1973: Annea Lockwood arrives at Hunter’s Electronic Music Studio in NYC. She’s there to cover for its director Ruth Anderson, who is going on sabbatical. Annea and Ruth immediately fall in love, starting a romance that would last for 50 years.

1973-1974: Annea and Ruth talk regularly on the phone while Ruth is on sabbatical in NH. Ruth secretly records their conversations, capturing hours of hellos, goodbyes, sighs, flirting, courtship, and—most of all—laughter.

1984: Ruth records Resolutions, her last electronic piece. It’s deeply minimalist, starting with high-pitched and mildly discordant tones, which descend into an equanimous hum over 17 minutes. This becomes the first track on the album.

Resolutions is one of the most psychoactive pieces of music I’ve ever heard, and I seek this stuff out. It’s like someone managed to take an audio recording of formless jhana. It’s the perfect palette cleanser, setting up the rest of the album.

Worth noting that Ruth was a Zen practitioner and a student of psychoacoustics. She deliberately crafted psychoactive sounds. Annea said of Ruth’s work: “They slow me down to a state in which I’m just at peace. She intended that with them.”

Back to 1974: Ruth layers clips of their phone calls—mostly laughter and short phrases—over sad, dreamy piano interpolations of old love songs. She gives this track, titled Conversations, to Annea as a gift on cassette. The two promise to listen to it again when they’re older.

The laughter in Conversations is wildly contagious. It’s just two women, deeply in love, giggling back and forth for a solid ten minutes. My first listen, I laughed until I cried. It became the second track, and received the most praise from critics.

2005: Ruth and Annea get married in Canada, shortly after the legalization of same-sex marriage.

2019: Ruth dies of lung cancer. Annea grieves at their home in upstate NY. She finds she’s unable to listen to music. But she sits on her deck enjoying the sounds of crickets, birds, and distant traffic.

2020: Annea begins making field recordings of local sounds, composing a track titled For Ruth. She finds the forgotten tape of Conversations sitting on a shelf. She combines her field recordings with clips from their phone calls to create a chronology of their romance.

For Ruth is the most beautiful track on the album. It’s a soft, quiet landing after the intensity of Resolutions and the raucous laughter of Conversations.

The album ends with Annea telling Ruth, “Good night. I love you.” Ruth replies, one last time, “Bye-bye, darling.”

Listen to the album:

Track 1, Resolutions

Track 2, Conversations

Track 3, For Ruth

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It’s been a bit over three years since I started this blog. It’s brought me new ideas, new friends, new opportunities. In fact, it’s brought me a whole new self—Max Goodbird began as a silly pseudonym, but has grown into a three-dimensional human with his own values and dreams. An increasingly large proportion of my friends refer to me as “Max”.

I started this blog because I felt an immense pressure building inside me. I was brimming with ideas I found tremendously exciting, but had no one to share them with. When I did share (starting with the least-strange ideas), I got either blank stares or vague affirmation—no one around me seemed to be wrestling with the same problems.

In a word: I was lonely.

When I started writing, I decided to be completely earnest and honest. I shared everything from sophomoric philosophical takes to trip reports to my trials with mental health. I even wrote some short fiction.

And people listened! People were interested! Not most people of course, but some tiny slice of the internet started following along. A few read every single article I wrote.

Even better, people started writing back! Readers left thoughtful comments, often challenging my ideas and forcing me to refine them further. Other, bigger blogs discussed my ideas. People I admired from afar reached out to connect. With me!

After about a year of writing, I started meeting up with people in person. I pushed myself to embody the same values I’d embraced online: earnest and honest. My whole personality shifted: self-consciousness turned into confidence, self-reproach into self-acceptance. Ironically, being Max allowed me to be unabashedly myself.

It’s hard to overstate the personal transformation that’s taken place as a result. I’m something like 2-10x happier than when I started, depending how you measure. And while I can’t say with certainty that this blog sits at the root of all that transformation, it was certainly a huge catalyst.

But these days I’m finding it hard to write. I started a company 18 months ago, and recently raised another round of funding; that endeavor takes all the energy my left brain has to offer. The rest of my time is spent playing music, dancing, and building community around Boston (if you’re in town, join us!)

I may still post here occasionally. And I may try dooting around on bluesky (join my tens of followers). But I’m going to shut down paid subs and stop pushing myself to post here regularly. I hope I’ll pick it back up in a year or two, once I have more space to think.

Thanks again for being here. See you on the other side!

—Max

P.S. In my last anniversary post, I promised to write another Church of Reality. That promise has been hanging over my head for about fifteen months now. As a consolation, here’s a half-written article on David Bohm and a flurry of notes on Grothendieck.

The vibe is aggressively wholesome. On offer is a syncretic mashup of Buddhism, Hinduism, Western Occultism, Russian Esotericism, psychedelia, and new age nonsense. This video should help set the scene:

As allergic as I am to all the talk of “awakening” and “transformation”, sound bathing is one of the most viscerally pleasurable activities I engage in, right up there with a post-coital cuddle.

Even stranger, all that “transformation” talk has substance behind it. There are lasting, positive emotional effects—the kind you’d expect from meditation or a psychedelic trip.

What’s going on here?

Outline

• Becoming a Synesthete

• The Bowls

• Solve…

• …et Coagula

• Is this Jhāna?

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Becoming a Synesthete

I first learned about synesthesia in undergrad. I was fascinated by exotic states of mind, and even experienced a few minutes of “seeing sounds” during a freshman year mushroom trip. I was envious of people with drug-free access to such rich sensory experience. My day-to-day mode of being felt drab in comparison.

So I was surprised and delighted when, after a couple years of meditation practice, I started to develop sound-touch synesthesia.

I began to feel music in my body.

With a good pair of headphones on, any piece of music would generate intricate, symmetrical patterns of tactile sensation. The nerves in my skin would undulate to the beat; I’d feel low tones in my stomach, and high tones in my head. White noise would create a spreading, tingling sensation; a loud drone note would set every nerve vibrating at the same resonant frequency.

I’d always been keen on music, but this was something new.

And yet, as far as I can tell, that synesthetic link was always there—the meditation practice just helped me notice it. It got me to shift my attention away from my ears and into my body, drawing those tactile sensations into the foreground.

And from my discussions with other meditators, this appears to be true for everyone. Including you, dear reader. You too are a latent synesthete.

Let’s see if I can convince you.

To maximize the effect, we’ll unfortunately have to start at the opposite end of the bliss spectrum. Close your eyes and listen to these jump scare sound effects. Pay particular attention to what’s going on in your body.

Unless you have nerves of steel, you should feel your body tense up a bit at each jolt. For me, it’s like someone tossed a large rock into a calm lake. There’s a sudden splash, and the ripples linger for a few seconds as that initial moment of panic dissipates.

This is easy to explain away as a flight response: you hear a threatening noise, and your muscles tense, preparing to react.

Let’s see how a more predictable sound feels:

(The effect is going to be an order of magnitude more subtle here. You may want to turn up the volume. If you’re not feeling any tactile effect, maybe try the jump scares again to familiarize yourself with the sort of sensation you should be looking for.)

When I listen to this steady kick drum, I feel a scooping or pushing sensation, mainly in my face, arms, and chest, coming forward to meet the sound of the drum. And if I pause the audio, those tactile sensations continue to echo for a few beats, eventually trailing off into the ether.1 [1]

If you’re still following me, let’s take one step further down the subtlety train:

Sitting here at my desk, it takes a good 30 seconds of quiet sitting to really start to feel the marimbas vibrate inside my head and torso, and even then the effect is soft. But different notes seem to resonate in different places, and recurring motifs trace a circuitous path through my torso. The biggest sensations arise when a new pattern appears, like that first sour note at 1:28—a miniature and much more pleasant jump scare.

Maybe you feel these things too. Maybe not. Maybe you feel something, but you’re not sure if you’re just imagining it. To which I’d say: keep imagining! The line between reality and hallucination is very blurry here.

However much you feel as you listen to these sounds, know that it’s a practicable skill. Meditation—especially body scanning—can help grow your synesthetic capacity. (For the impatient, a small dose of cannabis can greatly amplify the effect.)

Every sound is an invitation to react—to run, dance, turn your head, or shift your gaze. Whether or not you follow that invitation, you can feel your body prepare for it.

The Bowls

All the sounds above were percussive. Even the marimbas make a sudden burst of sound when the mallet strikes, which makes the resulting tactile sensations easier to notice.

But that kiki spike carries with it a touch of unpleasantness. It’s a miniature jump scare, a minor affront to expectations at the edge of your predictive processing network.

Singing bowls, by contrast, are as bouba as it gets. Just a single, constant note, resonating for minutes. Unlike the percussive sounds, which evoke a sense of motion and direction, the bowls generate a steady pulse.

When the bowls sing, my body begins to pulsate along with them. There are usually two dominant frequencies: the note itself, vibrating hundreds of times per second; and a subtle undulation in volume, cycling once or twice per second.

I can feel both in my body. The former is a warm tingling, the latter a steady pulse of expansion and contraction.

This isn’t entirely a synesthetic sensation. When you’re in the same room as the bowls, there’s a physicality to their vibrations. If you’ve ever been to a loud concert and felt the bass vibrate in your chest, you’ll have a sense for what I’m talking about. You can play the first video in this essay at full volume and place your hands on the speakers to get a sense for what I’m talking about. But something is lost in the recording.

When I’m in the presence of the singing bowls, those physical vibrations blend into and resonate with the synesthetic ones. It’s unclear where one ends and the other begins. The boundary between the external world and internal subjectivity gets fuzzy, and starts to dissolve.

Within minutes, my body disappears entirely. All that’s left is disembodied vibration.

Solve…

Phenomenology is a tricky thing. It’s famously impossible to describe “blue” to a blind person. How can possibly I describe to you what it feels like to not have a body?

We’ve already had a little practice with body scanning in the jump scare exercise, so let’s start there. Close your eyes and sit still—what sensations are telling you hey, you have a body?

Maybe you feel the pressure of the chair on your butt, or the cool air on your hands, or a tension around your forehead. All of these are tactile perceptions, spread out in space. And they form a foundation for proprioception—for your sense of your body’s size, shape, and orientation.

What would happen if those sensations went away? Or if all that differentiation between coolness and pressure and tension congealed into a single throbbing pulse?

This is exactly what I get from the singing bowls. At first I feel the hard density of the ground against my back, the cool air on my face, the roughness of my clothing. But soon the bowls dominate, and those individual sensations start to swirl together. Instead of feeling dozens of disparate proprioceptive signals, there’s just a single buzzing cloud. Sometimes it has a solid boundary, sometimes it bleeds out into infinity. But the shape of head-torso-limbs is nowhere to be found.

The effect fades in and out. Occasionally some individual sensation will poke back through into consciousness. Or I’ll get distracted when some tantalizing thought enters my awareness.

But for minutes at a time, I bask in the cozy comfort of dissolution.

…et Coagula

But I promised more than mere bliss. I promised long-term effects, on par with meditation and psychedelics.

Here we’ll have to step on epistemically shaky ground. I’m going to make an assertion, which you can, in time, verify empirically: all emotions are just correlated groups of tactile sensations.2

Here’s Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score:

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

(emphasis mine)

To put it a bit more directly: say you’re experiencing anxiety. Maybe there’s a knot in your stomach, a tension in your brow, a clenching in your jaw. We’d colloquially say that “anxiety”—some mysterious intangible force—causes these symptoms. I’m saying that it is identical to them. If you took away all that knotting and clenching, there’d be no residual sensation to label “anxiety”.

If you pay attention to this fact, patterns emerge. Positive emotions tend to be fluid, effervescent, difficult to localize. Negative emotions tend to be hard, dense, and have a specific location or set of locations. The worst emotions though (in my opinion) carry a sense of emptiness, as though your chest or head has been hollowed out, and all that remains is a hard outer shell.

So it’s not surprising that the singing bowls carry me off into bliss! The physical and synesthetic vibrations dissolve the hard edges propping up whatever anxiety or sadness or anger is lingering in my body. Everything becomes that singular ringing sensation.

This experience of dissolved body sensations is essential to meditative and psychedelic experiences. Here’s Michael Pollan describing his experience listening to Yo-Yo Ma on mushrooms:

Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it, not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant black well of space inside the cello…and I was now it, with no remainder.

Of course, eventually the bowls stop singing, or I stand up from my meditation, or I come down from my psychedelic trip. Slowly I return to my body. All those hard edges recongeal.

Usually the process is as sudden and natural as waking up. But once—at the end of an intense psychedelic trip—I was able to observe it. I watched as the smooth surface of my tactile lake rose up, twisted upon itself, and burrowed deep into my suddenly-remembered stomach. “Oh neat, I guess that’s where my baseline anxiety lives.”

Each time I untie and retie these knots, I get better at it. I figure out the tricks. There’s the anxiety in my stomach, which loosens so long as my attention is on it. There’s a knot in my left temple that seems to correlate with discursive thought and problem solving. I’m even starting to be able to conjure a sense of joy just by spreading my attention across my head, torso, and the surrounding space.

Is this Jhana?

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I’m told by some expert-level meditators that eventually the knots stop re-forming. Edges might appear and disappear as they move their body, or experience an emotion, but their default state is dissolved. Honestly I don’t know how they’re able to ride a bike or put food in their mouth, but I’ve had enough first-hand experience with these states that I trust their reports.

I’ve already drawn some loose parallels between singing bowls, meditation, and psychedelics. For me, all three are part of what I’d call an introspective practice. And increasingly, I’m interpreting my experiences in terms of jhana.

The first jhana is characterized by—you guessed it—tactile sensations. Practitioners look to identify and amplify pīti, pleasant tingling found anywhere in the body. The metaphor of “champagne bubbles” comes up frequently. For me, nothing conjures pīti more than staticky white noise.

The next two jhanas are traditionally described more in terms of emotion (“joy” and “peace”) than in terms of physiological sensation. But again, I’ll assert that emotions are tactile sensations. My map isn’t great here, but the spreading and smoothing of the champagne bubbles seem to roughly correlate, respectively, with those two emotions.

In the fourth jhana, the field of tactile sensation becomes so smooth and undifferentiated that (a) there’s not much sense of a body left over, and (b) there’s not much emotion lingering around. It’s a state of deep equanimity.

My map ends at the fifth jhana—the first of the subtle jhanas. It’s described as “boundless space”, which feels impossible to describe, but I’ll try. In the fourth jhana, there’s still a bit of a shell surrounding me, a sense that there’s a hard edge at the periphery of my awareness. But sometimes—especially with the help of those vibrating crystal bowls—that hard edge dissolves, and I’m left floating in a void. You might imagine the ocean rising above the continents; with no more shores to lap up against, the waves just roll along.

I think this is what the Buddha meant when he said “Life is dukkha,” aka suffering: you need a body to live, the body has hard edges, and hard edges are unpleasant.

I haven’t yet figured out how to exist without dukkha. Some claim it’s possible, and a combination of empirical evidence and naive hope leads me to believe them.

For now, I’ll continue gathering with strangers, laying on the floor, and basking in the dissolutory vibrations of a crystal singing bowl.

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Astral Codex Ten

Twilight Of The Edgelords

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a year ago · 145 likes · 334 comments · Scott Alexander

(Unattributed quotes below are from this piece.)

I’m going to pick on Scott a bit, for three reasons:

• First, because Scott is one of my favorite essayists, and I think he’s a good person who wants to help people

• Second, because it seems like Scott is in a sensitive place and actively trying to make sense of his cultural power

• Third, because one time he was kind of mean to me on Reddit

Outline

• Backstory

• Edging

• Feel Me?

• Rules for Thee

• Truth and Power

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Backstory

For those who are out of the loop: Scott Alexander is a figurehead of the Rationalist movement (which I’ve been more or less adjacent to for over a decade). The Rationalists, to greatly oversimplify, believe that any subject—no matter how technical, controversial, or esoteric—can benefit from dispassionate study and candid open discourse. There’s a lot of meta-discussion about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and epistemology.

It’s a bustling marketplace of ideas, and often very good ones do bubble up to the top. The community does its best work around the center of the Overton Window, providing deep explorations of important-but-uncontroversial topics like housing policy, taxation schemes, the efficacy of various medical interventions, etc.

Thing is, this approach to discourse really thrives at the edges of the Overton window. Race, gender, mental health, politics, and moral philosophy are among the most tantalizing Rationalist subjects, because it provides a safe space for taboo ideas. Do you think that a particular conspiracy theory is somewhat plausible? That Identity Group A is inherently smarter than Identity Group B? That Technocratic Aristocracy is better than Democracy? The Rationalists want to hear from you! Come hawk your wares! The unregulated (ok fine, lightly regulated) marketplace will decide if they’re any good.

Rationalists’ big thing is that the natural human process of cognition is capable of reaching accurate results, but that’s not really the default mode. And rationalists are not just aware of this — they think it’s a big problem, and they try really hard to push back on it and develop better reasoning skills.

…But of course, there’s more to it than predicting…part of the practice of rationalism is that in order to do it effectively, you have to be willing to be impolite. Not necessarily 24 hours a day or anything, but when you’re in Rationalism Mode you can’t also “read the room.” A rationalist would say that human psychology is over-optimized for reading the room, and that to get at the truth you need to be willing to deliberately turn off the room-reading portion of your brain and just throw your idea out.

—Matthew Yglesias via Slow Boring, In defense of interesting writing on controversial topics

Edging

As the culture wars intensified, Scott’s ostensible Psychiatry blog became a gathering place for people with…let’s call them nuanced opinions. It attracted gay marriage supporters who are wary of having trans women in traditionally female spaces; politically literate people who think the government should operate more like a corporation; and—most notoriously—people empathetic to racial inequality who nonetheless think it’s more a product of genetics than institutionalized racism or systemic bias. The blog became increasingly concerned with the rise of Cancel Culture and Woke Ideology, and the perceived chilling effect on honest-but-controversial research.

We wanted people to question p-hacked psychology studies and TED talk experts telling them the Nine Ways That Science Proves Merit Is Fake

…We wanted a swift, lean government that stopped strangling innovation and infrastructure

…We wanted to be able to hold a job without reciting DEI shibboleths

…We wanted to be able to discuss commonsense facts about sex and race without getting called Hitler

…We wanted to be able to prevent biological men with testosterone-boosted muscles from competing in women’s sports leagues

The tone of Scott’s writing began to shift as well. The little hints of self-satisfied intellectualism that dotted his earlier essays grew into a bitter self-righteousness.

I can’t entirely blame him—the Left was starting to overreach, clamping down hard on the Right side of the Overton window. Well-intentioned professors were being fired because their scientific conclusions didn’t match the consensus liberal reality occupied by your average undergraduate. Scott himself was attacked as racist and sexist by The New York Times.

And so the Rationalists pushed back. Scott had gathered huge amounts of credibility, especially among the techie elite, and was now using it to bravely defend the rightmost edge of the Overton Window.

Now that fight is over, and it’s clear who won. But the Overton Window can’t sustain too wide a berth, and the erstwhile “free speech absolutists” are literally jailing people for Leftist political speech. Scott is understandably upset.

We’ve spent the past ten years pushing, you know, based heterodox edgy opinions. I still think our opinions were true and good. But…

All of our good ideas, the things the smug misinformation expert would have tried to get us cancelled for, have gotten perverted in the most depressing and horrifying way possible.

…Wasn’t it Kipling who said you needed to be prepared to “hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools”?

What went wrong?

Feel Me?

Writing is effective to the degree that it pulls the reader into empathic resonance with the author. This is true of fiction and poetry, sure, but also of philosophy, news reporting, and mathematics1.

Content thrives when it evokes feeling. Feeling is what gets content copied, clicked, shared, liked. The feeling can be joyous or angry or horny or sad—all that matters is its strength. Everything, from cat gifs to medieval literature, follows this rule.

Sometimes we like to think that nonfiction is somehow exempt. That documentaries and essays and newspapers thrive because of their informational content, and not because of the feelings they arouse in their audience. This is obviously silly.2

So the purpose of an essay is not to argue for a thesis. The purpose of an essay is what it does. The purpose of an essay is to evoke emotion.

When I read Scott’s Ivermectin essay, sure I learned a bunch about statistical analysis and worm infections. But mostly I felt very clever, because I was able to follow each plot twist in Scott’s Agatha Christie-esque investigation. I fantasized about all the WELL ACTUALLYs I’d be dropping the next time the topic of Ivermectin came up. I mentally rehearsed my lines in bed that night.

I write because I want you to feel what I feel. Sometimes getting you to believe what I believe is part of that, maybe even a necessary part. But it’s not the main point.

Sometimes the author is afraid, and infects you with their fear. Sometimes the author is optimistic, and infects you with their optimism. Sometimes the author is greedy, and infects you with greed. Sometimes the author is just really jazzed about a neat idea, and…you get the pattern.

The best Scott Alexander essays are the ones where Scott is feeling clever: in his wanderings he has stumbled upon a compelling idea, and the essay promises to guide you along the same magical journey. The next best are written by a perplexed Scott, and offer a tour through a delightfully interesting maze, where he points out the most intriguing dead ends (see e.g. his Gordian resolution of the Repugnant Conclusion).

But the worst essays, the ones that turned me off from reading his blog for a couple years, are the ones that come from a place of self-righteousness. The ones where Scott sees himself as fighting an important ideological battle, as a bastion of truth in a mad world. Because when I read those essays, I start to see myself as a soldier in the fight. My adrenaline rises. I can feel the threat emerging, just over the horizon. They’re coming for our free speech! For our academic rigor! They’ll make us choose between Truth and Justice!

A sample from one essay that made the rounds as Trump propaganda:

If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.

And if you don’t, stop.

Stop fearmongering. Somewhere in America, there are still like three or four people who believe the media, and those people are cowering in their houses waiting for the death squads.

…Stop talking about dog whistles.

…Stop responding to everyone who worries about Wall Street or globalism or the elite with “I THINK YOU MEAN JEWS…”

…Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.

…Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

This is great writing! It immediately draws us into Scott’s emotional state. His anger and frustration are infectious. The repetition is hypnotic.

And so it doesn’t matter that Scott is emphatically not a Trump supporter. The essay made Trump supporters feel good about themselves. And so, much to Scott’s and no one else’s surprise, it made the rounds in a bunch of Conservative spaces.

Scott’s essays are so compelling because of his skill at drawing—literally compelling—the reader into his own headspace. It’s just that sometimes it’s not a very good headspace.

Again, I’m picking on Scott for reasons. The same is true of every other essayist I love. Sam Kriss at his best provides catharsis; at his worst, a sense of jaded superiority. Ted Gioia at his best makes me fall in love with art and music as if for the first time; at his worst, like I’m part of a small culturally-literate elite in a crumbling world. Alex Dobrenko at his best makes me feel silly and whimsical; at his worst…well, actually, Alex is almost always silly and whimsical.

And of course, the same is true of me. My best essays come from a sense of wonder; the worst come from a place of frustration and despair. It doesn’t help that the latter tend to get more engagement. (Where this particular essay ranks is left as an exercise to the reader.)

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Rules for Thee

We’ve always known that authors are unreliable. It’s been hammered into my head since middle school that there’s no such thing as unbiased writing, that every writer brings their personal experience and emotions and opinions into their work, no matter how hard they try to stay objective. Doesn’t matter if it’s The Associated Press or Breitbart—the difference is only ever a matter of degree.

The problem with Rationalism is that we really, desperately want to believe that we’ve found the magic formula, if not to be perfectly objective, then at least to be more objective than anyone else. That we’ve found antidotes for the passions, superstitions, insanities, and groupthink that plague other movements. That we, through our growing Rational superpowers, are capable of perfectly separating the subjective and objective, of evaluating reality as it is, without any contamination from our feelings about how it should be.

I would approve of [the Rationalist community] much more if they called themselves the irrationality community. Because it is just another kind of religion. A different set of ethoses. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but the notion that this is, like, the true, objective vantage point I find highly objectionable. And that pops up in some of those people more than others. But I think it needs to be realized it’s an extremely culturally specific way of viewing the world, and that’s one of the main things travel can teach you.

—Tyler Cowen, in an interview with Ezra Klein

Here’s what I wrote in Ayn Rand Will Kill Us All, the essay Scott took issue with:

…for many of us—including myself—the most insidiously sticky ideas are dressed up in scientific or logical rigor. The language of reason creates an illusion of certainty.

Sometimes we can uncover this trickery through rational discourse—e.g. the sections above make a rational argument that Rand is wrong. But too often the logic serves as armor for a belief that carries emotional appeal. We might listen to a counterargument, but we won’t hear it.

…When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.

And here’s the most salient part of Scott’s long response:

Mention that Reason exists, and they'll interpret it as a claim that you, the only rational person, are claiming to always be right and infallible. But (they retort) actually nobody knows anything, and the only wise people are the people like them who humbly admit this.

Look, I’m far from an anti-Rationalist. I really do believe in Reason, or at least that there are more and less effective methods for navigating the world. I believe Rationalism worth studying and learning from.

I just doubt the ability of any person—and especially any group of people—to grasp Reason for more than a fleeting moment. Worse, the more we try think of ourselves as rational and objective, the more we push our emotion, bias, and insanity into the shadows, where they can operate with impunity.

Scott’s sin was not, as he implies in Twilight of the Edgelords, merely speaking truth to an increasingly illiberal Leftist ideology. It was not in the facts he enumerated or in the opinions he offered. It certainly wasn’t in presenting ideas I and other Cringe Soy Redditors disagreed with.

His sin was indulging in that feeling of self-righteousness. It was in deploying that informal, hyperbolic, caps-ridden, repetitive style of rhetoric seen in the “Stop” passage above. It was the emotional affect—not the intellectual content!—that made his writing such a powerful weapon for the knaves.

Truth and Power

There’s a way to do this correctly. The ACLU has literally defended Nazis, but no one thinks they’re responsible for galvanizing the White Supremacy movement. You can defend without simultaneously attacking.

If you want to make the world a better place through writing, ask yourself—what emotion am I drawing people towards? Am I writing from a place of compassion, curiosity, excitement? Or am I writing from a place of anger, fear, and resentment?

I have two thoughts on how writers might learn from Scott’s experience, and become more responsible stewards of our collective cultural clout:

First, you can just not write things. Sometimes signal-boosting a particular truth creates negative utility. Maybe the “true, kind, and necessary” criterion isn’t something to be weakened. Don’t be Coria.

Coria: …I think you should say true things.

Beroe: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying too.

Coria: No, you think that saying true things happens to produce good consequences. I’m saying that you should say true things, regardless of the consequences.

Second, understand and acknowledge your own emotional state before putting hands on keyboard. Avoid writing out of resentment and anger, even when (especially when!) it feels justified.

Opposing evil is also a virtue, and I plan to exercise it. I think the coming years will provide us with no shortage of emergencies, and during emergencies I’ll focus my energies and commentary on triaging the emergency rather than backstabbing

I think Scott’s essays, in aggregate, have done more good than harm. They’ve introduced me and many others to new and powerful ways of thinking. More importantly, his writing has spawned several online spaces with slightly-less-than-average horribleness.

I’ll also point out that impossible to wield power without doing a proportional amount of harm. Well-intentioned CEOs sometimes need do layoffs; peaceful world leaders sometimes need to conduct wars. Every national policy, no matter how well thought out, hurts someone. It’d be shocking if Scott’s influence never had any negative effects on the world.

But we can’t overlook the fact that Scott’s writing had a substantial—and, as I and many other Cringe Soy Redditors tried to point out, predictable—role in creating an ideological foundation for the illiberal regime that currently occupies the seat of power in America.

The smug woke misinformation expert Redditors knew! They predicted, very clearly, “if you ever let people talk about how men have higher grip strength than women, then 5 - 10 years later America will be taken over by a cadre of frothing tyrant-bigots who will try to cancel the Constitution.” We laughed at them because it was so outlandish. But in retrospect they were the greatest superforecasters of all.

So I’ll try and make another prediction: Scott will continue his foray into post-Rationalist territory. He’ll recognize that Truth is always distorted by language, and choose his words more carefully. He’ll realize that he’s not just a purveyor of fine ideas; he’s a wizard who can draw millions of people into a synchronized emotional state.

And then we’ll see what an honest man can do with power.

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You might even see them as opposites: mathematics requires deep concentration on abstract concepts; meditation involves relaxing attention1 and letting go of concepts.

But mathematics is unreasonably effective at describing the physical world. So maybe it can help us describe mental world as well.

In particular, the language of vibration—of circles, cycles, frequencies, waves, phases, oscillation—comes up constantly when talking about states of consciousness. It’s almost cliche in New Age literature, with practitioners claiming “everything is vibration” or trying to “raise their frequency”.

But all that nonsense comes from an intuitive wellspring: vibration underpins everything, and our minds are no exception.

(I’'ll also recommend Sabine’s Substack, Science without the Gobbledygook, which is the most delightfully German way to say Minus the Nonsense I can imagine)

Outline

• Going in Circles

• Everything is Vibration

• The Shape of Waves

• A Recipe for Anything

• I Am a Strange Loop

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Going in Circles

I promised “gentle math” in the title, so let’s start simple. And what could be simpler than a circle?

Pick out a center point, then put a dot at every place exactly one inch from there.2 Boom, you’ve got a circle.

When we talk about circular motion, the terminology changes a bit. We tend to speak of waves, oscillation, or vibration. These words describe anything that wiggles back and forth around a center point—similar to how our circle above is cycling around a center point. The difference is that while a circle moves in two dimensions, waves move in one dimension.

In fact, if we break things down a bit, our 2D circle above is really made up out of two waves, one moving vertically and one horizontally:

(If the sudden appearance of sine waves is triggering PTSD from high school math—relax! We won’t get into trigonometry here.)

You can think of waves as one-dimensional circles, or of circles as two-dimensional waves. So I’d argue that waves are even simpler than circles—they just describe anything that wiggles, anything that moves back and forth around a center.

Bounceback Systems

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

—The Kybalion

I like to call anything that wiggles like this a bounceback system. Some examples:

• A playground swing

• Your lungs as they breathe in and out

• A flag flapping in the wind

• The shock absorbers on a car or bike

• The keys on your computer keyboard

• Your vocal chords

But if this were a physics textbook, we’d probably be talking about pendulums:

Bounceback systems have a happy resting spot, like the pendulum when it’s pointed straight down. But if you disturb them a bit, they start to wiggle back and forth around that happy spot, rather than falling straight back into it and resting there.

If we plot the position of our pendulum over time, we get a wave like the ones above:

In the real world, our pendulum would eventually run out of energy3 and rest back in the vertical position. But if there weren’t any wind or friction to slow it down, it’d keep wiggling back and forth forever!

There’s a simple way to state the dynamic at play here: a bounceback system accelerates back towards its stable point, in proportion to how far away it is. Push the pendulum a little, it accelerates back just a little; push the pendulum a lot, and it’ll pick up real speed.

But no matter how far you push it, it’ll always overshoot, past its happy spot at the bottom. At that point, it starts to accelerate in the opposite direction, triggering an infinite loop.

Everything is Vibration

So why is this useful knowledge for meditators? The key insight is that everything you experience is vibratory. Bounceback systems are everywhere.

Sound is the most obvious example—vibrations in the air wiggle your eardrums, and you experience a voice, a song, applause. And sine waves, like the ones we explored above above, make the simplest conceivable sound—a tiny hum. Here’s one that wiggles 440 times per second:

Vision is a bit harder to think of in terms of vibration, but every photon that hits your eyes is vibrating4 trillions of times per second. The only difference between yellow and blue is that blue is vibrating a bit faster. And if you pay close attention to your visual field (especially with eyes closed), you’ll notice a whole lot of flickering and pulsing. In fact, the image on the screen in front of you is flickering somewhere between 60 and 250 times per second—so fast your brain can’t see it.

Even smell and taste are hypothesized to be vibratory phenomena, related to how chemicals wiggle after attaching to the chemoreceptors in your nose and tongue. Chemicals with the exact same shape but different weights (e.g. water with an extra neutron) wiggle differently, causing a difference in taste.

Really everything about the nervous system is vibratory: different neurons are described as having different vibrational frequencies; EEG, one of our best windows into brain activity, measures electromagnetic vibrations emanating from the brain, with different frequencies roughly corresponding to different conscious states:

And at the macro scale, any repetitive behavior—like breathing, shivering, blinking, walking, stirring, or brushing—can be characterized in terms of vibration.

So developing a more intimate understanding of vibration gives us a better vocabulary for describing and modulating our experience.

The Shape of Waves

Some of these sensations, like breathing, follow the nice smooth curve of a sine wave. But most of them take on stranger shapes, with complicated rhythms and sudden jumps.

Consider your heartbeat:

It has the regular peaks and valleys of the sine wave, but the peaks are sharp and sudden, while the valleys are flat and extended. And there seem to be a few signals mixed together here, with some smaller peaks surrounding the main peaks.

There are a few basic wave shapes (which will be particularly familiar to electronic musicians) that come up frequently:

And we can get all sorts of interesting shapes by adding different waves together:

So vibration doesn’t just cover the smooth in-and-out motion of a pendulum or your breath. Flapping, twisting, throbbing, jiggling, bouncing, heaving, winding, rocking, quivering—all these types of motion can be captured by the mathematics of vibration.

A Recipe for Anything

In fact, we can make any5 shape we want by combining sine waves (or, in 2D, spinning circles).

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There are three numbers we care about when combining waves (or spinning circles) to create a recipe6 for something bigger:

• The amplitude: how high are the peaks and how low are the valleys? or, how big is the circle?

• The frequency: how many wave peaks occur each second? or, how quickly is the circle spinning?

• The phase: does the wave start at a peak, a valley, or somewhere in between? or, which direction is the circle pointed when the spinning starts?

In our “recipe” analogy, the ingredients are frequencies, and the amount of each ingredient is the amplitude. The phase might be the timing of when each ingredient is added—the analogy breaks a bit here. (And in many cases, like with sound waves, the phase doesn’t matter at all.)

For example, you can build a square wave out of sine waves with increasingly higher frequencies:

We can lay this out in 2D as well, just by replacing waves with spinning circles. We add them together by stacking the circles on top of each other, putting each circle’s midpoint somewhere (the phase) along the edge of the previous circle.

And then we press play:

Each row shows in this animation shows what happens when we add one more spinning circle to the mix. Note how the black dots in the middle column get closer and closer to tracing out a (very wobbly) 2D square. And when we plot the vertical position of those dots in the right column, we get closer and closer to our 1D square wave.

But it’s not just squares—any loop, no matter how complicated, is made up of spinning circles! That’s how we get our drawing of a hand: we just stack spinning circles, with very precise frequencies, amplitudes, and phases.

The recipe above has dozens of spinning circles, each with its own frequency, amplitude, and phase. It’s perfectly calibrated to produce a line drawing of a hand holding a pen. A similar recipe exists for any7 line drawing you can think of.

I Am a Strange Loop

When sitting in meditation, I’m often struck by the fact that the gestalt of my experience—the sum of all my thoughts, emotions, and sensations—is exactly like the hand drawing above. My state of mind is composed of many different vibrations, all added together into something that seems much more intricate.

Take, for instance, your internal monologue (assuming you have one): like any sound, hallucinated or heard, it’s just a vibration. It’s made up of a handful8 of waves added together.

Scientifically-minded meditators often describe their experiences in terms of vibration. I wrote the following in Macro and Microphenomenology:

Some contemporary microphenomenologists are even helping to translate traditional meditative concepts into contemporary scientific terms: Romeo Stevens has observed that most of the mental events the Buddha discusses occur very rapidly, in the 10-40 Hz range; Nick Cammarata and Daniel Ingram concur, claiming that tanha specifically occurs between 25 and 100 milliseconds after a stimulus (which translates precisely to 10-40 Hz!).

Another data point: I’ve heard Roger Thisdell say that he gained insight into centerlessness after noticing his sense of center would reassert itself at a rate of about 1.6 Hz.

Thinking in terms of vibration helps me break down my experience into its component parts. I can feel anxiety as a twisting in my stomach, sometimes in combination with a throbbing between my temples. Panic is a sudden increase in both the frequency and amplitude of those sensations. And recognizing this is a huge help in mitigating the effects—often I just need to relax the muscles in my abdomen, and any anxiety dissipates.

As I deepen my meditation practice, I can increasingly see the individual vibrations making up my experience, and even start to bring them into harmony. The throbbing in my temple is accompanied by a flashing white spot in the corner of my vision; the ringing in my ears syncs up with the visual snow behind my eyelids; the sound of a churning dishwasher is connected to an eddy of tactile sensation in my torso. These synesthetic harmonies are usually quite enjoyable.

Things get even more pleasant when the vibrations dissolve into white noise. Some of the deeper experiences I’ve had resemble a field of evenly distributed tingling, buzzing, or static. And importantly—as an exploration of the math will tell you—the recipe for white noise is a combination of every frequency, in roughly equal amounts. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

If you’re mathematically inclined, there are a ton of great courses out there on vibration. None is better than Prof. Brad Osgood’s course on the Fourier Transform. His awe at the beauty of oscillation is infectious.

If you’re more a hands-on kind of person, I love playing with audio synthesis to explore the dynamics of vibration. VCV Rack is a wildly fun (and free!) program for making strange sounds and beautiful music with nothing but vibes.

But all you really need to do is open your eyes. As I sit here typing, I can hear music behind me; my fingers hit the keyboard in time with the beat; the pothos plant next to me wiggles with each keystroke.

Bounceback systems are everywhere.

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I’d always wanted to do a retreat, but (a) it’s a scary to thrust yourself into such an intense practice, and (b) I’m distrustful of spiritual authority. So I always found reasons to put it off.

Enter Wystan Bryant-Scott and Roger Thisdell. I met these two at a QRI study and was quickly impressed by their ability to describe exotic phenomenology and their wide knowledge of meditative techniques, but above all, by their warmth and humility.

When they announced a joint retreat, I jumped at the opportunity.

And so last week I spent seven days at a castle-themed home in Westchester, with around a dozen fellow meditators, doing nothing.

Outline

• Detox

• Dissolution

• Dreams and Visions

• Freakout

• Retox

• Integration

• Karma Police

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Detox

First insight: information fasting is extraordinarily effective.

At the retreat, we not only turned off our phones—we left behind books, writing implements, even casual conversation. There was nothing to do but sit, walk, and drink tea. For fifteen hours a day.

The retreat started on a Saturday afternoon. By Sunday evening, the amount of discursive thought passing through my brain dropped by around 50%, especially while formally practicing meditation. More importantly, about 80-90% of those thoughts were about meditation. I mostly stopped thinking about work, family, friendships, politics, life goals, etc.

I’ve never been so maniacally focused on one thing.

As painful as the detox was (more on that below), I feel like I’ve discovered a new superpower. I’m now trying to figure out small ways to bring this back into daily life—can I do no-internet Sundays? Spend one weekend a month totally detached? Maybe I’ll try and organize a smaller, looser detox retreat.

And I’d love to try applying this to other domains. What would happen if I focused solely on writing? On a single math textbook? If I just brought a guitar and a tape recorder?

Dissolution

I spent 8-9 hours each day practicing meditation. My focus was primarily on spreading and dissolving the tactile sensations that comprise my sense of a unitary, bounded self.

To illustrate—these days, when I close my eyes and sink into meditation, I feel a bit like this:

When I first close my eyes, each body part feels like a lump of tingling sensations surrounded by an empty void—as it probably would for you if you closed your eyes now. But within a few seconds, the lumps become fuzzier, and start to clump together. I notice tiny wisps of static in the void. I can feel currents of sensation pulsing through it all.

I call this set of sensations the tactile field: everything I can feel that isn’t sight, sound, or smell. The deeper I get into meditation, the more the tactile field smooths out—and the less it resembles a torso, limbs, and head.

But I’ve never felt that field completely smooth out. Typically, there’s a dense spherical shape in the center of my awareness, which roughly corresponds to my face and head. Below the sphere, there’s a blurry mound of sensation created by my torso and limbs; the limbs can be more or less well-defined1. Above and around the sphere are airy, staticky sensations that don’t map to any particular body part, or even to my sense of self—they’re more like my mental representation of space.

At the retreat, I spent most of my time trying to iron out those remaining clumps of tactile sensation.

The most stubborn clumps are the ones that comprise the dense pink circle in the center of the image, the sensations in my head and face. I’ve dissolved them before with chemical help: dissociatives like 5-MeO-DMT, nitrous, and ketamine (see those links for my previous trip reports) are all very effective.

My hope was that with Roger’s guidance, I’d be able to unlock this skill while sober. In my practice at home, I’d successfully dissolved the left, right, and bottom parts of the circle. But it still felt like there was a ceiling above me.

Roger’s first instruction was to look for specific areas in my scalp and forehead that might be generating those sensations. This seems wildly obvious in retrospect, but I’d been so fixated on working from within the dissolved mindstate that I’d completely neglected to look at my physical body!

Within a few hours I managed to relax a bunch of tiny muscles in my scalp, making the boundary considerably more permeable. But a throbbing sensation, coupled with a flashing white light at the top left of my visual field, persisted. Worse, any amount of focus seemed to exacerbate the throbbing.

It took a full day of struggle for me to finally palpate my skin with my fingers, only to discover a vein in my left temple, pulsating perfectly in sync with the throbbing and flashing. Within another hour I was able to relax some muscles in my neck and shoulders, which dropped the blood pressure in my head. The throbbing finally dissolved.

For a few minutes, only the wispy static was left—no more clumps. I was a transparent eyeball, floating in a boundless, empty space.

It still takes me a great deal of effort (and non-effort, Roger’s second most helpful instruction) to find my way back to this mindstate. But I’ve bushwacked a path, and now I just need to keep treading it.

Dreams and Visions

On Monday, the second full day of practice, I started to hallucinate.

Now, I’m no stranger to hallucination. I’ve done my share of psychedelic drugs. I’m an intrepid explorer of the dream world, and of the weird, hypnogogic spaces between wakefulness and sleep.

But now I was fully sober and awake, and somehow seeing long streams of dreamlike imagery behind closed eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to what I’d see on .75-1g of psychedelic mushrooms—not a heavy dose, but much more than a microdose.

I immediately sought Wystan’s council. He and I have bonded in the past over our love of cataphatic practice. He’s grounded in the Vajrayana tradition, and describes powerfully vivid interactions with Tibetan deities.

He assured me that my hallucinations were a common experience, and that cataphatic practitioners actually use the mindstates I’d been practicing in as a launchpad into imaginal spaces. Specifically, they aim to get as close as possible to that dissolved, boundless space, without actually crossing over. From there, they can grow new limbs (even a second head!), interact with deities, or slip out of body and explore the imaginal universe.

So I continued playing with the hallucinations, excited at the prospect of expanding my dreamwork into waking life. But by Wednesday evening things started getting a little too intense.

Freakout

I think the transition happened around a peak experience: one of the first times I stably entered that boundless space, I suddenly…disappeared. There was nothing but warmth, or maybe sparkling light. The warmth didn’t have a shape, a size, a location, or even a vantage point from which to observe it. There was just warmth.

I remember a vague effort to pull myself together, and the warmth became a string of red jewels, which coalesced into a circle. The circle became my face, and suddenly I had a body again. Whoa.2

That night, lying awake in bed, I experienced an extraordinarily vivid stream of hallucinations, for the better part of an hour. I saw a giant beetle eat the earth. I saw two cartoonish sharks make out. I saw geometric shapes, angels and demons, pulsating dragons. I saw what looked like an AI-generated orgy, with limbs and torsos and heads and breasts merging and morphing into one another, in an ecstatic Cronenbergian heap. I even met this guy:

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The next morning, I dreamt of incompetent pilots attempting to build a space program, and nearly killing a crowd of bystanders with their first drone. The bystanders looked directly into the camera and held up signs saying “CODE RED”.

As the day progressed, things got shakier. The closed-eye hallucinations continued. And even with eyes open, the walls wouldn’t sit still. My visual field would spontaneously flatten into a 2D mess of shape and color. Everything felt sort of thin, like the world was made of papier-mâché.

I told Roger I was concerned. He gave the OK to break the container a bit, and turn down the volume.

Retox

Specifically, Roger suggested I skip our group sit and journal in my room. Instead, I opened up my text messages.

I’d been growing increasingly anxious that some horribly time sensitive thing was waiting in my inbox (narrator: There wasn’t). That worry compounded as things destabilized, and I was unsure if I’d be fit for work on Monday.

On the one hand, this worked very well. Almost immediately, the hallucinations abated, and the anxiety vanished. I was back to comfortably sitting the next morning. Above all, I built a lot of trust in my ability to reorient after an intense experience.

On the other hand, it was a complete reset. I thought I’d just crack the container open for 20 minutes, then maybe spend a few hours rebuilding it. But no—that tiny crack reset the clock back to Day 1. My narrative thoughts returned, and now they were mostly about work, not meditation.

I didn’t get back into full meditation mode until Friday afternoon, about 18 hours after breaking the seal. That gave me another 24 hours to continue practicing, but I never got nearly as deep as I was at the peak.

Integration

The retreat ended Saturday afternoon. Despite the setback, I was feeling incredibly positive about the experience. I’d made huge progress in my practice, added several new skills to my ever-growing mental toolkit, and got to peek a little further down the rabbit hole of no-self.

Midweek, I thought I’d be ecstatic to finally dive back into samsara. I fantasized about jumping into my car and heading straight to my favorite local bar for a beer and a cheeseburger—and I almost never eat beef. I even had an image in my head from the final episode of Breaking Bad, where Jesse escapes from literal slavery.

But my actual departure was quiet and somber. There were lots of hugs and smiles as we lifted our silence and ate a last meal together (with a cookie this time!) and I felt a mild, healthy sadness as I pulled out of the driveway.

About an hour into the drive I decided I was ready to listen to music, and put on The Creek Drank the Cradle by Iron & Wine. At the start of the second song, to my great surprise, I began to cry.

When I stopped for gas, all I bought was a bottle of water. Normally I’d give myself a rare junk food treat to offset the boredom of a long car ride, but I was completely disinterested in the chips and soda. As I got close to home, I realized my desire for a cheeseburger had completely evaporated.

That night, after slowly digging out of texts and emails, I got some takeout, had one alcoholic drink, and watched one episode of TV. It was too much, too fast. I felt overwhelmed and dissatisfied by the lot of it.

But before sauntering off to bed I spent a couple minutes meditating, and tapped back into that spacious equanimity. It was a reassuring reminder that, no matter what life throws at me, I can always lean on this mindstate.

Karma Police

Throughout the retreat, I kept asking myself: why did it take me nearly a decade of practice to make this leap? I’d have made so much more progress, so much faster.

The answer is that I’m hugely skeptical of spiritual authority. I grew up a sincere Catholic, and then in my early teens learned that the men I trusted to have all the answers had been doing lots of child rape. This was earth-shattering, and a few years later I left the Church, with the clear sense that I should never delegate my spiritual autonomy to another human.

Throughout my years of meditation practice, I did try to make contact with existing communities. About two thirds of them turned out to be verifiably corrupt: one teacher punched a student in the face, and stole tens of thousands of dollars; another guru faced multiple accusations of rape; another convinced several students to take out loans they couldn’t afford to attend his trainings. The best I found was a well-established meditation center, but even there, I was turned off by the teacher’s self-certainty, and her flippant dispensation of life-changing advice to a woman she’d never met before. The room was filled with doe-eyed people looking for someone to fix them, someone to give them the answer, someone to worship.

But with Wystan and Roger, I was able to build up the container of a friendship first. They’ve been consistently open and vulnerable—I’ve helped Roger think about his romantic life, and watched Wystan process some mild anxiety about returning to school. For all their meditative accomplishments, they feel like my peers, and have always treated me like a peer. When I ask their advice, it feels more like getting tutored by a friend with a PhD than like requesting an audience with a guru.

I hope they’re able to maintain that humility as their influence inevitably grows alongside their natural talent for teaching. They’ve chosen one of the most psychologically dangerous professions out there—somewhere between slaughterhouse worker and prison guard.

We can see that clergy of all faiths have very dangerous jobs…Think if you were the pope. It would be a real spiritual problem to deal with your grandiosity…everyone constantly dumps their idealizing projections onto you…Think about going around the world and having 400,000 people gathered in front of you idealizing you while you do Mass.

…Just because you are ordained doesn’t mean that your shadow disappears. I deal with clergy all the time who have massive problems managing their own grandiosity. They tend to act out a lot. In fact, the phenomena of clergy acting out sexually, or in substance abuse, workaholism, or any other compulsive behavior, relate directly to the problem of managing their inner grandiosity.

—Robert L. Moore, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity

Wystan and Roger are the only meditation coaches I’ve met whom I trust wholeheartedly, the only ones I don’t squint at and wonder just how much ego is hiding behind their equanimous gaze. (I feel similarly towards Shinzen Young and Rob Burbea, though I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting either.)

For all my reading, conversing, and community seeking, I can’t name another teacher who seems to sit below average on the narcissism spectrum—including those I believe to have a robust experience of no-self. Spiritual practice doesn’t protect us from our worst instincts; unless we’re very careful, it magnifies and disguises them.

Thanks to the relationship I’ve built with these two, I was able to finally give myself over to a deep, intense practice, without worrying that I’m falling into someone else’s ego trip.

I’m immensely grateful to Roger and Wystan (and to our wonderful organizer, Jess!) for creating this space. It’s redoubled my enthusiasm for meditation, and given me a whole new set of techniques for growth.

I’m very much looking forward to the next one.

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But I’m an impatient person. I’ve always sought out ways to accelerate the process, looking for shortcuts and embarking on get-enlightened-quick schemes. This is inadvisable for two reasons:

• One: there really is no shortcut—you have to do the work

• Two: you’re messing with your brain, and you can do damage

That said, meditators often get stuck in habit, fruitlessly body-scanning or counting their breaths.

Sometimes you need a kick.

Outline

• Fire Kasina

• Mirror Gazing

• Pain

• Shivering

• Intuitive Movement

• Drugs

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Fire Kasina

Fire kasina is a deceptively simple practice: you stare at a bright light—a candle flame, a light bulb, even your phone screen—then close your eyes and watch the after-image. When the after image fades, rinse and repeat.

Kasina practice can induce psychedelic- and dream-like visions, alter your perception of time and space, and give way to life-changing mystical experiences. In a recent small-scale study, participants practiced kasina for 6-11 hours per day for several weeks:

Mean [mystical experience] scores were…similar to prior observations of high-dose psilocybin [i.e. psychedelic mushrooms]…experiences were described as the most intense of the individual's life, while subsequent transformational effects included substantial shifts in worldview.

Daniel Ingram (coauthor on the paper above) seems to be the biggest advocate for kasina meditation. He’s created an entire website with instructions for practice—as well as some intense safety guidelines.

When I spoke to Daniel about kasina practice last year, he estimated that around 1 in 9 retreat participants has an intensely negative experience, on par with a bad psychedelic trip. One, he said, sobbed for hours. Another began seeing demons in the mirror.

I haven’t yet found a month of free time to attempt a full-blown kasina retreat, but I’ve done a handful of 30 minute sessions.1 While I haven’t had a full-blown mystical experience (or seen any demons), it does feel quite powerful.

With kasina I become fully immersed in sensory experience, and after several minutes begin seeing all sorts of strange colors and patterns. It’s led to several insights on the ephemerality of perception.

I’ve even felt the need to put kasina down for a time, for fear of getting lost. Like any advanced meditation technique, kasina needs to be treated with caution and respect.

Mirror Gazing

Close the doors of your room and put a big mirror just in front of you…Then constantly stare into your own eyes in the mirror. Do not blink.

…Your face will begin to take new shapes. You may even be scared. The face in the mirror will begin to change. Sometimes a very different face will be there which you have never known as yours.

…If you continue…the most strange thing happens: suddenly there is no face in the mirror. The mirror is vacant, you are staring into emptiness.

—Osho, cult leader of Wild Wild Country fame

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A strange thing happens when you stop blinking—your visual buffer has no chance to reset, and tiny perceptual distortions begin to self-reinforce. I’ve often played with this phenomenon, watching solid objects disappear from my vision, or seeing the three-dimensional scene before me flatten into nothing but shape and color.

But none of that comes close to the strangeness I’ve seen in a mirror.

I discovered mirror gazing mostly by accident. I was on vacation, meditating on my bed. On an impulse, I turned 90 degrees and faced the wall mirror to my left.

Within a few minutes, I saw huge ranges of emotion sweep across my (in reality expressionless) face: joy, terror, despair, excitement. I saw my self as a woman. I saw my self as an old man. I saw myself as a warrior, as an invalid, as an angel and a demon. The faces of family members and friends appeared superimposed on my own—most often my brother’s. I even caught a few glimpses of the “no face” Osho alludes to above.2

It’s such an intense experience that I only earnestly engage in it a few times per year.

There are two interdependent insights that I’ve gleaned from mirror gazing (in conjunction with other practices, like dreamwork):

• I contain within me every aspect of humanity, good and bad3

• I’m “one” with the rest of humanity—we’re all the same thing, wearing different masks

These are the sorts of insights you can dismiss as platitudes, or think you’ve understood intellectually. But they take on a new character when you look in the mirror and see your mother staring back. Your felt sense of self becomes blurry and distorted, and you realize that those statements point to an empirical fact.4

Pain

Nothing will focus your attention like pain.

I still remember the first sit where I dug into the psychodynamics of suffering. During a normal meditation session, I shifted my weight, and the seam of my jeans began poking into a pressure point on my ankle. The pain was intense, but for some reason I hesitated before reacting, and decided to just lean in and see where it took me.

The pain crescendoed into an alarm as I made up my mind to do nothing. Within a few seconds, it maxed out, and transitioned from a constant sensation to periodic rolling waves. The pressure would subside into a warm, tingling, almost pleasant glow. But the moment my attention drifted, the pain would come roaring back.

I sat with the pain for around half an hour, before becoming concerned that I might be doing lasting damage to my poor ankle (spoiler: it was fine). It was the most focused I’d been in a meditation session for a long time—no long discursive thoughts, no daydreaming, no sleeping. Just me and the sensations in my ankle.

Since then, I’ve occasionally experimented with deliberate pain—pressing a needle into my skin or sitting in some terribly uncomfortable way. But all that seems too morbid and masochistic, so these days I just seize the opportunity when pain arises on its own. I actually get a little excited when an itch on my face starts to complain, or a mosquito lands on my arm. It feels immensely empowering to refrain from moving and simply sit equanimously with the sensation.

(If you’re interested in this topic, I’ve also done a deeper dive into the effects of meditation on pain, through the lens of Shinzen Young’s teachings.)

Shivering

This is a bit of an odd one, and it’s not a technique I’ve seen described elsewhere (though it’s probably somewhat related to Tummo meditation).

As a teenager, years before I started any kind of meditation practice, I found I had a tiny degree of control over whether my body would shiver when cold—but only if I was right on the edge, maybe wearing a t-shirt on a crisp autumn evening.

In the years since, I’ve tried all sorts of ways to expand this ability—visualizing fire, humming, breathing deeply, focusing my attention—with some slight progress.

More interesting, though, is the sensation of suppressed shivering. Once my body physically stops shaking, I continue to feel an immense reverberation coursing through my torso and limbs. The vibrations occur at the same 8-10Hz frequency as physical shivering—I imagine the same signals are hitting my nerves, just not hard enough to engage the muscles.

It’s a raw, intense, tactile sensation that pervades my being. It can be hugely pleasurable, and I’ve found I can move and modulate those vibrations, even expanding them to fill my entire sense of self. I become a transparent ball of vibrating energy.

If you’re interested in working with the pīti of jhana practice, the qi of Taoism, the prana of yoga, or any of the other names various traditions have given to the tactile sensations that arise during contemplative practice, not-quite-shivering is a great place to start.

Intuitive Movement

I’m a very brain-oriented person. I make a living with my mind, and I’ve always been praised for my mental output. But I was never very athletic or coordinated, so I’ve mostly neglected my body.

When I took up a meditation practice, I had the idea that it was yet another brain-skill for me to master. I’d learn to modulate my attention, to quiet my mental chatter, to master my emotions. But things really took off once I began to pair all that mental effort with an embodied practice.

Ironically, my journey here started in a quiet, seated mettā meditation. But this was no ordinary mettā practice—it was the beginning of a dance party hosted by a wonderful human named Tasshin. We began by wishing for love and peace and acceptance for all the people sitting there with us. And (it’s easy to forget this part) feeling their well-wishes in return.

Now, normally when I’d dance—only at weddings and when mildly drunk—I’d just bob back and forth, trying as hard as I can not to look dumb, intensely aware of how I must appear from the outside. If I made eye contact with someone, I’d immediately assume they were gawking at how ridiculous I look. I’d try to move as little as possible and stare at my feet in the hope that no one noticed me.

But at Tasshin’s party, something new happened. Instead of seeing my body from the outside, through the imagined eyes of others, I became completely absorbed by the sensations inside my body. I lost track of the people around me, completely forgot that they might be looking at me and judging my movements. I even lost any sense of having a physical body! I just felt movement and flow and release.

I can’t begin to describe how freeing this was. I put my hands in the air. I spun in a little circle. I wasn’t really even in the picture—my body was doing these things all on its own, to the timing of the beat, without any premeditation or post hoc judgement.

I’ve adopted the idea here into other little rituals. I’ll wiggle about on the couch while listening to music, or move through some random yoga-ish poses on my living room floor. There’s something immensely pleasurable about just letting my body do what it wants, without any interference or planning or judgement from my brain.

But it’s not just hedonistic pleasure—there’s some kind of emotional processing happening as I move. Sometimes I can sense stress or sadness as though they’re physical objects, which I can touch and manipulate just by twisting my body or moving my arms the right way. From the outside it probably looks like I’m practicing an esoteric version of Tai Chi. From the inside, it feels like I’m Tom Cruise in Minority Report, except the computer is my soul.

Science seems to be slowly catching up to the idea that our minds extend into our bodies. Several meta-analyses have shown the effectiveness of Tai Chi in treating psychological illness; The Body Keeps the Score seems to have turned some heads; there’s increasing evidence for the existence of mechanisms that would allow the body to store memories. But our knowledge is still in its infancy here, and self-experimentation is cheap—the best way to learn more is to dive in.

Tasshin’s mettā dance party was a peak mystical experience for me. It feels almost silly to say that now, because it’s become a common feeling—I now attend weekly ecstatic dances. It still takes some effort to fully click into a flow state, and some days I never really get there. But it’s the most fruitful part of my meditation practice today—specifically because I’m so naturally brain-biased.

Drugs

It’d feel dishonest to leave chemical aids out of this essay, given how much they’ve affected my practice—for better and for worse.

When I first began meditating, cannabis was a great incentive to get my butt on the mat. At the time I was smoking daily (not a good habit!), and made up my mind that I’d only get high if I then meditated.5

Cannabis gave me an incredible endurance for meditation. I’d struggle to sit for more than 30 minutes while sober, but could happily sit for two or three hours if I was high.

Cannabis also turns up the volume on my internal sensations: the tingling in my hands, the colors and shapes behind my closed eyelids, the intensity of ambient noise—the sort of stuff experienced meditators will dismiss as “fireworks”. But these sensations made it easier to become absorbed in my immediate perception rather than abstract thoughts, and incentivized me to keep sitting.

And psychedelics! A wild LSD experience is what first convinced me to take up meditation. That trip did some indescribable6 things to my ego, which I felt compelled to investigate further. Subsequent trips (there have been few, all low-dose) have reacquainted me with those strange, beautiful states of mind. I’ve found ketamine particularly useful lately, especially in combination with cannabis.

My peak drug experiences serve as a sort of waypoint for my meditation practice. I’ll experience something new and profound—a shifted sense of time, an inner stillness, a loss of my body map—then work towards that feeling while sober. The meditation experiences can lag behind the drug experiences by months or years, and it takes work to distill the essence of the experience from the more esoteric effects of the drug. But this feels a lot better than just placing my faith in the words of some monk or ancient text. I at least have a vague sense of what I’m looking for. I know, without a doubt, that there’s a there there.

But the vast majority of drug-oriented practitioners I talk to are far too dependent on chemical aids in their exploration. Drugs make it easy to feel like you’re making progress, when really you’re just wandering in circles. Every time I try nitrous oxide, I’m absolutely convinced that the next huff will bring enlightenment.

I like to say that drugs are like skydiving, and meditation is like growing a pair of wings. The latter is much more powerful and sustainable.

Eventually I realized cannabis was becoming a crutch (in both life and in meditation) and took a long break. I still use it at least weekly, often during meditation—but I try to have more sober sits than not. And I remain persistently skeptical of my own drug use.7

I want to reiterate that there are no shortcuts when it comes to meditation. You simply need to spend a lot of time sitting quietly and studying your mind.

But there are more and less skillful ways to make progress. Too many people get stuck in one form of practice, thinking they just need to tough it out. Method X worked for their friend / guru / guy on twitter, so they dogmatically cling to it.

Experimentation is crucial. Every brain is different. Even the same brain is different on different days, or from year to year. Little changes can help: picking a new chair, or switching from eyes-open to eyes-closed, can be enough to reinvigorate my practice. But sometimes you need more.

The methods above will mostly add fuel to an existing practice. You can experiment with different levels of intensity, or with mixing them together,8 but be careful. Meditation is not without risk, and adding fuel to that fire can cause harm. Worse, diving right into something like kasina or psychedelics, without any grounding in vanilla meditation, can send you over the edge of psychosis.

So take it slow. But if you’ve got a stable practice and you’re feeling stuck, experiment! And do be sure to report back.

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For centuries, physics consisted of domain-specific models for human-scale phenomena: falling objects, acoustics, the movement of the stars, and the like. Deeper questions about the origins and extent of the universe, or about its fundamental building blocks, were relegated to philosophers and theologians.

But the discovery of a general framework for mechanics gave rise to particle physics and cosmology. Science found it had the tools to explore even the largest and smallest scales of reality.

Psychology seems to be following a similar trajectory. We have a thousand models for practical phenomena, like emotions, personality types, and psychopathologies. But increasingly scientists and psychonauts are learning to study the atoms of experience, and exploring exotic corners of the mental landscape.

I see three emerging subfields in the study of mind:

• Classical Psychology, which describes day-to-day phenomena using increasingly general models

• Microphenomenology, which describes the building blocks of experience and their interactions

• Macrophenomenology, which describes the global geometry and dynamics of phenomenological space

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Classical Psychology

Most of contemporary psychology consists of small, overlapping models of mental life. These range from scientific (e.g. the diagnostic criteria in the DSM, neurochemical descriptions of psychoactive drugs), to fuzzy-but-useful (e.g. Myers-Briggs personality types, mood wheels).

This cacophony of models resembles the state of physics at the end of the Age of Enlightenment. But in 1788, Lagrange introduced a mathematical structure that encapsulated all known mechanics, unifying many disparate theories under a single principle: energy.

Could something similar happen in psychology?

The most successful attempt here is Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and its cousin, Predictive Coding. These frameworks try to describe a wide range of mental and behavioral phenomena with a single mathematical formalism. Scott Alexander has some interesting speculation on how the theory explains everything from optical illusions to placebos to your inability to tickle yourself; he also has deeper dives on its application to autism, schizophrenia, and depression.

These theories won’t ever replace the point-models, for the same reason no one uses the Lagrangian formalism to determine how much fuel a rocket needs. But they can provide a unifying foundation for the huge range of psychological phenomena that comprise the human experience.

And if Predictive Coding proves to be a general model for describing conscious agents, it can serve as an intuition pump as we build models for small- and large-scale phenomenology—much like the Lagrangian formulation of physics extended its domain into the quantum and cosmological scales.

Microphenomenology

…the simplest bits of immediate experience are their own others…They run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate. What in them is relation and what is matter related is hard to discern. You feel no one of them as inwardly simple, and no two as wholly without confluence where they touch. There is no datum so small as not to show this mystery, if mystery it be.

—William James, A Pluralistic Universe

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There are two interesting questions we can’t answer by looking at phenomena through our typical, human-sized lenses:

• What are the smallest atoms of conscious experience?

• How do those atoms combine to create larger experiences?

Microphenomenology tries to answer these questions by examining experience in fine detail. Say you have a headache: where, precisely, is it located? is the location moving? is it more throbbing, or buzzing? at what rate, in hertz? does the frequency or amplitude change over time? how does that correlate with the level of pain?

Deep Microphenomenological study tends to happen around the zero-state of consciousness. When you concentrate on a single sensation, everything else—sound, color, emotion, thought—fades into the background, or disappears entirely. If you can focus your attention precisely enough, it becomes a microscope for the mind, shutting out everything but a tiny slice of your experience.

But “microscope” might be too strong an analogy—phenomenology has a tendency to change in response to directed attention. You might find your headache dissipates or loses its negative valence while your attention is fixed on it. Much like small-scale physics, Microphenomenology involves complicated interactions between observer and observed, and even challenges the distinction between the two.

It’s an outrageously tricky subject to study.

Tools and Techniques

The focusing of attention on moment-to-moment experience is a long-standing technique in Buddhist meditation practice, especially Vipassana (literally, “super-seeing” or “seeing into”). Traditionally, the goal is to gain insight into three universal qualities1 of all forms:

• They are ephemeral

• They are unstable

• They have no fixed identity

As this insight deepens, meditators experience successively deeper states of consciousness (jhanas), where experience becomes subtler and more ill-defined (the final two states are described as “infinite nothingness” and “neither perception nor non-perception”). The process culminates in nirodha-samapatti, or total cessation of awareness.

For the impatient, anesthetic drugs can take you on a tour of these near-zero states of consciousness. I’ve previously reviewed my own experience with nitrous oxide; some of my conclusions rhyme with the Jamesian and Buddhist insights above. Ether and ketamine have similar effects at the right dosage. 5-MeO-DMT (not to be confused with the more common N,N-DMT) also seems to have this property of propelling users towards the zero-state, but while paradoxically maintaining intense arousal and awareness.

Preliminary Results

The most interesting phenomenon reported by Microphenomenologists is an altered or non-existent sense of self. They might lose any sense of having a body, of being separate from their sensations, or having a central locus of awareness. Phenomenological binding itself seems to break down—the aggregate, multiplicitous experience we’re used to dissolves into its individual atoms.

Deep microphenomenological investigation often steps beyond positive and negative valence, with jhana meditators describing the last five stages of dissolution as entirely equanimous. Many long-time meditators (myself included) claim that focusing attention on a painful sensation will cause its negative valence to evaporate.2 This implies that valence may be an emergent, high-order experience.

A sense of space expanding, shrinking, or losing a dimension also seems to be common.3 Some report that all points in their visual field “become the same point”, or that the notion of distance between points evaporates. This implies that spatial extent, too, is an emergent, high-order experience.

Linear time often loses meaning during microphenomenological investigations. Time manifests in short pulsing cycles, or disappears entirely. Explorers are often uncertain as to how much time has passed during their experience. This suggests that cyclic time may be a more fundamental experience than the linear time we’re used to.

Some contemporary microphenomenologists are even helping to translate traditional meditative concepts into contemporary scientific terms: Romeo Stevens has observed that most of the mental events the Buddha discusses occur very rapidly, in the 10-40hz range; Nick Cammarata and Daniel Ingram concur, claiming that tanha specifically occurs between 25 and 100 milliseconds after a stimulus (which translates precisely to 10-40hz!).

Interestingly, explorers of Microphenomenology frequently speak in terms of vibration—a strange parallel to small-scale physics, where the most popular models involve vibrating strings or fields.

Macrophenomenology

For many, the exploration of near-zero states of consciousness feels dignified, even righteous—a preparation for the inevitable experience of death. For others, it feels boring and nihilistic.

Fortunately there’s also a vast, high-dimensional space of conscious states to explore.

Macrophenomenology looks to describe the global geometry and dynamics of phenomenological space. It’s primarily concerned with extreme pleasure and pain, but also explores richly detailed sense data, self-other interactions, and esoteric beliefs. Even enumerating the dimensions of large-scale conscious experience is a Herculean task.

Tools and Techniques

Psychedelic drugs are the most obvious launchpad for explorers interested in Macrophenomenology. They tend to produce extremely esoteric states of consciousness, with rich audio-visual-tactile phenomena, strange semantic content, seemingly-intelligent entities, and psychotic beliefs.

Active dreaming is another way to break out of the constraints imposed by external reality. The physical world seems to anchor us to a small range of conscious experiences; like psychedelics, the dream world dissolves those strictures.4

There are also contemplative practices that explore the far-reaches of consciousness. Many tantric traditions, such as those of Vajrayana Buddhism or the left-handed path of Western esotericism, encourage practitioners to conjure images of hyper-violent, hyper-sexual deities and demons, and to interact with them. These traditions tend to adopt richly colored, intricate iconography, often with jarring semantic content.

Predictive Coding has a large role to play in Macrophenomenological exploration. Deeply-held beliefs exert a gravitational pull on our conscious state; weakening those priors—through drugs, dreams, or meditation—is the key to reaching escape velocity. And strategically strengthening particular priors can help anchor you to a new subspace, allowing you to explore it more thoroughly.

The real trick is not getting lost.

Preliminary Results

My favorite Macrophenomenologist is Justin Schmidt, an entomologist who bravely explored the space of pain through insect bites. In his descriptions you can see that pain isn’t simply a single dimension: it can be more or less pure, smoky or brilliant, dull or electric. This is a typical methodology: explore some subspace as deeply as possible, and start building a map.

QRI has more thoroughly catalogued the space of valence, with an important observation: a fixed-sized step seems to multiply the intensity of both pain and pleasure. They cite Schmidt’s pain scale, cluster headache ratings, and the Scoville heat scale as examples of this logarithmic shape. They also provide a compelling argument that there’s a direct link between symmetry and valence.

But while pleasure and pain dominate Macrophenomenological study, the space of conscious states is much bigger than that single dimension. There’s a huge variety of high-bliss and high-suffering states, and an even bigger space of mixed states, where pleasure and pain swirl together.

Strange narratives often emerge in deep phenomenological space. Psychonauts can become possessed by the conviction that the world is ending, or that they’re a cosmic savior, or that they’ve connected to an intergalactic network of intelligent life. These beliefs are radically psychoactive, and can propel the believer into the purest dilutions of bliss, terror, and excitement (as I’ve experienced first-hand).

More progress has been made on navigational techniques than in actually mapping these spaces. Explorers like John Lilly, Robert Monroe, and Tenzin Wangyal consistently point to attention and intention as the keys to moving about in Macrophenomenological space. Whatever you focus your attention on will tend to grow, and your perceived environment will tend reflect your interior state. It’s easy to slip into feedback loops of both fear and joy.

In another strange parallel with physics, Macrophenomenology involves complicated geometry—much like Minkowski spacetime. High-dimensional and hyperbolic simulations are often reminiscent of the dream world; objects change shape, pop in and out of existence, and bend at the edges of the visual field. QRI has argued that psychedelic visuals typically have fractal properties and hyperbolic geometry; this likely has to do with the specifics of our visual processing system.

Limitations

I don’t want to push the parallels with physics too hard, or over-reify the distinction between Micro and Macrophenomenology.

The Macro and Micro scales of experience bleed into each other in strange ways, and there are plenty of experiences that seem to transcend the distinction. There are far-out, high-dimensional psychedelic experiences with low information content (e.g. 5-MeO seems to reduce the dimensionality of experience while simultaneously generating a huge amount of arousal and valence). And anyone who’s able to remember their nightly descent through hypnagogia and NREM sleep (before they enter full-blown REM) can attest to the fact that even these near-zero states can be full of emotion and semantic content.

Eventually we’ll have to contend with the fact that both small- and large-scale phenomena belong to the same continuum of conscious states. But before we jump to a theory of everything, a divide-and-conquer approach seems fruitful. We can deal with the phenomenological equivalent of quantum gravity later.

Better phenomenological theories can help us reduce extreme suffering, and to access states with strong positive valence. The more we’re able to understand how qualia arise at the smallest levels, and how to navigate the massive space of macro conscious states, the more capable we’ll be of avoiding suffering and finding joy.

But to make progress we’ll need more people—especially people with scientific and mathematical training—to explore these spaces, build maps, and report back.

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About nine months ago, I was invited to join a group of brilliant psychonauts at a retreat center in British Columbia. The mission: a deep exploration of 5-MeO-DMT.

I’d never encountered “five” (or even its distant cousin, NN-DMT), and was a bit nervous. Michael Pollan calls 5-MeO is “one of the most potent and fast-acting psychotropic drugs there is.” He also notes that a friend of his calls it “the Everest of psychedelics” and that some Amazonian tribes refer to it as the “semen of the sun”.

Was I really prepared to mount Everest?

Outline

• The Fear

• Misfire

• Return

• Preparation

• Experience

• The Third Hit

• After

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The Fear

My hesitation was reasonable: I’ve had adverse reactions to psychedelics in the past, with years-long consequences.

But I’ve also been working through a more irrational fear associated with all mystical experience. Whenever I begin to dissolve my ego—whether it’s through psychedelics, meditation, or dreams—I tend to clench back into normative reality.

This reaction is common. The sensation of dissolution is terrifying—it literally feels like you’re dying. And I still carry a lot of Catholic1 programming from my youth; I often find myself frightened that self-exploration is somehow sinful, that I might do permanent damage to my soul. That I might wind up in hell.

And so whenever I start to relax into that non-egoic state espoused by every mystic, the fear response kicks in, and I clench back into my normal waking self with a feeling of both frustration and relief.

I’ve been working though this fear for a few years—through therapy, meditation, dreamwork, and all the other tools in my psychological kit—with incremental progress. In the months leading up to the retreat, I found I was able to regularly enter a semi-dissolved state and calmly abide there. But still, if I managed to go one step deeper, the fear response would kick in.

And that’s definitely not the reaction you want after launching into DMT-space.

Misfire

In the weeks leading up to the retreat, I felt the fear of 5-MeO mounting. So I confronted it the best way I know how: through dreamwork.

I specifically remember one dream, where I found myself in a moldy basement, being offered a strange substance by a group of dark strangers. I took the drug, despite my misgivings—and the fear melted away.

I had dreams like this most nights for about a week. Sometimes I acted with poise, and was rewarded; other times I reacted out of fear, and ended up in a nightmare. But as the days went by I was feeling increasingly confident. I made up my mind to take part in the 5-MeO sessions.

But the night before my departure, I had a new dream. I saw my bamboo plant2 placed underneath a brilliant light, and it bloomed into a massive, beautiful flower. But the weight of the new growth was too much—the bamboo reed snapped. I was then given a birds-eye tour of a never-ending hell realm—a many-roomed concrete basement full of blood, excrement, and dental tools.3

The dream held a deep numinosity. I’d put it in the top 1%, the sort of dream I only have a few times a year. Its message was clear: you’re not ready for this, and you’ll suffer if you keep moving forward.

With my plane ticket purchased and my room already reserved, I still proceeded on to Canada, where I watched with mild envy as my colleagues engaged in deeper and deeper explorations of the most intense psychedelic known to man.

The trip itself was delightful—I got to form intimate connections with brilliant people, all of whom share my interest in exploring and mapping conscious states. I learned a great deal from them and from their 5-MeO experiences, even if I couldn’t always understand what they were talking about. And the retreat center itself was gorgeous, situated along a massive shimmering lake, and surrounded on all sides by sprawling mountains. It was literally one of the best weeks of my life.

I returned home deeply satisfied, both spiritually and intellectually. I had no regrets about listening to my instincts. But I knew I’d missed out on something special.

Return

Nearly a year later, 5-MeO found me again. A friend of mine happens to be an experienced 5-MeO guide, and invited me to participate in a small group ceremony. There’d be about ten of us, and she and another friend would serve as guides as we explored the drug individually or in pairs. A very similar setup to the psychonaut retreat.

Naturally, I was hesitant—was I ready now?—but I gave her a tentative “yes”.

Despite the surface-level similarities, the vibe was very different from the explorations in Canada. The goal now was spiritual, not intellectual. We were here to grow and heal ourselves, not to conduct a scientific expedition. Each of us stated our intentions at the outset, and requested any support we’d like to receive from the group.

I immediately knew what my intention would be: I wanted to work through the fear.

Over the previous year, I’d reified my fear as a knot, buried deep in my belly. Whenever I get pulled out of a mystical state, the pull starts from my lower abdomen. In fact, this is where all my anxiety resides, regardless of the cause; if I’m feeling any emotion along the lines of fear, dread, regret, or guilt, I can usually locate it as a throbbing or tension about two inches behind and below my navel.

What’s more, the previous few weeks had been some of the most stressful of my professional life, and I could sense the knot getting harder and tighter. I’d been working through it with meditation (and small amounts of cannabis), but things were still getting worse.

I told the group about my knot, and my desire to work with it. They heartily approved.

Preparation

I still wasn’t sure I’d have the guts—or the internal permission4—to participate. I chose to sit out the first day, so I could give my system some time to process what was about to happen. At the very least, the dream gods would have one night to make an appearance and guide me, one way or the other.

I sat along one side of the ceremony room (a beautiful, circular space, decorated with the help of our hosts). We all sat ready to hold space as the first participant laid down in front of us. He inhaled a fairly small dose, and laid back.

He then proceeded to weep for an hour.

Strangely, this didn’t frighten me much. The weeping seemed cathartic—he was clearly working through something difficult. I sat there meditating, feeling each of his sobs course through my body.

About forty minutes in, I felt something shift: a sudden opening in my lower abdomen. It felt like a small bubble popped, and a bit of tension was released. I walked out of the ceremony feeling a touch lighter. He and I got a few minutes to chat afterward; he affirmed that, internally, it had been a wholesome experience.

That night, I didn’t dream much, but I woke with a single memory: a dream character saying that I’d “find my faith by October.” I’ve learned not to trust specifics in dream messages, but the overall vibe was that I was moving in the right direction. So I spent the morning meditating and walking, preparing my mind for my first encounter with 5-MeO-DMT.

Experience

On my way to the ceremony, I was stung by a bee. I’d stepped on a flower he was pollinating. (Sorry, bee.)

The pain was searing, but I reacted calmly. I poured some cool water on my foot, and found a bench to sit on. I felt this was a good omen: I was capable of handling intensity. Even if the experience was hard, I’d get through it.

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I took the first session that day. I laid down on the mattress, and asked my friend to place her hand on my abdomen. I wanted my focus to stay there, so I could work with whatever energy was trapped in my gut.

I placed the 5-MeO vape5 to my lips, and drew. I was told that pulling 2-4 seconds would be a small “handshake-level” dose (as opposed to a “hug” dose or beyond). But the second I felt the smoke hit my throat, I stopped inhaling and laid back.

Nothing happened.

That’s not entirely true—I felt a slight tingle throughout my body, something obviously foreign, but strangely familiar. There was a uniformity to it: the tingling seemed to spread evenly through my tactile field. But it was barely noticeable.

I took another draw from the pen, this time longer. I held it for a count of ten. And this time it worked.

Within seconds, the weight of my body fell away. The phrase “unbearable lightness of being” echoed through my head, but the feeling was far from unbearable—in fact, it was the most bearable thing I’ve ever experienced. A vague half-articulated thought entered my mind: “oh right, I remember now, this is what heaven feels like.”

My sense of self flattened into a rippling two dimensional sheet. Bits of light streamed through my closed eyelids, but my visual field and tactile field had synesthetically merged—I could feel the light streaming through my entire being.

I no longer had a body, was no longer located in a room, was no longer surrounded by friends. I was simply a two dimensional vibrating surface, extended infinitely in all directions. My thoughts went back to a day of kayaking on the lake in Canada. I felt like the shimmering surface of that lake, but without any shores to lap up against. I was nothing but a calm, infinite ocean.

The uniformity from that first tiny hit was still there. I vaguely recall a sort of lattice guiding my tactile sensations. The best image I can conjure is the flower of life:

To be clear, this was not a visual impression—it was a tactile sensation. And yet “light” feels like the best word for that tactile experience. It glistened with the same playful regularity as sunlight on the surface of the lake.

And here’s the strangest part: this light had precisely the same texture as the light from my dream, the light that broke my bamboo plant. It was, as far as I can discern, the same light.

That sounds more prophetic than it is—in truth, I’ve had tastes of this sensation in meditation, in dreams, and on other substances. I’d never felt it isolated with this level of purity, but the feeling was deeply familiar. So it’s not entirely surprising that my dream-self used it to represent its understanding of what 5-MeO might feel like.

But I still get chills when I think about the connection.

The Third Hit

I started to come down from that second hit after a few minutes. It maybe felt a bit longer in subjective time, but not by much.

I wasn’t done yet. I asked for the pen back, and took another sip. Within seconds, I was once again the surface of a shimmering lake.

But suddenly a third dimension burst forth from that two dimensional field. It felt like a wave suddenly rising, pointed outward. Suddenly I was working in a much bigger, more complicated space.

I felt the hand on my abdomen, and covered it with my own. The somatic work was about to start.

My knot came up, and I could feel it in front of me. There still wasn’t much visual sensation, so I was deeply immersed in the tactile. The knot became bigger and looser, and I could feel its twists and turns. Over the course of a couple minutes, it came in and out of view, usually dissolving, sometimes intensifying. I sat by passively, feeling the scene unfold.

As the knot unwound, my experience began to spread and flatten again, and soon I was back in the calm, two dimensional waters where I started my trip.

I came back to reality with a sense of peace and awe. A single sentence passed through my mind: “I’m not ready yet.” I couldn’t tell you exactly who uttered this sentence; it didn’t quite feel like “me”. But I was quickly sobering up, and some other part of me decided that we’d had enough transcendence for one day.

I remembered the space and the people around me (oh! right! there’s a whole world out there!) and thanked my guide. She sat back as I started to feel my way back into my body, curving my back and stretching my limbs. I was filled with gratitude.

I got up and took my original spot against the wall, still basking in a tremendous afterglow. Without thought or hesitation, I touched the knee of the friend to my left and thanked him.

I started to say something to the group—something about how wonderful and healing the experience had been—when suddenly, I felt my “sense of self” click back online. I stumbled over my words, worried that I might say the wrong thing. For a minute I’d been moving through the world as effortlessly as water flowing downstream; now, in the afterglow of my experience, I was coming back to my normal, self-conscious self.

A minute or two later, while sitting quietly with my eyes closed, I felt two waves of tactile sensation circling around one another, in the shape of a rotating yin-yang6.

Suddenly the waves collided, and the waters became choppy and irregular. I felt my knot re-form.

But now it was a bit looser, and a bit higher up in my abdomen. Progress, perhaps.

After

In the days since that experience, the shift in my knot has persisted. It’s higher up in my abdomen, and easier to notice. And it dissolves much faster with focused attention.

More importantly, I’ve learned how to work with it. I can enter that same semi-dissolved state that I’d already gotten used to—which has some resonances with the 5-MeO state—and the knot starts to loosen and untangle itself. I can use my attention to jostle it here and there, causing it to unfold even more.

This is the biggest gift I’ve gotten from my 5-MeO-DMT experience: a deeper facility for somatic work. Suddenly I have a whole new set of tools for working with this knot, and for working with fear and anxiety by extension. I’ve been picking it apart bit by bit every day. The knot does tend to re-form, especially under stress. But finally it feels like two steps forward, one step backward, and not the reverse.

When I had the bamboo dream, I thought it was warning me against the dangers of a bad trip. I thought maybe it’d reinforce the fear, rather than melt it. I was afraid it might set me back considerably on the spiritual path.

But now that I’ve had the experience, I think the danger was quite different: I’d have gone wild with unfettered access to 5-MeO for a week. The retreat was only a few months after my deep exploration of nitrous (arguably my favorite substance), whose dissociative effects are not unlike 5-MeO. I likely would have pushed too hard, and jeopardized my mental health. Too much light, indeed.

I’m still digesting and integrating that first handshake7 with 5-MeO. I’m resisting the urge to buy a pen of my own (for now!), because I’ll likely have months worth of insight to build on here.

But if that was a handshake, boy am I looking forward to getting a hug.

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Many thanks to the QRI HEART team, as well as my guides and fellow participants in the later sessions, for creating these spaces and for early feedback on this essay.

Exegesis posts are a thank you for paid subscribers. All other Superb Owl content is free thanks to your support.

One of my favorite things to do is put on a good pair of over-the-ear headphones and listen to a full album, end-to-end, no distractions.

Is this meditation? I don’t know! But for a skillful practitioner, anything can be an opportunity for contemplative practice. And there are a few albums which—thanks to their lyrical content, musical form, or both—make particularly good meditation companions.

Songs from the Bardo

Laurie Anderson, Tenzin Choegyal, and Jesse Paris Smith

There’s something magical about the harsh whisper of Laurie Anderson’s voice breaking through an ambient silence with the words: Awakened One!

Awakened One! Do not let your thoughts wander.

Now the bardo of the moment before death is dawning. Abandon all grasping, yearning, and attachment. Enter undistracted into clear awareness.

Release your consciousness into the space of the unborn mind, leaving this body of flesh and blood. Know it to be a transitory illusion.

I’ve been a Laurie Anderson fan ever since the video for O Superman changed my definition of the word “music”. So I was immensely excited to see her collaborate with Tibetan Buddhist and world-famous musician Tenzin Choegyal1.

Songs from the Bardo draws from the ancient Bardo Thodol, popularly known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The book itself is delightful and disorienting. It takes the reader—or more traditionally, the listener—on a journey through the liminal, dreamlike space that allegedly separates lifetimes. The text is meant to serve as a guide for the recently deceased, as they navigate the bardo seeking liberation (or at least a promising rebirth).

On the album, Anderson recites passages from the text, accompanied by singing bowls, violin, cellos, piano, and traditional Tibetan instruments. Occasionally Choegyal joins in, singing in a throaty, resonant Sanskrit.

Much like the book, Songs from the Bardo balances light and dark, harmony and dissonance, awe and terror. There are beautiful rainbow lights, deities dancing with knives, holding cups full of blood, angry and smiling. The instrumentation follows along, sometimes beautifully consonant, and sometimes holding a horrific tension.

The album has the same ritualistic feel as a ceremonial reading of the Bardo Thodol might. It feels disrespectful to put it on casually, without giving it your full attention.

And if you do start to get lost in thought, every few minutes Anderson will pull you back in with a jarring: Awakened One!

Currents

Tame Impala

It should come as no surprise that I’ve listed an album that dedicates an entire song to the effects of nitrous oxide.

My first play-through of this album took place on a summer day, as I laid in the sun with my eyes closed, on a half tab of acid. The opening song, Let it Happen, is in many ways perfect for a psychedelic come-up—the name alone is a wonderful mantra for the psychonaut.

It's always around me, all this noise
But not nearly as loud as the voice saying
"Let it happen, let it happen (It's gonna feel so good)
Just let it happen, let it happen"

But the album isn’t just a Beatles-esque feel-good anthem. It contends with the suspenseful terror of immanent transcendence, with the duality of doubt and faith.

New Person, Same Old Mistakes perfectly articulates the inner tension here—a tension I’ve frequently felt when on the verge of ego death. Two voices (both belonging to Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker) argue, presumably in an inner dialogue:

Feel like a brand-new person
(But you'll make the same old mistakes)
Well, I don't care, I'm in love
(Stop before it's too late)…
I finally know what it's like
(You don't have what it takes)
(Stop before it's too late)
(I know there's too much at stake)

The whole album is a never-ending crescendo. Epiphany, catharsis, resolution always feel like they’re one beat away.

This, to me, is precisely the issue with drug-centric spirituality. It’s always slightly dissatisfying, and never fully resolves—unless you do the work to enter and navigate those spaces without the crutch of a chemical.

Finally taking flight
I know you don't think it's right
I know that you think it's fake
Maybe fake's what I like
The point is, I have the right
Not thinking in black and white

Rectangles and Circumstance

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion

I think a lot of my stuff is weirdly joyful about mortality, and this [album] is no exception.

—Caroline Shaw

I’ve been enjoying the collaboration between Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion since their 2021 album Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, but this year’s Rectangles and Circumstance is one my favorite contemporary classical compositions.

The album moves through a vast array of emotions, and expertly carries the listener along its currents. It opens up with an angsty description of contemporary techno-culture:

What’s the solitary game you play?
What are you content to say?
What’s your slot machine ballet?
Have your fears refreshed today?

…bitter gods look down at ants
scrolling through the avalanche
of politics and quick romance,
navigating the expanse
of rectangles and circumstance.

But it balances that intensity with soothing, lullaby-esque meditations. Shaw’s voice is perfect here, pleasant and mesmerizing.

Two books
Two songs
Wet air
Deep breath

One kiss
One hug
Hold time
Deep breath

Other times it takes on a haunting tone, self-harmonizing, with Reichian vocal snippets repeating percussively in the background.

Walking the line
Everything’s fine
Internal rhyme
Of a lie

I’m searching the streets
Finding beats of deceit
And skin on clean sheets

Throughout the album, Sō Percussion’s instrumentation is wildly innovative, with strange time signatures and sounds I can't quite identify. They complement Shaw’s voice perfectly.

And, true to the Shaw quote above, the tone of the album is entirely hopeful, despite candidly grappling with the pre-apocalyptic modernity we find ourselves in.

When all the seas rise high my dear
and the rocks melt with the sun
will the memory of us still rhyme with anyone?

Will we still tune our violins?
Will we still sing of roses?
Will we exist at all my love?
Or will fade to stanzas of the dust?

River Without Banks

Leo Svirsky

This is the only instrumental album on the list. But it’s been a wonderful meditation companion for me, so I feel the need to include it here, despite not really knowing how to properly articulate its beauty.

The title itself does a wonderful job: river without banks a mantra I’ve returned to repeatedly in my meditation practice. The phrase comes from musicologist Henry Orlov (whose wife, not coincidentally, was Svirsky’s piano teacher). Orlov viewed music as a bridge to a “higher reality”, as a way to transcend the merely physical (the banks) by entering a stream of the spiritual (the river).

The album primarily consists of two pianos, echoing and supporting each other. The effect is ethereal, and distorts the listener’s sense of time. Whenever the composition reaches a climax, the voices are so full that it becomes difficult to focus your attention on any one sound or motif, and your attentional muscle inevitably collapses into a wide passivity.

The poetic notes accompanying the album, written by composer Antoine Beuger, convey the wonder of Svirsky’s work better than my prose ever could:

how to begin?

no beginning: in-ing, being with-in, be(come)ing, coming to be, to be(g)in, to enter a world of

infinitives, of infinite, never ending reverberation: verb-ing again, ever dissolving what might seem to

be(come) an object to be observed; not finding: being found, finding oneself implied in a deeply

moving transparency of layer upon layer, fold upon fold, nothing happening without immediately

multiplying itself, in a trembling, highly spirited undulation, ululation sometimes, a shivering,

surfacing upon the face of this river without banks.

Mystic Familiar

Dan Deacon

Close your eyes
Float away
Feel so fine
A new day
Starts any moment you'd like

You may have expected this list to be full of spa-friendly, pan-flute-filled muzak. If the inclusion of Tame Impala didn’t disabuse you of that notion, Dan Deacon’s Become a Mountain sure will.

Deacon is, if nothing else, a maximalist. His work has the manic feel of Beethoven on amphetamines set loose in a room full of synthesizers.2 Every track is filled with layer upon layer of sound.

And yet somehow it all coheres together into a beautiful gestalt. With a good pair of headphones, you can hear each individual part, and feel its contribution to the whole. It’s never noise for the sake of noise—everything feels meticulously balanced. Become a Mountain is no exception.

Lyrically, the album reads like a guided meditation. Deacon’s work has always had a mystical bent (see, for example, this delightful animation of his song When I Was Done Dying—a song that deserves its own Exegesis post). But Mystic Familiar takes it to a new extreme, repeatedly exhorting the listener to “close your eyes” and focus on feelings of metta and equanimity:

Close your eyes
And become a mountain
Become all around you
Become the skies, become the seas

Open your eyes
And remain the mountain
Breathing in deeply
Feeling the day change with the breeze

Like in Songs for the Bardo, most of the lyrics are in the imperative, constantly calling the listener to attention.

Dig deep (The water deep down is safe enough to drink)
Burn bright (The fire inside is brighter than you think)
Stay sharp (Time will want it smooth around the end)
Feel free (First you must relax before transcend)

When I follow Deacon’s music not just with my attention, but with my whole emotional being, every climax creates an internal, tactile explosion; every cut to silence leaves an echoing, resonant stillness, like ripples on a pond slowly returning to the surface.

When it comes to meditation, I’m generally a fan of just sitting, free of distractions—even traditional guided meditation can be a bit of a crutch.

But sometimes you need a little extra stimulation, a little extra motivation to keep your butt on the cushion. On those days, music can be a wonderful addition to your practice.

I grew up a God-fearing Catholic. I saw people through the lens of good and evil, as allies and enemies.

After leaving the Church and getting an engineering degree, I saw the world as a sort of clockwork set in motion by the big bang. People became mechanistic automata, with no free will or culpability.

And lately the the world feels animated by a life force I can neither name nor describe. I’m often struck by the stark impression that we’re 8 billion manifestations of the same underlying deity.

In fact, I’ve gotten wildly lost in the space that separates all these worldviews. Most people will change their core beliefs once or twice in a lifetime, if at all. But my interest in meditation, my use of psychedelics, and perhaps a predisposition to psychosis, have tossed me about on the sea of ideas.

Fortunately, in all that chaos, I’ve learned to navigate effectively. And there are three main levers I’ve found—three ways of modulating my worldview to make it kinder, happier, and more stable.

Outline

• The Penrose Trinity

• Ontology

• Epistemology

• Metaphysics

• Pluralism: The Meta-Worldview

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The Penrose Trinity

One of my favorite models of reality comes from physicist and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose:

I like to call this the Penrose Trinity. It points to three mutually arising aspects of reality:

• The physical world of atoms and planets, matter and energy, space and time

• The mental world of colors and sounds, feelings and emotions, impressions and dreams

• The platonic world of numbers and words, concepts and logic, definitions and theorems

Incidentally, there are three intimidatingly big words1 that get thrown around by philosophers, which map neatly to the components in Penrose’s Trinity:

• Metaphysics: what, ultimately, is the nature of reality?

• Epistemology: where does our knowledge of reality come from?

• Ontology: how do we break the whole of reality down into smaller concepts and categories?

These questions keep me awake at night. They are unanswerable, and yet they demand answers.

More importantly, the answers we adopt—even provisionally—have a huge impact on our thoughts, emotions, and behavior. Each one represents a choice, a degree of freedom in our worldview.

Ontology

Language is a tricky thing.

With words, we draw lines on top of reality. Every word lumps certain things together, and divides them from their surroundings.

An ontology uses words to break a continuous space into discrete buckets. So the full spectrum of color becomes red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purple; the vast space of musical sound gets shunted into a dozen or so genres; the interconnected web of life is split into individual species along often-debatable lines.

Of course, we can always keep zooming in, adding more categories to our ontology, capturing ever deeper levels of nuance. We can distinguish different greens like “chartreuse” and “lime”, or divide the musical world into thousands of subgenres. But no matter how small we make the divisions, behind every category sits further nuance, obscured by some catch-all label we’ve invented.

Without those labels—without words—we’d be lost in a sea of ambiguity. But we quickly forget that the lines are there, and that they’ve been drawn arbitrarily.

Usually the consequences are merely silly, triggering internet debates about whether Pluto is a planet, or whether a hot dog is a sandwich. But too often the consequences are literally a matter of life and death: ontological choices decide whether your illness is covered by insurance or whether you can be drafted into the military. The lines between criminality, insanity, and mere deviance vary widely between societies (homosexuality has spent time in all three buckets). And the Nazis famously developed a rigid ontology to decide which people should be labeled “Jewish”.

Consider the concept of gender: do we insist on splitting people into two hard categories based on the shape of their genitals? Or do we acknowledge the small minority of people who find themselves outside those buckets and the larger minority that finds them stifling? The former creates less cognitive burden for most people (only two options in the “gender” dropdown!) but fails to capture the experience of millions.

What’s more, in subjective and intersubjective domains, the ontological choices we make feed back into reality, changing the world itself. Words become magnets, drawing our attention and energy towards their platonic center and away from their boundaries. We invent an esoteric category like “superhero movies”, and suddenly billions of dollars begin pouring into films of gaudily costumed vigilantes.

Sure enough, adopting new gender categories seems to be catalyzing changes in our felt sense of gender identity:

Too often we insist that our ontological choices are inherently correct. Both the two-gender and many-gender camps will insist that their categories are a biological reality, and the other is a perverse attempt to transcend or constrain nature. But all we’re doing is drawing arbitrary lines on top of an amorphous continuum. We can always redraw the lines when it suits us.2

But a change in ontology can be deeply disturbing. Having to alter the very categories of being at the roots of our worldview is so disorienting that it has its own special term: ontological shock. Consider: merely adding a few new gender categories has thrown the world into political tumult. People literally get murdered over it.

One of the greatest metacognitive skills you can develop is the ability to let go of your ontology and witness, wordlessly, the continuum of experience sitting behind it. This shift away from thinking in discrete categories is a hallmark of mystical experience (often described as “ineffable”, or unable to be put into words), and is the reason meditators put so much effort into abandoning discursive thought.

Stepping back into that wordless vantage point allows you to reconsider and reshape your ontology. Which—as we’ve seen—can radically alter your relationship with the world.

Of course, eventually you’ll need to return to the world of words. You need an ontology if you want to have anything resembling logic or communication—there’s no way to participate in society without one. You can choose a simple ontology with few categories, or a complex ontology drowning in nuance. You can choose an ontology that’s reasonably compatible with the society around you, or one that’s disruptive to the point of creating confusion. But you have to choose.

See also: Scott Alexander on Taxometrics and The Categories were Made for Man, as well as this blog on Taoist ontology.

Epistemology

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Having carved up the world into discrete categories, our next question is: how do we learn more about those categories, and the relationships between them?

Sensory experience is our most immediate (and perhaps only3) source of information. Any mind comes to know its surroundings through sensation. This is why I map epistemology to Penrose’s “mental world”.

But while sense data might sit at the root of our knowledge, it’s extremely noisy. Every second, there’s a ton of information pouring into your eyes and ears that isn’t particularly relevant to your needs, and you only have so much space in your brain.

Fortunately we seem to live in a world that mostly follows predictable patterns, and we can use those patterns to filter out the noise. We build up an internal model of those patterns, and then compare our sense data to that model.

In neuropsychology, this way of coming to know the world is called predictive processing. If you have a very strong model of how the world works, but you see or hear something that contradicts that model, you’ll typically write off the contradiction as a fluke—often you won’t consciously notice it.

This is where our epistemic freedom lies: how much weight do you give to your immediate sensory data, and how much do you give to your mental model of the world? In Bayesian terminology: how strong are your priors, your preconceptions?

Strong priors make for a predictable experience, but might blind you to what’s really happening. You can become locked in place, unable to adjust as you encounter new evidence, or as the world itself evolves into a new configuration.

Weak priors, on the other hand, allow you to see the world more directly, but will subject you to a firehose of noisy data. You might start to drift around psychotically, unmoored from any stable model of the world.

It’s not unlike the tradeoff we saw in ontology, where more categories provide nuance, but at the cost of a heavier intellectual burden. Here, weak priors provide more information about reality, but again, at the cost of a heavier intellectual burden.

No coincidence then that meditation and psychedelics, in addition to melting ontological categories, also weaken priors, subjecting the experiencer to a deluge of sensory information.

This seems to be the mechanism behind the huge psychological changes that can be induced by both contemplative practice and psychedelic experience. When we let go of our existing world-model and become immersed in sensation, our models have a chance to update, to adjust themselves to all that new information.

So once again you have a choice: how strongly do you cling to your existing model of the world? Relaxing your priors can be deeply disruptive, but that’s precisely the lubricant you need if you want to move between worldviews.

Again, you’ll eventually need to re-strengthen your priors—it’s impossible to navigate the world without a model to lean on. But as you do, you might find that your old model of the world no longer quite fits. And, as we’ll see below, choosing a new model is a matter of metaphysics.

See also: Steve Lehar’s Cartoon Epistemology, Michael Titelbaum on The Problem of the Priors, Scott Alexander on Epistemic Learned Helplessness, and Andrew Gelman on The Problem with Bayes

Metaphysics

So we’ve carved up the world into categories, and we’ve got a sense for how to navigate our sensory impressions of those categories. Sure, we made some arbitrary choices along the way, but at least now we can build an accurate model of the world!

Unfortunately, we’re still flying blind. Our metaphysical situation, by definition4, is underdetermined by the data we have. We’ll never have enough evidence to know what’s going on at the meta-level.

For example, a metaphysician might ask whether our universe came into being ex nihilo, was created by a god, or is a Matrix-style simulation built to enslave humanity. All three universes would look exactly the same from the inside—from where we’re standing, there’s no way to known which one we’re in.

And so, once again, we have some freedom.

Of course, some arguments might be more or less convincing. I think it’s reasonable to assume the universe has an intelligent creator, or that it doesn’t. But the idea that it was made in seven days, only a few thousand years ago, and that dinosaur fossils were planted by the devil to convince us otherwise, seems pretty preposterous. Possible, sure! It’s consistent with the facts, in its own weird way. But it’s so oddly specific, and requires so many unwieldy assumptions, that it seems safe to dismiss out of hand.5

We also have to face the fact that there is some kind of truth to the matter. Our ontological and epistemic choices are more or less arbitrary, but a metaphysical choice runs the risk of being wrong. Either our universe was created by a higher intelligence, or it wasn’t—whether or not we’re able to prove it.

And yet, any metaphysical assertion is built on top of epistemic and ontological choices. We can wiggle our way into conjoining any metaphysical assertion with the facts just by shifting our definitions. No one can stop us from calling the laws of physics a “higher intelligence”.

So when confronted with unanswerable metaphysical questions like: are plants conscious? do humans have free will? does life have meaning?—realize that you’re welcome to answer in either direction, maybe shifting your definitions of words like “conscious” in the process.

And, above all, consider how your answer might impact your sense of well-being, or your treatment of others.

See also: Paul Feyerabend’s Farewell to Reason, William James’ A Pluralistic Universe, and this blog on Behavioral Theology.

Pluralism: The Meta-Worldview

Once, while meditating on a profound sense of guilt, the idea struck me that if I simply let Jesus into my heart, my sins would be forgiven. I did. And it was good. The guilt melted away, for the first time in years. Nearly a decade later, I still occasionally attend a nearby Unitarian church for a healthy dose of Jesus.

But I am not a Christian. Or, I am a Christian, but am also simultaneously a Buddhist, an Atheist, and a Pantheist. Or I am sometimes some of these things, and sometimes others. And sometimes I am none of them, just a cloud of being floating in the void.

The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest.

—Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

That might seem flaky, non-committal, or intellectually dishonest. But I’ll happily discuss the nuances of each worldview, pointing out the parts I like and where I think its limitations are. Ultimately my attitude is a reflection of pluralism—the belief that no single system of thought can ever have the final say.

I’m not claiming that pluralism is the correct worldview—only that it’s immensely useful for me personally. It helps me empathize with just about anyone, especially people whose worldviews seem particularly foreign. I’ve heard friends express incredulity that anyone could support Trump, or believe in young-earth Creationism, or assert that 9/11 was an inside job. But after taking that familiar step back into unknowing, for minutes at a time I can try on their ideas and feel the internal consistency of their beliefs.

It’s kind of scary, feeling the magnetic self-importance, self-righteousness, and obvious correctness of worldviews that I (from my current perspective) find abhorrent. Racism feels pretty good, it turns out! From the inside, you can really see how people get stuck there.

The crucial skill of the mystic is the ability to step backwards, away from knowledge and certainty, into the cloud of unknowing. It’s only from that standpoint that all your ontological, epistemic, and metaphysical assumptions are obviously assumptions, rather than justified beliefs. And upon reentry, you may find them changed, sometimes radically.

Again, this is a dangerous quest. Once your brain is in that pliant, receptive state, it becomes thirsty for a new worldview. And it will happily latch onto the circular logic that fuels any subculture. Take LSD and wander into the wrong YouTube rabbit hole, and you might not come out the other side.6

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?

—Matthew 7:15-16, New King James Version

So it’s important to repeatedly step back, and question the worldview you’ve adopted. Questioning it on the grounds of truthfulness would be silly—every worldview is true from its own perspective. Instead, you should look at the fruits: look at your sense of well-being, and at your behavior towards others. How skillfully are you able to navigate the world? Where are you falling down? And how might an adjustment to your worldview help?

There’s no ultimate destination here, no final worldview that captures the world itself. Each one provides a unique perspective. They can be more or less beautiful, more or less safe, more or less stable. But none has the final say.

We live in a pluralistic universe. That’s my worldview, at least.

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It’s hard to believe I’ve only been writing on the internet for two years. This blog and its extended universe have become a huge part of my life. I’ve made dozens of new friends, both online and out in the world. My life feels much richer.

This year brought me a fulfilling new job, the death of a close friend, a wonderful relationship, a subsequent breakup (date me!), and some big steps forward in my meditation practice.

I’m in a great place mentally, physically, and spiritually. And this community has a lot to do with that.

Outline

• Writing

• Essays

• Community

• Substack

• Looking Forward

Writing

I wrote far fewer essays this year than in my first year.

In year one, I wrote 40 essays—almost one per week, which was my stated goal.

This year I wrote only 16 essays, slightly better than one per month. I lost a few paid subscribers as a result.

Why the drop? Partly it was a matter of quality over quantity: I stopped doing monthly “links” posts, and I’ve stopped doing low-effort/low-impact posts, like The Psychosocial Beauty of r/AmITheAsshole and Contra Ozy Brennan on Ameliatarianism.

For the higher-effort stuff, each post takes me around 10-15 hours of researching, writing, and editing—sometimes more. This is maybe too much? I don’t know. But I also don’t know how to do it any faster.

Despite the drop in output, writing continues to be one of the healthiest habits in my life. It’s easy to become intoxicated by wild ideas, especially when exploring the fringes of science and spirituality. Having to actually articulate and justify those ideas to a discerning audience keeps me grounded in reality. So thanks for being here!

Essays

My most popular article this year was Phase Blindness. I’m both surprised and delighted—it’s a pretty wild take on a very technical topic. I spent years groping at connections between the Fourier transform and our experience of time before finally finding a way to articulate those ideas (you can see me circling around the same space in last year’s Time is a Wheel, Time is an Arrow). Finally getting that article out was deeply cathartic, and I’m so happy that it resonated.

I also published the most terrifyingly personal essay I’ve ever written: Navigating Manic Psychosis. Admitting not only to past mental health issues, but to grandiose delusions in particular, was hard. But what’s the point of writing pseudonymously if you can’t be honest? I’m glad I did it—it seemed to help others with similar experiences, and the confession exorcised a big chunk of my own residual shame.

The series-oriented posts have fallen off a bit. I did write four Exegesis posts for paid subscribers, including a freely-available essay on Hilma af Klint. But I wrote only a single Minus the Nonsense article (on energy healing), and precisely zero Church of Reality articles. I’m particularly sad about the latter: Church of Reality posts have been some of my most popular (particularly the one on Barbara McClintock). And spreading the spiritual views of highly credible scientists does more to further my agenda—bridging the gap between science and spirituality—than my own philosophical speculations ever will.

(By way of excuse, I got completely hung up trying to do an article on Alexander Grothendieck, a world-changing mathematician who wrote long, semi-psychotic diatribes about spirituality. I worked through most of his 1500 page manifesto, Reaping and Sowing, which is only available in French, a language I do not speak. Google Translate helped, but if anyone knows how the heck it arrived at the phrase “cake daddy” please let me know. It appears 14 times in my translation and appears to be somewhat important to his thesis.)

I promise to rectify this. I still haven’t done Bohm! Tesla! Einstein! There’s so much more to explore here.

Community

This space has been growing healthily. At the one-year mark, we had 1337 subscribers; that number nearly tripled in the second year.

Paid subscriptions have also been steadily rising. Still not enough for me to quit my job and write full-time! But I can dream. Many thanks to the 30-odd folks out there supporting my work.

For now, everything is still going to GiveDirectly. But I’ve also used this revenue as an excuse to send myself to conferences like Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness. So your contributions are actually improving the quality of content here!

Substack

It’s been interesting to watch Substack evolve over the last two years. I’d previously written a few things on Medium, but never felt like I was building my own community—more that I was yet another voice within the walls of their platform. I was attracted to Substack because they seemed to be invested in the idea of helping writers build a direct relationship with their readers.

This is in contrast to most platforms, which seek to insert themselves between the creators and the audience. Most platforms want to own that relationship. They want leaving the platform to be painful, for creators (who lose their audience) and for the audience members (who lose access to content).

I’m afraid that Substack is slowly drifting down the typical platform path, one sesame seed at a time. While I can take my subscribers above with me if I leave, I now have an additional ~400 “followers” who would be left behind. I’ve managed (with considerable effort) to export my essays, but my “notes” are locked-in. It’s natural for Substack to build moats around its garden, but every day it feels a bit more like long-form Twitter. And no one wants that.

I’ll be sticking with Substack for the foreseeable future, and I’m still hopeful that they’ll manage to avoid or at least slow the natural process of enshittification. But as a reminder, all the content here is mirrored at blog.superb-owl.link.

Looking Forward

While I’m very happy at my full-time job, I consider this blog my primary calling. Writing, for me, sits at the top petal the ikigai flower: I love it, I’d like to think I’m reasonably good at it, and I’m certain the world needs it—the wound separating science and spirituality has festered for too long.

One day, with your help, maybe I can make a living doing it as well.

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Many spiritual practices reference a “life force” that permeates and flows through the body.

It’s called qi in Taoism, prana in Hinduism and yoga, and goes by names like “energy” and “vibration” among the New Age crowd. Its flows are allegedly mapped by the chakra system and the meridians of acupuncture. Practices like qigong, reflexology and Reiki even claim to alleviate health problems—both mental and physical—by manipulating it.

There’s little scientific basis for all this. Even after a tremendous number of clinical studies, there’s no consensus as to whether energy-based therapies are truly effective, or just esoteric placebos. Worse, claims made by the most fervent believers (and the most shameless grifters) are overblown to the point of being dangerous.

Still, qi is a visceral bodily sensation, experienced by millions—myself included. To dismiss it as hallucination is to miss the point: there’s something going on here, something that sits at the squishy boundary between mind and body, between between science and spirituality. And no one has quite figured out what.

Outline

• (Don’t) Trust the Science

• The Subjective Experience of Qi

• See for Yourself

• Tactile Synesthesia

  • Sound

  • Sight

  • Emotions

• Mind Cure

• The Nonsense

  • Not a Treatment for Cancer

  • Energy Transfer

  • Remote Healing

  • Metaphysical Claims

Note: this article represents my own views, rather than the historical or contemporary views of Taoists, Hindus, Reiki practitioners, etc. I will use words like “qi” loosely.

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(Don’t) Trust the Science

The worst way to learn about energy healing is to consult the scientific literature. There you’ll find an amorphous ambiguity which readily conforms to whatever bias you arrived with.

Research this for too long, and you start to sound vaguely stoned. Is Reiki real? Does it matter whether Reiki is real? And whose definition of real are we working with: Is it real according to the presiding scientific and medical framework, which tells us that phenomena need to be measurable to be taken seriously, or is it real in the looser, unquantifiable way of spiritual practice?

—Jordan Kisner writing for The Atlantic, Reiki Can’t Possibly Work, So Why Does it?

Still, I’ll try to summarize: practices like Reiki and acupuncture do seem to provide stress and pain relief, especially when compared with a control group that receives zero treatment. But the effect becomes smaller (and sometimes disappears) when compared with “placebo” treatments that have the same form: a session with an enlightened Reiki master seems to have roughly the same effect as any care provider gently placing their hands on your skin. There are similar findings for acupuncture and reflexology.1

The Atlantic article above suggests a reasonable hypothesis: that the mechanism here is care itself—simply having another human being demonstrate concern for your well-being is itself healing:

Touch-based healing simulates the most archetypal care gestures. Several scientists I interviewed mentioned the way their mother would lay a hand on their head when they had a fever.

But this can’t be the whole story. It fails to explain the effects of more impersonal techniques like acupuncture, or why all these therapies focus more on the body than on emotional state. And many Reiki practitioners self-administer—it seems there’s no real need for another human’s involvement.

I’d like to propose an alternative explanation, one that coheres strongly with my own first-hand experience: these therapies “work” because they focus our attention on bodily sensations. They get us out of our head, away from the narratives we’ve constructed about our health, and into the raw data of felt experience. They teach us to navigate our afflictions from the inside, rather than trying to manipulate them from the outside.

Also from the Atlantic article, via Reiki convert Amy Fusselman:

What I wanted was to lie there and not use my brain, and believe someone was trying to help me, also not with his or her brain. I understand how this sounds. But you have to remember that I had been trying to use my brain on my problems for twenty years…I was over my brain. I was over everybody’s brain.

The Subjective Experience of Qi

I’ve spent nearly ten years exploring somatic2 phenomena, mostly by accident. I started meditating, and found that my hands were tingling, that my head was throbbing, that something was moving up and down my spine.

I never attributed these sensations to a mystical “life force”. I always assumed they were physiological: either tingling nerves in my body, or maybe signals moving through my brain’s bodymap.

But the sensations all followed similar patterns: arising, migrating, spreading, pulsating, vibrating, repeating themselves, responding to attention. They were begging to be united under a single concept—one I lacked entirely.

I’ve mostly settled for the new-agey term energy, or the more technical-sounding somatic phenomena, but the most precise term I can come up with is flows of tactile sensation.

Tactile sensation is a strange thing. It’s high-dimensional: you can pinch, stroke, or knead your arm to get a sense for the range of possibilities. And it’s ubiquitous: if I let my attention wander, I can feel the coolness of the air on my skin, the pressure of the chair supporting my back and butt, the roughness of my jeans, the tickle of hair against my forehead, the tightness of a full stomach. If I spread my attention, I can feel many of these things at once, arranged in a three dimensional scene.

Tactile sensation is also deeply intertwined with proprioception, your sense of the size, shape, and density of your body. If all tactile cues disappeared, you might feel weightless, or boundaryless, or even lose your sense of self completely.

See for Yourself

The easiest way explore somatic phenomena is to sit still, with your eyes closed, in a quiet room. (A sensory deprivation tank is even better, if you have access to one.)

At first, you’ll probably feel pretty normal, like a torso with four limbs and a head. But if you stretch your attention across the entire field of tactile sensations, that shape might start to feel fuzzier and rounder. You might find your hands and head take up a large amount of “touch-space”, thanks to a disproportionate number of nerve endings.

I call this space the tactile field—the set of all the touch-sensations you’re experiencing from moment to moment, spread out in three3 dimensions.

If you sit there long enough with your eyes closed, you’ll likely start to feel bits of motion in your tactile field. At the very least, you should feel it expand and contract with each breath. Sit quietly enough and you’ll feel your heartbeat as well, sending a cascade of pressure through your body once or twice per second.

With enough practice, you might start to feel some faster vibrations, or a tingling in your hands, or a cloud of sensation moving in circles around your torso. You can try generating and guiding tactile sensations with attention, scanning up and down your arms, legs, or spine. The sensations might even seem to extend outside your body.

If you want to speed things up a bit, I’ve left some fun exercises in the footnotes.4

Tactile Synesthesia

Of course, touch is only a small part of our total experience—sounds, sights, tastes, smells, and more abstract experiences like emotions take up a large part of consciousness.

But the more I attend to tactile sensations, the more these other senses seem like nothing more than sophisticated forms of touch.

Sound

It started with sound. After a few years of meditation, I found I could put on a good pair of headphones and feel my whole being vibrate in response to the music. I once said (blushing mildly) that “it feels like my is aura dancing”—as much as I hate to throw out woo-y words like “aura”, that’s the best description I can provide. My body lays perfectly still, but internally there’s tremendous movement, in time to the beat.

And it’s not just music. Once, after a peaceful guided meditation, the Zen-trained instructor broke the silence by violently clapping his hands together. I jumped at the shock of it—but not a physical jump. None of my muscles moved, but I felt something inside of me lurch forward in the direction of the sound. My body was still, but my tactile field exploded in response to that single, sharp clap.

And as another data point, here’s jazz musician and critic Ted Gioia describing his experience with singing bowls, a form of “sound healing” (emphasis is mine):

• …I found myself so overwhelmed by the experience of vibrations spreading through my body that I couldn’t really focus on anything except the moment-to-moment visceral feeling. Even in the most flow-inducing moments of performing jazz on stage, I’ve never felt so intensely that I had become the music itself.

• …Because the [intense volume of the bowls] is channeled into my body, I welcomed the intensity. It feels invigorating and energizing. I wouldn’t want it any less intense.

• …the vibration moves back in forth from different parts of my body in a set rhythm. The most typical situation is when the vibrations start moving back and forth between my right ear and left ear at predictable five-second intervals…

• In other instances, the music seems to move back and forth from my ears to my neck, or from leg to leg, or in some other pattern, but always with a marked and repeated rhythmic pulse.

I’ve always been musically inclined, but developing tactile-auditory synesthesia has completely changed my relationship with sound.

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Sight

When vision becomes linked to touch, things get even weirder.

For me, it typically starts with my pulse. If I sit quiet and still, I start to feel a ~1Hz jitter in my tactile field, with each jolt starting from my chest and expanding outward—the engine of my heart creating a steady biorhythm. If I then focus on my vision, I can see that same 1Hz pulse ripple through the visual field, as the pressure in my eyes rises and falls with blood pressure. With enough time and attention, higher frequency vibrations5 appear in both the visual and tactile fields, perfectly synchronized.

In some cases, my visual and tactile fields merge entirely, creating proprioceptive confusion: it feels like I am the things I’m seeing. I see the trees swaying in the wind, and I can feel that swaying viscerally, in my own body. I can feel “my” leaves fluttering. At an extreme, it feels like I’m “one with everything”.6 It’s a state of deep, almost psychotic empathy.

Emotions

It’s not just sight and sound. After enough introspection, even emotions start to feel like sophisticated tactile sensations.

Here’s Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score (emphasis mine):

In my practice I begin the process by helping my patients to first notice and then describe the feelings in their bodies—not emotions such as anger or anxiety or fear but the physical sensations beneath the emotions: pressure, heat, muscular tension, tingling, caving in, feeling hollow, and so on. I also work on identifying the sensations associated with relaxation or pleasure. I help them become aware of their breath, their gestures and movements.

…Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.

Emotions, I will tentatively claim, are nothing more than correlated groups of bodily sensations. We feel a heaviness, a pressure welling up in our chest, tears forming in our eyes, and we say “I am sad.” We feel warm and fuzzy, and call it “happy”. But if you were to discard all those bodily sensations, there’d be no abstract “sadness” or “happiness” feeling left over. The sensations are the emotion, and vice versa.

This is a large claim, and one that can only be verified through introspection. So lately, whenever I feel a strong emotion, I go looking for it. I try to pin it down in space and time, so I can better understand its dynamics: where does it come from? how does it evolve? why does it go away?

When looking for the emotion, I’ve found my mind will go to one of two places:

• Sometimes it will focus on symbolic representations of the emotion. E.g. if I’m angry, I’ll hear my internal monologue describe my reasons for being angry, or just make little interjections like “fuck that guy.” I’ll see scenes of violence play out in my mind’s eye, or more archetypal images like fire or a red face.

• Other times, my mind will locate the emotion in a specific part of the tactile field. I’ll sense the anger as a tension between my eyebrows, or a clenched jaw, or a tightness in my chest. I’ll feel it pulsate and move, perhaps migrating to different parts of my body, or spreading between them.

Interestingly, focusing on symbolic representations seems to strengthen the emotion, while focusing on the tactile sensations seems to weaken it.

This makes the latter a difficult thing to explore. As you examine the sensations, they dissolve!7 But I’ve learned a simple trick to get around this: I can use words to conjure the emotion, then focus on my body and watch it fade away.

For the last year, I’ve been doing this exercise weekly with my therapist—he’ll suggest a statement that conjures a particular emotion, then I repeat it and spend a minute or two scanning my body.

It’s not your typical “energy work”, but it feels far more principled than Reiki or acupuncture. And it’s helped a great deal. Seeing those knots of tactile sensation fold and unfold, over and over, makes it easier to navigate the same emotions in daily life, when the stakes are higher.

For example, I’ve become much better at recognizing and repairing anxiety. When I’m anxious, I almost always feel a twisting sensation in my stomach, eventually forming a knot. Once I notice the twisting knot, I can focus my attention there to untie it, and the anxiety drops away. Lately, I’ve been able to see and undo the twisting before it becomes a knot—before it escalates to anything I’d label “anxiety”.

My baseline state is noticeably more relaxed, and I haven’t experienced a panicky peak of anxiety since I started this therapy a little over a year ago.

Finding this link between low-level tactile sensations and high-level emotions has been like discovering the command line prompt on a computer. It feels like I have access to the system’s internal state, not just the symbolic icons sitting on my desktop.

Of course, that internal state is harder to work with, but it’s far more powerful.

Mind Cure

Even the staunchest skeptic would probably admit that energy work might help psychologically. But what about physically?

Of course, there’s no firm line between the two: being sick is stressful, and stress can make you sick. So we should expect energy work to at least relieve some minor symptoms, and make psychologically managing any disease easier.

But some health issues are fully psychogenic. In these cases, energy work can provide immense relief.

Let’s take a personal example: I recently experienced two of the most stressful weeks of my career. The entire time, I also had…let’s call it “irritable bowels”.

I have no doubt this was a psychogenic problem. It began with the stress, and it died with the stress. It didn’t matter that I improved my diet, reduced alcohol intake, or quit coffee. Those things helped, but the underlying cause—the stress—was still there. I could literally feel it twisting around in my bowels, forming the same anxiety knot I described above.

More specifically, I would feel it twist clockwise, about two inches below and behind my navel, getting tenser and harder as the anxiety rose.

Now, obviously my insides aren’t literally twisting in clockwise circles; my intestines are not literally tying themselves in knots. But the sensations do seem to go along with actual physiological changes inside my gut—a big twist is often accompanied by a burp, an audible rumble, even an urge to vomit. My best guess is that those twisting tactile sensations are an amplified map of what the smooth muscles in my gut are doing.

Surprisingly, I can modulate the twisting sensations by making subtle internal movements—mainly by guiding my attention.8 As a result, I not only feel less anxious—I have fewer digestive issues.

So it makes perfect sense to me that psychological approaches are so successful in treating Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). You’d probably want to do that in conjunction with dietary changes and medicine—in many cases, IBS might be due to something concretely physical, like a food allergy or damaged tissue. But 60% of IBS patients also have a psychiatric illness, mainly anxiety. I’m hopeful that if I continue to improve my skillfulness here—particularly my moment-to-moment mindfulness of anxiety—I’ll be able to navigate weeks like these without any psychological or physical discomfort.

I don’t want to overstate the potential here, but some physical ailments are psychogenic, or have psychosomatic components. In these cases, energy healing techniques—like the ones I’ve been using with my therapist—can have a huge benefit.

The Nonsense

Not a Treatment for Cancer

I want to emphasize, very clearly, that most illness has a physical cause. You should never treat a broken bone, a viral infection, or a tumor with energy work.

People do this sometimes! One study found a 250% increase in mortality for cancer patients engaging in alternative therapies. Famously, Steve Jobs died of liver cancer after trying to treat it with acupuncture and a strict diet.

Energy healing is a psychological intervention. It can only help physical illness to the degree that the illness is psychogenic. It can help you deal with the emotional stress of cancer, but it will not prevent the tumor from killing you.

Energy Transfer

A lot of energy modalities claim that qi can be sent outside the body, typically into another person. This is the basic claim of Reiki.

To some degree, if we define qi as “tactile sensation”, this is trivially true. If I touch your arm, I’m “sending” tactile sensation into your body—sensation that has a perfect correspondence to tactile sensations in my hand. And there’s indeed something magical about us feeling the same thing at the same time, despite the mundane mechanism.

But this idea is often taken too far. At extremes, you get things like this credulous documentary showing a man igniting a newspaper with his qi.9

I will say, I’ve had some experiences with romantic partners that stretch my imagination here. And the body does generate and respond to electromagnetic disturbances. I’m default-skeptical on the subject of energy transfer, but would love to see more research.

Remote Healing

Many Reiki practitioners claim the ability to heal over a distance, even without the recipient’s knowledge. I hate to dismiss any idea purely on the grounds of “no plausible mechanism”, but it’s pretty hard to imagine this being real, for any sensible definition of the word real.

Of course, a placebo is a placebo. If the recipient is aware they’re getting “remote Reiki”, we should expect the effects to be similar to in-person Reiki: so long as they’re paying more attention to their body, they’ll feel better.

These testimonials for Focused Life Force Energy™ are a great example of how positively some people react to simply being told they’re getting treatment.

Metaphysical Claims

Empirically, all we can say about qi/prana/energy is that some people experience flows of tactile sensation. But that hasn’t stopped experiencers from speculating about the source of those sensations.

Most commonly, it’s described as an animating “life force”, which flows through and between all living things. It’s often taken to be primordial, something that predates and prefigures biological life.

There are more esoteric interpretations as well. Kundalini yoga interprets one particularly strong energetic flow as a store of “divine feminine energy”, which rises from the base of the spine to the head, taking the form of a coiled snake.

Metaphysics, as always, should be understood metaphorically. If visualizing tactile sensations as a life force or as a divine snake helps you, by all means, go ahead. But remember that it’s just a provisional model of reality, not reality itself.

I much prefer the term “somatic work” to “energy work”. It leaves metaphysics out of the equation—we’re just studying and working with sensations in our body.

I’d love to see some enterprising neuroscientist prove, once and for all, that the sensation of qi is correlated with an electrical pulse in the associated body part, or with a tiny seizure in the cortical homunculus, or with some other physiological indicator. Until then, any description of qi is entirely anecdotal, and all we can do is compare anecdotes.

But there is a lot of correspondence between those anecdotes! Anyone who takes the time to introspect their tactile field seems to find these flows, and to agree on at least some of the shapes they can take.

It’s unfortunate that language demands every verb have a corresponding noun. It would be uncontroversial for me to say “when I sit quietly, I can feel movement”. But we’re left with the obvious question: what, exactly, is moving? Is it my nerves? My muscles? My awareness? Me?

For now, I guess I’ll continue to call it energy.

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Most people will tell you that Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita is a scathing critique of Soviet culture. But they’re only half right.

In truth, the book is much deeper, more general, more heretical. It’s a broad defense of chaos, mischief, and violence. Bulgakov wants us to understand that—in the right context—bad things can become good.

The Master and Margarita is an apologia for the Devil.

Outline

• The Plot

• Historical Context

• Inversion

• Complication

• Redemption

• Reflection

The Plot

“But, the Devil isn’t real!” I hear you protest. And that’s precisely how the novel begins—with two prominent Soviet literary figures discussing Jesus and the Devil as nonsensical fictional characters. As they tout their state-approved atheism, fervently trying to out-virtue-signal one another, Satan encroaches on their conversation.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name!
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.

—The Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil (inspired by The Master and Margarita)

The Master and Margarita is deeply absurdist. Magical realism drives much of the book’s visceral appeal, but also serves as a sleight-of-hand distraction from the its subversiveness—a potentially life-saving defense for a writer in Soviet Russia.

I’d like to focus on the trick itself, the subversion, so I’ll spare you most of the fantastical details. I’ll spare you the sexy vampire, the fanged hitman, and the talking cat. I’ll spare you the same cat swinging from a chandelier while firing a machine gun. I’ll spare you streets full of naked women and an empty suit clacking away at a typewriter. I’ll spare you Satan’s ball, the parade of condemned souls, and the cognac-filled swimming pool.

But there are three main storylines we need to contend with. Unlike Bulgakov, I’ll relate them in chronological order.

First, we have a creative take on the story of Pontius Pilate, who has been tasked with executing Ha Nozri (a stand-in for Jesus). Pilate is impressed by the prophet and wants to befriend him, but for political reasons1 is forced to carry out the execution. Pilate is racked with guilt, and secretly orders the assassination of Judas.

Nearly two thousand years later, Pilate’s story is recorded by a writer who goes by “the master” (a stand-in for the author, Bulgakov). Despite his novel’s obvious merit, and despite the undying support of his lover, Margarita, the master is preempted by critics and literary enemies, who torch his book. The master winds up in a mental asylum.

And shortly thereafter, Satan arrives in post-war Moscow, introducing himself as “Woland”. He and his retinue gleefully spread chaos throughout the city, finding increasingly absurd and creative ways to punish the Russian citizenry—with a primary focus on the self-serving literary elite that have been harassing the master.

Eventually, all three threads intertwine. Margarita befriends Satan’s retinue, becomes a witch, and (after a brief detour to unleash her powers on the master’s critics) enlists her new friends to liberate the master. The lot of them fly into the sky, where they witness Pilate’s fate.

Historical Context

Every one of us is a product of our culture. Some of us live in open, liberal societies; others in strict theocracies. Some of us are surrounded by intellectuals, and so value intellect; others are surrounded by believers, and value faith. A strange few have even grown up feral, adopting the attitudes and behaviors of wild wolves or monkeys.

Even so, you’d be one up on Bulgakov, because Bulgakov lived in Stalinist Russia.

It’s hard for many of us to imagine what Stalin’s dictatorship was like, and how its effects percolated out into daily life. Printed media were strictly under state control, and propaganda flourished. Religion wasn’t exactly illegal, but wasn’t exactly encouraged either. There were secret police. Citizens were routinely jailed, tortured, or killed for having the wrong views, being associated with the wrong people, or just because. Emigration was illegal, foreign goods were rare, and housing was tight—most people lived in communal apartments. Anyone could ruin your life with a phone call. Trust was a scarce resource.

Of course, people mostly parroted the state’s talking points (whether they believed them or not). They wrote poems and essays and plays about the greatness of Russia, about the folly of religion, about the beauty of Communism. They did this for personal gain, fame, special privileges, and most of all, to avoid any possible confrontation with the state.

But in all cultures, there are exceptions: misfits, rebels, queers, outcasts; the criminal and the insane. There are people whose wiring is too far out on the edges of the distribution to abide by the dominant worldview.

And every culture has a way of handling these anomalies, pushing them to the margins in order to protect its identity—often (as in Soviet Russia’s case) with violence. But violence can only effect the desired behaviors. It’s much better if you can psychologically induce conformity through thought and emotion.

Now is a good time to mention that Bulgakov wasn’t only a product of Stalinist culture. He grew up before Stalin’s time, in Tsarist Russia, and witnessed the rise of Lenin and Stalin in his late twenties. More importantly, he was the son of a prominent Orthodox theologian, and the grandson of two Orthodox clergymen. While Bulgakov’s explicit religious beliefs aren’t quite clear (and, I have to assume, not quite orthodox), he was deeply influenced by his father, and maintained a strong inclination toward spirituality throughout his life.

Christianity, it must be said, is immensely effective at psychologically enforcing conformity. Not only does it conflate authority with God Himself, it promises an eternity of suffering for disbelief and dissent. And it personifies these things in an archetypal rebel: Satan, who refused to submit to God’s will, and started the War in Heaven.

So Bulgakov found himself wedged between two competing cultures, both demanding his obedience and threatening him with punishment. The dissonance could easily drive one mad—and several writers in Bulgakov’s novel, including his stand-in, do indeed end up in the madhouse. But Bulgakov’s mind twisted the dissonance into something new: Satan, the original rebel, becomes a hero, a savior. Religious poison becomes a political cure.

Only with the Devil at his side can Bulgakov straddle both cultures at once.

Inversion

Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
'Cause I'm in need of some restraint

—Sympathy for the Devil

The Master and Margarita portrays Woland (aka Satan) as a sympathetic character. He’s neatly-dressed, well-read, and clever. He begins every interaction politely, but always finds a way to expose the hidden selfishness lurking inside the people he encounters.

His misdeeds are all focused on the greedy, the cowardly, and the hypocritical. Most of all, he goes after liars—one of his victims, we learn, has falsely reported his neighbors to the secret police in hopes of taking their apartment. And it’s Woland who ultimately saves the protagonists.

The theme of inversion is echoed throughout the story. Misfortune is justice, befalling only those who deserve it; chaos brings freshness and excitement to every situation that has settled into a malignant normal; “respectable” people are all shown to be liars, cowards, and thieves; the only people who understand what’s really happening are locked away in a madhouse.

Repeatedly, Bulgakov shows us the folly of trying to create too much order, of relying on a single authority, of pretending we can know and control the world. Much of the novel’s comedy comes from watching the Russian citizenry try to hold onto their pragmatic worldview, while Woland repeatedly rips the carpet out from under them. They desperately seek rational explanations, and finding none, panic. They cling to order, while he sows chaos.

In one memorable chapter, Woland puts on a show, entitled Black Magic and its Exposure. He makes heaps of designer clothing appear out of thin air, and showers the crowd with ten-rouble bills, resulting in an explosion of chaos and greed. In steps Arkady Apollonovnich, Chairman of the Acoustics Commission, to uphold his culture’s pragmatic demands:

“…it is desirable, citizen artiste, that you expose the technique of your tricks to the spectators without delay, especially the trick with the paper money…The exposure is absolutely necessary. Without it your brilliant numbers will leave a painful impression. The mass of spectators demands an explanation.”

But instead of exposing his techniques, Woland exposes the Chairman’s ongoing affair with a young actress. And, to triple the entendre, all the women who wrapped themselves in designer clothes soon find themselves exposed on the streets outside the theater.2

Complication

Back in reality, did Bulgakov take on Satan’s role, and rebel against Stalin? The answer is complicated. As it turns out, he was one of Stalin’s favorite writers, thanks to a book (and subsequent play) he wrote about the Russian Revolution. Stalin even intervened when the play was canceled due to poor reviews.

And this happened despite the fact that Bulgakov was repeatedly critical of Stalin’s government. It’s a miracle he wasn’t murdered over it. Here’s a taste of a couple of his lesser-known works, via Wikipedia:

The Fatal Eggs tells of the events of a Professor Persikov, who…discovers a red ray that accelerates growth in living organisms…the Soviet government puts the ray into use at a farm…the eggs produce giant monstrosities that wreak havoc in the suburbs of Moscow and kill most of the workers on the farm…This tale of a bungling government earned Bulgakov his label of counter-revolutionary.

Heart of a Dog features a professor who implants human testicles and a pituitary gland into a dog…The dog becomes more and more human as time passes, resulting in all manner of chaos…It contains a few bold hints to the communist leadership; e.g. the name of the drunkard donor of the human organ implants…can be seen as a parody on the name of Stalin

But perhaps “miracle” isn’t quite the right word for Bulgakov’s survival—Stalin himself came to his defense, saying Bulgakov’s genius placed him beyond typical political allegiances. Of course, that didn’t stop Stalin from banning most of his output, culminating in a complete ban on all his writing and his theatrical productions in 1929. Bulgakov was no longer allowed to work.

Frustrated, Bulgakov wrote to Stalin personally, asking for permission to emigrate to America. The two spoke on the phone: Bulgakov agreed to stay, and Stalin agreed to let him go back to his work in theater.

So Bulgakov was indeed a rebel, but he also relied on and negotiated with the target of his rebellion. His complicated relationship with Stalin even inspired a (deeply fictionalized) play, Collaborators.

After his un-banning, Bulgakov languished, with most of his writing going unpublished. The little that did get out was severely criticized in the Soviet press. He wrote The Master and Margarita during these years, while struggling with sickness and, understandably, depression. At one point—just like the fictional Master—he burned his working manuscript, and later had to rewrite it from memory. When he died in 1940, there were only a few unfinished sentences, nothing a good editor couldn’t polish away.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that anyone dared print it; even then it was censored. But the novel’s most famous line quickly become a rallying cry for free expression:

“Manuscripts don’t burn.”

Redemption

It’s not easy for someone steeped in Christian theology to rebel, to take on the role of Satan. And much of The Master and Margarita is concerned with the rebel’s redemption. In the final pages, you can feel Bulgakov’s hope and angst, his desire to be saved, to be relieved of his counter-revolutionary burden after a decade of intellectual isolation. The novel ends happily—and literally ever-after—for the master, for Margarita, for Pontius Pilate, and even for the Devil himself.

In the final chapter—titled Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge—the master and Margarita find Pontius Pilate in the same position he was left at the end of the Master’s story: suffering with guilty conscience next to a broken jug of wine, longing to walk and talk with Ha Nozri (aka Jesus). We learn that he’s been here for “twelve thousand moons”, a sentence Margarita decides is far too much. The Devil exhorts the master to finish his novel, and the master shouts:

“You’re free! You’re free! He’s waiting for you!”

Pilate—a man who literally killed God—is released from his agony.

The Devil then leads the master and Margarita to their eternal refuge, teasing them along the way:

“oh, thrice-romantic master, can it be that you don’t want to go strolling with your friend in the daytime under cherry trees just coming into bloom, and in the evening listen to Schubert’s music? Can it be that you won’t like writing with a goose quill by candlelight? Can it be that you don’t want to sit over a retort like Faust, in hopes that you’ll succeed in forming a new homunculus? There! There! The house and the old servant are already waiting for you, the candles are already burning, and soon they will go out, because you will immediately meet the dawn.”

Much like Goethe’s Faust3, the master and Margarita make a deal with the Devil. But in the end, it’s only a show, a test—the danger suddenly and irreversibly evaporates. Their salvation, it turns out, is not contingent on some byzantine set of contracts and laws, but simply on their capacity for bravery and kindness and love.

Reflection

The Master and Margarita is a slippery, interconnected web of loosely related events, which extends beyond the novel and into the real world.

There’s the obvious allegory tying reality to fiction: the autobiographical details Bulgakov has mixed into the story. Both he and the master write a book about Pontius Pilate, burn it, and rewrite it. Both have the undying support of a lover (Margarita was inspired by Bulgakov’s third wife—he, too, was “thrice-romantic”). And, though Bulgakov would never know it, through this novel he eventually found immortality, just like the master.

In the Epilogue we learn that, upon Satan’s departure, things in Russia mostly returned to normal. Explanations were concocted involving a gang of hypnotists. A few cats were arrested by overzealous citizens, but it was soon decided that the talking cat must have been nothing more than a ventriloquist’s illusion.

Real-life Russia, too, has mostly returned to normal, despite the success of Bulgakov’s counter-revolutionary novel. A strongman is in power, the cultural narrative is dominated by propaganda, and dissenters are routinely silenced.

Surprisingly, Russia released a film adaptation of The Master and Margarita in early 2024, much to the displeasure of Putin’s government, and to the shock of its dogged creators. Like the novel, it’s proven to be extremely popular, setting box office records. And like Bulgakov, its director—Michael Lockshin—has been harassed by government officials, even threatened with criminal investigation.

It seems that ideas, like manuscripts, don’t burn. Every culture will have its misfits, every government its critics, every religion its heretics, every deity a devil. And Bulgakov’s message here is a clear “thank God”—without resistance we’d drift into authoritarianism, monoculture, total uniformity. We’d crystallize into nothingness.

I saw this video, and the secrets of the universe were revealed:

In one instant, I felt the immanent truth of Nietzsche’s eternal return. I could see the mechanism of karma itself. I understood immediately that every ostensibly unique experience is composed from an alphabet of smaller, not-unique-at-all experiences. That we are the echoes of patterns put in place long before us.

That description of the world may or may not actually be true. It was a mystical experience, not an intellectual epiphany. It was my visceral, felt sense of time that shifted in that moment—all the connections to Nietzsche and Hinduism fell out afterward, as I tried to make sense of it.

There are two things I’ve realized since:

• First: there’s a very elegant mathematical description of that shift in time perception, which just so happens to be a foundational part of signal processing.

• Second: that shift is a key ingredient in most or all of my mystical experiences.

Outline

• Good Vibrations

• Frequency and Phase

• The Thickness of Time

• Zooming In and Out

• The Fourier Transform

• Thick Time and Mystical Experience

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Good Vibrations

There’s a point, at around 20 beats per second (i.e. 20Hz1), where a driving rhythm turns into a hum. You can hear it in the video below:

There’s something important happening at the transition point. Physically, nothing much2 has changed—packets of compressed air are are hitting your ear just a bit faster than they were a moment ago. But perceptually the story is quite different—what before was a series of events spread out in time is now a single constant tone.

And this isn’t just an auditory phenomenon. You can spot it visually too: the turning wheels of a car blur into a solid object at high speeds; solid colors are really electromagnetic vibrations (the only physical difference between red and purple is that purple vibrates faster). Even smell is hypothesized to be vibratory, and yet most of us perceive scent as an unmoving constant—those tiny molecular vibrations are required for perception, but not perceivable themselves.

It’s as though your brain’s clock speed maxes out at some point, and stops trying to discern the individual impulses of the input signal. But it knows something is there, so it smears all that wiggling into a single, solid object.

Frequency and Phase

To be clear: it’s not an issue of your brain’s sampling rate being too low. The hum you hear when the rhythm exceeds 20Hz contains nearly all the information present in the original signal. There’s only one piece of information missing: the phase.

Frequency and phase (along with amplitude) are the most important variables in describing how a waveform evolves over time:

Some brief definitions:

• Amplitude: how high are the peaks, and how low are the valleys? Higher amplitude means bigger bumps.

• Frequency: how many peaks and valleys occur in a given time period? Higher frequency means more cycles per second.

• Phase: Are we currently3 at a peak, a valley, or somewhere in between? Unlike the other terms, higher phase doesn’t lead in one direction. Instead, phase is cyclic—if we start at a peak, and keep shifting the phase to the right, we come back to another peak.

Here’s a visualization of a wave signal being processed. At each point in time, you can see the wave’s phase clearly—you can tell if we’re at a peak, a trough, or somewhere in between:

When the wave gets a lot faster (i.e. its frequency goes up), it becomes harder to see the beats. Eventually, they get so close together that they’re thinner than the width of the black line traversing them:

Inside that black bar, we can see the frequency of the wave inside it. But there’s no clearly defined phase; the bar doesn’t have any particular location among the wave’s crests and dips; it contains several of both.

Conversely, when the frequency is slow and spread out as in the first animation, the bar knows exactly where it is phase-wise. But from the bar’s perspective, it’s hard to see the wave’s frequency—it’s only seeing one tiny bit of the wave at a time.

So there’s a dual relationship between phase and frequency. When the waves are spread out, the bar captures phase, but not frequency; when the waves are packed in tight, the bar captures frequency, but not phase.

The Thickness of Time

That bar is a representation of how we experience time.

Following Husserl, let’s call it the thickness of the present moment. Our conscious experience is extended in time, so that there’s no precise, discrete notion of “now”. Here’s William James describing the phenomenon (emphasis mine):

In short, the practically cognized present is no knife-edge, but a saddle-back, with a certain breadth of its own…We do not first feel one end and then feel the other after it, and from the perception of the succession infer an interval of time between, but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole

(There’s a physical basis for this thickness, which falls out of relativity. Your present moment is created by many different parts of your brain activating together. But information can’t travel faster than light—those different parts of your brain need time to cohere together. If an experience is spread out in space, it must also be spread out in time.)

Because of this thickness, we experience the same tradeoff we saw above with the black bar. Events that occur very rapidly smear together, and we lose track of phase, like in the video above where the rhythm gets too fast to hear the individual hits.

Conversely, events that occur far apart feel disconnected, even when they’re not. You might call this the thinness of the present moment—slow a rhythm down enough (below about 0.5Hz, or one hit every two seconds) and it no longer feels like rhythm. We hear sudden, random noises instead of the beat’s gestalt:

Zooming In and Out

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Interestingly, we seem to have some control over how thick our present is. We can expand and contract that time window at will.

I can deliberately zoom into the present moment, and feel all the individual events it comprises. This is actually a common meditation technique. For example, Daniel Ingram encourages his readers to see how many sensations they can count per second, aiming for around 10. It’s an exercise that helps us see what perception is like on the smallest scales, how it operates and evolves from moment to moment.

I can also zoom out, and see the present moment not as a unique event, but as the resonant residue of thousands of long-range patterns. I’m sitting here writing, because I have an established habit of writing. I’m doing so in my favorite coffee shop, having ordered my usual breakfast. Around me there’s a first date, a young woman reading a novel, and an older man on his laptop—all traditional coffee shop rituals, iterated into the present moment. Today is identical to a thousand other Sundays, this coffee shop identical to a thousand other coffee shops, modulo some minor details. When my perception of time shifts, like it did when watching that Joe Rogan video, the details completely fade into the background, and all I can see is repetition.

A lot of techniques (like Daniel’s) focus on the former, on how to clench and strengthen that attentional muscle. But relaxing it is just as important, if not moreso. Our natural state is one of narrowly focused attention—even if the direction of its gaze wanders capriciously. Relaxing into wide attention is crucial for recognizing and appreciating beauty. For me, clenching only leads to mystical experience when that muscle becomes so exhausted that it collapses.

Our hardware probably sets hard boundaries on how thin that band can get, putting a lower bound on phase perception. Sub-millisecond phase perception is probably out of the question—imagine being able to notice thousands of things per second!

Long time intervals, on the other hand, are probably limited not by hardware, but by lifespan. If I zoom out enough, I can sense the turning of day and night, and the cycle of the seasons. As I get older, I’m even beginning to glimpse the generational patterns that play out over decades, but they’re very fuzzy. There’s no way I could sense e.g. the climatological cycles that play out over centuries—my lifetime only covers one small section of a single cycle.

Scientific instruments can augment us here, of course. We can “speed up” or “slow down” time by taking measurements and plotting them on a graph that fits neatly on a page of paper, where we can see the signal indirectly. But there are hard lower and upper bounds on what we can experience viscerally.

Fortunately, there’s also a rich space in the middle, between milliseconds and years, where we can take either perspective, contracting or expanding the thickness of our present moment at will.

The Fourier Transform

Here’s what happens mathematically when you unclench that attentional muscle and let your time window expand:

These are both Fourier transforms of the same sine wave—but the second one uses a much larger window, giving it a much clearer picture of the wave’s frequency.

The Fourier transform is a beautiful4 mathematical procedure that let’s us see a signal from either perspective: in terms of phase/rhythm/events, or in terms of frequency/tone/patterns. We call the former the “time domain”, and it’s how you’re probably used to looking at sine waves (with time on the x-axis and intensity on the y-axis). The latter is called the “frequency domain”—frequency is on the x-axis, and intensity on the y-axis. The Fourier transform is a way of shifting between these two perspectives.5

So if the original signal is a sine wave vibrating at 200Hz, its Fourier transform will just show a vertical bar at 200. If the wave is more complicated, with many frequencies mixed together, you’ll see more vertical bars, with taller bars for stronger frequencies. If it’s white noise, you’ll see nothing but a block of equally-sized vertical bars.

You need the whole signal to accurately compute its Fourier transform. But usually we want to process a signal in real time—we can’t wait for the whole signal to arrive before we start analyzing it. The solution is to use a “sliding window”—we perform many Fourier transforms, one small chunk at a time.

Again, as the band gets wider, we capture more of the signal, so our picture of the frequency gets clearer (and our picture of the phase gets fuzzier6). The resulting Fourier transform gets better and better at approximating the “true” Fourier transform of the full signal.

The example at the top of this section shows two Fourier transforms with different window sizes. The original signal is just a sine wave vibrating at 200Hz—so the “true” Fourier transform should just be a vertical line at 200. With a narrow window, we can sort of see a peak near 200, but there’s a lot of other noise there; with a larger window, the picture becomes much sharper. With an infinitely large window, we’d get the pure form of a vertical line at 200.

Thick Time and Mystical Experience

There’s a meditation exercise I enjoy, where I progressively thicken my experience of time. I start by focusing on the present moment, plus or minus a second or two. Then I expand the error bars, thinking about today, then about this week, this month. Eventually I’m considering the trajectory of my life over the past and coming years, and finally seeing my life as a cohesive whole.

I’ve had a handful of moments, on and off psychedelics, where I zoom out completely. It feels like I can see the whole universe at once, Alpha and Omega. The picture might be a little fuzzy, but it’s all there.

I can’t say this is a true revelation, because I’ve never come back with new information—I can’t suddenly predict the future. But that’s precisely what we’d expect with the Fourier transform. It doesn’t add or remove information—it rearranges existing information to provide a new perspective. The shift I’m experiencing isn’t some download of information from the Akashic records, it’s a birds eye view of all my memories and experiences, my life splayed out before me as a fixed pattern in space rather than a moving pattern in time. “My life flashed before my eyes,” mathematically stated, is “I saw the Fourier transform of my life.”

There are simpler—but equally profound—experiences to be had as well. Zooming in instead of out can lead to an absorption in the present moment, which counterintuitively delivers the same felt sense of eternity.

For me, this tends to happen when the present moment is highly repetitive, and the thinking mind has faded into the background. Sitting quietly with birds chirping and branches waving in the wind, I start to forget that there was a time before this, or that there will be a time after; there is only breath, birds, branches, repeating forever. And I can see all of it at once.

In both cases, the Fourier window extends over the entire signal available to my thinking mind. In the former case, where my mind is active and capable of considering things like the big bang and heat death, the Fourier window has to swell up to cosmic proportions (or more practically, to cover every experience I’ve had since birth). In the latter case, where my mind is quiet, the Fourier window only has to cover a few seconds.

(Generally I would suggest the latter—it’s a lot easier to get there, and less likely to lead to psychosis.)

Again, I can’t tell you if what I’m seeing in these moments points to some grander truth. But I can tell you that there is an experience of time which is radically different from the norm, a shift in temporal perspective that transforms the world from an unfolding present into an eternal hum. And I love it.

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PS: for a completely different (but compelling!) description of the experience of time, see QRI’s pseudo time arrow. If you have ideas on how to connect the two please leave a note in the comments.

• How do I feel about myself?

• How do I feel about others?

The answers place you somewhere1 on this grid:

Obviously this isn’t the only way to organize mental states.2 But it’s one I find very helpful.

I spend a lot of time in the right half of this map, trending upwards. But I drift around too, like a leaf on a busy lake. Every day, I spend at least a few seconds in each box. And once or twice I’ve been sucked into an eddy in that bottom-left quadrant.

Obviously we all want to be at the top-right. So what’s stopping us?

Outline

• Fluid Dynamics

• I’m more OK, You’re more OK

• The Path of Equanimity

• Two Paths

  • The Leftward Path of Anger

  • The Downward Path of Shame

• Breaking the Cycle

Fluid Dynamics

Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky.

—Thich Nhat Hang

We might drift around this map, but the drift isn’t entirely random. There are prevailing winds, predictable currents of flow. We might try to will ourselves in a certain direction, but some movements are easier than others.

In particular, it seems much easier to move leftward or downward into not-Okayness, than to move upward and rightward into Okayness.3

I can make myself angry—all it takes is a few minutes thinking about my least favorite politician. I fill my attention with Bad People doing Bad Things, and that delicious self-righteous fury starts to boil up.

And I can easily trigger a sense of shame—all I need to do is pull up one of a dozen memories (you know the ones). This is where I tend to get stuck. I start to ruminate, deliberately pushing myself further and further downward.

In fact, the further I delve into anger or shame4, the easier it gets to keep going in that direction. Like a fire that’s already raging, all I have to do is keep adding fuel.

Moving in the opposite directions is harder. I can remind myself of my accomplishments, or repeat positive affirmations, and maybe I push upwards a bit. But mostly it rings hollow—especially if I’m starting from a shame-hole.

Or I can try to push rightward through loving-kindness (metta) meditation. This works reasonably well for me in the moment, but the largest effects are short-lived. And I imagine that, for some people, metta meditation rings as hollow as positive affirmations do for me.

It seems there’s a natural drift, leftward and downward. Which makes sense—if the natural drift were up and right, we’d all be living in a John Lennon song.

This is not an optimistic picture.

But there must be something missing. Even if we’re not living in the heaven of Imagine, we’re not collectively in hell either.

I’m more OK, You’re more OK

Here’s another way of looking at our map:

There are only two sections now, determined by your self-other orientation. Above the sloping line, I feel like I’m more OK than you, even if I’d put us both in the “not OK” bucket; below the line, I’m more focused on my own shortcomings than on yours. Above the line is a sense of superiority; below it, a sense of inferiority.

I suspect most people have a stable bias toward one side of this line or the other. But we all shift positions depending on what’s in focus—I’m below the line when talking to my boss, above it when scolding my dog.

And then there’s the line itself, splitting the two halves. At these points, the “I’m OK” score is exactly equal to the “You’re OK” score. Maybe you think we’re both OK, or maybe that we both need to change. But along this line, neither side dominates—you see yourself and the people around you as equals.

This is a good place to be.

Let’s call this line (drumroll…) The Path of Equanimity™

The Path of Equanimity

Here’s a claim: along the Path of Equanimity, there’s a natural drift upward and rightward.

This is something I’ve repeatedly verified for myself. No matter how badly I feel, if I can find that balance—if I can stop thinking of myself as better or worse than the world outside me—then I slowly drift back to a place of contentment.

And I’ve come across at least one small study that replicates my finding:

For most participants [n=154], self-compassion [“I’m OK”] was positively associated with other-compassion [“You’re OK”]. However, there was substantial heterogeneity in this effect. The degree of self-other harmony [i.e. proximity to the Path of Equanimity] moderated the link between compassion directed towards self or other and well-being. Higher levels of compassion were associated with higher levels of well-being, but only for those who experienced the harmony. When the two forms of compassion were not in harmony, levels of self/other-compassion were largely unrelated to well-being.

So for subjects whose self-compassion and other-compassion were correlated, more compassion meant higher well-being. But for subjects with a low self-other correlation, more compassion was uncorrelated with well-being.

Translating that into our vocabulary5: The study found that for people on The Path of Equanimity, more compassion leads to greater well-being—moving upward tends to move them rightward, and vice versa. But for subjects with an imbalance, who live above or below the Path, more compassion was uncorrelated with well-being. They drift aimlessly around our map.

(Importantly, the study found moderate correlation6 between “I’m OK” feelings and “You’re OK” feelings. It seems many people do live on or near the Path of Equanimity, which explains why we’re not all constantly miserable.)

So no matter where you are on our map, if you can find your way to the Path of Equanimity, you’re on your way home to that top-right quadrant.

And it’s not hard to get there if you know the terrain.

Two Paths

With a bit of willpower, I can move myself around Okayness-space. But, as we saw, it’s easiest to move left and down into anger and shame. Deliberately moving up and right is a struggle—except on the Path of Equanimity. So how do we get there?

Here’s the good news: no matter where you are, you can find your way to the Path of Equanimity just by moving leftward or downward.

In other words: shame and anger counteract one another. If you’re feeling ashamed or inadequate, a little anger can stir you out of it. And if you’re angry, a little self-reproach can ground you back into balance.

Again, this is something I’ve repeatedly validated. When I’m being swallowed by feelings of shame and inadequacy, I can wrap myself in a cloak of spite, and drift back into a happy equanimity—after a short detour through hell. Conversely, it took a great humbling for me to end my foray into manic narcissism (as well as a much longer stay in that bottom-left quadrant).

It’s important not to overshoot! You can end up stuck in the opposite extreme, or vacillating in circles around the Path of Equanimity. There’s a ton of psychological research on shame-anger loops: anger arises as a way of avoiding shame, and the resulting outburst leads right back into shame. With each turn of the loop, you cross that point of balance, but momentum prevents you from escaping.

If you’re operating consciously, it’s you can manage the risk. For me, it only takes a pinch of anger/spite/disdain to escape the shame hole. Or if I’m upset at someone else, all it takes is a few seconds of ruminating on some of the stupid shit I’ve done. Suddenly I’m back to feeling even with the world—and then begins the slow drift into a comfortable Okayness.

Both these paths have been traced by others as well.

The Leftward Path of Anger

There’s broad agreement that anger is a natural coping mechanism for shame—often it’s seen as a symptom of hidden shame. And half a century ago, it was common advice to “vent” your anger—picture the frustrated analysand being encouraged to “hit the pillow.”

Research has since shown that venting tends to make angry people angrier—just as we’d expect from our map—so it’s fallen out of favor as a universal salve. But for those of us who live below the Path of Equanimity, a moderate amount of anger can be immensely helpful. It shifts our focus from inward problems to outward problems, breaking us out of habitual self-reproach, stirring us into action.

Nothing annihilates an inhibition as irresistibly as anger does…destruction pure and simple is its essence. This is what makes it so invaluable an ally of every other passion.

To a Fox, a Garibaldi, a General Booth, a John Brown, a Louise Michel, a Bradlaugh, the obstacles omnipotent over those around them are as if non-existent.…many have the wish to live for similar ideals, and only the adequate degree of inhibition-quenching fury is lacking.

—William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (links mine, obviously)

Or, for a more contemporary example, Sabaa Tahir speaks of rage as a vehicle for escaping a sense of powerlessness:

Rage can fuel you. But grief gnaws at you slow, a termite nibbling at your soul until you're a whisper of what you used to be.

—Sabaa Tahir, All My Rage

My favorite example is Camus: instead of rage, he advises scorn. Camus spent years grappling with the profound insignificance of humanity, which should have placed him squarely in the bottom-right quadrant. But he describes Sisyphus—a former king cast down into the underworld to be a “futile laborer”—finding his way back to happiness not by elevating himself, but by lowering the gods:

Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

…Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods…One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (emphasis mine)

The Downward Path of Shame

On the other side of our map, we have the reverse situation: an excess of anger, hatred, or narcissism calls for a dose of shame.

This downward path pops up most often in religious contexts: self-effacing practices, like vows of poverty and silence, are common for monastics seeking enlightenment; Aldous Huxley believed ego-reduction was the key to all religious feeling; and William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience is full of anecdotes from people who found lasting happiness only after accepting their own wretchedness and submitting to a higher power.

Here’s one of the stories James collected, from a reformed alcoholic (emphasis mine):

I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart-broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once…About midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never want it…Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life.

In Psychology, shame is typically seen as something to be overcome, rather than as an asset. But it does serve its purpose! It prevents us from drifting too far off into “I’m OK, You’re not OK” territory, keeping us grounded in common decency and social norms.

Unless one feels shame to some extent, one cannot emerge successfully from any well-worn pathologic behavior pattern.

—Henry P. Ward, Shame: A Necessity for Growth in Therapy

For someone who lashes out at the world, or has narcissistic tendencies, or is stuck in that mode of self-righteousness that pervades every political subculture, shame is an immensely useful anchor.

Breaking the Cycle

Of course, it’s best if we can just stay on the Path, avoiding anger and shame altogether. And with practice, this does seem to be possible.

Horace Fletcher tells of a conversation with a friend who had taken up Buddhist meditation:

…I longed to taste some of the sweets of the calm he pictured, and begged him to tell me the process of the discipline, so that perchance I might follow it and reap some of the benefits.

…“You must first get rid of anger and worry.” “But,” said I, “is that possible?” “Yes,” replied he; “it is possible to the Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.”

…From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an entirely different aspect.

—Horace Fletcher, Menticulture

For me, the process hasn’t been quite as short or as simple. But the more I balance my self-other orientation, feeling neither superior nor inferior to the world, the more I escape that natural current pulling me into shame, anger, and despair.

In fact, as I discovered during a minor bout with depression last year, I can escape those feelings entirely during meditation. I just sit, find my way to the Path of Equanimity, and float home. More and more, that feeling is becoming stable, something I can carry with me into daily life.

Again, the key is a balance of self-other orientation. If you feel superior, you’ll spend your time swimming in anger and disdain; if you feel inferior, you’ll be mired in shame and anxiety. But if you can balance the two, if you can “love your neighbor as yourself”, you’ll float equanimously toward happiness.

But if you ever find yourself out of balance, a touch of the opposite affliction can get you back on track.

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But I frequently find myself on the other side of the debate. Utilitarianism inspires near-religious absolutism in some believers, with its strongest adherents claiming it’s the One True Moral Philosophy. And when Utilitarian conclusions come into conflict with other sources of moral authority—intuition, deontic imperatives, notions of virtue, tradition—the most hard-core Utilitarians don’t back down.

And so I often find myself pulling in the other direction, away from attempts to shoehorn moral decisions into rigid mathematics and rational deduction. I feel like a Socialist surrounded by Radical Communist Revolutionaries—I appreciate their inclination, but their righteous fervor scares the shit out of me.

Outline

• The Strawman

• Mixing Morality and Math

  • Quantification

  • Information Overload

  • Rationalization

• The Sacred and Profane

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The Strawman

In Less Utilitarian Than Thou, Scott Alexander takes on a strawman argument often leveled at Utilitarians—namely that they’re willing to do evil things in service of a greater good. He lists out several counterexamples, most of which show that he, as a Utilitarian, is a reasonable human. He knows that he shouldn’t dox people on the wrong side of an issue, or block traffic to support his favorite cause—no matter how consequential that cause might seem. This is all great, and exactly what I’d expect from Scott.

But then he turns it around, and builds his own strawman for Anti-Utilitarianism:

So why do people think of utilitarians as uniquely willing to do evil for the greater good, and of normal people practicing normal popular politics…as not willing to do that?

I think people are repulsed by the idea of calculating things about morality - mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math). If you do this, sometimes people will look for a legible explanation for their discomfort, and they’ll seize on “doing an evil thing for the greater good”: even if the thing isn’t especially evil, trying to achieve a greater good at all seems like a near occasion of sin.

I find this blithe dismissal of Anti-Utilitarianism surprising.

I find it especially surprising given that Scott wrote one of my favorite arguments against the of over-mathematization of morality. In his review of William MacAskill’s What We Owe the Future, he takes on the Repugnant Conclusion (a Utilitarian thought experiment, which paradoxically implies that we should trade a world with a few very happy people for one with billions of barely happy people):

Maybe MacAskill can come up with some clever proof that the commitments I list above imply I have to have my eyes pecked out by angry seagulls or something. If that’s true, I will just not do that, and switch to some other set of axioms. If I can’t find any system of axioms that doesn’t do something terrible when extended to infinity, I will just refuse to extend things to infinity. I can always just keep World A with its 5 billion extremely happy people! I like that one! When the friendly AI asks me if I want to switch from World A to something superficially better, I can ask it “tell me the truth, is this eventually going to result in my eyes being pecked out by seagulls?” and if it answers “yes, I have a series of twenty-eight switches, and each one is obviously better than the one before, and the twenty-eighth is this world except your eyes are getting pecked out by seagulls”, then I will just avoid the first switch. I realize that will intuitively feel like leaving some utility on the table - the first step in the chain just looks so much obviously better than the starting point - but I’m willing to make that sacrifice.

This is a good Anti-Utilitarian argument! If a particular Utilitarian conclusion betrays your moral intuition, you can just ignore it, and find some other argument (“some other set of axioms”) that does support your intuition.

Scott clearly understands that Utilitarian ethics is useful, but not a final solution to the problem of morality. So I think he and I are philosophically aligned here—even if he continues to pull in the Utilitarian direction, and I find myself pulling against.

Mixing Morality and Math

Rather than make a broad attack on Utilitarianism (and its softer cousin, Consequentialism), I want to specifically address the problems that arise when we try to quantify morality.

Again, I’m generally in favor of leveraging math where it makes sense—mathematical reasoning is an essential part of moral reasoning. But while it can help us navigate particular decisions, it obscures countless assumptions about who is affected, what they feel, and what well-being really means.

Quantification

How do I measure my happiness against yours? How do I even measure my own happiness?

This is the first major problem of Utilitarian ethics. We need a way to quantify how “well off” everyone is under every possible outcome.

Sometimes we can get away with an externally observable metric. We might measure how often people get sick, or how wealthy they are. We might ask them to self-report their happiness level, or their satisfaction with different areas of life. We hope these measurements roughly correlate with people’s actual well-being.

But the correlation between externally observable metrics, and the internal sense of happiness, is hard to determine—especially when we start trying to guess at what animals feel. Even when it comes to fellow humans, we’re catastrophically bad at estimating how much pain they feel.

Even if we do come up with a good observable correlate of happiness, we run into trouble. Trying to maximize a single metric always leads to problems.

If you’re maximizing X, you’re asking for trouble by default. You risk breaking/downplaying/shortchanging lots of things that aren’t X, which may be important in ways you’re not seeing. Maximizing X conceptually means putting everything else aside for X - a terrible idea unless you’re really sure you have the right X.

…EA [a Utilitarian movement] is about maximizing how much good we do. What does that mean? None of us really knows. EA is about maximizing a property of the world that we’re conceptually confused about, can’t reliably define or measure, and have massive disagreements about even within EA. By default, that seems like a recipe for trouble.

—Holden Karnofsky, EA is about maximization, and maximization is perilous

There are better and worse ways to quantify utility, but it’s important to remember that every observable metric is only a correlate, and that the metric we pick is always a reflection of our own values—not necessarily the values of the beings we’re measuring.

Information Overload

Once we’ve settled on a framework for quantifying well-being, we need to go about actually measuring it. This is an impossible task.

First, we need to measure not just present-day well-being, but hypothetical well-being under each possible outcome. If we want to be very rigorous, we might survey all affected people about how they’d feel, or look at the effects of similar events in the past.

But in practice, we mostly just guess. Say your mother is sick, and you’re deciding whether to bail on plans with your friend so you can check in on her. You’re left doing a bunch of mental guesswork: how sick did she sound on the phone? would she be happy to see you or would she rather sleep? how bummed will your friend be? will it be easy to reschedule?

Even in this tiny scenario, picking the action that “maximizes utility” is full of guesswork.

Things get worse when we consider externalities. An infinite number of consequences ripple outward from every action we take. Even something as trivial as the decision to drink coffee over tea has marginal impacts on farmers in Africa, global carbon emissions, local caffeine culture, and your own stress levels. It’s impossible to bring all the consequences of our decisions into the equation.

Typically we just stop measuring at some point, and assume that everything else zeroes-out. But which consequences we include in our calculus, and which we push out to the margins, is again an arbitrary choice, and a reflection of our own values.

Rationalization

Which brings me to the most insidious issue with quantifying morality: it allows us to launder our selfishness, and present it as virtue.

Pick any villain, any catastrophically evil person, and they’ll most likely tell you their actions were justified, even righteous. We have an immense capacity for rationalizing our self-interest. Recognizing and grappling with this is a never-ending moral responsibility.

The worst thing we can do is abandon that responsibility, and decide that our moral judgements are unassailably correct.

That self-righteous conviction is most closely associated with religious fundamentalism—God Himself gave the instruction!—were it not infrequently inspires mass murder. But when we hold up our moral judgements as mathematically derived, as the result of hard-nosed logic, we’re in danger of being possessed by the same self-certainty as a religious zealot.

To bring out an obvious example, here’s Caroline Ellison describing Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), who is currently awaiting sentencing on charges of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering:

He said that he was a utilitarian...he believed that the ways people tried to justify rules like “don’t lie” and “don’t steal” within utilitarianism didn’t work...the only moral rule that mattered was doing whatever would maximize utility.

This is precisely the form of Utilitarianism that Scott criticizes above—the idea that it’s OK to do evil things in support of a greater good. But you don’t need to be an SBF-level extremist to fall into the trap of rationalization.

Rationalization is made possible by the immense ambiguity in every moral decision. We assume we know what other people are feel, and how they’ll feel in the future. We decide which consequences are important enough to factor in, and which are too remote.

All of this is natural and unavoidable. Moral reasoning is inherently difficult and ambiguous. Our merely finite brains will never overcome this problem. And that’s OK—we’ll do our best, and make mistakes along the way.

The biggest problem with Utilitarianism is that it sweeps all that ambiguity under the rug. It pretends there are right and wrong answers, and that those answers are knowable.

By wrapping morality in a veneer of mathematics, we make it look like a science. And we trick ourselves into thinking that we’ve reached the “correct solution”, rather than a merely plausible one.

Mathematizing ethics allows us to launder our biases through small assumptions, then hold up a self-serving conclusion as mathematically derived. A bad faith actor might use this to trick others into acting against their own interests. But more dangerously, we might trick ourselves into acting against our conscience.

Without proper grounding in other approaches to morality, we’re in danger of ending up like SBF: sticking to a logically derived Utilitarian conclusion, even when it betrays every moral intuition.

The Sacred and Profane

Again—again!—I want to say that I’m all for Utilitarian approaches to ethics. But we need to remember that it’s only an approach, not a solution to the problem of morality. Other approaches have their place.

Many of us squirm when confronted with the inherent squishiness of moral philosophy. The idea that there are no right answers, that we have to just do our best and live with the ambiguity, is terrifying. It’s especially hard on those of us who like to think in terms of systems and rules—we see the chaos and instinctively try to put things order. It’s a valuable instinct, so long as we remember that too much order is just as harmful as too much chaos.

Scott accuses Anti-Utilitarians of being uncomfortable with “mixing the sacred (of human lives) with the profane (of math).” I think he’s right. But this instinct, just like our instinct to create order, is valuable in moderation. We ignore it at our own peril.

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Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.

—William James

The relationship between belief and reality is stranger than it seems. Most of us assume reality simply is, and our beliefs can only reflect it more or less accurately. But the spiritually-minded often invert that formula, claiming that reality is a reflection of our beliefs.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle.

Outline

• Seeing the Continuum

  • Objective Reality

  • Subjective Reality

  • Intersubjective Reality

• Living the Continuum

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Seeing the Continuum

Some facts are simply facts. No matter what you believe, the earth is roughly spherical, global average temperatures are rising, and arsenic will kill you.

But our common sense notion of reality breaks down when we start to ask subjective questions. There’s no single, definitive answer as to whether Nic Cage is a good actor, or whether eating meat is wrong.

It’s tempting to just partition reality into two buckets: the Subjective, and the Objective. By cordoning off value judgements into their own special domain, we might preserve our common sense notion of Objective reality. But it’s more productive to think of reality as a continuum between the two, with a murky Intersubjective middle-ground:

• Objective Reality—these are facts about the physical world, which would be true even if there were no people around. Things like “it’s raining” or “there’s a mountain 42 miles from here.”

• Subjective Reality—these are facts that are only true for you personally. Things like “I’m feeling sad” or “I like ice cream.”

• Intersubjective Reality—these are facts that are independent of any one person’s beliefs, but which would change with public opinion. Things like “Maseru is the capital of Lesotho” and “Democracy is a good form of government.”

The borders between all three levels are porous. You could imagine e.g. a mathematical model that shows Democracy creates more social stability, moving the statement “Democracy is a good form of government” towards being an objective truth. Or you could imagine an argument over where exactly the base of the mountain starts—is it 42 miles away, or 41.5?—making it more intersubjective.

Within any subject, it’s important to situate ourselves on this spectrum. The more Objective a subject is, the harder it is to sustain false beliefs, and we should expect to see broad agreement on what’s true. At the Subjective end, facts are fluid, influenced by beliefs, amenable to change; here, disagreement is the norm.

But no domain sits perfectly at either edge; all are more or less Intersubjective.

Objective Reality

At the Objective end of the spectrum, reality is entirely independent of belief. No matter how fervently you believe the Earth is flat, it isn’t so.

[Objective] Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

—Philip K. Dick

Beliefs in this domain can be easily categorized as true or false, and false beliefs tend to create problems. I wouldn’t want a flat-earther flying a plane or planning a trip to the moon.

But probe any domain long enough, and subjective cracks start to appear. As they say, all models are wrong, and precisely which wrong model we subscribe to is often arbitrary; ontological choices, political allegiances, personal values, and historical happenstance all influence the outcome.

Some examples:

• The Big Bang is often thought to be scientific fact, but there are many competing cosmologies

• The mathematical concept of infinity was controversial for years

• Physicists and philosophers love to debate whether electrons are real, or simply useful, man-made abstractions

On the left reaches of the Objective realm, we find domains like psychopathology. A diagnosis of mental illness can be mostly objective—say, if someone isn’t able to care for themselves, or repeatedly self-harms. But if a mind is simply maladapted to its particular society, the label “illness” is an intersubjective judgement. (See also: ’s You Don't Want A Purely Biological, Apolitical Taxonomy Of Mental Disorders)

Subjective Reality

I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.

—Arthur Rimbaud

At the far Subjective end, reality and belief are deeply intertwined: if I believe I’m happy, I am happy (and vice versa). And while Objective facts remain facts indefinitely, the set of Subjective facts is constantly shifting and evolving.

An example: for years I insisted I didn’t like milk in my coffee, but here I am sipping a latte. Did my tastebuds change? Or did I just drop the silly notion that drinking black coffee is manly? I was convinced that milk in coffee tasted gross, but that sensation probably had more to do with my identity than with how my tongue is wired. Strangely, my latte is starting to taste worse as I write this.

We can try to objectivize the Subjective realm through neuroscience, finding externally observable correlates for sensations like happiness and taste. But what happens when self-reports contradict1 observations? Interior experience is the final arbiter of truth here, not external, observer-independent measurements.

Leaking out on the right-hand side of the Subjective realm we find domains like fashion and aesthetics. Each of us has our own sense of what looks good, and no two aesthetic sensibilities are perfectly aligned. And yet our tastes follow mathematical rules, and change predictably with the crowd’s. (See also:’s Taste Games)

Intersubjective Reality

The Subjective and Objective collide in weird ways at the Intersubjective level. The truth here is an aggregation of opinions, which by some alchemical process becomes reified into fact.

The existence of a friendship, for instance, depends on precisely two things: the belief of both members that the friendship exists.

Do you like me or not?…Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation…But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence...ten to one your liking never comes.

—William James, The Will to Believe

Intersubjectivity operates at societal scales too. Pop culture, art, and fashion might be driven by individual tastes, but those tastes are often mimetic—we imitate the tastes of our friends, in-group, and idols. Things are popular because we like them, sure, but we also like them because they’re popular.

Country borders are another perfect case of Intersubjective truth: without humans around, borders would disappear entirely, reduced to some carefully placed roadsigns and deteriorating walls. This is why China is so insistent2 that Taiwan not be called a country: if everyone believes Taiwan belongs to China, then it belongs to China.

Of course, Intersubjective truth isn’t determined by a simple majority-rules democratic vote—people with more power and status have an outsized voice. Politicians, tastemakers, and thought leaders are able to direct public opinion towards new Intersubjective realities. When Warren Buffett announces he’s bought a company’s stock, its price goes up—he literally changes the company’s value by decree.3

But “who has power and status?” is itself an Intersubjective question, which is what makes this domain so dynamic. If enough Americans believe Donald Trump is the rightful President, it doesn’t matter who voted for who—Donald Trump will find himself sitting in the Oval Office. If other powerful people disagree—say, the Supreme Court and Joint Chiefs—then the people might be overruled. Unless those leaders are broadly seen as illegitimate!

Everything here depends on shifting opinions. And so we often end up with multiple, competing Intersubjective Realities—cognitive dissonance at a societal scale.

When those conflicts arise, both sides will claim their stance is rooted in Objective fact—and at times this might be true. But all Intersubjective conflicts give rise to in-group dynamics: huge swaths of unrelated values, tastes, and symbols become lumped together as a single identity, pushing both sides further and further into Subjectivity.

A large minority of Americans do indeed live in a world where Donald Trump is the true President, regardless of vote counts. Following the election, many believed he’d soon be reinstated.

And with sufficient numbers, the insurrection would have succeeded, transmuting fervent belief into fact.

Living the Continuum

Before coming across the notion of Intersubjectivity, I saw the world as two non-overlapping domains: the Subjective and the Objective. But that false binary drove me mad.

On the one hand, I was confronted by the fact that some music and art seemed objectively bad. In many cases, everyone around me shared the same opinion. But someone must find it good, at least the artist! Aesthetics seemed to follow a loose set of rules, but also no one could be called “wrong” for breaking the rules. Even stranger, breaking rules seemed to be an important part of the game!

On the other hand, while studying math in college, I was surprised to learn just how much taste and opinion mattered. I’d fantasized that mathematics was perfectly, unassailably objective. And while I could mostly indulge that fantasy—especially at an undergraduate level—occasionally I’d glimpse cracks in the foundation. Studying the history of axiomatic set theory, as well as Gödel’s quashing of Hilbert’s dream, put my fantasy to rest.

But dropping that fantasy only strengthened my confusion. Sometimes I’d despair that the pursuit of scientific truth was completely hopeless. I wanted to keep facts separate from values, but everything I found was a mixture of the two.

Years later, while in a particularly fluid mental state, I finally grokked the fact that all domains lie on this continuum of Intersubjectivity. I realized that, while no domain is purely Subjective or purely Objective, there’s still a gradient. We can still distinguish math from music, even if it’s not a categorical distinction.

All that cognitive dissonance gave way to a clearer, fuller picture of reality. Suddenly I could approach any domain on its own terms, without trying in vain to push it to one side or the other.

And that huge space of subjects occupying the uncanny valley between Subjective and Objective extremes—psychology, politics, economics, morality, fashion—have gone from being frustrating to being fun. I no longer write off left-leaning topics (like fashion) as frivolous, or try to shoehorn right-leaning ones (like psychology) into rigid theoretical frameworks.

Every domain, no matter how cerebral or banal it might seem, is pregnant with Intersubjective weirdness to explore.

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It was a sudden and shocking shift in perception, a completely new way of feeling. But it was oddly familiar, like a strange scent that transports you to some ambiguous, amorphous moment from childhood.

I was confused, trying to make sense of something I had no theoretical or experiential context for. My mind reeled with explanations: had I died? gone crazy? reached enlightenment? It probably didn’t help that I was on LSD.

In the years following that trip, I learned that it’s actually a fairly common experience. And not just for people on acid, but for meditators, contemplatives, and sometimes just random people going about their day.

The problem is, everyone seems to have a different name for it. And while there’s been some great academic work on its phenomenology, popular descriptions are clouded with poetic metaphors and spiritual platitudes. Folks who haven’t been there are bewildered by descriptions like “my ego dissolved” or “I felt myself merge with the universe.” Even the academic surveys rely on statements like this!

Based on a handful of my own experiences, as well as the hundreds of reports I’ve heard or read over the last decade, here’s a concrete phenomenological description of the process and parameters of what many call “ego death”—without the platitudes.

Outline

• Proprioception

• Immersion in Sensations

• De-Reification

• Tat Tvam Asi—That’s You

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Proprioception

When I was a child, I had a fever
My hands felt just like two balloons
Now I've got that feeling once again
I can't explain, you would not understand
This is not how I am

—Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb

Proprioception, by its Latin roots, literally means “to grasp oneself”. It encompasses the felt shape of your body, its weight and size, its movement and orientation in space.

You don’t typically notice these things until they start to change. Maybe you’ve had vertigo; or you’ve gotten off a boat or a treadmill, only to continue feeling its motion on solid ground; or like Roger Waters and Michel Gondry, you felt your hands swell to ten times their size. All of these are proprioceptive distortions.

In fact, if you spend a few minutes now with your eyes closed, you may find your body-sense is naturally a bit distorted—there’s much more sensation in your hands and face than in your torso. Introspect long enough and you may start to feel like this guy:

In altered states—deep meditation, dreams, and certainly psychedelics—proprioceptive shifts arise constantly. You may feel yourself getting much larger or smaller, changing shape or growing new limbs, even being propelled through space.

I’m continually impressed by the range of possibilities here. In meditation, I quickly shift from feeling like a torso with a head and four limbs, to feeling like a wobbly, spherical shell. Sometimes the shell starts to grow rapidly in all directions or hurtle upwards; once or twice it’s started to shrink or sink downward.

On one occasion, with eyes closed, I forgot whether I’d folded my hands in my lap, or placed them on my knees. Suddenly I could feel both pairs of arms! I often wonder if this hallucination is the inspiration behind the many-armed gods of Hinduism.

Alone, these distortions of body image don’t constitute what most people mean by “ego death”, but they’re part of the puzzle. Your body-image is the most concrete aspect of your self-image; feeling it twist and turn can give you a small taste for what it might feel like when the core of your self-image starts to dissolve.

Immersion in Sensations

A new world hangs
Outside the window
Beautiful and strange
It must mean I've fallen away
I must be
Sound and color

—Alabama Shakes, Sound and Color

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Normally we walk around with the strong sense that we’re a 3D object embedded in an external 3D space. Again, nothing strange here—it’s the sort of thing you don’t notice at all until it changes.

But that external world isn’t something we experience directly—it’s an inference made from a bunch of 2D visual impressions, sounds, motor movements, etc. The third dimension is something we learn to see—around five months of age1, as it happens. Object permanence—an important criterion for any sensible notion of external reality—comes shortly after.

There’s a shift that can occur under the influence of psychedelics or during meditation, where we revert back to that infantile state. We forget the external world and become immersed in the sensory impressions themselves.2 Here’s how I described my experience of that shift on nitrous oxide:

…normally, I begin with the assumption of an external world, which my sensory experience draws from; but on nitrous, sensory experience is primary, and an external world either does not exist, or is somehow built out of my sensations. The vibe is generally Idealistic or Solipsistic—my own mental events become the primary stuff of reality.

One symptom of this shift is that the 3D scene before you flattens into a 2D impression of color and shape. A mountain in the distance might start to look more like this:

And if your own body is in the visual field, the shift can induce and compound proprioceptive distortions. Right now, it feels obvious that my feet up on my desk are extended a meter or so in front of me. But if I let my visual field flatten, my body-map flattens as well, and suddenly the tactile sensations in my feet are collocated with the tactile sensations in my head. It becomes hard to tell the two apart.

De-Reification

Once you’re seeing everything in terms of sound, color, and touch, things start to get weird.

For me, the flattened visual scene often begins to decompose. What before was obviously the sky becomes a vibrating blob of blue; the leaves on the trees no longer seem to “go with” the branches that hold them. If you stare long enough at the Cézanne above, the mountain might stop looking like a mountain, or the trees like trees.

But it’s not just the physical world that decomposes; the platonic world, the world of ideas, follows suit. Concepts become fuzzy, and may lose their sense altogether, like when you repeat the same word over and over. Everything starts to feel slippery and unstable.

This is what’s meant by de-reification. Reification is the process of turning something vague and amorphous into a solid object; we might talk about how social networks reify popularity into a numerical score, or how political groups reify things like “wokeness” and “the alt-right”, despite not being able to offer a rigorous definition of those labels. De-reification operates in the reverse, turning everything—even solid physical objects—into goo. (Where does my butt end and the chair begin? The two are constantly exchanging particles, their electron clouds merge, the boundary is not well-defined.)

This, for me, is where the experience gets kind of scary. You start to lose track of reality. And not just reality as such, but the whole concept of there being such a thing as “reality”. All the words and concepts and values you define yourself by start to slip through your fingers, and you’re left floating in a void. It’s hard to tell where you’ll go, or if you’ll ever come back. It feels like you’re losing your mind, even dying.

At this point, I often get spooked, shake my head, and begin to ground myself out of the experience. I’ll start to look around and busy myself with some mundane task. But there’s always a sense that I’ve shied away from something beautiful and profound.

On the few occasions where I’ve calmly and equanimously3 passed through that door, I’ve been tremendously rewarded.

Tat Tvam Asi—That’s You

I feel fine
We'll feel sublime
Am I really all the things that are outside of me?

—Animal Collective, Taste

It’s hard to take insight back from a fully de-reified mental space. By definition, you don’t have any words or concepts to hold onto; it’s impossible to form a coherent thought to bring back into the waking world. So most of what I can tell you about that space is inferred either from a rough, dreamlike memory, or is pulled from insights generated in an only partially de-reified state.

At the extreme end of de-reification, the sense of self—arguably the most persistent concept we work with—disappears along with everything else. For me it’s usually the last thing to go. For a while, I feel like a passive observer peering into a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, sounds, and touch. But eventually something changes, and there is only color, shape, sound, touch.

Here’s Michael Pollan describing his experience of listening to Bach on mushrooms in How to Change Your Mind (emphasis mine):

…”listen” doesn’t begin to describe what transpired between me and the vibrations of air set in motion by the four strings of that cello. Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did now. Though even to call it “music” is to diminish what now began to flow, which was nothing less than the stream of human consciousness, something in which one might glean the very meaning of life and, if you could bear it, read life’s last chapter.

…Four hours and four grams of magic mushroom into the journey, this is where I lost whatever ability I still had to distinguish subject from object, tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music. Instead of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, egoless and one with all it beheld, I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it, not even a dry tiny corner in which to plant an I and observe. Opened to the music, I became first the strings, could feel on my skin the exquisite friction of the horsehair rubbing over me, and then the breeze of sound flowing past as it crossed the lips of the instrument and went out to meet the world, beginning its lonely transit of the universe. Then I passed down into the resonant black well of space inside the cello…and I was now it, with no remainder.

—Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

Whenever I come back to this passage, I both admire the poetic beauty and cringe at the looseness of the metaphors and metaphysics he employs. It’s not the work of an exacting phenomenologist, but his description coheres more strongly with my own experience than any other I’ve read.

And just about every other first-hand account resorts to the same strange metaphors. Here’s the Emerson quote Pollan is referencing (emphasis again mine; note the proprioceptive shift and de-reification):

Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent Eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: To be brothers, to be acquaintances—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

But I’m not much of a poet, and I’ve always struggled to give voice to my small handful experiences. The most technically precise thing I can say is that they involve a great deal of synesthesia.4 Vibrations in my visual field synchronize with a ringing in my ears, which in turn synchronizes with a tactile buzzing. Any new sensations tend to disturb all three modalities. This synesthesia is reflected in Pollan’s tactile descriptions of “horsehair rubbing” and “breeze” triggered by the Bach playing through his headphones.

This merging of the senses reduces my typical multimodal experience into something much simpler; sight, sound, and touch become nothing more than flavors of vibration. Time goes from linear to cyclical as my concepts of past and future de-reify along with everything else, and it feels like I’m floating through the same eternally looping sensations (whether this is terrifying or totally fine depends on exactly how de-reified I am; keeping one foot in both worlds can tear you in half). I’ve heard some say that they even experience a dissolution of space—all points become the same point; size and direction are no longer salient concepts.

Eventually consciousness itself ceases.

None of the above should be taken as gospel. I have no way of knowing how closely my own experiences resemble the experiences of others, if what I’ve experienced is a “true” ego death, or if it even makes sense to draw a firm boundary around some subset of conscious states and call them “ego death” (a de-reified mind certainly wouldn’t approve!).

All of these perceptual shifts—proprioceptive changes, space/time distortions, immersion in sensations, de-reification, and a weakened self-other boundary—bleed into one another and often cooccur, but none of them should be exalted as the One True Experience. All of them are interesting, and perhaps valuable, but they’re not something to be lusted after.

I often hear folks speak in awe about these states, even calling them “enlightenment” or “higher consciousness”. But all my experiences point to something smaller and simpler than everyday waking life, something nearer to the zero-state of deep sleep or death. Learning to access these states is not “leveling up”; it’s learning to feel once again like an infant, or maybe like a fetus, still continuous with its mother-environment. It’s about stripping away all the wonderful knowledge and models and values you’ve built over the course of a lifetime, so you can relax for a minute, so you can bask in the sublime, shimmering pulse of pure vibration.

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Typically these posts are a thank you for paid subscribers, but af Klint’s work deserves more attention, so I’m pushing the paywall to the bottom.

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Hilma af Klint was arguably the first Western painter to experiment with abstraction, a style that dominated the the first half of the 20th Century. Though her work was ignored for decades, she’s now recognized as a pioneer of the genre.

af Klint’s paintings were inspired by two countercultural, female-dominated religious movements: Spiritualism and Theosophy. She claimed the so-called High Masters—a group of enlightened, etheric beings—had instructed her to paint, and guided her hand as she channeled their message to humanity.

My mission, if it succeeds, is of great significance to humankind. For I am able to describe the path of the soul from the beginning of the spectacle of life to its end.

—Hilma af Klint

With af Klint, it’s often hard to distinguish art from prophesy, or genius from insanity. But the work itself holds a power that’s impossible to ignore.

Outline

• Pioneer

• Spirit in Nature

• The Invisible World

• The Geometry of Religion

• The Illusion of Gender

• Transcendence

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Pioneer

For decades, af Klint’s work was mostly overlooked—especially in comparison to contemporaries like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), a self-appointed authority on the historical narrative of abstract painting, has repeatedly snubbed her. But a 2018 exhibition at The Guggenheim brought her out of obscurity, drawing more visitors than any other attraction in the museum’s 80 year history.

Meanwhile, MoMA’s 2012 Inventing Abstraction exhibit completely ignored af Klint. It featured paintings from 1910 onward, crediting Kandinsky with inventing the genre in 1911. af Klint panted this in 1907:

In fact, her work often prefigures later paintings by more famous artists:

Interestingly, Kandinsky and af Klint shared a connection via the esotericist Rudolf Steiner. He had recently viewed af Klint’s work when he met with Kandinsky in 1908—whether Steiner shared his photographs with Kandinsky is a question that will likely plague art historians for decades.1 Kandinsky and af Klint’s shared interest in Theosophy could easily account for a contemporaneous discovery of abstraction, but the timing of Steiner’s visit is intriguing.

Spirit in Nature

Nature figures heavily in af Klint’s work. Before entering art school she would often paint detailed illustrations of local flowers; later she would earn a meager living documenting the dissected tissues of large animals.

Much like Steiner, whom she idolized, af Klint saw plants as a living doorway to the spiritual world. In her notebooks, one drawing of an aspen tree is labeled with “Obedience. Humility.”; another captions an apple tree with “Enlighten me about my thoughts. Arrogance. Help me improve the spleen (and liver) of humanity.”

Behind the effervescent force of a plant is concealed the warmth of feeling.

—Hilma af Klint

These themes are explored in a series of 70 watercolors: On the Viewing of Flowers and Trees:

The connection between human and vegetal life comes to the foreground in another series entitled The Tree of Knowledge; the paintings all depict a transcendent whole emerging from plantlike forms.

That feeling of kinship with plants is a topic we’ve discussed before; it seems to be a common theme among mystics and naturalists.

The Invisible World

It’s easy to poke fun at Spiritualism. Its attempts to commune with the dead, to see the future, to channel “High Masters”, might seem to us like Ouija board antics.

But it’s important to understand the historical and scientific context in which Spiritualism flourished. Science had only recently moved beyond taxonomies of visible, macroscopic phenomena; suddenly we were discovering hidden worlds of electromagnetic waves, germs, atoms, and sub-atomic particles.

Emerging technologies—radio, photography, artificial light, audio recording, telephones—made magic a reality. The public’s imagination was dizzied with possibility.

If telephones could allow voices to speak over long distances, why couldn’t the living speak to the dead?

—Catharine de Zegher, via Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

And the divorce of science and religion, though well underway, had not yet fully materialized. Many prominent scientists, engineers, and academics were convinced that a sober approach to spiritualism could bridge the emerging gap; they earnestly engaged in psychical research.

af Klint was an eager participant. From 1896 until 1908, she belonged to a small group of women—known as The Five—who made regular attempts to contact other-worldly life forms, living beyond the veil of mundane reality. They believed these beings surrounded and suffused the waking world, constantly inviting us to communicate and participate.

Those granted the gift of seeing more deeply can see beyond form, and concentrate on the wondrous aspect hiding behind every form, which is called life.

—Hilma af Klint

The Five experimented with prayer, seance, trance, and of course, automatic drawing. These practices would go on to fuel af Klint’s shift into abstraction: in 1904 she channeled a message about “astral paintings” from an etheric being named Ananda. Two years later, his peer Amaliel commissioned a series, Primordial Chaos; she and her group (especially Anna Cassel) then collaborated to produce some of the earliest works of Western abstraction:

Whether af Klint deserves full or partial credit for this series is up for debate. It seems she had a tendency to over-assert herself with respect to The Five; the group disbanded in 1908 after she channeled a message that she was meant to be its leader.

The pictures were painted directly through me, without any preliminary drawings, and with great force. I had no idea what the paintings were supposed to depict; nevertheless I worked swiftly and surely, without changing a single brush stroke.

—Hilma af Klint

After the group’s disbanding, she continued to paint for decades, producing over 1000 works of non-figurative art.

The Geometry of Religion

While af Klint put some of her thoughts in writing, abstract painting served as a vehicle for ideas that were difficult or impossible to express in words or in figurative art. Over time, she developed an intricate vocabulary of geometry and color.

An example: around 1920 she painted a series on the standpoints of various religions. The series begins with a circle divided horizontally, with black and white halves. She then distorts this picture in various ways to illustrate the differences between spiritual philosophies.

I suspect these paintings (along with several others) were inspired by the Taoist Yin-Yang symbol (which would have been well known to Theosophers)—the interplay of opposites is a constant theme in af Klint’s work. And while I could happily speculate2 about the intent behind her depictions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam, I doubt any single interpretation could capture exactly what she saw.

Even more fascinating are her depictions of what I’ll call moral inversion. My favorite in this series shows a cross in the top half of the canvas, surrounded by black-and-white geometry; the shapes are reflected in the bottom half of the canvas—including the occult inverted cross—but with a rainbow of colors.

In the top half, it’s easy to see af Klint’s frustration with the mainstream Christian philosophy surrounding her; she spent a great deal of time exploring Christianity’s more esoteric emanations, presumably represented by the bottom half of the image. And while the association of rainbows with the LGBTQ community wouldn’t come for several more decades, af Klint—a gender nonconformist and probably a lesbian—is clearly using it to contrast the black-and-white worldview of the dominant culture.

Importantly, neither half of the image is glorified or vilified—instead, they bleed into one another. For af Klint, transcendence takes the form of two opposites joining into a greater whole.

The Illusion of Gender

Many who fight in this drama are dressed in the wrong clothing. Many female costumes conceal a man. Many male costumes conceal the woman.

—Hilma af Klint, Studies of the Life of the Soul

Gender figures heavily in af Klint’s work, and was a constant source of friction in her career. The idea of female artists was a fairly new one—The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, where she received formal training, had only begun admitting women 18 years prior; many male artists vocally opposed the idea of women joining their ranks.

But af Klint’s work isn’t a simple rejection of patriarchy—it portrays masculinity and femininity as opposites seeking to reunite. Much like the artwork of medieval alchemy or the drawings of Carl Jung, her paintings depict hermaphroditic forms, or male and female bodies coalescing into a whole.

This theme becomes even clearer in light of the visual vocabulary she outlines in her notebooks. Femininity and masculinity are represented by pairs of symbols: blue and yellow, lily and rose, eyelet and hook, respectively; pink stands for spiritual love, and red for physical love; the spiral (often in the form of a snail shell) represents evolution; the swan, one of her most important symbols, stands for the union of opposites, apotheosis, transcendence.

Transcendence

Nearly all of af Klint’s paintings, either individually or in series, deal with the themes of growth and transcendence.

You are bewildered by what we have told you, but the phenomenon we are trying to explain is truly bewildering. What is this phenomenon, you ask? Well, beloved, it is the phenomenon of secret growing.

—Hilma af Klint

It’s this fact that allows me to see past the fantastical imagery of Spiritualism, and into the core of af Klint’s message. It’s the same message of medieval alchemy, of Taoist philosophy, and the message which Carl Jung tried in vain to distill from religious superstition. They all push us down the same path: we look inward, discover an abundance of possibility, resolve internal contradictions, and grow beyond them.

In this moment, I’m aware, living as I do in this world, that I am an atom in the universe possessing infinite possibilities of development, and I want to explore these possibilities.

—Hilma af Klint

If I reframe af Klint’s “High Masters” as dream characters or tulpas, as products of her subconscious mind, it’s much easier for me to see the source of inspiration in her work. af Klint’s depth of imagination and creativity are clear evidence that she did connect to a vast, hidden world full of wisdom—even if that world was embodied within the confines of her own skull.

af Klint was convinced her work was an important message for humanity, and believed it was meant to be exhibited in a grand, spiral temple—an echo of the helices and snail shells that dominate her work. 193 of her paintings were specifically created to adorn this temple, including three incredible altarpieces:

She never managed to get her spiral temple built, but nearly a century later, her work was featured in Frank Lloyd Wright’s wonderfully impressive six-story spiral: The Guggenheim Museum.

Whether this was a miraculous act of prophesy from af Klint, or a clever connection made by an enterprising Guggenheim curator, depends on your perspective. But the exhibition broke attendance records and brought af Klint’s work into the spotlight. It’s a beautiful, synchronistic conclusion to af Klint’s obscurity, and a hopeful beginning to a new narrative on the origins of abstract art.

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Thanks for supporting Superb Owl! If you’d like to continue learning about af Klint, here are a few sources:

• Paintings for the Future, Guggenheim.org

• Beyond the Visible, a feature-length documentary on af Klint (Criterion, YouTube, Amazon)

• Notes and Methods, an English translation of af Klint’s writings

• The Hilma af Klint Foundation

• Hilma af Klint: The Art of Seeing the Invisible (includes some solid essays on the history of Western esotericism, spiritualism, occultism, and Theosophy)

• Vital Signs, by Aliya Say at Tate.org

• Take the pencil, by Jo Applin

• Hilma af Klint’s Visionary Paintings, by Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker (archive)

• The Esoteric Botany of Hilma af Klint, by David Adams, Ph.D.

• Gender Reconciliation in Hilma af Klint’s Paintings, by Jovana M. Nikolić