Meaningness Podcast

Many people in the West pursue meditation in order to experience altered states.

Meditation is sometimes considered a safer alternative to taking psychoactive drugs, with roughly similar effects. The jhanas are altered states of consciousness, for example. Buddhist tantra also produces diverse altered states, using various methods.

In Western Buddhism, the usual idea is that enlightenment itself is a special kind of experience. It’s an altered state of consciousness, also in the way that psychedelic drugs can produce altered states.

This is roughly consistent with some traditional Buddhist ideas about enlightenment, although no...

A facilitated discussion of how the participants find sacredness in the actual world—and in community.

This Vajrayana Q&A session is an Evolving Ground online discussion I co-hosted with Jared Janes. You can get some sense of the eG style here. We don’t go in for “dharma talks,” much less lectures. All our meetings, both in person and online, are highly interactive, mainly created in the moment by the participants.

There’s a transcript below. But first: several announcements!

I’ll co-host the next Vajrayana Q&A on Saturday, December 13th, 10:30 a.m. US East...

“Dzogchen Street Preacher” is the overall title for a series of performance pieces I planned in 2009. This extremely brief one, “Kadag,” was meant to introduce the whole thing.

I was on the verge of recording them when there was a mundane emergency that took all my time for a year. When I had the opportunity to work again, the Meaningness book seemed more important.

But less fun! There’s a bit of slack in my life now, and yesterday I decided to take a few hours to record this one. That was fun, and it’s a way to s...

Before controversy and fame, Jordan Peterson was a psychologist theorizing myth and meaning.

Jake Orthwein points out striking similarities in Peterson’s work and David’s. Along with them, fundamental disagreements: partly due to Peterson bringing a Christian perspective, and Chapman a Vajrayana Buddhist one.

Nihilistic catastrophes ※ Chaos and order ※ Reconciling myth and rationality ※ Interactionist cognitive science ※ The purpose of life

Jake intercut our conversation with brief relevant clips from Jordan Peterson’s classroom lectures and media interviews. It’s fun seeing the commonalities and contrasts!

In this post:

* The Making Of: d...

Rationality is stereotypically masculine. What about meta-rationality?

Transcript:

Charlie: What’s the connection between gender and meta-rationality?

David: I had never thought to ask that!

The systematic mode of being, or the rational mode of being, is male-coded, or masculine-coded. Meta-rationality involves an openness that surrounds systematicity, or rationality; or may just completely transcend it. And that is possibly feminine-coded? Or at any rate, it’s either feminine or non-gendered.

Charlie: Mm-hmm.

David: I’m thinking actually now, in Vajrayana, how there’s often a sequence of: female-c...

The common civilizational pattern of a separate priesthood and aristocracy casts light on current political dysfunction.

This video follows “Nobility and virtue are distinct sorts of goodness.” You might want to watch that one first, if you haven’t already.

These are the first two in a series on nobility. There will be several more. Subscribe, to watch them all!

Transcript

Many successful civilizations have two elite classes. They hold different, complementary, incommensurable forms of authority: religious authority and secular authority.

This usually works reasonably well! It’s a system o...

Nobility is the wise and just use of power.

Nobility is not moral virtue. They are not in conflict; they may correlate, but they don't always coincide.

Nobility is the proper matter of politics.

Transcript

Sermonette

Nobility is the dark matter of society. The pull of dark matter holds galaxies together. Without it, stars would spin off into intergalactic space. Nobility holds societies together. Without nobility, societies disintegrate.

Once, the now-dark matter of nobility was brilliant, and shone throughout space. With nobility, society grows strong, prosperous, decent...

A visual, kinesthetic, embodied experience 𐡸 A fish-eye lens and a magnifying glass 𐡸 The little clicker wheel 𐡸 Nurturing a plot of woodland 𐡸 Becoming the space, unstuck in time 𐡸 Freed up to play

Like most of my posts, this one is free. I do paywall some as a reminder that I deeply appreciate paying subscribers—some new each week—for your encouragement and support.

Transcript

What is the right question?

“Stage five” is a concept in adult developmental stage theory. That is—or used to be—a branch of academic psychological research. I think it may be very import...

A nine-minute radio sermonette.

I think I may be doing a bunch of these. Subscribe to get all of them!

Possibly I’ll create one every day or two! And maybe you don’t want that many emails? So I could post these as Substack Notes, and collect them into emailed posts, sent once a week maximum?

What do you think?

Transcript

In the 1970s, researchers in cognitive developmental psychology discovered something that may have great practical power; and is underappreciated, I think.

The researchers applied Jean Piag...

Emptiness, form, and the Big Bang 𐡸 How understanding creates students 𐡸 Buddhism outside institutions

This short video explains two stanzas from the Evolving Ground invocation liturgy. The first is an origin myth, and the second explains the prerequisites for successful Buddhist teaching. Each reworks traditional themes and scriptural motifs in a contemporary worldview.

The video is extracted from a recording of an Evolving Ground Vajrayana Q&A session. I host those monthly, and they’re free for all Evolving Ground members. Membership in Evolving Ground is also free.

Transcript

Origin myth, metaphysics, physics<...

A seven-minute radio sermonette.

I think I may be doing a bunch of these. Subscribe to get all of them!

Possibly I’ll create one every day or two! And maybe you don’t want that many emails? So I could post these as Substack Notes, and collect them into emailed posts, sent once a week maximum?

What do you think?

Transcript

This is it!

We’re actually here. I’m here in this room you can see behind me maybe, if you’re watching, not listening. You can he...

Rigpa is Dzogchen’s word roughly equivalent to “enlightenment.”

But what is rigpa, actually? And what does it imply for ethics?

A conversation with Varun Godbole.

This is a clip from the monthly Q&A I host for Evolving Ground, a community for contemporary Vajrayana practice.

Participation in the Q&A sessions is free for Evolving Ground members, and membership in Evolving Ground is also free. Our next Vajrayana Q&A is tomorrow, Saturday April 12th, 2025!

Transcript

That’s rigpa

Varun: I’m still not sure I und...

What is learning math good for? — Robert Kegan and “meaning-making” — Existentialism’s error — Narcissism and tyranny — How can we avoid radical relativism? — My experience of teaching

This is the video from my January 2025 monthly AMA (“Ask Me Anything”).

As a cine auteur, for previous AMA recordings, I have insisted on the director’s cut, editing both the video and text transcript carefully, out of respect for viewers, listeners, and readers.

The CFO of the studio, Nebulonic Media Productions Inc., put his foot down this time. It takes more than two full days for me—the creator and dir...

The felt experience of mathematics — witchcraft and black magic — “Shut up, kid!” — what is a real number? — shocked and embarrassed — clouds all the way down — a choir of angels singing — painting Cthulhu’s third eye on the walls of our mathematics and science departments

Video from a monthly live Ask-Me-Anything!

The transcript is below. The web page adds fun illustrations, and a wonderful comic strip, as mentioned in the video!

But first, how to join us next time:

It will be Sunday, January 26th, 9 a.m. Pacific Time. To participate, you need to subscribe (f...

How thoughts work — goddesses at the origin of philosophy — inspiration in adult development — how myths transform society and culture — Spock and Jimi Hendrix — entrepreneurship, purpose, and value

Video from a monthly live Ask-Me-Anything!

How to participate next time, and more info: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/myth-adult-development-entrepreneurship

Unexpected connections

Everything is connected to everything else; and this is very inconvenient! It’d be much tidier if everything would stay in its own box. But, it’s also fascinating and wonderful how things connect. And we’re going to see ways in which my recent...

Following our earlier conversation about Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana, we add adult developmental stage theory to the mix: three transformational frameworks in synergy.

We recorded this when Charlie was in Berlin on a Chinese martial arts retreat. Charlie had had been away from home for more than a month, after teaching several Vajrayana retreats in New York. The video signal was not good, so this is audio only.

Transcript

Charlie: I was thinking about the kinds of changes that occur through this kind of practice that we’re talking about, changing ways of being and...

“What do you think you’re doing? And, um, why?”

This is a recording of a Substack live video AMA (“ask me anything”) session I hosted two days ago.

Around fifty people attended! I enjoyed it, and hope everyone else did too.

We had a preliminary discussion in the subscriber chat, which was very helpful for collecting questions and getting the conversation started.

I’ll do these monthly, for as long as there is interest. To participate, you need to subscribe (free or contributing), if you haven’t already:

You also need t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit meaningness.substack.com

This video is for paying subscribers only. There’s a brief “teaser” for free subscribers that ends in in a cliff-hanger. This comes in the “too much fun!” category of paid posts.

Military use of Buddhist Tantra helps explain why it is so weird

I extracted this seven-minute video from my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. In that session, we discussed the weirdness of the Buddhist Tantra we have inherited; and how it evolved as a series of adaptation...

Ultraspeaking trains you in confident, effective speaking; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.

Vajrayana trains you in confident, effective action; and is also a path for spontaneous personal transformation.

We find them startlingly similar, although one offers courses in a consequential everyday competence, and the other is an ancient Indian religion.

This thirty-nine-minute video records a spontaneous, mostly-unplanned conversation between Charlie Awbery and David Chapman.

Charlie is an Ultraspeaking coach, currently leading the Fundamentals Level Two course; and co-founder of the Evolving Ground Vajrayana meditation community. David writes...

The point of Vajrayana is to change your way of being.

It has effective methods for that, but they are weird and complicated and difficult, and there are a vast number of them. It can be overwhelming. It's difficult to know where to start, and traditional approaches and curricula may not suit you. Understanding Vajrayana theory—how and why it works, and for which goals—helps you navigate the complexity, to practice efficiently and enjoyably.

I extracted this eighteen-minute video from the recording of my September 2024 Vajrayana Q&A. It includes my ten-minute introductory explanation, a pa...

There’s a wrong idea about the end of suffering. Probably wrong. I mean, maybe some people don’t suffer. I don’t know anybody like that.

Spiritual suffering is unnecessary, though. I have the recipe for eliminating it, and it works.

An audio recording of my long answer to a question, in a live Q&A session organized by Jessica B. three years ago. (Thanks Jess!)

Monthly Q&As

I’m doing Q&As like this monthly now. I don’t usually go on at such length! The next one is Saturday...

We both aim to transmit ways of being. That demands a different mode than conventional teaching, which explains facts, concepts, theories, and procedures.

David attempts to transmit meta-rationality—not a theory or method, but a way of being, namely “actually caring for the concrete situation, including all its context, complexity, and nebulosity, with its purposes, participants, and paraphernalia.”

We both attempt to transmit Vajrayana Buddhism. That is a way of being: it includes elaborate doctrines and practices, but those are not the point. The point is effective beneficent activity, enabled by liberation from fixed patterns of thi...

Content note: Traditional religious artworks featuring nudity, death imagery, and body horror. Possibly not safe for work, or life.

The video includes those as illustrations. Without them, listening to the audio alone may be difficult to understand. Watch full-screen for maximum impact.

Context, explanations, and transcript at: https://meaningness.substack.com/p/wearing-human-bone-ornaments

I discuss the intellectual history of interactions between Buddhism and cognitive science, prompted by a blog discussion of doubts about modern meditation systems.

There’s not many intellectually interesting people in the world, and they all talk to each other. They’re in very different fields, working out the same set of ideas in different contexts. But any intellectual era has a fairly limited number of major, significant new ideas that everybody’s working on.

If you’re going to be part of the zeitgeist, you need to figure out what are the ideas that are actu...

Max and I discussed the nature of lineages, and why they are so important for learning through apprenticeship.

I went into detail about my participation in multiple lineages of artificial intelligence research (0:33), developmental psychology (5:41), Vajrayana Buddhism (9:18), meta-rationality in experimental science (17:38), teaching and learning tacit knowledge (21:22), the misuse of statistical methods and meta-rational remedies (24:45), the perversion of science for institutional legibility (30:19), understanding the performance of epic poetry (32:27), a fun side-quest (36:49), and how meaning itself fell apart (38:25).

There’s a pretty-good AI-generated transcript available via a button, if you view this in the Substack app or on th...

This is about my self.

It's about how I relate to it—to my self. I've gotten somewhat better at that, over many years. You may have a self too, in which case my experience may be interesting.

This is an unusually personal, and unusually concrete, piece.

That is motivated by reader feedback. I did a post about Ultraspeaking recently, which some people said they liked because it was more personal than usual. That was partly because I originally intended it to be an audio piece, like this one. I failed in my atte...

Welcome to the first episode of the Meaningness podcast!

It is about how to learn to be kind.

I want to be kinder than I am. Maybe you do too. Good intentions are not enough, I think. My spouse Charlie Awbery offers suggestions.

Charlie will teach some methods relevant to this podcast in a workshop in New York City, April 22nd–25th; you can read more and reserve a place here.

The making of

This is the first serious joint recording by Charlie and me. For years, we had re...