Absolutely wonderful!! I have deeply chafed at phrases like “ fulfill MY destiny” while passing those without homes suffering in the heat and lying on concrete for beds. How can WE not be affected? Our transition from individuality into conscious collaboration is achingly painful but your writing and beautiful sharing so captures this essential human evolution. Thank you!
Absolutely! So expressed in neuroscience and also by paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and others in the mystical tradition. But this particular blog of yours deeply struck me. Even in the contemplative circles in which I travel I have to mentally translate the “me” to “we.” Its so conditioned in western thought. I am in my seventies, white, happily embodied in my personal life but each day my heart breaks open for those suffering so needlessly when we have so many material resources. It astounds me to think my happiness is individually earned when I know it’s luck, karma, genes, whatever. Thank you so much for listening and for your provocative insights.
I followed Sam Harris And his Mindfulness app crap for a bit and found that the following around him, who it seems to tend to be independent minded tech people, exhibited this behavior, I am sure there are those who do not fit that but this paper backs my initial observations. Very interesting to see why or how this might be formed makes sense.
Even worse is Sam Harris and his belief and statement that we do not have Free Will and that a deterministic reality means that we are programmed to do as we do, it is not our fault what we do, therefore we should not blame a murder for their actions.
A combination of heartless ‘Mindful’ independent Libertarians, and deterministically mindless lack of responsibility sounds like an apocalyptic mess in the making; all heading to their headless dream of a future upload into the digital singularity, where you can leave all those shitty Serfs behind.
Ha, totally. That harris combo of no free will plus mindfulness in a libertarian setting is pure late capitalist acceleration. Re no free will, this notion of linguistic determination ( language priming) is both “free will” and” no free will”, as we can choose to speak differently (free will is only determined negatively imo, an inertia breaker) so that we can not choose (inertia) to behave selfishly.
The realization that there’s no free will can have opposite effects on people - some feel trapped and some feel free. I imagine that the understanding that “choice” is an illusion doesn’t predict behaviour, but that a person’s nature before the realization determines how it affects them. Someone who’s already selfish could become moreso, while someone who’s pro-social could become moreso. Or it could be benign.
Thanks for the comment. I think (or perhaps hope) that the predetermined state is largely based on linguistic orientation. Such that it is not a persons “nature” that determines whether or not they are selfish but their nurture (language, in this case). I do think there will be a return of the sort of post modern seriousness of language-as-reality-maker.
Definitely. Language is of utmost importance. The whole concept of "free will" is the problem. What is will free from anyway..? We might as well say the wind has free will.
I wrote a little piece on the free will in this substack. In a nutshell, my opinion is that will is always only in the negative as in it has the ability to dam up an inertia. Some people may never use will and only work with the existing inertia of their behaviors. I’m not sure if the wind is conflicted about which direction it blows, but will, being a break from inertia, represents a sort of struggle. Of course for others like Sam Harris will is the right idea of agency boiled down to ANY choice “occurring” before we “realize” it. But actually the study he and others like him use to advocate for their side has been proven to be flawed and sort of bebunked.
I like to say "Only what can happen does." Everything is bound by its limitations.
The wind is an ever-changing occurrence, like us, changed by whatever it interacts with, like us.
I would say, we cannot "transcend" the self because the desire to "transcend" is a desire of the self and the feelings that frame any decision are rooted in the self.
The tricky part is that we have feelings about how we feel about our feelings about our feelings.
p.s. Bebunking sounds like it would be something fun!
Fascinating and it makes perfect sense. I’ll pass this along to my wife who is a Unity minister. Might be changing some of those affirmations they use. Thanks, Alex. I appreciate your insight.
Yes, it's such a simple shift, yet it means literally the world. I saw this article just after reading about Indigenous 'Potlatch' gift ceremonies, by which ties of reciprocity and interdependence are strengthened. It made me wonder if a 'crypto potlatch' could be a thing - competitive altruism on a digital level. The thing that is missing is maybe a connection to the land, which might actually be the crucial thing.
Yeah. The question of how crucial the land actually is to things is one of the big questions in our future. As we digitize, we tend to think mostly about physical interpersonal loss...but there is immense experiential land loss. As we travel into space, how important is the earth in particular, as an origin point, or will any planetary energy do...etc...
Thanks so much for sharing! Fascinating and important!! Mindfulness should be taught in schools only in an interdependent context! Not how it is at the moment.... all the me me me focus.
Were these mindfulness practices ones that had developed over a substantial length of time? Mindfulness can do a lot of good. Have you heard of Tara Brach’s Insight Meditation Community of Washington? She’s highly focused on compassion and community awareness. I don’t think sincere mindfulness practice needs to be taken down. It does help in our interactions with others, and much of Buddhist teaching emphasizes “Lovingkindness” cf Sharon Salzburg.
But I see also how the market skews some of these holistic and often Asian-derived teachings, and can contribute to a solipsistic focus on one’s lifestyle and wellbeing and less on attitudes toward others.
Words DO matter. I think that’s a great takeaway, here. The words we say to others, and also the words we tell ourselves, make so much more of an impact than we realize. ❤️
But, if meditation were taught when a person is at an impressionable age, would that not make the person more of an interdependent personality? I believe I was more accepting of Buddhism and the concept of interdependence when I came across it as a teenager because my I lived with my grandmother for six months when I was six, and she exposed me to Christianity, and even though she was poor, made sure I saw her take actions such as giving money to the gypsy who came to our door. It was those six months of my life, when my grandfather taught me to read and love learning as well, that I think were more responsible for the person I grew up to be than any other period of my life. So I don't think the Dalai Lama is incorrect, I think your study is a poor analogy since it dealt with adults whose personalities were already formed. Show me the same study with eight year olds and having the same results, then I may say he erred.
I disagree. Teaching children that “you create your own reality” and about “personal sovereignty” before meditating would be a wild disaster, churn out spoiled kids. Having a child myself, language very obviously orients them. Teaching them about sharing alone is an arduous process of linguistic orientation.
We should teach children about bugs and rain and shooting stars and things like that. Or maybe just give them a chance to notice these things. Sharing comes more naturally when children are spending time in situations where they can move and work and think at their own pace.
I am not sure you and I have the same idea of meditation. Mediation is language free. For me it is merely a practice to teach one to focus on the immediate moment instead of living in the past or the future. It has nothing to do with creating your own reality, merely to be present in the moment that you are inhabiting. Though I do think that Buddhism tends to teach that your "perception" creates your reality, such as the example that if there is a piece of rope fifty feet ahead of you on a trail and you "perceive" it as a snake and turn around to avoid the snake, then it was a snake. I don't think that is bad to teach children. Of course, at the age of eight, I was asking my father what he saw when he closed his eyes at night because I wanted to know if his interior world was the same as mine, so I am probably not the right person to consult on what we teach eight year olds. As my mother used to say, I was a weird kid.
The meditation may be language free of course. The question is what is the language we are using and viewing the world with preceding the meditation – that’s the point of this whole piece. What is the mind state we are in before we enter the meditation. And the fact is that the mind state we are in before we enter a meditation will determine in some sense the effect of the meditation.
But that is, and again I am not claiming to actually know anything about this, a goal of mediation, to free you from the preconceived concepts that language creates. That instead of seeing a "rose" as it is defined in a dictionary, you perceive the rose as being everything that needs to exist for the rose to exist, its interdependence on all those other entities. I am also influenced by having lived in Bangkok at the age of 13 in 1970 and experiencing what an incredible people the Thais are and watching monks every morning go door to door begging for food in a large metropolis, their physical survival literally dependent on the kindness of strangers. If teaching our children to meditate brought us closer to that type of life, I'm all for it. However, I have been informed that the influences brought by U.S. soldiers and U.S. commerce has destroyed the culture I experienced, so a peaceful society, may be like all things, simply transient.
This is so interesting! I used to meditate, manifest, etc I even went on a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, all of this to „find myself“ „do me“…etc while realizing the best part of the pilgrimage was the other pilgrims and the community we had while walking.
The time I truly found something, was when taking care of my grandfather and spending time with him the past year before he died. When it is time we just put the elderly all away in special facilities, when in the past different generations took care of each other. We don’t want to see aging and dying especially the last few weeks when someone is dying from old age. Seeing all of this with my grandfather and now going through this again with my grandmother is truly humbling, beautiful, ugly and hard at the same time. Before I start rambling I will end this comment, but I thought this would fit to both subjects.
I loved the past two podcast. I had to slow down the speed a bit when Bard was talking to be able to follow along because English is not my native language, but it was worth it :) Great talks! Thanks, Alex
That’s a wonderful reflection on how when we say “it’s not where you go it’s the journey along the way” what we often really mean is it’s the relationships along the way. Sure, the failures too, and the learning...
Thank you for this wonderful post! As an Asian American Zen priest, I write and speak a lot about how the cultures of Asian Buddhist countries developed over millennia as ways for human beings to live and practically embody Buddhist teachings--and how this has been whitewashed out of Western Buddhism to our collective detriment. Mindfulness is the prime example of this.
Re: the Dalai Lama's thoughts, my Zen line comes from Japan's samurai classes so it's easy to think of historical examples of meditators engaged in warfare. But some of those figures--like Yamaoka Tesshu, Miyamoto Musashi, and Yagyu Munenori (samurai who later in life became Zen priests)--did orchestrate negotiations and compromises that saved thousands of lives from needless battle and death. The consensus is that they were able to do so because of their cultivation of kiai (vital energy, charisma, presence) and their clarity of vision through meditation and other hard spiritual training.
I'm so happy to have found your newsletter! I have long loved your music. "Truth" is still my favorite, but I've also reflected often on the chorus, "I want to be the prayer, not the pray-er," from "I Don't Wanna Pray". Excited to keep reading.🙏🏼
Absolutely wonderful!! I have deeply chafed at phrases like “ fulfill MY destiny” while passing those without homes suffering in the heat and lying on concrete for beds. How can WE not be affected? Our transition from individuality into conscious collaboration is achingly painful but your writing and beautiful sharing so captures this essential human evolution. Thank you!
🤝 appreciate this. Yeah, and of course our interrelation is not an ideology but the actual foundation of the total architecture of the universe.
Absolutely! So expressed in neuroscience and also by paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and others in the mystical tradition. But this particular blog of yours deeply struck me. Even in the contemplative circles in which I travel I have to mentally translate the “me” to “we.” Its so conditioned in western thought. I am in my seventies, white, happily embodied in my personal life but each day my heart breaks open for those suffering so needlessly when we have so many material resources. It astounds me to think my happiness is individually earned when I know it’s luck, karma, genes, whatever. Thank you so much for listening and for your provocative insights.
I followed Sam Harris And his Mindfulness app crap for a bit and found that the following around him, who it seems to tend to be independent minded tech people, exhibited this behavior, I am sure there are those who do not fit that but this paper backs my initial observations. Very interesting to see why or how this might be formed makes sense.
Even worse is Sam Harris and his belief and statement that we do not have Free Will and that a deterministic reality means that we are programmed to do as we do, it is not our fault what we do, therefore we should not blame a murder for their actions.
A combination of heartless ‘Mindful’ independent Libertarians, and deterministically mindless lack of responsibility sounds like an apocalyptic mess in the making; all heading to their headless dream of a future upload into the digital singularity, where you can leave all those shitty Serfs behind.
Cheers
Ha, totally. That harris combo of no free will plus mindfulness in a libertarian setting is pure late capitalist acceleration. Re no free will, this notion of linguistic determination ( language priming) is both “free will” and” no free will”, as we can choose to speak differently (free will is only determined negatively imo, an inertia breaker) so that we can not choose (inertia) to behave selfishly.
The realization that there’s no free will can have opposite effects on people - some feel trapped and some feel free. I imagine that the understanding that “choice” is an illusion doesn’t predict behaviour, but that a person’s nature before the realization determines how it affects them. Someone who’s already selfish could become moreso, while someone who’s pro-social could become moreso. Or it could be benign.
Thanks for the comment. I think (or perhaps hope) that the predetermined state is largely based on linguistic orientation. Such that it is not a persons “nature” that determines whether or not they are selfish but their nurture (language, in this case). I do think there will be a return of the sort of post modern seriousness of language-as-reality-maker.
Definitely. Language is of utmost importance. The whole concept of "free will" is the problem. What is will free from anyway..? We might as well say the wind has free will.
I wrote a little piece on the free will in this substack. In a nutshell, my opinion is that will is always only in the negative as in it has the ability to dam up an inertia. Some people may never use will and only work with the existing inertia of their behaviors. I’m not sure if the wind is conflicted about which direction it blows, but will, being a break from inertia, represents a sort of struggle. Of course for others like Sam Harris will is the right idea of agency boiled down to ANY choice “occurring” before we “realize” it. But actually the study he and others like him use to advocate for their side has been proven to be flawed and sort of bebunked.
Debunked
I like to say "Only what can happen does." Everything is bound by its limitations.
The wind is an ever-changing occurrence, like us, changed by whatever it interacts with, like us.
I would say, we cannot "transcend" the self because the desire to "transcend" is a desire of the self and the feelings that frame any decision are rooted in the self.
The tricky part is that we have feelings about how we feel about our feelings about our feelings.
p.s. Bebunking sounds like it would be something fun!
A fucking men to that!
Agree , we are all connected,thank you Alex Ebert ,I have been fighting a lot between philosophy,religion and teaching , you help a lot 🙏🏻
Fascinating and it makes perfect sense. I’ll pass this along to my wife who is a Unity minister. Might be changing some of those affirmations they use. Thanks, Alex. I appreciate your insight.
Wonderful!
Be mine 🤖💎💀🖤
Yes, it's such a simple shift, yet it means literally the world. I saw this article just after reading about Indigenous 'Potlatch' gift ceremonies, by which ties of reciprocity and interdependence are strengthened. It made me wonder if a 'crypto potlatch' could be a thing - competitive altruism on a digital level. The thing that is missing is maybe a connection to the land, which might actually be the crucial thing.
Yeah. The question of how crucial the land actually is to things is one of the big questions in our future. As we digitize, we tend to think mostly about physical interpersonal loss...but there is immense experiential land loss. As we travel into space, how important is the earth in particular, as an origin point, or will any planetary energy do...etc...
Thanks so much for sharing! Fascinating and important!! Mindfulness should be taught in schools only in an interdependent context! Not how it is at the moment.... all the me me me focus.
Ah shit. Never mind. My post on Tuners turned out to be the opposite of RIP. 😬😂
I enjoyed your thoughts. Alas, it has helped me refine my disagreement! I posted it there.
Were these mindfulness practices ones that had developed over a substantial length of time? Mindfulness can do a lot of good. Have you heard of Tara Brach’s Insight Meditation Community of Washington? She’s highly focused on compassion and community awareness. I don’t think sincere mindfulness practice needs to be taken down. It does help in our interactions with others, and much of Buddhist teaching emphasizes “Lovingkindness” cf Sharon Salzburg.
But I see also how the market skews some of these holistic and often Asian-derived teachings, and can contribute to a solipsistic focus on one’s lifestyle and wellbeing and less on attitudes toward others.
RIP personal sovereignty. I’m in!
Words DO matter. I think that’s a great takeaway, here. The words we say to others, and also the words we tell ourselves, make so much more of an impact than we realize. ❤️
But, if meditation were taught when a person is at an impressionable age, would that not make the person more of an interdependent personality? I believe I was more accepting of Buddhism and the concept of interdependence when I came across it as a teenager because my I lived with my grandmother for six months when I was six, and she exposed me to Christianity, and even though she was poor, made sure I saw her take actions such as giving money to the gypsy who came to our door. It was those six months of my life, when my grandfather taught me to read and love learning as well, that I think were more responsible for the person I grew up to be than any other period of my life. So I don't think the Dalai Lama is incorrect, I think your study is a poor analogy since it dealt with adults whose personalities were already formed. Show me the same study with eight year olds and having the same results, then I may say he erred.
I disagree. Teaching children that “you create your own reality” and about “personal sovereignty” before meditating would be a wild disaster, churn out spoiled kids. Having a child myself, language very obviously orients them. Teaching them about sharing alone is an arduous process of linguistic orientation.
We should teach children about bugs and rain and shooting stars and things like that. Or maybe just give them a chance to notice these things. Sharing comes more naturally when children are spending time in situations where they can move and work and think at their own pace.
I am not sure you and I have the same idea of meditation. Mediation is language free. For me it is merely a practice to teach one to focus on the immediate moment instead of living in the past or the future. It has nothing to do with creating your own reality, merely to be present in the moment that you are inhabiting. Though I do think that Buddhism tends to teach that your "perception" creates your reality, such as the example that if there is a piece of rope fifty feet ahead of you on a trail and you "perceive" it as a snake and turn around to avoid the snake, then it was a snake. I don't think that is bad to teach children. Of course, at the age of eight, I was asking my father what he saw when he closed his eyes at night because I wanted to know if his interior world was the same as mine, so I am probably not the right person to consult on what we teach eight year olds. As my mother used to say, I was a weird kid.
The meditation may be language free of course. The question is what is the language we are using and viewing the world with preceding the meditation – that’s the point of this whole piece. What is the mind state we are in before we enter the meditation. And the fact is that the mind state we are in before we enter a meditation will determine in some sense the effect of the meditation.
But that is, and again I am not claiming to actually know anything about this, a goal of mediation, to free you from the preconceived concepts that language creates. That instead of seeing a "rose" as it is defined in a dictionary, you perceive the rose as being everything that needs to exist for the rose to exist, its interdependence on all those other entities. I am also influenced by having lived in Bangkok at the age of 13 in 1970 and experiencing what an incredible people the Thais are and watching monks every morning go door to door begging for food in a large metropolis, their physical survival literally dependent on the kindness of strangers. If teaching our children to meditate brought us closer to that type of life, I'm all for it. However, I have been informed that the influences brought by U.S. soldiers and U.S. commerce has destroyed the culture I experienced, so a peaceful society, may be like all things, simply transient.
But Lenny, the mentioned study is concluding something completely different from what you're saying, and that makes it so intriguing.
If you're not familiar with the works of Peter Staudenmaier, please look him up.
This is so interesting! I used to meditate, manifest, etc I even went on a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, all of this to „find myself“ „do me“…etc while realizing the best part of the pilgrimage was the other pilgrims and the community we had while walking.
The time I truly found something, was when taking care of my grandfather and spending time with him the past year before he died. When it is time we just put the elderly all away in special facilities, when in the past different generations took care of each other. We don’t want to see aging and dying especially the last few weeks when someone is dying from old age. Seeing all of this with my grandfather and now going through this again with my grandmother is truly humbling, beautiful, ugly and hard at the same time. Before I start rambling I will end this comment, but I thought this would fit to both subjects.
I loved the past two podcast. I had to slow down the speed a bit when Bard was talking to be able to follow along because English is not my native language, but it was worth it :) Great talks! Thanks, Alex
That’s a wonderful reflection on how when we say “it’s not where you go it’s the journey along the way” what we often really mean is it’s the relationships along the way. Sure, the failures too, and the learning...
🛼🪼🎷🎸🌸
"whenever two or more of us interact there is a higher power."
~ Donald Hoffman - Portals into the realm of consciousness
Let's give it a whirl! I love that expression!
Thank you for this wonderful post! As an Asian American Zen priest, I write and speak a lot about how the cultures of Asian Buddhist countries developed over millennia as ways for human beings to live and practically embody Buddhist teachings--and how this has been whitewashed out of Western Buddhism to our collective detriment. Mindfulness is the prime example of this.
Re: the Dalai Lama's thoughts, my Zen line comes from Japan's samurai classes so it's easy to think of historical examples of meditators engaged in warfare. But some of those figures--like Yamaoka Tesshu, Miyamoto Musashi, and Yagyu Munenori (samurai who later in life became Zen priests)--did orchestrate negotiations and compromises that saved thousands of lives from needless battle and death. The consensus is that they were able to do so because of their cultivation of kiai (vital energy, charisma, presence) and their clarity of vision through meditation and other hard spiritual training.
I'm so happy to have found your newsletter! I have long loved your music. "Truth" is still my favorite, but I've also reflected often on the chorus, "I want to be the prayer, not the pray-er," from "I Don't Wanna Pray". Excited to keep reading.🙏🏼