Lol, I somehow initially read "Plus: The Making Of" in the subtitle to refer to the making of Piss Buddha. And then was kind of relieved to realise it referred to something else, that's probably a level of insight into the artistic process we don't need :)
I'd been meaning to subscribe and this post just pushed me over the edge. Sensationalism sells, haha! The post was 'clickbait' in the sense that it was 'scandalous' but not in the sense that I felt cheated. Been around long enough to know what I was going to get. :)
I broadly divide your writing into two - things that are useful at 'work' (professional life, metarationality) and things that are useful at 'home' (personal life, selfing, vajrayana, shadow etc.). Being an introverted nerd, there is a lot of personal identification there. In my 20s, at the start of my career, getting a handle on technical work, becoming a 'good engineer' was very important. But with time, even at work, 'human issues' are becoming more and more important. I want to graduate from being just an engineer. Technical issues are in a sense easy. Working with messy human beings not so much. You can't really do metarationality unless you understand human beings and their interactions very well. And you can't do any of this if your personal life is in shambles, as I discovered through personal experience. So that's been the growth edge for me, not necessarily better technical understanding.
Like you, I value content over form. I'll read even if the writing was dry, though more entertainment isn't a *bad* thing. :)
> Technical issues are in a sense easy. Working with messy human beings not so much. You can't really do metarationality unless you understand human beings and their interactions very well.
Yes... some of that coming up soon.
> And you can't do any of this if your personal life is in shambles
Ah, this is a very interesting insight! I hadn't quite seen that, but it makes total sense now that you point it out.
Maybe this is relevant to the debate in stage theory about "lag"—to what extent you have to advance in all domains in synchrony. The primary division of domains being the emotional/relational ones and the cognitive/practical ones. You're pointing out a reason these may have to progress in sync.
> Maybe this is relevant to the debate in stage theory about "lag"—to what extent you have to advance in all domains in synchrony.
I think that may be it! Your comment took me down memory lane, trying to reconstruct what happened to me and stage shift and lag seems like a model that applies directly.
Your comment clarified the nature an important personal event for me so thank you for that. I think this overlap of domains is important. For instance, for most "normal" people (i.e. NOT Elon Musk like overachievers), work is a subset of life and not the other way around. You can't do stage 5 work embedded in a stage 3/4 life. You might be able to manage it practically but it goes emotionally out of whack after a while. I was largely stage 3/4 in life in general but (I daresay) stage 5 in pure technical work. An encounter with a dakini put my stage 3/4 being into shambles and I just could not work properly for several years. (One reason why your dakini post was so intriguing.) I think I'm currently going from stage 3 -> 4 and 4 -> 5 in life domains outside of technical work.
That's all I can say in public. Let me know if gory details are useful and I'll DM you. But I learnt the nature of dakini encounters from you, so obviously you already know what this looks like!
> An encounter with a dakini put my stage 3/4 being into shambles and I just could not work properly for several years.
Fascinating! Yes, details would be useful in writing about this—I'm aiming to post it in about a week. Of course, I will keep the details confidential and check with you before discussing them even vaguely or generally. Currently, the post is based on a quite limited number of case studies, so to speak, and it would be good to know how common this is, and how experiences vary.
I appreciated the piss test. The historical backdrop was helpful. And personally, the phenomenology description of one taste was insightful, you helped unlock something in my own practice. It reminded me of how "nebulosity and pattern" point to hackneyed concept but somehow the wording soaks deeper. Thanks!
- “Insider” Western Buddhist perspective; many of the accounts I read from the period of time you described are either doctrinal Buddhist accounts or secular dharma, punk-rock style Buddhism-lite. I find accounts like yours are much rarer.
- A straightforward, honest approach to esoterica; people’s respect for what they consider sacred often leads to obfuscation, being unnecessarily mysterious. This may also just be people’s unwillingness to out themselves as unknowledgeable or inexperienced.
- An account of your personal relationship to Buddhist tantra, mixed with principle-and-function analysis of how tantra works; again, this is usually obfuscated in people’s accounts of tantric practice, I guess because thinking critically/skeptically about a practice is not something one is often encouraged to do as a devotee? Your account personalizes the approach, making it seem workable for others as well.
What to write next…after reading this and listening to your selfing podcast, I’m especially interested in the overlap between systematicity and enjoyment.
That is, actually enjoying the process of working in a system. I know how to create and modify systems, and find this enjoyable. But I’ve found I’ve suppressed (more like atomized, really) the self-part that initiates systematic work, because it was once quite the bully.
So when you described working so systematically so often that you sometimes become a kind of slave to the systems you’ve put in place (i.e.), I thought “Woah, I could use more of that!”
There is (as you know!) active discussion of this and related questions in the Evolving Ground Discord, and Ignacio Prado's _Vajrayana and Rationality_ group.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say that one reason (of several) I haven't joined in much is that I'm not good at this. I find it very difficult to maintain open awareness while in the doing of rational/systematic work. Not always impossible, and I believe people with much greater meditative experience than me who say they do it regularly, but I share the common experience that the modes are, by default, antithetical to each other.
There was a time when I had to read and understand a lot of 25-page contracts written in contract-ese. My meditation teacher said "I can't do that, my mind just slides off it when I try to read the stuff." I said "it's anti-meditation. In meditation practice [in the style she taught me], you whenever you notice yourself thinking, you let it drop and return to open awareness instead. In contract-reading anti-meditation, whenever you notice yourself drifting into open awareness, you let it drop and return to thinking."
I subscribed directly because of the piss test post.
I've been a long time reader of yours though, and had been thinking about subscribing anyway (I subscribe to far too many things and have to try and keep it under control).
Wanting to read the rest was enough to achieve "activation energy" for subscribing, but it was only the proximate cause :)
It wasn't "clickbait" though, I really liked it and I learned a lot. The rest of the post did deliver on the teaser.
I do think personal content can help with communicating complex ideas, in all sorts of ways, and you shouldn't ignore the success of this post - but also honestly this post was a nailed-on winner. You won't be able to get a combination like drinking piss and the Dalai Lama into everything :)
I confess, I wanted to know how the story concluded! But I've also found so many of your pieces helpful over the years, and you've always been very helpful when I've had the odd question.
Hello as a new subscriber, but long-time reader! I honestly loved reading The Piss Test, but also had the background context of reading Buddhism for Vampires and Vividness.live, and therefore had a more grounded idea of what to expect—as well as the existing trust that it wouldn’t be just clickbait. After getting such benefit from your work over many years it seemed fair to me to finally chip in and pay for some writing. I understand the reasoning behind why you paywalled it, but your surprise that it ended up being so popular is itself surprising to me. People love reading about breaking taboos and killing sacred cows.
I really appreciated both the detailed backstory on the state of Western tantra / the Dalai Lama’s statement and the spirit of practical experimentation in the post. It was quite enlivening and refreshing to me! As for what more I would want out of similar writing, I suppose I’m just fascinated by tantrika practice stories, but I don’t want to put pressure on you to share intimate information about your personal practice if that’s unwanted either.
> your surprise that it ended up being so popular is itself surprising to me.
You are right; I was being somewhat clueless.
In retrospect, I think that remembering all this history transported me mentally back into the world of white-people Tibetan Buddhism of twenty years ago. It was remarkably narrow-minded, paranoid, puritanical, and obsessed with religious status competitions. All completely opposite fundamental tantric principles, and what the texts recommend!
I'm really glad that world has mostly evaporated. Good riddance!
"you may find me interesting as a person, and read what I write (or listen) partly to learn more about me and feel a sense of connection." -- yes, and because it's a parasocial connection I try to redirect the energy I feel on reading your posts towards people I actually know in person. I so appreciate what I've gotten for free and your paywall serves as a useful boundary to remind me to turn towards the people in my life.
I subscribed a few days ago, not because of the piss test post (haven't even read it (yet)). I just recently got around to reading The Eggplant and realized that this is probably going to be the biggest upgrade for my mind since... IDK maybe ever? So I really wanted to get access to the paywalled parts of the ch4 drafts.
Wow, thanks, great to hear about your experience reading about meta-rationality!
And glad to know some people have recently subscribed for other reasons. There were so many sign-ups on the day of publication for that post that I've implicitly assumed all the follow-on ones were to read it too, but in retrospect that was mistaken.
Like others here, I've been reading your writings for years and finding immense personal value in them. It's been important to me, so it feels important that it continues being something that's happening in the world, available to benefit others as it's benefited me.
So yeah, even if the Piss Test paywall was something like click bait, for me, it wasn't so in a misleading way. It was more like a nudge to align my actions with my values.
After years of reading your work across Meaningness, Vividness, Buddhism for Vampires, and The Vetali's Gift, I trust that the blurb you wrote in your Substack bio is what the world is going to keep getting--one way or another--as people find your writing:
> Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
That's important to me, and you've delivered big time on that over and over again, for years.
Thank you.
The paywall in the Piss Test functioned like the messages I hear in various podcasts I listen to: "if you value this, and want to support its continuing, you can become a patron." I think that's a good model. When I hear those messages, I feel them as nudges to reflect on what I do value; and then, maybe, to act accordingly.
My subscription is a long overdue, money-vote to say "Yes, amen! Thank you. I hope this continues."
I liked the piss post, I think it delivered. I'm interested in how tantra looks in action: what do tantrikas do and experience, how does one think? What are some examples of it in life. (Later: what if I start thinking like that?).
Guess I'm also interested in your personal shifts and milestones because you've worked in some areas I've worked in, or passed through personal themes I recognize.
I think a lot about your stuff against cognitive science (even as I probably disagree in the end)
I had been on the fence for a while. I enjoy your writing on all your websites, but what I saw here mostly reiterated things I thought you had already explained enough—like the differences between rationality and metarationality. I felt like I understood that well enough that while I "ought" to subscribe to support your work, I never actually found the time to do so. I expected I would subscribe eventually when I saw something new to me.
I nearly signed up for the penicillin post, which promised an interesting story and examples illustrating potentially new-to-me aspects of metarationality. But that post promised to be detailed and I worried it might be too technical re: (bio)chemistry for me to follow. I have only a general education about and vague memory of chemistry, and I know/remember even less about biology. I came close but didn't get around to it.
The piss test, though, promised a story, a funny one, and to touch on the topic of enjoyment in vajrayana. It was mildly funny. I found it more interesting for the bits about enjoyment. I was familiar with other things you and Charlie have written about enjoyment and with a few Aro books that sometimes discuss related topics, and wanted to understand more. To give just one example: Ignoring other considerations that may be relevant, conventionally we prefer things we enjoy. But a successful practitioner could enjoy everything. So if one enjoys everything, how do preferences work? I have lots of questions like these and the post didn't directly answer them but it did shed some light on some of them. I think you did mostly deliver what you promised there.
Thank you very much for the detailed response, and for subscribing!
I think my takeaway from this experience is that it's useful to alternate among my various writing projects, interleaving progress on each, gradually.
> So if one enjoys everything, how do preferences work?
Well, these can separate. This doesn't require any special mediation, although that tends to accentuate it. If you pay close attention to experience, you will probably find that how much you enjoy something doesn't correlate perfectly with whether you prefer it.
An interesting example that was helpful for me was bruises I got when sparring in kung fu practice. I'd prefer not to get bruised, and it hurts, and I'd prefer not to hurt. However, I enjoyed the bruises anyway, because the sensation, and their appearance, was a constant reminder that I was doing something I found extremely cool.
And actually, paying close attention to the pain itself, it became interesting rather than aversive, and then actively enjoyable.
I see, thank you for clarifying about enjoyment! That's a good example. In hindsight, I feel like I should have been able to notice this. I find that often happens with meditation-related questions. I wonder why I didn't? Anyway, I found it helpful, so thank you.
I suspect what I have around this idea of enjoying everything is less a question and moreso general anxiety. Conventionally, that anxiety feels something like: What kind of person enjoys everything? What would that even be like? That doesn't sound very person-like at all. You'd have to be an alien---or a sky god. How would you even relate to people? That way of being sounds sounds scarily alien in the abstract---but also intriguing.
It sounds interesting, but also --- you drew a connection on Vividness, I think, between enjoyment and transformation and I'm not sure I fully followed that until now. None of this is new, but I found it helpful to spell it out.
A lot of how we talk about enjoyment and preferences confuses the two. People often justify art -- making it or viewing it -- in terms of enjoyment. "I'm writing this story for my own enjoyment," "This is a fun show." We connect in part based on (excused/limited by?) what we enjoy. We say things like, "I think you'd enjoy Death Race 2000." We avoid things on the basis (excuse?) they seem unpleasant or "unenjoyable." It seems obvious when it's pointed out---but (conveniently?) forgettable at other times.
Enjoying everything would seem to upset a lot of our conventional ways of being. A lot of our conventional justifications might evaporate, leaving behind the choices they carried. That sounds like part of the mechanism of how enjoyment leads to transformation---and why it might be scary. You might discover that you've become some kind of dinosaur man (https://lucykeer.com/notebucket/dinosaur-man-altruism/), and then what would you do?
> Enjoying everything would seem to upset a lot of our conventional ways of being.
Well... yes... most sources agree that "enlightenment" does that, in general :)
And "enjoying everything" is supposed to be a mark of enlightenment, according to some systems at least.
Tantra sometimes makes a big fuss about what a wrenching experience enlightenment is, and how it may leave you incapable of everyday functioning. I'm not a fan of that. It might be OK for elite monks who have a ton of social support, but not for us here now.
I aim to enjoy more things, including unexpected things, more often, and to retain everyday sanity.
Even if you have a Big Enlightenment Experience and are left in a state of helpless bliss for a couple years, eventually you are supposed to "return to the marketplace"; and "... and then there is a mountain again."
I didn't sign up because of the piss test -- I had signed up before that, pretty much in the same instant that I heard you would be writing on Substack. I appreciated both Meaningness and Vividness both for the content and for the candid and direct way in which the topics are presented. I liked the piss test for the same reason. I think what you said about both teachers and personal enlightenment was useful in general but especially from a Vajrayana point-of-view but I suspect it's a message not many practitioners would be willing to say in public. So it's not necessarily the writing style, per se, that I appreciate but the fact that you're a very smart guy, you notice things that not everyone notices, and you're willing to blurt them out in a way that's helpful, even at the potential cost of readers (although, as you've seen, not everyone is turned off by direct personal communication).
As a former STEM professional and a Dzogchen practitioner, I also appreciate the view you take in analyzing the issues you discuss. While I may not always agree with what you say, the language as well as the common interests which inform your viewpoint make it easy for me to see where you're coming from and how you came to your conclusions. I had the occasion to spend most of a day with a very long-time friend who had become a flat-earther since I last saw him and while our common love of philosophical discussion gave us plenty to talk about, I came away from the meeting no smarter than I was when I started. I've never had that feeling reading any of your articles or posts.
As to what to write next... I'm still following the metarationality stuff but just barely -- so that's probably the lowest on my list. I'd like to see how the protagonist fares in The VItaly's Gift but the recent sudden turn made me think you might be trying to finish that up quickly, which would be a shame because each of the earlier installments had it's own teaching value embedded inside. I'd be interested in hearing more about your random thoughts -- not necessarily about what to have for lunch today but things that are being tossed around on various discussion boards that you think might be completely missing an important point. I don't know how many of those might be possible but I'm sure there are a few things you've thought of and wondered "why isn't anyone talking about *this* aspect instead?".
Anyway... thanks for the candid writing and I hope you have fun doing it so that the stream continues.
Joe, thank you very much for the detailed reply! Feedback like this is really helpful for me.
> the recent sudden turn made me think you might be trying to finish that up quickly
Ah, no, not at all! It's a sword-and-sorcery novel, which means it has to be a trilogy. That's the rule. Also, there have to be big battle scenes, and much bigger magic than we've seen so far. And it's also a standard-issue Hero's Journey plot, which means there needs to be a descent into the underworld and a showdown with the Dark Lord and a triumphant return after personal growth. Also it's a romance novel, so there has to be a Royal Ball and a wedding at the end. All of that is yet to come! (And is on a spreadsheet.) Also there's a ton of deliberate plot loose-ends, like what happened to Surya's uncle, and what's this about a Final Quest, and who is "the young monk" the tale is told to and why, and wtf is the vetali up to anyway. All have answers (not yet written, but plotted.)
How much of that I'll ever get to remains to be seen... it's the project I'd most like to finish for my own enjoyment, so maybe if I prioritize that, it'll happen.
Since you asked…I have a different reason for reading and I’ve thought of upgrading several times but the content is not what I’m after, it’s watching how you deal/play/react/respond to everything.
I would recommend your writing to anyone because of the modeling that you are doing for metasystematic reasoning.
This type of modeling is hard to find because most will get stuck in context and content without being able to step back and watch you write.
I’ve often stepping back in my own cases of frustration or lack of knowing and attempting to understand why I do things as well.
Your comment in most recent post about figuring out what you want to really write about and why (paraphrased) reminded me of some months past my own reflection—about where I’m coming from when I’m teaching self-knowledge myself and went off into writing about my own worldview so I could see how much of my own bias is actually involved without me knowing it and to identify who I am as well—all good stuff and of course a work in progress—I’ll be interested to watch your journey;)
I’m just finishing a book up on inquiry, et al and I’ve been looking at it rationally as well as with metasysystematicity and it’s an interesting set of ideas to try to hit what might be an impossible mark…I sense that in your work as well and the reflection on it you may be doing for different reasons than mine—but nonetheless modeling it.
On a side note (metasystematically):
There are some folks in high energy physics et al who are attempting to show mathematically that a structure exists beyond spacetime…and for some of us ‘dominant intuitives’, we know this to be true because…;)
The reason I mention this is due to the idea that what seems to be attracting many of us to study a variety of things, including ourselves;) is what’s more…musk when asked what question he would ask an AGI: what’s beyond the simulation?
While we are stuck here sort of, it’s interesting to see the ways that some are approaching the more…like yourself…with a mindset of less?
In other works Holmes might be getting his figs….
Keep writing and thank you for allowing some of us to sit in your laboratory ;)
Lol, I somehow initially read "Plus: The Making Of" in the subtitle to refer to the making of Piss Buddha. And then was kind of relieved to realise it referred to something else, that's probably a level of insight into the artistic process we don't need :)
I'm liking the mix of stuff so far!
I'd been meaning to subscribe and this post just pushed me over the edge. Sensationalism sells, haha! The post was 'clickbait' in the sense that it was 'scandalous' but not in the sense that I felt cheated. Been around long enough to know what I was going to get. :)
I broadly divide your writing into two - things that are useful at 'work' (professional life, metarationality) and things that are useful at 'home' (personal life, selfing, vajrayana, shadow etc.). Being an introverted nerd, there is a lot of personal identification there. In my 20s, at the start of my career, getting a handle on technical work, becoming a 'good engineer' was very important. But with time, even at work, 'human issues' are becoming more and more important. I want to graduate from being just an engineer. Technical issues are in a sense easy. Working with messy human beings not so much. You can't really do metarationality unless you understand human beings and their interactions very well. And you can't do any of this if your personal life is in shambles, as I discovered through personal experience. So that's been the growth edge for me, not necessarily better technical understanding.
Like you, I value content over form. I'll read even if the writing was dry, though more entertainment isn't a *bad* thing. :)
> this post just pushed me over the edge
Oh, good! Thank you for subscribing.
> Technical issues are in a sense easy. Working with messy human beings not so much. You can't really do metarationality unless you understand human beings and their interactions very well.
Yes... some of that coming up soon.
> And you can't do any of this if your personal life is in shambles
Ah, this is a very interesting insight! I hadn't quite seen that, but it makes total sense now that you point it out.
Maybe this is relevant to the debate in stage theory about "lag"—to what extent you have to advance in all domains in synchrony. The primary division of domains being the emotional/relational ones and the cognitive/practical ones. You're pointing out a reason these may have to progress in sync.
> Maybe this is relevant to the debate in stage theory about "lag"—to what extent you have to advance in all domains in synchrony.
I think that may be it! Your comment took me down memory lane, trying to reconstruct what happened to me and stage shift and lag seems like a model that applies directly.
Your comment clarified the nature an important personal event for me so thank you for that. I think this overlap of domains is important. For instance, for most "normal" people (i.e. NOT Elon Musk like overachievers), work is a subset of life and not the other way around. You can't do stage 5 work embedded in a stage 3/4 life. You might be able to manage it practically but it goes emotionally out of whack after a while. I was largely stage 3/4 in life in general but (I daresay) stage 5 in pure technical work. An encounter with a dakini put my stage 3/4 being into shambles and I just could not work properly for several years. (One reason why your dakini post was so intriguing.) I think I'm currently going from stage 3 -> 4 and 4 -> 5 in life domains outside of technical work.
That's all I can say in public. Let me know if gory details are useful and I'll DM you. But I learnt the nature of dakini encounters from you, so obviously you already know what this looks like!
> An encounter with a dakini put my stage 3/4 being into shambles and I just could not work properly for several years.
Fascinating! Yes, details would be useful in writing about this—I'm aiming to post it in about a week. Of course, I will keep the details confidential and check with you before discussing them even vaguely or generally. Currently, the post is based on a quite limited number of case studies, so to speak, and it would be good to know how common this is, and how experiences vary.
I appreciated the piss test. The historical backdrop was helpful. And personally, the phenomenology description of one taste was insightful, you helped unlock something in my own practice. It reminded me of how "nebulosity and pattern" point to hackneyed concept but somehow the wording soaks deeper. Thanks!
Aspects of that post that were appealing to me:
- “Insider” Western Buddhist perspective; many of the accounts I read from the period of time you described are either doctrinal Buddhist accounts or secular dharma, punk-rock style Buddhism-lite. I find accounts like yours are much rarer.
- A straightforward, honest approach to esoterica; people’s respect for what they consider sacred often leads to obfuscation, being unnecessarily mysterious. This may also just be people’s unwillingness to out themselves as unknowledgeable or inexperienced.
- An account of your personal relationship to Buddhist tantra, mixed with principle-and-function analysis of how tantra works; again, this is usually obfuscated in people’s accounts of tantric practice, I guess because thinking critically/skeptically about a practice is not something one is often encouraged to do as a devotee? Your account personalizes the approach, making it seem workable for others as well.
What to write next…after reading this and listening to your selfing podcast, I’m especially interested in the overlap between systematicity and enjoyment.
That is, actually enjoying the process of working in a system. I know how to create and modify systems, and find this enjoyable. But I’ve found I’ve suppressed (more like atomized, really) the self-part that initiates systematic work, because it was once quite the bully.
So when you described working so systematically so often that you sometimes become a kind of slave to the systems you’ve put in place (i.e.), I thought “Woah, I could use more of that!”
There is (as you know!) active discussion of this and related questions in the Evolving Ground Discord, and Ignacio Prado's _Vajrayana and Rationality_ group.
I'm a bit embarrassed to say that one reason (of several) I haven't joined in much is that I'm not good at this. I find it very difficult to maintain open awareness while in the doing of rational/systematic work. Not always impossible, and I believe people with much greater meditative experience than me who say they do it regularly, but I share the common experience that the modes are, by default, antithetical to each other.
There was a time when I had to read and understand a lot of 25-page contracts written in contract-ese. My meditation teacher said "I can't do that, my mind just slides off it when I try to read the stuff." I said "it's anti-meditation. In meditation practice [in the style she taught me], you whenever you notice yourself thinking, you let it drop and return to open awareness instead. In contract-reading anti-meditation, whenever you notice yourself drifting into open awareness, you let it drop and return to thinking."
> “Woah, I could use more of that!”
I recommend Things.app!
(Or any similar GTD-style task management app, although I do like Things particularly.)
Thank you! Glad you liked it! This may help guide me in future writings on the topic.
I subscribed directly because of the piss test post.
I've been a long time reader of yours though, and had been thinking about subscribing anyway (I subscribe to far too many things and have to try and keep it under control).
Wanting to read the rest was enough to achieve "activation energy" for subscribing, but it was only the proximate cause :)
It wasn't "clickbait" though, I really liked it and I learned a lot. The rest of the post did deliver on the teaser.
I do think personal content can help with communicating complex ideas, in all sorts of ways, and you shouldn't ignore the success of this post - but also honestly this post was a nailed-on winner. You won't be able to get a combination like drinking piss and the Dalai Lama into everything :)
Thank you very much! And what you say here was great to hear, on all counts. Appreciated!
I confess, I wanted to know how the story concluded! But I've also found so many of your pieces helpful over the years, and you've always been very helpful when I've had the odd question.
All best, Daniel
Thank you, Daniel!
Hello as a new subscriber, but long-time reader! I honestly loved reading The Piss Test, but also had the background context of reading Buddhism for Vampires and Vividness.live, and therefore had a more grounded idea of what to expect—as well as the existing trust that it wouldn’t be just clickbait. After getting such benefit from your work over many years it seemed fair to me to finally chip in and pay for some writing. I understand the reasoning behind why you paywalled it, but your surprise that it ended up being so popular is itself surprising to me. People love reading about breaking taboos and killing sacred cows.
I really appreciated both the detailed backstory on the state of Western tantra / the Dalai Lama’s statement and the spirit of practical experimentation in the post. It was quite enlivening and refreshing to me! As for what more I would want out of similar writing, I suppose I’m just fascinated by tantrika practice stories, but I don’t want to put pressure on you to share intimate information about your personal practice if that’s unwanted either.
Hope this can be a useful anecdote for you.
Thank you, this was really helpful!
> your surprise that it ended up being so popular is itself surprising to me.
You are right; I was being somewhat clueless.
In retrospect, I think that remembering all this history transported me mentally back into the world of white-people Tibetan Buddhism of twenty years ago. It was remarkably narrow-minded, paranoid, puritanical, and obsessed with religious status competitions. All completely opposite fundamental tantric principles, and what the texts recommend!
I'm really glad that world has mostly evaporated. Good riddance!
"you may find me interesting as a person, and read what I write (or listen) partly to learn more about me and feel a sense of connection." -- yes, and because it's a parasocial connection I try to redirect the energy I feel on reading your posts towards people I actually know in person. I so appreciate what I've gotten for free and your paywall serves as a useful boundary to remind me to turn towards the people in my life.
I subscribed a few days ago, not because of the piss test post (haven't even read it (yet)). I just recently got around to reading The Eggplant and realized that this is probably going to be the biggest upgrade for my mind since... IDK maybe ever? So I really wanted to get access to the paywalled parts of the ch4 drafts.
Wow, thanks, great to hear about your experience reading about meta-rationality!
And glad to know some people have recently subscribed for other reasons. There were so many sign-ups on the day of publication for that post that I've implicitly assumed all the follow-on ones were to read it too, but in retrospect that was mistaken.
Like others here, I've been reading your writings for years and finding immense personal value in them. It's been important to me, so it feels important that it continues being something that's happening in the world, available to benefit others as it's benefited me.
So yeah, even if the Piss Test paywall was something like click bait, for me, it wasn't so in a misleading way. It was more like a nudge to align my actions with my values.
After years of reading your work across Meaningness, Vividness, Buddhism for Vampires, and The Vetali's Gift, I trust that the blurb you wrote in your Substack bio is what the world is going to keep getting--one way or another--as people find your writing:
> Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.
That's important to me, and you've delivered big time on that over and over again, for years.
Thank you.
The paywall in the Piss Test functioned like the messages I hear in various podcasts I listen to: "if you value this, and want to support its continuing, you can become a patron." I think that's a good model. When I hear those messages, I feel them as nudges to reflect on what I do value; and then, maybe, to act accordingly.
My subscription is a long overdue, money-vote to say "Yes, amen! Thank you. I hope this continues."
Thank you very, Mike! I really appreciate the appreciation.
I liked the piss post, I think it delivered. I'm interested in how tantra looks in action: what do tantrikas do and experience, how does one think? What are some examples of it in life. (Later: what if I start thinking like that?).
Guess I'm also interested in your personal shifts and milestones because you've worked in some areas I've worked in, or passed through personal themes I recognize.
I think a lot about your stuff against cognitive science (even as I probably disagree in the end)
I had been on the fence for a while. I enjoy your writing on all your websites, but what I saw here mostly reiterated things I thought you had already explained enough—like the differences between rationality and metarationality. I felt like I understood that well enough that while I "ought" to subscribe to support your work, I never actually found the time to do so. I expected I would subscribe eventually when I saw something new to me.
I nearly signed up for the penicillin post, which promised an interesting story and examples illustrating potentially new-to-me aspects of metarationality. But that post promised to be detailed and I worried it might be too technical re: (bio)chemistry for me to follow. I have only a general education about and vague memory of chemistry, and I know/remember even less about biology. I came close but didn't get around to it.
The piss test, though, promised a story, a funny one, and to touch on the topic of enjoyment in vajrayana. It was mildly funny. I found it more interesting for the bits about enjoyment. I was familiar with other things you and Charlie have written about enjoyment and with a few Aro books that sometimes discuss related topics, and wanted to understand more. To give just one example: Ignoring other considerations that may be relevant, conventionally we prefer things we enjoy. But a successful practitioner could enjoy everything. So if one enjoys everything, how do preferences work? I have lots of questions like these and the post didn't directly answer them but it did shed some light on some of them. I think you did mostly deliver what you promised there.
Thank you very much for the detailed response, and for subscribing!
I think my takeaway from this experience is that it's useful to alternate among my various writing projects, interleaving progress on each, gradually.
> So if one enjoys everything, how do preferences work?
Well, these can separate. This doesn't require any special mediation, although that tends to accentuate it. If you pay close attention to experience, you will probably find that how much you enjoy something doesn't correlate perfectly with whether you prefer it.
An interesting example that was helpful for me was bruises I got when sparring in kung fu practice. I'd prefer not to get bruised, and it hurts, and I'd prefer not to hurt. However, I enjoyed the bruises anyway, because the sensation, and their appearance, was a constant reminder that I was doing something I found extremely cool.
And actually, paying close attention to the pain itself, it became interesting rather than aversive, and then actively enjoyable.
I see, thank you for clarifying about enjoyment! That's a good example. In hindsight, I feel like I should have been able to notice this. I find that often happens with meditation-related questions. I wonder why I didn't? Anyway, I found it helpful, so thank you.
I suspect what I have around this idea of enjoying everything is less a question and moreso general anxiety. Conventionally, that anxiety feels something like: What kind of person enjoys everything? What would that even be like? That doesn't sound very person-like at all. You'd have to be an alien---or a sky god. How would you even relate to people? That way of being sounds sounds scarily alien in the abstract---but also intriguing.
It sounds interesting, but also --- you drew a connection on Vividness, I think, between enjoyment and transformation and I'm not sure I fully followed that until now. None of this is new, but I found it helpful to spell it out.
A lot of how we talk about enjoyment and preferences confuses the two. People often justify art -- making it or viewing it -- in terms of enjoyment. "I'm writing this story for my own enjoyment," "This is a fun show." We connect in part based on (excused/limited by?) what we enjoy. We say things like, "I think you'd enjoy Death Race 2000." We avoid things on the basis (excuse?) they seem unpleasant or "unenjoyable." It seems obvious when it's pointed out---but (conveniently?) forgettable at other times.
Enjoying everything would seem to upset a lot of our conventional ways of being. A lot of our conventional justifications might evaporate, leaving behind the choices they carried. That sounds like part of the mechanism of how enjoyment leads to transformation---and why it might be scary. You might discover that you've become some kind of dinosaur man (https://lucykeer.com/notebucket/dinosaur-man-altruism/), and then what would you do?
Anyway, thanks again!
> Enjoying everything would seem to upset a lot of our conventional ways of being.
Well... yes... most sources agree that "enlightenment" does that, in general :)
And "enjoying everything" is supposed to be a mark of enlightenment, according to some systems at least.
Tantra sometimes makes a big fuss about what a wrenching experience enlightenment is, and how it may leave you incapable of everyday functioning. I'm not a fan of that. It might be OK for elite monks who have a ton of social support, but not for us here now.
I aim to enjoy more things, including unexpected things, more often, and to retain everyday sanity.
Even if you have a Big Enlightenment Experience and are left in a state of helpless bliss for a couple years, eventually you are supposed to "return to the marketplace"; and "... and then there is a mountain again."
I didn't sign up because of the piss test -- I had signed up before that, pretty much in the same instant that I heard you would be writing on Substack. I appreciated both Meaningness and Vividness both for the content and for the candid and direct way in which the topics are presented. I liked the piss test for the same reason. I think what you said about both teachers and personal enlightenment was useful in general but especially from a Vajrayana point-of-view but I suspect it's a message not many practitioners would be willing to say in public. So it's not necessarily the writing style, per se, that I appreciate but the fact that you're a very smart guy, you notice things that not everyone notices, and you're willing to blurt them out in a way that's helpful, even at the potential cost of readers (although, as you've seen, not everyone is turned off by direct personal communication).
As a former STEM professional and a Dzogchen practitioner, I also appreciate the view you take in analyzing the issues you discuss. While I may not always agree with what you say, the language as well as the common interests which inform your viewpoint make it easy for me to see where you're coming from and how you came to your conclusions. I had the occasion to spend most of a day with a very long-time friend who had become a flat-earther since I last saw him and while our common love of philosophical discussion gave us plenty to talk about, I came away from the meeting no smarter than I was when I started. I've never had that feeling reading any of your articles or posts.
As to what to write next... I'm still following the metarationality stuff but just barely -- so that's probably the lowest on my list. I'd like to see how the protagonist fares in The VItaly's Gift but the recent sudden turn made me think you might be trying to finish that up quickly, which would be a shame because each of the earlier installments had it's own teaching value embedded inside. I'd be interested in hearing more about your random thoughts -- not necessarily about what to have for lunch today but things that are being tossed around on various discussion boards that you think might be completely missing an important point. I don't know how many of those might be possible but I'm sure there are a few things you've thought of and wondered "why isn't anyone talking about *this* aspect instead?".
Anyway... thanks for the candid writing and I hope you have fun doing it so that the stream continues.
Joe, thank you very much for the detailed reply! Feedback like this is really helpful for me.
> the recent sudden turn made me think you might be trying to finish that up quickly
Ah, no, not at all! It's a sword-and-sorcery novel, which means it has to be a trilogy. That's the rule. Also, there have to be big battle scenes, and much bigger magic than we've seen so far. And it's also a standard-issue Hero's Journey plot, which means there needs to be a descent into the underworld and a showdown with the Dark Lord and a triumphant return after personal growth. Also it's a romance novel, so there has to be a Royal Ball and a wedding at the end. All of that is yet to come! (And is on a spreadsheet.) Also there's a ton of deliberate plot loose-ends, like what happened to Surya's uncle, and what's this about a Final Quest, and who is "the young monk" the tale is told to and why, and wtf is the vetali up to anyway. All have answers (not yet written, but plotted.)
How much of that I'll ever get to remains to be seen... it's the project I'd most like to finish for my own enjoyment, so maybe if I prioritize that, it'll happen.
Since you asked…I have a different reason for reading and I’ve thought of upgrading several times but the content is not what I’m after, it’s watching how you deal/play/react/respond to everything.
I would recommend your writing to anyone because of the modeling that you are doing for metasystematic reasoning.
This type of modeling is hard to find because most will get stuck in context and content without being able to step back and watch you write.
I’ve often stepping back in my own cases of frustration or lack of knowing and attempting to understand why I do things as well.
Your comment in most recent post about figuring out what you want to really write about and why (paraphrased) reminded me of some months past my own reflection—about where I’m coming from when I’m teaching self-knowledge myself and went off into writing about my own worldview so I could see how much of my own bias is actually involved without me knowing it and to identify who I am as well—all good stuff and of course a work in progress—I’ll be interested to watch your journey;)
I’m just finishing a book up on inquiry, et al and I’ve been looking at it rationally as well as with metasysystematicity and it’s an interesting set of ideas to try to hit what might be an impossible mark…I sense that in your work as well and the reflection on it you may be doing for different reasons than mine—but nonetheless modeling it.
On a side note (metasystematically):
There are some folks in high energy physics et al who are attempting to show mathematically that a structure exists beyond spacetime…and for some of us ‘dominant intuitives’, we know this to be true because…;)
The reason I mention this is due to the idea that what seems to be attracting many of us to study a variety of things, including ourselves;) is what’s more…musk when asked what question he would ask an AGI: what’s beyond the simulation?
While we are stuck here sort of, it’s interesting to see the ways that some are approaching the more…like yourself…with a mindset of less?
In other works Holmes might be getting his figs….
Keep writing and thank you for allowing some of us to sit in your laboratory ;)
mike
Mike, thank you for a very interesting comment! And for subscribing.