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?
We’re all going around making sense of everything. We have different kinds of models that we use without even realizing it. A non-exhaustive loose sketch:
The first we mostly learn from direct experience.
The second we mostly learn from studying and reasoning, plus confirming that it doesn’t contradict our experience or our other related models.
The third type we largely get from seeing how other people think about things. These models have too many details for us to properly verify them for ourselves. They may also have reflexive effects where believing them causes you to acquire more evidence in their favour. We may be very influenced by the popularity of the ideas, or the status afforded to those who hold them.
But just because we can’t directly verify these models, doesn’t mean that our personal experiences don’t play a critical role in model adoption. It’s just that instead of it being directly obvious or based on conscious checking, instead it happens more out of our awareness, as more a kind of sudden click-match or a gradual subtle seduction.
Suppose that someone is living their life, and they keep being told what a man is and what a woman is, and finds themselves thinking “uhhh I keep being told that I’m a man/woman, but I resonate more with the description of woman/man”. There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast from someone about their experience of being transgender, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.
Meanwhile, suppose that someone is is living their life, and they keep being told that gender is completely a social construct and that they shouldn’t notice or care about differences between transwomen and ciswomen, but they find themselves thinking “but I really do feel differently in relation to them” whether it’s about safety or attraction or whatever else… There’s an experience they’re having, that they don’t know how to make sense of, and they feel like they can’t talk about this with anybody. Then they come across some writing or a podcast where people are talking about evolutionary biology and how these differences are real and matter, and they go “OH!” and something clicks. The world makes more sense.
How do people end up with crazy worldviews?
» 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 (1) reject what they’re saying or (2) “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 »File this one under Evolution of Consciousness studies.
I’ve been working on a new theory inspired by Andrew Cutler’s Snake Cult of Consciousness article and Eve Theory of Consciousness articles, about the evolving relationship between what you could call id, ego, and superego. I’m honestly not particularly stoked about those terms, for lots of reasons, but they do seem to roughly map onto the thing that I’m looking at, so here we go.
This post also relates to some other thinking I’ve been doing over the last few years about how egos are necessary for managing your attention & care in relation to external systems that might co-opt your attention & care if you’re too open.
Here’s part of the post in a tweet:
Andrew writes:
In Freudian terms, we had an animal id for millions of years. We then evolved a super-ego, the simulated view of society in our head. Implicitly, there was a node resolving conflicts between these competing interests: a subconscious ego. A fateful encounter with snake venom allowed someone to perceive this process and she could not unsee it. Henceforth, she perceived and identified with her ego, the agent tasked with navigating the tribe’s moral code. Or in the parlance of the time, she “became as the gods, knowing good and evil.”
That is, the Fall, from a nondual mode to one dualistically separated from an experience of flow with god-ness. Ouch. The transition from the first memetic operating system to the second.
What are we talking about with id, ego, and superego. First thing to know is that those terms made a lot more sense before they were translated from German into Latin. In Freud’s original work, they were “Es, Ich, & Über-Ich”—the it, the I, and the over-I. Now admittedly “I” is a bit unwieldy, visually and acoustically, but the translation to latin made these notions seem very weird and foreign and reified, rather than natural parts of our experience.
At any rate! It is also helpful to have these other words for them for various reasons now. Here’s my take:
The rest of this post will be exploring some of the implications of this model for the evolution of consciousness, as I see it. I’m sure I’ll see more within a few months, so I wanted to share these now while they’re fresh.
The genesis of this post came while I was visiting an old dear friend in another city and staying at an airbnb a short walk from his place. We were talking about the Snake Cult model and some related ones, and as the night got on we started talking about whether he might go home briefly, in part to pick some stuff up and in part to see his partner. And we were kind of feeling into what made sense, and then we noticed that there was a tension in him between a sense of wanting to be a good husband (by connecting with his partner, tucking them in, and helping them de-stress before bed, especially given that their work is stressful at the moment) and wanting to be a good friend (by continuing to hang out with me, uninterrupted).
» read the rest of this entry »note to self: art is choosing what to breathe life into
art is choosing what to breathe life into
this?
not this
this? not this. not this. this?
this.
this!
sometimes I get stuck because I have more urges than I know how to handle
“I want to write”
“no I want to take a shower”
“but before I take a shower I want to work out”
“but I’m still partway through writing”
“wait but I’m kinda hungry”
“wait no but I don’t want to eat if I’m about to work out”
…and on. and on.
so many urges. so many things to take care of. I can’t do all of them, not all at once. I can maybe take care of all of them eventually… but by then there will be more.
I can probably take care of what needs taking care of eventually, on some level of abstraction, somewhere up in my perceptual control hierarchy
even thinking a thought is sort of an urge
hi urge
you’re tryna take care of something
these urges are helpful
while it may be challenging when they’re all tugging in different directions
…these urges are all really helpful
honestly, they’re kinda… made of helpfulness
» read the rest of this entry »Another piece I wrote a year ago that I want to publish as a kind of snapshot rather than try to get it perfect. My ideas here keep evolving and any version that I come up with seems simultaneously confused and clarifying.
A sequel to “Mindset choice” is a confusion.
My Non-Naive Trust Dance framework and its clarity that mindset choice is confused was a huge source of relief for me, because I’d been feeling pressured to somehow make a choice that I couldn’t make, and which on some level I knew I couldn’t make.
However, I have also experienced a perspective from which it seemed to be true that in some sense your mindset is certainly a thing that only you can choose, and in another sense perhaps even the only thing you can choose. So how does that integrate with “mindset choice” being a confusion?
Here’s some thinking out loud on the topic. I’m aware of some limitations—this feels like it’s sort of dancing around the puzzle, not getting right to the heart of it.
One piece of the choice puzzle is: via expanding awareness.
This framing of expanding attention (awareness) as including both doing and not-doing is really interesting. One of the core skills of Alexander Technique is that of inhibition, the constructive noticing and not responding to stimuli. You may notice that you have the urge to yell at your boss, but you don’t.
But this is an active process, one that is continually renewing itself. You are aware of what you are doing in response to your boss (having a conversation) and what you’re not doing in your response to your boss (yelling). Through the skill of inhibition, your awareness includes both of these processes at once.
The expanded awareness is what allows this to happen. If your awareness were collapsed down to the yell response, you wouldn’t have any choice but to yell. By expanding out you are able to monitor a wider field of processes and choose the one you want.
— my friend Michael Ashcroft‘s newsletter. Emphasis mine in the last paragraph
And elsewhere:
» read the rest of this entry »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 »I am coming to the conclusion that everything I was trying to get myself to do is better approached by exploring how to allow myself to do it.
😤✋❌ how do I get myself to do the thing?
😎👉✅ how do I allow myself to do the thing?
It’s obvious, on reflection: if “I want to do the thing”, great! The motivation is there, for some part of me that has grabbed the mic and is calling itself “Malcolm”.
The issue is that some other part of me doesn’t want to do the thing, for whatever reason, or I’d simply be doing it. (To be clear, I’m not talking about skills, just about actions, that I’m physically or mentally capable of taking.)
So there’s a part of me, in other words, that isn’t allowing me to do the thing that I supposedly want to do (I say “supposedly” because the part claiming I want to is necessarily also partial).
…and that’s the part with the agency to enable the thing!
So the question is:
» read the rest of this entry »While queuing up the 100× vision post last week, I realized I hadn’t published another vision doc that I wrote awhile back and had been sharing with people, so I figured out would be good to get that out too. In contrast to the 100× vision, which is imagining the 2030s, this one is the adjacent-possible version of the vision—the one where if you squint at the current reality from the right angle, it’s already happening. I wrote this one originally in November 2020. There’s also A Collaborative Self-Energizing Meta-Team Vision, which is a looser sketch.
This is intended to evoke one possibility, not to fully capture what seems possible or likely.
In fact, it is highly likely that what happens will be different from what’s below.
Relatedly, and also central to this whole thing: if you notice while reading this that you feel attracted towards parts of it and averse to other elements (even if you can’t name quite what) then awesome!
Welcome that.
Integrating everyone’s aversion or dislike or distrust or whatever is vital to steering towards the actual, non-goodharted vision. And of course your aversion might be such that it doesn’t make sense for you to participate in this (or not at this phase, or not my version of it). My aim is full fractal buy-in, without compromise.
This diagram (except for the part where one of the people is marked as me 😉) could apply to any network of people working on projects together, that exists around a closed membrane, but I want to elaborate a bit more specifically about what I have in mind.
The Collaborative self-energizing meta-team vision public articulation 2020-10-19 is describing the outermost regions of the above diagram, without any reference to the existence of the membranes. The open-network-ness is captured by this tweet:
This is a beacon—want to work with people doing whatever most deeply energizes you? Join us!…how? There’s no formal thing.
Joining = participating in this attitude.
The attitude is one of collaboration in the sense of working together, and in particular working together in ways that everybody involved is excited about and finds energizing and life-giving. Where people are motivated both by the work they’re doing as part of the collaboration, and by the overall vision. That’s not to say it’ll all be easy or pleasant or straightforward—working with people is challenging! And that’s where the other layers come in.
I’m now going to jump to the innermost, closed membrane, because the dotted-line teal group kind of exists as a natural liminal area between that and the wider group.
» read the rest of this entry »What’s the difference between positive & negative motivation?
I like to talk about these as towardsness & awayness motivation, since positive & negative mean near-opposite things in this exact context depending on whether you’re using emotional language (where “negative” means “bad”, ie “awayness”) or systems theory language (where “negative” means “balancing” ie “towardsness”). I have a footnote on why this is.
There’s a very core difference between these two types, both inherently to any feedback system and specifics to human psychology implementation.
Part of the issue is (and this is why I say positive vs negative motivation are different in all systems) you fundamentally can’t aim awayness based motivation. In 1-dimensional systems, this is almost sorta kinda fine because there’s no aiming to do (as long as you don’t go past the repulsor). But in 2D (below) you can already see that “away” is basically everywhere:
Whereas with towardsness, you can hone in on what you actually want. As the number of dimensions gets large (and it’s huge for most interesting things like communication or creative problem-solving) the relative usefulness of awayness feedback gets tiny.
Imagine trying to steer someone to stop in one exact spot. You can place a ❤ beacon they’ll move towards, or an X beacon they’ll move away from. (Reverse for pirates I guess.)
In a hallway, you can kinda trap them in the middle of two Xs, or just put the ❤ in the exact spot.
» read the rest of this entry »
