Deconstructing Yourself

Scientist, programmer, and author David Chapman talks with Michael W. Taft about metarationality, emptiness and form, nihilism, tantrism, dzogchen, Kegan’s stages of development applied to meditation, vampire romance novels, and the importance of being able to switch reality tunnels.David Chapman is a writer, computer scientist, engineer, and Buddhist practitioner. He’s been practicing Vajrayana Buddhism in the Aro Ter tradition for 20 years. David is a leading proponent of metarationality—a subject we’ll go into in some depth in this episode—and writes about it on his website Meaningness.com. Show notes1:43 – What is metarationality? 2:45 – What happens when you run off the edge of the map? 4:44 – Pattern and nebulosity, emptiness and form 6:45 – Story of scientist Barbara McClintock, and epicycles 13:30 – Donald Schön & design creativity 14:37 – Ways to deal with system failure, Nihilism 17:28 – Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson, switching between reality tunnels 20:22 – Is metarationality ju