_Quick! Without consulting your notes, articulate the heart of your aspiration for [[Thyself.ai]]._ (A part of my mind loves to float at a certain level of abstraction; sometimes I need to tug it back down like a balloon about to drift off. Yes, the view is grand from up there; but the air is thin...) What are the core patterns? What are the core patterns of human life? What are the arcs of growth, socialization, identity formation, cognitive challenge and development, and so on, that everyone goes through? What do we collectively know about the healthiest and best ways to go through those arcs, for the person, their community, and the world? Of that collective knowledge, what can be generalized into a framework for reflection that anyone can use to produce meaningful shifts and insights? Does it even make sense to believe that there is a simple and clear way to talk about this rather than a bunch of heuristics, half-truths, and culture-bound accretions for different life domains and time scales, which each person must learn their own "fingertips-feeling" for in their own way? Even if this "one simple way" is a fiction, is it a useful fiction? How could it be a North Star for a project of finding a coherent universal narrative? How could the effort of constructing such a thing articulate principles accessible to ordinary people across a wide range of ages, cultures, and developmental stages, to apply to the growth challenges of their own lives? - [[George Vaillant]] - Robert Kegan - [The Enneagram](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/there-are-nine-wolves-inside-of-you) - [[STAGES development model]] At any given moment, our experience is heavily mediated by past experiences and the beliefs and habits that have grown out of them. That filtering constrains our behavior and makes some outcomes seem more possible than others. Yet *refactoring* these filters is always possible. I think of the old Ribbonfarm tagline, "Experiments in refactored perception". A software development career and a meditation practice have given me a rich field of connotations for this word "refactoring". In programming, it means to rearrange some code to make it more legible and maintainable, to clarify its purpose, to separate out different concerns and responsibilities. And in the frame of Buddhist meditation practice, I use it to mean gaining more insight into how we construct our subjective worldviews out of raw perceptions and the agency we have to influence that process. (One relevant model for this is the [[Five Aggregates]].) So in the context of Thyself.ai -- something that you talk to, and talks back to you in a helpful way -- an artifact that points out the "simple way" would itself be quite complex, to adapt to the variety of conditions people bring to it. In dialogue with each person, it would put the specific details of their experience into a context that illumines it as a unique expression of perennial themes, evoking a sense of possibility, of agency and creativity, of willingness to exert oneself; and confidence that such effort will be rewarded with insight, self-understanding, with meaning. This illumination brings the shadow into view. What is hard to talk about? What is apparently lacking? Is there a "hungry ghost" feeling of inability to be nourished emotionally and spiritually, a sense of lacking healthy connection to nature, to beloved community? Is there some imbalance of give and take? A sense of powerlessness? A desire to harm or destroy. A sense of having to fight, to struggle, to persist despite being misunderstood or unseen, and a deep fatigue that comes from knowing one cannot keep on in this way for much longer. A wound that never healed. A sense of not knowing how to truly rest, to let go, to be carried, to trust deeply... The hope is always that through this process of illumination, something that was pushed into the shadow because it was too overwhelming, too shameful, too powerful, can find its way back into right relationship with the conscious self. That with the support of the wisdom of the ages, it can be seen as a gift. That it can belong. The details of our life circumstances unceasingly multiply; yet the number of core themes is finite. Every generation struggles both to channel the chaos of the raw aliveness being born through it, and to go beyond the control structures of the prior generation. It must invent new language and forms to express the perennial ideas in a way that meets its unique moment, and whatever technologies and trends are most current weave and are woven into this invention... %% Is *this* the hill I want to die on? Why? What am I trying to prove, to myself or anyone else? Or I could ask: What am I carrying on? What streams of culture and inquiry have landed in me with sufficient force that I feel propelled by them, that my personal sense of equilibrium and meaning is enmeshed with their propagation, ripening, understanding? If this moment of meeting, having ripened through time and space to this moment, is a collective being awakening to its potential: *What do we desire?* %%