Vivid Void

Tickets for the second annual Contemplative Hiking Retreat are now live! Join @WystanTBS and me for a 4-day backpacking trip this summer (7/11/26 - 7/15/26) in the Northern Colorado wilds. We'll hike, dine and meditate together, practicing both Tibetan and Zen contemplative techniques. We sold out in 24 hours last time, so get your tickets fast. Benefactor Tickets are $1250 and help us fund scholarships so that low-income individuals can also access the retreat. You can get those here: vivid-void.com/services-store… Standard Tickets are $800. You can get those here: vivid-void.com/services-store… Scholarship Tickets are a suggested donation of $400 to cover your costs, but we will consider your application regardless of your ability to pay. You can apply here: forms.gle/zVmkYk7akGnkL3…

The dedication ceremony for Nameless Mountain was wonderful. We took vows of stewardship, consecrated and burdened the center, and had a lovely, cozy celebration afterward. The center is dedicated! Regular programming begins the first week of June.

@FemCondition She's in Africa, one good rage bait post pays the bills

Gentle reminder that a woman who cleans the house is actually sacrificing nothing and would still have to clean her house if she didn't have a family.

@ick_real Account based in Kenya, paying the bills with rage bait

A gentle reminder that a man who goes to work to “provide for his family” is actually sacrificing nothing And would still have to work if he didn’t have a family

So they dropped the second half of my non-awakening series on the Waking Up app. You get 30 days free to check it out. link in reply

@sympatheticopp Gradient intimacy is human nature, it's only natural that its study should feature the same

psychology is anti inductive so the only possible way to preserve a theory of psychology long term is to talk about it abstrusely. lacan discusses this (if we could only understand)

@JimDMiller The taller she is the less she likes you

Given that women have a strong preference for tall men, and given that height is highly heritable, why hasn't evolution given men a stronger preference for tall women?

@neuroblossom @AlanWattsDaily lmao

@AlanWattsDaily get your hand off it wattsy. what about, kenosis, grace, revelation, quintessence, holy spirit, holy fire, agape love your work you little pisspot. rest in peace.

The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the experience of oneness with the universe. We have no appropriate word because our own Jewish and Christian theologies will not accept the idea that man’s inmost self can be identical with the Godhead.

@owenbroadcast @ClickingSeason You can recover the experiential flavor of the enchanted world, with rational understanding at hand when needed, by staring at a wall for an hour a day

part of the anthroposophical model of early childhood (what waldorf is based on), is that the child begins life in a kind of magic bubble, and that the time spent in this state is essential for their long term spiritual development. you can accidentally rush them out of this stage. the child goes through a process of recapitulating the stages of civilization itself: they eventually go through an egyptian stage, and become fascinated with writing, symbols, and what we think of as the hallmarks of that civilization. later, they go through an antiquity / roman stage, and become fascinated by building, laws (rules), and the things we think of humanity as generally acquiring during that time. later, the medieval, and so on. but at the start, the child is in magic world. this is occasionally referred to as “the garden”, as in the garden of eden, but i just think of it as fairy world, where the boundary between myth, story, imagination, and reality is completely fluid. taking this view puts you at odds with modern parenting in ways that you would not expect. a lot of parenting discussion online is about nutrition, discipline in general, appropriate punishments, homeschooling, giving them tablets - there’s a clear set of basic controversial topics. taking a concern about rushing the child out of this initial state and into the next one too quickly puts you at odds with other less obvious aspects of parenting style. the one i find most interesting is the conception of early childhood and learning itself that i see as flowing downstream from the modern scientific worldview. recently, i was at an aquarium. they have this large cylinder tank that you can walk around and look into. the walls are glass. in the center, there’s a (real) fish that’s huge - easily the biggest fish i’ve ever seen. a girl runs up and says, “wow, that’s a huge fish”. the mom says: “yes, it is a large fish, but just keep in mind that the glass is convex. when glass is bent this way, it makes things inside look bigger. but it is a big fish”. now, the kid asks, “so, it’s not a big fish?”, and the mom says, “well, yes, it is a big fish, but…” and reiterates the explanation about what convex glass is and what it does to your perception. in the modern scientific worldview, part of “becoming wise” is accumulating facts and that are not intuitive, and that undercut empirical perception. becoming educated means knowing these facts and having them at hand to make sure you’re perceiving things accurately - unlike someone uneducated, who wouldn’t know about glass distorting perception, and the finer mechanics of how and why that happens. this means that “passing on wisdom” and being “the wise elder” often amounts to passing on and dispensing these facts. here, the kid is looking at something - but has to be told: “don’t get the wrong idea. i, the wise elder, know something you don’t, and i’ll let you in on the secret.” there’s nothing wrong with this in and of itself, but it’s completely at odds with the world the child is presently inhabiting (in my opinion). the child is just in awe of a large fish. this is a total, magical, all encompassing spiritual experience - but the adult has to step in and take them out of it, to ensure that they’re giving primacy to a scientific perception. the adult, due to their model of what knowledge is, is constantly stepping in to jet pack the child out of their direct perception, into abstractions that have nothing to do with their inner world. once you notice this, you really see it all the time. i’m at the park, and a kid is hitting a log with a stick. it’s making a cool sound. he says, “dad, look at this”, and the dad starts explaining that sound is really vibrations, what vibrations are - bam: smash the eject button. the kid can’t just hear the sound: an adult has to step in and make sure that the experience of hearing the sound is being filtered through this paradigm’s conception of what knowledge, and life, “really” is.

"alignment grows out of the barrel of a gun"

Has anyone written about the post-alignment problem of how we will align humanity to an aligned AGI? Everything I've read supposes it will be self evident that we all fall in line but I don't see why we would suddenly cease to be plural, noisy and chaotic

@seashell_luvr Hell yeah

I am well aware that there is no benefit for a woman to be as opinionated as I am, truly doing it for the love of the game.

if you manage to unite desire & the law, you can have la petit objet a, said the name of the father i sure hope this doesn't have lifelong consequences, thought the child, structuring the soma into the symbolic order

@sympatheticopp Fantastic

@RomeoStevens76 @Thomasdelvasto_ x.com/i/status/19424…

@Thomasdelvasto_ Many buddhist aspirations are just the protestant tendency to desire the same impact as an inert dead body.

Many objections to this tweet over the years. Point was that kids learn energetic postures from their parents. It's about giving them a rich vocabulary, not never doing anything wrong. Implied parent didn't notice kids freeze response. Our emotional slack builds their slack.

@midwesterneur Do you ever seethe Jerry

“you know what it is, to seethe?” another beautiful turn of phrase

Good news: men already do half of all work within households! You can just calculate the statistics! All this data is public!

if we're friends I'd rather you occasionally ask me for forgiveness than frequently ask me for consent. the explicit consent check is a reminder we don't know each other well enough to infer appropriateness from context

@eigenrobot No fuckin way I'm noticing that. Have you ever seen how women take rejection

"why dont stupid men notice when women flirt" have you considered the possibility that they do and when they dont respond theyre just trying to let you down easy? that theyre simply not interested in you specifically. did you even ask for consent

@TalchionDalias Agreed

@vividvoid It's the middle which is unbearable. I (& suspect most) would be fine with being a cog in a machine,and total freedom if it were an option would be doable. But having obligations and expectations with none of the recognition or reward is unbearable.

There is no sustainable community or culture possible without a reasonable expectation of conformity. But almost everyone I see yearning for communal living and the lost commons simultaneously can't bear anyone telling them what they do At some point you will inevitably need to choose between freedom and devotion, which is to say, a wider or narrower freedom. If you understand fully the trade-off that you're making, your regret will only be a little wistful. But if you persist in the delusion that both are possible, you'll just continue to hop from place to place, partner to partner, group to group, never making a commitment, never feeling satisfied, subtly undermining and pulling apart every community that welcomes you as you go through life.

@romanhelmetguy There is a middle way

Stoicism is popular because apathy is the sickness of our age and stoicism glorifies it. Stoicism is cope for living in a dying society. Stoicism is managed decline. You need to become anti-stoic. You need to become so passionate it’s self-destructive.