The bulk of this post is a letter I wrote to the other members of a team I’d been on for years, but since it begins in the middle of things, I’ll lay out a bit of context here first. Feel free to skim it if you already know much of the context or just want to dive into the meatier part. (I say “meatier” in part because communication into a specific situation is often more evocative in general, and also because I was feeling quite inspired and in touch with new insight when I wrote the letter itself, compared to writing this backstory.)
In late 2016, I started working with my friend Benjamin Carr on some projects related to my intentionality app business, which was at the time known as Complice and is now known as Intend. We explored a few different projects, and the one that had the most staying power was a workshop series we started running, which was called the Goal-Crafting Intensive (GCI). The team was organized in a very loose way—we often decided how to split the profits we’d made after the workshops rather than before. It had a vibe of sort of a family business, reflective of the fact that Benjamin and I were living together when we started it, and that over the years as we tapped our romantic partners for help, they ended up taking on substantial roles on the team, although at first mostly not directly getting paid, for various reasons.
In a way, from my perspective, those early years saw us running mostly on vibes and implicit precedent, rather than on clear agreement, and that was satisfyingly flexible but also sometimes left unclarity about decisions. Benjamin and I mostly saw each other as equal cofounders/co-owners (though from an economic perspective he was a contractor working for me, and I controlled most of our non-financial resources as well, such as the websites). This was a bit confusing when we would sometimes try to use Peter Koenig’s Source model, which states very plainly that any initiative has exactly one person as its source.
One of the things that was messy about the situation is that it seemed pretty clear to me that I was the Source, in the sense of having taken the first risk and in the sense of continuing to feel a pretty strong sense of ownership over certain key aspects of the project… and yet by a few years in, I was also least excited about the project, which was a conundrum that was also kind of hard to acknowledge.
Anyway, in 2022, following multiple of those romantic relationships ending, we discerned that for the time being we were willing to keep working together, but that we needed to make things a bit more professional and formal, so we came up with an agreement for dividing the money we made from each workshop, based in part on the work of organizing each workshop session and in part on historical contributions. When Mary first took a sabbatical and then left the team in early 2023, the remaining team members continued giving her a small contribution in recognition of the role she played getting things off the ground.
In mid-2023, we found ourselves realizing that we wanted to overhaul the workshop content, and the overall framing of it, which we started calling the Beyond Goals Intensive (instead of the Goal-Crafting Intensive), to acknowledge that a lot of the approaches we were most excited about were no longer specifically oriented to goal-setting—although they continued to be based on getting clear about what you want in life. And, largely given my aforementioned lack of excitement, the other team members—Benjamin, Sarah, and Teresa—did most of the work on that (with me giving a bit of input).
We launched that for New Years 2024, and the conversations around money in the context of the overhaul led me to realize that I wanted out—and had sorta wanted out for awhile but was afraid to say it. But it was increasingly unignorable to me that I needed to reclaim my attention for other things and get more space from a work context that I’d started when I was at a different phase of my life. And on some level it was more obvious that there could be enough momentum without me to make it work. But my first attempts to instantiate this change were confusing and contradictory, and left things in a kind of stuck mess. I was simultaneously trying to create space and also trying to maintain control of various things such as how much I got paid for my past involvement and also some of the technical details.
Then, in the spring, I started reading The Surrender Experiment by Mickey Singer, and paying attention to a sensation I’m provisionally calling “going against the grain”… a kind of awful slog of a sensation, that life is fighting me every step of the way when I try to do something. Then the question is… what is the grain, and how do I let go of trying to fight it? And the letter below is the answer I got in this case, after months of waffling about what I was and wasn’t available for in relation to the transition process here. (I’m struck by how in the book, his practice of surrendering involves a lot of saying yes, and mine here involved saying no.)
I didn’t know how this would play out, but once I was willing to look at the scary feeling in my gut telling me that what I needed to do was to stop trying to control the situation, it was clearly the thing I needed to do. I’m sharing it now, with permission from its recipients, as part of telling our story and as a case study of an unusual way of doing business.
Benjamin, Sarah, Teresa—
With apologies for the third—but final—Reverse Uno card…
I realized why my move in January didn’t liberate y’all the way that I’d hoped. In short: I was still trying to have a kind of control. Such a move might make sense for some other person or in some other context—I don’t know. But I can now tell that it’s not in integrity for me here. I wasn’t ready to see that in January, let alone say that. And I’m sorry for how janky that has made things for all of you, over the past months and the prior years. I was doing my best, and sometimes the results were kinda shit. And the control that I did have—via the technical skills and branding and other things—means that I had an asymmetrical role in things being janky, and an asymmetrical responsibility for making it not janky.
I sensed into things more this evening, in a conversation with my roommate Vincent. Lots of tributaries flowed into a new sense of vivid, sober clarity: notably a book I’ve been reading, a conversation with a friend in a similar situation, and the whole experience of our call today—which was so clearly draining for all of us. And, nervously at first but then with conviction, it became obvious that the move I need to make here to be in integrity is to completely let go.
I want to put our professional expectations of each other back to nothing.
I want y’all three to be totally free to do whatever makes sense to you: with the BGI content & brand, with its marketing, and most crucially, with the money you make from it going forward. More like how Mary left. (Some differences of course, which I’ll discuss below.)
» read the rest of this entry »Suppose you and I are out having a canoe trip. We’re spending the day out, and won’t be back for hours. Suppose there’s a surprise wave or gust of wind and… you drop your sandwich in the water. Now we only have one sandwich between us, and no other food.
If we were in this situation, I’d want you to have half of my sandwich.
That wouldn’t be a favour to you, or an obligation, or a compromise. I’d be happy to give you half my sandwich. It would be what I want. It would be what I want, under the circumstances. Neither of us wanted the circumstances of you having dropped your sandwich, but given that that happened, we’d want you to have half of mine.
Yes—this is more accurate: we would want you to have half of my sandwich.
However, this requires us having a We that’s capable of wanting things.
To explore this, let’s flip the roles—suppose it’s me who dropped my sandwich. I’m assuming that you feel the sense in which of course you’d want me to have some of yours. If you need to tweak the story in order to make that true, go for it. Eg maybe you wouldn’t if “I” dropped my sandwich but you would if say an animal ran off with it—not a version though where you lost my sandwich and you’re trying to make it up to me! That’s a very different thing.
So suppose my sandwich has been lost and your initial response is like “of course I’d want you to have half of mine”.
However… suppose that in response to this event, I’m kind of aggressive & entitled about the whole thing and I’m demanding some of your sandwich (or all of it, for that matter). My guess is that this would dramatically reduce the sense in which you would want to give some to me. You might anyway, from fear or obligation or conflict-avoidance or “wanting to be a good friend” or whatever, but it would no longer directly feel like “oh yeah of course I’d want that.” Part of why, is the breakdown of the sense of We that is implied by my demand—my demand enacts a world where what you want and what I want are at odds, which didn’t seem to be the case back when you felt that sharing the sandwich would be what you wanted. I seem to only care about my needs, not yours, thus I’m not caring about our needs, so it seems like you might get exploited or overdrawn if you try to open yourself towards my needs. (And by “seems”, I don’t at all mean to imply that this isn’t what’s happening—maybe it is! “If you give them an inch they’ll take a mile” is a real interpersonal pattern.)
» read the rest of this entry »Sixth post in “I can tell for myself” sequence. On the last episode… Reality distortion: “I can tell, but you can’t”, which opened up our exploration of interactions between one person who is in touch with their own direct-knowing and another person who is more just taking others’ word for it. With this post we’re finally reaching some of the core ideas that the other posts have been a foundation for.
(I left “guru” in the title of this part, because “guru dynamics” are what I call this phenomenon, but I decided not to use the word “guru” in the body of the text. It’s a loanword that originally means “teacher” but of course in English has the connotations associated both with spiritual teaching in particular and thus also with the dynamics I want to talk about here, some of which are well-documented in The Guru Papers. To be clear, I don’t think guru’ing, as a role, is necessarily bad—it’s just extraordinarily hard to do well. But “guru” as a frame… the roles are probably best not thought of as a student-teacher relationship at all. Instead, perhaps, “one who’s remembering” and “one who’s reminding”: ancient wisdom tradition words for this like “sati”, and “aletheia” mean “remembering” or “unforgetting”. Those are awkward though.)
Things get weird when a person who has consistent access to their sense of “I can tell for myself” across many domains—especially spiritual, interpersonal, esoteric, subtle, ineffable., ones—finds their way into a position where they’re trying to help others develop this capacity for themselves.
This happens remarkably often! There are many factors that contribute to this, of which here are six:
So it’s very common for someone who has developed their sense of self-authored direct-knowing to find themselves surrounded by a bunch of people who also want to develop this capacity. (We’ll explore in a later post why there’s often precisely one teacher per learning context; the previous post also hints at it.)
But attempting to teach “I can tell for myself” (or self-trust, or whatever you call it) leads to what is nearly a paradox:
Suppose that when someone says something you don’t understand or resonate with, your two available moves are either to reject what they’re saying or “take their word for it”—a condition which is tautologically the starting point for someone who has learned to not trust themselves in the face of what someone else is saying, and is wanting to develop that self-trust—then if I’m trying to convey “how to tell for yourself”, you’ll either… reject what I’m saying as senseless, or… take my word for it that this is in fact how to tell for yourself and you just need to do it exactly as I say yessirree!
…which is not “I can tell for myself”. Or is it?
» read the rest of this entry »A tangent off the “I can tell for myself” sequence, between post 4 & 5.
There’s a thing it feels like to know 5+5=10.
Wait—that’s exactly the opposite of what I mean. There are many things in feels like—in some sense at least one per person who’s ever known it, in another sense as many as times it’s been known! And while I can know 5+5=10 is so true that I can be certain that if you know what I mean by 5 and + and = and 10, that you’ll agree… my knowing and your knowing are still different.
Concretely, I might be knowing 5+5=10 from a verbal memorized table that never did me wrong, and you might be imagining two nickels and a dime. Or one of us has an experience of beholding 10 fingers, 5 on each hand, the other has a sense of 5 having a halfness to it, in relation to 10, related to thinking in decimals for a lifetime. But those are just four abstract descriptions, under which many yet-unique experiences of knowing 5+5=10 could be binned—and many could not. And either or both of us might go about knowing 4+8=12 very differently than we know 5+5=10.
And those knowings are likely yet different from what it would feel like to know such a thing together.
This applies to all knowings: mundane and spiritual, mathematical and episodical. My knowing is not your knowing, and neither one is our knowing. And they aren’t the thing that is known.
Something can be true without being known: I could write a computer program that would generate a true statement that nobody had ever seen or known (such as 12364871317234+1=12364871317235, but imagine it’s longer and more convoluted) and it would still be true within that formal system, but it wouldn’t be known unless or until someone went and knew it. It could be true that there’s life on a particular exoplanet 51 Pegasi b, but it’s not currently known (as far as I know—if I’m mistaken, pick a different exoplanet). There are philosophical questions about who counts as “someone” and I am mostly going to say “definitely at least humans, in some cases animals or parts-of-humans”.
In the previous paragraph I was talking about things that are true but not known by anyone. There are also true things that are known by someone but not by someone else. You can even know OF a “true fact”, without actually knowing it. Here’s one: I’m typing this paragraph while listening to Tycho’s album Dive. One of my favorite albums. You could memorize this fact and perhaps pass it onto many other people… and maybe you even have good reason to believe me, because I’m a pretty honest guy in general and have no incentive to lie or whatever, but you don’t know it. Not directly. You can’t tell for yourself, but you can take my word for it.
A kid can know that “Santa comes on Christmas eve!” The question of whether Santa is “real” in the same senses in which the kid’s parents are real is not vital to the kid’s knowing—the kid knows that there are presents from Santa, and various other evidences such as cookie crumbs or in the case of very theatrical parents, sooty bootprints or whatever… insofar as the phrase “Santa comes on Christmas eve!” refers to that event, the kid can tell for themself that that happens. Santa sure doesn’t come on a randomly selected Tuesday in late April, for the purpose of leaving broken toasters on the lawn!
» read the rest of this entry »Opening this doc to write, I went to title this blank page “my tendency to talk about myself” but that in a nutshell highlights precisely what it is that I’m noticing and want to point at.
I’ve been writing for the last 3 hours, a few posts about the spiritual dimensions of my to-do list app business, and I’ve noticed that some of my thoughts that I’m writing are drifting towards talking about myself. And I’m struck by how different talking about myself is from talking as myself, ie sharing my experience.
I’m noticing a draw towards making generalizations about myself—about what’s salient to me, about what matters to me, about how I seem to be in the world, my tendencies or personality or soul… in contrast, presumably, with other people. Telling the reader “this is how I am”, as if they can’t observe for themselves. “This is how to see me.”
I’m watching myself navigate this as I write this piece as well. The previous paragraph initially began “I’m noticing I’m drawn towards” which is ambiguous—it can read both as simply a thing that is happening but also as a general timeless statement about what I’m like. It’s not as strong as “my tendency” but it’s there.
I can think of lots of examples of my writing which doesn’t do this—writing that talks about how things seem to me, and maybe some stories, and maybe some generalizations about the world, but doesn’t try to tell the reader who I am—and also some that does. And I don’t think it’s inherently problematic. In my previous post “Whose job is this?” I actually open specifically with “It occurs to me, in the shower, that a lot of my life is preoccupied by this question. It’s a good theme, for Malcolm Ocean.” The post is an attempt to reveal my soul to the world, where by “my soul” I mean “my particular manner of doing relevance realization”, and it does so in part by describing how I seem to me to be.
But it’s incuriating me today to notice myself ending up in talking-about-myself mode by accident.
» read the rest of this entry »Or more straightforwardly:
“how to give feedback to somebody about something that you’re noticing going on for them, where you suspect that if you try to acknowledge it they’ll get defensive/evasive & deny it”
One of the core principles of my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework is that it’s impossible to codify loving communication—that any attempt to do so, taken too seriously, will end up getting weaponized.
Having said that, maybe if we don’t take ourselves too seriously, it would be helpful to have a template for a particularly difficult kind of conversation: broaching the subject about something you’re noticing, where you expect that by default what will happen is that you won’t even be able to get acknowledgement that the something exists. This can be crazy-making. I often call it “blindspot feedback” although for most people that phrase carries connotations that usually make people extra defensive rather than more able to orient and listen carefully.
To see more about how I think about this, you can read this twitter thread:
But I want the template to stand alone, so I’m not going to give much more preamble before offering it to you. The intent is that this template will help people bridge that very first tricky step of even managing to acknowledge that one person is seeing something that the other person might not be seeing, and having that be okay.
I’m calling this alpha-testing not beta-testing because while I know the principles underlying this template are sound, and I’ve tested the moves in my own tough conversations and while facilitating for others… as of this initial publication the template itself has been used zero times, so I don’t want to pretend that it itself is well-honed.
So I’d like to collect lots of perspectives, of what people think of the template just from looking at it, and of how conversations go when you try to use the template for them.
Without further ado, here’s a link to the template.
I’d love if you gave me your thoughts while you read it. To do that, make a copy, name it “Yourname’s copy of Template” then highlight sections and leave comments on them, then give comment access to me (use my gmail if you have it, or malcolm @ this domain). That would be very helpful. Even just little things like “ohhhh, cool” or “I don’t get why you’d say this” or “would it work to rephrase this like X, or would that be missing something important?”
To try it out, make a copy, then fill it out, and do what you want with it. Then, if you’d like to help me iterate on it or would otherwise like your experience of using it seen by me, fill out this form and let me know how it worked for you (or didn’t).
I wrote this addressed to a learning community of a few dozen people, based in Ontario, that evolved from the scene I used to be part of there before I left in late 2020. I’m about to visit for the first time in nearly 2 years, and I wanted to articulate how I’m understanding the purpose & nature of my visit. It’s also aimed to be a more general articulation of the kind of work I’m aiming to do over the coming years.
This writing is probably the densest, most complete distillation of my understandings that I’ve produced—so far! Each paragraph could easily be its own blog post, and some already are. My editing process also pruned 1700 words worth of tangents that were juicy but non-central to the point I’m seeking to make here, and there are many other tangents I didn’t even start down this week while writing this. Every answer births many new questions. See also How we get there, which begins with the same few paragraphs, then diverges into being a manual for doing this process.
To “jam” is to improvise without extensive preparation or predefined arrangements.
“Convening” means coming together, and Ontario is of course that region near the Great Lakes.
As for the “meta-protocol”…
It seems to me that: consistent domain-general group flow is possible and achievable in our lifetimes. Such flow is ecstatic and also brilliant & wise. Getting to domain-general group flow momentarily is surprisingly straightforward given the right context-setting, but it seems to me that it usually involves a bit of compartmentalization and is thus unsustainable. It can be a beautiful and inspiring taste though. (By “domain-general” I mean group flow that isn’t just oriented towards a single goal (such as what a sports team has) but rather an experience of flow amongst the group members no matter what aspects of their lives or the world they turn their attention to.)
It seems to me that: profound non-naive trust is required for consistent domain-general group flow. This is partially self-trust and partially interpersonal trust.
It seems to me that: in order to achieve profound non-naive trust, people need to reconcile all relevant experiences of betrayal or interpersonal fuckery they’ve had in their life. This is a kind of relational due diligence, and it’s not optional. It’s literally the thing that non-naive trust is made out of. That is, in order for a group to trust each other deeply, they need to know that the members of that group aren’t going to betray each other in ways they’ve seen people betray each other before (or been betrayed before). Much of this is just on the level of trusting that we can interact with people without losing touch with what we know. So we either need to find a way to trust that the person in front of us won’t do something that has disturbed us before, or that we ourselves aren’t vulnerable to it like we were before, which involves building self-trust. It takes more than just time & experience to build trust—people need to feel on an embodied level why things go the way they’ve gone, and see a viable way for them to go differently.
It seems to me that: people attempt to do this naturally, whenever they’re relating, but understanding what’s going on and how to make it go smoothly can dramatically increase the chances of building trust rather than recapitulating dysfunctional dynamics by trying to escape them.
» read the rest of this entry »In which I answer 6 questions from a friend about my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework. I’ve said a lot of this before, but kind of all over the place, so here it is collected together, as yet another starting point.
The questions:
My experience of writing this post has caused me to have a sort of meta-level answer to a question I see behind all of these questions, which is “why is the NNTD so important? should I care?” And my answer is that I don’t actually think NNTD is that significant on its own, and that most people should care if it intrigues them and seems useful and not otherwise. What makes the NNTD important is that it’s a new & necessary puzzle piece for doing world-class trust-building, which is necessary for making progress on collective consciousness, and that is important. But if you’re not working on that, and NNTD doesn’t interest you, then maybe you want to put your attention elsewhere!
It is, perhaps unfortunately, all 3 of those things. I would say that in some sense it’s mostly a worldview or a theory, and any practice that emerges out of that could ultimately be described as simply being what it is. Certain practices make more or less sense in light of the theory, but it’s descriptive rather than prescriptive.
So as a worldview, the NNTD view sees all beings as constantly engaged in trust-dancing. “Trust” and “truth” have the same root, and trust can be thought of as essentially subjective truth, so trust-dancing with reality is figuring out what seems true from your vantage point. Where naivety comes in is that humans have a tendency to try to interfere with each others’ sense of what’s true, resulting in apparent trust that’s actually layered on top of repressed distrust.
» read the rest of this entry »
Last year, I was inspired by a fellow friend and consciousness-evolution-furtherer, who sent a screenshot of his “100× vision” in a newsletter. I replied “I feel dared by you doing that to do something similar myself.” A couple months later, I finally wrote something up. At the time it felt too big and scary to post anywhere, but perhaps I’ve grown, or just gotten more comfortable with it, or shared it with enough people who responded positively… because I now feel pretty easeful about posting it to my blog.
I’ve written some adjacent-possible visions. This one is about 10-15 years into the future—sometime in the 2030s—and is written as if I wrote it then, in the present tense, describing what I see when I look around at my life. It’s not a complete description of what I want—it’s actually very abstract and is designed to be a sort of generic placeholder vision that many people would also find themselves wanting. A friend recently challenged me to make an actual personal vision, so I’ve now done that too and it’s called “Malcolm’s bespoke personal selfish vision” but that I’m also not ready to publish. Wants can be very vulnerable!
Without further ado: here’s what I see from an imagined place in the 2030s:
I’m deeply embedded in beautiful, bountiful, brilliant collaborative human superintelligence on many scales, of which I’ll highlight 3 below. I’m not the leader on any of these scales – to some extent because there is no single leader but also because inasmuch as there is, that’s not what I’m called to do. But I was one of the major figures getting it all off the ground years ago, because I knew I needed all of this to exist in order to be thriving this much… I wouldn’t settle for anything less, and nobody else was already simply doing it in a way I could join, so I Sourced some of it.
Since precisely *what* we’re all working on at this point is highly contingent and path-dependent on both what else has happened and is happening in the world, as well as on who’s involved, and I’m writing this from a trans-timeline perspective that’s independent of those details, I can’t specify in detail what projects we’re working on, but I can describe the rough structure of things as they look right now in 2035.
I’m part of a slowly growing group of 10-20 people who are capable of getting profoundly in sync and are thus able to actually think as well as… it’s hard to put it but something like “as well as a single human could if it had 10-20x as many neurons”. Another analogy might be “a five year old is to an adult as an adult is to this collective brain”. We’re able to solve problems better than almost any individual could (except given specific expertise). Individual wisdom is integrated—the group is wise about anything that any individual in the group is wise about.
This group is one of several that are connected, and we’ve had some splittings and mergings over the years to find better configurations of people.
We have been and are ongoingly achieving this through a combination of…
» read the rest of this entry »A protocol is a set of behaviors and expectations for interaction, whether explicit, such as NVC (“Non-Violent Communication”), or just the unspoken cultural norms of any social group. Shared protocols can dramatically increase people’s ability to collaborate and trust each other. But trying to get everyone to operate the same way is imperial, like trying to get everyone to speak the same language, and thus generates a ton of resistance if you try it.
The meta-protocol is the translation process, the dance by which trust is built between and within people. It navigates the fractal puzzle of the fact that when you and the other have different protocols, you need to somehow deal with the fact that you don’t have a shared protocol, while not having a shared protocol.
However, the meta-protocol is still relevant even if two people think they’re already following the same protocol… insofar as that protocol is inadequate, ie:
…the meta-protocol is what allows them to notice that and iteratively improve whatever they’re doing and patch those gaps. (Such patches might produce a new ongoing implicit or explicit protocol, or not.)
No matter how perfect a hypothetical protocol might be, it’s impossible to systematically address everything that arises in the complex experience of being human together. There will be gaps, including during the learning process for how people can come to use a protocol consistently. The meta-protocol is whatever fully and completely answers the question of “well, then what do you do in the meantime, or when those gaps occur?”
» read the rest of this entry »