Some years after making that decision, I’m much happier. My life is richer, and I’m doing more for others. Regularly, I react with positive disbelief when I look at what my life has become. It looks like I’ve been executing a genius strategy. But in reality, I am living in a state of ongoing confusion, just seeing what happens.

If you’ve achieved a bunch of your goals, and you’re still not happy with your life, consider giving up on self-chosen plans. Instead, listen to your life, inner and outer, and see if you can feel a current. Then fall into it, especially if it has nothing to do with the story you had about where you were supposed to be going.

This choice is known as surrender. As with most cliches, I don’t think I can explain the profound experiential content of surrender—what it feels like, why it works. But perhaps I can lay out a constellation of propositions1 that will, together, illuminate a worldview very different from the one I once inhabited.

Knowing and not-knowing yourself

1.1 The planning part of your mind, the one that generates ambitions and hypothetical situations, is a small part of your overall intelligence. Anyone who is halfway good at sex, comedy, or any creative art will know this. Designing your life based on what that part of your mind wants is like designing your house to fit the needs of your right hand. Congratulations, your house is filled with fidget spinners and soap.

1.2 A large percentage of human suffering is anticipatory tension, or dreading a future experience such that you actualize its potential suffering in the now. Anticipatory tension is using the illusion of knowledge to generate the illusion of control. Much of what people call planning is this.

1.3 My best outfits are all selected by someone else. When I’m at a clothing store, and I meet an employee who seems engaged, I tell them to dress me for maximum attractiveness. They do a much better job than I do. Of course: I can’t see myself as well as someone else can. This is why I try to listen to what the world apparently wants to do with me, rather than who I imagine I am.

1.4 Often, our self-image is a defense against the traits we reject in ourselves. “I love to be spontaneous,” says the most calculating person you’ve ever met. Thus, if you’re trying to live in self-loathing and denial, one way is to sculpt your life around the self-image you’ve decided on.

1.5 I’ve discovered that scrutinizing my motives too closely is a great way to stop creating. The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the fully examined life is a pinned butterfly in a glass case. I’ve concluded that my life is a grand artistic project, but I’m best off not knowing what it is.

1.6 You know that person who had important ripple effects in your life, based on a brief meeting or a kind gesture they extended to you, which meant nothing to them, but everything to you? Or that interesting stranger whose manner cast a brief spell on you, lingering in your memory disproportionately? That’s you also, you’re that person. Most of your impact on others, you will never fully apprehend or appreciate. Thus, it’s not important to know what you’re doing.

1.7 The proper end of introspection is not being filled with facts about oneself. Your introspection is successful if it is finite, if it leads you towards direct contact with experience. Get out of the way of your becoming.

Choice and authenticity

2.1 People feel most themselves when they are unselfconscious, which is to say, their actions emerge without apparent control. Think of the phrase “singing with abandon.” In our most profound moments of intimacy, we have abandoned the wheel. Who is driving, at that moment? What if we simply let that driver have the wheel more often? It takes practice to notice when that’s the person taking over the wheel—as opposed to our reactive, fear-based conditioning, which is also eager to take the job. Surrender is a skill.

2.2 When people talk about “being authentic,” they are often referring to executing some program, some persona, that they’ve devised privately. Of course, our impression of such people is that they’re unnatural and unoriginal. They assign us the job of reinforcing a character we never agreed on.

2.3 Surrender is something that happens through you, not something chosen2. I couldn’t have skipped the part of my life when I was contriving everything. And the way I’m living now wouldn’t work without the skills I accumulated during that period of contrivance. If you’re reading this and thinking, “gosh, I wish person x would see the wisdom of surrender,” you have discovered an opportunity to surrender to interpersonal helplessness.

2.4 Often, the apparent struggle to make a decision is an attempt to meet an internal flailing quota, after which we will feel affirmed in the choice we already knew we were making. Sometimes you can just skip all of that, and admit that you’re scared of what you know you will do. And then do it.

Goals, outcomes, effort

3.1 Discovered goals are entirely different from preconceived goals. Let’s say you notice that when you play guitar and sing, people stop what they’re doing to stare at you. The discovered goal of being a musician has presented itself. You are more likely to be successful than someone who privately dreams of being a musician without prompting from existence. Noticing such opportunities requires a lack of some previously decided agenda.

3.2 I’ve known many impressive people. Almost none of them started with a comprehensive vision of the grand work they would produce. Instead, they simply got into escalating amounts of trouble, and kept riding the trouble wave as far as it would go.

3.3 Excellence requires non-attachment to principles. All mediocre performers are the same: instead of improving on feedback from what happens, they react to what they think is supposed to be happening, or try to reinforce a theory they’ve internalized—perhaps an inaccurate approximation of someone they admire. This attempt at coherence is futile, since the mind of an expert makes no sense. It is filled with exceptions, contradictory principles butting up against each other. Perhaps the knowledge of how your life works is the same.

3.4 When a project in my life is working, it’s typically marked by a sense of leverage. It’s as if I’ve fallen into an updraft and it’s propelling me. Meanwhile, when I’m privately excited about something, but there’s no cooperation from the world, nothing comes together. The sensible conclusion is that my enthusiasm, alone, is not a helpful measurement.

3.5 It’s nice to enjoy what you’re doing. But there is a greater liberation available: accepting that the Work in front of you is your Work, and that has little to do with how you feel.

3.6 Another property of things that work out for me: they don’t make sense to my rationalizing mind. There is the thought, “this isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing,” even as greater forces pull me forward. This is known as the refusal of the call to adventure. It’s a routine part of adventure.

3.7 There is a criticism you could make of my advocacy of surrender. It is: “you’re just lucky and narrativizing it.” Yes. If you, too, have luck that seems unrelated to your conscious choices, consider letting that run the show.

Happiness

4.1 The norm for human life: gross injustice, corrupt rulers, disease and death, unequal fortunes, looming apocalypses. It’s possible that a large portion of our species will die off—it’s happened before, we’ve almost gone extinct previously, that’s allowed in the game. If your basic needs are met but you cannot be content with the way it is now, that is not the fault of the way things are now. It’s because you haven’t surrendered to the basic properties of incarnating in human form.

4.2 Strangely, happiness isn’t produced by getting what you want. Unhappiness is the product of the number of times per minute that you believe circumstances should be otherwise. “Enough” and “not enough” are mental stances that, very often, are uncorrelated with exterior facts. Perhaps this is one reason Jesus says it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”—the more you focus on expanding your pile, the more ravenousness becomes a habit. By contrast, you can, right now, try believing that what’s happening is what’s supposed to be happening, in exactly the right order.

4.3 Satisfaction comes from giving yourself away. From realizing that you have been called to some occasion that requires everything from you, and saying, fine, fuck it, here I am, tear me apart, I will exhaust myself to set right this one irrelevant corner. It is possible to view your whole existence this way, as a process of giving away all, everything, of what was never yours.

4.4 Another profound source of satisfaction is fit: when you fit like a slender hand in the glove of your circumstances. Consider the possibility that this satisfaction is already trying to happen, but you are resisting it, in a doomed attempt to be happy. Settling into this fit is another way of describing what I mean by “doing what God seems to want.”

4.5 I can’t defend this intellectually, but it has been true in my experience: spontaneous compassion is the approach to ethics that feels best and works most often. If you want a plan for consistently being good, the dumbest one that will work, and therefore the most robust, is “notice that prosocial behavior is nourishing, and that peace is only available if you’re on good terms with your conscience, and allow behavior to flow from that.” I’m not deluded enough to think this is always sufficient, but it’s a good start.

Love

5.1 I am capable of privately spoiling my wonderful marriage at any time, by noticing that it’s not the relationship I would’ve imagined being in. Meanwhile, a few months before meeting my wife, I wrote down a list of characteristics that the perfect partner would have, and I subsequently met that person. She was completely lovely—I find much to criticize in my own behavior from that period and nothing bad to say about her. And yet the relationship did not stick. How odd.

5.2 When I insist that a relationship must survive, I begin to resent it—I become burdened by all of the little moments of inauthenticity engaged in to shield the other person. The person becomes an obstacle, someone to navigate around. When I accept that any relationship could end, and surrender to the reality of people finding their own level, I become free to relate openly, and then actual closeness happens.

5.3 Panic is a part of love. I’ve learned that as I enter into any relationship that will alter me for the better, the manager in my head will come up with convincing reasons why it’s all wrong. This, too, is the refusal of the call; it is the fear of personal transformation masquerading as reason.

5.4 The older I get, the more that friendship is a discovered property. There are lots of wonderful people I meet who aren’t my friends. And then I meet someone and think: oh, that’s my friend, you’re coming with me. One of the best things you can do for yourself is to notice when you’re inexplicably bound to someone, and act on it without thinking.

5.5 We are drawn towards people because they are different. We are given the opportunity to love more when we find ourselves resenting them for the very difference that drew us to them. The opportunity is to release resentment and instead surrender to separateness. Ironically, this is how you feel less alone.

Thank you to Erin Shetron for editorial assistance. This essay was inspired a little bit by The Surrender Experiment, and a lot by this totally wonderful meditation guide. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

My answer is to give up immediately on that idea. There’s no reason to believe that you will find persistent balance between these conflicting elements of your psychology. There’s also no reason to believe such a thing is necessary. You can drive yourself crazy with ambition now, and relax later, or vice versa, or some fractal intertwining of both. Here’s what you do: just do what seems right based on the situation in front of you. Don’t worry, the correct choice will be obvious in retrospect, whether or not you select it.

Sure: some idiots will try to sell you a definitive answer, one way or the other. One brand of idiots will claim that pushing yourself is a bad thing, that great things only come without force. (Have they known any genuinely productive people?) Another brand of idiots will sell you on the necessity of constant discipline, of grinding until your last breath. (At some point they will do ayahuasca and have a psychedelic influencer arc.)

Clearly neither group of people is describing reality. They are just trying to sell you on some hope of persistent balance—of resolution.

There is a phrase from the writing of therapist Bruce Tift that, to me, is one of the most sanity-generating combinations of words in the English language. It is: “without hope of resolution.” If that phrase doesn’t wash over your whole tortured mind like a cool breeze, I don’t think you’re yet internalizing how beautiful and liberating it is.

Tift uses the phrase to describe his combination of Buddhist practice and Western psychotherapy. These traditions offer two contradictory perspectives: one tells you to stop believing the stories in your head and just accept the way things are in the moment. The other tells you to be a forensic scientist of your own mind, delving into the historical roots of behavioral patterns. One says forget about your identity, the other says debug it. How do you resolve this contradiction? Bruce Tift’s relaxing answer is basically: you don’t. Useful philosophies disagree with each other sometimes, and this is only an issue if you expect yourself, or reality, to be philosophically consistent. Where did you get that expectation?

He also uses it to describe the character of intimate relationships. You know how you long for closeness with your partner, and then you focus on connection, and then suddenly the air is damp and swampy with connection, so you want separation again? That’s not a problem. None of that is a problem. Because if you nullify that cycle, you don’t have a real relationship anymore. The only problem is some fictitious idea of relationships where your appetites are static. But people aren’t like that. We are basically cyclic. We freeze into roles because we need some predictability, but we’re also changing internally all the time, so our roles eventually become confining. Then we have to melt, only to freeze anew. We can either make room for this process in our relationships, without hope of resolution, or have a shitty marriage (a time-honored option, to be sure).

This all feels so fucking obvious? Like I feel silly writing this? And yet, I need this reminder myself, more often than I care to admit. The hope of resolution is a curiously persistent feature of the imagination. It’s so persistent that it may be creeping in as you read this. “Aha, I will now live without the hope of resolution—so I will never be disappointed in the future!” Congratulations, you have already lost the game. And you will again. Hopefully, you can give up on the hope of resolving this.

The hope of resolution makes a seductive promise. That one day, we will hit the exact balance point between the opposing virtues: dependability and spontaneity, openheartedness and independence, acceptance and judgement. That we will be rescued from constantly stumbling too far in one direction, noticing a bit too late, and then lurching in another. Perhaps, if we try hard enough, we can fully protect ourselves from living.

Thank you to Erin Shetron for editorial help. Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

I recently ate at Cafe Kestrel, which was recommended to me as a “stupidly wonderful” meal and which brought home the power of devotional action.

Two minutes after arriving, I was not convinced. The bathtub-sized dining room was filled with two large parties, making it loud enough that I couldn’t hear my friend Marisa, a foot away from me. We moved to another table. Still too loud. I explained to the server that we were leaving. She said, “oh, want to try the patio out back?”

She led us to a darkened backyard. We were seated at a metal table with metal chairs. It had rained, so everything was damp. We were seated at wet dark tables in some random backyard in Red Hook and we had damp butts. “Your friend who recommended this place,” Marisa asked, “does she hate you?” The bread came, and it was pretty good. 25m in, we got drinks. They were drinks. What is happening? Our server was nonchalant to the point where it was unclear whether she’d worked in a restaurant before. 35m in, she returned. “Here’s some popcorn,” she said, dropping a small plate of salted popcorn on the table and disappearing again. Normal popcorn.

I don’t remember the last time I’ve laughed for three solid minutes. Tears were streaming down our faces. It felt like we had entirely left civilization. It felt like that moment in a psychedelic trip where you ask, “is reality supposed to be like this?” The average restaurant in NYC is, at this point, stupidly optimized, backed by wealthy investors, coated in impeccable branding. Meanwhile, this place was jankier than most pre-adolescent lemonade stands. We wondered whether the whole restaurant was a prank, or if possibly we were about to be murdered. “How funny would it be if the food was amazing?” I said.

And then the first dish showed up, a fried halloumi with bitter spices and honey, fried so you could hear it shatter against your teeth. Sometimes you see a person walking down the street, and you just know they grew up doing ballet. The halloumi was like that: a casual display of studied technique and taste. And also, somehow, a reference to the frozen mozzarella sticks I’d eaten as a lonely youth.

Then the next dish: an asparagus terrine. An arrangement of achingly fresh peas and asparagus, perversely encased in gelatinous animal fat. It felt both healthful and carnal, natural and fussy, and I’d never had a vegetable dish like it. At that point, we were stunned. Another server showed up. “Who are you?” I asked. “What is this place?” She turned out to be the general manager, and a total delight. “Things got off to a rough start,” I told her, “but these are weird and amazing.” “That’s what I like to hear,” she said.

The mains arrived. A burger that, I swear to God, was maybe the best I’ve had on earth. Mountainous, perfectly pink in the middle, swimming in an exceptional sauce. Then a macaroni and cheese that made Marisa remark: “how is it floral?” A fucked up riff on chicken piccata, with date and carrot, thickly seared on the outside but tender all the way through. We were filled with speculation. At some point during the mains, I was like, this place has to be a husband and wife duo. Something about it felt like an artwork by sexually satisfied people with nothing to prove. Marisa started wondering if they had their own supply chain, because “the food tastes too good for New York.”

Everything had an irreducible sense of absurdity to it—we were eating particular whims, rendered flawlessly by chef Dennis Spina.

The general manager showed up to refill our drinks. “Are we still weird and amazing?” she asked, which we took as an opportunity to question her. Marisa was right, I was half-right: they do have their own supply chain, and the restaurant was opened by formerly married people.

“So the service is a bit… informal,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah,” she nodded, “We keep it casual. We just figure the food speaks for itself.” We realized that, as we’d been eating, they’d set up the whole back patio for us. We found ourselves surrounded by candles and tablecloths, even though we were the only diners. So while our welcome wasn’t ass-kissy, we were cared for. “We love you?” I said to the GM, at one point.

I’ll eat at Cafe Kestrel again many times if I get the chance. It’s a tier of cooking I would describe as, “I’ve had food as good as this, but not better.” Still, I’m a little sad that I’ll never again experience going in a 90-minute swerve from “I’m about to leave” to “this is unforgettable.”

You will get a sudden plate of popcorn. Your wine will be served in a clunky chalice. The burger will come with a pickled pepper under the bun, leaving a soggy dent in the soft bread, for some fucking reason. You will experience food by people who have religious attention to their particular vision, with zero regard for ironing out the wrinkles.

I left wanting to look at my life afresh. Have I made unnecessary concessions, filing off my rough edges in order to accommodate the boring? Cafe Kestrel has not. And it was my utopia that night. I’d recommend going, but I have no guarantees if you do. It just doesn’t give off uniformity vibes. You might wait seven hours. They might announce that the restaurant is now for dogs. If they did that to me, I’d forgive them and wish them every happiness. I’ve never eaten at a restaurant that renewed my sense of innocence.

Here’s a photo of the final dish, an apricot cake. “The cream to cake ratio…” I said. “…is perfect,” Marisa said, reading my mind.

Another way of translating it is: you want some “after picture” of meditation. Tranquility, insight, to shoot love lasers out of your eyes. Grand. But you can’t get there by forcing an after picture to appear. You have to get there via a procedure, which sometimes is a very counterintuitive way of achieving the results.

Almost any time I hear that someone has had a damaging experience with meditation, I find that it’s because they’re violating this rule. I get it, I’ve been there too. It’s really tempting to read an inspiring description of a Zen master, and think, “alright, if I crunch up my forehead correctly, I’ll just snap myself into being that person.” I spent about eighteen months of my early 20s this way. But it was a mistake.

The importance of this will become clear if we review a few genres of contemplative practice, and how they can be distorted by practicing results instead of method.

Non-dual or Nothing practice.

Result: Spontaneity and ease, an openness to the mystery of being and a thinning out, and eventual disappearance, of the illusory sense of separation from life.

Method: Relax and open and settle bit by bit, such that habitual processes of mind can slow and stop, as they are revealed to be unnecessary protections from the vividness of experience.

The cost of practicing results instead of method: Practitioners affecting a dead-eyed blankness rather than engaging with their present-moment experience, which may contain frustration or envy or other things they’re ashamed to feel. Reinforcing a new self-concept, one oriented towards rigid tranquility rather than normal humanness. In worst-case scenarios, humanness shoved into the shadow until it erupts, causing interpersonal scandals.

Heart practice.

Result: Open-hearted compassion, extending even to your enemies. Not always, but in many moments. A contagious glow in the chest that connects inner and outer.

Method: Facing your feelings as they are, in all their ambiguity, while encouraging and cultivating the heart’s potential for openness, which slowly grows over time.

The cost of practicing results instead of method: oh my God, about 1/3 of the California spiritual world, it feels like sometimes? Strained nice-nice fakeness that is good for nothing. The New Age community, where people pretend to be benevolent Teletubbies, but behind the scenes are as money-hungry, power-seeking, and gossip-spreading as anyone.

Concentration practice.

Result: A flow state that can be restful, beautiful, and even healing. Often, as a bonus, insights about the nature of mind spring from the ability to observe it in more detail.

Method: Without strain, repeatedly choose an object of awareness such that it eventually becomes the default during a session. Shrug off distractions, seeing them generously as an opportunity to unite more layers of mind. Eventually, deepen into levels of absorption where most habitual mental scattering is gone.

The cost of practicing results instead of method: Straining to produce an effortful, taxing pseudo-concentration by tightening the mind. Sometimes, temporary concentration followed by renewed or increased jags of negative emotion or distraction. Sometimes, dissociation, agitation, or energetic disturbances.

I welcome the addition of other practices in the comments. I’m not a divination expert, so I don’t know how you can screw up the I Ching by practicing results instead of method. But I trust that it can be done.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

But as you get a little older and this loosens, you realize how much you can actually see people, how much this is a skill you automatically hone if you remain open and fully, sincerely contact others. This requires sitting in a state of heightened relaxation, an open sensitivity where you are maintaining discernment but not jumping to conclusions based on the first clue you get.

When this becomes your area of interest, anyone is interesting, because they are always revealing something that can help your ongoing study. Someone narrates a professional dispute. They don’t know that they’ve told you about their victim mindset, which likely foreclosed potentially useful options. Another person eagerly narrates a professional success, without hearing the desperate twang in their voice. These details, paradoxically, only reveal themselves when you listen without an evaluative agenda weighing down your perception. It’s not like you see someone tuck their t-shirt and think “daddy issues.” It’s more like you come away from even a brief interaction with hypotheses to disconfirm, areas of ambiguity to explore further.

You’re foolish, of course, if you judge others harshly for these involuntary disclosures, because you realize that this is the way you’ve been perceived by those older and wiser than you, for your entire life. Many times, you’ve walked into a room and started talking and, within five minutes, someone has glimpsed all of your blind spots, laid out as clearly as jars in a spice rack. Of course they didn’t tell you, they correctly ascertained that you weren’t ready to hear their feedback. It can be an act of love and compassion to have faith that someone else will learn the lessons they need to learn. This is “silence that speaks volumes,” a signal that is very hard to listen for.

“Information is the measure of surprise.” The more listening you do, the more you hunt for subtler moments of surprise. Like a connoisseur of some medium, you become familiar with the common structures, such that novel variations please you more.

Over time, you get better at discerning qualities that are hard to fake: embodied wisdom, integrity, hard-earned joy. You start to be attracted—in friendships, in working relationships, in intimate partnership—to these finer qualities, rather than chasing after shiny object people who promise to make up for what you lack. Over time, this organizing principle sorts your life, so that some relationships become unbelievably rich, while others fall away, or fail to form. If you care to, you can start to experience yourself less as an individual and more as a node in something larger that takes shape around you, if you let it.

Simultaneously, you become aware that others are engaging in a similar sorting process, such that the total human network does reward virtue. Sure, some skilled sociopaths run amok. But most of those who are crudely, blatantly power-hungry in the long term lose it, or never gain it in the first place. Those who behave extractively wonder why they end up alone. Eventually, communities find their own level. Almost nobody reaches a position of real respect undeservedly. Famous buffoons don’t get respect from the people they really want it from, just sycophants whose praise is meaningless.

The more you can see this ecologically, the less it’s upsetting or confusing. A sense of wonder takes over. You thought that people were stupid, when you were young and thought yourself precocious. Individuals say dumb things. But there is such intelligence in the interplay, in what resonates versus what dies. You can bear witness without getting hooked on every passing drama. Strangely, this is self-possession: the ability to let others be as they are.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

How could doing nothing be valued over those?

The trick of it is that “do nothing,” the instruction, tells you little about the hallucinatory, profound things that happen if you let yourself come to a stop.

When someone with a regimented practice that’s gone stale comes to me for advice, one suggestion I almost always give is, “see if you can just do nothing for an hour.” If I feel like elaborating, I might say, “let your attention settle into a natural groove of open receptivity. Be like a cat, with a delicate, broad awareness taking in the whole environment, inner and outer. Let all intention go beyond this extremely light intention.”

Frequently, I then receive a text message explaining that they’ve had an immensely powerful experience, and they sometimes attribute wizard powers to me. But I am no wizard. I am simply aware of the power of Nothing, having made Nothing practice the main anchor of my contemplative life for half a decade now. I like other things, but I always come back to Nothing.

I’m wary of trying to describe the powerful experiences of Nothing Practice, because I’m liable to induce a classic meditation fuckup: practicing results rather than method. Which is to say: you can easily go wrong in meditation by trying to make your mind do the after picture. For example, awareness of breathing practice tends to produce peace and rapture, but not if you monitor your mind and try to force it into a state of pretend peace and fake rapture.

So don’t try to duplicate what I am writing below. Take it as a disclosure of the possibilities. Your practice may not resemble what I subsequently describe.

Nevertheless. Here is something like what your mind might naturally do, if you simply practice Nothing without expectation—the results that might accrue over an hour if you attend to the delicate labor of non-intention:

1. Find a posture that balances alertness and comfort.

2. For 5-15m, settle into a natural, nice-feeling groove of present-moment attention, neither pushing away nor grabbing onto thoughts and emotions.

3. Notice a natural clarity beginning to arise, which feels strangely blissful.

4. Notice, on the edges, a troubling feeling lurking—something like the fear of death, or shame about previous misdeeds.

5. Let it approach you, allow a disowned feeling that’s quietly dominated your entire life.

6. Feel that you will certainly die, for several minutes.

7. Discover that even within the heart of the dreaded feeling, you can find clarity and peace, in a part of you that has never changed.

8. Realize, for a moment, that you don’t ever need to be afraid, because nothing can touch your fundamental consciousness.

9. For a few seconds, spontaneously drop into a timeless stillness outside identity, Nothing itself, and find it shockingly fresh and beautiful.

10. Go “what the fuck is that,” try to grab onto it, lose it.

11. Know that you will begin your next practice by attempting to recreate this moment of timeless stillness, laugh at your own silliness.

12. End the sit refreshed, amazed, confused.

With more practice, your Nothing sits might start to look like this:

1. Settle into your customary posture, which feels like rejoining a friend.

2. Slip into a state of deep, pleasant tranquility, after 5-10m of allowing your sub-minds to quiet.

3. Contact the fact that many layers of conscious experience taken to be essential—the sense of self, time, space—are actually produced by habitual mental action.

4. Watch these habitual mental actions slow, and, sometimes, halt.

5. Rest in a space beyond concept that feels impersonal and yet universal; the home at the heart of Being.

6. Rejoice that the Nothing you once compulsively fled is an endlessly refreshing font of creation that can be found in every sensation.

7. Leave the sit but take the Nothing with you, find it everywhere, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.” Feel it in your lover’s mouth when you kiss. See it in the thunderclouds in the sky. Realize that you were never separate from God, that this idea is completely laughable. You’re separate from God like a painting is separate from the canvas.

And with, say, years of practice, the walls between this technique and life might start to fall down, such that your “practice” looks like this:

1. Rest in presence, which is at every moment the origin of being, in any situation, in movement and rest, in disturbance and tranquility.

2. Be grateful that you can have a mystical experience in line at Trader Joe’s.

But there are some issues that might stop you from getting there. I can’t name them all, but here are a few:

Common failure modes in embracing Nothing:

Having a fulfilling Nothing practice requires an equal embrace of all present sensation. It is welcoming association, not dissociation. But without realizing it, many Nothing practitioners are subtly distancing from disfavored sensations—difficult emotions, sexual urges, etc. If the practice feels dry and dead, rather than pulsating and alive, this is probably what’s happening. Try to intentionally lean into the difficulty and the emotion. I will not report you to the Zen police if you do Nothing but subtly raise the salience of the heart space. Alternatively, engage in a practice involving intentional cultivation of emotion, spontaneity, etc.

If you have too much coarse emotional/intellectual disturbance to find a natural “groove” of resting in sensation, if your mind is still bucking crazily 15-20m in, it might not be the time for Nothing practice. Try more focused absorption practice, like heart practice, or mantra practice—there’s plenty of good concentration techniques. If those are experienced as primarily negative, it might be time for therapy or IFS or confronting that thing you’ve been avoiding. Or just asking: “why might I have a fucked up relationship with rest and enjoyment?”

If you catch yourself fighting your mind, trying to squeeze out all distraction and randomness in mental activity, remember the priceless Shinzen Young pointer: “If you can’t drop it, it’s not an intention.” His video on Nothing practice is excellent.

If you still catch yourself fighting your mind, try on the frame that you are letting God meditate you. Surrender can be a helpful pointer here.

If there’s something on your mind that you don’t have the resources to confront alone—a big feeling or trauma—then don’t try this at home. Nothing practice is psychologically thorough: all of your stuff will come up, in an order not determined by you.

If you can’t adopt a spacious, open awareness on command, try some Loch Kelly cues, or this great Alexander Technique course. If none of that works, your ego might be trying to keep a lid on something—and that might be adaptive in your current situation.

If you want to read more, I like the “natural meditation” section of Angelo Dilullo’s book, and A Trackless Path remains a classic.

If Nothing practice feels spacey and disembodied, try getting in touch with consciousness within the body before orienting towards stillness and non-intention; Realization Process has great exercises along these lines.

If there’s a lot of energy in your body, try non-directed body movement, the “do nothing” practice where you let your animal body steer. I am forever in Corey Hess’ debt for introducing me to this practice, which was pivotal in helping me confront emotional difficulty.

And finally:

Nothing practice can feel bracing, confusing, intense. But it ought to feel good—like an engaging encounter with the mystery of being, not like a chore. If it’s not feeling good for you for whatever reason, come back to it after taking up a more active practice. Nothing will always be there.

When it’s going well, you may ask “am I doing it right?” The core of Nothing practice is to make contact with what cannot be made explicit, a knowing outside of concept. Your explorations will contain delicate variation that can’t possibly be articulated. If you find yourself having a hard time explaining why your Nothing practice is so fulfilling, you are probably on the right track.

Ultimately, though, when I’m assessing someone’s work, I try to ask the following question. Is this teacher, pastor, therapist, facilitator, coach, whatever, on average, according to my best guess, moving people closer to liberation, or further away?

And there aren’t actually many spiritual teachers who are so bad that their effect on the world is definitely net negative. Even some of the looniest loose cannons on the scene, the most corrupt and megalomaniacal (Jeffery Martin) often have positive effects on balance. The wisdom of Chögyam Trungpa lives on, even though he was massively unethical at times. Spiritual teachers aren’t competing versus a wise mass culture. They are competing versus TikTok and Fox News, popular astrology and fad diets. It takes work to be worse than that.

This doesn’t mean we should automatically forgive horrible conduct. As individuals, we ought to strive for exemplary behavior, and expect the same of others who do spiritual work.

However, there is the following question. Who do we need out there, if we want to awaken all beings? My answer is:

We need everyone.

Frequently, I hear backchannel spiritual community gossip along the lines of: “I tried studying with teacher A, but they had such obvious blind spots. Then teacher B straightened me out.” Later, I then hear the same story, but reversed, where teacher B is the obviously blinkered one, whose faults were illuminated by the teachings of teacher A.

We need teacher A and teacher B.

We need the spiritually gifted Mormon sex therapists. We need the heterodox bodyworkers and the near-psychic embodiment wizards. We need contemplative accounts from Christian mystics and stridently atheist polyamorists. We need pricy spiritually-flavored executive coaching programs. We need old-school Theravada teachers who are not for sale at any price.

We need psychedelic dropouts, and people who correctly point out that drugs can’t be the ultimate answer. We need spiritually-informed psychotherapists who urge the meditators to look at content, and meditators who encourage the therapycels to ignore their stories sometimes, or look at the emotions underneath.

We need Neo-Tantra weirdos to teach people emotional release and butt exercises, and we need DBT therapists to teach emotional regulation and theory of mind.

We need IFS artistes to provide space for others to encounter their parts and achieve greater inner coherence. We need Zen teachers who can remind people to just be open and quit it with the fragmentation.

We need scientists working avidly, providing the neural correlates of awakening. We need irascible naysayers who point out that awakening is probably not something that can be fully mapped by scientific understanding.

We need non-dual YouTube influencers with cringe taste in video effects. We really need Frank Yang to make many more videos. We need Cheetah House to help with meditation side effects caused when unbalanced people get too high on spirituality content.

We need the massively scaled meditation hucksters who claim that their techniques work for everyone. We need the angry blog posts by people who point out that these techniques do not, in fact, work for everyone, and that real spiritual work doesn’t survive scale.

We need autistic teachers who carve up the contemplative landscape into a million sub-techniques, like Shinzen Young, and poetic teachers who tell you to just relax and wake up, like Adyashanti.

Sometimes, I hear complaints about the overabundance of professional spiritual types. Well, I’m in Berkeley, the white hot center of it, and I can tell you that we are nowhere near saturation on effective meditation teachers, or spiritual workers generally. I don’t have enough good people in my referral network.

Meanwhile, lots of smart, informed people still don’t believe in jhana. That’s like not believing that ibuprofen is real.

I think I’ll believe we are saturated when awakening is viewed, in popular culture, like noob gains in lifting. It is commonly understood that a novice lifter can double their strength within months of training, that’s in the water. There’s plentiful information about all the different programs you can do, and how to rehab injuries you might get along the way. Sure, there are arguments about the best method. But a general picture has cohered, and is common knowledge. Awakening isn’t there yet. Not nearly. I’d like to ask people on the street what they think of spiritual awakening, and hear the response, “Yeah, I know I could open my heart and relieve something like 90% of my suffering and be much happier and more prosocial if I did some years of serious spiritual practice. I understand that I can have a deep relationship with the transcendent that can transform me and my relationships and all of my perceptions, I know that’s out there for me.”

I believe enough in the intelligence of the world that, through the existence of more and more spiritual voices, rough points of consensus will emerge that could massively benefit humankind.

We’re not there yet. We need you to help us get there, even if I find you personally annoying.

Try it now. One minute. If you like that, add more minutes. See if the emotion can enter and pervade the breath like incense.

This framing is designed to counter the main failure mode of heart practice, which is to make it aspirational. People hear about “loving-kindness” practice and they think, “alright, time to pretend I have the emotions of Jesus, time to love dictators.” You may get there, but you have to begin with your average post-industrial heart.

Take the emotions that already sweeten your life in small quantities, and notice that they multiply when given delicate attention. If the phrase “may all beings be happy” has zero here-and-now resonance for you, ignore it. Instead, pick up the appreciation for how music sounded when you were in college. Or the bittersweet transience re: the beloved friends who are off living separate lives somewhere. Gratitude that you are still allowed to be in society despite your previous failings. Whatever is effortlessly opening when you turn towards it internally. I also introduce heart practice as “corny feelings” practice. You have at least one of those within reach, right?

If your mind is jumpy, try conjuring a feeling out of a jumpy series of impressions. For awhile, I really enjoyed thinking of all the people in my life fleetingly, inwardly repeating “good job,” until I was awash in enough feeling to hold it as a concentration object. The technique that works for you might be stupid.

If your experience is tinged with sadness, that is fine. Also, I disagree with traditional Buddhist guides that tell you never to confuse heart practice with romantic or sexual feelings. Pick whatever is rich and involving as an object, right now—as long as you can stay with the feeling itself and not any attached fantasies. Stay with the feeling. And gently notice how pleasant and engaging that is, sliding into a relaxed flow state. That’s all you need to do.

When the feeling is large enough that you can let it overtake you like a tidal wave, do that. Let the feeling start steering. Getting there involves mastering your emotional system, which is more like befriending an animal than following a recipe. Force won’t work. Gently experiment with different coaxing. You will learn, in time, what stirs you. Some people, I’m told, get blissed out by remembering their favorite equations.

It might be completely insane, what happens to you. Heart practice is a great onramp to jhanas, the druggy bliss states you may have heard about. If you do heart practice for some years, as your main meditation or as a supplement, you might find yourself default loving everyone, even the people who annoy you. Approaching strangers as if you love them, because you do, has an effect. You’ll empathize even with your enemies as you are smiting them. With significant training, MDMA will seem like a mostly superfluous compound, just a stimulant atop your normal emotional spectrum. (Really.) You won’t be blissful 24/7, challenging emotions will still arise. But you can get closer than most people would believe possible to embracing everything, while still functioning sensibly.

You don’t have to believe me, any more than people who go to the gym have to believe that, with repeated application of resistance, the average person becomes muscular. You just have to show up. Feel what is rich and involving today, on many days.

If there aren’t any rich feelings available, you might be tensed up in a state of resentment. Try this forgiveness meditation, or try having the difficult conversation you’ve been postponing.

If there’s a big screaming billboard of anxiety or shame in the way of any other emotion, and you’re mentally stable overall, try focusing on the screaming billboard as if it’s a positive sensation that you want to appreciate every detail of. Just the physical parts of the sensation, not the interpretations. Could be cool, this book might help.

If you’re not afraid of the G-word, try the feeling that results from the phrase “remember that God loves you.”

If you’re sick of feeling positive emotion alone, if that feels a little insular and masturbatory, try tonglen. I fucking love tonglen.

There may be side effects to heart practice.

What side effects?

Meditation side effects generally fall into two categories.

The first category, not typically caused by heart practice, is perceptual weirdness—for example, after dry vipassana, where you carve sensation up into its constituent parts, sometimes reality will feel buggy, like a stuttering film strip.

The second category is “congratulations, you have been forced to do some helpful therapy.” Material is produced which has to be worked on. Mostly, the side effects of heart practice are like that. Behold these oscillating cones:

Distraction gets an undeservedly bad reputation. It’s a helpful method of concealing difficult things we don’t yet wish to confront. ADD behavior is an emotional regulation strategy, and subtler forms of distraction are useful ways of obscuring, say, the knowledge of death and transience.

After heart practice, your attention will be more open and stable, so you’ll contact the difficult parts of the human experience. Luckily, you’ll be armored with a sense of love and safety after a good sit. But the emotional glow won’t necessarily persist—so you might have to encounter these difficult sensations without that armoring. This can be done, but it’s intense, and you’ll have to feel out your capacity as you go. It’s like being sent out on a mountain with a pack full of delicious food. Halfway up you might run out of lunch and find yourself hungry out there. Before doing intensive heart practice, make sure you have someone who can support you when you’re halfway up, a teacher or friend or therapist or parent or whoever, someone who can hear your tantrums. If you can’t allow yourself vulnerability, I don’t advise this practice.

If you find yourself taking on too much, feel free to re-enter distraction. Most people are experts in checking out—draw on that skill when necessary. Have some carbs and video games until you develop more equanimity.

There is a far side beyond, where every sensation can be met with open tenderness. Heart practice will get you moving in that direction. Complete intimacy with all experience is an unusual place to live from. You will be, in some facets of your emotional experience, unrelatable to many people. This is the tradeoff; you will know that, at bottom, the mind is wonderful, in a culture that frantically tries to persuade you that life is essentially tragic. You will enter the small weird team of happy people.

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

Self-help books are, at their best, personality transmission devices. Consuming the self-help books that have changed my life, like The 4-Hour Workweek and Existential Kink, changed me not because of any one tactic, but because the human gestalts within were helpful additions to my default tendencies. (This is why reading self-help books cover-to-cover tends to be more helpful than just grazing them for tips, even though a summary of the average self-help book could fit on a napkin.)

While our book contains good tactical advice, my real hope was for You Can Just Do Things to capture Cate’s unusual mind-shape, such that readers could download a useful sliver. I’ve improved as a result of living with Cate, and I would like to be the only person living with Cate, but I also want other people to have a similar opportunity for improvement.

Cate has accused me of writing about her as if she’s a mythical creature. This is a fair accusation, and I can report that she’s a human being. We’re going on four years together, which makes me the world’s foremost expert on her foibles and irrationalities.

However. My assessment of her overall competence and personal qualities, which I wrote about breathlessly in our early days, is the same as ever. She continues impressing me. I continue asking: what makes Cate so different? What makes her so fucking good at everything? I have come to an updated brief answer: extremely high confidence, extremely low defensiveness. In other words, Cate both believes that she can do anything, and believes that she’ll get there by being completely open to feedback, rather than clinging to competence as an identity.

If Cate’s worst enemy lobbed an insult at her, I think she would stop to ask: is there a good suggestion for improvement in there? Almost nobody is like this.

Lately we’ve been watching a lot of Top Chef in the evenings. It’s an opportunity to polish our Padma Lakshmi impersonations, but it’s also an opportunity to see how poisonous defensiveness is. There is a trait shared by almost all the top competitors: they almost never pout in response to the criticism of the judges. They listen. Perhaps they don’t agree, but they search their conscience about whether the judgement contains useful information. Meanwhile, those who are doomed to early elimination are indignant when challenged. They greet feedback like “it was mushy” with disbelief or excuses, like, “this is just my style of food.”

Cate’s journey as a writer is an example of the opposite of defensiveness. People sometimes ask me: how much do I help with Cate’s writing? The answer is that my role has shifted over time. At the book’s inception, I was helping a lot—nearly all of the first vomit draft (which she has completely overwritten) was mine, based on notes from our conversations. However, I barely touch her writing anymore. We give each other about the same amount of writing feedback. She has learned almost all of the relevant skills I have—I’m no longer the main writer in the relationship.

Previously, friends and partners have viewed my writing ability as a gift to envy, a mutation they couldn’t possibly acquire. I don’t think that perspective ever entered Cate’s mind. She just observes. Since our relationship began, through viewing my early drafts, watching me work, and asking me questions, she has relentlessly downloaded the viewpoint that allows me to be creatively productive and non-neurotic. When I read her an excerpt of something I admire, and she doesn’t immediately get why I’m so impressed, she asks: “why do you like that,” and she scans for nutrients she can absorb. Later, I see little glints of them turning up in her work.

This is how anyone should act if they had the perspective “Sasha is a better writer than me, I want to learn why, I’m going to maximize my learning rate until I’m just as good.” But nobody else who’s been close to me has done this simple thing, despite the fact that many expressed a desire to learn.

One of the many lovely benefits of our marriage is that I really don’t know what Cate is going to do next. Assuming this book gets the reception it deserves, “public intellectual” would be an easy lay-up for her at this point, another addition to an already surprising list of past professions. She’s already done the TEDtalk, and could open up a fancy consultancy in a second flat. She might spend some time doing this, but I find it hard to believe that I’ve seen the last plot twist, or even the next-to-last. She’s too smart to want an identity that would require defending.

If you are not one of those people, but you’d like to learn more about meditation of this sort, I’d recommend reading:

Original Love by Henry Shukman

The Science of Enlightenment by Shinzen Young

These resources are good if you’re just starting a meditation practice:

Some people find this essay I wrote helpful

This short essay is incredibly good

Tucker’s book is great

Charlie’s book is great

If you’ve started having profound spiritual experiences, and you haven’t read End of Your World, do yourself a favor and go read it. It’s pithy, fun, and deeply helpful, perhaps the only really accurate book about the deep end of meditation practice. Adyashanti is one of the most important humans in my life even though we’ve never met, and I know a bunch of other meditators who feel the same way.

The following short essays are written in the spirit of this great/bizarre meditation resource, which I partially agree with, but, moreso, admire. (It’s huge and forbidding, but has some amazing passages—search for “The state, process, and physical environment of the system are also its plans and goals.” for the beginning of a particularly inspired moment.)

The keep it up game

Sometimes, I think the spiritual path is really complicated. There are all these diverse skills to master, layers of ego to work through, constant opportunities to attempt a more ethical life, or wonder how to do so.

And then sometimes I think it’s actually very simple. What you are trying to do is lose a game.

You know those keep-it-up games that all children naturally reinvent? Where the floor is lava and you need to keep hitting a balloon or a ball so it doesn’t hit the floor?

The vast majority of humans are wired to play a game like this with experience. Raw experience is scary. There might be a lot of emotions down there. Perhaps there’s less control than you think there is. Perhaps you are a little fucked up inside, and not living up to your values. There’s also the fact of ever-present transience, which reminds us how soon we will vanish, along with everything we hold dear.

Reasonably, we avoid going there. And so we play a keep-it-up game. We kick the balloon of mind away from bare experience. Masters of this game spend days relitigating arguments that already happened, or arguments that haven’t happened yet. Or watching short form video constantly, or compulsively optimizing themselves in some fashion. Whatever it takes to get away from the gritty immediacy of being here.

Perhaps this is unsatisfying to you. And so you take up meditation, or another form of slowing down, and get a little worse at the keep-it-up game. You get closer to bare experience, and start noticing how painful and tight your avoidance mechanisms are. You start having more and more interactions with the fullness of emotion, which is wrenching and wonderful.

Some people then wonder: hey, how deep does this go? And they read a bunch of books about spirituality, and master a bunch of meditation techniques. Experience becomes amazingly psychedelic, and you find out that this psychotechnology has endured through millennia for a reason. It is undeniably potent.

But at this point you are still playing the game. The balloon is allowed to get pretty close to the ground, but every time it almost drops, there is a reassertion of identity. Like: “I’m so open to my emotions now, wow, it’s a shame that not everyone is like me.” Or: “My awareness is so expansive and beautiful, surely this is the spiritual awakening that I’ve been told about.” Each of these assertions is a subtle tap on the balloon that propels it upwards just long enough. This is a reasonable place to hang out.

But perhaps, one day, by the grace of God, you lose the game. The balloon hits the floor. Which feels like it should result in annihilation—the destruction of your precious identity as a meditator, along with the destruction of everything else. You lost the game! Isn’t the game all there is?

Strangely, though, life does not end with this annihilation. Instead, life is beautifully renewed by the hilarious knowledge of this game you’ve been playing, the whole time. It becomes extraordinarily funny how much your default setting was to flee from beauty, relief, and joy. Your whole life was about making yourself happy and you were not even good at it.

From then, you can do whatever you want. My life looks pretty similar to what it was before I lost the game. I am just more eager to help, because I’m aware of how painful the game is, and now that I’m not as busy playing it, I have more energy for other people.

I still kick the balloon around, because you sort of have to, to get along in society. But it feels lighter and easier when it’s not life and death, it’s just a balloon.

You actually do have to want it

Occasionally you will hear someone spiritual say, “spiritual ambition is dumb, you shouldn’t be meditating to get things,” or “just accept how everything is now.” To which I say, lol, lmao. Like obviously you actually want something out of spiritual practice, right? You want to have a completely different relationship with this life, and building this relationship requires real work. Without a spiritual yearning, you would not be practicing (or paying attention to my opinions about practice, certainly). “The secret is not wanting anything” is nonsense.

…On one level! But on another level, statements like this are extremely helpful: as practice pointers. The aim of statements like these is to avoid the failure mode of future-oriented meditative practice. In future-oriented practice, which is typically destructive, you are trying to aggressively bend your bodymind into a different shape, the shape you think it ought to be when you become spiritual, rather than lovingly meeting your bodymind where it is, thus changing your relationship to it.

So how do we find the synthesis between these points of view? It’s actually simple. The spiritual yearning, the desperate want for something else? Treat these as present-moment phenomena to be welcomed, opened to, examined, lovingly encountered. That want to be somewhere else is fascinating, if you start looking at it, really looking at the sensations composing that yearning. Where do you think you’re going?

A mundane view of the powers

Here’s a message I heard from serious meditators: “hey, you might get spiritual powers from meditation. But they’re a peril and a distraction more than anything. Just keep sitting.” I always thought this was woo-woo hogwash. And then it happened to me, but not like I expected. And it turned out to be an important warning.

How do I understand this now? Well, let’s say that on the meditative path, you are switching between two reward functions, two ways of gaining satisfaction.

Default reward function: “I have to get what I want to get! I just have to. That’s the important thing.”

Spiritual reward function: “All will be well. All manner of things will be well. Implicit in this is the realization that me and my wants are not so ultimately important, this identity is just an outfit.”

Since the meditative path gives you real benefits—like increased emotional intelligence, a greater ability to be present with people, etc—sometimes you will unlock an ability that makes it much easier for you to fulfill your default reward function. Like intense powers of concentration, or greater charisma, or something like that. This will create a natural temptation to become a cool spiritual person who is good at fulfilling your wants that way. And there’s nothing wrong with this, as a phase to hang out in for a bit, maybe a few years if you want. But it’s much less pleasant, in my experience, than moving to the latter reward function, which involves deeply interrogating your wants, in a way that requires humiliating self-honesty.

A huge amount of the New Age scene is people stuck in this cul de sac.

Your ego structure just will co-opt the spiritual path

You might read the above essay and think, “aha, great, I just won’t let my spiritual search be hijacked by my ego-level wants!” The bad news is it doesn’t work like that. How it works is that your ego structure will co-opt the spiritual path, and in the process, you will learn so much about the pain inherent in that way of being, and thus become increasingly willing to choose something else.

For example, as an Enneagram 7 with a side of 3, I was after two things in the spiritual path, not always consciously:

1. To always have fun/good experiences

2. To be a cool shiny spiritual person

And meditation gave me some of those things! But imperfectly. Oh no! You cannot always make your experience good, no matter how skilled you are as a meditator. And the more validation you get, the more you’re aware of the pain of lack that’s driving the search for validation. So I was brought into deeper and deeper contact with my stupidity, until release felt like a more tempting option than carrying on the way I had been.

I think there is no escaping this kind of self-confrontation.

In favor of insane Southeast Asian high standards

The phrase “enlightened” or “awakened” is, confusingly, used to refer to these two things.

1. Someone who has been through a particular mental event—a massive reduction in the part of consciousness that could be called “the separate self,” typically resulting in a shocking increase in well-being, and a dramatic change in perspective on life.

2. Someone who has reached a state of unusual moral perfection.

Being 1 is rare, but less rare than being a chess grandmaster—certainly tens of thousands, and maybe hundreds of thousands of people qualify, by my estimation. I’ve now met dozens of people who meet criterion 1, and I am one of them myself. Some are unusually wonderful people. Some are more neurotic than average, or complete lunatics.

2 is obviously much rarer. Sometimes, 2 is formalized in a title, as in the “arahant” in Buddhism, which I roughly understand as designating someone who is never superfluously an asshole, ever. People whose opinion I trust have told me that there are maybe a few of these people alive at any given time, like under ten. I know a few elder teachers who I’d guess are approaching the zip code.

From this perspective, I’m in favor of 2 being the goal, and 1 being considered a laudable credential, like a PhD, that prepares you to do serious work. If you have experienced the abundant joy and ease of the separate self departing, and you’re not actively concerned about how to give your gifts away—in whatever way that means for you personally—I’m really confused by your priorities.

I think sometimes people downplay the idea of working towards unusual moral perfection because the idea can invite neuroticism. But this is, as the kids say, a skill issue. We can all acknowledge that it’s possible to be much more loving, kind, skillful, patient, wise, etc, than we are, and that there are concrete steps we can take in this direction, without constantly chastising ourselves or being dishonest about our remaining flaws. We can also acknowledge that we can be much better without opting into all of the trappings of what exactly that means in a renunciate religious context. (I like Chapman’s nobility.)

1 makes 2 more possible, in my experience, by making it more painful when you’re an asshole. The freedom of the spiritual path is a freedom from the desire to do massive amounts of self-interested clinging. However, sometimes people become dharma teachers, accumulate acolytes who fawn over them, and cut off the possibility of receiving real feedback, and stagnate or worse.

Anything can be a defense against any other thing

Sometimes, people who notice how their minds work start thinking: “Aha! Thoughts are so tricky and elusive! As long as I’m staying with my embodied emotions, I won’t deceive myself.” Alas, the ego is tremendously good at avoiding things, and can use anything as a defense against any other thing. You can use a thought to defend yourself against an emotion, or an emotion as a defense against a thought. Or an emotion as a defense against another emotion. Or you can put an emotion outside, into the world, as a defense against feeling something inside (projection.) Etc etc etc.

Thus, woe unto the meditator who believes that the key to awakening is “embodiment” or “emotional release” or “attunement” or “samadhi” or “memory reconsolidation” any specific state or attribute or benefit. Sure, these are nice precursors, and accessing them will likely be part of the trip. Memory reconsolidation, specifically, can clear up everyday cognition to a shocking extent. But the trip isn’t about any of that specifically — it’s finally about something so terrifyingly simple that you don’t want to see it. Extended periods of samadhi will make it likelier that you see it, but not if you fetishize concentration. The thing you’re looking for is part of every state, but it transcends all of them.

And any state can be used to avoid awakening. And you will avoid awakening, because it is terrifying to the ego structure. That is part of the journey—the terror, and the resistance. The resistance that tends to naturally decrease as you get increasingly sick of your own shit, and thus desirous of an alternative.

The switchback

There is a really weird property to the meditation arc. It is unlike anything else I know of in skill acquisition.

Let’s decompose the meditation path into two steps.

1. Get really good at skilled state cultivation. Really relax for the first time in your life. Develop equanimity, fill yourself with bliss, absorb the cosmic pain and transmute it into pure love, tune into spaciousness. Wow yourself with how psychedelic experience can become. Maybe get some fun side benefits, like telepathy-level empathy, or a reduced need for sleep. Do self-inquiry until self/other duality falls away.

2. Radically let go of thinking that states are important at all. Let the spirit do whatever it wants with you. (You might notice that you were always doing this, you just didn’t know it.) Give up on getting anything from the meditative path except your completely normal life. Accept death completely.

Notice how weird this is? It’s a complete reversal! In an interview with Michael Taft, Tucker Peck analogized this movement to how a musician starts out playing scales, but graduates to “just feel the music, man.” This comparison is helpful, but it’s weirder than that. It’s as if becoming a great racer, at some point, involved getting out of your car and joining someone else’s pit crew.

I don’t imagine that there’s an exact recipe for deciding when it’s time to make the switch. Some people quite quickly acquire the insight necessary to understand what letting go actually means, and the resources necessary to do it. Some people, like me, take a much longer period of time.

For me, it was a somewhat disturbing change in direction—I was really indignant that no particular state held the key, that there was nothing I could do, but simply let go until the letting go worked its way through my entire bodymind, as my life fell into alignment with the path (or vice versa). The phrase “nothing needs to be done” was deeply upsetting to me, and deeply moving. I held it as a mantra in all of my waking hours.

This is also where it helped, personally, to be unafraid of the G-word, which is to say, God. It was helpful to take the perspective that none of my spiritual path was my work at all—this made it easier to allow the remaining work to do itself.

The waiting room

Anyway, related to the switchback: after the stage when it mostly becomes about letting go, many meditators arrive at an odd time in practice before the self-making engine is unmade. In this phase, there’s a high level of meditative skill, and a lot of insight, but it’s not clear where to go next. Like: self/other duality is nearly gone, there is a fairly relaxed sense of doership, emotional experience is high-definition. But you know you still haven’t experienced the Great Unmaking. You maybe try and talk yourself into thinking you’ve got it. But then you chat with people who have been through it, and there’s something in their eyes, like the quality of someone haunted by war, but the opposite of that. And you know you aren’t quite on their wavelength yet.

What to do then? The traditional advice is to simply do a bunch of shikantaza and wait for the thing to unmake itself. Or to go on retreat and get your concentration revved up. But I was rewarded by a different approach. I started assuming that the sense of self was hanging on for a logical reason, and I started to ask terrifying questions about that reason.

Questions like:

• Hey, have you ever managed to successfully avoid suffering for even one day? Really, if you’re being honest with yourself?

• What is your worst motivation for spiritual practice, and what if you will always have corrupt motivations like this?

• What if you still don’t understand the basic nature of suffering?

• What are you hoping spirituality will let you get away with?

• What part of your identity depends on being a spiritual person, or someone who is seeking?

• What if you got absolutely nothing from the spiritual search?

These questions surfaced psychological resistance to work with directly.

Obviously this is not the only approach. One person told me he got out of the waiting room by simply hearing and really trying to understand the phrase “you are trying too hard.”

At this stage, the path itself is often used as a defense against letting go.

Sexuality is an under-discussed piece of the puzzle

Assuming that the whole of the path is habituation to openness, to paraphrase Andrew Holecek. Like being open to what is, and dropping all of your resistance to what is going on. For many people, “resistance to what is going on” will include some number of sexual hangups. This can include being ashamed of one’s sexuality, shame around prior sexual experiences, excessive attachment to the idea of sexual conquest or one’s attractiveness, and many many others.

To put it another way, disembodiment is an intelligent strategy if you have some automatic rejection of sexual energies, urges, and associated feelings. Those are a substantial component of embodied experience! Being in presence is threatening if your sexuality is even a little bit alive and you’re not okay with it.

I’ve found it extremely powerful to simply work with sexual hangups and feelings the way I would work with anything else. Like: greeting sexuality with more equanimity, treating sexual feelings as doorways to jhanic states, bringing open loving awareness to sexual shame, et cetera.

Many meditators don’t talk about how powerful and important this can be. There are three reasons, I think:

1. Sex is awkward and taboo to begin with, and there are some Buddhist cultural hangups in the meditation world.

2. If you introduce sexual stuff to your meditation group, it’s easy to accidentally do a sex cult. On the 1:1 level, introducing sexuality into a teaching relationship requires care, and many teachers, reasonably, do not want to go there.

3. Few of us want to be confused with the neo-tantra nerds, for whom sexuality is a Special Interest, who always have horny energy. I happen to like a lot of these people, but they are not normal, and thus not aspirational for many meditators.

And so, the possibility of bringing sexuality into practice is under-discussed (in some circles). But if you don’t want to be a monastic and go for the “shut it off” option, you are going to have to work with your sexuality. Which simply means trying to experience it without resistance, and also trying to incorporate it into an ethical life, as a vessel for connection, and a set of energies that bring us into contact with creation. (May I suggest marriage as a spiritual practice?)

What the happiness without conditions means

I’d always misread the phrase “the happiness without conditions.” I took it to mean a kind of happiness that persists no matter what life throws at you. I have come to a different conclusion. It refers to the happiness that arises if, and only if, you stop putting conditions on life.

Future essays to come, maybe, on request:

• The shocking power of the Diamond Sutra

• Non-dual glimpse practice as Legend of Zelda map destination

• Some species of energy shit I’ve seen out there

Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

Meditation is about more than one thing. But if it were just about one thing, it would be releasing mental tension so you can fully feel your experience. All of the fancy insights you are trying to get from meditation become nakedly obvious, in due time, once you drop inhibitions to feeling what is already going on. The same insights are available at the office or the monastery, when you allow yourself to see them.

You might be like: but what about distraction, aren’t I supposed to be staying focused? Yes. Continuity of attention is good. Enough continuity will likely rocket you into some wonderful bliss state, if that’s what you’re into. And the distraction that keeps you from establishing this is typically an automatic flinch. Relax all the flinching and you will find progressively expanding stillness, which you can point in some direction if you want to. The quality of a mind that is not being messed with constantly is tranquil, assuming that basic survival is taken care of.

There are sources of mental tension that meditators often don’t notice because they are simply accepted as background activities/properties of the mind. It’s not clear, until you learn to turn them off, that they are optional. But they are optional, and toggling them off is necessary to experience the profound depths of practice.

This is not a “meditation 101” post. For that, go here.

Tracking/predicting experience, rather than being open to possibility

We have an automatic tendency to monitor ongoing experience and predict the next moment. Mentally, this creates a sense of wariness or watchfulness, which is a layer of tension. Also, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mental intention to predict experience keeps experience predictable by reducing your sensitivity to variation.

Helpful tricks:

• Notice if there’s a moment of relaxation, or a pause in mental activity, after you think “I don’t know what will happen next,” or “I can’t predict experience.” See if you can ease into that pause.

• Notice how there is constant detail in sensory experience that you can’t predict. The next thought, the next flicker of body sensation, the next shade of emotion. Relax into the flow, allow yourself to be drawn in by the unpredictable flux of subtlety.

• See if you can let the breath drive itself, by responding naturally to the desire for oxygen rather than trying to keep your breath predictable, while maintaining mindfulness.

Reaching out and grabbing experience, rather than receiving experience

There is an unconscious tendency to direct attention to specific portions of experience—to mentally “squint” at what we’re looking at, for example. This is not actually necessary for perception. In meditation, it is typically more helpful to enter a mode of holistic, receptive experiencing, where we let the field of experience come to us.

Helpful tricks:

• Play with the prompt “I am a puddle, and experience is the rain.” (Thanks to Hormeze for the inspiration.)

• Notice that you are already listening without the decision to listen. See if you can do this with all of your senses.

• Allow your awareness to be broad and inclusive: lightly include both your head and your feet in experience. A wide aperture of awareness naturally creates a receptive mode.

Having a frantic pace of intending

Many intentions function best when held lightly. For example, when you’re walking to a destination, you typically don’t need to remind yourself to keep walking every few feet—you only need to remind yourself if you get distracted by something and stop walking. The intentional savoring required by focused meditation practice (like jhana practice, for example) is one of these intentions best held lightly: it is a direction we allow ourselves to move in. However, many novice meditators engage in the frantic renewal of intention, reminding themselves constantly of what they ought to be doing. Not helpful!

Helpful tricks:

• Reduce the pace and intensity of voluntary mental action. If the mind is chaotic in the short term, trust that this will settle down as you relax into pleasant feelings.

• Do the unhelpful thing intentionally, so you can get a feel for the helpful thing. Frantically issue a few mental commands to yourself—voluntarily engage yourself in thought repeatedly at a fast pace. Notice the turbulence this creates. Then, try to do the opposite: see if you can smoothly, slowly connect with one mental intention.

• Try, for a period, to completely let go of voluntary mental action. See what it’s like to have faith that the mind can settle itself, if you don’t shake it. (This may take some minutes, and may not happen if mental activity is particularly intense. It is also a whole style of meditation.)

Evaluating whether or not certain things are supposed to be happening in meditation

Mental movements that get in the way of absorption, sometimes called “hindrances”— like doubting your meditative skill, other discursive thought, restlessness—always occur in meditation, even to very experienced practitioners. Experience gives you the capacity to work with these mental events, it doesn’t banish them. So, generally, the most helpful attitude is one of “allow, then reprioritize”: don’t get disturbed by the mental event, just notice it and shift back to the intention of meditation. But many novice meditators instead stiffen up, tightening too intensely around the intention to keep mental activity restricted, in a way that is counterproductive.

Helpful tricks:

• Internally affirm “everything is allowed, everything can be interesting.” Detours can be fun parts of the trip.

• Check to make sure you’re not enforcing overly harsh extensions of general principles. For example, notice whether you’re interpreting “try not to intentionally get caught up in thought” as “never have or get caught up in thoughts.” If you are, stop it.

• See if you can hold the mental intention to meditate a bit more loosely. To get a feel for loosening intention, imagine throwing a ball at a specific target, and then imagine loosely chucking it in a direction.

• For a few minutes, drop all control. Allow random distraction while loosely noticing it, as if you’re a voyeur dropping in on your thoughts and feelings. Try to enjoy the randomness, the unpredictable nature of interior life. Then return to a loosely held intention.

Guarding against emotional intensity

Often, people are taught to emotionally contain themselves at a young age, and the most robust way to contain yourself is to not allow yourself to feel too intensely. This is adaptive in development, but unnecessary for adults with good emotional regulation. And yet the habit to constrain your emotional experience often remains present in adult meditators. It adds tension and drains the color from meditation and life.

Helpful tricks:

• Just ask: could I let myself feel everything 10% more? If that worked, what about 20% more?

• Check whether there’s a perceived boundary between you and the emotion in your experience, a sense that there’s a spatial “partition” in the way of feeling. If so, see if you can earnestly adopt the intention to relax that boundary.

• If your experience feels “dull” or “boring” or “unemotional,” what does that feel like? What is the texture? If the experience isn’t peaceful, there is probably some subtle anger, sadness, or fear in it that will intensify if you tune in. (And in the context of meditation, that is a good thing, assuming you’re in your window of tolerance.)

Tracking time, tracking space

Space and time—by which I mean, the sense of where on earth you are, and what time it is—aren’t directly created by bare sense experience, they are inferences placed on top. When you look at a sunset and you are absorbed in it, no part of the experience unambiguously tells you “it’s 6:22 PM.” Temporarily relaxing the tracking of space and time can create incredible experiences in meditation. Reflect on how flow states are typically characterized by dropping these frames of reference: wouldn’t it be nice to gain the ability to temporarily drop the frame?

Helpful tricks:

• Ask: what mental sensations, specifically, tell me that I’m located in this place, or this time? Once you notice that the feelings of space and time are being created by a mental process of “marking” or “tracking” reality, the tracking often diminishes all by itself.

• Play with the question: “what if there is only one eternal moment?” Or: “what if everything in my life has happened within one space of awareness?” The intention is not to entertain these as philosophical or intellectual truths, but to use them as temporary lenses on experience.

• Ask yourself whether there is a quality of awareness that is ageless, a quality has been the same since you were a child. See if you can tune into this foundational quality. Remembering spacious, expansive-feeling moments from childhood may help as a reference.

Problem: The essence of the dharma is not grasping, and doing some other nicer stuff instead. You know, the noble truths that we keep talking about. But, in speaking about all the nuances therein, and building a religion, the teaching has gotten all tangled up.

Solution: Let’s make a tradition built around less theorizing, and more interfacing with a master who serves as an embodiment of the teaching. Just sit there and let go, and have the master trigger you when you’re missing the point.

New side effects: Some people need all the theorizing to understand what’s going on. Also, just sitting there and intermittently getting triggered is an abrasive style for many. So, a few students get traumatized, and a bunch of others don’t get it, and occasionally your teacher is just a lunatic.

We can also think this way about valuable modern wisdom teaching. Let’s take my understanding of Art of Accomplishment (hey AoA friends!).

Problem: Much of the beauty of the contemplative path is in working with emotion. But people use the contemplative path as another way to resist emotion, despite what everyone says in all the books—and for strivey people, holding in emotion is perhaps the most common form of grasping.

Solution: Let’s go for that juicy emotional release right away, and use that release to train people on what it feels like to unclench themselves, with the wonderful feedback loop of connection.

New side effects: Focusing on your emotions and connection can just become a new kind of grasping. Some people who might need better self-regulation skills become less functional as they over-focus on chasing catharsis.

Or Jhourney, an organization which I love, and happily collaborate with (hello Jhourney colleagues!).

Problem: People miss out on the life-changing effects of meditation because they don’t know that some helpful and beautiful states might be closer than they think, and they’ll maybe never undertake the experimentation required to hit them.

Solution: Let’s make a retreat that gives people agency to experiment in such a way that they hit an onramp to unbelievable pleasure and release, much faster than usual.

New side effects: There is no way to do this that won’t create, in some people, strivey button-mashing, reinforcing the attitude of “optimize myself harder.” Occasionally someone will hit an emotional sinkhole, and bliss practice will suddenly be therapy practice (productive, even amazing, but less fun).

Or, for more lightning round, Byron Katie’s work.

Problem: People get caught up with thoughts to try to make themselves happy, when, often, deconstructing thought is the most immediate path to mental freedom.

Solution: Here’s a powerful tool for creating mental fluidity, a rapid procedure for loosening the grip of painful identity beliefs.

New side effects: People get all caught up on the tool of debugging their reactive thinking, thus becoming more worried about thoughts, rather than understanding mental fluidity as a pointer towards a non-graspy way of relating to life.

I have fun criticizing different traditions and teachings from this standpoint, noticing all the ways they break down in implementation. However, for a long time, this criticism carried the assumption that someday, I’d come up with a better, pithier instruction set that would avoid these side effects.

And then I noticed that years after writing a passionate post called Deep Okayness, about the positive effects of working lovingly with all the difficult parts of your psychology, people still came up to me saying: “hey, how do I know I’ve reached real Deep Okayness? I keep feeling bad about myself because I haven’t done self-acceptance right.” Sometimes they assume I will personally disapprove of them for this, which makes me sad. I now have a Deep Understandingness of how any pointer you give someone can become fuel for more grasping.

More recently, I started to wonder: wait. What if I’m thinking about all of this the wrong way? What if this is the spiritual path?

Problem: Life. Seems bad? Feels bad? Some wise-seeming people say it’s actually good? What do.

The spiritual path: Open up, try to be kind, notice how wonderful the universe is, let this fill you with awe and humility, notice that there’s plenty of work to be done, especially on yourself. Here are a million practices and frameworks that might help.

Side effect: Whatever fucked up way you relate to the above instructions, or the teachers who convey them, or a cool spiritual experience you have, will cause you to become further ensnarled in your suffering.

Which is also the solution: Eventually you will be forced to stop doing whatever stupid shit the spiritual path caused you to do. Hopefully a kind teacher (formal or informal) will be there to point out the stupid shit. Someday, letting go will show itself, by the grace of God, and you will be transformed. Hopefully you can also remain honest about your flaws.

A vessel for transformation is an opportunity to come up against your foibles. They are the same thing.

Or: you come to God by struggling with God.

This has given me a sense of reality about what we’re all doing here. None of us can spread, reinterpret, or revamp these precious teachings in a way that avoids causing temporary damage. Temporary damage is the nature of the work—hopefully, damage that causes helpful adaptation, which is to say, wisdom. All we can do is be kind, be honest, be pragmatic, and try to exemplify wisdom ourselves in the way we relate to people, such that a crude attempt to copy us will result in the least harmful errors. An opportunity to refine this craft is there in every interaction.

If the wisdom is there, then people will feel better, on average, and move slightly closer to liberation as a result of having interacted with us. If we lose track of the wisdom, we will know it also by the direct effects of our mode of relating. None of us can know the ultimate benefit. That is a matter of faith.

I try to remember my favorite words of the Diamond Sutra. “In the realm of complete nirvana, I shall liberate all beings. And while I thus liberate beings, not a single being is liberated.” For me, this is a rich paradox with many implications. One is a pointer for how to be with people: the moment that I’m splitting the world into you, the un-free thing, and me, the thing trying to free you, I have already lost the plot. It is so easy to slip out of actual relation, back into a place of superiority or technique, and forget the nature of what we’re doing here.

May we all keep our heads out of our asses, and remember!

There are two kinds of desire. It’s hard to tease them apart conceptually. But that doesn’t matter too much, because it’s relatively easy to tell them apart experientially. They are tanha, and chanda.

Tanha: Scarcity-based desire. Graspy, clingy. Feels like fighting life. “I don’t want this headache, let me tense my forehead until it goes away.” Perhaps if I get a little more social status, I will finally love myself. Sigh, I don’t really want to do the dishes, but I should, because I want more sex and less arguments. Though I’m full-to-bursting, I’m taking another bite of ice cream. Push motivation.

Chanda: Whole-being desire. The kind of desire you fall into, which requires energy to resist. Your arm is being pulled by the paintbrush. The hours-long conversation that feels like it’s over in five minutes. Getting lost in a book. Slowly teasing apart a really gratifying puzzle. Desire that refreshes you when indulged, rather than leaving you feeling spent and dirty. Pull motivation.

The most interesting finding in human psychology, ever, is that basically all of us are born with the wrong intuition about how to be happy. We think that doing enough tanha, enough grabbing, will please us. But actually, grabbing is the source of something like 90% of our unhappiness. It’s a basically dissociative reaction to reality which creates a sense of temporary dissatisfaction, like putting on tight shoes so that later your feet will feel good again. Skip it altogether, as much as possible, if you want to be at peace. It’s crazy how true, and how unintuitive, this is. (The main reason long-term meditation makes people wildly happy is that it sensitizes you to when you’re doing tanha, thus providing the opportunity to relax most of it, which does beautiful things to the mind.)

We also tend towards poor intuitions about chanda. Perhaps we say to ourselves: “my intuition is telling me that I need to become a CEO to be happy.” But it would be weird if that were the case, because the intuition mechanisms in your mind are much older than job titles. What’s likelier is that there are certain configurations of experience that will make you happy. Like “leading a group of people,” or “slowly turning something over in your mind,” or “transmuting reality into an artistic representation.”

For example, I’ve noticed that I’m persistently delighted by affecting someone directly, in a 1:1 relationship. This can be accomplished by writing someone an email, or doing coaching, or cooking someone a meal. If I get creative about where to find this particular chanda, it is all over the place.

The things that satisfy you most will contain multiple compulsive delights. For example, I loved being a bartender, because it contained the opportunity to affect someone directly, and the opportunity to appreciate aesthetic experience, and useful low-resistance exercise, three personal sources of chanda. This made nearly every shift feel like an engaging dance, rather than a boring slog. To someone unaffected by such delights, it would be a horrible job.

Chanda is not particularly negotiable. As in: what provides it for you changes slowly over a lifetime, and the change is not voluntary. This is weird, because a shocking amount of human psychology is negotiable. You can reprogram disgust reactions that cause you to be racist or regard avocados as poison. People who are scared of heights can become mountaineers. Dissociated nerds can become sexual athlete tango champions. You can forgive people who have wounded you unforgivably. It is incredible how plastic we are.

But the energy patterns that give us compulsive delight? Mostly static, and mostly not in our control.

This implies how you can figure out your chanda, if you don’t know what it is. Look for the repeating patterns of desire in moments when you are truly happy. Look for the arrangements of energy that compel you. Remember, you are looking for general shapes, like “the feeling of sharing confidences,” or “the knowledge that you have served your duty.” Language here only serves as a pointer to the elemental arrangements of experience.

Meanwhile, tanha is much more variable, because the mind can create diverse feelings of scarcity. You might have a grippy desire to be skinnier if hanging around glamorously slender people, and then, later on, a grippy desire to be more muscular if you hang out with a bunch of gym rats. Around wealthy acquaintances, you might acquire a temporary itchiness about your financial status, and then later, traveling in a poor country, a shameful urge to conceal your wealth.

So your true desires will show up repeatedly in different guises, unmistakable signatures signed in different colors. Whereas your insecurity-based wants will likely be more environment-specific.

Obviously the separation isn’t completely clean. Designing a fashion line might involve chanda around the creative act, and then tanha around clingily fixating on whether certain colleagues show up to the runway show. But also obviously, some acts have a more favorable ratio.

This is a way more helpful distinction than extrinsic vs. intrinsic, a division that makes no fucking sense if you think about it for more than two seconds, since most of our feelings occur in the context of relationship.

This is the important thing:

The people I know who are happiest, most productive, and most creative are people who feed off chanda. They have structured their lives such that their work, relationships, and pastimes repeatedly offer true delight, in ways that also have prosocial externalities. This applies to artists, founders, chefs, housewives, all kinds of people. To me, a wonderful example is Tyler Cowen, who has said he lives selfishly, in complete surrender to his interests, but who gives out tons of money to promising young people, produces a huge amount of insightful writing for free, and so on. Structuring your life in this way requires creativity and flexibility about how to get your chanda, rather than attachment to a specific concept of what your job/relationships/hobbies ought to be.

Does all of this mean that we should never do tanha? Probably that is an overreaction. Sometimes there are chores that won’t be accomplished if we insist on enjoying them. And sometimes there are tradeoffs that totally make sense—like pushing yourself really hard to temporarily do a gig that gives you life-changing money or status, thus opening up future options for life engineering. Occasionally, being moral might require doing some gripping, like, say, holding yourself back from having an affair if you’re in an unhappy marriage with resolvable issues. Also, basically nobody writes a good book without some tanha. “Just follow your bliss” is a good corrective principle for strivers, but infantile if taken as sufficient guidance period.

So a rough guideline presents itself: engage in tanha if it helps set you up for more chanda in your future, or it’s a really good way to increase the welfare of others in some situation. Otherwise, think twice. Filling your days with tanha will lead to a tense face, a writhing gut, and a false life.

If you can engineer a life that’s at least benign for other people that’s mostly chanda, you are doing well. And if you can design a life where getting your chanda is also good for others, you are insanely fortunate. Most materially wealthy people live in a prison, compared to the freedom you enjoy. Be completely grateful that you and the world can operate in joyful harmony.

This post was a crystallization of some thoughts that have been percolating for awhile, but the crystallization was directly prompted by this great Tyler Alterman post: “Chanda is desire that arises from a place of non-tension. It often feels like a relaxed current, but can sometime be strong, channeled, like a great benevolent wave surging outward – and yet it is unattached to outcome. Intensify this style of desire while releasing craving & clinging, and genius springs naturally.” Photo credit goes to Daido Moriyama.

Recently, I’ve been getting the urge to send the following message to everyone I care about: if I die soon, know I was happy and that I love you.

I don’t plan to die, that’s not what brought this on. Although I’m going to Mexico soon, and international travel always gives me a little paranoia, even though I know the statistics are i…

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She saw herself as someone ambushed by life. Her hopes and dreams were being withheld from her—nothing she could do would bring them closer. And any nearby substitute prizes were deemed unworthy. At times, she regarded me as the only person who could help, and her ongoing unhappiness was also evidence of my inadequacy. This was hallucinatory because she had a lot of real power, which she was disregarding.

Meanwhile, I did see myself as a helper, who could make her happy. When my interventions failed to produce the desired result, I became resentful. She just wouldn’t accept my assistance, that’s why she was miserable. This was hallucinatory because I had very little ability to fix what was wrong. I couldn’t control her. Meanwhile, I was overlooking my own conspicuous issues.

This wasn’t the entirety of the relationship, but it was a lot of it. Later, after I exited the relationship and regained consciousness, I realized: oh, I am a therapeutic cliche. This is the drama triangle, right? We were in the drama triangle. Later, we reconciled, and we both talked about this dynamic as if we’d been drunk the whole time—neither of us recognized the realities which were so convincing previously.

Here is the way I now understand the Karpman drama triangle, which is a therapeutic cliche that captures an important element of social reality.

Let’s say life is giving you information you can learn from. Events tell you that you should update a behavioral pattern, or admit your complicity in your ongoing pain, or let other people be the way they are, or something humiliating like that. But you don’t want to learn! That would be embarrassing and hard! Instead, you want to slip into a cartoon universe where there are three roles. Each role contains a psychological defense—it shields you from pain, and provides motivation (to act immaturely) where you might otherwise feel helpless.

Here are the basic scripts:

The victim: Everything is being done to me. I have no agency or responsibility in the present—maybe I did once, but I squandered it. Someone needs to rescue me. (The goal of the victim is to avoid the scariness of responsibility, and embarrassment around being a contributor to the situation.)

The rescuer: This person is hopeless. It’s up to me to help them. If they refuse my help, or implement my advice imperfectly, that just goes to show how much help they need. (The goal of the rescuer is to avoid their own feelings of helplessness, and any other inconvenient circumstances they’re dealing with, in favor of manufacturing a feeling of goodness or usefulness.)

The persecutor: This person is wrong. It is my righteous duty to inflict retribution, or at the very least to tell them exactly why they were wrong, so they can feel shame, and order will be restored to the universe. (The goal of the persecutor is to salvage the feeling of righteousness from the unbearable pain and ambiguity of life.)

My astute friend Milan Cvitkovic notes this maps onto three of the four reactions to overwhelm: fight, freeze, and fawn. The fourth, flight, is represented by the tactic “leave the situation immediately,” which does cause drama, just in your absence.

Drama triangle 101 is to simply know that these are three common hallucinations for human beings to slip into, and, moreover, that when you’re in one of these hallucinations, you will be seized by a feeling of conviction. You’ll have the delicious sense that you’re finally gripping the situation, you know how to advance to the next stage of the game. This false certainty helps you avoid whatever the hallucination is designed to conceal. Typically, this pseudo-certainty bears a frenetic quality, which is palpably different from the stillness of true insight. Watch for defensiveness: a flashing irritability that might come up when you’re questioned about the conclusions you’ve come to.

Each of us has a favorite role we tend to slip into. Given the above sketch, it should be obvious that rescuer is my favorite. Which sounds nice, until you consider the fucked up part: that it means I’m liable to subconsciously locate ways in which other people are incapable, so I can feel better about myself. Ironically, to get good at helping people, I had to get over this compulsive rescuer dynamic.

You might respond—is it always bad to be a rescuer? Can’t you actually kind of rescue people sometimes? Yes, absolutely. There are also real victims, and it is good sometimes to prosecute. One interesting thing about these three roles is that they are each cousin to skillful action:

• If you’re a victim of harm, it’s good to notice this, grieve if required, and sometimes recruit others to help. Just not at the cost of discarding your responsibility in shaping situations, or your own power to work with all the cards you’re dealt.

• It’s good to assist others. Reality is a team sport. But you can’t control anybody else, or make them well by force, and maybe they don’t agree with your definition of wellness. Skilled assistance is empathetic, humble, and situation-specific.

• Sometimes there really are wrongs to be addressed. But what would actually be just or helpful is rarely depicted accurately by your immediate desire for moral or personal satisfaction.

So, if you find yourself believing one of these roles, it might not be 100% fiction. It’s more likely that it’s just an exaggeration. Getting to a nuanced perspective probably requires admitting emotions and thoughts that might be unflattering to the current perspective. This is desirable, because a dramatic reaction tends to create more drama rather than resolving the underlying pain.

Here is a suitably embarrassing example of this. Early on in my marriage, it was my birthday, and my wife was bad at celebrating it, because I hadn’t specified what I wanted adequately. We were sitting in the car, and I was feeling disappointed at how the day was going. I saw a chain of thoughts forming in front of me—about how she clearly misunderstood me, and, moreover, I’d gotten into another relationship with someone who didn’t care about my preferences. Clearly, my role in life, I realized, was to be the giver, not the receiver. Could I put up with pain like that? Did I have the strength?

And then I noticed this long line of thoughts stretching out from my forehead and thought, oh. This is the victim role being offered to me, to cover up my discomfort. My brain has given me this mask, all ready to put on. But it’s not real. My birthday is sucking right now because I’m uncomfortable with spelling out exactly what I want. I took a deep breath, and said exactly what I wanted, and my wife gave that to me. The whole cartoon universe melted.

That’s drama triangle 101: notice the hallucination, hopefully before you put it into practice. See if you can embrace the discomfort underneath, and stop pulling other people into choreographed conflicts.

As for when other people bring you drama, I don’t have the perfect recipe. Sometimes, a civilized response can end drama instantly—like listening patiently to someone who brings you a grievance, rather than responding defensively. Sometimes, if faced with a dramatist of higher intensity, you’ll need to grey rock or withdraw, simply removing your oxygen from the fire. And with very intense drama, removing your personal oxygen might not end the situation, because other people can get drawn in.

That being the 101, what is the 201?

Earthquake people

Have you ever had a relationship with somebody else that felt really spicy? Like in a destabilizing way, not in a fun way?

Maybe when you entered their life, they introduced an incandescent quality. Everything began glowing. They instantly declared you a favorite person. Then, like a summer storm, a sudden turn occurred. There was this situation they needed help with. Something with a landlord, or a partner — an enemy for you to ally against. Pulled into this situation abruptly, you couldn’t totally meet the requirements foisted upon you. And then, suddenly, you found yourself on the outside, declared an enemy. Then, weeks later, a peace offering, luring you back in.

Or maybe it just felt really easy for things to get into a bad place. Everything was fine in the relationship for days, maybe even weeks at a time. And then you crossed a threshold you didn’t see coming, and your behavior was suddenly deemed unacceptable. Wham! Suddenly, you became a villain, or you were drafted into service as a rescuer, to mend your supposed harms. After a few days, back to uneasy tranquility, and then repeat.

Some people have an inherent talent for grabbing onto others by pulling them into drama. All it takes is an inflammatory text message, or a sudden outburst. And, because each drama can only be dragged out so long, after you reach equilibrium, they soon start another chapter. People can do this by pulling you into a different role, or simply by spamming you with the same role repeatedly—like putting themselves in the victim or persecutor role by presenting grievance after grievance. Advanced players can change the scale of the drama by pulling in other players, or moving to a different stage—like by taking a dispute public over social media.

There’s a natural question here, with personal and societal implications—how many such people are there? And what are the different kinds of dramatists? We find potential answers in an intriguing psychology textbook, Demystifying Personality Disorders, by Gregory W. Lester, Ph.D. and Alan Godwin, Psy.D.

The textbook’s POV, supposedly crafted based on thousands of clinical evaluations, is that some portion of humanity is chronically resistant to feedback, and thus, routinely creates drama so as not to learn from their behavior. It labels this an essential component of a disordered personality, and thus characterizes personality disorders in a novel way—via different patterns of drama triangle activity. We call these patterns things like “borderline” and “schizoid,” but they’re just different patterns—many of which respond well to therapeutic intervention, some not so much.

Obviously, this isn’t “truer” than other systems of diagnosis, but it’s a provocative lens. According to the textbook, a fairly large percentage of the population is walking around with one of these disorders: 15-19%. I don’t know enough to evaluate this claim. But…

The political aspect (quite speculative)

Here is an unoriginal insight: politics looks similar at extremes. It’s clear that people understand this based on the very fact that the term “woke right” exists. At both far ends of the political spectrum, we find cartoonish worldviews, characterized by a sense of opposition and grievance: heroes and villains, a zero-sum game that someone else is winning. Without the Jews everything would be fine. Or the wealthy. Or the white cismale. Or the transgenders. And on and on.

If we tentatively accept the conclusion that something like 15% of the population is walking around with a drama triangle view of the world, this starts to seem like the natural order, which might be depressingly difficult to reverse. There is a portion of humanity tragically stuck in repetitive, simplistic characterizations of their lives. This simplicity propagates to their views about the world as a whole. They perceive everything as drama. And this contingent is large, so, in a two-party country, any political faction that refuses to cater to that perception will lose.

The drama triangle lens also makes new meaning of temporary moments of political craziness, like the height of woke, or the War on Terror: we’re all vulnerable to transient trips through the drama triangle. Most of us snap out of it eventually. Some don’t, just picking new rescuers, persecutors, and victims, forever.

The mind control aspect (less speculative)

I’ve noticed that most adults, including me, basically don’t have a drama-based view of their life—no perpetual victim mindset, or savior complex, or whatever. However, they don’t necessarily possess this sophistication about narratives passing through their world. Or narratives they manufacture.

In one of Ryan Lizza’s recent articles, he makes passing mention of “…Donald Trump, who turned everything in his life into an easily digestible story in which he was a hero or victim under attack by vindictive heels.” And I instantly thought: oh yes, that’s a huge part of his cleverness. Drama is mimetically fit; you can throw it onto any situation and make it instantly memorable. Reacting to a dramatic storyline gets you engaged, if you respond with anything other than a flat dismissal of the frame.

How many times have you been consoling a friend after a breakup, and found yourself eager to condemn their ex as a monster, absolving your friend of all responsibility—perhaps in response to an implicit demand that you do this? How many times have you sought sympathy by complaining about a superior or colleague, while failing to mention your clear responsibility in setting up the situation? How many times have you posted about some injustice or bad behavior online, inviting others to join you in condemnation, while privately suspecting the situation might be more ambiguous than your post suggests?

It’s common and perfectly rational behavior: we flatten a situation in order to pull others into a choreographed response, or join a choreography in motion. We create hallucinations to pull others into, even if we, ourselves, understand the complexity of the underlying situation.

Very few of us are completely free of drama.

Thank you to Cate Hall, Carly Valancy, and Stephen Zerfas for notes on this piece.

Psychotherapy and traditional Buddhist meditation both offer compelling ideas of how to live a healthy life, ideas which happen to be completely incompatible.

The Buddhist idea is that your suffering is caused by an illusory sense of identity that separates you from experience. To dissolve this illusory self, inquire into the substance of your thoughts and emotions rather than getting caught in them, notice that they are transient, and, eventually, your illusory identity will dissolve. Your stories are not important.

The psychotherapeutic idea is that your identity is a densely woven fabric informed by all of your experiences, which contains valuable truths, but also outdated coping strategies. To become healthier, unweave and reweave this patterning, by carefully examining your stories and emotions, considering them important clues about how you function.

You can see the incompatibility here. One perspective regards mental content as important, and the primary material to work with. The other regards mental content as waves, which, instead of getting caught in, we should learn to simply surf.

Most people who have tried to work with both of these theories have noticed that they both work sometimes, despite being philosophically incompatible. So what is the synthesis of these perspectives?

It is something like: meditation can make you a really good therapy patient. It can dissolve some thoughts and emotions that are merely the mental engine sputtering. And it can also fast-forward you to difficult content that requires therapeutic work. Addressing this content will improve your stillness of mind, which will make you a better meditator, forming a virtuous feedback loop. Over time, your ego gets thinner and more flexible. You have a more durable happiness, and more awareness of the effects of your behavior. If you follow this loop far enough, you can maybe become a saint in this lifetime (like, over the course of decades). Not in the sense of working miracles (although if that happens to you, cool) but more in the sense of being unusually dedicated and skillful in living a life that benefits others.

The sweet smell of coherence floods the pagoda. But how to actually practice the combination of meditation and therapy? The above is not a sufficient operating manual. Making the above paragraph into a practice would be like trying to derive a gym routine from the principle “work your muscles hard enough to hurt them temporarily, not permanently.”

Sanity and Sainthood is the closest thing to a sufficient operating manual on the market. It’s written by Dr. Tucker Peck, a clinical psychologist and dharma teacher, who has years of experience watching people run afoul of the intersection. He thus is equipped to make credible recommendations about when you should work on the content of your mind, as opposed to merely observing it with meditative equanimity. He’s also pithy, funny, and wise, and the book represents him well, so it’s fun to read even if you’re not totally gaga about meditation yet.

The biggest endorsement I can give this book is that I once considered writing a book like this, but now I consider the job done. I can write something else. Also, I would’ve been a lot less stupid in areas of my meditation practice if I’d been given this book when I was 20. (For this reason, I have extra copies of this book to opportunistically give to young meditators I meet.)

Readers of this blog will know that I’ve experienced transformative effects from long-term meditation, more than I believed possible. I’m still amazed by what my life has become, on a near-daily basis. But something I don’t emphasize enough, perhaps, is that I spent hundreds of hours bashing my head against meditation in my early 20s, practice hours that were net negative for my mental health. Largely, my early practice wasn’t helpful because I was trying not to have a psychology, something this book would’ve talked me out of.

There’s lots of solid practical advice in this book. But most readers of self-help will notice that the best books don’t really work by imparting advice. You might take some of the advice, but the real action of self-help is vibe transmission. By reading the best self-help, you absorb the mental presence of a wise person, who can serve as a virtual interlocutor. In this capacity, Tucker shines.

An indicative story about him: I went for a walk with Tucker during the really psychoactive part of my meditation practice. I told him that I was extremely happy. He said something mildly congratulatory, and then said something like, “consider that you’re a privileged, healthy, smart married person living one of the best lives in history. Maybe it’s just appropriate that you’re happy, and that’s nice or whatever, but you can shoot for something more than that.” He managed to say it so gently and matter-of-factly that I immediately realized that it was true, with no resistance. Tucker is one of those people who can collapse your bullshit quickly, but it feels like a big hug. It helps that he is also highly conscious of his own frailties—this book doubles as an atlas of Tucker’s neuroses, which are presented joyfully.

If I have a criticism of the book, it’s that it, perhaps, underrates the effects of long-term serious meditation. Reading this book, you might get the sense that long-term meditation will make you quite pleased, whereas my experience is that it can completely explode what you thought life was, and replace it with something immeasurably better.

But then again, maybe this kind of dissuasion is helpful. My experience with meditation started getting really good after about 12 on-and-off years of it, with many, many hours of psychological self-exploration that were not immediately pleasurable. I write a sentence like this in almost every one of my posts raving about the era of practice I’m in now, and yet somehow people don’t manage to read the part where I say it was hard, based on some of the emails I get. Like people mentally skip the part where I struggled with myself for an extended period. That’s a message that seems unabsorbable by seekers in an aspirational mood.

Some meditation books will tell you that you can count on enlightenment within a year or two of serious practice, which actually does happen to some lucky students, but not to like 95%. The more typical case is not as rosy. One of Tucker’s big points in this book is that meditation gives you the opportunity to look at, and mend, destructive parts of your psychology—and this means confronting your destructive psychology, which is not pleasant in the short-term. So taking up meditation, even when it goes quite well, can involve a significant dip in perceived happiness before the benefits start kicking in.

And even if meditation gives you dramatic results in the short term—say, if you have a spectacular time on a Jhourney retreat—it typically tends to take many hours to integrate this into your life, and actually live differently. As in other domains, dramatic results from self-work tend to result from unusual levels of dedication.

Meanwhile, Sanity and Sainthood is one of the few meditation books that doesn’t lie to you, at all. I wish it had a more clickbaity title, it would sell more copies. But it is the anti-clickbait meditation book, and for that, it should be praised.

Geese — Getting Killed 2/5. When I was an adolescent, people were really worried about “irony” in popular culture. I think this is what they were worried about. What happens if you make rock music and have a distaste for crude maleness, but don’t suggest anything solid as a replacement? What if you did Talking Heads, but took away the fear and wond…

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Next week, I’ll have a paywalled post of truly deep Enneagram nerdery, about the flaws I see in the system, how it compares to other diagnostics, and various other bits and bobs.

5: The sage, the knower, the hermit

Strengths: Curiosity, open-mindedness, competence through knowledge. The curators of entirely personal lifetime research projects, which sometimes yield marvelous feats of invention.

Weaknesses: Stinginess, isolation, overthinking. Slothful overwhelm. They’ll read several articles about historical landscaping design but find it too overwhelming to hire a gardener.

Core fear: Without your shield of knowledge, you will be overwhelmed by the unexpected. Better plan ahead so you never look stupid, ever. Your needs are too overwhelming for others, and vice versa, so you should keep your distance.

On the group hike of life, they’ve got a detailed map, tracking the location of minerals far underground, and weather systems originating far away. It gets them there, you just wonder how much they’re seeing what’s in front of them.

There is a fantasy that Enneagram 5s find appealing, almost universally. It is this: you are a wizard, and in your laboratory, there are grimoires containing powerful spells. If you spend enough time studying the grimoires, when you venture outside of the laboratory, you will be able to instantly vanquish all of life’s problems with your superior knowledge.

They are the most unusual type, as measured by sheer difference from others, even though they are not motivated by specialness in the same way 4s are. “Remote” is a word that comes to mind. The reason is that they instinctively want to search beyond the social consensus for knowledge. Not because they want to rebel, necessarily — they just know how fallible received wisdom is, and have a hunger to find out what is really going on. This also makes them reflexively search for the antithesis of their position. Think of the Christian scholar who is deeply aware of scriptural inconsistencies, or the libertarian who can enumerate the downsides of free market capitalism more ably than the average communist. What gives them great satisfaction is looking over a panorama of conflicting knowledge and then arriving at a firm position with earned authority. They also sometimes despair that others don’t reason like this, and just believe things (although they can probably rattle off reasons why this is adaptive, since they’ve read a few books about cultural evolution.)

Their taste for secret knowledge also frequently manifests as a quiet acceptance of the taboo. Get to know one closely, and you might find an appetite for some weird shit: the most out-there music and art, or perhaps an intricate kink, or some ceremonial magick practices, or maybe a half-dozen secret opinions that would get them super canceled, no matter what part of the political spectrum they occupy. They want to go right to the edges.

Just one more thought experiment, bro, I promise. Where 5s become frustrating — to themselves and others — is in domains where theoretical knowledge is less helpful, or even a hindrance. The big ones tend to be social skills generally, romantic relationships, and spirituality. Entrepreneurship can be tricky without a cofounder. Managing can be tough, because of, you know, people. 5s can only really grasp these domains when they consent to the humiliation of learning through doing, rather than learning through frameworks. Sometimes, instead, they meticulously craft their lives to avoid the pain of trial and error. This works decently but can limit growth.

And yet they are not really aliens. Whether or not it is consciously apprehended, what they typically want is what we all want: to be deeply seen and loved. To do valuable things, and be understood as valuable. It’s just typically harder for them to get social approval in the usual ways. If you can feel genuine enthusiasm for a 5’s project, and try to understand it with them, it’s very easy to form a rich friendship. Unlike the 4, they often want you to move onto their alien planet, and have a deep generosity re: sharing their passions.

They can have stingy hoarder tendencies. The stereotypical Silicon Valley apartment with a mattress and laundry on the floor, and stacks of books but no furniture? That is a 5 apartment. Depending on your perspective, you can either see 5 tendencies as a laudable detachment from enslavement to creature comforts, or as what the fuck, you’re making half a million a year and you’re wearing those shoes? This stinginess also gets applied to personal energy, which they can hoard. They often don’t ask for normal help from friends, not just because they’re uncomfortable receiving it, but also because they’re anxious about being in a position of future obligation.

Often, they have an all-or-nothing work ethic. What bores them tends to seem painful. But if something captures them intellectually, there’s no stopping them. No type works as hard as a strapped-in 5; the mythical Silicon Valley “10x developer” is a 5 who has found their problem. A story about a 5 friend: he found it difficult to get working at a boring tech job, where the work was mostly beneath him from an intellectual standpoint. But when he found out about a particular Hearthstone tournament format, he realized that with an insane amount of work, he could make a solver that could give him the optimum lineup of decks. He wrote the solver, and won the first such tournament so thoroughly that he broke the format — other top players switched to his algorithm. Sometimes, 5s take advantage of this tendency by making a research project out of a “dumb” hobby. The bulkiest guy I know personally is a 5 who became a weightlifting nerd.

5s typically become scarily effective when they learn three skills: treating reality as a team sport (delegating intelligently and asking for help), learning through execution (fucking around and finding out), and acting under uncertainty (welcoming fear). The cliche examples in this category include Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. These three skills involve repeatedly confronting the nervous system overwhelm — the sense of being invaded by the world — that 5s usually avoid with competence.

The woo angle is that not-knowing, if you make peace with it, opens the possibility of embodied wisdom that can’t be communicated through abstraction.

When unhealthy, 5s take on the self-indulgent time-killing tendencies of a neurotic 7. When healthy, they take on the instinctive, fearless style of a thriving 8.

My instinctive reaction is pure fondness, if we share even a single mutual interest. I love the purity of the 5 taste for knowledge. But the social skills can be tricky.

8: The rock, the bulldozer, the rugged individualist

Strengths: Self-mastery, drive, fearlessness. Human cannonballs who can be powerfully nurturing to those they protect.

Weaknesses: Pushiness, cruelty, defensiveness. A compulsive and annoying tendency to see life as a battle, when often it is not.

On the group hike of life they are out ahead, clearing obstacles and accumulating blisters, and loudly debating which way to go.

Core fear: It’s a harsh world, where the strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must. Surrender control and you will be controlled or annihilated. It’s all up to you, nobody else can be trusted, especially not with your soft underbelly.

You understand the 8 if you ponder the following question. What would you do if you were driven by an aversion to fear, shame, and weakness so strong that, ideally, you would never feel those sensations? Naturally, the answer would be the armor of mastery. You would become confident and commanding, and concentrate your vision on areas of life where there’s winning and losing, and you’ve got a shot at winning. You would want to win the game so thoroughly that further play is at your leisure. Whether it’s at the sorority, the dojo, or the academic conference, the 8 wants to leave their stamp on the matter, to rise above the fray and mark their territory.

The work product of a leader is clarity. And this is why 8s are natural leaders—they distill the world down into actionable problems and clear positions. Think of the reality-warping sloganeering of Donald Trump (the most visible 8). Or the atheistic argumentation of Christopher Hitchens, which was not theologically sophisticated, but instead brutally effective in its simplicity. This is a great gift: 8s are naturals at finding a simple, effective strategy and hammering it. Sometimes this lets you take over the world. But if it’s compulsive, it can be an annoying limitation, which narrows the vision, making the 8 the person with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail. More than any other type, they are likely to give unsolicited advice, or tell you they know what your problem is. An 8 being pushy is perhaps the most irritating personality, period—they will just not let go of that bone.

8s have a sphere of control that varies in size. All 8s tend towards control. But some are primarily interested in self-control, and have a libertarian sensibility. They take care of themselves, and perhaps laugh darkly at the weakness of others, but don’t let themselves become bothered by it. Some other 8s believe that their family, or company, or country, is theirs to command. Depending on the wisdom of their leadership, and their emotional health, this can either be highly welcome stewardship or the worst kind of mafia don behavior, where they relate to the world with an expansive sense of oppositional grievance, and encountering them will go poorly unless you kiss the ring.

Real vulnerability is hard for them, but caring is not. Their care is typically of the “come eat this buffalo I slayed” variety. A dear 8 friend, Aike, is absolutely insistent that I’m ludicrously fed whenever I visit her city, and orders for us whenever we go to a restaurant. And while I’m almost twice her weight, I think her instinct would be to defend me in an ambush. (Queried about this, she responds: “I would absolutely defend you in an ambush and cut off the balls of those who dare to attack with a dull jagged knife.”) How better to demonstrate mastery than to have extra spoils, and surplus strength?

8s like to lock horns. Whether it’s in a fiery debate, physical fighting, or athletic competition, 8s tend to challenge others, and typically respect those who engage more than those who back down, even if the 8’s preference is to eventually win. Returning to Trump: people who don’t understand how he hurled insults at Mamdani and then became his buddy do not understand the 8 personality. For an 8, conflict is a natural mode, which says little about future potential affinity. One of my oldest friends is an 8, and in our first interaction, when we were roommates, he was so disgusted by the intellectual sloppiness of an essay I was reading in the New Yorker that he snatched the magazine out of my hands and threw it in the garbage. I didn’t initially understand that this was a friendly gesture.

There’s a new sheriff in town. While they can be bullies, they can also detest bullies— the incompetent execution of power triggers the desire to usurp. They’re not moralists like 1s, but they believe in a personal code of honor. And typically, they are not afraid of confrontation. This makes them natural activist leaders, and natural ladder climbers, although an open lust for power in less self-aware 8s can sometimes be unstrategic and offputting.

They’re hot and cold, but not in the way this is normally meant. A happy, comfortable 8 is a joy to be around, with an earthy, immediate energy, and often a frank, unselfconscious sexuality. (An 8 tell for me is an energetic sense that the person wants to fuck the universe.) They are present, generous, and playful. But if an 8 is in competition mode, they can become cold-blooded killers, viewing people in their way as mere obstacles. Meanwhile, a disempowered 8, fearful that they will lose control, can go to collapse, anxiety, and childlike grief. This quality of having a few entirely distinct gears is one that loosens in only the healthiest 8s.

But they do like to submit when they trust they’re in good hands. Often, 8s will be devoted to a few chosen teachers or mentors, who they will speak of in glowing terms. (Name-checking the sensei is a classic 8 method of affirming personal authority.) 8s also love assuming the position of mentor, to pass on their way of doing things. What’s more stressful for them is peer relationships where the power dynamic is ambiguous: one-up or one-down is more comfortable than side-to-side. Among these peers, they can exude “wounded hound” energy—this edginess you see in dogs that have been in a lot of fights, a wariness rooted in the assumption that play can suddenly become warfare. Sometimes this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They have a soft underbelly. Few get to see it. If you’re one of the privileged few, you likely have an ally for life.

The woo angle is that, paradoxically, surrendering to the universal order is freedom, and striving for perfect control is just self-imposed imprisonment.

When unhealthy, they withdraw into paranoid isolation like a neurotic 5, seeing threats everywhere and getting mired in analysis paralysis. When healthy, they access the open-hearted generosity of a 2, using their power to nurture and protect without needing to dominate.

My instinctive reaction depends entirely on the relationship configuration. If I’m not in competition with an 8, I simply love them. They are extremely fun. If it happens to be an 8 who sees me as a rival or obstacle, I just maintain a respectful distance.

2: The giver, the pleaser, the attunement artist

Strengths: Empathy, generosity, geniuses of love. At their best, they can make nearly anyone feel seen and cared for—they have a borderline psychic grasp on the needs and states of others.

Weaknesses: Intrusiveness, manipulation, martyrdom. Neediness masked as altruism. The person who suffocates you with unwanted assistance or deference, then resents you for not being grateful enough.

Core fear: You are lovable only when you’re needed. If you ask for too much, they’ll see you’re worthless and leave. Love is never freely given.

On the group hike of life, they’re making sure everyone has enough water, checking on the slower hikers, and secretly exhausted but insisting they’re fine.

One of my oldest friends, Jackie, is a 2. She’s not necessarily my closest friend. And yet there is something about the bond that’s unique among my relationships. It is the feeling, any time of day or night, that she is there for me. Not via any specific act, but just via her fundamental nature — that is part of who she is. She is someone who’s there, always, for the people she chooses to care about. Recently, I had an exhausting day, and I simply thought about how she is there, and I relaxed. We didn’t even have to talk for her to care for me. This is the astonishing power of the 2 at their best.

Saying that they’re the teacher type is a misunderstanding of their versatility. I have met C-suite execs who are 2s, and managers, and artists, and realtors, and, yes, therapists and teachers. What unites them is being image-focused, but with an image constructed on feelings and outcomes occurring in others. There are many ways to be other-centered, and thus there is a diversity of 2 occupations. They’re easiest to pick out with energy, this ooey-gooey feeling of being met, that, depending on the health and savviness of the 2, will either feel incredibly comfortable, or like too-warm bathwater.

Other types do not totally grasp what it means to be so other-focused. Here is a hint. One 2 told me: “If someone I love says they need something, I feel like I’ve already failed. I should have been able to see it coming.” Really imagine what it would be like to feel this way, and you’ll start to glimpse the 2 existence.

As a result, they can be remarkably attuned to what you’re hungry for—praise, validation, gifts, favors, being seen in a particular way. Especially with avoidant people, who usually resist attention, they possess an instinctive grasp for finding the hard-to-find button. This can make them remarkably charismatic and/or seductive 1:1. The darker side of the 2 is that this can turn into manipulation (now you can’t abandon me), or unwanted help followed by entitlement (you have to pay the price for the gift you didn’t need).

The 2 suffers from a specific form of pride. It is a pride that, in the average 2, must be disowned to maintain their self-image as a giving person. It’s something like: I am the reason that my partner is happy. Or that this pop star I produced is touring internationally. Or that the diners in my restaurant are fed. Sure, other people get the credit, but behind the scenes, everyone knows that it’s me who put the necessary icing on the cake. And given that I’m the one who’s really responsible, they couldn’t possibly abandon me. It seems to me that the emotional health of the 2 is largely based on them confronting this fiction, which is a useful fiction to hold lightly, but a torture device if taken seriously.

And there is a tragedy beneath this pride. The tragedy is that the 2 often holds a covert hope that they will be held and comforted with the same sensitivity they apply to others. But they often end up in relationships with difficult people, out of a natural tendency to rise to the level of their ability. If you want to win the Caring Olympics, pick someone avoidant to be your love treadmill! So the 2 gives all they can, which sometimes is not enough (or not really wanted), and this can infuriate the 2 (thank you to Jackie for pointing this out). Meanwhile, they rarely receive the same level of attunement and charity from others. At its worst, this tendency creates borderline type behavior, when the 2’s resentment is externalized, and others go from saints to monsters in their eyes.

Also tragically, when offered the interest they’re covertly asking for, they are not often comfortable receiving it! While there is a heart-level yearning to be seen, there is a gut-level discomfort with it, because it’s an unfamiliar energy flow, and out of step with their habitual self-demotion. One dead giveaway that I’m talking to a 2 is that they keep redirecting the conversation to my gifts and my strengths, and then hurriedly qualify any compliments or deference I give them. Another is that they talk about developments in their lives largely relative to other people—narrating the states of others as more significant than their own.

As with the 4, “feel your feelings” is often bad stand-alone advice for these people. Not because they don’t repress—often, they repress their anger and resentment. But because they already feel tremendously, as a regulatory strategy, and a spell of anger would typically be too foreign to integrate. Better first-pass advice in a conflict situation, if they can take it, might be: “Think about taking the approach that feels, to you, like being monstrously selfish, cognitive, and tactical.” This will bring them to a point where they are only somewhat more giving and empathetic than the average person, rather than enormously. This will surface a lot of feelings to start examining.

The woo angle is that the most potent type of love cannot possibly be earned, and it has actually always been there.

When unhealthy, their resentment blooms into a full-on collapse into rage and/or depression, as in a neurotic 8. When healthy, they take on the vivid self-awareness and distinctness of the 4, rather than compulsively merging and self-minimizing.

My instinctive reaction to 2s is, ahhh, this is wonderful. And then, sometimes: but I’m supposed to earn the center of attention, why are you just giving it to me?

4, 1, and 7 are referred to as the “frustration” trio, or triad if you’re fancy. These types all have an idealized vision of how things should be, and experience constant frustration at the gap between their ideal and reality. The 4 tries to close it by cultivating specialness, in themselves and their experience. The 1 tries to close this gap through perfection and correction. The 7 tries to close it by reframing everything as positive and seeking constant novelty.

4: The poet, the romantic, the dispossessed one.

Strengths: Depth, creativity, originality. The true aesthetic orientation: a divine discontentment that creates much of humanity’s great art and culture.

Weaknesses: Victimhood, moodiness, indulgence. Bitterness. “I’m such a disaster,” says the 4, either smugly or despairingly, after another predictable act of self-sabotage.

Core fear: You are fundamentally flawed and irredeemable, and all the preening you do only serves to accentuate this. You’re as disgustingly normal as everyone else, and yet you still can’t figure out how a person should be.

On the group hike of life, they just happen to be taking their own route, which seems roundabout but satisfies their private goals.

Difference is a funny thing to base your identity on. Because you need someone to notice the difference, an audience to find you semi-relatable. Too close and you merge, losing your distinct markings. Too far and you’re just a complete unknown. This is the strange dance of the 4. They want to be seen and admired, but not reduced or figured out. If you can grasp this wonderfully perverse instinct, so much about the 4, a type that is otherwise confounding, becomes logical. All the peacock-ish adornment, in costume and mannerism, combined with the tendency towards isolation and guardedness — it’s the straightforward product of a conflicted strategy.

The instinct towards specialness creates a natural contrarianism. If you tell them to go left, they will develop a fondness for right, or at least apply a little rightward nudge to the trajectory. Falling into your agenda completely can represent an existential collapse. This applies more generally to gender, political, and professional scripts. They will find a tweak on your way, even if they don’t realize they are mutating the instructions they are given. And when things get too stable, too figured-out, average 4s often blow shit up. They’ll sabotage relationships, find ways to get fired, uproot themselves continuously. This is a defense against ordinariness. Better to destroy the mundanely pleasant circumstance before you catch yourself enjoying it.

Many 4s are drawn to outcasts — schizophrenics, disgraced starlets, nerds, bad boys, cult leaders, monsters in cinema. These figures represent true authenticity, a disconnection from the impositions of societal order. They are unplugged in a way the 4 can’t quite be, completely. Equally, the 4 is drawn to what is aristocratic, rare, refined, and timeless. “Broke with expensive taste” is thus a common 4 pose, whatever the underlying net worth is.

They are easy to spot. Fully 1/3 of people introduced to the Enneagram misdiagnose themselves as 4s, but this is instantly dispelled once you know a few. Of the types, they have the most characteristic energy. It is like standing on the beach at twilight — an abyss is calling. To get a sense, listen to Fiona Apple trying to explain herself. (Although note that 4s can act, as can any other type, so you might not glimpse this energy upon first meeting.) They often have a fondness for aliases, and/or are fussy about the pronunciation of their name. They are often defensively sarcastic. Their melancholy is rich and lovely, unless they have chosen to blame it on you. Among my age cohort, 4s are often interested in androgyny, but I suspect younger 4s might be leaning back into traditional gender expression to squirm away from the expectations of liberal parents.

Follow them into the darkness. More than any type, the 4 is unafraid of negative emotion. This makes them wonderful companions in the dungeons of human experience — they can make you feel accepted when all is lost. You’re completely soothed, not because they are trying to fix your despair, but because they don’t see it as an issue. I receive coaching from a wise 4, and he never fails to catch me out in my falsity, partially because of what seems like an intrinsic desire to glimpse the depth I’m so eager to obscure.

They live with a sense of absence, a nostalgia for something beautiful that hasn’t happened yet. This is created by their constant urge to search for what is whole, rich, real — the catch being that this is the only 100% reliable strategy for missing out on real transcendence. On an interpersonal level, this feeling of absence manifests as painful self-awareness. They look out at people getting by normally and wonder: am I too special for this world, or just more fucked up than average? My coach, Gareth Holman, comments: “If you’re an outsider, you freak people out, but you can also illuminate them. If you’re insecure, it’s hard to be that person.”

Their success depends on what they do with this essential yearning. Think about Bob Dylan. There is a constant sense of searching for the answer in his music. Did he ever find any answers? Not as far as I’m aware; and yet, he took the yearning as a continuous prompt for further search, and forever changed our culture in the process. 4s can become outrageously productive and original if they fall continuously into the yearning, really embrace it as a fuel source, rather than taking it seriously as a sign of inadequacy. Adrienne Lenker and Karl Ove Knausgård are two current examples of 4s who have settled into this mode, to profound results.

It’s common to note that 4s can be dramatic, finding occasion for large emotions in light of relatively minor developments. (Returning to Dylan, he wrote “When the Ship Comes In,” a song of divine retribution, upon being given guff by a hotel clerk.) Are these jags of emotion “false?” That doesn’t quite get it right. It’s more like the 4 can create aliveness, contact reality more thoroughly, through being a feverish tourist of their experience. This Wallace Stevens line captures the dynamic: “They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are, are changed upon the blue guitar.’”

The woo angle is that the 4 can realize that the ache of separation is, itself, a part of the wholeness of presence. The yearning is literally made of the substance it desires.

When unhealthy, 4s start looking for a lover or savior to thrust their ungainly cravings at, like neurotic 2s. When healthy, they take on the responsibility and standards of a healthy 1.

My instinctive reaction to 4s is to be fascinated, often at a slight distance.

1: The perfectionist, the critic, the saint in training.

Strengths: Integrity, honesty, energy. High standards and the resolve to follow them. A bullshit allergy, in themselves and others, that sometimes makes genuine heroism the only option.

Weaknesses: Suppression, moralism, disowned pride, stress. Score-keeping and pettiness. Explosiveness and dysfunction resulting from failed efforts at self-containment.

Core fear: You will never find a way out of your corruption and mess. All of your purported goodness is a thin veil over the roiling mass inside, and this is true of the world, also. Better hang onto that separateness, who knows what would happen if you lost that thing!

On the group hike of life, they have figured out the objectively correct route, a virtuous path that few follow with them.

They are characterized as the religious or moralist type, but this is best thought of as a consequence of their core mechanism, not the root of it. At their heart, 1s are conflicted, torn between their intense emotions and their rational superego. They are their own rigid parents, whipping themselves into shape with guilt and shame. This creates a natural yearning for clear codes of behavior, and a sense of pride when their corrective internal agenda is successfully maintained. Meanwhile, they are threatened by the chaos of others, who ought to do the right thing, as they do.

This inner battle also creates a deep sense of shame and grief — the shame and grief of self-submission. The beaten-down part of the 1, the tempestuous locked-away child, is still in there. Thus, a predictable vicious cycle: when this shame is encountered, its chaotic power triggers more suppression. A 1 can easily spend their adult life this way, because the coping mechanism so often creates high performance in work, and an orderly, if not fully satisfying, way of relating to others. Meanwhile, this can create resentment: while they keep everything bolted down, everyone else is just coasting along in their sloppiness and self-indulgence.

They turn anger, fear, and shame into competence and diligence. If you look carefully, you can see this process happening in real time. Something imperfect comes into the 1’s world, either the misdeed of someone else, or an undesirable emotion, or a mess in progress. They purse their lips, clench their jaw, or take a sharp inbreath. Then, they respond, turning the rigidity into a coolly chosen next move, with just a hint of barely noticeable fury. I think of this as “calm lightning,” and I find it to be captivating and a little scary. (Reader, I married one.) Unfortunately, the inner accompaniment to this process is often a scathing critical voice.

If you are not moved by the genuine integrity of the 1, then you are not paying attention. In this haphazard world, so many of us are looking for an excuse for our sloppiness, but 1s are constantly attempting to rise above it. When this works, they can be machines of loving grace — the whole drama of the 1 is visible in this video of Thomas Keller. Ironically, to maintain this rarefied level of performance, 1s have to be forgiving and kind towards their normal human needs, and normal human sloppiness. Otherwise, burnout, addiction, or another form of involuntary self-restraint will follow.

There is a notable division within the type, between extroverted-leaning and introverted-leaning 1s. The former are your pastors, teachers, and campaigners—moving the world towards goodness and order through relationships. The latter are your craftspeople, chefs, philosophers, and architects—righting the universe through more private labor. Both kinds can be natural founders, in the profit or non-profit worlds: entrepreneurship is a potent method of sending a message. Though the two subtypes are superficially different, they are united by the obsession with the straight and narrow path: punctuality, honesty, consistency.

The bitter irony of 1s is that they are the type most desperate to seek divine grace, but most capable of blocking it by remaining in a stance of perpetual judgement. I’ve met a number of 1 meditators who systematically miss what is really meant by the Zen maxim: “Without thinking of good or evil, in this very moment, what is your original face?” My wife comments: “There’s something I’ve come to see as central to the 1 character, which is a default stance of ‘no’ towards the world — things aren’t good, you can’t let them in to pollute you. This makes it really hard to accept grace and come to see holiness in the everyday.”

Looseness and ambiguity bothers them. “What are we doing here” is a key question 1s are asking, with the answer hopefully coming in the shape of a standard that they can meet, exceed, then enforce. This makes 1s terrific organizers and managers. However, there are two key failure modes. The first is arbitrarily arriving at high standards others don’t agree with, and then becoming furious at others’ lack of compliance. The second is trying to create false order in domains that are resistant to order — or a simple refusal to believe that such domains exist. This is an intellectual deficit they share with the 5, a blinding desire for reality to be neater than it is.

Their emotional distance isn’t personal. It’s just that they let you into their emotions only to the degree that they’re letting themselves feel them. This is often not apparent to them, because an apparent defense mechanism is a shitty defense mechanism. And when the 1 opens up, you see a beautifully childlike quality, like a kid getting out of detention. (It also just is a kid getting out of detention.)

The woo angle is that from the perspective of their shadow, their ego is the thing blocking the light — the inner ugliness is redeemed and transformed only when you actually own it.

When unhealthy, their inner drama takes on the quagmire quality of the neurotic 4. When healthy, they take on the lightness and fluidity of a high-functioning 7.

My instinctive reaction towards them is admiration, and a bit of confusion. They are as different from my type as can be, and I so appreciate their striving. But I’m also like… why?

7: The optimist, the dilettante, the socialite.

Strengths: Positivity, curiosity, versatility. Speed and buoyancy. The person who can genuinely fall in love with everything, and wants you along for the ride.

Weaknesses: Gluttony, flakiness, cowardice. Glibness, vacuity. The person who can convince themselves they’re in love with everything in order to avoid deprivation or pain.

Core fear: You are cold, bored, and alone, pigeonholed in a dreary pen, while everyone else is having fun without you. You stopped moving long enough that someone can finally see you, and, oh look, you have such obvious limitations.

On the group hike of life, they can’t decide whether the smell of eucalyptus is the most beautiful thing ever, or the wildflowers, or your boots, and they would like to discuss all the options.

Much of the character of the 7, my type, becomes clear if you extrapolate the consequences of one odd property. We are stimulated and pleased by change, whatever it is. This is unusual — if you list the factory setting human fears, change is supposed to be one of them. But when change is merely amusing, everyone you haven’t met could be a best friend, every skill you haven’t learned could be your new personality, every city could be your new home. This is a superpower which is also a hideous temptation. Almost before you begin to feel pain or boredom, you can already think of a dozen opportunities for stimulation. When I’m trying to type someone, I sometimes ask them: “if I kidnapped you, took your possessions, dropped you off in Russia, and told you that you had to find your way to Myanmar, would you find this fun?” An instant and genuine “yeah” is a 7 giveaway.

The tempo is fast. It is a hungry, impatient speed. I am thinking to get to the end of the thought, reading to get to the end of the book. After a beautiful experience, I think, “thank God that’s over,” and dash to the next thing. As a result, we are natural generalists. I’ve forgotten about more interests than many people ever have. Recently, my wife was talking to a friend about structural issues with science funding, and he said, “Sasha has a great whitepaper about this.” I thought he was joking, and then I realized that I actually had coauthored such a document, during the five weeks when I was thinking about a career in public policy. If he hadn’t mentioned it, I may never have thought about it again.

We like to play a little dumb. In truth, 7s can be formidable — our resilience and curiosity makes us fast learners, and our restlessness often takes the form of abundant creativity. Our allergy to structure and routine is counterbalanced by our effortless, endless motivation to pursue our genuine interests. But we like to pretend we’re less capable than we are, because owning up to our true capabilities would mean adopting a mantle of responsibility. Of the 7s I’ve met, a suspicious number are talented people unconsciously (or consciously) choosing mediocrity as a defense, and it is a mode I can also lapse into if I am trying to outrun my anxiety.

To soothe myself during insomnia, I used to look up cities in China on Wikipedia. There are so many cities in China with over a million residents. You can get interested in each one. You can look them up on Google Street View or YouTube to sample the pedestrian experience, maybe while listening to a Melvyn Bragg panel discussion on Zoroastrianism. Or you can just think about how “Ulaanbaatar” has far too many “a”s in it. In this mental spinning, what is real fascination, and what is just decorative distraction? It took a thousand or so hours of meditation for me to start teasing this apart. And even then, it is not always obvious.

We can be quite caring, because we want you to join in on the good time. I am uplifting without even trying to be. Your mood cannot drag me down. When my wife had a brief cancer scare, and she texted me about it, my mind was instantly filled with a rapid-fire montage of how I would lift her sorrows. I thought of a great “you have cancer” party we could host. I considered the wig possibilities. But we can also be extremely insensitive, because we expect the world’s moods to be alterable and flickering as ours, and we don’t take the time to consider our remarks. Occasionally I say something hurtful, and then am surprised that I am being listened to.

Negative emotions are magnified enormously — one dreary afternoon, and we are convinced that our whole life is a tundra of despair. Everything good in life can be ruined unless we learn to stop taking this perception seriously.

Our appetite for dodging this despair gives us a reputation of being hard therapy cases. Our central defense mechanism is fun, and the world rewards it. Okay, it does not age gracefully: the 48-year-old restaurant manager still doing cocaine on a Thursday is a 7. But the 7 is quite capable of spending their whole life in flight from themselves, while simply experiencing this as the world being interesting. I went through a few genuinely traumatic circumstances without ever really noticing my pain. Instead of grieving, I got on planes, stuffed my face, wrote a book, had three crushes per month. And then when I stopped and felt my heart for the first time, I was shocked — I had been laughing and laughing, walking around with a knife wound.

To have a rich life, 7s need to thwart their central instinct and commit. To a vocation, sure, and a relationship, yeah, but most importantly, an honest reckoning with our real limits. As I type that, a chill runs through me: limitation as a concept makes me uneasy. And yet, every iota of true value in my life has come from it. Meanwhile, in periods of my life when I allowed myself to be a free agent, nothing real happened. It turns out that compulsive optionality maintenance is not true freedom. But you cannot force 7s to get that message — I received it suddenly one day by the grace of God. Sometimes, I meet 7s who are still frantically trying to feed their hungry ghost, and I think, “oh, I hope the comedown from that realization is gentle.” Anthony Bourdain’s life and death are both instructive for the 7 who wants to understand how they can thrive and, equally, explode.

The way I’ve tricked myself into appreciating depth is by adopting the position that complexity is where infinite adventure actually lies. Fortunately, this appears to be true.

The woo angle is that if you really relax all the way, like all the way, you discover the ultimate prank, which is that consciousness is made of bliss, and that candy-floss giddiness you were manufacturing was never necessary.

When unhealthy, we take on the self-suppression of a neurotic 1, in an attempt to rein in the gluttony. When healthy, we take on some of the depth and seriousness of an actualized 5, and maybe just a touch of asceticism, for a treat.

My instinctive reaction to 7s is pretty gendered. When I meet 7 women, it is often like meeting a sibling: there is an instant click which is completely platonic. (Thank you to two such women, Carly Valancy and Jenny Huang, for their help with this piece.) When I meet 7 men, unless they are uncommonly healthy, I see my own psychology and instantly break out in hives.