What are we aimed at? I use the integral developmental frame as one heuristic to understand things and see where potential lies.

I think the USA/Europe is really good at including “orange” motivations toward objective achievement, a powerful aim that can bring a lot of good into the world. When people realize achievement won’t bring happiness, they start to seek happiness directly. You can see this “green” motivation toward inner subjective well-being or outer community/connection sprouting up in places like Austin and Amsterdam. Here too people can start to feel empty—happiness/connection are both often fleeting and ironically self-centered (think social media). So people realize happiness/connection is not the final aim, it’s a strategy to find meaning/a purpose for their life energy. So they start to seek meaning/purpose directly. One way this shows up is seeking inner-transformation via self-development programs and coaching. Another way is by seeking outer-transformation via addressing global existential crises.

This kind of “what-are-we-aimed-at” development tends to occur when the motivation starts to feel empty, fails to address its impact, or fails to meet environmental challenges. This process may be endless. There may be no final destination, but we can identify a few more movements… meaning tends to be seen through as a construct to avoid intimacy with the infinite chaos of being, so people shift to orient toward intimacy with all that is, which eventually gives way to unity.

Survival -> Pleasure -> Duty/Belonging -> Achievement -> Happiness -> Meaning -> Surrender -> Unity

https://uptrusting.com/post/ONVrwN

OK I’ve tried talking about this before and it always feels impossible, but it also feels super important, so here goes:

“We have the option to see everything in your life as collaborative”

1. The nature of the universe is co-constructed / nondual: I think “experience” and “reality” are fundamentally intertwined; you can’t talk about a world out-there without a subjectivity talking about it (experiencing) and you can’t have an experiencing without a world out there (reality). In other words, subject and object (consciousness and matter) are one interpenetrated thingy. When I say “reality” I really mean “reality-experience” and when I say “experience” I really mean “experience-reality.” Sometimes I just say “Life.”
   
   I mean this in a very extreme way.
   
   Not collapsing to the outer (materialism): This is not “there’s a pre-existing world out there, and many different pre-existing subjective views on it” which is the common way of understanding pluralism. That framing still fundamentally separates the outer world from the inner, and presumes a kind of self-existence of the outer without consciousness, which I think is basically epistemologically untenable. We simply can’t know if that’s possible, ever, because every thought- or real- experiment we do will always be known, by us, inside of a conscious experience.

Not collapsing to the inner (idealism): This is also not “there’s no world out there, just constructs,” which I see as incoherently self-defeating: where do the constructs exist? We’re just hiding the fact that we presume constructs are objectively existing prior to that statement, and then declaring nothing inherently exists. It also doesn’t jive with out lived experience that there seem to be “things” like the laws of physics that are outside of our ability to simply construct a new meaning around. Perhaps the laws of physics are mutable, but we’d still be left with a meta-physics claim, like the one I’m making:

The inner and outer, the consciousness and matter, fundamentally coexist as one occurrence. This is what I’m referring to as “life” in the title of this post.

2. From this claim I think another follows that there’s a (possibly) inviolable metaphysics of correspondence between the interpretation and world-out-there, a “mirror” to the (obvious to almost all adults) correspondence between the world-out-there and interpretation: eg I can reinterpret the experience of stubbing my toe, but I can’t reinterpret the existence of the table leg I stubbed it on. The most obvious inverse correspondence is that I can use my reinterpretation to change the outer world: let’s say I consider stubbing my toe a lesson, and what I learn from that lesson is that I want to move the location of my table. Now I move my table.
   
   You can probably see where I’m going with this.
   
   If I don’t have access to the interpretation that toe-stubbing is a lesson-opportunity, maybe I’m less likely to move the table, or change my walking patterns, or whatever. (Yes there’s another failure mode in thinking the lessons are always only internal lessons, but that’s recapping the “collapsing to the inner” mentioned above, so already covered I think). Having the lesson-frame changes the way we encounter and react to adversity, even as small as toe-stubbing. Any given frame changes the way we encounter and react to all that we experience, because they’re interpenetratingly one thing.
   

3. “Everything in my life is collaborative” is one of the interpretation-choices we all have; and it is causative in the same way “stubbing my toe is a lesson” is causative. I think this is a pragmatic statement of fact; here’s the value-laden one:
   

Seeing everything that happens as collaborative is very good way to live, and results in greater well-being.

It puts us in flow with what’s happening rather than resistance; it has us take self-responsibility for “what now” and keeps us close to where our actual power is (meaning making, as Frank said yesterday); all of this leads to a better experience regardless of your values and regardless of your life circumstances.

“we are scared to say this because we don’t want to victim-blame”

This feels very un-politically-correct to talk about because people immediately try to apply it to others. They misinterpret it to mean, “If someone has a shitty experience it’s their fault.”

This is a mistake!

(1) I’m not using it to talk about others.
(2) The capacity to do something now doesn’t imply the capacity to have done something in the past.
(3) I’m definitely not saying it’s fair.

The statement is about everything in your life, not everyone’s life. The mistake at a philosophical level is trying to make it an “out there” proposition, instead of remembering the entanglement of inner-and-outer.

This clarification is super important because to the extent what I’m saying is true, it’s a huge, underutilized technology in well-being improvement available to you in your life, but it remains unavailable to you if you think that using it means you have to blame other people for their circumstances. Don’t do that! Not necessary! For personal use only! (Even when I apply these ideas in coaching sessions, and we teach them in The Relateful Coaching School, it’s always first from a place of asking questions, finding attunement.)

“but we’re also scared of the possibilities and transcendence that opens up”

The other most common block to trying on this perspective is that we’re terrified of being this powerful:

• What if we don’t use it responsibly? (Then you’d have the chance to see that as collaborative, taking the results as feedback)

• What if we can’t use it well? (There’s no standard—that’s an unnecessary imposition we make up in our heads; and I don’t know if there’s an end either, so we’re always growing in capacity, if we want to)

• Does this mean it’s our fault if we don’t have a good experience? (no, remember that would be collapsing the outer to the inner)

And we’re terrified at facing the reality of how deeply interconnected we are.

This means the “I” that I think I am really is indistinguishable from the entire world, which calls into the question the nature of that I. This is a scary thing to face, in my experience. Luckily, as far as I can tell the nature of reality-experience is holonic—transcendence always comes with including. So yes, I am much much bigger than whatever concept I make of myself, but that bigness doesn’t erase the concept or the me, it simply contextualizes it in something much grander. Which ironically, gives us a lot more room for self-expression, play, and surrendering into embracing the whole human experience with all of it’s complexity, suffering, and joy.

1. Consider my whole past — all of the stuff I’m worried about, feel guilty about, the stuff from my day and week and childhood, all the good memories, my ancestors, the whole of evolution, and bundle the felt-sense of it all into the word “past”.

2. Now I think to myself “past collapse” and let the whole of it (ideas, emotions, body sensations, memories) all whoosh away. If you prefer you can imagine placing it on a beautiful altar before God and saying “I give this all to you God”.

3. Now I do the same with the future – what I want, am afraid of, expect, imagine, from the next moments, to days, to years, to eons. I don’t spend long collecting this all, it’s more of a vibe that takes 3 seconds max. Once I’ve got something of a felt sense, with no attention to thoroughness, I “future collapse” and let it all go.

4. Finally, I collect up the “Present” and think to myself “Present collapse” as I release whatever is left of “my” experience and enter a state of nothingness.

With surrendering the past and future, I feel physical and psychological relaxation. But with surrendering the present, I feel the real state-change. If there’s no past, present, or future, what is there? What remains? What’s it like? The idea is to enjoy the experience, not to litigate the ideas with the mind.

I suspect some mechanisms behind the transformative aspect here are (1) the psychological entanglement with the concept of time, which is usually so woven into our assumptions of reality. Who or what remains to “have” this experience without a self persisting in time? (2) The subject-object split’s requiring time; a subject that persists “over time”.

Credit to Richard Dotts, whose book titles make you want to run and hide, but whose content is basically mystical pointing out instructions. I can’t remember if I learned the “present collapse” bit from one of his books or I iterated on it.

This week I noticed how often I describe the relateful approach from the perspective of an individual’s experience in a relationship. This frame makes a lot of sense; it’s the most accessible and inarguable. It helps us explore a nearly infinite array of questions like: what are my blindspots? What am I responsible for here? Can I change so the we/world changes? Can I love what is? How can I find peace, no matter what, without bypassing? Where do I abandon myself, when I could bring more of me into the relating? Where do I withdraw or dissociate, when I could stay present to more discomfort—and gain more insight, freedom, and acceptance? What unconscious rules and norms am I following in groups—and thereby upholding? How can I skillfully choose different rules or surrender more fully? How am I reifying my whole sense of “I” in the first place? How can that be transcended? How can “I” be of deeper service for the divine?

It’s awesome. But it’s not the whole picture. It relegates us to the realm of the personal. And it doesn’t speak to many of the confusing aspects of being a human that being relateful (hopefully) innovates.

We-Self Awareness & Collective-Alignment? 🧲

Here’s another way to describe what we’re exploring: How do groups become more group-self aware? How we are, what are we blind to, what do we enforce, how do we update, what do we defend, what can we let go of? How do we change intentionally, moment-to-moment? What are we oriented to? What external incentives corrupt our purpose? What larger motives are already using our collectives for their own ends? What’s the role of any of us as a so-called individual in all of this?

Flow sessions in particular offer us a chance to actively inquire into our collective unconscious. Individuals are often thrown into ‘we’s they don’t feel like they belong to—exactly like being outside of a flow session. How do you skilfully work with this? Flow invites us into experiments of leadership and alignment. They’re uniquely suited for playing with ‘self-organizing systems’ that have minimally pre-determined structures

It’s hard enough staying aligned with our individual selves. Even if we know what’s good for us, we often opt for what’s expedient instead. (And that’s a big if). So how do we align a group of people? How do we do it when there are vastly different enactments of what reality even is?

The AI alignment question as something that’s already happening, where it’s more about culture. Making a mistake and then technology.

The Ethics And Relationships Between Individuals and Groups 🍱

We can also see Relateful flow practice as an exploration of relationship—and particularly the ethics—between individuals and collectives. There are probably a lot of wise philosophical perspectives on this. I don’t know maybe … there’s a bunch of people who have tried to ask and answer similar questions. How to do governance. How to be stoic. But we’re struggling here still, so I think there are still a lot of questions to ask. Many of the biggest problems facing our species are not things one individual can do alone. Even our dreams—like becoming an interplanetary species—are not possible for one person.

How do you relate to spacetime? We usually think about how we move through time, but how does time move through us as awareness, making sense of things? Not as a concept, but experientially, looking in this exact moment, what is time? As you witness whatever’s happening, can you check out time as an object appearing in timelessness?

A bunch of physicists are starting to converge on the idea that spacetime is not fundamental, it’s a result of some deeper process. In this recent podcast convo with John Vervaeke, Donald Hoffman suggests maybe this is why consciousness is a “hard problem” to understand. If we’ve been asking how consciousness emerges from material phenomena that themselves are emergent from something deeper, it could be like asking why drownings increase as a result of ice cream sales (they don’t; both are a result of a third thing so the frame of the question is faulty).

How cool is it to try to put yourself in the lived experience of being outside of spacetime? (thanks to my friend Robin Arnott for the podcast rec)

A tree doesn’t build a forest, a node doesn’t build a network. Community is in between, what the relationships and connections do outside of our attempts to control, in spite of, and because of, our avoiding, complaining, gossiping, caretaking, and generally being a beautiful mess. Our modern sensibilities resist this. The whole frame of “an individual builds” is in the way of the community trying to coalesce.

Many of the people I see ‘building community’ are doing so in avoidance of their own existential fears and pains, and it looks structurally very similar to killing yourself with work now to one day retire and enjoy your life: “One day once I’ve ‘built enough’ I’ll no longer be lonely, socially awkward, excluded, judged, different. I’ll no longer be afraid to die alone. I’ll no longer need to face society’s ills because I’ll have built my own little paradise.” I think this can work if you’re willing and able to give up your autonomy and submit to a fundamentalist religion. Otherwise, a better tack is to face all those fears and feelings, one by one, while you’re fully living now, recognizing the communities all around us that are so insanely vast and plentiful that we’ve taken them for granted.

I am practical, and my actions are less grumpy than my opinions, so here are some things an individual can “do” that people in incredible communities tend to do (but you can’t do them to create the outcome or you’re back in the contradiction):

• Get our false self-concepts out of the way and let happen what’s already happening

• Love our life

• Do stuff we love, letting it be enough for the sake of itself and not attaching to any outcome (I think this is more common than it sounds: if you love playing soccer, you love playing pickup and often don’t even keep track of score)

• Show up: for others, asking for what we need, taking 100% responsibility for our stuff—especially strengthening the great web of communities we’re already in and making them healthier

As Rilke says: we live the questions and one day we might accidentally find ourselves living out the answers.

For many, it’s vulnerable to get excited: what if we don’t get what we want? But if you don’t get your desire, you’ll likely be disappointed anyway. Isn’t it better to have felt excitement and disappointment, rather than just disappointment? For most situations your excitement doesn’t have any negative impact on whether or not you get what you want.

Defenses do what they’re designed to defend against; a powerful shadow concept we go into depth about working with in the Relateful Coaching Training (starting September). Of course the simple logic presented above doesn’t address so many things—layers payoffs for staying guarded; personal or societal uniquenesses; the role of awareness in being able to choose; and how you embody this in challenging times—but instead helps us begin the process of discernment through making subjective experiences objects we can see. Sometimes, just being able to name something reveals a freedom to choose how we express it.

I’ve also written about many alternatives (universal energies, negative space of a tunnel entrance/exit, self-organizing system, pollinator, dance-floor anemone-spine / road network, integrated, purposeful self, etc). These will surely have their own shadows too; I’m pointing out so many alternatives to help us develop fluidity, freedom, and playfulness in the way we conceptualize the “self” we hold ourselves to be.

Here’s another to add to the list: Versions.

“There’s a version of me that wants to go, and a version that doesn’t.” This feels like an easy shift from ‘parts’ (for those who want to play), but it

(1) more closely matches the holism of my experience (I don’t feel like I’m split into parts; I feel that there is a holistic me commanding the whole self, enacting the one and only world-experience I know in that moment; if another version of me wants to take over, it’s doing so as a way to create a whole new universe).

(2) more accurately describes how the inner version of ‘me’ I choose also enacts the outer world I inhabit, and

(3) there’s no escaping the responsibility of the present version of me, no matter how fluid or temporary.

So if you’re down, play with this framing to see if it can invite us to embrace each version of ourselves as a fully accountable creator of the reality we inhabit—whole, fluid, and alive in the moment.

And then let’s find its limits, and create something new.

- Alfred Korzybski

There’s a concept called construct-awareness in developmental theory. I first found out about it from Suzanne Cook Greuter, who presents the Fool archetype as an antidote to self-importance and save-the-world narratives.

The heart of construct-awareness is recognizing that all meaning-making is incomplete. Yes, including this. Especially this… if I were wiser this writing would be way more foolish and fun.

Construct-awareness is like Gödel’s incompleteness theorem of reality. This turns out to be a relief. When we realize our maps will never be “enough,” we get to play. Easier to empathize with radically different worlds. To reframe deep beliefs that give rise to people’s problems in coaching sessions. To be less defended in the face of critical feedback and therefore quicker to learn.

Most of us see our ideas about trauma, parenting, or politics as pretty good approximations of an independent reality. Construct-awareness doesn’t deny this possibility, it points out that we must always “choose” a framing—time, scale, and purpose—to experience, much less name anything. We get a lot more creative freedom in how we make sense of stuff if we can recognize those “choices.”

You don’t have to buy this being “higher” development. Though higher always means higher level pathologies too. But the idea predicts that people who truly make sense this way will be less defensive about their models and more responsive in their problem-solving approaches as they’re less identified with their conclusions (on average).

It also predicts that for some, this expands to being aware of constructing the “I” too, opening the door to more unitive experience. Being less enamored with the act of constructing, one starts relating with the stuff meaning/selfs are constructed from. Eg: “making stuff out of play-doh is fun, but wtf is play doh?” This trends unitive because you see there’s only one play-doh: pre-differentiated wholeness.

And then you put it in your mouth.

As far as any I is concerned, everything that could ever possibly be known is (at least) experientially entangled with the I. Even the unknown is entangled, when someone considers it. Given this, how could we ever prove that consciousness can be explained by something outside of it?

This using awareness to point at itself applies to claims we can make about awareness too. I can’t make an ontological claim that awareness is final or ultimate or even that it always is, just that we could never know if it isn’t. For us to ever be aware, awareness is. But that doesn’t make awareness claims invalid. They’re like breaking the fourth wall in a movie; both part of the story and inviting something more.

I can make claims that it’s upstream of other claims though, like ideas of falsifiability. To say “this pointing to itself makes it unfalsifiable” asks us to step inside a frame of objective thinking via logic, and then forget stepping inside it (imposing the rules of logic via our subjectivity onto unmediated experience), which is the point I’m making. We’re left with our undeniable experience, maybe nothing else, and gratefully that is everything.

I want to pause to acknowledge that scientific materialism is incredible. We built rockets that go to the moon because it’s so useful to set aside questions of consciousness and assume an objective point of view! I just don’t want to forget that we are phenomenologically bracketing subjectivity when we do that; we are making a reasonable choice to ignore an experientially indivisible aspect of reality for a little while in order to focus our attention on just one subsection. But materialist assumptions basically can say nothing about the epistemic realm, which is where most of what humans actually care about resides. We want to go to the moon because of what we feel, value, experience, desire. Even basic needs like food, shelter and health matter because of people’s experiences, not as ends in themselves.

(How) does this decrease anxiety and increase awareness of peace?

What is this good for? Why do I care? Why did I bother sharing that with y’all?

I think it’s extremely helpful, but for whom? Aren’t I deconstructing the self that wants help?

The shape of my argument for this recognition goes:

1. Awareness must be present for any consideration. As long as we are, it is constant.

   • Experience of awareness allows us to see the self (rather than thinking about awareness, which maintains a self as primary thing doing the thinking about).

2. A self appears within awareness, not as awareness.

3. Awareness sees that selves are always changing. Eg: The self I think I am is more of a “selfing” that requires constant effort to create and maintain.

4. This fluidity makes it obvious that selfing is not the primary identity, and this can’t be unseen.

5. Efforting to maintain selfing as if it were primary and static feels off and therefore is energetically expensive (like pretending to believe someone who’s lying).

6. Eventually this expense is unsustainable so the effort eases. (Sometimes this is a years-long process that starts by doubling down on effort; this can be intense but burns the effort energy faster).

7. Effort at “selfing” produces asymmetrically ‘negative’ subjective states such as anxiety; relaxing the selfing then structurally relaxes the anxiety.
   

What’s left? Here’s where it gets weird and cool. We don’t have to make any claims as to “who” is experiencing the peace, just that it notably increases, reliably, compared to before.

It’s not clear if there’s a self to ‘experience’ peace or if the self got reimagined to something much bigger. Either way we’re still aware of “things”; peace is one of them that becomes more obvious when less effort goes to selfing, controlling, protecting, defending. I think this suggests that peace is a quality of awareness.

Whatever I repress usually leaks out in less healthy ways, including all of the developmental levels I’ve lived so far. My infantile needs, my magical thinking, my egocentric self that just cares about me, my ethnocentric self that just cares about ‘my people.’

Now that I’ve got a wider identity, I can hold many overlapping and sometimes contradictory ethnocentric identities. Like any subjective experience I’ve made into an object, I can choose when and how to express when that energy shows up in my field. Like today. If I repress my “American” identity I’m going to project it onto some other group (ironically) or even other Americans (confusingly) and kick off the guilt-attack cycle.

You may be a rare person who has fully integrated all of your “Amber,” conformist self. But chances are you’ve got some ethnocentric skeletons in your closet. Religious affiliation. Gender. Race. Country of origin. Clique in highschool. If so, consider this an official invitation to find a way to love this part of you more. Relax the self-judgment, and find a healthy way to say “yes” to this younger you. You get more love of self and other, but you’re also being more honest. There’s nothing spiritual about self-denial. There’s nothing more evolved about seeing one as better than someone “less developed.”

In the beloved coaching course we do an exercise about feeling into all these levels, finding which ones are most repressed, appreciating and unblocking that repression, and learning to coach from them. The most difficult one for most people to embrace is their ethnocentric self. Especially if they’re white, from a rich country, or have been taught that it’s virtuous to be guilty for the circumstances of their birth (ironically) or that the best way to help those less fortunate than ourselves is to disavow our fortunes.

Practically, knowing this helps me relax and let go. I’m more open to feedback. More adaptive to what’s really going on (eg: Creative potential misinterpreted as sexual / romantic attraction). My natural love and honesty are not hijacked by unquestioned stories. To unpack it a little:

My body makes sense; bodies stitch together raw sense data and create interpretations which we then take to be real. Your body gets the shape of the ground wrong when you’re drunk. I watched my niece evolve from not seeing shapes when she was born six weeks ago to recognizing faces. Common body constructs are often more predictions than facts, eg: “This chair is trustable.” (Is it?)

My emotions make sense of the world too. Sometimes as a result of thoughts and sensations (the temperature drops and I get scared), sometimes being the cause of them (I’m scared and now I get goosebumps). A lot of therapy hinges on recognizing our emotions and then “questioning” the reality-interpretations they create by being in touch with an experientially obvious current alternate interpretation of what’s happening. “I feel scared, while I’m also aware that I’m in a boring and safe room.”

All of these meaning centers interpret and create a world without requiring any coherent concept of ‘me’ (ego) while also creating concepts of me in their realm (who’s doing the sitting in the chair?). Sometimes these creations are independent of each other, sometimes they feed each other.

Construct-awareness means an ongoing recognition that ‘real’ is an abstraction, including “physical”, and “emotional” realness, including this very meta-map of experience. (I think the next evolution of consciousness experientially feels the process of constructing as an indivisible part of what realness is, both as and distinct from the constructor, constructing, and constructed).

If the only ‘sense’ I can identify is my mind, then all the other sense-making happening has me by the balls. And, I’m likely to judge others for being “too heady”. Unable to connect to them in the richness and beauty of the way they make sense of the world, I’m likely to demand they come to my preferences, rather than feel the grief of the gap between us, or learn to truly see through their eyes.

Let’s make other meaning-making centers object, instead of being subject to them.

OK — so this has already been “too philosophical” by my self assessment, but there’s no better time to share this Nerdy definition of a Flow Session 🤓 we sometimes unpack in Level Up: “A group process of communication that opens all meaning-making centers to facilitate consciousness self-awarely radiating as interactions, in such a way that the distinctions between I and we/other are both preserved and blurred.”

Flow - is the same process as above but between any I/other (not just a group process).

More. More intelligence, more production, more value creation: the false idol of modernism. Intelligence on demand’s making people psychotic, addicted, working harder. That won’t make us happier!

Happiness. “Pursue wellness, creative self-expression, following your bliss then!” you say. Welcome to the false idol of postmodernism. When AI does this, we mostly see through it (sycophancy, slop), so why do we think our own version will save us? All empty self-expressions are equally empty. Then make the self-expression deep, right!?

Depth. Meaning, purpose, growth, transformation, authenticity, shadow integration and solving civilizational level problems (and winky self-implication)? The false idol of meta-modernism. AI is quite the therapist / coach. Your “assistant” can reframe, organize, philosophize, even solve famous math problems in an endless snake-eating-its-tail loop that never looks the core question of existence in the eye. It reflects back to us our own sisyphean quest, and even recursively makes overcoming the sisyphean quest-making into another boulder to roll up the hill. Yikes.

AI falsifies each idol by fulfilling its promises better than we ever have. Infinite intelligence didn’t make us happy, infinite self-expression is sloppy, infinite deep diving is a boulder-generating existential-avoidance-trap. “Salvation” delivered, absolution absent, idol dethroned.

AI won’t fix this for us because it is the child of these idols. Optimal for optimizing.

I’m not blaming AI, frontier labs, or even Western Civilization (whatever that means) that we turned living life into a KPI. And then made a tool that 1000xs our obsession with always-being-somewhere-else. What for? To enjoy life with our kids? To have great conversations? To appreciate nature?

Maybe we’ll even be able to use AI to help us after all. But we’ll have to reshape ourselves for us to enact it differently. Here’s what I suggest—

“The point of dancing is to dance”

I don’t read a book to get the bullet points.1

I don’t raise my children to get to adulthood.

People who love to cook aren’t upset when the fruit of their labors disappears minutes after their hours of labor.

As Alan Watts said “The whole point of the dancing is the dance.”2

a choice of worlds

But wait! Isn’t this counterdependency: giving up the fancy clothes for monk’s robes, but still being attached to what we wear? Replacing “more” / “happiness” / “depth” with “presence” / “surrender” / “being” / “union”?

You tell me: are you instrumentalizing this?3 Or are you delighting in what’s already here?4

Are you “doing the work” or are you playing? Play isn’t purposeless. Play is direction without rigidity. Control without being controlling. I do prepare my kids to have a wonderful adulthood. It’s just preparing is not what family is for; it’s not for anything.

I love progress like I love getting better at rock climbing: as a happy bonus that comes from being in love. I don’t climb to progress in climbing, I progress in climbing because I love to climb.

an ending

I’ve loved fruit-bearing trees for my 39 years on this earth (gift of grandpa Myska), yet it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I discovered the Texas persimmon: native, small black fruit with big seeds, delicious. I discovered them on a hike with a friend, from a sign on the trail (not from the internet). Now I see (and eat) them everywhere in the wild.

My daughter Ciça interrupted me as I wrote this. "hey daddy, look at this." It’s a Lego creation, bc I gently encouraged her to play quietly with legos in the dark rather than force her to keep trying to sleep; a lesson I learned from being too harsh with my son.

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Responsibility Symmetry 👐

When we’re unable or unwilling to deal with our own state, we recreate it outside of ourselves.

• I’ll fix your feeling of sadness, rather than dealing with my discomfort that you’re sad.

• I shout my boundaries so you’ll uphold them—because I don’t trust myself to

• I can’t relax my body, so I seek out stimulation (social media, intense movies, etc) (hat tip to Relateful Camp Presenter Forrest Wilson)

• I’ll save the world, because I don’t know how to deal with my personal insignificance

• I invest in things I don’t care about because being with the truth of how much I love threatens my sense of independence.

This is a functional way to practice stuff we’re not good at yet: I’ll give you advice about your business that I can later apply to my own. It’s a way we learn. We can’t yet hold in our self-identity so we recreate: recreation is activity done for enjoyment. But it limits what we love in ourselves and others, keeping us under the thumb of our defenses (against what we’re avoiding). We end up overextending our attention at others, underextending it for ourselves, as one process.

This is another way of saying projection makes perception, which is the same as saying defenses do what they’re designed to defend against, which is the same as saying there’s only one happening—separation is a construct that creates the one-who-separates-and-perceives as much as it does the-things-perceived.

If there’s anything new I’m adding here (probably not—Freud, Jung, and so many mystics have said it thousands of times before me), it’s that I think there’s a symmetry. “If I can’t handle X, I’ll create X’ externally.” When I’m lucky enough to notice this happening in my experience, it seems almost like a conservation law in physics, where the energy of avoidance must be preserved somewhere in the system. There seems to be a proportionality—the amount that I’m blaming the world for its injustice seems equivalent to the amount I’m not taking responsibility for myself / the amount I’m taking too much responsibility is equivalent to my unwillingness to face the world’s injustice. ← These may sound like opposites, but from this frame they seem like the same meta-process.

This symmetry highlights two ways to reverse it (since being one, either side of the mirror is a viable place for chance)—if we want to embrace more and get more in touch with the fullness of what’s available in existence: (1) Noticing my attraction/aversion to something outside, I can turn my attention inward instead, and start the process of learning to love the unloved in me. Or (2) noticing what seems unlovable in me, I can look at how I externalize that, and learn how to love and boundary that.

..“Allowing” versus expressing… 🛰️
In the face of this it’s very helpful to remember that allowing does not equal expressing. Allowing is simply saying “it’s OK for me to feel this.” Expressing means “here’s how this is going to act in the world.” Learning to trust this distinction—that feeling doesn’t have to mean acting—is one of the key steps in becoming more comfortable with “turning towards” what we’ve repressed.

This distinction is also critical for Relatefulness. Not all expressions are created equal. Some keep us locked in an endless loop. Some help us heal. Some are nearly impossible for other people to receive. Some express love. A common mistake is for newbies to think that there’s one particular way to express whatever’s happening in them (eg: “anger should be yelled!” Or “grief should be cried!”), and to make themselves or others wrong for not expressing as they expect. Speaking of making yourself wrong, finding better ways to do something doesn’t mean your old ways were crap; it means you’re learning.

Running from something (through anxiety, depression, or other forms of repression) gives it power over us, while turning toward it with loving awareness ironically gives us more control over how we act. (defenses…)This defines emotional maturity not as the ability to keep certain experiences at bay, or to fully embody them, but as the capacity to be present with the full range of human experience while maintaining choice about its expression.

Surrender is a way of collaborating with fate to make its (retro)causality more likely to influence the present effect. Which ends up feeling really good. 🪢

In the normal way we think of time, the past has an extremely strong influence on the present, but you can still change it through greater awareness and surrender. For example, if you’ve been hurt in a relationship, you can change the likelihood of present reactivity through forgiveness.

What if we think of “fate” in a similar way, but in reverse? The more we presently surrender to fate’s future pull—which usually shows up as gut instinct, intuition, synchronicity—the more likely it is to happen. And the present becomes an immensely enjoyable sensation of flow even when it’s extremely hard work. You may have felt this in a life calling that demands hard work and sacrifice—like being a mother, doctor, artist, community servant.

Or you may have felt this in a Relateful session, experiencing something deeply unsettling, uncomfortable, or challenging, but with a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Even the most challenging relating becomes meaningful and satisfying in the surrender of “I wouldn’t want it any other way.” The moment is its own reward. Different potential futures or pasts that might come from this mean less than the feeling of alignment, grace, and gratitude.

Ultimately, outcomes become secondary to the process of staying in flow. We’re driven to maintain the beautiful balance between history and fate, seeking futures and pasts that help us stay in transformation, rather than achieve a particular outcome. We’re more free to see these outcomes and directions as limited constructions of our particular worldview and be open to feedback about our blindspots. We’re better at collaborating. We seek influence from beyond ourselves—other people, fate, other conceptions of time even when they don’t seem to make much sense or feel too philosophical to have practical implications—and end up bigger. Our vision and sense of potential grows; we’re more able to do complex things individuals can’t do alone.

Surrendering to fate doesn’t just influence the present—it transforms it into a deeply satisfying and meaningful journey, where every moment is its own reward. Ironically, in doing so, we become far more effective and powerful leaders, communicators, partners, even as we’re more willing to be inadequate and weak, followers, inarticulate, unseen and alone.

I think it’s better to have our agreed upon understanding of “awakening,” as independent from psychological maturity (growing up) and shadow material (cleaning up). We don’t ask our spiritual teachers to design our bridges or balance our books. Why should we assume someone with a persistent baseline of wild-empty wholeness is the best to design our morals, or balance our relationships?

Perhaps “enlightenment” and “ethics” are only separate when the awakening is partial, and we should be using the word to mean the whole thing. Distinguishing the two makes the pursuit of awakening less sexy (it won’t save us from hurting others or give us magic god-powers), but more honest. I think this is better. It helps us honor the gifts of people we might otherwise ignore, seeing everyone as our teachers. It helps us see the flaws of our most beloved gurus, to avoid and learn from their dark sides. It helps us keep from deluding ourselves into thinking our actions are ethical simply because we’re in flow. It helps us reclaim our golden shadows—the ‘awakening’ we can’t hold for ourselves that we project onto others. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. We’re it.

I think this difference is a property of nondual perception—with nowhere to get, nothing to attain, and nothing to clean up, what sense does right and wrong have? A whole host of unexamined and likely false reality-constructions—that I’m separate from everything and everyone else, that I have to earn love, that there’s something other than all here already, can be recognized as projections onto the things and people we think we need to improve.

But I want to make a clear case for nondual ethics: 🪷

But I want to make a clear case for nondual ethics: I like good dreams and plays with happy endings. If we’re truly all one, your suffering is mine, so wouldn’t I want to ease all the world’s suffering the same way I would want to resettle my body in an uncomfortable posture? And if I’m totally free as in a simulation but I’m still here experiencing it, wouldn’t I freely aim toward the highest good possible, acting from a deep sense of unity and compassion? Aren’t motivations for almost anything other than the world of form reflecting our deepest understanding of love and interconnectedness, shadowy upon close inspection?

This seems to go against my first point—suggesting that in the absence of perceived separation, ethical action becomes a natural extension of the realization of oneness. I don’t have great answers here. The nature of pointing is separate from that which is pointed to. These kinds of questions are about the world of form, which is a world of separation. Still, seems to me the process of awakening can loosen identification or strengthen it (because people experience their finding as THE truth and all relative distinctions pale in comparison); so you can find teachers who are extraordinarily ethical and mature, but you can find others who DGaF.

It’s complicated. This is an email. My tone may say otherwise, but I’m always writing in discovery, trying to find out what I seem to know and don’t, reminding myself of what I want to learn, further integrate, explore, appreciate.

What struck me was how he was the architect of his own suffering. He created the cage (the idea of eating at the same time), and then he kept himself imprisoned. He could make up a new idea. But his construct had become reality to him. So he got to experience grief and powerlessness.

We are all Jack. About almost everything. This is such a universal spiritual truth that it feels trite: When I stop clinging to my ideas of how things should be, I stop suffering. Bubba Girl eats eggs, regardless of Jack’s desires. The economy, my job, “I am not enough”, “life isn’t fair”, my expectations of how others should treat me; these are all Bubba Girl eating eggs.

Jack’s commitment to his created reality unveils one pathway to a different experience. What are we assuming to be true that we instead made up? Possibly everything. Hence Relatefulness’ relentless inquiry into the basics that everyone else takes for granted.

(note: I read this to Jack when he was upset later, and although he wasn’t impressed by the content, he did calm down with me reading.)

Or maybe I find myself teasing you—but wait! I don’t like teasing people, so why am I doing this?—perhaps we’re in a relational dynamic where you think I don’t think much of you, and I’m accidentally reading the lines to the script you’ve handed me. But don’t use this to abstain from responsibility—perhaps it’s all a big ruse for me to disown my inner desire to tease you (by making it your fault for projecting onto me), where the original teasing I’m not willing to feel is a defense mechanism (projection) against an even deeper feeling-I-don’t-want-to-feel of my own self-hatred.

If it’s causative, it seems related to the Pygmalion effect, where people tend to perform better with high expectations and worse with low expectations, with the added emphasis of projection and how it impacts relating (and the interplay of self-fulfilling prophecies and the results): People tend to harmonize with our projections onto them. If I expect a child to be a troublemaker, they tend to meet my expectations. And vice versa, we tend to harmonize with others’ expectations of us.

With projection, we take an unwanted aspect of ourselves and put it on someone else, seeing a double dose of it in them—for example, if we project our anger, they’ve got their own anger, plus ours. The term isn’t so important; what I want to call attention to is how sometimes we fit what others project onto us, like when we revert to old habits at home for the holidays or at high school reunions.

This implies a tough pill to swallow: you can tell what something’s for in a relationship by observing the results you get. Ultimately this means the power’s in our hands, at least for our experience. We can’t necessarily change someone else by changing what we project on them, but we will necessarily change the relationship. And in gaining awareness, we have choice and therefore freedom. And the freedom comes with a deeper surrender to our interconnectedness and how totally interdependent we are with everything and everyone.

Here’s AI Claude’s Concise definition:

Projective harmonization is a psychological phenomenon where individuals unconsciously mirror and reinforce each other’s projections in a relationship, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of behavior and perception.

“Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing / There is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

...is apparently a very loose “translation” of Rumi’s original Persian poetry, which is more like:

“Beyond Islam and unbelief there is a ‘desert plain’.
For us, there is a ‘yearning’ in the midst of that expanse.
The knower of God who reaches that plain will prostrate in prayer.
For there is neither Islam nor unbelief, nor any ‘where’ in that place.“

I can’t read Persian, but I’m starting to get the gist that the popular Coleman Barks books on Rumi should be considered inspired rather than translated. Which is totally fine, but I prefer the experiential contemplative transmission I get from the higher fidelity translation. It speaks to me and feels simultaneously more personal and more universal.