This is the second post in a sequence that demonstrates a complete naturalist study, specifically a study of query hugging (sort of), as described in The Nuts and Bolts of Naturalism. This one demos phase zero, all the preparation that's often needed before you can really get to work. It corresponds to the how-to posts "Getting Started With Naturalism" and "Catching the Spark". For context on this sequence, see the intro post.

The Dead Words Of Others

At the outset of any naturalist study, original seeing and curiosity are paramount. If they’re already present—and they aren’t crowded out by other concerns, such as a desperation to solve your problem as quickly as possible—then you can dive right in. Otherwise, some deliberate cultivation is needed.

Where did I stand with original seeing and curiosity, at the beginning of this study? I was pretty low on both. 

There was this whole coherent concept, “hug the query”, handed to me from the outside by a clear and well-written essay that did not leave me feeling confused. I could tell there was something in there that I wanted to engage with, somehow; but for the most part, my understanding was relatively inert.

If I wanted to transform that seed of interest into a study that was live, growing, and really mine, it was going to take some work. As I said in the introduction, I had to forget what I already knew so I could see it all again, this time entirely for myself.

“Making a fake thing real” was the challenge I set for myself in this study.

It wasn’t such an extreme case as a busy work assignment in middle school. I wasn’t handed something fake, exactly. But what I held was nowhere near real enough to fuel a naturalist study, not without some alchemy. 

For one thing, I was embarking on a study originally intended not to satisfy some burning curiosity of mine, nor even to solve one of my personal problems, but to “demonstrate the naturalist method”, simply because that was the next step in my larger project. I thought it would be cool if my demos provided useful companion resources to pre-existing rationality material, and I settled on “hug the query” somewhat whimsically.

Additionally, these ideas I was working with—"closeness to the issue", "the screening off theorem", "hug the query"—they were dead words on a page, the empty skin of someone else’s thoughts shed as he slithered across a website years in the past. Learning from someone else’s writing always poses this kind of challenge, to one degree or another. 

“Catching the Spark” is a procedure for shining original seeing and curiosity at arbitrary topics. I’ve never made a concerted effort to lay out what I know of how to make fake things real; but I think “throw original seeing and curiosity at it systematically, relentlessly, until it starts to change” is a big chunk of the skillset.

So that’s how I started this study. I opened up “Catching the Spark”, read the instructions, and followed them.

Catching the Spark

A quick summary of the process: Catching the Spark begins with story articulation, which gets you grounded in your intuitions about a topic. You then “squint” at your story, examining your intuitions piece by piece. Finally you reconnect with your intuitions from the beginning, and choose a “quest”, a related question that will guide your investigations going forward.

When working with text, I often try highlighting the bits that jump out at me, so I can feel into them and get a sense of why I seem to care. That “jumping out” is an indication that my own interests and priorities have found a potential interface.

This works even if a certain phrase makes me angry or sad. If I feel anything at all while reading, it means that somehow, for some reason, I care. There is realness hidden somewhere behind every fake thing. Emotions often indicate crenulations in the facade.

In "Hug the Query", the part that most jumped out was:

"In the art of rationality there is a discipline of closeness-to-the-issue—trying to observe evidence that is as near to the original question as possible, so that it screens off as many other arguments as possible."

As I read back through this sentence, I looked for a felt sense of what seemed important about it. I offered some phrases to the felt sense, and found a few that resonated: “the heart of the matter”, “driving straight at”, “not getting distracted”, “cutting straight to”, “intimacy”, “nothing in the way”, “clarity”, “staying in touch”. 

I wove those phrases into a story statement, tinkered with that statement for a while until I found something that more or less fit my felt sense of "what's important here", and ended up with:

I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial.

(It later turned out that this story was a bit off. That’s ok; it was only meant to be provisional, something to work with.)

Once I had a story statement, I started "squinting" at the story.

There are two especially hard-hitting concepts in this story: "distraction" and "crucial". So at this point, I thought for a while about "distraction". 

In my notes, I seem to be sort of turning the concept around and around, as though trying to see all the sides of it, or to memorize its shape. I asked a lot of questions, such as "Where does distraction come from?” and, “Is it something with a positive force, like a draw to think about something else? Or is it merely an absence, a failure to focus on the intended subject?" 

The main point of these questions was to activate my curiosity and familiarize myself with the sensation of it. Some questions burned brighter than others. By dwelling on this “squinting” process, I learned to feel my desire for understanding as it interacted with my thoughts around “distraction”.

I deviated from the standard instructions in the middle of “squinting”. There was an obstacle I needed to pause and contend with, one that turned out to afford my first phenomenological snapshot for the study.

My obstacle, which had been showing up all over the place at that time, was postpartum hormones. I’d given birth a month and a half earlier, and things were not as usual inside my head. 

It was so hard to think straight. Whenever I put effort into directing my mind in any way at all, I found that I was tied up in agonizing knots of anxiety and self doubt. More than half my cycles were going toward coping with the neuroticism, rather than toward my intended topic. “Will I ever be able to think again?” I ruminated, intrusively, incessantly. “Will I ever truly return to work? Is my work even any good at all? Is the entire project completely hopeless? Am I hopeless?”

Sometimes when I’m trying to use my brain in a certain way, it insists on pursuing some other activity instead. Here, I was “trying to make progress on my project”, but my brain insisted on engaging in anxious rumination. In such moments, I tend to get a lot of mileage out of giving up on control, while carefully watching whatever thoughts and experiences result. So that’s what I did next. I stopped “trying to work”, and just sat there staring at a blank wall for a while, watching my mind do whatever it was that seemed so important to it at the time.

After about twenty minutes of staring at a wall, I got a snapshot of a moment that seemed particularly relevant to my study. Here is what I wrote afterward, to record the experience.

Log Excerpt

I ended up turning my attention toward whatever's going on with this "trying to work" thing. What I found is that I felt I’d been "missing the point", or something.

I was aware of an internal conflict, and the conflict was over something about "doing my work or not doing my work". There were various things underneath each of those options, such as "never being able to do work again", "being shit at what I do", "giving myself time and space to recover when I go on a trip", "recognizing that I went to the grocery store today and that throws me off", "making excuses", and some other stuff. 

I did not address any of that directly. Instead I... well, the way it actually worked in my head was extremely kinesthetic and proprioceptive, which much of my thinking is. I sort of felt myself becoming a river that flows in underneath the wall of conflict. I think I was recognizing "none of that is the thing itself". It was a very soft feeling, soft like releasing, soft like letting go, the petals as they open, the pillow as it cradles the head. Soft flowing underneath the hardness of the conflict above, moving past all of that toward... what? "Toward anything else", is my immediate response. "Toward whatever is on the other side of the wall." 

I don't know what is there, on the other side of the wall. [That is, I don’t know what “hug the query” is, yet.] I don't know what it is or what it means, I don't know what I'll find. But anything real to be found is beyond the internal bickering over concepts of work, duty, worth, expectations, promises, ability. I got past myself. 

But how did I know that I was "missing the point"? That's the biggest question here, right? The biggest question of "hug the query". How do you know what to hug? Or how do you know what constitutes hugging, and what doesn’t? How can you tell when you're distant from the thing you want to stay intimate with? How can you tell when you're looking toward what is crucial, and when you're "distracted"? 

I was making a guess, that I was "missing the point". I could have been wrong, of course. But whatever I perceived, I think it was a pretty reliable signal that "this is not in direct connection to what I care about here". Yes, maybe I am "not capable of doing work". That might be true. But I'm not here to "determine whether I can do work". I'm here to lay my body alongside some particular thing that I want to learn about. If I "cannot do work", then yes, perhaps I will fail to learn the thing. But it's better to try to learn the thing, than to try to determine whether I can learn the thing.

Looking back at this first snapshot from the other end of my study, I have a story about what was going on. I wasn't yet able to reflectively recognize, or perhaps even directly perceive, the phenomenology of "closeness to the issue" that I can now take as object and notice fairly reliably. But I think I must have felt what I now think of as "darkness in my chest", the feeling that corresponds to "distance from the issue". And in response, I managed to navigate away from that experience of distance.

Choosing My Quest

After this pause for meditation and phenomenological photography, it felt right to me to return to the official structure of “Catching the Spark”. It was time to “choose my quest”; time to find a conceptual crux in the form of a question that would kick off my study. 

To feel my way toward a question like that, I first reconnected with my felt sense of the story, "I leave behind distraction when I look toward what is crucial." I wrote:

Log Excerpt

It's like a snail reaching one antenna out from beneath its shell. Like some small and soft creature extending a probing tentacle from beneath the safety of the rock they're hiding under. Vulnerable, sensitive, soft, raw, alive. I think that's half of it. 

The other half is actually hard and sharp. Like a razer, like a laser, like the tip of an arrow that's just split another arrow lengthways on its trip to the bullseye. 

I would like to know where I feel each of these in my body, so I can find them more easily later. The vulnerability I feel from three inches above my belly button to the middle of my chest. It's like a glowing ball, and it comes with a forward cautious restrained reaching motion. The cutting laserness I feel... in multiple places, I think? In the "pit of my stomach" like a tungsten sphere dropped into a pond, sinking immediately with no delay straight to the bottom and settling several layers deep in the silt. And in my chest and head, a buzzing excitement, a feeling of forward energy, piercing like a bayonet or a spear.

(Remember that “glowing ball” somewhere between my belly button and my chest. I later talk about “chest luster”, which I think is probably the same sensation.)

Holding these feelings against the various questions I'd written down, I chose, "What's going on with distraction?" This became my quest.