Coincidentally, he was visiting Charlie Awbery and me at the time, so we were able to discuss it in person, and recorded a video of our conversation.
In addition to that, this post includes a section of links to relevant discussions elsewhere, assembled by Andrew; and a transcript in case you’d rather read than watch.
A follow-up post, going live next Saturday, explains bits I botched during the recording and we deleted from this video. It’s about ways metaphysics muddles our thinking, feeling, and acting. And, about how we perceive sacredness in the actual world—such as in a salt shaker.
Vervaeke’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned
* Relevance realization: Vervaeke, Lillicrap & Richards (2012), “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” J. Logic and Computation 22(1): Oxford Academic · open PDF
[Caveat: Generated by “AI,” inaccurate and in places misleading.]
[00:00:00] David: I thought maybe it would make sense for you to start by introducing your project here, what it is that you’re trying to do and why. And some background on John Vervaeke’s general project, because people may not be familiar with that.
[00:00:29] Andrew: So I encountered your writing and his writing around the same time. I would guess about five to six years ago. It was kind of a time where a lot of things were breaking for me, and so I found them both incredibly useful. John Vervaeke recorded a 50-hour lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and you have written many partial books, which are probably far more than 50 hours of reading.
In my mind they’re a little bit interleaved, and I found both of them very useful. Recently I wanted to figure out how your ideas interact. They’re both about the word “meaning” and different aspects of it. I think that both you and him have a diagnosis of what’s going on, and I wanted to understand how you saw each other’s ideas. I think I have a decent idea of the way you disagree, but you can correct me.
[00:01:46] David: So I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. I read a few of his academic papers, and I watched, I think, two episodes of the 50-hour meaning crisis series. Then I read a lot of blog posts from other people about his work. So I have a quite diffuse sense of it. Something you mentioned when we were talking about this earlier is that he has developed his ideas in further directions, or maybe even a different direction, since the meaning crisis series. And neither of us, I think, is very clear on quite how he’s gone.
I thought it’d also be good to say that the Meaningness book I started working on 25 years ago, and I worked most of the ideas out during a six-month period when I was staying with Rin’dzin, who’s now Charlie, my now spouse —
Andrew: Congratulations.
David: Yeah, it’s great to be married to Charlie. On her kitchen table while she was off at work. This was when she was living in Bristol in the UK. So that book doesn’t really reflect my current understanding. It’s not that I disagree with anything or that I think it’s wrong, but there’s another 15-plus years of development since I put it on the web, which was in 2010 or 2012 or something like that. So we have two out-of-date understandings.
[00:03:58] Andrew: Try to merge two out-of-date understandings, right. And see how they go. So I had written a tweet thread that may go out as a tweet thread, or maybe this conversation, or something like that. Perhaps we could go through it. I can kind of summarize. I think it’s useful to speed-run his ideas. Maybe you can interject with your background.
The overall shape of his lecture series is that it’s a little bit entertaining. If you like watching him lecture, then it is an entertaining thing to watch. If you’ve never encountered the ideas, there’s a lot of learning. He’s knitting together thought from eastern, western, different branches of philosophy in very pleasant ways.
One way of looking at what he’s doing is this intellectually entertaining sort of thing. I think that understates what his goal was, but there’s intellectual understanding there. The first half is largely a history lesson and the second half is largely cognitive science. Maybe we could go through a little bit. Would that be good?
[00:05:22] David: And maybe I’ll throw in random, incoherent interjections periodically.
[00:05:28] Andrew: That’d be great. That’s what we signed up for: David Chapman random interjections.
I think looking back at his work, one of the fundamental things I realized is he believes we have lost something.
[00:05:43] David: So I’ll interject right at the beginning. I think maybe I’ll get to the substance of my objection a little later, but I think we haven’t lost something. I think we probably disagree already at this point. I think we’ve gained an enormous amount. We have enormously more sophisticated ideas about meaning, and how it works and what it is and how to work with it, than at any time in the past.
And the whole history that he tells — it’s great that he’s telling that history. It’s important to understand the history, to understand how we now understand meaning. But we’ve actually just accreted a whole lot of extra stuff. And there’s nothing that we’ve lost. A little later, I’ll get back to why I think he thinks that, and why I disagree.
[00:07:00] Andrew: So if he approaches from “we’ve lost something,” it makes sense to do two things. One, that motivates understanding: well, how did we get to where we are now? So that motivates the history lesson. And then it motivates what he perceives as the solution space. How do we recreate the thing that we’ve lost?
His idea is that around the Bronze Age, no one was worried about finding meaning. Meaning is all around us. It’s within the substrate of culture and nature, and it existed in the interplay of relationships and that kind of thing. Then you have this innovation that occurred across the world in many places that he calls the axial age, where metacognition developed — second-order thinking. Because of that, a separation of here and the divine emerged, and you see this separation in religions.
You see it in religions that don’t exist anymore, and in current religions: we are here in the dirty realm of existence, and there is this pristine, divine existence that’s separated from us. Our goal is to figure out how do we connect to that thing. Both connect to it while we are living here, for divine inspiration and purpose and meaning, but also when we die. So there’s a story there about the afterlife.
His story is that because of this, a lot of psychotechnologies were developed to try to meet this need of bridging the separation. So there’s meditation, dialectic, prayer, ethical discipline. All of the philosophies and religions develop from this. He would include shamanic medicine and that kind of thing, a way of tapping into this divine that is hidden from us.
So we had three different orders that emerged. From what I can tell, the Middle Ages tried to recreate everything in the axial frame as stably as possible. He has three orders. The nominal order gave coherence — the universe is rationally ordered by logos, God, something like that. A normative order gave significance — there’s a hierarchy of value that’s available to us. And narrative order gave purpose. That’s history moving from creation through fall to redemption. A lot of this is Christian-inspired.
Nominalism broke first because the scientists started doing what scientists do and started poking at the universe. And if the universe is just names, mental labels attached to things, then rational order just became arbitrary. You’re not getting a rational order from on high. The Reformation had God’s will as primary, so salvation comes through faith, and so you are starting to lose the other orders as well. You had less need for institutions, and these institutions were the things that were cultivating wisdom. The scientific revolution killed the universal telos, and the external world is purposeless matter in motion. So that’s his “fall.”
Then the philosophers had their go of it. Descartes formalized the mind/matter split. The self is severed from the world. All meaning was relocated to the subjective side. Kant said we can never know the thing in itself. Romanticism tried to decorate everything, but it’s an absolute mess. So it doesn’t work. If we can’t touch reality, perhaps Will can. And so you have these cultural wills that assert themselves: communism, fascism, nationalism, that kind of thing.
Where we find ourselves now is basically a system that had fallen apart. The Bronze Age had a stable system. Around the Middle Ages, a somewhat stable system. And we’ve basically deconstructed that second stable system. I’ll pause there. That’s the history side.
[00:11:18] David: I think this history is really important. I also, in the Meaningness book, have a history that mostly covers the late 1800s up to the present. And it’s the same story. And this is standard-issue intellectual history. I don’t know his version of it, but I assume he’s following the standard story. I follow the standard story. And then I think we have somewhat different diagnoses of what to make of that.
We were talking yesterday or the day before about why history and understanding history is important. We are heirs to an enormous amount of ideas that we’re mostly not even aware of. We just take them for granted. We may not even know that we have the ideas. Thought soup. These ideas actually are wrong. And the fact that we have the ideas without knowing we have the ideas, and they’re wrong ideas, that’s very significant.
They distort the way that we are. In order to undistort our way of being, to return to some natural state, it is helpful to find out what the ideas are that we have without knowing it. I think Vervaeke uses the term “cultural grammar.”
Andrew: Yeah, that sounds familiar.
David: I think that’s nice, because grammar is something that we use constantly, and unless you’ve studied linguistics, you’re mostly unaware of the grammar that you’re speaking. It is shaping the way that we communicate without our being aware of it, and we can make it explicit. An example, which is sort of a famous example in English — there’s grammatical rules. When you have adjectives piling up in front of a noun. A clear blue sky.
[00:14:17] Andrew: Yes. Like, why does “clear” go before “blue”?
[00:14:20] David: Exactly. A blue clear sky — I mean, a lot of them actually just come out incoherent. It would just be wrong. A blue clear sky is not the same thing as a clear blue sky. This idea comes from Aristotle. Nobody knows this, but we are obeying a cultural grammar according to which things have essences and have accidental properties. And this is completely wrong, and it distorts everything. So I’ve gone off on a side ramp.
[00:14:53] Andrew: This is what we’re here for.
I can do the little speed-run. The second half of his lecture series is basically knitting together what the solution space might look like. He’s coming from the frame of “we’ve lost something, we need to restore it.” Let’s understand the things we have lost, and let’s just recreate those things.
He uses two primary tools from cognitive science to motivate this. One is relevance realization, which has connection to the frame problem: how do we know what is relevant in any situation? We’re taking in so much information, and it’s almost like affordances just reach out to us. Things have affordances in a way that is kind of mysterious to us right now, and it’s still mysterious to AI. It’ll probably become very relevant as AI is operating in the real world: how do you actually pull relevance from a system in a way that is meaningful?
[00:16:07] David: This is what my PhD thesis was about. So Vervaeke and I are sharing a lot of cognitive background. We’re actually working with mostly the same set of ideas.
[00:16:21] Andrew: It’s lovely, because the two of you diverge and then come back. So he calls this relevance realization. He has a story of how this works, but in general you have this tension between overfitting and underfitting, and the human mind is trying to find this balance between the two. He highlights here that relevance is not a property of objects. If you’re looking for meaning in life, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re not gonna find meaning in life. Relevance is the dance between interactions.
The other tool he uses, which I think sticks in a lot of people’s brains from his lectures, is his four P’s — four ways of knowing. He basically creates these categories that largely is pointing to: there is more than propositional knowledge. We can make propositions about things, and a lot of our left-brainy world really likes propositions about things. But there are very obvious ways of knowing that aren’t propositions. So he has the procedural — that’s knowing how. The perspectival, which is knowing what it is like. And the participatory, which is knowing by being. You can kind of think of a hierarchy from the propositional all the way through to the way of being. If you try to establish your meaning normatively through propositions, it’s very weak, because propositions themselves are pretty flimsy. You’re not gonna find meaning there. Largely you’re gonna find meaning in this embodied sense of involvement. So those are the two tools he uses. Any thoughts?
[00:18:21] David: From a cognitive science perspective, I think his account of how relevance realization works is probably wrong. I don’t think that’s very relevant to the meaning crisis, so I won’t go into that.
I really like the four P’s. The propositional versus procedural is standard in cognitive science going back to forever, but putting in the participatory and perspectival, I like that.
Andrew: It’s one of the things that stuck with me: hey, when you find yourself being very literal about things in the propositional, look another way. It’s just very useful. [00:19:12] So he takes these two things. Relevance is coming from this process that’s occurring, so something feels relevant to us, thus meaningful to us, through this process. And there are these other ways of knowing. How do we cultivate both of these? How do we tune them? How do we shape them?
So he creates this framework called DIME, which is basically a four-legged stool that recreates what we’ve lost. If you were to look back, what did these people have? They had elements of this four-legged stool. Practices. The four practices are: dialogical, which is basically mind experiencing mind in the external, to work through self-deception in some way. You have to interact with the world, you have to interact with other minds, debate them, that kind of thing.
There’s the imaginal, which transforms perspective. He uses the phrase “serious play.” He thinks we’ve lost play —
David: I love that phrase.
Andrew: — and that we should be seriously playing. He has quite an elaborate construction of what the imaginal is doing in our world.
The mindful — this is meditation practices. And embodiment. For him, I think this is Tai Chi, but any kind of movement practice that trains bodily foundation.
[00:20:44] David: So, a question. He has the Bronze Age where meaning was a non-problem, and then in the axial age it becomes a problem. These practices sound to me like axial age practices. So it’s not the case that these are the way that in the Bronze Age, meaning was a non-problem. These were ways in which the axial age tried to overcome their failure to be like people in the Bronze Age. And it didn’t work in the axial age, so why should we believe it would work now?
[00:21:33] Andrew: That’s a great point. I don’t know his account well enough about why in the Bronze Age meaning didn’t need these practices. It could be something along the lines of: metacognition had not fully been developed, and to do these practices you need some layer of metacognition. And so I think if you’re subject to your experience, in some ways you avoid some of the flaws as well. I’m guessing, to some extent.
Do wild deer out in the mountains have meaning problems? No. Well, it’s because they don’t think about their situation and their lot in life, and they’re not looking for cosmic significance, I assume. I hope not.
So now I get to — I think I’ve bastardized Vervaeke by compressing 50 hours into 15 minutes. Then I summarize your beliefs, following the same arc. Maybe it’d be better coming from you. So what’s the diagnosis? What went wrong, if anything?
[00:23:00] David: Well, this is where my story now is probably somewhat different than it was when I wrote the 10% of the Meaningness book which is actually up on the web.
I think you say later: well, Vervaeke believes in philosophy, he thinks philosophy is good. I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. And in my view, Vervaeke has a lot of respect for them, devotion for them, that I don’t share.
I think the cultural grammar that we have is largely descended from the ancient Greeks trying to solve problems with inadequate tools, and their problems were ones we don’t have. But we’ve got the kind of bric-a-brac, or residue, a lot of broken furniture. It’s like we’re living in a house that is stuffed with ancient, broken-down furniture. And what we need to do is to clear out all the stuff that we’ve been somehow having to make our way around, and have some open space, and leave the things that actually do still work.
One fundamental idea in the cultural grammar, cognitive grammar, I forget what he says, is that real things are perfectly definite. This is Plato’s theory of forms. And anything that’s not perfectly definite isn’t really real, and is defective, and needs to kind of be stuck in a box so it’ll behave and have the proper form it’s supposed to have. And he applies this to, you know, salt shakers or whatever. This isn’t a real salt shaker from Plato’s point of view. This is a bad approximation to the form of a salt shaker, which lives in heaven.
So the meanings that we have, we discover that they are nebulous, meaning they’re not perfectly definite. And that seems unacceptable because Plato said so. And then we conclude that these aren’t really meanings at all. They’re fake meanings, and all meanings are fake because all meanings turn out to be nebulous. They’re not perfectly definite. And what he’s calling the meaning crisis is the fact that this became apparent during the 20th century.
There’s the whole history before that, which it’s helpful to understand, but my history is basically a history of the 20th century because that’s when this problem became apparent. The idea that meanings must be perfectly definite — “patterned” is the word I use — they must conform to a pattern. That’s the Platonic Form. This idea I call eternalism. It’s a term from Buddhism. The idea that because meanings are not perfectly definite, they don’t exist at all — that’s nihilism.
The standard histories of the 20th century say that nihilism is a huge problem. That’s, I think, what Vervaeke is addressing in the meaning crisis series. It’s also what all kinds of thinkers have been addressing. Nietzsche was kind of the first person to point this out and start to grapple with it. And all worthwhile philosophy since Nietzsche has been working within his problematic, I think.
So the part of the Meaningness book that’s semi-written is basically saying: look, meaning is somewhat patterned. Different meanings have different degrees of definiteness or patternedness to them. But it’s always also nebulous — changing and indefinite and sort of fluid and impossible to pin down. And if that’s unacceptable, then you kind of go in one of these two wrong directions of eternalism and nihilism. And the book basically just said: well, don’t do that, ‘cause that doesn’t work. It makes you miserable and confused, and it’s better not to be miserable and confused.
And then it has some sketches of practices that are not very well worked out, for working with nebulous meaning, and working with your confusions. There’s a series of confusions that come out of failure to do that. These practices are not very well worked out. And I think toward the end of this you present a partial criticism of both Vervaeke’s work and of mine. And one of the things you say is: you don’t seem to have practices here. And it’s true enough, I didn’t have a practice there. And I kind of feel like I have a little more to say about that now than I did in 2010, or whenever it was that I was writing it up.
[00:30:15] Andrew: To me, what stuck out most was this eternalism–nihilism axis. You also had other axes.
David: Yes. They’re kind of secondary.
Andrew: It’s basically confusions, flawed ways of thinking, that if you are existing on that axis, you will fall toward an attractor basin that is somewhat miserable.
David: That’s a nice way to put it.
Andrew: So one of the meta things I like is that you are recognizing two polar ways of being that both have something true to say that the other doesn’t recognize. So nihilism recognizes the nebulosity that eternalism doesn’t recognize. Eternalism recognizes the pattern that nihilism doesn’t recognize. And so it’s this beautiful move of: they both recognize the truth in each other, and the resolution is they’re both making the same mistake. For you in Meaningness, the mistake is not recognizing the nebulosity and pattern, which you call the complete stance. Not recognizing that they’re inseparable and they’re both always there.
The other interesting thing is, I think Vervaeke often thinks about things in terms of balance. The right action, which I think is a kind of Theravada way of thinking about things. Yours is not — you’re not trying to balance two things. You’re not trying to balance eternalism and nihilism. You’re recognizing: oh, they’re both wrong about something.
So I think we can now interplay. You alluded a little bit before that you think his diagnostic is wrong. He starts in the wrong place of believing philosophy, or believing the ancient Greeks.
[00:32:16] David: So you characterize Vervaeke as saying that we’ve lost something and we need to reconstruct it. I don’t think we’ve lost anything. The way of being of the Bronze Age is always immediately available, and we actually live that way much of the time anyway. When we’re making breakfast, we are not concerned with problems of meaning. It’s obvious. The world is obvious. Things are as they seem to be. And the ancient Greeks got this idea that somehow things are very different than they seem to be. You know, the real world is completely different from this, and we need to figure out how to get to the real world. And that’s not the situation we find ourselves in.
We do have problems of meaning, but there being some other world is not a helpful way of approaching that at all. What we have is 2,600 years’ worth of accumulated ideas about meaning that we all, without knowing it, without having studied philosophy at all, we’re all downstream from philosophy. I say the toxic effluent of philosophical production. We’re drinking in these philosophical waste products. They come into our bodies and our brains, and they’re polluting us.
So what’s needed is to find these wrong ideas and point to them and say: oh, this is why that’s wrong. Here’s how acting on the basis of that wrong idea causes trouble. And then let’s not do that anymore.
The kind of utopian vision of “wouldn’t it be nice to live in the Bronze Age?” — he probably doesn’t say that. I think he likes technology. But wouldn’t it be nice to have direct access to meaning? Well, we do have direct access to meaning. What has gone wrong, what we lost, is the credibility of eternalism. That is the definition of postmodernity: postmodernity is the condition in which grand meta-narratives are no longer credible. Grand meta-narratives are these eternalistic structural theories of meaning. And starting in 1971, nobody could believe them anymore.
And so we lost that, but that wasn’t a terrible thing. I mean, it had some benefits, but we’re better off without it. Nietzsche was starting the work of deconstructing the terrible wrong ideas we got from the Greeks, and that was one of them. And hooray, we’re rid of that.
There were certain benefits: if you could be a good Christian, it solved a lot of problems for you. And it’s no longer possible to be a good Christian, or at least it’s extremely difficult. People who think they’re Christians aren’t. And serious Christians say this about most people who think they’re Christians: they’re actually moralistic therapeutic deists. That’s the phrase from recent theological thinking — that most Christians are actually that. They don’t actually believe in the Christian story, in the details that matter. They think God is a vague source of some kind of nice morality, and is kind of your parent/psychotherapist/best friend. And deist in the sense of: well, he doesn’t really exist exactly, but there’s sort of a something. And this isn’t Christianity.
So it would probably be nice to be a Christian. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I don’t think anybody can imagine it now. If you were born after 1971, you’ve grown up in a world in which it’s impossible to actually believe in any of these things. So we did lose that. But better off without it. Although it has left a lot of people feeling confused.
Andrew: Unmoored.
David: Yes. So there’s this sense of groundlessness. And that is something where Vajrayana Buddhism, which is very influential for me, has the tools to work with. And there are other approaches and tools for working with that, which are realistic in a way that eternalism isn’t.
And so for me, the way forward is to both clear out the wrong, bad ideas and also to have the practices. And here I very much agree with Vervaeke, that practice, as well as intellectual understanding — you need both. The practices are very important, and practices for finding meaning, those are available. But they’re not emphasized in the culture now.
[00:39:24] Andrew: Another aspect that I like about your view is that you’re already very close to the complete stance. Because if you fully believed the other stances, it would be largely unworkable. It’d be difficult to exist in the world. And so in many ways, they’re self-terminating. People have these a priori, or even prior to beliefs, and that permeates and leaks into their life. But practically, a nihilist probably has a favorite song, unless they’re in deep depression or something like that. Meaning still leaks out. That’s an interesting perspective, because it seems that not much needs to be done.
[00:40:18] David: Meaning is everywhere obvious. This is a salt shaker. It has a meaning. It’s used for shaking salt. There’s not a lot of complexity here. In Dzogchen — a branch of Vajrayana Buddhism — rigpa, which is sort of the goal for Dzogchen, is the natural state, and it’s the state in which things are just obvious and things are as they seem to be. When you’re making breakfast and putting salt on your scrambled eggs, you don’t have a problem. It’s interesting.
[00:41:30] Andrew: So I think we’ve talked a bit about Vervaeke’s investment in ancient philosophy, which you disagree with. The systemic tools that might address this — should we talk about ethics at all? I think there’s probably a difference in how you and Vervaeke perceive ethics.
[00:41:37] David: I can say a little about how I think about it, but I don’t know how Vervaeke thinks about it.
Andrew: My sense — and I could be wrong — is that in many ways he wants to cultivate virtue. I see a little bit of this Platonic form leaking out. That there is a right way to be, and you are trying to align yourself toward that way.
[00:42:10] David: Cultivating virtue seems like a good idea. Because I emphasize the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, I think ethics is always going to be somewhat nebulous, to varying degrees, in varying ways. I don’t think you can have a system of ethics which is the correct system. I don’t think that there’s always a well-defined right thing to do. In a lot of situations it’s nebulous what’s right to do. But one can and should make an effort to do right things.
[00:42:56] Andrew: Would it be useful to talk about stances trumping systems? Because I think that’s another disagreement you might have. He is constructing DIME as a system — that if you do the system, you will find meaning, you’ll restore this thing that’s been broken. Can you talk a bit about your view of stances?
[00:43:25] David: Stances are simpler than systems. They’re prior to systems. They’re sort of attitudes that you take toward whatever — meaning, in this context. So the attitude that meanings don’t exist is nihilism. The attitude that the only purposes that really count are kind of materialistic, egocentric ones — that’s a stance. You don’t need a big theory that says the only thing that really matters is me and the people I immediately care about, and basically I want to get all the goodies and everything else is some kind of airy-fairy. That’s what I call the stance of materialism. And everybody falls into that all the time. We all do, including people who are explicitly rejecting it. One just naturally does. But it’s a confused stance, because it is denying that there are purposes — altruistic purposes, or artistic purposes — that are not materialist in this sense. So it is making a false distinction and coming down on one side of that and denying the other side of it.
I’m not against systems at all. Vajrayana is a very elaborate structure, a highly structured system with its own embedded system of logic and enormous conceptual complexities. And I think it’s great. But I have a meta-systematic view, meaning I don’t take that or any system as being some kind of ultimately true and correct thing. It’s useful in some circumstances. And I don’t know whether this DIME thing he takes to be some kind of ultimately correct thing either. As a system of practice, that may just be what it is. Vajrayana is a system of practice — it’s got different things that you do, and they fit together in a particular way.
Andrew: I wouldn’t be shocked if he were to say that DIME is a solution to where we find ourselves right now. [00:46:17] And that a different people group at a different time might have a different set. There may not even be four — there may be a different set of practices. I think he is fairly committed to these practices. They’re fairly generic. If I say “embodiment,” that doesn’t really tell you what to do. Inside of that, you have to explore.
To me it feels like something has collapsed, and this is a structure that he’s going to inflate, and inside of that, meaning can exist. And if you’re missing any of the legs, it’s almost like the volume collapses in some way. It seems to me decently pragmatic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the ways he’s changed is developing this a bit more. Okay, in what ways does DIME become an object that someone can treat as a religion: “I did my little movement practice, I argued with someone and whatever, and I still don’t feel meaning”?
I wouldn’t be surprised if Awakening from the Meaning Crisis was a theory of structure, and that since then he’s tried to refine the practices, or something like that. But neither of us know.
[00:47:30] David: Yeah, I like all of those practices. I’m not sure how he’s using it. It doesn’t seem obvious why those four things. They all seem like good things, and I can kind of see how you might think you need something from each of those categories.
[00:48:00] Andrew: Another lens, that you only talk about in other places, and he doesn’t talk about at all, is your influence from Robert Kegan. Another way of viewing some of the disagreements. My theory is it is actually a Kegan thing, where it almost seems as though he is providing a Kegan three-to-four system for someone to reboot something. And it can be immensely practical, even if you followed him directly and took some of his metaphysics, because in some ways you are figuring out: what am I, if I’m not identified by my group? Can you speak a little bit about this?
[00:48:53] David: That seems insightful. I don’t know whether it’s accurate, because I don’t know enough about his stuff. But there is a pre-systematic way of being, a systematic way of being, and a meta-systematic way of being. And each going from one of those to the next is a radical personal transformation. According to this theory, which I think is substantially right, it reorganizes everything about you. And it is tremendously valuable to go from pre-systematic to systematic. And that’s roughly what the ancient Greek philosophers were doing. They were going from a pre-systematic way of being to something that was beginning to be systematic. I think in retrospect, people project a lot of rationality and systematicity onto the Greek philosophers that wasn’t yet there. They could kind of see what rationality would be, but they hadn’t actually got it yet, properly. That’s an interesting historical point that may be consequential.
But you described DIME as a well-structured system where you know what you’re supposed to do. It’s got procedures and it’s got a theory. Any sort of structure that you really take on board and take into yourself, and remold yourself to fit some system — that is the three-to-four transition. It has its costs, but it is very, very valuable.
I am much more interested in the stage four to stage five transition, which is systematic to meta-systematic. I don’t understand it very well. Nobody understands it very well. I write about it a lot. I said that I could view DIME from a meta-systematic point of view, or I can view Vajrayana from a meta-systematic point of view, as a contextually useful set of tools that you can apply for particular purposes in particular situations, but it’s not some kind of truth or correct way of being.
[00:52:20] Andrew: That’s lovely. And Vervaeke does use the phrase “reverse-engineering enlightenment.” So it does seem to me that he’s trying to figure out the system that gets you there, right?
[00:52:47] David: Yeah. I’m on board with that. I mean, I’m not on board with enlightenment, but the engineering metaphor — I’m an engineer by training. I like that metaphor. It appeals to me. Yes, that sounds great: let’s reverse-engineer enlightenment so we know what to do. I find that really appealing. And I also put on my stage-five hat and say: well, yeah, that’s not the way things work, actually.
[00:53:11] Andrew: Nice. I think we’ve completed the loop. I talk a little bit about sacredness, but I think this probably touches what we’ve talked about before: whether sacredness is a thing that we can get to, or whether it’s everywhere and you need to observe it.
David: Yes.
Andrew: I think that could be another difference, where he has this Platonic bathwater in his cells that makes him want to find the sacred someplace else. And the sacred is always right here, right now.
My mile-high view is that his architecture fails as ideology. It may be useful in the circumstance someone finds themselves in, but as a grand narrative of what happened, how we got to where we are, the diagnosis of where we are, and the solution — it’s probably partial, or it may not be situationally relevant.
You mentioned that Meaningness actually doesn’t prescribe very much. It just waves its hands a little bit. How has your thinking evolved since then?
[00:54:31] David: I wish I knew. I feel pretty confused. I find my situation to be very frustrating, because I have an enormous amount that I want to say and I don’t have time. Both in the sense that I’m sixty-something, and I’ve got a limited number of years left. But also the amount of time that I have free within a week to write is limited.
And during the past 15 years when I haven’t had much time to write, my thinking has gone in all kinds of different directions, and I kind of see everything tying together, and that’s really exciting to me. The Meaningness book has a very defined structure. It really is a system, and it’s got these tables that neatly outline the different stances and what all their properties are, those little boxes. In the same way that reverse-engineering enlightenment is appealing to me, those boxes are appealing to me. But I can’t do that anymore. My understanding doesn’t fit into boxes. And that, I suppose, could be a sign of continuing to move from four toward five.
I was involved with Vajrayana intensively from about 1998 to 2008, and then much less until the last year and a half or two years. So the period leading up to writing the Meaningness book, as far as I did, was very heavily influenced by Vajrayana, which I was practicing intensively. And my thinking now is again intensively influenced by Vajrayana, because (for some insane reason) I’ve been teaching it. And then there’s a period in between where I was just not thinking along those lines so much, and things went in lots of different directions.
So the meta-rationality material, I see as being the same thing presented a different way, but it is meant as a practice. Meta-rationality isn’t a theory, it’s a practice. It’s stuff that we do. And it is working with nebulosity and pattern in a practical way. Again, the book is largely unwritten, so there’s a lot of draft material about how in practice do you deal with a world in which things are nebulous and patterned at the same time.
And then, you’re talking about cultivating virtue. I had this arc a year ago about nobility and how to cultivate nobility, and there’s a lot more to say about that. And there’s a lot to say about ethics. And there’s a lot to say about — I don’t know, sex and gender has been something that’s been on my mind a lot recently.
There’s a bit right near your end that I love. Vervaeke: “The sacred is inexhaustible. Reality always exceeds any frame; no matter how much you understand, there’s always more. The experience of the sacred is the recognition that the inexhaustibility of reality and the inexhaustibility of your own relevance realization resonate with each other. Within that recognition, the gap between self and world heals.”
I mean, that is Vajrayana. That is the essence of Vajrayana. Vervaeke isn’t influenced by Vajrayana as far as I know, although he is influenced by the Kyoto School of Zen philosophy, which historically is influenced by Vajrayana. So there is maybe some connection there.
Chapman: “The sacred is wonder, heightened agendaless attention combined with suspension of habitual interpretation.” I think that’s the same thing. It’s more about what you’re not doing: not fixating, not denying, not interpreting. You’re experiencing nebulosity and pattern together, which has a specific experiential flavor that “inexhaustibility” lacks.
I don’t know. I think, “inexhaustible” — the world is just, if you’re open to perception, all this wonderful complexity that you also can’t pin down. And the appropriate response to the unbelievable vivid complexity of just whatever is in front of you — the salt shaker. My God, you just look at it and there’s so much detail. This brushed stainless steel — this won’t show on the camera, but there’s really fine detail in here. It’s beautiful.
[01:00:55] Andrew: The salted rust.
[01:00:59] David: Yes. There’s just a lot going on there. And you wonder at that, and you just say: oh, I thought this was something really mundane, but there’s some kind of chemical process going on here that I don’t know what it is. That’s fascinating.
So curiosity — I have what I call the textures of meaningness. Wonder is the first one. Curiosity is the second one. Play is the fourth, I think. And serious play — I think I used the phrase “serious play” in there too. What’s the third? Humor, I think. Humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creation.
Andrew: I’m loving the salt shaker. Someone even thought to put these glass ridges, which I assume make it slide across the table better. [01:01:54] Yeah, there’s a lot of detail.
Well, thank you. This is absolutely lovely. I think this will be helpful.
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You can just bless things
Saturday, April 4, 2026 • Duration 07:26
Transcript
You can bless things. It’s easy! You can do this!
You just go around blessing things.
You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a fancy hat (although the hat might help).
This is a non-denominational practice. It’s not particularly religious; you can be of any religion, or no religion.
There’s no prerequisites. It’s easy! You just do it.
This is a practice of perception, of appreciation, of connection, of expanding benevolence.
It’s not a metaphysical practice. The point is your intention, not the effect that it might have on whatever it is that you’re blessing.
I normally do this silently, but for this video I’m going to do it out loud, which feels kind of dorky, but this way you can hear what I’m thinking.
When you do it, you can do it silently. I found the practice is embarrassing at first, even if you do it silently; but if you overcome your embarrassment, it becomes ecstatic.
Bless this place.
Bless this trail. I, personally, bless this place.
Bless everything here.
Bless the flowering trees.
Bless this house. May it keep its inhabitants safe and comfortable.
Bless this amazing purple plum tree. Bless these willows. Bless the creek. Bless the petals.
Bless the sun. Bless the sky, the clouds. Bless the creek, bless these new green leaves, bless last year’s dead leaves, the petals on the surface of the creek.
Bless these fluffy white flowering shrubs. Bless the shrubbery. Bless the shrubbers.
Bless last year’s dead grass; bless this year’s grass, just starting to come up.
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You can’t sell enlightenment
Tuesday, March 31, 2026 • Duration 13:24
Transcript (ish)
Dzogchen is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by; that I love most.
It’s extraordinarily compelling and exciting and beautiful. It’s in some sense the basis of pretty nearly everything that I write.
It has several serious problems, though.
One is that you can’t sell it. And this problem is nearly fatal.
Every religion has to have some economic basis. This is something we resist in the West; going back to Martin Luther, whose slogan was “Every man his own priest.” His idea was that everybody (every man at least) should be able to read the Bible in his own language, and understand it. Then he should form his own direct relationship with God, without a priest intermediating. This is a very attractive idea! It eliminates the class of religious professionals, who had become corrupt and parasitic in Europe at that time.
The problem is, this doesn’t actually work. Most people are not capable of being their own priests. Not any more than most people are capable of being their own plumber. DIY religion sounds great, but hardly anyone can make it work. You need professionals to do the job. So, in many Protestant denominations, there’s a “pastor” role which is officially definitely not a priest, but performs most of the same functions in practice.
Buddhism is also a religion that needs religious professionals. In Asia, there were professional Buddhist clergy. And, in Asian cultures, there were various economic arrangements that made it feasible to support a class of religious professionals. Those depended on cultural patterns that we don’t have in the West. The main one, monasticism, mostly doesn’t work in the West, despite attempts.
This is a big problem for Buddhism in the West. On the one hand, we want, and actually need, full time professional teachers. But we don’t think we ought to pay for them. And it’s not clear what the payment model should be. So we’ve mostly followed the pastor model, from Protestantism. That has worked pretty okay, although not ideally, in many cases. .
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The unaltered state
Tuesday, March 24, 2026 • Duration 14:36
Many people in the West pursue meditation in order to experience altered states.
Meditation is sometimes considered a safer alternative to taking psychoactive drugs, with roughly similar effects. The jhanas are altered states of consciousness, for example. Buddhist tantra also produces diverse altered states, using various methods.
In Western Buddhism, the usual idea is that enlightenment itself is a special kind of experience. It’s an altered state of consciousness, also in the way that psychedelic drugs can produce altered states.
This is roughly consistent with some traditional Buddhist ideas about enlightenment, although not others. For example, in some tantric systems, the endpoint of the path, enlightenment itself, is said to be the simultaneous union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Those are often explained more-or-less as altered states of consciousness. Then tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, including ultimately that union. (There are other explanations of tantra that are more metaphysical; less psychological.)
I don’t want to denigrate altered states, in any way. I think they can be fascinating, enjoyable, meaningful, and useful. However, the branch of Buddhism I care most about, dzogchen, denies that enlightenment is an altered state.
In fact: Exactly the opposite!
Enlightenment is theunaltered state.
The dzogchen word for enlightenment is “rigpa,” which is defined as the natural state. You might say it is the state in which you are not altering your mind.
Nearly all the time, we are in an altered state, which is called samsara. Samsara is the state in which you are constantly poking at your mind in order to get it to behave better—instead of leaving it as it is, in its natural condition.
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This Vajrayana Q&A session is an Evolving Ground online discussion I co-hosted with Jared Janes. You can get some sense of the eG style here. We don’t go in for “dharma talks,” much less lectures. All our meetings, both in person and online, are highly interactive, mainly created in the moment by the participants.
There’s a transcript below. But first: several announcements!
I’ll co-host the next Vajrayana Q&Aon Saturday, December 13th, 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. That will actually be the last one, too! Don’t miss it! It’s free! Instructions for how to join are included here.
Starting in January, the Vajrayana Q&A series will be replaced with the monthly Evolving Ground Q&A, co-hosted by Charlie Awbery and Jared Janes. It’s free to all eG members. Membership is also free; you can join here.
Also starting in January, Charlie and I will begin a new monthly online meeting series in a similar format. The first one will be on Sunday, January 11th, at 10:30 a.m. US Eastern time, 7:30 a.m. Pacific. You can join via Zoom with this link.
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Dzogchen Street Preacher #0: Kadag
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 • Duration 00:19
“Dzogchen Street Preacher” is the overall title for a series of performance pieces I planned in 2009. This extremely brief one, “Kadag,” was meant to introduce the whole thing.
I was on the verge of recording them when there was a mundane emergency that took all my time for a year. When I had the opportunity to work again, the Meaningness book seemed more important.
But less fun! There’s a bit of slack in my life now, and yesterday I decided to take a few hours to record this one. That was fun, and it’s a way to salvage a tiny piece of a project I put a ton of love and attention into, long ago, when I was a different person than I am now.
The video might somehow stand on its own, and communicate something… but explanation might help.
Kadag
Kadag is a key term in Dzogchen, the branch of Buddhism I’m most influenced by. The usual translation is “primordial purity.” That may be misleading.
Kadag is the recognition that nothing is impure—and therefore nothing is pure, either. Purity is a metaphysical distinction, not something found in the actual world. “Primordial” is meant to communicate that.
In the video, I substituted “evenly.” The point is that nothing is more pure than anything else, because this is a nonsense concept from the beginning.
So what?
When you recognize kadag, you recognize that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the world. There are no spiritual, existential, or cosmic problems. Only practical ones, which you can address practically, instead of metaphysically.
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Maps of Meaningness
Tuesday, November 4, 2025 • Duration 01:51:49
Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning.
Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements: partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one.
Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life
Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts!
In this post:
* The Making Of: demons and the idiot
* Sections and topics in the video, with timestamps so you can find them
* Further reading: books &c. we refer to, with links
* “AI”-generated “transcript” (not safe for human consumption)
Demons and the idiot
This podcast has been years in the making. Our attempts were incessantly obstructed by malicious demons, who don’t want you to see or hear it. Eventually this became comical, although also frustrating.
To be fair to the demons, progress was also frequently obstructed by an idiot. Namely: me, David. I fumbled the technology repeatedly.
After finally getting to record the conversation, I applied “AI” to remove pauses and “ums” and such. This improved the audio track, but makesthe video extremely jerky. Also, I used “AI” to make it appear as though we are looking at the camera when we weren’t. An uncanny, demonic appearance results. And, because I am an idiot, I did this irreversibly. Sorry about that!
Next time, I will perform extensive exorcisms and protective rituals. And also learn how to use software before inflicting it on Jake’s invaluable contribution. Or leave the editing to him; !
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What's the connection between gender and meta-rationality?
Thursday, June 26, 2025 • Duration 08:50
Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta-rationality?
Transcript:
Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality?
David: I had never thought to ask that!
The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered.
Charlie: Mm-hmm.
David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana, how there’s often a sequence of: female-coded, male-coded, non-dual.
Charlie: Mmm.
David: And meta-rationality is analogous in some ways to non-duality in Buddhism. So maybe it is also… it is a little farfetched, but could be analogized to transcending gender; or being— I really don’t like the word “non-binary,” but we haven’t got a better one.
Charlie: Mm.
David: One of the things that is important in Vajrayana is practicing a yidam of the opposite sex. Not exclusively, but that is part of the path: to step into a new alien possibility that shakes up your attachment to the fixed identity that you have.
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Priests and Kings
Wednesday, April 30, 2025 • Duration 12:49
The common civilizational pattern of a separate priesthood and aristocracy casts light on current political dysfunction.
These are the first two in a series on nobility. There will be several more. Subscribe, to watch them all!
Transcript
Many successful civilizations have two elite classes. They hold different, complementary, incommensurable forms of authority: religious authority and secular authority.
This usually works reasonably well! It’s a system of checks and balances. Competition and cooperation between the classes restrains attempts at self-serving overreach by either.
I think this dynamic casts light on current cultural and political dysfunction. At the end of this video, I’ll sketch how it has broken down in America over the past half century—perhaps not in the way you’d expect! In following videos, I’ll go into more detail, and suggest how we might respond.
Archetypically, historically, and allegorically
First, though, I’ll describe the dynamic archetypically, historically, and allegorically.
Archetypically, the two elite classes are the priesthood and the aristocracy. They hold different types of authority (and therefore power).
Priests hold authority over questions of virtue. They claim both exceptional personal virtue and special knowledge of the topic in general. On that basis, they dictate to everyone else—both aristocrats and commoners—what counts as goodness in personal life, and in local communal life.
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Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness
Monday, April 28, 2025 • Duration 07:56
Nobility is the wise and just use of power.
Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide.
Nobility is the proper matter of politics.
Transcript
Sermonette
Nobility is the dark matter of society. The pull of dark matter holds galaxies together. Without it, stars would spin off into intergalactic space. Nobility holds societies together. Without nobility, societies disintegrate.
Once, the now-dark matter of nobility was brilliant, and shone throughout space. With nobility, society grows strong, prosperous, decent, and glorious. But it was eclipsed, obscured by virtue, and now it is invisible. The gravitas that held society together is ebbing away. Bits collide, and fragments are flying off into intergalactic space.
Virtue cannot hold society together. Rule by virtue is theocracy, which engenders repression and revolt, which engenders collapse.
Tyranny also cannot hold a society together forever. It saps the strength of society, and engenders corruption, which engenders collapse.
Distinguishing nobility from virtue
Okay, so this is a sermonette; so it had to start with some sort of religious-sounding cosmic nonsense. I will speak more plainly for the rest of this.
I want to distinguish nobility and virtue, as two quite different types of goodness. I think there are many types of goodness, and much trouble results from trying to assimilate them into a single kind. In particular, much of our current social, cultural, and political trouble stems from having subordinated nobility to virtue.
This is not about the words. I’m not going to say that “nobility” and “virtue” really mean certain things, or should mean those things. Rather, I want to point at a distinction; and these words are the best I can find for these two types of goodness. I think my use more-or-less lines up with the usual understandings, but both terms are vague in common usage, and may overlap. For example, nobility, and its constituent characteristics of wisdom, justice, decency, and magnificence, might all be counted as virtues.
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Bless the path.
The path that takes us from the base to the result, and delights us along the way.
Bless my feet that carry me on the path, my legs that support me, the ground that supports me. Bless gravity!
Bless these birds. Bless the cottonwoods that are just starting to get leaves. Bless the contrail.
Bless these plums. Bless these three plum trees, each individually.
Bless these dandelions.
Bless this fruit orchard. Bless the fruit that will come from the fruit orchard. Bless those who planted the fruit orchard. Bless those who will enjoy the fruit. Bless the carpet of petals on the ground. Bless the forsythias.
Bless the dog poop bag. No, it’s gloves! Bless whoever thoughtfully put the gloves in a place where someone might find them again.
Bless those who clean up after their dogs, bless their dogs, bless the love they have for their dogs.
Bless the warmth of the day. Bless the wind, the breeze, caressing my skin.
Woo! Bless the bunny. Hello, bunny! Bless you, bunny! Two bunnies! Bless you both.
Bless this manhole cover, that is undoubtedly doing something important.
Bless… Danielle Amanda Quillman Heilmann, who died in her twenties, with a ginkgo leaf. Bless her memory. Bless those who remember her. Bless them for providing this bench.
Bless the bridge. Bless the bridge makers. Bless the Continental Custom Bridge Company. Bless the solidity of the iron. Bless everything made of iron everywhere. Bless the sound it makes.
I bless the neighborhood. I bless this house. I bless the people who live in this house. I bless their future. May they always know happiness.
Bless this place. Bless all phenomena here. Bless all beings here. Bless all beings everywhere now and forever.
But the Asian models didn’t work for dzogchen, either! The problem is, dzogchen has nothing to sell. At least, not in its original version, which is the one that I care about. That’s sometimes called “pristine” dzogchen. Later, dzogchen got modified, repeatedly over centuries, to overcome this problem, along with several other genuine problems with it. So Tibetans added things that you could sell, but those actually messed it up, I think.
You can sell secrets, but dzogchen isn’t secret
One thing you can sell is secrets. So Scientology, if you keep going with it, at each level, you pay much more, and you get told the next chunk of the secrets. But all of the secrets of Scientology eventually came out, and you can find them on the internet for free.
In Tibet, they tried this model, and supposedly dzogchen was extremely secret. That pretense was retained until dzogchen came to the West, and then the store got given away. So now you can find the whole thing on the internet.
The original version of dzogchen simply told you what enlightenment is and what it’s like. And that’s extremely simple. It’s two or three sentences, maybe. And it’s not easy to sell two or three sentences!
And also, they’re no use, because they don’t make any sense. What is enlightenment? What’s it like? If you understand the brief description, you say, “yeah; yeah, that’s what it’s like.” And if you don’t understand it, there’s no further explanation possible. You can ask questions, and the answers may sound interesting, but usually they don’t help. I have a post about this, called “A non-statement ain’t-framework.” It explains why you can’t explain dzogchen.
What actually happens is: if you meditate in certain ways, quite a lot, eventually you start to see it. And then, at that point, the two sentence explanation can suddenly make sense.
So you could try to sell this secret, but it’s useless, and people would feel like they didn’t get their money’s worth. And anyway, it’s on the internet!
In Tibet, secrecy mostly didn’t solve the economic problem either. So the way they addressed it was to add more things to dzogchen which you can sell. Two of them are methods and entertainment.
You can sell methods, but dzogchen has no methods
You can sell a method for getting to enlightenment. In Tibet, tantra is considered the main method for getting to enlightenment. So you can sell tantra. Tantra has many complicated methods, and it takes a lot of in-person instruction to learn those methods, and you can charge for the expertise and labor of teaching them. So that works for tantra.
(I should say that in Buddhism, as in Christianity, it’s mostly considered gauche to put a straightforward price tag on religious services. So instead there are implicit norms and deniable negotiations. I can see good reasons for this, but on the whole I find transparent arrangements more copacetic.)
There’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris.
Anyway, this doesn’t work for dzogchen, because it doesn’t have any instructions. Because it’s not a path. It’s not a method. There is no method. It’s just a description, of enlightenment. Once you’re enlightened, you don’t need a method. “Dzogchen,” in Tibetan, means “full completion.” It’s what you get when you’ve completed tantra. You don’t need any instructions at that point. It’s like: there’s no point asking ChatGPT how to get to Paris if you’re in Paris.
So, to make dzogchen saleable, a whole lot of methods got added to it, which (in my view) violate the spirit of the thing, and are actually a step backward. The methods are kind of dzogchen-flavored, but they’re essentially tantric methods. And tantric methods are great. I love tantra! But it’s not dzogchen. And it’s missing the point.
Student: How do I get enlightened?
Teacher: You already are.
Student: No I’m not.
Teacher: . . .
Student: Everybody is doing these way-out esoteric mystic things and getting enlightened. Tell me how to do that!
Teacher: [sighs] OK, first you need to stand on your head…
You can sell entertainment, but dzogchen isn’t entertaining
Another thing you can sell is entertainment. Most people in Medieval Tibet didn’t have internet access, so there wasn’t enough entertainment to go around, and that created demand for something better than watching yaks chew their cud. So rituals, which had been genuinely religious, were recycled as entertainment. Those became the main form of public spectacle in Tibet. And lots of extra foofaraw was added to these religious rituals, to make them more entertaining. Primarily, this was done with tantra; but once you’ve started adding methods to dzogchen, you can do the same thing, so you can have big public dzogchen rituals.
That is actually a contradiction in terms, again in my view. If pristine dzogchen could be said to have any rituals at all, they take about two seconds, and are improvised one-on-one on the spot. But that’s not something you can charge for.
And because dzogchen had the reputation of being the fanciest kind of Buddhism, the idea was it must have super-duper rituals. So a dzogchen ritual was something very special that you would pay a lot of money to go and see, and it would be highly entertaining; or you’d hope it would be. That subsidized the actual work of dzogchen professionals, so maybe it was a good thing. But it’s dishonest.
Dzogchen is still available, despite its unsellability
So, where does this leave us, here and now?
It leaves us with the main forms of “dzogchen,” the ones widely taught and practiced, being diluted, adulterated with tantra. Maybe you could even say corrupted. And that’s fine, if you understand that’s what you are getting. They are probably great for what they are! I don’t know, I haven’t tried them seriously. Tantra is great, and tantra that’s pretending to be dzogchen is probably extra good! It’s just, there’s a conceptual confusion here, and it’s a motivated confusion, and this results in a lot of incoherent explanations, and duplicity, maybe even a kind of sleaziness in the relationship between teachers and students.
I said that the unsellability of dzogchen was nearly fatal. But fortunately, the original, pristine thing is still available. In fact, it’s much more available than it ever was in Tibet, or at least than it had been in hundreds of years, because there’s no longer any attempt at secrecy. But if you want it, you need to know what you are looking for.
And you aren’t going to get it on its own—unless for some reason you can understand the two-sentence explanation when you find it on the internet. No one can sell it to you, so it only comes as part of a package deal.
You can get full-strength, unadulterated dzogchen from someone who mostly teaches tantra, yet maintains a clear distinction between the two. You can get it from someone very holy, with a gold-embroidered hat, who drops the two sentences in the middle of a days-long lecture series on archaic Tibetan metaphysics. You can get pristine dzogchen from a professor in a Western university classroom, who gives you the straight dope in an off-hand way while lecturing on Buddhist history. You can get it from an informal meditation teacher. That’s probably the best bet!
So you might suppose that rigpa is the special state in which you don’t do that. But this is actually wrong. Samsara is also nirvana. It too is enlightenment. It is also rigpa.
The thing is, rigpa is always present. It’s not something you produce. Rigpa is not something you produce, because it’s always already there. It’s something you notice. Or don’t notice.
Dzogchen is not like tantra. It has no methods for getting to enlightenment. From dzogchen’s point of view, tantra’s attempts to produce enlightenment are impossible and absurd. It’s like trying to get to Paris from Notre-Dame Cathedral. You’re already there! You are right at the center of it! Just look, and you’ll see Paris all around you! Everything you can see is more Paris!
Rigpa’s present, regardless of what state you are in. Samsara is nirvana, because rigpa is there, even when you’re samsara-ing. You, personally—you—are fully enlightened, right now.
Maybe it doesn’t seem like that?
An alternative term, that’s considered more or less equivalent in Tibetan Buddhism, is tamalgyi shepa, which literally means “ordinary mind.” So, rigpa is ordinary mind, which is the ultimate goal of dzogchen, which claims to be the ultimate form of Buddhist practice.
Tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment …
In my experience, tax preparation seems the exact opposite of enlightenment. It’s certainly the exact opposite of meditation! A typical basic meditation instruction is: whenever you notice that you are thinking, let go of it, and return to open awareness. My recipe for efficient tax preparation is: whenever I notice I am aware, squash that, and return to Schedule 8849 line 2 column h, trying to force it, by narrowing my thinking, to equal Form 1099-B Box A.
This is miserable. It’s probably a better example of samsara than the dramatic torture scenarios you can read about in scripture. At least there’s energy in those!
But rigpa is there, just the same. Or so I am told! I don’t recommend my anti-meditation recipe as a religious practice. It’s better if you can meditate while doing your taxes. I can’t!
When you stop samara-ing, it’s easier to notice rigpa. The samsara is a bit of a smokescreen.
There’s particular circumstances in which it’s difficult to samsarize. They are ones in which rigpa might become obvious. Sacred texts have a standard list, which includes things like sneezing, orgasm, dreaming, dying, fainting, stubbing your toe with a sudden pain.
In each of these experiences, it is more difficult to do samsara, so you may have a recognition of rigpa. It could become obvious. It’s difficult to think. Thinking is totally compatible with rigpa, but it tends to obscure it. Each of these experiences might also be considered an altered state of consciousness. That’s not the rigpa, but altered states make it easier to notice. Remember, though, that rigpa is ordinary mind; it’s the same when you are coming and when you are doing your taxes.
Unfortunately, each of the things on the standard list has some difficulty that make it not particularly easy to find rigpa there. Easier than when doing taxes, but not easy. Sneezing, for example, is extraordinary. There’s a moment when you know you are going to sneeze, and there’s a unique, overwhelming itchy tickling feeling that pervades your physical body, subtle energy channels, and mind, and you can’t think, and rigpa is right there—and the whole thing lasts only a fraction of a second, and then you immediately lose it.
Similarly, fainting, orgasm, and sudden sharp pains may last only a little longer. Tantra has esoteric techniques for prolonging these. That’s one of the points of sexual tantra. If you prolong and intensify orgasm, there’s more likelihood that you will notice, in the middle of it, “Ah! there’s rigpa here.” This may be difficult to arrange, though. Pain might be easier, but it’s difficult to have intense enough pain for long enough without injuring yourself. There are esoteric methods for that too, but generally people would rather have an hour-long orgasm than an hour-long torture session.
The problem with dreaming and dying is that they make you stupid. You get caught up in some compelling, illusory drama which distracts you from your intention to recognize rigpa. Again, there are esoteric techniques, but they are difficult.
Dying is supposed to be the best and most important opportunity for recognizing rigpa. That’s what the so-called “Tibetan Book of the Dead” is about. Unfortunately, though, you don’t die very often, so you don’t get a lot of practice.
People in hell don’t realize how lucky they are
The exception is if you’re in hell. According to Buddhist metaphysics, after you die, which realm you get reborn in depends on your emotional state. If you are angry, you get reborn in hell. Some of the Buddhist hells—there are several Buddhist hells—some of them are so lethal that you die almost immediately after rebirth. So you are born in hell, and get sliced to bits by whirling knife blades, or crispy-fried in boiling oil, and you die two seconds later. If that makes you mad, you get sent straight back.
So being in hell is actually a great opportunity for dzogchen practice, because you’re dying every few seconds. Countless opportunities to recognize rigpa! People in hell don’t notice how lucky they are, because hell is unpleasant. It’s the same problem as with prolonged pain. It makes you stupid, and you forget to practice. Everybody in hell is stupid.
Don’t go to hell. It’s a stupid place.
So tantra is a collection of methods that produce altered states, I guess you could say. The point is not the altered states for their own sake. Well, maybe. As I said, tantric theory says enlightenment is the union of clarity, bliss, and emptiness. Why is that enlightenment? I mean, it’s nice. You don’t suffer, I guess. The point of enlightenment as originally conceived was to stop suffering. And if you’re experiencing clarity, bliss, and emptiness, then you’re not suffering, which is nice for you. Rather like orgasm. It’s kind of difficult to do samsara in these states.
From point of view of dzogchen, the value of the state is that it makes it exceptionally easy to recognize rigpa. I think some people would say it is rigpa, but I’m not necessarily convinced. Rigpa is ordinary mind, remember!
It’s easiest to find rigpa when your mind is clear and sharp, but you are not distracted by thoughts or bad feelings. That’s not necessary; rigpa is there when you are obsessing about the awful thing someone said about you at work, or you’re short on sleep and your brain feels full of glue. But it helps.
Meditation helps notice rigpa
So there are particular types of meditation that tend to produce that clear, undistracted state of mind. It’s pretty ordinary. You probably wouldn’t call it an “altered state of consciousness”; it’s not like taking drugs.
However, “clear and undistracted by bad feelings or thoughts” is pretty much the same as “clarity, bliss, and emptiness!” Except you haven’t turned the volume up to eleven. That makes it safer and easier than esoteric tantric methods. Or drugs. It might be slower; tantra is fast but dangerous. Supposedly fast, and supposedly dangerous! I think both are often exaggerated.
“Meditation” is not all one thing. Most types of meditation aren’t about this. They don’t aim for it, and probably won’t help.
You will probably need many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours of practice of the type that does—and it’s still easy to miss the point. It helps to have someone checking your progress, and redirecting you if you get a bit off course.
You need to know what you are trying to notice, and until you’ve seen that a few times, you don’t notice it, even though it’s right there all the time. Even right now! As you are listening to this! It’s rigpa!
Charlie and I are scheming up anew collaborative project for 2026. It’s not about Vajrayana Buddhism. It’s based in several other topics we’re both excited about—like personal development, pro-social entrepreneurship, and cultural upgrades through nobility. We are aiming to provide better ways to learn and engage inmeta-systematic practice.
We’re in early planning stages, and would love to hear what excites you! We’re happy to discuss, or answer questions about, any of the subjects we write or speak about. If you post preferred topics, questions, or reflections here, it’ll help us know what to concentrate on in the session, and we’ll make sure to cover as many as possible.
Transcript
[“AI” generated, lightly proofread, may contain egregious errors]
David Chapman: This is a Q&A, so primarily it’s an opportunity for participants to ask questions, and that can lead to discussion. I can answer some questions, but that’s not exactly the point here.
When there’s a break in the flow of questions, or if nobody can think of anything, then I can talk about what I’m doing at the moment, which is writing about sacredness without metaphysics. Sacredness as an interactive, situated, in-the-moment activity or perception, rather than some kind of abstract thing involving a lot of conceptual stuff. So that could be a topic if nobody has questions, but I’m hoping that everybody has brought some burning question that we can all discuss.
Chris, you’re grinning like you might have one.
Chris: Well, I wouldn’t say I came with a specific question in mind. I mostly, I haven’t come to an eG meeting besides the weekly sits in a while, but something on my mind right now, it’s kind of a general topic. So I’m related to eG, I’m in a local Shingon group with a teacher, and also I was born a Christian, and the difference in terms of community, locally speaking, where I am at least, but I think in a lot of Western places period, is there’s a real Christian community; and connections, and the impacts of that, that have at least trickled down from that religion, and then the associated practices and communities. And I’m curious about, as Buddhism moves into the West, it feels like the practices, the technologies are one thing, but then there’s this whole thing that I think, at least partly, we’re working on here.
But I’m just curious about, as a Western practitioner born into a Christian tradition, who’s primarily practicing Buddhist traditions for the past 15 years or so, is there a happy meeting place for those two traditions, and what might that look like, and how do I not get burned at the stake?
David Chapman: It sounds like there’s two questions there, maybe one is some kind of happy union or coexistence of Buddhism and Christianity possible, and the other is one about the nature of local in-person community.
Regarding the second, I think it’s something that Buddhism in America has been spotty about. There are groups that are quite like a Christian congregation in the degree of closeness and mutual support. That’s relatively uncommon, and I think that’s something of a weakness. Buddhism in the West has been presented as individualistic, in a way that it is not in Asia. That’s a Westerly distortion or invention, and probably serves important needs for some people who don’t want the social aspect of religion. And maybe that’s what makes Buddhism attractive for a lot of Americans, but it also can be a big lack.
I wasn’t raised Christian and have never been part of a Christian congregation. I can’t speak to that part. Maybe someone else here could.
I’m looking at Max.
Max Soweski: I don’t know. I mean, I was thinking about this recently because I did grow up Roman Catholic, and I was the most serious little Catholic boy you would have ever met. I was very, very devoted in a way that probably came off as kind of annoying to a lot of people.
The thing that I was reflecting on recently is that in the Catholic community that I grew up in, there was a sense of community, sometimes of people coming together, but it did not often feel very sacred. It did not often feel very much connected to our practice, which was to bring us closer to God, at least ostensibly. And it really was not until eG that I found a community of people where it was possible, in group settings, to have that connection to sacredness and to do that together.
And so I’m not quite sure what to do with these two things, or even how much this pertains to your interest, Chris. Basically, we would do like potlucks and get like the kids together for Sunday school and stuff like that. But there wasn’t a whole lot of ecstatic union with God happening in group settings.
David Chapman: And do you experience… I mean, that ecstatic union with God is, I guess that’s yidam practice for us. Do you experience something in eG that is that combination and what’s that like?
Max Soweski: I do. I mean, I think that the yidam practice, specifically the Gesar sadhana that you created, David, is a good example of in a group setting. So just a bunch of people coming together in a room, doing the sadhana together.
What it’s like is very intense, very connective. I had the sense of really being connected to the people that were practicing this with me, both in terms of like, we’re all bringing something into being together. There was that sense.
There was a sense that we were participating in something that was naturally available together. All those things that I just mentioned were notably absent from my upbringing in Roman Catholicism. I mean, again, ostensibly that’s what all of it’s about. All of these teachings, all of this catechism, all of these rule sets are meant to systematize that contact.
And yet it seemed totally absent as I was growing up. And it seems very present in eG to me.
David Chapman: I’m completely foreign to Christianity, but I find the descriptions I’ve read of charismatic practice, of Pentecostalism, any other denominations of that sort, seem intriguingly similar. And it’s interesting how kind of low status that is considered by middle-class, upper-middle-class American Christians. It’s like embarrassing and ignorant and somehow.
Max Soweski: Last thing I’ll say about Roman Catholicism. That is exactly the sense that I had growing up in Roman Catholicism is that it was somewhat embarrassing to be too enthusiastic about your spirituality, even at church or even like in discussions with other religious people, which to me seems like just a total bug, actually. I don’t find that that’s a very good thing.
David Chapman: Stephanie, you have your hand up?
Stephanie Droop: It’s very different in the UK. At least some people I know. So I come from that kind of born again charismatic Christian family that you mentioned.
And my parents and two of my brothers still go to church. And I’m always quite admiring and envious of the community they have. They have such a strong, big, like—all ages, cool young people, fashionable people, and they’re all really professional and middle class and successful people.
So I haven’t been to a church service for a very long time, but theylove it. They have their kind of ecstatic union stuff, but then they also then go and have a fire pit on the beach and a barbecue and pray there. And they’re all kind of very touchy-feely with each other.
They really help each other out for everything. They move each other’s houses and look after kids and stuff. And they just love each other’s company. They do all their fun hobby stuff together. They have whiskey appreciation, they get drunk, they brew beer, they’re always outside. They’re always having fires and they’re doing all the stuff, the same stuff that any other normal fun person does.
And they’re always touching each other, hugging each other, and they’re just a really nice bunch of people. Like there’s no drama, agro. They just seem to love life and appreciate life and be really doing it quite well.
And like attending to the whole question of building community in a very wise and skillful and kind of interesting way. It’s just that there’s Christianity underneath it all, which is a little bit, you know. So, it’s definitely not that they’re kind of ashamed of it. I even think it’s a little bit, a tiny bit class based; but the other way from what you were saying, that it is only middle-class people and educated people. And if ever anyone working class joins the church, I’ve kind of sometimes worried a little bit that, that they were a little bit hoodwinked into it by thinking, “Oh, if I joined this church and follow these people, maybe I’ll get a nice house.”
But the leadership class of the church are aware of that, and they try to diffuse it, and try to make sure that doesn’t happen, because we’ve talked about that. I mentioned that, and they agreed and said it was a problem, and that they had to be aware of it and stuff. So they’re very warm, empathetic and open people in general.
Chris: Yeah. I suppose that kind of everything people have said kind of clarifies my question back to Vajrayana. Is there an element of, not necessarily elitism, but, kind of a more fine filter, that maybe will—in terms of the West not having this foundation of? You could say like folk Buddhism, that, in terms of that experience, that very nice experience I would say, Stephanie, you’re discussing in terms of community. Is there something about the filter of Vajrayana, or even just Buddhism, that maybe naturally leads to social forms in the West that are just going to be the way they are now?
David Chapman: I think the social forms of Buddhism in America, I can’t speak for the rest of the West, are quite varied. And that’s partly dependent on which flavor of Buddhism, but it’s also, I think, just a matter of the particular social group the Sangha.
There is a kind of elitist intellectual strain in American Vajrayana, which does go back to Tibet.
But there’s also Ngak’chang Rinpoche, who was my teacher and Charlie’s for a long time, he really emphasized that this is not about class. He considered himself to be working class. He very actively encouraged working class people to be involved, and also encouraged the kind of close-knit community that we’ve been talking about. I think that worked sometimes and failed other times, and that has a lot to do with the particular individuals involved, probably more than anything doctrinal.
I know many of us are involved in creating local community for eG. Yetsal is very much creating local community in the Boulder-Denver area, Ari in the Bay area, others elsewhere. Maybe that’s a bit of a work in progress, but my impression is that it’s quite highly functional for some people here.
Chris, where are you physically? I don’t know.
Chris: I’m in Vermont and, and I might say very lucky to have access to a Shingon teacher. Just total luck, I suppose.
David Chapman: So is there a community around that teacher or is it more individual?
Chris: So, Jim Sensei is the teacher here. He is the senior North American student of Ajari Tanaka, and Hokai Sobol is a senior student in Europe. So it is Mandala. People are from all over, there’s people in Canada, people spread out over North America, who are a member of Mandala Vermont. But more people local in Vermont, at least that I have engaged with. People are moving to Japan, or living in Japan, and you can go on pilgrimage in Japan.
And so it’s three continents, I suppose not bad, but it’s a pretty small, tight knit group from what I understand so far. I’ve only been a member for about a year or so.
David Chapman: I’m writing about sacredness without metaphysics, as an immediate interactive experience. Jared and I were talking just before we started this session. There is a super moon currently, a full moon where the moon is at its closest to the earth and it’s exceptionally large and bright.
It was full a couple of nights ago. Charlie and I went for dinner and a drink to our favorite brewpub. And when we got there, the moon was just above the horizon, which makes it look much bigger than it normally does. And it just kind of was like, and, and we both got out of the car and just stood and stared at it for a couple of minutes, because it was, well, an experience of the sacred.
And something I find really interesting is cross-culturally, there are certain things that are pretty reliably regarded as sacred. There’s the sky, there’s things that appear in the sky, like the moon and the sun. Mountains are very often regarded as sacred; big odd rocks; trees, particularly old, unusual looking trees.
I think, even for people who would never say that they regard trees as sacred, it’s easy to see which trees somebody else might regard as sacred.
So I’ve got a couple of pictures here. [Shows them.] This is an absolutely beautiful, huge tree. And this is another huge tree, which is kind of ugly actually. I think one of these is obviously sacred and the other one is obviously not.
I think it’s this one that is sacred. And there’s a crowd of people. This is a tourist attraction somewhere on the East coast. And people come and look at it and, and they say, “This is mesmerizing, it’s spooky.” And many of them are probably good Christians, and the idea of trees being sacred might be anathema to them, but they respond to that. And so there’s a sense in which sacredness is not subjective and it’s something that we see and do spontaneously.
There’s another example I found. So this is from a blog post. I’ll stick it in the chat.
Just about every hill on West Ardnamurchan [apparently somewhere in Scotland] has some sort of cairn at its summit. This one is on Creag an Airgid, the Silver Crag. When we come across one, each of us dutifully adds a new stone, but without really thinking about why we do it, other than that perhaps it will bring us good luck. So sometimes we add an extra one and think of someone in hope that it’ll bring them good luck too.
I think I’ve got a picture of this cairn. Mountains are regularly experienced as sacred, and the cairns on them are experienced as sacred.
It’s just a very natural thing to do when you get to the top of a mountain to put an extra stone on. I think people do that without thinking about it, but it’s meaningful in some way. So I think another, another thing that’s natural to do, but that is embarrassing,
Throwing pennies into fountains!
You can bless things. You don’t have to have any special qualification to bless things. You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a funny hat. You can just go around blessing things.
You go to a place and it occurs to you, you just think, “I bless this place.” You could say it out loud. You could think about what that means, what you hope for it, but in a conceptual way, just kind of vision of uplift. And this is a natural sacred activity, that I think people do without thinking about it. But if you did think “this isn’t something I’m supposed to be doing,” why not?
I wonder if any of this, I wonder if any of this resonates and what experiences you’ve had that it might bring to mind.
Vinod Khare: Yeah. It’s interesting because I’m reading, uh, this book called, uh, How God Becomes Real.
David Chapman: Yes! I was reading that while writing this.
Vinod Khare: Okay. What comes to mind is that there is a counterpoint to what you’re saying. So I can see what you’re saying that there are certain places, things, activities that kind of have this spontaneous feeling of sacredness. But what comes to mind is that we can also make things sacred.
So if I look at Hinduism in India, for example, both of these ideas exist. There are places, shrine cities, that are considered to be sacred and they are kind of special. You get something there that you don’t get elsewhere, but at the same time, you can go to a village and there’ll be a completely ordinary tree. And the women in the village are performing rituals with that tree. So it’s sacred for them. Right.
And it has been made sacred by the performance of this ritual, perhaps over generations. So that’s something that I see in my own life as well, in terms of practice, that you can experience something as spontaneously sacred, or you can deliberately go and make something sacred.
Like one practice I did in my Zen days was just making the mundane ordinary, right? Zen people love to like wash dishes mindfully, do the laundry mindfully. And so that was a deliberate practice of evoking sacredness in everyday activity.
And sacredness can go away. That was another thing that came up, a lot of what I see in India, for example, just because of the crowds and the bad maintenance of the shrine, for example, a lot of places have lost their sacredness, right? So that can, that’s another aspect.
David Chapman: Jan, you have your hand up?
Jan: Yeah, I, this resonates a lot. In a way, there’s both, as you were saying, David, this sense in which some things are objectively, interculturally sacred. And then also like the Vinod, what you were saying reminded me of the story of the Buddha’s canine tooth. You can also make random anything sacred, through repetition and practice.
What came to me was this image of, you can pour holy water over anything, but if you pour it in a bowl, it’ll stick around more easily than just on the street.
Yetsal: I feel like because of all my practices that I have found sacredness in things that I didn’t even expect to be sacred. I think that’s because there’s a lot more awareness and appreciation for very simple things. But they have this sacredness to them, then they get, yeah. I’ve noticed that happened a lot with practice.
David Chapman: In this piece I’m writing, I’m emphasizing the possibility of finding sacredness, for people who, I’m sort of writing for STEM rationalists, who have rejected the concept because it doesn’t objectively exist. And for them, the idea that it is possible to find sacredness at all might be revelatory, if it’s presented in a way that strips off the metaphysics that usually goes with it.
For practitioners, it’s explicit in Buddhist Tantra that one aims to perceive everything and to interact with everything as sacred. And perhaps that is also the Zen approach that Vinod was speaking of, I don’t know.
I was thinking about this in relationship with the distinction between Tantra and Dzogchen. In Tantra, because it’s kind of artificial, it’s method-based, it’s making things happen, so you can ritually cause something to be sacred; and that’s tremendously valuable. And you’re trying to get to the point where everything appears sacred through effort and method and repetition and so on.
Whereas in Dzogchen, things appear as sacred or they don’t appear as sacred, and whether or not they’re sacred isn’t particularly clear, and all of that’s just fine, so you don’t need to be cranking it up in the way that that happens in Tantra. So you’re allowing sacredness, and then you’re allowing it to draw you in, and you see the cairn, and this can be non-conceptual or it could be conceptual; but you do the ritual action of putting the stone on the cairn just because that’s what spontaneously arises as the affordance of the situation.
Max?
Max: This particular distinction is what’s really interesting to me, the distinction between naturally available sacredness and finding that spontaneously, versus this ritualistic enactment of sacredness.
So to bring this stream back to the Max as a young Roman Catholic stream from before, I have this memory of being, I don’t know, like six or something like that. And I had this little container that is intended to hold holy water, for Catholics. I can’t remember what it’s called. I’m sure there’s some Latin name for it because it’s Catholicism.
And I had this container, and I think it was empty, and I filled it up with water from my garden hose. And it felt like since the container had held holy water, it followed that some of that sacredness would be left over, and could be amplified into the new water that I added. And I went around and I blessed all of these sapling trees that were in my yard. We were trying to grow some new trees or something.
And I was always trying to do stuff like that as a kid. Like I really desperately wanted to enact sacredness. And most of the time it didn’t work. I really have this memory of the supreme disappointment of trying to call forth sacredness and it not working.
And, contrast that with… I was traveling for work a couple of weeks ago, and I was in the airplane, and air travel is a thing that a lot of people find really difficult. I found it difficult in the past, but it’s like this amazing thing.
You’re, you’re soaring through the sky. You’re actually in the sky as a human being. It is amazing to do that.
And you’re all lined up in rows with people like in pews in church, you can see the backs of people’s heads lined up in front of you all the way through the fuselage. And, I just remember I was looking out the window, it was towards sunset. We were above a cloud layer and the colors of the sun as it was setting on the clouds, the shape of the clouds, just had this inviting quality to it.
And as I just relaxed my gaze and looked at the clouds, it was like they started to run like rivers, like parallel rivers. Um, very hard to describe this, just this non-ordinary motion. And that sense just sort of lit up the entire experience of being in this plane, and the shape of the back of people’s heads just took on this tenderness to it that I felt.
And it was like the whole plane was just beatified, including the lady crammed in next to me with the leaky nose, who was constantly coughing and sniffling and stuff like that. I mean, that would have just been a terrible experience for me just a few years ago; but I found natural sacred. Sacredness was just readily available there.
David Chapman: Yeah, that was wonderful. I was near tears. For the benefit of anybody who’s watching a recording of this, everybody’s got that little heart icon lit up.
I’ve always found flying to be astonishing, and I’m always amazed that people, I mean, it can be a grind, but astonished that people don’t find it astonishing.
I’m reminded of a time when I was flying from Britain to San Francisco. When you do that, you’re going practically over the North pole. And it was late at night, and there was this astonishing display of aurora. I’ve never seen anything like it.
And I was looking out the window at the aurora borealis and looking around the airplane as well. And essentially nobody else was.
And it’s like, this is something I’ve only ever seen once in my life. It is unbelievably beautiful and not like anything else.
And a sense of something having gone wrong. Although I don’t want to condemn the people who were not looking out the window. Maybe they looked out and said, “Oh yeah, that’s pretty.” And then, you know, went back to whatever they were doing. And that’s very understandable.
You know, in the same way you can look at a rock or tree that somebody finds sacred and say, “Well, yeah, I can kind of see that.” But so what?
James?
James Matthews: Um, strikes me that a lot of the descriptions of sacredness could overlap with a lot of descriptions of what people would describe as “awe.” Would you be willing to compare and contrast in your view between sacredness and awe, David?
David Chapman: Yeah. So, there’s a series of things that are, that could be confused with sacredness. I’ve got a little list.
There’s the sacred, there’s metaphysical, supernatural, mythic, religious, spiritual, sublime (in the technical aesthetic sense, which we’ll come back to). And there’s the good, which includes ethically or morally good. All of those are separable.
You could have any one of those without any of the others, or any combination of them, but they tend to all get glommed together.
There’s a very famous book on the sacred by Rudolf Otto, which is— it’s translated in different ways. The title basically is The Sacred, and it’s very influential. He defined the experience of the sacred as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which means a terrifying and fascinating mystery. And those are two aspects of the sacred, in his very influential theory.
Um, Jared adds: “I like Paul Tillich’s framing for sacred, which is “that which is of ultimate concern to you.” One of the things I write about in this post is that the sacred is where we find big purposes. And I didn’t know that quote from Tillich.
So, awe is something that tends to go with sacredness. The two experiences often come together, but they’re not necessarily the same. So for example, watching a rocket launch, which I’ve never done, but would kind of like to. The Space-X rockets nowadays are really, really big. And, the flames and so on when they’re taking off, and these descriptions I’ve read of people’s experience of watching that is one of overwhelming awe. But I think not very many people would describe that as sacred.
So they’re not the same thing. There also can be experiences of the sacred, which are just comfortable and they’re not awesome. I’m thinking of some places in the mountains where there’s a rock formation that just feels really welcoming and friendly. You sit there and you feel like everything is okay. And there’s a sacredness about that, as a kind of a stillness and a warm, uplifted stillness that has a sacred quality. So the awe and the sacred are often go together, but they are separable.
James, you have something to follow on about your question?
James Matthews: No, I guess as potentially part of the target audience for your upcoming article or post on sacredness: I have somewhat of an aversion to the term. But I’ve felt in awe of things, right?
Like that’s, that’s not something that I really have a choice over in a lot of instances. So it feels like there’s the potential there for that to be kind of an in, to accepting that things could be sacred. Yeah.
David Chapman: Yeah. I think that seems just right to me. That would be a place to start.
Jared: David, I like your saying awe being a result. And I was trying to think of, “Ooh, what is another result?” There’s this preciousness, where it’s not like, but it’s like, Oh, you know, like this really, uh, prized non-explosive, but like gentle holding, that as a reaction to sacred, that kind of feels like it’s maybe the two are on some sort of spectrum.
Very gentle and definitely not awe, but still a common result I have from sacred experience.
David Chapman: In the chat, Max says, “I was looking at my sleeping wife one night last month, touched the top of her head and had the sense that if the purpose of my entire life was only to experience what this is like, that would be excellent. Not awesome, but sacred still.”
I have certainly had that experience.
And Stephanie says, “I’ve felt awe without sacredness, usually for some extreme manifestation of stupidity or evil or single-minded devotion to something ridiculous.”
I mean the extreme evil, this thing may tie in with the tremendum aspect of the sacred, of the terrifying. I have a page on black magic. This is on Buddhism for Vampires. Black magic, I think people get into it because they want to reach the sacred, but they are rejecting a lot of the stuff that goes with that typically, but they still can feel the pull, the fascinans pull of the sacred, and black magic is a degraded attempt to get at the sacred through taboo. And this is an aspect of Vajrayana. There are Vajrayana practices where we do that in order to approach the sacred in this sort of left-hand way.
Taha, I think you’re next.
Taha: I noticed that when you went through your little list, as you were talking about the awe and the sacred and stuff, we didn’t talk about beauty. That seems like a big door to, for example, talk about beauty in mathematics, like when you have like symmetry between stuff. I’m curious, what do you think about that?
David Chapman: Yeah, I think often it is part of it. In aesthetic theory, there’s a distinction made between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime is an aesthetic reaction to something that is overwhelming and somewhat horrifying. There’s a lot of art of various sorts where that’s the principle, so it’s not beautiful exactly as such. So maybe this relates to this sense we had earlier of there’s awe, but there’s also comfortable sorts of sacredness. And the comfortable sort might very often go with a sense of beauty.
I’ve certainly experienced mathematics as sacred also, and awesome. There’s moments when you get a mathematical proof, and the experience of it is like descriptions of people’s enlightenment experiences. And there’s actually this sense of brilliant white light and choirs of angels. It’s not literal, but that’s what it feels like.
Apostol: For me also sacredness has this strong heart, heart element, like you sense something, you see something, you experience something sacred and it hits you in the heart in a almost rapturous way. Lately I’ve been feeling it when I’ve been doing the small rituals of mine, connecting with the land spirits around here. And there is something about that, about connecting with something bigger, something “beyond”—the whole devotional thing, right?
David Chapman: Um, I’m wondering if this resonates with other people’s experience. I would love to hear sort of specific anecdotes or in personal stories of if this brings something to mind.
Before I got into Vajrayana Buddhism, I was a, a Neopagan Wiccan, and we did that kind of ritual of connecting with land and air. And so I have a sense of that.
Apostol: I’m pretty sure in Vajrayana, there’s also like these kinds of practices with connecting with land spirits quite a lot, actually. They’re smoke rituals, fire rituals.
David Chapman: The Gesar material, which we’ve started exploring in eG, has a lot of that. It’s a lot about connecting with land spirits.
Apostol: I have one specific example, which was kind of before I got too devotional. It’s a little bit weird and funny.
In my first retreat, it was online, I was doing it here. I was doing Green Tara mantra, and I was also doing a lot of metta practices. “May you be happy. May you be healthy.”
People would share how they’re preparing to get into a psychedelic ceremony. And I would spontaneously feel like I want to bless them. And I started like saying, “May your ceremony be well, may you be protected, may you be…” Just similar to the phrases that I was doing on the retreat.
And that was very well received and valued in that community. Someone has something important that’s going on, that’s somewhat risky, and you’re blessing it in order for it to turn out well, I guess. That’s the purpose of blessing for them to be well.
David Chapman: I have an example of a connection with the sacred in a ritual context. It’s not a Buddhist one, it was in my neopagan days. It was very intense. I remember it very clearly. It was at a large pagan gathering.
There was a ritual after dark. There was a huge bonfire. We were all seated around the bonfire. And the way that the neopagan rituals start is by calling the quarters, which means invoking with the spirits of the four directions. This is invoking the local spirits.
And when it came around to the last of the quarters, there was a pond next to the site where this bonfire was. And when the quarter was called, it was twilight. It was actually dark, but we could see from the bonfire this enormous shape emerging out of the pond.
And it was sort of black and it was terrifying, but also fascinating. It was like, what was happening here?! Because this was reality, and there really was this thing coming out of the pond.
There was a humanoid figure, and it lurched toward us, and then began speaking.
And so, this book is kind of a founding text of Wiccan neopaganism. Certainly at the time that I was doing it. By Margo Adler, it’s called Drawing Down the Moon. The moon being one of the things that we just described earlier as being obviously sacred. It’s got a naked witch on the cover because that sells things.
So it became apparent that this enormous shape that had emerged out of the pond, like, how could anything come out of this pond? Everything was—there was nothing in the pond.
The enormous shape that emerged out of the pond was Margo Adler. She had been, she went into the pond, she had been underwater throughout the beginning of this ceremony, breathing through a snorkel, and then emerged at this time.
And it was unbelievably and dramatic because it was obviously impossible. And, you know, she was enormous, I mean, a very large woman. So that was one of the most memorable nights of my life. I mean, that was just the beginning and it went on after that.
We’re officially at an hour. I guess that means we’re supposed to stop recording. The good stuff always happens after the recording ends. You know, anybody who’s watching this recording, you need to know that the good stuff in eG meetings happens after the end of the recording.
Jared: I had a complaint about that one time. I apparently did a really bad cliffhanger. I was like, “Ooh, that’s a really good question; let’s stop the recording.”
Before we go off recording, I did want to say something because I was just reflecting recently back to Chris’s original question. And I’m feeling this connection between sacredness and the universality versus the specificity and how different traditions have a very deliberate way of constructing or revealing or creating sacredness.
I realized that the thing that I’m interested in the most is creating methods that are open enough for them to be entertained by anybody who’s coming from their own religious background. I think the tragedy of method for discovering or creating sacredness is that it can make it unaccessible to others because of metaphysical or spiritual commitments or something like that. And that feels really sad to me.
And to Max’s point, and David talking about sacred from the perspective of Dzogchen, I think the punchline there is everything has potential for sacredness. And if you’re genuinely open to that emerging at any moment, it could come up and surprise you at any moment. And that’s the most miraculous type of sacredness that I like.
So I have a bias for that a little bit. Charlie and I actually were just recently talking about creating some more methods for in-person groups to step into. And as we were talking here, I was realizing I would want those methods to do was be completely accessible to anybody, whether they’re a Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or a rationalist or whatever you want to call it.
So yeah, I don’t know. That’s some thoughts, Chris, of connecting all the dots here. And maybe now we’ll go off recording.
Then you don’t have to wring your hands about the supposed Problem of Suffering. Suffering is not a Great Evil, it’s just a thing that happens. So it is actually possible to enjoy everything.
There also is nothing fundamentally wrong with you. You are not impure, stained by original sin, inadequate, or rotten at the core. You are just fine—just as you are.
Kadag is not a Pollyanna-ish attitude. There are many things we don’t like and want to change. And that is good! Let’s do it!
Street Preacher
The frame-story for the “Dzogchen Street Preacher” series is a personal alter-ego in which I’m that.
Dzogchen teaching is usually overburdened with Tibetan religious decorum and status-hierarchy nonsense, so it’s tiresome and intellectual and reaches nearly no one.
The idea that I could stand on a street corner and rant at passers-by about Dzogchen is entertainingly ridiculous. But it might also be effective, and therefore important? I admire people who have the courage and charisma to do this:
Although I have reservations about both his message and some aspects of his delivery!
While I was recording this, some homeless people politely asked what I was doing, and kindly offered to move the garbage bags full of their possessions out of the way. I explained, and politely declined. It adds to the atmosphere of primordial purity, I think, although I didn’t say that.
I didn’t preach at them, because that would have been rude. I think.
Western Buddhism
My former Buddhist teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, loves the culture of the cowboy-era American West. There’s layers of meaning in that, and how it relates to Vajrayana. One aspect, though, is a pun.
“Western Buddhism” is often what Consensus Buddhism called itself. There was a consensus that “Western Buddhism” was becoming a thing, and that it was the right thing; and yet a lot of wrangling in Consensus Buddhist publications about what it was, and what it should be. That was all quite silly and quite distasteful; but now it’s all ancient history, and no one cares anymore.
But—what would “Western Buddhism” mean, if it was a thing? Obviously, Western Buddhists should dress like this:
That’s from a Vajrayana Buddhist retreat on a horse ranch in Montana in 2004. We all dressed as Western Buddhists, and rode horses up into the mountains, and shot single-action 1880s-style revolvers at paper targets, and had wrathful empowerments in the evenings.
It was on this retreat that my now-spouse Charlie Awbery and I got together.
In the picture, that’s me on the left. It’s a Sangha friend on the right, not Charlie. I think Charlie took the picture.
Anyway, that was a daytime Western Buddhist outfit, for riding and shooting. In the evenings, we were more elegant. Specifically, I wore the same outfit that appears in the video.
Ngak’chang Rinpoche was amused by it. It looks like a cowboy-era priest’s get-up. He teased me by calling me “Preacherman”; and I rolled with the joke.
It was ridiculous, of course. Being a priest was as far from my concept of myself as anything possibly could be.
In the last year, I have somehow inadvertently transformed into my most-distant self-possibility: acting as a tantric Buddhist priest, performing the religion’s central ritual role, with gods and miraculous transformations and all that razzmatazz.
Life is very strange. Especially when you are Western Buddhist.
Outtakes
I filmed this on the spur of the moment. I had planned to draft Charlie as camera crew, and also to do a bunch of voice work and practice runs beforehand; but Charlie was at a conference in LA and it was possibly the last day of the year when the weather would cooperate, so I just did it. I did nine takes, but couldn’t check whether any of them were any good, for boring technical reasons, and was afraid they might all be lousy. I’m reasonably happy with how it came out, although I think I could have done better if I’d been able to review the first few takes before continuing.
Anyway, some takes are quite different from others. I thought you might be amused to watch another couple. And maybe you can tell me which of the three you like best!
I wonder if I should substitute one of these for the one I chose to put at the top of this post. What do you think? Which do you prefer?
00:01:05 David summarizes Meaningness (his book): it’s about the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern.
00:05:01 The intellectual lineage of Meaningness is mainly the same as that of Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning. However, David draws on Vajrayana Buddhism where Peterson draws on the Western tradition, particularly Christianity.
00:07:48 Nihilism, as explained by Nietzsche and as in Buddhism, is a key topic for both of us. Psychological lineages: German Romanticism, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Robert Bly.
00:10:54 Jake summarizes Peterson’s project and intellectual lineage. The catastrophes of the twentieth century. Recovering the mythic mode as compatible with rationality. Envisioning positive futures and preventing nihilistic ones.
00:20:59 The history of the gradual collapse of meaning. Tradition, modernity, postmodernity: communal/choiceless, systematic/rational, and postrational/nihilistic modes.
00:32:20 A future that combines the advantages of different historical modes of culture, social organization, and psychology, avoiding their disadvantages. Subdividing the past century: totalitarianism, countercultures, subcultures, atomization. Those abandoned, in order, nobility, universality, rationality, and coherence. We can restore all of those, but not as absolutes.
00:43:32 Jake explains Peterson’s somewhat different take on the same historical periods. Rationalism and modernity as the result of encountering alien cultures.
00:53:02 Jake explains Peterson’s “universal grammar” of myth in the Western tradition: Chaos is the Great Mother, Order is the Great Father, the Divine Son mediates between them. Peterson maps this onto twentieth century history.
00:56:43 David explains how Vajrayana Buddhism’s understanding of emptiness and form is fascinatingly similar to Peterson’s account of chaos and order, and also quite different. This may account for our fundamentally different attitudes, despite sharing much of our intellectual backgrounds. Personifications of chaos in Babylonian and Buddhist mythology: Tiamat and Prajñaparamita are the same goddess, viewed in radically different ways.
01:05:06 Positive and negative aspects of the characters in Peterson’s mythology. The self-sacrifice of Jesus, the Divine Son (a theme we return to later).
01:09:55 Our shared lineage in “4E,” interactionist cognitive science, and our rejection of rationalism. Heidegger, situated activity, Gibson, affordances, rigpa in Dzogchen. The frame problem in AI research, and how David (and others) resolved it in the late 1980s. “You see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning.”
01:23:09 How the Ancient Greeks rejected the mythic mode and invented rationalism, as an eternalistic response to a nihilistic crisis. How Nietzsche finally diagnosed the failure of rationalism, and realized that would lead to another nihilistic crisis. His rejection of the delusion of a supposed True World, more real than the apparent one, in Twilight of the Idols.
01:34:07 Peterson’s account of Christian soteriology, and its justification for social action. Buddhism’s lack of a social vision. Social vision is a form of purpose. Rationalism has no account of purpose. You have to go to myth for that!
01:39:19 The influence of AI planning research on Peterson’s thinking. My debunking of that (with Phil Agre, influenced by Lucy Suchman and Hubert Dreyfus) in the 1980s. Francisco Varela’s reformulation of subplans as micro-identities in micro-worlds.
01:47:28 Self-sacrifice as essential in identifying purpose: in the Western tradition, and in Buddhism.
01:50:56 Demons subjugated at last! Credits roll.
Further reading: books &c. we refer to
In the order we refer to them in the podcast, explicitly or implicitly:
This is inaccurate and actively misleading in places. I wouldn’t recommend reading it. It’s mostly so people can find it in web searches.
On the other hand, it’s often unintentionally hilarious, so there’s that.
[Update, 16 November 2025: Andrew Shade Blevinskindly fed the original “AI” transcript through a script that uses ChatGPT to fix things up. The result may possibly be even more inaccurate, having gone through two rounds of “AI” distortion, but it certainly reads better! So I’ve replaced the original version with his.]
[00:00:00] Jake Orthwein: The occasion of this conversation, much delayed but long anticipated, is just for you and I to get a chance to talk about your work, of which I’ve been an enormous fan for, I don’t know, seven years or whatever it is now. Maybe more.
We’ve decided to frame it as comparing your work to Jordan Peterson’s, both because of Jordan’s significance in the zeitgeist and because he has worked on similar problems, but also because the differences between the two of you are illuminating.
[00:00:50] David Chapman: Well, we’ve been talking about this for years and years and planning to do a podcast, and there’s been demonic obstruction. Like every time we go to record, something goes wrong.
[00:01:02] Jake Orthwein: Very nearly food poisoning deterred us as well.
[00:01:05] David Chapman: Right. I thought maybe I would start by just giving a short overview of what I think the Meaningness project is.
It’s a book. There’s a website, which is meaningness.com, confusingly. There’s also meaningness.substack.com, which is a different thing. Meaningness.com is the book. It is meant to be a self-help manual for relating well with meaning, and I think it’s important that I don’t see this as an intellectual project.
It’s a practical project. The Meaningness book explains ways of relating to meaning that work and ways of relating to meaning that don’t work. The ones that don’t work make you miserable and ineffective or cause you to cause trouble for other people. The ways that do work ideally make you joyful and creative and productive, and this is better, so it’s better to do the better things.
That’s what the book says. I have a style of understanding and explaining which starts from the abstract and general and works towards the specific, and a lot of what’s on the website is quite abstract and general. Because I know that other people have different styles of learning, I’ve put in some specifics near the beginning.
There’s a tendency to misunderstand Meaningness as philosophy. And philosophy is taken to be an intellectual thing that’s interesting as opposed to practical. And I really want the Meaningness book to be practically useful. We’ve been talking for quite a while about the ways in which my interests and work and style are similar to Jordan Peterson’s and different. I’ve dressed up in Jordan Peterson’s style today because I thought that would be funny.
He always wears something like this, and I actually really like that. So I’m doing that today. But my writing, my thinking style is similar to his as well. There’s an underlying theme that goes through everything that I do, which is the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern. Nebulosity is the aspects of the world that are fluid, constantly changing, impossible to pin down, indefinite. Pattern is the aspects of the world that are solid, enduring, well-defined, structured. Everything is some of both of those things, so they’re inseparable. This isn’t a metaphysical thesis; it’s just if you consider things in the world, that’s how they are. And you just look and you see. The underlying idea in the Meaningness book is that we tend to try to pull those apart and deny one or the other somehow, and that’s because nebulosity—we think we don’t like it. We think it is constantly undercutting us because we can’t get complete understanding of anything because it’s changing out from under us all the time, and therefore we can’t get control, and therefore we can’t make things go the way that we want them to go.
They go some other way instead. So we’d like to impose structure or pattern on everything, and that doesn’t work because we can’t do it. And then when we try to do it, it fails, and it would be better to go with the flow. That’s the whole message of the book, and then there’s just a whole lot of applications of that.
This is very interestingly similar to one of the fundamental themes in Jordan Peterson’s work, as you’ve pointed out repeatedly. We’ve had a lot of really interesting conversations about this. Chaos and order are fundamental for him. And those are not quite the same, but very closely related.
[00:05:01] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, I think the way they’re not quite the same is very interesting. It accounts for much of the difference in your styles and approaches. When you get into the details of like what exactly the difference would be between nebulosity and pattern, or even emptiness and form, which is one of those frames you’re taking on to talk about nebulosity and pattern, it’s not quite the same thing as chaos and order, even though they sound very similar.
You mentioned that you don’t see it as an intellectual project. There are intellectual sources to it, and I remember it was very illuminating for me after encountering Meaningness and having some Buddhist and a little bit of cognitive science context. So I sort of could orient, but it also felt very sweet, generous. And what is this? It’s a very novel presentation. And then working my way through your appendix for the reading page, starting to piece together this whole set of lineages that then make the text make a lot more—I’m not even sure it makes it make more sense because you do try to make it stand on its own without the baggage of philosophy, but it put it in context for me in a way that I didn’t have before.
So maybe you could say something just about the intellectual lineage that Meaningness sits in, even if it’s not intellectual in itself.
[00:06:18] David Chapman: Yes. I do draw on a lot of sources. I do footnote them. It’s spooky reading Jordan Peterson’s work because we are mainly in the same intellectual lineages and drawing on the same sources.
[00:09:39] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, that’s actually a surprising omission. I’ve sent you that one clip where Jonathan Pageau brings up Kegan to him and he doesn’t quite latch onto it, which suggests to me that he’s not super aware of that despite the fact that he himself is doing psychoanalytic and constructive developmental synthesis in his work all the time. You clearly mentioned you’re in the lineage of Carl Jung. That’s somewhat surprising to me. Is Robert Bly the person you’re putting there or, ‘cause he—
[00:10:05] David Chapman: He’s my main entry point into that, yes.
[00:10:08] Jake Orthwein: Okay. Okay. I remember you having some kind of suspicion toward Jung. Maybe it was all the selfie language or the romanticism. But I wouldn’t have situated you in his lineage as obviously.
[00:10:18] David Chapman: Well, yes, he is in romantic lineage, which means that he overemphasizes emotions and feelings and stuff inside your head relative to the outside world. And I think that’s a big mistake. But in the past century, he’s the person who was most influential in the understanding of the mythical mode of myth, dreams, fantasies, obscure images, and that’s tremendously important for me.
[00:10:54] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So maybe since you’ve just laid out how you see both the project and the lineage of Meaningness, I’ll say something about how I see Peterson’s and I think probably throughout the conversation I’ll do the Peterson foil just ‘cause I’m familiar with that work. So he is very consciously responding to the problem of nihilism as framed by Nietzsche. He sees the risk of nihilism much more strongly than you do, which also influences how he frames the events of the 20th century.
So you don’t quite frame it as a nihilistic catastrophe. You say that people were worried about a nihilistic catastrophe, but much of what was happening was actually a defense against the threat of nihilism, for example, through totalitarianism. And Peterson, he would view that through the nihilistic lens of the loss of the prior meaning system. But in Maps of Meaning, which is pre-fame Peterson, and it’s him at his most systematic and comprehensive, he very explicitly was saying he was plagued by nightmares of nuclear holocaust during the Cold War, which is when he began writing it.
[00:11:57] Jordan Peterson: I found myself suffering from two things. One was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction. And they’re very affecting dreams.
[00:12:09] Jake Orthwein: That set him on this adventure to understand how it could have been possible that we’d find ourselves in such a situation.
[00:15:54] David Chapman: Yeah. That point about the mythic mode being oriented to action, that’s, I think a piece that’s missing in Jung, and I think it’s terrific that Peterson picks up on that.
[00:16:07] Jordan Peterson: This is one of the things that the psychoanalysts, I think didn’t get quite right, although Jung touched on it in his later work. There’s not, all of you isn’t inside your head. And for the psychoanalysts, a lot of the work that you were doing on yourself was on your, on the relationship, say between your conscious and your unconscious mind, but tremendous amount of that was sort of inside your skull, so to speak. But the phenomenologists, the phenomenological approach enables you to start reconceptualizing the psyche as something that extends beyond you and, and always will. And so that you can work on its reconstruction at any level of analysis where your own nervous system is signaling to you that there’s a problem.
[00:16:56] David Chapman: I’m less concerned with totalitarianism, medieval, and the wars of the 20th century than he is. And that’s just a matter of, I guess, personal interest. I mean, it’s not like those things aren’t tremendously important and globally there is a worrisome turn towards authoritarianism that may develop into totalitarianism. I’m more worried about that now than I was a few years ago.
It’s interesting. Peterson’s dream. We’re almost the same age. We grew up in similar circumstances, and I remember as a kid having dreams of streams of bombers on the horizon flying toward me, and I could see what was about to happen. And this is something that was very alive in everyone’s mythic understanding at that time.
This was really gripping. My parents had a very half-assed nuclear fallout shelter in the basement. This was a normal thing to do. So, yeah, I feel that, and there’s lots of people who worry about potential catastrophes and there’s a lot fewer people who think about what could we really like to have happen?
And that’s much more difficult. And I’m trying to grope my way toward positive future visions. I don’t hear that in his—
[00:18:28] Jake Orthwein: In his mild defense, I mean, I think he is trying to do that a lot more now. It takes a different shape, certainly than it would for you. It’s much more explicitly Christian, or at least Christian inflected.
I don’t know if you’ve seen this ARC thing that he recently founded. It’s his answer to the World Economic Forum. ARC is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. It’s a big conference that’s all about positive visions for the future. Especially I think in its early years, it’s got a lot of, here’s what we don’t want, we don’t want the damn postmodernists, you know, blah blah blah.
But its mission statement is at least about forging positive visions for the future. So I think he’s trying there.
David Chapman: That’s really good to hear.
Jake Orthwein: Yeah. The one interesting point about the Cold War background—I wrote about this at one point—but at some point I realized that part of the reason I got the sort of bug of your work, and to some extent Peterson’s also so much, was because of, like, 9/11 as a similar sort of foundational event.
I was very young. But much of my teenage years were coming into more and more consciousness of whatever context produced 9/11, and 9/11 was also this return of history moment from a sort of sense that those kinds of things had ended that I had in my childhood.
And just this problem of like, why do people—at that point I would’ve framed it as—believe such different things? How can that motivate them to action in such dramatic ways? And I remember reading, for example, “Fundamentalism Is Countercultural Modernism”—a mouthful of a title of one of the posts in Meaningness, which is about, to some extent, about jihadism.
That interest definitely motivated me to get really, really curious about these questions of meaning and belief and so forth as well. Maybe one other thing that would be helpful as context, because this is a point of contrast to Peterson, and it’s not that you necessarily view totalitarianism as differently bad, but I think he’s got this frame that most of what happened in the 20th century is fallout of the death of God, which is to say that it’s mostly a nihilism problem.
He would frame it as the atheistic totalitarianism of Stalin and the morally nihilistic totalitarianism of Hitler through to postmodernism in some way. And the story you tell is like a little bit different because it has this complete stance lens and this developmentalist lens. Maybe give a little gloss on the second part of the book, the Meaningness and Time part of the book story from choice through to modernity and modernity’s collapse or systematicity collapse.
[00:20:59] David Chapman: Yeah, I mean, I think he is right and this does come from Nietzsche that the problems of the 20th century came from the collapse of what I call eternalism, which is the insistence that despite all evidence, the world is completely patterned and ordered by some cosmic ordering principle, which you would identify at this point with the Christian God.
I guess that’s Nietzsche’s realization. He said, look, imagine that you live within a belief system and then something arises to challenge the belief system. Not only does the belief system collapse, but something worse happens. Your belief and belief systems collapses. And that’s the road to not—now it doesn’t have to because you can jump from one belief system to another, but sometimes that doesn’t work.
Is that you do a meta critique and you say, oh, I was living in this protective structure and it turned out to be flawed. Okay. One alternative is jump to another protective structure. Fine. Another alternative is protective structures themselves are not to be trusted. Bang, you’re in chaos. How the hell are you gonna get out of that?
That’s the pathway nihilism. Well, you can work your way through that. That’s difficult. Or you can do what Jung would regard as a soul-damaging move and you can sacrifice your new knowledge and re-identify with something rigid and restricted, which is what I would say is happening to some degree with the people in Europe who are turning to a regressive nationalism as an alternative to the current state of chaos.
It’s like I know that people need to identify with local groups. I understand that. But that they risk the danger of making the state the ultimate God. And that’s order, but that’s not a good replacement for chaos. It’s just another kind of catastrophe. Right? Too much order, too much chaos, both catastrophes.
[00:22:53] David Chapman: I think it’s equally and maybe even more a collapse of belief in rationalism, that being the internalistic insistence that rationality can give us all the answers to everything and is always correct. And if you’re just rational, everything will work out right. I think that much more than Christianity was what animated the high point of modernity, which is the 1880s to 1890s, and then again around 1950, 1950s for high points for modernity.
So the meaningless and time story is, historians would say, a periodization. It’s dividing history into periods with different characteristics and treating those as homogeneous, and these periods correspond to the developmental stages in personal psychology from the Kegan lineage. I’m by no means the first person to recognize that the progression of historical development is interestingly similar to the progression of personal development.
There’s a lot more to say about why that is true, but that’s a side issue. So the first stage is what I call the communal mode, which is the mode of people living in a village or a hunter-gatherer band. It is just about your relationships with a few dozen people.
[00:24:37] Jake Orthwein: Just to be clear, it’s not the first stage of Kegan’s developmental system. It’s the correspondence to the third stage of Kegan’s developmental system. But it’s the first stage in the sense that it’s what human adults would’ve landed in for most of human history once they’re functioning members of their society, their traditional society.
[00:24:57] David Chapman: That’s right. We now live in postmodernity. Many people living in postmodernity have the psychology of the communal mode. Many people are living as if they were in a small village, and that is how they understand things. And this is what drives a lot of current politics.
We are evolved to live in small groups, and people have innate political reasoning. I believe you can see this in other apes, and our understanding of global politics, our nation-scale politics in many cases is by analogy, implicitly to the political dynamics of a village of a hundred people. And that really doesn’t work, and that’s a huge problem.
[00:25:44] Jake Orthwein: There’s something interesting that I think both you and Peterson do that’s been very influential on me, which I associate it with this phrase that’s in Kegan, where he describes each developmental stage as both an achievement and a constraint. And often from a later perspective, the temptation is to look back on a prior stage only in terms of the sense in which it’s constraint and not in the sense in which it’s achievement. And one can do the same thing with respect to history and see all the ways that they hadn’t yet learned the things that we learned without realizing the extent to which they had triumphed or figured out very important things and arrived at functional equilibrium as best they could.
[00:26:23] Jordan Peterson: That’s how our civilization works. It’s like there’s all these ruined people out there. They’ve got problems like you can’t believe. Off they go to work and do things they don’t even like. And look, the lights are on. My God. It’s unbelievable. It’s a miracle. It’s a miracle. And we’re so ungrateful college students, the postmodern types, they’re so ungrateful.
You know, they don’t know that they’re surrounded by just a bloody miracle. It’s a miracle that all this stuff works, that all you crazy chimpanzees that don’t know each other can sit in the same room for two hours, sweltering away without tearing each other apart. Because that’s what chimps do.
[00:27:01] Jake Orthwein: And both you and Peterson have a generous and gratitude-based relationship to history that I think is partly informed by that developmental lens, which is very interesting, even as you see the limitations.
[00:27:14] David Chapman: Yes. The mythic mode of being, acting, thinking, feeling, seeing is stage two. This is something that develops in children around the ages of five to nine, maybe. This is the mode of dreams, of make-believe, of visions, of things being other things, like when kids are playing, the sofa becomes a pirate ship, and it’s simultaneously a sofa and a pirate ship.
This is a stage two thing, and that’s how the mythical mode works. And that’s tremendously important. And one of the big problems, and Peterson says this and I think it’s absolutely true, one of the big problems with our current way of being is the denial of that, to say that’s irrational. It’s bad. You shouldn’t do that. And we all do it anyway.
I mean, we as adults, we still have dreams and occasionally visions and fantasies, and we act as heroes or kings or whatever it is. And that is really important. And Bly was very big on this. Robert Bly, who is in the Jungian lineage, very influential on me, reclaiming that is a project that we need to undertake.
David Chapman: So the communal mode was gradually replaced with the systematic mode, which is the rational construction of society, culture, and psychology. This corresponds to stage four in the Kegan lineage, and that’s modernity. So there’s premodernity, which is the communal mode, and there’s modernity, which is a systematic mode.
And in the late 1800s, we started to outgrow that because we started to see its inherent contradictions. We started to understand the limitations of rationalism, of systematicity, of imposing pattern, everything, and this fantastic accomplishment. I mean, modernity is wonderful. Great. It’s incredible what we were able to do.
It’s a miracle. So much progress was driven by the rationalist delusion that we could get control, and we did get a lot of control over a lot of things. And we understood so many things, and we learned so much that over the twentieth century reached the point where it no longer became tenable. Postmodernity was defined by Lyotard as the condition of incredulity toward grand metanarratives. Grand metanarratives are these overarching stories that provide structured meaning for everything. These are what I call eternalism. That’s a Buddhist term, but it says there’s some kind of eternal cosmic ordering principle which decrees that things will be like this.
And so progress with a capital P or science with a capital S and Christianity itself in the versions that were most predominant in terms of power, at least in the 1800s, was also a grand metanarrative that became difficult to actually believe in. So in 1971 or thereabouts, everybody stopped believing in these things.
And then what? We were confronted with groundlessness. We had believed in modernity that we had built these wonderful structures on solid ground, and that just dissolved. And so postmodernity is this condition of, whoa, now what? And if the now what is nothing? That’s nihilism. And in a certain sense, postmodernity began with the First World War because people had believed that civilization had become so moral, so advanced that war had been eliminated and this was never gonna happen again.
They went into World War I thinking, this will be over in a few weeks. It’s not a big deal. Our side is gonna win because God is on our side and rationality and science and reason are on our side. And, you know, 30 million people dead later or whatever the number was. And then like that, it was like, oh.
Something went absolutely terribly wrong there. And that enabled, I think, and I think this is part of Peterson’s story, that enabled the catastrophes of fascism and communism as a response. These were attempts to impose order on the chaos that had broken out by force.
[00:32:20] Jake Orthwein: There’s one other piece of your story that I like a lot, and that also is sort of interesting contrast to Peterson where another term you use in Meaningness in Time for the communal mode is the choiceless mode, because of the way people relate to their traditions of meaning and their culture, which is as though there were no alternatives, because they’re unlikely to encounter alternatives and also not by reference to justifications, but because they’re in the concrete practices of the culture that you just get enculturated into without having to tell many step why stories about them. And then one way you describe modernity as a project or, I guess it would be modernity as systematic eternalism or stage four eternalism is an attempt to recover choice by way of certainty. And then that was the failure.
It was the failure of those certainty projects and their different guises that really initiated postmodernity.
[00:33:19] David Chapman: Yes. Everything I write is like one-tenth written. The actual point of Meaningness in Time is supposed to be about the future. And the future is a hypothetical mode of social and cultural organization I call the fluid mode. There is a preposterously named webpage, which is “Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths in Subculture Evolution” for any future mode of meaningness. And this is again, this idea of wanting to recover what is good in previous developmental stages. Ideally we ought to provide all of the benefits of each of these previous historical modes without their downsides.
And the great thing about the choiceless mode is you just don’t have to worry about a whole lot of junk. The amount of bureaucratic nonsense we have to deal with as adult Americans in 2025 is insane, the number of institutions that you have relationships with. It’s literally hundreds. Insurance paperwork takes a huge part of everyone’s time.
[00:34:25] Jake Orthwein: We found a way to get this bugaboo of yours into the conversation. Your bureaucratic paperwork existence. So the choiceless mode is—
[00:34:34] David Chapman: You don’t have to do any insurance paperwork. That’s what’s great about it. But you also have close relationships with some kind of a community, and that’s what’s most important for you.
[00:35:38] Jake Orthwein: Yeah, I think that differentiation that you do within the 20th century is also an interesting point of contrast to Peterson, where it’s different in some ways, structured reactions to the breakdown of modernity. The countercultures were reacting to something, the subcultures were reacting to something. Totalitarianism was reacting to something and each just trying to recover something while also trying to get rid of what they perceive as the reason why modernity failed.
[00:36:04] David Chapman: Yes. Well, totalitarianism was the first response, and that is let’s simply reimpose order by force of arms and the apparatus of the state. And that didn’t work because it’s so heavy-handed that it made everybody’s lives miserable. And I mean, you know, everybody knows this story. Various totalitarian regimes collapsed. There still are totalitarian regimes, but on the whole, the world became much less that way.
So postmodernity is the point where at some level everyone understood that modernity was no longer working in the United States. In the early seventies, there was a real danger of a nihilistic collapse, and there was a lot of attempt to reinstate order by force there, you know, violent clashes. We worry now about political violence, and I think it’s right to worry about it, but the level of political violence in the United States in the early 1970s far exceeds anything we’ve experienced so far. And people forget that.
[00:37:12] Jake Orthwein: This book, Days of Rage, everybody is citing again recently ‘cause it’s about this sort of forgotten period of political violence in the seventies.
[00:37:20] David Chapman: Yeah. So there were series of reactions to modernity starting, I guess the Beats were the first kind of anti-modern, this is 1950s. They were really in the Romantic lineage. They were not really significant except as precursors to the 1960s hippie counterculture, which was also in the Romantic tradition.
So the Romantics were a group of German intellectuals in the late 1700s, early 1800s who reacted against the European Enlightenment. So they recognized the errors and limitations of rationalism and actually extolled the mythic mode and the emotions and poetry. And woo, all the stuff that the hippies picked up on quite a long later without really realizing that that’s what they were doing.
But the hippie movement was really creative and interesting and did point out what was going wrong with American modernity, and that merged with the New Left movement, which was new because it wasn’t about unions and working class versus the owners. It was a cultural movement, primarily against the excessive rigidity and pattern being imposed by 1950s modernism.
So these two things came together. That was the sixties to seventies counterculture that generated a lot of political violence came out of that, but also eventually that became so mainstream that that was the whole left half of Western culture and society for decades was rooted in that.
There was also a Christian counterculture that said the modernity of the 20th century had, as Peterson said, lost touch with God. And this needed to be rectified by reinstating Christianity as the center of Western culture and of American culture and the operation of the American state. And that was quite successful for a while too.
Both of these are now over. They were, you know, even like five years ago, they were still kind of stumbling along and were still the backdrop to American culture and politics. I think that’s no longer true.
[00:39:58] Jake Orthwein: I want to put one frame around this because just the extent of the logic is very interesting to me. So you define in Meaningness and Time systematicity as being characterized by universality, rationality, and coherence. And then each of the—I think those are the three, right? And then each of these reactions are surrendering one of those and attempting to recover others of those. So the countercultures on your account surrendered rationality, but also, but still had pretenses to universality. And that’s part of the—and coherence of their destruction and coherence. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
[00:43:32] Jake Orthwein: I’m gonna do a little stepping back just to reorient people in case they’ve lost the thread, but also from my own memory. I’ll try to give what I think of as Peterson’s slightly different account of the twentieth century.
So I think we might have glossed over this, but the solution that you provide or the methods you suggest in the first part of the Meaningness book, which you talk about confused stances with respect to meaningness of monism, dualism, nihilism, and eternalism. Nihilism and eternalism are the sort of central ones. Monism and dualism are sort of symptomatic, I guess you could say, of eternalism or nihilism. Those are the four extremes in a Nagarjunian reading of the same material. And the failure to fall into any of those confused stances you call the complete stance, which neither fixates nor denies nebulosity and pattern but recognizes them to always be inseparable, which I think you did say, but spread out over the beginning of the conversation. Is there anything about that you’d like to correct?
[00:44:30] David Chapman: No, that’s really a very nice summary.
[00:44:34] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So then, to graph that onto your twentieth-century story, there was the choiceless or communal mode, which inhabited stage three developmental position. It could be lived unreflectively for lack of any alternatives or anything to challenge it.
And then there’s this idea of a primordial encounter between different communal mode cultures that forces them to begin this process of justifying their practices by reference to ever deeper meanings, which is what initiates modernity and the need to situate everything on an ultimate justification that is supposed to be universal.
And one way of thinking about it is that the Enlightenment came out of a bunch of religious wars that were racking Europe, which is sort of an encounter of these different communal mode or traditionalist cultures. The Enlightenment says in part, well, we all don’t want to die violent deaths, so at least we can agree on that and sort of retreat to that position and take a, at least at the level of the state, take a live and let live posture with respect to these other doctrinal differences.
[00:45:40] Jake Orthwein: This is something Nietzsche pointed out with regards to the psychological consequences of European colonialism on Europe. So he said, okay, imagine Europe is, uh, Christendom, all things considered when the European expansion started. Okay, now the Europeans go out into the world and, yeah, there’s some arguments within Christendom about which branch of Christianity should rule, you know, and there’s doubters. But basically, as far as the Europeans were concerned, the cosmos was structured according to Judeo-Christian precepts. It was just that assumption network.
Okay. So now the Europeans go out in the world and they find out that there’s a lot of different belief systems equally well developed or arguably equally well developed, apparently predicated on different axiomatic systems. Okay. So now that brings up, that’s doubt. So the doubt is, well, you know, the Japanese Chinese, they seem to be doing pretty well and they’re not, or better, even in some regards. I think you could argue that when the Europeans hit Japan, that the Japanese had attained a higher level of sophisticated civilization in many ways. They’re certainly well advanced on the hygienic front, for example.
And so that’s the first doubt. The first doubt is, oh, oh, there’s a bunch of belief systems. But then Nietzsche pointed out, but then there’s a secondary doubt, which is once you realize that a belief system per se, especially a relatively core one can collapse, that raises not only the specter of which belief system is correct, but another specter, which is, well, what makes you think any belief system is justifiable? Right. And that’s the nihilist trap. It’s like, well, everything is meaningless.
[00:47:26] Jake Orthwein: And you can see the sort of developmental logic by which modernity comes into being like, almost literally. Like, why do you think that? Which forces you to develop a justification and push your way down the stack until you get toward more and more universal or seemingly universal meanings. Does that sound right to you?
[00:47:45] David Chapman: Yes. Uh, it’s really interesting that I hadn’t thought about it quite that way. Rationalism, I think, comes from this encounter with other cultures and then trying to justify your own. And the Greeks did that. There was the Dark Ages where everybody forgot.
I see modernity—I mean, this is my education as a scientist, maybe—I see modernity as coming to a significant extent from the Newtonian revolution there. The medieval worldview was the synthesis of Christianity and the Aristotelian worldview, and that collapsed with the discovery of heliocentrism. That the sun is at the center of the universe, not the Earth. And that seems to—that seems like just a fact, and it’s not particularly significant. Who cares? Center what? And now the sun isn’t the center of the universe anyway, but the whole medieval worldview turned out to rest on the fact that the Earth was at the center.
And when it was realized that it is not, there was a nihilistic crisis. This is mostly forgotten, but there was a period there where atheism became a serious consideration as a result of the collapse of that worldview feeling. This nihilistic sense of collapse of nothing is true anymore because that whole worldview was invalidated.
And luckily Newton came along very shortly after that and restored rationality. And what you describe, which is historians would point to the Treaty of Westphalia where all of the major European powers agreed that they would not go to war about religion. Every state got to deal with religion on its own and weren’t going to have pan-European wars that killed tens of millions of people again.
Uh, so Newton came along and restored rationality, and there’s a whole new worldview that underwrote the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution and everything up to 1971. Newton found certainty. And the possibility of full understanding and of full control seemed available. So rationality had never actually worked before. It was worshiped in theory, but Greek rationality, it just didn’t work. And the Newtonian rationality actually worked as incredible. So that I think is a very important foundation of modernism.
And I think it’s—I’m not sure to what extent this is true, but I argue in Meaningness that it was a significant factor—the end of Newtonian physics with relativity and quantum actually, in the same way that heliocentrism destroyed the medieval worldview. Relativity and quantum played a significant role along with other things in destroying the modern worldview.
[00:51:09] Jake Orthwein: I think there’s actually in the Francis Fukuyama book, The End of History and the Last Man, when he’s framing all of this, I think he literally says this is born of two crises: the political crisis of the two world wars and the intellectual crisis of Western rationalism, which is what you just sketched, the intellectual crisis of Western rationalism.
But you also say in the Meaningness in Time book this Western nation-state thing also fell apart with the First World War, because the whole point of the Western nation-state was to prevent these pan-European wars, which of course the First World War put the lie to. And so both of those things were falling apart at the same time: the political stream of “here’s how we’re going to mitigate violence” and the intellectual stream, or the epistemological stream. And within like a two-decade span, both of them fell apart in a dramatic way.
So I talked about your solution, this framing of nihilism, eternalism, monism, dualism, and then the confused stances, and then the complete stance, which doesn’t do that. And then one can inhabit or not the complete stance in any given developmental stage, but the tendency historically was an eternalistic position. And then when that eternalism collapsed, it collapsed into nihilism.
And what you’re doing in your positive vision is talking about how to both inhabit the complete stance with respect to any of these different stages, which has to do with this recovering what was valuable about prior epochs and prior developmental stages, and sketch what a functional stage five would look like that isn’t just postmodern nihilism, but that actually is a robust vision.
I set all that up by way of comparison to where Peterson ends up. So as I said before, he starts with this Nietzsche and death of God, and Nietzsche’s prophecy that there’ll be totalitarianisms because of that in the 20th century. That came true to some extent, and then says that part of what happened was that we lost access to the insights of this mythic mode of cognition when rationality ate Christianity.
And in Maps of Meaning, he tries to give a more explicit account of what meanings, or what implications for action, were encoded in the mythic tradition of the West. And then to provide a kind of somewhat like universal grammar—and I think you might take issue with this way of talking about it—but like a somewhat universal grammar for interpretation of those myths to understand the essence of them.
And this is this division into, there are different ways of describing it, but the Great Father, the Great Mother, and the Divine Son. The Great Father is order, or explored territory, or the known, and many other things: culture. Great Mother is unknown, unexplored territory and nature, and chaos. And the Divine Son is the individual that mediates between those two, ideally neither pathologically identifying with the Great Father nor pathologically identifying with the Great Mother, but riding this border so as to always be updating the culture with this confrontation with the potential, while not allowing it to collapse into the chaos and dissolution.
[00:54:20] Jordan Peterson: I produced this map because I was trying to understand the fundamental substructure of the mythological world. I think that’s the right way of thinking about it, and I’m not claiming that this is the only way it can be represented, because I know full well that it can be represented other ways. But it’s a pretty good schema: known territory, or what’s explored; unknown territory, or what’s not explored; the transformation or the dilution of one into the other; and then the reconstitution of that.
That’s what an election does, right? It’s like, okay, we have our leader who’s the person at the top of the dominance hierarchy and defines the nature of this particular structure. There’s an election, it’s regulated chaos. No one knows what’s going to happen. It’s the death of the old king. Bang. We go into a chaotic state. Everyone argues for a while, and then out of that argument they produce a consensus, and poof, we’re in a new state. Right?
That’s the meta-story, right? Order, chaos, order—but it’s partial order, chaos, reconstituted and revivified order.
[00:55:26] Jake Orthwein: When he maps it on the 20th century, he talks about pathological identification with the Great Father as the fascist, the sort of archetypal fascist, and pathological identification with the Great Mother as the archetypal decadent. And I think he wants to say this has something to do with Hitler as the fascist and Stalin as the decadent, or something like right and left pathologies.
But he would want to say that part of what came along with the fall of Christianity was the fall of this ethic of embodying Logos—we can get into what that means—but embodying this individual inhabiting the border between order and chaos, which is part of why in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, you see this either pathological identification with the Great Father in authoritarian fascism or pathological identification with the Great Mother.
[00:56:43] David Chapman: Yeah. Reading Maps of Meaning is kind of surreal for me because so much of it is parallel to—I mean, I only came across it relatively recently—so a lot of it is parallel to my thinking that had gone on for decades before. And at the same time, there’s a fundamentally different orientation, and I think this is because I’m in the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, and he is now explicitly a Christian. I believe he was sort of on the edge of being that when he was writing Maps of Meaning.
I mean, I feel from where I stand, the story you just outlined has a lot of insight in it and is also importantly wrong in a lot of respects. I think the fundamental underlying difference is that in Buddhism—so let’s go back to this word chaos—it’s really interesting. It means something different in ancient Greek, particularly in the pre-Socratic era before rationalism got seriously underway. Chaos means unformed. It means without a fixed form.
So it is fluid and hard to define, fuzzy around the edges. It’s squishy. In Buddhism, key terms are emptiness and form, and these are a pair in the same way that chaos and order are for Peterson and generally the Western tradition. Emptiness means unformed. It is what is not nailed in place. Emptiness in the Buddhist sense is much closer to the ancient Greek notion of chaos than to a modern notion of chaos.
Chaos now means lots of contending forces heading in different directions and fighting each other, and that’s not what chaos meant to the pre-Socratic Greeks. Emptiness in Buddhism is seen to be good or at worst neutral and to be a necessary complement to form. And the Heart Sutra, which is a key scripture, says emptiness is form, form is emptiness, emptiness is no other than form, form is no other than emptiness. These are—it’s not even just that they’re inseparable. It’s that they’re in some sense the same thing. They’re just aspects of everything that we encounter. Emptiness is the goal for some branches of Buddhism. You’re trying to get to this unformed state.
Peterson comes back repeatedly to this ancient Babylonian myth of Tiamat, who is the personification of chaos, which is unformedness. She is also a dragon or sort of snake goddess, and she is subterranean and identified with water. She is the ocean in some sense.
[00:59:49] Jordan Peterson: So I’m gonna tell you a story like that, and it’s the story of Marduk, and it’s the Mesopotamian story. And Mesopotamia is one of the earliest civilizations, and it emerged as a consequence of the amalgam of Middle Eastern tribes. So over a very long period of time, you could think the gods of all of these tribes were warring in an abstract space, in a conceptual space. And out of that, a meta-story emerged, and this is the meta-story, and it’s one of a host of similar meta-stories that came out of the Middle East, one of which is the account in Genesis.
Okay, so here’s the story. So there are two primary deities to begin with, Apsu and Tiamat. Now, in order to understand that, well, here’s how the Mesopotamians conceptualized the world. There was a—let’s call it a disc—that’s salt water. Well, why? Well, what happens when you go to the end of the continent? Salt water everywhere, right? So wherever you go, you run into salt water. So that’s the disc that surrounds everything.
Now, why is it a disc? The world is a dome on a disc. Why? Well, say you’re standing in the middle of a field. What does the world look like? A dome on a disc. So it’s a phenomenological representation. So the bottom of the dome is the ground on which you stand. What happens if you dig? You hit water, fresh water. So the dome of the land is on a disc of fresh water. What happens if you go to the edge of the land? You run into salt water. The dome of the land is on a disc of fresh water on a disc of salt water.
Okay, those are the two gods. Tiamat is god of salt water, and Apsu is god of fresh water. And it’s happenstance in some sense because that’s the masculine and the feminine, and they could be attributed all sorts of different geographical areas. Okay, so the two primary gods are Apsu and Tiamat. Tiamat is female and Apsu is male, and they’re locked together in an inseparable embrace.
Okay, so how do you understand that? Easy. Yin and yang. It’s the same idea. Here’s another representation. This is a cool one. I’ve got a couple of them here that are really cool. This is from China. So this is Fuxi and Nüwa. I think I’ve got that right, but I just love that reference. It’s so insanely cool, this representation. So you see the sort of the primary mother and father of humanity emerging from this underlying snake-like entity with its tails tangled together.
[01:02:43] David Chapman: And in the Enuma Elish, which is this Babylonian mythical cycle, Tiamat has to be slain by Marduk, who is the representative of order. And she’s seen as highly negative.
[01:02:58] Jake Orthwein: She’s chaos itself, right? She gave birth to everything. This is no joke. And so they send one god out after another to confront her, and they all come back with their tails between their legs. There’s no hope.
And then one day there’s a new god that emerges, and that’s Marduk. And the gods know—as soon as he pops up, they know he’s something new. Remember, and this is happening while the Mesopotamians are assembling themselves into one of the world’s first great civilizations. So all the gods of all those tribes are coming together to organize themselves into a hierarchy, to figure out what proposition rules everything.
And so Marduk is elected by all the gods, and he says, “Look, I’ll go out there and I’ll take on Tiamat, but here’s the rule from here on: you follow me. I determine destiny. I’m the top god. I’m the thing at the top of the hierarchy.” And all the other gods say, “Hey, look, no problem. You get rid of chaos, we do exactly what you say.”
Now, Marduk has eyes all the way around his head, and he speaks magic words. Those are his primary attributes. And so he takes a net and he goes out to confront Tiamat, and he encloses her in a net, which I think is so cool because it’s an encapsulation, right? It’s a conceptual encapsulation. He encloses chaos itself in a conceptual structure. He puts it in the net, and then he cuts her into pieces. And he makes the world.
[01:04:16] David Chapman: In Buddhism, emptiness is personified as the goddess Prajnaparamita, which means the perfection of wisdom. She has some kind of relationship with the nagas. Nagas are water demons who live underground and are snake demons.
So it’s the same myth, but Prajnaparamita is the ultimate goal, up to a certain point at least, in Buddhism, and we worship Prajnaparamita, and that is the highest good, and you’re not going to go around slaying her. If you’re extremely lucky and you’re a tantric Buddhist, you hope that you might someday have the chance to make love to Prajnaparamita. This is the consummation of the Buddhist path in some sense. I think that’s the fundamental underlying difference in our worldviews.
[01:05:06] Jake Orthwein: I sort of agree with everything you said, but I think—I want to see if I can bolster the case for Peterson a bit more, because I do think that’s the underlying difference. Buddhist and Western streams, and Peterson as an inheritor of much more the Western stream than the Buddhist one.
So there is this way of thinking about it where—and much of life feels this way—where you are attempting to defend fragile order against entropy, against chaos, and hold things together. And a hero myth like the Enuma Elish seems to correspond to that, where you’re wresting order from chaos and then defending it against the forces that would dissipate it.
But one piece I left out of my account of Peterson’s metamythology, or this sort of grammar of myth, is that each of those different archetypes—the great father, great mother, and divine son—has a positive and a negative manifestation. So the great father, the positive manifestation is the sort of protective aspect of culture, and the negative manifestation is the tyrannical aspect of culture. For example, the great mother—the positive aspect is the creative and generative aspect, and the negative aspect is the devouring, destructive aspect.
And then the divine son is the hero and the adversary, which is a little bit more confusing to me how exactly that fits on this border between order and chaos for the adversary. But all that is to say, he doesn’t say the great mother is just uniformly a devouring chaos agent with no positive aspects. And he does usually talk about the experience of being the hero as not as encounter necessarily exclusively with chaos, but as encounter with potential, which is quite a bit like unformedness that you convert into the habitable order, and you’re always supposed to be at the bleeding edge of it, identified, so to speak, with the great father as against the chaos and unformedness.
So he is not uniformly this old-school hero slaying the dragon and thinking everything outside the city gates is evil and demonic. And there’s a way that that maps onto his reading of the Christian story, because in the Bible there’s this evolving account of sacrifice and what sorts of sacrifices are appropriate in relationship to God.
Certainly the Old Testament God can seem like a capricious, not all too nice figure demanding sacrifices to allow you to sustain the—it’s like you must appease God as this other thing to allow you to defend your tenuous, orderly condition. But on Peterson’s reading of the Christ myth, and this is not just Peterson, the ethic elevated to the highest place is this ethic of voluntary self-sacrifice, which does—
[01:10:29] David Chapman: Uh, this goes back to the mid-1980s. I think encountering Heidegger through the work of Hubert Dreyfus was a key piece of that. But I had a background in cybernetics going back before that, and that has this view, and this is the view that what is primary is interaction. It is perception and how we are effective in concrete action, like lifting up a coffee mug and swallowing it. You know, I can see the coffee mug on the table in front of me. I can see how to pick it up. I reach for it. I pick it up. This isn’t calculated, um, rationally we’re in constant dialogue with our world, the physical world and the social world. And that’s something that the rationalist tradition just, just doesn’t look at it, it’s not part of the story except as an afterthought.
And so in the mid-1980s, I was doing artificial intelligence in rationalist tradition, more or less, although I already was a weirdo and slightly off the main track and encountered Heidegger. And my then collaborator, Phil Agre, and I worked out drawing on, on a lot of cognitive science stuff that was all kind of marginal. So there’s the work of the Gibsons in perceptual psychology, for example.
[01:12:10] Jake Orthwein: Which is hugely influential on Peterson, I should say. So Ecological Approach to Visual Perception is one of Peterson’s go-to citations. This is the person who coined, uh, the, the idea of an affordance.
[01:12:21] David Chapman: Yes, an affordance for those who who may not know is something that you see that immediately suggests an action. So the coffee mug on the table, um, suggests the action of grasping it by the handle and lifting it up. This is an affordance for grasping, and the world is full of affordances, and that’s how we get around. And everything that we do is mainly a matter of acting on affordances that we perceive.
And when we’re in interaction with a person, the things that I say afford opportunities for you to interrupt and add what you have to say and and vice versa. That deeply influenced the way that I think about everything that it is. Interaction is the primary thing to understand. Not reasonings sitting in an armchair.
And this actually ties in a lot with Vajrayana Buddhism, and especially Dzogchen, which is the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by. Dzogchen is all about perception and how we interact with the world through seeing so the kind of fancy term in Dzogchen is rigpa, which is Dzogchen’s word for enlightenment, more or less.
[01:15:12] David Chapman: Exactly that.
[01:15:12] Jake Orthwein: And then the other association is Rigpa’s nondual awareness, which I guess is like what’s going on in this affordances for action picture, because if you’re seeing something in terms of its possibilities for action for you, you’re not yet constructing yourself as a subject and it as an object separate from you. You’re just in a flow of interaction with an environment. Is that right?
[01:15:38] David Chapman: Yes.
[01:15:40] Jake Orthwein: Cool. Interesting. Okay, so I’ll just say something about this, the influence this has on Peterson. There’s a wonderful talk that I’ve sent you a bunch of times where he comes about two inches from saying your name. I mean, he says, I don’t remember their names, but there were a couple people in the AI lab in the eighties at MIT.
[01:15:58] Jordan Peterson: The AI researchers solved this problem, and part of the way they solved it was by embodying cognition, incarnating artificial intelligence in an embodied structure, and the first people to really propose that that was absolutely necessary—I don’t necessarily know the first people, but I know that an MIT researcher named Rodney Brooks, who by the way invented the Roomba, some of you may have a Roomba and it’s kind of a laughable little object, but not really because it can sort of move around your house without falling down the stairs and your two-year-old can’t do that. So the Roomba isn’t nothing, right. And Brooks was one of the first people who really recognized that to solve the problem of perception, we would have to duplicate the process of evolution in hardware.
[01:16:47] Jake Orthwein: This is in a talk called “The Problem of Perception,” where what he means by the problem of perception is what you guys talked about as the frame problem, which a bunch of your graduate work was about, which started as a concrete problem in robotics and then got generalized philosophically to this problem of relevance and the problem of how to reduce the infinite complexity of the world down to those aspects of the world that we do perceive.
The reason why 4E-type things are part of the solution to this is that you sort of evolve to construe the world in certain narrow ways that have to do with the kind of thing that you are. You don’t encounter the world as it is first and then have to select from among that—the world presents itself to you in terms of the kind of being that you are. And that automatically narrows the frame of perception dramatically.
And then perception is being narrowed still further by your goals, your motivations, what sorts of states are active in you, and the actual embodied situation that you find yourself in each moment. So you’re never doing this rationalist view from nowhere from which you have to deduce what’s relevant. You’re always—the world is giving you a relevance moment by moment by moment, which is the Heidegger “always already meaningful” picture. Is that right?
[01:18:02] David Chapman: That’s a great summary.
[01:18:04] Jordan Peterson: It’s necessary for you to look at the world through a limited frame of reference. The reason for that is you’re not very smart. Your consciousness can only handle about four bits of information per second. It’s not very much given that the number of bits of information coming at you from the external world are for all practical purposes infinite. You’re like Aldous Huxley suggested—your brain seemed to be primarily a reducing agent.
[01:19:06] Jake Orthwein: In this talk that I mentioned where he very nearly mentions David’s name, he says the way he describes it in terms of utilization behavior. Maybe we’ll just clip this when we post this conversation, because I think it’d be cool to see it.
[01:19:17] Jordan Peterson: There’s a condition called utilization behavior. It’s got an interesting neuropsychological condition. And generally if it is affected right-handed people, that’s relevant here because of lateralization. If you have left prefrontal damage, you sometimes will engage in utilization behavior. And what happens if you are afflicted by this neuropsychological condition is that you lose the ability to inhibit your motor response to the presentation of an object.
Now that’s worth thinking about, even though it doesn’t sound like it’s something that’s necessarily worth thinking about because what do you mean motor response to an object? Because we think object thought, motor response, but that’s not how it works. The object itself announces its utility in the perception. And so what that means is that your eyes, which map, let’s say patterns of arrays, that’s a good way of thinking about it. They map that onto your visual system and, but part of your visual system is actually your motor output system.
And so that when I look at, let’s say this bottle, you think, I think bottle hand grip drink, but seeing bottle is hand grip and hand grip is drink. And so if you have a utilization behavior, you lose the ability to inhibit the motor response to the object. And so if you had this condition, I put a cup in front of you, you would pick it up and drink from it. And if you walk down a hallway and there’s a door open, you will go through the door and it’s not because you see the object door and think door and then think walk through and then walk through. Even though that’s what you think.
You think it’s that door is a walkthrough place and if you lack inhibition, you can’t stop acting out the perception. And so what that implies is that at some direct level, and this is the science, not the philosophy, you don’t see objects and infer meaning. You see meaning and infer objects. And that’s really something you can think about that for like 40 years because it looks like it’s true factually. And that’s a strange thing too, right? It’s very strange claim to say that the facts support the notion that the primary object of perception is meaning not objects.
[01:21:45] Jake Orthwein: Utilization behavior is a certain kind of behavior that people exhibit when they have a certain kind of brain damage, where they can’t help but enact the motor response associated with a perception. So if they see a door, they’ll open the door. If they see a cup, they’ll pick up the cup, they’ll grasp the cup. And this is meant to show that the suggestion for action is embedded in the perception not inferred from a prior perception of an object.
And so the way Peterson puts it is you see meaning and then infer object rather than see object and infer meaning. And this world of mythology that he sketches, he calls it the world as a forum for action. It’s a world of affordances. Then the rationalist mistake was to see those sort of imagistic descriptions of the world as a forum for action. And these kind of constituent elements of such a world, like such a world always has chaos or unformedness or potential in such a world.
Always has the known, and they’ll talk about tools and obstacles or friends and adversaries, these sorts of things that are always there in the perceptual and social world when construed in terms of its relevance for action. The mistake would be then taking the imagistic descriptions of that that are meant to evoke it, concretizing them into propositional descriptions, looking for those things in the world and failing to find them and then throwing out the myth.
You have a fascinating story about how this happened with Tiamat, who we spoke about earlier, becoming everything is water, like in some rational sense. Maybe you could describe that.
[01:23:09] David Chapman: Yeah. I mean, there’s a historically fascinating process where the myth of Tiamat got assimilated into Greek mythology and then, well, we can go through the steps briefly. Parmenides was a key figure in this. He was a Greek guy, so the myth of Tiamat. Parmenides, he transformed that. He wrote this book, which prioritizes the unformed over form. He said, actually, in the unformed, there is no change. There is no distinction.
[01:26:30] Jake Orthwein: It’s like a return of good cheer.
[01:26:33] David Chapman: Yeah. Breakfast. He says breakfast.
[01:26:37] Jake Orthwein: For some context, there’s a bit from Nietzsche that I actually haven’t heard Peterson mention, although I’m sure it’s influential on him, and that you do mention in the further reading part of Meaningness where he summarizes the entirety of the Western tradition in its relationship to the idea of what he calls the true world.
So in Nietzsche, there’s this idea that we posit the existence of a true world apart from the world of our experience whenever the apparent world, the world we experience, fails to satisfy our longing for stable meanings. And then we project in some elsewhere a true world that doesn’t have any of the defects, the seeming defects of the apparent world, and then construe life as a project of getting from the apparent world to the true world.
And in this passage from Twilight of the Idols called “How the True World Became a Fable,” he talks about Plato’s world of forms as the beginning of that in the Western tradition, or one beginning of that you could say, like original meaning crisis in the way that we talk about it now that happened among the Greeks to which Plato’s assertion of a world of forms was responsive. I think you said that there was this nihilistic crisis and then the typical response to a nihilistic crisis is an eternalistic crackdown, and you sort of see Plato as an eternalistic crackdown. Take it away.
[01:27:57] David Chapman: Yeah. I recorded a little video talking, had video of myself a few months ago, which was about this and just saying, look, you know, we’re here. This is, this is actually it. This is it. And there isn’t any other world that we can escape to. This is also a Vajrayana Buddhist idea that the horror of living in the actual world makes us want to escape it.
And this is described as the entire universe being a charnel ground. A charnel ground is a place where unclaimed dead people were just dumped outside the city someplace, and they would get eaten by wild animals or rot. And if you imagine the entire universe being that with no escape, then possibility opens up because instead of trying to escape into some imaginary heaven, you say, okay, I actually have to deal with this.
This is the world I’m in. It is full of tigers and rotting corpses, and the real world actually is full of all kinds of horrors, is also full of all kinds of extraordinary joys and beauties and connection and satisfaction.
And these things are inseparable. This is, uh, you know, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Is this also that you can imagine that time has stopped? If you’re kind of feeling miserable wherever you are, you can just stop. You stop time, and you imagine this moment is going to go on forever, and then you can relax into that because you know it’s only as terrible as it is.
[01:29:39] Jake Orthwein: Well, before that, the first line is something like the true world is inhabited by the wise man and he lives in the true world. And then the true world gradually becomes more and more remote where it’s not attained but hoped for. He talks about Plato’s world of forms is one of them. Like the Christian heaven is one such true world. The Kantian noumenon is one such true world. And then after the Kantian noumenon, it becomes so remote as to cease to be regulative of behavior basically, or like inspiring or motivating.
[01:30:12] David Chapman: Kant says the noumenon is inaccessible. We cannot know anything about it. That’s what’s left of the Platonic forms, and the noumenon is how things actually are as opposed to how they appear. That’s the phenomenon.
I was educated as an engineer, and this is a key part of my worldview, is things are pretty much the way they appear to be. The whole idea that the world is an illusion, or that things are actually very different than how they appear and one needs to do spiritual practice to see through the illusion and find the truth behind the appearance. You know, it’s a coffee mug. It works like coffee mugs work. This is, we know this.
[01:30:57] Jake Orthwein: I’m gonna, I’m gonna try to, I don’t know if I’m gonna get this right, but I want to go back to the Nietzschean real, uh, true world theories thing and talk about the relationship to Peterson. Okay? So in this Nietzsche true world story where you posit a true world, when the apparent world thwarts your longing for stable meanings, um, and then he describes how this happened in the Western tradition. The true world grew more and more remote and then ceased to be regulative. And that is roughly the same thing as the death of God.
In another way, it’s like on what were you basing your sense, the eternal meaning. And then when that gets so remote from experience that it stops being motivating, then that’s the same as the death of God. Part of the reason this is interesting in comparison to Peterson is that, so when Peterson talks about how we solve the frame problem, that he’s now in the habit of saying the frame that we put on our perception is a story like, uh, you know, this is why he talks about the significance of narrative.
But what he’s referring back to in his earlier work is what he called, I think, like motivation, action perception, schemas or something like that. And there’s, there are these drawings of, uh, uh, imagine circle that says the unbearable present, the imagined or hoped for future, or something like that. And then a planned sequence of behavior that gets you from the unbearable present to the hoped for future. And in any given moment at different nested scales, you’re inhabiting some conception like that, that you’re motivated by some sense of where you are, some sense of where you’re going, some sense of what you’re gonna do to get there.
[01:32:21] Jordan Peterson: This is the smallest unit of meaning that makes up a referential frame. I think it has three elements. The basic framework is something like this, and you’re always looking at the world through this framework. And the framework has as one pole where you are and what you’re doing, where you are now. So that’s point A.
You’re always trying to get from point A to point B because you’re a linear creature and you’re embodied, so you’re moving. And so fundamentally, what you’re looking at the world through is a sequence of maps. And maps tell you how to get to where you want to go. And so the map specifies where you are because obviously you can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you are.
And many people, of course, are confused about where they are, so they don’t get anywhere. And you also have to know where you’re going, and that’s point A and point B. And every time you look at the world, you’re looking through a framework that has those two valued points implicit in your cognitive structure.
And generally what you think is where you’re going is better than where you are because otherwise, why would you go there? Now some people do choose to go to places that are worse than where they are, but they’re a special case. You probably live with some of them.
[01:33:31] Jake Orthwein: And then what counts as chaos or what counts as like an interruption of your schema is defined relative to whichever one of those you’re holding.
And then a sort of narrative structure that everybody’s familiar with of like, you’re in an ordinary world, then you’re confronted with an inciting incident or an anomaly, and then you descend into chaos and then you get back into a better world is one of those things when the plan sequence of behavior encounters anomaly. So you sort of descend into chaos and then you do it again. But that split between the unbearable present and the hope for future has this shape of the Nietzschean true world.
Because the uppermost version of one of those schemas is religious on Peterson’s account. And in like a Christian frame, the unbearable present is the fallen world, and the hope for future is heaven. And the whole soteriology is about getting from here to there.
But there’s a weird wrinkle, and this is, I don’t even understand how this works in Christian doctrine, which is that somehow in the wake of Christ, you’re already saved and you’re trying to bring about the kingdom of God. So there’s this collapse of that distinction between the true world and the hope for future and also some sense that you’re working to bring about the kingdom of God here on earth.
And Buddhism does have that collapse of the two. That’s the Samsara Nirvana claim in some way is that you go from thinking, I’m in Samsara and I’m trying to get to Nirvana to realizing that they’re the same world. When you recognize the prior context in which such conceptions of not being where you want to be arise, but it doesn’t have this, let’s bring about the Kingdom of God thing on earth all that much.
You can’t really use Buddhism to galvanize somebody to a story about progress. And by the same token, I think Christianity and maybe Peterson’s construal Christianity is quite galvanizing to like, let’s get out there and confront some chaos and build a great future. And yet the present is always the unbearable present. You know, he literally labels it, the unbearable present on the diagram. And I just think that’s interesting. It maybe relates to what we were talking about before.
[01:35:30] David Chapman: Yeah. There’s a couple things there. One is we could talk about plans, but—
[01:35:34] Jake Orthwein: I was gonna ask you about this. ‘Cause Peterson cites at some place, the Pribram and Lanter—
[01:35:41] David Chapman: Miller Lanter. Pribram, yeah. The foundational scripture of planning.
[01:35:45] Jake Orthwein: Yeah. Which you and Phil critiqued as part of your work. So there might be some source of distinction between you guys there, but maybe that’s a little in the weeds.
[01:35:53] David Chapman: Maybe we’ll skip that for now. I think it is true and important that Buddhism does not have a social vision, and that’s a real failure. And when Buddhism encountered modernity in the mid-1800s, thoughtful Buddhists identified that as, you know, this is a real strength of Western modernity and of Christianity. And they tried to import that with not much success on the whole.
Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past couple of years is that Dzogchen, the branch of Buddhism that I’m most influenced by, Dzogchen in particular, does not have a good theory of action. It says you spontaneously act beneficially.
So one of my great heroes in Buddhism is a character called Jamgön Mipham. He is late 1800s, early 1900s. Something I’m fascinated by is that his work seems in some ways modern and modernity was coming into Tibet at that time, and I don’t know. I’d love to understand to what extent he may have been influenced by that.
He invented or transformed mythos. This book here, right behind me, this is the mythos of King Gesar, which is a collection of Tibetan folk tales or epics, and he transformed that into a Buddhist social doctrine and an account of action and of how you go about acting and what it means to act well. I think a lot of the details of that don’t work outside of what was essentially a medieval kingdom in Tibet. But the fact that there is, that there is highly motivating for me to try to figure out how to take that vision forward.
[01:37:53] Jake Orthwein: I was talking about the similarity and structure between Nietzschean true world theories and what Peterson calls motivation, action perception, schemas, which are sort of the frames that we put on our perception that consists of some sense of where you are, some sense of where you’re going and how you’re gonna get there in accordance with which the valence of things, for example, manifest themselves. So like whether something is perceived as a tool or an obstacle depends on what kind of story like this you imagine yourself to be inhabiting.
[01:38:19] David Chapman: Right. So going back to the cognitive science and the work that Phil and I did in the 1980s, and then that’s influenced my thought ever since. Purpose is enormously important in the solution to the frame problem, but also obviously in action.
And rationalism doesn’t have an account of purpose. It has goals or some kind of objective function or something which just falls out of the sky. And it’s not questioned, it’s never explained. And most of the story doesn’t actually involve it at all. I mean, you do reasoning, and eventually, I mean, and there’s the goal there somewhere, but that’s really not part of the story.
Bringing purpose in is fundamental in the mythic mode, but also if we’re gonna have some vision of the future, inevitably, purpose is a huge part of that. What do we actually want? Why do we want it? What are the trade-offs? How do we get there?
[01:39:19] Jake Orthwein: Maybe we should talk about the planning thing, ‘cause I think it actually is relevant in this motivation, action perception, schema. It’s unbearable present, and then the future, and then a planned sequence of behavior.
Part of this is coming out of this lineage in cognitive science about these sort of nested plans that we might construct to get to this imagined future. You’ll be much more equipped to talk about this, but maybe you could say what the Lashley Pribram planning stuff was, and then how you and Phil critiqued it. Because Peterson definitely does cite that. I mean, he relies on it.
[01:39:46] David Chapman: Yeah. There’s a lineage there for which Miller Lashley Pribram is kind of the source text, although obviously there’s always antecedents for everything. The view was that the way that action occurs is you have a goal which falls out of the sky. That’s your goal, and you’ve got your current state of the world. The goal is a different state of the world, and you reason logically about what series of actions can I take that will get me from here to there? And then you execute the plan. You take those actions one at a time.
And there’s a flowering of interactionist cognitive science in the late 1980s that came out of the work of Lucy Suchman, who is a student of Hubert Dreyfus and out of Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of AI, which was really a critique of this view. In part Lucy Suchman was an anthropologist, but also educated as a cognitive scientist. So she wrote a book that was very heavily influential for Phil Agre and for myself and for many other people that says, look, we’re actually constantly in interaction with the world. Yes, we may think vaguely about how we’re gonna get from here to there, but the actual actions are these responses to affordances along the way.
And the problem with planning is that plans always fall through. Like constantly. Whatever you thought you were going to do doesn’t work. The method of anthropology that Suchman used is to look at videotapes of people actually doing things. And you find that it’s like literally once every few seconds, if you watch a scientist doing an experiment, once every two seconds, something goes wrong and they course correct immediately.
And this is almost always unproblematic. So your plans falling through isn’t a crisis because the world is full of affordances that let you correct. And by and large, that’s how we get through the day and that’s how our lives go. I mean, you might have some idea of I want to be a great scientist and therefore I will go to university and then I will do this and I will, whatever the thing is, the nesting is, okay.
These are high-level goals that you first make a high-level plan with the key waypoints, and then to get from each of those to the next, you make another plan, which is a subplan, and to get from a subgoal to the next subgoal, you have another plan. And that’s what I guess Peterson is referring to.
[01:42:25] Jake Orthwein: There’s an interesting wrinkle. He definitely sees that that doesn’t give you an account of where the purposes came from, which is part of why he is making this a religious critique of the rationalist tradition. Where do the purposes come from? And even now when he has this conversation with predictive processing people, he is always saying they’re not just predictions, they’re desires, they’re motivated.
And he also thinks about those maps, those motivation, action perception, schemas, as personalities. He’ll describe them as nested personalities rather than just nested goal structures to give some sense of the way that they’re embodied and embedded and so forth and motivated.
[01:43:01] David Chapman: I’m really glad to hear that. I love that he is challenging the predictive processing people on that basis, because that’s my first of many gripes with predictive processing is exactly that. There’s no account of you’re actually trying to do something.
[01:43:16] Jake Orthwein: Well, and so when he draws that nested diagram that would be drawn as hierarchical goals and plans to achieve those goals, he actually draws it as nested personalities culminating in the ideal personality, which would be like religious—of Christ as the most abstract general vision of what the perfect person is.
[01:43:47] David Chapman: I like the idea of these as personalities that is concordant with the mythical mode. I’m not happy with the fixed hierarchy or there being some ideal. That thought doesn’t work for me. But yeah.
[01:44:02] Jake Orthwein: I want, I wanna maybe just to relate this planning stuff to earlier stuff we talked about. So in sort of Heidegger terms, this critique that you just described that you and Phil were making of the planning tradition would be described as going from the idea that breakdown is a peripheral phenomenon to that breakdown is sort of the central phenomenon. And is that, is that fair to say?
[01:44:24] David Chapman: Or? I wouldn’t say it’s central. I’m just saying it, I, I would just say it’s extremely common. Okay. And also that it’s usually unproblematic breakdown in Heidegger. I guess I, I distinguish trouble from breakdown. So things go wrong all the time, but you can almost always repair trouble.
A breakdown occurs when you can’t see how to repair trouble. And then you step back and go into the rational mode and say, okay, objectively what is going on here? How can I understand this in order to get control and then I can restore the ordinary, normal unreflective mode of coping?
[01:45:06] Jake Orthwein: That’s, that’s always been confusing to me. ‘Cause I always thought it was sort of the other way, like the experience of breakdown is your rationalism fails, so you’ve gotta get embedded in the details. But I guess, I guess both, both happen. I think
[01:45:18] David Chapman: that’s, yeah, both of those do happen. I think my memory is that
[01:45:22] Jake Orthwein: you, you’re right about Heidegger. I just, I’m just saying that right?
[01:45:26] David Chapman: Well, I mean, that would assume that we’re in the rational mode most of the time and is one of Heidegger’s central insights is that we’re not, I mean, we’re most of the time, not in rational mode. That’s not how we actually do things.
[01:45:41] Jake Orthwein: Okay. So to, to keep drawing this connection. So there’s a passage from Francisco Varela that I’ve sent you. Francisco Varela being another father of embodied cognitive science. It’s in a book called Ethical Know-how. He also talks about this, these sort of emergent personalities that show up to cope with different parts of the world that we’ve learned to cope with. He talks about them as, as micro worlds and micro identities ‘cause the, the subject and object are co-constituting here.
So it’s like a sense of what the world is and what you are, are co-arising. Each time one of these, these things arises. But he says all the interesting stuff occurs in the, the hinges between micro worlds, which, which happens in breakdown because in some way that’s when you could say like, that’s when the world gets in. That’s when like the world is calling forth fresh action from you. And then that will then later become a sort of a habitual structure. But in, in that hinge, you’re, you’re generating fresh and a Buddhist frame, compassionate responsiveness to circumstance.
And then he goes on to describe this ethical vision of seeing the, he says virtual in the book. He means empty, basically nature of each of those micro worlds and micro identities, which allows you to always be doing the compassionate, responsive thing when it’s called for by, by circumstance. Interestingly, in Peterson, when I, and this is this, this clip is in my, in my film, which you’ve seen. He’s got this diagram on the board of one of these motivation action perception schemas.
And he’s like, well, hold on a minute. You don’t wanna identify with this condition of order because it can fall apart and it will fall apart. But you don’t actually even, even wanna identify with this one either, because when you get there, it will also fall apart. And that forces you to go up one layer and say, you want to identify with the willingness to continually undergo that cycle of repair and breakdown and repeating it over and over and over again.
And that’s where you get this idea that the topmost personality is this self-sacrificial Christ-like figure who is ongoingly willing to die and be reborn. And by that willingness transcends the the cyclical samsara-like character of death and rebirth.
[01:47:45] Jordan Peterson: What’s the ultimate order doing this? Willingness to do that? That’s the ultimate order, right? It’s order at a different level of analysis. And you can see that’s what’s represented in that idea. That’s what that idea means. That’s the Phoenix, right? The Phoenix is something that lives, ages and then allows itself to be consumed by fire and then reemerges and the old Phoenix gets old and burns and the new Phoenix reemerges.
[01:49:25] Jake Orthwein: It’s weird. I think he ends up in a very similar place, but through a different trajectory.
[01:49:30] David Chapman: That’s really interesting. Varela is influenced by more or less the same thread of Vajrayana Buddhism that I am. In Buddhism, there is the idea of a bodhisattva who is somebody who vows not to escape from samsara into nirvana, but rather to choose to be reborn in suffering over and over and over again in order to benefit others.
And in Zen, this is taken for granted, but there’s an interesting doctrine, which is to say the person I was one second ago is already dead. I am being reborn now. I’m a different person. As my world changes, as circumstances change, of course, my compassionate response to benefit others needs to change too and spontaneously. This is Lhundrub again. I’m going to be a different person. I’m going to be reborn as someone else in order to benefit new circumstances.
[01:50:38] Jake Orthwein: Yeah. I honestly think this is sort of—I mean in the Maps of Meaning book, when he is talking about this, he’s got a picture of these, this bodhisattva image that has a thousand nested ones behind it, probably where it goes back and back and back into the thangka. I mean, he explicitly talks about the bodhisattva rather than just Christ. It does. This is fun, man. I’m glad we’re finally—yeah.
[01:50:59] David Chapman: I’d be really happy to do this again if there’s more topics we could—
[01:51:04] Jake Orthwein: We totally should. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll just say thank you very much. It is a super huge pleasure to finally get to do this, and I look forward to many more, but this has been exactly what I hoped it would be.
[01:51:14] David Chapman: Great. I’m really glad to hear that. I’ve enjoyed it too. I think it’s going to be a great podcast. I’ve been planning this for several years and it keeps falling through for weird reasons, and it’s great to actually having done it.
[01:51:28] Jake Orthwein: Yes. Yes. It’s in the can now. Let’s not close the window before the upload saves. This is the last chance for the demons to intervene.
[01:51:36] David Chapman: So I will push the stop button and then it will continue uploading and—
So, female is analogized with emptiness, and you go from emptiness to form, which is analogized with male, and then to the—
Charlie: Right, so,
David: —non-duality that is—
Charlie: Yeah, so I wanted to pick up on that, and say that you’re starting with the feminine, in Buddhist tantra you’re starting with emptiness, and that is connected to wisdom. And then the male aspect: you’re connecting to form, to compassion. And then the non-duality: to the inseparability of both of those.
And interestingly, in our culture, fluidity is more female-coded. And I wonder now whether the move into meta-systematicity, and beyond highly systematized thinking, is actually difficult, and one of the ways that it’s prevented, possibly, is that for men, moving out of that rigidly defined, very easily legible way of being looks and feels like a move toward “more feminine.” And because things are so clearly segmented culturally and socially, it’s very difficult for guys to do that.
David: Yeah. It’s not a coincidence, presumably, that the tech industry has an awful lot of—a preponderance of—male participants.
Charlie: Mm-hmm.
David: Because this is basic gender psychology: that men are systematizers.
Charlie: Say more about meta-rationality, in terms of our social circumstances, and gender.
David: Well, I mean, before you can move into meta-rationality, you have to have mastered rationality. And to the extent that that is seen as masculine-coded, that could be an obstacle for women.
Empirically, in the research done in the 1970s and '80s, many more men moved into what Piaget originally called “stage four,” which is the rational, systematic way of being, and that actually caused huge trouble at the time. There’s a famous book by the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who was a researcher in adult developmental theory, called In a Different Voice. I read it at the time it came out, which must have been early eighties? I thought it was brilliant then. Now it is hard to know why it seemed brilliant. Basically she just rejected the whole paradigm of rationality being a stage. And said: okay, maybe for men that’s how it works. But for women, there’s a different series of stages. And this was seen at the time as a breakthrough in feminist theory. Now the ways that people understand gender politics, that would be unacceptable; to say there’s separate hierarchies for men and for women. But that was very exciting at the time.
But in her system, women never got to rationality! That just was, that’s a male thing. So, because meta-rationality does require rationality as a prerequisite, in terms of gender one would expect that one would find fewer women being meta-rational.
Charlie: Hmm.
David: However! As you’ve pointed out, there is then a move away from the rigidity that is masculinely coded, and in a direction which might be understood as toward more of a center position, a non-duality of the genders, at the meta-rational level. So maybe once women have accomplished rationality, which certainly a great many do, it may very well be that it’s then easier for them to move to the meta-rational stance.
I don’t know. The problem is, this whole field, as an academic discipline, was abandoned in the wake of Carol Gilligan’s work! It just became too politically hot to handle. And so we have no empirical data on any of this. We’re just kind of guessing on a basis of anecdote.
Charlie: Mm-hmm. So the whole field originally was centering around a relationship with rationality; and it came out of, and in conversation with, the rational tradition. I came at it via systematicity rather than rationality. And for a long time I actually thought of the field as being about systematicity; which is strongly connected to and related with rationality, but is not the same. And it seems to me that if we understand the stages in relation to systematicity, not only in relation to rationality, that there’s a lot more space there for understanding, for example, “stage four” in Kegan’s terms; understanding that as being about a relationship with systems.
And when you look at it from that perspective, there are many ways in which a female-coded relationship with systematicity could be drawn. I’m thinking about some of my female clients and how a lot of the work that we do together is about systematizing emotional experience, systematizing boundaries and perspectives.
David: Yeah. Piaget was a cognitivist, so he thought rationality was what was there. I think Kegan, a big part of his contribution was in extending that to systematicity in the relational and emotional domains.
And my most recent post was about the fact that tech people (who tend to be male) tend to systematize in the work domain before they learn to systematize in the emotional and relational domains, and then they need to catch up.
Charlie: Mm-hmm.
David: And it’s not surprising that for women, they might do the relational and emotional domains first. And I gave the example of high level sales executives, who do have a very systematic understanding of relationship. And a lot of those people are women. That’s a much more evenly split.
Charlie: Hmm. I didn’t realize that.
David: It would depend on the industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was disproportionately women.
Kings, or more generally a secular ruling class, hold authority over the public sphere. They claim to exercise their power nobly. They may consider that’s due either to innate character, strenuous personal development, or both. That would justify a legitimate monopoly on the use of violence, and authority to dictate the forms of economic and public life.
This typically leads to an uneasy power balance. The two classes need each other, but also are perpetually in competition. Priests provide popular support to the aristocracy by declaring that they rule by divine right—or proclaim that the gods are angry with aristocratic actions, so virtue demands opposing them. Priests reassure aristocrats that they, personally, will have a good afterlife—or warn of a bad one when they don’t do what priests say they should. Priests depend on the aristocracy for most of their funding, for protection, and for favorable legislation. The aristocracy can increase or decrease that, or threaten to.
It’s extremely difficult for either class to displace the other entirely. Things generally seem to go better when they cooperate. Especially when priests are, in fact, reasonably virtuous, and the nobility are reasonably noble. Otherwise, they may collude with each other against everyone else.
Sometimes, though, one side or the other is dominant, and subordinates or even eliminates the other class.
Theocracy, in which priests usurp the role of secular rulers, does not go well. Priests try to increase their authority by inventing new demands of virtue. In the absence of secular restraining power, there is no limit to this. Most people do not want to be saints. When priests seize secular power, they unceasingly punish everyone for trivial or imaginary moral infractions. This is the current situation in Iran, for example. It’s bad for everyone except the priests. I expect it is unsustainable in the long run. Eventually there comes a coup, a revolt, a revolution, and the priests get defenestrated. (That’s a fancy word for “thrown out of a window.”)
Secular rulers taking full control of religion also does not go well. A classic example was Henry VIII. He rejected the Pope’s supreme religious authority and seized control of the Church. He confiscated its lands and wealth, dissolved its institutions, and summarily executed much of its leadership. He was able to do that through a combination of personal charisma; the power and wealth that came with kingship; and the flagrant corruption of the Church itself, which deprived it of broad popular support.
After clobbering the Church, Henry’s reign, unconstrained by virtue, was arbitrary, brutal, and extraordinarily self-interested. Economic disaster and political chaos followed.
Henry was succeeded by his daughter Mary, England’s first Queen Regnant. She used her father’s tactics to reverse his own actions. She restored the Church’s wealth and power through brutal and arbitrary executions. For this, she was known as “Bloody Mary.”
She was succeeded by her younger sister Elizabeth I. Elizabeth re-reversed Mary’s actions. She established the new Church of England, designed as a series of pragmatic compromises between Catholic and Protestant extremists.
Elizabeth was, on the whole, a wise, just, prudent, and noble ruler—which demonstrates that the archetype of a Good King has no great respect for sex or gender. Likewise, the reign of “Bloody Mary” demonstrates that women are not necessarily kinder, gentler rulers than men.
How modernity ended, and took nobility down with it
Allegorically, archetypically, such colorful history can inform our understanding of current conundrums. You might review what I’ve just said, and consider what it might say about American public life in 2025.
Now I will sketch some more recent, perhaps more obviously relevant history.
On the meaningness.com site, I have explained how modernity ended, with two counter-cultural movements in the 1960s-80s. Those were the leftish hippie/anti-war movement and the rightish Evangelical “Moral Majority” movement. Both opposed the modernist secular political establishment, on primarily religious grounds. Both movements more-or-less succeeded in displacing the establishment.
Revolutions can be noble. I think the 1776 American Revolution was noble. It was noble in part because the revolutionaries respected the wise and just use of legitimate authority. They accepted power, and ruled nobly after winning.
The American counter-cultural revolution two hundred years later refused to admit the legitimacy of secular authority. Its leaders instituted a rhetorical regime of permanent revolution. For the past several decades, successful American politicians have claimed to oppose the government, and say they will overthrow it when elected; and, once elected, they say they are overthrowing it, throughout their tenure.
This oppositional attitude makes it rhetorically impossible to state an aspiration to nobility. You can’t uphold the wise and just use of power if you refuse to admit that any government can be legitimate. Nobility, then, was cast as the false, illusory, and discarded ideology of the illegitimate establishment. In the mythic mode, we could say that everyone became a regicide: a king-killer. After a couple of decades of denigration, nearly everyone forgot what nobility even meant, or why it mattered, or that it had ever existed outside of fantasy fiction.
Secular authority in the absence of nobility
Secular authority persisted, nonetheless. What alternative claim could one make for taking it? There are two.
First, there is administrative competence. This was an aspect of nobility during the modern era, which ended in the 1970s. “Modernity,” in this sense, means shaping society according to systematic, rational norms. Developed nations in the twentieth century depended on enormously intricate economic and bureaucratic systems that require rational administration. One responsibility of secular authority is keeping those system running smoothly.
Both counter-cultures rejected systematic rationality, as a key ideological commitment. However, it was obvious to elites, inside and outside government, that airplanes need safety standards, taxes must be collected, someone has to keep the electric power on. A promise of adequate management was key to institutional support from outside elites during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. That kept a new establishment in power.
However, it lacked popular appeal. Managerialism is not leadership, which is another aspect of nobility—one that more people more readily recognize. And, as modernity faded into the distant past, beyond living memory, later generations failed to notice that technocratic competence matters: because we will freeze or starve without electricity.
Accordingly, virtue has displaced competence in claims to legitimate authority. Initially, this came more from the right than from the left. The 1980s Moral Majority movement aimed for secular power, justified by supposedly superior virtue. Some American Christians explicitly aimed for theocratic rule.
However, for whatever reasons, the left came to dominate virtue claims instead. They gradually established a de facto priesthood: a class of experts who could tell everyone else what is or isn’t virtuous. Initially it claimed authority only over private and communal virtue; but increasingly it extended that to regulate public affairs as well. In some eyes, it began to resemble a theocracy. It did increasingly display the theocratic characteristics that I described earlier. And, in punishing too many people for too many, increasingly dubious moral infractions, it overreached; and seems now to have been overthrown.
Regicide and defenestration, OK; but then what?
This religious analogy was pointed out by some on the right, fifteen years ago. I think there is substantial truth in it. However, I think they are terribly wrong about the implications for action. I’ll discuss that in my next post.
If the ruling class is neither noble nor even competent, but can claim only private virtue, then metaphorical regicide (or defenestration for the priesthood) is indeed called for. That’s justified whether their claims to virtue are accurate or not. Whichever opinion about trans pronouns you consider obviously correct, holding that opinion does not justify a broad claim for secular authority.
But… now what? Perhaps there is some noble prince in waiting, biding his time, cloaked in obscurity, like Aragorn, rightful King of Gondor?
More likely, some commoners will need to reclaim, re-learn, and rework nobility. As did Frodo, son of Drogo, “a decent, respectable hobbit who was partial to his vittles.”
Maybe… that should be you! As I’ve pointed out before, you should be a God-Emperor. Maybe now is a good time to get started on that?
Nobility is the wise and just use of power. Nobility is the aspiration to manifest glory for the benefit of others. Nobility is using whatever abilities we have in service of others. Nobility is seeking to fulfill our in-born human potential, and to develop all our in-born human qualities.
By “virtue,” I mean roughly the currently popular understanding of “ethics.” Or, it would be more accurate to use the slightly archaic word “morals.” Whereas nobility is a quality of public actions, virtue is a matter of private life. Virtue inheres in having good mental contents: you think, feel, and say good things. It manifests also as qualities in private relationships—“private” including one’s friends, family, and immediate community.
Nobility is not virtue. It does not require virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don’t always coincide. You can be a morally bad person and yet act nobly. You can be a morally outstanding person and act ignobly, through cowardice, ignorance, or incompetence. Virtuous actions are not necessarily or typically noble, although they may be.
Neither nobility nor virtue are intrinsic or immutable character traits. They are developed through intention and effort. Developing either does not necessarily develop the other.
Nobility does not require authority or position. Power is capability for action. Authority and position can give power, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. Nobility is a quality that anyone can possess, regardless of position. We can all aspire to nobility. We all can be noble. We all are noble sometimes. We can aspire to be noble more often, and more effectively.
Nobility as the proper matter of politics
Nobility is a topic that I’ve been wanting to write about for twenty years now. I have an enormous quantity of notes and sketchy drafts. It’s become clear that I will never write that up, because there’s too much of it. I am hoping that this new format—which I’m calling “radio sermonettes” to poke friendly fun at myself—will make it possible to chop the topic up into bite-sized pieces, to make key parts of what I have to say available. These may also be more accessible for you than my usual long-winded, somewhat academic-sounding book chapters.
Nobility is the essence of politics. Nobility concerns the right use of power, which is the proper matter of politics.
And yet, nobility is a temporarily lost possibility. At the same time it is the essence of politics, it is not political in the current sense.
Nothing I will say is concerned with what is the correct form of government. In particular, I am not advocating an aristocracy; that is an absurd anachronism. I am not advocating any other sort of autocracy, or authoritarianism.
Nor will I discuss right versus left; this is not about that. Nor do I advocate political centrism. Much less will I discuss any specific political issue, nor political parties, elections, or whatever is the current scandal in which someone said something they weren’t supposed to.
Rather, I will discuss what nobility is; how we lost it; and how we might restore it—both as individuals and as a society.
I will discuss the history of how nobility was lost. And because the form of nobility that last existed is no longer adequate for current conditions, I believe we need to construct a new conception of nobility, a new practice of nobility. As a practical matter, I will suggest activities informal groups or organizations may employ to promote the development of nobility.
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