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What Hacker News says
- I'd have my own share of experiences, so I'll take what you say here at face value. (Though there are a wide variety of experiences).
Given your background, I think you might find Christopher Wallis's Tantra Illuminated -- in particular, the chapter on the View of Tantra -- more sensible. Although it does not talk about wholes, centers, and unfoldings in those terms that Christopher Alexander does.
I think the key is in the non-duality of creator and creation. That within all parts are the Whole. I can't tell from the wikipedia page on Leibniz's monadology if monads are distinct from each other, whereas that stuff about wholes and centers point to apparent distinctions on a continuum that is the Whole.
- Before I scan the thread for inspiration, these are mine:
1. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; I have no words for this except that it was profound and I was ready for it.
2. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team; a classic where history knows better than we do.
3. Special Topics in Calamity Physics; a fictional tale that shows you how damn easy it is to get lost in conspiracy and speculation.
4. House of Leaves; you can't beat a mind-bending horror like that. I live for this stuff.
5. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse; It's 50 pages long, just read it.
6. Tantra Illuminated; A well researched and academic study into the history and the beliefs of Tantra
7. The King in Yellow and its derivatives; The Hanged King lore in the SCP universe is obsessively fascinating to me.
- Tangent: there's a great history on modern yoga ... huh, I forgot the title of the book. It is in my Kindle library somewhere. The book talked about how various yoga teachings came into America, starting as far back as Ralph Waldo Emerson. It also talked about some of the distortions of Tantra from India when it came out to the US.
Christopher Wallis's Tantra Illuminated has a section on the history of classical non-dual Shaiva Tantra, and how parts of it evolved (or perhaps, devolved) into the modern yoga, which then got imported into America.
- People's journeys are different, so what is insight for me or triggers a realization for me may not for you. Transformative experiences doesn't always happen in a book. I will add some non-book medias, but not all of transformative experiences of my life.
In my teens, I was all over the place. I was exploring some existential stuff. I probably could have benefited from talking to a transpersonal psychologist. These were three books that stuck out in my mind from that time:
Ken Wilbur's Brief History of Everything (this is Wilber's Integral Philosophy, and helped me know there are some framework to put seemingly competing paradigms and views into a coherent whole, as well as a few philosophical techniques to get my head out of my rear... somewhat)
James Redfield's Celestine Prophecy (kicked off a lot of things)
Robert M Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (I didn't know this at the time, but it spoke to me about what can be beyond subject-object duality)
In my early 30s, I stopped using books and media as a proxy for change and transformation, and journyed. Went through a lot, experienced many things that I had only read about. Lots of peak states. But coming back to ordinary life had proven to be difficult. That started the next era -- of embodying what I had found with those peak experiences in ordinary life.
Chris Wallis's Tantra Illuminated -- lots of view correction for me, helped untangled some things for me, particularly around working. I read this one within my first year of marriage.
Second year of marriage, I might have been able to work, but my marriage at this point was on the rocks. I had this book on my shelf for years and never really read it. When I read it, it was pointing out to me some of the deep stuff on why my marriage was failing:
Glen Mazis's The Trickster, Magician, and the Grieving Man.
This is a critical, honest look at toxic masculinity, and descriptions of alternate masculine archetypes; but not complete by itself, just made me wallow in anger and depression, and self-loathing. I could tell, it did not integrate well with the hard-won personal perspective from all those journeying earlier.
The next book that followed was one from last summer:
Crucial Conversations. (Four authors)
This book was very good to read following Mazis's book. It was very practical advice grounded in psychological research, yet very much in alignment with all the things leading up to it. It wasn't a pancea, but reading this and trying to apply it was probably the inflection point in my relationship with my wife.
In the past six months, I somehow got sucked into the orbit of one particular non-dual teacher by the name of Adyashanti. I usually prefer reading rather than listening, and with Adya, it was the reverse. I mostly listen to his stuff while washing dishes (and that seems somehow appropriate). There are some free podcast interviews with him (on different podcast series), and some of his retreat talks are also available for free. He has some guided meditation.
His talks and his teaching lineage is very direct. By that, I am talking about very directly pointing to the nature of being, of letting the world be _exactly_ the way it is. I don't know what kind of transformative experience you have, but whatever it is, if you're ready for this stuff, his words will speak to you. If you are not, that's fine too.
- There is a fantastic book on Shaiva Tantra written by Christopher D. Wallis, named Tantra Illuminated. The book covers the View (philosophy), history, and some practices. The View can get very involved. I've been mining that for a while, applying it to living in our modern world.
On Quora, there is a guy named Les Matheson who also wrote this fantastic essay on "authentic self". I think it is Les Matheson -- Quora is down right now, so I can't check my memory. It is a chapter he wrote for his book. He had dropped it in on his Quora blog and then removed it, said he was revising it. When I read it, it was a very clear discourse on what the authentic self, and how there are various stages in understanding that authentic self. Unlike Shaiva Tantra, which will have religious views woven into it, Matheson's essay does not (though I don't feel it mutually excludes the Tantric view). His essay starts with this idea of a single-piece puzzle. We usually think of puzzles as multiple pieces that you fit together to form something. But what about a single-piece puzzle? Where does that fit? Is our self puzzle of many pieces ... or a single puzzle piece? If it is the latter, what does that mean? This discourse goes from there -- is the self a box or light? Is it something you try to contain all the things you think of as "you"... or is it light, that radiates and shines?
To answer the questions you brought up from the perspective of my shamanic experiences -- yeah, I have found multiple fragments of personalities that are within. I've found that pieces of ourselves are scattered all over. They might come into greater or lesser influence depending on situations, circumstances, who you are with. Some of these are the rejected shadows (part of Jungian psychology). There are shamanic methods to deliberately get in touch with these, perhaps by bringing temporarily individuating them (similar to gestalt therapy). These can be facilitated by dream work, by drumming, or other means. Reintegration is not really straightforward as, hey, put these things together and somehow they will fit. But no single piece are really Self.
- I see that the author of this post is a woman. I wanted to write something about overworking and burnout as a result of our normative (but toxic) masculine archetypes (disclosure: I am a man; I have a wife and a step-daughter; I have burnt out twice in the past two years, the first time was really bad).
Last year, around this time of the year, I read "Tantra Illuminated", which changed how I view work (and overwork), and play. Tantra is not really that accessible to most people though, and it takes a long time to explain.
This year, personal crisis led me to the book, "The Trickster, Magician, and Grieving Man". Unlike "Tantra Illuminated", the book is very accessible, though it might evoke significant emotional resistance in men who attempt to read it. The book is a critique on the normative archetype of masculinity, and has a powerful way of explaining why overworking and burnout is appealing.
The book starts with the first chapter on the shadow archetype of unacknowledged pain. The rest of the first half of the book explains the consequences of the unacknowledged pain, with the latter half of the book explaining three additional masculine archetypes. Although the book covers a lot of ground, I'll narrow it down to just overworking and burnout.
Pain is the experience of something in the world imposing on your sense of self. The normative masculine archetypes is such that, we try to chose our pain (by being a hero). The reality is that we cannot control and master all that we see. Each of us is connected in a complex intertwining of relationships, both physically and emotionally. In order to achieve the perceived ideal of being untouched, and untransformed, the classical male archetypes tends towards deadening ourselves towards pain and cut ourselves off from the connections that pain is signaling to us. That pain doesn't really go away, and instead, accumulates as a rejected shadow-side of our psyche.
One of the things that happens after that is to the taking on of the burden of the world as a proxy. The strain of upholding something is substituted for becoming present to the pain we carry. It brings with it thrill, the exhilaration. We tell ourselves narratives such as, "I am doing this for you", but it is just another way of avoiding the pain.
Taking this to its extreme leads to violence and war, drawing in others into the maelstrom of rage in a fit to avoid that pain.
Burnout happens when you can no longer avoid the pain. It looks like external stress, but what it really is, is the accumulation of unacknowledged pain of living. It's not something you can move past (which was what led to that accumulation in the first time). Being present to that pain, and just letting it be, letting it speak, letting it unfold in its own time is the only way to recovery.
This whole thing goes deeper than that if you want to avoid the cycles of overworking and burnout.
