> _K: So we were going to pick up today with mystery, but first you wanted to add something you feel like we missed last time._ R: Yeah. Something about my aversion to spirituality being related to the explicit verbal, written, legible bias of this world. Books, lectures, guided meditations — all of that has its place. What draws me is some distinction I feel between _about_ and _from_. I don’t want to write _about_ spirituality. I want to write _from_ a lived stance of spiritual reality. I don’t want to talk _about_ energy or essence. I want everything I say and do to come _from_ coherent essential energetic embodiment. I don’t want my life to be _about_ the sacred. I want to live _from_ sacredness without consciously thinking about it or having an agenda for it. A big part of my current ick toward spirituality is that it has so much *aboutness* to it, and so vanishingly little *fromness*. > _K: That feels like the — I know you don’t like this idea — but the whole, ‘you know your spirituality is working if it turns you into a normie’ thing._ R: Yeah, I really don’t like that one. To the extent that it’s true, I don’t think it’s true in any of the ways that people talk about it. Or not the meanings it gets recruited for in tweets and substacks and expensive meditation retreats. Hillman has this great quote—something like: ‘all the great teachings say that in the beginning you’re simple, in the middle you’re complicated, and in the end you’re simple again. The problem is that the people listening to these teachings are simple in the beginning, and they think, “Oh good, I’ll skip that middle bit.”’ That sums up a lot of it. Like, if I hear one more entrepreneurship-as-spiritual-path person talk about the ox-herding pictures — you know the ox-herding pictures? > _K: From Zen, right?_ R: Yeah. These Zen pictures that show a version of the spiritual path, and the final one is called Return to the Marketplace. > _K: Ah_ R: And people cite this as evidence of, like, this very Protestant Western idea that if your spiritual path has worked, you’ll go back to your job, back to engaging in the marketplace, back to being indistinguishable from any other, I don’t know, architect or cashier or CFO or whatever. That you return to the marketplace. But the Buddha in that final picture? It’s Hotei, the Laughing Buddha. He’s this itinerant, wandering holy man who cheers everyone up and gives them gifts from his magic bag, brings wisdom and happiness, and moves on to the next village. Kind of Santa Clause vibes, fat happy guy giving presents from his magic sack. The marketplace is literally a marketplace, a big public square where all the people come and go to buy and sell things. I would find it more hilarious if it was less frustrating. People using a wandering gift-giving mystic as evidence that the spiritual path should ideally lead you to plugging yourself back into the economy to create shareholder value. This especially pisses me off in our current reality, where the incumbent world-system is holding itself up by destroying human wellbeing and life and meaning and the environments that all of us rely on to survive, and that reality relies on to unfold further. This idea that if you’re spiritually realized, you’ll just… go back to participating in and holding up that system, but at least _you’ll_ be all joyful and enlightened about it and not feel a need to do anything about it. I find it nauseating. > _K: You mentioned aboutness and fromness. For you, fromness doesn’t mean doing the normal life thing — wife, job, kids, house — but doing it in a more wholesome, awakened way. For you it means living a different way?_ R: It can mean either, if that’s the thing that naturally comes through you. I don’t want to get into that detour, that’s a whole thing. We’ll probably end up accidentally clarifying it as we go. I will briefly say that I think people put *way* too much weight on existing cultural templates when this comes up. Like, a "return to normal life" somehow has to mean the things that have come to look normal over the past few decades. For me, there’s just something important about the way that — huh. I think I just caught myself. This might be important. Aboutness is — fuck — this isn’t true, or is only contingently true. It doesn’t have to be true. So I associate aboutness — talking about something, writing about it, making your life about it — with abstraction, with ‘meta’-coded stuff like all the meta-crisis, meta-cognition, meta-modern, meta-tribe, meta-everything; very left hemisphere, a lot of distance. Trying to back away from everything, become a view from nowhere, see everything clearly by being outside of it. Basically, it’s the easiest thing in the world to see and talk about something. The hardest thing to actually live it — to actually participate in it and live it so dedicatedly that you _become_ it. Whereas fromness is, yeah, almost a functional prerequisite of fromness that you’ve _become_ the thing that earlier you’d only ever talked about or thought about. There’s a Basho haiku somewhere, let me see if I can find it. Here it is: “How admirable A man seeing lightning and not satori.” Seeing lightning _from_ satori, not seeing lightning and making it _about_ satori. That evokes this whole complex for me. A couple of things are true here. One is that, yes, talking about things is easy, so almost no one who talks about something has actually embodied it to any real degree, let alone become it. It’s a numbers game, the market is flooded with people who talk _about_ this stuff, there’s zero barrier to entry, and people who have never felt the thing can’t tell the difference. And another factor is that by the time you’ve *become* something, it’s boring and almost too invisibly obvious to bear talking _about_ it. "Those who speak don't know, those who know don't speak." That vibe. Because of that situation — thousands of voices talking _about_ these topics, and a within a rounding error of zero percent of them having _become_ what they’re talking about — because of that, I’ve been blind to a possibility before I started talking here: the possibility that a spiritual figure could speak, write, act, live _both_ from and about what they’re teaching. This is rare, I think. And hard to find. It’s quiet, and everything around it is loud. But either way, what matters to me most is fromness — becoming the thing that I’ve so far mostly only seen or felt the rightness of, and only embodied in little strands here and there... My aversion to spirituality may be my perception that if I keep going that way, it would mean talking, writing, acting _about_ spirituality, which I’ve unconsciously assumed precludes the possibility of _becoming_ the truths that have claims on me. Not sure where I sit on that right now. I’ll need to sit with it. My internal feeling is that I want to not really orient around aboutness at all— only fromness. And if aboutness naturally emerges from fromness, cool. But I don’t want to orient either toward or away from that at all. I just want it out of my consciousness. > _K: I have some questions, but I feel like that’s a wrap for you. Is that topic closing?_ R: For now, yeah. It needs time to sit. Already too much thinking about it, I need time to let what’s stirred up settle in. > _K: So want to start with mystery now?_ R: Do you mind if we take five? I feel like a lot just moved. I need to let it settle. ... > *K: All right. Mystery. You surprised me at the end last time. Our talk on your aversion to spirituality. When you said that you wanted to talk about mystery, you meant the genre. Not the ineffable.* R. To be fair, I mean both. But more so the genre conventions. Yeah. And what it reveals about the ineffable. > *K: Where do you want to start?* R. The natural state of all things is truth. >*K: I really want you to just go into pulpy genre stuff now.* R. I feel a little stuck on not wanting to give any spoilers for specific mysteries. Can you think of any popular mystery stories you already know and love? >*K: Let me Google mysteries to get my brain going. Does Gone Girl count?* R. For sure. >*K: Knives Out? Memento?* R. Great. So I'll spoil those if I need to spoil anything. This may have all had too much preamble. I think the mystery is pretty simple, actually. To me, a bad mystery story is one where things are hidden and revealed just for the sake of it. Just to keep the reader off balance or interested. The hidden and revealed facts don't actually add up to much. I got maybe halfway through some book, *The Paris Apartment*, I think, that was a lot like this. To the point where there were some facts that were irrelevant to the mystery, at least as far as I got, and were known to most of the characters, and didn't change anything. But they were hidden from the reader for a while, just so the reveals could spice up some otherwise dull chapters. I hated that. And some mysteries are incredibly well-constructed, but have no depth. The phrase puzzle box is coming to mind. It's just a shiny object, a technically well-constructed arrangement of facts and events, and weightless cognitive flittery. >*K: Is flittery a word?* R. Maybe? You get it. >*K: What I'm hearing is that you want all the hiding and revealing to be about more than just hiding and revealing. I get the image of an amusement park, and you don't respect stories that are just ups and downs for the sake of ups and downs.* R. That's fair, yeah. >*K: So a good mystery does what? What's the secret sauce?* R. I can't give a system or formula or anything, but basically things are hidden so that when they're revealed, or if they're revealed, you see them and understand them in a way you wouldn't have if you had just known them from the start. They ask you to understand reality one way, and then once that is set up, to put something new in there, and watch that whole way of understanding turn to dust. Or they create a frame, a pedestal, a place to present something to fix your attention to some answer. And they keep it empty until your attention is wrapped enough to really see what's there. *Gone Girl*, for example. We see the marriage and disappearance one way, and then we find out she's alive and a psycho, and suddenly we understand the whole marriage very differently. All the information we'd been given up to that point suddenly means something very different, and we can see it. If the facts were simply available to us at the beginning, it might be an interesting but forgettable story, or a bit of an unrelatable one. But the way things are hidden and revealed is designed to craft our attention, to shape us into someone who can perceive acutely the things that are about to be revealed. *Memento* is huge for this. If we watch it in chronological order, if we know all of the facts from the beginning, it's a very, very different story, and one where we would feel very, very differently about the characters on a scene-by-scene basis. There's something about the immersion in the world created by hiding things. It educates us, sharpens us, deepens us. >*K: Starting to see where this is going, I think.* R. I think so. A well-structured mystery prepares us to see truth, to feel why it matters, to understand and perceive it in a way that makes it stand out against a backdrop of other truths. And a well-made mystery shows us something about how dangerous and disruptive truth is to the world at large, the people in it, their projects and desires and so on. It lets us in on how lies allow everything to function a certain way, and certain things can't function when truth is present. >*K: I hear this in the abstract, but you got any concrete examples?* R. In *Memento*, the main character is a good man, an honorable man, avenging his wife's death, an agent of justice despite his affliction. Except that he isn't, obviously. He's a monster. But he gets to hide that truth from himself because his life doesn't work if he knows it. In *Gone Girl*, they stay married at the end, and the few people who know the truth find this insane. A lot of viewers find it insane. There's a complex piece there where their relationship makes no sense to anyone who knows the truth, so they have to hide the truth to be left alone. But also it makes perfect sense, we just have to adjust ourselves to a truer view of who these two people are, what they're like, what's important to them. And if those things were revealed in-world, it would be really inconvenient for them. Is this making sense? >*K: I think so. I want to connect this back to spirituality. I can feel it coming.* R. The phrase that comes up is something like, your soul is a perfectly constructed mystery, and that mystery is your path. >*K: Not quite what I expected, actually.* R. In my view, the soul of a person, or of a place, or an object, a world, whatever. I picture it as this insanely multidimensional dynamic geometry outside of time. The total fullness of who and what you are, both inside and outside of time. Your ego and body are just one small part of your soul. One small cross-section of it. You know cymatics, where they sprinkle some sand on a surface and then play a particular sound or frequency, and the sand moves into the shape being made by that frequency? And then they change the note and the sand all snaps into a new shape? >*K: I think I've seen that. Yeah.* ![[595d6ce2-2eef-4a07-959f-ee152ffd71a8_400x360.gif]] R. So the shape the sand is making is just one cross-section of the sphere that the sound is actually creating. Emanating out from where the sound is made. That, to me, is the basic simplified dynamic of the soul. The soul is the note that's being played, and the visible part of your life is just the cross-section of sand that makes that frequency visible. It isn't the frequency itself, but it is moving to show and reveal the shape of the frequency, or at least of some part of the frequency. Except in this case, it's not a 3D vibration creating a two-dimensional shape. It's like an impossibly 10,000-dimensional hypermandala made of form and energy and essence and consciousness and light. And it's not playing one note. It's a complex song that moves and changes. And your life takes shape within that soul, or your true life is that soul, but the visible section we tend to think of as our lives and ourselves are just shaped by that vibration in a limited cross-section. And one way of thinking about one dimension of the spiritual path is that you go from identifying with the sand to identifying with the song. >*K: Connect that back to mystery for me.* R. Right, I'm going full schizo. It's fine. I think the simple picture will emerge. Basically the 10,000 dimensional hyper-mandala song that is your soul, it's constructed like a mystery. You don't start out knowing who you are, what your life is about, why these things are happening to you. You don't know why your childhood was like that, why your teachers treated you that way, why the exact right friends came into your life at the exact right moment, why the exact wrong woman showed up in your life at the exact wrong moment, why you got sick, why you got stuck, why your house burned down, why you felt so drawn to pick up jujitsu, why you were repelled by Christianity but kept feeling drawn to nature animism. Or vice versa. Every single piece of it is just mystery, perfectly constructed mystery. There's something that you're supposed to see, something that you've been given to understand. Not to understand in a *speaking about* way, but in a *speaking from* way; not from meta, but from infra. There’s something you’ve been given to *know* that’s unique to the shape of you, you specifically. Yeah, it's not a thing you're supposed to understand explicitly or cognitively. It's something you're supposed to *become* through the process of living exactly the frequency that your life is shaped by and shaped within. If you could skip to the end, zoom out, see what your soul is about, what your life is, what you've been given to ken, you'd miss the point. Like a mystery that you check the Wikipedia page to find the answer for, instead of actually reading or watching it, instead of actually investing yourself in it and allowing it to move you the way that it moves you over time, step by step, bit by bit, always clarifying, revealing, hiding, revealing again, misleading, so that it can lead you where it needs to go. Right, it's the *aboutness* and *fromness* again, seeing versus becoming. We're so greedy to know about ourselves and our lives and our souls, to see and explicitly understand what we are, how things end, to control how it goes, the way that we think it should go from any given point in the song. But all of that is beside the point. Worse, it short circuits the *becoming* process. If you had the twists and turns of a mystery spoiled for you, something is short circuited about what it was trying to show you. You can understand it in the explicit aboutness mode, you can get a bumper sticker understanding; but the *becoming*, the *fromness* mode, that potential has evaporated. The soul of the thing has been interrupted. >*K: The last couple conversations, feel like they're crystallizing for me. Mind if I could try out what I'm seeing and you can cross check me on it?* R. Please do. >*K: Your life is all about the religious impulse or the soul. And when you step into places that are also supposed to be about that, you see them as doing the aboutness thing, which you see as short circuiting the actual becoming process. And the becoming seems to be the most important thing to you, being shaped by your soul into the thing that you've been given to be.* > >*And you're like terrified of getting into situations that would short circuit that, that would interfere with either your soul's ability to keep shaping you or your ability to keep getting shaped by soul. I get the image of the sand on a vibrating surface again and like someone putting their hand on the vibrating plate to muffle the vibration so that the sand mandala falls apart; or somehow spilling water on the sand and it gets too heavy and lumpy to really move with the vibration while it changes.* R. Yeah, those images feel pretty correct. >*K: And last time, you ended by naming what you've been standing up for. This stance that feels important to you, where constant weird evolution is allowed without getting trapped. Am I right in connecting that to staying with the song? Like allowing the sand mandala to keep moving, allowing the song to play at full volume without dampening it?* R. Exactly that, yes. Without interfering with it in general. Part of my suspicion of the meditation traditions I talk about, the whole "our ideas about the psyche affect the psyche" piece, it's that I perceive a lot of these traditions to be trying to play their own song next to yours, layering their bass notes under your song to subtly, or actually not at all subtly, reshape your song to be closer to theirs, to propagate their own song more through you, recruiting you to play their song instead of yours. And it feels like a type of monocropping to me, like pausing or dampening the vibrant evolution in favor of stabilizing the system. Which has a role. For a lot of people, the natural frequency of their soul is so chaotically interfered-with already, by culture, by family, by trauma, societal expectations, and all the rest. They're already a chaotic thrash of sand bouncing shapelessly around the plate. Having a tradition to lend you their bass notes and stabilize something, that's valuable. Life-saving. It serves a necessary function. But when it starts to interfere with the song that would otherwise naturally unfold into fuller expression of someone's life and soul, that's a problem for me. And when people lose faith in their own song, and just hand themselves over to some other song, allow themselves and their resources and their souls to be recruited to that instead of unfolding what's in them, that feels tragic to me. >*K: Because their unique mystery is getting messed up.* R. Among other things, yeah, the way your soul has been structured in time, the journey you can move through that shapes your understanding and becoming, it gets all gummed up with exogenous materia. Something is missing, not just from you, but from the universe. Because every single soul, every single 10,000 dimensional hyper-mandala song, they all exist together. They create a harmony. And when song after song after song gets interrupted, reconfigured, some things go quieter, some things go louder, it's not just individuals who are losing something very precious that they could become. The universe itself is losing something very precious that it could become. Like the forest we talked about last time. A forest with maybe a half dozen creatures in it, or half dozen types of creatures in it, is much more stable. But it's not what that forest was meant to become. And yes, there's risk in becoming. But if you can't take that risk, something is missing, not just from you, but from the world. There's this animated Superman show that's going the past couple years, and I'm getting a line from that in my head. There's some big moment where Lois Lane says, "love is not for cowards." I think a lot of this is extremely connected to love for me. I don't want to get too into it. I think we'll get into it if we talk about beauty and love.later on, but this is connected. To really live your song, to really go into and trust the mystery that you've been given, is a type of deep existential love. It's where all love comes from. It's where the more human and relational level type of love leads us if we follow the thread deeper down. It's an echo of this deep existential love that is, quite frankly, a love from and for our own soul and the world soul. Love is not for cowards. >*K: Can I psychoanalyze you again?* R. Go for it. >*K: All of this is reminding me you've talked before about having a very low sense that you're allowed to exist.* R. Yeah, my default sense of right to exist is shockingly low. >*K: And you're also one of the more sensitive people I know. Sensitive in the sense of an instrument or how a physical material can be hypersensitive to the conditions around it. Like a moth's antenna is sensitive to smells from miles and miles away, or how a guitar string is sensitive to slight changes in temperature and tension.* R. Yeah, conditions affect me pretty strongly, I wouldn't argue with that. >*K: The question for me is something like, is the interference really a problem for other people? Or would having a tradition play bass notes under their song just not affect their songs at all, besides providing a helpful structure?* R. The implicit question here sounds like, "what am I defending," right? Like, I'm the only one who's actually affected by all the noise and perturbations getting in the way of how my soul expresses. No one else even notices. Something like that? >*K: Definitely not that you're the only one. I'm a bit like this too, and I know some of our mutual friends are as well. I think a lot of people are. But yeah, that we are in a bubble where this feels like a bigger problem than it is in the world at large. And that you specifically, even within that bubble, have more problems with it than most.* R. That feels correct. Something in me both relaxes and feels some embarrassment when you say that. On the one hand, that does clarify for me that there is something extremely worth protecting here. The souls who are just extremely sensitive instruments in a world where there's a constant, endless baseline of interference that others don't even notice, it's worth setting a strong boundary there, that we deserve to exist and need certain protections to exist well. And no one else is going to stop energetically polluting the whole field, so we've got to figure things out for and with each other. It also feels important to note what I just said, that if one person's song gets interfered with, and this happens over and over again across thousands or millions of people's songs, that it's not just those people who are losing something. The world is losing something. So when these hypersensitive people, hypersensitive instruments, when their songs are just undergoing constant interference, something precious is being lost to the world in general. It's not just that we need to protect these people for their sake, it's that the world is missing something without them and without their songs. On the other hand, I am noticing in this part of the conversation that my tone and strategy are some version of, like, stepping into a loud-as-fuck town square and giving a speech about how the constant hum of refrigerators, power lines, and electronic devices is way too loud. It's a ridiculous move, maybe. Like, the people in the loud square aren't the ones who are bothered by the hum of the fridge. >*K: I don't want to overemphasize what I'm perceiving here, or say that it's just you being neurotic or anything. I hear a lot of value in your sense of defending the right of souls to unfold the way that each of us has a big weird evolving soul that we're meant to become, and that the process of becoming it is constantly interfered with and sabotaged. All of that feels quite real. But do you also do the Jeremiad prophetic register thing, crying out about a set of problems that I think just aren't problems for a lot of the people you're crying out to?* R. For sure. I can feel the runaway energy there. I start getting caught up and inflating the issue, making it less clear, or adding some emotional register that doesn't actually help. >*K: Hmm. Where are we? I feel a bit lost.* R. I'm drifting. Yeah. >*K: I want to clarify, just personally, that I think you have a lot to say that's really clear and helpful. Something there feels crisp and fresh and true a lot of the time, and when I hear static creeping in, I want to point it out to you.* > >*Something about preserving and sharpening the clarity of what you see feels important. I want to see it too, and I want to see it clearly, and I want to see it in a way where I don't confuse your baggage for an integral part of the message.* R. Me too. I appreciate that. There's something I'm feeling here, some energetic signature I get when I'm in the baggage, in the static. The inflate-deflate thing. It feels brown, dry, clumpy, but also staticky and airy. It's too earthy and too airy. Dust cloud. Pigpen. >*K: Hygiene comes to mind.* R. Yeah, hygiene. Pigpen needs a shower. I need a shower, but I get dirty again so fast. It's some button in me that just flips on the dust cloud and starts it building and building. What is that? >*K: I feel a lot of fear when you go into it, and exhaustion. Tired and scared.* R. And tired of being scared. >*K: Yes, wrung out. When you talk like that, I feel like I've given everything I had to just living with fear and wringing it out, but there's still more, and I'm just, yeah, exhausted, terrified.* R. Terrified. Helpless. That's in here too, for sure. Like I've been doing so much for so long, and used all my reserves, and still there's terror. So it all feels useless. Why keep trying? >*K: Learned helplessness.* R. Yeah, I can't keep trying, and also I have to keep trying. Oh! It's a double bind. Gas and brakes. >*K: My whole body just relaxed, I'm not totally sure why.* R. I feel like the universe just exhaled. Oof, yeah, it's a double bind. I can't keep going, and I have to keep going. But I actually don't have to do any of that. Double binds are workable, once I notice them. >*K: What's it like to get free? To step out of the trap there?* R. It's this thing I've described before. That time I was [Redacted Anecdote]. Basically I create a hell realm for myself by thinking I'm not okay unless I get help from someone, and then pouring all of my energy into trying to pull help from places I won't get help. When I could also just accept that I can do this thing for myself if I stop wasting energy on perpetuating the hell realm and its helplessness physics. Everything relaxes when I put the responsibility fully on myself. >*K: It sounds lonely though.* R. Yeah, I don't think I know yet how to take that kind of responsibility while remaining in connection. That's where I get stuck. Triggering me back to the hell realm thing. >*K: From outside the static hell realm, does it feel like anything is clearer?* R. Coherence. Coherence is important. And coherence comes from becoming. And the only thing to become is my own soul. And I can only do that if I'm free to open to the actual process of my soul without interference. Our world has, in so many ways, lost coherence. It thinks coherence and integrity are myths, even, or saintly unattainable things. What I'm standing for is the importance of *becoming* in a world that thinks explicit understanding is good enough. Because *becoming* is the only thing that brings coherence. And if our world doesn't become coherent, soon, the incoherence that no one can avoid seeing anymore will keep winning. And so much that matters will be lost. So much that matters has already been lost. The feeling here is that even if no one helps me, even if no one joins me, even if people deem me unworthy of the resources and respect and care I would need to have a home and health and a wife and family and good work, even if I'm cut off from all of those as a result of choosing coherence and becoming, I'm still going to choose it. Because I get to choose that for myself. I don't need anyone's support or approval. Though that would certainly make it a lot easier. For me, and, I think, for the world. >*K: We can wrap there for today. But I hear some fire in your voice around the resources, home, health, approval stuff. If you feel like there's more to say there, I'd like to pick it up next time.* R. Maybe. I think that stuff triggers my Jeremiad mode, which makes it either the worst or best thing to talk about next. Great practice for staying grounded in myself and my own coherence, but also high likelihood of falling out of it over and over. >*K: Great. Let's see how it feels next time.*