I speak with personal practice consultant and Evolving Ground co-founder Charlie Awbery about extrospection, a term many people may not be familiar with—the ways it relates to contemplative practice, Buddhist vehicles, and Charlie’s new course on Opening Awareness meditation.
Transcript (abridged)
Max introduces a Marc Andreessen clip
Max: Good to be here with you, Charlie. I noticed something on Substack recently — a clip making the rounds of Marc Andreessen talking about introspection. What mattered to him about introspection was that he never does it, and never should. A lot of people found that troubling; it was most of what I saw in my feed. People were concerned that those in positions of power, especially in tech, might not value introspection — when they themselves had found it so important.
At almost the same time, I was having conversations with several people — fellow meditators, people involved in contemplative practice — and a common theme kept surfacing on their end: they were feeling stuck in an introspective mode, looking inward a lot and finding real difficulty there. It brought me back, maybe to 2021, to you introducing our contemporary Vajrayana community to a meditation called opening awareness. One of the points you made often back then was about extrospection. I thought, “I want to talk to Charlie about that and see what’s there.” Does that ring a bell?
Charlie: It does. And I have questions already. First, defining terms — I wonder what people mean when they say introspection, because it can cover a range. Did Marc Andreessen say what he meant by it? You can’t function in the world without some kind of inner life, so presumably he didn’t mean he has no inner world at all. Was there any conversation about what he meant — or what people were using the word to mean?
Max: From what I recall of the interview, he was talking about the patterns of rumination people get caught in — thinking about themselves, about their problems. What mattered to him was the distinction between thinking about a problem and actually doing something in the world, having an effect.
Defining introspection & extrospection
Charlie: In a meditation context, I’d understand introspection to mean an inward-turned attention — awareness that’s concentrated, moving inward, inside the body, inside one’s personal experience, to the exclusion or downregulation of whatever is happening outside the body and the personal inner world.
Extrospection I’d use to mean moving awareness into the field of experience outside the body — not necessarily one’s own activity, but the whole field of perception: sounds, sights, the visual field, everything going on around and outside of inner experience, whether that inner experience is emotional, physical, or mental.
Max: I understand it similarly. So this internal/external distinction — you’re locating it at the body: the distinction between the body and the environment it’s in, and including the mind—
Charlie: Right — mental activity as well. If I’m going over a story about something that happened, or there’s an internal narrative running itself, and I try to bring awareness to that process, that’s introspection — the same as bringing awareness to a sensation in my gut. That’s part of the whole field of introspection. If instead my eyes are open and I’m bringing awareness to the field of everything around me — hearing distant sounds, noticing their quality and texture, finding awareness in the space of the room or the sky above me — that’s extrospection. Most meditations focus on something more introspective.
Mindfulness, the renunciative path & no-self
Charlie: Most mindfulness meditation is about calming what’s happening in here — in the body, the mind, the mental experience. It turns the lens inward, so you become extremely familiar with everything that goes on internally.
Max: One of the things you do is coach, and one of the domains you coach in is meditation — it’s not exclusive, but it’s one of the things people come to you for. So when I think about this introspection/extrospection distinction, I wonder what makes that axis interesting from a meditation standpoint. The big mindfulness era — it lasted a decade, starting around the 2010s in American culture — was very introspective, as I remember it. So when you introduced me to extrospection while describing this practice, opening awareness, that struck me. I wanted to know why it might matter.
Charlie: Because the purpose of opening awareness is, eventually, to become beneficent — functional, active in the world. It’s to facilitate that connective experience of doing, being, and making great things in the world. It’s the preparation for tantric practice, if you like.
Different meditations have different purposes. A very introspective meditation belongs much more to the renunciative tradition, and the whole path of renunciation has a wide range of purposes and results. But at one end of it, the experience of no-self is paramount. In a very traditional Theravadan renunciative path, the whole point is to experience no-self. That isn’t of much interest in opening awareness at all.
Opening awareness & extrospection
Charlie: The extrospective move is meant to facilitate a fluidity of self in the world, so you can be more effective. Tantra is all about being effective — about having an impact. So the kind of meditation you practice, and how introspective or extrospective it is, how wide a field it takes in, makes a long-run difference to how you are in the world. From that point of view it seems pretty important.
Max: As you describe this, I’m remembering 2020, the pandemic. I’m listening to Michael Taft’s Deconstructing Yourself podcast, and you and Evolving Ground’s co-founder, Jared Jaynes, are on it describing the project that became Evolving Ground — maybe it already was Evolving Ground, I can’t remember.
Charlie: I think we’d just started.
Max: And what you described had a lot to do with what you just said — the distinction between renunciative paths, where so much Buddhist practice aims at that renunciative effect, and non-renunciative practice, goals oriented toward being in the world, making change, having an effect. I found it so exciting. As soon as I heard it, I thought, “I have to find more.” I think I joined the Slack immediately after.
For some reason I’m still in this historical mode — so, you’re describing a very traditional Theravadan style of practice with a certain goal. Is that right?
Charlie: Partly because it’s hot right now. Especially in our circles, in tech circles — interestingly, among people who are highly functional in the world, making a lot of difference — the no-self path is extremely popular. To me that seems like a misfit. I don’t quite get the connection between wanting an experience of no-self, post-cessation no-self, and being functional in the world. And what I see is that it doesn’t actually work. It can be an extraordinarily impactful experience to have that cessation, to understand no-self from experience — I just don’t see it making people more functional. The preoccupation with it seems to be a problem in itself.
So the path of renunciation might include coming to an experience of the emptiness of all phenomena, and that’s bridged by an experience of the emptiness of self — sometimes described as a bridge in the renunciative tradition.
Max: I’d like to pin this, because it’s important. The function of renunciative practice is this experience of emptiness — of all phenomena, and maybe of specific phenomena like the sense of self. As I understand it, that’s the one intended function of renunciative practice you’re pointing to.
Charlie: I think there are several intended functions, and the experiences described are different. There’s a very specific experience of no-self that isn’t the same as the experience of the emptiness of all phenomena — though they get conflated, along with the experience of the emptiness of self.
The emptiness of self isn’t the same as the no-self that can occur post-cessation. There can be a vivid, full, potential-rich experience of emptiness that’s nothing like a textureless, dissociated, flat experience of everything being illusory, nothing quite real. There’s a whole range of experience and result on the renunciative path.
The one we’re particularly interested in for opening awareness is the connected, spacious, bright, full, textured one. You wouldn’t downregulate sensation or emotional experience in opening awareness, just as you wouldn’t downregulate the experience of what’s happening outside yourself — outside the body, outside the locus of sensation.
So the move toward extrospection wasn’t to say opening awareness is all about extrospection. It came from noticing an assumption — that when you meditate, you go inward. There’s a basic assumption, in mindfulness and many techniques, that what you’re doing is preferentially focusing on something internal. That simply isn’t the case in opening awareness. Using the word extrospection brought more into the practice — not to look only outside, but to include all of it. The word was helpful that way. It can also be a scaffolding practice, to get the feel for what that’s like, because it really is very different from becoming more and more focused inside the body and the mind.
Jhanas: a comparison
Max: What comes to mind as you describe this is jhana practice — the absorption states. You mentioned a style that’s hot right now; that’s one of them. My understanding — and I’ve only practiced the first three jhanas before going a different direction, so I’m no expert — is that they work the way you describe: you lose the external world for a while, titrating down and down into an experience we could call internal. Does that seem accurate?
Charlie: I’m not an expert in jhanas either. From what I know, there’s something of that in jhana practice — but I don’t think the first four jhanas are necessarily cut off from the world. You could experience pīti in any circumstance, and sukha as a general way of being as you go about your life.
So the technique, the path that gives rise to these jhanas, is highly internalized, but the result isn’t necessarily only internal. At least with the first four, you experience them in connection with the phenomena around you, in the world. There are many ways to experience jhana. There’s a particular path that teaches them as staged phenomena, one after another. But in opening awareness it’s very common for jhanas to arise naturally in different circumstances, in gradations — it’s much more like a field of sensation in and around the body, and very fluid.
So in jhana practice you’d intentionally develop the skill of moving between jhanas, up and down deliberately. In opening awareness it’s almost a mismatch of terminology to use the word jhana at all — you’d simply talk about the field of sensation, sensation in the body. I came at it the opposite way around: I learned the lower jhanas after the higher ones.
Max: Oh.
Charlie: I don’t know how common that is. But I entered that realm of experience and then became more adept at understanding how to give rise to a lot of sensation and energetic experience in the subtle body — in Vajrayana that would be the subtle body, the tsa lung system. So you can approach from different directions.
Max: What you describe about how the orientation to sensation, especially in the body, can change through opening awareness — that’s been my experience. It’s interesting to hear it contextualized in the language of a totally different system, the jhanas. It’s interesting to compare meditation systems this way, by their function and how that function works. The way you’ve described jhanas — the practice is fairly internal, but the results become available in a way that isn’t necessarily internal, that can be enjoyed in daily life — I think that’s the framing Jhourney uses for teaching them.
Charlie: That’s interesting. There’s something about extrospection here too. It’s quite possible to reach an experience of no-self in that system and be fairly dissociated, fairly equanimous with whatever arises — no differentiated internal response to emotional reactivity, to what’s going on around you. And that can become a little dysfunctional. If you’re cut off from the experience of your effect in the world and on the people around you — that would be fine in a monastery. That would be the point: to be unaffected by stimulus, simply present in the moment, responding to basic needs, capable of communication but without internal effect and connection, emotionally or psychologically, in interaction with others.
Opening awareness doesn’t promote that kind of dissociative experience. It actually leads to more care about your impact on others and on circumstances. It opens a field of care and connection that’s quite different.
Max: In my experience, opening awareness isn’t at all about uprooting the potential for certain ways of being, or certain ways of experiencing what’s happening. That’s how I see those more renunciative, usually monastic, practices being described.
Charlie: Why was this important for you personally, in your practice, Max?
Max: Good question. What was it about that life-oriented framing, when I first heard it on the podcast with Michael Taft and Jared, that was so interesting to me? At the time I’d been practicing in a way shaped by the mindfulness movement I mentioned.
As I’ve come to understand, those practices mostly came out of the monastic system — a lot of it directly from a layperson program developed by Mahasi Sayadaw, not exclusively but largely. And a particular view got smuggled along with it. Maybe it comes from our Christian culture in the West, I’m not sure — an orientation toward life as somehow wrong at its base, defiled in some way. Something’s wrong with being in the world, and the way to deal with it is ultimately to get away — away from the defilement.
So when I heard there’s a style of practice oriented toward what’s happening in a way that makes acting effectively in the world more available, not less — that doesn’t close off possibilities according to what’s preferred — I found it exhilarating. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that such a thing could, or should, exist. I think that speaks to how deeply ingrained the renunciative view is in our culture.
Charlie: It’s interesting to untangle the view from the practices, too. Opening awareness doesn’t deny the inside, or focus only outside. It’s more about focus itself — about the preferential focus that other practices emphasize. That’s what gets—
Max: The mechanism.
Charlie: Yes. That’s loosened, so that nothing in the field of awareness is given preferential focus.
Max: So you’re describing the method itself. The instructions I first received from you for opening awareness were: remain uninvolved. That was five or six years ago, and I’m sure how you introduce it has evolved. But from what you’re describing — this preferential selection for or against sensation, relaxing that function for a while during meditation — it sounds like you still introduce it in much the same way.
Charlie: I like that phrase, relaxing it. Yes, I still use “remaining uninvolved” — remain present and uninvolved with whatever is happening in experience.
Max: This also reminds me — you’ve been designing a course specifically to introduce people to opening awareness, the method, and to its result through the method. So when I talk about how you introduce the method: what has that process been like for you?
Charlie: It’s a real joy — to share that experience and facilitate it with others. And it’s interesting, because most people coming to opening awareness aren’t beginners. Mostly they’re like you, coming from other traditions. It seems to me that across the board — pretty much every kind of silent, still, seated meditation — is actually introspective. So introducing something more opening, more extrospective than what you’re used to, is the differentiator between opening awareness and other meditation.
Often, people who’ve already had a concentrative practice are at an advantage, because you already have that internal experience; you’ve honed the skill of stillness and concentrated focus. So it’s a matter of opening out from that and relaxing a little. The difficulty in that move is usually that everything starts to seem chaotic, or suddenly not to work — “I’ve spent years developing this calm, still, equanimous presence,” and then you loosen the grip. Because it is a grip.
I keep wanting to use the word dissociation, because I really do think a lot of meditation leads to a calm, pleasant, dissociative experience — more pleasant for the person experiencing it than for the people around them. There’s a dissociation in the sense of a lack of care for one’s environment or impact on others — and that’s very different from caring about how one is perceived. I want to keep those distinct. It’s about connectedness. Some meditations are designed to create so much separation and space that there’s disconnection; others increase space and connection at once. You can’t really have both — they don’t work together in the practice.
Max: You use this word grip, which I love — for the activity that people with a lot of concentrative experience have gotten so good at. That was the case for me.
The grip: view in relation to “shoulds”
Max: It’s like a grip — using your attention like a hand, holding it in one location. Coming from that to opening awareness can be a real advantage, because you’re familiar with what it’s like to hold attention a certain way; you’ve gotten very familiar with that grip. So the instruction — notice the grip, relax it, and see if a change happens — I found really helpful.
Charlie: And actually seeing the underlying view can be really difficult.
Max: Say more about that.
Charlie: Part of getting used to opening awareness is gradually noticing how you’ve been constraining your experience — and that usually isn’t apparent, especially if you’ve gotten very good at concentrative focus. Seeing how it restricts your capacity, particularly in interaction, in exuberant fullness with others, in energetic capacity — that can take a long time. The loosening you mentioned is bound up with beginning to see a view that has been forming a world — an entire form of mind, a worldview.
Max: This word view is really interesting. It’s used a lot in Vajrayana, and I’ve found it valuable — it can mean both a way of seeing things and a way of being in the world. I hear that in what you’re describing: it’s a way of seeing your place in the world, how you should respond to circumstances, and also a subtle bodily orientation toward what’s happening.
Charlie: Oh — when you use the word should, that says something. If you’re in the world with many shoulds about yourself, about a way of being — if there’s a should in your expected demeanor, and it’s a very particular demeanor — noticing that can open things out a lot.
Max: With this distinction between extrospection and introspection — extrospection, as it applies to opening awareness, isn’t a prescription to deny introspection or to leave inner experience entirely. What you’re describing isn’t “call off whatever concern might motivate a should.” You mentioned the word care earlier, and I think that’s important.
For me, coming out of opening awareness practice, I started to notice all the ways I’d armored myself in the world — all the prescriptions I had for my own activity, all the shoulds. My first response was, “Okay, no more shoulds. I’m done. No prescriptions, I’m totally free” — and that was wonderful to begin with, a huge relief to see it as an activity that could be relaxed and set down.
Charlie: I think that’s part of the move from introspection to extrospection. It’s not that there are no ethical or moral considerations to bring — it’s that the framing shifts emphasis. The emphasis becomes “what is the right action here?” rather than “what kind of person am I being? Am I honing my virtue, becoming a particular calm, quiet being, developing a persona?” That last one very much comes from introspective practice — cultivating a kind of person, a persona in the world. That’s quite different from an extrospective view, where you look at a circumstance and ask, “What does this situation need?” — without knowing in advance, without a prescriptive sense of what’s right across all circumstances. It’s a very subtle change in experience, but it comes from this different practice.
Max: That’s how it ended up happening for me. I noticed all those shoulds, and as the activity dropped, the care that had motivated it became a little more obvious. Then there’s a question: what other forms of care, what other activities, would be more appropriate? And often the most appropriate thing isn’t to look back at myself, holding up a mirror, wondering “is this the right way to be?” It’s just to look at the circumstance as directly as I can — and then action seems to flow very naturally from there.
Charlie: I’m hearing you say something about feeling connected to circumstances as they arise around you. And I like that word loose. There’s something about holding things loosely, not vigilantly — not being on the lookout for doing and saying and being the right way, but relaxing into circumstances so you can be responsive in your care.
Max: There’s an orientation athletes have, bodily, where they’re loose — supple in a way that makes them much more available to respond. This can seem counterintuitive; it was for me. The way to be powerful in the world, to have the effect you care about, isn’t to hold a clenched fist ready to let loose at any moment. It’s the other way around — stay loose, stay receptive, and when action is called for, you’re in a far better position to act.
I notice we’re talking a lot about results now. We started that way too — talking about practices, how they work, the results that come from them, and how some kinds of meditation don’t produce the same results as others. Can you talk about the results of opening awareness — how you think about them, what’s important there?
Charlie: Let’s go back to the renunciative results, because in a way opening awareness does encapsulate a renunciative path — but from the perspective of wanting and desiring activity in the world, for the benefit of everyone involved. So it has a very different flavor. In a Buddhist context the result could be defined as experiential emptiness — the base for tantric, Vajrayana practice. But it’s an empty experience full of potential: full of the potential for meaning, for activity, for channeling and wielding energetic power in the world. The emptiness is full, in a way.
So when I started experiencing the difference in opening awareness — let me see if I can give examples.
Results: what changes in the world
Charlie: My life became a lot more joyous, and a lot more spontaneous. Things loosened up; I felt more relaxed. I’m naturally quite shy and introverted, and especially as a young adult I had a lot of difficulty finding connection — being loose and free and relaxed with others. Opening awareness helped me a great deal there. It opened up the possibility of relaxing in conversation, in activity, of having a sense of connected respect and resourcefulness with others.
The results in the world are connected to the results on the cushion. There’s an opening and relaxing as you sit and get used to the meditation, and that naturally begins to arise in the world too — partly through this lessening of the importance of what’s going on internally. It’s almost an adjustment of emphasis and possibility. Rather than upregulating the importance of everything happening inside, it can be held loosely. It carries less interpretive meaning. It can relax without being ignored — because ignoring often does the same thing, making something seem more important. So without ignoring whatever’s happening internally, the narratives and stories become relative and empty — empty in the sense of malleable, not so important and fixed. How about for you? What changed?
Max: I was really moved hearing you talk about the difference in social interactions, because it’s been very much the case for me. As a young adult I was really introverted too. In a big crowd, I’d get tired fast — and when I left, I’d feel like I needed to recover, to recuperate from all that effort.
In opening awareness, I started to realize how I was creating that effort, in a subtle but bodily way — what I was actually doing. And when I let the effort go, when it wasn’t needed, the social situations themselves became so much brighter, so much fuller — full of care, really, for other people, in an ordinary but sometimes startlingly intense way. I realized that what I cared about was simply all these people around me.
If I’m in a big crowd at an event, or even a crowded grocery store, I started to notice how good it was to be with people — regardless of any motive or outcome, just enjoying being with people. And that this could come from a method where you sit by yourself and relax the capacity to particularize sensation — it was a little bizarre that it should be so, but amazing.
Charlie: That’s rather lovely, that that was the case. I mentioned states earlier. When we talk about results from meditation, what I have in mind for opening awareness in particular is that it’s not that states aren’t available to work with — it’s that a better way to put it is: the intended result of opening awareness isn’t about maintaining a state out into the world.
Max: Like a fixed mind-body condition carried into the world.
Charlie: Right — that’s a useful distinction. In the jhanic path, and the more Theravadan paths, you work toward a state.
Rigpa is often — Rigpa is the result in the Vajrayana path, where the path is meant to lead. And people often use Rigpa interchangeably with any result. There’s a perennialist idea that Rigpa is just a name for the end result of all paths, and non-dual gets used the same way. But this sense of maintaining a still, very particular internal state and calling that Rigpa isn’t accurate intercanonically. There are many words for Rigpa. Rigpa is associated with activity — with continuity of non-dual activity in the world. Using the word activity really changes how you understand it. It’s not a state of mind; it’s a state of interaction. If you shift the emphasis so that the space of interaction is where awareness occurs, you get a different experience in the world.
Max: The space of interaction — I love that phrase. I learned it from you, I think, and I’ve loved using it. You’ve pointed out a clear difference here: if the result of Vajrayana has to do with availability for interaction, with stepping into interaction in the world, that’s very different from a renunciative system whose intended effect is to limit interaction in a certain way, so it always goes a certain way.
Charlie: Limiting interaction — or limiting one’s internal state, so that whatever happens in activity, you stay in the same mental and emotional experience throughout. That’s not the experience of Rigpa. Emotions come and go; they always will. Disruption is entirely real, and it happens in terms of state.
Max: The phrase availability for interaction comes to mind.
Something else I’d like to talk about is the result of opening awareness specifically. You’ve described opening awareness as making Vajrayana, the tantric path, available — and you were talking about Rigpa in the context of the Vajrayana path itself. But there’s a term for the result of opening awareness that I think you coined: spacious clarity. Would you talk about that?
Spacious clarity
Charlie: Spacious clarity can refer to sitting in meditation and the result experienced there, but it’s useful because it also describes an experience arising in the world. It’s a loose description — not exactly a translation — of what occurs in ngepa, the Tibetan word for the result of the meditation opening awareness derives from. That is presence of awareness with the absence of stuff arising in mind.
It’s a vivid experience, because when much less is happening in your mental states — your narratives, your ideation, your storytelling, your habitual reactivity, internally and in the world — when all of that subsides and you still have extrospection available, still connected and open and interacting, then a very vivid, spacious, vibrant, energetic experience of being in the world can arise. That’s what I mean by spacious clarity. It comes from practicing opening awareness, and then becomes available in other methods, or simply arises naturally in experience with others.
Max: This is a really nice way of describing that sometimes-mysterious word emptiness you used earlier. I’ve also heard you point to emptiness with the phrase sensation prior to concept — I hear a commonality there. You described emptiness as full, and that came to mind too as you described spacious clarity.
I haven’t thought about this in years, but your description reminds me of being bewildered that when there’s less going on in mind — if your orientation is somewhat extrospective, somewhat available to what’s around you — then although there’s less happening, somehow there’s more. It’s hard to describe. More available. It’s like there’s—
Charlie: More available, yes. The experience is so full — so full of sensation, so full of aliveness. It’s just a wonderful place to be.
Max: You have a website with the same name, spaciousclarity.com. Would you like to talk about that?
The new Opening Awareness course
Charlie: It’s basically a landing page for the opening awareness course. The course is going to be adaptive and responsive — not a linear, step-by-step path that everyone follows the same way. It’ll be based much more on the meditation you bring, an interactive experience. We’re building it now, and it’ll be available on a rolling basis so people can join, send feedback, and we can see how it goes — building according to what works and what doesn’t for people using the app. You can sign up for the waitlist now at spaciousclarity.com. It’s very exciting.
Max: It is. I was just looking at that page — it’s beautifully put together.
Charlie: That’s Andrew Conner’s design.
Max: We have Andrew Conner to thank, too, for our current AI-assisted interview setup. Andrew’s amazing.
Charlie: That’s fantastic. Thank you, Andrew.
Max: Thanks, Andrew. Charlie, is there anything else you’d like to say about introspection, extrospection, or spacious clarity?
Charlie: Let me emphasize that these are emphases, rather than heuristics for the whole of practice. If you’ve been very introspective, it can be valuable to recognize that, to open things out, to spend a while doing things very differently — so that eventually you’re including everything. And in opening awareness, where you’re heading — and I have you to thank for this language, Max; I think you originally brought it — is “including everything.” That’s really what the practice is about: including everything in awareness. Then your experience of presence becomes very different. You can be present in many different ways. Including extrospection in your practice makes a different kind of presence possible — and that presence is the spacious clarity we’ve been talking about, that fullness and vibrancy.
Max: Well said. Charlie, I think this is a good place to end. Thank you for this conversation.
Charlie: This has been amazing.
Max: Thank you. You’ve given me all these flashbacks to the early days of my opening awareness practice, and I feel so grateful for it — grateful to you for introducing me to it.
Charlie: Thank you, Max. It’s a pleasure.
