My friends Harmony, Sahil, and James created a practice for relating called Stemless. They’ve written about it here. The core question of Stemless is “what does it take to own your experience?” Stemless is not prescriptive about how to do this, merely insistent that you keep attending to the question.
Unlike practices like Circling, in Stemless you don’t particularly try to own your experience by using stems like “I have a story that…” or translating your sense of betrayal into a body sensation plus a request or whatever. Instead, you’re invited to recognize the shocking fact that we are all in some ways exquisitely owning our experience simply by having it and by acting from it at all. Very dzogchen-flavoured (and, I think, -inspired).
There’s something about it that feels deeply relieving. Some sense of “wow, the right hemispheres just get to talk now, and the left hemispheres are a bit confused but along for the ride.” And a sense that it immediately gets to the meat of what’s actually going on, rather than caught up in endless preamble. Clarification is done not by backing up and pinning meaning down, but by beholding it in all of its nebulous glory and then saying whatever needs saying give however things seem to be landing.
And it’s not exactly a skill so much as a stance, although there are perhaps skills that can help scaffold the process of shifting stances.
In Dream Mashups, I write:
Everyone is basically living in a dream mashup of their current external situation and their old emotional meanings. Like dreaming you’re at school but it’s also on a boat somehow. And as in dreams, somehow the weirdness of this mashup goes unnoticed.
Stemless is about noticing the weirdness directly and bringing the emotional meaning into the foreground—at least for yourself, possibly also out loud. “I’m sitting in a classroom and the prof has tried to answer another student’s question, but he didn’t understand the question, and I’m supposed to re-ask the question but better, to get clarification.” That’s a thing I said at one point during tonight’s session.
It’s in part about noticing the supposing process, that creates the supposed-tos. Someone says something, or does something—or outside of a conversation, I notice something or read something—and I feel compelled to respond in a particular way. Quick: what is the scene I have just cast on the situation, such that that’s obviously the next move? You can’t tell me what mine is, although you have whatever you’re sensing and it might shine some light for me.
Leaning into blame
One playful thing that the Stemless hosts encourage is leaning into blame. One way to really see the situation you’re in is to find the way in which you feel a totally helpless victim—where reality is just forcing you to perceive things a particular way and there’s nothing you can do about it.
What will happen if you don’t say something immediately in response to what someone else said? It depends on the person or the situation, but various answers might be:
And then you can ask “why’s that a problem? who’s going to punish me? where is this urgency coming from? who’s forcing me to respond this way?”
Not to disagree with it or try to shift it, per se, just to take it as object and allow it to more fully exist as the force that is compelling you. Although indeed, once you bring it into conscious awareness, you’ll often find that the urgency vanishes and the compulsion fades. After all, if you’re doing something to please your mom and she isn’t even in the same timezone as you, well, maybe you will find that you don’t have to do it quite so urgently.
The point is not to enact the blame, but to see how the world you experience is pre-generated by a bunch of stories you don’t remember choosing. By externalizing the sense of where that all came from, you can see it more clearly than if you go looking for your interpretations as something you are already aware of doing. Your interpretations will just feel like reality. Your sense of things.
There’s a common trope in spiritual or personal development circles that what someone says about you says more about them than it does about you. Sometimes this will even be stated as the extreme “it has nothing to do with you; it’s all about them.” This is a confusion, in my view; if it weren’t for you doing what you’re doing, they’d be projecting some completely different weird thing onto you.1
But there’s also a deep truth to it worth seeing, and Stemless does a great job of pointing at that truth in direct experience, and actually taking it seriously.
“If that’s so…” it says… “…if everybody can’t help but speak only out of their own entire momentary visceral crazy world with even the smallest utterance… then what are we doing pretending there’s any such thing as small talk, or any such thing as real judgment?”
Someone just said a thing to you that feels kinda underhanded. Well, they may have not been honest on a surface level, but they’ve actually revealed to you in high-resolution their own construal of the situation by the precise way in which they avoided showing themselves. And then you feel some whole sort of way about that, because of all of the past experiences you’re projecting onto it in order to make sense of it. And that’s all going on in vivid detail for you—and maybe if you turn your gaze quickly enough you can glimpse it before you’re just acting into the story.
Right now: what is your situation? You’re at the end of reading a blog post, whether on my site or in your email inbox or some reader. What does that mean? What are you compelled to do right now? How does this last, more direct addressing of your situation change that from what it might have been if I’d ended with the previous paragraph? Can you glimpse it?
Samesidedness refers to that lovely experience when you’re navigating some sort of interpersonal problem and instead of fighting/arguing etc, the experience is one of being on the same team trying to figure out what to do about the problem. There are various things that can get in the way of samesidedness, one of which is being too close, ie tolerating being involved with someone to a degree that is unworkable. But a different one is that you have a mistaken assumption that it won’t be possible to come to an outcome where both/all parties can be deeply satisfied at the same time. This exercise is intended to help with that. You can do it solo, prior to having a difficult conversation, or you could have a group do it together if there’s buy-in for that.
Consider what you want in relation to this situation: your careabouts.
You might just mentally enumerate them, or if you have a journal handy you might write them down.
Note that your concept of your careabouts is not the actual careabouts. You in some sense don’t actually know the full shape of your careabouts in advance, but on some level you know what you’re aiming for. The words are not the thing—someone might do something that theoretically matches some description you made of what you wanted, and that doesn’t mean “now you should feel satisfied.” It’s possible to be profoundly satisfied and profoundly surprised-by-how-that-happened at the same time. With sufficient skill at non-naive trust-dancing, it can even be common.
Get in touch with how it would feel for you to have all of your relevant careabouts be completely satisfied, and ground in the sense of how much you truly want that for yourself. Spend only the minimum attention needed imagining the details of how the careabouts get satisfied that you need to feel that satisfaction.
If some part of you objects, then try to include the objection itself inside what wants to be satisfied! For example, if the objection is “that would be naive,” then you could say “okay, maybe there are some versions of that would be naive. How would it feel to have these careabouts satisfied in a way that was not naive?” Or if the objection is “if I were completely satisfied, that would necessarily mean someone else were suffering as a result,” then you might include that with “clearly also one of my careabouts here is that other people not suffer in order for me to be satisfied. So suppose that somehow I achieve that—all my careabouts are satisfied, and other people aren’t burdened by that at all.” (Anyway, handling such objections is a huge topic on its own, but for now I’ll just say “do your best” and “it’s a learning process; it’s okay if you’re having difficulty!”)
Tap into what the other peoples’ careabouts might be. Not in that much detail, but a general sense.
What would have come up for them in step 1?
Imagine how the other people involved might feel if they also had their careabouts completely satisfied. Even more so here, don’t pay too much attention to how, yet.
While doing so, maintain the sense that you could also be completely satisfied.
You might find more objections here, particularly ones about an apparent impossibility of satisfying their careabouts while also satisfying your own. To those, you can say, “Yes, it may be impossible, given the available resources or even in some absolute sense, but suppose it were possible for me to be deeply satisfied and for the other person to be deeply satisfied. How would that feel?”
Orient to the actual situation and start trying to understand together what the collective set of careabouts are and how you might go about satisfying all of them.
Unless you’re in a leadership position or otherwise empowered to just call the shots in this situation, then ultimately you’d need to do this phase together, but you can also simulate it if you’re journalling before a conversation. If you’re doing that, I’d encourage you to question your assumptions about what the other person wants. “What is this really about for them?” Consider that you might really not know. This humility may also help you realize that even if you can act autonomously here, you might want to learn more first.
The important thing is that each person pays attention to their sense of what would actually deeply satisfy their own careabouts, and being willing to be surprised and update their concept of what they want or what the other person or people want. For instance, you might think you want to do a particular thing, only to realize that much more salient is a need to be heard and understood by someone about that thing not having happened at some time in the past, and that once you feel heard, you discover that in fact your original careabout doesn’t need any further addressing.
Tips for use: This practice is intended for use in relation to interpersonal conflict, though it can also be useful for internal conflict, as well as in general. It’s probably best to practice it with a concrete conflict first—something that can be well-described with a physical quantity—before trying it on a conflict about meaning, relationship, identity, or situations involving feelings like “I don’t feel heard” or “I feel betrayed.” The practice is also probably easier if it’s about a relatively fresh or new situation, although with sufficient skill and capacity it should be helpful for things tangled with resentment or regret as well.
This exercise maps onto the 3SED (3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue) technique, which is essentially the same process but for “what you know and understand” rather than “what you care about“. It’s for frame battles rather than object-level fights.
(another ~20 minute onepager. read the other posts written in this style here. for a longer take on the 3SED process and how to DO each of the steps, read the secret to co-gnosis)
(this post was written in about 20 minutes, in the “onepager” genre: my friend Visa’s challenge to explain your thing rapid-fire. my others: Non-Naive Trust Dance, Evolution of Consciousness, Bootstrapping Meta-Trust)
Yesterday I published hostility is a sign of too-closeness, which featured my response to a friend from my former community, about his desires for the logistics and culture of a co-living house he was creating. In that post, I talked about how blame can be downstream of people pretending they are a good fit for living together (or working together, or whatever) when they actually have some real conflict or incompatibility that they’re trying to convince themselves they have to put up with, but on some level they know they don’t have to… which turns to hostility.
In this post, I continue my response, reflecting on a more specific phenomenon central to the puzzle of living together: how do you talk about the dishes? …and have it work out. And not just the dishes but the dozens of other places where your patterns of life will need to interface smoothly for living together to feel good. Even for people who are very compatible, there will still be points of tension and friction, and you’ll need to figure out how to talk about those.
So. One of my friend’s desires for the shared purpose / culture of the space was:
impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
And below is my response:
First of all I want to name how vital this is for sane living—how crazymaking it is to be living with someone and unable to acknowledge simple impacts without it either turning into “so you hate me” or getting rounded to “nbd whatever”. And largely we all know this in the extended upstart scene, but since I’m a bit of an apostate these days it feels worth making explicit that YES, THIS MATTERS, and I see that it matters, and am speaking from there.
So then given that this bullet as described is clearly ideal, how do you handle situations where that isn’t working? What does the pathway look like to get from not-flowing to flowing? Merely intending this doesn’t necessarily make it happen.
It seems to me that the situations where blame comes up can be described in a few different ways, both as distinct situations and as distinct understandings/framings of those situations, where the language used to understand them has an effect.
So: a few ways impacts can be received:
Breaking these down a bit, with their implications:
» read the rest of this entry »I’ve found it surprisingly powerful to reframe statements of the form “it is so” into “I can’t trust that it’s not so”. It’s not just because this is an I-statement: “I think this is so” doesn’t have the same effect, and “I know this is so” certainly doesn’t.
It’s because “it is so” is an attempt to foreclose the possibility space, whereas “I can’t trust that it’s not so” or “if that’s so, I don’t know it” leaves the sense of shared knowledge open. In fact, arguably it’s less that it leaves it open and more that it pushes it open.
In my “I can tell for myself” sequence, I talk about personal gnosis, by which I don’t mean anything particularly metaphysically profound or perfectly true, but simply the capacity to know directly, rather than knowing something because somebody else told you and you believed them.
What unforeclosing statements do is they say “it may be so, but I cannot tell for myself”. And, in the face of someone asserting such a thing, this implies further “and I will not (perhaps cannot) take your word for it.”
“Look, I’m not saying he’s untrustworthy, or that you shouldn’t trust him. I’m just saying, that even given everything you’ve said, I still don’t trust him.” (And, therefore, we don’t coherently trust him.)
“Oh is that so? I haven’t heard of it.” (I’m not refuting your sentiment, but I’m adding zero sense of knowing towards it, and I’m allowing your statement into the space but not letting it become new common knowledge now that you’ve said it.)
Consider the difference between:
The former is clearly “fightin’ words”, whereas the latter leaves space for the absence of knowledge to be filled in: “ah, you do care, I just didn’t see it because I was assuming that if you cared you would do XYZ and you weren’t.”
Here’s an even more extreme example—note that the parity of negation is the same in both of these sentences! They don’t express opposing denotations. Both are saying “you are not clearly guilty”.
In a way, the simplest form is just when someone asks “are they together?” and gets the reply “uhh they’re not not together“. This isn’t explicitly about the speaker’s ignorance, but it is saying “look, the idea that they’re not together is not one I’m going to agree with”. But it doesn’t foreclose in the way that “they’re together” does.
That’s the entirety of this idea: an unforeclosing statement is one that expresses what you don’t know, rather than expressing that you do know something. And it’s a meaningful (and sometimes critical) contribution to the common knowledge space, even though what it does is to reduce the sense of common knowledge.
» read the rest of this entry »My first post attempting to deconstruct objective & subjective was >10 years ago, and at that time I tried to fit objective into subjective. It now seems to me like the whole thing is confused. So what are we to make of the nature of knowing? John Vervaeke uses the fancy word “transjective”. Whatever is, it’s relational, it’s perspectival, it’s a kind of interface. I like Don Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception a lot, which is one of several inspirations here. Perspective is interfaces all the way fractal.
Thoroughly deconstructing a duality requires, from my perspective, offering a better answer to the sorts of situations that would be inclined to reinvent the duality. Here’s my latest: instead of objective-vs-subjective, consider two modes of relating to intersubjectivity. The modes are:
These are a kind of co-epistemological equivalent to Heidegger’s distinction between how a tool feels when you’re using it—transparent, obvious, unremarkable, like an extension of yourself—vs when it’s broken and you’re trying to fix it—opaque, problematic, exceptional, self-conscious. It’s just here, the “broken tool” is the conversational interface between you: the shared sense you’ve been making of things.
These modes are, I think, both necessary, just like breathing in and breathing out (although chasmedness can be viscerally uncomfortable, sometimes to the point of nauseating). They show up on different levels of abstraction, and to different degrees. On a relatively trivial level, consider this ordinary exchange:
» read the rest of this entry »Charles: want to come over on Saturday afternoon?
Sharon: I can’t, I’m spending the day at Katelyn’s.
Charles: wait, huh?? Katelyn is in Minneapolis all month!
Sharon: [any of]• yeah she is but I said I’d go over and take care of a bunch of her house stuff
• ahh, yeah no, she had to come back early because her kid got sick
• wait really? we made the plans a long time ago, maybe she forgot…
• whaaaa…? ohh, haha! no, Katelyn Jones, not Katelyn MacPherson
(originally written mid-2023)
my close friend & colleague Michael Smith asked me
Question for you: In terms of Donald Hoffman’s interface interpretation thing, have you found a way to suss out how different someone else’s interface really is? Like, a way around the freshman philosophy problem of “Do you experience what I call ‘red’ as what I’d call ‘blue’, but you just call it ‘red’ too?” But deeper. Like, I wonder whether “thing” and “other” and “space” are coded radically differently between people. I’d expect that your perspective-taking practices might have hit on something there. So I’m curious.
The short answer is pretty well-articulated by @yashkaf here, but of course we can do a longer answer as well!
My overall sense is that first order human perception is in some important sense pretty similar (certainly compared to the similarity between a human and a bat, or a human and a grasshopper), although of course blind people are in a very different world. This is what allows us to maintain the illusion that it’s NOT all an interface.
Yet simultaneously, our experiences of everything are radically, radically different to a degree that is hard to fathom. Hoffman completely dissolves “Do you experience what I call ‘red’ as what I’d call ‘blue’, but you just call it ‘red’ too?” There is never a “is your red my red?” in the abstract. That’s like asking “is this apple that apple?” like uhh no they are different apples.
And thus in some ways, my red actually has more in common with my own blue than it does with your red. Both of my colors are entirely composed of all of my own experiences.
However, of course, your and my “red” are more compatible than my “red” and “blue”, for many reasons that are obvious but I’ll say them anyway:
» read the rest of this entry »This post is a case study of the phenomenon described in Coalitions Between are made by Coalitions Within. If you haven’t read that post, this post may seem vague, but I’m talking about a very precise phenomenon. Having said that, if you like to start with concrete examples before moving to abstractions, you may enjoy starting here instead!
While working on that piece of writing, I had a fascinating conversation with a Born-Again Christian guy preaching with a megaphone at a Sunday fair. While my wife went to get the car, I approached him to find out what his deal was.
Fun fact about me: I’ve long found it helpful to talk to street preachers once a year or so, as a gauge on my ability to stay relaxed and grounded and open-minded while talking with someone who is trying to persuade and argue with me. This guy in particular was very aggressive compared to eg the chill Jehovah’s witness in Alamo Square last year… both in his use of the megaphone and in his loud declarations that everybody was sinners and needed to repent.
I opened with a simple question: “What does ‘repent’ mean?” He talked about it as a turning, a change of heart—and clarified that of course he meant the specific change of heart of accepting Jesus. Implied but not stated was that this also would include accepting and following the moral interpretations of the Bible that his particular church adheres to.
Rather than endure the tedium of him trying to convince me to change in some particular unlikely way, I figured I’d make much more headway in mutual understanding by asking him about his story of repentance.
He described his pre-conversion life as “living sinfully” — naming things like alcoholism, gambling, lying — a collection of self-destructive behaviors. And he felt totally out of control, and out of nowhere tried praying for relief, and suddenly had a breakthrough where by the Grace of God he became a righteous man (and joined some nearby available church).
It seems to me that essentially enough parts of him recognized that this shift would be a net win, compared to his existing self-destructiveness, that a new inner coalition was able to form and rule his psyche—with the support of this church etc. Which is not to say that all of his subsystems are happy with the new situation, but it’s at least a stable struggle, not a total race to the bottom. Christianity, classically centers around a struggle with temptation—found extensively in the writings of both Paul and Augustine, whose conversion stories could also make very interesting case studies for fractal coalition theory, and may yet.
I asked how it reached him, where his sense of conviction came from. He said he grew up hearing about the gospel—people came door to door to their house. I asked why he went with street preaching, because it seems like maybe the door-to-door thing would work better. He said they’d tried a lot of different things. I’m not sure how they were measuring their success but on that level it sounded kind of empirical.
I asked him about his theory of change: given the intention to convert people, why did he think the best approach was to yell loudly to people who seemed uninterested?
» read the rest of this entry »On the previous episodes of Fractal Coalitions Theory…
In the second post, I tell the story of a group of people attempting to create a kind of all-welcoming evolving meta-coalition, but which was systematically unable to welcome certain perspectives, and instead seemed to incentivize me to repress those. In this post I’m going to talk about what happened when I noticed this was happening, and how that played out over the following years.
(This post may not make much sense without the previous one; the first one is less critical.)
Up until my “Non-Naive Trust Dance” insight in 2020, I had oscillated between two broad coalitions:
This structure maps loosely onto what The Guru Papers calls “goodself” and “badself”. This is ironic because part of the whole aim of the culture was be post-dualistic, not talking in terms of good or bad, but it turns out that if you try to get rid of certain ideas on a conceptual level, you don’t necessarily get rid of the underlying dynamics of social power and perspective.
(Of course, there were other moments when if you asked why I was doing what I was doing, the answer would have been orthogonal to this: eg “I’m trying to win this ultimate frisbee game” or “I’m figuring out whether today is a good day to get groceries” or “I’m trying to grow my business”. Although sometimes even in such cases there would have been some sense of “and I’m doing this collaboratively (or not)”.)
And in spring of 2020 I realized that I was going kind of crazy oscillating between these two views, and desperately prayed for some sort of way to hold them both at the same time. And, after a few months of grappling with my confusion, I was graced with an insight that I’ve come to refer to as my “NNTD insight” (NNTD stands for “non-naive trust dance”).
The NNTD insight in large part consisted of:
» read the rest of this entry »
