What’s the relationship between deepening spirituality and increasing practical knowledge? Many, especially in Silicon Valley, are concerned with this question. Practical knowledge would include anything that reliably contributes to more effective intervention in the world (aka, “getting shit done”). It runs the gamut from being able to write formal instructions for computers to accomplish certain tasks (aka, “automating skills”); to being able to write and explain recipes for humans to accomplish certain tasks (aka, “teaching skills”); to having the kind of embodied, tacit knowledge involved in competently skiing, dancing, meditating, communicating inside of a political coalition, or relating to a life partner (aka, “having skills”). Spirituality is more nebulous, and any definition is really the start of a theology to be elaborated and defended. My definition is going to be: maximally congruent—experiential and embodied—relations to the environment and others that are available to all human beings. The theology to be elaborated and defended will be everything that follows.
Some people concerned with these questions, let’s call them “rationalists”, treat the task of increasing practical knowledge or deepening spirituality—or the task of relating the two—to be a matter of designing effective, precise systems from first principles. I don’t think an exclusively rationalist approach will produce a spirituality worth wanting (or successful under its own terms). Instead, I think a humanistic approach is also necessary. A humanistic approach involves the careful interpreting and relating together of meaningful things that bear on a problem. It involves seeking out and really understanding foreign views that go against local assumptions (including self-congratulatory moral narratives). It involves knowledge of history, texts, and the ability to skillfully articulate vibes.
That’s it. That’s the Substack. Why bother and who am I to say? This first newsletter is story about that.
Our current emergence from COVID-19 is fairly unheroic and half-assed. It’s happening in an environment of increasingly surreal memetic drift into reality. It’s been a year of reckoning with our failure to handle the pandemic with either comparative competence or common purpose. That reckoning is really just continuation. Many aughts-era bloggers have been saying: our political institutions are structurally blocked from taking collective action, our popular culture is recycling franchises rather than imagining new worlds, we’re on the wrong side of the 80:20 rule of industrial modernity, we’re shrinking from history. We just don’t build stuff anymore. It’s a degenerate age.
Degeneracy is itself, though, a trope that reappears throughout history. It’s always a partial truth, a framing device. As any Pinker-bot on Twitter will tell you, the last twenty years have been, globally, better for vastly more people than not. So the primary thing to explain here is how to relate the feeling and evidence of degeneracy, the malaise, against the countervailing trends. Then new institutions might be built to make the malaise go way.
Smart people are on this. I don’t have practical solutions to contribute. I have no world-changing SAAS apps to pitch. I do have an odd assortment of knowledge and skills. For most of my twenties, I was studying for an academic career in the humanities, and I continue to read a lot at the intersection of philosophy, cognitive anthropology, and comparative religion. In my thirties, I learned to code and established a serious individual meditation practice. Now, in my 40s, I technically lead software teams, have started a part-time MBA, and have finally found a spiritual community online. My view of our cultural moment is fed by all those lifestreams. It is defined by believing that part of what we lack are any shared, resonant words and symbols for harnessing we want—the intersection of practical knowledge and spirituality—maximally congruent intervention in the world. That congruence includes what might normally be called “social justice”, but justice will look very different when the practical dimension of congruence, scaleable effectiveness in getting shit done, is raised to first-class status among virtues.
I don’t know what the shared, resonant words and symbols for what we want might be (that’s what it means to lack to them). I do know how I will go about trying to find and articulate them in the process of writing this newsletter. I’ll stitch concepts for thinking together systems of technical management, social cooperation, and spiritual realization—Harvard Business School case studies, reflections on experimental music and art, feminist interpretations of spirit possession, Du Bois speeches and Keynes memos, the history of Reconstruction and Weimar, Reactive programming techniques, post-positivist philosophy of science, Himalayan maps of meditation. The goal is to see the world in a Grain of Sand, but also in a well-managed supply chain (the Satanic Mills of industry understood as prophetic vehicles of world disclosure). I’m going to assay a poetics and theology of maximally congruent intervention in the world.
We lack such a poetics and theology for deep, historical reasons. All literate, stratified, urban civilizations since the Axial Age have generated their own versions of an elite ideal of retreating from worldly business and pursuing a higher good. It usually goes hand-in-hand with a method of disciplining mind and body into dealing with the world and experience in the raw, as they as are, rather than how we receive them or want them to be. Cloistered Oxford dons and ancient sramaṇas share this much. Say what you will about rejecting appeals to tradition and daring to know, or rejecting sensuality and upskilling desire, but at least they’re an an ethos. As cultural technologies of self-mastery, however, they can become quite atomizing and—when one-sidedly extended—detrimental to generating new descriptive or explanatory models of the world that can serve as the basis for effective intervention in it.
At Evolving Ground, the spiritual community I joined in January, both tradition and desire are approached differently. Traditions, in particular Dzogchen and the Nyingma school of Tibetan Vajrayana, are viewed meta-rationally: as ways of seeing, acting, and ultimately real-making that one must immerse oneself in—cognitively, relationally, practically, and experientially—before their principle, function, and— ultimately—their value can be assessed. With respect to desire and worldly business, those traditions define themselves against earlier, “Sutric” traditions of world-renouncing Buddhism. They have robust, pre-modern lineages practiced by householders and wandering yogis, not monks. They emphasize contemplative—and embodied ritual—methods for the non-manipulative finding of awareness in and around all desire, emotion, thought, action, and sensation. From inside this always-available experience of spaciousness, our selves can deconstruct and then come back online, ready to strategically engage in worldly business and find maximal congruence with our society and environment. This is Tantra.
My hope, as an apprentice Tantrika, is that, in the battle between basically pleasant bureaucrats and sexy murder poets, I need not choose. Show up to the virtual office on time, memorize and parse the details of an RFQ trade flow with the ecstasy of a Talmudic nitpicker, leave work on time and make myself available for playing with babies, seeing friends, recalling inevitable death, pursuing justice, loving my partner, being sad for a bit, cooking a good meal, and, in a sit before bed, arising in meditation as a wrathful goddess whose form qualities are but the spontaneous play of the world’s enlightened energy articulated in an inherited cultural script. In the streets, in the sheets, etc.
The vision here is quite normie, and you may say it’s already quite widespread, at least in other costumes. World-renouncing ideals have always been elite phenomena, and ordinary people thank Jesus for touchdowns or Natural Mind for Cate Blanchett’s performance in I’m Not There. We have a surfeit of prosperity gospels and Zen and the Art of the Deal bestsellers. I don’t actually think, however, that these are counterexamples. They’re really just paraphrases of the problem. Popular instances of transactional, world-intervening spirituality—e.g., relying on St. Anthony to find your keys—are theologically incorrect by the learned canons of their own respective Axial traditions. They harness no methods of opening awareness and leave selves complacently untouched, rather than deconstructing and reconstructing them within systems of maximal congruence. We still lack bridge systems between such virtuosic spirituality and competent intervention in the world that are (1) doctrinally coherent, (2) popular, and (3) not kitsch.
The remoteness of learned Axial theologies—in particular their increasing abstractness in response to post-Galilean science—are themselves a contributor to the problem. As the ground of being came to be conceived ever more impersonally and ever less sensuously, the God of the philosophers ceased to have any role to play in the grubby business of intervening in the world and getting stuff done. Austere technical rationality has completely filled the role that used to be at least partially played by magic and ritual. The gain in epistemic reliability has come at a loss in poetic relatability. Take, for example, this medieval Buddhist spell:
To gain heightened perception:
Place the tears of a recently deceased person into the palm of your hand, and then mix them with dust from the mat that was in contact with the corpse. If you anoint your eyes with the mixture, you will be able to see gods and spirits within nine miles. If you put it on your ears first, you will hear all sounds.
I don’t doubt that the code implementing augmented vision in Oculus goggles is a marvel to behold, but it will necessarily lack the empathic taste of my vanquished enemies tears. Computational procedures cannot, except in metaphor, conjure and control spirits, but conjuring and controlling spirits is how we saturate the world with invisible others who can mirror back to us human meaning about what we want. Except as mere metaphor, though, what could it possibly mean to conjure and control spirits? A beginning into honestly asking and answering this question might mean looking to abandon not the “metaphor” part, but the “mere”.
“Is there a form of spirituality that is not self-congratulatory, complacent, or kitsch, that does not involve committing intellectual suicide and losing one’s dignity as a critical, rational subject in more or less subtle ways?”
“The world,—this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of those next to me, take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech”
Whatever happens; may it happen!
Whichever way it goes; may it go that way!
There is no purpose!
- The Three Terrible Oaths of Dorje Tröllö
All the schools of Tibetan Buddhism conceive of spiritual vehicles as having a distinctive experiential base, path of practice, and result. The base of Tantric practice is experiential acquaintance with emptiness. “Emptiness” means too many things in Buddhism, but here it means the experienced fluidity in the phenomena of consciousness—their unstuckness—that can arise when thought cuts out. At Evolving Ground, the primary method for finding emptiness is shi-ne. Maintaining the presence of awareness with no attentional focus, attempting to remain uninvolved with thoughts as they arise, one occasionally gives way, released from the background tension of being coiled in grasping. The release can feel like a pop in headspace that flushes down the central channel from crown to nether bits. It’s not unlike a spiritual sneeze. It can also feel like an all-over all-at-once percolation of vibe through one’s surfaces and insides. Sometimes the second feeling follows as echo to the first. There’s usually an extension to the sense fields. Felt spaciousness surrounds what arises in them.
It’s natural to inquire of this experience of emptiness: what is it?—what does it mean?—what it is for? “Nothing”, I’ll argue, or at least nothing in and of itself. And I don’t primarily mean by this the “no thing” of punny mystical theologians, though I will eventually say something about that too. What I do mean is that periodically relaxing the grip of our concepts can be preparatory for something else. Untangled from familiar reference points, awareness opens space for being addressed by invisible others, and from that space new forms of congruent engagement with our worldly business release into view.
The ambit of invisibility is large. It includes those in ordinary life who are here right now in front of me, but occluded by the thought-stories I overlay on them. It includes those who are sensibly here but not currently visible, perhaps the other meditators on Zoom, each facing their own eyelids or slab of wall, all committed to the same practice. It includes those existing right now but not sensibly here: wife at her work, cat either sleeping or eating, friends not seen since the start of the pandemic, and the canopy of strangers compassion reaches for but rarely touches. It includes those on the other side of time’s passing as well; ancestors recalled from memory and dead authors hovering behind their texts.
Finally, it includes those invisible others who can only exist as such by courtesy of pretense: the pink noise of nearby rapids or distant traffic, the familiar wash of winter light, a horizon line glimpsed behind concrete cubes arrayed against desert sky, sonic overtones, semi-mantric catchphrases reemerging from childhood. I tend to these sorts of invisible others a lot. Let’s call them “virtual others”. They’re others because they seem to address us with needs and purposes. They’re virtual because they’re just sensible chunks of energetic phenomena and don’t really exist as others (yes, I suppose I’ll eventually have to define test stubs for my system’s “really exist as” modules). Because they’re virtual, their needs and purposes are unarticulated, yet they seem to demand our articulation of them.
Why become a virtualist? Why make a spiritual practice of opening space in awareness for being addressed by the needs and purposes of stones, tones, and machine exhaust? Why, having opened the space, make a practice of responding? It may seem like just playing around with imaginary friends. It may also seem like the antithesis of spiritual awakening. One mouthy gloss on that is that awakening is a spontaneous de-realization of the imputation of human meaning or purpose onto the phenomena of awareness in the process of realizing awareness unlimited by mere human meaning or purpose. If something in awareness is demanding you articulate its meaning, then you are, under this view, still asleep, imposing your errant desires on the equanimous perfection and realness of bare awareness itself. There is no purpose!
As noted at the outset, I want to move beyond this. I doubt that cultivating Sutric enlightenment, East or West, is enough. We need commitment to traditions without ultimate rational foundations, and we need delusive, folly-provoking, fantasy-fabricating desires (and it’s a good thing we need them because we’re unlikely to exist without them). I want to say that virtualizing, as a practice, makes something both existentially authentic and intellectually honest of both our natural, pre-cultural religious instincts and our unnatural, post-Axial religious inheritances in our degenerate age. I want to say—and that wanting should make you skeptical, or at least leery. Like all things pre-born of craving, engaging with virtual human meaning and purpose is not not-fraught. Intellectually sussing out a spiritual practice as a solution to the historical problem of modern disenchantment is also not likely to be very convincing to anyone outside of a university seminar room (or those wishing to be back inside). But the opposite, in this case, is also fraught and not likely to go well: closing ourselves off from sensed or imagined human purpose—and the muted goddess in the pink noise of distant traffic is at a minimum that—can easily slide into being anti-human.
They key is getting to the base of Tantra, or emptiness. That means, in this context, letting human meaning and purpose show themselves in experience—sheltered in our imagined gods or any inherited symbolic form—while at the same time showing themselves to be the product of the impermanent, groundless, delusive dance of human desire, sensory experience, and our cultural scripts. Meaning, like any other phenomenon of consciousness, will always come unstuck, but practicing the path of virtuality can cognitively acquaint us with the play of definition and vagueness in our application of categories to things. It can engender new symbolic forms that lessen the grip of our extractive way of relating to real, non-virtual others. But first, rather than hatching an escape plan, we must find the other virtualists. Then we can practice while engaging in the worldly business of modern life.
The virtualist can feel their own spirituality, not without ambivalence, as an exemplar of a type. The story of the type usually begins, in adolescence or early adulthood, with a break from religious upbringing. Popular imagination regards, and many of this type self-conceive, the break as intellectual: one can no longer believe in the creeds, in the efficacy of the rituals or prayers. Certainly the break can happen this way. It may even be the prevailing way among those constitutionally inclined to, or trained into, literal-minded modes of sense-making (those of us who feel most at home analyzing arguments, programming computers, or executing living wills ). More often, though, settling into disbelief follows something more sub-cognitive and elemental: the life of the received religious community no longer compels or inspires. One can no longer imagine being like that anymore. The horizon has been wiped.
Likely, certain experiences and encounters have intervened. Music and sexuality stoke the animal spirits, and these meet the well-worn homilies of temptation—Jesus in desert, Mara descending on the Buddha—with amused condescension, a cynical adolescent knowingness feeling its oats. There is reading too, of course—the usual East-to-West starter kit: Beat poetry and The Three Pillars; Hesse and Huxley. One goes to the last as prelude or coda to something else that figures prominently in the story—psychedelic experiences. Trips progressively melt the face of the inescapable fraud the engine of our self-storifying overlays on the world. The bad ones acquaint consciousness with the poverty of psychological materials fueling it; the good, with the romance of sense and imagination available on the other side.
From Huxley, one learns the name “perennial philosophy” and starts sitting on a cushion in the hopes of realizing it. The sitting does enough, if fitfully, to metabolize the experiences that brought one to it. So the virtualist keeps sitting and achieves some regularity of practice. Results are, however, uneven or at least the one feels unable, on their own, to assess them. So we become convinced of the necessity of finding teachers and a community of practice, though we seek them with the wariness of the once-lapsed. Instinctively, we distrust priestcraft and mystery-mongering, so much so we find ourselves constantly inventing the threat of them.
Here, the story devolves. Unsatisfactory antipodes tug at the “way-seeking mind”, as we learn to call it. At one pole sits the “spiritual but not religious”. Easy to mock in caricature, the best secular spiritual groups bring together people who are informal but committed in their style of practice, open but self-critical in what teachings they accept, and ultimately capable of balancing a profane and self-mocking attitude with a spiritual focus and seriousness. The trouble is the old dialectic: the more realized a spiritual group becomes in these secular virtues, the less in common its members find themselves substantively committed to outside of formal practice. Spiritual secularists will often share—fiercely held!—norms and processes for relating to each other and meta-attitudes for bringing their practice into the world. What they won’t share is much pattern or frequency in relating to each other in ordinary life. They eschew all of the social technology located at the other pole that would supply that: inter-generationally inherited forms—smells, bells, bows, vows and chants—ritual calendars and obeisances to complete at prescribed times and places, duties of social charity and obligations to ancestors, authoritative lines of transmission for spiritual teachings, enumerable moral precepts and rules that one must avow to fully own one’s place in the tradition. The means to ground and orient a community of spiritual practice in everyday life are there. “If you know what to do exactly, and you do it, you can express yourself fully”, as Shunryū Suzuki says. Yet, if this pole remains ultimately unsatisfactory, it’s because the virtualist can’t convincingly maintain embodiment of its forms; expressing ourselves like that naggingly feels like cosplay. Fake it until you make it, but what if you never make it. Adolescent knowingness maintains its grip on our karma.
A Pause and Some Methodological Notes
The primary intellectual influences are (1) Ernst Cassirer’s writing on the philosophy of symbolic forms (and many of its downstream influences) and (2) David Chapman’s writing on meta-rationality (and many of its upstream influences). On the spiritual practice front, it’s Charlie El Awberry and Jared Janes’s mentorship in contemporary Vajrayana (along with the whole Evolving Ground community they steward). The Aro gTér Lineage is our main point of departure. Outside of Evolving Ground, the two dominant practice influences are (1) Soto Zen as descended from Shunryū Suzuki and (2) the eclectic range of guests on Michael Taft’s Deconstructing Yourself podcast. I linked to some instances of all these influences earlier, but it’s pervasive, too much to link to in every given instance.
So I should say something, then, about the links. The goal is a throwback “hypertext essay” of 1990s vintage, where the links are there for exploration and to acknowledge sources for what I am saying. Where possible, I will link directly to web content that can be immediately explored, rather than to dutifully footnoted books. I do aim to write, however, in such a way that knowledge of the sources is unnecessary for any first-level understanding of what is said. The allusions and cites simply provide fuller inter-textual context, and many of them will be the target of more direct, non-footnoted engagement in subsequent writing.
Between my work and MBA schedule, I will be, at most, a weekend newsletter-writing warrior, cranking out 500 to 1,500 draft words each Sabbath. I will attempt to make a virtue of this constraint and develop a writing form and process that mirrors the subject matter—finding intellectual insight and spiritual space in and around worldly business. The vice of that constraint will be the necessity of quickly skating on shallow ice over a deep pool. Content will be composed of essayistic fragments, progressing and linking back in infinite scroll, and bundled in newsletters of around 2,500 to 4,000 words. I’m aiming for a 1 newsletter a month cadence, for 12 months. All content will be free.
Going forward, every writing session will end in a commit to my real-making repo on GitHub, no matter how fragmentary. The goal is to traceably record my thoughts as they develop from their half-baked hunch, bluff, and mistake stage (aka, “inspiration”) to whatever stage of rationalization, defense, and refinement signals to me either adequacy for publication or necessity of abandonment.
Plus one for using github as a tracker for in-progress work. It takes some courage, but it's an invaluable practice!
> expressing ourselves like that naggingly feels like cosplay.
Just so! And yet, those without costumes appear to be running around naked in Antarctica: also unsustainable.
I wonder if the "like that" will turn out to have been a feeling that someone is watching and judging; a hipster so afraid to workout lest he be confused for one of the bros that he denies himself the benefits of physical exercise. Thus a generation of the spiritually-weak too embarrassed to go to a spiritual gymnasium.