child development

AMA with Ali Beiner. Wednesday 2/4 at 11:00 AM CT

Kainos host Alexander Beiner exploring cultural sensemaking around psychedelics, popular culture, philosophy, psychology, alternative economics, and spirituality.

an inevitable future of unconditional love. "The world is sacred. It can't be improved." says verse 29 of the Tao te Ching.

I know the experience this statement comes from. I believe everyone knows it. Knows moments of simple unimpeachable perfection, no matter how violent (eg watching a crocodile catching a deer in slo mo). In this moment—wedding, sex, nature, child's birth, "first sip" of coffee, simple flower—this sacredness is everything.

What if we all remembered this? What if we made our decisions from this place? What if we let go of needing to "get somewhere" altogether? Like a post-scarcity economy, but for our relationship to existence. Unconditional love and faith. What would a society look like that recognizes it is in full devotion to what already is, and needs do nothing?

I can feel my own resistance—what if I need to take out the trash!? Or redesign social media's incentive structure?! But then I challenge the assumptions these question depend on: how come perfection someone doesn't include taking out the trash? Doesn't it already, if this quote is true? Doesn't the unconditional love I'm pointing to already include all of it?

One view: the future of unconditional love is inevitable, because it's what we already have, and have always had.

#FutureYouLove 

Gun violence in the USA schools. This weekend Stephanie got onto an instagram rabbithole which took her into some dark, near-conspiracy places about gun violence. The sad bit was of course the increase in polarization, rather than an increase in compassion, or even solutions focus. It’s much easier to blame an other than try to sort out a super complex, nuanced, and ambiguous problem.

This topic is interesting in general to me, and it kicked off a beautiful discussion on the UpTrust slack thread (it seems we’re influencing ourselves to be better online conversationalists everywhere!), but it also made we wonder how to solve the school-shooting issue in the USA? What are the nuanced, synthetic perspectives? For example, even comparing data about school shootings across the world can be shaped, interpreted, mixed. Many of the countries that have fewer school shootings (all of them) have much higher death-by-firearm rates, or death by gang-violence, or war, etc. So it’s difficult to get good comparisons, even if we ignore cultural approaches. Also

How do we take an integral approach which addresses all four quadrants?
- UL psyche: mental health—but what does this mean? Where does the money come from to increase such mental health?
- LL culture: US roots in revolution and gun ownership, media, glorification of shooters
- UR behavior: Gun safety training? mandatory? What can we learn from Israel and Switzerland, who have similar or higher gun ownership rates but no school shootings? Quick research: it seems like increasing metal detectors and stuff is NOT a solution that works. What other behavior changes do?
- LR systems: Gun control—even as a gun owning Texan, I think it’s obvious at this point that things need to change. I don’t have much research or understanding so probably people have a lot to say about the nuanced ways of doing this, and I’m sure I’m naive in my suggestion here but it seems like there could be various licenses like there are for driving; the more dangerous a weapon is, the more training you have to prove you’ve had like getting a commercial driver’s license. It also seems like we could clearly do a two year experiment: Write a new law that expires in two years and look at the data: did we stop the shootings?

anyway this is super inchoate, but I’d love to get the collective brain’s nuanced take that can genuinely steel man all sides, understanding and including the validity of the right-wing arguments as well as seeing the problems of the left-wing solutions, the bits left on the table.

My therapist says... if you have a disorder (I’d call this an undesired response + occurring regularly), don’t apply any strategies, any self-regulating methods to meet the stimulus. Don’t try to lower the fear. Any safety strategies will likely keep it in place.

When you do any kind of method you tell your nervous system this is truly dangerous. You need to show your primitive brain that this isn’t dangerous: I don’t have to do anything.

…

This feels so right in me. What a relief actually!

It feels related to what Jordan said earlier, that naming safety creates feelings of unsafety, making us more aware of what could go wrong.

Similarly, naming trauma encourages people to feel into their traumas, leading to distress…creating the opposite of what is intended.

Showing up to a disorder with a strategy is like an invitation to experience more of it.

What do you guys think?

What is the Dark Side of Wisdom? What would it be like to live in a Dark Age, devoid of Wisdom? Is there such a thing as too much Wisdom? Too little? Is Wisdom always good? Is there Wisdom in the Shadow? If so, what?

In contrast, what would it be like to live in a perfect Golden Age, where Wisdom is taken for granted the same way as brushing one’s teeth or wiping one’s ass? Would a Golden Age also include Wisdom’s Shadow? What do we even mean by Golden, Age, Dark, or Shadow anyway?

These are the questions bouncing around in my heart. What questions of yours bounce around in response? 🤔

👽 aliens and angels 👼 . We’re driving on 620, passing one of those statue places that has a bunch of big metal dinosaurs, big green alien statues, flamingo statues, etc.

Me, to Jack: What do you see buddy?
Jack: A flamingo!
Jordan: Yes! What else?
Jack: An angel
Jordan: Yeah, where?
Jack: The big green thing

What do you make of this?

I’m starting to take this idea pretty seriously: the universe is filled with subtle energy beings that have some overlap with our realm, and some not.

One of the strange factors about the beings/energy is that it can’t be perceived directly in the concrete realm through our normal five senses, so we have unique APIs that translate these beings into a cultural context that makes sense. So the same being could be seen as an angle, or a hindu god, or an alien, or simply energy depending on the person. My guess is this helps account for plant teachers, DMT entities, UAPs, etc.; although I realize this is extremely hand wavey on the details.

👽 aliens and angels 👼 . We’re driving on 620, passing one of those statue places that has a bunch of big metal dinosaurs, big green alien statues, flamingo statues, etc.

Me, to Jack: What do you see buddy?
Jack: A flamingo!
Jordan: Yes! What else?
Jack: An angel
Jordan: Yeah, where?
Jack: The big green thing

What do you make of this?

I’m starting to take this idea pretty seriously: the universe is filled with subtle energy beings that have some overlap with our realm, and some not.

One of the strange factors about the beings/energy is that it can’t be perceived directly in the concrete realm through our normal five senses, so we have unique APIs that translate these beings into a cultural context that makes sense. So the same being could be seen as an angle, or a hindu god, or an alien, or simply energy depending on the person. My guess is this helps account for plant teachers, DMT entities, UAPs, etc.; although I realize this is extremely hand wavey on the details.

Providing environments for learning. Imagine you’re attending a meditation workshop and the facilitator invites you to lean into stillness. After a few seconds, they start giving cues on how to be still, one after another, followed by reading a passage from a book about meditation, and then it ends. You didn’t really get to experience stillness, but you learned a lot about why it’s important. Now imagine being facilitated by a person who gives a short context in the beginning, shares short cues at 10-minute intervals, and ends after 30 minutes. In the first scenario, stillness was interrupted by talking about how to be still; in the second, you were provided the environment to be in stillness and possibly experienced stillness.

Similarly, we ought to teach our children by providing environments where they can have certain experiences and relate to them with integrity, trust, love, and whatever other qualities we want to foster in them.

Teaching concepts like confidence or processing emotions is very limited, or even counterintuitive if the child doesn’t have a reference from their own experiences. If your child is consistently trusted in their daily choices, they’ll believe in themselves. If you let your child express their emotions, they will know what processing emotions means—because they have experienced it.

If you want a self-confident child, trust in your child’s abilities and give plenty of opportunities for them to be trusted.

Here’s some examples of what I’ve been doing to support my daughter’s confidence, autonomy, individuality, and freedom:

• Simple daily things I do that are maybe the most important is that I wait a few seconds longer than most parents to intervene, interrupt, speak, direct, or support. During this time, I’m looking to see what minimal intervention or support I can give for her to accomplish her mission by herself.
• I trust in her development and the natural intelligence of her body. She will reach developmental milestones in her own time. I will not rush her to talk, walk, or master skills like eating with a spoon. When it’s necessary and relevant for her, she’ll make the effort to learn and do it.
• I offer several options for food and let her decide what she wants to eat and how much. I trust that she’ll eat when she needs food and that she’ll pick food that matches what she needs. The only thing I control is what food is provided for her.
  -I’m available to listen to her feelings when she needs to process her emotions. I trust that she’ll express herself when she feels safe, and I don’t force or suppress her expression.
• I mostly let her direct our play and follow her lead. I avoid suggesting what to play with and instead see where her attention goes. When I ask her if she wants to play with something, it’s mostly in the context of offering her an alternative to something unsafe, like Do you want to play with this smooth metal spoon instead of that very sharp metal knife?
  -We have a yes-space where she can follow her own directed play without interruptions for safety concerns.

Every time we show a child how something works, we take away their opportunity to discover it by themselves. This is why child-led play and learning, or unschooling, is an amazing alternative to traditional schooling. They don’t need to rediscover the wheel, but providing an environment with the necessary pieces at their developmental level to make similar discoveries is fun and empowering.

Adults are slightly different, but I think the concept of providing environments is still relevant. For adults, environments can be a thought experiment or imaginative, like the example at the beginning of this post. As dreams show us, our imagination is an environment that provides learning opportunities.

Parenting our children is more about creating a supportive environment where they can naturally develop these qualities or learn them through the experience of being in a relationship with us, rather than trying to teach them directly. This post doesn’t really end here—I invite you to first run an experiment where you create an environment for an experience to happen and share what you learn.