How thoughts work — goddesses at the origin of philosophy — inspiration in adult development — how myths transform society and culture — Spock and Jimi Hendrix — entrepreneurship, purpose, and value

Video from a monthly live Ask-Me-Anything!

How to participate next time, and more info: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/myth-adult-development-entrepreneurship

Unexpected connections

Everything is connected to everything else; and this is very inconvenient! It’d be much tidier if everything would stay in its own box. But, it’s also fascinating and wonderful how things connect. And we’re going to see ways in which my recent posts, and the questions, and my random rambling are going to tie together in ways that I find unexpected, and really kind of cool.

My “bad brain” joke, and the nature of mind

I made a series of jokes about my “bad brain.” My bad brain decides what I’m going to write, because it gets really excited about something or other and says, we’re writing that! And I say no, that’s dumb, and there’s no good reason to write that, I’ve got too many things to write already; and my brain says, nope, nope, we’re writing that! And I’m like, yeah, you write that! But usually my brain doesn’t, so_ I_ have to write it, and this is really quite annoying!

This is a joke. And, I got some feedback from people who I think didn’t quite get the joke. And I was talking with my spouse Charlie Awbery, who is a meditation teacher, and they said, “Well, this is a joke which you get if you meditate; and if you don’t meditate, maybe you don’t see the point of the joke.”

The point of the joke is: when you start meditating, you have the idea that you’re gonna, like, clear your mind and concentrate, and all of the stupid mental junk will go away. And the first thing you discover is, you can’t do that. You try to do that, and all these thoughts keep happening.

The traditional phrase is “monkey mind.” It’s like, you know, a mischievous monkey that is jumping around, and getting into trouble and turning everything upside down, and pulling things out of where they’re supposed to be, and throwing around, and creeping up behind you and pinching you, or biting you, and it’s quite painful. Your thoughts are like that.

You think, okay, there’s something wrong with me. I had no idea that this is happening in my mind. You start to realize in ordinary life that this is happening too. As you meditate more, you realize that this is just what minds do. It’s the natural function of mind, and as you let that be, the monkey calms down. Some of the time.

But thoughts keep arising. The type of meditation that I do, that my spouse Charlie teaches, it’s a non-goal to make that stop. Because the goal is the natural state of mind.

So, when I complain about having a bad brain, it’s, it’s this monkey mind phenomenon. And this is just funny because this is how minds are. This is everybody’s mind.

Some people misunderstood me as saying that there’s something defective about my brain, and that’s probably true, but it’s not what I was joking about. I wasn’t complaining that I have some kind of mental health problem or something. It’s just, I get excited about things. And then I’m moved to write about them.

And this sense of there’s me and there’s my brain— is a kind of joking metaphor for this sense that we’re not some unified individual with control over our own thoughts. We don’t have control over our own thoughts for the most part. That’s not how it works.

Philosophy is bad because it pollutes our thought soup

And this is a main part of why philosophy is bad. Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuring things out.

But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re thinking thoughts, but actually the thoughts are just happening, and they’re ones that we’ve picked up.

And the ones that are about meaning, purpose, value, ethics, the traditional subjects of philosophy: these are thoughts that somebody had twenty-five hundred years ago, who was completely out to lunch and wrong about everything, but they slipped into the culture, and they’ve been repeated, for millennia, with slight variations; and then they come up in awareness, and we think they’re our thoughts.

And we’re thinking bad thoughts that don’t actually make any sense, and we don’t notice because we don’t see how thinking works!

Encouraging community

Right, so I’ve been writing about why philosophy is bad, and I wrote that I have very mixed feelings about this, because this is one of my bad brain’s projects, and I’m not sure it’s actually a good thing to be doing, and I’m not sure if I’m going to continue.

But it drew a lot of attention and comments, which suggests that it may be an exciting topic that is worth pursuing, or it may just be that it’s rage bait, or some kind of bait that is drawing people, in a way that’s not healthy, and I should drop it like a hot potato. I’m not sure about that still.

However, one thing that’s exciting for me is seeing how, uh— Used to be, the comments on my posts were addressed only to me, but there’s increasingly conversation among people with each other, on my posts. And that seems like the beginnings of an emerging community around the kinds of things I write about. And that’s something I want to encourage! I decided that would be a project for this year, at the beginning of the year when I was doing my annual planning. And I mentioned in one of my monthly roundup posts that I was going to do this, and several people said No no, that trades off against time spent writing the real stuff, and we want you to write the real stuff. Not create community, because who cares about that!

Well, I do care about it. I hope you’ll come to care about it too. So I think it is worth putting some of my time into, even though it is really time-consuming. I spent essentially all day yesterday answering comments on the most recent philosophy post.

How myth got mutated into metaphysics

About that post: there is something very weird in the middle of it, when suddenly there’s all these dramatic illustrations, and weird bits of text that don’t seem to connect, and what is that about? I find this very interesting. There’s something emerging there, that I haven’t completely got a handle on yet. It’s starting to assemble itself, and this is the sort of impersonal nature of thinking. I don’t— I don’t do the stuff that supposedly I do. It just arises in mind. And, you know, I can, sometimes it’s a lot of work, sometimes I can guide it some, but primarily it’s an autonomous process that is impersonal. I’ll come back to this, because this really relates to the questions from both Vinod and Nick.

If you follow the links in that weird bit with the dramatic irrelevant illustrations, you’ll get some hints about what’s going on there. This is about myth, and mythopoesis, and the emergence of metaphysics out of myth.

I’m gonna say just a little bit about this. This is going to come out, I think, as a thing. It’s now a bunch of semi-connected thoughts, but I’m going to give you a through-line, I think, that is the outline of the story.

So in the beginning, there was Tiamat. Before the heavens and the Earth, there was Tiamat who was the waters of the ocean, and she was chaos.

This is in the Mesopotamian myth cycle called the Enuma Elish. The word that’s translated “chaos” in the Enuma Elish, and the Greek word chaos, do not mean what “chaos” means in English. It means unformed.

So the world was unformed, and Tiamat mated with Apsu, who was the fresh water of the rivers, and she brought forth the heavens and the earth, and the trees and the greenery, the animals, and monsters. She is the mother of everything. She is also the devourer and the destroyer of everything.

Hesiod. He’s not counted as a philosopher, he’s kind of a proto-philosopher. He systematized the Greek myths, and he addressed them to questions that subsequently became called the philosophical questions.

Uh, G-M-L comments, “This sounds a bit Discordian.” Yes! There’s a very clear connection there.

Hesiod’s myths are partly a retelling of the Enuma Elish— I think, and it’s not just my opinion.

Thales counts as the first philosopher, for some reason. His main doctrine was that everything is water. Tiamat is water, and the origin of everything.

Parmenides, who is right at the cusp between myth and metaphysics, he rode a magical chariot into the watery underworld and met a goddess, and she gave him philosophy.

Zeno was his student, who codified Parmenides’ understanding as a series of logical proofs.

Plato’s main work, I mentioned, was trying to make sense of this. Plato was concerned with forms. Remember, chaos is “unformed.”

Nagarjuna is the origin of Mahayana philosophy. He was concerned with the relationship between form and emptiness, which is the unformed.

Where did he get his stuff? He got it from water demons, snake demons.

The philosophy that he espoused concerns what’s called Prajnaparamita, which is the “perfection of wisdom.” “Wisdom” in Buddhist philosophy means the recognition of emptiness. And Prajnaparamita, emptiness, chaos, is personified as a goddess.

So, if you look at that weird middle section of my “Philosophy Doesn’t Work” , which is about myth and metaphysics and how they relate, what I just said may make that make more sense.

Inspiration in adult developmental stage transitions

Nick Gall has a series of interesting questions in the preliminary chat, which are about inspiration, and self-transcendence, and stage five in adult developmental theory, and how these relate to each other. They draw on an academic article that I haven’t read, and so I may not be able to address all of what he wanted to hear.

Inspiration is tremendously important to me, and I hope you can hear in my incoherent rambling about ancient philosophy and dragons that I’m inspired by this. It’s really exciting for me at the moment, trying to make sense of this, and the material is drawing me. This is highly meaningful to me in some way that I don’t really fully understand yet.

So I’ll come back to inspiration in a moment, but stage five in adult developmental theory… I’ll say some things about it, but this is something that nobody understands very well. There’s very little scientific study of it. The whole thing may be really pretty off. I can speak from my limited understanding and my limited personal experience. I think at the moment that’s all anybody can do.

In general, stage transitions involve both a push, which is a repulsion for your previous stage, and a pull, which is an inspiration drawing you toward the next stage. So you start to understand the limitations and failure modes of your previous stage, and you become disgusted with it, and that pushes you away, and you may find yourself in chaos: in an unformed space in which nothing is fitting anymore, and that can be terrifying. It can be depressing. Nihilism is an eruption of emptiness, or chaos, into awareness that you can’t deal with.

Hopefully, you manage to avoid that, because as you move away from the previous stage, you start to get a view of the next stage, that is glimmering in the future ahead of you, and this is inspiring, and pulls you forward, even though you don’t understand it yet and you can’t quite see it.

So in the three to four transition, you become sick of your social community, because everything is emotional drama. And people are constantly having these insane feelings about nothing that make no sense. And it’s impossible to get anything done because everybody is distracted by some relationship thing. And not doing what needs to be done. So you’re driven away from that.

And then you start to see, "Oh! Well, you know, if we had some clear responsibilities here, and if we had some coherent ideas about how we were relating to each other, such that we would reliably get along, and be able to work together, and not have constant drama, and if everything actually made sense, because there were some clear categories that things fit into, that would be much better! And that’s the inspiring vision of stage four that pulls you forward into this rational, systematic mode.

Then at some point you realize the limitations of that, that it’s very rigid, that you’ve put yourself in a box, and you’ve become an isolated individual. You’re trapped in your system of rationality. You have become a machine, a robot, going through the motions, executing a program, and it’s dead, you know, the life has gone out of it, and then you may go into a stage 4.5 nihilistic depression, where you realize that doesn’t work. But again, there’s chaos. Without rationality, there’s just chaos, and you’re tossed about on this black sea of unformed nothing!

Stage five and self-transcendence

And then you get the vision of stage five! And that pulls you forward and it’s inspiring.

Nick quotes some sections of my piece called “The Cofounders,” which is about how the entrepreneurial cofounders of a tech company… That the relationship between them develops from stage four to stage five. And the bits he quotes are from stage 4.8, which is the point where you’ve got the inspiration, you’re most of the way there, you can’t quite consistently be in a stage five way.

So what happens at stage five? Nick talked about self-transcendence; and I’m a little wary of this word “transcendence,” because this sounds like philosophy, it sounds specifically like early 19th century German philosophy; and philosophy is bad, and early 19th century German philosophy is kind of exceptionally distasteful in a lot of ways.

However, in each of these stage transitions, according to Robert Kegan’s version of this theory, there is what he calls a relativization of an old self, and the emergence of a new self. The old self becomes an object within the space of the new self.

And that could be seen as transcendence; I don’t like the word, but it’s the same, maybe the same idea. I don’t know, I haven’t read this article.

Stage five is different from the others in that the new self is not a self in the same sense. Each of these selves are structurally different, but the self at stage five is non-personal. You “become the space.” It’s very hard to talk about this without sounding like you’re on acid. Within awareness, everything is arising. Whatever is happening, is happening. And that is not separate from you. And this is not some kind of non-self exactly, it’s not that your self disappears, it’s just that yourself becomes a collection of stuff that appears on essentially the same basis as everything else within this space. You understand yourself as a space, not a box. You know, a self is the box. We’ve got some stuff in it, and everything else is outside. And at stage five, that just opens out.

Nick comments that “‘Self-transcendence’ comes from psychology. For example, Maslow’s highest level wasn’t self actualization, it was self-transcendence.” I read Maslow a couple of years ago. I was really impressed! This was a book that was popular when I was a teenager, and people thought it was great. And it sounded kind of dumb. But I read his book and I was very impressed with it. I recommend giving some possibility to checking that out.

So this self-transcendence into stage five relates with that impersonality of mind, which you can discover in meditation.

Mythopoesis

And it relates to the process of mythopoesis. There’s a famous, very influential essay by Tolkien, called On Fairy Stories, which is about mythopoesis, which is the creation of myths. Hesiod, who I mentioned, is sort of the original for mythopoesis. He apparently collected a lot of different Greek myths from around Greece, and systematized them into a coherent story, which then became canonical.

Tolkien, I think, understood himself to be doing mythopoesis on an individual basis. It was Middle Earth: The Lord of the Rings, The_ Silmarillion_, it was his creation. Which is true in some sense, obviously. But in general, mythopoesis is a social, cultural process that is not personal.

This bizarre story that I told you with a lot of Greek people in it, and goddesses, feels quite impersonal to me.

I should say I actually got partly interested in this because Jordan Peterson is obsessed with Tiamat. I think he’s obsessed with Tiamat in a quite different way, but I was contemplating his lectures on this, and that was part of what got me started.

Myths transform can society

So Vinod Khare asks, “In what ways do you find myths useful for people today? You’ve written extensively about the utility of myth for personal transformation. What other usefulness do you find in the mythical mode of thinking?”

I think it is tremendously important for developing culture and society; and Tolkien very much felt this. He was creating a new origin mythology for England, which he felt didn’t have the kind of myths that the Celts did, and the Finns did, and of course the Greeks.

So, lot of it came out of his experience of the First World War, but he wanted to create something that was going to be transformative for England.

I want to create something that can be transformative now for whomever, and myth is a way to do that. Myth operates at this watery, deep, underground level, that is primal, and tremendously important and inspiring, even if it makes no sense. And yet it makes sense in this mythical mode, not in the rational mode.

And I said in that “Philosophy Doesn’t Work” piece that the mythical mode and the rational mode are not in conflict. The rationalist Greeks got the idea that these are in conflict, we need to get rid of the myths because they’re not true, and we need to replace them with rationality, and from that they created metaphysics, which was a disastrous mistake in my view.

Myths and fantasy and science fiction

“What similarities and dissimilarities,” Vinod asks, “do you find between ancient, well established mythical entities such as Zeus or Vajravarahi, and more modern, contemporary mythical entities from Hollywood or fantasy novels. Are they on an equal footing, in some sense? Or not?”

There’s a related question he asked, which is “What kind of fiction do you like to read? What value, if any, do you find in reading or watching fiction, besides enjoyment for our day to day lives?”

So, I do read and love fantasy fiction, with dragons and heroes and witches and creepy underground stuff; and I think it is the modern expression of the mythical mode.

Oh, Vinod says, “This makes me think of how the myth-making of Golden Age science fiction ushered in much of the technological progress later.” Yeah! I mean, that stuff was tremendously inspiring. I just caught the end of the golden age when I was a kid, which was in the steam age or something. Heinlein was an enormous inspiration for me, and I went into artificial intelligence because of Heinlein novels. I think that is a form of modern mythology. I think that sword and sorcery novels— I mean, a lot of them are junk, because 95 percent of everything is junk, but the best of them tell you something about human possibility that I think is really important.

Yidam practice, Spock, and Jimi Hendrix

Vinod asks, “How similar is yidam practice”— That is a tantric Buddhist practice of, relating to, and perhaps becoming, a deity. I wrote about this somewhat obliquely in a recent piece called “You Should Be a God-Emperor”; there’s also a more straightforward piece on Vividness about this.

“How similar is yidam practice to considering ‘What would Spock do?’ That one is actually personal. I spent my teenage years regularly trying to imitate and embody Spock, who is my favorite Star Trek character. The effect, I think, was emotional dissociation, and getting really good at technical subjects, and infrequent explosions of anger, which is exactly what I would expect from taking on Spock as a yidam.”

This is a wonderful story! Thank you, Vinod.

I think asking in a conceptual way “What would Spock do?” is not completely in alignment with the traditional practice of yidam, which is non-conceptual. It’s important in some ways that it’s non-conceptual. But otherwise, I think, yes, this probably is meaningfully similar.

My former teacher, Ngak’chang Rinpoche, had a similar story about this, which is, he had a poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall. Ngak’chang Rinpoche was an aspiring blues musician, and so this poster of Jimi Hendrix was like the thangka, the religious icon of the deity. And he said that you put this on your wall, and then you adopt the mudra of the yidam. So the mudra is the kind of bodily posture and gestures of the yidam. And the Jimi Hendrix mudra is: terrrrlzlzlzlp! So, he became a semi-pro blues musician, and was quite successful at that for some years. So maybe that worked for him.

Hollywood mythology

Vinod mentions Hollywood; and a lot of Hollywood stuff is quite explicitly drawn from mythology, in a somewhat degraded form, and sometimes that seems kind of vile. But I think a lot of it works because it is mythology. And when it’s good, it’s good partly because it’s bringing myths to life, and making them [THUMP!] They hit you in the chest. And that’s what myths should do. If it’s some story that you’re reading without any emotional impact, then there’s not much point in that!

G-M-L in the chat is mentioning the Dune films. I actually haven’t seen those. Charlie, my spouse, watched them and was excited. I loved the Witcher series on… Netflix, I guess? And the video game Witcher 3, Charlie and I both played that through, before watching the TV series and found it very affecting. The Witcher is a tantric sorcerer, sort of? Doing the things that a tantric sorcerer does, and we’re like, yeah, this is tantra!

And the Lord of the Rings movies were, for both of us, quite impactful; because again, Tolkien was deliberately engaged in mythopoeisis.

My experience of entrepreneurship

Maybe I’ll go on to Steph’s questions, which are about entrepreneurship, and purpose and value in major life projects. Steph said that I’ve started a company, “Can you tell us more about that?” I will, but I asked Steph for what in particular might be of interest, and why she was asking. She said “It’s all in the vein of what should I do with my life.” And there’s a series of questions she asked, and her path to entrepreneurship is strikingly similar to mine, so it’s possible that the analogy may be somehow interesting.

I’ll say a little about mine first. I got fascinated by artificial intelligence due to reading Heinlein novels. And I went and got a PhD in artificial intelligence. Toward the end of that, I realized that it was a dead end field that was not going to progress, and there was no point in continuing with it. And AI couldn’t answer the questions that I came to it with, which was questions about the nature of mind. Which I’ve gotten to have better answers to through practicing meditation. And other ways.

Then I had a Ph. D., and what do I do, because I’m not going to do AI research? I had a existential crisis of purpose. What is my purpose in life now? My purpose has been artificial intelligence for 20 years. And that’s just a dead end. Along the way, I got extraordinary programming chops, and thought, okay, how do I use those to do something else? And I wanted to do whatever was going to be of greatest benefit.

I thought something in the area of medical research and health seemed like a good bet. And I went into computer stuff in pharmaceutical research, which is about inventing new drugs. I did that at a small, very screwed up company for a few years; and then started my own, even smaller company, that was successful enough that I was able to retire, in 2002, I think.

Entrepreneurship, and purpose and value in major life projects

So, what does that have to do with Steph’s questions?

Steph asks “I’m asking about startup life because for some reason that’s a direction that’s really hot for me at the moment.” Yeah, I mean, I found entrepreneurship inspiring. There is a draw, because it’s creating something that is completely new, and you’re really up against reality there. It’s not conceptual; I mean, concepts play some role, but you’re actually creating a thing, and you have to become the space. As founder, you are the space within which the company happens. That can drive people into stage five, and my piece called “The Cofounders” is basically about that.

Steph says, “I’m on an incubator scheme, getting a lot of support and encouragement. I’m finding a natural, buzzy fit in this early stage.” That sounds great! The incubator hadn’t been invented yet when I was doing this, I think.

Steph says, “But it’s all froth.” That doesn’t sound so great! I think Steph is maybe expressing some question of whether the apparent purpose is real. And that’s a question I am constantly asking myself, and always have been, because purpose is nebulous, and there’s never going to be a definite answer.

Steph says, “I’m going to keep developing and validating my idea”; even with some uncertainty she expresses: “I can’t decide how committed I am to the lifestyle. I want purposefulness more than anything, but I also don’t want to sacrifice down time. I don’t want to work more than 46 or so hours a week.”

Yeah, that’s tough… I’m not sure it’s realistic to found a company in 46 hours a week. I wouldn’t say it can’t be done; I don’t know. I routinely worked seventy hours a week, often more. My spouse, Charlie, is a founder now of a small organization that’s growing rapidly, and Charlie works routinely seventy hours a week, sometimes more. And it is brutal. That’s just a realistic fact about this.

But, if you have a one-person business, and you’re not aiming to grow rapidly… Managing people is very time-consuming, but an individual, solo business might very well be done in 46 hours a week or less. And there may be ways to run a more substantial business as a normal sized job; I don’t know.

Within eG, which is our community, that Charlie and Steph and a number of others of you are in, there are quite a number of entrepreneurs who have been through this process, and might be available as a resource.

What is software expertise best used for?

Steph says, “The other issue is more fundamental. It is: what questions are computational methods best suited for? I’m fairly deep into computational cognitive science,” as I was, “but it’s become clear that computational modeling is not the best tool to study the human mind,” which is what I figured out in about 1989, which was a great disappointment!

“I got into it because I was fascinated by the riddle of the mind, but I now see that, this was just an expensive toy case for me to study to learn computing”— there really are surprising analogies here, Steph! “Now that I have my programming, statistics, and probability, I want to leave ideas of the mind for meditation, and instead find an application for the methods that I learned. I’m a generalist.”

Yeah, I think being a generalist is critical in entrepreneurship, because you have to do everything in the beginning. The founders are also the people who assemble the furniture, and who talk to lawyers, and raise money, and deal with people’s personal crises, and get the health plan in place, and you have to be a generalist to be willing to do that, and if you’re not willing, you’re not able.

“Surely I must be able to use it now for good, but what and how?” Very good questions!

“I have some ideas for causal modeling in health tech, like some reasoning tool for normal people to quantify how many minutes they’d need to run to offset eating a donut, and keep diabetes at bay for the same amount of time, that sort of thing.”

I think this is a great space to be in! I don’t know any specifics. There is a member of the eG community who founded, grew, and recently sold a similar-sounding company, that was a personal health metrics startup. He might be willing to talk to you. I’ll check with him, and put the two of you in touch if he’s up for it.

I wish I could be more specific for stuff, but I’m out of that, all of those fields, and things are quite different now than they were almost thirty years ago, when I was doing this.

Founding a startup is a mythopoesis

I’m finding another connection, which is: A successful startup is a myth. The idea initially is probably completely unrealistic, but it’s inspiring. It has an emotional impact and to be a successful founder, you need to inspire people with the myth of the company.

At some point that can become dysfunctional. The famous case—and it’s in this space!—is Theranos, which was a startup founded on an inspiring myth of dramatically cheaper, more convenient blood testing, or medical testing in general, which could have a huge impact. And the founder inspired employees, and venture capitalists, and the press. And the myth was brilliant, and inspiring; it’s exactly the sort of thing that I would want to do, and it sounds like the sort of thing that Steph would want to do. The problem was it wasn’t true.

At some point, the myth has to draw reality to its vision, and bridge that gap.

It maybe relates to this idea of meta-rationality, and stage five perhaps, being, in part, about the interplay of different modes of thinking, feeling, and acting. In the meta-rationality book, I talk about reasonableness and rationality; but the mythical mode is another one that I don’t talk about in that book. But connecting rationality, which is reality-based, with myth is what a founder does.

Philosophy is a disaster for the same reason Theranos was

I’m just making this up as I go along! Thoughts are thinking me! I don’t know where this stuff is coming from.

So, Elizabeth Holmes was the founder of Theranos, wasn’t able to do that for whatever reason.

And I think the Greek philosophers also failed. All of philosophy is downstream from their failure to bridge rationality and myth. Rationality was new, they didn’t know how to do this. They observed that the myths were false, like Theranos’ medical tests were false. They said, “Okay, we don’t want to do that. That would be wrong. So we’re going to get rid of the myths, and just be rational, and address the subjects of the myths with rationality instead of myths.” And that’s what philosophy is; and it doesn’t work.

Décalage: slippage and lag

There’s a question here: “Can you talk more about the transition from stage 3 to 4 to 5 in the sense of how you can be in different stages at different parts of your life? I feel I may be at stage five in my professional life, but transitioning between 3 and 4 in relevance to spiritual friendship and community.”

Unfortunately, I can’t see who asked that, so I can’t credit, and this is an excellent question. This is a key question. I think it’s the key question in adult stage theory, which does throw the whole thing into question.

Technically, it is called décalage, which means slippage between domains of life. Professional life and personal life, or interpersonal life, are different domains of meaning. And I think it’s actually extremely common for one to experience and operate at different stages in these different domains; and that can cause a lot of trouble.

For technical people, it’s extremely common to be at stage four, and even to be moving forward out of stage four cognitively, while still being stuck back at stage three, or dragging oneself from three to four, relationally.

I think there’s a valuable possibility there, which is to reflect on the way that you are in the domain that you’re more advanced in, and try to find analogies between that and the domains in which you are lagging. There are structural analogies between these domains, such that stage four in the relational domain is structurally similar to stage four in the cognitive domain, or the professional domain. So if you can bring those into correspondence reflectively, that can be a powerful way of accelerating development in domains where you may feel a little stuck.

Companies and cults

Nick Gall is asking, “This passage from ‘The Cofounders’,”—that’s the piece I wrote—“strikes me as gesturing towards company myth-making: ‘Some said the company was turning into a cult, and we lost a few of our best people. It was a calculated risk. Most stayed, and some say the training has radically improved their lives, outside work, as well as in it.’”

Yes! So, “turning into a cult”: that is related to company myth-making.

Robert Kegan, whose version of adult stage developmental theory is the one that’s most influential for me, and for many people… I think it’s his most recent book, was a study of three different companies that tried to actualize his theory. One of them was Bridgewater, which is a gigantic investment company that is uniquely successful financially; and within the financial industry, it is widely regarded as a cult. It has a sacred text, which was written by the founder, and it has weird ritual practices.

And for outsiders, the big question is, was this company incredibly successful because of this bizarre off-putting mythology? Or, is that just an accident, and it was successful for some other reason? I don’t know the answer to that. There’s some discussion in Kegan’s book, that is very interesting, but I think not very illuminating, to be honest.

Relational stage four: professionalism

The bit about “most stayed, and some say the training has radically improved their lives, outside work as well as in it”… I get contacted very often by people in technical management who say, “The people that work for me, they’re STEM educated, they are cognitively at stage four, possibly even beyond, but they are operating in their relationships with their colleagues and with me at stage three; and this really is causing a lot of trouble. How, how can I encourage these people to move to stage four interpersonally?”

Stage four interpersonally in a company context is what we call “professionalism,” and this is something that… I think it’s become much more of a problem than it used to be. It used to be understood that if you were a “white collar worker,” you had to behave in certain ways, and relate to your coworkers in certain ways. And due to cultural changes, that requirement is no longer feasible. But having everybody in a company that’s trying to get work done relating to each other in stage three ways is really very difficult, and causes all kinds of interpersonal problems, but also, concrete problems in not getting the work done.

Consensus Buddhism is stage three

Uh, Apostol says, “For me, the transition from three to four in spiritual community was triggered by a total failure to get my needs met at a stage three community. I realized it was a structural problem.”

Yeah, that’s really interesting! My critique of a lot of modern spiritual communities, particularly what I call “Consensus Buddhism,” which is kind of the “nice” version of Buddhism, is that it is stage three; it is unstructured; it’s about relationships and emotions. That’s all great stuff! But it has its limitations, and depending on where you are personally, this may not work for you; and it sounds like for Apostol that didn’t work, and moving into a community with more structure was helpful.

Have a great holiday! See you in a month!

Okay! This has been great. Thank you for showing up! We’ve got 45 people currently. Probably some people have dropped in and out. It’s a great turnout. It’s wonderful to see some familiar faces, many familiar faces, and some new people. And I’ll be doing this again in a month or so. Have a great holiday.

See y’all!

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