The Lineage Test

So many conversations ostensibly about spirituality are really attempts to assess potential material advantages of choosing one mental orientation or another that I have trained myself to assess them for that up front and leave if they test positive.

There’s a huge difference between using the internet for coordination and using it for idea-farming, but since they both start with language calibration, it can go on at cross purposes for a while. So I’ve learned to back out from the content as soon as possible and ask lineage questions.

A turn of phrase I picked up talking to certain idea farmer cultures is “meta-level,” which is the kind of idea conversation that is productive to have, as opposed to “object-level,” which just leads to a standoff.

By “lineage questions,” I sort of mean “sub-level.”

In a conversation about spirituality, what’s most salient to me is where someone is coming from, what shapes their values. The way they respond verbally to ideas can be affected by all kinds of temporary factors, but it will revert to those formative values eventually.

Since my goal is coordination, it only makes sense to listen to values. Responses to ideas reveal values in many ways, but many of them are indirect. Traveling in idea-heavy cultures, I find questions about lineage tend to carry an element of surprise that can be revealing.

The reason this is all so explicit for me is because it’s cultural minority behavior. I always start from lineage in such conversations because that’s a cultural value for me. When I’m talking about spirituality as ideas, I’m mostly just explaining implicit features of lineages.

I have many rich lineages coexisting in me, and I have to be flexible and code-switch between them, so I can explain them fairly well to outside perspectives. But that doesn’t mean I turn them on and off with a switch. This is deep stuff. It’s not a consumer choice.

So when someone doesn’t lead with that, I know we’re different enough that I don’t know what values to expect. That’s why I go to lineage questions quickly. There are myriad worlds of answers to those that take us in great directions. But a startle reaction is telling.

Often someone thinks I mean, “What sect of what academically categorizable religion are you?” or “Who is your formal spiritual teacher and what are their credentials?”, and I don’t. I clarify that “Where you grew up” or “How you were raised” is plenty, we move on, it’s fine.

But if the conversation fails that test, and it feels like my interlocutor is more worried about introducing impurities into the test sample than whether our values are compatible, that’s all I need to know. If lineage matters less to you than messaging, we’re not gonna vibe.