Tastes of magic

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be,... See more

"There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be... See more

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be remin... See more

I know that some annoying-sounding things that mystics or Zen teachers say, about cosmic oneness or the flow of the Dao, are actually just straightforward descriptions of what the world looks like from a certain point in the contemplative path. “The original face you had before your parents were born” is a phrase that will make perfect, undeniable,... See more

One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the

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Having lost that original identity of the ordinary and the special, we typically give up on the ordinary and look to new special experiences to compensate for our loss. Although what we’ve lost is the most ordinary thing in the world, we go looking for something special to replace it. And thus, by pursuing the special, we are, in effect, forever co

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traditionally associated with psychedelia; the disillusion of a localised self-centered reality that is replaced with a far greater sense of interconnectivity with a greater whole — a replacement of concern for measurement with an appreciation of meaning as Huxley describes it.