Any coherent framework for how we will solve aging requires therapeutics simultaneously capable of both complex effects and permeating well through the entire human body.

Yet no such modalities currently exist. And this does not seem to be a major focus of aging research. Why?

Modern modalities

Current therapeutic modalities generally fall into one of two camps: systemically distributed but mechanistically limited, or mechanistically powerful but distribution limited.

Small molecules can access all tissues, organs, cells, and sub-cellular compartments, but are basically fairly crude tools1 that usually break things.2

Large “molecules”—CRISPR, gene and cell therapies, antibodies, biologics, etc—can effect much more complex transformations upon drug targets, but are very limited in terms of what parts of the human body they can actually access.3

No current modalities are both mechanistically powerful and systemically distributed.

An aging thesis

The thesis of this essay is two-fold:

i) we will not solve aging until we develop systemic, cell and CNS permeable, therapeutics capable of achieving complex transformations upon drug targets,

and

ii) Induced Proximity Medicines (IPMs) are the only credible shot of achieving this in the near future.

Here’s why.

The future of longevity is induced proximity

IPMs are a class of medicines that work through the action of bringing two macromolecules together, generally a target protein and an effector protein, to drive some therapeutic outcome (very different from how a typical therapeutic works). This can be called a protein-protein interaction or more simply an (induced) “proximity event”.

All biological processes are downstream of binary protein interaction events, so gaining specific control of proximity events theoretically enables a nearly unlimited set of biological outcomes.

While IPMs can be either small or large molecules, the most powerful examples are small molecules, as they retain their oral bioavailability and systemic distribution, and in this piece IPMs refers only to these.

IPMs are both a new and old class of medicines. Old in that the greatest chemist of all, Mother Nature, often makes molecules that work through induced proximity.4 Also old in that many human-developed drugs have serendipitously been found, many years later, to work through induced proximity.5 But new in that we are just learning to design these molecules ourselves rationally, and tap into the massive new pharmacology space they offer.

Why do they make so much sense for longevity?

There are two main processes we need to modulate systemically in humans for which induced proximity medicines are especially relevant: proteostasis and transcription.

Rescuing proteostasis

Proteostasis is the body’s ability to maintain a healthy, functional proteome, and dysregulated proteostasis is one of the most well-established hallmarks of aging: as we age misfolded proteins accumulate, the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) loses efficiency, autophagy declines, and chaperone capacity becomes overwhelmed.

Proteostasis dysregulation isn’t a localized problem; it happens in every tissue, cell, and organ in our bodies, and it is causative or implicated in many aging-associated pathologies: neurodegeneration, amyloidoses, tauopathies, sarcopenia, and immunosenescence, to name just a few.

How is proteostasis regulated? Via proximity events—protein interactions of proteostasis machinery with dysfunctional or misfolded proteins.

Restoring proteostasis at scale requires the ability to selectively recycle, refold, or redirect specific proteins across the entire human body.

IPMs that induce productive interactions between proteostasis machinery and dysregulated proteins, or that directly tune the machinery itself, are the best shot we have of achieving this.

Root access to human transcription

Most cells in the human body contain our entire genome, but in any given cell only a fraction of those genes are transcribed into RNA, then translated into proteins. This is the dynamic process by which our bodies grow, respond, and adapt to various stimuli.

The key players are transcription factors (TFs). TFs are proteins that bind to specific DNA sequences to induce transcription of target genes and genetic programs. Any given TF can bind to many sites of the genome, and the process by which this is determined is entirely regulated by protein interactions. A given TF will have hundreds or thousands of interacting partners capable of tuning its function in response to various stimuli.

All of the hallmarks of aging, including proteostasis, are regulated via transcription.

TFs are a canonically “undruggable” class of proteins due to their often unstructured nature, and lack of traditional small molecule binding sites.

However, two factors make TFs much more amenable to modulation via IPMs:

• physiologically they are controlled by protein interactions678, so if one can find the right proximity partner, one can gain far more control of TF biology than a normal therapeutic

• even intrinsically disordered proteins like TFs become folded in certain contexts, most notably when in complex with another protein or macromolecule

By finding the right partner for a given TF, meaning one that both induces a productive and druggable complex, and then inducing that proximity event with a small molecule, we can develop systemic therapeutics capable of transcriptional modulation and reprogramming for the most important diseases.

We won’t solve aging until we achieve root access to human transcription.

A note on gene therapies for transcriptional reprogramming

To date, the primary way researchers have attempted to modulate transcription has been through gene therapies.

The majority of the cellular reprogramming research to restore youthful phenotypes or cellular functions relies on genetic delivery of TFs to aged cells.

Data generated in these studies have shown that, at least in vitro, it is possible to reprogram human cells to a more youthful state.

However, there are three major problems with using gene therapies to reprogram human cells in the clinic:

1. Delivery: we are very far away from being able to deliver genes to the majority of cells and organs in the human body.

2. Transcriptional control: very importantly, bulk delivery of a TF to a human cell does not phenocopy how either our bodies or IPMs normally regulate TFs. Physiologically, TFs are controlled by protein interactions (proximity events) which is quite different from just grossly increasing TF level. TF abundance ≠ TF activity.

3. Safety: gene therapies have a relatively long duration of action, which is unlikely to be ideal for safely and systemically reprogramming human cells. A short pulsatile bolus of transcriptional modulation, achievable by IPMs, is likely to be significantly safer, and is again much more similar to how transcription is regulated physiologically.

Even for liver-targeted gene therapies, where delivery is much less of an issue, I suspect it will be very difficult to get aging therapeutics approved in otherwise healthy humans. It’s an extremely important challenge, and luckily there are many smart people working on this.

Once and future IPMs

What do we need to do to get to this future? We are still in the dawn of the induced proximity era. Molecules like rapamycin are powerful proximity medicines, but very non-trivial to design or discover.

The first instance of rationally designed IPMs, PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeras (PROTACs), are nearing FDA approval, but are only capable of achieving a specific proximity event (E3-ligase mediated degradation) of a drug target, and not of more complex transformations.

To fully realize the promise of this field we need to build tools and technologies that let us understand exactly which proximity event we need to induce between the hundreds of millions of binary possibilities, and then allow us to develop small-molecule drugs recapitulating these proximity events.

My company, General Proximity, is hard at work on this, but to my knowledge there are no other longevity companies developing proximity medicines, which I find frankly baffling.9

Will IPMs actually “solve aging”? Of course we can’t know this, but with arbitrarily powerful control of transcription nearly anything is possible. I’d bet all my money that the way this will first become possible is through IPMs rather than some sort of next-gen gene therapy tech.

Hopefully this article will inspire many more researchers both in academia and industry to enter the IPM field, to help develop what I believe will be the single most important class of therapeutics in our lifetime.

The year is 2038

The year is 2038. Aevitum® hit the market five years ago after conditional Phase 2 approval for a rare mitochondrial disorder, but the biohackers were on it for years before now that the FDA’s right-to-try program only requires an AI doctor to perform a simple risk/reward analysis for each individual patient. Full approval for use in “healthy aging” was granted in 2036, making it the first ever rationally designed IPM to be approved for aging (and second ever aging IPM behind only rapamycin).

Aevitum® is also the first systemic transcriptional reprogramming medicine approved outside of cancer. It works by co-opting a key piece of intra-cellular machinery in order to activate a transcription factor involved in mitochondrial biogenesis—bringing these two biomolecules together in the exact right spatial orientation. The end result is that patients experience a significant increase in both total and healthy mitochondria, which drives a plethora of downstream benefits.

Analysts predict Aevitum® could be the first trillion dollar drug: roughly 0.5% of the world’s population now takes a once-monthly to once-quarterly pill at $500 USD a pop, via a self-serve DTC portal, and that number is expected to grow to nearly 4% in the next decade.

Elderly patients report energy levels they haven’t felt since the mid-20th century, with corresponding increases in mood and well-being (turns out having healthy mitochondria feels really good). In combination with 8th-gen GLPs, obesity is now entirely a matter of preference, rather than biology. Aevitum® is the drug of choice for Wall Street traders, and other knowledge workers, to increase their focus and energy, and the increased productivity it brings can be read out as a moderate uptick in the national GDP. Bryan Johnson’s nighttime erection scores have hit record highs.

Preliminary estimates are that Aevitum® will add three years of healthy lifespan to the average patient (four in America), while reducing risk for cardiovascular disease and various dementias by 30-45%.

New medicines for reprogramming other key transcription factors to support healthy aging are on the horizon, and the prediction markets have a number of long-term bets on who the first human to live past 150 will be.

While not (yet) a panacea, the affordable nature of such medicines has also begun to greatly decrease health inequities for tens of millions of humans.

The future is bright.

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6

An (incomplete) post-translational modification (PTM) map of p65 (part of NF-κB). There are ~200 types of PTMs possible in humans.

7

An (incomplete) interactome map for c-Myc.

8

Human TF interactomes.

• the inner work of fundraising

• the magic of doing hard things

• how to have great ideas

• being a solo founder

• fantasy novels as meaning-makers for founders :)

• lots more

Enjoy!

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Metta is a meditation practice different from breathwork/concentration practice (samadhi) or insight meditation (vipassana).

Metta means lovingkindness. One way to define it is as a system to reprogram your mind into experiencing more joy, gratitude, safety, and love for both yourself and others.

The way it works is simply by repeating a set of phrases in your head, either while sitting or walking. The phrases are all positive wishes: may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be at ease, may you be healthy, may you be free from suffering, may you be loved, etc. The object of them shifts throughout a practice session, usually starting with the easiest person for you to do this for (often a parent or mentor or early caretaker), and then moving to yourself and further outwards to other friends, family, loved ones, neutral beings, difficult beings, and then all beings.

On the first day of the retreat we turned in our devices (they went in a safe in the office “for a retreat of their own”). I woke up every day with the sunrise and walked out to meditate or get breakfast without any of the normal encumbrances like my wallet or keys or phone or watch. The meals were delicious and healthy and cooked by an awesome staff. We had six or seven amazing teachers who led the meditations and gave dharma talks every day and who we could also talk to for personal instruction. If you needed a break from meditation there were miles of beautiful trails with outdoor meditation spots all around the center. It was so nice how everything was taken care of and all you had to do was show up and meditate and exist.

It was a life-changing experience.

Below are some of my (unstructured!) notes.

One of the teacher’s favorite definitions of metta: unstoppable friendliness towards yourself and all beings.

Advice for walking metta meditation: walk as if in your body, not with your destination in mind.

Chanting is a form of somatic therapy via vagus nerve stimulation? (Like humming?) Do more.

A metta poem, shared by one of our teachers.

One of the best parts of the retreat was the environment:

• surrounded by beautiful nature

• barely seen cues at the retreat center lead to a palpable sense of safety

• there was a luxurious amount of meal time, when was the last time I spent 45 minutes on a normal meal and nothing else?

• no devices, waking up with the sunrise and getting a good dose of sunshine, healthy vegetarian meals that were tasty but easy to not overeat (I also had no sweets or caffeine the whole time either, although there was some if you wanted, it felt easy to ignore)

Everyone had a work meditation they had to perform each day. Mine was washing the dishes after lunch. Every day at 1 PM I’d show up in the back of the kitchen with two other retreatants who I’d never spoken to and silently wash dishes for 45 minutes. Afterwards I’d sit on the porch bench outside the kitchen and drink peppermint tea in the sunshine and meditate. It felt funny to start “work” every day at 1 and be done by 1:45.

Buddha said to attune your efforts like an instrument: not too loose, not too tight.

One of the goals of metta is to realize that when directing it to I, you, others, all, all of those are the same.

Forcing metta feels hard and boring. Try steadying your attention on phrases and let it come in on its own. It’s about accessing something that already exists.

Sincerity is key. Be ardent and earnest, even if there is doubt. Just keep planting the seeds.

Metta can be everything from non-aversion, to kindness, to fireworks of love.

Why metta is good: what you think, you become. Everyone is planting seeds for their future self every moment. What do you want to plant in this moment?

It’s a universal truth that everyone is always cultivating something, decide what you want to cultivate.

Transference: if a random stranger or even an enemy can deserve your metta, so do you.

This was one of the things I found most powerful. It’s often hard to give myself self-love because I don’t “deserve” it. But I found it obviously good and easy to give to everyone from loved ones to complete strangers. Of course they should be loved and safe and happy! Of course it’s not something they need to “earn” it should be unconditional, and if it were truly so the world would undeniably be a better place.

From there it was a very short step towards seeing if that was true for others then it was probably true for me as well. Especially after I’d spent so much cushion time and intention sending it to others.

When doing metta go in the easiest order, often: easy being (or benefactor), self, friend, family, neutral being, difficult being, all beings.

When beginning metta, it's best to just stick with one person for each category instead of skipping around.

Partners can be tricky to start with because there can be a lot of weeds there. Start with the least complicated relationships.

Metta is a way to practice the opposite of our habitual judgment mind.

In the past when I’ve thought about morals, or self-love, or forgiveness I’ve often had more of a categorical imperative view: these things need to be earned or else everything breaks down. On retreat this flipped, obviously love and safety and peace and health and ease would be good for everyone in the world, and people can deserve this without “earning” it.

Part of my resistance on the retreat to sending (and receiving) metta in the beginning was a puritanical part of myself that was unsure if the world would actually be a better place if our wishes for all beings and ourselves came true.

Humans are a garden, you are always cultivating something. What are you cultivating right now?

Metta is a way to plant a different kind of seed. To re-write our thought patterns and our habitual reactions to our thoughts and to other people.

Meditation retreats are secretly the world’s best elimination diet programs. Most Westerners have probably never gone 10 days on a completely clean diet.

Metta forgiveness meditation:

For all the ways I have knowingly or unknowingly caused you harm. I ask for your forgiveness. May I be forgiven.

For all the ways you have knowingly or unknowingly caused me harm. I offer you forgiveness. I orient my heart towards forgiveness. I commit to forgiving you. May you be forgiven.

For all the ways I have knowingly or unknowingly caused myself harm. I offer myself forgiveness. I orient my heart towards forgiveness. I commit to forgiving myself. May I be forgiven.

Metta doesn’t actually directly affect others, so you don’t need to worry about if the people you direct it towards fully deserve it (a common hindrance). Think of it more as just training for your own mind.

When distraction patterns come up in metta just treat them with kindness and compassion.

Happiness is just the absence of mental patterns that turn you off + conditions for contentment and gratitude: it’s a nice day, I ate a good meal, I have an amazing partner, my work is going well, etc.

Do you view the world more as a playground or jailyard?

Metta can shift into mudita (compassionate joy): I’m happy that you’re happy.

When the mind becomes steady and safe on retreat things can come up that feel more disruptive. This is normal. It’s not about you. This is your body finally having a chance to let go of old wounds.

When you feel super distracted, down, etc on retreat that might just be a purification process. Let it pass with metta or equanimity.

Showing up and doing the work even with many distractions is practicing well. It can help to re-frame distractions, doubt, etc as actually just part of a purification process that is arising from retreat.

Even if it feels like you are making no progress during these periods, you are.

Relatedly: when you feel distractions, doubt, aversion, or other uncomfortable feelings arise when doing metta instead of being discouraged, try reframing them as a part of yourself raising its hand and saying “hi, I’d like some healing please”, and share the metta accordingly.

Equanimity is a state of no reactivity but deep curiosity about the truth. A neutral person or natural ecosystem can be a good place to start for equanimity metta training.

Equanimity can be a resonating joy as well, that things are just good.

The number one benefit of metta (according to one of our teachers): you will sleep well.

(I got what were probably the nine best nights of sleep of my life on this retreat, although probably at least 30% of that was quitting caffeine cold turkey on day 1, which I don’t 100% recommend.)

Often the work of retreat will only be obvious after. Do the work, trust that it is doing something. As you progress the metta afterglow and spontaneous metta towards others can become more common.

One measure of progress is that the mind starts to go into metta phrases more naturally. It can take a month or so for this to happen.

At its root metta is simply a tool to rewire our brains to be more full of love and less full of judgment.

The phrases I used for most of the retreat were: may you be happy, may you be safe, may you be loved. As they became more natural they started taking on an almost psychedelic quality in my mind where the repetition of each phrase would be accompanied by warm and intense mental imagery and sound, that was shooting towards the object of metta and bathing them in its essence.

May your heart be bursting with the music of joy, may you be so loved that all beings feel like your best friend, may you be completely unharmable and indestructible.

This beautiful reminder about “secret work being done inside us” kept coming for me on retreat:

I mean I always think that that’s the secret of change — that there are huge gestations and fermentations going on in us that we are not even aware of. And then, sometimes, when we come to a threshold, crossing over, which we need to become different, that we’ll be able to be different, because secret work has been done in us, of which we’ve had no inkling.
–John O'Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty

One of the most interesting takeaways for me was the difference between using metta to relate arisings versus using vipassana/equanimity. In the latter you simply practice accepting what is. You teach yourself how all emotions are transient. How to look at them and accept them and let them flow through you without clinging. But you don’t really interact with them.

In contrast metta is much warmer and feels more healing. And can deal with root issues in a different way I think. When I was using metta to sit with arisings the natural way to interact with them felt like tenderness and compassion and self-love. Instead of the somewhat sterile feeling of just letting things go, metta felt more oriented towards finding and healing the wound that led to the arisings in the first place.

I think metta is probably a better tool for healing trauma (although equanimity certainly helps to calm the ship).

Any time thought comes up when doing metta: this is none of my business.

May I love myself in this moment, just as I am.

Rob Burbea: "When I give lovingkindness to others, it cannot help but bathe me."

In my day job I do a lot of selling—to investors, recruits, and to our team for continued buy-in to our vision. Sometimes these can be challenging, especially around fundraising where even being highly competent here can mean a 95+% rejection rate. Over time, this can lead to a buildup of resentment and other things. I wonder how this dynamic could change if I spent more time sending these people metta.

The proximate cause for metta to arise is seeing the goodness of all beings.

All beings everywhere want safety and ease and happiness.

Metta phrases can be a vipassana (insight meditation) anchor, just like breath, body scans, etc.

Metta is so powerful because it lets us rewire our thought patterns and orientations towards others. And other people can sense when we authentically wish them well, it feels like warmth and good vibes and positive energy.

It can be good to try to get out of distracted/sleepy/etc states, but it can also be good practice to try to work from within them.

Jhana factors:

• one-pointedness: do one thing at a time

• welcoming and inviting simple contentment

• aiming and sustaining attention: these respond to will and effort

  • “I’m going to dedicate these whole 15 minutes to bringing up this person and holding them in my heart’s attention”

• curiosity, awe and beauty towards the object of your attention

• start with simplicity and contentment as a base then focus it with the dedication of aiming and sustaining

On the last day we took a vow to let go of judging and comparing mind for at least a week.

Focusing on the purity and benevolence of your intentions in metta can help you get deeper, probably because it distracts from grasping mind (your mind only has a finite set of resources and it’s possible to redirect them more skillfully than you usually do).

Metta feels to me almost like it gives a sense of karmic security that I was lacking before. By putting so much goodwill and effort towards the well-being of others, both in the meditation, and in the eventual positive actions sustained metta meditation inevitably leads towards, it felt like I was filling up my tank with goodwill from the universe.

Post-retreat, one of the very best things has been to watch as my mind spontaneously bursts into metta (both the phrases and just a feeling of goodwill) towards strangers, waiters at restaurants, the homeless, friends, loved ones, co-workers, and even myself.

What a beautiful practice and blessing.

May you be happy.

May you be safe.

May you be loved.

1. Have lots of ideas

The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.
–Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize (2x)

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas… The way to come up with good startup ideas is to take a step back. Instead of trying to make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, turn your brain into the type that has startup ideas unconsciously.
–Paul Graham, How To Get Startup Ideas

Ideation is a skill, and like any skill you don’t improve unless you practice.

So practice having ideas about everything, all the time.

If you do this often enough you will be able to turn this into a habitual “ideation program” that runs as a continuous background mental process.

2. Believe an ideal solution exists

They can conquer who believe they can.
–Virgil

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
–Steve Jobs

One of the most important parts of your ideation program is the belief that something better exists.

Try to instill a reflexive habit in yourself to look for a better version of everything you encounter (within your areas of interest), that you simply have to find. Try to derive this through analogy, first principles, or just research whenever you can.

3. Accrete interesting knowledge

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
–Haruki Murakami

My approach to problem-solving is to carry around a dozen interesting problems, and a dozen interesting solutions to unrelated problems, and eventually, I’ll be able to make connections. […]. You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state.
–Richard Feynman

The best way to have valuable ideas is to understand the entire landscape of a field and figure out what can emerge now that couldn’t before.
–Sam Altman

Once you have your ideation program set up, the next step is to give it the right fuel.

Talk to interesting people, read interesting books, collect interesting problems. Do weird things, follow strange thinkers, explore opposites. Look for patterns, connections, and isomorphisms across these and the areas you care about.

Treat your information diet like a professional athlete does their training.

4. Write down everything

Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.
–David Allen

You might be surprised by how many ideas you have once you commit to writing each and every one down. Most will be bad. Some might be ok. Others may be a piece of a good idea, or a half-turn away from a great one.

If you don’t commit to writing them down though you can’t learn from them or build off them. On top of that, writing down each idea is a signal to yourself that you are committed to having better ideas, and will help make that so.

5. Develop your idea taste

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
–Ira Glass

Set up a process to review your ideas often. Learn to calibrate your idea quality. Especially in the beginning most ideas will be terrible and unoriginal. If you stick with it though then you may gradually ideate your way in to new, uncharted realms of human creativity.

The mark of a good idea is that you’re still obsessed with it one month, two months, three months… after the aha moment, and that it survives the sunlight of conversations with intelligent friends or sharing it publicly.

As you practice having ideas, you might also learn that you can develop intuition for where good ideas lie. Beautiful, rich fields of proto-ideas are awaiting harvest just beyond your horizons! Follow your curiosity and excitement. Read the histories of the great ideas. Learn to recognize the patterns of things that precede them.

The goal is to teach your ideation model to have more good ideas and less bad ones through feedback and reinforcement.

Then be patient, forget what you’ve learned, and let it sink into your blood.

6. Make space for ideation

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
–Pablo Picasso

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
–Friedrich Nietzsche

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.
–Amos Tversky

Once you have your ideation program running smoothly and calibrated well, the last step is to allow it abundant mental space and overhead to operate in.

A certain amount of chaos is good for creativity but if your mind is too cluttered or distracted it will probably hurt more than it helps.

Let yourself become bored. Solvitur ambulando: go on long, meandering walks. Let your mind drift before bed with a pen or recording device nearby.

The best ideas arise when your mind is full of interesting thoughts, and calm enough to forge them into something new.

7. Embrace uncertainty

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.
–Henrik Karlsson, Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

Creativity loves uncertainty.

8. [Bonus] Take lots of showers

This is my personal hack, to the point where if I’m feeling stuck in my life I’ll consciously make an effort to take more/longer showers. I already take two relatively long showers every day and I’d say at least 50% of the time I get out with at least a few ideas to journal or write about, try at my company, or read more about.

The idea for my current company was a shower thought. Some of the best decisions I’ve made while there have originated in the shower as well.

The only other place I have a similar amount of ideas is at a specific type of heated power yoga classes my gym does. It’s intense enough to occupy most of my mind, but meditative enough to allow for some wandering which seems to be a fertile ground for creativity.

For this I use Superhuman. I don’t consider myself a power user (I feel embarrassed every time I manually click on an email instead of navigating to it solely through the use of an elegant set of keystrokes the way God and Rahul Vohra intended). But I do have a system that’s a good 80/20 balance on productivity gained vs time spent learning arcane finger-bending shortcuts.

Here’s a quick write-up.

Inbox Zero

Superhuman requires you to switch to an inbox zero type email management style. In case you aren’t familiar with the concept, it means that instead of using the read status of an email to determine whether an email has been fully actioned, you instead use its presence in your inbox.

What this means is that when you’re done with an email (e.g. you’ve replied or read and don’t need to reply) you archive it. This moves the email out of your inbox into your archive where it stays until it gets replied to or re-summoned to your inbox via a snooze reminder. Archived emails will always show up when you do a normal search and don’t get ever get deleted.

Once you switch to this your inbox then effectively functions as your todo list. Everything in it is an email that requires an action from you, anything that doesn’t has already been archived.

Superhuman has a nice feature to transition you to this called “Get Me To Zero” that lets you archive all emails older than a set period of time. (You can get to this by typing command-k, then zero).

Split Inboxes decrease context switching costs

The most useful Superhuman feature is the ability to easily create “split inboxes”. These basically let you use standard gmail filters to create a separate inboxes for different types of email you receive. EG you can have inbox just for all your bills, another for all communication with your team, and another for various notifications that you can archive after reading the subject line alone.

The power of this is that when you sign on in the morning and have 250 new messages you can triage them in a way that doesn’t require you to constantly context switch, which it turns out, in the aggregate over many emails, is tiring and unnecessarily time consuming.

It also makes it easier to quickly respond and to not miss important emails since they won’t get as buried if they have their own split inbox.

Some notes:

• Inbox is a default split inbox that’s basically all emails that are not in some other split inbox unless you have the checkbox ticked in the specific split inboxes setting that says “Also show in Important or Other”. This is a slight bug, it should actually say “Also show in Inbox or Important/Other”. In the main split inbox settings there’s a tick box that lets you turn on Important/Other which basically splits Inbox into two—Important and Other—and categorizes emails based on whether gmail has them marked important or not. I recommend keeping this off.

• The best way to think about Inbox is that it’s the list of emails that still need to be categorized into split inboxes + a place to read one-off emails that don’t fit into any specific category.

• I also recommend creating an inbox that mimics the normal gmail inbox. I call mine “All”. The way to do this is do a search for in:inbox and from there type command-k → create split inbox. Then go to the split inbox settings for All and click the box that says “Also show in Important or Other” (or else your normal Inbox will be always empty and useless for triage). You now have an inbox that is identical to the standard gmail inbox.

• If you want to be a little fancier you can filter unimportant notifications out of this working inbox eg the settings for mine are something like in:inbox AND -label:CRO -label:ops -label:notification.

• In the mornings or whenever I have a bunch of new email I process them through the various split inboxes. Then during the day, once I’ve finished responding to/archiving the morning emails, I spend most of my time in the All inbox since its the easiest way to see all new emails without constantly switching to other split inboxes. This works best if you can keep total emails during the day to under 20 or so.

Comments for team communication

This is a great new feature that I’ve started using with my team that I love. Basically you can now “comment” on emails inline with the email thread viewer.

There are a few things that are nice about this:

• it’s much cleaner than forwarding an email to someone because instead of having to scroll through a bunch of progressively commented email history they just see the full thread as if they’d been CCed on it from the first message

• people you comment in then see all new replies to that thread so you don’t have to keep updating them

• it’s much easier to comment directly on an email instead of sending someone an email or slack message to discuss it

Keyboard shortcuts I actually use

e: archive
l: label
h: snooze
/: search
shift-/: AI search, very useful for finding hard-to-find emails
command-k: superhuman command (type shortcuts to see the full list here)
shift-1: mark spam/block
command-shift-a: share availability
command-shift-i: fast way to reply to an intro (auto-BCC)
command-u: unsubscribe (although I now mostly use an unsubscribe label that my EA checks every week since this doesn’t always work perfectly) 

Planning Suffertember VIII to keep this going:

• no warm showers (pretty sure the water heater was broken in my building at the retreat)

• no food delivery ordering

• one hour of meditation/day

• no social media/news or TV/movies (not really part of my life anyways)

• no caffeine

• no checking sleep scores for entire month

• 6:30 AM wake-up/out of bed every week day

• 9 PM devices/lights off + wind down ritual every week day

• doing Santa Cruz IM 70.3 and trying extra hard

MTGBWY,
Armand

Have enough. People who need nothing from you, and more, whose cup runneth over, feel good to be around. The tiny amount of stress most of us have in social situations about pleasing other people fades away and we can just be comfortable in the moment.

Love yourself and others unconditionally. The natural output of metta. People can tell when they are in the presence of someone who radiates love for all beings. And it turns out it feels quite good. Generalized authentic benevolence is cool.

Notice what's awesome about other people and interact from that place. Authenticity is attractive. Interaction from an authentic place of love or respect doubly so. Become the kind of person who looks for the lovable facets in others in order to amplify them.

Would love to hear others if you know them!

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
–Maya Angelou

This is one of my favs.

Audio by Steven Roggenbuck
Video edited by Haley Farrell

Transcript:

We are animals on a rock in space. Sometimes we forget that. Because we have jobs, school, political systems, debt, law, clothes, television stations, but most people on earth seem kind of bored or kind of annoyed about life.

If you're ever on a subway train or a bus, look at all the people, nobody is shocked about being an animal in space. People get so used to the fact that being a human being. Sometimes I want to shake people and say, “Are you paying attention to what is going on?”.

It's raining, water is falling from the sky, and I can sit on a computer and hit a few keys and radically change how somebody feels on the other side of the world. And I mean, we have the sunrise. And I mean, we have the pink light on the bottom of the clouds during a sunrise, and there used to be dinosaurs on our planet. Probably in the place you are now.

So like something goes bad — “Oh, my dog shitted in my bed! My dog shit in my bed. I really hate this, ugh fuck”. My dog like hella pooped on my bed. Okay, okay, that's true. That's true, I got to deal with that but also, we are floating through space on a cosmic orb. And, nobody knows why we're here. But you know what, also I'm going to take this moment to remember fruit and sex exists.

I like being around people who are dancing, because it seems like the closest that people usually come to directly celebrating the fact that they're alive. Well, what I really want is that moment when somebody brings it up. When somebody refuses to let pointless filler and formalities use up our time with each other. I just want somebody to say, “Hey, right now is our life. And I'm grateful that this is the one I get. I'm grateful that you are in it. I'm grateful that we get this moment together.” I just want to say that and sometimes I'm too nervous to say it.

But when I'm looking for it I can find those moments all the time, the first drink of the seltzer water right after I opened it, eating a whole watermelon with my friend, reading Walt Whitman out aloud for hours, vegan pizza, and I liked the fall—everything about the fall. I like Halloween. My dad offering to make popcorn when my friends come over, trying to make my brothers laugh during dinner at my grandma's house, hugging my mom for 15 minutes at a time and even when it means being fully sad—crying alone in my apartment after leaving my girlfriend of six years, crying alone on a train after touring for nine months. I love the internet so much but sometimes I have a nightmare where my eyes are stuck on a screen and I can't look up from it, like I'm not allowed to see anything else in the world anymore. I just have the screen now. My life gets froze on that. And I'm worried sometimes I'm doing this to myself. Sometimes I need to just close my computer when I remember and go hug somebody in the room or jump up and down and run laps outside or I just stop and try not to think anything and just be in the place that I am.

I don't want to be in a haze. I don't want to coast through any of that. I don't want to regret later that I didn't pay attention now. I don't want to sit through it like I'm waiting for something better.

Napping with the person I love on a nine hour bus route, Christmas lights, and my hometown radio station, hailstorms. Sometimes I like love the cold air. Boston in the snow, Chicago in the snow. New York City, sharing a sofa with three friends trading off who chooses the music.

Waking up early only ‘cause I have to but loving how it feels. Driving the tractor at dawn in a bean field only because I had to but loving how it feels.

And the moon. Sometimes you can forget about the moon but then one day when you're walking out of the building, there it is in the sky and you say “wow, waxing gibbous already? That's fucked up”. And it kind of reminds you that you are on a rock in space too. And when you look at the stars or when you image search for pictures of galaxies to photoshop cats on them, that's something you're part of too. This is our family photo album.

We are animals on a rock in space. We are part of this gigantic, confusing, brutal and awe-inspiring world and it's not boring to be here.

And how can it ever be boring at all?

Noticing is when you clearly define a pattern that you’d like to shift and then load it into your subconscious. Your brain is a pattern-noticing machine. So it’s not that hard to load a new pattern and then have it automatically surfaced to your conscious thoughts without any effort.

Once that happens you get an option to interrupt that pattern the next time it arises.

At first this requires willpower. And feels very hard. For me it feels like I’m pushing a boulder up a hill and I’m like 5% of the way there and already completely exhausted. Hopeless.

But I’ve realized that that’s just the normal first step of most growth, so instead of taking it as a negative sign (this is hard) I’ve been able to notice (!) when I do this and then mentally reframe it as “ooh look I’ve just started growing, this is a good signal”.

Eventually, if you do this enough, the interrupts start to get easier. And then sometimes they just become fully subconscious. This is my model of one way habit change actually happens on a mechanistic level.

Steps

1. Name and define a pattern you want to change, as explicitly as you can, e.g. I get this very specific shame feeling in my chest and face when I do certain things slightly outside of social norms. I think of it as a microshame, normally too small to notice like normal shame but still something that changes my emotional state and subtly affects my interactions with the world and others. So I call this one noticing microshames.

2. Load the pattern into your subconscious. I do this by making a Roam tag for it so I can journal on it—in this case [[[[noticing]] micro[[shame]]s]]—and also by making a recurring todo in Todoist for this that links to the corresponding Roam tag. Usually I’ll have it recur anywhere between every day and every week in the beginning, and then once this process is complete I’ll shift it to every ~two months.

3. Interrupt the pattern. When your brain promotes the pattern to your attention when it’s happening, do something to interrupt it. For the microshame one I just try to do some sort of embodiment/somatic move to come back to my body, and to find the shame in my body, feel it completely without resistance, and just watch it as it eventually floats away.

4. Embrace the pattern-interrupting being hard in the beginning. Notice that you will probably feel like you want to just give up because the shifting in the beginning is too effortful and emotionally draining, and just reframe that as growth. I find trying to get excited about it helps. Ooh growthy things are happening! This is usually the rate-limiting step for me, it’s very easy to forget that this is ~supposed to be hard and that hardness is a sign of progress (encouraging) not failure (not encouraging).

5. Repeat until you are satisfied.

6. Meta-notice that you can do this for any thing in your life you want to change, and get good at noticing specific things you want to change.1 Not always easy.

Polarity Flipping

Other than shifting more easily, one other interesting thing that’s come from this practice for me is around how problems feel. They used to feel hard but now they mostly just feel exciting. The hardest part of a “problem” now feels like noticing there is an actual problem, actually identifying its root, and then defining it super well. Once I have a well-defined problem I can usually solve it. So when I do find one it’s exciting because instead of representing a roadblock it just feels like a patch of my mental map of the world that I have yet to explore, and which I can do easily and which then makes all future exploration easier.

“Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.”
—Dan Dennett

Notes

"The thing I would say is, when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life, that's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life, and actually something will, you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side, that you can change it. You can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it, versus embrace it. Change it. Improve it. Make your mark upon it. I think that's very important. And however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better. Because it's kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again."

–Steve Jobs

“The world is a very malleable place. If you know what you want, and you go for it with maximum energy and drive and passion, the world will often reconfigure itself around you much more quickly and easily than you would think.”

–Marc Andreessen

"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are.

People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential."

–Sam Altman

One of the largest mindset shifts I’ve experienced over the last year has been the deepening of the feeling of agency. Not just the intellectual belief that change is possible, but the gut feeling of being able to effect it.

This feeling of high agency also maps on to a number of similar concepts: abundance mindset, being “above the line” (in CLG speak), power, etc. But in my head the name I give it most often is “reality malleability”.

It comes with an unclenching of perfectionism. Rather than believing there is one correct path that one must wend perfectly to achieve a desired output (scarcity), there is a new belief that there are many paths to the goal and that as long as one brings intelligence, the ability to learn from mistakes, and an unstoppable work ethic, anything can be achieved.

I write about this because even though, or perhaps because, it seemed so obvious to me already on an intellectual level, I was blinded to the deeper meaning of this concept. I believed for years in the quotes above and made decisions shaped by this and thought it meant I was high agency. But it’s only been very recently that I’ve truly felt the malleability of reality. That the world really can be built. That there are an infinitude of levers just past our fingertips with which to subtly shift the world in the directions of our choosing. And that there isn’t just a single perfect path that you must search for until you find, but many branching paths to many ideal futures.

I’ve only recently begun acting on this newfound, deeper version of agency, but so far it has felt like a profoundly creative act, giving rise to something at the core of being human: the feeling of true aliveness.

One Blade of Grass is good progress in this direction.

The first time I heard Henry Shukman speak I was struck by how warm and clear his conception of Zen was. Two things not usually associated with this flavor of Buddhism.

I read One Blade of Grass soon after and it quickly became my favorite book of the year.

OBoG is Henry’s story. He grew up in an intelligent atmosphere (both his parents were professors at Oxford) high in rationality but lacking any spiritual frameworks.

When he was nineteen, working a summer job on a farm in Mexico, he has an awakening experience (kenshō) on a deserted beach while staring into the sunset on the waves.

With little spiritual (or religious) background he has no conceptual framework with which to understand this experience.

OBoG is the story journey he embarked upon to remedy this.

What is Zen?

Zen the adjective evokes a sense of stillness, ineffable purity of spirit, a centerdness, a mystical, mysterious wholeness of spirit.

On the other hand Zen the flavor of Buddhist practice feels colder, more austere, disciplined, perhaps even impenetrable. To me it has felt both useful and impractical.

One Blade of Grass shows the warmth that is possible (although often missing) at the lively beating heart of Zen.

While Zen itself is almost tautologically indefinable, OBoG does a phenomenal job of sketching in broad strokes, bringing light to areas that have been murky such as how koans can be used, and providing a rigorous, approachable framework for understanding the flavors of awakening experiences from beginning to end.

OBoG

Reading OBoG felt like a mini-awakening experience itself. The world blossomed. I felt more connected to things. I noticed at times that I was a living breathing animal, and every breath seemed strange and wondrous. Music felt alive. I danced more.

Henry's writing has the quality of poetry. It somehow makes you see the beauty in everyday things. OBoG was a joy to read.

I also especially loved how lucidly and rationally Henry writes about the qualities of various awakening experiences—retaining an inner logic without while still conveying the deep beauty and power these experiences can represent.

The journey from complete spiritual novice to an awakened being(?)1 is portrayed in a way that is lucid, woo-free, and accessible.

It’s especially remarkable that he does this with Zen, a school not normally known for its legibility. Before reading OBoG my (uninformed) conception of Zen was just a sort of tangled Gordian knot where you had to put effort in without really ever expecting to get anything out.

Now my (slightly less uninformed?) view is that Zen attacks the root of conception itself, which is why it’s normally so hard to speak about. IE the conceptual mind itself—the part of your brain that takes in random photons and sound waves and smells and converts/simplifies them into a framework—is itself the core thing standing in the way of true equanimity.

Selected Passages

Kenshō As Anti-Trauma

One particularly fascinating bit of OBoG was the conception of kenshō as a kind of "anti-trauma".

Kenshō are awakening experiences—paradigm shifting moments of completely different way of relating to the world. Often love and/or oneness will have complete primacy in these experiences.

Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kenshō. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone.

If trauma is a deeply negative experience that becomes embedded in one's psyche and subsequently colors all future experiences in a negative light, then kenshō—experiencing deeply a moment of love, interconnectedness, oneness—can be the opposite, a beautiful experience which indelibly makes everything a little bit brighter.

Henry’s first awakening experience

On his first awakening experience at age 19 on a beach in Mexico (written in third person)

He had the little beach all to himself. It felt like he’d put down a burden he didn’t know he had been carrying. Something in him rose by itself as your arms do when you set down a heavy weight. All his life he had been trammeling his mind, he realized, keeping it in channels so it could communicate with others. Now he didn’t have to. He was free, totally free, in a way that felt so good he wanted it always.

A large old fishing boat was anchored off shore. As he stared into the blinding light on the sea the boat vanished, swallowed by the brilliance. Then it reappeared for an instant, a black shape, then disappeared, a ghost-hull flickering on and off like a stain on the retina. It seemed so beautiful he could hardly comprehend it. And suddenly all the past months of travel seemed like nothing more than a dream-like series of images that had passed before his eyes.

A young man, a beach, a boat on the water: there was nothing to tell him what year it was. He could have been any young man in any century, gazing over any water.

And the water was fascinating, blindingly white yet completely dark. Scales of brilliance slid over darkness, so it alternated between thick matte black and blinding light. But water was transparent, so was air, yet there the surface was, the sea’s skin, thick as elephant hide. What was he actually seeing?

As he pondered this question, suddenly the sight was no longer in front of him. It was inside him. Or he was inside it, as if he’d stepped into the scene and become part of it. He could no longer tell inside from outside. At the same instant the whole world, around, above, below—the sand, the sea, the light on the water—turned into a single field of sparks. A fire kindled in his chest, his fingers tingled, in fact everything tingled. The fire was not just in his chest but everywhere. Everything was made of drifting sparks. The whole universe turned to fire. He was made of one and the same fabric as the whole universe. It wasn’t enough to say he belonged in it. It was him. He was it. The beginning and end of time were right here, so close his nose seemed to press against them.

Suddenly he knew why he had been born: it was to find this. This reality. His life was resolved, the purpose of his birth fulfilled, and now he could die happy. He could die that very night and all would be well.

Two arms of black lava enclosed the little beach. They lay like lazy iguanas with their noses to the water, and they too were implicit in this truth. That it was true he knew beyond doubt. It was more true than anything else. This was the way things always had been and always would be.

…

Back in my cabana, I lay on my bunk in the gloom with the wooden ceiling just overhead while a flame burned in my chest like the flame of my kerosene camping stove, which was fierce but ghostly. It was a fire of love, and it kept pouring out of me. I’d never known anything like it. Yet somehow it was familiar, as if it had been with me all my life, just unnoticed.

The walls of weathered plywood gleamed in the dark. I lay listening to the rustle and murmur of water outside. Previously there had always been a limit to beauty, but now it was everywhere. Nothing was left out. All I had to do was lie here, with love pouring out of my breast in a swift, silent stream, like a Roman candle. I felt like I’d been claimed by immemorial love.

That night I lay awake a long time, the watch fire in the heart burning long into the night. It seemed I would never need to sleep again. I’d found something larger than the world, and didn’t need to.

On meditation

Often while meditating, after a few minutes of restlessness a sense of soothing would come on, as if I were being salved inside and out. In neurophysiological terms, this was the parasympathetic nervous system engaging, turning down the dial on the stress response. I had lived with a dysregulated nervous system for so long that I hadn’t considered the possibility that maybe the anxiety I ordinarily felt wasn’t 100 percent necessary.

The change of location, the new job, the therapy, the publishers, quitting the PhD: they had all happened once I took up meditation. Was it possible that just sitting still twice a day could bring order to a disordered psychophysiology, and regulate a dysregulated life? On top of that, in fits and starts, my skin was getting better.

Zazen (Zen sitting meditation)

It was a nice room. It hit you immediately: a peace about it. It was pretty much square, made out of thick adobe, like most of Santa Fe, and was cool and quiet. There was no furniture, the whole space bare except for a row of black mats lined up around the walls, about a dozen of them, each with a small black cushion in the middle.

The room ought to have felt spartan. Instead it felt thick with peace, with restfulness.

A small Buddha made of wood sat on an altar with a candle. As Robert lit the candle and made a bow to the altar, I noticed a shaving nick on the back of his scalp. Then he pulled out two of the black cushions.

There wasn’t much to zazen. He showed me different possible positions for the legs, and I settled on what he called “quarter lotus.” He taught me the correct alignment of the spine, and the way to hold my hands in my lap, and told me to start counting my breaths in sequences of ten. And that was it.

“Nothing else?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “That’s about it.”

As I walked away down the path into the trees and down a drop into the little gulch of the stream along which ran the track where I had left my bike, it came to me that what I had just tasted was the reality of being alive. It was frightening, as it should be. Normally, I realized, I pulled away from the bare fact of being alive. I didn’t know how not to. But now I did. It was zazen. Meditation in the Zen style. It somehow was no surprise that the other form of meditation I had been doing did not offer this kind of taste. The TM was restorative, ameliorative, medicinal almost. It helped you relax and sleep and restore. But this zazen—it didn’t seem to be interested in those things. Instead, without any deliberation on its part, it simply let you know what it was to be alive.

I began to do zazen daily. Over the weeks I grew to love it: a sense of clarity, a watery quality to everything, would come on. Zen was done with the eyes open, which made one’s sense of the world while meditating more vivid. I’d feel a warmth, a pressure in my chest. Sometimes, for no reason, I’d start crying. Sometimes a strange wind seemed to riffle through me and through the surroundings as I sat, reminding me of Sappho’s famous line about love shaking her the way the wind shakes the oak trees on the mountainside.

Zen in the art of writing

Her approach came from Zen. She called it “writing practice.” Zen was popular in American letters. Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Peter Matthiessen—many writers made no secret of their affiliation with Zen. Natalie was another. “First thought, best thought” was the maxim. Get the page covered, outrun the internal censor. There was something about her—a stillness, a quiet radiance. I’d never known anything exactly like it. As if some kind of jewel shone inside her.

Koans

The first koan Henry hears

Natalie opened up a book on Zen and read aloud from it. It was a passage by Dogen Zenji, a Japanese Zen master from the thirteenth century. In her slow, Jewish New Yorkese (a “Lorne Guyland” accent, as Martin Amis called it), she read:

Mountains do not lack the qualities of mountains. Therefore they always abide in ease and always walk. You should examine in detail this quality of the mountains walking. Mountains’ walking is just like human walking. Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.

She put the book down and looked around, a little dazed, and said, “Wow,” shaking her head. “Isn’t he mind-blowing?”

I hummed noncommittally. I couldn’t make head or tail of what I’d just heard. Was it supposed to be nonsense, like Edward Lear or something? Mountains walking?

I asked her for the book and took a look myself. The chapter was called “The Mountains and Rivers Sutra.” Whatever that meant. I reread the paragraph to myself. Then she asked me to read it out loud, so I did.

I couldn’t understand it at all, and said so. She said she couldn’t, either, but loved it anyway.

“What was your original face before your parents were born?” This is a famous “barrier” koan in Zen, the teacher explained: a question given to novices that may help precipitate a breakthrough.

THERE WERE SEVERAL “FIRST KOANS” to work through. One of them was about a “distant temple bell.” I don’t want to give too much away—koan training is an intimate thing, not to be bandied about in loose talk—but I can say a little.

The koan about the distant bell is pivotal, in that it’s the first of the major “presentation” koans, meaning a koan where no amount of discussion will help. The student has to come up with a wordless “presentation” of the koan, to show it, embody it, be it. It’s no use talking about it. The whole thrust of koan study is away from language into liberation from language. The great silence of all things opens up, where words are just flotsam and jetsam.

I sat with the koan about the bell for quite a few weeks. Already the recent experience was turning itself into a metaphysical understanding in my mind, and that held me up with the new koan. Had John not been there, had he not known so instinctively how to work with me, it would probably have gone the way of the other experiences and become a troubling memory. But here he was, and he’d given me the strange koan about the bell.

“Stop the sound of the distant temple bell,” it runs. How on earth do you do that? “There’s no place for discussion,” John kept telling me. “We have to do it. Trust the experience you had. Let it show you how.”

After several dokusan, with John probing and prodding me, finally one evening in the dokusan room, after I thought I’d exhausted every imaginable possibility, an urge came and I randomly trusted it. As soon as I did, I fell into a groove of centuries of practice worn smooth by others. I no longer cared if I was making the “right” presentation. The koan disappeared, a great expansiveness opened up, as I did what I did.

Mu koan

Mu is traditionally the first koan. The student uses mu as a kind of mantra. On every out-breath, while sitting, they silently voice the sound mu. The student is encouraged not to think about its meaning. The koan has work to do. Its work cannot be done by the conscious mind. Only mu itself can work on the practitioner, releasing them from a kind of prison they didn’t realize they had been caught in. While the conscious mind is kept busy attending to the sound “mu,” the “real” mu can slip in unnoticed through the back door.

Sante Fe

I fell in love with the hills around Santa Fe, hills of chunky red earth, fragrant with small pines and juniper. I fell in love with the town too, its ocher mud buildings sitting squat and hunched under the sky, fragrant with the woodsmoke that began to be burned as autumn rolled in, overseen every day by sunsets that were apocalyptic, with pillars of cloud smoking over the city, and late sunlight flooding the streets. Thick as concentrated orange juice, it was light you could have scooped up in your fingers. It was palpable, you could feel it in your chest, it enveloped you.

On self-love

“It’s okay to take care of yourself, you know.”

Frankly, I didn’t. I lived in fear of being self-indulgent, and was confused about where to draw the line between that and self-care.

On Zen

The Japanese word zen derived from the Chinese ch’an, which in turn came from the Sanskrit dhyana and meant “meditative absorption.” But unlike other kinds of meditation, it was short on detailed instructions. The advice Robert the Zen priest had first given me—to count breaths in sets of ten—was about as elaborate as it got.

Zen had “lineages” of masters who had “confirmed” one another down through the ages. What they had confirmed was that the student had had the same insights into the nature of consciousness or reality that the master had, and had learned to live by them in daily life.

It was weird: it was about some kind of radical experience that shifted one’s view of things, yet it was also about absolute ordinariness. If you saw reality more clearly, ordinary things became miraculous.

I had heard that sesshin retreats were the heart of Zen training. The word—ses-shin—literally meant “encountering or touching the heart.” Natalie explained that in Japanese the word shin meant both “heart” and “mind.” That right there was the difference between East and West, she said. We cut off the heart from the mind. Not so the East. And according to Zen, our true heart-mind was infinite, knowing no bounds or limits, and included everything.

ZEN IS NOT EASY. ZEN is baffling. Zen is impossible to pin down. On the one hand, it’s easy to pin down: it’s about sitting on a cushion every day. You try to be aware of what is going on. Breathing, mostly, and thoughts that come and, you hope, go. It’s nice when they go. You can find yourself in a state of exhilarating peace. Zen is a journey back to radical simplicity. No mantras, no “sacred syllables,” no sacred anything.

ZEN CALLED ITSELF THE “SUDDEN school,” George explained. You didn’t have to go through a gradual process, through stages of practice. Instead, in one sudden leap, you could find all you were looking for. Bodhidharma said the practice wasn’t based on scripture or words, but rather “directly pointed to the human mind.” “Sudden teaching.” You didn’t have to travel by stages. Some how, in spite of the torment, I recognized that too. The answer to life was right here already.

On the other hand, a principle of Zen, George had told us, was the discovery that we had been wrong about everything. There was great relief in that, he assured us.

According to George, Zen’s view was that we were busy being wrong all the time in ways we didn’t realize. “Awakening” was nothing other than to see this.

Not only that, but without me, there was no past or future. Every phenomenon that arose was happening for the first and only time, and filled all awareness entirely. That made it an absolute treasure.

The rest of that day I was in bliss. Peace suffused everything. A love burned in my chest like a watch fire. I could hear the grass growing, a faint high singing sound, like the sibilance of a new snowfall coming down. I remembered the Jewish saying: “No blade of grass but has an angel bending over it, whispering, ‘Grow, grow.’” Every blade of grass deserved that. Each blade was an angel. I cried. My heart was mush. Somehow it felt as though the grass were growing in my own chest. Every object contained an inner lamp, and now I could see it.

More kenshō

Imagine a pane of opaque glass. A hole is driven through it, and suddenly we see that there’s a world on the other side of the glass: that’s kenshō. Koan study seeks to enlarge the hole, and create new holes, until over time the whole pane becomes riddled with holes, small and large, loses its structural integrity, and collapses. Then the separation between that world and this world is gone.

John gave me my first koan there and then, the original ur-koan described by Zen master Mumon in the thirteenth century as “the Gateless Barrier of the Zen sect”:

A monk asked Joshu in all earnestness: “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?”

Joshu answered, “Mu.”

I’d heard about this koan in talks given by various teachers in other centers. Literally, mu means “not.” But the real meaning of the koan is something else, something unspeakable.

I’ve been making supper for my wife and myself. The boys ate earlier. I carry two plates of food upstairs. In the little bedroom, Clare lies sprawled on the bed with the boys, watching the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The room is suffused with the last of the sunlight. I bend down to give her a plate, fork balanced on the rim.

“Thank you,” she says.

I stand up straight for a moment, my own plate in hand. I’m about to sit down but get arrested by a scene in the movie where Roger Rabbit’s tail is singed on a stove, and he proceeds to accelerate faster and faster round a kitchen, trying to outrun his flaming rear, turning the kitchen cabinets into a centrifuge, like a biker on the Wall of Death.

I remember loving this scene years ago when the movie first came out. I start laughing. Something happens. A tingling, a whirring inside me. I notice how malleable the apparently solid surfaces in the cartoon are. The tingle becomes a flywheel in my belly, spinning faster and faster, until it is almost unbearable, a sweet agony. It’s in my chest now, and at once my heart just about breaks and the sensation whips itself into a cyclone, a dust devil, a whirlwind, and spins up the throat into the skull.

My head explodes. A thunderbolt hits the room. I black out—except I don’t; I’m still standing. Everything else blacks out. All the circuitry that keeps the world going snaps off. A fuse blows. I find I’m not standing on anything. Below, a chasm; above, a void; all around, in every direction, nothing. Dark, radiant nothing.

I let out a whoop and start laughing.

Clare looks up from the bed. “Oh, God,” she groans, “it’s not that Zen again.”

IN THE ROOM, EVERYTHING IS bathed in rich light, a dark, lucent limpidity drenching the bed, the window, the TV, the three other people sprawled on it.

Giddy, dizzy, I totter downstairs with my untouched plate, delirious with joy, feeling like any moment I might topple into the abyss and not caring. How is it even possible to take a step, to be suspended on this imaginary surface called the floor? It’s all a dream, a floating illusion, a mirage-like reflection, a ghost of something on nothing.

The food looks magnificent on my plate, like a still life from a seventeenth-century master. I can’t imagine what to do except admire it. I can’t imagine what to do at all. Everything is one glorious abyss of peace that fizzes with energy.

I pull a cushion off the sofa, fold it in half, and sit down in zazen. I can’t think what else to do. At the end of twenty minutes, the carpet, sofa, and cushions are all still alive with energy.

A flicker of alarm: Am I going mad? Will this never end?

I let myself out and go for a walk around the dusky neighborhood. Billows of smoky energy seethe everywhere. The houses hang still and quiet in the gray-blue dusk. They, too, are smoky and alive, poised between being there and not being there. The mind is a wisp of smoke, the remains of a blown-out candle. Not just the houses but the seeing of the houses is the same: there and not there. I could go up and knock on their doors, tap on their windows, but “being there” isn’t what it seems. The world “out there” is a reflection quivering on nothing, even when you rap on a door.

ONCE AGAIN, EVERYTHING ANSWERED AND fulfilled. I still can’t put into words what it was—indeed, words were one of the principal devices for screening this reality—but when you saw it, when it appeared, it folded up everyday reality like a piece of paper and dropped it in a furnace. This reality, unbearably real, loved us fiercely, it loved all things—it was like discovering that the whole world was one heart. Yet at the same time it wasn’t anything.

I had no answers. Only what I felt. Which was that, by some miraculous power, I had just been granted a glimpse into reality, into the true fabric of the universe—into its DNA, as it were, and what I had seen there implicated me too, so that it was clear that, like everything else, I was a child of the universe. I wasn’t separate from it.

“Not one speck of cloud to mar the view,” an old Zen saying has it. Not one thought in the whole universe. Nothing exists! All this earnest training of the mind that we did in Zen—or thought we did—and there was no mind!

On needing a teacher

But a few things had to be in place: a steady daily practice, a life sufficiently in order not to create constant demands on our nerves, a reasonably stable psychology (though the practice itself should help with that), and two final pieces: a community of practitioners and a guide.

I used to think I shouldn’t need a teacher. I should be able to handle things myself. Wasn’t that the measure of a competent, responsible adult? To the extent you didn’t handle it, life would knock you around until you did. It would teach you the lessons you needed to learn. But it was between you and life. It was a long time before it occurred to me that one of the lessons life had been trying to teach me was that sometimes you needed a teacher.

On the benefits of Zen

Zen’s demands were few: daily sitting, occasional retreats, being open to what life brought in each moment. It had benefits for others: It made me more attentive, less fretful. It opened up more love, and I’d return from the retreats with vivid eagerness to be with the family.

Miscellany

After a week in the refugee camps, then another driving around in the back of a stripped-down Land Rover with a squad of guerrillas, sleeping under the stars, spying on enemy positions with binoculars, drinking tiny glasses of strong tea, smoking fierce tobacco out of small bronze pipes, eating strange stews cooked over open fires, and coming under occasional artillery fire—we’d hear a pair of thuds somewhere in the distance, followed a few seconds later by two crashes or booms, depending on how far away the shells landed—I came back to life.

I had a diagnosis now: dysthymia. Persistent, low-grade, shame-based depression. It was tricky, because one of its symptoms was a denial of symptoms prompted by shame at the symptoms—the shame itself being one of the symptoms. Cleverly circular. But the new cognitive-behavioral approach was actually helping. I never knew what diabolical habits of mind I’d had. It turned out that as long as I could remember, I’d been thinking myself into misery. I beat myself up, put myself down, shoulded myself to death, catastrophized and awfulized. I was an inveterate musturbator: I must do this, that must work out, et cetera. As I exposed and gave up these habitual cognitions, to be alive became stranger and more interesting.

THE FOURTH DAY WAS WARM, and in the afternoon George decided to have us sit outside in the long grass. “Let the wind give us a dharma talk,” he said.

What is Suffertember?

Suffertember is a month of doing hard things with friends.

The most common question we get is: “does it have to be extremely suffery/painful?” It does not! While we recommend doing a few very hard things, which would normally be aversive for you, and then attempting to reframe them as experiences to be enjoyed or at least embraced, it’s definitely not a requirement.

You should choose anything that’s a growth edge. Things that are normally hard for you to stick to, but where being surrounded by a community of awesome people doing similarly hard things in a high energy, time-bounded container will be motivating. One friend’s goal this year is to “party more”!

I like to think of Suffertember as a month-long playground for trying new ways of being. It’s also a misogi—a spiritual journey so challenging that it stretches your conception of what you are capable of merely through attempting it.

Impeccable Agreements

A big part of Suffertember is building self-integrity: doing what you say you’ll do. Impeccable agreements are integral to this. Defining clearly what you’ll do and by when, and in the rare cases where you don’t meet this, cleaning it up quickly to restore broken (self-)trust.

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned while doing CLG is how integrity breaks like this negatively affect energy levels. Broken agreements to yourself or others, even if normalized by culture or convention, are energy leaks. They’re a constant source of tension in your mental overhead that slowly sap your energy and vitality. Try this on some time if you’re skeptical.

Warren Buffet Prioritization

“A majority of life’s errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do.”
—Charlie Munger

"Focusing is about saying no. And the result of that focus is gonna be some really products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts."
—Steve Jobs

One of the most common mistakes new Sufferpeeps make is over-commitment. To combat that, especially if this is your first time, I recommend2 you doing a version of the Warren Buffet productivity method:

• list out the top 25 most important things you want to work on

• rank order them by importance

• fully commit to the top five

• anti-commit to the bottom twenty—this doesn’t mean don’t do them necessarily, but don’t put any effort or attach any importance to achieving them

  • or for added focus, try actively avoiding doing these things at all costs

Giving What We Can

explains this better than I ever could, so I’ll just leave this post here: Nobody is perfect, everything is commensurable.

tl;dr: I challenge you to donate 10% of your income for the month to a worthy cause.

My Suffertember

In previous years, as a way to make sure I was actually pushing my limits, my metric for setting goals was that they should be hard enough that I’d fail at least half of them, even with maximum effort. Now that I’ve done that six years in a row, I feel reasonably comfortable with my expanded sense of what’s possible, and instead want to focus on execution this year—doing a few important things extremely well.

Goals (~in progress)

1. no warm showers3

2. no news, social media, TV, movies

3. no sweets, fried food, or coffee4

4. 30 minutes of meditation/day

5. set/abide by a daily end-time for work

6. one joke a day (stand-up thing I’m doing with some friends)

7. 1500 pull-ups, 2 hours of planking, treadmill mile PR, lift 3x/week

8. get a monthly average sleep score of 90+ by hitting my sleep routine every day

9. donate 10% of my income for the month to charity

Most of my goals are either keystone habits or different types of mild ascetism. This is usually the key to a good Suffer for me: getting the simple things right, and then when the fundamentals are met and the energy leaks are gone, letting myself be more fully me.

Happy Suffering ✌️

What I mean by this is that I act like I have agency, and I believe I have agency, but I don’t actually have the internal experience of having agency. The realization was prompted by many interactions with this friend and crystallized during a conversation about hearing her describe what it was like to be a founder. My story was that her internal experience was almost like a video game—despite the open-ended nature of the worl

d there is a clear and deep belief that high-level goals are achievable and it’s just a matter of putting together the right pieces.

Intellectual vs experiential knowledge

I don’t have a great name for this concept. I generally think of it as either the difference between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge or the difference between System 2 and System 1 (respectively) beliefs.1

The key point is that you can believe something very deeply, but not actually feel the belief and a gut/emotional/instinctual level. And that that’s a very important distinction to notice.

Consequences

The implications of this realization were immediately obvious. There are many ways in which I’ve not achieved what I desired to or even actively self-sabotaged that I can now see trace back to the lack of my gut-level self-agency belief.

In the IFS I’d say that just because I have deep intellectual belief about something doesn’t mean my unified self is behind it. Some other part of me lacks this belief and that is creating dissonance, loss of energy, and decreasing the force of will I’m able to put behind things that I think I believe in.

Arrested fake it ‘til you make it

Another lens with which to view this though is that one potential process for gaining both System 2 and System 1 belief around something is to first develop the intellectual knowledge through reasoning or the shared experience of trusted others, and then to experience enough real examples of it to also develop the gut-level knowledge. The first part of which is actually just oft-shared the “fake it ‘til you make it” advice. Pretend you are a certain way that you could reasonably believe being, and then eventually you will become and believe you are that.

The danger is getting stuck in just the pretend part, making it a habit, and then thinking that is equivalent to actually becoming the thing. Which is what I think I’ve done. I went through a very low-agency period of my life in college, hit a breaking point and realized I needed to make massive changes, and basically decided2 I was going to turn my life around and become a completely different person.

I then willed myself into this mindset and embraced the story3 that I was high agency and then started to believe it (S2) because I did lots of “high-agency” things4. And then never moved beyond that step.

Learning to feel agency

This is still something I’m working on and hope to write more on it soon. But one of the interesting tools I’ve been trying to use that I will say a little about is something I’ve been thinking of as “somatic snapshotting”.

There are very brief times5 when I think I’ve believed and deeply felt high-agency on every level. I’ve tried to capture the imprint of that on my body; the feelings, sensations, emotions, and gestalt state. I’ve found if I concentrate I can sort of picture it as a unified whole in my head that also has an accompanying bodily sensation.

I’m trying to do this more intentionally during times that I think I should feel high-agency, but don’t.