KD MacKay

Nobody’s wife thinks he’s enlightened.

Everyone wants to have more conscious control when they need it AND also be able to ‘let things happen’ when it goes well. The problem is letting go is not a method. It’s the result of long, hard conscious control. Experts have earned effortlessness, they don’t start with it.

You can’t be a free spirit without conscious control.

If you want to improve your posture don’t start by feeling your body more deeply, start by seeing your body more clearly. Use video.

The will is cultivated through the coordinated training of the whole person, not by training “willpower” in isolation. The will is psychophysical.

Wellness is a loser word. -1 to 0

The typical person involved with mind body methods needs more control over their body, not less. But the pleasant feelings of ‘letting go’ are too immediate, seductive and convincing. A better way is learn how to convert the tension into energized action.

Recursive self-mastery: the deliberate acquisition of new powers by which the agent becomes capable of further transforming himself and his world.

psychophysical self-mastery → open-ended self-transformation

psychophysical self-mastery → psychophysical self-transformation → psychophysical self-transcendence →

🫡

Recursive self-transcendence (Odin) Recursive self-entrapment (Macbeth)

Recursive self-transcendence

the wanderer 🤝 the wonderer

European monasteries were laboratories of self-cultivation.

The whole person can only be studied as a dynamic unity in action.

The task: how to develop Psychophysical Intelligence in the age of artificial intelligence.

Organic Intelligence: what evolution gives us. Psychophysical Intelligence: what we can deliberately develop in ourselves. Artificial Intelligence: what we build outside ourselves.

Sparring forces you to get smarter because another intelligent organism is constantly destroying your predictions.

The truly forbidden gift is: the means of ceasing to remain what you were. And the final dangerous gift is: Here is how to invent new means of transforming yourself which neither I nor you can currently foresee.