☙ Insights
Short essays on self-discovery, awakening, and the dream of life. Written quietly, for whoever is reading slowly.
We experience life through one body, one set of memories and one vantage point, and the experience is convincing enough that we take it for the whole of what we are. The character, the player and the creator; the ocean, the wave and the droplet; and why an inability to perceive a wider connection neither establishes its absence nor proves that it exists…
Einstein said imagination was more important than knowledge, and what he meant was narrower and more useful than the version on the poster. Knowledge can only ever be about what has already happened. Imagination is the only faculty that works on what is still open. On the asymmetry between the two, where the image from physics stops, and why a sentence set in the future returns nothing…
A sensation is interpreted. The interpretation evokes emotion. Emotion directs attention. Attention encourages repetition, until the response arrives before deliberate choice and what began as an event is experienced as a trait, a voice, or a world. On servitors, tulpas and egregores, on what belief can and cannot command, and on artificial intelligence as externalized cognition…
Much of the spiritual search begins with the assumption that we are not yet what we should be. On the trap of becoming, why the search for an exit is the ego’s most convincing disguise, and how consciousness evolves without a destination through Shoshin, Zanshin, Mushin, Fudoshin, and Senshin. There is no ascension, only awakening…
From the search for meaning to ambivalence. On why spiritual seeking can become the ego's final and most sophisticated disguise, and on the movement toward purposeless participation, harmony, and the lived release we call ambivalence. Includes the four-stage architecture and the Way of Water…
There is a moment almost everyone has had and almost nobody mentions. At a red light. In a meeting, just after you said the right thing in the right tone. A thought surfaces so quietly you can dismiss it before you finish having it: this is not me. On the mask that is not a lie, the beliefs you never chose, and the one who has been watching all along…
The ego does not travel back to the Higher Self. It becomes capable of recognizing the relationship that was present all along. On the layered architecture of Source, Higher Self, and ego; the four movements of Innocence, Identification, Awakening, and Ambivalence; and why ambivalence, in this work, means harmonious non-attachment rather than indecision…
Perception is shaped by belief, and belief tunes us to a frequency. We keep landing in the timeline shared by everyone tuned to the same one. On companions who travel together while their frequencies stay compatible, the stagnant drift of NPCs, and why the field is unlimited far out yet nearly parallel up close…
Six minds who never shared a century, at one table (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, and both Krishnamurtis), on fear, the ego, the two physics, escaping reality, samsara and moksha, wu wei, enlightenment, and finding harmony. Truth is not a doctrine. It is a conversation…
The most comprehensive piece I have written. A philosophy and metaphysics for the awakening self, in two parts, the territory underneath everything the series walks. Thirty-nine pages, free to download…
A glimpse of the culminating book. Nine pillars in three movements, each with an opening verse in the register of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. The working scaffolding for the writing to come…
A young student hears of a wise old man who lives atop a remote mountain. He sets out to find him. After a lifetime of love, loss, riches, silence, and tears, he finally arrives at the summit and looks into the pool of fresh water waiting there. An allegory, and a reflection on why some truths cannot be transmitted, only walked into…
We have inherited a strange idea: that religion, science, and spirituality are at war. I do not think the war is real. Religion asks where we came from, science asks how it works, spirituality asks who we are, three blind men describing one elephant…
People talk about intuition as if it were weather. Something that arrives, or doesn’t. A gift you are born with or a sense you have lost. I think that’s wrong. Intuition is not weather. It is a signal you can learn to hear…
The word karma has been worn down by overuse. Most of the time when people say it, they mean something close to: the universe will get you back for that. A cosmic ledger. A slow moving consequence machine. That is not what the word means…
There is a phrase that’s been with me as long as I’ve been writing about this work: come home to yourself. I never set out to make it a tagline. It crept in, the way certain phrases do when they’re true. But the more I sit with it, the more I think it’s the only honest thing I’ve ever written…
A reader wrote last week and asked the question I get more than any other: “Which book should I read first?” The simplest answer is Book One. The longer answer is the one I want to write down here, because it’s about more than reading order…
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