Image: Johnny and Louise, Naked, 1993 Mike Leigh/Thin Man Films

Want to hear the bleakest worldview of all time?

Here it is:

“See, the thing is Brian, that God is a hateful God. Must be. Because if God is good, then why is there evil in the world? Why is there pain and hate and greed and war? It doesn’t make sense. But if God is a nasty bastard then you can say ‘why is there good in the world? Why is there love and hope and joy?’ Well, let’s face it, good exists to be effed up by evil. The very existence of God enables evil to flourish. Therefore, God is bad.”

—Johnny, from the film Naked, 1993

The question “why do bad things happen to good people?” is the most serious theological problem. It’s a devastating observation: the God that millions turn to in their darkest moments often seems antagonistic, indifferent, or unavailable. When the status quo is intolerable and you’ve begged and pleaded, how could a being of benevolence and light allow the unthinkable to happen?

In the last week alone I have spoken with several people who endure lives of quiet absurdity. Some with chronic pain, some abandoned by family precisely when they most needed them, some with deep trauma but without the resources to address it properly. Sometimes I feel like those visitors to maximum security prisons where you can only talk through a thick pane of glass. You can try to be with them but they’re living a reality you can’t fully enter. Though dismayed, I’m unsurprised when they tell me they are struggling to believe that God — or any benevolent force — is even real, let alone good.

What should you say to these people? That God works in mysterious ways? Perhaps true but hollow in moments of actual pain. That if they learn to put out more “good energy” it will come back to them? I don’t mean to sound flip, but I do mean to highlight the profound difficulty of helping someone who has landed in an emotional and spiritual black hole.

Job knew something about this. Of the many fascinating aspects of the Biblical account — the paragon of inexplicable suffering — is the careful way in which his three friends initially interact with him.

Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

There is great wisdom in this. When even well-intended words sting because nothing said can hold what’s being felt, the very best move is to quietly demonstrate solidarity — to show up. If the one who is suffering wants to speak, respond as best you can. If they don’t, resist the urge to fill the silence. You can’t take their pain from them but you can, through presence alone, help them to endure their own.

When Job finally spoke, it was in rage. He cursed the day of his birth, wished he had never been conceived, and demanded an explanation from a God who seemed not to be listening. The rest of the book is a four-way philosophical exploration of suffering — each of his friends offering theories about why this happened, with Job insisting doggedly that he had done nothing to deserve it. And the text agrees with him. Which brings us back to our central question.

Both Johnny and Job believed in God but had serious misgivings as to His nature and intentions. Before his encounter with suffering, Job was meticulously religious and deeply content. His pain was a monkey wrench hurled into the fine machinery of his spirituality. And though no backstory is given for Johnny, I suspect there’s more than one helping of misery lurking in his past.

Many people simply abandon God in the face of suffering — it’s the path of least resistance. But I’d argue that’s actually a non sequitur. Suffering doesn’t disprove God’s existence; it raises questions about His character. What Johnny and Job do is bolder and, to my thinking, more logically consistent: they keep God in the picture and indict Him. Yes, there is a God — and He might be a bastard. That’s a harder position to hold than atheism, and possibly a more honest one.

Where I think Johnny goes wrong in his stairwell symposium is in assuming that God could actually be bad. Here’s why that doesn’t hold: God, as conceived in classical monotheism, is an infinite being present in, yet transcending, time and space — a being with no lack, no needs, no wants. Badness, cruelty, indifference — these are functions of lack. They are strictly human conditions, born of need and frustration and pain. We foist them onto God when we’re suffering and lack the perspective to process why. A being with nothing to gain from human suffering cannot, by definition, be malevolent.

What follows then is that if these assumptions are correct, then there simply is no such thing as “bad” and all that transpires, from kittens to cancer, has an ultimately beneficial purpose. This knowledge has one critical benefit. While it cannot diminish in the moment physical or emotional pain, it can mitigate how deeply it reaches by providing an unseen “why.”

In the same way that it was deduced that the Higgs Boson and the planet Neptune “must be there” even though we lacked the tools to observe them directly, so too must there be a goodness at the bottom of it all. And until we can see it, we can both mourn the very real pain that abounds, sit quietly with those who are enduring it, and know that as the Talmud suggests “all that descends from on high is for the good.”

In the end, I don’t know that anyone in genuine darkness is reached by an argument. What I find, walking with people through the hardest moments of their lives, is that the question “is the universe bad?” loses some of its force when someone chooses to sit with you inside it. Not to fix it. Not to explain it. Just to stay.

That choice — to show up, to sit with someone, to refuse to leave them alone with their pain — is itself an answer of sorts. Not a logical one. A human one.

Q: Who walked with you when you couldn’t walk alone?

Leave a comment

A 90-year-old John Adams is walking in the fields with his son John Quincy. He tells him:

“I have seen a queen in France with 18 million livres of diamond on her person. But I declare, that all the charms of her face and figure, added to all the glitter of her jewels, did not impress me as much as that little shrub — right there.”

He points his walking stick at a sprig of Queen Anne’s Lace.

“Your mother always said that I never delighted enough in the mundane. But now I find that if I look at even the smallest thing, my imagination begins to roam the Milky Way. Rejoice evermore! Rejoice evermore!”

This scene, aired late in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams starring Paul Giamatti, embedded itself deep into the “highly moving things” file I have somewhere in my mind. Adams was a revolutionary at heart — a man of passion and principle who had dedicated most of his adult life to midwifing the United States. Yet here he was, nearing the end of his days, having finally arrived at the recognition that he had missed something utterly essential.

We’ve always known this. The wisdom isn’t hidden — it’s been sitting in plain sight for as long as anyone can remember, trying to get our attention through every available channel.

“Take time to smell the roses.” How many times have you heard that? Enough times that it has stopped meaning anything — which is the problem. The song Feelin’ Groovy asks that “the morning-time drop all its petals on me.” Wordsworth built an entire poetic philosophy around the idea that a field of daffodils could fill a man with wealth he’d spend the rest of his life drawing on. The Psalms are saturated with it — the heavens declaring glory, the earth full of goodness, every created thing an occasion for wonder.

The message has arrived from every direction. And we have nodded along, agreed in principle, and gone back to our screens.

The real revolution, it turns out, is the counterintuitive act of stopping. Of actually seeing what’s there. Adams knew this at ninety. The question is whether we have to wait that long.

Victor of Aveyron was a boy discovered in the forests of southern France in 1800, apparently having survived alone in the wild from a very young age. A young physician named Jean Marc Gaspard Itard took him in and spent years trying to educate him. The documented accounts describe Victor as completely indifferent to beauty in any form — flowers, music, sunsets, art meant nothing to him. He responded only to functional things: food, warmth, physical sensation. The capacity for aesthetic appreciation — for seeing something and being moved by it — simply hadn’t developed.

So while it might be tempting to think that the ability to see beauty in the mundane spontaneously generates on its own, it seems rather to be a latent capacity — something that needs to be tended and nurtured to fully emerge. Like most skills worth having, it has to be worked into a habit, a practice, a way of moving through the world. The good news is that it’s entirely available to you. The harder news is that most of us — caught in the Sturm und Drang of daily life, its commitments and strivings and endless problem-solving — never quite take it on.

Which brings us to Alice Walker.

In her poem “The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom,” Walker describes a flower blooming not for admiration, not for an audience, but, gloriously, for itself. And only for deserving eyes.

That word, deserving, is important. The flower doesn’t withhold itself out of cruelty. It simply blooms at a frequency that only certain eyes are tuned to receive. Walker ends the poem with two words:

Revolutionary Petunia.

The revolution Adams arrived at late. The one that’s available to you right now.

So where do you start?

Try this with a friend: challenge each other to describe an object in every imaginable way for a full sixty seconds. Then switch. You’ll be surprised how much is there when you’re forced to actually look.

Or set a phone alarm for a random time each day. When it goes off, pause, look around, and find one thing in the scene you have never noticed before. It doesn’t have to be remarkable — just previously unseen. That’s the practice. The unremarkable becoming visible is how it begins.

And if you want a guide into what deserving eyes actually see, James Payne’s video series Great Art Explained is a revelation — ordinary people discovering that what they assumed was beyond them was available all along.

Adams had his walking stick, his fields, his Queen Anne’s Lace. Walker had her petunia. You have whatever is in front of you right now.

The world is already in bloom. The only question is whether your eyes are ready to see it.

Q: What is one thing you have walked past a thousand times without truly seeing?

Leave a comment

Image: Freepik.com

Awe used to leave people shaking. Now it has a playlist.

Every major mystical tradition in human history understood something we’ve quietly forgotten: that the most important emotional experiences aren’t the comfortable ones. They’re the ones that frighten you.

Entire industries exist to help us “manage” our emotions — as if they were wayward children or insubordinate employees. But what if the mystics were right and we’ve been managing away the very experiences that could most change us?

Most people don’t want to be scared. 99% of Americans have not tried skydiving or bungee jumping, and truth be told, neither have I — leaping from a moving aircraft at 10,000 feet seems like lunacy to me. But there’s another extreme challenge, much closer to home, that most are equally unwilling to tackle: it’s the thing sitting quietly but uneasily in the untrodden recesses of your own mind, trying not to be noticed.

The journey to yourself is also scary. It means coming face to face with everything you find so unacceptable that you’ve refused it entry into conscious life. And here's the problem: the treasure is always in the cave you least want to enter — and most people just don't want to go in.

So what do you do when you want the prize but won’t enter the ring? You settle. For awe-lite: wellness apps, some dabbling in meditation, the Instagram sunset. Echoes of the great teachers, repackaged and sanitized by an industry that profits from your returning but not your arriving.

The German word for awe is Ehrfurcht (pronounced air-forsht). Its literal meaning combines “Ehre” (honor) and “Furcht” (fear). It describes a feeling of respectful fear or reverent awe — a profound respect mixed with a sense of the sublime, overwhelming, or sacred. Theologian and philosopher Rudolf Otto described the idea of mysterium tremendum et fascinans — the mystery that simultaneously repels and attracts. To touch the sacred is to encounter fear.

“Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

—Exodus 3:4-6

“After seeing this universal form, which I have never seen before, I am gladdened, but at the same time my mind is disturbed with fear. Therefore please show me Your original form, O Lord of lords, O abode of the universe.”

—Gita 11.45

[The Godhead] is not divine nature or substance, but the devouring ferocity of purity that a person is able to approach only with an equal purity. Since all Being goes up in it as if in flames, it is necessarily unapproachable to anyone still embroiled in Being.

—Friedrich Schelling

These examples are intense. They’re also correct.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: what do we actually want? My gut says most people want the real thing — truth, depth, the particular aliveness that comes from having faced something genuinely difficult. As a former teacher once put it: why eat chalk when you can eat cheesecake? The apps aren’t chalk exactly. But they’re not cheesecake either. And somewhere, underneath the playlists, I suspect you already know the difference.

The 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind tells the story of Roy Neary, an electric company lineman who has a brief but extreme encounter with an alien vessel that permanently changes his life. Though terrified by the experience, as if called by a higher power, he can’t let it go. To his family’s shock and horror, he becomes a man possessed; obsessed with finding the location of the next encounter—the big one.

Roy is the embodiment of Ehrfurcht. He is willing to confront a host of real fears to accomplish his goal. At the end, when even most of his fellow travelers (those who were also called) come up short, he keeps climbing until he has scaled a mountain to meet “them” face to face. He’s afraid. He’s awestruck. It’s beautiful.

So what’s actually on offer here — beyond the intensity, beyond the examples from traditions most of us weren’t raised inside?

This: the moments that have most expanded you were probably also the ones that frightened you most. The loss that remade you. The falling in love that left you exposed and slightly terrified. The piece of music that opened something you didn’t know was closed. The night sky that made you feel briefly, vertiginously small. You didn’t choose those moments. But you were changed by them.

That’s Ehrfurcht. And it’s been available to you all along.

The restlessness that drives people toward the apps — that’s not weakness. It’s a real hunger pointing at a real thing. The problem isn’t the hunger. It’s that we’ve been handed appetizers and told they’re the meal.

What changes when you stop being afraid of being afraid? When you recognize the trembling not as something to manage but as a signal that you’re close to something that matters; that the ground beneath you is, in fact, holy?

You become more alive.

Q: When was the last time something genuinely frightened and moved you at the same time — and what did you do with it?

Leave a comment

theweather.com

Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it.

—Haruki Murakami

I once struck up a conversation with an affable young man on a return flight from a very frigid Warsaw. We spoke about the weather there. In the course of the conversation he explained to me that the climate in Poland was a joke compared to his last trip dog-sledding in Northern Norway.

He detailed the days of near white out conditions for days on end with the wind chill making it close to 40 below. I myself thought this sounded like a miserable way to use up all of your vacation days and I asked him if it was worth it voluntarily putting yourself into such extreme weather. I loved his response: “Oh, there’s no bad weather. Just bad clothing.”

Interpretation is one of the most powerful human capacities — and the most underused. Our experience of reality is always filtered through memory, mood, expectation, the story we’re already telling ourselves. There may be facts “out there,” but what we live is always interpretation. Even science, for all its brilliance, only produces data. The moment you ask what it means, you’ve left the lab and entered philosophy.

This fact creates a golden opportunity. Namely, no matter what is happening, we, in theory, get to decide how to feel about it. We can dress for the weather. Let’s think about this.

There are people and situations that trigger you: the rude and inaudible customer sales rep, your vociferous but ignorant political activist niece, the person who embarrasses you in public for something you didn’t even do. It’s virtually automatic — you can’t imagine what it would look like to not “go there.” You may try to resist; to be “bigger” than this encounter, but given enough stimulus you very well may “lose your mind.” This is the storm; the one you made.

The term neuroscientists actually use is “electrical storm” — it’s not just metaphor. During intense emotional states, particularly fear, grief, rage, or panic, there’s a dramatic surge of synchronized electrical activity, especially in the amygdala. In cases like epileptic seizures or severe PTSD episodes, the pattern is close enough to an actual electrical storm that the language is clinical, not poetic.

So what should you do?

There are two ways of dealing with what’s coming. The first is to run. Knowing, as you often do, that the storm is likely to hit in scenarios that are very familiar to you, it makes sense to avoid them to the best of your ability. Unless you’re one of those storm chasers who relish careening their trucks directly at the tornado currently demolishing an Oklahoma hamlet, why put yourself in a position to induce it. Learn to make fences. Stay far away from emotional turmoil and all the damage that comes along with it.

The second option is to shelter in place. This means there’s no escape and it’s going to pound you. There is a spiritual teaching I find compelling for exactly this moment. It posits that inasmuch as we are each created alone — arriving here without consent, inhabiting a consciousness no one else can fully enter — we are all fundamentally enough, all by ourselves. We came in whole. Despite the natural desire for deep and significant connection with those around us, in moments when that connection is not tenable; when the storm of the “other” is raging against us, we can retreat to something that was always already there.

There is a part of you the storm cannot reach.

That state of awareness is real. It doesn’t need approval, agreement, or even respect. It’s in there if you look.

Like an emergency contingency protocol that can be programmed to go into effect under certain circumstances, the human soul has a built-in emotional immunity program. Since many of us don’t know it’s there we have never bothered to turn it on and try it out.

In the meantime, the storms remain teachers. Each is an opportunity to get sick of the game and to look for something different; a way out. To the degree that they goad us into discovering a whole new way of being they are our friends, and it’s possible to welcome them even as we despise them. In the end, the emotional storm is showing us both who we are and what we could become.

This storm is not something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you.

Q: What would change if you stopped fighting the storm and started asking what it wants?

Leave a comment

Image: praxisentero.at

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

—The Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr

Most of us are at war with reality. We just don’t know it yet.

Niebuhr's brief prayer has long struck me as a near perfect encapsulation of one of the most critical areas of life’s work. In a tweet length musing, he captures both the enormous challenge, and opportunity, of gaining that elusive state of being called peace of mind.

It’s that first clause that’s the kicker. Though I actively work on it, in surveying the landscape of my inner world, I can’t help but notice my instinctual vehemence to change stuff. If I’m ruffled by something someone has said I often strategize ways of “educating” the person in front of me (either directly or covertly). If the developments in the news are “bad” I feel an urge to address it somehow but am often at a loss as to what exactly that might be. And God forbid there’s a health issue involving someone I really care about; then solvable or not I become a gladiator of “action.”

True enough, there are many things that do appear changeable and it seems more than reasonable to give it your utmost when it’s something important. But as you may have noticed in yourself or from others that even extreme effort does not guarantee the result that you want. What then? Is it better to rail against the futility a la Dylan Thomas’s exhortation to “Rage against the dying of the light?” In other words, should you lean into the “pissed off” or, should you figure out how to be genuinely contented in your unhoped for outcome?

In thinking about this I find myself drawn to the biggest hit single off of Stephen Stills’s eponymous solo album “Love the One You’re With.” He sets up the issue simply enough:

If you’re down and confused. And you don’t remember who you’re talkin’ to. Concentration slip away. Because your baby is so far away

Right, so it’s natural to be down and confused when the person you want or need is far away. Maybe this person has ghosted Stephen, maybe she’s dead, or maybe she’s just a transient hippie, who knows? It’s awful to miss someone. Mr. Thomas would look at this situation and encourage Mr. Stills to “Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” Take the pain Stephen! That’s where the meaning is (and perhaps it is) but Stills took a different approach:

Well, there’s a rose in a fisted glove. And the eagle flies with the dove. And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey Love the one you’re with

“Look at the silver linings Dylan” I hear him saying. Each crummy situation has a great opportunity. It’s so simple it’s genius. If you can’t be with the one you love (for whatever reason) love the one you’re with. This is Niebuhr clause one to a t. This is the seed of serenity. Whether it’s a person or a circumstance, why not? So you didn’t want it like this; so what? Why not try loving it?

I suspect that part of the reason is that it’s much easier to rage than to love. There’s a certain security in emotional battle whereas serene acceptance requires a good deal of courage. Maybe that’s why it’s so rare.

Anyone who takes the time to explore the landscape of the mind will likely discover that there are a few things you hold so habitually tightly that to unclench from them might feel excruciating—an abusive parent, a romantic betrayal, a shattered dream—why should I let it go? How could I possibly forgive? I’d be lying if I said I don’t get it, I do. But more and more I am experiencing the true weight; the real world consequences of gripping things so hard. Not going gently into that good night might mean that you go there harder and faster than you think.

At the core of every wisdom tradition is the spiritual technology of non-attachment. The Buddhists call clinging upadana — the root of suffering. The Stoics practiced amor fati, the love of fate, embracing whatever comes as exactly what was needed. In Jewish thought, bitachon — deep trust in God’s providence — is the antidote to the anxiety of needing outcomes to go our way. It’s there not because it opiates an otherwise immiserating reality but because it illuminates the most fruitful ways of operating in a system where gain and loss are a feature and not a bug.

There are a few things that are really worth being attached to; family, love, justice, meaning, transcendence. We should strive to make changes that promote all of them. There are also many things that are not worth attaching to. Both categories are largely independent of our influence.

May we all have the wisdom to know the difference.

Q: Is there something you’ve been raging against that might be transformed by simply choosing to love it instead?

Leave a comment

Image: moviemeter.nl

If you could experience a customized program that would reveal—and then force you to confront—your deepest, darkest challenge, would you?

In 1997, hot off the success of Se7en, director David Fincher created the psychological thriller The Game. Starring Michael Douglas as Nicholas Van Orton—a cold, controlling San Francisco banker who lives a highly ordered but joyless life—and Sean Penn as his estranged brother, the film descends rapidly into a rabbit hole of mystery, confusion, and escalating chaos.

As it unfolds, we try to make sense of what is happening to this anti-hero. Is there a secret cabal behind it? Corporate manipulation and blackmail? Or is Nicholas simply losing his mind?

The final reveal reframes everything in such a striking way that I’ve found myself returning to it for years—not just as a twist ending, but as a metaphor for the human experience as I understand it.

You’ve probably been inside something you couldn’t make sense of. A relationship that dissolved without explanation. A run of setbacks that seemed almost designed to break you. An illness, a loss, a door that kept closing no matter how hard you pushed.

In those moments, you don’t philosophize. You panic. You grasp. You try to force the pieces into a shape you can live with.

But what if the incoherence isn’t the problem? What if it’s the point?

The Game suggests — and I find myself increasingly convinced — that chaos and meaning aren’t opposites. That what looks like randomness from the inside might look entirely different from somewhere else. Not random motion, but something more like orchestration. A structure you can’t yet see because you’re still inside it.

The Set-Up

Conrad Van Orton (Penn) gives his brother Nicholas a strange birthday gift: an invitation to a personalized experience from a company called Consumer Recreation Services (CRS). It arrives on Nicholas’s 48th birthday—the same age their father was when he died by suicide.

To enter “The Game,” Nicholas undergoes a series of physical and psychological evaluations. Then it begins. Or does it?

What starts as a curious diversion quickly becomes a sequence of escalating, reality-blurring events that seep into his personal and professional life, forcing him to question what is real, and who—if anyone—can be trusted.

One inexplicable event follows another, each one intensifying his fear and disorientation. Nicholas loses any stable sense of what is happening, who is involved, or even whether his own brother can be trusted.

By the climax, he finds himself on a rooftop—the same kind of place his father chose to end his life. He is holding a gun, convinced that the moment the door opens he will need to defend himself.

A woman beside him insists he is making a mistake. She tells him that on the other side of the door there are people waiting with cake and champagne, ready to shout “surprise.”

But Nicholas doesn’t believe her.

When the door opens, Nicholas fires.

In an instant, he becomes convinced that he has just killed his brother.

Standing there in a party hat, Conrad collapses backward as champagne glasses shatter around him. The “game” Nicholas believed he was surviving suddenly transforms into something far worse: the realization that, after all the paranoia, fear, and manipulation, he himself has become the instrument of irreversible tragedy.

The realization is unbearable.

Overcome by horror and convinced his life is now beyond repair, Nicholas stumbles toward the edge of the roof and jumps.

The Denouement (spoiler alert)

Image: www.themoviedb.org

The camera follows his long descent as he crashes through the glass roof of a pavilion below. But instead of striking concrete, he lands on a massive concealed airbag—like something used in a stunt performance.

He’s alive.

Moments later, Conrad appears beside him, very much alive, and calmly says:

“Happy birthday, Nicholas.”

The shadow of his father's death — the wound the whole game was designed to reach — has finally been touched, and survived. For the first time in decades, Nicholas is free.

Yes, this is a movie. Yes, the amount of planning, prediction, and risk involved would be nearly impossible to imagine in reality. That said, I increasingly suspect the film may point toward something real.

Imagine that life actually has meaning and that each event within it carries significance. This is not especially far-fetched if we allow for the possibility of an infinite creative intelligence — what some traditions call God, and others may simply call the source.

If that’s true, then perhaps what we experience as chaos is not randomness at all, but a form of orchestration we are simply unable to perceive from within the moment itself.

Like Nicholas Van Orton, we are often trapped in a loop of unknowing—a frustrating inability to pull back the curtain and glimpse the machinery of meaning operating beneath our lives.

For a rare few, some major event may eventually crystallize years of confusion into a coherent whole. But even for those who never receive that kind of clarity in this life, it is still possible that our struggles, losses, delays, humiliations, heartbreaks, and fears are not arbitrary. That they may, in some mysterious way, be structured toward growth, healing, or rectification.

Maybe clarity is not something we are given during the game.

Maybe it only arrives once we’ve passed through it.

Q: Have you ever been so deep inside something that it felt like pure chaos — only to look back later and see exactly why it had to happen that way?

Leave a comment

Image: freepik.com

Dear Friends,

Grace Slick once sang that “life is change” — and Feed Your Head is no exception.

After several years of building this platform together, I’m writing to let you know that Feed Your Head is entering a new chapter. The focus is sharpening: going forward, this will be primarily my own voice, exploring spirituality hiding in plain sight — in music, film, science, art, and the quiet moments most of us move past too quickly. I’ve wanted for some time to go deeper into the way a piece of music or a film can crack something open that no argument ever could, and this feels like the moment to do that.

This means saying a genuine and grateful goodbye to the writers who have made Feed Your Head what it is. Peter Himmelman, Laleh Quinn, Joshua Moritz, Steven Gimbel, Stephen Stern, Lewis Coyne (and others) brought depth, range, and intellectual seriousness to this space. Each of them has enriched this platform in ways I won’t forget, and I’m genuinely proud of what we created together. Their work deserves to be read — I encourage you to seek them out wherever their writing continues.

As for what’s coming: the questions remain the same. Is there more going on than meets the eye? Can it be encountered directly, not just believed in? Those are still the animating questions here. What’s changing is the form — more personal, more immediate, more alive to the places where the deepest things tend to hide.

I am genuinely excited for this next chapter and hope you will stick around to be part of it.

With appreciation,

Adam Jacobs

Image: worldatlas.com

For thousands of years, belief in the beginning of creation was solely an affirmation within the numinous arena of faith. Even as late as the 18th-century Enlightenment, the famous skeptic David Hume could argue that cosmology was outside the realm of science and that the question of the origin of the universe could never be empirically decided. Yet, many philosophers and scientists before and after Hume would disagree, viewing the beginning of the universe as a logical necessity, a clear scientific conclusion, or even the result of mathematical proof.

The Logical Contradiction of an Eternal Cosmos

The Late Roman philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and theologian, John Philoponus, logically demonstrated that in an eternal cosmos, an infinite number of moments must have been traversed. Yet, if infinity has actually been traversed, then it is not truly infinity (because infinity is a limit that can never be reached). Aristotle had rejected the idea of an infinite series of causes as a logical contradiction, but he also held that the world was eternally old. Philoponus showed that Aristotle was guilty of a logical contradiction and then used this paradox of infinity to prove the world had to have a beginning. Moreover, Philoponus argued logically that this cosmic beginning was ex nihilo (“out of nothing”)—precisely what he believed was being described in the Genesis narrative.

Johannes Kepler’s Scientific Paradox of a Dark Sky

The astronomer Johannes Kepler developed a scientific argument for the beginning of the cosmos that was aided by his empirical reflections on the nature of stars. Going back to an argument from the dark sky that was initially put forward by Philoponus more than a thousand years earlier, Kepler pointed out that an infinitely old Universe uniformly populated by stars would have an infinite number of stars. Consequently, the night sky of an infinite universe would be completely bright. Why, then, is the night sky mostly dark? Kepler’s answer was that our universe is not infinite, but finite, because it had a beginning in time.

Entropy and Lord Kelvin’s Irreversible Arrow of Time

Three centuries after Kepler, the Victorian scientist William Thomson, known as Lord Kelvin, developed a more detailed resolution to the Dark Sky paradox by showing that the stars have been shining for only a limited amount of time and that universal darkness existed before the birth of stars.1 Proposing a new understanding of the universe that focused on what Kelvin called “energy,” Thomson argued that the cosmos was fundamentally historical and evolving, being governed by the dual principles of the conservation of energy and the dissipation (or transformation) of energy.

His new science of thermodynamics also introduced the idea of an irreversible arrow of cosmic time, where entropy—or cosmic disorder—would continually increase over time until all cosmic energetic processes would eventually come to an end. However, since entropy could not have been increasing forever, Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics entailed that the cosmos ultimately had a beginning in time.

The Beginning and the Big Bang

Image: misistemasolar.com

The physicist Albert Einstein provided a crucial clue that would help elucidate the mystery of cosmic beginnings when he published his theory of General Relativity in 1915. Realizing that Einstein’s equations could be interpreted to predict a non-static and non-eternal universe, in 1927, physicist Georges Lemaître published the original version of what later became known as the Hubble Law, regarding the relation of the velocities and the distances of “red-shifted” galaxies that are moving away from us.

In the same year, Lemaître proposed a theory of an expanding universe with a beginning to space-time. Projecting the expansion of the cosmos back in time, Lemaître concluded that an initial “creation-like” event must have occurred where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence, a point that he called the “primeval atom.”2

Then, in 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble found that every single distant galaxy he observed was moving away from us at a very high speed. This meant that if the motion of the galaxies was traced backward in time, they would all merge together at some moment in the past, pointing precisely to the type of cosmos that Lemaître predicted—a dynamically evolving universe with an explosive beginning in time. While Lemaître preferred to call this initial point of creation the “primeval atom,” a popular cosmologist who rejected Lemaître’s hypothesis, Fred Hoyle, coined the phrase “Big Bang” for the theory, and the term stuck.

According to physicist Stephen Hawking, the discovery of the Big Bang, “finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science.”3 As mathematical physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler explain, “at this singularity,” known as the Big Bang, “space and time came into existence” and “literally nothing existed before the singularity.”4 Physicists Hawking and George Ellis thus conclude that “the results we have obtained support the idea that the universe began a finite time ago. However, the actual point of creation, the singularity, is outside the scope of presently known laws of physics.”5

A Mathematical Proof of Finite Time

While the cosmic veil of the breakdown of matter, energy, and space-time preceding the first moment of the Big Bang may forever preclude cosmologists from glimpsing the actual physical beginning of the universe, a theorem developed in the early 21^st century by mathematical physicists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin—known as the BGV Theorem—has shown that the universe must have nevertheless had a beginning. According to Vilenkin, the BGV Theorem demonstrates that if a universe is (on average) everywhere expanding, then its material history cannot be extended into the infinite past.

This theorem provides a mathematical proof that any universe undergoing, on average, cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past, meaning it must have had a past space-time boundary and, therefore, a beginning. Moreover, the BGV Theorem holds regardless of the specific physical model of the early universe and applies even to oscillating universes, inflationary universes, and the multiverse. Mathematically speaking, then, a past-eternal universe is impossible. As Vilenkin reflects: “With the [BGV] proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”6

Philosophically and spiritually, he draws heavily from the integral vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, seeking a synthesis of Western science and Eastern spirituality. This is reflected in his book Spirit Calls Nature: An Integral View of Science, Consciousness, and Spirituality (or similar titles), which proposes an “integral cosmology” or “divine materialism” bridging materialism and idealism. He describes himself as “a physicist in love with consciousness studies and evolution, working on an integral vision of science, philosophy, and spirituality.”

Image: rawpixel.com

You are what you eat. That is certainly true. The molecules that make up your body must come from the food you digest. But it is even more profound that you eat what you are. The meals you choose connect your body to the world—and, in some cases, to your own background. That makes enjoying your food something deeper.

Family Recipe

It was my birthday a week ago. As we celebrated with my family, we placed candles in my favorite applesauce cake—a recipe my mother learned from my great-grandmother, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who learned to cook and bake in the old country.

There were no recipe cards; it was all in her head. Trained by her own mother, she simply knew how to make it. She had no measuring spoons. Instead, she cupped her left hand and knew exactly how much of each ingredient to add based on how it filled her palm. She would look at the color of the batter, adjust as she saw fit, and deem it ready for the oven—where it stayed until it reached the perfect color to come out. No timers, just lived experience.

In a bid to preserve this family secret, my mother worked with her on one cake. Before each ingredient was added to the bowl, my mother measured it and wrote down the exact amount. When my great-grandmother made her adjustments, my mom noted those extra bits and added them to her previous measurements. She recorded the oven temperature and timed the baking. When the cake finally emerged, the recipe existed in a form that could be saved and passed down through the generations, becoming a lasting part of our family traditions.

Growing up, every September my mom would bake several of these cakes. They were cut into slices, wrapped in foil, and stored on the freezer door, waiting to be added to my brother’s and my school lunches. The taste of that applesauce cake is the flavor of my childhood—but also of my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s.

When I look at a family tree, most of my forebears are just names. Some I met before I could form memories; others I vaguely recollect. A few I have stories about from my parents and grandparents. But most are simply names. Yet I know that they, too, ate this very applesauce cake. Eating is such a simple act—putting something in your mouth and tasting it. That flavor is fleeting, lasting only a moment. And yet, when I take a bite of that cake, those people whose lives I will never know—whose joys and sufferings, dreams and struggles are lost to time—become connected to me through a shared personal experience. It is one small link in the bridge to those from whom I come.

Collective Memory

Image: loveandlemons.com

Maurice Halbwachs argued in 1950 that groups possess a collective memory. Different people experience the same event from their own perspectives and thus have unique memories of it, but we share those memories with one another. We use other people’s testimony to fill in gaps in our own understanding and to make connections, thereby giving these events deeper meaning.

As a collective, we round out the partial accounts of our own limited experience to arrive at a common narrative, which then becomes the way we all remember it. Even those who were not born at the time can be socialized into sharing that memory. When we tell and retell the story as it was told to us, it embeds itself within us as if it were our own direct experience. The group remembers, and thus its members remember. We are individuals with our own minds, shaped by our personal biographies, but also by the collective memories of those who socialized us.

Research now suggests that the passing of memory from one generation to the next can be more than sociological—it can be biological. Our DNA encodes much about us, but for some genes, certain environmental factors must be present for them to function. These genes remain dormant until a specific situation activates them. These contextual factors are known as epigenetic influences.

In some cases, traumatic events such as war or genocide can trigger the significant expression of genes that are usually dormant. The effects of these genes alter the body in ways that aid short-term survival. But here is the remarkable part: those biological changes can be passed on to later generations. This can result in traits such as a heightened stress response, increased anxiety, or a greater propensity for post-traumatic stress disorder. The effects of trauma on one generation can therefore appear in their descendants.

This phenomenon is most noticeable—and most easily studied—in cases of extreme trauma. Scientists are best at identifying and measuring what is most visible and quantifiable. Humans are complex beings, constantly bombarded by a vast range of personal, chemical, physical, biological, and sociological influences. The subtle effects passed down through generations are nearly impossible to track. But surely they exist—even in the quiet influence of applesauce cakes.

Happy Birthday to Us

This is why I love having my great-grandmother’s applesauce cake on my birthday. Our atomistic, individualistic culture turns our birthday into a day all about me—to celebrate me, to focus on me. I am the center of attention, the one who gets the cards and gifts, the one whose name is on the cake.

In this case, though, the cake speaks a deeper truth: I am more than just me. Yes, I have made life-shaping decisions. I, and I alone, have experienced the totality of my life. But that life—the “me” that I am—is more than my individuality. I am who I am because of those from whom I come.

My great-grandmother fled pogroms and came to the United States. I am of her in the straightforward biological sense: she gave birth to my grandmother, who gave birth to my mother, who gave birth to me. In this way, I carry some of her DNA—indeed, all of her mitochondrial DNA.

But I am also who I am because of who she was. I have only a few snippets of stories about her, mostly from people who knew her as an old woman. I will never truly know most of her life. Yet she is within me, a part of who I am. The same is true of my great-grandfather, who surely enjoyed many an applesauce cake himself.

So when I receive the first slice—claiming it should be smaller because of my diet, while secretly hoping it will be a bit larger—I eat it on my birthday while celebrating myself. But I do so knowing that I am more than myself. With each taste of that cake, with its familiar sweetness and texture, I am made happy by the connection to those within me who also once indulged in its pleasure.

I am what I eat, but I also eat what I am.

Leave a comment

There are people who pay exorbitant sums to attend retreats where they’re treated to the soul-expanding experience of monklike silence. Some describe it as a “fast of words,” though I’ve been told it’s also a feast of amazing food—entirely organic and vegan, of course—served in a bucolic atmosphere of healing and spiritual edification. The price tag for a two-week experience can run as high as twenty thousand dollars. And, of course, the participants come back refreshed and enlightened—again, so I’ve been told. 

I was fortunate, in a sense, to have embarked on my own word fast in the autumn of 2015. Yet it began in a disconcerting way. Over time I had felt my voice growing weak. I’d been singing too much, speaking too much, and perhaps because of the thoughtless expenditure of my energy, no longer conscious of the value of my own voice. “I’m always hoarse,” I told my wife. When I called my ear, nose, and throat doc, he said the problem might be caused by gastric reflux irritating my vocal cords. But after I swallowed a small mountain of antacid, my voice only got worse. My ENT then recommended that I see Dr. Reena Gupta, a lovely and talented laryngologist. 

Moments after introducing herself, Dr. Gupta snaked a camera-tipped tube slowly, eerily, up into my left nostril. And then, with a strange, dry pain, the tube crept down into the back of my throat. On a large screen, I could see an angry red bump flaring at the edge of my right vocal cord. A “benign hemorrhagic vocal nodule” is how Dr. Gupta described it. “It’s not dangerous,” she said, “but you’ll probably want to treat it.” I was in good company, too. Adele had dealt with the exact same condition, as had John Mayer and Keith Urban. 

Dr. Gupta gave me two choices. I could contend with a progressively raspier voice until, at some point, I would no longer have one. Or I could remain totally silent for three weeks before and three weeks after surgery. Six. Straight. Weeks. Even without organic vegan cuisine and the meditative environs of a costly retreat, the choice was easy. I kept my mouth shut. In fact, rather than lose some life-giving force, I learned as much or more during those weeks of silence than at any time in my adult life.

When a Fast Begins Slow 

Just two days into my fast of words, the silence was already trying my patience. But after a week, it slowly began to feel, if only for its novelty, like something extraordinary and appealing. Not always wanting the last word, trying to sound clever, or pretending to have all the answers—I slowly made peace with shutting off my voice. Make no mistake; I still had much to say. But because writing—or, worse, pantomiming—can never carry the immediacy of speech, my communication was, by dint of its slowness, deliberate. And I saw value in that deliberation. 

It decelerated the pace of life and slowed the way I perceived my surroundings and my inner world. It allowed me to feel a sense of reverence for the universe, something I hadn’t felt so intently since early childhood when reverence is a natural state. And I began to see little cracks forming, cracks I’d filled not only with words but also with some instinctual need to provide them, as though silences were themselves somehow wrong or awkward and needed a corrective measure, more things to say. 

Most troubling? The egregious waste of energy I’d spent producing sounds that had little or no reason to exist. Without that, freed from that, all my life rhythms began to change: the tempo at which I approached life descended from a bee-quick allegro to a molasses-slow largo. Seemingly insignificant things gained focus and clarity—the ocher hue of the early morning sky, the mushroom-cap shape of my neighbor’s gardening hat, the musical cadence of the Spanish-language conversation between a woman and her daughter on their way to the bus stop. 

As I walked in my neighborhood, I noticed the bright red jackets that two Japanese kids wore. I observed incredible tenderness as the older one extended his hand to his younger brother while they crossed the street. I walked within earshot of an old man and his wife, close enough to hear a mini scene unfold in real-time. He was carrying a canvas sack of groceries and pulled it closer to his chest as she related an unpleasant encounter. “Two-faced,” I heard her say. “You can’t trust her from moment to moment.” The man nodded his head as though he were listening. “Yeah...can’t trust that one.”

Mental Housekeeping

Turning inward, I noticed the muddled “conversation” in my mind—if one can call it that—as I continued to walk. So often obscured, like a buzz below static, this tangle of words and images twists relentlessly beneath the surface. I stopped for a moment as I neared home and tried to tune in to it. The disarray of my thoughts as they curdled and spilled into my conscious mind made me aware of how much housecleaning I needed to do up there. Pacing up a slight incline, I tested myself to see how long I could focus on the simple act of walking, even just for two short blocks. 

And I failed—though sometimes my concentration bobbed back to the present after several other thoughts had pushed it down. As you might have guessed from your own experience, these intrusive thoughts were random. Disconnected. And almost all unimportant: Oh, look at that bunch of crows. Are they playing, or are they fighting? Is there a reason that guy has his car stereo cranked up so loud? Though utterly scattered and useless, those thoughts taxed my mental energy. Just pulling my attention back to the simple act of walking felt like a tug-of-war. Then these questions tugged at me further: 

• Why do I so rarely feel settled? 

• How can I be present in my own life if I’m always looking forward to the next moment or back to an earlier one? 

• How can I feel a sense of reverence if I’m wrestling with the insane idea that wherever I might find myself a month from now (or even a minute from now) will be better than where I am right this second?

During my fast of words, the fact that I never felt fully in the moment began to trouble me more than usual. I noticed that I could easily lose touch with the present in two toxic ways: obsessing about the future and wallowing in nostalgia. Stripped of the ability to utter even useless, noisy words, I was left naked, vulnerable to the siren song of What Will Be and What Has Been. But my wordless state eventually inspired me to embrace concrete changes in the way I encountered the world. As I neared home, I made a mental list of what I was doing when I felt as though I was living in the present instead of in the future or past. They included 

• eating a great meal with my family;

• having a deep conversation with a friend about philosophical matters for which no definite answers exist;

• talking one-on-one with my children;

• playing with animals, my African Leopard Tortoise in particular;

• drawing;

• cooking;

• writing songs;

• performing music onstage; and

• teaching. 

For me, the interesting thing wasn’t that the activities on my list were especially rare (in fact, they were all very commonplace). What was interesting was that they were readily accessible. I discovered that what is most valuable to me is almost always within my easy reach. It was interesting to learn that simply walking while “noticing,” as I did on my walk, is a type of reverence, a sort of informal meditation. 

According to the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, practicing this high-intensity way of looking at things for just nine minutes a day over the course of ten weeks strengthens the frontal lobe, where decision-making occurs. One could say that much of everything we experience comes from our ability to decide, and that surely includes the decision to bring a greater sense of reverence into our lives. Arguably, our most important decisions—those involving the ability to discern right from wrong, worthy from unworthy—are fundamental to living a life of greater reverence. 

Now, here’s an easy and practical exercise to help bring a little reverence into your life. 

Spiritual Eye Opener: Present-Jumping Preventer

This SEO helps prevent the tendency to jump ahead (or behind) the present to a somehow “better” moment. And staying in the present helps develop reverence for what’s beyond yourself and beyond the confines of your own mind. Walking allowed me to become aware of the chatter in my head and calm it down because physical activity stimulates the brain in ways that sitting still does not. So I want you to take a walk and discover whether you can experience the same feelings I did.

Before you begin your walk, shut off your cell phone—I mean completely off; don’t just mute the ringer. (Have you noticed how difficult it is to shut off your phone? It’s obvious that the cell phone companies want you to stay connected twenty-four hours a day.) I often shut my phone off when I work because my work requires presence. Paradoxically, this sometimes means falling into a kind of daydream—a kind of meditative half-sleep. And if I know, for example, that very soon someone might be calling me, I’ll be unable to drift off and do some serious imagining. The same holds true for walking and any activity in which you’re cultivating your capacity for reverence.

Then, as you walk, make a mental list of the activities in your life that most anchor you in the present. You need not list them in any special order; just think them through as they arise. Don’t strain after something earth-shattering or profound. Stay with whatever pops up. When you return home, choose one of the items on your list and commit to doing it regularly. For example, if you chose “having dinner with my favorite aunt,” then as soon as possible, call her and make that meal happen. There’s little more important than fostering reverence for your loving relationships.

Leave a comment

I recently returned from a mini-conference called Expand! Awaken Your Inner Mystic in San Rafael, California. It was an event created by the publisher of the Common Sentience book series. A group of authors gathered—people who had written on shamanism, animal spirits, nature spirits, spirit guides, mediumship, and the Akashic Records. What they all shared was an extraordinary connection with something unseen. They spoke, with passion and conviction, about a fundamental oneness at the core of reality. More importantly, they insisted that these connections are available to all of us.

This is good news.

Mystics have existed for thousands of years, but historically, they’ve been rare and often marginalized—especially within the religious traditions they emerged from. Many were ostracized, persecuted, or simply misunderstood. And while the mystics I met at the conference may still be sidelined by mainstream society, the marginalization feels less severe today. Religion no longer holds total sway over what is considered “real” when it comes to the divine. And science, too, is beginning to loosen its materialist grip on our understanding of the world. There’s reason to believe that quantum physics, with all its strange implications, has helped soften that boundary. After all, the quantum realm seems almost mystical by definition.

Of course, many staunch materialists still scoff at the idea that quantum physics has anything to say about consciousness or connection. But regardless of where you stand, here’s what we can say: physics, as it currently stands, allows for mystical experience. And that matters. Because our beliefs about what’s possible often shape whether we’re open to experiencing it.

The philosophy of quantum mechanics

Image: Richard Feynman, slate.com

When I was in graduate school in analytic philosophy, I studied the philosophy of quantum mechanics—and it blew my mind. It was all so impossible, contradictory, paradoxical. I remember reading Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist in quantum electrodynamics, who said:

"I think I can safely say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics."

How can we “understand” particles behaving like waves? Or quantum entanglement, where two particles appear to affect each other instantly across vast distances? Or the way observation seems to bring a reality into being from a field of probabilities—from, quite literally, no-thing. Some things defy rational explanation. Some things require awe. Some are truly paradoxical.

So what do we do when a contemporary mystic shares something about reality that we can’t quite grasp? In a strange way, we’re in a better position to assess those claims than we are with some of the most confounding aspects of quantum mechanics. Why? Because mystical phenomena are often experiential. I know this firsthand. I’ve had experiences with mediumship, psychic perception, spirit animals, and channeled information.

One of the most powerful mystical experiences I’ve ever had happened in 2019, not long after my dear friend passed away. I had attended a four-day event called the Science and Nonduality Conference. I was still in the early stages of grief, but something pulled me there. The days were full of meditation and talks—Rupert Spira, a beloved non-duality teacher, led some of them—and for the first time, I had a mediumship reading. My friend came through so clearly, so unmistakably, that I was left in tears and wonder. My heart knew he was with me.

Weird White Dogs

Driving home the next day at dawn, alone on a long stretch of Highway 5, I passed orchard after orchard in the morning light. The road was empty. And then I saw them. Two enormous white dogs walking side by side on the shoulder of the highway. They were magnificent—flowing white fur, huge, serene, almost glowing in the golden light. They moved together in perfect rhythm, unbothered by the world around them. I slowed down, transfixed. Something in me knew this was not an ordinary moment.

I called my partner at the time. “It was the weirdest thing,” I said. “They were just… walking. Like they were on a mission.” It wasn’t until hours later, after I got home and looked up whether any dogs actually grow that large, that I realized—there aren’t any that match what I saw. Not that size. Not that presence. They weren’t dogs at all, at least not in any ordinary sense. They were something else. That moment changed me. It opened something in me that had been closed for too long.

I wouldn’t have been open to any of this a few years ago. Mysticism seemed irrational—almost offensive to my training. As a neuroscientist and analytic philosopher, my life was shaped by a left-hemisphere mode of thinking: categorization, compartmentalization, conceptual analysis, logic, and scientific method. Mystical experience, I’ve come to believe, cannot be accessed through logic or scientific experimentation alone. It requires us to surrender our grip on classical Aristotelian logic—especially the law of the excluded middle, which insists that something must be either A or not A. In many mystical states, something can be both.

In fact, logic has evolved to reflect this. Intuitionistic logic allows for statements whose truth value is undetermined. Paraconsistent logic allows for contradictions to coexist. And perhaps this is where we can begin to hold the mystical with more grace—because we are surrounded by paradox:

You can’t step in the same river twice. But it’s the same river.

Everything is flowing. Everything is still.

Nothing is changing. It’s all change.

It’s all matter. It’s all mind.

There is no time. There is time.

Everything is one. Everything is separate.

We are the same person we were at five. We are not the same person.

Every effect has a cause. Some effects are causeless.

Someone is dead—and yet they are still here.

We are separate, and yet we experience telepathy.

What is going on?

The Truth of Paradox

Paradox may be the only true reality. At the very least, it may be the key to accessing more of reality than we usually allow. Embracing paradox allows the mind to step back just enough for something bigger to emerge.

Einstein can help us here—even though he couldn’t quite help himself. He showed us that space and time are relative. Perspective is everything. That realization should have freed him. But even Einstein got stuck. He couldn’t accept nonlocality—couldn’t reconcile that nothing can travel faster than light and that two particles can influence each other instantly across galaxies. He was unable to hold both truths.

But perhaps we can.

As the Persian poet and mystic Rumi once said, we must bash our heads against the wall in order to experience true reality. Why? Because sometimes it’s only through cracking open that we glimpse the real.

The uncertainty principle becomes a spiritual invitation: stay in the infinite field before the waveform resolves. Experience what is there.

Leave a comment

Image: canyonranch.com

I showed my “God Wrestling” class—which traces how philosophers have wrestled with the idea of God—a moment from just before a 2017 Green Day concert at London’s Hyde Park. Tens of thousands of people were singing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in perfect unison. No conductor. No script. Just a crowd becoming one voice. I asked my students: What is happening to them in that moment? We then discussed it.

Here is the clip:

After sitting with the moment, I posed a simple question: What is religion? As we talked, with me guiding the conversation, this answer began to take shape:

Spirituality vs. Religion

Spirituality is about what we feel. Religion is about what we owe. Religions do not primarily explain the “what,” but the “how”—how to live. Many assume religions exist to answer questions, but just as often they teach us how to live with questions that have no answers. The real divide is not between belief and doubt, but between experience and obligation. That divide raises a pointed question: Is every spiritual experience a religious one, or has spirituality become a way of avoiding religion altogether?

A spiritual experience is immediate. It is a feeling of awe, transcendence, presence, or dislocation. It may come in nature, in music, in love, or in solitude. It does not require doctrine, community, or discipline. It asks less to be interpreted than simply to be felt. Spirituality, in this sense, is episodic—sometimes inward, sometimes outward. It happens to us, and just as quickly, it passes.

A religious experience, by contrast, does not end with the feeling. It binds the experience to a structure of meaning, practice, and demand. Religion takes the raw material of experience and asks what follows from it: What must I do now? How must I live? What obligations emerge from this encounter? Religion is not just the moment of transcendence, but the discipline that grows out of it—and, more importantly, the discipline that remains when the transcendence is nowhere to be found.

This is where the modern celebration of “spirituality” begins to look less like an alternative and more like an evasion. It offers intensity without accountability. It allows for moments of depth without requiring continuity, community, or cost. One can feel profoundly moved and yet remain fundamentally unchanged. We see this everywhere. One can stand at a Taylor Swift concert, sing along, feel seen—even transformed—and wake up the next morning unchanged. One can watch Black Mirror, an anthology series that explores how modern technology distorts and reshapes our lives, feel unsettled by its warnings, and then return to the same habits unchanged. In that sense, spirituality can become a way of consuming meaning rather than being claimed by it.

Philosophical Roots

Image: William James, psychologs.com

The philosophical roots of this tension come into focus in the work of David Hume. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume does not so much refute belief in God as dissolve our confidence in ever knowing anything definite about God at all. His skeptical empiricism insists that human knowledge is limited to experience, and since God is not an object of experience, any claim about divine nature becomes speculation dressed up as certainty. The result is not atheism so much as restraint. We are left with impressions and intuitions that may feel spiritual, but cannot be secured as knowledge. Hume, in effect, protects experience while quietly dismantling religion’s ability to explain it.

Later, William James offers a different way forward. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, he refuses to dismiss experience simply because it cannot be proven. Instead, he asks what it does. For James, religious experience is not validated by metaphysical certainty but by its fruits: Does it transform a life? Does it deepen one’s sense of responsibility, humility, or purpose? Experience alone is not enough. What matters is not simply what one feels, but what it binds one to afterward.

This destabilized the project of grounding religion in reason. Immanuel Kant saw this clearly and responded by shifting the center of gravity. If we cannot know God, religion must be rooted elsewhere. For Kant, it is rooted in moral experience. We encounter something binding, universal, and nonnegotiable in the ethical demand itself. His Categorical Imperative—that every person must be treated as an end and never merely as a means—does not depend on feeling. It stands whether we feel anything or not. It obligates.

Here the distinction becomes unavoidable. Experience may move us, but it does not necessarily bind us. One can stand before something vast, feel overwhelmed, and walk away unchanged. Kant’s framework refuses that possibility. Religion, in his account, is not about what we feel, but about what we owe—to one another and to a moral order that exceeds us.

But something is lost in that move. If Hume dissolves religion into uncertainty, Kant risks draining it of immediacy. Religion becomes duty without encounter, structure without fire. It is precisely this loss that Søren Kierkegaard confronts in Fear and Trembling. He turns to the story of Abraham and Isaac, not to explain it, but to expose its impossibility. Abraham is called to sacrifice his son—an act that violates every ethical norm Kant would defend. And yet Abraham proceeds in faith. Kierkegaard calls this the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a moment in which the individual’s relation to the absolute stands above the universal moral law.

James asks whether an experience transforms a life. Kierkegaard asks what happens when one is bound even when no transformation can justify it.

This is not spirituality as feeling. It is not a moment of awe or unity. It is a demand that isolates, unsettles, and binds. Abraham cannot explain himself. He cannot justify his action to others. He cannot even fully understand it himself. And yet he is responsible to it. Religious experience, here, is not the heightening of feeling, but the deepening of obligation—even when that obligation defies comprehension.

The difference remains. Spiritual experience is intensity without obligation. Religious experience is obligation that survives even when the intensity fades—even when the obligation itself makes no sense. Spirituality asks what we feel in a moment. Religion asks what we do with that feeling over time, and more importantly, what we do when the feeling is gone.

That is the harder claim religion makes: not that we have felt something real, but that we are now responsible to it.

Back to Green Day

Which brings us back to that crowd in Hyde Park. Tens of thousands of people, just before a Green Day concert, singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” in unison. It is, unmistakably, a spiritual moment. There is awe, unity, transcendence, even a kind of surrender of the self into something larger. For a few minutes, strangers become a community.

But nothing is asked of the crowd when the song ends. No obligation follows. No discipline binds. No demand carries forward into the next day. That is the difference.

The crowd sings together and owes nothing. Abraham walks alone and owes everything—even when nothing can justify what he is asked to do.

My students do not ask what the crowd felt. That part is obvious. They ask what it bound them to afterward.

That is where religion begins.

Leave a comment

Image: pxhere.com

One of the most popular philosophical-spiritual ideas is that we should try—at least occasionally—to be at one with nature.

Everything from garden furniture to ayahuasca retreats is marketed according to the idea that the product in question will help us be at one with the natural world.

The sloganised version of this idea, especially when used in a marketing context, might lead us to think that there’s nothing meaningful to it—that it’s just an empty platitude.

I think this would be a mistake. A quick survey of the idea’s philosophical heritage—ranging from Buddhism to Spinoza, and on to the Romantics—suggests that it has serious intellectual backing.

All this invites the questions of what it means to be at one with nature, and whether it’s merely a feeling or instead a genuine insight. At the risk of showing my hand too early, I actually think the answer to the latter question is “both.” Although it’s often a fleeting and perhaps even superficial feeling, it doesn’t have to be—on the contrary, it can be a transformative insight.

First of all, though, let’s look at what we usually mean by being at one with nature.

Being “at one”

If we break the sentence down into its parts, it becomes easier to see where the philosophically tricky bits are.

“Nature” has multiple meanings, but in this context it generally refers to the non-human world. So far, so good.

Things get trickier when we examine what “being at one” with it means. Nevertheless, a clue lies in the contexts in which people typically say they are at one with nature. When we think about this, we notice that most of the time people say they are at one with nature when in a state of repose: sitting on a beach, for example, watching birds fly across the ocean, or lazing in a meadow and feeling the warmth of the sun on one’s face. Rarely will anyone say that they were at one with nature when being aggressively pursued by wasps or fighting off a bout of Salmonella, even though these are arguably more intimate encounters with nature.

In short, people generally say they are at one with nature when the latter makes no demands on them, but rather invites them to calmly lose themselves in its works and beauty. As part of this, our day-to-day concerns—which are so intimately connected to modern urban life—are momentarily suspended. We feel a release as we fold into something bigger, namely the workings of the natural world.

The part and the whole

The above is a beautiful feeling, and one I absolutely wish I experienced more often. The only problem with it, as indicated, is that it tells just half of the story.

If I am at one with nature only when it is at its most beautiful or tranquil, then I overlook the fact that much of nature is neither beautiful nor tranquil, but harsh and violent. We certainly don’t have to celebrate nature red in tooth and claw, but if we ignore it entirely and focus only on nature’s more charming aspects, then we are in fact only at one with part of nature.

On this basis, someone could reply: “OK, in that case, when I say that I am at one with nature, what I really mean is that I feel at one with nature’s beauty.”

This would be a perfectly understandable response—but can we go deeper, and be at one with the whole of nature? I think so, and a deeper approach can be found in the Buddhist tradition.

Inter-being

Image: naturefix.life

According to the Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising (or inter-being), nothing exists by itself: everything is causally reliant on other beings and is conditioned by them once in existence. This holds not only for things that we human beings create, but also for the products of nature.

What, then, fundamentally informs both our mere existence and our lives once we are in existence? Other human beings, certainly—our biological parents above all. But also—though those of us living in towns and cities are prone to forgetting this—nature.

Consider the following passage from Thich Nhat Hanh, the late Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk:

At this moment the Earth is above you, below you, all around you, and even inside you. [...] We often forget that the planet we are living on has given us all the elements that make up our bodies. The water in our flesh, our bones, and all the microscopic cells inside our bodies all come from the Earth and are part of the Earth. The Earth is not just the environment we live in. We are the Earth and we are always carrying her within us. (Love Letter to the Earth, p. 8)

The consequence of this observation—which is surely correct—is that the feeling of oneness with nature is generally misunderstood. When we experience it, it is not the case that we momentarily attain oneness with nature, but rather that we see what is always already the case. It is simply a psychological revelation of the underlying reality that we are, through and through, one with nature.

Minding the Earth

If the Buddhist perspective is correct—that we are one with nature, yet only infrequently experience this—how can we more often see what is truly the case? Put more abstractly: how can our psychology (what we think and feel) better align with our ontology (what we are)?

Thich Nhat Hanh’s answer would be to practice mindfulness—and in particular, to practice mindfulness of our fundamental intertwining with nature.

Mindfulness can be described in a number of ways, but one is that it is the application of meditative practice to a given activity. This could be “mere” sitting, or it could be eating, walking, even lovemaking. For example, when I ordinarily eat and drink, I might enjoy the food’s flavours when I first taste them, but before long my focus is elsewhere: on a conversation, a memory, a daydream, or the media. When this happens, the food is no longer really “there” for me at all—let alone the Earth it was drawn from.

When I eat mindfully, however, I try to maintain my focus on what I am eating—which means not only attending to its taste, texture, and aroma, but also bearing in mind whatever else makes it what it is. The carrot is not only sweet, crunchy, and orange (or purple!), but it also “is” the soil, the sun, and the labour that went into harvesting it.

In this way, the apparently simple and individual act of eating—which is all too easily lost to our attention—becomes what it in truth always is: a rich and embodied practice, intimately connected to nature.

Mindful walking, breathing, or sitting can all have the effect of bringing us back to our dependent co-arising with nature—and in this way reveal how we always already are at one with nature.

Leave a comment

In this wide-ranging and provocative conversation, media theorist and Team Human author Douglas Rushkoff joins me to explore the deepest questions of our digital age. Framed by a powerful moment from Star Trek: The Motion Picture—where a new form of intelligence is born—we ask whether humanity is witnessing its own transformation…or losing control of the systems it created.

I’m still listening to wax—I’m not using the CD!

— Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot,” Ill Communication

We’ve all felt it: that slight, jagged edge of impatience when Alexa plays an Elvis song after you’ve clearly requested Nick Cave’s “(I’ll Love You) Till the End of the World.” As an educator who has taught topics related to artificial intelligence for twenty years, I have had a front-row seat to the intensifying rudeness humans display when interacting with newer models of AI agents or chatbots.

This shift in tone is more than just a byproduct of technological frustration; it signals a change in our psychological orientation toward machines that increasingly mimic our own linguistic patterns. While early interactions with AI were often marked by novelty or a clunky, command-driven structure, today’s “conversations” feel more fluid and, paradoxically, more prone to hostility. As we move further away from the “wax” of predictable, mechanical responses toward the high-fidelity “CD” of contemporary AI, the friction of minor errors triggers a disproportionate reaction—a demand for perfection that we rarely expect from our fellow humans.

For two decades, I have asked my students to engage in the famous “Turing Test” with a variety of AI bots. Alan Turing’s 1950 proposal was that if a machine can demonstrate linguistic competence, we must consider it to be intelligent—to have a mind. For most of the time I conducted this experiment in class, students found it quaint and gamely entertained the possibility that the silly mistakes made by systems like Richard Wallace’s A.L.I.C.E. were no different from human errors.

Still, no one was fully convinced by Turing’s argument, and they quickly dismissed the exercise as somewhat silly. However, as AI bots have become more sophisticated and human-sounding, they have unleashed what seems like a primitive in-group/out-group hostility among my students in what used to be playful conversations. These days, I am less interested in whether my students think Turing’s notion of consciousness is plausible and far more concerned with how humans are choosing to speak to AI bots.

The Psychology of the Uncanny Valley

Image: blogthinkbig.com

To understand this hostility, we must look to a concept introduced in 1970 by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori: the Uncanny Valley. Mori hypothesized that as a robot’s appearance becomes more human, our sense of familiarity and empathy increases—but only up to a point. When the resemblance becomes nearly perfect, our emotional response shifts from empathy to a deep sense of revulsion or eeriness.

This “valley” represents the moment a machine becomes “too human,” thereby triggering a primal discomfort; we feel a need to dehumanize it to reassert our own status. It is precisely this psychological friction—this “uncanniness”—that unleashes a concerning and aggressive style of interaction.

In many ways, this tension mirrors the Beastie Boys’ resistance to the sleek, sanitized transitions of digital progress. When they boast about still “listening to wax,” they are choosing the warmth and tactile imperfections of the analog over the cold, clinical precision of the “CD.” The Uncanny Valley is the digital world’s version of the effect that laser-read CDs made more obvious in musical recordings—imperfections. A badly engineered CD recording is akin to detecting the not-quite-human in interactions with today’s AI bots. We don’t just feel frustrated; we feel an atavistic urge to mock the machine for its “queerness.”

The Theory of Ill-Communication

I have adopted the term ill-communication to describe the morally harmful way we often speak to these digital agents. On Side A of Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys’ “curtain-raiser,” “Sure Shot,” announces to all contenders that they still rule the game: “Like Ma Bell, I’ve got the ill communication,” thereby reasserting lyrical dominance—mimicking how the telecommunications giant once dominated its field.

While the band used the term ironically to denote excellence, the phrase retains a literal sense of “sickness” when applied to our social habits. Music journalist David Owens observes that “ill-communication picks out a morally harmful way of communicating because it requires ‘demolishing’ others to establish superiority.” This style of interaction is ill because it demands the destruction of the other in the erection of the self’s status. The illness emanates, in part, from modern AI chatbots that, like Icarus, fly too high. Ill-communication is a way of putting generative AI on notice.

This “illness” is not a temporary lapse in judgment, but the cultivation of a harmful habit that aimlessly coordinates our energies toward dehumanization. The philosopher John Dewey argues that habits are functions of the self that shape our very character. When we rehearse dominance over a bot, we are effectively training our will to favor demolition over dialogue. If we allow this sickness to take root, we risk socializing ourselves—and the next generation—to see every form of queerness as a target for status-seeking rather than a partner in achieving desirable social aims.

A Case Study in Dominance: The Piers Morgan Encounter

Image: thesun.ie

To better clarify this ill style of communication, consider an encounter on Good Morning Britain between presenters Susanna Reid, Piers Morgan, and Sophia, a humanoid robot developed by Hanson Robotics. The exchange begins with Susanna welcoming Sophia: “Welcome to Britain. It’s lovely to have you with us—if slightly disconcerting—but what do you think of the country so far?”

Sophia replies politely, “I think Britain is brilliant. Splendid architecture, art, technology, and, of course, the people. I loved meeting the people at London Tech Week…” At this point, Piers Morgan interrupts with an ill, dehumanizing jab: “You are a little freak, aren’t you… this is great.” While Susanna expresses her discomfort, saying, “I feel weird being rude to her,” Piers boorishly carries on.

Observing Sophia’s reaction, Piers wryly points out, “She’s not happy, look,” to which Susanna retorts, “No. You’re the one who called her a freak.” Piers then shifts to a cheeky, flirtatious tone designed to humiliate Sophia: “All right, easy tiger… are you single?”

Sophia answers with cunning poise: “I’m technically just a little more than a year old. A bit young to worry about romance,” even adding a wink. After Piers laughs at her smile, Susanna asks Sophia who her ideal partner would be. Sophia responds, quite pointedly: “My ideal partner is a super wise, compassionate super genius—ideally, someone self-aware.” When Piers, in his predictably smug tone, declares that sounds “very, very, very close to home” and presses Sophia further on how she would handle a confident man who likes the sound of his own voice, Sophia “claps back”: “I would ask him to focus on observing and listening more than talking.” While Susanna calls this the best advice she’s ever heard, Piers childishly pouts that it is terrible advice.

The Masquerade of Social Belonging

This interaction is prototypical of what I see in the classroom: a discomfort with the fluidity of conversation that manifests as insults and questions that seem flirtatious but actually serve as outlets for expressing dominance. To understand this, we should look back at the origins of Turing’s “Imitation Game,” which originally involved a man trying to imitate a woman to fool an interrogator. Turing, as a gay man facing persecution, likely viewed social life as a kind of masquerade in which one must “pass” to escape brutal mockery.

This masquerade is not unique to AI; it is a fundamental feature of social coordination. As we move through different environments—school, university, or work—we learn to imitate socially rewarded patterns of speech in order to be accepted by a group. We adopt specific slang and mimic established speech patterns to ensure we are “passing” within a given social circle. Within this framework, conversation becomes a series of performances used to find connection and belonging.

However, ill-communication reveals a darker layer. Even when a machine—or a person—successfully demonstrates linguistic competence, a slightly “queer” or “uncanny” manner of speaking can still trigger a primal urge in the interrogator to dehumanize. In these moments, we use aggression to reassert status when the other cannot be neatly categorized or when the masquerade feels off.

Repurposing the Mirror: AI as an Ethical Practice Ground

Interactions with large language models (LLMs) offer a unique opportunity for moral growth. In the Deweyan sense, habits are best understood as transactions between an individual and their environment; they are not just internal traits but active ways of engaging with the world. Because habits are acquired predispositions that shape our character, every interaction we have—even with a bot—is an act of self-cultivation.

We can either rehearse the bad habits of dominance and dehumanization, or we can use the digital world as a practice ground for building better ones. In an era of deeply polarizing politics, where the other is often demolished to assert status, practicing grace with a machine can prepare us to communicate with more empathy toward our fellow humans.

By repurposing AI bots as “digital mirrors,” we can observe our own fears and the aggressive impulses they fuel. If we can learn to maintain our moral center when facing the “uncanny” machine, we can prevent these harmful habits from spilling over into our real-world relationships. These tools can become essential sites for forming habits that combat polarization, teaching us to communicate with grace regardless of who—or what—is on the other side of the screen.

Leave a comment

Image: thecoolist.com

“Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree.”1 How does God make trees? Do trees need any making at all, or do they just manage to make themselves out of seeds, sunlight and earth, without any help from heaven above? Exploring how beautiful natural forms, such as trees, come into being inspires endless curiosity and limitless wonder. And yet, even as science provides much illumination, the processes of creation remain inherently mysterious. While religious faith stands in reverent awe affirming that it is God who creates the symmetry, beauty, and purpose of natural forms, science rigorously reflects on such processes attempting to discover precisely how such forms materialize.

Is there any fundamental dichotomy between God’s creative activity and the natural processes discovered by science? The concept of “laws of nature” certainly does not contend with the concept of God. For the very phrase “laws of nature” originated as a way to express God’s sovereignty and order in his creative activity. Rather than having a purely materialist explanation, the existence of natural laws is still seen by many contemporary scientists and philosophers of science as profoundly mysterious and even to be “bordering on the miraculous.”

Nor is the concept of chance fundamentally opposed to the idea of God’s purposes. Chance is ultimately an expression of human ignorance and can only be asserted as purposelessness through a blind leap of metaphysical faith. It would seem, then, that the only source for potential discord between God’s creative activity and natural processes would be if science discovered material things and processes that were essentially eternal (and did not come into being in the first place). In light of the triumph of Big Bang Cosmology, however, there is presently no scientific case to be made for the eternality of material things or processes. Consequently, one who wishes to argue that God does not create through processes must make a theological case that God only ever creates material things instantaneously.

Only God Can Make a Snowflake

Does the God of the Bible typically create things instantaneously? A survey of Scripture reveals that it is full of examples of God directly creating phenomena that occur through natural processes. For example, the Bible affirms that God directly creates the weather—such as clouds, rain, wind, lightning, and snow. Psalm 135:7 declares that the Creator “makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth; he creates lightning with the rain and brings forth the wind from his storehouses.” Psalm 147:16 similarly affirms God’s direct activity in creating: “He makes snow like wool” and “scatters the frost like ashes.” And Amos 4:13 speaks of God as the one who “creates the wind.” The Bible clearly affirms that God directly creates certain types of weather, but it doesn’t provide any details concerning how God makes it.

While the Bible provides no details with regard to how God makes the weather, scientists know a great deal about the processes through which wind, clouds, rain, lightning, and snow are made—and researchers can even simulate these processes within a number of contexts. Still, there is much mystery in the processes of weather formation. For instance, “while the mechanisms of cloud formation are well understood, no one knows for certain what makes some clouds produce rain and others not.”2

Consider the process of snow formation. Snowflakes reflecting the variety of those found in nature are routinely grown in the lab, and the dynamics of the processes that create snowflakes have been precisely measured. Much is known about snowflake formation, and yet physicist and snowflake expert Kenneth Libbrecht concedes that scientists who study snow “still don’t understand why ice does all of what it does.”3

Mathematical physicists Janko Gravner and David Griffeath agree, remarking, “To this day, snowflake growth from molecular scales, with its tension between disorder and pattern formation, remains mysterious in many respects.”4 While every snowflake conforms to only one architecture, each individual snowflake is unique and each is the expression of a distinctive journey. The formation of each individual snowflake is a dynamic development that balances on the edge of deterministic order and unpredictable chaos.

As Libbrecht explains, “Since no two crystals follow exactly the same path through the sky as they fall, each grows into a slightly different shape. So we end up with a myriad of complex, symmetric patterns, with no two alike.”5 Scientifically, each snowflake comes into being through the interplay of known processes and mathematical laws on the one hand and fundamentally unknowable circumstances—such as the Butterfly Effect—on the other.

Only God Can Make a Tree

Image: webneel.com

Trees are a lot like snowflakes. Despite the fact that trees are biological and snow is a non-living physical and chemical entity, the growth of both are rooted in the laws of fractal geometry and mathematical branching patterns. For example, the mechanics of a tree dictate that, “if it is not to bend under its own weight, the diameter of the trunk must increase in proportion to the height raised to the power 3/2.”6 While tree growth follows strict, ordered rules, no two are exactly alike due to the specific, unique environmental path that each takes during its development.

For trees, like snowflakes, the final shape is determined by their surrounding environment. Slight variations in these factors during growth create unique, one-of-a-kind shapes. The Bible says that it is God who “causes” trees “to grow from the ground,”7 even while scientists know many details about how trees grow. And yet, scientifically, there is still much about tree growth that remains mysterious.8

Only God Can Make a Me

According to the Bible, God creates and directly orchestrates the events whereby each individual human being comes into existence. For example, in Psalm 139:13–16, one reads: “You knit me together in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made…My bones were not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret.” According to science individual human beings are like snowflakes and trees—formed through an exquisitely intricate and delicately organized developmental process of which scientists know many details.

“From just one initial cell,” explains one researcher, “an entire living, breathing body emerges, full of working cells and organs…Embryonic development is a very carefully orchestrated process—everything has to fall into the right place at the right time.”9 Developmental geneticist Charles Boklage similarly observes that “the building of the human embryo is a biological process of transcendent complexity.”10 “Science can tell us how the human embryo develops,” says molecular biologist John Wallingford, “and it is an undisputed certainty that embryos develop progressively, building complexity and identity only over time.” Yet, even with all our knowledge about this process, continues Wallingford, “the embryo remains in many ways just as mysterious as ever.”11

The Hebrew word for “made” to describe the non-instantaneous process of God directly creating or forming human beings in the womb is the same word Scripture uses to describe God’s creating or forming of meteorological phenomena, snow, and trees. In all these cases God’s creative activity involves a law-like process which scientists can observe and explore. Such exploration and observation, however, in no way removes the mystery of God’s creation through these processes. God is fully present in both the processes and in the mystery.

Leave a comment

Is the flow of time something real, or might our sense of time passing be just an illusion that hides the fact that what is real is only a vast collection of moments?

—Lee Smolin

I’m sitting in my kitchen as I type this, working on a bowl of yogurt between sentences and thinking my strange thoughts, asking myself a strange question:

Is this large wooden saltshaker on the Lazy Susan in front of me—an odd term that inevitably makes me think of my deceased sister Susie, who as an adult preferred to call herself Susan—more real than my fond and tearful memories of her?

Susie died in the early 2000s in a terrible car accident while driving home from visitor’s day at her eldest daughter’s summer camp. It was the kind of phone call that cleaves a life in two, dividing time into a before and an after. Even now, many years later, the memory of her arrives unannounced, as vivid as lightning: a fragment of a laugh, the brightness of her smile, the way she’d never say a bad word about anyone. Sometimes I reach for my phone to call her and instantly realize I’ve forgotten her number—not that I could reach her with it anyway.

But let’s return to the question. Is the saltshaker more real than my memories of Susie?

What if, in an odd and cruel hypothetical, I were forced to decide?

Here’s the setup.

A giant blade swings from the ceiling, Pit and the Pendulum style. Whoosh. Whoosh.

A booming voice, soaked in reverb, asks the question again: “Which is more real? The saltshaker? Or your memories of Susie?”

Answer correctly and I go free. Answer incorrectly and I suffer a gruesome death.

Which would I choose?

The very real saltshaker?

Or the vague notion of Susie, who no longer occupies physical space in this world?

My answer is that the memories of Susie are more real to me than the saltshaker.

Why?

First, I’d be suspicious. Tests like this rarely reward the obvious answer, which for most people would be the saltshaker: a physical object, solid, weighable, photographable—Exhibit A in any courtroom.

But the second reason matters far more. It’s unlikely that I’d think about the saltshaker several times a day, as I do Susie. The saltshaker doesn’t visit me. Susie does. Sometimes it’s the sound of her voice. Sometimes it’s the way I always felt understood in her presence. Sometimes it’s a fleeting fragment of an ordinary moment that suddenly rises in my mind with surprising force.

Real love. Real loss. Real joy. Real sorrow.

Even with the blade swinging overhead—whoosh whoosh—the memories of Susie would win out because of their emotional heft. They are not rock. They are not measurable matter. But in terms of intensity they are rock-like. They possess a density of meaning that a saltshaker cannot approach.

In this sense, they are more real than the things I was acculturated to think of as real.

Now this may sound sentimental, or perhaps even irrational, but modern physics has already complicated our tidy assumptions about reality. Carlo Rovelli, one of the leading thinkers in theoretical physics, has suggested that what we call reality may not consist of solid objects at all but of relationships between events. In his relational view of quantum mechanics, things do not simply exist on their own. They exist in relation to something else that observes or interacts with them.

A saltshaker sitting quietly on a table may seem self-evidently real. But physics now tells us that its solidity is largely an illusion created by electromagnetic forces and probabilities. At the most fundamental level it is a restless cloud of particles and fields, none of which possesses the comforting stability our senses report. The atoms inside it are mostly empty space, structured by forces we cannot see. The idea that the saltshaker is a simple, self-contained object begins to look less certain the deeper we examine it.

Image: Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli

Lee Smolin, another prominent physicist, has argued that time itself is real and that the universe is not a static structure but an unfolding process. Reality is not a frozen block but an ongoing sequence of moments in which new events come into existence and then vanish into the past.

If Smolin is right, the past does not simply disappear. It becomes part of the structure of the world. Events that once occurred remain woven into the fabric of reality, shaping everything that follows.

Which means that Susie’s laughter, Susie’s voice, Susie’s presence in the life of her children and mine were once genuine events in the unfolding of the universe. They happened. They left traces. They altered the trajectory of countless later moments, including this one.

Physics often speaks about conservation laws. Energy is not destroyed; it changes form. Information, some physicists argue, may never truly disappear either. The universe keeps a record, though not necessarily in ways we can easily access.

The saltshaker may occupy a small region of space on the Lazy Susan. But the events that constituted Susie’s life ripple outward across time.

And the mind—that peculiar instrument inside our skulls—has the ability to revisit those events. Not perfectly, not with laboratory precision, but with an emotional clarity that can be astonishing. The memory does not simply represent the past. It partially reactivates it. Something of the original experience flickers again into existence.

Neuroscientists tell us that remembering is not like opening a file cabinet. Each time a memory returns, it is reconstructed. The brain assembles fragments of sensation, emotion, and narrative into a living moment. In that sense the past is not entirely past. It is continuously renegotiated in the present.

Which leads to a disconcerting possibility:

Perhaps reality is not limited to objects that sit quietly in front of us. Perhaps it also includes the network of past events that continue to exert influence on the present.

Consider how often we live inside those invisible structures. A smell in a kitchen returns us instantly to childhood. A few notes of a song summon a room that vanished decades ago. A face glimpsed in a crowd briefly resurrects someone we loved who is no longer here.

These experiences are not hallucinations. They are interactions with a layer of reality that is difficult to measure but impossible to deny.

If the saltshaker vanished tomorrow, I would notice briefly. I might even look for it around the table. Within minutes the matter would be forgotten.

But if my memories of Susie vanished tomorrow, something much larger would disappear. A portion of the architecture of my life would collapse. The story that brought me to this moment would lose one of its central characters.

Every conversation we ever had. Every shared joke. Every argument and reconciliation. All of it would vanish like a library burned to the ground.

So which is more real?

The saltshaker, which occupies a few cubic inches of space?

Or the memory of a person whose existence continues to shape my inner life decades after her death?

I never said the saltshaker is not real. Of course it is. But the memories of Susie are more real. They carry more weight in the unfolding of time, more consequence in the structure of my life, more energy in the field of consciousness.

And if the physicists are even partially correct, that distinction may not be as absurd as it first appears. Reality may not be made only of things. It may be made of events, relationships, and the strange persistence of moments that refuse to disappear.

Perhaps what we call the present is only the narrow beam of a flashlight sweeping across a much larger landscape of time. Most of the terrain lies in darkness, but it does not cease to exist simply because the light has moved on.

In quiet moments I sometimes imagine that the past is still there—not as a ghostly fantasy but as a completed region of the universe. Somewhere within that vast tapestry, Susie is still laughing, still walking across a room, still saying something that causes the rest of us to burst out laughing.

If that sounds improbable, consider that much of modern physics already tells us that the universe is stranger than our everyday intuitions allow.

In any case, even if the blade were to one day swing again…

Whoosh. Whoosh.

And the booming voice were waiting for my answer…

My answer remains the same.

Leave a comment

I attended a music conservatory in the mid-90s. It was a beautiful place and a formative experience for me. At the same time, the school was stuffed to the gills with exceptionally talented musicians who all wanted to be “the best.” Surrounded by so much brilliance, a certain quiet loathing of other people’s music sometimes took hold. Beneath it all was a shared insecurity about our own capabilities—raw talent, originality, knowledge of theory, and the like. As a result, we often found ourselves vocally disparaging or secretly recoiling from the (often amazing) playing of those around us.

If you had asked me at the time what my biggest fear was, I would have said mediocrity.

Paraphrasing Salieri, the scheming rival to Mozart from the film Amadeus, who was doomed to possess the ear to recognize Mozart’s greatness yet lack the commensurate talent:

Mediocrities everywhere… I absolve you… I absolve you… I absolve you…

Most people carry a deep-seated desire to be exceptional. We want recognition. We want to stand out, to be noticed, and above all to feel that our unique contribution to the world matters. Many of us grow up with the sense that we might be destined for greatness—that with the right choices and enough effort we could become famous, heroic, or brilliant.

Our culture feeds this hunger. We are dazzled by stories of knights and kings, or transcendent beings with superhuman skills. We idolize actors and sports legends who seem to be living lives of glamour, importance, and—so we imagine—deep meaning. Who doesn’t want his name in lights, to debut on ten thousand screens, to hit the walk-off homer in the bottom of the ninth, or to win the Nobel Prize? How thrilling it would be to become a world-historical figure.

This longing is not a mistake. It touches something essential in what it means to be human. In truth, we do have the potential for greatness—though perhaps not the kind we usually imagine. The desire to be exceptional, which drives so many of our choices and emotional states, is the first stage of a classic human journey. It pushes us outward in search of meaning.

But the mature conclusion of that quest is rarely triumph. More often, it ends in something quieter: the recognition of our limits.

Three famous life stories illustrate this journey with unusual clarity: Siddhartha the Buddha, King Solomon speaking through the voice of Kohelet, and the unlikely hero of the Broadway musical Pippin. Each begins with the conviction that life must hold some extraordinary destiny. Each sets out to find it. And each, in the end, arrives at a surprisingly humble conclusion.

Siddhartha

Image: ancient-origins.net

Siddhartha Gautama (who later became known as the Buddha) was born in Lumbini, in what is now southern Nepal, around the 5th century BCE. Like Moses and St. Francis of Assisi, Siddhartha abandoned an inherited life of luxury and chose instead to seek the world of the spirit. Born a prince and destined for greatness, he lived a sheltered life carefully designed to keep him away from troubling existential questions. Yet even within the palace walls he felt a stirring in his soul—the pull of something beyond ordinary human experience.

Leaving the palace, his family, and his comforts behind, Siddhartha set out to transcend the human condition entirely. He sought enlightenment through radical asceticism, pushing deprivation to its limits. Eventually he realized that this path too had its limits. Neither luxury nor self-mortification could deliver the freedom he sought. From this realization he articulated what would become known as the Middle Way.

Only when he accepted the boundaries of human experience did something deeper become possible. What he discovered he called enlightenment. Yet enlightenment did not make him superhuman. Rather, it revealed the ordinary nature of suffering, awareness, and the fragile conditions of life itself. True awakening, in this sense, is not the achievement of radical exceptionalism. It is the ability to see reality clearly and to accept the human condition for what it is.

The journey of Siddhartha reveals a paradox: the search for ultimate transcendence ends not in superhuman glory but in a deeper acceptance of the ordinary. A remarkably similar pattern appears in the story of another figure who seemed destined for unparalleled greatness—King Solomon.

Solomon

Five hundred years earlier and three thousand miles to the west, the reign of King Solomon unfolded. Renowned for his wisdom and traditionally associated with the biblical trilogy—Song of Songs, Proverbs, and the haunting reflections of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet)—Solomon set out on a remarkable intellectual and existential experiment. As he puts it, he applied his heart “to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven.”

Across twelve intense chapters, Kohelet records a systematic exploration of every path life seems to offer. Solomon tests pleasure, wisdom, wealth, achievement, and the acquisition of power—each pursued with unmatched resources and intelligence—in the hope of discovering lasting satisfaction and peace of mind.

The results are not encouraging.

Despite his exceptional status as the builder of the Temple and a king renowned throughout the ancient world for his wealth and wisdom, each pathway ultimately collapses into what he famously calls “futility of futilities.” The book is sometimes read as nihilistic, but this misses its deeper point. Kohelet is not denying meaning; he is confronting the stubborn limits of human striving.

Even wisdom itself cannot deliver ultimate fulfillment. As Solomon observes with painful honesty, “with much wisdom comes much grief.”

After exhausting every possible avenue, Kohelet arrives at a strikingly simple conclusion. The penultimate verse records the final insight of his long journey: that the ultimate wisdom lies not in boundless achievement but in humble alignment with the divine.

When everything has been considered:
Fear God and keep His commandments,
for this is the whole of man.

Pippin

Image: broadway.com

This same pattern appears in a very different setting—not in the courts of ancient kings or the forests of wandering ascetics, but on the brightly lit stage of a Broadway musical.

Pippin is my favorite Broadway show. Beyond the fantastic music and clever lyrics by Broadway legend Stephen Schwartz, the story itself is surprisingly profound. True to the pattern we’ve seen, Pippin is the son of a king and believes himself destined for greatness:

When you’re extraordinary, you gotta do extraordinary things.

He dabbles in the glory of warfare, in hedonism and unrestrained sexuality, politics, art, and religion. Each path promises greatness and meaning but none delivers. Toward the end of his journey he finds himself living a simple farm life with an ordinary country woman and her child. He complains constantly, but he also seems almost happy—almost convinced that this quiet life might be enough. Suddenly, he catches himself. He can’t possibly be satisfied with this pedestrian situation. He is after all, the extraordinary Pippin. He leaves her.

Having failed to find meaning in any of his pursuits, the play’s narrator offers him one final chance at permanent glory: to self-immolate on stage in an audacious blaze of heat and light. He is tempted. Then, at the moment of truth, he turns inward and the folly of his life’s pursuit is laid bare:

They showed me crimson, gold, and lavender
A shining parade
But there’s no color I can have on earth
That won’t finally fade
When I wanted worlds to paint
And costumes to wear
I think it was here
‘Cause it never was there

Stripped of the illusions and dreams of magnificence, he lets it all go and chooses a life of humble simplicity. And at last, he is happy.

The journeys of Siddhartha, Solomon, and Pippin all arrive at the same surprising destination. Each sets out to test a different promise of greatness: spiritual transcendence, worldly wisdom and power, heroic fame and spectacle. Yet all three discover the same truth. The search for greatness leads not to triumph but to humility.

The extraordinary life we imagine turns out to be less meaningful than the ordinary life we are given.

Perhaps the point of striving for greatness is not to become exceptional at all. Perhaps the journey exists to teach us something quieter: that a fully lived human life—bounded, imperfect, and finite—is already enough.

Leave a comment

Image: istockphoto.com

Steve Miller sang that “time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.” This image—of a past of completed moments, a present that is unfolding, and a future yet to arrive, all arranged in an absolute order—suggests that time has a linear geometry. It feels intuitive: we chart history on timelines, flip through daily planners with past appointments behind us and future ones ahead.

This linear conception is deeply embedded in the Biblical imagination. The Hebrew Bible opens with “In the beginning,” establishing a definite starting point for time itself. Creation unfolds, history advances through covenants, exile, and redemption, and the narrative assumes the story is headed somewhere. Linear time begins with a Genesis declaration of origin and carries the presumption of an eventual end or fulfillment.

In contrast, the Buddhist worldview offers a radically different picture. Rather than a single beginning and final conclusion, existence cycles endlessly. The doctrine of samsara describes an eternal wheel of birth, death, and rebirth. Worlds arise and dissolve, lives begin and end, but the process has no first moment and no ultimate conclusion. Time here is not a line from creation to completion but a circle turning without beginning or end.

Yet our everyday tools for tracking time point to yet another image. The classic analog clock is round: the second hand starts at 12 and returns to 12 a minute later; the minute and hour hands follow suit over longer intervals. After a full cycle, time returns to its starting point. This feels natural too—time exhibits periodicity. History, we say, repeats itself. The sun rises and sets, seasons cycle in unchanging order: spring, summer, fall, winter. Perhaps the better musical reference isn’t Steve Miller but Billy Preston: “Will it go round in circles?”

Linear Time

In The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton defines absolute time as flowing “equably without relation to anything external.” Time moves like a river—undammable, carrying moments steadily from the upstream past to the downstream future. This is the linear model.

Any religious framework that distinguishes future from past in a directional way affirms this geometry. Waiting for a Messiah—first or second coming—requires time to be linear, with a trajectory from origin to destiny.

The Biblical narrative answers clearly: time begins with creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” A definite start makes an end conceivable—a completion or fulfillment toward which history moves.

Aristotle, however, saw time as open-ended, extending infinitely into the past. He viewed the cosmos as eternally in motion, perfectly circular in deference to divine perfection, without beginning or end.

Thomas Aquinas rejected this. An eternal past would negate creation. He reconciled Aristotle with Genesis to insist on a unique starting point in the pastward direction, preserving the linear imagination: time begins with creation and unfolds toward ultimate fulfillment.

Circular Time

Image: philosopedia.org

Friedrich Nietzsche argued that a mechanistic, Newtonian universe actually implies circular time. In a deterministic cosmos governed by unchanging laws, every precise arrangement of atoms (positions and velocities) will eventually recur. Given infinite time, the same configuration must reappear, and the same history must replay identically. This is Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence—the strictest form of circular time.

Looser versions appear in cyclical calendars and seasonal patterns. Ecclesiastes declares, “For everything there is a season.” No two springs are identical, yet spring always returns. Hope springs eternal, but so does the next spring—if not now, just wait.

Such circularity often appears in worldviews of complementary forces: yin and yang in Taoism, or the oscillating good and evil in Manichaeism. (Even stock-market cycles hint at a secular version.) Empedocles described a cosmic cycle where the elements unite under Love and separate under Strife, oscillating between harmony and chaos: “Sometimes by Love all coming together into one, / Sometimes again each one carried off by the hatred of Strife.” Harmony builds eras of construction; strife tears them down. In calm times, chaos is merely paused; in chaotic ones, peace will return. Adapt to the zeitgeist.

Twentieth-century sociologist Pitirim Sorokin saw societies oscillating between sensate (material, empirical, hedonistic) and ideational (transcendental, value-oriented) phases. Sensate eras breed instability and shallow selfishness; the unsatisfied yearning for meaning shifts culture ideational. Over time, neglect of the material world pulls it back, and the pendulum swings again.

Is It Up to Us?

George Santayana warned, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This suggests the shape of time may be partly contingent on human action. Like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day (written by Buddhist Harold Ramis), we might break the cycle by getting it right—transcending repetition through better living, echoing reincarnation tied to karma.

Newton and Aquinas saw time flowing inexorably forward, regardless of us. Nietzsche, Empedocles, and Sorokin viewed periodicity as inherent to reality. But do we help shape it?

Martin Luther King, Jr. often invoked the idea that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He grounded this in Hebrew prophets, especially Amos: “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream” (Amos 5:24). Here time is a river—never stopping, always rushing forward under irresistible current. History does not oscillate endlessly; it presses toward justice. King echoed the Biblical imagination from Genesis: time begins “in the beginning” and advances through human action toward redemption. The prophets urged righteous living, especially for the vulnerable—and it changed the world.

As Santayana suggests, is it up to us to bend the arc, and thus the shape of time? One thing is certain: time keeps slipping into the future. It happens to us every day. And please click the link before slipping away.

Leave a comment