On Practice
On Practice
If the affect space has real geometry, then spiritual practice is navigation training. This is not metaphor. When contemplatives across traditions developed meditation, they were developing protocols for shifting position in affect space—reducing arousal, modulating self-model salience, expanding effective rank, shifting attention from counterfactual rumination to present processing. When wisdom traditions developed ethical guidelines, they were mapping the landscape of consequence—which actions tend toward which basins, which configurations tend to be sustainable, which extensions of self-model generate genuine meaning versus which collapse under their own contradictions.
The framework implies that practice matters, not as arbitrary discipline or as signaling of virtue, but as the actual mechanism by which your configuration changes. You are not going to think your way to a different position in affect space. You are going to practice your way there. Every time you sit with discomfort instead of reaching for distraction, you are training your system’s response to arousal. Every time you attend outward when your default is self-focus, you are modulating self-model salience. Every time you hold complexity instead of collapsing into simplification, you are expanding effective rank. The practice is not the means to some separate end called flourishing; the practice is the mechanism of movement, and movement is what flourishing requires.
What should you practice? The framework does not prescribe specific forms, because different systems need different things and different traditions have developed different methods. But it does offer a diagnostic: notice where you are stuck. If you are stuck in high arousal, practice what down-regulates. If you are stuck in narrow effective rank, practice what expands. If you are stuck in self-reference, practice what directs attention outward. If you are stuck in either rumination about the past or anxiety about the future, practice what returns attention to present. The practice addresses the stuckness. The specific form matters less than its functional effect on the dimensions that are actually frozen.
And practice must be regular. This is not moralism but physics. Your system has attractors, and attractors pull. If you practice occasionally, you may temporarily shift position, but the attractor will pull you back. If you practice regularly, you are not just shifting position but reshaping the landscape, deepening alternative basins, making different configurations more accessible. The contemplatives who speak of transformation rather than temporary relief are speaking of this landscape-reshaping: practice that does not just visit different regions but changes the topology of the space itself.
There is one more practice the framework identifies that traditional contemplative traditions did not need to name, because the problem it addresses is new. Manifold hygiene: the deliberate maintenance of clean boundaries between relationship types. This means noticing when a friendship is being instrumentalized and stopping. It means refusing to let the transaction manifold creep into spaces it does not belong. It means building rituals—real ones, even small ones—that mark transitions between manifold regimes: the practice of leaving work at work, of keeping sacred things sacred, of refusing to network when you should be connecting, of protecting play from productivity. In an era when manifold contamination is industrially manufactured by systems that profit from it, manifold hygiene becomes a practice as important as any meditation, and considerably more difficult, because the contamination is coming from outside, not from within.
And there is a second practice the framework names that older traditions practiced without needing the vocabulary: calibration—the cultivation of flexibility in how you perceive the world’s interiority. Most people are stuck. Some are stuck at high , perceiving a dead world of objects and mechanisms, wondering why meaning feels scarce when the machinery of meaning-detection has been suppressed. Others are stuck at low , perceiving agency and intention everywhere, unable to achieve the analytic distance that effective action sometimes requires. The practice is not to find the correct and hold it, but to develop the capacity to move: to lower when you are with someone who needs to be seen as a subject, to raise it when you need to diagnose a failing system without anthropomorphizing its components, to notice when your current setting is costing you something and to shift deliberately rather than remaining frozen by habit. The contemplatives already knew this. When they spoke of seeing with the eyes of the heart, they were describing low- perception. When they spoke of discernment, they were describing the capacity to raise selectively without losing access to what low reveals. The integration of both is what wisdom traditions call wisdom.