The first Real-Making newsletter previewed what I'll write about this year, throwing in some gnomic theses and metaphors. David Chapman, a central influence, offered a generous summation of my aims and suggested an approach to the default density of my prose.
I've also received good follow up questions from Aryeh Nielsen, a consultant for Sonoma International Academy and Chief Dharma Summarizer at Evolving Ground. He's asked for clarification and expansion on some points.
Consider this, then, the first in a series of newsletter after parties. I'll answer Aryeh's questions. Exposition will proceed at a more deliberate pace. The whole thing will feel like we're back in a late 90s chill out room. There will be shoulder massages and lengthy breaks to use the restroom. Pseudo-Isaac Chotiner, an ungenerous character of my own invention, will chime in occasionally to call out what he presumes to be BS.
Like many late night conversations, we’ll lose track of time in this newsletter and linger on one topic in particular, the dimensions of “congruence” that bridge spiritual experience and practical knowledge. I’ll send out an addendum next week that illustrates with a detailed look at exercising skill in web development. If you are here for just a straight discussion of ideas, I suggest skipping the next section and going to the Q&A. For those of you looking for more cowbell, let me set the scene.
A Disco Bardo
Aryeh, Pseudo-Isaac and I are hanging out on November, 22, 1998. It’s the 35th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. We're at a Toneburst Collective event in Worcester, MA. It's very late in the early AM. DJ /Rupture is spinning ambient dub in the main hall. There's a backroom lounge on the other side of a wall covered in X-Files memorabilia. A blacklight painting of Agent Mulder sits between two doors. On the left side, over door #1, a sign reads, Trust No One. On the right, over door #2, it’s The Truth is Out There. Both doors seem to lead to the same place. We don’t know which to take.
In the midst our uncertainty, Force Ghost apparitions manifest. Mr. Miyagi and Xena Warrior Princess are there, locked in Tantric embrace. In one of his six arms, Miyagi holds a bonsai tree, shaped over many lifetimes into a taut Vajra. Peaking over Xena's shoulder, he looks us in the eyes and says, "you do not understand these signs, but you must choose”. Walter Benjamin is also hovering around, dressed in drag as the Angel of History. He's asking for money and doesn't have much that's intelligible to say, but he suggests walking backwards through whichever door we choose. And with that, the apparitions disappear. We make a sign of the cross, rotate 180 degrees, and take door # 2 on the right.
A bath of vaporized Vicks rub and patchouli oil greets us as we enter the lounge. Happy for a break from the EDM, The Space's regular crowd, blue-collar queers on leave from downsizing workplaces, mingle with travelers from Cambridge, Allston, and Somerville. The imports are serving Food Not Bombs meals that they've smuggled into the club underneath some Dr. Seuss hats.
In honor of the assassination anniversary, noodlers named "The Mayaderen Collective" are improvising over a vinyl pressing of the 1960 Nixon-Kennedy debates. Players contribute motley sounds assembled from sources recovered and catalogued in the The Spin Alternative Record Guide (1995). Aryeh and I are particularly fond of the Fijian nose flute, which the band first heard on a David Toop album.
Floating above most of the instrumental action, the flute creates some necessary space. The band is otherwise suffocating the room. Grooves of down-tuned microtonal guitar interlock with vamps on a Farfisa organ. Soulful, parading sax lines add emotional weight. The drummer, who normally steadies the caterwaul with a Motorik beat, is off tonight. The electric bass is doing what it can to pick up the slack, but the backing rhythm is sludgy. It all sounds like marching taps for an alien dwarf invasion. Wispy images of bug eyes and stub legs start replicating across the room, Gremlins-style.
The music is, however, clarifying things at a more subterranean level. Discursive thought is settling. Attention is being focused where it needs to be—at a point on the wall opposite to the band, roughly where Agent Moulder's shoulder blades would meet. An old 16mm reel projection of Metropolis (1927) is centered there. As Kennedy redirects questions about his experience to his vision for the 1960s, Weimar intimations of apocalypse play out.
There, in their midst, we discover the portal. Tradition tells us it’s the Aleph. We go through. On the other side, we dissolve. Then, gradually, we emerge. Now, where our bodies would normally be, we find ourselves as empty space, pregnant with the potential of the moment. Time slows. We’ve become what we’ve been told we always were—the centerless source of the rainbow lights turning in the disco ball at the heart of the room.
Headz are nodding on couches. Bill Clinton is about to be impeached. Al Qaeda is still mostly the dream of resentful engineers with a problematic theology. Coming off the blitz following Netscape's IPO, Aryeh and I are buzzing about the rumor on Slashdot that Red Hat may also go public. We're trying to figure out our own business model for an open-source education startup. Blackout curtains shield us from the dawn's early light.
We're also trying to understand what the purpose of even starting our own business would be in the midst all of this. It seems like the time and effort involved will just take us away from what matters. Or maybe it won't. Maybe there's time and space for both, worldly business and non-ordinary experience. Each has its own proper place. The two don't need to be related. Yet there's still a nagging desire for achieving coherence in our autobiographical narratives. Denny's breakfast is in the offing.
Q&A, Part 1
Aryeh Nielsen: Elaborate what you mean by "congruent"?
There are few components to the concept. I'm borrowing the word from Charlie. It denotes the fruit of Vajrayana practice, expressed directly and spontaneously in action as we relate to others and our environment. You can hear various references to it in their Stoa presentations, including the most recent.
I'm just beginning Vajrayana practice, but I have a background in Zen, which has many points of overlap. Both are late Buddhist traditions that come after the spread of Buddha-nature doctrine. Buddha-nature view implies, among other things, the non-duality of spiritual realization and everyday awareness. They're neither the same nor fundamentally distinct. Mountains are mountains, then they're not, then they are again. So we should, with the right introduction, be able to appreciate intimations of realization in a wide variety of everyday contexts.
In my first newsletter, "congruent" was mainly used to express a relation of good fit between the behavior of an agent and their situation. The agent could be an individual, group, or really anything that would be an appropriate target for the Intentional Stance. The good here would be understood instrumentally, as good for meeting the agent's already understood needs and purposes. Being able to reliably achieve good fit is having practical knowledge. It means acting appropriately, given the features of a situation and one's goals. The purpose of my writing is to see what such practical knowledge looks like when it's exercised inside of an idiosyncratic spiritual container. Eventually, the hope is to glimpse notions of good that are more than merely instrumental. The direction of fit between our actions and the determination of our goals reverses in those cases.
Let me try to explain the last point. Heidegger, when he's discussing our everyday engagement with the world in Being and Time (1927), uses a great pith that's been translated as, action has its own kind of sight. He means that acting can be a way of disclosing the features of equipment that wouldn't be accessible to passive observation. It's only when I'm hammering that I'm understanding what the hammer truly is. The same dynamic can apply at the meta level, to the person hammering. When I'm engaging with my environment congruently, I'm also understanding what I really am. I'm discovering what needs and purposes it's good for me to have in context, rather than just satisfying the ones I already have. I'm simultaneously discovering what I'm good for and what it's good for me to be through my engagement with the situation.
Experientially, from the agent's point of view, congruence is characterized by cycling between active and receptive engagement with the features of a situation (sometimes, layering those modes rather than cycling between them). When I'm engaging actively, I'm competently manipulating my environment to execute a task. When I'm engaging receptively, I'm appreciating aspects of the situation that exceed my competence or my understanding of what I'm doing. Spiritual practice is largely about cultivating such receptivity. However, in a tradition that isn't world-renouncing, that receptivity should feedback into activity. I should be shaping my world in light of my appreciation of the ways in which it fundamentally exceeds my grasp. I'm manipulating my environment with an underlying humility, but I'm confidently manipulating it, nevertheless.
The active mode of engagement feels like a flow state. In a cognitive task domain, it's the experience that accompanies recognizing and applying patterns to a problem. It's the joy of competence. One issue, in most task domains, is that I often need to get into flow when it's not arising spontaneously. This is especially true of routine drudgery. Here, spiritual practices or other cognitive-behavioral supports can help. If I routinely open awareness to what's arising on the cushion, I can, over time, increasingly find space around drudgery off-the-cushion. This keeps me from falling into neurotic motivational patterns in relation to the routine bullshit of work and life. I might feel the pull of routine bullshit when I want a break from dealing with complexity. I might push away from routine bullshit when I want excitement or a growth opportunity. I might regard routine bullshit with fatalism when it seems to accumulate inexorably. Letting the motivational drama of that neurotic push, pull, and indifference just play out in awareness, without manipulating or engaging it, helps me move on. I acquire the freedom to just do the routine bullshit.
I might also need to get out of flow when it's arising non-congruently. This may be more interesting and less appreciated. In a cognitive domain, this would be when my spontaneously recognized and applied patterns are blind to crucial features of my situation. The receptive mode of task engagement, layered over the active mode, is again useful here. It allows me to appreciate things in my task environment that should interrupt or redirect my flow. Warding off the danger of oblivious geeking is a good example. Oblivious geeking would be abstract displays of technical mastery or pattern recognition that are blind to concrete context and what a situation actually demands. Think of the technically masterful sax player who's so drunk on his own solo that he's completely oblivious to what the other players are doing or how the audience is responding. The awfulness of Phish, for example, seems rooted in their belief that a song can comprise cycles of oblivious instrumental geeking so long as the geeks take equal turns.
Finally, regarding congruence, there's the panoramic view. That involves seeing how practical activity achieves good fit not just between an agent and their micro situation, but with their macro situation as well—with their life, society, and moment in history. Here, we get to the outer reaches of congruence that are going to be the main subject matter of this Substack. I have an intellectual background that I think lets me see a different big picture than your average web developer and MBA student. That hopefully gives me a different way to evaluate the practical interventions that tech and business are making in the world. I hope to illustrate that next week in my web dev addendum to this answer.
Pseudo-Isaac Chotiner: You seem to have lost track of the fact that this was a Q&A about your first newsletter with more than just one question. You write about national decline and degeneracy. I'm getting real "9/11 clarified my values and I'm joining the CIA" vibes from it. Are you expressing imperialist nostalgia for the "American Century"?
No, I'm more of an Ambient Century type of guy. So I'm a cosmopolitan, but one looking for an old weird globalist posse. I'm especially looking forward to the future of global humanities. That said, I have pretty normie politics these days. I think competent national governments dedicated to internal economic growth are the proper vehicles of political cosmopolitanism. Those governments need to be backed by shared notions of collective good that are at least semi-factually connected to a nation's history. Mythologization is inevitable in imagined communities. The question is how and when it's responsible and useful. I'd also want the benefits of economic growth to be much more evenly distributed within already-developed nations than they are currently. So I'm just a boring internationalist social democrat with, hopefully, weirder and more entertaining jokes.
Aryeh Nielsen: You also mention Pinker's case for global economic optimism. The Anti-Pinker-Bots accuse Pinker of mistaking a period where volatility is artificially suppressed for a "new normal", as it was in many other inter-war periods. Comments?
If I had any confidence in my ability to forecast global trends, I'd try to find real money to invest and have actual skin in the game. But, from a spiritual practice perspective, it's interesting to entertain the question, "what if we really are at the end of history?"
The idea would be the following. No revolutions or cataclysms are coming. Our current political and economic order will sustain itself indefinitely. The radical Left will never make another world actual. Fiat currency will do fine. Crypto will stay a speculative vehicle for the profits of businesses and the savings of professionals that aren't being reinvested into ventures producing tangible things. The world will continue to flatten culturally. There will be hipster cupcake shops along the Great Wall of China and a Target in Piazza San Marco. Maybe we inch towards progress at guaranteeing access to good housing, education, healthcare, and a baseline standard of living. There will be more nice parks and fewer cars. We'll continue to have fewer children and more, still very domain-specific, intelligent automation.
It's interesting what parts of such a world we find intolerable to contemplate. Some of me is certainly triggered by a lot of it. That can be an entry to practice.
Aryen Nielsen: In what way does business life and spiritual life combine or stay separate for you?
Well, I think spiritual life, differently imagined than normal, should touch everything, including the mundane. Once you don’t have ultimate sources of meaning, local source meanings get spiritualized. You just need to be wary of the danger of falling into eternalism or monism. One of the things I will highlight in future newsletters is that I think that’s really how all religions, often in opposition to their own self-understanding, really work. It’s why people show up.
I should say more about the notion of "worldly business" in the first newsletter, though. It casts a much wider net than profit-oriented enterprises. It's really any social venture that requires deliberate care, concern, and effort by people to sustain. It includes family also. It's anything that creates the tragically fragile attachments to the world that contemplative monastics traditionally separate themselves from.
If you aren't just willing to just shrug off the transience of something from a Himalayan cave, then that's a potentially spiritualized connection to worldly business. It’s something you find meaning bound up in trying to sustain, so long as it’s serving its purpose.
Now, in our moment in history, participating in profit-oriented enterprises is how many of us spend our days. Sustaining them is what takes up a lot of our effort, care, and concern. There's plenty of political, cultural, and spiritual criticism that will tell you what's wrong with this picture. I think much of it is right. But I am going to focus a lot on the other side: what are some intimations of a better future implicit in the interventions tech and business are making in our world?
Pseudo-Isaac Chotiner: Aren't you just papering over the objective dystopia of our late capitalist world with some vaguely spiritual, Pynchon knock-off routine?
Well, I might have a different view of what's dystopian. Some of my most intense feelings of world-historical affirmation have come in anticipation of a second round of breadsticks at The Olive Garden. In some ways, to put it too grandly, I'm trying to glean the material base for an intellectually honest Bodhisattva Vow . It’s an impossible, visionary vow. It’s meant to be. But, if it’s also meant to connect to practical ethics, then it should have some empirical connection to the service delivery mechanisms that are actually meeting needs at scale.
Aryeh Nielsen: Any movement can be replaced by a meme that refers to it. What is your opinion on the current state of social justice vs. ["Social Justice!!!"(tm) as a meme]?
Ooh, thank you for the opportunity to position myself in the culture war. I hope to get some canceled subscriptions. Let's pick that question up at Denny's.