Meaningness Podcast

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

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

Discover how participants find sacredness in everyday life and community connections. Engage in lively discussions about blending Christian roots with Buddhist practices. Explore the contrasts between individualistic Western Buddhism and strong communal bonds. Hear about spontaneous moments of sacredness and childhood rituals that evoke powerful experiences. Delve into the nuances of sacredness in group practices and the differences between Tantra and Dzogchen. Finally, connect beauty with deeper feelings of sacredness, enhancing the understanding of immediate interactive experiences.

The podcast delves into the intriguing concept of kadag, a key tenet of Dzogchen Buddhism. It emphasizes that nothing is inherently pure or impure, challenging traditional notions of purity. The speaker skillfully illustrates that once you recognize kadag, you see that the world lacks fundamental spiritual or existential problems. Instead, it highlights practical issues that can be tackled directly. This insightful exploration provides a fresh perspective on how we perceive reality and address challenges in our lives.

Jake Orthwein, a contributor well-versed in both Meaningness and Jordan Peterson’s ideas, explores fascinating parallels and differences between their philosophical approaches. They delve into the chaos/order dichotomy versus nebulosity/pattern, highlighting contrasting focuses on nihilism and future visions. The discussion extends to the mythic triad in Peterson’s work compared to Buddhist ideals of emptiness. With humor and insightful commentary, Jake ties in relevant clips from Peterson, enriching their engaging conversation on meaning and purpose.

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

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

Explore the intriguing distinction between nobility and virtue, where nobility is highlighted as the wise use of power essential for societal cohesion. The discussion reveals how society can thrive only through nobility, rather than virtue or tyranny. Delve into the idea that nobility, once a shining force, is now obscured, leaving societies vulnerable to collapse. The conversation encourages a renewed understanding of nobility's critical role in politics, urging listeners to recognize its importance in fostering strong, prosperous communities.

A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to playLike most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support.TranscriptWhat is the right question?“Stage five” is a concept in adult developmental stage theory. That is—or used to be—a branch of academic psychological research. I think it may be very important. But stage five is somewhat mysterious. It’s not clear what it is.Before asking “what is stage five?”, there’s several other questions one ought to ask. Starting with: “IS stage five?” I mean, is this even a thing? Or is it just some sort of psychobabble woo? Why should we believe in this?And then, what sort of thing is stage five, if it’s a thing at all? What is a stage, actually? How do we know whether something is a stage or not? How many are there? Which are they?These are skeptical questions one ought to ask if you’re interested in adult developmental stage theory. Especially if you use it, or are considering using it.I’m not going to address them at all now! That’s because the academic literature on this sucks. The answers available are vague, and they’re not well supported by empirical research. So I’m setting all this aside for now—although I plan to come back to it.An exciting interdisciplinary sceneInstead, I’m going to give several answers to “what is stage five?”, as if this was a clearly meaningful question. I’m going to give several because different theorists describe it in different ways.That’s because they came to adult developmental stage theory with different intellectual frameworks, from different disciplines. In the 1970s and '80s, there was a really exciting scene, mainly at Harvard, in which researchers from different fields and departments were trading ideas about this.Their different ideas seemed similar in important ways, but they also had major disagreements, reflecting their different lenses.So, were they all actually talking about the same thing, like the blind men and the elephant? Or were they actually describing quite different things, all of which they called “stage five” for inadequate reasons? Unfortunately, academic research in this area ended almost completely around 1990, probably for political reasons.  And that means that at about the time that they were starting to do really good scientific tests of whose ideas were valid, if anyone’s, the whole thing just ended.So we don’t know.I’m mostly going describe my own understanding of stage five. It’s is generally consonant with that of many researchers in the field, but also somewhat eccentrically different. That’s because I came to the scene with different background knowledge than anyone else.Everyone in the field starts from cognitive developmental psychology, and particularly Jean Piaget’s four-stage theory of children’s cognitive development. His fourth and final stage he called “formal operations.” He thought the essence of that was the use of propositional logic, a simple mathematical system.Later researchers extended Piaget’s stage four to systematic rational thinking in general.Piaget explicitly denied that there could be any stage five, because he somehow thought propositional logic was the highest form of cognition.Starting in the early 1970s, researchers found that here are further, more powerful forms of cognition. They exceed not only propositional logic, but systematic rationality in general. Or, so the researchers thought; and I agree; and that’s what we call “stage five.”I come to this with backgrounds also in cybernetics, ethnomethodology, existential phenomenology, and Vajrayana Buddhism. And those have shaped—maybe distorted—the way I understand stage five.* From cybernetics, I understand developmental stages as patterns of interaction of an organism and its environment. The typical framing of cognitive psychology is in terms of representations held in an individual mind; I’m skeptical of those.* From ethnomethodology, I am skeptical that we even have “individual minds.” Or, at least, I think this is a misleading way of understanding ourselves. Our patterns of interaction are manifestations of our culture and our local social environment. They are not primarily personal.* From existential phenomenology, I am moved to investigate what being in a stage is like. “Being” is the existential part, and “what is it like” is the phenomenological part. I’m influenced particular by work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who emphasized the role of the body, and of active perception, in experience.* And from Vajrayana Buddhism, I take the habit of seeing all phenomena in terms of the interplay of nebulosity and patterning. Nothing is either entirely definite or entirely arbitrary. We are nebulous and patterned; everything we interact with is nebulous and patterned; the interactions themselves are nebulous and patterned.Unfortunately, the insights each of these four disciplines are notoriously difficult to express in plain language. Cybernetics communicates in mathematics; ethnomethodology and existential phenomenology use long made-up words and abnormal sentence structures; Vajrayana is transmitted in ritual and poetry, not prose.I’m going to try to describe stage five as an experienced interaction, as a way of perceiving and acting, rather than theorizing about supposed mental structures, as cognitive psychologists do.  I’m going to do my best to speak plainly, but describing the texture of experience is going make me come out, I’m afraid, sounding like a stoned hippie!After I babble a bit, I’ll summarize briefly some descriptions of stage five from academic cognitive scientists. They may be talking nonsense, but at least they sound sober.What stage five is likeSo what I’m going talk about is a visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience, and that’s especially difficult to talk about. It’s easy to talk about thinking, because that’s already largely in words. And I think a distinctive feature of stage five is that it is not so much about thinking in words.What I’m going to describe is not a mystical experience, not hallucinating, not a special state of consciousness. It’s really difficult to express what kind of thing it is. What I’m hoping is that you may recognize some of it, remember having been that way.  I think these are experiences that anyone can have, “at” any stage, if that’s even a meaningful thing to say.  What may be distinctive about stage five is that they become more common, and that you gain more skill in being in these ways.So the first aspect of what I want to talk about is what I call “the open field of activity.” Imagine that you are in front of, looking out on, a plane; a landscape. And there’s all this stuff happening on this landscape. Like, things are emerging out of the plane, they’re popping out of the ground, and they dance around. They maybe change color, they bump into each other, and then they subside back into the field. These are the “happening things.”In this quasi-metaphorical description I’m giving, these are not generally physical objects. They are matters that call for care, or that impinge as relevant to your concerns.Sometimes these seem to be coming at you from all directions, tasks, interruptions, people emoting, public events, and you may feel embattled, and this can be overwhelming.  I think this is an experience that everyone has had, this feeling of stuff coming at you, metaphorically. And that can give a sense of what sort of description I’m trying to give.In a more characteristically stage five experience, you have panoramic vision over the whole field of activity. Your view is from outside, and above. At the same time you can see accurately extremely fine details of these emerging phenomena. It’s like you’re looking through a fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass at the same time. So you see the forest and you see the trees. And you see the leaves on the trees, and the caterpillars walking on the leaves on the trees! So you don’t get lost in the details, and you don’t get lost in space.Another aspect of this is that you are not detached, you’re engaged. The experience of stage four can be like looking at the world through a heads-up display. So there’s a transparent piece of glass that has projected on it engineering diagrams, or an org chart, that is telling you what you are seeing, and categorizing it and representing it. This is the experience of stage four.At stage five, you can still do that when it’s useful; but more typically, you’re actually looking directly at the world, you’re perceiving without an interposed representation. You can still, when it’s useful, turn the heads-up display on, and use some kind of rational system, some systematic ontology, for perceiving, conceptualizing the world. That can often be very useful; and stage five can do everything that stage four can do.But you also have, like, a little clicker wheel, so you can choose different heads up displays, different representations of the world in different conceptual schemas. You can use different frameworks for perception, and you can actually look with multiple ones simultaneously. This is a very characteristic aspect of stage five.In stage five, caring about lessens; caring for increases. You are intimately involved in the details of the field of activity, because you care for them. It’s more like tending a garden than like building and operating a machine, which is the experience of stage four.   It’s more nurturing, less controlling. At stage four, you relate to everything in terms of “What does this mean to me? What do you mean to me? What can I do with this thing?”Although, a garden is still pretty top down; like, you decide where to put which rose bush, and you put some tulips over here. Maybe a better metaphor would be taking responsibility for a plot of woodland that you nurture. So you make sure that there’s adequate water in a drought. You clear out diseased trees. You build brush piles to provide habitat for small mammals. Foresters do this. They pile up dead branches, and rabbits or weasels, or I don’t know what, live in there.This metaphor of “nurturing” might sound nice. And that’s not really the point. Part of caring for a plot of woodland is uprooting invasive plant species. It’s setting traps for pest animal species. It’s building a fence around the plot to keep out wild dogs. If 30 to 50 feral hogs break through the fence, a semi-automatic rifle might be called for.The next aspect of stage five I’d like to talk about is what I call “becoming the space.”  And this is a sense that your self, your awareness, becomes fused with the field of activity, the space within which everything happens. So in some sense, you feel like you are doing everything that occurs in the field of activity, because you are the space. And at the same time, you’re not doing anything, because you are just the space. You are not any longer an isolated individual in your head who is doing the thing: one thing, and then the next thing. It’s a continuous flow of activity, that is interaction across all of the participating entities, human, and material, and information technology, or whatever.This sense of extending through space—you also feel decentered in time, and like you extend through time. So you become aware of your place in history, and that you are in the middle of a lineage of people doing things, thinking and feeling and being, in ways that are shaping you now. This can extend centuries into the past, centuries into the future; but also just years, or any period of time.And just as with the spatial metaphor—where you’re seeing all the details, you’re getting this really close-in look, and you’re seeing the whole picture— With time, you’re both… You’re much more present, in the now. In stage four, your time is structured. It is scheduled. You have deadlines, you’re doing this, and then you’re doing this and you know what’s going to happen next. The stage five experience of time is of being here now without the structure. It’s also the experience of being across centuries, because you’re not separate from those who have gone before. They are being you, and you are being the future; all of the people who come after you.There’s a quote from Abraham Maslow that I find really moving. He said:I had a vision once, at Brandeis University. It was at commencement. I had ducked commencement for years, but this one I couldn’t duck; I was corralled. And I felt there was something kind of stupid about these processions and idiotic medieval caps and gowns. This time, as the faculty stood waiting for the procession to begin, for some reason there was suddenly this vision. It wasn’t a hallucination. It was as if I could imagine very vividly a long academic procession.(This makes me cry, actually.)It went way the hell into the future, into some kind of misty, cloudy thing. The procession contained all my past colleagues, all the people I like, you know, Erasmus, Socrates. And then the procession extended into a dim cloud in which were all sorts of people not yet born. And these were also my colleagues. I felt very brotherly toward them, these future ones. It’s the transcending of time and space, which becomes quite normal.Robert Kegan, who’s one of the foremost theorists in this area, says that in his data set, he finds that nobody really gets to stage five until age forty. You have to have had decades of experience in order to begin to get this sense of one’s extension in time, of being the past and being the future at the same time. And maybe it’s not until you get to forty that that really sinks in and shapes you.This sense of the diffusion of oneself, of being extended, being the space, leads you to experience “me” as being one of the things that happens within the space of activity. So “me” is just one object among all these other happening things. It’s not that you stop having a self, it’s that the selfing is an activity that happens within the space that you are. And lots of different kinds of selfing activity may arise from the field, and dance around, and then submerge again.And this is very funny! It leads to a sense of humor about oneself. You can’t take yourself seriously if you’re just this little dancing puppet. So you’re much less bothered by people’s negative opinions about you, because the “me” is not an especially significant thing in there.So you’re freed up to play. It’s serious play, because you do care for the whole field, but you’re not identified with outcomes. You are aware of risks; you take sensible actions. You may be unhappy when things go badly, but it’s not saying something about you so much anymore.Within the field of activity, because you are seeing through multiple lenses, there’s a lot of scope for paradox, for contradiction, that you’re seeing in different ways simultaneously. And this is really funny, and enjoyable, because contradiction is no longer a problem. You can integrate both sides of a contradiction, without needing to resolve it in favor of one side or the other; because these are both valid ways of looking at things.So that was me sounding like I’m on drugs.Academic accountsI’m going to now briefly talk about a series of academic characterizations of stage five. It may actually be helpful to see how each of these descriptions is incomplete or inaccurate; so one can understand what stage five is in terms of what it isn’t, quite. Similarly, a lot of the standard explanations of stage five are in terms of what it isn’t; namely, stage four.As you’ve heard, it’s really difficult to describe stage five in its own terms. And as you move toward a new stage, or are not yet firmly embedded in it, it’s actually a lot easier to look back at the previous stage, and say “not that,” than to look forward, or down or around, and say, okay, this is where I am now, and this is how it is. This is on top of the problem that stage five, unlike stage four, is mostly not about explicit representations, which are easy to verbalize.The term “stage five” itself is really a “what it isn’t” description: namely, it isn’t stage four; it’s something else. It’s good as a term, and I use it a lot, because it’s basically meaningless. It doesn’t try to tell you what stage five is, and so that leaves it as an open space of possibility; where a bunch of these other academic terms are trying to nail it down, in a way that doesn’t seem to be all that helpful.Calling it “stage five” does drag in Piaget’s stage theory, which is definitely questionable. “Is there actually such a thing as a stage?” This is a question! And using the term “stage five” prejudges that; so I actually also like to use other terms, which don’t prejudge that.I use the term “fluid.” This is good primarily by contrast with stage four, which is really marked by its rigidity, its dualism. Stage four is about “this, not that”: sharp distinctions, logic. There’s a couple of problems with the term “fluid.” One is that it could describe stage three, which is also non-rigid. Another is that a fluid is homogeneous and undifferentiated, and stage five isn’t that. So the term “fluid” might point toward what I call “monism,” the “All Is One” idea; that is definitely not what stage five is about! Stage five, we saw, is intensely attuned to details and differences, as well as the big picture.The first term for stage five was “post-formal.” That is defining it in terms of what Piaget had said stage four was, namely formal. There’s a quote here, from a review article:Various theories arose, which were based on the assumption. The distinctive characteristic was the acceptance and integration of various, at times incompatible, truths; which were highly dependent upon context, and upon the way in which the subject perceives them; without the subject needing, as in stage four, to look for and find a single truth. Such theories provoked great enthusiasm in the scientific community.I think that is a relatively accurate description of an important aspect of stage five. “Post-formal” points to a rejection of propositional logic, which goes all the way back to Aristotle. It’s the logic of the Law of the Excluded Middle; that every statement is either absolutely true or absolutely false; and that’s something that stage five critically rejects.This is not a new idea. So, one of the first terms applied to stage five, in the 1970s, was “dialectical”; and this is going back to Hegel, who is not my favorite person. But we do have to admit that Hegel had a bunch of ideas that were wrong in detail, but in general trend turned out to be really important and correct in some ways; and one was his rejection of Aristotelian true/false logic. And that’s what “dialectic” is supposed to be about. It’s taking multiple frameworks and aiming for a synthesis, or at least working with the contradiction, without trying to resolve it.Another early term besides “dialectical” that was applied to stage five was “reflective.” This is good because it describes the way that stage five stands apart from systems and can take this view from above and around; not being locked into a system, but looking outside on top of it; and being able to intervene in systems from outside.This isn’t, however, really unique to stage five. Kegan says that each stage is in some sense a theory of the previous stage. So stage four is a theory of stage three. Relationships are the substance, or a critical part of the substance, of stage three, and they’re not thematized. You are in relationships. Stage four is a theory of relationships. It structures relationships, and you have to reflect on relationships. So reflectiveness is not actually a distinctive feature of stage five.  One develops into stage four by conceptualizing the limitations and failure modes of stage three.There’s another problem with the term “reflection,” which is it is typically taken to be a cognitive operation. It’s thinking about, and this is actually deemphasized in stage five. I mean, certainly, in stage five, you do all kinds of difficult thinking; but that’s not the distinctive substance of it.Other terms that are applied to stage five in the literature are “relativistic” and “contextual.” This could also describe stage three, which is similar to stage five in some ways. There’s a stage three attitude of “everybody’s opinion is equally valid, because everybody has their own experience”; and that could be understood as relative and contextual. Stage five is relativistic and contextual, again, relative to stage four.“Meta-systematic” is a term that I use, and that other theorists in the field use. It is, again, a way of talking about this ability to see things in multiple ways simultaneously. But as a term it’s problematic, because it suggests that’s all you’re doing, and it centers systems. Stage five is not primarily about systems, in the way that stage four is. Stage five uses systems, sometimes, when they’re useful. But that’s not, again, its substance.There’s another problem here, which is that “meta-systematic” suggests a system of systems. This is a very common misunderstanding. Stage five is not itself a system; is not a system of systems. Understanding how a superordinate system can subsume and incorporate another system within itself: that just gives you another system. This is a stage four recursive operation. It’s not stage five. What one subsumes systems within, at stage five, is the space, the field of activity. Systems appear as entities that pop out of the ground, they spin around, and they go “flomp!”, back into the ground.The term “inter-individual” is used in Kegan’s book The Evolving Self as the term for stage five. It points towards this decentering of one’s self. But it again leaves intact the idea that there are distinct selves; that stage five is again about how selves relate to each other. And in stage five they interpenetrate in a way that they don’t at stage four; and they are structured in a way that they aren’t at stage three. But, at stage five, selves are not the thing; and this is I think, a limitation in Kegan’s understanding.In his later book, In Over Our Heads, he used the term “self-transforming.” Again, this centers “self” as the key thing. It also has the problem that each stage represents a fundamental transformation of selfing, a very different mode of “self” occurring, than the previous one. So transformation is an aspect of every stage; or every transition, at least. I think he’s pointing to the fact that at stage five, transformation continues, and it’s a deliberate act; and that is actually true and important. But again, the self is not the key thing, I think.At stage five, because the self is no longer an entity, there isn’t a coherent thing that could act to transform itself. Rather the delocalized patterns of activity, which we think of as selfing, continue to transform, not through the action of the self on itself, but through interaction with everything in the context, the situation, the field, the space of activity. That’s what accomplishes the transformation.I’m sounding like a stoned hippie again. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

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