People make fun of those who talk about “energy” in a “woo” way. As if we didn’t know the world is full of ambient information. Every breath contains millions of microbes, pheromones, and spores. Fragments of plant terpenes, trace hormones, viral signatures, and emotional

We are a singing species. Pretty much every other culture from history had a regular container for community to come together and sing. Singing appears second only to eating, sleeping and sex in the history of what humans give importance to. Yet now it is at best a niche

Great thread! Highly recommend people interested in some of the benefits ritual can offer us in our day to day lives give it a read 👇

No wonder our culture treats pop singers like gods. We’ve outsourced the most sacred parts of ourselves to them. Singing is the most natural way for humans to express their connection to what is sacred. It’s also a way to celebrate every day life. So together it weaves the

It’s a blessing in some ways that AI is proving that words are not the distinctive activity of being human. For too long we’ve given too much importance to words. Now, more and more word-making is getting outsourced to machines. So we’ll be forced to re-engage with our true

Peace is the art of letting the world be itself by itself. It’s not all about forcing our environment into a state of stillness and harmony. It’s also about letting chaos be itself by itself. Allowing anger, grief, pain and sadness to exist. Without demanding they be

To chase “achievements” in the external world is just to chase our own shadow. We are all hallucinating. Everything we see is a creation of our mind. The outside world is just the consensus delusion where most people’s hallucinations overlap. “Achievement” just means bending

Our thinking mind should never be playing a CEO role in our inner organizational structure. At most it should be a kind of bureaucrat that signs off on decisions made my our heart. However, the power of our heart will swerve us into ruin if we don’t make it conscious. The art

Imagination can be a tool for seeking wisdom every bit as much as reason or experience. Every experience we have involves some form of imagining. We’re always viewing the world through the lens of of our pre-conceived beliefs, desires, memories, stories and emotions. As long

The idea that one can “master the jhanas” in a few days or become enlightened as a side hobby is absurd on its face. Becoming a concert pianist, Olympic athlete or surgeon requires thousands of dedicated hours over many years. It also has to be the utter centre of one’s life

We seek stimulation so much from the outside world that we forget how much stimulation we have available on the inside. When we are fully in touch with our senses, sitting still can be as orgasmic as any sexual experience When we’re fully in touch with our intuitions, they’re

We’ve got love the wrong way round. It’s not that there are lovable things out there that compel us to love them. Actually, what we love becomes lovable. For me, learning the skill of being able to choose what we love is one of the best gifts we can give ourselves and others.

We’re often implicitly telling our emotions and body to shut up throughout the day. We’ll do anything to not have to listen to or feel our inner world too much. Plugging our ears into headphones, our eyes into screens and our brain into any source of dopamine it can find.

People say they’d be fascinated to meet aliens from other planets, yet show no interest in the aliens on our own planet. Trees are about as maximally alien a species I can imagine that we could still meaningfully communicate with. They also display behaviour that is much more

We cannot avoid the experience of pain. But we can experience everything as beautiful, including pain. Much of the most beautiful art, film, literature, theatre etc is an exploration of pain. In some ways pain carries a deeper potential for beauty than pleasure. Very few

A good recent example of this is the turning of jhana meditation into a new form of masturbation. Totally divorced from the goals that merit using the word “jhana” (an explicitly Buddhist term.) Indeed, the removal of the goals is presented as some incredible hack worked out by

Mantra is the easiest way to bring magic into our lives. Of course, “magic” makes a certain type of modern mind uncomfortable. But I’d like to offer some examples of what “magic” might look like for more initially sceptical minds. Take the classic Buddhist mantra “om mani

An entire life can be redeemed in a moment. People talk about this happening when they have their first child. They see that everything that happened in their life up to that moment had to have been that way or this specific child would never have been born. But we don’t

One thing not many people on here know about me is that I was once put on a BBQ by a community of indigenous pygmies in an African country I’d rather not name, until I passed out. When I came to, they proceeded to blindfold and swing machetes at me whilst they all gathered round

In circumstances where it’s entirely justified, getting indignantly slapped in the face by a woman can be a major growth experience. An example: I remember in my mid-20s eating some hash brownies with a Dutch girl on a beach in Ecuador at night. We were having fun and I