Every now and then, one finds oneself in a cosmic struggle between two truths that have a hard time being seen at once. I’ve been in one of those for a few years, and thought I would try to describe what I see from my current position.
A story to help illustrate it: I was talking with a good friend of mine a few years ago, and he described a feeling that he was stuck in a pit, trying to get out, and asking others for help, and kept getting back this message to the effect of “you’re doing this to yourself. we can’t help you until you decide to stop doing it to yourself.” There was a sense that he was unworthy of even being considered for help without somehow changing first.
And I said: yeah. I see you in the pit. And on behalf of the universe, *we are doing what we can* to help you out of the pit, without you needing to fix yourself first. You are not unworthy. And also, our capacity is very limited right now—including that some people themselves are still confused about all this. And so to the extent that you CAN help yourself out of your pits, even a little, that helps bridge the gap and helps us help you. But if we knew how, we would meet you fully, exactly where you are, without demanding anything.
This view of mine was hard-won, having spent years struggling with a similar issue only to suddenly have this insight where I GOT that the kosmos contained a force that fully wanted to meet me where I was at, and I could tell that it did because *I was a participant in that force*—I could feel its will flow through me, in my desire to meet others where they were at. (And sometimes parts of me are others to other parts of me.).
And yet, over the years, both before and after this insight, I have tasted the other side of it. I’ve gotten glimmers of the truth in C.S. Lewis’s “the doors of hell are locked on the inside.” I’ve felt strain and struggle suddenly shift into eternal boundless perfection—perfection that, when I look in the rearview mirror, was there the whole time, through the struggle. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve arrived in such a place. And there was truth to “nobody else could do it for me”, truth that it involved letting go of my grievances without trying to sort them all out first, and truth that that loving presence was always there holding me and supporting me and rooting for me.
» read the rest of this entry »I was worried that due to time constraints, and also because of the current zeitgeist, that I was going to end up writing a short outline of my year and then getting Claude or some other LLM to expand it for me into a full post. But I currently don’t do that with any of my writing, and a yearly review post feels like almost the worst thing to do it with because part of the whole point is it’s just an expression of what’s going on for me, and the AI is not gonna be able to fill in the details accurately (unlike if it can interpolate some model or explanation) so I might as well just publish the outline.
Instead, however, I find myself dictating large chunks of this post using wisprflow transcription (which can keep up with me at >200wpm with background music!) plus a foot pedal keyboard with three buttons: [tab, dictate, and enter] while feeding my baby daughter. And that feels like a great place to start in terms of what has the year been like. My year has been a year characterized by coming into contact with nascent intelligence, notably:
The fact that Jess was pregnant was a detail omitted from last year’s yearly review, since we hadn’t told more than a few family and friends at that point. The previous year, I omitted the fact that we’d gotten engaged, for the same reason!
Anyway, the year thus began for the Ocean family with a sense of the water slowwwwly pulling back to create a massive wave that we knew would crash down and completely change our lives sometime in the summer.
how do we bootstrap from trust we already have, to the trust we want to have to thrive (and need to have for problems we care about)?
[This post written in about 15 minutes, as part of my new experiment in Writing It Live!]For a much much longer take on the same question, with more examples and angles, read my mini ebook How we get there: a manual for bootstrapping meta-trust.
If you like one-pager bullet-list style posts, I have more:
What if instead of falling madly in love, you fell sanely in love? Sanity is underrated. In particular, if you fall madly in love, you might find it hard to tell what to do about that love, eg whether to commit or get out. Retaining your sanity allows you to navigate that.
I don’t usually write listicles but this does seem like a pretty good format for summarizing many of the ideas that I’ve been developing over the last year and will be sharing in my upcoming course The Mating Dance: finding your center in courtship.
This question is more important than making the relationship succeed in any particular way. If you try to make the relationship become something in particular, but it doesn’t want to be, you’re inviting a world of suffering.
Put another way, the question is: what does this relationship naturally want to be? It might be that you’re totally fit to be intellectual companions or business partners, or you’re fit to be hot late-night lovers, but not fit to be spouses. And if you’re looking for a monogamous marriage to raise kids in, then any sexual or romantic relationship that obviously isn’t going to become that is uhhh… kind of in the way. But the intellectual companionship could be wonderfully supportive of that.
The fit question therefore also requires that you’re clear enough on how you want to live and raise kids and so on, that you can connect with someone else who wants to live that way. Or you need to make sure that you and your mating dance partner think similarly enough and are very capable of resolving differences, so that you can navigate that stuff.
If you don’t feel like enough for the other person, or you feel like they’re not enough for you, then back up until you both feel like enough. It’s not that you can’t challenge each other, but you don’t want to be feeling like every day you’re failing to live up to who the other person already expects you to be.
Some “too close” warning signs:
» read the rest of this entry »Have you done enough “dating indefinitely” and you want to get real about courting?
Or do you know a friend (or couple) in that situation: they’ve started seeing someone, and they’re serious about figuring out whether it’s a fit and not wasting time if it isn’t?
If so, I’ll encourage you to check out (or forward to them) my new online course, the first cohorts of which start next week: (Update: new sessions in July!)
The Mating Dance: finding your center in courtship
This course is not for most people, but fortunately most people don’t read my blog.
It’s for people who are asking the following questions and aren’t satisfied with platitudes or simple heuristics as answers, but instead want something they can ground in their sense of “I can tell for myself“.
Is this the right person? Are we moving too fast? Are we hesitating because of some generic fear of commitment or because there’s something we can sense isn’t a fit? Can we resolve this conflict or will it follow us forever?
These kinds of questions are what this course will help you learn to answer for yourself. I don’t have the answers—I have an approach for finding your own answers and helping your partner find theirs.
The Mating Dance is my first group offering where I’ll be sharing the practice of non-naive trust-dancing with people. (If you want help in a different context, you can book a 1-on-1 or 1-on-2 session with me here.)
I’m really excited to be doing this! I’ve already sold 30% of the tickets, and I’m hoping I can make more of my living from helping people have marriages as delightful as my own.
It turns out that the Non-Naive Trust Dance theory that I’ve been blogging about for the last 4 years makes more intuitive sense to most people when applied to courtship than other topics. In particular… in NNTD Q&A, I posited that maybe NNTD doesn’t matter that much except for people who are trying to do leading edge cultural stuff or dealing with some big trust repair situation.
But over the last year as I’ve gotten married and started to talk to more of my friends about their courtship processes and the kind of trust needed to create a stable bond between life partners… I’ve come to realize that even a relatively ordinary courtship demands a level of skill in non-naive trust-dancing that is (currently) extraordinary. And without this, many relationships end up getting stuck partway in the mating dance, unable to move forward or abort, or they end up committing despite major foundational issues.
Said one friend who read some of my writing on mating dances:
» read the rest of this entry »Ninth and final (for now) post in “I can tell for myself” sequence.
I know the secret to co-gnosis, aka “we can tell for ourselves”. In a sentence the secret is:
Nobody knows the secret, in the sense that nobody can simply say “I know how it works and this is it and if you’re not doing it then well idk what to tell you but it isn’t gonna work.” There is no once-and-for-all secret, articulable or ineffable.
Everybody knows the secret, in the sense that everybody is acutely sensitive to what it feels like for their sense of “I can tell for myself” to be respected in a dialogue, and so if you’re in a dialogue with them, then the secret of how to have “we can tell for ourselves” is right there inside the “I can tell for myself” and “you can tell for yourself”. It’s whatever satisfies both.
I’ve been having trouble finishing my “I can tell for myself” / gnosis sequence, and part of why it’s been hard is that my answer to the problem I spend the sequence framing is the same thing I’m already trying to point at in most of my posts. This is the meta-protocol all over again.
And so every time I went to write the conclusion to this sequence, it felt like it was just another post I’d been meaning to write for awhile and which might stand better on its own. Having said that, since we’ve built up some new ways of talking, let’s see if I can give some reflections on the meta-protocol puzzle in terms of “I can tell for myself” and “we can tell for ourself”.
I wrote in the previous post: merely getting everybody in touch with their own knowing isn’t enough. When multiple people are both operating from a grounded sense of what they know, they tend to avoid each other because they see things differently and either don’t know how or don’t want to bother sorting out those differences. It’s HARD. But it’s possible.
Bridging between what I can tell for myself and what you can tell for yourself is an additional skill beyond each of us being in touch with our respective knowings in the first place.
On further thought… it’s a bunch of skills.
» read the rest of this entry »I have a commitment that I made pretty strongly nearly 7 years ago, and then 3.5 years ago I sort of released it for myself, and even though I don’t particularly think anybody is holding me to it, it feels wise to formally release it. I would say I released it for myself in 2020 the moment I had my non-naive trust dance insight, but since it was a social commitment it feels right to withdraw it from the social sphere too. It’s good, in general, to follow through with commitments; it’s bad to keep pretending to be committed if it’s no longer alive. In this case I would say I realized that the commitment was both self-defeating (as in I could serve its purpose better by dropping it than by keeping it) and in some sense impossible as stated.
In 2021, I published “Mindset choice” is a confusion, which is precisely about this. In it, I describe how while committing to a project can make sense, committing to a way of seeing the world (except as a very bounded temporary experiment) has within it some basic confusion or commitment to not looking and not listening to things that might counter that way of seeing the world. It may be a useful stepping stone, but that doesn’t make it not a confusion.
In 2017, I had a taste of a new experience of easeful flow, that I tried somewhat unsuccessfully to point at in Towards being purpose-driven without fighting myself. The same day I had that experience, I tried to distill my clarity into something that would help me keep it, and wrote up a commitment that I then performed as a small ritual that evening with my learning community as witnesses (I also ritually repeated it daily for months while donning some rings and a necklace, as an attempt to enact it). I still stand by the spirit of the content of the commitment, but the tone of how I approached committing now strikes me as entirely antithetical to everything that was precious about the experience I tasted and loved so deeply.
This blog post is both a formal renouncement of that commitment, as well as a case study in the whole “Mindset choice” is a confusion insight.
The text of the 2017 commitment read:
I hereby commit (and hereby act on the basis of such commitment)
• to take myself and all others I am in relationship with seriously
as centers of experience, understanding, and agency, and from there
• to take response-ability for generatively re-interpreting
oscillating tensions into creative tensions &
double-binds into opportunities for shared laughter, and thereby
• to be access-able as a resource to collaborators
towards caring for the ongoing survival and thrival of humanity
I hereby uncommit to that, not because it’s not a good way to live, but because it’s the sort of thing that a commitment is not a good way to approach (as far as I can tell). Keep reading for more of my thoughts on this.
The context for how I got here today was that I was re-reading The Guru Papers—one of my all-time favorite books, which interestingly I would have first read in late 2016, relatively shortly before the experience of freedom/liberation in 2017 that plugged into this commitment. Specifically, today I was reading the chapter on addiction, which describes the inner struggle for control between some sense-of-self-that-is-good-in-terms-of-social-uprightness/superegos and some sense-of-self-that-seems-selfish-or-self-centered. The “goodself” and “badself”, although these names are tongue-in-cheek and more refer to what they tend to call themselves; in fact, both have both wholesome desires and self-destructive patterns.
And I was reading about their take on Alcoholics Anonymous…
» read the rest of this entry »By request, a published resource elaborating slightly on my response to a question a friend asked in a groupchat:
A lot of advice is some variation on “express your feelings to not be haunted by them forever,” but what do people mean by ‘express’ here? On one end there is being alone in a room and naming the feeling silently in your head, on the other end is telling your married boss you’re crushing on them, in between is stuff like journaling or going into the woods to scream and writhe or talking it out with a friend.
One model is that the key is to “let yourself fully feel the feeling” and the relevant sense of expression is whatever moves you towards that. Another is that feelings are for taking action in the world so apply appropriate thoughtfulness and discernment to avoid being rash and stupid but ultimately figure out what this trying to make you do and do it, and that will be the relevant expression. Does anybody find this advice helpful and wanna try to convey what it actually means for me?
From my perspective, there’s:
I’m calling these loops because they all have a kind of feedback loop quality to them, even though the feedback is quite subtle. There’s a sense of something landing.
The first loop is about cultivating the sense of “I mean what mean“. Articulating something. Modifying it if it isn’t quite right. Trying again. Saying it out loud and feeling if it resonates. Getting to the point where you’re like “Yeah! THAT!”
Think of a time when you try to explain something to somebody, and they didn’t get it. Whether that was a model or a framework, or some emotional or relational thing or whatever.
» read the rest of this entry »My 2023 was unequivocally awesome.
It’s a testament to the ways in which having a few key things go right makes any other mistakes or problems or challenges feel navigable.
I started 2023 with a theme in mind, which was Allowing Diligence. Coincidentally, like my friend’s year theme “Play With Responsibility”, this has a dual meaning:
One of the things I had in mind when I oriented to allowing myself to have diligence was that I’d get more on top of my email inbox, which for the past few years has been more like a stream I’d dip into every couple of days to glance for possibly-relevant-and-actionable items, and a repository of things I might search for. I’ve had a few alerts for specific kinds of emails, including any replies to messages I’ve sent, but otherwise… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And last year for some reason I felt like it was a good time to get on top of stuff. I intended to be diligent, set up some new systems, have consistent routines or habits…
I failed at this. I’m as on top of my email as I was a year ago. And… I’m okay with that. Maybe at some point I’ll get inspired to rejigger my email system, but it doesn’t feel like something I want to make a point of doing.
Part of why I’m okay with my distant relationship to email was that I had the experience a few times of telling people about it and hearing them get hugely envious. Somehow I’m getting away with not checking my email. I feel it too, when I say it: a bit cheeky. High status, like Christopher Nolan, who famously does not have an email address (obviously somehow he has an assistant or something). Sometimes I drop balls, but on the whole this has been worth it for me in order to not be addicted to inbox zero, which has happened to me many times in the past. It’s compelling, but a to-do list that anybody can put stuff on is a distraction from proactive intentionality. Obviously there could be better solutions, but for now, this is mine. If you want to reach me, DM me on twitter or text.
Part of me is tempted to say that this conclusion was a win by the other meaning of Allowing Diligence: having diligence about allowing. But it’s not really the main point in that direction either! But I did perhaps get better last year at allowing the reality that I can fail at stuff.
I figured it would be appropriate to make this year’s post image using an AI image generator, since those really took off this year. This is an image I generated sometime in December, not for something but just as part of moodboarding & envisioning something about the vibe I want my life to have, and it’s apt for this post. Regarding images, you’ll see various photos below, many of which are contextualized by the adjacent paragraphs but some aren’t. They’re all basically in chrono order though. Think of it as a way I’m saving a few thousand words.
In my yearly review last year (2022: Deepening in a Different Direction) I noted how the editorializing process leaves out details for various reasons, and how that had historically included any of my struggles that I hadn’t figured out how to frame (read: rationalize) in a positive optimistic light. And before I can talk about what happened last year in anything resembling chronological order, I need to fill you in on something that happened in 2022 but which I left out of the blog post, that shaped the arc of my entire 2023:
» read the rest of this entry »Part 8 of “I can tell for myself” sequence. Previously: The eyes-open student: “I can see things my teacher can’t acknowledge”.
The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points.
— Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the messes wouldn’t end if we could just somehow get everybody (within some context) to have grounded confidence in their sense of “I can tell for myself” even when others say something that seems to contradict it (or find enough people who already have it and herd them into the same room).
Instead we get new messes!
If I can tell for myself that “X”, and you can tell for yourself that “Y”, and it seems to us that it’s not possible for both X and Y to be true at the same time, then we’re going to be pretty stuck! The resulting communicational impasses can be pretty intense, depending on what’s at stake (and how emotionally resilient participants are, such that physical stakes feel more or less gripping). I described above how it tends to play out when there’s a major power imbalance on some relevant axis. What happens when there’s not?
When the conflict isn’t too central, what happens is: they have relationships that work out. This is pretty good! They have enough overlap in what they each want, and how they each already see the world, that they’re able to found a company together or get married and have kids, or co-run a community or some other kind of project, or just be lifelong friends. There may be other arenas where they don’t see eye-to-eye, and can’t figure out how to bridge, but those arenas are sufficiently inconsequential to the relationship that they can be ignored (or periodically explored in a low-stakes way, as friends sometimes do with philosophical questions).
But when the conflict is at the core of their identity and/or purpose and/or worldview (which is broadly the case when we’re talking about spiritual teachers and/or those who are aiming to discover and embody pragmatically & philosophically workable answers to life’s big questions (I count myself as one of these))… well, I may be missing something, but as far as I can tell what usually happens is, oddly: “nothing”. The really high-self-trust people just don’t interact that much. They keep to their own contexts where nobody is self-trustfully challenging their worldviews that are based on generalizations of their direct-knowings. They run their training center, or monastery, or company, or online community, or whatever, where their wisdom can flow and so can others’… to the extent it doesn’t contradict theirs. These contradictions may not even be on the level of “what’s so”; they can even just be “what’s relevant”.
» read the rest of this entry »