Intentions
For the month starting September 8, 2025 I lived with five other Sleepawake alumni in the Mt. Shasta area with the shared commitment to radical honesty and transparency. The intention of this piece is to reflect on the month, bring together the good the bad the ugly so that future experiments can benefit from our experiences here.
The intention of this experiment was multifaceted; each person came into the container with different but (apparently well-enough) aligned and harmonious intentions. My intention was to live in “relational presence” within a group context and to test the viability of a longer term coliving container where the experiment could continue beyond the month.
In that intention, I also wanted to treat this container as a kind of control where there wasn’t too much prescriptive structure to begin with, it felt better to start spacious and layer structure gradually and organically as the need arose, rather than imposing structures based on stories that did not track with reality.
Background
Throughout my life, in family, in grade school, in university, in work, there wasn’t room for emotions. In all these different systems the external world had more legitimacy and weight than inner world. Revealing “negative” emotions in these contexts only made things worse. It risked the possibility of being scapegoated as unruly, bad, antisocial, failing. There wasn’t really anyone in my life who had the spaciousness to be present with my emotions, they were a problem to be solved, a trigger to ignite blame. In this state of being, negative emotions were dysfunctional, and an appropriate response was to disown and repress them.
The 9-day Sleepawake Immersive in February 2025 was perhaps the first time I experienced a state of being in which all emotions were valid in a group context. While I had arrived at an intellectual story of the validity of emotions before the Immersion, the experience of validity felt profoundly different. Knowing something privately felt distinctly different, shallow, compared to a shared knowing which validated my experience through external acceptance. It felt like I had a brief view of feeling whole within myself, feeling human, which is to say, natural and at ease.
Outcomes
Reflecting on my first day back, I’m surprised by the felt differences. The day began with a surprise situation where was it was necessary to firmly state my boundaries; it was received as well as it could be, it was interesting that in the moment it felt like the only option. In the evening, home-made lasagna was offered by a housemate and a spontaneous dinner party emerged, over dinner I felt like I was cracking good jokes consistently. I felt significantly funnier today. I checked in with Vlad afterwards and he offered an assurance that it was good for the vibe. He also commented on my degree of openness and vulnerability in the conversation; the conversation was light and casual but within that I still shared myself. I confided in him that I found one of our guests cute and that I’d like to flirt with her. Immediately after that conversation I ran into her and proceeded to flirt with her in a way that I typically feel unable to; the defining sense was ease and humor, rather than pressure to perform. The overarching pattern today was a conspicuous absence of fear. Lets see if this lasts. I hope it does.
At the highest level, I believe this container was a kind of proof of existence. Prior mini-retreats (the 12-person retreat in April and a 5-person “come together to fall apart” retreat) demonstrated that the same way of being that I experienced at Sleepawake in February could be recreated. What this container demonstrated was a new kind of depth. One month together in a house in a rural area like Mt. Shasta felt distinctly monastic. There was a quality to it that reminded me of a 10-day silence retreat; lack of external stimulation meant the focal range of attention and sensitivity narrowed and became more precise. Over the course of the month, it felt like I was living in a relational microscope where default daily behaviors and patterns could come to light. Prior retreats were distinctly different than normal routine life, and as a result many daily behaviors were disrupted. In living together over the course of a month, natural behaviors re-emerged and there was enough time to collect observed instances of subtle patterns, sufficient to bring up and dig in. It felt like a unity of a temporary retreat context and normal day-to-day life.
Within the relational microscope it felt like my emotions and stories were fully legitimate in a way that is quite radical compared to the norm. It felt like another step closer to ease, to wholeness through acceptance, to humanness. It seems like this sentiment was shared within the group, and the next step is to work towards bridging this isolated monastic context with normal day-to-day life, so that this degree of ease can become my norm.
Dynamics and Discoveries
Emergent Norms
A simple but powerful shared norm emerged in the container. On the one hand it feels like these norms are completely obvious, but some of the most important things are:
- We’re the authority of our own experience and emotions.
- Experience and emotions are facts and therefore legitimate by default; they require no explanation or story to be externally valid.
- All boundaries are downstream of emotions, as such, they are legitimate and require no explanation or story to be externally valid.
- All stories we tell about ourselves and others are tools not Truths. Stories are safe to be named and verified, especially if they are about others, so there can be a collaborative triangulation to fit stories to experience.
With these norms, emotions and stories become separate entities, the former, fully legitimate, the latter, lightly held and practical. In day to day life, my emotions and my story of them often become muddied and conflated; the story for my emotions makes sense, so that they can be externally justified and legitimized. However, the sensible story is often premature, incomplete, mislead. The clean separation felt quite clarifying, it permissioned sitting with the emotions, rather than moving immediately and compulsively to story-telling.
There was often a clear mapping between emotion and belief. Where stories are heady and surface-level, beliefs are stories that are embodied in a deep and pervasive way. If personality maps to a web of contingent reflexes, reflexes often if not always map to core beliefs. As core beliefs are recognized, there’s new potential to change the story. All beliefs are held because they are narrowly true. Reality continues to re-validate the story, it’s continually relived and reinforced. The key word is narrowly; beliefs can have a self-fulfilling kind of reality. To provide a simple example: default trust and distrust to newcomers are equally true. If I meet a stranger with trust, it invites trust in them, which confirms the belief. If I meet a stranger with doubt and distrust, it invites distrust in them, confirming the belief. Both are narrowly true despite being opposite beliefs.
What was so amazing about this container is that it created radical transparency for emotions and stories to be named. Core beliefs are so default that they’re essentially invisible, they are so foundational that there is no contrast to compare them to. They are the water we swim in, and without the reference point of air, they remain invisible. A friend (Vincent Li) describes being “possessed” by this kind of default-but-invisible story, which I find to be a poetic way to describe it. Within this container, the emergent norm of allowing emotions and stories to be named allowed for these patterns and beliefs to be named and made legible. And in becoming legible, they moved into awareness, and therefore agency.
Radical Transparency
The atmosphere of radical transparency had many fascinating outcomes. Perhaps most notably it turned the container into a kind of relational microscope. The fact everything was put out into the group field meant more data and more intelligence. Verbalizing what was coming up (e.g. sensations, emotions, resistances, “blips”) meant group awareness of everyone’s internal states, states which usually remain masked and opaque. By moving this information into the group awareness, compulsively it was used to build explanations that “fit” the states into some kind of causal story of how and why behavioral patterns occurred. In effect, these stories became a form of crowdsourced or collective intelligence. Moreover these different perspective all had different vantage points on the situation, which often complemented each other to provide a richer explanation. In allowing and encouraging the stories to be named, the subject of the story could contest or agree with parts of the story. Moreover, the monastic-like isolation meant the group field of awareness was more sensitive and could lock onto subtle behaviors. This process felt quite connective, as it often brought new parts of the story into awareness and provided an opportunity to “set the record straight”.
The relational microscope enabled a rapid transition from default behaviors going from invisible, to visible, to cogently explained, to modified. All parts of this loop were at home, it was a sufficient environment for rapid personality sensemaking and change. In the beginning of the experiment, I was quite aversive to verbalizing frustrations that were coming up, but what would inevitably occur instead is that they would still come up eventually, but “sideways”. When they came out “sideways” my frustration would be accidentally “triggered” by a perceived transgression, but the perceived transgression was individually quite arbitrary or insignificant. A broader pattern of transgression and repression was the root of the pattern, and until it was named explicitly, the issue was quite opaque and disorienting for everyone involved.
Once this default and invisible behavior became visible, we quickly triangulated on a story that made sense, given all our perspectives on it. I was caught in a self-validating loop. In situations where I felt transgressed, I would feel anger, and then compulsively repress the anger out of fear. For me, frustration was a form of repressed anger, and repression came from a story that anger itself is inherently destructive and socially unacceptable. But this very repression meant any recurring patterns of transgression produced pent up hurt and resentment, which would inevitably spill out. At this point, the issue represented a series of transgressions, which meant it was greater magnitude and complexity than any specific instance of the pattern. When people were met with sudden, unexpected, and sharp frustration from an arbitrary instance of unrecognized transgression, it seemed completely out of proportion with the inciting incident. Without understanding the full pattern of transgression, it felt like a rug pull. This rug pull would often be mutually triggering for them, which had much higher likelihood of spiraling. This downward spiral superficially validated my belief that anger was unacceptable, which perpetuated the cycle. Rather than reassessing the self-validating story, which is often so big and so default that it’s hard to see, I would assume that the problem was a lack of effort or skill, that I just needed to try harder to repress the anger or try different tactics for externalizing it safely.
Within this relational microscope the story became explicit and legible within the first week. This is what a group commitment to radical transparency allows. The story that I was “possessed” by, that was so big that I could see it, could be named by outsiders almost immediately. My story was not shared by others in the group, which became a point of contrast for my story to become visible. With the freedom to discuss all emotions and stories openly and candidly, others could see the contrast between their story and mine, the gap was obvious to them, and name it. Once named, my story could change. I had the freedom to move my emphasis from the “what” of demonizing and repressing anger, to the “how” of expressing it in a immediate, clear, and kind way. This was met in an incredibly accepting and affirming way, something that felt utterly unimaginable before. Being met in such a supportive and affirming way directly contradicted my original story, and directly and experientially allowed a new story: anger is acceptable and legitimate, but the burden of responsibility is on me to express it cleanly so that others can feel safe receiving it. Each time the pattern of transgression played out became an opportunity to test the new story, and each time my small leap of faith was met with acceptance and care, disconfirming the old belief, and validating the new one. In effect, a new self-validating loop had formed, which allowed the new story to become increasingly “embodied” as it was repeatedly reinforced by external reality.
The speed in which this whole situation played out was quite amazing, within ten days a loop I had been trapped in for at least two decades was flipped to a new loop. If personality is comprised of bunch of interacting loops like this, then this experience demonstrated that within an environment of radical transparency these behavioral loops could be adjusted quickly and deftly, and with it, personality. This experience substantiates a sense that these kinds of relational microscopes and forms of communal therapy hold the promise of massive personality overhaul. Conversely it demonstrated that the cultural story of fixed or static personality is also a self-validating myth, a consequence of unsafe and opaque norms and environments, rather than fixed limits of physiological plasticity.
From this new vantage point, lack of plasticity looks like a crude way to scapegoat individuals rather than putting the burden of responsibility on communication norms and social systems. Another equally legitimate (and complementary, rather than substitute) interpretation draws on my experience with anger: as I was met with bad outcomes it was easier to assume it was skill or effort issue than the root story being globally wrong but locally self-validating. The very fear of bad outcomes motivates a kind of tunnel vision which favors digging in, trying harder on the existing belief. Recognizing the belief that I was “possessed” by required zooming out, which communal engagement and support helped facilitate. Looking back, “trying harder” while getting the same outcomes was a sign to pause and reorient towards naming the core belief rather playing out the same pattern yet again.
In some sense, it feels like there are two self-fulfilling steady states. The urban, liberal, American norm I was coming from is in a steady state of repression and passive aggressiveness. My orientation towards anger was an instance of it, but it applies to variety of other emotions and tendencies and to communication itself. Within this norm, there is a conflict-avoidant stance towards communication, which itself is a self-fulfilling loop. Conflict-avoidance begets lack of direct and communication and repression of feelings, repression drains capacity and produces repetitive hurt and resentment. When the issue finally comes to a head it’s simultaneously explosive and occurs when there’s lack of capacity to work through it. Lack of practice also exacerbates things. I have lost several friendships to this pattern. Loss substantiates the original conflict avoidance, but similar to my anger, it’s not the “what” but the “how”. Conflict is not inherently a problem, if it’s with the right “how”: immediate, clear, kind.
Radical transparency provides a different steady state. While it initially felt like a lot more work, over the course of the month it felt like it may be less energy and heartache in the long-run. A lot of the initial work represented a backlog of unaddressed issues that were pent up from the prior steady state, and it took some work to move things to a “clean” state. By naming emotions as they came up, energy went from repression to exploration, from fear to curiosity. Sideways emotions are indirect, complex, and scary; the pathway from trigger to root can be complex, and the reaction feels pent up and explosive. In contrast, direct emotions are comparatively simple and safe. While it initially felt quite scary to name my frustrations, it turned out the fear was more related to my repressed “explosive” reactions, not my direct expression of frustration. If anything the direct expressions were met with a tremendous amount of care and acceptance, which felt healing. As there was more and more trust in the process, it felt like my energy moved from fear of retribution and shame to playful curiosity. As emotions came up, the stories that arose could be verbalized and explored as a kind of hypothesis, and from there, new experimental solutions could be proposed to address the problem. It became a collaborative kind of game. Fear turned into curiosity, the possibility of disconnection of loss became a source of connection and closeness.
As an aside, it feels like a norm of radical transparency may be easier in a group dynamic than in a pairwise dynamic. It felt like the presence of multiple vantage points on the same behavior enabled a kind of “triangulation on truth”. Time and time again in Shasta I would make a discovery with one person, share with another and from that new vantage point we would uncover something new, producing another discovery. In this way it often felt there were gestational periods of mulling over certain opaque puzzles, followed by periods of rapid-fire insight and resolution.
Looking to the future, one area I would like to focus on is understanding how to effectively and gracefully transition from one steady state to another, from communication avoidance to transparent and continual communication.
Structure and Experimentation
In the beginning of the container, I came in with a vague sense of wanting to come in without too much prescriptive structure. Looking back, I think this instinct was half-right, half-wrong. The half-right portion was the healthy fear of premature imposition; coming in with preconceptions and acting on them before reality-checking them. The half-wrong part was not focusing on structures that enabled rapid iteration and experimentation. This is a kind of meta-structure, a necessary “seed” that allows the emergence and growth of context-appropriate structure.
Several situations arose which demonstrated the vital importance of experimentation. In two of these situations, there was a pattern of failed asks, in one situation someone felt like they were continually asking me to make a certain change, I thought I was getting in when in fact I was not. The second situation was the inverse, where I was making an ask and kept feeling like it was not being acted upon. In both situations, the feeling of trying and continually feeling unmet lead to a exhaustion of goodwill, hope began burning out and turn into apathy.
This is a “third rail” kind of issue, for radical transparency to work there must be hope in achieving better outcomes, and the hope must be eventually validated. If hope sours into apathy, it often is quite difficult to rekindle. In some sense, one of the most root factors of all this work is hope, and hope is not infinite. Hope must be met with tangible upside, or it will eventually collapse. In both cases, the root of the repeated failure appeared to be that the same “ask” was attempted, there was not a meta-level awareness that the specific method was failing, and that a different method was required for resolution.
The only structure we began with was daily “pods”, usually at 11:30 am. In “pods” (pluralized because at Sleepawake Immersion there were multiple pods, in this container there was only one) each person had 3 minutes to share whatever felt most present and alive for them; the intent is to focus on ongoing emotions rather than stories of the past or future. Over time we extended pods so that it was followed by “radical asks, offers, and gratitude”, and daily logistics.
If I were to do anything different for next time, there would be an opt-in section for daily experiments, after pods. The idea is that a puzzle (some kind of recurring problem), hypothesis (a lightly held story of the puzzle), and experiment (a new behavior to try, hopefully to achieve some desired outcome) would be shared with the group. There are many benefits of group participation. It allows experiments to be crowdsourced at each level and it helps permission new behaviors in the group field and provide more accountability and support. A daily check-in of ongoing experiments provides a kind of meta-level awareness which encourages rapid iteration, rather than falling into failing patterns. I really liked “pods” as a starting seed of structure, but it was missing a dedicated time to reflect on ongoing dynamics and structures and intentionally iterating on them for better outcomes. The idea of pods followed by experiments, where experiments can go meta into additional structures feels like a good way of rapid structural unfolding, so that structure is grown bottom-up out of need and resolution rather than build top-down out of heady stories that may be disconnected from real needs and constraints.
I would also like to figure out better systems of granular and legible monitoring of these kinds of experiments and day to day life. On rereading this piece there is insufficient recollection of specific situational and experiential instances of resolution and unfolding. Looking forward, I want to figure out how to bring more communal experimentation into my daily life, of creating systems and practices that facilitate more effective group sensemaking and conflict resolution through continual iteration and reflection. I think both of these intentions could be tackled at home at my 15-person coop. Excited for this home-application phase!
Points of Connection and Reflection
In an environment of radical transparency, something really interesting happens.
Every commonality between people becomes a point of connection, and every difference becomes a point of reflection.
With Jonathan, we both have a very similar orientation narrativizing behavior and interpersonal dynamics, this commonality became a powerful point of connection, where it felt like he was one of the best, if not the best, people to name my stories, because he really understood my thought process, and vice versa. I felt seen by him, and it was immensely helpful to have someone who could name core beliefs that were largely invisible to me. It felt like we formed a powerful narrative tag team.
Conversely, I felt most transgressed by Emily, but the contrast and conflict provided a powerful foil for my default behaviors. My interactions with Emily were the greatest source of personal realizations over the month. When you travel, you learn more about home than about where you went. It felt like that, where every instance of contrast and conflict was an opportunity for reflection, to see with more clarity what my default patterns are. Framed in these terms, conflict at an object-level can always be tempered with curiosity at a meta-level; the conflict is a point of contrast, and contrast enables self-discovery.
These points of connection and reflection are occurring with every person in the group. This provides an amazing environment for both bonding and awareness.
The points of connection provide a near automatic sense of compassion and investment, I see myself in others and feel one with them. This oneness provides a basis for resilience and a felt sense of safety and care.
The points of reflection become a path to self-awareness. A story that became stronger over the course of the month is that I have no “objective” view on myself. Objectivity presumes distance between subject (the observer) and object (the observed). In matters of personality there is no distance between subject and object. Consequently, it is difficult if not impossible to see myself within a vacuum. A picture of self is revealed through points of reflection, the more points of reflection the more a picture of self can be triangulated upon.
One thing that felt profoundly beautiful about a shared commitment to radical transparency is that you win either way. If you are committed to this way of being, then every similarity is a point of connection and therefore resilience, every difference is a point of reflection and therefore self-awareness. You literally cannot lose. The more similar, the more resilient, the more different, the more aware. Win either way.
This feels quietly profound and revolutionary to me. In this way of being, it means automatic and universal investment in people. It is completely self-serving to be invested in the human race, for resilience and for self-awareness. Extending it further, it may be self-serving to be invested in all sentient life, all consciousness provides points of connection and reflection. I feel very excited to explore this observation, I have a sense that this is just the beginning of something very important.
The Unconditional and the Conditional
The Shasta experiment was basically non-stop emotional processing. Emotions and frictions arose, we would verbalize them, we would dig into them and attempt to figure out what was going on. Non-stop. This was only possible because the entire group was currently unemployed and had a lot of intellectual interest and stamina for this kind of thing. It did create a unique environment in which issues were be discussed almost infinitely, and I feel like it is valuable to have this experience as a reference point. It felt like within the container there was a shared commitment to the principle that everyone’s emotional experience is valid, intelligent, sensible, and we had the capacity to really drill into all the stories which made sense of the transient and recurring emotions.
There is the “talk” dimension of holding space and digging into emotions and in that dimension all emotions and needs can be first-class citizens. But at a certain point, these emotions and needs meet material constraint; how do you resolve validity of needs and emotions with worldly scarcity of resources?
On a very simple level, I believe this question is at the root of the norm of repression described earlier. Access to scarce material needs must be prioritized over one’s internal state. Access to finite parental care and attention must be prioritized over the child’s internal emotional state. Access to finite educational resources and teacher attention must be prioritized over the student’s experience. Access to finite institutional or corporate resources or employment must be prioritized. At each step there is material scarcity which forces internal repression.
The ideal of universal validity of emotions and needs is a difficult ideal to uphold. It is a very high ideal to satisfy, especially given worldly constraint. I have formed an intuitive connection between the former and the “unconditional” and “transcendental”, and the latter and the “conditional” and “immanent”. Universal validity, unconditionality, and transcendence feel clustered because they point to an ideal of love, trust, absolute acceptance, and safety. Worldly constraint, conditionality, and immanence, feel clustered because they point to a reality of scarcity and practical constraints. Within the Shasta container, I feel like we upheld unconditionality within the “talk” dimension, but we could have done a lot more to creatively uphold it when met with material constraint. There was a pattern of resources like group and individual attention that were over-subscribed and individuals felt unmet in their needs.
I think an ethos of experimentation would have helped, by trying different things any unrecognized “slack” and surplus in the system of constraints can be better utilized, and meet more needs. I think in future retreats and experiments I want to really drill into trying different approaches for meeting everyone’s needs, discovering systems that allow us to uphold unconditional care and love in a conditional and scarce world.
One point of hope that arose out of the Shasta experiment was just how much capacity the group did have. I was surprised by how load-bearing it turned out to be, and I think it demonstrated to me just how resilient community can be. Part of that resilience appeared to come out of the pattern that needs and asks were often spaced out in time, and group capacity could meet multiple people in their needs. In contrast, a recurring pattern I have seen and experienced in pairs, like romantic relationships and friendships, is that the relationship falls apart when both partners require their needs to be addressed first. In a group context, the likelihood of coinciding distress across the entire group is lower, and there is more default capacity for intervention, mediation, support.
Looking to the future, I really want to figure out personal practices and group systems that walk the line between the unconditional and the conditional. I also want to understand the relationship between the unconditional and conditional on a theoretical level, across many systems there appears to be kind of recurrent rhyme, and I want to figure out what’s going on. At the end of this piece I go into some early, gestating thoughts on this rhyme.
Personality Structures
Thinking about personality from a bottom-up perspective, it is made up of a web of contingent reflexes, and reflexes seem to frequently map to core stories. The difference between a story and belief is that a story is purely intellectual whereas a belief is embodied through reflexes. In becoming aware of core beliefs, there is new potential to redefine the story, and with it reflexes, and personality.
For a new story to “stick” there must be an effect that validates the new story. The validating reward could also exist in negative space, in terms of absence rather than presence — if the story is expectation of punishment then absence is its own kind of reward. At that point the new story has a complete feedback loop which transforms it from story to belief, allowing the new story to be continually reinforced and embodied through the new reflexes.
Something I began doing in the Shasta experiment was mapping out the chain of initial circumstances, stories, reflexes, effects, to make the structure of my personality legible. Once legible, the hope was that faulty stories could be identified. All stories are narrowly true, otherwise they wouldn’t be held. A faulty story is story that is misaligned with one’s own needs and well being.
Once identified, the hope was that new stories could be hypothesized, which are better-aligned with one’s needs and well being, and from there, new behaviors could be framed as experiments. If the experiment produced positive outcomes, the feedback loop is completed and the hypothesis-experiment combo could become embodied into a new belief.
During Shasta this personality structure framing only became coherent in the last week of the experiment, so unfortunately I did not apply it to the extent I wish I could, but the legibility already feels useful, and I have continued to add to it as pathways become apparent.
This was the “personality structure” I made for myself:
Steven's Personality Structure
Link to originalflowchart TD Z[IC: Initial Circumstances<br/> S: Story<br/> ER: Emotional Reflex<br/> SR: Somatic Reflex<br/> E: Effect<br/> H: Hypothesis <br/> EE: Emotional Experiment] A((IC: father angry and gaslighting, mother unable to hold space for emotions. Father teaches Steven that emotions will be used against him, and ultimately make things worse. Mother teaches Steven that emotions are problems to be fixed)) --> B(S: From father, having emotions get me in trouble) Authority A --> M{ER: Distrust of authority} subgraph Authority M --> N{ER: Aversion to imposition of authority} N --> SuspectDisbeliefEF{ER: Difficulty suspending disbelief, compulsively looking for cracks in self-consistency} M --> O(S: Authority and agency costs) O --> M M --> P(S: Bottom-up, peer-to-peer systems are safer) O --> P N --> Q{ER: Desire to test, reduce external authority} end Anger A --> Y{ER: Sensitive to transgression of boundaries} subgraph Anger D --> AngerShame(S: Anger is destructive and shameful) Y --> ZZ{ER: Anger arises} ZZ --> AA{ER: Anger is repressed} AA --> AF{ER: Anger comes out sideways as frustration} AngerShame --> AA end AngerShame -.-> AngerOkay(H: Anger is fine, provide its kind and clear. The problem *is* explosive anger which comes from repression) AngerOkay -.-> KindAnger{EE: Direct and kind expression of anger} KindAnger -.-> AngerMet((Effect: Anger met with compassion and consideration)) AngerMet -.-> AngerOkay WIP subgraph WIP K{ER: Aversion to saying no to others} WorkAversionER{ER: Aversion to programming work that feels imposed} StageFright{ER: Fear of performance} CompEmbarrassment{ER: Compulsive empathy during external embarrassment} FallApart{ER: Fear of things falling apart} end
Looking forward I want to use this map for explicit updates in personality. It seems absolutely bonkers that we don’t have graphs like this already to make our behaviors legible. Without legibility there’s no way to make cumulative progress, to asymptotically converge on a stable story of behaviors and core stories coupled to revealed examples of how they showed up.
I am especially excited to apply these maps to communal radical transparency — they feel completely complementary.
Gestating Thoughts
In the process of Shasta there were some early “well that’s funny” kind of moments. To me, these moments are the genesis of all new ideas. In the beginning, something unexpected occurs. This is experiential gold. X marks the spot, thar be gold. I see these as infant ideas, and like infants they require trust in the initial intuition, encouragement, love, care to grow up and bear more weight, and eventually take more abuse from the world ha. Here are some gestating thoughts, which I intend to keep in mind for future experiments.
The Inner and Outer
There’s an interesting mirroring pattern that seems to keep coming up, where my internal state or story is consistently a kind of mirror image of external reality. One example of this is the self-validating nature of core beliefs and behavioral reflexes. These are reinforced only because external reality provides a mirror for them. I wonder if this pattern is more broadly and deeply present. For instance, I have an intuitive sense that while I cannot materially commit to everyone, I must emotionally connect and accept everyone to emotionally connect and accept myself. This may sound overly ambitious and naive, but I have a felt sense that if I cut off connection from others, the repulsive parts I perceive in others will also be repulsive within myself. The process of coming into full internal acceptance and wholeness comes with a full external acceptance and wholeness. The inside and outside are a unified package.
This sense of unified package feels related to aversion I have in a series of cultural dichotomies that intuitively feel absurd: means and ends, practice and theory, body and mind, economy and democracy, metabolism and genetics. In each case, the “platonic ideal” (ends, theory, mind, democracy, genetics) is given a higher position or status, looking down on “its body”. With my “alien anthropologist” hat on, it feels utterly bizarre and culturally insane.
Means and ends presumes that the “how” can be divorced from the “what”. This feels absurd to me, it feels like a post-hoc way to rationalize dirty “hows” for self-deceiving “whats”. Practice and theory presume that detached and disembodied knowledge exists in a vacuum, that human stories of reality have some kind of separate reality and platonically pure existence outside the brains that weave them out of embodied experience. Which naturally introduces the next one: mind and body. Body, emotion, subjectivity at large is gaslit and deemed illegitimate and anecdotal, when from an individual perspective it’s the only thing self-evident and known to exist. These dichotomies in turn are rhymes with each other, I think they have some kind of self-consistent reality, where they circularly reference and reinforce each other (the “big lie” of Western Positivism?”), but all rest on the same disembodied, false foundation. Each requires a kind of top-down dogma to justify itself.
I have an intuitive sense that “embodiment” is at the root of a more coherent orientation towards self and world. In “embodiment” everything arises bottom-up from coalescing, co-arising pressures and emerging structures. All these false dichotomies are in fact organic flowing loops, where there is no separation, just transformations in time and space. In this framing “heady” notions of ends, theory, mind, etc are emergent properties that arise out of pressures, but ultimately they’re locally useful but globally false stories. Nondualism is being outside the story, to realize that “outside” exists, and that heady stories are one optional state of being, not the only one.
If this inner-outer unity is present across systems there are some really interesting implications. It could account for the fractal nature of some systems — “flipping” at one level could trigger a simultaneous “flipping” at higher levels, and the “outer” or one system is simply an “inner” of a larger concentric system. I think this could account for why both embryology and death (both in biological and societal terms) have a kind of cascading nature. Embryology represents a kind of “cascade upwards” while death represents a “cascade downwards” which is when this fractal coinciding flipping is occurring. If this is true, I actually suspect the best way to learn about system collapse is to learn about system birth; birth is cleaner and ascendence and collapse are also mirrors of each other. I have anecdotally found this to be true in my exploration of history and economics — learning about the emergence of societies (e.g. colonial American history, emergence of Italian city states, land reform in North East Asia, etc) have time and time provided better causal understanding of the holistic pressures that produce higher order social systems. Breakdown of systems is significantly messier which makes it very difficult to make sense of system health. In the presence of so much messy complexity often the only reasoning is quite symptomatic and approximate rather than essential and root. This investigation matters to me because I think America’s existing societal trajectory is currently “flipping downwards” towards authoritarianism, militarism, deeper inequality, deeper fear and alienation. “Cascading upwards” back towards democratic norms may require this kind of understanding.
There are interesting ways to connect this back to transitioning from communicational steady states. In the Sleepawake Immersion there was a powerful kind of “spiral upwards” where a positive feedback predicated on deep safety and acceptance was achieved. The structure of this loop was as follows: different sized containers with shifting participants were created, each container provided an opportunity for individuals to open up about themselves, as individuals took risks that were met with acceptance and safety this permissioned risk-taking in the rest of the group, and as transparency unfolded points of connection and reflection exploded. It amounted to a near religious experience of connecting and seeing other and self. I wonder if the facilitators are creating a very intentional feedback loop that’s essentially a “cascade upwards” from “shared but divided” alienation to communal connection. Figuring this dynamic is extremely important to me, as it could be key to deep and viral re-communalization.
Unconditional and Conditional
Trigger alert: even more speculation, hand-waving, woo! The unconditional and conditional seem to come up a lot as rhymes across disparate domains. Feminine polarity feels clustered with the unconditional; a mother’s nurturing love. Masculine polarity feels clustered with the conditional; a father’s challenge for excellence, and respect for achievement. At least in my intuition, “talk” and “action” or “ideation” and “execution” correspond to the unconditional and conditional. In the realm of ideas and discussion, no physical violence can occur, by definition. No idea I communicate can inflict physical violence on its own. This means the space of ideas and discussion has a kind of levity and expansiveness which makes imagination a space of unconditional acceptance and possibility. In contrast, the realm of action and execution has serious constraints and consequences, which rhyme with the conditional. These complementary qualities are often paired. For instance, the feminine-masculine pairing. I find it fascinating that they are paired and unified in “containers”. “Container” is a term used across authentic relating kinds of communities to describe exercises that uphold a high degree of safety. A container is made up a conditional barrier, vetting people on the basis of their history, behavior, perceived integrity and values, etc. Within the container is unconditional safety. Conditional outside, unconditional inside. Community, home, body feel analogous to “container”, where there is a conditional barrier with the broader world, and an internal microcosm of unconditionality. This pairing applies to other areas — romantic love for instance. Dating follows the pattern of conditional vetting followed by unconditional commitment. Maybe this is just my hammer and everything is now a nail, but it also feels like it applies to government vs market-capitalism; constitutional democracy is predicated on human rights which vaguely correspond to the unconditional, market-capitalism is predicated on scarcity and excellence which vaguely map to conditionality. This conditional-unconditional pairing comes up a lot, enough for me to feel like something is going on. Maybe I’m just the crazy one, I’m open to that ha.
Subgroup Dynamics
It was fascinating to see subgroup motifs that arose. For instance, one way of disrupt or promote specific pairwise spirals was to introduce a “wedge”, individuals whose very presence disrupted downward spiraling, or “catalyst”, individuals whose presence introduced upward spiraling. I want to keep an eye out for more complex subgroup dynamics and patterns, just making a brief note here.