At 28, she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won her that Pulitzer in 1975. Mostly, the result was distraction. She was a theologian. Her business was always with the contradictory emanations of divinity. So in full flight from her success, she packed up and moved to a remote island in Puget Sound near the Western Canadian border. The idea, in her words, was “to turn from literary and commercial success and to rededicate myself to art and to God.”

The result, two years later, was a completely bizarre little book, Holy the Firm. It opens with one of many miracles she managed to document involving moths. She tells of a summer spent camping in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. She read every night by candlelight, moths massed around her head. Usually, when the moths flew into the flame, they’d only burn for a second before jerking away. But the damage had been done. Their heated wings had been seared soft, and as the darting moths flew wildly from the flame, their melted wings fused to whatever first thing they touched. Pans, spoons, book jackets, etc.

This particular moth had a slightly different fate. “A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.” Her wings flared and then vanished. Her legs “clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly.” When the show was over, Dillard wondered: “Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work?”

Dillard was possessed by the question of how creatures may learn to do their work. Bugs and animals display a singularity of purpose that she seemed jealous of. One time, she locked eyes with a weasel in the middle of suburbia and took home some wisdom.

“I don’t think I can learn from a wild animal how to live in particular--shall I suck warm blood, hold my tail high, walk with my footprints precisely over the prints of my hands?--but I might learn something of mindlessness, something of the purity of living in the physical sense and the dignity of living without bias or motive. The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel’s: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.”

But the weasel’s way of living in pure necessity does not translate all that simply to a human life. I don’t consider it much of an affront to weasels to say that humans are tangled up in a more complex affair. Dillard’s weasel-like manner was once described as a “demented singularity of purpose.” Based on what she makes of the weasel, I think she would embrace this.

“We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t ‘attack’ anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.”

I imagine myself attending Dillard’s funeral. Maybe if she has an open-casket, I could stand beside her still body and wonder, just as she did of the moth: Had she done her work?

…

Like many others, reading Annie Dillard did something irreversible to me. It set a slow and grinding process in motion. At first it was a thorn wedged between the cracks in my mind. It sat there for years, only registering a slight pinch in very particular movements, ones I seldom made. Sometimes it happened in the sea of bodies at a frat party, when I stood aloft on the risers and looked out at the creatures there gathered.

“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking. We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”

I knew I was missing the show, but I couldn’t find any gourds. Then I read Pilgrim at some point in my early 20s and it was like a large mallet positioned itself straight above the exposed thorn’s face and cracked down, driving it so deep that something split open. Up to that point, I’d been restless. I had a long list of things I knew I didn’t want to do, ways I knew I didn’t want to live. But I had no better ideas. There’s a Sanskrit expression and meditation practice, neti neti, which translates as something like “not this, not that.” The idea is that you can open your experience to the essential nature of all things by way of negation. Choose anything that appears in your experience: The computer screen, the feeling of your lips against the cool air, a weasel, if you happen to see one. Every moment that you notice something arising in your experience, you say: This is not the essence of all things. Not this.

I gather that eventually, when there’s nothing left, something is supposed to happen. But through my first quarter of a century living, negation had not proved a decent way to live. I was adrift. I rejected any path I could find. I wasn’t interested in joining a monastery, or becoming a data scientist. I was sick of meditators and their riddles. I was bored of writers and uninterested in their stories. I was tired of philosophers and their tedious, hopeless fantasies that some arrangement of concepts will finally straighten out this business of living. Again, I was in my 20s. But then I read Pilgrim.

That book gave me a taste of what it felt like to yield completely to the single necessity of my life. It took me by the shoulders and pointed me towards a way of seeing the world that discloses the terrible and beautiful incandescent mystery inside of which we all one day, if we’re lucky, wake up. It’s well known among artists that, as per Mary Oliver, “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.” I wanted to yield, to give my power and time, but didn’t know how. What do I do with it? Pilgrim shook the gourd in my face and said: This. And the entire humming civilization of 35 trillion cells lumped into the shape of my body sang back in a sort of chorus, unreservedly: Yes. This.

…

The ordeal with the candle-lit moth at the campsite did not end after her wings, legs, and head had burnt into oblivion. Her pale carcass remained, emptied of flesh and lodged upright in the pooled wax.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning—only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.”

I still have no clue what’s going on here, generally speaking. I’ve let go of the idea that there’s some sort of tolerable explanation for this clumsy business of reproducing and dying by the billions. What would it matter, anyway? Dillard asks: “Say you have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?”

I’m dazzled and sickened by this mystery without end. But I’m learning that recoiling is always a losing strategy. I yield, and in yielding, to my surprise, there’s action. If I concentrate, I can see the mystery’s jugular vein bulging from anywhere I look. And rather than grasping at it, I just let go, and in that surrender I’m shocked as I witness my teeth clamping down, all my limbs working in unison as I taste the perfect freedom of single necessity. Dillard’s body, transmuted like the moth from flesh to light, burns even now after death. She threw everything she had into the candle. The soft bits burst and were gone in an instant. But now her empty vessel holds the flame aloft, casting a small sphere of light into the infinite darkness.

Thank you, Annie.

I. The popular science of wonder

There is no greater ambivalence than watching something you consider quasi-sacred get pulled into the primetime as a trend in the gargantuan wellness industry. I’ve watched like a deer caught in headlights as “wonder” and “awe” have gone from philosophy, weed-hazed dorm rooms, and the heart of contemplative traditions onto the smiling ivory couches of the Today Show.

If the popular science of wonder has a herald, it’s probably UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of the 2023 book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Even thoughtful media coverage outside of the glitzy circus has embraced the story of awe, one of our least scientifically understood emotional states, as “an essential pathway to physical and mental well-being,” and “an evolutionary tool that holds the key to humanity’s capacity to flourish in groups.”

This popular science of wonder is something of an immune response against a much broader cultural drift labeled ‘disenchantment’ by sociologist Max Weber. Disenchantment describes the secularizing transition from magical religions to rational science as the lens through which we see the world; a particular worldview where all things are available, in the fullness of time, to rational comprehension. The world is emptied of all impenetrable mystery and incalculable forces, and remade as a fundamentally calculable phenomenon. All things may be contained in the equations of the future1.

As Charles Taylor, perhaps the greatest living philosopher of disenchantment, has written across a series of Very Large Books, during enchanted eras of the past, wonder was supplied by relation to the living spirits and divine forces woven through all things. Humans were situated within a much larger Great Chain of Being that imbued our world with meaning. Disenchantment severed us from larger causal systems, draining the external world of meaning and collapsing the generation of wonder into a personal problem.

Per Taylor, disenchantment’s secular worldview is not necessarily in tension with wonder. “Do we not now experience wonder at the vast yet intricate universe and the manifold forms of life,” Taylor asks? “In fact, from the very beginning, materialism has generated a sense of awe at the universe and at our genesis out of it.”

He locates disenchanted materialism’s engine of wonder as a particular kind of reflection on the marvels and intricacies of the natural world. There may be no divine cosmic order outside of our comprehension, but contemplating the fact that stardust became a planet where some molecules colliding in deep sea hydrothermal vents evolved into ballet dancers and peacocks can still fill us with a certain kind of wonder. This thread of naturalized wonder has developed alongside the process of disenchantment, from the Romantic poets through to Carl Sagan’s wide-eyed tours of the cosmos and Dacher Keltner today.

There are two things I dislike about this particular telling of the story of wonder.

The first is that it participates in the very worldview it reacts against. By accepting a cosmology evacuated of causal forces beyond our capacity to ever comprehend them — gods, spirits, extradimensional intelligences, whatever — disenchanted materialism’s story of wonder trades in the assertion that we know enough to rule any of that out, cosmologically speaking. It inflicts a premature closure on our account of the world. But let’s not get stuck on ontology.

The second is that the popular science of wonder seems to be getting things exactly backwards.

In Keltner’s book, he writes that “in our distal evolution as very social mammals, those individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behavior fared well in encounters with threats and the unknown.” In other words, evolution favors our sense of wonder. “We have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies.”

I don’t think evolution wires in a need for wonder and awe. Instead, the measly drip of evidence we have so far suggests that the evolved mechanisms of cognition actually filter out a baseline of wonder and awe that’s already there, as among the most fundamental qualities of human consciousness. Strip the mind of its layered constructions down to its most essential form, and perplexingly, something like wonder lies beneath it all. Rather than bringing this underlying sense of wonder into richer expression, evolution seems to be engineering it out of our experience.

Following this thread reels us in from cosmology and cultural theory into some weird frontiers of consciousness science and philosophy of mind. But this is fruitful terrain. Against the grim backdrop of disenchantment, recent advances in the science of consciousness — particularly the study of advanced meditation and psychedelics — are spewing out raw material for new stories about the origins, nature, and even cultural prospects of wonder.

II. The science of consciousness has “a historical opportunity to start over.”

Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher now in his late 60s, wears sleek rectangular glasses with a thick silver upper frame. He has hair the color of a crisp moon and a mildly extraterrestrial appearance. In the world of consciousness science, he’s near mythological status. His 2003 book, Being No One, is still probably the most comprehensive attempt at something like a theory of subjectivity that actually gives a robust answer as to why consciousness feels like it’s happening to someone, explaining the mechanics of this sense of self apparently at the center of each of our skulls.

One more piece of Metzinger lore. My favorite science fiction book is Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s a hard sci-fi book that puzzles over the nature of consciousness. In the appendix, Watts cites the inspirations for the ideas in the book. He begins by shitting on a few household names, like Steven Pinker and Christof Koch:

“Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works, then admits on page one, ‘We don’t understand how the mind works.’ Koch writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.”

And then, Metzinger:

“Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His ‘World-zero’ hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he’s right—the man’s way beyond me—but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three A.M., long after the last roach is spent.”

So, you get the idea. In 1996, Metzinger was on the founding executive board of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which has since become the leading academic series on consciousness studies. He organized the first ASSC conference in 1997, devoted to an emerging research paradigm on the neural correlates of consciousness.

The NCC approach takes two irreconcilable streams of data — brain activity and conscious experience — and seeks to close the gap by finding as many correlations between them as possible. Imagine strapping an EEG cap on and walking into a sanctuary of friendly and playful otters. The otters rush towards you, delighted by the prospect of company. They scurry and snuggle up into every available crevice of your body. Their slippery noses lightly tickle your neck, arms, and back. You are in heaven. Neuroscientists observe what part of your brain lights up with electrical activity during this whole affair. And lo! They will have then identified the “neural correlate” of delight2. And so on for every conceivable conscious experience.

Boosted by the NCC paradigm, the science of consciousness has grown from a fringe project to a mainstream field of research. Other sorts of theories of consciousness have emerged, like integrated information and global workspace theories, and are being empirically tested against each other. Related ideas, like active inference and predictive processing, are generating new insights into the functions of the mind.

And yet, the NCC paradigm has still not delivered a theory of consciousness the field can agree on. Most papers and books on consciousness still begin — and often end — by pointing out how much of a stubborn mystery consciousness remains. In a recent lecture, Metzinger summarized a growing pessimism: “now, we have a situation where many leading people in the community are saying that two decades later, let’s face it: this was basically a failed approach. We haven’t made enough progress with the NCC approach in consciousness research.”

For the last seven years, Metzinger has been working on launching a different approach, which he calls The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project, or MPE. Rather than trying to weave a story of consciousness out of correlations between neural mechanisms and conscious experiences, MPE uses a “minimal model” approach.

To build a minimal model of consciousness, you strip away absolutely everything that can be removed without collapsing consciousness altogether, until all that remains are features that are universal to all instances of conscious experience. A minimal model of consciousness would tell us the structures, features, or qualities that are present in all cases of conscious experience. Whatever is contained in the minimal model is contained in every instance of consciousness.

Following this approach, Metzinger, who’s had a meditation practice for over 40 years, starts by saying that we need to throw the ordinary sense of consciousness most of us are accustomed to, where each of us experiences ourselves as selves located in time and space, out the window. Consciousness as we know it is a surface phenomenon, as he writes in his recent book on MPE, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness:

“My general working hypothesis is that there actually exists a maximally simple form of consciousness: minimal phenomenal experience, hereafter MPE. This simplest form of conscious experience lacks time representation; self-location in a spatial frame of reference; the experience of ownership, agency, and autobiographical self-awareness; and a phenomenally experienced first-person perspective.”

Similar states of consciousness have been described in contemplative and mystical traditions for millennia. Rigpa in Tibetan Dzogchen, sāksin in advaita vedanta, turīya in the Upanishads. Non-duality in both Advaita Vedanta and contemplative research today. But Metzinger’s project leverages what he sees as “a historically new situation.” Namely, millions of people across Western societies now meditate regularly, but do so in a secular context, outside of the traditional belief systems that have, until now, always informed how people describe these sorts of experiences.

Metzinger thinks that these new descriptions of meditative experience can feed directly into his minimal model approach, affording the stalled-out science of consciousness “a historical opportunity to start over.”

III. New methods in mind

In The Elephant and the Blind, Metzinger describes the “pure consciousness” of MPE as “a phenomenological prototype of humankind;” the bottom layer of any and all conscious experiences. He also calls it “a systematic societal blind spot,” dovetailing with a 2024 book by philosopher Evan Thompson and physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.

The book argues that science has been structurally blind to consciousness since about 1623, when Galileo published Il Saggiatore, or The Assayer, wherein he formalized the scientific method by cleaving apart subjective qualities like taste, smell, and touch from objective qualities like size, shape, location, and motion. He declared that mathematics was the language of the universe, while conscious experiences were the immaterial province of the soul. For Galileo, science had no business studying the soul, and could simply concern itself with the mathematical universe.

Philosopher Philip Goff calls this separation of subjective and objective qualities “Galileo’s Error,” and it has persisted all the way into the NCC paradigm. Somehow, the mathematics of brain activity must explain the conscious experiences they correlate with. There’s just no explanation of how.

Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser argue that overcoming the blind spot requires “a methodological transformation of the problem of consciousness into a new scientific research program.” Specifically, one anchored in an idea proposed by Chilean biologist Francisco Varela in 1996: neurophenomenology.

Neurophenomenology argues that subjective qualities ought to have the same epistemological status as EEG and fMRI readouts of brain activity. Brain activity does not explain conscious experience any more than conscious experience explains brain activity. The two are irreducible to each other.

While NCC has reigned supreme, consciousness science has mostly focused on refining the side of the equation with objective data. The number of electrodes on EEG caps keeps going up. The magnetic field strength of fMRI machines is rising. But these sharper pictures of brain activity are just getting mapped to the same blunt units of conscious experience. While the precision of neuroimaging improves, the precision of introspection has remained stagnant.

Varela’s pitch for neurophenomenology is that this is a weird mistake: “It is remarkable that this capacity for becoming aware has been paid so little attention as a human pragmatics. It is as if the ability for rhythmic movement had led to no development of dance training.”

The obvious example is meditation. Getting better at meditation is framed as providing higher quality data into the dynamics of subjective experience. Which brings us back to Metzinger’s MPE project, a concrete implementation of exactly the kind of methodology that Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser think we need to build a better science of consciousness.

In 2021, Metzinger published the first round of results from a 92-question survey on MPE experiences in meditators, which included an option for free-form descriptions of pure consciousness episodes. With 3,627 submissions, he wound up with 1403 usable responses to the 92-item survey spanning five languages and 57 countries (46 percent identified as spiritual but not religious/affiliated), and 841 free-form descriptions.

Most of them went something like this:

“Pure awareness is the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”

IV. It is pretty odd that minds appear to be made of wonder

The MPE questionnaire is kind of a doomed enterprise. It asks for descriptions of an experience where, by definition, there was no one present to experience it. You can read the instructions for yourself, which try a couple of different awkward maneuvers to isolate a particular thread of weird meditation experience from all the rest:

This questionnaire investigates all experiences in which there is an “awareness of awareness itself” or “consciousness of consciousness itself.” Our target is the subjective experience of “consciousness as such.” Sometimes such states are also referred to as “pure awareness” or “pure consciousness.” We are not primarily interested in mystical experiences or dramatic spiritual peak experiences of any sort, but rather in all states characterized by a quality of “pure awareness” or of “consciousness itself.” This means that—independently of the current existence or nonexistence of other consciously experienced contents—an “awareness of awareness” has emerged. In other words, we are interested in states in which we clearly and distinctly experience the quality of “consciousness” itself.

Do you catch the immaterial drift here? Regardless, Metzinger dutifully plods on to run all sorts of thematic analyses on the responses he got. The first thing I’d like to point out is how delightfully strange the responses are. For example:

Respondent #3369: “There was a sensation of ‘being turned inside out,’ as if I had slipped through the eye of a needle, and everything dissolved. Every bodily sensation, thought, emotion, everything. There was a very light-filled and incredibly joyful pure presence, pure being in which there was no object or subject, observer, etc., but only pure, luminous joy and limitless being. The sense of time was completely gone; when ‘it was over’ it was 2.5 hours later. […] The awareness was very strong that this is ‘actually’ the true being and my real nature, also that it is infinite, eternal, and indestructible.”

Respondent #1337: “I began to discorporate and spread in every direction. My mass had converted into energy. The energy was aware. My awareness spread in boundless directions. I was everywhere and everything.”

But maybe reading these isn’t your idea of fun. Fair enough. Of particular interest to our whole enchantment thread is a theme running through the reports that Metzinger calls a “calm and entirely undramatic phenomenology of rapture and ‘nonsensational awe.’” He further describes it as a “subtle but distinctive form of bliss,” and the “sheer experience of aliveness” as it’s “pulled into the foreground” of consciousness.

According to a few of his survey respondents:

Respondent #3146: “There was a quality of gentleness and wonder, not in any words or concepts, but more as a pervasive feeling of ‘this is it, this is how everything truly is.’”

Respondent #3624: “...There was a subtle and completely undramatic but positive feeling tone permeating this silent awareness, a very fine and nonsensational sense of wonder, of delight, and soundness.”

These are varieties of experience that would be at home under labels like “wonder” or “enchantment,” but they subtly differ from more popular accounts. The wonder is not in reaction to anything. There is no starry night sky, great bulging mountain, or delicately woven spider’s web. The wonder is just there, like a basic feature of deconstructed awareness itself. Meditators keep unraveling the layers of the mind, and they keep finding this same fundamental sense of enchantment just humming along in the basement of the mind.

Contemplative traditions disagree on whether this flavor of wonder is actually fundamental to consciousness, or if there’s some even deeper fabric of awareness so “pure” that it has no qualities at all. The Vedantic idea of sat-chit-ananda (existence, consciousness, bliss), for example, does ascribe qualities to pure consciousness. Tibetan Buddhist traditions like Mahamudra often dismiss these experiences as mere “meditative moods,” cautioning practitioners not to cling to them, lest they get sidetracked from the real goal, which is the actually pure “abiding state.”3

According to predictive processing, the theory that underpins Metzinger’s view of the mind, even a pure consciousness episode is still a representation being generated by the predictive mind. Every experience is an internally generated model of something, a construction built in just the same way as the sense of self, space, and time.

Speculatively, Metzinger currently suspects that pure consciousness is what the representation of cortical arousal in the Ascending Reticular Activating System feels like. Internally modeling this basic degree of arousal is the primordial representation that creates the arena of subjective experience.

He further describes the phenomenology of that pure arena of experience as wakefulness: “Wakefulness is always there whenever there is conscious experience at all, autonomous and largely independent of the ever-changing kaleidoscope of surface phenomenology, but it comes in different degrees of intensity and somehow it ‘radiates.’”

I read this as placing Metzinger closer to the camp of Vedanta than Mahamudra, with the baseline of all consciousness indeed having qualities. But he isn’t sure what qualities actually belong as part of the minimal model of consciousness. He uses his data in the MPE book to untangle a number of more ecstatic states that are often reported in mystical experiences or deep states of meditation:

“The new phenomenological data presented here show a double dissociation: In meditators, the experience of pure consciousness can definitely occur without automatically triggering joy, awe, bliss, or gratitude; and all human beings—meditators and nonmeditators alike—know the conscious experience of joy, awe, bliss, or gratitude in situations where the phenomenal character of awareness itself is entirely absent.”

So the more sensational and dramatic experiences aren’t fundamental qualities of pure consciousness. They’re close relatives, but not necessary features of his minimal model of consciousness.

But when it comes to the “very subtle, undramatic, unsensational quality of rapture and wonder,” — what I’m calling enchantment — he considers whether these qualities are fundamental to wakefulness, to the fabric of the arena of experience itself, “one of the most interesting research questions in this subdomain.” Maybe minds are made of wonder.

Here’s another question. If something like enchantment is a fundamental, structural feature of consciousness itself, and is therefore at some level present in each and every instance of consciousness, why then aren’t we all staggering around with drool slithering from the corners of our open mouths in perpetual states of awe? Why do we need a popular science of awe to make the case that we ought to spend more time cultivating it? Why does wonder feel partial to certain kinds of experiences, like contemplating the miniature intricacies of the worlds of insects, or the scale of the universe and the luminosity of the stars set against the black velvet sky?

If wonder is a property of all conscious experience, shouldn’t it be just as present when I’m staring at the cracked white paint on the wall of my office? If wonder is so fundamental, why is it also so hard to sustain?

V. Evolution selects against enchantment

Maybe Keltner is right that to some degree, evolution recruits a minimal sense of awe for survival purposes. Even so, it does not seem to select for creatures that have maximally wonderful experiences of being alive. It’s easy enough to imagine how being perpetually blissed-out on the savannah would not have made you a better hunter. But some relatively new ideas gaining prominence in cognitive science frame the relationship between evolution and enchantment as particularly antagonistic.

In 2014, a very prominent psychedelic neuroscientist by the name of Robin Carhart-Harris proposed the entropic brain theory. The gist is that the brain has evolved a capacity for entropy suppression, which recruits networks of brain regions — primarily the default-mode network — to support more complex varieties of selfhood that, while enabling the metacognition that boosts prediction and planning, also suppresses the richness of conscious experience. The gist is that our fancy selves are buzzkills, making sure we never get too drunk on the splendor of all things.

Carhart-Harris argues that in our ancestral past, consciousness was predominantly rich, in the way that psychedelic trips, meditative states, the onset of psychosis, or infancy are all experientially rich. He calls this primary consciousness. We have research on almost all of these cases, which are marked by higher degrees of entropy (aka disorder, randomness) in their associated brain activity. Higher degrees of entropy, he suggests, index richer conscious experiences, like flooding a black and white image with color.

Per that point about being blissed out on the savannah, primary consciousness was not an evolutionary marvel. So at some point, the DMN evolved in a way that let it turn down the dial of richness. This made us more successful creatures, since we could now focus more on the business of living and reproducing, rather than the blinding grandeur of raw experience. Carhart-Harris calls this toned-down orchestration of experience ‘secondary consciousness.’

According to Carhart-Harris, secondary consciousness depends on the brain’s “extended ability to suppress entropy and thus organize and constrain cognition.” He continues: “this entropy-suppressing function of the human brain serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies.” But here’s the kicker: “Equally however, it could be seen as exerting a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.”

The DMN’s production of secondary consciousness may have outcompeted primary consciousness in evolutionary terms. Too much richness comes with less metacognitive oversight, and undermines our ability to predict, shape, and control our environments. Primary consciousness, Carhart-Harris says, “may be a sub-optimal mode of cognition that has been superseded by a more reality-bound style of thinking, governed by the ego.”

We shouldn’t just conflate richness with enchantment and Metzinger’s whole thing about undramatic rapture. But I do think that their Venn diagram would closely overlap. And both the sciences of psychedelics and meditation have converged on reducing activity within the DMN as a primary mechanism involved in the eruptions of wonderfully strange and rich altered states of consciousness. So it does look plausible that the DMN helps to sustain a more disenchanted style of selfhood.

To step out of the realm of theory for a moment, looking back at accounts of meditation experiences does fit suspiciously well with all this. Take the biotech writer José Luis Ricón, who recently published an account of his seven day meditation retreat focused on cultivating states of blissful absorption known as the jhanas (emphasis my own):

So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (”Huh? I thought”). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life. I had to look away. I calmed a bit. I walked a few steps and looked back. The exact same thing happened. “It’s reproducible, hihihihi”, and I started laughing. Then I found a log to sit on, calm down, and look back at the ocean. Now it wasn’t overwhelming, but “kinda nice” was now “fucking amazing”.

It’s exactly this kind of joyful overwhelm that the DMN usually keeps a lid on. And since we’re now on the receiving end of neuroscience research on all things advanced meditation, let’s take a quick look. One of the most rigorous fMRI studies of jhana meditation to date (the kind of meditation Ricón was doing) just came out. And it affirms the general idea that meditation basically flips the DMN’s usual patterns of activity. It reduces activity within the DMN, while cranking up its connections to other parts of the brain.

The authors suggest that flipping the DMN’s patterns around in this way disrupts the usual organization of experience. And all of that unbridled joy “may be experienced by curtailing the influence of prior beliefs in the pleasant object of meditation, and thereby amplifying the inherently pleasant and novel quality of the sensation.”

But given the MPE framework, we can interpret this a little differently. The overwhelming joy, bliss, or pleasantness aren’t inherent to any particular sensation. Not exactly. It’s not that Ricón was overwhelmed by awe because he looked specifically at the immense ocean, and had he instead looked at a rock, he would not have had the same experience. The ocean might make it easier to see the enchantments of awareness, but even the rock, properly attended to, could have been just as overwhelmingly joyous.

The idea here is that these overwhelmingly wonderful qualities are properties of awareness itself, the fabric of all sensations. Any sensation, properly attended to, becomes a gateway into the qualities of pure awareness4. Enchantment is a mode of perception, a style of selfhood made porous5 to the intrinsic qualities of awareness itself6.

VI. Don’t worry about the bewusstseinskultur

There are a few things that still bug me about this new story of wonder that makes it an attunement or opening of cognition to the underlying qualities of pure consciousness. As with disenchanted materialism’s story, it makes wonder something of an individual responsibility. If you are suffering under the crushing weight of disenchantment, simply meditate to unblock the pores of your-self and let the crisp air of pure consciousness in.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Cultural patterns of phenomenology are socially constructed. That’s why theorists of enchantment like philosopher Jane Bennett angle their own projects explicitly towards deriving social, political, and ethical commitments from the phenomenology of enchantment. A variant of materialism that takes the phenomenology of enchantment seriously, Bennett writes, would draw from it a “contingent source of receptivity and generosity toward other bodies. In the hem of this matrix, ethical principles, rules, ideals, and sensibilities are born.”

Even Metzinger tends to conclude his papers and books with calls for a Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness. “One important research target for the future,” he writes, “will be to better understand the mutual relationship between the meditator’s individual phenomenology and the sociological context in which it is embedded.”

When pressed, Metzinger will sometimes take one additional step and say something about the mental toxicity of the attention economy. But you won’t find any actionable policy blueprints for that Bewusstseinskultur.

Which is, of course, fine. That’s not his job. One new research program in consciousness science need not resolve the entire cultural matter of enchantment. But maybe it can help. Bennett, in her more sociologically oriented work, has been criticized for, basically, having too hand-wavey a definition of enchantment.

She tells us: “There is, for most humans, a subdispositional attachment to the abundance of life that is deeply installed in their bodies.” And “Enchantment, that energizing and unsettling sense of the great and incredible fact of existence, reflects a stubborn attachment to life that most bodies seem to possess.”

All well and good. But, as one reviewer put it, her idea of enchantment “seems to encompass all of the ways in which human beings can enjoyably experience their presentness to the world — but if this is enchantment, who has ever denied its existence?”

Maybe MPE research helps pin down what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about enchantment. Maybe it articulates a particularly self-and-neuro-centric account of wonder that theorists of enchantment define their own vision against. Maybe it does nothing at all on the cultural theory front. If all it managed to do was budge the trajectory of the science of consciousness to care as much about refining the depth and quality of data on subjective experience as it does ramping up the magnetic field strength of MRI machines or recreating brains inside of computer simulations, that would still be progress. I’m not sure that it would land Metzinger on the Today Show. But these days, you never know.

In what should come as a surprise to nobody, we in the West have developed an approach to using psychedelic drugs that goes against the major tenets of tripping honed by non-Western cultures for millennia.

Whether Shipibo or Santo Daime ayahuasca ceremonies, Mazatec psilocybin vigils, Bwiti ibogaine rites, Native American Church peyote use, maybe even the Ancient Greek kykeon-fueled Eleusinian Mysteries initiations, many cultures of psychedelic use often share in two pillars: people trip in community, and enmeshed in particular cosmologies of interpretation and healing, often with guides who freely, skillfully wield the responsibility of suggestion.

The major institutionalized approaches to psychedelics in the West, then, have us all tripping in historically peculiar fashion: alone, and under “non-directive” supervision.

Whether you’re tripping at a MAPS psychedelic therapy session using MDMA to treat PTSD, a Johns Hopkins clinical trial testing psilocybin as a trigger for mystical experiences, a swanky ketamine clinic in Manhattan on a depression diagnosis, or an adult-use psilocybin center in Oregon or Colorado for personal reasons — all these therapeutic, academic, and public models that bring legal psychedelic experiences to the general population, are built on the same pillars of solo trips and non-directive guidance.

I call this the ‘Western Model,’ and have a piece out in Asterisk Magazine detailing its philosophy, triumphs, and perils:

In the piece, I focus on a somewhat insidious quality of the Western Model. By concealing its own cultural bias under the pretense of neutrality, it nudges the psychedelic experience towards the values of individualism and autonomy, while foreclosing on the much wider panorama of psychedelic experiences that might arise from rituals that leverage community and suggestion. It smuggles a set of values, and through them, a frame of reference into the psychedelic business of breaking frames, thereby creating a subtle loom on which the pieces of the mind reassemble themselves. We are each alone, and individually responsible for making sense out of all this chaos.

More broadly: we should value the legal freedom to design our own psychedelic rituals, built around values of our choosing, rather than being corralled into one culturally-specific way of working with them.

But there’s a simpler question to track in all of this. If the Western Model of tripping is such a break from existing precedents, how did it come to be?

Why do we trip this way?

I touch on this in the piece a bit. But to make room for other points I wanted to make, and first-hand reports from my voyage to an ayahuasca church in Oregon, where I tripped with people who were mostly old enough to be grandparents and saw weird psychedelic bugs in my head, much of that history was left on the editing room floor. Here, I’d like to trace the history of the Western Model in more detail. Partly because it is an excellent, characteristically strange story.

But also, if you squint hard enough at recent stages of the Western Model’s development, you find a thread that frays just a bit more at each step. You find that telling the history of the Western Model contains the story of its own decline.

II. In which Captain Trips rejects hospital tripping

Why do we trip this way? The answer is surprisingly tractable. A thorough answer would be indistinguishable from a complete history of all creation. In lieu of that, we can begin the story in 1951, with the eccentric figure of Al Hubbard, who would eventually receive the nickname “Captain Trips,” on account of his habit of flying celebrities from Los Angeles to Vancouver to try LSD and then back.

Hubbard had been many things. A bootlegger, Catholic, science director of a uranium mining company, owner of a private island off the coast of Vancouver, a suspected CIA informant, and around 50 years of age, unhappy.

Adrift while hiking in the woods, he had a vision. As he told it to a friend, an angel appeared to him and said that “something tremendously important to the future of humankind would be coming soon, and that he could play a role in it if he wanted to.”

A year later, in 1952, he stumbled across a paper describing the effects of giving rats a newly developed drug called LSD. Sandoz Laboratories had been casually distributing LSD to psychiatrists since 1947, but there wasn’t all that much psychedelic fuss yet. Intrigued, he tracked down the study authors, got some LSD, and, well: “I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse.”

Clearly, seeing himself as a tiny mite and watching his parents have sex were just the signs the angel had meant. Hubbard emerged with a new mission: “to liberate human consciousness,” as he reportedly told Albert Hofmann, who first discovered LSD.

Hubbard was a man of many, if shadowy, connections. Various accounts have him procuring massive quantities of Sandoz LSD, from one liter to forty three cases to six thousand vials, a chunk of which he carried around with him in a leather satchel.

He became the sole distributor of Sandoz LSD in Canada, and miraculously secured an investigational permit from the FDA letting him conduct clinical LSD research in the US. Michael Pollan reports that Hubbard “would introduce an estimated six thousand people to LSD between 1951 and 1966, in an avowed effort to shift the course of human history.”

Around this time, there were few Western protocols for how to use LSD. Psychiatrists were generally just giving patients LSD as they would other on-site treatments: in rickety hospital beds under fluorescent lighting, caged in by sterile white walls, and surrounded by the discomforting palette of hospital sounds. Beeps, groans, emergencies.

This is also, by the way, where the “solo” aspect of the Western Model stems from. We trip alone because psychiatrists were in charge of distributing the initial supply of LSD, and the way that psychiatrists deployed medicines was on an individual basis.

Hubbard championed the retrospectively obvious point that hospitals were no place to trip. He was one of the first Western psychedelic researchers to take “setting” seriously. So he established LSD treatment centers across California and Vancouver with rooms that felt more like living rooms than a hospitals. He scattered art along the walls, bouquets of roses on coffee tables, even diamonds were strewn about. He played classical music. He made sure no one was entering cardiac arrest nearby. This “comfortable living room environment,” as its often called today, was initially known as the “Hubbard Room.”

As one psychedelic researcher told Pollan: “This whole therapeutic regime, which is now the norm, should by all rights be known as ‘the Hubbard method.’”

III. In which Spring Grove Hospital formalizes the method

But Hubbard’s method, like his life, was informally orchestrated. He did not like working with formal treatment centers because they were charging north of $500 per LSD treatment (around $6,000 in today’s dollars). If he was going to help liberate human consciousness, $500 a pop wouldn’t do.

He continued seeding LSD experience across the land, from Aldous Huxley to engineers working in the early days of Silicon Valley. But the next step in the development of the Western Model would be one of institutional formalization. And that brings us to Spring Grove State Hospital outside Baltimore.

The “Spring Grove Experiment” was kicked off by psychologist Sanford Unger. He was aware of psychedelic research through his contact with the team at Hollywood Hospital in Vancouver, where work on using LSD to treat alcoholism had been ongoing. This was one of the Canadian centers that worked with Al Hubbard to devise their treatment protocol, connecting the Hubbard Method right to Spring Grove.

From 1955 to 1976, while hippies were riding in rainbow-painted buses dishing out LSD-spiked Kool-Aid, and the CIA was attempting to use LSD for mind control, Spring Grove kept up a relatively uncontroversial stream of psychedelic studies, mostly focusing on LSD as a treatment for addiction, end-of-life anxiety, and mystical or “peak experiences.”

In 1955, the first Spring Grove study gave LSD to patients with chronic schizophrenia. They tried using a double blind procedure, where study participants didn’t know who got the LSD and who got placebo. This, of course, did not work, and the blinding procedure was quickly abandoned. Even after a 1962 amendment made double-blind controls the gold-standard for drug research, both hospital staff and patients objected on ethical grounds. They wanted anyone who qualified for treatment to receive it (we still haven’t figured out how to blind psychedelic studies).

Psychedelic research at Spring Grove was housed in “Cottage 13” on hospital grounds, a two-story facility with two designated treatment rooms. Their approach was to use psychedelics as an adjunct to psychotherapy in treating various conditions, which in addition to the Hubbard Room decor, couched their method within existing clinical norms.

Patients received preparation sessions beforehand and integration work afterwards. They wore eye shades and headphones that played carefully curated classical music. A male and female supervision team, one a therapist and the other usually a nurse, was always present to offer support or gently guide the session.

They believed that the mechanism of action for healing wasn’t drugged up talk-therapy, but the “peak experiences” that people had on psychedelics. Accordingly, the therapeutic team didn’t perform ordinary psychotherapy. Can you imagine talking with a therapist about your mother during the peak of an acid trip? Instead, they offered “emotional support and companionship,” the seed of what would later be formalized as “non-directive” supervision.

In 1968, a Czechoslovakian psychoanalyst named Stanislav Grof joined Spring Grove, serving as Chief of Psychiatric Research for five years. To this day, at 94 years old, Grof remains a Major Player in psychedelic therapy. I have attended conference sessions where people mostly just clap in appreciation of his work for 45 minutes.

At Spring Grove in the early 70’s, Grof developed what was basically a psychedelic spin on the Rogerian style of therapy pioneered in the 1940s. Note that Rogerian, or “person-centered” therapy, has also been called “non-directive” therapy.

Spring Grove already embraced the idea that mystical experiences were the mechanism of healing. But Grof developed a therapeutic institution and method around it. As a research fellow named Richard Yensen involved with the Spring Grove work remembers, Grof held “a deeply optimistic view of the intrinsic healing mechanisms released through altered states of consciousness.”

In that view, altered states of consciousness like psychedelic trips, or the Holotropic breathwork Grof would later pioneer, unwound the mind’s resistances and defenses, allowing for an unencumbered expression of the intrinsic healing aspect to do its work. In the same way that your skin “knows” how to heal a cut, your mind knows how to heal trauma, if only you’d get out of its way.

He was not yet using the language of “non-direction,” but his method was the ground from which it would eventually spring.

Despite promising results and favorable media portrayals (like the CBS documentary, LSD: The Spring Grove Experiment), as the political tides turned against psychedelics and new regulations made getting approvals for new research extremely difficult, the center’s psychedelic research came to an end. Their last dose was administered in 1977, by a psychologist named Bill Richards.

IV. In which Spring Grove alumni spread its method to modern behemoths

Richards had joined the Spring Grove team after finishing graduate degrees in both psychology and divinity in the late 60s, where he stayed until that last dose in ‘77. With psychedelic science out of the picture, Richards practiced psychotherapy out of his Baltimore home, patiently waiting to see if circumstances might change and he could work with psychedelics again.

And they did. Richards met Roland Griffiths in 1998, who was assembling a team to run psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins. Richards joined, importing the Spring Grove method to the Hopkins squad, even down to the Hubbard Room decor: “When I designed the space at Hopkins,” Richards told anthropologist Tehseen Noorani, “I purchased similar furnishings.”

The Hopkins team would go on to reignite contemporary psychedelic research, with their guidelines and methodology serving as a blueprint for academic teams from North America to Australia.

Parallel to the academic revival, Rick Doblin and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies had been scheming for a psychedelic revival since 1986. Their goal was to win FDA approval for MDMA therapy, which, they continue to hope, will kick off a broader cultural renaissance in the acceptance of psychedelics.

MAPS has since become one of the most visible and consequential organizations across psychedelia. Their study designs and therapy protocols have influenced how the rest of the field, from researchers to practicing therapists, approach their own work. And the entire MAPS philosophy and protocol, it so happens, was built around the work of Stanislav Grof and “non-directive” therapy.

Beginning in 2015, the MAPS treatment manual that both enshrines and propagates their model adopted the label of a “non-directive approach” as the sixth core element of their therapeutic method:

6. A nondirective approach to therapy based on empathetic rapport and empathetic presence should be used to support the participant’s own unfolding experience and the body’s own healing process. A non-directive approach emphasizes invitation rather than direction.

So we now have a direct lineage of the Western Model running from Al Hubbard, to Spring Grove, to Hopkins and MAPS, and through them, across today’s academic research and psychedelic therapy protocols.

The story, of course, goes on.

V. In which States adapt the clinical model for general adult-use

Most of us do not trip via clinical trials or psychedelic therapy, underground or otherwise. These are small, though visible and consequential, slices of how psychedelics are actually used by people in general.

But if you are of the belief that psychedelics should be generally accessible to anyone who wants them (maybe with varying degrees of screens, supports, or restrictions), then we need more legal access points than just medical prescriptions and participants in academic research.

So thought two Oregon-based therapists, husband and wife Tom and Sheri Eckert. With momentum growing from the clinical research, they wanted to break the medical industry’s monopoly over the legal psychedelic supply. So they wrote what would pass in 2020 as Oregon’s Measure 109, a bill that legalized a “supported adult-use” model and set up the first state-sanctioned psychedelic program for any interested adult.

In practice, that means no longer requiring a diagnosis or prescription to gain access to legal psychedelic use. All you need is a few thousand bucks, and to live within traveling distance of Oregon.

Measure 109 established a state regulatory agency — the Oregon Health Authority — to setup a licensing process for both service centers and facilitators. Beginning in 2023, these psilocybin service centers began accepting customers. Although there’s some variation, the bones of the structure are familiar: clients do preparatory sessions with their facilitator beforehand, and generally trip alone1 inside of a comfortable room while under the non-directive supervision of their guide.

In Oregon’s model, non-direction is a requirement. As per the third item of the facilitator conduct guidelines from the Oregon Health Authority:

A facilitator must use a nondirective facilitation approach to providing psilocybin services to clients during preparation, administration and integration sessions.

A couple years later, Colorado followed suit, passing their Natural Medicine Program, legalizing more or less the same thing, but without the same codification of non-direction.

Facilitators still learn non-directive methods in their training curriculum. But the absence of a mandate stating that all facilitation must be non-directive opens the door for clients to opt-in to guides who offer things like guided meditations, or work with specific cosmologies that interpret psychedelic experience in particular ways2.

The loosening grip of non-direction over legal psychedelia, together with the rising interest in group modalities, suggests that the hegemony of the Western Model is already coming apart. That means the question is not really one of revolution; “how do we overthrow the Western Model?” Instead, I’m more interested in exploring something like, “how can we skillfully participate in the ongoing deconstruction of the Western Model such that things work out as well as possible?”

VII. In which we answer the question

So, why do most of our legalized approaches to psychedelics have us all tripping in this one particular way? Alone and left to our own interpretative devices? A rough sketch:

We sanction tripping this way because Al Hubbard promoted comfortable living-room-like settings, because Springfield Hospital couched psychedelic therapy within clinical norms, because Springfield alumni anchored that approach in today’s twin behemoths of academia and healthcare, because states are modeling their programs off of those clinical best practices, and because all of this gels with the Western values of individualism and autonomy, such that what is actually an extremely culturally particular way of ritualizing the psychedelic experience dons the cloak of objectivity, undermining the apparent value of allowing for other ways of tripping.

But nestled into the latter half of that progression is that simultaneous story of undoing.

In the academic and healthcare arenas, the scope of interest (and funding) is expanding from a short list of mental health conditions to a lengthening scroll of research questions. Linguists, anthropologists, and artists are getting involved as the field of psychedelic humanities boots up. Organizations are reviving research into psychedelic-assisted innovation. Clinicians themselves are studying how the narrative framing of the potential psychedelic effects their study teams provide to participants affect experiential outcomes.

The expanding list of research questions is creating friction against the limitations and influences of atomized non-direction.

In the jump from research and clinical practice to general adult-use in Oregon and Colorado, all manners of red tape and bureaucratic constraints were lifted (replaced by others, to be sure, though I think the balance still leans towards more flexibility).

Taking legal psychedelia out of healthcare loosens the standard of non-direction3. Already in the second state program, the mandate of non-direction slipped into more of a suggestion. Exceptions for tripping at home were introduced. More liberalizations will likely follow, and the saga, as always, will roll on.

VIII. In which the pioneers reflect

In 1979, after the first wave of psychedelic research had come and subsequently crashed, the major players of the movement gathered for a reunion at the Los Angeles home of psychiatrist Oscar Janiger. Attendees included Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Humphry Osmond, Sidney Cohen, and the Captain himself, Al Hubbard.

“The great project to which they devoted their lives lay in ruins,” Pollan writes. But there was no doubt that something had been accomplished. Or, at least, something had transpired, and they had been at its center.

We have a scratchy but audible video tape of the event.

Hubbard, now a plump old man wearing a paramilitary uniform, is sat rather uncomfortably next to the high priest of LSD himself, Timothy Leary. Hubbard was likely still resentful of Leary’s antics, which many felt played a decisive role in the crackdown on LSD.

Someone asks Hubbard when he and Leary met. It was at Harvard, 1961. “I gave him a bottle of about 500 tablets [of LSD],” Hubbard says. “I remember that,” Leary responds. “The galactic center sent you down just at the right moment.”

By then, Hubbard had gone broke. The shutdown of LSD research shuttered his centers, forced him to sell his Vancouver island, and landed him at a trailer park in Arizona. He died in 1981, alone.

Later, a guy on the far end of the couch turns to Hubbard.

“When you started with it all, Al, you had some kind of a purpose or vision in mind, didn’t you?”

“I’ve still got it. I haven’t changed my mind,” Hubbard shoots back.

“And why? What are you doing it for?”

“I think it’s a thing to do…just to keep on waking people up and let them see themselves for what they are.”

I’m triangulating onto them by interviewing three groups of people: practitioners sharing first-person reports about what those pivot points feel like from the inside; the state of the science of pivot points; and teachers sharing what their traditions and experiences with students make of pivot points.

I’m looking to find practitioners willing to interview about their own pivot points for the series. I won’t be publishing our full conversations — just snippets, woven together into the story. Which is to say, these conversations don't need to be polished. We can just have a relaxed talk about the weirdest and most intense moments of your meditation practice. It'll be fun. If you’re interested, you can fill out this form.

I.

A paper published in Nature last year estimates that nearly 61 million Americans tried meditating in 2022. But I look around, and I do not see 61 million Buddhas1. That is, it doesn’t look like 18% of the US population has directly realized some luminous essence of mind, transiency of self, or emptiness of all phenomenon.

Most of meditation’s mainstream popularity is hitched to introductory versions of mindfulness, which leads to varieties of meditation experiences more or less like taking a long walk, or listening to relaxing music. It can feel nice! But these aren’t usually psychologically transformative experiences. Many people who start up a meditation practice get bored, burnt-out, or just find no compelling reason to keep meditating.

Every now and then, someone starts meditating and eventually reports back that their entire psychology has been transformed. Usually, though not always, for the better. But these reports hardly ever make sense to the rest of us. They ramble on about “emptiness,” “impermanence” or, god forbid, “awakening.” But their claims find no purchase in our non-meditatively-transformed minds, so they just bounce off, like hearing about someone’s dream.

It is as @bashu_thanks’ great tweet tells us: breakthroughs in deep meditation are like an English speaker learning how to think in Japanese, discovering it’s the most psychologically transformative, experience-enchanting thing they’ve ever done, and then trying to tell all their English-thinking friends how to do it…but they’re doing so in Japanese.

Across contemplative traditions, stages of more advanced practice often aren’t considered to begin until practitioners have already had some sort of experience that opens up their sense of what’s possible. Or, that at least gives them reason to have “faith” in the extent of what meditation can do.

“Faith,” in the Buddhist sutras, is the first of the five “spiritual faculties.” Theravada monk Bhikku Bodhi comments that for the development of insight, which he calls the direct road to awakening, “the faculty of faith provides the element of inspiration and aspiration which steers the mind away from the quagmire of doubt.”2

In Buddhist cultures, faith often came from exposure to a teacher, “generated by meeting with the holy being who imparts advice,” writes psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher Dan Brown.

“What makes the meeting convincing is the actual presence of the spiritual being. Many Buddhist texts give accounts of unusual qualities and deeds of perfected masters.” Exposure to these teachers was the first pivot point, the first moment wherein people gained the motivation to stick with meditation practice.

“The result of such a meeting is called the certainty that generates belief…The meeting produces a definitive effect; something is generated within the mental continuum of the listener…The entire path toward enlightenment begins to ripen from this moment of interest generated during the auspicious meeting.”

Somewhere in the continuum from Buddhist cultures to secular Western modernity, this dynamic has largely fallen off. Western people still stumble upon teachers who blow open their minds. But faith in general, let alone in the transformative potentials of meditation practice, is not a defining characteristic of secular modernity. It’s kind of the opposite — we value empirically verifiable evidence.

These are what I mean by pivot points: inflection experiences in meditation practice that transform what we expect is possible with further practice.

I think these experiences are among the most interesting, and obscure, aspects of practice today. They’re what traffic between the surface of meditation and it’s stranger, more potent depths. And I think contributing to the public understanding of them — even just sharing various accounts that suggest they’re actually real, that these are things that can happen when you meditate, could be helpful to the ~60 million of us with a practice, and however many more who are curious about this whole endeavor.

So, as one does these days, I decided to make a podcast about them.

II.

The podcast, supported by the Waking Up meditation app, will be structured as a narrative told across 5 episodes. I’ll triangulate on pivot points by interviewing three groups of folks:

1. I’ll speak with meditation practitioners to hear first-person accounts of what their first pivot point felt like from the inside. The idea is to interview enough people that I can begin to spot patterns and themes running through them. (Note: taking psychedelics does not count. I am interesting in meditation-induced pivot points, not drug-induced ones. The latter seem comparatively far more accessible and well-documented than the former).

2. Next, as the study of advanced meditation is now becoming its own distinct field, I’ll interview scientists to report on what we know — and don’t — about the science of pivot points.

3. And last, I’ll check in with teachers to hear what deep experience and contemplative traditions make of pivot points.

This is a departure from my old podcast format, which was just publishing single long-form conversations with one person. I don’t think we’re lacking stories about one person’s transformative meditation experience. But there’s a sense of unreality that I get from reading a single report that’s so alien to my own experience.

The real interesting stuff, in my view, will arise from compiling 20, 30, 800 interviews about people’s pivot experiences, enough to find common patterns that might apply to pivot points in general, and help make them more tractable to the wider public.

What do pivot points tend to feel like? How far into people’s practice do they tend to occur? Do they change why people practice, or make it easier to stick with it? Are they brief and transient flashes of insight, or do they have leave permanent marks? Can we find them earlier in our practice if we try, or will treating them as a goal undermine the practice altogether? Do pivot points show up on an EEG or fMRI scan? And so on.

The practical motive for this email is to recruit participants for the practitioner interviews. So if you’re a meditator that’s had something like a pivot point experience, I’d love to talk.

Logistically, since the podcast is a narrative, I won’t be publishing our full recorded conversations. Just short clips from across all of them arranged into a hopefully coherent, maybe even compelling story.

Which is to say, as far as our interviews are concerned, they don’t need to be polished. We can just have a relaxed talk about the weirdest and most intense moments of your meditation practice. If you’re interested, you can fill out this very short form:

Sure, I'll share my experience

If you’d like to support the project but don’t want to interview on the record, or don’t feel it applies you, you can still help me beat The Algorithm that downplays links on Twitter by sharing the tweet, or sending the survey link (https://tally.so/r/wa1aPZ) to your secret meditation group chats and Discord groups.

All things permitting, I’ll share some of my favorite excerpts from the interviewing process here as things roll along. And if you have particular questions you’d like answered (or at least explored) about these “pivot points,” these great swings in our expectations of what meditation can do to these humble little human minds we have, let me know.

Remember, above all, that while we might “pull up swagless into this sauceless void” as Sam Kriss writes, and “Bro needs to consider that there is some lore to this world that bro will not be able to understand,” pivot points need not remain among that formless lore that haunts the swagless. The void itself is nothing but sauce. And if we won’t take that on faith, we might as well try to understand. Using, of course, those great vehicles of understanding: podcasts.

Previous dispatches:

We’d been talking about how we don’t speak to our mothers enough, which made the ears of our girlfriends assembled on the couch across the room perk up. Then, in the sort of non-sequitur that makes sense only when you’re drunk, a guy standing at my 2 o’clock, with eyes so earnest you get the feeling that he’s still basically grateful to be alive, asked me point blank: “Do you believe in God?”

The topic has been on my mind lately. God-talk is percolating across unusual corners of my world. An old and now famous fraternity brother of mine recently added “Jesus Follower” to his Twitter bio. The writer Sasha Chapin just wrote about what he means when he says that “Abruptly, about five years ago, I started believing in God.” The tech writer Packy McCormick also recently found God, which to him means coming to believe that consciousness is the fundamental property of the universe, and noticing how the world is growing more magical as we all groggily wake up to that fact.

These are not, of course, identical ways of understanding “God.” There’s little consensus, but there is a common impulse. A God-shaped discourse in places I’m unaccustomed to finding it. My world seems to be shifting. Standing around with the boys at 1am, drunk, can now mean talking about the primordial stuff of the cosmos rather than basketball.

One of the last pictures of my dad shows him standing in the spacious, finished attic of his Victorian home, assuredly smiling, donning a white t-shirt with thick black lettering: “TRY GOD.” This is now one of the first images that comes to mind when I think of him, and his smile has become more of a smirk, as if he knew I’d come around eventually.

In his translation and commentary on a 4th century Sanskrit poem, the Meghadūta, or The Cloud of Longing, he describes his project as articulating “a vision of nature that can add depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

In that sense, God isn’t an abstract proposition, but a sensory phenomenon. And she doesn’t just quietly slot-in to your pre-existing sense of how the world is. God shows up, I guess, during the tumult of transformation. Some combination of practice and grace yanks perception into an unfamiliar configuration, which renders a new world for you to experience, and as you search for your bearings in that transformed experiential landscape, you notice — is that God?

I’m not prepared to tell you there’s some version of God I believe in, save for maybe Joseph Campbell’s very modest proposal that “God” is a metaphor for the unknown, for all that eludes the human intellectual grasp. But I’m opening up to the possibility of a more concrete version of God in ways that surprise me. Specifically, as of this particular moment, I see two stories of God that make about as much sense as the atheist’s story of the universe (which is exactly as fantastically fucking weird and hostile to common sense as any ‘God created all this’ version).

We are God’s kidney cells

Let’s start with the comparatively modest story. Imagine you are one of my kidney cells.

You are roughly 20 micrometers across, or about one quarter of the width of the average human hair. Just as human bodies maintain a boundary between ourselves and our environments, the skin that traffics between our insides and outsides, the kidney cell version of you also maintains a plasma-membrane, a boundary, that separates you from the rest of the environment inside my kidney.

And as one of my kidney cells, you sit there next to all your buddies. You reabsorb a bunch of electrolytes, returning them to the bloodstream to help regulate things like blood pressure and toxin levels. You have a nice little life in there. But you don’t really know why there’s this constant stream of electrolytes showing up in your environment. You do the best you can — you try to hold your boundary together, you survive, you adapt.

Say you’re an enterprising little kidney cell, and you do some philosophy. You wonder why these things are happening. Where does this stream of electrolytes come from? Perhaps you reason that there’s a stream of blood that seems to be the origin of electrolytes. But obviously, there are things even a philosophizing kidney cell could never even begin to know about why its environment is the way it is, things for which they just aren’t equipped to comprehend.

Say, for example, my full human body just finished a 90-minute soccer game, hobbled off the field, and chugged two bright blue Gatorade drinks. Soon, my kidney cells will be flushed with a fresh stream of electrolytes. But even the brightest among them could never have any way of knowing that the environments they’re adapting to are being structured by the activities of the entire human body, by an ongoing soccer game and subsequent sports drink. These things are happening on a scale that’s just too alien to a kidney cell’s environment, too big for them to ever make perceptual contact with.

Well, I can’t think of any good reason to believe that we aren’t in basically the same position as our kidney cells. This isn’t a particularly original insight. The actor Ethan Hawke puts it this way: we can understand God (or in his case, the “divine concept of time”) about as well as a dog can understand a clock. The earth could be to some grand cosmic being what microbes are to us. How would we know? Our entire world could be the kidney cell of some vast celestial creature, moving through space as it plays some game that remains forever unknown to us.

You can push back easy enough. We are not kidney cells. And we aren’t stuck with philosophy alone — we have scientists. We have the James Webb telescope that orbits 1 million miles away from Earth and can spot new galaxies 13.4 billion light years away. We have probabilistic inference. We have equations and background radiation that suggest there was once a Big Bang.

But however far the absolute perimeter of our knowledge might reach — the extent of the presently knowable universe — there’s no reason that even that entire domain might be nothing but a puny microbe compared to the vastness of whatever is really out there, whatever is really going on here. Maybe God is a matter of the misalignment between our perceptual capacities and the unfathomable-to-us scale of all things.

We are God’s dream

This is the one that really gets me. Dreams. Every night, whether we remember or not, our minds demonstrate their capacity to build entirely convincing, immersive worlds out of nothing but mind-stuff. Dream worlds are not made of atoms, electrons, or any sort of solid thing. Dream worlds are made of awareness. No one disputes this.

So what good reason do we have to think that this ‘waking’ world is also not just composed, entirely, all the way down to its inmost essence, of awareness? It is, at least, possible.

The famous story of Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi’s butterfly goes like this: Zhuangzi falls asleep by a river. He dreams he’s a butterfly, happily flapping around. He wakes up by the river, remembers the dream, and can no longer be certain whether he is the man, Zhuangzi, who dreamt he’s a butterfly, or if he is perhaps the butterfly, who is now dreaming itself a man.

People usually take this story to be a cute little chicken-and-egg problem. Few people are really troubled by the possibility that they’re actually the dreams of slumbering beings. It just doesn’t feel all that plausible.

But again, no one questions the plausibility that in our dreams, we inhabit worlds that are made of nothing more than mind-stuff. And this seems more destabilizing to me — it isn’t a cute little thought experiment, but a repeatedly affirmed fact, that each of us knows that entirely convincing cement floors and wooden chairs and soft grass can be made of mind alone.

I’m not especially concerned that I’m currently dreaming, exactly. But I do know that this world I experience can be made entirely of mind. And if some sort of idealism is true, then whose dream is this? Whose awareness am I touching when I clatter on the keyboard?

God, in this case, is the entity to whom all this awareness we encounter in the waking world belongs. The world is God’s dream.

Of course, there are problems here, too. We like to believe that in our nighttime dreams, we are the only actually conscious entities. In a dream, other people are just projected exteriors. Conjurations of light from the projector of our minds. “Dreams are by definition solitary: they permit only the illusion of ‘we,’” writes philosopher Raymond Tallis.

In waking life, we like to believe that other beings are conscious, too. We can’t formally prove each other’s consciousness, but we sort of need to just make the assumption in order to go on. And so how could multiple little loci of consciousness exist inside of a single entity’s dream? Can there be a ‘we’ inside of a dream, or are we all just twists of light emanating from God’s mind? Loops in the holy electromagnetic field? To Tallis, Zhuangzi might respond: reality is by definition collective: it permits only the illusion of ‘I’.

The problem with God is effort

Historically, a metaphysics that takes some form of mind to be the primary stuff of the universe has been the norm, although you can place them along a sliding scale. Something like Yogācāra Buddhism is among the most strict, where all of reality is nothing but consciousness. The world is just a bunch of mental impressions. Advaita Vedānta says that pure consciousness is the true reality, where the world as we tend to experience it is a transient illusion. Kashmir Shaivism says that the primordial stuff of the universe is Siva — mind, or awareness — but Siva emanates Sakti, or these multiplicities that are actually real and comprise the world, mostly just for fun. The Aztecs had this idea of teōtl, where neither mind nor matter exist, but only the dynamic, oscillating process of teōtl, an impersonal energy that’s self-generating and always in flux.

Commenting on Aztec metaphysics, anthropologist Miguel León-Portilla asks: “Has man any hope for escape from the unreality of dreams — from this evanescent world?”

I’m neither sure that dreams are unreal nor that escape interests me; two reasons I’m not a Buddhist. But I would like to know if the waking and dreaming worlds are composed of the same kind of stuff. Maybe it’s just an evolutionary impulse; I want to find my bearings in this unfamiliar environment. Where are we? Like the writer Annie Dillard, I want to “explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.”

I don’t know what the practical consequences of an answer would be. I don’t think I’d live much differently if I knew this was not all a show of quantum fluctuations springing into universes of colliding particles and fundamental laws of physics, but one great big field of awareness with vortexes and eddies that evanescently develop feelings like “I’m hungry,” and “I wish I were better at basketball,” and “wow my partner is beautiful.”

But asking about the practical consequences of a God-like situation is how you wind up needing concepts like Heaven and Hell. And sure, maybe there’s something it feels like when our bodies die and our knots of awareness untwist and there is no longer any local ‘I,’ just the general, diffused mind of all things. Maybe that’s heaven. Or maybe God is now and death is oblivion.

Either way, what occurred to me when I was asked whether I believe in God was that my Dad’s t-shirt was, I hate to say, smart. God is something to try. Belief can flow from direct experience. In that sense, there’s no answer that can travel from person to person. Language is rarely up to the task of transmitting the sort of perceptual transformation in which, I gather, God might show up.

Instead, there are practices that promise to reconfigure how we experience the world. And I think this, more so than any inherent intractability of God, is why the sort of theological belief that flows from experience remains rare. Usually, it takes serious effort. Devotion, even.

This makes the perception of God its own chicken-and-egg problem — you generally have to put in serious effort just to catch the first glimpse. But it often requires an initial glimpse to motivate and sustain all that effort. So in the matter of perceiving God, what comes first: the perception, or the practice?

Either way, I’m still stuck on the implications of dreams. We’re reminded, nightly, that awareness is solid enough to construct a convincing and immersive world. One where even as you feel cool wooden floorboards on the bare soles of your feet, and the prick of an upturned splinter lodging into your big toe, you, the floor, and the splinter are all conjured of nothing but mind. There is no wood, no toe, no pain, but for the awareness that is temporarily spun into those shapes. And if this waking experience is no different, then I ask again: whose dream is all this?

Here are the last two dispatches:

The mass appeal might have something to do with their stated ambition to shape what would be the third political order the country has seen in the past century. And that Klein and Thompson are both big-time writers and podcast hosts at The New York Times and The Atlantic, respectively.

“The problem with the abundance framing,” said Klein of his own book, while perched on a luscious looking blue-velvet chair alongside Thompson and moderator Josh Barro, “is that it’s a little too good. Like, what, you’re against plenitude?”

A political order can be defined as the common ground shared by opposing political parties; the subterranean consensus that no one questions. During the New Deal order that sprang up in the 1930s, Democrats and Republicans alike agreed that the government should help manage the economy and support workers. They mostly disagreed on how. Through the neoliberal era that succeeded it in the 1970s, the bipartisan backdrop was an ascendent individualism. No party bragged about getting the government involved in things, and workers were meant to figure out how to support themselves.

Klein and Thompson’s proposal for a new political order of abundance sounds so obvious that you might wonder why anyone would need to write a book about it: “we need to build and invent more of what we need. That’s it, that’s the thesis.”

Of course, that isn’t really a thesis. It’s like saying Americans value freedom. Sure, but what political commitments does freedom entail?

With a bit more detail, their vision centers on housing, infrastructure, clean energy, state capacity, and innovation. Everyone’s rent is too damn high, so we should build more housing. Fossil fuels are cooking the earth, so we should build more clean energy. Government has gotten very bad at executing ambitious projects, like building high-speed rail, or, say, tripling the electricity grid's output in less than 30 years while converting it to renewable energy sources, so we should rebuild that capacity. And bureaucracy has swallowed science, so we should free it.

“What we are proposing is less a set of policy solutions than a new set of questions around which our politics should revolve. What is scarce that should be abundant? What is difficult to build that should be easy? What inventions do we need that we do not yet have?”

To Ezra’s point — there isn’t much to argue with here. Right?

Progressives versus “Abundance”

Reactions from my social media chamber make it seem like Abundance is already neatly polarized, pitting a rebranded center-left-and-right coalition against progressives. I don’t think this is actually the case, though. There’s more overlap between progressives and the abundance agenda than Twitter makes it seem.

Still, many critiques from the left have been defensive. Law professor Zephyr Teachout writes of Klein and Thompson’s “abundance of ambiguity” on antitrust:

“I still can’t tell after reading Abundance whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small-bore and correct (we need zoning reform) or nontrivial and deeply regressive (we need deregulation) or whether there is room within abundance for anti-monopoly politics and a more full-throated unleashing of American potential.”

And executive editor of The American Prospect David Dayen takes issue1 with their neglect of labor power. He writes: “In order to actually remove the barriers that have hollowed out our industrial base, the answer is not a liberalism that builds, but a liberalism that builds power.”

He continues: “Supply-side progressives like [Matt] Yglesias and Klein are skilled at detecting the structural problems in American government. They’re less concerned with the problem of power as an impediment to progress. And they’re certainly not interested in equalizing that power, aligning the interests of labor and capital, as the clearest path to deal everyone into a next-generation economy.”

Onstage, it seemed that the relationship between labor power and abundance is one that Klein and Thompson aren’t quite sure how to tackle. Or aren’t sure they want to. During the event’s Q&A portion, an audience member asked how public sector unions fit into the abundance agenda. Thompson looked right over to Klein. “You’re looking at me like you want me to take this one,” Klein said. “I sure am,” Thompson shot back.

Klein went on to say that while he supports unions (and has for a while), they’re complicated. Sometimes, union demands clash with rapid development. Other times, organized and experienced employees with production know-how can be an asset to development projects. And abroad, you’ll find both higher union density and faster building, so claiming that unions, in general, affect the speed of development one way or another doesn’t hold up.

In both cases, antitrust and labor power, my read is that the pair just don’t think they’re the most relevant issues to the problems their book focuses on. Thompson pissed a lot of leftists off by saying that oligarchy “does a terrible job of describing today’s problems.” He then clarified, via Twitter, that antitrust can be useful in some cases, but when you’re looking at why red states like Austin build so much more housing than blue ones like California, antitrust — or a theory of oligarchy — just isn’t the best explanation. Neither is union density.

That’s all fine. It’s okay for a book to merely advocate for zoning reform and state capacity. But here’s where I think progressives have a point. Abundance does not make a modest argument. According to their own introduction, Klein and Thompson are pitching a new political order to redefine the common sense of the entire Democratic party, and beyond it, American political life in general.

And here’s Thompson in The Atlantic two weeks ago:

Maybe they had to make their argument more grandiose in order to sell books, or engage more readers. But emphasis matters when you’re trying to define the common sense of an era. If zoning and permitting reform are elevated while labor power and antitrust are not, and the agenda succeeds in getting traction, then you’ll get, predictably, more results in zoning and permitting reform than labor and corporate power.

Another example. Both Klein and Thompson have vocally supported redistribution for a long time. They affirm their support in the book. But they don’t emphasize its contribution to an abundant future, which has already left room for terrible interpretations, like this Harvard economics PhD student (and researcher at the Institute for Progress) arguing that the subtle, radical message of Abundance is that redistribution doesn’t matter2:

As for the confused vision of Abundance on the whole — is it modest, or paradigmatic? — writer Malcolm Harris argues that Klein and Thompson ultimately fail to offer an exciting new way forward for society (Harris’ preferred example is David Schwartzman’s call for “solar communism”).

“Permitting single-stair apartment buildings, ending single-family zoning, and eliminating parking requirements are all strong housing reform ideas,” Harris says of some Abundance policies. “A good policy is better than a bad policy, but don’t piss in a ditch and call it an ocean of lemonade.”

Which could sound pretty ridiculous, as if anyone who isn’t pushing solar communism is just pissing in a ditch. We need zoning reform. We need a government that can execute ambitious projects. It’s not only fine, but good, to advocate for these things. Except, as other leftist reviewers have commented, Klein and Thompson explicitly define their project as a utopian vision for the future.

“Our era features too little utopian thinking,” they write. “What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it differs from the present. This book is a sketch of, and argument for, one such vision.”

Abundance does not bill itself as a modest political overhaul to prune the overgrown thicket of regulations, empowered coalitions, and bureaucracy that slow us from building and inventing more of what we need. It’s presented as a galvanizing vision for the future. A “once-in-a-generation, paradigm-shifting call to renew a politics of plenty,” as per the book jacket. And as such, their vision of Abundance falls pretty flat, a fact evidenced by their decision to recruit exciting political possibilities in their introduction that the book never mentions again.

Don’t promise shorter workweeks if you aren’t going to talk about power

Abundance opens with a vision, written in all italics so you know it’s sort of dreamy, of how life could be in 2050. “You open your eyes at dawn and turn in the cool bedsheets.” You drink desalinated water from your tap. You eat cellular meat that spares animals from slaughter, and vegetables grown in vertical farms that free up land for forests and parks. Outside, you don’t hear engines churning; you hear only the quiet hum of electric vehicles. Drones deliver miracle “star pills” that make powerful medicines available to all.

But then, they overreach:

“Across the economy, the combination of artificial intelligence, labor rights, and economic reforms have reduced poverty and shortened the workweek. Thanks to higher productivity from AI, most people can complete what used to be a full week of work in a few days…Less work has not meant less pay. AI is built on the collective knowledge of humanity, and so its profits are shared.”

But labor rights get no further attention. Nothing they write about in the remainder of the book will deliver shorter workweeks or sharing AI profits. Clean energy, lower housing prices, more scientific innovation, and more capable governing will not reduce the workweek, nor collectivize the profits from AI. As history makes clear, those require the very things that Klein and Thompson sidestep: labor power and antitrust.

The remainder of the introduction doubles down on this flavor of utopianism that the book itself fails to live up to, using subtitles like “Beyond Scarcity,” “Scarcity is a Choice,” and “The Abundant Society.” In order to generate buy-in for their vision, Klein and Thompson can’t help but invoke the very things that their agenda leaves out. But you can see why: what sort of utopian vision is an ‘abundant society’ where everyone is still forced to work 40 hours per week just to get by?

To be clear — if you amputated parts of the introduction and conclusion, I’d have nothing but good things to say. Abundance shines as a call for common sense reforms that both political parties can get on board with. Whatever your vision of the future, it would probably benefit from most of the ideas in this book. But they’re best understood as the ground floor of a sane political order, not a ceiling for pragmatic utopian visions.

Building a politics of abundance worth the name

Writing about the contemporary Left, Klein and Thompson mostly focus on the “degrowth” wing. But they also acknowledge, briefly, that “abundance is a return to an older tradition of leftist thought,” where the capitalist forces of production could be turned towards building true abundance for all.

This is true — leftists of what sociologist Aaron Benanav calls the “post-scarcity tradition” have been arguing for a political economy of abundance for centuries. From Thomas More’s 1516 novel Utopia, John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 vision that we might “solve the economic problem” by 2030, Murray Bookchin’s 1971 Post-Scarcity Anarchism, to contemporary works like economist Mark Paul’s The Ends of Freedom, “post-scarcity” is generally defined around unconditionally meeting everyone’s basic needs.

This tradition isn’t merely an older one. There are plenty of post-scarcity leftists around today, even if bickering about degrowth gets more media traction. And given Klein and Thompson’s mention of shorter workweeks and collectivizing AI profits, maybe this new abundance agenda and post-scarcity leftists don’t have to be in conflict. Instead, contemporary post-scarcity politics could help inform the agenda.

What I’m saying, I now realize, is that Klein and Thompson were correct to bring up shorter workweeks and collectivized profits in their introduction. But that choice meant the book — the agenda — would be left unfinished. And instead of shit-flinging about it, progressives should help fill in the rest. Especially since there’s serious attention and money (to the tune of $120 million from Open Philanthropy) pumping into the space. In that spirit, here are two additions that might help nudge the abundance agenda towards the progressive ethos of its name:

Can we build an abundance of worker power by dealing sectoral bargaining into the agenda?

Labor standards aren’t just a drag on development — they’re outputs. Part of what we need an abundance of is good jobs. Especially so long as jobs continue to claim so much of our time.

If “abundance” becomes code for brute deregulation and union-busting in the name of rapid development, then it really would become some sort of neoliberalism reboot. That isn’t what Klein and Thompson advocate, though they do seem ambivalent on unions. So are there other forms of building worker power that fit better?

Towards the end of Klein’s response to the audience question about public sector unions, he added: “I’m a bigger fan of sectoral bargaining than a lot of other ways we do bargaining.” Why not take him up on that?

From a labor power perspective, sectoral bargaining — where representatives for workers, employers, and sometimes government bargain to set contracts that apply to workers across an entire industry, whether or not they’re unionized — is a bigger deal than individual workplace unions.

It’s also possible that “abundists” would be more likely to embrace sectoral bargaining than supporting unions since the former sets industry standards that create more predictable conditions. One bargaining standard set across an entire industry is less of a hurdle for planning development projects than a thousand unions with different demands.

There are plenty of caveats here. Framing sectoral bargaining as an alternative to unions would undermine both. To get effective sectoral bargaining, you want higher union density. Ultimately, you want sectoral bargaining units setting minimum standards that workplace unions can build on. But it’s possible to advance sectoral bargaining even before the union infrastructure is in place.

California, for example, passed Assembly Bill 1228 in 2023 (replacing the stymied FAST Recovery Act of 2022), establishing a 10-person council to set wage standards across the entire industry. That council wound up agreeing on a $20/hour minimum wage for California fast food workers, which took effect in April 2024.

Since true sectoral bargaining is constrained by federal law (via the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA), AB-1228 found a few clever workarounds to achieve a similar outcome without actually producing a binding collective bargaining agreement.

But clearing away the regulatory barriers that prevent outcomes we want is what Abundance is all about. Present NLRA law basically kills sectoral bargaining by requiring employer consent for unions to combine bargaining units (note: employers will never consent to this). And since the NLRA generally preempts state and local labor law, this is a case where — unlike housing abundance — federal regulation is actually the level of government where the main problem resides.

Abundance enthusiasts could change that3. In the same way that Institute for Progress wrote The Case for Clinical Trial Abundance, and How the White House can Reform NEPA, progressive wonks and thinktanks should write something like The Case for an Abundance of Sectoral Bargaining. And even though the current White House will probably not, uh, do anything to support sectoral bargaining, there is some support for it among conservatives. So why not also write How the White House can Reform the NLRA to Unleash Sectoral Bargaining4?

Can we build an abundance of leisure time?

Klein and Thompson write that “Just as freedom has historically loomed large in the American consciousness, so has abundance.” That is true, and historically, both freedom and abundance were broadly understood as a rising tide of leisure time (both have written about this quite a bit).

Beginning right around the 1930s, the idea of free time as a measure of freedom began to die. Anthologies have collected various theories as to why, despite forecasts of 15-hour weeks by now, we still work so much. Thousands of podcast hours have been taped (I contributed about 1.5 of those hours).

Whatever the case, I think philosopher Martin Hägglund was right when he argued that “socially available free time,” where necessity does not force the hand of our decisions, remains the best measure of freedom (even “spiritual freedom,” as he argues) we have, and we ought to pursue it — for everyone — with everything we’ve got.

Further, I’d suggest that leisure time (I prefer Goodin’s construct of “discretionary time,” but don’t want to get bogged down in contrasting it to leisure time) is the most general teleology of abundance we can express without getting dogmatic.

Klein has been decrying DOGE for chasing “efficiency” without a well defined vision of a life worth pursuing. Efficient towards what end? The same goes for abundance. An abundance of what? “What we need” isn’t a helpful answer. The book offers housing, clean energy, and better medicines. All of which are important.

But all can be seen as means towards the end of facilitating an abundance of time ownership for all. A cooked planet with sky-high rents, untreatable disease, and half-built high-speed rail lines are all impediments to meaningful time ownership. But neither are lower rents and better trains intrinsically good. They’re good insofar as they facilitate an abundance of time and capability.

At their launch event, Klein and Thompson said that one of a book’s products is the discourse it generates. In that sense, Abundance remains incredibly productive. The book tour still isn’t finished, the $120 million abundance fund has just been announced, and my Twitter feed remains a maelstrom of abundance takes. The jury is still out. Abundance is still up for grabs.

Maybe the rhetoric will get carved away from the common-sense, and we’ll be left with a modest but necessary focus on rebuilding the capacity to carry out the baseline functions of a sane society. Maybe we’ll just get real traction around zoning reform. Or maybe, abundance can still be wrestled into a political order that threads pragmatism with the full scope of the book’s opening sequence. An abundance inclusive of time and power. Not an ocean of lemonade, exactly, but something at least worthy of the name.

English is her second language. And she still seemed quick as ever with her French, though mine was broken enough that I couldn’t be sure. So maybe, we thought, she was fine. Just getting old.

A few months later, either by dumb luck or divine intervention, she slammed the side of her head on the corner of an opened kitchen cabinet so hard she vomited. My sister brought her to the hospital, where they confirmed that yes, she had a mild concussion. That’s when they noticed the tumor.

It was about 5.5cm, or the diameter of an average lemon. “Massive,” the doctor said. It was growing on the outside of her left frontal lobe, pushing down on a part of her brain that handles language processing.

To get that large, the tumor had likely been growing for years. Removing it should go well, the doctors said. But operating near that area of the brain could also further damage her language ability. Leaving it in wasn’t really an option, though, since it would just keep growing, guaranteeing further decline at an unknown rate. So off she went to surgery. We’d see how much language she’d recover afterwards.

…

They let us — my sister, father, partner, and myself — into her recovery room a few hours post-op. She looked terrible, like truly horrifyingly bad. But things went well, they told us. The tumor was benign. Her thick brown hair, not quite shoulder length, had been shaved from the left side of her head. Most of the newly carved border between hair and scalp was crusted over with dried blood. Tubes were protruding from all over the place. But the tumor was out, and there had been no big surprises. The doctor explained that over the next few hours, she’d slowly wake up as the anesthesia wore off, and her language should spring right back. Her compressed brain matter would do the same.

Except, she didn’t. Not really.

Her eyes would occasionally flutter open, and they’d flicker something like recognition when they caught us. But then they’d shut, and she’d sink back into oblivion. A few hours into that cycle, her lack of progress brought the doctor back in. His method for trying to induce wakefulness involved placing his hand on her sternum and aggressively shaking her side to side while yelling her name. “Celine! Celine!” he’d shout, as he rattled her back and forth, sort of like he was horizontally beating an egg.

In response, her eyes would shoot open, as if he’d shot adrenaline straight into her heart. She’d lurch forward, eyes blazing wide, back lifting from the bed exorcism-like. But then she’d sink back down, eyes closing, body going limp again.

This went on for hours. They thought maybe she had a stroke, and brought her back in for an MRI. But it looked clear. So we sat and waited.

…

Some time later, I don’t remember if it was the next day or late that night, she began to emerge. She’d keep her eyes open, and they’d emit that recognition. But no words, and not for lack of trying.

She’d look at you for a few moments, then she’d look upwards as if thinking, or looking for words, and then she’d drop her eyes back to you while trying to start what she must have wanted to be a sentence. But nothing would come out. Just a sort of ghostly silence. Someone had stolen her words again. She’d regroup, and literally go looking for the words again in the northern regions of her visual field. She’d come back, try to speak, and again — .

Her reaction to this whole ordeal of being absolutely cut off from any use of language will never leave me. After a few seconds of curving her open lips into the sort of contracted oval that might begin a sentence with some sort of “W” sound, as if she were trying to blow smoke rings but forgot to actually smoke first, she’d pull back in surprise, pinch her eyebrows in confusion, and look up at you as if you’d both just witnessed the strangest thing you’ve ever seen.

This went on for at least a day, the discovery of language’s absence and the subsequent astonishment. After a while, towards the end of the sequence where she’d return to bewildered eye contact with you, she began to smile at the whole thing in the way that you might if you’d both just seen one of the world’s rarest birds land briefly on your shoulder.

…

Finally, the looping sequence produced her first word. It came not while she was trying to speak, but afterwards, during the astonishment phase. I don’t remember which one of us she was looking at when it came, but she spoke clearly, with most of her usual intonations: “Unbelievable.”

This became the new sequence. Eye contact. Word search. Failed speaking attempt. Shocked reaction, now accompanied by the same word each time, “unbelievable.” And the word came in full emotiveness, as if she’d never in her life found anything as unbelievable as whatever she was referencing. Each syllable was emphasized.

Slowly, a few other words creeped back into her arsenal. “Wow.” “Gee.” “Weird!” Each came with the same palpable astonishment and fully intact Quebecois accent. It was like she was so thoroughly bamboozled that a language cluster around that sentiment had sputtered back online, and slowly, its perimeter expanded.

Her first phrase was so on-the-money that it felt like parody. If the universe is a simulation, surely the simulators were now fucking with me, I thought. “We don’t know,” she started saying, with a shrug and a small smile. “We don’t know.” In that grubby ICU recovery room, some profound mystery was apparently present.

Some time later, when we were able to feed her some hospital-grade applesauce, she’d pause between spoonfuls, softly shaking her head: “To know that you are eating is amazing.”

Apparently, to my mother, everything had been made wonderful. Even hospital food. The dull film of ordinariness that sets in over time was lifted, and her world seemed alive with the sort of bewildered delight I mostly associate with children, psychedelic trips, and that story of Zen master D.T. Suzuki having so much fun playing with a kitten that he forgot he was supposed to give a serious lecture to gathered attendees (it’s also possible, even likely, that he felt playfully coexisting with a kitten in view of others was more instructive than any lecture he could’ve given). The fact of her own experience dazzled her. We’re alive, can you believe it?

“We still and always want waking,” Annie Dillard writes in one of her books. “We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”

Yanking a lemon-sized tumor from my mother’s frontal lobe had apparently woken my mother up, who was now perpetually stunned while dawning a hospital gown. She could see the show — it was everywhere, everything. Maybe language usually gets in the way, and having a bit of a break helps us remember something that words and concepts and intellectualizing obscures. Maybe, with language set aside, some deeper current of mind, usually suppressed, can make its way up to the surface of experience. Maybe wonder isn’t something to be found, but unobstructed.

…

There’s a metaphysics for that

According to the 11th century Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, that’s exactly, without any sort of poetic flourish or metaphor, what’s going on. In his view, as described in a recent book by religious studies professor Loriliai Biernacki, wonder is the expression, or unfolding, of an “essential subjectivity.” It points us “to a deeper awareness of self, before the mind jumps in and builds border walls, closing off and demarcating itself as self proper against that which is other.”

Abhinavagupta’s argument, which offers a flavor of panentheism, argues that wonder is not only the essence of mind, but of all matter. His view, which we don’t need to get stuck on, is that there’s a primordial consciousness that transcends the manifest world, Śiva, but the world is itself an expression of that primordial consciousness. “The category of Śiva unfolds the world out of itself and then savors this multiplicity in the experience of wonder,” as Biernacki puts it.

And most succinctly: “Wonder is the essence of matter…at base, what constitutes matter is just the state of wonder.”

Let’s put claims about the nature of the entire universe aside, and just dwell on the subsidiary idea that wonder is the essence of subjectivity. That’s a strange idea. Wonder feels like a complex thing you can build from simpler aspects of mind, not its fundamental stuff. How can a mind be made of wonder? And if the deep nature of subjectivity really is wonder, why can it be so elusive? Why do things like language seem to bury it?

But walking around with this strange idea, I keep finding little hints. Flavors of the idea strewn about the world. Just a few days ago, for example, one of Aella’s essays popped up on my feed: “When your mind relaxes, the floor beneath you is a solid base built out of delight.” Imagine that!

On my end, I’ve been romping around as a journalist across the contemplative sciences for the past few years, and it’s beginning to look, suspiciously, like the frontiers of the mind sciences are basically curving back around to Abhinavagupta’s idea.

In research on advanced meditation, psychedelics, and consciousness in general, we’re now getting a bunch of science that suggests minds clench and carve up experience in ways that obscure a whole range of mind-blowing qualities that rise up when given the chance. Turn the mind upside down and shake it a bit, and what falls it out is pretty surprising. It might not be all that outlandish to say that minds could actually be, to some literal degree, made of wonder.

…

Consider Metzinger’s meditators

Maybe basking in the aftermath of successful brain surgery on your left frontal lobe is one way to wake up to the mind’s baseline of wonder. At least for a bit. But meditators have been waking up for thousands of years, voluntarily, with no surgery or hospital-grade applesauce required, and trying to tell anyone who’ll listen all about it.

In fact, meditators have been evangelizing the wonder-full fruits of meditation for so long that I’ve grown pretty numb to it. Like sure, fine, I am ignorant as to the nature of my own mind, my awareness is hitched to a misleading sensation of “self,” and that unholy union is, in fact, the very source of suffering that my life’s actions are trying, in vain, to mitigate. Whatever.

But every now and then, someone repackages that basic contemplative spiel into a form that pierces my numbed exterior and actually gets through. One of the latest is German philosopher Thomas Metzinger, who is both a long-term meditator and something of a mythical figure in the science and philosophy of consciousness.

He has a new book out — The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness — that reports on a 2020 survey of 3,500 meditators across 57 countries describing their experience of “pure consciousness.” And the thing is, these reports read eerily like my mother’s experience. It’s a huge book of experiential evidence that Abhinavagupta might have been on to something, and the basic, foundational quality of awareness itself could literally be something like wonder.

By “pure consciousness,” used interchangeably with “pure awareness,” he means the simplest possible form of conscious experience, or “Minimal Phenomenal Experience” (MPE). The idea is basically: how many features of consciousness can you strip away while leaving consciousness itself intact? What is the maximally deconstructed, most stripped-bare form of consciousness available to us? What is the essence of consciousness like?

In experiences of pure consciousness, these meditators report no sense of time or space; no autobiographical self-awareness; no agency; no first-person perspective at all, as in, there’s no feeling of ‘you’ at the center of your experience, but experience itself remains. And here’s how various respondents — each assigned a number — described MPE, that infinitely stretched canvas of awareness that remains after all the mind’s other habits have been deconstructed:

#3146: There was a quality of gentleness and wonder, and not in any words or concepts, but more as a pervasive feeling of “this is it, this is how everything truly is.”

#3524: “...sensationless awe, being deeply moved, all-pervading floaty thoughtless state of not searching further, being boundlessly held, fulfilled without needs.”

#3207: “Feelings were mainly love and amazement and gratitude.”

#2056: “Complete unburdening — a slight (almost “childlike”) feeling of joy…”

#2346: “There was a general sense of awe and joy.”

#35: “Pure awareness is the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”

And so on. The point is this: apparently, when meditators sit still enough that the outer layers of the mind begin to fall away, leaving only the simplest, barest possible core of conscious experience, the variety that presumably undergirds all else, these meditators’ accounts really do suggest that what remains feels something like wonder.

So we’re up to two data points for Abhinavagupta’s strange claim that wonder is the essence of mind. My mom’s ordeal, and Metzinger’s meditators. Now, there’s the obvious next data point. Psychedelic drugs.

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Psychedelia is a wonderland, too

One of the many unresolved questions in psychedelic science is why drugs can make just about anything appear like the most meaningful thing you’ve ever beheld. Take a load of mushrooms and sit facing the corner of a room with nothing but crunchy white paint in your visual field, and sure enough, you could probably turn away from that corner hours later with the conviction that you’ve discovered the great secret of existence. That wall will transform into the most wonderful thing in the world.

The leading theory of what psychedelics do to the mind is known as RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics — or the REBUS model, an acronym which requires serious elbow grease to derive from that name. It suggests that psychedelics relax the conceptual frameworks our minds use to construct experience.

When our minds use these conceptual frameworks as lenses to make sense of experience, it’s “top-down” processing. The mind is imposing its constructed view of the world upon experience. When psychedelics relax these frameworks, it allows for more “bottom-up” processing, the lower-level sensory processing that’s ordinarily crowded out of experience by the top-down framework.

And so apparently, when you relax all the ways that the mind tends to construct experience, and just let experience happen with less conceptual overlay, you get — among other things — an often shockingly wonderful, meaningful experience1. Relaxed minds seem to spew meaning on whatever’s in perception. It doesn’t matter if it’s the drab corner of a room, tree bark, or the sky, which suggests that the wonder isn’t coming in from the outside, but is actually being projected onto perception from the reconfigured mind on the inside. Relax the mind, and wonder gets through.

…

Whatever the mind is made of can also be absolutely horrifying

Okay, but for credibility’s sake, let’s puncture this convenient narrative a little bit. Yes, there are meditators and psychedelic users and spontaneous mystics out there who will tell you that beneath the churn of ordinary minds is an inexhaustible wellspring of wonder.

But at the same time, there are others — including meditators and psychonauts — who will tell you that when they voyaged to the depths of the mind, what they found was downright horrifying. David Foster Wallace has a nice — which is to say, terrible — description in Infinite Jest of what can be just as true of dipping into “pure awareness” as what all of Metzinger’s meditator’s report:

“It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystic unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self.”

The more visible surfaces of meditation discourse usually paint a rosy rhetoric around how wonderful and existentially redeeming the depths of awareness are. But not always. There are also what Willoughy Britton once called “Dark Knights of the Soul” experiences, which sound like flavors of the above. Sometimes, meditation folk argue that these Dark Knight experiences, feelings of having encountered the ground of awareness and discovering that it is, in fact, “a nausea of the cells and soul” that’s “thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self,” is mixed up with all sorts of psychological confounders, mental illness, phases that can be worked through, or generally a not-yet-resolved-and-purified encounter with pure awareness.

But there are similar themes in the wider discourse on wonder and awe in general. Etymologically, the word “awe” reaches back about 800 years to the Middle English “ege” and Old Norse “agi.” Both, as psychologist Dacher Keltner points out in his recent popular science book, Awe, refer to shades of fear, dread, and terror.

In 2003, Keltner was working with psychologist Jonathan Haidt (the ‘smartphones are ruining us’ guy) to develop a definition of awe. They came up with: “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” And as Keltner adds, eight centuries ago, amidst plagues and famines and short life expectancies, “what was vast and mysterious was violence and death.”

Though Keltner goes on to cite evidence that awe’s emotional associations have shifted to the positive over the years, there’s still an undercurrent of terror (to put a number on it — a yet-to-be-published study of his looking at daily diary entries from respondents across 26 countries finds that about 75% of awe experiences were associated with positive emotions, leaving about a quarter for the underbelly).

In Rudolf Otto’s 1917 book, The Idea of the Holy, he describes encounters with the deepest sense of awe, a sense of the “numinous,” or “mysterium tremendum,” as both fascinating and terrifying. “We generally take 'holy' as meaning ' completely good,” he writes. “But this common usage of the term is inaccurate.”

According to Otto, the feeling of the numinous, mysterium tremendum, is basically all over the place:

“It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

Journalist Michael Pollan, in his 2018 book on psychedelics, recounts his trip on 5-MeO-DMT, which has the reputation of being the strongest psychedelic around, in that it just wipes your mind out entirely while leaving you — well, not “you,” but some canvas of infinitely stretched awareness that is at once both everything and nothing — somehow present through the whole affair:

“In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this is what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe.”

In the hospital, for all the wonder my mother had awoken to, there was also terror. Sometimes, often in early in the morning, groping helplessly for words led her eyes to swell with something more like a terrible sadness. As she cried silently, her body screamed.

Probably, those moments had a fair bit to do with the more particular fear that maybe she’d never be able to speak again, rather than some intrinsic, trembling horror spewing from her newfound contact with a layer of awareness beneath, or before, words. But even if so, that tells us something about pure awareness. It’s no place to live2.

If the teeming and multiplicitous world of dualities we all encounter each other in is just a play of emanations from some primordial and undifferentiated consciousness, Śiva, then it still seems that we like to inhabit this partitioned world together, chattering, rather than dissolve back into Śiva, alone and mute3.

…

What do we do about wonder

My mother, by the way, has made a full recovery. She’s spritely and linguistically able as ever. Her hair has grown back to cover her scar. She has some strange, hazy memories. We talk about the whole ordeal as an episode now quickly fading into the past, wonder and all.

Describing this essay to my partner, she found the whole thing kind of silly. “I feel that way all the time, what’s the big deal?”

To return to Dillard, “Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” and while I’m still trying to find my bearings, I’d like my form of life to at least “choir the proper praise.” Drawing wonder into awareness is, for me, both a remembrance and celebration that doesn’t always come easy. It’s work, a kind of sadhana.

But if it comes easier to some than others, then the existence of that spectrum implies the ability to move along it, which could be an interesting aspect of the conversation around what “progress” or “flourishing” mean. Back in the late 1800s, economist Henry George looked around at the rapid transformations of society brought on by industrial technologies, and said that you might have expected all that progress blazing about to make “the poorest labourer’s life a holiday, in which every high quality and noble impulse could have scope to grow.” He imagined even “the man with the muck-rake drinking in the glory of the stars4.”

I do not think that the living conditions of today’s poorest laborers are conducive to drinking in the glory of the stars, and would love to see “progress studies” work on that (abundance is great, but alone, I don’t think it’ll do the trick5).

Metzinger wants his research to help us develop a ‘culture of consciousness,’ one that “values and cultivates the mental states of its members in an ethical and evidence-based way.” But already, secular culture has embraced a certain scientific flavor of wonder. Wonder has become “the go-to consolation prize for our loss of some greater power in the universe, a soul, a god,” Biernacki writes.

In a disenchanted, atheist, Newtonian universe (or even a multiverse, which is now even a common Hollywood trope), “wonder ferries us into the giddy high of transcendence, but still manages…to stop short of the certainty of faith. Historically, transcendence has been the provenance of religion. Wonder offers transcendence without the religious strings attached.”

Which leaves us receptive to precisely that: a mode of wonder that enchants us while disenchanting the universe; that evokes transcendence without challenging positivism; that praises science while trivializing religion; that externalizes wonder as something to be found out there, staring into the twinkling night or marveling at the intricacies of nature’s web, rather than a quality embedded in the deepest layer of what we already are, everywhere and always.

If awareness is wonder incarnate, the positivist worldview where science is over-extended into a reductive kind of scientism buckles. Which is to say, if wonder serves as the spiritual praxis for modern society, the way we think about it matters. It shapes our world.

Metzinger, for his part, helped orchestrate a $20,000 prize for the best contribution to building a testable scientific model of pure awareness. And maybe the jhana buzz, or work on using ultrasound stimulation to accelerate meditative progress, will bring more people into the fold of investigating the old-fashioned way, sitting lotus-like while deconstructing the mind.

So maybe, if we can hold open our minds long enough, a new flood of data will arrive to help us puzzle through the nature of the mind. Or maybe, we — the variably rigid cognitive schemas that conjure that feeling of you, and I, and us as separate creatures — are forever stuck tracing language on the surface of impenetrable mystery. In flashes of wonder, the self and its reflection in the world might still join as one. The conceptual schemas that pry us apart crack, and for a moment, there’s only everything.

But then, we snap back up to the surface. Maybe it’s for the best. Because where the mystery is resolved, we do not exist. And where’s the fun in that?

“Persistence in current form is impossible” — Michael Levin1

I.

I was recently sitting on a porch in upstate New York watching trees get slammed by relentless wind, and it seemed obvious enough. Form — of trees, bugs, human bodies, landscapes — is the memory of experience. Biology, in particular, is sensitive to experience, and good at storing it.

In the universe, stuff is always happening. Everywhere you look, there’s an event unfolding. And the involved parties are either made of stuff that can store a memory of what happened (humans), or not (a plastic chair). Events can be turned into experience by finding purchase in form (trans-formed). Or, they can just fall back into the infinite flux of all phenomenon without a trace2.

The more of an event any given form is able to capture, the more experience can be generated. Capture is what transforms events into experience3. Once captured, experience can then be mobilized to redirect the flow of events in the world. A neat loop.

Humans are more sensitive to experience than mountains, or crickets. Flesh and muscle is more sensitive than stone. More responsive. Humans are clad with orders of magnitude more muscle than crickets, giving us all manners of physical storage for experiential information.

Our bodies are more capable of responding to the infinite flux of all phenomenon, and storing those responses. That means we can do more with it.

In some kind of literal sense, I think humans can build cities and computers and write poetry and feel deep wells of love and grief while mountains and crickets cannot4 because our bodies are more capable of clenching and responding to experience than theirs are.

From the view of evolution, then, we might think of humans as biological forms fine-tuned to generate as much experience out of events as we can muster. Experience is useful. Our function is to wring out each passing moment, to squeeze as much function out of the endless, faceless happenings of the universe as possible. Function for what? To keep on living, I guess.

Being relatively sophisticated experience-catchers is a mixed bag. It’s the root of trauma. Probably the whole shit-storm of suffering in general, too, as per Buddha. But it’s also the source of wonder, awe, conviviality, love, or whatever else you take to be among the most redeeming qualities of being alive. Annie Dillard calls consciousness evolution’s “bittersweet birthday present.” Of course, evolution pays no mind to whether we enjoy our presents.

This sensitivity to experience, our marvelously complex bodies that can make so much out of the ceaseless flow of events, is what’s helped us build shelters from the elements, lay plumbing pipes to mitigate disease, invent vaccines to thwart infant mortality, and everything in-between. Sensitivity to experience helps us deter entropy, and seek joy. By storing so much experience, we can use it increasingly complex ways.

Just like storing food sparked the agricultural revolution, humans as experience-storing-beings sparked a much older inflection point in the development of minds, yes, but more specifically, in how skillful minds can become at realizing their own goals. Like skirting death.

Relatedly, a favorite moment from my podcast conversation with neuroscientist Mark Miller

II.

How does this all come to bear on that big mystery of what the mind is, or where it resides? Is mind some invisible substance that inhabits the body on loan from a divine realm? Is it a pattern of electromagnetic information processing?

Maybe mind is the result of holding experience in a muscular amber, repurposing the cosmic drift of all things towards the aims of the living5.

In Buddhism, there’s The Heart Sutra, which says “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” Similarly, it seems to me like form is mind and mind is form.

The Buddha’s teachings are often translated from Pali into English as something along the lines of “desire causes suffering.” Romeo Stevens has a great article reminding us that the actual statement is “Tanha is the cause of Dukkha,” and everything after that is just someone’s bumpy translation.

Instead of desire, he suggests we translate Tanha as clenching, grasping, clinging, or as Nick Cammarata calls it on Twitter, the “fast-grabby-thing” our minds do.

Clenching or grabbing after experience does sound exactly like the basic function of a mind. It’s what I saw happening between the wind and the trees from the porch in upstate New York. The trees didn’t have muscles to clench, but the pattern of which leaves fell, the way the swaying trunks could subtly shift their slants over time, the carved slices of bark from centuries of stray lightning bolts or rocks thrown in the wind — these all make up the trees’ various clenching apparatuses. They’re primitive muscles that hang on to whatever events happen around them. Records of their entanglement with the world.

And so with humans. Experience courses through us, and we clench, and that clenching creates patterns of muscular tension held in the body. If Michael Johnson’s vasocomputation hunch is right, those patterns of muscular tension sculpt the coursing of blood through the body, which in turn shapes brain activity, which, in turn, delivers each of us our own twisted versions of mind.

III.

After watching the trees, we went for a walk through the 56 acres of our upstate AirBnB. We’d heard rumors that the owners rent part of the land out to a farmer for his cattle to graze.

Sure enough, after a passing through a few alien landscapes, we spotted them. Far off in the distance, speckled against the rolling hills, maybe 50 cows, mostly a silky almond-brown, or black.

We started closing the distance between us. One or two spotted us coming, yanked their heads up from the grass, and stared. After a few seconds, they began trotting towards us, like dogs coming back from a long toss with a tennis ball clutched by the teeth. The commotion of a few trotting cows alerted the others within earshot. They looked up, saw their comrades heading off, looked further and saw us humans heading their way, and joined in.

As we kept walking towards them, I saw the news of our approach spread across the entire herd, like ripples on a lake’s surface shooting outwards. Now they’re all running towards us, maybe 30 in total, and the warier among our group of humans stop, realizing that perhaps a stampede of cattle heading not just in our direction, but all with eyes locked directly on us, might actually be something to run from, not towards.

The rest of us proceeded to the edge of the creek, just beyond which there was a flimsy fence, where the cattle were arriving.

Now we’re standing maybe 10 yards across from a line of black and brown cows, a small creek and two thin wires between us, locked in eye contact. Behind them, the mountain is a collage of green, yellow, orange, and red leaves.

I want to hop the creek, duck the wires, and say hello. Scratch their snouts and rub under their ears. Pat their firm bellies, as if to say that creation has really done a fine job with these lot. Some of the larger ones in the back are kind of scary. But mostly, they seem curious. Maybe they think we have snacks.

Or, maybe life wants to know itself. To mingle amidst its own fecundity. Maybe their bodies cannot quite store and repurpose experience so as to develop impulses like “I’d really love to pet that human and scratch just beneath its ears in a display of affection,” but that curiosity in their eyes was almost unmistakable. Maybe it was a more primitive version of what I felt. Or, hell, maybe theirs is more complex.

But we didn’t go over and touch them. Superimposed upon that desire was the complex schema of human ideas. Property lines, the ownership of cattle, the agriculture industry. That note from our AirBnB hosts about making sure to not, under any circumstances, stray beyond the perimeter of their property. DO NOT cross the creek, where the neighbor’s property begins, their “house rules” shouted.

And so I begin to see the cows in front of me not as fellow adventurers in life and form, but as things only perceptible thanks to my own species’ doings, our marshaling of cosmic events into storable experiences, wielded towards our own complex ends. In front of me are walking products. Beef, milk, leather, gelatin. They’re like a field of shoes.

Astrophysicist Sara Imari Walker has this idea that consciousness is a mechanism for bringing increasingly specific and complex configurations of matter into existence across time. Consciousness “defines what we, as features of our universe, might build in the future.”

And I see all the good and bad this entails. The possibility of arranging matter into legal systems that uphold property rights, or into agriculture industries that feed nations while brutalizing animals, these bring me away from the prospect of communion during my standoff with the cows. It’s only because of these wider, more specific possibilities that I do not cross the creek, that I do not scratch beneath the ears of these small and playful looking creatures. What if I upset the farmer who owns them? What if I get a bad review on AirBnB?

The proliferation of forms is a tool for survival. If you buy into the free energy principle stuff, it’s a tool for life’s war against entropy. But it carries no promise of communion, of enlivenment, or as the darker corners of creation cry out for, of redemption.

If there is something rather than nothing, there is no guarantee that something is better than nothing. That’s mostly up to us living creatures, I suppose, to redeem the mysterious fact that existence has occurred. Some cosmic wind blew from nowhere and here we all are, learning how to use our fleshy and responsive bodies to freeze experience, twist it, store it, and send it back out into the world in a way that, hopefully, makes this place a little more beautiful.

…

In other news, a few pieces I published over at Vox recently:

- DMT, “the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family,” kind of explained

- A research round-up on combining meditation with brain stimulation

- The very old and delightfully strange history of nitrous oxide use

I’m writing lots of stuff for Future Perfect, my squadron at Vox, where my contractual obligation is to write about the frontiers of political economy and consciousness science. Imagine that! A jaunt through some highlights:

Science of consciousness

• The past decade has seen a progressive expansion of the kinds of things that Western culture is willing to consider might be conscious. We’re moving from a human-centrism to now including animals, and perhaps event plants and insects. But what about computers?
  
  More broadly, what about things that are not made of carbon, or biological material, but silicon, or metal? Many philosophers of mind are now making the assumption that non-biological systems, like AI, can become conscious so long as they can perform the right kinds of computation. I’m skeptical of this, but what do I know. So I spoke to philosophers of mind and computer scientists and cognitive scientists to sketch the landscape of this debate down to its core question: do you need biology to have a mind? Or, if you’ve read Terry Bisson’s excellent short story: Must minds be made of meat?

• The richer a state of consciousness, the more ineffable, or impossible to describe with words, it gets. This is both strange and frustrating — intense experiences are often those we might want to communicate most. Mystics, meditators, and people who take lots of drugs have been grating against this for millennia.
  
  Now, as consciousness science leans into its “structural turn,” where math is taking a swing where language hasn’t dispelled the mind’s mysteries, I wrote about new work in mathematizing the old problem of ineffability. The upshot is that while ineffability means information loss, it also enables generalization, which makes it easier for those ineffable experiences to yield insights that help us navigate chaotic and unpredictable environments.

  

• Neuroscience has gone from staining neurons black in the late 1800s to quantifying the complexity of brain activity. It’s tough to glean much about well-being from single neurons. But if you look at the brain’s overall electrical activity, turns out that you can maybe tell quite a bit, like how rich a moment of experience is. Maybe richness can help break open stale ideas like “happiness,” adding some diversity and nuance to what makes for a “good” state of consciousness — I wrote a little about this saga.

Psychedelics and Meditation

• Last year, I wrote about the science of meditation’s ongoing transition from studying basic mindfulness to more advanced and interesting stuff.

• A few months ago, I finally got around to publishing my piece on the jhanas, or the series of advanced meditative states that are actually quite accessible to beginners, intensely strange and blissful, and may help bring all sorts of attention to the many as-of-yet under-explored ways that minds can learn to feel. And if you’re looking for a very straightforward manual, Nadia’s writing on the jhanas has been a delight to read.

  

• People consistently rate psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. This is a curious fact, and it replicates. Given all the interest humans have shown in having meaningful experiences (as opposed to what, mere existing?), I spoke to a bunch of scientists to figure out what psychedelics might tell us about the neural mechanics of meaning, and the role of society and culture.

Economics

• In his famous 1948 textbook, economist Paul Samuelson writes: “Ours is a world of scarcity…All your life — from cradle to grave and beyond — you will run up against the brutal truths of economics.”
  
  I find this a pernicious way of thinking, and thankfully, its hold on the social and economic imagination is beginning to slip (though if I’m being charitable, I see what he means). I wrote about the history, present, and future of a modest interpretation of “post-scarcity,” where basic needs are unconditionally met, and scarcity’s hold on the mind gives way to something more interesting.

• Some people see guaranteed income as a “capitalist road to communism,” or a world free of work. Others see it as everything from a means of unleashing the population’s creative potential to a policy that would undermine human agency and erode “psychological capital.” Some see it as a way to shore up the welfare state. Others, a way to bulldoze it.
  
  But when you look at the actual proposals, studies of their impacts, and pilot experiments, the truth seems less drastic. A world with basic income is one of less poverty and higher taxes, not utopia or collapse. (And if you’re interested in an overview of the research on basic income, take a gander at our report over at the Library of Economic Possibility.)

  

• The US has designed unemployment insurance to mostly cover people who get laid off. If you quit, you don’t get unemployment benefits, largely because helping people quit their jobs has not really been seen as a policy objective. I wrote about how extending unemployment benefits to people who quit, by making it easier to leave shitty jobs, could actually salvage the logic of markets that has been deployed to justify capitalism in everyone from Adam Smith through to Friedrich Hayek and Albert Hirschman.
  
  The freedom to quit shitty jobs turns out to be an important and overlooked aspect of making capitalism work as its supposed to.

• If shorter workweeks are really going to become a thing in the US, it will be because workers get more bargaining power, not because advocates manage to convince companies that it’s good for productivity. Strong German labor unions managed to bargain for codetermination in the early 20th century, which was later codified by federal law. This is a good template to think about achieving shorter working weeks in the US, so I chronicled the fight for codetermination in Germany, looking at how it could inform efforts for shorter weeks in the US today.

• “Phase-ins” are a long-standing practice through which American economists and politicians have prevented the poorest Americans from receiving government benefits, grounded in the belief that doing so would do more harm (support laziness) than good (relieve poverty).
  
  I don’t think this practice has ever really held up to scrutiny, but in the past few years, the case for phase-ins has absolutely crumbled. And yet they remain in place on programs like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. “That’s something that a lot of research organizations are engaging with now,” policy researcher Halah Ahmad told me, “this question of how much further we can get with evidence, when we know that narrative eats evidence for lunch.”
  
  In this piece, I covered the history and present of arguments for and against phase-ins, hopefully contributing to the erosion of their future. Because child poverty is a choice that we keep making:

  

Psychedelic rituals

I’m working on a piece that looks at the role of ritual in psychedelic experiences, with an eye towards the landscape of rituals (that already exist, that are emerging, that may yet be developed) in the West.

I’m curious to explore just how deep the influence of ritual goes, and modes of thinking about (and ritualizing) the sacred in the context of Western secularism. If you have ideas, thoughts, or resources, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to chat about this.

And that brings you mostly up to speed on what I’ve been writing. With updates out of the way, the next dispatches will turn back to the good stuff, this newsletter’s usual fare (a few entry-points for those of you who’ve just recently joined): keeping tabs on the contours of the ‘general theory of spirituality’ emerging from the confluence of cognitive science and contemplative practice, scouting out bridges between things like poverty and the neuroscience of very strange meditative states, and how ideas like “resonance” bring sociology and neuroscience into the same conversation about what it means to live well.

I.

The morning after cremating my father in Southern India the old fashioned way, meaning on a bed of logs and dung and bricks and flowers and some rice sprinkled on his lips and a Brahmin priest speed-reciting various Sanskrit liturgical verses, the cremation yard worker handed me a small bag of cool milk, torn at the corner, to pour on my father’s still scalding bones, which had been plucked from the ashes and piled into a small wicker basket.

My dad picked up an infection while traveling in India. Probably while hiking the holy mountain Arunachala barefoot and bleeding all over the stones, though the doctors thought food poisoning. A 71-year old diabetic with congestive heart failure, his death was sudden and unexpected, but not unforeseeable. As a professor of religious studies at Vassar College, where he literally taught a course titled Religious Responses to Suffering and Death, which he’d call his seminar on dying for short, he’d been preparing to “leave the body” for decades.

He first arrived at Vassar as a graduate student from Columbia to teach a small group of faculty Sanskrit. Before arriving, he’d dropped out of Harvard as a freshman to join and eventually run the Hare Krishnas in Paris, which entailed shaving his head and chanting to god in public for a couple years. This latter portion, the chanting to god, was a habit he never kicked. Then he roamed India for a few more years. For as long as I’ve known him, he’d been trying to figure out how to die, which, put differently, is trying to figure out how to live given the pesky knowledge our species carries around that everything we have ever known, loved, hoped, and felt will all, at some unknown moment, forever vanish into oblivion.

My dad’s death has, unsurprisingly, stirred up some questions in me. The universe extinguished a beautiful, forceful instance of consciousness, a lifetime of seeking and striving and uncommon achievement and of course, spiced through with fuck-ups. If you can spend 71 years summiting most tracks of achievement, from conventional and professional to spiritual, and even then, death claims you all the same, and your body rocks side to side as medics wheel the gurney holding your evacuated body towards the flames that will turn you to glorified dust, then what of his accolades, his accomplishments, his myriad doings, actually mattered? What were his greatest triumphs over the entropic lean of all things, given where it was all inevitably heading?

I don’t mean this as some sort of cheap nihilism. Just because something is going to end doesn’t empty its impermanent forms or feelings of all meaning. You can still build a sandcastle on a shore with rising tides that will eventually wash it away. Worthwhileness or meaning in the face of death does not require eternal persistence.

But staring at his stiff, lifeless body as we wheeled it from the ambulance to the cremation yard, my mind speed-ran his long list of honors and achievements, and, as tends to happen, his lying there, dead, a smile pulled across his cheeks from dehydrating skin, made a number of them seem ridiculous. He knew this. One of his favorite stories: strolling into high school basketball practice a tad late one day, his coach fumed, nose and lips contracted, “Eric, you snotty piece of shit, you’re just like me. You know it’s all bullshit. But if you don’t show up to practice on time anyway, I’ll sit your ass on the bench.”

Culturally, our notions of achievement can be seriously misleading. The pursuit of culturally elevated accomplishments have this insidious effect of stripping away our capacity to achieve the sort of presence that, in the end, I think is what matters most. I think he would agree that some of his best triumphs were the moments of presence he managed to muster, and learning how to drop into those worthwhile moments of presence occupied him for a lifetime.

We tend to “invest” the present moment in service of some improved future, to instrumentalize the present, which is to make it about something other than itself, and in doing so we cultivate a habit of deference that renders us incapable of inhabiting the present in a way that cashes in all of our investments. We get so good at investing in the future that it’s all we know how to do.

Maybe a better way to put this kind of presence, the kind that can survive the scrutiny of death, is what Hindu and Yogic traditions call sadhana.

A few days after the cremation, my family traveled to Tiruvannamalai, a town in Southern India where my dad spent the last week before his death. We met with Ma Devaki, the resident spiritual figurehead of Yogi Ramsuratkumar’s ashram there, where my dad had spend a fair bit of time.

She explained that sadhana is that which makes us sensitive to the presence of God. But the God stuff is a major turn off to many Western ears, which can obscure the rest that would actually resonate deeply, the practices we take on to transform our experience of the present, to transform our capacity to inhabit the present in a mode of consciousness that we aspire towards, rather than whatever kind of mind the circumstances of our lives have bestowed upon us.

The world molds us into shapes we have not chosen, through systems whose driving incentives are more often profit than grace. At some point in our development, we blink awake to lives already on the move, trajectories and forms of life already in the making. The writer Annie Dillard thinks this moment of reckoning happens around ten years old:

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here...They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or from drowning...surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighborhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way."

Sadhana is a commitment to reclaiming our experience of the world, refashioning our attunement to the present by routinely undertaking voluntary practices with uncommon devotion. For me, it suggests both a conceptual remembrance and a somatic dive into the mysteries that quiet the mind’s darwinian motion, and builds roots thick enough to keep a sense of that mystery even after the practice ends and the rhythms of daily life resume, when the bills are due and laundry needs to be switched over into the dryer.

Because that’s what it takes to become anything that runs agains the stream of how your life’s circumstances steer you by default1 — an unwavering, nearly impossible devotion to practices for transformation, despite it all. Sadhana is to repaint our habitual experience of life, to progressively cast it in a sacred light through sustained intention and practice.

In my dad’s last published book, The Cloud of Longing, he translates a 4th century Sanskrit poem, the Meghadūta, as an example and exploration of rasa, or “the liquid mellow of aesthetic ex-tasis, which from the beginning of the classical Indian tradition, was said to be the goal of any valuable work of art.”

His interest in Sanskrit literature was a mode of engaging with the present. Translating the poem only set the stage for his actual project, was which was “to articulate a vision of nature that can add depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

But as Anna Kornbluh notes in Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, our modes of cultural reproduction seem to be making us increasingly numb to these moments of aesthetic transformation. Rasa is getting harder to come by.

Consider the earless painter Van Gogh. “Van Gogh’s quotidian images, utmost color saturation, and mental distress are not enough to generate adequate sensory encounter” in our generation, she writes. Simply gazing into a Van Gogh painting no longer splits us open. So in our quest for rasa, we figured maybe we’d feel something more if we stepped inside of the painting? Perhaps we can rekindle that numbed sense of aesthetic transformation, of depth and richness, by digitizing and projecting his paintings onto the walls, ceiling, and floor of a room in which we sit, fully immersed in a flickering simulacrum of Van Gogh’s transmission, hoping for a spark of what the painting, humbly hanging on a wall, could do to generations past.

There is no lack of exertion in contemporary wellness culture. Hike the mountain for yoga at sunrise, religiously attend exercise classes that look and sound like cults, get your morning mindfulness meditation in, keep a gratitude journal. Cut out gluten. But there is a lack of orientation, of direction. The self is seen as a given vessel to be filled, rather than a medium to be refined. A spirituality of consumption will never get off the ground.

Kornbluh also invokes the performance artist Marina Abromovic’s installation piece, The Artist is Present, where she sits in a chair for 10 hours a day for three months, so still and present that she must piss through a hole cut into the bottom of her chair into a bedpan, where participants sit across from her for however long they can bear it.

In this piece, Korbluh observes that “presence itself is the work,” and that “presence overflows the constraints of modality, medium, even venue.” The work is not the content, the yoga poses, the particular meditation technique, the easel, the installation. The work, the sadhana, is what comes next, or through: it’s the variety of presence one can bring to bear on a given moment, a sustained presence that cuts through the ordinary churning of the Darwinian mind that culture and evolution have carved into our species and pressed into our skulls, a sustained presence that invites, as my old man put it, “depth, richness, subtlety, and even transformation to our culture’s habitual way of viewing and experiencing the natural world.”

Without it, death always comes too soon.

Another of my dad’s favorite stories to tell. After years in India doing the whole meditation and learning Sanskrit thing, a couple of his Western friends had thrown their passports into the Ganges river and declared themselves dead.

He was preparing to do the same. Roaming India as a broke spiritual seeker felt closer to the heart of living than the Western track (you can imagine how much he liked Thoreau). But then, in a serendipitous moment that you would not believe actually happened unless you’d witnessed, time and time again, how full of these story-book, surely scripted moments his life was, he happened upon an article by Carl Jung that changed his plans.

In it, Jung describes the necessity of working through your own cultural matrix. Throwing his passport into the water and disappearing in India would have been the ultimate act of repression, not transcendence. And so, he flew back to the states, got a PhD at Columbia in a program he got approval to create called East-West studies under the supervision of the Sanskrit literature scholar Barbara Stoler Miller, and worked through things not as an anonymous seeker in India, but an eccentric professor at Vassar College who perpetually wreaked of incense.

If Jung was on to something, it was that one’s form of sadhana is not exactly arbitrary. There being some alignment between our own constitution and the sadhana we practice is important. The alignment can give off some kind of spiritual lubricant.

This is where the idea of translating sadhana into Western cultural grammar gets fuzzy. The God-stuff doesn’t fit, and we haven’t really found anything else that can contextualize sadhana in a way that guides spiritual practice.

This question is open, and intriguing. Today, there’s this alchemical blend emerging between contemplative traditions and modern cognitive science that, among other things, is unmooring the question of sadhana from any recognizable templates. God is dead but science is blind. The old has been discarded and we’re no longer infatuated by the new. In this interregnum, what new forms of sadhana, of practices for transformation, might appear? And more relevant for our present condition, what new contexts of understanding and frameworks of value might emerge that can direct our efforts?

We know how to prompt transformation, how to deconstruct the hierarchies of the predictive mind so that we might reconstruct the salience landscape, but we don’t know what we’re trying to build. Go ahead and taste the ground of awareness, but what’s next? We don’t know what we wish to become.

In Mexico City 19 days after his death, on a wander through the massive Chapultepec park, I strolled into an art museum where Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitor was installed.

Brushing aside a heavy black curtain, you walk into a dark rectangular room with black walls and no lights except for a series of eight large screens around the room.

On each screen there’s a beautifully framed video of a different musician, each inhabiting a different room in the same old victorian house somewhere up in New York’s Catskills. There are two pianists, one of whom keeps sucking on a cigar, a guitarist soaking in a bathtub, a tall, slender banjo player slouched at an office desk, an electric guitarist sitting on the side of a bed where a naked women sleeps behind him, a forlorn, sort of haunting cellist, a staid drummer, and a shot of a big group sitting on the front porch. Each screen has its own speaker, playing the particular sound of that musician. But all are playing together, the same droning song at the same time, connected via headphones and spirit, singing the same haunting lyrics, or trading verses and choruses, the sound undulating around the room like a ghost.

You can walk around the room, and you soon begin to feel that you yourself are beginning to swirl as the song spirals around you. The separation between yourself and the music, and the musicians, begins to fade as you lean into a new space they are beginning to pry open. You begin to feel yourself transported.

In this space, the rasa begins to hit. The cello moans deep and pulls you into a basin of feeling that you do not often allow yourself to enter, and the chorus floats angelic, inviting you in deeper, and now the drums are hitting and some primal mechanism in your chest begins to beat too and a sudden moment of synchrony across the entire room, all speakers aligned in a burst of something that feels alive, and now you begin to leave your ordinary mind behind. And now you hear the accordion, and the accordion reminds you of the harmonium your now-dead father used to play every morning by the fireplace as if it were just him and God reveling in yet another sunrise and you wonder how he can really be dead and you have no words for the fact that his pale body lying in the cremation yard’s fire and releasing his bones into the ocean’s pull were the last new memories you will make of him. And now you notice the music is rising and your throat is quivering and you feel the deep rumble of a sorrow that words cannot reach and the fact that you are standing in a room full of other people slips further from your mind and you sink deeper into a religious forgetting of what usually preoccupies you, your pretenses of sanity slip away, and you feel the music pulling at the roots of your pain, which is not your pain alone but a pain that we all in this suspended space know, the cellist knows it in her forlorn stare, the guitarist in the bath tub has been here before, and he’s here now, and you’re confused by the beauty that comes with the pain, and now the music is cradling your whole being and you let tears fall because you know that you cannot, you must not try and think your way out of this loss and so you surrender to whatever is happening, you lift the gates of the mind and set them aside because there is nothing else to do unless you intend to bury this forever and you feel things that you do not describe but inhabit with equal measures of catharsis and despair and the music reminds you that stars are exploding all around you and there is nothing you can do and your father is gone but you are still here and through all of this you begin not to understand but to feel that here, now, in this space that has taken eight instruments and a mansion in upstate New York and a darkened museum room and the sudden death of a loved one to create, something sacred is present.

Now you notice the others, some seated against the walls quietly crying, some strolling around the room slower than they have ever moved in their lives, and you begin to realize how precious this space is, how so much has had to conspire in order to allow a space like this to emerge, and you realize how much of your life unfolds inside of spaces that are not designed to feel this way, to let this happen, that actively inhibit this unfolding, that have been built as if this sacred presence is not the thing that matters most in our lives that are buttressed by mystery, suffused by sorrow and beauty and pleasure and pain and woven of so many relations, these spaces have not been constructed to let the surfaces of the mind settle enough to feel the things that you cannot conceptualize, those vapors that crystallize only in sufficient stillness and support. And you begin to know that you will never be the same after leaving this room, this submersion in a tidal wave of inexpressible sentiment, this liquid mellow of aesthetic ex-stasis has engulfed and transformed you and yet, and yet, you also know that immediately upon exiting this place, this miraculously held space, with tears and darkness, when you push aside the heavy black curtains you will lose this sacred structure of feeling entirely, you will return to what you were, and you wonder how you might possibly change your life to return to this place, to sustain and nurture this atmosphere that quivered with grief, yes, but grace too, and you begin to understand that the work of returning here, this remote corner of the mind’s possible configurations, over and over, day after day, this sustained presence beyond words, this is the rasa that your dad wrote about, this is the work of presence that drives Abromovic to sit so still for so long that she must piss in pots to create, this is what Rilke meant when he told a young poet “You must change your life,” it is this place, this temple where the sacred begins to poke through the barricades of the everyday, that you must practice to return to with devotion. This is sadhana.

After sufficiently cooling his bones with the bagged milk, we drove to the beach. My dad loved the ocean. “For as long as I can remember, the mystery of the sea has absolutely enthralled me: its depth, its beauty, its utter enormity,” he had scribbled on some papers kept in his computer bag.

There, under the instruction of the kind Indian men2 who shepherded us through the whole traditional Hindu cremation procedure, my mother and I waded knee-deep into the Indian Ocean, gripping a container each, and released him into the water, bone by bone.

Each time I plunged my hand into the sea, clutching a femur or a bit of skull, the current practically ripped them from my grasp, as if the gods were eager to finally have him back.

A long and still growing list of people have told me what will happen to my father’s soul. One group of Indian men assured me, directly after the cremation, that he would return as my son in one year3. That remains an exceedingly weird thought. Another time, I was told he’s making his way to the feet of the guru. Who exactly “the guru” is depends on who you’re talking to. But for him, I could imagine he’s heading for some celestial loft with Hilda Charlton.

As for my own read, I don’t have much to say about souls or spirits. Maybe consciousness is a primordial field of the cosmos, a stretched blanket more fundamental than time and space, and each of us are just these little topological twists in the fabric, forms folded from an empty expanse just as a clown twists shapes into a balloon. Maybe the cosmos is some kind of balloon twisting knots in itself, playing, creating shapes and feelings and living beings and earthquakes and solar flares and black holes and art installations and urinals. And, for some sick and twisted reason, mosquitos. That would jive with the Heart Sutra, which I have chanted so many times that now, in moments of silence, I sometimes hear it humming in the stillness: form is emptiness, emptiness is form. If that’s the case, maybe death just unravels the knot, the strangely-looped self, and form snaps back into its unity with emptiness like a wave crashing into the ocean.

But if I stick to my most materialist of intuitions — noting that actual materialism is not a reductive stance, but holds open an endless horizon of possibilities as to the true nature and capabilities of matter4 — then at least I know that his bones will rest in the mystery that so enthralled him, while the question that he spent a life working on, the question of finding resonant modes of sadhana in the West, or practices for inviting the sacred into our everyday lives that alchemically rearrange the workings of capital and bureaucracy and dynamic innovation into mediations of, rather than against, rasa, or habitual ways of experiencing the world that are shot through with depth, richness, and subtlety, his mode of living burrowed these questions into my own mind and so many others, like little mischievous organisms that outlive us by jumping from one dying body to the next, spreading a sort of holy affliction, a peculiar inheritance that will not allow you to sleepwalk through this life any longer. So what now?

“What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”
— Annie Dillard

Recently, I enjoyed a pinch of psychedelic and spent most of the day reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory. The combination reminded me of one of the most primal, delightful, and bewildering feelings. I’ve come to think of it as “creatureliness.”

The trouble with describing creatureliness is that language usually points in the wrong direction. Words are all strung along an underlying grammar, an unseen logic that shifts our sense of the world for uncreaturely ends. Alan Watts says that “to comprehend mysticism you must also follow some type of sadhana, or discipline in nonverbal perception,” bypassing the snares of language altogether and allowing consciousness to unfold its wordless expanse.

Creatureliness is not quite mysticism, and not perfectly impervious to language. It’s more like being stripped down to the flesh and reminded that we’re just another species inhabiting the earth, living and dying by the billions, surrounded by dramas unfolding along timelines measured in millennia. And thanks to some evolutionary marvel, we can hold the inscrutable facts of existence in our minds. We can gaze at them, and puzzle over them. So far as we can tell, there is no real beginning or end, no center or boundary. Just an infinite mystery that surges so far along the axes of space and time that they fail to contain it. Theologian Rudolf Otto calls it the mysterium tremendum, awe-inducing and terrifying all at once. The mystery spills over, engulfs us, and strips away culture and social norms like a spiritual acid.

Creatureliness is to perceive the world stripped bare of narrowed human contexts. It leaves us to consider any of the trillion details of our improbable existence against the sprawling backdrop of undulating mountain ranges, swaying forests, and the stillness of eternity.

The mundane bits of life we encounter — a flower, a building, a bar fight — are jettisoned from the everyday milieu that cloaked them as ordinary. Each is made nearly incomprehensible in their unlikely existence, becoming a sort of ode to the mystery that exceeds us. Creaturely awe. We may or may not live in a multiverse, but we can see how a flower tilts towards the sun, and charms nearby bees. Or a child riding a bike, giggling as her velocity builds. Imagine that! Here in this unknowable expanse, such strange treasures. Every moment is an impossible gift. Or senseless cruelty.

The science writer John Horgan, in his book Rational Mysticism, notes:

“Seeing life against the backdrop of infinity can evoke joy, madness, terror, revulsion, love, gratitude, hilarity — or all of the above at once. You may delight in the world’s astonishing beauty or despair at its fragility and insignificance.”

However you react to infinity, it bathes all our human goings-on in a funny, creaturely light. The flowers tilt and pollinate. Beavers build dams. Mountain ranges swell and shrug. We construct niches and tribes and technologies and ideologies, all of which have a way of making us forget.

Horgan, quoting Otto:

“Religions, Otto argued, do not reveal the mysterium tremendum so much as they shield us from direct confrontation with it. ‘They are attempts . . . to guess the riddle it propounds, and their effect is at the same time always to weaken and deaden the experience itself.’ Theology ‘often ends by constructing such a massive structure of theory and such a plausible fabric of interpretation, that the ‘mystery’ is frankly excluded.’”

Theology isn’t alone in this. Labor markets, insurance payments, recreational soccer leagues — humans have constructed such a massive social apparatus that we forget our basic creatureliness. We forget, as Powers’ novel implores the reader to remember, that while our species is maybe 300,000 years old, trees have been on the scene for some 400 million years. Ours are not the only stories playing out here. Powers: “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”

Maybe that’s the only way any of this — modernity’s industrial apparatus, economic growth, prosperity for a growing population — works. Maybe a constant state of creaturely remembrance, of reverence, would doom the productivity we’ve grown to depend on (our own form of soil). Maybe we’d just die out, a blissful blip, organisms that marveled and gawked at our own creation but failed to build the institutions that would keep us around to continue doing so (though modernity’s more industrious civilizational logic appears to be pointing us down troubling paths anyway)1.

Annie Dillard, who I’ve written about before as a sort of tortured bard of creatureliness, asks:

“Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer…will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered?”

Such is the power of creatureliness. She continues,

“We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show.”

Wake up, and then what? Just sit back and watch the show until we die out? Rather, can we rebuild our massive social apparatus — theologies, labor markets, sports leagues — to sustain rather than suppress a sense of creaturely wakefulness? Or is creatureliness the price of modern civilization?

A quick logistical note: I recently joined Vox's Future Perfect as a staff writer, where I'll write about the budding field of consciousness studies, political economy, & important but under-covered ways we might navigate the future of each. 

I'll write something up on the transition soon. But for now, as readers of this newsletter, you're probably somewhat acquainted with what I tend to write about. I'm always open to hearing any thoughts around what, from my basket of interests (or otherwise, why not), deserves more coverage or consideration among large, general audiences. 

My first piece was on measuring the complexity of consciousness and experiential richness, and two forthcoming are on what an attainable form of "post-scarcity" could mean today, and efforts to engineer quick access to the advanced meditative states known as jhanas for the masses. 

Point being, I have a pretty wild freedom to roam into the weird, and I look forward to using it. Future Perfect is unusual; our ethos is to write about important and tractable ideas regardless of their newsworthiness. In fact, the idea is to cover exactly those topics that are generally left out of the news. So what's missing in our mainstream conversations around consciousness and economics?

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I. Scale-invariant patterns are keys to understanding the cosmos, at least a little bit.

When a pattern stubbornly persists across different scales, it’s probably worth noticing. Scale-invariant patterns are like tiny keys to understanding, to some hopefully non-trivial degree, the universe we’re all floating in.

For example, consider mutualistic symbiosis. The rhizobia bacteria lives in legume roots, like the base of a pea plant. The rhizobia draws in Nitrogen from the air, cooks it, and serves it to the pea for dinner — something the pea is unable to do on its own. In return, the plants shelter the bacteria, while providing abundant sugar for them to munch on.

Now, zoom up a level from microorganisms to amphibians and insects. There is a species of narrow-mouthed frog — microhylids — that forms this sort of symbiotic relationship with tarantulas. The frogs receive protection from other predators by staying beneath, or generally near the spiders. Personally, I strive for the opposite. But the spiders will enact revenge on the frogs enemies, attacking, for example, geckos that make attempts on frog eggs under the spider’s protection. The frogs also get leftovers from spider meals. The spiders also benefit. The frogs eat small insects, primarily ants, that ordinarily make a meal of spider eggs, being too small for large spiders to deal with. These ants are to spiders as mice are to elephants.

Up again. Consider the symbiosis between the small Starbucks locations that nest themselves inside larger stores, like Target. Starbucks gets exclusive access to an enclosed group of customers, and Target gets customers who linger longer, spend more, and now go shopping while hopped up on sugar and caffeine, making for more impulsive purchases.

Scale-invariant patterns are little clues strewn about the world, or step-ladders that hoist us up a little higher to see wider vistas of the unknown landscape.

I found one of these patterns recently, one that scales from brain activity to sociology. Perhaps it’s worth holding in our gaze for a moment, seeing what it might open: resonance.

In neuroscience, harmonic resonance1 is gaining ground as an alternative to neuron-centric theories of consciousness. Rather than explaining consciousness by way of all the individual neurons firing like engine pistons, harmonic resonance focuses on how all firing neurons generate electromagnetic fields that synchronize across the brain.

When we speak of “alpha waves” in the brain, or gamma, theta, and so on, we’re talking about a group of neurons all firing predominantly within the alpha frequency of 8 to 13 hertz (some folks, like Susan Pockett, argue that consciousness is not some mysterious or elusive set of processes, but just is the spatial electromagnetic pattern generated by all this activity2). This synchronized activity is a form of resonance across the brain.

Turns out, elsewhere, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa has developed his own theory of resonance doesn’t just connect different parts of the brain, but connects people to their environments. He calls it a “sociology of our relationship to the world.” The idea, suitable to a German philosopher, has a pretty grand vision. In a world that has lost coherence around what we’re actually trying to achieve at a collective level, what actually makes for a good life (GDP? Subjective life satisfaction? Driving infant mortality to zero? Leisure time?), Rosa says “I want to firmly establish resonance as the normative yardstick for quality of life.”

Here, resonance is a phenomenological dimension of our relationship to the world. What does our connection to the world feel like? Subjects are connected to their environments, the world, the other, through various “axes of resonance,” which extend outwards and latch onto people (friends, loved ones), things (music, landscapes, a smooth tennis forehand), and totalities (how we relate to what exceeds us, religion or art).

Each of us, “in the course of our lives,” he writes, “experience constitutive moments of resonance in which our wire to the world begins to vibrate intensely, in which our relationship to the world begins to breathe.” Resonance is a vibrating connection between subject and environment, whereas alienation is its opposite. A mute relationship between self and world, a limp wire.

A formal definition is a bit lacking without the book’s other 800 pages of context, but to pin it down, Rosa’s resonance is a kind of relationship to the world “in which subject and world are mutually affected and transformed,” where subjects feel both affected by, and able-to-affect, the world around them.

In the end, we’ll see that these two views on resonance are just different scales of the same pattern. We’ll add resonance to the inventory of scale-invariant patterns along symbiosis, two little keys to understanding the universe.

II. Dipping the toe in brain harmonics, or: your brain is a vibrating steel plate that arranges neural activity into patterns, which are themselves, actually, your mind, or consciousness.

Imagine you’re sitting at a big living room table, with a soft afternoon sun spreading pleasant, soft light through big farm windows. On the table is a large steel plate. In the room with you, across the table, is Steven Lehar, who has a PhD in cognitive and neural systems, and a new theory of mind and brain known as harmonic resonance theory.

He sprinkles a bunch of sand on the steel plate, whips out a violin bow made of Pernambuco wood but stained to a deep mahogany, which creates a nice contrast with the tooth-white horsehair drawn from either end of the bow. He begins drawing the bow perpendicularly along the edge of the steel plate, sending a steady stream of vibrations throughout. The sand begins jumping like agitated beans, slowly shifting and rearranging across the plate into patterns. By manipulating the speed and pressure of the bow, he can manipulate the patterns that emerge.

In 1787, the German physicist and musician Ernst Chldani (1756 – 1827), sometimes remembered as the father of acoustics, created a catalogue of these patterns, or the “nodal lines” that are revealed on a vibrating surface.

According to harmonic resonance theory, this is basically how your mind works. Your brain’s electrical activity similarly vibrates (through oscillating neural activity) at various frequencies, which creates electrochemical standing waves in the brain, or electromagnetic patterns set atop the neural substrate, just like the arrangements of sand that emerge on the steel slab.

These waves, writes Lehar, “are proposed as the principle pattern formation mechanism in the brain.” This resolves a few puzzles in the science of consciousness. Most notably, neuroscientists struggle to explain how all the scattered activity in the nervous system gets picked up and integrated into a single, unified moment of experience. This moment, to you, feels like a unitary thing. A gestalt. But if it’s produced by a thousand smaller processes, how are they all woven together?

Lehar:

“The Harmonic Resonance theory finally provides a promising computational principle to account for the unity of the conscious experience, for it is in the very nature of resonances in different resonators to unite when the resonators are coupled, to produce a single coherent coupled oscillation of the system as a whole. The individual oscillators that make up the coupled system have a mutual influence on each other, each one inducing the others to match to its own oscillation, resulting in a single coherent global oscillation state…”

Neural resonance is an integration, a unification of different oscillating processes. And if, as per Pockett, consciousness is the resonating electromagnetic pattern it all gives rise to, well then, there you go. A single unified thing from a bunch of lesser, contributing processes.

Although Lehar’s theory was consistently rejected by the academy, harmonic resonance theory is making its way into peer-reviewed literature. Neuroscientist Selen Atasoy, for example, is on a recent paper:

She uses a method called Connectome Harmonic Decomposition (CHD) to study the relationship between the brain’s structure (the steel plate) and its function (consciousness). CHD, as I sort of understand it, is a way of breaking down the brain’s harmonic patterns and studying consciousness as a distributed pattern of activity across the brain, rather than in terms of “discrete, spatially localized signals.” The paper states:

“The spatially distributed perspective on brain function provided by CHD raises a pressing question: what insights are we missing out on as a field, by limiting ourselves to the spatially-localised view of brain function? The central hypothesis of this work is that the connectome harmonic view of brain activity will provide insights about consciousness that are complementary to the spatially-localised perspective, which has dominated neuroimaging research to date.”

They looked at a spectrum of ‘levels’ of consciousness, from anesthesia-induced unconsciousness, chronic loss of responsiveness from severe brain injury, ordinary consciousness, and psychedelic states. They found a tight relationship between the harmonic patterns of activity and phenomenology in each state.

The measure they use to quantify the brain’s harmonic patterns is a measure of entropy, or “the diversity of the connectome harmonics that are recruited to compose brain activity.”

Next, they plotted each different state of consciousness on an entropy chart, moving from brain-injured (DOC: Disorders Of Consciousness) patients on the left all the way up to tripping on LSD on the right. More ‘active,’ or ‘richer’ states of consciousness tracked with higher levels of entropy, and higher-frequency harmonics:

The objective measures of entropy map well onto the subjective reports of what each of theses states feel like, which is big news. Harmonic resonance begins to build a bridge between subjective and objective, or brain structure and function (consciousness). Just by knowing some details about the formal, objective harmonic patterns, we learn about the subjective experience of what they feel like.

III. A sociology of resonance

Just as brain harmonics propose a relationship between the structure of the brain and the phenomenology of its harmonic patterns, Hartmut Rosa’s sociology of resonance proposes a relationship between the structure of modern capitalist society and the patterns of consciousness that characterize how our relationships to the world feel.

The basic idea is just to extend the same principles of brain harmonics beyond the boundaries of the skull, something that I believe both Lehar and Atasoy would happily grant. Recall that Lehar says “it is in the very nature of resonances in different resonators to unite when the resonators are coupled.” As a vibrational frequency, couldn’t resonances from the brain’s electrical activity couple with resonances from the environment?

For Rosa, not only can this happen, but resonant couplings between the brain and its wider environment are the origins of consciousness, which he sees as relational all the way down. “Human subjectivity and social intersubjectivity basically develop via the establishment of fundamental resonant relationships.”

He cites the German doctor Hans Jürgen Scheurle:

“…processes of synchronized oscillation are the connecting principle of the interaction of brain, body, and environment. Through them, the brain becomes an organ of perception and activation responsive to processes inside and outside the body. It no longer appears as an isolated apparatus, but as the organ of a living being in relation to its world…the function of the brain can only be comprehended in terms of its resonant relationship to its surroundings.”

In both cases, brains and societies, consciousness is the resonant output.

Rosa defines modernity, today’s medium of vibrational resonance, is a society in the mode of “dynamic stabilization,” where continual growth, acceleration, and innovation are required just in order to maintain the status quo.

As a result, “subjects’ positions in the world are constantly shifting and changing, as are those of institutions and organizations,” mirroring the activity of sand on the steel plate, jumping around and settling into patterns. Society itself becomes the vibratory medium, as he describes:

“Resonance requires a vibratory medium; resonant relationships are possible only in mutually accommodating resonant spaces. It is in this sense that I will examine the resonance-facilitating and resonance-inhibiting aspects of the institutions, practices, and modes of socialization constitutive of (late) modern society…we will see how the spheres of work and family, along with those of art, religion, and nature, typically function as modern spaces of resonance, as well as how in particular the pressures of acceleration and competition increasingly serve to block resonance…Every society or social formation is defined by the ways in which it forms and pre-structures how subjects relate to the world…”

You’ll find a related idea in the way Gary Tomlinson describes selective pressures in the context of evolution, citing Deleuze & Guattari’s idea of an abstract machine: “a schema of conditions in which energies and entities meet and fall into a process.” Or the late anthropologist David Graeber’s comment that “structures of relation with others come to be internalized into the very fabric of our being.” Resonant coupling offers a formal, concrete mechanism for these otherwise nebulous ideas.

I’m not going to dive into Rosa’s elaboration on the particular axes of resonance — but I’ll skip to the end, because what he does that’s so refreshing set against the backdrop of most other critical theory is actually propose structural solutions based on his diagnosis.

“So long as the accumulation of capital remains the true subject of modernity’s economic relationship to the world, the imperatives of escalation will remain in effect,” he writes. And escalation — or the dynamic stabilization from above — is, on his diagnosis, a deep resonance inhibitor, causing a social formation that mutes our relationships to the world at scale.

“Growing competition and unrelenting acceleration…promote and favor a mute dispositional relationship to the world, in particular because they allow anxiety to become the dominant form of social being-in-the-world. Stress and anxiety operate even at the neurological level as empathy and resonance killers par excellence.”

How to restructure modernity so as to pre-structure the world, the social formation, in ways that do not inhibit, but foster resonance? He has two main strategies:

1. Economic democracy: “A more resonant form of modernity’s institutionalized relationship to the world cannot be realized unless we tame, or rather replace, the ‘blind’ machinery of capitalist exploitation with economically democratic institutions capable of tying decisions about the form, means, and goals of production back to the criteria of successful life,” which for Rosa, are resonant relationships to the world. He doesn’t want to abolish all markets, but exempt the vital infrastructure of a decent life from the profit motive, including things like transit authorities, utilities, banks, and health care.
   
   If you’d jive with a slightly less anti-capitalist version of this critique, I think Mariana Mazzucato’s recent paper on “Governing the economics of the common good: from correcting market failures to shaping collective goals” provides a more concrete roadmap for building exactly the kind of economy Rosa means here, but that’s for another newsletter.

2. Guaranteed income: “A basic income could potentially form the bridge between a necessary institutional reform and a change in our cultural mode of existence…it’s appeal lies…in the fact that it could shift the basic mode of being-in-the-world from struggle to security, thus removing existential anxiety from the equation without undermining a positive economic incentive structure.”
   
   I’ve just published a piece over at Vox on how basic income is actually not very radical. But what I really meant was that in macroeconomic terms, basic income wouldn’t be a huge disruption. Implementing any actually viable basic income (which rarely affords more than poverty-line income) wouldn’t do anything crazy to GDP or labor force participation, it’d just create a world with less poverty and higher taxes.
   
   But I think in microeconomic terms, there’s still the potential for, as Rosa says, a bridge towards something more profound, if it’s coupled with other reforms. Eliminating poverty would be no small thing.

“Modernity’s relations of resonance are dysfunctional…Modernity is out of tune,” Rosa concludes, but “another way of being in the world is possible.”

As Lehar tells us, “individual oscillators that make up the coupled system have a mutual influence on each other, each one inducing the others to match its own oscillation.” In other words, resonance is dynamic, always changing. And not only can we, each of us our own oscillating members of a vast network of couplings, induce a change in the system via our own oscillations, but as Rosa argues, we can also, through political mechanisms, alter the vibrational medium that structures all oscillating relationships.

We are the sand on the steel plate, but unlike those tiny little grains, we have the power to change our vibrational mediums. We can move steel, build mountains and canals. We can design — to some degree — the patterns that we settle into. Chldani drew diagrams of all the different acoustic patterns he found. Our catalogue is more difficult to convey in an image, it’s the entire human inventory of conscious states, and it is certain that we haven’t even begun to map out all the possibilities.

III. Bridges between resonance scales

A few similarities and speculative bridges between the two modes of resonance described above.

High levels of neural entropy may be the signature of vibrating axes of resonance between self and world.

Rosa describes high resonance moments as “vibrating wires” between self and world. They’re experiences of transformation, but they also have an element of elusiveness, because the ‘other’ in the resonant relationship is closed off enough to remain a separate, and in some sense inaccessible, entity.

What if these sociological moments of high resonance are marked by high levels of entropy in the brain?

High entropy conscious states are theorized to feel both rich and unpredictable. The richness could map onto the “vibration” of the axis of resonance between self and world. And the unpredictability tracks with both transformation and elusiveness.

On psychedelics, a prototypically entropic state, the transformative sense is clear. But transformations are only possible in relationship to something that is unknown, or elusive. It’s precisely that which eludes us that can transform us. If you knew the world perfectly well, if you could predict its every move, it would never surprise you. It would never transform you. So the sense of transformation discloses the associated elusiveness.

Neither in the brain nor in the world do you want to maximize resonance all the time.

Neurologist Robin Carhart-Harris’ well-received theory of “the entropic brain” argues that evolution has tuned the brain, particularly the default-mode network, to moderate levels of entropy, always keeping them from getting too high.

Predators on the savannah would lick their lips at the sight of a blissed-out human, immersed in a high-entropy phenomenology and marveling at their surroundings rather than scanning for threats. Too much entropy in our ancestral past likely meant a pretty gruesome death.

Similarly, Rosa does not advocate that we should try to live in states of maximal resonance. “The notion that one’s environment must be made resonant in all of its various manifestations thus is not only misleading and potentially dangerous…but is also conceptually incoherent.”

It’s incoherent because resonance always has aspects of inaccessibility and elusiveness. Since perfect and eternal resonance would be neither inaccessible nor elusive, it would not actually be a mode of resonance.

And there’s a way in which more resonance means more of its opposite, alienation. “Alienation born of indifference and repulsion must first become palpable before resonant relationships to the world can be developed. Capacity for resonance and sensitivity to alienation thus mutually generate and reinforce each other.”

Moreover, resonance does not “arise simply from the absence of alienation.” There is no resonance without alienation. “At the root of resonant experience lies the shout of the unreconciled and the pain of the alienated.”

The single-minded pursuit of resonance in all aspects of our lives, on Rosa’s account, would leave us in a similar position to our maximally entropic ancestors on the savannah: toast.

IV.

Each of these modes of resonance — in the brain, in the structure of late modernity — are big and messy ideas. I haven’t managed to do either of them justice, let alone the bridges between them. It’s a work in progress.

But I hope I’ve done enough to spark a similar suspicion in you, that perhaps there’s something worth understanding and elaborating here. If resonance is on the right track, there’s a lot to do — theories to (re)construct, technologies to build, institutions to remodel, policies to draft, maybe some manifestos to write.

If resonance is a tiny key to understanding something about just what the heck is going on here, we should get busy searching the landscape for all the locks we might try and turn. All the secrets we may yet discover, all the suffering we might avert, all the joy we might find, and bask in their warm lights like a campfire discovered somewhere in a dark forest, and when it burns down to a soft and dying ember, as all fires do, off we go again, back into the dark to find the next waypoint. Because there is no resonance that lasts forever — all resonances fade back into whatever they rang out from. Then again they arise, elsewhere, in a shifted key, carrying new and enchanting harmonies, birthing fleeting pockets of salvation that each, at their best and in their own ways, make this whole business of living and dying a little more beautiful, so long as it lasts.

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I.

Psychedelics are the most reliable pathway towards experiencing big, unusual insights into the nature of consciousness I’m aware of. These can be quite jarring, like that feeling of invigoration that surges through your bones after plunging into your first ice-bath, conferring the realization that up to that point, you’d spent your entire life in the lukewarm waters of a default mode of consciousness pre-selected for you by your circumstances, in the same way that a mother might lay out her young child’s outfit before the first day of school.

But the philosopher of all-things-consciousness has a handy word of caution about psychedelics: “When you get the message, hang up the phone.” He continues:

“For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.”1

On this point, psychedelics are swallowed up into the wider world of contemplative practices, including everything from meditation and breathwork to neurotechnologies and drugs. This entire contemplative proposition is vulnerable to the same temptation, which I’ll call contemplative atomization: collapsing the project of reprogramming consciousness for the better from social structures onto atomized individuals. Contemplative science and its project of positively transforming consciousness should reach all the way out to the largest relevant governing bodies, say, nation-states.

II.

There is a lot of action around the space of contemplative technologies, especially as they fit nicely into the secular-friendly model of spirituality emerging from the cognitive sciences.

The psychedelic renaissance is driving a renewed interest in chemical alterations of consciousness towards more enduringly pleasant, adaptable, and richer states of consciousness that can be made available to mostly anyone who’ll have them.

Scientists are studying advanced meditation in the lab, charting secular roadmaps into “well-documented grades of zest ranging from mild buzzing and passing showers of joy all the way up to almost unbearably strong ecstasies,” as Malcolm J. Wright and colleagues described the meditative states known as the jhanas.

Shinzen Young and Jay Sanguinetti are building an ultrasonic stimulation protocol that may just zap brains in all the right ways to make these deep states of consciousness more accessible to the masses.

But notice the common thread running through them all. There’s you, bestowed with a configuration of consciousness that could do with some alteration. And there are these practices and technologies, that you, the individual, can undertake to achieve whatever new contortion of consciousness you’re hoping for.

If contemplative practice can be understood as reprogramming the mind, too little attention is paid to the “re-”. How is it programmed in the first place? Can we intervene at that earlier stage, so that less work needs to be done when, or if, one gets around to the various mind-acrobatics involved in reprogramming consciousness?

Or: one way to transform consciousness for the better is to follow a regime of contemplative practice that promises just that. Another is to change the conditions that generate consciousness in the first place, so that less contemplative practice is needed. This also has the added benefit of reaching way more people. Contemplative science should focus on both, not just the former.

The conditions that generate consciousness are obviously many, but we can squint at two: genetics and circumstance, the old nature and nurture. Genetic engineering is not my realm, though there’s probably going to be a growing conversation around it for greater baselines of well-being in the coming decades (maybe look to David Pearce for that).

“Circumstances” are also a wide bucket, but contained within: the great leviathan of society, and all its interlocking institutions. So we can ask: how can we reweave the social conditions that give rise to consciousness such that the default states of consciousness humans arrive edge towards higher and higher gradients of baseline well-being?

III.

You probably know the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

When it comes to the transformation of consciousness, contemplative atomization restricts the scope of what one feels they can change to the realms of individual or group practices. But we can change the social structures that determine much of the early environments where consciousness develops in the first place.

Let’s take an example: the expanded child tax credit (CTC). For the duration of 2021, President Biden transformed the CTC from a comparatively mild end-of-year tax credit for working-poor families, to a historic anti-poverty achievement, paid out as monthly checks to every poor American child’s guardian, whether or not they were employed.

Over the course of the year, child poverty was cut nearly in half, with most of the heavy lifting thanks to the expanded CTC. Conservatives worried that an unconditional payment that included unemployed Americans would discourage work, leading politicians to a stalemate (despite the abundance of evidence that the expanded CTC did not, in fact, discourage work). They couldn’t strike a deal, and the CTC reverted back to its prior form at the end of the 2021, leading 2.7 million children back into poverty.

For recipients of the expanded CTC, that was a full year where economic precarity — on measurable dimensions like financial hardship and food insecurity, in addition to regular old poverty rates — played a lesser part in their lives. Economic insecurity and precarity, I would argue, are prime examples of important social parameters we can tune up or down in ways that affect the baselines of consciousness that emerge through the social matrix.

So thanks to one policy, 2.7 million children enjoyed a year of cognitive development with less stress than they otherwise would have. And if that sort of stress exerts a negative influence on the development of consciousness, that’s a dazzling contemplative outcome, achieved at scale.

As Danielle Carr put it:

“There is increasingly strong evidence for the idea that chronic elevation of stress hormones has downstream effects on the neural architecture of the brain’s cognitive and emotional circuits…the implications of the research are very clear: When it comes to mental health, the best treatment for the biological conditions underlying many symptoms might be ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives.”

For every one of the 2.7 million children, there was a family or guardian, too, that enjoyed a temporary reprieve from what the big kahuna in consciousness science Thomas Metzinger would call functionally rigid categories of conscious experience, leading to greater mental autonomy in steering the direction of their own minds.

It’s overwhelming how many other examples suggest that social constructions have been evolving in ways that degrade the default formations of consciousness. The turn from beautiful to cost-efficient-but-horrendous architecture; the jettisoning of public spaces that fostered social connection from urban environments; the for-profitization of our media environments whose engagement and ad-based business models thrive on polarization and shallow interactions; the desecration of our soil, monocrop culture/yield maximization and the subsequent hollowing out of food’s nutritional value, compounded by a deeply confused and financially conflicted nutrition science/industry with subsidies for ingredients that corrode us from within2.

A framework that elucidates the ties between the social and mental architecture could help us, at least, begin to see what we are doing to ourselves.

IV.

Economic policies can achieve contemplative outcomes at a scale that more targeted practices like meditation, psychedelics, or even neurotechnologies probably won’t. But there’s surely a tradeoff.

What the contemplative project gains in scale via policy it loses in the precision and potency of individually-targeted practice. For example, you can pretty reliably design a psychedelic therapy session that will lead to measurably beneficial outcomes in well-being. I expect that very soon, we’ll be able to pair specific meditation programs with their associated neurotechnology-aides (a brain-zapping headset, neurofeedback machine, harmonic resonance recalibrator, whatever) to provide a personally-tailored meditation program that can also reliably induce measurable benefits on short timelines.

I suspect the impact of reducing stress by means of economic policy on baselines of well-being may be somewhat less reliable, and probably lower in magnitude than targeted contemplative interventions. Though I think this has its own virtue: it provides for more diversity in outcomes, which is good.

Contemplatives should not have the final say on what a good life is. Empowering people to adopt their own values free from the influence of economic necessity doesn’t guarantee a Buddhist society, but it does mean that people will be increasingly free to adopt and express their own preferences, rather than being forced into the contemplative idea of a good life.

Scaling up contemplative systems is thus a somewhat lossy process, though you may gain some diversity for what you lose in potency. It would be nice to live in a world where every single human being has a well-resourced contemplative toolkit tailor-made for their particular circumstances and values, but alas. We don’t yet have this sort of abundance. Instead, we can build social systems that have maximally-feasible conditions for the reliable generation of higher and higher gradients of baseline well-being. This idea leans into a sort of contemplative social science (the heart of which is what I explored in this podcast conversation with the economist Christian Arnsperger).

V.

A diagram. Consciousness and social structure are tangled in a reciprocal feedback loop:

Contemplative atomization approaches the transformation of consciousness from one end only:

Contemplative social science adds on the policy dimension3:

We could have some fun with this, imagining connections running direct between social policy and contemplative practice:

VI.

I’m not exactly sure what this all means, in practice. Developing a really detailed & rigorous theoretical analysis of the relationship between social structure and consciousness doesn’t seem all that impactful — I love the Frankfurt School, but their heady analyses of how the structure of capitalism affected the structure of people’s minds preceded neoliberalism, not some wonderful paradigm of emancipatory social science.

Neither do I think advocating for economic policies on the grounds of rigorous contemplative science is a promising theory of change — that’s destined to be niche, and won’t be the platform that gets Joe Manchin to change his mind about making the expanded CTC permanent, or even new and aligned politicians elected (we’re thinking a lot about what makes policy research most useful & impactful over at LEP).

But on this question, I’ll keep digging. I suspect there’s fruitful cross-pollination to be had between the social and contemplative sciences. Each bears a sort of hole shaped like the other.

Social science can’t really say what progress is for. “Shared prosperity,” “human flourishing,” these are upsettingly vague, which is why both Left and Right can agree on them in theory, but agree on little else in practice. Contemplative science can provide a concrete understanding of the real stuff of progress, but it lacks the means of making that happen at scale. I could imagine a sort of contemplative social science, where each completes the other.

But as of now, that idea remains in the penumbrae of my imagination, dimly lit but suggestive enough to keep the hunt alive. This newsletter stalks the prospect in the same vein that the unrivaled author Annie Dillard follows her own subject (which, as far as I can tell, is an unyielding state of bamboozlement at the world we awaken to):

“I am an explorer, then, and I am also a stalker, or the instrument of the hunt itself. Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book [or in my case, newsletter] is the straying trail of blood.”

But Dillard had no interest in politics. When it comes to the question of what we should actually do, as a collective, she had this to say:

“We should amass half dressed in long lines like tribesmen and shake gourds at each other, to wake up; instead we watch television and miss the show."

If contemplative social science’s study of consciousness is to amount to anything more than fluff, if it is to scale up its hopes for the organized diminution of suffering for all sentient life, it will have to bring itself to bear on the most profane, bureaucratic, and tedious of modernity’s underpinnings: the tax code.

Imagine it: hordes of meditators taking to the streets, psychonauts writing blog posts and academic articles, creators producing Youtube videos, online communities hosting salons, all around a shared objective: reinstate the expanded CTC, for consciousness’ sake.

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Hello friends,

My first long-form piece for Vox is up. I wrote it after growing sufficiently frustrated at the glaring absence in just about every single mainstream piece on the Western psychedelic renaissance.

Even though we’ve already created a hype-bubble that researchers argue should be systematically deflated, just about every headline still focuses on the therapeutic value of psychedelics for treating mental illness. This aspect of psychedelics is both important and deeply exciting. But it’s only the foothills of what revitalized worlds a resurgent effort of serious research into psychedelics makes possible. From the piece:

But as important as anything that can turn the tide on mental health is, the frenzy over transforming psychedelics into new treatments for illness obscures — and may even interfere with — their further potential to expand our understanding of what healthy minds could be. The deep history of psychedelics shows they have far more to offer than simply the next generation of psychiatric treatment.

But it’s generally tough to get into all that without going off the deep end, in a way that doesn’t find much purchase on large platforms. Then, Roland Griffiths, one of the central scientists behind today’s psychedelic renaissance, received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and publicly stated that research on spirituality and well-being in healthy volunteers (as opposed to those with mental illness) is “the most consequential direction for future psychedelic research,” and I knew I had a solid foundation to write something on it.

I wound up writing a ‘state of the psychedelic renaissance’ piece that doesn’t stop short at therapy, but explores the underlying mechanisms that might help explain why anyone, mentally ill or otherwise, might benefit from psychedelics, and the legal/political dimensions of how to build a far more diverse and accessible post-prohibition world for psychedelics.

I received some wonderful feedback (and some derision, which was also fun), but my favorite review might’ve been this from Zach Haigney (who has a great newsletter on psychedelics):

If you want to read the piece, you can do so here.

II. All plasticity, no entropy

Since most media focus has gone towards the therapeutic benefits, neuroplasticity has had plenty of time in the spotlight (drawing a line from heightened plasticity that favors reshaping patterns of thought and behavior to therapeutic outcomes is easy enough).

But boosting plasticity is only one of a handful of mechanisms we know that underlies the psychedelic experience. Far less well known, and yet perhaps farther-reaching, is the way that psychedelics spike entropy levels in brain activity. You may recognize entropy as what the second law of thermodynamics states the universe is tending towards: disorder. In the brain, you can think of entropy as the diversity, randomness, and unpredictability of electrical activity across brain regions.

In 2014, Robin Carhart-Harris, a neuroscientist who was then the head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, published a landmark work on what he called “the entropic brain.” The basic idea is that what any state of consciousness feels like — and in particular, what he calls the “richness” of its feeling — depends on the amount of entropy in the associated brain activity. Brain entropy is low in reduced states of consciousness, like when you’re under general anesthesia. During altered states, from psychedelic trips to deep meditation, entropy is higher. In ordinary waking consciousness, it rests somewhere in the middle.

Carhart-Harris argues that the brain evolved an ability to strike a useful balance of entropy levels. In particular, he believes that the collection of regions known as the default-mode network (DMN) is primarily responsible for suppressing entropy in the ordinary brain. Doing so favors forms of cognition that help us make sense of our environments in ways that are useful for survival. “Equally however,” he writes in the paper, “it could be seen as exerting a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.”

Psychedelics reduce activity within the DMN, loosening its hold over entropy levels. The resulting high-entropy states may not have been the most beneficial for our ancestors on the savannah. (Predators would welcome blissed-out prey, marveling at their surroundings rather than scanning for threats). But for a species where basic survival can now mostly, kind of, be taken for granted, these states may have much to offer. Beyond mere vacations into “richer” states of consciousness, entropic states can cast new light on the ordinary ones we return to when a trip subsides. Sometimes it’s tough to imagine how different something that’s grown so familiar can be — like the habitual ways we’ve come to process experience — until we’ve had the direct experience of it being otherwise.

III. Next steps towards the post-prohibition world

Ok, so entropy is interesting and can benefit anyone, wherever they fall along the diagnostic spectrum of mental illness. But given the reality of path-dependence, how do we get from where we are today, to a world where psychedelics are sanely, even wisely, stewarded?

I closed out the piece with an idea I’m confused as to why I haven’t heard more about: licensed legalization. Think of it like getting your driver’s license, but for buying psychedelics. Once you are a certain age, you would become eligible for a supervised psychedelic experience at a licensed facility — a sort of initiation ritual where you learn the ropes. Perhaps there’s a written portion to ensure basic safety knowledge (remember that permit test?). Afterward, you receive a license that allows you to purchase psychedelics for use however and wherever you see fit1. The license could be revoked for any number of infractions, just as we do for drunk drivers.

I got a lot of shit on Reddit for suggesting any form of gatekeeping. Why should someone’s first trip have to be at a government-approved facility? Why not with your parents, or a community of practice? Why not wherever or however one wishes, so long as they aren’t harming anyone else?

In a vacuum, and in the core of my being, I agree. A paragraph that got cut from the piece, but that I feel is still the most relevant case for broadly legalizing psychedelics:

Beyond cost-benefit calculations that weigh risks and rewards of wider access, some psychedelic advocates point to a deeper rationale for legalization: cognitive liberty, which reimagines access to psychedelics as a basic human right. On this view, the right to use non-addictive substances in the peaceful stewardship of one’s own consciousness is a fundamental freedom that continued prohibition violates. 

But these things are path dependent, and advance iteratively through the adjacent possible.

Also, in the course of my research, I found out that cognitive liberty does not poll well, which is one reason why advocates working on the legal end of things have sort of abandoned it as a path towards legalization. But licensed legalization feels like a sensible stepping stone from the current adult-use model shaping up in Oregon and Colorado. Would love to hear if folks see any others floating around.

IV. Loose ends

I’ll be at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver later this month. If you’re gonna be there, say hello! I also seem to be Vox’s ‘psychedelic guy’ at the moment, so if you have any thoughts on what deserves wider readership in the scene, I’d love to hear.

For unrelated psychedelic content, my conversation with Chris Letheby on his ‘self-unbinding’ account of high-dose psychedelics continues to inform how I understand the space. But to add contrast, Anna Ciaunica has a fun paper out arguing that in deep contemplative experiences of selflessness, psychedelic or otherwise, a minimal form of the self is never actually lost. Whatever you experience in your mind, the homeostatic processes that keep your body churning along remain uninterrupted, and thankfully so. Unless you die the sort of death that consciousness does not return from, but that’s a different trip.

Until next time,
Oshan

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Hello, fellow humans.

Today, some notes on catching a strange advanced meditative state in the lab, and rethinking poverty. But first.

• Since my last dispatch, we’ve finally launched the full version of the Library of Economic Possibility. This will get a newsletter of its own, but for now, feel free to check that out if you’re interested in the world of policies to actually design a better social structure, or general knowledge-management. There’s a bit of a user’s guide in our launch announcement.

• I released a new episode of the Musing Mind Podcast. I got to speak with the sociologist Eran Fisher about algorithms, subjectivity, and both their threats and prospects for emancipation.

Ok, in we go.

Meditation lore is full of stories that mere Western mortals may find unbelievable. But sometimes we get a delightful bone to throw our skepticism: we find someone able to enter strange, advanced meditative states on command, and willing to do so while enmeshed in a host of neuroscience gizmos.

Here is one such instance. A few weeks ago, researchers published a paper attempting to build a conceptual framework for preliminary data that weaves between ancient Buddhist philosophy and modern cognitive neuroscience. They’re trying to make sense of something very, very strange: nirodha samāpatti, or “cessation attainment.”

From a couple thousand years ago, the Mahāvedalla Sutta tells us that one disciple of the buddha asked another, more experienced disciple:

“What’s the difference between someone who has passed away and a mendicant who has attained the cessation of perception and feeling?”

The disciple answers:

“When someone dies, their physical, verbal, and mental processes have ceased and stilled; their vitality is spent; their warmth is dissipated; and their faculties have disintegrated. When a mendicant has attained the cessation of perception and feeling, their physical, verbal, and mental processes have ceased and stilled. But their vitality is not spent; their warmth is not dissipated; and their faculties are very clear. That’s the difference between someone who has passed away and a mendicant who has attained the cessation of perception and feeling.”

The claim here is, again, pretty strange: advanced meditators can attain a state — cessation — where all perception, feeling, and mental processes have stopped. This sounds like death, but it isn’t. Their vitality is not spent. Instead, it’s more like going under general anesthesia. Consciousness switches off, extinguishing without a trace. But only temporarily. Meditators capable of doing this are said to predetermine the amount of time. So they may set the intention of entering cessation for 3 days. And for 3 days, all subjective experience will vanish. The body goes rigid, and you can’t shake them awake. Then, 3 days later, consciousness switches back online.

But instead of emerging woozy and disoriented, like anesthesia recipients, meditators emerge crisp, clear, and refreshed. So this claim isn’t even “advanced meditators can replicate the effects of general anesthesia without the drugs,” it’s more like, “advanced meditators can do something even better than general anesthesia: total and temporary cessation of all conscious experience, but it leaves you refreshed instead of woozy.”

In the paper, they describe what it’s like to awaken from a cessation:

A typical description of alterations of consciousness following nirodha [a sort of micro-cessation, whereas adding samāpatti indicates a longer-term version] may include: a sense of increased clarity, less grasping of experience (i.e., de-reification), increased energy and vibrancy, “openness” of mind and emotions, greater mindfulness, increased cognitive flexibility, less self-centeredness, less concern for the past or future, just to name a few.

This is not the fugue of post-anesthesia. How could someone induce the effects of general anesthesia from within, and without any drugs? And why would it be so beneficial?

The guy who the researchers recently found who can do this on command presented as a very nice, unremarkable guy. He spoke of his cessations like a perfectly fine thing, but no more or less fine than the myriad other fine things one might notice. Birds, trees, a quick and disarming smile. It was encouraging that he wasn’t selling his cessation capability like snake oil.

Here’s what they did:

“…we used EEG to examine the neural correlate of nirodha in an adept meditator with over 6000 hours spent in meditation retreats. In this case, what the participant considers nirodha was observed during vipassana/open-monitoring/insight meditation practice…this meditator reported nirodha as a momentary extinction of experience that was followed by profound alterations of consciousness, a sort of ‘reset’ that is characterized by mental clarity. In the study, we employed a neurophenomenological approach where our phenomenologically trained subject systematically evaluated the mental and physiological processes relevant to nirodha as he experienced them, and these evaluations were used to classify and select 37 high-grade nirodha events for subsequent EEG-based analysis.”

Before getting into what they found, let’s slide over to poverty for a second.

Poverty is still a big thing in the US, but also, maybe it shouldn’t be

A new book about poverty by the sociologist Matthew Desmond is making the rounds, inspiring many and pissing others off in apparently equal proportions. I think it’s excellent, despite making a few strange choices that unfortunately give critics a valid bone to pick that ultimately distracts from the larger message that’s a lot less controversial.

Matt Bruenig of People’s Policy Project did a video review of the book, wherein he made a few points that are shifting how I’m thinking about poverty.

Poverty is a location in the system, not a group of people.

On the statistical aggregate, poverty is not a static group composed of the same people year after year. People in poverty frequently get out of poverty, and perhaps fall back in later on over the course of their lifetime.

The point is that talking about “the poor” could actually feed into the very anti-welfare rhetoric that undermines serious anti-poverty efforts. Because “the poor” conjures the image of a fixed group of people. This makes it easier to imagine “the poor” as an unchanging demographic marked by laziness, lethargy, addiction, or whatever other debunked idea one might still hold.

Instead of a fixed group of people, poverty is a fixed location in the system. That means the way to address it may not be through targeting policies towards “the poor,” but paving over the location of poverty altogether.

Poverty is mostly not an issue of low wages1

Also on the statistical aggregate, there seems to be a conflation between low-wage workers and poverty. People who earn any sort of wages make up only a small minority of those who are in poverty.

Most people in poverty have no exposure to wages at all. For example, 84% of the Americans in poverty in 2016 were children, elderly, disabled, students, or caregivers. Together, the categories of employed + unemployed only constituted 16% of the poor, meaning issues of low wages could only (directly) affect 16% of those in poverty (note that this doesn’t include part-time work, so the numbers are fuzzy).

To be sure, the condition of low wage work and workers in America needs addressing (though things are improving at the bottom of the wage distribution for the first time in a long time these days!). But Bruenig’s point is that we shouldn’t conflate that issue with “poverty.”

So if we understand poverty as a location that primarily afflicts non-workers, how do we pave over it?

Back to the neuroscience of cessations.

Some preliminary neuroscience on cessations

So, what the heck is going on in the brain of someone who has meditatively switched off their consciousness for some period of time? We can break this down into two lenses: measurements of what’s going on in the brain taken with neuroscience gizmos, and speculation as to what’s going on in the mind.

On the brain front, preliminary findings center on the synchrony and desynchronization of brainwave activity. Since brains deal primarily in electrical impulses, you can measure neural activity by measuring electrical activity (with EEG, for example). Brainwaves are just rhythmic and repetitive patterns of this neural activity. Depending on how quick or slow the brainwaves are, they get some different names.

Synchrony refers to how many of the brain’s individual neurons are emitting activity at the same frequency2. The more neurons firing in the 8 - 12 hz range, which is known as the alpha range, the more ‘alpha synchrony' in overall brainwave activity (alpha is the most common frequency that dominates during ordinary consciousness).

The researchers found that about 20 seconds before a cessation, alpha wave synchrony begins decreasing. It bottoms out during the cessation, and after emerging from it, alpha activity begins winding up again.

We don’t have the actual data from this yet — that’s forthcoming in a different paper. But we do have something. One of the researchers from the paper (Ruben Laukkonen, who I’ve interviewed on the podcast before) shared an image of brain wave recordings from a Muse headband that records brainwaves (it’s a commercial headband, so very rudimentary, but still) from someone who claimed to be able to enter cessations on demand. In that data, not only alpha, but all brainwaves dropped off during cessation:

Referring to the preliminary data yet to be published, Ruben writes:

Specifically, the breakdown in coherence or synchrony was highest in cessation, followed by the nap, and then the control condition. So, cessation desynchronizes neural activity in the brain, but why, and what does this mean?

Now, we’re moving into the speculative lens on what’s going on in the mind.

Drawing on Integrated Information Theory, one of the defining features of consciousness is that each moment of experiences appears “integrated.” That is, all the innumerable tiny fragments of sensory experience I process in any given moment do not present in my conscious mind as a disintegrated mess of tiny sensory experiences. The mind weaves these altogether into coherent, unified wholes.

What I see as the “table” is actually a collection of tiny little sensory bits (color, shape, etc). Integrating bits of sensory experience into higher-order wholes makes us fantastically more capable of navigating the world in useful ways.

Here’s the key: desynchronizing neural activity (as cessation events appear to do) looks liker the inverse of integrating information.

Ruben explains:

“Desynchronizing neural activity results in a breakdown in information integration: a key mechanism that binds our experience together into a unified whole gets a mortal blow. Similar desynchronization results are found when you take enough propofol or ketamine.

Remember that all our sensory experiences reach the brain at different times and are processed in different areas. If these events are not successfully integrated it is not possible to have a coherent conscious experience. To disintegrate them is to disunify consciousness.”

The philosopher Chris Letheby once described this process to me as “unselfing” with particular attention to how high-dose psychedelics cause the self-model to unbind, explaining the varying senses of ego dissolution.

So the preliminary idea: desynchronizing neural activity may be a signature of unbinding integrated information. As Ruben explained in our conversation, you can unbind conscious experience at increasing levels of depth via meditation, reaching deeper into the underpinnings of the predictive mind.

Cessation, then, might occur when an advanced meditator drives the unbinding process deep enough into the most fundamental integrations of information, such that the entire experience of consciousness simply unravels, leaving no trace.

The authors speculate that cessation may be the dis-integration of the most basic expectation of the predictive mind: the expectation of awareness itself:

To summarize, NS [nirodha samāpatti] may reflect a final release of the expectation to be awake or aware. This could be brought about through (neuro)physiological changes that support a low-arousal, hypometabolic state."

And why is coming out of a cessation refreshing, rather than disorienting, like anesthesia? One option is to speculate that meditators maintain some sort of awareness that is more present while the mind reconstructs itself from the ground up. Put differently, meditators could potentially witness the process of mental reconstruction — taking the unbound pieces of the mind and weaving them all back together again into the integrated holes we ordinarily take for granted — in a way that anesthesia recipients miss.

Coming out of NS may follow a reverse path in which the mind is progressively reconstructed going from simple wake-fulness (e.g., pure awareness) to temporally shallow (e.g., sensory experience) to temporally deep predictive processes (e.g., thinking).”

This would make sense, given that one skill meditators are said to cultivate is precisely this sort of ‘witnessing’ consciousness, an awareness of awareness. The further down the meditative path one gets, the more they’re said to integrate this mode of awareness into their ordinary baseline.

Another somewhat related possibility is that the cessation event functions as a sort of “precision reset” on the priors that constitute the predictive mind. You can think of these priors as assumptions the mind is so sure of that it takes them as given. They thereby elide conscious reflection (saving our attention for other, higher-order reflections). But different assumptions get assigned different “weights,” or confidence levels.

Maybe the cessation resets these confidence levels, which then allows for a different state-space of consciousness to enter into conscious reflection:

If priors undergo a precision-reset—the extent of which may be determined by the depth of the cessation—this would manifest as greater confidence in, and attention to, present moment sensory experience, or phenomenologically a sense of clarity and freshness, as if everything is new or as if “seen for the first time.” Or put simply, cessation would result in an experience of the present moment that is less conditioned by past beliefs.

Putting it all together:

Hence, one possibility is that cessation leads to a kind of inner reset of the precision-weighting landscape at higher-levels in the processing hierarchy, reducing one’s computational trust in priors that encode deep beliefs about (oneself in) the world—which have just been revealed to be highly vulnerable and volatile in light of cessation—and hence increasing the vividness, attention, and confidence, associated with sensorial data. In essence, this represents a shift in the system such that the generative model is driven by bottom-up input more than top-down expectations.

As I wrote about in the last newsletter on a general theory of spirituality, it would be naive to equate “more bottom-up processing” with the totality of spirituality. It’s half the story, at best. Once you’ve fiddled with your ‘generative model’ of the world such that it’s increasingly sensitive to bottom-up input, you don’t necessarily want to live in that state forever (neither do I think you can, the very slope of how cognition works is to reify bottom-up data into hardened, top-down concepts, because that’s an incredibly useful evolutionary trick). Instead, you can ask: how do I want to rebuild my top-down expectations?

Paving over poverty

The economist Thomas Sowell makes the argument somewhere that progressives are too wound up about poverty and inequality because they use statistics that are snapshots of a single moment in time. Sowell argues that it’s better to look at poverty over time, and that when you do so, the disparities shrink. People who are in poverty do not always remain in poverty. People who have low earnings are often young, and make more money as they get older.

This is somewhat true. Many people who are in poverty at some point in their lives tend to exit poverty later on. Snapshots of inequality miss the natural earnings lifecycle of a career.

This is important, but not because it dismisses progressive concerns about poverty or inequality. This just furthers the point that poverty is a location in the system, not a static group of people.

When one person climbs out of poverty, there’s another who fills in. The issue is how deep that place is, how suffused with depravity and despair those depths are, and how those experiences leave indelible marks on the lives — and minds — of those who pass through.

The issue is that things could simply be otherwise. We could devise a generous social safety net that fills in the depths, such that being in the lower end of the income distribution is not a miserable, damning existence amidst a country so flush with resources. We could provide an unconditional child allowance, as many other rich countries do, drastically reducing child poverty. And since child poverty is one of the biggest categories of those in poverty overall, this would also make big progress on aggregate poverty itself.

Instead, we remain caught on assigning personality traits to a demographic that doesn’t actually exist, at least not how our ordinary language invites us to imagine. Joe Manchin single-handedly drove 2.7 million children back into poverty, a corrosive location that we could simply decide will no longer exist.

Cessation of poverty

Cessations occur by progressively desynchronizing neural activity until consciousness unravels entirely, without a trace. When Desmond advocates for poverty abolitionism, I imagine an economic variety of cessation.

Via careful policy interventions, we could desynchronize all the various life-paths and economic conditions and individual behaviors from the location of poverty, until there is simply no path left that leads from being an American citizen to living in poverty3.

Just like sufficient desynchronization of neural activity eventually reaches a point where consciousness just disappears, sufficient desynchronization of any form of life with incomes below the poverty threshold would eventually lead to the entire location of poverty falling off the map of the U.S. To deepen the cessation, we could simply raise the poverty line, and do it over again.

Tying together things like cessation and poverty is one of my particularly weird interests — but through this newsletter and the podcast, I’ve learned there are plenty of others out there. This collective readership is far more inventive than myself alone, so why not leverage that?

I’m going to start a Substack chat thread for any thoughts, responses, or ideas of their own folks might have to drawing together disparate things like cessation and poverty, or contemplative science and economics. This can also help me decipher if these Substack features are worthwhile.

Here is a link to the chat, go nuts. Stranger the better.

Until next time,
Oshan

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A General Theory of Spirituality (GTS) is afoot. The secular West has been trying to figure out how to talk about spirituality for decades, how to bring it into the domain of polite conversation and scientific language and academic research funding and the God-is-dead world. The GTS is the most promising, though incomplete, step I’ve seen.

The GTS I’m talking about is from Shamil Chandaria’s talk at Oxford, and subsequent conversations unpacking how predictive processing and meditation can spiral into a full-blown explanation of consciousness, the perennial philosophy, and enlightenment.

The GTS goes something like this.

…

GTS, phase I: deconstruction

First, you deconstruct your conscious awareness, which we now like to talk about as a predictive processing system that’s driven by the free energy principle to minimize uncertainty.

You can use various technologies of transcendence to put this system to sleep—meditation, psychedelics, prayer, good therapy, maybe even baking. For example, you can trick your mind to lose interest in its predictions by sitting very quietly and focusing on the tip of your nose, and then dropping that focus altogether and sinking back into the newly quiet and serene mind, all the way until you encounter the ground of that entire generative model, the ground of awareness.

Now, with the deconstructed mind at ease, you’re simply lying on this ground. You can rub your hands along its surface like Jim Carrey when he reaches the edge of the world in The Truman Show.

If you’re familiar with Aldous Huxley’s idea of the Perennial Philosophy, this ground is it. In the introduction, he writes:

“The metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being — the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the Perennial Philosophy may be found among the traditionary lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.”

But the GTS says that the perennial philosophy is only half the story. Humankind’s final end is not to simply bask in the suchness of the “transcendent Ground of all being.” After the ecstasy, the laundry, as Jack Kornfield wrote. After hitting the absolute ground of consciousness, emptiness, you reenter the marketplace.

In predictive processing terms (the native language of the GTS), you then engage in a process of reconstructing your high-level priors, where very real differences emerge in how that perennial ground is embodied depending on the context of how and why and for what you’re reconstructing the system.

…

GTS, phase II: reconstruction

Now, you’re no longer stuck together as a single being with the predictions your mind is always making (I should clarify that here, “predictions” means your subjective experience of the world). Chris Letheby described this to me as “unselfing.” You notice how they’re constructed in real time. You are also one of these ongoing constructions, so you can’t just shake them off1.

But with this new unselfy ability to notice the ongoing construction, you can participate. You can exert some agency. You can fiddle with the priors that uphold your hierarchical model of the world like someone moving Jenga logs around, reconfiguring the stack.

You can tilt your predictive models — the contents and even textures of your consciousness — towards whatever patterns of perception you’d prefer. Love, wisdom, well-being, agency, or maybe a general sense of Deep Okayness as an organism.

But if you’re wondering whether the GTS has a way of sorting and ranking these various goals, these various different ways of being that you might choose to tilt yourself towards, you will be disappointed. It does not, and this is a problem.

…

Extracting technologies of transcendence but discarding their ethical contexts leaves a big hole

Here’s where the GTS, a secular and Western spin on one of humankind’s oldest themes, still comes up short. How should we choose what to reconstruct ourselves towards? Whither shall we anneal ourselves?

Answers to these questions tend to exist in the larger cultural and ethical milieu where deconstructive practices are highly developed. The various technologies of transcendence we might use for phase I — meditation, psychedelics, prayer, ritual — all came to us via extraction from rich social, cultural, and ethical contexts.

We’ve taken the tools for transcendence but discarded the ethics, and are left wondering how to make up the gap. We’re deconstructing ourselves without a map.

…

Should we reprogram ourselves, or should we reprogram the social worlds that produce our-selves?

Here’s where a somewhat common but quite important critique comes into play, especially if we don’t tread carefully.

The gist of the GTS is this: life can be tough, and you’ll probably acquire some kinks in your generative models of the world that do not serve you, or you would prefer were otherwise. Maybe you still hold back your opinions in public because that one shithead made fun of you in 4th grade in front of the class. Maybe you lived through violence at a young age, and it continues to define how you relate to others. But have no fear, you can deconstruct these priors, sprawl out on the ground of awareness, and reprogram your predictive mind in ways that are kinder, stronger, or wiser than how the world made you.

In other words, the GTS can shift focus towards learning how to reprogram your-self, rather than reprogramming the world that produced the very kind of self that called for reprogramming in the first place.

It might actually draw people and energy away from the project of building a social reality that helps foster flourishing for all, rather than only for those who manage to undergo regimes of spirituality.

If we can just reprogram ourselves with greater and greater degrees of skillfulness, why reprogram the social world, which is comparatively far more difficult?

There are a number of things to say here. One: the idea that one can only focus on either themselves or the social world is wrong. These two are of course interwoven and available for simultaneous action.

Two: it takes a great degree of luck, privilege, and favorable circumstance to find yourself in the kind of life where you can undergo the full regime prescribed by the GTS. And our lives are all hitched together—for every tech entrepreneur with millions in the bank going on meditation retreats and ayahuasca journeys and diets and various gizmos measuring their metabolic age, there’s an entire subnivean world of poor, laboring Americans whose lives allow very little time, bandwidth, capital, or energy for daily guided meditations with Rob Burbea’s talks (which are excellent) and ayahuasca sessions (not to mention the global tangle of souls who sustain our lifestyles).

Evan Thompson has a nice take here:

“It strikes me as more consumerist, capitalist appropriation of meditation as a kind of narcissistic personal experience,” he said. “It’s about my enlightenment attained through techno-enhancement. Call that enlightenment if you want, but enlightenment in a richer sense is about a profound transformation not of yourself just as an isolated individual but of your relationship to other human beings in the world. It’s social.”

- (From Sigal Samuel’s piece on new neurotechnologies)

We flourish together, or not at all.

So what to do? I believe that GTS could be a force for good, and may continue to grow in its power. But it’s unfinished. It needs an ethical framework, a cultural container, and a social dimension to expand beyond the atomized individualism of late modernity.

Consciousness is social (I mean this literally, as in it arises from a fundamentally relational substrate, and makes no sense as an atomized, isolated thing), and we need a General Theory of Spirituality that recognizes and reconstructs it as such.

…

An ethics of Care

Since GTS uses the language and ontology of cognitive science, we might as well look for an ethical framework with the same language. So here’s one option, why not.

A really surprisingly diverse group of academics wrote a paper titled Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence. The basic idea is that “care,” defined in highly specialized terms, offers an approach to ethics that can fit not only humans, but the incoming world of highly diverse and novel living systems, from hybrid beings that are part-human-part-machine to AI’s that pass the Turing Test.

“We propose a central concept as a key invariant across these fields: Care (a metric focused on motivation, stress, and goal-directedness of agents). If stress is the manifest discrepancy between current and optimal conditions, ‘Care’ can in turn be defined as concern for stress relief, and ‘intelligence’ as the degree of capacity for identifying and seeking such relief.”

The big idea here is that intelligence (the capacity to close the gap between a living system’s present state and desired state) is not confined to the individual. Instead, care drives intelligence outwards, which actually expands the scope of intelligence itself (by expanding the spatiotemporal scale of the goals that an intelligent system pursues).

“Whereas the drive to reduce one’s own stress is a primitive and universal ingredient in cognition and intelligence, the inclusion of others’ stress as a primary goal necessarily increases the cognitive boundary of an individual and scales its intelligence.”

And tying it all together (also I spoke with Michael Levin on the podcast, one of the authors, if you’d like to dig deeper):

“Above all, the concept of Care provides a strong and fundamental link between practical strategies that will enhance engineering capacities and a way to develop a mature system of ethics that will be essential for a future in which highly diverse sentient beings must coexist and thrive together.”

An ethics of care is nothing new (great Philosophize This episode if you want another angle). But the paper begins to translate the ethics of care into the same cognitive science language as the GTS.

I’m not sure how well they might fit together, or whether they’d have any gravitas beyond the walls of academia. But before we become a writhing mass of deconstructed organisms with no collective schema for whatever is worth reconstructing ourselves towards, it might be wise to find out.

Because this is another paperclip maximizer threat—the drive to deconstruct could overtake humanity before we develop an ethical map that motivates any shared direction of reconstruction, leaving us all unbound and wandering along the ground of awareness, roving an eternal present like wraiths tracing the surface of the void. We’ve seen there’s nothing intrinsic to these technologies of transcendence that bend them towards inherently virtuous ends2. Greatly accomplished meditators still sexually abuse others. Psychedelics pose no intrinsic threat to capitalism—they can just as well be great productivity boosters.

A matured GTS will require real Buddha’s to learn how to build up from the ground of Being for good, for each other, together.

Updates:

— Next episode of the podcast is set! I'll be speaking with Eran Fisher, author of Algorithms and Subjectivity: The Subversion of Critical Knowledge. If you have any questions or thoughts around how the influx of algorithmically-created knowledge is transforming consciousness, reach out & let me know.

— LEP is finally set to launch this month. I'm fiendishly excited about this. If you have your own platform/newsletter you'd be willing to help spread the word on for our launch, please reach out. You can hop on LEP's newsletter if you want to stay tuned.

— I'm working on a long-form piece for Vox on 'psychedelics beyond psychiatry.' There's been plenty of attention, funding, and legalization efforts looking at the potential psychedelics hold for treating mental illness. But of course, psychedelics can offer something more to our lives than the next generation of psychiatric medicine. As Huxley put it, it is “to be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception,” to experience consciousness not as “an animal obsessed with survival,” or “a human obsessed with words and notions,” but to “directly and unconditionally” apprehend the “burning brightness of unmitigated Reality.”

If you have any thoughts around this, I'd love to hear.

Until next time,
Oshan

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Hello, fellow humans.

A few years ago, some apparently enlightened spiritual teacher was giving a talk in my dad’s attic. Bodies huddled, enthralled. People gripped little yellow mugs, sending herby vapors aloft. My dad sat near the back, with a smirk that he did not show outwardly, though I could see it through his skin. Afterwards, the guru took questions. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but my dad asked something like: “What is the ultimate truth?” The guru responded: “There is that which changes, and that which does not. That which does not change is the truth.” Dad sat back, pleased.

…

A recent change in my life: in December, I received a year-long fellowship to join the Future Perfect team at Vox. I’ll spend 2023 writing about economics, consciousness studies, more expansive varieties of progress, and whatever else gets caught in my web.

I’m excited to join Vox in general, and Future Perfect in particular. I suspect we’ve hardly begun to discover how digital media will transform our relationship to information, and Vox is as good as large organizations get at charting this frontier. Whether my podcast, or building the Library of Economic Possibility, or even my little Research Garden, I’ve spent the last few years fiddling. Getting a year to fiddle at Vox will be fascinating.

And Future Perfect itself is a unique project. The origin story goes something like this: Dylan Matthews was writing one of those banal pieces that mostly gets written because journalism is pegged to the news cycle, forcing it to write about whatever’s happening, whether or not it’s important in more existential terms.

Thinking to himself “God … why does this even matter?”, Dylan said something to his editor, Ezra Klein, who responded: “If we only wrote about stuff that’s really, really important, we’d write about nothing but, I don’t know, malaria.”

A short while after, Future Perfect was born. Its mission: “…to carve out a space, away from the regular news cycle, to cover and think about crucially important issues that are currently undercovered.”

I have never thought of myself as a journalist, nor imagined becoming one with much hint of desire1. But Future Perfect was born of a dissatisfaction with the banality and short-termism of ordinary journalism. What if we actually just wrote about ‘things that matter’, insulated from the imperatives of news-cycle coverage, advertisement dollars, and engagement metrics?

“Things that matter” is vague, which is precisely what makes this exciting: working with the team offers an opportunity to participate in defining that scope. What does matter, and how can we best serve it2? What is the ‘Good’, and how can we develop institutions that align it with the churn of progress?

I have much to say on the matter, and more to learn.

…

So, that’s Future Perfect.

Above, I mentioned that the thought of becoming a journalist had never really crossed my mind. Throughout the interview process, I reflected on that.

The philosopher Peter Sloterdijk declared it time we recognize humans as the being who result from repetition. Everything we do is a form of practice, a repetition. Some part of me was concerned: as a form of practice, what does journalism do to writing? Is journalism a death sentence to literary merit? I’ve always felt that writing, at its best, is basically what Annie Dillard managed to do. As a practice, I’ve wanted to develop my writing in a sort of ‘Annie Dillard, but economics’ direction. It never occurred to me that journalism might be a good environment to do that. And honestly, maybe it isn’t. But Future Perfect’s particularities blur the lines just enough.

Also.

By the time Walt Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, he’d already been a journalist for 15 years, publishing short pieces on everything from politics to bodybuilding. At age 23, he ran a paper called the New York Aurora. In his late 30’s, he spent two years as a full-time editor for the Brooklyn Daily Times.

Or, consider David Foster Wallace. Though he took great care to disavow the label of “journalist”, some of his most enduring pieces – tomes aside – were those commissioned by a magazine, sending him out to react to, and report on, the world, whether a lobster festival, a luxury cruise, or a tennis match.

There’s also Barbara Ehrenreich, who probably did more for the working poor with her book reporting on low-wage Americans, Nickel and Dimed, than most economists.

I could go on – John McPhee, Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, Tom Wolfe.

All these writers comprise a tradition known as literary journalism. In The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism, the editors ask just what ‘literary’ journalism means:

“Our five-word answer would be: thoughtfully, artfully, and valuably innovative. The ‘innovative’ is key, for two reasons. First, it is our view that like much else in the twentieth century, journalism has been an object of mass production, turned out according to codified standards and in agreed-upon shapes. These standards are in many ways useful, yet they are also limiting, and for a writer to cast one or more aside can be liberating.”

One reason I was wary towards journalism was that I’d (naively) grown to conflate all journalism with its mass-produced strain. The kind where the fitting of word-to-format is so blaring that the words themselves lose intrigue, knowing how enslaved they are to the market-tested structure of what keeps eyeballs reading and fingers clicking.

I’d grown to equate journalism with writing where you skip as much as you can, skimming only for the scoop. To my mind, writing – real, literary writing – was much more profound. Art! Craft! A reprieve from the banality of everyday life! Writing is a practice of puncturing that banality, cleaving it open with words that are sharp and surprising and variably shaped and atmospheric, inviting more meaningful, subterranean currents to burst out and engulf us, and plunge us into something richer, and more meaningful, and more redeeming of being alive. Real, literary writing is a gust of fresh air that pierces the stale oxygen of everyday life.

But economists formalized what adrenaline junkies and drug addicts have long known: there is a law of diminishing returns. The same practice–or at least, the same structure and form–can only enliven us so many times before we require greater quantities to spark the same magnitude of affect.

And so, it makes sense that “the innovative is key” in literary journalism. You cannot simply uncover a template that works, and recycle it across every piece of media until the end of time, and assume that it will have the continued effect of peeling back banality’s skin, unleashing life’s pulse, and bathing us in some redemptive bath of a feeling, an exorbitant sufficiency, that revives our delight in being alive, if only for a quick moment.

…

Writing – at its best – can deliver this feeling. So can dancing, love, or dumb luck. But having stewed on this a bit, I think that journalism – at its best – can do that, and maybe a smidge more. If writing can conjure that feeling, journalism can, I wager, I hope, nudge the world more towards normalizing it. Or: can more directly affect the structure of the social world so as to increase hedonic baselines for all.

Journalism is worldly, mundane by nature. It tackles questions of policy, government, bureaucracy, institutions, civil associations, technologies. Conveniently, these are all tools to build a more beautiful world. We can inch the median human experience closer towards a communion with that pulse of life that is always present. That pulse, that rapturous feeling, does not change, but our societies do. And we can either come into greater relationship with it, or not. We can culture more resonant relationships to the world, or let them go mute, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa would say.

And as luck would have it, I suspect moving in this direction is still simple enough. We’ve been slow to pick the low hanging fruit. As Danielle Carr wrote in the NYT about reification and mental health, a general strategy may look something like “ensuring that more people can live less stressful lives.”

However nebulous things might get towards the upper echelons of enlightenment, however difficult it is to discover some unchanging ground of awareness, to encounter the Truth that does not change, it’s far less difficult to find strategies that can at least move the needle in that direction, given how far we have to go. This, reader, is a tractable project.

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

– Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

This place is beautiful, and it’s vile. And for the upcoming year, I’ve stumbled into an opportunity. My attitude will be something like this. If there is an ultimate truth worth spending one’s life searching for at this moment in time, it might have something to do with building more affordable, beautiful housing; abolishing precarity from the everyday experience of all citizens, no matter where they fall on the income, wealth, or education distribution; extending healthcare coverage to all citizens that does not burst your entire being into flames if you’re forced to interface with it; increasing the freedom citizens have to choose how they spend their time, rather than having labor markets impose deadening forms of life; building tools and technologies for conviviality; retrofitting the world’s energy infrastructure to help avert the worst of climate change; ending factory farming and taking the welfare of all sentient life a little more seriously; …..you get the idea.

I’ll still meditate most nights, and maintain a healthy skepticism towards utilitarianism, because despite all this, I get the guru’s drift, and think he wasn’t entirely wrong. In the end, I think Alan Watts hit it on the nose:

“My point was, and has continued to be, that the Big Realization for which all these [spiritual] systems strive is not a future attainment but a present fact, that this now-moment is eternity, and that one must see it now or never.”

Meanwhile, and to make the Big Realization a little easier, we can make this place beautiful. We could start with reinstating the Child Tax Credit, without those work requirements that carve out the poorest Americans from receiving benefits and make their lives significantly less beautiful than they might otherwise be.

Until next time,
Oshan.

A quick note on other projects: the fellowship is full time, but both LEP and the podcast live on. LEP recently received a grant, so we put off going public to make a few improvements first (reach out if you'd like to test-drive them). The podcast has averaged a new episode every 2-3 months. I expect that cadence to hold, but no promises.

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Hello, fellow humans.

I’ve just published a new podcast conversation on ‘emancipatory social science’ with Christian Arnsperger.

I’m jazzed about this one. It provides a handy framework where my weird interests in ‘consciousness’ and ‘economics’ naturally come together, and in a way that makes at least a modicum of sense.

i.e., if you’re interested in reducing the suffering of all sentient life (yes, you, Buddhists), or amplifying the blips of joy and elation and ecstasy our present configurations of mind already bear witness to, or generally think that ‘progress’ is ultimately grounded in phenomenology, and you think that a strong leverage point for doing so at scale is to design an economy in support of these projects (or at least, un-design the present configuration that actively obstructs them), then you might enjoy the conversation.

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What is emancipatory social science?

I’m drawing on the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright here. In 2007, he gave a lecture outlining a framework for emancipatory social science (on which he expanded in his 2010 book, Envisioning Real Utopias). Here are his terms:

1. Emancipatory: identifies a central moral purpose in the production of knowledge – the elimination of oppression and the creation of the conditions for human flourishing.

2. Social: implies that human emancipation depends upon the transformation of the social world, not just the inner self (once again, I’m looking at you, Buddhists).

3. Science: recognizes the importance of systematic scientific knowledge – not just philosophy and social criticism – about how the world works for this task.

Further, he suggests that emancipatory social science (henceforth, ESS) has three main tasks:

1. Diagnosis & critique

2. Envisioning alternatives

3. A theory of transformation

ESS has its roots in Marxist theory, and is especially derivative of the Frankfurt School’s work in critical theory during the 20th century. But ESS is, and must become, larger than Marxism.

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Arnsperger’s ESS

Wright’s critique of capitalism, and so launchpad for ESS, is quintessentially Marxist: capitalism simultaneously creates the potentials for universalized human flourishing, while also actively obstructing their realization.

It’s an insidious trick, if you think about it. Like dangling a fresh branch of catnip in front of your wide-eyed cat, but holding it to just too high for her to reach. The potential is clearly perceptible. But its realization is structurally withheld. She might be better off never having seen the catnip.

Christian’s work provides a different look. In Full-Spectrum Economics, he uses the spiritual philosopher Ken Wilber’s integral framework to argue that economics, with its computational approach, excludes the interior dimension of human life. You can model behaviors, but you can’t model consciousness.

Critical Reflection

You can model how I make my decision to purchase healthcare, but you can’t model what it feels like to make that decision, or the true depths of despair that come from getting fucked by medical bills.

You can model my subjective evaluation of how my life is going, on a scale from 1-10, but you can’t model my nagging sense that the entire system is askew, that something is deeply wrong with the kind of lives we’re all generally incentivized & nudged to live. You cannot model a preference for an altogether different system, if that preference has no actionable behaviors that might convey it. Preferences are bound by the systems they operate within.

He calls this “critical reflection” – a human’s capacity to harbor a critique of the system on the whole, despite their inability to express this critique in practice (i.e., in behaviors that are legible to modeling).

Existential Reflection

Critical reflection is a critique of systems – institutions, structures, policies. But there’s another dimension at play, the interior dimension on Wilber’s map.

Christian refers to this as existential reflection – a human’s capacity to formulate preferences regarding the relationship between the exterior systems in which they’re embedded, and the interior dynamics of their experience.

He also points to this as “anthropological malleability”:

This capacity, our ways of imagining and valuing different ‘ways of being human’1, is something that’s incredible difficult, or perhaps impossible, to capture in a computational model of how agents interact in an economy.

Christian’s argument is that from neoclassical economics to complexity economics, the inability of economic modeling to capture these two fundamental parts of the human experience has significant consequences.

Since methodologies reproduce their assumptions, such economic approaches will, to a degree, assume these kinds of critical and existentially reflection-less humans into being.

So, what to do instead?

...

ESS: Methodological Parity

We don’t need to reject modeling altogether. That would be silly, because modeling can be incredibly, if contextually, useful.

Instead, Arnsperger argues (as did David Sloan Wilson, my last guest) that we need to rebalance power between computational, sociological, anthropological, and philosophical approaches to doing economics.

Using models to support your claims is one, totally fine way of doing economics, or arguing for this unemployment policy over that one. But it should carry no epistemological superiority over, say, using sociological evidence of how other societies have provisioned for the disenfranchised, and qualitative data to support those claims2.

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ESS, In Practice: Critical Spirit

Great, but ‘emancipation’ is a grand word, and ‘confer social sciences more epistemological legitimacy’ vis-a-vis econometrics is an anticlimactic translation.

But our capacities for critical/existential reflection are not stymied because sociologists are getting thumped by econometrics. I think it’s much simpler than that.

If one lonely guy’s sense of critical reflection leaves him dissatisfied with the present organization of strategy, then you just have…one lonely, discontent guy. But if he were to meet 200,000 comrades who shared his sense of dissatisfaction, they might coalesce into a social force that can exert causal power over how the economy is organized.

As we detail in our conversation, I think the largest barrier to realizing our critical reflections in a way that matters is that most people simply lack the material security (let alone organizational know-how) to act on their sense that the system as a whole needs some rearranging. If engaging in a different way of life, one that reflects my internally-held values, even if they’re at odds with the system-on-the-whole, carries disproportionate costs, like risking basic financial security, or healthcare, or retirement accounts, then of course most people won’t actually behave in ways that reflect those values. We need to know we’ll have healthcare before we can mobilize a revolution (at scale)!

But, imagine a society where real choices between fundamentally different forms of life are actually, pragmatically viable for the average citizen. Then, critical reflections aggregate up into what Christian calls a society’s “critical spirit”.

Now, here’s one of my favorite ideas of his. Just as Hayek showed the way that prices operate in a ‘decentralized’ market economy, a society of actionable critical reflections gives rise to a similar coordination of normative signals:

“In the same way as market prices are a key emergent property of a complex adaptive system of narrowly instrumentally rational individuals, a key emergent property of a complex adaptive system of critically rational individuals is the social system’s … ‘‘critical spirit,’’ … critical spirit is not meant as a metaphor for some fuzzy or elusive spiritual entity. It is not a set of numerically measurable quantities such as prices. It nevertheless designates something quite definite, namely the overall ‘‘normative atmosphere’’ of the society, which allows individuals to form their initial aspiration for a better society and to flesh out this desire with critical theories which change through contacts with other, similarly active individuals.”

(Critical Political Economy)

…

If this resonates, you’ll enjoy the full conversation, where we explore a number of other elements/leverage points of ESS.

And if the idea of ESS resonates with you at all, I’m on the lookout for related resources/authors/bits that might add to it. Let me know if any related ideas come to mind, or folks doing work in an adjacent space.

…

Also, after a nice run buoyed by some beginner’s luck, the podcast received its first 1-star review.

Accordingly, I’d like to ceremonialize the event by asking that if you enjoy the podcast, consider leaving a rating and/or review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge difference in encouraging folks to give it a shot (and also in assuring potential guests that it might be worth their time).

Until next time,
Oshan

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Quick bits of news.

If you’ve been following my recent series on value theory and vitality, I recently published an essay with Return Magazine that condenses things into about 1,800 words. You can read it here.

Also, the next guest for the podcast is confirmed. I’ll be speaking with Christian Arnsperger, an economic anthropologist who wrote this synthesis of Ken Wilber’s integral theory and post-neoclassical economics. He’s sketching an integrally informed framework for what he – and Erik Olin Wright – would call an emancipatory social science. If you’re interested in his work, or in the conversation between integral philosophy and post-neoclassical economics, I’d love to hear any ideas/thought as I prepare.

Ok, in we go.

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Economies Produce and Distribute Potential

Brian Massumi writes that “Capital, as movement of potential, is the quality of money as transformational force, the force driving the system’s becoming.”

Hold on to this idea: money’s quality as a transformational force, a fluid movement of potential, its patterns of ebbing and flowing slowly, rhythmically, comprehensively giving shape to the system’s becoming.

The US economy produces and circulates a lot of this fluid and transformational force – money – every year. Nearly $20 trillion in 2019 alone. Imagine it like this: every year, we raise a dam from deep within the forest that releases all that money, spilling out across the topologically complex forest floor. It does not flow evenly, but in tune with the terrain.

Just about every corner of the ideological spectrum agrees on one thing: too much of it is getting stuck somewhere. It’s pooling and accumulating, leaving other parts of the forest floor dry and barren.

But very few groups can agree on where, exactly. We’re left with a maldistribution of potential.

…

Wealth vs. Housing Prices: Where’s the Snag?

In 2014, the economist Thomas Piketty published Capital In the 21st Century, making a now-famous case that money is getting stuck with the wealthy, the infamous 1%. If you create two categories – labor and capital – and map how much of the country’s annual income is going to each, you’ll see that capital is absorbing more and more of the overall production of monetary value.

For Piketty, “capital” is basically synonymous with “wealth”. It’s a broad definition that includes things like stocks, cash assets, houses, land, intellectual property, and interest. As a result of capital’s gravitational pull on all the fresh money the economy produces, he argues, we’re speeding towards a historic imbalance of wealth and power that will undermine democracy, society, and any sensible notion of justice.

Then, in probably the most-cited critique of Piketty’s work, the economist (at the time, graduate student) Matthew Rognlie argued that Piketty’s simple division of the economy into capital and labor was too blunt to see where things are really getting snagged.

Instead, you need to divide the economy into three categories by separating housing prices as a distinct category from “capital”. Once you do, you’ll see that actually, the capital share hasn’t increased at all through the postwar era. What has increased are housing prices.

From Rognlie’s paper. Note that with housing separated out, the returns on the rest of the “capital” category seem to have actually decreased:

Piketty’s work is often mobilized to argue that the wealthy 1% are the snag where value is getting stuck, and the response should be a globally coordinated effort to tax wealth. Rognlie argues this is far too broad: if we want to mitigate inequality, our focus should be more specific, on housing prices.

…

Look to the Land

But not so fast! Georgism (the economic philosophy inspired by the 19th century political economist Henry George) argues that Rognlie is committing the same mistake he criticizes Piketty for: using too blunt a tool to really see where all this economic value is getting stuck.

As Lars Doucet has recently articulated, housing prices can further be broken down into land value and the value of buildings + improvements built atop that land. Now, we’ve split the economy into four pieces:

i. Labor
ii. Capital
iii. Buildings + improvements
iv. Land

With this new category, it’s argued that in fact, buildings + improvements aren’t driving up capital share either, they aren’t the source of the snag. Instead, after separating it out, you’ll find that land value is where the economic value production is disproportionately accumulating, like a secret basement filling with water.

Here’s Lars giving an overview (should start at 7:38):

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Piketty vs. Rognlie

This is a compelling story. But as these things go, it isn’t that simple. Piketty mostly dismisses the Rognlie critique. Here he is in conversation with Tyler Cowen, who asked what he makes of it (should start at 19:44):

Piketty’s response is that real estate (including land values) isn’t responsible for driving up the top 1%, or 0.1%’s wealth portfolios, even if it is responsible for driving up wealth inequality more broadly. His focus is not on aggregate wealth inequality, but the distributional inequality, especially focused on what’s happening at the very top.

Again, he does agree that if you’re looking at aggregate wealth, real estate is a big deal, especially for the middle class. He references a paper where he & colleagues showed the decomposition of national wealth, confirming the magnitude of real estate (housing):

But if you’re interested in the distribution of wealth, with a focus on what’s driving up the portfolio’s of the world’s wealthiest people, Piketty argues that business/financial assets are far more significant than real estate.

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What do you care about?

As one does when they’re burrowing into a rabbit hole, I took to Reddit, in the hopes of better understanding the contours of the disagreement between Piketty and Rognlie (the fact that I’m linking Reddit should convey that if you’re looking for definitive answers, I don’t have them).

One response seemed to locate a crux of the issue nicely:

“At the end of the day, poor people being as badly off as they are has much more to do with land than it has to do with the 1%. US billionaires have made $2 trillion since 2019 and some of that is justly earned, non-rent, although of course some is due to monopoly patents. US homeowners made $9 trillion just in 2021 and that is 100% rent.”

I think this puts the main point of divergence on display. Cowen, Rognlie, & this Reddit post are interested in aggregate wealth inequality. Within that context, land seems to be a more significant factor than financial assets.

But Piketty is interested in more than just aggregate wealth inequality. He’s also concerned about democracy, education, and justice. And people concerned about those things tend to – rightfully, I’d add – feel that what’s going on at the very top of the wealth distribution is very important, even if it isn’t the largest explanatory factor behind rising inequality overall.

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Also, Rognlie’s numbers don’t look very Georgist

To confound things further, Rognlie’s numbers don’t really agree with the Georgist view. In his paper, Rognlie decomposed ‘housing’ into constituent parts, including separating land value out.

If you look at both lines for land, you’ll find neither are big contributors to the rising share of returns on capital. Instead, the key elements appear to be structures and equipment:

This discrepancy aside, even if Rognlie’s numbers aren’t very Georgist, their ultimate policy prescriptions are very Georgist-compatible. In his paper, he holds exclusionary zoning responsible for much of the rise in housing prices, and suggests that reforming them should be a primary focus for those interested in reducing wealth inequality.

Repealing exclusionary zoning is a practice that Georgists support (alongside land value taxation), and Piketty supports as well (alongside progressive wealth taxation).

The fact that there’s general policy agreement (or at least complementarity) among these disagreements raises an interesting question: why does this argument matter?

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There’s a lot of harmony here

If society today made sense, maybe we’d just have Piketty, Rognlie, and Nicolaus Tideman (or Doucet, or whoever your preferred Georgist representative might be) all sit down in a room, bring their datasets, and arrive at some shared understanding. This would be a great podcast.

But, alas. In lieu of that, I’ve arrived somewhere that’s far from the bottom of the rabbit hole, but deep enough that I don’t feel much need to continue digging.

We should progressively tax wealth, regardless of whether or not returns to non-housing capital are driving up capital’s share of national income. There’s more at stake in historically concentrated wealth than inequality alone.

We should repeal & reform exclusionary zoning practices, regardless of whether it’s returns on land values, or buildings and structures, or other improvements that’s driving up housing prices. Exclusionary zoning places a stranglehold on urban development.

And we should implement land value taxes, because it’s one of the great mistakes of modern market economies to have gone on this long without doing so.

Each of these complements the other. The bickering that remains is not to determine which policies are necessary, but where they fall on the priority list, and how to strategically allocate resources towards their realization.

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Economy as the conversion of potential into actual

The economy is a deterritorialized topology that gives shape and direction to the system’s becoming. And so, to our own. It's a socially constructed system by which we pattern the transformation of our potentials into actualities.

Each year, we produce great quantities of money, that transformational force that flows through the economy, its pathways given by the shape of the landscape. Labor digs the ravines and crevices. Tax policy sculpts the riverbanks and bends. Trees and objects populate the landscape according to land-use regulations. And vegetation – life – emerges most vigorously along the most watered pathways.

Capital, like water, is formless potential that molds itself to the topologies we have great agency in designing, and redesigning. This is how someone like Karl Marx could believe that given the right topologically constructed landscape, capital would flow, and accumulate, and burst straight through into its negation, into communism.

We are stewards of the landscape. Progressive wealth taxes, repealing exclusionary zoning regulations, and land value taxes are each symbiotic tools at our disposal. Our tools, used wisely, can create landscapes for more conviviality.

Let’s get to work.

Until next time,
Oshan.