Connection

Jared: Welcome to Delicate Fire. Today we'll be exploring the Aphorisms of Effective Choice by Forrest Landry. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Be sure to like and subscribe and follow along. Thanks so much. I look forward to hearing from you soon. Hey Forrest, great to see you again. And last week we talked about joy and pain and potentiality and the lack thereof and Jesus and Buddha.

Forrest: We had a lot of big, big.

Jared: Wide-Ranging arc of conversation. And I'm wondering now about the connection to self, world, and other, and the, maybe the channel that is formed between these three. We mentioned this in one of the earlier episodes, and this is a bookmark. So I'd be curious what you have to say.

Forrest: Great. So just picking up from where we were, right? We were talking about the teaching of how to be in right relationship between nature, humanity, and technology. And there's a need for a teaching around this today. Like there's just not a lot of guidance in the world about right use of technology. And I mentioned that it was mostly being directed towards comfort, entertainment, and war making or power seeking or status or all the usual contests that people have with one another. Usually men that are doing the contesting, cause that's kind of a biological instinct. And we bookmarked already the instinct thing. So again, some future episode.

But the notion here is that if I'm really trying to say, hey, what is the right use? And just naming the things that it's not is not really helping to give the advice is what is right use. And when I'm basically saying, hey, something like spiritual integrity is, with Buddha and Christ and so on, that these things matter, that there's a reason for why these skills are kind of important and that we should strive for this. And so there's a sense of this is a teaching, it's not entertainment, right?

And so on one hand we could say, yeah, I would hope that people enjoy the experience of this process. There's no reason for it to be challenging or difficult per se. And it's part of the reason why last week when we were talking about joy and pain, I was basically saying they go together. Life, living, the process of interaction, the likelihood of experiencing pain, the likelihood of experiencing joy are all entangled together. You can't have an experience without it potentially being one of pain or one of joy in addition to just experiencing anything at all. So in other words, there's no way to have just joy, guarantee that that's going to be the only outcome. Or, as I said, if you had a lot of experience of pain, that it will guarantee that you'll experience joy. No guarantees.

And given that it is worthwhile and you have the spiritual integrity to navigate the process of being in interaction, that's part of the reason why you would want to have a spiritual integrity so that when life gets intense, that to some extent you can continue to be in interaction. Because not being in interaction is dead. So, or functionally equivalent to death. So to the extent that living is good, it is good that you can live. Right? Again, a lot of this stuff seems like it sounds pedantic, but it's important to say it so that you can see why there's structural reasons for the coherency of the way the thing is being spoken to.

Jared: Right. Right.

Forrest: So in this sense, we say, oh, there's a motivated basis for us to have integrity. And out of this comes practices. The theory of non-relativistic ethics is essentially what is the best practices of choice-making that maintain or support integrity in self, world, and other actually. And we're going to bookmark that as a future conversation, which are what are the two principles of a non-relativistic ethics, which we've been putting off because frankly, we haven't really put the right infrastructure in place to even name what that is. But now we're starting to, right? We're starting to basically have a sense as to what are the practices needed to maintain integrity of self and to maintain the integrity of relationship and to maintain the integrity of world and also other people and things in the world.

And so in effect, when we're talking about technology, which is effectively a causal structure in the world, and we're saying something like, we're noticing that the side effects of the use of that technology, or in this case, the misuse of that technology, is resulting in harm to the substrate, i.e., the integrity of life. That this is a problem. It's a problem because that which does not support life will not continue to live. So the human beings that are in the world need to learn how to be in right support of life, or consequences they don't get to continue to live. So we need to rally right now. Like, this is a situation where we need to take decisive action. We need to do it with skill. We need to know what we're doing, and we need to do it in a collective way because frankly, it's bigger than any one of us could do by ourselves.

And the notion of integrity is applied both at the level of the individual and the community and the state and the ecosystem. It's not either or for any of it. It's like they're all required, which means down to the organ system level and down to the cellular tissue level, if you want to think of it that way. You need integrity at all the levels, up and down the whole scale of the totality of what is. And I'm saying is in the sense of real rather than is in the sense of exists or is objective, which are philosophical technicalities, which will become important someday far down the road if you ever get into this in a more serious sort of like foundational sense.

For now, let's just basically notice that insofar as we are trying to be in right relationship to life, we want to name what that is. So we talked about the dimensions of interaction that create joy and pain. We've talked about the dimensions of interaction that are supportive of friendship. We've talked about the dimensions of interaction that are supportive of communication. And now we're starting to talk about, well, what is some way to generalize this into how do we understand this notion of relationship between self and other, self and reality, self and, well, this is where language starts becoming a problem. I could say spirit, I could say soul, I could say conscience, I could say divinity, I could say God, whatever.

But the notion here is that in the same sort of way, and I think I may have mentioned this in a previous session, we could talk about the totality of the objective and we call it universe when we do that. There's a totality of the subjective, and what's that called? Well, that's usually the monotheistic notion of divinity, of God, basically. Capital G. So in the sense that there's one universe, there's one God. And if people ask, well, do you believe in God? I basically say, well, I believe in the universe, and they're mirror images of one another across the finite, across the sense of self, which is embodied, contextualized, in the world in a concurrent distributed way. Like we're all here in this world now. So it's distributed, embodied, and contextualized, which you may know is basically being connected to response to X-risk, as was mentioned in other dialogues in other channels.

So in effect, there's a sense of, I noticed that these three kinds of connection from self to spirit, from self to world and from self to other, that all three of these want to be well held. And that if we're thinking about what is the essence of practice, it's going to focus on these three skills and that everything else is going to connect to that.

So we're talking about right use of technology. Well, technology is an aspect of world. Science identifies causal patterns in the world. Technology applies causal knowledge and things happen in the world. That's like affecting ecosystem and nature and all that stuff is out there. And we want right balance in that sense. But given that we're building the technology, we're making choices about it, we as human beings essentially intermediating technology and nature, then as the intermediaries, we need to, in a sense, be making wise choices about that.

Well, on what basis are we going to know what's right to do with world? Well, we're going to compare notes with one another and we're going to check with our conscience. We're going to feel into it. We're going to think about it as clear as we can collectively because reason occurs in between. We can thank Habermas for that. And we can basically say something like, I need to basically have all of myself participating in it. I need essentially a coherency of the subjective in order for me to function effectively.

We talked about joy and pain last week as essentially being more likely to be joyful when you have moments of coming together. So integrity is coming together is a worthwhile spiritual pursuit and usually a joyful one. If you start it, you should probably finish. But on the other hand, there's a sense in which we're saying, given that we now have an orienting basis within the first person, within the totality of all that is self, which is the finite relationship between the uncountably infinite of the universe. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. Uncountably infinite.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: The countably infinite of the universe and the uncountably infinite of the subjective, of the interior is related by the finite, countably finite, if you want to specify that. Anyways, so for every finiteness, you have two infinities and for every infinity, you have at least two finiteness, but that's another thing, two finiteness and two definitely different ways. Metaphysics gets interesting once you get acquainted with more it.

Anyways, the point is that as a sort of focus of practice, we're now basically saying, what is it that community is doing together? What is it that we are doing in the first person as individuals spiritually and as communities collectively? So in effect, we said something like, oh, we noticed that even under extrema of joy and pain, right? We named two historical figures or maybe figures. I mean, nobody knows everything about all that, but obviously there's a situation where we're saying these are exemplars of capacity to integrate into self a great variety of intensity of experience of whatever kind. That is the strength of one's spiritual character. And that's at the individual level.

Religion, as we may have defined, did we get to the point of describing the difference between spirituality and religion? Okay.

Jared: No, that's.

Forrest: That's.

Jared: A good one.

Forrest: One of the points that's in this thing, in these series, we should do I'll do that someday. Another bookmark. Anyways, if we're thinking about spirituality, it's usually not named. I'm not this spirituality or that spirituality. But if it's social in a sense of with other people, it has a name because I need to be able to talk to other people and name the things so that they know what I'm talking about when I use the name. That's the whole point. So in effect, there's a recognition that if it has a name, it's a religion. If it doesn't have a name, it's probably related to spirituality unless it's tied to one of the other of the six paths. I'm just talking about the two in this particular case. Two in the immanent sense, in the first-person relational sense, not in the theoretical sense, although I'm using theoretical constructs to describe them because we're speaking in English language and you and I aren't the same person. And so as a result, there's a need for us to use some sort of form in order to convey things that otherwise wouldn't be very obviously having form.

So in this sense, the notion here is that if I want to be effective in spirituality, I need to think about how the flow of experience, both from world and from other, flows into self.

Jared: Right, right. Yeah.

Forrest: And how I can integrate that into self and remain self. Not become blown apart by the intensity of the incoming signal.

Jared: Right, right.

Forrest: Religion is the outward flow. And it's essentially how does a community of people stay together regardless of what is going on. Like, it's like the spirituality's capacity to accept experience is mirrored by the religious community's capacity to accept expression or even better to be in right expression. So in this sense, there's a kind of now clarifying principle that if it's singular and solo, it's spiritual. And if it's collective and plural, it's religion. If it's about experience, it's spiritual. If it's about expression, it's religious.

And so in this sense, I'm using the word religion as roughly the same as community. Every community is going to have something that holds it together, something they care about. That's the common notion of community. And I use the word community and care interchangeably in a lot of interrelated ways in conversation as distinct from say institution, which is about like, if we look at the care transaction power triangle, communities are about care. Institutions are about transaction or power. So what holds the people together in a group? If it's transactional, i.e., they're paying you, right? You're basically demanding money of some kind, or it's about some sort of hierarchy of control or decision-making. Either one of those things is going to make an institution. If it's got both, it's definitely an institution.

So, and there's plenty of institutions in the world and they're all equally effective at navigating care. So we got to build communities so that the holding of care is actually relevant in the choices we're making alongside wisdom and a knowledge of current position so we can actually do something like affect as a community, what is the right use of technology and what is it in service to? Well, it needs to be in service to life. It needs to be in service to the integrity of the actual foundations of life itself, which is the ecology, not the economy. Institution can deal with economy, but if you're going to get the ecology right, you need community.

So in this sense, we are therefore looking at how do we as individuals be in right relationship as community so that the community as a whole has the culture and the value systems and the learnings and the capacities to be in the choice-making that is at the scale of wisdom necessary to respond to existential risk or do civilization design or actually get the right balance between nature, humanity, and technology as humanity. If we're going to answer questions of like, what is the alternative to using technology to create comfort? Well, use technology in relation to care rather than entertainment, you're aware of transaction, right? So you start thinking about distribution and embodiment and recontextualization rather than say extraction, abstraction, and accumulation, which is the linear commercialism that has created all the ecological consequence in the first place. It's depleting something from somewhere and it's piling up a bunch of stuff that nature can't process somewhere else. That's what toxic means. Fundamentally, the word toxic is depleting of things that are necessary for life or accumulating things that are inhibitive of life. Very straightforward.

So in this sense, we now have a definition of toxicity. We also have essentially a sense in which linearity cannot not create toxicity. And that if we're going to, in a sense, restore life, we have to restore cyclicity. And to do that, we need to be in mirror image of extraction, abstraction, accumulation, which means distribution, embodiment, and recontextualization. So that becomes the practice of the community.

Jared: Great.

Forrest: I.e., what the religion needs to be about. In other words, what you participating in the religion need to be in the skill of as a spiritual practice, which is right relationship with spirit, world, and other.

Jared: Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. And that's that. Now that ties all the way back to this initial, the question that first popped in my mind of like, okay, as a self relating to spirit, world, other, what is the right ordering as just a self watching this right now?

Forrest: I think it's not so much about the ordering. I think it's more about the co-supportiveness. Hmm. Okay. If I'm experiencing a sense of doubt about my interior, I'm wondering whether I'm crazy or I've got some delusion. What do I do? I check against reality and I check notes with other people. If I'm doubtful about something that's going on in reality, I trust my conscience and I trust other people. I do a sort of internal, does it make sense? Can I feel through it? Like, what's going on? Like, I might meditate or I might go to sleep and so on. And I will talk to anybody that I know and trust. Basically say, what are you seeing? This thing going on in the world, is this guy lying or is he actually telling the truth? Did that actually happen or did I just believe that it happened? I mean, like, we check our own senses and we check what other people are saying.

Now, again, let's say that I don't trust another person. I check with reality, which is non-falsifiable, and I check my interior conscience. I check my spirit and my intuition or my thinking and knowledge and compare, again. So think of it as like a three-legged stool.

Jared: Nice.

Forrest: Each of the two legs supports the third. So it's not so much about the sequencing, although you can sequence it. I mean, honestly, if you're looking at sort of it from a child developmental thing, they experience relational first, or maybe they experience world first. I don't know. What does a baby experience first? Okay. I mean, that's basically the question here. Like, there's a sense in which they probably don't notice themselves first. They probably experience other first and then world. That would be my guess. So in this sense, I would say get really, really good at the relational practice, and then from there you can develop skill in the interior spiritual practice and skill in the outer world practice.

Jared: Makes sense.

Forrest: That might not work for everybody. I noticed for my own part, basically being orphaned, that, I mean, functionally orphaned. I mean, I'm not literally orphaned in the sense that I do actually have parents, but as far as emotional connectedness, the sense of belongingness, safety, and dignity in a family, those were pretty much pegged to zero. There was dignity, but I was earning it. And belongingness, they just didn't know how to do that. At all. And safety was, let's not even start with that. So in effect, I had to learn how to create those for myself. And this is a thing that basically is like why I say to some extent, I experienced myself as being functionally an orphan still.

So the net notion here is that growing up that way, my first trust was of nature. So I experienced a sense of co-regulation with nature before I experienced co-regulation with another person, which is really unusual. Like most of the time people don't grow up technically wild, but I did. So, and we can argue or discuss whether or not that was enabling factor for me to come into right awareness of the metaphysics, but that's a whole other story. And I don't even know that that's something we're going to bookmark. We tried doing an introduction on that particular thing, but it still feels a little too intense for me.

In any case, the notion is that if we are genuinely holding that a deep connection with nature can be trusted, then in effect, the person that trusts that is going to be effectively wild. A person that trusts other over both self and the world is going to be what we call domesticated. They're at least social. I mean, domesticated, I don't mean to use it pejoratively, although sometimes as a wild person, we tend to have some objections to domestication because domestication tends to be pretty violent towards the wild. Think of the Victorian era. That was terrible. Beautiful, but terrible.

So we had some people that basically experience a sense of interconnection first that is just supreme to them. And that mystic orientation can yield a bunch of stuff too. And you can have people that don't trust any of these things. They don't trust their connection to the wild. They don't trust their connection to the others. And they don't even trust themselves. And we call that condition feral. Think of a feral cat. Don't trust nothing.

Jared: Right. Right. Right.

Forrest: So you can try to become hyper self-reliant as a kind of compensation for that, but that's called hypervigilance for a reason. And it's exhausting. And ask me how I know about that.

Anyways, the point is that we notice that these three things of skill in each of these three areas develops a sense of capacity that we can develop skill in any of the other two in an increasing way. So start with what you got. Try to leverage two of the things to create strength, the strongerness or strength in the third, and then keep bouncing back and forth to each of them until all of them more or less climb together. And that braid will be stronger than anything else could possibly be by itself.

I guess my thing here though is, and this is sort of the central teaching of this particular thing, is that to the degree that you have deep connection with the sort of interior notion of like, what does it mean to be ultimately good? And if I have deep connection with the world, I have deep connection with what is ultimately true. And if I have deep connection with what is other, I have deep connection with what is ultimately beautiful. So the more that you can deepen the good, the true, and the beautiful in the sense of the depth of the connections that you can have in each of these three ways, the more that you will be trustworthy in community and be trusted by community. And the more that obviously having skill in your perception in all these three ways, you'll be able to know when to trust and when not to trust. And therefore, if a community is the kind of community of people that have these kinds of skills, then now you're cooking with gas. That's going to be able to do things that frankly are well beyond the capacity of probably anybody but me to imagine at this moment. I will need to teach you the language of even to recognize how much potential there is actually there. It's way more than most people think.

A few people working in governance keep having this intuition of we haven't even been close to doing it right. And then they try to go for incremental improvements on democracy or voting systems as such. It's like, yeah, that's the right direction, but it's not an incremental change. I'm looking for fundamental changes that are not just 2x or 3x improvements or 15% or 20% improvements. 2 or 3x would actually be pretty good for their measure. I'm thinking 10 to 100x improvements in terms of our capacity to make choices in the world at scale with a level of coherence and clarity and wisdom that is holding of care with enough strength to genuinely be a response to existential risk up to the level of imagine every single man, woman, and child has a big red button on their lazy chair that if they hit it, everybody dies. Because from an existential risk calculation point of view, we're 10 years away from something like that, maybe even none.

And so in effect, there's a sense in which we are needing to have a level of integrity, a level of integration of the ethics that is essentially requiring me to be willing to be very forthcoming about these kinds of things. And to be somewhat uncompromising about how I express these, because it kind of matters that people get this stuff right soon. So there's a sense in which I'm being a bit more than a little vulnerable here and being quite direct about a lot of what some people might think of as profoundly spiritual concepts and profoundly direct ways.

But there's a sense here in which, honestly, we need to enable one another to be the healthiest, best versions of ourselves. So we can enable the healthiest, best versions of community, cuz that's where the focus point is. We can't do anything as individuals. And the state for the most part is essentially a few individuals or some constellation of people running around trying to make stuff happen. But the system part of the system is incapable of really doing that. Like there's the principal agent problem, the rules for rulers trap, and the multipolar trap. The rules for rulers problem is something most people don't know about, but it's worth looking up anyways.

If you look at people in power, they're just as stuck and constrained in what they can do as everybody else who happens to be poor. Money isn't the enabling factor. It's choice that's the enabling factor. And the thing is that neither individuals nor states can really make choices, but communities can. And so in effect, communities have to. Institutions can't, right? They're stuck about transaction and power. We need something that's about care so that there's a basis for that choice, i.e., an orienting basis.

Utilitarian calculus can't do it because it's ungrounded. There's no value system at its root. But if you have a values-based organization and that values-based essentially is centering care, is centering love in some real sense, then the effectiveness of that group to actually get stuff that matters done— technology will tell us what you can do, but it won't tell us what you ought to do. So the ought dimension is important. What is the orienting compass that allows you to take your knowledge of current position and your wisdom combined with your care? Your care tells you where you're going to go. That's the asymmetry that matters. The compass is going to basically say something like, what's ethical? But you still have to make the choice. You still have to care.

And the map and the current position is going to basically tell you where you are so that you know what is relevant to care about. But if you don't combine wisdom, care, and situational awareness, you can't make good decisions. It's like you're running blind. You don't have a map. So therefore, developing skills in the space of connection to spirit, connection to world, and connection to other as a situational awareness, as a field of information that you can genuinely trust, that makes you trustworthy for other people, that is the network of sensemaking necessary for the community to even know what they care about, what success looks like, and where they are right now that enables them to discover what is the available, actionable, relevant potential, right? What Dave Snowden would call essentially the accessible possible or something like that. The adjacent possible.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: So there's a sense here in which, yeah, I can know what 15 accessible adjacent possibles there are, but I need to pick one. What is the basis upon which I pick that one? Well, it better be ethical. As principles of effective choice, which by the way means you know what you're passionate about, you know what you care about, and you have the wisdom to basically have the skill and the presence of being to actually bring that about, i.e., enough integrity to essentially have that occur. This is where we basically have said, what is religion for? That's it.

Jared: Incredible. I can't wait to share this with my community, my church, and the people close to me. I think this is a really beautiful, full, and deep, yeah. And I don't even know how to describe it, but it was incredible. Thank you, Forrest.

Forrest: Glad to help.

Jared: I'll see you next week.

Forrest: Okay.

Jared: This was Delicate Fire. Thank you so much for joining us, where we explore the aphorisms of effective choice. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments or head to delicatefire.com and join the Signal community. Please like and subscribe if you want to follow along. And I look forward to seeing you next week.