the actual world, and imaginatively inhabit the domain of metaphysical abstractions instead. Doing so is silly and harmful. However, metaphysical assumptions are so deeply embedded in our way of being, even in English grammar, that it’s difficult to avoid unconsciously applying them. They includes essentialism, among many others.

The world was never disenchanted.

There’s a common idea that we lost meaning because of rationality.

According to this story, the world was “enchanted,” pervasively charged with meaning, before rationality was invented. This primordial meaningfulness was sacred and tremendously important, and the meaning crisis is the result of its loss.

That never happened.

Theorists have assigned this loss of meaning to innovations in rationality at different points in history. The earliest candidate was Ancient Greek philosophy. As I said in the video, I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. However, my superficial impression is that he thinks we lost meaning back then, and we somehow need to reclaim it. If so, I disagree.

Two things did happen:

• Rationality revealed that many explanations of meaningful events were incorrect. Gods do not cause plagues to punish us for our sins. This is an important advance in understanding, and for effective action. Prayer does not help. Antibiotics do help. Hooray for rationality!

• Rationalism had no explanation for how meaning works. Eventually, it insisted that anything it couldn’t imagine an explanation for doesn’t exist. Therefore, nothing is meaningful. This inference became part of our pervasive cultural cognitive grammar: nihilism. Even though it’s obviously false, everyone’s way of being is harmfully distorted by it. Boo to rationalism!

Meaning is obvious everywhere. In the video, I use the example of a salt shaker. It is there to shake salt. This is not mysterious! We never lost such meanings!

We see meaning everywhere, all the time. I wrote about this “Reasonable perception,” for example. We now have quite good understandings for how meaning works, and how we do see it.

“No!” some would reply, irritated:

You are playing on the ambiguity of the word “meaning.” Mundane trivia like salt shakers are not the kind of meanings we are talking about here. The point is big stuff like immanent sacredness, and your true purpose, and the meaning of life. That’s what we lost, throwing away the sacred along with discrediting belief in miracles, omens, and thunder gods.

We didn’t lose anything. What we got from rationalism was a ton of harmful new metaphysical ideas, which we’ve had to live by for a couple thousand years. One egregious example is:

Nothing in the actual world is sacred. Only the other, better, metaphysical world is sacred! We have to get from here to there!

But we see sacredness all the time. We’ve just learned to parrot the rationalist lie that we don’t, and to deny the meaning we see in order to maintain our faith in rationalism.

I’d explain this more, but has already done an outstanding job in “The world was never disenchanted. We were.”

“Disenchantment” became a posture. A way serious people were expected to speak. A performance of maturity that bore little relationship to actual experience.

The world was never stripped of its enchantment. We just learned to avert our gaze.

Disenchantment, then, is not a discovery about reality; it is a training of perception.

Re-enchantment is a discipline of attention. A practice of looking again and acting on what we see, rather than hiding behind abstraction. Of noticing again what we’ve learned to dismiss. Of feeling what we’ve learned to numb. Of staying present to mystery without rushing to resolve it.

We can choose to see differently.

We can remember that perception is participation, and that how we look shapes what we find.

We can recover our capacity to perceive and orient around beauty and aliveness.

We can cultivate humility, stay present to mystery and cultivate our sense of wonder and awe.

The world was never disenchanted. Only our ways of seeing were.

THAT, like the intricate beauty of the salt shaker, is the essence of Vajrayana.

pinpointed some in his insightful essay “Is the ‘meaning crisis’ a real loss?”

Coincidentally, he was visiting and me at the time, so we were able to discuss it in person, and recorded a video of our conversation.1

In addition to that, this post includes a section of links to relevant discussions elsewhere, assembled by Andrew; and a transcript in case you’d rather read than watch.

A follow-up post, going live next Saturday, explains bits I botched during the recording and we deleted from this video. It’s about ways metaphysics muddles our thinking, feeling, and acting. And, about how we perceive sacredness in the actual world—such as in a salt shaker.

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Relevant discussions elsewhere

Primary sources

• John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (AftMC): YouTube playlist · series home · community transcripts

• David Chapman, Meaningness

• David Chapman, Meta-rationality

• Andrew Conner, Is the “meaning crisis” a real loss?

Chapman’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned

• Eternalism: meaningness.com/eternalism: the stance that meanings must be perfectly definite

• Nihilism: meaningness.com/nihilism: the mirror-image stance, that since meanings aren’t perfectly definite, they don’t exist

• The complete stance: meaningness.com/meaningness: recognizing meaning as inseparably nebulous and patterned

• Nebulosity and pattern: meaningness.com/nebulosity

• No world beyond the actual one: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it

• Stances trump systems: meaningness.com/stances-trump-systems

• Materialism (as stance): meaningness.com/materialism

• Textures of the complete stance: meaningness.com/textures-of-completion · wonder · curiosity · humor · play · enjoy-the-dance · creation

• Vision, Instruction, and Action (Chapman’s PhD thesis, lightly revised)

• Vividness: vividness.live · Approaching Vajrayana

• Nobility arc: table of contents

Vervaeke’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned

• Relevance realization: Vervaeke, Lillicrap & Richards (2012), “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” J. Logic and Computation 22(1): Oxford Academic · open PDF

• Four P’s / Four Ways of Knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory): Henriques overview · Vervaeke & Mastropietro, revised 4P paper

• DIME / Ecology of Practices (Dialogical, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment): Vervaeke Foundation EoP page

• Reverse-engineering enlightenment: AftMC Ep. 36 and Ep. 37

• The sacred as inexhaustibility: AftMC Ep. 35 develops it; Ep. 50 ties it together

• Cultural grammar: AftMC Ep. 38

• Serious play: AftMC Ep. 17 (Gnosis and Existential Inertia)

Developmental psychology, cognitive science

• Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self (1982): Harvard UP

• Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994): Harvard UP

• The frame problem: SEP: Frame Problem

• McCarthy & Hayes (1969): “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence” (origin)

• Dennett (1984): “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI” (philosophical generalization)

Miscellaneous

• Adjective ordering (“clear blue sky” vs “blue clear sky”): Cambridge Grammar: order of adjectives · Wikipedia: English adjective order (the so-called “royal order of adjectives”)

• Bronze Age / Late Bronze Age Collapse: Bronze Age · Late Bronze Age collapse

Transcript

[Caveat: Generated by “AI,” inaccurate and in places misleading.]

[00:00:00] David: I thought maybe it would make sense for you to start by introducing your project here, what it is that you’re trying to do and why. And some background on John Vervaeke’s general project, because people may not be familiar with that.

[00:00:29] Andrew: So I encountered your writing and his writing around the same time. I would guess about five to six years ago. It was kind of a time where a lot of things were breaking for me, and so I found them both incredibly useful. John Vervaeke recorded a 50-hour lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and you have written many partial books, which are probably far more than 50 hours of reading.

In my mind they’re a little bit interleaved, and I found both of them very useful. Recently I wanted to figure out how your ideas interact. They’re both about the word “meaning” and different aspects of it. I think that both you and him have a diagnosis of what’s going on, and I wanted to understand how you saw each other’s ideas. I think I have a decent idea of the way you disagree, but you can correct me.

[00:01:46] David: So I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. I read a few of his academic papers, and I watched, I think, two episodes of the 50-hour meaning crisis series. Then I read a lot of blog posts from other people about his work. So I have a quite diffuse sense of it. Something you mentioned when we were talking about this earlier is that he has developed his ideas in further directions, or maybe even a different direction, since the meaning crisis series. And neither of us, I think, is very clear on quite how he’s gone.

I thought it’d also be good to say that the Meaningness book I started working on 25 years ago, and I worked most of the ideas out during a six-month period when I was staying with Rin’dzin, who’s now Charlie, my now spouse —

Andrew: Congratulations.

David: Yeah, it’s great to be married to Charlie. On her kitchen table while she was off at work. This was when she was living in Bristol in the UK. So that book doesn’t really reflect my current understanding. It’s not that I disagree with anything or that I think it’s wrong, but there’s another 15-plus years of development since I put it on the web, which was in 2010 or 2012 or something like that. So we have two out-of-date understandings.

[00:03:58] Andrew: Try to merge two out-of-date understandings, right. And see how they go. So I had written a tweet thread that may go out as a tweet thread, or maybe this conversation, or something like that. Perhaps we could go through it. I can kind of summarize. I think it’s useful to speed-run his ideas. Maybe you can interject with your background.

The overall shape of his lecture series is that it’s a little bit entertaining. If you like watching him lecture, then it is an entertaining thing to watch. If you’ve never encountered the ideas, there’s a lot of learning. He’s knitting together thought from eastern, western, different branches of philosophy in very pleasant ways.

One way of looking at what he’s doing is this intellectually entertaining sort of thing. I think that understates what his goal was, but there’s intellectual understanding there. The first half is largely a history lesson and the second half is largely cognitive science. Maybe we could go through a little bit. Would that be good?

[00:05:22] David: And maybe I’ll throw in random, incoherent interjections periodically.

[00:05:28] Andrew: That’d be great. That’s what we signed up for: David Chapman random interjections.

I think looking back at his work, one of the fundamental things I realized is he believes we have lost something.

[00:05:43] David: So I’ll interject right at the beginning. I think maybe I’ll get to the substance of my objection a little later, but I think we haven’t lost something. I think we probably disagree already at this point. I think we’ve gained an enormous amount. We have enormously more sophisticated ideas about meaning, and how it works and what it is and how to work with it, than at any time in the past.

And the whole history that he tells — it’s great that he’s telling that history. It’s important to understand the history, to understand how we now understand meaning. But we’ve actually just accreted a whole lot of extra stuff. And there’s nothing that we’ve lost. A little later, I’ll get back to why I think he thinks that, and why I disagree.

[00:07:00] Andrew: So if he approaches from “we’ve lost something,” it makes sense to do two things. One, that motivates understanding: well, how did we get to where we are now? So that motivates the history lesson. And then it motivates what he perceives as the solution space. How do we recreate the thing that we’ve lost?

His idea is that around the Bronze Age, no one was worried about finding meaning. Meaning is all around us. It’s within the substrate of culture and nature, and it existed in the interplay of relationships and that kind of thing. Then you have this innovation that occurred across the world in many places that he calls the axial age, where metacognition developed — second-order thinking. Because of that, a separation of here and the divine emerged, and you see this separation in religions.

You see it in religions that don’t exist anymore, and in current religions: we are here in the dirty realm of existence, and there is this pristine, divine existence that’s separated from us. Our goal is to figure out how do we connect to that thing. Both connect to it while we are living here, for divine inspiration and purpose and meaning, but also when we die. So there’s a story there about the afterlife.

His story is that because of this, a lot of psychotechnologies were developed to try to meet this need of bridging the separation. So there’s meditation, dialectic, prayer, ethical discipline. All of the philosophies and religions develop from this. He would include shamanic medicine and that kind of thing, a way of tapping into this divine that is hidden from us.

So we had three different orders that emerged. From what I can tell, the Middle Ages tried to recreate everything in the axial frame as stably as possible. He has three orders. The nominal order gave coherence — the universe is rationally ordered by logos, God, something like that. A normative order gave significance — there’s a hierarchy of value that’s available to us. And narrative order gave purpose. That’s history moving from creation through fall to redemption. A lot of this is Christian-inspired.

Nominalism broke first because the scientists started doing what scientists do and started poking at the universe. And if the universe is just names, mental labels attached to things, then rational order just became arbitrary. You’re not getting a rational order from on high. The Reformation had God’s will as primary, so salvation comes through faith, and so you are starting to lose the other orders as well. You had less need for institutions, and these institutions were the things that were cultivating wisdom. The scientific revolution killed the universal telos, and the external world is purposeless matter in motion. So that’s his “fall.”

Then the philosophers had their go of it. Descartes formalized the mind/matter split. The self is severed from the world. All meaning was relocated to the subjective side. Kant said we can never know the thing in itself. Romanticism tried to decorate everything, but it’s an absolute mess. So it doesn’t work. If we can’t touch reality, perhaps Will can. And so you have these cultural wills that assert themselves: communism, fascism, nationalism, that kind of thing.

Where we find ourselves now is basically a system that had fallen apart. The Bronze Age had a stable system. Around the Middle Ages, a somewhat stable system. And we’ve basically deconstructed that second stable system. I’ll pause there. That’s the history side.

[00:11:18] David: I think this history is really important. I also, in the Meaningness book, have a history that mostly covers the late 1800s up to the present. And it’s the same story. And this is standard-issue intellectual history. I don’t know his version of it, but I assume he’s following the standard story. I follow the standard story. And then I think we have somewhat different diagnoses of what to make of that.

We were talking yesterday or the day before about why history and understanding history is important. We are heirs to an enormous amount of ideas that we’re mostly not even aware of. We just take them for granted. We may not even know that we have the ideas. Thought soup. These ideas actually are wrong. And the fact that we have the ideas without knowing we have the ideas, and they’re wrong ideas, that’s very significant.

They distort the way that we are. In order to undistort our way of being, to return to some natural state, it is helpful to find out what the ideas are that we have without knowing it. I think Vervaeke uses the term “cultural grammar.”

Andrew: Yeah, that sounds familiar.

David: I think that’s nice, because grammar is something that we use constantly, and unless you’ve studied linguistics, you’re mostly unaware of the grammar that you’re speaking. It is shaping the way that we communicate without our being aware of it, and we can make it explicit. An example, which is sort of a famous example in English — there’s grammatical rules. When you have adjectives piling up in front of a noun. A clear blue sky.

[00:14:17] Andrew: Yes. Like, why does “clear” go before “blue”?

[00:14:20] David: Exactly. A blue clear sky — I mean, a lot of them actually just come out incoherent. It would just be wrong. A blue clear sky is not the same thing as a clear blue sky. This idea comes from Aristotle. Nobody knows this, but we are obeying a cultural grammar according to which things have essences and have accidental properties. And this is completely wrong, and it distorts everything. So I’ve gone off on a side ramp.

[00:14:53] Andrew: This is what we’re here for.

I can do the little speed-run. The second half of his lecture series is basically knitting together what the solution space might look like. He’s coming from the frame of “we’ve lost something, we need to restore it.” Let’s understand the things we have lost, and let’s just recreate those things.

He uses two primary tools from cognitive science to motivate this. One is relevance realization, which has connection to the frame problem: how do we know what is relevant in any situation? We’re taking in so much information, and it’s almost like affordances just reach out to us. Things have affordances in a way that is kind of mysterious to us right now, and it’s still mysterious to AI. It’ll probably become very relevant as AI is operating in the real world: how do you actually pull relevance from a system in a way that is meaningful?

[00:16:07] David: This is what my PhD thesis was about. So Vervaeke and I are sharing a lot of cognitive background. We’re actually working with mostly the same set of ideas.

[00:16:21] Andrew: It’s lovely, because the two of you diverge and then come back. So he calls this relevance realization. He has a story of how this works, but in general you have this tension between overfitting and underfitting, and the human mind is trying to find this balance between the two. He highlights here that relevance is not a property of objects. If you’re looking for meaning in life, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re not gonna find meaning in life. Relevance is the dance between interactions.

The other tool he uses, which I think sticks in a lot of people’s brains from his lectures, is his four P’s — four ways of knowing. He basically creates these categories that largely is pointing to: there is more than propositional knowledge. We can make propositions about things, and a lot of our left-brainy world really likes propositions about things. But there are very obvious ways of knowing that aren’t propositions. So he has the procedural — that’s knowing how. The perspectival, which is knowing what it is like. And the participatory, which is knowing by being. You can kind of think of a hierarchy from the propositional all the way through to the way of being. If you try to establish your meaning normatively through propositions, it’s very weak, because propositions themselves are pretty flimsy. You’re not gonna find meaning there. Largely you’re gonna find meaning in this embodied sense of involvement. So those are the two tools he uses. Any thoughts?

[00:18:21] David: From a cognitive science perspective, I think his account of how relevance realization works is probably wrong. I don’t think that’s very relevant to the meaning crisis, so I won’t go into that.

I really like the four P’s. The propositional versus procedural is standard in cognitive science going back to forever, but putting in the participatory and perspectival, I like that.

Andrew: It’s one of the things that stuck with me: hey, when you find yourself being very literal about things in the propositional, look another way. It’s just very useful. [00:19:12] So he takes these two things. Relevance is coming from this process that’s occurring, so something feels relevant to us, thus meaningful to us, through this process. And there are these other ways of knowing. How do we cultivate both of these? How do we tune them? How do we shape them?

So he creates this framework called DIME, which is basically a four-legged stool that recreates what we’ve lost. If you were to look back, what did these people have? They had elements of this four-legged stool. Practices. The four practices are: dialogical, which is basically mind experiencing mind in the external, to work through self-deception in some way. You have to interact with the world, you have to interact with other minds, debate them, that kind of thing.

There’s the imaginal, which transforms perspective. He uses the phrase “serious play.” He thinks we’ve lost play —

David: I love that phrase.

Andrew: — and that we should be seriously playing. He has quite an elaborate construction of what the imaginal is doing in our world.

The mindful — this is meditation practices. And embodiment. For him, I think this is Tai Chi, but any kind of movement practice that trains bodily foundation.

[00:20:44] David: So, a question. He has the Bronze Age where meaning was a non-problem, and then in the axial age it becomes a problem. These practices sound to me like axial age practices. So it’s not the case that these are the way that in the Bronze Age, meaning was a non-problem. These were ways in which the axial age tried to overcome their failure to be like people in the Bronze Age. And it didn’t work in the axial age, so why should we believe it would work now?

[00:21:33] Andrew: That’s a great point. I don’t know his account well enough about why in the Bronze Age meaning didn’t need these practices. It could be something along the lines of: metacognition had not fully been developed, and to do these practices you need some layer of metacognition. And so I think if you’re subject to your experience, in some ways you avoid some of the flaws as well. I’m guessing, to some extent.

Do wild deer out in the mountains have meaning problems? No. Well, it’s because they don’t think about their situation and their lot in life, and they’re not looking for cosmic significance, I assume. I hope not.

So now I get to — I think I’ve bastardized Vervaeke by compressing 50 hours into 15 minutes. Then I summarize your beliefs, following the same arc. Maybe it’d be better coming from you. So what’s the diagnosis? What went wrong, if anything?

[00:23:00] David: Well, this is where my story now is probably somewhat different than it was when I wrote the 10% of the Meaningness book which is actually up on the web.

I think you say later: well, Vervaeke believes in philosophy, he thinks philosophy is good. I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. And in my view, Vervaeke has a lot of respect for them, devotion for them, that I don’t share.

I think the cultural grammar that we have is largely descended from the ancient Greeks trying to solve problems with inadequate tools, and their problems were ones we don’t have. But we’ve got the kind of bric-a-brac, or residue, a lot of broken furniture. It’s like we’re living in a house that is stuffed with ancient, broken-down furniture. And what we need to do is to clear out all the stuff that we’ve been somehow having to make our way around, and have some open space, and leave the things that actually do still work.

One fundamental idea in the cultural grammar, cognitive grammar, I forget what he says, is that real things are perfectly definite. This is Plato’s theory of forms. And anything that’s not perfectly definite isn’t really real, and is defective, and needs to kind of be stuck in a box so it’ll behave and have the proper form it’s supposed to have. And he applies this to, you know, salt shakers or whatever. This isn’t a real salt shaker from Plato’s point of view. This is a bad approximation to the form of a salt shaker, which lives in heaven.

So the meanings that we have, we discover that they are nebulous, meaning they’re not perfectly definite. And that seems unacceptable because Plato said so. And then we conclude that these aren’t really meanings at all. They’re fake meanings, and all meanings are fake because all meanings turn out to be nebulous. They’re not perfectly definite. And what he’s calling the meaning crisis is the fact that this became apparent during the 20th century.

There’s the whole history before that, which it’s helpful to understand, but my history is basically a history of the 20th century because that’s when this problem became apparent. The idea that meanings must be perfectly definite — “patterned” is the word I use — they must conform to a pattern. That’s the Platonic Form. This idea I call eternalism. It’s a term from Buddhism. The idea that because meanings are not perfectly definite, they don’t exist at all — that’s nihilism.

The standard histories of the 20th century say that nihilism is a huge problem. That’s, I think, what Vervaeke is addressing in the meaning crisis series. It’s also what all kinds of thinkers have been addressing. Nietzsche was kind of the first person to point this out and start to grapple with it. And all worthwhile philosophy since Nietzsche has been working within his problematic, I think.

So the part of the Meaningness book that’s semi-written is basically saying: look, meaning is somewhat patterned. Different meanings have different degrees of definiteness or patternedness to them. But it’s always also nebulous — changing and indefinite and sort of fluid and impossible to pin down. And if that’s unacceptable, then you kind of go in one of these two wrong directions of eternalism and nihilism. And the book basically just said: well, don’t do that, ‘cause that doesn’t work. It makes you miserable and confused, and it’s better not to be miserable and confused.

And then it has some sketches of practices that are not very well worked out, for working with nebulous meaning, and working with your confusions. There’s a series of confusions that come out of failure to do that. These practices are not very well worked out. And I think toward the end of this you present a partial criticism of both Vervaeke’s work and of mine. And one of the things you say is: you don’t seem to have practices here. And it’s true enough, I didn’t have a practice there. And I kind of feel like I have a little more to say about that now than I did in 2010, or whenever it was that I was writing it up.

[00:30:15] Andrew: To me, what stuck out most was this eternalism–nihilism axis. You also had other axes.

David: Yes. They’re kind of secondary.

Andrew: It’s basically confusions, flawed ways of thinking, that if you are existing on that axis, you will fall toward an attractor basin that is somewhat miserable.

David: That’s a nice way to put it.

Andrew: So one of the meta things I like is that you are recognizing two polar ways of being that both have something true to say that the other doesn’t recognize. So nihilism recognizes the nebulosity that eternalism doesn’t recognize. Eternalism recognizes the pattern that nihilism doesn’t recognize. And so it’s this beautiful move of: they both recognize the truth in each other, and the resolution is they’re both making the same mistake. For you in Meaningness, the mistake is not recognizing the nebulosity and pattern, which you call the complete stance. Not recognizing that they’re inseparable and they’re both always there.

The other interesting thing is, I think Vervaeke often thinks about things in terms of balance. The right action, which I think is a kind of Theravada way of thinking about things. Yours is not — you’re not trying to balance two things. You’re not trying to balance eternalism and nihilism. You’re recognizing: oh, they’re both wrong about something.

So I think we can now interplay. You alluded a little bit before that you think his diagnostic is wrong. He starts in the wrong place of believing philosophy, or believing the ancient Greeks.

[00:32:16] David: So you characterize Vervaeke as saying that we’ve lost something and we need to reconstruct it. I don’t think we’ve lost anything. The way of being of the Bronze Age is always immediately available, and we actually live that way much of the time anyway. When we’re making breakfast, we are not concerned with problems of meaning. It’s obvious. The world is obvious. Things are as they seem to be. And the ancient Greeks got this idea that somehow things are very different than they seem to be. You know, the real world is completely different from this, and we need to figure out how to get to the real world. And that’s not the situation we find ourselves in.

We do have problems of meaning, but there being some other world is not a helpful way of approaching that at all. What we have is 2,600 years’ worth of accumulated ideas about meaning that we all, without knowing it, without having studied philosophy at all, we’re all downstream from philosophy. I say the toxic effluent of philosophical production. We’re drinking in these philosophical waste products. They come into our bodies and our brains, and they’re polluting us.

So what’s needed is to find these wrong ideas and point to them and say: oh, this is why that’s wrong. Here’s how acting on the basis of that wrong idea causes trouble. And then let’s not do that anymore.

The kind of utopian vision of “wouldn’t it be nice to live in the Bronze Age?” — he probably doesn’t say that. I think he likes technology. But wouldn’t it be nice to have direct access to meaning? Well, we do have direct access to meaning. What has gone wrong, what we lost, is the credibility of eternalism. That is the definition of postmodernity: postmodernity is the condition in which grand meta-narratives are no longer credible. Grand meta-narratives are these eternalistic structural theories of meaning. And starting in 1971, nobody could believe them anymore.

And so we lost that, but that wasn’t a terrible thing. I mean, it had some benefits, but we’re better off without it. Nietzsche was starting the work of deconstructing the terrible wrong ideas we got from the Greeks, and that was one of them. And hooray, we’re rid of that.

There were certain benefits: if you could be a good Christian, it solved a lot of problems for you. And it’s no longer possible to be a good Christian, or at least it’s extremely difficult. People who think they’re Christians aren’t. And serious Christians say this about most people who think they’re Christians: they’re actually moralistic therapeutic deists. That’s the phrase from recent theological thinking — that most Christians are actually that. They don’t actually believe in the Christian story, in the details that matter. They think God is a vague source of some kind of nice morality, and is kind of your parent/psychotherapist/best friend. And deist in the sense of: well, he doesn’t really exist exactly, but there’s sort of a something. And this isn’t Christianity.

So it would probably be nice to be a Christian. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I don’t think anybody can imagine it now. If you were born after 1971, you’ve grown up in a world in which it’s impossible to actually believe in any of these things. So we did lose that. But better off without it. Although it has left a lot of people feeling confused.

Andrew: Unmoored.

David: Yes. So there’s this sense of groundlessness. And that is something where Vajrayana Buddhism, which is very influential for me, has the tools to work with. And there are other approaches and tools for working with that, which are realistic in a way that eternalism isn’t.

And so for me, the way forward is to both clear out the wrong, bad ideas and also to have the practices. And here I very much agree with Vervaeke, that practice, as well as intellectual understanding — you need both. The practices are very important, and practices for finding meaning, those are available. But they’re not emphasized in the culture now.

[00:39:24] Andrew: Another aspect that I like about your view is that you’re already very close to the complete stance. Because if you fully believed the other stances, it would be largely unworkable. It’d be difficult to exist in the world. And so in many ways, they’re self-terminating. People have these a priori, or even prior to beliefs, and that permeates and leaks into their life. But practically, a nihilist probably has a favorite song, unless they’re in deep depression or something like that. Meaning still leaks out. That’s an interesting perspective, because it seems that not much needs to be done.

[00:40:18] David: Meaning is everywhere obvious. This is a salt shaker. It has a meaning. It’s used for shaking salt. There’s not a lot of complexity here. In Dzogchen — a branch of Vajrayana Buddhism — rigpa, which is sort of the goal for Dzogchen, is the natural state, and it’s the state in which things are just obvious and things are as they seem to be. When you’re making breakfast and putting salt on your scrambled eggs, you don’t have a problem. It’s interesting.

[00:41:30] Andrew: So I think we’ve talked a bit about Vervaeke’s investment in ancient philosophy, which you disagree with. The systemic tools that might address this — should we talk about ethics at all? I think there’s probably a difference in how you and Vervaeke perceive ethics.

[00:41:37] David: I can say a little about how I think about it, but I don’t know how Vervaeke thinks about it.

Andrew: My sense — and I could be wrong — is that in many ways he wants to cultivate virtue. I see a little bit of this Platonic form leaking out. That there is a right way to be, and you are trying to align yourself toward that way.

[00:42:10] David: Cultivating virtue seems like a good idea. Because I emphasize the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, I think ethics is always going to be somewhat nebulous, to varying degrees, in varying ways. I don’t think you can have a system of ethics which is the correct system. I don’t think that there’s always a well-defined right thing to do. In a lot of situations it’s nebulous what’s right to do. But one can and should make an effort to do right things.

[00:42:56] Andrew: Would it be useful to talk about stances trumping systems? Because I think that’s another disagreement you might have. He is constructing DIME as a system — that if you do the system, you will find meaning, you’ll restore this thing that’s been broken. Can you talk a bit about your view of stances?

[00:43:25] David: Stances are simpler than systems. They’re prior to systems. They’re sort of attitudes that you take toward whatever — meaning, in this context. So the attitude that meanings don’t exist is nihilism. The attitude that the only purposes that really count are kind of materialistic, egocentric ones — that’s a stance. You don’t need a big theory that says the only thing that really matters is me and the people I immediately care about, and basically I want to get all the goodies and everything else is some kind of airy-fairy. That’s what I call the stance of materialism. And everybody falls into that all the time. We all do, including people who are explicitly rejecting it. One just naturally does. But it’s a confused stance, because it is denying that there are purposes — altruistic purposes, or artistic purposes — that are not materialist in this sense. So it is making a false distinction and coming down on one side of that and denying the other side of it.

I’m not against systems at all. Vajrayana is a very elaborate structure, a highly structured system with its own embedded system of logic and enormous conceptual complexities. And I think it’s great. But I have a meta-systematic view, meaning I don’t take that or any system as being some kind of ultimately true and correct thing. It’s useful in some circumstances. And I don’t know whether this DIME thing he takes to be some kind of ultimately correct thing either. As a system of practice, that may just be what it is. Vajrayana is a system of practice — it’s got different things that you do, and they fit together in a particular way.

Andrew: I wouldn’t be shocked if he were to say that DIME is a solution to where we find ourselves right now. [00:46:17] And that a different people group at a different time might have a different set. There may not even be four — there may be a different set of practices. I think he is fairly committed to these practices. They’re fairly generic. If I say “embodiment,” that doesn’t really tell you what to do. Inside of that, you have to explore.

To me it feels like something has collapsed, and this is a structure that he’s going to inflate, and inside of that, meaning can exist. And if you’re missing any of the legs, it’s almost like the volume collapses in some way. It seems to me decently pragmatic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the ways he’s changed is developing this a bit more. Okay, in what ways does DIME become an object that someone can treat as a religion: “I did my little movement practice, I argued with someone and whatever, and I still don’t feel meaning”?

I wouldn’t be surprised if Awakening from the Meaning Crisis was a theory of structure, and that since then he’s tried to refine the practices, or something like that. But neither of us know.

[00:47:30] David: Yeah, I like all of those practices. I’m not sure how he’s using it. It doesn’t seem obvious why those four things. They all seem like good things, and I can kind of see how you might think you need something from each of those categories.

[00:48:00] Andrew: Another lens, that you only talk about in other places, and he doesn’t talk about at all, is your influence from Robert Kegan. Another way of viewing some of the disagreements. My theory is it is actually a Kegan thing, where it almost seems as though he is providing a Kegan three-to-four system for someone to reboot something. And it can be immensely practical, even if you followed him directly and took some of his metaphysics, because in some ways you are figuring out: what am I, if I’m not identified by my group? Can you speak a little bit about this?

[00:48:53] David: That seems insightful. I don’t know whether it’s accurate, because I don’t know enough about his stuff. But there is a pre-systematic way of being, a systematic way of being, and a meta-systematic way of being. And each going from one of those to the next is a radical personal transformation. According to this theory, which I think is substantially right, it reorganizes everything about you. And it is tremendously valuable to go from pre-systematic to systematic. And that’s roughly what the ancient Greek philosophers were doing. They were going from a pre-systematic way of being to something that was beginning to be systematic. I think in retrospect, people project a lot of rationality and systematicity onto the Greek philosophers that wasn’t yet there. They could kind of see what rationality would be, but they hadn’t actually got it yet, properly. That’s an interesting historical point that may be consequential.

But you described DIME as a well-structured system where you know what you’re supposed to do. It’s got procedures and it’s got a theory. Any sort of structure that you really take on board and take into yourself, and remold yourself to fit some system — that is the three-to-four transition. It has its costs, but it is very, very valuable.

I am much more interested in the stage four to stage five transition, which is systematic to meta-systematic. I don’t understand it very well. Nobody understands it very well. I write about it a lot. I said that I could view DIME from a meta-systematic point of view, or I can view Vajrayana from a meta-systematic point of view, as a contextually useful set of tools that you can apply for particular purposes in particular situations, but it’s not some kind of truth or correct way of being.

[00:52:20] Andrew: That’s lovely. And Vervaeke does use the phrase “reverse-engineering enlightenment.” So it does seem to me that he’s trying to figure out the system that gets you there, right?

[00:52:47] David: Yeah. I’m on board with that. I mean, I’m not on board with enlightenment, but the engineering metaphor — I’m an engineer by training. I like that metaphor. It appeals to me. Yes, that sounds great: let’s reverse-engineer enlightenment so we know what to do. I find that really appealing. And I also put on my stage-five hat and say: well, yeah, that’s not the way things work, actually.

[00:53:11] Andrew: Nice. I think we’ve completed the loop. I talk a little bit about sacredness, but I think this probably touches what we’ve talked about before: whether sacredness is a thing that we can get to, or whether it’s everywhere and you need to observe it.

David: Yes.

Andrew: I think that could be another difference, where he has this Platonic bathwater in his cells that makes him want to find the sacred someplace else. And the sacred is always right here, right now.

My mile-high view is that his architecture fails as ideology. It may be useful in the circumstance someone finds themselves in, but as a grand narrative of what happened, how we got to where we are, the diagnosis of where we are, and the solution — it’s probably partial, or it may not be situationally relevant.

You mentioned that Meaningness actually doesn’t prescribe very much. It just waves its hands a little bit. How has your thinking evolved since then?

[00:54:31] David: I wish I knew. I feel pretty confused. I find my situation to be very frustrating, because I have an enormous amount that I want to say and I don’t have time. Both in the sense that I’m sixty-something, and I’ve got a limited number of years left. But also the amount of time that I have free within a week to write is limited.

And during the past 15 years when I haven’t had much time to write, my thinking has gone in all kinds of different directions, and I kind of see everything tying together, and that’s really exciting to me. The Meaningness book has a very defined structure. It really is a system, and it’s got these tables that neatly outline the different stances and what all their properties are, those little boxes. In the same way that “reverse-engineering enlightenment” is appealing to me, those boxes are appealing to me. But I can’t do that anymore. My understanding doesn’t fit into boxes. And that, I suppose, could be a sign of continuing to move from four toward five.

I was involved with Vajrayana intensively from about 1998 to 2008, and then much less until the last year and a half or two years. So the period leading up to writing the Meaningness book, as far as I did, was very heavily influenced by Vajrayana, which I was practicing intensively. And my thinking now is again intensively influenced by Vajrayana, because (for some insane reason) I’ve been teaching it. And then there’s a period in between where I was just not thinking along those lines so much, and things went in lots of different directions.

So the meta-rationality material, I see as being the same thing presented a different way, but it is meant as a practice. Meta-rationality isn’t a theory, it’s a practice. It’s stuff that we do. And it is working with nebulosity and pattern in a practical way. Again, the book is largely unwritten, so there’s a lot of draft material about how in practice do you deal with a world in which things are nebulous and patterned at the same time.

And then, you’re talking about cultivating virtue. I had this arc a year ago about nobility and how to cultivate nobility, and there’s a lot more to say about that. And there’s a lot to say about ethics. And there’s a lot to say about — I don’t know, sex and gender has been something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.

There’s a bit right near your end that I love. Vervaeke: “The sacred is inexhaustible. Reality always exceeds any frame; no matter how much you understand, there’s always more. The experience of the sacred is the recognition that the inexhaustibility of reality and the inexhaustibility of your own relevance realization resonate with each other. Within that recognition, the gap between self and world heals.”

I mean, that is Vajrayana. That is the essence of Vajrayana. Vervaeke isn’t influenced by Vajrayana as far as I know, although he is influenced by the Kyoto School of Zen philosophy, which historically is influenced by Vajrayana. So there is maybe some connection there.

Chapman: “The sacred is wonder, heightened agendaless attention combined with suspension of habitual interpretation.” I think that’s the same thing. It’s more about what you’re not doing: not fixating, not denying, not interpreting. You’re experiencing nebulosity and pattern together, which has a specific experiential flavor that “inexhaustibility” lacks.

I don’t know. I think, “inexhaustible” — the world is just, if you’re open to perception, all this wonderful complexity that you also can’t pin down. And the appropriate response to the unbelievable vivid complexity of just whatever is in front of you — the salt shaker. My God, you just look at it and there’s so much detail. This brushed stainless steel — this won’t show on the camera, but there’s really fine detail in here. It’s beautiful.

[01:00:55] Andrew: The salted rust.

[01:00:59] David: Yes. There’s just a lot going on there. And you wonder at that, and you just say: oh, I thought this was something really mundane, but there’s some kind of chemical process going on here that I don’t know what it is. That’s fascinating.

So curiosity — I have what I call the textures of meaningness. Wonder is the first one. Curiosity is the second one. Play is the fourth, I think. And serious play — I think I used the phrase “serious play” in there too. What’s the third? Humor, I think. Humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creation.

Andrew: I’m loving the salt shaker. Someone even thought to put these glass ridges, which I assume make it slide across the table better. [01:01:54] Yeah, there’s a lot of detail.

Well, thank you. This is absolutely lovely. I think this will be helpful.

What does “yidam” mean?

Yidam practice is traditionally the primary method of Buddhist tantra.

A yidam is a being you can relate to as the embodiment of an extraordinary possibility for interaction. They are usually described as “enlightened.” We mostly avoid that word, though, because traditions have confusingly different ideas about what it means.

“Yidam” is sometimes translated as “meditational deity.” Thinking of them as gods is a decent starting point, but potentially misleading. In traditional cultures, many people do relate to them as actually-existing independent external gods. However, canonical texts make clear that this is a misunderstanding.

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What are yidam practices?

There are several quite different ways of relating to yidams. Particular practices are useful depending on where you are and where you want to go.

All involve “visualizing” a yidam. This term covers more than mental imagery. It can be proprioceptive, emotional, and energetic: the felt sense of the yidam’s presence.

• In some practices, you visualize the yidam in front of you, and you receive their energy.

• In others, you become the yidam yourself, and visualize manifesting their energy.

• Some practices involve ritual actions, as support for the visualization. Some involve reciting a sadhana (fixed text). Some involve mantras (magical phrases) and/or mudras (magical gestures).

• Other practices involve little or no ritual, text, mantra, or mudra. Omitting these and going directly to the visualization saves time if you don’t need the support.

We tend to recommend the simplest practice that works for your purposes at a particular time. However, the ritual elaborations are also wonderful for their own sake!

Evolving Ground teaches diverse yidam practices

Our community practices many different yidams, including three described here. We practice them for quite different purposes, and with quite different methods.

Vajrasattva

Vajrasattva clears negative rumination on your past mistakes, thereby opening a vast space for new possibilities.

We practice Vajrasattva with front-generation: seeing the yidam in front of (or above) you, separate from yourself.

Avalokiteshvara

We practice this non-binary embodiment of compassion as self-arising: you become Avalokiteshvara.

Avalokiteshvara practice fills you with tenderness and love for all beings, opening the possibility of unbounded kindness in action. We practice in the anuyoga style: direct, unelaborate, ecstatic.

Good King Gesar

Gesar is the warrior-king-sorcerer-god folk hero of Tibetan epic. We take Gesar as inspiration for noble activity: the wise, creative, and just use of power.

• Gesar functions as a protector of practice, practitioners, and projects.

• Gesar functions as a joyful yidam: celebrating courageous caring competence.

• Gesar functions as a wrathful yidam: destroying obstacles, such as conceptual confusions and emotional fixations.

We practice Gesar with a sadhana text. It provides instructions for a structured meditation ritual which you can practice individually or in a group.

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Why is yidam the core tantric practice?

Historical explanation

Late Mahayana had the idea that you have Buddha-nature potential (tathagatagarbha) within you. As an aspiring bodhisattva, you’re supposed to actualize that. However, it had no coherent theory of how that could happen.

Yidam practice began as an idea for how to make it happen. “Visualizing your way into Buddhahood” was found to have dramatic positive effects.

Why is it still functional now as a tantric practice?

It works.

Not always, not for everyone. But for many people, it’s the most effective tantric practice.

Many people, regular Westerners who take up yidam practice sincerely, report dramatic positive effects.

What is it like to practice yidam?

That depends on what style of yidam practice you are going to engage with. This is related to yana and “view” (theoretical framework). It also depends on your individual propensities.

In general, the result is often described as the union of bliss, clarity, and emptiness:

• Ecstatic, sometimes overwhelmingly intense bliss

• Vivid, clear perception and understanding

• Awareness without conceptual elaboration: emptiness

The practice gives rise to devotion: overwhelming love and respect for life.

You see the world as the yidam sees it:

• The scaffolding practice: superimposing the mandala, the elaborate envisioned environment of the yidam, on actuality.

• The thing itself: actuality around you arises in perception as sacred space, empty and full of vivid transparent phenomena.

What yidam practice is not: common misunderstandings

• Yidams are not actually-existing independent external gods. Many canonical texts state this explicitly.

• The practice is not creative imagination. It is not fantasizing about something that you make up.

• It is not narrative. Mental stories of interactions with the yidam are not the practice. (They may also be valuable! But they are not this practice.)

• Yidam practice is not about you and your psychology. It’s about becoming not-you, and going beyond your psychology into new possibilities.

• A yidam is not a Jungian archetype. Yidams are meant to challenge your deep psychology, not to confirm and reinforce it. They are highly specific and weird.

• You can’t invent your own yidam: not because it’s not allowed, but because their being alien to you is critical to their function.

• The yidam practices Evolving Ground teaches are quite different in principle and function from prayer. They are also quite different in principle and function from similar-sounding practices from other cultures, such as loa possession in vodou or invocation in Western ceremonial magic. Relying on analogies from those practices leads to misunderstandings.

Otherness

The alienness of yidams, and of the practice, is important. The unfamiliarity is key: you practice in order to discover radical new possibilities, not to fix up your current psychology. You’re stepping into a differentness that is provided externally, not coming from “deep within” you.

In traditional cultures, for a religion to specify a ready-made new shape to step into seems natural. It’s confronting and seems unnatural in our individualist culture. “Who are you to say what I should become?” It is harder to get our heads around, because we take religion as a choice, not as given. We need to establish a degree of trust that the practice will work for us before starting.

Nowadays, many may also balk at the ontological ambiguity: “but do they really exist?” That doesn’t matter for the practice, so it is best to set that question aside.

Is yidam practice necessary?

This is often asked because the practice may seem off-putting and weird and unlikely to work. (That is part of how it does work!)

Buddhist systems are described in terms of the base, or prerequisites; the path (or methods); and the result (or goal). In this framework one can view sutrayana (renunciative, mainstream Buddhism) as establishing the necessary base for tantra; tantra as the path, or collection of methods; and dzogchen as the result.

“Dzogchen” means finding that you are already fully liberated (and always have been). This is not obvious!

It’s possible to get to the result while skipping tantra. For example, in the four naljors system, the meditation practice called moving awareness gets the effect of tantra without yidam.

Also, direct energy practice (tsa lung) could be a bypass. This is the other core tantric practice. It’s usual to start it only after you have significant experience with yidam.

These bypasses are not easier; they are more difficult (for most people).

And yidam practice is great once you get into it! So it’s worth working with doubt and giving it a try (if you want to explore Vajrayana).

Is empowerment necessary?

Traditionally, before starting to practice yidam, you were required to undergo an “empowerment” ritual. Originally, that was a very big deal. The ritual could be terrifyingly intense, and it came with a set of vows that most people might not now want to take. Getting access to the ritual required years of full-time preparation.

Nowadays, anyone can go to an empowerment. This is a pity, in some ways! “Very big deal” can be a powerful method for personal transformation.

Despite the low effort now required, many people still resist empowerment. They ask “Do I really have to do this? Why? I don’t believe it is magic, and I don’t want anyone’s permission. Can’t I just start the practice?”

Maybe! But an effective empowerment gives you a first taste of what yidam practice is like, and shows you that it can actually do something. If you start solo with instructions from a book, it typically takes a hundred hours of practice to get any results. It’s hard to maintain the motivation for that.

Empowerments vary a lot. Look for a ritual leader whose style resonates for you. Otherwise, they can be excruciatingly boring, or threateningly confrontational.

Evolving Ground offers empowerment rituals on some retreats. They are simple and effective, in accord with the eG style.

A mala is a string of beads used for counting repetitions of mantra in Buddhist tantra (Vajrayana). They are also used as decorative, vaguely spiritual knickknacks. Ones made for that purpose may not work for serious practice.

Why make your own mala?

Tantra delights in involvement with complex specifics of the actual world. Making your own mala gives you a personal connection not easily bought. Tantra urges appreciation for perceptual qualities of material objects. Making your own mala is an opportunity to explore, develop, and display your unique aesthetic sensibility.

This post explains how. It’s pretty easy, taking about two hours once you’ve acquired the materials.

Alternatively, you could buy a ready-made mala that is functionally adequate. You can find them in any Tibetan/Nepali tchotchke shop, or probably in a bead store. You can get one that’s good enough to start with for about $15 on Amazon. Etsy has nicer ones (at higher prices). You need to know what to look for, though! I explain the requirements in this post, too.

There are many “how to make a mala” pages on the web. Most are about how to make decorative knickknacks with diffuse spiritual overtones. Those usually lack the functional requirements for tantric practice. The others I found use traditional materials and methods for stringing the beads. Tradition has its own value, but there is a much better high-tech option.

How malas work, and functional requirements

You recite a mantra, associated with some particular yidam, many times. The mala is a piece of technical equipment for keeping track of how many. (How mantra works, why you might want to do it, and the point of counting, are all complicated. The answers are also quite different according to different Buddhist systems. So, I won’t go into any of that in this post.)

If you are moderately serious about practicing tantra, “many times” means “several hundred thousand, maybe millions.” I know that sounds absurd, but it’s doable, and if you get into it, you may find yourself motivated to go there.

This has two implications.

• You need a device that can count up into the millions. Early in my mantra practice, I thought using a mala was a ridiculous anachronism, and got a digital clicky counter thing. This was a mistake; the feeling of moving the beads through your fingers is part of how mantra works.

• You are going to put a lot of wear and tear on your equipment, so it needs to be made from durable materials.

If you look at the picture of the mala at the very top of this post, you can see that the main circular strand has a whole lot of beads on it. Traditionally, there are 108 identical ones,1 plus one bigger one.2 You start at the big bead, and move one small one through your fingers for each repetition of the mantra. Then when you get back to the big one, you have done “a hundred.” Traditionally, 108 repetitions counts as “a hundred,” as insurance against the catastrophic risk that you skipped a few by mistake. Depending on how long the mantra is and how fast you say it, a hundred only takes a few minutes. Probably not enough to have much effect.

If you go longer, you need to know how many “hundreds” you have done. That’s the function of the two short strings, with ten beads each, that come off on the sides. One of them counts hundreds. So each time you do a hundred, you slide a bead along on that side string. When you’ve got all the beads from one end of that to the other, you have done a thousand. The other side string counts thousands. When you’ve got all ten beads on the hundred counters at the far end, you push them back, and slide one bead along on the thousands counter.

Then there is a ten-thousands counter, which clips onto the main strand. This is called a “bum counter” (pronounced “boom”). Each time you finish ten thousand, you move the bum counter one bead along the main loop. So, altogether, the mala can count to 10,000×108, or a bit over a million.3 If you are serious, you get a second clip-on for counting millions. (I am not serious.)

So if you buy a mala, functional requirements are that it has 108 beads, plus a big one, and the two side counters. Or, if they are missing, you could get side counters separately and attach them with clips. Bum counters are always clip-on, and you can wait to buy one until you get that far. If a mala has some other number of beads, or lacks necessary bits, it won’t work for Buddhist tantra. Other religious systems use malas with other numbers, so you may see those for sale (as in the photo at the top of this section). Malas may also be designed only as decorations, with no specific religious function.

The remaining requirement is durability. The beads need to be made of something hard. Semi-precious gem stones, bone, and certain woody seeds are traditional. And, the string needs to be strong and inelastic.

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Use Softflex instead

If you already know how to make a mala, or are following traditional instructions, or are restringing a broken mala, the main point of this post is: use Softflex beading wire instead.

Traditional string materials inevitably break, and then you have to restring the beads, which is a pain. And also you may lose some when the mala falls apart and they go everywhichwhere. (Speaking from experience here.) Traditional instructions tell you to make a knot between each bead, thick enough that they can’t slide over it. Then if the string breaks, only one bead falls off. The knotting is quite a lot of fiddly work. Softflex doesn’t break, so you can skip that.

Traditional string materials also stretch with use, opening up gaps between the beads. Putting a knot between each one limits how much extra play they get; otherwise, you eventually get a long section of bare string, which looks bad and also makes it more difficult to move the beads along. Softflex doesn’t stretch.

Stuff you’ll need

• 108 small beads

• One big bead, with a hole big enough for the string to pass through twice

• Two side counters (they come in pairs, with two different charms at the ends)

• A tassel, or materials for making one (explained later)

• Softflex beading wire

• Crimping beads and a crimping tool (shown in the picture at the top of the previous section). Needle-nose pliers would probably also work if you have those

• Eventually, a bum counter

Important principle: Vajrayana has many, many specific “lineages,” which are somewhat different religious systems. Some specify details of practice equipment, including the materials used to make malas. If you are practicing in a particular tradition, it’s important to find out first what requirements it may have. And, more generally, if you have a teacher, consult him or her before proceeding. Whatever they say should override random internet posts like this one.

Otherwise, the general principle is: design your mala by choosing materials you really really like! I suggest going to as many Tibetan stores and bead stores as you can. Fondle their wares until something speaks to you. Or, look at examples online.

A “wrathful” mala

I’ve illustrated the assembly instructions in this post with photos of a mala I made this past weekend, on Easter. You can see the result in the photo at the top of the post. I made this mala specifically for the yidam practice of Good King Gesar, who I wrote about in “You should be a god-emperor.” My choices of materials are meant to reflect his energy.

Gesar is sometimes categorized as a wrathful yidam. “Wrathful” in Vajrayana doesn’t mean “hostile” or “evil.” It means clear and direct. It means: willing to do whatever is necessary for the benefit of a situation. Even (but not only) when that involves destruction. And even when it is morally ambiguous:

Iconographically, wrathful yidams are associated with death. Years ago, I came across a string of snake vertebrae at The Bone Room in Berkeley, and bought it, thinking “this would make a fantastic wrathful mala.” So I used those as beads.

For the big bead, I used a grumpy rhinoceros. In Vajrayana, rhinoceroses are symbols of wrathful protective power, particularly military power, which seemed appropriate for Gesar as a warrior-king. The rhinoceros casting had an enormous hole through it, so I added the skull bead to fill it.

The side counters are specifically wrathful ones, which are uncommon. Usually you see ones made from a yellow metal. At the end of the counter strings there are two tiny charms, versions of key tantric equipment: a bell and vajra. These are symbols of emptiness and form, respectively. Or, equivalently in tantric symbolism, female and male energies.

Wrathful counters are made of iron instead, and the charms at their ends are a kartika (butcher’s flaying knife) and phurba (demon-destroying dagger). Those are also symbolic of female and male energies (or emptiness and form).

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Making a tassel

Malas nearly always have tassels. As far as I know, they’re purely decorative, and not symbolic or functional, so I suppose you could omit this. Making a tassel is a bit fiddly. Craft stores sell them, or you can get them online. If you find a premade one you like, it will save some time and aggravation.

Embroidery thread is a good material for making tassels. There’s illustrated instructions here, in case mine are unclear!

In this case, I wanted to use black leather, in line with the “wrathful” theme. The best I could find is thicker than I wanted, and I’m not altogether happy with the result.

You wrap the tassel material around a piece of cardboard that’s a bit wider than you want the tassel to be long. That gives you a bunch of parallel strands:

Slip that off onto a coat hanger or similar:

You will wind thread around the tassel strands just below the wire in order to tie them together. You can use the same material as for the main strands, if those are thin. Here I’m using something thinner, which is common for tidiness. Run a length of the thread alongside the main strands, with one end loose at the bottom. (Shown above.)

Then wind its other end around:

Tie a square knot between the ends. (I feel there ought to be a way to conceal the somewhat untidy result inside the tassel, but I couldn’t figure out how.) To keep it from coming undone, dab a tiny drop of fabric glue on the knot:

Then cut through the bottom ends of the loops to create free ends:

The result looks kinda like Cthulhu’s beard maybe! This isn’t quite the effect I wanted, but it’s unique and interesting:

Stringing the beads

Leave one end of the Softflex attached to its spool, which prevents beads from slipping off. In other words, don’t cut the string to length until near the end of this process.

Start by putting a few beads on. The number doesn’t matter at this point. Eventually, you’ll join two ends of the Softflex, and you might think it natural to do that at the big bead, but that doesn’t work. Instead, the joint will be somewhere inconspicuous and random.

Add the big bead, and immediately after it the tassel. (The free end of the Softflex is off to the bottom left of the photo here. And, remember that I’m using two beads, the rhinoceros and skull, in place of the usual single big one.)

Then pass the wire back through the big bead, creating a loop to hold it in place:

Not very clear in the photo, but the free end of the wire is touching the table just to the bottom right of the row of vertebrae.

Now continue adding small beads until it’s time to put a counter on. Some lineages or particular practices may specify where that goes. (Check with your teacher if you have one.) At one point in the Gesar practice I’m doing, you sing the mantra twenty-one times, so I put the two side counters twenty-one beads along from the big bead:

Continue until you’ve added all the beads and both counters.

I made the mala with 111 beads rather than 108. Some lineages call for that variation, including the Aro gTér, the one I mainly trained in. Although no longer a member of that sangha, I used this number out of continuing respect for my former teachers.

Closing the loop

Now finally you cut the Softflex away from its spool, leaving a couple of inches of bare wire at each end. Pass both ends through a crimping bead, which is a tiny ring of soft metal:

Then slide the ends together, leaving about a centimeter between their end beads to allow room for your fingers when counting, and crimp the bead:

(I didn’t leave enough room there, and had to redo it. It was cramped as well as crimped.)

Then cut the free ends off as close as possible to the crimping bead; the joint will be nearly invisible.

Bum counter bunny

I had assembled all the materials I needed before starting, except for a bum counter. I planned to get one later. But just as I started stringing vertebrae, the doorbell rang. I went and retrieved a Fedex box and opened it. Inside there was a card…

“Rin’dzin” is my spouse ’s Buddhist name. “Bless those bunnies” refers to my previous post, “You can just bless things,” which features a pair of them.

There was also a box of chocolates, and a chocolate egg.

Usually Easter eggs are laid by bunnies, but this one was as big as my hand. I think it must be a capybara egg:

It opened to reveal a magic charm:

And… those words, kitsch written by a chocolate company, are also the essence of the Gesar practice:

This little bunny, which came with a convenient clip, is now my bum counter:

I suppose many tantric traditionalists would object. Such incongruous, offensive sweetness has no place in the very serious business of wrathful practice, they’d say.

I’m more traditional than they are, though. Early tantra revels in paradox, absurdity, jokes and jarring juxtapositions. I love clipping a happy symbol of new life onto the skeletal remains of a poisonous predator. Like form and emptiness, neither negates the other. Good and bad, happy and sad, life and death: these are the same, and different.

Thanks

To Ngakma , who showed me how and why to restring my first mala with Softflex, taught me to meditate, and introduced me to King Gesar.

To Rin’dzin Pamo (), for the bum counter bunny, delicious Easter chocolates, opportunities to practice and teach Vajrayana, and much else.

To the Evolving Ground sangha, for continuing inspiration.

​You can bless things. It’s easy! You can do this!

You just go around blessing things.

You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a fancy hat (although the hat might help).

This is a non-denominational practice. It’s not particularly religious; you can be of any religion, or no religion.

There’s no prerequisites. It’s easy! You just do it.

This is a practice of perception, of appreciation, of connection, of expanding benevolence.

It’s not a metaphysical practice. The point is your intention, not the effect that it might have on whatever it is that you’re blessing.

I normally do this silently, but for this video I’m going to do it out loud, which feels kind of dorky, but this way you can hear what I’m thinking.

When you do it, you can do it silently. I found the practice is embarrassing at first, even if you do it silently; but if you overcome your embarrassment, it becomes ecstatic.

Bless this place.

Bless this trail. I, personally, bless this place.

Bless everything here.

Bless the flowering trees.

Bless this house. May it keep its inhabitants safe and comfortable.

Bless this amazing purple plum tree. Bless these willows. Bless the creek. Bless the petals.

Bless the sun. Bless the sky, the clouds. Bless the creek, bless these new green leaves, bless last year’s dead leaves, the petals on the surface of the creek.

Bless these fluffy white flowering shrubs. Bless the shrubbery. Bless the shrubbers.

Bless last year’s dead grass; bless this year’s grass, just starting to come up.

Bless the path.

The path that takes us from the base to the result, and delights us along the way.

Bless my feet that carry me on the path, my legs that support me, the ground that supports me. Bless gravity!

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Bless these birds. Bless the cottonwoods that are just starting to get leaves. Bless the contrail.

Bless these plums. Bless these three plum trees, each individually.

Bless these dandelions.

Bless this fruit orchard. Bless the fruit that will come from the fruit orchard. Bless those who planted the fruit orchard. Bless those who will enjoy the fruit. Bless the carpet of petals on the ground. Bless the forsythias.

Bless the dog poop bag. No, it’s gloves! Bless whoever thoughtfully put the gloves in a place where someone might find them again.

Bless those who clean up after their dogs, bless their dogs, bless the love they have for their dogs.

Bless the warmth of the day. Bless the wind, the breeze, caressing my skin.

Woo! Bless the bunny. Hello, bunny! Bless you, bunny! Two bunnies! Bless you both.

Bless this manhole cover, that is undoubtedly doing something important.

Bless… Danielle Amanda Quillman Heilmann, who died in her twenties, with a ginkgo leaf. Bless her memory. Bless those who remember her. Bless them for providing this bench.

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Bless the bridge. Bless the bridge makers. Bless the Continental Custom Bridge Company. Bless the solidity of the iron. Bless everything made of iron everywhere. Bless the sound it makes.

I bless the neighborhood. I bless this house. I bless the people who live in this house. I bless their future. May they always know happiness.

Bless this place. Bless all phenomena here. Bless all beings here. Bless all beings everywhere now and forever.

Bodhi. Svaha. So mote it be.

​

Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by; that I love most.

It’s extraordinarily compelling and exciting and beautiful. It’s in some sense the basis of pretty nearly everything that I write.

It has several serious problems, though.

One is that you can’t sell it. And this problem is nearly fatal.

Every religion has to have some economic basis. This is something we resist in the West; going back to Martin Luther, whose slogan was “Every man his own priest.” His idea was that everybody (every man at least) should be able to read the Bible in his own language, and understand it. Then he should form his own direct relationship with God, without a priest intermediating. This is a very attractive idea! It eliminates the class of religious professionals, who had become corrupt and parasitic in Europe at that time.

The problem is, this doesn’t actually work. Most people are not capable of being their own priests. Not any more than most people are capable of being their own plumber. DIY religion sounds great, but hardly anyone can make it work. You need professionals to do the job. So, in many Protestant denominations, there’s a “pastor” role which is officially definitely not a priest, but performs most of the same functions in practice.

Buddhism is also a religion that needs religious professionals. In Asia, there were professional Buddhist clergy. And, in Asian cultures, there were various economic arrangements that made it feasible to support a class of religious professionals. Those depended on cultural patterns that we don’t have in the West. The main one, monasticism, mostly doesn’t work in the West, despite attempts.

This is a big problem for Buddhism in the West. On the one hand, we want, and actually need, full time professional teachers. But we don’t think we ought to pay for them. And it’s not clear what the payment model should be. So we’ve mostly followed the pastor model, from Protestantism. That has worked pretty okay, although not ideally, in many cases. It doesn’t work for dzogchen.

But the Asian models didn’t work for dzogchen, either! The problem is, dzogchen has nothing to sell. At least, not in its original version, which is the one that I care about. That’s sometimes called “pristine” dzogchen. Later, dzogchen got modified, repeatedly over centuries, to overcome this problem, along with several other genuine problems with it. So Tibetans added things that you could sell, but those actually messed it up, I think.

You can sell secrets, but dzogchen isn’t secret

One thing you can sell is secrets. So Scientology, if you keep going with it, at each level, you pay much more, and you get told the next chunk of the secrets. But all of the secrets of Scientology eventually came out, and you can find them on the internet for free.

In Tibet, they tried this model, and supposedly dzogchen was extremely secret. That pretense was retained until dzogchen came to the West, and then the store got given away. So now you can find the whole thing on the internet.

The original version of dzogchen simply told you what enlightenment is and what it’s like. And that’s extremely simple. It’s two or three sentences, maybe. And it’s not easy to sell two or three sentences!

And also, they’re no use, because they don’t make any sense. What is enlightenment? What’s it like? If you understand the brief description, you say, “yeah; yeah, that’s what it’s like.” And if you don’t understand it, there’s no further explanation possible. You can ask questions, and the answers may sound interesting, but usually they don’t help. I have a post about this, called “A non-statement ain’t-framework.” It explains why you can’t explain dzogchen.

What actually happens is: if you meditate in certain ways, quite a lot, eventually you start to see it. And then, at that point, the two sentence explanation can suddenly make sense.

So you could try to sell this secret, but it’s useless, and people would feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth. And anyway, it’s on the internet!

In Tibet, secrecy mostly didn’t solve the economic problem either. So the way they addressed it was to add more things to dzogchen which you can sell. Two of them are methods and entertainment.

You can sell methods, but dzogchen has no methods

You can sell a method for getting to enlightenment. In Tibet, tantra is considered the main method for getting to enlightenment. So you can sell tantra. Tantra has many complicated methods, and it takes a lot of in-person instruction to learn those methods, and you can charge for the expertise and labor of teaching them. So that works for tantra.

(I should say that in Buddhism, as in Christianity, it’s mostly considered gauche to put a straightforward price tag on religious services. So instead there are implicit norms and deniable negotiations. I can see good reasons for this, but on the whole I find transparent arrangements more copacetic.)

Anyway, this doesn’t work for dzogchen, because it doesn’t have any instructions. Because it’s not a path. It’s not a method. There is no method. It’s just a description, of enlightenment. Once you’re enlightened, you don’t need a method. “Dzogchen,” in Tibetan, means “full completion.” It’s what you get when you’ve completed tantra. You don’t need any instructions at that point. It’s like: there’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris.

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So, to make dzogchen saleable, a whole lot of methods got added to it, which (in my view) violate the spirit of the thing, and are actually a step backward. The methods are kind of dzogchen-flavored, but they’re essentially tantric methods.1 And tantric methods are great. I love tantra! But it’s not dzogchen. And it’s missing the point.

Student: How do I get enlightened?

Teacher: You already are.2

Student: No I’m not.

Teacher: . . .

Student: Everybody is doing these way-out esoteric mystic things and getting enlightened. Tell me how to do that!

Teacher: [sighs] OK, first you need to stand on your head…

You can sell entertainment, but dzogchen isn’t entertaining

Another thing you can sell is entertainment. Most people in Medieval Tibet didn’t have internet access, so there wasn’t enough entertainment to go around, and that created demand for something better than watching yaks chew their cud. So rituals, which had been genuinely religious, were recycled as entertainment. Those became the main form of public spectacle in Tibet. And lots of extra foofaraw was added to these religious rituals, to make them more entertaining. Primarily, this was done with tantra; but once you’ve started adding methods to dzogchen, you can do the same thing, so you can have big public dzogchen rituals.

That is actually a contradiction in terms, again in my view. If pristine dzogchen could be said to have any rituals at all, they take about two seconds, and are improvised one-on-one on the spot. But that’s not something you can charge for.

And because dzogchen had the reputation of being the fanciest kind of Buddhism, the idea was it must have super-duper rituals. So a dzogchen ritual was something very special that you would pay a lot of money to go and see, and it would be highly entertaining; or you’d hope it would be. That subsidized the actual work of dzogchen professionals, so maybe it was a good thing. But it’s dishonest.

Dzogchen is still available, despite its unsellability

So, where does this leave us, here and now?

It leaves us with the main forms of “dzogchen,” the ones widely taught and practiced, being diluted, adulterated with tantra. Maybe you could even say corrupted. And that’s fine, if you understand that’s what you are getting. They are probably great for what they are! I don’t know, I haven’t tried them seriously. Tantra is great, and tantra that’s pretending to be dzogchen is probably extra good! It’s just, there’s a conceptual confusion here, and it’s a motivated confusion, and this results in a lot of incoherent explanations, and duplicity, maybe even a kind of sleaziness in the relationship between teachers and students.

I said that the unsellability of dzogchen was nearly fatal. But fortunately, the original, pristine thing is still available. In fact, it’s much more available than it ever was in Tibet, or at least than it had been in hundreds of years, because there’s no longer any attempt at secrecy. But if you want it, you need to know what you are looking for.

And you aren’t going to get it on its own—unless for some reason you can understand the two-sentence explanation when you find it on the internet. No one can sell it to you, so it only comes as part of a package deal.

You can get full-strength, unadulterated dzogchen from someone who mostly teaches tantra, yet maintains a clear distinction between the two. You can get it from someone very holy, with a gold-embroidered hat, who drops the two sentences in the middle of a days-long lecture series on archaic Tibetan metaphysics. You can get pristine dzogchen from a professor in a Western university classroom, who gives you the straight dope in an off-hand way while lecturing on Buddhist history. You can get it from an informal meditation teacher. That’s probably the best bet!

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You might get it from a crazy street person in a Starbucks, who trades it for your building her a web site.

Meditation is sometimes considered a safer alternative to taking psychoactive drugs, with roughly similar effects. The jhanas are altered states of consciousness, for example. Buddhist tantra also produces diverse altered states, using various methods.

In Western Buddhism, the usual idea is that enlightenment itself is a special kind of experience. It’s an altered state of consciousness, also in the way that psychedelic drugs can produce altered states.

This is roughly consistent with some traditional Buddhist ideas about enlightenment, although not others. For example, in some tantric systems, the endpoint of the path, enlightenment itself, is said to be the simultaneous union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Those are often explained more-or-less as altered states of consciousness. Then tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, including ultimately that union. (There are other explanations of tantra that are more metaphysical; less psychological.)

I don’t want to denigrate altered states, in any way. I think they can be fascinating, enjoyable, meaningful, and useful. However, the branch of Buddhism I care most about, dzogchen, denies that enlightenment is an altered state.

In fact: Exactly the opposite!

Enlightenment is the unaltered state.

The dzogchen word for enlightenment is “rigpa,” which is defined as the natural state. You might say it is the state in which you are not altering your mind.

Nearly all the time, we are in an altered state, which is called samsara. Samsara is the state in which you are constantly poking at your mind in order to get it to behave better—instead of leaving it as it is, in its natural condition.

So you might suppose that rigpa is the special state in which you don’t do that. But this is actually wrong. Samsara is also nirvana. It too is enlightenment. It is also rigpa.

The thing is, rigpa is always present. It’s not something you produce. Rigpa is not something you produce, because it’s always already there. It’s something you notice. Or don’t notice.

Dzogchen is not like tantra. It has no methods for getting to enlightenment. From dzogchen’s point of view, tantra’s attempts to produce enlightenment are impossible and absurd. It’s like trying to get to Paris from Notre-Dame Cathedral. You’re already there! You are right at the center of it! Just look, and you’ll see Paris all around you! Everything you can see is more Paris!

Rigpa’s present, regardless of what state you are in. Samsara is nirvana, because rigpa is there, even when you’re samsara-ing. You, personally—you—are fully enlightened, right now.

Maybe it doesn’t seem like that?

An alternative term, that’s considered more or less equivalent in Tibetan Buddhism, is tamalgyi shepa, which literally means “ordinary mind.” So, rigpa is ordinary mind, which is the ultimate goal of dzogchen, which claims to be the ultimate form of Buddhist practice.

In my experience, tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment. It’s certainly the exact opposite of meditation! A typical basic meditation instruction is: whenever you notice that you are thinking, let go of it, and return to open awareness. My recipe for efficient tax preparation is: whenever I notice I am aware, squash that, and return to Schedule 8849 line 2 column h, trying to force it, by narrowing my thinking, to equal Form 1099-B Box A.

This is miserable. It’s probably a better example of samsara than the dramatic torture scenarios you can read about in scripture. At least there’s energy in those!

But rigpa is there, just the same. Or so I am told! I don’t recommend my anti-meditation recipe as a religious practice. It’s better if you can meditate while doing your taxes. I can’t!

When you stop samara-ing, it’s easier to notice rigpa. The samsara is a bit of a smokescreen.

There’s particular circumstances in which it’s difficult to samsarize. They are ones in which rigpa might become obvious. Sacred texts have a standard list, which includes things like sneezing, orgasm, dreaming, dying, fainting, stubbing your toe with a sudden pain.

In each of these experiences, it is more difficult to do samsara, so you may have a recognition of rigpa. It could become obvious. It’s difficult to think. Thinking is totally compatible with rigpa, but it tends to obscure it. Each of these experiences might also be considered an altered state of consciousness. That’s not the rigpa, but altered states make it easier to notice. Remember, though, that rigpa is ordinary mind; it’s the same when you are coming and when you are doing your taxes.

Unfortunately, each of the things on the standard list has some difficulty that make it not particularly easy to find rigpa there. Easier than when doing taxes, but not easy. Sneezing, for example, is extraordinary. There’s a moment when you know you are going to sneeze, and there’s a unique, overwhelming itchy tickling feeling that pervades your physical body, subtle energy channels, and mind, and you can’t think, and rigpa is right there—and the whole thing lasts only a fraction of a second, and then you immediately lose it.

Similarly, fainting, orgasm, and sudden sharp pains may last only a little longer. Tantra has esoteric techniques for prolonging these. That’s one of the points of sexual tantra. If you prolong and intensify orgasm, there’s more likelihood that you will notice, in the middle of it, “Ah! there’s rigpa here.” This may be difficult to arrange, though. Pain might be easier, but it’s difficult to have intense enough pain for long enough without injuring yourself. There are esoteric methods for that too, but generally people would rather have an hour-long orgasm than an hour-long torture session.

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The problem with dreaming and dying is that they make you stupid. You get caught up in some compelling, illusory drama which distracts you from your intention to recognize rigpa. Again, there are esoteric techniques, but they are difficult.

Dying is supposed to be the best and most important opportunity for recognizing rigpa. That’s what the so-called “Tibetan Book of the Dead” is about. Unfortunately, though, you don’t die very often, so you don’t get a lot of practice.

The exception is if you’re in hell. According to Buddhist metaphysics, after you die, which realm you get reborn in depends on your emotional state. If you are angry, you get reborn in hell. Some of the Buddhist hells—there are several Buddhist hells—some of them are so lethal that you die almost immediately after rebirth. So you are born in hell, and get sliced to bits by whirling knife blades, or crispy-fried in boiling oil, and you die two seconds later. If that makes you mad, you get sent straight back.

So being in hell is actually a great opportunity for dzogchen practice, because you’re dying every few seconds. Countless opportunities to recognize rigpa! People in hell don’t notice how lucky they are, because hell is unpleasant. It’s the same problem as with prolonged pain. It makes you stupid, and you forget to practice. Everybody in hell is stupid.

Don’t go to hell. It’s a stupid place.

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So tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, I guess you could say. The point is not the altered states for their own sake. Well, maybe. As I said, tantric theory says enlightenment is the union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Why is that enlightenment? I mean, it’s nice. You don’t suffer, I guess. The point of enlightenment as originally conceived was to stop suffering. And if you’re experiencing clarity, bliss, and emptiness, then you’re not suffering, which is nice for you. Rather like orgasm. It’s kind of difficult to do samsara in these states.

From point of view of dzogchen, the value of the state is that it makes it exceptionally easy to recognize rigpa. I think some people would say it is rigpa, but I’m not necessarily convinced. Rigpa is ordinary mind, remember!

It’s easiest to find rigpa when your mind is clear and sharp, but you are not distracted by thoughts or bad feelings. That’s not necessary; rigpa is there when you are obsessing about the awful thing someone said about you at work, or you’re short on sleep and your brain feels full of glue. But it helps.

Meditation helps notice rigpa

So there are particular types of meditation that tend to produce that clear, undistracted state of mind. It’s pretty ordinary. You probably wouldn’t call it an “altered state of consciousness”; it’s not like taking drugs.

However, “clear and undistracted by bad feelings or thoughts” is pretty much the same as “clarity, bliss, and emptiness!” Except you haven’t turned the volume up to eleven. That makes it safer and easier than esoteric tantric methods. Or drugs. It might be slower; tantra is fast but dangerous. Supposedly fast, and supposedly dangerous! I think both are often exaggerated.

“Meditation” is not all one thing. Most types of meditation aren’t about this. They don’t aim for it, and probably won’t help.

You will probably need many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of practice of the type that does—and it’s still easy to miss the point. It helps to have someone checking your progress, and redirecting you if you get a bit off course.

You need to know what you are trying to notice, and until you’ve seen that a few times, you don’t notice it, even though it’s right there all the time. Even right now! As you are listening to this! It’s rigpa!

Pure obviousness

Rigpa has been called “pure obviousness.”

[Holds up an eggplant] This is rigpa!

[Rings a bell] This is rigpa!

AI obsoleted software engineering three months ago. Routine rational programming no longer requires humans.

You can now tell “coding agents” what to build, and give them some general guidance about how, and they’ll do the whole thing by themselves. Sometimes they screw up, but often they write a complex app from scratch and get it right.

Or! That’s what many people with relevant expertise say. Others say this as the usual AI hype.1 My guess is that the claim is somewhat exaggerated, but moderately true now,2 and likely mostly-true fairly soon.

Late last year, some serious engineers stopped writing code entirely. Instead, they just tell AI systems what needs to get written. Some say they no longer read that code, even. The agents are reliable enough there’s no need to check their work.

Software engineering has been the most economically valuable rational work for decades. The coding part of that, at least, may be about over.

I said that coding agents need you to tell them what to build (“requirements analysis”), and the big picture of how (“architecting”). Those are the parts of the process that still require human judgement. They are meta-rational parts of software development!

The meta-rational aspects of software development are its most economically valuable—although that’s often not understood. Giant software development projects, with hundreds of millions of dollars invested, often fail due to missing or incompetent meta-rationality.

and explain why “AI-first” software development especially requires meta-rationality:

We’ve come to see the pursuit of value creation with AI as the cultivation of capacity for nebulosity. Traditional software development afforded a sense of certainty in the “how”, even if the “why/what” were deeply uncertain. AI-first work is fundamentally different. It forces teams to confront the nebulosity of the “why” and “what” in a comparatively confronting way. This creates a specific kind of pressure. Individuals have to accept that while certainty is impossible, you can develop the skills and discernment to confidently navigate product development faster. Not because you eventually achieve certainty. But because you get better at navigating without it.3

I’ll next summarize briefly a series of posts I’ve written about meta-rationality in software development. (They start here.)

What is needed? Software purposes

• A system that does something different from what was needed is useless, no matter how well it works technically. “What is needed?” is a question of purpose.

Rationality (problem solving) deliberately excludes consideration of purposes. It just takes the problem statement as a given, without considering whether it is sensible in context. Rational requirements analysis methods usually miss the mark:

It’s common for software projects to deliver something that more-or-less matches what the customers said they wanted, but is nothing like what they imagined. Expensive and useless, like an ornate Victorian treehouse.4

Purposes are central for meta-rationality:

The essence of meta-rationality is actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.5

How should we go about this? Software architecture

• Software projects also often fail because overall design for the system—its architecture—was a bad fit for the job.

Architectural choices depend on unboundedly complex, nebulous aspects of the context. That includes participants such as customers, users, managers of users, and regulators. It includes hardware and software paraphernalia, such as connected devices, software libraries, and external databases.

Rationality critically depends on excluding nebulosity, and excluding considerations of context. That leads to making bad architectural choices early in a software project. Those can commit the team essentially permanently; changing architecture is enormously expensive, not usually attempted, and rarely successful.

Bad architecture is common because skilled architecting requires meta-rational skills that aren’t taught and that most people don’t realize exist. There is no formal qualification for the job, but also many of those who do it aren’t functionally qualified either.6

The value of software meta-rationality is about to be revalued

Upward. Drastically. I suspect!

Some organizations recognize the value of meta-rationality, and support and reward it. Most do not.

In current software development organizations, meta-rationality is typically invisible, denigrated, neglected, or overcontrolled.

Clueful technical leaders recognize the cost of this neglect. If no one else does the job, they may reluctantly take responsibility, for the sake of the overall success of their team; even knowing their careers may suffer. You can read rueful discussions of this sacrifice, and ways to minimize its cost, on their blogs.7

If AI can do all the rational work, everything that’s left for humans must be meta-rational, by definition. Then meta-rational developers will be the whole software job market.

Meta-rational competence is rare.

If one meta-rational developer, plus a swarm of coding agents, can replace an entire team, they will be extraordinarily valuable. And (because they are rare) they can probably capture a significant chunk of that value.

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Boris Cherny leads the development of Claude Code, currently the most powerful autonomous code-writing system. In a recent podcast about how those will transform the job market, he said:

Every founder and hiring manager I’ve been speaking with these days is feeling the same pressure. Hire the best people as fast as possible, but recruiting is time-consuming, alignment is hard, and competition for great talent keeps getting tighter.8

A point I’ve made repeatedly is that the standard departmental siloing of software-related disciplines is deeply dysfunctional.9 Meta-rationality characteristically ignores field boundaries.

I suspect software development will increasingly require single individuals to combine:

• Product management: figuring out what people need software to do; specifying those purposes in technical-enough terms that artificial coding agents can implement a solution; checking with the people who use it that it does do what they need; revising specifications if it doesn’t.

• System architecting: choosing a general strategy for implementation, and the particular framework technologies within which it will operate.

• Project management: dividing up the programming work into chunks small enough that fleets of coding agents can complete them reliably; revising the task decomposition when they fail.

Boris Cherny says:

I don’t have to do the tedious work anymore of coding. The fun part is figuring out what to build. It’s talking to users. It’s thinking about these big systems. It’s thinking about the future. It’s collaborating with other people on the team, and that’s what I get to do more of now.

His advice to software professionals:

Try to be a generalist more than you have in the past. In school, a lot of people that study CS, they learn to code, and they don’t really learn much else. But some of the most effective engineers that I work with every day, and some of the most effective product managers and so on, they cross over disciplines.

Some of the strongest engineers are hybrid, product engineers with really great design sense. Or an engineer that has a really good sense of the business, and can use that to figure out what to do next, or an engineer that also loves talking to users and can just really channel what users want to figure out what’s next.

So, I think a lot of the people that will be rewarded the most over the next few years they won’t just be AI native, and they don’t just know how to use these tools really well, but also they’re curious and they’re generalists, and they cross over multiple disciplines and can think about the broader problem they’re solving rather than just the engineering part of it.

I describe this as fluid competence in “Sorcery”:

Fluid competence is general competence, meaning potentially competent enough in any domain to provide “what the situation needs.” It doesn’t mean you are expert at everything; no one can be. It’s based on a realistic assessment of what you can do now, and the minimum you need to learn to act outside your areas of expertise, well enough to address the current situation.

Fluid competence is a direct consequence of prioritizing meta-rational norms over rational, systematic ones.

I’ve sketched the way to develop this general competence in “How to be omniscent.”

Restarting the meta-rationality project? Talking my book

Two years ago, I started publishing draft sections of the Part of my book Meta-rationality that is actually about meta-rationality. (The first three Parts provide background understanding.)

One year ago, I abandoned it, part way in. I realized that it was a much larger project than I had expected. Plus, the explanatory structure was wrong, and there was less interest than I had expected.

Now I’m thinking it may be time to start again! If meta-rationality becomes the critical ingredient for success in the world of 2026, in software and possibly other fields, explaining it is important.

In investment finance, “talking your book” means hyping a future possibility which would benefit you financially if other people believed it was going to happen. Because they’d make it happen by acting on their belief.

Here I’m talking my book—specifically, my meta-rationality book! I want meta-rationality to be better understood and applied more widely. And I do think it’s reasonably likely that software meta-rationality will soon be much more highly valued, and better compensated, than it has been. And if you believe that, you may be motivated in that direction.

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One problem with what I’ve published so far is that it starts with very abstract, dry generalities, and works gradually toward specifics. I had intended to use software development as just one source of concrete examples.

Maybe the structure should be inverted! It could start with lots of examples from software development, and work up the abstraction hierarchy to general lessons that could be applied across many fields. That would limit its appeal to other readers, but make it more accessible for people in tech.

I do have unpublished year-old drafts of additional explanations of software applications. But, I have no experience with cutting-edge coding agents. I can’t explain how to use those. (Yet, anyway.) I can explain what you need to do before and around using them: the aspects of software development that are not about coding. Those probably won’t change soon.

What do you think? Is this something you’d be excited to read?

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But can’t AI do the meta-rational part too?

If AI systems will be able do all the meta-rational work as well, then explaining it to humans now might be pointless. So: will they?

Maybe? Probably? Eventually? I don’t know! How could anyone know?

(I have a PhD in AI, and I mostly find it baffling. What I find most baffling is that everyone from hair stylists to AI lab CEOs are extremely confident in their opinions about the future of AI. These opinions, including those of supposed experts as far as I can tell, are based solely on feels. There’s nearly no meaningful evidence or reasoning involved.)

I’d say first that meta-rationality is not some metaphysically special capacity that only humans can have. (Arguments that “AI can never do X” usually rely on this delusion.) It’s just acting on what situations need, while taking context, purposes, and rationality into non-rational consideration. I am confident there’s no in-principle reason computers can’t do that.

Artificial meta-rationality requires access to context and purposes in a form the system can process. Currently, that mainly means text. Much of a situation’s context and purposes can be described in text. Ryan Lopopolo of OpenAI highlights the necessity of doing so:

Our human engineers’ goal was making it possible for an agent to reason about the full business domain directly from the repository itself. Knowledge that lives in Google Docs, chat threads, or people’s heads are not accessible to the system. We learned that we needed to push more and more context into the repo over time. That Slack discussion that aligned the team on an architectural pattern? If it isn’t discoverable to the agent, it’s illegible in the same way it would be unknown to a new hire joining three months later.

Meta-rational judgement is non-rational, but not irrational. It’s often described as “taste” or “intuition” (although those terms can be misleading). A couple weeks ago, wrote in “Something Big Is Happening”:

The most recent AI models make decisions that feel like judgment. They show something that looked like taste: an intuitive sense of what the right call was, not just the technically correct one.

Lopopolo writes:

Human taste is fed back into the system continuously. Review comments, refactoring pull requests, and user-facing bugs are captured as documentation updates or encoded directly into tooling.

Situated, embodied, interactive human experience underlies much of context and purposes and judgement. Much of that probably can’t be captured in text. Not practically, anyway. It may be possible to make it available in other ways. I don’t think this is an in-principle limitation. I do suspect that it will put practical limits on artificial meta-rationality for quite some time.

Meta-rational competence is partly portable

For many reasons, software development is a domain uniquely suitable for automation. One is that it’s mostly rational. Extreme proponents of AI, and extreme opponents, both predict that all other rational domains will also soon get automated. Some say that will eliminate most office jobs as soon as the end of this year (2026). I’m skeptical. For many reasons, I think other domains are less amenable than software development.

I also think the meta-rational aspects of most domains are more nebulous than those of software development. Even if rational, routine work in law or medicine gets automated soon, meta-rational work there will need humans for much longer.

Among all rational work domains, software may also be the one in which meta-rationality is most important, and so has been best understood. Working in the field may give you a significant head start elsewhere.

Meta-rational skills are rare and valuable everywhere. Rarer than in software development, in fact! Fortunately, they are partly transferable across domains, because fluid competence is general competence. Plus, meta-rational “sorcery” gives you the ability to learn the necessary bits of new fields quickly.

Both your skill at managing AI agents, and your meta-rationality skills, may give you a startlingly sharp edge in a possible upcoming nearly-no-jobs future. When and if humans are no longer needed in software development, you may still do well in some unrelated field.

I realized only after assembling my list of seven true romance stories that every one of them is about a witch. Weird! What does this mean? About me? About transformational romance?

According to scripture, the religious system tantra was given to Buddhists by dakinis. “Dakini” originally meant “black magic witch” in Sanskrit, and sometimes still does. Dakinis may be supernatural or human. They can be terrifying or alluring; malignant or helpful. They are described as executioners and cannibals, and also as the source of all delight and wisdom.1

The erotic union of form and emptiness

“Tantric Buddhism” is roughly synonymous with “Vajrayana.” Fundamentally, that is about the play of form and emptiness. “Form” means the same as in English; “emptiness” doesn’t. I translate it as “nebulosity.”

Tantra is described as “the path of transformation.” That includes changes of form, as preliminary methods. The aim, though, is a change of relationship with form. You recognize that all forms are also “empty”: insubstantial, impermanent, interwoven, intermittent, indefinite.2

That particularly includes the form of you. Some Buddhisms claim that your self is non-existent. Vajrayana denies that. Rather, selves are empty; nebulous. The path dis-identifies you from the form of your self, so you recognize it as insubstantial, impermanent, interwoven, intermittent, indefinite. And yet there is still form. You are unique. You preserve formness, but relativize it as nebulous things you do, not a solid entity you are.

The stage 4 to 5 transition process closely resembles the path of tantra, at this level of abstraction.3 Do you remember the discussion of “surrendering identification with the form” from the previous post?

Sexual and gender symbolism pervade Vajrayana. Form is masculine; emptiness is feminine. The union of form and emptiness, in sexual play, is enlightenment. This may be literal (in “tantric sex”), or (more often) metaphorical. The simultaneous perception of emptiness and form is transcendent timeless bliss.

Robert Kegan unknowingly echoed tantric symbolism in discussing relational stage 5:4

The choices for adulthood need not be between a form of intimacy at the expense of identity [stage 3], or an identity at the expense of intimacy [stage 4]. Although the classic Freudian identification of intimacy with mutuality of orgasm has a depressingly humorless ring to it, there is something at least symbolically powerful about the image of at once satisfying oneself (not subordinating one’s pleasure to the other’s) while at the same time transcending, in resplendent play, the isolation of our separateness, our polarity, our time-embeddedness.

Dakinis’ ferocious magical power makes them untamable by men. They are unavailable for formal relationship.

The counterpart to “dakini” is vira, meaning “noble warrior.”5 The barbarian warrior prince’s all-conquering prowess makes him untamable by women. He is unavailable for conventional relationship.

Vajrayana advice on romance describes the dakini, embodying emptiness, as a threat to form. The vira, embodying form, is a challenge to emptiness.6

• Like Circe, the dakini’s magical power trans-forms anyone who attempts to relate to her. Her fluid meta-rational understanding executes the death sentence on rigid rationalist formalism. She cannibalizes the corpse of a lover’s systematic self-identification. She gives renewed birth to him as a cheerful, kind, useful monster.

• The vira does not respect sloppiness, emotional incontinence, vacillation, lack of principle, evasiveness, manipulation, or conformity when used to avoid conflict. He will not take a girl-child seriously. If you want to ride with the prince, you must grow up and take your own form as a powerful, distinct individual. Stand your ground in battle, and master the forms of equestrianism and sword-play.

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Vajra romance, stage theory, and the split in feminism

Vajrayana bridges the inspiration of the mythical realm and the practicality of the actual world. It unites them with practices of view: ways of seeing the everyday as magical.

An extraordinary unavailable person may seem mythic, almost supernatural:

The practice of vajra romance is to view your human partner as a supernatural dakini or vira. You actively seek her threat to your rigid formal identity; or his challenge to your chaotic, unformed lack of a coherent self.

This fits neatly with stage theory. If you are at stage 3, personal growth through relationship requires growing a solid, enduring, separate, consistent, defined self.7 If you are at stage 4, personal growth through relationship means allowing continuous transformation through repeated death of what you thought you were.

The vajra romance practice does not involve deliberately threatening or challenging your lover. If you are at stage 4, simply being as you are is a challenge to anyone at stage 3. If you are at stage 5, simply being as you are is a threat to anyone at stage 4. (Do you see why?)

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An obvious objection is that this offers a method for heterosexual women to transition to stage 4, and for heterosexual men to transition to stage 5, but not vice versa. This is awkward!

However, it rhymes with a 1970s empirical discovery in adult development research. Psychometric testing found many more men than women in stage 4. The misunderstanding that “a higher stage number means you are a better person” suggests an invidious comparison of the moral worth of women and men. This was, naturally, offensive to feminists.

The resulting political conflict ended adult developmental stage theory as a scientific field. It also irreparably split the women’s movement. Should it aim for formal equality of the sexes, or demand accomodations sensitive to profound differences between them? (I explain this in “Liota,” as a keystone in the formal structure of our rational romance.) We’re all still suffering consequences of that rupture.

The impasse can be resolved by recognizing that men and women can both manifest all human qualities, and that most men more often manifest those typically considered masculine, and most women more often manifest those typically considered feminine.

The qualities of stage 4 include ones typically considered masculine. The transition from 3 to 4 is typically easier for men than women. Many women do make that transition, nevertheless!

It may be easier for many women to make the initial relational transition in the domain of intimate relationships. The practice of viewing one’s partner as a vira may help. Admire his consistency, fortitude, and mastery of methods. Seeing the benefits those bring may inspire a woman to overcome her reluctance to “act like a guy.”

It may be easier for many men to make the relational 3-to-4 transition in the domain of work first. Relating with a powerful man often enables that transition too: your respected superior and leader in a legitimate hierarchy of authority. Archetypally: your liege lord, the noble vira.

Nevertheless, it is possible for men to make the relational stage transition in the domain of romance. “Liota” is subtitled “the challenge of a lesbian feminist sadomasochist witch” because she modeled stage 4 relating for me. I had to grow up and get strong to meet her there. It’s probably not coincidental that Liota was quite butch. She might now be called “non-binary,” although that concept hadn’t been invented yet. A witch and a warrior.

Tantric symbolism is exclusively heterosexual. Vajra romance is possible for same-sex couples nonetheless, because both men and women can manifest both masculine and feminine characteristics. Both partners can view the other as a witch, or as a warrior, or as both at different times, according to circumstances.

This is also possible for heterosexual people! It may be less comfortable; but discomfort is intrinsically necessary to the functioning of both Vajrayana and stage transitions.

I suspect the 4-to-5 transition is typically more difficult for men than for women. That may make relating with an unavailable dakini—a fascinating, mysterious woman you can’t get—a particularly valuable catalyst for men. Expect beheading. “Today is a good day to die.” Admire her mercurial responsiveness, access to archetypes, and primordial wisdom. This may inspire a man to overcome his reluctance to set aside justification, “get in touch with his deeper self,” and act spontaneously.

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This series is titled “Unavailable dakini catalyst” because each story is from the point of view of a man in relationship with a woman. The dynamic is more likely that way around.8

However, a romance with a stage 5 man might also enable a woman’s transition from stage 4. Archetypally, he may be a sorcerer, rather than a prince. His accomplishments are famed. Outwardly, he seems merely perky; kindly and vague, or even meek. But occasionally, his actions are outrageous. The results are dramatic, but their source is inscrutable, with no apparent causal logic.9

Your life works. Your marriage works. Your emotions behave themselves. Everything is under control. Everything is… slightly stale and unsatisfactory.

Then a cannibal witch casts a magnetic spell on you.

Or a barbarian warrior prince abducts you on horseback.

The system of your life collapses in twisted wreckage, and you fall into the storm-tossed ocean between stages four and five.

Well, that was dramatic, wasn’t it?

This is about ways romantic relationship can accelerate personal development—sometimes dramatically or traumatically.

Love and liberation through wrenching revisionings

I will tell seven true-ish1 stories about romantic relationships and how they catalyzed developmental stage transitions. They are less dramatic than a horseback abduction, but maybe not much less dramatic.

1. Elena: A life-or-death decision forced me out of relational stage 3, and into the confusion of 3.5 nihilism.

2. Liota: A lesbian feminist sadomasochist witch challenged me to grow up into a stage 4 relationship.

3. Maya: An extramarital encounter threw my colleague James into a profound depression.

4. Astarte: Ideology repeatedly wrecked a recurring romance.

5. The princess: A non-existent goddess guided me toward stage 5.

6. Rin’dzin: Two people who had given up on romance worked together toward stage 5.

7. Mauricia: Protected by unavailability, she may have catalyzed the most important knowledge in the world.

Romantic catalysis

According to adult developmental stage theory, three radically different sorts of selves, and three radically different sorts of relationships, are typical for adults. Each stage, as you achieve it, is a triumphant accomplishment. Each stage has distinct advantages over previous ones. You may remain comfortable in a stage for years, decades, or a lifetime.

Each stage also has serious limitations. For some people, those eventually become increasingly uncomfortable. As you outgrow a stage, you feel stifled and trapped in a too-small self and too-small relationships. It is time to move on. You need to let go of the self you have, to build a new one of a completely different sort. You need to let go of your theory and habits of relationship and learn completely new ones.

However, for each stage, the next way of being is literally inconceivable. Explaining stage 4 (systematic) to someone in stage 3 (communal) is usually fruitless. They simply cannot hear what you are saying. Likewise attempts to explain stage 5 (fluid) to someone in stage 4.

This makes the transition from one stage to another inherently difficult. You exit one stage, but cannot yet see where you are headed. You must traverse an ocean gulf to reach the next solid land. That generally takes a few years, during which you may frequently feel disoriented. You are no longer willing to operate in the too-limiting former mode, but not yet able to operate consistently in the next. To deliberately let go and move forward, you must somehow trust that a better destination exists.

Stage transitions can go relatively smoothly, or be wrenching, terrifying, sometimes fatal. That can depend on your personal psychological resources. It may depend even more on how much support you get from your social and cultural environment. For example, some adult institutions provide helpful guidance for the communal-to-systematic transition (3 to 4). However, you must accept their somewhat rigid framework. The military is a solid example, as are some sorts of civilian employment. Universities used to provide this support, but mostly no longer do. (My post “Ofermōd” explains that.)

Also unfortunately, there has never been good institutional support for the systematic-to-fluid transition (4 to 5). (My post “A bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapse is about this.)

As an alternative, a close relationship between two people can support development. That can be from 3 to 4, or 4 to 5. My story “The Cofounders” is a “business fiction” explanation of the 4-to-5 transition in the domain of professional relationship. In that story, it goes pretty smoothly.

A romantic relationship can also catalyze a stage transition. The first three stories in this series, “Elena,” “Liota,” and “Maya,” explain transitions from 3 to 4 in that context.

Romantic 4-to-5 transitions are the topic of stories 4–7, and of the second half of “Maya.” Those are fairly rare, whereas the 3-to-4 relational transition is quite common. I understand them less well. Some relationship experts probably understand them better than I do, but I have found no extended discussion. That means I can offer only limited and tentative advice.

Instead, I mainly describe things that can happen. I know they can happen, because I have experienced them, and have talked with other people who have experienced them. Just knowing that they can happen may be helpful. (Or at least interesting!)

Years from now, you might remember reading this post, and suddenly relational changes in your life make better sense. This could be relevant:

• When you feel ready to make the 4-to-5 transition, but can’t get unstuck from relational systematicity.

• To be prepared for the transition, when it seems to be about to happen, or if it is starting for reasons beyond your control. For example, when you have just been abducted by a barbarian warrior prince, or entranced by a black magic witch. These inconveniences may be growth experiences.

• If you have started the transition and are finding it difficult. Recognizing that you are at this point is unusual! A major benefit of stage theory is giving you a conceptual framework for understanding confusing, sometimes traumatic, psychological and relational changes.

• For understanding your experience in retrospect, if you are a fair way through the transition, or have completed it.

Protected by unavailability

This series was inspired by an enigmatic, entirely unexplained point buried deep in Table 7 in developmental psychologist Robert Kegan’s book The Evolving Self:

Medium of 4–5 transition: love affairs protected by unavailability of the partner.

What could that mean?

Protected by unavailability??

I long puzzled over this. Then I realized I had seen it happen.2 Originally, I intended to explain my understanding with a single story. Then I found more that each fit the pattern, but are quite different from each other.

And then I realized it would be more useful to write stories illustrating the 3-to-4 transition. That’s a much more common challenge than the 4-to-5 one! So I added ones about that. Although those are not about unavailable dakini catalysts.

How systematicity works, and how it fails

Systematicity abstracts the messy details of actual-world situations into a more-or-less formal structure of principles, policies, and procedures. My post “Rational romance” explains how that works in the domain of relationships.

The actual world is nebulous, and cannot be fully or accurately described or manipulated by any system. Part One of Meta-rationality explains how systematicity fails, sometimes catastrophically, when you overlook its limits.

How can systematicity work, when it does, considering that all principles, policies, and procedures are necessarily inaccurate? Part Three explains: we have to do practical and conceptual work to bridge the gap between theory and actuality. Two of its strategies are particularly useful in relational systematicity:

• Sanity-checking: We have to accept that rationality often comes to wrong conclusions. When the theory tells you to do something that seems clearly wrong, then it quite likely is, and you should do something else. Or at least think again, differently!

For example, toward the end of “Elena,” I concluded from my theory of relationship that facts rationally implied I had to put all my energy into taking care of her for the rest of my life. That was obviously wrong. I knew it was wrong, but I mistakenly prioritized rational deduction over what I could see happening. Earlier in the relationship, my sense-making was just overwhelmed by her intense feelings. Toward the end, I was trying to be systematic, but wasn’t yet up to it, and did it badly.

• Shielding: We reorganize our environment to minimize external influences that might interfere with the operation of the system.

In the first half of “Maya,” James abandons his career in order to preserve a nascent systematic self. In the second half, his inamorata describes how she ghosted men she was attracted to, to preserve the system of her marriage and family.

Systematicity subordinates actuality to principles. That is both its source of power, and its limitation—in relationship, as in technical work. A systematic relationship subordinates the other person to its system. Depending on how rigidly you adhere to principles, the human being you think you love may disappear, replaced by an abstract representation of their functional role in your model of how a relationship should work.

At stage 4, each new relationship is exciting; but then, typically, it grows stale. Your representation of the person is much less vivid than their actuality. Kegan tells the story of “Michael,” a successful businessman in his mid-thirties, who has a series of moderately serious, limited, rational relationships with women that each become unsatisfactory.3 I recognized myself as I was in my mid-thirties: a successful businessman who had a series of year-long, moderately serious but limited rational relationships with women. (I discuss this near the end of “Liota.”) Michael and I thought this was because each woman wasn’t quite right for us. Eventually, though, we started to realize that the problem was our own systematicity: our demand that the relationship conform to our personal limits.

How romantic longing can explode rationalism and free you for fluidity

“Shielding” could also be described as “relevance control.” Systematicity fails when circumstantial factors become relevant that the rational abstractions render invisible. Shielding protects the smooth operation of the system by keeping chaos out.

But sometimes a black magic witch appears and weaves a spell around you. Or a barbarian warrior prince gallops up and hoists you onto his saddle.

Metaphorically: a witch or barbarian is someone you cannot subordinate to your system.

If you start a relationship with someone available in terms of your system, you remain stuck in stage 4.

If you fall hard enough for someone unavailable, their meaningfulness is so intense it bursts your system apart.

Then the witch or barbarian is suddenly the most relevant thing in your world—and cannot be captured by your relational rationality.

Exit stage 4, into the wilderness between 4 and 5.

Catastrophic catalysis. A chaotic confusion in which you throw aside principles, violate policies, and ignore procedures.4 The self you thought you were is dying: in pain, in hope, in desperate longing for the beloved you cannot have.

And then, perhaps, creative (re)construction: of a new self and a new way of relating: stage 5, the fluid mode.

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What does unavailability protect an affair from?

It protects the affair from: you.

From you as you were: a smoothly-operating, well-shielded machine.

There are many ways someone may be “unavailable.” We’ll see some surprising ones in the upcoming stories.

In the second half of “Maya,” the professor’s pattern of ghosting men she had one-night stands with made her and James mutually unavailable—in the way they wanted in the moment. That made transformation possible, with a good outcome for all parties.

Lack of sexual consummation is often helpful, as in “Astarte,” “The princess,” and “Mauricia.” It’s not necessary, though. Someone who isn’t available in the way you want can be the catalyst. You might have a sexual affair with them, but they aren’t willing to leave their marriage, prioritizing it above you; or they just don’t take the relationship with you as seriously as you do.

That is what happens in “The puzzle of meaningness.” It’s about a transition forward out of stage 4, catalyzed by an extramarital romantic relationship ending.5 This is another story showing how stage transitions don’t have to be catastrophic. The protagonist is confused, deeply uncertain about their future, but seems in good spirits despite that.

It’s important to take ethical considerations seriously if you fall for someone else while in a monogamous relationship, whether or not a stage transition is involved. The protagonists indeed do that in “The puzzle of meaningness,” “Maya,” and “Mauricia.” This can result in your transitioning from a stage 4 understanding of ethics to a stage 5 one.6

A surrender of identification with the form

After “protected by unavailability,” the entry in Kegan’s Table 7 explaining the 4-to-5 transition continues:

At once a surrender of the identification with the form while preserving the form.

What does that mean?

Stage theory began with Jean Piaget’s four-stage theory of children’s cognitive development. He called the final stage, number 4, “formal operations.” That was full rationality, which he considered equivalent to formal mathematical logic.

In the 1970s, researchers in Piaget’s lineage discovered that some people go beyond formal rationality, and develop further cognitive capacities. They called this fifth stage “post-formal.”7 Cognitive stage 5 development requires letting go of rationalism, the belief that rationality is the ultimate mode of cognition.

That implies letting go of your congratulatory self-definition as someone who has mastered systematic, formal reasoning. This may precipitate a stage 4.5 post-rationalist crisis: since rationality is unreliable and inadequate, do I actually know anything at all? What am I, what can I be, if not a system of rational methods?8

This can eventually resolve as meta-rationality, stage 5 cognition, whose viewpoint is from above all systems. It engages with territories before, beneath, and around them. It sees through and past them, as transparent but sometimes-useful illusions. Meta-rationality requires a new type of self. You “become the space” and “come unstuck in time.”9 This does not mean rejecting rationality. Rather, it results in its more accurate application.

In the relational domain, stage 5 entails surrendering ideological commitment: not only to your particular theory of relationship, but to theorizing altogether. You surrender identification with any form of relationship. That does not mean rejecting your understanding of romantic rationality. You preserve the form: you remain cognizant of relationship ideologies, which often provide valuable understanding and skillful methods. However, your relationship is no longer limited by any form. Instead, you relate as spacious passion.

How the romance may go

• You are not currently in a relationship. Your unavailable crush catalyzes your reorganization of your self into stage 5. They recognize you are now ready, and invite you join them in a stage 5 relationship. This is the best outcome!

• They remain unavailable, but you are now ready for a stage 5 relationship with someone else, new and available. Also a great outcome!

• You lack the courage to transition. You remain at stage 4. They disappear, disappointed.

• The unavailable person becomes available before you transition, and you join them in a new stage 4 relationship. This might be enjoyable; but if you were ready for transition, it may stall your development. “Rinse and repeat” is a common outcome.

• You were already in a relationship. The outside party remains unavailable. Your longing for them forces you into stage 5, and your current partner is able to transition roughly simultaneously. The relationship deepens and strengthens. “Maya” ends this way.

• You were already in a relationship, and you transition to stage 5 personally, but your partner remains at 4 (or even 3). The relationship may become more playful, spontaneous, creative, due to your newfound fiveishness. However, that’s inherently limited if your partner stubbornly systematizes it. This seems to be what’s happening in “The puzzle of meaningness” at the end.

Understanding stage 5, even if only conceptually at first, can ease the transition. Practicing the six textures of completion, characteristic of stage 5, may help. Notice how the protagonist in “The puzzle of meaningness” develops open-ended curiosity in the face of nebulosity. For the other five textures, you can:

• Feel wonderment at glimpses of a new way of being and loving.

• Maintain good-natured humor about your own ridiculousness as you bumble through wrenching changes.

• Shift the balance of your relational engagement from rigid rationality toward child-like playfulness.

• Enjoy the vertigo of not-knowing what you are becoming, and what romance can mean for you.

• Co-create a new, fluid relationship with your partner.

Warriors and witches

I’ve left unexplained part of the title of this post: dakini. That is the Sanskrit word for a witch. All seven stories are about witches…

The male counterpart of the dakini is the vira, Sanskrit for “noble warrior.”

A follow-on post, “The threat of the dakini & challenge of the vira,” concerns gender dynamics in romance, in Vajrayana Buddhism, and in stage transitions.

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He was a medicinal chemistry team leader in a biotech company. I was a chemistry software team leader there. We were both a few years past our PhDs, and had recently been promoted to the first management rung. My team supported his, so we worked together; and we also went out for lunch together every couple weeks to discuss work challenges as peers.

We both faced problems and uncertainties as new managers. We were scientists, we knew nothing about management, and the company offered us no training or resources. Sink or swim.

I now know that one main problem we faced is common when first promoted into management. We knew how to relate well with peer members of a team at work. That is not very different from relating to personal friends. A boss’s relationship with their subordinates must be quite different, although it should also be friendly. For example, the boss has to point out a subordinates’ failings; work with them to change their attitudes, ways of relating, or patterns of technical mistakes; and, ultimately, discipline them if that doesn’t work.

This is not friendly in the usual sense. It is difficult and unpleasant, and we were deeply uncomfortable with it, and we both felt we weren’t doing it well.

We also faced increasing doubts about our scientific fields. When James was an individual chemist, he took for granted what he had learned as a graduate student, and read in scientific journal articles, and heard discussed at conferences. His boss told him to figure out how to make a particular molecule, and that’s what he did, and he was good at it, which is why he was promoted to management.

But as a team leader, it was partly his job to decide what molecules the team should make. And increasingly he realized that the field’s theories about how to do that were based on dubious, dogmatic assumptions. In fact, many of its foundational ideas were clearly false, and led to bad decisions, wasting huge amounts of time and money.

In parallel, I was figuring out that the fundamental methods in computational chemistry were based on highly inaccurate empirical data and on “approximations” that were outright wrong.

Maya joined James’s team as a new graduate. He couldn’t help noticing that she was conspicuously hot. But, of course, he did his best to treat her exactly the same way as all his other team members. In his mid-thirties, James was married, with two small children, and also took the moral responsibilities of management utterly seriously.

The first story in this series was “Elena.” Writing the second, “Liota,” has been unexpectedly difficult, so I’m publishing this “third” one now. Fortunately, the order doesn’t matter. You don’t need to have read either “Elena” or “Liota” to understand “Maya.”

However, a basic knowledge of adult developmental stage theory may help you understand what happens here.

As with the other stories in the series, this one is true-ish. I have fictionalized details to protect identities. I have also simplified complex interactions to bring out relevant themes.

A couple times a year, the whole team flew out to attend a national medicinal chemistry conference. Scientific conferences are primarily social events, and most of the “work” is done at the convention center hotel’s bar. So James’s team was hanging out with other chemists after dinner, enjoying shoptalk and arguing politics and favorite science fiction novels; and as the evening wore on, one by one everyone drifted off.

Except Maya. And James hadn’t really noticed, because he was engrossed in conversation with her. He had been so carefully not over-friendly with her before that he hadn’t discovered how smart and interesting she was when discussing non-work topics. It turned out they had a shared fascination with the philosophy of science, and the early history of chemistry, and the symbolism of religious artwork, and…

…and James had been carefully not looking at the talisman hanging on a silver chain in Maya’s remarkable cleavage. But for a moment he did, and when he looked up she smiled and lifted it out to show him.

“It’s a pentacle,” she said. It was a star in a circle.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

“It means I’m a witch,” she said.

“What does that mean?” he asked.

And she started to explain—and at that particularly inopportune moment, the bartender came around and told them it was closing time.

They looked unhappily at each other in shared disappointment at the interruption. “Uh… we could continue in my room?” she said. James nodded. He’d had a few drinks and a vague sense that this was dodgy, but they were both having such fun, and as a manager it’s good to get to know your team members personally, and of course he wasn’t going to do anything inappropriate.

There was nowhere comfortable to sit in the room other than on the bed, and they continued there, exploring what witchcraft meant in Maya’s life, and the tensions between James’s spiritual experiences and his lukewarm Christian beliefs and his commitment to scientific materialism,

and gradually the discussion became increasingly horizontal

and James could feel the heat of her thigh against his leg.

And then it was three in the morning. And James had a sensation of slow-falling into a soft receiving cloud.

She leaned in, her lips closing toward his—

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—and James jerked away. “Early session tomorrow!” he said. “I totally forgot, sorry, got to go!”

He literally ran out of the room. Or, that’s how he remembers it, and told me later.

The next few weeks were the most stressful in James’s life. Not the worst—that came later—but the most frightening.

On the one hand, how could he have done that? He had utterly violated the most basic standard of professional conduct as a manager; and had cheated on his wife. Well, not exactly cheated, but it was the moral equivalent, more or less. It wasn’t just uncomfortably close to casual sexual infidelity. Worse—he realized in retrospect—he had been falling in love. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about how wonderful she was, and what life would be like if—

What on earth was he doing? He had been absolutely sure of his own uprightness. The day before, he would have been able to say, with not a sliver of doubt, that he would never do such things. It was tempting to blame the alcohol, but he hadn’t had that much to drink. And it would be unthinkably churlish to blame Maya. He was the one with power in the situation; all responsibility lay with him.

On the other hand—the practical consequences might be catastrophic. Some of their colleagues must know he’d been drinking alone with her. Had anyone seen them leave together? Had she told anyone? Who knew? What did they know? Were they gossiping behind his back?

In the lab, he did his utmost not to show any special interest in her—but was he overcompensating? He suspected he was being exaggeratedly cold and distant; was that a tell? Did she feel used, abused, or rejected?

He woke from nightmares, soaked in sweat:

He gets called into the HR head’s office, where Maya denounces him; he is disgraced and publicly fired for sexual harassment in an all-hands meeting; sex with her dissolves into horror as she shape-shifts into a giant cannibal bat.

Agonizingly, he didn’t tell his wife. He knew how hurt she would be; and what good would it do? But of course she could tell something was terribly wrong. He felt enormous guilt about hiding his wrongdoing; but although confessing might make him feel better, it would make it worse for her.

He couldn’t do his own work properly, and he couldn’t manage his team effectively while constantly worrying about what they might know and do. Much less Maya.

He wondered whether he should confess to someone—his boss? HR? Did he have a moral obligation to do that? Would that help? Or make it worse? Might some of the blame fall on Maya? That would certainly be wrong!

His sort of Christianity didn’t have priests to confess to, and for the first time he wished it did.

Four weeks later, he went to the HR head’s office to say he was resigning. The HR head was concerned, wanted to know why. Did he have a better offer? What could the company do to keep him? He was a valuable employee; how had the company let him down? What could they do to change his mind?

James couldn’t explain. He had no complaints. He had no other offer. He wasn’t looking. He didn’t have something else he’d rather be doing. The HR head called in James’s boss. James liked and respected him, but wasn’t going to explain to him either.

He went home and did nothing. For weeks, and then months, obsessively replaying that night, spiraling down in confusion, self-recrimination, exhaustion, apathy, and paralysis. He knew his wife was confused, angry, and terrified, but he’d resolved not to tell her.

She tried to get him to see a therapist, but he refused. He didn’t have a mental health problem, he thought. He had a moral problem. He had a problem with his self, with his character. He had betrayed himself, and his wife and family, and Maya, and his boss, and his team, and his company. Redemption was impossible.

“Get a new job at some other company, if something awful happened there” James’s wife implored him. But maybe he’d do the same thing again. He couldn’t be trusted as a manager. And he couldn’t go back to being an individual chemist, either. He didn’t believe in it anymore. Medicinal chemistry was intellectually bankrupt, and the whole of pharmaceutical R&D was a nightmarish morass of bad science and morally wrong incentives. There was no way forward.

James told me this story years later. There was a way forward, eventually. I’ll tell the rest of his story later in this post.

I’d like to go meta to this part now; to consider it theoretically.

First, an observation. This is a story about an adult developmental stage transition catalyzed by a romantic relationship with an unavailable person. The title of this series overall is “Unavailable Dakini Catalyst.” Maya was unavailable to James—not because she was unwilling, but because he was. That made it worse, not better! There are many ways someone may be “unavailable,” some of them surprising.

Second, when you take a professional course in stage theory, you get case studies like this as homework. You have to figure out what stage the person is at from what they said and did. Further along in the course, you might get posed the problem of figuring out which transition a person is making.

So, this you could take this as an exercise, or puzzle:

• What stage was James at before the conference?

• What stage was he at where we’ve temporarily left him, in his misery?

If you find this confusing, it’s because there’s a curve ball. This isn’t a fair question—or it’s more like a final exam problem in a stage theory course, not something you’d get at the start.

One clue is the concept of “lag,” in which someone may be “in” one stage when operating in some domains, and “in” another when operating in others. This is particularly common for people working STEM fields. You can read about that in “Leveraging lag: engineers and salespeople.”

You can read James’s own answer—and my response to it—after the break. But maybe you’d like to try thinking it through now first? And maybe post a tentative answer as a comment here?

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Dreams Reoccurring

James emailed me a few years ago. Due to a recent event, he’d been thinking about what had happened a quarter century earlier. He’d looked up some key people from his time then, including me, and found my web pages about stage theory. Reading them, and then more in The Evolving Self, had made new sense of his non-affair with Maya. He wanted to know if it would make the same sense to me.

And also… there was an event. Which had implications. So we set up a video call, and talked for several hours.

The second half of this post has a second true romance story from James’ life, plus our analysis of both of them in terms of stage theory.

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It points out the benefits of doing so, and acknowledges the costs and limits. It makes suggestions for how to find or create systematic relationship if you want that.

A systematic relationship provides autonomy with closeness. It’s an opportunity to see another, and be seen yourself, for who you each actually are.

It offers smooth operation: order, predictability, understanding. It’s free from the emotional drama, acting-out, and interpersonal crises of a pre-systematic relationship. A systematic relationship delivers. Both partners can get what they need without screaming arguments at three in the morning.

Initially, systematicity might sound like no fun. You might consider rationality the opposite of romance! It might seem to exclude spontaneity, magic, playfulness—romantic essentials. It doesn’t have to! This is a potential pitfall, however. Fully overcoming it does point beyond systematicity: into meta-systematic romance.

I wrote this to provide background understanding for “Liota,” the second in a series of true stories about personal transformation through romantic relationship. The first was “Elena,” about my failings in a pre-systematic romance. “Liota” is about my transition from pre-systematicity to systematicity in another romantic relationship. I’ll post it soon!

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“Liota” will make better sense if you read this post first. However, if you find this dry, you may want to start with the story. Then you could return here to read the background, and you will better understand what happened in our romance. Starting with that concrete example may also motivate this post and make it easier to understand.

Reasonableness, rationality, and relationship

The framework here is adult developmental stage theory. That explains how you can approach any domain of meaning pre-systematically, systematically, or meta-systematically. These are termed “stage 3,” “stage 4,” and “stage 5.”

If stage theory is new to you, it would be helpful to read first my overview of the theory; or at least its brief systematic mode section.

Stage theory originated in cognitive psychology; only later did psychologists extend it to emotions, relationships, and self-understanding. Cognitively, stages 3 and 4 correspond to two different modes of reasoning, reasonableness and rationality. (Here I’m using these words in somewhat technical senses, although they pretty much line up with the ordinary meanings.)

This page features a chart contrasting reasonableness and rationality. It would be helpful to look at that now, because the same contrasts apply directly to stage 3 vs. 4 relationships. The differences might be summarized as informal, ad hoc, and tacit reasoning, versus formal, general, and explicit reasoning.

If you look through the table, you’ll see that I was relating reasonably with Elena. That did not work.

Robert Kegan’s book The Evolving Self first extended cognitive stage theory to relationships. He summarized stage 4, the systematic stage, as involving a relationship to the relationship. And as an explicit theory of relationships, or at least of the specific relationship. And he describes stage 4 selves, and stage 4 relationships, as institutions. And as deploying an ideology of self and relationship. These are each formal, general, and explicit: rational.

Nothing can ever be fully formal, because everything is somewhat nebulous. People and relationships are particularly nebulous. However, understanding them semi-formally can be tremendously helpful. It can also be misleading, and even semi-formality can lead to unhelpful rigidity. (Meta-systematicity is the antidote to this.)

To say that a rational romance is semi-formal does not mean you wear a tuxedo or evening gown in bed. (Although that might be hot.) It means that it has some specific form: a structure. And this form is an artificially constructed object of knowledge, not a natural, unthought pattern of interaction.

Systematic selves in romantic relationship

Systematic relating requires systematic selves.

To be systematic is to principled, explicit, consistent, and stable. Systematicity prioritizes principles over feelings, commitments over convenience, and coherence over chaotic impulses.

In stage 4, you identify your self with a structure of enduring principles, projects, and policies. You are “self-authored”: you choose your own principles, projects, and policies.

You organize your self as a rational bureaucracy of defined, effective procedures. It is “rational” in that you can usually justify what you feel and think and say and do through logical reasoning.

You have sharp personal boundaries: you are very clear on what is you, and what is someone else.

Your stuff is your stuff; my stuff is my stuff.

“Stuff” here means: experiences, emotions, preferences, opinions, and so forth. We recognize whose stuff is whose, unambiguously. We reject impulses to accept and incorporate the other’s stuff as though it were our own. We also have no need to reject or argue about the other’s stuff.

You are not your stuff; I am not my stuff.

We each have such stuff; and we are not defined by it. We are bigger than any of that. We are comfortable with having different feelings and opinions, because those are incidental: not core to our personhood.

A software engineering analogy may be helpful for some readers. A well-engineered program is “modular”: composed of mostly-independent pieces. A module has particular purposes, things it does individually, and information and objects within it that are its sole property. Modules communicate and relate to each other in limited, well-specified ways. Most modules depend on others for particular sorts of assistance. Critically, modules can’t mess around with other modules’ internal affairs.

Programs that do not respect this principle generally become tangled, chaotic, and dysfunctional. They can be nearly impossible to understand, fix, or improve.

A stage 3 romantic relationship is analogous. Mental contents are shared, activities are shared, and the partners are constantly interfering in each other’s personal business. A chaotic dysfunctional emotional tangle may result. Reasonableness is usually inadequate to understand, fix, or improve the situation. Often the partners resign themselves to tolerating an unsatisfactory, unfixable mess. (As I did, for too long, with Elena.)

A stage 4 romance provides the experience of seeing and being seen as a mostly-independent, unique, whole, distinct individual, rather than as an unreliable supplier of generic good feelings. It’s a mutual appreciation of who we each actually are: in an enduring, fundamental way, rather than the superfice of what we are feeling and doing in the instant.

When you are in love with someone you recognize as intrinsically different, you frequently discover delightful (or at least unexpectedly interesting) new aspects of their personality; of how the other makes sense of life.

Systematic people prioritize each other’s principles, projects, and policies over fleeting feelings. A stage 4 romantic relationship not only tolerates the partners’ differing values, but respects and actively supports them. That is what it means to be in relationship with another, distinct person. This contrasts with a stage 3 relationship that merges two selves in a sea of shared feelings, losing track of your individual priorities. “Elena” demonstrates how that can go terribly wrong.

“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky.” —Rilke

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A systematic romance supports your whole stage 4 way of being. It’s difficult to maintain full systematicity in other domains if you are at stage 3 in your relationship. That’s especially in the domains of emotions and self-understanding: because intimate interactions are entwined with strong emotions, and because it’s difficult or impossible to fully separate your own self-understanding from your partner’s understanding of you. And, indeed, ecstatic feelings, and learning about your self through your partner’s mirroring, are among the most rewarding aspects of a romantic relationship if it works well.

Refraining from reactivity

At stage 4, you no longer are in relationships that are larger than you and define you. You have relationships, which you contain. You manage and limit them according to your rational theory of relationship. You no longer are a stream of transient emotional experiences, as in stage 3; you have emotions, which you can usually keep under control. You no longer react compulsively to what your partner just did. You speak and act in accordance with interactional norms that are derived from, or at least consistent with, general principles.

We are not subject to our stuff. We choose how to act, and interact, on the basis of principles, policies, and enduring commitments. We are not jerked around by arising experiences. We organize our emotional reactions, rather than being organized by them. We don’t impulsively “express our feelings,” or opinions, when that would be disruptive or hurtful.

We feel no inherent compulsion to act on our knowledge of the other’s stuff. We treat the other’s stuff as potentially important, as worth taking into consideration, but not necessarily as implying anything about either of us, nor about our relationship. We can relate lovingly and congruently while taking disagreements into account.

We recognize that most feelings are transient. Even transient feelings may be important, and we may choose to act accordingly. However, mere intensity of emotion does not compel drastic action, nor long-term policy changes. We prioritize the enduring structure of the relationship over incidents in the here-and-now.

We recognize that we each have unresolved internal conflicts, flotsam and jetsam from personal history. We welcome relevant insights and support, but take sole responsibility for dealing with our issues. We don’t inflict them on each other. As much as possible, we avoid confusing our current partner with figures from our past. We do not try to use a lover as a psychotherapist or substitute parent. We inhibit impulses to act out dysfunctional patterns we learned in old relationships.

Rational communication

We communicate our stuff to inform, not to manipulate or coerce.

We do not “process the relationship,” as stage 3 has it. That often means uncontained emotional venting. It tends to run less to understanding than to complaining, blaming, and demanding. Instead, we stick to a rational communication protocol, rather than blurting out whatever we are feeling in the moment.

We apologize when we have erred. We sympathize when the other feels bad because of something we do or say; but we do not apologize if it was not a mistake. We are each responsible for taking care of our own feelings.

We are honest, because we know each other well enough to trust them with the truth.

We make explicit requests. We do not drop hints, hope the other will recognize them as implicit demands, and expect they will feel compelled to act on them. We refuse unwanted requests clearly, rather than equivocating to avoid conflict. We generally keep our promises, and inform the other as soon as possible when we decide not to.

A systematic relationship is “win-win or no deal.” In a conflict, we stand our ground without attacking. We negotiate straightforwardly, explicitly, avoiding covert emotional manipulation. We settle disputes on the basis of principles, not just who expresses stronger feelings (although that is one factor to take into account).

This explicitness is relative to stage 3. No system of any sort can ever be fully explicit. It is not necessary to be explicit about everything, and often not wise. (What is better said, and what better left tacit, is a meta-rational judgement.) At stage 4, we communicate much more explicitly than at stage 3. We hold still more as explicit private knowledge of personal stuff, which at stage 3 we might have only have felt as nebulous emotion.

Liota and I were explicit about far more in our relationship than most stage 4 couples—for particular rational reasons I’ll relate in that post.

Co-authoring principles

By definition, a stage 4 relationship has some rational structure; but particular stage 4 relationships may have wildly different ones.

Stage 4 is often described as “self-authorship.” A stage 4 relationship is co-authored. It is deliberately co-constructed by the partners.

This contrasts with stage 3 relationships, which we often “find” or even “fall into.” Then we merely experience the relationship as it lurches along of its own accord, perhaps from crisis to crisis, without design or understanding.

Participants in stage 4 relationships have formal roles: that is, artificial ones adopted to make the system work, not ones that are biologically inherent. You negotiate agreement about the principles you will jointly adopt, and your shared standards of interaction, and the responsibilities you will individually undertake. You organize your own emotions individually, and also construct the relationship so it can organize the emotions that arise in interaction between the two of you.

A systematic relational structure requires maintenance. You can, and must, renegotiate and revise its form, as you and your circumstances change.

Although the exact set of principles, roles, and responsibilities that define a relationship may be unique to a couple, it’s infeasible to invent these from scratch. In practice, everyone draws pieces from one or more prevailing cultural forms. That is: from ideology. You might, for example, agree to relate on Biblical principles.

More commonly, couples adopt bits and pieces of several competing relationship ideologies—often without fully understanding the sources. A unique assemblage may work better for the partners than any standard-issue form. However, dissonances between source ideologies may cause dissonances in the relationship. I’ll come back to that in “Liota,” and throughout the series.

Objections, costs, limits, and what comes after

“Your idea of a ‘systematic relationship’ sounds like hard work, and no fun at all!”

It does require cognitive effort and emotional energy. For many people, the benefits seem worth it! Systematic relating is fun. It adds the feeling of a creative, challenging, rewarding, collaborative project to the fun you can have in a stage 3 relationship.

Because it requires effort, it’s common to regress when mentally tired or emotionally stressed. Then one may backslide into a stage 3 mode of relating. That may be for a moment, an evening, or even much longer. However, this is not permanent. You retain the skills of rational relationship, and return to it when the stressors abate.

“Ugh! Rationality is the opposite of romance. That’s the last thing I want! Emotions are good, and the whole point of an intimate relationship!”

It is not true that rationality and emotion are mutually exclusive opposites. This is a harmful philosophical falsehood. Both work better together.

Delicious swoony gooey feelings and a rational structure are compatible. Further, they can support each other. Combining them is more difficult than just letting go into whatever feelings arise. Feelings are transient, and when they conflict, a stage 3 relationship has no good way to resolve them. The result is often a chaotic rollercoaster ride of elation, disappointment, resentment, fury, and despair.

Stage 4 relating is partly a collection of learned skills, but it also requires a fundamental reconceptualization of what a romantic relationship is. It means using a rational structure as a container for feelings; one that organizes them so that the relationship will remain satisfying in the long term.

Rationality doesn’t mean suppressing your feelings, nor losing touch with them. It’s choosing how and when to express or act on feelings.

At stage 3, the only way you know what your feelings are may be by expressing or acting on them. You experience yourself yelling, and from that you know that you are angry. If so, a danger at stage 4 is that when you don’t express or act on feelings, you are ignorant of them. You can’t organize your feelings well if you don’t know what they are!

So doing stage 4 well actually requires greater sensitivity to your feelings—to their internal manifestation, not just their external acting-out. Your relationship with emotions can become richer, subtler, more complex and nuanced than the simplistic on/off emotional experience of stage 3.

Misunderstanding this may lead some people, on first discovering the value of rationality, to try to kill their emotions, or to act like a cartoon robot.

“This sounds like how my boss wants me to behave at work!”

That’s because work environments often are structured at stage 4. The specific roles and norms of behavior required at work are obviously quite different from those appropriate in a romance, but they are structurally similar.

For many people, learning how to relate professionally at stage 4 precedes learning how to relate intimately at stage 4. The work environment provides tacit (and sometimes explicit) training in how to do that. Conversely, some people learn systematicity in a romantic relationship first. Either way, one may be able to transfer an understanding of relational systematicity from one to the other.

From a stage 3 viewpoint, relational systematicity is artificial, inhuman, constricting, and unfair. It may seem emotionally unacceptable, or even morally wrong, to adopt this way of being. However, it’s what professional workplaces demand, because it’s effective in coordinating diverse types of work in a shared project. It’s a more sophisticated, powerful, and intellectually challenging way of being. It can also be extraordinarily satisfying when mastered: for instance when a team is “working like a well-oiled machine”—as the relevant cliché has it.1

A stage 4 intimate relationship, working smoothly as an exciting collaborative project, can also be extraordinarily satisfying.

“You want me to be in control at all times, but opportunities for losing control are what is best in an intimate relationship!”

Indeed: letting go into sexual ecstasy can be a peak religious experience. Less intensely, letting down one’s emotional guard, through trust and comfort with a partner, can be exceptionally gratifying and transformative.

Better than being in control at all times is the ability to choose when to let go, and when to contain your emotions. That is mostly possible at stage 4. Wise choice is a matter of meta-rational judgement, which you can develop further when moving on toward stage 5.

“I hate bureaucracy. Becoming one, or relating to someone who is pretending to be one, is the last thing I want to do!”

The benefit of bureaucracy, done well, is efficient, trouble-free maintenance of routine activity. The cost is rigidity and brittleness in the face of nebulosity: surprise or ambiguity.

Stage 4 does involve paying some of that cost. It can be inflexible. Relating to someone who is at stage 4 can feel like interacting with a machine, with nobody home inside.

In “Elena,” I wrote:

It is characteristic of stage 3 that you have no actual self, and you do not realize this. You think you do, but what you have is an incoherent patchwork of relationships in which you try to be whatever the other person wants.

It is also characteristic of stage 4 that you have no actual self. You think you do, but you have constructed an abstract machine in the place where a self would go. You have an incomplete, somewhat inaccurate representation of a hypothetical, impossible self.

Stage 5 relativizes the bureaucracy, intervening in its functioning on a meta-rational basis. Meta-rationality considers principles and policies with reference to the context and purposes. It takes nothing as absolute.

Smooth functioning of relational rationality should be interrupted, at times, in service of a broader vision. Then you relate instead as beneficent space. That is a creative, sometimes shocking intimacy, of which stage 4 is incapable.

How we get systematic in romantic relationship

Understanding the 3-to-4 stage transition process is valuable both if you are not yet at stage 4, or if you are but your partner is not.

If you are not yet at stage 4, you need first to recognize that it is something you want, and why. I hope this post (and “Elena,” by contrast) have provided that motivation.

Fortunately, there are copious resources for the 3-to-4 transition in general, and in the domain of relationships in particular. (In contrast with 4-to-5, for which there’s nearly nothing.)

Although the stage framework is not so commonly used explicitly, a goodly fraction of relationship advice is relevant. This includes both written advice, and personal advice in coaching, psychotherapy, and counselling. That said, more of the available advice is implicitly about how to do stage 3 well, or even about the 2-to-3 transition. With a basic understanding of the stage framework, you can recognize which resources are relevant to where you are currently at.

Systematic selfing typically comes before systematic relating, or at least gets started first. However, because self-understanding and intimate relationships are so closely entwined, the two may develop together gradually, over a period of several years.

Having developed a systematic self, or even systematicity in your professional work, you might deliberately change your way of relating to match it. This is “leveraging developmental lag.” I wrote “Transitioning soft domains to stage 4” about this.

It takes two to tango, so this is difficult to do by yourself. In any domain, a systematic “holding environment” facilitates a transition to stage 4. That means an interpersonal structure that encourages systematic functioning and discourages pre-systematic functioning.

If you enter an intimate relationship with someone who is at stage 4, who expects systematic relating from you, you may become systematic yourself—if you are willing. (Liota did this for me.) If you are not currently partnered, you could make systematicity a criterion for dating.

If you are already partnered, it may be more difficult:

It’s common for two people to form a romantic relationship (or marriage) at stage 3, and then to mature at different rates. A relationship between someone at stage 3 and someone at stage 4, or at two different points in the gradual transition between 3 and 4, can be difficult. Their fundamental understandings of what a person is, and what a relationship is, are so different that communication can become almost impossible.

If the partners are sufficiently committed to each other, and understand that this is happening, each can support the process, in different ways.

The lagging party can see this only implicitly and vaguely. Your partner is changing in some way you don’t understand, and mostly don’t like. They seem increasingly distant, unfeeling, rigid. (This is where Elena was at, as our relationship neared its end—“cold bastard” was her bitter description of me to her friends.)

If you are genuinely committed to the person, you let go of who they were, and do your best to support their change into something else, despite costs and misgivings. You look for positive aspects of the transformation. For example, you notice that they are less often angry about trivia—and you reward them for that. As they develop further, you see broader benefits for them. You begin to sense why and how they are changing. You appreciate some plusses for yourself in the changing relationship too, despite missing and mourning what you used to have together. Eventually, you may come to want what they have become—and you begin your own journey toward stage 4.

For the partner changing faster, the challenge is to not demand state 4 relating from your partner before they are ready for it. Your role is not as a teacher, therapist, or coach. That does not work within a romantic relationship! Rather, your task is to interact in the stage 4 way yourself, to the extent it is workable, even when that may be difficult for your partner to appreciate. You refuse your partner’s desire for emotional fusion—gently. You make it clear in words and deeds that you still love them and want to be close—but not in that way. You request that they assume responsibility for their own initiatives and preferences, rather than leaning on you. In these ways, you tacitly model what is possible, and how and why you have chosen this path.

Transitioning together, simultaneously or sequentially, may simply be impossible if your partner just doesn’t want to. Stage 4 is flatly unappealing for many people, and no demonstration of its benefits may change that. Many marriages or long-term relationships end once this becomes irresolvable.

Alternatively, if you are in this situation you may consider that continuing the relationship is more important than systematizing it. It can be an agonizing choice, and there is no right answer in general. Often, even in specific relationships, no good outcome may be possible. Divorce may be catastrophic (or not); continuing a frustratingly limited, chaotic, painful marriage may be worse for both partners (or not).

That said, marriages between a person in stage 3 and one in stage 4 can be stable and satisfying for both, so long as each recognizes and accepts their roles within it. Kegan explains this in The Evolving Self, over several pages starting at the bottom of p. 250.

Further reading

My posts

• “Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence” is my introductory overview of adult stage theory.

• I have written many other posts on this topic. “Index to the most important knowledge in the world” links all of them. (The title is a joke. Probably.)

• “Leveraging lag: engineers and salespeople” is the most specifically relevant; especially its section “Transitioning soft domains to stage 4.”

Books by other people

• Philip M. Lewis’ The Discerning Heart is a short, clear, non-technical introduction to adult stage theory. Chapter 7, about stage 4, is the most relevant.

• Robert Kegan was the first psychologist to extend cognitive developmental stage theory into the domains of self-understanding and relationships. His In Over Our Heads concentrates on the 3-to-4 transition. Chapter 4, “Partnering” is most obviously relevant. There’s also valuable discussion toward the end of Chapter 3, “Parenting,” explaining the difficulty and importance of continuing adult development while supporting the psychological development of your children.

• The Evolving Self was Kegan’s first book on the theory. It’s a key text, but more difficult reading than In Over Our Heads. Chapter 3 is an overview of the different stages, and maybe the best place to start. (You could skip Chapters 1 and 2, about the history of the theory, on first reading.) Parts of Chapters 7 and 8 cover the 3-to-4 transition specifically.