Layering and Technical Debt in the Global Wayfinding Model
(Crossposted on Lesswrong)
Global Wayfinding is a model of meditation and transformative practice, developed by Mark Lippmann. Mark’s materials are unfortunately fairly inaccessible, often even to people with both substantial technical and meditation backgrounds. I’d like to make some concepts more available which haven’t yet made their way into the discourses I’m in.
Claims in this essay are meant to accurately reflect Mark’s models, and I can’t quite sharply endorse all of them. In particular I can’t attest to many of these claims from my own practice, which is generally the epistemic standard I hold for claims claims about meditation/phenomenology etc. Also, my pool of anecdata is much smaller than Mark’s, and I’ve forgotten a lot of the details of where various claims and models came from.
Layering
In the Wayfinding framework, a person is said to layer, sometimes layer over, when a compensatory structure is added to prevent, diminish, or attenuate perceived negative parts, behaviors, or emotions. Layering can be variously effective, sometimes completely blocking out a part or a class of parts from coming to conscious awareness. Layering is obviously not causing the structures responsible for the undesired qualities or states to cease, only for their arising in consciousness to be prevented. Sometimes layering is initiated “consciously” but often the layering that people report discovering in their practice is not willful, and they usually have little control over it consciously. Extant layering may also be quite old, and a meditator may have no available memory of the events which led to it. Delayering is a consistently noted phenomenon among serious practitioners. There are many reports of people “discovering” in the course of their practice intense sadness, anger, sexual energy, or many other qualities which might have been covered over or dissociated from.
Many traditional religious and meditative systems prescribe practices to purposefully attenuate various undesirable mindstates. These are variously effective for different people, and though they sometimes work to substantially attenuate negative mental qualities in the moment, they are generally not effective at ultimately dissolving those parts. I find it telling that teachers often prescribe practices to persistently push against negative states. Sometimes traditional teachers recognize that this reflects the fact that purposeful attenuation is incomplete, but it’s claimed that after sufficiently deep awakening these negative states fall away of their own accord. I would call all of these kinds of practices “purposeful layering”. Some kinds of layering practices are relatively gentle but still ultimately problematic, and many are quite forceful. Again I find it conspicuous that traditional teachers prescribe forceful layering practices for long periods of time. A similar critique applies to many contemporary schools of psychotherapy.
It should be said that layering is necessarily functional, and that even “correct practice” according to Wayfinding doesn’t magically destroy all layering at once. Existing layering will persist until it is carefully unraveled, and new layering may accrue while the mind does not yet have better tools to accommodate or integrate negative experiences.
Technical debt
Technical debt is a term from software engineering that refers, among some other things, to the accumulation of unmanaged complexity in a piece of software. A good image is that of the Burrow (the Weasleys’ house) in Harry Potter. As new features are added, they are tacked on without attention to the structural integrity of the program. Each new feature is crammed inside, under, on top of, or dangling off existing structures. As this continues the piece of software becomes more and more difficult to maintain: imagine trying to fix the electricity in one room when it’s got another room standing on stilts poking through its roof.
Technical debt relates to refactoring, another concept from programming, which is the process of tearing down a mess like this and creating a new architecture which is better suited to what’s now needed.
Most people come to meditation practice with elaborate structures of layering. Mark’s claim is that correct transformative practice consists of careful unraveling, of thorough refactoring of the person with perfect care for all of their values. In Mark’s model, the mind is understood to be lossless with respect to its values (modulo brain damage, dementia, etc.), and so therefore “incorrect” attempts at dissolving negative structures will either simply be ineffective, or will result in a layered structure being tucked further away, thereby accruing more technical debt. Unlike a piece of software, however, a person cannot be safely shut down and taken apart, nor can one know ahead of time what the “correct” new architecture will be. Therefore, the process of Wayfinding is of an intricate back and forth dance, of healing and delayering, relayering, and allowing parts of the mind to come to peaceable solutions on their own terms, in their own time.
Lastly, according to Mark, layering is often quite subtle and intricate. My description of layering may evoke images of someone deliberately repressing anger, which is indeed a kind of layering. However, often a layering structure contains layers compensating for other layers, with small but pervasive effects left throughout the body and mind.