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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

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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.”

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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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being “at one”

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

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

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

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

The part and the whole

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

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

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

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

Inter-being

Image: naturefix.life

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

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

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

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

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

Minding the Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Beastie Boys, “Sure Shot,” Ill Communication

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

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

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

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

The Psychology of the Uncanny Valley

Image: blogthinkbig.com

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

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

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

The Theory of Ill-Communication

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

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

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

A Case Study in Dominance: The Piers Morgan Encounter

Image: thesun.ie

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

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

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

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

The Masquerade of Social Belonging

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

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

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

Repurposing the Mirror: AI as an Ethical Practice Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

Only God Can Make a Snowflake

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

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

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

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

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

Only God Can Make a Tree

Image: webneel.com

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

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

Only God Can Make a Me

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

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

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

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

—Lee Smolin

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the setup.

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

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

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

Which would I choose?

The very real saltshaker?

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leads to a disconcerting possibility:

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

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

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

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

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

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

So which is more real?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoosh. Whoosh.

And the booming voice were waiting for my answer…

My answer remains the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siddhartha

Image: ancient-origins.net

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

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

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

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

Solomon

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

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

The results are not encouraging.

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

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

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

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

Pippin

Image: broadway.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image: istockphoto.com

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

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

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

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

Linear Time

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

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

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

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

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

Circular Time

Image: philosopedia.org

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

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

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

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

Is It Up to Us?

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

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

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

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

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Ego is the veil between humans and God.

—Rumi

In a world that is sadly obsessed with control, image, and personal achievement, a “healthy ego” is often misunderstood as a necessary part of success. But what if the exact opposite is true? What if the very mechanism that seeks to elevate and protect you—your ego—is in fact the main source of most of your anxiety, conflict, and dissatisfaction?

This isn’t just some philosophical musing. It’s a lived reality, observable in your quotidian interactions, mental monologues, and cultural conditioning. The ego, when unchecked, becomes a mirage that distorts your perception of yourself and others. Like the symbiote "Venom" from the Spider-Man and Venom film franchises who latches onto a host (like Eddie Brock) and amplifies his aggression, pride, and impulsivity, the ego feeds on status, comparison, and control. It is fragile and defensive, always hungry for validation and terrified of insignificance.

And it is ruining your life.

The Nature of the Ego

By “ego,” I’m not referring to self-respect or confidence, but to that internal mechanism that insists on being separate, superior, and in control. The ego wants to dominate situations, win every argument, secure admiration, and insulate itself from all discomfort or uncertainty.

It’s that voice in your head that says, “Wrong!” or “I’ll get even,” or “What will people think?” It thrives on being right, being seen, being someone.

But that voice is rarely aligned with reality. It’s reactive. It’s fearful. And worst of all, it’s never satisfied.

Surrendering Control

The ego's primary illusion is control. It clings to the idea that if we manage our environment, people, and outcomes precisely, we will find peace. But peace doesn’t come from control. It comes from alignment—with truth, with humility, and especially with the present moment.

In truth, we perceive only a narrow sliver of the vast reality around us. Our thoughts, projections, and desires are shaped by filters we didn’t choose and can barely see. Trying to control everything from this limited vantage point is not only futile—it’s exhausting.

The beginning of wisdom is the recognition of how little we actually command. Surrender, then, is not weakness. It’s clarity. It’s the conscious decision to step out of the ego’s narrow domain and allow a deeper intelligence—call it flow, providence, or God—to guide the path.

The Virtue of Humility

Humility is not self-deprecation. It is the recognition of our place in the vastness of existence. To be humble is to understand that we are not the center of the universe—and that this is a source of relief, not diminution.

A humble person is not paralyzed by his or her smallness. Rather, they are empowered by their connectedness to something greater. When you relinquish the need to be exceptional (admittedly very tough), you become receptive: to beauty, to other people, and to the truth.

Joy begins where the ego ends.

The Strength of Modesty

Modesty, like humility, is often mistaken for weakness. But in reality, it is a subtle strength.

To be modest is to be clear-eyed about both your capacities and your limits. It is to live without the desperate need for attention and recognition, without posturing or pretense. Modesty reflects a settled interior life—one that is not reliant on external (and often fickle) applause to feel real, valuable, or whole.

This kind of groundedness is rare in a world driven by performance and self-promotion. And it is deeply attractive—not in the flashy sense, but in the way rivers attract roots and silence attracts peace.

The Discipline of Gratitude

If the ego thrives on lack, then gratitude is its undoing.

The ego says, "I’m always getting screwed over. I’m not enough. They owe me. I need to be more."
Gratitude says: I have. I am. This is great as it is.

To consistently orient yourself toward gratitude is not simply a mood booster—it’s a radical spiritual discipline. It reorients your inner compass from craving to contentment. It trains the mind to recognize sufficiency in the present moment.

The more grateful you are, the less the ego can dominate your experience.

Life Without Ego

Imagine a life freed from the constant need to prove yourself.
A life without petty envy, comparison, or brooding.
A life where joy arises naturally, not as a result of winning, but of being.

This isn’t some naive dream. It’s what emerges when you decide to take the keys from your ego. You step onto the path towards clarity, stillness, and alignment.

The ego is a toxin—but it’s not the final word. Its antidotes are simple and ancient:

• Humility

• Modesty

• Gratitude

They are not abstract ideals. They are daily practices. They are attitudes of the heart that can be cultivated slowly, even imperfectly, until they reshape us from the inside out.

You don’t need to destroy your ego. You only need to stop feeding it.

And when you do, something lighter, truer, and freer will take its place.

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Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

(If you’re already a paid subscriber and would like to receive the All 50 States email, click here).

Image: The Movie Database

Se7en’s Thirtieth Anniversary and Fincher’s Raw Masterpiece

This September marks the thirtieth anniversary of the psychological crime thriller, Se7en. Released in 1995, Se7en was only the second feature film directed by David Fincher, whose criminally underrated debut, Alien³, had left a bad taste in the mouths of critics and fans alike. Though Fincher would go on to direct such cerebral films and cult classics as The Game, Fight Club, The Social Network, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Zodiac, there is a raw, visceral audacity to Se7en that, thirty years on, safeguards it at the pinnacle of his corpus for me.

Like many great films, Se7en defies easy categorization. It is in various parts drama, action, mystery, psychological thriller, detective fiction, and neo-noir, with just a dash of the infamous “twist” ending so popular with many films of the 90s. Set in an unnamed urban hellscape, filled with constant rain and gloomy skies, Se7en employs the familiar trope of the newly partnered detective team – the young idealist (Brad Pitt as David Mills) and his jaded, disillusioned superior on the cusp of retirement (Morgan Freeman as William Somerset) – as they hunt a methodical, sadistic serial killer (Kevin Spacey as John Doe) creating a meticulous panorama of elaborate murders organized around the seven deadly sins.

Se7en is thus one of the most provocative horror films of the 1990s. In The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell distinguishes between terror and horror, relating terror to a potential violence that may be done to one, as opposed to horror, which concerns a perverse threat at the heart of human nature itself: “Horror is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become, something other than we are, or take ourselves for…” In the 90s, the horror genre began to pull back from the trope of the superhuman slasher, a trope which, by the end of the 1980s, had become merely a comical caricature of itself. 90s horror instead began exploring the possibility that the scariest monsters look and act just like you and me.

Horror Redefined: The Ordinary Monster in John Doe

Image: YouTube.com

Se7en is certainly an occupant of this category of horror. Spacey’s Doe is as ordinary and unremarkable, to paraphrase Doe himself, “unexceptional,” as a man can be. Balding, average in both height and build, dressed in completely typical attire, he looks more like an insurance salesman than a serial murderer. Despite the intricate design of his murderous masterpiece, he’s not superhuman. When the detectives, following a lead based upon Doe’s reading habits, appear at his door, Doe responds like a frightened animal, shooting haphazardly, running erratically, diving from random apartment windows and down fire escapes.

This “setback” then forces him to, as he says, readjust his schedule. He is, as Somerset reminds Mills, “not the devil. He’s just a man.” Moreover, his anonymity, his lack of fingerprints and any discernible provenance, signifies that he is not a particular man, and not just any man, but every man, indicating that the most significant villain in the film is something deeper than John Doe himself.

In 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche issued a proclamation that is likely one of the most frequently quoted, if least understood, in Western philosophical history: “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” Many a college philosophy major (a much younger version of your author included) has taken Nietzsche’s prophetic announcement to be nothing more than a poetic formulation of the banal claim that “God does not exist.” Much as this might tickle the fancies of rebellious adolescents, Nietzsche actually means something much darker and more ominous: the West has sacrificed the very foundation of its values. Worse, we haven’t recognized it yet, and because we haven’t recognized it yet, we are likely to unwittingly fill that void with something unimaginably horrifying. A dark cloud has descended upon us, the cloud of nihilism.

Rooted in the Latin word nihil, meaning “nothing,” “Nihilism” signifies the negation of values and is believed to have been coined by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in 1799. It was a topic of profound interest to nineteenth-century Russian authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, all of whom worried greatly about the potential valuelessness lying beneath the Enlightenment zeal for abstract rationality.

But it was Nietzsche who gave the concept its most concentrated articulation: Nihilism had always hidden at the core of Western thought, and it had at last reached its fullest realization. Nihilism is an inevitable reality of our moment; it is upon us already, and bad times are a comin’. Looking at the first half of the twentieth century—the excess of the Roaring Twenties followed by the Great Depression, the advent of worldwide warfare, chemical weapons, the rise of fascism, the concentration camp, the atomic bomb…it’s difficult not to think that Nietzsche was onto something.

The real villain of Fincher’s Se7en is not John Doe, but the nihilism that this “everyman” embodies. This is the adversary with whom Detective Somerset wrestles throughout the film. True, Doe’s nihilism has a religious foundation, but then again, so does the one diagnosed by Nietzsche. Consider Doe’s project: his every creative act is an act of destruction, every affirmation a negation of life, based upon his appraisal that human existence is, in its entirety, irredeemably suffused with evil.

Nietzsche’s Nihilism and the Dark Heart of Se7en

Image: emersoncentral.com

A heaviness hangs in the air at the film’s conclusion, precisely because his masterpiece exempts no one: in the end, it is not Doe who completes the picture, but Mills, (emissary of the legal order), as Doe has successfully tempted Detective Mills into the sin of wrath, resulting in the spontaneous execution of Doe. Doe himself is implicated in his own diagnosis, as he confesses his sin of “envy,” a variation of what Nietzsche calls ressentiment. Mills’ wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), the one seemingly indisputably innocent person in the film, has been murdered, her unborn child (a fleeting image of hope) never reaches fruition, and nothing resembling justice is ultimately served.

The sin of envy has summoned forth the sin of wrath, first in the homicidal acts of Doe, and consummated in the actions of Mills. The entire culture is shot through with putridity, and absolutely no one is left unscathed. Furthermore, inasmuch as Doe draws his inspiration from the Western canon—the Bible, Pope Gregory I, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Shakespeare, etc., Doe manifests Nietzsche’s assessment that nihilism is the inevitable outcome of the values of Western culture.

In the mid-1990s, the nihilistic landscape of Se7en likely seemed overly and unnecessarily pessimistic. The Soviet Union had collapsed, the Berlin Wall had fallen, and Francis Fukuyama had declared “the end of history,” capitalism’s decisive triumph over communism that left no major challengers to the new world order. Home ownership (the greatest representation of the “American Dream”) was skyrocketing. The U.S. and its allies appeared to be thriving, and Western triumphalism was riding high. The future looked bright, and universal peace and prosperity seemed inevitable.

In such a moment, the darkness of Se7en must have appeared as sophomoric cynicism, the stuff of an overly cerebral undergraduate. But thirty years on, through the interminable “war on terror” and its black sites, the lawlessness of Wall Street and the collapse of 2008, the unprecedented chasm between the rich and the rest, the rapid acceleration of climate catastrophe, the widespread resurgence of fascistic movements, the concentration camp, the renewed threat of nuclear war, and a political and media climate in which “truth” is treated as nothing but a function of mass belief…it’s difficult not to think that Fincher was onto something.

Yet we would be remiss to overlook the tiny artifact of hope nestled within this diagnosis. Though Nietzsche believed that a nihilistic collapse was imminent, he also thought that, within the embrace of that “death of God” lay the possibility of recreation, the hope that human beings might one day realize their nature as the creators of values, that we might jettison our antiquated values of life denial and repression, and bring forth values of life affirmation. This is where his famously misunderstood notion of the Übermensch comes into play.

Fincher’s Se7en pulls no punches. It does not affirm the consumerist ethos of U.S. culture, nor does it hide from the pervasive rot at its core. It does not pretend that the struggle against a vapid complacency will be easy. And it certainly does not suggest that any ultimate confirmation of hope is inevitable. But if Doe’s nihilism appears all-consuming, it is crucial to note the cracks in its edifice. Doe’s self-perception is that of a holy, kenotic martyr.

As the detectives escort Doe to the desert scene of the film’s climax, Detective Somerset asks Doe for a bit of context about his life and motivation. Doe’s response is, “It doesn’t matter who I am; who I am means absolutely nothing.” To Detective Mills’ question of “What makes you so special that people should listen?”, Doe replies, “I’m not special; I’ve never been exceptional. This is, though, what I’m doing, my work,” painting himself as nothing more than a vessel for the Lord’s work, a latter-day prophet with a pious acumen, willing to engage in the unsavory but necessary labor of divine instruction.

But the reality is, Doe is not a self-emptying martyr, devoid of ego, but rather, just another “sinner,” no better than the culture he decries. His hatred for that culture derives not from righteous indignation but from his own desire to be part of it and the concomitant alienation resulting from his exclusion. His journals are filled, not with the self-disciplining introspection of the Stoics or the prayerful reverence of St. Augustine’s Confessions, but with egomaniacal and deep-seated loathing for his fellow human beings. This ressentiment lies at the root of everything he does.

His final act is not one of turning “sin against the sinner” but of stamping out the single image of goodness in the film: Tracy and her unborn child, and with them, Detective Mills's righteous optimism. The method of the rest of Doe’s crimes had been to demonstrate the spiritual “death” inherent to each particular sin by forcing each victim to carry the internal logic of their sin to its terminus.

Tracy’s Hope Against Doe’s Envy

Image: reddit.com

But Tracy is, even by Doe’s standards, innocent. She is a school teacher, a caretaker of America’s children. She is decent and kind, gentle and earnest, a loving wife, and an expectant mother. Tracy reveals her pregnancy to Detective Somerset in the diner scene, where it becomes clear that the question of whether or not she will carry the child to term is, for her, a question of whether or not to hope. To bring life into the world is to acknowledge a creature for which we are infinitely responsible, and yet, one that we know we cannot ultimately protect. It is, inherently, an act of hope.

In Doe’s final moments, he reveals that Tracy had begged for the life of her unborn child, and thus that she had answered affirmatively, in favor of hope. In a world where all appears dark, without any obvious reasons for hope, Tracy hoped nonetheless, and carried it to the end. That hope was stamped out, not by the ubiquitous wickedness of a “worldly” U.S. culture, but by the envious loathing of a single man, a man who saw that world as hopelessly unredeemable.

The nihilistic ressentiment of John Doe is contrasted with the love and hope of Tracy Mills, and though that hope is killed, that death was never an inevitability. Ultimately, Se7en challenges its viewers to affirm that love and that hope, in spite of the apparent absence of any reasons to ground it. In our present moment, nothing could be more vital. To quote the final words of the film, spoken in the mellifluous voice of Morgan Freeman, “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place; and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

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Image: Rafael Nadal, wallpapers.com

Part of the joy of sports is its theatricality. Who are the heroes, and who the villains? Who’s the underdog, who’s mounting an improbable comeback, and who are the great rivals? In this way, sport is not merely a physical and athletic endeavour, but a dramatic spectacle—one that reflects and magnifies aspects of human existence.

In the summer I wrote an article in tribute to Roger Federer, whose elegant and apparently effortless mastery of tennis reminds me of what Taoists call wu wei, or non-action. Wu wei doesn’t mean doing nothing, but rather acting without forceful striving. It means going with the flow of things, acting instinctively and naturally. Watching Federer play tennis in his prime was almost like watching a river running its course.

Not everyone can—or should—play tennis like Roger Federer, because the sport benefits from different styles, temperaments, and ethos’s. All lead in different ways to failure or success, which is part of how sport mirrors human life more broadly.

In this article I want to pay tribute to Federer’s greatest rival, Rafael Nadal. The way I would like to do it is by highlighting the philosophy that Nadal best embodies, which is quite different from Federer’s wu wei.

That philosophy is Stoicism.

The rational way

Stoicism was founded by Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE in Greece, and it would go on to enjoy prominence throughout the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Zeno was heavily influenced by the Socratic dialogues written by Plato and Xenophon a few generations earlier, and Stoicism—like Socrates’ own thought—places emphasis on both ethics and metaphysics (the nature of reality).

For the Stoics, metaphysics and ethics are not only of equal importance, but intertwined. The central dictum of Stoic ethics—attributed to Zeno’s student Cleanthes—is that human flourishing consists in “living in accordance with nature”. The gist is that to live well we must use reason to act in line with the workings of the universe and human nature, so that we are not at odds with either.

One way this can play out is the following. Consider how often we’re emotionally driven to think about things over which we actually have no control. This could be, for example, fretting over whether our train will arrive in time to catch the next bus. We know, rationally, that fretting about this makes no sense at all, as there is literally nothing we can do to make the train go faster or have the bus delayed. Our emotions, however, don’t see this—only our powers of reason do. And this rational realisation can help release us from the passion that’s driving us astray.

Central to the Stoics’ account of the good life, therefore, is rationally working out what is within our power to control and what is not—then focusing on the former, and simply accepting the latter.

It sounds reasonable—but what does it look like in practice? Here are three ways that Rafa Nadal put Stoic philosophy into practice.

Forget the past

One of the most obvious ways our emotions lead us astray is when we fret over what has already happened.

Why, rationally speaking, would we do this? Short of inventing a time machine, there is absolutely nothing to be gained by dwelling on what might have been. We can learn from the past and apply those lessons to the present, no doubt, but beyond that, regrets and imagined alternate histories rarely lead to anything of positive value.

Nadal once encapsulated this line of thinking brilliantly when asked whether his terrible start to the clay-court season would affect his performance at the upcoming Italian Open. His response, delivered with a brilliantly nonchalant shrug, was: “What happened in Monte Carlo happened, what happened in Barcelona happened, and what happened in Madrid happened, and here we are: we are in Rome.”

He went on to win the tournament.

Observe rituals

Image: Epictetus, luibat.com

The Stoics stressed the importance of rituals in order to maintain focus on what one has rationally decided. As Epictetus put it, do “not [be] satisfied with mere learning, but add practice and then training. For as time passes we forget what we learned and end up doing the opposite.”

Nadal was famous for a series of rituals he would carry out between points. During a changeover he would place his two bottles at his feet, to the left in front of his chair, with one neatly behind the other and both angled diagonally toward the court. Then, in anticipation of serving, he would adjust his shorts and sleeves, tuck his hair behind his ears, and wipe the sweat from his nose. Only after this would he be ready to serve.

Commenting on his tics, Nadal stressed that they weren’t mere superstition. “If it were superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over whether I win or lose? [Instead] it’s a way of placing myself in a match, ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.”

Be disciplined

The Stoics argued that there are four cardinal virtues (the character traits that lead to a good life): wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance—the last of which is fleshed out as self-control, discipline, and modesty.

Few tennis players have demonstrated the levels of self-control and discipline that Nadal showed throughout his career. If his on-court demeanour could be summarised in a few words, it would be: never complain and never give up.

Regarding the latter half of this slogan, Nadal was explicit that he tried to give everything he could in any given moment—chasing down every ball that could conceivably be reached, fighting until the match was truly over. The most dramatic example was perhaps the 2022 Australian Open final, where Nadal rallied from two sets down and multiple break points to eventually win in five sets—an effort that took nearly five and a half hours.

Rafa was clear, though, that giving your all is not the same as giving 100% all the time. The latter is impossible, because there will inevitably be times when you face impediments over which you have no control, such as illness. In such instances you might only be able to give 50% of your best, but if you still focus on giving that 50%—and no less—then you build the habit of giving everything you can.

Regarding the first half of the slogan—never complain—Nadal was famous for rarely throwing a tantrum and for never once breaking a tennis racquet in anger. (Even Federer broke five, while Novak Djokovic has broken dozens in his career to date.) Why? Because, he said, “to break a racquet would be to lose control of my emotions”—whereas reason dictates that success or failure has nothing to do with the racquet and everything to do with the person wielding it.

Many paths, one destination

For all these reasons and more, Nadal made for a supremely exciting tennis player to watch, and a great contrast to his rival Federer. Whereas Federer was smooth and graceful, Nadal was relentlessly focused, fighting like a gladiator to win each point.

Whichever style you prefer says something, I suspect, about your inclination toward Taoist wu wei or Stoic discipline. Nadal and Federer embodied these philosophies, and their comparable successes showed how each was valuable both on the court and off.

What this shows, I think, is that while different ethoses represent different pathways, a good pathway can be judged as one that leads to the shared goal of human flourishing—a life well lived. By that metric, Nadal’s mindset and career show us what Stoicism has to offer.

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Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

(If you’re already a paid subscriber and would like to receive the All 50 States email, click here).

Image: youtube.com

We come spinning out of nothingness, scattering stars like dust.

— Rumi

It was in my first graduate level Neuroscience class on cellular and molecular neurobiology that I learned about pluripotency. Little would I know that nearly thirty years later that notion would contain my deepest understanding of the nature of reality, God, and us. We were learning about stem cells. I knew this was a new (at that time) treatment program that held hope for many diseases, but I didn’t have any idea what a stem cell was.

In this amazing class I was taught that stem cells have the capacity to be “pluripotent’, meaning they are at their stage in development where, given the milieu they are inserted into, they can become whatever type of cell is needed. I pictured these cells, undifferentiated, not yet knowing who they are or what they are going to become, being placed into an environment, and somehow slowly morphing themselves into exactly the type of cell needed to enhance the whole and ultimately cure the organism.

From Biology to Being

Now what I know is that we are the same, that we are pluripotent and have the capacity to become the most useful and healing members of our collective body. The way I came to understand this required a journey through quantum physics, Kabbalistic philosophy, and spirituality. Quantum physics points to an extraordinarily incomprehensible level of reality, which I”m coming to believe may be the point of it, as it requires a quantum leap for us to let go of our staid conceptualizations of how the world works and shake us out of the constraints of standard scientific materialism.

Many quantum physicists now agree that lying at the “bottom” of reality is something referred to as the “zero-point field”. The zero-point field is one of the strangest consequences of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It is what is left when everything is stripped away, every particle, every atom, all heat, all light, every thing and every energy. What is extremely interesting about this field is that what is left is not empty. It fluctuates and “jitters”, never at rest and full of potentiality. It is the underlying reality of all that is. Everything emerges from it, but it is kind of “nothing.” It is an empty fullness.

Why does this field jitter and create “things” and not remain empty? We normally consider the uncertainty principle to describe the fact that we can’t determine both the momentum and the position of particles simultaneously. But the uncertainty principle is more general. It also applies to energy and time (E and t). So with respect to the zero point field, according to the uncertainty principle we can’t ever discover that it has zero energy. And that is because to do so would be to imply that it’s true at every moment in time, since zero energy cannot ever fluctuate.

That would mean we could know its energy perfectly for all time, making the uncertainty in energy (ΔE) = 0. But the uncertainty equation says if ΔE = 0, then Δt must be infinite. We would have to observe the zero point field for an infinite amount of time to confirm that its energy never wavers, which is impossible. For this reason, according to the uncertainty principle, there will always be movement even in the emptiest of states.

The Overflowing Nothing

Image: youtube.com

Kabbalah, an ancient, extraordinarily beautiful and intricate form of Jewish mystical thought, was not something I had ever encountered in my life until I was tasked with writing an essay on this forum on the brilliant and extremely unique Kabbalist, Abraham Abulafia. It was through a deep dive into his world that I learned about the notion of Ein Sof. I came to see the correspondence between Ein Sof and the other forms of pluripotency and began to suspect that this was a deep truth about our reality. Ein Sof literally means “without end” or “the Infinite.”

It refers to the utterly unknowable, limitless divine essence of God before any act of creation or manifestation. Ein Sof is beyond comprehension, thought, or attributes. It is the source from which all creation emanates. Prior to manifesting, it is absolute potentiality. One of the most profound and difficult questions in cosmology is why is there something rather than nothing? The Kabbalists grappled with this question. Why did the Ein Sof, the formless, infinite, no-thing, a perfect state of wholeness, ever become something?

Kabbalah has a beautiful description of the reasons Ein Sof stirred itself out of its undifferentiated state. Ein Sof, wishing to share its hidden radiance, drew itself back in a great breath, tzimtzum, making space for something other than itself to arise. This way, a relationship with something outside of itself could be had. This way, love could have a beloved. Creation blossomed as a way for the Infinite to behold itself reflected in countless mirrors.

The uncountable worlds were born so that the One might be known through the many, and so that beings might journey from separation back to Source, each act of return adding something precious to the perfection from which they came. In this unfolding, even the deepest difficulties have a purpose, for through brokenness and mending, the light becomes brighter.

The Kabbalists have told us an important quality about Ein Sof: that “it is the nature of the Good to bestow goodness.” But isn’t this a contradiction? How does something undifferentiated and with no attributes hold the attribute of goodness? We can find traces of an answer to this in other mystical sources. In order to explain why something emerged from nothing, they claimed that the Infinite, being the epitome of fullness itself, overflows into being. I love this explanation. It is just a natural quality of something “full” to overflow.

Like the big bang. The infinitely dense, infinitely small singularity at the start of the universe was so full it couldn’t help but overflow into being. So Ein Sof does not choose to create, in the human sense. Rather it emanates, as light from the sun or fragrance from a rose. So while Ein Sof is beyond qualities, the first trace of its emergence, Keter, the highest sefirah (sphere), is associated with Divine Will, or Desire to Give, or Infinite Compassion. Such paradox, but somehow it feels right. The nothing which is Ein Sof is an overflowing will towards relationship and love. Perhaps Kabbalah gives us the why and quantum physics gives us the how.

Touching the Void

When I began to meditate many years ago, I unexpectedly became “nothing.” I lost myself. I had never experienced anything so shocking, or so alien, or so astonishing, in my life. I was in an immense spaciousness that felt like a “place” but with no coordinates. Time stood still. Nothing happened. But it was the most profound nothingness imaginable. And when I emerged I was changed. What I didn’t know then is that many spiritual traditions refer to this “place”.

Across spiritual traditions, the deepest reality is often described as a vast, formless ground, called the void, emptiness, ground of being, Brahman, or Wuji. In Buddhism, śūnyatā (emptiness) means that nothing has a fixed, separate essence; everything arises interdependently within a boundless openness. Hindu and Advaita teachers call this same empty ground Brahman or pure awareness, not empty in a barren sense but overflowing with potential.

Taoists speak of Wuji, the undifferentiated source from which yin and yang emerge. Mystics in the West describe it as the ground of being or divine nothingness. Meditatively, it may be experienced as samadhi, a still, luminous state beyond thought. This is likely what I experienced that fateful day. Though the words differ, all point to the same ineffable reality: a silent fullness that underlies and gives birth to all things. The pluripotent underpinning that is at the core our true selves and everything else.

And today, in a spark of synchronicity I read these words in a beautiful little book called “The Black Hole Survival Guide” written by the physicist Janna Levin. “Black holes are nothing. Black holes are special because there’s nothing there. There’s no thing there”. And still, everything is there. This prompted me to read more about black holes. What I discovered was that at the singularity within the black hole, density and curvature become infinite, and therefore it becomes “no-thing”, Yet, paradoxically, black holes contain the most information of any object in the universe. That’s why some physicists call a black hole the ultimate storage device of the universe. Black holes also hold everything within their nothingness. Pluripotency seems to permeate our reality in diverse and surprising ways.

When we touch into the void, into the pure potentiality, we have the capacity to become pluripotent. To tap into the infinite information at the center of all that is gives us infinite capacity. When we touch there we find out we are capable of becoming much more than we thought possible. And somehow when we touch there there is a deep experience of goodness, joy, and love. Why is love at the center of this nothingness? Many have found this to be true. It’s worth a shot to go there and explore. And just like the pluripotent stem cell holds within itself all information about the countless numbers of types of cell it will be asked to become, perhaps we are the same. What do you want to become?

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Image: rarehistoricalphotos.com

When History Becomes Heaven

Imagine spending the majority of your waking hours 1,000 feet below ground. Your daily routine involves getting up at 4:00 AM. You wake already tired. Coffee goes down fast. A slab of buttered bread—breakfast and lunch—disappears into your satchel. Then the shaft. The mine in which you, your children, and everyone in your town work alternates from freezing and wet to intolerably sweltering. The timbering that is holding back the mine from collapse is dicey at best. Everyone you know is pale, underfed, and prematurely old.

This is 19th-century France as depicted by Emile Zola in his highly compelling novel Germinal. It tells the story of what happens when deprivation becomes intolerable and resentment begins to organize itself. Zola chose the title Germinal to evoke what grows unseen beneath the surface—the slow work of germination in darkness and pressure. Something is growing. The question is: what? Will it flower into justice—or into fury? The answer may depend on what has first been planted in the human heart—and how it’s cultivated.

When the mining company announces a wage reduction, justified as economic necessity, it pushes an already starving workforce past its breaking point. For people living at subsistence, the cut is the final straw. A general strike forms around Étienne, the novel’s restless protagonist. He speaks not of wages, but of destiny. When the strike brings capital to its knees, a new dawn will break—brotherhood, fairness, and dignity. The old world will crumble and be replaced with a glorious bastion of rights and prosperity. Étienne is no longer merely an organizer. He becomes a redeemer. But after two months without food, with the company unbroken, hope curdles into violence.

The miners are not foolish to hope. Humans are built for hope. We are drawn to figures who promise transcendence—who speak not merely of reform but of redemption. These are potent forces. Zola paints a portrait of what happens when politics becomes end of days hope—when the struggle between labor and capital is invested with the promise of salvation, and the desire for utopia grows so strong that almost any means begins to feel justified.

One of the striking features of the novel is the near absence of traditional spirituality. The characters operate as though governed by immutable laws—of physics and economics. They are trapped within a closed system, sealed off from transcendence. There are no appeals to a Higher Power. The local priesthood is dismissed as an arm of the bourgeoisie—mocked, distrusted, and irrelevant. In Zola’s world, there is no heaven. There is only history.

Social mores fray under pressure. Children are promiscuous. Neighbors slander and backstab. Men brawl in the pubs. Like the coal they depend on, the miners are subjected to relentless compression. It is purgatorial—and yet there is no heaven beyond it. With no transcendent horizon, redemption can only be sought through history. Politics becomes the sole vessel of hope. The deeper question is whether another seed—one capable of absorbing and transforming suffering—might have altered not only their fate, but the novel’s grim conclusion.

When Heaven Returns to Earth

Image: Tukaram, mypunepulse.com

And yet there have been communities just as poor, just as constrained, in which something very different germinated. In 17th-century India, the poet Tukaram lived under crushing debt and public humiliation. “I have no wealth or status,” he wrote. “My only treasure is the Name of God.” Tukaram was a practitioner of Bhakti, a devotional movement that emphasized surrender, direct access to the Divine, and spiritual equality across caste lines. In this system, poverty did not disappear. It was relativized. It ceased to be ultimate.

By redirecting longing upward rather than horizontally, Bhakti transformed deprivation into devotion. Among laborers and lower castes, it inspired ecstatic poetry and a fierce sense of spiritual dignity. Unlike Étienne, whose political salvation collapses into violence, Bhakti figures such as Kabir sought revolution in the inner world. God, Kabir insisted, was accessible to anyone who loved. Their practices required no wealth, no institutional power, and no historical upheaval. They only required devotion.

This pattern is not unique to India. In the impoverished Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, Hasidic teachers often spoke of a seed buried in winter soil. To the eye it appears lifeless, even decayed. In truth, its concealment is gestation. What looks like death is the beginning of growth.

Similar currents surfaced elsewhere—early monastic communities, devotional movements across continents—places where material scarcity pressed hard, but transcendence pressed back. Poverty was the common soil. The seed was different.

What We Are Planting Now

We are not miners in 19th-century France. Most of us are wealthier and more comfortable than any generation before us. And yet our public life often feels as volatile as Zola’s fictional strike. We inhabit an “us versus them” atmosphere in which every election feels apocalyptic and every policy dispute existential. Many live in perpetual outrage. Politics has become all-consuming, even a kind of counterfeit religion—complete with passion, devotion, and absolute tenets, but stripped of transcendence. And like all counterfeit religions, it divides the world into believers and heretics. Disagreement becomes betrayal. Loss becomes apocalypse, and compromise becomes sin.

Zola’s cautionary tale reminds us that underground pressure can, when improperly channeled, explode into blood-letting. That same pressure, filtered through a worldview that affirms life as meaningful and beauty as possible even in inhospitable soil, can germinate into something life-affirming. The pressure beneath the surface is inevitable. The question is what we are planting.

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Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

(If you’re already a paid subscriber and would like to receive the All 50 States email, click here).

For some of us, this is the most hopeful time of year. As pitchers and catchers report to spring training camps in Florida and Arizona, the present is just a gateway to an indeterminate future, a realm of delicious possibility in which our team may have the ingredients for that magical season we will remember for generations. “This could be our year,” the fans of every franchise tell themselves. As we gaze out the window at snow-covered ground, we read about players gathering in the sunshine for meaningless “Grapefruit League” and “Cactus League” matchups featuring players we may never cheer for again. We daydream of a World Series championship run.

But of all the greats who live on in their playoff glory, perhaps the ballplayer who should come to mind is Ernie Banks, a Hall of Famer who never won a championship ring, but whose orientation to the game and life offers a joyful counterpoint to that espoused by the great French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Banks gives us the secret to a meaningful life: joyful engagement, even in the face of defeat.

Mr. Cub

Ernie Banks’ nickname was “Mr. Sunshine.” He is widely regarded as one of the nicest people to play the game of baseball, someone who was universally beloved for his joyful, caring demeanor. The catchphrase for which he became famous was “Let’s play two!” He loved the sport of baseball so much that one game was never enough.

Despite the drive and talent to win back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards in 1958 and 1959, it was never all about him. He was a part of a team, and being a great teammate was his nature. In an interview, he once said, “My whole life, I’ve just wanted to make people better.”

It is always easy to be kind when things are good. When you have enough, it is straightforward to share your bounty with others. A lack of scarcity breeds generosity. But when times are hard, people turn inward, protecting their own.

Banks’ other nickname was “Mr. Cub,” who played his entire career in Chicago for a team that is legendary for its lack of success. Winning is fun. Losing is both the opposite of winning and the opposite of fun. And the Cubbies were infamous for losing. Their home ballpark is Wrigley Field in Chicago. Early April games in the shadow of Lake Michigan are cold and windy, not the most enjoyable weather to be out in for nine innings.

So, when Banks would say “Let’s play two!”, he was not saying that it is a blast to keep winning or that it is just too gorgeous a day not to be out playing ball. No—his encouragement was to play for another three hours, an additional game his Cubs would likely also lose. For Banks, the reward was not in the outcome, not in the triumph, not in the ability to assert dominance over the opposition. Rather, it was the act of playing itself that was not only valuable but also the source of joy. Yes, it is more fun to win, but the real secret is to enjoy each moment of the playing.

To Be Is To Do

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise of a philosophical movement called existentialism. For the existentialist, the essence of humanity is freedom. We are by nature radically free. There is no human nature. We are not forced to be anything in particular. We are born the blank slates that John Locke contended a century and a half earlier.

But that freedom comes with a cost. Being free means not being anything. If there was a human nature, then we could blame it for who we are. Without one, we have the responsibility of creating ourselves. You, and you alone, shoulder the entire burden for figuring out who you should be, what it is to live the life you should lead, and then making yourself that way in the world. You have to think about who you are as a human, what makes you the “you” you are.

But that is the easy part. The hard part is that you then have to actually live life in good faith—that is, live according to the way you have figured out you should. You have to make your ought into an is, and you do so by acting. Life is not a thing; it is an activity. Existence is not something you are given; it is something you create, something you construct, something you design and then build.

René Descartes, in the 1640s, worried about the question of existence. How do I know I am real? He concluded with his famous “I think, therefore I am,” contending that because thinking is an action, it requires an actor. To do is to be. In the 1940s, Jean-Paul Sartre inverted this equation. The great existentialist thinker argued that Descartes had it backward: To be is to do. Existence requires asserting oneself in the world, through the world, on the world.

We are who we are because we do what we do. When you act, you create yourself as the person who did what you did. You are only a baseball player if you play baseball. You are only an artist if you make art. You are only a caring person if you care for others. You are who and what you are because you do what you do. Aspirations are meaningless unless they are backed up by action. Someone who doesn’t do anything isn’t anyone. We are what we do.

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy

Sartre’s fellow existentialist Albert Camus takes this line and extends it. If we are what we do and we are radically free, then we could be anything. This seems liberating. We all have dreams. Go live your dream.

But, Camus points out, we do not live in a dream world. We live in the real world. And that can be a nasty place. The world puts speed bumps in our path, only to then erect walls. In real life, our fantasies are challenged if not outright quashed. We have the ultimate freedom to create ourselves, but we have to do so in a universe that does not care, and that will often sabotage our good-faith efforts. Life is a contact sport. Being a human often hurts.

Yet, we inherit the ultimate responsibility: to decide who we ought to be and then to become it. We have no choice if we want to live.

And why should we? If we have to decide who we should be in a world that will likely disallow it, why should we exist at all? The only philosophical question, Camus writes, is why we should not commit suicide.

We are like the mythical figure of Sisyphus, who was condemned for his crime of trying to gain the secret of immortality for humanity with an unending torture. He had to roll a heavy boulder to the top of an increasingly steep mountain. He struggled and strained to roll the rock, and inevitably, as he approached the summit, the terrain would turn upward at such an angle that the boulder would roll over him and back down to the bottom, where he would have to start again.

The torture, Camus points out, is not in the physical exertion. Yes, it was hard, painful work. But Camus points to the moment where Sisyphus, just steps away from the apex, must pivot, look at the bottom of the trail, and know in his heart that he can never accomplish the thing he must do. He then must take that first step back down, knowing what awaits him, knowing the pain to come, knowing of the inevitable failure again.

But, Camus argues, there is one way that Sisyphus can escape. He can avoid the punishment—not by running away, but through a change of mind. If he decides that he wants to roll the rock, if he makes it his choice, then he reclaims his autonomy, his humanity. In Camus’ eyes, this is a middle finger to the gods who punish him. It is an act of scorn. “Just try to take my personhood away from me; I will reclaim it,” Sisyphus declares. Scorn, Camus argues, is what we need in a world that conspires against us in order to affirm ourselves.

Eternal Sunshine of the Loving Mind

Image: Ernie Banks, bleedcubbieblue.com

If there was ever anyone like Sisyphus, it was Ernie Banks. While every baseball fan in February bathes in the gleam of hope that this will be their year, Banks went to camp knowing that it most likely would not. The point of playing the season was to crown a champ. Banks would play his heart out to win games, to make the post-season, to celebrate in the locker room drenched with champagne. Like Sisyphus standing at the top of the mountain having to take that first step down to his boulder, he knew where the campaign would ultimately lead.

But what made Ernie Banks so extraordinary was that he did not give in to Camus’s scorn. Mr. Sunshine took another direction. He appreciated the progress; he embraced the grind; he stopped thinking about the forest and appreciated each tree. It was the love of the game and the appreciation of those who were there with him that gave it value. It was not the destination, but the glory of being able to take the next step that deserved celebration.

Ernie Banks was a baseball player because he played baseball. The existentialists had that correct. But what drove him to continue his existence as such was not scorn, but love. In reveling in the joy of the playing, the glory of the moment, the exchange on a double-play with his second baseman, Ernie Banks gives us a model for a well-lived life. There will always be sorrows and challenges, but we have to embrace those with us and the fact that we get to play—even if we lose, even if it is a blustery cold Chicago day. We have to look at the world as it is and say with authentic joy, “Let’s play two.”

Leave a comment

Each week, you’ll get a guided exploration of a single state of mind — from everyday states like focus, flow, and daydreaming, to deeper emotional, meditative, and contemplative states we all pass through in the course of a human life.

Think of it like a map + travel guide:

Clusters / Regions (like US regions):

Everyday States = “The Lowlands” (common terrain of life).
Emotional States = “The Heartlands.”
Meditative States = “The Mountains” (higher elevations of awareness).
Altered / Substance-Induced States = “The Islands.”
Mystical / Transpersonal States = “The Skies.”
Extreme / Edge States = “The Deserts & Depths.”

(If you’re already a paid subscriber and would like to receive the All 50 States email, click here).