I was recently talking to a friend who was navigating a situation where he was frustrated that his girlfriend of a few months kept implying that something that had just happened might be grounds for breaking up… something that seemed to my friend pretty minor, or even just a misunderstanding.
“She keeps threatening the connection!” he would say, and at first I thought he meant something about emotional warmth, but it was more about this sense of security. And implied was that somebody more mature or more collaborative, if they were in the same situation, would be able to convey the sense of “this is a problem” without the sense of threat. And I agree the move is problematic (not just unpleasant) but I see it as (usually) a symptom of a deeper problem: you got too close. The coalition that draws you together is facing coup attempts by the subsystems it’s oppressing, which were not consulted on the distance.
It’s not that there’s supposed to not be tensions, is that those tensions need to be included at the negotiation table—welcomed into the coalition, rather than forced outside it.
Anyway! With this basis, I want to explore the origin of this kind of blameful relationship-threatening. I used to see it as a behavior to be addressed, but now I see it, as I said, as more like a symptom of a situation to be addressed. “This isn’t supposed to be happening” can be viewed as a failure of spiritual acceptance or equanimity… or it can be viewed as a sign that, well, maybe you’d be better off if you made something else happen.
As the central case study for this piece of writing, I’m going to share some replies I made to someone in the extended network of the culture incubator I was part of in my 20s—the one whose magic I boggled at in Wtf is the Synergic Mode? He had put out that he was looking for people to come live with him, and listed out elements of his vision, including a dozen bullets about various “practical house things” about windows, AC, aesthetics, bikes, kitchen., as well as “shared purpose” items that referenced some of the cultural resonances of that scene:
- desiring the information of what others’ experiences are like
- an inviting space for grief to be felt, and for feelings in general to be felt and not suppressed – also, freedom to experience grievance as a pathway into grief when grief cannot easily be accessed – also, a context-sensitivity in expressing grievance, and an awareness of the impacts that grievance can have in a space
- impacts can be shared freely, and can be received as impacts rather than hearing impacts as being judgement or blame
- blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame – I don’t want this to sound like I’m creating a “rule”, rather I’m sharing that I just find it uncomfortable to be around people who are feeling entitled to their blame-mindset. This goes both ways – I also wouldn’t want others to egg me on if I’m finding myself on the edge of going into blaming someone for anything.
And I wrote a response!
blame to be expressed only within a context of desiring to shift out of blame
I’ll make a general comment from my own experience that while I’m hugely in favour of shifting out of blame and not feeling entitled to end up in a conclusion that is based on blame, I’ve sometimes found that trying to shift the blame away too early makes it hard to even think the thought that I’m trying to think—to access the wisdom in/under the blame. Sometimes there’s something sacred that I care about, whose first way of expressing itself involves blame, but if I can welcome it fully without trying to change how it articulates itself, then it finds a clearer perspective, beyond blame etc. And that this is the kind of failure mode that can show up in a mindset learning community, that is focused on “avoiding blame” instead of something more like “welcoming everything that arises”.
» 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 »I would like to give a caveat that this whole essay is more reified and more confident in what it says than I would like it to be. I am currently finding that I need to write it that way in order to be able to write it at all, and it longs to be written. I should probably write this on all my posts but shh.
I observed to my friend Conor that for a given conversation you can ask:
what forces are running this conversation?
In other words, you can treat the conversation as having a mind of its own, or a life of its own (cf Michael Levin; these are essentially the same thing). It has some homeostatic properties—attempting to make it do a different thing may be met with resistance—sometimes even if all of the participants in the conversation would prefer it!
From here, you can ask:
if the conversation has a mind of its own, what is that mind’s relationship with the minds of the individuals who make up the conversation?
(Note that “conversation” here spans everything from “a few people talking for a few minutes” up to Public Discourse At Large. A marriage or friendship can also be seen as an extended conversation.)
This lens provides a helpful frame for talking straightforwardly about the ecstatically satisfying experiences of group flow that I had as part of an experimental culture incubator in my 20s, and why I came to view those experiences as somewhat confused and misleading and even somewhat harmful—while simultaneously, I don’t regret doing it, and I maintain that they were meaningful and real! (And re “harmful”—we talked at the time about it being an extreme sport, so that’s not an issue in the way it would be if it were advertising itself as safe.)
My previous post, Conversations are Alive, began its life as a short intro to this post, but it got so long that it needed to be its own post. It describes many kinds of ways that something can be in charge of a conversation that’s not any one individual in it, but an emergent dynamic. What begins as bottom-up emergence becomes top-down control, which we may feel delight to surrender to the flow of, or we may feel jerked around and coerced by. Even oppressive silences aren’t mere deadness but an active force. And sometimes multiple conversational creatures are fighting for dominance of the frame of the conversation.
These are all descriptions of what happens when the mind of the conversation doesn’t know how to be self-aware (we-aware?) and to directly negotiate with its participants. But what about when it does?
When I look at the kinds of conversations we were working to co-create in the culture incubator I lived in in my 20s, they were characterized by a deliberate intention to have a strong sense of collective mind, but to have it be a mind that is awake (not on autopilot) and that is actively dialoguing with the participants of the group such that they are knowingly choosing to surrender to it, to open to it, etc. And sometimes, we would have an experience of succeeding at this, which (as I mentioned above) was ecstatic.
The satisfaction of surrendering to a larger intelligence which includes you and accounts for you and incorporates what you care about is hard to overstate. And where you’re not just taking someone’s word for it that it’s accounting for your cares—you can tell that it does! You can feel it in real-time! It is incredibly compelling and life-changing for many people. It gives an immediate taste of a possibility for how people can relate and decisions can get made, that is obviously in some key way more sane than what is usually going on. Imagine the flow of when you get into a really good jam with someone on an intellectual topic you both care about… except it’s incorporating many different levels of abstraction of what’s going on in different peoples’ lives, and is capable of navigating tricky territory of interpersonal feedback and differences of values.
It’s awesome. People feel more alive and sometimes their faces even become dramatically more attractive. Shame falls away. Judgment gives way to curiosity. Things get talked about that had felt unspeakable. Apparently incompatible viewpoints appear as part of a larger whole. The nature of humans as learners and the cosmos as an upward spiral become apparent and obvious. These experiences have been the inspiration for many hundreds of hours I’ve since spent researching and experimenting with collaborative culture, trust, and the evolution of consciousness.
Everything I’ve said above is true, good, and beautiful. It’s real. It happened to me, countless times, and continues to happen to and for others, and I yearn for more of it in my life. It continues to feel like a huge pointer towards what humanity needs in order to handle its current constellation of crises.
So what’s the thing that I said at the top seems to me to be confusing, misleading, and even harmful?
» read the rest of this entry »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 »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 sequel to “Mindset choice” is a confusion. Here’s the first, which I wrote a year ago and published earlier this week: Mindset choice 2: expanding awareness.
I started exploring the implications of a simple question: what is within my power to choose?
This is something that we have to learn as infants and toddlers and kids—oh, I can choose to clench my fist… but I can’t choose to clench yours. Ooh… I can choose to look at something, but I can’t choose to make you look at something. Ah! I can choose to point at the thing, and maybe you’ll look, but I can’t directly steer your gaze or attention. In some sense, this is precisely where the boundary of self and other is located! And it’s also connected to how when we’re wielding a tool that works for us and it fades into the background, it becomes part of ourselves.
I can’t directly control you, although I might be able to invite or persuade or coerce you. And while I can’t quite control you, I can be trying to control you. Or I can be allowing you to be you and honoring the obvious-once-you-look-at-it reality that my choice ends at the edges of me. Society has historically involved a lot of the former, at great cost but also with meaningful results: lots of civilization was built by someone telling someone else what to do, on some level.
Then I considered that same structure, but applied internally to my own mind, and I realized that I have different parts that have different wills, and these parts also can’t control each other. They each have their own choice-making faculty, in this sense. To be clear, this line of thinking doesn’t require reifying these parts as persistent named entities as one might in IFS (Internal Family Systems). That’s an option, and might be helpful, but most fundamentally we’re just talking about some sort of subsystem that in a given moment is doing some perceiving, some wanting, some steering, etc.
And if those subsystems want something that’s compatible, I simply do it—no choice required.
But if one subsystem wants one thing and one wants another, and on a given level both aren’t possible—suppose part of me wants to keep writing and another part wants to go eat dinner—then neither system can simply enact its will since the other will oppose it. If one urge is particularly strong, eg because of a deadline or the smell of pizza in the oven, then that urge might overpower the other—it seems there are systems that track the size of urges as part of prioritizing and preventing such inner gridlock. Anyway, at that point, if the overpowered part releases and allows the first thing to happen, I’ll have full energy to do whatever it is I’ve found myself doing; if not, then I’ll experience friction and distraction—thoughts of food while trying to write, or thoughts of my blog post while eating. Or some more subtle indigestion of the mind and/or body.
What choice do each of these parts have, while in a conflict?
» 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 »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 »I want to point at a style of thinking that I’ll call [[thinking that rejects other thinking]].
(not sure this is the right name but it’s what I’m going with for now)
It’s a hard thing to point at.
Many have tried to point at [[thinking that rejects other thinking]], in many ways (and with many terms for it) and most of the ways that people try to point at it end up resulting in people ending up engaging in [[thinking that rejects other thinking]] about the very concept of [[thinking that rejects other thinking]], despite attempting not to. Sometimes the original articulator isn’t doing this but almost always the people around them still are. Usually the original articulator is too, at least a little.
This is unfortunate, not because [[thinking that rejects other thinking]] is bad, but because then they miss all the wisdom hiding in whatever other thinking they’re dismissing or distrusting because they’re seeing it as [[thinking that rejects other thinking]]!
Symmetrically, this is also unfortunate because it makes their own wisdom less accessible to those whose thinking they’re dismissing or distrusting.
On a meta-level, this is furthermore unfortunate because it creates a bunch of muddle around the very thing they’re trying to point at, which is an important thing to point at. (I clearly think so since I’m here trying to point at it.)
…
Perhaps, instead of pointing at [[thinking that rejects other thinking]], I will point at what kind of thinking isn’t [[thinking that rejects other thinking]].
Huh—perhaps I already have, by how I wrote the above paragraphs.
…
(If you want, you can re-read the above and feel into how I feel satisfied with it as a way of pointing at this kind of thinking while doing something different than thinking that rejects thinking myself. I genuinely wasn’t sure, when I started writing this 10 minutes ago, how I’d find a way to do it, and I feel pretty satisfied with how it turned out.)
But hey, I’m a verbal dude, and while ineffability abounds, I think it’s worth spelling this pattern out way more explicitly, giving some examples, and talking about how to navigate more effectively. So keep reading for that.
» read the rest of this entry »“Having is evidence of wanting.”
— Carolyn Elliott (eg here)
This is true, and useful, on net, but can easily encourage an Over-reified Revealed Preferences frame, in that it doesn’t account for the emergent results of conflict! …which is what’s underneath most behavior, particularly confusing behavior. By ORP I mean, assuming that you or others want exactly what’s happening, for some specific reason, as opposed to it being the attractor basin they found themselves in given various pressures in multiple directions.
When my partner Sarah & I walk, I sometimes end up about a foot ahead. We were reading some shadow shit into this (power dynamics!? respect!?) until we realized that I just have a faster default pace, & my system would only slow down once the error of me being ahead reached about 1′; she had a similar threshold for speeding up.
Hence me being one foot ahead was a stable point, what Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) calls a “virtual reference level” formed by two control systems in a tug of war (the tug of war being about walking speed, not position). The speed we were walking was also at a virtual reference level that was a compromise between our two set-points.
Neither control system wants the current situation, but neither has unilateral access to a move that would improve things in terms of what they do want. The gap was erroneous to both of us, but in order to close it, I would have to slow down or she would have to speed up, and neither of us had decided we would do that and shifted our overall mood towards walking to be compatible with the other.
So yes, the fact that part of you wants some shit that is socially unacceptable and/or bizarre from the perspective of your conscious desires, doesn’t mean that want is any more true or real than what the other parts of you want, and the want may not even really be direct.
Your shadow stuff may be “deeper” in the sense of “more buried” but that doesn’t make it “more profound” or whatever. All the things you consciously want also matter!
» read the rest of this entry »
