Nov 6Partial meaningfulness makes no senseIf you are a person with a spiritual outlook on life and engage in a conversation about the big questions with someone who has a more materialistic mindset, there is one notion that is particularly difficult to convey: the meaningfulness of life. Not just the good parts, but all of…4 min read4 min read
Oct 18Will It Be Different This Time?I had a vision: thousands of people tore down a border fence in front of confused soldiers — The headline of an op-ed I saw the other day read: ”Every second of this repulsive tragedy is the result of wrong policy”. Many formulate their disgust for the renewed war in the Middle East in terms like these. I agree, but it is a scratch on the surface. What…6 min read6 min read
Aug 14Are There Even Any Places?We have all heard that time does not exist, as such. This notion is fairly widely accepted even in mainstream physics. Weird as it may sound, although I suppose quantum physics has implicitly said it for a hundred years, distance is most likely also an illusion. I have often referred…6 min read6 min read
Jun 9Are There Even Any Events?When did World War I begin? Was it when the first German shots were fired in Belgium in August of 1914? Was it when Gavriolo Princip shot the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914? Was it when Bismarck reshaped and consolidated Germany in the 1870s? Was it when…4 min read4 min read
May 28No Machine Can Threaten the Primordial Fabric of Our ExistenceIs A.I. merely the next layer in an already ”artificial” reality? Everybody and their aunt takes on the A.I. issue these days. I don’t know if I am everybody or their aunt, but here is my contribution, anyway. I will examine the phenomenon from a more philosophical-spiritual viewpoint than most do. I will not dwell in detail on neither the wonderful…9 min read9 min read
May 4Nineteen Eighty-Four: Reflections from a Late ReaderI recently read George Orwell’s groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Late, I know. I should have read it when I was 20 or thereabouts, like everybody else. But I didn’t, and then the years went by, I read all kinds of other books, and as for Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was of…Nineteen Eighty Four4 min readNineteen Eighty Four4 min read
Apr 30The Brain is a Processor, not a Hard-DriveI have written before about the unwarrantedly deep reverence our culture shows the brain. It is an immensely important organ, no doubt, but it is a bodily organ, not an ersatz God. I have used different analogies. In my essay Are We Living in an Approximation, I described the internet…3 min read3 min read
Mar 27The Stockholm Syndrome on a Species LevelA psychological reaction to a spiritual deficiency — Most of the human suffering in the modern world boils down to our fear of death. This is not surprising, since modern mythology stipulates that matter is primary and basically all there is. If nothing exists beyond, above or beneath–whichever spatial metaphor you want to use–the physical universe, every physical…6 min read6 min read
Feb 10The Ultimate Purpose of News Media: to Create SufferingIt has often been said by people who are awake that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional. If you don’t fully understand the nature of suffering it might seem like a callous thing to say, but it is true. Nobody who is truly present can suffer, because the fabric…3 min read3 min read
Jan 25To regret is to wish you weren’t hereThe past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present John Archibald Wheeler If you are familiar with, for lack of a better term, the spiritual community, you have undoubtedly heard or read some version of the perfectness of the present moment. It is a spiritual credo: …5 min read5 min read