If you don’t know what people are talking about, experientially, when they talk about God, or Buddha Nature, or whatever your favorite label is, you are missing a large part of the human experience that is importantly humbling and helpful in a bunch of other ways. You can think whatever you want about the metaphysical claims that people attach to spiritual experience — it’s totally coherent, although hard to do in practice, to have classical spiritual experiences and remain a committed atheist. But if you just have no idea what that Thing is, you’re missing a basic point of life. Once you are not missing that basic thing, there is then the tremendously challenging lifelong project of understanding how to live in alignment with it, a subject that nobody can definitively crack.
Clipping
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clippings > Have some sense of the spiritual
[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-grownup-i-want-to-be]
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clippings > Counterculture is dead
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44548713]
Cyberpunk was essentially a sub-type of counterculture, and counterculture itself has pretty much been dead for a couple decades now. When the hackers are primarily interested in VC funds, the cryptocurrency ethos overtaken by the finance industry, and the goal of every artist to “make it” as a creator, there’s basically no room for culture that explicitly wants to operate outside the system.
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clippings > Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory
[https://aethermug.com/posts/i-do-not-remember-my-life-and-it-s-fine]
Often my wife mentions an event or the name of a shop, saying something like “I miss the Flavor Savor hamburgers we used to go to when we lived in Nagareyama!” Usually, to her unconcealed dismay, I draw a complete blank: “what’s the Flavor Savor?” We used to go there all the time, she says, and it wasn’t even that long ago.
I get absolutely nothing. I frantically try to think of hamburger joints in Nagareyama: zero hits.
Then she adds some spatial information, like “it’s on the last floor of the XYZ building in front of the station” and suddenly I’m transported there in a roller-coaster instant and it all comes back to me clearly. I almost feel the swooshing movement of going from the station to the entrance of XYZ building, then to the escalators, then up to the last floor, and finally homing into the entrance of the Flavor Savor, all in less than a second. Now all the semantic information pours out: “of course, the Flavor Savor! We went there, like, six times in a year. They have great avocado burgers and a tasty homemade sauce there!” If not too averaged-out, even some fragments of Flavor Savor episodes might come back to me at that point.
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books > The Rose of Paracelsus (W. Leonard Pickard)
“Did you…did you dose me?” “NEVER,” he responded, without guile. “The phenomena you experience sometimes occur in our proximity, as if you remember our ancient language. It happens where ‘two or more are gathered together’, it has been said. A contact high from shared subconscious archetypes; the opening of neurological regions among the experienced.”
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
I always told you that you were not made to be a thinker, and I also told you that this was no lack since, in exchange, you were a master in the realm of images. Pay attention and I’ll explain it to you. If, instead of immersing yourself in the world, you had become a thinker, you might have created evil. Because you would have become a mystic. Mystics are, to express it briefly and somewhat crudely, thinkers who cannot detach themselves from images, therefore not thinkers at all. They are secret artists: poets without verse, painters without brushes, musicians without sound. There are highly gifted, noble minds among them, but they are all without exception unhappy men. You, too, might have become such a man. Instead of which you have, thank God, become an artist and have taken possession of the image world in which you can be a creator and a master, instead of being stranded in discontentment as a thinker.”
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clippings > Hard to see someone as controlling when they make you feel special
[https://skincontact.substack.com/p/21-observations-from-people-watching]
You can tell how controlling someone is by how forceful they are in conversation, how often they cut someone else off or steer the conversation towards what they want. Sometimes it is hard to see someone as controlling when what they desire is making you feel special and chosen.
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
And now the decision was at his fingertips; everything had become clear. Art was a beautiful thing, but it was no goddess, no goal—not for him. He was not to follow art, but only the call of his mother. Why continue to perfect the ability of his hands? Master Niklaus was an example of such perfection, and where did it lead? It led to fame and reputation, to money and a settled life, and to a drying up and dwarfing of one’s inner senses, to which alone the mystery was accessible. It led to making pretty, precious toys, all kinds of ornate altars and pulpits, St. Sebastians and cute, curly angels’ heads at four guilders a piece. Oh, the gold in the eye of a carp, the sweet thin silvery down at the edge of a butterfly’s wing were infinitely more beautiful, alive, and precious than a whole roomful of such works of art.
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books > Narcissus and Goldmund (Hermann Hesse)
Perhaps it was after all worthwhile to place one’s entire life at the service of art, at the expense of freedom and broad experience, if only in order to be able once to make something this beautiful, something that had not only been experienced and envisioned and received in love, but also executed to the last detail with absolute mastery? It was an important question.
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clippings > Depression does something useful
[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X6Nx9QzzvDhj8Ek9w/a-slow-guide-to-confronting-doom-v1]
I strongly suspect human brains have the ability to enter a depression state because the state does something useful. It seems to me that depression often arises from feeling stuck or not believing that one is able/on track to achieve acceptable outcomes. It’s like the brain, dissatisfied with the situation, boycotts and withdraws motivation. Something like that.
Having one’s brain not let you mindlessly or unreflectively continue down a path that won’t work, seems maybe useful. I’m not sure if that’s it, but I think it’s something.
Capitalism: our best, or even only, truly working coordination mechanism for deciding what the world should work on is capitalism and money, which allocates resources towards the most productive uses. This incentivizes growth and technological progress. There’s no corresponding coordination mechanism for good political outcomes, incl. for preventing extinction.
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clippings > The inner voice is not the problem
[https://qualiacomputing.com/2025/05/03/the-voice-in-your-head-dont-mind-the-inner-monologue/]
The problem with having a voice in your head is that it is a judgmental voice – it creates a self-view.
Judgment is self-perpetuating. It stings. It costs energy. And it builds on top of itself. When you’re too far gone in a judgment spiral, you judge yourself for being judgmental.
Freedom from judgment is within grasp for all of us (assuming we put in the time and effort – though please don’t take this as a judgment on your temporal thriftiness or laziness!). Burbea affirms it’s “absolutely possible” for the habit of judgment to end – sometimes large chunks of the “mountain of judgment” crumble suddenly in a matter of weeks. Even when judgment thoughts continue to arise from habit, they arise “completely free of any charge… just like empty words” with no power behind them. Eventually, these empty judgments fade away because they’ve been “sucked dry” of meaning.