The Path of Right Action

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 yeah, these last 2 weeks have been really potent for me. Whenever I, when I first got introduced to this ability to distinguish between thoughts, feelings, emotions, and then to actually know the flow, the actual dynamics of emotion in a reasonable and orderly way, it was so empowering. And I felt so excited about the work and I've been really jazzed up about it. And so, yeah, bringing this in, we're now talking about navigating choice. Like, how do we actually navigate this world and make choices with this as kind of a basis? Like, what do we do to— how do we make choices in the world?

Forrest: Well, the enabling factors are twofold, right? So in other words, we have emotion as this energy. That enables choice. And so in effect, there's this excitement, there's this potential. And so we're looking at, well, where do we flow this energy? Like if we have this passion, I mentioned passion last time as a kind of, I care so much, I want to bring into the world, right? And then there is this choice of how do I do that? Where do I bring it? In what way does this move into manifestation?

And so given that emotion is already present in our conversation, we're already talking about the passion as basically being the impetus, the love as being an impetus into the world. What are the other two tools? Well, we mentioned thinking and we mentioned feeling. And so these are now going to be the two discerning bases by which the two sort of organizing or orienting elements that now in combination with the energy of emotion guides choice.

So choice is the choice of where do I bring this energy? Where do I bring potentiality into actuality? So when we're saying, like we mentioned in the ethics, what are the principles of making good choices? We're now talking a bit of what is the practice of making good choices?

And in this sense, we're saying something like, well, I want to be able to anticipate the outcome a little bit. Like, it would be helpful to predict what will be the manifestation. What are the outcomes of the actions that I take? Will those outcomes line up or align with my hopes and dreams? If I'm an artist, for example, will the thing that I'm doing with the paints and the canvas create an image that matches the inspired image that I had in my head of something that I desire to experience more deeply or to see more deeply.

So, regardless of whether we're thinking about manifestation in a sort of creative, artistic way, we're not even needing to be specific about the medium of one's expression. We can also look at very much the relationship between the technique and the methodology and the outcome and basically say, thinking is going to be a guide by which we predict what do we expect those outcomes to be. And the more correct our thinking, the more rational our process, the more that it corresponds to reality, the more that those predictions are likely to be correct. And so therefore we can say thinking can become a guide to choices that are effective, i.e., creating, manifesting something that's in alignment with the underlying love or desire energy that's associated with emotion.

But that's not all because frankly, no matter how perfect our cognitive process may be, no matter how intelligent we are, there's always going to be some variation between what our initial conditions and the actual outcomes that occur. So in this sense, there's a faith element. There's kind of an embodied, do I have the skill to bring about these things? It's not just, does it conceptually make sense that I could take paint and put it on a canvas in the right sort of shapes, but does my body have the ability to literally draw the thing that I can see in my mind's eye?

And so in this sense, there's a feeling element too. There's an intuitive element as well. And so it's not just going to be the instinctual energy of love creativity, desire to manifest, driving into this sort of intellectual process, but also that there's a kind of, well, what are the kinds of things that I know myself, I trust myself to be able to do? Or given my just general wisdom about humans and situations and so on and so forth, my intellect can maybe predict something, but there's a limit beyond which it just doesn't have the data that it needs. And at some point I have to basically rely on a kind of faith or a kind of feeling or a kind of embodied skill for which my intellect might not have an accounting.

And so in a sense, there's a kind of, again, a metaphor, a CPU type function. And a kind of GPU type function, right? And sometimes the cognitive CPU type function has the data that it needs and it can figure it out. But other times you need your unconscious, you need the feeling capacity, you need the general massively parallel, more or less opaque, can't see what's going on, but it's kind of invisibly co-occurring. Pretty much everywhere at once in this sort of holographic or distributed way, which gives you a strong impression. Do this now or hold back or pick these lottery numbers. I mean, there's no rational way to anticipate future lottery numbers. The whole point is to make it random so that nobody could do that. So in effect, it's intuition or nothing. Sometimes.

And in this particular sense, if we're going to make a good choice, we want to use all available capacities to be able to think through something clearly, trust that, and to be able to feel through something completely and trust that, because both are guides to choice. And when it is the case that both guide you in the same way, the two outcomes of these guidances align, then we have as much basis of this is a good flow of energy of manifestation to actually engage with.

So a lot of times people just use one mode or the other. You have people who make all of their choices intuitively, and have essentially no intellectual process. And that works as well as you'd expect. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong. And you've got other people who basically just rely on the rational thing. They try to predict everything they can or to figure it out or to use some sort of analytic method. And sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.

And so really, if you are using both, moreover, you're using both in an integrated way. This gets a bit personal, but in the sense that you can't just understand the metaphysics and you can't just intuit mysticism or the metaphysics. You need to take both of these capacities and to bring them together, to blend them. And only through the blending does a new capacity emerge, to actually gain the insight to see the things that go beyond that which is just rationally apparent, right?

There's a metaphor or a sort of aphorism out there. I didn't invent this, but that the smart man shoots at a target they can see, whereas the genius shoots at a target no one else can see. Right. In other words, it's in the transcendent, it's in a beyond realm where your eyes can't perceive, only your vision can perceive. Right? So faith in this sense is vision wide open, right? It's not here yet, but I have reasonable, in the sense of I feel the future well enough that the reason and the feeling can support one another. It's like the feeling gives me something to think about and the thinking gives me something to feel into. And I go back and forth between the two of these. Fully realizing all that I can do with thinking and all that I can do with feeling, because each is guiding the other at every point that there's any ambiguity with either one.

And that is the full realization technique. There's a method by which you can combine a fullness of feeling and a rigor of thinking to guide choice in a way that is holistic enough to give the absolute best possible chance for manifestation in a way that is coherent with the love and care that you actually carry. This is, again, I'm speaking a kind of idealized way of perfected practice. But the thing is, is that there's really no reason not to strive for this all of the time. I mean, it's just the way, there's no real sense that there's anything less than this that's worth it. And nor is there any sense that there's anything more. So might as well go as best as you can into the fullness of it. And that's what's meant by effective choice. That's it.

Jared: Yeah. Just making, navigating the world in this way. Ever since I really learned about these principles and I have, I think I've just kind of been slowly like building the infrastructure in my mind, like in my body, like the thoughts and the structures of like, in living this metaphysics, it's become more and more ingrained to be able to deeply and clearly think, but also really deeply and clearly feel like really bringing the importance of that feeling in. And it just feels so good to have, yeah, these, this short series that actually really, really gets to the heart of it very quickly. I'm really excited about this. Yeah.

Forrest: That's good because the idea here is that as we become more skillful in this practice, flow happens more and flow feels good. So it's like, as we may have mentioned in this conversation about path of right action, where we are looking at choices that are win-win choices. I can think through them in a way that sees everybody wins. And I could feel through them in a way that I, quote unquote, know this is good. And in this sense, the notion of there is always a win-win choice is a kind of attunement practice, is a kind of discernment practice. Attunement and discernment being about feelings. And so the more that I can be in attunement and discernment, attunement to other, discernment of what's really going on in the feeling space, feeling deeply into something, the more that I can combine that with my thinking and rational process to have all of myself operating together at once to create an outcome that is not only holistic in my world, in my own interior, but holistic in the exterior.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: As within, so without. As above, so below, right? This is, you know, aphorisms that have come to us from long history. We really have no idea who was the first person to say this, to hold this as a cultural transmission. But the realness of it is essentially in this connection between if the basis by which I'm making these choices is holistic, including all aspects of self, the maximum chance possible of knowing and believing and holding and actually it being the case through resonance, through some sort of symmetry of wholeness of self creating a wholeness of world, right? Through the continuity of the flow from the wholeness of self into the continuity of flow with the wholeness of world that we have this integrity of choice, choice operating as one together.

So this idea that this kind of practice and this series of principles, which I'm giving name to, are combining with one another to create in actual life, win-win outcomes, holistic outcomes that are genuinely beneficial, which are essentially reflective of wisdom. Wisdom being a kind of wholeness that holds past, present, and future. The notion of larger volumes of space, accounting for the whole ecosystem, the whole community, accounting for more than just my own needs, but everybody's needs. And life's needs, and holding also an awareness of all the different possibilities of what could happen. I have a greater sense of imagination that informs my life experience. I can imagine all the different outcomes that might happen and therefore start to nurture. These are the ones that are— wisdom is essentially the wholeness of my whole process of life and learning and so on and being in this present. Helps me to know these are things that are worthwhile, that we ought to strive for.

Jared: Right.

Forrest: And so in effect, the isness through the mechanism of causation itself, creating change has an oughtness to it. We ought to choose as whole beings. We ought to choose in a way that is inclusive, that has not just diversity of aspects of self, or if it's a community of people, a diversity of voices, but also an integration of that. If you don't have the integration, then you don't have integrity. You don't have acting as one together. So people have focused on the diversity side of it, but they haven't focused on the integration side of it because there's a transcendental principle that needs to be applied to that. And a lot of times people go into the analytic and they try to figure out how to manipulate this side of outcome. You can't manipulate people to create good outcomes because that's essentially a division. It's a barrier that you're introducing. You're trying to control in a sense of command and control, which means you have to be separate from and over.

Jared: Right. Right.

Forrest: Whereas in this sense, we're saying, how do I operate as a whole self, an ecology of all of thought, feeling, and emotion operating together in a flow that is in the right sequence through the dynamics that thought and feeling therefore become guides for the quality and the quantity and the direction of that energy moving so as to create an outcome that is holistic in the world, actually a win-win choice.

So now we have not just the idea of it's always possible to choose win-win because transcendent is greater than omniscient. We're therefore saying something like our capacity to move in this direction enables us to continue to be in flow. I have the sequence of the path of right action, the path part, but also the degree to which I converge on, get closer and closer through attunement and discernment, the wisdom element, moving us in the direction of convergence onto the path of right action. Therefore, we have all three of these elements of the path of right action in a way that makes sense even if we didn't know the true basis of the non-relativistic ethics.

So one of the nice things about the metaphysics is that as you begin to see how all of these pieces fit together, you recognize the tapestry of every part supporting every other part. And it just begins to make more and more sense to the point that it becomes profoundly obvious and like, why would I live any other way?

Jared: Yeah, it's incredible. I noticed you mentioned a lot about this path of right action and the, the kind of, yeah, the opening of that path as you are doing the clear thinking, the clear feeling, you're making these choices that are win-win and the path becomes available to you. I wonder if we can just maybe like dive in on that a little more for those who aren't familiar with what the path of right action is or what that word, that section of that phrase means.

Forrest: Yeah. So the first thing I should probably do is just to disambiguate the language a little bit. So it turns out that there is in other traditions, in Buddhist philosophy, for example, a thing they call the path of right action. And I gave that name to my own philosophy or this element of it before I realized that that had been something that had been in their culture as well. So there is some deconfusion that wants to happen there. So when I'm referring to the path of right action, my version of it, so to speak, is really 3 ideas or 3 theorems. They're actually technically theorems. They're— a theorem is something that if you think about it from a certain basis, you arrive at this as a conclusion.

The first theorem is essentially there is always a win-win choice. Now, I might not know in any given moment what is the win-win choice, but I can use feeling and thinking combined to find my way towards what that win-win choice would be. Assuming I have time to actually meditate on my feelings and know what those are and to think through the situation carefully and to reflect a little bit. The more important the choice, the more you want to take that time. Right. If it's a very, very significant choice in life, like, do I go to this college or do I go to that college, or do I go with this girl or that girl or this job or that job? Do I have children or not? These are hugely momentous choices at an individual life level. And then of course, at a government level, if you're thinking about policy, even more so. But there's a sense in which the more the choice has impact, more you want to respect that choice through deepening of feeling and thinking. Or thinking and feeling. I mean, the order is not so important because you're trying to do both.

So in this sense, the first part of the path of right action is the belief based upon the logic that there is always a win-win choice, that it therefore becomes necessary for us to think about finding that. Like the notion that there's a trolley problem, that you have to do one thing or the other and there's a trade-off, that there's a kind of result where you don't get what you want, which is both things. Well, that's actually smuggling in the conclusion. The nature of trolley problems is to start with an omniscient frame, assume that there's no other alternatives, and to fix you into dealing with that situation. Ethics doesn't work like that. In fact, if somebody presents a trolley problem and claims that they're studying ethics, it's like, no, you're actually studying morality. You don't understand ethics because ethics is about principles. It's not about the logic of trolley problems. That's essentially a way to understand how you think about moral codes. And there's a bunch of subtleties between ethics and morality and what does it mean to be in practice versus in theory.

But I think that the main thing that I'm saying is that if you know for sure that it is always the case without exception, that there is a win-win choice, there is a thing you can do, there's always an option. Where it works out. Now, in our firsthand subjective experience as finite beings with finite lifetimes, we might not have the resources necessary to find out what that choice is, but that doesn't absolve us for doing the best we can seeking for that win-win choice regardless with the resources we have to not just assume that it's going to be trade-offs. That's a terrible way to be. It's better than choose the worst thing always, but between do the evil thing versus compromise versus choose win-win, go for win-win. Why not just do that? It's worth it.

The first theorem is there's always a win-win choice. The second theorem is that it isn't the case that making a win-win choice means that you're going to have to spend equally amount as much time to make the next win-win choice. And in the hyperspace of all possible choices, that they're near one another, the win-win choices. If you're making a sequence of choices, the next choice is easier to make in a win-win way if the previous choice was made in a win-win way because of the adjacency in the hyperspace of the outcomes.

So in this sense, we are saying that the minimum energy path through the choice of the, once I make a win-win choice, the continuing ability to stay on the path of making win-win choices is globally maximum flow, lowest required energy. I'm not fighting resistance. So, I mean, we could have, if I ignore all sorts of things, we could have been born into a universe that every choice was equally difficult to make. Like the amount of energy that it would take to find the win-win choice was, say, some large amount, right? And then immediately after that, it's like the clock resets and the next choice I gotta make, I gotta invest a huge amount of energy to find out what's win-win for that. That would be a terrible outcome. It would basically be like, yeah, there's win-win choices, but in practice it takes so much energy to seek them that it's just not worth bothering.

Well, that's not the universe we live in. The universe we live in is actually the universe of if you make a win-win choice, making another win-win choice is actually easier. Most people know the inverse of this, which is if I lie, then I have to now lie more. And before long, the explosion of lies that I have to tell becomes so large that the amount of energy I have to invest in maintaining this huge, increasing, exponentially increasing deception, eventually it runs out of, your rob Peter to pay Paul, your MLM scheme, your pyramid, financial Ponzi scheme goes away. That's just an incredibly inefficient way to run, basically. And there's a notion here that if I look at the win-win side of things, that we can know that the win-win choices are maximally energy efficient. Just ask any autistic people. They have a very limited amount of energy to invest in time and attention to navigate these kinds of things. So they're going to converge on this thing right away and stay to it because frankly, it's just easier and it's the only navigable path.

Jared: Yeah.

Forrest: That's broadly true for a lot of people who have limited resources. So there's a third theorem, which basically says that the degree to which it seems that I can't make a win-win choice is the metric of deviance, the level of distance that I have away from the path of right action. So the first thing is the first theorem essentially says the path of right action is made up of points and those points exist. The second theorem says these points are continuous. And the third theorem says that everywhere else in space, there's an arrow that points you towards the path. And the length of that arrow and the direction that that arrow are both oriented so that you can tell both how far away you are and which direction you need to go to get back on the path.

And again, it's pretty lucky, right? Because we could live in a universe where there is both win-win choices and the sequence of them. But maybe the universe is folded in such a way in the hyperspace of choices that if I'm off the path of right action, that I can't really tell what I need to do to get back on the path of right action. It's like just confusing. You're in the fog. You don't know which way to turn. But what we can say is that to the degree that I use thought and feeling to shape expression, to shape emotion, choices made so that they are the most win-win, then that'll move me through the hyperspace of choices so that the next choice I make will be closer to the win-win path. And if I keep doing that, then the convergence with the path of right action will eventually occur. So I can asymptotically approach the path of right action or just flat out get to a point where the bubble of space that I can see, that the path of right action passes through that and I can just join it.

Jared: Great. Yeah.

Forrest: But if I'm in a bubble of space where I can't see the path of right action, then I can see the side of the bubble that looks warmest, that's brightest because it's illuminated by the path of right action. And so a third way to think about this third theorem is to essentially say that the totality of this space is organized in such a way that I can do something roughly equivalent to linear gradient descent and converge on the path of right action. And I can trust that that'll happen without running into, say, local minima or maxima or cusp regions or things that would prevent this convergence from working.

Now, again, you could say, if you didn't know the path of right action, you might just assume there's no win-win choices, at which point nothing else matters. Or you might say, well, there's win-win choices, but they're disorganized. The points are scattered throughout space. Kind of suck. Would suck almost as bad as not having win-win choices at all. Having them randomly scattered through the hyperspace of choices would be kind of also terrible, really. You don't gain any efficiency from finding one. You gotta work equally hard to find all of them. Or any of them. And the third one would basically be something like, well, it could be the case that the path of right action's there, but finding it is like challenging because you could be lost in these foggy gray regions or these minima or these maxima of what seem to be, or these plateau regions or whatever. And that would also be terrible in its own way.

But instead what we have via these three theorems, which collectively are called the path of right action, we're simply saying it happens to be the case that the world has win-win choices, that they are minimum energy paths, and that we can converge on them using things like gradient descent, and it just works. That is astoundingly good. Like, that's basically being born into the most beneficent version of a universe that you can conceive of. You have free will and it can work for you. Right? Like that's the universe we live in. And in effect, the notion of the universe being this way is actually built in at a level of substrate that is profound, well beyond the confines of this conversation. But basically, like, if you were God and you wanted to create a universe in which you had both free will and the notion of goodness, this is what it looks like.

Jared: Yeah. These have been really, really rich. I'm really looking forward to sharing these with my friends. Thanks so much, Forrest. I'll see you next week.

Forrest: Yep.

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. I look forward to seeing you next week.