the judging function creates a sense of incompleteness, or wrongness. Like our present circumstances are never quite right. We are drawn to the flaw, the trace of hunger or thirst approaching, the trace of menace in the happy crowd.
The opposite of this experience is thoroughgoing wholeness, inner and outer. A sense that the universe is... See more
Just realized I don't really talk about psychedelics anymore because I learned to meditate (and I use that term loosely—what I'm referring to is actually more like a cluster of skills that can be summed up as "sink into and trust my felt senses, which when listened to carefully, reveal vital information about how I take in the world and feed it... See more
That’s the mimetic trap in a nutshell: it hurts to leave, and there’s nowhere to go. It decouples the social reward signal from the rest of objective reality — you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.
Faced with the possible annihilation of the planet as we know it, certain modes of knowing fall short. Especially insufficient is knowledge that purports humans to be distinct from ecosystems, much less in control of them...A mysticism for the Anthropocene, just like mysticism through the ages, would regard the “object” of knowledge as alive and... See more
Ultimately, it is the ideology of human supremacy that allows us to maltreat animals in factory farms, blow up mountaintops for coal, turn vibrant rainforest into monocropped wastelands, trawl millions of miles of ocean floor with nets that scoop up everything that moves—while glorying in the Anthropocene, claiming that nature only exists to serve... See more