Everyone can do nothing about it

A field that’s permeable and open. A few decades ago I did my first Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence. No talking, no phone, no eye contact. Just meditating. About ten hours a day. The first few days are rough. The mind does not want to be still. It chatters and argues and produces an… Continue reading You’re a field

What does it mean to connect with another person? Really connect? Not just be in the same room. Not just talk. Not just have sex. Actually meet. Nervous system to nervous system. Heart to heart. The living energy that animates you, meeting the living energy that animates them. Two beings, actually making contact. Most of… Continue reading How to connect

Mind and felt sense. The brain chops. The body knows.The brain is a chopping machine. That’s what it does. It takes the world — this continuous, interconnected, flowing thing — and cuts it into pieces small enough to think about. A tree. A feeling. A problem. A person. Little LEGO blocks of reality, labeled and… Continue reading Brain and body

Solipsism and Idealism. Solipsism is the fact that you can never directly know anything about anyone else’s inner world, about their experience. There is absolutely no way to prove that other people have an inner world. That they experience anything. The lights could be off and you would never know. Perhaps this, your experience, is… Continue reading Two things

Our beliefs create our reality and our experiences will be influenced by that belief system. We look back at history and smile a little condescendingly at what people used to believe. Superstitions, magic, gods, spirits, witches, curses, blessings, ghosts. Silly stories that obviously can’t be true because we now understand the natural world through the… Continue reading Reality is belief based

We’re believers. Humans create reality through belief. It is what we do. It is how we are wired. And we think there is one true reality. But all reality is belief based and no belief is true. No belief is true. But the stories that we tell, the beliefs that we hold, are real. Because… Continue reading Believers

The way we understand the world is through thinking. We observe, categorize and reason. All the while chopping the world into little bits through concepts. Those concepts are made up and have arbitrary boundaries (check for yourself). The universe, the thing we apply the concepts to, is in fact one continuous ‘thing’, kind of like… Continue reading Thinking and feeling

Me – Everything is just stories You – I disagree Me – How would you show that my claim is false? You – …

The human species has become totally dominant on this planet because of fictions. Made-up stories that allow us to cooperate to an extent that no other animal can. Yuval Noah Harari writes about this in Sapiens, but the concept is very simple. Without fictions a troop of apes can be about 50 individuals. Beyond that… Continue reading Fictions

We’re humans. Some special category. Apart from animals. We are thinking, rational creatures. We conceptualize. We categorize. We analyze. We master ourselves and our environment. And we live our entire lives in our heads. And it’s killing us. Individually and collectively. We’re traumatized and we’re sick. Our planet is on the brink of ecological destruction.… Continue reading Animals