So in this essay I’d like to name that distinction a few different ways, and point out a tradeoff between them.

Make us smarter vs. make us dumber

The distinction starts out as “tools that make us smarter vs. tools that make us dumber”. I’ll adjust that framing in a moment but this is how I want to start talking about it.

Here are a few quick examples:

• Arithmetic: abacus vs. calculator. Learning how to use an abacus trains your brain to internalize it. Arithmetic becomes faster and more reliable over time, and the mechanisms behind why different strategies work become obvious and intuitive. Eventually you don’t even need the physical abacus anymore. Whereas with a calculator you will magically, reliably, and instantly get the right result as long as you give it the right input. The price is that even if you were pretty good at mental arithmetic once upon a time, if you keep using a calculator (or “Hey Siri, what’s twelve times six?”) then by default those mental skills sort of fade away over time. And you will always need a calculator for math: it never becomes part of you the way an abacus does.

  

• Navigation: maps vs. GPS. Back in the 20th century, we’d have to use paper maps to figure out how to drive somewhere. We’d write down directions for reference, often needing to steal a glance at our sheet while driving. The result was that generally if you drove somewhere two or three times you’d know how to get there without directions. And typically you learned the lay of the land (or city) from doing a few such trips. Whereas today you just plug the address into your phone and follow its step-by-step directions without having to learn or remember anything. Asking someone for directions is mostly useless today because folks’ sense of how to get places has atrophied: no more “Turn left at the gas station, then look for the bird-shaped bush on the right” type instructions. But now our tools let us account for traffic, road closures, etc. So we’re more effective on net even if we’re less competent without our phones than we used to be.

• Memory: mnemonics vs. search. If you want to remember some facts, one strategy is to use a set of memory techniques. Things like the mnemonic link system and spaced repetition. Another strategy is to just look it up with Google or an AI anytime you need the info. The former strategy is more energy and time intensive but makes the knowledge immediately accessible within you. The latter makes you more dependent on external sources of data and is less likely to integrate into your habits of thought. But you do get access to vastly more knowledge than our ancestors would have ever had a chance to memorize.

There’s another very famous example. In Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates tells of the Egyptian god Thoth1 presenting his invention of writing to the god-king Thamus:

But when they came to letters, “This,” said Thoth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.”

Thamus replied: “O most ingenious Thoth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

In other words, Thamus views writing as a tool that makes people “dumber”.

And in some important sense he’s correct! Cultures did in fact see their arts of memory decay as literacy spread. The same effect became even stronger when search engines like Google became commonplace: people became more skilled at remembering where to look information up but much worse at recalling what that information is.

(How many of your friends’ phone numbers do you know? Maybe none of them. And yet you probably know how to look one up if you need to, say, name someone as a reference in a job application.)

And yet to Thoth’s point, our functional memories are much better as a result of literacy. Writing is much, much more reliable than mnemonics, and more permanent. It’s telling, for instance, that we know about Thamus’s objection to Thoth’s innovation because Plato wrote the story down.

And since the ability to write is pretty reliably available to us, it just works most of the time. Thus the art of memory has faded from widespread relevance.

Which, sadly, means that the things that are hard to write down and organize tend to be forgotten more easily now.

Coming to need our tools

At this point I’d like to adjust the frame of “smarter” and “dumber”. I don’t think one is actually better than the other. I see a real tradeoff between them. My aim is to illuminate the tradeoff so we can think more carefully about where we want to use each type of tool.

Another way to highlight the difference I’m trying to point out is learned dependence.

If you’re a shop clerk, there’s a learning curve involved with using an abacus, but not really with a calculator. The latter just immediately expands your functional arithmetic skills. But it works by outsourcing a certain skill to a black box: you put in the numbers and trust the output. If your black box stops working, your functional skill range suddenly collapses. And possibly to less than you started with, depending on how long and how completely you’ve been relying on the calculator to do all your math for you.

Whereas the effort involved in learning to use an abacus makes you more skilled even if you lose the tool later on. Eventually an abacus will make itself obsolete for its user. One downside is that it takes much longer to learn to use well. And an abacus is much less versatile than a calculator, let alone resources like Wolfram Alpha. Working out something as simple as the cube root of some number is impressively tricky on an abacus but is downright trivial on most scientific calculators.

Part of the key is that an abacus has its user interacting with the structure of arithmetic. Gaining skill means you integrate the shape of numbers into the movements of your fingers. Whereas a calculator lets its user outsource the arithmetic. Any fledgling familiarity with math can atrophy as long as you can prompt the calculator correctly.

But that’s actually maybe fine, so long as you (a) always have a calculator when you need one and (b) don’t have use for the internalized mastery of arithmetic.

Subtle benefits of the harder choice

But sometimes there are hard-to-anticipate benefits to that kind of internalized mastery.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”2 If you don’t have well developed numeracy, you’re much more confusable with figures and survey percentages and so on. It’s hard to know what it means for something to cost “$20 billion” versus “$300 million” and what that implies about the US budget. Politicians can fling big numbers and scary statistics around, and innumerate folk will mostly just go with the vibe of what’s being claimed (or agree with their political allies) without really understanding what’s true and what’s ridiculous.

Developing numeracy well enough to be a clear-minded citizen really does require a kind of deep familiarity with numbers and arithmetic. You just can’t develop the right intuitions if you always outsource the intuition-building activities to a calculator. You have to dance with numbers until their rhythms are deep in your bones and nerves.

Another example is in the ancient history of Buddhism. As the story goes, the Pali Canon was passed along orally for about four centuries before being written down. I’ve heard they had a really robust practice: an aspiring monk would recite the canon in front of several others, and they’d be admitted as a full member of the sangha only after demonstrating an ability to recite the canon flawlessly, as judged by others who’d passed (and often administered) similar tests before.

I’d totally expect something like that process to faithfully transmit specific phrases word-for-word for a very long time.

In those first few centuries, I imagine being a monk was a very rich internal experience. There’d be a grueling initial study period where you’d have to listen to spoken sutras, and try to memorize them, and rehearse them like you might do for lines in a play. But by the time you passed your exam, you’d have all the known words and teachings of the Buddha committed to memory. If you put any effort into understanding their meaning along with the words, you’d have an immensely rich library of guidance living inside you at all times. If you ever struggled in your meditation and wondered what to do, a passing thought (or a conversation with a fellow monk) might call to mind exactly the guidance you’re looking for, because it’s already available inside you.

Whereas today, folk can actively and seriously practice Buddhism for decades and still need to reread the Pali Canon. It’s nice that it’s reliably there! And even more searchable today thanks to modern digital tech. But it isn’t reliably deeply a part of every devoted practitioner, precisely because the memory of the Buddha’s words is outsourced. Thamus’s challenge to Thoth very much applies here.

Classical Western education used to encourage something similar. One of the benefits of performing in a Shakespearian play is that Shakespeare’s words become a part of you. It’s easy to look up the quote about someone being “an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Today it’s an amusingly fancy way to say someone’s being loud and vapid. But in its original context, the quote is actually something entirely different: the speaker, MacBeth, just learned that his wife is dead. It’s dark, and poignant, and deeply moving. The language is rich and evocative. Taking the time to commit it to heart weaves this moment of story into you, and brings those words and ways of speaking ready to hand and tongue:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

In a time when dialoguing with AIs causes more and more people to sound like them, the Bard’s grace acts as an elegant antidote. One that cannot be taken through a quick search and citation but must instead be savored and cherished to work its subtle magic.

In short, tools that make you “smarter” (less dependent) tend to enrich you. Instead of expanding your absolute and immediate ability to perform, they expand what you can see and think, over time.

…which is precisely why they tend to be slower to use and offer less scope: they’re enriching you, and it takes time and effort to integrate that enrichment with the rest of your being.

What do we let die?

And sometimes those enriching practices are just obsolete.

A lot of Homer’s stories use a ton of repetition. In The Iliad he starts every single day with the same phrase: “When dawn with her rosy red fingers shone once more….” The redundancy makes the whole poem easier to remember, which was a big help when the story’s survival depended on repeating it word-for-word based on having simply heard it.

Today we solve that memory problem by writing the story down. Rowling has rich detail to the weather of basically every day she mentions in Harry Potter. And it works perfectly well because we don’t have to remember which day has rain or whatever. The page remembers for us.

So it’s totally fine to let our ancient oral memory practices die. We honestly don’t need them anymore. Writing is just better. Our stories are richer for it. We are richer for it.

But there are cases where I have a harder time telling what is or isn’t obsolete.

I have a deep love of math. I often want to say that “math” classes don’t teach math at all, and there’s a truly beautiful art that most people never get to see because of it.

So from time to time I’ll look at some detail of math, and meditate on it, to deepen my understanding of something. Simply because this kind of deep comprehension is wonderful and profoundly rewarding.

Recently I was pondering one such detail. It turns out that there’s an intimate relationship between exponential growth and circular rotation. You use the same mathematical tool to track both of them.3 But I didn’t have a good intuition for why that should be true.

Normally I’d spend days or weeks pondering the topic deeply, playing with algebra and geometry, meditating carefully and playfully on the proofs I’m familiar with. It’s a process that strikes me as quite similar to Buddhist insight meditation.4 It takes a while.

…unless you just ask an AI.

It occurred to me that I could turn to Claude and just spell out what I was trying to understand, and ask what the key insight was. So I did, and Claude immediately gave me the answer that made it click for me.5

I feel quite mixed about this result. On the one hand, I’m very excited by the possibility of being able to flesh out my mathematical intuitions much much faster than before. I know where many of my gaps in understanding are, where my technical skill outpaces my insight, and I can just directly ask AI for the key intuitions.

On the other hand, that the slowness before wasn’t pure inefficiency. When I spend days or weeks examining the algebra and meditating on subtle implications, I’m reshaping my mind. I’m noticing approaches that don’t work, and why. I’m using mental muscles involved in juxtaposing lots of intellectual texture, chunking relevant bits together, and groping toward the insight myself.

Skipping all that is a bit like hearing a riddle and then asking an AI to answer it for me. I get the answer much faster, but I don’t get any better at pondering riddles. Maybe the answer grants me some insight that expands my horizons. But it also risks letting some mental strength atrophy. It’s using AI in a way that risks making me dumber more dependent.

But how important is that mental strength? Is it just obsolete now that we have AI?

I find math beautiful, and I want to see more of its beauty. Maybe it’s fine to outsource some of the meditation to AI, the same way it’s usually fine to outsource driving directions to my phone. If I always have AI handy, I can just jump to the math insight, and admire the landscape of mathematical truth much more freely and deeply than before.

And maybe folk working at the frontier of math researchers are in the same position. Maybe the key skill now is asking AI to name the right insights. What if we just don’t need that deep meditative pondering anymore?

But I’m suspicious of that possibility. There’s a glorious experience mathematicians describe when landing on a hard-won insight. The most common term for the sensation is “euphoria”. The ecstasy of discovering mathematical truths is without earthly equal, comparable to the profound pleasure of the first jhana in Buddhist practice. I think you have to grapple with the puzzles yourself to experience that euphoria.

And it’s not just a matter of hedonistic pleasure. The kind of understanding you get after a deep struggle is much more fundamentally a part of you.

So do we want to make this kind of mathematical enrichment be one of the things we cherish and encourage in a post-AI world? One of the things we can never fully outsource?

Or is that meditative skill now obsolete, like Homer’s repetitive storytelling structure? Would we just be better off letting AI do all the struggling at the frontier of math insight, and just handing us key insights so we can appreciate the fruits of labor we no longer need to do?

What do we want to exalt, and what do we want to let die?

I get the sense that we’re just barely starting to notice that this is a question that’s even relevant to ask. Let alone one that might profoundly matter.

How are my tools shaping me?

I’m implicitly answering this question all the time in my daily life. I could, for instance, use Google Maps to look at a suggested driving route and then just try to drive without navigation. And maybe pull over and check my phone if I get disoriented. But most of the time I just use the real-time driving directions. I basically always have my phone, and navigation basically always works, so it’s not all that important for me to retain my “memorize driving direction” skills.

On the other hand, most of the time I use a calculator to check my mental math rather than to do it for me. I care about keeping my numeracy sharp, but also about getting the right answer. So if I’m unsure I can check with Siri once I’ve given it a go myself.

(Examples like these add some nuance to the tool type distinction I started out with. It’s not really that tools themselves make me “dumber” or “smarter”. It’s that they encourage being used a certain way, and how I use tools can make me more or less dependent on them over time.)

The same thinking shows up with, say, grocery lists. I used to use mnemonics for those. And doing so is fun! It’s just less reliable than writing the grocery items on a piece of paper (or in an app) and then checking it while at the store. When I do the latter, I’m letting my memory skills atrophy. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, like us losing the habit of Homer-style repetition in our stories wasn’t a bad thing. But it does happen. And if I care about my mnemonic skills, I might want to adjust how I use lists. E.g., I could make the written list, but check it only after trying to shop using some mnemonic method to remember all the items. Then the list becomes a way to train my memory instead of replacing it.

I’ve started using LLMs for a lot of search queries I used to use Google for. I can tell that some of my “dig through the internet to find and verify information” skills are getting less practice now. But in most cases I’m okay with that. It used to take me a while to find solutions to even try for things like “My whiteboard won’t wipe clean” and “I want my soup to thicken.” I’m quite happy to just get answers basically right away, even if I need to check them a bit.

The place where it gets more suss (for me) is when I outsource remembering an explanation to the AI (or to Google-like searches for that matter). Once I really understand how (say) cast iron seasoning works, I can easily remember how to take care of it.

But if I read an explanation of seasoning and treat it as entertainment, and just assume I can look it up later and therefore isn’t something I need to really take in, I feel like I’m depriving myself of an inner richness. I’d be letting my deep sense of how reality works atrophy. I don’t like that. Understanding is one of the things I personally never want outsource to AI.

For a similar reason, at this point I don’t let AI do any of my writing. I’m enriched by the act of articulating, and working my pieces, and massaging my ideas and words. I’m sure I would output some of my ideas more quickly if I used LLMs. But right now I don’t care. It feels like using a calculator to get through my mental math practice. My aim isn’t to hop to the end. It’s to enrich myself with the process.

But I’m happy to let AI create some images for me. I’m not the image-creating artist type, and I don’t currently have much of a drive to become one. In the pre-AI era, that’d mean I’d need to just put in time getting good at drawing or picture-taking or whatever in order to visually express what I mean. And that would be enriching in some ways! But I’d rather pour my self-enrichment time elsewhere right now and for the foreseeable future. So the freedom to skip that particular training montage is very welcome.

I see myself making choices like this all the time. When I remember my schedule by looking at my calendar rather than trying to call it to mind, or when I take the escalator instead of the stairs, or at what point I ask for help when having trouble with some piece of software.

There’s often a tradeoff between

• (a) getting the current problem solved versus

• (b) improving my overall ability to solve problems like the one at hand.

I like at least noticing when I’m making such a tradeoff. And giving myself the chance to decide if I want to change the direction I’m leaning in some way.

The coaching session was a particularly clear snapshot of how the trick works. I want to try anonymizing the example and use it to lay out how to get a special kind of relief here.

“I messed up because I’m stupid”

The guy in question was trying to practice piano. He’d sometimes hit a wrong note. And then he’d get this sharp jab of pain about how “God, I’m so stupid, I keep making these screw-ups!”

I think there are actually two different pains going on here:

1. There’s the pain of the error. It’s a simple thing: he wanted to hit a certain note, and that didn’t happen. The pain here is a correct signal that there’s something for him to attend to and to learn. It’s what feedback feels like.

2. Then there’s the pain of twisting the error into meaning something about him. Instead of “Oh, I missed a note, I guess there’s something to adjust there” it’s “I’m such a screw-up” or “I’m an idiot.”

Malcolm and I have been referring to that second twist as “Original Spin”. It’s a multi-layered name. In part it’s meant to be a pun on “Original Sin”. The relevant part here is that it kind of spins your discernment around so that instead of serving you, your discernment attacks you.

The core way Spin twists perception is by getting you to think something like “There’s a problem because there’s something wrong with me.” It looks for an essential quality (like “I’m stupid” or “I always mess things like this up”) and then suggests that the simple error occurred because of this essential quality. The implication being that you’ll keep having this problem if you don’t change your essential nature somehow.

So in this case, this fellow would have to stop being “stupid” in order to stop messing up piano notes. Since it’s unclear how to do that, each error becomes a reminder that he’s “stupid” (and possibly that he can’t learn).

Rename the problem without you

A simple way to fix this is to redescribe the problem under one constraint: you cannot be part of the problem. You can have a problem, but you cannot be the problem.

So for instance, here the fellow’s issue was that his finger hit the wrong key. That’s simple. It’s not the outcome he wants, but that’s all there is to it. No need for angst. Just “Oh, that’s not what I wanted. How can I make what I want happen next time?”

Maybe there’s actually some content to the “I’m stupid” thing. Like maybe he has some tendency to forget to adjust his finger at that point in the musical piece he’s working on. Maybe that’s even something he tends to forget in general. But if so, that’s a tendency. It’s a limitation to his ability to remember in a useful way while playing a piece. So that becomes a simple parameter for solving the problem: “Okay, I keep meaning to adjust how my finger moves at that point, but I keep forgetting. Whatever in me is responsible for remembering at that moment isn’t doing an adequate job. How can I play that part correctly given that the current strategy hasn’t been working?”

Notice that there’s a simplicity here. There are no emotional knots. No “How do I deal with being such a screw-up?” No “How do I account for being so incompetent?” It’s very simple: “I don’t seem to have this capacity available. How do I solve the problem at hand given this limitation I’m working with?”

When Malcolm and I talk about “unwinding Spin”, we’re referring to this kind of reframe that lands on emotional simplicity. The situation might suck, and it might even suck a lot, but that’s just because some problems are real and meaningful. After unwinding Spin, there’s no extra impression that the situation sucks as a result of there being something wrong with you.

Spin served a purpose once

Lots of people have an urge to fight back against unwinding Spin.

That might be deeply wise. It might be that this trick is actually unhealthy in some way neither I nor Malcolm have pinned down.

But in most cases, I think it’s basically a natural echo of the reason why so many of us started doing Original Spin in the first place.

This fellow, for instance, felt uneasy about releasing himself from the shame of having messed up on the piano. As he described it, he might become this big confident person if he weren’t making himself a bit small with this shame, and being that big and confident seemed scary to him.

There might be something real to that perception. There might be a real problem in his life if here were confident. But my guess (which I told him) was that he’s remembering what it was like to be a child.

As far as I can tell, Original Spin arises because it was in fact an effective strategy for dealing with some kind of social problem in our earliest environment. I talk about a version of this in The Hostile Telepaths Problem. The issue is that sometimes our nature as learning beings was kind of overwhelming to some of the adults taking care of us. So we had to find ways of putting blockages in how we learn so that we could stay in sync with our caregivers.

Sometimes there’s something similar going on as adults. Someone who’s in an abusive relationship might make their situation worse if they suddenly drop shame and aren’t doubting themselves anymore.

But in most cases, Spin is just a habit. And unwinding it requires encountering something like the original fear that caused the Spin to happen in the first place.

The guy I coached yesterday, for instance, probably figured out as a child that self-condemnation helped him avoid some kind of problem with his parents. I don’t know what that might have been; we didn’t talk about it. But the point is that I’m guessing there was something like that going on. Something like the parents needing him as a toddler to “behave” himself, but that’s too developmentally advanced for a toddler to actually do, so he had to mimic “behaving” by getting really nervous about whether he was doing everything right. Slowing down his learning process so that he could stay in sync with his mom & dad (or whoever his caretakers were).

If that’s the case, then when he starts unwinding Spin, he’s going to feel some of the same fear that caused him to Spin in the first place. Why? Because Spin was solving a (social caretaker) problem before, and now by breaking it down he’s again scared of the original (social caretaker) problem.

The thing is, he can’t automatically tell the difference between (a) his fear being a holdover from when he was a kid versus (b) his fear being an accurate reflection of a current problem he has that Spin is solving.

Which means it’s time to do science.

Treat unwinding Spin as an experiment

When there’s resistance to unwinding Spin, I think it’s helpful to do a particular process:

1. First check to see whether you can afford to pay the cost if the fear is correct. For instance, some people might fear that they won’t learn to play the piano correctly if they don’t make themselves notice that they’re stupidly screwing up the notes. (That’s said with Spin, to be clear!) So the question becomes: “Can I afford to learn nothing for a little while as I experiment with unwinding this Spin?” The answer might be no!

2. If the answer is “Yes, I can afford the cost of this experiment going badly”, then you try unwinding Spin as an experiment and see what happens. (Which is to say, you do the reframe so that you have a problem instead of being a problem, until the emotional simplicity clicks into place.) You’re not trying to unwind Spin forever here. You’re just trying it for a little bit, to see what happens.

3. As the results of unwinding Spin come in, you check: what happened? How does it compare to what usually happens under Spin? For instance, if you try practicing at the piano for a bit and you unwind Spin (as an experiment) while doing it, and if you were worried about not learning as a result of not beating yourself up… then how well or poorly did you learn? Honestly check!

Key to this process is that you’re not trying to unwind Spin forever. You’re just noticing what’s true when you try doing it for a little while.

And it’s also important that you’re doing this in dialogue with the fear. This dialogue lets the fear update in contact with the truth. The shift isn’t cognitive. It’s emotional. You’re showing the scared part of you what’s true about the situation in which it’s calling on Spin.

Worth noting, it’s possible (I think highly unlikely, but possible) that you actually weren’t scared enough. That has to be a possible outcome! The point here isn’t to bludgeon your fears into submission. It’s to unravel patterns of shame by noticing where they don’t serve you anymore. That works only if you’re willing to discover that they still do serve you! You have to be willing to look at the truth of reality, whatever it might be.

It’s just that as far as I can tell, in most cases adults simply don’t need Spin. Original Spin is purely anti-helpful in most situations. It handicaps your learning process and confuses you about what’s important to you, usually because some part of your emotional habits are still dealing with some situation you were in as a child but aren’t in anymore.

(And in my dream future, children don’t need Spin either! I want to see a world in which parents can track when they’re putting pressure on their kids to Spin this way, and can adjust to remove that pressure.)

It’s simpler than you probably think

From having helped a lot of people unwind Spin, it seems worth noting: just about everyone overcomplicates it. It really is incredibly simple. Much simpler than you might think at first.

Just redescribe the problem without you being the cause of any part of the problem.

Example: Instead of “I’m so lazy”, notice what the actual pain is. Maybe it’s “I’m scared of what others will think of me.” Why is that a problem, if you’re not allowed to be a cause of the problem? “Others might distance themselves from me if I don’t work harder. I don’t want to work harder, but I also don’t want others to distance themselves from me.” That situation is uncomfortable, but it doesn’t have to mean or imply that there’s something wrong with you. It’s just the situation you’re in.

Original Spin tends to make people actively consciously wrong about what the problem even is. Sometimes what they think the problem is doesn’t even make sense. “I’m such a loser” isn’t a coherent problem. What does it even mean?

After a while, you might start developing a “gut detector” for the “flavor” of Spin. “Why does he have to be so rude?” often has a bit of Spin in it: it’s trying to apply social pressure (in complex ways) by suggesting that the person being talked about has something wrong with him that he should change. (It depends on vocal tone though. I can imagine someone asking “Why does he have to be so rude?” in a way that’s sincerely curious! Generally speaking, curiosity is antithetical to Spin.)

I find Spin a bit nauseating. It literally feels kind of dizzying to me. And now that I’ve practiced spotting it in the wild as much as I have, it’s incredibly obvious. I suspect it can become obvious to you too. Learning to spot Spin isn’t all that mysterious. It’s very, very simple! It just requires some practice.

What do you notice about Original Spin? Is it a clear thing you can see in your own life? What happens when you try unwinding it?

I’m honestly curious! I think this stuff could become quite important. I also just find it fascinating.

So please, drop a comment below!

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I don’t think psychology is a science yet. Science is quite hard to do well. It’s even harder when the topic isn’t objective. Psyches are extremely reflexive, which is to say, they change based on how they’re viewed. And even worse, they change based on how they’re viewed by psyches. Including themselves.

This whole picture makes objective scientific methods woefully inadequate here. It’s hard to even define what psyches are because they’re so reflexive!

So we end up with what amounts to psychological theories as cargo culting science. They sound astonishingly like humorism (the main medical theory before we figured out that germs are what make people sick). There’s even an analog to bloodletting: psychological problems are supposedly due to an imbalance of humors psychoemotional energies, so to heal the trauma that causes the imbalance we have to release the excess blood trapped survival energy.

(Not to say there’s no value to this view! There was also some value to bloodletting. I just think we can do much, much better.)

I think this cargo culting happens because objective things are easier to study and easier for the modern world to take seriously and thus to fund. But psychology really can’t be an objective science. It’s necessarily a subjective science. So if we’re going to make real scientific progress on understanding the human condition in a meaningful way, we absolutely have to develop good subjective scientific methods.

In particular, the core of good science best as I can tell amounts to finding and conducting crucial experiments. The problem is that that “finding” part is usually extremely difficult. Physics is an absurdly easy case: off the top of my head I can list at least a dozen that define the history of the field. But it’s much, much harder to list those for chemistry or biology — and in my experience, most reflexive sciences are very much like biology.

I keep finding I run into problems when trying to give folk crucial experiments in subjective science. There are a few I can point at, like dabbling with “occlumency” in light of the hostile telepaths problem. But even that isn’t really sharply crucial the way that, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment decisively killed the luminiferous ether hypothesis and paved the way to Einstein’s relativity theories.

So given all this… how do we make real progress on psychology1 as a proper subjective science?

Relatedly: how do we find which crucial experiments in psychology are worth doing? We could have worked on finding ways to falsify humorism, for instance, but that’s actually quite hard and wouldn’t have told us much once it failed. In some sense we’re trying to replace psychological humorism with real mental medicine. Maybe we can just draw from the history of medical science here?

Borrowing from chemistry

I feel inspired by the history of chemistry right now. Early chemistry struggled to differentiate itself from alchemy. They didn’t have any underlying theory other than the alchemical ones, most of which couldn’t be falsified. There was an idea, for instance, that all metals are some mixture of sulphur and mercury, and that gold was defined by them being in perfect balance. So if you could somehow separate and cleverly recombine those two key components, you could convert any base metal into gold. But failure to do so wasn’t disproof of the sulfur/mercury idea: you could always attribute any failed attempt to an imperfection in the process or a lack of skill or having done it under an unfavorable condition of the stars or whatever.

Once the idea of scientific scrutiny came about, it was vividly unclear where to start in alchemy. Do we try to force the sulphur/mercury thing to make more falsifiable predictions and test those? If they fail, what then? If they succeed, what else does that imply? It wasn’t clear where the key leverage points were. Bear in mind that what we’d recognize today as atomic theory hadn’t yet been thought of (although its seeds had indeed been planted in ancient Greece, which is why we use the Greek word “atom”, meaning “uncuttable”).

I poked around the history of this development and asked Claude to summarize how this transition worked. Here’s my summary of Claude’s summary:

1. The scientific revolution in chemistry started by making chemical reactions reliably reproducible. Alchemists had been able to get some fascinating reactions to happen sometimes, but it was haphazard, and they didn’t know why it worked or didn’t. They’d record info that we now know is irrelevant, like the tide phase and the time of day and the astrological positions of the planets. Early chemists dropped the effort to achieve certain reactions and instead explored what’s involved in making reactions succeed or fail. As a result, chemists learned from every experiment, even if an alchemist would view the effort as a failure: the fact that a reaction didn’t happen would reveal something about the conditions under which it would. So the growth of chemical insight became relentless even if alchemical ideas couldn’t change much.

2. This “work out how to make reactions reliable” effort caused them to notice the importance of measurement and precision. It started becoming clear that the ratio of different substances were relevant for making specific reactions happen, for instance, and they started being able to describe those reactions mathematically.

3. There was a shift from goal-orientation (turn lead into gold, create “the elixir of life”, etc.) to discovering the composition and properties of various substances. E.g., there’s a substance called “aqua regia” that can dissolve gold. Alchemists viewed this as a possible tool in their attempted Great Work. Early chemists used it as a starting point for curiosity: what exactly is aqua regia made of? What’s key to its ability to dissolve gold? What exactly happens when the gold dissolves? That curiosity eventually let them figure out ways of recovering the gold. (There’s a fun story of a Hungarian chemist in fact doing this to hide Nobel prizes made of gold from the Nazis during World War II.)

All of this was doable before there was any deep underlying theory. We could start converting alchemy into a proper science by just looking at what actually happens and trying to replicate it. Viewing every effort as a learning opportunity regardless of what happens. Getting really curious about why the reactions happen under these conditions and not those ones. Then explanations sort of emerge from real phenomena.

In particular, alchemical ideas (like the sulphur/mercury thing) didn’t matter all that much. They might inspire ideas about what exploratory experiments to try. But it was totally fine that we couldn’t tell whether or not those old ideas were accurate. We were just gathering a much more precise sense of what there is to explain via looking at what actually happens.

Applying it to subjective science

I’m not sure we can just port the analogy straight over to developing a science of psyches. But I have hope! I think we can draw inspiration from it.

Chemistry started by looking at chemical reactions, which is to say, how they changed under different conditions. That focus invited us to work out which properties of the various chemicals were relevant for those reactions. We could do something very similar for subjective structures: what exactly is involved in creating state shifts? There are lots of states like flow, depression, hypnotic trance, etc. We have a bunch of tools for inducing or avoiding or maintaining those states. Sure, I personally don’t like getting depressed… but what precisely are the processes that would let me create it, and un-create it? Kind of like dissolving and un-dissolving gold from aqua regia.

I think for this to work, we need to adopt the “drop goals and just learn from every exploration” attitude. Yes, Buddhism might have some great insights, but it’s pretty singularly focused on ending suffering. But what exactly is the functional structure of suffering? What precisely does it take to increase it in my own subjective experience? Obviously I don’t want that! But I do want to know how suffering works. In this sense Buddhism is a kind of subjective engineering endeavor (the way alchemy was a chemical engineering effort): it might have helpful things to suggest, but it’s not yet a science. And we should be able to make it much more effective at what it does by developing a real science here.

That said, things get tricky when it comes to measurement. Measurement goes hand in hand with objectivity for the most part. We generally deal with reflexive situations (like, say, an animal’s life cycle) by standing outside that situation and describing the reflexive thing as a whole, objectively. That approach could work if we wanted to develop a science of how others’ subjectivities appear to us. But if we want a science of how our own subjectivities appear to us (which I think is utterly critical for having a science of spirituality and wisdom), we cannot pretend we can treat everything objectively. We have to swallow that we’re examining inherently reflexive situations. Which is to say, we must develop the analog of measurement for systems that we can only see from the inside.

At this point it’s a bit funny to talk about what “we” could do to explore individual subjectivities scientifically. “We” can’t. But you can explore yours, and I can explore mine, and we can compare notes and swap experiments and learn things about each other and ourselves.

I think that’s actually quite exciting. It means that subjective science is open source. It doesn’t make hardly any sense for someone to come along and proclaim expertise on how your subjectivity works. All they can do is suggest what you might find if you were to try certain experiments. Everyone can engage in subjective science; no one can really own it.

But reflexivity is tricky

However, there’s something to be aware of here in terms of reflexivity. Let me give an example.

I like the Enneagram. I find it useful. Sometimes someone’s Enneagram type sort of punches me in the face so hard I can’t fail to see it in them. And generally, when I use that type to ask them about their subjective experience, they’re often stunned by how much I get about them. I’ve sometimes accidentally given the impression that I’m psychic as a result.

But it’s actually unclear how much Enneagram type is inherent to a person versus something they conform to because the type is presented to them. When someone is super obviously (say) a Nine to me, is that because they “really are” a Nine (i.e., their subjective structure is objectively of type Nine such that we could reliably detect it as a Nine architecture given the right tools)? Or is it more like a self-fulfilling prophecy where they sometimes act a little Nine-like and people respond to them in kind, which reinforces that way of operating, etc.? In which case they might have a totally different Enneagram type (or none at all!) in a different situation.

How would you tell the difference? Given that the very act of trying to detect someone’s Enneagram type might cause their subjectivity to take on a specific type?

I’m reminded of how in math graduate school I once got treated like the class dunce. I went in for an oral exam and the professor started talking more slowly to me, like I was particularly thick-headed and couldn’t think straight about even quite obvious things. I recognized both his way of interacting with me and my own defeated body language from my own students. I was acting like the kids who were struggling to pass with a C-. He was talking to me like I would talk to those kids! I graduated as the valedictorian of my undergrad college, and quite a few of my fellow graduate students in my math program were quite sure I would most definitely pass the qualifying exams to move to doctoral level work. And yet, given the right social context, I suddenly reliably became a complete idiot who could barely remember what a number was.

I think subjective structures respond a lot to how they’re viewed. And that effect gets used internally: we can change how we’re subjectively arranged by changing our own self-image.

This just isn’t something chemistry ever had to deal with. The chemist is implicitly outside of the chemical reaction they’re examining. Chemistry is intrinsically an objective science. So measurement is pretty straightforward.

I run into this issue a lot when trying to explain what kind of foundation I think memetics needs as a science. There’s a clear objective component: you can look at the flow of memetic influences in culture, or observe their effects on other people. But what it feels like on the inside to be affected by a meme looks quite different! It typically doesn’t look like “a memetic influence”. It looks like realizing something. Getting caught up in a Flat Earth conspiracy meme feels like “realizing” that the Earth really is flat, that there really is some kind of conspiracy, etc. Converting to Catholicism in a subjectively meaningful way is less “I now believe in Christ” and more like a deep transformation in how the world seems to you. Et cetera.

So I think a big component of developing subjective science involves stepping into and out of memetic lenses. I think it’s helpful to be able to become Catholic or MAGA or woke or whatever, and then also to stop. There’s a real skill here, because these memes usually want to stay in residence dominating your subjectivity: it’s really hard to fake faith in the Lord in a subjectively convincing way, and once you’re doing it for real it’s very hard to deconvert. But I really do think there’s a skill here that lets you switch back and forth pretty fluently. And I think you can’t really understand how things affect your subjectivity if you basically always get stuck in (or out of) a given memetic view.

I also think this approach is kind of hazardous. It’s a bit like researching psychoactive substances by taking them. Some of them are very likely to have permanent effects on you. It’s hard to predict ahead of time what those effects are, since that’s precisely what you’re trying to explore.

I’m particularly reminded of a friend who committed suicide earlier this year, basically in the wake of “trying” meth. It was like a demon that possessed her. She eventually got off of it, but it wrecked her sense of meaning and identity while she was on it. She was something like a year sober when she took her life.

This stuff is real. It’s extremely potent. I think there’s cause for concern in doing these explorations. Ideologies like to possess people and stay in control of their bodies and minds. And on the inside it almost never feels like possession! It feels like clarity, or ease, or simplicity, or rightness. Some of them seriously want to eat your soul, for lack of a better term.

Meth ruined my friend’s psyche by giving her an experience of power and capability without any cares at all. Once she knew what that was like, her sober state of being was subjectively agonizing in comparison, even if the meth state was objectively deeply dysfunctional and damaging to things she cared about. There was always this relentless whisper: “You could make all that pain go away if you just take another hit.” And it was right. It’s a horrid nihilistic truth that points away from wholesome outcomes. One of those examples that makes me think “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be” is dangerously context numb.

I suspect there’s a potent meta-memetic skill here that most people don’t develop but that many people could. Basically the ability to fully dive into an influence without letting it keep hold of them. If subjective science were a mature discipline, developing this skill would be a core part of the intro training, I think. Along with some kind of recommendations about which subjective experiments to try first, and which ones to avoid. (E.g., definitely do not start by taking a hit of meth. Maybe never ever touch it. We can hopefully understand whatever’s important there without losing any more souls to demons like that one.)

“But isn’t this just Buddhism?”

A lot of spirituality already explores this area. I think we’ve been wrestling with a need for a science of subjectivity for at least tens of thousands of years, and we’ve developed some methods for approaching parts of it. It’s the subjective equivalent of the accumulated lore that created alchemy, or medical humorism.

Buddhism in particular is super popular in my social circles for this kind of topic. “But Buddhism already addresses this with XYZ” is a pretty common refrain.

I want to emphasize something here to make clear what I’m seeing. I really don’t think Buddhism solves the need for science. It’s kind of subjective alchemy. It has a goal, and a bunch of claimed methods for getting there, and a bunch of people who say they’ve achieved whatever the thing is. Awakening or whatever. Enlightenment is kind of Buddhism’s philosopher’s stone.

The whole thing is based on solving a problem via ancient methods and frameworks. Much of which has to be transmitted. Failure to get the tools to work is a failure on the part of the student, and rarely if ever casts meaningful doubt on the tradition. The analogy to alchemy is really quite striking.

That isn’t to say it’s useless or bad. Just that it’s not science. It doesn’t have science’s relentless power of inevitable insight. There was a brilliant gift that graced the world about 400 years ago that gave us an unparalleled mastery of the objective world. I’m pretty sure we can apply that gift to subjectivity, and to other reflexive domains as we expand our clarity of vision. We can draw inspiration from wisdom traditions just as chemistry drew inspiration from alchemy. But the same way that chemistry completed the objective project of alchemy by proving we cannot convert lead to gold via chemical reactions, and physics learned how to actually create gold via nuclear reactions, I think we can complete meaningful parts of the wisdom traditions. I think we can develop incredibly potent psychotechnologies that outdo what the Buddha and his lineage of students were able to create, in part by building on their insights but also by honoring that science really is exactly this kind of potent.

With all that said, I do think that some Buddhist methods are great for exploring subjectivity. Just sitting and watching your thoughts and examining their structure is an incredible tool, and it seems to develop some ability to see more. (Although, again, reflexivity: how much of what we come to see forms because we’re looking as opposed to having already been there and we’re just noticing?) There are maps of subjective states along the path that I think are pretty relevant to consider and take seriously (as in: do they happen? Why? How? Can we induce them? Can we reverse the order? How self-fulfilling is the map? Etc.). There’s a ton of other stuff that I think should be sources of serious inspiration.

…just like alchemists figured out a whole lot of really curious chemical reactions and methods that formed the basis of chemistry. But chemistry still did something really meaningfully new and potent that alchemy was just never, ever going to accomplish without the core insight of science.

What now?

I’m not sure chemistry’s history is the right thing to draw from here, or a complete vision. But I think it has some promise, and at least lets us get started.

Eventually I bet we can start doing really crucial experiments in subjective science. But first: let’s explore!

One of the things I’m personally most excited about is developing that meta-memetic skill I gestured at earlier. I might write about it in its own post. I think it’s key to navigating psychedelic spaces well, and to expanding our capacity for deep empathy without bricking ourselves. I also think that political discourse has a lot more hope to do something sane and kind if more people can see that memes are speaking through us, and just stop taking their urges so seriously.

In particular, I think there’s something exciting about getting very good at creating the “chemical reaction” of donning a memetic lens, or taking it off. It’s gonna be different for different memes. But I bet there are general rules. I’ve noticed quite a few in my own explorations. Again, I might write about this sometime in its own post.

But quite importantly, this isn’t just my research program. It’s necessarily open-source and very individual. We can say some general things about how subjectivities seem to work when seen from the outside (which is to say, how others’ subjectivities appear to us). But developing a science of first-person perspective really is something that I think we understand by each one of us learning how to play with it.

So: what do you see as possible here? What are you playing with? What “reactions” are you able to reliably induce that seem significant, and how do you do it? Do you think you could describe it in enough detail that someone else might be able to try? What are the parameters such that tiny changes create big yet predictable differences?

And where do you see me being confused here? What am I missing?

How might you, and we, actually do good subjective science?

The field is wide open!

A lot of mysticism and spirituality focuses on the question of who “you” truly are. How there’s “a true self” or “no self”, and how you can come to realize that truth through meditation or whatever.

But I think the discussion tends to cloak why we should care.

For instance, many Buddhisms talk about freedom from suffering, and how suffering arises due to a confusion in your sense of self. And sure, there are probably ways I make my life more miserable than it needs to be as a result of how I view it and/or myself. But if I’m lonely, or hungry, or in physical pain, why would I want to solve that by messing with my psychology? Why not get satisfaction by solving the underlying problem?

Calling that attitude “more confusion” really doesn’t clarify anything. It makes Buddhism sound confused! Why would I want a solution to my problems that sounds indistinguishable from ceasing to care about my life?

Ironically, I think the discussion sounds like this because most people are confused about the nature of the self. But I don’t think that has to be a source of endless paradox. It seems to me that the situation can be clearly stated and mentally understood with some effort. At which point the “why” behind a lot of spiritual practices becomes a lot more obvious. And I think that’s a good thing.

So in this post I want to spell out a possible explanation for “the self” that I find both clarifying and pragmatic.

By that very model, though, it’ll work better if I start with an example of why it matters. What kind of problem this understanding can solve. So let me start there. Just be aware that I don’t mean this to be a description of all problems that can arise from identity confusion! I’m simply trying to point out a reason why you might want to care.

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Sticky problems

Some problems fight being solved. They’re not merely hard to solve; they strategically shapeshift so as to prevent solutions from working.

One example is “anxious attachment” (i.e. being clingy in relationships). There’s a certain kind of person who tends to get very needy and insecure when dating someone. That neediness can then drive the person they’re dating to put up emotional walls. When such a person learns about attachment theory, they’ll often get excited because they see a tool for resolving relationship problems and getting closer. So they’ll try to pressure their now-resistant partner to put even more effort into the relationship. Thus an understanding of why their connection is glitchy gets used to make their connection more glitchy. The clinginess prevents its own solution.

There are tons of examples like this. My breakdown of the Enneagram points at nine such clusters. For instance, one personality design (“type One”) wants to make sure their own behavior and ways of thinking are perfectly good and right. When they learn about this pattern from the Enneagram, they have some tendency to try to purge themselves of their perfectionism, implicitly seeing it as wrong or sinful. That’s of course an effort made of irony. If they notice that irony, their tendency is to get rigid and harsh with themselves and to try even harder. Their perfectionism prevents itself from being softened.

It’s not a coincidence that so many of these error modes go through the sense of self. “I’m too needy” or “I’m too hard on myself” or whatever. Needing a job is just a pragmatic issue, but it becomes a self-reinforcing problem when it becomes part of identity: “I’m such a loser, no one wants to hire me, I’m worthless.” At which point it becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy!

To be clear, I’m not saying that all such sticky problems go through the sense of self. I’m saying that some do, and that de-confusing the sense of self can resolve many of them.

At this point, if I were teaching this as a live class, I’d invite those attending to spend a minute or so jotting down some stubborn problems in their own lives. Ones they’ve tried to solve but that seem to stick around no matter what they do. Chances are that at least one of those problems will start to look more solvable as a result of what I’m about to lay out. But it really does matter to have them in mind before going over the general theory.

So: I encourage you to pause and think of a few such challenges in your own life. I know that breaks reading flow a bit, and if you prefer a fluid reading experience then by all means carry on. But I really do mean less than a minute of reflecting. I’ll explain later on why that’s important.

How I think self works

Here’s my explanation for identity in short:

• Minds solve problems. That’s all they do.

• Minds construct a sense of self to track which tools they can use to solve problems.

• Minds also construct our sense of objects to help with problem solving.

• In particular, to solve certain social problems, minds tend to create a vision of ourselves as seen from the outside, and then to treat those visions as real objects.

This setup is great for solving some problems, but it’s systematically bad at solving some others. If we’re clear about precisely what that distinction is, then the mind can change how we’re using identity such that some of those sticky problems become a lot easier to approach.

Let’s dive into some detail here.

Minds solve problems

When I say “mind”, I’m trying to point at a kind of module that shows up in subjective experience. It’s where thoughts come from, and what produces speech. (How do you take a feeling and articulate it? What’s that subjective experience like?) It’s also what you consult when you’re trying to remember someone’s name. (If you try and try and try, and then set the effort aside, and then a minute later the answer blasts into your awareness… where does the answer come from?)

I sometimes find it helpful to imagine the mind as some kind of internal computer that I’m using. I give it a prompt, and it runs off and does some computation in the background, and then it gives a response. Sometimes it responds instantly, but sometimes it takes a while. (Hence the forgotten name “coming to mind” a little while later.) Or maybe a bit like I have a secretary or genie who lives in the back of my head, and I make requests of them.

(For now, don’t worry too much about who “I” am in this picture.)

I claim that all the mind ever does is try to solve problems. All mental activity is part of some strategy for achieving some goal. Every thought — even a “random” one — arises for a reason. It’s always targeted.

In particular, you can always in principle connect a thought back to a prompt — often one you gave at some point.

Sometimes this connection is very obvious. If the conversation has moved on from remembering the guy’s name to politics or whatever, and you suddenly think “His name is John Glover!”, you’re not confused about why you’re thinking of that name. The thought sort of comes tagged with what prompt it’s attached to.

At other times it’s much more subtle. You might start thinking about how you need to reply to that one client very soon. That thought might obviously be about solving the problem of needing to reply, but it’s often not clear why the thought arose at that moment. What was it in response to? Did something “complete”, as with finding a person’s name you were trying to recall before? If not, why did the situation arise in your awareness just then?

It turns out that you can trace your thoughts kind of like you can trace a conversation. (“How did we get to talking about beach balls? Right before that we were talking about sunscreen, and we were talking about that because… oh right, we were deciding if we should go to the store this afternoon!”) If you do this a lot, I think you’ll find one of two things in each case:

1. You’ll be able to trace the thought back to a prompt. Sometimes it’s an external prompt (like when someone asks you a question), and sometimes it’s an old prompt (like if you’ve been trying to sort out plans for an upcoming trip). But it’s a prompt nonetheless.

2. You’ll find it hard to trace the thought. You’ll draw a blank, or get bored with trying, or suddenly remember that there’s an urgent task you need to take care of, or get really tired or mentally foggy, or get lost thinking about something else, or get an uneasy feeling like you really shouldn’t keep trying to trace the thoughts back.

Why would the latter one happen? Well, one reason is maybe you’re just not used to examining your thoughts. Lots of people don’t notice that their thoughts have experiential texture (colors, shapes, sounds, weights, etc.): if I ask what the capital city of France is, the answer probably comes to mind easily, but if you don’t examine what comes to mind you probably won’t notice how you actually experience the thought. That’s very normal. It can take some practice to learn to notice these “mental sensations”. Without that level of internal sensory detail, it can be tricky to find the trail so to speak.

But another reason is that some mental strategies rely on parts of the strategy staying outside of your awareness. Self-deception being a type of example. If you think of yourself as “a sloppy person”, and the reason you started thinking of yourself that way was to have a self-image that could make your parents show you pity, the whole effort might break down if you were to become aware that that’s why you have that thought. So the mental program that produces the thought will also try to keep you from noticing why you think of yourself that way. Which means it’ll drag up some kind of noise or distraction whenever you try to investigate.

I say this to point out that while every thought is goal-directed, you might not be aware of the true goal. You might in fact be actively wrong about the goal. Thoughts aren’t for informing you of the truth; they’re the conscious part of a mental program that’s directed at solving a problem. Thoughts are accurate only to the extent that they need to be for solving the problem at hand. (E.g. if you’re trying to remember the combination code for unlocking your suitcase.)

And in general, thoughts about who you truly are don’t need to be accurate.

Identity is about tool use

I think the sense of self comes from the mind. And as with anything about mental behavior, it’s about solving problems.

Suppose I want a drink of water, and there’s a cup of water in reach. I can use my hand to lift the cup up to my mouth. That’s a pretty straightforward way to solve the problem. But it’s a little silly to say that I use my hand to grab the cup. Normally I’d just say “I’m picking up the cup.”

Here “I” includes my hand but excludes the cup. That’s where the identity boundary gets drawn.

But if I sleep on my arm wrong and my hand is numb, it becomes a thing. It’s kind of external to me. I can look at it like an anatomical object that’s attached to “me”. So now “I” excludes my hand.

Or in the other direction, if I can’t quite reach a light switch while sitting down unless I use a book I’m holding, then I’m still inclined to say that “I flipped the light switch.” I could say that I used the book to flip the light switch, but only if I’m trying to bring attention to specifically how I did it. Without that, “I” naturally includes the book.

Or for a more extreme example: if I mention a story where I’m driving downtown and I almost hit someone, I don’t mean that I almost rolled down my window and punched a pedestrian. Everyone intuitively knows that “I” includes the car I’m driving.

But if I lost control of the car, like if the steering wheel and brakes stopped affecting the car’s movement, I’m inclined to say I lost control of the car. I don’t typically say that I lost control of myself. Suddenly the car is an external object, rather than part of me.

In all these examples, I’m illustrating how identity is a way of tracking the difference between (a) what you can use to accomplish a task versus (b) what you act on in order to accomplish that task. The first category is part of the sense of self and is what first person singular pronouns (“I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “myself”) get applied to.

I want to emphasize that the thing about pronouns is an inclination. Identity is about what feels natural to include in those words. When I’d practice sword fencing in martial arts, it felt quite natural to say that I hit my opponent or that he hit me, even though it’s really the swords that hit our respective bodies. But if he knocks my sword off to the side, it feels very weird to say he knocked me off to the side. Which is to say, identity is moving very fluidly even at the pace of a sword fight.

Identity can even change mid-sentence. That’s pretty common when people use reflexive pronouns (e.g. “myself”). When folk say things like “I just couldn’t stop myself from saying that”, the parts referred to as “I” and “myself” are usually different. “Myself” was trying to say whatever it was, and the “I” part didn’t have the power to stop the “myself” part. But by the time the person says the word “myself”, they’re usually identified as the person who made the utterance.

In short, identity is how the mind tracks what tools it’s relying on right now.

I mostly don’t think about my keyboard while typing; it’s kind of subjectively “invisible”, the same way it’s “invisible” how I move my fingers to type. I just say that I’m writing. But if the keyboard started behaving erratically, it’d pop outside my fluid implicit sense of self, and I’d be looking at it as an external-to-me object while trying to understand what’s going on. The problem I’m solving has changed, so naturally who I am has changed.

Another way to see this pattern is to notice what it’s subjectively like when there’s no problem to solve. One example can be while watching a show on Netflix. You don’t need to do anything other than make sense of the story. So your sense of self can vanish. There’s just show-watching-ness going on. (But later when you need to explain what you were doing, your mind can retroactively interpret it as that you were watching the show, even though that wasn’t the subjective experience at the time.)

Some experiences of awe do this for me too. Like when viewing a vista, or admiring a sunset. There’s nothing I’m trying to accomplish, no problem to solve, nothing to figure out. I’m just enjoying my present moment experience. When I’m really struck by the beauty of the scene, it subjectively feels less like “I’m struck by” and more like being-struck-by just happens. There is no subjective sense of “I” at the time.

But if I’m sort of caught off guard by a blast of beauty mid conversation, and my friend asks me what’s going on, I might “come to” and reconstruct a sense of self. I need to explain what just happened for social reasons, so I task my mind with reinterpreting the scene. Then the “I” comes back into the story I tell of the sudden pause.

Meta: keep it practical

It’s normally hard for minds to track problem-free ways of being. If those ways of being are problem-free, then what good are they? What problems do they solve? They might even interfere with current problem-solving efforts by ceasing to care! So sometimes you’ll find that a mind will block access to “all is well” states of awe and no-self.

That’s a major reason why I started by pointing out problems that minds typically have a lot of trouble solving without sorting out identity issues. I’m suggesting that the no-self perspective can be useful for dealing with some of those sticky situations. I’m trying to spell out why, in a usable way, so that the mind has a reason to care about orienting to (and sometimes handing control over to) non-mind parts of subjectivity.

(I suspect that in the spirit of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas, I’m talking about conveying to the brain’s left hemisphere some reasons why the right hemisphere is important. But what I’m saying doesn’t depend on this picture of the brain. I just like McGilchrist’s model and notice that there’s a clear plausible connection to what I’m spelling out.)

I think it’ll be easier to understand the ideas I’m laying out here if you keep connecting them back to pragmatics. Are there problems in your life that seem to resist being solved? Do you have some of them fresh in mind? When you examine them, can you see how identity is a factor in at least one of them?

I haven’t finished the explanation, so I don’t expect it to be useful just yet. But I want to emphasize that the intention here isn’t abstract philosophy for its own sake. It’s very practical. If you keep the goal in mind (!), I think you’ll find the ideas easier to understand and relate to.

I bring up pragmatism at this point because typically when I start naming no-self experiences, many people will go kind of blank or get confused. I think that at least sometimes this comes from the mind objecting to what it sees as ideas that get in the way.

That’s a very sensible reaction. I don’t mean to say it shouldn’t happen. I’m saying that I expect you’ll get farther in following along with these ideas if you remember that the point is to improve your ability to solve problems, especially in cases that so far have been intractable.

Objects are for solving problems

I also add the above interjection because the last key point tends to create an even stronger reaction. Some mix of “That’s obviously false”, “That doesn’t make any sense”, and “What’s the point?”

I’ll try to address all that here. Just bear in mind that the point is practical. There’s a perspective shift on how to view the mind that makes some super sticky problems just… melt away. And it’s clear why, from inside that perspective.

So with that said:

The same way identity is about solving problems, so is object perception. A chunk of experience gets mentally tagged as a thing so that it can be accounted for and maybe affected or controlled.

There’s a kind of assumption in Western thought that objects are inherently real. I’m typing on a keyboard, which is really here. You’re reading these words, which are really in front of you. There are things in the world. We see them as such because we’ve learned to recognize what’s already there.

I basically want to suggest that this view is a simplification. It’s not really true. It’s just useful in some situations. But it proves to be systematically flawed in others.

Consider the apps on your phone. It sure looks like there really are apps there, right? You open your phone and there are the icons. You touch one to open the app. Real, right?

But there aren’t actually any apps in the phone. There are pixels lit up in specific patterns on a screen. You mentally interpret some of those pixels as “an icon”, but there’s no “icon” in the phone. There’s just circuitry.

The same is true for words. It’s not true that there are words here independent of all human minds. What it means for there to “be words” here is an interaction between reality and human minds. There “really are” words here in the sense that when you view this experience through that lens, you’re able to suss out coherent meaning, which you imagine is related to what some author intended to convey.

Westernized minds typically have a lot of trouble with this idea. They’ll typically object that however their brain is interpreting the situation, some interpretations are more correct than others. Yes, newborns can’t make sense of objects yet, but that’s because they haven’t yet learned which objects are really there.

I really am saying that no, this view of objective reality is simply false. That’s not how reality works. There are no objects prior to minds creating them to solve problems. There’s no “correct” way to parse reality into things. There are just more or less useful ways of viewing parts of reality as separable for given tasks.

It’s helpful for me to view a cup as distinct from a glass if I want a sip of water from it. It’s not very helpful for me to view the scene as an undifferentiated sea of atoms. So once I have a goal in mind, there are more or less “correct” ways of making sense of what’s going on.

But to a chemist, the difference between the cup and the table is pretty minimal if they’re both glass. And the difference is truly irrelevant to someone who’s trying to destroy the whole building.

I’m suggesting that the same way every thought is suffused with a goal, so is every object in your perception. You perceive objects for the sake of solving specific problems.

Or said more precisely: your mind carves reality into “this thing” and “not this thing” as a strategy for using “this thing” for some goal.

One hint of this view of objects is, again, in states of awe. When viewing a vista, I see a wholeness. I’m beholding the vastness of the view. (Or rather, there is beholding-ness.) With some subtle effort I can pick out a river and specific trees and so on. I might zoom in on a few objects and make sense of them and name them for a companion. But the default state is object-less-ness. There’s nothing I’m trying to do, so there’s no thing for me to do it with. My mind has no reason to create any thing.

Object rigidity

Just like with identity, this object perception is quite fluid. Minds are pretty good at sorting out objects in useful ways for simple physical tasks. Like how a chair can suddenly become a stool when you’re looking around for a way to reach a high-up shelf. You probably don’t even notice the carpet or the paintings on the walls or the shadows that the curtains cast on the floor. Your mind probably didn’t bother parsing any of those into objects at all. (Why? Because they don’t seem relevant to any current problems!)

Sometimes, though, minds can kind of get stuck on viewing part of reality as an object in a very particular way. Creative solutions that require de-parsing the object as such get automatically thrown out.

A classic example of this is the Duncker candle problem. (The below video is about 90 seconds long; for whatever reason it’s a video of a longer video.)

In many cases the issue is that the person just never thought to view the object differently. If someone had never seen anyone stand on a chair, they might not realize it could be used as a stool. But it’s usually no trouble to think of it that way once it’s pointed out.

But sometimes it’s very important to someone that they keep viewing something a particular way. For complex reasons I’ll get to in a bit, this usually shows up in social situations rather than physical ones.

Like whether a trans woman “really is a woman”.

A simple clarifying question I like to ask here is “…for what?” When something’s nature seems confusing, it’s helpful to ask what problem is being solved. Is a trans woman really a woman… when it comes to giving birth? No. When it comes to how they’re socially treated? Well, that depends on the social context and whether they’re “passing”. How about legally? That’s more complicated and is subject to ongoing debate, but right now under the second Trump Administration the federal answer is roughly “No.”

But it can feel meaningful to ask: are trans women really women, or not? What’s the truth here?

It turns out that the answer is reflexive. Which is to say, the “correct” answer depends on how the situation is viewed. So anyone who has stakes in this argument has some reason to claim that the answer is not reflexive, i.e. is instead objective and therefore should be viewed a particular way. That there’s an absolutely correct conclusion here, and that if everyone were to conclude something different then everyone would be wrong.

In this case, the political view is an attempt to steer where we all land, rather than an attempt to describe what’s objectively true. Although it works better if the people involved believe they’re just fighting for recognition of an objective truth!

Just like with the candle problem, this rigid way of thinking can make some problems unsolvable. Sadly, unlike the candle problem, pointing out the rigidity rarely helps, since there’s a social problem being solved with the rigidity.

And as a general rule, minds will not change their strategies unless and until they have a better way to solve the problems those strategies are for.

…which is very tricky when their current solutions constrain which solutions they’re able to even consider!

Social self

Minds tend to parse situations into things that interact. So if I’m picking up a cup, I’m by default inclined to think of “me” and “the cup” as separate objects.

Having a mental model of myself as a thing is actually quite useful. It lets my mind do recursive social reasoning. To be socially graceful, I have to distinguish between all of:

• Whether Alice wants to go on a given trip.

• Whether Bob wants to go on the trip.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob wants to go on the trip.

• Whether Bob thinks Alice wants to go.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob thinks Alice wants to go.

• Etc.

Likewise, I need a way of viewing myself so that I can be added to the mix:

• Whether Alice thinks I want to go.

• Whether Alice thinks Bob thinks I want to go.

• Whether Alice thinks I think Bob wants to go.

• Etc.

To think this way, I have to have a way of viewing myself sort of “from the outside” the same way I view Alice and Bob. And I need to view myself as distinct from, say, the floor or the sky or whatever, in roughly the same way as I view the other two.

So I end up with what amounts to a kind of little icon or model of “myself” in my mind, that’s of basically the same type as for other people.

I think that’s why images like this one can make sense:

It doesn’t matter whether you, or I, are one of the figures being depicted here. It’s kind of “from the outside”. It’s an objective depiction of a social situation.

When solving social problems, people often default to using this kind of mental icon for themselves. “I’m a Democrat” or “I’m a Catholic” is often (and I think usually) an assertion that an attribute they see being assigned to some other people should also apply to themselves. Where “themselves” here is about that mental icon.

Contrast with statements like “I’m happy” or “I’m tired”. Those are often statements from inside the experience, trying to articulate what the experience is actually like right now. Very different from “I tend to be a happy person”, which is pretty blatantly a statement from a vantage point outside the “I” who is being described.

The same way my keyboard is kind of invisible to me while I’m using it, so are these social icons. I tend not to distinguish between my housemate and my mental model of my housemate; I sort of project my impression of who he is onto the person standing in front of me. That process can go more or less poorly depending on how good a fit my model of him is for a given situation.

…although I hasten to add, “fit” here doesn’t mean accurate. How could I ever know? What I mean is, when I use my mental model of my housemate to guide my interactions with him, how well does that go? Do I get the results I’m expecting? I don’t think there’s a correct model of someone, the same way there’s no correct way to parse the world into objects. The question is whether the model is fit for a given purpose.

If I run into object rigidity with how I’m viewing someone — which is to say, it’s important to my mind’s current strategies that I view that someone in a very particular way — then there can be trouble. Like if I’m in a romantic relationship but my view of my partner is a bad fit for changing some of our painful ways of interacting. If I can’t set the model aside enough to see her afresh and develop a new vision of her, then I can’t change, and our dynamic can’t change. This pattern is part of where stubborn relationship problems can come from.

And it’s important to add, this pattern isn’t due to some bad habit of being stuck or whatever. Model rigidity, best as I can tell, is always strategic. Minds don’t hobble themselves for no good reason. If the mind fights changing its model of someone, then there’s some strategic reason why it’s important to view them that particular way. You cannot change such a mind without giving it some different way of solving the underlying problem.

Because my social icon for myself has the same properties as my social icon for others, I can run into exactly the same dynamics here. My social sense of self can be invisible, sort of projected seamlessly onto my more immediate experiences of being. It can be more or less fit for a given purpose. And sometimes (such as with self-deception) it can become very strategically important that I view myself in a particular way even if it’s not fit for a given purpose.

In sum

At the risk of repeating myself, here again are the components of how I view the mental sense of self being created:

• Minds are problem solvers.

• Minds create a “me”/“not me” distinction to track which tools can be used (“made invisible”) versus what is to be affected. This sense of identity is always with respect to a task.

• Minds also create the impression of things. Object perception is always with respect to some goal.

• In particular, minds create mental objects (what I sometimes call “social icons”) to do social problem solving, and have to create a social icon for “myself” in order to be included in social thinking.

• Some social problem solving can result in object rigidity, i.e., a strategic need to view an object or a person in a very particular way.

All of this can combine into a sense of self that’s (a) seen as separable from the rest of reality, (b) is a bad fit for solving some of your problems, and (b) nonetheless pragmatically hard or impossible to change directly.

Solving problems that fight back

I think this paints a pretty good picture of where some sticky problems (i.e. problems that strategically fight being solved) can come from. The basic issue comes down to the cause of object rigidity: there’s some reason why you have to view a thing, or someone else, or yourself, in some particular way. So if that framing is a bad fit, you’re stuck with the problems of that bad fit unless and until you can solve the underlying problem differently. And pragmatically speaking, that underlying problem is basically always a social problem (as opposed to a physical problem like being thirsty).

I think the Buddhist aim of realizing no-self is at least partially a general attempt to fix this meta-problem. It turns out that the mind’s model of self is fundamentally incoherent: minds have a lot of trouble making sense of reflexive situations they’re part of, so their models of themselves are always flawed in some critical way.

This challenge shows up in the model of self I’ve given so far, in fact. I’m treating the mind as a thing, and the mind’s user (“you”) as a thing, and naming their interaction. But there’s no way for the mind to stand outside itself and observe itself.

Typically, minds deal with reflexive situations by assuming they can view those situations from the outside. That works fine when you’re trying to make sense of a foreign economy, or someone else’s marriage. But it fails spectacularly when trying to analyze systems that that very mind is part of!

A lot of Buddhist insight meditation strikes me as basically staring at this incoherence and prompting the mind to make sense of it until the mind sort of gives up on its basic strategies. Object rigidity with respect to the social self sort of falls away because the underlying problems that the rigidity is solving are seen as meaningless.

My guess is that there are probably ways of implementing this strategy much more efficiently.1 But we don’t have those methods yet. So in the meantime I want to gesture at some alternatives.

The main unifying theme is that the underlying problem causing object rigidity has to be solved differently. That’s almost always a social problem. For instance, that’s how I came up with some unusual solutions to signs of self-deception. I reasoned basically like so:

All mental behavior is strategic. When there’s a strategy that seems to create problems for the person, but they fight against attempts to change the strategy, that implies there’s some social problem being solved for which the current issues are acceptable side-effects. If I look at self-deception through this lens, what do I see? What could be socially useful about self-deception?

The result was the idea of the hostile telepath problem. And it suggested some odd interventions, like that giving yourself permission to hide or even lie about your internal experience can clear recurring mental fogginess. The reason being that some mental fogginess is a solution to a hostile telepath problem, and “occlumency” (i.e. the skill of hiding your internal experiences from others) is an alternative solution that might work even better.

The issue, of course, is that if part of your current strategy requires that you be unaware of the original problem, then coming up with alternative solutions can be quite hard. You certainly can’t do it by just consciously thinking about it!

I suspect this is why some methods of “trauma processing” mysteriously work when they do. They’re often helping you to notice that the situation you were trying to deal with isn’t around anymore. But it has to be indirect, because the strategies you implemented won’t let you be aware of them. So sometimes you can get clear on why you have the problems you do only after you’ve solved them somehow.

For related reasons, it can be helpful to have someone else guiding you through a process of finding alternative solutions. Since they are (hopefully) not subject to your current need to keep your strategies hidden! But this is very tricky business, since the underlying problem is almost always a social problem of some kind, and it’ll often apply to your friend or coach or therapist or whoever it is.

I’ve solved some special cases of these problems quite elegantly. I hope to talk about those cases quite soon. They relate to what a colleague & friend and I refer to as “Original Spin”. I also have one quirky approach laid out in my article on hostile telepaths.

But this piece is long enough, and I’ve run out of time to work on it this week. So I’ll leave this sketch here and invite your own exploration:

If you apply this lens to your own situations, what do you see? What underlying problems might be there? If you get mentally fogged or distracted while trying to answer that question, how might you explore alternative solutions without risking breaking the ones you already have?

And germane to subjective science: what “sticky” problems do you observe that you can tell do not have the structure I’m describing here?

Appropriately enough, that experience had led me to reflect on the nature of dreams.

I grew up with a lovely worldview. I’ve played with setting it down for a while. This week I’ve tried picking it back up again. It’s relieving to do so, honestly. That view is what I’m going to write about this time.

It can be explained. But I think doing so is actually less clear. Cognitive minds might like that approach, but that’s such a small part of people.

Instead I’d like to show you.

I’ll share a handful of vignettes and reflections. There really is just one theme. The scenes interweave. I invite you to feel their interconnection even if you don’t consciously understand it.

View it like poetry if you like. I think that’s more helpful than looking for theories. Theories can come later. For now, I invite you to enjoy a short journey.

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When I was little, I could see the Milky Way from our back yard.

In the 1980s, even in the city the light pollution was low enough that starlight would make the night sky glow. Looking up, I would feel a vastness, drawn in by the stunning silence punctuated with multicolored freckles. Awe would grace my heart.

To this day it still does. Whenever I’m in a place far enough outside the bounds of civilized light. I look up, and my soul sings for home.

As a child, my father would tell me how this was all made for us. How his father would say that this reality is a vacation. “The purpose of life is to have fun!” Sometimes Grandpa would add that when we wake up from this dream, it’ll be time to get back to work — always said with a grin.

My mother once met someone from beyond the stars. It feels impolite to give too many details; I think it was a private visit. You can think of it as a dream if you like. I think that works well enough. But it always stayed with me, the clear impact that the Laughing God left with her. A certainty that this world is not what it seems. That there is a true reality beyond it.

I’m told that the ancient Hermetic wizards and astrologers used to view the night sky as a sphere, with pinpricks in it that let God’s light through. And that the planets and Sun and Moon wander around on that celestial sphere.

There’s something very quaint about that view. I can see why they’d want to see it that way.

It’s really something to behold the night sky with wonder.

Why does it touch me so?

What lies beyond it?

None of these questions quite touch the true ask my heart has here.

I think the real question lives in my heart, and my eyes.

Once, as a pre-teen, my cousin tried to trick me with a ghost story.

We were like brothers. We’d sometimes get in fights and refuse to talk to one another. But we’d leave audio notes for each other on an audio cassette using my boombox.

I still have some of those old audio tapes. Side A is labeled “The Wor of Alex and Michael”. Side B has “WAR” written several times on it. I’d tried to make up for how I’d misspelled “war” on the first side.

One day he told me that his hearing was so sensitive, so acute, that he could hear the dead.

I think he didn’t understand how I would react. I’m guessing he wanted to impress and wow me. And the claim did! But my immediate reaction was less “You’re so amazing!” and more “Oh! So we can investigate stuff!”

There was an old abandoned house at the dead end of the street my family’s home was on. Tucked away inside the blackberry brambles. Our parents forbade us from exploring inside the house. But we’d sometimes traipse near it to take a look.

So naturally Alex claimed that he could hear ghosts inside the house.

When he made that claim, I got excited, and practically dragged him to the house. I wanted to know what they were saying! Who are they? How did they die? What’s it like being a ghost? What do they want?

I kept prodding him with questions, sometimes addressing the ghosts and turning to him to act as the translator. Sometimes we noticed that the wind would blow in ways that seemed like a response from our invisible friends. I honestly don’t know anymore what Alex thought about it all at the time. But I thought it was magical and wonderful.

A little like looking at the stars.

After a while of this, he got tired of the game and told me he didn’t want to be the translator anymore. So I turned to the ghosts I couldn’t see or hear and asked if we could communicate directly. I suggested using the wind as a yes/no sign: wind blows means yes, stillness means no.

“Does that work?” I asked.

Winds blow.

“Great! And just to check: do you want this conversation to end?”

Winds stop.

“Excellent!”

So I continued to chat with the ghosts. I learned a lot about them. They even taught me how to make the winds blow!

For about two years after that it was a lovely trick I would sometimes show my friends. They’d ask me to make a breeze happen while we were hiking so we could cool off.

Sadly, that magic trick vanished shortly after my family moved from that street.

A little while after the incident with the winds, my mother asked me not to talk with Alex about the ghosts down the street. I didn’t know how she’d found out, or what the problem was. But I agreed.

I learned many years later that apparently I’d terrified my cousin. He’d gone to his mother, clearly scared. She extracted enough of the story to call my mom and ask what was going on. It was apparently Alex’s mom that had asked if I could stop frightening him with these ghost stories.

What can I say?

Perhaps it’s unwise to bullshit a young wizard about matters of magic! Reality might not respond how you’re expecting.

I used to dream vividly every night, effortlessly.

And at least once a week, I would have a lucid dream. A dream where I’d recognize it as a dream while it’s happening.

There were recurring themes. If I fell from too great a height, I would fall through the floor, appear miles above our house in the sky, and keep freefalling until zipping through the roof and slamming into my body. If I swore or got angry, the Pain Machine would come from around the corner with a “BAM. BAM. BAM.” sound like an ominous drum, and zap me with an agonizing laser that would wake me up. If I found myself wandering around inside my house, I couldn’t go inside my room or I’d get sucked into my body and the dream would end.

Mostly it was just fun and fascinating though. Wondrous.

A bit of starlight.

My family liked sharing dreams, and talking about dreaming. My parents were jealous of how easily I had lucid dreams. They’d share advice with me and encourage me to keep playing in the dream world.

I had a pretty clear sense as a child that the dream world was just over the eastern horizon. I would go there each night. In my dream body.

When I was a bit older, Dad and I would sit outside in the backyard looking up at the stars. And he would suggest questions that still stick with me.

How do I know that I’m awake?

Have I ever thought I was awake, and then awoken to realize I was actually dreaming?

How do I know that isn’t what’s happening right now?

I find it easy to put my thinking mind to these questions. It’s so clever! It thinks lovely thoughts that I enjoy very much.

But there’s a subtler movement here. One made of wonder.

There have been so, so many times I’ve simply known I was dreaming. I could tell. It wasn’t reasoned. My environment looked totally normal, even by my judgment after waking up. But I knew. I was lucid.

And there have been times I’ve considered whether I’m dreaming, and tested the possibility, and the test came back very conclusive that I am in fact dreaming… and I simply did not believe it. Or I would think the thought “Well, I guess I’m dreaming” but the thought somehow did not make me lucid.

Lucidity is something deeper.

A glimmer of it is in these thoughts. That I can never know I’m awake, but I can know I’m dreaming.

Is this a dream? Right now?

Glimmer.

Glint.

Like a hint of light tickling my soul through the darkness.

A thought experiment:

We know the world we experience comes through our senses. That our brains interpret sensory input and translate it into what we see and touch and so on.

Which means we don’t see the world. We see our brain’s presentation of the world.

We hope that that presentation is somehow “like” the real world. That there really are trees and roads and other people and so on.

But we really can’t know that. Because all we ever see are these presentations.

That’s why things like The Matrix and Boltzmann brains are even plausible. It’s possible, in theory, to induce experiences that have very, very little to do with what’s literally real.

But all of that is pretty abstract. I’d like to suggest a mental trick to make it more concrete, that my father once suggested to me.

In a sense, all the above means that the world you see is inside your head.

Which is to say, the dome of the sky is the inside edge of your skull.

I mean, of course not literally. Don’t take this as a truth claim.

I mean to invite you to try on the view. Not because it’s true. It clearly isn’t. But because it’s suggestive of something true.

Literally everything you see is inside your head. You can literally see that.

It’s like being in a giant dream world.

You’re making the trees, and the people, and even these words.

Now, maybe you’re making all these things because there’s something beyond your head that’s really there. Maybe each thing is a re-presentation.

Or maybe it’s more like desktop icons on your computer, or app icons on your phone. There are no actual icons inside the phone’s circuitry. Those are just how we interpret the interface. (h/t Donald Hoffman.)

Or maybe you’re just dreaming. Maybe it’s all made up.

How would you know? How would you tell that you’re not dreaming?

There’s a tense, contracted way to tackle that question. Firm logic and adherence to ideas. Arguments. Fearfulness. Anger. Certainty that the “sky as skull” view is wrong and can be dismissed.

But I don’t mean a challenge to logic here.

I mean an invitation to taste a bit of wonder.

What lies beyond your head? Beyond the dome of the sky?

There’s a way to hold that question that is very much like looking at the stars.

I’ve met some curious characters in my dreams. Ones that really throw into question my understanding of what dreaming even is. And who or what I am.

For many years, zombies were a recurring theme of my nightmares. Usually I’d be in a house with some other people, and someone would just forget to close one of the doors. It would be infuriating and scary at once. A clear reflection of some of my deeper emotional structures.

In one lucid dream, my friends and I approached a cabin that held the Zombie Master. I was delighted: I’d finally get to see where these nightmares were coming from! We entered and found a charismatic gentleman in a pinstripe suit standing next to a lit fireplace. It was a pleasant scene with an air of danger.

I forget the exact nature of the scene, but he quickly oriented to me and ignored my companions. I named that I am the Dream Master — a common title I use in lucid dreams to let dream figures know I am lucid. And the Zombie Lord laughed.

“No, I’m afraid I am the master of this dream. You are not nearly so lucid as I am.”

And he proceeded to prove it. He could control the dream at least as well as I could, and he could block my lucid dream powers.

It’s very strange, encountering a dream figure who is more lucid than I am.

In another dream, I was fully lucid but basically powerless. I could not levitate or create objects or do even the simplest coincidental summoning. I was in a girl’s kitchen in her apartment, so I turned to her and said

“I’m not consciously creating you, so you must have access to parts of me that I don’t right now. Can you help me gain my lucid dreaming powers?”

She gave some suggestions and then wandered off while I tried them. It took a bit, but they worked. I felt my full power snap into place. I hovered above the kitchen floor and did a few other tests to confirm. I then floated into the living room where the girl had gone and told her

“Thank you. That worked. I’m kind of a god here now, so is there anything I can do for you in return?”

She pondered for a few seconds. And then she replied

“If you could make it so I don’t cease to exist when you wake up, I’d really appreciate that.”

At the time I sort of stammered. I really didn’t know how to do that.

I’m still not sure, honestly. But it’s a wish I’ve taken to heart.

Entering a dream nearly always feels like entering a world to me. Complete with its own history.

In October 2014 I did a breathwork ceremony. It broke my sense of dreams as real and plunged me into a materialist worldview. I didn’t understand what had happened; I just felt devastated and hollow, like all hope had been retroactively erased from reality. Like my home not only had ceased to exist, but had been erased from the past as well.

I stumbled around for several days after that, unable to say anything more coherent about the experience than

“I’m sealed at the bottom of an infinite tomb full of nothing but dust and death forever.”

I’m told this experience is similar to deconversion. Folk who grow up atheist have little idea what it’s like to lose belief in God. It doesn’t feel like learning a clarifying fact about the world. It feels like something has been retroactively stripped from reality. Whereas before the ground supported you via God’s love, now it’s just electromagnetic repulsion and the Pauli exclusion principle — and all those impressions of “God’s love” get reframed as having been delusion.

It’s quite an intense thing, to enter a dream that rewrites the past.

When I look back at the wind gift the ghosts gave me, I’m sure the right way to explain it is something like confirmation bias. I’d notice when it “worked” and would view when it didn’t as a skill issue. Maybe coupled with something kind of like cold reading: if I could subconsciously tell the wind was about to blow, I’d “decide” to try “making” it happen.

That does sound like roughly the right way to rewrite the history of that dream, from this one.

One of the common signs of non-lucidity is believing that the world is exactly as it seems to be. That maybe you were confused before, but now you finally have clarity. The true view of reality.

I do believe that true clarity is possible.

But it cannot come from finding the right story.

Every story is yet another dream. Describing itself as though it is the real world.

The true world beyond your head might not be findable. Perhaps it is. But how could you tell?

But perhaps one can tell if one is lucid.

Humans love stories.

They give texture to life.

“We are at war!” cry the virtuous. “We must defeat the armies of evil!”

Stories of saving the world. Ending atrocities. Purifying Earth of toxins.

Or stories of the simple life. A bit of homesteading, and raising children, and fixing the plumbing yourself.

A girl struggling to express herself through theater. Her friends passionate about the same.

An uncle playing music he loves for a niche audience able to appreciate it.

Endless stories. So many beautiful lives.

One such story involves “self actualization”. A great deal gets said about it these days. The “coaching” industry is built on it.

Whispers of “healing your trauma” and “becoming your true self”.

My, what a fascinating little dream.

I mean no offense to call it such. I cherish every one of these dreams.

It is very alive to me that some little dreams have asked to survive my awakening. They are real. They matter.

At the same time, they are dreams. Most do not appear to be lucid.

It’s curious how rarely the “healing” dream encourages lucidity. I see people drawn in ever more deeply. “Changing the world” by “healing our lineages”. Believing the story ever more fervently.

Perhaps. Perhaps that dream will spread. Maybe it will be a good one.

I wonder what a lucid world would feel like. Where everything is cherished and immersed in, but nothing is fully believed.

I think it could be quite lovely.

Are you dreaming?

Right now. This moment.

Perhaps these words are a reminder to you.

I invite you to look.

Not to consider. That’s a dream mind thinking dream thoughts.

Not with your eyes. What is there to see?

Instead, I invite you to wonder.

To awaken just a little bit.

Even if just for a moment.

My.

Oh my.

The stars are beautiful.

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Sadly I’ve run out of time to finish any of them this week. So I made a recording trying to focus on a particular idea: distraction programs.

I ended up discussing the idea of crucial experiments and what I hope for from subjective science. It felt like relevant context to give first. So most of the talk ended up being about those topics before diving into the mind structure I had set out to discuss.

I had Otter.ai create a transcript, which you can view at this link if you like. I make no promises as to its quality though!

Enjoy!

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So for instance, someone who was sweating from fever might be thought to have too much Air (because Air was “hot and wet”), which corresponds to the humor of blood. Hence bloodletting as a solution.

This was the dominant medical theory in Europe for centuries. Today we usually think of it as pretty backwards to weaken someone who has a fever by making them bleed. So why did the practice survive for so long?

Well, it turns out that bloodletting sometimes can make it feel like a fever is backing off. A doctor (or a barber) would conduct the procedure, and the patient would feel cooler, which seemed to validate the model that the fever came from too much blood.

We now know that the patient merely feels cooler because losing blood can create an emergency response in the body. Weakening someone who’s fighting off an infection is actually a really bad idea. But often enough someone would recover despite the medical intervention — at which point most people would attribute the recovery to the bloodletting.

So it sure looked like it worked!

I think we’re basically at this stage when it comes to social science. I’m thinking particularly of mental health therapy (or “coaching”) and spirituality. People have very strong opinions about how to “heal trauma”, or the nature of “the ego” and why it’s important for it to “die”, or how to raise emotionally healthy children, or what makes for a good marriage, or what policy would solve some societal problem if it were put into law. When the intervention seems to work, the success gets attributed to the intervention. When it doesn’t, there’s nearly always some explanation for why that keeps the original theory alive.

This approach misses the core insight of science.

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Not to say there’s nothing to these ideas! Even bloodletting turned out to be genuinely helpful sometimes. (It could reduce excess levels of iron in the blood, for instance, which really can help deal with or prevent other issues.) People were successfully solving tricky problems tens of thousands of years before the invention of science.

Like cathedral building: we were able to work out the idea of flying buttresses centuries before Newton. And that solved a real problem! Suddenly cathedrals could have glorious amounts of light.

And yet, no pre-scientific advances in cathedral design were ever going to let us build skyscrapers or rockets to the Moon.

But somehow, the single idea of science let us not only build those, but also master electric power, and systematically manufacture steel, and invent vaccines, and set up satellites to develop GPS, and create engines that could power machines for us. All in the same 300 year period. A mere fraction of the time we’d been working on cathedrals.

We just haven’t seen anything like that kind of advance in terms of subjectivity. We don’t have a “vaccine” for mental illnesses, or a “steam engine” for meditation, or a “GPS” for governmental design.

What we have instead sounds an awful lot to me like humorism.

There have been attempts to fix this before. An example is behaviorism, which tried to turn psychology into a natural science by making everything objective. Behaviorism gave us some pretty powerful tools like masterful animal training. But it spectacularly failed at most things we really care about, like good education and sorting out interpersonal conflicts.

I think the problem arises from two related issues:

1. We misunderstood what the insight of science actually was. We’ve come to think it’s tied to objectivity. I think that’s simply incorrect. Science is an insight about how to relate to understanding. Objectivity is just the domain we got really good at applying science to.

2. Objectivity works incredibly well when examining objects. But the most interesting aspect of people is precisely the ways in which we are not merely objects. In particular, unlike objects, people are reflexive — meaning that our nature changes based on how we’re viewed. Things like how well a date goes depends a lot on how well the pair expects the date to go. Objective scientific methods tend to stumble or outright fail in contact with reflexive phenomena like this.

It seems to me that these issues are straightforward to fix. That possibility excites me a lot. It means that we can maybe have a real science of wisdom and wholesomeness. Something that makes everyone who comes into contact with its ideas more vibrant and kind and clear-minded. What would wholesome science be like, building engines of compassion and clarity that can then empower our culture to grow into wonderful ways of being?

I don’t have a full answer to all that. It’s pretty critical that it’s not all up to me.

But I think I see a key piece of how to get there.

I’d like to take a shot at sharing that piece here.

The soul of science

It seems to me that science is a process of evaluating and refining explanations. It’s not about some particular methods like RCTs or statistics or data-gathering. Those are tools. The soul of science is in the pressure it puts on ideas to explain the world clearly in ways that sort of stick their neck out.

More precisely, I think of the core process of science as having two parts:

1. Come up with explanations that are easy to disprove if they’re wrong.

2. Then give them a chance to be disproven.

That’s it. That’s science.

Crucial experiments

There are lots of adjacent processes that often get called “science”. Things like counting the calories in the food you eat. Lots of people will say that this is “doing science” with your diet.

That really isn’t. It’s just measuring something. People have been measuring things for tens of thousands of years.

Actually doing science would look more like so:

There’s this explanation for obesity that it’s “calories in = calories out”. So if you can maintain a calorie deficit for a while, you should lose weight. Meaning that if you hold a calorie deficit over a reasonable amount of time and you don’t drop your weight, then the theory is false.

That’s the disprovable explanation. It allows you to perform what’s called a crucial experiment: you can run a calorie deficit for a while and see whether you lose weight. If you don’t, that disproves the theory.

In practice, people don’t really care that much whether this theory is disproven. It would for sure be strange if it were! It’s based on thermodynamics. But the hard part is more like using the theory to lose weight. Basically a question of applied science. Many people cannot force themselves to maintain a calorie deficit, get down to an ideal weight, and then maintain a calorie in/out balance to maintain that weight.

To which there’s a common refrain (maybe more in the cultural groundwater at this point — I mostly don’t hear people saying this anymore):

“It’s just a matter of willpower.”

Like failing to stick to a diet and exercise plan is a failure of will. Like the person just isn’t trying hard enough, or maybe doesn’t really care.

Through the eyes of science, this is something that could become a real theory. But it’s missing a pretty key element: how would you disprove it?

That’s not just a formalism. It’s really key. If there’s no way to challenge the idea, we can’t know how good its fit to reality is.

I mean, here’s a counter theory:

Everyone is born with a kind of natural set point of weight kind of programmed into them throughout their lives. That’s why they tend to have the same obesity and scrawniness patterns throughout their lives that their family members do. Trying to force your body to change in defiance of its set point is actually really unhealthy. It’s possible some toxic things in the environment can cause those changes, in which case sorting out environmental toxins is pretty important so you can reach a healthy weight. But starving your body to get down to a weight that you think is good is usually unhealthy.

Sounds plausible. More detailed than the “It’s just a matter of willpower” theory.

How shall we decide which one is a better fit to reality? Argue about it? Point at authorities who agree with one view and disagree with the other? Refer to sacred texts? Trial by combat?

The key insight of science is that there’s a way to pressure ideas to get good at telling useful truths. Making explanations killable and then trying to kill them forces them to survive by being good at explaining things.

The scientific answer to the weight loss debate is to ask how we could make the ideas specific enough to make falsifiable predictions. And then we’d look.

For instance, what does it mean for it to “be unhealthy” to deviate from one’s weight set point? What does that look like? Is it a subjective feeling? Is it about measurable things like blood pressure? Is it a reference to overall morbidity, meaning we could detect “unhealthiness” only at the population level by looking at how many people live or die over some period of time?

Let’s suppose the theory says that biological markers of health like blood pressure and cholesterol levels would get worse due to deviation from the set point. We now have a disagreement in prediction between the two ideas:

• If losing weight is purely a matter of willpower, then lowering the willpower requirements to stay with a calorie deficit should work, and people should get healthier.

• But if losing weight is a matter of deviating from a set point and that’s why there’s resistance to doing it, then we should see that forcing weight loss should result in people getting less healthy.

Now we can do a crucial experiment. One of these ideas will die in the crucible of looking at reality.

This is the basic logic of science. Over and over again, you (a) try to make your explanations specific enough that they necessarily predict some outcome in some situation, and then you (b) try to set up that situation.

Making theories disprovable

Theories that are easier to disprove are more precious. They tell us more as a result of their survival.

There was an old idea about how motion worked before Newton came up with his laws of motion and gravitation. It was the dominant theory for centuries before Newton’s insights. The idea was basically that the Greek elements had a natural order with Earth at the bottom, Water above it, Air above that, and Fire at the top of the four. So rocks fall because they’re mostly Earth and they’re trying to return to the sphere of Earth, which is below Air. Whereas bubbles rise because Air is above Water.

How then can we throw a stone up into the air? Why doesn’t it just immediately fall? Well, clearly living creatures have some kind of ability to add a force or intention to inanimate objects. So we sort of imbue the rock with that intention when we throw it. But as our intention kind of leaks out of the stone, it starts to fall. Hence it goes through a kind of arc in the air.

But what’s the shape of the arc? Is it circular? Is it some other shape? Why isn’t it a kind of “V” shape where it goes in a straight line until it abruptly runs out of living force and sort of “dies” and drops straight to the ground?

The old theory (Aristotelian physics) could be massaged to account for any of these. But without actually looking at the trajectory of a projectile, it wouldn’t be able to predict the shape of the arc.

Newton’s physics are far more constrained. They absolutely require that a stone thrown into the air follow the path of a parabola.

So that’s interesting. It means that if we measure the paths of a bunch of different thrown objects, if any of them clearly deviate meaningfully from a parabola, we will have disproven Newtonian mechanics. But not Aristotelian physics.

So what are we to make of the fact that many, many such measurements exactly accord with the parabolic arc?

Well, it means that Newton’s theory is more useful as an explanation of what’s going on. It gives the same predictions as Aristotle’s physics, but more narrowly. It’s a highly constrained theory. Meaning that we learn more from its surviving crucial experiments.

What’s so special about this process?

So why would this particular approach to ideas work so well? What’s so important about making ideas disprovable? Surely there are some ideas that are true and important but hard to disprove, right?

(To that last question: yes, of course. But that’s precisely why wisdom practices are so tricky to distinguish from nonsense! Why dangerous guru dynamics are possible, for instance. I’d say that true and important ideas particularly about wisdom can be hard to disprove so far, and that one day — hopefully soon — we’ll care a lot about changing that ASAP.)

I really want to give a full answer to this question sometime. About why this particular orientation to ideas is so important. But a detailed answer is worth its own full post, and I haven’t written it yet. So I’ll try to provide just a quick sketch here with some pointers for now.

It turns out that ideas obey evolution. That’s not a scientific finding; it’s more like a logical necessity. It wouldn’t mean anything coherent for that claim to be false.

Most ideas undergo “wild” evolution. This can produce, for instance, the mental equivalent of parasites. (Have you ever seen someone go kind of crazy due to contact with an idea?) I think CGP Grey gives a great breakdown of an example application of the logic. If you have time and inclination, I think it’s worthwhile to spend the 7 minutes it takes to watch this video:

A key insight here is that what we consciously believe mostly isn’t about what’s true. It’s about what encourages those ideas to survive. That’s what they evolved to do. Making us think true things is just one strategy ideas can use to survive.

Science is a kind of evolutionary pressure on ideas. It’s making it advantageous for them to help us understand the world better. We do that by encouraging ideas to explain the world to us in ways we can check.

That “in ways we can check” part is really critical. If we are happy with ideas that feel compelling, then ideas will evolve to be compelling. That becomes their evolutionary angle of advantage. That’s why, for instance, Flat Earth conspiracy theorists are able to convert people to their view and remain unpersuaded in the face of compelling evidence: conversion and inoculation against competing ideas is precisely how Flat Earth ism can survive.

So if we want to “domesticate” ideas, we have to apply an evolutionary pressure to them that makes them actually “friendly” and helpful to us, systematically, over time.

The key insight of science is that we can actually do this. If we get ideas to explain the world in ways that necessarily require very specific predictions, and those predictions pan out, then we can use those explanations to solve problems. If those explanations ever fail, they “die”, and we seek new ones that can explain and predict everything the defunct theories did without the “deadly” flaw.

Without this kind of “artificial selection”, ideas evolve to survive through us based on whatever we’re paying attention to about them. Things like creating feelings of insight, or making us outraged, or keeping us numb and checked out while we mechanically follow patterns that make sure they replicate in our children. Some will give us benefits too, but only incidentally, or when their survival strategy happens to hinge on their being helpful.

But with science, we can systematically move toward clear-mindedness. We can actually understand the world in ways that matter.

…including how science works. Science, clearly seen, is reflexive.

There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’ll leave it here for now.

Objective vs. reflexive

So why has science converged so hard on objectivity?

I think it’s basically a simplification. We can loosely split up everything we observe into two patterns:

• Objective: Stuff that’s there no matter how we look at it. Rocks and trees and the Sun. This is the domain of Philip K. Dick’s quote, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

• Reflexive: Stuff that changes its nature depending on how we look at it and who we are when we’re looking. Things like whether a date will go well, or whether a vague horoscope “is accurate”, or the true meaning of a Rorschach ink blot test.

Most of the stuff that deeply matters to the human heart is reflexive. Falling in love is a kind of dance with another person: it is absolutely essential that they be responding to us, and how they respond to us is based on how we respond to them. Poetry touches us because of how we relate to the material, which is related to things like meter and word choice but fundamentally isn’t about them. Spiritual experiences feel profoundly meaningful, and we care about that, even though the basis of knowing they’re meaningful is the simple fact of our having experienced them.

I’m particularly interested in questions of wisdom: what does it mean to skillfully live a good life, in ways that enhance others’ ability to skillfully live good lives? What encourages wholesomeness, given that how I try to find an answer to that question can itself be more or less wholesome?

I think it’s absolutely possible to approach these domains with science. I think it can be beautiful. I suspect it has to be.

But it does require loosening the bond of science to objectivity.

Objective science is easier

Objective stuff “moves around” less. So it’s easier to come up with easy-to-disprove objective explanations and then test them. Science is just way, way easier to do on non-reflexive things.

Like when Einstein came up with general relativity. That explanation of gravity predicted that the planet Mercury would move a bit differently than Newton’s theories said it would. That meant we could actually look and possibly disprove Einstein’s idea. But instead reality disproved Newton’s.

It did not matter what Einstein’s mood was. The planet Mercury wasn’t going to vary based on people testing it. The authority of people who agreed (or disagreed) with Einstein had no bearing on what we’d find. Gravity isn’t shy such that it changes what it does when tested.

So Einstein’s theory didn’t have to account for how the theory itself was presented. He could just state it, and we could test it. And then we discovered that his idea was a better fit than the one we had before.

But we don’t have to avoid reflexivity. It’s just easier to do science on things that aren’t reflexive.

Which is to say, on objective things. On objects.

Subjectivity is reflexive

Some stuff necessarily has to be explained reflexively. Meaning that the very act of explaining them is often part of the phenomenon being explained.

A vivid example here is any theory of the self. The moment we say “the self”, there’s some inclination to implicitly think of it (!) as a thing that you (!) might be able to look for and find.

But if you are looking at it, then who’s looking? What are they looking at?

The thing we’re calling “the self” is you. You can’t look at yourself from the outside. The very thought is incoherent!

Which means that if you come up with some kind of explanation about your innermost nature, that explanation needs to account for how you relate to that very same explanation as you’re looking at it.

I think there are some theories like this. Some Buddhist ideas are pretty good along these lines. The cluster around “emptiness”, “no self”, and “dependent origination” strike me as something that could be made clear enough to be easy to disprove if it’s false.

(Sadly the “easy to disprove” part isn’t very prevalent in most Buddhist contexts I’m aware of. They emphasize “Come see for yourself, don’t just take my word for it”. And I think that’s very good. But many places don’t lay out the claims clearly enough to be disprovable. Instead there’s always room for people to have “misunderstood the dharma” or have made errors in their meditation practice across years. This is the kind of stuff that feels to me like a spiritual version of humorism.)

Objectivity doesn’t define what’s real

Because objective science was so successful at mastering objects, people started conflating “objective” with “real”. As in, asserting that anything that can’t be made objective isn’t real.

Which weirdly would imply that people either (a) aren’t real or (b) are just objects.

That’s a very weird place from which to start looking for explanations of human nature. It’s not a promising angle for exploring wholesomeness. The basis of human connection is fundamentally reflexive: I see you seeing me seeing you. How on Earth are we going to adequately explain that if we treat it as incidental to objective stuff?

I think this is where the “hard problem of consciousness” comes from. The issue arises if we view consciousness as something objective and try to explain it objectively. That’s literally impossible. It’s basically a confusion made of words. What would it mean for consciousness to behave a certain way when no one is experiencing or interacting with it?

A key challenge is that objective science requires factoring out the first-person perspective. We remove the scientist from the thing being studied. Which means that if you want a science of first-person perspective, you cannot rely primarily — let alone entirely — on objective methods. The whole approach is gibberish. “First-person perspective” isn’t an object you can look at from the outside!

This situation is no trouble if we allow that reflexivity is real too. That falling in love means something even though it’s kind of self-defining. That wisdom exists even though we aren’t really sure how to define it and maybe cannot objectively do so.

That people are real. That experience matters. That relating to others as “I and Thou” is meaningfully different from seeing them as “it”.

Bad wizards

Now, I want to offer a thought experiment. Please bear with me here.

Suppose that astrology actually does work quite well, but that it does so reflexively. That it’s basically a tool for honing the intuitions of the astrologer so that they can very effectively cold-read their clients and provide subconscious nudges in ways that actually meaningfully help them.

The catch is, the tool works only if those involved believe it does.

If an objectivity-minded skeptic comes along and tries to show that the tool doesn’t objectively work, they might succeed — in part by breaking the tool.

If they then go around publicizing how they’ve “debunked astrology”, that makes the tool less likely to work — which will seem to validate the skeptic’s claim that there was nothing to it!

I’m reminded of the headline I saw years ago, referring to a 2010 medical study:

“Placebos found to work even when subjects know it’s a placebo”

…to which my immediate thought was

“Well now that’s true!”

Because if there’s a reflexive dimension to the placebo effect, then we should expect that telling everyone that it works this way will cause it to work this way.

The reverse could have in principle happened instead: someone could announce that placebos have been found to stop working once patients know they’re getting just a sugar pill. At which point that would become more true.

I’m also reminded of a friend who went to a doctor who warned “If you don’t get your stress under control, you’re going to have a heart attack or a stroke.”

When people refine their objective thinking to the exclusion of the reflexive, they can become very bad wizards. Casting curses willy-nilly with no clue what they’re doing. Often insisting that they can’t possibly be having the effects that they obviously are.

I’m really hoping we can develop wider awareness of both how science works and of reflexivity, so we can end the accidental gaslighting that follows from insisting that only objective things are real. We don’t have to choose between science and spirituality. We don’t have to fake their union. They can be the same thing.

I think the current split between the two is related to why astrologers work so hard to keep their art unfalsifiable. I do think there’s some real value to the discipline. I see it helping some people live much more full and happy lives. That matters. I don’t know the underlying mechanism, or how reliable it is or isn’t. I haven’t done good science on it yet. But it makes sense to me that if you have a seemingly good reflexive artform, and someone wants to beat it to a pulp with their objectivity cudgel, you might (perhaps subconsciously) make it hard for them to hit.

We just end up with the misfortune that it also makes science harder to do with the art. Which means the wrong ideas “breed” and over time the art itself becomes diluted and its true value starts to fade.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I think we can recognize that self-fulfilling prophecies are real, that some specific situations have that nature, and then use that recognition to intentionally predict the world that we want.

Kind of like choosing that placebos work because we expect them to.

And then it becomes possible not to curse ourselves into an objective dismissal of beauty, meaning, and the sacred. We can instead cherish them, and understand them, and come to embody an exquisite and glorious world together.

Needed: subjective methods

Objective science is way ahead of reflexive science. We’re just barely getting the latter into a coherent paradigm.

But I think we’re here. I think we’ve got the foundation now.

For instance, I think the model I gave for self-deception is a scientifically good one. It makes specific predictions about how certain subjective shifts should change certain subjective states. The idea is disprovable. It’s just hard to objectively disprove. The method of disproof is more like:

1. Understand the model well enough to map it to your subjective experience.

2. Notice which experiments could be crucial (i.e. could disprove the idea, or at least could strongly suggest it’s wrong, if it is).

3. Conduct those experiments inside yourself.

At which point you can tell whether the idea (as you understand it) has been shown to be wrong.

The tricky part is that self-deception might make it hard to think through the logic of the experiment. So your test has to account for that reflexive element.

But it’s quite doable. And in my experience it’s very striking when, say, someone’s mental fog very abruptly clears once we establish a good “occlumency shield” for them. That doesn’t prove the idea is right; that’s not how science works. But it’s quite meaningful if and when it survives that spectacularly.

Importantly, you can’t actually know that the model is correct for you. You might have a different understanding of it than I do. So even if I’ve done dozens of crucial experiments and found that this overall explanation works quite well, there’s still an important gap in your understanding.

Also, I could be BSing you, or myself, totally unintentionally.

So while I can give you the model and claim to you that it works, the actual scientific transmission is to give you a means of falsifying the model if it’s wrong. So basically making it easy for you to tell whether the experiments really are crucial and then to replicate them for yourself.

I think this is a good example of a subjective method (as opposed to objective methods): sharing crucial subjective experiments (including why they’re crucial) so others can replicate them.

To some extent I feel like I’m kind of brute-forcing the obvious solution here based on analogy. My guess is that there are more elegant subjective methods possible.

At this point I want to emphasize that this is a project that you can engage in. Science has never been about institutions or academics; that’s just how we formalized objective science, in part because objective crucial experiments often require a lot of materials and literal physical energy. But if you really get the soul of science, and you work on carefully tracing the reflexive reasoning of your subjective experience, you can come up with legitimate scientific experiments that can bring the clarity of the Enlightenment into your inner world.

This project is necessarily open-sourced. There are no gatekeepers here. No one granted me some official authority; I’m giving you the same keys I have.

Have fun with it!

1. Personality Machines, which is my Enneagram intro. I think it’s worth reading even if you’re already familiar with the Enneagram: I derive the types from the Centers in a way I don’t recall seeing elsewhere, and I’ll be relying on that derivation today.

2. Ego Spirals, which is about how to use the Enneagram for personal growth. This is the whole point of the system in my opinion.

3. Putting People in Boxes, which is about the challenges involved in typing ourselves and others. It’s also secretly about navigating a paradox that shows up in today’s topic too.

Today I want to focus on investigating a likely flaw in the Enneagram, and how you can personally do some science to investigate and possibly fix it for yourself if you’re so inclined.

The issue centers around the diagram’s inner lines. Up until this point, nothing I’ve said requires anything other than having nine types drawn on a circle. But that’s really not the most visually striking part of the Enneagram symbol. For whatever reason, it has an inner triangle and an unusual six-sided star pattern connecting non-adjacent points together.

The diagram is central enough that the whole system is literally named after it. It’s called “the Enneagram”, not “the three Centers theory”.

So what do the lines mean?

It turns out that the standard answer introduces a problem:

• There’s a way to view the usual interpretation of the lines very pragmatically. You can test them out for yourself to see if they work for you. And at least sometimes they work very well!

• But the lines’ historical origin is very suspicious, and their underlying theory is fragmented. There’s good reason to expect them not to work as described.

This problem type shows up from time to time in the history of science. In the 1800s a physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, came up with a stunningly successful method of preventing “childbed fever”: doctors should wash their hands between conducting autopsies and assisting with childbirth. It sounds obvious today. But the problem was that the germ theory of disease had not yet been invented, and Semmelweis’s theory was incompatible with the dominant model of medicine at the time. The result was that Semmelweis had his career ruined and was driven into an insane asylum. It wasn’t until well after his death, after germ theory had been discovered, that physicians were willing to use Semmelweis’s methods despite the fact that he had objectively demonstrated that they worked.

When faced with a ridiculous tool that works, one challenge in science is to neither (a) dismiss the tool for its ridiculousness nor (b) believe its nonsense simply because it works. It turns out that Semmelweis’s theory was wrong and resulted in something effective for almost coincidental reasons. When the error was corrected, his methods were improved upon. What would have let medicine benefit from his solution to “childbed fever” without getting locked into a wrong view about what caused it?

I want to use the Enneagram’s lines as a case study of walking science’s middle path here. We can see how to use the lines, see their theoretical absurdity, and then while holding both views ask: “What’s really going on here?”

So that’s what I’m going to spell out today. I’m going to lay out the standard description of the Enneagram’s lines with an eye toward using them pragmatically. Then I’ll explain the lines’ background theory. I’ll share a bit about my own experience with the lines as a case study of how they really can be surprisingly effective. And then I’ll suggest an experiment you can do to maybe get insight into what’s really going on.

Two guidelines for this post:

• If your only interest is in my take on how to use the Enneagram’s standard theory of its lines, you can get that from just the first section below.

• If you care only about the experiment and not about the background, you can jump to “The experiment” near the end. I think you can engage in it without knowing the background theory first if you want to.

So with that, let’s get to it!

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Using the lines’ standard theory

The standard use of the lines is to track how types can suddenly switch around under stress.

The personality machine doesn’t really want to enact a downward spiral. It’s just an enthusiastic computer program. It’s trying to achieve the goal that Essence set for it. The downward spiral arises from the fact that the personality’s strategies are inadequate to handle all of life. That creates problems due to the “one trick pony” nature of the robotic personality. And it then tries to solve those problems using the same strategies that created them, because it kind of has just one button it can mash.

Sometimes, though, the personality will try switching strategies before doubling down on the original one. And that strategy switch can kind of work! It’s a bit like trying to release some steam instead of adding pressure to keep the container from exploding.

But the personality is still mechanical. Which alternative strategy it tries is very predictable. It supposedly goes in what’s called “the Direction of Disintegration”:

There are two cyclic patterns here, one for the primary types and another for the secondary types:

• Primary: 9 → 6 → 3 → 9

• Secondary: 1 → 4 → 2 → 8 → 5 → 7 → 1

So for instance, an Eight who’s under a lot of stress might suddenly start acting like a Five. They might take a step back and self-isolate to strategize and gather their resources. An Eight personality will sometimes try a move like this before doubling down on forceful and punishing action.

The thing is, such a person is still an Eight. They don’t become a Five; they just start operating as one for a while. The core issue is still that their personality’s Eight design is overwhelmed. It won’t work for them to treat themselves as a Five to ease their situation:

• Fives need Essence to shine through their Gut Center and then use that bodily grounding and activity to open their Hearts.

• But the type Eight personality design starts with Gut Center distortion. Trying to push themselves into effective action exactly plays into the machine’s basic strategy. It’s not a pathway for Essence to come through.

So an Eight who recognizes their movement to Five and then tries to apply type Five de-spiraling strategies will tend to tighten their type Eight knot.

A more helpful approach (in theory) is for the Eight to use the movement to Five as a signal. It indicates that the personality is at risk of tightening up. Even though stilling the mind isn’t something Average Fives can do, it’s often exactly the right move for Eights who are Disintegrating to Five.

And they can check if it’s working: the impulse to operate like a Five should evaporate if the Eight unwinds their core ego spiral a little. If it doesn’t, then that’s a sign they’re not an Eight!

So in practice, once you know your type, the lines can give you more detail about what choice points to look for in yourself. If you’re a Seven and you start getting serious and focused and kind of tense, that might be a Disintegration to One, which would make it a signal to notice the urge (from the Gut) to do something in response to a feeling of dissatisfaction (i.e. a neglected Heart). It’s a sign that the core type is stressed. The problem is actually addressed by unwinding the Seven spiral, not by putting more energy into the Disintegrated strategy of forced discipline (despite that move seeming very sensible on the inside!).

It’s also a warning when it comes to determining type. Someone can very, very clearly show up as an Eight but turn out to be a Disintegrating Two, for instance.

This is yet another illustration of why it’s important to determine type based on which lens actually works to make life better in contact with them. As opposed to focusing on traits or behavior, or on what explanation feels compelling to you or to them.

The explanation is lacking

The above description is very pragmatic. Given the diagram, here’s how you read the lines to notice more choice points for unwinding your type’s downward spiral.

But it doesn’t give any structural reason for the lines to be this way. Why do they have to be about reactions to stress? Why will a type switch to just one other type under stress? And why should this specific pattern depicted by the lines be how the types are interconnected?

I have some bad news:

No one knows.

The diagram itself came from GI Gurdjieff. He said he’d learned it from some spiritual teachers. And maybe he did! But it seems worth noting that there’s no clear sign of the Enneagram’s diagram prior to him.

He didn’t talk about personality types. He did talk about the personality mechanically trapping the soul, and he used enneagrams to relay some of his ideas about how to free the soul. But it was other people (most notably Claudio Naranjo) who developed the enneagrams into a personality typing system.

Gurdjieff’s explanation for the diagram amounted to sacred geometry based on numerology. The main key observation is:

Which is to say, the decimal expansion of 1/7 follows what we now read as the Directions of Disintegration for the secondary types.

Two of the principles Gurdjieff taught were “the Law of Three” (represented by the Enneagram’s inner triangle) and “the Law of Seven” (represented by the six-pointed figure following the 1/7 decimal pattern). It’s possible that the diagram basically started out as a way to put these two principles together visually.

It looks like Naranjo started with Gurdjieff’s diagram, noticed that the way Gurdjieff and others described the nine corners could be fleshed out into personality patterns, and then tried to find a way to make Gurdjieff’s lines relate to the personality types.

As to why the lines are specifically about stress, that idea apparently came about due to a misinterpretation. Naranjo originally suggested that types might move along both lines (and to both wings), both under stress and also while integrating (i.e. becoming Healthy). A Jesuit priest, Robert Ochs, misheard or misremembered what Naranjo said about the lines at a seminar in the 1970s. Ochs then went on to teach about Disintegration (and Integration, which is movement along the opposite direction when Healthy). It just turns out that the priest’s accidental idea was very sticky and eventually became endemic.

It’s possible that Ochs stumbled onto a true idea. Maybe it spread because it spoke to something in people. But even if so, we still have some pretty critical unanswered questions:

• Why would Gurdjieff’s diagram relate to the personality types? What’s the structural relationship? What does the decimal expansion of 1/7 have to do with the dynamics of the Centers, for instance?

• Why number the types the way we do? The labels were totally arbitrary up until this point. But now the fact that One Disintegrates to Four supposedly arises from the fact that “14” appears in the decimal expansion of 1/7. So all of a sudden it matters a lot how we’re numbering the types!

• What structurally determines the Directions of Disintegration for the primary types? Why does Six Disintegrate to Three instead of to Nine for instance?

Sadly, these just aren’t questions I’ve heard asked in the Enneagram world, let alone answered.1 Meaning there’s no coherent underlying theory for the lines as far as I know.

But the lines still work sometimes

And yet, attending to the lines suddenly started really working for me when I figured out my type.

I gave up on the lines many years ago. Their background seemed like nonsense. People argue over how to read them in ways that remind me of astrologers fighting about how to interpret Pluto now that it’s “not a planet”.

And I couldn’t see how to use the Directions! When I thought I was a Five, I didn’t know what to do with observations of what I saw as my Seven-like behaviors. And when I thought I was a Six, I flat out didn’t relate to most descriptions of “Disintegration to Three”.

But I sometimes do display some Four traits. I started out thinking I’m a Five with a Four wing. And when I reinterpreted myself as a Six, I guessed that the Four-like stuff was “type Six moodiness and self-doubt”. I even seriously wondered for a little while last year if I just am a Four — with a sentiment like “Okay, if I can be a Four instead, then I don’t think the Enneagram is useful.”

When the stuff about being a One clicked, and the type One map of the downward spiral started working for me, a thought arose:

“Oh no. Oh no. Is that Four-like stuff… Disintegration? Are those stupid lines actually right?”2

So I tested it out. Normally in Four mode I’m tempted to “process” my feelings. A Four would need to address that temptation by dropping the heartbreaking stories and focusing on grounded activity. But a One Disintegrating to Four needs to find the (possibly hidden) urge to condemn something, and then relax that harsh grip on the Heart. Basically ignoring the melancholy and feelings of worthlessness: they’re distractions from the core stress of trying to fix the imperfections of the world.

And when I tried it, it worked. The dark mood would abruptly lift.

I want to emphasize that the effect really isn’t subtle for me. It’s quite powerful. I used to wallow in a sense of my life going nowhere, that what I do doesn’t matter, that I’ve been so terribly hurt by my past that maybe I’m just permanently broken, etc. Even though I knew these thoughts probably didn’t make sense, I still couldn’t stop them from arising and shifting my state, almost like an emotional fog would roll in and occlude my inner experience.

But once I got a handle on how to catch the Wake-Up Call for Ones, I could just look for the hidden cramp in the Heart, release that… and POOF. Fog cleared. In seconds.

So whatever the reason, tracking my Direction of Disintegration as such in fact works for me.

Some pragmatics

So, in the midst of this mess… what are we to make of the lines?

Fortunately, from a practical standpoint the situation is pretty easy. Here are two options:

1. You can totally ignore the lines if you want to. Dismiss them as a quirk of history if you like. Maybe there’s some way to explain how I benefitted from considering them, but you don’t have to figure it out. You can use the rest of the Enneagram just fine without giving them any attention.

2. You can test whether your Direction of Disintegration is useful to you. If you’re pretty sure you’ve figured out your type, try looking for how your Direction shows up in your life, and test what happens when you treat its appearances as choice points. If that view works to dissolve stress reactions, great! If nothing notable happens, then you can go back to option 1.

Technically that second option is a little messy. If you don’t get good results, maybe you’ve just mistyped yourself, or maybe you’ve misidentified how your Disintegration shows up, or maybe you’re still developing skill with responding to your core type’s Wake-Up Call.

But you don’t have to worry about all that. If the tool is useful, it shouldn’t be arbitrarily subtly useful. There isn’t much point in throwing hours of study into a system that maybe kind of helps a little if you look carefully enough, or promises to work “someday”. If it’s useful, it should demonstrate itself as such quickly and clearly once you’ve worked out your type. Even if the road to changing your habits is slow, it should be clear you’re on the right path.

As always, the measure to focus on is whether life is becoming more wholesome for you.

Some science

With all that said, there’s a way you can test what’s really going on with these lines. I’d like to explain how.

In part 1 of this series, I noted how the primary types have two modes when they’re in Average functioning. How Heart types (3) have a Head/Gut mode, Head types (6) have a Heart/Gut mode, and Gut types (9) have a Head/Heart mode.

This is an unexplained detail. Why should the primary types have two modes? Why don’t the secondary types have two modes too?

Well, something interesting happens if we suggest that they do.

The Center-based mechanism for Average Nines’ Head/Heart mode, for instance, is that the personality drops the primary Center (the Gut) and focuses on a fusion of the other two.

What would it look like for Ones to do the same? Well, they’d drop the Gut and bundle the Head and Heart, just like Nines do. But Ones already mechanize the Heart more than the Head. So what if Ones’ “other mode” emphasizes the Heart a bit extra? Meaning it’s a kind of temporary “Heart with some Head” state?

Well, that would be Four. That’s precisely what defines Four.

Which just so happens to be One’s Direction of Disintegration.

It turns out that this proposed mechanism almost but not quite overlaps with the standard lines. I’ll bold the exceptions:

• Head/Gut (7) → Gut/Heart (1)

• Gut/Heart (1) → Heart/Head (4)

• Heart/Head (4) → Head/Gut (7)

• Heart/Gut (2) → Gut/Head (8)

• Gut/Head (8) → Head/Heart (5)

• Head/Heart (5) → Heart/Gut (2)

Which is to say, under this theory Fours and Fives would swap their Directions of Disintegration.

It also implies that the primary types don’t “Disintegrate” to another type, and certainly not to each other. The thing we’re calling “Disintegration” for the secondary types shows up as mode-switching in the primary ones. If we really want to depict that pattern visually, we’d project the primary types directly across the circle, representing that they sometimes “Disintegrate” into an even mix of the opposite two Centers in the Average range.

If this theory is roughly right, then the reason the Directions of Disintegration seem to work sometimes is because Gurdjieff’s lines happen to overlap with the mode-switching patterns for 1, 2, 7, and 8. Meaning that some people will accidentally get excellent results from using the lines, while most others won’t be able to get them to work at all.

I want to emphasize that this theory makes empirical predictions. It should be possible to distinguish between this mode-switching idea and the Disintegration claim that relies on Gurdjieff’s lines. It suggests, for instance, that Fours will get better results from observing and dissolving Seven-like behavior than from targeting Two-like behavior.

It also implies that the Centers-based advice for the primary types might be wrong. Eights and Ones, for instance, need to dissolve their “Disintegrated” modes by having Essence come through the Head and Heart in some order (Head first for Ones, Heart first for Eights). If the checked-out fantasy mode of Nines really is an even balance of these two “Disintegration” patterns, then Nines should do better to clear out the Head and Heart simultaneously, and then use that resource to sort out their Gut distortion. Heeding the Nine’s Wake-Up Call should be practically made of dropping the dual-Centers fantasy mode directly.

The experiment

So here’s how you might be able to do an empirical test of what’s going on with the lines:

• If you determine you’re a Four or a Five, you can try treating both Seven and Two as possible “Directions of Disintegration”. You learn something in every case:

  • If your classical Direction works much better, then that invalidates the mode-switching theory, which (a) makes it more likely that Gurdjieff was on to something with his 1/7 pattern and (b) raises the question of what’s up with the mode-switching for the primary types.

  • If the mode-switching theory works better, then it’s more likely that personality has a consistent meta-structure independent of type. It raises another question for future exploration: why does personality mode-switch while still preferring a type? What mechanically prevents it from fluidly moving between all the types if it’s able and inclined to switch which Centers it’s using like this?

  • If neither Direction works in any interesting way, then there’s probably nothing to the lines at all, at least for you. My own experience remains unexplained but is less compelling as evidence for the lines.

  • If both work well, then that suggests that a lot of the Enneagram works via self-fulfilling prophecies. Which is amazing! It suggests that maybe we can somehow “predict” ourselves into much more wholesome ways of being directly. Suddenly there’s more to explore!

• If you determine you’re a primary type (Three, Six, or Nine), you can experiment with directly clearing your dual-Centers mode. Under the mode-switching theory, this approach should work significantly better than focusing on the primary Center does. I’m not totally sure what this approach looks like, which means this branch of the experiment is less conclusive than the one for Fours & Fives. But here’s a possible sketch:

  • Threes would focus on physically relaxing and coming into stillness and clarity. Things like yoga nidra might work extremely well for them (especially if they can drop into living relaxation instead of going mentally limp). The aim being to directly dissolve their efficiency/performance mode when it arises.

  • Sixes would attend to savoring the present moment, relaxing into the delight of connecting with whoever or whatever is with them. Stuff like Authentic Relating might be a blessing here. Again, aiming to let go of their devotion mode when it activates.

  • Nines would focus on clearly seeing and being touched by the precise beauty and preciousness physically around them. I’m personally not aware of a single practice that does both Head and Heart stuff like this; I think it’d be concentration meditation but with heart, or loving-kindness meditation but with sharp clear focus on what’s right here right now. The point being to come out of fantasy and reminiscing. (This also suggests the Nine’s Wake-Up Call might be misnamed: it’d be about spacing out, which can result in overriding “no”s and going along with others.)

• If you determine you’re a One, Two, Seven, or Eight… then there’s much less you can do here. You just don’t have an internal way of distinguishing the two theories. But you can still check whether accounting for your Direction of Disintegration helps you. If it doesn’t, that invalidates both theories. If it does, you can’t conclude very much… but at least you have a tool that works for you!

There’s a fascinating quirk to this exploration: it’s possible for you to run the experiment and come to a clear conclusion, but not be able to show me the results as clearly as you know them. I probably can’t replicate your experiment since my type is probably different from yours. I also can’t directly see whether & how your subjective experience improves. I can hear your claims, and those matter, but I also know that people can fool themselves. You might be able to tell you’re not fooling yourself, and yet not be able to show me how you know in a way I can trust as deeply as you do.

(That said, if you do run the above experiment, I’d love to hear how it goes! Your claim is still highly relevant evidence I’m happy to learn about.)

This challenge is intrinsic to doing science when some of the measures are subjective (e.g. how good life feels to you). We usually solve this problem in science by finding objective measurements that we hope are good proxies. And I think that effort is worthwhile. It’s part of how we bridge communication inter-subjectively.

But in this case it wouldn’t help you to start with objective measures. Some of the stuff you care about is subjective. If your focus is on benefitting from the Enneagram (as opposed to convincing others that the Enneagram is useful), then you really want to directly track the subjective stuff that really matters to you.

So it’s not key that you make what you’re doing objective.

It’s that you can tell for yourself what works for you.

This was a case study

I’m using the Enneagram as a case study. I’m giving an example of a very particular kind of analysis. While I suspect and hope that the Enneagram really is helpful to a lot of people, I actually care a lot more about the method of analysis.

It’s very closely related to what kicked off the scientific revolution. There was a key insight that let us invent steam engines, and harness electrical power, and obliterate an ancient monster, and enact countless other miracles our medieval ancestors would find stunning.

I think that insight was applied too narrowly. We mistakenly thought the insight was about objectivity. That resulted in enormous command over objects. But we don’t seem have a corresponding growth in wisdom or compassion. We struggle to work out how to make marriages healthy, or what makes communities thriving and wholesome, or what to do in the face of depression and despair.

And I don’t think we can fill that gap with even more objective rigor. I think something else is needed.

I have a solid guess about that “something else”. It’s what I’ve been using to reorganize the Enneagram into what I hope can be a powerful psychotechnology. Not just something that’s psychoactive (e.g. creates feelings of insight), but something that does real work. With an eye toward building an “engine” that creates wholesomeness and wisdom with roughly the same kind of reliability that a motor creates movement.

So with the Enneagram in hand as an example, I’m hoping to explain the general theory next time. I want to spell out what I mean by “subjective science”.

1. Personality Machines, which is my explanation of the Enneagram in terms of how Essence (loosely the “true self” or “soul”) creates a personality (loosely “the ego”) by mechanizing three Centers (the Head, Heart, and Gut).

2. Ego Spirals, which is about how to use the Enneagram to unwind the knots we tie ourselves into.

In this post I want to talk about the most popular part of the Enneagram: typing people.

This is just about everyone’s favorite focus when they first encounter the Enneagram. “What’s my type?” and “What’s so-and-so’s type?” It’s fun, both because people just seem to be drawn to putting themselves & others into categories (“Which Hogwarts house do you belong in?”), but also because the Enneagram suggests explanations for folk’s behavior and inner experiences. And the humans really seem to love rich explanations for what they and others do.

There’s a particularly fun experience when someone feels “caught” by a type description. They’ll be listening along (“Ones experience the world thus and such way, Twos this other way…”), and then all of a sudden some type description feels like dissecting the intimate details of their life. When I first had this experience, it felt like someone had been spying on my thoughts and private behavior and then wrote a chapter about me in particular. It’s weirdly exposing. Embarrassing and funny at the same time.

Once the system has really impressed you, there can be a temptation to play with it by explaining everything in its terms. Stuff like:

“Oh, of course he’s tidying up. He’s a Two. He just has to do nice things for people. And that One wing is why he does it by creating order.”

At this point I really want to urge caution.

I don’t mean to say “Don’t do this.” I think it’s an important stage in developing a good idea for what the Enneagram types even are. You have to play with it a bit to grow familiar with it. By all means, try it on! See if you can explain people’s behaviors with it. Try typing public figures and fictional characters. Try typing nations! I think this is fine and good.

But be careful. There’s a pitfall right here.

The most common way I see people (including me!) getting bricked by the Enneagram is by taking this too far. They start trying to see others and themselves entirely through the tool’s lens. Instead of using type to inspire insight about where to look to create more freedom, they’re using type as a complete explanation of who they and others are. They’re seeing people as Enneagram types, instead of noticing how knowing someone’s type can help them see that individual person (and their suffering) more precisely.

When that confusion happens, personality has taken over use of the Enneagram. And the tool becomes useless as a map to freedom.

…at least while you’re using it this way. Several times I’ve noticed my thinking about the Enneagram becoming mechanical and rigid, and I’ve had to set the tool aside for a while — sometimes years. But it kind of refreshes for me after a bit. When I stop taking the tool so seriously, my personality loosens its grip, and I can again use the Enneagram as a guide to freedom.

But I recommend skipping that whole arc. Play with typing yourself and others, but use type to see through personality.

Two stories

I want to share two of my own stories of typing turning out well. I think that’ll offer some good context. Then I’ll go into some pragmatics about typing yourself and others, and what to do with that knowledge.

Getting closer to my dad

When I first read an Enneagram book, the main thing that leaped out at me was how much I didn’t resonate with several of the types. And yet, I knew people who felt immensely caught by those very types I couldn’t see myself as.

It was my first clear glimpse into just how different people can be. I didn’t realize just how much I was assuming everyone experiences the world basically like I do with a few adjustments (things like being more or less emotionally controlled, or more or less intelligent). But I felt extremely nailed by type Five, enough to make me squirm in my chair while reading about it. Whereas one of the people introducing me to the system felt super pegged by type Two. And yet I didn’t relate to Two almost at all.

So my mind was blown. I started devouring Enneagram stuff in order to get a better sense of how people who are very different from me might feel on the inside.

(I still think this is among the most precious things I learned from the Enneagram. It taught me to be very humble about my understanding of others’ subjective experience. And it’d be silly to assume that learning the Enneagram in particular could completely patch my ignorance here! As far as I can tell, people are infinitely interesting when I’m seeking to understand them, Essence to Essence. It’s actually the personality that’s pretty boring and completely understandable.)

It’s pretty common when reading a type for people you know to leap to mind. For me, reading type One had me thinking vividly of my father. It was hard to miss, honestly. The book I was reading from has little quotes along the edges of the pages for each type, and the quotes for type One felt like someone had just transcribed things my dad would often say or mean.

And upon seeing that, I realized something. I had long felt like Dad was really critical of me, like he expected me to screw up basically anything I tried to do. (“Now Son, did you call to make sure the theater is open today? Remember to take some money with you to buy a ticket.”) But when I imagined him doing it as a One, it became incredibly obvious to me that his criticality was his expression of care. It wasn’t that he thought I in particular was incompetent. It’s that Ones tend to view everyone as less competent than they are, and therefore that it’s the One’s job to make sure that everything goes well. If I forgot my money, Dad would feel bad because he’d blame himself for not reminding me!

That revelation created a lot of ease for me. Even when Dad would get irritated with me or others, I could see the kindness and care that’s underneath it. I stopped bristling so much. I definitely stopped taking it so personally. That made my experience of my connection with him much more pleasant.

And I think it improved our relationship too. We were on great terms anyway. But it became a lot easier for me to be affectionate with him and to see his persistent positive intent, which I think helped him to relax too.

I also realized that there were some tensions I could just resolve with this insight. Ones have a hard time taking criticism because they’re already so hard on themselves. I started trying to find ways to reflect the sincere message “I see you’re right” to Dad, which often helped a lot with dissolving arguments.

I think this is an excellent use of the Enneagram. It helped me see my father in a way that made our relationship and the family dynamic more pleasant.

Mistyping myself

I got my own Enneagram type wrong twice.

I mentioned up above how I felt nailed by type Five. The reason that happened was that the person who introduced me to the Enneagram handed me a book and said something like:

“I think you’re a Five with a Four wing. I mean, I could be wrong! You should read the types and notice which one resonates with you. But I have a pretty strong hunch.”

So when I read type Five, I had her guess in mind. I was trying to see how Five is a description of me.

It turned out that reading it that way prevented me from understanding what Fives are. I looked at type Five using myself (as I saw myself at the time) as a template. I’m pretty smart and well-read, and Fives are about something like intelligence and knowledge-gathering, so I could make it fit.

The thing is, I couldn’t become more functional by viewing myself as a Five. Fives need to focus on embodiment and action (Gut Center stuff), and then on making contact with others and being affected by the world (Heart Center stuff). But no matter how much energy I put into that approach, I couldn’t unravel what I saw as the main Five temptation of going into my head (the Wake-Up Call).

Thirteen years later, in 2014, I went to a week-long training offered by The Enneagram Institute. On the first day we gave our introductions, including our best guess about our own Enneagram type. I said I was a Five. A couple of ladies who’d long used the system in their therapy practice watched me for a few days and then pulled me aside:

“Hey, just something to consider: we really don’t think you’re a Five. You really come across much more like a Six. Maybe consider it?”

I did, and I reread stuff on Fives and Sixes. When I imagined that Five might be talking about a pattern very different from my own, I realized that something coherent arose in my understanding, and it very much did not fit me.

Whereas I could read Six as describing me. Stuff about self-doubt and seeking some external source of guidance. I mean, here I was doubting my Enneagram type and using books and others’ opinions as authorities to tell me what my type was!

Maybe you notice the error. I made literally the same mistake again. I reinterpreted Six using myself as a template in order to figure out whether I’m a Six.

And again, I couldn’t get the Enneagram to work for me while viewing myself as a Six. No matter how much energy I put into stilling my mind and acknowledging my successes, I couldn’t release what I was interpreting as how the Wake-Up Call (looking for a sure thing) shows up for me.

I noticed the error earlier this year while talking with someone about stuff unrelated to the Enneagram. I was telling a story about how in kindergarten I would get sent to the principal’s office every week. It was usually because I got in a fight with the teacher. She would enforce rules in ways I could tell were out of line, and when I tried to correct her she’d say stuff like “No, I’m right because I’m the adult and you’re the child.” At which point I’d go absolutely berserk with rage. Because no, her social power over me had absolutely nothing to do with whether what she was doing was fair! That’s not how truth works!

The person I was talking to was pretty struck by this story:

“Wow! That’s a lot of moral clarity for a five-year-old to have. That’s got to be a big theme in your life!”

I hadn’t really thought of it as moral clarity before. But when I started reflecting on it, I noticed that yes, actually it is a big theme. I refused to become an Eagle Scout out of moral protest for how the adults in my Scout troop were behaving. I got a Ph.D. in math education because I thought the way math is taught is criminal and needs fixing. I relate pretty strongly to this meme:

And after that conversation, it slowly dawned on me:

None of that is the self-doubting, external-orientation-seeking pattern of type Six.

It’s the righteous rigid certainty of type One.

Suddenly a lot of things clicked for me. I remembered how when I first looked at the Enneagram, I saw that the types were sorted by dominant emotion: rage types (for the Gut Center), shame types (for the Heart Center), and fear types (for the Head Center). And I pointed at that and said “Oh, yeah, I’m totally a rage type. No question.” But I overrode that to see myself as a Five.

I also keep my room immaculate. And I bristle when the shared kitchen isn’t immaculate too. I had imagined that’s the type Six nervousness about rules being broken, but if I’m honest it’s not fear. I’m irritated when things aren’t right.

But however compelling all that is, it could be the same error I’d made with Five and Six. Reinterpreting type One using myself as a template.

The key difference is this:

I’m now finding that the Enneagram map of the type One spiral actually works for me.

I realized that the particular flavor of my Wake-Up Call is when I confuse condemnation for moral clarity. It feels automatic: I can tell when something is right, and when people are violating it, and the obvious thing to do is to highlight the error and point at what the right thing to do is. But there’s a very particular charge that comes from closing my Heart and trying to pressure others to align. It’s a forceful “This is wrong” kind of energy.

When I watch for that charge and I release it, I notice an alternative arising: I can just name the good thing, and align myself with it, and let others come along as well if and when it’s right for them to do so.

That move has in fact been softening me. It’s part of why I’ve been able to write and publish more often. All my relationships are feeling more pleasant and free for me. I’m getting some reflections from others that I’m coming across differently now — that it’s easier to listen to me, and that my ideas make more sense to them, and that I’m more pleasant to be around.

That’s actually the part I care about. I could come up with a new explanation for my experience and behavior based on being a One. But that’s just storytelling. The whole point of the Enneagram, as far as I’m concerned, is to live a life filled with kindness, clarity, and presence. I now find it’s doing that for me. I consider that to be the fruit of typing myself right.

Finding people’s types

There’s a bit of a cyclic problem with the Enneagram. You have to develop your understanding of the types by seeing how they actually play out in examples. But in order to see the examples clearly, you need to know how to see them as the types, which requires understanding the types first.

This showed up in my own story of discovering my type. I used myself (with the understanding I had of myself at the time) as a possible template for some of the types, which warped my sense of the whole system and severely limited how much insight it could give me about myself.

But such warping is inevitable. It’s a hard-to-avoid property of models of subjective experience. That’s why it’s so important to ground your guesses in something other than compelling explanations: knowing someone’s Enneagram type should make life more wholesome when you interact with them. If you can’t do that when seeing them as that type, then you want to consider that you’ve maybe mistyped them and/or that you’ve maybe misunderstood how the types work in general.

(Or that you’re viewing them too rigidly as a type. Remember that the Enneagram is a map of mechanistic personalities. Knowing I’m a One can tell you what general patterns my personality will robotically tend toward, but it doesn’t tell you the specifics, and it tells you next to nothing about my Essence. Seeing me as a One is an invitation to notice ways you might come to see past my personality. It’s the same for everyone: personality is robotic and possible to completely understand and predict, but Essence is endlessly beautiful and interesting and creative and worthy of wonder. Finding ways to connect Essence to Essence is the whole point.)

Hold your guesses lightly

So first, I want to recommend that you hold your sense of the types in general and of individuals’ types (including your own) in particular extremely lightly. You might start by thinking of Fours as “tragic romantics”, but you’re going to have a bunch of associations with that stereotype, and you can’t yet know which of those associations are good guidelines and which are misleading. For instance, I think of tragic romantics as theatrical, which fits some Fours I know but very much misses the mark for others. Be ready to table-flip your entire impression of what Fours are like, or whether a friend who really seems loudly Four-like to you really is a Four.

In particular, don’t believe the “Oh God, this describes me so painfully well” reaction too strongly. I got that from the type Five descriptions at the very beginning, and I got it from Russ Hudson’s description of Sixes at an Enneagram workshop in 2018. I think in both cases I was seeing something accurately, but I was mislabeling it, and as a result I warped my sense of what the Enneagram was actually saying.

So I really recommend that you keep a big fat “maybe” around all typing, no matter how compelling a given instance might seem.

View others’ guesses as about them

Second, track who’s talking when being told what your or someone else’s type is.

Getting others’ guesses about type is necessary to some extent. It’s probably helpful to learn that I think Donald Trump is an Eight and that Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show “Wednesday” is a Five. That tells you something about how I view those two types. But that’s all it tells you: it gives you insight into how I in particular view both (a) those Enneagram types and (b) those characters.

Likewise, Sasha Chapin self-describes as a Seven. Does that mean we should view him as an example of a Seven? Well, maybe. But what we really know from his assertion is that when he combines (a) his sense of the Enneagram with (b) his sense of himself, he concludes he’s a Seven. So when he says

“I am an absolutely classic example of type 7”

we should take that as insight into how Sasha views the Enneagram (and himself), rather than just assuming our current impressions of him tell us what the type Seven pattern in fact is.

I mean, how warping would it have been to give myself as an example of a Six? I did so for many years! Anyone who believed me inherited some of my personal confusions about the Enneagram types. I’m in part wanting to protect others from whatever of my own distortions about the types still remain. Even now I hope your read is “Michael views himself as a One” rather than “Michael is a One.”

Relatedly, I suggest avoiding online Enneagram tests. They’re mostly just confused. They’ll ask you about some traits, assuming you’re thinking of the traits in ways that fit the system. (“People probably see me as distant” could apply to several types, but an online test might take a “Strongly agree” response as evidence for just one of them.) Then they list some ranked order of which types supposedly fit your responses. This is just misleading. You’re better off rolling a nine-sided die to figure out which type to consider as your own first: at least the die won’t implant a premature guess in your mind!

Try on many types

Third, I suggest you try on at least a few different types to see what fits. Both for typing yourself and for typing others.

Doing so involves some storytelling. How do you retell the story of your life if you’re really a Nine? How about if you’re a Two? Can you make sense of your career if you view yourself as an Eight?

Last year I sincerely tried on the possibility that I’m a Four. I could make it make some good sense: I have lots of stories about how I’m strange and unique, and I often feel profoundly misunderstood. I’m pretty sensitive and can fall into bouts of melancholy. I told this story vividly enough that for a few days I really wondered!

(Ultimately I rejected it because that view of myself isn’t useful. It doesn’t help reverse the downward spiral. This again emphasizes how a narrative is not enough on its own to determine type, no matter how compelling it is.)

Remember that you’re simultaneously developing your understanding of both (a) the types and also (b) the person you’re typing. That requires some pretty wide and varied experimentation! You might even need to return to a type as a guess as your models develop.

Be playful, but really sincerely try on each type you’re considering. Reminiscent of what John Vervaeke calls “serious play”.

Check if it makes you more wholesome

Finally, at the risk of beating this drum too much: the measure of whether you’ve typed someone correctly is if viewing them that way makes your interactions with them more wholesome.

I don’t know for sure that Dad is a One. For some time I thought he might be a Six: he’s very security-minded and puts a ton of his mental energy into worrying about what could go wrong. But viewing him as a Six doesn’t help make interactions with him better. He doesn’t get indecisive, for instance, and when he claims not to have a preference it doesn’t help much to make the options binary. (That’s a common hack that I’m told can help many Sixes.)

But viewing him as a One definitely helps. It makes interactions with him more pleasant, and over the years it has inspired me to try conversational moves that have panned out well with him.

So in practice I think I’ve got Dad’s Enneagram type right. I see both him and the type well enough to get good results.

Same with my own: I can tell I’m also a One because viewing myself this way lets me reverse my downward spiral. The fact that it’s working suggests that I’m understanding both Ones and myself usefully.

Not to say my understanding is final or complete. I hold the possibility that I’m still wrong about my type, or that maybe there’s no correct answer. Since seeing myself as a One, suddenly several people close to me obviously look like different types than I’d thought before. That might change my sense of the Enneagram in a way that has me notice an even more effective interpretation of my own type.

But as long as I keep aiming for wholesomeness, I think this process is totally fine. The goal isn’t to type myself or others. It’s to live a good life.

Why do I keep emphasizing this part?

I emphasize this pragmatism so much because not doing this is the main pitfall I see in Enneagram spaces. People like to treat the Enneagram as a God-given classification system and want to know how to sort themselves and others into it. And then they want to use that system to explain everything: why someone chose the color of bedsheets they did, why a person likes artichokes, why their friend uses a 2H pencil instead of HB, etc.

They’ll even go on to contort themselves to fit their new self-image. It’s a bizarre thing to see. People will say stuff like “Well, I’m such a Seven, so I can’t help myself from going out tonight even though I’m tired!” This strikes me as an almost perfectly backwards application of the Enneagram. The whole point is to have more freedom from the personality. Why take your current view of a type and impose it more firmly on your behavior?

At a guess, it’s the same thing that makes sorting people by astrological sign, or by Hogwarts house, or whatever, so meaningful. It offers a framework for making sense of the world. So if you conform to it, everything makes sense! At least in some narrow way.

I really recommend not doing this. Have some starting stereotypes about the nine personality patterns, and some guesses about your and others’ types, and then experiment. Find out what creates wholesomeness. The aim is wholesomeness, not correct classification. In the end you might throw out the Enneagram entirely! But if you have a better life along the way, then that was a correct use of the tool.

Why type others?

As far as I’m concerned, the right use of the Enneagram is internal. It’s not about other people. It’s about your own suffering, and how to unwind it.

So why develop an understanding of all the types? Why not just laser focus on your own?

I have a few answers:

1. You can’t tell ahead of time which type is yours.

2. Because the types interrelate, they form a system. You might not be able to usefully understand your type until you see how it fits as part of the larger system.

3. All personalities display all nine error modes to some degree or another. It can be helpful to notice how each one applies to you, even if one of them overwhelmingly dominates.

4. It’s helpful to see patterns from the outside too. That’s especially powerful if you see others of the same type as you. But there are analogies and symmetries between each of the types, so you can learn more about your own personality machine by observing others’.

5. How you relate to others is subtly a fact about you. Learning to see others compassionately and clearly is about how you see them. It looks like it’s just about them, but that’s because that’s how psychological projection works.

An additional answer I used to give is, correctly identifying someone’s type should let you predict their behavior and reactions. I think that’s kind of true, but it’s also anti-helpful to focus on. The personality wants to use that power to manipulate others according to its strategy. That’s part of how you make the Enneagram useless to you.

I really encourage you to keep bringing the focus back on yourself. If you see your spouse is a Three, what insight does that give you? Maybe you come to understand your dynamic with them more clearly as a result: they get impatient with you for not “growing into your potential” more actively, and you respond by going quiet and then later watching your favorite Netflix show. What does that tell you about yourself? How can that insight create more space in your life and more tenderness and aliveness in your connection with your spouse?

And please remember: look through someone’s Enneagram type to see them more clearly.

What’s next

I have two main points still in mind for this Enneagram series.

One is, what’s up with those lines inside the diagram? Why is 5 connected to 7 and 8 for instance? Why are the primary types directly linked to each other but the secondary types have this weird six-sided star thing going on?

I brushed the topic aside in the last two posts. Here’s another teasing take: I can’t tell if the lines are useful in general. I found them very useful for the first time in over a decade once I tried viewing myself as a One. And it mattered a lot! But I’m quite sure the explanation given for why the lines are the way they are is at best incomplete, and might in fact be wrong. But I still suspect the lines have some value.

The other main thing I want to talk about is validity. I’ve been explaining the Enneagram so far. But is it right? Is this an accurate way of describing personality? Or is it just generating an illusion of insight? E.g., are the types so generic that anyone could see themselves as any of the types if they tried, and thus if you start digging into the Enneagram and later feel better, you falsely attribute your progress to the system?

The validity question dives into the domain of subjective science. What’s a scientific approach to spirituality that both scientists and spiritual folk would consider to be high integrity and in good faith? I don’t claim to have a complete answer, but I’m pretty sure I have a solid foothold on something that can become one.

In particular, I think most approaches I’ve seen so far don’t sufficiently account for reflexivity. Because it’s hard to! But not impossible. It’s just that science usually assumes non-reflexivity, i.e. objectivity. So domains that are “loopy” (like how understanding your own Enneagram type is a prerequisite for understanding Enneagram types in general and vice versa) can’t use the familiar corpus of scientific tools.

So that’s what I’m currently expecting to publish next. Probably in at least two more parts.

(You can view part 4 here.)

The main point of the Enneagram as I see it is that it describes some systematic ways we create and recreate our own suffering. The intent being that if we can recognize what we’re doing at key moments, we can do something different and become more free.

Each of the nine types of personality has a downward spiral nature to it. Last time I gave the analogy of alcoholism: if you drink too much, your life gets worse, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more, which makes your life even more bad, etc.

But every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around. If you can identify the choice points and make a different choice, you can kind of unwind the “cramp” of the personality machine. With alcoholism, for instance, if you notice that you’re inclined to deal with stress by reaching for a bottle, you might be able to choose something different the moment you notice yourself reaching.

Ideally you notice your particular downward spiral and learn its choice points. The Enneagram tries to help by suggesting you look at nine clusters of spiral types to see which one is most like yours. Then the generic template can help you to pick out key choice points you might have otherwise missed.

Noticing moments of choice

The “downward” direction of the Enneagram spiral is toward a more overpowered or “thick” personality that takes over more and more of your life. Whereas “upward” is toward having Essence shine through ever more freely.

In practice this scale isn’t perfectly smooth. It’s not really a continuum. There are specific habits and mechanisms you learn to notice along the way which you either release or don’t. For instance, there’s a way that Enneagram Ones can turn into tense balls of condemnation and certainty. If your personality is running a One pattern, you either do this sometimes or you don’t.

And even in unwinding that pattern, there’s a pretty marked difference between each of:

• (a) just following the impulse the way water runs downhill (“This is wrong!”),

• (b) noticing the pattern and seeing it for what it is (“Oh, huh, that’s condemnation”),

• (c) observing the opportunity to choose something different (“What’s the ennobling place to put my attention instead?”),

• (d) in fact choosing that “something different”, and

• (e) having that alternative choice become the new default.

A lot of Enneagram literature will name a bunch of these discrete patterns for each type. That’s most of the point of learning the types’ patterns (IMO): you get an overview of specific mechanisms that each type tends to use, which can help you notice how your personality employs them.

That said, there are two particularly stark transition points that I think are worth talking about in some detail.

When personality starts leading

It’s possible for Essence to shine through most of the time. When that happens, people come across as radiant and pleasant. Their personality is usually still present, but it’s less like a wall and more like a resource. This is when just one Center is mechanized, and usually lightly at that.

That pattern shows up for each secondary type like so:

• Healthy Ones are open-hearted, kind, connected. Their sense of right and wrong is still very clear, but they no longer condemn others. They experience their moral clarity as a personal guide.

• Healthy Twos are at peace. They stop pushing themselves to people-please. They still engage in kind acts, but the primary focus of their action is kindness to themselves through their enjoyment of loving and being connected to others.

• Healthy Fours are clear-minded. Their creativity is engaged with the world and flows through them readily. They drop the effort to “dig”, to view themselves as special, or to stir their feelings with fantasy. They’re instead alive to the present moment, expressing their inner world gracefully.

• Healthy Fives, like Healthy Ones, have freed their Hearts to shine with Essence. They stop retreating into their minds and instead remain in contact with others and the world. They still mentally tinker, but their playfulness becomes a medium for engaging rather than disengaging.

• Healthy Sevens, like Healthy Twos, are at peace from bringing ease to their Gut Center. They drop the restless pursuit of something novel to throw themselves into. They still have intense joie de vivre, though, which is expressed through their involvement in, enjoyment of, and development of the life they already have.

• Healthy Eights, like Healthy Fours, have clarity due to a free Head Center. They stop strategizing about resource or power accumulation from a place of needing to be independent. They’re still potent actors and highly strategic, but the drive is to live their life with full-on engagement.

I focus on the secondary types because I think the pattern is simpler to see: the secondary Center stops being involved in the personality’s machinery. That Center is instead a clear vessel for Essence.

The first “shock point” I want to talk about is when the second Center becomes mechanized in the personality. That’s the shift from “Healthy” behavior to “Average” behavior. Most descriptions of the Enneagram types are descriptions of Average behavior: Ones are precise but rigid, Twos are kind but graspy, etc. This is when the personality controls the majority of Centers and thus kind of takes the lead. At this point the word “I” often gets used to mean the personality rather than Essence.

Each of the types have a signal that they’re about to drop from Healthy to Average functioning — what Don Richard Riso and Russ Hudson call “the Wake-Up Call” for each type. You might be able to derive the Wake-Up Calls for the secondary types from the above description of how Healthy behavior arises:

• Average Ones start feeling burdened by the need to do or fix everything themselves. (Heart distortion.)

• Average Twos start people-pleasing, trying to win others over. (Gut distortion.)

• Average Fours start intensifying their feelings with fantasy. (Head distortion.)

• Average Fives start withdrawing into their minds. (Heart distortion.)

• Average Sevens start getting dissatisfied with their current experience and looking for where things are more exciting. (Gut distortion.)

• Average Eights start feeling like they need to struggle toward being self-sufficient. (Head distortion.)

The equivalent for the primary types is when the personality grabs the extra two Centers and bundles them together into a secondary “mode”. It looks like so:

• Average Threes have a Heart mode and a Head/Gut mode. In Heart mode, they’re very sensitive, often turning into a kind of crying or devastated mess that can’t take action (Gut) or think clearly (Head). When in Head/Gut mode, they’re efficiency machines that are all performance and no tenderness (Heart). So their Wake-Up Call is when they start thinking their value depends on their success.

• Average Sixes have a Head mode and a Heart/Gut mode. In Head mode, they’re wrapped up in fearful worry about what could go wrong, but divorced from action (Gut) or vulnerable connection (Heart). In Gut/Heart mode, they become passionately devoted, refusing to ask whether what they’re devoted to is worth their loyalty. Lots of Enneagram literature refers to these as the “phobic” and “counterphobic” modes of Sixes, respectively. The Wake-Up Call for Sixes is when they start looking for a sure thing — i.e., something they can devote to.

• Average Nines have a Gut mode and a Head/Heart mode. In Gut mode, they’re mechanically following habits or sitting around doing nothing in particular, neither planning (Head) nor really engaged with what deeply matters (Heart). In Head/Heart mode, they “float off” and fantasize in a way disconnected from action — stuff like imagining how lovely it’ll be to finally write that book someday, but not in a way that ever has them actually writing anything. Their Wake-Up Call is when they start automatically going along with others, as that’s a sign that they’re suppressing their “no”s and distracting themselves from the resulting internal violation via their fantasy mode.

So the shift from Average to Healthy behavior for the primary types is mostly about dropping the bundled mode. That release lets Essence shine through more clearly, which relieves some pressure on the primary Center as well:

• Healthy Threes are authentic and open-hearted. They drop the efficient performance mode as their approach to success. They instead act based on what fulfills their Hearts, and they let others feel their tenderness. Their ideas and actions inspire others to make the most of themselves.

• Healthy Sixes are clear and stable. They drop the attempt to find something to plug their devotional Heart/Gut mode into. They instead follow their inner knowing. This lets their authentic caring guide their hands to build and support systems that hold everyone.

• Healthy Nines are present and at peace. They stop escaping into fantasy to go along with others. They instead maintain their inner peace by saying “no” when they mean it, letting others feel and understand what actually matters to the Nine.

Going from Healthy to Average is a massive loss of freedom. It’s a tipping point from “The personality is a tool for Essence” to “The personality is running the show while Essence takes a back seat.” It’s like the difference between wearing light, comfortable clothes versus being embedded in a mech suit that often decides for you how it’s going to move.

If you can notice your type’s Wake-Up Call, though, you might be able to choose differently. Sort of reversing the downward spiral before handing control over to the personality machine. It’s where you (as Essence) can intervene and say “No, thank you. I’ve got this. I’ll take it from here.”

When personality starts imprisoning the soul

The other main shock point is even farther down the dysfunction scale. It’s about a “danger zone”: how the types create things like suicide, homicide, schizoid breaks with reality, mania, catatonia, etc.

In terms of the Centers, the key transition is when all three Centers get mechanized as part of the personality at the same time.

Even when the primary types are in their two-Centers modes, the main Center kind of gets dropped: Threes disconnect from their feelings in high-performance mode, Sixes drop all attempts to orient in their unquestioning devotion, and Nines space out and take no action when they go to their inner world of pleasant fantasy.

The secondary types mostly neglect their third Centers. Hence Ones & Twos tending to be duty-oriented (kind of like Sixes in devotion mode), Fours & Fives withdrawing into inner worlds (like Nines in fantasy mode), and Sevens & Eights taking strategic action disconnected from what deeply matters (like Threes in efficiency mode).

This neglect is actually a good thing. It’s the robotic personality ignoring the third Center. Essence can most easily shine through that Center and intervene: Ones & Twos can learn to see their predicament clearly, Fours & Fives can take action and develop presence, and Sevens & Eights can let the world and others touch them more deeply.

Likewise, the primary types can kind of unwind their dual-Center mode from their primary Center: Threes can attune to the meaninglessness of their performance mode, Sixes can notice the way that their devotion doesn’t resolve their underlying fear, and Nines can become aware of the impotence of their fantasies via being present and attuned to their bodies.

So when personality co-opts that third Center, there’s no longer an internal intervention point. The system is sealed. The personality is running without any reference to Essence and becomes terrified (warped Head), hateful (warped Heart), and disconnected from reality (warped Gut). The overclocked personality engine needs to either run out of steam and release its grip on some Center, or have someone pry its fingers back from the outside. Otherwise it’ll continue in this locked mode perpetually.

The exact flavor of this hell depends on the type. But unless you’re a therapist or coach trying to use the Enneagram for a client, those differences probably don’t matter that much for you. The real point for individual practice is to notice the warning sign your type has carved above its own gate into hell. Riso and Hudson call these the “Red Flag Fears” for each type:

• Type 1: “Are my ideals actually wrong?”

• Type 2: “Am I driving people dear to me away?”

• Type 3: “Am I failing? Am I a fake?”

• Type 4: “Am I ruining my life and wasting my opportunities?”

• Type 5: “Will I never find a place in the world or with others?”

• Type 6: “Have I harmed my own security?”

• Type 7: “Am I causing my own pain and misery?”

• Type 8: “Are others turning against me? Are they going to retaliate?”

• Type 9: “Is reality going to force me to deal with my problems?”

A fleeting thought along these lines is concerning, but not necessarily dire. What I’m talking about is a very dark kind of experience. E.g., Average Ones might wonder from time to time if they’ve made a mistake in how they think about their ideals, but the Red Flag Fear of Ones is more like a horrifying revelation of one’s own deep corruption and contributions to evil as an inevitable result of sincere attempts to do good.

If you’ve identified your type and you notice this kind of transfixed horrified fear bubbling up, that’s a “halt and catch fire” moment. Whatever you’re doing, stop. The tools you’ve been using are what are driving you forward. You absolutely do not want to continue with business as usual. It does not matter how much sense your plans make or how necessary the path forward looks. Stop. Get help.

On the inside, being in an Unhealthy personality doesn’t look like “I’m in an Unhealthy personality”. It looks like the world is awful. Existence looks inherently evil, or inhospitable to life, or like dire horrid action is just objectively necessary, or that people are alien creatures with inherently malicious intent. Or any number of other horrors. But the problems look real. Your responses make sense based on the world you see.

That’s why the Unhealthy realm can be so insidious. The horrors you see feel like objective reality. Like your problems are real and you have only so many options for solving them.

I should also emphasize that an “Unhealthy” type can feel good to be in at times. An Unhealthy Eight might sometimes feel victorious due to heartlessly obliterating some rivals for instance. The issue here isn’t constant misery. It’s lack of choice while in a pattern that recreates pain. Unhealthy Eights are constantly at war with everyone and everything; their machinery is powerfully and reliably creating the very thing they most fear — and they cannot stop.

That lack of choice is why it’s so critical to heed the Red Flag Fear. It’s your last chance. Life just gets worse if you plow ahead through that gate. Going Unhealthy is rarely a permanent transition, but you don’t get to decide how long it will last, what gets you out, or what price you pay along the way. Death, imprisonment, the destruction of people or systems that matter to you, physical mutilation, and permanent psychological damage are all very possible before the dark pattern ends.

It’s best just not to enter in the first place.

Mapping your own spiral

I named the hope that the Enneagram offers near the beginning:

Every downward spiral is an upward spiral if you turn around.

The key is to notice where you can turn around. Where the personality machine wants to go in a direction, but you can tell that it’s pointing wrong way.

If you want to use the Enneagram for this, the first step is to discover your type. This can be a long road if done carelessly. I’ll talk more about typing yourself and others in a future post in this series. I’ll just suggest a few quick highlights for now:

• Keep an open mind. Your initial impression of how a type shows up might be meaningfully wrong, and it’s hard to see yourself clearly from the inside.

• Be careful of Enneagram tests and of others’ impressions of your type. They might offer some hints about your type, but they can also distort your sense of what you’re looking for. I think it’s best to look through the types with as little preconception about what’s a good fit for you as possible.

• If you’re right about your type, then the map should work.

Once you have a solid guess about your type, the next step is to map out your choice points. This project requires a bit of back-and-forth between your experience and Enneagram theory. I suggest looking for three key transition points to start with:

1. If you’ve ever been fully free of your personality, such as via meditation or entheogens, what did it feel like for it to come back online? That should be when your type’s main Center gets its first mechanistic distortion. What exactly did you start doing inside? What were the signs of your personality arising?

2. How does your type’s Wake-Up Call actually show up for you? What are some specific instances? (If you spend most of your time in the Average range, like most people do, you’ll notice the tone of your Wake-Up Call basically everywhere in your life.)

3. If you’ve bumped into the Red Flag Fear of your type, how did that show up? What did it feel like? What were the circumstances? What seemed real to you? What happened afterwards? What helped you get out of it?

There’s actually a lot between those three transition points. You can learn a lot from reading Enneagram material on your type. Don Riso mapped out more nuance in what he called “the Levels of Development”, and he and Russ Hudson detail all nine Levels for all nine types in their book “Personality Types”. Their other main book, “Wisdom of the Enneagram”, explicitly spells out many of the key patterns to look for in Average functioning. I also like Richard Rohr’s Christian approach as a rich way of seeing the key choice points from a different angle.

But the important part is that the map actually works for you. Is it helping you to notice your habitual behavior, and does making different choices at those moments actually improve your life?

If the answer is “no” after sincerely trying for a little while, you should wonder if you’ve misidentified your type. Remember that the point is to become more free, not to have a tidy explanation for why you do what you do. I really recommend a very pragmatic attitude here: if the tool doesn’t bring you more peace, love, and clarity, then change how you’re using it.

If it does start helping you, though, I really recommend studying your type through lots of different sources. Getting those details with an eye for noticing choice points can be immensely helpful.

Preparing for Red Flags

I also recommend developing specific plans for what would help you in particular if you hit your Red Flag Fear. It’s very hard to gather the resources you need when you’re right at that gate. But if you know what helps you when you’re there, and you set things up so you can call on those resources when you need them, you’ll be much better off if you find yourself knocking on the entrance to that particular underworld. Things like having specific friends you plan on calling, or knowing to eat a bunch of chocolate and binge-watch Frieren. Stuff that’s wholesome and healthy and unwinds you from your downward spiral.

Just keep in mind that whatever your plan is, it needs to be one you can actually enact when right at that transition from Average to Unhealthy. A One might have a silly keyphrase he agrees on with his wife to get her help (e.g. “I am a pineapple, this is not a drill”), but when actually facing the Red Flag Fear, he’ll have to grapple with his terror that actually telling her that phrase might be him enacting evil. The answer might be “If I worry about that, then I’ll override the worry and tell her anyway.” But he probably does need that part of the plan laid out ahead of time for it to work.

In practice I find the Red Flag Fear stuff isn’t something to be super concerned about. But if you know you’re prone to going Unhealthy, or if you’re concerned about the possibility, then it’s a fine idea to have some attuned self-care tools ready to go.

Supportive psychotech

Finally, I want to suggest a few additional tricks from outside the Enneagram. I find that they make a big difference.

In my old company, the Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR), we used to teach a technique called “Trigger-Action Planning” or “TAPs”. It’s basically a memory boost: if you want to notice or think of something when a particular event happens, you set a TAP, and most of the time it just works.

Once the Enneagram helps you identify your key choice points, you can set a TAP to notice each one. Each TAP should fire at exactly the right moment. And if it doesn’t, you tweak the TAP until it does.

You can read instructions for setting TAPs here.

There’s also a way to sort of tilt your internal landscape toward noticing and setting the right TAPs kind of automatically. You do this by developing an alternative self-image (along the lines that Maxwell Maltz talks about in“Psycho-Cybernetics”). You basically notice a coherent alternative way you could be and then kind of mentally rehearse it.

This doesn’t have to be complicated. Stephen LaBerge uses basically this idea in his MILD technique for inducing lucid dreams: you get a coherent sense of what you’d be like if lucid in a dream, and then you mentally replay past dreams but as your lucid self.

Here’s how this trick might look for encouraging a shift from Average to Healthy functioning:

1. Get a clear sense of how a Healthy version of you might act, feel, and think. It doesn’t have to be perfect or complete. Just coherent. (Maybe my Healthy description of your type up above is actually enough!)

2. Think of a situation in which you missed your Wake-Up Call. E.g., if you’re a Four, think of a time you fell into the impulse to (say) stir melancholic longing and loss by reflecting on a past lover.

3. Call up the experiential details of it. Do you remember where you were? How it felt in your body? What was going on around you? It’s fine to make up some of it if you don’t remember everything accurately; the important part is that the scene is believable to you and has good sensory detail, like a dream or a movie.

4. Replay the detailed scene in your mind, but this time as the Healthy version of yourself. When your Healthy version feels the impulse to (say) fantasize, how do they respond to that impulse? What do they do instead? How does that feel? Get into the sensory details of it. Spend a while really feeling the whole thing, like you’re reliving the event (only as Healthy).

5. Set the practice aside and carry on with your life.

I want to emphasize that this last step is a real one. It’s kind of like when you struggle to remember someone’s name: after a point it’s helpful to stop trying so that your subconscious mind can keep working in the background without your conscious interference.

This mental rehearsal of Health is the same. The goal is to convey to your subconscious mind “This is the direction I want to move in.” Let it figure out how. Your job is simply to name the destination and then get out of the way.

More specifically, it’s not your job to make yourself act Healthy. That very much gets in the way. The thing trying to change behavior at that point is almost always the personality machine. Its efforts are basically guaranteed to backfire. E.g., a Four might try to force themselves to stop fantasizing but not be able to, which affirms their self-image of being uniquely flawed. (“Not even the Enneagram can help me….”)

The hope here is simply to notice choice points right when they happen. Merely noticing might sound inadequate, but it’s actually extremely potent. It’s just gentle. Truly skillful interventions often are.

Want help?

If you want to engage in the above and you might like my support, reach out to me:

I offer coaching. If working on becoming Healthy in the Enneagram sense calls to you, I might be able to support you in that. We can talk and figure out if we’re a good fit.

What’s next

I have at least three more pieces in mind to say about the Enneagram:

• Typing yourself and others. There are a few common pitfalls here to be aware of. Not just mistyping, but also misusing the view that people are running specific personality machines.

• Those inner lines inside the Enneagram’s main diagram. I think they indirectly say something potent about how science and subjective experience relate — but not for the reason Enneagram enthusiasts might think.

• The question of validity. Are the Enneagram types real? Or is the system made of compelling illusion? If it’s illusion, does it turn out to be helpful anyway, and if so is there a way to benefit from its real value without believing in fantasies? This, too, touches on the interplay of science and subjectivity.

I might have more, and the above three might not be how I end up organizing the essays. But those are definitely the topics I’m itching to talk about right now.

(You can view part 3 of this Enneagram series here.)

I have several things I’d like to say about it. Some clarification about what it is and how to view it (in my opinion), some of what I’ve learned about how to use it, and quite a lot about how it relates to scientific thinking.

So, in this post I’ll give my overview of it.

To spell out my reasons a little more:

• People often get a lot out of how I introduce systems. I tend to rejigger the logic until the whole thing makes a simple kind of sense to me. The result is often something that makes good sense to others too.

• I find that most overviews of the Enneagram miss what in my opinion is the core point. They talk about it like it’s a God-given classification system of personality traits and/or souls. I think it’s more useful than that. I’d like to hint at how.

• The Enneagram was my introduction to what I might call “subjective structures”. That idea has become central to what I do and think about, independent of personality types. I hope the idea can click for some of my readers too.

• The usual logic of the Enneagram is pretty bad, and I don’t think it has to be. I want to show what I think a slightly cleaned-up version looks like. Both for its own sake, and also as an example of how I clean up spiritual or mystical tools.

I’m not going to be able to get to all of the above in this post. It’d be too lengthy and take too long to write. So here I’ll just give my overview of the Enneagram, in part to give a lens through which to view other descriptions of the system (whether from me or others). I hope to dig into the other parts above in future posts.

The Essence

The Enneagram is a theory about how personality works.

It’s most often used to talk about which “personality type” each person is. It names nine strategy types a personality can use, meaning you can kind of categorize people by which strategy they most rely on. That’s usually the part people are most interested in.

But I think that application alone misses the core point. The Enneagram isn’t a classification scheme, even if people like to use it as one. It’s actually a map of suffering.

It’s a very negativity-laden map. It’s talking about the ways in which we torment ourselves by how we try to escape our misery. I often tongue-in-cheek summarize the Enneagram as asking:

In which of these nine ways are you most screwed up?

The core idea of the Enneagram is that there’s a structured relationship between your deepest nature (usually called “Essence”) and your habitual ways of navigating the world around you (“personality”). The personality is necessary to some extent, but by default it kind of takes over for Essence, sort of like an overly helpful dog that “protects” its owner from a love interest. To the extent that personality lives our life for us, its shortcomings get baked into everything we do, and Essence painfully withers.

Intuitively you can think of Essence as something like your soul, or the way that conscious awareness arises in you in particular. It’s the nature you had (but hadn’t yet developed or given much structure) when you were born. It’s what makes babies so different from one another and yet still so radiantly present and aware and innocent. When someone has an innate gift, like a gift for music, we can view that as an expression of their Essence.

Essence is naturally capable and wonderful and caring, but it still has to learn how to interface with the world as part of being born and growing up. Sometimes it encounters a challenge that’s too great for it to handle “nakedly”, so it creates a kind of machine to stand between it and the challenges of life. That machine is kind of like a mech suit with an AI. The more power it’s given, the more complicated it becomes, and the more of life it tries to robotically take over for Essence.

That machine is the personality. Some people use the word “ego” here, but that word gets applied to too many things and isn’t in standard usage in Enneagram literature, so I’ll keep using “personality” to talk about this mechanism.

It’s actually really helpful to have machines or autopilots in us. I like not having to think about keeping my heart beating for instance. I’m also grateful for my ability to walk without having to remember how. (That’s especially present for me right now as I watch the 10-month-old child I live with trying to figure out how to walk.)

But sometimes automatic habits can create problems, which those habits then try to solve using the same methods that created the problem in the first place. It’s like the runaway issue that can happen with alcoholism: if you start drinking too much, your life could start becoming really difficult, which creates stress, which you might try to deal with by drinking more.

Essential qualities & toxic mimics

The whole point of a personality mech suit is that it isn’t Essence. It’s acting as a kind of shield, sort of like oven mitts. But it still has to act as though it’s Essence sometimes. So it ends up robotically mimicking some Essential qualities. And yet it lacks the fundamental creativity of Essence, so the robotic imitation often ends up being a kind of toxic and kicks off a downward spiral akin to alcoholism.

For reasons I’ll get into in a bit, the Enneagram focuses on nine self-reinforcing problems that result from toxic mimics of nine Essential qualities. I’ll give them the classical numbering here, but don’t worry just yet about what the numbers mean or why there should be nine of them. Just treat them as nine painful mistakes every personality makes to some degree or another. You can also treat this as an overview of the nine personality types along with their central themes in bold (whose origins I’ll explain when I get to why the numbers are the way they are):

1. Perfection: Essence is just so. Exact. Precisely as it is. And there’s a fundamental rightness to that precision, due to its perfect alignment with all that is. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to make things right. The focus is on right & wrong, condemnation, judgment, and perfectionism. It’s imposing an idea of how things should be. The more this imposition happens, the better the personality gets at noticing things that could be fixed or improved, and the more distant is the Essential perception of everything already being just so.

2. Love: Essence is caring, kind, loving. When personality mimics this quality, it notices that affection is the main social sign of love, so it focuses on both giving affection and eliciting it from others. There’s a degree of fakeness in targeting affection directly, though, which throws the value of that affection into question. The personality tries to sort of overwhelm the value question by being even more “loving” and getting more “love” from others. This creates a downward spiral of manipulation, codependence, and an ever more empty meaningless illusion of pride.

3. Achievement: Essence is inherently valuable and practically made of potential to grow and become. (Think of how children naturally develop into adults, or how acorns grow into oak trees.) When personality mimics this quality, it seeks value via signs of growth, i.e. accomplishment. Yet accomplishment achieved via a mechanical personality alone doesn’t develop Essence, so it’s recognized as hollow and meaningless, and therefore devoid of inherent value. That spurs even more striving and an ever deepening sense of worthlessness.

4. Preciousness: Essence is precious. When personality mimics this quality, it focuses on being special and unique as a source of worth. It recognizes that only Essence can be truly creative, but its task is to keep Essence from coming into contact with the world, so it instead fixates on the “negative space” where Essence isn’t — which is to say, the painful apparent lack of preciousness and inherent worth. The result is a deep sorrow and melancholy, which it sort of mines in order to create an impression of specialness and uniqueness — which it recognizes as hollow, thus reinforcing awareness of the (apparent) lack of inherent preciousness.

5. Understanding: Essence sees clearly. It recognizes the true nature of what’s real. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to build mental models and understand instead. It’s doing so in a mechanical and therefore fragmented way, though, so there’s always room to miss something. So the urge arises to keep everything at a distance and examine it from afar until it’s completely understood in a mental way, which can never happen.

6. Safety: Essence is inherently secure. It naturally has a kind of innocent trust in all of existence. When personality mimics this quality, it operates from distrust (due to the absence of Essence) and tries to find a sure thing. But what should it rely on to determine what it can rely on? That puzzle repeats endlessly in a downward spiral of anxiety.

7. Freedom: Essence is free, in the sense of the freedom of the wide open road. All action is available. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to generate possibilities and avoid restrictions. Obligations and internal negative feelings can feel constraining, so the personality tries to distract from them with stimulation and optionality. This leads to addiction: doing things to distract from a sensation without addressing the sensation’s cause, thus requiring ever more distraction.

8. Power: Essence is real. It’s not some ghostly phantasm. It’s in the contact our fingertips make with the world around us for instance. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to be solid and feel its realness via the impact it makes. It wants to affect while resisting being affected. This tends toward violence (in the sense of “a tendency to violate”). That causes others to try to intervene, which is the opposite of the personality’s strategy of “affect without being affected”, so it doubles down on applying violent force to stop the intervention.

9. Peace: Essence is deliciously blissful and effortless. When personality mimics this quality, it tries to resist any negative experience. It becomes numb, sleepy, repetitive, and passive-aggressive in a foot-dragging way. This approach tends to have negative problems pile up (since problems sometimes can’t just go away). These issues demand attention, which the personality responds to by ignoring them even harder.

The Three Centers

So why nine Essential properties and toxic mimics? And why these nine?

The main inspiration comes from viewing people as having three kinds of intelligence — what in Enneagram theory is usually called “the Centers”:

• The Head Center, which is about thinking and plans and figuring out what to do. When Essence shines through it, its function is awareness and clarity (in the sense of clear perception and clear understanding).

• The Heart Center, which is about value, preciousness, connection with others, love, and honesty. Its Essential expression is of inherent worth, innocence, and belonging.

• The Gut Center, which is about action and will and power. Essential Gut energy shows up as vivid presence, ease, naturally right action, and a simplicity of being.

I think these Centers are pretty intuitive. We talk about people being “in their heads” or really “heart-centered” or “open-hearted”. We at least used to say that someone’s “got guts” when they can take action in the face of fear, and that has a slightly different tone than saying the “have courage” (from French “cœur”, meaning “heart”).

The idea is that while each Essence is unique and grows up in a unique context, and therefore will create a unique personality, there are still some general trends. We can observe those trends by looking at how Essence sort of plugs the Centers into the automated machine that is a reactive personality.

When we examine personality from this angle, we can see something like types of personality design. It’s a bit like how different can openers might feel quite different to use, but the basic strategy is still to press a blade into the edge of a can lid. Its functional design is basically different from that of a knife, even though they both cut.

So the same way it’s helpful to have a mental category of “can openers” that’s different from “knives”, it can be helpful to have some mental categories for personality design.

Deriving the nine types

We can use the three Centers to derive the nine personality designs that the Enneagram focuses on.

If Essence focuses on just one Center for designing its mech suit, then you end up with what’s called a “primary type”. So you get a primary Head type, a primary Heart type, and a primary Gut type. The primary types are thus something like pure expressions of how each of the Centers behave when they’re used to toxically mimic Essence:

• Without Essence, the Head Center can’t see clearly and can’t serve as a source of orientation or guidance. This generates a lot of fear. That fear gets used to stir thoughts, which are mostly pointed at finding external sources of guidance (to replace the internal guidance of Essence). This is pattern 6 up above. (I’ll explain the numbering shortly.)

• Without Essence, the Heart Center creates a feeling of abandonment and shame. It cannot radiate with a sense of inherent value from within. So the personality machinery seeks value in external expressions instead. The way a distorted Head Center uses fear to generate thoughts, a distorted Heart Center uses shame to generate feelings. Those feelings drive action toward getting reflections from outside sources about the person’s value and nature. This is pattern 3.

• Without Essence, the Gut Center feels violated, which generates rage. That rage creates tension (the same way fear creates thoughts in the Head and shame creates feelings in the Heart). The result is fragmentation and enormous pressure. Issues of energy and resistance become very central. Actions become mechanical and the personality actively resists forces that try to change those actions. (Contrast with the attuned dance of mother and infant synching up, or two lovers dancing together.) This is pattern 9.

So those are the primary types.

We get six secondary types by starting with one Center and somewhat involving a secondary Center in the mechanical personality design:

• Gut with some Heart (pattern 1)

• Gut with some Head (pattern 8)

• Heart with some Gut (pattern 2)

• Heart with some Head (pattern 4)

• Head with some Heart (pattern 5)

• Head with some Gut (pattern 7)

Now it’s possible to put the nine designs on a circle, at which point the numbering scheme makes a bit more sense:

This is the eponymous “enneagram” (nine-sided figure). Ignore the inner lines for now; they’re the topic of a post’s worth of discussion, and we don’t need them to understand or use the system.

The circle can be split into three regions based on which Center is most involved:

You can think of it as, we specify the regions of the circle by Center, and put the primary types in the middle of each corresponding region. Then if we sort of “lean” a primary type toward a secondary Center, that creates a secondary type.

So for instance, type 1 is what you get when you start with the primary Gut type (9) and “lean” a little toward distorting the Heart. So pattern 1 is defined by tension and forceful action focused on questions of value and worth — hence the type One emphasis on right & wrong and perfectionism.

Themes from the Centers

This bit about “leaning” can be used to explain where the nine themes I listed up above come from. Like how pattern 1 is about perfection. Here’s the logic:

• Of the Gut types:

  • When Essence withdraws from the Gut, the action is tension and resistance — the opposite of harmony, even though it’s used to try to mimic harmony. Hence pattern 9’s theme of peace.

  • Essence withdrawn from the Heart results in questions of value. When lack of peace get pointed at questions of conditional worth, the focus becomes about how to suppress evil and fight for good to arise. This yields 1’s theme of perfection.

  • Essence pulled away from the Head creates distorted vision and lack of orientation. Pointing lack of peace at the question of how to orient creates a forceful “carve your own path” kind of focus. Thus 8’s theme of power.

• Of the Heart types:

  • Pattern 3 most purely expresses Heart without Essence: value comes from external reflections. Thus the theme of achievement.

  • Adding a dash of distorted Gut focuses on how to achieve (and get your value reflected back to you) via forced effort. This creates pattern 2’s theme of love, emphasizing the way in which “love” is a verb.

  • Instead adding a bit of distorted Head results in trying to figure out how to achieve reflections of value (in a way that’s divorced from the Gut’s domain of action). The immensely internal and personal theme of preciousness for pattern 4 comes from this one.

• Of the Head types:

  • Non-Essential Head can’t orient on its own and seeks external guidance, but can’t tell which external guidance to trust. This defines pattern 6’s theme of safety: how do you find a sure thing to rely on?

  • An abandoned Head with a dash of Heart distortion means seeking safety in some externally perceived sense of conditional value (and as with 4, in a way that’s divorced from action due to not involving the Gut). This creates an at-arms-length mental examination pattern, i.e., type 5’s theme of understanding from afar.

  • Instead adding some Gut distortion means seeking safety through forceful action. The ability to move freely the way thoughts can move overwhelms the strategy here. Thus pattern 7’s theme of freedom.

Here I’m emphasizing the themes from the negative side. I could just as well have emphasized the positive sides — what it’s like for Essence to skillfully use each combo.

But as I said earlier, I think the main benefit of the Enneagram is actually how it’s a map of suffering. It’s certainly good to know what you’re aiming for! But you don’t create the Essential qualities by trying for them.

My hope is to talk more about how to use the Enneagram this way in a future post. But for now I’ll focus on tying up some loose ends:

Some leftover questions

You might wonder why we start counting with the Gut-with-some-Heart type as “pattern 1” and go Heart-wise. Why start there? Why not start with a primary type? And given that we’re starting with a secondary type, why not move toward the middle of its own Center’s triad?

The short answer is, I don’t know. No one talks about this choice as far as I know. It’s simply the convention. It’s an extremely universal convention in the Enneagram, so it’s what I’m going to keep using.

Second, you might wonder what’s up with all those lines in the middle of the diagram. That’s a good question. I’m hoping to dig into it in a future post. It’s actually the main reason why I started writing a post about the Enneagram to begin with: the situation with these lines is a wonderful case study of scientific logic. (I just realized I needed to give a lot of context first, and that the context works better as its own post.)

The short answer for what’s going on with the lines is: people think they know why they’re there, and what they say might turn out to have some value, but it’s also clear that basically no one knows what they’re talking about here. If they’re right about what the lines mean, it’s because they’re repeating something they’ve been told that was once worked out somehow. The reasoning doesn’t seem to have survived.

Third, why are the only two options for personality design (a) involve one Center or (b) involve a main Center and a secondary Center? Why can’t there be two equally involved Centers? Why can’t there be some of all three Centers?

You actually can have a pattern with all three Centers, but it doesn’t create a separate personality type. Once you’ve specified the first two Centers, you’ve determined the Enneagram type. Involving the third Center means that the personality has become so thick that Essence doesn’t shine through basically at all. It’s a state of immense psychological dysfunction — stuff like being suicidal, homicidal, schizoid, catatonic, etc. (The details of which dysfunction depend on the Enneagram type.)

“Wings”

As to why you can’t have two Centers equally involved… well, this is basically a flat assertion on the part of the theory. Some Center will be primary. In principle we could maybe find someone who really is running something that’s equally (say) type 1 and type 2 strategies. But in practice it’s usually anti-helpful to think of this situation as being possible. It’ll tend to mislead you about where your suffering is.

That said, it’s often helpful to view personalities as having a “wing”: usually someone whose personality is mostly of one type will still borrow heavily from one of the two adjacent types. Like a slightly 5-flavored 6 would be called “a Six with a Five wing” (or “6w5”). This is a personality that’s mostly about pure safety (i.e. Head issues) but will sometimes systematically add a bit of Heart distortion.

When a personality is of a secondary type and its wing is from a different triad, that basically means the personality sometimes switches which Center is its main focus. So for instance, an Eight with a Seven wing (8w7) mostly withdraws Essence from the Gut but also involves the Head. But at times the priority switches: the Head gets so involved that the personality sort of “pops” into a Seven pattern temporarily.

However! An 8w7 and a 7w8 are notably different. Their lives will look different. 8w7 is still basically an Eight, their life defined by themes of power. 7w8 is still basically a Seven, focused on freedom and stimulation. In practice it’s helpful to view these as very different types even if they have a structural similarity. (E.g. they’re both powerhouse types, arguably the two most aggressive and energetic of the Enneagram.)

I don’t think Enneagram theory says why this discrete difference should be the case. But I do find the tool more useful if I kind of go along with the claim.

What’s next

Hopefully the above acts as a good introduction/overview of the system. I doubt it’s enough to get a really rich feel for each of the nine types. But if you want to dig into the Enneagram more, hopefully this framework will help highlight the right things.

If you take just one impression from this whole post, I hope it’s this:

The point being, if we understand what’s going on, we might be able to observe how we’re recreating our suffering in real time, and then do something different in the moment. The tool is meant to be useful, not just a cute framework for classifying people.

I see this point missed so, so often with this tool. Basically everyone who gets into the Enneagram starts trying to classify everyone by what type they are and then explain all interactions within the framework. That kind of play can be helpful, especially to get familiar with a new toy. But I think it tends to do something unkind when used this way.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. That’s one of the topics I want to talk about in a future post: how to use the Enneagram well, and what some common pitfalls are, and how I think we might avoid them.

There’s also a question of how valid the system is. That question deserves some attention. I think we, collectively, are pretty incoherent when talking about models of subjective experience and what affects our behaviors. We mix up science and engineering all the time without noticing, which leaves us collectively very confused about what’s even real. I see what I think is a better way to explore this domain. The Enneagram is a case study I happen to know quite a lot about, so I might use it to demonstrate what I mean.

I also want to talk about those inner lines. Like I mentioned earlier, that’s actually what had me start writing this post to begin with. I just noticed that I needed to give all this context to even start talking about the inner lines. I think they’re interesting because their history is a fantastic example of pre-scientific engineering, only it’s about engineering subjectivity. I hope to explain what I mean by that and why it’s interesting.

I also hope to name something general about “subjective structures”. It’s unclear whether that’ll be an Enneagram-specific post though. I consider self-deception as a telepathic defense to be an example of a subjective structure, and it’s not at all dependent on personality type.

But maybe most pragmatically, I have several things to say about how to use the Enneagram. I’ve found it personally quite touching. It helped massively expand my sense of how varied people are, and it improved several of my closest relationships. It also made me more annoying in some of my relationships due to misuse of the tool. I’m hoping I can help folk benefit from my own experiences with the Enneagram.

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(You can read part 2 of the Enneagram series here.)

This is a lightly edited article I originally wrote on Less Wrong back in October 2024. I think it’s a great example of “subjective science”, i.e., seeking & testing good explanations of subjective phenomena (as opposed to insisting on objective data or statistics). The core idea is one I want to refine and build on within my Substack. I also imagine my readers who aren’t on Less Wrong might like to see it. So rather than quietly backdating the article the way I have with most of my others, I’m re-posting this one.

Imagine you're a very young child. Around, say, three years old.

You've just done something that really upsets your mother. Maybe you were playing and knocked her glasses off the table and they broke. And now she’s furious with you.

Of course you find her reaction uncomfortable. Maybe scary. You're too young to have detailed metacognitive thoughts, but if you could reflect on why you're scared, you wouldn't be confused: you're scared of how she'll react.

She tells you to say you're sorry.

You utter the magic words, hoping that will placate her.

And she narrows her eyes in suspicion.

"You sure don't look sorry. Say it and mean it."

Now you have a serious problem. You don't have an internal "actually mean it" button. And yet here's Mom peering into your soul and demanding that you both have that button and press it. Trying to appease her didn't work. She needs you to be different — and she's checking.

What can you do now?

This is a template for what I've come to call "the hostile telepaths problem". I think it's a common feature of social problems. The hostile telepaths problem is when you're dealing with a being (a) who apparently can kind of read your internal experiences and (b) whom you don't trust won't make your situation worse due to what they find in you.

There are lots of solutions to the hostile telepaths problem. I don't claim to know all of them. But recognizing some common ones has helped clarify a lot of my thinking — particularly around self-deception and akrasia1.

And getting very clear on the nature of the problem makes identifying real solutions way easier. This fact produces some previously-surprising-to-me predictions, especially for trauma processing and for making emotionally difficult decisions.

I'll try to spell out what I mean with some theory and a few examples.

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Newcomblike self-deception

There's one really tricky solution to the hostile telepaths problem. It deserves some special front-loaded attention before I name some other solutions.

Here I'll try to spell out its logic with a modification of Newcomb's Problem.2

Suppose that instead of the usual infallible Omega character, you're dealing with Omega-V. Omega-V is an extremely good but imperfect predictor of someone's box choice.

Through some clever sleuthing, you deduce why. Omega-V is scanning only folks' visual thinking for a little while prior to their box choice. It's extremely good at tracking the difference between the mental visualizations of one-boxers vs. two-boxers… provided they don't know Omega-V is scanning specifically their visual thinking.

So now you have an edge. Maybe you can trick Omega-V. Maybe you can visually think like a one-boxer and use other modes of reasoning (like inner talk) to plan on actually two-boxing. You just have to be very careful to have any "leaks" of reasoning into visualization look totally normal for a one-boxer.

If you decide it's worth the risk to try for this deception, the visual reasoning part of your mind has to be kind of siloed from the rest. It's like you have a subagent that truly honestly believes you're a one-boxer. It's the non-visual reasoning parts of you that are aware of the real plan.

Another way of saying this is: in normal Newcomb's Problem, you can't tell whether (a) you're in the real world being faced with Omega's offer or if (b) you're instead Omega's simulation of real-you and you're revealing what real-you will do. The situation is similar with Omega-V, but in this case it's specifically your visual reasoner (viewed as kind of a subagent) that has to be built in such a way that it can't tell whether it's a simulation. Many other parts of you can tell perfectly well what's going on!3 But for the deception to work, the way in which you plan on two-boxing cannot be something your inner visual reasoner can even deduce.

Now, let's take this one step further.

Let's suppose we're instead dealing with Omega-C. Also an imperfect predictor. But this time you learn that Omega-C scans specifically all of — and only — your conscious thinking.

At this point, the right strategy is to consciously decide you're going to one-box.

But some people still find themselves two-boxing and winning. Even while consciously intending to one-box. Sometimes they get confused and say the wrong thing or push the wrong button. Some of them trip and accidentally grab both boxes. Some laugh and grab both boxes and find them both full.

Assuming that at least some of those outcomes are strategic… how?

Hint: now you (by which I mean conscious parts of you) are maybe the siloed part. Basically an illusion meant to trick Omega-C.

The thing is, you cannot tell. Because if you could, then the deception — if it were there — wouldn't work.

Which is to say: on the inside, you cannot tell the difference between running this Omega-C deception strategy and honestly truly just being a one-boxer.

And furthermore, it's actually to your advantage not to check. Even if you were to find some way of being able to tell the difference!

But because of that, if you're aware of this deception strategy, it might work best if you honestly (from your perspective) look for some way to tell if you're running it. Actively trying to "come clean". That's a pretty powerful signal to Omega-C that you really are a one-boxer.

So if you can make it so that it seems to you like you really are looking, including accounting for awareness of possible non-conscious "shadow" reasoning, and you find none, but you still two-box in the end…

…well, you win!

…while the conscious parts of you are confused and surprised. And possibly quite dismayed.

Sketch of a real-world version

I call this pattern "Newcomblike self-deception" as a nod to Nate Soares' point that Newcomblike problems are the norm.

The deal is that people are kind of telepathic, in the sense of using things like vocal tone and body language and microexpressions and so on to intuitively deduce what might otherwise be hidden in others. They're scanning for things like intent and strategy and emotional tone. Often this telepathy is in service of synching up ("Hey, you seem upset, is something wrong?"), but it doubles as threat detection.

This telepathy is imperfect. Which means that sometimes Newcomblike self-deception is in fact a viable strategy.

I'd like to name one way I think this type of self-deception can actually happen in a person. It might be the main way it happens, or it might be rare. I honestly don't know. But it's one I've in fact seen in myself4 and I think I've observed in some others.

By some mysterious method, it's possible to contract your awareness — by which I mean, the space of things you're actually aware of can be smaller than the space of sensory inputs (including mental experiences like thoughts and memories). Lots of people experience this when watching TV (losing awareness of the room), or when deep in flow work (not noticing hunger for hours while programming).

If you construct a sort of fake self in your mind, and then contract your awareness around that fake self, it can seem to you on the inside like you really are the way depicted in the fake self. Like it's not fake, it really is who you are.

If you also build up explanations to your fictitious self about why things outside that fiction either are consistent with it or don't matter, then you both (a) can honestly display to hostile telepaths that you (here meaning fake you) are being fully sincere in not hiding anything and (b) possibly give the telepaths ways of discounting the unavoidable signals that you (here meaning you holistically) are hiding something.

For instance, as a child whose mother says to you "Say you're sorry and mean it", you might be able to strategically misinterpret your fear of Mom's Wrath as "being really sorry". As long as you're not aware that that's what you're doing, it might work very well! She might read your distress as you really meaning it. ("I'm sorry I'm sorry I won't do it again please Mom I'm sorry…!") And you can keep yourself from being aware of this whole strategy by keeping your awareness contracted on the fictitious version of yourself that's "bad" and "very sorry", and keeping your understanding of the real problem outside of your awareness.

Possible examples in real life

Here are some examples I think I've actually seen — in culture, in others, and in myself:

• I think the thing with kids that I sketched above really does happen. More generally, I think similar applications of Newcomblike self-deception are the root cause of (a certain very common kind of) shame: it's a strategic mislabeling of one's pain as being about one's "flaws".

• Relatedly, lots of folk mislabel their experience as "I hate math." Most people I've talked to who say this actually hate the coercion and gaslighting used almost universally in math classes. The real problems most folk are focused on in math class are social, like "Appease the teacher" and "Get Mom & Dad off my back." But teachers and parents might insist to a student that "you need to try harder" with the math itself while seeming to sort of telepathically scan them for whether they are in fact trying. I think this can sometimes lead students to strategically mislabel their distress about the situation to themselves.

• Gurus getting involved in sex scandals. I'm sure that at least some of them have been very sincere about what amounts to real Jungian shadow work. But somehow all that sincerity mysteriously ends up hiding and serving (instead of revealing and dealing with) an underlying drive to just get laid.

• Likewise people "accidentally" cheating. Sometimes folk really are just surprising-to-them vulnerable in some situation and don't have the right kind of discipline when they turn out to need it. But the fact that that ever happens can act as a cover. It's especially obvious in cases of repeated "accidental" cheating.

• I've seen four friends, as mothers, stay with and defend abusive partners (boyfriends or husbands) for years. She'd often insist that he's just stressed, or it's a frequent misunderstanding but they love each other, etc. In three cases it became possible for her to consider that he might be abusive after a change in her work gave her enough money to support herself and her child without him if need be. In the fourth case, the mother got a lot of social support such as a place to live and people she trusted to take care of her and her child, and then she had room to acknowledge her partner's actions as abusive.

• If I'm upset with a friend and I'm worried that they can't handle what I'm upset with them about, sometimes I can't think straight about what my problem with them is while I'm talking to them. My mind gets foggy, my concepts seem mushy even to me, the words I remember from journaling about it before now form what feels like a gibberish argument, etc. Often this fog suddenly clears up if I get a vivid sense from my friend that our friendship will be fine after we talk. It also gets clearer if the issue is so big that I realize I'm fine with them not being in my life after we talk.

• Badly wanting someone to like you can make them like you less. So how do you get them to like you? Not by being aware that you're asking that question! But maybe if you do things for them without knowing that's why you're doing them…? ("Oh, I forgot Bob likes sushi! I just got some because I felt like it, honest!") And maybe if you add an extra dose of self-loathing ("God, I'm being a creep, aren't I? I always do that!") you can pass Omega-C's others' scrutiny here by eliciting care & concern when you might otherwise get caught.

I'm not trying to be exhaustive here. There are tons more examples.

Other solutions to the problem

We can't actually penetrate our own Newcomblike self-deception without having another viable (to us) strategy for dealing with hostile telepath problems.

However, if we do have another strategy in a given instance, then in that instance it can be safe to look. The self-deception can lift.

Gaining independence

One alternative strategy type is, coming to trust that you're able to handle the consequences of being accurately seen.

Such as the moms in the abusive partners example above: each one could acknowledge her self-deception once it was safe for her abusive partner to know too. She got enough independence (financial or social) to protect herself and her child, making the telepathic scan no longer a dire threat.

I think a lot of "trauma processing" amounts to this “gaining independence” strategy. But it's more like, noticing you already have independence. I bet a lot of foundational self-deception habits come from being a child faced with telepaths (adults) who have a lot of power over them. A kid who deals with Mother's "Say sorry and mean it" demand with self-deception might then grow up to become really apologetic and "have low self-esteem". But it's just an old strategy for dealing with Mother that hasn't made contact with the fact that Mother isn't that powerful over them anymore. It's now actually just fine for her to know they're not "really sorry". If this raw physical truth comes into contact with the impulse to "be sorry", the mental firewall might simply collapse, and the mislabeling will stop.

So in many cases, "trauma processing" can basically mean noticing you're not a child anymore. You have independence. So you don't have to appease the hostile telepaths just because they're adults. They can just know your internal state, and you (trust that you) can handle the consequences of them knowing.

Building emotional resilience is like this, I think. If you (trust that you) can handle the emotional and somatic sensations of others being upset with you, then you don't have to hide the parts of you that might make them upset. They can just be upset. While you might not like it, you know you'll be fine.

(Not to say anything about what's ultimately good to do here. Caring about others' reactions totally makes sense for other reasons, like the health of the community we're in. Here I'm focusing specifically on what can solve the hostile telepaths problem without self-deception.)

Occlumency

Another solution type is occlumency. Which is to say, if you trust you can keep your real goals and/or strategies hidden from a hostile telepath even if you consciously know what your goals/strategies are, then it's safe to consciously know them.

(This is something like switching from Omega-C to Omega-V.)

A classic example is in WWII when Nazis come knocking and ask if you're harboring any Jews. The analog of one-boxing here is just not harboring Jews. Newcomblike self-deception doesn't seem plausible to me here. You very much don't have the power to handle the consequences of being caught "two-boxing". So if you're helping refugees, you probably have to lie convincingly. And if self-deception were a plausible strategy here, you wouldn't need it to the extent that you trust your ability to hide the truth from the Nazis even if you know the truth.

I think many psychopaths5 use occlumency quite a lot. I've met some who know full well that they're trying to manipulate others and are presenting a façade to do so. It works for them in part because they don't send implicit distress signals around thinking they're bad for being manipulative: they're not nervous, so they don't need to explain their nervousness away.

There's a moral tangle here. Honesty is important for connection, integrity, and communal health. But you might not trust that it's safe to reveal the truth to a hostile telepath.6 In this case, the moral injunction not to lie makes occlumency harder (because of fear of being caught, plus doubt about whether you should be using occlumency at all). This situation can leave self-deception as your only viable solution — which, incidentally, means you're still not being honest!

I think this means that if you care both about (a) wholesomeness and (b) ending self-deception, it's helpful to give yourself full permission to lie as a temporary measure as needed. Creating space for yourself so you can (say) coherently build independence such that it's safe for you to eventually be fully honest.

Solution space is maybe vast

I've named three solutions to the hostile telepaths problem:

• Newcomblike self-deception

• Gaining independence

• Occlumency

These aren't the only ones. A pretty simple one is just running away and avoiding them. Another is investigating whether the telepaths are in fact hostile and discovering they're not (if that's true). Yet another is to jam telepathic scans with emotional charge that backs privacy norms. ("It's none of your business whether I 'really am' sorry!")

The important part isn't that we have a full taxonomy. That might be helpful, I don't know. The important part, as far as I'm concerned, is that by being very clear about what problem we're solving, we can tell when something is — and is not — a solution.

Ending the need for self-deception

By this model, to end (Newcomblike) self-deception, we have to remove the need for it. This means solving each instance of the hostile telepath problem some other way.

This is kind of tricky in practice. When you use self-deception to deal with a hostile telepath, you can't know that that's what you're doing. You7 can't even know which hostile telepath problem you're solving! So how do you come up with another solution?

I don't have a provably general answer, but I have a pretty general approach that makes sense to me and has clearly worked several times. I'll share that approach here.

Welcome self-deception

First is welcoming that I'll self-deceive.

But this isn't "Well, I'm going to do it anyway, so I might as well be okay with it." That's nonsense: you probably can't just "be okay" with it. And trying probably makes the problem worse!8

I mean something more wholehearted. If I self-deceive, it's because it's the best solution I have to some hostile telepath problem. If I don't have a better solution, then I want to keep deceiving myself. I don't just tolerate it. I actively want it there. I'll fight to keep it there!

This is somewhat akin to dealing with Omega-C by saying:

Look, I know it's possible I'm running a deception strategy. I could spend a bunch of energy trying to suss it out as a costly signal that it's not there. But at a policy level I'm just not going to do that. Not because I have evidence that I'm not following up on, but because I don't want to add stress to myself in the world where I really am self-deceiving. Since I'm doing this regardless of whether the deception strategy is running, it's not information about whether I'm secretly trying to two-box.

This relieves pressure. If I have some sense that I'm self-deceiving, and my attitude is to back the deception instead of trying to penetrate it, then the hidden-to-me part of me running the deception doesn't have to engage in an internal arms race with me. We become same-sided.

Look away when directed to

Once I really back my own self-deception, it becomes easier to notice signs I'm doing it.

This works way better if I trust my occlumency skills here. If I don't feel like I have to reveal the self-deceptions I notice to others, and I trust that I can and will hide it from others if need be, then I'm still safe from hostile telepaths.

Seeing where I self-deceive doesn't mean I see what the deception is. In practice it's more indirect than that. What I mean are things like:

• Revealed preferences. (Akin to noticing I two-boxed "by accident".)

• My mind suddenly going foggy.

• Forgetting what I was thinking about.

• Mental chatter getting loud.

• Suddenly being very disinterested in what I was just focused on.

• Getting abruptly absorbed in something unrelated.

• My attention scattering.

• Losing awareness of my body, or parts of my body, or my body drives (like hunger).

• Body activation signs: holding my breath, tensing my shoulders, quickened speech, etc.

• Energy crash or getting really sleepy. (Like a freeze response.)

• A sudden addictive impulse.

• I feel shame, inadequacy, or otherwise think I'm broken or flawed or bad in some way.

• Etc.

I don't mean this as an exhaustive list. Nor do I mean it as things to look out for. Nor do I mean that these always imply that self-deception is going on.

What I mean is, there are things a person does to maintain self-deception. If you basically promise the strategic not-conscious-to-you part that you really will respect the strategy, then it doesn't have to keep you so firmly out of the loop. Then you can potentially start picking up on some signposts like these ones.

Part of the deal is, when you notice such a possible signpost, you look away. You notice it and you drop the inquiry. Because until you have a non-self-deceptive strategy for whatever the real problem is, you don't want to break the one strategy you have.

For instance, sometimes I'll think about responding to an email… and I start getting sleepy. If I push, I start wanting to watch YouTube. These are signs that something in me doesn't trust it's safe for me to look there. Maybe it involves a decision that requires me to ask myself an unsafe question. I don't know — and I don't try to figure it out. At least not right away. Instead I back off and direct my attention elsewhere. Maybe I go cook something, or take a walk. I consciously distract myself from the tension point.

In my experience, this alone can often eliminate most of the stress involved in self-deception. It becomes fine. Annoying, glitchy, but no longer fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.

Hypothesize without checking

After a while I kind of get a "negative space" sense of what the self-deception is about. I continue not to look, out of something like respect. But I still have a hint.

Like if there's an email I keep freezing around. I can tell there's something there. I might even have some intuitive guesses about what it is!

…but I do not check. I don't introspect on whether my guesses feel right.

Instead, I hypothesize. What hostile telepath problem might someone in my shoes be trying to solve such that this behavior arises?

For instance, let's suppose the person is asking for me to run an event this weekend. I might hypothesize like this, intentionally referring to myself in third person:

Maybe Michael doesn't actually want to do it, but he's scared that letting them know will make them think he's actually uninterested in them in general, which might have them closing opportunities he wants with them in the future.

Importantly, I am not introspectively checking. I'm not asking if I think the above really is what's going on with me. I'm just noticing that, viewing myself in third person, this model does seem to fit the evidence.

I'm also not trying to construct a plan to verify what's going on! Here Nature wants her secrets kept. I do not try to peek under her skirt.

Instead, I notice what Michael (i.e., me in third person) in this hypothetical could maybe do instead of Newcomblike self-deception. What would be a viable alternative strategy for him?

Maybe Michael could meditate on their possible disapproval, and come up with a plan for what happens next in which he's okay. (Building independence.)

At this point I could just implement this possible solution. I don't have to check if it's relevant to my situation: there's not much cost in leaving myself a line of retreat this way.

If it turns out there's been Newcomblike self-deception going on, and if this hypothetical solution really did resolve the core problem that the self-deception was solving, then the self-deception should basically just lift.9

And if I still have an ugh field around the email, then I haven't addressed the real problem yet. Which is fine. Not ideal, but I'm still going to back any self-deception that might be there while I don't have a better option!

I can repeat this process. Hypothesize without checking, implement solutions that would work in the hypothetical, and find out what happens.

…at least unless and until I start getting frozen about this process. That might mean I'm getting too close to understanding the strategy before it's safe to do so.

Then I back off.

Does this solve self-deception?

I don't know.

I didn't originally set out to make sense of self-deception. I was just trying to understand why people sometimes view themselves as flawed and in need of fixing.

It just turned out that that question was tied to a lot of others. Self-deception being one of them. A lot of them unified by considering the problem of hostile telepaths.

It seems worth noting that a bunch of the method I describe here — particularly the "hypothesize without checking" part — is derived. It amounted to a prediction that I tested and discovered worked as the model anticipated.

Likewise, occlumency being helpful. There might be other explanations for why getting better at privacy makes more thoughts thinkable. But I derived it from this explanation. And, again, occlumency (anecdotally) seems to have worked as predicted.

These approaches work remarkably well on many kinds of shame too, by the way. I might write a separate post on shame. Its logic is a bit different, but with a few adjustments I've found that lots of shame dissolves extremely well in contact with these ideas.

With all that said, I don't think I'm in a position to say that I've solved self-deception. I don't know how I could know that. I'm not even convinced I've solved Newcomblike self-deception! My method seems plausibly general, but I don't have even the sketch of a necessity argument yet.

So, more work needed.

Summary

It seems to me that self-deception is solving a real problem. If we don't solve that real problem differently in a given instance, then in that instance we can't stop self-deceiving.

It seems to me that the real problem is (at least sometimes) hostile telepaths.

When I view hostile telepaths as the real problem I'm trying to solve, the perspective suggests what alternative solutions might look like, and it lets me check whether a given approach even can work as a solution.

And it seems to me that when I implement those alternative solutions, the result is sometimes that self-deception visibly falls away, non-mysteriously. It becomes obvious to me what was going on, and why.

I don't know if this model captures all cases of what we might want to call "self-deception". Maybe it does. But my impression is that it at least captures some cases that matter, and quite a lot of them.

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Here’s the gist:

Lots of people keep snapping between two modes. One is a kind of

TRY REALLY HARD PUSH PUSH GO GO GOTTA GET THIS DONE

And the other is more slumped. Exhausted, collapsed, face flat against the floor.

It’s often super helpful to view these as something like build-in modes for your body. But they’re very simple, and on their own they don’t let you function at a very high level.

Like, when people exercise really hard, they’re often pushing themselves into that tryhard mode, and then end up dead exhausted in their recovery. I often want to refer to this strategy as turning into “a bag of bones”.

There’s a third… mode, I’ll call it, but it’s special. I learned it in my martial arts training as “living relaxation” (in contrast to “dead relaxation”, which is what we called the collapsed/slumped thing).

At first it can feel like a balance of the built-in pair, where you’re deeply calm and relaxed but also quite alert and ready for action. But it really is a third thing. It comes to encompass the other two. When that happens, dead relaxation becomes deep rest and trying hard becomes vivid vitality.

The experience of living relaxation is often one of suffusing everything with breath. Collapsing can feel breathless, like you’re dead on the couch. But if you breathe deeply while there, you get more life. Literally more air. Instead of being exhausted, you can just be. It’s restful.

Likewise, explosive effort done with breath is very powerful. It feels like firebending looks in “Avatar: The Last Airbender”.

The deal is, you’ve gotta build up your skill with living relaxation. It doesn’t just happen automatically the way the other two do.

I think this is the same thing Stephen Porges was pointing at when he came up with polyvagal theory. (That’s the basic theory behind almost everyone’s ideas these days around “healing from trauma” and “somatic processing”.) The idea is that your nervous system has these two main branches, the excitement/fight-or-flight system (SNS) and the calming down, restorative system (PSNS). The latter is governed by the longest nerve in your body, the vagus nerve, which supposedly has multiple branches. (Hence “poly-vagal”.) One branch, running a bit more toward the back (“dorsal” in anatomical terms), is responsible for the dead relaxation mode. The branch that’s a bit forward (“ventral”) is responsible for living relaxation.

There’s a lot to say about this theory. It’s popular for a reason. It’s also highly questionable as a literal description of what’s going on. But in practice, if you use the idea as a guide for how to interact with your lived experience of your body, it works.

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One of the big claims in polyvagal theory is that both the SNS and the dorsal vagus branch are built-in. They’re fully formed when you’re born. They’re very old in terms of evolution. But the ventral branch of the vagus nerve is quite new and is fundamentally social. It has to be “myelinated”. In practical terms that means it has to learn. We aren’t born with living relaxation as an accessible state. Instead we develop it in contact with others and by becoming more conscious throughout our lives.

…or we don’t! Or our learning is scattered. There are lots of possibilities. But in practice, lots of people — possibly most? — don’t develop very much living relaxation. So they end up snapping back and forth between the two other modes. Coffee and alcohol, work ‘til exhausted and then flop in front of Netflix. That oscillation keeps people reactive at a very basic animal level. And it’s also quite exhausting! Very hard on a human body.

Without living relaxation, the way an animal deals with having vastly too much sensation is to have the “dead relaxation” mode sort of lock the high-charge fight-or-flight energy under a lid. This is the “freeze response”.

I see this all the time with people who find exercise miserable. Working out can feel glorious, even while challenging. But if you’re stuck in a sort of low-grade emergency “play dead” mode all the time, then trying to lift weights or whatever will feel awful and exhausting, and it’ll often create nausea.

I liken this state to having “blown a fuse”. If you get too much tryhard energy (SNS) blasting through you, it’s a bit like having too much voltage passing through a circuit. That’ll often pop something fragile in the system, causing it to suddenly become a poor conductor of electric current. That’s basically what a fuse is: it’s an intentionally fragile part of a circuit that keeps more precious and harder-to-fix parts from breaking first under extreme conditions.

Hence my talking about the metaphor of “channeling lightning” as a possible replacement for language like “trauma processing”.

In practice, lots of (maybe most?) people operate in an ongoing “blown fuse” mode. Irene Lyon calls it “functional freeze”. It’s a state of partial numbness where you can still kind of move your body through the motions of taking care of some things, but everything is kind of grey and heavy and difficult. It can be hard to get riled up about things, but at the same time it can feel like being constantly agitated or on the edge. The mind tends to be a bit foggy all the time in this state.

The deal is that all that tryhard (SNS) energy is sort of pent up under the “blown fuse” thing. It’s like having a bow drawn, ready to fire. It’s quite stressful on the bow to hold that position for a long time.

The theory is that this is an ancient survival strategy. It’s why rabbits go slack and play dead when in the jaws of a wolf. The switch from terror to horror is because the fight-or-flight strategy can’t work: the rabbit can’t win in a fight, and it can’t get away. So instead it kind of stores all that explosive SNS energy (instead of, say, exciting the wolf by struggling). If the predator sets the rabbit down and gets distracted, then BAM! All that energy can fire, like releasing the bowstring, and the prey can suddenly fly away.

One trouble with humans in particular is, we can kind of carry our “predators” around with us in our heads. We can stress about what we need to take care of, or ruminate on what’s going to happen as a result of our past actions. We can also contemplate our inevitable deaths. This is intensely stressful — and it’s one reason why focusing on the present moment can be so calming and freeing.

The thing is, all of that functional-freeze behavior is a patch. It’s based on an old strategy for dealing with SNS overwhelm. We borrowed it from the way that many animals deal with situations where they’re trapped. But at least they can usually let it go and forget about it afterwards! They’re not embedded in time the way we are.

There’s a much newer strategy (on evolutionary timescales) for dealing with all that excess energy. It’s based on this living relaxation.

So let me show you how this strategy can work:

Take a moment to remember the space around you. You’re looking at a screen, right? (Or maybe a page, if you printed this out. My household likes to do that with essays we want to talk about.) It’s pretty common to lose track of your surroundings when reading something. I often think of this as sort of coagulating my awareness by pushing it into things.

What happens if you just… notice that there’s space around you? Between your face and these words? Above you is a ceiling, or the sky. Behind you is… whatever is behind you. Just take a moment and notice.

Some people get stuck on a sort of zoomed-in version of this process. It’s like the focal point of their attention zips around like a laser pointer. So they notice the ceiling, and then the wall behind them, and then the distance between their face and the page… but they still get surprised if I mention their toes. Instead of relaxing awareness so that it springs to being vast, they end up sort of “pushing” it out with concentrated attention.

In case it helps: think of it like using your peripheral vision. If you look at a distant spot, like some particular part of a wall or a specific leaf on a tree, you can probably see the whole object without moving your eyes. The whole wall or tree or whatever. You’re doing that by taking in lots of your peripheral vision all at once.

Or how about looking at a vista? When you see a view from up high, like looking down at a forest, what’s so striking about it? It’s not just that you can choose a lot of little things to look at. For me it’s the vastness itself that stands out. What am I using to see the vastness? I use something like peripheral vision, or peripheral awareness. I see the bigness of it by taking it in kind of all at once.

I claim that when you’re taking it all in like this, you’re engaging a glimmer of living relaxation. It should feel like your breath wants to change. Not like when you get tensed up, and not like when you suddenly get tired and want to take a nap. Something else. Something calm yet inspiring.

On a very simple level, living relaxation builds just by practicing it. It’s quite normal to forget about your toes even though I just mentioned them a few paragraphs above. Why? Well, we’re used to switching to the tryhard/collapse oscillation. Living relaxation is like having good tone in our postural muscles: until we’ve worked those supports well, we’ll tend to slump into “bad posture” when we’re not focusing on doing something else.

…though I want to poke at that framing a bit. I say “bad posture” because it immediately conveys the main point I want to say. But it adds something I’d now like to remove. “Bad posture” isn’t bad. It’s what our bodies very intelligently do with the resources they have. We slump forward while working at a computer because without enough living relaxation, there’s no way to “unify the body”. There’s a tendency to focus on the task that’s kind of inside the computer, and to drop awareness of most of the body. So the body has to get good at managing sort of on its own while you work in a highly mental way. “Bad posture” here is extremely intelligent: it’s the body’s best adaptation to that situation. And it might be perfectly fine for the life you want to live!

That said, in my experience most people do in fact change their posture, and feel better for it, as a result of developing living relaxation. They change how they sit at the computer for instance. But that’s not because there’s some kind of “correct posture” that everyone should be doing. It’s that living relaxation expands your resources and capacities. So you don’t have to leave your body to fend for itself so much. It can be healthier even when you sit for hours hammering away at a keyboard.

(I mean, here I am writing a weekly blog! I’m very much speaking from experience here.)

Anyway, back to the main topic.

Living relaxation is a skill. It grows slowly over time. And like any skill, you grow it by meeting challenges close to the edge of your capacity.

A lot of “trauma processing” emphasizes what strikes me as soothing. Being gentle with yourself and letting your system come to rest.

I think that’s really good, particularly if people haven’t allowed themselves to rest. But when you’re not practiced with living relaxation, it’s very hard to tell the difference between resting while full of breath versus being breathlessly collapsed. So you can end up sort of slumped as a pile of nothing, talking about how you’re “healing” while you’re not able to climb out of bed or get a job.

(I don’t mean this dismissively. I’ve just seen literally this error mode so many times that it’s worth naming as a kind of warning.)

The first step has to be entering living relaxation. Yes, that usually requires backing off from the tryhard effort. Dropping into dead relaxation can help since it’s sort of “adjacent” to living relaxation. Hence stuff like getting a massage or taking a hot bath can be supportive.

But at some point you’ve got to switch to the vastness. The delight in being alive. The open-hearted experience of this moment. Reverence for the glory of being. Sometimes a spark of SNS excitement can help here! Sort of shaking off the dullness of dorsal vagal collapse.

At first, just finding living relaxation is hard enough. Getting into it, then losing it, then getting back into it again. It’s very much like building a muscle, only it might also be hard to find the muscle due to unfamiliarity.

But after a while, basically once you can hold the state at all, you’ll want to challenge it.

This is where “firebending” comes into play.

Here’s the deal: most people engage SNS-type energy by contracting their awareness around whatever they’re trying hard to do. I see this all the time in the gym: people lifting a heavy weight by focusing on their thoughts and on the intensity of the sensation. They totally lose awareness of the people around them, the ceiling above them, the feeling of their clothes, the joy of being alive, etc.

That’s the breathless tryhard version.

If you want to train living relaxation, you’re probably going to do less than your body is technically capable of. You can’t lift as heavy, or as many reps. But you’ll get there! Just stay within your living range.

Here’s how it works: you start in living relaxation, and then you add a little bit of intensity. It’s probably way, way less than you’re expecting at first. See if you can keep your awareness vast, your breathing clear, your intention fluid and smooth and engaged.

After you do a little bit, check: did your awareness compress? Did you lose track of your surroundings?

It’s normal if you do. It’s no biggie. You get to try again. It’s like learning to juggle: you’re basically guaranteed to drop some balls while you’re learning. And that’s a good thing! It teaches you what the limits of skill are. Failure isn’t just the price of learning; it’s an absolutely critical part of learning. You want to fail sometimes, so you can feel how failure in fact happens, and so you can learn to address it.

Over time you can build up your capacity to move more and more “fire” without compressing your awareness. Living relaxation kind of “shimmers” but doesn’t collapse. Eventually you’ll probably notice how tryhard energy becomes explosive vitality when given resonant living breath. You can start moving it purely with intention instead of with compression.

It’s a really beautiful experience. I’m seriously not exaggerating when I say that this makes working out glorious. It feels really really good to move energy this way! It builds up your body’s ability to move energy in general. And it keeps your body safe while you’re working it very hard. So it’s kind of inevitable that you end up getting healthier this way.

Exercise isn’t the only way to build up “firebending” skill. It’s just the most direct I personally know of. It’s quite popular these days to “sit with” challenging feelings and try to “stay present” as part of “processing” them. I think such a practice is trying to do something quite similar to what I’m talking about. I just think it’s not as good at building capacity as is the physical practice. It runs the risk of sliding into fantasy and dead relaxation. It’s a powerful use case but not that hot at building energetic strength.

Whereas when I’m practicing firebending at a punching bag, I can tell the moment my awareness slips. My body starts getting discoordinated, or my wrist buckles. (I wear minimal padding and sometimes practice bare knuckle.) I get sloppy. If I breathe and expand again, often my body becomes coordinated again, and I can go a bit longer. I do not get hurt when training this way, despite going more and more ferociously over time.

And then when I pause, I notice the urge to “rest” like this:

…and I instead expand. I lengthen. I rest with breath. No collapse.

It’s extremely effective for building living relaxation.

Best as I can tell, the lion’s share of “trauma processing” amounts to lifting the “blown fuse” chronic freeze and “releasing” the “stored survival energy”. (Though like I explained in an earlier post, I think it’s more accurate to say that you “heal” by getting good at channeling that kind of survival energy, not by releasing energy like you might squeeze puss out of a zit.)

Key to lifting that freeze is having some way of channeling the intense energy underneath it. That’s what robust living relaxation gives you. The deeper your living relaxation is, and the more well-forged it is through encounters with the “fire” of effort with breath, the more intensity that can freely move through you. And then it becomes safe for your body to release the freeze response. It’s like building a lightning rod and connecting it with a strong ground wire.

I think that’s the gist of most “trauma healing”.

I look up above and see a lot of words. But it really does feel quite simple to me. I often summarize what I’m trying to say here as:

I just keep saying one thing: there are two things, and you make them whole by enclosing and holding them in one thing. Then they become part of that one thing.

The “two things” in the case I’m focusing on are the tryhard and dead relaxation modes. The “one thing” that encloses and holds them is living relaxation — something that initially feels like a balance of the two, but quickly becomes the context within which the original two just function better.

I hope this post gives enough of a guide that you can play with living relaxation yourself.

If you’d like any clarification, feel free to ask in the comments below.

And if you’d like mentoring in it, shoot me a message. There are lots of great programs out there on “regulating your nervous system”. But if you want 1-on-1 tutoring and like the martial spin I put on it, let’s talk.

I don’t use that term lightly, or as hyperbole. I mean it in a pretty straightforward way.

It’s a prime example of what I mean by “bad teaching”. Instead of enticing the students with the beauty, value, meaning, and relevance of the subject, the system threatens children into attending required classes. It often adds a layer of gaslighting: if the students feel unmotivated, they’re often told it’s because there’s something wrong with them (“You’re not taking your future seriously”, “You aren’t being a good student”, etc.).

Bad teaching is worse than no teaching. We would be better off if we dropped all required math classes and replaced them with literally nothing at all. At least then we wouldn’t be beating the curiosity out of children. And frankly, hardly anyone needs to know what’s taught in math classes, and what little they do need they’ll tend to pick up as they need it.

Education should not feel like this:

I lead with all this because I want to illustrate what I think a good future could be. I want to use math education as an example since it’s definitely my area of expertise. But math trauma is so widespread that I basically have to start with some validation:

If you feel unease, nausea, boredom, inadequacy, numbness, hopelessness, cringe, etc. when math is brought up…

…I want you to know that that’s an extremely sane and correct response to abuse. Your reaction makes sense. It’s more than understandable. It’s actually the correct reaction to have when you don’t have better strategies for avoiding an abusive situation.

If you’re willing, I invite you to consider that maybe your reaction is to the abuse, not the math. Something utterly beautiful and precious was probably hidden from you. I want to try to show you a glimpse of the delight lying at the core of the art when we remove the harmful part that doesn’t belong there.

I want to do this for two reasons. The lesser one in this case is that I just really want more people to be aware of what math actually has to offer. I think it’d result in a healthier society in many ways. I also think it’s just fun and meaningful in its own right.

But the main reason is that I want to give an example. I think a way forward to a really good future comes from us cherishing our humanity and helping one another to enrich our lives. I want to see education become more decentralized, more profoundly respectful of all living beings, and built on meeting the deep heartfelt needs and desires of humanity.

I want us aiming for the future we want, rather than just reacting against futures we don’t want.

In my dream future, people study math because it’s interesting and/or relevant to them, and they can tell. There are no required classes. Not even implicitly: you don’t have to have good grades in math classes to enter the vocational training (e.g. college) you want. Instead, if certain math skills are truly needed to enter a given context (e.g. engineering school), they’d test you on those math skills. Because it’s the skills that are relevant, not the obedience training.

But even so, I’d want to see education focusing on deepening our experience of being human rather than on making people employable. This is for several reasons:

• We don’t know what will be employable in ten years. But we do know that delighting in music, falling in love, savoring insight into how the universe works, and enriching our connections to one another will be good no matter what happens.

• Focusing on employability feeds an empty economic engine. It’s why getting our jobs replaced by AI and robotics can be threatening: if they can be more productive than we are, and if our economic value is based on being competitively productive, then we’ll make ourselves obsolete. But we cannot ever become obsolete in an economy based on ennobling the human experience.

• An economy based on solving problems does better if it generates more problems, or if the problems always seem tractable but are never actually solved. That’s part of why war is ongoing in geopolitics, and why dating apps and services are universally terrible, and why there’s planned obsolescence. But an economy based on enriching the human soul does well because it creates good in a way that people can tell is good. Exploitations and manipulations can’t survive in that economic environment. You thrive by helping others thrive.

• It’s just wholesome. Plain and simple.

This might sound utopian. Maybe it is. I’m very open to talking about it, debating it, etc. I think we need to discuss it in order for something like what I’m describing to work.

But I think some steps in this direction are quite practical, honestly. I think we might be able to fix math education for instance. And possibly education in general by similar methods.

Fixing math ed starts by highlighting the connection between math and the human soul. Not to convince, but to offer the truth. That truth as I articulate it won’t speak to everyone, but it’ll speak to some people, and then those people will know what to seek out.

Let me take a stab at showing what that might look like.

It’s a bit intimidating to try to convey what I really love about math. It feels a bit like trying to tell someone about a person I really like. Sometimes the words just don’t work, and I feel terrible because I’ve given a bad impression about someone I really respect.

So I’m going to say some things, and I hope that if it comes across badly you’ll consider that I’m just awkward at explaining it — either in general, or to you, or just right now.

So with that:

Math occurs to me as the sacred art of relating to truth.

I feel a bit shy using the word “sacred” there. It often puts people off. But anything less feels dishonest.

There’s a truly glorious feeling when I glimpse the truth of a situation. Many mathematicians have long used the word “euphoria” for the experience that accompanies the click of suddenly seeing the truth.

And yet, it’s also humbling. I’ve been very sure of some truths in math, only to discover a counterexample later on. I learn I was cleverly wrong.

And it’s not just me! The history of math is made of cases like this. An entire field of math was built on some people trying to make sense of a weird property of polyhedra. They kept coming up with really compelling arguments for why the property should be a certain way and then they’d find counterexamples. This went back and forth for a long time until someone figured out a way to rephrase the question. The rephrased question gave birth to what’s now known as “topology”.1

I get the sense that people who haven’t really grappled with math don’t understand this intimate and complex relationship between confidence and humility. What does it mean to really truly know something so solidly that you can do this:

…but still hold your belief so lightly that you’re gladly willing to look for counterexamples and completely change your mind the moment you find them?

(Can you imagine what political discourse would feel like if everyone were approaching those discussions this way? Standing strongly for what they can see clearly, while respectfully taking their opponents’ arguments seriously and truly revising their thinking in contact with those arguments? What would the world look like if voters expected this kind of nobility from people running for office? If arguments went viral because of how gracefully respectful and clear they are instead of how infuriating and unreasonable they make one side of the debate look?)

There is so much nuance to the art of math. I’m quite expert in it, and yet I find it’s almost trivial for me to dive deeper. Reflecting on it helps me notice ways that my thinking in a day-to-day way can be refined.

But it’s also just beautiful in its own right. There’s something profoundly elegant about noticing that two magical numbers — π and e — keep showing up in intimate relationship with one another. One has to do with the shape of circles. The other has to do with exponential growth. Why would those two things be related? Well, their relationship goes through what are called “imaginary numbers”, which have their own profoundly rich structure….

I could go on for a long time like that. It feels like peeking into the deep secrets of the universe. Or like glimpsing the mind of God.

I want to give you a few examples of this. I’m aware I might be making it sound kind of mystical, and I do think there’s something spiritually quite deep about math, but it’s also extremely grounded. It doesn’t have to be weird at all. That’s part of why it’s so marvelous.

I’m going to lift an example straight from Paul Lockhart’s essay “A Mathematician’s Lament”:

If we draw a triangle inside a box, how much of the box does the triangle take up?

Does it depend on how square the box is? Or where the triangle touches the top of the box? If it’s the same in all those cases… why?

I love the simplicity of this question. And its approachability. You can totally give this to kids as something to tackle. If they’re old enough (and geometrically mature enough) to understand the question, they’ll usually find it pretty engaging.

It so happens that there’s a really elegant move available: what happens if we draw a vertical line through the topmost point?

It’s now quite obvious (I think!) that each half of the triangle cuts its corresponding part of the box in half. Which means that the triangle takes up half the box.

If you read this far without tackling the initial puzzle, in some sense it’s sort of spoiled for you. You don’t get the joy of struggling with the initial question, and trying things on, and running into dead ends, and possibly developing your own explanation for why the triangle takes up half the area. It’s quite normal for students to grapple with a question like this one for a few days.

Although you can get a glimpse of the delightful challenge if you did grapple with the initial puzzle and concluded the triangle takes up something other than half the area of the box. Like, if you were sure it changes, now you can ask: was there something wrong with your argument? If so, what was it? Or is the above argument with the vertical line flawed somehow?

This is the mathematical dance. You look at something you can understand, and you try to make sense of it, and you try on explanations and reasoning. Eventually you come to realize something — and maybe you’re exactly right, and you can tell! But maybe you’re mistaken. This waltz of confidence and humility, curiosity and exploration, articulation and wonder defines the whole art.

Do you see a glimmer of what I mean?

Here, try it on this: notice that if you have the tip of the triangle reaching way way over to one side, the vertical line trick doesn’t work so clearly:

Does the triangle still take up exactly half the area of the box? If so, why? If not, why not, and what proportion does it take up?

Can you see why tackling this is so much more interesting and enriching than is memorizing and “applying” some given formula for the area of a triangle? Does it make sense why figuring out mathematical properties this way might make them a lot easier to remember?

Here’s another puzzle:

You probably learned that “multiplication is commutative”. Which is to say, a x b = b x a. (Think of commuting to work: it’s saying that the symbols can travel around.)

But that’s a jargon-heavy way of hiding the interesting claim being made here. It’s not a statement about how to rewrite symbols. It’s a rather surprising description of how physical reality actually behaves.

Here’s a use case: if I have four bags of apples, and each bag has seven apples, then I can work out how many apples I have. I just add 7 to itself four times: 7 + 7 + 7 + 7.

Normally we write that as “4 x 7”. So the “4” there is talking about how many groups there are — in this case the number of bags of apples. Whereas the “7” is counting apples, not bags.

The statement “4 x 7 = 7 x 4” is actually pretty bizarre. It’s saying that if we swap it around so that we have seven bags of apples where the bags have four apples each, we will not have changed the total number of apples whatsoever. Even though I get there very differently: 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4.

Can you see why that fact might be a bit surprising?

What’s even more surprising is that this holds for any two numbers. You can just swap which number is “number of bags” and which is “number of apples per bag”, with no effect at all on the total, for any pair of numbers.

Now, why would that be? Why can’t there be some numbers where swapping their roles changes the total? Can you really be sure that 102,487 x 982,238 = 982,238 x 102,487? That’s an awful lot of little things to keep track of! What tells you that these two ways of arranging things involve the same total number, no matter what? Can we actually be that confident?

Normally when I give people this puzzle, the scars of bad teaching show up. They’ll often say that they know it works this way because that’s what they’ve been told. It’s deference to authority. Together with the fact that when they plug it into their calculator it works out.

If you’re caught by that way of thinking, I want to encourage you to try looking for an explanation that you find elegant and compelling, that would give you the confidence needed to correct authorities and calculators. Like, what if there were some pair of numbers that didn’t work this way in calculators, and that all mathematicians and teachers said is the one weird exception? Can you land on a way of seeing this commutativity property such that you could stand in your own clear knowing and say “No, you are all wrong”?

Math is full of puzzles like this. The real art isn’t at all about memorizing methods and solving exercise problems. It’s about reflecting on a curious situation, and trying on explanations, and discovering that you’re wrong, and trying again, and getting glimpses of insight, and sometimes getting an explosion of clarity that makes the whole thing incredibly and gloriously obvious.

It’s the art of clearly understanding truth.

In my dream world, people who are called to it just play with puzzles like these. Those puzzles inevitably lead to more. (What does it mean for multiplication to commute when one term is a fraction? Why would commutativity still work there?) The exploration becomes the whole point! It’s enriching. It’s beautiful.

And people who don’t find that stuff interesting just… don’t study it! And that is totally fine. Hardly anyone needs to know how to solve a quadratic equation, just as hardly anyone needs to know what the circle of fifths is in music.

And then, what is a math teacher for?

Well, to ask really damn good questions.

I know what questions lead somewhere interesting in math. I know that most students aren’t going to struggle with (say) even vs. odd when it comes to understanding commutativity. There’s no reason to distinguish between isosceles and right triangles in the triangle-in-a-box example. But I did name some questions up above that in fact do stimulate students.

A really good math teacher knows where to point. “Look here. What do you see? Can you make it do this other thing?” Their job is rarely to explain things clearly. It’s to guide attention in ways that entangle the student with the topic independent of the teacher. And hopefully lead the student to something they find enriching and fascinating.

One common objection to this direction for teaching math is:

But won’t that take too long? Lots of ideas in math took centuries to develop. Is it really reasonable to expect students to reinvent all of math?

This concern is precisely why teachers are useful. But not by just telling the students a list of results and coercing them into plowing through a bazillion mind-numbing application drills. A huge amount of math’s history is about finding good questions or noticing anomalies. Why not offer good questions up front? When students come up with an argument that ignores an anomaly, a skilled teacher can say “Cool, that seems pretty compelling. It makes me wonder about this strange thing though. What do you think?”

At which point another common objection arises:

But there just aren’t that many skilled teachers! And training teachers this way is impractical. So is this even doable?

I agree, it’s not practical to get most teachers in the current school system to become skilled this way. There were sincere efforts to do exactly that in the USA in the late 20th century, and it badly backfired. It turns out that institutional reform is extremely difficult.

(That’s the main reason I left academia, in fact. I realized that no matter how much research we did on math education and effective interventions, the nature of the political and technological landscape would never allow that research to become relevant at scale. We could help dozens of students, and maybe hundreds, but not even thousands. Barely a blip.)

That said, here are two points I think address the concern:

• No teaching is better than bad teaching. I mean it. I think we should halt math education as it’s currently done even without a replacement. It’s abusive and morally wrong, on top of being ineffective. We’d be better off without it at all.

• Teachers like me are more accessible thanks to the internet. And with some care and attention, we might be able to nurture AI into supporting good teaching this way too. Or at least develop well-known guidelines for using AI in self-enhancing ways!

This last point is something individuals can just do. People like me can just offer good math education. We can lay out the value to the human soul of what we’re doing. If it seems true and good and beautiful, some people will want to study with us. The clearer we all are about how wholesome this kind of transaction is, the less power the coercive systems will have to confuse people. And then more people can check out of the abusive math systems, and can come join more joyful and fulfilling explorations instead.

That dynamic creates an economic incentive for more people to become good math teachers, and/or for AI to become excellent at good math tutoring. Eventually I think this snowballs into a full decentralized replacement for formal math education.

And it never requires institutional reform. We just… replace it. By sincerely caring for the nobility of the human spirit. As individuals.

I wish I had a better answer for what current students in the coercive system could do. I’d love for them to at least have their experience acknowledged (yes it’s abusive, you’re right to hate it, there’s nothing wrong with you) and to give them some immunity to the gaslighting and misdirection that’s so standard. Help them get good at consciously solving the real problem facing them, namely the social problem of having to appease a coercive system in order to get what they want.

But whatever turns out to be the sane, kind answer here, I think we get there by keeping our eye on the future we want.

I think we want a future that’s made of exalting the human spirit. Not just stopping wickedness and wrongdoing, but nurturing our individual nobility and encouraging goodness, wholesomeness, depth, meaning, and compassion in everything we do.

And that vision isn’t just about math. I think it applies to all the academic disciplines. I think we can encourage something really beautiful if we’re on the lookout for what graces the heart and broadens the mind, enriches our lived experience and helps us cherish our connections with one another.

Let’s make what we focus on really, really good.

“Let us have a universal mind that loves and protects all creation and helps all things grow and develop.”

- Koichi Tohei

I don’t yet know of good widely available material for learning math in what I consider to be a good way. I think lots of people are working on similar things. But right now the available material is (to the best of my knowledge) pretty sparse just yet.

The YouTube channel 3blue1brown has some really wonderful explanations — though I’ll warn that even incredibly elegant explanations won’t bring you into contact with the art of grappling with a question, which I consider way, way more central.

The closest I’ve personally encountered is a physics book: Thinking Physics by Lewis Carroll Epstein. Particularly the first section, on mechanics. It walks the reader through a question-led pathway of deeply understanding ideas of motion, time, energy, momentum, acceleration, etc.

If you’re interested in my skills as a tutor in the deep art of math, shoot me a message:

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This sentiment tugs at me in particular:

Last week I talked about how education tends to be coercive. Forcing people to go through required courses in order to get the degree they want, even if they don’t see the point of those courses. And how that creates really bad incentives.

I think the opposite of that offers something really powerful. What would it be like for education to have to speak to the relevance and desire of students? How would learning and teaching transform if everyone involved in the system knew to entwine learners’ efforts with what’s relevant instead of with the feedback of some authority?

Well… we do see some instances of that actually! But it’s often focused on training for employability. Things like coding bootcamps. I imagine that some people go to those purely because they find programming fun. But I imagine that most people going to those are trying to get a job as a programmer, because it’s lucrative.

And as time goes on, AI will probably replace more and more of those kinds of jobs.

Which creates a really practical problem: if more and more human labor gets replaced with AI, who gets to participate in the economy at all? If no humans get jobs, who buys the products that machines create? How?

I don’t think we’re asking this question very skillfully as a civilization right now. We’re just… making it happen faster and faster. Because it’s profitable to do so.

I’d like to suggest a possible pathway for this transition to move in a good direction. I don’t know if it works, but hopefully it can at least help the conversation focus in a kind direction.

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It seems to me that we need to focus on helping people transition to the kind of work that machines can never automate for us.

And yes, there absolutely are some. Here’s a bunch of examples:

• Savoring the taste of food.

• Enjoying a sunset.

• Being enriched by reading a piece of classical literature.

• Coming to a deeper understanding of morality in a way that impacts how you want to show up in your life.

• Falling in love.

• Erotic delight with another being.

• Being touched by music.

• Participating in camaraderie.

• Really understanding a mathematical theorem.

• Profound spiritual experiences.

In broad strokes, machines can never automate the process of living well for us. We cannot outsource that. Machines might be able to participate in or enhance these effects. (E.g. robot lovers aren’t out of the question, even if the idea is pretty sus.) But they cannot do these things for us.

If we were to collectively pivot to focusing on human enrichment, I think this would shape how we use AI, and what’s profitable for AI to become. I could imagine a world where there’s no longer a need for human hands to be involved in distributing food and essential medicine for instance. But I cannot imagine a good world in which we do not speak in community with each other, where we no longer remember and savor the works of Shakespeare, where we don’t hug one another when crying and celebrate our accomplishments when we worked hard on something.

I’m struck by how some people still hand-carve things like chairs. Not because there aren’t adequate chairs available from manufacturers. Not because it’s profitable. But because it’s good work. It means something to use a chair that you’ve built with your own hands. It means something to receive one as a gift from someone who poured labor into it in recognition that it would be helpful to you. It’s touching to the human heart in a way mass manufacture just cannot compete with.

So yes, there are things machines can never automate. And the human spirit knows it.

I see hope when I look at what we could do by focusing on what’s irreplaceable. I expect the transition to be hard; our economic system is currently made of people doing tasks that will eventually be replaced with AI or robots or some other cleverness, sooner or later. And it looks like a lot of that replacement could happen very rapidly quite soon. That’s going to be rough.

But we can pivot. We could even pivot quickly.

For instance, I know how to teach math kindly and profoundly. Like I named last week, most math classes are very coercive, embedded in a coercive system. They induce what I often call “math trauma”. But the trauma is actually to abuse, not to math. I’ve seen many people tremendously uplifted by having their reactions to math validated, and then showing them the gorgeous sacred thing at the core of math. In lots of cases they get quite angry at how they were treated, and at the fact that math is vastly more meaningful than they were shown. That they were threatened and shamed instead of enticed.

This anger is good and right. It’s part of healing.

If people wanted to come to me to heal this way, and to touch the true enrichment of the deep art, then their desire drives where we go. And I can act as a skillful guide. Helping them refine their own relationship to truth so that more and more it’s reality teaching them. I’m just nudging them along, asking strangely insightful and frustrating questions.

But slowly putting myself out of a job too. Because it’s not about me. I’m just a steward of this particular part of grace.

I could imagine that my role here could become automated. Current AIs can’t quite do it best as I can tell, but maybe someday quite soon they will.

But you know what?

If AIs automate guiding us to enrich our souls, I think we’re doing pretty well.

The reason we keep encountering more and more AI slop is that it’s economically relevant. Because the current economy is built on extracting usefulness out of humans, like milk out of dairy cows.

What would it be like if there were a growing distaste for things that distract us from enrichment?

What would happen if the addictive slop that keeps drawing people in, like those fake game ads or sexualized cartoon figures or headlines designed to outrage folk, inspired people to offer ways of helping us all become immune by feeding our hearts what we’re truly longing for?

There’s a wholesomeness possible here.

I think it might be the way forward.

Not based on condemning things we cannot stop or lamenting the way things are going…

…but by instead focusing on what is precious and irreplaceable about being human.

What would a noble education in literature look like? What there would deepen our souls? It’s not in training the five-paragraph essay format, probably. But it probably does involve mastering writing in some fashion, for instance, even though AI can write for us. The act of writing seems to help us learn to think better. How can we refine that practice? How might we use AI to zoom in on the parts of writing that are deeply relevant for us?

And even though AI can make drawings for us, it cannot express our souls for us. Works of art, done by hand, will still matter — much like the hand-carved chair.

Same with music. And poetry.

Machines might eventually do science better than us, but it cannot do our understanding and inner transformation for us. I still enjoy learning the nuances of physics even though other people know it much more deeply than I do, and even though it’s not obviously relevant in practical ways to my daily life. But it is relevant: it colors my experience of the blades of grass I touch, and the way I feel the wind, and how I hear the timbre of the voices of the people I love.

It’s a big ask, for the world to pivot in any direction. There are some deep laws that say it’ll be hard.

But I think it’s getting easier, now that so much of what we’ve had to do to survive is being replaced.

So in short, here’s my invitation:

• Let’s focus on human enrichment. Both for ourselves, and also in terms of what we support. Let’s focus on what we want more of.

• Let’s create things that transparently offer enrichment. Let people come because they can tell it’s worth checking out. Drop all coercion. Let’s dance with desire and meaningfulness instead.

And also, for reasons beyond the scope of this particular post, it’s important to me that this is taken as an invitation. I feel a lot of hope for this direction, but I’m also just one person. Even if I were totally right on the nose here, that matters only to the extent that others can see it themselves, without reference to me. And there might be important things I’ve overlooked or didn’t think to mention.

(In particular, I’m loosening my usual perfectionist standards so I can get an essay out each week! So this whole post is a bit messier than I’d prefer.)

So please take this as a starting point. If you feel inspired and it changes what you want to focus on, wonderful. I’d love to hear about it. If you have doubts, let those be voiced! As my dear friend and colleague Malcolm Ocean might say: distrust is sacred.

And the whole point I want to make here is:

Let’s deeply honor what’s truly sacred.

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I want to rant about bad teaching.

I keep seeing folk complaining about students “cheating” with AI. Submitting essays spat out by ChatGPT or whatever.

I agree that it’s distasteful. It’s sad that this is the situation we’ve wrought.

But the problem isn’t the students. And it’s not the tool.

The problem is that we’re used to making students do something they don’t want to do, and now they have a way around our coercion.

I got a Ph.D. in math education. It’s silly that that’s relevant, but here we are. The point is, I’ve spent a lot of time staring at how people learn and teach math, and the psychology of math, and I have Opinions™. Some of which apply to teaching in general.

I remember when WolframAlpha first showed up. I celebrated. I thought it just might force an end to the coercive paradigm for teaching math. It’s a super-calculator that could make homework trivial.

But that isn’t what happened. Instead classes kept and reinforced their shape that made the tool hard to use in quizzes and exams. (Gotta ban those smartphones during tests! Just like the calculators, right?) So students could still be forced to learn how to (say) factor quadratics on their own.

Never mind that WolframAlpha would be available to them if they ever actually had a quadratic they needed factored.

I find this entire approach to education sickening. It’s absurd. I understand how we got here, and I don’t think most teachers are to blame for it. But the whole thing is really dumb.

And now I think we’re being confronted with the need to do better. Again. But louder.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. Let me lay out the problem as I see it.

Coercive math

I used to teach math classes in universities. Mostly topics like precalculus and business statistics. The sort of courses that no one would take in college if they weren’t required for a degree.

So, unsurprisingly, students would do whatever they could to pass. Sometimes that involved studying. But quite often that amounted to arguing with me about whether their exam answers should “count” and be given more points.

(It’s also impressive how many grandmothers got sick right before midterms. Utterly stunning. And nearly always grandmothers specifically. Pure coincidence I’m sure.)

I remember at one point I was teaching a class on geometry for people who were hoping to become middle school teachers. We were covering the kind of math they’d need to master in order to teach children well. I’d given them a formula for finding the sum of the internal angles of any polygon based on a particular way of cutting it into triangles:

Since we know the sum of the internal angle of a triangle (180 degrees), you just have to count the number of triangles. It turns out that’s always going to be two less than the number of sides of the polygon. So you get a formula that looks like this:

Separately I also showed them some proofs that the sum of the internal angles of a triangle is 180 degrees. I won’t torment you with one of those. Just know they exist, and the students saw them.

So on their exam, I asked them to explain their reasoning for why the sum of the internal angles of a triangle should be 180 degrees. And most of them responded with:

Because, you know, a triangle has three sides. So you plug n = 3 into the formula.

It’s possible you don’t see the problem here. Lots of people don’t. But I promise you, as a mathematician turned math teacher turned philosopher, this is forehead-slapping. It’s really not an explanation of anything. It’s literally saying that if you cut a triangle into triangles, you get one triangle, and therefore the sum of the internal angles of your triangle should be… the sum of the internal angles of one triangle. That’s literally the reasoning that just happened. The “180” is there purely because that’s the formula I gave them. If I’d put “360” there then that’s what they’d have written instead.

When I handed their graded exams back to them, there was a small revolt. The students thought the question was unfair. I mean, so many of them got it wrong, so clearly it wasn’t fair!

We spent over twenty minutes discussing why the common answer they gave didn’t make any sense. Eventually when they could see that I wasn’t going to budge on the logic, one of them objected:

“But you didn’t say we couldn’t use that formula!”

To which many of the other students adamantly nodded.

“Yeah! You didn’t! So your grading isn’t fair!”

I again want to emphasize that perhaps you, my dear reader, have been traumatized by bad math teaching. Perhaps you do not see the problem with what the students were doing here. If so, I do not blame you.

But I want to assure you that it is quite maddening. Truth does not care what is “fair”. Their logic would not make sense even if I had caved to their demand for more points.

At the time I was bewildered and frustrated with the students. I now think this was an error on my part. I think I was confused. I was in fact contributing to the very system that I now see as utterly insane in this regard.

The problem was that the students were solving a different problem. They weren’t trying to understand something about polygons. They were trying to get through a required course.

They were — correctly! — solving a social problem. The one they actually cared about. I was basically the authority figure standing in their way. (Hence “unfair”, like we were in some kind of competition.) And I was trying to force them to learn something they had no reason to care about other than due to my threat to not pass them if they didn’t learn it.

The absurdity here is that the education system has made teaching adversarial to students’ interests. Students have to get through exams in order to get what they want. And they have to learn some seemingly arbitrary things in order to get through exams. So learning pointless nonsense is the obstacle course some authority requires them to navigate, on pain of withholding what the students actually care about.

It strikes me as extremely telling that children — children, for God’s sake, who are known for their voracious love of learning — so very often dislike school, which is nominally about learning.

This should be an extremely loud warning sign that we aren’t doing what we think we’re doing.

“Cheating” at writing

Let me switch back to the topic of using AI to write essays.

With a great deal of empathy for their plight, I’ve been reading a lot of English teachers complaining about their students submitting slop. A lot of the students’ work is pointless tripe. Some of it is soulless AI blather. Nearly none of it is students having poured their souls into articulating something dear to them and refining their expression.

There’s fear that AI and social media and whatever are degrading students’ ability to think and argue. Undergraduates can’t do literary analysis anymore. Many of them quite literally cannot read books from the Western canon: they just don’t have the attention span for it.

That really is a sad state of affairs for our civilization. It’s a problem for us to address collectively. Or at least it’s an effect we’re going to feel the impact of one way or another. It might result in collective cultural amnesia and even more social fragmentation than we have now.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think the students are doing anything wrong. I don’t think they’re “cheating” by having AI write for them. They’re solving the problem they’ve been handed. They’re told they have to navigate this class to get the degree or diploma they need, and that they have to produce a bunch of written words to navigate this class… so of course once they have an essay machine, they’ll use the machine to solve their problem!

Just like with math classes, the problem is the adversarial setup. You can’t coerce people into wanting to learn. You can at best trap them into having no available choice than to learn something. You can threaten them into pretending to learn.

But frankly at this point that’s just a shitty thing to do to a person. It maybe made sense mid 20th century when conformity helped a functional culture support nearly everyone. But today? Where our systems aren’t coherent or trusted enough for students to see the point of reshaping their lives to fit into them? At this juncture there’s no reason to carve people into cogs of a broken machine. That’s bad for them and frankly might be bad for the machine too.

Here’s how I think you fix an English class — bearing in mind that I’ve never taught English. I’m experienced in math education and have many strong opinions that sure seem to apply. But I might meaningfully not know what I’m talking about when it comes to teaching literature and writing. And yet I’m going to assert opinions about it anyway:

I think you fix post-LLM English classes by appealing to the students.

Supposedly they’re learning something of value to them from writing. Right? Things like how to organize their thinking, and how to express themselves better, and how to persuade others. Joining the centuries-long deep discussion that built today’s world. Enriching their souls.

If these things are relevant to what the students care about, and if you can demonstrate that you can offer these things to them, and you can show them how learning to write well is key to this process, then you won’t have to battle their urges to “cheat”. They’ll get that it’s not about producing an essay to beat the system. It’s about practicing writing well so that they can live better lives.

It’s like that old quote:

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

If you put in the work to lure students to feel why they already care about learning the art of skillful writing, then you won’t be able to stop them from learning. You’ll just be a facilitator. You’re there as a masterful guide of the domain that they’re so keen to explore.

And then you can warn them about AI. You can show them the result of applying AI to thinking, and persuasion, and how it actually weakens them if used wrong. Not that it’s a bad tool, but that it’s a bad substitute for learning to express themselves. And how using it that way can harm things that the students care about if they’re not careful.

If they get all that, then your class isn’t adversarial anymore. It’s cooperative.

Some teachers really do understand this point. The best ones.

It’s weirdly rare though. We’ve all been modeled really, really bad teaching.

Punching nothing

You might think the problem I’m pointing out here is coercion. That we’ve set up an adversarial incentive between students and the system that’s trying to make them learn.

And I think that’s basically right. But I think there’s a deeper error causing this one: the feedback loop is through a social authority instead of through the topic the students have drive to learn.

Let me give a very different example: martial arts. This is a case where, for the most part, students aren’t motivated to “cheat”. They’re not trying to, say, get a job that requires them to have a black belt. So they’re not going to argue with the teacher about whether their performance on their black belt test deserves to get more points. That’s just silly.

But it’s absurdly common for the teaching to still be based on social authority.

A few months ago I watched a Shorinji Kempo class. At one point they were practicing a specific kind of punch. Over and over again striking in the air as the instructor counted in Japanese.

This is something like shadowboxing. But in shadowboxing, you’re refining something you hopefully learned while hitting a punching bag. You noticed how you tend to forget to pivot your foot at the right moment, or how you need to lift your elbow a bit more, or whatever. So you rehearse that movement to correct errors you recognized when the bag (or a sparring partner) was giving you real-world feedback.

But that’s not typically what’s going on in traditional Japanese martial arts classes in my experience. It’s more like, students are told to mimic roughly what learning looks like. So you practice punching in the air because that’s what the teacher tells you to do. And you obey the teacher. ‘Cause that’s what you do.

At one point the instructor paused the students and said something like this:

When you’re doing this strike, make sure your knee is pointing in the same direction as your fist. Don’t let it waver to one side or the other. Get them both aligned in the same direction.

This style of correction is madness.

Again, as with the math example up above, there’s a good chance that you don’t see the problem. Totally understandable. I think missing it is an artifact of the ubiquity of terrible teaching. It’s so normalized that it’s often hard to notice.

The problem here is that the feedback loop is totally wrong. The students will probably adjust their postures, but it’s in order to conform to an authority. They don’t know why they should get their knees and fists aligned. Even if they already knew about this alignment thing (because they’d been told), they don’t know why their bodies didn’t adhere to the instruction before. Bodies are quite intelligent and will become efficient at what they repeatedly do. So if there’s a natural tendency to let the knee drift in this strike… why? And what exactly is the problem with misalignment such that the natural tendency is worth correcting?

But instead of inviting students to ask questions like these and explore, the instructor just told them which authoritarian instruction to mentally impose on their movement patterns.

People these days sometimes talk about “decolonizing the mind”. Here’s an example of colonizing the body. Literally bypassing your own visceral knowing so that some authority figure can directly write their will onto your nervous system.

Here’s what I would do as the instructor (noting that while I’m very experienced in martial arts as both a student and a teacher, I haven’t trained in Shorinji Kempo, so maybe I’m missing something about that art in particular):

I’m guessing that the knee/fist alignment thing is about stability and strength. So I’d have the students keep shadowboxing, and while they do that I’d go up to each one and catch their fist and push in a way that’d make them stumble. I’d then have them mess around with different body positions until they stop stumbling when I push. I would avoid telling them what to adjust! I’d have them generate the exploration for themselves. At most, if constraints of class time required me to move on before their natural learning process would complete, I might suggest that they try moving their knee around as well to see what happens.

This approach plugs students into the right feedback loops. Instead of attuning to an authority figure, they’re feeling the physical reasons for the adjustment. When they’re shadowboxing later on, they’ll feel the weakness, and that feeling will remind them to adjust. If some other teacher later comes along and tells them that they should deviate their knees, they’d have reason to object and to ask for clarity. Their knowing would be rooted in a direct personal relationship with the physical skill, not in conformity to some kind of socially proclaimed ideal.

There might be other, more clever ways of getting this result. I might pair students off and have them do games involving the strike, for instance. But the point is that as the teacher, my job isn’t to tell students what outcome to reach. My job is to help them get the right feedback so that they can tell what they want to learn and whether they’re learning it — ideally in a way that eventually makes me obsolete!

The core of bad teaching that I’m pointing at here is, giving feedback loops through authority instead of through direct contact with the truth. Telling the students what outcomes to produce instead of where to look to develop a skill they care about.

Learning well anyway

This kind of bad teaching is everywhere. It seems to be the thing most folk default to. It’s how most instructors teach, and it’s what most students are trained to seek out when they want to or have to learn.

I honestly don’t know why it’s like this. Bad teaching is a tendency I have to resist in myself too. I have guesses about its cause. Many people do. And maybe figuring that out would help us fix it.

But the main pragmatic point is, it’s everywhere. Good teaching is surprisingly rare once you know what to look for.

Which means that if you want to learn skillfully, you need to account for two things:

• The best sources of information are often poor sources of feedback. You have to check the feedback loops yourself. Often you’ll need to fix them, or find or create new ones on your own.

• You need to keep an eye out for your own tendency to conform to some social ideal that masquerades as “learning”. Notice when you’re inclined to use an expert’s opinion to check what you’re doing instead of to guide your attention. Beware being told when you’re doing well!

For instance, if you want to learn a martial art, it’s helpful to notice when you’re being told how to contort your body without being guided to feel why. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes tend not to make this error because the feedback loops are so clear: you roll with someone and find out why a technique has to be done a certain way. But most martial arts classes teach traditionally, which tends to mean poorly. So you have to figure out ways of getting good feedback loops yourself.

After I watched that Shorinji Kempo class, I went to a punching bag and experimented with moving my knee around as I hit the bag. That’s how I came to my guess that the knee thing is about stability and power. Striking the bag with my knee deviated made it harder to avoid stumbling. It also put a tiny bit of torque on my knee in a way that I think could eventually become unhealthy. Now my knee and fist align without my having to think about it because any other movement type with that strike feels wrong.

That’s an example of what I mean by seeking your own feedback loops. Reality becomes your teacher.

Another example is in math. Math Academy does an absolutely amazing job at the authority-based style of teaching. But it’s still glitchy in the way I’m talking about. It’s excellent bad teaching. They tell you what you’re going to learn, and how to solve problems, often without guiding you to even understand why those computation techniques work. But it’s still a great resource! Its lessons are still correct. That material is powerful for mastering domains of computation, which can be a wonderful foundation for a lot of different STEM disciplines. It just means that if you want to actually understand math instead of having pure computation and obedience authoritatively pounded into your skull, you have to seek your own feedback loops.

Math in particular is quirky in that you can get good feedback loops basically by thinking. As a kid I used to solve algebra problems very slowly so that I could think through why each move made sense. Sure, I can quickly isolate x by dividing both sides by 3 or whatever… but I needed to stare at what it meant in order to understand it. Like to solve 3x = 15 I’d think:

“Okay, so if triple this unknown quantity is the same as fifteen, then I can break both the triple and the fifteen into thirds. That gives me six pieces that are all the same size. Three of them literally are each the unknown quantity. The fifteen breaks into three pieces of size five. So the unknown quantity is five.”

That’s a lot of extra steps. I could have gotten the answer faster by just dividing both sides by 3. But my goal wasn’t to just get to the end. My aim wasn’t to have done a bunch of math problems. My desire in my case was to deeply master a type of reasoning. So if some step felt like magic to me, I would spend time staring at it and tracing the reasoning until it went from “I guess it works” to “Oh, it absolutely must work this way! I can tell for myself!”

Math Academy tends to punish you for going slowly like this. Whatever. If you use it, but you want to understand mathematics instead of just computation, keep the brokenness of their feedback loops in mind. You’re not there to please Math Academy. Keep your eye on what you care about.

I dislike Duolingo’s achievements and streaks for a similar reason. They motivate the wrong thing. If you need gimmicks to learn a language, then why are you learning the language? Why not relate the reason you’re learning the language to how you learn? The most common reason I’m aware of is that most teaching is bad this way, and building good feedback loops is often hard. It’s easier to just use the easily available bad feedback loops. But you’ll tend to learn the wrong thing if you do that. (How many Americans have spent years studying a foreign language and still can’t speak it?)

Keep coming relentlessly back to what you’re trying to learn, and why. Seek out ways of practicing and mastering what matters to you instead of getting some expert to tell you that you’re doing a good job.

It can be weirdly hard to guide your own learning this way. But on net it’s both much faster and vastly more rewarding.

Good teaching

And if you’re a teacher, formally or informally, or if you design systems meant to teach people something, I beg of you:

Please, for the love of everything good in this world, please pay attention to the feedback loops you’re giving learners.

Your job is to put yourself out of a job.

Your expertise means you can see the actual truth and the feedback loops that plug you into it. And maybe you can notice which forms of feedback students are likely to overlook or take a long time to discover on their own.

Once they’re plugged into the truth directly, they don’t need you anymore. Reality becomes their teacher.

That is extremely good.

If you’re very good at what you do, you can turn students into colleagues. You might always be more skilled than they are, and you might always have more to teach them. It turns out that reality has a surprising amount of detail. There’s no end to the relevant feedback available. So if you have a head start, you might always have more you can show those who are less experienced than you are.

But if you do your job well, they will discover things you’ve missed. They’ll become masters of areas that might even be relevant to you and that you’ve always had trouble with.

This is part of the beauty of us all being in relationship with each other. We are different instances of life. Different souls. We see the everything differently from one another. We can come together and see the world more deeply than any one of us could have on our own.

You want that opportunity. You want to let your students grow into collaborators who can help enrich us all, including you.

Or rather, I don’t mean to presume what you in particular truly want. Maybe you mostly want prestige! I don’t know.

But I think there’s something really beautiful possible here, if it were more widespread.

In particular, please be especially careful with how you use your authority. If you tell students that they’re doing a good job, or that they missed something and need to adjust it, what are you training them to do with their attention? Where will they habitually look? Most of the time that type of interaction makes students more dependent on the teacher!

Again, your job is to make yourself obsolete to each student. What questions can you ask them that will guide their attention to the right feedback loops? Good teaching is mostly not about clear explanations. It’s about inviting your fellow human beings to notice for themselves that reality is constantly whispering precious secrets to them.

And please, please let students be the authority on what’s relevant for their own learning. Stop trying to make them learn things that they don’t see the point of. If it’s valuable to them, then show them the value. Let them feel it. Give them a longing for the endless immensity of the sea. That’s much harder to do than requiring things of them from a position of authority, but forcing people to learn things they don’t care about is quite frankly cruel. And we’re thankfully losing the ability to do it anyway.

And if you don’t know how to convey the value of what you have to offer, but you’re quite sure it is worthwhile to them, then earn their trust. Ask them if they’re willing to test your guess that they want what you have to give. Give it well. And then at the end, sincerely and humbly check with them: “Was I right? Was this worth your while?”

If you’re well-attuned to what matters to them, you will tend to be right, and they’ll see that. Then they’ll correctly tend to trust your suggestions about what to explore.

Just beware making them dependent on you. Ask for blind trust sparingly. It’s a path that readily leads to bad teaching. Keep turning them back to the feedback loops that don’t involve you.

Again, your job is to free each student of the need for your guidance.

I think there’s a much brighter possibility in humanity’s future than attempted forced obedience and low attention spans and AI slop.

Let’s focus on the learning that’s actually relevant, that’s soul-enriching, that helps us build a good society, that lets us talk more deeply with one another, that lets us recall and contend with the deep questions that brought us to today’s conundrums.

Let’s teach and learn beautifully.

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I’ve always been kind of obsessed with time. When I was 5 years old, I’d sometimes ask my mom what time it is, and then I’d get mad at her if she said something like “It’s about half past three.”

I mean, I didn’t want to know roughly what time it is. I wasn’t trying to play “Guess the time!” I wanted to know what the time actually is. She’s still pretty baffled what a five-year-old could possibly need to know the exact time for. Oh well.

I also wanted to study physics… so I could build a time machine! Basically because it’d be awesome. I didn’t have any specific thing I wanted to go back and change. Mostly I just thought it’d be a lot of fun. Overturning old ideas of what’s possible, kind of showing up all those stuffy old people who wanted the accepted theories to be all boring and mundane.

And also time tourism. I mean, come on, how awesome would it be to actually experience ancient Rome for a few days? Or go back and talk to Benjamin Franklin?

So, yeah. I’ve been thinking about time for a long time.

So in the spirit of everything being monocausal…

…I’ve come to wonder if our experience of time might be super central to most of the problems I care a lot about. Personal things like remembering what really matters instead of getting lost in stories. But also collective things like how we all deal with the arrival of AI, or what to do about the culture wars.

I see a kind of puzzle at the heart of it all. I’d like to try spelling out what I see.

If nothing else, I think it’s interesting.

But I think it might be really important. It’s honestly one of those key things I most regret not having tried harder to talk about when I think I’ve run out of time.

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We are time lords

I think the super duper power that makes humans so absurdly powerful is mental time travel. Normally we call that “planning” but I think it’s bigger than that.

I want to belabor the subjective experience as I imagine it here. Most life is “in the present moment” relative to us. There’s a kind of experience of time where you toss a ball in the air and you anticipate it’s about to fall, and where, and how to position your body. I think many living things have this sense of time.

And I think a lot of them even do something that deserves to be called “planning”. Like how spiders concoct a whole strategy for weaving their webs.

But I think the basic experience is fundamentally embedded in the present moment. The way we view a ball tossed in the air. The spider is looking at where the web goes and intuiting what to do. It might stare at the situation and gather data, but at some basic level the spider’s experience must be something like the catching-the-ball type.

The human experience of time obviously includes the catching-the-ball type, but it has another one: I can refer to Christmas, or the Cold War, or the coming of smarter-than-human AI. We can talk about what we’re going to do two months from now, or how it takes 365.24 days for the Earth to go around the Sun once.

I don’t think other animals can do all that. They can react, depending on whether their instincts have had evolutionary time and opportunity to create a strategy (like the spider’s web weaving). But they don’t have a general-purpose ability to embed themselves in time and think things through.

It makes us very general problem-solvers. We didn’t evolve to weave spiderwebs, but we could build them if we wanted to. We’d just use this other kind of time. We’d consciously work out how it needs to happen, and who needs to do what when. And then people could go do it. That’s how we create skyscrapers and bridges and rockets to the Moon.

I think this mental time travel is enough to explain human dominance over so much of the biosphere. We can do arbitrary planning, and we can coordinate across those plans. It wouldn’t matter if something else were “smarter” than us if we could tell better what’s going to happen than it could: if it literally cannot conceive of a time horizon greater than a day or two, and if it’s not physically more powerful than all of us combined, then we can outpace it. We can change what resources it has on vastly larger scales than it can orient to.

Time for ego

This whole setup makes me think of the sapient paradox. We humans have been roughly as smart as we are for about 100,000 years, but somehow we didn’t start building cities and civilizations until about 12,000 years ago — at which point we did it everywhere across the whole globe. So if it was such an amazingly good idea, why did we stick with tribal hunting-and-gathering for ninety thousand years? And if being tribal was so functional for that long, what changed?

I’m guessing it just took that long to invent this other way of experiencing time. Most of the pieces were there, but it wasn’t until twelve millennia ago that we suddenly figured out how to combine them into mental time travel and teach each other how to do it. Before then we literally couldn’t coordinate on larger scales than a tribe. We were embedded in the eternal present moment just like all other forms of life. But after that profound shift, we became the eyes through which life could see arbitrarily long stretches of time.

I first heard of the sapient paradox from Andrew Cutler. His answer is similar: a really powerful idea became capable of spreading and explosively did so. He suggests that the core idea was “I am.” Basically the creation of a self-reflective sense of self. I think he might be right. But I think the reason it mattered so much was because it made our weird relationship to time possible.

My guess is that we already had a sense of self before this explosion. We need it for social reasons. For me to track what other people think about me, I have to have a way of thinking about myself from their vantage point. Which means I have to be able to see myself “from the outside” somehow. My guess is that we do this by creating a kind of mental image and using the same pronouns for it that we use for ourselves (“I”, “me”, “my”, “mine”, “myself”). Kind of like how we have icons for apps on our phones: we tend to point at the icon and call it the app. (“Oh, yeah, that’s a game I downloaded a few months ago.”)

The key thing here is, that mental “self” icon is seen in third person but somehow maps to first person experience. If I wonder what Alice thinks about Bob, both Alice and Bob are “out there”. But if I wonder what Alice thinks about me, I have to both see “myself” as “out there” while also connecting my thoughts about her looking at my “self” icon to when she literally looks at me. I have to flexibly switch between viewing myself in third person (“Bob knows that Alice trusts my ability to make a good pie”) and my raw experience of seeing the world from what sure looks (to me) like the center of consciousness (for me).

If I put fictional characters on some kind of timeline, I can tell a story about them. Like in the Harry Potter series: we can talk about when Harry’s letters incessantly besieged the Dursley’s home, and how that happened before Harry’s first visit to Diagon Alley. All that can happen in coherent story time.

So what happens if I put myself on such a story timeline, and tell a story that connects to and includes my present-moment experience? So that I, in this very instant, am in the very story I’m telling?

I think that’s basically it. That’s the key insight that gave us this enormous power. We learned how to embed ourselves in stories that we could then make happen.

It just seems kind of mundane because we don’t remember a time when humanity couldn’t do it. Kind of like it’s hard for me to remember when I was too young to do it as a baby. We do this embedded storytelling constantly.

(Although we do tell myths of a time when we couldn’t do it: the Biblical Garden of Eden, Australian aboriginal Dreamtime, Greek Golden Age, Hindu Satya Yuga, Japanese Age of the Gods, Daoist Age of Perfect Virtue, Native American time of the Sky People, etc.)

I think this story embedding is related to why reframing the past can sometimes feel so healing (or damaging). How we describe what happened before and anticipate what lies ahead defines what meaning we make in the present moment.

I’m reminded of how, at 18, I read a book on the Enneagram and realized that my dad’s frequent harshness and disapproval were actually how he expresses love and care. The revelation rewrote a lot of my memories so I could see him as having always been that way. It helped me relax a lot around him. I simply changed the story that I saw as leading up to my present-moment experience of him.

Or on the flipside, the Boltzmann brain thought experiment. I think it’s disturbing precisely because of how it messes with our experience of what the present moment even is. It makes the “now” unsafe when we mentally place ourselves in this timeline.

Whereas thought experiments like the trolley problem, the Sleeping Beauty paradox, and lifeboat scenarios are just abstract things to ponder. By default they don’t relate to the present-moment experience of reading this blog post. So they don’t hit the same way.

Life finally sees death

I think the above is interesting. And I hope it makes clear what I’m thinking.

But the reason I bring it up is this:

I think this explanation of how we embed ourselves in time lays bare a big problem we keep poorly grappling with. And I think it gestures at what a solution has to look like.

Here’s the issue:

We have this superpower. It’s overwhelmingly powerful. We really want to be able to use it.

But also, it makes our individual deaths something we can each see. Not just abstractly, but as something we can map back to our first person experience.

I think that’s huge. It’s absolutely bewilderingly huge.

The rest of life cannot conceive of death in first person at all. This is a first-time unique weirdism. Maybe the first true existential horror.

Other living things, embedded in the ongoing flowing eternal present moment, will sometimes encounter threat. And they’ll react to that threat. Like when a rabbit is caught in the jaws of a wolf. The rabbit’s body reacts to this, often by going limp and kind of playing dead and hoping that the wolf gets distracted long enough for the rabbit to make a run for it.

But that’s not how the rabbit experiences it. For the rabbit, it’s just horror and numbness, and then when the wolf looks away there’s an explosion of “OMG I CAN GET AWAY GO GO GO GO GO”. It’s not a mental plan. It’s a set of instincts that have had time to evolve via contact with death’s filter (i.e. natural selection).

What this means is that the rabbit never actually orients to its own death. At some point it dies. But death is kind of a surprise. There’s momentary anticipation depending on how it happens. But death just sort of side-swipes the rabbit. The rabbit simply was, and then BAM it’s dead. The dying experience might be strange, but at no point does the rabbit have the cognitive and temporal context to have an idea of its mortality.

Literally all life is like this as far as I can tell — except for humans!

We literally invented mortality. We figured out how to embed our experience within a linear time that extends from and beyond the catch-a-ball range. This makes our deaths perceivable. We understand mortality in a way that is literally the first time life has noticed it. Up until this point life has made some adaptations based on parts of it getting carved away via natural selection. But human beings can see personal death itself. We are life’s first eyes in this sense. The first thanatoscopes.

Broken cope

But here’s the problem: we are part of life and heirs to its old tech for dealing with threat. It’s a momentary avoidance and escape strategy. Like the rabbit going slack, or a bear going ferocious when some animal tries to sneak in to eat its cubs. There’s no plan. There’s just reaction.

So what do our animal instincts do when we can see the “predator” coming for us? When we see inevitable relentless death heading our way, looking right at us from down the story timeline? From every believable story timeline?

I think our instincts in fact kick in and make us do dumb stuff. And here I say “dumb” because those actions often don’t make sense based on what’s in the present moment, even accounting for the eventual death we see. Those instincts aren’t reliably orienting to how long or uncertain the time is between now and our demise. They just grip us and tell us to run and hide, or rigidly freeze, or “play dead”, or go beat up the f**ker. And usually that we have to do so right now.

Right before the pandemic, a dear old friend of my family died. His brother heard about the death and panicked, and took up running to try to get healthier. He pushed himself too hard and gave himself a heart attack and died.

What did he learn from his brother’s death that he didn’t know before? Why did he push himself that hard that fast?

By my read, most humans are this kind of crazy most of the time.

(Including me!)

The basic puzzle I see here is: how do we use mental time travel without overwhelming our animal selves? How do we look at the truth of our predicament without going mad?

I think we have a bunch of partial solutions. But they really are partial, and we keep pretending they’re good enough. They really aren’t good enough, best as I can tell. They’re just barely functional enough that we can (and usually do) ignore the problem for the time being.

My impression is that most solutions fall into one of three clusters. There might be others, maybe major others. But these are the three I keep noticing:

1. One strategy type is to stop doing mental time travel. I think this is why “focus on the present moment” can be such good stabilizing advice: it gives the human animal an opportunity to regulate in its current situation the way it would if it didn’t have this extra time thing in its head. I think this is also why “be present” and “no self” are so commonly intertwined in spirituality: they’re strategies for dealing with mortality based on breaking the engine that does mental time travel. It’s basically an attempt to return to Eden, metaphorically speaking.

2. Another strategy family is based on lying to our instincts about the nature of death. I say “lying” because there’s an obvious physical reality to the situation that these strategies hide. These are things like “There’s life after death” or “I am one with the universe, and the universe will continue on after this body dies, so really there is no death.” Without trying to comment on whether there is or isn’t truth to these claims, it seems important to notice that they’re trying to tell the animal survival instincts that animal death won’t happen. The fact is still that at some point the physical body will probably die, which is precisely the part those survival instincts care about.

3. The third strategy type I often see is what I call “timeshatter”. It’s extremely common. The gist is to use mental time travel but only in fragments that seem like they’ll safely avoid glimpsing mortality. This seems to result in things like being able to plan your afternoon and put things on a calendar but not being able to orient to what you want out of life or how you want to do things over the course of years or decades. If you never build a coherent long story, you never connect the sight of your death to your present-moment experience. It’s like talking about a lion hunting you versus seeing a lion coming at you.

The thing is that none of these strategies let us really collectively orient to the truth of our situation. The second one at least lets us talk about our physical mortality… but in a way that tends to trivialize it, like it’s something that happens to a fictional character. We aren’t really looking at it or acknowledging the devastation it really implies.

All this together means that we never take death seriously.

I think this is part of why we keep getting so intensely impacted by death when it happens near us. These coping methods stop working when death is on the “catch a ball” time scale. Touching the fresh grave of a loved one makes it extremely vivid that there is a long flow of time, that death is real, that it matters, and that a tremendous amount of what we occupy our attention with does not make a lick of sense in the face of this intensely relentless silent truth. It’s all a distraction from what matters.

I think it also has super practical effects. Timeshatter makes it almost impossible for groups of people to have good collective memory and foresight. Today it often feels to me like the shared context window of Americans is roughly one week. That’s in part because of the speed of communication on the modern internet. But a lot of it is because short collective time windows are a natural result you should expect from timeshatter: different people shatter time in different ways, so the ability to have a coherent sense of shared time ends up relying on time windows that are much smaller than most individuals operate in.

I think this short context window is key to why collective planning is so hard. Today’s fears around AI are at least decades old, but the public couldn’t orient to those fears until AI started taking jobs. The problem finally became visible in collective “catch a ball” time. But it’s still not part of mainstream (as far as I can tell) to talk about where we collectively want to go as we automate more & more human cognition. We can’t even talk coherently about what global relationship we want the nations to have. Geopolitics is all reactive. “Catch a ball” thinking.

But the most heartbreaking part to me is, we let what’s utterly precious die. We keep forgetting what really matters until it’s too late.

So, yeah. None of our current solutions really work.

Finding a real solution

I’m a fan of deeply understanding problems without having to have a solution first. Often an answer just kind of bubbles up on its own.

I think this sentiment applies here. I think we’re in a bit of a collective bind. We shatter our shared attention or tell ourselves lies about our predicament because that’s easier than facing naked, simple mortality without any way to bear it.

I view what I’ve shared in this post so far as defining the parameters of a solution. It’s not “Oh man, human existence sure is bad in this way.” It’s more like “Hey, can we take a look at this puzzle and really solve it?”

My best bet right now is based on strengthening the body’s ability to handle threat. Building up the capacity to “channel lightning”.

In the style of aikido I trained in, we had to keep our expansive meditative calm even when someone was attacking us. If we tried to “stay calm” we’d numb out and move too slowly. If we got anxious, our focus would become weak and we’d lose balance and coordination. So we had to learn to move the fight-or-flight energy through us without it “catching” anywhere.

I’m reminded of these two guys reacting to an alligator on the golf course:

They’re both reacting to basically the same real threat. But the first guy is way more composed. The second’s reaction just… isn’t very helpful to him.

If we can build up our ability to look our deaths in the eye and react like the first guy, we don’t have to avoid looking anymore. Then we can look clearly, and collectively, into the long future.

I think that’s a really big task though. Way bigger than people imagine.

What would it take to get a terminal diagnosis and have the experience be “Oh, I guess this is how it happens”? Not because you’re dissociated from it being real, but because you’ve already prepared for what your death will feel like from behind your eyes and inside your skin? How can the vivid first-person truth of mortality move freely through you like any other emotional energy? The dread and panic feeling like yet another fluid sensation?

I hope that’s doable. I think it might be.

But I do think it’s a big ask. And we won’t ever do it if we stay lost in distracting fantasies instead. And man oh man are the distractions tempting.

That said, what I’ve articulated here is just my best current guess about a real solution. I’m most interested in there being a real solution. Some way we can retain our full capacity to peer deeply into time, and tie it to our present-moment experience, without overwhelming our animal selves. Some foundation on which we can build coherent collective attention that can have a long memory and see far into the future.

The problem remains unsolved as far as I know. The space for pondering is open.

The setting was gorgeous, tucked away in the Sacred Valley between Cusco and Machu Picchu. Pictures never did that space justice. Apparently the Incas viewed the mountains towering over both sides of the Sacred Valley as gods. It’s viscerally real in person why they’d say that. The land has presence there.

Instead of a ceremony space buried in a swampy jungle, we had a treehouse. Delightfully free of mosquitoes. Five times over the course of a week, we all headed into that dark space suspended high up above the ground and drank the strange brew.

(Fun fact: the drink itself has a kind of intense flavor but can be kind of pleasant at first. You sort of learn to find it disgusting after a few goes.)

In the second ceremony I experienced dying, going to Heaven, and then falling into Hell.

In saying this, I want to emphasize that I didn’t see anything strange. People talk about having powerful visions and talking to beings from other worlds and so on when taking Ayahuasca. But I never saw anything odd. When I say I went to Heaven and then to Hell, I mean that my sense of what reality I was in shifted. In Heaven I saw the fundamental “done-ness” of everything, how Love had won forever, how it was now my exquisite joy to continue the divine work amongst my brothers and sisters but that goodness was not and never would be at stake. And in Hell, the fragility of Heaven became vivid, and I saw how consciousness itself was fundamentally horrid and yet never-ending, and how I could at best hope I might forget the existential horror at the root of reality for a little while longer.

Throughout this whole experience I was carrying the metaphor that whole Sacred Valley seemed to be soaked in:

Healing.

We were there to spiritually heal. To become more whole. To process our traumas and fully actualize ourselves. To heal our ancestral lineage and free our descendants of familial pain. To play our part in awakening humanity.

So there I was, writhing in Hell, aware that maybe this endless suffering was really my fault somehow for not being brave enough or not “healing” enough or something…

…and then one of the shamans came up to me and said something like this:

If you don’t face this feeling, Ayahuasca will just keep bringing you right back here.

I really don’t think she was trying to be cruel. She also had years (decades?) of experience guiding thousands of people through Ayahuasca ceremonies by that point.

That said, six years later I think her move there was at best unhelpful. The main impact on me was that I now have a clear example of someone casting a curse. To this day I cannot touch anything psychoactive without risking a return to Hell.

But I have learned a fair bit about how to face it. And it mostly came from fixing the metaphor of what “healing” is about.

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Metaphor soup

The standard metaphor goes something like this:

We have an innate wholeness. But we got hit by something and were damaged. Traumatized. Emotionally bruised and cut. Those wounds still affect us today. We have to heal those wounds in order to be whole again.

But what is this “healing”? And why doesn’t it just happen automatically, the way cuts and bruises naturally heal on their own?

At that point many people switch up the metaphor. Instead of talking about wounds, we talk about energy like it’s a kind of fluid under pressure:

An emotional wound is when a feeling or energy gets stuck inside us. We learned it’s not safe to feel it, so we suppress it. We get good at suppressing it. Sort of pushing it down. But that feeling is trying to be felt so it can release its pressure, the way a good cry releases the sadness. So the compressed energy leaks out. It recruits our subconscious minds to create scenarios that will open up a pathway for the feeling to vent — or sometimes to escape abruptly, like someone pulling the trigger of a loaded gun. But then our suppression mechanisms kick in! So we’re stuck in a creation-and-resistance cycle that we can’t consciously see clearly. We get out of this by consciously venting the pressurized energy, which is to say, letting go of the resistance and feeling the stuck feelings until the pressure is fully gone.

And why would feeling stuck feelings release pressure? Why isn’t it just a physiological process, like sobbing or shaking? What is it about consciously experiencing the energy that’s so key?

Well, now we turn to a third metaphor: parenting.

That energy gets stuck in us because when we were little, we encountered a feeling that was too big for us, and we weren’t held the way we needed. That’s why we started suppressing the energy to begin with: it was all we could do at that age. We ended up with a version of ourselves at that age, a wounded inner child, sort of trapped inside us. Healing from our trauma is a matter of finding that inner little one and being the loving and supportive parent to them that they didn’t have when they needed one.

There’s a lot going for this whole soup of metaphors. I’m glad we’re collectively talking about this stuff and creating tools that help.

But I think this view is meaningfully confused. It encourages people to develop “safety” but also to somehow “face their feelings” and let go of “resistance” (often assuming without checking that the “resistance” is an old coping strategy that doesn’t apply anymore). It emphasizes “regulation” in a way that’s ambiguously kind of like soothing a child but sometimes is brought into contrast with soothing. “Capacity” becomes a mysterious ability to somehow feel feelings without getting overwhelmed, which is kind of related to safety but is kind of something different. It also implies that “getting triggered” should be a good thing, and that the problem is actually from trying to calm down before all the emotional energy has fully released. And people using this model often swing back and forth between whether “release” is (a) a physical and automatic process (like crying) that the body just does or (b) a reference to consciously experiencing the trapped emotions.

I think this confusion is part of why there can be shamans with tens of thousands of hours of practice guiding people through “emotional releases” or “reparenting” or whatever and still be deeply unskillful. I think it’s also why so many “seekers” can go through decades of “healing” but still struggle with basic stuff like keeping a job or being emotionally available in a romantic relationship.

I think they’re aiming at the wrong target.

It’s not that you’ve got a bunch of energy stuck inside you that has to vent. As though you’re a damaged child who needs conscious attention in order to heal and return to some ideal fixed state.

It’s more like, life is energy movement. And sometimes we discover a need to move more energy than we yet know how.

Building a safe path

Here’s what I think is a more coherent metaphor:

When we build our skyscrapers tall enough, eventually lightning will strike.

That’s part of what we sign up for when our architecture reaches for the sky. It’s not that there’s something wrong with all that energy being stored in the clouds. It’s not God’s pent-up trauma that needs to be released. It’s just a fact: if we reach high enough, we’ll encounter the intense power that was always there.

We solve this by sticking a lightning rod on top and wiring it to the ground.

This setup creates a channel that can handle all that explosive power. Without it, lightning travels through the building and destroys it. The bricks and wires and so on just can’t take that kind of voltage. But if we build a pathway for the energy, it prefers that pathway. It safely travels around the fragile urban spire.

Now that we know all this, we have basically three options:

1. We can put lightning rods on our skyscrapers.

2. We can let lightning destroy our tallest buildings sometimes.

3. We can avoid building things that high.

So if we want to sustainably reach for the sky, we have to build channels for the overwhelming power we now know lives up there.

Electric sensation

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of reframing “healing” this way.

We run into problems because as we grow, we sometimes encounter more intensity than we know how to handle. We get “struck by lightning”.

This can be devastating, but as long as it doesn’t kill us we can usually recover. Maybe scarred, sometimes with some serious loss, but we can repair at least some of the damage and carry on.

The problem is that there was an origin of that intensity. The “lightning” came from somewhere. Which means it can strike again.

So we have three options:

1. We can learn to safely channel that energy when it arises.

2. We can just expect we’ll be devastated sometimes and take the hit.

3. We can avoid those parts of reality. Staying small. Never reaching for the dangerous sky.

One way to stay small is to increase resistance — but here I mean something analogous to electrical resistance. We can try to be less conductive to energy. Sort of hoping that the intense power won’t try to go through us and will pick some other path. Kind of like wearing rubber shoes in a lightning storm.

And we can shrink away from “storms”. Avoiding contact with the overwhelming voltage. Making a habit of “staying inside”.

That’s a totally fine option. Sometimes it’s even the best option!

But it reduces how much we can explore. What we can do. How we can grow.

A more expansive strategy is to build up channels that can handle the flow of intensity.

I find this to be a helpful way to think about “building capacity”. Instead of the ability to hold energy, we can talk about ability to conduct it. How much power can move through your body before you “blow a fuse”? When an intense current of sensation blasts through you, how much (“electrical”) resistance does it hit? Can you let the current “burn” the resistance off and purify the channels? Or do you need to increase that resistance to diminish the current for a while? How smoothly can the intensity flow through you?

I’m now under the impression that “emotional releases” work for me when they do because they strengthen my body’s ability to move that emotion whenever it arises. It’s less like venting a pressure and more like mastering a skill. My body changes shape and becomes healthier, stronger, more capable of conducting ever larger currents of sensation.

Like with “venting anger”: I find it’s less important that I “get it out” and more that I learn how to move angry energy through my body without getting tight or collapsing or losing awareness of my surroundings. Then when I get angry, I don’t have to choose between (a) pushing it down or (b) letting it take me over.

So when I approach intensity this way and I’m hit with some kind of “lightning”, it doesn’t have to overwhelm me anymore. I might even be able to use it. My whole being knows just what to do.

Riding the lightning

For about a year, the threat of re-experiencing “Hell” the way I did on Ayahuasca would throw me into panic attacks. The last one of those was December 2024. No “plant medicines” needed. Just some journaling and a bit of meditation.

(That’s part of what scared me so much: it felt like that state could just come crashing into me at any moment. Once it slammed into me while I was just taking a shower!)

But the last time it tried, I’d built up my capacity to move the intensity. Instead of knotting up like a tight ball, I could breathe and expand. Opening up the pathway from the “lighting rod” to the “ground”.

It was still pretty overwhelming. But it didn’t blow a fuse or make me collapse. And I didn’t go into a panic attack. I felt the urge, like a temptation to cramp. And I just… breathed into it instead. Expanded through it. Let the lightning blast through me.

I think the metaphor soup I referred to before can explain what happened just fine. It’d go something like this: Since December I’d worked on my capacity to hold my terrified inner child when he started “crying”. He could feel my solidity and had room to release some of those too-big feelings. That let me integrate some of the original trauma and start the healing process.

But that isn’t what it felt like. And it’s not how I thought about it as I built up my inner resources.

I “built capacity” in part by going to a punching bag. I worked on explosively moving energy with breath and expansive awareness. Being neither gentle nor tight. Letting power flow through me. Relaxing to open up the spots inside my body where the sensation would “catch”. Growing my ability to blast the bag with enormous ferocity while not harming myself at all.

When the existential horror crashed into me this last time, I felt the urge to go tight — and my body recognized it. It’s the squeezing, exhausting thing that happens when I’m trying too hard to hit the bag. I breathed, and opened up, and looked straight through the Gates of Hell, and faced it with the spirit of “I can do this.”

And honestly it just wasn’t that bad. It was immensely intense, but actually kind of sweet.

There’s a related bit of theology in parts of Christianity. They sometimes say that the beatific Light of Heaven and the searing Fires of Hell are precisely the same: they’re both Love, just received differently. The difference is entirely in how the person views the Glory of God. Do they resist it and turn away from it, or do they openly receive it and allow it to enter and transform them?

That thought feels a bit like a poem that captures something about the experience for me.

I get the impression that lots of folk these days are focused on “healing” as though they need to return to some Edenic state of wholeness, and then everything will be okay. Kind of hitting “undo” on a bunch of what has happened to them.

But I don’t think that’s what life is made of. I think it’s made of learning. I want to be transformed by what I encounter. That’s part of being vitally alive.

Rather, I want to know I can meet and move through challenge. That I can deal with the enormous power I encounter as I grow and reach for the sky.

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This is a slightly edited version of a 2022 Facebook post. I’ve added a few footnotes to remind (or inform!) folk of some context I was relying on readers knowing at the time. The main point itself is much more timeless though.

I think the world makes more sense if we recognize humans aren't on the top of the food chain.

We mostly don't see this clearly, kind of like ants don't clearly see anteaters. They know something is wrong, and they rush around trying to deal with it, but it's not like any ant recognizes the predator in much more detail than "threat".

There's a whole type of living being "above" us the way animals are "above" ants.

Esoteric traditions sometimes call these creatures "egregores".

Carl Jung called a special subset of them "archetypes".

I often refer to them as "memes" — although "memeplex" might be more accurate. Self-preserving clusters of memes.

We have a hard time orienting to them because they're not made of stuff we're used to thinking of as living — in basically the same way that anteaters are tricky for ants to orient to as ant-like. Wrong pheromones, wrong size, more like reality than like members of this or another colony, etc.

With memes, we don't see a fleshy body, or cells, or a molecular mechanism. So there's no organism, right?

But we have a clear intuition for life without molecular mechanisms. That's why we refer to "computer viruses" as such: the analogy is actually very good. But the medium is computer code, not RNA.

Likewise with a piece of news "going viral" and showing up through lots of different news sources.

What's the medium? What's the analog of molecules or code?

Well, it's patterns of behavior, thought, and attention.

When you look at what's going on with Joe Rogan1, or with the Canadian truckers2, or with Australia's lockdowns3, the easiest way to orient is to pick a side.

But just imagine in each case that you're an ant trying to understand two animals having a fight. They're sometimes kicking your path or hitting an entrance to your colony. Sometimes bits of what you recognize as food lands near you or one of your colony mates.

Maybe one of those giants is an anteater.

Maybe both of them are. Maybe they're fighting over which gets to eat you and your kin.

Maybe you never get to know what they are or why they're fighting.

The analogy breaks down very quickly because the thought experiment projects human intelligence into an ant. What actually happens for humans is more like, the act of trying to look at an egregore tends to result in it affecting you. Like it reaches into your nervous system simply because you notice it.

This is why it's easier to orient by picking a side. You're becoming an extension of the egregore. It's using your biological resources to manifest in the physical world.

Many of these hyperobject creatures seem to like humans. Parts of science and religion come to mind. So do some wisdom practices. In some ways these spread more naturally through us, like the relationship is a kind of symbiotic. Loving-kindness practices and attitudes seem like this to me for instance.

But for this very reason, many of the predatory egregores do not want us functioning naturally. They intentionally disrupt us. They lean heavily on systematized trauma and threat responses. They want to keep us scared, or angry, or exhausted, or hopeless.

And it works in part because we have a hard time noticing the true origin of these drives. We rehearse the reasons we hear and think of, and learn how to point fingers at an outgroup as bad or inferior or threatening…

…and then over the course of years or decades we find ourselves having been chess pieces in a game we weren't really playing. Something else was playing us. History flowing through us in arcs much, much larger than we're accustomed to seeing.

I mean, at this point you've probably noticed at least one person who used to be close to you who has "lost it". Who clearly believes falsehoods while insisting that you're the one who's confused.4

That's what predation at the egregore level looks like. Ideological capture. People's lifeforce poured into sustaining an idea cluster that has possessed them.

Flat Earth, "plandemic" conspiracies, blind trust in demonstrably untrustworthy authorities, "cancel culture", Q-Anon…

…no matter where you stand on these or other controversial issues, I hope you can see a common thread of madness.

That's the zombie virus. The anteaters. Our cordyceps.

This picture — the one coming through me in this post for instance — comes from an egregore that wants us to see this pattern. One that wants to end the egregoric culture wars via symbiosis and transparency. It wants to spread and thrive by making us immune to this predation.

It just requires that you learn to see the spirit world, so to speak.

To stop pretending to know that your free will is what you think it is — since your thoughts are part of what get reprogrammed in the course of this global memetic war.

Start by slowing down and looking.

When you read these bits of news, what does your body do? Do you lose track of your feet? The feeling of your skin on the air? Awareness of the room around you and your screen?

Are you just now waking up to those sensations right now as I name them? Did you forget them while reading this?

There's a lot of work to do here. Of learning to let go, and to ground in safety, and choosing to enter time and truly face death. Feeling the depths of scarring that the predator memes clawed into us from a very young age. Truly healing.

And that all takes time.

But even beyond this, as humans and not ants, we have an opportunity:

We can come to see, understand, and touch this level "above" us.

We can slow down and honestly witness our confusion, and our reactions, and recognize the kind of emergent intelligence that seems to pass through us and others.

We can integrate more symbiotic egregores into our consciousness and orient, intentionally, to the real causes of our global challenges.

We can stop letting the predatory aspects of corporations and governments sway us.

We can actually participate in our own future history.

I think that's very, very worthwhile.

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There’ve been several times I’ve been pretty sure I was about to die.

Each time is really clarifying. There’s something super vivid about believing I’m facing the end, and noticing that I’m not ready. And specifically how I’m not ready. What’s left to do. The fact that I could have done more but somehow was too distracted. A desperation floods me to have more time, and to somehow use that time better than I tend to.

Over and over again, I see death as this kind of clarifying. When I’ve lost someone I love, and all the stories drop away. The aching hole where they once were is too vivid to ignore. I see the busyness that had me living in a fantasy life — and some part of me always knew that fantasy was kind of fake. And the way that real death is so strangely mundane and simple. It doesn’t even bring great drama. It’s just… naked. Silent. Empty.

In those moments of clarity, it’s always befuddling to me why I ever let my attention wander. I’ve wasted so much precious time on things that don’t matter. Of course, on some level everything matters: even mindless scrolling on social media has its place. But those excuses are pointlessly thin when facing the final end. When I see that my aspirations will never become real, or that I’ll never hold that one person I love ever again. What matters then isn’t that I was justified. What matters is whether I cherished each moment. And what went unsaid.

I have so, so much unsaid. When I believe I’m dying, that is always my greatest regret. I have gifts I mean to give. It would be devastatingly heartbreaking to go to the grave with them trapped inside me. Fading away forever into nothingness.

I want to work on saying them.

I feel pretty good about my ongoing relationships here. The people dear to me in my life know I love them. I can always love them better, with my words and my hands. But I don’t feel really constrained this way. In that I’m blessed.

But I have a lot unsaid to humanity.

There’s something deeply precious I very much want to share. I think it’s needed.

If I am to die, I want to dedicate the time I have left to sharing it. I want to know it will survive me.

A moment of pure stillness

There’s a franticness I see everywhere. Including in me.

When I’m talking about fun ideas with a friend, it’s a pleasant franticness. It’s very easy to sort of play out a busy process in my mind. Saying things because I’m excited about the thoughts.

But it’s the same franticness as in an argument. When I’m with a group of people and everyone is talking over each other. Trying to squeeze in their thoughts. Seeing so clearly that what they need to say will sort out the tangle, or will push back against something unfair.

It’s the thing that can have lovers being angry with each other. Snippy or hostile or mean.

Or even just mechanical. Problem-solving. Talking pragmatically without touching souls.

Feeling disconnected even while physically together.

There’s such a simple movement here that ends it all. Not always accessible, but absolutely precious. Worth reaching for.

It’s just to make eye contact, and take a breath, and be still.

Be still together.

Not to disregard the noise. But to have it no longer drive everything. At least for a moment.

Can there be a moment to remember together what matters?

What would we want here, if these were our final moments? If one or both of us were to suddenly die in a few minutes?

Yes, of course, we don’t really expect that. And that matters too. I don’t mean to suggest ignoring what’s real.

I actually mean the absolute opposite.

That franticness doesn’t understand what’s at stake, and how short time is. It might even freak out about time. But it loses context. It repeats noise. It acts based on some kind of program. It doesn’t keep track of what really truly matters. It just… loops.

I want to underline the heartbreak there.

It loops.

It loops.

It will keep doing this.

It will keep us doing the same thing over and over again until we die.

The same disconnection.

The same bracing.

And then we’ll look back on our lives and wonder “Why didn’t I pay attention to what really matters to my heart?”

“What did I do with my life, now that it’s over?”

We don’t have to go that route.

We can pause together.

Feel your breath right here, right now, as you’re reading these words.

Just pause.

Hello.

This matters.

Knowing we will die

It looks to me like most people don’t know they’re going to die.

I forget too. I don’t mean to put myself on some pedestal here. I have a strange gift of memory here, and I’m hoping to use it for good. But I forget too. That’s part of our shared plight.

I’m not talking about a factual knowing. Most people would know to answer “yes” to the question of whether they’ll die someday.

I mean more that there’s a kind of horrifying clarity, a visceral knowing, that crashes into someone when they get a terminal diagnosis. It’s something new.

The thing is, we already are going to die. What’s new here isn’t that Death is coming. What’s new with the diagnosis is that the person can feel it. It’s real to them. The inevitability grips their throat and chills their guts. They get that there is no escape.

“We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one.”

—Confucius

Best as I can tell, humanity lives in a strange shared dream fueled by franticness. We pretend it goes on forever, that “death” happens to some characters along the way like in a video game, that we should be upset by it when it’s the focus, but we should also carry on with our political struggles and our daily tasks and our jobs and so on as though everything goes on the same way as before.

I think this is why grief cuts through so much.

It cuts through because death is real. Unlike the frantic stories. We can gossip however much we want, be upset by an unreasonable family member or an annoying coworker… but if they have a heart attack and are gone, the silence does not care what stories we tell. We know they’re just that: stories. They can’t fill the aching hollow in our hearts. They can’t stop us from being forever changed.

I’ve known a few friends who’ve lost young children. Bereaved parents know what I mean. There’s a horrifying silence that crashes relentlessly against any stories. When you hurt that deeply, reassurances are obviously thin. Irrelevant. It’s sweet that people care, but they don’t understand. The emptiness of the child’s room is too real.

Most of the time, we collectively ignore all this.

It’s astonishing to me that we even can.

I think it’s possible because many people simply have never noticed that they will in fact die. Not really. Not the way it feels when you know you’re taking your final breath.

Not even a death scare seems to make this reliably clear. When someone survives a nasty car crash, or pulls through an emergency surgery, the expression is often “That was close.” Not “Oh. I thought that was the end. But not yet. I have a little more time.”

I dearly, dearly want humanity to consciously feel where it is. Where we are.

We are mortal.

That matters.

It’s not an idea.

It’s vividly, heartbreakingly real.

Frantic dreams

So much is crazy wrong with the world.

With more caution and mental precision, I could say something more literally true. How there are trauma responses and developmental limitations. How geopolitics forces certain behaviors. How we just haven’t yet found a better answer to creating abundance than corporate capitalism and a globally entangled supply chain.

But there’s an innocent truth here.

Humanity is confused.

Why does anyone starve?

Why can’t we unify around global warming — to fix the real problems, and also to reassure and comfort those who are terrified as though the situation is much worse than it really is?

Today we’re building AI. We’re granting our global economic engine the power to decide whether humanity survives, and whether we have any control over our own future.

It’s a large-scale version of a group of people yelling at each other. Frantically trying to get their ideas heard.

Something is wrong. The world is crazy.

It hurts.

But we don’t collectively pause. Listening to the world the way we might attune to a distressed child when we don’t know how to help them.

Instead it looks to me like humanity is tight in frantic illusions. News stories and politics and pointing fingers. Panic and judgment and numbness. Machinery that locks us out of our hearts and drains our bodies’ power into patterns of distrust and disconnection.

I dearly want to grab each soul by the shoulders, look into their eyes, crying from my heart.

“Please. Please, just stop. You are going to die. Take a breath. Please, meet me here. Meet us here. There has never been much time. But there is a little time right here, right now. Just pause with me. Please. We need you.”

“Sit down,
be still,
and listen.

You are drunk
and this is
the edge of the roof.”

—Rumi

Praying together

In the silence, something new is possible.

When I set aside my wild mind and my lighting words, and I look another soul in the eyes, and we pause together…

…I can feel how I don’t know what to do.

And that what’s at hand deeply matters.

The combination of those two is heartbreaking.

But if I’m willing to let my heart be broken, I can stay with the truth. I can face it. I can know that this matters, that something precious might be harmed or destroyed, that I want to address it… and that I do not really know how.

If I hold that vividly, I can listen.

To myself, to the other, and to emptiness itself.

If the other does the same, we can share that aching not-knowing, and that listening.

It’s in these moments that real connection happens. And where real insight can arise.

I think this deserves to be called “prayer”. I pray for an answer. We pray for an answer. Not with words, but with our hearts. Not to some idea of a God, but to the unknown. To each other. With each other.

When we pray this way together, new answers can come. We don’t have to follow those looping frantic behaviors forever.

We can pause.

And listen.

And do something new together.

My heart aches fiercely for a shared moment, just a few seconds, where humanity can pause and look around together. Where we can set aside our stories for just a few moments, and breathe, and make real contact as one shared people.

“Oh. This is real. This matters. It really truly matters. And we honestly don’t know what to do.”

If we should all die

Some people worry that AI might kill us all.

Sometimes I worry about that too.

For a moment, if you’re willing, maybe set aside whether you think that’s likely. Or whether you think it could be specifically AI.

Instead, I ask you to listen. Just for a moment.

Imagine that we’re somehow facing our collective end. It just dawned on us that we’ve messed up. It’s too late, and we’re now watching the last days or minutes playing out.

At that end, there might finally be a clarity. A pause.

An “Oh.”

It becomes real.

Like the patient who hears that they have two weeks to live. It’s not a theory anymore. They didn’t even realize their mortality was a mere idea before. But now it’s real.

In those final hours, we might finally take that collective breath.

Really seeing together that this is it. There’s nothing more to do.

And in that stillness, we might pray as one.

Not with words. Not to some shared idea of a God.

But with each other. In the brief yet long silence. Facing the end.

And we’d have a clarity we wish we’d had sooner.

That we wish we’d had sooner.

Sooner.

As in here.

Here.

That we would wish then that we have now.

We are not right now at that end. Even if it is coming, we are not there now.

If we are heading that way, we can choose to notice it.

To realize deeply that we are mortal. To really get it.

To let the horror move through us.

The heartbreak.

The devastation.

And to listen deeply. To care with all our hearts, and to not know what to do.

If we can just breathe, just pause and breathe together…

…maybe something else can become possible.

Choosing to know we will die

My vision is simple.

I want humanity to realize that it is going to die.

Not to panic. Not to collapse. Neither of those matter.

I mean something very simple. Wholesome. Devastating. Real.

I want to see us attending to what matters, and letting go of frantic fever dreams.

I want those tight, rushed words to stop being what we believe. As though they tell us what deeply matters. Or what to do.

I want us to learn to see this confusion, and notice our plight. That we do not know how to stop being crazy this way.

But also not to laughingly shrug off that we’re crazy, like it’s just a joke. The laughter is good, but not if we act as though our plight isn’t devastatingly meaningful too. As though it will not literally kill everyone we love and could come to love — one by one even if not all at once.

I think — and hope — that everything I do is with an eye to this. To helping humanity learn to take a collective breath, for the sake of all that is holy and precious.

I am not convinced we have time.

We never know how much time we have.

But I imagine that with each person who comes into vivid contact with death’s clarity, we have a collective nudge to pretend just a little bit less.

We waste a little less time.

We can touch. Just a little more.

I’m calling for us to reach for this. To learn Death’s lesson before Death becomes our teacher.

You do not want to realize you will die because you are about to die.

You want that clarity much, much sooner.

Please. Pause and notice.

This moment, too, is precious.

You are alive.

But maybe not for much longer.

How much have you lost track of what deeply matters to you? Where have you made choices you could tell were wrong for your heart? The ones you’ll regret in your final moments, even if they sounded so sensible and justified at the time?

Can you feel the heartbreak there?

Please, stay with that.

Just pause.

Breathe.

Let it in.

Let in what you can tell deeply matters.

What I hope to give

If the above were to ripple out into humanity, I would feel pretty complete.

I have a lot I’d love to do. For myself and with others. I would not get bored for centuries at least.

But if Death’s clarity were really present and conscious in our collective heart, I would feel like my sacred purpose had been fulfilled.

I’d have a solid sense of “Okay, now humanity’s got it. We’re good.”

I could die knowing I’d lived well.

My guess is that it’s gonna take many tries. I’m going to have to rephrase this, and vibe it, and spell out nuances, and share videos, and create art, and and and…

…and I hope there’s time.

As long as there’s time, I’ll keep trying.

I believe in us.