I recently finished a ten-day silent meditation retreat. It was often painful and occasionally strange, yet valuable in unexpected ways. It wasn't my introduction to meditation, though. For about five years, throughout college and for a year or so after, I had a 20-minute daily meditation habit. I quit about six years ago. When I first started, I experimented with a few different techniques, but I ultimately landed on a practice of breath-counting, where I would observe my breath coming in and out while focusing my attention on my lower abdomen. I would count breaths up to ten and then begin again at one, or if the mind wandered before I reached ten I would begin again at one upon noticing the mind had wandered. The practice helped me a lot initially, and I credit it with helping me develop much more empathy, likely because it helped me understand my own emotions better. I met a lot of other meditators along the way, many of whom had done one or more of these ten-day retreats and had positive things to say, so it's been on my radar for a long time to attend one.

Over time my practice became a chore though — just another task I felt I had to continue for the sake of maintaining my streak — so the practice eventually became very frustrating and I would often get off the meditation mat feeling less at ease than when I sat down. But the biggest challenge by far was pain. Sitting down on the mat cross-legged for just 20 minutes would often require shifting around every few minutes to manage the pain in my legs and hips. Kneeling or sitting on a chair was slightly better but still very difficult. And the problem was never flexibility. In fact, it was the opposite. I'm hypermobile, and I'll have more to say about that later.

I went into the retreat with a bit of knowledge of the history and ideas behind Buddhism. I took classes on the history of both China and Japan in college, in which I learned the high-level history of Buddhism's origin around 2,500 years ago and how it evolved as it spread outside of India. I don't know much about Buddhist phenomenology — the Buddhist account of how the mind works and the nature of conscious experience — but I have read Scott Alexander's review of the book Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. The book is written by an ER physician, and tends to attract secular, nerdy types like engineers, scientists, and psychologists. In Alexander's account, it reads like a clinical handbook, presenting Buddha's teachings as a rigorous procedure that produces a predictable sequence of experiences, challenges, and breakthroughs on the path to enlightenment. I also went into the retreat with some familiarity with the jhānas, discrete states of consciousness characterized by overwhelmingly positive sensations, typically experienced in meditation and likely described under other names by Muslim and Christian mystics such as Teresa of Ávila, who may have experienced them during prolonged states of prayer. Finally, I'm familiar with Michael Edward Johnson's theory of vasocomputation^[1]. The theory attempts to reconcile Buddhist phenomenology with human physiology. Johnson points out that the vascular system, made up of the heart and blood vessels, is much more than a plumbing system for blood. Whereas blood typically flows to areas of the body and brain in response to an increase in neuronal activity, some have suggested that blood flow often begins first, exerting fine-grained control over neuronal activity. Johnson points out that smooth muscle, which lines the body's blood vessels, can lock into a contracted position^[2] and precisely modulate blood flow in healthy tissue by a factor of 20 (i.e., by nearly 2,000%). In the brain this could lock an individual into certain patterns of thought and reaction, and in the body it could lock an individual into a specific pattern of motion. In short, you can clench anywhere in the body that blood flows. Reactions may actually begin as a clench in the vascular system that exerts control over the nervous system^[3]. If so, even thinking itself — grasping a concept or holding an image or a plan in mind — may be the mind clenching around an idea to keep it in place.

When one is badly injured, the body responds by increasing tension in the affected area to reduce motion and prevent further injury. This is adaptive at first, but if the pattern stays locked in place it becomes maladaptive, like the victim of a car accident who maintains a limp decades after their injuries have fully healed. This is why doctors advise you to move as soon as possible after an injury or surgery, at least within the range of motion that is manageable without severe pain, so that the associated pattern of tension doesn't lock in and permanently reduce the dynamic range of the body. Vasocomputation suggests that psychological trauma may also be a persistent pattern of maladaptive clenching. Again, this may be adaptive initially. For example, a soldier in combat is hypervigilant. Their attention narrows to threats, their body tenses at sudden noises, and they sleep lightly. This keeps them alive in a combat zone, but if the pattern locks in, it keeps firing when the threat is gone. Back home, a crowd watching fireworks might feel delight, awe, or mild annoyance at the noise, but a traumatized veteran may invariably brace themselves and duck for cover. In treatment-resistant PTSD, this kind of pattern stays permanently locked in, reducing the mind's dynamic range to a single response. Whether or not Johnson's theory turns out to be correct, it's a useful framework for understanding how we get stuck in patterns of suffering, and why it's so hard to get unstuck. It frames the mind in the language of the body. I thought of it often during the retreat.

The retreat was held at Dhamma Geha in Bali, Indonesia, a Vipassanā center in the lineage of S.N. Goenka. Chances are, if you're even a little bit into meditation you know exactly what I'm talking about. Goenka's network of Vipassanā centers is probably the largest international organization running Buddhist meditation retreats. There are well over 200 locations worldwide that run these ten-day silent retreats. Although Vipassanā simply means insight in the ancient Indian language Pāḷi, it has become synonymous with these ten-day Goenka programs. That said, it seems to be less of an organization than a movement. I believe most or all of the centers are run independently with their own nonprofit structure, though they all run essentially the exact same program. The Goenka tradition calls these programs courses, but most people know them as retreats, and I use the two words interchangeably.

Goenka, who passed away in 2013, was an Indian man born in Burma (now Myanmar), who began practicing Vipassanā in the 1950s and started opening Vipassanā centers in the 1970s. All of the courses at these centers today play audio and video recordings of Goenka as the primary form of instruction. There are also two so-called assistant teachers present, one for men and one for women, who attend all the meditations and are the main point of contact for questions and concerns about one's meditation practice — the course isn't entirely silent.

Before I get into the day-to-day of the retreat, a few quick high-level notes. First, everyone arrives on the evening of day zero, and the course concludes on the morning of day eleven. In this course, there were about 50 people in attendance, 25 men and 25 women. The course grounds are physically split down the middle so that you won't see members of the opposite sex except in your periphery in the meditation hall, where there are two entrances (one on each side), and where men and women sit on opposite sides of the room, all facing forward toward the assistant teachers at the front of the room. All participants at the retreat, also called students, take a vow of noble silence, meaning that in addition to not speaking, you don't communicate through body language, gestures, or eye contact with anyone except the course manager (again, one for each sex) or the assistant teacher, and only if necessary. The assistant teacher may also occasionally call you up to inquire about the progress of your practice, and the course manager may communicate with you if it appears you're experiencing some difficulty or if you are late to one of the required group sittings. As a result, I basically did not look anyone in the eyes, unless by accident, for the first nine days of the retreat — more on day ten in a moment. I had about five to six short interactions with the teacher and manager in total throughout the course, and occasionally could hear these same interactions from other students. This, in addition to ambient noise within and around the center, made for an atmosphere of isolation more so than silence. We surrendered our phones on arrival and also turned in all reading and writing materials, so there was almost nothing to do outside of meditating, eating, and sleeping. Students are asked to set aside all forms of prayer, worship, and other religious rites and rituals for the duration of the course, and to turn in any religious or spiritual items such as prayer beads, crystals, incense, and images of deities. On day ten, noble silence is relaxed so you can chat with your peers, and the dining hall partition is drawn back so that you can see and chat with the opposite sex during meals.

We each had an assigned seat in the dining hall, marked with a cloth napkin, so for nine days I ate one foot from the same two men without ever speaking to them. The meals were phenomenal. They were officially vegetarian, but I would be hard-pressed to identify any item that contained dairy or eggs. There was also very strong ginger tea on tap in the dining hall, plus tea packets and instant coffee with optional sugar and honey. The diet was effectively a low-fat and potentially high-sugar vegan diet, with lots of beans, tempeh, and tofu for protein, all cooked with minimal oil. There was also a lot of fruit and salad served at each meal. I don't have any dietary restrictions in my day-to-day life, yet I loved the food. We were served breakfast and lunch every day, buffet-style, generally with plenty left for seconds. Dinner, however, was only a small portion of fruit for new students and just lemon tea for returning students^[4]. I never went to bed hungry though, and I ate less and less each day. Meditating ten hours per day probably doesn't burn many calories.

Dhamma Geha is away from the tourist centers on Bali, but as I mentioned above, there was some ambient noise at the center. This came partially in the form of tropical birdcalls, a car horn or engine in the distance, and, about once every other night, what sounded like an extremely loud tree frog on the roof of the meditation hall, doing a single call that lasted about ten seconds^[5]. These noises didn't bother me, and I imagine most students appreciated the sounds of nature. The vast majority of the ambient noise, however, came from chickens and pigs nearby. I could see chickens in the lot next door, foraging on the ground below a bunch of banana trees, and based on the chicken noise I heard throughout the retreat, I would guess that most land in the area has a handful of free-range chickens on it. Ninety percent of the chicken noise came from the roosters, and they were active throughout the day. They were by far the loudest during the 4:30-6:30am morning meditations though, and if I recall correctly they were pretty much silent by the last two sessions of the day, from 6-7pm and 8:15-9pm. But the chicken noise was nothing compared to the pigs. My guess is that the pigs were fed twice a day, once sometime between 7-10am and once around 5pm. They would squeal loudly during these times but were silent otherwise. I'm no expert on pigs, but based on the noise I would assume there were about 20 living a few properties down the road on the male side of Dhamma Geha, and another 20 or so living much farther up the road on the female side. Bali has very sharp, parallel ravines that cut across large portions of the island, and most roads run along the ridges between them. Dhamma Geha backs up to one of these ravines, and as a result, sound can be a bit deceptive in the area, so either one of the pig farms I heard could easily have been much farther away or on the opposite side of the ravine. The smell of the pigs from the farm on the male side would typically waft in our direction in the morning, but was only especially bad on day four, when it drifted into our space before the 4am morning wake-up bell, and was so strong it woke me up through my open window. It really wasn't horrible though^[6]. Anyone with the resolve to do a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the first place should not feel deterred from Dhamma Geha because of the nearby animals. The ambient animal noise bothered me considerably less by day three and became almost irrelevant by day four.

On days five, six, and seven, there was some human noise coming from the ravine in both directions. On day five there was a party in the distance with a very enthusiastic MC, and there were also a handful of people singing karaoke, presumably from their homes. The karaoke continued on days six and seven to a lesser extent. Day five was a Monday night, and given that the MC at the party was speaking Indonesian (or Balinese), I assume that lots of locals take their weekend starting on Monday, due to the weekend-heavy nature of the island's tourism industry. I was happy the MC was speaking a language I can't understand, because even though most of it was unintelligible due to how far away the sound was coming from, if I had been able to pick out a word every now and then that I understood, it likely would have distracted me. Similarly, the karaoke was all Indonesian or Balinese. There may have been one or two songs I recognized (I'm 80% sure I heard All of Me by John Legend), but it was only by the tune. Since karaoke tracks are usually re-recorded sound-alike instrumentals, and since all of the songs were in a foreign language, they also didn't bother me. I arrived in Bali only 24 hours before the retreat started, but on day ten the other students in the retreat made clear that this little bit of chaos amidst the natural beauty is just how Bali is. And once again, none of this noise bothered me, and none of the other students said it took away from their experience.

Inside the Dhamma Geha grounds, the setup was simple. Each student had their own room, with a thin mattress (slightly less wide than a normal twin bed), a small shelf for personal items, a dehumidifier, and a mosquito net. It's the dry season right now in Bali, so I didn't need to use the net or dehumidifier. There was about two feet of clearance to the left of each bed and at the foot of each bed. This turned out to be crucial space, as exercise was officially permitted but not outside of our rooms, as it can be a distraction for other students. I did a lot of pushups and handstands in this two feet of clearance in my room, and I did a lot of core exercises on my bed. This was also the only space on the grounds where we could wear shorts. Elsewhere we were required to wear long, loose-fitting pants.

Beyond the rooms there were shared bathrooms on either side of the retreat center grounds, with plenty of showers and hot water. There was also the dining hall, the meditation hall (formally called the Dhamma hall), and a bit of walking space and grass between them all. Overall everything was simple. While booking my course I looked at a few other Vipassanā centers, and Dhamma Geha seemed to be pretty typical in terms of its facilities. There were a handful of centers in Thailand which looked absolutely incredible, with large golden pagoda Dhamma halls and lush gardens, but there were also centers elsewhere that were simpler than Dhamma Geha, with dorm rooms instead of a private room for each student. I'm sure it would have been awesome to go to a more beautiful center, but I don't really care. The value of the retreat was much more about the meditation techniques we learned than the physical setting.

I meant to take pictures on the morning of day eleven, when I got my phone back, but I was in a rush to catch the shuttle back into town and forgot, so below are photos I pulled from Google reviews of Dhamma Geha and from blog posts.

The daily schedule ran from 4am to 9:30pm. The schedule was posted every day on the outside wall of the dining hall, and a bell was played over a speaker system around the grounds ten minutes before each meditation session, and at the end of each session. The wake-up bell rang at 4am, followed by a ten-minute warning 20 minutes later for the first sit of the day. Typically meditations ran 4:30-6:30am, 8-9am, 9-11am, 1-2:30pm, 2:30-3:30pm, 3:30-5pm, 6-7pm, and 8:15-9pm. Lights went out at 9:30pm. All of the one-hour sits, as well as the final 45-minute sit from 8:15-9pm, were required group sittings, meaning we had to be in the meditation hall for them. For all other sessions we could meditate in the hall or in our rooms. There was always a ten-minute buffer on either side of the group sessions, meaning the 9-11am session actually ran 9:10-11am and the 1-2:30pm and 3:30-5pm sessions were also ten minutes shorter in practice. Breakfast was at 6:30am, lunch at 11am, evening tea break (with fruit for new students) at 5pm, and there was an evening discourse every night at 7pm, meaning we were in the meditation hall watching a video recording of Goenka explaining a bit of the theory behind the meditation we were practicing during the day.

If you're strongly considering doing a Vipassanā retreat in the near future, I recommend you jump to the last two paragraphs of this essay at this point. The rest of the essay contains a lot of my own personal experiences from the meditation techniques we practiced in the course, and I wouldn't want to bias your experience, or cause you to be searching out or expecting a set of experiences similar to mine.

Days one through three and the morning of day four we practiced ānāpāna meditation. The core of this technique was to observe the breath at the base of the nose and the upper lip while breathing through the nose and to return our awareness to this focal point whenever we noticed that the mind had wandered. We were instructed not to control our breathing, but to just observe the natural breath, unless we felt drowsy or were having a particularly difficult time focusing. Then we could do a few intentional breaths, so-called hard breaths, and then return to observing the natural breath. Early in the course, Goenka also set a strong prohibition on verbalizations and visualizations, including counting breaths, as I did in my old meditation practice. Since the ānāpāna technique is breath-oriented, I occasionally did slip into the habit of breath-counting, but I always caught myself by about the third breath. It happened infrequently enough that I never felt annoyed or discouraged. In fact, I felt very encouraged by the technique. In my old breath-counting practice I was also ideally observing only the natural breath, but in practice it was very hard to do reliably, perhaps because I was focusing my attention on my lower abdomen, an area which moves as a result of the breath. With the ānāpāna technique, however, I rarely found myself inadvertently controlling my breath. It's probably a good thing that I quit my old habit a number of years ago to give myself some time to unlearn the old pattern.

Ānāpāna meditation was not easy though. It was very hard to stay focused. At one point, either the evening of day two or the morning of day three, Goenka came on over the speakers at the beginning of one of the group sessions and instructed returning students that they should ideally be able to focus on their breath for at least one minute before they lose their focus and their mind wanders, and he said they should ideally notice within two to five minutes that their mind had wandered and return to their breath. This was super encouraging because by that time I was focused on the breath well below 20% of the time and I rarely made it to a minute of uninterrupted focus. I was able to pretty consistently return to the breath within five minutes though.

As the days went on I noticed my mind wandering to a pretty consistent set of themes. I thought a lot about money, women, and life plans — a lot more than I'd like to admit. I also thought a lot about AI. I landed in Bali only 24 hours before the retreat started, and while in transit, I read Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei's vision of a world with powerful AI, so in hindsight I could have anticipated the time I spent thinking about the topic in the early days of the retreat. I became a lot more bullish on the trajectory of LLMs^[7], realizing I've been in a bit of soft denial on the topic since it implies a highly uncertain future.

Instead of sitting with the uncertainty, at one point I felt like I had sorted out my life plans for the next few years. This was obviously not the purpose of the meditation we practiced, but the planning arose naturally in the moments when my attention drifted from the breath, as well as in the rest periods while we weren't meditating. I got excited about my plans. In the first half of the retreat I was hitting daily personal records for how long and how still I could meditate, which gave me a lot of confidence. The confidence spilled over and gave me the sense that I could achieve whatever I set my mind to.

Sometimes, my mind would just chatter in the background while I was still focused on my breath, something like having the background noise of the TV on while you focus on preparing a meal. Just noticing the chatter was usually enough to pull my attention away from the breath, at least momentarily, because it was exciting to notice the mind on autopilot.

I'd noticed mental chatter on autopilot a few times in my old meditation practice, but only sporadically. The frequency with which I noticed it during the course created a bit of distance between my sense of self and my thoughts, because it showed me how I'm not always actively involved in thoughts, the same way that the breath is usually on autopilot. It gave me the impression that the various themes of mental chatter have a strong influence on how I experience and interact with the world. That may seem obvious, but the direct experience of frequently noticing mental chatter on autopilot made the impression stronger, directly analogous to the way in which a default pattern of quick, shallow breathing is bound to affect one's experience with the outside world much differently than a pattern of slow, deep breathing.

Starting on the evening of day two I began to notice that some thoughts of a visual nature, like a memory or a visualization of some future action, would begin to warp. In the midst of reminiscing about some event, the visual aspect in my mind's eye would sometimes begin to elongate out, like a ball of dough being stretched out. Sometimes the memory would swirl, or stretch out to the point of incomprehensibility. Other times, only the individuals in these visualizations would warp, becoming totally out of physical proportion or developing a sort of cartoon or uncanny nature to their physical features. This happened infrequently and never continuously, maybe a couple times per day, and occasionally outside of meditation hours. I would not call these experiences hallucinations, as they occurred in my mind's eye, not my visual field behind closed eyes.

On day three, I felt a very slight rocking, like the sensation of being on a boat in very calm waters. I figured it could be an earthquake, but given the distortions I had begun to experience in my mind's eye, I figured it was just a mild sensory hallucination as a result of the meditation. On day ten, once we could speak again, one of the first things another student said was, "Did you guys feel the earthquake?" Turns out it really was one. There was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake a few islands away on Flores Island.

There were also a handful of times I may have experienced auditory hallucinations. A few times I heard a very fine ringing in my ears for a moment. I've read that this can happen as a result of meditation, and that it's really just very low-level tinnitus that one may become aware of for the first time as their focus sharpens, but I was never convinced that these weren't simply some noise emanating from the lights, speakers, or some distant piece of industrial machinery. There were two times that I'm confident I hallucinated a split-second, sharp, crackling noise, something like the sound of cracking multiple knuckles at once underwater. It happened a handful of other times as well with just a single pop, but in these cases I think it was more likely just someone's joint popping in the middle of a meditation session, something that happened a lot, especially at the end of a session as people were getting up from their mats and walking out of the hall. There was another time I heard the sound of ice filling a glass, like when a bartender scoops a bunch of ice into a glass before filling it with water. This was a pretty similar noise to the crackling sound, but it happened while meditating on my back in my room and feeling quite drowsy, so it was more likely a dream sound coming from the threshold of sleep rather than an auditory hallucination from meditation.

Goenka refined the ānāpāna meditation technique day by day. First we were instructed to focus on the sensations caused by the air moving in and out of the nose. I usually felt the air moving on my upper lip or right inside the inner ring of my nostril. We were also instructed to observe whether we were breathing through one or both nostrils without having any desire to change what was happening. I learned that I rarely breathe through both nostrils at once, and I breathe through my right nostril about 50% more often than my left nostril. By day three, we were directed to focus on the breath only until we could identify any concrete sensation in the same region of the face, like a tingling sensation on the outside of the nostrils, a throbbing on the upper lip, or an itch. Once identified, we focused on this sensation until it dissipated or the mind wandered, and then we would return to the breath and begin again. This practice was preparing us for the new meditation technique we learned on day four, which I'll discuss soon.

My focus improved as Goenka refined the ānāpāna technique each day. I recall one session in the afternoon of day three that may have been the most focused breath meditation I've ever experienced. I was typically only able to concentrate on the breath or some other sensation in the area of the lower nose and upper lip about 15% of the time, but this specific session felt like it could have been as high as 40%.

In spite of my improving focus, the odd but infrequent mental and sensory distortions, and all the mental chatter, the dominant feature by far at this point in the course was pain. I was in so much pain in every session, and I was adjusting my posture every 20 minutes or so, maybe 45 if I was lucky.

Pain while sitting was nothing new for me. As I mentioned earlier, I'm hypermobile. I have no diagnosed hypermobility disorder (of which there are a few, such as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and the more severe Marfan syndrome), but I have rarely ever met anyone more flexible than me. I can easily place the palms of my hands flat on the ground without bending my knees or curving my spine. As I have learned in the years since I quit meditating daily, hypermobility falls on a spectrum, and in most cases is thought to result from genetic factors affecting the body's fascia, a connective tissue throughout the body whose function is not yet fully understood. It is believed to complement the skeletal system in providing structure to the body. If one's fascia is insufficiently tense, as in the case of hypermobility, their musculature compensates. Generally speaking, hypermobile people's flexibility is not because they stretch so much. Rather, they stretch so much because they are hypermobile, as a way to deal with the higher baseline muscular tension they live with. This is 100% the case for me. One massage therapist I've worked with told me their best customers are all hypermobile. When I meditated daily, no matter how much I stretched I could never relieve the physical pain I felt while sitting on the mat.

Since quitting my old meditation practice, I've learned that mobility work relieves tension far better than stretching. If flexibility is defined as range of motion, then mobility is range of motion under tension, the difference between a passive and an active stretch. If you're hypermobile, your body actually relies on the tension you're passively stretching away, so it's no surprise when a passive stretch provides only temporary relief. Mobility work, on the other hand, builds strength throughout your full range of motion, so your muscles can hold the tension your body needs across a wider dynamic range, rather than locking into a constricted position that can pull an entire chain of muscles into a suboptimal pattern of movement^[8]. In practice, nearly any conventional strength exercise can be turned into a mobility exercise. For example, instead of a regular pushup, you can place your hands on blocks so your chest can sink below the level of your hands, building strength at the very end of the range of motion.

Calisthenics has been my main way of training mobility for the last five years or so. When most of your exercises are limited to your own bodyweight, you're forced to slow down, increase reps, or increase range of motion in order to make any given movement progressively more difficult. Had I not been training mobility for years beforehand, I don't think I would have been able to make it through this retreat with a manageable level of pain. I still experienced a lot of pain, but it was much less than I assume I otherwise would have felt.

Beyond the higher baseline tension that comes with hypermobility, two large areas of my body are especially tight. The first is on my right side, from slightly above my right hip in my lower abdomen and lower back down to my right toes, affecting every muscle group in between. The second is on my left side, from my left hip up to my left shoulder, predominantly in my left oblique, back, and shoulder. The tension on my right side traces back to a sledding injury when I was twelve that compressed my lower spine, leading to mild sciatica and an impinged nerve in the area of my lower right groin, possibly the femoral nerve, where the iliopsoas (the main hip flexor) extends from the pelvis to the femur. It's the same kind of locked-in pattern as the longstanding limp of the car accident victim I mentioned earlier. The tension on the left side may just be a pattern of clenching primarily due to hypermobile instability.

On the mat, the pain was intense in both hips and both knees, as well as my upper left back and shoulder, but it was the worst along the clenched muscles of my right leg. The straighter I kept my lower back, the more the impinged nerve in my lower right groin would fire up, creating the sensation of being pinched an inch below the skin, surrounded by a burning sensation that radiated slightly into my thigh. My right calf and my right quad, right next to the knee, felt clenched the entire time, not able to fully relax. And my knees on both sides felt like they were twisting, especially on the right side. I was meditating cross-legged, and typically the leg on the top would feel more twisting in the knee and the bottom leg would rapidly fall asleep, causing a dull ache in the lower leg and ankle. There were two types of cushions in the meditation hall that we could use however we wanted to on top of our meditation mats: a larger, roughly 10-by-15-inch cushion for sitting on and a smaller 6-by-8-inch accessory cushion. I experimented with both at the beginning of each session, adding more cushions to sit on and trying a smaller cushion or two below my knees and thighs or in between my upper and lower leg, but no specific position seemed to help much. I also tried kneeling once but had to switch back to cross-legged mid-session because it hurt my right knee so much.

Because of the pain, day three and the morning of day four were the hardest of the retreat. I didn't feel too discouraged though. My peers were clearly experiencing a lot of discomfort as well. It was fun to see how everyone's cushion setups evolved day by day, especially in the earlier days. There were more and more cushions on everyone's mat each day and a few guys had to move from their assigned spots to the back wall to give their backs some support. There was one woman who moved to a chair, and I believe there were also one or more on that side of the room who moved to the back wall. In the spirit of the retreat and the atmosphere of isolation it creates, I generally didn't glance around the room unless by accident. My assigned spot was in the back row though, so it was hard not to see how the other guys' setups evolved.

The focus of the retreat was on practice, and Goenka repeatedly said that the theory of Buddhism is not useful without the practice. Goenka did, however, share a bit of theory each night in the evening discourses, as well as a number of parables, both modern stories and ones from the time of Buddha. The most heavily emphasized bits of theory were introduced by day two. The first was Dhamma, the Pāḷi word for law, Buddha's way of speaking of a sort of natural law that governs the world of matter and mind and that, by extension, implies the right way to live. Buddha is said to have discovered, not created, Dhamma. There was an emphasis throughout on just doing the practice and letting Dhamma handle the rest, like a way of saying, "Don't think about it too hard, just do the practice and see the benefits for yourself". According to Goenka, one of Buddha's core teachings was that any practice that does not produce benefits now and in the future cannot be true Dhamma. The second heavily emphasized bit of theory was on craving and aversion. Most people with a little bit of exposure to Buddhism will have heard of these terms. Craving and aversion are considered the root of all suffering, misery, or unsatisfactoriness, called dukkha in Pāḷi. Ignorance of the true nature of reality is considered the cause of craving and aversion, and insight, gleaned through meditation, the remedy. Dukkha applies to all living beings, not just humans. When we react to experiences with craving and aversion, it generates saṅkhāra, which Goenka describes as grooves carved in the mind, some like a groove in sand, easy to eradicate with a bit of work, and others much more difficult to eradicate, like grooves carved in stone. The more we react with craving and aversion to the same kinds of stimuli, the deeper these grooves of saṅkhāra are carved. Each pattern of craving and aversion is its own saṅkhāra, cut by our reactions to its associated stimuli, so a single mind holds a whole stock of them at varying depths. When we stop reacting they begin to wash away, and the mind begins a process of purification.

I thought deeply about these concepts in the many moments of rest throughout the retreat and when my mind wandered during meditations. At a high level these ideas fit well with concepts from modern neuroscience and with Johnson's theory of vasocomputation. First of all, craving and aversion translate well to the way we talk about muscular effort. Suppose, for example, that I gave you a small slice of delicious chocolate cake, and as you were halfway through it, about to take the next bite, I snatched the plate off your table. Chances are you can feel the craving you would feel in that moment, as if your mind is trying to pull the cake back into your possession. As another example, imagine you just changed a baby's diaper, didn't wash your hands, and now you're eating a burger and fries. You can probably feel the aversion, as if your mind is trying to push the food away. Disgust is the most intuitive form of aversion. It is as if your mind wants to push the offending person or thing entirely out of your field of awareness. So craving and aversion are like pushing and pulling. In both cases, the mind clenches in response to an experience, in the same way you can imagine physically clenching in response to seeing a snake, losing your balance, or looking over the edge of a cliff. It's not obvious how all of these forms of clenching generate suffering, though. On the contrary, it's obvious how these patterns are adaptive biological responses that increase our likelihood of survival. This is an important point. It suggests these patterns exist in all animal life. Therefore Buddhism's method of purifying the mind is not a way to return to a more pure form of nature, but a way for the mind, through awareness of itself, to overcome its own programming. It is a pathway to overcome our biology, and it's not something available to other life forms. In this sense, Buddhism may have been one of the world's first transhumanist philosophies.

Because the connection of craving and aversion to suffering is not always clear, many prefer the translation of dukkha as unsatisfactoriness. If, for example, you accomplish something difficult and find that it isn't nearly as satisfying as the journey along the way, you're not obviously suffering. You might immediately start craving the next accomplishment, though, and that would make the current achievement feel unsatisfactory, not miserable.

The connection of craving and aversion to suffering is clear in many cases, though. Consider envy. It's sort of a push and a pull. It's not just the feeling that one ought to have something that someone else has, but also the feeling that that other person ought not to have it. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) seems to have the same push and pull. A thought arises, like the possibility of a burglary or a house fire. The mind resists it, appraising it as a meaningful threat. When the thought persists, the mind goes into threat-resolution overdrive, grasping for an impossible certainty that the threat has been neutralized. The person checks the lock for the tenth time or leaves a social function early to check if they left the oven on. Eventually they develop an aversion to the triggers themselves, avoiding cooking or rarely leaving the house. But like the instinctive reaction to losing one's balance, it's not hard to see how these patterns also may be adaptive, or at least may have originated as an adaptive response to an insecure environment.

As a child, I was a bit obsessive-compulsive. Like a lot of kids, I didn't like stepping on cracks in the sidewalk. But for me, it was really uncomfortable. While walking to elementary school down the cul-de-sac I lived on, it took me two steps to cross each patch of sidewalk. This meant I was always stepping over the cracks with the same foot, and this, too, made me uncomfortable. So I would intentionally switch my stride occasionally until it felt like I had stepped over roughly the same number of cracks with each foot. I typically walked through a field for the next leg of the journey, but if it had rained hard recently or there was deep snow in the field, then I would take another path on a different stretch of sidewalk. That stretch of sidewalk had variably sized patches of pavement, and this annoyed me because it took a lot more concentration to feel out roughly how many cracks I was stepping over with each foot. I knew my behavior was at least a little bit strange, so I would avoid looking too directly at the sidewalk around friends. Though I was never diagnosed with OCD, obsessive-compulsiveness is an old pattern for me, and later I'll discuss how it appeared in the retreat.

In addition to envy and OCD, psychological trauma appears to be a form of suffering generated by extreme craving and aversion. Consider the child who experienced emotional neglect or abandonment from one or more parents and now keeps their distance in close relationships as an adult. They may also choose romantic partners with similar traits to the parent who harmed them, in an unconscious attempt to change that person's behavior, or become loved by that person, to prove to themselves that the neglected child is now lovable after all. One part of them is resisting, running away from the insecurity associated with intimacy. Another part is craving for the security of being a lovable person. The threat of their insecure childhood is frozen in their psyche, and they're stuck in patterns that helped them through that time of life, before their brain was developed enough to even conceptualize the injustice of what was happening to them. The patterns were once adaptive. Now the threat of their insecure childhood is long gone and the patterns have become maladaptive. Their efforts to resolve an unsolvable threat that no longer exists often strengthen the maladaptive patterns of behavior. Recall the well-known saying in neuroscience: "neurons that fire together wire together", as in the drug addict whose addiction becomes stronger every time they indulge it. This sounds almost identical to the idea that continued craving or aversion in response to the same kinds of stimuli carves the grooves of saṅkhāra deeper, making them progressively more difficult to eradicate. If Johnson's theory is correct that the mind and body can literally lock into these maladaptive patterns, then it may truly be a form of clenching that generates our suffering.

Psychological trauma is rarely, if ever, purely psychological. It often has a physical component, like a child who grew up walking on eggshells around an unpredictable parent and now has a permanently clenched jaw. This is the core argument of psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk's bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score. Van der Kolk argues that trauma is not just a memory problem but a physiological one, and therefore must be addressed in the body in addition to the mind. Somatic therapy has grown rapidly in recent years as a complement to talk therapy and has become something of a trend, with plenty of practices that draw criticism for drifting into New Age woo-woo. Popularity alone doesn't settle the question, but the core idea shows up in everyday experience: even mild psychological tension, well below the threshold of trauma, manifests in the body, like workplace stress you feel in the neck and shoulders, anger you feel in your chest, or rejection that makes you feel sick to your stomach. In other words, it appears that clenching in the mind has its counterpart in the body.

I believe the same is true in reverse: physical clenching, whether it restricts motion or produces it, has its counterpart in the mind, like a forced smile that generates a real improvement in one's mood. Forced laughter works the same. Beyond smiling and laughing, consider the person who plays sad music so that they can cry. For them, the cathartic release of grief lies in the physical act of shedding tears. Or consider the person who punches a pillow when something frustrating happens. Do they punch the pillow because they are angry, or to feel their anger? Either way, their anger almost certainly increases in the midst of the punch. Many of the words we use to describe someone who lacks the ability to feel or express one or more emotions hint at the same connection. Words like stiff, rigid, frigid, callous, closed-off, guarded, and buttoned-up all carry the connotation of reduced motion. It's not always clear which direction the relationship runs between motion and emotion. When a loved one or friend is struggling, we don't tell them "just be happy" or "just relax", but we do often say things like "just keep your chin up" or "remember to let your hair down". Maybe these are simply ways of communicating our desire that they be happy and free from stress. On the other hand, maybe they're part of an unconscious recognition that going through the motions can provoke the emotions associated with them. Perhaps this is all no different than saying that physical patterns and mental patterns are tightly coupled, so activating one activates the other. But in that case, you could just as easily say that they are functionally two parts of the same system. Vasocomputation suggests the vascular system exerts control over both, so that, fundamentally, they may be the same pattern.

My sense is that when one is physically injured, their emotional patterns at that time become fused to the physical ones, and the body may more readily activate these pathways in similar physical or emotional circumstances in the future. For the victim of a car accident, the way they physically clenched their body during the crash may be tied to the fear of annihilation they felt in the moment, the extreme uncertainty they felt in the minutes and hours after the fact, or the grief they experienced in the weeks and months following. In the future, when external circumstances force them into a posture similar to the one they assumed during the crash, they may more readily feel the fear and grief that the crash provoked. Similarly, when they experience future moments of fear or grief, their body may reflexively activate the same pattern of physical clenching, linking new events of a similar nature to the core physical trauma of the crash. If these mental and physical patterns of clenching are so tightly coupled, it stands to reason that working on one works on the other by extension. It would not surprise me if the victim of a car accident, while working through their physical symptoms years later, could more readily access the fear of annihilation they felt while bracing their body during the crash.

I've tried a lot of things over the years to deal with my physical tension, especially the clenched chain of muscles on my right side, frozen in the pattern that first emerged in my sledding accident so many years ago. In a few cases, while stretching or getting a massage, I've experienced two or more memories of a related emotional nature rise to the surface of my awareness. Some were memories from around or shortly after my sledding injury, including memories of struggles with close friendships. When these memories arose, simply feeling the hurt feelings they came with had a clear and direct effect that reduced the physical tension I was feeling in the moment, and these experiences had lasting positive effects.

These experiences relate to the work of Stanislav Grof, the pioneering researcher of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Grof, a Czech psychiatrist, began using high doses of LSD with his patients in 1956, years before its use was banned globally. He emigrated to the US in 1967, and later developed Holotropic Breathwork with his wife Christina Grof. Holotropic Breathwork is a prolonged breathing practice that can evoke an intensity of experience similar to a high-dose LSD journey, but in an unquestionably legal way. In his work with altered states of consciousness, Grof developed the idea of COEX systems (systems of COndensed EXperience), upon observing that many individuals would simultaneously, or in rapid succession, re-experience a series of memories bound together by a shared emotional quality or physical sensation, like claustrophobia, a fear of death, freedom, or unconditional love. He also observed that as difficult material surfaces, one's tension, or suffering, often intensifies before it releases.

Grof's subjects reported re-experiencing biographical memories from their own lives, as well as previously inaccessible memories of birth and even past lives. I'm not here to argue that anyone can actually remember their birth, or that past lives are real. But I have little doubt that Grof's subjects genuinely experienced what felt like memories from birth and past lives. When an American man recalls the life of a Chinese woman from a thousand years ago with the same weight and texture as a memory of his own childhood, to him it feels like a past-life memory, even if some quirk of cognition or neurology better accounts for it. Goenka spoke of past lives a handful of times during the retreat, probably the most controversial idea he raised in the course, and he described the grooves of saṅkhāra as carved over many lifetimes. Someone who takes rebirth seriously might read Grof's findings as those grooves reaching back across lifetimes. But even if we set aside birth and past lives and look only at the material of a single life, Grof's COEX systems may be one way the grooves of saṅkhāra manifest in the mind. These grooves are carved by similar or identical reactions to a closely related set of stimuli, and as a byproduct they bundle those experiences together in the psyche.

Perhaps one of the things that Buddha was pointing out was that when we have an entrenched pattern of clenching, we have to develop a new relationship to it, or more specifically, we have to change the way we react to that pattern's triggers before it can dissolve, like the traumatized veteran treated with psilocybin mushrooms, MDMA, or ayahuasca, who re-experiences the violent death of their close friends, but in a lower-reactivity state of mind, and has the opportunity to create a new relationship to the experiences they lived through, rewriting the stories they tell themselves about what happened and why. In the strictly Buddhist sense though, the goal is not to write a new narrative. It's to stop reacting with craving and aversion. A new internal narrative may be much better for living a happy and healthy life, but it may still be the product of a craving to once and for all make sense of a confusing reality. Perhaps the new internal narrative and the new pattern of healthier reactions represent a weaker clench or a much shallower groove of saṅkhāra than the old pattern, but I imagine that Buddha might find it is still the product of the fundamental nature of our mind, reacting to experience with craving and aversion, albeit in a more subtle way.

By day three, just as my pain levels were really ramping up, Goenka began to speak more about non-reactivity in response to the experiences of meditation. At the same time, it was becoming clear that there was no good reason for my legs to be in so much pain. My legs and knees were not actually under excessive strain. The pain was due to the way my legs and hips stayed clenched in response to the position they were in. Once I saw that my legs weren't in any real danger, I realized that all the squirming, readjusting, and clenching in my lower body were just forms of reacting with aversion to the pain. This realization was a turning point for me in relation to the pain. Although I couldn't always maintain the ānāpāna meditation for the full duration of every session, especially the 90-minute and two-hour sessions, I stayed on my mat and focused on not clenching in response to the pain. I would rock back and forth or clench my jaw, just to keep my lower body relaxed, and it helped a ton. Despite rising pain levels during meditation, I felt better and better every time I got off the mat, to the point where I was feeling lighter than I ever have. But there was no single cathartic moment of release, just incremental improvements every time I stepped off the mat. Even then, the pain was still there, but my relationship to it was changing.

The first meditation of day four, from 4:30-6:30am, was absolutely excruciating. By the end of it I was biting one of my small pillows and rocking back and forth so far that my head was nearly touching the ground, but I kept my legs relaxed, and I felt incredibly light when I got off the mat. Throughout the course, Goenka would chant in Pāḷi at the end of all the group sessions for about 5-10 minutes, and for about 20-30 minutes at the end of the 4:30am session. By the end of this particular session I was shouting in my head for the chanting to be over. It felt a bit like the way you might curse or clench your opposite fist when you accidentally pick up a hot ceramic mug, in order to keep the hand holding the mug relaxed while you set the mug back down, rather than reacting with the burning hand, dropping the mug, and creating a much bigger problem for yourself. In other words, you clench elsewhere to avoid clenching your hand. You can also think of getting a massage, while the massage therapist digs into a large muscle like the back of the thigh, and you bite a towel or squeeze the sides of the massage table to avoid clenching your leg in spite of the pain, because you know intuitively that there will be no relief if you can't keep your thigh relaxed while it's being worked on^[9]. During the excruciating meditation, I thought it might have been one of the most painful things I've ever experienced, and on reflection later, considering I have never broken a bone or had a serious or life-threatening injury, I realized it was probably the most pain I've ever felt. The incremental release of tension continued throughout the rest of the course, and from the late morning of day four through day seven I was totally cruising, feeling amazed by the results of the meditation. Crucially, we learned a new method of meditation in the afternoon of day four, and I coincidentally discovered my optimal sitting posture immediately before the first session with the new technique.

The new technique was Vipassanā meditation, the name of the course itself. Vipassanā is a body-scan meditation. We were instructed to focus our attention on one region of the body at a time and observe whatever sensation, or lack of sensation, exists there and then move on to the next region. Buddhism in general, and Goenka's tradition in particular, emphasizes the spectrum of gross to subtle or gross to fine sensation, gross sensations being those that are more intense or easier to sense, like anger or an itch, as opposed to slightly subtler experiences like the sensation of airflow over the skin or the feeling of impatience. By the time we learned Vipassanā meditation, we had already been training to move our awareness along this spectrum of gross to subtle in ānāpāna meditation, moving from awareness of the entire region of the lower nose and upper lip to a single nostril, to a singular point of sensation somewhere in the area, if possible. We trained along the same spectrum in Vipassanā meditation, starting by sensing larger areas like the whole face or the whole head, and moving on as soon as we felt any sensation anywhere in the region, then eventually observing finer and finer areas like a single earlobe. As for the areas where no sensation was present, so-called blind spots, we were instructed to keep our awareness in the area for a minute or so and then move on, ideally not craving for a sensation or becoming upset if none arose, just observing that reality as is.

With my new pillow setup, I had five cushions to sit on, and in front on either side another five of the smaller cushions pointing slightly outward for my upper legs to rest on. I sat with the soles of my feet facing one another on the ground, slightly beyond the front edge of the mat, halfway between a butterfly pose and sitting on a stool, with another big cushion on my lap to rest my folded hands on, one on top of the other with the inner edges of my thumbs touching each other. In this posture my legs would still fall asleep sometimes, but much more gradually than while cross-legged. My new sitting posture and the act of moving my awareness around the body were game changers. My awareness would still jump around the body inadvertently to some degree, but it was nothing compared with what I experienced during ānāpāna meditation, where my attention would constantly jump from the lower nose and upper lip area to whatever area of the body was currently in the most pain. The pain was still there, but I was much more capable of letting it be and not reacting to it. When we broke silence on day ten, I learned that the new technique had made a huge difference for many others too.

During the Vipassanā meditation instructions, Goenka began to discuss non-identification with the sensations that arise in meditation, letting them simply be sensations. This was a very light introduction to the well-known Buddhist view that the self is an illusion. Goenka would say, "no I, no me, no my", nudging us toward the observation that there is pain in the knee rather than my knee hurts. This was about as deep as he ever went on the idea of no self. He reminded us a handful of times throughout the course not to identify with sensations, but only went deeper one or two times in passing during evening discourses.

In order to sense any part of the body, it was almost a necessity to first visualize that part of the body. You can experience this for yourself if you try to sense some part of your body you rarely think about, for example the middle of your spine or the outside of your left ankle. I quickly realized that I naturally began to visualize touching each area of the body as I moved my awareness along, and this was the beginning of a strange, multi-day journey into the depths of what it means to be right-handed — not at all what I had expected from a ten-day meditation course.

First, I noticed I was visualizing touching each part of my body specifically with my right hand. I was also able to observe sensations more easily on the right side of my body in general, and I had more blind spots on the left side. As far as I know, Goenka's earlier prohibition on visualizations and verbalizations still held while we practiced Vipassanā meditation. But it wasn't totally clear. Goenka had specifically disallowed practices like reciting a mantra or visualizing the face of a god one is devoted to, which may be especially common among students in India, where there are a lot of centers. A mantra or an image of a god isn't a neutral object. It carries all the associations one has built around it, including how one wants their god to be, which may bring a subtle craving to the practice. Visualizing a part of the body seemed different to me, really just a means of locating sensation. Regardless, there was no explicit prohibition with Vipassanā meditation, and the fact that Goenka himself calls the areas that lack sensation blind spots is a pretty big clue that most people have to first visualize a part of their body in order to sense it.

Looking back, this right-dominant asymmetry mirrors the patterns of tension I described earlier, the chain running down my right leg and the one from my left hip up to my left shoulder. I suspect both are at least partially related to being right-handed and growing up playing sports with a very handed nature, like baseball and tennis, rather than sports that move both sides of the body equally, like swimming. Years of favoring one side may have shaped not only how my body holds tension, but how my mind pictures the body.

One of the first modifications I made to my body scans, then, was to visualize touching each region on the left side of my body with my left hand, and even occasionally scanning my entire body with my left hand. This was harder and slower, but it helped bring some sensation online on my left side. I also began to notice at this time that these visualizations existed predominantly on the right side of my field of awareness, somewhere behind and slightly above my right eye. The spatial nature of these visualizations only existed in the same sense that when asked where you exist, you likely have some idea of a spatial characteristic of your sense of self, somewhere in your head or chest, such that if you lost a limb, your sense of self would travel with the rest of the body rather than the limb. Biologically, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, so by no means would I say that these visualizations exist in the right side of my brain. I simply noticed that they exist on the right side of my field of awareness, again somewhere behind and slightly above my right eye. Furthermore, I also realized that these visualizations were typically of my body as viewed from my right side, as if my right eye had moved one meter to the right and then turned to the left to view the body, so even though I was visualizing using my left hand to touch each region of the body, it was as if the right side of my field of awareness still owned them. If I needed to visualize the left side of my body, I would just rotate my body 180 degrees while still viewing it from the right side of my mind's eye, rather than changing my perspective to the left side of my mind's eye. I've had this realization before in a weaker form while visualizing calisthenics movements I've worked on. For example, I might visualize myself doing a pullup as viewed from my right side before grabbing the bar and doing a pullup. Now, though, it was clear that I visualize myself from the right in nearly every situation, and that it's actually difficult to see myself from the left in my mind's eye, so I began to intentionally move the visualizations of the left side of my body into the left side of my field of awareness somewhere behind and above my left eye, and I also began to hold those visualizations in the left side of my mind's eye, as if viewed from the left side of my body. This visualization practice was a tough challenge, though it brought even more sensation online. It remains much more difficult to do than my right-dominant mode of visualization. I practiced this both in meditation and while exercising in my room during rest periods. An unexpected result of this retreat is that my handstand got steadier, purely because I started visualizing myself doing the movement as it would look through my own eyes, or even as it would look from the left side of my body, rather than always unconsciously defaulting to visualizing it from the right side of my body. It got me thinking that going forward, it might be useful to add a short body scan to the warm-ups of my workouts.

By day five, it would take me about 20-25 minutes to complete a full scan from head to toe while remaining mindful of my method of visualization. On day six, Goenka instructed us to attempt to scan the body symmetrically, sensing the left and right sides of the body simultaneously, for example to sense both ears, shoulders, or knees at the same time. This introduced a new challenge for me: to hold two different visualizations in mind at once, or to hold a single visualization directly in the center of my field of awareness, jointly owned by the left and the right. An odd experience began to arise in response to this. If, for example, I visualized the left and right sides of my back simultaneously, split down the center of my field of awareness, the left side of the visualization would sit slightly askew of the right side, like splitting a painting down the center, and moving the left side slightly higher, then rotating it 5-10 degrees toward the viewer. It was frustrating to notice that the faculties of my mind are not perfectly under my control. I imagine this experience is something like 0.1% of the difficulty that a severely autistic individual, with very poor motor control and limited speech, may experience on a day-to-day basis. I've heard that in some cases of severe autism, an individual may completely lack the ability to visualize their body, and my limited struggle in meditation gave me some empathy for how frustrating that must feel.

With Vipassanā meditation, it was clear almost immediately that my mind wandered less, simply because it had more to do. But it was also clear that my mind would sometimes wander while the body scan was still running in the background, albeit with a much lower level of awareness. When my mind was focused and the body scan was running in the foreground, I continued to notice mental chatter on autopilot. I noticed that the mental chatter had a spatial nature in my field of awareness, though it was less stationary than the default location of visualizations behind my right eye. It moved around somewhat, but was almost always slightly on the left side of my head, on average 65% of the way to the back of my head. A visualization seemed to fill a small region in my field of awareness, its size depending on what I was visualizing and from what perspective. Mental chatter, by contrast, seemed at any given moment to sit at a single point in space. There were a couple times my mind wandered and I caught myself in a moment recalling some past action I had taken involving speech or imagining some future one, and I noticed the visualization of myself was in the default location behind and above my right eye, while the speech component was simultaneously somewhere in my field of awareness in the left hemisphere of my head.

At this point in the retreat I had developed a few ways of dealing with the wandering mind. When I noticed the mind had wandered, in my head I would say "That's okay" or just "Yes" as a gentle acknowledgement that indeed the mind had wandered. Then I would return to the practice. Often, I would also visualize myself with my hands on my heart, the way you would when you empathize with someone who shares a personal struggle they're dealing with. I call these mental devices: tools that gently slow the currents of craving and aversion. Crucially for me, all three devices helped me generate a subtle sense of compassion for myself in the moments I had noticed myself failing at the practice. Here's an example of what it looked like:

the mind wanders

"I should do [fill in the blank] after this retreat is over."
"Heck yeah, what a great idea."
"Time to start planning this out."

noticing the mind has wandered

"Shoot, I'm distracted."
"Am I getting worse at meditating?"
"Damn, I'm getting worse!"

noticing the mind is still distracted and visualizing my hands on my heart

"That's okay."

the mind returns to the practice

Realistically, my mind would typically wander for one to two orders of magnitude longer than it does in this example. Yet, this very short example still contains at least two discrete moments of craving and at least two discrete moments of aversion. Again, Goenka disallowed intentional verbalization and visualization in our meditation, so verbalizing "yes" and "that's okay" and visualizing myself with my hands on my heart may have been technically out of alignment with the core technique of Vipassanā, but I felt confident enough in their utility to continue on with them. My sense is that reactions of craving and aversion come so fast and in such quick succession that the beginner is only equipped to notice them at the gross level as patterns over time — what I refer to as currents. Mental devices help slow these currents once they've been noticed.

Occasionally, though, it's possible to catch a single reaction as it forms, because there is a gap between a sensation and the mind's response to it. Johnson puts a number to it in the opening paragraph of his vasocomputation paper. He notes a delay of somewhere between 25 and 100 milliseconds between a sensation and the craving or aversion that follows. Perhaps the highly trained mind can notice this gap consistently, but at least for the beginner, I imagine it's quite rare. It happened to me three times during the retreat.

The first was on day seven while I was walking out of the meditation hall after the 1-2:30pm sit. The meditation hall sits on the second floor of the main building on the grounds, above some of the students' rooms. There are about 15 steps up to the entrance, and it faces the dining hall where the filtered drinking water is. I had developed a habit of walking down the stairs and straight to the faucet immediately after each meditation, then splashing water on my face, taking a small drink, and dripping some cold water down the back of my neck to wake myself up. This was especially useful in between back-to-back sittings. On this particular occasion, I was looking at the ground, and a few moments after walking down the steps I looked up at the dining hall. I noticed I was less than halfway there, and an instant later a negatively charged judgement took form in my mind. It had no verbal component to it, but it roughly translated to the feeling of too far!

The other two instances happened during meditations. One was when a rooster crowed, and a split second later my mind grabbed onto the concept of chicken. The other happened when a bird flew close to the window and the echo of its fluttering wings sounded like a person shuffling quickly behind me. My mind first jumped to the concept of person moving behind me and a split second later jumped to bird near window. Neither of these latter two cases had any verbal component either. They were like the mind grasping the concept itself, the way you can briefly hold in mind the idea of gratitude without saying the word in your head or picturing someone feeling it. When the bird flew by the window, I didn't perceive the two judgements (person moving behind me and bird near window) as building on one another. It was as if they were independent processes fired at or near the same time in my brain, and one took slightly longer to return a result, the correct result of bird near window. Perhaps the mental pathway of person behind me has evolutionary reasons for running quicker and occasionally returning false positives.

My reaction to the first case, while I was walking to the water station, was clearly an aversion, but it's not clear how my reactions in the other two cases could lead to suffering. Never at any point in the retreat was there discussion of judgement, or the way the mind labels, orders, and characterizes its experience. The focus was fully on craving and aversion, but on multiple occasions in the past I've encountered Buddhist literature and teachings espousing the idea that the judging mind is the same part of the mind generating craving and aversion, for example "This course is good", "That person is bad", or "If I do X I'll gain notoriety". In the latter two experiences (the rooster's crow and the echo of the bird's wings), my mind's reaction seems like a neutral judgement of what the thing was, so maybe Buddha was only teaching a method to purify the mind of judgements with a positive or negative charge, as they are perhaps the ones made up of craving and aversion. On the other hand, perhaps at a very subtle level my judgements in both cases were a manifestation of a craving for order and control, the inherent evolutionary necessity to make sense of the world we live in. That said, if this really is the case, and Buddha's path leads to the cessation of this feature of the mind, then I'm not sure how he himself would have recognized his own acquaintances.

Questions like these remind me of ideas from Daoism (also spelled Taoism), the ancient Chinese philosophy that later evolved into China's folk religion. Its founder, Laozi, likely lived around the same time as Buddha but about 500 years before Buddha's teachings reached China. Once Buddhism reached China, the vocabulary of Daoism was used to translate Buddhist concepts, and to this day Daoist concepts have a strong influence on Buddhism in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. This type of functional translation happens all the time, matching the most closely associated concepts between two languages. Early Christian teachings, as they spread to the Greek-speaking world, adopted some of the vocabulary of Stoicism, and even in the modern day, when Buddhism reached the West, we used Christian terms as translations of Buddhist ideas. For example, we call a Buddhist individual who lives in a temple and meditates all day a monk, and we call the head of this temple an abbot, both concepts from Christianity that most closely fit the cloistered, reclusive nature of religious fellows dedicated to intensive internal practices. All of this is really a story about the limits of names, which is where Laozi begins in the foundational text of Daoism, the Daodejing:

The way that can be spoken is not the enduring way.
The name that can be named is not the enduring name.
Nameless, it is the origin of heaven and earth.
Named, it is the mother of the ten thousand things.

I've always read this as a critique of the judging mind, as if pointing to a recognition of the fact that in reality, behind every rooster's crow there is a unique set of vibrating particles — never again to be expressed in the life of the universe — arising and passing away in the present moment, but the mind clenches to identify and categorize every sensation into a named experience ("the ten thousand things"). Maybe even naming is a subtle form of craving, and it somehow cuts us off from the divine, cosmic nature of the present moment ("the origin of heaven and earth"). Perhaps this is the insight Buddha was pointing his followers toward: an embodied recognition of reality as it truly is. That's only a guess, though, and it never came up at the retreat.

On day eight, Goenka spoke of the benefits one might experience after returning to the world, and he used the example of a day ruined because of some unfortunate event in the morning, saying that what may have caused you to stew in anger for eight hours before may only bother you now for six, and that's two hours of your life back. This, to me, says clearly that the job of the beginner truly is just to notice and slow the currents of craving and aversion at the gross level, rather than to notice each individual microclench of craving or aversion in response to sensation. The beginner might still carve the grooves of saṅkhāra, but less deeply than before.

This is exactly what mental devices help the beginner with, like saying "that's okay" to oneself when the mind has wandered. My guess is that mental devices come with a cost, though. A verbalized mantra or a visualized deity isn't a neutral object, and perhaps no mental device is. If even naming is a subtle form of craving, as the Daodejing seems to suggest, then it may be there are no neutral judgements. Every word, image, or idea would be a persistent, subtly charged clench with its own groove of saṅkhāra. A mental device is a bundle of them, so using one repeatedly may carve a groove of its own. But that groove would be relatively shallow, and for the beginner, trading a strong current of craving and aversion for a weak one seems like a good deal. It's like filling the trunk of your car with gas cans. The weight of the gas itself will reduce the car's gas mileage, but if distance is your goal, the gas cans will carry you a lot farther than a single tank.

These devices exist everywhere, and in many cases they are deeply embedded in our cultures. Consider the idea that God is the final judge and that we cannot know the content of another person's heart. True or not, if one believes it, they might more easily catch themselves in a moment of adoration or disgust toward another person and more easily stop themselves from carving a deeper pattern of attachment or anger toward that person. Then there is the idea of taking your burden — whether it be relational, psychological, or physical — and placing it on an altar, giving it up to a higher power. You may still hope that it goes away, but you accept it may continue, because you've given up responsibility for it, trusting that your higher power will do with it as it sees fit. This means you can stop reacting to all the ways it manifests in your life. If it manifests, so be it. You have peace about it because it's no longer under your control, and perhaps it never was to begin with.

As I write this, I'm looking out over a rice field from a warung in rural Bali, a modest restaurant run out of a family's home. I'm the only customer here, and I spent two US dollars on lunch and coffee. The family's father just returned from the temple, told me to treat his home as my own, and offered me an assortment of treats that were just used in a religious offering. This food is known as lungsuran, food given to the gods, returned as a blessing, and often shared. Say what you will about his belief system, but it's hard to deny that a ritual like this appears to train generosity, so that the grooves of saṅkhāra carved by the currents of greed stay shallow.

Even entire psychological frameworks can act as mental devices. The field of psychology famously has no single view of the universe. It has many competing theories of how the psyche works, and I would argue that most fall into the category of useful-but-not-literally-true. Consider the psychological framework Internal Family Systems (IFS), also known as parts work, which suggests one is not a single self but a collection of selves (i.e., parts), and that at any given time, one of these parts sits at the fore, like when a family reunion brings out old patterns of one's teenage years. IFS is a weaker version of Buddha's claim that the self is an illusion. It says that there is simply no single or constant self. Whether IFS is ultimately correct doesn't change the fact that it's useful. Suppose someone has spent years carving the patterns of their work-self with long, intense hours at the office. That part craves efficiency and control and recoils from anything unplanned. When that self comes to the fore at home, it pushes back against a partner's spontaneity and can ruin an evening. With parts work, they might catch themselves and think, "Oh, that's my work-self", and just naming it can be enough to slow the current of aversion. Parts work can also naturally engender self-compassion, which slows a second current: aversion toward one's own reactions. If one views oneself as made up of multiple selves, they're more likely to treat each part as they would others, with basic respect and courtesy, rather than meeting the work-self's reactions with more resistance. Imagine a hired porter on a wilderness expedition. Just as they clench their body while hauling baggage, a proponent of IFS clenches their mind while hauling around the concepts and ideas of the framework, each having a psychological weight of its own. But ultimately, these concepts and ideas keep them from carving the grooves of saṅkhāra as deeply as they otherwise would.

About eight years ago I spent ten days at a Catholic monastery in Big Sur, California. The monks there spent their days praying, singing, and performing the Eucharist. But mostly they prayed. One of them explained to me that dogma, despite its bad reputation, is a tool on the path to union with God, something one uses in order to eventually go beyond it. For a Catholic, this is a bold statement, though it has deep roots in the church's mystical tradition. At least as his tradition sees things, the Catholic dogma is a set of beliefs that point one in a direction of transcendence, where, amongst other things, the concept of belief itself becomes irrelevant. In my own words, it's like a hiking trail. It may subtly cut you off from the raw essence of the wilderness, but it gets you into the woods to begin with. The backcountry isn't typically at the edge of town. To reach it, you often have to start on a trail. Some mental devices may work this way, as shallow grooves of saṅkhāra worth carving so that one day they, too, can be left behind, like empty gas cans on the side of the road.

Buddha, at least as he's rendered by Goenka, was a puritan about mental devices. Say, for example, that you find yourself in a deep pattern of aversion in meditation. A quick petition to your god may help you find the strength to stay calm in stormy waters. Perhaps even just a brief visualization of your god could do it. But to Buddha, it apparently didn't matter how helpful this might be, or whether or not your god is even real, because, as I mentioned previously, mental devices seem to invariably introduce subtle forms of craving into the practice. To Buddha, the cost wasn't worth it. Goenka explained that Buddha prescribed ānāpāna and Vipassanā meditation because simply observing the breath and the sensations in the body brings nothing to the practice beyond what is already there. Hence the prohibition on verbalization and visualization, as well as the request that all students cease other religious practices and turn in any religious items for the duration of the course. So Buddha had the same outlook as the porter on a wilderness expedition: if you have to keep clenching to hold it, it must be baggage.

And the only way to get rid of this baggage is to drop it — to unclench. A groove of saṅkhāra begins to dissolve when we stop reacting to its triggers with craving and aversion. This is easier said than done. If we've been carrying the baggage long enough, it may seem to be a part of who we are, like the hunched back of the porter years after retirement. In this case, dropping the baggage could even feel, from a psychological standpoint, like an experience on the spectrum of dying.

An analogy occurred to me during the retreat for what this process of dropping baggage might look like in practice, inspired by Stanislav Grof's observation in his work with altered states of consciousness: as difficult material surfaces, tension often intensifies before it releases. The analogy comes from geology. Certain minerals, such as aragonite (CaCO₃), form deep underground under high pressure yet persist at the earth's surface, even though the very same atoms could just as well be arranged there into a lower-energy crystal structure — in this case calcite (CaCO₃). Both minerals are made of calcium carbonate, but aragonite is locked into a higher state of free energy (loosely akin to potential energy), because there is a necessary level of activation energy required before it will spontaneously repackage itself into calcite. For this reason, aragonite is known as a metastable mineral, as it will hang around until it is exposed to a sufficient level of external energy (heat) in order for its transition to the stable mineral calcite to take place.

Goenka's sand and stone map neatly onto this picture. A groove in sand is a shallow well with a small hump beside it. A groove in stone, like trauma, is a deep well behind a mountain of activation energy. If a traumatized state of the body and mind is like being locked into a metastable state, then the triggers of that trauma are like heat that raises the energy of the system. Every time one clenches to resist the sensations those triggers bring, it's as if they lower the temperature. The system settles back into its metastable state, and the activation energy needed to eventually slide downhill to the stable state grows. In Goenka's terms, each reaction carves the groove of saṅkhāra a little deeper. His remedy is simply to observe the sensations without reacting to them with craving or aversion. If one learns to do that, then the heat can rise. Things may become temporarily more uncomfortable, as they do for the traumatized veteran re-experiencing their worst memories on psychedelics, but that discomfort may be what is necessary for healing, setting off a spontaneous release of energy the system has been holding onto. This seems to be the same essential wisdom behind the advice to "face your fears" and the suggestion that, in the end, one may find they were all paper tigers. It also underlies old sayings like "the darkest hour of night is just before dawn" and "the only way out is through", and Carl Jung's observation that "Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering".

Goenka taught that when one stops generating new saṅkhāra, the old stock of saṅkhāra naturally begins to rise to the surface and dissolve, noting that sometimes a particularly strong saṅkhāra can arise, bringing with it gross sensations that can challenge the equanimity of one's mind. Goenka never gave a concrete example of what this might look and feel like in practice, but he did seem to hint at it. In one evening discourse he pointed out that Buddha instructed his followers to focus on the sensations of the body because it is often too difficult, at least for the beginner, to focus on a sensation like anger. Instead, one can simply notice the changing nature of their breath, their pulse, or the temperature of their skin as a difficult experience arises. So perhaps rising saṅkhāra are like rising heat, carrying the same pattern of clenching that carved the groove in the first place, implying a subtle sort of reliving or re-experiencing as described by Grof's COEX systems and bringing emotions like anger, lust, or pride to the surface. If this is true, the Buddhist path is one in which the mind continually passes through successively lower-energy metastable states, so to speak, but only after first passing through each state's requisite increase in activation energy^[10].

I believe this process of the heat rising before release is exactly what happened with my right leg throughout the retreat. By days five and six the pain was still present, though diminishing. In the group sits, there was now an expectation of adhiṭṭhāna, or strong determination: to sit still for the full hour, without opening one's hands or eyes, and without changing one's posture. I was now able to sit still for an hour, only occasionally straightening my back, unrounding my shoulders, or picking my head up. I was still rocking a bit by the end of some of the longer non-group sits to keep the pain at a manageable level. I also experimented with removing cushions from my setup. This would increase the pain, but it was now more bearable than before, so it was easier to keep the pain below my threshold of reactivity. I got down from five cushions to two cushions at one point, sitting in a much tighter butterfly pose, but eventually added one back to the stack and kept the setup with three cushions for the remainder of the retreat.

On the morning of day five, I found a note at my spot in the dining hall asking me to meet the assistant teacher in the meditation hall after lunch. When I went in, she asked me if I was experiencing any problems. It was a very open-ended question, but I assumed she might have noticed my intense rocking on the morning of day four or my moderate rocking since then in the non-group sits. I told her I wasn't experiencing any problems per se, but that I was experiencing a lot of pain in my right leg, which felt like a good thing since there was some physical relief associated with it. She didn't say much in response, but she encouraged me to take breaks during the non-group sits, especially the longer ones, even just to step out of the meditation hall for a few minutes. Her reply lasted about a minute, and in it she said three times, "Equanimity is most important". Equanimity is the state of mind in which one does not want any sensation either to continue or to cease. Generally, this means not wanting positive sensations to continue and not wanting negative sensations to cease. Whether or not my teacher knew exactly where my head was at this point in the retreat, I felt like it was exactly what I needed to hear. I realized I was actually craving for the pain to continue. I was craving for the opportunity to continue to work through the tension in spite of the pain because the relief that followed felt so good. I was gritting my teeth and muscling my way through the long meditation sessions, and I was also developing a bit of pride, noticing at the end of the non-group sits how few others remained in the hall.

I began taking 5- to 10-minute breaks during the long sessions and noticed that my mind stayed much more relaxed, even outside of meditation sessions. This got me thinking about the way that pain can be an impediment to equanimity. It is possibly the most gross sensation of all, and it tugs hard on the mind. This reminded me of something my college yoga teacher used to say about pain. Before he was a yoga teacher, he was into adrenaline sports, and a serious downhill longboarding accident (think 60+ mph on a skateboard) left him immobilized for months. In his hospital bed he read the Yoga Sūtras, the foundational text of the spiritual path of Yoga in Hinduism, which is similar in many ways to the path laid out by Buddha. As a yoga teacher, he would constantly say, "No pain", stressing, in his words, that "if at any point you feel pain from the practice, then you're not practicing yoga and you should reduce the intensity".

Around day six, Goenka started to refine the Vipassanā meditation instructions, having us scan the body head to toe and then toe to head. He acknowledged that by this time many of us would be feeling a subtle tingling sensation throughout the body, but he instructed us to treat it no differently than gross sensations, simply observing the tingling and moving on. I was definitely feeling this sensation, and I'm fairly confident it's the same sensation as ASMR. As a kid, I would feel this same tingling sensation on the back of my head when my school teachers would drone on in monotone about a topic I already understood. The tingling sensations felt very similar to the way that qi (also spelled chi) is described, the energetic life force of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), said to circulate throughout the body. The difference is that in Vipassanā meditation, awareness moves rather than the tingling sensation. Yet, there's a saying that "qi flows where the mind goes" or "where the mind goes, energy follows", so maybe what I was feeling is actually the same thing TCM describes as qi, and the difference is just one of perspective.

Goenka then began instructing us to sweep our awareness across the body en masse (all at once), suggesting that we could even, if possible, sweep head to toe in a single exhale and toe to head on a single inhale. We could also sweep the body en masse side to side or front to back, and could even include an awareness of sensation on the inside of the body in addition to the surface. I could sweep the body en masse but only very slowly, and I couldn't do it with an awareness of the inside of my body. I visualized a rectangular plane passing through my body, and focused my awareness on all the points of the body intersecting with it in any given moment, just as if I were sitting in a pool with a continually falling and rising water level, focusing my attention wherever the surface of the water was touching my skin. Sweeping the body en masse always left more blind spots than scanning part by part, since my attention was spread thinner.

Even before we started sweeping the body en masse, I noticed I needed a rhythm to keep my awareness moving along smoothly, and I inadvertently started to verbalize the sound of a drum as I moved my awareness region by region. By the time we started sweeping en masse, I could reliably feel my pulse on any region of my body. It became the perfect metronome. With each heartbeat I would move my imaginary rectangular plane about a centimeter or so through the body. If there was no pain in the focused areas, then I would often feel my pulse and a uniform tingling sensation for a split second before moving my awareness on the next beat. In one meditation, I moved my awareness to my entire body, and for a few moments was able to catch the sensation of my pulse over the entire surface of my body simultaneously, noticing the slight delay as it moved from my chest outward.

On the days we swept the body en masse, we were still instructed to occasionally survey the body part by part, paying special attention to the blind spots. At this point I would take over an hour to scan head to toe and toe to head, surveying smaller and smaller areas of the body as my focus sharpened. I gradually stopped visualizing touching each part of the body and began visualizing a small circular plane on the surface of the skin, like the light of a flashlight, moving along in frames, as if turning off the flashlight, pointing it at the next location, and turning it back on. There were still blind spots though, and they often clustered around the areas of pain. While focusing on the lower left back, for example, I might notice a sensation, but then realize it was actually pain in the upper left back. It was as if an area of gross sensation were more massive, like a black hole capturing all the light in its vicinity, warping spacetime around it and pulling the awareness of sensations in the surrounding area into itself. Similarly, when sweeping the body symmetrically, it was common for pain on one side, say the right thigh, to interfere with the simultaneous awareness of sensation on the left thigh. That said, if I kept my focus on one of these blind spots in the vicinity of pain for a minute or so, sensations would typically arise. Sometimes, toward the end of a long sit after I had gone through a few full sweeps of the body, I would focus my attention on the painful areas and identify the location of maximum pain, then move my attention away a centimeter at a time until I felt no pain. I could often feel subtle tingling sensations very near to or within the radius of a gross sensation.

In the days following my talk with the assistant teacher, my newfound equanimity spread beyond the sensations of physical pain. I slowly began to see how all my efforts to balance the right-handedness of my mind were the same underlying pattern behind my childhood habit of stepping over an equal number of sidewalk cracks with each foot. Even though the visualization work helped bring a lot of sensation online, there was an unmistakable obsessive-compulsive quality to it. This realization brought a totally unexpected sense of peace, helping me let go of the craving for symmetry and relax into the reality of being a right-handed being, with a mind that doesn't always do things in a perfectly balanced and harmonious way as I would like it to. There were times during the body scans when, for a single heartbeat, half of the rectangular plane sweeping through my torso would disappear and I would feel nothing on that half of my body, typically the left half, then the full rectangle would reappear for the next heartbeat and I would feel both sides of the body. Sometimes when scanning the body part by part, the circular plane moving over the surface of my body would move to a different location than I intended. I resisted these experiences for the first seven days or so, attempting to correct what went wrong by going back one step during a sweep, or trying to pull the circle into its intended location while scanning part by part. When I stopped resisting, things got weirder. The rectangular plane sweeping through my torso would sometimes drop a frame at a fixed interval of two or three heartbeats, but always only on one side, and again typically the left. There were a lot of dropped frames, since I was only moving the rectangular plane about a centimeter at a time. One time while scanning part by part, I was scanning toe to head, and was up to my upper torso, moving the imaginary circle right to left across my lower chest. About three-quarters of the way across, it stopped moving horizontally, then moved diagonally up and to the left. Rather than try to pull it down into its proper position, I ignored it and imagined a second circle on the correct next spot in my lower left chest, focusing in on the sensations in that area. Meanwhile the old circle continued moving up and to the left diagonally. I continued the body scan with the new circle, now moving left to right across the upper chest. The old circle continued on its way for a few moments till my mind's eye lost sight of it, so to speak, extending at least a few feet past the edge of my body. During the 2:30pm group sit on day ten, while sweeping the body from toe to head, I was approaching my hips, and in my mind's eye, something like a cancerous growth or a wart began to appear on the visualization of my right hip. I just ignored it and scanned right over it, but before it left the periphery of my mind's eye, it was at least the size of a basketball. These experiences gave me the impression that the visualizing part of my mind was glitching. But because I wasn't craving for order and harmony anymore, I had a show-must-go-on attitude, and I never missed a beat with my body scans, though I definitely noticed in the moment how strange they were.

It seems as though many of the sensations I experienced over the course of the retreat were the very beginning of an unclenching process in both my body and mind, like a slow unraveling of a tangled ball of yarn. Just as Goenka taught, the grooves of saṅkhāra naturally begin to rise to the surface and dissolve when one stops generating new ones. Ten days of silent isolation with little to do but eat, sleep, and observe sensations in the body may be the most highly optimized environment to that end^[11]. In light of this, there was something eerie about noticing one of the oldest patterns of my mind, obsessive-compulsiveness, emerge during the retreat. Beyond that, as the tension in my right leg continued to release, the tension on my left side, from my hip up to my shoulder, began to increase in both relative and absolute terms. I've held these physical patterns for more than half of my life. The lower right side has always been the louder of the two, and as it relaxed, the left side began to speak up.

Something similar was unfolding in my sleep. About halfway through the retreat, I began to have stressful dreams. The common theme in each was that I spent a great deal of effort in response to some event where I lost my safety, security, or social standing. A couple times, I woke up out of these dreams around 3am and noticed myself a few minutes later still working through whatever issue was at hand in the dream. Granted, I was very drowsy, but not in a state in which one dreams. It was as if my mind was stuck in a pessimistic pattern preparing for the expectation of a scarce future. And what is an expectation if not the mind locked in a pattern of clenching for some future outcome, whether positive or negative? I can't say that there was any resolution to the pattern behind these dreams, but neither was there anything that provoked it. I figure that it too was like an old saṅkhāra rising to the surface.

Days eight and nine were more challenging mentally than physically. On day eight, I slept through the 4am bell and was ten minutes late to the 4:30am meditation. During the 9-11am session, when we were allowed to meditate in our rooms, I left the meditation hall and accidentally fell asleep after about 30 minutes of meditating in my room. This hurt the pride I had built up around staying in the meditation hall more than my peers during the non-group sits. Goenka also began noting that day ten would not be a day of serious meditation, because noble silence would be over, and "chatter and serious meditation don't go together". Learning that we'd be allowed to talk on day ten made the end of the course feel closer. I felt my resolve drop in proportion with the distance to the finish line, and I wished he hadn't told us that was coming. Then, I started doubting the life plans that I had sorted out in the early days of the retreat. I was obviously in a bad mood, and the new challenge for me was to remain equanimous in spite of it, just noticing doubt and sluggishness without wanting them to cease, and without craving for more of the determination and clarity I had experienced on days four through seven.

Despite Goenka's suggestion that day ten would not be a day of serious meditation, the 2:30pm and 6pm group sits on day ten were the most still of the entire retreat for me. Both times I sat so still that almost nothing but my diaphragm moved. I didn't even find myself needing to gradually straighten my neck, something I would do when noticing that my head was drooping forward. Perhaps the happiness and confidence I felt upon reaching the end of an arduous journey strengthened my equanimity.

At the end of each group meditation and the evening discourses, Goenka would chant, "Bhavatu sabba-maṅgalaṃ" three times, meaning may all beings be happy in Pāḷi. This got me thinking about what appears to be a fundamental communication problem in Buddhism. What does it really mean to want other beings to be happy? If craving and aversion are the source of suffering, then how does one want something without craving it? I bet I could come up with an argument supporting the idea of desire without craving, but for such a fundamental teaching of Buddhism, I shouldn't have to. It should be totally unambiguous. So what is right desire? Or how should one ideally feel when they are not stuck in a pattern of craving and aversion? If thriving is the opposite of suffering, then what does thriving look like to a Buddhist? Buddhism, at least in the way it is understood in the West, is great at pointing out what thriving isn't. But it's not so good at pointing out what it is. Maybe there are reasons for this. Perhaps Buddha felt that emphasizing what thriving looks like would become a pitfall, generating a new source of craving for his followers. Or perhaps the Buddhist idea of thriving is just incomprehensible to the layperson.

Buddhism's communication problem makes it liable to attract the type of person with an aversion to experience itself. If one already struggles with the pain of being alive, then the teaching of no self is more likely to sound attractive. Credit here to Goenka for only touching very lightly on this topic. Considering Goenka's earlier remarks that the theory of Buddhism is not useful without the practice, perhaps the Vipassanā tradition feels that the nuances of no self are only well understood by the intermediate or advanced practitioner. But most people meet Buddhism's vocabulary long before they meet its practice. Consider the most well-known term from Buddhism, nirvāṇa, meaning to turn off or extinguish. It's the Sanskrit version of the Pāḷi nibbāna, and it's what we commonly understand to be the final stage of Buddha's path, the result of enlightenment. The word is so well known because of the 1990s grunge band named after it. The singer of this band clearly had an aversion to experience, as he died by his own hand. An individual with this sort of temperament may be more likely to interpret "not wanting positive sensations to continue" as "wanting positive sensations to cease", and "not wanting negative sensations to cease" as "relishing pain and darkness". And when one approaches meditation with this mindset, they may inadvertently turn down the magnitude of experience altogether, the way many people report that antidepressants seem to turn down the volume on life, or turn them into zombies. I doubt this is what Buddha had in mind while teaching his followers meditation as a technique to turn down their reactivity, simultaneously becoming more sensitive to the subtle sensations of the present moment. And this is why I stress the lack of emphasis in Buddhism on the way one ought to feel. For example, what does it feel like to enjoy a positive sensation without also craving it, or wanting it to cease? If it were unambiguous how one ought to feel, and if one consistently felt differently, then this could be a clue that there's an issue with their practice. A couple days after the retreat ended, I read this quote from the meditation teacher Shinzen Young: "dissociation is the evil twin of enlightenment". This is exactly what I'm getting at. A lot of serious meditators seem dissociated. They seem to be just watching life go by rather than living in the moment. I mean no disrespect, but their existence isn't always clearly one with less suffering than the average person, much less an existence that's bringing about the happiness of all beings.

In college, I was pretty involved with a couple of organizations at my university's religious center. There was a lecturer from the psychology department who used to occasionally lead guided meditation groups and informal meditation lessons there. He lived in a Buddhist monastery for years and, as I remember it, came inches away from taking a lifelong vow. He was always courteous, but he had a somber vibe. He had an app on his phone that would send notifications multiple times per day reminding him that he was going to die. I can totally see how this could help someone remember to be present with the finite time they have, but it didn't seem to be doing him any favors. I have no idea what he was like before he started using this app, what season of life he may have been in, what hardships he may have been dealing with at the time, or whether or not he was an extremely joyful person on the inside, so I mean zero disrespect when I say that, as an external observer, this constant reminder of death — and whatever Buddhist ideology likely fueled it — didn't seem to be improving his life or his general aura.

There's a similarity here between the ideologies and historical interpretations of Buddhism and Stoicism. The Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome believed that we should focus on what is within our control, like our character and our actions. What lies outside of our control they considered fundamentally neutral, like reputation, illness, aging, and other people's actions. Though they recognized that external circumstances can provoke sadness, impatience, awe, or pleasure, they believed that these circumstances do not ultimately determine whether we live a good life. They taught that distress is the result of incorrectly judging things outside of our control as good or bad, similar to the Buddhist idea that suffering stems from craving and aversion. Stoicism was meant to help people meet hardship without being consumed by grief or anger and meet fortunate events without becoming arrogant or possessive. It did not mean becoming numb or withdrawing from the world. Many Stoics were deeply involved in public life and believed they had a duty to other people. Yet just as Buddhism today can be mistaken for a way of checking out of life, the very word stoic carries the connotation of emotional suppression, or even dissociation. That is different from the Stoic goal, which was not to feel nothing, but to keep our feelings from ruling us.

There's also an analogy here to Friedrich Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity, that Christianity was an inversion of morality that made virtues out of weakness. He argued that it rebranded cowardice as humility, submission as obedience, and the inability to assert oneself as forgiveness. I don't believe this was Jesus's original intent, but it's true that, for many people, Christianity has become a justification to dissociate from their true desires. In Nietzsche's words, this is hostile to life. I believe that Buddhism is too, to the extent that it becomes a justification for one's continued suffering, rather than a way out of it. But I'm not saying that Buddhism is rotten. It has a communication problem, but there's a pearl at its core. The same goes for Christianity. In fact, as I wondered during the retreat what one might feel in the absence of craving and aversion, Jesus's fruits of the spirit came to mind: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Back when I meditated daily, I met a serious meditator whose friend had spent years moving between Buddhist monasteries, meditating diligently. For a long stretch of time, his friend's practice stopped bearing fruit. His breakthrough came when he discovered the teachings of Jesus and realized the practice is not about becoming a progressively more asexual and sensationless recluse, but about becoming more loving, compassionate, and full of goodwill for others. Although at face value it may not seem obvious how the teachings of Jesus and Buddha relate to one another, both are the product of a search for truth in the deep inner realms of consciousness. Buddha, before starting his ministry, spent 49 days fasting and meditating under a tree, and Jesus fasted and prayed in the desert for 40. They likely passed through many of the same states of consciousness and gleaned many of the same insights. But by no means am I suggesting their teachings are the same, only that they can complement one another.

Though Buddhism doesn't seem to emphasize how one ought to feel nearly as much as how one ought not to feel, it doesn't skip the topic entirely. Starting around day seven, Goenka spoke of Buddhism's ten pāramīs, or perfections. The pāramīs include qualities like equanimity and selfless love, but also ones like renunciation and effort, which are more like practices than feelings. On day ten, we learned mettā meditation, a practice to use for a few minutes at the end of our Vipassanā meditation sessions. Goenka, over the speakers, would have us repeat after him in our heads as he would chant in a very slow, sing-songy voice things like "may I be peaceful", "may all beings share my peace", "may I be free from suffering", and "may all beings be free from suffering", alternating his chants between the English and Pāḷi versions of each. Because we only practiced mettā a few times, and because he chanted so slowly and every English line was interspersed with a Pāḷi line, I never caught the full script he recited. The spirit of the practice, however, was clear: to feel goodwill toward others. But Goenka said that we should only practice mettā when we are feeling uniform subtle sensations throughout the body in our Vipassanā meditation. I had blind spots, dull areas, or areas of gross, painful sensations in every single Vipassanā meditation throughout the retreat. I don't think that was a problem, but according to Goenka's own advice I shouldn't have been practicing mettā meditation anyway. Regardless, mettā clearly contains the implication of a way one ought to feel. More broadly, the recorded teachings from the life of Buddha and his disciples, known as the Pāḷi Canon, are well over 2.5 million words in total, and many more when translated to English, enough to fill several feet of bookshelf space. So I'm confident that there are many descriptions of how one ought to feel, and that many flavors of Buddhism throughout the last 2,500 years have emphasized these ideas to a much greater extent than they currently are in the West.

Buddhism in the West doesn't only attract those with an aversion to experience. It also has a very strong appeal, relative to other religious traditions, to the materialist skeptic. By materialist, I mean the view that all there is in the universe is physical stuff — matter, light, etc., or more specifically the particles and fields they're made of — and that everything we experience and observe must ultimately be reducible to this physical stuff. By skeptic, I mean someone inclined to dismiss all observations, divine encounters chief among them, that aren't clearly explained by the emergent properties of matter as we currently understand it (chemistry, biology, etc.), considering them more likely to be errors in human cognition than real phenomena.

Buddhism is the nerdiest religion, perhaps the only one that self-described nerds are more likely to practice than the general population. Whereas a Western Hindu might tell you to avoid eating animal products because of the inherent value of all animal souls, a Western Buddhist is probably more likely to frame it in utilitarian terms, saying something or other about how a vegetarian diet promotes brain health in a way that aids serious meditation. For one, many argue that Buddhism is not a religion in the first place, Buddha himself having prescribed no required form of deity worship. This is particularly agreeable to the atheist. Further, Buddhism's focus on the practice of meditation gives it an empirical flavor. It considers the highest form of wisdom to be the wisdom of direct experience, as if whispering seductively in the skeptic's ear, "Don't trust my results, just run the experiment yourself". Most religious traditions have esoteric traditions focused on internal practices, like the monastic traditions of Christianity, Sufism in Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism, and the variety of yogic traditions in Hinduism. But these practices are all peripheral to the way that the layperson experiences their religion. Granted, even in nominally Buddhist cultures of Asia, the actual practice of meditation is peripheral to rites, rituals, and the worship of a deified form of Buddha. In this regard, Buddhism in the West is probably closer to Buddha's original intent, and its emphasis on practice over ceremony and deities makes it feel way less woo-woo than other religions, like Hinduism, with its pantheon of gods, spirits, and supernatural forces. This makes Buddhism much more palatable to the skeptical mind. The icing on the cake is Buddhism's claim that ignorance is the cause of craving and aversion, and insight the remedy — a tailor-made ideology for the skeptical, nerdy type who has a lot of their self-worth tied up in being less ignorant than other people.

But if Buddhism is taken seriously, in its original form, then it's every bit as woo-woo as any other religion. On days ten and eleven of the retreat, there were some reading materials laid out in the dining hall. Most were books by Goenka, books about his lineage of teachers, or books published by Goenka's research organization, the Vipassanā Research Institute (distinct from the nonprofits that govern the individual Vipassanā centers). During a rest period, I flipped through one of the Institute's pamphlets, A re-appraisal of Patanjali's Yoga-sutras in the light of the Buddha's teaching by S.N. Tandon. As I mentioned earlier, the Yoga Sūtras is the foundational text of the yogic traditions of Hinduism. In its most general form, yoga just means disciplined action, so Buddhist monks can be called yogis, and historically they often have been. But throughout this essay, when I discuss Yoga, I'm referring to the Hindu traditions. In this pamphlet, Tandon points out that Buddha believed in a host of supernatural powers, including telepathy, remote viewing, and the ability to multiply one's body and appear in two or more places at once. Buddha also believed that he routinely used his psychic powers to travel to the brahmalokā, or brahmā realms, inhabited by divine beings who had reincarnated there. Spiritual traditions around the world speak of humans with supernatural powers used for utilitarian ends like winning a battle, healing a sick person, or gaining followers through public displays of their powers. Buddha didn't deny the existence of these powers, but he did discourage indulgence in them, especially as a means of persuasion. He believed they were a distraction, and that for many, the pursuit of their attainment would become another source of craving. And Buddha certainly believed in gods, many of whom could intervene in worldly events. He believed there were six tiers of heavenly gods, and two realms of the highest gods of the brahmalokā. So Buddhism is only less woo-woo than other religions in the sense that the woo is de-emphasized. Yet Buddhism has cultural appeal with the skeptic.

This presents a problem for the skeptic who practices Buddhist meditation. This person may feel that Buddha was wise in discovering and promoting these techniques that have improved the lives of so many people and whose benefits are backed by troves of neuroscience research. But this same person must either be unaware of the supernatural phenomena Buddha himself acknowledged, or else conclude that Buddha was highly delusional. Why would anyone trust the path laid out by someone whose mental faculties they find suspect?

I don't have an answer to that, and anyway, I didn't pick up the pamphlet on the Yoga Sūtras to read about supernatural powers. It caught my eye because I had some foreknowledge of the Yoga Sūtras and its similarities with Buddhism. Both systems come from Northern India, and both are organized into a path of eight parts, starting with morality, continuing with practices of meditation, and culminating in some final ideal state of awareness, insight, or wisdom.

The pamphlet opens on the origins of the Yoga Sūtras, noting that Patañjali lived at least a few centuries after Buddha^[12], and that while Buddha's teachings were still highly influential, his original teachings, as recorded in the Pāḷi Canon, had already been lost in India, preserved abroad in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Tandon argues that this is responsible for both the similarities and differences between the two traditions, the biggest difference being their end goal. Patañjali identified it as the cessation of mental fluctuations, and Buddha identified it as the cessation of the mind itself. As far as I can tell, this must be what is meant by nibbāna (nirvāṇa).

Despite how crazy that sounds, I'm open-minded to the possibility that Buddha's final goal was better. That said, as I pondered the difference between the two traditions while the retreat was coming to a close, it occurred to me that in some ways, Patañjali's path, at least as it's commonly taught in the West, is more practical. Consider, for example, the concept of ahiṃsā, the Pāḷi (and Sanskrit) word for non-harm. On paper, it's every bit as important in Buddhism as in Yoga. But the two traditions were carried to the West by very different crowds, each emphasizing what best matched its temperament. If the Western Buddhist is the professorial nerd explaining the default mode network, the Western yogi is the barefoot hippie telling you to honor your body and that we're all drops in the same ocean of love, man. It's the yogi, not the Buddhist, whose vocabulary is saturated with ahiṃsā. Fittingly, the first limb of Yoga is yama, or ethical restraints, and it starts with ahiṃsā. The practice of ahiṃsā applies to all beings, including oneself. Hence my old yoga teacher's constant reminder, "No pain". If you're causing pain for yourself, then you're not practicing ahiṃsā. Practicing ahiṃsā naturally leads to the development of self-compassion, because it implies that one ought to extend the same empathy to oneself as they do to others. Buddha's path, on the other hand, starts with right view or right understanding, which reads more like a statement of faith that "suffering exists, its cause is craving and aversion, these can end, and there is a path to reach that end".

At the retreat, we all observed the five precepts for the duration of our stay:

1. No killing
2. No stealing
3. No sexual activity
4. No speaking of lies
5. No consumption of intoxicants

I've seen the first precept recast as reverence for life. That makes it feel a lot closer to ahiṃsā. But in any case, there wasn't much said about the precepts or why exactly we observed them. Despite Goenka's repeated suggestion that practice is at least as important as theory, the precepts were not presented as practices in and of themselves, but rather as mere prerequisites to the practice of meditation. No killing, however, naturally became a practice. I noticed myself watching the ground to avoid ant trails, blowing mosquitos away rather than slapping them, and coming to appreciate the massive spider that lives above one of the shared toilets, since I couldn't take matters into my own hands even if I wanted to.

The third limb of Yoga is āsana, or posture. Its original intent was to achieve a steady and comfortable sitting position for long stretches of meditation by relaxing the mind and body. It's also the limb that modern yoga ran with, invoking it as the classical justification for yoga as exercise as we've come to know it. Today, Yoga traditions that place a greater emphasis on the practice of meditation teach āsana as preparation for it, a way to steady the mind and the body and to build the strength and mobility needed to sit comfortably for long stretches, commonly using the types of postures that strengthen the lower back and open the hips. The only Buddhist tradition I know of that, at least in part, emphasizes physical preparation for comfortable seated meditation is the Tibetan practice of trul khor, also called Tibetan yoga, which has historically been a closely guarded secret restricted to initiates.

Perhaps the highly trained, equanimous mind can bear any disturbance without a reaction of craving or aversion, but if physical pain and a lack of self-compassion are major impediments to the development of equanimity in the first place, then practicing ahiṃsā and āsana seem like great starting points for a chair-based society with tight hips and self-esteem issues.

I took this retreat in Bali, and I'm currently staying in the town of Ubud, possibly the global capital of self-compassion and woo-woo spirituality. Although I haven't read or watched Eat, Pray, Love, I believe the final third of the author's journey, on Love, takes place in Bali, and specifically Ubud. I arrived here aware of a common criticism of Ubud. Some people here are the type who, upon feeling love for themselves for the first time or simply realizing that it's okay to be who they are as they are right now, undergo such a strong transformation that they get stuck craving the expansiveness, catharsis, or joy that came with it. This can manifest as a never-ending search for the next healing modality, complete with a set of niche fashions, habits, and vocabulary for people in the know, creating and reinforcing the idea that one is a spiritually elevated being.

Despite the criticisms and my preconceived notions, I think Ubud's great. Sure, sometimes people seem to get stuck in that early transformation and become obsessed with healing, but it doesn't make that initial transformation any less important, powerful, or necessary, especially for those of us raised in a culture steeped in the subliminal messaging of marketing, music, and film that says one ought not to accept oneself and that one ought not to consider oneself worthy of love — at least not yet. Maybe this issue was so foreign in the culture of roughly 500 BC India that Buddha didn't need to emphasize any remedy for it. Indians of 500 BC were also not overstimulated, chairbound people who interacted with a screen and a keyboard for a living, so they probably had a much easier time comfortably sitting cross-legged for an extended period of time. These issues matter today, and as much as one might be inclined to point out the silliness or irrationality of the more outlandish beliefs and practices arising from New Age spirituality or the spiritual-but-not-religious movement, these beliefs and practices are growing faster than any religion because they work for people, in the sense that they provide something missing in their lives. This is like the aphorism "tradition is smarter than you". A belief or tradition may seem totally irrational, but the fact that it has survived decades or centuries of cultural selection suggests it may contain some wisdom or utility that you don't fully understand.

Buddhist meditation moves along a spectrum from gross to subtle, but New Age practices start at a much more gross level: just learning to love yourself, feel compassion, be gentle, take it easy, or go with the flow. Back when I meditated daily, I didn't have much self-compassion. Had I come to this retreat without it, I think it would have been much more difficult. The importance of being able to forgive oneself cannot be overstated with regard to the ability to sit still and continually notice and redirect the wandering mind in one's meditation practice. Here, too, New Age spirituality has an advantage in that it doesn't reject the self. It prefers the language of the higher self. If, however, one is attached to the idea that the self does not exist, the whole idea of forgiving oneself may seem totally illogical. The inability to forgive is perhaps the clearest example of the clenched, suffering mind. As the saying goes, a grudge poisons its holder. It's a fixed state of clenching toward oneself or another, and to truly forgive is to unclench, to relax the mind's aversion to that individual.

Ultimately, I am extremely happy I chose to do this retreat. All of the patterns of physical clenching in my body still exist, but the relief I experienced was well worth ten days of isolation and then some. This retreat gave me a new perspective on the fact that I quit meditating daily six years ago. For a while, I mourned losing the habit, feeling like I ought not to have quit or that my life would be better if I had kept it up. But now I'm glad I quit. I have conviction that I was practicing incorrectly or at least suboptimally. I wasn't experiencing any benefits from it anymore. On day nine, during the evening discourse, Goenka said that equanimity and awareness are like the wings of a bird. They have to be equal in strength for the bird to fly. Upon hearing that, I realized that my old practice had lots of awareness, especially of my flaws, shortcomings, and physical pain, but it had very little equanimity.

I'm also glad I took a course from a lineage of Buddhism straight out of Asia, rather than a sanitized Western retreat stripped of any teachings that don't align with the materialist view of the world, like the concept of reincarnation. Goenka may have tailored his teaching to a certain degree for the Western mind, but I doubt he intentionally censored any of the teachings as he learned them. It was clear by the end of the retreat that the Vipassanā lineage of Burma has incredible pride in the purity of its teachings, and whether justified or not, one gets the sense it may really be Buddhism as Buddha would have taught it. It felt like a mini-immersion in a culture of ancient history.

The teachings of the Vipassanā tradition are super practical in the sense that any teaching that does not produce benefits now is not considered true Dhamma. But at a higher level, Buddhism as it's popularly understood struggles with a fundamental communication flaw and an inability to offer practical advice. If one ought not to crave, then how can one really desire anything, even if just to help others? If one ought not to crave for positive sensations to continue, can one still enjoy them? What does that feel like in the absence of craving? If one ought not to resist negative sensations, or to want them to cease, can one still dislike them? What does that feel like in the absence of aversion? Buddhism should strive to make these ideas totally unambiguous. If the path laid out by Buddha can be misinterpreted as a path to becoming an asexual, sensationless recluse with no sense of self, then it is bound to attract types of people with an aversion to experience itself, or who struggle in general to attain the things they desire, for whom a life of renunciation may not sound so bad, since one need not renounce a life they never had in the first place. Perhaps most importantly, how can a devoted Buddhist monk who glimpses the value of nibbāna — the cessation of the mind itself — feel they can offer practical advice to the rest of us, so deep in the matrix that this sounds like a completely unreasonable aim?

As I ask these questions, it occurs to me that perhaps many of them are only questions because my theory is ahead of my practice. Goenka spoke only lightly on the concept of no self and said nothing of what nibbāna is other than peace. But I have a much greater familiarity with these concepts due to my cultural milieu and my historic interest in religious traditions. Regardless, if theory ought not to outpace practice, the implication is that the novice is liable to misinterpret precious concepts or spread false ideas if they are given a detailed map of their journey on day one. Buddha himself, while meditating for 49 days under a tree, hesitated before starting his ministry. He wondered if it was even possible to teach Dhamma. As the story goes, Buddha made up his mind only after a god from the brahmalokā, sensing Buddha's hesitation, descended to earth and encouraged him to teach. Because the wisdom of Dhamma is hard to convey, it is withheld from the practitioner and revealed piece by piece, each teaching arriving only when they are ready to receive it. This makes Buddhism more like a mystery school than a religion — something like Freemasonry, where practices are kept secret, like trul khor (Tibetan yoga), and truths are revealed in stages, so that no matter one's level of expertise, they don't really know the destination, let alone the next step, of the path they're on until they reach it. This suggests that Buddhism requires as much faith as any other religious tradition. Even the skeptic, disregarding all the supernatural phenomena of Buddhism, must place a great deal of trust in the teachings to believe that Buddhism is the correct path. So the promise of benefits now and in the future may be a functional requirement of true Dhamma rather than an ideological one. Without benefits at every stage, one's doubts may grow too strong to remain on the path.

That said, Goenka's lineage is a departure from the norm of Buddhist history, in which meditation has largely been a monastic affair. His predecessors believed in sharing their practices with laypeople rather than reserving them for monastic initiates. Goenka himself had six children and ran many businesses. His teacher held a number of posts in the government of newly independent Burma. His teacher's teacher was a farmer. The tradition still reveals theory at the pace of practice, but its door is open to anyone, and that openness is a big part of why it has spread around the world. What it does share with a mystery school is its demand for commitment. Goenka insisted that once you find a path that works for you, you should devote yourself to it rather than mixing bits and pieces from various traditions, lest you confuse and disorient yourself. If you can't see the destination, the only way to learn whether a path leads anywhere is to follow it.

Buddha's path is a spartan one, especially so as it's rendered by the Goenka Vipassanā tradition. To the greatest degree possible, it frees us from the need to conceptualize, focusing only on what we can sense here and now. Buddha, in his rejection of mental devices, treated deity worship, appeals to supernatural forces, and the rites and rituals surrounding them as unnecessary. On that point, the skeptic can most certainly agree. As far as I can tell though, Buddha never denied that beauty, harmony, solace, and awe can come with these things. He simply insisted that it doesn't matter. Real or not, your god cannot do the work for you. In his eyes, the urgent work of ending suffering depends on one's own practice, and to that end, all mental devices are baggage, hindering the purification of the mind by generating new forms of craving and aversion.

Yet, at some level, Buddha seemed to acknowledge that it's mental devices all the way down. In a famous parable, he likens Dhamma to a raft used by someone to cross an expanse of water. He asks his followers a leading question: "Upon reaching the other shore, should this person carry the raft around on their head?" No, he explains, they should leave it behind, for the teachings of Dhamma are to be used, not clung to. This seems to be a tacit admission that Dhamma is itself a mental device — a body of named concepts, each with a psychological weight of its own, that one must keep clenching to hold in mind, itself a subtle pattern of craving, or grasping at the teaching. So perhaps Buddha wasn't a puritan about mental devices, so much as a pragmatist. He is said to have discovered Dhamma, but in sharing it he necessarily reduced it to concepts, creating a tool that slows the currents of craving and aversion, possibly all the way to zero. In my reading, Dhamma is the conceptualization of the path, not the thing itself. The path leads to a place where concepts become irrelevant. It's just as Laozi writes in the first line of the Daodejing: "the way that can be spoken is not the enduring way".

But I must admit that this is simply my interpretation. As I mentioned, Buddha's teachings imply that the novice is liable to misinterpret. I sincerely hope that nothing I have said gives a distorted picture of the teachings of the Vipassanā tradition. Whatever I've gotten right or wrong, the most obvious benefit this retreat has given me, so far, is the focus and resolve to churn out this 24,000-word essay, drawing on ideas that have been floating around my head for more than a decade. This essay would fill something like a third of a typical book, not counting the visuals. It's nearly as long as everything else on my site combined, and it's without a doubt the longest thing I have ever written.

If you want to learn meditation, you can read up on various techniques and try a few till you feel like you've found one that works. Or just do a Vipassanā retreat. We meditated for about 100 hours over the course of the retreat, including the evening of day zero and the morning of day eleven. If you meditate daily for 20 minutes every morning, skipping one day per week, you'll be at it for 350 days before you get 100 hours under your belt. And you'll have zero extended sits of one hour or more. What are the chances you patiently stick with any habit for 350 days before evaluating whether or not it has benefited your life? I recommend you don't "do your research". Chances are, there's a Vipassanā center near you. Just do a retreat, and trust the process.

Lastly, a note on the spirit in which these courses are run. They are 100% donation-based, run on the Pāḷi concept of dāna, the spirit of generosity. Toward the end of the retreat, during the evening discourses, Goenka made it clear that one should only give if they feel like helping others, and that one's spot in a Vipassanā course is not secured by a donation they are expected to give at the end of the course. Rather, their spot is secured by someone else who has previously donated. Never was there any indication that one is obliged to give at all or that financial service is the only way to give. I have immense respect for the spirit in which these courses are run, and in light of it, the global scale of the Goenka Vipassanā ecosystem is a strong testament to the efficacy of the techniques Goenka teaches. This was one of the most challenging things I've ever done, yet I can wholeheartedly recommend a ten-day Vipassanā retreat, and Dhamma Geha in particular, to anyone who feels they may benefit from it. Someone has already paid for your spot.

Notes:

1. For a concise explanation of vasocomputation, see Johnson's description from 06:50-18:35 in this video.

2. This is known as the latch-bridge mechanism.

3. Johnson suggests the smooth muscle contracts reflexively where nearby electrical activity is unsettled, and that the contraction itself reduces it to a settled state, shaping the electrical activity in the brain and body that gives rise to our thoughts, emotions, and actions.

4. There was a full dinner on day ten.

5. Turns out it was actually a Tokay gecko. Listen here. Given the proclivity of geckos to climb on any surface they want, I wouldn't doubt this particular gecko was actually on the ceiling of the meditation hall, not the roof. It was very loud.

6. The smell of the pigs was nothing compared to Iowa, where I grew up. A pig farm there typically has thousands of pigs, and you can smell it miles down a country road if the wind is blowing in the right direction.

7. Case in point: Claude made nearly all of the visuals and animations in this essay in a single evening after I finished writing. The essay was a very detailed prompt, granted, but a model that can sketch this well might soon begin to bridge the divide between the digital and physical worlds, drafting highly detailed blueprints for new forms of machinery and robotics.

8. Our muscles may actually be bound together by the fascia into myofascial chains, or trains, that stabilize the body and cause physical discomfort when disrupted. Some of these proposed myofascial chains correlate with acupuncture meridians, and it's possible that acupuncture may unknowingly work in part at the level of these myofascial chains, accounting for at least some of its observed efficacy in treating physical ailments. See Anatomy Trains by Thomas W. Myers.

9. The best massage therapists, then, are probably those who can work just below one's threshold of reactivity, which likely varies not only from person to person, but from muscle to muscle and day to day.

10. In other words, Buddha's purification of the mind is a multistep exergonic reaction.

11. Of course, this only applies to those who freely choose it. Imposed isolation would generate tremendous levels of aversion for most of us.

12. Some scholars argue the true author of the Yoga Sūtras lived as much as 900 years after Buddha. Much less is known about his life than that of Buddha.

Farming has been the most common occupation on earth for all of written history. The technological progress of the modern world may owe more to agriculture than to any other cultural development, since reliable harvests create the leisure time necessary for innovation. Yet it began only around 10,000 years ago, very recently in the long history of Homo sapiens.

Agriculture emerged independently in numerous places around the world between 10,000 and 3,000 years ago. Because these populations were largely isolated, agriculture cannot be explained by a sudden genetic change that enabled humans to understand plant cultivation. In any case, humans have been exceptionally intelligent for much longer than 10,000 years. Even a child can observe that if a piece of fruit drops from a tree and is left to rot on the ground, it will eventually produce another tree. Hunter-gatherers, immersed in a world of plants, undoubtedly knew that water and sun were the key ingredients for plant growth, and their intuitions about plant growth were probably much stronger than those of modern humans. They likely had immense knowledge of the nutritional and medicinal qualities of hundreds of plant species in their ecosystems, and they would have been well aware of the conditions under which each species grew and thrived. Plant cultivation was likely common knowledge among most pre-agricultural populations.

So why, then, did agriculture emerge when it did? The simplest answer is that it was not a sudden discovery but a shift in behavior. It was a choice shaped by changing conditions.

There is evidence of plant cultivation as early as 23,000 years ago. Yet these early efforts did not lead to sustained or widespread farming, suggesting that agriculture was not initially a major success. Things began to change between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago. During this period, atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels rose by roughly 50 percent, from about 185 to 270 parts per million (ppm). CO₂ is a limiting reactant for plant photosynthesis, and hundreds of studies have shown that plants generally grow larger, more quickly, and more water-efficiently under conditions of higher atmospheric CO₂. Today, it's not uncommon to pump CO₂ directly into horticultural greenhouses as a form of fertilizer. Many plants are particularly sensitive to atmospheric CO₂ changes in the 170-300 ppm range, including all the earliest domesticated crops. The lower end of this range is near the lowest level at which most land plants evolved, and many plants may have been near carbon-starvation levels 20,000 years ago, with significantly limited photosynthesis as a result.

As CO₂ was rising, the most recent glacial period was ending. This brought longer growing seasons and more rain, so plant life was more abundant. In regions with abundant edible plants, this may have simply made foraging easier. But elsewhere, a global megafauna extinction was underway, possibly driven by overhunting. As hunting was becoming less reliable, farming was becoming more viable, creating a practical incentive for many populations to augment their food resources with agriculture^[1].

Agriculture, then, may not have been adopted because humans suddenly discovered how to farm, but because environmental pressures made it increasingly worthwhile to do so.

Notes:

1. Comparable climate conditions existed 135,000 years ago during the end of the penultimate glacial period, with rising CO₂ and warming temperatures. Though no megafauna extinction occurred then, the environmental conditions for agriculture were present. It's possible that future discoveries will reveal evidence of limited plant cultivation from this earlier period.

Intelligence is a highly polygenic trait, meaning it's influenced by a large portion of our genetics. This suggests the growth in human cognitive potential over time has been much slower than most would assume.

When advantageous genetic mutations occur, they "sweep" through a population, because the presence of a specific sequence of DNA that makes an individual much more likely to survive and reproduce spreads quickly. Lactase persistence, the ability to digest lactose into adulthood, is the classic example of a genetic sweep. Before dairy farming first emerged around 9,000 years ago, nearly all humans were lactose intolerant. Since then, several different mutations arose independently, all affecting the same specific portion of DNA and all enabling lactase persistence. These mutations swept through populations all over the world, and today around a third of all humans are lactose tolerant. In Northwest Europe, the sweep was particularly strong, where lactase persistence first appeared only 4,500 years ago, spread slowly at first to less than 10% of the population by 3,000 years ago, and then spread very rapidly, reaching 90% today.

Lactase persistence is a monogenic trait, though — it relies on a single genetic locus. Global genetic sweeps are also uncommon. A widely-cited 2011 study found virtually no evidence of genetic sweeps as a dominant driver of human evolution in the last 250,000 years^[1]. Even the widespread nature of lactase persistence is partially the result of convergent evolution, where multiple independent sweeps occurred in different populations. If a number of highly advantageous mutations affecting cognition had occurred in the last 250,000 years, they would have swept through all human populations and left a record in our genomes. Each would also be linked to a specific genetic variant with a strong influence on intelligence. This is not the case though. In reality, there are thousands of genes and a much larger number of genetic variants that are predictive of the heritability of intelligence^[2]. Even the most powerfully predictive genetic loci can individually explain less than 0.02% of the variance in intelligence.

The consensus is that human intelligence evolved primarily through so-called soft sweeps, where natural selection acts on many different existing genetic variants over time, which become more frequent in human genomes as a result. But even in this case, there's no master combination of alleles that unlocked radically new levels of intelligence. If there were, this combination alone would be highly predictive of intelligence and we would expect to find a record of a highly-coordinated shift in the frequency of its alleles in historical human genomes shortly after it first appeared. That said, there are a handful of significant mutations researchers point to that influence brain development and function, but most are more than 300,000 years old and in many cases are millions of years old, predating the emergence of Homo sapiens^[3].

To make this more concrete, imagine transporting a child from an uncontacted tribe into an industrialized society. Imagine also that you could transport their family and whatever other support structures this child would need to be raised in a happy, healthy, supported way. Every member of every uncontacted tribe on earth, despite lacking access to the accumulated knowledge of industrialized societies, is an anatomically modern human whose genome is at least 99.9% identical to that of every other living human. With the right teachers and resources, it's not difficult to imagine that this child could grow up to be a calculus teacher who flies airplanes in her free time.

Now imagine transporting a child from 100,000 years ago into the present day. This child would also share our anatomy and 99.9% of our genetics^[4]. They, too, could likely become a calculus teacher and a pilot.

We are not fundamentally different from our very distant ancestors — or our more recent ancestors, for that matter. The word "barbarian"^[5] was first used as a catch-all for foreigners, viewed as culturally and cognitively inferior due to their alien way of life and the unintelligible "bar... bar... bar..." of their speech. We make the same mistake today when we implicitly assume that very ancient humans were cognitively inferior because their way of life remains largely incomprehensible. But intelligence, just like height, resting heart rate, circadian rhythm, and a host of other human traits, is highly polygenic. It evolved slowly over a long period of time, much of which took place before Homo sapiens first appeared. Humans have been exceptionally intelligent for an exceptionally long time.

Notes:

1. Subsequent research has found evidence for a number of regional sweeps that likely increased fitness in specific regional environments but were lost due to later mixing with other populations. See here and here.

2. Intelligence is quantified using IQ test results, which may only be a weak proxy for intelligence. But even a perfect metric that is precisely measurable, stable throughout an individual's life, and fully isolated from culture and other environmental factors wouldn't change the underlying polygenetic nature of intelligence.

3. There are more recent mutations that have been identified as well, notably to the ASPM and MCPH1 genes, though these mutations have been found to have no predictive power over intelligence.

4. They may actually have a slightly bigger brain than the average human today. Humans likely had a 10% larger cranial volume, on average, 100,000 years ago. Brain size is only weakly correlated with intelligence though, and as I discussed in The archaic nature of intellect, even animals with microscopic brains, such as honeybees, are capable of impressive cognitive feats.

5. The Greeks coined the term, originally βάρβαρος (pronounced BAR-bar-os).

First, two important concepts to keep in mind:

• Shared inheritance refers to traits and behaviors that appear in two or more species and that were passed down from their common ancestor. An evolutionary biologist might refer to this as synapomorphy or homology, but I think "shared inheritance" is more intuitive and approachable. The textbook example of shared inheritance is the anatomical similarity in the forelimbs of mammals (see Figure 1).

• Convergent evolution is the process by which similar traits and behaviors appear in two or more species, arising from independent adaptations to similar environmental pressures.

For example, both bats and dolphins use echolocation to navigate and hunt, but they developed this ability independently. Dolphin echolocation is specialized for use underwater and bat echolocation for air, and as a result there are large anatomical differences between the two systems that suggest they aren't a form of shared inheritance. But there's a simple heuristic for arriving at this conclusion without getting into the weeds of anatomy. The common ancestor of bats and dolphins is thought to have lived at least 60 million years ago, and if bats and dolphins inherited echolocation from a common ancestor, then we would reasonably expect to see echolocation in at least some of the other animals that share their common ancestor, such as dogs, cats, horses, and cows (see Figure 2). Said another way, it would be surprising if the common ancestor of bats and dolphins had echolocation but the overwhelming majority of its descendants lost the ability^[1].

This heuristic also works the other way around. The presence of a given trait or behavior in closely related species indicates that it likely arose in their common ancestor, rather than as a product of convergent evolution. This heuristic is especially useful for thinking about shared behaviors, since they often don't rely on underlying anatomy specialized for the task. Consider the following three examples.

1. Counting

Counting is the ability to determine how many elements exist in a finite set of things. A more technical term for this ability is numerosity, which implies an organism has a numeric sense, but doesn't necessarily "count" one by one as a child might, using their fingers or voice. The earliest evidence in the archeological record for the human ability to count is the 40-thousand-year-old Lebombo Bone, pictured below. It's thought to be a calendar, used to track the passage of days in a lunar cycle. While humans may be the only animals that have a numeric sense for very large numbers, we are not the only animals that can count. Bees, for example, can both count and communicate numeric values. Honeybees, in particular, use what's called the waggle dance, a flying movement that communicates the direction and distance to an item of interest they've identified, which could be a food source, water, or a potential site for a new hive. In lab experiments, honeybees can also distinguish two sets with a different number of objects and can do basic addition and subtraction.

The common ancestor of bees and humans probably lived over half a billion years ago, and millions of extant species share the same common ancestor, so it's very unlikely that we inherited the ability to count from our common ancestor with bees. If we did, we would expect to find counting animals everywhere. But, consider our closest living relative — chimpanzees. They can also count. Therefore, it's likely that the human ability to count is at least as old as our common ancestor with chimpanzees, which is thought to have lived around 7 million years ago. As many other apes and monkeys can also count, the human capacity for counting could in reality be tens of millions of years old. So, while the Lebombo Bone is interesting for a number of reasons, its suggestion that humans had the ability to count 40 thousand years ago is not groundbreaking.

2. Tool-use

Broadly speaking, a tool is an external object that an organism uses to achieve a goal that it could not achieve as easily with its body alone. Tool-use exists in a wide variety of animals but is rare relative to the number of known species. The types of tools used also vary widely from species to species, so it's safe to assume that tool-use in distantly related species is a form of convergent evolution.

As I mentioned in Half a million years of Homo sapiens, the oldest evidence of stone tool-use is 3.3 million years old, associated with the extinct genus Australopithecus, thought to be the precursor to the genus Homo. Chimpanzees and a variety of other primates also use stone tools though, so it's probably a much older behavior.^[2] But some of the Australopithecus tools were deliberately altered, specifically to produce sharp edges. There's no definitive evidence of primates intentionally altering stone tools in the wild, but they clearly do so in captivity. Capuchins, bonobos, and orangutans all do so. While in each case these animals only displayed this behavior after being taught by humans, it's nevertheless undeniable that they have the capacity for creating stone tools. This suggests that the capacity for manufacturing stone tools is much older than the oldest direct evidence for it. And while the evidence for stone tool-use is about seven times as old as the oldest evidence of wooden tool-use, the 476-thousand-year-old Kalambo structure, there is much stronger evidence that the ability to manufacture wooden tools is the shared inheritance of all great apes, and perhaps of all primates. Most live in environments where wood is much more plentiful than stone, and many deliberately alter twigs, branches, and other wooden materials for use as foraging and hunting tools. In particular, some chimpanzees deliberately chew the ends of branches to make them sharp, then use them as spears to hunt bushbabies nesting in tree hollows.

So, imagine you just discovered a 5-million-year-old wooden archeological remain. As I discussed in Ancient history's blind spot, it would be very surprising to find a wooden remain that old. But, if you did, despite being ten times as old as the Kalambo structure, it wouldn't be incredibly surprising if it was an intentionally crafted wooden tool like a spear.

3. Boats

Boats are just a sophisticated tool, a floating device used to navigate a body of water^[3]. Some animals understand how to manipulate buoyant objects, but humans are the only known living animals that build boats. The oldest known boat is the Pesse Canoe, discovered in the Netherlands in 1955 and dated to about 10 thousand years old, and the oldest known seafaring boats are the La Marmotta Canoes, discovered in Italy and dated to around 7 thousand years old. But there is strong evidence that Homo sapiens were a seafaring species much earlier and that even some long-extinct hominin species were as well.

The oldest evidence of human presence in Australia dates to 65 thousand years ago, and, even during periods of low sea level, there has always been open sea separating the Australian continental shelf from that of Southeast Asia. The region that separates the two continental shelves, known as Wallacea, has a number of deep-water straits that generate powerful and unpredictable currents, making the region difficult to navigate even for modern ships. It also straddles the equator, which means that even in the coldest glacial periods there was no sea ice present for animals to accidentally drift across the sea on. This is the reason for Australia's unique plant and animal life, and it also suggests that some groups of Homo sapiens were capable of navigating the sea at least 65 thousand years ago.

The presence of Neanderthal remains on a number of Greek islands, in particular 130-thousand-year-old stone artifacts on the island of Crete, indicates that Neanderthals were a seafaring species, too. Neanderthals, by the way, are the closest known relatives of Homo sapiens that have ever existed. There are also significantly older hominin artifacts on islands in Wallacea, dating from 1 million to 1.5 million years old, thought to be the remains of Homo erectus. Although no one has ever successfully sequenced the DNA of Homo erectus, they are believed to be the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals. This suggests that the capacity for boat-building in Homo sapiens and Neanderthals is a form of shared inheritance, predating the La Marmotta canoes by at least a million years.

A thought experiment

Imagine that an extraterrestrial species arrives on earth with the intention of teaching a group of humans advanced concepts in physics. While we might suspect that this species has a more powerful intellect than humans, there is no way to know for sure based on this information alone. It only suggests that they possess knowledge that humanity doesn't. Assuming humans can successfully learn their physics, then by definition we have the capacity for it. This is a crucial point to emphasize. The above example about boats doesn't suggest that archaic humans were building aircraft carriers or Spanish galleons to cross oceans, and it would probably be unreasonable to assume that most of them ever built even the most primitive form of boat. Most people alive today have no reason to build a boat or to navigate the sea, and most humans throughout history probably didn't either. The knowledge of boat-building and seafaring is not an inherited human trait, but the capacity for these activities is.

This is especially important to keep in mind when considering the rapid advance in human knowledge and activity since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10 thousand years ago. Just as our capacity for counting, making tools, and building boats is much older than commonly assumed, we likely possessed the intellect required for agriculture long before it was first implemented at scale. Everything since then — writing, the renaissance, and the industrial revolution — has unfolded so quickly, relative to the long history of human evolution, that little, if any, cognitive evolution has occurred simultaneously. Therefore, our unique period of history is one marked by rapidly increasing knowledge, not intellect. This makes the question of why agriculture happened when it did even more intriguing, and I intend to write about that in a future post.

Notes:

1. Apparently humans can develop the ability to echolocate, so there could potentially be a more general mammalian ability to echolocate, but there is clearly not a general reliance on it. The vast majority of mammals do not have specialized organs for echolocation like bats and dolphins do.

2. I discovered while writing this post that there is archeological evidence of tool-wielding capuchins from 3 thousand years ago. This is pretty cool but also extremely unsurprising, considering how small 3 thousand years is in comparison to tens of millions of years of primate evolution.

3. Technically, an archeologist would consider a raft a primitive form of watercraft that's distinct from a boat. I'm considering a raft a primitive form of boat.

• As of the latest revision, it says, "Anatomically modern humans emerged at least 300,000 years ago in Africa".

• As of December 31, 2017: "Several of these hominins... gave rise to anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago".

• As of January 28, 2007: "Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna between 100,000 and 250,000 years ago".

• As of May 8, 2006: "Homo sapiens originated in the African savanna between 100 and 200 thousand years ago".

Wikipedia is, of course, not always correct, and it likely lags the scientific consensus on many topics by months or years at best. Nevertheless, the Wikipedia trend reflects the fact that our best estimate of the age of Homo sapiens is growing with time. On one hand, this is unsurprising. As soon as you have one secure dating of any phenomenon in the archeological or fossil record, its estimated age over time either grows or stays the same. On the other hand, this goes against our intuitions about how the story of deep history is pieced together. You would probably find it strange if, for example, the estimated age of ancient Egypt had doubled within your lifetime.

In order to better understand where we come from, let's jump into the rough story of human history as it's currently understood. Before we get into the weeds, though, one clarification is needed. Because some disagreement exists on the use of the terms hominin and hominid across different fields of science, here's how I use them:

• Hominin: members of the genus Homo. This includes Homo sapiens and our close relatives like Homo neanderthalensis.

• Hominid: members of the family Hominidae, also called apes. This includes all members of the genus Homo, as well as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and all other species, extinct or not, that descended from their common ancestor.

With that out of the way, the story of human history starts about 7 million years ago with Sahelanthropus tchadensis, the earliest hominid commonly believed to be bipedal. It's considered the possible common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, or perhaps a close relative of that common ancestor, though this is debated. Regardless, fewer than ten specimens of Sahelanthropus tchadensis have been recovered, all within one square kilometer of each other in northern Chad. Consequently, very little is known about it, and it's probably safe to assume that if it was truly bipedal, then there were other bipedal hominids around at that time as well.

Fast forward about three million years and we see the emergence of the genus Australopithecus, the first hominids known to make stone tools^[1]. Australopithecus is thought to be the ancestral genus of Homo, though there are other known bipedal hominins that co-existed with Australopithecus, such as Kenyanthropus, which may also have played a part in our evolution. Early members of the genus Homo include rudolfensis, appearing 2.5 million years ago; habilis, 2.3 million years ago; and erectus, about 2 million years ago. There's no definitive evidence of direct ancestral progression between these species, and as I discussed at length in Defining Homo sapiens, the lines between hominins are often very blurry. One reason for this blurriness is that direct genetic evidence only reaches so far: at around 430 thousand years old, the Sima de los Huesos hominin fossils, discovered in the 1980s and believed to be a precursor of Neanderthals, represent the oldest specimens from which anyone has successfully sequenced DNA. This is obviously much younger than Homo erectus and many other super-archaic hominins, so researchers rely heavily on anatomy to classify hominin fossils and their relation to one another.

Homo erectus is thought to be the first hominin that left Africa, commonly cited at 1.8 million years ago, though there are multiple lines of direct evidence that hominins did indeed leave Africa before, at least 2.5 million years ago. Many related hominins such as Homo ergaster, Homo antecessor, and Homo heidelbergensis have been classified over time as either independent species or as transitional forms that represent subspecies of Homo erectus over its roughly 2-million-year history. Homo erectus, possibly first evolving into Homo heidelbergensis or Homo antecessor, split into isolated populations in Asia, Europe, and Africa, subsequently evolving into Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, respectively, on each continent. All three of these groups interbred to some degree but remained distinct for hundreds of thousands of years. Homo sapiens left Africa in at least two big waves, and Neanderthal genetics are thought to have found their way back into Africa in at least one wave, either directly via Neanderthals or indirectly via groups of Homo sapiens they had previously mingled with. Meanwhile Homo erectus in Southeast Asia stayed relatively isolated from the other hominins, perhaps evolving into Homo floresiensis in parts of present-day Indonesia and Homo luzonensis in the present-day Philippines, before eventually dying out. The last Homo sapiens wave out of Africa ended around 50 thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens populations began exhibiting widespread cultural complexity marked by better weapons, more trade, and a higher level of symbolic activity like cave art and carved figurines. A number of other hominin populations began to die out at roughly this time, and direct competition with Homo sapiens may be partially responsible for their demise, though much remains uncertain.

Okay, so that's the rough story. And just to emphasize — it's really rough. Don't worry if it was hard to follow, because the details change constantly with new archeological finds, DNA and protein analyses, and radiometric datings. Below I've included various figures from the last 30 years mapping out the proposed evolutionary history of Homo sapiens, just to reinforce the idea that the story is constantly in flux. We should assume that even the most detailed evolutionary history below is missing the vast majority of the story, evidence of which has either been completely lost to time or is yet to be discovered^[2].

Despite all the uncertainty, genetic data gives us a high level of certainty about some aspects of our history. For example, mitochondrial DNA analysis makes it clear that all living humans share a common matrilineal female ancestor around 150-200 thousand years ago — the common ancestor, that is, of every living person's mother's mother's mother, and so on. This doesn't mean that she was the only woman alive at that time, rather that she is the only woman from that time with an unbroken line of female descendants between her and every living person. Similarly, Y-chromosomal analysis shows that all living humans share a common patrilineal male ancestor between 200 and 300 thousand years ago. There's also genetic evidence for a number of other genetic bottlenecks throughout human history which could be related to infectious diseases, climate change, migration trends, or cultural evolution, like the widespread adoption of agriculture.

While this data gives us some important information about our very distant ancestors, it doesn't tell us conclusively whether or not they were anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens). For that, we rely on skeletal remains. Over the last hundred years, numerous fossil discoveries have influenced the estimated timeline of human history. In many cases, the estimated age of these findings has grown with time. Here are four key examples:

• The Skhul and Qafzeh remains, discovered in present-day Israel between 1931 and 1935: These Homo sapiens fossils were commonly thought to be Neanderthal descendants and were initially estimated to be 40-50 thousand years old based on their biostratigraphy and the types of tools found alongside them. Thermoluminescence (TL) dating, electron spin resonance (ESR) dating, and Uranium radiometric (U-series) dating from the late 1980s onward pushed their estimated age well beyond 80 thousand years, and a 2005 U-series study found that some of the remains are up to 130 thousand years old. Today the Skhul and Qafzeh hominins are considered Homo sapiens who were part of an early migration wave out of Africa and who predate many of the Neanderthal remains found in the region.

• The Florisbad Skull, discovered in South Africa in 1932: This skull was initially considered a new species, called Homo helmei, and it was suggested that it originated in the Middle Pleistocene, sometime >130 thousand years ago, although this was debated. Later radiocarbon datings from the 1950s-1970s dated it either beyond the upper limit of radiocarbon dating^[3] or around 40 thousand years old. In 1996, it was dated with ESR to 259 ± 35 thousand years old. From the 90s onwards, consensus shifted towards the conclusion that the Florisbad Skull is indeed an early Homo sapiens fossil.

• The Omo fossils, discovered in Ethiopia in 1967: These remains were initially estimated to be at least 130 thousand years old, significantly older than any other recognized Homo sapiens fossils at the time. In 2005, a radiometric argon dating pushed their estimated age up to 195 ± 5 thousand years, and, in 2022, another argon dating pushed their age to 233 ± 22 thousand years.

• The Jebel Irhoud fossils, discovered in Morocco in 1961: Initially believed to be Neanderthals and estimated to be around 40 thousand years old, biostratigraphic evidence later pushed the consensus view well beyond 100 thousand years. New excavations starting in 2004 led to the reclassification of the fossils as Homo sapiens with some archaic features. In 2017, flint artifacts were dated with TL to 315 ± 34 thousand years ago, and a mandible was dated to 286 ± 32 thousand years ago. Jebel Irhoud is now considered the oldest known Homo sapiens remains.

There are two primary reasons for this trend towards an older origin of our species. The first is that, while there was no consensus view in the early 20th century on the birthplace of Homo sapiens, there was a prominent Eurocentric view that Homo sapiens evolved primarily from Neanderthals. Most Neanderthal findings at the time were estimated to be somewhere between 40 and 100 thousand years old. This created a perceived upper bound on the age of Homo sapiens fossils, and hominin fossils presumed to be older, such as the Florisbad Skull, were categorized as different species. The second and more obvious reason is technological progress in dating organic remains. In the 1930s, radiometric dating for organic materials didn't exist, and although radiocarbon dating was developed in the 1940s, it doesn't provide reliable dates beyond 40-50 thousand years. Since then, geochronological dating methods, including TL, ESR, and U-series dating, have improved immensely, so I don't expect that further improvements will significantly shift the estimated ages of the aforementioned fossils. But, as I discussed in Ancient history's blind spot, as you go further back in time, estimates tend to become minimum bounds. Said another way, we are not sure exactly how old Homo sapiens are, but we're highly confident they're at least 315 thousand years old.

And, in recent years, the cadence of new archeological findings challenging the status quo has not slowed down. If anything, it's speeding up. Many new hominin species have been discovered just in the last 20 years, including Denisovans, Homo naledi, Nesher Ramla Homo, and Homo luzonensis. In 2013, there was also a 2.8-million-year-old mandible discovered in Ethiopia, called LD 350-1, believed to be from an unknown species of Homo. It pushed back the minimum age of the genus from 2.4 to 2.8 million years.

Also in recent years, multiple lines of genetic evidence seem to indicate that Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans split from their common ancestor sometime between 500 and 800 thousand years ago (see Figure 1). If we ever recover hominin fossils older than those at Jebel Irhoud that are presumed to be a part of our lineage, perhaps their anatomy will be midway between anatomically modern Homo sapiens and Homo heidelbergensis or Homo antecessor. If so, the fossils would likely be classified as a new species, a precursor to Homo sapiens as the Sima de los Huesos hominins are to Neanderthals. A new study, published in January by the same team responsible for the latest Jebel Irhoud excavations, claims to have identified additional hominin fossils in Morocco that could be exactly that missing link. The fossils, discovered at Grotte à Hominidés (English: "Hominid Cave"), are dated to 773 thousand years ago, and the study's authors suggest the fossils are the best candidate for a precursor to Homo sapiens sometime after they diverged from their common ancestor with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

But, because we lack DNA evidence from these fossils, a lot remains uncertain. Just as many early researchers mistakenly believed that Homo sapiens descended from Neanderthals, we may be mistaken again about the hominins we believe we descended from, whether Homo heidelbergensis, Homo antecessor, or the hominins from Grotte à Hominidés. The truth may be that we simply coexisted with these hominins — which is what a recent study of a deformed, 1-million-year-old skull from central China seems to suggest. The study, published in September 2025, digitally reconstructed the skull and identified it as a Denisovan^[4]. The authors further suggest that the split from the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans actually occurred between 1.3 and 1.4 million years ago. If true, this would roughly double the current consensus. It's also hundreds of thousands of years before Homo heidelbergensis and Homo antecessor are thought to have first appeared. Of course, these findings are recent, and time will tell if the study's conclusions are broadly accepted.

Regardless, as we see in the Jebel Irhoud fossils, consensus is built on what is observed, not what is expected. The safest assumption is that Homo sapiens are only as old as the oldest known find. But a reasonable assumption is that we are older. As a rule of thumb, I expect that Homo sapiens are about half a million years old. If we eventually find fossil evidence to prove it, we should consider it interesting, but not that surprising.

As a closing thought, consider that, in 1997, when the Schöningen spears were dated to 400 thousand years old, the discovery revolutionized our understanding of archaic hominins' weapon-building capabilities. It's presumed that these spears were built by an ancestral or cousin lineage of Homo sapiens. The same is true of the world's oldest known woodwork, the Kalambo structure, discovered in 2023 and dated to 476 thousand years old. Given the variety of hominins roaming the earth at the time, more than likely these were not made by Homo sapiens. But the truth is we don't know. They could have been us. All we know for sure is that we've been around for at least 315 thousand years.

Notes:

1. Lots of hominids use stones as tools, but the Australopithecus tools were manufactured, having been sharpened or altered in other ways.

2. It is extremely likely that the closer this topic is studied, the more complicated it will grow. I expect that the real story is at least 100x more complex than the most detailed evolutionary history proposed to date, and I expect that there are dozens of additional extinct hominins we have not yet discovered.

3. See C-850.

4. It actually identifies the skull as Homo longi, one of the proposed species names for Denisovans.

Homo sapiens are, of course, humans. But there's no easy way to distinguish ourselves from other similar species.

For animals, the most intuitive way to define a species is the "biological species" concept. It says that a species is the largest group of organisms capable of reproducing with one another and producing fertile offspring. While dogs and cats can't reproduce, horses and donkeys can, but they produce sterile offspring in almost all cases^[1]. For other animals, the line between species gets blurrier. Lions and tigers can also reproduce, and while their male offspring are almost always sterile, their female offspring are typically fertile^[2]. For Homo sapiens though, the biological species concept breaks down completely. Every living human has some Neanderthal DNA (Homo neanderthalensis), so we clearly interbred with them and produced fertile offspring.

The next most logical way to distinguish Homo sapiens from our close relatives would be to classify each group by its ecological niche. But, beyond the fact that we are land-dwelling animals, Homo sapiens are clearly not restricted to a single ecological niche. And for our close relatives like Neanderthals, evidence continues to point in the same direction, including remains stretching from Portugal to Italy that suggest many groups developed specialized marine diets of fish, shellfish, and marine birds and mammals. This contradicts the stereotype of Neanderthals as a cold-weather species restricted to hunting large game on the Western Eurasian steppe.

Many existing human populations also have DNA from other members of the genus Homo, including Denisovans and so-called "ghost populations", whose DNA appear in some human genomes but has not been conclusively matched to a specific member of the genus. The genomes of some West African and South Asian populations, for example, reveal the existence of ghost populations. Researchers have suggested Homo ergaster, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, or otherwise undiscovered archaic hominins as the potential identity of one or more of these ghost populations.

Many papers, articles, and news reports refer to members of the genus Homo as distinct "human species". Referring to them as species doesn't align with the biological species concept. Plus, if they were indeed human, then Homo sapiens are only a subset of all humans. One reason for the disconnect is that paleoanthropology is an older field of science than genetics. Long before we understood DNA and could prove that modern humans interbred with other hominins, paleoanthropologists were classifying them primarily according to their anatomy. It's also extremely difficult to extract undamaged bits of DNA from many hominin fossils, due to the exceptional antiquity of the remains or the environment they were preserved in. As a result, anatomy is still the most reliable tool for categorizing hominins.

Anatomy is inferred primarily from bones and teeth, since these organs are most likely to fossilize. This leaves large gaps in our understanding of archaic hominins' soft tissue anatomy, but it does lead to solid conclusions about height and muscle mass, as well as brain size and brain shape. Jaw and tooth structure can also tell us something about a hominin's diet, but, given the incredible variation in modern and ancient Homo sapiens diets, it often doesn't strongly suggest any particularly unique characteristics. Interestingly, Homo sapiens are the only apes with a "true" chin. All other apes, including more distant relatives such as chimpanzees and gorillas, lack the same bony structure on the front of their mandibles. This is known as an autapomorphic trait, a trait that is unique to one group of organisms and absent from all others. Autoapomorphic traits are a key way to distinguish species by their anatomy.

Nevertheless, the study of anatomy actually highlights just how similar Homo sapiens are to other hominins. Of all our ancient relatives, Neanderthals are the most well-known and well-studied. The genomes of modern humans are 99.7% identical to those of Neanderthals, leaving only 0.3% where alleles, genes, indels, and non-coding sequences of DNA commonly differ. Notably, this is the same level of genetic differentiation observed between isolated populations of chimpanzees, yet they are considered the same species. For additional context on genetic differentiation, we share 99.9% of our genomes with all living humans, 98.8% with chimpanzees, about 85% with mice, and about 70-75% with elephants. Neanderthals are commonly characterized as slightly shorter than Homo sapiens and as having more muscular bodies, a large nasal aperture, a prominent brow ridge, and a 10% larger brain with a much bigger occipital lobe and a smaller frontal lobe. But many Neanderthal traits lie within the range of normal Homo sapiens variability. For example, average height of an adult Homo sapiens male ranges from under five feet in populations of present-day Congo to above six feet in various regions in Europe. Neanderthals, on the other hand, were thought to be about five and a half feet tall, a few inches shorter than the average Homo sapiens they coexisted with. Studies have suggested that, despite their shorter stature, Neanderthals had somewhere between 5-15% more^[3] lean muscle mass^[4] than Homo sapiens. This is similar to the level of variation in muscle mass observed across broad ethnic groups in the US^[5], especially in aging individuals. Additionally, the modern human populations with the highest muscle mass have Central and West African ancestry, ethnicities which have less Neanderthal DNA than almost all other Homo sapiens populations. Arctic-dwelling modern humans, such as the Inuit and Yupik peoples, also have certain cold-weather adaptations that show a degree of similarity to Neanderthals, such as shorter limbs relative to torso size, greater lung capacity, and a larger nasal aperture. Current evidence suggests these morphological traits are examples of convergent evolution, having developed independently rather than as the result of Neanderthal ancestry^[6].

Consider also the Red Deer Cave people, whose fossils were discovered in Southwest China in 1979, dated to as recently as 11,500 years ago. Since their discovery, researchers have suggested their morphology resembles Denisovans or much older hominins such as Homo erectus or Homo habilis. Recent DNA analysis, although debated, suggests they are just Homo sapiens with an uncommon morphology.

The distinction between Homo sapiens and our hominin relatives is further complicated by the fact that a large degree of human variability is due to phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a single genotype to produce different observable traits (phenotypes) depending on environmental conditions. One well-known example of phenotypic plasticity comes from a study of London taxi drivers that found that the average taxi driver's posterior hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in spatial navigation, grew 7-10% larger than average, and its size correlated with the number of years an individual had worked as a taxi driver. It's possible that for the many Neanderthal groups that lived through long, dark winters and hunted large game, phenotypic plasticity can partially explain some of their traits, like greater muscle mass and a larger occipital lobe, the region of the brain responsible for visual processing^[7]. In fact, a 2014 study of Neanderthal and Denisovan epigenetics suggested that gene expression was the primary driver of skeletal changes across these hominin populations, rather than underlying genetics that differed from Homo sapiens. That said, I'm definitely not suggesting that phenotypic plasticity is the sole explanation or a better explanation for any given trait that differs across archaic hominin populations. My point is that it's extremely difficult to know what portion of a physical trait is due to unique genetics and what portion is due to culturally-ingrained behaviors and/or the environmentally-regulated expression of shared genetics.

The differences observed between archaic hominins are further complicated by small sample sizes. Researchers estimate that the fossil record currently contains about 400 individual Neanderthals, only 30 of which are relatively complete specimens. Neanderthals are thought to have had extremely low population density, perhaps never exceeding 70,000 individuals, so 400 individuals may be a representative sample, though it's certainly debatable. And, given that they roamed the earth for at least 375,000 years and were spread across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, it would not be surprising if Neanderthal genetics, appearances, and culture were at least as varied as they are across modern human ethnic groups.

With regard to other archaic hominins, like Denisovans, it's clear that the limited number of findings are not representative samples. In fact, we only discovered that Denisovans existed in 2010, due to DNA analysis of a bone fragment. Because so little is known about them, they don't even have an official species name; Homo longi and Homo denisovensis have been suggested. The remains of about 15 individual Denisovans have been confirmed to date, and about 10 of them come from Denisova Cave in Siberia, each of which is linked to a single tooth, a small bone, or a bone fragment. Outside of Denisova Cave, a single skull, two mandibles, a tooth, and a rib have been confirmed as Denisovan remains, all discovered in East Asia. If, for example, a number of these Denisovans experienced famine in utero, their physical characteristics would have been highly skewed relative to the average Denisovan. And the modern human populations with the highest amount of Denisovan DNA are indigenous to the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. It's possible that modern human populations migrated there long after mingling with Denisovans, but if Denisovans did inhabit warm equatorial regions that far south, their physical characteristics might have differed considerably from Siberian Denisovans.

Despite our anatomical similarities, and the way phenotypic plasticity and small sample sizes blur the lines between groups, I am not suggesting that Homo sapiens are the same as our close hominin relatives. No modern human populations, with the possible exception of the Red Deer Cave people, share all or most of the physical traits of any known archaic hominin. Yet we are much more similar than commonly thought, and our categorization as different species is a weak distinction. Homo sapiens appeared at least 300,000 years ago, but our cultural complexity, marked by higher population density, superior weapons, expanded trade networks, and better cave art, is thought to have become widespread only 45,000 years ago. This doesn't suggest our relatives were inferior or incapable of producing similar cultural aspects; evidence suggests that, at least in isolated cases, many did create artifacts of equal symbolic or technological quality^[8]. The widespread cultural complexity of Homo sapiens appears in the archeological record at the same time that all of our known remaining relatives began to die out (see Figure 1). If competition with Homo sapiens was a primary driver, then the disappearance of our relatives, although spanning thousands of years, resembles a similar pattern within Homo sapiens populations, where societies with superior weapons, trade, and art often intentionally or inadvertently wipe out others. But the cultural complexity of one society of modern humans does not imply that another is incapable of adopting such complexity or developing it independently.

In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, "I look at the term species as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other". This is how we define ourselves as Homo sapiens. An alternative view of our past is that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other archaic hominins were not different species that went extinct. They were more like highly isolated races of humanity that died out, and, given that all living humans carry some DNA from these archaic hominins, it's questionable whether they truly did die out. Ultimately, Homo sapiens are indeed humans, but, specifically, we're just the humans that survived.

Notes:

1. The Romans even had a saying, "cum mula peperit" (English: "when a mule foals"), signifying an impossible event, similar to English expressions like "When hell freezes over" or "When pigs fly". Interestingly, there are rare documented cases where female mules have produced offspring, but these are akin to a natural form of two wrongs making a right, where two subsequent errors cancel each other out. They result from an anomaly in the reproducing individual's own genetic makeup, or from a form of meiotic failure which skips genetic recombination and creates an egg with DNA from only one parent (100% horse or 100% donkey), which is therefore fertile.

2. This is consistent with Haldane's rule.

3. See Results, page 105, "discrepancy between Neandertal and anatomically modern human average body size". Also see Discussion, page 108, "Greater body mass in Neandertals compared to anatomically modern humans results mainly from reduced muscularity in the latter".

4. See Table 3.

5. See Figure 3.

6. This is consistent with Allen's rule. Also, there is evidence that Inuit people inherited adaptive cold-weather metabolic traits from Denisovans.

7. The same adaptation may exist to a lesser degree in modern humans. A 2011 study found that populations in higher latitudes tend to have larger eyes, suggesting they also have proportionally larger visual cortices.

8. Examples include a 40,000+ year old stone bracelet from Denisova Cave and the 400,000 year old Schöningen Spears.

Humanity's view of its own ancient history is, needless to say, incomplete. It's particularly distorted by survivorship bias, the fallacy of concentrating only on the "survivors" — the artifacts, structures, texts, traditions, or even entire societies that endured long enough to reach us — while overlooking the vastly larger number that did not survive.

Before I explain why, I need to make a few quick points. Sometimes "history" is used synonymously with written- or recorded-history, meaning only those things that have occurred since the advent of writing. But when I say history, I mean all of human history, starting sometime long before the controlled use of fire 1 million years ago. Second of all, when I discuss "humanity's view" of ancient history, I'm referring to the general, non-expert understanding of history. With regard to the experts, the job of researching our ancient history falls into the hands of archeologists, paleoanthropologists, and an increasing number of multidisciplinary teams including specialized geneticists and earth scientists. In this essay I refer to them all as simply "archeologists" or "researchers". Finally, on more than one occasion in this essay I use behavioral observations of indigenous groups from recent history as a way of thinking about pre-literate, stone-age history. It goes without saying that these people are different from our ancient ancestors^[1], but the fact remains that they are our best modern analogs for understanding what life might have been like long before the first-known human civilizations.

With that out of the way, consider the stone age. While, technically speaking, the term "stone age" has more to do with tools and weapons than it does with building materials, for many people the term evokes a vision of history in which humans were at some point obsessed with building large stone structures. But this mental image many of us carry isn't an accurate reflection of what the world was like. It was only sometime in the 20th century that concrete surpassed wood as humanity's primary building material, and still wood remains way ahead of stone, brick, and metal. Wood, by volume, could have been used 100,000 times more than stone in stone-age-era buildings, but wooden structures are much more prone to decay and therefore appear much less frequently in the archeological record relative to the frequency with which they were built.

In fact, entire wood-based civilizations may be completely lost to time. Researchers in the Amazon are just beginning to uncover vast amounts of evidence that the jungle once supported many large population centers. The remnants of civilization appear to be scattered across the Amazon, but because the jungle's rain, humidity, and dense vegetation degrade and cover up the remnants of human activities so quickly, researchers have only recently discovered that large, complex societies existed there. The primary remains of these societies, initially uncovered as a result of deforestation, are earthen mounds that were formerly the foundations of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, revealing the layouts of what were once large networks of interconnected communities. Researchers, now using lidar to scan the jungle, have located tens of thousands of mounds in less than one percent of the total area of the Amazon. Many of these Amazonian civilizations are assumed to be about 1,000-3,000 years old. Who knows, perhaps similar jungle-based civilizations in other regions of the world had been completely erased before the first Amazonian one appeared.

Similar to the way that the jungle swallows up history, the ocean submerges and washes away the evidence of human activities. Today, about one third of all humans live within 100 meters of sea level, and humans have likely congregated along coasts for a very long time. This was the case when Western Europeans began exploring stone-age North America starting in the 15th century. At the time, the Pacific Northwest was one of the most densely populated and least nomadic areas of what is now the US and Canada, due to its abundance of coastal food sources.

For ancient humans during the most recent ice age, living near the coast may have been even more likely than it is for humans today. The last ice age stretched from 115,000-11,700 years ago, and its climate, in particular because of its low CO₂ levels, had more extreme average seasonal temperature shifts. Proximity to large bodies of water reduces seasonal temperature fluctuations, and therefore could have made life considerably easier. There was also an abundance of megafauna roaming the earth at the time (see Figure 2). Undoubtedly, many groups of humans learned to rely on these animals as key sources of food and supplies, despite competition from our physically stronger cousins, Neanderthals. But for many other groups of humans, the presence of megafauna may have been one extra incentive to subsist on a less risky ocean-based diet. While this idea is only a speculation^[2], it would be hard to find evidence in support of it, because sea levels are 130 meters higher today than they were in the midst of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago. In fact, sea levels haven't consistently been higher than they are now for about 3 million years. And for the last 1 million years or more, sea level has continually oscillated between the approximate levels of today and the minimum levels seen during the last ice age.

So, it's not unreasonable to assume that a significant amount of human history, potentially including large portions of our biological evolution, took place in locations that are currently underwater. Additionally, if it exists at all, most direct evidence of seafaring humans at the end of the last ice age is likely under at least 100 meters of water. Because of sea-level fluctuations over the course of human evolution, our understanding of ancient humans is skewed towards those that lived away from coastal areas, and who, due to climate and other natural threats, were likely to live less stationary lives.

Now, shifting gears, let's take a minute to consider the history of writing. Technically speaking, "writing" is defined as the ability to fully record language in symbolic form. The general consensus is that writing, in the technical sense, is at least 5,000 years old. Many people, upon hearing that statement, may envision a world in which humans never recorded symbolic information before that point in time. But written communication, specifically in the form of numbers and pictograms, is older than writing. Technically, this is called proto-writing, and, unsurprisingly, all of our oldest artifacts containing proto-writing are on long-lived materials like bones, tusks, clay tablets, shells, and cave walls. The earliest widely-accepted forms of proto-writing are the Jiahu and Vinča Symbols, dating from 6,000-8,000 years old. But some researchers argue they have identified direct evidence of proto-writing on a 38,000-year-old mammoth tusk, but they published their results only a few days ago, so time will tell whether the claim gains consensus.

Regardless of whether the marks on the mammoth tusk in question are actually proto-writing, it seems overwhelmingly likely that at least some humans were engaged in proto-writing 40,000 years ago or earlier. Why? Well, recall that all of our oldest examples of proto-writing are on long-lived materials. Any group of people that was proto-writing on durable objects like bone and clay tablets was definitely writing on more ephemeral objects, or drawing in the sand as children do, especially when they only needed to remember or communicate something for a relatively short amount of time. As far as we know, the oldest form of lightweight writing surface was papyrus, used in ancient Egypt at least 4,500 years ago. But long before ancient Egyptians figured out how to make papyrus, humans were in constant contact with natural, lightweight, easily transportable writing surfaces — leaves and bark. And sure enough, both have been observed in use in more recent times by indigenous groups as surfaces for their proto-writing systems, such as Nsibidi in West Africa, Rongorongo on Easter Island, or Yukaghir birch-bark carving in Siberia.

But this still doesn't explain why it's likely that humans were using proto-writing on the order of 40,000 years ago. Proto-writing, in its most basic form, would include the simple act of counting with dots or tally marks. Although we lack conclusive evidence that this was occurring, we do have abundant evidence that humans were recording much more elaborate forms of information in paintings and sculptures. The Picasso-esque paintings of Chauvet Cave, estimated by one team of researchers as up to 36,000 years old, are perhaps the most impressive examples. Any group of people, civilized or not, with individuals capable of this quality of painting, had highly symbolic minds and would certainly have had the concept of numbers and a simple way to record them. If you don't think these people could count, consider that chimpanzees can count, which means that humans and our ancestors have likely been able to count at least since the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees roamed the earth about 7 million years ago. That said, perhaps you could argue that the act of painting is a right-brained activity and therefore it represents a different type of complexity than is required for recording numbers, but consider that humans (or our ancestors) have been doing all the analytical, left-brained activities of modern day indigenous groups such as hunting large game, trading, building wooden structures, and handcrafting jewelry for well over 100,000 years.

As long as there were groups of people capable of creating the paintings at Chauvet Cave, there were likely also at least some groups of people engaged in proto-writing^[3]. More likely than not, very ancient humans stored written information on large leaves or other plant material that was easy to transport and store for later. For example, perhaps you stored some provisions in a location you wouldn't return to for months, or which another member of your group would need to retrieve. You likely would have been able to draw out a simple schematic to help you remember where you left it or to communicate its location to another person. But you would generally have no reason to record it on something that lasts 40,000 years, such as stone. If researchers eventually find and/or agree upon direct evidence of extremely ancient proto-writing, we should therefore consider it important, but not surprising. Now, before we move off the topic of caves, consider the "caveman" moniker we use for Neanderthals. All of the very first discoveries of Neanderthal remains were found in caves. Does this mean they predominantly lived in caves? No. They probably spent about as much time in caves as modern indigenous groups living on stone-age technologies. The concentration of Neanderthal remains in caves is simply a reflection of the fact that things last longer in caves^[4]. Caves are less exposed to all the natural forces which cause human remains to breakdown, and therefore it is much easier to find well-preserved evidence of ancient human activities inside of caves. Unfortunately though, given that coastal areas have been repeatedly submerged over the last million years, many of the caves with the most interesting archaic human remains are probably underwater.

Ultimately, no matter what an archeologist searches for, less remains from deeper history. Nothing lasts forever. Even impressive stone structures are eventually swallowed up by earthquakes, washed away in floods, or buried in sediment. As a result, the further back in time you go, many estimates tend to become simply minimum bounds. The approximate age of an evolutionary or cultural development is established based on its first appearance in the archeological or fossil record, but this only proves its minimum age. For example, for nearly fifty years the scientific consensus was that no human had stepped foot in the Americas before about 13,000 years ago. At the time, there were many archeological sites with securely-dated artifacts from that time period, and there was no agreed-upon direct evidence of a more ancient human presence in the Americas. But, since the late 20th century, a rapid succession of archeological finds have continually pushed back the timeline of first human-settlement in the Americas. The most recent findings are fossilized footprints in White Sands, New Mexico. Recent radiocarbon dating of the solidified mud the footprints were laid in shows that they are up to 23,000 years old. But whether humans arrived in the Americas at that time is highly uncertain. All we can say for sure is that humans migrated to the Americas at least that long ago.

At the end of the day, our understanding of ancient history is primarily based on the artifacts, features, and organic remains of human activities, all of which are subject to the natural forces which cause things to crumble, weather, dissolve, disintegrate, or decompose. Simply put: things don't last forever, and some things last longer than others. Unfortunately, archeologists can't study what they don't find, and our understanding of history is shaped by what they can find.

Notes:

1. Many indigenous groups that have managed to live until recent times in an illiterate, stone-age manner have unique characteristics that allowed them to keep their way of life despite the changing world around them. For example, they may have tended to hold extremely unfavorable views of outsiders. Indigenous groups that were less xenophobic were more likely to expose their immune systems to novel pathogens, adopt technologies such as writing and metal, or assimilate into another culture. Surviving groups, such as uncontacted tribes, may also tend to be less prosperous, on average, than our stone-age ancestors, because indigenous groups living on the most fertile land were much more likely to have it taken from them long ago by a more technologically advanced society. So, paradoxically, using indigenous groups as a way of understanding ancient human behavior is also prone to survivorship bias.

2. One argument against this speculation is that in Africa, which experienced much lower megafauna die-off at the end of the last ice age, a number of historically dense populations centers, while close to rivers and lakes, are far from coastlines.

3. In fact, some researchers argue the Chauvet Cave painters themselves also left proto-writing in the cave.

4. Related to the "caveman" moniker, see Figure 2 for images of the extinct "cave bear" and "cave lion". Similarly, many pre-literate societies that existed for hundreds or thousands of years are named after nothing more than the characteristics of the pottery they left behind, such as the Bell Beaker Culture, the Corded Ware Culture, and the Jōmon Period.

Lately I've been traveling in Peru and Colombia. The thing I love most about traveling is the people I meet along the way, and on this trip I've particularly enjoyed chatting with digital nomads. As is the case in many parts of the world, a dollar goes much further here than it does at home. Digital nomads are really good at taking advantage of this, and I admire them for how deeply they value their quality of life. My conversations with them have reminded me of a quote I once heard about wealth. It goes something like this: "Wealth is not about how much money you have. It's about how you spend it." Indeed, we can all imagine stereotypes of the penny-pinching landlord or the miserly lender, like Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol. This type of person, despite the size of their bank account, moves through life with the mindset of an impoverished person. They seem to be uncomfortable with abundance. So, if wealth is more about how someone spends their money than how they earn it or save it, what is wealth really made of?

The first element of wealth is luxury. Indeed, there are some things that only money can buy. In general, I define a luxury item as something built to last that one grows to adore more with time. Luxuries are things that attract sentimentality, and often that requires that they be long-lived. This would include a nice set of knives, a quality piece of furniture made with solid hardwood instead of a thin veneer, or a 100% wool coat instead of a trendy polyester one. When we buy these things, we naturally care for them over time. And as we grow more fond of them, we're also more likely to consider them as heirlooms, things that we'll pass down, and which could touch the lives of our loved ones for decades. There are also more ephemeral luxuries like food, gardens, flowers, and experiences, but I would place these under the second element of wealth — leisure.

Maximizing the quantity and quality of one's leisure is built on the reliance of others. Almost everyone prefers to rely on others. We want barbers, bankers, handymen, teachers, housekeepers, babysitters, dogsitters, chefs, and waitstaff all working on our behalf so we can do more of what we want when we want. A sense of prosperity emerges from these relationships. This relates to an idea I once heard distinguishing financial security from financial freedom. The idea is that financial security is the ability to weather the storm, whether it's job-loss, a market-crash, or a costly and unavoidable medical intervention. Financial freedom, on the other hand, is the ability to do what one wants when they want and to know they'll be able to cover the bill. If you decided right now that you want to ride a horse across Mongolia starting next week, you could rest assured that you'll be able to afford the right teachers, guides, and supplies to make it happen. So in one sense leisure is something that can be bought. With enough money, one can almost always find the time to do what they want, and they can always afford to pay the people supporting them along the way.

But maximizing leisure is not just about having tons of money. For example, if someone feels they work too much because they built a successful business that they don't yet trust anyone else to run, then in at least one sense, their source of income has become a source of scarcity in their life. Similarly, if someone overworks themselves because of an unconscious desire for status or control, they may achieve great financial success, but they're likely missing out on a lot of life. There's little joy in working hard to afford the big house with a pool if you never have time to swim. On the other hand, if a person with loads of money still works a lot because they like it, then work is their leisure. They work because they want to, not because they have to.

Maximizing leisure is about making deliberate choices. If most of your leisure time is spent at home, a modest floor plan may be a worthwhile trade-off for a better view, a larger garden, or a quieter street. Better yet, consider living closer to the cafe, the sauna, or the park where you and your friends like to hang out. If you enjoy cooking, buy the more fully-featured oven. If you enjoy eating out, go more often to the restaurant with better service, better lighting, or better food. Best of all, enjoy all these things more frequently with friends. And, on the topic of friends, it's important to distinguish them, along with neighbors and family, from the people who we rely on in a more transactional way like barbers and dogsitters. Relationships with friends and family are the greatest source of joy in most people's lives, and they are extremely hard to build and maintain without leisure. So relationships are like a form of meta-leisure. Having them helps us maximize our leisure, and because of all the joy they add to our lives, building and growing them is the richest form of leisure in and of itself.

This brings us to the third element of wealth — mastery. In many cases, an individual obtains mastery in one or more domains that are also the source of their income, like law, coding, plumbing, or real estate. This enables them to buy the luxuries and leisures of a wealthy lifestyle in the first place. Mastery also generates self-efficacy, the confidence in oneself that they have what it takes to do what they want, whether it's making new friends, learning a new language, or running a marathon. And often the most satisfying things in life are difficult and require high self-efficacy. If you really want to ride a horse across Mongolia, having the money to make it happen isn't quite sufficient. Sure, you may have the money to afford the teachers and guides to support you on your journey, but first you have to believe in your ability to find them and then to convince them to work with you. You also have to believe you have what it takes to endure any hardships that arise during your journey.

While mastery often comes in the form of the skills which generate your income, it doesn't have to. It could come in the form of an athletic, academic, or musical ability, and this may be especially true for an individual born into an affluent family, where they may experience less pressure to develop economically-viable skills. Generally speaking, having a lot of money increases one's self-efficacy because it makes doing so many things in life easier. But it's not guaranteed to do so. For someone born into an affluent family who never develops mastery, there’s a risk of falling into the "trust-fund kid" stereotype. They may be able to afford whatever they want in life, but they're apparently incapable or unmotivated to do the hard things which make life satisfying. Like the founder of a company who can’t remove themselves from its day-to-day operations, the trust-fund kid also has a form of scarcity in their life. In their case, free from financial pressures, but also lacking any particular skills, it comes in the form of directionlessness. And that’s why mastery is important. It gives you the confidence that you can do hard things.

As a final note, consider for a moment the ancient Greek roots of the word "school", originally σχολή (pronounced skho-lay). It's meaning was leisure, rest, free time, or freedom from labor, and in particular its meaning came to include the activities one engaged in when they were free from the occupations of their daily life. This included philosophy, debate, lectures, and other forms of learning and development. School was the opposite of toil. It was leisure spent developing oneself in higher pursuits. It wasn't easy, but it was desirable. It was, in one sense, a pursuit of mastery, and in another, an activity made possible by mastery already achieved in one or more domains.

Leisure, combined with mastery, generates a sense of freedom — a sense that you own every hour of your day and that you alone are responsible for the outcomes of your life. Combined with luxury, these three things generate a feeling of abundance. They generate wealth in the form of a felt-sense that there is always enough to go around.

Wealth is not a quantity of money. It is a mindset of abundance, which money can help buy. So buy nice things that don't go out of style. Ask yourself how you would ideally spend your time, and then take small steps in that direction, including spending more money when necessary. Finally, hone your craft, and don't be afraid to pay for the teachers and resources that will help you along the way. Develop your skills in a way that gives you confidence that you can take on the challenges that make your life rewarding. And remember, the point of money is not to have it, but rather to have the life it can afford you.

I recently read The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, an early 20th century Jesuit priest, geologist, and paleontologist, who was a key contributor in the discovery and research of the "Peking Man" fossils, a collection of fossils mostly dating to around 700,000 years ago from the early human relative Homo erectus. The book introduces many concepts from Teilhard's personal philosophy as a student of the natural sciences, and in particular it champions the concept of orthogenesis, the idea that biological evolution has a direction or purpose^[1].

While orthogensis is an interesting idea, it's not the primary reason I chose to write this post. In fact, I really didn't enjoy reading the book. It uses overly-complicated language to describe simple ideas, and I struggled to get through many sections of the book. The book was written in Teilhard's native French, so perhaps the difficulty is at least partially attributable to the specific English translation I read. Regardless, one idea from the book sticks with me, and I find myself thinking about it more with time. The Phenomenon of Man is most well-known for introducing the concept of the "noosphere" (pronounced NOH-uh-sfeer), and that's what I want to discuss here. A lot has been said on the topic and as a result my explanation might not resemble others', but my goal here is only to describe it as I understand it.

In geology and the earth sciences, the world is partitioned into many spherical zones, often containing the suffix "sphere". There's the atmosphere, the hydrosphere — oceans, lakes, clouds, etc. —, and the geosphere — all the solid parts of the earth. There's also the magnetosphere, the area surrounding earth which is dominated by its magnetic field. Due to its interaction with the charged particles of the solar wind, the magnetosphere is not very sphere-shaped at all. It is often described as tear-drop-shaped or bullet-shaped, where the bullet shape faces away from the sun.

Within many of the earth's spheres there are also subpartitions. In geology there's the crust, mantle, and core, as well as the lithosphere and asthenosphere. The atmosphere is broken down into the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, and exosphere.

Perhaps the most consequential sphere we learn about in school is the biosphere. It's the world of living things, and it exists primarily on the surface of the lithosphere and in the hydrosphere. But it also takes up residence in the atmosphere in the form of flying animals, spores, pollen, and all manner of microorganisms. And there's speculation due to the existence of extremophile organisms, and specifically lithophiles (rock-eating organisms), that the biosphere may reach deep into the lithosphere or even below it. If there's any truth to one of the many hypotheses that life on earth has extraterrestial origins, then depending on the way you define it the biosphere would be similar to the magnetosphere in that it is not spherical in nature.

Many of the earth's spheres rely on the existence of other spheres. For example, the earth's atmosphere would likely resemble Mars's relatively thin and simple atmosphere if not for the magnetosphere, shielding it from the constant barrage of solar wind. And without the atmosphere and its greenhouse effect, the hydrosphere would also much more closely resemble Mars's — just ice. Similarly, the biosphere relies on each of the other spheres and may not exist at all without them.

This brings us to the noosphere. The noosphere completely relies on the biosphere, and could be considered a subpartition of the biosphere. But as I will return to later, the level of activity and the rate of change within the noosphere make it particularly unique. Similar to the magnetosphere, the noosphere has little to no mass. And the noosphere also leaves behind artifacts pointing to its existence, similar to the way the biosphere does in the form of fossils.

So what is the noosphere? In short, it's the realm of minds. And minds are unique to only some regions of the biosphere, or at the very least there is a spectrum of the luminosity of minds, and many or most organisms posess an infinitesimally low luminosity of mind. I don't mean to create confusion by saying this or to suggest this is what Teilhard believes. I'm simply leaving room for the mystery of consciousness, and specifically for hypotheses that predict consciousness could exist in very simple forms of life or even non-living things. Also, since so much has been said about the nature and qualities of minds, I want to be clear that when I use the term mind I simply mean a specific instance of consciousness. Of course, if consciousness exists in non-living things then the noosphere would extend outside of the biosphere, but for simplicity let's assume it only exists in some forms of life. Using this definition, one could say that an alien world covered in a thick slime of prokaryotic organisms has a biosphere but not a noosphere.

Teilhard argues that the noosphere arises through the process of "cerebralization" in animals, or the emergence of and increasing size and complexity of nervous systems. Recall that Teilhard supported the idea of orthogenesis, so he believed that this cerebralization process and the emergence of the noosphere from the biosphere was part of the purpose of evolution. He argued that evolution goes through a process of "groping" and "pruning", where, as he argued was the case in early human evolution, it "tries out" many forms, like Neanderthals and Homo erectus, and then, once it has achieved its most capable form — humans in this example —, begins to multiply and spread out while the less optimal forms are pruned back from the tree of life.

In the case of animal species, he argues that the optimal form of a species will tend to develop a greater nervous sytem, social interactions, and eventually entire societies. He also argues that the process of groping and pruning is fractal. The process occurs at the level of the individual species, but also at the levels of the family, class, phylum, and kingdom. Within the insect class, ants and bees occupy the role of the most capable species. Among insects, they exhibit the most complex behaivors and social interactions, but as insects they are limited in ways which, according to Teilhard, make them ultimately less optimal than other groups of animals such as mammals. Whether or not they have minds is debatable.

Teilhard's ideas about cerebralization and orthogenesis are interesting but they're not crucial for understanding the noosphere. As I alluded to earlier, I think it's up for debate whether nervous systems are a key or unique ingredient of consciousness. For example, there's ongoing research into the communication methods of fungi via their mycorrhizal networks. Speculative as it is, some researchers argue that fungi actually send information through mycorrhiza in the form of language. So the key takeaway from Teilhard's work is not how or why the noosphere exists, but simply that it does exist.

And in the noosphere exist such things as language. Not just human language — also sperm whale, elephant, crow, and fungi language, if indeed these forms of communication can be considered language. There are also mating rituals, such as the elaborate displays of the birds of paradise, and perhaps Amazon river dolphins' tendency to lift balls of clay above the surface of the water. Then there are fads, obvious in the fashion and behaivors of humans, but also present in orcas, where in at least one region they have been observed wearing dead salmon on their heads. Finally, there are all manner of hunting and gathering techniques that vary within a given species's population. That said, it's up for debate whether any given one of these techniques exists "in the mind" or not, for perhaps some of them are somehow wired into a species's DNA.

I mentioned previously that the noosphere also leaves artifacts, just as the biosphere leaves behind fossils. Among the abundance of noospheric fossils, books are perhaps the most notable. But there are also broken shells throughout Southeast Asia, where crab-eating macaques use rocks as tools to hammer open oysters, clams, and other aquatic food sources. The types of stones and techniques used by these monkeys varies from group to group. There are also the carcasses of great white sharks off the coast of South Africa, fully intact with the exception of a single organ, where local orcas hunt them solely for their livers. These carcasses are more indicative of orcas' cultural evolution than their genetic evolution.

What's notable about the noosphere is the diversity, rapid rate of evolution, and magnitude of the activity it contains. All of the earth's spheres have some level of activity. The poles of the magnetosphere, for example, are constantly wondering and occasionally flip. In the geosphere, the dynamic processes of plate tectonics, volcanism, and mantle convection are constantly unfolding. And in the biosphere an unfathomable number of constantly evolving chemical processes are underway at all times. But in the noosphere there is thought, feeling, and the ever-changing tides of culture, as well as all the activity that takes place inside the artifacts of the noosphere. This includes every strand of fabric woven in every mechanized loom, every operation in every computer processor, and every unit of thermal energy converted to electricity in every nuclear power plant.

At this point it may have occurred to you that the noosphere is perhaps simply the world of memes. But this does not make the noosphere any less significant. David Deutsch, in his book The Beginning of Infinity, writes that, "...the frequently cited metaphor of the history of life on Earth, in which human civilization occupies only the final ‘second’ of the ‘day’ during which life has so far existed, is misleading. In reality, a substantial proportion of all evolution on our planet to date has occurred in human brains. And it has barely begun. The whole of biological evolution was but a preface to the main story of evolution, the evolution of memes." In other words, the rate of evolution in the noosphere outpaces the biosphere to such an extent that it makes all of biological evolution look insignificant in comparison. But, beyond the noosphere's extraordinary dynamism, there is a realm of possibilities with deeper implications.

Allow me to leave you with one final speculation: if there is even a kernel of truth to any of the various claims of extrasensory perception, including children who report verifiable memories of someone else's life, patients who perceive verifiable details in and around a hospital during a near death experience, children said to demonstrate "mindsight", and perennial assertions of telepathy^[2], then at the very least there may be one or more undiscovered organs through which animals transmit or receive information. Or perhaps the noosphere is much more than the realm of memes, which spread through cultural replication and are fully reliant on the sense organs of biology. The noosphere could constitute a genuine ecology of minds, able to interact directly with one another or world in general, and which are perhaps somehow more than just specific instances of consciousness constrained to their individual biological hardware.

Notes:

1. As a Jesuit, Teilhard received sharp criticism from the Catholic church for his unorthodox ideas, including his support for the theory of evolution. That said, it's not difficult to understand why a Christian who accepts the theory of evolution would support the idea of orthogenesis. In short, Teilhard viewed evolution as a process set in motion by God to create humankind. Teilhard's ideas have received praise from many high-ranking Catholic clery in more recent years, including multiple popes.

2. Telepathy claims:

   • today
   • in the 20th century
   • in Christianity
   • in Judaism
   • in Buddhism
   • in the Yoga Sutras

The common definition of a Luddite is someone who opposes the use of new technology. It’s used in a disparaging way towards anyone accused of being against some specific innovation. The term comes from 1810s England, where groups of textile workers raided textile factories and destroyed machines which they believed threatened their jobs. These protestors banded together under a fictional leader they called Ned Ludd, hence the name “Luddite”.

This familiar use of the term Luddite to describe anyone opposed to some technology is too broad. In my opinion, a Luddite’s primary concern is their own social and economic status, not technology. Luddites oppose the adoption of some new technology not because it is dangerous to society but because it is dangerous to their standing within society. The historical Luddites worked primarily with their hands, and they opposed textile machines for fear that each machine would reduce demand for manual work and therefore make their role in society obsolete. This would force them to incur some inconvenience and retraining in some other field before regaining the real or perceived social and economic status they had before the adoption of the machines.

While social and economic status are often intertwined, the distinction between them reveals a sharper insight into Luddite motivations. Introductory economics teaches us that wealth-creation is a positive-sum game, often increasing the economic status of one or more parties without affecting the economic status of others. On the other hand, social hierarchy competition is basically zero-sum. An individual’s social standing exists largely relative to others’ social standing, and when one person’s social status increases, one or more other’s often decrease. Social competition is a deep-seated evolutionary behavior much older than humans, whereas money, capitalism, and economic competition are all more recent emergent phenomena. As a result, many people concerned with increasing their wealth are really concerned with the social status it confers on them. Similarly, when faced with the prospect of losing one’s job, most people don’t immediately fear going hungry. Instead, they worry about the social implications of losing their title and/or their wealth. Therefore, we could say that Luddites are concerned primarily with losing social status. The distinction is useful but not crucial here; the point is that when a new technology is introduced, a Luddite believes, whether consciously or subconsciously, that they stand to lose in a way that their peers do not.

With this in mind, we can identify with each new technological development who the true Luddites are. We can also distinguish them from those who oppose a given technology for some other reason – let’s call them technoskeptics. Consider GLP-1 agonists (e.g. Wegovy), whose loud opponents have been health, wellness, and fitness influencers. They say they're concerned about the effects on society and culture if individuals no longer need to learn discipline and willpower in order to stay healthy. But the truth is that most of these individuals sell a product or service that’s directly competitive with GLP-1s. And in many cases they're probably also blessed with genetics that allow them to stay thin with less discipline and willpower than the average person. Therefore, on average and all else held constant, their genetics contribute positively to their social and economic standing, and a drug which makes it easier for others to stay thin negatively impacts their standing^[1].

Bringing this argument a bit closer to home, take a moment to reflect on all the opposition you've heard or read in passing about GLP-1s. Were any of the people sharing these opinions not in shape? Probably not. And if they were out of shape, they might have just expressed opposition to the unequal access that different groups of people had to GLP-1s, which was particularly apparent in the early days of GLP-1 adoption for weight management^[2].

Contrary to Luddites, a technoskeptic opposes a technology for some other reason. Consider Tristan Harris, perhaps most well-known for his role in the documentary “The Social Dilemma”, where he argues that, with regard to social media and many other software products, “If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”. Harris quit a lucrative job at Google when he concluded that many of its products had misaligned incentives, designed to distract and steal the attention of their users. Harris was directly benefitting from the technologies he now opposes, so he’s not a Luddite.

So what’s the point? This post isn't intended as a criticism of any group of people or an endorsement of any particular belief or set of beliefs. And this post is definitely not about the definition of words. What I’ve chosen to call “Luddites” and “technoskeptics” you can create your own unique terms for. Armed with the distinction between the two groups, you can make sense of the world more easily. Our world is flooded with opinions, performative outrage, and algorithmically amplified extremes – so it’s useful to have ways of filtering out some of the noise. When you hear someone loudly oppose some form of innovation, ask yourself what they might have to lose relative to others, or, if they are a politician, what their constituents might lose. If they have nothing to lose, or if they would even gain relative to others from the innovation in question, then they may have an opinion worth listening to more closely. Said differently: On average, the arguments of the Luddite may be overrated, and the arguments of the technoskeptic may be underrated.

Notes:

1. Since GLP-1s also decrease muscle mass, some diet and fitness influencers have also directly benefited from GLP-1s by tailoring their content to those taking the drugs, but the negative effect on muscle mass wasn’t widely known when GLP-1s were becoming popular, which coincided with the time of highest negative GLP-1 sentiment.

2. As opposed to GLP-1 use for type 2 diabetes

I recently finished the book The Intelligent Investor, by Benjamin Graham. Graham is considered the father of value investing and was Warren Buffet's mentor. He makes a distinction early on in his book between investing and speculating. Most speculators, he says, incorrectly believe they are investors. To invest, in Graham's words, is to put capital into something which, "upon thorough analysis promises safety of principle and an adequate return."

Graham notes that, "speculation is neither illegal, immoral, nor (for most people) fattening to the pocket book." He goes on to say:

There is intelligent speculation as there is intelligent investing. But there are many ways in which speculation may be unintelligent. Of these the foremost are:

1. speculating when you think you are investing;
2. speculating seriously instead of as a pastime, when you lack proper knowledge and skill for it, and;
3. risking more money in speculation than you can afford to lose

The point here is that investing and speculating are two different activities, and the key difference between them is that investing promises safety of principal.

With that in mind, consider the angel investor. Most of their investments go to zero — so the assumption is that they risk 100% of their principal. They are actually speculators. While the title "angel speculator" doesn't hold the same level of distinction, note Graham's comment that there is nothing immoral about speculation. Case in point: many of the biggest tech companies today would not exist at all had it not been for the speculative bets of angels in their early days. The same could be said of the railroad, steel, and oil industries.

The problem is that speculation is an alluring game. Throughout The Intelligent Investor, Graham occasionally shares pieces of advice about how to select an investment and then immediately discounts the value of his own advice, saying that in practice its value is simply to give the investor something to do. His point is that an individual may be prone to speculation if they don't have anything to do. Put another way, unintelligent speculation is often a result of boredom or a bias towards action.

It's not hard to understand why this is the case. It's easy to look at a stock's price-chart and say to yourself, "If I had bought then and sold now I would have made an xxxx% return in only a few weeks/months/years". Hindsight makes the process look easy. While some people can consistently yield positive returns through speculation, these individuals are akin to professional athletes. If, for example, you understand finance better than 95% of people, you may think you could be a successful speculator. But if you were better than only 95% of people at golf, you would be wrong to believe you have (currently) what it takes to be a professional golfer. You should be better than at least 99.99% of people.

At the end of the day, speculation decreases wealth for most people engaged in it. Don't get caught off-guard speculating when you think you're just investing.

I recently finished the book "An American Sickness" by Elizabeth Rosenthal. In it, Rosenthal covers an array of incentives driving up healthcare costs in the US. Here I intend to distill the key lesson I took away from the book: the health insurance sector, with an assist from hospital systems, is the linchpin of abnormally high healthcare costs in the US.

Health insurance in the US adds a layer of obfuscation between a patient (the customer) and his or her healthcare provider (the business). Patients, as customers, purchase healthcare from their healthcare providers. Note that I'm using the term "healthcare provider" broadly — I would include a pharmaceutical company in the definition as the product they deliver provides healthcare to its intended customer. Patients have a personal relationship with some healthcare providers such as primary care doctors and pharmacists. With others, such as medical-device manufacturers, patients have no personal relationship. Yet a patient has a business relationship with each and every provider that serves them, and health insurance obscures this fact.

Generally speaking, patients operate under the assumption that their healthcare bills will be invoiced to their insurance provider. Patients then pay for the healthcare indirectly through some combination of monthly premiums, deductibles, co-pays, co-insurance, depending on their insurance plan. This is straightforward. The reason I lay it out in these terms is to highlight the fact that patients are customers that are a layer removed from the businesses charging them. In this relationship, the patient generally discovers the cost of services when they are charged for them. If health insurance didn't exist then, holding all else constant, patients would demand to know the cost of non-emergency services before they take place. Because patients don't demand to know costs ahead of time, providers are incentivized to overcharge.

But wait, don't health insurance companies negotiate with healthcare providers to bring costs down? Yes, but crucially, they have a weak incentive to do so. Before I get into the reasons why this is the case, let's break down the high-level business model of health insurance. For the sake of explanation, let's imagine a generic health insurance company called XYZ-health. XYZ-health brings in revenue from its customers' by charging monthly premiums. In exchange, it's obligated to cover a portion of its customers' healthcare costs. The portion of healthcare costs a health insurance company is obligated to cover is analogous to the company's cost of goods sold^[1]. The difference between premiums and XYZ-health's healthcare-costs is equal to its operating costs and profit. Bear in mind that the way I'm framing this is a useful simplification — I'm using the term "operating costs" to encompass all non-healthcare costs.

As a corporation, XYZ-health has an imperative to maximize profit. It can do so in four ways: increase premiums, reduce its healthcare costs, reduce its operating costs, or grow its customer base.

To reduce its healthcare costs, XYZ-health has two productive options^[2]:

1. Promote healthy lifestyles amongst its customers to decrease the incidence of necessary medical interventions
2. Negotiate prices with healthcare providers

The problem with these approaches are that if XYZ-health reduces its healthcare costs too much, it must also reduce its premiums in-tandem. This is due to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which stipulates that 80-85% of a health insurance company's premiums must go towards healthcare costs. This percentage is called the medical loss ratio (MLR)^[3]. So if XYZ-health is an extremely efficient business, it will operate at the minimum allowable 80% MLR. It is legally prohibited from being more efficient than this. If its healthcare costs drop from this point, it must reduce its premiums as well, and therefore it is disincentivized from reducing the cost of its customers' healthcare past a certain point.

Another way of stating this problem is that health insurance companies have a legal upper limit constraining their profit margins. If, in theory, a health insurance company created an algorithm to run the whole business, its only operating-cost would trend towards the cost of electricity in the limit. And yet, it would be prohibited by law from earning more than a 20% gross profit margin. In contrast, tech and financial companies commonly earn in excess of 50% gross margins. And indeed, before the ACA, it was not uncommon for health insurance companies to operate well above a 20% gross margin (i.e below an 80% MLR). As Rosenthal points out, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas had an MLR below 65% in 2010.

So, in our example, XYZ-health can only increase its profit to a limit by reducing its healthcare- and operating-costs. What's more, the health insurance sector in general is highly concentrated, so for most existing companies there is a limit to which they can grow their customer base before they run into antitrust concerns. A comprehensive report from the American Medical Association claims that in 2019, 74% of health insurance markets were highly concentrated^[4], and recommends tighter state and federal antitrust scrutiny of the sector.

This leaves XYZ-health, and the sector broadly, with one reliable strategy to increase profit in the long-run: to increase premiums. But, as we just learned, a health insurance company must still spend at least 80% of those premiums on healthcare. Thus, health insurance companies have a weak incentive to negotiate prices with healthcare providers: while XYZ-health cannot increase its gross profit margin past 20%, it can increase its total profit indefinitely as long as the costs of its customers' healthcare continues to grow.

I said at the beginning of this essay that the linchpin of abnormally high US healthcare costs is health insurance, with an assist from hospital systems. Just like the health insurance sector, hospital systems are highly concentrated. According to The Healthcare Cost Institute, 77% of US metros have highly concentrated inpatient hospital markets^[4]. But hospital systems are more than just inpatient healthcare businesses. They would be better described as healthcare conglomerates. It's common for hospital systems to own primary care and specialist practices, diagnostic labs, imaging centers, outpatient surgery centers, physical therapy centers, and much more.

Abstractly, the natural consequence of a hospital system's market dominance within a given metro is that insurance companies have the weaker hand in price negotiations. But hospital systems also take concrete steps to strip health insurance companies of their negotiating power. Rosenthal highlights the hospital system Sutter Health, which favors buying remote maternity wards in Northern California that are the only viable option for a specific population of expectant mothers. As a result, health insurance companies must have the wards in their network in order to ensure adequate access to care for their policy holders in the region. So Sutter Health negotiates "all-or-nothing" deals, requiring insurers that include any Sutter Health facility in their network to include all Sutter Health facilities in their network. Point being, when a hospital system corners the market on a specific medical intervention in a given region then a health insurance company risks stranding its customers without in-network care if it refuses to agree to the hospital system's pricing structures.

But the moral of the story is that at the end of the day, the math works out fine for the health insurance company. Higher costs one year mean higher premiums the next, which ultimately is the only sustainable way to increase profit in the long run. This is a problem of bad incentives. By mandating a maximum efficiency level in a highly concentrated for-profit sector, the federal government ensured that rationally-acting health insurance companies will accept higher healthcare costs over time.

Notes:

1. COGS is not a financial metric used in analyzing a health insurance company's financial performance, but it's a useful concept for conceptualizing the health insurance at a high-level and comparing it to other industries.

2. Other options are 1) Cover a smaller percent of medical costs or a more narrow variety of medical care and 2) make the healthcare system more difficult to deal with, which makes its customers likely to purchase less healthcare. Both of these options are counterproductive, as they would drive rational customers into the arms of competitors.

3. For health insurance companies that sell large-group coverage (51+ people), the minimum required MLR is 85%. For all others it is 80%.

4. "Highly concentrated" is defined as a score of ≥2500 on the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI). HHI is calculated by summing the square of the market share of each market participant. A market with a full monopoly scores 10000. A market with two companies with 50% market share scores 5000. Four companies each with 25% market share scores 2500.

It's often said that housing has become outrageously expensive. Indeed, home prices seem expensive, especially when you consider how much higher home prices are now than they were during the home price bubble of 2007/2008 (see Figure 1). But I don't believe that homes really are so expensive, at least not when compared to the homes our parents and grandparents lived in.

The median home price in Q1 1980 was $63,700, and was $438,000 in Q3 2022, 588% more than it was in 1980. In contrast, the consumer price index (CPI), grew from 78 in 1980 to 297.9 in October 2022, 282% more than its 1980 levels. So home prices have outpaced inflation 109%. But homes are bigger now^[1]. The median new home in 1980 had 1,570 sqft, whereas the median new home in 2022 had 2,383 sqft, 52% more than the size of the median home in 1980. Therefore, while home prices are 588% higher than their 1980 levels, home price per square foot is only 353% higher than its 1980 level, outpacing inflation by only 25%^{[2, 3, 4]}.

In contrast, the S&P 500 grew 782% between January 1980 and October 2022. Ignoring dividends and returns on reinvested dividends, it outpaced inflation by 177%. Annual healthcare spending per capita in 1980 was about $1,100. In 2022 it was $13,500, outpacing inflation by 300%^[5]. Average college tuition, at $738 in 1980 and $9,596 in 2022, outpaced inflation by 326%. That said, while healthcare spending and college tuition have outpaced home-price growth, we probably feel home price growth more acutely because the absolute dollar amount is much larger^[6]. From 1980 to 2022 median home price grew by about $374,000 while healthcare spending has grown by $12400 and college tuition by about $8900.

Although homes have become more expensive on a per square foot basis, median household income^[7] has outpaced inflation over the last 40 years, sitting at $74,580 today, 321% higher than it was in 1980, at $17,710. So while home price per square foot has outpaced inflation by 25% since 1980, it has only outpaced median income growth by 10%^[8]. I'm going to call this the home purchase pain index, and say that it's 10% more painful (on a per square foot basis) for the median individual to buy a home in 2022 than it was 42 years ago. Said another way, the home purchase pain index has grown annually at a rate of 0.23% since 1980.

By way of analogy, a 10% spike in the price of bread in a poor country would probably meet the threshold of a crisis, but a 10% rise in the relative price of a home over more than 40 years probably doesn't. Homes aren't commodities though, and you certainly can't purchase individual square feet of a home, so this isn't a fair analogy. The increase in home prices is annoying and a reflection of structural issues, and on the margins it pushes certain people out of home ownership entirely. So it's certainly a problem. Frankly, homes should become less difficult to acquire with time^[9]. But most homebuyers view a home as a financial investment, so they expect home values to grow at least at the rate of inflation, and ideally much quicker. Plus, restrictive zoning in most jurisdictions makes it illegal to build dense housing that benefits from economies of scale, but that's a discussion for another time.

Coming back to the argument at hand, there's also been a large rural to urban migration trend since 1980. The US urban population has grown 73% since 1980, from 223M to 338M, while the rural population has shrunk from 60M to 56M. One study mapping development patterns found that US urban area growth grew only 20% between 1985 and 2015. I couldn't find a dataset for the full 1980-2022 time period, but extrapolating the 1985-2015 data set on both ends results in a roughly 28% urban area growth from 1980-2022. Obviously, extrapolating data doesn't tell the real story, but my goal here is to be directionally correct, not perfectly accurate. Even doubling the 28% I've arrived at, urban area growth from 1980 to 2022 would still be less than the 73% growth in urban populations.

Perhaps in response to this trend, average lot size^[10] has dropped 10%. There's also been a very slight shift towards condo ownership. According to the US Census Bureau's American Housing Survey, single-family attached homes shifted from 3.8% to 5.4% of all owner-occupied units from 1980 to 2021 (the date of the most recent survey). But the dominant form of home ownership remains the single-family home. It stood at 84.4% in 1980 and 84.2% in 2021^[11]. Additionally, as the physical size of homes have grown, household size has shrunk. In 1980, the average household size was 2.76 people and in 2022 it was 2.50, about 10% less today^[12]. This could be a reflection of family-planning efforts to compensate for the higher cost required to shelter a family in a home. On the other hand, it also means that while our home-size requirements have grown 52%, our space-per-person requirements have grown 68%^[13].

So what's the overall trend here? We have a lot more people competing for space in urban regions where they demand larger homes with modestly smaller yards for their modestly smaller families. More power to them. This seems sufficient to explain the 0.23% annual growth rate of the home purchase pain index from 1980-2022. The usual culprit blamed for rising home prices is NIMBY anti-development sentiment from existing home owners and conservationist groups. While NIMBYism undeniably plays a role by constraining supply, it's the story of evolving expectations around what constitutes a home that has been largely ignored.

Unfortunately for the individual, there's no easy way out of this predicament by simply changing one's expectations of what they should get when they buy a home. As median home size has grown, the proportion of small homes has massively decreased. This issue is commonly referred to as the lack of "starter homes". In 1999, the U.S. Census Bureau started reporting data on the square footage distribution of new homes^[14]. You can see below in Figure 2 the proportional decrease between 1999 and 2022 in new homes under 1,800 square feet. Only 23% of new homes built in 2022 were under 1800 feet. To put this in perspective, the median new home in 1980, as mentioned in the second paragraph, was 1,570 square feet. So although this Census dataset doesn't go back that far, by definition 50% of all new homes were under 1,570 square feet in 1980. And again, homes are not commodities. You buy a whole home or no home. The result is that while small homes are indeed cheaper, they generally cost more on a per square foot basis. This is especially true in popular urban areas, where the land under the home can be more valuable than the structure itself.

In the end, homes are indeed more difficult to buy than they used to be — but on average they're not truly unaffordable. They're generally nicer than the more modest abodes of our parents and grandparents, and we're paying a premium for bigger dreams in more crowded cities. The reality has been a quiet escalation of our own expectations, not a collapse in affordability.

Notes:

1. See Sale Price data for Single-Family Sold, SoldMedAvgSF tab

2. 1980 is arbitrary cutoff point, chosen because it's hard to find reliable household income data going back further than 1980. That said, I believe the analysis in this post would be much more convincing if I had picked 1960 or before as my cutoff point. Another key point: In January 1983, the BLS shifted from including home prices in CPI calculations to using owners' equivalent rent, decoupling the index from direct home price inflation thereafter.

3. ^5.88+1⁄_0.52+1 - 1 = 3.53

4. ^3.53⁄_2.82 - 1 = 0.25

5. See table 01 of NHE Tables download

6. Healthcare spending is also not a perfect comparison as Americans are probably more over-treated today than we were in 1980. People also live longer on average and we have treatments for conditions that weren't previously treated.

7. See table H-9

8. ^3.53⁄_3.21 - 1 = 0.10

9. It is interesting, however, that while most goods and services get cheaper with time, homes, healthcare, and college, all subsidized by the federal government have gotten more expensive with time. The US government subsidizes these sectors with cheap loans, medicare, and more cheap loans, respectively. This increases demand without directly affecting supply, so perhaps it is not that surprising that they grow more costly with time.

10. See Lot Size data for Single-Family Sold

11. In 1980, owner-occupied units numbered 52.516M, 1.998M of which were single-family attached units and 44.332M which were single-family detached (see page 1 of linked source). In 2021, owner-occupied units numbered 82.513M, 4.486M of which were single-family attached, and 69.508M which were single-family detached.

12. See table HH-4

13. ^{(2382 / 2.5)}⁄_{(1570 / 276)} - 1 = 0.68

14. See Square Feet data for Single-Family Completed

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But total carbon dioxide emissions dwarf methane emissions, so efforts to fight climate change focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions. I've often wondered if this is the wrong approach. Is it possible that cumulative methane emissions are worse, despite their lower overall levels? To investigate this, we can estimate the relative heating effects of carbon dioxide and methane.

First, we need to define atmospheric heating (i.e. global warming). The atmosphere heats up when more energy enters it than exits it. The rate of energy entering the atmosphere is called radiative forcing. Its units are joules/second/square-meter. If you multiply radiative forcing by the surface area of earth's atmosphere, you get the net energy per second entering (or exiting) the atmosphere. A positive number indicates increasing atmospheric energy. This causes warming.

Greenhouse gases increase radiative forcing by absorbing energy that could otherwise leave the atmosphere. The most common greenhouse gases, sorted by decreasing atmospheric concentration are H₂O (water vapor), CO₂ (carbon dioxide), CH₄ (methane), N₂O (nitrous oxide), and O₃ (ozone). To gauge the heating strength of these gases, we can compare their radiative efficiency values. Radiative efficiency for a given gas is the amount of radiative forcing caused by a given increment of atmospheric concentration. For example, for each part-per-billion increase (or decrease) of H₂O in the atmosphere, radiative forcing increases (or decreases) by X amount, where X/parts-per-billion is the radiative efficiency of H₂O. This implies that radiative forcing is linearly correlated with the atmospheric concentration of a given gas^[1]. But the atmospheric concentration of a gas grows sub-linearly with emissions. Fortunately, carbon dioxide and methane are present in very low concentrations in the atmosphere, low enough (0.04% and 0.00018%) that new emissions of either gas causes a roughly linear increase in its respective atmospheric concentration^[2]. So radiative forcing is linearly correlated with atmospheric concentration and, at least for carbon dioxide and methane, atmospheric concentration is linearly correlated with emissions. Therefore radiative forcing due to a given greenhouse gas is linearly correlated with emissions. This will help simplify our calculations. It means we can ignore current levels of carbon dioxide and methane when comparing the two, because their current levels have no effect on the heating strength of new emissions.

According to the the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the radiative efficiency (in joules/second/square-meter/parts-per-billion) of carbon dioxide is 1.37x10^-5. Methane is 26.5 times as high, at 3.63x10^-4 (source). This means methane's heating effect per molecule per second is 26.5 times as high as that of carbon dioxide. But a molecule of carbon dioxide is 2.75 times the mass of a molecule of methane, so the heating effect per unit mass per second of methane is 73 times that of carbon dioxide^[3]. According to the UN's International Energy Agency, the value of 2020 methane emissions (from human activities) was approximately 340 million metric tons. Carbon dioxide emissions were 92 times as high, at 31.5 billion metric tons. Given that heating per unit mass per second of methane is only 73 times that of carbon dioxide, we could say that cumulative methane emissions cause about 20% less heating per second than carbon dioxide^[4].

But these gases hang around in the atmosphere for considerably different timeframes. Methane sticks around for about 12 years, on average. Carbon dioxide is less predictable. It can stick around anywhere from tens to thousands of years. There is no agreed upon average value for the atmospheric lifetime of CO₂, but it's likely much higher than that of methane^[5]. If we assume the average atmospheric lifetime of a molecule of CO₂ is 100 years (it could be much higher), then the cumulative 2020 carbon emissions will cause more than 10 times as much heating over time than cumulative 2020 methane emissions^[6].

Conclusion: carbon dioxide emissions are significantly worse than methane emissions.^[7].

Notes:

1. This seems unlikely to me, so I assume radiative efficiency is a crude metric. That said, the IPCC uses radiative efficiency values for its climate forecasting models, so it should be good enough for a rough calculation of the heating strengths of CO₂ and CH₄.

2. The concentration of a gas is ^x⁄_(x+c) where x is the number of molecules of the gas in question, and c is the number of all other gas molecules present. It's first derivative is ^c⁄_(x+c)², which is a multiple of ¹⁄_x² in the limit. That's a much slower rate of growth than linear growth. But the atmosphere (excluding water vapor), is almost entirely made up of Nitrogen (~78%), Oxygen (~21%), and Argon (~1%). Everything else, including the greenhouse gases we worry about, make up 0.04% of earth's atmosphere. So while atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels grow at the rate of ^c⁄_(x+c)², x is so small compared to c that the growth rate is essentially constant (i.e. linear).
   In math notation: When x≪c, ^c⁄_(x+c)² ≅ ^c⁄_c² = K, where K is some constant.

3. CH₄ molar mass: 16 ^g⁄_mol
   CO₂ molar mass: 44 ^g⁄_mol
   26.5×(⁴⁴⁄₁₆) = 73

4. 1-(⁷³⁄₉₃) = 0.22 = 22%

5. The average atmospheric lifetimes of methane and carbon dioxide are subject to change as their atmospheric concentrations increase.

6. (¹⁄_1-0.22)×(¹⁰⁰⁄ ₁₂) = 10.42

7. Granted, it's commonly believed that there is some threshold value of global temperature that the earth can tolerate. The goal of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords is to keep global average temperature from rising two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, and many people believe this means we won't have a planet worth living on anymore if we fail to meet the goal. If we assume a threshold value exists, then there is an extra incentive to reduce heating in the near term, and the cost of the shorter-lived methane emission rises relative to the longer-lived carbon dioxide emission.