This is one of the fifty states of consciousness explored in the All 50 States program. Explore the full map.

My spiritual tradition has a day on which it is not just permitted but encouraged to get drunk.

The day is Purim, and the drunkenness it calls for is a strange one. Not the “I love you, man” kind. Not the kind where people laugh uncontrollably and parade around with lampshades on their heads. The drunkenness Purim asks for is at once deeply joyful and deadly serious — a loosening aimed, of all things, at God.

Judaism is hardly alone in this. The Greeks had their Dionysian rites; Christianity places wine at the center of its holiest sacrament; the Sufi poets wrote endlessly of a divine intoxication that made the literal kind look tame. Across history, culture after culture has carved out a sanctioned place for altered consciousness — and reached, through it, for something sacred.

It’s a hard state to achieve, and when I was younger I would spend the day trailing the people who did it well. Once, one of them gave me a kind of status check. My teacher began to dance with me — face to face, holding my eyes. He was already there: uplifted, thankful, expansive, entirely present. After a few moments he told me, “You didn’t have enough.” And he was right. My primary companions that day were still the weight of the world, my responsibilities, and a dozen other concerns I couldn’t put down.

There is, obviously, a delicate line here. The same reaching that can open onto communion can just as easily end at the porcelain god. But when the needle is threaded just right — and threading it is a skill — something real happens. The difference between drunkenness as oblivion and drunkenness as prayer turns out to have almost nothing to do with the alcohol, and almost everything to do with what surrounds it.

Like many harnessable — and dangerous — substances, alcohol carries potential energy. Activated, it is enormously powerful, and what it does depends entirely on the container it finds itself in. It's not unlike nuclear power, which can level a city or light one for generations. The reactor has a containment building — a thick shell of reinforced concrete and steel, built to hold the danger in when something goes wrong. Purim, too, had its containment: the ritual, the intention, the teachers, the day set apart, the whole structure aimed at pointing the energy somewhere.

Take away that structure and the fuel remains, but nothing holds it. With no containment, what becomes of the energy in six beers and a bad week — or half a bottle of scotch and a failing marriage?

Somewhere beneath the occluding sheath of your inhibitions is your true self. In daily life those inhibitions serve a purpose — they keep the peace, they hold things in — but they also veil something. Beneath them is a simpler, purer entity: one that could express what it actually feels, share itself without calculation, and roll more easily with life’s slings and arrows. Some people call this aspect the soul. And the soul, freed for a moment, is not only at ease with others but fearless, and strangely energetic.

That energy is the danger and the gift both. When the inhibitions drop but you aren’t prepared for the surge — no intention, no container — it spills out as aggression or foolishness. But held rightly, aimed rightly, the same loosening reveals the best of what’s in you: the truest part. If you’ve been there, you know. There’s a warm, deep aura to it — the feeling of being, briefly, exactly who you are.

Here's the thing. If the feeling I'm describing really is the true you, then it isn't a rare summit to be scaled — it's your own nature, and it should be possible to live there far more than we do. We may never take up permanent residence; even the people I followed on Purim weren't "there" every day. But that only means alcohol isn't necessary to reach it. The drink is just a clumsy trigger we reach for when we haven't learned the other ways in.

There are many gates to this foundational state: deep prayer, ecstatic song and dance, fasting, meditation, the collapse of self in awe, the abandon of real laughter, even the loosening that comes from grief or exhaustion or love. Each dissolves the same occluding sheath — quiets the self-monitoring, drops the guard — and lets the soul come forward. Alcohol is one key to a room with many entrances, and by far the one that costs the most on the way out. It’s not popular because it’s the best way in, but because it’s the easiest: no teacher, no discipline. Just you and a bottle.

And here’s the good news: there’s nothing wrong with a glass of wine to unwind, or cocktails at a party. The loosening can be lovely. But the better news is that the state the alcohol reaches for is already in you — it’s yours by right, waiting behind the sheath whether or not you ever pour a drink. What if the thing you reach for a drink to feel could be reached, more fully, without one?

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If this is the sort of thing you like thinking about, compassion is one of fifty states of consciousness I mapped in All 50 States: A Passport to Your Mind — a guided journey through the full terrain of the inner life, from ordinary waking awareness to grief, flow, awe, mystical union, and the harder territories most of us visit without a map. Each state comes with its own orientation, its own wisdom from across the traditions, and its own practice. All fifty lessons are available as a single download.

Explore All 50 States

Coming this fall: I’ll be leading a small founding cohort through the first segment of the map — five weekly lessons and a live session together, beginning Sunday, Oct 18.

I’ll tell you something I’m not proud of.

I used to run a community center on the Upper West Side — a busy place, all kinds of people coming and going. Most were warm, bright, easy company. Once in a while someone came through who was harder to place, a little “off,” and occasionally one of them — almost always a man — would draw a complaint for an unwanted advance or some inappropriate behavior. The policy was simple: one warning, and if it continued, we’d ask him to leave.

One day the job of having that conversation fell to me. The man was defensive and immovable, insisting he had a “right” to be there, and the longer he argued the angrier I got. Finally I blurted out that he needed to “grow up.”

He stopped. He looked at me sadly, and said: “You know, it’s not easy being me.” Then he turned to go.

My anger vanished in an instant — replaced by remorse, and a sudden, aching compassion for this man I had just been so amped up to kick out.

So what happened here? What kept me from seeing this man as a person from the start — and, most importantly, can this kind of compassion be cultivated, so that it’s present before we walk into tense encounters like this one?

My post-mortem of the exchange is not so flattering. I had cast him as a threat — to my authority, to my sense of propriety, to my reputation. And when we perceive someone as a threat, the instinct is to other them: to strip away the particulars until what remains is a category, a problem, a type. It is much easier to move against a category than against a person.

George Orwell caught this mechanism in himself. Fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he lay in wait as a sniper near the Fascist trenches. At last a man leapt out and ran along the parapet in full view — but he was half-dressed, clutching his falling trousers with both hands as he ran. Orwell didn’t shoot. A man holding up his pants, he later wrote, “isn’t a ‘Fascist,’ he is visibly a fellow-creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.” The abstraction “enemy” could not survive the sight of something so absurdly, ordinarily human.

That is what happened to me, too. The man I had written off broke the category with one quiet sentence. In both cases the category we’d assigned — “Fascist,” “problem” — could not survive the sight of a particular human being. But notice what the two moments share: the recognition came by accident, uninvited, at the last possible second — after the insult, with the rifle already raised. Which returns me to the question that matters most. Can we learn to see the person before the encounter turns — to have the warmth ready, instead of waiting for it to ambush us?

We tend to think of compassion as something that we have a particular quotient of; some more, some less. But the evidence seems to suggest that its actually a trainable state of mind; less like a personality trait and more like a capacity that can be deliberately built — the way the contemplative traditions always claimed, and the way a brain scanner in Wisconsin eventually confirmed.

Matthieu Ricard was a French molecular biologist who left science to become a Buddhist monk, and later a confidant of the Dalai Lama. In a now-famous experiment at the University of Wisconsin, part of a study of hundreds of advanced meditators, Ricard was hooked up to 256 sensors and asked to meditate on compassion. The instruments picked up gamma-wave activity at a level “never reported before in the neuroscience literature” — far beyond the normal range — prompting the press to crown him “the happiest man in the world.”

Ricard rejected the title. What the machine had detected, he insisted, was not happiness but compassion — the signature of a mind saturated with care directed outward. I had felt a flicker of that after my quiet rebuke, and I suspect we all have at some point. The difference is that in Ricard it was vast, stable, and available rather than accidental and fleeting. And here is the part that surprises people: such intensity of care doesn’t overwhelm or exhaust the one who feels it. It was not a wave that swept him away but a warmth he could hold — steadily, at enormous strength, without being consumed by it.

This capacity was not something Ricard was born with. Like most things worth having, it was the result of sustained effort over time. We are willing to think long-term about money — to make plans, to accept slow progress toward financial stability. But when it comes to deliberately cultivating a quality of character, we tend either to pay lip service (”I’m working on it”) or to file it under sainthood — the way of a kind of person we don’t quite identify with, and therefore excuse ourselves from becoming. Which is a strange thing to concede. We are declining to train the one capacity that would dissolve most of our conflicts before they start.

Most people — myself included — fail to seriously lean into compassion out of fear: of being overwhelmed by it, or of letting someone off the hook who hasn’t earned it. And there’s something to both. There are people who will take everything you offer and come back for more. And sometimes an uncomfortable truth genuinely needs saying — for the other person’s benefit though and not from our desire to punish.

But this thing we’re afraid of isn’t compassion at all. It’s a related state called empathic distress — what happens when someone else’s suffering doesn’t just reach us but knocks us over. Their pain becomes our pain. We’re upset, destabilized, and while we sincerely don’t want them to be suffering, we also very much don’t want to be near it. That is the state that exhausts people. Two people are now drowning instead of one.

Compassion is something else. Ricard’s — measurable, as it turned out — was so vast it could hold the pain of others without pulling him under. And this is the strange economy of the thing: those who genuinely have it don’t drain easily. The draining starts when it becomes about us.

So the door you’ve kept shut for fear of the flood doesn’t open onto a flood at all. It opens onto something you can deal with. Which means the real question was never can I afford to feel this much? but can I learn to feel it well? — a training question, not a question of temperament.

So how do you actually do it? Ricard’s practice was to meditate on compassion in widening circles — first toward people he already loved, then toward neutral people, then toward the difficult ones, then toward all beings. Slow, deliberate, unglamorous. Day by day, year by year, for decades. But the same research found that a far more modest commitment moves the needle: twenty minutes a day for three weeks. That’s seven hours total. Four hundred and twenty minutes to change the way you meet other people. Would you take that trade?

I did eventually reconcile with the man I asked to leave my center. It was awkward, and it came far too late to spare either of us the encounter itself. But that is precisely the point. The compassion I felt for him arrived by accident, at the last possible moment, after the damage was done — and it still turned out to be the truest thing in the room. What I keep wondering is who I would have been if it had been there when he walked in.

If this is the sort of thing you like thinking about, compassion is one of fifty states of consciousness I mapped in All 50 States: A Passport to Your Mind — a guided journey through the full terrain of the inner life, from ordinary waking awareness to grief, flow, awe, mystical union, and the harder territories most of us visit without a map. Each state comes with its own orientation, its own wisdom from across the traditions, and its own practice. All fifty lessons are available as a single download.

Explore All 50 States

Coming this fall: I'll be leading a small founding cohort through the first segment of the map — five weekly lessons and a live session together, beginning Sunday, Oct 18.

Maybe the original sin wasn’t the fruit. Maybe it was sex.

So believed the 18th-century millenarian Christians called the Shakers. They were first known as the “Shaking Quakers,” a mocking nickname for the trembling and ecstatic dancing of their worship. So committed were they to avoiding what they deemed sinful that they essentially committed theological suicide.

Nothing if not consistent, they dissolved existing marriages when members joined, the couples living afterward as brothers and sisters. How did they survive past a single generation? Only through conversion and the adoption of orphans. They peaked at around six thousand in the mid-1800s — and yet, remarkably, three adherents remain even today.

Brother Arnold Hadd lives in the last of their communities, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in New Gloucester, Maine. He has described their celibacy as “a wonderful privilege” and “a dreary, horrible existence all at the same time.” His words hold a strange truth: their belief was so opposed to survival that it consumed the very people who held it — yet they called it the highest good.

The Shakers are the most extreme case, but they are far from the only one. Across many wisdom traditions, the highest echelons are populated by people who do not procreate. Jesus never married, and Roman Catholic clergy follow his example; the Buddha made celibacy foundational to monastic life, where a single lapse means permanent expulsion; Gandhi took a formal vow of brahmacharya in 1906 and kept it for the rest of his life.

Not every tradition points this way — Judaism, Confucianism, and much of Hinduism place marriage and children at the very center of a righteous life. But even most of these keep a renunciant strand: the fast, the vow, the hermit, the season of withdrawal. The arrow shows up almost everywhere, if only in one corner of the map.

And notice what it means, however it arrived — inherited along a shared lineage in some cases, surfacing in cultures with no contact at all in others: each of these traditions took some of its most devoted members and removed them from the gene pool entirely.

You might reasonably object that celibacy was never meant for everyone. And you’d be right. These traditions didn’t ask the masses to renounce marriage and children — most actively directed ordinary people toward exactly that. Celibacy was for the few: the monk, the nun, the priest, the renunciant.

But that concession is the strange part, not the escape from it. Because the few weren’t the marginal or the left-behind. They were the ones held up as having gone furthest — the exemplars, the people a tradition points to and says: this is what the summit looks like. Ordinary life carried on at the base, marrying and reproducing as always. But at the very top, again and again, these cultures placed a life that renounced the drive the base depended on. They kept the many having children, and taught the few that the highest achievement was to want something more than that.

This deepens the question rather than dissolves it. Why would so many traditions — whether they invented the idea or inherited it — keep choosing to place, at the peak of a human life, something the species could never actually follow?

Celibacy is only the sharpest instance of a whole suite of behaviors we might call survival-negative. “Love your enemy” asks you to extend care to the very people who threaten you — the opposite of what any struggle for existence would seem to reward. The command to protect the widow and the orphan — the weakest, least able to repay — strikes us as noble, but is biologically backwards. Even the private disciplines point the same way: fasting, isolation, the deliberate diminishment of the body and its wants. Everywhere you look, the same strange arrow: away from appetite, away from advantage, away from the self and its survival.

So how did so many different traditions come to embrace the same odd set of ideas — ones that biological imperatives should have weeded out? Some of it is surely borrowing; ideas travel, and one culture inherits from another. But borrowing only relocates the question. A costly idea doesn’t spread just because it’s available — plenty of available ideas don’t. Someone, everywhere it traveled, had to keep choosing it and crowning it. And borrowing explains nothing at all in the cultures that had no contact to borrow from.

It could be argued that reciprocal altruism, kin selection, or costly signaling can account for these expensive behaviors — the way a peacock’s absurd tail, costly as it is to grow and drag around, pays for itself by attracting mates. But notice what the peacock gets for his trouble: more offspring. The costly display is repaid in the only currency evolution counts. That is exactly what the deepest religious version refuses.

Celibacy is a signal paid in a coin that can never be returned — you cannot be repaid in descendants by having none. The hidden fast that no one sees earns no status. The love extended to the enemy who will never reciprocate buys no alliance. These behaviors keep pushing past the point where the fitness story works — as if the useful version were never the target.

Perhaps, then, the idea survives at the level of the group: a community bound by costly commitments outlasts a looser one, and the wisdom rides along. But look closely and this concedes the very thing it means to explain. If the teaching endures by making people act against their own biology — for the sake of the community, the institution, the idea itself — then it isn’t an expression of the survival drive at all. It’s something that overrides it. Which is precisely the mystery, not its solution.

It seems to me there are only two ways to explain this. Either the wisdom simply “works” — it happens to be useful, with no deeper meaning behind it — or it’s pointing at something true.

Take the first. If loving your neighbor turns out to be good for survival, wonderful. And if what we call love is, as we’re assured, just chemistry doing its job, then it worked. I find this hard to swallow, but my incredulity isn’t the argument. The argument is that “it works” can’t bear the weight we need it to. Nature, as Tennyson put it, is red in tooth and claw. Rome was brutal yet flourished for a thousand years; plenty of cultures did whatever they pleased in the name of survival and thrived doing it. If that is “working,” it’s a pyrrhic kind — it tells us what persists, not what is good, and certainly not what is true. Cruelty works too. A criterion that can’t tell the saint from the tyrant isn’t explaining the thing we actually wanted explained.

There’s a deeper wonder underneath it all. Why is there an imperative to reproduce in the first place? Natural selection can tell us why the organisms around us are the reproducing kind — the ones that weren’t left no descendants. But that explains which strivers persisted, not why there is any striving in the universe at all. That question was never biology’s to answer; it belongs to philosophy, or to awe. And it’s worth sitting with, because the wisdom traditions turn precisely against that unexplained striving — as if they sensed it was not the last word.

Which leaves the other possibility. What strikes me about so much of spirituality is its decision to step out of the game entirely — to refuse the nasty, brutish, and short terms of physical existence. And notice: the traditions never frame this as choosing nothing. They frame it as an exchange — give up the physical, gain something more real. That is the ground they seem to converge on, whatever their theology: that there is an accessible, non-physical reality, and that through certain transcendent technologies — prayer, fasting, stillness, renunciation — a person can elect to live more there than here.

We tend to think of the renunciants as exotic, people who did something the rest of us never would. But the truth is we do it all the time. We spend lavishly to bury and mourn our dead, pouring resources into people who can never return the favor — who are, in the coldest terms, of no further use to us at all. We give anonymously, to strangers we will never meet and never be thanked by, which is the exact opposite of protecting our own.

When we do these things, we are living as the mystics live: transcendently. We are making the same exchange they made — trading biological selfishness for something more exquisite — participation in a spiritual reality, even while we remain firmly anchored in this one.

Q: When have you given something to someone who could never repay you — and known, without being able to prove it, that it mattered?

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Image: gstarschool.charterschoolsusa.com

Have you ever felt that you have more to offer than anyone realizes? And have you also felt that despite your goodness, your talent, your insight — somehow it isn’t landing; that people fail to appreciate, or even see, what’s in you? I suspect quite a lot of people feel this way, and that it’s a quiet source of real pain and confusion.

I was a music major in my undergraduate years, and every so often we’d sit in on seminars with the graduate students, many of them modern classical composers. I noticed that whenever a presenter finished and opened the floor, one of them would invariably lead off with the same question: “How do we get our music out there, and actually listened to?”

It was a genuine ache for them. They knew they were highly skilled — bold, original, doing things few people could pull off compositionally. And yet few people cared. Once, they hatched a plot to overthrow Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Mozart piece that won the local classical station’s top-100 countdown every single year. They organized a call-in campaign to unseat it. It won that year anyway, as usual.

A more extreme example — this one fictional — of the need to be truly seen comes in the film My Left Foot, which tells the moving, difficult story of Christy Brown. Born with severe cerebral palsy to a poor Dublin family, Christy is assumed by almost everyone to be barely there — no one home behind the eyes. The exception is his mother, who never quite stops believing there’s a whole person inside.

Then one day Christy girds himself for a desperate attempt to break through. Using his one functional limb, he grips a piece of chalk between his quivering toes and scrawls MOTHER on the floor of their house. He’s done it. And everything changes — because they finally see what had been locked inside him all along. His father, beaming, lifts him up, carries him to the pub, throws open the door and declares: “This is Christy Brown, my son. Genius.”

Christy's story, for all its hardship, ends in triumph. In a finale almost too neat to believe, he transcends his limitations so completely that he becomes a celebrated writer and painter — carried, by sheer force of spirit, from a prison of a body to a voice the world couldn't ignore. But what about the people who never get the against-all-odds ending wrapped in a bow? What of the countless gifted actors and painters and singers who simply never break through? For every one spot on Broadway, there must be ten thousand people who could have filled it just as well. How do you move forward when you've heard "thank you — next!" enough times?

There are two cheap answers to this existential question and one tough, but real one. One cheap approach is to say, “never give up! If you want it bad enough you will get there.” This is simply untrue. You may get there but making false promises in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is unkind. Another dime store direction is to make light of the dream; to suggest something like “you have so many good things in your life, just focus on those.” This sidesteps real pain and longing and insults the real grief of the unrewarded. There is, however, a third—tough wisdom— way.

There’s an idea I’ve come across — effortless striving — and it means honoring both halves of an equation most of us try to escape. On one side: don’t deny your need to be seen — on a stage, in a relationship, anywhere it matters. Don’t pretend it’s nothing, because for a lot of people it’s everything. Strive with all your might for the result you want. But on the other side — and this is the part that takes a lifetime — strive just as hard to become fully at peace with never getting it.

It sounds like a contradiction. It isn't. There is a real beauty in striving with everything you have for something you want — you should. It's part of what makes a life vivid. And there is a second beauty, quieter and harder-won, in not being chained to whether you get it. The two can live in the same person at the same time: the full reach toward the result, and the open hand around it. You don't have to choose between wanting it completely and being free. The wanting is beautiful. So is the freedom.

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Do you ever find yourself revisiting a major moment of choice from your past? Maybe it surfaces often, and you feel compelled to turn it over, examining it from every angle, again and again. There may be a twinge of longing or incompleteness attached to that critical juncture — and for some reason you can’t stop looking at it and wondering. Even if you’re at peace with the choice you made, there’s an unnamed feeling that comes with the weight of the moment: a frustrating fascination with the other path, the one you will never know.

I have one of these. Music was the first great love of my life, and I spent an enormous amount of my time between third grade and grad school focused on it. Then, rather unexpectedly — just as I was crossing from student to professional musician — I felt what I can only call a spiritual calling; one that I knew would require most of my attention. The cost of this choice took the physical form of a gorgeous black Yamaha baby grand that lived in my room. It was my pride and joy. To fund the new path, it would have to be sold — sacrificed, really — along with my dream of pursuing music in a serious way, forever. And though I don’t regret it, part of me still wonders about that musician I’ll never get to meet.

There’s a writer named John Koenig who sought out scores of emotions the English language had never named, and coined his own words for them — one of which, sonder, now appears in Merriam-Webster. The project is called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, though the feelings he names are far broader than sorrow. Sonder is the dawning awareness that every stranger you pass is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own. His word onism is the frustration of being stuck in a single body that can only ever be in one place at a time. I scoured his dictionary to see whether he’d named my feeling — the ever-futile return — but he hadn’t. So I coined my own.

The word is mataionostia.

n. the compulsion to return, again and again, to a single crossroads in your past — not one you stumbled through blindly, but one you saw clearly and chose with open eyes — turning the decision over as though this time the other path might resolve into view; knowing, even as you do it, that the looking can change nothing, recover nothing, and lead nowhere but back to the same fork, worn smooth from your visits.

It comes from two Greek roots. Mataios — vain, futile, to no purpose. And nostos — a homecoming, a return; the same root that gives us nostalgia. The Greeks understood that a nostos was always partly a doomed errand, since neither the home nor the one returning to it ever stays the same. Mataionostia, then, is the vain return — the homecoming to a place that no longer exists, made over and over by someone who knows it no longer exists.

There’s been an ocean of ink spilled on the importance of living in the now — and rightly, since the present is the only state that truly exists. Even the past is reached only through the present; memory itself happens now. So what keeps us pressed up against that translucent wall, straining for a glimpse of the road not taken?

Here’s what I’ve come to suspect: the pull isn’t backward at all. Something very present is trying to get our attention, and it’s using the past to do it.

That particular musical path is gone for me — but the connection to music, and what it represents (an essay for another time), is a permanent feature of my soul. It still needs to find expression, no matter how many years have passed. It’s a reservoir of energy behind a valve that’s been shut for a long time, and when the pressure finds no outlet, it goes looking for the place where the flow stopped. That place is the fork. So the mind returns me there, again and again — not to torment me, but to knock on the door it was closed behind.

Which means the word may be a little wrong. I called it the vain return. But the returning isn’t vain at all. It’s the most honest part of me, refusing to be silenced — still asking to be let out.

I’ll never meet that musician. But the thing that made me want to be him is still here, still mine. And maybe that’s what mataionostia really is: not grief for a life you didn’t live, but a message from the part of you that’s still alive in it.

So the next time you find yourself back at that crossroads you haunt, it might be worth asking a different question. Not what if I had chosen otherwise — that road is dark and will stay dark. But: what is the part of me that keeps coming here, and what does it still want? The fork isn’t asking you to undo your life. It’s asking you to finish something.

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Q: What part of you keeps knocking — and what would it take to finally let it speak?

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A few days after Blaise Pascal died in 1662, a servant noticed something odd about the great man’s coat: a thickness in the lining, where there shouldn’t have been one…

On the night of November 23, 1654, from about half past ten until half past midnight, the French scientist had experienced a two-hour mystical vision he would later call his “Night of Fire.” Though he was already a celebrated mathematician, physicist, and inventor — and already a man of some faith — the experience remade him. From that point on he largely abandoned science and worldly affairs, devoting himself to religious writing, most famously his Pensées. He embraced an ascetic life, sold his finest possessions and gave the money to the poor, and held to his faith until his death, at the age of 39.

That night, he had immediately written the experience down on a small piece of parchment he called his “Memorial.” Then, oddly, he sewed it into the lining of his coat — and for the next eight years, each time he had a new coat made, he carefully cut the parchment out and sewed it into the new one, so that it was always with him. No one ever knew. The document came to light only by accident, after his death.

The Memorial is a passionate mix of prose, prayer, biblical allusion, and ecstatic exclamation, mostly in French with phrases of Latin. It reads, in part:

FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and the learned. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

Why would a man sew that into the lining of his coat, and carry it there in secret for the rest of his life?

Move forward three hundred years, and into the world of fiction, and you find a man cut from the very same cloth. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread, the idiosyncratic dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock — brilliantly played by Daniel Day-Lewis — has a habit of sewing hidden things into his garments. But whereas Pascal sewed out of spiritual ecstasy, Woodcock sews out of grief. The death of his mother had marked him deeply; in a fevered vision of her during an illness, he murmurs, “I miss you… it’s as simple as that.” His way of keeping her close was to sew a lock of her hair into the lining of his own coat, and carry her there, always.

Two men. One gesture.

Open almost anyone’s closet and you’ll find the same thing in a plainer form: a shirt you don’t wear but can’t give away, a dress kept only because of the day it was worn, a coat that still smells like someone. Next to the body itself, the garment is the closest layer we have to a person, and the clothes we choose serve, on some level, to communicate something concealed inside us. They are costumes that evolve with the times; a signal that you belong to this group or that, an index of your tastes and temperament. But, as George Michael once sang, “sometimes the clothes do not make the man.” There is a sense in which our garments blunt and conceal our true selves.

So a garment does two things at once. It conceals us — obscures, masks, holds the world at a slight distance. And it connects us — carries what is most private right at the surface, where it can be near other people without being seen. Pascal and Woodcock only made literal what the rest of us do without noticing. We are all sewing something precious into the lining.

Which raises a stranger question. If the clothing closest to us can carry what we cannot say — what about the garment closer still?

There is a Kabbalistic reading that treats the physical body itself as a garment. It turns on a single letter. In the account of Eden, after the fruit is eaten, God clothes Adam and Eve in ohr — “skin” — spelled with the Hebrew letter ayin. But there is an old tradition that the word was once written differently: ohr with an aleph, the same sound but a different word, meaning not skin but light. Read that way, the verse remembers something — that the first human garment was not skin but radiance, a body that let light shine through it, and that “skin” is the denser thing it became.

Seen this way, the body is a kind of filter with an adjustable opacity. The more refined we become, the more that inner light is allowed to show through. The body is, at once, a barrier and a means of connection. Like a kettle, which keeps water and fire apart so they don’t destroy each other and, by that very separation, lets the fire pass its heat into the water, the body holds the soul and the world apart so that they can meet at all. The garment is the interface. It conceals, and by concealing, it connects.

How much of your true self are you willing to reveal? Many people don’t even share their deepest parts with themselves, let alone others. There’s something in there that’s absolutely personal — something that doesn’t feel like it’s for public consumption. So we filter. We let dribs and drabs of our consciousness escape the garment of the body and test what effect they have. Will it be embraced, valued, reciprocated? Or laughed at, criticized, and ignored — until the aperture of the soul constricts again?

There is something in human nature that wants to share. It’s the impetus for everything from Faust to Facebook. But some things — for some people, whether ecstatic rapture or the despair of unresolved grief — can only be “worn on the sleeve” if that sleeve never faces outward.

Pascal never showed anyone his. For eight years he carried the most important night of his life sewn into his coat, moved it from old coat to new, and let no one read a word of it. It wasn’t for them. It was the thing he needed against him — proof, on the days he doubted, that the Fire had been real.

But a lining is not a grave. What we sew away in secret, we sew away to keep — and what we keep, we sometimes find the courage to let show. The point of a garment of light was never to trap the light. It was to wear it. Maybe the things we carry closest are not meant to stay hidden forever, only until we are ready — until the day the seam is opened, and what was pressed against the skin turns out to be the brightest thing we own.

Q: If you sewed one sentence into the lining of your coat, to carry against you for the rest of your life — what would it say?

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In 1952, a pianist sat down before a packed hall and played … nothing. It may be the most important piece of music I’ve ever encountered.

I took a life-changing course in music composition as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. I was exposed to invaluable techniques, deepened my understanding of theory and musical history, and, amazingly, was shown how to unlock a reservoir of creativity I didn’t know I had. By forcing my musical palate to stretch way beyond what was familiar, I began to change, and not only as a musician.

In one session, the professor played us a modern classical piece and asked what we thought of it. My comment was that it was “too chaotic” and “impossible to follow.” His response — that in his opinion it was too structured and predictable — showed me that I simply lacked the ear to hear what he did; that there was a world of musical meaning way beyond what I could perceive at that time.

The most radical expression of that idea I ever encountered came from a composer who took it further than anyone.

It was a rainy late August evening at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York. The pianist, David Tudor, sat down at his instrument, closed the keyboard lid, and proceeded not to play. Twice he briefly lifted the lid and shut it again, marking out three movements he timed with a stopwatch, turning the pages of a score on which no notes were meant to sound. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds later, he stood and bowed. This was the debut performance of 4'33" by the experimentalist composer John Cage.

The idea — that whatever ambient sounds were produced, by the weather, the wildlife, or the audience, constituted the piece itself — was not well received. Reviled as a gimmick by some but hailed as a masterwork that redefined art and philosophy by others, 4’33” remains a touchstone for questioning artistic conventions more than 70 years later.

Three influences molded Cage’s thinking and propelled this “musical” demonstration. The first was his tutelage with Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki in the late 1940s. These studies centered on embracing the idea of chance, the acceptance of the present moment, and quiet reflection. The second was visual artist Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (1951), which featured seemingly blank canvases that changed with light, dust, and shadows, demonstrating that “silence” or emptiness could be dynamic and full of subtle variation.

The third — and most fascinating — was his visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951. Cage entered a room designed to eliminate all sound, but discovered that he could still hear his own nervous system (a high whine) and his blood circulating (a low whoosh). This convinced him that true silence is impossible — that there is always sound, if one listens carefully. To Cage, these sounds were music; they were beautiful and worthwhile, and to recognize and engage with them carried the potential for a deeper, richer encounter with daily life.

As I sit here typing, I’m trying to also listen to the melody of moment-by-moment life. I can hear people talking outside, the low bellowing of a passing jet, the distinctive hum of electric cars, and the metallic screech of truck brakes. If I focus more I can hear my own breathing. To most, these sounds are background noise; so familiar as to hardly be noticed. But is that all they are, or only what we’ve trained ourselves to stop hearing? Many of us have seen those videos where a deaf person has her cochlear implant switched on for the first time. Often, the sound of the doctor’s voice — or of the friend or relative beside them — instantly produces heartfelt weeping. What we generally regard as standard, basic, and unimportant is a joyous symphony for the person who has never heard.

So what might these seemingly random, often industrial, sounds mean? To me, they mean life. The sound of communication, from birdsong to street banter. The din of transportation is so human: people pursuing their hopes and dreams, making connections, leaving one situation to arrive at another. But what about the sound of leaves blowing around the pavement, or a thunderclap, or the bubbling of a river? Cage would say that if you simply put a frame around it, you have elevated it to music — but I wonder if it’s even more intrinsic than that.

What if all that unfolds is purposeful — the product of a higher intelligence, a deeper consciousness? Then there would be order in the chaos and meaning imbued in every sound. The Earth itself becomes an instrument, every interaction a string, with a master composer orchestrating each moment. Maybe the cochlear implant is a metaphor for each of us. Maybe we are all hard of hearing, to one extent or another — and when we find the on switch, the music of mundane life will be revealed as utter profundity.

But here is the part I keep circling back to. If truck brakes, thunder, and leaves can be music, then what about the parts of my life that sound like noise? The interrupted plans. The detours. The stretches that feel like static between the songs I actually want to hear.

I think of that classroom again. The piece I called “too chaotic” hadn’t changed when my professor called it “too structured.” Only my ear had failed to meet it. The chaos was never in the music. It was in me — in what I hadn’t yet learned to hear.

So maybe the random days, the ones that feel like meaningless noise, aren’t noise at all. Perhaps they’re a movement I’m too close to follow, a structure I haven’t yet developed the ear for, a piece still being performed. Maybe the task was never to escape the static. Maybe it was to realize, slowly, that there was never any static — only music I didn’t know how to listen to.

The Earth is singing. It always was. Can you hear it?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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