Context: my wife (Jess) and I spent 4 months last year running weekly “Experimental Church” services, going on hiatus when our daughter was born. Part of what led into this was checking out different churches and finding them lacking, following which I started drafting this document… and then a month or so later we started the services. I iterated on this doc a bit during that time and somewhat after. It was originally called “Vision for a Viable Christianity” but as I got into the church project I found it surprisingly liberating to feel free from anybody’s concept of what Christianity is or was (my concepts or others’)
I still resonate with most of what’s written here, but as I stare more at the nature of faith (as a key counterpart to trust), and as Jess & I get further into reading Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age I’m sure my thinking will evolve a lot further—not, I suspect, to outright disagree with the content of what’s below, but to new senses of what I’ve missed below and where I’m confused about the center or the question to even be asking. It feels good to publish this now as documentation of my 2024 view of this journey. At some point I’d also like to write up a short retrospective of the experiments we ran, which this is not.
The church I envision…
Has a sense of being “one church” (even with many different places and practices) unified not by top-down creed or belief or dogma, but via the ability of its members to recognize each other as fellow people who are open-mindedly resonating with a similar shape in godspace. More broadly, is unified also with others who worship other gods or who are atheistic, based on mutual recognition of each other as self-aware practitioners of the meta-protocol.
Supports the development of gnosis / direct-knowing of people within and without the church—on a mainstream level, not merely for the mystics. Does not appeal to authority, but respects that there are lots of ancient sources of wisdom that are worth drawing on.
The church I envision is memetics-conscious/literate, ie, recognizes that:
Aims to not rationalize or justify. Is not about pretending we all believe things we don’t believe. Isn’t about faking belief til we make it—at least, not propositional beliefs. Maybe “believing in” in the sense of putting one’s weight behind something.
Is open-ended (draws on Vervaeke and Kauffman and Romeo Stevens). The opposite of eg Islam claiming that while it comes from a lineage, it finally found the final prophet and has the final word of God.
» read the rest of this entry »Today’s post is about a 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.
How do you say things like “hey, you left this dish unwashed and it caused this problem for me?” without it turning into defensiveness or a suspiciously overemphatic apology? How do you cultivate a sense of We about it?
This post continues yesterday’s, hostility is a sign of too-closeness, both of which edited from my response to a friend writing about his search for people to live with.
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 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, it’s 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 »This is a short tangent I pulled out of Open Letter: Convening an Ontario meta-protocol jam in 2022. It may make more sense if you read that, and reading The meta-protocol for human trust-building might also help. But also I think the core learning loop describes here has a kind of general applicability.
It seems to me that: as a result of having been raised in cultures that didn’t adequately welcome us and help us learn to welcome everything into awareness, we each learned many automatic patterns to suppress what we deem unwelcome.
I have also learned that when I am being rigid and inflexible, I am usually in the grip of an emotional reaction. The rigidity is a compensatory reaction to an uncertainty I am not able or willing to experience
—A Trackless Path by Ken McLeod
It seems to me that: in order to deeply rest at home in a fully-welcoming culture, and to access all of our wisdom and experience collaborative culture internally, we need to learn not just how to inhibit the default reactions and do something else, but to welcome those reactions and the knowings underneath them, and find out how to bring them into dialogue with the rest of what we know. My understanding here comes largely from learning and internalizing the Emotional Coherence Framework. The basic tension between releasing the emotions directly in the moment, and finding out their roots to release those, is described in Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation.
It seems to me that: in the meantime, it is possible to try out the basic stance of the meta-protocol in our interpersonal relating, and have powerful experiences of connection and trust as a result.
It seems to me that: there’s an interplay between trying out the stance and understanding the stance—each supports the other. In particular, one core feedback loop seems to look like the diagram below. Both the means and the end of the loop below are an embodiment of the meta-protocol. In other words, the meta-protocol is developed and learned by following this loop, and enacting the meta-protocol also consists of following this loop.
If you see prayer as the practice of getting into a resonant reciprocally-caring relationship with a system that you’re part of, then you can reasonably pray to all sorts of things.
How?
You can pray to your bedroom, or your apartment or house. Feel how nice it is to have this space, and how your ability to relax into it (however much you can) serves your sanity. Then consider… how can you take care of it in some small or big way right now? What needs doing? What’s been neglected? What act of care brought you so much joy last time that you get excited imagining doing it again? What do you need, and can you make it happen?
You can pray to your friend group. Feel the gladness you have for these relationships and connections. Who needs your help, or listening ear? Who have you fallen out of touch with, such that you wouldn’t even know if you could do something for them? Who would like to meet each other, that you could introduce? What event could you throw that would bring people together and create laughter or relief or satisfaction?
You can pray to your neighborhood, or your dorm. As with the friend group, but perhaps with more emphasis not just on the individuals but on the whole system that includes place and rhythms and people you aren’t close to but who nonetheless share it with you.
You can pray to your body. Feel appreciation for how it works, for how many things are happening without you having to attend to them at all—breath, cellular respiration, blood pumping, neurons firing, muscles making sounds come out of your mouth, eyes saccading to read and take everything in. How can you love your body better? How can you shift into a slightly more comfortable position? Are you thirsty or tired? Would it feel good to have music on, or more quiet? Are there choices you could make that will benefit your health over the coming years? Not because you have to or because it’s “good to” in some abstract sense, but because you care about your body and want to take care of it so it can care for you. (Don’t @ me about mind-body dualism here, I get it. I am the body.)
» 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 »When I had my Non-Naive Trust Insight in mid-2020, I initially conceived of it as a patch on what we were doing at the cultural incubator I’d been living in for years, and I drafted this intro in Roam intended to convey it to the people I was living with. Things got pretty weird and I didn’t quite get it to the point of finishing it to share it with them at the time (although it wasn’t private—technically they could have looked, since it was in our shared Roam). So we’ll never know how it would have landed at that time. Some of the terminology or assumptions referenced below may be opaque to readers outside of that context. I’ve tried to add a bit of context but feel free to comment asking for more clarity.
“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” – Marcus Aurelius
“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” – Rudyard Kipling
Malcolm’s initial introduction to the Non-Naive Trust Dance, mostly written early October 2020
The [[[[non-naive trust]] dance]] is a framework created by [[Malcolm]] for modeling how [[non-naive trust]] is developed within and between people, which of course includes the nurturing of self-trust within each individual.
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 »
