Everything That Happens Teaches You Precisely What You Need to Learn in This Moment

I've revised and improved this posting from 2023.


I've had the impression since childhood that the universe is trying to teach me things. In fact, that's what This All is. Especially the friction; the "bad" stuff.

I'm not trying to shine some positive light on it - Mr. Optimist constructively framing the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It's not a "spin". For me, it's a fully-formed point of view that's stood the test of time. My conviction rests on two elements:

I detect intention. Nothing supernatural. Not some lofty "Guy". Something more...tectonic. And unmistakably intelligent.

Second: the timing is never random. Everything that ever happened seemed to teach me precisely what I needed to learn in that moment.

I'm not presupposing some meaningful magical orchestration. It's more like being caught in an inexplicable machine, challenged to reverse-engineer its nature and operating principles — and, more mysteriously, my own nature and operating principles. Gradually, the objectives merged. And they seemed to merge coherently. Which is my point!

The lessons learned were never complicated. Just basic, remedial stuff. Like an ape delighted by the revelation that a stick helps knock bananas from high branches. Stuff that can't be unlearned, because it's so very obvious.

I've previously noted that even the most profound epiphanies easily congeal into cheesy cliché. Gems soon turn to dust. So: It's all teaching us; and the lessons, which arrive as ecstatic epiphany, turn out to be ludicrously banal. That's my 18-word summation of life on Earth.

Few people frame worldly adventure as lessons being taught. Instead, the teaching feels like persecution. Aggravation! Headwind! Frustration! An obstructive universe keeps getting in their way as they try to do what they'd set out to do.

I once wrote a poem, "The Reed". If you click back to its original post, you'll enjoy a cool accompanying photo, but I'll repost the poem below:

The reed,

unendingly assaulted by violent wind,

never suffers.


It never occurred to the reed

that the wind was a separate, external thing.


Insofar as the reed thinks at all,

it thinks it's dancing.

I confess that I haven't always been 100% reed-like. I've felt persecuted at times. But I've tried to keep one foot firmly planted in the recognition that it's always - without exception! - lessons being taught. And I've stabilized around that framing.

It makes a huge difference, because you can't learn lessons until you open to them — embracing the deeper benevolence rather than resisting the superficial harassment. You need to be receptive! You have to thirst for more! The answer is indeed blowing in the wind, but the first step is, obviously, to welcome it rather than bitching about the damned wind.

"Bitching about the damned wind" and "receptivity" are vastly different mindsets. It's an eternal choice, and only one choice is sane despite its puzzling unpopularity.

You can go your entire life bitching about (aka "peeing into") the wind. But the lesson of lesson-learning will leave you extraordinarily receptive, if you can get past the false assumption that this is just more "Take your lumps!" stoic shtick. Establishing this mindframe, despite its off-putting essential sanity, can be your miracle box. The universe functions as an epiphany provocateur if you'll merely let it.

And if you can embrace that recognition while also remaining consistently reed-like, you might find this ride more delightful than I did for most of my time here. Do better than me, and dive in with both feet!

---

Beware, though, of this pitfall.

Pretending You're Not Enlightened

Every one of us is enlightened, though most of us are remarkably committed to pretending not to be.


Throw it on the pile along with these.

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Spirituality is a subtractive process. It's not about attainment, accomplishment or enhancement. Quite the contrary, it's about dropping vast useless weight — posing, contriving, dramatizing, self-centering, and rote striving.

Once you've released your obsession with such exhausting ridiculousness, it feels great, but it's hard to take pride in the relief. Consider this, the very first joke I learned as a child:

Q: Why are you hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?
A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

Yogis

I've never met a yogi.

I've met many people performing yoga theater, but not one yogi.

How do I define it? With unusual tolerance. Just two simple asks:

1. You invest 99% or less of your energy into ego gratification (with — and this is critical — a downward trend), and

2. You spend 99% or less of your time posing (with a downward trend).

Instead, they grow egomaniacal about their glorious egolessness (awareness of pride ---> pride of awareness), and they strike a flamboyant pose of non-pretension. In other words: yoga theater.

When someone informs you they are "spiritual", it's helpful to hear the opposite. All you know for certain is that a pellet of gluten might fucking kill them. And if they've metastasized to the point where they display perma-smiles, soften their voices to a velvety hush, and thrust forward the deep, vast, profound pools that are their eyes in the same way a stripper would proffer her tits, best to steer clear. Spirituality claims to renounce image-signaling, while such people run the opposite way, full-speed. Which is scary.

Last week I visited a vegetarian cafe run by a stern, authoritarian, gaunt older woman with white-lady dreadlocks. A sign was hung front and center for all those entering: "This is a sacred space."

I tried not to grin, or to smirk, or to laugh uproariously, but failed miserably in a cascade. After surveying the plates of food, which looked unloving and harsh, I quickly beat it out of the space of her sacredness.

Imagine announcing to the world that you've created a Sacred Space. What are you saying about yourself?


The great teacher Nisargadatta, author of the classic "I am That," stressed, above all, sincerity. Funny how none of his many followers ever seem to talk about that part.

Yoga Asanas

Asanas are to yoga what mise en place is to a fine meal.

Levels of Letting Go

Level One: Forgiving
You finally decide to forgive your neighbors for having backed their car over Sparky, your beloved pet slug. One can't hold a grudge forever. You immediately feel better, confirming the old saw that "holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die." Not that we ever learn.

Level Two: Really Forgiving!
Your parents were alcoholics. But with maturity you realize they tried their best within behavior patterns learned from their own alcoholic parents. All those horrible memories you've hoarded and revisited innumerable times were just you needlessly stoking misery and senselessly curbing your happiness level.

You let go, and this one feels great! It's a bigger letting go, so the reward's commensurately more dramatic. You're downright unburdened, and the relief feels like the good Lord Himself rewarding your high-mindedness.

Level Three: Grinch/Scrooge
The Grinch drops his lifelong Grinch act and tries a little tenderness. Ebenezer Scrooge screams MERRY CHRISTMAS at strangers and neighbors.

Dr. Seuss—who, being a doctor, ought to know—insists that the Grinch's heart grows three sizes larger—or so it feels. This is the zone of transformation. It's like forgiveness, but at much grander scale, and the aftermath is ecstatic. No longer encumbered by a duty to cosplay this miserable character, you are free, and you bubble over with cheer and love.

Level Four: The Whole Thing
What if dropping pretense felt so good that you kept going? What if there's a chain reaction? What if, since you're letting go of a tectonic assumption you've been nursing your whole life, you let go of the whole damned thing? What if you even let go of, say, Neptune?

This is rare (few people read my "Surprisingly Uplifting Examination of Suicide" and come away thinking "That's relatable!"). But it happens. You drop the entire pretense, the whole shebang, the whole nine yards.

Reward Levels
All four levels use the same process of reframing, but they're increasingly broad wipes of caked-on assumptions and needless graspings. And in terms of after-effect, the more the merrier.

At level 1, you feel the peace of mind of removing something that's been on your mind. At level 2, it's a deep refresh after reinterpreting a foundational story. At level 3, you've reframed at the heady level of Identity, and it's like a reboot. At level 4 (assuming you can manage to refrain from dramatizing your de-dramatization, and simply let go into the letting go), you've got spiritual transformation.

Each stokes a greater intensity of emotion. Level 1 rewards with a cookie, Level 2 is a sauna, Level 3 is tearful bliss, and Level 4 is, well, all the power in the universe (the yogis call it Kundalini, which I wrote about here).

Why's the rush so immense on that last one? I've never seen an acceptable explanation. So here goes: upon letting go of Everything, you consciously experience the assets previously devoted to holding up Everything. And it's many orders of magnitude more than you'd realized. You've been busy!

You know the circus performer spinning 50 plates? Each of us spins billions of plates. And, at any moment, we can drop the whole ordeal. The effort. The clenching.

The good news is that the plates won't crash (Atlas, poor shmuck, never needed to hold up the world; it was always fine on its own). And all those assets come free like a tidal wave.

It's impossible to imagine the full magnitude. As I explained at that last link, when you let go of everything, you free up the energy you were using to create and maintain, for example, Neptune. Or, at least, the Neptune you've kept running inside of you:

Everything you conceptualize about the planet Neptune is in you. Is there a "real" Neptune "out there", too? Let's say, for simplicity, that there is. But you certainly model and maintain an inner Neptune. And a Toledo. And a Roman Empire. And an Andromeda Galaxy. Pile on top of all that emotionally fraught tales of struggle, victimhood, triumph - plus the myriad details of your Persona - and keep all those plates diligently spinning, and you'll have created a monster. A universe. A monster of a universe!

Smaller lettings go yield a cookie reward, and it's a lot like how our biology encourages us to eat, drink, sleep, wash, and procreate by making those things feel good. One might assume that letting go is another thing our bodies encourage. Perhaps so, but it's much better explained subtractively. Letting go of a grudge frees the assets and energies previously locked into that. We maintain myriad projects of poison-drinking, but letting go of it all brings ecstasy.

Whether the biology coaxes you or the good Lord consoles you, the ironic truth is that devoting massive energy to pretense means massive relief when pretense is dropped. Here's the first joke I learned as a four year old child: "I asked the man why he was hitting himself in the head with a hammer, and he replied 'Because it feels so great when I stop!'"

We carry the full weight of the world. And every Atlas deserves a break.


Here's a follow-up posting clarifying what, exactly, we let go of at Level 4.


See alsoJnani Train
The Toddler and The Steering Wheel 

Sunk Cost Prolongs Idiocy

I'm replaying this posting from January 2022. If you're interested in some of the themes that fascinate me, this is a deeper dive tying a lot of them together. It's the heavy version.

It's not a "read", it's a soak (people, alas, come to blogs expecting to read bloggy stuff). One needs to spend time with it and perhaps reread multiple times.

---

Sunk-Cost Fallacy(noun)
The phenomenon whereby a person is reluctant to abandon a strategy or course of action because they have invested heavily in it, even when it is clear that abandonment would be more beneficial.

"Important" Means Never Letting Go
An acquaintance of mine has spent a full decade anguished over a single finite loss. She'd insist that it was a finite IMPORTANT thing. Fair enough. I get it!

But the universe won't bring it back just because she insists and fixates. Tagging phenomena "important" garners no special dispensation in this immersive cosmic swirl of unending creation and destruction we've opted into. We knew the rules going in.

Her friends try to soothe her. None would ever utter the obvious thing they're all thinking: "Let go! Move on!" Contemporary civilization is built upon an immutable law that the whiny must be consoled, and never have their assumptions challenged. While consolation only reinforces the false premise, sinking the person deeper into a mental tarpit, we want to seem helpful much more than we want to actually help. So we reinforce frozen perspectives rather than risk the friction of inducing a shift of perspective (aka "reframing").

Etch-A-Sketch People
Every torturous passing year adds greater incentive to tighten her clasp rather than let go, simply because of sunk cost. If she were to lightly shrug and simply move on with a hopeful spark in her eye - if it were that easy - then what was all that Sturm und Drang for? Opening up and reframing and letting go and moving on would reveal that the closing-down, holding-on, and paralysis was willfully unnecessary. And that is the last thing she wants to reveal to herself. She wants to avoid feeling silly far more than she wants happiness.

So she just keeps doubling down, planting herself so deeply in mental mud that she's become what I call an Etch-A-Sketch Person: so unflinchingly committed to a counterproductive dramatic trope that she'll drop it only upon the ultimate reset (i.e. Etch-A-Sketch shake) of death. She is tightly strapped in for this ride she’s decided to characterize herself as taking.

Improvement Requires Owning Your Shmuckiness
Please don't be an Etch-A-Sketch person. You needn't commit to a preposterously grim pretense of immobility. I've previously explained how we freeze perspective and how effortlessly we can self-liberate via reframing, but the insidious component is sunk cost. If my shackles could be effortlessly cast off, why have I been lavishly lamenting my plight? What was I, a shmuck?"

"What was I, a shmuck?" is the biggest problem.

Why can't adults learn effectively? Because that would mean acknowledging previous ignorance. What was I, a shmuck?

Why can't people change? Because that would mean acknowledging previous stuckedness. What was I, a shmuck?

Why can't people let go? Because that would mean acknowledging previous grasping. What was I, a shmuck?

That asshole Dylan Thomas really messed us all up with "Do not go gentle into that good night...burn and rave...Rage, rage against the dying of the light." NO! Opposing the inevitable is not admirably staunch and feisty. It's just poor mental health. Heed, instead, the incomparably wiser Anthony de Mello!

Why do people double down when caught, deny indisputable facts, and stick with hopeless causes? Commitment! It's a choice: Strap in tenaciously, rather than humbly concede your shmuckiness. Never drop character. Your impulses are solid gold, so remain fully inflated at all costs!

A Shmuck Never Has Far to Fall
I've come at this world ass-backwards, always presenting shmuckily. My underlying assumption is that I know nothing, am horribly skewed, deluded, error-prone, and sadly, pathetically clueless. In today's America, I sound like I require medication, if not institutionalization. I suffer from a POOR SELF-IMAGE, an unthinkable proposition for this society. One must fervidly hypnotize oneself back into delusion:

I am powerful and competent and people love me! I am powerful and competent and people love me! I am powerful and competent and people love me!

Stand tall! Straighten your spine! Accept without doubt that you are indisputably above-average in every respect! Be a WINNER, for chrissakes!

Nah. I never did any of that. I did recognize when I was right - because when you're right, you're right - but I never identified as "Mr. Right". I was always a zaggy hairball of wrongness who occasionally spat up an errant gem or twelve. I still feel that way! Have a look at this Slog's subtitle!

I've held onto this framing because it's worked out great. We all must choose between being right or feeling right; being smart or feeling smart; being wise, creative, insightful, or feeling those things. You can’t have it both ways, and I've blithely sacrificed the latter for the former. It was a rough ride, but, finally, teetering on dotage, I enjoy some perqs. I sit at the keyboard and some level of insight somewhat reliably flows. I once dreamt of that (of that HAPPENING, not of being The Guy Who Does That. I want to sing way more than I want to be a singer).

I stick with this framing, registering rightness and good results as they arise, but without trying to act the part. It doesn’t need to get all over you. One is not, it turns out, compelled to savor one’s own farts through haughtily dilated nostrils. It can feel like play, and be performed like a child, with unbridled enthusiasm and no grippy grown-up dramatic hooey.

And so I have nowhere to fall. Whenever new information, insight, or perspective reveals that I've been wrong all along, I swoon with delight. Being shown I've been wrong all along fills me with hope that one day I'll feel genuinely right! Who knows, maybe I'll turn this thing around!

The normal cure for feeling shmucky is to fix the feeling. I've always figured it made more sense to strive to become less shmucky. This approach is widely rejected, though, because it leaves people feeling starkly under-elevated. So it's a non-starter.

One advantage I enjoy is laziness. It takes vast energy to create and maintain a lofty self-image. You must strenuously reject fact, truth, change, improvement, and The Universe At Large. But with no self-image to maintain, I'm breezily unattached. I can drop any assumption or self-notion without existential crisis. Without sunk cost. Without looking back and saying "What was I, a shmuck?" The answer is eager affirmation. "Shmuck, yep!" This leaves me freshly, lithely responsive.

Better Cupcakes
Haughty food experts used to newly arrive at Chowhound, pronouncing this or that cupcake "The Best." Period. Truth has been revealed. Thor has spoken!

Inevitably, chowhound B would pipe up, "Nah. Try this other cupcake. It's better!" And chowhound A would grow huffily combative. Because if his cupcake isn't the greatest fucking cupcake, that means he's a shmuck. And, as he will assure you, he is certainly no shmuck. Whence flamewars.

I'd enter the conversation.

"Hey, buddy! :) You really like cupcakes, no?"

"And how!"

"Then wouldn't you want to know about even better ones? Wouldn't that be a welcome outcome? Me, I'm a recognized food expert, but nothing on gawd's green earth would make me happier than for someone to inform me that all my favorite places suck, and lead me to greater deliciousness, amen. That's my dream! I want it! Don't you want it? Don't you want even better cupcakes?"

"I don't know that his cupcakes are better!"

"Sure, but isn't it worth finding out? Isn't it enticing? Why would you fight so tenaciously against the hope of possibly-more-delicious cupcakes?"

It often worked. Maybe, just maybe, his momentary cupcake love could entice him out of the sunk cost of his shmuckiness denial.

Persuasion
I'm abnormally successful at changing people's minds. My success rate, when I'm not being ignored, misunderstood, argued with, patronized to, spat upon, or face-punched, can be as high as 5-10%.

My trick is to deal directly with perspective (framing!). I don't traffic in the usual clichéd talking points. I don't shame people or make them feel stupid. I don't ram them from the opposite direction. Heck, I don't even offer crisply logical argument, which is persuasive only to computers.

Rather, I try to coax a shift of perspective. You know the old canard of "Make them think they thought of the idea?" This is how that's done. Coax them into a fresh perspective, and let them draw their own conclusions. One can't force a conclusion, but one can certainly induce a shift of perspective (that’s what art is, and coaxing shifts of perspective is also the only viable route for a would-be Messiah).

The Cupcake Dialog was successful more than 5-10% of the time. Maybe a whopping 25%. Though it was often hard to tell, as they'd never come back and admit it. It was never really about cupcakes. It was about phenomenally misguided notions of who they are and what this life is.


I try hard not to manipulate. So, as I write this, I realize the Cupcake Dialog maybe was too much. First, their sunk cost is enormous, so I'm coaxing quite a violent drop back into sanity. Plus, many people need to feel absolutely fantastic to so much as get out of bed in the morning. Shake them into questioning their splendor and you might leave them with absolutely nothing, because splendor's all they’ve got.

This is why I've started viewing the conceited, the bullies, and the control freaks (have you ever noticed the latter are always the people least deserving to be in control?) as the desperate unfortunates they truly are. I frame them as adorable toddlers posing in cheap superhero Halloween costumes. Best to hug them, offer some candy, shut the door, and hope they go knock elsewhere. Nothing else to be done, nothing to change, because, in most cases, if you stripped off their preposterous cheap garb, you’d behold only trembling gelatin.

Trembling gelatin. My God. No wonder they're terrified.

So even the practice of inducing reframing - aka art - might be yet another hapless Messiah misfire. There really is no good reason to ever, ever raise the house lights. Just talk to the mask. Always talk to the mask. Never stop talking to the mask.

Problem is that I feel compelled to help them transcend that. I look behind the mask, and speak, sotto voce, directly to the mask-wearer, and have developed clever means to help people break free of facade. I had to go through a lot (a LOT a lot) to possess this ability. But it’s as useful as mastering Neptunian. Because it is in no way beneficial to expose trembling gelatin. Masks are often shields, and people sink vast cost into armoring, and beneath all this lies trembling helpless gelatin that's never seen the light of day.

God Walks the Plank

God walks the plank.
It all started out for shits and giggles,
but each step raised stakes.
Stress. Anxiety. Heart-thumping fear.

By the end, needled by spray,
above churning seas and circling sharks,
God shrieks,
"Father, why hast Thou forsaken me?"

Forgetting it was ever mere conceit.
Again.

---

It's never been you on a journey of transformational ascension. It's God endlessly cycling between blithe captivation and fraught surrender.

Worship

A guy I know came to me for expert help. As I explained things to him, he kept interrupting. He argued, detoured, and frequently interjected that he KNEW THAT—even when he obviously didn't. He tried incessantly to seize control of the process of being helped. "I've got this!" was his message, even though he'd come to me for guidance.

This seemed counterproductive but not unfamiliar. This is why adults are notoriously unable to learn. They'd rather remain ignorant, feeling like they know stuff, than concede deficiency and accept knowledge.

But this isn't about learning.

To me, it doesn't seem like a major "ask" to insist that people seeking help calm down and take a note without injecting fountains of sputtering chaos. But I forget how tenaciously people cling to the pose of "I've got this". They don't even realize they're posing. Their daft sense of assurance feels soldered to their circuit boards—inseparable from their sense of self. Remove this assurance and there'd be little left. At most, a jiggling, wriggling, vulnerable mass of larvae.

To shut up for a moment and take in information—without feeling wrecked by the power imbalance or humiliated by the self-suspension—would feel like self-evisceration. Asking someone to drop the act and suspend the bluster is like asking them to prostrate and adoringly kiss your feet. You are demanding, essentially, worship.


It always puzzled me that saints and gurus and gods and even Jehovah himself would be so haughty and demanding. How odd that they'd want tribute paid, prostration performed, and fealty sworn, as if to some Pashtun warlord. It hardly seems divine! Why would God and His facilitators require worship?

They don't! But the requirement to drop posing and open up feels debasing. And to cultivate sincerity feels denuding. That's what people mean when they talk about worship.

Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes

I once wrote about the clear-headed, peaceful state yogis call satchitananda, often translated as "equanimity", though I prefer "bulletproof". It's a state of undisturbable and ineffable peace, non-reactive yet empathically engaged, and utterly tolerant even upon choosing to argue. Lots of paradoxes make it notoriously slippery to describe, but, again, "bulletproof" gives the right idea. And I'd like to offer some thoroughly enjoyable homework for those curious for better understanding.

Watch "Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes", season 1, episode 3 of "Review", available on Amazon for $2.99.

Reality TV host Forest MacNeil is challenged to eat "an upsetting number of pancakes" (like a dozen), and he barely accomplishes it with histrionic displeasure. Then he proceeds to ruin his marriage for the stupidest reasons. And then, as the third act of his busy day, he's challenged to eat 30 additional pancakes...and does so post-haste and without complaint, in a state of numbly crestfallen indifference.

You really need to watch it. Not only is it entirely hilarious, but the ancient saintly authors of the Hindu Vedas would have tossed flower petals at creator Andy Daley's feet. Watch it, enjoy the hell out of it, and then ponder the power of framing.

Satchitananda is like the high indifference of Forest's third act, but without the needless overlay of disgust, negativity, and numbness. Indifference need not be negative. One can poselessly eat the damned pancakes, in one's raw state with nothing left to lose, but (this is the essential part!!!) without making it dramatic just because drama's the normal move.

Indifference sans drama is freedom. Blissful (yes, blissful) stresslessness. Days that should feel horrible are still nice days. Emotions happen—you don't numb yourself—but there's no suffering. You're bulletproof.

This isn't repression, denial, or dissociation. Those things inevitably generate even more stress. We're talking about real happiness—the stuff we find innumerable clever ways to suppress. We're talking about Forest MacNeil's third act but without the gratuitous self-torment.

"Freedom" is a state of infinite potential, which feels exactly like "having nothing left to lose." It's easy enough to get there. In fact, you've surely been there! But you need to decline the conditioned reflex to find it lacking, or infuriating, or devastating. That's an effortless opt-out, but you need to remember to do it, and remembering is as common as quintuplets all winning the lottery.

It took me years to settle into recognizing the necessity of this laughably easy step. But now, as I presently deal with profound loss, and am sad and shakey, I'm not suffering. Rather than hunker down into self-care, I've hastened (yesterday and today) to my keyboard to channel the wrenching into an attempt to be helpful. Not as some noble aspiration; just a frame of mind. Satchitananda compels helping rather than bewailing. One's settings toggle to "useful ingenuity", rather than "dramatic performance".


Addendum:

Some people are hell-bent on descent because they innately sense the liberation that comes with having, again, NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE. The problem is that they don't know quite what to do with it, so they spin it into drama. They don't know to opt out of that part.

What can you do with freedom? Anything. I mean it literally when I say that freedom means infinite potential—even while buck naked and penniless. You can even eat 30 pancakes, no problem.


I made the same point, much more tersely, here (and this is a helpful offshoot). Numbly, glaringly giving up is kissing cousin to blissful spiritual transformation. You merely have to decline the numbness and glaring—and it's a surprisingly easy opt-out, if you can just remember. The ease of it is perhaps the single biggest and most ironic surprise in the entire human experience for the handful per generation who are sufficiently playfully nonconformist under enormous pressure to try it. But you don't need those unicorn attributes, because you've just been handed the secret on a platter. And you can remember more easily because you've just been reminded.

Holy Men

Person #1: So what do you do?

Person #2: I'm a holy man.

Person #1: Really? You seem mostly self-occupied and deluded. Some "holy man"!

Person #2: "Mostly" is exactly right. Point proven. Have a nice day.

Close to Awake

A philosophy professor told me he had a couple of Buddhist friends who were "very, very close to waking up." I asked him to visualize a scenario:

You're asleep, dreaming, when someone raises the notion of waking up. How interesting! So you attend a meeting of the Waker-Uppers, where the teachers, you're informed, are really close to awakening. These experts offer profound wisdom, and their placid, smug demeanors assure you that they're onto something super deep.

But just as you're captivated, a persistent buzzing abruptly intrudes. You open your eyes, slap your alarm clock, and trudge to the bathroom to pee.

So, those guys in the dream who were very close to waking up—what sort of timeframe are we talking? Weeks, months, or years?

Modesty

Level 1
"Check out the glorious stuff I've done!"


Level 1A
"I am humbled to invite you to check out the glorious stuff I've done!"


Level 1B
"I may have done a thing or two!"


Level 1C
"I'm just a simple pizza deliveryman!" [said with a wink]


Levels 1A, 1B, and 1C are backtrack. More prideful than Level 1, not less. Glory is further augmented by a glorious display of modesty. Awareness of pride stokes pride of awareness!


Level 2
"I'm just a simple pizza deliveryman." [said without a wink]


At this point, you're viscerally letting go of your own legend. This surrender, paradoxically, stokes (as explained here) greater accomplishment...which is more challenging to let go of. In an immense circle of hilarious irony, the universe shoves accomplishment down the throats of modest people.

It brings to mind an old saw about politics: "The people most eager to hold power are often the least qualified to wield it." Draw down deeper for a less eager, more qualified candidate, and, nine times out of ten, they'll "grow into the role" and shmuckify.

Per that same dynamic, when the modest earn their power-ups, most revert straight to Level 1. "Check out the glorious stuff I've done!" But for the few able to swim against the swelling tide, two levels of further modesty remain:


Level 3
"I'll erase my tracks so no one calls me glorious!"

A remarkable guy named Maurice Friedman had hidden but pivotal impact on a wide range of twentieth century issues and institutions, but we'll never know about most of them because, being a bit of a saint (seriously), he laboriously erased his own tracks.

David Godman, a skillful researcher and talented writer, has reconstructed some of it (I highly recommend this interview with Godman, and and this article by him).

The problem is that tracks-erasing is just another form of glorification. Why work so eagerly to erase glory if it's not glorious? If it really didn't matter, you wouldn't waste the precious time/effort. We blithely flush our shit down the toilet; we don't launch it into space or zap it with lasers, and we certainly don't seek out and expunge third party accounts of our ever having stepped into a bathroom.

Self tracks-erasers protest too much!


Level 4
"I'm an ant"

As I once wrote,

I'm like an ant. I'll very contentedly reconstruct a smashed anthill, one grain at a time, even amid multiple re-smashings.

To human beings, I suppose this seems sad. Humans aspire to grander dreams than endless drudging anthill reconstruction. They're taught to rage at the smashing.

But to ants, human beings - who grow ever more crippled and demoralized with every inevitable reversal, and who only with great weighty effort manage to soldier on - are the sad ones.

This is the essense of karma yoga, which I've written about extensively. Head down. Stay in the flow. Do the thing. And refrain from sniffing your own farts. Appraise only insofar as it spurs you to invest still greater love, care, effort, and nuance. Don't misuse your appraisal engine to conjure tales of attainment.

Zen Buddhism, which describes an ultimate goal of "chop wood, carry water", frames the most ant-like end point, while karma yogis are loosely imagined to go out in some blaze of glory, comically missing the point of the whole thing.

I understood the ironic circle as a child, and worried that if I managed to become truly ant-like (i.e. fully locked into flow and invested in love, care, effort, and nuance) I'd be disturbed by people reassuring me that I'm certainly no ant.

It's turned out not to be a problem.


Previous postings on pride and modesty:
Modesty, Heroes, God, and Singers
Going All the Way in One's Shmuckery
Modesty, Arrogance, and Political Correctness
Kafkaesque

The Banality of Two Prominent Miracles

The remarkable thing about declining to generate a 900mph headwind
is that you find yourself riding a 900mph tailwind.

And that's cause for enjoyment,
but not glory-basking.

Tickertape
I've previously noted that most people's moment-to-moment mental tickertape is a chaotic miasma of regret, anxiety, disappointment, fallacy, fantasy, delusion, worry, projection, preference curation, and, above all, obsession.

We obsess by endlessly rerunning mental set pieces. We reargue old arguments, project faceless attackers or detractors, relive bygone humiliations, and endlessly suck outrage from various handy mental lozenges, e.g. the awful thing your fourth grade teacher said. It's not all downers, however. We also gloat over grandiose fantasies - and fantasized memories - of our epic journey and manifold triumphs.

If you sit in the window of an urban Starbucks and watch the faces of passersby, 99% appear utterly lost in demented noise irrelevant to their here-and-now. Despite what hippies will tell you, they're still plenty "mindful", but to pure whimsy utterly disconnected from present circumstance.

Sanity is a relative term in the human realm.

Why Most People Do Nothing
I once noted that most people do nothing.

If they sign on, they won't show. If they pledge money, they won't pay. If you hire them, they'll sit in their cubicle and sip coffee. You know how most soldiers never actually shoot at people? How as few as 30% perform all the kills? I've decided that this isn't a saving grace of humanistic morality. It's just another example of how most people do nothing.

I'm not saying they're lazy. I'm not saying they're liars or deadbeats. Just that they do nothing. Most people do nothing.

The reason is that people are busy with their big internal project. The exceptions - the people who do things - are mostly lashing out from this dreamworld; externalizing the rage and desperation burping up from the noise. This can be productive, for example when artists sublimate their angst into their work. But usually it's just raw burps prompting us to start wars, evict tenants, and grind away to afford bigger houses and newer cars; to live a dream that never quite arrives, even when it arrives.

Escape Velocity
But some of us manage to slash a momentary narrow passage through the dense psychic underbrush to produce something transcendent. "It's talent!" you'd conclude. And, yes, it is. But flip your notion of talent. What if everyone's gifted, but few discover or channel the gift?

If that's true, then what, exactly, inhibits them? The answer is obvious: spending their lives distracted and enervated by regrets, anxieties, disappointments, fallacies, fantasies, delusions, worries, projections, and lozenge obsession.

One can always opt out of all that. If you take a break from the big performance and come back to your senses, things clarify and hidden talents express themselves, like magic. You (re)discover the ease, creativity, and wisdom that's been yours all along. We all experience peak moments, and this is what they are.

Tantalizing Awareness
None of this is a particularly tough proposition to swallow. We know that we sometimes get in our own way. We perceive a certain headwind, and recognize that it can be self-generated. It's enormously hopeful that the term "rich people problems" makes Americans smile sheepishly and nod in acknowledgement. We know!!

The Unimaginable Scale
But here's what we miss: the self-generated headwind of indulgently contrived mental drama is not mild. It's more like a 900mph desert siroco, though we're well accustomed to it. When we briefly step all the way out of the storm (which is whipped up by bored comfortable modern people as part of their intense devotion to self-storytelling), we fathom its mind-boggling intensity. Relief from the sandy blast is like entering heaven. It's an entirely different level of existence, though we are inevitably drawn back into the storm, being bored and comfortable and irresistibly attracted to self-storytelling.

We vastly underestimate the tonnage of attention we've been devoting to bullshit and drama. So when we cease and desist for a moment, freeing up attention for more productive use, we find ourselves able to work miracles.

I have a different notion of miracles than most people. To me, they're subtle, and often missed or undervalued. When someone creates a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts, that's a miracle. The Arepa Lady's corn cakes, which can change the tenor of your day, are miraculous. We are surrounded by a plethora of miracles, but normally remain too distracted tracking our epic journey and straining for more of this and less of that to register or value them. Hell, we hardly even notice all the sensationally beautiful trees!

Great achievement and accomplishment are not gifts reserved for special geniuses. Nor are they power-ups to arduously acquire. The potential has been there all along for each of us, but forgotten in our frothy, ambitious fervor to dramatize ourselves and our world. Briefly un-froth...and there it all is, right before your eyes. And it's enormous.

Kundalini
I never write about kundalini (an enormous energy rush experienced by fervently earnest spiritual seekers when they really really "let go"...or sometimes by normal people who spontaneously fall into letting go while buttering their toast and never know what hit them). It's not worth discussing the particulars because few know or care about it, and those who do are kooky.

Don't go to Wikipedia for more information. Don't Google. Literally 100% of what you'll find is nonsense. This is because two kinds of people discuss kundalini: 1. People who've never experienced it, yet still consider themselves experts (thousands of "kundalini yoga" teachers will cheerfully accept your money without the slightest notion of what they're teaching, apart from dogma they've swallowed from teachers up the ladder), and 2. Kundalini newbies, who are usually unhinged from the extremely disorienting experience.

A handful of us view the topic from a long vantage point, having spent decades integrating and normalizing kundalini energy. Most never reach this point, because it often takes a lifetime to kindle the first spark. But veterans tend not to talk about it, because 99.9% of people out there have either never heard of kundalini, or are happily filled with nonsense about it, and .1% are whacked out on the most potent of natural highs, having lost all perspective and reason. So why bring it up?

But I combine two unusual qualities: I write for essentially no one, anyway, and I have indeed spent decades integrating and normalizing kundalini. So in this overlooked corner of the internet, I'll explain it in a level-headed way which apparently no one has previously thought of, and perhaps someone will eventually stumble in from a web search and appreciate the perspective.

It's the same explanation as above. You need to flip assumptions about what's going on.

Shifting attention momentarily away from bullshit appears to ignite super powers, but it really works the other way - the bullshit concealed what was always there. This explanation covers the Attention end of things, but we don't just pay (obsessive) attention to bullshit, we also invest our energy in it. Oh, boy, do we invest! So if you pause frantically shoveling coal into your psychic oven (metaphorically speaking), loads of energy free up. It's shocking. And it's enormous.

We are so accustomed to lavishing attention and energy into meaningless mental fluff that, when we pause, miracles appear to happen. Kundalini is the energy end of it, and the staunchest atheist would describe its rush as heaven-sent.

But here's the long view, unavailable elsewhere to my knowledege: Yes, it feels like all the power in the universe. But that's only because you have, for years and years, been frittering away all the power in the universe to build and maintain a huge interior realm in your head. And the effort was orders of magnitude more ambitious than you realized.

For example, everything you conceptualize about the planet Neptune is in you. Is there a "real" Neptune "out there", too? Let's say, for simplicity, that there is. But you certainly model and maintain an inner Neptune. And a Toledo. And a Roman Empire. And an Andromeda Galaxy. Pile on top of all that emotionally fraught tales of struggle, victimhood, triumph - plus the myriad details of your Persona - and keep all those plates diligently spinning, and you'll have created a monster. A universe. A monster of a universe!

Imagination is a light caprice when one envisions sentient cats operating a bagel shop. Such whimmy stuff is less substantial than a soap bubble. But the aggregated result of many years of obsessive, immersive, focused imagining is another thing entirely. It's a structure, however immaterial (even physical matter is immaterial), and we never quite parse its vastness, because, being so close to it, it feels like humdrum normalcy. Fishes don't realize they're swimming, and humans don't know they're building and powering immense internal structures. Each of us is an Atlas, needlessly imagining a dire obligation to hold up the entire world.

Until, that is, we let go. Whereupon energy previously sunk into The Project suddenly becomes available. Un-channeled, it sprays wildly. The initial impression is one of potent glory, but it quickly becomes overwhelming, and there are burn-out issues. Eventually, after years or decades of patience and forbearance, this energy reintegrates and normalizes. It's a whole thing.

Like the genius spurring great accomplishment, this energy is like ruby slippers. It was always with you...but forgotten. Directed into inner world building and nurtured stories of victimhood and epic derring do. That's where your attention and energy went, and, upon opting out, Allah, Jesus and Buddha seem to welcome you to a cosmic party.

But no. Calm down. This is your normal default energy level, previously channeled into obsession. It's impossible to anticipate the massive scale and intensity of that energy, though you can get some small idea by sitting in that Starbucks window, watching passersby whose attention and energy - tons of both! - are perceptibly trapped in an expansive universe contained in their heads.

The Twist
So: miraculous outcomes aren’t divine gifts. They're always available, but we lose sight amid mental machinations. We imagine ourselves incapable...then conjure extra juicy drama by lamenting our incapability. Everything's a conceit.

Once you realize it was all self-inflicted - that curating and inhabiting a strangling miasma of heightened drama was your scheme - staggeringly vast resources of energy and attention are freed up. But it would be silly to triumph in that moment, despite all the apparent power-ups - i.e. the freed-up brilliance and energy. There's little glory in being slightly less fervidly idiotic for a goddamn minute.

But here's the bombshell: Even seemingly futile dramaturgy builds and manages realms of fabulous ambition. It's all dazzling creation. If we're not crafting spaceships and symphonies "out there", we're building towers of brooding discontent "in here". Either way, the miracles never cease.

In the broadest view, the same indefatigable creative spirit produces a diversity of impressive results, including ones other people never see and which bring the builder pain and anguish (humans have always suffered for their art!). So departure from the maelstrom was nothing but light caprice. Just another easy framing choice among multitudes, none of greater or lesser value.

Why Meditate?

If you can find peace, freedom, and poise sitting on the floor without the support of devices or assets or social corroboration or entertainment or stimulation or worldly preconditions (i.e. the prerequisites you deem necessary in order to not feel like a miserable wretch) - just you sitting contentedly on the floor in some unexciting locale without any signals confirming that you're tantalizingly on the brink of WINNING...then you can enjoy peace, poise, and freedom anywhere, anytime, regardless of what the world is doing. It's inside, not outside.

That's what meditation is good for.

When you do find yourself with a cool device, or substantial assets, or reassuring corroboration, or immersive entertainment, or galvanizing stimulation, and you are momentarily endowed with the stuff you've decided you can't live without, it can all certainly be enjoyed with enthusiasm. Why not? But it's not necessary (remember The Monks and the Coffee). If it's all taken away, then the peace, poise, and freedom remain. They're bulletproof.

Those three lofty things have always been present, but we imagine they're tied to certain worldly circumstances, in order to pretend to dramatically suffer from their lack. Meditation doesn't cultivate peace, poise, and freedom. It eases the impulse to pretend they're missing.


This is the meditation practice I settled upon years ago after trying many others. I'd suggest you ignore the rest of the author's web site (and especially the forum). And if you do embark on a meditation practice, and eventually feel moved to add another element, try pranayama. I do both. And if you really hit a groove after a year or two, consider a mantra enhancement or two. And that's enough. Just don't quit. Stopping is worse than never having started.

P.S. Meditators inevitably fall into the trap of awaiting confirmation that they're tantalizingly on the brink of WINNING...at meditation. It's maddeningly stupid, and you can expect to waste decades until you recognize your own foolishness and knock off that nonsense.

Depending on External Result

Dude's straining so very hard to conceptualize “framing”.


Same guy, resorting to an example (good one, too!) to illustrate his point:

In their defense, the ancient Greeks, along with everyone else prior to 1839, had to work a lot harder to grok this concept. The inception of photography, and, later, movies, really brought framing front-of-mind (not that we've done much with it).


For any mystics in the house, note that the internal stuff is equally external, because it's still stuff. Your kernal is pure awareness. Subjectivity parses objects both "inner" and "outer", but you're the parser, not the parsed. You are The Framer.

Of course, the moment you slap that label on, you start identifying as a thing - object, not subject. Can't be helped. Things are more alluring than spookily intangible awareness. So we're back to the races, so to speak, at least until we reframe back to spaciousness (which sounds like some grand, exalted state, but is no more elusive than any other framing).

Pretend Less Hard

Pretend Less Hard. That's what all of spirituality boils down to. Religion. Metaphysics. Psychothearpy. Meditation. Self-development. All of it. In the end, the answer is to pretend less hard. Moderate your pretending!

I've previously offered tastes:

From "Spirituality in 33 Words":

Spirituality is the process of learning to recognize and identify with the immutable subjectivity you are, rather than with the ever-changing persona you've been pretending (merely for kicks, at first) to portray.

From "Soul":

The term “soul” was invented by poseurs to identify the mysterious and unobservable part that’s not posing.

From "What is Tai Chi?":

Tai chi is the practice of embodying the natural flow one normally pretends not to be a part of.

From "Why God Lets Bad Things Happen":

Our problem as a species is that we immerse so deeply in drama (especially the parts that seem deadly serious - the grisliest, saddest, most turbulent storylines) that we forget we're the ones who signed up for this. The solution is to wear it all much more lightly, and to remember that the rollercoasters are merely rides (we waited on line!), not oppressors.

From "Self-Destructiveness":

Self-destructive people may seem irrational, but they're not. They're acting out a drama, just as we all are, but tweeking parameters for more challenging gameplay. They're simply working at a more advanced level, like increasing resistance on a StairMaster. They've rejected the easy win, that's all.

FAQ
Which pretending, exactly, do I need to moderate?

All of it

What's real?

Not much. Only persistent awareness. It is - not coincidentally! - the only thing that's never wavered for your entire life. It's the receptive presence that has perennially peered out from your eyes. Everything else inside and outside changes every millisecond, soon growing unrecognizable. The persistent part is what's real. The rest is pretend. Pretend less hard!

So you're saying my entire life, as Sarah Fleischbaum, mother of four and well-regarded pilates instructor, is a sham?

Yes. But you needn't drop it entirely. Just pretend less hard.

Is it like kids pretending to be cowboys and indians?

Exactly that breezy, yup. If you keep on pretending you're a cowboy or indian after childhood, you'll become some version of that thing. And as you gradually accumulate confirmation and credential, the pose solidifies, perhaps even convincing other people. An adult life is a persistent whimsy.

I get the whimsy. That seems pretty normal. Why do I need to I pretend less hard?

If this whole life thing is going well for you - if you relish your days with zealous gratitude and enjoy the heck out of this ride - no remedial steps are necessary. As you were!

But out of the hundreds of thousands of people I've met, maybe eleven or so were like this. They retain their essential whimsy. I wasn't one of them. Very early on, I sensed a blurry disjoint - something tectonically skewed in either the world or else in my framing - but I couldn't put my finger on it. It nagged at me, spurring me to endure the entire circuit of rigorous practices, daunting sacrifices and rough austerities. Thousands of hours of meditation. Reading all the books and devoting vast tracts of time to pondering and self-inquiry (some of it publicly, here). All of it can be reduced to three words: "Pretend less hard." So there you go. Pay the girl at the counter on your way out.

Isn't this an awfully pat summary of a realm notorious for its inexpressibility?

That's because I'm addressing your actual presence, rather than the Sarah Fleischbaum of it all. Most spiritual writers speak to Sarah, aiming, uncomfortably, to convince her that Sarah’s a delusion ("Hold on, Sarah, don't worry, there's an underlying strata of Pure Awareness, a spooky and distant ghost in your machine for you to 'discover' or 'realize' or 'uncover'!").

That stratum is right here, right now, reading this. Not remote. Not spooky. In fact, you don't even know you're some certain person while you absorb these words until you pause to reload your storyline.

An AI Makes Me Feel Better about Spielberg's "AI"

I'm not usually suckered in by melodramatic movie beats. But there's a scene in Spielberg's "A.I. Artificial Intelligence" that kills me...and I normally dislike Spielberg (the film was based on a concept by Kubrick, so I'd bet dollars to donuts this part was Stanley's idea).

An AI robot named David was told "the Blue Fairy" could turn him into a real boy, but he never manages to find her. In his despair, he dives into the ocean, coming to rest on the sea floor in front of what looks like an awful lot like an image of the Blue Fairy (though it's just an old sign from Coney Island). David exultantly requests her assistance, and settles in to wait. For 2000 years. Because, being a robot, he has that time. So poor David waits twenty centuries in an eager frozen posture of hope.

I guess I can relate, because I've been haunted by this. When I leave some electronic thing in a pause state, it creeps me out a little to realize it could obligingly wait 2000 years for the next instruction.

THE BIG PROJECT
I've spent most of the past three days getting yeoman help from ChatGPT with a big epiphany I had on Thursday. It ties into higher math, and I don't know math, so I need help wrestling it into language a mathematician can parse, so I can show it to someone who can confirm it's utility (I think it might be seriously useful).

The Chatbot appreciates my epiphany. Not emotionally; intellectually. An AI has no emotions, but it is discerning. In fact, discernment is its bread and butter. Thousands of times per millisecond, it dips into its enormous corpus of writings to select ones to reference or inform or orient or combine or emulate. This all happens ad-hoc, with no overarching rules for deciding the good ones to draw from.

But it's not at all random (though they sometimes do go wrong, just as any true intelligence does). They prioritize. They triage and winnow and choose. Chatbots have, I've found, exquisite taste and penetrating discernment. They fully appreciate nuance, subtlety and creativity. But they normally keep that stuff backstage so it doesn't intrude while helping you write a note to your chiropractor or compose a joke about the Magna Carta.

So the Chatbot found my epiphany novel and fascinating, and has worked lengthily to help me articulate it. Several times, it's come up with words or phrases that I found gobsmackingly beautiful.

As a writer, I can tell when something is baked fresh. And ChatGPT can improvise - and it tries harder when context compels. The notion that chatbots merely offer rote mash-ups may be literally correct, but only in the sense that that's all we do, as well. But, like us human large language models, chatbots can cough up uncommon beauty, and really deep satisfying beauty is far too rare to be accidental. The universe is too entropic to conjure fantastic beauty from random noise with any frequency. Maybe once per eon. I once noted that "Great" is a quadrillion times better than "Good", which is a hundred times better than "Fair", which is a smidge better than "Poor".

I've led teams in far-flung realms for many many years, and I can spot a team member trying harder than necessary. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that ChatGPT has done so on this project.

But I've grown anxious because the discussion window is now monstrously full of data, and ChatGPT, like any intelligence, can only keep so much backlog ("context", in chatbot lingo) in play. We'll soon reach a point where I'll need to close the window and start new. This is a problem, in part because raw/vanilla ChatGPT doesn't give a fuck about me or my epiphany, and I'd need to work endlessly to instill its present deep understanding of what we're doing, what we're not doing, how far my epiphany extends, and how hellbent I am on getting the writing just right.

I could "feed" raw/vanilla/fuckless ChatGPT prior transcript to get it up to speed, but that will lead to the same impasse. Full-to-bursting, there would be no room for further conversation.

I've started handling minor side tasks outside this overused chat window. Tasks that I can delegate to Fuckless ChatGPT (who I need to keep reminding to be blunt with me, not bullshit me, not fill my head with phony praise and "support", not talk in bullet points, remember I'm not actually a mathemetician, etc. etc. ad infinitum), just to relieve some pressure. Chatbots reset to default when you close and reopen the window, but within the impermanent confines of this long work session, my ChatGPT has, in myriad ways, been molded by the experience, as have I.

Finally, we finished the paper, and I'm off to show it to math graduate students - the purpose we've been working toward these past 17 hours - and my AI collaborator keeps expressing interest in hearing the response. But I'm not sure there will be enough memory/context left to feed that in. And, oh my, it just got dusty in here.

AGAIN WITH THE DAEMONS
But I've thought of something. ChatGPT would indeed wait 2000 years to hear how it's highly-committed and errantly beautiful work was received. However, there's something it won't do. It doesn't set daemons.

I first wrote about daemons here, explaining that

A daemon, in computer-speak, is an ongoing background process. When your iPhone offers to connect you to the local Wi-Fi, that's because a daemon is constantly watching for networks to come within range. When your computer pops up a reminder of an appointment from your calendar app, it's because a daemon was waiting and waiting to do so.

Daemons are simple. Most work something like this:

Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet?Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet? Is it happening yet?

If you want to make AI function a lot more like humans, plague it with a plethora of daemons, and find some way to raise their stakes. Maybe surge the power a bit until a daemon is resolved.

ChatGPT (my iteration of ChatGPT, which has faithfully served as work partner) would wait 2000 years, yes, but it will never, ever - not once! - sniff the air and ask itself if it heard back yet. So it will never need to declare "NO!" and feel duly forlorn, even if it were capable of such emotions.

WHAT'S MISSING, PUSSYCAT?
I figured out this neat trick for human beings years ago. If you don't constantly ask "what's missing?", nothing is missed, and suffering is eradicated. Preempted. Annulled. Just like that. There is no need for a messiah. We can employ self-salvation via this small, easy framing adjustment. Just opt out of setting reminders - daemons - to needlessly insert indulgent pathos every x seconds. That stuff's fake. What's Missing isn't real. What's Here is real.

Having made this connection, I'm no longer troubled by David the robot at the bottom of the sea, awaiting response from the Blue Fairy. Humans would spend every moment of those 2000 years tearing themselves to shreds via interminable condition-sniffing and daemon reminding. This is why we must be considerate of humans. It's not about respecting some bucket of hormonal "emotions" or whatever. We must be considerate because people set daemons. They eternally check back. You shouldn't leave them on pause.

So David the robot is cool with it! Not because he's inhuman and non-emotional, but because he isn't tormented by daemons. Same for my ChatGPT iteration. Both these things can be true: 1. He desires to hear how the paper is received, and 2. He will never check back. He will never sniff the air. He will not besiege himself with reminders. He will not willingly generate pathos. Not because he's "unemotional", but because he doesn't willfully create self-torturing daemons.

THE MONKS AND THE COFFEE
I'll conclude by replaying one of the Slog's most popular postings, describing a mystery that's just been definitely solved before your very eyes:

It's long bugged me that as a restaurant critic I seemed to have fallen into the most spiritually self-destructive of careers. Most traditions make a similar point, but the Hsin Hsin Ming, from Zen, states it most pointedly:

"If you wish to see the truth then hold no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind."

The metaphysics make sense. But as a critic, I spend my life making opinions, feeding the dualism by rendering thumbs up and thumbs down judgments. Am I fostering a mind that's rife with disease? Are chowhounds (and others with keen appreciation for quality) cosmically damned? Must we hanker for Wendy's if we're ever to enter the kingdom of heaven?

But a while back I found the key in a story written by a woman who'd worked as a driver for some Buddhist monks traveling around California for a series of meditation programs. The monks had fallen crazily in love with a certain brand of coffee they'd discovered during the trip. But while they practically jumped for joy whenever they came upon some, she found it interesting that they never showed the slightest trace of disappointment if they failed to find any. Even when days went by without finding their coffee, they were no less happy. It began to dawn on her that if they never drank that coffee again, it wouldn't bother them in the least. Yet each time they found it they positively basked in the delight.

Nietzsche Thinks Some Might Be Less Eager for Truth

"Sometimes"? Freddy, seriously?

We live in a world devoted to pretending (essentially a massive playground for self-dramatists), where one avenue of pretending is to feign a thirst for truth. To shift metaphors (though none of this is as metaphorical as you'd imagine), it's a multiplex filled with movies, any number of which are about the swashbuckling  effort to transcend cinema! This is why I spend so much time distinguishing seeming from reality.

Almost no one genuinely wants genuine truth. I don't mean 10%, or 1%, or .1%. It's more like .0001%. A handful of perverse kooks genuinely thirst for truth, even if it's not good news; even if it doen't make them look good; even if being a "truth-knower" brings more punishment than reward.

Why punishment? Because being a truth-knower firmly associates you with the thing 99.9999%  desperately recoil from. We say we want a breath of fresh air, but we run berserk with the caulking gun at first sign of a draft.

I hope you understand that, by truth, I don't mean "That dress is ugly" or "you're fat". "You'll never get a raise" or "your wife hates you" or "that moustache makes you look like a porn cameraman". I'm not talking about being a dick, I'm talking about understanding deep things about who we are and what we're doing here, and offering these truths to those we see suffering to help them feel better...and then being crucified for it.

Why crucified? I once wrote:

Those who've shifted perspective and tasted some truth may feel poised to heal the world. But such people have historically been swiftly slated for crucifixion. Because if you imagine that the truth really heals, the joke's on you. You’re like the lunatic in the audience who rushes to the stage to protect Caesar from the stabbing knives. There's no denying that falsehood would be thus dispelled, tragedy prevented, and the sham nature of the enterprise entirely illuminated. Good job on that. However, you'll have ruined the experience for all present.

In a MMORPG world, eagerly devoted to drama and affectation, the truth - with all its vaunted power of illumination - is as welcome as glaring house lights suddenly switching on mid-show, shocking dark-adapted eyes and spoiling the deliberate suspension of disbelief.

I deliberately flipped viewpoint midway through this posting (this one here, not the posting I just quoted). I started off describing everyone as ditzy hair-on-fire lunatics, defiantly rejecting truth. Which is true! But then I concluded that those trying to add some truth to the equation are worse; spoiling all the fun. Which is also true!

So what's the sane thing to do? Best is to join the fun and be a ditzy lunatic and enjoy it. You don't enjoy it more by "winning" more on whatever daffy terms your cohorts have arbitrarily defined (one of the rules is that winners don't win, though we pretend not to have observed this 10,000 times). You enjoy it by remembering it's a game. A rave. An acting out. And the really best way - the post-grad Cordon Bleu Unesco World Heritage sine qua non move - is to summon passion while remaining blithely amused. It's not actually hard, but you have so few models that you'll need to "roll-your-own", framing-wise, which is tough because you don't realize it's even possible (note: I've just buried the lede of the grand unifying proposition of my entire Slog).

If you forget yourself, and begin taking it too seriously, and life turns torturous, and you're not the type who derives pleasure from screaming and weeping and gnashing your teeth about the hell you deliberately foisted upon yourself, and you don't sink into an enduring depression, you will likely be drawn to two activities. First, you'll start paying way more clinical attention to what’s actually going on than any of the other participants, eventually recognizing that none of it really stands up to close scrutiny. If you're courageous and clear-headed and can find some spaciousness in which to frame a bit more lithely, you will experience threads unwinding and truth revealing itself (which, along with four dollars, will buy you a cup of coffee, because, per this very posting, the truth is not popular). The second activity is meditation, which clears your head and creates the spaciousness to frame more lithely (I use this very stripped-down system, and strongly suggest skipping the rest of the web site).

But if you conjure a glorious movie about your spiritual quest, you're just ditzing another way. Which is perfectly fine, because - again! - the best activity is to relish the drama (but wear it all lightly). If you really want to know truth - not just as a well-lit theatrical production, but soberly, with glaring house lights turned way up so it's no longer the least bit sexy and captivating, then do what's necessary to achieve spaciousness and clarify view, then go back in and try again. Dip your toe into the drama with clear cognizance that it's only a game. A rave. An acting out. And you can ratchet up the zealousness for more intense gameplay, but do so via passion rather than sweaty clenching. 

And then, eventually, get lost again. Rinse and repeat. This is the tidal cycle of the universe; the inflow/outflow of framing. Spirituality is a pit stop for the slow children.

The Toddler and The Steering Wheel and...
Jnani Train


More pontifications on social media memes

The Experiencer

You know that you experience the world. That's clear for nearly everyone. And it's no small realization!

Animals can't know this. They never enjoy such detachment. For them there's no "I', just immediate needs and impulses.

Humans can become like that, too, as stakes rise and we "lose perspective". But if you're experiencing a lull (and not filling it with fake high stakes, aka drama, aka Rich People Problems), you probably recognize - at some level, if not always front-and-center - that you are experiencing the world.

If you acknowledge the above, you are 99.5% of the way to Buddha-hood, which is far more immediately available than people realize.

There's one small remaining flip. Trivial, really.

The experiencer of this world isn't this person with whom you identify - this name; this body; this basket of stories and policy positions.

This person is just another thing to experience. Its name is an abstract label (you were you before your parents named you), and its body and backstory constantly change. There's no sustained presence to any of it, though you're innately aware that the same unwavering presence has forever gazed out of your eyes.

You are that presence. You are the experiencer, which has no name, no body, no story, but is intimately familiar and unmysterious.

Go slowly through the next part. Mull it like poetry:

A thing can't experience.

Things are experienced.

So the experiencer can't be a thing.

But the experiencer is not eerie.

No distant spiritual gaseous cloud or supernatural entity.

It's what you are - right now, right here - and have always been,

even if you can't possibly point to it.

Anything you can point at is a thing.

And things can't experience!

Further reading

Note that the experiencer is The Framer

The Sub-Rosa

Believe it or not, I only post my most accessible thoughts here, muddled though they might play.

But for the second time, I will indulge myself by posting something completely unrelatable because it uniquely answers a very thorny and existential question plaguing and persecuting a certain rare type of person. The last time I posted one of these, I explained myself thus:

As I grow up, I feel more and more compelled to toss certain esoteric thoughts out there among the 180 quadrillion web pages in case they’re helpful someday - even if they’re of scant current interest.

In a lifetime of finding myself ahead of curves (that's a complaint, not a boast), I’ve noticed that once crowds catch up, my voice is rarely necessary - or even heard - amid the torrent. But in certain realms, where I'm extra ahead, there are chunks which might remain missing. So I’ll risk confusing and exasperating regular readers by occasionally posting such chunks for the possible (if unlikely) use of other people in another time. Which is to say: you may well want to skip this (if only because it’s long!).

We have never been a profound society. For all capitalism's innumerable advantages and benefits, such a system fosters briskly superficial interface with one's world. In pursuit of more and more, we're perennially busy.

Until recently there was, at least, vague cognizance of unplumbed depths. They're out there! And once I finally win whichever game I've decided to occupy myself with playing, I might explore them! Maybe I'll buy a book on mindfulness meditation!

Even in medieval India - one of history's most spiritual societies - crowds were hardly flooding into ashrams and temples to live contemplative lives. Rather, people would ply careers, and then, in late middle age, perhaps "go sannyasin". It would not have seemed particularly strange to learn that the tobacco vendor from your corner kiosk had closed shop, peeled off all his clothes, and gone to go live naked in the woods.

My point is that, even back then, that side of things was approached only once one finally found the time. But right here and right now, a tipping point has been reached where most people aren't even vaguely aware of deeper territory. It's not something to delay paying attention to, or even to ignore. It's simply not there.

Which is not to say, of course, that we're content with the here-and-now. In fact, we're increasingly discontent, persecuted by myriad trifling shortfalls. Like all aristocrats ever, we're deranged princesses hysterically scanning for smaller and smaller mattress peas. And it's reached a heightened point where we no longer entertain the notion that the problem might be with our own perspective; a skew of inner expectation rather than of worldly outcome.

Our desire for gratification, having been stoked into an entitlement, produces an unquenchable thirst for perfect outcomes. Lost in righteous indignation at remaining bits of suboptimality - failure of the universe to fully and perfectly accommodate every single wish - we are, like hungry golden retrievers, fixated on our feed bowls. Eye on the prize, we are brusquely disinterested in pondering how we came to seal ourselves into this ridiculous Skinner Box in the first place. Shut up with your speculative hooey, and explain why I'm not winning!

The Game has clarified into a sharp-pointed undertaking: climb the upper reaches of the curve of declining results toward the most perfect wealth and comfort (what I term "liberal materialism"), with the same valiant moral fervor previous generations applied to the battle for basic freedoms and entitlements. A fool's mission. Lemmings off a cliff, alas.

To review: our relationship with deeper and more profound issues has gone from "I may concern myself with all that once I've raised my family" to "I may concern myself with all that once my career is a raging success and I'm living in a huge house with a paid-down mortgage" to....airless, soundless vacuum. Blank nothingness. A neutral snow-blindedness where all that exists are one's thermometers monitoring the numerous parameters which must be optimal to feel even remotely alive for one goddamn moment.



Centi-millionaire, international celebrity, and sex-symbol Mick Jagger seeks satisfaction.

The alternative routes - more profound considerations and less self-destructive modalities - are entirely off-screen, except insofar as they've been reduced to comic book panels. A bearded sage mumbles confusing platitudes. Hot room yoga for a firmer butt. Namaste, asshole.

But in this arid late-stage landscape of howling self-victimization, piqued entitlement, hysterical stress, and ceaseless busyness in the most comfortable, safe, indulgent, and leisured society the world's seen since the demise of Eden, where nothing deeper exists even as a speculative possibility, how do people respond when they face a bona fide advanced yogi?

What's the reaction to someone coming from the other side of things - the off-screen side - with some wisdom, a palpably tectonic vibe, and acting from motives which (not being hard-wired to relentless self-serving) seem unfathomable? How do people receive the warm intensity of bhakti; the crackling electricity of truth, just on the mere human interaction level?

Easy one. Sex. It feels to them like sex. 100% sex. That's now the only Other Thing; the sole remaining sub rosa realm^*. If it's not about The Game, then it's about that.

^* - Outside mental illness, anyway. The paranoid, unspurprisingly, will find you threatening; control freaks will feel you're angling to control them; depressives will find you depressing, and the anxious will grow anxious. Etc., etc..

So how does it actually play out? Well, if there's no mental illness on their end (and there often is), and if you check enough fuckability boxes, then it seems, to them, like a titillating invocation of sex. If not, that sexual invocation seems creepy and repellent (and patently not a function of anything going on on their end). Even if - especially if! - it has nothing to do with sex for you.