Preface: A Book With No Final Version

Why I Started Writing

When I first began writing this book on spirituality, I was in a very good place. I had developed strong intuitions about how I had arrived there—and how to remain there—but much of what I knew was still implicit.

My first goal in writing was to make that knowledge conscious: to understand more clearly what I was doing and how it worked.

My second goal was to share it with others and see whether it replicated. If it did not, that failure would help me improve my understanding of the process.

The third goal was to discover whether my skill was complete. I do not know whether such a skill can ever be theoretically complete, but perhaps it can become reasonably complete in practice—for a human being, a bounded agent living in the world. By translating my intuitions into words, sticky notes, clusters of concepts, and graphs showing their logical relationships and dependencies, I hoped to expose the blind spots in what I knew.

What Happened Instead

Now I am returning to this book after two years, and I am returning from a very different place.

In the meantime, I went through a major relationship crisis. It affected almost every part of my daily life and well-being. At the same time, I was caring first for a newborn, then for a toddler. Sleep deprivation and emotional turmoil left me cognitively and physically degraded.

Because of the nature of the crisis, it could not be resolved within any reasonable amount of time. It needed to unfold at its own pace. I had to therefore remain inside it—to live for a prolonged period in a mode of being that felt severely diminished.

At first, I had to learn simply to survive. Eventually, I learned something more. I would not call it thriving, but I learned how to live in that degraded state with some degree of skill and wholesomeness.

Easy Mode, Hard Mode

When I first started the book, the qualities I had learned to embody were real. But I had reached them during a long period of abundance. The conditions were unusually favorable. In retrospect, I had learned them on easy mode.

Over the past eight months, I have begun learning how to embody those same awakened qualities on hard mode.

I still fail. I expect to keep failing. That's simply what it is to be a bounded agent in the world. Even on easy mode I failed—but the surrounding abundance made it easier to absorb negative feedback, flow with it, and regain balance afterward.

On hard mode, the same feedback lands differently. Recovering from it is harder. Living through it required significant changes in my way of being, in the perspectives through which I see the world, and in the practices that support me.

This is therefore not simply a return to the book I left unfinished. It is the beginning of a new version.

One of my original aims was to discover whether my knowledge and skill were complete. Life answered that question for me: it wasn't.

Now they feel significantly more complete than they did before. But I have no reason to believe they are complete even now.

So this is the second version of a book that probably has no final version. Perhaps that is what it is now about.