Meaningness Podcast

The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being. It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably.I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the recording of my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. It includes my ten-minute introductory explanation, a participant’s questions about it, and answers from me and from Jared Janes.I offer these live Zoom gatherings monthly: answering questions, and maybe asking some, and leading discussion. The next one is October 12th. These are sponsored by Evolving Ground, the Vajrayana practice community co-founded by my spouse Charlie Awbery. The sessions are available only to eG members, but membership is free. If you are not a member, you can sign up, and you’ll get an email with information on how to access the eG Discord forum. The top item in the forum is Events, and if you scroll the Events to Saturday the 10th you’ll get the zoom link.If you have questions about this discussion, you could ask them in a comment here on Substack—or attend the next Q&A!TranscriptDavid: I’m going to begin each of these Q&A sessions with a little talk. Partly this is in case you haven’t got any questions, you could ask about whatever I blather about. But that’s not necessary at all. You can completely ignore my little talk and ask me whatever is most exciting for you.I’m going to talk this time about the relationship between the theory of Vajrayana and the practice, and why understanding the theory is actually important; and how in order to understand the theory you need to actually know something about the history, which is kind of tedious because there’s an enormous amount of the history. But the practice doesn’t always make sense unless you know about things that happened many centuries ago.Practice questions are often the really burning ones, where you really want an answer, because you’re a bit stuck in your practice, or you’re a bit stuck in your life even, or you see some opportunity. You can kind of see it, but there’s a doorway and you’re not sure how to access it. And you’re like, “Okay, I know that’s there. But how do I get there?” That can be highly motivating. And you so hope that if you ask the question, you get a good answer, then you’ll be able to move through that door.Theory questions often are really dry. You have some kind of a jigsaw puzzle and there’s a missing piece. You know, there’s a missing piece in the theory and you just want to know, “Okay, what goes in this hole?” And that kind of question… I mean, I like that kind of thing. It’s less vital than something that’s coming out of practice, but it’s still good to understand what those gaps are.I said last time that Vajrayana has a crystalline logic. And that is what makes sense of the theory, but it also is an enormous mess of contradictions and conceptual confusions. And that’s why maybe having this kind of a Q& A session can be helpful.Traditional teachers of Vajrayana can’t see this, usually, and they can’t really help sort out these things. It’s like, if you go on a long vacation, you’re away from home for a couple of weeks, you come back and you suddenly realize your house is a god-awful mess. And you didn’t see that before, because you were living inside it, and it’s just how things are. The Tibetans live inside the system. They don’t stand outside it, so they can’t see what a mess they’ve got. Because it’s home, it’s sacred, you don’t question it.There are exceptions. There are some exceptional Tibetan lamas who’ve been able to see the whole thing, understand the logic, and explain it to Westerners. Without that, we would be completely lost. So we have to be very glad that there are a few who are able to do that.We wouldn’t know what the point was without that explanation. It would just be this vast mass of esoteric practices, which, like, “So what?” The point is not an intellectual one. Primarily Vajrayana practice actually follows the theory closely. And the theory, in the case of Vajrayana, the theory is just a theory of the practice. It’s not a theory of life, the universe, and everything. It’s not a philosophy. It’s not trying to explain where the universe came from or something. This is a religion that is just about the practice.That’s where the theory bites. If you don’t understand the theory, you can’t really understand the practice. You can take practice instructions and put them into practice, and that may work somewhat, but usually the practice instructions are really condensed. There’s a lot of not-said stuff, of details.And if you have a teacher you work with closely you, you can just try to do what the instructions say. And go to your teacher and say “I tried this and it didn’t work. What am I doing wrong?” And do that over and over again. But not everybody has a teacher. The teacher is not always available. You don’t want to be bugging them all the time.If you understand the theory, you can actually see those details. You can work it out for yourself: why the practice works, how it works, and what the point is; and then you can fill in the details for yourself.You might get that wrong. You want to go to your teacher and say, “I didn’t really understand this, but on the basis of theory, I thought, okay, probably it’s like this. So I did that and it seemed to work. Did I get it right?” And your teacher says, “Well, yeah, kind of, but you know, if you want to walk on water, this practice is efficacious, but you need the pontoons as well.” Or whatever.The other thing is that the theory tells you the why. Why you would want to be practicing, what the point is. This is easy to miss, because there’s just this mass of details, and the point isn’t explained.And so, as an example of a common misunderstanding of the why, people think Vajrayana is a collection of methods for accessing weird states of consciousness, which are exciting. And the practices do often put you into weird states of consciousness, but that’s not the point. And people can spend years, having weird hallucinations or whatever, and think that’s the point. And that’s a sidetrack that you could waste all of your time on, instead of actually following the path toward the point.Because the theory is a theory of the practice, the two of them illuminate each other; the more practice you do, the more sense the theory will make. The more you understand the theory, the more sense the practice makes.Confusions come from the fact that the religion had to repeatedly adapt to new circumstances. And because the whole thing is sacred, the scriptures are the literal words of enlightened Buddhas living in the sky, you can’t say, “Well, that was then, this is now.” You have to innovate by pretending that the old texts say what you want to say, which is appropriate to what you think the current circumstances are.And the thing is, people have different ideas about what the right thing is for current circumstances, or they’re in different circumstances. And so there’s all these divergent interpretations of what the scriptures really mean. And then people argue about this; and without the historical context, there’s no logic to the arguments. It’s just, “Well, what it really says is this!” “No, what it really says is that.” It’s like, well, somebody said it said this because that was addressing a particular problem, at a time, with a reasonable understanding.I’d like to read a quote from a recent Substack post by Rob Horning. It’s about the importance of open ended curiosity in computer science research; and how the big picture understanding which you get with that curiosity relates to all the details. He said:If you don’t know how to navigate a discipline’s canon, if you can’t map it, situate different resources ideologically, recognize disputes and contested points, recapitulate the logic of different arguments from different points of view, then you probably don’t know what you’re talking about, regardless of how much information you can regurgitate.This, I think, applies very much to Tibetan Buddhism. There’s people who have read a huge number of books, or have been to endless boring dharma talks with fancy teachers, and they’ve assimilated all of these esoteric details, but they don’t actually know what the fundamental principles are, and how everything fits together.I would include a lot of the fancy Tibetan lamas in that. They know how to regurgitate a lot of information. And I, it’s really arrogant for me to say this, but they don’t actually know what the point is.So this is why the history and the theory matter. To fully understand your own practice, you need to know how to navigate the canon, how to relate competing religious claims to these old conflicts, that really mattered at one time but are now irrelevant. You see why the practice is as it is in the light of that.So, yeah, that’s enough, blah, blah, blah from me. If I was a traditional teacher, I’d go on for another couple of hours because that’s the way they do things. I’m perfectly happy and capable of doing that, but. Instead, let’s have some questions.Ask me anything!Alta: This is Alta, I’m not on camera, but there’s some things that I’d love to hear you explore a little more. One I think about how, in psychotherapy or some modalities for personal development, healing, change, we’ll say conceptual understanding is the booby prize! Because, especially when it’s about how we are living, it’s about changing how we be, our emotional experiences, how they’re expressed, our reactivity. So that’s one: just, “Huh! How much conceptual understanding is necessary.”Then the other part is, in the somatic work and tradition that is mostly where I live, we do a lot to try to communicate, emphasize, encourage people to understand the principle of a given somatic practice, so that then they are able to pursue or experience or identify that principle in other things.So let’s say there’s a principle of deepening awareness of what’s happening at the level of sensation, and we do that through something called centering; but you could do that through a body scan, or you could do that taking a walk . There are other practices that get to the same point.Is it possible inside of this methodology, which has a whole lot of what I would call decoration, right? Is it possible to reduce things to core principles? Or do you mean that understanding is both of the social context and historical context in which something evolved, plus the theory of the overall path.David: Right. These are excellent questions, which very directly address what I wanted to communicate.It’s true. I think the point that the conceptual understanding is the booby prize is very applicable to Vajrayana, and it is often missed. And there’s a lot of people who approach it intellectually, and they do a huge amount of book learning. And that’s just missing all of what’s important. No matter how much book learning you have, it’s pointless unless you’re doing the practice, and getting the results of the practice; and the results of the practice are to change your life: to change your experience subjectively, but more importantly, to change the way that you are in the world.So, yes, the intellectual understanding is a booby prize if it’s there without the rest. The value of it is only to support the practice, because the theory is a theory of the practice.Unfortunately, because Vajrayana is such a mess, that hasn’t been sorted out really well by anybody, some amount of the intellectual understanding, I think, is really important just in order to make sense of the practice.The second question was, is it the case that there are fundamental principles, that are relatively simple, that make the practices make sense, and then the details of the practice, are not that important? And I think you said it was decorative, which is exactly right. “Ornamental” is actually a common word used in describing Vajrayana.And that is… it’s just delight: in the complexity, the vividness, the colorfulness of the world, and of creativity, that somebody who really has done a lot of the practice and understands it, can create new material that is alive and beautiful and complicated and ramifies in all directions. Tantra just revels in that, but when you’re coming to it new, all you see is, “There’s so much of this stuff. What is it all for?” And that’s again where the theoretical understanding of the principles is helpful, in seeing what is beautiful ornamentation, decoration, and what is really at the core of it.There’s also one other point you made, about there being multiple practices with much the same effect, and that is very true in Vajrayana. There’s endless practices, and in some sense, they’re all just pointing at experiencing the inseparability of emptiness and form; clarity, bliss and emptiness; duality and non-duality. Everything is just pointing at that. These are non-separate. It doesn’t matter what you do. I mean, it’s just ridiculous kinds of practices, but they’re all pointing to that.Alta: Thank you. That, that is so helpful. Especially that, there’s a way that when we think about art, right, that part of what’s so glorious about it is that it’s, in a sense, non-utilitarian. It’s just, it just is. And it’s this, effusiveness of the human existence. And in a way that, that gives me another way to think about what I was calling decorative or the ornamental, that it’s that celebration of the multiplicity of form, right?It’s not like, yeah, we’re just going to celebrate it, and therefore not in a sense, utilitarian. It isn’t the point. It’s the, it’s part of the result.David: Yes.Alta: OK. Gotcha.That’s helpful. That’s enormously helpful. I might actually then make it through that book.Jared: I was going to say too, one thing that I do appreciate about the multiplicity, that took some time to move into, is just that personal fit and aesthetic preference, and just vibe of practices. Because there’s such a vast variety of things, it makes it— there’s an abundance of possible ways of engaging in practice, and everybody’s different.And if you look around long enough, people are going to find their “Ooh, yeah, this is my, this is my vibe; but that, that teaching seems a little dry for me; or this one’s a little overly ornamental, and I like it a little bit more essentialized, or this one’s, ‘Ooh, so much heart here.’”The multiplicity also, I think, affords for a lot of people to make informed personal decisions about the types of practices that most resonate with them as well, which is fun. And the fact that they all are pointing at the same principle, as David said, is a reassuring punchline. 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

There’s a wrong idea about the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.Spiritual suffering is unnecessary, though. I have the recipe for eliminating it, and it works.An audio recording of my long answer to a question, in a live Q&A session organized by Jessica B. three years ago. (Thanks Jess!)Monthly Q&AsI’m doing Q&As like this monthly now. I don’t usually go on at such length! The next one is Saturday, September 21st, at 10:30 a.m. Eastern / 7:30 a.m. Pacific.LinksWeb links for some topics mentioned:The “complete stance” acknowledges the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. It’s formally analogous to some Buddhist conceptions of enlightenment, in which you recognize emptiness and form simultaneously.Meaningness: the book. It’s free online, only about 20% written, and apparently useful in its current form.Vividness, my take on Vajrayana BuddhismNgak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen“Meeting Naropa’s Dakini”: an improbable story, on my site Buddhism for Vampires, that is as true as I could make it. In the audio, I misremember the title as “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini”; she appeared to both Tilopa and Naropa (as well as to me).Marpa, founder of the Kagyü School of Tibetan BuddhismThe charnel ground and the Pure Land. In the recording, I refer to the Pure Land as “the god realm,” which is inaccurate. In some versions of Buddhism they’re more-or-less the same thing, but not in Vajrayana.“Misunderstanding Meaningness Makes Many Miserable”: In the recording, I say that Meaningness does not address suffering in general, only spiritual suffering specifically. This web page explains that briefly.The book offers a method for ending what could be called existential, cosmic, or spiritual suffering. The whole book explains the method, with periodic, increasingly difficult summaries. The first is “Accepting nebulosity resolves confusions about meaning.”“The novel that I wrote the first quarter of” is The Vetali’s Gift. It’s now about 40% done, and free online. Maybe I will finish it before I die.The scene in which “the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly” is “Love and Death.”TranscriptJess: What does it look like to feel shock, despair, et cetera, and still maintain the complete stance?David: Right. I can give a Buddhist answer to this and I can give a Meaningness book answer to it. There’s a connection, and they’re also not the same thing. So you’ll get some sense of that, maybe, out of my two different answers.So, some versions of Buddhism make a big deal out of suffering and say that Buddhism has the answer to suffering, and that if you do Buddhism right, then you won’t suffer. That might be true; I don’t know. I’m pretty skeptical. In the traditions that I’ve practiced Buddhism in, that’s not really the line. And my experience— I don’t have an experience of not suffering. I would say that meditating and practicing Buddhism does seem to lessen suffering and it changes your relationship with it.I’ll tell a couple of stories that are relevant, and then do a theoretical thing.So, my former teachers, Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Dechen, about 10 years ago their sixteen year old son got tongue cancer, which is a really unusual thing.His tongue was surgically removed, which was horrifying. Unfortunately, they didn’t catch it early enough, and it metastasized, and he died slowly over the next nine months or so.I wasn’t there for this, so this is second hand; but what people who I know well said about what they observed was that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen were obviously devastated. And that it was as horrifying for them as it would be for anyone. And at the same time that there was a clarity and spaciousness and acceptance in the way that they dealt with the situation, practically and also with their own suffering, that seemed extremely unusual.They’re as much a candidate for enlightenment as anybody that I have known personally. And I don’t think they didn’t suffer.This echoes a story. The most recent thing I wrote was called “Meeting Tilopa’s Dakini,” which is about a story of the founding of the most important lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, the Kagyü lineage. The lineage chant, it begins: “Great Vajradhara, Tilo, Naro, Marpa, Mila, Lord of Dharma Gampopa,” et cetera, et cetera. There’s Tilo, Naro-pa, Marpa. My story was about Tilopa and Naropa. Naropa was the one who met the dakini, who I met in a Starbucks in San Francisco 1300 years later. His primary student was a Tibetan named Marpa. Marpa founded this most important branch of— politically most important branch of Tibetan Buddhism. (It’s not the one that I primarily practice.)Marpa, when he was in his fifties, his son, who was about thirty, died of some illness, and his son was going to be his successor, carry on the lineage. Instead, the chant goes, Marpa, Mila; Milarepa was the continuation of the lineage.When his son died, Marpa spent weeks being miserable and crying and wailing and making a big fuss and being miserable. And people said, “Oh, Marpa, we thought you were enlightened. Why are you miserable? You’re supposed to have gone beyond suffering!”I think his answer was basically “f**k off!” I can’t remember. You know, there’s some sort of a story about what he said. But again, the point is, he’s regarded as one of the most enlightened people in Tibetan history. So, your son dies, you’re going to be miserable for a few weeks!And it’d be, you know, if enlightenment meant that your son dies horribly and you say, “Oh, okay, whatever. You know, what’s for lunch?” It would seem like there was something wrong, actually.So, I think there’s a wrong idea of the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, you know, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.On the other hand, there’s this sense, that Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen apparently manifested, of having space around the suffering, having clarity about the suffering, and not inflicting that suffering on everybody else. Meditation seems to tend to do that for you, just kind of automatically; but there are specific practices that are relevant to that.One that I’ve written about is a pair of practices. They’re written about as separate practices, but I recommend taking them together, which is the charnel ground and the god realm. And the charnel ground is the practice of viewing all experience as an absolute nightmare. And if you see everything as an absolute nightmare, an extremely claustrophobic situation in which you can’t escape horror, that can open out into a sense of freedom in the middle of a nightmare, because there is no hope of escape.It’s the sense that somehow what is happening is wrong, and it shouldn’t be like this, and if things were different, and blah, blah, blah, blah. That line of thinking is not helpful. It’s extremely natural, I do it all the time; but to the extent that you can let go of that kind of thinking, that’s a productive way of dealing with negative valence.The paired practice is the god realm, which is one of seeing everything as perfect just as it is. That reality can’t be improved upon, and that the seemingly horrifying aspects of experience are actually— There is a kind of crystalline perfection to things playing out the way that they do, however that is.Neither of these are a Truth, but as a way of seeing, they can be helpful ways of dealing with experience.So that’s a Buddhist answer. The Meaningness answer is related, although not so colorful.First of all, the Meaningness book explicitly doesn’t try to address most forms of suffering. It’s only addressing kinds of suffering that are caused by misunderstandings of meaning.The kinds of suffering that it addresses are ones where we make things mean something extra on top of whatever they naturally do. Suffering is naturally meaningful to us; that’s just how human beings are. It’s the addition of cosmic meaning, or spiritual meaning, on top of the suffering, that makes it worse than it really needs to be. And the practices in that book are ones of talking yourself out of adding on those extra things that aren’t necessary.So these are two takes on the same approach, but very different flavor.When my sister was dying— she had metastatic cancer also— I was sitting at her hospital bed, and there was blood pouring out of her mouth, because when you’re in the late stages of cancer, your gums bleed.And, there’s this scene, in the novel that I wrote the first quarter of, where the hero’s girlfriend is dying horribly, and there’s blood pouring out of her mouth. And I, you know, I was sitting there with my sister, and blood was pouring out of her mouth. H. P. Lovecraft, a master of writing horror fiction, said the problem with writing horror fiction is that the things you wrote about start coming true.And I was watching my sister dying, and I thought, “Oh! This is the scene that I wrote five years ago in my novel. This is really funny!” And, being willing to let go of the meaning of “This is how I’m supposed to feel about watching my sister die,” and being willing to say, “Oh, watching my sister die, this is really funny!” — that sort of humor in the face of horror. And you also can feel wonder and joy at the same time as, “Oh my god, there’s blood pouring out of my sister’s mouth!” So that was the first thing.And then the second thing is, being willing to feel whatever the negative emotion is clearly doesn’t necessarily— it doesn’t make it any less negative, inherently. It may make it more acute. But again, not adding extra stuff on allows you to feel it more clearly. And there is a transformational value in that clarity of negative emotion. When we add extra meaning on top of negative emotion, it blurs and blunts it— which can be a coping strategy that is valuable when it’s overwhelming and more than we can deal with. But just feeling whatever the sadness or pain or horror is, as straightforwardly as possible, can change the way you relate with the negativity in a positive way.A more interesting question is whether you can actually eliminate spiritual suffering. I think the answer to that is yes, because I think I have done that. I’m prone to depression and I suffer in lots of ways. The kinds of questions and problems that the book is about I found agonizing in my twenties, maybe my thirties. And I just don’t have any trouble with those anymore. So, I could be fooling myself in some way, but I think it probably actually does work.Depression is a not-very-good way of dealing with suffering. It’s a tempting way, because it works somewhat. It’s a way of dulling yourself to the pain. And then, you know, you don’t feel the pain so much, but it’s not, it’s not actually a good way to be. It’s one of my typical ways of dealing with pain and trying to dull it. There’s lots of other ways that are not-good ways of dealing with pain. Drinking a lot, for example. If you drink a lot, it actually kind of works. Or if you overeat, it actually kind of works. But these are not good ways of dealing with pain. Depression is another not-good way of dealing with pain.Depression is a way of dealing with any kind of emotion that’s too intense, by just turning the master volume knob on your existence down, and slowing everything down and muting everything. And the problem is, you can’t mute the bad stuff without muting the good stuff. So you wind up in a space where everything is gray. And then the gray gets to be darker and darker gray.And then somehow you have to pull yourself out of that by finding some little bits of color and you have to be willing to let those in. You say “Yeah, everything is horrible, but I do like blueberry jam, and I’m enjoying this blueberry jam on toast.” And that just admits a little bit of light, and when you’re depressed, you don’t want to do that! You want to just cut everything off and say everything is uniformly bad. If you’re willing to let a little bit of light in, then you can work your way out of the depressive spiral.I’m sorry, that was an incredibly long answer to a very simple question. If I answered all the questions with a half hour long rant about things that happened thirteen hundred years ago, we probably wouldn’t get very far. 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

We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures.David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.”We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate doctrines and practices, but those are not the point. The point is effective beneficent activity, enabled by liberation from fixed patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting.Vajrayana can be subdivided into Buddhist tantra and Dzogchen. Both include multiple, non-ordinary, centuries-tested ways of transmitting the way of being. Tantra uses elaborate ritual methods, such as abhisheka/wang/empowerment, which David described briefly in “You should be a God-Emperor,” and which we discuss in this podcast episode. Dzogchen relies on obscure non-instructions, as in “A non-statement ain't-framework.”Traditional Vajrayana demands particular patterns of teacher-student interaction that in the podcast we describe as “gross.” They rely on dominance/submission dynamics, and we don’t believe they work well anymore. Charlie has developed an alternative approach, discussed in the podcast. (Also in “The learning relationship in contemporary Vajrayana” and “How to learn Buddhist tantra.”)The podcast is a recording of a spontaneous conversation, in which David sought and received advice from Charlie on how to be as a teacher.TranscriptDavid: We have these discussions that are really animated and exciting, and usually about 30 minutes into them when we’re more or less done, we say, damn, we should have been recording this.Charlie: How many times?David: Yeah, this happens every few days. And this time, 20 minutes into one of them, I said, okay, let’s stop, drop everything, and try and record something, and see. But we’ve now got the context of 20 minutes of animated discussion of a topic. And if we go back over it, it’s not going to be the same, but maybe we can talk about it a bit to introduce it, and then there was some stuff I was going to add on, and that was the point where I thought, okay, maybe we can record that.Charlie: I remember the conversation starting when you expressed some discomfort around finding that people were beginning to be sycophantic or adulatory or have some response to your writing recently that triggered this reaction of discomfort of, well, can you say more about what that was?David: Yeah, having started writing on Substack has changed the way I think about relating to an audience in ways that I don’t really understand very well. I want to get a better understanding of my side of the relationship with the audience. And also, what is functional for readers or listeners. And you know, what can I do that’s most useful? And I was seeing that some of the pieces I’ve written recently, and the most recent piece was the God Emperor piece, have gotten a lot of attention in ways that I’m not really completely comfortable with. There’s a sense of: I don’t want to be writing clickbait, I don’t want to be sensationalistic. With both that and The Piss Test, which also went somewhat this way, I wasn’t intending, or mostly not intending to be sensationalistic. I was just trying to explain a thing. There’s bits in there that are kind of deliberately over the top, but that’s just a normal part of how I communicate.I worry about a number of different dynamics. One is that I might get sucked into writing that kind of piece rather than the much more serious things, and I think the more serious things are more important. Those are the ones that I really want the readers to take onboard. I’m worried about audience capture, where one gradually becomes a caricature of oneself in response to an audience liking a thing and then you do more of that thing and then your audience drifts into being more and more one sided of, they just want that entertainment; and then, you know, you can wind up being stupid.I said I was uncomfortable with a lot of things, not that it was going to stop me, but that I need to think it through. And one of them is a discomfort with some people going over the top on the fan thing. And you asked me why that’s uncomfortable for me and partly it’s just being autistic and awkward, and not really wanting to be seen in some ways. I said I fear the possible ego inflation that could come with people going on about “Oh, you’re so great,” and some people do that, not a lot, but sometimes it’s kind of over the top. It’s partly how that makes me feel, but it’s more of this sense that they’re putting themselves down by doing that. Sometimes! I mean some people just genuinely offer appreciation, which is very genuine. And I think for them, that’s good. It may make me uncomfortable, but that’s not significant. But I think some people debase themselves in some kind of effort to maybe communicate genuine appreciation? Possibly in some cases it’s manipulative.And you’d given me a lot of good advice, but we had gotten to talking about the way this functions in traditional Vajrayana, which both of us find really off -putting and just gross.There’s this social norm of, I mean, it’s called devotion, but it’s, it isn’t devotion. It’s usually fairly fake, and it’s this hyper-effusive adulation combined with this dominance and submission dynamic. You know, I was just writing about master and slave morality. That was my jumping off point for the God Emperor piece, although mostly I just said this is stupid, but people do that. People are behaving like slaves to the lama and that’s just, it’s gross.Charlie: It’s predictable, it’s very prescribed, it’s the same from one person to another. That’s one of the ways that it’s different to appreciation, which is usually very personal and specific.David: I’ve been trying for eight years to move into a teaching role. You very kindly have provided a venue for me to start doing that, which is happening the day after tomorrow. So that brings up questions about what is my role? As something like a teacher. You’ve been working with this question for yourself for, well, decades, but especially since forming Evolving Ground four years ago?Charlie: Yeah.David: Yeah. You said a little about how you’ve handled that and how you’ve changed the way do it. And how we both feel that avoiding the traditional teacher-student dynamic that comes in Vajrayana, that’s gross. We don’t want that. And yet, there are some aspects of that that are functional and I was suggesting to you a few days ago that, in fact, you have separated yourself from some of the functional parts of that role in order to avoid the dysfunctional parts, and I was encouraging you to pick up a bit more of the functional parts. But you said you wanted to speak about sycophancy in general and how you think about that and how gross it is?Charlie: Well, so, there’s the whole question of role or not role, or whether, we individually relate to what we are doing as role, and the extent to which we might step into a role.In Evolving Ground it’s very explicit that role is a fluid concept, and there are some structures that people can move in and out of, including in the in the learning experience. And in the providing, the teaching, the mentoring, whatever. One does not take a fixed role and that is it, always that role in that context.So there’s a different way that role, and relationship with role, is being offered and explored. But for me personally, it’s not so much about role anymore. It’s much more about how am I in this particular situation with this particular person or this group. What is the dynamic here?So it’s a question of reading. It’s like I would read a room or a group dynamic or an interaction, and then be responsive in that situation. So it has much more of an immediate question around way of being, or response, than it is a general question for me now.One of the reasons that we both left traditional context was because of that dynamic. Because the predictability of it makes it very dead. It’s actually just not interesting to be in circumstances that are that prescribed, and that people are behaving in a very particular way that is not coming from their individual experience, or it’s so boxed into a way of expressing that it’s very samey.David: I think of Jordan Peterson as a cautionary tale that— I don’t know what happened with him, but it seems that the pressure of his being guru to millions of people somehow caused severe trouble for him. And I’m not going to be guru to millions of people for lots of reasons, but on a smaller scale that is a potential long term concern.I’m much more concerned for the person doing the fan thing in a way that seems unhealthy for them, and I would like to find a way to be such that they don’t feel, whatever the motivation is for doing that, they don’t feel that they want to or need to do that, because it’s not actually good for them.Charlie: Wouldn’t want anybody going over the top here.David: Yes, god forbid anybody go over the top about tantra!Charlie: Oh, no.David: That’s right out in tantra.I would be interested, if you’re willing to talk about it, you said that you have taken various tacks on this in Evolving Ground. You’ve changed the way that you are in a teaching situation, as a matter of skillful means in addressing some issues like this. And then I wanted to say, hey, I think actually, you may be partly missing the mark, or going too far in that— particularly in the context of transmission, is where this came up in an earlier conversation a few days ago, where I feel that something in this region is importantly functional. And when sane traditionalists talk about there being no substitute for the tantric lama, and the whole thing can’t function without that, they’re talking about transmission. And maybe we need to delete this section; it’s a sensitive topic. I think, based on something you said a few days ago, there may be an opportunity for you to relax certain things that you have set up as off limits for yourself, for very good reasons.Charlie: There are a number of themes. There’s charisma, which is quite topical at the moment, so it could be interesting and useful to talk about that. There’s power, which overlaps, and is not the same. There’s transmission…So I’ll say something about what I’ve practiced with, how things have changed it a little bit. I appreciate you wanting to see more of what you know I have done in the past, and I’m capable of: around that stepping into a particular way of being that is very conducive to atmosphere and to transmission.I’ll say something about that in a traditional context: there’s a particular kind of dynamic, it, it involves a way of being that is supported by the structure of a traditional context, in that anyone who doesn’t fit into that immediately deselects themselves, or is deselected by the group.So there is an intense focus. And a coherent atmosphere, that can be found very quickly in a traditional context, because of that setup. And a key aspect of that setup is the lama in the center of that mandala of interactions, everybody’s attention on the lama. And the lama behaves— this is really very much more tantric than a Dzogchen style, to be honest. The lama behaves in a way that— It might be called charismatic. There’s a lot of direct relating, maybe eye contact; aspects of interaction that would normally be associated with social dominance. So, examples of that: long staring eye contact beyond what would be a conversational norm. Unwavering.Often people will call it “presence.” It’s just so easy to do that. It’s so easy to cast your spell on somebody so that they become subdued into awe. And of course that functions, in that context.At this point I am confident that it’s possible to transmit, in the traditional sense, transmit the experience of being in non-ordinary state, or being in a different way of being, interacting in a way that is highly non-ordinary, and beneficial and conducive to extraordinary experience, and extraordinary things happening.And I think it’s possible for that to occur without the power-play. And in fact, often what is confused as transmission is the power aspect of that, and the dominance and submission. And of course it does work, but then the people who are operating in that context think that it is the same thing. They believe that in order to get the juice, we’ve got to go into this mode. You even hear people talking about going back to a particular lama to get the thing and to get that experience. And there’s a kind of hypnosis that comes along with that.It’s an extraordinary experience. I mean, I’ve certainly had that myself, and it makes a lot more non-ordinary mind state accessible, but the question that I’ve had and that I, I’m pretty confident that I’ve answered now, is that it ought to be possible to— if you can access that kind of a state, open presence of awareness, let’s call it, it ought to be possible to access that in different contexts, without relying on the crutch of being back in that context with that person, with those people.And so a lot of the work that I do in my one on one, or in different group contexts, is ensuring that, when something extraordinary happens, that it’s also embedded into that experience, that it is entirely possible to find it in different circumstances. And a lot of the methods that I’m developing are in order that that can be possible. So that’s the transmission part of the traditional context, and how it could look and feel very different.And the charisma that is connected with that. And, you know, there’s a lot of discussion recently, which is really quite interesting around, well, what is charisma? And often I think charisma is confused with that power, to hold attention, hold— traditional word— hold the mandala, only through that social-dominance way of being. And actually, what’s really interesting is being able to do that when that isn’t there. That’s exciting. The very predictable, go into a retreat setting and be in the presence of this person who’s really stepping into a role, and behaving in a guru way, being the guru; actually that just personally to me that doesn’t appeal. I can do that, and I know well enough now that just I don’t like that. It’s something to do with seeing how much that limits the potential of other people who fall into that mode. I don’t think it’s any particular person who could fall into that. It’s just circumstances. You know, something can just happen in certain circumstances that make that possible. And it is so extraordinary when you have that experience that you can see why people get stuck in it.David: A very funny thing happened. Well, it’s funny for me.Charlie: What was that?David: Very funny thing happened earlier today, which is you said to me, you said, “You are much more traditional than Evolving Ground.” And I was like “Me? I’m more traditional?? I thought I was the least traditional explainer of Vajrayana on the planet!”Charlie: No you’re not! That’s so funny!David: You know, there’s people giving me all kinds of flack for, you know, I have no right to speak about Vajrayana because, you know, you’re not doing the whatever. So that that was very funny.But I want to come back to— In the “God Emperor” piece, I wrote about abhisheka, wang, as it traditionally was; and that’s not the way anybody does it now. But wang is a ritual that is orchestrated by the lama, is centered on the lama, and there is a decorum around it. The participants need to understand what is expected of them very clearly. They need to understand— well, often they don’t. I mean, very often in wang, nobody has any idea why they’re there; but ideally they should understand clearly what’s going on, and why they’re there, and what their role is, such that they will receive the transmission.And part of that is— so I think this may be, you know, where I’m more traditional, and you’re going to reject this. Part of that is visualizing the lama as the yidam. For me, that was highly functional. And the ritual decorum around how one relates to the lama, for me was highly functional, just in the context of wang. Otherwise, a lot of the time it seemed fake, forced, unnecessary, and not actually good for anybody involved.Charlie: Oh yeah, I totally agree. I mean, for me, in the empowerment, the formal empowerment situation, that was very moving, sometimes very moving indeed.David: For the sake of listeners, wang, abhisheka, and "empowerment" are three different words for the same ritual.Charlie: So yeah, I would use the English and I’d just say formal—David: —formal, formal empowerment, formal transmission, right—Charlie: transmission or empowerment, yeah. And those circumstances, if you are open to just stepping in to the structure and the experience of ritual, that can be very transformative and moving and beautiful. It can be a beautiful experience.David: So I don’t know if you are avoiding doing that out of personal discomfort?Charlie: How do you mean, in Evolving Ground? We’re just not quite at that point yet. We have formal tsok. We have a chöd practice. We have various group rituals.But the whole way of relating to ritual and bringing a meaningful, alive, electric ritual experience into being— that takes a long time. You know, for a start, you have to have a group of people who have spent years together already, bonding and having a shared language and shared context of interest and practice. And that’s why we say we’re a “community of practice.”There is that base now, there are those connections and friendships. The first group ritual that we had was January 2022, and we’ve been building on that, building on that experience, but the— yeah, we just haven’t gotten around to having the formal empowerment there yet.But yidam practice: we have Evolving Ground yidams now. I mean, you can’t have an empowerment without a yidam, right? So you have to have, you have to have theDavid: you have to haveCharlie: have to haveDavid: yidams.Charlie: Yidam first.Also, we have very consistently been constructing everything from perspective of Dzogchen understanding and framework and view. And that means that there is a particular flavor to the practices that come into being. And empowerment isn’t the first thing that you would set up and create, when you’re working from that perspective.David: Right. Well, I’m thinking more about transmission in general, when there is some ritual element to it. And, one of the things I often say is, I actually have no idea what you do! You put it nicely that my relationship with Evolving Ground is nebulous. And my standard joke is that my official Evolving Ground title is Sangyum, which means the lama’s wife. So I, you know, I don’t know what you do. Maybe—Charlie: Well, a lot of what I do is very personal as well. So, you know, in some sense you wouldn’t, and other people don’t, because the relationship that I have with one person is not the same as, or exactly the same as the relationship that I have with another.And, we do have plenty of group contexts. But you know, in a way it would be better to ask other people what I do.David: Mm-Hmm. Yeah.Charlie: I guess?David: Well, maybe I should don my anthropologist hat and interview a bunch of Evolving Ground students to find out.Charlie: Yeah. And I don’t think it’s, you know, this isn’t false humility. It’s: a lot of what I do is seeing the possibility space, and seeing and encouraging the potential in some very serious and experienced practitioners in Evolving Ground.There was a lovely story, today actually. I was with Tanner. So we were having this conversation about a sudden shift that he experienced in relation to talking to people about politics. He had been getting to this point where he had opinions, but it was really important to be honest in those opinions, and take them and share them with family and with his friends. And he was getting into these heated, really quite painful discussions, and falling out with people, and relationships were getting very difficult. And he spoke to Ari, who is a long term practitioner and apprentice in Evolving Ground. And he said, “Oh, Ari just said this one thing, and everything changed from that moment.”I said, “Well, what, what did he say? Amazing! I, you know, tell me.” And he said, “Oh, he said ‘Really pay attention to the care more than the opinion. I tend to just be more focused on care than what the opinion is.’ And everything just shifted and changed.”So there’s a context that, because of the relationships within Evolving Ground, there’s this ongoing discussion and conversation. So it’s much, much more of a continued conversation that gives rise to that kind of transmission.David: Right. Yeah, I mean, it seems consistent with Dzogchen, and I guess maybe I’m just thinking about empowerment because I wrote about it a few days ago. I think you have said before that transmission typically in Evolving Ground is one-on-one.Charlie: Not necessarily now, because we have so many group retreats now that a lot of— vajra retreat in Evolving Ground I’ll always start by giving— we’ll have a talk on atmosphere. I say a lot about what it is about an atmosphere that is coherent, not disparate, that can give rise to everybody being on the same page, a shared awareness. And when you’re in that space, that’s electric. It’s an amazing experience, when you know, and everybody knows, everyone in the same room is aware in the same space of awareness. And you can’t really have that if people are off doing their own, you know, some people are chatting in this corner and that corner.It’s like when you have a dinner party and there’s a small enough group that everybody’s having the same conversation. That is such a different experience to everybody sitting, talking to the person next to them. And some people are talking to the other people down there, and then there’s just this very different kind of atmosphere.It’s not that there’s anything wrong or right with either sort of atmosphere, it’s simply that when there is a shared experience of awareness, then all other kinds of shared meaningful experience can come online. But you need that atmosphere first.So we teach that. We look at, well, how does that happen? What is it that gives rise to that kind of experience? How do we facilitate that as a group?And then transmission occurs, through the ritual, through spontaneous stuff that happens in those circumstances.David: Cool. I have often wished that I was involved with Evolving Ground, much more intimately, from the beginning, but I haven’t been able to due to circumstances.We actually started out talking about sycophancy, and how the traditional Vajrayana setup demands it, as well as encourages it, and you have found ways of not encouraging it, or actively disencouraging it; and it might be useful for me, because we started out this conversation with my saying that that was making me a bit uncomfortable, and making me think about how do I relate to my audience on Substack. And if I’m starting to teach, how do I feel and think about this, and what can I do to be helpful in discouraging artificial sycophancy.Charlie: You just relate to them as an adult. You know, if somebody goes into, you know, makes themselves small for whatever reason, you simply just continue regarding them and talking with them and, and seeing them as an adult, and as capable, responsible, interesting, delightful person that you want to understand and connect with.David: That sounds easy. Good. In that case, probably I should stop being concerned.Charlie: Say more?David: Something I learned in business is that as an executive, your personality defects are multiplied by the number of levels of hierarchy below you. If you’ve got five levels of people below you, any personality defects you have are going to get blown up fivefold. And that means if you’re going to be operating at that level, you really need to sort out your personality defects. And a lot of people don’t, and you know, there’s a lot of psychopathic CEOs. I think the same thing happens with any kind of status hierarchy. it happens pretty clearly with a significant number of Tibetan lamas who go off the rails. They would be fine being a town priest, but, when they have millions of followers, they get themselves in deep trouble.Charlie: Do you think of yourself as having defects that you need to be careful about?David: Yeah!Charlie: What are those?David: What are my personality defects? In some ways, I fundamentally just don’t care about people. I have dedicated my life very seriously to the benefit of other people. I just about always try to be kind and decent in interactions. There’s exceptions, but usually I manage that. But there is a level at which I just don’t actually care. So that’s one thing.I have the standard kleshas, if we want to use Buddhist terms. I do have a tendency to grandiosity, which you’ve seen me joke about a lot, but I think you haven’t actually seen me in that mode because I’ve been hiding in a cave for 25 years.Charlie: I have totally seen you in that mode.David: Oh, I see. All right, fine. Right. So yes, ego inflation is a real danger for me, and there’s a lot of things that I have chosen not to do, for precisely that reason. Before I was involved with Buddhism, I was involved with Wiccan Neopaganism, which is actually tantric and it’s actually modeled on Hindu Tantra, although officially it isn’t, but that’s where a lot of it comes from.And just because nobody else was doing the job that needed to be done, I gradually effectively transitioned into a guru role. People wanted that from me. I could do it. And having not gone at all far down that road— I was, I don’t know, 26, 27, 25. It was very clear to me that this was nuts. I was utterly unqualified for this role, and nobody should be looking to me for what they were looking to me for. So I just left.Charlie: So how does that connect to your big inflated grandiose ego?David: Well, I could see that there was, I mean, I it wasn’t an actual possibility, but it was a hypothetical possibility that I could have rolled with that. And, you know, I can in fact be very charismatic. I’m not sure you’ve ever seen that.Charlie: I think I’ve seen that, too. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can think of certain circumstances, yeah.David: So, I mean it wasn’t a real temptation, but it was a hypothetical temptation, and that was bad enough. And again, there was a point where I was suddenly famous in artificial intelligence, and I had fans and groupies, who were being sycophantic and adulatory in ways that I thought were quite inappropriate. I had a lot of reasons for leaving artificial intelligence, but being uncomfortable with that probably was number three.When have you seen me being charismatic?Charlie: When you wear a business suit. And you move into a different way of being.David: That’s interesting.Charlie: So you’re quite different when you’re in that mode. Often it involves— when you’re wearing different clothes, actually. So when—David: Clothes make the man! That is tantric principle.Charlie: Times in Montana when you were behaving in a very magnetic way. So, I associate charisma with the two Buddhakarmas, magnetism and the power one, destroying, those two. And there’s a mode of being that is very direct and clear, that I do think is charismatic. And I think it’s not associated with the more common social dynamics that, once you can see those, they just become really tedious, and just uninteresting. And yeah, there’s something very different about a way of being that is clear and present and commanding, but not commanding of any particular person for anything. It doesn’t need anything.I had a lot of conversations with Barine around need and perceived need. She’s had a lot of experience with different teachers in very different contexts, and something she really picks up on when somebody is needing the energy from the audience or the students, for their own sense of well being, or sense of being important or status or whatever it is. And it’s so obvious.It’s also really obvious when you just don’t need something from people. And that can be frustrating for some people.David: One of the things that has impressed me about some of the lamas that have impressed me is exactly that sense that that they— well, I think it’s actually maybe related to the sense in which I don’t care about people. It’s that I don’t actually need anything from anybody.Charlie: Well, I was going to ask you when you said that: What do you make of the contradiction of “in some way, at some level, I don’t care about other people at all, and I have dedicated my whole life to other people?”David: Yeah. I think I said that partly because I don’t feel I understand it very well. Maybe this is self-congratulatory. I do think it’s related to the sense that I don’t need people to be any particular way or do anything. Maybe it’s the opposite of narcissism? Being narcissistic means that you constantly need the reinforcement and… I was about to say I’m indifferent to it, but we started out with my saying that in some ways I’m actually actively uncomfortable with it. Maybe that’s out of a fear that I am also narcissistic as well as anti-narcissistic. That I am, historically have been, prone to ego inflation. It doesn’t seem to happen anymore, so maybe after six decades I’ve grown up a little bit, I don’t know.And you did say that you had modified the way that you taught in the first— I think you said it was in, like, in the first year or so of EG— in order to deliberately discourage that, and I said that I wanted to know how you had done that, and I don’t think you’ve answered yet.Charlie: Well, I went out of teacher mode, I stopped giving presentations. All of the early recordings of eG, they’re just me blathering on for like 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes, just giving a presentation, teaching a thing. It’s the closest that we had been to “giving a dharma talk.” I never give dharma talks now. I might— five minutes, ten minutes maximum, give an introduction to a topic if it’s not something that we’ve talked much about before or spent a lot of time on.Usually I will teach in the way of having conversation, and eliciting experience, encouraging people to talk about their own experience, and hearing about their experience, and asking questions and responding, such that something will just arise in context. And I might— some kind of rant will arise or something that might seem to be useful given where the conversation is going.It’s not that there isn’t teaching and learning happening, but it’s much more fluid. We have this phrase “the learning relationship,” and it’s much more that the attitude is one of “what is there to learn here?” Not “what is there to explain?” And if you simply have that holding attitude, everything changes. The method changes, the method of transmission changes, the method of interaction changes. And it becomes much less “Here is an expert giving a talk”; people retain only about 5 percent of that anyway. And it’s much more interesting, it’s much more alive for the people engaged in that topic, because they’re actually relating whatever it is to their lives.I mean, it seems pretty obvious, but it’s not the way that it’s usually. I do think, I really do think Evolving Ground has developed its own style in this area.And each of the gathering types are very distinct, they have their very own particular method or mode of interaction that is not the same across the board. So, for example, we’ll have one that is much more a Q&A circumstance, where everybody in the room is invited to give their answers from their experience, from their practice. Or, another one is much more of a deep dive where one person is exploring their practice, facilitated by others there. So there are these different modes that have naturally grown, and it’s much more interesting, I think.David: So I have a couple of questions about that. Maybe I’ll ask all the questions at once, so I don’t forget them and then you can forget them instead! One is, How does this relate to discouraging dysfunctional sycophancy? And the second one isn’t a question, it’s more of a comment, which is that I assembled a “dharma talk” out of your doing that thing, and turned it into this video presentation about tsa lung in Dzogchen, which I think is great, and has about a thousand views on YouTube so far. So I’m not the only person who thinks it’s great. So possibly I have misled everybody about what you do, but maybe giving dharma talks might actually sometimes be useful. The third thing is, when you suggested that I start doing a monthly Q&A, I think one of the things you said was something roughly along the lines of “You’re much better at giving boring theoretical and historical explanations of boring stuff—”Charlie: Sure I didn’t say exactly that.David: “…and doing a traditional boring dharma talk…”Charlie: although it is true.David: So I, I will bore everybody to death with these things.Charlie: Well, we’ve been looking for a guru.David: Right, well if drafted I will not serve.You know, I think I’m good at answering boring questions with boring answers. More seriously I’m good at giving conceptual explanations of things. It’s a different mode than what you do, that is also useful for some people and—Charlie: Yeah, I mean, it depends on the context. There are contexts in which I will give much, much more theoretical framing, and answer questions theoretically. It depends. The monthly regular gatherings tend to be more personal experience oriented. The book club sometimes can be more theoretical. But courses, and certain classes and retreats, there’ll be much more of that, providing some historical context, or teaching on the principle of something, or giving a little bit of a framing, or a theoretical, much more of a kind of “talk” style. So I do do that, sometimes, certainly not averse to that in some congruent context.What was the first question that you asked?David: How does this mode discourage sycophancy?Charlie: Oh, because, it isn’t simply, let’s everybody share experience here. There is an, element of inviting people to bring their experience. And that does provide an interesting context for what arises from that. Usually there is a lot of riffing on that, such that it’s not simply a “let’s all share our feelings” and it’s much more considered than pure expression. Many people are contributing. I mean, if you were going to be sycophantic, you’d have a hard job, because you’d have to like, be keeping up, like it would really difficult because because everybody is shining. Everybody is actually very interesting.And the more that you bring out people, to their edge, of their practice or their life experience— because we’re always relating it back to life experience— the more that somebody gets into that zone where “actually, this is something I really don’t quite understand about how I can work with this, or what this is, or what’s going on here,” then it’s interesting.If you’re inclined to sycophancy, it’s a very difficult context to manifest that in, because, you know, our community norms are that we’re encouraging skillful disagreement, we’re training curious skepticism, we’re, you know, these are baked into the nature of the interactions. So that’s one reason.Another reason is that nobody is there giving an expert opinion and “talk.” And therefore there isn’t a reference point on which to glom your sycophancy.I want to have more conversation about charisma, or even if we don’t call it charisma, you know, there really is something that can happen in interactions that is very powerful. And it would be easy for— I don’t know whether we want to keep this on the recording at all or not— but there are moments in which I can choose to be powerful, and that isn’t a problem for me, and I can just move into that mode, and execute, or provide what is needed. Certainly, at this point in Evolving Ground, I still don’t do that very much at all. I might do it occasionally, in individual circumstances, or very small group circumstances. It’s too easy for me.I don’t think the reason that I don’t do that is because it’s easy. It’s partly to do with fit. That kind of mode really does work very well with people who are more inclined towards making themselves insignificant. And, to the extent that people do tend to do that in Evolving Ground, I want to encourage the opposite. I really encourage people to see their difference, to see how they’re autonomous, to have that as their base. That’s our base for the Fundamentals, one of our bases, and it’s important for entering into any tantric practice: that you’re quite adept at knowing your own boundaries, knowing how to be different, being able to express difference, autonomy. All of the things that go wrong in traditional contexts would not go wrong, if people had available that capacity to self-distinguish. And set aside from difficult or unhealthy group dynamics.So we’re very actively encouraging that mode, and it is somewhat contrary to that to move into a mode that is easily powerful and conjuring with atmospheres and interactions. Those two things do not sit easily together. So I tend to just be a little cautious around that.David: Yeah. Just conceptually, a very interesting question, if you have a group of self-authored, confident, self-contained people, how to structure a ritual atmosphere, which can actually draw on that, and that empowers a different kind of ritual atmosphere, where there’s a sense of, “Okay, everybody here is actually powerful, and knows they’re powerful, and therefore together we can do magical things.”Charlie: That’s the question that we’ve been answering, basically. And it works. And it’s amazing. And we have had circumstances that speak to that desire and that necessity, and we’ve had enough circumstances that answer that, and provide for that, that we know that, yeah, we’re, we’re doing that now.David: That’s what you’re doing. You’re confident you can do that, yeah.Charlie: Yeah. That’s what we’re doing in the, in the small group ritual retreats, like the chöd retreat that we just had in New York.David: Cool.Charlie: It is. 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Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life.The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact.Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments 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

Dive into the intriguing blend of Buddhism and cognitive science as they explore how these fields intersect. Discover the historical intellectual exchanges from the 1960s, featuring contributions from key thinkers that reshaped perspectives on economics and cognition. The podcast also examines the collaborations in AI and philosophy that reveal past failures in understanding. Additionally, meditation practices are discussed, challenging the dualistic thinking of rationalism while highlighting the connections between Western philosophy and early Buddhist ideas.

Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship.I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional legibility (30:19), understanding the performance of epic poetry (32:27), a fun side-quest (36:49), and how meaning itself fell apart (38:25).There’s a pretty-good AI-generated transcript available via a button, if you view this in the Substack app or on the web. 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 speaker shares a deeply personal journey on understanding identity. They discuss the complexities of self-reflection and the benefits of using external tools for self-improvement. Traditional notions of a rigid self are challenged, suggesting a more fluid concept of identity. The importance of internal dialogue and practical action over deep introspection is emphasized. Vivid analogies and personal experiences make the exploration of self both relatable and insightful, inviting listeners to reconsider their own understanding of self.

Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast!It is about how to learn to be kind.I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions.Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here.The making ofThis is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had repeatedly agreed to podcast, and occasionally made half-baked attempts which didn’t quite work. This time we prepared, used proper equipment, and it came out well.We thought a spontaneous, natural-sounding conversation would be better than a scripted one. We each wrote bullet points before starting, and deliberately didn’t share them with each other. The conversation is fluid and fun. However, we circled around the topic, and perhaps never quite hit the mark. Next time, we’ll merge our lists of bullet points and put them into a coherent overall plan before starting.Something I forgot to explain: what the guy in the elevator said was a humorous and insightful comment on the situation itself. It was neither self-deprecating, nor at his companion’s expense. It was friendly and droll.Humor, both in the sense of pointing out a funny aspect of a situation and in the sense of “good humor,” is often a skillful form of kindness.Image: (CC) a4gpaThe Black Goat podcast episode “Kindness in Academia,” which we discuss, is here. The bit about introversion being an obstacle to kindness starts at 33:20.TranscriptDavid: I suggested this topic because I feel like I would like to be kinder than I am, and I find being kind sometimes difficult, and I think there’s a number of reasons I find it difficult. And I suspect that there’s a meaningful number of listeners who find themselves in this same position. Charlie: Hmm. That is really interesting for me to know. I didn’t know that. David: About me? Charlie: Yeah. David: Oh. Charlie: I didn’t know that you find being kind difficult, and it’s kind of funny because when I was making a few bullet points for this conversation— I’ll read the very first thing that I wrote. You’re going to laugh. “There’s an idea that kindness is difficult, that it’s something you have to work hard at. I think that’s wrong.” David: Right. Well, I think this may contradict the lived experience of many people, including me. Charlie: Hmm. Well, so do you want to say [00:01:00] more about what it is that you find difficult? What goes wrong? Why is it difficult? David: Well, there’s a podcast I re-listened to this morning with Simine Vazire, who is one of my heroes. She’s a leader of the academic psychology reform movement, which was in response to the replication crisis, but also in response to lots of other problems.And the title of the podcast is “Kindness in Academia,” and she and the other discussants are talking about ways that one can be kind in academia, but there’s this short section that I find really touching, that is quite raw on her part, where she says I would like to be much more kind than I am.And the obstacle for me, [00:02:00] she says, is that I’m so introverted. And, in order to be kind, you often have to break through a, maybe even extremely thin, but a slight layer of interactional business as usual. And so she says she’s constantly buying gifts for people because, you know, “Oh, yes, so-and-so would really like this,” and then she doesn’t give it to them because it might be awkward for them because they might feel obligated or, giving somebody a compliment, like they could take it the wrong way.Charlie: Goodness. David: And I feel that way too, maybe not quite as extremely as she does.Charlie: Do you have something similar going on? Do you want to buy gifts for people or buy gifts and then not give them? David: No, but there’s times when giving a compliment— I mean, I’ve gotten a lot better at this, to be honest. I’m partly [00:03:00] recalling how I was in past, but it’s still sometimes— It’s awkward to do things for people if they might feel some kind of unwanted reciprocal obligation, or you think this is something that the person would want, but actually they don’t, and maybe you misread that. Charlie: So let me reflect something back to you and see whether this is accurate from your perspective. It sounds to me like there’s an equivalence between between kindness and doing something for somebody, or giving somebody something, even if that’s a compliment. David: Well, no, actually, in my notes, I have a list of various sorts of things that are not the same as kindness, which can be confused with it, and generosity is one of them.Generosity can often be kind, but a lot of kindness isn’t particularly generous. [00:04:00] Often it costs you nothing to be kind, and then it’s just a matter of choosing and remembering to do it. Charlie: Yeah, I agree. I agree. So, I’m curious that the examples that you brought there are all to do with giving and generosity. And the example from Simine as well. David: Right, yeah, I think I was following her lead. Charlie: Yeah, well that’s very interesting because that connects to one of the things that I’ve perceived, I’m not 100 percent confident about this, but I think that this idea that kindness is difficult is mixed up with the idea that it has something to do with giving, generosity. Also that it has something to do with a kind of feeling that you have to cultivate or nurture towards others in [00:05:00] order to be kind. David: Yes. Charlie: And I think that’s wrong, too. David: Yes, right. My list of things to distinguish kindness from are: niceness, generosity, compassion, empathy, warmth, charm, and good feelings, and being ethical. Each of those is interestingly not quite kindness. Charlie: Not quite the same, but I think there are connections. David: Yes. Charlie: Some of the connections are significant. David: Yes. Charlie: So I would want to say that when I think about what kindness is, I always come back to an attitude that the kindness is based in, and I think there’s a generosity comes into that attitude. There’s a kind of an attitude, a base attitude of just simply wanting the best for everyone, sincerely wanting that wanting others to experience happiness and [00:06:00] enthusiasm and love for life and joy and peace, and it’s easy to get caught up in a worry about “Oh, can I be kind? Will I be kind? Am I doing the right thing to be kind to this person?” And that isn’t— that’s an extra layer. It’s an extra layer on top of the very simple interaction that there is underneath things. And that concern is really all about “How do I look? How are they gonna think about me? Am I gonna do something daft and ridiculous and silly?” And the more that you can not worry too much about that, the more likely it is that you can relax into a kindness attitude, I think. I have done so many ridiculous, idiotic, silly things. I don’t worry about that anymore. I really don’t. We’re human beings. We’re going [00:07:00] to be calibrating with some kind of trial and error. I think it’s okay to recognize that and to take risks. So a lot of the fear around kindness is tied up with being afraid of taking risks. David: Yeah. That makes sense to me. The phrase “kindness skills” is a framing that I’m kind of guessing that you would probably actually reject; and I have mixed feelings about that myself. Charlie: I prefer “kindness attitude.”David: Yes. Charlie: I do think there are some skills involved. David: Ah, all right, good. Charlie: However, David: We’re not completely disagreeing. Charlie: Yeah. I mean, what are kindness skills for you? David: Well , I think this is interesting in a somewhat broader context of… the kinds of [00:08:00] people that we both tend to attract and advise have a technical mindset, in which the way that you are good at something is by having a set of techniques that you have mastered. And that is at best limited and it interferes with spontaneity, which is, I think, probably critical for kindness; and taken too literally, you can try to rely on gimmicks or little tricks that you can play that you hope are reliably going to constitute kindness and make people like you or something, which is exactly the wrong attitude.Charlie: This is really interesting because I think there are hacks. I really do think there are hacks that can help you get into the zone or the space that is going to result in being kind. [00:09:00] And I’m just thinking about this because those, the kinds of hacks, and I will come to some of those, but the kind of things that I think work , they’re actually not about interaction per se.Whereas you might think that the kindness skills are going to be in the fields of interaction, but actually they’re more about setting up the space and the attitude and even the intent. Whereas the interactions are what can happen spontaneously and maybe need to happen spontaneously in order to change the habitual patterns that you might have, whatever those are, like maybe shyness, or reluctance to take the risk of saying something different, or to do something that is obviously unconventional, or whatever it is.David: Yeah, you use the word “scaffolding” to refer to various hacks. In your meditation [00:10:00] teaching, you talk about scaffolding as techniques that are kind of dumb tricks, but they actually do prepare you to do the actual thing. And it seems to me that communication skills and social skills actually are a thing. And those can be scaffolding toward a more spontaneous and natural form of kindness. It’s a certain kind of “fake it until you make it” thing going on. Charlie: Yeah. I think that can be a part of it. Kind of hacks that I’m thinking of— We have a whole Evolving Ground gathering recording on this which is around kindness rituals. It’s like a little reminder, like a mantra that you can bring to any situation that you’re finding challenging or difficult you can just relax. “What do I want for them?” Oh, yes. Yeah. Remind myself, oh, “I [00:11:00] want them to feel okay. I want them to be less stressed. I want them to enjoy life.” We tend to forget those real basic mutual desires.Like, finding what is it that we all want here. Whenever you have, say a, I dunno, a difficult team meeting or a group interaction, which is causing some problems because people want very different things. Just remembering. Just remembering that, well, actually, we all want to have an outcome that is going to be the best for the team, or we all want to have, to feel okay by the end of this interaction, not to feel “Oh god, that was awful, I’ve got to go, you know, um—David: Throw up in the bathroom. Charlie: Right. And simply remembering that can just provide some space. David: So is the ritual just that remembering, or is there something that you could do to sort of remind yourself? Charlie: You can have like a little [00:12:00] phrase that you bring, like for example “How can I be generous?” or “Where is the space here?” Or whatever your personal little phrase is, “Remember I want the best for them.” Yeah, just something that you can just say to yourself. Another really practical kindness ritual that somebody came up with was that every time they go out the front door, or every time they’re going into a familiar situation like a conversation with a friend or moving through the door into the workspace, they say a little thing to themselves; or they just stop, breathe, relax, and then move on. Just tiny simple little things that, really, they’re all about awareness, going to awareness, reminders. David: See whether this makes sense: I have the sense that kindness can depend on refusing to take [00:13:00] meanings seriously. That you’re aware of social expectations but you’re not bound by them, and you are aware of the meaning that somebody else is putting on what is happening, or has recently happened, or what they think might happen. You’re aware of that meaning, but you don’t consider it fixed. And also you don’t take seriously your own construction of the meaning of whatever is happening. So that creates space for spontaneity. Charlie: I think that’s interesting. It’s quite complex. The phrase that I’m not so sure about is “taking seriously.” And first of all, there are really complex [00:14:00] knots of different sorts of meaning in any one situation. So there’s that. “Not taking seriously” I think is your way of describing the emptiness of form, like the nebulosity of pattern or whatever, and I think it could be misunderstood. David: Yes, I think it’s not a great phrase. Charlie: I think I always take another person’s meaning-making very seriously, but I don’t regard it as Truth. I might see it as their truth, or I might talk with them about that and ask, “Is this a Truth? Are there other ways of looking?” Or whatever, depending on circumstances. So I think I know what you mean by “not taking it seriously,” but I would say something like having a looseness around the fixed meaning, or the understanding of the meaning, or even having a willingness to explore that [00:15:00] kind of meaning. And that in itself can, if you can do that for yourself and you can help other people do that , that can be really an act of kindness. Again, I’m not sure about this phrase, I’ve been questioning it myself recently, but the phrase that I always used to use is “meet somebody where they’re at,” and by that I don’t necessarily mean stepping into and embodying the same space as them, and the same meaning-making, but acknowledging what that meaning-making is, and just getting it clear as well, because it’s very easy to misunderstand or to get that wrong.So I’ll quite often just check with somebody: “Have I understood this? Have I understood what you’re saying?” And rephrase it in a different way just to check that what I thought I heard was what I was hearing; what they were saying. David: Yeah, also in my notes, I said [00:16:00] that “Simply understanding and articulating where the other person is at can very often be a great kindness, because people very often don’t feel like they are understood.”Charlie: And that can also just be a huge relief. You know, just provide some space. Like, hang on a minute! We don’t even have to go full steam ahead along this particular track that we’re already setting in motion here. We can just go a little bit meta and just stop. That is a relief sometimes.David: So, I want to get back to this tension between some sense of being naturally and spontaneously kind, which “is great work if you can get it,” my first Buddhist teacher used to say. But that often doesn’t feel possible. I actually started thinking about this whole line of inquiry… We were together actually, must have [00:17:00] been well over ten years ago, in Bristol, we had this lovely flat on the water. And, we got in the elevator. Charlie: Oh yeah. Oh, I remember this. David: As we got in the elevator, this other couple walked in. And she was really angry with him. And she was going off about, he always does this and he never does that and da, da, da, da, da, and you just did this thing, which means that… And he said this thing, and I wish I could remember it, because it was so perfect. He just said this thing, which acknowledged her upset completely, made it clear that he understood what this was about, and did not take responsibility. He didn’t give in to her complaints. He didn’t take responsibility for it because he [00:18:00] obviously believed, and made me believe, that this was not a legitimate complaint, but he didn’t say, you’re making an illegitimate complaint. He said this thing that made her feel completely understood, and then she calmed down, and we got out of the elevator and went our separate ways, and then I forgot what he said! I’ve been regretting this for like 15 years now, because that was so skillful. Charlie: Was it the actual words that were skillful? David: I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t know because I can’t remember them. But at the time I felt, “Damn! I wish I could do that! I wish I had the skill that he, the interpersonal skill that he has that made that possible for him.” And I’ve sort of ever since been thinking, “Whoa, how do I gain kindness skills? Well, like, what even is that? Like, what was he doing there?” I did feel that he, that he had something. He wasn’t just “ being himself” or something. He had some [00:19:00] understanding of how to deal with this situation that I would have wanted to have. Charlie: Yeah, to succinctly respond in a way that was, rather than escalating the emotional investment and spiraling, was actually providing some space around that. I remember the circumstance very well because I remember having a whole conversation after that about “How do you do that??” David: Uh huh. So how do you do that?Charlie: Well, in Evolving Ground we talk about it as confidence in spaciousness and spacious clarity.If you have that spacious awareness when you’re in interactions with somebody, whatever usual habitual hooks are thrown your way, or whatever interactive, manipulative patterns are around, there’s nothing for them to grab onto. It’s space. It can’t be pushed around [00:20:00] and pulled around or whatever. It’s just there.And that is actually incredibly reassuring in heightened interactions. I think it’s reassuring for other people as well. It could be a little frightening. It could be a little frustrating maybe as well. So there’s no guarantee that it’s all going to work out. We’re so wound up in these interactive patterns in which we’ve learned that if we can just simply get that person to respond in the way that we think they should respond or that we’re used to, that everything will be okay.So I think the process of learning to undo all of that can be painful and difficult and challenging. But it’s worth it. David: I think there’s two failure modes that are opposite. One is the idea that there’s a bag of tricks that you can use to be kind. The opposite [00:21:00] wrong idea, like, there’s this common piece of dating advice which is “Just be yourself!” And for some people that could actually be useful if it lets them be spontaneous in a way that they feel inhibited from. But for other people it could be totally counterproductive. Charlie: Actually really bad advice. David: Yeah, terrible advice. If they are consistently running some pattern that isn’t working. Charlie: Like, for example, if you are on the autism spectrum and you’re “naturally,” in inverted commas, disagreeable, spiky, and grumpy most of the time.David: I don’t know anybody like that! Charlie: No, me neither. [Laughing] “Just be yourself!” David: Grrrrrrrrrrrrr! Charlie: [Laughing]Yeah. David: So it’s a [00:22:00] different self. It’s finding the emptiness as opposed to the very solid self. Charlie: It’s finding who you can be. And it’s also not a balance. And I think it’s a real mistake to think that, oh, there’s some kind of equilibrium or some balance between agreeableness and disagreeableness, or— it’s more like you want to step into a way of being that is both appealing and a little frightening, maybe, and is not entirely yourself. You’re stepping into a possibility. It’s like a self possibility. It’s not beyond the bounds of what you can understand as being possible as a way of being, but it’s not simply going along running the same patterns, especially if that hasn’t worked, or if you’ve felt isolated because your interactions haven’t worked out so well, or whatever it is.David: [00:23:00] I’m just amused and reminded, you used the word, the phrase self possibility, which is sort of your code phrase for translating “yidam”— Charlie: Yeah, it’s not exactly yidam practice. Like, yidam is a very specific method. So self possibility is one of the nodes in the Fundamentals Journey in Evolving Ground, and it’s influenced by yidam, and you could say it’s the most general and informal mode of yidam practice. It’s more like, what it would be like if there weren’t yidams in yidam practice. David: Right. Yeah. Charlie: But there’s definitely an influence there. David: Right. What made me chuckle and reminded of was the observation that we’ve made, but many people have made, that when you’re doing a lot of yidam practice, you suddenly become magnetically sexually or romantically attractive to practically everybody.Charlie: Right. [00:24:00] Or, something changes in the way that you are, it’s not even necessarily romantic or sexual, it could be to do with capacity, or the way that you’re shining or powerfulness or you’re suddenly able to fluidly move through difficult circumstances in a way that you were not able to previously.So something changes. Something changes. Yeah. Mind you, you need a hell of a lot of yidam practice before you get there. You know, there has to be a pill you can take that would do it better!What we’re talking about here is stepping into form in a way that is not self-prescribed. The form is arising from something that is actually coming outside of yourself, and in self-possibility, that’s from the interactive circumstances. So there isn’t this predictability of [00:25:00] quality, or characteristic, or fixed demeanor that you would have with very specific yidam practice. It’s more that you’re allowing the interactive circumstance to shape and mold the response. And that does require some confidence to try something different.Or, be open to the circumstances giving rise to something completely unpremeditated. David: This actually gets right at what I was wanting to discuss next, which is “Buddhist ethics,” one of my bête noires. It keeps talking about compassion and the cultivation of compassion. And, I think this is a Dzogchen point of view: that compassion isn’t a special thing that needs to be cultivated by some kind of technique. It’s something that is just completely inseparable [00:26:00] from awareness. Although I have to say, I did a lot of tonglen practice at one time, which is a practice of cultivating compassion, and I did find that transformational. Charlie: What do you make of that contradiction?David: Well, I guess it’s scaffolding, is the only sense I can make of it. But I think that’s the canonical explanation: that practices like that are path aspect, where Dzogchen is fruition aspect. There’s something about Buddhist ethics, which I wrote a whole series of essays about how wrong it is, it has this attraction, which is— coming back to our original topic— people want to be more kind, find it difficult, and don’t know what to do. And so any set of guidelines— and the Buddhist ethics keeps saying compassion, compassion, compassion, which is [00:27:00] easy to confuse with kindness— if you have some sort of guidelines and practices that supposedly develop this, then I think there’s a very natural and healthy, wholesome desire to pursue that, because we, well, speaking for myself, I do want to be more kind.And I think a lot of the Buddhist discourse about that goes slightly off track. And especially the Westernized Buddhist ethics is more than slightly off track. Charlie: I agree with what you’ve said. I think there’s often an assumption in the cultivation of compassion that it is necessary to feel compassion, to have the experience, the felt sense of compassion, open heart, warm heart towards another in order to be kind. And I don’t think that’s true. David: You can just choose to [00:28:00] be kind. Charlie: You can choose to be kind. You can feel annoyed, frustrated, angry, wretched, miserable, depressed, grumpy, whatever—and simply choose to be kind. And that is possible. You may find it difficult , you may find it not your usual way of being, and not quite know how to do that, but it is possible.And if you set that as a way that you want to be, then it’s more likely that you’ll be able to. Very often there’s an implicit assumption that, oh, if I’m feeling grumpy, then it’s okay to lash out at somebody else or just snark, or go off and be huffy, or whatever it is. And if you simply set yourself a standard and say, “Well, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be like that. I’ll do my best to separate out, have some space between the way that I’m feeling [00:29:00] and the way that I am towards other people.” That’s a good start in itself.There’s also this confusion between morality and kindness. And that gets all mixed up with being a good person. Being morally right. There’s something in that that must be hugely reassuring. It’s about, if I simply just do this thing again and again and again and again, I’ll be a good person. David: Yeah. Charlie: Unfortunately, I don’t think it really works like that. David: Indeed. I mean, that’s my— Charlie: It didn’t work for me. David: You’re still not a good person. Despite all the hard work. Charlie: I’m definitely not a good person.David: I mean, that’s my basic gripe about Buddhist ethics. I think that it’s actually a bunch of stuff for looking like [00:30:00] a good person. And looking to yourself like you’re a good person; you’re your own most important audience for your playing the good guy character on screen. Charlie: So there’s some kind of payoff there. There’s some kind of payoff about being morally superior to others who haven’t quite gotten it yet. How do you notice that in yourself? How can you see yourself doing that?David: I don’t know of any trick or technique; I think just being aware is all that I know to do. Charlie: Maybe it’s a phase that we go through. I’ve certainly been morally superior at times. Actually, there’s something interesting here: it’s something to do with finding a system for the first time. People who find the thing that works for them, and it’s like a revelation, and it’s just so fantastic, and you want everybody else to know [00:31:00] that. And you want everybody else to see how amazing this thing is because it’s changed you, and they should do it too, and this is a very, very natural progression away from… I guess you could see it in a Kegan stage framework: you could see it as just coming out of socialized mode, maybe? You’re beginning to see the value of how a system can work, and mold and change things, such that you can be bigger and better, and more skillful, and have more capacities than you were able to previously. And so there’s this sense of “It’s the one true thing!” And then you want to put that onto everybody else. Maybe that is where some moral superiority comes from.A way that that can help with kindness is understanding that, especially as you get a little older, and you’re [00:32:00] moving into your 30s, your 40s or whatever, you’ve been through that. David: Yeah, you can see other people do it and cut them slack for it, even though it’s incredibly annoying.Charlie: You can actually just really enjoy their enthusiasm. You can enjoy their love of this thing. Be like “Wow, that sounds amazing! Tell me more! I want to hear about it!” 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