Really glad you liked it! I do plan more. I have a list of a couple dozen plausible topics. I’ve learned a lot about how not to do this from a string of failed attempts; I felt this one was sort of minimally acceptable (production-values-wise).
It’s probably too long and too dense for the format? I’m going to aim for ~20 minutes, and see if I can make them lighter / throw in more jokes, and improve my voice quality, and the audio/recording quality, and…
Yes... but they are usually rambling conversations? Charlie and I may do some of those. We recorded one a week ago, but I felt it was *too* rambely and too jargony. We will try again, although I have to book time with them several weeks in advance!
A lot depends on the skill of the interviewer. Long conversations can get rambley or they can get really deep and interesting. I've heard multi-hour long conversations leaning both ways and it's almost always the interviewer, almost never the guest. Making people talk and keeping them talking is a skill. And there is certainly a point of diminishing returns, perhaps around the three hour mark.
I was half joking... should've added a winky face. Don't really have a preference tbh - I'm pretty versatile in my content consumption. I really do enjoy your sense of humor so more jokes, please!
Wonderful! This was an excellent listen. I must agree with whoever gave you feedback previously about making things more personal—I found your writing engaging already, but the way you write about the specifics of your life helps me to feel a connection with you, and so with your writing as well. And it helps very much that your passion for various topics comes through in your voice.
This is also an excellent post because, like much writing on developmental theory, your four progressive models of self map very well onto my personal history.
I’ve been reading about and dabbling in applying IFS principles, and have found it really useful. I had previously (as usual) been attempting a speedrun towards the Dzogchen leaf devil model…this mostly worked to resolve all existential angst about who I was and what I was doing, except that it sort of left me deflated and inert, surrounded by a bath of the “atmosphere” resulting from self-liberating thoughts, emotions, and identities.
Something about the multiplicity and theatricality of parts-type models is reintroducing some much needed form into my selfish landscape. And yet I’ve noticed some compulsion in the IFS literature towards maintaining an apparent continuity of self via repeatedly-appearing parts. This strikes me as obviously unnatural, like you say: not how selves appear to work, dependent as they are on ever-shifting contexts. In the theater of my inner “podcast studio”, parts are consistently morphing and mutating, and only require definition at all when there’s a problem, or when an improv scene is otherwise called for.
The point about IFS providing some needed form as an antidote to the slight overemphasis on emptiness/formlessness in Dzogchen semdé was very interesting. I hadn't thought of that. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I increasingly feel that Dzogchen is slightly off, in that sem-de is slightly nihilistic (in the "overweighting emptiness" sense), and menggagde, as an attempted corrective, doesn't quite hit the mark. I don't yet have any clear idea of what to think or do about this. Maybe these vaguely Jungian practices point in a productive direction.
Your last paragraph fits my experience (not formally with IFS, but similar informal practices). I wonder how/whether this understanding could be made more available.
There's some interesting discussion of this and related points in Scott Alexander's two recent posts on IFS, and in the comment threads on them. (The more recent one is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-going-on-in-ifs)
I’m very interested in this transition between “emptiness realization” and “further vision” in Dzogchen semde and the bigger picture in Vajrayana.
As I’ve been trying out the parts work/imaginal exploration, I’ve become more and more interested in the book framing the current discussion on IFS. Reading it, I’m finding the way incoming wisdom-beings (the “good” alternative to Unattached Burdens/demons) are discussed there sounds very reminiscent of the way people with yidam practices talk about their yidams. I do not/cannot claim these are the same phenomenon, but I find it fascinating!
And speaking of the semde, I’ve had some experiences in lhatong that felt very dangerous because the shape awareness takes often feels very “other” at first. Not other as in an object beheld by me, the subject, but an-other, like another person’s face looking back at me.
Something seems resonant there—the emphasis on the face in Dzogchen and the personification of energies in imaginal work.
Loved this, David! Really enjoyed listening to the audio version. As you mentioned at the beginning, the personal and concrete nature of this writing really makes it more relatable and impactful
Oh, thanks, I'm really glad to hear it! I will do more like it, since quite a few people seem enthusiastic. Some of them probably with Charlie, if we can figure out how to make a dialog work for listeners!
I wish psychodynamic therapy was more popular and accessible. It makes a LOT more sense than CBT or IFS. Psychodynamic therapy has evolved since the days of Freud and Jung. It has moved away from trying to define the self and/or the un/sub-conscious and now focuses more on patterns of human relationships which are replicable and non-obvious (to ordinary people). Bringing such patterns into awareness and learning a little bit about how they work in general for human beings is was very useful for my own selfing. I think especially useful for STEM people who are not as developed in the emotions/feelings domain.
Yes, I mentioned in the recording that I’d done some graduate-level coursework, and it was in psychodynamics actually! I learned a lot more from that than CBT, but the episode was already too long.
As it happens, I hope to post in about two weeks a piece that draws on Jung, developmental stage theory, Vajrayana, and a personal experience of psychological transformation…
Then you will be happy to know that this is one field where progress (in a sense) has been made! I was very happy to encounter the current literature in the field. Good insights there.
The current generation keeps citing Nancy McWilliams as a big name. I haven’t read her work (mostly for therapists, not patients) but some of her interviews on youtube were very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_McWilliams
"On a larger scale, I wasted most of my effort for a few years helping a religious organization grow, because I was sticking to a plan that was increasingly obviously going to fail. "
Am I correct to infer you are done with Aro Ter? Understandable if this is not something you want to elaborate on. I did the same with a different Vajrayana community, unfortunately.
>>There's usually an audience for my internal dialog. Much of my thinking is lecturing, delivering an explanation to a shadowy classroom. That's you, right now! But it's really me. I'm trying to figure something out for myself, but imagining explaining it to you is the best way to do that!
Hmm. Reminds me of a quote from Rebecca West.
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. We speak; we spread round us with sounds, with words, an emanation from ourselves. Sometimes they overlap the circles that others are spreading round themselves. Then they are affected by these other circles, to be sure, but not because of any real communication that has taken place—merely as a scarf of blue chiffon lying on a woman’s dressing table will change color if she casts down on it a scarf of red chiffon."
It sounds like it may be making points about the difficulty of communication (and about everyone's egocentric obliviousness)?
Those are real things sometimes, but it seems overly pessimistic. My understanding of how people work is strongly influenced by ethnomethodological conversation analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis), which finds that (by default) we're extraordinarily responsive to what others are saying as they say it, even at sub-second timeframes.
I suspect that's why we (or I, at least) need an imaginary audience for our imaginary conversations. "In real life," we produce language only while orienting to other people, and with their active listening participation (perceivable as "backchannel" activity such as head nods, gaze direction, "uh huh"s, and so on). To produce imaginary speech ("thoughts,") we need the support of imaginary listeners.
(Or, I do. Apparently some people don't experience imaginary speech at all, so I'm probably overgeneralizing—I'm not sure by how much!)
"Leaf devil" mode seems closely related to Zhuangzi's "free and easy wandering." It's the title of Chapter 1 of his book, so pretty central, inasmuch as the work has a center. I have probably made this comparison before, though.
I have read the "inner chapters" of Zhuangzi, on your recommendation, but can't remember it well, so I went to look for that first chapter, and I can't find my copy now! What you say seems very likely, though.
More than twenty years ago I wrote an essay on the related Buddhist archetype "crazy wandering yogi" and how I was trying to do that. I went back to it recently, wondering if it could be resurrected and published now, but it's painfully naive.
Probably everything I write now will seem painfully naive in twenty years if I'm still alive then.
This one is exceptionally great. I also really like how you read!
In the 00's, after leaving fundamentalism, I spent a few years arguing with Christians when I didn't have to. There was one home discussion group that a megachurch put together for outreach. They were very concerned about where atheists thought you go when you die, if not the afterlife. I said the mind isn't a thing, it's a process. Like juggling. After the juggling stops, it doesn't go anywhere, it just stops. They said, maybe the balls rolled under the couch. I couldn't get the concept across. It would have helped if I had an explicitly-worked out concept of eternalism instead of groping at it intuitively.
I would have not listened because of somewhat pathological aversion to non-fiction audio content (the scroll like linearity and the sheer TIME it takes to listen in comparison to reading), so having the text to read was very useful.
Interesting points about CBT, I think the standard/basic CBT is *obviously* wrong for me because there's rarely anything wrong with my thinking, yet the emotional (= physical, bodily) machinery malfunctions on various occasions. Yet I've encountered many people (and yes, disproportionally technical type people actually) for whom it really worked. I wonder if it's something to do with having fixed ideas about things (rather than accepting beliefs as somewhat provisional and approximate -- this wouldn't be a very effective approach to technical tasks) getting people stuck.
What's interesting to me is that the second approach you describe feels completely alien to me (I mean, I KNOW people do that, commonly, and swear by it, and I also use, for example, a calendar app to avoid forgetting tasks, but beyond that the idea that getting. "reminder to work out" would have ANY effect on my working out if I don't want to work out seems laughable -- so I wonder if there's some kind of brain variation that makes some people amenable to (at least in parts) selfing as a business and others not at all.
And finally, on acting vs "figuring things out", this feels very true:
>>*Psychotherapeutic models lead you to take thoughts and emotions more seriously than you already do. Taking them as your self, taking them too seriously, believing that they are what matter most, is often what causes your trouble in the first place.*
...but I wonder if this isn't straightforwardly caused by therapeutic approaches being rooted in "psychopathology": there's a level of disorder/dysfunction when effectively the "self" is those emotions and their products so for example acting is sometimes literally but often figuratively impossible before paying attention to that. Although we do know that so called behavioural activation helps even in pretty dire depression, so maybe this compulsion to emotion-focus is illusory and part of the problem even then.
> I wonder if it's something to do with having fixed ideas about things getting people stuck.
That makes sense!
> I wonder if there's some kind of brain variation
I wouldn't be surprised...
> there's a level of disorder/dysfunction when effectively the "self" is those emotions and their products
Yes... or this is also typical of "stage 3" in adult developmental theory, in which case it is usually not pathological. Perhaps it becomes pathological when taken to extremes.
The "self as institution" models is pretty much exactly "stage 4" in that theory, and "leaf devil" is stage 5. There were several reasons I didn't mention this. One is that the psychotherapeutic approach doesn't fit into the theory at all, so it would have been untidy at best. And also stage theory is somewhat dubious and would probably have been a red herring in this piece.
> behavioural activation helps even in pretty dire depression
The key point is to do things you would usually enjoy even if you don't want to/don't feel like or/anhedonia-got-you, because doing stuff is helpful longer term. But I suspect it's also distraction/break from rumination.
I need to go back to the development model which I recall vaguely reading about (quite possibly on your website), but it's also possible I am confusing it with Kohlberg somehow.
---
I've been also thinking about "debugging" as a process of fixing discrete, specific errors or malfunctions, vs certain recognised ways to, idk what metaphor to use, "reset" isn't probably quite right (or I don't quite know what happens during a reset apart from clearing some temporary data), such as using ketamine, ECT or psychedelics to somehow shake up/reconfigure brain (mind?). These do feel holistic (in descriptions and reports, I don't have personal experience) but maybe they only seem holistic because they act on the whole system but in fact what happens is fixing specific errors anyway.
> The key point is to do things you would usually enjoy even if you don't want to
Thanks, yes, this has often worked for me! (I've been prone to depression for most of my life, although less so in the past ~decade, for no clear reason).
> I suspect it's also distraction/break from rumination.
That makes sense!
> the development model which I recall vaguely reading about (quite possibly on your website)
> possible I am confusing it with Kohlberg somehow.
That would be natural; Kohlberg and Kegan (who I wrote about) are in the same intellectual lineage. In fact I think Kohlberg may have been Kegan's PhD advisor, although I don't remember for sure.
Kegan's PhD thesis (revised and published as _The Evolving Self_) synthesized cognitive stage theories (Piaget) with psychoanalytic ones (particularly the ego psychology development thread with e.g. Erik Erikson, and developmental object-relations theory with e.g. Winnicott and Bowlby). It's been very influential for me for several decades, although of course incomplete and flawed, like anything else.
Thanks for the thoughts about resets vs debugging! I know very little about chemically or electrically induced resets. Do you have a sense of how/why they would fix specific errors?
I find this talk also related to self very interesting: Non-dual Awareness and Awakening: a computational neurophenomenological account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvPtqGp9PHA
TL;DR: Self is just a hyperprior rooted deeply in our brain. As any other prior, it can be turned off using e.g. meditation, which flattens the prior landscape and suspends top-down constraints. When you get to pure awareness, rigpa, the priors are gone, including time, space, self and what not. What remains is the ground of being, the feeling of being you, of being this organism. This feels very nice to me, like self is not really a big deal. It is a part of the experience. I try to go with the flow and not to get stuck in a valley that causes my brain to then interpret what is happening right now in a way that is not useful. I find myself suffering much less since I got in touch with pure awareness. They say there is no reference point, but I find rigpa a good spot from which to relate to the rest. But sure, when you are there, you are not relating to anything really...
Anyway, a fine article, as you can see, it sparked some excitement in me :-)
Oh well, I think that Meaningness, Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires played a non-trivial role in the search phase to shift my attention to Vajrayana and this kind of meditation, although there was an intermezzo with MCTB before being finally done in by Dzogchen and Ken McLeod's A Trackless Path, so thanks again ;-)
Also from the conceptual perspective, I like self as used within Self-determination theory. The self-organising organismic nature that pushes us to integrate ourselves and the environment. To go out and explore, discover. To open. I find it also pretty nebulous as you like to say, but I feel like I can sense how it animates me.
I was actually reading the book mostly when still in my Theravada concentration and insight phase and it was sparking a proper number of insights regularly as the brain was just processing new input, although I usually started meditating on the three characteristics. Oh well, what can you do :-) Need to totally get back to the book once I am finished with Tibetan Yoga: Principles and Practices...
This is just great David, so happy you did it! Would love more audios like this from you 😍
Really glad you liked it! I do plan more. I have a list of a couple dozen plausible topics. I’ve learned a lot about how not to do this from a string of failed attempts; I felt this one was sort of minimally acceptable (production-values-wise).
It’s probably too long and too dense for the format? I’m going to aim for ~20 minutes, and see if I can make them lighter / throw in more jokes, and improve my voice quality, and the audio/recording quality, and…
You know that the trend for podcasts is to make them really, really, really LONG. Not short.
Yes... but they are usually rambling conversations? Charlie and I may do some of those. We recorded one a week ago, but I felt it was *too* rambely and too jargony. We will try again, although I have to book time with them several weeks in advance!
A lot depends on the skill of the interviewer. Long conversations can get rambley or they can get really deep and interesting. I've heard multi-hour long conversations leaning both ways and it's almost always the interviewer, almost never the guest. Making people talk and keeping them talking is a skill. And there is certainly a point of diminishing returns, perhaps around the three hour mark.
I was half joking... should've added a winky face. Don't really have a preference tbh - I'm pretty versatile in my content consumption. I really do enjoy your sense of humor so more jokes, please!
I have "learn basic interviewing technique" as a task in Things.app :)
Naah I don't mind the length and density, but I can only speak for myself! Looking forward to these then 👌
Wonderful! This was an excellent listen. I must agree with whoever gave you feedback previously about making things more personal—I found your writing engaging already, but the way you write about the specifics of your life helps me to feel a connection with you, and so with your writing as well. And it helps very much that your passion for various topics comes through in your voice.
This is also an excellent post because, like much writing on developmental theory, your four progressive models of self map very well onto my personal history.
I’ve been reading about and dabbling in applying IFS principles, and have found it really useful. I had previously (as usual) been attempting a speedrun towards the Dzogchen leaf devil model…this mostly worked to resolve all existential angst about who I was and what I was doing, except that it sort of left me deflated and inert, surrounded by a bath of the “atmosphere” resulting from self-liberating thoughts, emotions, and identities.
Something about the multiplicity and theatricality of parts-type models is reintroducing some much needed form into my selfish landscape. And yet I’ve noticed some compulsion in the IFS literature towards maintaining an apparent continuity of self via repeatedly-appearing parts. This strikes me as obviously unnatural, like you say: not how selves appear to work, dependent as they are on ever-shifting contexts. In the theater of my inner “podcast studio”, parts are consistently morphing and mutating, and only require definition at all when there’s a problem, or when an improv scene is otherwise called for.
Thank you!
The point about IFS providing some needed form as an antidote to the slight overemphasis on emptiness/formlessness in Dzogchen semdé was very interesting. I hadn't thought of that. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I increasingly feel that Dzogchen is slightly off, in that sem-de is slightly nihilistic (in the "overweighting emptiness" sense), and menggagde, as an attempted corrective, doesn't quite hit the mark. I don't yet have any clear idea of what to think or do about this. Maybe these vaguely Jungian practices point in a productive direction.
Your last paragraph fits my experience (not formally with IFS, but similar informal practices). I wonder how/whether this understanding could be made more available.
There's some interesting discussion of this and related points in Scott Alexander's two recent posts on IFS, and in the comment threads on them. (The more recent one is https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-going-on-in-ifs)
I’m very interested in this transition between “emptiness realization” and “further vision” in Dzogchen semde and the bigger picture in Vajrayana.
As I’ve been trying out the parts work/imaginal exploration, I’ve become more and more interested in the book framing the current discussion on IFS. Reading it, I’m finding the way incoming wisdom-beings (the “good” alternative to Unattached Burdens/demons) are discussed there sounds very reminiscent of the way people with yidam practices talk about their yidams. I do not/cannot claim these are the same phenomenon, but I find it fascinating!
And speaking of the semde, I’ve had some experiences in lhatong that felt very dangerous because the shape awareness takes often feels very “other” at first. Not other as in an object beheld by me, the subject, but an-other, like another person’s face looking back at me.
Something seems resonant there—the emphasis on the face in Dzogchen and the personification of energies in imaginal work.
Cool new format! I lolled a bunch of times. You got me with paleolithic era!
Loved this, David! Really enjoyed listening to the audio version. As you mentioned at the beginning, the personal and concrete nature of this writing really makes it more relatable and impactful
Oh, thanks, I'm really glad to hear it! I will do more like it, since quite a few people seem enthusiastic. Some of them probably with Charlie, if we can figure out how to make a dialog work for listeners!
I wish psychodynamic therapy was more popular and accessible. It makes a LOT more sense than CBT or IFS. Psychodynamic therapy has evolved since the days of Freud and Jung. It has moved away from trying to define the self and/or the un/sub-conscious and now focuses more on patterns of human relationships which are replicable and non-obvious (to ordinary people). Bringing such patterns into awareness and learning a little bit about how they work in general for human beings is was very useful for my own selfing. I think especially useful for STEM people who are not as developed in the emotions/feelings domain.
Yes, I mentioned in the recording that I’d done some graduate-level coursework, and it was in psychodynamics actually! I learned a lot more from that than CBT, but the episode was already too long.
As it happens, I hope to post in about two weeks a piece that draws on Jung, developmental stage theory, Vajrayana, and a personal experience of psychological transformation…
Then you will be happy to know that this is one field where progress (in a sense) has been made! I was very happy to encounter the current literature in the field. Good insights there.
Ah, and I'm almost 40 years out of date. What/who would you recommend I check out?
Jonathan Shedler is a contemporary practitioner/advocate:
https://x.com/JonathanShedler
https://jonathanshedler.com/writings/
The current generation keeps citing Nancy McWilliams as a big name. I haven’t read her work (mostly for therapists, not patients) but some of her interviews on youtube were very interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_McWilliams
Thank you very much! I will follow up!
If I had to recommend just one thing, this would be it: https://jonathanshedler.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Shedler-That-was-then-this-is-now-R10.pdf
"On a larger scale, I wasted most of my effort for a few years helping a religious organization grow, because I was sticking to a plan that was increasingly obviously going to fail. "
Am I correct to infer you are done with Aro Ter? Understandable if this is not something you want to elaborate on. I did the same with a different Vajrayana community, unfortunately.
Yes, I left the Aro gTér sangha about ten years ago now.
Sorry to hear about your analogous experience!
This podcast format worked great for me. It was even entertaining at times. Loved this post, as well as the one on Ultraspeaking.
>>There's usually an audience for my internal dialog. Much of my thinking is lecturing, delivering an explanation to a shadowy classroom. That's you, right now! But it's really me. I'm trying to figure something out for myself, but imagining explaining it to you is the best way to do that!
Hmm. Reminds me of a quote from Rebecca West.
"There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all. We speak; we spread round us with sounds, with words, an emanation from ourselves. Sometimes they overlap the circles that others are spreading round themselves. Then they are affected by these other circles, to be sure, but not because of any real communication that has taken place—merely as a scarf of blue chiffon lying on a woman’s dressing table will change color if she casts down on it a scarf of red chiffon."
That's a nice quote, thank you!
It sounds like it may be making points about the difficulty of communication (and about everyone's egocentric obliviousness)?
Those are real things sometimes, but it seems overly pessimistic. My understanding of how people work is strongly influenced by ethnomethodological conversation analysis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis), which finds that (by default) we're extraordinarily responsive to what others are saying as they say it, even at sub-second timeframes.
I suspect that's why we (or I, at least) need an imaginary audience for our imaginary conversations. "In real life," we produce language only while orienting to other people, and with their active listening participation (perceivable as "backchannel" activity such as head nods, gaze direction, "uh huh"s, and so on). To produce imaginary speech ("thoughts,") we need the support of imaginary listeners.
(Or, I do. Apparently some people don't experience imaginary speech at all, so I'm probably overgeneralizing—I'm not sure by how much!)
"Leaf devil" mode seems closely related to Zhuangzi's "free and easy wandering." It's the title of Chapter 1 of his book, so pretty central, inasmuch as the work has a center. I have probably made this comparison before, though.
I have read the "inner chapters" of Zhuangzi, on your recommendation, but can't remember it well, so I went to look for that first chapter, and I can't find my copy now! What you say seems very likely, though.
More than twenty years ago I wrote an essay on the related Buddhist archetype "crazy wandering yogi" and how I was trying to do that. I went back to it recently, wondering if it could be resurrected and published now, but it's painfully naive.
Probably everything I write now will seem painfully naive in twenty years if I'm still alive then.
This one is exceptionally great. I also really like how you read!
In the 00's, after leaving fundamentalism, I spent a few years arguing with Christians when I didn't have to. There was one home discussion group that a megachurch put together for outreach. They were very concerned about where atheists thought you go when you die, if not the afterlife. I said the mind isn't a thing, it's a process. Like juggling. After the juggling stops, it doesn't go anywhere, it just stops. They said, maybe the balls rolled under the couch. I couldn't get the concept across. It would have helped if I had an explicitly-worked out concept of eternalism instead of groping at it intuitively.
Wonderful. Thank you.
I would have not listened because of somewhat pathological aversion to non-fiction audio content (the scroll like linearity and the sheer TIME it takes to listen in comparison to reading), so having the text to read was very useful.
Interesting points about CBT, I think the standard/basic CBT is *obviously* wrong for me because there's rarely anything wrong with my thinking, yet the emotional (= physical, bodily) machinery malfunctions on various occasions. Yet I've encountered many people (and yes, disproportionally technical type people actually) for whom it really worked. I wonder if it's something to do with having fixed ideas about things (rather than accepting beliefs as somewhat provisional and approximate -- this wouldn't be a very effective approach to technical tasks) getting people stuck.
What's interesting to me is that the second approach you describe feels completely alien to me (I mean, I KNOW people do that, commonly, and swear by it, and I also use, for example, a calendar app to avoid forgetting tasks, but beyond that the idea that getting. "reminder to work out" would have ANY effect on my working out if I don't want to work out seems laughable -- so I wonder if there's some kind of brain variation that makes some people amenable to (at least in parts) selfing as a business and others not at all.
And finally, on acting vs "figuring things out", this feels very true:
>>*Psychotherapeutic models lead you to take thoughts and emotions more seriously than you already do. Taking them as your self, taking them too seriously, believing that they are what matter most, is often what causes your trouble in the first place.*
...but I wonder if this isn't straightforwardly caused by therapeutic approaches being rooted in "psychopathology": there's a level of disorder/dysfunction when effectively the "self" is those emotions and their products so for example acting is sometimes literally but often figuratively impossible before paying attention to that. Although we do know that so called behavioural activation helps even in pretty dire depression, so maybe this compulsion to emotion-focus is illusory and part of the problem even then.
> I wonder if it's something to do with having fixed ideas about things getting people stuck.
That makes sense!
> I wonder if there's some kind of brain variation
I wouldn't be surprised...
> there's a level of disorder/dysfunction when effectively the "self" is those emotions and their products
Yes... or this is also typical of "stage 3" in adult developmental theory, in which case it is usually not pathological. Perhaps it becomes pathological when taken to extremes.
The "self as institution" models is pretty much exactly "stage 4" in that theory, and "leaf devil" is stage 5. There were several reasons I didn't mention this. One is that the psychotherapeutic approach doesn't fit into the theory at all, so it would have been untidy at best. And also stage theory is somewhat dubious and would probably have been a red herring in this piece.
> behavioural activation helps even in pretty dire depression
TIL! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_activation , for any other readers unfamiliar with it.
Seems like common sense, pretty much ("you'll feel better if you do things you enjoy"), but it's good to have evidence that it works.
The key point is to do things you would usually enjoy even if you don't want to/don't feel like or/anhedonia-got-you, because doing stuff is helpful longer term. But I suspect it's also distraction/break from rumination.
I need to go back to the development model which I recall vaguely reading about (quite possibly on your website), but it's also possible I am confusing it with Kohlberg somehow.
---
I've been also thinking about "debugging" as a process of fixing discrete, specific errors or malfunctions, vs certain recognised ways to, idk what metaphor to use, "reset" isn't probably quite right (or I don't quite know what happens during a reset apart from clearing some temporary data), such as using ketamine, ECT or psychedelics to somehow shake up/reconfigure brain (mind?). These do feel holistic (in descriptions and reports, I don't have personal experience) but maybe they only seem holistic because they act on the whole system but in fact what happens is fixing specific errors anyway.
> The key point is to do things you would usually enjoy even if you don't want to
Thanks, yes, this has often worked for me! (I've been prone to depression for most of my life, although less so in the past ~decade, for no clear reason).
> I suspect it's also distraction/break from rumination.
That makes sense!
> the development model which I recall vaguely reading about (quite possibly on your website)
Maybe this? https://vividness.live/developing-ethical-social-and-cognitive-competence
> possible I am confusing it with Kohlberg somehow.
That would be natural; Kohlberg and Kegan (who I wrote about) are in the same intellectual lineage. In fact I think Kohlberg may have been Kegan's PhD advisor, although I don't remember for sure.
Kegan's PhD thesis (revised and published as _The Evolving Self_) synthesized cognitive stage theories (Piaget) with psychoanalytic ones (particularly the ego psychology development thread with e.g. Erik Erikson, and developmental object-relations theory with e.g. Winnicott and Bowlby). It's been very influential for me for several decades, although of course incomplete and flawed, like anything else.
Thanks for the thoughts about resets vs debugging! I know very little about chemically or electrically induced resets. Do you have a sense of how/why they would fix specific errors?
I find this talk also related to self very interesting: Non-dual Awareness and Awakening: a computational neurophenomenological account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvPtqGp9PHA
TL;DR: Self is just a hyperprior rooted deeply in our brain. As any other prior, it can be turned off using e.g. meditation, which flattens the prior landscape and suspends top-down constraints. When you get to pure awareness, rigpa, the priors are gone, including time, space, self and what not. What remains is the ground of being, the feeling of being you, of being this organism. This feels very nice to me, like self is not really a big deal. It is a part of the experience. I try to go with the flow and not to get stuck in a valley that causes my brain to then interpret what is happening right now in a way that is not useful. I find myself suffering much less since I got in touch with pure awareness. They say there is no reference point, but I find rigpa a good spot from which to relate to the rest. But sure, when you are there, you are not relating to anything really...
Anyway, a fine article, as you can see, it sparked some excitement in me :-)
Thanks! Glad you liked it. And also glad that meditation is working for you!
Oh well, I think that Meaningness, Vividness and Buddhism for Vampires played a non-trivial role in the search phase to shift my attention to Vajrayana and this kind of meditation, although there was an intermezzo with MCTB before being finally done in by Dzogchen and Ken McLeod's A Trackless Path, so thanks again ;-)
Also from the conceptual perspective, I like self as used within Self-determination theory. The self-organising organismic nature that pushes us to integrate ourselves and the environment. To go out and explore, discover. To open. I find it also pretty nebulous as you like to say, but I feel like I can sense how it animates me.
I didn't know about this, thank you! I've got the wiki article open in a tab to read (the introductory section made it sound intriguing): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory
Hi David, I noticed there is now a newer book on Self-determination theory available, in case you are still interested and didn't make it too far with the one I originally mentioned: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/124938078-the-oxford-handbook-of-self-determination-theory
I am actually still in the middle of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30652098-self-determination-theory and I find it totally worth reading. Everything explained so clearly.
I was actually reading the book mostly when still in my Theravada concentration and insight phase and it was sparking a proper number of insights regularly as the brain was just processing new input, although I usually started meditating on the three characteristics. Oh well, what can you do :-) Need to totally get back to the book once I am finished with Tibetan Yoga: Principles and Practices...