Slay the Princess, Secret to Superhuman Strength, and Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

[roadrunnertwice]

OK, here we go — the final 2025 bookpost! And it's, uh, well, it's certainly something.

Daniel M. Ingram — Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (2nd ed.)

Feb. 25

Readable online. There’s also a pdf on the site, but I ended up downloading the html version and scrunching it into an epub. Here's that, if you want it. (Hopefully the author won't mind a little light format-shifting in the name of spreading information. If you meet the Buddha on the road, right-click him and save as.)

This one's been sitting unreviewed because there's a whole big context around it that is going to be kind of annoying to explain. I'll probably make a mess of it, but let's try.

A while back, right before the demise of Cohost, I read this all-time banger of a post by Matthew Seiji Burns. I want you to read it yourself, but basically:

Feeling better is possible. I mean in a baseline, day to day, non-temporary way. [...]

[...] I am going to describe a kind of meditation with a goal to make a specific “thing” happen, because the thing I’m about to describe was the single best improvement to my mental health that I ever experienced. I think it’s important for more people to know about. It is totally achievable— not exactly easy, but not ridiculously hard either. It employs meditation not as an open-ended and never-ending practice, but as a specific, targeted activity. Perhaps surprisingly, you do not need to keep meditating afterward to continue to have the benefit it confers.

And then he gives you the recipe.

I had previously done a fair amount of meditation and gotten some benefit from it, but it was all the undirected type, building concentration without doing anything specific with it; this type of focused campaign was a new and compelling idea to me. The post continued to simmer in the back of my brain for a couple months.

Of course I had to try it. It was inevitable!! You know me by now, obviously I was going to try a painful and inconvenient project to address some non-emergency background problem!

But also, maybe that background problem wasn't a non-emergency. I was not doing so great. At the start of this year, it felt like cruelty, selfishness, and waste were in some final state of permanent ascendence in both our nation and the world at large, and I was having a hard time with existing in it. The prospect of being a little less weighed-down by it all was very attractive.

Long story short, the recipe works. You really can exhaust your brain's defenses and briefly interrupt the continuity of those illusions of permanence, selfhood, and satisfiability. (I did it.) And if you do, it really does cause an experience that changes your perceptions in a long-term way. (I felt it.) Descriptions, analogies, metaphors, and other tools of intellectual understanding don't appear to do the trick, because after all, none of these ideas were new to me; it seems you really do have to witness it directly.

I wouldn't say that that experience fixed me or anything, but, it helped. It's hard to describe, but it feels like it installed some sort of subfloor, so that I'm not just walking on exposed joists anymore. Or to put it differently: a lot of stuff remains really quite awful and I'm going to continue to feel a lot of physical and emotional pain about it, but that doesn't mean I have to take it quite so personally all the time.

The experience also left me absolutely convinced that this was the start of a path, not the end of one; I'm lighter, not enlightened. So, I got curious about what other places that path leads to.

---

Hence, this book. Matthew Seiji had mentioned it prominently in the post that started me on this, so I figured I'd start there and then see.

Daniel Ingram an American who has studied in some variety of Buddhist traditions, but as best as I can tell, his current point of view seems most influenced by Burmese teachers? It might take another read to pick that out more exactly. In Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, he starts from the axiom that "awakening," as described by various Buddhist traditions, is 1. a real, physical phenomenon, 2. beneficial and worth seeking out, and 3. practical to achieve. (Or as some other guy put it: there is suffering, there is the cause of suffering, there is the end of suffering, and there is the path that leads to the end of suffering.)

He then points out that there exists a lot of quite detailed knowledge about what awakening is and how to get there, but much of it is obscure, hermetic, mystical, and hard to access, and there's a severe lack of straight talk about it from teachers who are able to read and interpret that knowledge. So, he sets out to systematically record, in as plain and non-mystical terms as possible (which, there's some limits there), the real dirt about how to get free and the various things that might happen to you along the way.

That's a grandiose project, and the grandiose title of the book serves as appropriate warning of that. And Ingram seems to be in many ways a pretty strange dude. So, having eaten the whole thing, I definitely want to read a bit more widely about all this; Ingram's point of view is expansive, but it's idiosyncratic for sure. (To his great credit, he vigorously urges you to read more widely and seek out actual teaching.)

Caveats aside, I found this incredibly refreshing and energizing. The thing I experienced back in February was very serious, and it was a joy to read something that took it seriously and tried to offer an overview of the nearby territory.

I would actually strongly recommend this book; certainly if you're feeling All That, but maybe even if you're just curious.

---

I think, probably, not a lot of people want to dig in this spot. (Even within Buddhist traditions where you've ostensibly got these tools for awakening available, you see a lot of avoidance of direct engagement; that was my big takeaway from my undergrad survey course on Buddhisms (plural), was that a lot of the time it's just another way for humans to go to church.) We get into the habit of not looking too hard at the big and weird fundamental questions, and honestly it feels a bit embarrassing to admit to confronting them in any kind of focused way. It seems like a dangerous and disreputable activity, the kind that tends to lead people into being exploited by malignant religious movements or whatever.

But having gotten a little taste of the practical results available, I'm interested in digging further. Like, it does have some dangers, sure; the brain's just made of flesh, thinking is a physical change to that flesh, and I think it's generally accepted that it's possible to do some strange psychiatric damage with meditation. But if feeling better is possible, and confronting the substance of consciousness and perception can really help you feel less stressed out by the mere fact of existence, well. Hmm.

---

So anyway, what was it that I actually perceived and experienced, when I did the thing? Well, it was that things (me included) don't have any sort of boundary or stable locus of identity; we're more like a tornado, which occurs but which can't actually be distinguished from the surrounding medium of the atmosphere. (Does a tornado "exist?" It does not.) Since we don't have boundaries or cores, every interaction between anything is a destructive and disorganizing mixing, an exchange of momentum and stuff between blurry whorls in the surrounding flow. If anything did "exist," it wouldn't be able to perceive or interact with anything; the destructive mixing is the entire game. So, that's why impermanence isn't scary; it's just the same thing as being able to experience sensations at all. (This is also the key to dissatisfactoriness, though that one's harder to explain.)

I think, probably, you've heard all of that before; there's no new ideas in there. It's plausible that you even agree with most of it. It's just, well... I got to touch it. It stopped being abstract.

That got my attention.

Alison Bechdel — The Secret to Superhuman Strength (comics)

Dec. 25

And then there's the last two reviews of the year, which, due to their content, are somewhat easier to write now that I've written all that context just north of here.

As coincidence would have it, Alison Bechdel's most recent book is all about her lifelong hunger to escape the illusory prison of the self. The framing lens this time around is that she's writing about "exercise," but you know how it goes with these weird spiral-shaped memoirs of hers: she's actually writing about more or less everything, and rummaging through literary history in search of signposts and cairns from people who might have been on this trail before her.

I really like this loose trilogy of autobiographies. Bechdel has this sort of frantic, vibrating intelligence, and these books feel like spending a series of pleasant late nights with her during some period where she's almost-but-not-quite gotten her train of thought under control and can spin out the entire spirograph mandala shape for someone who happens to be on her wavelength. Powerful ADHD friends energy, basically.

Anyway, a recurring thread through this one, both explicitly discussed and arising from things she just depicts happening, is that she very much is on the same hunt as I've found myself: the quest to dissolve some boundaries between the self and the universe, and also to stop fucking hitting yourself with these goddamn illusions.

She also, and I wasn't expecting this, made a case that I should go back and read The Dharma Bums, even though I figured I was done with Kerouac. I'm not sure I'll be able to see what she saw in it; it seems likely situational. But maybe worth a try.

Bonus Level: Slay the Princess

Nov. ??

(Content warning: horror game with lots of murder and some gore.)

I'm still cleaning up some of the weirder inner routes that I haven't seen yet, but I think I've done enough full loops and endings that I can say I've played this game. And: it rules.

As I think I've mentioned before, I've had a kind of standoffish relationship with the video game genre called "visual novels". The default point of view for a very large swath of the format seems to be the blank-slate "self-insert" character (this is very much a legacy of the dominant "dating sim" sub-genre of VNs), and somehow something about that kind of repels me? Like, it's meant to be "me," but my agency is constrained to often prevent doing what "I" would actually do? And also, deliberately choosing things foreign to what I would do feels much weirder and grosser with a self-insert stand-in. We always kind of half-inhabit characters in a story, that's much of the point, but I prefer having a more depicted personality as an initial scaffold to hang my imaginings on; even in a CRPG with a blank slate protagonist, you usually go through a formal scaffolding process of building out their appearance and history and capabilities, which goes a long way toward making a more usable vessel for imagined choices.

This is very much an inconsistent reaction; I'm sure you wouldn't have to look hard to find something I like a lot that gives the lie to that as a general principle. But nevertheless, there it is! It's meant I've always held the genre at arms-length a bit, and despite having enjoyed several VNs in the past, I've still been kind of waiting to "get it."

I think Slay the Princess has helped me get VNs a little more! To start with, it quickly becomes clear that the protagonist is extremely separate from the player (and in many ways separate from their own self, but we're getting ahead of ourselves here), so that gets my aforementioned self-insert gag reflex out of the way.

For another thing: the actual gameplay of a VN consists of exploring what is ultimately a static tree structure, and since the branchings are one-way gates, this requires repeated runs. StP weaves these repetitions into the story itself, with two layers of epicyclic repetitions on top of the non-diegetic new-game repetitions. (The innermost loop starts when you're on a path in the woods, and the middle loop ends when you [REDACTED] a vessel to [REDACTED].) This isn't a generalizable technique, it really only works for this specific story, but that's a big part of why the game is so good — the balanced harmony of a story and a gameplay structure that feel made for each other. And the nested repetitions give this illusion of dynamism to the tree structure — your next pass on the innermost loop is profoundly affected by what you did on the last one, with the Princess's protean nature drastically mutated to match the protagonist's revealed personality. Anyway — that harmony helped make the VN tree-traversal gameplay fun for me in a way it hadn't really been before.

The other big part of why the game is so good is just that the art and writing are stellar. Abby Howard is an outstanding cartoonist; I know she's a good writer as well, so it's harder to pick out precisely what her husband Tony contributed, but I consider this a cut above her solo work, so he's doing something in there. There's some killer lines in this that continue to live in my head rent-free. (Solitary lights in an empty city...)

I kind of want to be careful about saying too much about the story, because it's one of those ones where the joy of discovery plays a big part. But: since I already knew the gimmick was a powerful one, I went in prepared for it to be more gimmicky than heartfelt. It was not. There's genuinely a lot going on in here, thematically and dramatically. Including, well... I guess, once you get to the late-game outermost loop scene where the narrator finally plays fair with you, you'll see why I'm lumping this game into this batch of reviews. (And if you traverse to the weird "happily ever after" inner-loop path, you'll see it even more.)

Comments

[hoarmurath]

"Well, it was that things (me included) don't have any sort of boundary or stable locus of identity; we're more like a tornado, which occurs but which can't actually be distinguished from the surrounding medium of the atmosphere. (Does a tornado "exist?" It does not.) Since we don't have boundaries or cores, every interaction between anything is a destructive and disorganizing mixing, an exchange of momentum and stuff between blurry whorls in the surrounding flow. If anything did "exist," it wouldn't be able to perceive or interact with anything; the destructive mixing is the entire game. So, that's why impermanence isn't scary; it's just the same thing as being able to experience sensations at all."

I think I might need to go lie down for a bit, but this possibly was something left behind corner type of answer to an adjacent question I've been asking about some of my mindspace for a long time. Kind of reminds me of that Alan Watts book I read once.

(Funny how I keep finding things this year when I am finally ready to utilise them somehow, but that is neither here nor there).

And your write up of Slay the Princess makes me think I should play it, after all.

[roadrunnertwice]

🌻