how to become ungaslightable

(the written-in-20-minutes version. feel free to ask questions in the comments below or on twitter if you would like me to unpack something or you try it and get stuck at some step!)

• in 3SED, my 3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue, self-validation is the step that unlocks curious listening
  • or “listen to yourself so thoroughly that you couldn’t possibly lose track of what you know”
• this idea of becoming ungaslightable also shows up in:
  • Passionate Marriage, as “self-validated intimacy”
  • a quote from Bessel van der Kolk, ~“healing from trauma amounts to learning that it’s okay to know what you know”
• but often people are like “how do you actually do that?” what do you even mean “listen to myself?”
• for learning this skill, I recommend solitude and a journal
  • however it’s often easiest to see what you need to do when you have a conversation handy
    • so you might use a difficult conversation that’s playing out over texts/emails/tweets
• go ahead and paste the thing they’re trying to say at the top of the page
• and then notice what arises in you that you want to say to the other person, to argue with them
  • and notice: there’s something they’re missing
    • ↳ that’s true.  there’s always something they’re missing
  • and notice: there’s something I know about this
    • ↳ that’s true.  there’s got to be something you know about this
    • (this situation, this misunderstanding, what matters to you here, what you’re defending)
• and notice that: whether or not they can agree with or even acknowledge the existence of the something that you know about it, or the fact that they’re missing something…  you still see it!
  • you might be confused about what it is, or how it applies to the world or to them
    • but you’re seeing something
  • any words you might put to it out loud might be arguable, misleading, or ultimately wrong
    • (you can address this somewhat with “I have a story that…” or “I don’t trust that…”)
• how to know if it’s working:
  • curiosity, not defensiveness: the ultimate way you know it’s working, as I write in 3SED, is that you can listen to what the other person is saying with full curiosity, knowing that anything that is really true, that you know, you won’t lose track of.  you trust that you won’t get pulled into a coalition that negates it.
  • “this guy totally gets it” when you look at your own writing. “yeah! it IS like that”
  • I’m ready to not pretend things seem to me other than how they seem: there’s an even simpler level, which isn’t about asserting that you know something, and more about being firmly honest about what you do not know
    • you know the feeling when someone is explaining something to you, and it doesn’t make sense?  whether from grade school math class or a coworker last week
    • and there can be some temptation to nod along and go “uh huh, yeah”
    • but…  you don’t get it.  it doesn’t make sense to you.
    • that doesn’t mean that what’s being said is wrong, but you can tell for yourself that it does not cause you to change from your current understanding: demonstrably!
    • even if you haven’t gotten to the bottom of all the details, backing yourself on this level can allow for groundedness and some curiosity
• doing it live
  • as I said, this is harder. I often signpost what I’m doing: “hang on, I need to take a moment to listen to myself here so I have any hope of listening to you”
    • if they won’t give me space, it might a sign they’re trying to mess with me, but might also just be that they have momentum and don’t know how to make space
  • then I go through the same motions, mentally or with writing, as in the journalling above

(another ~20 minute onepager. read the other posts written in this style here. for a further description of how this skill can help you listen to others and thereby get understood by them, read my one-pager on the 3 steps for empowered dialogue. to see more of how deep the magic goes, read the secret to co-gnosis.)

3 Steps for Empowered Dialogue (3SED)

• the problem: you want to convey your experience or model, but they won’t listen / they get defensive
• the underlying issue: they can’t take you in while they themselves don’t feel understood
• the solution: first listen to them thoroughly, so that they know they’re understood
• the problem with that: you can’t take them in because you don’t feel understood
• the paradox: they can’t hear you first, because they still don’t feel understood
• is there a way out of this trap?
  • one option that sometimes works is having a third party listen & understand (cf Carl Rogers)
• but suppose you don’t have a third party with sufficient presence, perspective, persistence, etc
• well, what what’s the root cause? why can’t people listen when they don’t feel understood?
  • what you’re saying seems to contradict what they know, so it doesn’t make sense to them
  • maybe…  they don’t trust that if they take in your view, they won’t lose touch with their own
  • it may not feel like it, because they may seem very aggressively confident
  • but if they were more grounded, they could more readily hold contrary views
  • …same goes for you!
• so if you could somehow build your own trust that you won’t lose touch with what you know, even in the face of something contrary, then you’d have another way out of the paradox!
• how would you do that?
• in short, you behold what it is that you know, about whatever’s at hand
  • and you reaffirm to yourself that whatever you know here, you really know
  • that all of that knowing is real, even if you’ve overgeneralized or misapplied it in some places
  • that you don’t have to let go of anything that’s real in order to take in something new
• you might find that you need to recurse, because you actually have multiple subsystems that are blocked with the same paradox, where it’s hard for something to listen because it doesn’t feel heard
  • you might also find part of you is bitter that the other person isn’t putting in this work proactively
    • fair! listening to yourself is a substitute for unblocking, but not for actual connecting
• but eventually, you’re ready to try another shot at listening to the other person’s view
  • and you give it a go!
  • and…  haaaa nope you’re still very defensive.
  • that’s okay! back up again: what are you defending?  how can you strengthen its clarity?
• eventually: wow.  you can listen to the other person
  • what they’re saying, it turns out, is of great interest to you, because it’s often something you’ve been unable to take in thus far, so it’s key information that you’re hungry for!
  • taking in their perspective may feel painful, but it also feels like a relief
  • it requires focused attention, but not force or effort
  • and maybe partway through you need to pause and breathe, to reaffirm that everything that you know is still real and part of your sense of things
  • eventually you’ve made sense of something that previously you weren’t able to make sense of
  • and you have something of an integrated sense of your view and theirs
• then…  you might foray into getting them to understand you
  • and if they once again get defensive, you go back to seeking to understand them
  • and if you once again get defensive, then you go back to reaffirming your own view
  • but as long as you both have the patience, you can reach mutual understanding
• in summary: 3 steps for empowered dialogue (3SED)
  • 1.  understand yourself so thoroughly that you have infinite space and curiosity to listen
  • 2.  understand the other so thoroughly that they have space to listen to you
  • 3.  get understood — what you wanted in the first place
• empowered, because you’re never a victim of their unwillingness to listen.  you always have a move.

(another ~20 minute onepager. read the other posts written in this style here. for a longer take on the 3SED process and how to DO each of the steps, read the secret to co-gnosis. for bullet-points specifically on step 1, read this one-pager on self-validation.)

making sense of “that makes sense”

• people say “that makes sense”, but what does it mean for something to make sense?
• to answer that, I’ll turn to another phrase: “my sense of things”
  • I, you, everybody—we each have a sense of things
  • this sense of things is our overall gestalt experience of what’s going on
  • all of our sense organs participate in constructing it
  • right now, I’m sitting in downtown San Francisco, and my sense of things includes the sounds of music playing, water rushing, a siren, and the sights of my computer and the fountain and street nearby
  • the mind, as the Buddhists note, is a sense organ, and it contributes all sorts of useful features to my sense of things, that I’m not perceiving with my other senses in the moment
    • my intentions for writing this post
    • my awareness that I only have a few minutes before I’m going to head to work
    • my spatial sense of the train station I just left and the sense that the trains are running today
    • the sense that my office building will be open when I get there
  • my sense of things is “reality, as it seems to me”
• so now, when someone says something, and it makes sense to me, what has happened?
  • what they said has affected reality, as it seems to me
  • when a friend coming over texts me and says “I’m here”
    • my sense of things now includes them downstairs at my front door
    • it’s not merely that I have some propositional belief that they’re here: reality, for me, now contains them being there.  kind of like a hallucination, but only in the sense that it’s not in a direct feedback loop with my eyes. all sense is inference.
  • this situation so obviously makes sense that I wouldn’t even bother saying “that makes sense”, although if someone who I thought was out of town texted me saying “I’m here” I might go “huh, what? that doesn’t make sense” and it’s fairly likely that they texted the wrong person.
    • in this case, my reality has maybe been jabbed in the ribs by this strange text, but I don’t just coherently imagine that they’re at the front door.
  • maybe I have double-vision though (as described in commongrounded vs chasmed)
• non-exhaustive list of ways things might not make sense:
  • too vague
  • seems like a lie, or you don’t trust their motives
  • you haven’t been given enough evidence for something to feel right just adopting it
  • someone says X, X seems to you to imply Y, and Y seems obviously false
    • ie when you try to let X affect your sense of things, it produces a conflict
    • this could be about a worldly fact, or someone’s motivation, or a law of nature
  • if someone reports something but you don’t trust their judgment (or perceptiveness), perhaps because they’ve given inaccurate but confident reports in the past
    • about observations of the world, or about other people, or eg someone saying they’ll show up, on time, and that has almost no effect on your expectations
  • if someone makes a claim using words you don’t know, it may not make any sense at all
• “I trust [person]” can mean:
  • “I let your words simply affect my sense of things, without sandboxing or guarding”
  • likewise, of course, with “I don’t trust [person]”
  • part of what trust between people is, is this kind of permeability of sensemaking

(this post was written in about 20 minutes, in the “onepager” genre: my friend Visa’s challenge to explain your thing rapid-fire. my others: Non-Naive Trust Dance, Evolution of Consciousness, Bootstrapping Meta-Trust)

Bootstrapping Meta-Trust

how do we bootstrap from trust we already have, to the trust we want to have to thrive (and need to have for problems we care about)?

[This post written in about 15 minutes, as part of my new experiment in Writing It Live!]

• full meta-trust = a relaxed ease about the possibility of sorting out any conflicts that might arise, in a way where the process feels to everybody like it’s respecting their sense of things the whole time
  • this enables talking about anything, synthesizing group wisdom, & learning well together
• start by recognizing the trust & distrust of the current situation, & being exquisitely honest about both
  • so if we consider a group of people trying to:
    • make sense of a big hairy problem
    • live together or be a healthy, supportive community
  • “boundaries”: the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously (Prentis Hemphill)
  • if we get too close, we’re demanding of ourselves and each other that we trust each other more than we do, which messes with our ability to non-naively listen to our trust functions
  • if we’re too far away, we’re not making contact with the actual trust challenges that we have, which means we aren’t encountering the real chasm between us
  • either of these results in bullshit and makes the key learning harder to do
  • there’s a zone of proximal development edge to surf here
• “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” (M. Aurelius)
  • respecting others’ distrust of you can be hard because it can be hard to get shared reality with them while maintaining contact with your own trust of yourself
  • respecting your distrust of others can be hard because it can be discouraging to realize that you can’t rely on them in some way that you’d like to…  and that therefore you need to:
    • step back from the relationship
    • or manage the interface more proactively yourself
  • however! in general, respecting distrust is a form of accepting that reality is as it is
  • but my distrust and your distrust are different, and so they can coexist
  • me trusting me doesn’t mean you should trust me, and vice versa
  • we have different trust systems, trust functions, and also different values/careabouts
• solve via induction 1 (n ➔ n+1)
  • consider a group of people with full meta-trust of each other: all conflicts seem workable
  • how do you add another person to that group, while keeping that property of full meta-trust?
  • it can’t happen all at once; it requires trust-dancing
  • it’s not just about the new person learning that they can trust the group
  • but also about learning whether and how to create such an interface that’s actually trustable
  • and the new person might need something that the existing people didn’t need with each other
  • eg for a woman joining a group of men: there might be aspects of trust (social or biological) that the men just haven’t had to sort out between them yet! but they do in order to include her!
• solve via induction 2 (increasing trust within a group)
  • okay but how do you bootstrap to a full meta-trust group in the first place?
  • same method, except with existing group rather than between group & newcomer
  • own the distrusts, and respect them—particularly whatever is relevant to the group being able to speak honestly with itself about the relevant issues (whether technical problems or the dishes)
  • and have humility about where the possibility of a solution might lie…  who has the opportunity to make what changes?
  • and be creative! try things, see what effects it has. make sense of it together
• the meta-protocol: there are some general principles that groups/people can align with that make trust-dancing work better, including recognizing (ironically) that there’s no right way to do things, only ways that work in a given situation! also transcending shame/guilt/blame, reward/punishment

For a much much longer take on the same question, with more examples and angles, read my mini ebook How we get there: a manual for bootstrapping meta-trust.

If you like one-pager bullet-list style posts, I have more:

• Non-Naive Trust Dance (the physics of trust)
• The Evolution of Consciousness
• my alternate intentionality philosophy/app, Intend

Evolution of Consciousness one-pager

Another “explain what you’re on about right now, in one breath, standing on one foot“, this time for the nascent field of EvConch. See the NNTD one here.

• I’ve been getting increasingly excited about conceiving of a field of study called “the evolution of consciousness”. I’ve seen a lot of people writing and thinking into this field, some of whom seem to be aware of the larger field and others who are just exploring a piece of it. As I see it, it’s necessarily also the study of evolution in general—not just biological evolution but:
  • cultural/memetic evolution
  • pre-biological physical evolution
  • thinking as an evolutionary process (which can be framed in terms of relevance realization)
  • evolution as a tautology: the fact that wherever you look you’ll tend to see mostly the sorts of things that are better at sticking around and/or making more things like themselves
• It’s also necessarily the study of what happens when evolution becomes aware of itself. As Tom Atlee’s Co-Intelligence Institute puts it:
  • > we are evolution — or at least one significant facet of it — becoming conscious of itself. Across many domains of society, life and spirituality, we are in the process of birthing ourselves as conscious evolution.
• The field draws on cogsci and other “scientific” sources, on history & religious texts, philosophy, and also draws from wisdom traditions like Buddhism and Christian mysticism.
• Necessarily, as a study of consciousness, most research in this field is aware that it’s not just third-person research but first-person: the study not of how things are but of how they seem, and the study of the “seeming” process itself and our relationship to it (and how changes in our relationship to it change it, as part of that evolution). There is no place outside consciousness from which we can study consciousness.
  • My particular research (the “Non-Naive Trust Dance”) focuses on inter/co-seeming; on the process by which things that seem one way to me and seem a different way to you can come to be seen in some shared way by us, together… and what gets in the way of that.
• Anyway, a rough sketch of the evolution of consciousness (so far!) as I see it:
  • at some point in the past, our ancestors were not consciousness of their own consciousness. they lived as much in flow with the dao as cats and lizards
  • then they developed language and memes, but (I suspect) these memes were at first entirely un-self-conscious and there were no double-binds (and perhaps in some sense no lies)
  • then, perhaps through biological evolution but more likely through transformational ritual that may have involved snake venom and apples, we developed recursive self-awareness
  • thus, from previous unquestioned oneness emerged dualism: the ego, which was previously a mediating layer between the id (animal urges) and superego (social expectations) became aware of itself and started identifying with itself and seeing itself as separate from others, and became aware of its choices and of the option to “be selfish” or “be altruistic”
  • at this point, a new kind of evolution started occurring among the superegos/memeplexes, to incorporate deception, shame, & blame to control large groups into behaving in coordinated ways (outcompeting groups that were unable to do this). “anti-rational memes” in DD’s terms
  • in parallel, various mystical traditions emerged for helping people re-access an experience of nonduality, but they were never able to be mainstream as they were too in conflict with the societal structures of the day. also some tried/try to go back to pre-consciousness modes.
  • phenomena like the scientific revolution shifted peoples’ relationships to their memes, creating an attitude of “we can figure it out for ourselves rather than take things from authority” (though modernity threw many babies out with bathwater in rejecting traditional wisdom)
  • at present, many people from many angles are exploring how to live in conscious relationship to memes/superegos, and build a new recursively-self-aware yet ALSO nondual society 

Malcolm, explain the Non-Naive Trust Dance right fucking now, in one breath, standing on one foot

My friend Visa challenged his friends to explain their thing rapid-fire style, and specifically DM’d me to ask me to do one on my Non-Naive Trust Dance framework. So I’ll write a 6th introduction or whatever this is now, and try to get all the way through the basics to the depths in about 15 minutes of nonstop writing.

• trust sure is important. it would be nice* if we knew the laws of trust-physics: in general what works and what doesn’t work for building trust. (* tbh it might be necessary for humanity’s survival)
• it’s tempting to try to build perpetual motion machines w/ trust (assuming trust in order to build trust) but this is impossible with the laws of trust-physics. but it seems possible (& awesome) to build engines!
• obviously trust-building is contextual. eg, in a tense meeting in Dune, a desert-dweller spits as a sign of respect (releasing precious water) and nearly gets killed when that’s interpreted as a sign of disrespect.
• so what can be said about trust-building in general? well, one of the most important things that CAN be said is that it’s extremely contextual!! and a remarkable amount follows from this, eg:
  • the only way to build trust with someone is by doing something that builds trust with them. however, they may seem to want you to do something that’s abhorrent or senseless to you, which you refuse to do. somehow what needs to be found is something that works for both/all parties. there is a remarkable open space of possibilities here if we can get out of the trap of being frustrated that our first attempts didn’t work as we’d hoped
• notice that the bolded line above is a self-evident statement; a tautology; something that’s true by definition. this is not a coincidence, because self-evident statements are another basis for building trust since anyone can confirm them for themselves (although of course we may have different interpretations of what the implications are, and that can get tricky)
• the central tautology to NNTD is “you can’t trust what you can’t trust” (this is kind of the same one as the previous). inherent to this idea is the reality, not quite a tautology but also pretty self-evident once you consider it, that different people trust differently. (different parts of people trust differently too).
• thus [me trusting something] and [you not trusting something] is not a contradiction in the slightest.
• what do I even mean by trust? a few lenses:
  • trust as an unquestioning attitude (from C. Thi Nguyen’s paper of that title)
  • trust as “what truth feels like in first person”
• things we call trust:
  • naive trust: an unquestioning stance because you don’t know what warning signs to look for
  • fake trust: ignoring warning signs in order to deliberately adopt an unquestioning stance
  • non-naive trust: an unquestioning attitude that comes from an absence of the relevant warning signs, or having investigated the warning signs and discerned to one’s own integrated relaxed satisfaction that they’re not a big deal (or that one could handle the situation if the issue did occur)
• when I use “trust” I’m generally referring to non-naive trust, which has a kind of robustness
• I generally think in terms of trusting situations more than trusting “people”
• there is a logic to (non-naive) trust and how it scales up:
  • if I trust a situation (eg this salesperson to not be scamming us) and you don’t trust it, then we don’t trust it
  • if I trust it and you trust it, but we don’t trust that each other trusts it, then we still don’t trust it
  • if we have common-knowledge of our trust, then we trust it
• there’s a thing it feels like for this sync-up to occur
  • as an example, have you ever made a decision and there’s a clear sense of “yes this is obviously what we want”?
  • by contrast, have you ever made a decision and you’re left feeling either that something you care about wasn’t adequately incorporated into the tradeoff process, OR you feel like someone else isn’t actually totally satisfied with it?
• in general, trust-building works via respecting that distrust contains the wisdom that allows trust to be non-naive (ie sane & robust) and finding a way to respect & dance with it, vs trying to bypass it. quoth Aurelius: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
• since trust ~= subjective truth, this process is literally perceiving the world together

Whew! Not quite one breath or one foot, but it was all in one go and it did fit on one page. It took more like 20 minutes though.

For slightly more uhhh edited introductions to NNTD or elaborations, you can check out these posts:

• Non-Naive Trust Dance—why the name?
• NNTD Q&A (six concrete-ish questions about relevance)
• NNTD pith instructions exploration (it’s mostly a dialogue with a friend)
• Internal Trust Dancing case study 2: scheduling & cancelling dates
• or any others under the NNTD category (which is most of my blog posts these days tbh)