It only takes a few moments of introspection to become aware of the vast, yawning emptiness that abides at the center of your heart. Every adult feels it. Most of us experience it as the pain of grief, and do anything we can to avoid feeling it. This is because postmodern people, enamored of the frigid faith of scientific rationalism and its dead, mechanistic world, experience the void as a loss. It feels like a hole in the heart, a raw wound that can only be temporarily soothed by sex, drugs, conformity, and most recently, the bright stimuli of our screens. The void has a place in our collective history that we perceive as the death of God, the death of external meaning. And it has a place in the emotional body that we perceive as an infinitely cold yearning where the thrum of life used to be. A darkness that, at some indeterminate point in the fog of the past, swallowed our creativity, joy and spontaneity, and left us a slave to the passions that afford a moment of mercy. But this is not the only way to experience the void, or to interpret it. If you stay with the sensations of this vast nothingness, this powerful yearning, for long enough - painful and fearful as it may be - you start to get to know it. It begins to change. Whether via meditation, yoga, prayer or simple creative work, with enough gentle attention, you start to realize that this hole in you is not *only* a point of departure. It's also where everything in existence comes from. Every thought, idea, feeling, inspiration that channels through you comes from that void, persists for a time, and returns to it. This is the living, infinite process that Christians call creatio ex nihilo, or "creation from nothing". The nothingness, which Buddhists call Dharmakaya, and which the Chinese name Dao - is in fact the great ground of Being, that from which your ego came, and to which it will return. And that ground, that eternal context, that patient, quiet, generative space held for all the suffering and beauty and drama of creation - that will outlive you. It will continue on, as it always has. That is the part of you, the fundamental part of you, that is beyond death. It is the Great Self that beholds every moment of your life with unfathomable love. In other words, that hole at the center of your being is not what the absence of God feels like. It's precisely the feeling of God's presence.

Believing others are "NPCs" is motivated reasoning, and a fallacy We can infer other's interiority to such an extremely high degree of precision and replicability that to *not* believe it requires holding it to an evidentiary standard we wouldn't apply to any other part of life

i'm tired boss. i've never felt more unc so i guess it's my job to say old-man stuff like this: good is shockingly good and evil is shockingly evil. the distinction between them is shockingly consequential, not at all fake controlling bullshit, in extremity a matter of life and death. if you are lucky, the first time you learn this the blast radius won't be too large. you were supposed to learn these things from your elders and betters but for too many of us the chains of lineage have been broken and so we had to figure and are figuring this stuff out ourselves, the hard way. it is worth your life and your soul, it is worth the lives and the souls of your loved ones, to earnestly cultivate a love for the good in yourself and others, and to seek out those who have done and are doing the same as companions

So it turns out it's better for weed to be illegal, but the state mostly doesn't care if you get high, unless there's a problem It's better for monogamy to be socially normed and couples to allow small, short affairs if they don't tear families apart What else is like this

I need men to realize worrying about being creepy towards women energetically reads as “creepy” to women

Huge rains in Barcelona last night. The whole road to Casa Tilo washed out. First day of the men's retreat: journey through peril and hardship to the Great House in the wooded hills

If your spirituality is... • Designed by you • Filtered through your preferences • Evaluated only in terms of how it makes you feel …you alienate yourself from undergoing the disruption required for growth.

One of the best feelings in the world is getting abruptly fired by a client with whom you have been working on the courage to set boundaries Baby bird is clumsy but flying 🥲

I've given thousands of hours of my life to meditation, communion and spiritual study. Over 10,000 at this point. And I still don't know a thing that can be spoken. All I've done is habituate myself to a very vague sense-impression of the world as it exists beyond appearances, which I have not seen for myself. I expect at the end of the next 10,000, I will be no closer to understanding any of this. If I'm lucky, I'll get another 10,000 after that

When I see a psychologist writing about how morality has no place in psychology, I shudder to think of their trauma patients' outcomes There's always a moral dimension; if the therapist disavows it, guess what their patient also does. And guess what remains buried thereafter

Having this take reveals how profoundly unaware you are of the huge number of things that control you every day

Knud Baade - "Cloud Study" (1838)

You should always have at least one local forest you know like the back of your hand

Some people don't believe anyone is truly evil (e.g., "Everyone is trying to do what they think is good"). Indeed, there aren't many evil people, but some are. A strong indicator: they're willing to cause a very large amount of harm to others for a small benefit to themselves.

i hope Yuko knows... somewhere in this world, she was loved enough to be search for 763 times.

VI I walk back down the old street on purpose There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fill it with water Cannonball VII I walk back down the same street on purpose There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fill it soil I plant a tree in it Years later, kids climb it and play VII A kid climbs a tree There is a tall branch The kid falls out of the tree It isn’t their fault

i'm convinced burnout has nothing to do with 'working too hard' and everything to do with betraying yourself for an extended period of time