Following our earlier conversation about Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana, we add adult developmental stage theory to the mix: three transformational frameworks in synergy. We recorded this when Charlie was in Berlin on a Chinese martial arts retreat. Charlie had had been away from home for more than a month, after teaching several Vajrayana retreats in New York. The video signal was not good, so this is audio only. Transcript Charlie: I was thinking about the kinds of changes that occur through...

“What do you think you’re doing? And, um, why?” This is a recording of a Substack live video AMA (“ask me anything”) session I hosted two days ago. Around fifty people attended! I enjoyed it, and hope everyone else did too. We had a preliminary discussion in the subscriber chat, which was very helpful for collecting questions and getting the conversation started. I’ll do these monthly, for as long as there is interest. To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit meaningness.substack.com This video is for paying subscribers only. There’s a brief “teaser” for free subscribers that ends in in a cliff-hanger. This comes in the “too much fun!” category of paid posts. Military use of Buddhist Tantra helps explain why it is so weird I extracted this seven-minute video from my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. In that session, we discussed the weirdness of the Buddhist Tantra we have inherited;...

Ultraspeaking trains you in confident, effective speaking; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation. Vajrayana trains you in confident, effective action; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation. We find them startlingly similar, although one offers courses in a consequential everyday competence, and the other is an ancient Indian religion. This thirty-nine-minute video records a spontaneous, mostly-unplanned conversation between Charlie Awbery and David...

The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being. It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably. I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the...

There’s a wrong idea about the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that. Spiritual suffering is unnecessary, though. I have the recipe for eliminating it, and it works. An audio recording of my long answer to a question, in a live Q&A session organized by Jessica B. three years ago. (Thanks Jess!) Monthly Q&As I’m doing Q&As like this monthly now. I don’t usually go on at such length! The next one is Saturday,...

We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures. David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.” We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate...

Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life. The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact. Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments Get full access to Meaningness at meaningness.substack.com/subscribe

I discuss the intellectual history of interactions between Buddhism and cognitive science, prompted by a blog discussion of doubts about modern meditation systems. There’s not many intellectually interesting people in the world, and they all talk to each other. They’re in very different fields, working out the same set of ideas in different contexts. But any intellectual era has a fairly limited number of major, significant new ideas that everybody’s working on. If you’re going to be part of...

Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship. I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional...

This is about my self. It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting. This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece. That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I...

Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast! It is about how to learn to be kind. I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions. Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here. The making of This is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had repeatedly agreed to...