Mysticism 101, or: In defence of Natural Language DSLs
If you aren’t a coward, you should be getting signal from everywhere
Hello! You may have been linked here by another blog post. Please read this post before reading my more esoteric posts. Thank you!
What do I want to talk about on this blog?
I could do the usual tech blog thing of only sticking to things I’m extremely confident in and can back up with tons of evidence and proof. But this comes at a cost, in that it greatly restricts the kinds of things I can talk about. There are many very important things in life that are worth talking about that are simply not easy/possible to discuss in a completely rigorous/formal way. And in the past, I have gotten signal that there is appetite for me to talk about things on the “edge”.
In this blog, I want to be able to talk about very high signal things that are on the edge of rigor, dipping into the territory of “mystical” or “esoteric” (I’m gonna define what I mean by that in a second). I think these are extremely real and useful things to be thinking about, but they aren’t quite strictly true in the most narrow definition of the word.
There are high signal/variance things that are not (yet) well digested into a rigorous framework that allows it to be consumable without using high-risk “mystic” tools of communication. I want to talk about some of those things, knowing the risk that many people will misunderstand or bounce off what I’m talking about. C’est la vie.
If you want to risk some of the more exotic Expeditions to the Far Lands1, read this post to help you understand how I write such posts and how you can extract useful (or at least amusing) signal.
I will be putting my experimental posts by default behind a paywall, mostly to filter readership for people actually interested in the topic. These aren’t really meant for a mass audience.2
Some of it is science, some of it is fiction, most of it is somewhere in the middle.
Join me for the Expedition.
Rigor vs Signal
What is Mysticism? Well according to wikipedia it means “becoming one with God or the Absolute, but may refer to any kind of ecstasy or altered state of consciousness which is given a religious or spiritual meaning”.
I will now do what’s called a “pro gamer move” and ignore that definition entirely.
When I refer to “Mysticism” or “Esotericism”3, what I mean is something like “topics that are on the edge of rigor/science/sanity, neither necessarily wrong nor right, unformalized, with lots of sharp intellectual edges; and the tools and styles of communication related to them”.
As you may be able to tell, that definition itself is far from formal.
Language and Truth
The more right4 you want to ensure you are, the more rigorous and the more constrained your language needs to be, both in terms of what topics you talk about and what language/symbols/grammar you use to talk about them.
If you want to ensure you’re never wrong5, we actually have ways to do that!
It’s called Logic6, and is a fascinating topic I’m sure I’ll end up writing about sooner or later.
But as I’m sure you can intuit, using formal logic and writing formal proofs is a huge pain in the ass, and is very constraining. If you’d try to have a normal day to day conversation exclusively in a formal proof language, you would not get very far.7
There are simply many, many concepts we talk about constantly that are not very formal. And, as an unsurprising corollary, humans are wrong and miscommunicate constantly.
So if I restrict my language to rigorous things only, there will be a massive amount of real signal I cannot communicate to people. Try forming an emotional bond with people without ever using informal or vibes based communication, good luck!8
Getting Signal from Wrong Things
The further along towards the informal end of the spectrum we go, the more we will get “wrong” things, and especially wrong explanations.
There is a common “nerd” reaction to informal/esoteric stuff: Dismissing everything that is “wrong” completely, as embodied by the platonic “reddit atheist” that encounters e.g. the topic of theodicy and therefore concludes that the common monotheistic worldview cannot be correct (which is a correct inference), but then goes on to dismiss that there is any signal or information or wisdom to be had. This is, as we say in the business, “monumental cope”.
Obviously there is signal in ancient (or just “common”) traditions, social structures, history, practices, etc.9 It may not be the signal the practitioners themselves think it is, but, if you’re not an epistemic coward, there is a lot of things to be learnt.
As a concrete example, I’ve had certain back problems for most of my adult life, and have tried various forms of physical therapy for it, to little success. A little while back, I tried something called Rolfing. The explanation Rolfing gives for how it works is, to put it lightly, batshit crazy. It’s about “aligning the body’s energy field with the Earth gravitational field” or some shit like that. But, it made all my back pains go away and my posture has improved dramatically with no effort on my part.
So from this should we conclude that there actually is a “body energy field” that is being “aligned” to the Earth’s gravitational field?? Well, no, duh. But obviously something interesting is happening here.
Now we can argue about what the “actual” explanation for the phenomena is, whether it’s “placebo effect” or “they actually treat the fascia properly which almost no other physical therapy does, completely coincidental to the energy healing stuff”10 or “space aliens”, but you should be able to learn something and investigate this phenomena.
Or think of Buddhism. In Buddhism there are ghost guys with tiny mouths that are really hungry (???). But obviously there is a shit ton of signal to buddhism and meditation11 , tiny mouth ghosts notwithstanding. Buddhism is, in my humble12 opinion, such a fascinating marvel, as the arguably most serious attempt to actually study and categorize mental phenomena and practices in a prescientific framework the world has ever seen.13
Now that doesn’t mean the Buddhists necessarily have the right explanations for everything they do and say, but I would trust a Tibetan monk or Zen master far more to actually get my brain to an “enlightened” state in one piece (if that’s what I wanted) than any modern scientist. They obviously know something.
The Abyss Stares Back
There is a common trope that I’ve seen play out a number of times. It goes something like this:
Young person either grows up with no exposure to esoteric/religious topics, or grows up religious but rejects it.
Person becomes a fervent defender of atheism/science/rationality/etc.
As person gets older, they have some experience that cracks this perspective (psychedelic trip, witchy girlfriend, alt medicine success, cult indoctrination, atheists being very cringe…)
Person is so overjoyed to be a bit more “open minded”, and gets so much enthusiastic support from the “(too) open minded community” that they flip (horseshoe theory style) to believing all kinds of esoteric stuff.14
Person is now (permanently or temporarily) batshit crazy. Sad.
There is a cost to be paid in allowing more mystical reasoning into your epistemics. The more you move what you accept as “valid” to the mystical end of things, the less resistance you have to being wrong, being duped or just going crazy.
If you stare into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you. If you delve into the esoteric, the not-quite-true, then you will also likely start to become not-quite-true.
Of course, what this solemn warning15 really is, is a Deep™ way to say “Warning: skill issue”.
Unintuitively, formal proofs are really easy to not fuck up. Every single step is completely formal and well defined, there is no misunderstanding.
The further you go to the other side, the more Skillful you need to be to not fuck yourself up and go crazy. This is why most mystic traditions present themselves as “paths”16, where you start with the easier things first, until you’ve built the skills to handle the more advanced stuff without going crazy/getting confused and shooting yourself in the epistemic foot.
One principled epistemologist and 100 witches
There is another risk associated with discussing esoteric topics, which is that most people who are interested in esotericism are interested in it for stupid reasons, or more prosaically, are really just not very good at it. Or, even more prosaically, simply suffer from some form of mental illness.
So you get the effect that if you are a principled Expeditioner on your journey to figure things out and ground things in proper rational worldview as much as possible, you will quickly find yourself in the company of 100 people that are doing it because they like LSD, have very strong opinions about polyamory and the age of consent or stopped taking their antipsychotic medication recently.
This is the classic “one principled libertarian and 100 witches” problem. The more you stretch what you tolerate, the more you let in people who want to (ab)use that tolerance for less than good reasons, or that are just crazy.17
There is no general solution to this problem, just something important to keep in mind if you poke your head down these paths: Most people treading them are Lost.
Tools of the Trade: How I write esotericism, and how to read it
I use a standard “toolbox” when I write about esoteric topics.18 There (obviously) isn’t one true correct way to talk about these kinds of topics, and every mystic will have their own tricks and style. Here are some of mine that I will be using and will be important to understand in order to understand how I write esoteric stuff.
Tool 1: Binding Words and Natural Language DSLs
Words were made for man, not man made for words.19
What do words mean? Are their meanings independent of their context? Well, no, but also yes. We have these things called “dictionaries” that tell us what words are “supposed” to mean. This is all well and good, and in most scenarios, I am greatly in favor of using words to mean what the consensus says they mean. But…
English20 is really just not a very good language to discuss esoteric concepts effectively. It lacks so many grammatical constructs21, words and even punctuation I wish I had access to to express finer grained concepts.22
But alas, there is no perfect language. And this is a problem that crops up in formal languages, in particular programming languages, a lot, and one of the best ways to address this problem is the use of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs).
A DSL is a smaller, more specialized language embedded in a more general language, where some of the words can mean different things from what they usually mean in the more general language. This is common in programming, but also in all kinds of other fields, math being one of the worst/best offenders. The word “group” is a pretty common and very well agreed upon word meaning-wise, but oh boy does the meaning in math have ~nothing to do with what it commonly means.
This is often a great initial hindrance to learning higher math, where you have words like “Group” and “Knot” and “Ring” thrown around like they mean something normal.
And I want to come out in full defense of this behavior!23
We don’t have enough words in English to cover every possible thing we want to talk about in every possible context, and so I am fully in favor of “rebinding” words to new meanings in different contexts, and this is exactly what I’m going to be doing a lot of.
To do this, I will be mercilessly exploiting a degree of freedom that is left in written English:
Whenever I take a word that is normally lowercase and I instead write it as Uppercase, this is syntax for “this word has been rebound to some context-specific meaning”. Which also means don’t interpret this word in its usual way, read the rest of the post to understand what it’s supposed to mean!
Hey, look at me!
Hey!
Read that again!
If you link a piece of one of my esoteric posts that includes high context DSL words like this out of context, then -1000 aura cursed upon you! Read the whole damn thing or I place a hex upon you! May your life feed be cursed by the following of 1000 vengeful spirits AI bots!
DSL Syntax Glossary
Capitalization (e.g. “[...] they are Lost.”) = This word is bound to some other concept than usual, read the surrounding context to understand. Very often, it will deliberately be left undefined, in which case you are supposed to Think about what it is supposed to mean.24
™ symbol (e.g. “that is True™”) = Tongue-in-cheek. I’m joking/being cheeky about this word, don’t take it literally, I probably mean the opposite. Often meant to be mocking.
Triple quotation (e.g. “““the truth”””) = Big airquotes, not to be taken too literally, like I’m aiming at something high that I am obviously not actually reaching. Not meant to be mocking.
SpongeBob case (“e.g. bUt CoNnOr WhAt AbOuT [...]”) = I am mocking whatever hypothetical strawman is saying this. Imagine this being said in a really stupid and annoying voice.
Footnotes: I really like footnotes, deal with it.25 They are usually either extended elaborations that are optional for understanding, or more often just meant to be amusing/funny side observations/commentary. They should be taken at least one level less seriously than the main text.
This syntax is not Complete, in the sense that there will still be lots of vagaries of natural language, and many not-serious things will appear even outside the designated Silly Syntax™.
Tool 2: Pointing in Concept Space
What is the purpose of using all these funky words and esoteric stuff? What am I trying to do? (Pseudo-) Mechanistically?
I like to imagine there is a huge “concept space”, where every possible idea or concept is a point (or cloud of points) somewhere in this super high dimensional space.
A lot of science/formal writing is detailing a specific(-ish) point in concept space, laying out exactly where it is, what properties it has, what to do with it, etc. (One of) The purpose(s) of esoteric writing is to point to things26 that are not that crisp.
This can often look like me doing the conceptual equivalent of “Hey! You see this weird corner over here in your head? Haven’t ever thought about that area before, huh? Go poke around there!! I promise it’s worth your time!”
A common (and fair) reaction to this is: “Why don’t you just show me the thing you want me to find instead of dropping me off in the conceptual boonies and leaving me to fight for my conceptual life??”27
First, stop complaining, enjoy the free Travel. Second, here comes the Thinking Stick™!
The true answer is some mix of:
We have limited time
We have limited attention
We have limited patience
We have limited intelligence
You have limited trust in me28
We have other things we could be doing
Skill issue (mutual)
Constructing a fine, crisp, “memetic bootloader”29 that you can just drop into an arbitrary person’s head that then actually gets them to the idea you want them to get (instead of, say, a nearby, seductive but wrong idea30) is incredibly difficult, resource intensive, and sometimes just impossible. With more time, trust, energy, etc, a shittier bootloader can go further, but there is basically no limit to the amount of intellectual resources you could invest in better and better explanations/bootloaders.
Making people understand things is hard. It’s a miracle of memetic infrastructure that over generations we have discovered so many explanations for really complicated stuff that actually work pretty well.
Where we’re heading, we don’t have the luxury of well paved memetic roads, so vague memetic hand gestures and memetic maps-sketched-on-the-back-of-a-napkin will have to suffice.
Hope you’re good at Pathfinding!31
Tool 3: Funny Word
I like funny word. Funny word good.
I use many funny word when non-funny word could be use. This make me bad academic.32
If there is a “sane” option for a word (e.g. calling it an “explanation”) and an insane option that is funnier (“memetic bootloader”), there is a tight calculus that needs to be run in my head to convince me not to say the funnier one.
This is especially useful as a “memetic signpost” to demarcate stuff like “hey, this is crazy high temperature territory, bring Sunscreen.”
Also it’s funny, and people remember things better when they are funny.
Tool 4: Chekhov’s Koan
A lot of “““wisdom””” tends to be delivered in a form that seems to be optimized to fulfil the karmic obligation of being very, very annoying when told to young and Un-Wise™ people, only for it to serve as a very ironic Checkhov’s Gun later.
The archetypical piece of “““wisdom””” is a Deep™ sounding, almost meaningless little quip, a thing an old wisened master says to their protege with a twinkle in their eye and a bamboo rod to the apprentice’s fingers. And yet, alas, eventually that very thing the master spoke of ends up happening in an ironic and unexpected way, and The Student Was Enlightened™.
The best model I have for what is going on here is that the Wisdom is an attempt to pre-register a thing the Student has yet to learn, and that can’t be taught directly, so that when it inevitably Happens, the Student will Learn. Many things are sadly of this shape. Many things you just gotta learn the hard way.33
Wisdom of this shape works as a “a vaccine that doesn't (usually) prevent you from getting sick that first time, but prepares you to recognize and fight off the virus every time after that.”34 It’s a claim to the Student that “this thing you just saw wasn’t just some weird one off, it’s an Important Pattern, pay attention!”
I call this the “Chekhov’s Koan”.
Classic examples might include:
“The teacher appears when the student is ready”35
“The more you know, the more you realize you don't know”
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world”
“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried”36
“The fish is the last to discover water”
“The axe forgets; the tree remembers”
“To straighten the crooked, you must first do a harder thing: straighten yourself”
"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
“The palest ink is better than the best memory”37
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
“The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness”
“The map is not the territory.”38
All of these are extremely annoying/obvious/meaningless, until they very suddenly Mean A Lot.39
It might mean nothing right now for me to tell you:40
“Your learning is accidental” or
“If you only do what you like, you have no power” or
“If you don’t do something, it doesn’t happen” or
“It doesn’t matter what people say in private, it doesn’t exist” or
“You are not your brain/mind/body”41 or
“Don’t be stupid.”42
but I promise you, dear reader, if you keep reading43, and living a normal, dynamic life, that Chekhovian gun will go off sooner or later.
When you see me get very worked up about something that looks like an utterly irrelevant or bizarre detail, at least entertain the hypothesis that it might be a Chekhov’s Koan that will become important later in Act 3.
Just keep it in the back of your mind, for now.
Tool 5: It all adds up to normality
…and if it doesn’t, you fucked up!
In the Shamanic Journey44, you journey to the Underworld, discover all kinds of strange and wondrous Spirits, gain new insight and Wisdom, etc, and finally, the ultimate punchline is (spoiler alert): There are no spirits, there never were any spirits!! It’s just You, embedded in good ol’ Physics!
The ultimate punchline to all of esoteric knowledge (and all other forms of knowledge) is that it all adds up to normality.
At the end of the day, no matter how far you ventured into the Underworld, eventually you pop back up out of the other side, exactly where you started. Apples didn’t stop falling from trees just because Einstein supplanted Newton’s theory of gravity.45
If you acquire Deep And Esoteric Knowledge™ and this leads to a fully radical different conclusion for everything about reality where you have to abandon your family and live in a commune to communicate with the space aliens that live in the quantum realm, you fucked up.46 Retrace your steps and try again.47
If you ever come away from one of my posts with your mind so utterly blown that you rethink your entire life and reality itself, you almost surely fucked up somewhere. The Ultimate Enlightenment™ shouldn’t feel epic, it should feel like “huh, oh yeah, of course, duh”. If it feels Deep™ and Radical™ and Meaningful™, you’re probably still Confused.
Ultimate gnostic enlightenment should feel boring as hell, because it’s just seeing boring reality for what it boringly already boring is.48
Use this tool as a guidepost and anchor, to double check both your and my sanity.
Conclusion
Thank you for reading the Beginner’s Guide™, the Expedition49 begins now.
Hah, title drop!
I will put all my “normal” (usually AI related) content free to read for all.
“esoteric”, defined as “intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest” is in fact pretty close to what I mean.
In the sense of “if I say ‘X is true’, X actually is true”
Up to your choice of assumptions/axioms.
In particular for this blog, the subarea of Proof Theory.
Though I encourage anyone willing to try it to let me know how it went!
And how’s Berkeley this time of year?
Despite the best efforts of many incompetent adherents of said ancient traditions.
My preferred explanation. I have various schizo (read: not high confidence/not formal) theories about fascia and its neglect in modern medicine.
As I’m certain you have at least one very annoying friend to inform you of.
and correct
But honestly, even that’s selling it short, it’s so close to science as we understand it nowadays. Just look at how much Buddhists love naming, numbering and categorizing stuff with an autistic fervor that would make the most die hard entomologist proud!
Optionally, they move to Berkeley.
That any mystical text worth its salt must, by karmic necessity, contain.
Expeditions, even.
I am sure sooner or later you will be able to observe this effect in all its glory in the comment sections of some of these posts!
When you’re operating on the edge, you want to have the right tools for the job!
Though that is rich coming from a bunch of words…
And all other natural languages I speak, alas.
From just German alone (the other language I speak), (extensive) compound words and modal particles are features I miss dearly in English.
I especially wish we had finer grained constructs to express nuances of confidence and sincerity vs jokiness (as you will see, a lot of my custom syntax is devoted to this) and in general to do in writing what tone of voice does in spoken language. It would be so great if we had punctuation that expressed something like grades of confidence of a statement/sentence in a natural way, or whether something is meant to be taken seriously or not.
Yes, I know that if there was a thing in language that marks “this is a joke”, it would immediately render your jokes unfunny forever. Humor is unfortunately (partially) anti-inductive.
Won’t stop me from trying though.
Though I will admit I think higher mathematics is among the fields that is the worst at picking which words to rebind lol. “You see, the pre-sheathe forms a fiber-bundle in the field of the…” stfu nerd.
Can we like crowdfund to hire a scifi author/schizo to come up with names for new mathematics? We evidently cannot leave this in mathematicians’ hands.
[something something Koans]
ADHD Thoughts™ always come with extra cool, free, Bonus Thoughts™
or at least point in the general direction of things
See e.g. this post and its comments for a particular clear example of this kind of communicative trainwreck. Or my teenage self the first time I encountered a koan.
I, of course, have trust in you, dear reader.
aka “explanation”
A form of Antimemetics, the property of an idea/meme being resistant to being known. This is a lot less magical than you think it is, I promise you. The most common form of Antimemetics is just being very boring.
I am sure we’ll be talking a lot about Antimemetics in due time.
And if not, I’ll come pick you up again here at 8. Now have fun and just don’t get too lost, dear!
Thank god. Don’t know if I could live with myself if I had a d*gree.
Trust me, I run a software company full of extremely brilliant young people with marginal real world experience (and I used to be one myself). I know how it do be like dat.
Thank you to this very good blogpost for explaining this more elegantly than I could.
Unfortunately, binding this concept to the word “sazen” overloads that term in the context I want to use it in and isn’t nearly as funny/memorable as “Chekhov’s Koan”, so I am claiming eminent domain on the idea.
This one took me a while but sure hit me hard when it clicked.
Or the superior Zen Buddhist version, “The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”
Gee, it’s almost like those Zen guys actually know something!
I should win an award for my restraint on not immediately trying to autistically explain what each of these mean, even though, of course, that never works.
Sadly mine are not as refined and cool sounding as the old ones. Give it a couple centuries, I’m sure we can come up with better versions.
No, you’re also not some kind of magic soul thing, sorry to disappoint.
Or: “Being smart is hard, try not being stupid first.”
This line could be the entire blog (and most of my life).
and assuming I keep writing instead of getting distracted
My version of it at least.
If they did stop falling from trees when you learned about general relativity, you fucked up. I don’t know how you fucked up this badly, but you did.
Not least because the space aliens live in space, not quantum. Idiot.
Or take a break, you sound like you need it.
It may feel like a great punchline to an anti-joke, because reality is, in fact, a great punchline to an anti-joke.
“What did the man do the day after he achieved ultimate esoteric giga-enlightenment???” “Go to work and spend time with his family.”
expedition /ˌɛkspɪˈdɪʃn/, noun: a journey undertaken by a group of people with a particular purpose, especially that of exploration, research, or war.
K, I want More
Thank you for writing this - it has already helped me.