And they’re really bad at economics.

Let me be honest: I’ve spent too much time with science, math, logic, ethics, epistemology, and people to ever actually be good at economics. But when I think of the global economy as a complex network of mostly clueless entities, it just starts sounding like the kind of stuff I played with in grad school, and it starts falling into place.

In short, economics is what happens when a group of people get together, decide on a system of commerce, forget that they chose the system, and then start studying it like a naturally occurring and even dominant force of nature.

Really, economics seems like too much cleverness and too little wisdom. Putting everything in terms of trade is intellectually indistinguishable from putting everything in terms of five, and with enough twisting you can fit more or less anything into the bottle of any tiny idea. But in doing so, you declare that tiny bottle a microcosm of reality, and since you “understand” and “control” the idea, that declaration becomes a declaration of godhood: you control everything that fits in the bottle, and you can fit everything into the bottle.

Now sweeping generalizations like the one I just made are guaranteed to be wrong, because they simplify out a lot of stuff. For example, the Discordian “Law of Fives” is a joke and a mental exercise: seeing that you can everywhere find a pattern which is patently absurd demonstrates that looking for patterns found based on presupposed notions are only as valid as the idea that told you to look for them. And what makes an idea valid? Nothing, ever. It is very hard to tell when observations support your theory and when your theory supports your observations, and understanding this is part of why Sherlock Holmes consistently kicked Inspector Lestrade’s ass. This is also why real Zen koans are painfully confusing: they build an expectation or idea and then they subvert it at a level far below the obvious. If the subversion were more obvious, they would be devilishly funny, and one of the most common second reactions to “getting” a koan is hysterical laughter (the first reaction is usually some form of kenshō). Still, this means they contain, subtly, an idea and its negation, and posit them both as true.

Zen and the Discordians are cleverness in service of wisdom, because they’re both attempting to subvert the comforts of ideology. And even Judaism and Christianity agree with this, without knowing it: “idolatry” is the sin of confusing the symbol of something with the much more majestic reality of it. Islam’s ban on representing Muhammad is in the same vein. And in recent history, we have some stunning examples of the cost of idolatry in the “cult of personality” in the USSR and China.

Economics is just our most recent ideological cult. It claims its superiority to other ideas based on the tremendously shaky claim that it’s supposed underpinning, capitalism, “beat” communism and central planning. And so when I ask Economics to go die in a fire, I’m being entirely serious. The cold war was bad enough. Let’s not subject society to an ideological monopoly for much longer.

The summary of our view of suffering is so short that it feels like I’m making a straw man of it, but I don’t think I am: suffering is bad, and it should be avoided. Our idea of a happy life is one without suffering, and our ideal society is one where nobody suffers. It’s hard to even think where to begin with it.

But is suffering really a bad thing? I suspect that it might not be, in a way.

Exercise hurts, doesn’t it? Especially when you’re out of shape, and you do something that you know fit people should do, like run 15km or lift something really heavy or bike up a huge hill. Not only does it hurt to do, it hurts for days after, and you can even injure yourself. This is why, when you’re starting to exercise, it’s important to learn to exercise properly. You warm up, you don’t overexert yourself, you learn the proper form. In cycling, for example, you learn to pedal from the ball of your foot, to keep your knees in line with your leg and ride a bike that fits. Not only is this more efficient, it reduces the strain on your joints and feet. If you just start cycling hard on a poorly sized bike and with bad pedaling form, you’re likely to injure yourself, and it’ll take ages to recover. Yoga is another good example: bridge pose can wreck your lower back, the plow can hurt your neck, headstands can do both, and let’s not even talk about something like Dwi Pada Sirsasana. So you learn to watch your body, and know the difference between stretching and overextending.

Of course, we all know that exercise is good for you when you do it right. At the end of all of that discomfort, you come out with more powerful muscles, better flexibility, a stronger heart, more efficient lungs, and so on.

I propose a definition: suffering is the sensation of spiritual exertion.

Most of us have had the opportunity to meet someone who has suffered a lot and come out of it with a presence. They are probably not very loud—they might not say much at all—but they somehow fill the room. You get the impression that on some level, they see right through you. It’s almost unnerving. You could say that these people have suffered well. On the other side, we probably know people who, under the weight of their suffering, have turned into brittle, neurotic shells of people. You could say that they haven’t suffered well; that they’ve injured themselves.

We can’t avoid suffering. Just like we can’t live without using our bodies, we can’t live without using our spirit. No matter what, there will always be a box to lift or a flight of stairs to climb. Likewise, there will always be heartache and disappointment. We already know that if we don’t want to experience physical discomfort in our everyday lives, we need to keep our bodies at a fitness level that can handle those boxes and stairs without undue discomfort. But we don’t seem to accept that for the spirit.

Of course, when it comes to spiritual exercise, there are a few obvious problems. Mainly, we don’t know what we’re doing, or what we’re straining, or how we can hurt ourselves. In fact, I don’t think we consciously control anything that we do, spiritually. We do seem to see a cycle, where people repeat painful patterns until they see them and understand them, and then something opens up and they move on, to get caught in something more subtle. This process of opening and increasing subtlety makes me think that spiritual exercise looks something like yoga.

When you do yoga properly, your mind is engaged in a specific way. You aren’t focused on achievement, you’re just watching. You watch your position. You watch your breathing. You watch your muscles and your joints, and where they are tight or where they strain. You go into everything fully, but only as far as you feel you can. You accept your limitations and keep going, and you open up.

And so it follows that the way to suffer is with that same watchful awareness and acceptance. You go into everything fully, but only as far as you feel you can. You accept your limitations and keep going, and you open up.

• “Must be able to work flexible hours” – At the very least, this means they want you to work 10 hours/day while getting paid for 8. In a small company or startup, it means your boss gets bug reports from clients on his cell phone and will call you in a panic at 11pm on a Friday and expect a resolution before you go to sleep.
• “Must be familiar with (software engineering practice X)” – For all development to this point, they have not been using software engineering practice X well or at all. If software engineering practice X is something fundamental, like a web or UI job mentioning MVC, or any job mentioning revision control or object oriented programming, you’re about to apply to a war zone.
• “Must be able to work on several projects in a fast paced environment” – Management doesn’t know what they want you to develop, but they want it now. See also, “Dynamic Work Environment.”
• “Must have an ability to work under pressure and meet deadlines” – They are understaffed. See also, “Dynamic Work Environment.”
• “We offer a dynamic and challenging work environment” – They have high staff turnover.
• “We are looking for someone with 7 years experience with PHP and the Zend Framework” (Zend was released in 2005) – Either the developers aren’t involved in the hiring process, the developers are really green, or there are no developers.
• “We are looking for someone with experience in PHP, Java, C++, Ruby, Python, HTML, CSS, AJAX, SOAP, XML, ODBC, REST, HTCPCP, and Lisp” – They have no developers or code, and no idea what they need. You’ll probably get to be lead developer, but not CTO. The CTO is the guy who knows all those acronyms.
• “The starting salary is small” – They have no capital.
• “We’ll offer a reasonable ownership stake” – They have no business plan.
• “It’s a small job. We only need someone to…” – …re-implement a product that a team of people worked on for years, but with other stuff added on. You should be able to do it in two weeks with a budget of $200.

And there it is. Armed with this list, you’ll find the software job of your dreams in no time. Good luck!

In the chakra system, we have low-vibration energy that comes into your sushumna through the muladhara chakra, and its vibration is raised as it passes through you and leaves at a very high vibration through your sahasrara chakra. But where does that low-vibration energy come from?

In some theories there’s another chakra below the root chakra, the “earth star,” which is perhaps to be viewed as the earth’s crown chakra. This evokes the idea of an earth mother; that is, Gaia. This seems to be the widely accepted interpretation of the source. But while we’re borrowing from the Greeks, let’s point out that they had a division here: Ge, Gaia’s realm¹, referring to the earth, underground, agricultural fertility, and so on; and Chthon, referring to the underworld, the realm of Hades, Hecate, the furies, and all the gods that we view as creepy because they involve death.

Now, it’s not surprising that we’d overlook this distinction in the West, because it has been an exceptionally long time since Christian areas of the world believed in a unified afterlife that was below us: after Jesus, all good Christians go to the sky, and what’s left down there isn’t much fun. Not only did this destroy our culture’s conception of the underworld and our understanding of the allegorical significance of an underworld descent, it made death even worse to think about. And so we assume that the source of the energy for our chakra-cogs is the Gaia of life and fertility, which detaches the whole concept of the subtle body from death and gives a comfortable feeling of magic.

But what happens if we assume that the energy Chthonic instead of Gaian? First of all, that energy flowing up our sushumna stops being psychic power and starts looking like our life force and a host of more familiar metaphors: the thread of fate, the candle-flame of the soul, and so on. And then the idea of improving the flow of energy starts looking a bit different: less like a psychic awakening and more like having a stronger life force, a thicker thread, or a brighter flame.

Essentially, it becomes clear that the subtle body is a metaphor for the psyche.

Let’s look at an ideal activation of the chakras². First, as a child (when your root chakra is activated) you develop a “primordial trust” that “the earth is a secure place which provides you with everything you need.” As puberty comes along, the sacrum is activated, and you “open yourself towards others, especially people of the opposite sex, and behave naturally.” Your creativity is awakened. As you grow to maturity (solar plexus activation) you develop “a feeling of peace and inner harmony with… life in general, and your place in life in particular,” you find your calling. With this solid foundation of safety and belonging, you are able to view others with compassion and acceptance—the activation of your heart chakra—and then (apparently in your 30s) learn to express yourself without fear with the activation of the throat chakra. Through this open and honest communication you gain the wisdom that comes along with the activation of the third eye, and finally, generally somewhere around 50, you get your crown chakra activation and gain a deep understanding of what this whole ride has been about.

This is the story of an ideal life without unaddressed psychological trauma, and the activation of each chakra corresponds to a new stage in our personal development. The work done to clear blockages becomes a form of therapy. For example, Kundalini dance turns into a form of movement therapy, with music chosen to bring up blockages from a specific chakra, and then dance to work through it. It even throws Tantra into a theraputic light of sorts.

This interpretation puts the chakra system approximately in line with a lot of other things: if chakra blockages are called attachments and patterns, it lines up with ideas from Zen, Buddhism and Hinduism about acting without attachment and seeing through illusion. It also fits nicely with psychotherapy.

I love it when things come together.

1. In fact: Gaia comes from Ge (earth) and Aia (grandmother).
2. The quotations and approximate activation ages in this paragraph are taken from The Chakra Workbook by Shalila Sharamon and Bodo J. Baginsky.

I have a M.Sc. in Computer Engineering. Despite my barely above-average grades in undergrad (where I worked like a cat) and uncomfortable tendency to screw up one graduate course per term, my supervisor offered to take me on for a doctorate based on the strength of my thesis. To this day, I wish I’d published more stuff that he could put his name on, because he was the best supervisor I could imagine having, with a heart to match his considerable brain. On the other hand, I don’t regret turning down the offer for an instant.

I can’t imagine how unhappy I’d be as an engineering academic, a mere 400-metre walk from hundreds of lovely young people doing exactly what I knew even then that I should have done in the first place. And so that degree represents seven years of running from my dreams and beating myself up for it.

It’s really astonishing in retrospect. How did I not see? How did I not act?

My notes were 75% doodles, often lacking critical information in favour of shapes, squiggles and cartoons. I avidly collected obscure old computers, which I admired for their astonishing craftmanship and the ingenious ways they bent the limitations of their technology. I collected strange music, which I admired for their skill with their instruments and their subversion of my expectations. I also listened to a lot of angry and pretentiously sad music, where admiring the skill of its execution was honestly a cover for deeply identifying with its desperate cries for attention, admiration, acceptance, love… whatever.

At the end of undergrad, I had two close friends who were engineers. One sang in choirs and shared my admiration for the brilliant artistry of the deeply arcane guts of our computers and the beauty of well-composed music, though he has always been more willing to accept the beautifully trite as much as the beautifully unexpected, and he’s still one of my dearest friends; the other shared my more obscure and violent tastes in music as a balm for pain he clearly had no idea how to deal with, and renounced me after a crush on my sister went sour. I found one more close friend in grad school, a gifted and pudgy Chinese man who shared my tendency to understand the phenomena of our field intuitively before even looking at the math—a helpful tendency in research, where the math often doesn’t exist yet. I lost track of him in the following years. I hope he’s doing well.

The rest of my friends were misfits, humanities or arts students, musicians, and seekers. I pursued friendships with people in cultural and artistic fields, more often than not pushing them away with an unending barrage of questions and a childish admiration paired with an arrogant assumption that I was one of their peers. I took every opportunity to hang around the opposite end of campus, because arts and humanities clearly had more interesting women, although I had no idea how to relate to them, feeling that they were part of a braver, more sophisticated species than I.

It’s a wonder to me that I could so deeply understand where I wanted to be and still keep myself so very far from it. What forceful self-denial! What savage self-flagellation! Or more accurately, what fear!

And if I’d found any believable solace, I might have kept resisting until the flow of life wore me down to a nub. Even now I regret the loss of parts of my being that surely must have died, and parts of me that might now never grow. Some day, I hope I learn to forgive myself for it.

This sort of thing has happened before. Here’s the shape of it: some strange people start doing something. It’s misunderstood, except by a handful of people. That handful of people just happen to be “cool,” and so the whole thing draws more people, understand it or not. Eventually the strange people that started it get tired of it or the stuff that’s grown up around it, and they leave. The subculture stops evolving and turns into a historical edifice or parody maintained by people who mostly never understood it in the first place.

Everyone likes a bandwagon, and that’s why after the punks we have Punks¹, after raves we have Ravers, after hippies we have Hippies, after hipsters we have Hipsters. In all of these we have (occasionally very convincing) vestiges of the original philosophy, politics and attitudes that started the movements, but really, they’re just party scenes.

And hey, what is it that everyone hates about the Hipsters? The almost complete conformity under the banner of rebellion? The self-mockery? The shitty fashion? Wait, which party scene am I talking about again?

But to return to my original point: everyone accepts that it’s poor form to make fun of Punks, Ravers, and Hippies. They’re all adorable in a way, like lost puppies with strange hair. Hipsters are really no different, and if you leave them alone then all those negative attention seekers will move on and this mess will wind down to a niche just like every other dead party scene.

1)Yes, this is the same capitalization scheme used to discuss political philosophies, to distinguish followers a philosophy (like conservatives) from the party that forms around it (like Conservatives). It’s vaguely surprising how perfectly the distinction holds when talking about subcultures instead of political philosophy, until you grant that all of these movements had sound and subtle philosophical plumbing underneath them at the start.

Somehow, I never noticed that there are no doors on this elevator. It’s fine, really, because I get to see everything on the way back up.  On one floor there seems to be a seminar; a woman in a red business suit is pointing to slides and addressing an attentive audience. A couple of floors up, the space between the floors has a little garden growing in a neat grid of green wooden boxes.  It’s reassuring how well built this part of the building is, really.

A black, stenciled “10″ slides by. I look to the buttons, and nine is still lit, but the elevator is not stopping. Another of these ones, I guess. Outside is a four meter gap between the elevator and the unfinished concrete hallway marked 13. The elevator bumps into something and swings out to the right, continuing its upward journey with a gentle pendulum sway.

It eventually stops, letting me out on a narrow rough wooden floor suspended in space. Steel girders at the four corners mark the edges of the tower. Off to my right hover three finished houses with small yards; an old Japanese man in monk robes is shouting out the window of the nearest one at a construction worker with a jackhammer. Across the wooden path from the houses a crane clings to the frame of the building, and construction crews bustle around it, completely ignoring me.  The nearest solid part of the building is ten stories below.

Suddenly I realize that I’m not standing on wood, but a grey, knit wool.  I drop to my knees and grab it with both hands as the wool walkway starts swaying; I try to keep myself upright but adjusting my weight seems to accelerate the swaying.  I really just want to get back to my apartment.  Enough of this.  Really.  As I wrestle with the knit, three people walk up and join me to wait for the elevator.  ”Hello,” one of them says to me.

“I don’t know how you can live here,”  I say.

“You get used to it,” he replies.

“Yeah, but I have acrophobia.”  I look down, and my stomach turns.

With a friendly laugh, he says, “I suppose that might complicate things a bit.”

The wool path has settled, and I relax a bit.  In fact, relaxing seems to make it more stable.  The elevator appears from a hole in the sky above me, and starts sliding down.  It looks like it will arrive at our level ten meters out from the walkway.

“How are we supposed to get there?” I ask the others.

“We walk, of course,” one says.

“What? How?” I ask.

“Don’t worry, everything’s been built.  You just don’t know it yet.”

The elevator comes to a stop, and the others start towards it as the door opens.  I look down, take a deep breath, and follow.

Maneater (Reidmix)