The root of all suffering is addiction. We can end suffering by healing from all addictions. Simple, right? Ha. This is a work of logic, not psychological or medical science, and I am writing it in the order it came to me:

Truth One: Desire rules. All other rules are made up.

All morality is unscientific. Every moral judgment you have is based on an assumption you can’t prove is correct. If you think something is morally wrong, you can keep asking “Why is that wrong?” again and again. Eventually you’ll hit a question you can’t answer, and realize that you actually don’t know. …

i. Reading this probably won’t change your life. As Lao Tzu says, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.” As Tenacious D says, “This is not the greatest song in the world. This is just a tribute.” This is a description of an experience; this article is not the experience itself. Still, I am writing it. Everything I write comes from, and comes back to, understanding this and this understanding. I am practicing.

ii. The nature of existence is towards expansion and complexity. The nature of each living thing in existence is towards healthy equilibrium. …

A few months ago, I replaced cigarettes with rock music. These days, when I get in the car or go for a walk and I’m feeling a little low, I throw on some aviators, blast Dorothy or All Them Witches and let the waves of electric badassery wash over me until my nerves are sufficiently cooled. That’s what cigarettes always did for me: they cooled me off. They gave me this cloud of protection from vulnerability. …

I promise, after this rant, I am done explaining this one. So, one final time:

Any attempt at social change without centering emotional change will perpetuate the same cycles of suffering and injustice, because emotional transformation and social justice are the same work.

Let’s break it down:

Real social change can’t happen without democracy. Democracy requires power sharing. Power sharing requires giving up your monopoly on control. Giving up your monopoly on control requires trust. Trust requires confronting your own traumas and fears.

Without confronting our own traumas and fears, we perpetuate the need for power hierarchy because we fear that, if we are not in control, we will not be safe. This happens in macro ways and micro ways.

Real social change can’t happen without cooperation. Cooperation…

A belief is a confirmation bias you think is true. It’s an ingrained mental habit— a pattern of thinking strong enough to condition your thoughts, your actions, and your life all on its own. You can hold beliefs that help you to achieve your goals, live happier and healthier, feel more satisfied or loved or free or worthy, and you can hold ones that create cycles of suffering and frustration. Beliefs impact you constantly, in small ways and large, so you might as well get choosy about the ones you’re going to keep.

For most of us, throughout most of…

Apologizing, like so many aspects of human interaction, can be terrifying, uncomfortable and downright hard. Apologizing is actually a lot simpler than our minds tend to make it, but just because it’s simple does not mean it’s easy.

We’re conditioned to make all kinds of associations between apologizing and feelings of shame, powerlessness or vulnerability, and because we want to avoid those feelings, we often avoid apologizing. Extricating your mind from its unconscious, conditioned and reactive patterns can take years, but chipping away at those patterns, bit by bit, is probably the best thing you can do for yourself.

Today…

Unless you’ve already reached some eternal dynamic bliss state of perpetual Nirvana (if you have, how is it?), you likely suffer sometimes. You likely don’t enjoy suffering — in fact, by definition, that’s what makes it “suffering.” Because you don’t enjoy suffering, you probably want to minimize the amount you have to suffer. Right? Cool, me too. You’ve come to the right place.

While I cannot yet say from experience that suffering is curable (I’ll have to take Buddha’s word on that for now), I can tell you that it is healable. …

There’s an Indian parable you may be familiar with, the one about the blind men and the elephant. It goes something like this: A group of blind men stumbles upon an elephant. None of them has ever experienced an elephant before. They each touch a different part of the elephant: one touches the trunk, one the tusk, one the leg, one the stomach, and so on. Each builds a concept in his mind about what the elephant is from the part he is touching alone. Each believes the other men are lying, insane or just plain wrong when they tell…