And:

What if your astrological chart could reveal not just who you are, but who you have the potential to become?

Registration is now open for From Personality to Development, my 12-week Developmental Astrology course beginning January 13, 2027.

Learn to interpret Vedic astrology charts as maps of human development, revealing personality patterns, developmental challenges, and opportunities for growth and transformation.

Register before January 1 and use code EARLYBIRD to save $100 on tuition.

Last week’s podcast, Relationality, Identity, & Reality, was a lively conversation with author Pieter Niemann where we discussed authenticity in relationality, the nature of identity, compensation patterns, autism, and more.

Today’s article is about an endangered species known as “critical thinking.” There’s a lot of conversation about how AI might end human civilization in ways we’ve seen in the movies, but I’m not afraid of human extinction. What I am afraid of the acceleration of the existing trend of the end of critical thinking as a value, which AI is already doing. That future is now, and the better AI gets, the more people are likely to delegate their thinking to it. That appears to be the most probable disaster, far less dramatic than being enslaved by machines, but in one way no different.

Logical fallacies are usually taught as mistakes in argumentation: straw man, ad hominem, false equivalency, circular reasoning, appeal to authority, and so on. They are treated as things to identify in debates, essays, or political arguments.

But their developmental significance is much greater than that.

A logical fallacy is not merely an intellectual error. Very often, it is what thinking looks like when something else has become more important than accurately representing reality.

Consider the straw man. Someone makes an argument that threatens us, and instead of engaging with the argument as it was actually made, we unconsciously alter it into something easier to defeat. The intellectual failure is misrepresentation and that is usually what’s addressed. But psychologically, the distortion serves a purpose: it protects us from having to seriously encounter a position that might destabilize our own.

Ad hominem works similarly. Rather than examining whether a claim is true, we shift attention to the person making it. Perhaps they are hypocritical, biased, “privileged,” selfish, ignorant, or otherwise objectionable. Some of those observations may even be true. But none of them determine whether the claim itself is true. The shift from proposition to person allows us to escape the more demanding task of evaluating the proposition.

False equivalency performs another kind of regulatory function. Two things share some characteristic, so we treat them as equivalent while ignoring important differences. This can relieve us of the burden of making finer distinctions. Instead of determining how two situations are similar, how they are different, and which differences are relevant to the question at hand, we collapse them into the same category.

These are failures of reasoning in the mental domain, but they are also frequently failures of emotional regulation.

Can You Think While Triggered?

One of the more important developmental questions is not whether you can reason. Most reasonably intelligent adults can reason when nothing important is at stake.

The harder question is: Can you continue reasoning while emotionally activated?

Can you accurately represent someone else’s argument while angry at them? Can you distinguish evidence from interpretation when you feel threatened? Can you update your position while embarrassed? Can you remain curious when the available evidence is moving toward a conclusion you do not want?

Or does reasoning effectively shut down when emotional regulation becomes difficult?

Because that is a system that causes serious stagnation. The answer to these questions hinges significantly on whether you can value truth more than comfort, which is something many subscribe to, but few embody.

This is where logical fallacies become useful diagnostics. They reveal the places where the need to regulate an internal state overrides the obligation to represent reality accurately.

The person may still “feel” as though they are reasoning; however, this is not determined via feeling. In fact, they may become more articulate. But intelligence can just as easily be recruited into defending an existing conclusion as into discovering what is true. The sophistication of the argument therefore tells us relatively little about whether actual reasoning is occurring.

The more important question is whether the reasoning remains corrigible.

Can You Be Wrong Without Shame Taking Over?

Being wrong is not an unfortunate side effect of development. It is one of its primary mechanisms.

You cannot become more competent without discovering where you are incompetent. You cannot improve your model of reality without discovering where the existing model fails. You cannot develop discernment without making distinctions badly and then learning to make them better.

This means that the capacity to be wrong is inseparable from the capacity to grow.

Yet for many people, being wrong is not experienced simply as receiving new information. It is experienced as a threat to identity.

This grinds development to a halt.

“I was wrong” rapidly becomes “I am stupid,” “I am inadequate,” “I am a bad person,” or “I cannot trust myself.” Once that happens, the problem is no longer the original error. The person now has shame to regulate.

And that creates enormous pressure to make the error disappear.

Evidence gets reinterpreted. Definitions change. Responsibility moves elsewhere. Intentions are substituted for consequences. Irrelevant facts become suddenly important. The other person’s flaws are introduced. The original claim changes.

Logical fallacies flourish under precisely these conditions because they allow the mind to preserve identity at the expense of accuracy.

A mature relationship with error is different. An error is information about the limits of a model, skill, perception, or decision. It may be uncomfortable. It may have consequences. It may require repair. But it does not have to become an existential judgment about the person who made it.

The less identity depends upon being right, the easier learning becomes.

Can You Apologize for an Objective Mistake?

This becomes particularly visible when an error affects another person.

Can you simply say, “I made a mistake”?

Not “I made a mistake, but you also…” which I call “The Turnabout.”

Not “I’m sorry you experienced it that way” which is an evasive Appeal to Subjectivism.

Not a lengthy explanation of the circumstances that made the mistake understandable, scrounging for compassion.

Not an immediate demand that the other person recognize your good intentions, which I call the Good Intentions Fallacy.

Just recognition of what happened.

A competent apology requires several capacities at once. You have to perceive reality accurately enough to recognize the error. You have to tolerate the emotional consequences of recognizing it. You have to separate responsibility from self-condemnation. And you have to remain sufficiently oriented toward the other person to repair the consequences rather than immediately regulating your own discomfort.

This is why something as apparently simple as apologizing can be developmentally demanding. This is also why most people are not very good at it. It could have been something we learned in 8th grade Health Class, in addition to the surprising truth of the equivalent alcohol content per serving of beer, wine, and liquor. We could have been taught reasoning, as well, but that might not have gone over well at the dinner table when you argue with your parents about their most sacred beliefs at age 15. Real reasoning is stunningly scarce.

The Normalization of Bad Reasoning

Poor reasoning is so common that much of it has become socially invisible.

We routinely see people answer arguments that were never made, attack people instead of propositions, change standards when the original standard becomes inconvenient, confuse explanations with excuses, treat intentions as evidence of outcomes, and manufacture equivalencies between situations whose relevant features are substantially different.

Because these moves are ubiquitous, they can begin to look like ordinary disagreement.

They aren’t. They are an intellectual blight in our society and contribute to the current decline of our civilization.

Disagreement is compatible with rigorous reasoning. Two people can examine the same evidence, identify genuine uncertainties, weight competing values differently, and reach different conclusions. Neither person has to distort the other’s position for disagreement to exist.

Logical fallacies are different. They degrade the process by which disagreement could potentially produce greater understanding.

That is why learning them matters beyond philosophy or debate.

Knowing the names—straw man, ad hominem, false equivalency—is useful. But memorizing a list of fallacies is the least important part. The deeper practice is learning to notice the moment when your relationship with reality becomes conditional.

Can you keep thinking when the answer hurts? Or does your grade level drop precipitously?

Can you represent an opposing argument accurately enough that its advocate would recognize it?

Can you discover that you were incompetent at something without converting that discovery into shame?

Can you admit an objective mistake without immediately defending yourself?

Most importantly: Can you allow evidence to change you?

These are not merely intellectual skills. They are developmental capacities.

Logical rigor ultimately requires more than intelligence. It requires enough emotional maturity that reality is allowed to remain reality even when you would strongly prefer it to be something else.

Pieter Niemann is a South African writer living in Zürich. Neurodivergent and trained in mental health, he writes about connection, dating and the experiences behind them. His first book, Swiping for Something Real: A Queer Journey Through Ghosting, Longing, and the Hope for Love, launched on 22 October 2026.

Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HL67K3RP
Website: https://pieterniemann.com

Notice the fear and sadness is in Trump’s left eye, compared to the anger in the right. It’s often possible to see vulnerability in people’s left eye and protection in the right, although it’s usually more subtle than in this photo.

Announcements:

In the last podcast, I discussed some new breakthroughs I’m quite excited about. I introduced a quadrant model called The Four Modes of Learning & Development that you will be hearing more about. I related this to a new theory for how to interpret astrological retrograde motion of all kinds, especially the movement of the nodes.

Speaking of which, Mercury goes retrograde in Libra from 10/24 to 11/12/26. I’m theorizing this is a broadly a time for reorganizational development at the level of perception and cognition. Traditionally, Mercury retrograde is observed as a time of increased communication breakdowns, technological and transportation problems, confusion, and/or reappearance of old connections or unresolved projects.

If you start tracking these short and often troublesome retrogrades, you will see the patterns are frustratingly uncanny.

Developmental Astrology’s response to these observable phenomena is, “Yes, but to what end?” That is, how is one supposed to grow through these annoyances and not play victim? Can one be more specific than “reorganizing cognition/perception”?

Yes, I can, but it depends very much on your chart, where Mercury is and who its with, and especially which house holds Libra for you. This is a good reason to have me do a chart reading for you. ;-)

So, about Trump….

In April 2026, I published an article examining three periods of potentially significant difficulty for Donald Trump over the following year. The first was in August, the second in November, and the third in January 2027. My analysis suggested that the periods would become progressively more intense.

With August behind us and the November midterm elections approaching, it’s time to revisit the first prediction and consider what might happen next.

Before doing so, I want to clarify something important about the purpose of this exercise.

Developmental astrology does not depend on the ability to predict events. Its purpose is to understand the structure of human development: the functions through which we engage reality, the domains in which development occurs, and the ways those functions can mature or become compensatory.

Predictive astrology is a more traditional application of the discipline. It attempts to correlate planetary movements with events and circumstances in the world. Whether and to what extent those correlations can support reliable predictions is a separate question from the developmental value of astrology. The realm of prediction and developmental diagnostics are radically different.

I’m exploring prediction here out of intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn. What can transits tell us with reasonable confidence? How specifically can their significance be anticipated? How many different ways might the same configuration express itself? And where does interpretation become so flexible that almost anything can be made to fit?

These are empirical questions, at least insofar as predictions can be documented in advance and compared with subsequent events. I’m interested in discovering both what astrology may be able to tell us and what it cannot.

Revisiting August

My original analysis identified August 9 as a particularly challenging period for Trump.

Saturn was transiting his eighth house, which I call Revelation in my developmental model. This domain concerns encounters with realities that expose the limitations of existing assumptions, strategies, and control.

Mars was also involved in the configuration, while significant planetary activity was occurring in the twelfth house, which I call Surrender. This domain concerns the limits of individual agency and the necessity of accommodating realities that cannot simply be controlled or overcome.

I interpreted the combination as suggesting a period in which Trump might encounter significant difficulties, particularly circumstances exposing vulnerabilities or frustrating his ability to impose his preferred outcomes.

So what happened?

The most substantial correspondence appears to have involved the continuing conflict with Iran.

In early August, reporting described growing constraints on American military options, including concerns about depleted missile supplies and disagreements over how to proceed. Trump faced difficult alternatives: further military escalation carried substantial risks, while concessions threatened to undermine the administration’s objectives.

These developments correspond reasonably well to the structural themes I had identified. The eighth-house emphasis concerned the exposure of limitations, while the twelfth-house emphasis suggested circumstances requiring accommodation rather than unilateral control.

There was also considerable public speculation about Trump’s health. In mid-August, footage showing an unexplained protrusion beneath his suit generated attention and questions. That incident does not establish a medical problem, and I would not claim that it does. Nevertheless, it contributed to a period of public scrutiny concerning potential vulnerabilities.

How accurate was the prediction?

I would call it a partial correspondence, with important qualifications.

I identified the period months in advance, and significant developments occurred near the selected date that were consistent with the developmental domains I emphasized.

However, I did not specifically predict military supply constraints, a particular diplomatic impasse, or a health-related disclosure. Nor did the difficulties involving Iran originate in August. Some were continuations of problems already underway.

The stronger claim, therefore, is not that I predicted particular events. It is that I anticipated a period of heightened difficulty involving the exposure of limitations and constraints, and that the subsequent developments were consistent with that interpretation.

Whether the timing was unusually accurate would require a more systematic comparison with surrounding periods, which is an important distinction. Things have been getting progressively worse for the president, and a prediction should not become more impressive simply because its interpreter becomes more imaginative after the fact. That’s what leads to giving more credence to predictions than they deserve.

November: A More Concentrated Configuration

The second period I identified centers on November 20, 2026.

This configuration is particularly interesting because transiting Mars returns exactly to Trump’s natal Mars in Leo, in his first house of Selfhood. This happens to each of us only about every two years. Transiting Jupiter and Ketu also closely conjunct natal Mars at the same time.

In developmental terms, Mars represents mobilization: the function through which we assert ourselves, confront obstacles, pursue objectives, and apply force.

The first house concerns Selfhood: the organization and expression of individual identity and agency. Jupiter introduces expansion, amplification, and the pursuit of significance or possibility. Ketu introduces a different dynamic, potentially involving challenges to established patterns of adaptation, detachment, or the limitations of familiar ways of operating.

The combination suggests an unusually concentrated activation of Trump’s self-assertive function. But what would that mean in practice? This is where prediction becomes difficult.

Mars conjunct natal Mars in first house does not inherently signify defeat. It might correspond to forceful initiative, intensified confrontation, increased confidence, or an attempt to overcome resistance. With Jupiter involved, the scale or perceived significance of the action would likely be amplified.

Equally, heightened assertion can expose the limits of one’s agency (Ketu’s structural reduction influence on the house of self). An attempt to impose an outcome may succeed, fail, or create consequences that exceed the original intention.

The astrological structure may suggest which functions are being activated without determining the particular events through which that activation will express itself.

The Midterm Elections

The November 3 midterm elections provide one obvious possibility for examining the transit. Democrats are expected to take the House, as the opposing party usually does in the midterms. Republicans currently control the Senate, but several races are competitive, and control of the chamber remains uncertain and increasingly interesting.

A change in Senate control would have significant implications for Trump’s ability to exercise political authority during the remainder of his term, which would fit with the November 20 transits; but there is a timing problem: the election takes place seventeen days earlier.

That does not make the election irrelevant. Its consequences could create the circumstances to which Trump responds during the subsequent Mars activation. It would predictably anger him, and Mars’ return reliably produces irritability, but that is not usual for the president.

An unfavorable congressional outcome could produce intensified efforts to assert executive authority or confront political opposition in multiple domains. Conversely, an outcome favorable to Republicans could encourage more ambitious initiatives.

Both possibilities would be consistent with an amplified Mars function, which illustrates the difficulty of translating planetary symbolism into a specific electoral prediction.

The election is therefore a useful independent benchmark, but it should not be confused with the exact November transit.

The Iran Conflict

A second possibility is renewed confrontation involving Iran. Loss of the Senate and/or House could trigger Trump to project his issues toward the war–excuse me, “excursion” executed by the newly renamed “Department of War.” Because “Department of Excursions” didn’t fit on the letterhead.

The conflict has already demonstrated the limits of military force (e.g. running out of missiles) , the complications of escalation (who would have thought they’d close the Strait!?), and the difficulty of translating tactical action into durable political outcomes (surprisingly, the assassinated Ayatollah’s son hasn’t decided to start a democracy yet).

A concentrated Mars activation could correspond to renewed military initiative, intensified confrontation, or a forceful attempt to change the strategic situation.

But it could also accompany a decisive diplomatic initiative, particularly one undertaken from a position of asserted strength.

The presence of Jupiter alongside Mars is important here. Expansion of initiative is not necessarily expansion of warfare. It may involve a larger ambition, a more consequential decision, or an attempt to establish a new arrangement.

What interests me is whether November brings a significant development in which Trump’s personal assertion of authority becomes unusually consequential, especially because he himself in a Jupiter major period, which often teaches lessons by people getting what they want and dead-ending.

That would be more directly connected to the planetary configuration than a generalized prediction that something bad will happen.

What Would Count as a Meaningful Test?

For this experiment to be useful, I want to identify the relevant possibilities before the events occur.

The primary observation period will be November 15–25, centered on the November 20 Mars return.

I will be watching for a significant, independently documented development involving Trump’s exercise of personal authority, particularly in one of three areas:

• A consequential confrontation between the presidency and Congress arising from the midterm elections.

• A substantial escalation, change of strategy, or major agreement involving Iran.

• A significant executive initiative or institutional conflict in which Trump personally assumes a central role.

These are hypotheses about possible expressions of the transit, not three separate predictions that all such events will occur.

I also recognize that these categories are broad. A serious evaluation must consider whether developments during this period are genuinely unusual, whether their timing is close to the selected transit, and whether similar events were already occurring with comparable frequency.

Most importantly, if nothing particularly consequential happens, that result needs to count against the predictive significance of the configuration; otherwise, the exercise becomes unfalsifiable.

A Third Test in January

The original April analysis also identified January 24, 2027, as another significant period.

By then, Mars will have moved farther through Leo, continuing its transit of Trump’s first house, while Saturn remains in his eighth house.

This creates a useful opportunity to compare two stages of the same broader process.

November emphasizes the exact return of Mars to its natal position, with Jupiter closely involved. January presents a later phase of Mars’ movement through Selfhood against the continuing background of Saturn’s eighth-house transit.

If these periods correspond to distinctly different developments, that may help clarify the relationship between precise planetary contacts and longer-term developmental pressures. If they do not, that is useful information too.

Prediction, Interpretation, and Intellectual Honesty

One of the problems with predictive astrology is that symbolism can be remarkably accommodating, especially after the fact.

Mars may signify conflict, courage, initiative, aggression, or decisive action. Saturn may signify restriction, responsibility, discipline, loss, or consolidation. Jupiter may signify expansion, opportunity, excess, or overconfidence.

All of these associations can be meaningful. But their flexibility creates a serious interpretive problem. If almost any event can be explained afterward, what exactly has been predicted?

This is one reason I distinguish developmental astrology from traditional predictive practice. Developmental astrology concerns the underlying structure of human functioning and the ways that structure can mature. It does not require that we know what will happen next Tuesday.

Nevertheless, studying transits may help us understand how developmental pressures unfold over time, what kinds of circumstances activate particular functions, and how different expressions of the same underlying structure become possible.

For me, the value of this experiment is not in demonstrating that astrology can predict political outcomes with certainty. It is in becoming more precise about what the symbolism actually warrants. That makes it worth doing, besides being fun.

August offered some interesting correspondences, though not an unambiguous predictive success. November offers another test, with a more concentrated planetary configuration and several consequential possibilities already visible.

We’ll see what happens.

The point is not to make astrology right. It’s to find out how right it can be, about what, under what conditions, and how good I can get at it. ;-)

A Few Specific Predictions

Having established the broader and firmer likelihoods, I want to risk a few more specific predictions. These go beyond what I think the astrology can confidently establish, but that’s precisely why they’re worth making.

My strongest prediction is that between November 15 and 25, Trump will personally initiate a significant expansion or assertion of presidential authority that produces immediate institutional or international resistance. I expect the initiative to be unusually consequential, rather than yet another episode of inflammatory rhetoric.

Second, I predict escalation rather than accommodation in the conflict with Iran. Specifically, I would expect a new ultimatum, military initiative, or significant threat intended to force a change in the strategic situation.

Third, I suspect that whatever major initiative occurs in November will produce an unintended setback or expose a limitation of presidential authority by December 15.

Finally, I predict that the January 24 period will be more about confronting consequences or constraints than initiating new action.

These are deliberately stronger claims than the planetary symbolism alone warrants. They could all be wrong. And if November passes without a clearly identifiable, consequential development, I intend to count that as a failure of this predictive experiment, not search for a minor event that can be made to fit.

That’s the point of making predictions in advance: to give reality an opportunity to disagree, which is how we learn.

Even More Specific: Democrats Take the Senate

I’ll go a step further and predict that Democrats will win control of the Senate in the November 3 midterm elections.

To investigate this possibility, I really geeked out. I compared Trump’s Election Day transits with those of Chuck Schumer, the current Democratic Senate leader, and John Thune, the Republican majority leader.

Schumer’s chart shows considerable activation of his tenth house of Authority, along with transiting Rahu approaching his natal Jupiter in the second house of Continuity. This could correspond to an expansion of institutional responsibility and influence.

Thune’s chart (which I had to rectify as his birth time isn’t known) presents a different picture. He is undergoing a rare inverse nodal transit, which is often correlated with sudden changes, and in his 8th house of Revelation no less, which tends to be associated with transformation via the loss of control. Jupiter enters that 8H nearly on the day of the election and Ketu is already there, activating containing his natal Moon and Rahu in Leo. Within my developmental framework, these configurations suggest significant pressure on established structures and potentially consequential changes in his relationship to institutional authority, especially against the inflated and arrogant shadow of Leo.

Taken together with Trump’s own transits, I find the contrast sufficiently interesting to risk a concrete prediction: Republicans lose their Senate majority, and Democrats take control. I would not have made this call without seeing Thune’s inverse nodal return. I also didn’t think Trump would win in 2016, but later learned his Jupiter major period began eight days after he won. If I had known that….

So the GOP Senate loss is a considerably stronger claim than predicting a period of difficulty or heightened assertion. It has a clear, independently verifiable outcome, and I am making it before the election.

If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. That’s part of the experiment.

Secondly, a profound new orientation toward retrograde motion and the infamous nodes of astrology. If they’re not “malefic,” then what are they? What if people villainize the nodes precisely because they demand reorganization that most people innocently don’t know how to orient themselves toward?

Thanks for listening. The chart is shown in the video on substack and Youtube.

The podcast is back after a delay related to today’s article. Last week’s episode expanded upon the recent Follow the F—ing Instructions article, which ironically received much lower than average reads.

Oh well. I understand that nobody likes being told they have to do something they don’t want to, but such is the real nature of freedom: everything has a price. You don’t have to like it!

For my next trick, here’s yet another thing you won’t like, but is true.

One of the most useful principles in developmental work is also one of the least intuitive: when a person or organization reliably produces the same unwanted result, the first question should not be why the system keeps failing.

The better question is “What mechanics makes the result so reliable?”

Consistency is evidence of structure.

People tend to understand written systems when they produce good results, but tend not to understand the invisible ones that produce bad ones.

Structurally, there is no difference:

Consistent results, good or bad, are a result of repeated patterns. Intentional or not. Written or not. It doesn’t matter.

This is where people fail, because they don’t want to look at the system behind the consistently bad results; understandably so, because it’s usually messy. But it must be done.

I’ve been customer of Hawaiian Telcom for over ten years and I say without exaggeration that it offers consistently the worst customer service I have ever experienced. Stunningly so. And recently I had the misfortunate to become more intimate with its machinations.

I live in rural Maui, where occasional outages are not especially surprising, but recently had one persist for days. A technician, who chewed tobacco and spit frequently, eventually determined that neither the equipment at my house nor the line immediately serving it was responsible.

He drove a mile away to try to fix it and came back reeking of weed. The problem was elsewhere and required escalation to the splicing team, he explained, while I considered whether to call him out on being stoned or not. I didn’t, thinking it was best to keep him on my side.

I called the next day and the work was scheduled for that afternoon Great! The CSR, however, told me that schedule is “tentative,” and it could take longer. Could I call those people to find out? She gave me a number that I would dial many times, but it only ever refrained an unbranded, music-less recorded message about how important my call was and that someone would be with me shortly. No one ever answered, and the recorded message was so hollow and creepy I couldn’t last longer than ten minutes waiting. It reminded me of the recording of the numbers in the TV show Lost.

The next morning, I drove into town on a mission and dropped $350 on Starlink to use as a backup, which I should have done a long time ago, having barely managed with a cell phone booster and tethering headaches. But this was the longest outage ever by far and I’d already spent $40 on increased cell data.

I could still get no commitment from HT to a fix and, more remarkably, could not obtain a meaningful explanation of what was wrong or when it would be repaired.

The experience was frustrating, but the customer-service interactions were more interesting than the outage itself. The amazing thing about Hawaiian Telcom is not that their service is bad, but that it’s bad in such a reliable way.

Different employees and different levels of management produce variations of the same result, as if it were right out of a training manual. Direct questions produce indirect answers. Escalations produce additional conversations without additional authority. Promises to investigate replace commitments to act. Departments could send messages to other departments but apparently could not hold them accountable for responding.

Eventually, the pattern became sufficiently consistent that it deserved to be treated as a system, one that I find myself inside of, and I begin remembering Kafka’s nightmarish novels about bureaucracy based on his own work experience. By the way, if you haven’t seen The Onion’s Kafka International Airport, it’s a must-see filled with easter eggs.

The Kafka Problem

Franz Kafka understood something important about bureaucracy. Its absurdity does not require malicious people, and it does not even require particularly incompetent ones. It requires a structure in which information, authority, action, and responsibility have been sufficiently separated that everyone can perform a role while nobody remains responsible for the whole.

The resulting conversations can become almost comical. I was told, for example, that my repair could not be completed because a bucket truck was required. When I asked what was actually wrong with my internet, I was told again that they needed a bucket truck. I explained that I understood the logistical requirement, but wanted to know what physical problem required the truck. The answer, in various forms, remained that the repair required a bucket truck.

Kafka would have recognized the structure immediately. The information exists somewhere, as does the authority to act upon it, but the person with whom one is permitted to speak possesses neither. The people who possess one may not possess the other, and the customer is prevented from reaching any location at which information and authority converge.

This produces an organization that appears continuously active. Tickets are opened, notes are entered, messages are sent, issues are escalated, supervisors are consulted, departments are notified, and apologies are offered. I can’t tell you how many times I was thanked for my patience, despite not exhibiting any whatsoever, which is of and to itself a bit maddening. Considerable activity occurs in a bureaucracy without anyone becoming responsible for producing the actual result.

This suggests an important distinction between procedural accountability and functional accountability. Procedural accountability asks whether the prescribed process has been followed. Functional accountability asks whether someone owns the outcome. An organization can have elaborate systems of procedural accountability while possessing remarkably little functional accountability. The former is a kind of “responsibility theater” and functions as a kind of front-end for an out-of-sight backend that does God-knows-what.

The distinction is easy to recognize in language. Procedural accountability says that a ticket has been opened, the matter has been escalated, another department has been contacted, or someone will look into the problem. Functional accountability sounds different: I own this until it is resolved. This is what happens next. This is who is responsible for the next step. This is when we expect it to occur, and this is what I will do if it does not.

The first describes activity. The second establishes ownership.

How Responsibility Disappears

So, based on my analysis, here’s how you create a bureaucracy with Swiss-watch level reliability. I’m talking about a customer experience that is as consistent as The Ritz Carlton, but instead of reliably great, it’s reliably terrible.

First, separate customer contact from meaningful authority. The people who speak with customers should be capable of documenting and routing problems but unable to resolve anything outside a narrow range of ordinary circumstances. Then divide the organization into specialized departments, each responsible for a portion of the process but none responsible for the customer’s final outcome. The customer must always own that.

Next, restrict communication across those departmental boundaries. Customer service may be able to send a message to dispatch, dispatch may be able to assign something to a technician, and the technician may be able to escalate something to network operations. As long as nobody owns the chain from beginning to end, however, responsibility fragments and the signal degrades like a game of telephone as the problem moves through the organization.

The people with actual decision-making authority should also be impossible for customers to reach directly. Their names and contact information must remain unavailable, and customer-facing employees should be prohibited from making commitments on their behalf. The employee can therefore acknowledge the problem while remaining structurally unable to assume responsibility for its resolution.

Budget allowing, there should be several layers of management that the customer can escalate through, but none should be significantly more competent than the last so that customer loses hope and energy as they move through the ranks. Ideally, anyone the customer has access to should speak with a strong accent, unusual grammar, and be otherwise difficult to understand which serves to further fatigue the customer into giving up.

Common sense must be either unknown or ignored by employees so that the customer must repeatedly explain how and why they expect even the most basic and fair treatment. Employees must not enter such domains of conversation and instead quote company policy which they are bound by along with the customer.

Questions asked by customers that require a Yes or No answer must be not be answered as such. Instead, tire the customer out by repeating previous or already known information in a different way. CSRs should speak laboriously, and always unnecessarily repeat back what the customer has said to provide the appearance of listening while delaying progress and aggravating them, but not in any specific way that could be called out.

When escalating/transferring calls, do not hand off the call to protect the customer from having to repeat their plight. Communicate a sincere desire to help while the customer has to repeat their story and act a little bit surprised and slightly offended if and when this upsets them.

Finally, everyone should be trained to apologize.

This last feature matters more than it initially appears. An apology can provide the interpersonal appearance of responsibility without establishing the structural reality of responsibility. The employee may sincerely regret what is happening while possessing neither the authority nor the obligation to change it. Sympathy therefore substitutes for ownership, and the organization can appear responsive while remaining functionally inert.

The result is a peculiar achievement: everyone can truthfully claim to have performed the responsibilities of the role while the organization as a whole remains responsible for nothing. It’s really quite impressive to behold how much activity can produce no result.

The Customer as Project Manager

Responsibility does not actually disappear from such a system. It migrates.

In my case, there remained one person with end-to-end responsibility for restoring my internet service: me. I had to remember whom I had spoken with, keep track of the ticket, call again when nothing happened, explain the situation repeatedly, discover that one department did not know what another had done, request escalations, follow up on those escalations, locate higher levels of management, and continue asking what would happen next.

The organization possessed the personnel, infrastructure, vehicles, scheduling systems, technical expertise, internal communication systems, and authority required to repair its network. Yet I had effectively become the unpaid project manager responsible for coordinating its response to its own failure.

This is more than poor customer service. It is a structural transfer of responsibility. The organization retains the resources and authority while exporting the burden of integration to the person least capable of performing it: the customer.

Once this is recognized, repeated organizational dysfunction begins to look different. When something goes wrong once, an individual mistake may explain it. When the same basic result appears repeatedly across different employees, departments, managers, and circumstances, individual incompetence becomes progressively less persuasive as an explanation. The consistency of the outcome itself becomes evidence that something systematic is producing it.

Reliable results come from reliable organization.

This remains true even when everyone involved dislikes the results.

If customers are repeatedly bounced among departments, the organization contains structures that reliably produce bouncing. If employees repeatedly cannot answer direct questions, information is distributed in a way that reliably produces ignorance at the point of contact. If managers repeatedly cannot make commitments, authority has been organized in a way that reliably produces powerlessness. If customers repeatedly have to pursue resolution themselves, responsibility has been organized in a way that reliably externalizes ownership.

The organization may sincerely wish that these outcomes were different. Its employees may dislike them, and its executives may publish values statements explicitly opposing them. None of this changes the functional reality. Systems are revealed less by what their participants intend than by what they reliably produce; this is the structural analog of “Actions speak louder than words.”

Structure Is a More Reliable Expression of Values

Organizations routinely claim to value customers, accountability, communication, excellence, responsiveness, and integrity. Such statements tell us relatively little because values expressed abstractly cost almost nothing. Structure is more revealing because structure determines what actually becomes possible when values encounter competing pressures.

If an organization claims to value accountability, the useful questions are structural. Who owns a problem when it crosses departmental boundaries? Who has authority to make a commitment? Can the employee who learns of a failure cause something meaningful to happen? Can one department hold another accountable for responding? Does anyone remain responsible until the customer receives an actual result? When the same failure occurs repeatedly, what mechanism causes the organization itself to learn?

These questions expose the difference between declared values and operative organization. An organization may genuinely believe that it values accountability while being designed in ways that systematically prevent accountability from occurring.

If we want to understand an organization, therefore, we should not begin by asking what it says it values. We should follow the movement of responsibility. Where can responsibility travel, where does it stop, where does it fragment, and where does it disappear? Those boundaries reveal far more about the organization than its stated intentions do.

Bureaucracy Is Made of People

It is tempting to imagine bureaucracy as an impersonal monster imposed upon otherwise responsible individuals, but bureaucracies are composed of people, and systems and individuals continuously shape one another.

A system that chronically diffuses responsibility requires people who are willing, or have gradually become willing, to participate in that diffusion. This does not mean that every employee in a dysfunctional bureaucracy is personally irresponsible. People need jobs, inherit systems they did not design, and frequently possess little power to change them. A highly responsible person can certainly find themselves inside an irresponsible structure, but one with integrity would be actively looking for another job.

Nevertheless, such a structure exerts developmental pressure upon the people within it. Organizations recruit, reward, punish, exhaust, normalize, and select for particular forms of functioning. Someone with a strong internal standard of ownership may repeatedly collide with a system that prevents ownership, attempt to change it, leave it, or eventually adapt to it. Over time, phrases such as that’s not my department cease to seem like descriptions of organizational limitations and begin to seem like descriptions of reality itself.

This is one reason dysfunctional systems can become remarkably stable. The system does not merely organize behavior; it gradually recruits people capable of reproducing the organization that already exists. Individuals maintain the system, and the system conditions the individuals.

The Invisible Systems of Individual Life

The same analysis becomes considerably less comfortable when applied to individuals.

Organizations are easy to criticize because their dysfunction is external to us. Our own repeated results are more difficult to examine structurally because we tend to explain them through circumstances, intentions, isolated decisions, or failures of effort.

Someone repeatedly runs out of money before the end of the month, repeatedly becomes overwhelmed, repeatedly enters relationships with unavailable people, repeatedly fails to exercise, repeatedly becomes responsible for other people’s problems, or repeatedly cannot find time to meditate. Each individual occurrence can be explained plausibly. There was an unexpected expense, work became unusually demanding, this particular relationship was complicated, the week was unusually busy, or there simply was “not enough time” as if that varies.

At some point, however, repetition changes the appropriate level of analysis. The question is no longer merely why the result happened this time. The more important question becomes what organization makes this class of result so reliable.

There is no hidden supply of time waiting to be discovered. There is an organization of priorities, commitments, avoidance, rewards, fears, identities, habits, compensations, and competing demands that reliably allocates time as it does.

Likewise, chronic overwhelm is rarely produced only by an unfortunate sequence of unusually demanding weeks. It may be produced by an organization that repeatedly accepts obligations, avoids limits, derives identity from usefulness, postpones difficult choices, or externalizes the responsibility for prioritization.

The unwanted result is real, but so is the system producing it.

This is why the principle that applies to organizations applies equally to individuals:

Reliable results imply reliable organization.

Indeed, the more reliably an unwanted result appears, the more interested we should become in the invisible organization that produces it.

Intention Layered Over Structure

Most attempts at personal change begin at the wrong level because people respond to systemic results by increasing intention.

They resolve to become more disciplined, communicate better, meditate every morning, stop procrastinating, establish stronger boundaries, exercise regularly, spend less money, or make more time for themselves. These intentions may be entirely sincere, but sincerity does not alter structure.

When the underlying organization remains intact, the new intention must fight that organization repeatedly. This is sometimes referred to as “self-discipline.” The person may succeed temporarily through increased effort, but the effort is applied against a system whose default output has not changed. Eventually the system reasserts itself, the old result returns, and the person concludes that they need to try harder.

This is the personal equivalent of opening another ticket.

The failure is not necessarily insufficient motivation. The intervention may simply be occurring at the wrong level. New initiatives are layered over an invisible system that continues to generate the deeper result.

Development therefore requires a different class of question. Instead of asking only how to force a different behavior, we can ask what makes the existing behavior so reliable? What is the pattern accomplishing? What does it protect? Where does responsibility move when pressure appears? What reliably happens immediately before the familiar outcome?

What identity, relationship, emotional equilibrium, or compensatory structure would be disturbed if the pattern disappeared? There’s almost always some cost not willing to be paid.

These questions move inquiry beneath intention and toward organization.

A mature system does not require heroic effort every day merely to prevent itself from producing its default outcome. Development changes the default by reorganizing the conditions from which behavior emerges. The goal is not simply to exert greater force against an unchanged structure but to alter the structure sufficiently that different behavior becomes increasingly natural.

This is as true of individuals as it is of families, businesses, institutions, and telecommunications companies. Persistent dysfunction should therefore provoke curiosity before exhortation. When a result keeps appearing despite repeated declarations that nobody wants it, we should become less interested in promises to try harder and more interested in the architecture producing the result.

The system may not be failing at all.

It may be working exactly as designed.

Epilogue: As I schedule this for release, fiber has been down for just under three weeks, with no communicated schedule for a fix.

FTFI is not an argument for obedience. Mature people can question an instruction, refuse it, or leave a developmental container altogether. But once we voluntarily accept a challenge, discomfort does not automatically invalidate the demand. Sometimes the instruction is specifically designed to prevent us from solving a problem in the way we already know how to solve it. Productive failure, confusion, and temporary incompetence are not defects in that process; they are often the conditions under which genuine learning becomes possible.

Using an astrological case study, I look at the relationship among Will, Structure, standards, and learning—and at the crucial distinction between scaffolding another person’s capacity and substituting our capacity for theirs. Development requires support, but support becomes counterproductive when it repeatedly rescues us from the very conditions that would require us to grow.

Today’s piece goes a level deeper, and is a gift to my substack members. Thanks for your support!

I introduce today a key new distinction in my work: the difference between acquisitional learning and reorganizational learning, and how consequential understanding this is for any ambitious person.

If you’re not already a member, I think this one is surely worth 5 bucks.

Also, my fiber internet is down and I’m still on satellite backup and rationing data, so The Human Maturity Podcast is on hold until that’s fixed. I did, however, watch my first DVD in years and it was a novel and nostalgic experience.

When I was a springboard diver, one of the stranger things I had to learn was how to surrender control of my body while flying through the air.

This is not generally considered a good time to surrender control.

When you’re learning a new dive with multiple somersaults, however, you have a problem. You “know where” the dives you’ve already learned are. If you can do a double somersault, your body knows what a double feels like. You know when to come out of the tuck, straighten your body, and prepare to enter the water.

But suppose you’re learning a two-and-a-half.

Where is two-and-a-half? You don’t know. You cannot know.

That’s what you’re trying to learn.

So your coach stands on the pool deck watching your rotation and “calls you out.” You take off, initiate the somersault, and then wait.

“HUP!” That’s your cue.

When you hear it, you kick out.

Imagine driving blindfolded at 35 mph (and pulling 6-7g) toward a brick wall and having to make a hard right when your coach yells “HUP!” from outside the car. That’s what it’s like. and it’s never not scary.

This call is not advice. It’s not something you take under consideration. There’s no time to think. You act instantly or you crash.

You come out when you’re called, and there are very good reasons for this.

Your coach can see something you cannot. They can see your body rotating from outside. They know what a two-and-a-half looks like. You don’t yet know what it somatically feels like.

The entire learning structure exists to bridge that gap, and usually it’s terrifying. But if you want to get better, then you must be terrified and do it anyway. There’s no way around it. The fear tapers slowly after that, but it doesn’t disappear until you’ve done the dive dozens of times.

Where I Know What to Do

I remember learning a front two-and-a-half from the three-meter board. I did ten or so doubles from one meter. That’s what they call the “lead up.” Unfortunately, they do very little for the fear.

The idea is that you find a rhythm and are imagining another half rotation, then take it upstairs with whatever terror remains. I knew well how to do a double, but that became a problem.

On my first attempt, I took off, chased my feet into a tuck, and collapsed under the fear. Instead of waiting for the call, I kicked out where I knew the double was. It wasn’t even a thought; it was a vain hope that somehow I could bail out.

It was familiar.

I knew what to do there. Thank you very much, I’ll just do two somersaults for now. Something in me really thought I could get away with that.

Unfortunately, I had plenty of room and angular momentum left. After kicking out at the double perfectly (I was later told), arms at my sides and totally committed to a feet-first entry, I rotated another ninety degrees, flat as a board, smacking so parallel to the water that I didn’t go deeper than a foot.

It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, like being stung by 1,000 wasps. My entire front seared with red-hot pain from head to toe and I cried into the edge of the pool for a while. I couldn’t see right for twenty minutes.

There is something wonderfully clarifying about hitting water face-first at high speed.

I had tried to make myself safer by returning to what I knew, and that’s what hurt me. This is one of the most important things I’ve learned about learning.

Sometimes the thing that feels safer is only safer within the range of competence you already possess.

Once you are attempting to move beyond that range, returning to the familiar can become the dangerous move.

Follow the Fucking Instructions

I recently wrote about something I call FTFI: Follow the Fucking Instructions.

When I work with people I’m often surprised by how difficult this is for them.

I’ll give an assignment with very specific instructions designed to make them practice a particular thing. Then they’ll change the assignment to something more comfortable.

From their perspective, some of these modifications probably seem completely reasonable.

But the instruction isn’t arbitrary: It’s the apparatus creating the learning condition.

This is something that springboard diving makes extremely obvious because the consequences arrive quickly and often painfully.

If I tell you to wait until you’re called out and you decide, while rotating, that you’d rather come out where you’re comfortable, reality will provide unusually prompt feedback.

Most adult learning doesn’t work that way.

You can modify the assignment, preserve your existing way of thinking, produce something plausible, and walk away believing you learned something.

Nobody lands on their face.

You just remain organized exactly as you were before, with a manufactured narrative and self-image that you learned something.

The Information You Don’t Have Yet

This points to a basic problem with learning that I don’t think we talk about enough.

Sometimes the capacity you’re trying to develop is the very capacity you would need in order to know what to do. If I already knew where two-and-a-half was, I wouldn’t need someone to call me out. The information I need is unavailable from inside my existing competence.

That’s why the coach is there.

This occurs in many physical disciplines. Gymnastics, trampoline, aerial arts, trapeze, martial arts, freestyle skiing, and countless other activities eventually put you in situations where an experienced person can perceive something you cannot yet perceive.

But the same problem occurs in less dramatic forms of learning. If you don’t yet think structurally, you cannot reliably use your existing structural thinking to determine how to learn structural thinking.

And by the way, there are many highly intelligent people who cannot think structurally, and have no idea what they’re missing, often precisely because they’re so intelligent that they cannot imagine an entirely different domain of mental perception that they suck at.

If you don’t recognize the way you organize information, you cannot necessarily identify when you’re reverting to it. If you don’t know what you don’t know, you cannot independently generate all of the conditions required to discover it.

Research gives us little reason to trust learners’ intuitions about how they learn best. People can readily tell researchers how they prefer to learn, but those preferences do not reliably identify the methods through which they actually learn most effectively. This is critical.

A major review by cognitive psychologists Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer, and Robert Bjork found virtually no credible evidence that matching instruction to a learner’s supposed “learning style” improves learning.

In another study of 426 college students, students’ assessed learning styles neither predicted their study behavior particularly well nor predicted their performance. What “feels like” the best way to learn and what actually produces learning are not necessarily the same thing.

I’d argue that anyone who’s learned something of serious significance already knows this. You learn best by doing what experienced people tell you is the way to learn. You accept the method with their expertise, because because they have information about the learning process that you do not yet possess; that is, they know what it takes.

In other words:

At some point, someone will have to tell you when to come out.

This Is Not Blind Trust

There’s an obvious problem here. Coaches can be wrong. I’ve received bad calls as a diver, and made bad calls as a diving coach, too. Calling is a skill in and of itself and it’s not easy.

A coach can call you early. A coach can call you late. You can react too slowly. You might kick in the wrong direction because you’re so disoriented. Things can go wrong and sometimes will.

That’s tough: following the instruction does not guarantee safety. This is important because otherwise the lesson becomes something stupid like:

Trust authority.

No, that’s not the lesson.

The alternative to following the call isn’t perfect safety. The alternative is relying upon an internal reference that you do not have. That’s a completely different calculation.

I’m not surrendering because the coach is infallible. I’m surrendering because I have voluntarily entered a learning situation in which there is an information asymmetry.

They can see something I can’t. They know something I don’t. And for a very specific period of time, I have agreed to let their perception govern my action.

That’s not obedience. It’s developmentally necessary surrender.

Self-Authority Includes Surrender

This can sound paradoxical if we have a simplistic understanding of self-authority.

Shouldn’t mature people think for themselves? Of course. But self-authority doesn’t mean maintaining conscious control over everything at every moment.

I chose the coach. I chose to get on the board. I chose to learn the dive. I understand why the call is necessary. If I conclude that my coach is incompetent, I can stop training with them. All of that belongs to me.

But once I’ve made those decisions and I’m rotating through the air, I come out when they say so. The surrender occurs inside self-authority.

I haven’t surrendered authority over my development. I’ve used that authority to enter a situation in which I temporarily surrender control because doing so is necessary to develop a capacity I don’t yet possess.

That’s a very different thing from submission.

Submission says:

Your judgment supersedes mine because you are the authority.

Developmental surrender says:

For this specific purpose, in this specific domain, I am temporarily allowing your perception to guide me because you possess information or capacity that I do not yet.

And here’s the crucial part: The goal is to eventually stop needing the call.

In most sports with somersaults and twists, you’re supposed to learn how to “spot,” which means not relying on somatic feeling after some time. You keep your eyes open: water/sky/water/sky/water/kick. That’s a two-and-one-half.

If you learn that, you become more independent of calls, more quickly. That increases self-authority and transfers to future dives, but you never escape needing occasional calls. Greatness requires learning to spot and it isn’t easy. I never did.

How Authority Should Make Itself Obsolete

After enough repetitions, something changes.

You begin to feel where two-and-a-half is, and ideally you learn to spot it, too.

The external information becomes internal capacity. You take off, rotate, kick out, and enter the water without anyone yelling at you. This is what good developmental authority should do.

It should progressively make itself unnecessary.

The coach’s perception temporarily supplements yours so that yours can develop. The teacher’s structure temporarily constrains your thinking so that you can develop greater structural capacity. The instruction creates a condition you cannot yet reliably create for yourself.

Eventually, if the learning works, you don’t need it.

This is also how we can distinguish developmental surrender from dependency. If the relationship continually requires me to surrender my judgment because the authority figure must remain the person who knows, something isn’t right.

If the relationship progressively increases my capacity to see, decide, and act for myself, the temporary asymmetry has served its purpose.

The Problem With Staying in Control

There is a deeper paradox here.

If I insist on retaining control throughout the entire learning process, I can only exercise the capacities I already possess.

Read that again.

If I will only act according to what already makes sense to me, then my present organization has become the final authority over the process intended to reorganize it.

That’s a nearly perfect recipe for what most education and training is: acquisitional learning.

I can accumulate more information. I can learn terminology. I can add techniques. I can become more sophisticated. But I remain fundamentally organized in the same way.

Reorganizational learning is different.

At some point, it has to interfere with the organization doing the learning.

And that means there will be moments when what you’re being asked to do does not yet make complete sense from inside your existing organization.

Of course it doesn’t.

If it already made complete sense, you wouldn’t be reorganizing.

Why We Modify the Assignment

This also explains something I watch repeatedly as a teacher.

When people encounter uncertainty, they often modify the learning condition until it becomes compatible with capacities they already possess.

The structural assignment becomes a personality analysis. The experiment becomes a discussion. The completed attempt becomes a request for preliminary feedback. The unfamiliar syntax gets translated back into familiar language.

The student experiences this as personalized adaptation.

From the teacher’s perspective, it can look like someone kicking out at the double.

There. I know where I am again.

The problem is that sometimes the entire point of the exercise is to take you somewhere you don’t know where you are. The instruction is specifically designed to prevent you from solving the problem in the way you already know how to solve it.

That’s why following instructions can sometimes be developmentally necessary rather than merely administratively convenient.

You don’t follow them because compliance is virtuous. You follow them because the instruction carries information your current organization cannot yet generate.

The Risk Cannot Be Removed

This is where I think a lot of contemporary developmental thinking becomes unrealistic.

We want learning to be “safe.” We want people to retain agency. We want teachers not to abuse authority. We want students to question assumptions.

Good.

All of those concerns are legitimate.

But they can accumulate into an impossible requirement:

Develop without ever surrendering control to anything you don’t already understand.

You certainly can do that, and you will get nowhere beyond what your self-image and narrative manufacture.

Real learning contains epistemic risk. You might trust the wrong teacher. You might follow a bad instruction. You might fail. You might look stupid. You might temporarily become less competent rather than more competent. You might discover that something you were certain about was wrong. Sometimes you might even land flat on your face. But if any of that happens, you will learn important lessons from it.

The objective cannot be to eliminate those possibilities.

The objective is to develop enough self-authority to decide which risks are worth taking, which teachers are worth trusting, and which developmental containers deserve temporary surrender.

And then, having decided, actually surrender.

Come Out When I Call You

Looking back, the lesson from diving seems almost embarrassingly obvious. I wanted to learn something my body didn’t yet know. Someone standing outside me could see what I couldn’t. I agreed to let him guide me through the part I didn’t know.

Then fear arrived. And at exactly the moment when I most needed the learning structure, I abandoned it and returned to what was familiar.

I kicked out at the double and got the shit slapped out of me by a swimming pool. Of course, I was furious at my coach because the alternative would be to look at my total responsibility.

The psychological versions are usually less dramatic and more difficult to notice for most students. Reality often lets us get away with them for years. We hire teachers and then reinterpret their instructions. We enter developmental relationships and then negotiate away the developmental demand. We ask to be shown something we cannot see and then reject the perspective because it doesn’t match what we already see. “This feels harsh” which is a judgment, not a feeling. “This doesn’t resonate with me,” when it hasn’t been actually tried and you’re not a guitar string.

These are symbolic and deflective forms of resistance that you have the right to invoke, possibly in a way that’s perpendicular to what you say you want.

We say we want to change while reserving the right to remain in control of exactly how change occurs. That’s a cake-and-eat-it-too problem, and because nobody hits the water face-first, we may never realize what happened.

Sometimes learning requires something more difficult than effort. It requires voluntarily entering a situation in which someone else can see further than you can, while knowing perfectly well that they may sometimes be wrong. That’s difficult.

It requires enough self-authority to surrender without submitting, enough discernment to choose where to surrender, and enough courage, once you’ve made that choice, not to retreat to the familiar merely because the unfamiliar has become frightening.

Sometimes the only way to discover where two-and-a-half is…

…is to wait for the call.

And when you’ve only ever done a double, it seems like you’ve been in that tuck forever while you hang on for your life.

There is an old expression from computer culture that I’ve always liked: RTFM—Read the Fucking Manual.

The phrase predates the popular internet. It appeared in print at least as early as the 1979 LINPACK Users’ Guide, where “R.T.F.M.” appeared anonymously in the table of contents, suggesting that the expression was already familiar within technical culture. By 1991, it was common enough in network communication that an official Internet Engineering Task Force guide for new internet users explained the abbreviation alongside expressions such as “FYI” and “IMHO.”

RTFM became particularly associated with Unix culture, where documentation was not merely an accessory to the software but part of the environment itself. Unix systems made documentation readily available through the online manual, where you could type “man” followed by the command name and the manual page appeared.

The culture that developed around these tools and the pre-web message boards carried a strong expectation of self-sufficiency: before asking someone else to solve your problem, you were expected to make a serious attempt to solve it yourself.

RTFM could certainly be used obnoxiously. Like many norms built around competence, it sometimes was a way for experts to establish superiority over beginners or dismiss legitimate confusion. Even the old hacker dictionaries recognized both sides of the expression: it could be used to brush off a question deemed trivial, but saying that one had already “RTFM’d” was also a way of establishing that one had made an effort before asking for help.

The deeper norm was therefore more interesting than the profanity. As Unix writer Harley Hahn described it, RTFM eventually came to mean something broader than literally consulting documentation: try to help yourself before asking someone else to help you. Correspondingly, once someone had made that effort and remained genuinely stuck, helping them became appropriate. It’s a mature value.

All of the above is to offer this: I think developmental work needs a related expression:

FTFI: Follow the Fucking Instructions.

This may sound unnecessarily crude, but it identifies a surprisingly common problem. People enter courses, coaching relationships, therapeutic practices, spiritual disciplines, training programs, and other developmental containers because they want something to change.

They are given an exercise designed to produce a particular developmental demand. Then the exercise reaches precisely the place where it becomes uncomfortable, and instead of following the instructions and discovering what happens, they begin renegotiating the exercise.

They want reassurance before continuing. They substitute an easier version of the assignment. They explain why their circumstances are different so the instruction doesn’t apply. They become preoccupied with how the demand makes them feel. They ask whether another method might work equally well. They want social proof that it will work. They reinterpret what was requested into something more compatible with what they were already inclined to do.

Sometimes these responses are appropriate. Instructions can be poor, a teacher can be mistaken, an exercise can exceed a person’s present capacity, and circumstances can make a particular intervention inappropriate. Development does not require surrendering judgment to authority.

But there is another possibility that deserves considerably more attention: the instruction has reached the developmental problem it was designed to reach.

Difficulty Is Not Incapacity

One of the easiest mistakes in developmental work is to confuse difficulty with incapacity. If an exercise elicits anxiety, resistance, frustration, uncertainty, embarrassment, or emotional activation, those experiences can quickly be interpreted as evidence that something about the exercise needs to change.

Sometimes that interpretation is correct. Usually it is not.

A developmental intervention necessarily creates some discrepancy between the organization a person currently possesses and the organization the intervention is attempting to develop. If no discrepancy existed, there would be nothing to develop. If a weight is easy to lift, it probably will not make you stronger.

An exercise in tolerating uncertainty should therefore be expected to produce worry. An exercise in boundary-setting may produce guilt. An exercise in self-assertion may produce fear of rejection. An exercise in relinquishing control may produce anxiety. An exercise in intellectual rigor may expose confusion and incompetence.

The appearance of discomfort does not establish that the intervention has failed. It may establish that the intervention has become relevant; that is, that it’s working.

The appropriate question is therefore not simply whether something is difficult but whether the difficulty exceeds the person’s actual capacity to engage productively. That is a much more demanding distinction. A person who is sufficiently overwhelmed that challenge produces significant dysregulation may genuinely require greater support, slower pacing, or external stabilization. A person who possesses adequate capacity but strongly prefers not to experience the discomfort is in a different developmental situation, and may simply be unwilling (rather than unable) to pay the price for what they want.

Treating these situations as equivalent can transform compassion into accommodation.

Compassion Does Not Require Exemption

Compassion concerns how we relate to another person’s difficulty. It does not, by itself, determine whether the developmental demand producing that difficulty should be removed.

It is entirely possible to understand why someone is struggling while continuing to require something of them. A teacher can recognize fear without concluding that the feared action should not occur. A coach can understand resistance without reorganizing the work around it. A parent can recognize a child’s frustration without immediately completing the difficult task for them. A friend can care deeply about someone’s pain without agreeing with the interpretation through which that pain is being understood.

In this sense, a mature developmental response may sometimes be:

I understand why this is difficult, and the requirement remains.

This is not the opposite of compassion. In certain circumstances, it is a more developed form of it. Removing a developmental demand whenever discomfort appears can implicitly communicate that the person cannot tolerate the experience necessary for growth. It can also teach the person that sufficient distress reorganizes the environment around their existing limitations, which is observably not how life works.

Compassion does not require rescuing someone from the conditions under which development becomes necessary.

This becomes especially important when emotion acquires epistemic authority. A person experiences a boundary as dismissive, an expectation as harsh, a correction as shaming, or a demand as unsupportive. The experience itself is real and deserves to be recognized as such, but its existence does not determine whether the boundary, expectation, correction, or demand was inappropriate.

Feelings are data about an encounter. They are not final adjudications of it.

Following Instructions Is Not Obedience

FTFI should not be confused with obedience. This distinction is essential.

Developmental work should ultimately increase self-authority rather than replace it with submission to an external authority. A mature participant must remain capable of questioning an instruction, examining its purpose, identifying a contradiction, proposing an alternative, refusing an exercise, or leaving the developmental container altogether.

Mature self-authority includes the authority to say no.

What it does not include is saying Yes and then quietly substituting another task for the one that was agreed upon.

If an exercise asks someone to make an independent attempt before receiving feedback, asking for feedback halfway through changes the exercise. If an exercise asks someone to tolerate uncertainty, seeking reassurance before proceeding changes the exercise. If an exercise asks someone to establish a boundary and tolerate another person’s disappointment, changing the boundary as soon as disappointment appears changes the exercise.

The problem is not that the person has disobeyed an authority figure. The problem is that the experiment has not been run.

This distinction becomes especially important in praxis. Instructions create conditions under which something can be learned. Following them generates information. The person may discover that the exercise works, that it fails, that it exposes an unexpected limitation, or that the instructions themselves were poorly designed. All of these are useful results because reality is allowed to answer the question.

Modifying the experiment before running it produces much less information. The person remains largely inside the organization they began with while believing they have tested an alternative. This produces either bad or no data.

FTFI is therefore not fundamentally an instruction to submit. It is an instruction to stay in contact with the developmental demand long enough to discover what it actually reveals.

When Compassion Becomes Compensation

Helping relationships create a particular danger because the helper often possesses capacities that the person seeking help is attempting to develop.

A patient teacher may possess enough emotional stability to regulate a student’s distress. A highly structured coach may organize a client’s confusion. A forceful mentor may supply Will that the student cannot yet reliably mobilize. An insightful therapist may provide distinctions the client cannot yet generate independently.

Initially, some degree of this is inevitable. Development is scaffolded. We often borrow capacities from relationships before they become sufficiently established within ourselves.

The question is whether the borrowing progressively develops capacity or progressively replaces it.

Excessive accommodation can make the teacher responsible for regulating the student’s discomfort. Excessive pressure can create the opposite problem: the teacher supplies the student’s Will. The student performs while being pushed, confronts themselves while being confronted, maintains standards while being monitored, and collapses when the external pressure disappears.

These styles can look very different while producing the same structural failure. In both cases, the helping relationship becomes a substitute for a capacity that was supposed to develop within the person.

This gives us a better criterion than whether a developmental relationship is compassionate or demanding:

Does the intervention increase the person’s capacity to meet reality without requiring the teacher to continue supplying what is missing?

The goal is not permanent co-regulation, nor permanent external pressure. It is increasing functional freedom.

The Right Amount of Help

Developmental teaching therefore requires calibration rather than allegiance to either gentleness or severity. Too little support can overwhelm capacity. Too much support can prevent capacity from developing. Too little demand allows the existing organization to remain undisturbed. Too much demand can substitute the teacher’s force for the student’s development.

The appropriate intervention supplies enough support for productive difficulty and enough demand that the person must actually reorganize.

This also changes the meaning of failure. A student who follows an instruction sincerely and fails may have done excellent developmental work. Failure exposes the current boundary of organization. It generates information about what is missing and provides material for the next iteration.

By contrast, avoiding the experiment in order to avoid failure protects precisely the organization that needs illumination.

A student who attempts something independently and produces a terrible result has given the teacher something useful to work with. A student who repeatedly asks the teacher to prevent the terrible result from occurring has made the teacher responsible for protecting them from the information contained in their own incompetence.

The purpose of scaffolding is not to make failure unnecessary. It is to make productive failure possible.

FTFI

There are many legitimate reasons that developmental work proceeds slowly. Trauma can restrict capacity. Developmental lines can be profoundly uneven. A person may require considerable relational stability before particular experiences can be metabolized. Some forms of reorganization simply require time and repetition. Patience in these situations is not indulgence; it is accurate calibration to the organization that actually exists.

But developmental culture becomes distorted when compassion is generalized into the assumption that demands should retreat whenever distress appears. At that point, support begins protecting people from intimate encounters with their own developmental limits, encounters that (however uncomfortable) are often significant contributors to the change process.

Sometimes the appropriate intervention is sophisticated interpretation. Sometimes it is careful co-regulation. Sometimes it is slowing down, changing the exercise, examining resistance, or questioning whether the intervention was appropriate in the first place.

But most of the time, the appropriate intervention is much simpler:

Follow the fucking instructions.

Do the exercise before redesigning it. Make the attempt before asking to be rescued from getting it wrong. Let yourself encounter the incompetence, uncertainty, frustration, fear, or resistance the exercise exposes. Then bring what actually happened back into the developmental relationship.

At that point, there is something real to work with.

Development does not require eliminating compassion. It requires becoming more precise about what compassion is for. The purpose of compassion is not to preserve people from every difficult encounter with themselves or reality. The purpose of developmental work is to increase their capacity to have those encounters without needing someone else to continually remove the difficulty.

Sometimes caring about someone’s development means understanding exactly why something is hard for them and helping them through it.

More often, it means understanding exactly why it is hard and not moving the requirement an inch.

#FTFI

I share a piece today from my forthcoming book, Alignment: The Architecture of Human Development.

Learning is often oriented toward as if the central problem is acquiring information and sometimes it is; however, especially in development, the more difficult problem is what happens when a person encounters the limits of what they know.

This is where learning posture becomes important and is our topic today.

Quick announcement: last week’s podcast How Do You Benefit from Sameness is very much related to today’s piece and is an exploration of reorganizational velocity with an especially interesting celebrity chart: a person who reinvented themselves several times in one life.

A learning posture is the organization a person brings to uncertainty, incompetence, correction, exposure, and the possibility of being wrong. Two people can receive the same instruction, possess similar intelligence, and develop at radically different rates because one organizes around preserving competence while the other organizes around discovering where competence ends.

The difference is not merely intellectual. Real learning recruits the whole person.

People commonly imagine confidence as a prerequisite for learning. They assume that after enough preparation, healing, reassurance, experience, or self-esteem, they will arrive at a state in which ambiguity no longer destabilizes them, embarrassment no longer hurts, failure no longer threatens identity, and they finally feel ready to proceed.

That state is largely imaginary.

A person can become more tolerant of shame. Old humiliation can be processed. Selfhood can become more stable, skills can improve, experience can reduce unnecessary fear. All of this helps.

But critically, development does not eliminate exposure. It requires it.

The further someone moves toward the edge of existing competence, the more likely it is that uncertainty, awkwardness, failure, and self-doubt return. The problem is not that these experiences continue to occur. The problem is granting them authority over whether one participates.

A mature learning posture does not sound like:

I finally feel confident enough to proceed.

It sounds more like:

I am sufficiently organized that lack of confidence no longer gets veto power.

This distinction is critical because a person otherwise may spend years trying to solve the emotional conditions surrounding learning before actually learning. Consciously or not, their posture is that fear of failure must first disappear, shame must be healed, confidence must be established, and/or the possibility of looking stupid must somehow become harmless.

Some of these things can be worked with. But at a certain point, processing becomes postponement.

You cannot always heal your way out of the requirement to risk incompetence. Often the developmental task is to proceed while the discomfort remains.

Then, the central question is your tolerance for discomfort, which interestingly is the same governing dynamic for physical fitness, right? No pain, no gain.

Learning Across the Developmental Houses

The twelve Developmental Astrology houses provide a useful way to see why learning difficulty can arise for very different reasons. The same outward behavior (hesitation, avoidance, endless preparation, reluctance to ask questions) can be generated by very different developmental challenges.

The placements in your chart can provide significant clues related to which of these most apply to you and how. I can provide this analysis for you and much more if you’d like.

1. Selfhood: Who am I if I am wrong?

Learning exposes the edge of identity. If selfhood is fragile or overly invested in appearing competent, error is more than error. It becomes evidence about the self.

The person therefore remains near established competence, avoids questions whose answers might expose ignorance, or presents conclusions before they have been tested.

The developmental task is not to construct an identity that never feels threatened. It is to become able to remain oneself while discovering that one was wrong. This often requires realizing that you are not your identity, which what nondual awakening produces, but there are many layers to that onion.

There is a often a learning posture that say implicitly says, “How do I learn this and remain the same person?” In development, the answer is often “You don’t.” You either let the learning change you or you don’t really learn it. But instead of facing this real dichotomy, protection mechanisms will approximate learning and mendaciously appear to take in the learning without true reorganization, which results in a kind of embodied hypocrisy where people know the principles but do not live them.

2. Continuity: What happens to what I already have if I change?

Learning does not merely add information. Real learning disrupts continuity.

It may threaten an existing worldview, professional identity, relationship, community, strategy, source of status, or way of making sense of the past. New information can make previous investments obsolete.

A continuity problem therefore produces a learner who can acquire information as long as nothing important has to reorganize.

The question becomes less, Can I understand this? and more, What will I have to give up if I do?

This is one reason intelligent people can remain remarkably resistant to evidence. The threat is not cognitive, but organizational. People cannot take in information that threatens to reorganize that which they falsely preserve.

3. Self-Agency: Can I act before I feel ready?

Learning requires initiative under incomplete conditions. Weak self-agency often produces the belief that action should follow readiness. The person waits for motivation, confidence, certainty, clarity, or reduced discomfort.

Confident people know that competence is usually built by acting before those conditions arrive. The learning posture here is simple but demanding: discomfort can inform action without determining it.

People will strong self-agency do not ask, “How do I become more confident?” It’s a question that produces stagnation because it functions as an excuse. The answer is that you earn confidence by doing what you don’t feel ready to do.

4. Grounding: Can I remain stable while I do not understand?

Not knowing is destabilizing.

Some people rush toward explanations not because the explanation is good, but because uncertainty itself is difficult to tolerate. Premature certainty ostensibly restores psychological ground.

This can produce rigid conclusions, excessive reliance on authorities, or compulsive frameworks that make everything immediately intelligible.

Mature grounding allows temporary disorganization. Sometimes the correct intellectual state is: I do not know yet, but I really want to find out.

5. Authorship: Can I generate rather than merely receive?

Learning becomes developmental when the person begins producing interpretations, hypotheses, decisions, and judgments rather than only consuming them. This is where many apparently strong learners stall.

They can absorb sophisticated material, repeat it accurately, and recognize a good interpretation when someone else produces it. But authorship requires exposing one’s own thinking to reality.

The person must say, Here is what I think. Here is why. Let us see whether it survives contact with evidence. That is far more dangerous than understanding someone else’s answer.

Bloom’s taxonomy of learning makes a similar distinction. Its hierarchy moves from remembering and understanding through applying and analyzing to evaluating and creating. Knowing something is a lower developmental achievement as being able to use it, reorganize it, evaluate with it, or finally, generate something new from it.

This is why advanced education eventually demands original work. A doctoral candidate cannot demonstrate mastery merely by showing that they understand what other scholars have written. A dissertation requires synthesis, evaluation, and some form of original contribution. The student must eventually become an author. Most students never get even near this stage and so strictly speaking, they have not completed the learning process. Indeed, they may not have completed any learning process, which causes them to narrow their awareness of how learning works.

The same transition occurs far outside academia. A person can understand a sophisticated framework while remaining dependent upon someone else to use it. They can recognize an excellent diagnosis without being able to produce one, admire a compelling argument without constructing one, or understand a solution without generating one when circumstances change.

Recognition can masquerade as competence because the correct answer seems obvious once someone else has produced it. Authorship reveals whether the understanding can generate anything of its own.

Have you ever looked at a painting or heard a piece of music and think, “I could have made that.” Maybe, but you didn’t. Being able to play your favorite band’s song on guitar is completely different from being able to originate it.

6. Adaptation: Can I change myself in response to difficulty?

When learning becomes difficult, a person can either adapt or reorganize the environment to reduce the difficulty.

Some adaptation is obviously useful. Good instruction matters. Scaffolding matters. Appropriate pacing matters.

But adaptation becomes compensational when the person continually asks how to make the task easier rather than how to become more capable of doing the task.

There is a critical difference between removing unnecessary friction and removing the developmental demand.

The purpose of scaffolding is to make productive failure possible, not to make failure unnecessary.

7. Encounter: Can I be seen not knowing?

Learning is often social. Questions reveal ignorance, attempts reveal ability, mistakes expose differences in understanding. Being corrected places one temporarily below another person in a specific domain.

For someone highly organized around relational calibration, this can be intolerable.

The person may remain silent, ask safe questions, imitate understanding, or avoid exposing unfinished thinking. Mature encounter allows another person to see the edge of one’s competence without turning that exposure into humiliation.

A mature learner is not stopped by their own confusion, overwhelm, or embarrassment. They hungrily ask their question, allow themselves to be seen wherever they are, and bear whatever emotional pain may arise.

To do otherwise is self-image-based victimhood; to take responsibility for one’s learning is to risk exposure.

8. Revelation: Can I let reality destroy what no longer works?

Some learning adds to existing organization, but other learning dismantles it.

Revelation occurs when evidence does not merely answer a question but exposes the inadequacy of the structure producing the question.

This is why coaches, when they discover a flawed approach, love the question, “Where else do you…?” because very often how one does anything is how they do everything.

This can be profoundly threatening because it moves the focus from one instance to a dysfunctional and structural pattern. We’re not trained to think this way at first.

For example, most of us learned the basics of the scientific method in our early teen years, but how many of us actually reorganized how we determine what is true around it? Did your eighth grade science teacher even raise the question, or was it only put in the context of mixing chemicals together and seeing what happened?

A person may discover that a belief was false, a relationship was misunderstood, a career was organized around compensation, a spiritual interpretation was wishful, or years of effort were directed toward the wrong problem. That hurts.

Learning here requires willingness to let reality invalidate existing organization.

This is one reason people can appear curious while repeatedly avoiding anything capable of changing them.

9. Coherence: Can I proceed before everything makes sense?

Coherence is essential to learning, but it can also become a prerequisite that prevents it. Some understanding cannot be achieved before engagement. It emerges through engagement.

The learner who insists on a complete conceptual map before attempting anything may try to obtain in advance what practice is supposed to produce.

Sometimes confusion is not evidence that the learning process has failed. Confusion is often an inevitable stage of the learning process and must be related to as such.

10. Authority: Can I become a beginner again?

Authority creates a special learning problem.

The more competent, accomplished, educated, or respected someone becomes, the more psychologically expensive it can be to enter a domain where that status disappears.

The notion I should already know this is especially destructive and creates needless friction. Why should you already know something they have not learned? The result is energy directed into shame, regret, or dismay that could go into learning.

Mature authority does not require appearing competent everywhere. It includes the ability to accurately locate one’s competence and willingly become subordinate to reality, instruction, or expertise where appropriate.

11. Participation: Can I learn as part of a field rather than as a private project?

Learning is often imagined as an individual activity, but much development occurs through participation.

A person asks questions others benefit from, risks an interpretation others can challenge, contributes partial understanding, receives correction, and helps create a shared field of inquiry.

Participation becomes weak when the person remains a spectator and/or conforms their uniqueness into the group. A good example of this is when a learner says, “I don’t want to take space from the other students.”

You’re not that powerful. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to manage that, not the student’s, so it’s actually excuse to not fully engage.

One can attend classes, read books, listen to discussions, and remain adjacent to the learning process. Participation begins when one risks brings something unfinished into the field and takes the space driven by their hunger for learning.

12. Surrender: Can I enter without controlling the outcome?

Real learning contains an element of surrender.

You may not know where the inquiry will lead. You may discover that the subject is more difficult than expected, that your original goal was misguided, that you are less talented than hoped, or more capable than imagined.

The person who must control the destination can only learn within predetermined boundaries.

Surrender allows the inquiry to alter the learner. You do not become ready and then enter the unknown. Entering the unknown is one of the things that makes you ready.

Confidence Is Often Downstream

Confidence is useful when it exists, but it is unreliable as a developmental prerequisite.

In many domains, confidence is produced retrospectively. A person acts while uncertain, survives being wrong, receives feedback, adjusts, tries again, and gradually discovers that incompetence is tolerable.

What changes is not necessarily that embarrassment disappears. What changes is its authority over the individual. In other words, you don’t try to make the discomfort go away, you get bigger than it is.

This is why attempting to become confident before acting can become circular. The experiences that would generate confidence are postponed until confidence appears.

The learner waits for the result of a process they refuse to begin.

A better developmental question is not:

How do I become confident enough to try?

It is:

What would it look like to learn while I am still unconfident?

Eventually, this question may disappear, and the the person’s existential orientation toward reality is simply engagement.

Productive Failure

Failure has acquired an unnecessarily dramatic meaning in our world.

In learning, failure often means nothing more than producing an inadequate result with your current organization. That is information, not failure.

If someone is learning a language, they form bad sentences. If they are learning music, they hit wrong notes. If they are learning structural interpretation, their early interpretations are clumsy, literal, incomplete, or wrong.

There is no alternative route in which one privately becomes excellent and then begins practicing.

Skill is built through iterations whose inadequacy becomes visible.

This is why preserving self-image and developing skill eventually come into conflict. The learner must decide which matters more.

Someone organized around appearing intelligent will avoid precisely the situations required to become more intelligent. Someone organized around learning will repeatedly enter situations in which intelligence is temporarily insufficient.

The Trailing Edge

A mature learner develops an unusual relationship with the edge of competence.

Most people naturally enjoy functioning where they are strong. There is pleasure in fluency, recognition, mastery, and successful execution.

But development occurs disproportionately near the trailing edge: where knowledge becomes incomplete, skill becomes unreliable, language becomes clumsy, and identity can no longer rely on established competence.

Leading with the trailing edge does not mean glorifying incompetence: it means deliberately making contact with the place where development is still required.

The relevant question is: Where exactly does my ability stop?

That is an extraordinarily useful thing to know.

When Processing Becomes Avoidance

None of this means fear, shame, trauma, or self-image should simply be ignored.

Sometimes emotional processing is exactly what is required. Someone may be so dysregulated by exposure that meaningful learning cannot occur. A history of humiliation may make ordinary correction disproportionately threatening. Developmental capacities may genuinely need strengthening.

But there is no universal requirement that every difficult feeling be resolved before action becomes appropriate. That would be emotionally indulgent.

At some point, another possibility must be considered: perhaps the feeling is not a barrier that needs to disappear. It may simply part of the cost.

A person can spend years trying to eliminate fear of failure when what life requires is becoming willing to fail while afraid. They can process shame indefinitely when development requires allowing themselves to look foolish. They can search for certainty when the capacity being developed is action under uncertainty.

This is a crucial distinction. Some suffering identifies unfinished developmental work. Some suffering is the price of doing the developmental work. Confusing the two can produce endless preparation for a life one never enters.

Learning as Reorganization

The deepest learning does not simply increase what a person knows: it changes how they organize around not knowing. The beginner wants the right answer. The developing learner wants to understand the reasoning. The mature learner increasingly wants to discover where their current organization fails.

This is why curiosity and humility are not merely pleasant intellectual virtues. They are structural capacities. Curiosity moves toward the unknown. Humility allows reality to reorganize what curiosity discovers.

Without curiosity, there is no movement. Without humility, there is no revision. And without revision, there may be information acquisition, but very little development. This exact conflation has produced many millions of people who mistakenly use what they understand as evidence of who and what they are.

A mature learning posture therefore does not require the absence of uncertainty, incompetence, shame, embarrassment, or fear. It requires that none of them be granted final authority over participation.

You will be wrong. You will misunderstand. You will occasionally look foolish. You will encounter things that exceed your ability. You may discover that an idea you loved was false or that something you dismissed was valuable.

None of this means the learning process has gone wrong. It means you have finally reached something capable of teaching you.

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.

Vladimir: That’s what you think.

– Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

When people keep doing something they claim not to want, the useful question may not be, “Why won’t they change?” but, “What is it still doing for them?”

That’s our topic today, but first:

Last week’s podcast was a rich conversation with Suneet Bhaat who is doing very cool things with purpose and self-awareness.

My awakening group began last week, and it’s ongoing. You can join anytime. Email me with questions or interest. If you are curious about meditation, awakening, or want your existing practice sharpened, this is for you.

Many years ago, when I first moved to Maui, I had a mouse problem.

Or at least I thought I had a mouse problem. It turned out I just had an incentivized mouse.

I kept finding evidence of mice in my place, so I went online and figured out how to make a humane mouse trap. It was wonderfully simple: a mason jar propped up on a nickel, with peanut butter smeared high enough on the inside of the jar that the mouse had to stand up to reach it.

The mouse would climb into the jar, stand up for the peanut butter, disturb the nickel, and the jar would fall down over it.

It worked perfectly.

I would find the mouse trapped under the jar, take it outside, and release it about fifty feet from my house.

Then, a day or two later, I would discover another mouse in my house. So I would set the trap again.

Again, it worked perfectly. Mouse under jar. Carry mouse outside. Release mouse. Problem solved.

Except there would soon be another mouse. This happened enough times that I finally mentioned it to a friend.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I told him. “I keep trapping these mice and putting them outside, but more mice keep coming back.”

He thought about it for a moment.

“It seems like that mouse has a pretty good system going on there.” He was an engineer.

I stopped.

“Wait. You think it’s the same mouse?”

“Yeah,” he said. “The mouse keeps getting peanut butter. Why wouldn’t he keep coming back?”

It had genuinely never occurred to me. I thought I had been imposing a consequence, but the mouse thought I was giving him free peanut butter.

From my perspective, the system looked like this:

Enter house. Get trapped. Get expelled. Surely the mouse would learn.

But from the mouse’s perspective, the system apparently looked more like this:

Enter house. Find delicious peanut butter in reliably the same place. Spend a little time in a jar. Receive free transportation fifty feet away. Return to house.

My trap was working exactly as designed, but my system wasn’t. This distinction is beyond mice.

We often think we’re discouraging a behavior because we have imposed something that we regard as a consequence. But people, and systems generally, don’t necessarily respond to the meaning we assign to our interventions. They respond to the actual incentives and constraints they encounter.

A parent tells a child repeatedly that a behavior is unacceptable but reliably rescues the child from real consequences.

A manager has the same conversation with an employee every few months, but nothing about the employee’s role, compensation, or responsibilities changes.

Someone repeatedly crosses a boundary in a relationship. There is an argument. There are apologies. Everyone feels terrible. Then the relationship returns to precisely the structure that existed before the boundary was crossed.

The same principle works in the other direction.

Suppose a manager wants employees to raise problems early, before they become expensive. She tells everyone, “Please bring me bad news as soon as you see it.”

But when someone does, she becomes visibly irritated, interrogates them about how it happened, and immediately adds work to their plate. Meanwhile, employees who quietly solve problems before she hears about them receive praise for being self-sufficient.

Her stated system rewards early disclosure. Her actual system rewards concealment.

If she genuinely wants problems raised early, she has to make early disclosure go well: thank people for flagging problems, distinguish identifying a problem from causing it, and make it easier to solve problems that are surfaced early.

Then the system begins teaching what she intended to teach.

We do this internally as well.

We repeat a pattern that we say we desperately want to change. The pattern hurts us. We regret it, analyze it, and promise ourselves that this time will be different.

And then we do it again.

It is tempting to conclude that we haven’t understood the lesson, and sometimes that’s true.

But sometimes we have misunderstood the system.

A behavior can produce considerable suffering and still be adaptive within the system that sustains it. It can protect us from something we are even less willing to experience. It can preserve belonging, continuity, identity, certainty, approval, or control. It can fail conspicuously in one dimension while continuing to succeed in the dimension that actually keeps it alive.

From the outside, we see the jar. From inside the system, there’s still peanut butter.

This is particularly important when we think about psychological compensation.

A compensation doesn’t necessarily disappear when it starts causing problems. It may continue for years precisely because, despite its increasingly obvious costs, it is still accomplishing something important.

And when one compensation begins to fail, we don’t necessarily allow its failure to reorganize us.

We may simply find another source of peanut butter.

We change relationships, change jobs, find another teacher, adopt another philosophy, or begin another spiritual practice. We may develop a more sophisticated explanation for why the same fundamental difficulties keep appearing.

There can be enormous amounts of activity without structural change.

Eventually, I caught the mouse again.

This time I walked it about a quarter mile away before releasing it.

The mouse never came back.

I didn’t need to punish it. I didn’t need a more frightening trap. I didn’t need the mouse to understand that it had behaved badly.

I needed to change the system enough that the mouse’s existing strategy stopped working.

The same question becomes more uncomfortable when we turn it toward ourselves.

Suppose I keep saying I want to write, but I rarely write. I conclude that I lack discipline, so I make schedules, set goals, and criticize myself when I fail to follow them.

But perhaps writing exposes me to judgment in a way that thinking about writing does not. As long as I am planning, researching, reorganizing my notes, or waiting until I feel ready, I get to experience myself as someone with something important to say without discovering what happens when I actually say it.

Suddenly the system makes more sense.

Not writing has costs. I feel frustrated and disappointed in myself. But it also has a payoff: I never have to risk finding out what other people think.

The question is no longer, “Why can’t I make myself write?”

It becomes, “What is good about not writing?”

And then change means more than trying harder. It means becoming willing to give up the protection the old system provided: to write something, finish it, and let someone read it.

The system changes when I become willing to pay the cost that the compensation was designed to help me avoid.

That experience left me with a question I return to periodically:

When a behavior keeps recurring, what if we stopped asking why the person hasn’t learned the lesson we think reality is teaching them?

What if we asked instead:

What is the system actually teaching them? Anything?

Because behavior responds to the system that exists, not the system we imagine we’ve created.

When my clients complain about a repeated pattern of their behavior that they’re not acting to change, I’ll often ask, “What’s good about this behavior you say you don’t like?”

Almost always, they’ll say, “Nothing,” and fall for my trap. To which I reply:

“If there was nothing good about it, you wouldn’t keep doing it.”

“Nothing” hides the unconscious benefit, the compensation mechanism, the deeper function the behavior performs. There’s no such thing as a “habit,” by the way. A habit is a series of choices we make unconsciously and prefer to pretend has no benefit. It always does, or else you wouldn’t do it in the first place.

This is what you must identify and be willing to lose for real change to occur.

In other words, when nothing seems to change despite all the apparent consequences, the explanation is surprisingly simple.

The mouse has a pretty good system going.

Why do some people receive important feedback and change quickly, while others can hear the same feedback repeatedly for years without substantially reorganizing?

Yes, I’m talking about reorganizational velocity again: the speed at which we allow new information, feedback, and reality to change the way we think and operate.

The challenge is that receiving information is not the same as reorganizing around it. We can understand feedback intellectually, agree with it, discuss it, and even take action while preserving essentially the same underlying structure that created the problem in the first place.

The episode explores why this happens, including our attachment to coherence, identity, certainty, comfort, and existing ways of making sense of the world. Sometimes what looks like resistance to feedback is actually an attempt to preserve psychological continuity—to assimilate new information without allowing it to fundamentally change us.

Our mystery celebrity chart provides a striking counterexample. Over the course of his life, he repeatedly allowed experience and new evidence to overturn beliefs that were deeply connected to his identity, religion, community, and public reputation. His evolution illustrates an important distinction: having strong convictions does not require absolute allegiance to those convictions when reality contradicts them.

The episode also examines this phenomenon through developmental astrology, comparing chart structures that tend toward preservation and continuity with those that may make destabilization, iteration, and reorganization easier.

Ultimately, maturity requires more than being open to feedback. It requires becoming curious about what happens inside us when feedback threatens the structure we already have.

To support the podcast by becoming a member, go to content.clearandopen.com

One of the things I realized, and I shared this with Suneet after recording, is that while I used to focus more on purpose and was trained in some methodologies early in my career at EMyth, and I don’t focus much on it now. I think there are two reasons for that. The first is that when students come to me I assume they’re clear about what they want and are willing to do what it takes. My work is deep, intense, and requires serious commitment, so it tends to filter out those who are not clear about their purpose.

But even before we spoke, Suneet’s work got me thinking about what may potentially be a second reason and a blind spot for me: because for almost all of my life, I have been so clear about my purpose (whatever it was at the moment) that I think I project that clarity onto others in ways that isn’t true. So I’m continuing to chew on the observation that he makes in the very beginning: that self-awareness is a critical and often missing foundation that substantive purpose must be built upon.

So I’m really glad that Suneet wrote a book and is helping people get clear, because I completely agree it’s vitally important, even if as a teacher I like to help people who are clear at the moment about what they want.

Suneet’s website: makingsenseofpurpose.com

As promised, here’s the Tony Robbin video we talk about:

I’m noodling today on the subject of spiritual attainment and made some fascinating discoveries I’m excited to share with you today. First, announcements:

Awakening group begins Fri Sept 11, 2026 for people seriously interested. It meets twice per month for an hour and includes instructions and guidance on how to “get there.” If you’re interested, email me.

Last week’s podcast The Confirmation Bias in Enlightenment introduced an idea I deepen today. I examined the chart of Ramana Maharshi to answer the question, “Was his self washed away by the tide of enlightenment, or was his system organized toward that direction to begin with…you know, like personally?”

There is a critical distinction in spiritual practice that is easy to overlook: the difference between beginning with the assumption that there is no essential self versus with the provisional assumption that the self cannot be experienced.

The first is a metaphysical proposition. The second is an invitation to investigate.

When a teacher tells a student that there is no self, the student may try to experience the absence of something they have already been told does not exist. The conclusion is built into the exercise. Experiences of spaciousness, silence, or the disappearance of the ordinary sense of being a separate subject are then interpreted as confirmation that the self has been transcended.

But what has actually been established?

And did “confirmation bias” exist as a logical fallacy when Buddhism was created?

The fact that something cannot be experienced does not establish that it does not exist. Nor does the disappearance of a particular experience of self establish that the psychological structure through which a person lives has disappeared. These are different claims, and awakening traditions have often moved between them without adequate distinction. Category error strikes again! I swear, if I had a dollar….

My approach begins elsewhere. I propose that we begin with the assumption that there is a self, while recognizing that it cannot be experienced in the way we ordinarily imagine. We then investigate that proposition directly, which is what some people say Siddhartha Gautama originally taught, before his teaching was turned into an -ism.

Isms have an unfortunate way of replacing inquiries with conclusions, don’t they?

Looking for the one who is looking

The practice is simple in principle, though not easy in execution. Turn attention toward the one who is experiencing. Try to locate the subject to whom experience is occurring. Whatever appears—a sensation, image, thought, feeling, or sense of presence—can itself be experienced. It is therefore not the one who is experiencing it.

The inquiry is not an exercise in persuading yourself that you do not exist. That would be easier. Nor is it an attempt to manufacture a state of emptiness. That is also easier. These are common misunderstandings. It is an investigation into whether the subject of experience can itself become an object of experience. That is difficult indeed.

Again and again, the attempt fails. Something may be experienced, but the one to whom it appears cannot be found as another thing appearing. With sufficient repetition, this can become transformative. The ordinary organization of experience changes. The felt necessity of maintaining a separate, locatable center may relax or disappear.

But the transformation does not require the conclusion that the self has ceased to exist. It may instead reveal that we have been mistaken about how the self exists and how it can be known.

The distinction is crucial because the interpretation we bring to awakening influences what we subsequently do with it.

What the lives of awakened teachers suggest

My research in Developmental Astrology has led me to question the assumption that awakening replaces the individual personality with a universal, Divinely inspired, or nondual mode of functioning.

I have been examining the charts and biographies of teachers such as Ramana Maharshi, Adyashanti, Gangaji, Adi Da, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ammaji, and others. The research is ongoing, and the birth data vary considerably in reliability. Some charts have recorded times, others have uncertain or conflicting data, and some require provisional rectification. I do not regard the resulting interpretations as proof of a theory.

Nevertheless, a striking pattern is emerging that deserves attention.

These teachers do not appear to express awakening through an interchangeable human personality. Their teaching styles, relationships to authority, institutional structures, modes of service, degrees of withdrawal or participation, and ways of engaging students differ substantially. This is inarguable, but the question is why?

What accounts for why these spiritually attained beings express the Absolute, the Ground of Being, pure consciousness, or whatever else they call it, in such varied ways?

Shall we account for this with the different facets of Essence, like those of a diamond? Different angles on the same ineffable thing? That would validate the no- or non-self claim in their paradigms.

Spoiler alert: The expression-styles of these teachers is completely coherent with the individual developmental architectures suggested by their astrology charts when read developmentally.

Ramana’s radical inwardness, Adyashanti’s particular relationship to inquiry and transcendence, Gangaji’s direct invitation to end the search, Adi Da’s highly elaborated and authoritative teaching structure, Nisargadatta’s uncompromising verbal confrontation, and Ammaji’s extraordinary organization of maternal service are not simply different costumes worn by the same realization. They are distinct human expressions, and they are clearly legible in their charts.

This strongly suggests that the expressions of “awakened masters” can be understood through the preexisting personal organization of each person’s chart. If so, then awakening has not replaced the individual structure, and so renders the notion that there is no self patently absurd. If spiritual realization actually washed away the local self, then we would expect a post-realization being to be structurally different than the psychological map, yet this is demonstrably not the case. Enlightenment doesn’t erase: it clarifies, distills, and enhances. It also can be used to compensate.

Realization changes the conditions under which the original structure operates, which suggests that structure is quite real, however inexperienceable. Can you make an “And” between the two? Many people cannot, and throw the human baby out with the spiritual bathwater.

This is a very different proposition that Buddhist- and Hindu-derived models, which suggest respectively that there is either no essential self or merely a “lower self” that dissolves into the higher one like a drop in the ocean.

If either of those proposition are true, then 1) why do the most venerated teachers have charts that predispose them toward profound transcendence via porous boundaries, a penchant for withdrawal, and weak self-authority, and 2) why do these teachers behave so much like their charts say they will?

Clarification is not replacement

The conventional spiritual interpretation often assumes that the personality is something to be transcended. The more deeply awakened a person is, the less their individual psychology is presumed to matter. Their actions may then be interpreted as expressions of realization rather than as expressions of a particular human being.

But if the developmental architecture remains operative, this interpretation becomes difficult to sustain; in other words, Developmental Astrology calls bullshit.

A person may awaken profoundly and still express that awakening through a highly specific configuration of agency, authority, relationship, surrender, participation, and psychological adaptation. The ordinary sense of being a separate center may disappear (often because it was weak to begin with), while the structure organizing the person’s life remains very much in operation.

Awakening may clarify that structure. It may reduce defensive identification with it, expose its limitations, and allow its capacities to operate with less distortion. It may also reveal developmental asymmetries that were previously concealed. But none of this requires the personality to have been transcended in the sense of being eliminated or replaced.

Indeed, the persistence of recognizable individual expression suggests the opposite: awakening does not abolish the architecture through which a person lives. It changes the person’s relationship to that architecture.

This also helps explain why genuine realization does not necessarily produce corresponding maturity in every domain. A teacher may have extraordinary access to nondual realization while remaining developmentally limited in relationships, authority, agency, or ordinary worldly participation. The realization can be authentic without making the entire personality an expression of universal wisdom.

The danger of beginning with no self

When practice begins with the assumption that there is no self, students may be encouraged to interpret their developmental needs as evidence of insufficient awakening. Gangaji’s literally says, “If you think you need therapy, then you need therapy.” Is it actually that simple, Toni, or are you medicating with your realization?

If you begin with the assumption of no-self, the need for boundaries is may become attachment. The need for agency may become ego. The need for personal authority may become resistance to surrender. The need for relationship may become identification with the separate self.

Sometimes these interpretations may illuminate a defensive pattern, but they can also become a way of bypassing development.

A person whose architecture already provides relatively weak self-authority may find surrender unusually accessible. That same person may also be especially vulnerable to using realization as relief from the burden of developing authority. Another person may have a strong capacity for transcendence but difficulty with ordinary participation. If spiritual culture elevates the first capacity and treats the second as unimportant, the person’s asymmetry can become an ideal for others to imitate.

Are you following this? Selection bias extols the people structurally pre-designed for the deepest realization as exemplars of the apotheosis of spiritual awakening, whereas most people are structurally unable to become that, nor should they even try. This is akin to basing a picture of physical fitness on elite athletes with favorable genetic aberrations.

The result is a profound confusion between awakening and development.

The deepest realization is not necessarily the most developmentally appropriate model for another person. Nor does the disappearance of the experienced center establish that the individual structure has become irrelevant.

A different starting point

I am therefore developing an approach to awakening that begins with a different assumption: there is a self, but it cannot be experienced as an object.

This is not a claim that the self is a hidden entity somewhere behind experience. It is a working proposition that prevents the inquiry from prematurely converting an experiential discovery into a metaphysical conclusion. The question stays open.

We look for the self. We discover that whatever we can experience is not the one who is experiencing it. We repeat the investigation until the ordinary organization of subject and object begins to change.

What happens then is not the transcendence of the self, but it is a thinning of the identity. It is a clarification of the self through the recognition that it was never the object we imagined it to be.

The personality does not need to disappear. The developmental architecture does not need to be replaced. The person does not need to become an imitation of an awakened teacher personally and structurally pre-disposed to disappear whether it’s healthy for them or not.

Instead, awakening can become part of a larger developmental process in which the individual structure is increasingly understood, differentiated, and consciously inhabited.

That is the direction I explore in my teaching: not awakening as an escape from the human architecture, but awakening as a transformation in our relationship to it. The self cannot be experienced in the way we ordinarily seek it, and discovering this may change everything. But what changes is not necessarily the existence of the self. It may be our understanding of what the self is, and the freedom with which we live through it, with increasingly less identity, and increasingly more reality.

Today, is there a self or not? It depends on the paradigm you ask. Some say there isn’t, others say it’s sacred. I say, you can’t know and bad things happen when you pretend to. How is an awakening process tainted by the confirmation bias assumption that there is no self? And what happens when you wake up without that assumption? What is enlightenment if we cannot actually subtract out the personal contribution to its expression?

What if the “totally gone” apparent state of famous nondual teachers is not necessarily an artifact of their awakening, but psychostructurally exhibited as capacity in their astrological chart? We look at Indian Sage Ramana Maharshi’s chart to see if a case can be made.

I’m starting an awakening group for people seriously interested in enlightenment. It will meet twice per month for an hour and provide instructions and guidance on how to “get there.” In that spirit, I may write on this topic for a while. If you’re interested to join the group, email me directly.

Enlightenment looks impossibly rare partly because most people have never been taught the practices designed to produce it.

That may sound provocative, especially to people who have spent years meditating. But the fact that someone has practiced for ten, twenty, or thirty years without awakening does not necessarily tell us how difficult awakening is. It may tell us something about what they have been practicing.

Meditation has become enormously popular in the West over the last half century. Millions of people have discovered that sitting quietly, paying attention, and becoming less reactive can improve their lives. That’s valuable. But as Eastern spiritual traditions entered Western culture, their practices were inevitably interpreted through Western concerns. Meditation became associated with relaxation, stress reduction, acceptance, letting go, emotional regulation, and the cultivation of peaceful states.

None of those things are inherently problematic. They simply have nothing to do with enlightenment.

The distinction is critical because a practice should be evaluated according to what it is designed to accomplish. If you practice meditation primarily to become calmer, you may become calmer. If you use it to regulate emotion, you may become better regulated. If you practice concentration, your capacity to concentrate may improve. But none of these outcomes necessarily challenge the identification with mind that awakening fundamentally concerns.

This confusion has helped create several persistent myths about enlightenment.

Myth #1: Meditation Is About Clearing the Mind

One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is that the objective is to stop thinking. The meditator sits down, discovers that the mind continues producing thoughts, and concludes that meditation is going badly. Practice then becomes an attempt to suppress, control, or escape the very activity one is supposed to be learning to observe.

Thought is not the problem. Identification with thought is the problem. It’s a content/context confusion.

Ordinarily, the distinction between the two is almost invisible. A thought appears and immediately becomes my thought. An interpretation appears and becomes what happened. A judgment arises and becomes what I believe. A story about myself appears and becomes who I am. The contents of mind are continually converted into identity without the conversion itself being noticed.

Meditation for awakening is not primarily concerned with eliminating those contents. It develops the capacity to experience them without automatically becoming them. Over time, this can create an experiential distinction between awareness and what appears within awareness.

It is easy to understand this intellectually. Someone can agree that “I am not my thoughts” and remain completely identified with thought. Awakening is not produced by adopting the correct proposition about consciousness. The distinction has to become automatically experiential.

This is why meditation is considerably more demanding than the popular image of sitting quietly and letting everything go. Attention must become sufficiently stable and precise to observe identification as it occurs. The mind is not being cleared, but rather its operation is becoming visible.

Myth #2: Meditation Is Primarily a Relaxation Practice

Meditation can be relaxing, but relaxation is not a reliable measure of whether meditation is working. Serious practice can produce peace, but it can also expose anxiety, agitation, boredom, grief, fear, confusion, and deeply defended structures of identity.

If the objective of meditation is relaxation, discomfort naturally appears to be failure. If the objective is awakening, discomfort may sometimes indicate that practice has reached something important.

This is one of the consequences of turning meditation into a form of state management. The practitioner learns to prefer spaciousness to contraction, quiet to thought, equanimity to agitation, and transcendence to ordinary consciousness. Practice becomes increasingly sophisticated, but its underlying structure may remain unchanged: there is still a self attempting to manipulate experience into a condition it prefers.

The deeper question is not how to produce a better state of consciousness, but what exactly requires consciousness to be in a particular state? Who or what is that?

That question changes the purpose of meditation. Instead of continually adjusting experience, practice begins exposing the organization that is trying to control experience. This is much closer to the original problem enlightenment addresses.

Myth #3: Meditation Alone Is the Whole Practice

A major distortion in popular Western spirituality has been the disproportionate emphasis on meditation while radical inquiry has remained comparatively obscure. Different Zen traditions have preserved inquiry to different degrees, particularly through kōan practice, so it would be inaccurate to say that Western Zen simply abandoned it. But the meditation that entered mainstream Western culture was largely separated from rigorous investigation into the nature of self.

That separation is vital because meditation and inquiry perform different functions.

Meditation develops the capacity to observe mind without automatically following it. Inquiry directs that capacity toward the assumptions through which identity is constructed. Rather than asking how to improve the self, inquiry investigates what this apparent self actually is.

Who is thinking? What makes a thought mine? Where is the one having the experience? What exactly is being referred to when the word I is used? Can the entity that appears to stand behind experience actually be found?

These are not philosophical questions intended to produce clever answers. They are instruments for directing attention. The purpose is not to develop a more sophisticated theory of self, but to investigate directly whether experience contains what the mind continually claims that it contains.

This is why inquiry becomes uncomfortable. The mind is extraordinarily capable of discussing itself while protecting the assumptions on which its identity depends. Genuine inquiry does not merely add spiritual concepts to that structure. It turns attention toward the structure itself.

Meditation without this investigative dimension can become highly refined state cultivation. A person may become calmer, more concentrated, more emotionally regulated, more spacious, and more compassionate while remaining fundamentally identified with the same apparent self who began meditating decades earlier.

Those changes are worthwhile. They simply should not be confused with awakening. They are an identity improvement instead of a deconstruction.

Myth #4: Enlightenment Is a Special State

The idea that enlightenment is a permanent spiritual state creates another obstacle. Enlightenment becomes imagined as continuous bliss, unconditional love, perfect equanimity, cosmic consciousness, or some luminous condition in which ordinary human experience has disappeared.

This is understandable because meditation can produce extraordinary states and they are easy to sell. People can experience profound silence, boundlessness, unity, emptiness, ecstasy, or love, and such experiences can radically alter their understanding of reality. But an extraordinary state is still a state, and states change.

If enlightenment required maintaining a particular state, it would merely replace ordinary dependency with spiritual dependency. Instead of requiring money, approval, romance, success, or comfort in order to be okay, the practitioner would require peace, spaciousness, bliss, or transcendence. The object of attachment would have changed while the underlying organization remained intact.

Enlightenment, as I teach it, is not the acquisition of the ultimate state. It is a fundamental change in self-identification that leads to a freedom from all states.

This does not mean that an awakened person never becomes angry, frightened, sad, tired, confused, or psychologically reactive, nor does awakening confer omniscience or psychological perfection. Human experience continues, but what changes is the degree to which identity is confined to the content of the experience, and you don’t realize how claustrophobic this is until you’re no longer in it.

This distinction also explains why attempts to cultivate enlightenment directly can become self-defeating. If enlightenment is imagined as a state, the practitioner continually compares present experience with an imagined spiritual ideal. The very self whose apparent solidity is supposed to be investigated becomes the manager responsible for producing enlightenment. This squarely inhibits awakening.

Myth #5: Enlightenment Takes Decades

Perhaps the most consequential myth is that awakening necessarily requires decades of practice. This assumption has become so deeply embedded in spiritual culture that longevity itself is often treated as evidence of seriousness. Someone who has meditated for thirty years is presumed to have undertaken more profound work than someone who has practiced intensively for three.

But duration tells us very little without knowing what was practiced.

Someone can practice a musical instrument incorrectly for twenty years. The persistence is real, but the duration does not establish that competent playing requires twenty years. It may demonstrate that repeating the wrong movements does not reliably produce the intended result.

The same possibility should at least be considered with spiritual practice. If someone spends twenty years cultivating concentration, relaxation, emotional regulation, acceptance, or pleasant states, and awakening fundamentally concerns disidentification from the constructed self, then the relevant question is not why enlightenment failed to appear after twenty years. The relevant question is how much of those twenty years was actually spent investigating identification.

This does not mean enlightenment is easy. Serious practice requires sustained attention, commitment, honesty, and a willingness to investigate structures of identity that the mind has spent a lifetime protecting. At certain points, the work can be extremely demanding precisely because what is being questioned is not merely a belief but the apparent location from which beliefs, choices, relationships, and experience itself are organized.

But difficult does not mean slow. As any musician knows, practice doesn’t make perfect: perfect practice does. The time horizon of awakening can be radically reduced through efficient practice.

The assumption that it must take decades may itself be partly produced by a culture in which relatively few people are practicing directly for awakening, usually and tragically without realizing it.

The Circular Myth of Rare Enlightenment

There is a peculiar circular logic surrounding enlightenment. We observe that very few people appear to awaken and conclude that enlightenment must be extraordinarily difficult. Because we assume it is extraordinarily difficult, we accept practices that may remain indirect for decades. When those practices rarely produce awakening, their failure becomes further evidence that awakening must be extraordinarily difficult.

The conclusion may be correct. But there is another possibility worth investigating: perhaps the system is producing exactly the results its practices would predict.

Teach meditation primarily as relaxation and people will become better at relaxing. Teach it as concentration and they will become better at concentrating. Teach it as emotional regulation and they may become better regulated. Teach spirituality as the cultivation of preferred states and people may become remarkably skilled at producing those states.

If the objective is awakening, however, practice must eventually confront identification itself. Meditation must develop the capacity to observe mind without automatically becoming it, and inquiry must direct that capacity toward the mechanisms through which the apparent self is continually reconstructed.

This does not require adopting any beliefs whatsoever. You do not have to believe there is no self, that consciousness is fundamental, or that Buddhist philosophy correctly describes reality. In fact, replacing ordinary beliefs with spiritual beliefs can become another way of avoiding the investigation.

You have to look.

That is the radical simplicity at the center of awakening practice. The mind would often prefer a spiritual philosophy, a transcendent experience, or a thirty-year project of self-improvement to direct investigation of the one who supposedly needs to become enlightened. The evidence demonstrates it.

Practicing for Awakening

This is the purpose of the meditation and awakening group I am putting together. The work will not be about relaxation, clearing the mind, manufacturing transcendent experiences, or maintaining spiritually desirable states. Those experiences will occur, but they are not the objective.

We will use meditation to develop the capacity to differentiate awareness from the activity of mind, and inquiry to investigate the structures through which identification is continually produced. The work is experiential. The point is not to acquire the correct philosophy of enlightenment but to become increasingly capable of examining what is actually happening in consciousness.

Eventually, conceptual understanding reaches its limit. You can understand everything I have written here and remain exactly where you started. Awakening requires something more direct: sustained contact with experience at the point where the mind can no longer answer the question of what you are by referring to its own contents.

When the mind is shown what it cannot do, again and again and again, eventually a kind of dam breaks, and you are never again the same.

Enlightenment may be rare. But before concluding that it must take decades to attain, we should ask a much simpler question: How many people have actually been taught to practice for it?

This week’s article is about the critical shift from personality to psychic structure in Developmental Astrology and it’s the last call for my upcoming course, From Personality to Development, that begins September 3, 2026. I don’t know when I will offer another intro course like this, and:

There are 2 spots left! Is one of them is yours?

Last week’s podcast How We Live Inside Projection, illustrated this very point. It was about the context of projection, rather than the content. When we think of projection, we think typically of judgments, triggers, and other local expressions, but projection is much bigger: it is existential.

We form our very worldviews and personalities around projection, mostly without realizing it. To demonstrate, I unpack one of the most fascinating and haunting celebrity charts in world history to show how much behavior was driven by structural-level projection, completely legible in the chart.

Lastly, do you want to wake up? I’m starting a group to support real meditation and inquiry. Most people learn to meditate in ways that create steady-states, not awakening, and it’s unfortunate. Real meditation is like exercise. It doesn’t always feel good and it’s not supposed to: that’s how you know it’s working. Email me with interest or questions. Two, one-hour sessions/month, begins mid-September.

One of the central problems in astrology is that astrologers routinely ask charts to tell them things they cannot reliably show them.

Someone sees Mars in Aries and says, “You’re assertive.” Venus in Pisces: “You’re romantic.” Saturn in the seventh house: “Relationships are difficult for you.”

Sometimes these statements are strikingly accurate, but sometimes they aren’t. More importantly, they confuse two very different things: the structure of a psyche and the content that eventually fills that structure. This is what Carl Jung began to see in the 1940s before he abandoned astrology to gain acceptance from science (priorities, right?).

I’ve discovered that astrology becomes far more precise when we stop asking a birth chart to tell us exactly who someone is and ask a different question:

How is this person organized?

This distinction is at the heart of developmental astrology.

Structure Is Not Content

Consider two people with Mars in the same house and same sign.

Traditional interpretation might give us a list of likely manifestations: conflict, aggression, initiative, courage, competition, sexuality, anger, injury, and so forth.

But those are possible forms of expression. They aren’t the underlying structure itself.

At the structural level, Mars describes something more fundamental: a function involving assertion, force, separation, action, and the capacity to impose oneself upon reality. The house tells us the developmental domain in which that function is operating. The sign modifies the expression like an adverb does a verb.

What somebody actually does with that structure depends upon many things the placement itself cannot tell us.

One person may become aggressive. Another may become extraordinarily disciplined. Another may suppress assertion almost completely and repeatedly encounter aggressive people instead. Another may become an athlete, surgeon, entrepreneur, activist, soldier, or someone who simply spends their weekends arguing with strangers on Facebook.

The chart hasn’t changed, but the expression has.

This is why astrological interpretation becomes unreliable when we move too quickly from structure to biography, from context to content. And then it makes a brilliant model look hit or miss, when the responsibility is on the astrologer, not the astrology.

A Birth Chart Describes Constraints, Not Outcomes

In Developmental Astrology, the birth chart describes a set of structural constraints.

It tells us something about the architecture through which experience will be organized.

Certain psychological functions are brought together. Certain developmental domains become highly charged. Some functions support one another; others create tensions that must somehow be resolved. Particular areas of life become disproportionately important to the development of the person.

But structure does not determine what gets built inside it.

Think of architecture in the ordinary sense. If I show you the blueprint of a building, you can tell me quite a lot about it. You can identify where movement is easy or constrained. You can see where weight is carried. You can identify spaces that are unusually large, isolated, exposed, or central to the design.

But the blueprint cannot tell you whether the person living there is happy.

It cannot tell you what books are on the shelves.

And it certainly cannot tell you what happened at dinner last Tuesday.

What happened to astrology is the same thing that happens to every brilliant, sophisticated system: people who cannot think systemically well reduce it to what they can understand, like reducing chess to checkers…and then forgetting chess ever existed.

People mostly try to use astrology to infer the furniture from the blueprint. You can do that, but it’s not what it’s for. You can use the back of a screwdriver as a hammer, too.

Developmental Astrology is interested first in understanding the building.

Why the Same Placement Produces Different People

This immediately explains one of astrology’s most obvious problems: people with identical placements can be radically different. They should be.

A placement is not a personality trait.

Every astrological structure develops through a particular person, family, culture, historical period, level of consciousness, set of experiences, and series of choices.

Most importantly, the person develops.

The same structural configuration can look dramatically different at different stages of maturation.

A person who initially experiences Saturn primarily as inhibition may eventually develop extraordinary discipline. Someone who experiences Mars as uncontrolled aggression may eventually develop an unusually clean capacity for assertion. A person who initially projects a psychological function onto other people may eventually recognize and integrate that function within himself.

The structure persists while its expression evolves.

This is why Developmental Astrology is developmental.

The chart isn’t merely describing what you are. It is describes something you are doing.

And some ways of doing your life work considerably better than others. Have you noticed?

The Chart Can Show You the Problem Without Telling You the Solution

This leads to a question one of my students recently asked me.

She was beginning to see the diagnostic power of the model. She could see how Developmental Astrology revealed the organization of a person’s psyche.

Her question was essentially:

Okay. Now what?

It’s an excellent question, because an accurate diagnosis is not development.

Seeing a pattern doesn’t automatically transform it, but a structural diagnosis gives us something extraordinarily valuable: it helps us locate the actual developmental problem.

Instead of saying, “You need to become more confident,” we can ask why authority is organized the way it is.

Instead of saying, “You need better relationships,” we can examine the structure through which orientation toward Self and Other are constructed.

Instead of treating anxiety, conflict, ambition, dependency, isolation, or compulsive achievement as isolated symptoms, we can ask what developmental task those behaviors may be attempting (successfully or unsuccessfully) to solve.

The chart becomes less like a personality test and more like a map of developmental tensions.

And once you can see those tensions, a very different kind of inner work becomes possible: work completely customized to the person’s specific developmental mandates.

What Astrology Can and Cannot Know

This also requires some humility about astrology.

If I look at a natal chart without knowing anything about the person, there are things I may be able to say with considerable confidence about its structure.

But there are other things I simply cannot know.

The chart may show me a powerful structural tension involving authority. It cannot necessarily tell me whether the person became a CEO, rejected authority entirely, submitted to domineering people, became domineering himself, or spent thirty years working through the problem in psychotherapy.

Those may all be expressions of related architecture.

Biography helps us discover how the structure became embodied. This is why the most compelling chart readings are not acts of psychic fortune-telling. They are investigations.

We move between chart and life. The chart helps us understand the life, and the life helps us understand how this particular person has expressed the chart.

Eventually something remarkable can happen.

You stop seeing a collection of astrological symbols.

You begin to see a psyche. This is the part of astrology I find most exciting. It’s like when Neo sees the code from inside the matrix.

At first, learning astrology involves a lot of information: planets, signs, houses, aspects, dignities, dashas, transits, nodes, and countless combinations among them.

But eventually the task changes.

You stop asking, “What does Saturn in this house mean?”

You start asking:

What is this whole system doing?

Why is this function here?

What developmental problem is being organized around this house?

Why are these planets operating together?

What is being projected?

What is underdeveloped?

What has become exaggerated to compensate for something else?

What would a more mature expression of this same structure look like?

At that point, astrology becomes considerably more interesting than personality description.

It becomes a way of investigating human development.

And that, to me, is what a birth chart can actually tell us about a person.

It cannot tell us everything.

But it may show us something even more useful than a catalog of traits: the architecture through which a human being is becoming who they are.

When we think of “projection,” we generally refer to triggers, judgments, and other content-expressions. But projection is bigger than this in ways most people never realize. We project existentially, contextually, and globally in a way that stops us from encountering reality or other people in significant and meaningful ways.

Merely addressing triggers and judgments won’t deconstruct this kind of projection. That’s the topic in today’s podcast, especially as it relates to projection with teachers and how to be a student. The episode completes with a fascinating study of an infamous celebrity chart with a 7th house stellium that manifested as projection unlike the world had ever seen.

I live on Maui, and Hawaii endured a category one hurricane last week…barely. This article is about how victimhood prevents structural perception, the confusion of content and context, and how a repeated and predictable of pattern events somehow becomes a surprise for millions of people every year. But first:

Last week’s podcast, Dare to Open Up the Walls was a taste of what we’ll be doing in the upcoming course below. There is still some room left. We go over a fascinating celebrity chart that illustrates the mechanisms behind both genius and how it can go awry, showing how structure can express in multiple ways at the level of expression.

From Personality to Development begins Sep 3, 2026 for 12 consecutive weeks. Click the link for details and registration. Structural perception training, Developmental Astrology, compensation deconstruction, and more. Space is limited, potential is not.

Special thanks to Carmine Denisco for inviting me onto his podcast, The Launch Network, where we discussed structural perception, root problem solving, and much more. Here are the links to that episode on Apple and Spotify.

Disasters are often interpreted at the level of the event itself: the hurricane, the fire, the flood, the earthquake. How severe was it, how much damage occurred, who was harmed, what assistance is required. These are necessary questions, but they’re questions about content. Structural perception asks a different one: why did this event produce this particular outcome?

Events do not determine outcomes by themselves. Events encounter systems, and the characteristics of those systems determine what the events become.

The distinction is easy to see in something as ordinary as snow. Seven inches in Massachusetts is an inconvenience: roads get plowed, salt goes down, schools rarely close, and life resumes. The same seven inches in a place where snow is rare can shut a town down for days. The snow doesn’t change. The receiving structure does: equipment, personnel, road-treatment systems, building practices, and cultural competence built around recurring snow, versus none of that, when there’s rarely been a reason to build it.

This is the basic principle: an event’s significance cannot be understood apart from the system receiving it.

Natural disasters work the same way. A hurricane’s destructive consequences aren’t set by its category alone: wind speed and rainfall are only two variables among many. Electrical infrastructure, drainage, vegetation management, road design, communications, emergency staffing, building practices, supply chains, redundancy, terrain, and institutional coordination all shape what follows.

A modest storm can wreck a fragile system; a stronger one can be absorbed by a system built to take it. The useful question isn’t how severe the disturbance was. It’s how much disturbance the system could absorb before it broke down.

In this sense, disaster is a stress test. The event supplies pressure; the system reveals its capacity. Hawaii is a fragile system that predictably and regularly endures hurricanes. The most recent one (Lala) barely made landfall on the Big Island and only held category one status for about a day, yet tens of thousands lost power, 263 homes and 18 businesses were damaged by flooding, two people were killed, and many roads remained blocked by fallen trees for days afterward. Lala reached category 4 with sustained 130 mph wind after passing the islands in counterintuitively cooler water. This was a close call.

But Hawaii doesn’t need a hurricane to reveal this problem, much less a strong one. Hawaiian Electric’s own 2024 reliability filing shows that even with major storm days stripped out of the data, the average customer loses power for roughly three hours a year across nearly two separate interruptions, and vegetation alone (branches, trees, overgrown growth encroaching on lines) accounted for about 110,000 customer-hours of outages that year. Eight days in 2024 qualified as official “Major Event Days,” and most of them weren’t hurricanes. They were ordinary rain and wind in January, April, May, June, August, and October that the grid simply couldn’t handle.

Maui’s flooding tells the same story without a storm ever getting a name. South Kīhei has flooded on a near-annual basis for years, badly enough that in 2023 a young man was swept into an uncovered storm drain and killed during what was, for Maui, an unremarkable rain event. The county has known the fix for over a decade: three separate consultant studies and a 2022 drainage master plan pricing roughly $200 million in mitigation, including a $13.5 million first phase of detention basins. None of it has been built. None of it is on the county’s capital improvement list. The vulnerability isn’t hidden. It’s published, priced, and shelved.

A hurricane doesn’t invent any of this. It just makes many ordinary failures visible at once, instead of one gulch or one downed line at a time. A storm reveals power lines vulnerable to vegetation. A flood reveals insufficient drainage capacity. An earthquake reveals construction unable to tolerate lateral movement. A cyberattack reveals organizations without meaningful redundancy. A wildfire reveals weaknesses in land management, evacuation planning, communications, water systems, electrical infrastructure, emergency coordination, and institutional authority.

The disaster does not create these weaknesses. It makes them visible, but when people play victim to the disaster and can’t think systemically, it doesn’t appear that way.

This distinction becomes especially important in what happens afterward. Structural failures are frequently met with responses in the emotional and relational register: grief, prayer, mutual aid, fundraising, solidarity, memorialization, storytelling, symbolic declarations of collective strength. Human beings need emotional processing after loss, and communities do real work of care and belonging during a crisis, but these responses can implicitly be treated as though they address the structural failure itself.

Grief addresses grief. Prayer addresses meaning, hope, or spiritual orientation. Mutual aid addresses immediate material need. Community bonding addresses belonging and social cohesion. Fundraising transfers resources to the people and institutions that need them. None of it, by itself, hardens a grid, redesigns an evacuation route, digs a detention basin, removes hazardous vegetation, alters the incentives that reward deferred maintenance, or reveals which government employees are qualified to have their jobs.

The internet line that feeds my home, about a mile from where I sit, hangs five feet above the ground, weighed down by trees and brush in a state-owned forest, and I’ve spent about ten hours over the last two years trying to get someone to do something about it. Hawaiian Telcom, who owns the line, won’t mobilize unless it breaks (their explicit policy!), and the Public Utilities Commission ignored my complaint.

This is largely how infrastructure gets handled in Hawaii: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if it is broke, don’t look at why it broke in the first place — just perform the minimal fix. That posture is exactly what turned the Lahaina fire in 2023 from bad to catastrophic.

When a structural problem receives primarily an emotional or relational response, a category error has occurred. The response may be sincere, necessary, and even beautiful while still being directed at a different level of the problem.

This is one reason disasters can generate enormous collective activity without producing equivalent structural change. People gather, donate, mourn, volunteer, organize, and affirm community identity. The intensity of response creates a subjective impression that the problem itself is being addressed. Activity feels like efficacy. Solidarity feels like solution. Concern feels like prevention. None of these are substitutes for the structural work itself.

The same principle applies even to disaster relief. Generosity does not eliminate the need for structure. Large flows of emergency money require verification, allocation criteria, transparency, auditing, competent administration, enforcement, and accountability. Without these mechanisms, relief systems themselves become vulnerable to exploitation, waste, corruption, and unequal distribution.

Good intentions do not substitute for good structure. Even compassion requires architecture.

There is also a deeper reason structural prevention is chronically neglected: successful prevention is largely invisible.

If a government spends heavily to strengthen electrical infrastructure, improve drainage, clear hazardous vegetation, create redundant communications, and redesign emergency procedures, and a severe storm then passes without major disruption, very little appears to have happened. Power remains on, roads remain open, emergency services function, and people return to ordinary life.

There is no dramatic image of the disaster that did not occur.

The cost of prevention, however, is immediately visible. Infrastructure requires money, personnel, political attention, and ongoing maintenance. Those resources compete with other urgent demands. The benefit is often deferred and counterfactual: it consists in something not happening at some unknown point in the future.

This creates a predictable bias toward underinvestment. Maintenance is postponed because nothing has failed yet. Redundancy appears inefficient because primary systems still function. Fragility remains invisible under ordinary conditions. Then an abnormal condition arrives and reveals what was already true, but mostly people play victim to the event and don’t ask why it hit as hard as it did.

None of this means every system should prepare for every conceivable disturbance — that’s its own kind of naivety. A town that gets real snow once a decade doesn’t need Boston’s snow-removal budget. The question is which disturbances are probable and consequential enough to design for, and how much failure is acceptable when they land.

Resilience therefore depends on intelligently chosen margin.

This matters especially in systems where failures cascade. Islands provide an obvious example. Limited roads, constrained ports, remote communities, long electrical distribution networks, difficult terrain, dependence on imported goods, and limited redundancy can turn localized failures into system-wide disruption. A system may function perfectly well under normal conditions while remaining highly vulnerable to simultaneous deviations across several variables.

For this reason, resilience cannot be measured merely by how effectively a system operates when nothing unusual is happening. The more revealing question is what occurs when ordinary assumptions stop being true.

The same principle extends far beyond infrastructure.

Human beings function as structures too. Criticism doesn’t produce the same outcome in every person, and neither does rejection, success, illness, betrayal, loss, or failure. The content is similar; the developmental process is radically different. One person meets criticism with curiosity. Another collapses, attacks, or dissociates. Another adjusts behavior while the underlying structure stays the same. Another lets it reorganize something fundamental. The criticism alone doesn’t explain the difference. The receiving structure does. But what do most people do? They play victim to the circumstance and seek to better control their environment or inner state rather than augment their capacity.

Content-level explanations miss this constantly. We say someone became depressed because a relationship ended, a company failed because the market changed, a community flooded because a hurricane arrived. True in content. Thin in context.

Structural perception asks what had to already be true for this event to produce this outcome. That question moves beneath narrative into architecture.

A disaster is therefore not only an event. It is information. It reveals where capacity was exceeded, where assumptions were wrong, where dependencies were hidden, where redundancy was absent, where authority was confused, and where responsibility was distributed so diffusely that effective action became difficult.

The emotional response tells us what the event meant to people. The structural response determines whether the same kind of failure is likely to happen again. Both matter, but neither substitutes for the other.

When structural failure is answered primarily with emotion, solidarity, symbolism, or narrative, the problem is not that those responses are inappropriate. The problem is that they belong to a different category. They address suffering, belonging, meaning, and immediate human need while leaving the architecture that produced the vulnerability substantially intact.

Then the next event arrives, and the resulting failure is treated as surprising. A more mature response to disaster therefore asks two questions at once: how do we care for the people affected, and what did this event reveal about the structure that received it?

The first question addresses the human consequences of what happened. The second determines whether anything fundamental will be different when (not if) it happens again.

P.S. As I write this on 8/21/26, another tropical storm is expected to pass Hawaii tomorrow night, close enough to bring a lot of rain to still saturated ground.

This is a recording of the free class I offered as an introduction to the upcoming course. It’s a taste of what we’ll be doing in the upcoming course. There is still some room left. We go over a fascinating celebrity chart that illustrates the mechanisms behind both genius and how it can go awry, showing how structure can express in multiple ways at the level of expression.