1. Natalie Cargill on Olively, an AI app that rewrites your texts to your partner and decodes theirs back to you. Cargill very persuasively makes the case that AI-mediated communication is helping people avoid the real work of attachment repair. I think the reality is more nuanced -- when the AI has the right information it can do more than erode our coping abilities, and help facilitate real therapeutic insight. The full argument will require more than a blurb. Just! Stop! Communicating! — Natalie Cargill

2. Erik Hoel diagnoses 21st century cultural stagnation as overfitting — algorithmic feeds and hyper-discriminatory measurement converge culture on narrow in-distribution outputs, with the AI em-dash tic as a canonical small-scale instance and “no better marker of culture’s unoriginality than everyone talking about culture’s unoriginality.” Big Erik Hoel fan - his book on the nature of consciousness, The World Behind the World, is a must read. Our Overfitted Century — Erik Hoel

3. Ben Recht: p-values are a regulatory mechanism, not a measurement device. Recht takes this view maybe a bit further than I would, but viewing statistics as a mechanism for technocratic decision making seems largely correct. This view is one reason I’m so fixated on better evaluation of randomized control trials, the most load bearing method we have in policy decision-making. Milton Friedman’s p-values — Ben Recht

At this point it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins. I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information from, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision making. I can see second by second real time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial.

Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims (2) claims linked to evidence (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence (4) continuous updating with new data.

What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that— scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point most of what’s missing is a fully end to end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system.

What’s now possible

The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them.

Document understanding

The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I'm confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest.

Hypothesis level extraction

There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized control trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2.

Forensic audit

A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future.

Methodological review

This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3.

Reproducibility and robustness

Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices.

Synthesis

This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on.

Continuous updating

There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task.

When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built.

The stakeholders are ready

The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality.

Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress has shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience.

A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come.

A pilot proposal

The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test.

Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data.

Key Hypothesis

Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate.

Secondary Hypotheses

1. Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures.

2. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs.

3. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige.

If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer.

Why this is informative regardless of outcome

If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports.

Conclusion

The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agrees, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that's the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What's been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That's what I'm proposing to build.

1. Elliott Ash et al. test whether AI agents can re-derive a social-science paper’s tables from text + raw data alone — this is interesting because most reproducibility agents use code as well. Seems like there’s an academic posting about an experiment like this about once a week. Can AI agents reproduce social science papers from text + data alone? — Elliott Ash

2. The argument from Jacobin that AI data center moratoria are a self-defeating Left tactic, since pausing US compute relocates development offshore, raises prices, entrenches incumbents, and widens the gap between people paying frontier-model subscriptions and people stuck with the lawyer’s $3000 fee. This is one of the best pieces on the Left in terms of engaging with AI seriously. Democratic Governance of AI Is the Real Solution — Jacobin

3. Tasshin Fogleman on Daoist and Tantric sexual practices as a contemplative on-ramp to the energy body, drawing on Julie Henderson’s The Lover Within and Mantak Chia’s The Multi-Orgasmic Man. I’ve heard some mixed things about Chia’s teachings and their efficacy, so YMMV. The Lover Within is on my list of books to read. Exploring Sexuality as a Spiritual Practice — Tasshin

1. Bill Nguyen on his AI agent: “I didn’t ask it to help me. I asked it to be me.” Very interesting article about a guy using AI to run his life. The man who is paying to see the future

2. Helen De Cruz on whether playing Super Mario with your grandkids belongs in the moral ledger (it does). On playing Super Mario with your grandkids and why you should benefit yourself

3. Chris Young (ex-Fat Duck under Heston Blumenthal) on the $6 Michelin-grade consomme you can pull from a Costco rotisserie chicken in 60 minutes via pressure cooker. Loved this recipe — who knew that blending raw chicken is a better way to make a raft! $6 Michelin Stock in 60 Minutes

1. David Oks on how citations ruined science: Garfield’s 1964 Science Citation Index and Hirsch’s h-index produced sixty years of unscrupulous gaming of the metrics, and AI is just letting the defectors scale. How citations ruined science — David Oks

2. Psychology textbooks still haven’t corrected the famous experimenta; errors they were called out for in 2018, and the more common 2023 fix is to silently omit the topic. Psychology textbooks still misrepresent famous experiments and controversial debates

3. Doug Muir on Phobos: Mars’s inner moon periodically tears itself apart into a ring and then reassembles, on ~100M-year cycles. Metaphor fodder. Inconstant Moon — Doug Muir

This is Heidegger’s3 insight, and it’s the strongest argument I know against AI reliability in its current form. And I’m not sure I’m totally convinced by it.

I recently came across this argument again in Melanie Mitchell’s wonderful tribute to philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, who spent his career articulating a version of this critique. Unmentioned in her piece is that Cantwell Smith’s critique is Heidegger’s, as refracted through Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus argued for decades that AI's fundamental problem wasn't computational power but ontological confusion. AI research assumed that intelligence means manipulating internal representations of the world. Heidegger (and Dreyfus after him) argued the opposite: the world isn't a model stored in your mind. It's the world itself, encountered through embedded, embodied engagement. As Dreyfus put it: "The meaningful objects among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the world itself."

AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI

Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years. Before he died last year, Brian held an endowed chair at the University of Toronto: the Reid Hoffman Chair in Artificial Intelligence and the Human. The title is very apt—Brian’s work wa…

Read more

3 months ago · 173 likes · 39 comments · Melanie Mitchell

To be a truly general intelligence that could replace humans, an AI would have to experience the world (perhaps embodied) in all its complexity, and orient toward the world like a human or animal would, from the perspective of care. There are domains of reasoning that lend themselves to formalization or rationality, like writing code or protein folding - these domains merely require what Cantwell Smith calls “reckoning”. While other domains, marked by what Dreyfus called "the ability to respond to what is relevant in a situation without having to explicitly determine what is relevant” — that requires something else - human judgment. These are domains like ethical reasoning in novel situations, parenting, reading a room. There’s also an interesting middle zone: research quality assessment4, legal reasoning, strategic decisions. In these domains, reckoning gets you surprisingly far. But whether we can get accurate human-like judgment in these areas is unknown. To get these domains right may require human-like care to shape what you notice.

And LLMs, even with various reasoning tricks bolted on by reinforcement learning, don’t interact with the world in this thick, embedded, embodied way. As such, they couldn’t possibly interact with the world intelligently, in all of the complexity of the real world. They can only at best accumulate and patch edge cases ad infinitum. Separately, one can wonder whether something like qualia, experience, what’s-it-likeness is required for a machine to be intelligent per this critique. I don’t think AI critics are in agreement on that question.

The chorus

The number of thinkers making a version of this argument is striking. People point to the problem in terms of causal understanding, world models, a barrier of meaning, or embodiment. Here, briefly is the parade of computer scientists and philosophers who make this argument in one form or another, in addition to Melanie Mitchell and Brian Cantwell Smith5: Hubert Dreyfus6, David Chapman7, Emily Bender8, Gary Marcus9, Yann LeCun10, Alva Noe11, Terry Winograd12, Francois Chollet13, John Searle14, Shannon Vallor15, Margaret Boden16, Evan Thompson17, Rodney Brooks18, Douglas Hofstadter19, Judea Pearl20 and others21.

There’s some nuance here, though — some of these writers point to the necessity of embodiment for true intelligence, while others have a more minimal requirement around causal understanding or “world modeling”. It’s possible to imagine a digital agent interacting with a digital world with grounding and gaining some causal understanding of it. That’s an argument that Marcus Ma and Shrikanth Narayanan make in a recent paper, “Intelligence Requires Grounding, Not Embodiment.” They write:

If an agent can sense and interact in a perception-action loop within a complex digital environment (like the internet or a high-fidelity simulation), it may be able to 'register' the world’s complexity and develop causal understanding without ever possessing a nervous system. In this view, the Heideggerian critique isn't a death sentence for AI, but a roadmap: we don't need to build a body; we need to build a world that the AI can actually care about.

In their framing the Heideggerian critique is more like a roadmap for what to build. Whether grounding requires embodiment or not, all of these authors point toward the same fundamental missing ingredient.

Being-in-the-world, the meaning of life, outsourcing

If this critique is right, then what the AI is lacking in are the very things that make life meaningful. In Dreyfus and Kelly’s book on the meaning of life, All Things Shining, this grounding that humans possess is more than simply the secret of our intelligence; it creates the very meaning of our lives. Care is more than just a passive preference. Care involves things in the world grabbing us, being swept up in a flow state22. When we make art, improvising and the art moves through us, when we are swept up with a crowd at a sporting event23, or staring into the eyes of our beloved - those are the moments of sacredness that define our lives. And maybe we can imbue sacredness into the AI. Or perhaps this is where we will forever be centaurs, outsourcing reckoning while providing judgment. This could be a good thing, concentrating the meaning in our lives.

We have to be careful though — it’s very easy to outsource judgment to the AI as well. I worked with Claude as a sounding board while writing this the old fashioned way. And Claude reckoned from our conversations that sometimes I do ask it for judgment, like assessing what’s going on in some of my relationships, or even asking what it thought about the thesis of this essay. Claude will offer reassurance for my neurosis in these moments - but it’s false succor. I'll meet someone at a party and ask Claude how clear the signs of interest were (hint: unclear). I’m asking it to do something it can’t really do, and my reliance on it in those cases is a problem. I’ve found it important and helpful to be aware of this tendency, to make sure I stand on my own two feet.

Is this argument convincing?

I’m not totally sure. Maybe richer contact with the world — multimodal input, causal encoding, continual learning — will close the gap. I don’t think a reward function (a la reinforcement learning) is a sufficient simulacrum of the kind of care that results from humans being thrown into the world (another Heideggerian concept).

On the other hand, maybe this is just a form of cope — a sort of “god of the gaps” argument where humans keep pointing to some ineffable secret sauce that we possess that the machines cannot. Every time the AI is successfully able to operate intelligently in a new domain we move the goalposts and say, “ah that was just reckoning”. Maybe it’s reckoning all the way down! Maybe we just have the illusion of explanatory depth.

Maybe it is cope. Or maybe this really is pointing to something fundamental that current systems, for all their astonishing fluency, can’t do. If all these critics are wrong, and intelligence can emerge without being thrown into a world that demands something of you, and you of it, that would certainly change my world model.

21

When I opened up X the other day, the first tweet I saw was:

I felt pressure to p-hack. To run a few more subjects and check the results, drop a condition, move failed studies into the file drawer, anything to cross that magical p < .05 threshold. My dissertation proposal was accepted on the condition that I get a positive result in an experiment. But I didn’t want to play that game. Instead I published a meta-analysis with a null effect as part of my dissertation. The findings didn’t support the hypothesis. That’s what the data said, so that’s what I reported.

Then I left academia.

The Problem Followed Me

I went into tech, working at top companies like Facebook, Google and Airbnb. I learned a lot about what it takes to build great products and run effective teams. Eventually I co-founded my own company, a Stanford nanotech spinout building a health-sensing toothbrush. The core technology was based on published research. Thousands of papers supported the sensor approach we were using.

The technology didn’t work. When we tried to replicate the foundational science, we couldn’t. Thousands of papers, and the basic claims didn’t hold up.

The problem had followed me out of academia and into industry! Meanwhile, the news kept confirming what I’d experienced firsthand.

Fraud Makes Headlines

In 2022 we learned that a landmark paper on a protein called Aβ*56, cited nearly 2,500 times and the basis for over a billion dollars in annual Alzheimer’s research funding, contained fabricated images.2 Other labs had quietly failed to find the protein for years, but those null results went unpublished. The field had spent sixteen years chasing a lead that was never real.

Marc Tessier-Lavigne, president of Stanford, resigned after investigations revealed problems in papers he’d authored, flagged by Elisabeth Bik, a microbiologist who has personally scanned over 20,000 papers for image manipulation.3

And in May 2025, Harvard revoked tenure for the first time in 80 years.4 The professor was Francesca Gino, who had built her career studying honesty and ethics, and was fired after forensic analysis revealed she had allegedly fabricated data across multiple studies. The irony of a dishonesty researcher faking her honesty research would be funny if it weren’t so devastating.

The Scale of the Problem

The numbers are hard to fully absorb. The landmark 2015 Reproducibility Project tested 100 psychology studies from top journals and found that only 36 percent successfully replicated.5 An eight-year project attempting to verify high-impact cancer biology found that less than half of experimental effects could be reproduced, and the successful replications showed effects 85 percent smaller than originally claimed.6 Over 10,000 papers were retracted in 2023 alone, a new record, double the previous year.7

One widely-cited estimate puts the cost of irreproducible preclinical research in the United States at tens of billions of dollars annually.8 The authors acknowledge significant uncertainty in that figure, but even the lower bound suggests an enormous waste of resources. And that’s just the direct costs. It doesn’t count the years lost chasing false leads, the patients enrolled in trials testing hypotheses that were never true, the graduate students whose careers collapsed when they couldn’t reproduce their mentors’ results.

Something Changed: AI Made a New Approach Possible

Methods to address these problems exist, but they are too tedious to compute manually for all of science. Existing efforts have only scaled to thousands of papers, while fieldwide efforts have been unable to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant p-values.

For example, p-curves can detect when a literature has too many p-values clustering just below .05, a telltale sign of p-hacking.9 Meta-analytic techniques can assess whether effect sizes are consistent across studies. Preregistration checks can verify whether researchers tested what they said they’d test. Statistical forensics can flag impossible numbers.10

Having moved into AI product development as an applied practitioner, I started to see a new possibility: AI can now do the tedious extraction work, pulling hypotheses, sample sizes, test statistics, and p-values from thousands of papers automatically, so these analyses can run at scale.

I started building tools to do exactly this. And I realized the impact it could have.

The Gap in Today’s Tools

There’s a whole ecosystem of scientific AI tools emerging right now. But they all stop short of what’s really needed.

Scientific search engines like Elicit and Consensus are genuinely useful. Elicit searches 138 million papers. Consensus shows you how many studies support or oppose a claim. But as Consensus acknowledges, each claim counts the same regardless if it comes from a meta-analysis of a thousand studies or the study of a single individual.11 They help you find papers. They can’t tell you which ones to trust.

Automated peer review systems are proliferating12, tools that scan papers for methodological issues and suggest improvements. They’re helpful for researchers and they surface potential problems that need to be addressed. But they stop short of actual evaluation or scoring. They won’t tell you that a finding is probably unreliable.

Specialized fraud-detection tools exist for specific problems. ImageTwin and Proofig catch duplicated or manipulated images.13 StatCheck flags calculation errors.14 The GRIM test detects impossible means. The Institute for Replication is building an AI engine to re-execute code and verify computational reproducibility.15

These are all good. But they’re siloed. Nobody is building the integrated system, one that brings all the signals together, reasons about individual papers the way a critical scientist would, looks at the full body of meta-analytic evidence, and produces an overall assessment of how much you should trust a given claim.

That’s what I’m building.

Vision: What a Critical Scientist Looks Like at Scale

Imagine you could ask: what’s the evidence that intervention X actually works? And instead of getting a list of papers, you got an assessment.

Here are 47 studies testing this claim. 12 were preregistered; of those, 8 found the predicted effect. The non-preregistered studies show a suspicious clustering of p-values just below .05. Three independent replications failed to find the effect. The original study was underpowered and has never been directly replicated. Two papers have statistical errors that, when corrected, eliminate significance. Bottom line: weak evidence, high risk of false positive.

This is how a careful, critical scientist thinks about evidence. They don’t just count papers. They weigh methodology, check for red flags, look at replication status, consider the full pattern. We can build AI systems that do this—systems that make this kind of careful evaluation possible for every claim, not just the few that get manual scrutiny.

The output should be meaningfully predictive of two things: whether a finding will replicate, and whether it is in line with the thinking of skeptical experts. Those are the real tests of credibility.

Who Needs This?

Almost everyone, it turns out.

Grantmakers and philanthropists deciding which interventions to fund. Right now they rely on manual literature reviews that can’t possibly keep up.

Policymakers basing policies on research. The growth mindset interventions that schools adopted based on Carol Dweck’s work? A large-scale UK trial found zero statistically significant effects on any academic outcome.16

Journalists trying to report on science accurately. Every week brings new studies with dramatic claims. Which ones should they cover? Which should they be skeptical of?

Government research agencies trying to improve the quality of science they fund. You can’t reform what you can’t measure, and right now there’s no way to monitor whether policy changes—like preregistration requirements—actually shift the distribution of evidence quality across a portfolio.

The general public, increasingly trying to navigate scientific papers themselves. If you’ve ever Googled a health question and tried to read the studies, you know how hard it is to evaluate what you’re reading.

AI labs and companies building on scientific literature. As AI systems increasingly use scientific papers for training and retrieval, they need to know which papers to trust. Garbage in, garbage out, at unprecedented scale.

This is a vital public good. Reliable information about what science actually knows, and doesn’t know, is infrastructure for a functioning society.

What We’ve Built So Far

The first piece already exists: an API at evidence.guide that extracts structured data from papers. Upload a PDF, get back JSON with study details, hypotheses, test statistics, and p-values. I’ve validated it against hundreds of hand-coded papers with 92%+ accuracy on p-value extraction. There are no other extraction APIs currently out there.

The next step is to build out a more comprehensive set of quality signals and a meta-analytic reasoning model that can weigh them appropriately.

How You Can Help

I need help.

Money. We’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Donations fund development, compute, and eventually a small team. Even small amounts help.

Compute. Running sophisticated analyses on millions of papers requires serious compute. The Render Network Foundation has generously provided initial support. If you have access to compute resources and want to support open science infrastructure, I want to talk to you.

Engineering talent. I’m looking for a junior (potentially new grad!) full-stack engineer or data engineer, someone passionate about this problem who can work on a tightly scoped 3-month project with potential for a full-time role. If that’s you, or you know someone, reach out.

Introductions. If you know funders, researchers, or organizations who should be aware of this work, I’d be grateful for connections.

Feedback. If you’re a researcher who would use these tools, I want to hear from you. What signals matter most? What would make this useful for your work?

Why This Matters

I left academia because the incentives were broken. I watched my startup fail because the foundational science wasn’t real. I’ve seen the toll this takes, on researchers who can’t replicate their mentors’ work, on patients enrolled in trials testing fabricated hypotheses, on the public’s trust in science itself.

The replication crisis is mostly a story of broken incentives, not bad actors. Most researchers want to do good work. The system rewards cutting corners. We need infrastructure that makes reliable science visible and unreliable science obvious.

Learn more: dawes.institute | evidence.guide

Support the work: Donate

Get in touch: info@dawes.institute

When the term “religion” settled into its now-familiar usage, around the 17th century, it reflected Protestant assumptions, emphasizing belief, individual conscience and voluntary association.

…

None of these definitions, or any other, won the day. If you follow many disciples of Durkheim, religion can look like almost any system that supports social cohesion and provides psychological comfort — at which point patriotism or even psychoanalysis can slip into the category. If it involves spiritual beings, it leaves out Buddhism in its more austere forms. If, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed, religion is a “system of symbols” establishing powerful moods and conceptions of a “general order of existence,” it’s hard to say why nationalism or Marxism doesn’t qualify.

The definitional perplexities are as persistent as ever.

I want to deemphasize beliefs as statements about the world—and the picture of religious life that comes with them. A quick note on how I’m using “belief.” There are two kinds of belief: propositional and practical (“as if”). I argue we don’t need the propositional kind1; the practical kind does the work.

This idea that belief is central to what it means to be part of a religion, as Appiah notes, is a Protestant idea. And yet many of us non-Protestants, marinating in Western culture, have unwittingly accepted the centrality of belief. Much to our detriment. In both of the spiritual traditions I’m part of, Judaism and Buddhism, belief is much less central than in this Christian perspective.

Judaism can be seen as a religion concerned with unifying a diasporic people. Beliefs can do that, but so can a shared community of practice, bound by law. During one of my recent re-encounters with Judaism, I was speaking with a renewal rabbi about my ambivalence toward participation and toward the halakhic way of life more generally. His reply, with laughter, was that such feelings were “the most Jewish thing ever.” I also met an Orthodox Jewish professor who does not believe in God but still practices because of the deep connection to the traditions. When the Hebrews received the Torah, they said “Na’aseh v’nishma” (נעשה ונשמע), usually rendered “we will do, and then we will understand.” In other words, action comes first.

Buddhism is, likewise, more a set of practices than a set of beliefs. When you take a view in a meditative practice, it’s more like “as if” than making a strong metaphysical commitment. In the sutras, the Buddha generally eschews metaphysical pronouncements. In Tibetan Buddhism there is a well-known debate, shentong versus rangtong. Very roughly, rangtong treats the ground as empty and insubstantial all the way down; shentong takes the luminous, loving, fecund quality of awakening as pointing to something absolute. Rather than give an answer one way or another, this is seen to be an irresolvable practice tension, and we are meant to avoid the nihilism or fundamentalism that either pole would lead us to on its own.

What’s remarkable about that practice tension is that holding it actually has an experiential effect, namely that the more I see reality as empty, insubstantial, the more my direct experience is one of radiance, of living in a sacred world. Another paradox to chew on.

Scientifically we can also ask whether we have any beliefs whatsoever. I am reminded of a classic paper I read in graduate school written by a professor of mine, Baruch Fischhoff, provocatively titled, “Value Elicitation: Is There Anything In There?” In the paper, Fischhoff contrasts the view that humans have a broad range of well-defined values (articulated values) that we can elicit versus the view that humans have only a few values and they have to re-derive or figure out what’s important given a novel set of questions. Psychologist Nick Chater also wrote a book about this, The Mind is Flat, where he argues that people have very few articulated values (and maybe not very many basic ones either).

Of course this sits on a continuum. My belief that there is a laptop in front of me is more well-defined than my belief about what really happened in my marriage. Fischhoff has a helpful list of conditions under which values are easy to articulate: personally familiar and personally consequential; publicly discussed and relatively uncontroversial; with few, similar, experienced, and fairly certain consequences; when one is acting in a single role without conflict; when there is a direct tie to action; when the topic can be considered on its own; and when the framing is familiar.

Looked at through this lens, metaphysical beliefs fail most of these at once. They are controversial, their consequences are many and hard to compare, feedback is sparse (or non-existent), the tie to concrete action is opaque, and they come bundled with other claims. By contrast, practice-laden values often meet these conditions: they are concrete, repeatedly experienced, discussed in community, and they provide feedback you can actually feel.

Even if metaphysical beliefs could be made crisp, it’s not clear why we need them. What matters in practice are values in the live sense: the convictions that shape attention and action. Not a catalog of abstractions, but the felt priorities that give practices bite. You can live Shabbat as if it matters and watch your attentional capacities change. You can take the Bodhisattva vow as if it’s real and notice your habits bend toward care. Practice guided by clear values yields belonging, transformation, and awe without requiring fixed metaphysical commitments. The conviction is doing the work, even when the propositions are nebulous.

Despite how long it had been and the slightly foreign customs2, it felt eerie - practices seared into my childhood brain still bring up a sense of devotion, sacredness and home3. The strangest part was comfortably praying in community while knowing that my Vajrayana practices make me an apostate at best, idol worshipper at worst. I didn’t mention this to anyone. Both of these traditions coexist pretty happily in my mind, though.

I was asked to give the wedding speech for my family, which made me a bit nervous, as the groom’s grandfather is a pretty famous rabbi, and the other wedding speaker was himself a well known rabbinical scholar. Luckily for me, my speech popped out of the dharmakaya during my darkness retreat 9 months ago, so there weren’t any decisions to make. I’m reposting it below (with a video of my delivery). The theme of the speech was tantric (the perfection of imperfection), but tactfully I avoided any direct reference to Buddhism. No one got mad so it seems like none of the religious folks picked up on what I was doing. They might have just been being polite. Offering teachings with this kind of attunement is is a skill I am working on.

The wedding speech

I was chosen to give this speech because it was thought that I'd be the most able to speak without breaking down crying. Nope. Please, talk amongst yourselves. I'll even give you a topic. Artificial intelligence is neither artificial nor intelligence. Discuss. Ok. Thanks.

I've been studying the genre of uncle's wedding toast and there are a few key components I have to touch on:

First, gratitude and thanks

Second, an enumeration of the virtues of the bride and groom (I promise I'll keep this to a minimum)

Third unsolicited advice,

Fourth, hopefully something genuinely profound and moving

And finally, at least one cringeworthy joke. Sorry - those are the rules. There’s your warning.

Let's start with gratitude. I'm grateful to be here with all of you. I'm no expert in halacha like some of the fine people in this room but I did say Shehecheyanu earlier. In Russian, we have a more succinct blessing my father will often say —‘Dazhil’— roughly, “I’ve lived to see this.” My parents are thrilled to have reached this day, and so am I. Of course in expressing that gratitude it bears acknowledging all of our loved ones that aren't here and couldn't be here – my grandparents, Jonathan’s grandmother and other loved ones who have passed away. May their memory be a blessing.

Second, on behalf of my family, thank you to the Arking and Angel families for welcoming us so warmly. We are honored to share this connection with you now and going forward.

Third, thank you—honored guests, family, friends—for sharing this simcha with us. We're so grateful you are here with us on this happy day.

I also want to thank Rabbi Angel for the heartfelt and moving ceremony.

And finally I want to thank the people working here today, providing the planning and organization, the food , the music, and the service in this beautiful space. The work of creating celebration is sacred and we notice and appreciate your care.

With gratitude out of the way let's start with compliments. I suspect that everyone here is well aware of the virtues of these two and so I won't go on except to say: Of course they are brilliant, but more importantly kind individuals devoted to the good. I know my parents tell anyone who will listen how amazing Abby is. Maybe we can trade: the Arkings can brag about Abby, and we’ll brag about Jonathan. Jonathan is wonderful, kind, energetic, curious - like a perfect kindergarten report card. I know everyone in my family is so excited to have you as part of our family.

Ok now I can say whatever I want - so I’m going to talk to you about the perfection of imperfections.

When Abby was starting high school, she was so driven to be perfect that I told her, ‘Go make some mistakes.’ She ignored me perfectly—thereby following my advice. Not making a mistake was her only mistake.

But imperfections – they’re essential. In Kabbalah, it’s said that God’s creation of the universe—tzimtzum—was the divine spirit withdrawing to make space for us. This world we live in is a product of God making space for our imperfection. It also makes for some good advice for any young married couple to keep in mind. Withdrawal leads to creation.

I warned you there would be a questionable joke! I'm sorry. Chatgpt predicted this would happen!

No, what I’m trying to say is – if God can make room for us, we can make room for ourselves. This has also been beautifully expressed by mystic and songwriter Leonard Cohen who wrote “there’s a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in." We must open ourselves up to our own imperfections in order to fully feel divinity.

How do you do that? By accepting your feelings. Carl Jung wrote: “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” What he meant is that if you don’t fully acknowledge an emotion, it doesn’t disappear—it steers your actions unconsciously in harmful ways.The more I accept my feelings, the more compassion I feel, and the better I can act. And that's true in relationships too - the more you accept each other the better you'll love one another.

Accepting doesn't mean acting on your impulses. It means acknowledging them. And that might be hard. Everyone has annoying things about them they don't want to admit. Trust me. But revealing them is vital. And you can do it with a friendly, loving curiosity. And if you do, you might find space for actual change. And sometimes you might realize that those annoying things are part of what makes us great too. So my unsolicited advice is this - open up to yourselves and each other. Accept the annoying and the amazing. And may your love grow ever more perfect by embracing each other's imperfections. I love you. Mazal tov.

We live in a world that is not perfectible, a world that always presents you with a sense of something undone, something missing, something hurting, something irritating. From that minor sense of discomfort to torture and poverty and murder, we live in that kind of universe. The wound that does not heal—this human predicament is a predicament that does not perfect itself.

But there is the consolation of no exit, the consolation that this is what you're stuck with. Rather than the consolation of healing the wound, of finding the right kind of medical attention or the right kind of religion, there is a certain wisdom of no exit: this is our human predicament and the only consolation is embracing it. It is our situation, and the only consolation is the full embrace of that reality.

Leonard Cohen

Cohen, himself a Buddhist practitioner, is pointing toward the recognition that there is no solid foundation beneath our experience, no ultimate ground to rest on. What can explain our imperfect world? This theme has been popping up a lot for me lately - the groundlessness of the ground.

Some react to this with a kind of formless panic, as Peter McEwan put it in a recent podcast, a feeling of vertigo from gazing into the abyss. Why is the ground groundless? Why would panic be a natural reaction? Because the mind desperately wants something to grasp, some final truth or foundation. You’d think that mystical experience would resolve this, yielding some kind of fundamental truth about the nature of reality. It certainly seems that way from within that experience. And yet it is a mistake to reify it or slip into fundamentalism or create a new dogma.

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It’s true that Buddhism might be better seen as a method than a statement of truth, but it’s also true that the method works by using a “view” - a perspective on reality that is accepted and internalized and possibly co-created by meditation practice. The Buddhist view posits reality is a certain way - that it is mind constructed (i.e. “empty”). Of course mind construction is also a mental construction (i.e. emptiness is empty)! In other words, the view is that there is an unresolvable uncertainty at the heart of existence. To be a Buddha is to let go of being a Buddhist.

And yet, when one holds that view, in contrast to the panic, reality can also disclose itself as sacred and loving. How mysterious and wonderful!

What does radical acceptance feel like? Each emotion rings the bell and I answer: welcome. The Nyingma oath attributed to Dorje Tröllö whispers, “Whatever happens; may it happen. Whichever way it goes; may it go that way.” Practice dissolves into life itself; as psychologist‑teacher Tucker Peck notes in a recent podcast (spotify, apple), giving unconditional permission to every mind‑state is its own pacification.

Yet acceptance doesn’t flatten experiences; it sharpens it. During the upheavals of the past year even the “appropriate” emotions sliced me open, leaving me wide open and vulnerable. Peck would call that sanity: feeling exactly what the moment calls for, no more‑no less. And that present moment becomes luminous and sacred without the past or the future superimposed upon it.

Against that backdrop I wandered through Asia’s Buddhist heartlands with no agenda beyond openness. I meditated at the moss garden temple in Kyoto1. I hiked the Kumano Kodo.2 An old woman helped me pray and make an offering at a shrine at the top of a ruined Buddhist temple in Angkor3. I explored the many temples of at Bai Dinh, the largest Buddhist temple complex in Vietnam4. It features a “corridor of the arhats” which contain 500 unique arhat statues each with its own unique motif and mudra.5 I marveled at the size of the reclining Buddha6 at Wat Pho in Bangkok. There’s so much more - dozens of cave shrines7, stone carvings8, and the even the occasional Theravada dharma lesson.9

Everywhere I went I prayed—sometimes words, sometimes silence—letting love radiate toward my ex, my family, all those suffering around the world. My direct experience of the sacred is not accompanied by metaphysical certainty, so I pray for my prayers instead.

Pilgrimage offered, paradoxically, nothing. A layer of ego around “getting” something from spiritual work seems to have loosened. Bodhicitta, the cultivation of skillful means, and devotion remain, but the itch to collect retreats, exotic states of mind, or stacks of dharma books is absent. Shifts continue to bloom, but predicting my mind’s next season seems beside the point—there is only this open awareness moving through a beautiful and precious life.

No longer a seeker, just trying to be a helper10.

1

It was snowing that day! The monk was unperturbed by the cold.

2

In preparation I read this very weird and interesting book about the trail, Kumano Kodo: Pilgrimage to Powerspots. Partly a history, partly a travelogue, the book interperses philosophical musings on the nature of pilgrimage, the modern and pre-modern history of the Kumano Kodo, the story of the authors’ own journey, told out of order. No topic is spared: for each segment of the hike, they even list the number of “shit blasts” they experienced.

Two photos of the hike:

3

It was at the top of this temple:

4

Just one of the stunning altars in the complex:

5

Probably my favorite use of AI on the trip was photographing different arhats and having ChatGPT tell me about them.

9

The mobility problems have yet to materialize:

There is some strange intimacy between grief and aliveness, some sacred exchange between what seems unbearable and what is most exquisitely alive.

It is in the inferior parts of our life that we will find redemption.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.

Over the last eight months I’ve grieved so much that at several points I thought, “time to write an essay on grief, I get it” and then another sorrow would transpire, and I’d think “wow, I really didn’t get it before”, and my relationship to grief would deepen. Well enough time has passed that I think I finally have enough perspective to write this. My goal is to describe my experience and what I’ve gained in my losses, to provide some benefit for people at an earlier stage of grief.

Why grieve?

My assumption is if you’re reading this, you may have something to grieve. Below I listed all the different things I’ve grieved; maybe you are grieving one of these too. But more broadly I think that stuck grief is a huge source of psychological distress and it manifests as a variety of symptoms. A loss of vitality, depression, a sense of nihilism or meaninglessness, anger and/or blame directed inward or outward, a feeling of stuckness, rumination, guilt, and emotional deadness can all result from unfelt grief. If you are experiencing these issues, unprocessed grief might be a reason why.

Given that you have some grief to feel, you should allow yourself to feel it. Sometimes people argue against “wallowing” in grief, but I think wallowing is just a special case of trying to make more of a feeling, a kind of grasping or attachment. I’m not suggesting trying to create grief; I’m instead advocating that you should fully feel the grief that is already present.

The above quotes from Francis Weller’s indispensable book on grief speaks to why it’s so important. So does this moving and funny talk by Martin Prechtel (you should listen to it). I’ve also alluded to this idea in the past, that grief and love are mirrors of one another. The bigger the love, the bigger the grief. As Weller puts it:

Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close. Alone and together, death and loss affect us all.

What I’ve been grieving

When we were able to see times of loss as inevitable and, in a very real way, necessary, we are able to engage these moments and cultivate the art of living well, of metabolizing suffering into something beautiful and ultimately sacred. It may be strange to imagine grief leading to beauty, but imagine, for a moment, the shining face of someone who has just released his or her cup of tears standing before us naked and cleansed. We are seeing someone as beautiful as Botticelli’s Venus or Michelangelo’s David.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (pp. 21-22).

Each of these acts of grieving have provided numerous gifts in return:

• The pain I’ve caused others

This yielded self compassion, and ultimately the ability to rest in the full knowledge of my mistakes, to be accountable and make amends, and to understand what I need to do better going forward.

• The pain others have caused me

This turned into forgiveness, love and compassion for them. It also turned into an understanding of healthy boundaries that I need to maintain in relationships going forward.

• The pain I’ve caused myself

This became self compassion as well as self acceptance, and an appreciation for how my “good parts” and my “bad parts” are the aspects of the same qualities. It helped me see that this pain couldn’t have been otherwise and was a gateway into insight into my own conditioning.

• The loss of loved ones, relationships

The deep experience of loss turned into a wave of gratitude and love for those that I’ve lost. Also there’s a feeling of softness, a raw open feeling, a sense of profound peace and equanimity and joy.

• The loss of who I thought I was

This both stemmed from and led to seeing the emptiness of self and the way that my behaviors and thoughts were not arising from a stable self but rather from causes and conditions (i.e. “dependent origination”). I felt a deeper attunement (not quite identification with) to the empty awareness space from which everything arises and everything dissolves into. You know, that loving fecund voidness no-thing?

• The loss of imagined futures

A sense of the sacredness of the present moment shines through as the grief around this loss arises and passes.

How I’ve grieved

Crying a lot, obviously. But there’s more:

1. Grief is a practice.

2. Grief should be witnessed by someone attuned to us

3. Grief needs a temporal, communal and ritual container

Weller describes the practice of grief eloquently:

Approaching sorrow, however, requires enormous psychic strength. For us to tolerate the rigors of engaging the images, emotions, memories, and dreams that arise in times of grief, we need to fortify our interior ground. This is done through developing a practice that we sustain over time. Any form will do—writing, drawing, meditation, prayer, dance, or something else—as long as we continue to show up and maintain our effort. A practice offers ballast, something to help us hold steady in difficult times. This deepens our capacity to hold the vulnerable emotions surrounding loss without being overwhelmed by them. Grief work is not passive: it implies an ongoing practice of deepening, attending and listening. It is an act of devotion, rooted in love and compassion.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 5).

It can also help to engage in these practices with someone attuned to us, of possible:

Attunement is a particular quality of attention, wedded with affection, offered by someone we love and trust. This deep attention is what enables us to make painful experiences tolerable. We feel held and comforted, reassured and safe. The failure to provide a safe and nurturing space in times of loss and grief can precipitate the formation of a complex.

Francis. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 6).

One thing that we Jews do well is grieve in community. In Jewish tradition grief has a cadence, a structure, and it recognizes the temporal flow of the process. When someone dies, you have a period of intense mourning for the week after the funeral (called sitting shiva). Then you say a mourning prayer (the Kaddish) every day for a year. And finally, after a year you have a yearly remembrance and say the Kaddish prayer on the anniversary of the person’s death. This recognizes that there’s an immediate acute phase to grief when it occupies the entirety of one’s focus. Then it becomes a daily practice, and then finally yearly. This tends to line up with how the grieving process generally unfolds. Moreover, the grieving process isn’t private — it takes place in a collective container.

Another source of grief in our lives is when that collective container is missing:

When we are born, and as we pass through childhood, adolescence, and the stages of adulthood, we are designed to anticipate a certain quality of welcome, engagement, touch, and reflection. In short, we expect what our deep-time ancestors experienced as their birthright, namely, the container of the village. We are born expecting a rich and sensuous relationship with the earth and communal rituals of celebration, grief, and healing that keep us in connection with the sacred. As T. S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land “Once upon a time, we knew the world from birth.” This is our inheritance, our birthright, which has been lost and abandoned. The absence of these requirements haunts us, even if we can’t give them a name, and we feel their loss as an ache, a vague sadness that settles over us like a fog. This lack is simultaneously one of the primary sources of our grief and one of the reasons we find it difficult to grieve. On some level, we are waiting for the village to appear so we can fully acknowledge our sorrows.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 54).

I’ve been lucky enough to have the support and love of dear friends, and a great therapist to create some kind of communal container for my sorrow. I’ve been able to have my grief witnessed. That isn’t to say that there hasn’t been lots of private grieving as well; there has. But part of the process for me has been having supportive loved ones around me as I’ve gone through this process.

Finally, a ritual structure around grief can be extremely helpful. I’ve written about how to engage in ritual practice before, here. Weller suggests that there are three functions to ritual: ritual connects us to the transcendent, repairs, and invites the denied aspects of the psyche to show up.

Ritual touches us in many ways. One of its most powerful impacts is that it breaks us open to a vast and more enchanted world. The first function of ritual is to enable us to become transparent to the transcendent, to use Joseph Campbell’s phrase. It fosters our link to the great mystery. Ritual elicits a certain vibration, a pitch, that enables us to individually or communally connect with the sacred. This pitch activates the psyche. In ritual space, movement, rhythm, expression of emotion, and direction of attention all open gateways to the sacred.

Secondly, there is a reparative function to ritual. It sutures the tears in the soul that occur in the daily rounds of living. We live in a culture that has forgotten the basic needs of the soul. This is especially important today, as our world is increasingly dominated by the rhythm of the machine. As we succumb to the pressure to adapt to this rapid-fire world, we feel ripped out of our own natural human rhythms. Many of us feel exhausted, flattened by the energy expended to keep up with the pace of culture. These ruptures in our emotional lives are frequent, and yet we lack the basic requirements for restoration and healing. African healer and elder Malidoma Somé calls ritual the anti-machine.

The third function of ritual is that it invites the denied and forgotten aspects of psyche to show up, those abandoned parts of who we are. Ritual provides a space potent enough to bring in the undeveloped aspects of our lives in order to help them mature. This is possible because the container, the safe space generated within the ritual field, is capable of holding the intensity of emotions associated with these aspects of soul. This is a pivotal function of ritual. However, inviting in the wounded, neglected, and rejected parts of our psychic life is risky. Without an adequate holding space to contain the emotional release that accompanies the return of these parts, we cannot commit to allowing them to return home.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 78-80).

The rituals I’ve engaged in around my losses have been smaller ones in the context of a few trusted friends. Nonetheless they’ve been very powerful. One small example — earlier this month I hiked the Kumano Kodo with two good friends. Along the thousand year old Buddhist pilgrimage trail, numerous shrines mark the path. At each shrine we made made an offering and I said a prayer. Adding my coin and my prayer at the places where so many have gone before me connected my own grief to collective human history. As the grief process reaches certain milestones, I plan to demarcate it with more ritual.

Once more, on the interplay of opposites

I want to come back to this theme of love and grief, light and dark, death and life, emptiness and fullness, expansion and contraction being intimately interlinked. Because this this seems to be the essential character of grief and of feeling “bad” emotions more generally. Once I recognized this through my grieving process, the whole thing became deeply okay; I found myself welcoming the grief like an old friend.

There is a proverb from Africa that says, “When death finds you, make sure it finds you alive.”

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 124).

When it comes, death will find me alive.

Over seven hundred years ago, the mystic Meister Eckhart wrote, “What is this darkness? What is its name? Call it an aptitude for sensitivity which will make you whole. Call it your potential for Vulnerability.” Rilke adds, “Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself / my God is dark, and like a webbing made / of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.”

The darkness we enter when we are overwhelmed by the swell of grief is a place of belonging. It is the fecund and gravid darkness of the womb, the dynamic vitality of duende that pulses through our bodies when we are singing from the dark earth; it is the quiet thrum of nature moving through our senses and the body of the earth.

Francis Weller. The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (p. 127).

Bob Ross also put it well, recording this show right after his wife died:

There is a stage in spiritual maturation beyond the preference for specific states of consciousness. In that vital space is where I hope to meet you.

They blame those who remain silent, they blame those speak much, they blame those who speak in moderation. There is none in the world who is not blamed. There never was, there never will be, nor is there now, a person who is wholly blamed or wholly praised.

Dhammapada (chapter 17, verse 227-228)

I’ve always been someone who was especially sensitive to both praise and blame. I’ve hoped people think well of me, and despaired at the thought that someone, anyone might not like me. Superficially that has caused me to try to “be a good person”, eschewing activities or actions that others might criticize. I’ve looked on with amazement at people who were able to do what they wanted and ignore what others might think, while observing how that insensitivity sometimes led them to immoral acts, which I’ve judged. On some level this sensitivity has served me well, though its failure modes are also well known to me — cowardice, hiding myself, avoiding conflict, and abandoning my own sense of conscience in order to avoid the consequences1.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve had the chance to really feel the winds of the eight worldly concerns2 come and go. I’ve done things in life that have been objectively blameworthy, and I’ve also been blamed unjustly. There are people walking around in this world who dislike me for good reasons, and for what I take to be bad reasons. Both have been painful in their own way. Everyone has their story, and however desperately I might try to alter it, most of the time I can’t. Letting go of the defensive need to try is part of spiritual maturation. So is seeing these occasions as opportunities to cultivate equanimity.

There is a well known story of the Chinese poet Su Dongpo who sent this verse to the Zen master Foyin:

“I bow my head to the heaven within heaven,
Hairline rays illuminating the universe,
The eight winds cannot move me,
Sitting still upon the purple golden lotus.”

When Foyin returned the poem with the word “fart” scrawled on it, Su Dongpo rushed to confront him in anger. Foyin wasn’t home and instead left him the following lines:

“The eight winds cannot move me,
One fart blows me across the river.”

I’m not writing this to claim total mastery over some of my deepest conditioning. I can tell you how I’ve worked with this tendency though:

1. The first and most obvious thing that I do when these feelings surrounding others’ opinions of me arise is I drop the story and rest in the pure sensation of the emotion, the swirling energy in my body that arises and then passes.

2. When the sensitivity to others’ opinions arises I the look for the self that’s being praised or blamed. It becomes an exercise in recognizing the emptiness of the self. I can observe that I didn’t choose to possess good qualities that are being praised, nor did I choose the bad qualities that are being blamed. From this perspective there are merely the causes and conditions that gave rise to the praiseworthy and blameworthy actions, with no substantive self to attach them to. One method of doing this emptiness practice is to look into one’s direct experience for that self - see if it can be be found anywhere in thoughts, sensations, or emotions, and to engage in this high speed search until one has the experiential shift of unfindability - the sense that there are just these aggregated mental formations without some free standing self anywhere to be found.

3. Only once I’ve worked with the emotional and self-reifying energy of the experience, will I examine the content of the blame, seeing whether there is anything meaningful that I need to change. While the previous view is about the insubstantiality of the agent of choice, this view provisionally accepts the idea of a chooser. Although some ideal of buddhahood is to be unmoved by what others think, I do believe that there is often useful signal to be extracted, and I don’t want to close myself entirely off. I can take corrective action and make amends if that is helpful.

4. Finally, I often do tonglen (I inhale their pain an exhale their relief), or practice loving kindness and compassion toward those that criticize and dislike me. These are the people I pray for the most and when I meditate I often dedicate the merit of my practice to them. Of course these are for the people I know dislike me - I’m sure there are others that secretly dislike me too, and I can generate some love for them too!

The result of these ways of working is a mind that is less perturbed and more loving, yet sensitive to the useful information contained in people’s judgments. I strive to remain steadfast in my own boundaries and adhere to my felt sense of what’s right.

First, a brief summary of these two essays:

• In “Principles of Vasocomputation,” Johnson introduces the idea of latches — fixed vasomuscular tension that can stabilize a pattern of neural activation. Stabilizing a pattern of neural activation can be adaptive - traumatic events can overwhelm emotional capacity and these muscle contractions can appropriately constrain the ability to fully feel these emotions and somatic sensations. However, this in turn limits the ability of the bodymind to respond spontaneously in activating situations and causes rigidity. Suffering can emerge when the brain tries to compress or clamp down on uncertain states, imposing forced certainty to minimize discomfort.

• In Dan Davies’ essay “Taming the unaccountability machine”, he describes the pathologies of outsourcing government functions to private firms. For commodities this can make sense, as private firms can provide certain goods more efficiently as a result of market competition. But for services whose quality are hard to monitor, outsourcing and a shrinking of bureaucratic capacity hobbles the ability of the government to understand outsourced functions are being carried out well. This inability to understand is the result of limits to the flow of information and the ability to process that information sufficiently to know what’s really going on, as well as fix procedures which hobble the ability of government to respond spontaneously.

From these brief summaries you can already see the similarities I’m pointing toward:

1. Compression as a way of dealing with complexity: Both bureaucracies and individuals limit the flow of information as a way to deal with overwhelming complexity which is adaptive initially but overtime limit the ability to respond appropriately.

2. Capacity constraints: Agencies outsource because they lack internal resources to manage sprawling duties. In each case, a mismatch between capacity and complexity fuels tension or dysfunction. Overextension produces clumsy reflexes in the mind (the persistent “clench”) and unaccountable contracts in public services.

3. Feedback loops and control: Buddhist texts emphasize mindful awareness—learning to notice grasping (tanha) as it arises breaks the cycle of clenching, restoring open responsiveness. Similarly, organizations must create robust feedback channels so that negative outcomes or abuse can be quickly identified and corrected. Both systems require timely error signals and active attention to avoid drifting away from reality.

4. Consequences of ignoring complexity: In the individual, ignoring complexity fosters repetitive stress and entrenched pain held in latched muscle tension. In the organization, ignoring complexity allows unresponsive “black box” deals to fester, producing scandals and dysfunction. In both, the price of turning away from signals—bodily or social—is cumulative and painful.

5. Resolving stuckness: For the individual, resolving stuckness involves cultivating awareness (i.e., noticing and releasing muscular or psychological tension), which can be done through many means including meditation, therapy, psychedelics etc. to reopen the capacity for spontaneous response. For organizations: re-establishing robust feedback loops (e.g., better contract monitoring, clear communication channels, crisis escalation procedures) so that decision-makers can adapt to new information and avoid “locked” or rigid policies.

The similarity between these two viewpoints is striking. It points to the fractal nature of agency, that there are some fundamental invariants to how dynamic systems (organisms and organizations) cope with complexity in their respective environments. Understanding these parallels has been helpful for me in understanding how to navigate both my own mind and the world at large.

Having so many occasions to settle into this feeling, I’ve gotten to really make friends with it. In doing so I was reminded that no one has written more precisely and eloquently about what it’s like to befriend loneliness, Vajrayana style, than Pema Chodron. When I rest into my loneliness, I first noticed the natural yearning for some resolution. Chodron writes,

The experience of certain feelings can seem particularly pregnant with desire for resolution: loneliness, boredom, anxiety. Unless we can relax with these feelings, it’s very hard to stay in the middle when we experience them. We want victory or defeat, praise or blame. For example, if somebody abandons us, we don’t want to be with that raw discomfort. Instead, we conjure up a familiar identity of ourselves as a hapless victim. Or maybe we avoid the rawness by acting out and righteously telling the person how messed up he or she is. We automatically want to cover over the pain in one way or another, identifying with victory or victimhood.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (p. 68).

In the darkness, no resolution was possible, so I got to experience the desire without the ability to alter the feeling. I found I had the capacity to just feel it. I find now when I rest into the feeling I can feel its energy and feel its okayness too — the dull ache in the pit of my stomach, the sharpness in the corner of my eyes, the energetic flow between them. The yearning for love is also there, tender and soft. It’s okay to want intimacy and companionship and okay not to act on it.

Chodron calls this style of experiencing “cool loneliness” and phenomenologically she breaks it down into a number of different components. What I’ve just described is what she calls “less desire”: “the willingness to be lonely without resolution when everything in us yearns for something to cheer us up and change our mood.” When resting in cool loneliness there is a kind of contentment (the okayness), and letting go of the need for resolution also means not grasping for distractions. No daydreams, no need to distract with exercise — in my case I’d injured myself when moving out and literally couldn’t exercise for the six weeks immediately following. It turned out to be a blessing because there was nothing to do but be with my arising experience (and catch up on sleep). Chodron calls this “avoiding unnecessary activities.” Loneliness is not a problem to be solved, and doesn’t require some compensating sense pleasure either, what Chodron calls “wandering in the world of desire.” And finally, coming back to the feeling again and again without avoidance is what Chodron calls “complete discipline.” She writes,

Complete discipline is another component of cool loneliness. Complete discipline means that at every opportunity, we’re willing to come back, just gently come back to the present moment. This is loneliness as complete discipline. We’re willing to sit still, just be there, alone. We don’t particularly have to cultivate this kind of loneliness; we could just sit still long enough to realize it’s how things really are. We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions—all our ideas about how things are—keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way. We say, “Oh yes, I know.” But we don’t know. We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.

Pema Chodron. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (pp. 70-71).

Recognizing fundamentally aloneness is healing too. A teacher of mine, Dustin DiPerna, once relayed to me a blessing he heard: “may you die alone and forgotten.” Dying alone is inevitable — even surrounded by your loved ones the process is a solitary one. Getting used to the idea of fundamental aloneness prepares us for death. But in an ultimate sense, in the process of experiencing loneliness I can realize interconnectedness. Connected with the ground of being, experiencing the unbounded nature of awareness present even in the feeling of aloneness, I see that I can’t ever truly be alone. To be alone is to reify separateness, and that separateness is a construction of my mind. This is what it means to experience emotions from a nondual perspective - to fully feel without bypassing it and also to recognize it as empty, embracing all the contradictions to find the wisdom it offers. When I feel lonely I also feel a tremendous amount of compassion, for myself, but also for the suffering of others, for the heartbreak we all inevitably experience. As I write this I imagine those that might read this and recognize their own experience in it. I love you and I’m with you. I take a breath, feeling our pain, and I exhale your relief.

What it looks like

Here’s what their specially designed cabins look like:

There’s a foyer with a fireplace where Scott, the director, comes in to check on you twice daily and bring you food, which he puts in the cabinet with a two way door. On the inside, you open up the cabinet after he’s loaded the food in, so no light can enter. The fireplace radiates heat into the space, though it’s pretty warm in there generally. There’s a fan that circulates air into the space. There’s a bathtub for ablutions as well. The ceilings are fairly high and it’s pretty spacious inside.

The miracle of being there

On a recommendation from a teacher2, I had signed up in September and had initially received a slot in 2027 - they only have 3 cabins and demand is extremely high. Scott, the founder, told me that there is a shortage of retreat locations in the United States. The highest ratio of caves to population by country is the Czech Republic for some reason; if we had as many caves as they did we’d have close to 1,000. I’m not sure how many retreat cabins there are in the US, but it’s somewhere in the low dozens. Scott mentioned that slots tend to open up suddenly due to cancellations, and I had told him that I had oodles of free time and could come on extremely short notice. At the beginning of November, he reached out and let me know that a slot had just opened up and offered it to me. I enthusiastically agreed. When I got there I learned that even the cancellation list is over 3,000 people long! Given how perfect the timing3 was relative to all my upheavals, it felt like a magical synchronicity that I was able to attend. Thanks for the miracle Scott!

Preparation

The general structure of the retreat is:

• You get there, and spend a day hanging out and preparing.

• In the evening, you see Adrienne, a somatic therapist and all around wonderful person, who gives you some helpful tips, and then you enter the darkness.

• You spend 3 days in darkness. Scott checks on you every morning and evening from the other side of the door.

• On the morning of the 4th day, you put on a blindfold, Scott leads you outside and you sit on a chair overlooking a scenic wooded valley. You slowly remove your blindfold and acclimate.

• Several hours later, Adrienne does a somatic release session with you to make sure you don’t return to the world in too unstable a mental state.

I did my retreat a little bit differently. Fifteen minutes after getting there, I said, “fuck it” and went right into the darkness. So I spent 24 hours in the dark preparing for even more darkness. I came out of the dark for a few hours to see Adrienne, and then went back in. In total I think I spent about 100+ hours in darkness.

Adrienne and Scott offer some helpful advice before you go in. First, although some “visions” / hallucinations can and do tend to happen, they are NOT THE POINT. Second, the most important attitude to cultivate is a spirit of openness and sincerity - don’t go in expecting any particular TRANSCENDENT THING. Third, your body might start experiencing low level terror from being unable to resolve perceived threat, and it’s important to look for signs of Fight/Flight/Freeze and ground yourself in your bodily sensations to calm yourself down should that happen. And finally, and they cannot emphasize this enough: DO NOT WHITE KNUCKLE THIS. If you find yourself desperately wanting to turn on the lights for a moment, or walk outside, you should probably do it. There’s no medal for perseverance.

When I asked my teacher for advice, he offered this:

“You'll have the opportunity to be with some of the deeper patterns of your mind. (The longer you stay in the closet to the root you go). My advice is to just let everything be. Tracelessness is the optimal view to let all of the deeper karmic impressions play out. But don't make this something "you" do. Just rest. Allow everything to be as it is.”

Basically, let it rip, which is my core practice anyway these days. Prior to going on retreat my sleep had been severely disturbed for months due to my troubles, so I would have been fine with just sleeping a lot for a few days. I did get some really good sleep, but it was a little more eventful than that…

(I’m) Just Being Myself

4

Ok, now the tender bits. I cried, a lot. Each day had its own texture and theme. There were some rather annoying visual hallucinations, mostly a strobe light effect where periodically it felt like a bright flickering light was shining into my eyes (indeed, they were totally besides the point). Every night featured extraordinarily vivid and often violent dreams. I did a little bit of formal meditation in the morning and evening, but mostly spent the days rotating between the bed and the chair. Until the final day, when thought activity settled down considerably, there were some repeated thoughts that looped. Namely, thoughts about some troubling relationships with family and friends and ideas on how to talk to them5. Another thing that looped was certain songs, some relevant to my breakup, and many related to the spiritual journey in general.6

On the first day I experienced a huge wave of grief related to recent losses. That yielded into feelings of tender longing to be in an emotionally nourishing and healthy family. A lot of material related to my relationship with women came up as well. So many memories of flirtations and encounters came up and dissolved. When Adrienne came for my preparatory session, the tears flowed nearly immediately. 24 hours in, and I was already totally opened up.

And yet on the second day an even bigger opening took place. I wasn’t expecting any kind of TRANSCENDENT THING, but the darkness had its own plan. I was sitting in bed and out of nowhere I started doing a practice: a person would come up from my life, or some person from the world, and to each of them I would quietly say, “I love you unconditionally.” I don’t know where this practice came from; it felt like it was implanted into my mindstream by some compassionate Buddha. But when I started doing it, an absolute floodgate of emotion was unleashed. Underneath the tears of sorrow and joy, of longing and grief, of love and compassion was the deepest well of okayness I’ve ever felt. Primordial purity and perfection. Spacious freedom. The capacity to be with anything. Peace - not the peace of the void, of nothingness. The peace beyond or underneath any surface turmoil. The quiet depth of the ocean underneath the choppiest of waves. Wow. I rested in that for the rest of the day. I continue to rest in that, even now.

Then on the third day of darkness my restless brain said to me: thoughts thoughts thoughts. I chanted my favorite mantra.7 I received a teaching on praise and blame that will be the subject of a future essay. I thought about relationships some more. When Scott came to visit, I had to tell him everything. I was a frenetic chatterbox. In response he suggested we do a meditation grounding me in bodily sensations. It was soothing. Then he left, and I started wondering, where was this overwhelming energy to connect with Scott coming from?

That question continued to rattle around in my mind through the last day in darkness. What was this energy of connection? The answer arrived — it was loneliness. I was feeling lonely, and I had a deep abiding fear of that feeling, going back to my very lonely childhood. I felt into that fear, seeing how much of that fear drove my behavior in both friendships and romantic relationships. I counted how many friends I had been texting with recently (a lot). I recounted experiences of sycophancy and self abandonment in early friendships, my fear of solo travel, all tied to a desperate desire not to feel lonely. And in the dark, with no one but myself, I could feel that loneliness without any distraction. It was beautiful, and tremendously healing. The next time Scott came to check on me, that desperation had evaporated. I have a lot more to say about the topic of loneliness that I’m saving for a future essay, but I will just say that in a profound way, that despite being “by yourself”, in another sense when we are in contact with reality we are never alone. The rest of that day also featured a life review of my marriage where I lived through every memory, good and bad, the details of which are private. I cherished all of it.

The next morning Scott took me out. I felt an outpouring of gratitude and sacredness upon contact with the world. I got a fantastic massage from an expert body worker. And then I had an amazing somatic release session with Adrienne. I laid face up on a massage table and she held my ankles while I narrated all of the difficult material that came up over the previous four days. Energy coursed through my body. It was cathartic and I felt a sense of release and relief. I also got some great advice on my practice edge, which is leading from intuition instead of my head. Grounding in the the felt sense of my body is so important for me.

Needless to say, if you feel called to do this, I would strongly recommend you do so. But if you do, I suggest you leave your expectations at the door and open yourself up whatever you encounter.

Finally, for those who enjoy the repeated use of swear words, here’s the moment I came out:

The basic idea here is as follows — when we start out on our psycho-spiritual journey, we are suffering from traumas, undigested emotions, our own shadow, etc. The path is moving toward greater integration and wholeness, bringing all our parts together and harnessing them for our own flourishing and eventually for the benefit of everyone around us.

We might start out meditating2, engaging in practices like concentration (e.g. breath meditation) or noting (bringing mindfulness to moment-to-moment experience and tracking what’s going on) or “do nothing” style (simple resting as the field of awareness and letting everything come and go). One thing that happens right away might be called “distraction” — the mind is really busy and you get derailed from your basic meditative algorithm through different kinds of mental content. Often it’s difficult to disengage from mental content, and the less integrated you are (i.e. the more undigested bits you have), the harder it is to disengage. In fact, one chief challenge of sitting is often how much of those unpleasant undigested bits there are floating around in awareness, and sitting just brings those up. This can feel kind of shitty3.

Now with time and practice, you start building up a tolerance to just sit with those uncomfortable bits. You might find that all of a sudden you have an increased capacity to feel things and it’s easier to rest in awareness. Then you can apply that capacity to various modalities of inner work.

In different sorts of inner work, the goal is to access those submerged feelings, traumas, aspects of self and fully feel them. It’s difficult to do this at first, because the pain and grief associated with becoming aware of these aspects of self is really difficult to bear. You might even notice how much of our personality structure and habits and energy are caught up in avoiding feeling those feelings. But the only way out is through. And as you meditate and develop the tolerance to sit with unpleasant stuff, you are more and more able to bring all this stuff into the light.

As you bring more of this stuff into awareness, they gradually become integrated, And lo and behold, once they are more integrated, they stop being so intrusive and unruly. They stop unconsciously steering your thoughts and behaviors. You feel better. As Carl Jung said “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." In other words, your mind will become more amenable to a sort of control… precisely the kind of control that makes various meditative practices easier and less unpleasant. My teacher, Dan Brown, would say that “to deconstruct the self, first you have to have a self.”

As you can see, it’s a flywheel — meditation makes therapy easier, which in turn makes meditation easier. And in fact, you can think of it as an ascending/descending spiral as much as a flywheel, because the fruits of meditation involve greater contact with the transpersonal realm.4. So in conclusion, do both! These are two great tastes that taste great together. Or maybe more accurately, they are all one taste.

“'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.”

You probably didn’t notice, but it’s been a long time since I’ve last written publicly. That’s because I’ve had a lot going on in the last five months - specifically:

• My co-founder and I shut down the startup we had been working on for the last 5 years.

• My dog died suddenly and tragically.

• My marriage of 16 years ended.

I’ve seen a number of Buddhist authors talk about the radical shifts that can happen on the spiritual path. Of course many people experience a kind of polycrisis at some point in their lives - old age, sickness, and death are ubiquitous. And a person in their 40s undergoing a midlife crisis is maybe the most cliched story in our culture. Still, when it actually happens to you, it still feels surprising. I never thought leopards would eat MY face. And yet here I am, face consumed1.

Having now had a lot of time to grieve and work with these events2, I’ve come to much better place - in fact, my baseline happiness is now the highest it’s ever been in my life.3 Since grief and love are two sides of the same coin (the bigger the love, the bigger the grief), my contention is that these two facts are related. When faced with the possible upending of one’s life, there are two pains to consider - the pain of things staying the same, or the pain of changing. There isn’t a path free of pain in this life, but for many people, the known pain seems easier to bear than the unknown pain, even if there is the possibility of something better on the other side of the unknown. No spiritual practice can guarantee change will be for the better; maybe the known really is the lesser of two evils. However — and I can only speak from my own experience — these events have been a sacred unfolding.

In Near Enemies of the Truth4, Hareesh expounds on the kernel of truth contained in the false bromide that “everything happens for a reason”, explaining that it is incumbent upon us to co-create that reason, that the reason isn’t a given. He calls this “extracting the blessing energy”:

I like to put it this way: all events contain potential gifts and blessings, and the more intense or challenging the event, the more potential blessing energy it contains. The events we call painful or challenging are, from the spiritual perspective, more accurately called “events that require work to extract their blessing energy.” Imagine if you were able to see all painful or challenging events in this way. Wouldn’t it be an incredible paradigm shift to experience all challenging events as neither bad nor wrong but simply events that require some work to extract their blessing energy? Note the word experience here is carefully chosen: it’s usually not enough to simply see a blessing in a painful event because that is often nothing but a conceptual overlay, a form of mental self-soothing. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we must do deeper inner work if we want to experience the palpable felt-sense and clear perception that the painful event is in fact a blessing.

Christopher Wallis. Near Enemies of the Truth: Avoid the Pitfalls of a Spiritual Life and Become Radically Free (p. 76).

Moreover, the key mental move in extracting the blessing energy is to fully feel the painful emotions that is associated with these events:

How do you do this inner work? That depends on the person and on the event in question, but my general guideline is this: first, feel all the emotions triggered by the event fully, pushing none of them away, while at the same time taking care to lay aside the associated stories or mental constructs that attempt to explain why you’re feeling these emotions. Allow the emotions to surge through you like a rushing river of energy—or drip through you like a dribbling stream, sink through you like a stone moving through mud, or whatever’s authentically happening. Be intimate with the emotional energy, without making a self-image out of it. When it has finished moving through (at least, for the time being), feel into the center, the still point at the innermost core of your being, and let yourself rest in that stillness for a bit. Then you can ask the inner wisdom to reveal the blessing(s) or the gift(s) in this challenging circumstance. Be careful not to jump to a comforting thought or platitude that may or may not be true in this case; feel your way, carefully and honestly, organically and vulnerably, into what your innate wisdom reveals to you—patiently waiting as you would for the slow opening of a beautiful rose.

Now that enough time has passed and I’ve felt these emotions in great depth, I feel ready to write about the last six months in a way that may be of benefit to others. That’s part of extracting the blessing energy for me — transmuting the pain into wisdom5 and sharing that in a constructive way with others. Although my prior writing might have been of some benefit, one thing that I noticed when I went back and read my posts from the first half of this year is a kind of narrative distance, a reluctance to speak from my personal experience. They read as if someone else wrote it about someone else. One consequence of experiencing so much grief is feeling scrubbed clean, of feeling open and vulnerable in a deeper, more immediate way. My hope is that this vulnerability can be helpful. My life truly is my practice - especially during challenging times. While there are some things I can’t share out of respect for others, I will be much more direct. This is just the start.

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