Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply
@TylerAlterman • 26,995 subscribers
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What are you fighting for? AI safety professionals answer
Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply59,027 views • 1 month ago
I asked a big group of friends, "raise your hand if you’ve ever had a personal breakthrough with a retreat, workshop, or psychedelic." All of them except one raised their hands. Then I prompted, "keep your hand raised if you were able to maintain that breakthrough when you got home." All the hands went down. This is the pathetic shape of our spiritual culture. We live disconnected lives. Then we escape from them with heightened experiences. After, we come back to our lives. These now seem even more drab and absurd. We've glimpsed what living in truth might look like, and this ain't it. What to do? Surely, we need some even MORE heightened experience. Surely, that will finally be the thing that fixes us: the *advanced* meditation retreat, the *even more* powerful psychedelic. "Just one more authentic relating workshop and I'll finally be able to stay centered around my family." Surely. The main way I see people exit this addictive cycle is by deciding to live full time in some spirituality counterculture. Which...kind of looks like more escapism. I'm talking about the phenomenon of someone quitting their job in real estate to become a coach who coaches coaches who coach coaches. This is not a personal problem, it's infrastructural. For 99% of human history, spiritual life was woven together with everything else. The temple or church was often literally at the center of the polis. When Athenians (plausibly) drank ergot-laced kykeon at Eleusis, nobody needed an integration coach. The culture itself would have been the container. By contrast, modern spiritual life is characterized by zero affordances for integration. You touch the infinite on 5-MeO, and three days later you're in a passive-aggressive email thread about Q3 deliverables. You experience unconditional love for all beings on your weekend nature retreat, and by Monday you're thinking "f*ck you motherf*cker!!!" when someone cuts in front of you to steal your parking spot. Sorry, there's no church elder or fellowship anymore to help you with that integration challenge. Good luck! I decided to do something about this. I went on a week-long retreat with Jhourney and, with great effort, planned my own integration day when I got back. The plan: a silent, day-long meditation attack from 11am to 11pm in NYC. A meditation attack is like a meditation retreat except instead of escaping your usual environment, you *embrace* it with your spiritual practice. I combined it with my birthday celebration. About 30 people joined throughout the day. We meditated: • In Times Square near a K-pop dance troupe • At the American Museum of Natural History under the giant whale • At Grand Central Terminal, radiating love & kindness toward the busy commuters of New York • In the subway (we meditated a LOT on the subway) Yes there were honking horns and human hubbub, and that was the whole point: to find practice in everyday life. We practiced open-awareness meditation rather than concentration. Concentration practice is too fragile for a world full of noisy distractions. (IMO – I think American meditation culture went down the wrong path here). You need a practice which doesn't block out chaos (impossible in the modern day). You need one that metabolizes chaos into fuel for greater presence. The basic meditation prompt was: "Invite an open-hearted feeling to color awareness." So if you hear a jackhammer or a couple arguing? That is not a distraction; it arises *within* the open-hearted feeling. Some of my favorite parts of the day were when the urban environment broke into our meditative practice. In the video below, we partied with this subway station saxophone man surrounded by dozens of dancing mechanical cats. It became quite a phenomenon. More and more strangers joined until we were surrounded by people filming. The saxophone man kept getting increasingly hype, especially when we started copying his dance moves. At the end he told us that we made his day! (He made ours too lol) Anyway, steal this idea: I invite you to run your own meditation attack. More generally, I invite you to stop beating yourself up about how hard it is to inhabit your higher self in everyday life, and to start building integration infrastructure. 🛠️
Tyler is finishing a book, slow to reply25,626 views • 6 months ago
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