My Next Move

see you in october, berkeley

Last week, I said I’d tell you about my next move, once it had solidified. It didn’t take that long to solidify!

You may remember that earlier this year, I made a giant post about some profound changes to my mental life. Ever since the events thus depicted, part of me has been wondering—can I help other people access the same changes, if they’d like to? Is there a treasure map to Deep Okayness that we can figure out, such that anyone who wants to try can massively raise their hedonic set point? I also have a bunch of other questions about psychology that nobody seems to be answering interestingly. 

Meanwhile, over the course of the last couple of years, I’ve become aware that I know a lot of people who are passionate about all kinds of psychotechnology—meditation, therapy, neurotech, psychedelics, etcetera. And I kept thinking that maybe one day I could take advantage of the ambient expertise in my social graph, by engaging my peers in these questions. 

What happened next seems a little too good to be true. These interests dovetailed quite elegantly. I happened to be in Berkeley, earlier in August, totally by happenstance. While I was there, a friend of mine told me that the Alembic, a meditation center there, needed some general help, maybe some writing. I had already known about the Alembic, and its existence had greatly increased my desire to move to the Bay Area, despite my having spent the last five years telling anyone who would listen that I would never move there. My favorite living meditation teacher, Michael Taft, teaches at the Alembic, as well as a rotating cast of other teachers and facilitators who do fascinating things I don’t yet understand. 

So I met up with Kathryn Devaney, co-founder and executive director. And basically, I told her that it’d be fun to do some stuff at the Alembic, and maybe it would be a good way to start edging closer to a long-term dream of mine, of doing interdisciplinary psychological research into the basic questions of human happiness. Kati said, more or less, “oh, that’s my dream too, what if we work on it together, instead of just giving you miscellaneous tasks?” 

Unlike me, Kati is a legitimate scientist and an extremely experienced meditator. But in many other respects, we are similar: she also achieved a vast increase in personal happiness with a patchwork of psychological techniques adopted on intuition. She, too, has asked the question of what can be generalized from her journey. And she, also, has a bunch of other related esoteric research interests that require some brain scanning equipment and pooled expertise. 

Over the days following, we met repeatedly and refined a vision for Alembic Labs, an independent academic department at the Alembic. The mission of Alembic Labs would be two-fold. First, conduct novel research and theorizing at the edges of the therapeutic and contemplative arts. Second, outreach, which means, I’m told, producing public utterances about our findings and ideas for the benefit of all beings. (As I am fond of utterance, that will probably be the core of my responsibilities.) As we plotted together, we were slightly baffled at the coherence of what turned out to be our collective dream. 

Given that the Alembic is a non-profit organization, our being able to proceed depended on getting some funding. First, we needed a seed grant, to pay for three months of me being a Resident Guy, during which I would be tasked with writing a full proposal for Alembic Labs, sketching out our research agenda, and performing initial forays into locating further funds. Improbably, our first potential funder, after a short call, immediately wired the requested amount to the Alembic’s account, about a week after Kati and I first met in person. Now we’re figuring out visa stuff and I’m moving there in October after I’m done with recording the latest release of the writing course. 

Kati is brilliant, and a treasure to conspire and hang out with. I actually feel pretty confident that we can answer the question, “how can we make any reasonably prosperous person with a stable, safe life become much much happier,” thus enabling the elimination of a huge amount of unnecessary human suffering. Maybe we can answer a bunch of other questions too.

I’ll still be writing this newsletter, and I’m not going to limit myself to writing about Alembic-related subjects, although there will be some of that. It’s important to me that a big part of my writing life remains anchored only to my whims. But expect a fair amount of writing in an Alembicish direction.