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 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…

Commence download:

TL;DR: Consciousness is right now coming into the recognition that communicating with itself is a more efficient way to get to its goal than competing with itself, but competition, communication and cooperation all still exist.

Communication creates knowledge by asking the three following questions: How is it? How come it is so? How does it become?

What’s true of every individual:

1. Each of us has faith. None of us knows everything right now. We all act according to at least some assumptions, whose truth we cannot verify with certainty. In order to act, we must act with some degree of faith. We do…

If you’re wondering why this particular moment in American politics feels so deeply existential, or why the Cold War felt like a crusade, or why some people get so dogmatic about their political or economic viewpoints to the point of religious fervor, your question has a simple answer: economic and political systems are religions. Not as a metaphor. They are literal religions.

If that made you uncomfortable, that is completely understandable. That does not make it any less true. …

One would think that the steady dissolution of power hierarchy in society would look like the oppressed coming to understand that they are powerful, and the powerful coming to understand that they are dependent. What I see happening, from micro to macro conversations, is rather different.

As power hierarchies dissolve, the narrative of victim vs. villain is collapsing. A new realization of innocence and agency is bubbling up, for each and all of us, as the shackles of fearful domination begin to unlatch. I choose the word “realization” consciously, because it means both “to understand that something is reality” and…