Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

The "other" ERE. Societal aspects of the ERE philosophy. Emergent change-making, scale-effects,...
OutOfTheBlue
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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

mountainFrugal wrote:
Tue Jul 05, 2022 9:58 pm
I am working on a longer update to this thread because a lot has happened in understanding... but in the mean time... please add discussion here @outoftheblue... :).
Thanks for the invitation, and for the update, @mountainFrugal! I feel the need to start practicing a bit first and finish reading all four books (two remaining), but I will be sure to post here and contribute to this discussion! Hopefully soon.

It's very exciting, but it's also daunting as Plotkin's approach (especially some practices and specific parts) represent quite a departure from what I have been accustomed/exposed to. I don't have any beliefs to bring with me, but I feel that having read Daniel Quinn's books, his Leaver/Taker cultures dichotomy [which combines nicely with Plotkin's egocentric/soulcentric or ecocentric societies], and his exquisite articulation of an animist world view (not incompatible with a certain agnosticism, as he asserts that "the number of the gods [including zero] cannot be determined by any means") has primed me for this. I might have been less receptive otherwise.
mountainFrugal wrote:A small group of us are exploring Plotkin and actually doing the exercises out in nature
Do you mean here in the ERE forums? Is it something (like a private group) happening behind the scenes? I have read yours, AnalyticEngine's and AxelHeyst's related posts, and I am grateful for what you all have shared.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by jacob »

OutOfTheBlue wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 2:27 pm
Is it something (like a private group) happening behind the scenes? I have read yours, AnalyticEngine's and AxelHeyst's related posts, and I am grateful for what you all have shared.
There's stuff going on, see viewforum.php?f=28

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mountainFrugal
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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by mountainFrugal »

Please feel free to contribute to the discussion without finishing all those other books. For me, it has been most interesting to see how my ideas have changed and become more refined after reading more and doing the exercises. You might also see that as you work on it.

I did enjoy reading Quinn back in college. I read many of his books. I like the main ideas, but I felt as though they were always backwards looking in the most obvious way it might be interpreted. I think Plotkin offers a richer picture/vision that is both forward looking and has some evidence to back up the claims. I am glad that you were primed based on Quinn. :)
OutOfTheBlue wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 2:27 pm
Do you mean here in the ERE forums? Is it something (like a private group) happening behind the scenes? I have read yours, AnalyticEngine's and AxelHeyst's related posts, and I am grateful for what you all have shared.
I am leading an Ecology/nature/adventure based Master Mind Group (see @jacobs link above for more details about the various groups). The initial intent was not to work on Plotkin related things at all, but we have come around to that as it offers an interesting framework for internal work while also spending time out adventuring in wilderness or your backyard.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by guitarplayer »

I read through the thread today and will try to get hold of Wildmind. I think the subject matter could be spot on for DW and good for me as well.

Thank you!

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by ertyu »

Yeah, same. Just read through and will read wild mind. People seem to have derived value from it and some of the quotes and reflections presented here echo things I've arrived at independently, but my initial intuition is that there will also be a lot that is missing the point and I will need to put aside. In particular, I'm weary of yet another over-elaborate T-style analytical framework which is essentially the Ts attempts of leveraging their strength to overcompensate for a weak link with an underdeveloped F. All the north south raven whatever conceptual twaddle is best left aside in favor of directly connecting to the "energies" or "vibes" or whatever, imo. The analytical framework feels like unnecessary training wheels (resident forum INFP here - and fully prepared to eat my words if after reading the book I find the analytical framework especially profound). I will give wild mind a focused read. I'm curious to see which parts I will find useful.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by mountainFrugal »

I was also initially skeptical of the conceptual stuff, but I think it serves an important practical purposes for the exercises. I am very much looking forward to your INFP take(s) @ertyu and seeing how it works out for your partner (and you) @guitarplayer.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by guitarplayer »

ertyu wrote:
Sat Jul 23, 2022 6:56 pm
[...] my initial intuition is that there will also be a lot that is missing the point and I will need to put aside. In particular, I'm weary of yet another over-elaborate T-style analytical framework which is essentially the Ts attempts of leveraging their strength to overcompensate for a weak link with an underdeveloped F.
You might be pleasantly surprised. I had a look at one of Plotkin's talks where he makes a similar point to the one in your first sentence, and then cites poetry to get his message across.

The framework seems to me to be on the light side judging by the first couple dozen pages. But I might be biased, after having read through some heavy psychology frameworks like e.g. Melanie Klein and object relations theory (which Plotkin refers to in the book, so seems he did his homework) for my uni years back.

Hope you will find it a good read @ertyu! I am sometimes MBTI 50:50 T / F and do enjoy the 'pretty' bits in his writing! Last night I was reading it before falling asleep and this one jumped at me:
Plotkin wrote: We discover ourselves to be essential extras in a cosmic drama in which Spirit plays hide-and-seek with itself (p.25)
especially the 'playing hide-and-seek with itself' seems to me a beautiful metaphor.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

mountainFrugal wrote:
Thu Jul 07, 2022 3:06 pm
I am leading an Ecology/nature/adventure based Master Mind Group (see @jacobs link above for more details about the various groups). The initial intent was not to work on Plotkin related things at all, but we have come around to that as it offers an interesting framework for internal work while also spending time out adventuring in wilderness or your backyard.
This sounds like a great way to go for a Master Mind Group, as it provides a common theme and meeting ground, regardless of each individual's stage in their ERE journey (I understand this can be a challenge), and a space to offer and receive support/motivation, connect more personally, and improve understanding of Bill Plotkin's demanding and original ideas.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

Jacob wrote wrote:Thus, I think psychology could benefit from more mapping of the territory rather than just declaring what [the territory] should be; or presuming that all the territory is similar to the mental valley one personally lives in; or simply working off an average.

Ideally, I'd like to see a map that describes the different temperaments (e.g. MBTI or enneagram); a map that describes different levels or stages of psychological development (e.g. Cook-Greuter, Piaget, Kegan, MHC); and a map that describes functioning (from sickness to health).
With this Jacob's post in mind, I am sharing a quote from Wild Mind:
The human psyche — our wild, multifaceted mind in its natural habitat of the more-than-human world — is complex and dynamic. In its mature fullness, it grants us an astonishing array of personal resources: a rainbow spectrum of skills and sensibilities applicable to almost any circumstance. It affords us multiple ways to heal our psychological wounds — and to benefit from them. It gifts us with deeply imaginative capacities for engendering life-enhancing relationships and cultures and for meaningfully participating in the world we cocreate with the other members of the Earth community.

[…]

One of my intentions in constructing this Nature-Based Map of the Psyche has been to recognize and appreciate the full spectrum of our humanity. I especially wanted to portray the psyche in a way that allows its paired opposites to coexist. The map celebrates the paradoxes of our human nature and the tension existing within each paradox, tensions that perchance make possible the very structure of our human psyches.

In the project of human self-understanding, the Nature-Based Map of the Psyche […] identifies only one set of ways in which one person can be similar to or different from another — namely, their degree of cultivation of the Self, their level of integration of subpersonalities, and the nature of their conscious relationship with Soul and Spirit. To fully understand any person, we must consider at least two additional dimensions beyond the structural elements of the psyche explored in this book: […] the person’s stage of personal development and their personality type.

Footnote: Fully understanding a person also requires us to know about their context, their relationship with the world — their historical epoch, cultural setting, ethnicity, language, family and social relationships, gender and gender roles, vocational and community roles, ecological place, and the nature and extent of their ecological awareness and participation.

---

Stages of personal development: Since 1985, Bill Plotkin and his colleagues have been fashioning an eight-stage, nature-based model of human development aka the Eco-Soulcentric Developmental Wheel (introduced in Nature and the Human Soul).

Personality types: They've also "sketched out a nature-based model of personality, also mapped onto the four-directions matrix but not yet published".
What a great holistic approach to human understanding, development and finding one's place in the world.

I personally would suggest starting with Nature and the Human Soul, for an overview of an ecocentric human development (and its egocentric variants), then follow up with Wild Mind, which is probably the most universally actionable, and The Journey of Soul Initiation (plus of course Soulcraft, his great first book, for some additional details and practices especially during the Cocoon).

Does anybody know more about his yet unpublished nature-based model of personality?

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

After rereading Plotkin, I came to the realization his framework fixes the problem of the "skipped Kegan level." That is, we've discussed how it seems like some people might skip K3 and go directly into K4, but Kegan's framework doesn't actually allow for that. This is because Kegan describes levels of consciousness. Given that consciousness is awareness of internal models, it's impossible to be aware of the K4 model without also being aware of the K3 model using Kegan's framework.

But we can use Plotkin to resolve this paradox. Plotkin describes a developmental model, not a consciousness model. Plotkin's three most relevant developmental stages, therefore, are:

1. Early adolescence describes the K2 to K3 transition.
2. Late adolescence describes K3 to K4.
3. The cocoon describes K4 to K5.
4. True adulthood is K5.

The implication of these two models is that you might progress along Kegan development but be arrested in Plotkin development. That is, you might have conscious awareness of a certain mode of cognition but have failed the developmental tasks of that stage. This describes the common Rationalist pathology of "skipping" K3 and being unable to grok the K3 social world emotionally while understanding it perfectly well conceptually. In this case, the Rationalist has completed the Kegan level but not the Plotkin level. Therefore, you may be K4 from a consciousness perspective but stuck in a patho-adolescence Plotkin level.

My conjecture is that it's fairly easy to mess up your K3/early adolescent developmental tasks if you're stuck in a peer group or situation that rejects your presence. Some examples may be: having unresolved trauma in adolescence that stops you from making friends, language barriers, having parents with drug addictions that make you "grow up fast, etc. This is a common problem so there are many examples. Anything that stops you from being able to explore the social world in an authentic manner as an adolescent is going to arrest your Plotkin development while potentially leaving your Kegan development to continue as normal.

One might imagine how their social maturation may have progressed differently inside of an environment that was a better fit. Plotkin believes that we live in a society with many cultural norms that prevent healthy development even inside of better environments.

Plotkin's books lay out the way to grow past arrested adolescence, so I won't lay them out again. Nevertheless, I found this an interesting way to interpret Kegan.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by jacob »

Interesting. I have a counterpoint/alternative.

I’ll be spinning off of http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

In Graham’s essay, early adolescents differentiate into [for the sake of simplicity but without losing generality] those who focus on things (nerds) and those who focus on people (popular crowd).

Both require a 2nd person perspective, that is, the ability to turn one's focus on oneself whether that's how who appears to others or how one appears to oneself.

Popularity requires developing the ability to see how one reflects in the eyes of the group in order to best fit in. Wearing the right clothes, having the right opinions, having the right interests, having the right relations, … where right means “group-sanctioned” in a way that is determined by politics. In other words it requires developing a kind of self-centered extrospection. A fairly simple algorithm is simply to copy the majority in whatever group one momentarily finds oneself in.

Nerdiness requires the ability to see how one’s ideas reflect back on themselves. Self-centered introspection. Do the ideas make sense? Are they logically consistent with other ideas or is one set of feelings consistent with other feelings? Whereas the popular kid tries to align themselves with the people in their group, the nerd tries to align themselves with the things they focus on. In developmental terms, this coincides with the development of formal symbolic thinking.

I submit that people begin to fork developmentally during adolescence. Modernism allows people to focus on things using a minimum of scaffolding for social politics because it constitutes a break away from the sociocentrism which otherwise dominates traditionalist and postmodernist behavior. Conversely postmodernism allows people to focus on people using a minimum of scaffolding for the world of things beyond “buying products and services” which makes the people-oriented focus stronger than in traditionalist societies.

What’s interesting is that the two are using what appears at equally complex frameworks (Kegan3, a first-person lens applied by a hypothetical second-person) but two entirely different paradigms. Each insist that their way is the only right way while insisting that any other way is somehow “retarded”. (Kegan4 is just learning to express this attitude politely. Only at Kegan5 are the merits of all ways appreciated and integrated.)

If I may paraphrase you: Anything that stops you from exploring the non-social world in an authentic manner (as opposed to a “I believe the same as what they just said”) as an adolescent is going to arrest your ability to theorize about the world (and yourself) while continuing your Kegan development as normal.

Insofar adolescence is a period of speedy growth that is already beginning to crystallize, the choice reflects “the bones of the house”. It may be less of a phase and more of the very foundation that everything beyond it rests upon. Kegan4 is the self-authoring stage. Kegan3 may be what determines what kind of authoring one eventually does.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by candide »

I think Laozi was trying to get at this early in the Tao Te Ching (more common English name, but I prefer Daodejing). In section 1, right after finishing that part about "dao is not dao" there is this pivot:
Truly, "rid of desire, one can perceive
the Wondrous."
With desire, one can perceive only outcomes.
It is when I realized that Laozi was "just a nerd" that I realized that Daoism doesn't "work" -- as a solution to the Metacrisis, or being on The Way to how the universe "really" is.

Still, the foregrounds something I think important. The wonder is the default when we don't have desires and outcomes (awareness of social hierarchy outside of our families).

Children are filled with wonder first. They like "things" -- dinosaurs, trains, etc. It is later on that the curiosity is crowded out with social concerns. I don't want to dismiss the importance of developing good skills at manipulating abstractions to being able to effectively deal with things, and thus ignoring that there is some crucial developmental steps that can stop someone from staying a nerd (forcing them to settle for geek?), but a lot of being a nerd is preserving things that were from our youth against the whims of the herd.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by jacob »

@candide -

Q: Is the [Tao] about being intrinsically or extrinsically motivated and/or being process-oriented or result-oriented?
A: Intrinsically process-oriented.

I think almost everyone talks their book.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by zbigi »

candide wrote:
Tue Oct 11, 2022 9:39 pm

Children are filled with wonder first. They like "things" -- dinosaurs, trains, etc. It is later on that the curiosity is crowded out with social concerns.
Is that truly the case? Jordan Peterson mentions studies in which little girls (I don't rememeber the exact age, but very young - perhaps 3-4 years old), if you give them a baby-shaped toy, will instinctively take care of it as if it was alive. Whereas boys will try to rip it apart and see what's inside :D So, it looks like there's a lot of early interest towards people, too, but more often seen in girls than boys.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by candide »

With my daughter at two months, this is a research question that I will not only have the motivation to hit some books on, but will have somewhat of an absorbing praxis.

Entirely possible that Laozi is not "just a nerd" but "just a nerd with a masculine slant at the world." ... I write that as someone who had spent years trying to make much of Eastern thought a way to understand/see through the world.... It just sounded right to me due to confirmation biases involving myself being a nerd, maybe even one with a masculine slant in how I see the world.
zbigi wrote:
Wed Oct 12, 2022 2:40 am
So, it looks like there's a lot of early interest towards people, too, but more often seen in girls than boys.
I think the interest at the younger age is in nurturance, rather than "politics." For little kids, the size of group that can be grokked and manipulated (in more than one sense of the word) is a very small group. Boys and girls both play, imagine, explore. There isn't much in the way of rigor until later.

To one of Graham's points from the essay Jacob was using, getting good in people is much more time consuming than nerds think. If you want to play that game to win against other people who are playing it to win, then what is needed is very precise (and ever-changing) indeed.

Little kids are too scattered to play it. Their identity isn't stable enough. It is a time of wonder and play. Once ... ahem... desire becomes too strong, a new potential master emerges. Then your time can go to social outcomes, or it can go to "the wondrous."

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

My understanding of Daoism is that it's a philosophical response to Confucianist, heavily role-based, traditional China, which is an environment that would be highly socially stifling to anyone going outside of their role. If you're born as a low ranking peasant, there may not be much from for you to do anything but farm rice and "give your parents grandkids." I always understood Daoism as a cope for the fact you are stuck in this oppressively tight traditional social system with no real way to get out of it due to the lack of a modernist economy.

To that extent, it overlaps somewhat as a solution to the same problem nerds today face--how do you cope with a social world that has socially-sanction demands on your behavior that you can't authentically or sincerely fulfill?

Jacob is proposing that nerds are a "subspecies" of humans interested in ideas over people, and that the subspecies of humans who are interested in people over ideas are going to continually think nerds are developmentally stunted. Meanwhile, nerds are going to think social butterflies are developmentally stunted due to their inability to broach ideas. Under this model, there's a lot of projection going on when people prescribe solutions based on their psychology (hence why so many talk their book).

The implication of this may be that it's a matter of fit. Naturally fitting the social mold may make you enjoy people more than ideas because it's easy; you're not having to mask. On the other hand, liking people more than ideas may make you want to fit the social mold, even subconsciously. There's a chicken and egg problem here. Does one begin to prefer ideas over people because they failed to fit normative standards? Or do they have the luxury of not caring about normative standards because they have other interests?

There's also the possibility that one likes both ideas and people equally. Is interest in ideas vs people a false dilemma? Or is opportunity cost going to stop you from being able to max out both areas? Can one converge ideas and people into the same entity to solve the problem?

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

It has been my observation that very young children do not differentiate strongly between "things" and "people." The trains and the dinosaurs that they like have smiling human-like faces. "Politics" emerges around age 3/4 in the form of arguments over "who is whose friend", although some boys will still be in the pre-verbal "hitting each other over the head" with any "thing" at hand stage of development. Even infants will demonstrate a tendency to like people who like the same things they like.

One of the students I tutor is a very bright 6 year old, who moves quite quickly from algorithm to concept at his developmental level in mathematics. He also has the social awareness to make comments like "Last year I was getting in everybody else's business. This year I am good." :lol:
There's also the possibility that one likes both ideas and people equally. Is interest in ideas vs people a false dilemma? Or is opportunity cost going to stop you from being able to max out both areas? Can one converge ideas and people into the same entity to solve the problem?
I think it is a false dilemma, but it is reinforced in our educational system by the use of textbooks which strip ideas away from the people who originally had those ideas.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by OutOfTheBlue »

@AnalyticalEngine

Thanks for the interesting post. I haven't read Kegan's work yet, so can't comment much on the two frameworks relationship, but it does seem as a thought-provoking (if slighly reductive) exercise.

A few comments

1. Regarding the numbered list, I think Plotkin's (healthy) Late adolescence *does* equate to the Cocoon (marked as 2 and 3 in your list). In modern egocentric societies, the stage to which most people are arrested in (of which there are several variations) is that of Early adolescence, not Late adolescence. Plotkin does describe an egocentric version of Late adolescence (called Secession), but in his model, it is thought as 3b (patho psychospiritual Early adolescence).
Plotkin wrote: Unlike the soulcentric sequence, the egocentric stages can be at least roughly coordinated with chronological age. Stage 3a (Conforming and Rebelling) usually spans from age twelve or thirteen to sixteen or eighteen […] [while] Sessession begins in the late teens and spans through most of the twenties.
2. It is worth noting that in Nature and the Human Soul, Plotkin actually presents two development wheels.

The soulcentric one gives an idea of what an optimal human development (in the psychospiritual sense) could look like.

It feels more normative than descriptive (that and the lack of -at least perceived- inclusiveness, is from what I understand, what Jacob holds against it), but I think this is understandable from the perspective that Plotkin is not simply interested in offering a model of human development, but a model (or models, and guides, if you take into account Wild Mind and his other works as well) of cultural (and therefore social, through individual) change.

The egocentric counterpart is more descriptive of what can (and often does) go wrong, a worse case scenario. As per Plotkin's quote above, it is more closely aligned with a chronological human development.

Here is the diagram of the egocentric stages of human development (the first post of this thread offers a diagram of the soulcentric stages):

Image

Note: Stages beyond egocentric Early adolescence (3) are variations of it. In other words, most people in egocentric societies are arrested in a variant of patho Early adolescence.
Jacob wrote:Each insist that their way is the only right way while insisting that any other way is somehow “retarded”.
This is something that is nagging me as well at some level.

It helps me to think that Plotkin does not necessarily seek to outline "the only right way" but

1. an optimal (as in ideal, aspirational and inspirational) way of human development, one that would create "true" adults and elders, agents of ecocentric cultural change, that would also help more individuals "get through to the other side" (aka second adulthood).

2. an explanation and critique of the impact of our egocentric societies/cultures to human development, including the absence of true adults and elders.

3. ways to tend to each individual stages culture-oriented and nature-oriented tasks (the tension between them helping usher us to the next stage), ways to address past developmental shortcomings and, once back on a soulcentric track, ways to embrace our current stage (I love how he concludes the description of each developmental stage: every time, this was surely the best stage to be in).

I think the descriptions of the first life-stages are wonderful especially for parents, as they play an important role in the child's development, and that of the later stages inspiring and insightful in general.
Plotkin wrote:The [Oasis - Early adolescence] nature-oriented task is the cultivation of authenticity, the capacity to know who you are psychologically and to express and embody this identity in your social life with friends, family, and coworkers. The culture-oriented task of the Oasis is to obtain social acceptance from and belonging in at least one desired peer group.
For a fuller quote, see: https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?p=262018#p262018

The challenge (and tension/mandorla) being to achieve authenticity and social acceptance/belonging both at the same time.

As per the quote above, it is social acceptance not by society as a whole, but at least one desired peer group. I don't think that precludes a nerd peer group.

And I don't know what Plotkin thinks about virtual groups/communities, but could ERE be one such group too?

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

@OutOfTheBlue - Thanks for the summary. That was super helpful.

One thing about Plotkin I wanted to add was that his use of subpersonalities exists as an exercise to encourage development of K3 -> K4. Because going up a Kegan level is about gaining awareness of unconscious processes, subpersonalities exist to help objectify unconscious processes and make you more aware of their existence. For example, you can learn to see how "the voice of your parents" was driving K3 behaviors. If you get good at subpersonality exercises, you can start to see how inner conflict might be driven by "the voice of your parents" colliding with "the voice of your high school friends." Thus you start to see Kegan3 social groups as driving your behavior where you couldn't previously. This is also why Plotkin has you do the sub-personality tasks before doing the Descent into Soul exercises because subpersonalities are about K3->K4 (and maybe even K2->K4 for particularly sticky ones) and Descent into Soul is K4->K5. Having your role in the universe is basically understanding how your relationships (with people, nature, and everything) fit together at a K5 level.

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Re: Bill Plotkin - Discussion Thread

Post by mountainFrugal »

I asked @AE if I could repost this in this thread because it has many implications for personal work through Plotkin. I also did not want to muddy the other discussion thread.
AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Sat Dec 17, 2022 3:16 pm
Alright, here's the full story.

How Learning to Write Brings the Nature of Consciousness into Question: A Memoir or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hear the Voice of God

I started down the path of experiencing imaginary inner experiences as outer forces when I started to write fiction. If you talk to advanced writers, they will all describe the same experience happening at some point. That is, when you get sufficiently good at writing a character, it feels like that character start to write himself or herself.

This can be bizarre if you've never experienced. Most people imagine that fiction characters are either manually piloted by the author like a marionette or all are autobiographical to some degree. Both of these things are true. When you start out writing a character, they will come from conscious choices and your past experiences. But once you master the skill of writing a given character (and each character is different so you do start from scratch each time), the act of writing said character becomes a flow state/slips into your unconscious. And once that happens, because the character is being written by your brain outside of your conscious choices, like riding a bicycle, it starts to feel like the character has come to life and is making its own decisions.

This phenomenon is so wide spread that it's been dubbed the "Illusion of Independent Agency." 92% of published fiction writers report this happening, so learning to do this is basically a writing skill.

Now the bizarre part about this is that because it's just a skill and occurs outside of your conscious awareness, the character's experience can leak into your experience when you're writing them or even in your daily life when you're doing other activities. For example, here's a story of an author talking about how her octopus character took over the running narrative voice in her head and started questioning her daily decisions:



This started happening to me when I learned to write, and it was so bizarre that I set out to research it more. I had an experience pretty similar to this octopus and his author of having specific fictional characters I was writing who were equipment to deal with some life problem I had giving me advice in my head about whatever the issue was.

How this can occur outside of writing
This lead me to one particular book called When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God that describes the techniques evangelicals use to "commune" with god and some of their experiences with "talking" to god. One woman in the book is even shown to have such a close relationship with Jesus that she's "dating" him via communing with the experience of Jesus inside of her head.

This might sound like schizophrenia at first, but it isn't at all. I don't have time to get into the full neuroscience of how schizophrenia works in this post, but if you want a summary, this lecture is a good summary. The tl;dr is that schizophrenia basically inhibits your ability to understand cultural norms, so these "bizarre" subjective experiences are "normal" if they exist inside of a cultural context that dubs them normal. So "hearing" god inside of your head is decidedly not schizophrenia because it follows social norms, and someone with schizophrenia would be having external hallucinations (instead of just a vivd internal experience). And those external hallucinations would be culturally inappropriate or include loose associations/other distinct schizophrenia symptoms.

Indeed, what this all feels like internally is just your normal, inner speech manifesting as someone other than you. This is what I mean by "inner experiences appearing to come from outer forces," and once you realize that, you notice that it pops up A TON in unrelated domains.

Servitors, Thoughtforms, and Tulpas
It was then I discovered an entire community dedicated to creating this internal experience. They used a few different names for the experience, including servitor and thoughtform, but the word tulpa is probably the most common. A tulpa is, at its core, just training your brain in the same way as writing a character so that thinking like someone else becomes unconscious and starts to feel like it's not being driven by you. Indeed, this practice has been used independently in many different religious traditions, and it explains how an experience might feel like "god" is talking to you or that you've been "possessed" by a spirit.

Why this works
This all sounds completely ridiculous at first, but the reason it works is very simple. Your consciousness is not a single, smooth experience. Instead, it's more like a chopped up, mangled, intermittent picture your brain manages to piece together from a massive stream of sensory data, both internal and external. Indeed, rather than "you" driving the show, it's more like your brain hacks together reality and informs the little homunculus upstairs that is "you" that something is happening. The amount of bizarre hacks your brain takes to construct reality is immense, and you can find them if you do a bit of research on how visual processing is handled by the brain.

People usually take this implication in two directions. There's the hard materialism perspective, which is what I personally believe, which states that free will is an illusion and you just experience stuff after your unconscious brain decides it for you. Under this paradigm, the illusion of independent agency makes total sense. If you train yourself to think like someone else, then that just happens unconsciously. You can even learn to stop experiencing yourself as "you" and instead experience yourself as "someone else," like changing DVDs in a DVD player.

The second take is the whole "the universe is actually made of consciousness" thing, which I can't personally speak to but I know some people do subscribe to that.

Note that the Plotkin subpersonality framework basically works using these methods as well. Actually most of Plotkin just involves intentionally dissociating, either through things like fasting or writing subpersonalities, so that you can get outside of your own head.

The implications
Once you really, actually, truly subjectively experience yourself as something other than you, it can radically alter how you view yourself and reality. The main things it did for me were:
1. Radically decenteralizing the individual. "I" am not as central to even "myself" as I once thought.
2. Realize that you are mostly things outside of you. What I mean is that things like your race, social class, sex, location, etc all MASSIVELY drive your sense of identity but are nothing that you chose nor some sort of concrete "reality" that "you" need to experience. But because these things are so central in driving your life, and can be so decoupled in how you experience yourself, you realize that your internal experience is basically completely disconnected from your external circumstances, and so an external reality that you had no choice over is basically the main drive in everything you do.

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