Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangsta

[Frita]

Yes! Survival is a default value. It seems that there are variables of consciousness, competence, and willingness to accept help (trust). Sometimes the fastest way forward (healing) is staying still or even going backwards. This may even appear to be doing nothing to the outsider or even oneself. And that can be scary.

Speaking from personal experience, asking “why?” can create an anxiety loop that avoids action. At some point, shifting to “how?” and “what?” can shift the internal dialogue.

[AxelHeyst]

Yes, but there is a basic assumption in this discussion that everyone possesses deep core values (and at any age/experience level). It could be that not everyone lives by an extensive internal core of ethics, or that some of the trauma you describe delays developing such things, so the search for how to get in touch with them is futile and potentially more traumatizing. Heal, then grow. The angst could be that one is trying to drink from a cup that hasn't been filled yet.

I completely agree, yes.

Stealing this from Biscuit's journal:

The final and most important point about adaptation is really a crucial caveat: no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long-lived, happy, or to achieve many other goals for which people strive.... [A]daptations evolve to promote health, longevity, and happiness only insofar as these qualities benefit an individual's ability to have more surviving offspring. - The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman (emphasis in original)

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks everyone for the discussion and challenging my ideas!

Let me attempt another reframe:

I think that given the freedoms of the modern first world that ERE highlights, actualization is important.

What does actualization mean?

What actions can be taken to move towards actualization*

*I don''t have a full working definition, but I think actualization isn't something one achieves fully in a moment, but something one works towards. I don't think one day you become actualized, I think it's more of a process where one becomes more and more actualized?

My idea, based on thinking about this and talking to people and being alive for my whole life is that it's important to know your core values and live in accordance with them.

I realized that I don't know my core values. Observing others, it seems as though "most people" don't know their core values.

Feel free to disagree, but if you think core values exist and are important for actualization or for anything:

How does one discover their core values?

A guess I have is that many people may need to listen to bodily or emotional signals more or in a different way than they already are. I don't think blindly reacting to emotions or pain/ pleasure sensations will work, in fact I think it will lead us away from actualization. However, I think being more aware of our emotions and sensations, observing them and questioning where they come from will lead us towards actualization. I think many of us are blocked by insecurities aka misplaced fears aka a misfiring of our CNS fight, flight and freeze mechanism. I'm currently trying it to see if it works but am interested on other's thoughts, opinions and experience.

I have noticed that weird fears and shame are behind a lot of my homeotelic goals.


Ok, that's a concise reframe. If you want efficiency of actualization, that's where I am currently thinking you look?


However:

Idk why the discovery of one's core values necessitates this much intellectualization.

It 100% does not, I just love intellectualizing shit, coming up with theories that may lead somewhere and then having them upheld or totally eviscerated by people who know more than me. I am in a total flow state when I'm writing these posts and reading everyone's responses.

or as @AH aptly said:

Certain personalities will, along this journey, get very curious about WHY they've had feelings-sensitivity hammered out of them, and ask questions about their environment. Not everyone sees this process of inquiry as necessary, in fact some see it as a distraction, which may be true for them, but for other personalities the curious inquiry process is a mandatory part of the process. It's not enough for me to know that I've got some issues with making contact with my core values, I've got to have a mental model of why there's a numbness there (or whatever my relationship with access is). Only with this model will my brain/self feel capable of participating in the process.

What I'm learning is that my evolutionary/ origin story idea sucked. I still like parts of it, but I can't defend it and I don't think I need it, so I'm dropping it.


I did notice what I perceive as two conflicting comments about evolution though:

I say all of this because I'm rather of the mindset that the trajectory of human evolution has been more along the lines of "good enough" rather than ever really achieving any kind of decent "alignment" with any environment. That was true 100,000 years ago, and it's also true now. It's all just so sloppy.

This is a radically new perspective for me. I've always thought of evolution as this precise and ruthlessly efficient tool where anything that wasn't crucial for survival was dropped. Does this not sort of blow a lot of social theories based on evolution out of the water?

Stealing this from Biscuit's journal:
The final and most important point about adaptation is really a crucial caveat: no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long-lived, happy, or to achieve many other goals for which people strive.... [A]daptations evolve to promote health, longevity, and happiness only insofar as these qualities benefit an individual's ability to have more surviving offspring. - The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman (emphasis in original)

In my mind, the first statement is partially at odds with this statement. We COULD be wired for happiness or some other random set of emotions as long as it came bundled in a package that made us slightly more likely to survive on average. What do you guys think?



I still have some questions to ask, which I was talking about through the lens of evolution. I'm dropping that lens now due to the glaring flaws pointed out by the commenters. Thanks again everyone for the debate and pushback!


Question are in bold, statements explaining what I think are not. Please comment on both or either questions and statements.



I feel that I received bad instructions. It seems like most people I know received bad instructions. It seems like most of the people who were giving us instructions also had bad instructions and were merely passing them on.

I think ERE is a set of great instructions. I think it specifically breaks our common cultural mythology, which kind of gives us a clean slate. Onto that clean slate, there are instructions for meeting your economic and financial needs, which I think map pretty well to our physiological and bodily safety needs.

Why do we keep loading everyone up with bad instructions?

In addition to that I think we get poor information about our bodies and emotions and, to a certain extent, minds. I don't think we learn how to operate them in the modern environment. I think we are taught that we are wrong, when the modern environment is not set up for us. I think we learn to ignore certain signals and internalize fears that we later respond to unconsciously.

Or to put it differently:

how do you know how you feel if you've have the feelings hammered out of you? If you're conditioned to be deeply suspicious and/or dismissive of the signals you receive from your own body, to the point that it takes active and 'unnatural' feeling work to even consciously notice them?

Since ERE causes us to question certain cultural myths, I think it can help us realize these internal issues. However, the framework of ERE doesn't address them (I think it's beyond the scope of ERE).

I think it's likely that these issues need to be addressed in order to actualize and fully escape Plato's cave. The severity and type of issues will vary from person to person.

Do you guys think fixing emotional and/ or body issues are necessary to leave Plato's cave and/ or actualize?


I think we could be handing out better emotional and bodily care instructions, while simultaneously coupling those with environmental changes that made our built environment and lifestyle design more appropriate for how humans function.

While change is always difficult, I see the prevailing cultural myths that more is better and everything can be solved with money as the primary blocks to getting anything useful done.

How do y'all think we could improve emotional and health instructions as well as set up our built environment to bias more physically and emotionally healthy lifestyles?

[jacob]

@J+G) If you haven't read https://www.amazon.com/dp/B099Y96ZBL yet, you should.

[ertyu]

This sounds analogous to the "Why don't you try being more cheerful?" brand of advice given to depressed or melancholy people.

Alright, let me try once again, this time hopefully without being dismissive and annoying you. To start, let me say I am a Slav, from the more feral/macho part of the Slav continuum. I wasn't taught any introspection skills, or any skills for getting to know myself, think for myself, etc. I was mostly lectured and humiliated for why I'm not how my father wanted me to be and given a frankly awful role model of what healthy relatedness between spouses looks like. I get the frustration. I remember being in my early 20s and terrified out of my ass about how I'm going to choose a career that won't feel like active torture for 8 hours a day, every day, for the rest of my life, and whether I would be able to keep a job and survive. Parents didn't help because they never helped with anything -- they shouted about why I hadn't gotten my shit together already, and look at so and so's son. I went to a career counselor (in hindsight, not a very good one) and she said, "well, what can I tell you, it's inside you" -- which made me feel, well thanks but no thanks, you don't think if it really was inside me id have seen it already??

Turns out it really was inside me but I had to first develop the skills for looking at it. Personally, I didn't do that until my thirties - maybe even my mid-thirties. It took reading Eugene Gendlin's [i[Focusing[/i] to cue me in to the fact that inside me, there is something besides just thoughts and emotions: something I'd call a knowing and something he calls felt sense.

I got better at this felt sense as I did EMDR on myself. At first, EMDR was very emotionally intense. With time, that intensity subsided and what was inside me were now a series of knowings. For the first time I understood what all the pop-Buddhism was talking about, stuff arising and subsiding. I learned the difference in the inner experience of what emotions/feelings are, what thoughts are, and what "knowings"/felt sense was. I literally did this by attending to the quality of each inner experience.

At this stage things become complex because while everyone knows what a chair is, not everyone knows what arising and subsiding is, or what a felt sense or a knowing is. At first, when I read all those books, I didn't have core understanding - I still don't, of many of the inner experiences they reference. But with time, my ability to sense my own inner experience improved. And as it did, I was able to go, "Ah! They were right all along, NOW I finally get what they're talking about!!"

You will absolutely know your truth when you feel it. You are right that this has layers. For example, if I remember correctly what you have shared over time, you did not arrive at your design a habitat value all at once. At first, you did it within the context of employment, while wearing yourself down, with all sorts of ego invested into being a savior, and so forth. How did you figure out that all of those things were "not it" while design-a-habitat was still "it"? You had an inner way to know what was baby and what was bathwater. You didn't know that automatically or all at once, but it did require you to be brutally honest with yourself -- for instance, about the ego you had invested into being a savior, and about how that makes one maybe not so nice of a person. Over time, you teased apart the aspects of the inner experience/state/felt sense that was build-a-habitat for you, and you knew that some parts of that were not it. This was you knowing your truth by staying with your experience and getting better and better at sensing it.

The way it works for me is, I will stay with the experience of something, and some part will feel open and true and right, and some part will feel more closed up. Maybe this sense will be vague at first, a sort of "hmmm smells fishy over here" or "hmm something's off over here". When you "incline" there (a word I learned from Daniel Ingram that I then had to go, aaaaah NOW I get what he means!!), "there" opens up -- or if opens up is imprecise, you gradually sense what is "there" to a better extent. Here we have the brutal honesty step: "Hmmm this is a sort of an ick impulse to have." "Ooooh, buncha ego, THERE you are! Enjoying looking down on so and so, aren't we inner eyeroll" "But if I go there, wouldn't that mean that X thing that I think shouldn't be true about me is true?"

It is at this stage where what you mention as the model of the world comes in. Waitta sec, what shouldn't be true about me? What's bad to be true about me? What I don't want to be true about me? Says who? Why do I not want this to be true about me? AAAAAh I see. I'm trying to not look at that, because I think there's no point in looking at that, because I'd suck at it anyway, because interpersonal experiences abcd said so and authority figure Y did not validate me and oooh looks like there's some sadness with that, actually, it really makes me sad that I wasn't better at this thing that I think it's so important to be good about."

I am describing these things in words, but they do not come up verbal. They come up as waves of self-knowledge and emotion. For example, now that I write about "that thing that I think is so important to be good at," I sense there's some hurt and sadness still wrapped up inthere. I don't know what the hurt and sadness is about, maybe that will unravel later. Maybe once it uravels, my obsession with the so-important-thing will lessen, or at the very least, my relationship to it will be transformed.

To me, if you can do EK, you are already doing this process. You are already, say, admitting to yourself that somewhere in there, you like some parts of these experiences that you think make you an ABCD type of bad person to like -- and you are investigating why you think that, and staying with the shame of it, and so on. It surprises me that you feel you won't know your values, or that the advice to look into yourself for them enrages you. I've been observing you do it for what is probably now years! How did you discover you wanted to move from plan to serendipity, for instance? Something inside you went, hmmm planning's all nice and it has its uses, but there really WAS that thing over there in the corner where a plan introduces a constriction, a limit. Serendipity and openness on the other hand, oooooo! <-- this is the feeling of you knowing your truth.

The process of observing your inner state and getting better and better is akin to measuring and counting calories and nutrients per dollar: at first it's conscious effort, then over time, it was no longer necessary because you developed an intuitive understanding of food. Later you augmented that with wanting to be good at cooking dishes that maybe weren't the lowest cost but were delicious to others. Why? Because somewhere inside, you had a knowing: this calorie per dollar business is well and good, but look, there's a limit, a constriction. Let's incline in that direction and see what comes up. Knowings were arising. Maybe they were arising in words, but there is a difference between bulshitting out an evolutionary theory of transcendence (feels like a nice mental exercise, brain is involved by itself, not v much in touch w the deep self) and the sort of knowing-in-words that arises when one is in fact in touch with oneself, e.g. when one does morning pages or meditates. The brutal honesty is in the willingness to incline to the icky place and see what comes there even if you don't like what you see. As for whether what you discover is self or programming, little by little as one stays with/attends to those inner experiences, one gets a sense for how they feel differently. It's the same process as, measure calories per dollar, develop a sense for nutritiousness while frugal. But now you stay with the inner experience of these things, and they open, and you see the difference in the inner sense of them. With continued measurement/attending, intuition and knowing are developed. You really CAN tell what is programming and what is you and what is, "oh i wish it were me so im trying to push away that other thing and make it me, but guess what, there's one way in which transformation ever happened and that's not in pushing away the part i don't like, it's in telling the truth about myself to myself, even if i wish it weren't true or i think it makes me bad for it to be true or mom/society/the schoolyard bullies said it shouldn't be true or whatever have you.

Hope this helps. We really aren't talking of different things, underneath it all.

[jacob]

Kohlberg's (or Giligan's) scales of moral development might provide as to what people's real core values are. In rough order, here are the core values according to Kohlberg.

1) Not getting punished/getting away with it.
2) Self-interested dealing.
3) Conformity. Fitting in and supporting the group.
4) Obedience and respect for authority like the law or a specific person.
5) Agreement and consideration (respect) for other people's [different] opinions.
6) Personal principles.

When it comes to what people actually do as opposed to what they say they'll do, the mass of adults are concentrated around 3 and 4. 1 and 2 describe children and sociopaths. Ironically, 5 is actually how we've arranged much of the (post)modern world with democracy and inquiring about everybody's opinions, but in practice most people still take their cue from someone in a position of authority or they say what they think the group wants to hear.

I know someone who will argue one position in one group only to argue the complete opposite an hour later when she's with another group. It's pure Fe with practically no Fi or Ti anchoring. I have no idea what if anything she actually believes herself. She's a complete product of the group she's currently with.

If you look around, you'll see that this is actually more normal than not even if it's typically less extreme. For example, many vote whatever their family/husband/pastor votes no mater what. The very idea that one votes according to one's own values doesn't compute. And here's an important point. It's not that these [very normal] people have decided that their husband's opinion is more important than their own---which is something 5 would assume is the case---it's that they simply never developed their own values. They never really gave much thought to it.

Also see https://earlyretirementextreme.com/the- ... a-lie.html

If we look at stages 1-6, the trend is to be increasingly less of a jerk to increasingly more people. IOW, from 1 to 5 the sphere of concern is grows from the selfish person to getting along with the family or tribe... to being able to get around and not be an ass in society. At 5 one realizes that different societies have different values and one is aware enough to ask "how not to be an ass" for a given society.

OTOH, if one is going to break with society and create a new society, one must develop a principled stand.

Important point: I don't think core values is someone one discovers after extensive digging deep down. I think core values are something one invents. It is basically an ethical system that is being constructed from the ground up. This construct is much deeper that the simplistic moral notions listed in 1-5. Observe how none of them actually require any complication in the foundation. The hard part here is the implementation. Like 1) Getting away with a crime. 2) Negotiating a deal. 3) Saying the right things at the right time. 4) Knowing what the law is and following orders. 5) Knowing how democracy works in practice.

My recommended approach would be to add moral philosophy to the curriculum. It properly belongs at WL6 as yet another "skill". It so happened that I was pretty interested in this stuff in my early 20s. Of course it might require the right neurotransmitter levels as well. I was already "asking questions and refusing to go along just to go along in the name of social conformity" when I was 13, so mileage may vary. I do think studying ethics and knowing about the different systems is helpful to construct your own ... or at least adapt something that fits YOUR particular WL7+ once you leave Plato's Cave.

ETA: I don't think it's super-surprising that my values subsequently happened to match up rather well with SD:Yellow. My formative (teenage) years was pretty much spent with my nose in academic books written around the mid 20th century when Yellow came into being in those places. Likely I just acquired the values by osmosis. Call it self-nurture.

ETA: Funny corollary. This explains why those living in cities are generally more tolerant towards people living differently (you have to be because they're often living right next door) and also usually have lower crime-rates per person (following the law is more important in the city because it's the only way for so many people to live so close and still get along) than in rural areas. Conversely, it explains why people are more polite in more sparsely populated rural areas. They have to be because everyone likely an acquaintance or a relative that they're sure to run into again. Ditto why rural areas are less tolerant of people who are different---it's hard to be when the social order is based on fitting in. Whereas in the city, people can be who they want and act like assholes with impunity as long as they don't break any laws, because they're unlikely to run into the same person again. In either case, most people only learn the enough moral behavior to get along with and in their surroundings. Ethics is not really an interest that inspires most normal people. A lot of human behavior is explained very simply by population density.

[AxelHeyst]

Alright, let me try once again, this time hopefully without being dismissive and annoying you.

Oh I wasn't annoyed, I know to trust you're engaging in good faith. (I tend to only get annoyed if I whiff conscious or - even worse - unconscious bad-faith engagement in a conversations.)

Turns out it really was inside me but I had to first develop the skills for looking at it.

Yes, this is what I hard agree with. "Just be brutally honest" to someone who hasn't developed the skills yet and maybe even hasn't been told that the way forward is to develop a whole stack of skills, sounds a lot like "just do it" or more like "everyone can do this automatically, what's wrong with you?"

One possible difference between mine and your experience might be that I had very low emotional skills as a young adult, but I entered a social milieu in my early 20's in which everyone around me DID have pretty advanced emotional skills, and their attempts to advise me were frustratingly low on useful details or guidance for where I was at. (Not unlike an advanced master of the seduction arts telling a neophyte to "just be yourself", also excruciatingly terrible advice for certain people not because it's wrong but because it's not at all useful or computable for people below a certain threshold of competence). I felt like a profoundly deficient human, and no one around me had the understanding of where I was at to explain that I could just, like, get more competent at it over time. I had to figure that out for myself.

..... Here we have the brutal honesty step: ......

Yep, I agree/resonate with this description. Lots of work and effort over time, building skills, confidence, and self-knowledge, which iteratively and compoundingly leads to increased understanding and alignment with ones inner truths and values.

To me, if you can do EK, you are already doing this process. You are already, say, admitting to yourself that somewhere in there, you like some parts of these experiences that you think make you an ABCD type of bad person to like -- and you are investigating why you think that, and staying with the shame of it, and so on. It surprises me that you feel you won't know your values, or that the advice to look into yourself for them enrages you. I've been observing you do it for what is probably now years! How did you discover you wanted to move from plan to serendipity, for instance? Something inside you went, hmmm planning's all nice and it has its uses, but there really WAS that thing over there in the corner where a plan introduces a constriction, a limit. Serendipity and openness on the other hand, oooooo! <-- this is the feeling of you knowing your truth.

The advice to look within certainly does not enrage me! It's one of my favorite hobbies. All I was pushing back on was the inference (<--that's me owning that I was interpreting your first post in a certain kind of way) that "be brutally honest with yourself" was step 1. The ability to be accurately, healthily, and productively brutally honest with oneself is a step in a whole long-ass and subtle journey, one which you're obviously familiar with and described well.

Why so many of us aren't delivered to adulthood with basic competencies in this domain is, I think, an interesting and potentially useful line of inquiry (but certainly not necessary for everyone's personal journey).

We really aren't talking of different things, underneath it all.

Yep.

PS having now read some discussion of core values, my interest and drive having to do with human shelter and the environment is less of a 'value' and more of a purpose/mission/vision.

[suomalainen]

Important point: I don't think core values is someone one discovers after extensive digging deep down. I think core values are something one invents. It is basically an ethical system that is being constructed from the ground up.
...
It so happened that I was pretty interested in this stuff in my early 20s. Of course it might require the right neurotransmitter levels as well. I was already "asking questions and refusing to go along just to go along in the name of social conformity" when I was 13, so mileage may vary.
...
ETA: I don't think it's super-surprising that my values subsequently happened to match up rather well with SD:Yellow. My formative (teenage) years was pretty much spent with my nose in academic books written around the mid 20th century when Yellow came into being in those places. Likely I just acquired the values by osmosis. Call it self-nurture.

Why were you interested in this stuff enough to desire constructing values? Why did your values "happen" to match up with the things you liked to read? Chicken or egg? Cart or horse? No offense to you and the others in this thread, but ... you're all pretty different from the masses, and I'm willing to bet that difference started young (like at conception).

A lot of human behavior is explained very simply by population density.

Had the same thought regarding political beliefs (at least here in the states).

I'd largely agree with @ertyu's second post. The way you discover your core values and then "construct" the verbiage and the practical scaffolding around them is through discovery and trial-and-error and openness and courage, etc., as @ertyu lays out. My process (and childhood) were vaguely similar. I've spent 30 years thinking about these things and it's taken roughly that long (maybe 20 years) to get to a point of self-authorship. It just takes time and effort. The specific effortful steps, or at least a sample of what they might be, are laid out in @ertyu's second post.

However, I'd also offer a caution along the lines of @ertyu's earlier post. There is a danger in over-intellectualizing, of over-navel-gazing, of over-ruminating. There is no magic bullet. There is no The Answer. There is no The Truth. Everyone needs to find and follow their own north stars. But if you over do it on the "finding", you may just be feeding depression. Stop thinking so much and get out there and do stuff you like (the "following"). It's not hard. Another way to think about it is if you are trying to find "the meaning of life", you are asking the wrong question - you are staring into the abyss and will get overwhelmed as the abyss stares back. Instead, try to find "meaning in your life". This is a much easier, and much more useful, question.

Why do people teach dumb shit? Because people are dumb as shit. My parents taught me almost nothing to prepare me for the adult world. Why didn't they do this? Because they didn't know how. Why didn't they know how? They never learned / they were never taught. They were barely functioning themselves. This world is just the blind leading the blind, mostly by example. Other people's opinions / teachings can be helfpul - see the obedience and conformity layers @jacob talks about, but there's a dark side to obedience and conformity as well - it can be used against you to control you. Fear, guilt and shame are often-used emotional triggers in this manner. My personal freedom was gained when I realized that guilt was a worthless emotion. I only ever felt guilt when I judged myself against someone else's (the church's) values, rather than my own. Getting rid of that authoritarian yoke was what began my period of self-authorship. There's no magic to it. We're just a bunch of monkeys running around doing our best, and most of the time, our best sucks. And here's an extremely important point: even when we're doing our best to teach good things, we don't know the intricacies of the students we are trying to teach. As a very self-aware person, I can try to teach self-awareness to my kids, but I'm not going to know how best to teach them given their genetics, their interests, their thoughts, their emotions, their insecurities. I've been very, very observant of my children and I've cut off a lot of bullshit from growing too much, but you are never in their heads. You never know what secret wounds they nurture. You just can't. So even if you could be a perfect teacher in theory, you will never be a perfect teacher to a perfect student. Such a combination just doesn't occur among mortals. And that's ok. We all learn from numerous sources, so there's a chance to grow out of the deficiencies of childhood.

[ertyu]

All I was pushing back on was the inference (<--that's me owning that I was interpreting your first post in a certain kind of way) that "be brutally honest with yourself" was step 1.

Idk if it is the first step in order, but it is the most crucial and key one. The ick, scary, constricted place? Go there. Stay with it, face what you find. never shy away from opening to the truth about yourself, even if you'd rather what is true weren't. One can't do "what is me vs what is programming?" without it. All the rest builds on it.

[AxelHeyst]

@ertyu I agree.

[black_son_of_gray]

This is a radically new perspective for me. I've always thought of evolution as this precise and ruthlessly efficient tool where anything that wasn't crucial for survival was dropped. Does this not sort of blow a lot of social theories based on evolution out of the water?

Why do I say "good enough"? Why do I say "sloppy"? Systems thinking time!

While it is true that some biological traits are occasionally relatively simple, most of them are not. This means that there are lots of different genes involved for any given trait, and lots of different evolutionary tradeoffs. These genes/tradeoffs often relate to really different aspects of survival.

To give an example off the top of my head: consider upright walking in humans. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to easily carry stuff in your (now free) hands, having a better view (especially in, say, grassland environments), efficiency of locomotion, and so on. However, upright walking comes with a price: a tendency toward low-back pain, narrow hips that can only deliver (relatively) small babies.

About those babies. We have big brains but have to be born small because... hips. This means a looooooong development period (contrast this to species which are up and walking as newborns within minutes). That is a huge survival risk, and mandates a ton of additional energy expenditure after birth by the parents. So, is it better to have a baby with a big brain or to have the ability to walk upright or to have a quick development period or to have your arms free when you walk? In different environments, these tradeoffs matter a little more or a little less, but they all matter sometimes.

Analogously, look at how webs of goal (that's the plural, right?) operate in an ERE framework. Inevitably, there will be frequent tradeoffs between disparate goals, if for no other reason, there is a finite amount of time in a day. You can kill two birds with one stone sometimes (e.g. exercise as a means of transportation if exercise is a goal), but not every time (e.g. it's hard to code a video game and catch up with friends and read a book at the same time). As Ryan Holiday would say, (paraphrasing) "saying 'yes' to something means saying 'no' to everything else, and saying 'no' to something means you can say 'yes' to something else."

This means that there usually isn't an obvious 'best' answer to a lot of system problems. Sometimes it is difficult to know whether something is even 'better' overall, after all the different tradeoffs have been considered. Sometimes the criteria used is just preference (rather than 'survival'), and that can also be changing over time. In that case, you'll only know through hindsight whether something was 'good enough' or 'not good enough'.

no organism is primarily adapted to be healthy, long-lived, happy, or to achieve many other goals for which people strive.... [A]daptations evolve to promote health, longevity, and happiness only insofar as these qualities benefit an individual's ability to have more surviving offspring. - The Story of the Human Body by Daniel E. Lieberman

In my mind, the first statement is partially at odds with this statement. We COULD be wired for happiness or some other random set of emotions as long as it came bundled in a package that made us slightly more likely to survive on average.

I don't really see any conflict with my statements and the one above by Lieberman. Something like 'happiness', or, as I would probably rephrase it, 'the traits that allow happiness to arise', are really complicated and best viewed through a systems framework. As such, there is no direct tug on them from natural selection, it is only indirect and the tugs come from dozens of different directions, reflecting a whole bunch of different tradeoffs and gene clusters. Which isn't to say that something like happiness cannot emerge (it clearly has) or that it isn't in some way beneficial. Case in point, unhappy people successfully reproduce all the time!

To put this in context, I am a biologist (with an unrelated specialty) but not an evolutionary biologist. Really getting into a nitty gritty explanation of this to a level that would be more satisfying means something like a 200-level undergraduate course in evolution (and a basic 100 or 200 level knowledge of how genes work). In any case, hope that is useful.

[figmenter]

How does one discover their core values?

My experience tells me it is through experimentation and feedback loops.

What you do or attract shows what you value. Even if only on an unconscious level. See what this is about in a talk at the Stoa about the book Existential Kink. Therefore I have come to the realisation that keeping track of your actions, interactions and moods is highly recommended, if not essential. I keep track to see what they reveal about my values, my life. I find that without feedback effective course correction is impossible.

I have generalized my web of goals to these seven items: good food, good shelter, good friends, good finances, good body, good mind and good fun. For me, an activity can check off multiple elements. For example when I volunteer in a food forest nearby I get to exercise my body, connect with other volunteers, occasionally harvest fruits and I'm having fun in the process. I rank activities based on how many of my goals I am able to hit at the same time. I try to give priority to activities with a higher "score".

In addition, I use a bullet journal to capture what actions I take during the week, what people I meet, how I feel. At the end of the week I do a review where I try to summarize the week in terms of the goals above. At the end of the month, I summarize the last four or five week summaries. Some weeks feel better, more alive, more meaningful than others. Keeping track of what I did allows me better tune in with my likes, dislikes, desires and hangups, i.e., my life.

[Jin+Guice]

Self-Actualization

Thanks again to everyone who commented previously. I've spent the time since my last post reading about self-actualization and related topics. I used this information to rethink my ideas and rewrite this series about self-actualization.

Thanks to @mountainFrugal, @AxelHyest, @Quadalupe and @guitarplayer for hosting me on my trip. Thanks to @figmenter for meeting up and giving me a tour of Eindhoven. Apologies if I'm leaving anyone out! Know it or not you all influenced me on this series. Thanks also to everyone at EREFest and everyone in both of my MMGs who also influenced these posts in various ways. Thanks to @theanimal, @AxelHyest and @mountainFrugal for helping me revise/ edit this post.

What is self-actualization?

I think it's defining our own values, purpose and identity, etc. and living in accordance with them.

How do we find values, purpose and identity?

I believe it's by doing exactly what "we" "want" in every moment. Then "we" evaluate the outcome of those actions and update our models of what is "wanted."

I think that self-actualization is an emergent property of determining our identity, values and purpose, which in turn is an emergent property of having our needs met. To find out how we get our needs met, it's necessary to boldly perform the above experiment, doing what we want and constructing our values, identity and purpose from the outcomes we observe, updating our model for each as we go along.

However, during this process internal conflict is likely to emerge. For those of us who don't have a solid identity, purpose and values, who aren't sure what exactly we want to do at every moment or who seemingly contain different "selves" with conflicting goals, noticing and resolving internal conflict becomes an important part of meeting our needs.

[OutOfTheBlue]

If "(self-)transcendence" [to use Maslow's terminology] could be seen as abiding in non-separateness (nondual awareness) [in other words, not merely as one or a series of "peak" or unitive experiences/altered states, but a shift in the default mode of experiencing], and if that non-separateness could be seen as an innate/underlying/ultimate characteristic (essence) of reality [and not an interesting or transient curiosity], then:

How could "self-actualizing", as described above, which suggests doubling-down on discovering/defining my "own" [limited/separate self] values, purpose and identity be congruent with that?

(In these forums), I am picking an implicit premise that "transcendence", "enlightenment", whatever supposedly awaits further ahead, rests on or is tightly coupled with (high degrees of) individual-growth/personal and ego-development/self-actualization and evolution.

From what I have gathered so far, personal development is one thing, and the paradigm shift of awakening is another. There may be a degree of correlation, but the latter does not necessarily result from the former.

Furthermore, while Maslow has noticed the paradox of some highly self-actualized individuals showing signs of selflessness/an expanded sense of self, etc. (although he mostly focused on experiences, not paradigm shifts aka spiritual awakening), could cultivating a separate sense of self and spending an inordinate amount of time working on and identifying with ultimately peripheral/limited aspects of selfhood (such as body, mind, personality, etc.) be detrimental in that regard? That's not to say inner work isn't worthwhile, on the contrary. I'm only wishing to highlight a possible limitation if not integrated in a wider view.

In another thread, the expression "writing your own scripts" was used to sum up freedom-from and to. I'd change that to "having seen through some of your conditioning", because, blind-spots be damned, there are bound to be more (scripts). For instance:

What if the idea that it's all about "me"/"you", my purpose-driven life, my unique identity, my wants, my legacy/achievement, my personal will/agency/sovereignty, was yet another script? One with possibly existential roots, but further exacerbated by prevalent cultural paradigms?

[Ego]

@OutOfTheBlue, Here at ERE central we love to turn hierarchies up to eleven, especially those that just happen to reveal our own quirky characteristics as rare, super-human strengths. Did you just use nondual awakening to turn Maslow up to twelve?

[OutOfTheBlue]

@Ego, no I am suggesting to decouple any sense of spiritual progression or giftedness from such awakening. There is no ladder. There is no merit or demerit. It is not something to attain, something new to gain. It's already here, just not fully recognized.

I was using Maslow to connect with the discussion and challenge some assumptions, based on my current understanding/insight.

[7Wannabe5]

@OutOfTheBlue:

Yes, as Ken Wilber would express it, "Growing up" is not the same as "Waking up" is not the same as "Opening up", "Cleaning up", or "Showing up." For example, Cognitive Development in alignment with a model such as MHC (model of hierarchal complexity) is just one line of development within the wide task of "Growing Up." "Opening up" is the task of expanding "Growing up" across multiple intelligences. A simplistic example Wilber offers is a Nazi doctor might be high in cognitive development, moderate in emotional development, but sub-basement in moral development. "Cleaning up" is basically doing the therapeutic "shadow work" that Jin+Guice is also emphasizing in order to "unblock" one's further potential for other growth. "Showing up" is basically developing the ability to shift perspective on any "problem" through the dial of "objective/inter-objective/inter-subjective/subjective." And as you noted, "waking up" is also independent of any of the other "up"s. except at the level of interpretation. Anyone can have a transcendent spiritual experience, but their other varying levels will inform their take on the experience and also their communication of it. For example, when Scrooge hastens to the materialistic outlook with which he is comfortable of "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Another example would be an occasion in my youth when I had a transcendent realization about death after ingesting some magic mushrooms, but I framed it in the language of somewhat naive science because that was what I was studying at the time. The thought/feeling was "It will be okay when I die", but the words/concepts I employed to explain it to myself were something like, "When my energy becomes disordered and the heat leaves my body, I will simply become one with the Universe." The reason why I would describe this as a "transcendent" or "waking up" experience is that it stays with me even as my perspective changes. I can "relax" into it and/or I can notice when/where/why/how it is more difficult to "relax" into it.

I've also had some transcendent experiences during sex which I could readily explain within the context of scientific-materialism "brain chemical levels causing mild hallucination" and/or cultural priming "based on mythology familiar to me", except for the fact that they stick with me too strongly in the background as "belief." Also these "visions" were so compelling, I have a bit of an unrelenting desire to find/transform a partner who can help me get into that space again (yes, I am aware that this is likely indicative of more shadow work I need to do myself, highly unlikely to find myself there by offering suggestions such as, "try to bring the energy of that awesome ghost tree we encountered on our hike the next time we fuck" although my blatant attempts at this have resulted in some otherwise memorable encounters) I was kind of disappointed by the two chapters in Wilber's most recent book on the topic of Transcendent Sexuality, because his description/practice only moderately synced with my own experiences, possibly because his practice/perspective as he described it was too visually focused on partner. Or, more likely, since he has been training others in tantric sexual transcendence for over thirty years, his level of "waking up" within that context is too far beyond mine to translate well.

[AxelHeyst]

How could "self-actualizing", as described above, which suggests doubling-down on discovering/defining my "own" [limited/separate self] values, purpose and identity be congruent with that?

Spitballing here: for some, it might not be enough to be told that ego-identification is a dead end road. They might have to get to the dead end and see for themselves. Relevant meme.

From what I have gathered so far, personal development is one thing, and the paradigm shift of awakening is another. There may be a degree of correlation, but the latter does not necessarily result from the former.

I agree, but do you have thoughts/experiences about what paradigm shift of awakening does result from? I see the 'personal development doesn't lead to spiritual awakening' insight guide a fair number of people into spiritual bypassing, and the obvious result of that is that it's difficult to maintain the state of paradigm awareness when the basic logistics of their lives falls apart because they aren't personally developed as functioning adults yet. This is a balance/trap/dynamic/etc that I don't have my head wrapped around yet, so, it's an honest-not-snarky question.

What if the idea that it's all about "me"/"you", my purpose-driven life, my unique identity, my wants, my legacy/achievement, my personal will/agency/sovereignty, was yet another script?

This seems clearly true to me. However the path out of the thicket of scripts is not clear to me, and also it's not clear to me that there IS a path out, that it isn't scripts all the way down/up, and I'm not sure I think that's even a bad thing if true, so for the moment I'm enjoying the exploration.

[Jin+Guice]

@OutofTheBlue:

Yes great questions about the assumptions!

@Ego: Haha, nice.

@7 + @AH: Yes, I agree with what y'all are saying.

In my own words though:

If "(self-)transcendence" [to use Maslow's terminology] could be seen as abiding in non-separateness (nondual awareness) [in other words, not merely as one or a series of "peak" or unitive experiences/altered states, but a shift in the default mode of experiencing], and if that non-separateness could be seen as an innate/underlying/ultimate characteristic (essence) of reality [and not an interesting or transient curiosity], then:

How could "self-actualizing", as described above, which suggests doubling-down on discovering/defining my "own" [limited/separate self] values, purpose and identity be congruent with that?

Self-actualization is required before self-transcendence. In my understanding, actualization is resolving internal conflict to understand your thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations and what they are telling you. This self-alignment is necessary but not sufficient for self-transcendence. The short answer to the theory of this is "to avoid spiritual bypassing." If you are not aware of your own needs and how they are being met (which include things like "what should I do?" and "why am I doing this?") then you don't have a strong enough self to transcend*.

*These are ideas. I welcome all questions and questioning assumptions, but I do not have an axiomatic, first principles model, complete with mathematical proof. I have a coherent synthesis of my own study on this topic, which I think is relevant to ERE WL6-8 in much the same way that I thought semi-ERE was relevant to ERE WL3-5. When I answer in statements I am offering my perspective and present understanding, but do not mean to imply scientific certainty or consensus.

Furthermore, while Maslow has noticed the paradox of some highly self-actualized individuals showing signs of selflessness/an expanded sense of self, etc. (although he mostly focused on experiences, not paradigm shifts aka spiritual awakening), could cultivating a separate sense of self and spending an inordinate amount of time working on and identifying with ultimately peripheral/limited aspects of selfhood (such as body, mind, personality, etc.) be detrimental in that regard?

I don't see self-actualized individuals showing signs of selflessness/ an expanded sense of self as a paradox. I think this is explained by what I said above. Necessary but not sufficient. I think it is also possible to get stuck at any level, including self-actualization. Not all actualizers transcend.



A question for you: Most of the models on the forum are dialectical, pulling an individual between two poles, "transcending and including" the previous levels. Thus focusing on the self opens up the next level, which will be a more collective focus. Is this the dialectical model the assumption being questioned?

What if the idea that it's all about "me"/"you", my purpose-driven life, my unique identity, my wants, my legacy/achievement, my personal will/agency/sovereignty, was yet another script? One with possibly existential roots, but further exacerbated by prevalent cultural paradigms?

I don't see the point of self-actualization as being about legacy or achievement. It's having a deep understanding about knowing what you want. It is understanding the driver of your personal action to resolve internal conflict.

This saves you from things like betraying yourself by joining a cult that makes you feel part of something bigger. First you need the parts of yourself to agree so you feel like part of yourself.



I became interested in Maslow once I realized that I personally had a bunch of internal conflict (heterotelic goals) as I tried to construct my web of goals. Further, simply identifying the heterotelic goal was not enough to resolve them. The heterotelic goals are both coming from different desires in myself. Once I realized this about myself, I looked up and saw a world of people doing the same thing. Telling me that they had goals, taking actions that directly prevented them from reaching those goals and shutting down or exploding when I pointed that out (I do not recommend doing this to anyone but yourself).

When I reached this point, I felt like I was off the map. The instructions are "find and eliminate heterotelic goals" and yet I found myself clinging to these goals. So i needed to build a more expansive map at this level and off into the woods I went.


Edited to change mistakenly writing "homotelic" instead of "heterotelic." Thanks to @OutofTheBlue and @Quadalupe for pointing this out to me.

[OutOfTheBlue]

@Gin+Guice, when you say homeotelic above, I think you mean heterotelic, right? Heterotelic goals are those that go to different directions and create conflict, and homeotelic ones, those that are generally congruent with each other. We want more of those (in a WOG).

@7Wannabe5, "Growing up" is not the same as "Waking up" = Yes, that is a nice way to sum up a key point I was trying to make. Thank you for that write up! Adding here that Ken Wilber's teaching on the pre-/trans-fallacy is also a handy one to keep in mind.

However, my post was also targetting evolutive models (including his, I believe, but also Plotkin's, Spiral Dynamics, etc.), often grounded in developmental psychology, that describe this as an evolution (of consciousness), as an evolutive process. So yes, @Gin+Guice, this is what is (partly) questionned here. In a certain way, I am questionning that "self-actualization is required before self-transcendence", but now I will depart from Maslow (and this terminology) as well as psychology, because my point is that the topic is not best approached from the confines of a psychological perspective.

If consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter, then it makes sense to consider that it too, may evolve (although evolution then often tends to be applied beyond the biological sense, with undertones of "progress" and "teleology"). But for now, such understanding cannot easily account for the qualia of experience (see hard problem of consciousness).

Here, instead, I am coming from a first person perspective, grounded in consciousness/awareness itself (and not that of a rarefied state or a "transcendental" experience, but our own everyday awareness/experience).

Granted, it's that of a conscious subject, with a certain level of knowledge, understanding and psychological growth, a capacity for symbolization, etc. But, upon closer inspection, there is a shift from the fact that "I am conscious" to the insight that "I am consciousness".

What do I mean?

When consciousness turns to itself in its self-reflective capacity, it does not experience itself as an object. You are not seeing this or that, you become aware of the seeing itself. Try it. It's like fish becoming aware of the water [or rather water becoming aware of... ha!]. Consciousness is the field within which everything appears/manifests. It permeates/encompasses everything in the world of your experience. Yet, it also somehow always lies beyond definition, determination, delimitation. It never becomes an object itself. If consciousness is a synonym for experience, then it is not limited by its contents (such as thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc.). Like space, it can hold everything in it. It does not depend on anything outside of itself. On the contrary, it's the contents/objects of experience that depend on "it". Like the reflections of a mirror.

Do you see?

The "I" that is looking through my eyes, the looking itself, consciousness, that which is more intimate and obvious than my own breath, is also not personal, it is not "mine". "What" is looking through my eyes is "that" which is looking through your eyes.

It is "unbroken by time, uncircumscribed by place, unclouded by attributes or adjuncts, unconfined by forms or appearances, unexpressible by words, and not unfolded by the ordinary means of knowledge". Because all that only appears within (and ultimated stems from) the light that is awareness/consciousness. [In that sense, there is no evolution of consciousness, because evolution implies succession/time and consciousness is that which expresses as such limitations, itself being unlimited by them]

The fact is, generally, we tend to identify with limited aspects/a subset of our experience (not experience/consciousness itself). We can be identified with our stuff [but in general, ERE people have seen through that "illusion"!], our body, our psyche/mind/personality (mental-emotional body), our moods/states and so on.

Realizing that we are not limited by/to any of these aspects (without rejecting them!) can be liberating. The mind and the body can relax. There is a deep trust. I am not just this body, not just this personality, not just my psychophysiological make up. I am this fullness of being, here, now. And out of this fullness, flows self-expression. Not from a sense of lack or striving.

And likewise, when working with parts, we are invited to adopt a wider perspective, to become the space that can hold and relate to these various parts of yourself, without merging/becoming overidentified with or dissociated from them.

Okay, so let's suppose all this is "true". Where does that leave us?

Please bear me a while longer, before I discuss a few more points.

Here, though, I am going to use words that are not mine, but may give a helpful overview (more helpful than what I could come up with myself).

As you read the following, consider whether and how personal development/self-actualization in the way that *you* define it and apply it in your own life does or could align or be helpful in that respect. Think homeotelic vs heterotelic.

What is awakening, if it’s not an experience? It’s a paradigm shift that reconfigures the way you experience everything.

While spiritual discourse can make it seem as if the awakened person knows something—or has something—the unawake person doesn’t, it’s actually the other way around. Awakening entails losing something—specifically, your deeply conditioned beliefs about who you are and what the world is—and gaining nothing."

Here are some aspects of what awakening could entail. Note that these are all experiential realizations, not conceptual ones, which is why it's hard to put into words effectively.

1. Waking up out of the socially constructed self: that is, out of the belief that your thoughts, memories, self-images, or 'stories' define, delimit or describe you. In other words, waking up out of the dream that the contents of thought have anything to do with who (or what) you fundamentally are. This entails seeing clearly that there is no ostensive referent to the ‘I’ thought — that is, seeing that that concept ‘I’ doesn't actually point to anything but a fabricated, ill-defined, nebulous and contradictory self-image; a thought or idea of 'me' that sits on top of, and veils, your deeper being. (Though 'I' can also refer to pure being, that's not how most people use the word.) 

2. Waking up out of conceptual overlay — that is, no longer projecting your concepts of things onto things. This is simply the natural extension of #1 above. [My note: and indeed: the map is not the territory, reality, what presents to my direct (pre-discursive} experience, is not the same as my re-presentation/interpretation/story, what I can think or say about it. ] Getting out of the habit of conceptual/interpretive overlay takes a long time for most people to work through, but if one follows this thread of realization to its terminus, it leads inevitably to: 

3. Waking up out of the dream of separation. By completely shedding the belief that there are objects (and people) separate from yourself, you awaken to the truth of seamless unity with all that is. Though this particular version/stage of awakening is often glorified, in actuality it's not mystical or anything; it's just seeing clearly without the filter of the conditioned mind. You don't attain unity; you experientially recognize that you have never been separate from anything ever.

4. Waking up out of the belief in objective reality, here defined as the imagined existence of an observer-independent universe of material objects with independent essences. This is too difficult and subtle to explain here, and as lived experience (rather than a concept) is certainly even weirder than it sounds.

I agree, but do you have thoughts/experiences about what paradigm shift of awakening does result from? I see the 'personal development doesn't lead to spiritual awakening' insight guide a fair number of people into spiritual bypassing, and the obvious result of that is that it's difficult to maintain the state of paradigm awareness when the basic logistics of their lives falls apart because they aren't personally developed as functioning adults yet. This is a balance/trap/dynamic/etc that I don't have my head wrapped around yet, so, it's an honest-not-snarky question.

I too am puzzled with this and still trying to figure out a balance.

There might be an element of grace/mystery at play here (I don't mean the result of being worthy etc., just something unknown and beyond control).

The paradox being that we are already consciousness. There is nothing to (ultimately) do but recognize this fact:

In reality there is no such thing as saṃsāra, so what bondage could exist for an embodied being? To bestow liberation on someone who is already free, who has no limitation whatsoever, is truly an exercise in futility. This is like the illusion of a snake in a rope or a ghost in a shadow, produced only from misperception. Do not abandon or grasp anything at all. Abiding in your natural state, exactly as you are, enjoy this play.

But I think a crucial ingredient might be that you simply orient yourself (with your whole being), that you and your attention/intention turns towards that (longing, truth, reality, etc.), and awareness is given space to do its work. In other words, it is about learning to lean into it with honesty and discernment, and getting out of the way!

About spiritual bypassing in this context, I find this short excerpt very helpful/eloquent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SORaGyZfKU

What I am talking about is inclusive transcendence, one that embraces both transcendence and immanence, non duality and duality. So it is not a rejection of the world or an escape. It is about being fully intimate with the world/reality/what is, without the suffering that comes from resisting it.

Also, the thing is, awakening is not an on/off switch. There are glimpses and there are shifts, but it is also a process. And it is not chasing after "experiences".

So after having awakened sufficiently to your true nature, there might be an iterative process of integration and realignment that covers all aspects of your being. Once you've seen through the identity you believed to be you or constructed, and once you have connected with the ground of being, my understanding is that this whole inner work takes on a very different dynamic.

Can you picture this? Because now everything is seen in the light of consciousness, and it becomes easier to avoid grasping, confusion, false identification and the rest. Suffering is mostly mind-created. Right? And it is hard to heal the mind/psyche only with the mind.

Yes, but until then, what?

There probably is no magic bullet. The answer is always contextual, it's for whom and when. In the end, we listen to and trust our inner sense of rightness.

But there is also help from traditions and others who have already tread this path.

Here there is no purity and no impurity, no dualism nor nondualism, no ritual nor its rejection, no renunciation and no possession…all the observances, rules and regulations [found in other scriptures] are neither enjoined nor prohibited in this way. Or, everything is enjoined, and everything forbidden here! In fact, there is but one commandment on this path: one is to make every effort to steady his awareness on reality. He must practice whatever makes that possible for him.

This seems clearly true to me. However the path out of the thicket of scripts is not clear to me, and also it's not clear to me that there IS a path out, that it isn't scripts all the way down/up, and I'm not sure I think that's even a bad thing if true, so for the moment I'm enjoying the exploration.

My understanding is that there is a lot of conditioning, a lot of habitual thinking and behaviors, a lot of undigested experiences having left subtle impressions that alter the ways in which we usually see/experience/show up in the world. But once a sufficient number of them falls away, the rest may follow suit relatively quickly or whatever remains does not really disturb/cloud your experience (for long).

To me, it definitely sounds easier to let go of scripts/conditioning past that initial shift... The adventure continues. Chop wood, carry water indeed!

---

Okay folks, that might sound too far fetched to some and that's fine. It is to be verified in one's own experience. All this was done in the context of ERE, so I just wanted to share some points that might be of interest to some, and are not often touched upon here.

PS: I realized I didn't discuss ego much. Will come back to this.