Links for Tuesday

Substack roundup edition: On working with thoughts and emotions, letting go, expressing your uniqueness, EA overclaiming and the implications of being embedded in dense networks.

There has been so much worthwhile Buddhist-adjacent writing on Substack lately; here are some of my favorites!

• This very clear essay by Arthur Joyce on the self-liberation of thoughts is a must-read for Vajrayana practitioners. It describes how thoughts are experienced from the Ground of Being - as an expression of spaciousness, an adornment, a bubbling up that arises and passes away. The big takeaway more broadly is that thoughts are not the enemy, and when viewed the right way they mostly deal with themselves without you having to “do” anything. Like a snake uncoiling itself.

• I’m a big fan of Eric Schwitzgebel¹ , and in this wonderful post he argues that we have a duty to creatively manifest our uniqueness in the world.

• This is a lovely book review of Jules Evans’ new book on The Art of Losing Control. It’s an extended discussion of how our rationalist culture has pushed to the side ritual and sacredness and “letting go” more broadly. There is value in allowing your mind to rest in mystery, in not knowing.

• Relatedly, I enjoyed this essay by River Kenna about letting go, pointing out that our ideas of how a spiritual person should act can become another source of tension rather than something we liberate into:

  There’s the recent Buddhist meditator, stopping every conversation to breathe deeply, center themselves, and soften their eyes before whispering whatever response feels appropriately enlightened enough.

  This is a helpful reminder for me, as a person who has a tendency to bypass negative emotion in various ways (even (especially) now!). Working with that “negative” energy is so important! This other essay of his is one I have some minor quibbles with, but the idea that we need to abandon transcendence as a goal of spiritual practice is spot on (and very Dzogchen). I’m also on guard against creeping expectations of perfection from both myself and my spiritual teachers / mentors.

• This was a good roundup (we’re going full meta today!) on Buddhist learnings, podcast etc from Artem Zen², with a focus on working with emotions. This was a good description of a practice he learned from Lama Lena (who seems awesome, btw. I’ve watched a little of her on YouTube):

The instructions for the practice were as follows:

• Choose an emotion to work with ((anger, fear, lust, jealousy, & sadness)

• Think about a story that triggers the emotion

• Allow emotional sensations to arise in the body

• Drop the story and the categorization of the emotion

• Notice where the sensations are without focusing on them

• Remain in open awareness and allow the sensations to play out in whichever way they do

• I try not to stir needless controversy, but I just want to highlight these lines from a post on how EAs should be proud to be an Effective Altruists:

  Giving money to effective charities and getting others to do the same is by far the best thing I have ever done in my life. Every nice thing I’ve done interpersonally doesn’t have half a percent the value of saving lives, of funneling money into the hands of charities so that little kids don’t get horrible diseases that kill them.

  The effective altruism movement has saved about 50,000 lives a year since its inception.

  I really dislike the idea that giving money is the best thing one can do in one’s life. What an incredibly impoverished view, and combined with this blithe assertion that EAs are saving 50k lives a year, incredibly arrogant. That 50k number, like all of these kinds of estimates, are laden with statistical and econometric assumptions. Assumptions that we could almost certainly poke holes in if we looked closely. The state of social science evidence is largely shambolic, and the more you get away from RCTs (though lots of problems there too!) into various causal assumptions, the more contestable your claims are. Look, I’m all for charitable donation, and I’m all for trying to carefully measure impact. What I am not for is going around claiming you know the true impact of actions you take and that everyone should consequently do what you say. I am also not for treating these kinds of estimates as sacrosanct and using them to bludgeon your opponents. I am also not for minimizing the impact of the interpersonal actions we take relative to the money we donate. It’s a recipe for becoming a giant asshole (or moral monster) or for violating human dignity at scale.

• Also relevant is this incredibly thought provoking piece about dense vs. sparse social networks and their implication for how ideas spread by Rohit Krishnan. Brief summary: unlike the past, the current technologically mediated society is one where our social networks are much more densely connected than before. The implication of this is that information and trends spread much more rapidly, there are fewer cultural islands, and more negativity bias. While this suggests that social movements can spread and consolidate more quickly (opportunity!), it makes it harder to maintain diversity. That’s my excuse for occasionally stirring the pot and arguing - when a very powerful idea rapidly takes hold among a population, there can be an opportunity to dislodge it if we can get alternative ideas to spread virally. I suspect that has been happening increasingly with ideas around good spiritual practice, and perhaps this is a moment where one has leverage to influence the shape of those ideas for the better.

1. Among other things, he wrote a great essay against longtermism based on the idea that it’s very hard to predict the future impact of our actions. It would be a fun topic for a post on its own.

2. I know he also linked to me favorably in there, but I promise this isn’t just reciprocity ;-)