Thread by @xuenay

Notes on Soulmaking Dharma, based on a conversation with my friend.

Epistemic status: had dozens of hours of lecture summarized to me in two hours. Summarizing that and adding own interpretations. Might get a lot wrong, don't really know what I'm talking about.

Soulmaking Dharma is a Buddhist practice mostly developed by Rob Burbea and Catherine McGee. This page has various additional resources, which I have not looked at. \:D/ reddit.com/r/streamentry/…

First thing to note is that Mainstream Buddhist (MB) practice focuses on reducing suffering. Soulmaking Dharma isn't about that; it's more about something like creating and understanding meaning. That may reduce suffering or keep it the same, but either way, that's not the focus.

What it does share with MB is a focus on "fabrication". That roughly means the interpretation of the world that the mind builds up. One's experience of the world usually feels like objective reality, when it's one interpretation out of many.

reddit.com/r/streamentry/…

MB goes into the direction of deconstructing the process of fabrication, and making you viscerally more aware of the fact that it's all constructed. Much suffering comes from ways of interpreting the world that feel like objective truths, so deconstructing them reduces suffering.

By going into deep meditative states, you can do things like having an experience of pure consciousness, with no objects of consciousness, helping you see how all objects are optional mental constructs. Or you can dissect your constructed experience of having a lasting self.

But you can't actually hang out in a completely deconstructed state all the time (and would you even want to?). All experience is fabricated, so in order to be alive, you need to fabricate _something_ - and you can't really choose not to.

So MB goes deep into deconstruction, on the theory that if you see what kinds of views maintain suffering and how they are fabricated, you will let go of them and instead fabricate something that causes you less suffering.

Okay great. So what exactly _do_ you fabricate instead, _besides_ it being something that causes less suffering?

MB as it's often practiced doesn't really have an answer to that. "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering." That's what its tools are for.

(Oblig. note: that "as it's often practiced" is an important caveat. Apparently the Buddha _isn't_ on record of "I teach only suffering and the end of suffering". But that's what many teachers attribute to him, and that's how things are often taught.)

tricycle.org/magazine/i-tea…

Anyway, Soulmaking Dharma tries to give you more tools for dealing with the question of "so what do you fabricate instead". My main takeaway was a conceptualization of experience in terms of eros, psyche, and logos.

Eros here means something like "wholesome wanting" or "wholesome love". It's distinguished from what MB calls "craving", the kind of unwholesome desire that creates suffering. In a sense, eros is something like "pure love", which can take anything - not just people - as object.

Psyche is the object of that love. It can be anything, from a person to an activity to an abstract concept. A mathematician can have eros to math, an avid gamer eros to a game, a person who finds honor important can have eros to the concept of honor.

There is an interplay where the nature of your eros is fabricated, but also not arbitrary. Math-eros is fabricated because not everyone experiences math in that way; it's possible to not love math, so loving it is something that your mind constructs.

At the same time, one's love of math cannot take absolutely *any* form: the details of what math is like, shape the ways in which a love of math can be experienced. Your love of math cannot take exactly the same character as your love of being honorable.

This also brings us to logos, which my friend described as a "conceptual view" that affects the shape of your eros. For example, you may view math as a literal language of the gods, or as discovering universal truths in a Platonic realm, or as something that humans construct.

Or if you are someone who loves the board game of Go, you might view it in terms of its connection to Eastern philosophy, or you might view it in terms of mathematical game theory. In either case you love it, but a different logos makes the nature of the eros different.

People's overall logos influences that which they feel is allowed to be meaningful. This comment is a nice example: many people may have a vague sense that there's something off about believing strongly in honor, because it feels unscientific, somehow.

lesswrong.com/posts/SWxnP5LZ…

If one person's logos is that all of existence is a manifestation of universal love, and another's is that the universe is a cold meaningless machine, the things that they feel eros towards are likely to be quite different, and manifest in different ways.

slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/uni…

I interpret one part of Soulmaking Dharma practice to merely involve making these things as the object of your investigation. What do you feel eros towards? How does your logos affect that? Does being aware of that, affect what kind of a logos you would _like_ to have?

One application is formal meditation practice where you work with various intuitive images that you may get, connected to the the psyche and logos of your eros. I interpret this as being closely related to felt senses.

lesswrong.com/posts/eccTPEon…

Another thing that was mentioned was that "your self becomes an image". The example of honor touches on that; you may have a mental sense or image of yourself being an honorable person, and experience eros towards that. And try to work on that image to get its sense more right.

As a more personal example, recently I've been feeling increasingly pulled towards the image of myself as a father with children. And in some sense that involves working with images of what that could be like.

Yesterday I wrote this thread of what I would like to do with my children. I might think of it as a kind of soulmaking, constructing an image that feels like it could become an object of eros.

https://twitter.com/xuenay/status/1362528145103028233

Of course, here's it's important to hold that image with a certain lightness, so that the eros doesn't turn into tanha (craving). You don't want this to become a fixed view where you suffer if it cannot be realized, or if it's realized in a different form than you hoped.

I made sure to work some of that into the image, by noting that if my kids actually end up finding the whole thing dumb, then we'll come up with something else together.

Possibly _some_ tanha is needed to have any experience at all. But you can try to keep it to a minimum.