Meaningness Podcast

About Meaningness Podcast

🚞 Trains of thought 💭 captured as sound🎙️; monologues on diverse ⁉️ topics, and conversations 👥 too! meaningness.substack.com (https://meaningness.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

David Chapman

Category

religion & spirituality · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

30 Mar 2024

Latest episode

7 May 2026

Latest episodes

31 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 May 2026

   Creating conduits between the visionary realm and the actual world

   Transcript Introduction [00:00] Most of this podcast is a recording from a retreat Charlie Awbery (https://charlieawbery.substack.com/about) and I led a month ago. I’m adding a short introduction here now, to provide background context, so you can understand more of what we presented then. So first, tantra is the branch of Buddhism concerned with energy (https://vividness.live/free-flowing-energy), and therefore with action (https://vividness.live/tantra-result). Energy is the potential for action. You can’t have either without the other. Tantra is still sometimes misunderstood as being all about sex. There’s a lot of energy and action in sex, so tantra can work with that. But there’s energy and action in everything we do, so tantra can work with everything in our lives. In all Buddhisms, one acts for the benefit of others. However, most just help you develop good intentions. Tantra calls the bluff on that. Without energy, intentions are flaccid piety. Tantra says, “Okay, that’s nice. What are you actually going to do for other people and how?” And it has answers. There are many different styles of beneficent activity. Tantra personifies them as yidams (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/yidam-extraordinary-relational-possibilities), who are mythic people, rather like gods, who represent particular kinds of energy (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/vajra-pride-and-the-diversity-of). This retreat was sponsored by Evolving Ground (https://www.evolvingground.org/), a contemporary Vajrayana Buddhist community we abbreviate as eG. eG teaches several different yidams (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/195343497/evolving-ground-teaches-diverse-yidam-practices), and therefore several different styles of benevolent energy, and beneficent activity. We wrote a post about that two weeks ago, titled “Yidam: extraordinary relational possibilities. (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/yidam-extraordinary-relational-possibilities)” You might want to check it out for more background explanation. One style of beneficence is nobility (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/nobility-table-of-contents): the wise, creative, and just use of power. In eG, we take the yidam Gesar (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/147291219/the-tibetan-caesar-with-the-wakeness-mind-of-buddha) as inspiration for noble activity. Gesar is the mythic warrior-king-sorcerer-god-hero of a vast Tibetan epic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_King_Gesar). We practice Gesar with a text, called a sadhana (https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Sadhana). A sadhana is the manual for a structured meditation ritual, which you can practice individually or in a group. Part of the ritual is reading the text out loud, and then doing the things it describes. The Evolving Ground sadhana is titled Good King Gesar (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/195343497/good-king-gesar). It’s written in flowery pseudo-poetic language, as is traditional. In the retreat recording that follows, I explained particular bits of the text; and quoted it in places. Gesar was the king of a place called Ling. Our retreat was held in a gorgeous remote mountain valley in Scotland. As you will hear, that is also Ling. One last thing: the transcript of this podcast on Substack includes numerous hyperlinks to explanations of uncommon concepts. If you are confused by missing background, or want to learn more about some point, you could follow those. Also, the transcript has numerous illustrations which can help visualize what we are talking about. And so now… let’s catch a ride to Ling on the back of the garuda of outrageousness! The actual world is the mandala of the deity [04:04] One of the things about this sadhana that is unusual is that it is emphasizing the actual world as the mandala of the deity. Mandala is the Sanskrit word for kingdom. It literally means circle, but it means kingdom. There is the visionary world, and there’s the actual world; and these are both real, in some sense. Tantra forms the connection between the visionary realm and the actual world. You (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/175972495/seeing-and-acting-two-ways-at-once) become the connection (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/175972495/seeing-and-acting-two-ways-at-once) between these two. You can think of the central channel as a conduit that connects the energy of the actual world and the energy of the visionary realm, and they flow through (https://vividness.live/unclogging)you (https://vividness.live/unclogging). You can get lost in the visionary realm. I recommend avoiding (https://vividness.live/tantra-is-anti-spiritual) becoming a spiritual person, because this means being lost in the visionary realm, and trying to un-see the actual world as much as possible. And this makes you ineffective! Because if you’re going to act in the actual world, for the benefit of other people, you need to have a accurate vision of what is going on (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/169304807/seeing-like-a-good-king), and how it works. On the other hand, if you are stuck in the actual world and you are trying to un-see the visionary world, then you’re caught in a kind of mundane (https://meaningness.com/ordinariness) materialism (https://meaningness.com/materialism) that lacks vision; that is not directed toward some… better future? That’s actually putting it in a bit of a materialistic point of view, but: some kind of pure vision of what is possible (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/169304807/positive-vision-is-a-good-kings-responsibility). I think “possibility” is the right word for this. So, a lot of Tibetan material… they were isolated in monasteries, and they got lost in the visionary realm a lot of the time. The Gesar material is, I think, an attempt to make this connection of the actual world of a very difficult political situation, at a particular time, at a particular place in Tibet, where action needed to be taken: for the benefit of people who were caught up in civil wars and religious strife. There needed to be a connection made between that mundane, difficult situation and a vision of what was possible instead. And the possibility was: a Good King (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/169304807/we-all-know-what-a-good-king-is). Mipham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamg%C3%B6n_Ju_Mipham_Gyatso), who did a lot of this work, was an advisor to the king at the time. And he wrote a book called The Just King (https://amzn.to/3PqjccX), which is a book of advice to the Crown Prince of Derge, which was a major kingdom in the area; who did become king. This is a form-oriented sadhana. It’s an action-oriented sadhana. And I think it’s why Mipham did what he did, which we’re reworking here. It’s that action was required, form was required, at that time. And Tibetan Buddhism had kind of gone off into fairyland, and he was trying to pull it back down to concrete form; reality. The cavortings of awareness unleashed [07:34] So all of this stuff is: the cavortings of awareness unleashed. And partly that’s to emphasize the fact that we’re speaking in the visionary realm here, and you don’t want to concretize this as something that’s actually existent in some sense. But also, there is the practice in tantra of seeing everything as illusory in some sense. And this is bringing the visionary realm and the actual realm into correspondence. And when you do that, things you see in the actual realm take on a visionary quality (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/seeing-and-doing-mythically), and become somewhat unreal and transparent and shape-shifting. And that can become psychotic, if you’re not maintaining also the connection with the concrete specifics of how stuff actually works. This is the trick of tantra: making that connection without losing yourself in either realm. And being able to superimpose them, to employ the logic of vision and the logic of actuality as appropriate; simultaneously, ideally. So, “cavortings of awareness unleashed” is this sense of sacredness (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/178464600/free-engagement-with-sacredness-without-religion), and slightly unreal quality. Jan: I have a question about “cavortings.” I checked it in the dictionary and it means, like, “play” basically? David: Yeah, energetic, bouncing around kind of play. Jan: What was the “leash” then? David: Um, unleashed from mundanity. From being lost in ordinariness. When you’re leashed to ordinariness, you can’t see sacredness (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/178464600/sacredness-is-not-subjective). You can’t see the electric qualities of actual things. Ideologies are demonic attempts to escape from actuality into some vision [09:38] David: The section “Displaying confidence in actuality,” I said last time: this is in the place of the refuge. “Taking refuge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refuge_in_Buddhism)” is displaying confidence in actuality. That’s this sense of, “Okay, I’m actually in this actual-world situation (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it). And that is what I’m confident of.” Mara (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara_(demon)) showing a mystic vision of perfection is the failure mode of trying to escape into the visionary realm. The actual world is the charnel ground (https://vividness.live/charnel-ground). It’s civil war, in that case. Do ask questions! Splendid! Yes? Sasha Vezhnevets (https://substack.com/profile/114591809-sasha-vezhnevets): Um, when I yesterday was going through it, I also had another way of interpreting the “vision of perfection”? David: Mm-hmm? Sasha: As kind of: an ideology, not necessarily related to mysticism or religion, but any sort of ideology that imagines perfection? David: Yeah. Sasha: I mean, for me, the “mysticism” would be communism; something like that. That’s what was more familiar growing up, but there’s no lack of other ones. So what you think of that interpretation? David: Yes. Sasha: And monastics, we can have academics, and that choice— Steph (https://substack.com/profile/81296937-steph): Or any rule-based system, or any framework, if you take it as the main, or the only, framework. David: Yeah, thank you. That’s exactly right. There’s a section in here about Gesar… Let’s see… Your horse-hooves trample the compulsions of demonic (https://meaningness.com/control) egregores (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore)! Your werma-arrows riddle the promises (https://meaningness.com/eternalism-appeal) of delusional enthusiasms (https://meaningness.com/understanding#politics)! Your prajña (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praj%C3%B1%C4%81_(Buddhism)#Mah%C4%81y%C4%81na_Buddhism)-sword eviscerates the certainties of fixed ideologies (https://meaningness.com/certainty)! This is addressed at exactly that. Dzogchen has a meta-systematic view of Buddhism [11:20] David: This is kind of eG-specific. It’s the meta-systematic view that any fixed system is actually demonic, and needs to be slaughtered. Once you’ve chopped the head off the demon, you can raise it from the dead and have it serve you. This is a very traditional role for Tibetan sorcerers, to subjugate demons and force them to serve the dharma. My work on meta-rationality (https://metarationality.com/), and other things that I’ve written, are relevant here, and being echoed in the sadhana. Dzogchen (https://vividness.live/emptiness-zen-tantra-dzogchen), uniquely in Buddhism, is meta-systematic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulayar%C4%81ja_Tantra#Atiyoga_and_the_nine_vehicles); and says, “Here are all these different Buddhist systems; and here’s how they’re useful, under what circumstances, for what purposes do you apply this Buddhist system; and here’s how it’s limited, and actually not a full story, not actually correct.” I think that’s part of the attraction of Dzogchen, for me and for Charlie and for others: that sense of “No fixed system; but systems are actually very valuable.” And we’re practicing a particular system in doing this; but there’s nothing sacred about this sadhana; or fixed as “this is the thing to do.” It’s a thing that has a particular function. We got this partly from Ngak’chang Rinpoche (https://aroterlineage.org/en/about/the-lineage-holders/), who got it from Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche (https://aroencyclopaedia.org/shared/text/k/kdr_ph_04_eng.php). I don’t know where Kunzang Dorje Rinpoche got it. I mean, he got it from the Kunjé Gyalpo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulayar%C4%81ja_Tantra), I suppose. Or his teachers. Victory over aggression [12:59] David: I’m just gonna go through this and babble, but please ask questions. That was a very illuminating question; thank you, Sasha! I act for the benefit of friend and foe alike. That’s central for the Gesar mythos: that a warrior is willing and able to kill (https://buddhism-for-vampires.com/buddhists-who-kill), when that is absolutely necessary; but does so without anger, and without aggression, but simply out of a sense of “this has to be done.” “I wish it didn’t have to be done, but I’m now going to kill you because that’s what has to be done.” I find, to be more concrete about it, that when I’m in conflict with somebody… I mean, this sounds nice and, and I’m not nice, and I don’t really advocate niceness (https://vividness.live/nice-buddhism) as such. But, looking for both how can I benefit the person, but also how can I actually take their side in a conflict, is really helpful. It doesn’t guarantee a good outcome. It doesn’t guarantee that either of us will wind up happy in the end, but by and large, it improves the interpersonal situation. Adult stage theory and Buddhist tantra [14:18] David: There’s several bits of eG-specific language in here. One is: Lead me into the autonomy of self-authorship, And my distinctive manifestation of nobility as self-possibility. These are eG terms, partly taken over from adult stage theory (https://meaningness.com/adult-stages-index), which has worked its way into a tantric sadhana! Charlie (https://charlieawbery.substack.com/about): They’re directly relevant to the eG path, the ninefold path, as well. “Self-possibility” is the sixth in that set, and “personal autonomy” is the third; and those two are directly related, vertically. So, personal autonomy is the form aspect of the base; self-possibility is the form aspect of the path; and then powerfulness (https://vividness.live/power) is the form aspect of the result, in that eG nine way. Ling is in Scotland and Colorado, and distills the nectar of the gods [15:14] David: In terms of this emphasis on the actual world in this sadhana, this is Ling. This is a magnificent place. Thank you for bringing us here, Steph! But you can see here the: grassy plains replete with iris and columbine. Apostol (https://substack.com/profile/8405111-apostol): Are there, like, esoteric wrinkles there? David: Yeah, everything in here is covered in esoteric wrinkles! Apostol: So why those? David: Why the iris and columbine? That’s esoteric in the sense that it’s coming out of personal experience of particularly sacred places in mountains. The iris is a reference to a sacred place in the Sierra Nevada, where Charlie and I lived for a decade. The columbine is the State Flower of Colorado. They’re spectacular blue flowers. Um, so… Where is it? Um, skipping ahead a few pages: The wind of attention parts the gray mist of nebulosity, Revealing a sunny upland meadow of Ling. There is a principle in tantra, that everything is everything else. No! Sorry! Everything is something else. There are monist religions in which everything is everything else, everything is actually the same as everything. Tantra is highly specific. It’s really interested in the complexity of details. And so: menstrual blood is emptiness. These are the same thing, and they’re also the sun; and so on and so forth. There are these systems of correspondences, where each thing is a series of other things. This is the Kingdom of Ling; but also the Kingdom of Ling is about 25 miles west of where we live, in the Rocky Mountains. Charlie and Steph have both been to that particular place in Ling, which is “replete with iris and columbine.” It’s at about 11,000 feet. It is spectacularly beautiful. And there is a stream that flows through it. The path that I’ve taken with Charlie and Steph, the stream that flows through there eventually works its way down through a series of spectacular canyons, drops about 6,000 feet onto the plane. The last canyon is called El Dorado Canyon, which is unbelievable. It’s got sort of 2000 foot walls. And, there’s a Scotsman who fell in love with an American, and married her and moved to Boulder, Colorado, which is where this stream eventually flows through, on its way out to the Mississippi River. He was trained as a distiller, and on moving to the US needed to find some kind of employment; and founded a distillery (https://boulderspirits.com/about-us), making a Colorado version of Scotch whiskey. And this distillery has won all kinds of awards for best American whiskey. People who do whiskey think that the water is very important. That’s what gives the whiskey its character. So the water for that whiskey comes from El Dorado Canyon, which is where this stream that comes down through the Kingdom of Ling, replete with iris and columbine, which we visited. So this whiskey is actually Ling whiskey, because things are other things! And we will be, in the wang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abhi%E1%B9%A3eka_(Buddhism)#Empowerment_(wang)), making ritual use of amrita (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amrita). Amrita is the drink of the gods in Indian mythology, and that is understood as alcohol in tantra. We will be making use of amrita from Ling. Charlie: Did you bring some? David: Yes. Charlie: Good! We are always in Ling, Gesar’s kingdom [19:46] David: Uh, “Ling.” “Ling” is interesting because “ling” is simply the Tibetan word for “a place.” Ling is in Kham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kham), which is the area that is at the border between China and Tibet, and for a long time was claimed by both China and Tibet as being part of them. Um, and the people who lived in Kham were like, “No, we’re independent of both of you, go away.” But the word “kham,” which refers to this particular area, simply means “region” in Tibetan. So Ling is a kingdom in Kham, which means it is “a place in the region.” So Lingtsang Gyalpo (https://grokipedia.com/page/wangchen_tenzin), I have explained to you, was the last king of Ling. He was the last king of a kingdom called Ling. But it just means “place.” He was the king of a place in some region. And very often Gesar is referred to as “Ling Gesar.” He is the Caesar (https://meaningness.substack.com/i/147291219/the-tibetan-caesar-with-the-wakeness-mind-of-buddha)of some place: Ling. And it’s actually historically unclear whether he existed, but if he did exist: like, which place is it that he was the Caesar of? It might have been Lingtsang (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Lingtsang); the people who live in Lingtsang want to claim that it was there, but it’s not clear. So in some sense we are always in Ling. Wherever we are, that’s Ling. So you take Gesar with you, and you take Ling with you. Emily: Is “Gesar” actually cognate with “Caesar,” or is that a coincidence? David: It’s believed by Western scholars to be cognate. As the Roman Empire expanded, the satraps and peripheral kingdoms… as the Empire collapsed, they declared themselves to be “Caesar.” So the Kaiser of Germany, that’s Caesar; and the Tsar of Russia, that’s Caesar; and the Gesar of Ling, that’s the Caesar too. In what are now the –Stans were Buddhist kingdoms, at one time; and the rulers there called themselves “Caesar.” And they had a lot of cultural exchange with Tibet, until they were taken over by Muslims. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe (https://meaningness.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

2. 

   28 Apr 2026

   Meaning: lost, or muddled by metaphysics?

   John Vervaeke’s Meaning Crisis (https://johnvervaeke.com/series/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/) and my Meaningness (https://meaningness.com/) address similar issues in similar frameworks. Yet there seem significant differences! Andrew Conner (https://substack.com/profile/8963032-andrew-conner) pinpointed some in his insightful essay “Is the ‘meaning crisis’ a real loss? (https://x.com/connerdelights/status/2045196446354559433)” Coincidentally, he was visiting Charlie Awbery (https://substack.com/profile/65531311-charlie-awbery) and me at the time, so we were able to discuss it in person, and recorded a video of our conversation. In addition to that, this post includes a section of links to relevant discussions elsewhere, assembled by Andrew; and a transcript in case you’d rather read than watch. A follow-up post, going live next Saturday, explains bits I botched during the recording and we deleted from this video. It’s about ways metaphysics muddles our thinking, feeling, and acting. And, about how we perceive sacredness in the actual world—such as in a salt shaker. Relevant discussions elsewhere Primary sources * John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (AftMC): YouTube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ) · series home (https://johnvervaeke.com/series/awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis/) · community transcripts (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/all-transcripts/) * David Chapman, Meaningness (http://meaningness.com) * David Chapman, Meta-rationality (http://metarationality.com) * Andrew Conner, Is the “meaning crisis” a real loss? (https://x.com/connerdelights/status/2045196446354559433) Chapman’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Eternalism: meaningness.com/eternalism (https://meaningness.com/eternalism): the stance that meanings must be perfectly definite * Nihilism: meaningness.com/nihilism (https://meaningness.com/nihilism): the mirror-image stance, that since meanings aren’t perfectly definite, they don’t exist * The complete stance: meaningness.com/meaningness (https://meaningness.com/meaningness): recognizing meaning as inseparably nebulous and patterned * Nebulosity and pattern: meaningness.com/nebulosity (https://meaningness.com/nebulosity) * No world beyond the actual one: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/this-is-it) * Stances trump systems: meaningness.com/stances-trump-systems (https://meaningness.com/stances-trump-systems) * Materialism (as stance): meaningness.com/materialism (https://meaningness.com/materialism) * Textures of the complete stance: meaningness.com/textures-of-completion (https://meaningness.com/textures-of-completion) · wonder (https://meaningness.com/wonder) · curiosity (https://meaningness.com/curiosity) · humor (https://meaningness.com/humor) · play (https://meaningness.com/play) · enjoy-the-dance (https://meaningness.com/enjoy-the-dance) · creation (https://meaningness.com/creation) * Vision, Instruction, and Action (https://amzn.to/4mRCnsA) (Chapman’s PhD thesis, lightly revised) * Vividness: vividness.live (https://vividness.live/) · Approaching Vajrayana (https://vividness.live/approaching-vajrayana) * Nobility arc: table of contents (https://meaningness.substack.com/p/nobility-table-of-contents) Vervaeke’s concepts, in the order they’re mentioned * Relevance realization: Vervaeke, Lillicrap & Richards (2012), “Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science,” J. Logic and Computation 22(1): Oxford Academic (https://academic.oup.com/logcom/article-abstract/22/1/79/1007787) · open PDF (http://www.ipsi.utoronto.ca/sdis/Relevance-Published.pdf) * Four P’s / Four Ways of Knowing (propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory): Henriques overview (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202101/john-vervaeke-s-brilliant-4p3r-metatheory-cognition) · Vervaeke & Mastropietro, revised 4P paper (https://osf.io/gw7r5_v2) * DIME / Ecology of Practices (Dialogical, Imaginal, Mindfulness, Embodiment): Vervaeke Foundation EoP page (https://awakentomeaning.com/vfeop/) * Reverse-engineering enlightenment: AftMC Ep. 36 (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-36-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-religio-perennial-problems-reverse-eng-enlightenment/) and Ep. 37 (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-37-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-reverse-engineering-enlightenment-part-2/) * The sacred as inexhaustibility: AftMC Ep. 35 (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-35-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-the-symbol-sacredness-and-the-sacred/) develops it; Ep. 50 ties it together * Cultural grammar: AftMC Ep. 38 (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-38-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-agape-and-4e-cognitive-science/) * Serious play: AftMC Ep. 17 (Gnosis and Existential Inertia) (https://www.meaningcrisis.co/ep-17-awakening-from-the-meaning-crisis-gnosis-and-existential-inertia/) Developmental psychology, cognitive science * Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self (1982): Harvard UP (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674272316) * Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994): Harvard UP (https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674445888) * The frame problem: SEP: Frame Problem (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/) * McCarthy & Hayes (1969): “Some Philosophical Problems from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence” (https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.pdf) (origin) * Dennett (1984): “Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI” (https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/cogwheel.htm) (philosophical generalization) Miscellaneous * Adjective ordering (“clear blue sky” vs “blue clear sky”): Cambridge Grammar: order of adjectives (https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order) · Wikipedia: English adjective order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_adjectives#Order) (the so-called “royal order of adjectives”) * Bronze Age / Late Bronze Age Collapse: Bronze Age (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronze_Age) · Late Bronze Age collapse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse) Transcript [Caveat: Generated by “AI,” inaccurate and in places misleading.] [00:00:00] David: I thought maybe it would make sense for you to start by introducing your project here, what it is that you’re trying to do and why. And some background on John Vervaeke’s general project, because people may not be familiar with that. [00:00:29] Andrew: So I encountered your writing and his writing around the same time. I would guess about five to six years ago. It was kind of a time where a lot of things were breaking for me, and so I found them both incredibly useful. John Vervaeke recorded a 50-hour lecture series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, and you have written many partial books, which are probably far more than 50 hours of reading. In my mind they’re a little bit interleaved, and I found both of them very useful. Recently I wanted to figure out how your ideas interact. They’re both about the word “meaning” and different aspects of it. I think that both you and him have a diagnosis of what’s going on, and I wanted to understand how you saw each other’s ideas. I think I have a decent idea of the way you disagree, but you can correct me. [00:01:46] David: So I don’t know Vervaeke’s work well at all. I read a few of his academic papers, and I watched, I think, two episodes of the 50-hour meaning crisis series. Then I read a lot of blog posts from other people about his work. So I have a quite diffuse sense of it. Something you mentioned when we were talking about this earlier is that he has developed his ideas in further directions, or maybe even a different direction, since the meaning crisis series. And neither of us, I think, is very clear on quite how he’s gone. I thought it’d also be good to say that the Meaningness book I started working on 25 years ago, and I worked most of the ideas out during a six-month period when I was staying with Rin’dzin, who’s now Charlie, my now spouse — Andrew: Congratulations. David: Yeah, it’s great to be married to Charlie. On her kitchen table while she was off at work. This was when she was living in Bristol in the UK. So that book doesn’t really reflect my current understanding. It’s not that I disagree with anything or that I think it’s wrong, but there’s another 15-plus years of development since I put it on the web, which was in 2010 or 2012 or something like that. So we have two out-of-date understandings. [00:03:58] Andrew: Try to merge two out-of-date understandings, right. And see how they go. So I had written a tweet thread that may go out as a tweet thread, or maybe this conversation, or something like that. Perhaps we could go through it. I can kind of summarize. I think it’s useful to speed-run his ideas. Maybe you can interject with your background. The overall shape of his lecture series is that it’s a little bit entertaining. If you like watching him lecture, then it is an entertaining thing to watch. If you’ve never encountered the ideas, there’s a lot of learning. He’s knitting together thought from eastern, western, different branches of philosophy in very pleasant ways. One way of looking at what he’s doing is this intellectually entertaining sort of thing. I think that understates what his goal was, but there’s intellectual understanding there. The first half is largely a history lesson and the second half is largely cognitive science. Maybe we could go through a little bit. Would that be good? [00:05:22] David: And maybe I’ll throw in random, incoherent interjections periodically. [00:05:28] Andrew: That’d be great. That’s what we signed up for: David Chapman random interjections. I think looking back at his work, one of the fundamental things I realized is he believes we have lost something. [00:05:43] David: So I’ll interject right at the beginning. I think maybe I’ll get to the substance of my objection a little later, but I think we haven’t lost something. I think we probably disagree already at this point. I think we’ve gained an enormous amount. We have enormously more sophisticated ideas about meaning, and how it works and what it is and how to work with it, than at any time in the past. And the whole history that he tells — it’s great that he’s telling that history. It’s important to understand the history, to understand how we now understand meaning. But we’ve actually just accreted a whole lot of extra stuff. And there’s nothing that we’ve lost. A little later, I’ll get back to why I think he thinks that, and why I disagree. [00:07:00] Andrew: So if he approaches from “we’ve lost something,” it makes sense to do two things. One, that motivates understanding: well, how did we get to where we are now? So that motivates the history lesson. And then it motivates what he perceives as the solution space. How do we recreate the thing that we’ve lost? His idea is that around the Bronze Age, no one was worried about finding meaning. Meaning is all around us. It’s within the substrate of culture and nature, and it existed in the interplay of relationships and that kind of thing. Then you have this innovation that occurred across the world in many places that he calls the axial age, where metacognition developed — second-order thinking. Because of that, a separation of here and the divine emerged, and you see this separation in religions. You see it in religions that don’t exist anymore, and in current religions: we are here in the dirty realm of existence, and there is this pristine, divine existence that’s separated from us. Our goal is to figure out how do we connect to that thing. Both connect to it while we are living here, for divine inspiration and purpose and meaning, but also when we die. So there’s a story there about the afterlife. His story is that because of this, a lot of psychotechnologies were developed to try to meet this need of bridging the separation. So there’s meditation, dialectic, prayer, ethical discipline. All of the philosophies and religions develop from this. He would include shamanic medicine and that kind of thing, a way of tapping into this divine that is hidden from us. So we had three different orders that emerged. From what I can tell, the Middle Ages tried to recreate everything in the axial frame as stably as possible. He has three orders. The nominal order gave coherence — the universe is rationally ordered by logos, God, something like that. A normative order gave significance — there’s a hierarchy of value that’s available to us. And narrative order gave purpose. That’s history moving from creation through fall to redemption. A lot of this is Christian-inspired. Nominalism broke first because the scientists started doing what scientists do and started poking at the universe. And if the universe is just names, mental labels attached to things, then rational order just became arbitrary. You’re not getting a rational order from on high. The Reformation had God’s will as primary, so salvation comes through faith, and so you are starting to lose the other orders as well. You had less need for institutions, and these institutions were the things that were cultivating wisdom. The scientific revolution killed the universal telos, and the external world is purposeless matter in motion. So that’s his “fall.” Then the philosophers had their go of it. Descartes formalized the mind/matter split. The self is severed from the world. All meaning was relocated to the subjective side. Kant said we can never know the thing in itself. Romanticism tried to decorate everything, but it’s an absolute mess. So it doesn’t work. If we can’t touch reality, perhaps Will can. And so you have these cultural wills that assert themselves: communism, fascism, nationalism, that kind of thing. Where we find ourselves now is basically a system that had fallen apart. The Bronze Age had a stable system. Around the Middle Ages, a somewhat stable system. And we’ve basically deconstructed that second stable system. I’ll pause there. That’s the history side. [00:11:18] David: I think this history is really important. I also, in the Meaningness book, have a history that mostly covers the late 1800s up to the present (https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history). And it’s the same story. And this is standard-issue intellectual history. I don’t know his version of it, but I assume he’s following the standard story. I follow the standard story. And then I think we have somewhat different diagnoses of what to make of that. We were talking yesterday or the day before about why history and understanding history is important. We are heirs to an enormous amount of ideas that we’re mostly not even aware of. We just take them for granted. We may not even know that we have the ideas. Thought soup. These ideas actually are wrong. And the fact that we have the ideas without knowing we have the ideas, and they’re wrong ideas, that’s very significant. They distort the way that we are. In order to undistort our way of being, to return to some natural state, it is helpful to find out what the ideas are that we have without knowing it. I think Vervaeke uses the term “cultural grammar.” Andrew: Yeah, that sounds familiar. David: I think that’s nice, because grammar is something that we use constantly, and unless you’ve studied linguistics, you’re mostly unaware of the grammar that you’re speaking. It is shaping the way that we communicate without our being aware of it, and we can make it explicit. An example, which is sort of a famous example in English — there’s grammatical rules. When you have adjectives piling up in front of a noun. A clear blue sky. [00:14:17] Andrew: Yes. Like, why does “clear” go before “blue”? [00:14:20] David: Exactly. A blue clear sky — I mean, a lot of them actually just come out incoherent. It would just be wrong. A blue clear sky is not the same thing as a clear blue sky. This idea comes from Aristotle. Nobody knows this, but we are obeying a cultural grammar according to which things have essences and have accidental properties. And this is completely wrong, and it distorts everything. So I’ve gone off on a side ramp. [00:14:53] Andrew: This is what we’re here for. I can do the little speed-run. The second half of his lecture series is basically knitting together what the solution space might look like. He’s coming from the frame of “we’ve lost something, we need to restore it.” Let’s understand the things we have lost, and let’s just recreate those things. He uses two primary tools from cognitive science to motivate this. One is relevance realization, which has connection to the frame problem: how do we know what is relevant in any situation? We’re taking in so much information, and it’s almost like affordances just reach out to us. Things have affordances in a way that is kind of mysterious to us right now, and it’s still mysterious to AI. It’ll probably become very relevant as AI is operating in the real world: how do you actually pull relevance from a system in a way that is meaningful? [00:16:07] David: This is what my PhD thesis was about. So Vervaeke and I are sharing a lot of cognitive background. We’re actually working with mostly the same set of ideas. [00:16:21] Andrew: It’s lovely, because the two of you diverge and then come back. So he calls this relevance realization. He has a story of how this works, but in general you have this tension between overfitting and underfitting, and the human mind is trying to find this balance between the two. He highlights here that relevance is not a property of objects. If you’re looking for meaning in life, you’re looking in the wrong place. You’re not gonna find meaning in life. Relevance is the dance between interactions. The other tool he uses, which I think sticks in a lot of people’s brains from his lectures, is his four P’s — four ways of knowing. He basically creates these categories that largely is pointing to: there is more than propositional knowledge. We can make propositions about things, and a lot of our left-brainy world really likes propositions about things. But there are very obvious ways of knowing that aren’t propositions. So he has the procedural — that’s knowing how. The perspectival, which is knowing what it is like. And the participatory, which is knowing by being. You can kind of think of a hierarchy from the propositional all the way through to the way of being. If you try to establish your meaning normatively through propositions, it’s very weak, because propositions themselves are pretty flimsy. You’re not gonna find meaning there. Largely you’re gonna find meaning in this embodied sense of involvement. So those are the two tools he uses. Any thoughts? [00:18:21] David: From a cognitive science perspective, I think his account of how relevance realization works is probably wrong. I don’t think that’s very relevant to the meaning crisis, so I won’t go into that. I really like the four P’s. The propositional versus procedural is standard in cognitive science going back to forever, but putting in the participatory and perspectival, I like that. Andrew: It’s one of the things that stuck with me: hey, when you find yourself being very literal about things in the propositional, look another way. It’s just very useful. [00:19:12] So he takes these two things. Relevance is coming from this process that’s occurring, so something feels relevant to us, thus meaningful to us, through this process. And there are these other ways of knowing. How do we cultivate both of these? How do we tune them? How do we shape them? So he creates this framework called DIME, which is basically a four-legged stool that recreates what we’ve lost. If you were to look back, what did these people have? They had elements of this four-legged stool. Practices. The four practices are: dialogical, which is basically mind experiencing mind in the external, to work through self-deception in some way. You have to interact with the world, you have to interact with other minds, debate them, that kind of thing. There’s the imaginal, which transforms perspective. He uses the phrase “serious play.” He thinks we’ve lost play — David: I love that phrase. Andrew: — and that we should be seriously playing. He has quite an elaborate construction of what the imaginal is doing in our world. The mindful — this is meditation practices. And embodiment. For him, I think this is Tai Chi, but any kind of movement practice that trains bodily foundation. [00:20:44] David: So, a question. He has the Bronze Age where meaning was a non-problem, and then in the axial age it becomes a problem. These practices sound to me like axial age practices. So it’s not the case that these are the way that in the Bronze Age, meaning was a non-problem. These were ways in which the axial age tried to overcome their failure to be like people in the Bronze Age. And it didn’t work in the axial age, so why should we believe it would work now? [00:21:33] Andrew: That’s a great point. I don’t know his account well enough about why in the Bronze Age meaning didn’t need these practices. It could be something along the lines of: metacognition had not fully been developed, and to do these practices you need some layer of metacognition. And so I think if you’re subject to your experience, in some ways you avoid some of the flaws as well. I’m guessing, to some extent. Do wild deer out in the mountains have meaning problems? No. Well, it’s because they don’t think about their situation and their lot in life, and they’re not looking for cosmic significance, I assume. I hope not. So now I get to — I think I’ve bastardized Vervaeke by compressing 50 hours into 15 minutes. Then I summarize your beliefs, following the same arc. Maybe it’d be better coming from you. So what’s the diagnosis? What went wrong, if anything? [00:23:00] David: Well, this is where my story now is probably somewhat different than it was when I wrote the 10% of the Meaningness book which is actually up on the web. I think you say later: well, Vervaeke believes in philosophy, he thinks philosophy is good. I think philosophy is bad. And in particular — I mean, philosophy is footnotes to Plato, that’s a famous phrase. The ancient Greeks were enormously confused and wrong about everything. And in my view, Vervaeke has a lot of respect for them, devotion for them, that I don’t share. I think the cultural grammar that we have is largely descended from the ancient Greeks trying to solve problems with inadequate tools, and their problems were ones we don’t have. But we’ve got the kind of bric-a-brac, or residue, a lot of broken furniture. It’s like we’re living in a house that is stuffed with ancient, broken-down furniture. And what we need to do is to clear out all the stuff that we’ve been somehow having to make our way around, and have some open space, and leave the things that actually do still work. One fundamental idea in the cultural grammar, cognitive grammar, I forget what he says, is that real things are perfectly definite. This is Plato’s theory of forms. And anything that’s not perfectly definite isn’t really real, and is defective, and needs to kind of be stuck in a box so it’ll behave and have the proper form it’s supposed to have. And he applies this to, you know, salt shakers or whatever. This isn’t a real salt shaker from Plato’s point of view. This is a bad approximation to the form of a salt shaker, which lives in heaven. So the meanings that we have, we discover that they are nebulous, meaning they’re not perfectly definite. And that seems unacceptable because Plato said so. And then we conclude that these aren’t really meanings at all. They’re fake meanings, and all meanings are fake because all meanings turn out to be nebulous. They’re not perfectly definite. And what he’s calling the meaning crisis is the fact that this became apparent during the 20th century. There’s the whole history before that, which it’s helpful to understand, but my history is basically a history of the 20th century because that’s when this problem became apparent. The idea that meanings must be perfectly definite — “patterned” is the word I use — they must conform to a pattern. That’s the Platonic Form. This idea I call eternalism. It’s a term from Buddhism. The idea that because meanings are not perfectly definite, they don’t exist at all — that’s nihilism. The standard histories of the 20th century say that nihilism is a huge problem. That’s, I think, what Vervaeke is addressing in the meaning crisis series. It’s also what all kinds of thinkers have been addressing. Nietzsche was kind of the first person to point this out and start to grapple with it. And all worthwhile philosophy since Nietzsche has been working within his problematic, I think. So the part of the Meaningness book that’s semi-written is basically saying: look, meaning is somewhat patterned. Different meanings have different degrees of definiteness or patternedness to them. But it’s always also nebulous — changing and indefinite and sort of fluid and impossible to pin down. And if that’s unacceptable, then you kind of go in one of these two wrong directions of eternalism and nihilism. And the book basically just said: well, don’t do that, ‘cause that doesn’t work. It makes you miserable and confused, and it’s better not to be miserable and confused. And then it has some sketches of practices that are not very well worked out, for working with nebulous meaning, and working with your confusions. There’s a series of confusions that come out of failure to do that. These practices are not very well worked out. And I think toward the end of this you present a partial criticism of both Vervaeke’s work and of mine. And one of the things you say is: you don’t seem to have practices here. And it’s true enough, I didn’t have a practice there. And I kind of feel like I have a little more to say about that now than I did in 2010, or whenever it was that I was writing it up. [00:30:15] Andrew: To me, what stuck out most was this eternalism–nihilism axis. You also had other axes. David: Yes. They’re kind of secondary. Andrew: It’s basically confusions, flawed ways of thinking, that if you are existing on that axis, you will fall toward an attractor basin that is somewhat miserable. David: That’s a nice way to put it. Andrew: So one of the meta things I like is that you are recognizing two polar ways of being that both have something true to say that the other doesn’t recognize. So nihilism recognizes the nebulosity that eternalism doesn’t recognize. Eternalism recognizes the pattern that nihilism doesn’t recognize. And so it’s this beautiful move of: they both recognize the truth in each other, and the resolution is they’re both making the same mistake. For you in Meaningness, the mistake is not recognizing the nebulosity and pattern, which you call the complete stance. Not recognizing that they’re inseparable and they’re both always there. The other interesting thing is, I think Vervaeke often thinks about things in terms of balance. The right action, which I think is a kind of Theravada way of thinking about things. Yours is not — you’re not trying to balance two things. You’re not trying to balance eternalism and nihilism. You’re recognizing: oh, they’re both wrong about something. So I think we can now interplay. You alluded a little bit before that you think his diagnostic is wrong. He starts in the wrong place of believing philosophy, or believing the ancient Greeks. [00:32:16] David: So you characterize Vervaeke as saying that we’ve lost something and we need to reconstruct it. I don’t think we’ve lost anything. The way of being of the Bronze Age is always immediately available, and we actually live that way much of the time anyway. When we’re making breakfast, we are not concerned with problems of meaning. It’s obvious. The world is obvious. Things are as they seem to be. And the ancient Greeks got this idea that somehow things are very different than they seem to be. You know, the real world is completely different from this, and we need to figure out how to get to the real world. And that’s not the situation we find ourselves in. We do have problems of meaning, but there being some other world is not a helpful way of approaching that at all. What we have is 2,600 years’ worth of accumulated ideas about meaning that we all, without knowing it, without having studied philosophy at all, we’re all downstream from philosophy. I say the toxic effluent of philosophical production. We’re drinking in these philosophical waste products. They come into our bodies and our brains, and they’re polluting us. So what’s needed is to find these wrong ideas and point to them and say: oh, this is why that’s wrong. Here’s how acting on the basis of that wrong idea causes trouble. And then let’s not do that anymore. The kind of utopian vision of “wouldn’t it be nice to live in the Bronze Age?” — he probably doesn’t say that. I think he likes technology. But wouldn’t it be nice to have direct access to meaning? Well, we do have direct access to meaning. What has gone wrong, what we lost, is the credibility of eternalism. That is the definition of postmodernity: postmodernity is the condition in which grand meta-narratives are no longer credible. Grand meta-narratives are these eternalistic structural theories of meaning. And starting in 1971, nobody could believe them anymore. And so we lost that, but that wasn’t a terrible thing. I mean, it had some benefits, but we’re better off without it. Nietzsche was starting the work of deconstructing the terrible wrong ideas we got from the Greeks, and that was one of them. And hooray, we’re rid of that. There were certain benefits: if you could be a good Christian, it solved a lot of problems for you. And it’s no longer possible to be a good Christian, or at least it’s extremely difficult. People who think they’re Christians aren’t. And serious Christians say this about most people who think they’re Christians: they’re actually moralistic therapeutic deists. That’s the phrase from recent theological thinking — that most Christians are actually that. They don’t actually believe in the Christian story, in the details that matter. They think God is a vague source of some kind of nice morality, and is kind of your parent/psychotherapist/best friend. And deist in the sense of: well, he doesn’t really exist exactly, but there’s sort of a something. And this isn’t Christianity. So it would probably be nice to be a Christian. I can’t imagine doing it myself. I don’t think anybody can imagine it now. If you were born after 1971, you’ve grown up in a world in which it’s impossible to actually believe in any of these things. So we did lose that. But better off without it. Although it has left a lot of people feeling confused. Andrew: Unmoored. David: Yes. So there’s this sense of groundlessness. And that is something where Vajrayana Buddhism, which is very influential for me, has the tools to work with. And there are other approaches and tools for working with that, which are realistic in a way that eternalism isn’t. And so for me, the way forward is to both clear out the wrong, bad ideas and also to have the practices. And here I very much agree with Vervaeke, that practice, as well as intellectual understanding — you need both. The practices are very important, and practices for finding meaning, those are available. But they’re not emphasized in the culture now. [00:39:24] Andrew: Another aspect that I like about your view is that you’re already very close to the complete stance. Because if you fully believed the other stances, it would be largely unworkable. It’d be difficult to exist in the world. And so in many ways, they’re self-terminating. People have these a priori, or even prior to beliefs, and that permeates and leaks into their life. But practically, a nihilist probably has a favorite song, unless they’re in deep depression or something like that. Meaning still leaks out. That’s an interesting perspective, because it seems that not much needs to be done. [00:40:18] David: Meaning is everywhere obvious. This is a salt shaker. It has a meaning. It’s used for shaking salt. There’s not a lot of complexity here. In Dzogchen — a branch of Vajrayana Buddhism — rigpa, which is sort of the goal for Dzogchen, is the natural state, and it’s the state in which things are just obvious and things are as they seem to be. When you’re making breakfast and putting salt on your scrambled eggs, you don’t have a problem. It’s interesting. [00:41:30] Andrew: So I think we’ve talked a bit about Vervaeke’s investment in ancient philosophy, which you disagree with. The systemic tools that might address this — should we talk about ethics at all? I think there’s probably a difference in how you and Vervaeke perceive ethics. [00:41:37] David: I can say a little about how I think about it, but I don’t know how Vervaeke thinks about it. Andrew: My sense — and I could be wrong — is that in many ways he wants to cultivate virtue. I see a little bit of this Platonic form leaking out. That there is a right way to be, and you are trying to align yourself toward that way. [00:42:10] David: Cultivating virtue seems like a good idea. Because I emphasize the inseparability of nebulosity and pattern, I think ethics is always going to be somewhat nebulous, to varying degrees, in varying ways. I don’t think you can have a system of ethics which is the correct system. I don’t think that there’s always a well-defined right thing to do. In a lot of situations it’s nebulous what’s right to do. But one can and should make an effort to do right things. [00:42:56] Andrew: Would it be useful to talk about stances trumping systems? Because I think that’s another disagreement you might have. He is constructing DIME as a system — that if you do the system, you will find meaning, you’ll restore this thing that’s been broken. Can you talk a bit about your view of stances? [00:43:25] David: Stances are simpler than systems. They’re prior to systems. They’re sort of attitudes that you take toward whatever — meaning, in this context. So the attitude that meanings don’t exist is nihilism. The attitude that the only purposes that really count are kind of materialistic, egocentric ones — that’s a stance. You don’t need a big theory that says the only thing that really matters is me and the people I immediately care about, and basically I want to get all the goodies and everything else is some kind of airy-fairy. That’s what I call the stance of materialism. And everybody falls into that all the time. We all do, including people who are explicitly rejecting it. One just naturally does. But it’s a confused stance, because it is denying that there are purposes — altruistic purposes, or artistic purposes — that are not materialist in this sense. So it is making a false distinction and coming down on one side of that and denying the other side of it. I’m not against systems at all. Vajrayana is a very elaborate structure, a highly structured system with its own embedded system of logic and enormous conceptual complexities. And I think it’s great. But I have a meta-systematic view, meaning I don’t take that or any system as being some kind of ultimately true and correct thing. It’s useful in some circumstances. And I don’t know whether this DIME thing he takes to be some kind of ultimately correct thing either. As a system of practice, that may just be what it is. Vajrayana is a system of practice — it’s got different things that you do, and they fit together in a particular way. Andrew: I wouldn’t be shocked if he were to say that DIME is a solution to where we find ourselves right now. [00:46:17] And that a different people group at a different time might have a different set. There may not even be four — there may be a different set of practices. I think he is fairly committed to these practices. They’re fairly generic. If I say “embodiment,” that doesn’t really tell you what to do. Inside of that, you have to explore. To me it feels like something has collapsed, and this is a structure that he’s going to inflate, and inside of that, meaning can exist. And if you’re missing any of the legs, it’s almost like the volume collapses in some way. It seems to me decently pragmatic. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the ways he’s changed is developing this a bit more. Okay, in what ways does DIME become an object that someone can treat as a religion: “I did my little movement practice, I argued with someone and whatever, and I still don’t feel meaning”? I wouldn’t be surprised if Awakening from the Meaning Crisis was a theory of structure, and that since then he’s tried to refine the practices, or something like that. But neither of us know. [00:47:30] David: Yeah, I like all of those practices. I’m not sure how he’s using it. It doesn’t seem obvious why those four things. They all seem like good things, and I can kind of see how you might think you need something from each of those categories. [00:48:00] Andrew: Another lens, that you only talk about in other places, and he doesn’t talk about at all, is your influence from Robert Kegan. Another way of viewing some of the disagreements. My theory is it is actually a Kegan thing, where it almost seems as though he is providing a Kegan three-to-four system for someone to reboot something. And it can be immensely practical, even if you followed him directly and took some of his metaphysics, because in some ways you are figuring out: what am I, if I’m not identified by my group? Can you speak a little bit about this? [00:48:53] David: That seems insightful. I don’t know whether it’s accurate, because I don’t know enough about his stuff. But there is a pre-systematic way of being, a systematic way of being, and a meta-systematic way of being. And each going from one of those to the next is a radical personal transformation. According to this theory, which I think is substantially right, it reorganizes everything about you. And it is tremendously valuable to go from pre-systematic to systematic. And that’s roughly what the ancient Greek philosophers were doing. They were going from a pre-systematic way of being to something that was beginning to be systematic. I think in retrospect, people project a lot of rationality and systematicity onto the Greek philosophers that wasn’t yet there. They could kind of see what rationality would be, but they hadn’t actually got it yet, properly. That’s an interesting historical point that may be consequential. But you described DIME as a well-structured system where you know what you’re supposed to do. It’s got procedures and it’s got a theory. Any sort of structure that you really take on board and take into yourself, and remold yourself to fit some system — that is the three-to-four transition. It has its costs, but it is very, very valuable. I am much more interested in the stage four to stage five transition, which is systematic to meta-systematic. I don’t understand it very well. Nobody understands it very well. I write about it a lot. I said that I could view DIME from a meta-systematic point of view, or I can view Vajrayana from a meta-systematic point of view, as a contextually useful set of tools that you can apply for particular purposes in particular situations, but it’s not some kind of truth or correct way of being. [00:52:20] Andrew: That’s lovely. And Vervaeke does use the phrase “reverse-engineering enlightenment.” So it does seem to me that he’s trying to figure out the system that gets you there, right? [00:52:47] David: Yeah. I’m on board with that. I mean, I’m not on board with enlightenment, but the engineering metaphor — I’m an engineer by training. I like that metaphor. It appeals to me. Yes, that sounds great: let’s reverse-engineer enlightenment so we know what to do. I find that really appealing. And I also put on my stage-five hat and say: well, yeah, that’s not the way things work, actually. [00:53:11] Andrew: Nice. I think we’ve completed the loop. I talk a little bit about sacredness, but I think this probably touches what we’ve talked about before: whether sacredness is a thing that we can get to, or whether it’s everywhere and you need to observe it. David: Yes. Andrew: I think that could be another difference, where he has this Platonic bathwater in his cells that makes him want to find the sacred someplace else. And the sacred is always right here, right now. My mile-high view is that his architecture fails as ideology. It may be useful in the circumstance someone finds themselves in, but as a grand narrative of what happened, how we got to where we are, the diagnosis of where we are, and the solution — it’s probably partial, or it may not be situationally relevant. You mentioned that Meaningness actually doesn’t prescribe very much. It just waves its hands a little bit. How has your thinking evolved since then? [00:54:31] David: I wish I knew. I feel pretty confused. I find my situation to be very frustrating, because I have an enormous amount that I want to say and I don’t have time. Both in the sense that I’m sixty-something, and I’ve got a limited number of years left. But also the amount of time that I have free within a week to write is limited. And during the past 15 years when I haven’t had much time to write, my thinking has gone in all kinds of different directions, and I kind of see everything tying together, and that’s really exciting to me. The Meaningness book has a very defined structure. It really is a system, and it’s got these tables that neatly outline the different stances and what all their properties are, those little boxes. In the same way that “reverse-engineering enlightenment” is appealing to me, those boxes are appealing to me. But I can’t do that anymore. My understanding doesn’t fit into boxes. And that, I suppose, could be a sign of continuing to move from four toward five. I was involved with Vajrayana intensively from about 1998 to 2008, and then much less until the last year and a half or two years. So the period leading up to writing the Meaningness book, as far as I did, was very heavily influenced by Vajrayana, which I was practicing intensively. And my thinking now is again intensively influenced by Vajrayana, because (for some insane reason) I’ve been teaching it. And then there’s a period in between where I was just not thinking along those lines so much, and things went in lots of different directions. So the meta-rationality material, I see as being the same thing presented a different way, but it is meant as a practice. Meta-rationality isn’t a theory, it’s a practice. It’s stuff that we do. And it is working with nebulosity and pattern in a practical way. Again, the book is largely unwritten, so there’s a lot of draft material about how in practice do you deal with a world in which things are nebulous and patterned at the same time. And then, you’re talking about cultivating virtue. I had this arc a year ago about nobility and how to cultivate nobility, and there’s a lot more to say about that. And there’s a lot to say about ethics. And there’s a lot to say about — I don’t know, sex and gender has been something that’s been on my mind a lot recently. There’s a bit right near your end that I love. Vervaeke: “The sacred is inexhaustible. Reality always exceeds any frame; no matter how much you understand, there’s always more. The experience of the sacred is the recognition that the inexhaustibility of reality and the inexhaustibility of your own relevance realization resonate with each other. Within that recognition, the gap between self and world heals.” I mean, that is Vajrayana. That is the essence of Vajrayana. Vervaeke isn’t influenced by Vajrayana as far as I know, although he is influenced by the Kyoto School of Zen philosophy, which historically is influenced by Vajrayana. So there is maybe some connection there. Chapman: “The sacred is wonder, heightened agendaless attention combined with suspension of habitual interpretation.” I think that’s the same thing. It’s more about what you’re not doing: not fixating, not denying, not interpreting. You’re experiencing nebulosity and pattern together, which has a specific experiential flavor that “inexhaustibility” lacks. I don’t know. I think, “inexhaustible” — the world is just, if you’re open to perception, all this wonderful complexity that you also can’t pin down. And the appropriate response to the unbelievable vivid complexity of just whatever is in front of you — the salt shaker. My God, you just look at it and there’s so much detail. This brushed stainless steel — this won’t show on the camera, but there’s really fine detail in here. It’s beautiful. [01:00:55] Andrew: The salted rust. [01:00:59] David: Yes. There’s just a lot going on there. And you wonder at that, and you just say: oh, I thought this was something really mundane, but there’s some kind of chemical process going on here that I don’t know what it is. That’s fascinating. So curiosity — I have what I call the textures of meaningness. Wonder is the first one. Curiosity is the second one. Play is the fourth, I think. And serious play — I think I used the phrase “serious play” in there too. What’s the third? Humor, I think. Humor, playfulness, enjoyment, and creation. Andrew: I’m loving the salt shaker. Someone even thought to put these glass ridges, which I assume make it slide across the table better. [01:01:54] Yeah, there’s a lot of detail. Well, thank you. This is absolutely lovely. I think this will be helpful. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe (https://meaningness.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

3. 

   4 Apr 2026

   You can just bless things

   Transcript You can bless things. It’s easy! You can do this! You just go around blessing things. You don’t need a clerical collar, you don’t need a fancy hat (although the hat might help). This is a non-denominational practice. It’s not particularly religious; you can be of any religion, or no religion. There’s no prerequisites. It’s easy! You just do it. This is a practice of perception, of appreciation, of connection, of expanding benevolence. It’s not a metaphysical practice. The point is your intention, not the effect that it might have on whatever it is that you’re blessing. I normally do this silently, but for this video I’m going to do it out loud, which feels kind of dorky, but this way you can hear what I’m thinking. When you do it, you can do it silently. I found the practice is embarrassing at first, even if you do it silently; but if you overcome your embarrassment, it becomes ecstatic. Bless this place. Bless this trail. I, personally, bless this place. Bless everything here. Bless the flowering trees. Bless this house. May it keep its inhabitants safe and comfortable. Bless this amazing purple plum tree. Bless these willows. Bless the creek. Bless the petals. Bless the sun. Bless the sky, the clouds. Bless the creek, bless these new green leaves, bless last year’s dead leaves, the petals on the surface of the creek. Bless these fluffy white flowering shrubs. Bless the shrubbery. Bless the shrubbers. Bless last year’s dead grass; bless this year’s grass, just starting to come up. Bless the path. The path that takes us from the base to the result, and delights us along the way. Bless my feet that carry me on the path, my legs that support me, the ground that supports me. Bless gravity! Bless these birds. Bless the cottonwoods that are just starting to get leaves. Bless the contrail. Bless these plums. Bless these three plum trees, each individually. Bless these dandelions. Bless this fruit orchard. Bless the fruit that will come from the fruit orchard. Bless those who planted the fruit orchard. Bless those who will enjoy the fruit. Bless the carpet of petals on the ground. Bless the forsythias. Bless the dog poop bag. No, it’s gloves! Bless whoever thoughtfully put the gloves in a place where someone might find them again. Bless those who clean up after their dogs, bless their dogs, bless the love they have for their dogs. Bless the warmth of the day. Bless the wind, the breeze, caressing my skin. Woo! Bless the bunny. Hello, bunny! Bless you, bunny! Two bunnies! Bless you both. Bless this manhole cover, that is undoubtedly doing something important. Bless… Danielle Amanda Quillman Heilmann, who died in her twenties, with a ginkgo leaf. Bless her memory. Bless those who remember her. Bless them for providing this bench. Bless the bridge. Bless the bridge makers. Bless the Continental Custom Bridge Company. Bless the solidity of the iron. Bless everything made of iron everywhere. Bless the sound it makes. I bless the neighborhood. I bless this house. I bless the people who live in this house. I bless their future. May they always know happiness. Bless this place. Bless all phenomena here. Bless all beings here. Bless all beings everywhere now and forever. Bodhi. Svaha. So mote it be. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit meaningness.substack.com/subscribe (https://meaningness.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2)

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