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Transcript Introduction [00:00] ​Most of this podcast is a recording from a retreat Charlie Awbery and I led a month ago. I’m adding a short introduction here now, to provide background context, so you can understand more of what we presented then. So first, tantra is the branch of Buddhism concerned with energy, and therefore with action. Energy is the potential for action. You can’t have either without the other. Tantra is still sometimes misunderstood as being all about sex. There’s a lot of energy and action in sex, so tantra can work with that. But there’s energy and action in everything we do, so tantra can work with everything in our lives. In all Buddhisms, one acts for the benefit of others. However, most just help you develop good intentions. Tantra calls the bluff on that. Without energy, intentions are flaccid piety. Tantra says, “Okay, that’s nice. What are you actually going to do for other people and how?” And it has answers. There are many different styles of beneficent activity. Tantra personifies them as yidams, who are mythic people, rather like gods, who represent particular kinds of energy. This retreat was sponsored by Evolving Ground, a contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist community we abbreviate as eG. eG teaches several different yidams, and therefore several different styles of benevolent energy, and beneficent activity. We wrote a post about that two weeks ago, titled “Yidam: extraordinary relational possibilities.” You might want to check it out for more background explanation. One style of beneficence is nobility: the wise, creative, and just use of power. In eG, we take the yidam Gesar as inspiration for noble activity. Gesar is the mythic warrior-king-sorcerer-god-hero of a vast Tibetan epic. We practice Gesar with a text, called a sadhana. A sadhana is the manual for a structured meditation ritual, which you can practice individually or in a group. Part of the ritual is reading the text out loud, and then doing the things it describes. The Evolving Ground sadhana is titled Good King Gesar. It’s written in flowery pseudo-poetic language, as is traditional. In the retreat recording that follows, I explained particular bits of the text; and quoted it in places. Gesar was the king of a place called Ling. Our retreat was held in a gorgeous remote mountain valley in Scotland. As you will hear, that is also Ling. One last thing: the transcript of this podcast on Substack includes numerous hyperlinks to explanations of uncommon concepts. If you are confused by missing background, or want to learn more about some point, you could follow those. Also, the transcript has numerous illustrations which can help visualize what we are talking about. And so now… let’s catch a ride to Ling on the back of the garuda of outrageousness! The actual world is the mandala of the deity [04:04] One of the things about this sadhana that is unusual is that it is emphasizing the actual world as the mandala of the deity. Mandala is the Sanskrit word for kingdom. It literally means circle, but it means kingdom. There is the visionary world, and there’s the actual world; and these are both real, in some sense. Tantra forms the connection between the visionary realm and the actual world. You become the connection between these two. You can think of the central channel as a conduit that connects the energy of the actual world and the energy of the visionary realm, and they flow through you. You can get lost in the visionary realm. I recommend avoiding becoming a spiritual person, because this means being lost in the visionary realm, and trying to un-see the actual world as much as possible. And this makes you ineffective! Because if you’re going to act in the actual world, for the benefit of other people, you need to have a accurate vision of what is going on, and how it works. On the other hand, if you are stuck in the actual world and you are trying to un-see the visionary world, then you’re caught in a kind of mundane materialism that lacks vision; that is not directed toward some… better future? That’s actually putting it in a bit of a materialistic point of view, but: some kind of pure vision of what is possible. I think “possibility” is the right word for this. So, a lot of Tibetan material… they were isolated in monasteries, and they got lost in the visionary realm a lot of the time. The Gesar material is, I think, an attempt to make this connection of the actual world of a very difficult political situation, at a particular time, at a particular place in Tibet, where action needed to be taken: for the benefit of people who were caught up in civil wars and religious strife. There needed to be a connection made between that mundane, difficult situation and a vision of what was possible instead. And the possibility was: a Good King. Mipham, who did a lot of this work, was an advisor to the king at the time. And he wrote a book called The Just King, which is a book of advice to the Crown Prince of Derge, which was a major kingdom in the area; who did become king. This is a form-oriented sadhana. It’s an action-oriented sadhana. And I think it’s why Mipham did what he did, which we’re reworking here. It’s that action was required, form was required, at that time. And Tibetan Buddhism had kind of gone off into fairyland, and he was trying to pull it back down to concrete form; reality. The cavortings of awareness unleashed [07:34] So all of this stuff is: the cavortings of awareness unleashed. And partly that’s to emphasize the fact that we’re speaking in the visionary realm here, and you don’t want to concretize this as something that’s actually existent in some sense. But also, there is the practice in tantra of seeing everything as illusory in some sense. And this is bringing the visionary realm and the actual realm into correspondence. And when you do that, things you see in the actual realm take on a visionary quality, and become somewhat unreal and transparent and shape-shifting. And that can become psychotic, if you’re not maintaining also the connection with the concrete specifics of how stuff actually works. This is the trick of tantra: making that connection without losing yourself in either realm. And being able to superimpose them, to employ the logic of vision and the logic of actuality as appropriate; simultaneously, ideally. So, “cavortings of awareness unleashed” is this sense of sacredness, and slightly unreal quality. Jan: I have a question about “cavortings.” I checked it in the dictionary and it means, like, “play” basically? David: Yeah, energetic, bouncing around kind of play. Jan: What was the “leash” then? David: Um, unleashed from mundanity. From being lost in ordinariness. When you’re leashed to ordinariness, you can’t see sacredness. You can’t see the electric qualities of actual things. Ideologies are demonic attempts to escape from actuality into some vision [09:38] David: The section “Displaying confidence in actuality,” I said last time: this is in the place of the refuge. “Taking refuge” is displaying confidence in actuality. That’s this sense of, “Okay, I’m actually in this actual-world situation. And that is what I’m confident of.” Mara showing a mystic vision of perfection is the failure mode of trying to escape into the visionary realm. The actual world is the charnel ground. It’s civil war, in that case. Do ask questions! Splendid! Yes? Sasha Vezhnevets: Um, when I yesterday was going through it, I also had another way of interpreting the “vision of perfection”? David: Mm-hmm? Sasha: As kind of: an ideology, not necessarily related to mysticism or religion, but any sort of ideology that imagines perfection? David: Yeah. Sasha: I mean, for me, the “mysticism” would be communism; something like that. That’s what was more familiar growing up, but there’s no lack of other ones. So what you think of that interpretation? David: Yes. Sasha: And monastics, we can have academics, and that choice— Steph: Or any rule-based system, or any framework, if you take it as the main, or the only, framework. David: Yeah, thank you. That’s exactly right. There’s a section in here about Gesar… Let’s see… Your horse-hooves trample the compulsions of demonic egregores! Your werma-arrows riddle the promises of delusional enthusiasms! Your prajña-sword eviscerates the certainties of fixed ideologies! This is addressed at exactly that. Dzogchen has a meta-systematic view of Buddhism [11:20] David: This is kind of eG-specific. It’s the meta-systematic view that any fixed system is actually demonic, and needs to be slaughtered. Once you’ve chopped the head off the demon, you can raise it from the dead and have it serve you. This is a very traditional role for Tibetan sorcerers, to subjugate demons and force them to serve the dharma. My work on meta-rationality, and other things that I’ve written, are relevant here, and being echoed in the sadhana. Dzogchen, uniquely in Buddhism, is meta-systematic; and says, “Here are all these different Buddhist systems; and here’s how they’re useful, under what circumstances, for what purposes do you apply this Buddhist system; and here’s how it’s limited, and actually not a full story, not actually correct.” I think that’s part of the attraction of Dzogchen, for me and for Charlie and for others: that sense of “No fixed system; but systems are actually very valuable.” And we’re practicing a particular system in doing this; but there’s nothing sacred about this sadhana; or fixed as “this is the thing to do.” It’s a thing that has a particular function. We got this partly from Ngak’chang Rinpoche, who got it from Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche. I don’t know where Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche got it. I mean, he got it from the Kunjé Gyalpo, I suppose. Or his teachers. Victory over aggression [12:59] David: I’m jus

John Vervaeke’s Meaning Crisis and my Meaningness address similar issues in similar frameworks. Yet there seem significant differences! Andrew Conner pinpointed some in his insightful essay “Is the ‘meaning crisis’ a real loss?” Coincidentally, he was visiting Charlie Awbery and me at the time, so we were able to discuss it in person, and recorded a video of our conversation. In addition to that, this post includes a section of links to relevant discussions elsewhere, assembled by Andrew; and a transcript in case you’d rather read than watch. A follow-up post, going live next Saturday, explains bits I botched during the recording and we deleted from this video. It’s about ways metaphysics muddles our thinking, feeling, and acting. And, about how we perceive sacredness in the actual world—such as in a salt shaker. Relevant discussions elsewhere Primary sources * John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (AftMC): YouTube playlist · series home · community transcripts * David Chapman, Meaningness * David Chapman, Meta-rationality * Andrew Conner, Is the “meaning crisis” a real loss? Chapman’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Eternalism: meaningness.com/eternalism: the stance that meanings must be perfectly definite * Nihilism: meaningness.com/nihilism: the mirror-image stance, that since meanings aren’t perfectly definite, they don’t exist * The complete stance: meaningness.com/meaningness: recognizing meaning as inseparably nebulous and patterned * Nebulosity and pattern: meaningness.com/nebulosity * No world beyond the actual one: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it * Stances trump systems: meaningness.com/stances-trump-systems * Materialism (as stance): meaningness.com/materialism * Textures of the complete stance: meaningness.com/textures-of-completion · wonder · curiosity · humor · play · enjoy-the-dance · creation * Vision, Instruction, and Action (Chapman’s PhD thesis, lightly revised) * Vividness: vividness.live · Approaching Vajrayana * Nobility arc: table of contents Vervaeke’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Relevance realization: Vervaeke, Lillicrap & Richards (2012), “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” J. Logic and Computation 22(1): Oxford Academic · open PDF * Four P’s / Four Ways of Knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory): Henriques overview · Vervaeke & Mastropietro, revised 4P paper * DIME / Ecology of Practices (Dialogical, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment): Vervaeke Foundation EoP page * Reverse-engineering enlightenment: AftMC Ep. 36 and Ep. 37 * The sacred as inexhaustibility: AftMC Ep. 35 develops it; Ep. 50 ties it together * Cultural grammar: AftMC Ep. 38 * Serious play: AftMC Ep. 17 (Gnosis and Existential Inertia) Developmental psychology, cognitive science * Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self (1982): Harvard UP * Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994): Harvard UP * The frame problem: SEP: Frame Problem * McCarthy & Hayes (1969): “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence” (origin) * Dennett (1984): “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI” (philosophical generalization) Miscellaneous * Adjective ordering (“clear blue sky” vs “blue clear sky”): Cambridge Grammar: order of adjectives · Wikipedia: English adjective order (the so-called “royal order of adjectives”) * Bronze Age / Late Bronze Age Collapse: Bronze Age · Late Bronze Age collapse Transcript [Caveat: Generated by “AI,” inaccurate and in places misleading.] [00:00:00] David: I thought maybe it would make sense for you to start by introducing your project here, what it is that you’re trying to do and why. And some background on John Vervaeke’s general project, because people may not be familiar with that. [00:00:29] Andrew: So I encountered your writing and his writing around the same time. I would guess about five to six years ago. It was kind of a time where a lot of things were breaking for me, and so I found them both incredibly useful. John Vervaeke recorded a 50-hour lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and you have written many partial books, which are probably far more than 50 hours of reading. In my mind they’re a little bit interleaved, and I found both of them very useful. Recently I wanted to figure out how your ideas interact. They’re both about the word “meaning” and different aspects of it. I think that both you and him have a diagnosis of what’s going on, and I wanted to understand how you saw each other’s ideas. I think I have a decent idea of the way you disagree, but you can correct me. [00:01:46] David: So I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. I read a few of his academic papers, and I watched, I think, two episodes of the 50-hour meaning crisis series. Then I read a lot of blog posts from other people about his work. So I have a quite diffuse sense of it. Something you mentioned when we were talking about this earlier is that he has developed his ideas in further directions, or maybe even a different direction, since the meaning crisis series. And neither of us, I think, is very clear on quite how he’s gone. I thought it’d also be good to say that the Meaningness book I started working on 25 years ago, and I worked most of the ideas out during a six-month period when I was staying with Rin’dzin, who’s now Charlie, my now spouse — Andrew: Congratulations. David: Yeah, it’s great to be married to Charlie. On her kitchen table while she was off at work. This was when she was living in Bristol in the UK. So that book doesn’t really reflect my current understanding. It’s not that I disagree with anything or that I think it’s wrong, but there’s another 15-plus years of development since I put it on the web, which was in 2010 or 2012 or something like that. So we have two out-of-date understandings. [00:03:58] Andrew: Try to merge two out-of-date understandings, right. And see how they go. So I had written a tweet thread that may go out as a tweet thread, or maybe this conversation, or something like that. Perhaps we could go through it. I can kind of summarize. I think it’s useful to speed-run his ideas. Maybe you can interject with your background. The overall shape of his lecture series is that it’s a little bit entertaining. If you like watching him lecture, then it is an entertaining thing to watch. If you’ve never encountered the ideas, there’s a lot of learning. He’s knitting together thought from eastern, western, different branches of philosophy in very pleasant ways. One way of looking at what he’s doing is this intellectually entertaining sort of thing. I think that understates what his goal was, but there’s intellectual understanding there. The first half is largely a history lesson and the second half is largely cognitive science. Maybe we could go through a little bit. Would that be good? [00:05:22] David: And maybe I’ll throw in random, incoherent interjections periodically. [00:05:28] Andrew: That’d be great. That’s what we signed up for: David Chapman random interjections. I think looking back at his work, one of the fundamental things I realized is he believes we have lost something. [00:05:43] David: So I’ll interject right at the beginning. I think maybe I’ll get to the substance of my objection a little later, but I think we haven’t lost something. I think we probably disagree already at this point. I think we’ve gained an enormous amount. We have enormously more sophisticated ideas about meaning, and how it works and what it is and how to work with it, than at any time in the past. And the whole history that he tells — it’s great that he’s telling that history. It’s important to understand the history, to understand how we now understand meaning. But we’ve actually just accreted a whole lot of extra stuff. And there’s nothing that we’ve lost. A little later, I’ll get back to why I think he thinks that, and why I disagree. [00:07:00] Andrew: So if he approaches from “we’ve lost something,” it makes sense to do two things. One, that motivates understanding: well, how did we get to where we are now? So that motivates the history lesson. And then it motivates what he perceives as the solution space. How do we recreate the thing that we’ve lost? His idea is that around the Bronze Age, no one was worried about finding meaning. Meaning is all around us. It’s within the substrate of culture and nature, and it existed in the interplay of relationships and that kind of thing. Then you have this innovation that occurred across the world in many places that he calls the axial age, where metacognition developed — second-order thinking. Because of that, a separation of here and the divine emerged, and you see this separation in religions. You see it in religions that don’t exist anymore, and in current religions: we are here in the dirty realm of existence, and there is this pristine, divine existence that’s separated from us. Our goal is to figure out how do we connect to that thing. Both connect to it while we are living here, for divine inspiration and purpose and meaning, but also when we die. So there’s a story there about the afterlife. His story is that because of this, a lot of psychotechnologies were developed to try to meet this need of bridging the separation. So there’s meditation, dialectic, prayer, ethical discipline. All of the philosophies and religions develop from this. He would include shamanic medicine and that kind of thing, a way of tapping into this divine that is hidden from us. So we had three different orders that emerged. From what I can tell, the Middle Ages tried to recreate everything in the axial frame as stably as possible. He has three orders. The nominal order gave coherence — the universe is rationally ordered by logos, God, something

Transcript ​You can bless things. It’s easy! You can do this! You just go around blessing things. You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a fancy hat (although the hat might help). This is a non-denominational practice. It’s not particularly religious; you can be of any religion, or no religion. There’s no prerequisites. It’s easy! You just do it. This is a practice of perception, of appreciation, of connection, of expanding benevolence. It’s not a metaphysical practice. The point is your intention, not the effect that it might have on whatever it is that you’re blessing. I normally do this silently, but for this video I’m going to do it out loud, which feels kind of dorky, but this way you can hear what I’m thinking. When you do it, you can do it silently. I found the practice is embarrassing at first, even if you do it silently; but if you overcome your embarrassment, it becomes ecstatic. Bless this place. Bless this trail. I, personally, bless this place. Bless everything here. Bless the flowering trees. Bless this house. May it keep its inhabitants safe and comfortable. Bless this amazing purple plum tree. Bless these willows. Bless the creek. Bless the petals. Bless the sun. Bless the sky, the clouds. Bless the creek, bless these new green leaves, bless last year’s dead leaves, the petals on the surface of the creek. Bless these fluffy white flowering shrubs. Bless the shrubbery. Bless the shrubbers. Bless last year’s dead grass; bless this year’s grass, just starting to come up. Bless the path. The path that takes us from the base to the result, and delights us along the way. Bless my feet that carry me on the path, my legs that support me, the ground that supports me. Bless gravity! Bless these birds. Bless the cottonwoods that are just starting to get leaves. Bless the contrail. Bless these plums. Bless these three plum trees, each individually. Bless these dandelions. Bless this fruit orchard. Bless the fruit that will come from the fruit orchard. Bless those who planted the fruit orchard. Bless those who will enjoy the fruit. Bless the carpet of petals on the ground. Bless the forsythias. Bless the dog poop bag. No, it’s gloves! Bless whoever thoughtfully put the gloves in a place where someone might find them again. Bless those who clean up after their dogs, bless their dogs, bless the love they have for their dogs. Bless the warmth of the day. Bless the wind, the breeze, caressing my skin. Woo! Bless the bunny. Hello, bunny! Bless you, bunny! Two bunnies! Bless you both. Bless this manhole cover, that is undoubtedly doing something important. Bless… Danielle Amanda Quillman Heilmann, who died in her twenties, with a ginkgo leaf. Bless her memory. Bless those who remember her. Bless them for providing this bench. Bless the bridge. Bless the bridge makers. Bless the Continental Custom Bridge Company. Bless the solidity of the iron. Bless everything made of iron everywhere. Bless the sound it makes. I bless the neighborhood. I bless this house. I bless the people who live in this house. I bless their future. May they always know happiness. Bless this place. Bless all phenomena here. Bless all beings here. Bless all beings everywhere now and forever. Bodhi. Svaha. So mote it be. ​ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript (ish) Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by; that I love most. It’s extraordinarily compelling and exciting and beautiful. It’s in some sense the basis of pretty nearly everything that I write. It has several serious problems, though. One is that you can’t sell it. And this problem is nearly fatal. Every religion has to have some economic basis. This is something we resist in the West; going back to Martin Luther, whose slogan was “Every man his own priest.” His idea was that everybody (every man at least) should be able to read the Bible in his own language, and understand it. Then he should form his own direct relationship with God, without a priest intermediating. This is a very attractive idea! It eliminates the class of religious professionals, who had become corrupt and parasitic in Europe at that time. The problem is, this doesn’t actually work. Most people are not capable of being their own priests. Not any more than most people are capable of being their own plumber. DIY religion sounds great, but hardly anyone can make it work. You need professionals to do the job. So, in many Protestant denominations, there’s a “pastor” role which is officially definitely not a priest, but performs most of the same functions in practice. Buddhism is also a religion that needs religious professionals. In Asia, there were professional Buddhist clergy. And, in Asian cultures, there were various economic arrangements that made it feasible to support a class of religious professionals. Those depended on cultural patterns that we don’t have in the West. The main one, monasticism, mostly doesn’t work in the West, despite attempts. This is a big problem for Buddhism in the West. On the one hand, we want, and actually need, full time professional teachers. But we don’t think we ought to pay for them. And it’s not clear what the payment model should be. So we’ve mostly followed the pastor model, from Protestantism. That has worked pretty okay, although not ideally, in many cases. It doesn’t work for dzogchen. But the Asian models didn’t work for dzogchen, either! The problem is, dzogchen has nothing to sell. At least, not in its original version, which is the one that I care about. That’s sometimes called “pristine” dzogchen. Later, dzogchen got modified, repeatedly over centuries, to overcome this problem, along with several other genuine problems with it. So Tibetans added things that you could sell, but those actually messed it up, I think. You can sell secrets, but dzogchen isn’t secret One thing you can sell is secrets. So Scientology, if you keep going with it, at each level, you pay much more, and you get told the next chunk of the secrets. But all of the secrets of Scientology eventually came out, and you can find them on the internet for free. In Tibet, they tried this model, and supposedly dzogchen was extremely secret. That pretense was retained until dzogchen came to the West, and then the store got given away. So now you can find the whole thing on the internet. The original version of dzogchen simply told you what enlightenment is and what it’s like. And that’s extremely simple. It’s two or three sentences, maybe. And it’s not easy to sell two or three sentences! And also, they’re no use, because they don’t make any sense. What is enlightenment? What’s it like? If you understand the brief description, you say, “yeah; yeah, that’s what it’s like.” And if you don’t understand it, there’s no further explanation possible. You can ask questions, and the answers may sound interesting, but usually they don’t help. I have a post about this, called “A non-statement ain’t-framework.” It explains why you can’t explain dzogchen. What actually happens is: if you meditate in certain ways, quite a lot, eventually you start to see it. And then, at that point, the two sentence explanation can suddenly make sense. So you could try to sell this secret, but it’s useless, and people would feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth. And anyway, it’s on the internet! In Tibet, secrecy mostly didn’t solve the economic problem either. So the way they addressed it was to add more things to dzogchen which you can sell. Two of them are methods and entertainment. You can sell methods, but dzogchen has no methods You can sell a method for getting to enlightenment. In Tibet, tantra is considered the main method for getting to enlightenment. So you can sell tantra. Tantra has many complicated methods, and it takes a lot of in-person instruction to learn those methods, and you can charge for the expertise and labor of teaching them. So that works for tantra. (I should say that in Buddhism, as in Christianity, it’s mostly considered gauche to put a straightforward price tag on religious services. So instead there are implicit norms and deniable negotiations. I can see good reasons for this, but on the whole I find transparent arrangements more copacetic.) There’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris. Anyway, this doesn’t work for dzogchen, because it doesn’t have any instructions. Because it’s not a path. It’s not a method. There is no method. It’s just a description, of enlightenment. Once you’re enlightened, you don’t need a method. “Dzogchen,” in Tibetan, means “full completion.” It’s what you get when you’ve completed tantra. You don’t need any instructions at that point. It’s like: there’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris. So, to make dzogchen saleable, a whole lot of methods got added to it, which (in my view) violate the spirit of the thing, and are actually a step backward. The methods are kind of dzogchen-flavored, but they’re essentially tantric methods. And tantric methods are great. I love tantra! But it’s not dzogchen. And it’s missing the point. Student: How do I get enlightened? Teacher: You already are. Student: No I’m not. Teacher: . . . Student: Everybody is doing these way-out esoteric mystic things and getting enlightened. Tell me how to do that! Teacher: [sighs] OK, first you need to stand on your head… You can sell entertainment, but dzogchen isn’t entertaining Another thing you can sell is entertainment. Most people in Medieval Tibet didn’t have internet access, so there wasn’t enough entertainment to go around, and that created demand for something better than watching yaks chew their cud. So rituals, which had been genuinely religious, were recycled as entertainment. Those became the main form of public spectacle in Tibet. And lots of extra foofaraw was added to these religious rituals, to make them more entertaining. Primarily, this was done with tantra; but once you’ve started adding methods to dzogchen, you can do the same thing, so you can have big public dzogchen rituals. That is actually a contradiction in terms, again in my view. If pristine dzogchen could be said to have any rituals at all, they take about two seconds, and are improvised one-on-one on the spot. But that’s not something you can charge for. And because dzogchen had the reputation of being the fanciest kind of Buddhism, the idea was it must have super-duper rituals. So a dzogchen ritual was something very special that you would pay a lot of money to go and see, and it would be highly entertaining; or you’d hope it would be. That subsidized the actual work of dzogchen professionals, so maybe it was a good thing. But it’s dishonest. Dzogchen is still available, despite its unsellability So, where does this leave us, here and now? It leaves us with the main forms of “dzogchen,” the ones widely taught and practiced, being diluted, adulterated with tantra. Maybe you could even say corrupted. And that’s fine, if you understand that’s what you are getting. They are probably great for what they are! I don’t know, I haven’t tried them seriously. Tantra is great, and tantra that’s pretending to be dzogchen is probably extra good! It’s just, there’s a conceptual confusion here, and it’s a motivated confusion, and this results in a lot of incoherent explanations, and duplicity, maybe even a kind of sleaziness in the relationship between teachers and students. I said that the unsellability of dzogchen was nearly fatal. But fortunately, the original, pristine thing is still available. In fact, it’s much more available than it ever was in Tibet, or at least than it had been in hundreds of years, because there’s no longer any attempt at secrecy. But if you want it, you need to know what you are looking for. And you aren’t going to get it on its own—unless for some reason you can understand the two-sentence explanation when you find it on the internet. No one can sell it to you, so it only comes as part of a package deal. You can get full-strength, unadulterated dzogchen from someone who mostly teaches tantra, yet maintains a clear distinction between the two. You can get it from someone very holy, with a gold-embroidered hat, who drops the two sentences in the middle of a days-long lecture series on archaic Tibetan metaphysics. You can get pristine dzogchen from a professor in a Western university classroom, who gives you the straight dope in an off-hand way while lecturing on Buddhist history. You can get it from an informal meditation teacher. That’s probably the best bet! You might get it from a crazy street person in a Starbucks, who trades it for your building her a web site. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

Many people in the West pursue meditation in order to experience altered states. Meditation is sometimes considered a safer alternative to taking psychoactive drugs, with roughly similar effects. The jhanas are altered states of consciousness, for example. Buddhist tantra also produces diverse altered states, using various methods. In Western Buddhism, the usual idea is that enlightenment itself is a special kind of experience. It’s an altered state of consciousness, also in the way that psychedelic drugs can produce altered states. This is roughly consistent with some traditional Buddhist ideas about enlightenment, although not others. For example, in some tantric systems, the endpoint of the path, enlightenment itself, is said to be the simultaneous union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Those are often explained more-or-less as altered states of consciousness. Then tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, including ultimately that union. (There are other explanations of tantra that are more metaphysical; less psychological.) I don’t want to denigrate altered states, in any way. I think they can be fascinating, enjoyable, meaningful, and useful. However, the branch of Buddhism I care most about, dzogchen, denies that enlightenment is an altered state. In fact: Exactly the opposite! Enlightenment is the unaltered state. The dzogchen word for enlightenment is “rigpa,” which is defined as the natural state. You might say it is the state in which you are not altering your mind. Nearly all the time, we are in an altered state, which is called samsara. Samsara is the state in which you are constantly poking at your mind in order to get it to behave better—instead of leaving it as it is, in its natural condition. So you might suppose that rigpa is the special state in which you don’t do that. But this is actually wrong. Samsara is also nirvana. It too is enlightenment. It is also rigpa. The thing is, rigpa is always present. It’s not something you produce. Rigpa is not something you produce, because it’s always already there. It’s something you notice. Or don’t notice. Dzogchen is not like tantra. It has no methods for getting to enlightenment. From dzogchen’s point of view, tantra’s attempts to produce enlightenment are impossible and absurd. It’s like trying to get to Paris from Notre-Dame Cathedral. You’re already there! You are right at the center of it! Just look, and you’ll see Paris all around you! Everything you can see is more Paris! Rigpa’s present, regardless of what state you are in. Samsara is nirvana, because rigpa is there, even when you’re samsara-ing. You, personally—you—are fully enlightened, right now. Maybe it doesn’t seem like that? An alternative term, that’s considered more or less equivalent in Tibetan Buddhism, is tamalgyi shepa, which literally means “ordinary mind.” So, rigpa is ordinary mind, which is the ultimate goal of dzogchen, which claims to be the ultimate form of Buddhist practice. Tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment … In my experience, tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment. It’s certainly the exact opposite of meditation! A typical basic meditation instruction is: whenever you notice that you are thinking, let go of it, and return to open awareness. My recipe for efficient tax preparation is: whenever I notice I am aware, squash that, and return to Schedule 8849 line 2 column h, trying to force it, by narrowing my thinking, to equal Form 1099-B Box A. This is miserable. It’s probably a better example of samsara than the dramatic torture scenarios you can read about in scripture. At least there’s energy in those! But rigpa is there, just the same. Or so I am told! I don’t recommend my anti-meditation recipe as a religious practice. It’s better if you can meditate while doing your taxes. I can’t! When you stop samara-ing, it’s easier to notice rigpa. The samsara is a bit of a smokescreen. There’s particular circumstances in which it’s difficult to samsarize. They are ones in which rigpa might become obvious. Sacred texts have a standard list, which includes things like sneezing, orgasm, dreaming, dying, fainting, stubbing your toe with a sudden pain. In each of these experiences, it is more difficult to do samsara, so you may have a recognition of rigpa. It could become obvious. It’s difficult to think. Thinking is totally compatible with rigpa, but it tends to obscure it. Each of these experiences might also be considered an altered state of consciousness. That’s not the rigpa, but altered states make it easier to notice. Remember, though, that rigpa is ordinary mind; it’s the same when you are coming and when you are doing your taxes. Unfortunately, each of the things on the standard list has some difficulty that make it not particularly easy to find rigpa there. Easier than when doing taxes, but not easy. Sneezing, for example, is extraordinary. There’s a moment when you know you are going to sneeze, and there’s a unique, overwhelming itchy tickling feeling that pervades your physical body, subtle energy channels, and mind, and you can’t think, and rigpa is right there—and the whole thing lasts only a fraction of a second, and then you immediately lose it. Similarly, fainting, orgasm, and sudden sharp pains may last only a little longer. Tantra has esoteric techniques for prolonging these. That’s one of the points of sexual tantra. If you prolong and intensify orgasm, there’s more likelihood that you will notice, in the middle of it, “Ah! there’s rigpa here.” This may be difficult to arrange, though. Pain might be easier, but it’s difficult to have intense enough pain for long enough without injuring yourself. There are esoteric methods for that too, but generally people would rather have an hour-long orgasm than an hour-long torture session. The problem with dreaming and dying is that they make you stupid. You get caught up in some compelling, illusory drama which distracts you from your intention to recognize rigpa. Again, there are esoteric techniques, but they are difficult. Dying is supposed to be the best and most important opportunity for recognizing rigpa. That’s what the so-called “Tibetan Book of the Dead” is about. Unfortunately, though, you don’t die very often, so you don’t get a lot of practice. People in hell don’t realize how lucky they are The exception is if you’re in hell. According to Buddhist metaphysics, after you die, which realm you get reborn in depends on your emotional state. If you are angry, you get reborn in hell. Some of the Buddhist hells—there are several Buddhist hells—some of them are so lethal that you die almost immediately after rebirth. So you are born in hell, and get sliced to bits by whirling knife blades, or crispy-fried in boiling oil, and you die two seconds later. If that makes you mad, you get sent straight back. So being in hell is actually a great opportunity for dzogchen practice, because you’re dying every few seconds. Countless opportunities to recognize rigpa! People in hell don’t notice how lucky they are, because hell is unpleasant. It’s the same problem as with prolonged pain. It makes you stupid, and you forget to practice. Everybody in hell is stupid. Don’t go to hell. It’s a stupid place. So tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, I guess you could say. The point is not the altered states for their own sake. Well, maybe. As I said, tantric theory says enlightenment is the union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Why is that enlightenment? I mean, it’s nice. You don’t suffer, I guess. The point of enlightenment as originally conceived was to stop suffering. And if you’re experiencing clarity, bliss, and emptiness, then you’re not suffering, which is nice for you. Rather like orgasm. It’s kind of difficult to do samsara in these states. From point of view of dzogchen, the value of the state is that it makes it exceptionally easy to recognize rigpa. I think some people would say it is rigpa, but I’m not necessarily convinced. Rigpa is ordinary mind, remember! It’s easiest to find rigpa when your mind is clear and sharp, but you are not distracted by thoughts or bad feelings. That’s not necessary; rigpa is there when you are obsessing about the awful thing someone said about you at work, or you’re short on sleep and your brain feels full of glue. But it helps. Meditation helps notice rigpa So there are particular types of meditation that tend to produce that clear, undistracted state of mind. It’s pretty ordinary. You probably wouldn’t call it an “altered state of consciousness”; it’s not like taking drugs. However, “clear and undistracted by bad feelings or thoughts” is pretty much the same as “clarity, bliss, and emptiness!” Except you haven’t turned the volume up to eleven. That makes it safer and easier than esoteric tantric methods. Or drugs. It might be slower; tantra is fast but dangerous. Supposedly fast, and supposedly dangerous! I think both are often exaggerated. “Meditation” is not all one thing. Most types of meditation aren’t about this. They don’t aim for it, and probably won’t help. You will probably need many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of practice of the type that does—and it’s still easy to miss the point. It helps to have someone checking your progress, and redirecting you if you get a bit off course. You need to know what you are trying to notice, and until you’ve seen that a few times, you don’t notice it, even though it’s right there all the time. Even right now! As you are listening to this! It’s rigpa! Pure obviousness Rigpa has been called “pure obviousness.” [Holds up an eggplant] This is rigpa! [Rings a bell] This is rigpa! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers o

A facilitated discussion of how the participants find sacredness in the actual world—and in community. This Vajrayana Q&A session is an Evolving Ground online discussion I co-hosted with Jared Janes. You can get some sense of the eG style here. We don’t go in for “dharma talks,” much less lectures. All our meetings, both in person and online, are highly interactive, mainly created in the moment by the participants. There’s a transcript below. But first: several announcements! I’ll co-host the next Vajrayana Q&A on Saturday, December 13th, 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. That will actually be the last one, too! Don’t miss it! It’s free! Instructions for how to join are included here. Starting in January, the Vajrayana Q&A series will be replaced with the monthly Evolving Ground Q&A, co-hosted by Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes. It’s free to all eG members. Membership is also free; you can join here. Also starting in January, Charlie and I will begin a new monthly online meeting series in a similar format. The first one will be on Sunday, January 11th, at 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. You can join via Zoom with this link. Charlie and I are scheming up a new collaborative project for 2026. It’s not about Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s based in several other topics we’re both excited about—like personal development, pro-social entrepreneurship, and cultural upgrades through nobility. We are aiming to provide better ways to learn and engage in meta-systematic practice. We’re in early planning stages, and would love to hear what excites you! We’re happy to discuss, or answer questions about, any of the subjects we write or speak about. If you post preferred topics, questions, or reflections here, it’ll help us know what to concentrate on in the session, and we’ll make sure to cover as many as possible. Transcript [“AI” generated, lightly proofread, may contain egregious errors] David Chapman: This is a Q&A, so primarily it’s an opportunity for participants to ask questions, and that can lead to discussion. I can answer some questions, but that’s not exactly the point here. When there’s a break in the flow of questions, or if nobody can think of anything, then I can talk about what I’m doing at the moment, which is writing about sacredness without metaphysics. Sacredness as an interactive, situated, in-the-moment activity or perception, rather than some kind of abstract thing involving a lot of conceptual stuff. So that could be a topic if nobody has questions, but I’m hoping that everybody has brought some burning question that we can all discuss. Chris, you’re grinning like you might have one. Chris: Well, I wouldn’t say I came with a specific question in mind. I mostly, I haven’t come to an eG meeting besides the weekly sits in a while, but something on my mind right now, it’s kind of a general topic. So I’m related to eG, I’m in a local Shingon group with a teacher, and also I was born a Christian, and the difference in terms of community, locally speaking, where I am at least, but I think in a lot of Western places period, is there’s a real Christian community; and connections, and the impacts of that, that have at least trickled down from that religion, and then the associated practices and communities. And I’m curious about, as Buddhism moves into the West, it feels like the practices, the technologies are one thing, but then there’s this whole thing that I think, at least partly, we’re working on here. But I’m just curious about, as a Western practitioner born into a Christian tradition, who’s primarily practicing Buddhist traditions for the past 15 years or so, is there a happy meeting place for those two traditions, and what might that look like, and how do I not get burned at the stake? David Chapman: It sounds like there’s two questions there, maybe one is some kind of happy union or coexistence of Buddhism and Christianity possible, and the other is one about the nature of local in-person community. Regarding the second, I think it’s something that Buddhism in America has been spotty about. There are groups that are quite like a Christian congregation in the degree of closeness and mutual support. That’s relatively uncommon, and I think that’s something of a weakness. Buddhism in the West has been presented as individualistic, in a way that it is not in Asia. That’s a Westerly distortion or invention, and probably serves important needs for some people who don’t want the social aspect of religion. And maybe that’s what makes Buddhism attractive for a lot of Americans, but it also can be a big lack. I wasn’t raised Christian and have never been part of a Christian congregation. I can’t speak to that part. Maybe someone else here could. I’m looking at Max. Max Soweski: I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking about this recently because I did grow up Roman Catholic, and I was the most serious little Catholic boy you would have ever met. I was very, very devoted in a way that probably came off as kind of annoying to a lot of people. The thing that I was reflecting on recently is that in the Catholic community that I grew up in, there was a sense of community, sometimes of people coming together, but it did not often feel very sacred. It did not often feel very much connected to our practice, which was to bring us closer to God, at least ostensibly. And it really was not until eG that I found a community of people where it was possible, in group settings, to have that connection to sacredness and to do that together. And so I’m not quite sure what to do with these two things, or even how much this pertains to your interest, Chris. Basically, we would do like potlucks and get like the kids together for Sunday school and stuff like that. But there wasn’t a whole lot of ecstatic union with God happening in group settings. David Chapman: And do you experience… I mean, that ecstatic union with God is, I guess that’s yidam practice for us. Do you experience something in eG that is that combination and what’s that like? Max Soweski: I do. I mean, I think that the yidam practice, specifically the Gesar sadhana that you created, David, is a good example of in a group setting. So just a bunch of people coming together in a room, doing the sadhana together. What it’s like is very intense, very connective. I had the sense of really being connected to the people that were practicing this with me, both in terms of like, we’re all bringing something into being together. There was that sense. There was a sense that we were participating in something that was naturally available together. All those things that I just mentioned were notably absent from my upbringing in Roman Catholicism. I mean, again, ostensibly that’s what all of it’s about. All of these teachings, all of this catechism, all of these rule sets are meant to systematize that contact. And yet it seemed totally absent as I was growing up. And it seems very present in eG to me. David Chapman: I’m completely foreign to Christianity, but I find the descriptions I’ve read of charismatic practice, of Pentecostalism, any other denominations of that sort, seem intriguingly similar. And it’s interesting how kind of low status that is considered by middle-class, upper-middle-class American Christians. It’s like embarrassing and ignorant and somehow. Max Soweski: Last thing I’ll say about Roman Catholicism. That is exactly the sense that I had growing up in Roman Catholicism is that it was somewhat embarrassing to be too enthusiastic about your spirituality, even at church or even like in discussions with other religious people, which to me seems like just a total bug, actually. I don’t find that that’s a very good thing. David Chapman: Stephanie, you have your hand up? Stephanie Droop: It’s very different in the UK. At least some people I know. So I come from that kind of born again charismatic Christian family that you mentioned. And my parents and two of my brothers still go to church. And I’m always quite admiring and envious of the community they have. They have such a strong, big, like—all ages, cool young people, fashionable people, and they’re all really professional and middle class and successful people. So I haven’t been to a church service for a very long time, but theylove it. They have their kind of ecstatic union stuff, but then they also then go and have a fire pit on the beach and a barbecue and pray there. And they’re all kind of very touchy-feely with each other. They really help each other out for everything. They move each other’s houses and look after kids and stuff. And they just love each other’s company. They do all their fun hobby stuff together. They have whiskey appreciation, they get drunk, they brew beer, they’re always outside. They’re always having fires and they’re doing all the stuff, the same stuff that any other normal fun person does. And they’re always touching each other, hugging each other, and they’re just a really nice bunch of people. Like there’s no drama, agro. They just seem to love life and appreciate life and be really doing it quite well. And like attending to the whole question of building community in a very wise and skillful and kind of interesting way. It’s just that there’s Christianity underneath it all, which is a little bit, you know. So, it’s definitely not that they’re kind of ashamed of it. I even think it’s a little bit, a tiny bit class based; but the other way from what you were saying, that it is only middle-class people and educated people. And if ever anyone working class joins the church, I’ve kind of sometimes worried a little bit that, that they were a little bit hoodwinked into it by thinking, “Oh, if I joined this church and follow these people, maybe I’ll get a nice house.” But the leadership class of the

“Dzogchen Street Preacher” is the overall title for a series of performance pieces I planned in 2009. This extremely brief one, “Kadag,” was meant to introduce the whole thing. I was on the verge of recording them when there was a mundane emergency that took all my time for a year. When I had the opportunity to work again, the Meaningness book seemed more important. But less fun! There’s a bit of slack in my life now, and yesterday I decided to take a few hours to record this one. That was fun, and it’s a way to salvage a tiny piece of a project I put a ton of love and attention into, long ago, when I was a different person than I am now. The video might somehow stand on its own, and communicate something… but explanation might help. Kadag Kadag is a key term in Dzogchen, the branch of Buddhism I’m most influenced by. The usual translation is “primordial purity.” That may be misleading. Kadag is the recognition that nothing is impure—and therefore nothing is pure, either. Purity is a metaphysical distinction, not something found in the actual world. “Primordial” is meant to communicate that. In the video, I substituted “evenly.” The point is that nothing is more pure than anything else, because this is a nonsense concept from the beginning. So what? When you recognize kadag, you recognize that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world. There are no spiritual, existential, or cosmic problems. Only practical ones, which you can address practically, instead of metaphysically. Then you don’t have to wring your hands about the supposed Problem of Suffering. Suffering is not a Great Evil, it’s just a thing that happens. So it is actually possible to enjoy everything. There also is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You are not impure, stained by original sin, inadequate, or rotten at the core. You are just fine—just as you are. In Dzogchen, the non-method for recognizing kadag is trekchöd. Kadag is not a Pollyanna-ish attitude. There are many things we don’t like and want to change. And that is good! Let’s do it! Street Preacher The frame-story for the “Dzogchen Street Preacher” series is a personal alter-ego in which I’m that. Dzogchen teaching is usually overburdened with Tibetan religious decorum and status-hierarchy nonsense, so it’s tiresome and intellectual and reaches nearly no one. The idea that I could stand on a street corner and rant at passers-by about Dzogchen is entertainingly ridiculous. But it might also be effective, and therefore important? I admire people who have the courage and charisma to do this: Although I have reservations about both his message and some aspects of his delivery! While I was recording this, some homeless people politely asked what I was doing, and kindly offered to move the garbage bags full of their possessions out of the way. I explained, and politely declined. It adds to the atmosphere of primordial purity, I think, although I didn’t say that. I didn’t preach at them, because that would have been rude. I think. Western Buddhism My former Buddhist teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, loves the culture of the cowboy-era American West. There’s layers of meaning in that, and how it relates to Vajrayana. One aspect, though, is a pun. “Western Buddhism” is often what Consensus Buddhism called itself. There was a consensus that “Western Buddhism” was becoming a thing, and that it was the right thing; and yet a lot of wrangling in Consensus Buddhist publications about what it was, and what it should be. That was all quite silly and quite distasteful; but now it’s all ancient history, and no one cares anymore. But—what would “Western Buddhism” mean, if it was a thing? Obviously, Western Buddhists should dress like this: That’s from a Vajrayana Buddhist retreat on a horse ranch in Montana in 2004. We all dressed as Western Buddhists, and rode horses up into the mountains, and shot single-action 1880s-style revolvers at paper targets, and had wrathful empowerments in the evenings. It was on this retreat that my now-spouse Charlie Awbery and I got together. In the picture, that’s me on the left. It’s a Sangha friend on the right, not Charlie. I think Charlie took the picture. Anyway, that was a daytime Western Buddhist outfit, for riding and shooting. In the evenings, we were more elegant. Specifically, I wore the same outfit that appears in the video. Ngak’chang Rinpoche was amused by it. It looks like a cowboy-era priest’s get-up. He teased me by calling me “Preacherman”; and I rolled with the joke. It was ridiculous, of course. Being a priest was as far from my concept of myself as anything possibly could be. In the last year, I have somehow inadvertently transformed into my most-distant self-possibility: acting as a tantric Buddhist priest, performing the religion’s central ritual role, with gods and miraculous transformations and all that razzmatazz. Life is very strange. Especially when you are Western Buddhist. Outtakes I filmed this on the spur of the moment. I had planned to draft Charlie as camera crew, and also to do a bunch of voice work and practice runs beforehand; but Charlie was at a conference in LA and it was possibly the last day of the year when the weather would cooperate, so I just did it. I did nine takes, but couldn’t check whether any of them were any good, for boring technical reasons, and was afraid they might all be lousy. I’m reasonably happy with how it came out, although I think I could have done better if I’d been able to review the first few takes before continuing. Anyway, some takes are quite different from others. I thought you might be amused to watch another couple. And maybe you can tell me which of the three you like best! I wonder if I should substitute one of these for the one I chose to put at the top of this post. What do you think? Which do you prefer? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning. Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements: partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one. Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts! In this post: * The Making Of: demons and the idiot * Sections and topics in the video, with timestamps so you can find them * Further reading: books &c. we refer to, with links * “AI”-generated “transcript” (not safe for human consumption) Demons and the idiot This podcast has been years in the making. Our attempts were incessantly obstructed by malicious demons, who don’t want you to see or hear it. Eventually this became comical, although also frustrating. To be fair to the demons, progress was also frequently obstructed by an idiot. Namely: me, David. I fumbled the technology repeatedly. After finally getting to record the conversation, I applied “AI” to remove pauses and “ums” and such. This improved the audio track, but makes the video extremely jerky. Also, I used “AI” to make it appear as though we are looking at the camera when we weren’t. An uncanny, demonic appearance results. And, because I am an idiot, I did this irreversibly. Sorry about that! Next time, I will perform extensive exorcisms and protective rituals. And also learn how to use software before inflicting it on Jake’s invaluable contribution. Or leave the editing to him; he’s a professional! Sections and topics 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:05 David summarizes Meaningness (his book): it’s about the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. 00:05:01 The intellectual lineage of Meaningness is mainly the same as that of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning. However, David draws on Vajrayana Buddhism where Peterson draws on the Western tradition, particularly Christianity. 00:07:48 Nihilism, as explained by Nietzsche and as in Buddhism, is a key topic for both of us. Psychological lineages: German Romanticism, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Robert Bly. 00:10:54 Jake summarizes Peterson’s project and intellectual lineage. The catastrophes of the twentieth century. Recovering the mythic mode as compatible with rationality. Envisioning positive futures and preventing nihilistic ones. 00:20:59 The history of the gradual collapse of meaning. Tradition, modernity, postmodernity: communal/choiceless, systematic/rational, and postrational/nihilistic modes. 00:32:20 A future that combines the advantages of different historical modes of culture, social organization, and psychology, avoiding their disadvantages. Subdividing the past century: totalitarianism, countercultures, subcultures, atomization. Those abandoned, in order, nobility, universality, rationality, and coherence. We can restore all of those, but not as absolutes. 00:43:32 Jake explains Peterson’s somewhat different take on the same historical periods. Rationalism and modernity as the result of encountering alien cultures. 00:53:02 Jake explains Peterson’s “universal grammar” of myth in the Western tradition: Chaos is the Great Mother, Order is the Great Father, the Divine Son mediates between them. Peterson maps this onto twentieth century history. 00:56:43 David explains how Vajrayana Buddhism’s understanding of emptiness and form is fascinatingly similar to Peterson’s account of chaos and order, and also quite different. This may account for our fundamentally different attitudes, despite sharing much of our intellectual backgrounds. Personifications of chaos in Babylonian and Buddhist mythology: Tiamat and Prajñaparamita are the same goddess, viewed in radically different ways. 01:05:06 Positive and negative aspects of the characters in Peterson’s mythology. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the Divine Son (a theme we return to later). 01:09:55 Our shared lineage in “4E,” interactionist cognitive science, and our rejection of rationalism. Heidegger, situated activity, Gibson, affordances, rigpa in Dzogchen. The frame problem in AI research, and how David (and others) resolved it in the late 1980s. “You see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning.” 01:23:09 How the Ancient Greeks rejected the mythic mode and invented rationalism, as an eternalistic response to a nihilistic crisis. How Nietzsche finally diagnosed the failure of rationalism, and realized that would lead to another nihilistic crisis. His rejection of the delusion of a supposed True World, more real than the apparent one, in Twilight of the Idols. 01:34:07 Peterson’s account of Christian soteriology, and its justification for social action. Buddhism’s lack of a social vision. Social vision is a form of purpose. Rationalism has no account of purpose. You have to go to myth for that! 01:39:19 The influence of AI planning research on Peterson’s thinking. My debunking of that (with Phil Agre, influenced by Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus) in the 1980s. Francisco Varela’s reformulation of subplans as micro-identities in micro-worlds. 01:47:28 Self-sacrifice as essential in identifying purpose: in the Western tradition, and in Buddhism. 01:50:56 Demons subjugated at last! Credits roll. Further reading: books &c. we refer to In the order we refer to them in the podcast, explicitly or implicitly: * Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning * David Chapman, Meaningness * Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power * Jordan B. Peterson, “A Psycho-ontological Analysis of Genesis 2-6” * Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self * Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow * Jordan B. Peterson and Joseph L. Flanders, “Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict” * The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship * David Chapman, “Fundamentalism is counter-cultural modernism” * David Chapman, Meaningness and Time; includng “How meaning fell apart” * David Chapman, “The mythic mode: from childhood, throughout life” * Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge * David Chapman, “Desiderata for any future mode of meaningness” * Bryan Burrough, Days of Rage * Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man * David Chapman and Philip E. Agre, “Abstract Reasoning as Emergent from Concrete Activity” * Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason * James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception * Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols * David Chapman, “This is it!” * David Chapman, “Charnel ground” * Jordan B. Peterson, “Three Forms of Meaning and the Management of Complexity” * George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior * Philip E. Agre, “Toward a Critical Technical Practice: Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI” * Jamgon Mipham, Gesar: Tantric Practices of the Tibetan Warrior King * Philip E. Agre and David Chapman, “Pengi: An Implementation of a Theory of Activity” * Lucy Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions * David Chapman, “Doing being rational: polymerase chain reaction” * Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I * Francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How “AI”-generated “transcript” This is inaccurate and actively misleading in places. I wouldn’t recommend reading it. It’s mostly so people can find it in web searches. On the other hand, it’s often unintentionally hilarious, so there’s that. [Update, 16 November 2025: Andrew Shade Blevins kindly fed the original “AI” transcript through a script that uses ChatGPT to fix things up. The result may possibly be even more inaccurate, having gone through two rounds of “AI” distortion, but it certainly reads better! So I’ve replaced the original version with his.] [00:00:00] Jake Orthwein: The occasion of this conversation, much delayed but long anticipated, is just for you and I to get a chance to talk about your work, of which I’ve been an enormous fan for, I don’t know, seven years or whatever it is now. Maybe more. We’ve decided to frame it as comparing your work to Jordan Peterson’s, both because of Jordan’s significance in the zeitgeist and because he has worked on similar problems, but also because the differences between the two of you are illuminating. [00:00:50] David Chapman: Well, we’ve been talking about this for years and years and planning to do a podcast, and there’s been demonic obstruction. Like every time we go to record, something goes wrong. [00:01:02] Jake Orthwein: Very nearly food poisoning deterred us as well. [00:01:05] David Chapman: Right. I thought maybe I would start by just giving a short overview of what I think the Meaningness project is. It’s a book. There’s a website, which is meaningness.com, confusingly. There’s also meaningness.substack.com, which is a different thing. Meaningness.com is the book. It is meant to be a self-help manual for relating well with meaning, and I think it’s important that I don’t see this as an intellectual project. It’s a practical project. The Meaningness book explains ways of relating to meaning that work and ways of relating to meaning that don’t work. The ones that don’t work make you miserable and ineffective or cause you to cause trouble for other people. The ways that do work ideally make you joyful and creative and productive, and this is better, so it’s better to do the better things. That’s what the book says. I have a style of understanding and explaining which

Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta-rationality? Transcript: Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality? David: I had never thought to ask that! The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana, how there’s often a sequence of: female-coded, male-coded, non-dual. Charlie: Mmm. David: And meta-rationality is analogous in some ways to non-duality in Buddhism. So maybe it is also… it is a little farfetched, but could be analogized to transcending gender; or being— I really don’t like the word “non-binary,” but we haven’t got a better one. Charlie: Mm. David: One of the things that is important in Vajrayana is practicing a yidam of the opposite sex. Not exclusively, but that is part of the path: to step into a new alien possibility that shakes up your attachment to the fixed identity that you have. So, female is analogized with emptiness, and you go from emptiness to form, which is analogized with male, and then to the— Charlie: Right, so, David: —non-duality that is— Charlie: Yeah, so I wanted to pick up on that, and say that you’re starting with the feminine, in Buddhist tantra you’re starting with emptiness, and that is connected to wisdom. And then the male aspect: you’re connecting to form, to compassion. And then the non-duality: to the inseparability of both of those. And interestingly, in our culture, fluidity is more female-coded. And I wonder now whether the move into meta-systematicity, and beyond highly systematized thinking, is actually difficult, and one of the ways that it’s prevented, possibly, is that for men, moving out of that rigidly defined, very easily legible way of being looks and feels like a move toward “more feminine.” And because things are so clearly segmented culturally and socially, it’s very difficult for guys to do that. David: Yeah. It’s not a coincidence, presumably, that the tech industry has an awful lot of—a preponderance of—male participants. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: Because this is basic gender psychology: that men are systematizers. Charlie: Say more about meta-rationality, in terms of our social circumstances, and gender. David: Well, I mean, before you can move into meta-rationality, you have to have mastered rationality. And to the extent that that is seen as masculine-coded, that could be an obstacle for women. Empirically, in the research done in the 1970s and '80s, many more men moved into what Piaget originally called “stage four,” which is the rational, systematic way of being, and that actually caused huge trouble at the time. There’s a famous book by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who was a researcher in adult developmental theory, called In a Different Voice. I read it at the time it came out, which must have been early eighties? I thought it was brilliant then. Now it is hard to know why it seemed brilliant. Basically she just rejected the whole paradigm of rationality being a stage. And said: okay, maybe for men that’s how it works. But for women, there’s a different series of stages. And this was seen at the time as a breakthrough in feminist theory. Now the ways that people understand gender politics, that would be unacceptable; to say there’s separate hierarchies for men and for women. But that was very exciting at the time. But in her system, women never got to rationality! That just was, that’s a male thing. So, because meta-rationality does require rationality as a prerequisite, in terms of gender one would expect that one would find fewer women being meta-rational. Charlie: Hmm. David: However! As you’ve pointed out, there is then a move away from the rigidity that is masculinely coded, and in a direction which might be understood as toward more of a center position, a non-duality of the genders, at the meta-rational level. So maybe once women have accomplished rationality, which certainly a great many do, it may very well be that it’s then easier for them to move to the meta-rational stance. I don’t know. The problem is, this whole field, as an academic discipline, was abandoned in the wake of Carol Gilligan’s work! It just became too politically hot to handle. And so we have no empirical data on any of this. We’re just kind of guessing on a basis of anecdote. Charlie: Mm-hmm. So the whole field originally was centering around a relationship with rationality; and it came out of, and in conversation with, the rational tradition. I came at it via systematicity rather than rationality. And for a long time I actually thought of the field as being about systematicity; which is strongly connected to and related with rationality, but is not the same. And it seems to me that if we understand the stages in relation to systematicity, not only in relation to rationality, that there’s a lot more space there for understanding, for example, “stage four” in Kegan’s terms; understanding that as being about a relationship with systems. And when you look at it from that perspective, there are many ways in which a female-coded relationship with systematicity could be drawn. I’m thinking about some of my female clients and how a lot of the work that we do together is about systematizing emotional experience, systematizing boundaries and perspectives. David: Yeah. Piaget was a cognitivist, so he thought rationality was what was there. I think Kegan, a big part of his contribution was in extending that to systematicity in the relational and emotional domains. And my most recent post was about the fact that tech people (who tend to be male) tend to systematize in the work domain before they learn to systematize in the emotional and relational domains, and then they need to catch up. Charlie: Mm-hmm. David: And it’s not surprising that for women, they might do the relational and emotional domains first. And I gave the example of high level sales executives, who do have a very systematic understanding of relationship. And a lot of those people are women. That’s a much more evenly split. Charlie: Hmm. I didn’t realize that. David: It would depend on the industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disproportionately women. Charlie: Mm-hmm. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

The common civilizational pattern of a separate priesthood and aristocracy casts light on current political dysfunction. This video follows “Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness.” You might want to watch that one first, if you haven’t already. These are the first two in a series on nobility. There will be several more. Subscribe, to watch them all! Transcript Many successful civilizations have two elite classes. They hold different, complementary, incommensurable forms of authority: religious authority and secular authority. This usually works reasonably well! It’s a system of checks and balances. Competition and cooperation between the classes restrains attempts at self-serving overreach by either. I think this dynamic casts light on current cultural and political dysfunction. At the end of this video, I’ll sketch how it has broken down in America over the past half century—perhaps not in the way you’d expect! In following videos, I’ll go into more detail, and suggest how we might respond. Archetypically, historically, and allegorically First, though, I’ll describe the dynamic archetypically, historically, and allegorically. Archetypically, the two elite classes are the priesthood and the aristocracy. They hold different types of authority (and therefore power). Priests hold authority over questions of virtue. They claim both exceptional personal virtue and special knowledge of the topic in general. On that basis, they dictate to everyone else—both aristocrats and commoners—what counts as goodness in personal life, and in local communal life. Kings, or more generally a secular ruling class, hold authority over the public sphere. They claim to exercise their power nobly. They may consider that’s due either to innate character, strenuous personal development, or both. That would justify a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, and authority to dictate the forms of economic and public life. This typically leads to an uneasy power balance. The two classes need each other, but also are perpetually in competition. Priests provide popular support to the aristocracy by declaring that they rule by divine right—or proclaim that the gods are angry with aristocratic actions, so virtue demands opposing them. Priests reassure aristocrats that they, personally, will have a good afterlife—or warn of a bad one when they don’t do what priests say they should. Priests depend on the aristocracy for most of their funding, for protection, and for favorable legislation. The aristocracy can increase or decrease that, or threaten to. It’s extremely difficult for either class to displace the other entirely. Things generally seem to go better when they cooperate. Especially when priests are, in fact, reasonably virtuous, and the nobility are reasonably noble. Otherwise, they may collude with each other against everyone else. Sometimes, though, one side or the other is dominant, and subordinates or even eliminates the other class. Theocracy, in which priests usurp the role of secular rulers, does not go well. Priests try to increase their authority by inventing new demands of virtue. In the absence of secular restraining power, there is no limit to this. Most people do not want to be saints. When priests seize secular power, they unceasingly punish everyone for trivial or imaginary moral infractions. This is the current situation in Iran, for example. It’s bad for everyone except the priests. I expect it is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually there comes a coup, a revolt, a revolution, and the priests get defenestrated. (That’s a fancy word for “thrown out of a window.”) Secular rulers taking full control of religion also does not go well. A classic example was Henry VIII. He rejected the Pope’s supreme religious authority and seized control of the Church. He confiscated its lands and wealth, dissolved its institutions, and summarily executed much of its leadership. He was able to do that through a combination of personal charisma; the power and wealth that came with kingship; and the flagrant corruption of the Church itself, which deprived it of broad popular support. After clobbering the Church, Henry’s reign, unconstrained by virtue, was arbitrary, brutal, and extraordinarily self-interested. Economic disaster and political chaos followed. Henry was succeeded by his daughter Mary, England’s first Queen Regnant. She used her father’s tactics to reverse his own actions. She restored the Church’s wealth and power through brutal and arbitrary executions. For this, she was known as “Bloody Mary.” She was succeeded by her younger sister Elizabeth I. Elizabeth re-reversed Mary’s actions. She established the new Church of England, designed as a series of pragmatic compromises between Catholic and Protestant extremists. Elizabeth was, on the whole, a wise, just, prudent, and noble ruler—which demonstrates that the archetype of a Good King has no great respect for sex or gender. Likewise, the reign of “Bloody Mary” demonstrates that women are not necessarily kinder, gentler rulers than men. How modernity ended, and took nobility down with it Allegorically, archetypically, such colorful history can inform our understanding of current conundrums. You might review what I’ve just said, and consider what it might say about American public life in 2025. Now I will sketch some more recent, perhaps more obviously relevant history. On the meaningness.com site, I have explained how modernity ended, with two counter-cultural movements in the 1960s-80s. Those were the leftish hippie/anti-war movement and the rightish Evangelical “Moral Majority” movement. Both opposed the modernist secular political establishment, on primarily religious grounds. Both movements more-or-less succeeded in displacing the establishment. Revolutions can be noble. I think the 1776 American Revolution was noble. It was noble in part because the revolutionaries respected the wise and just use of legitimate authority. They accepted power, and ruled nobly after winning. The American counter-cultural revolution two hundred years later refused to admit the legitimacy of secular authority. Its leaders instituted a rhetorical regime of permanent revolution. For the past several decades, successful American politicians have claimed to oppose the government, and say they will overthrow it when elected; and, once elected, they say they are overthrowing it, throughout their tenure. This oppositional attitude makes it rhetorically impossible to state an aspiration to nobility. You can’t uphold the wise and just use of power if you refuse to admit that any government can be legitimate. Nobility, then, was cast as the false, illusory, and discarded ideology of the illegitimate establishment. In the mythic mode, we could say that everyone became a regicide: a king-killer. After a couple of decades of denigration, nearly everyone forgot what nobility even meant, or why it mattered, or that it had ever existed outside of fantasy fiction. Secular authority in the absence of nobility Secular authority persisted, nonetheless. What alternative claim could one make for taking it? There are two. First, there is administrative competence. This was an aspect of nobility during the modern era, which ended in the 1970s. “Modernity,” in this sense, means shaping society according to systematic, rational norms. Developed nations in the twentieth century depended on enormously intricate economic and bureaucratic systems that require rational administration. One responsibility of secular authority is keeping those system running smoothly. Both counter-cultures rejected systematic rationality, as a key ideological commitment. However, it was obvious to elites, inside and outside government, that airplanes need safety standards, taxes must be collected, someone has to keep the electric power on. A promise of adequate management was key to institutional support from outside elites during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That kept a new establishment in power. However, it lacked popular appeal. Managerialism is not leadership, which is another aspect of nobility—one that more people more readily recognize. And, as modernity faded into the distant past, beyond living memory, later generations failed to notice that technocratic competence matters: because we will freeze or starve without electricity. Accordingly, virtue has displaced competence in claims to legitimate authority. Initially, this came more from the right than from the left. The 1980s Moral Majority movement aimed for secular power, justified by supposedly superior virtue. Some American Christians explicitly aimed for theocratic rule. However, for whatever reasons, the left came to dominate virtue claims instead. They gradually established a de facto priesthood: a class of experts who could tell everyone else what is or isn’t virtuous. Initially it claimed authority only over private and communal virtue; but increasingly it extended that to regulate public affairs as well. In some eyes, it began to resemble a theocracy. It did increasingly display the theocratic characteristics that I described earlier. And, in punishing too many people for too many, increasingly dubious moral infractions, it overreached; and seems now to have been overthrown. Regicide and defenestration, OK; but then what? This religious analogy was pointed out by some on the right, fifteen years ago. I think there is substantial truth in it. However, I think they are terribly wrong about the implications for action. I’ll discuss that in my next post. If the ruling class is neither noble nor even competent, but can claim only private virtue, then metaphorical regicide (or defenestration for the priesthood) is indeed called for. That’s justified whether their claims to virtue are accurate or not. Whichever opinion about trans pronouns you consider obviously

Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide. Nobility is the proper matter of politics. Transcript Sermonette Nobility is the dark matter of society. The pull of dark matter holds galaxies together. Without it, stars would spin off into intergalactic space. Nobility holds societies together. Without nobility, societies disintegrate. Once, the now-dark matter of nobility was brilliant, and shone throughout space. With nobility, society grows strong, prosperous, decent, and glorious. But it was eclipsed, obscured by virtue, and now it is invisible. The gravitas that held society together is ebbing away. Bits collide, and fragments are flying off into intergalactic space. Virtue cannot hold society together. Rule by virtue is theocracy, which engenders repression and revolt, which engenders collapse. Tyranny also cannot hold a society together forever. It saps the strength of society, and engenders corruption, which engenders collapse. Distinguishing nobility from virtue Okay, so this is a sermonette; so it had to start with some sort of religious-sounding cosmic nonsense. I will speak more plainly for the rest of this. I want to distinguish nobility and virtue, as two quite different types of goodness. I think there are many types of goodness, and much trouble results from trying to assimilate them into a single kind. In particular, much of our current social, cultural, and political trouble stems from having subordinated nobility to virtue. This is not about the words. I’m not going to say that “nobility” and “virtue” really mean certain things, or should mean those things. Rather, I want to point at a distinction; and these words are the best I can find for these two types of goodness. I think my use more-or-less lines up with the usual understandings, but both terms are vague in common usage, and may overlap. For example, nobility, and its constituent characteristics of wisdom, justice, decency, and magnificence, might all be counted as virtues. Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others. Nobility is using whatever abilities we have in service of others. Nobility is seeking to fulfill our in-born human potential, and to develop all our in-born human qualities. By “virtue,” I mean roughly the currently popular understanding of “ethics.” Or, it would be more accurate to use the slightly archaic word “morals.” Whereas nobility is a quality of public actions, virtue is a matter of private life. Virtue inheres in having good mental contents: you think, feel, and say good things. It manifests also as qualities in private relationships—“private” including one’s friends, family, and immediate community. Nobility is not virtue. It does not require virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don’t always coincide. You can be a morally bad person and yet act nobly. You can be a morally outstanding person and act ignobly, through cowardice, ignorance, or incompetence. Virtuous actions are not necessarily or typically noble, although they may be. Neither nobility nor virtue are intrinsic or immutable character traits. They are developed through intention and effort. Developing either does not necessarily develop the other. Nobility does not require authority or position. Power is capability for action. Authority and position can give power, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Nobility is a quality that anyone can possess, regardless of position. We can all aspire to nobility. We all can be noble. We all are noble sometimes. We can aspire to be noble more often, and more effectively. Nobility as the proper matter of politics Nobility is a topic that I’ve been wanting to write about for twenty years now. I have an enormous quantity of notes and sketchy drafts. It’s become clear that I will never write that up, because there’s too much of it. I am hoping that this new format—which I’m calling “radio sermonettes” to poke friendly fun at myself—will make it possible to chop the topic up into bite-sized pieces, to make key parts of what I have to say available. These may also be more accessible for you than my usual long-winded, somewhat academic-sounding book chapters. Nobility is the essence of politics. Nobility concerns the right use of power, which is the proper matter of politics. And yet, nobility is a temporarily lost possibility. At the same time it is the essence of politics, it is not political in the current sense. Nothing I will say is concerned with what is the correct form of government. In particular, I am not advocating an aristocracy; that is an absurd anachronism. I am not advocating any other sort of autocracy, or authoritarianism. Nor will I discuss right versus left; this is not about that. Nor do I advocate political centrism. Much less will I discuss any specific political issue, nor political parties, elections, or whatever is the current scandal in which someone said something they weren’t supposed to. Rather, I will discuss what nobility is; how we lost it; and how we might restore it—both as individuals and as a society. I will discuss the history of how nobility was lost. And because the form of nobility that last existed is no longer adequate for current conditions, I believe we need to construct a new conception of nobility, a new practice of nobility. As a practical matter, I will suggest activities informal groups or organizations may employ to promote the development of nobility. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. Transcript What is the right question? “Stage five” is a concept in adult developmental stage theory. That is—or used to be—a branch of academic psychological research. I think it may be very important. But stage five is somewhat mysterious. It’s not clear what it is. Before asking “what is stage five?”, there’s several other questions one ought to ask. Starting with: “IS stage five?” I mean, is this even a thing? Or is it just some sort of psychobabble woo? Why should we believe in this? And then, what sort of thing is stage five, if it’s a thing at all? What is a stage, actually? How do we know whether something is a stage or not? How many are there? Which are they? These are skeptical questions one ought to ask if you’re interested in adult developmental stage theory. Especially if you use it, or are considering using it. I’m not going to address them at all now! That’s because the academic literature on this sucks. The answers available are vague, and they’re not well supported by empirical research. So I’m setting all this aside for now—although I plan to come back to it. An exciting interdisciplinary scene Instead, I’m going to give several answers to “what is stage five?”, as if this was a clearly meaningful question. I’m going to give several because different theorists describe it in different ways. That’s because they came to adult developmental stage theory with different intellectual frameworks, from different disciplines. In the 1970s and '80s, there was a really exciting scene, mainly at Harvard, in which researchers from different fields and departments were trading ideas about this. Their different ideas seemed similar in important ways, but they also had major disagreements, reflecting their different lenses. So, were they all actually talking about the same thing, like the blind men and the elephant? Or were they actually describing quite different things, all of which they called “stage five” for inadequate reasons? Unfortunately, academic research in this area ended almost completely around 1990, probably for political reasons.  And that means that at about the time that they were starting to do really good scientific tests of whose ideas were valid, if anyone’s, the whole thing just ended. So we don’t know. I’m mostly going describe my own understanding of stage five. It’s is generally consonant with that of many researchers in the field, but also somewhat eccentrically different. That’s because I came to the scene with different background knowledge than anyone else. Everyone in the field starts from cognitive developmental psychology, and particularly Jean Piaget’s four-stage theory of children’s cognitive development. His fourth and final stage he called “formal operations.” He thought the essence of that was the use of propositional logic, a simple mathematical system. Later researchers extended Piaget’s stage four to systematic rational thinking in general. Piaget explicitly denied that there could be any stage five, because he somehow thought propositional logic was the highest form of cognition. Starting in the early 1970s, researchers found that here are further, more powerful forms of cognition. They exceed not only propositional logic, but systematic rationality in general. Or, so the researchers thought; and I agree; and that’s what we call “stage five.” I come to this with backgrounds also in cybernetics, ethnomethodology, existential phenomenology, and Vajrayana Buddhism. And those have shaped—maybe distorted—the way I understand stage five. * From cybernetics, I understand developmental stages as patterns of interaction of an organism and its environment. The typical framing of cognitive psychology is in terms of representations held in an individual mind; I’m skeptical of those. * From ethnomethodology, I am skeptical that we even have “individual minds.” Or, at least, I think this is a misleading way of understanding ourselves. Our patterns of interaction are manifestations of our culture and our local social environment. They are not primarily personal. * From existential phenomenology, I am moved to investigate what being in a stage is like. “Being” is the existential part, and “what is it like” is the phenomenological part. I’m influenced particular by work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized the role of the body, and of active perception, in experience. * And from Vajrayana Buddhism, I take the habit of seeing all phenomena in terms of the interplay of nebulosity and patterning. Nothing is either entirely definite or entirely arbitrary. We are nebulous and patterned; everything we interact with is nebulous and patterned; the interactions themselves are nebulous and patterned. Unfortunately, the insights each of these four disciplines are notoriously difficult to express in plain language. Cybernetics communicates in mathematics; ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology use long made-up words and abnormal sentence structures; Vajrayana is transmitted in ritual and poetry, not prose. I’m going to try to describe stage five as an experienced interaction, as a way of perceiving and acting, rather than theorizing about supposed mental structures, as cognitive psychologists do.  I’m going to do my best to speak plainly, but describing the texture of experience is going make me come out, I’m afraid, sounding like a stoned hippie! After I babble a bit, I’ll summarize briefly some descriptions of stage five from academic cognitive scientists. They may be talking nonsense, but at least they sound sober. What stage five is like So what I’m going talk about is a visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience, and that’s especially difficult to talk about. It’s easy to talk about thinking, because that’s already largely in words. And I think a distinctive feature of stage five is that it is not so much about thinking in words. What I’m going to describe is not a mystical experience, not hallucinating, not a special state of consciousness. It’s really difficult to express what kind of thing it is. What I’m hoping is that you may recognize some of it, remember having been that way.  I think these are experiences that anyone can have, “at” any stage, if that’s even a meaningful thing to say.  What may be distinctive about stage five is that they become more common, and that you gain more skill in being in these ways. So the first aspect of what I want to talk about is what I call “the open field of activity.” Imagine that you are in front of, looking out on, a plane; a landscape. And there’s all this stuff happening on this landscape. Like, things are emerging out of the plane, they’re popping out of the ground, and they dance around. They maybe change color, they bump into each other, and then they subside back into the field. These are the “happening things.” In this quasi-metaphorical description I’m giving, these are not generally physical objects. They are matters that call for care, or that impinge as relevant to your concerns. Sometimes these seem to be coming at you from all directions, tasks, interruptions, people emoting, public events, and you may feel embattled, and this can be overwhelming.  I think this is an experience that everyone has had, this feeling of stuff coming at you, metaphorically. And that can give a sense of what sort of description I’m trying to give. In a more characteristically stage five experience, you have panoramic vision over the whole field of activity. Your view is from outside, and above. At the same time you can see accurately extremely fine details of these emerging phenomena. It’s like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass at the same time. So you see the forest and you see the trees. And you see the leaves on the trees, and the caterpillars walking on the leaves on the trees! So you don’t get lost in the details, and you don’t get lost in space. Another aspect of this is that you are not detached, you’re engaged. The experience of stage four can be like looking at the world through a heads-up display. So there’s a transparent piece of glass that has projected on it engineering diagrams, or an org chart, that is telling you what you are seeing, and categorizing it and representing it. This is the experience of stage four. At stage five, you can still do that when it’s useful; but more typically, you’re actually looking directly at the world, you’re perceiving without an interposed representation. You can still, when it’s useful, turn the heads-up display on, and use some kind of rational system, some systematic ontology, for perceiving, conceptualizing the world. That can often be very useful; and stage five can do everything that stage four can do. But you also have, like, a little clicker wheel, so you can choose different heads up displays, different representations of the world in different conceptual schemas. You can use different frameworks for perception, and you can actually look with multiple ones simultaneously. This is a very characteristic aspect of stage five. In stage five, caring about lessens; caring for increases. You are intimately involved in the details of the field of activity, because you care for them. It’s more like tending a garden than like building and operating a machine, which is the experience of stage four.   It’s more nurturing, less controlling. At stage four, you relate to everything in terms of “What does thi

A nine-minute radio sermonette. I think I may be doing a bunch of these. Subscribe to get all of them! Possibly I’ll create one every day or two! And maybe you don’t want that many emails? So I could post these as Substack Notes, and collect them into emailed posts, sent once a week maximum? What do you think? Transcript In the 1970s, researchers in cognitive developmental psychology discovered something that may have great practical power; and is underappreciated, I think. The researchers applied Jean Piaget’s four-stage model of childhood cognitive development to college students and other adults. The fourth stage in Piaget’s theory is formal rationality, and the researchers found, first, that many adults are not able to reliably think systematically, rationally, or formally. This may not come as a surprise to you, but it did to them at the time! It contradicted Piaget’s beliefs. More importantly, the researchers found that some adults, after mastering rationality, went on to develop a further form of cognition, which they called post-formal; or meta-systematic; or stage five. Stage five is less about problem solving, which is the essence of stage four, than about problem finding, choosing problems, and formulating them. And stage five often applies multiple or unexpected forms of thought, when in complex, nebulous situations. By contrast, stage four tends to unthinkingly apply some supposedly-correct rational method, disregarding contextual clues that some other approach might work better. I’ve written quite a lot about this, because I think it’s critical now for cultural and social progress, as well as personal and intellectual development. However, while I said that stage five seems underappreciated to me, it may also be over-appreciated, in a sense, by some people. There is a tendency to sacralize it; to treat it almost religiously. This is a pretty common misunderstanding! Achieving stage five does not make you special in any way. It’s not sainthood, enlightenment, ultimate wisdom, or any other sort of perfection. Making stage five sound special is misleading and unhelpful, because it puts it out of reach. It suggests that only super-duper-special people could ever be that way. But, in fact, it’s an unusual but feasible way of being. You don’t need to be something special to make the transition from stage four to stage five. You don’t need any expectation or intention of becoming something special. Those are obstacles, actually! Because specialness is a metaphysical idea. So, thinking that stage five is something ultimate leads you to try to reach it through spiritual, philosophical, metaphysical means, almost by magic, where you think that it’s going to descend on you out of the sky. And this doesn’t work! You can work towards stage five in a practical way. It’s not something that just happens to you because you’ve gotten to be sufficiently meritorious. You actually have to do the work. And doing that unlocks new capabilities, even before you can consistently inhabit the way of being. Before you’re “at” stage five, you can begin to do the thing. So, I wonder where this wrong idea, that this is a special, almost religious achievement— where does this idea come from? It seems to be a natural human thing to harbor a hope for ultimacy: for a possibility that we can transcend the mundane world; that we can become special, elevated above this ordinary place. And making stage five special, sacred in a secular sense, seems to be a manifestation of that hope. To be fair, there are genuine similarities between stage five and some Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment. Stage five does involve a partial melting of the imaginary boundary between yourself and everything else. You realize that you are in constant interaction with your circumstances, and that you and your environment are constantly reshaping each other, so your experience of self and time and space expands. This is not, however, an experience of not having any sort of self. It’s rather that you encompass a broader and more precise vision of the diverse details of the world. You may come to find that you have different selves in different situations. And at first this may seem frightening, fake alienating, or confusing, like which is the “real me.” But, with growing confidence, you find that you can step into dissimilar, unfamiliar contexts, and become whatever they need. This fluidity of self is always a work in progress. It’s never perfected, but it’s a capacity that you can develop increasingly. I think that to be useful, or even meaningful, developmental theory needs to be based in detailed, realistic observation of actual people engaged in actual activities. For stages one through four, the Piagetian program, that’s been done extensively. But when it comes to stage five, there’s much less of that than I would like. And this makes me quite uncomfortable in talking about it, because we are really relying to a significant extent on personal experience and anecdata. Sometimes when people recognize that stage five is a merely mundane capability, they want it to be metaphysical. And so they posit some stage six, or even a hierarchy of further stages, as leading to a metaphysical perfection of what it means to be human, and to transcend being human even, maybe. This gives rise to metaphysical speculation, rather than empirical investigation. And there’s a lot of nonsense in the adult developmental literature as a consequence. That said, there are quite a few down-to-earth, practical, empirical studies of stage five in the academic literature. Less than I would like, but we can draw understanding and inspiration from those that have been done. ​ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

Emptiness, form, and the Big Bang 𐡸 How understanding creates students 𐡸 Buddhism outside institutions This short video explains two stanzas from the Evolving Ground invocation liturgy. The first is an origin myth, and the second explains the prerequisites for successful Buddhist teaching. Each reworks traditional themes and scriptural motifs in a contemporary worldview. The video is extracted from a recording of an Evolving Ground Vajrayana Q&A session. I host those monthly, and they’re free for all Evolving Ground members. Membership in Evolving Ground is also free. Transcript Origin myth, metaphysics, physics Primordial chaos and eternal order: Quantum flux and unified field: Emptiness explodes into form: Diversity and unity emerge. I would say this text is simultaneously extremely traditional and also extremely untraditional. There’s an order to it, which is emanational. “Emanational” is the idea that everything comes from emptiness, and there are successive waves of manifestation out of emptiness. Emptiness is perfectly simple, and form emerges through, initially, energy; and then form. And this can have a metaphysical interpretation, and that’s very traditional. I don’t like the metaphysical interpretation. The first paragraph is just very slightly snarky in this way. It is saying: traditionally we have the emanation from emptiness, and this is a little bit metaphysical. This is an allusion to the big bang, in current physics. And this is a sort of a slightly snarky commentary on, look, if we have to have an origin story, let’s have one that is modern Western understanding instead of this thing; but at the same time, it’s being the traditional emanational story. So it’s, it’s kind of doing both things at once! Fivefold confidence Because emptiness and form exist, time and place come into being. Because receptive awareness exists, understanding comes into being. Because understanding exists, students come into being. Because students exist, teachers come into being. The fivefold confidence is traditionally called the “five perfections” or the “five certainties.” It can be taught in a variety of quite different seeming ways. I will briefly sketch a religious or metaphysical interpretation, a practice interpretation, and a pragmatic interpretation. The five things are the time, the place, the teaching, the— traditionally, the word is “retinue”— the students; and the teacher. So there’s those five things, and the religious way of presenting this is that every Buddhist scripture begins with that: “Thus have I heard: Once the Blessed One was teaching at Raja Griha on Vulture Peak Mountain,” yada yada yada, this is the way scriptures begin. So it’s setting the place and the time and the teacher. It’s like, “together with a great gathering of bodhisattvas.” This is the Heart Sutra version. There’s who’s there, and then what the teaching is, and the whole rest of the scripture is what the teacher said on this particular occasion. In Tantra, the teacher is a Sambhogakaya Buddha. That means a Buddha made of energy. And the retinue is a group of enlightened supernormal beings. And the place is some kind of fairyland. And the time is eternity. The tantric Buddha is timeless and is speaking to us right now in this instant. One can find that inspiring, and it makes sense of the structure of a scripture. The practice of this is a practice of pure vision. This is describing a gathering, in which teaching occurs. We can practice seeing each other as being fully enlightened divine beings. And this makes the teaching more feasible. The pragmatic interpretation is that in order for a real life down-to-earth practice session on Zoom to be effective, these are the five conditions that need to be in place. And for you to participate fully and effectively, it’s helpful to be confident in each of those five factors: that you are in the right place, at the right time, with an adequate group of students who you feel copacetic feelings for; and the teaching is one that is relevant to you, and that will make sense, and maybe (at best) be inspiring. And the teacher has some sort of basic idea of what they’re talking about, which is dubious in my case. Time and place come into being “Because emptiness and form exist, time and place come into being.” That’s just the pragmatics of mundane reality. But because we have some appreciation for what “emptiness and form” means, this is a place and this is a time where we can explore that. Understanding comes into being “Because receptive awareness exists, understanding comes into being.” Before it’s meaningful to engage in a session like this, you need to have some kind of pre-understanding of why this is attractive and interesting and relevant for you. Students come into being Because that pre-understanding exists, that is what means that you are a participant. (The word here is student.) Teachers come into being “Because students exist, teachers come into being.” Uh, this is simultaneously traditional and untraditional. In institutional Buddhism, somebody gets designated as a teacher by, and blessed by, an institution. And they’re told, yes, you’re a teacher. But! In Tibet, it’s also very traditional for people to gather around some person just because they seem to know what they’re talking about, and maybe are inspiring in some way. And then that person winds up being drafted, essentially, as a teacher. So that’s the sense in which, because students exist, teachers come into being. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

A seven-minute radio sermonette. Transcript This is it! We’re actually here. I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can hear my voice. I’m in a place. I’m in this world. You’re in a place. You’re in a room, you’re out walking, you’re driving in a car, and you can see what place you’re in. We are in the actual world. There are people of a religious or philosophical bent, they say, no, this isn’t the real world. We’re not really here. Everything we see is an illusion. Or, this is a garbage world. We’re stuck here, but the real world is somewhere else. It is quite different and it is much better. The “real world” might be somewhat unimaginable. We can have some fantasies about it, but what we do know, they say, is that it is perfect! This is a vision that is attractive when it seems like this world is no damn good. The message that this is a garbage world then becomes really attractive, and we want a way of escape to some other, better world. So this is an idea that is just absolutely part of our basic way of being, and we’re imaginatively living in some fantasy land a lot of the time. We’re not actually willing to admit that we are here. The only reason for thinking that there might be some better world is the sense that life couldn’t be so unfair that we’re stuck here in a world that is completely meaningless, worthless. It is dust and ashes. It’s garbage. The idea that there is some other better world is obviously false. And so there’s a way of reacting to that, which is to say, yeah, we have to face up to the fact that this is all there is. “Is this all there is? Yeah. This is all there is. So I guess we have to make the best of it.” This leads to a kind of brutal materialism, in which we imagine, okay, the world is actually meaningless, but we evolved to like some things and dislike some other things. And so, we haven’t actually got any choice here. All we can do is try to get as much of the stuff we like as possible, and accumulate it and consume it. And try to get rid of as much of the bad stuff. This isn’t even hedonism. I mean, hedonism would be better than this! This is a grind. Hedonism is a kind of carefree enjoyment of sensory pleasure where you can get it. This kind of materialistic outlook is actually joyless. So this fantasy that there’s a better world leads to the fantasy that this world is meaningless and ordinary; and that all that is possible is engaging with it in an ordinary way. It’s like: Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Birth, school, work, death! Is that all there is? “Yeah, that’s all there is,” this materialist view says. And that’s completely wrong. Because the world isn’t ordinary. The world is absolutely extraordinary. The actual world, not this imaginary fantasy world. The actual world is incredible. It is just amazingly beautiful. If you look around wherever you are. There’s colors, there’s shapes, there’s things happening. There’s plants growing here, and there’s these books that are such incredible colors! And we don’t want to see that, because the extraordinariness is threatening. It could be overwhelming. The beauty is overwhelming. The possibility of joy is overwhelming because it can be taken away at any moment. And the horror, the amount of absolute terror and suffering that is going on in the world, we just don’t want to deal with any of that. It’s just too much. And so we unsee it. And we know yes, flowers are beautiful. Okay, yes, everybody knows that. And yes, you can look at flowers and they’re nice. And we also know there’s horrific wars going on with people being bombed and mutilated and dying in the street and living in absolute terror. And that’s somewhere else. “Let’s be in the ordinary world because the extraordinary world is too much to deal with.” So we narrow our scope of vision to what’s immediately on our plate... Taxes are due tomorrow, we’d better stick to taxes. There’s nothing more ordinary than taxes, let’s face it. “And that’s life.” So we shut out the actual world and live in a different fantasy world, not the fantasy world of the perfected philosophical utopia, or religious enlightenment or something. We live in the fantasy world of ordinariness. It is possible to start poking holes in the cloak of unseeing we put in front of the world, and to let a little light in, so that suddenly the intense red and blue of these books shows up as something remarkable and not just, “oh yes, that’s a book.” Then we don’t have to live in the ordinary world. We can live in the actual world, which is extraordinary. Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support. It’s changed my writing from a surprisingly expensive hobby into a surprisingly remunerative hobby (but not yet a real income). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe