Goal
I want an amazing, compelling fetters guide with visuals, a standard structure, an introduction to inquiry (with small exercises and strong vibe), and prompts to paste into chatgpt. As a stretch goal I’d add mini-apps where people could use the prompts in the article, with the understanding that they’re donating their responses for the sites’ improvement.
The Self is a series of developmentally-advantageous beliefs
your ego/self formed so you could navigate the world as a child. it formed different capabilities via beliefs in a specific order. these beliefs are good! things like “i am separate from my mother” needed to be bootstrapped. 1
But you weren’t born with any context on what an “i”, “separate”, or “mother” means, so you had to take evolutionarily-pre-determined sledgehammer-sized beliefs to that initial (nondual) unity in order to realize some level of individuality.
these beliefs are silly, like “there’s a mini me in my head that definitely can pull levers to affect the world” and “i can change the world by wishing really hard for a reality that’s different than this one” and “i need to mentally grab onto objects in order to make sense of them”
very useful as a kid learning to navigate! coarse and wrong at a fundamental level as an adult.
Fetters inquiry tests those beliefs: are they really true?
fetters “work” around here refers to simplytheseen dot com’s series of inquiries (that this dude named kevin created and @Plus3Happiness has been busy refining). it’s a list of exercises that are targeted at “seeing through” these developmentally-psychological-based beliefs in reverse order of formation. kind of like you might “see through” wind at a certain point and realize that “wind” doesn’t exist - it’s just thermodynamic gradients.
the work starts with beliefs you developed at ~24-36 months, and goes backwards from there. it’s not the only insight method that does this but he was channeling some real shit when he developed the sequence.
the second series of exercises is the biggest gamechanger for most. it’s targeted at the beliefs developed in the rapprochement stage of development, where you discover you have your own beliefs that differ from your parents and learn to exercise them). michael calls this “breaking reactivity” which is a fine enough word for it, as you learn that you’re pretty constantly pushing and pulling against external and internal stimuli in a way that is pretty counterproductive and self-harming. stop slapping yourself! My friend Owen has written about this more on his substack
it’s… shockingly fun work? takes a minute to get the spirit of it, but it’s so direct and liberation-amplifying. and apparently has the potential to lead to pretty deep levels of realization (i won’t claim it leads to arhatship or 4th path because who the fuck knows what those even mean and do we even have enough data to answer and does the answer even matter?)
PS: fetters = made up word coopted from the buddhists, similar but different meaning. fetter ~= “wrong belief tying you down.” But the 10 fetters have a very specific meaning that’s tradition-dependent and i’m hoping we can move away from the term before this method reaches escape velocity.
Here is a chart
Blue = initial reaction (event) | Green = secondary reaction (me)
Exercise: What’s my relationship with direct experience?**
Do your best to answer spontaneously rather than taking time to figure out the “right” answer. This is not an academic exercise but rather an exercise in uncovering hidden feelings and beliefs. The last question is an exercise in noticing the presence of this Quality, which often goes unnoticed. When answering these questions, feel into your immediate direct experience for an answer.
5 minutes What is right about not trusting reality as it is?
5 minutes Name something you don’t trust about reality.
10 minutes Name something you trust about reality right now.
Afterwards: what came up? What patterns/schemas could you work with? What’s your relationship to direct experience now?
Lists of prompts
- Ez mode inquiry: see that something small is empty (not sure what this is)
- Quiz: what is insight meditation?
- Quiz: what is reactivity?
- Support:
Footnotes
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See: Mahler’s Separation-Individuation Theory for more ↩