This seems like a good place to mention that if you are thinking about the future, doing contemplative practice, and get philosophically disoriented, and normal therapists and meditation teachers feel like they aren’t actually addressing your concerns, that I am more than happy to talk with you. Traditional instructions often don’t really emphasize that periods of high confusion are expected if you’re doing the thing correctly because it just doesn’t matter in a monastic context where you have a highly highly structured environment to fall back on.
I’d like to emphasize some things related to this perspective.
One thing that seems frustrating to me from just outside CFAR in the control group[1] is the way it is fumbling its way towards creating a new traditional for what I’ll vaguely and for lack of a better term call positive transformation, i.e. taking people and helping them turn themselves into better versions of themselves that they more like and have greater positive impact on the world (make the world more liked by themselves and others). But there are already a lot of traditions that do this, albeit with different worldviews than the one CFAR has. So it’s disappointing to watch CFAR to have tried and failed over the years in various ways, as measured by my interactions with people who have gone through their training programs, that were predictable if they were more aware of and practiced with existing traditions.
This has not been helped by what I read as a disgust or “yuck” reaction from some rationalists when you try to bring in things from these traditions because they are confounded in those traditions with things like supernatural claims. To their credit, many people have not reacted this way, but I’ve repeatedly felt the existence of this “guilty by association” meme from people who I consider allies in other respects. Yes, I expect on the margin some of this is amped up by the limitations of my communication skills such that I observe more of it than others do along with my ample willingness to put forward ideas that I think work even if they are “wrong” in an attempt to jump closer to global maxima, but I do not think the effect is so large as to discredit this observation.
I’m really excited to read that CFAR is moving in the direction implied by this post, and, because of the impact CFAR is having on the world through the people it impacts, like Romeo I’m happy to assist in what ways I can to help CFAR learn from the wisdom of existing traditions to make itself into an organization that has more positive effects on the world.
[1] This is a very tiny joke: I was in the control group for an early CFAR study and have still not attended a workshop, so in a certain sense I remain in the control group.
This seems like a good place to mention that if you are thinking about the future, doing contemplative practice, and get philosophically disoriented, and normal therapists and meditation teachers feel like they aren’t actually addressing your concerns, that I am more than happy to talk with you. Traditional instructions often don’t really emphasize that periods of high confusion are expected if you’re doing the thing correctly because it just doesn’t matter in a monastic context where you have a highly highly structured environment to fall back on.
I’d like to emphasize some things related to this perspective.
One thing that seems frustrating to me from just outside CFAR in the control group[1] is the way it is fumbling its way towards creating a new traditional for what I’ll vaguely and for lack of a better term call positive transformation, i.e. taking people and helping them turn themselves into better versions of themselves that they more like and have greater positive impact on the world (make the world more liked by themselves and others). But there are already a lot of traditions that do this, albeit with different worldviews than the one CFAR has. So it’s disappointing to watch CFAR to have tried and failed over the years in various ways, as measured by my interactions with people who have gone through their training programs, that were predictable if they were more aware of and practiced with existing traditions.
This has not been helped by what I read as a disgust or “yuck” reaction from some rationalists when you try to bring in things from these traditions because they are confounded in those traditions with things like supernatural claims. To their credit, many people have not reacted this way, but I’ve repeatedly felt the existence of this “guilty by association” meme from people who I consider allies in other respects. Yes, I expect on the margin some of this is amped up by the limitations of my communication skills such that I observe more of it than others do along with my ample willingness to put forward ideas that I think work even if they are “wrong” in an attempt to jump closer to global maxima, but I do not think the effect is so large as to discredit this observation.
I’m really excited to read that CFAR is moving in the direction implied by this post, and, because of the impact CFAR is having on the world through the people it impacts, like Romeo I’m happy to assist in what ways I can to help CFAR learn from the wisdom of existing traditions to make itself into an organization that has more positive effects on the world.
[1] This is a very tiny joke: I was in the control group for an early CFAR study and have still not attended a workshop, so in a certain sense I remain in the control group.