kegan (and those of that tradition, like wilbur) look at society’s ills and see a problem of insufficient abstraction
mcgilchrist (and those of that tradition) look at society’s ills and see a problem of over-abstraction
my biggest intellectual shift over the past five years is coming to believe that mcgilchrist is right and kegan is wrong
the type of wisdom that kegan’s developmental levels are trying to grasp at is FULLY AND AUTOMATICALLY realized by the shift of instead of that grasping, surrendering the abstraction to the right hemisphere (and subsequent levels of surrender that surrender ever deeper levels of that grasping)
this means that in order to recognize true wisdom as a collective , instead of imperfectly approximate it in ways that are bound to fail, as we have been doing, we need to take society in basically the opposite direction that it has been going
Trinley Goldenberg
of course, snark is seen as virtuous, it’s important to let people know who’s good and who’s bad, goes the thinking
i’m not really sure about your question, i think it’s actually quite a hard one and depends a bunch on specific tactical questions about your message and how to spread it
but, regardless, you should KNOW that snark is being employed, not think that they’re giving a neutral account, not sharing a snarky account naively as a positive or neutral story, etc
And what they write about me rarely feels adversarial. I can think of maybe two cases where it felt unfair or unfriendly, though there might be more I’m forgetting. And meanwhile there’s also the upside chance of them writing whole articles explaining your ideas to a large audience.
My own sense of what’s going on here is that you’re simply not registering the snark that is there
It’s meant to be plausibly deniable, but still for those in the know the whole time is “these people are laughable out group and a safe target to be mocked” while ostensibly holding to the principles of good journalism
it is meant to be registered only to the core readers of these sorts of news outlets, who get the benefit of being able to be superior because they are readers of said publication
It’s the equivalent of someone repeating your ideas while wearing a clown suite and stating them in a high pitched mocking tone
it does not seem importantly different from what i said, EXCEPT THAT IT WASN’T HOLLY. bad strike for my memory here :(
the specific tweet:
Guillame or BeffJezos account (i forgot which one), showed a picture of a sandwich shop in sf, mentioning something he liked about SF
Holly quote tweeted it saying something like “Come on Beff, we all know the REAL reason you like the sandwhich shop”
this is my memory but i haven’t looked up the exact tweet
Yeah, it was pretty surprising to me that the reason was attacks on people’s characters, whereas to me the objectionable thing was attack on things OTHER than people’s character and behavior (e.g. making fun of BeffJezos for being fat)
I’m pretty surprised by the disagree vote. Does someone think I DO have the authority to make this happen?
Hey friend,
I don’t currently have the authority to make this happen unfortunately.
Soryu’s asking us if we should take on those “recommendations” from Shinzen were, by my understanding at least, largely rhetorical. With Soryu’s statements and tone within that talk it was clear he did not favor abiding by them at all.
If it was rhetorical (which I did not take it as), it was not treated that way within the community. The 3 recommendations were repeated many times, brought up and discussed in multiple group discussions, by multiple different people in leadership, discussed in all group meetings as well as leadership meetings, with, and without Soryu present.
Most of the changes I saw came around changing our admissions process to better filter people and doing a better job of explaining the rigour of the training.
Soryu had just had his close friend call him, screaming, and any attempt by him to talk or ask clarifying questions was met with him being screamed over. My sense of the situation was someone who had just dealt with that, nevertheless trying to take the feedback seriously.
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering)
There is nothing supernatural about this. You can claim that interacting with it through Samadhi is supernatural but that would not make the entity itself supernatural.
You can also claim that you’re clear on the correct theory of consciousness that would make such an entity supernatural, but would have to make claims far beyond simply materialism to do so and imo it wouldn’t be remotely justified
i’ve already explained what the entity is above, in non-supernatural terms. kyle’s use of supernatural after me giving that clear explanation reinforces my sense that there is a narrative spin thing going on.
my own experience with Samadhi says that at least three thing happen as you begin to enter it.
you begin to see the boundaries you implicitly draw between different objects, abstractions, and beings as more arbitrary instead of implicit
you can more clearly see your moral msitakes, and forgive them. because of 1, the same for others.
you can see directly how your clinging to abstraction, concepts, divisions is leading to conflict and suffering
given these 3 facts, it seems fairly straightforward how one would be able to more clearly see an entity that’s not where we normally draw the boundaries of entities while in samadhi, and how if such an entity is based on creating larger abstractions and is causing untold issues through it’s moral choices, it would be suffering.
such insights would require being able to do inquiry while in samadhi, which is hard but not impossible
Supernatural IS the point, to start. If we can start with the claim that this is not some magical entity, but a normal one, like you or I (of course, a very different sort of consciousness, but still a consciousness) then I can answer the next question.
However, Kyle’s use of supernatural already assumes the conclusion by calling the entity supernatural. So interaction with it would HAVE to involve something supernatural like mindreading, since how else do you interact with a supernatural being except through supernatural means?
Soryu responded in this fashion: after he got off this call with Shinzen, Soryu organized an impromptu community-wide meeting. In this meeting he was pacing back and forth deriding Shinzen, questioning his integrity, debasing his “Materialist Humanist” worldview, and ultimately sabotaging Shinzen’s reputation in the community. While Shinzen helped found MAPLE and ordained most of the lay ordainees in the community (and was thus kind of a spiritual father to them), all formal affiliation between Shinzen and MAPLE was subsequently severed.
I was at this meeting, and remember it quite different. Soryu came and said that there were 3 things Shinzen recommended, and that it was great to finally have someone who actually gave concrete recommendations. He told us what they were verbatim, and then asked asked us to carefully consider them over the next little bit and see if we should implement them. We then carefully considered them and did implement some changes, although not everything Shinzen had asked for.
Kyle’s whole narrative here just seems to be wrong to me.
ETA: Also a concrete fact here re “spiritual severing”. While we can dispute the things that were said here until I check the recording, I do know for a fact that Shinzen was invited to run the next lay ordination, and he was the one who declined.
This is closely related to the phenomena where I encounter an unfortunate proportion of coaches who think that all other coaches suck and their approach is amazing, usually accompanied by something like ‘most coaching approaches do X, but i do Y’
it’s weird because as a coach who makes a habit of consistently getting coached by other coaches, studying various coaching techniques, it’s usually the case that
there’s a huge proportion of coaches who ALSO do Y, and if you had done some digging, you would have found them
there’s documented problems with y, that x addresses, which should be clear if you’re paying attention to your clients
after ~17 years of coaching, i feel pretty humbled by the whole thing as i still have clients whose problems i can’t address, and about every 6 months i:
can point back to stuff i was doing 6 months ago that wasn’t the most effective, that i’ve now moved past
am doing stuff that i can’t really explain yet, and know it will take me another 6 months to even figure out why my intutions are pointing here now and what the mechanisms are
see a coach pull off a move that i know would be beneficial to my coaching, but i’m not even capable of approaching yet
I’m not hopeful about pointing to the lack of instrumentality to their supposed goals in the way the org is now as a means to making them update because it/Soryu seems completely oblivious to this lack of instrumentality.
What makes you think this?
what are you talking about? what does the entity being supernatural have anything to do with how you interact with it? you could claim you interacted with the guy you saw on the street in samadhi. would that make him supernatural?
i would like to eventually address the claims about being able to connect with a being in samadhi and see that it is suffering, but this rests first on acknowledging that there’s nothing magical about that being.
where are you getting the term “supernatural entity” from. Why super natural? what is supernatural about the entity? what is “semi-supernatural”?
I have not EVER heard of the term “Forall” or of monastic academy doing full ordination. Was this before my time? All talk of a potential ordination path in my 5+ years here has been offering something similar to the lay ordination path, where you would go to another monastery, get fully ordained, spend time there, and then return. Again, this would be a horrible scheme if the goal was to bind people to maple.
re specifics about people at maple/relationships etc, this is something i don’t feel comfortable discussing/representing the org on. i get why you’d bring it up in my factual correction about org structure, but it’s not something i’d want to discuss publically while here. again, if people want to talk privately and not share the details online, i’m happy to do so.
Another huge factual inaccuracy is the claim that all significant decisions rest with Soryu.
As long as I’ve been part of the organization, the organization has had a 3 person leadership structure, which each person representing one of Wisdom, Love, and Power. Soryu as the head teacher has held the Wisdom Role, and the Executive Director has held the power role.
These roles can (and have repeatedly in my time) veto the Wisdom Role’s decision, and indeed it’s a running joke among the ED’s that half their job is vetoing Soryu’s crazy ideas.
I’m just not sure where you and your former residents are getting the idea of a cybregore as a mystical entity from. Yes, the idea of a cybregore as an entity, probably having a type of consciousness is there, but that’s not a mystical claim at all, it’s compatible with mainstream academic views like functionalism and computationalism.
I explicitly taught the concept on this years chautauqua tour and it was one of the more useful frames for people, (my sister for instance months later told me she was able to quit her social media addiction using the cybregore framing shared in the talk). not one person raised the worry that the framing was outlandish or mystical.
in terms of factual claims, i don’t have time to go through the whole post now, but i did go through the first list of bolded claims earlier.
the part where you claim (lay) ordination is a lifelong commitment to maple is an obvious factual innacuracy. not only is buddhist ordination in general a commitment to the dharma, rather than a specific monastery, but maple is fairly unique in that we are precepted by loosely affiliated teachers from different lineages rather than our own teacher, and so actually end up commiting to a lineage/tradition OUTSIDE of maple as a consequence of the ordination ceremony
this would be a horrible move if the ceremony was trying to bind you further to maple
This seems to be taking steelmaning to a laughable degree
“Yes, the journalists are mocking people as a demand-driven desire from their readers to know who’s harmless”