Meaningness Podcast

Oct 24 2024 11 ep. 29 mins 14

Meaningness Podcast artwork

🚞 Trains of thought 💭 captured as sound🎙️; monologues on diverse ⁉️ topics, and conversations 👥 too!

meaningness.substack.com

Religion & Spirituality Society & Culture

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Ask Me Anything! October 2024 edition

Oct 24 2024 43 mins

“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 t

Why Tibetan bureaucrats replaced battlemages with monks

Oct 15 2024 2 mins

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit meaningness.substack.comThis 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 weirdI extracted this seven-minute video from my Se

Ultraspeaking and Vajrayana are like peanut butter and jelly because...?

Oct 09 2024 39 mins

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 thi

How understanding Vajrayana theory boosts Vajrayana practice

Oct 03 2024 18 mins

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 yo

Can enlightenment (or the complete stance) end suffering?

Sep 09 2024 12 mins

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&AsI’m

Transmitting ways of being, without dominance ploys

Aug 24 2024 46 mins

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

Wearing human bone ornaments

Aug 14 2024 6 mins

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-or

Buddhism, cybernetics, and cognitive science

Jul 27 2024 18 mins

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

Lineage and learning, with Max Langenkamp

Jun 11 2024 43 mins

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

Steam engine, startup, podcast, leaf devil

May 29 2024 58 mins

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 m