Quote
Until a person chooses one discipline and commits to it, how can a deep understanding of themselves and the world be revealed to them? Spiritual work requires sustained practice and a commitment to look very deeply into ourselves and the world around us to discover what has created human suffering and what will free us from any manner of conflict. We must look at ourselves over and over again in order to learn to love, to discover what has kept our hearts closed, and what it means to allow our hearts to open. If we do a little of one kind of practice and a little of another, the work we have done in one often doesn’t continue to build as we change to the next. It is as if we were to dig many shallow wells instead of one deep one. In continually moving from one approach to another, we are never forced to face our own boredom, impatience, and fears. We are never brought face to face with ourselves. So we need to choose a way of practice that is deep and ancient and connected with our hearts, and then make a commitment to follow it as long as it takes to transform ourselves. This is the outward aspect of taking the one seat. Once we have made the outward choice among the many paths available and have begun a systematic practice, we often find ourselves assailed from within by doubts and fears, by all the feelings that we have never dared experience. Eventually all of the dammed-up pain of a lifetime will arise. Once we have chosen a practice, we must have the courage and the determination to stick with it and use it in the face of all our difficulties. This is the inward aspect of taking the one seat.
Kornfield, Jack. A Path with Heart: A Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life
This is another favorite quote of mine from Jack Kornfield - a reminder that to make progress we can’t be total spiritual dilettantes. That doesn’t mean we can’t try things out to find the tradition and path that most resonates with us - rather that once we find that path we must fully commit.
Links
Bigness/smallness - This law review article argues that pretty much every randomized control trial intervention in criminal justice has failed when scaled up - underscoring the difficulty of intervening to improve complex systems. Among other things, she suggests trying systemic reform instead, which of course could compound the problems she highlights from policymaking via RCTs. Years ago I read Mark Kleiman’s (RIP) wonderful book When Brute Force Fails, and came away thinking that “swift, certain, and fair” as implemented in Hawaii’s Project HOPE could be a much better approach to criminal justice, but I read in this paper that attempts to scale it up in 5 states were a failure. I guess I need to be more careful expressing my glib takes based on reading the social science literature…
Blogpost on “charnel vision” from Ribbonfarm, a site I find occasionally extremely illuminating but often inscrutable. The charnel is a place where dead bodies are stored or left to decay. It was often the site for Vajrayana ritual and practice. The idea of the post is that the era in which we live is a kind of charnel house - a place where we are confronted with decay and collapse (e.g. of our institutions). Hard to summarize, but this quote resonated strongly:
That’s why I think charnel vision is a healthy thing. A world that desperately celebrates optimism and medicates pessimism is a world that is not truly willing to look at itself and contemplate the death and decay that must necessarily accompany life and growth.
It is only if we take seriously the possibility (certainty?) that this is all impermanent and fragile that we can work to forestall collapse.
Cool paper that tries to synthesize the psychology and phenomenology of insight experiences, from a Bayesian / predictive processing perspective. One juicy quote:
To briefly take the model one step further, consider the question: Who or what is it that recognizes that an insight has occurred? How is that we can reflect on whether the insight phenomenology is reliable, or not (as is occurring in this paper)? Recent work extends hierarchical active inference to include an additional layer of parametric inference that corresponds to meta-awareness (Sandved-Smith et al., 2021). For example, there are objects of perception, then there is attention in relation to that perception, and there is also meta-awareness of changes in attentional deployment (e.g., noticing that “my attention has wandered”, cf. Schooler et al., 2011). Likewise, in the case of insight, we have an idea, we also have a feeling about that idea, and we can also have a meta-awareness about the feeling (i.e., how confident am I that this feeling is trustworthy in this context?).
On the power of devotion'
Related to the Jack Kornfield quote, having devotion - devotion to the lineage, the tradition, or the teachers - is central to the path. However, devotion isn’t very fashionable, even in many spiritual circles. People today cobble together practices and ideas from many traditions, engaging in a kind of syncretic activity that may or may not yield results. But in doing so they may miss the beauty that comes from a deeper and more complete engagement with a specific path. Of course, finding that path is difficult1 , and some people indeed are able to achieve great results from trying many different methods (no universal advice!). Nonetheless, devotion to a particular path (which for some may shade uncomfortably close to dogmatism - but really is more like a kind of mindfulness / discipline) and a moment to moment devotion to the Path can yield spectacular and rapid results. Maybe go wide, then go deep and then go wide again after achieving some degree of mastery.
A promissory note - I will write about this more in the future.