Ok, I know, this sounds weird but hear me out. Humans are freaked out by death. I’m not saying I’m any different, just drawing attention to this in hopes of reducing our suffering. Today I’m wondering what life would be like if we could change our relationship with death. The Toltec civilization of Central America considered death an advisor like a friend who gives advice. In this way, Toltecs navigated their lives knowing they were temporary.…
Ranking importance is critical to mental health What IS the matter? Matter is an interesting word. It’s a noun and a verb. The noun means something of substance and can be physical or metaphysical. The verb means for something to be important. There’s matter, and there is the matter. I like words like that, but the complication of communication and understanding. The idea of something mattering, as a verb, has been on my mind lately. The…
Spoiler alert? We can’t and we don’t Do ever joke that we’re living in the Matrix? Most of us have done this. It’s funny to think the world is so mechanical or programmed that we’re just victims of the program or the algorithm. I often refer to the movie when talking about the problems of the world. Sometimes it does seem like we’re living in a computer simulation. Or does it? How would we even know…
Have you ever felt like you didn’t belong anywhere? Do you have a ‘sacred space’ where you do feel like you have membership? For many of us, we have our family. Whether or not we truly feel comfortable in that space, there is a membership based on genetics or time spent together. It is a difficult thing to simultaneously exist as separate and together. We are individuals. Our skin is a boundary separating us from…
I’ll just come out and say it. I’m sick of academic arrogance. Academic. Scientific. Intelligence mafia. I don’t know why authority seems to be the foodstuffs of ego. But it sure seems like it is. I am so tired of being talked down to — as a society member — by those who are supposedly smarter than me. And it isn’t just the false dualism of ‘I’m smart and you’re not’. Or even that other people might know more…
If I’ve said it once by now, I’ve said it a thousand times: It blows my mind that any two people can have a conversation and walk away feeling understood AND having understood the other person with any degree of accuracy. In other words, our communication sucks. We often hear something other than the other person’s intent. And how often have you had a conversation and then have to have the same one AGAIN because…
As I navigate through the ‘Are vs. Should’ Problem‘ I see an initial split as we start to unpack our personal inventories. If we first have to lay out all the elements of our lives for inspection and understanding, it becomes obvious that there are (at least) two types of elements to consider. I’m calling these ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ elements, and they are defined within their respective realities. I’m not trying to make this esoteric…
In this episode I continue my larger project of explaining why humans are meant to realize their individual uniqueness. Here I explain what I call UN-natural selection, or the propensity for humans to deny their uniqueness and why this is something we most definitely should NOT be doing. Natural selection is simply how organisms respond to their environments through time. For the first few billion years or so animals modified their behaviors to suit their…
WHO are you? WHAT are you? WHY are you? On some metaphysical level we are awareness. We occupy a body on earth that abides by the laws of physics and biology, but what goes on when we think? When I meditate, or even when I’m just making decisions in my day-to-day life, I FEEL like ‘I’ (whatever ‘I’ am) comes from a spot in my head that encompasses my brain and my eyes. That’s where…
Fear can be crippling, but it can also be helpful. Fear certainly got us through some tough evolutionary times. “no, don’t pet the big kitty, be afraid of it eating you.” Or something like that. Nowadays though, we’re afraid of everything. Failure. Looking bad. Getting made fun of. Making mistakes. Pretty sure our ancestors didn’t intend for us to live in a fearful state of what people might think about us. I don’t think natural…