The Brain on Cushions: What Mindfulness Actually Does to Your Head

Sit still. Watch your breath. Feel faintly ridiculous. That is meditation, for most beginners, for about a fortnight. Then something shifts. Not enlightenment. Nothing so grand. Just a small, stubborn sense that the thoughts arriving in your head are not orders you must obey.

That shift has a body behind it.

Neurons. Grey matter. Hormones with unpronounceable names. This piece asks what is actually happening beneath the scalp during regular mindfulness practice, and how seriously we should take the neuroscience that claims to explain it.

The claim, stated plainly

Mindfulness meditation is said to change the brain in two ways.

First, functionally: it alters activity and communication between brain regions, often within minutes of sitting down.

Second, structurally: with sustained practice, it appears to change the physical architecture of the brain itself- thickness, density, connectivity.

A systematic review found that mindfulness induces neuroplasticity, increases cortical thickness, reduces amygdala reactivity, and improves brain connectivity and neurotransmitter levels, contributing to better emotional regulation, cognitive function, and stress resilience.

That is the headline. Now the detail, and the caveats. Read both. The caveats are not decoration.

The amygdala turns its volume down

Start with fear. The amygdala is the brain’s smoke alarm, quick, blunt, prone to going off when there is only toast burning. Chronic stress keeps it hypersensitive.

Sara Lazar’s team at Massachu

The same study found gains elsewhere. Grey matter density increased in the hippocampus, the region tied to learning and memory, and in structures linked to self-awareness, compassion, and introspection

Average daily practice time in that trial was modest. Roughly twenty-seven minutes a day was enough to produce these effects

Twenty-seven minutes. Less than an episode of most television programmes, and considerably better for you.

Lazar had already shown something similar in long-term practitioners some years earlier; her 2005 study found greater cortical thickness in the prefrontal cortex among experienced meditators, particularly in regions tied to attention and interoception, the sense of one’s own internal bodily states.

The prefrontal cortex ordinarily thins with age. Meditators seemed to be quietly resisting that. Fifty-year-old meditators in her sample showed roughly the same volume of grey matter as people half their age.

Worth pausing on. Not a miracle. A correlation, in modest samples. But a striking one.

The mind stops wandering off to argue with itself

Here is a fact about being conscious that nobody warns you about at birth. Left alone, your brain does not rest. It narrates. It replays arguments you already won, or lost, or never actually had. Neuroscientists call the network responsible for this the Default Mode Network, the DMN, active whenever you are not focused on a task, anchored by the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex.

Task based imaging studies of adults who practise mindfulness consistently show reduced activation within key regions of this network, particularly the posterior cingulate cortex, regardless of how experienced the practitioner is.

Put plainly, meditators show less of the neural chatter associated with mind wandering, and this shows up even in relative beginners.

There is a more specific finding worth savouring.

Researchers found that people with weaker functional connectivity between the thalamus and the posterior cingulate cortex reported being more mindful of the present moment, suggesting the thalamus may act as a kind of switch between wandering and attending

Somewhere in the middle of your skull sits a knob. Mindfulness practice appears to turn it.

The stress hormone, and a more honest accounting

Cortisol gets discussed as though it is simply a villain. It is not. It is a survival mechanism that misfires under chronic modern stress.Upon perceiving a stressful situation, the amygdala signals the hypothalamus to release a hormone that eventually prompts the adrenal cortex to secrete cortisol, which then rises through the body within a quarter of an hour of the stress being perceived.

The obvious hope is that mindfulness dampens this cascade.

The honest answer is: sometimes, a bit, inconsistently.

One randomised trial comparing Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy found both approaches improved how well the HPA axis, the hormonal stress system, habituated to repeated stressors, though neither reduced overall cortisol output across test days.

A more recent review of mindfulness and cortisol summed up the field bluntly. Findings on whether mindfulness affects cortisol regulation remain inconsistent, and much existing research lacks sufficiently large samples or properly active control groups.

Hold that thought. It matters for what comes next.

The part where a sober person interrupts

Every enthusiastic mindfulness article eventually needs a bucket of cold water thrown over it.

Consider this that bucket.

In 2018, a group of eighteen contemplative scientists, several of them pioneers of the very research being celebrated above, published a piece with a title that does not need translating: “Mind the Hype.”

Their argument was not that mindfulness is fake. It was that the science supporting it has grown faster than its own rigour. They raised four distinct concerns: weak validity in how mindfulness itself is measured, poor methodology in clinical trials, insufficiently examined adverse effects, and questionable interpretations of neuroscience data regarding the mental processes said to underlie mindfulness.

The lead author was direct about it in a subsequent interview. He noted that major reviews of the evidence in 2007 and again in 2014 found the applications of mindfulness for enhancing mental and physical health were largely unsupported by rigorous research, and that results from the handful of large-scale studies conducted so far had been equivocal at best.

This is from researchers who like the practice.

They simply do not think the current evidence deserves the confidence with which it gets sold.

A 2026 review in Advances in Integrative Medicine echoes concerns from within the field.

It flagged common methodological flaws across the literature, including small sample sizes, wildly inconsistent intervention protocols, and a frequent absence of active control groups, and set out to establish which findings actually withstand rigorous scrutiny. The same review offered one genuinely useful working model. It proposed that mindfulness training may function along a continuum, with short-term practice producing rapid but potentially unstable structural changes in the brain, and long-term practice consolidating and stabilising those changes over time.

In other words. Your first fortnight of sitting still might genuinely nudge your brain about. Whether that nudge sticks depends entirely on whether you keep turning up.

What can be said with a straight face?

Sceptic satisfied, mystic still standing, here is the fair summary.

The mechanism is plausible and increasingly well mapped. Attention, held deliberately and repeatedly, engages the prefrontal cortex. Repeated engagement of a neural circuit is, by the basic logic of neuroplasticity, exactly the kind of thing that produces structural change over time.

The literature consistently points to increased production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor as one likely support for this plasticity, a protein associated with neuron growth, synaptic plasticity, and improved capacity for learning. That is not mysticism. That is fairly standard neurobiology, applied to a fairly unusual habit.

The amygdala findings are among the most replicated and most sensible, structurally and functionally, because they match what people actually report feeling. The default mode network findings are robust and mechanistically satisfying, because mind wandering genuinely does quieten with practice, in ways you can notice yourself without an MRI machine. The cortisol and hormonal findings are the weakest link, promising in places, contradictory in others, and badly in need of larger trials with proper active controls rather than a waiting list doing nothing.

None of this makes mindfulness magic. It makes it a training regime for a specific set of neural circuits, roughly as reliably as a gym membership changes a specific set of muscles, and about as dependent on whether you actually go.

The call to action, since you may be looking for one

Do not read this piece and feel reassured. Feel challenged instead. The neuroscience is real, but it is provisional, contested by its own founders, and easily oversold by people with a course to sell you. That is not a reason to dismiss the practice. It is a reason to test it on yourself rather than take anybody’s word for it, mine included.

So here is the experiment. Twenty minutes a day, attention on the breath, for eight weeks. Keep a note of your sleep, your temper, your capacity to sit in a queue without composing furious letters in your head. That is not peer reviewed. It is also the only trial whose results you will actually have to live with.

Sit down. Watch your breath. Feel ridiculous for a fortnight. Then see what is left of you on the other side.

Alan /|\

Sources

Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R. et al. (2018). Mind the Hype: A Critical Evaluation and Prescriptive Agenda for Research on Mindfulness and Meditation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(1), 36 to 61.

Calderone, A., Latella, D., Impellizzeri, F. et al. (2024). Neurobiological Changes Induced by Mindfulness and Meditation: A Systematic Review. Biomedicines, 12(11), 2613.

Advances in Integrative Medicine (2026), 13(2). Mindfulness and the brain: A systematic review of neuroimaging evidence on structural and functional connectivity.

Hölzel, B. K. et al. (2011), reported in Harvard Gazette, Eight weeks to a better brain.

Lazar, S. W. et al. (2005), cortical thickness findings summarised in Simply Psychology and AAAS coverage of Lazar’s Harvard research programme.

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2015). Mindfulness is associated with intrinsic functional connectivity between default mode and salience networks.

ScienceDirect (2014). The network property of the thalamus in the default mode network is correlated with trait mindfulness.

PMC (2024). Augmenting mindfulness training through neurofeedback: pre-post changes on resting state functional connectivity.

PubMed (2019). Cognitive behavioural therapy, mindfulness, and cortisol habituation: A randomised controlled trial.

PMC (2025). The Effects of an Online Yoga Nidra Meditation on Subjective Well-Being and Diurnal Salivary Cortisol: A Randomised Controlled Trial.

PMC (2022). The Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation on Trait Mindfulness, Perceived Stress, Cortisol, and C-Reactive Protein in Nursing Students.

The Shouting Shop

There was a time when a political debate looked like a wake. Grey suits. Grey faces. A man from the Home Counties is reading a paragraph about balance of payments as if it were a psalm. Nobody clapped. Nobody laughed. Nobody, God forbid, had a personality

In a way, I miss it terribly.

Watch footage of a 1960s leaders’ debate, and you feel the particular boredom of church on a wet Sunday. The camera does not move. The men do not move. A point is made about monetary policy, and everyone nods, slowly, like cattle agreeing to a new field. It is dull. It is also, somehow, adult.

Compare this to now.

Now the debate has become a shop. Everyone is shouting their opinion like a fishmonger at closing time. Facts are the fish nobody wants. They smell. They spoil the display. Far better to sell the customer a nice fresh certainty, wrapped in newspaper, no questions asked.

The Death of the Boring Man

The boring wo/man served a purpose. S/He checked things. S/He read the brief twice before saying anything. S/He was, in short, a filter. Somewhere between then and now, we decided the filter was the problem, not the sewage.

So we removed him. We replaced him with people who understand cameras better than they understand policy. The result is a politics built entirely from reaction shots. A raised eyebrow now carries more weight than a white paper. A soundbite outlives a select committee report by roughly forever.

This is not an accident.

It is a design choice. Shouting is cheaper than research. Certainty is cheaper than nuance. And the audience, God help us, prefers the shouting.

We built the shop.

We keep coming back to it.

A Nation of Opinion Columnists

Everyone has become a pundit. Not an expert. A pundit. There is a difference, and it is the difference between knowing something and simply having said something loudly enough that it stuck.

The old debates had experts droning through statistics nobody enjoyed, but everybody trusted. The new arena has opinion holders, standing at podiums built from vibes, defending positions they arrived at roughly the same way you choose a fruit at a market. By squeezing it once and deciding you liked the feel.

Ask a modern politician a direct question and watch the footwork. It is genuinely balletic. A whole answer can now be constructed entirely from words that mean nothing, arranged to sound like they mean everything. It would be impressive if it were not the actual governance of sixty-seven million people.

Why We Let It Happen

We like a fight. This is the uncomfortable bit. Nobody made us watch this. We chose the shouting over the stodge because the stodge required patience, and the shouting required only a sofa and a packet of crisps.

Facts, unfortunately, do not perform. A well-sourced statistic has never gone viral in the history of the internet. A man calling his opponent a liar on live television, however, that will be clipped, shared, and replayed until the actual issue underneath it has died quietly of neglect.

We built an economy of attention and then acted surprised when politics adapted to sell within it. This was always going to happen. You cannot build a market for outrage and expect the product to be a reasoned argument.

Where That Leaves Us

Here is the punchline, and it is not a comfortable one.

We do not need the stodgy men back. Nobody is nostalgic for men reading paragraphs about the balance of payments. But we do need the discipline they represented. The idea that a claim should survive scrutiny before it survives an election.

That discipline will not return by itself. Broadcasters will not slow down. Platforms will not reward patience. The only lever left in the room is the audience, which means it is the only lever left in your hand.

So, here is the small, unglamorous task.

Next time a politician says something that makes you feel something, ask what it made you know. If the answer is nothing, put the fish back on the ice. Do not buy it just because it smells confident.

The shouting shop only stays open because we keep queuing.

Alan /|\

Truth and Fact: A Marriage That Never Happened

A man once told me he was the reincarnation of a Cornish tin miner. He wept when he said it. Real tears. Salt water, cortisol, the whole biological performance.

Was it true? For him, absolutely.

Was it a fact? Not remotely.

This is the whole trouble in two lines. Let us dig further. There is treasure down there, and also, probably, a body.

What Truth Actually Is

Truth is not a record. It is a feeling of wearing a records office badge.

Ask ten people what happened at a car crash. You will get ten different crashes.

Nobody is lying. Everyone is editing. The brain does not record events. It builds them, afterwards, from whatever scraps were lying about at the time.

Fear adds speed.

Guilt adds blame.

Grief adds meaning that was never there.

Truth, then, is personal. It is assembled from memory, emotion, and the story we need to keep telling about ourselves so we can get up in the morning without screaming.

This is not a design flaw. It is the whole point. A person without a comforting personal truth does not last long. Ask any therapist. Ask me. I have the certificates.

What Fact Actually Is

Fact does not care about your childhood.

A fact sits there, indifferent, waiting to be measured. The tin miner either existed or he did not. Parish records will say. The stone does not weep. The stone does not need to.

Facts are stubborn in a way feelings never are. You can starve a fact, ignore it, or shout at it from across the room. It remains exactly the same size. This is deeply irritating to most humans, who would much prefer a universe that agreed with them.

Where They Almost Touch

Here is the dark joke. We use the same word, “know”, for both.

I know my mother loved me. I know water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at sea level.

Two wildly different operations wearing the same coat. One is a fact you could reproduce in a laboratory with a thermometer. The other is a truth you could not reproduce even with your mother in the room, under oath, holding a lie detector.

Both claim certainty. Only one has earned it.

The Essential Difference

Fact does not need you. It existed before you arrived, and it will not notice when you leave.

Truth needs you desperately. It is built from your wounds, your loves, your grudges, your particular way of misremembering Christmas 1987. Take the person away, and the truth simply evaporates, because there was never anything there but a very convincing story.

Bias is not a bug in truth. It is the entire manufacturing process. Every truth is a fact that has been marinated in feeling until it is tender enough to swallow.

Why This Matters, and Why It Is Also Very Funny

We are living through an age that has confused the two on an industrial scale. People shout “that’s my truth” as though it settles a dispute about facts. It does not. It settles a dispute about feelings, which is a different courtroom entirely, with different rules and considerably worse lighting.

The comedy is this. We built entire civilisations, laws, bridges, and vaccines on fact. And we built entire wars, romances, and Tuesday afternoons on truth.

Both are necessary. Neither will admit it needs the other.

A fact without truth is cold. It is a spreadsheet. Nobody has ever cried over a well-constructed spreadsheet.

A truth without fact is dangerous. It is the man weeping over a mining career he never had, and it is, at scale, every regime that ever burned a library.

A Small Reflection Before You Go

Ask yourself, honestly, next time you feel certain about something: is this a fact, checkable by a stranger with no stake in you? Or is this a truth, built by you, for you, to keep you standing?

Both are allowed. Both are useful. But only one of them should ever be used to argue with a thermometer.

Go and check your facts. Then go and forgive your truths.

Alan /|\

The Difference Between Buddhism and Taoism

A man once asked a Zen master what happens after death. The master said, “I don’t know.” The man was shocked. “But you’re a Zen master.” The master said, “Yes. But not a dead one.”

That joke could belong to Buddhism or Taoism. Both traditions like a good riddle. Both distrust the man who claims certainty. But scratch the surface and you find two very different animals, wearing similar robes.

Two Roads Out of Suffering

Buddhism starts with a diagnosis. Life is suffering. Not tragedy, not occasionally, but structurally. We want things. Things change. We suffer. The Buddha’s plan was clinical. Find the cause. Apply the cure. Eightfold Path. Middle Way. Extinguish craving and you extinguish suffering.

It reads like a doctor’s chart. Symptom, cause, prognosis, treatment.

Taoism has no chart. It has a river.

The Tao Te Ching does not diagnose you. It watches water flow round a rock and asks why you cannot do the same. There is no eightfold anything. There is the Way, and there is your stubborn refusal to stop fighting it.

Buddhism wants you to see through illusion. Taoism wants you to stop interrupting.

The Self, and What to Do With It

Buddhism looks hard at the self and finds nothing there. No fixed soul. No permanent “you”. Just a fast moving bundle of sensations pretending to be solid, like a candle flame that looks the same for hours but is never the same fire twice.

Once you see that, the argument goes, you loosen your grip. Nothing to defend. Nothing to lose. This is not nihilism. It is closer to relief.

Taoism is less interested in dismantling the self and more interested in getting it out of its own way. The self is not an illusion to see through. It is a knot that ties itself tighter the harder it tries to be a good knot.

Wu wei, action without forcing, is the Taoist answer. Stop straining to be virtuous. Stop performing wisdom. The valley does not try to be low. It just is, and everything flows into it anyway.

Buddhism dissolves the self through insight. Taoism just tells the self to sit down and stop showing off.

Where They End Up

Push a Buddhist practice far enough and you arrive at liberation. Nirvana. The candle blown out, in the old, unfashionable but accurate translation. An end to the cycle. A finishing line, however non conventional that finish might look.

Push a Taoist practice far enough and there is no finishing line, because there was never a race. You arrive back at the start, except now you notice the start was rather good all along. The uncarved block. Simplicity, restored rather than achieved.

One tradition is trying to get you off the wheel. The other is trying to get you to enjoy the ride, on the grounds that the wheel was never really the problem. You were.

Why This Still Matters

We live in an age addicted to self improvement, five step plans, morning routines, and the quiet tyranny of “just fix yourself.” Buddhism, taken shallowly, can feed that addiction. Another technique. Another app. Another thing to master.

Taoism is the corrective. It suggests some problems dissolve the moment you stop gripping them. Not every knot needs untying. Some just need your hand to open.

Held together, properly, without turning either into a lifestyle brand, they offer something rare. A way to examine the self honestly, and a way to stop torturing it once you have.

A Small Task For You

Pick one thing today you are gripping too hard. A grievance. A plan. An opinion you are far too proud of.

Do not analyse it to death, Buddhist style. Do not force it to relax, which is its own kind of force. Just loosen your hand, Taoist style, and see what is still standing once you let it fall.

That is the whole difference, in one gesture. Understand the knot, or simply open the hand. Either way works. Neither works if you just talk about it.

So go and try it. The river is not waiting for your permission.

Alan /|\

The Devil’s Arithmetic:

What War Costs, What Peace Would Buy

There is a number. It sits quietly in an academic paper, unread by the people who set defence budgets. It says that ending extreme poverty across the globe, all of it, every household living on less than $2.15 a day, would cost $318 billion a year. That is roughly 0.3% of world GDP. Less than humanity spends on alcohol. A rounding error against cosmetics.

Now here is another number. A war that ran for months in 2026, fought over Iran’s nuclear programme, cost somewhere between $42 billion and $113 billion in direct US military spending alone, depending on which tracker you trust and which week you stop counting. Add the knock on costs, the oil shock, the stranded shipping, the fertiliser that never left the Gulf, and the bill climbs past $2 trillion.

Sit with that for a moment. The two figures are not close. One war, in one region, over months, could plausibly outspend a permanent global fix to the worst poverty on earth.

The invoice for a war

The 2026 Iran war began on 28 February and dragged on, with a collapsed truce in June and a second wave of strikes in July. By the most conservative tally, it cost $42 billion in direct spending over 108 days, with a further $87.6 billion requested in supplemental funding from the Pentagon. A separate tracker, counting the July escalation, put the first six days alone at $11.3 billion, the fastest burn rate of any American war on record.

Human cost does not fit neatly into a spreadsheet, but people tried. Fifteen to seventeen American service members killed. Over five hundred wounded. More than 3,600 Iranians dead by cumulative count, over seventeen hundred of them civilians, more than two hundred of them children. Associated strikes in Lebanon added thousands more. Forty two US aircraft lost or damaged. Twenty four drones destroyed. Numbers, stacked like sandbags, holding nothing back.

Then the ripples. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on 4 March, disrupting roughly a fifth of the world’s oil trade. Brent crude went past $120 a barrel. Qatar declared force majeure on its gas exports. Gulf states supply nearly half the world’s sulphur and urea, both essential to fertiliser, and that shortage has a lag of six to nine months before it shows up as hunger somewhere far from the fighting. Egypt alone saw $6 billion pulled out of its markets within weeks, and its currency fell by more than eight per cent. The Global Peace Index estimates a resumed war could cost the world economy $2.2 trillion in a single year. The broader global cost of violence, across every conflict, reached $21.8 trillion in 2025, a tenth of everything humanity produced.

That is the price of the sword.

The invoice for mercy

Now the other ledger. Researchers at Berkeley and Stanford spent years building a model using household survey data from twenty three countries, home to half the world’s poorest people. Using AI assisted targeting, direct cash transfers, no bureaucracy, no middlemen, they calculated the true cost of lifting nearly everyone above the extreme poverty line. Their answer: $318 billion a year. A separate, more conservative estimate, aimed only at closing the poverty gap rather than eliminating it outright, came in at $170 billion.

For an American on the median income of $45,000, ending poverty would cost about $135 a year. Less than a decent meal out with excuses.

The researchers were careful to place their number in context. The world spends seven times that on alcohol. It spends more on cosmetics than on saving lives. Foreign aid alone, before this study, ran close to the poverty solving figure without solving anything.

So the arithmetic writes itself, and it is not subtle. One year of a regional war could have paid for the end of extreme poverty on this planet, with change left over. Nobody planned it that way. Nobody sat in a room and chose bombs over bread. But the ledger does not care about intention. It only records what actually happened.

Two ways to spend a trillion

Here is the uncomfortable bit. Poverty does not make headlines the way war does. A missile strike on a refinery is news within the hour. A child going without food for the ninth consecutive month is not news at all, anywhere, ever, unless a photographer happens to be nearby and a war happens to be nearby too.

War is efficient at capturing attention and catastrophically inefficient at producing anything except more war. Poverty relief is the opposite. It is boring, unglamorous, and it works. Cash arrives, the household spends it on food and school fees, and nothing exciting happens on the news that evening. Which is precisely the point.

The devil, if he exists in any useful sense, was never interested in horns and sulphur. He is interested in ledgers. He is the one who ensures that the money always finds the bomb before it finds the child. That is his arithmetic, and we let him keep the books.

The grocery bill

A war ends in the headlines months before it ends in anyone’s grocery bill. The ceasefire gets signed, the cameras leave, and somewhere in East Africa a farmer is still waiting on fertiliser that got stranded in a strait nobody in his village could point to on a map. That is the real timeline of a modern war. Fast to start, slow to finish, and the finishing happens to people who were never asked and never consulted.

Ending poverty has no such lag. The money goes in, and within a season the effect shows up as a full stomach and a child still in school. It is the rare policy that is both cheap and immediate. We simply do not choose it.

Perhaps the question worth sitting with is not whether we can afford to end poverty. The numbers say plainly that we can, and have been able to for years. The question is why a bill for destruction always clears without debate, while a bill for repair sits unpaid on the desk. That is not an economic puzzle. It is a moral one, and it deserves an answer that adds up better than the one we currently give it.

Alan /|\

Sources

• NPR, Here’s how much the Iran war cost, and how its effects will linger, 17 June 2026

• WarCosts.org, Iran War (2026): Cost, Casualties & Analysis

• WarCosts.org / OpenWar, What Did the Iran War Cost? Final Accounting, updated 10 July 2026

• Vision of Humanity, The Hidden Price of the Iran War, Global Peace Index 2026, 11 June 2026

• Small Wars Journal, The Cost of the Iran War for the United States: A Strategic Blunder in Five Dimensions, 27 April 2026

• Wikipedia, Economic impact of the 2026 Iran war

• Wikipedia, 2026 Iranian strikes on Saudi Arabia

• Sahoo, Niehaus, Selker, Wager, Blumenstock, What Would It Cost to End Extreme Poverty?, NBER Working Paper, December 2025

• UC Berkeley Center for Effective Global Action, The End of Poverty, cega.berkeley.edu

• Vox, The Low, Low Cost of Ending Extreme Poverty, 17 December 2025

• Stanford Daily, $170 billion needed to end poverty, Stanford researchers find, 25 February 2026

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Alan Jones Website

THE INVENTION OF YOU

Theories, Illusions and Inconvenient Truths About the Self

Alan Jones

“I am the one who is looking for me.” — Attributed to no one, which is rather the point.

Introduction: The Problem That Thinks It Has a Problem

There is something happening inside your skull right now. It is reading this sentence. It is forming opinions about it. It believes it knows who it is, where it has been, and where it is going. It has a name. It probably has opinions about cheese.¹

That something is you. Or so you believe. The trouble is that neuroscience, philosophy, and evolutionary biology have spent the last century quietly dismantling this belief, brick by brick, while you were busy having lunch and feeling like yourself.

This essay explores the question of selfhood in earnest. It draws on philosophy, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and the occasional bout of existential panic. It will define its terms, cite its sources, and try not to make you want to lie down in a darkened room. No promises on that last one.

I. What Do We Even Mean by ‘Self’?

Defining the Terrain

The word self is doing a great deal of heavy lifting in everyday conversation. It is doing the work of a concept that philosophy has been arguing about since at least 500 BCE, when the Buddha reportedly told his followers that the self did not exist, and they responded by spending 2,500 years arguing about what he meant.²

Self (philosophical): The subject of experience; the entity that persists through time and change; whatever it is that makes you feel like you rather than someone else. Notoriously difficult to pin down.

In ordinary usage, the self is assumed to be unified, continuous, and the author of one’s actions. These three assumptions are, unfortunately, the ones that fall apart most spectacularly under examination.

Philosophers carve the self into layers. There is the minimal self: the basic sense of being a subject of experience, here, now. Then there is the narrative self: the story we tell about who we are across time. And there is the social self: the performance we enact for others, which is often rather different from what goes on backstage.³

Hume’s Brutal Honesty

David Hume sat down in 1739, looked inward with unusual rigour, and reported what he found. He found no unified self at all. He found impressions and ideas in constant flux. A bundle of perceptions. A stream with no stable river bed.⁴

“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception.” — David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

This is known as the bundle theory of the self. You are not a thing. You are a collection of experiences with no permanent owner. Hume himself admitted this was deeply unsatisfying, which suggests he was a man of some psychological honesty, if not particularly cheerful at dinner parties.

II. The Neuroscience of the Self-Illusion

The Brain’s Peculiar Habit

The human brain is a prediction machine. This is not a metaphor. Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists now broadly agree that the brain does not passively receive information and then decide what to do. It is constantly generating predictions about incoming sensory data, updating those predictions, and suppressing the errors.⁵

Predictive processing: A theoretical framework in cognitive neuroscience, developed by Karl Friston and others, proposing that the brain generates a hierarchical model of the world and constantly updates it by minimising prediction error. The brain infers reality rather than detecting it.

Within this framework, the self is not discovered. It is constructed. The brain generates a model of the body as a whole, embeds that model within a social and temporal context, and calls the result me. This model is updated constantly, though far less often than we imagine.

Antonio Damasio, the Portuguese-American neuroscientist, argues that the self has biological roots in the body’s continuous effort to maintain homeostasis. His somatic marker hypothesis holds that feelings originating in the body provide the scaffolding upon which the self is built.⁶

Somatic marker hypothesis: Damasio’s proposal that decision-making and the sense of self are grounded in bodily states. Emotions are not decorative; they are functional signals that shape cognition and selfhood.

The Default Mode Network

There is a region of the brain that activates when you are doing nothing in particular. It roars to life when you are daydreaming, thinking about the future, or contemplating your own existence. It is called the Default Mode Network (DMN), and it is extraordinarily active in human beings compared to other species.⁷

Default Mode Network (DMN): A set of interconnected brain regions, including the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, that are active during self-referential thought, mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, and theory of mind tasks. Sometimes called the ‘me network.’

The DMN appears to be the neural home of the narrative self. It is where you rehearse conversations that will never happen, where you construct memories that are partially fabricated, and where you maintain the fiction of a stable, coherent you. It is, in short, the organ of self-invention.

What is particularly alarming is that the DMN is most active when the brain is least accurate. Mind-wandering states correlate with unhappiness. The self-constructing machine appears to have a bias towards threat, rumination, and the creative reconstruction of the past.⁸

The Left Hemisphere Interpreter

Michael Gazzaniga’s split-brain experiments revealed something extraordinary. When the corpus callosum connecting the brain’s two hemispheres is severed, the left hemisphere will confabulate explanations for actions initiated by the right. It will make up reasons. Plausible, confident, entirely false reasons.⁹

Confabulation: The spontaneous production of fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive. The brain’s narrator making things up and believing them completely.

Gazzaniga called the left hemisphere the interpreter. Its job is to produce a coherent narrative from whatever information it receives, even when that information is fragmentary or contradictory. The self, it turns out, may be the story the left hemisphere tells to explain the body’s behaviour. You are not the author. You are the autobiography.

III. The Biological Origins: Why Evolution Built This Machine

A Useful Fiction

The self, whatever it is, presumably evolved because it was useful. This is the blunt Darwinian logic that underlies all evolutionary psychology. Organisms that behaved as though they had a persistent identity could plan, defer gratification, maintain social contracts, and remember who had wronged them. These are, broadly speaking, advantageous capacities.¹⁰

The social brain hypothesis, associated with Robin Dunbar, proposes that the neocortex expanded primarily to manage the complexity of social relationships. A creature embedded in a social network needs to track its own position, reputation, and obligations. The self may be, at root, a social tracking device.¹¹

Social brain hypothesis: Robin Dunbar’s proposal that the evolution of the large primate neocortex was driven primarily by the demands of living in complex social groups. Intelligence evolved not to solve physics problems but people problems.

Theory of Mind and the Self as a Model of Models

Closely related is theory of mind: the capacity to attribute mental states to others. To think about what someone else is thinking. This requires having a model of other minds, which in turn requires having a model of one’s own mind to use as a template.¹²

Theory of Mind (ToM): The cognitive ability to attribute mental states, beliefs, intentions, and desires to oneself and others, and to understand that others have states different from one’s own. Thought to emerge in humans around age four. Disrupted in certain developmental conditions.

The implication is striking. The self model may have evolved not to know itself but to model others. The inner life we experience as profoundly intimate and private is possibly, at its evolutionary root, an external-facing social technology. You invented yourself in order to understand other people. Kafka would have appreciated this.

The Body Schema and the Rubber Hand

The self is not purely a mental construct. It is also bodily. The brain maintains a body schema: a constantly updated map of where the body is in space, what it is doing, and where its boundaries lie. This map is more malleable than one might expect.¹³

Body schema: A dynamic, largely unconscious representation of the body’s posture, movement, and position in space, maintained by the brain’s parietal and premotor cortices. Distinct from the body image, which is the conscious, reflective sense of how one’s body looks.

The rubber hand illusion demonstrates this with disturbing elegance. A participant places one hand behind a screen and watches a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with their own. Within minutes, they begin to feel that the rubber hand is their hand. Their brain has updated the body schema to incorporate an object that is not their body. Their real hand, meanwhile, shows measurable physiological changes. The self, at least in its bodily dimension, is built from synchronised sensory prediction, not metaphysical essence.

IV. Buddhist and Eastern Perspectives: The No-Self Problem

Anatman and Its Radical Proposal

The Buddha’s concept of anatman (Sanskrit) or anatta (Pali) is usually translated as ‘non-self’ or ‘no-self.’ It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhist thought. It proposes that what we call the self is not a fixed, independent entity but a collection of processes, none of which constitutes a stable subject.¹⁴

Anatman / Anatta: The Buddhist doctrine of non-self. The claim that there is no permanent, unchanging self or soul (atman) underlying experience. The self is a conventional designation for a changing process, not a metaphysical entity. Considered one of Buddhism’s most distinctive and challenging contributions to philosophy.

This is, of course, precisely what Hume concluded by introspection in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, which either vindicates Buddhist philosophy or suggests that sufficiently honest introspection will reach the same grim conclusion regardless of cultural context.

Neuroscientist Sam Harris and philosopher Thomas Metzinger both argue, from secular positions, for something close to anatman. Metzinger’s concept of the phenomenal self-model proposes that the brain creates a model of itself that is transparent to the subject. You cannot see the model. You see through it. The sense of being a self is what it feels like to be a brain with an active self-model.¹⁵

Phenomenal self-model (PSM): Thomas Metzinger’s concept describing the brain’s internal model of itself as a whole. The PSM is experienced as transparent, meaning the subject does not perceive it as a model but as direct reality. The sense of being someone is an artefact of this modelling process.

V. The Narrative Self: You Are the Story You Tell

McAdams and the Life Story

Psychologist Dan McAdams developed what he calls the narrative identity theory: the idea that people construct selfhood by internalising an evolving life story that integrates past, present, and anticipated future.¹⁶

Narrative identity: Dan McAdams’ theory that the self is a personal myth constructed from one’s autobiographical memories, values, and cultural narratives. The self is not found but authored.

This is less comforting than it sounds. Memory, it turns out, is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Every time you retrieve a memory, you reconstruct it from available cues. Each reconstruction is subject to interference, updating, and motivated distortion. Your autobiography is a first draft that gets rewritten constantly and quietly, without your knowledge or consent.¹⁷

What you believe about your past shapes your present identity. But your present identity shapes what you believe about your past. It is circular all the way down. The self is not the author of the story. The self is the story. A story revising itself in real time.

The Social Performance of Self

Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model proposes that social life is performance. The self presented in public is a role, shaped by audience, context, and the desire to manage impressions. The ‘real’ self, if it exists, may be backstage, or it may be the sum of all performances, or it may not exist at all in any meaningful sense.¹⁸

Dramaturgical model (Goffman): Erving Goffman’s sociological framework treating social life as theatrical performance. Individuals manage the impressions others form of them, distinguishing between front-stage (public) and backstage (private) behaviour. The self is a performed, socially negotiated construct.

The implications for daily life are considerable. The person you are at work, at home, alone at two in the morning, and in a job interview are meaningfully different. None of them is fake. All of them are you. This is either reassuring evidence of human flexibility or evidence that the concept of a unified self is doing no useful work whatsoever.

VI. Free Will, Consciousness, and the Commander Who Takes All the Credit

The Libet Problem

In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that have been disturbing people at dinner parties ever since. He asked participants to flex their wrist whenever they chose, while monitoring brain activity and recording the moment the participant reported making the decision.¹⁹

The brain’s readiness potential, the Bereitschaftspotential, began building approximately 550 milliseconds before the movement. The participant’s reported moment of ‘deciding’ occurred only 200 milliseconds before the movement. The brain had begun preparing the action before the person knew they had decided to act.

Bereitschaftspotential (Readiness Potential): A slow, negative-going electrical brain potential that precedes voluntary movement, first described by Kornhuber and Deecke in 1965. Libet’s experiments showed it arises several hundred milliseconds before conscious awareness of the intention to move. Widely cited in debates about free will and consciousness.

The self, it appears, is not the initiator of action. It may be the narrator, arriving just in time to take credit. Philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued that this does not eliminate free will but requires us to reconceive it. Others have taken a darker view.²⁰

The Consciousness Question

The hard problem of consciousness, named by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, is the question of why there is subjective experience at all. Why does brain activity feel like anything from the inside? Neuroscience can, in principle, explain how information is processed. It cannot easily explain why that processing is accompanied by the peculiar fact of experience.²¹

Hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers’ formulation of the explanatory gap between physical brain processes and subjective experience. The ‘easy problems’ concern the mechanisms of cognition and behaviour. The hard problem asks why these mechanisms are accompanied by any inner experience at all.

The self sits squarely inside the hard problem. It is an experienced reality, not merely a functional one. Whatever the self is, it does not feel like a model. It feels like a subject. Bridging that gap between the third-person description and the first-person experience remains the most stubbornly unsolved problem in the philosophy of mind.

VII. Disorders of the Self: When the Model Breaks

The strongest evidence that selfhood is a construction comes from cases in which it breaks down. These are not metaphysical thought experiments. They are clinical realities.

In depersonalisation disorder, individuals feel detached from their own thoughts, feelings, and body. They experience themselves as observers of their own mental processes. The self is still present enough to notice its own absence, which is, philosophically speaking, remarkable.²²

Depersonalisation disorder: A condition characterised by persistent or recurring experiences of feeling detached from one’s mental processes or body. Sufferers often describe feeling like an outside observer of their own thoughts and feelings. Associated with disrupted activity in the default mode network and the insular cortex.

In Cotard’s syndrome, patients believe they are dead, do not exist, or have lost their organs. It is caused by disruption to systems linking facial recognition with emotional response. When the face fails to generate feeling, the brain concludes that the person bearing the face must not be real. An extreme confabulation. A self-model with a catastrophic error it cannot correct.²³

In advanced Alzheimer’s disease, the narrative self dissolves gradually as autobiographical memory erodes. What remains is a version of the person that others recognise but that may not fully recognise itself. The self, as a narrative construction, requires memory. Remove memory and the story loses its protagonist.

VIII. What Follows? A Call to Productive Vertigo

The evidence, taken together, suggests the following. The self is real as a functional construct but is not the unified, stable, autonomous entity that ordinary experience suggests. It is a model generated by the brain, grounded in bodily experience, shaped by social context, and maintained by a narrative process that is largely confabulatory.

It is, in short, a very convincing story told by an unreliable narrator who has the additional disadvantage of being the story itself.

This should not produce nihilism. It should produce productive vertigo: the recognition that because the self is constructed, it is also reconstructable. The stories we tell about ourselves are not fixed. The narrative identity can be revised. The body schema can be updated. The social performance can be rehearsed differently.

The self may be a fiction. But it is a fiction you have considerable authorial control over, once you have stopped mistaking it for a fact.

Ask yourself what story you are currently telling. Ask whether the narrator is reliable. Consider who you are performing for, and whether the performance is one you have chosen.

These are not abstract philosophical exercises. They are practical acts of self-examination that every tradition, from the Stoics to the cognitive behaviourists, has recommended. They differ only in their reasons. Knowing the neuroscience provides a new and rather bracing reason to take them seriously.

You are not who you think you are. You are who you decide to keep thinking you are. There is a difference, and it matters.

Alan /|\

References

1. The phenomenon of self-awareness and its apparent ordinariness is discussed in Nagel, T. (1974). ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Philosophical Review, 83(4), 435-450.

2. For the Buddhist non-self doctrine and its philosophical reception: Siderits, M. (2007). Personal Identity and Buddhist Philosophy. Ashgate.

3. The tripartite distinction between minimal, narrative, and social selves is elaborated in Gallagher, S. (2000). ‘Philosophical conceptions of the self: Implications for cognitive science.’ Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 14-21.

4. Hume, D. (1739/2000). A Treatise of Human Nature. Book I, Part IV, Section VI. Oxford University Press.

5. Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press. Friston, K. (2010). ‘The free-energy principle: A unified brain theory?’ Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 127-138.

6. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam. See also: Damasio, A. (2010). Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon.

7. Buckner, R.L., Andrews-Hanna, J.R., & Schacter, D.L. (2008). ‘The brain’s default network: Anatomy, function, and relevance to disease.’ Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1124, 1-38.

8. Killingsworth, M.A. & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). ‘A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.’ Science, 330(6006), 932.

9. Gazzaniga, M.S. (1989). ‘Organization of the human brain.’ Science, 245(4921), 947-952. See also: Gazzaniga, M.S. (2011). Who’s in Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain. HarperCollins.

10. Tomasello, M. (1999). The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition. Harvard University Press.

11. Dunbar, R.I.M. (1998). ‘The social brain hypothesis.’ Evolutionary Anthropology, 6(5), 178-190.

12. Premack, D. & Woodruff, G. (1978). ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1(4), 515-526. Frith, U. & Frith, C.D. (2003). ‘Development and neurophysiology of mentalising.’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 358, 459-473.

13. Botvinick, M. & Cohen, J. (1998). ‘Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see.’ Nature, 391, 756.

14. Harvey, P. (2013). An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

15. Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity. MIT Press. Harris, S. (2014). Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Simon & Schuster.

16. McAdams, D.P. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self. Guilford Press.

17. Schacter, D.L. (2001). The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Houghton Mifflin. Loftus, E.F. (2005). ‘Planting misinformation in the human mind.’ Learning & Memory, 12, 361-366.

18. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.

19. Libet, B., Gleason, C.A., Wright, E.W., & Pearl, D.K. (1983). ‘Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential).’ Brain, 106(3), 623-642.

20. Dennett, D.C. (2003). Freedom Evolves. Viking Penguin.

21. Chalmers, D.J. (1995). ‘Facing up to the problem of consciousness.’ Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.

22. Sierra, M. (2009). Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome. Cambridge University Press.

23. Hirstein, W. & Ramachandran, V.S. (1997). ‘Capgras syndrome: A novel probe for understanding the neural representation of the identity and familiarity of persons.’ Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 264, 437-444. For Cotard’s specifically: Young, A.W. & Leafhead, K.M. (1996). ‘Betwixt life and death: Case studies of the Cotard delusion.’ Method in Madness: Case Studies in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Psychology Press.

Alan /|\

Schrödinger’s Afterlife

Quantum physics, consciousness and death.

The science, the séance and the sales pitch.

Dr Alan Jones · The Rational Mystic

Nobody panics about magnetism. Nobody stands at a graveside and whispers that Grandad has merely become inductive. But say the word quantum and something in the human brain unlocks. Suddenly death is negotiable, consciousness runs the universe, and a man in expensive linen would like to sell you a course.

This is a shame, because the real story is stranger than the fake one. It just refuses to flatter us. So here is the real story, the fake one, and a guide to telling them apart at parties.

The problem that started it all

Quantum mechanics is the physics of the very small, and it is the most successful theory our species has ever produced. Its predictions have been confirmed to a dozen decimal places. Your phone works because of it. So does the sun. As science goes, this is the good china.

It also contains one genuine embarrassment. The mathematics says a particle exists in many states at once. An electron is here and there. Spin up and spin down. This is called superposition, and it is not a metaphor. The equations describe it exactly and the experiments confirm it.

But measure the particle and you only ever get one answer. The maths says many. Your eyes say one. Something happens between the two, and nobody can fully say what. This is the measurement problem, and it has been sitting in the middle of physics like an unexploded shell since the 1920s. The standard response, the Copenhagen interpretation, says measurement collapses the possibilities into a single result. Asked how, it changes the subject. Generations of physicists were advised to shut up and calculate. Mostly they did. The shell remained.

Enter the many worlds

In 1957 a Princeton doctoral student named Hugh Everett proposed something braver. What if nothing collapses? What if the maths means what it says? Every possible outcome happens. When you measure the electron, the universe branches. In one branch you see spin up. In another, a version of you sees spin down. Both are real. Both think they got the only answer. This happens constantly, everywhere, producing an unimaginable froth of diverging worlds.

The appeal is honesty. Many worlds adds nothing to the theory. It removes something: the mysterious collapse. The cost is extravagance. You buy mathematical tidiness by accepting more universes than there are atoms, none of which you can visit or verify. Serious physicists hold this view. Serious physicists also think it is a poor bargain. The other worlds do not interact with ours, which is convenient for the theory and maddening for everyone else. It remains an interpretation, not a discovery. Keep that word. It matters later.

The gun on the table

Take many worlds seriously and it leads somewhere dark. In 1997 the physicist Max Tegmark followed it there with a thought experiment called quantum suicide, which no one should try and everyone should think about.

Wire a gun to a quantum measurement. Spin up, it fires. Spin down, it clicks. Even odds, decided by pure quantum chance. Now put it to your head and pull the trigger. Under the standard view, ten pulls give you about one chance in a thousand of surviving. You die, and that is that.

Under many worlds, every pull splits reality. In one branch you die. In the other you live. And here is the twist. You cannot experience the branches where you are dead. There is nobody there to do the experiencing. Your conscious thread continues only where the gun clicked. From your own point of view, it never fires. Click. Click. Click. A thousand rounds, and you stand there impossibly alive, while in countless other branches your colleagues attend your funeral and say you always took things too far.

The catch is elegant and cruel. The evidence is yours alone. Everyone else, in almost every branch, just sees a dead physicist. You cannot publish. Science requires witnesses, and yours are at the wake.

Now the caveats, which the internet always deletes. Tegmark himself does not believe this buys anyone immortality. The experiment needs death to be instant and binary, a clean quantum switch. Real dying is nothing like that. It is gradual, a dimming rather than a light switch. Cells fail by degrees. There is no crisp branch point for your awareness to escape through. You do not slip sideways out of a stroke. Quantum suicide is a probe into what probability means when everything happens. It is not a survival manual. A puzzle about measurement got dressed up as a promise about death, and the dressing sells better than the puzzle.

How consciousness got into the room

There is a reason the mystics smelled blood, and it is worth being honest about. For a while, consciousness was a respectable answer to the measurement problem.

The trouble is that a detector is made of atoms, and atoms obey quantum rules, so the detector should simply join the superposition. So should the computer reading it. So should the physicist reading the computer. The chain has no natural end. In the 1930s John von Neumann, one of the great mathematicians of the century, suggested the chain must stop at the only thing that seemed to stand outside physics: the observer’s mind. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate, agreed. For roughly fifty years, consciousness collapses the wave function was a position held by giants.

It is not held any more, and here is why. The modern concept of decoherence explains how quantumness leaks away. A quantum system touching its environment, even a single stray photon, loses its ghostly multiplicity almost instantly. No mind required. A rock can do it. A photographic plate collapses reality just as well as you do, and it has never had a thought in its life. Observation in quantum mechanics means physical interaction, not attention. The particle does not know you are watching. It knows something bumped into it. Wigner himself abandoned the view before he died. His followers on the internet did not get the memo, or got it and burned it.

One serious fringe remains, and fairness demands it be named. Roger Penrose, a Nobel winning mathematician, argues that consciousness may arise from quantum processes in the brain, possibly in tiny structures called microtubules. Most physicists and neuroscientists reject this. Tegmark calculated the brain is far too warm and wet, with quantum coherence collapsing there a trillion times faster than a neuron can fire. Penrose has earned a hearing. He has not earned a verdict. Note the direction of his claim, though. He says quantum physics might explain minds. He does not say minds run the universe. The difference is everything.

The sales pitch

Now for the fake story, which you have already met on Facebook, probably beside an advert for crystals.

It goes like this. Quantum physics proves the observer creates reality. You are an observer. Therefore you create reality. Therefore your thoughts shape matter, your intentions bend outcomes, and death is an illusion of limited perception. Deepak Chopra has built a career on this scaffolding, along with terms like quantum healing and quantum consciousness, which relate to actual quantum mechanics the way a unicorn relates to a horse. Same general shape. One of them exists.

The method is always the same, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Take a true, strange fact. Superposition is real. Entanglement is real. The measurement problem is genuinely unsolved. Then perform the switch: replace physical interaction with human awareness, replace interpretation with discovery, and replace we do not know with therefore whatever comforts you. Season with the word energy. Serve at a retreat.

The energy move deserves special mention because it does the heaviest lifting at funerals. Energy cannot be destroyed, the argument runs, and you are energy, so you cannot be destroyed. Both premises are true. The conclusion is a card trick. Your energy survives death the way a bonfire survives going out: as a slight warming of the surrounding air. The energy is conserved. The pattern that was you is not. Nobody roasts marshmallows over the conservation of energy.

And notice who pays for all this. Not the physicists, who mostly find it funny. The bill goes to the grieving widow who buys the course, the frightened patient who chooses quantum healing over chemotherapy, the ordinary person left with the impression that science is just another belief system with worse branding. The pitch borrows the authority of the most tested theory in history and spends it on things the theory never said. That is not a victimless hobby. It is intellectual forgery with the occasional body count.

What quantum mechanics is, and is not

So let us end plainly, because the whole con depends on nobody ever doing so.

Quantum mechanics is a mathematical framework describing matter and energy at the smallest scales. It is the most precisely confirmed theory humans have ever built. It genuinely says the microscopic world is probabilistic, that particles exist in superpositions until they interact, and that some correlations span space in ways that offend common sense. It contains a real unsolved question about what measurement is. That question is open, fascinating and humbling.

Quantum mechanics is not a theory of consciousness. It is not a theory of healing, intention, manifestation or the afterlife. It does not say you create reality by observing it. It does not say your mind collapses wave functions. It does not say death is an illusion. It does not care about your thoughts, and it has never once responded to a vision board. Every popular claim to the contrary is built on a fifty year old abandoned hypothesis, a misread thought experiment, or a deliberate pun on the word observer.

Here is the honest position, and it is harder than either comfort or contempt. Two genuine mysteries exist. Physics cannot fully say what measurement is. Neuroscience cannot say why matter gives rise to experience. Two locked rooms, side by side. The mystics claim there is a door between them. The debunkers claim the rooms are empty. Neither has looked inside, because nobody can, yet. We are standing in the corridor, listening at both.

That is not a consolation. It is better than one. Consolations expire. Mysteries, properly respected, do not. The universe at bottom really is stranger than the furniture suggests, and it owes you nothing, and it is still the most interesting thing you will ever be briefly part of.

Do not let anyone sell it back to you with a discount code.

Alan /|\

Warning

This is a deliberately provocative article; I am not expecting you to agree, but it does, I hope, raise some valuable questions. I will respond to the discussion points, but not aimless rants or ad hominem attacks. We have the right to our opinions and, more relevantly, our considered opinions. Debates for improving our thinking often start with contrary statements and ideas.

I am also not sure I agree with myself!

An Eye, Politely Averted

On British justice, the gallows we abolished but never quite surrendered, and the question we take care not to ask.

I. The Verdict from the Armchair

A man does something unspeakable. The trial ends. The sentence is read. And somewhere, in a pub or a kitchen or a comment thread, the real verdict arrives.

“He’ll not last long inside.”

We say it with satisfaction. We say it the way we might remark on the weather. There is a warmth to it. A child has been harmed, a life taken, and we have found our comfort. The wing will see to him. The other men will know what he did. Justice, the proper kind, the kind with teeth, will be done in a place we cannot see and need not think about.

We do not call this the death penalty. We abolished that. We are civilised now.

We simply hope.

II. The Thing We Put Down

Britain stopped hanging people in 1964.^[1] Two men went to the gallows that August morning, one in Liverpool and one in Manchester, for a murder over money. Nobody marked the date. The next year, Parliament suspended capital punishment for murder, and four years after that, made the suspension permanent.^[2] By the end of the century, it was gone from the statute book altogether, even for treason.

This was presented as progress. An ascent. We had climbed out of the pit and would not be going back.

There was only one difficulty. The public never truly agreed.

For decades after abolition, poll after poll showed a majority wanting the rope returned. The law had walked on ahead. The feeling stayed where it was. And a feeling that cannot speak does not die. It goes quiet. It waits. It finds another door.

III. The Spectacle We Lost

We were not always so delicate.

For most of our history punishment was theatre, and the theatre was free. The gallows at Tyburn stood where Marble Arch stands now, and the journey there, three miles from Newgate, was a public holiday in all but name. Crowds came. Vendors sold pies and pamphlets. The condemned were expected to perform, to repent or to swagger, and a good death drew applause.

This was justice you could watch. Justice with a date and a place and a smell.

The list of things that could put you on that cart was extravagant. By the early nineteenth century the law named more than two hundred capital offences.^[3] You could hang for stealing goods worth a few shillings. You could hang for poaching, for forgery, for keeping the company of gypsies a month. The severity was the point. The severity, it was thought, would frighten the rest of us into virtue.

It did not.

Pickpockets are recorded working the crowds that gathered to watch pickpockets hang. The lesson was there for anyone willing to read it. People do not weigh consequences they never expect to face. The Italian jurist Beccaria had argued as much in 1764.^[4] It is not the severity of a punishment that deters, he held, but its certainty. A small penalty that always falls does more than a terrible one that rarely does.

So if the spectacle did not deter, what was it for?

The sociologist Émile Durkheim gave the unsettling answer. Punishment, he argued, is not really aimed at the criminal at all. It is a ritual performed for everyone else. When we punish, we draw a line and stand on the right side of it together. The hanging was never a lesson for the thief. It was a service for the crowd. It told them who they were.

Read that again, slowly. Then think of the pub, and the wing, and the warmth in your own voice.

The public hanging ended in 1868.^[5] The last man to die before a crowd was a Fenian, executed outside Newgate, and after him the scaffold went indoors. The French thinker Michel Foucault saw in this move something larger than decency. Punishment did not soften. It hid. The body was no longer broken in the square. The soul would be corrected in private, on a timetable, behind a wall. The crowd was sent home.

But the crowd did not lose its appetite. It only lost its lunch.

IV. Revenge in a Borrowed Coat

Here we must be careful with our words, because two of them are forever changing clothes.

Revenge is personal. It is hot. It has no limit and keeps no measure. You hurt mine, I hurt yours, then your cousin hurts mine, and the thing runs on forever.

Retribution is meant to be revenge with its collar buttoned. Cold, proportionate, handed to a third party who has no stake in it. “An eye for an eye” is misremembered as savage. It was the opposite. It was a ceiling. One eye, and not the man’s life. A brake, not an accelerator.

We built the whole apparatus of law to make that swap. Thomas Hobbes described the bargain plainly. We each hand our private right of vengeance to the state, and in return the state keeps the peace and settles our scores for us, without favour and without heat. We give up the knife. We get a court.

And then, quietly, we take the knife back.

When we hope a man will be made hell by his fellow inmates, when we trust the wing to deliver what the judge would not, we are reclaiming the very thing we promised to surrender. We want the outcome of the gallows without the vote for it. We want the death, and we want our hands clean.

There is a name for that posture, and a basin to go with it.

Pontius Pilate did not condemn the man before him. He washed. He let the crowd do the sentencing and kept his own hands dry, and for two thousand years we have despised him for it. Then we go home and hope the other prisoners will do our washing for us.

This is the distancing. This is the real subject. By putting the violence out to others we never have to admit that we want it. We keep the flattering self portrait, the humane nation that put the rope away, and we enjoy, at one remove, the satisfactions of a brutal one. The mob at Tyburn was many things, but it was honest. It came to see a death and it said so. We have not become more merciful than that crowd. We have become more squeamish, and more dishonest, which is not the same thing.

V. The Machine That Forgot

Kafka wrote a story about a machine.

In the penal colony an officer tends a beautiful and terrible device that executes prisoners by writing their sentence into their flesh with needles, slowly, over twelve hours, until they die. The officer loves the machine. He loves the old days, when crowds gathered to watch it work and understood its meaning. But the old commandant is dead, the new one is indifferent, the crowds have stopped coming, and nobody can quite remember what the machine is for any more. It still runs. It still kills. It has simply lost its reason. At the end the officer cannot defend the thing in words, so he lies down in it himself, and the machine, breaking, kills him without writing anything at all.

We have built our own machine, and it too has forgotten what it is for.

Ask it. Ask the British justice system what it is doing, and listen to the five answers it gives at once. It is here to deter. It is here to reform. It is here to protect us by keeping dangerous people away. It is here to give wrongdoers what they deserve. And, beneath all of it, never printed on any form, it is here to make someone suffer for our sake.

These aims do not point the same way. They pull against each other like dogs on one lead. Deterrence wants certainty and speed. Reform wants patience and money and the unfashionable belief that a person can change. Desert wants the punishment to fit, no more and no less. Protection only wants the door locked. And revenge wants pain, and is never quite satisfied, because pain does not bring the dead back.

A system asked to do all five at once, by a public that will not say which it wants most, cannot succeed. It can only disappoint everyone in turn. The reformer calls it cruel. The victim calls it soft. Both are right, because it is trying to be both, and a thing that faces every direction faces none.

Look at the machine now. The prisons of England and Wales sit at around ninety seven per cent of usable capacity, fuller than at any point in living memory.^[6] To make room, men have been let out early, and the committee that looked into it found, at one prison, inmates with a single day of their sentence left being bussed to another prison overnight, simply to free a bed.^[7] A bureaucracy moving a man twenty miles to sleep, on the last night of his punishment, so the books will balance. Kafka could not have bettered it.

And does any of this work, by the one measure that ought to matter, the prevention of the next victim? Around twenty eight in every hundred released offenders are convicted of a fresh crime within the year, and among those given short sentences the figure is far worse.^[8] Most crime in this country is committed by people the system has already held in its hands and let go, unchanged.^[9]

The machine runs. It still kills time, still costs fortunes, still fills and empties its cells. It has simply lost its reason.

VI. What It Is For

So we return to the question, which was never really about courts or sentences or cells.

Is the system broken? Perhaps not. Perhaps it is doing, with grim precision, exactly what an undecided people built it to do. Everything. And therefore nothing.

The fault, if we must find one, is not in the dock. It is in the armchair. We have never told the system what we want, because we have never been willing to say it aloud, even to ourselves. We want mercy in the law and vengeance on the wing. We want to abolish the gallows and keep the hanging. We want the man to suffer, and we want someone else to make him suffer, so that we may go on believing we are the gentle sort who never would.

The Grey Path teaches that the honest place is between the two lights, the candle and the star, refusing the comfort of a false choice. But there is a counterfeit grey, the grey of the man who will not decide because deciding would cost him something. That is where we have been hiding. Not in honesty. In evasion.

So here is a test, and you may try it tonight.

The next time you hear yourself say you hope he rots, that he will get what is coming, that he will not last a week inside, stop. Ask one question and answer it truthfully. Would you pull the lever yourself?

If you would, then say so plainly. Argue for the gallows in the open, where we can all see your face and weigh your reasons. There is more honour in that than in a whisper.

And if you would not, if your hand would shake on the lever and your stomach would turn, then ask why you are so content to let another man’s hand do the thing yours refuses. That gap, between what we permit and what we would do, between the death we want and the death we will not own, is not a flaw in the system.

It is the system.

We built it in our own image. We averted our eyes and called it justice.

Alan /|\

References

^[1]Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans, hanged on 13 August 1964, the last executions carried out in Britain.

^[2]Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965, made permanent in 1969. The death penalty was removed from the statute book altogether, treason included, by 1998.

^[3]The so called Bloody Code. By the early nineteenth century the law named more than two hundred capital offences.

^[4]Cesare Beccaria, On Crimes and Punishments, 1764.

^[5]Michael Barrett, hanged outside Newgate on 26 May 1868, was the last person publicly executed in Britain. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act of that year moved the gallows inside the prison walls.

^[6]As of November 2025 the prison population of England and Wales stood at 86,888 against a usable operational capacity of 89,291, roughly 97 per cent. The population reached a record high in mid 2025. House of Commons Justice Committee, 2025.

^[7]House of Commons Justice Committee, Ending the cycle of reoffending, 2025, reporting on HMP Elmley.

^[8]The overall proven reoffending rate for England and Wales was 28.3 per cent for the cohort released between October and December 2023. Ministry of Justice.

^[9]The Justice Committee noted that around 80 per cent of all offending is reoffending.

Between the Mountain and the River

Buddhism and Taoism. Where they meet, and where they part.

Two men sat down a long time ago. One sat under a tree until he understood suffering. One watched a river until he stopped arguing with it. Neither wrote a self-help book. We have been misreading them ever since.

A short history of Buddhism

Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince. The dates are argued over. Call it the fifth century before the common era, somewhere in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had everything. High walls kept the ugly parts of life on the outside. Then one day he went past the walls.

He saw an old man. He saw a sick man. He saw a corpse. He saw a wandering monk with nothing and no fear. Four sights. They ruined him in the best possible way.

He left the palace, the wife, the child and the throne. He starved himself half to death, decided that starving was idiotic, ate a bowl of rice, and sat down under a fig tree. He stayed there until he saw clearly. After that they called him the Buddha, which only means the one who woke up.

He taught for forty five years and then died, by most accounts of something he ate. His followers wrote nothing down for centuries, then wrote down a great deal. The teaching spread across Asia and split as it travelled. Theravada kept it spare. Mahayana grew vast and compassionate. Vajrayana added thunder and ritual. Chan, which the Japanese came to call Zen, stripped it back to silence. Today there are perhaps half a billion Buddhists. The man who began it owned a robe and a bowl.

A short history of Taoism

Taoism has no birth certificate. That, you could argue, is the whole point.

Tradition gives us Laozi, the old master, a keeper of court archives in the sixth century before the common era. The story says he grew sick of a corrupt government and rode west on an ox to disappear. A border guard begged him to leave something behind first. He sat down, wrote five thousand characters, handed them over, and was never seen again. Those characters became the Tao Te Ching. Whether Laozi ever lived is anyone’s guess. The book lived. The book was enough.

A century or two later came Zhuangzi, who wrote in stories and jokes and turned down every offer of high office. When ministers came to make him a great man he told them he would rather be a live turtle dragging its tail in the mud than a sacred dead one kept in a temple. Then he went back to his fishing.

Later still, Taoism grew a church. Priests, gods, temples, alchemists chasing the elixir of immortality, breathing exercises, charms against demons. Scholars love the split that followed. Philosophical Taoism, which is the books. Religious Taoism, which is the rituals. The first asks how to live. The second asks how to live forever. Both are still walking the same mountain.

Where they meet

Put the two traditions in a room together, and they nod at one another.

Both distrust words. The Buddha pointed at the moon and warned his students not to mistake the finger for the moon. Laozi opened his book with a flat refusal to be pinned down.

Both treat the grasping self as the trouble. We clutch. We cling. We want the river to run uphill because we asked it nicely. Buddhism calls this craving. Taoism calls it swimming against the current. Both prescribe the same medicine, which is to let go.

And both prize stillness. Sit down. Be quiet. Watch what happens when you stop interfering. One calls it meditation, the other calls it contemplation, but the posture is the same and so is the silence. When Buddhism walked into China it found Taoism already there, brewing tea. The two argued, borrowed, and in time had a child. That child is Zen: Buddhist bones in Taoist skin. The sudden laugh, the raked garden, the cup of nothing. That is the marriage of the mountain and the river.

Where they part

They are not the same thing, whatever the gift shop poster says.

Buddhism is a physician. It opens with a diagnosis. Life involves suffering. Suffering has a cause. The cause can be removed. Here is the treatment. This is the Four Noble Truths, and it reads rather like a clinic note. Calm, exact, slightly grim.

Taoism is not a physician. It is a fisherman. It does not think you are ill. It thinks you are fine, and would be finer still if you stopped struggling. Where Buddhism hands you a path with eight clear steps, Taoism hands you a river and tells you to float. Its great phrase is wu wei, action without forcing, the art of getting things done by not shoving.

The goal differs too. The Buddhist wants to wake from the dream completely, to step off the wheel of birth and death, to reach nirvana, which is less a destination than a candle going out. The Taoist has no wish to leave at all. The Taoist wants to belong here, to move with nature, to become like water. One seeks release from the world. The other seeks a better dance with it.

Then there is the self, and here the knives come out. Buddhism takes a blade to it. Look closely, it says, and you will find no fixed self anywhere, only a parade of passing parts. This is anatta, no self. Taoism does not bother with the blade. It simply widens the self until the edges blur into everything else. One tradition dissolves you by analysis. The other dissolves you by belonging. Zhuangzi told it best. He dreamed he was a butterfly, happy and fluttering, with no idea he was Zhuangzi. Then he woke, and could not say whether he was a man who had dreamed a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming a man.

Notice the trap that catches them both. The Buddhist tries hard to stop craving, which is itself a craving. The Taoist tries hard not to try, which is, of course, trying. Each tradition knows the joke and grins at it. Awakening, it turns out, is slippery on purpose.

Attitudes and approaches to life

What does any of this look like on a wet Tuesday?

The Buddhist Tuesday is attentive. You watch your own mind the way a careful gardener watches weeds. You notice the craving, the aversion, the small convenient lies. You practise kindness on purpose, because the Buddha was blunt about the futility of doing otherwise.

The Taoist Tuesday is looser. You do less, and you do it better. You catch yourself forcing something, and you stop. You let the meeting end. You let the bread rise. You trust that the soft outlasts the hard, because water wears away stone and the stone never wins a single round.

Put it crudely, and crude is sometimes the most honest. Buddhism teaches you to want nothing. Taoism teaches you to force nothing. The first is freedom from desire. The second is freedom from effort. They are cousins. They are not twins.

How one becomes a Buddhist

This is simpler than people fear. There is no font, no register, no official at a desk stamping your soul.

You take refuge. You declare, and mean it, that you trust three things. The Buddha, as proof that it can be done. The Dharma, the teaching itself. The Sangha, the community who keep it alive. These are the Three Jewels. To say so sincerely is to become a Buddhist. Many do it at a small ceremony with a teacher. Many simply begin.

Then you keep five promises. Do not kill. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not abuse sex. Do not fog the mind with drink and drugs. Nobody inspects you. The point was never to pass an inspection. The point was to live as though waking up mattered. After that you practise. You sit. You watch. You fail. You sit again. Becoming a Buddhist takes a sentence. Being one takes the rest of your life.

How one becomes a Taoist

Here the paradox comes back, smiling.

In the philosophical sense you do not become a Taoist. You notice you have always been one. There is no convert’s ceremony in the Tao Te Ching, no membership card, no sign up sheet. You read the book. You watch a river. You begin to force things a little less. That is the entire induction. A man who tried very hard to become a Taoist would have missed the joke completely.

Religious Taoism is stricter. There you can be ordained. You find a master, enter a lineage, learn the texts, the rituals, the breathing, the long patience of the temple. This is a real and demanding road, walked mostly in China and among its diaspora, and it is not finished over a weekend retreat with scented candles.

For most of us in the West the honest answer is plain. You become a Taoist the way you become aware of a change in the season. Quietly, without paperwork, and slightly before you notice it has happened.

The candle and the river

So there they stand. Two old answers to the oldest problem, which is the problem of being a creature who suffers and would rather not.

Buddhism hands you a map and a discipline and says the way out is through, so walk carefully. Taoism hands you nothing, points at the water, and says you were never trapped, so stop swimming so hard.

You do not have to pick a team. You can take the diagnosis and still learn to float. You can love the river and still keep an eye on your own mind. The rational mystic holds both in one hand, the candle and the star, the lamp of clear thinking and the dark patience of nature.

Here is the only homework. Tomorrow, just once, catch yourself forcing something that does not need force. A conversation. A queue. A grief. Then do the small and radical thing that both of these traditions, in their very different accents, have been suggesting for two and a half thousand years.

Let go.

Alan /|\

The Trouble With Being Clever

Edward de Bono spent his life annoyed by clever people. Not personally. Philosophically. He thought we had built a civilisation that worshipped one kind of mind, the analytical critic, and then acted surprised when the world stopped producing new ideas.

His complaint went like this. Schools teach logic. Universities teach more logic. Boardrooms reward people who can shoot down a proposal in under thirty seconds. We are excellent at judging ideas. We are hopeless at making them.

He once said that most thinking mistakes are not logical ones. They are mistakes of perception. The reasoning machine works fine. It is just being fed rubbish, and feeding it harder does not help.

Two stages, and we keep skipping one

De Bono split thinking into two stages. First comes perception. This is the part where the mind decides what it is looking at. What matters. What to ignore. What the problem even is.

Then comes processing. This is the logical part. The sums. The arguments. The Excel sheet.

Western education, he argued, obsessed over the second stage. Mathematics. Debate. Critical analysis. All processing. Meanwhile, the first stage, the part that quietly decides everything before the thinking even begins, was left to chance.

The result is familiar. A meeting where everyone reasons brilliantly toward the wrong conclusion. A strategy team that solves the problem nobody had. A bright graduate who can dismantle any argument but cannot make one of their own.

Logic, de Bono said, will not get you out of a hole that perception dug.

The mind as a self-organising mess

He had a theory for why this happens. The brain is a pattern-making system. It receives chaos and tidies it into familiar shapes. This is wonderful for survival. It is dreadful for novelty.

Once a pattern forms, the brain tends to prefer it. Information flows down the same grooves. We see what we have seen before. We solve problems the way we solved them last time. Yesterday becomes a tyrant.

This is why, de Bono said, you cannot think your way out of a fixed perception. You have to jump out of it. Sideways. Hence, the term he coined and never quite escaped. Lateral thinking.

Lateral thinking is not the same as creativity, which he found a vague and slightly embarrassing word. It is the deliberate breaking of patterns. You leave the well-worn path. You provoke yourself. You use humour, which he loved, because a good joke is the same shape as a good idea. Both arrive from an unexpected direction and make perfect sense in hindsight.

Critical thinking asks whether something is true. Lateral thinking asks whether something is useful, whether it moves you somewhere new. Both matter. Only one is fashionable.

The tools

De Bono distrusted lectures about thinking. He wanted thinking taught the way you teach a forehand or a recipe. Practical. Repeatable. Boring enough to actually use.

So he built tools. Small, ugly little acronyms that sound like instant coffee brands. He did not care. He wanted them memorable, not elegant.

The first set came from his CoRT programme, taught to millions of children and rather fewer adults who arguably needed it more.

PMI. Plus, Minus, Interesting. Before judging an idea, list its good points, its bad points, and the points that are merely curious. The third column is the trick. It stops you from collapsing the world into yes and no. Most people, given a new idea, decide in under three seconds whether they like it. PMI buys you three minutes.

CAF. Consider All Factors. A discipline for working out what you have left out. Most disasters are not caused by the factors people considered and got wrong. They are caused by the ones nobody bothered to list.

C&S. Consequence and Sequel. Look ahead. Immediate, short-term, long-term. What happens next, and then what happens after that, and then what happens when everyone has adjusted. Politicians might find this one useful.

AGO. Aims, Goals, Objectives. What are you actually trying to do here? Meetings would shrink by half if this question were asked aloud at the start.

FIP. First Important Priorities. Once you have a list of factors or ideas, decide which ones matter most. Not all considerations are equal. Pretending they are is how good intentions produce bad outcomes.

APC. Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices. Force yourself to find more options than the obvious two. The mind loves a binary. It is almost always lying to you.

OPV. Other People’s Views. Who else is affected? What do they actually think, not what should they think. Empathy as a checklist item. Crude, perhaps, but better than the alternative, which is forgetting other people exist.

Each tool is a deliberate redirection of attention. That is the whole point. You cannot order yourself to think differently. You can, however, ask yourself a PMI, and find that your attention has already moved.

The Hats

Later came the famous one. Six Thinking Hats.

The idea was simple to the point of seeming silly. In any discussion, people are doing several kinds of thinking at once, all tangled together, and getting cross with each other for doing the wrong kind. The optimist accuses the sceptic of being negative. The sceptic accuses the optimist of being naive. Nobody is listening.

So you give each kind of thinking a colour.

White for facts. Just the data. No opinions.

Red for feelings. Hunch, intuition, gut. No need to justify it.

Black for caution. What could go wrong? The critical hat. The one most managers wear permanently and call it realism.

Yellow for benefits. What could go right? The genuinely useful optimism, with reasons.

Green for creativity. New ideas. Provocations. Wild suggestions.

Blue for managing the process. Thinking about the thinking.

The point is not the colours. The point is that everyone wears the same hat at the same time. Parallel thinking instead of adversarial thinking. You all attack the problem, not each other. A meeting that would have taken an hour of polite warfare takes twenty minutes of actual progress.

It looks like a children’s game. That is rather the point. De Bono thought the dignity of grown-up meetings was costing the world a fortune in unmade decisions.

What he was really saying

Strip away the acronyms, and de Bono’s argument is uncomfortable.

He thought our culture had confused intelligence with thinking. Intelligence is the engine. Thinking is the driver. A powerful car driven by a poor driver is more dangerous than a modest car driven by a good one. We spent a century selecting for engine size and ignoring the driving lessons.

He thought criticism was the easy half of thinking, dressed up as the hard half. Anyone can find what is wrong with an idea. The harder work is making a better one and being willing to look foolish in the process.

And he thought perception was a skill, not a personality trait. You can learn to look again. You can learn to look elsewhere. You can learn to notice what you were about to ignore.

Whether his tools are scientifically watertight is a fair question. Critics have called lateral thinking pseudoscientific, and they are not entirely wrong about the evidence base. But the deeper observation, that we spend too much time judging ideas and too little time generating them, is hard to argue with after about ten minutes in any organisation.

So what

Pick one tool this week. Just one.

Before your next meeting, do a quick AGO. What are we actually trying to achieve here?

Before your next decision, do a PMI. Especially on the option you already like.

Before your next confident opinion, do an OPV. Who else has a stake in this, and what does the world look like from where they are standing?

You will feel slightly silly. That is the fee. The reward is that, every so often, you will catch your own mind in the act of skipping the first stage, and have a chance to make it stop.

De Bono’s wager was that thinking is a skill. Skills are dull to practise and useful to possess. The clever people will keep being clever. The question is whether you can be something rarer.

A person who notices, on purpose.

Alan /|\

Personal Note

I was fortunate enough to train with Dr De Bono, and these “simple’ tools had a profound effect on the way I thought about challenges, problems and situations. They also improved my creativity. I ended up as a De Bono Consultant and, having taught the systems, saw the power of these simple acronyms and coloured hats when used systematically. By the way, children were often better at using these tools than adults. The adults thought they already knew how to think effectively. The higher the degree or diploma, the more fixed or certain they seemed to be.

The Way of the Cat

A System of Mindfulness for Humans Who Have Forgotten How to Sit

There is a cat asleep on a radiator somewhere. It has solved a problem you did not know you had. This book is about that problem.

The cat does not know it has solved anything. That is also part of the solution.

Part One: The Problem

You are reading this on a screen. You have at least two other tabs open. Somewhere in your house there is a cup of tea you made an hour ago and forgot about. You have not been fully in any room you entered today.

This is the human condition in the modern age. We are everywhere at once, which is a way of being nowhere at all. We have built a civilisation of remarkable convenience and we cannot enjoy any of it because we are checking whether we are enjoying it correctly.

The cat does not have this problem. The cat is in the room. The cat is in the only room the cat has ever been in, which is the room where the cat is.

For three thousand years, sages in robes have tried to teach us this. They built temples. They wrote sutras. They sat under trees until they understood. Meanwhile a tabby in Cairo was doing the same thing on a warm stone and nobody gave it a certificate.

The Way of the Cat is not new. It is the oldest path. We just need a teacher who is not trying to sell us a meditation app.

Part Two: The Eight Pillars

The First Pillar — The Sit

A cat sits. This is not a euphemism. The cat sits as a verb and as a destination. When a cat sits, it is not preparing to do something else. The sit is complete in itself.

The Zen tradition calls this shikantaza, which translates roughly as “just sitting.” The Soto school of Dogen built an entire philosophy around the idea that sitting is not a means to enlightenment but enlightenment itself. Dogen wrote at length about this. The cat skipped the writing and went straight to the sitting.

Practice: Sit somewhere for ten minutes. Do not sit in order to meditate. Do not sit in order to relax. Sit in order to sit. If your mind asks what the point is, notice that the cat never asks this and the cat seems fine.

The Second Pillar — The Box

The cat chose the box over the bed. The bed was designed, marketed, and purchased to make the cat comfortable. The box arrived by accident and contained a bed.

The cat understood something the Stoics also understood. Epictetus, a slave who became a philosopher, taught that desire is the source of suffering and that contentment comes from wanting what you already have. The Taoists put it differently. Lao Tzu wrote that he who knows he has enough is rich. The cat does not read either of these men. The cat is in the box.

We spend our lives upgrading the bed. The cat is asking why.

Practice: For one week, do not buy anything to improve your life. Use what you have. Notice when the urge to upgrade arises. The urge is not you. The urge is a small ghost that has learned your name.

The Third Pillar — The Sprint

At 11pm the cat runs. There is no reason. There is no destination. The running is the point and then the running is done.

This is the principle of wu wei from Taoist thought. Action without forcing. Spontaneous response to the moment without deliberation or strategy. The cat does not plan the sprint. The sprint happens through the cat. When the energy is gone, the cat stops without ceremony.

We have lost this. We schedule our spontaneity. We book our holidays and then spend them anxious about whether we are relaxing properly. The cat runs when running wants to happen and rests when running is done. There is no diary.

Practice: Once this week, do something with no purpose. Walk in a direction you did not plan. Sing in the kitchen. Lie on the floor. Stop when it is finished. Tell no one.

The Fourth Pillar — The Watch

A cat can watch a leaf for an hour. The leaf is not particularly interesting. The cat is not bored. Boredom is what happens when a human cannot tolerate the present moment. The cat has no such allergy.

This is samatha in the Buddhist tradition. Calm abiding. The capacity to rest attention on a single object without strain. Monks train for years to do what the cat does waiting for a pigeon.

The cat is not concentrating. Concentration is effortful. The cat is simply not doing anything else. There is a difference.

Practice: Look at something ordinary for five minutes. A tree. A cup. Your own hand. Do not analyse it. Do not photograph it. Do not think about how looking at it makes you a deeper person. Just look. The cat is watching too.

The Fifth Pillar — The Eat

The cat eats when hungry and stops when full. The cat does not eat its feelings. The cat does not eat while reading the news. The cat does not eat to fill the silence.

This is mindful eating in the Theravadan tradition, taught by teachers like Thich Nhat Hanh, who would have us chew each bite thirty times and contemplate the rain that grew the rice. The cat does not chew the kibble thirty times. The cat does eat the kibble while eating the kibble, which is the part we keep missing.

Hunger is information. Fullness is information. We have learned to override both, and we are surprised when our bodies stop trusting us.

Practice: Eat one meal this week with no screen, no book, no conversation. Just the food. Notice when you are full. Stop then, even if food remains. The cat is unimpressed by your clean plate.

The Sixth Pillar — The Same Face

The cat does not perform. Alone or watched, the cat is the cat. There is no inner cat and outer cat. There is no cat for guests and cat for solitude.

The Confucian tradition speaks of cheng, often translated as sincerity or integrity, though it means something closer to wholeness. To be one thing all the way through. The Stoics called this living according to nature. The cat calls it nothing because the cat has not noticed there is anything else to do.

We wear different faces in different rooms. We have a work voice and a parent voice and a voice for the dentist. None of these is quite us. The cat is always the cat. This is not a refusal to adapt. It is a refusal to disappear.

Practice: For one day, notice when you adjust your face. Do not stop doing it. Just notice. Ask quietly who you would be if you stopped.

The Seventh Pillar — The Nap

The cat sleeps without guilt. The cat does not think it should be doing something more productive. The cat does not wake at three in the morning to rehearse old conversations.

Rest in our culture is a failure state. We rest only when broken. We have to schedule “self-care” because we cannot otherwise grant ourselves permission to do nothing. The Chinese tradition of jing, stillness as a source of strength, understood that rest is not the opposite of action but its foundation. A drawn bow is useless if it is never released and an undrawn bow is useless if it is never drawn. Both states are necessary. The cat knows when to be each.

Practice: Nap. Not because you are tired. Not because you earned it. Nap because napping is one of the things a body can do, and you have one.

The Eighth Pillar — The Indifference to Praise

You tell the cat it is a good cat. The cat does not care. You tell the cat it is a bad cat. The cat does not care. The cat’s sense of itself does not depend on you.

This is the deepest teaching and the hardest. The Bhagavad Gita instructs Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits of action. To do the thing because the thing is right, not because it will be rewarded. The cat has read no scripture and reached the same conclusion through the simple expedient of not caring what you think.

We are shaped by approval from before we can speak. We learn to be good in order to be loved. We never quite unlearn it. The cat was never taught the lesson and so has nothing to unlearn.

Practice: Do one good thing this week that no one will know about. Do not post it. Do not mention it. Let it be a secret between you and the universe. The cat is watching, but the cat will not tell.

Part Three: Cross-References to the Old Ways

The Way of the Cat is not new. It is what every wisdom tradition has been pointing at, dressed in fur.

Zen Buddhism gave us shikantaza, just sitting, and the cat embodies it on every windowsill. The koan tradition asked what the sound of one hand clapping was. The cat asks nothing. The cat is the answer.

Taoism taught wu wei, effortless action, and ziran, naturalness or self-so-ness. The cat has never been anything other than its own nature. Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly and was unsure on waking which he truly was. The cat does not have this confusion. The cat is the cat in the dream and in the waking.

Stoicism taught the dichotomy of control. Some things are up to us and some are not. The cat does not bother with the things that are not. The rain comes and the cat watches it from inside. Marcus Aurelius wrote his meditations to himself at night. The cat composes nothing and arrives at the same place.

Hindu Vedanta speaks of sat-chit-ananda, being-consciousness-bliss, as the nature of the self when freed from illusion. The cat appears to spend a great deal of its time in this state, particularly when sunbeams are involved.

Sufi mysticism speaks of the nafs, the lower self of cravings and complaints, which must be tamed. The cat has a nafs. The cat has not tamed it. The cat has simply not given it the wheel.

Japanese aesthetics offer wabi-sabi, the beauty of impermanence and imperfection, and mono no aware, the gentle sadness of things passing. The cat embodies both. The cat is old and stiff and still climbs onto the radiator because the warmth is now and the now is what there is.

These traditions disagree on much. They disagree on gods, on souls, on what happens after. They agree on one thing. The mind that is here, fully here, in this place, in this body, in this moment, is the mind that is free.

The cat got there first.

Part Four: The Final Teaching

You will not become a cat. You have rent. You have email. You have a vague worry about your knees.

But you can borrow. You can take one pillar at a time and place it in your week. You can sit when you sit. You can eat when you eat. You can choose the box. You can run at 11pm with no reason and stop when the running is done.

The masters say the path is long. The cat says the path is wherever your feet are.

Pick a pillar. Begin today. The cat began this morning and will begin again tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, with no sense that any of this is hard.

That, perhaps, is the final lesson. The Way of the Cat is not difficult. We have only made it so by looking everywhere except where we are standing.

Look down. The cat is at your feet. The cat has been waiting.

Begin.

Alan /|\

Inspired by last week’s post and Morganna, the black cat who shares her house with us,

In the last article, I mentioned “the cat”.

Which got me thinking.

The Cat as Zen Master

A cat sits on a windowsill. It watches a leaf. That is all.

You watch the cat and think about your inbox. The cat does not think about its inbox. The cat does not have an inbox. The cat has a leaf.

This is the first lesson.

On Sitting

A cat can sit for four hours. It does not check its phone. It does not wonder if it should be sitting somewhere better. The sitting is the thing. When the sitting is done, the cat will do the next thing. Until then, the sitting continues.

Humans cannot sit for four minutes without reaching for something. We call this productivity. The cat would call it nothing, because the cat does not call things anything.

On Eating

The cat eats when hungry. The cat stops when full. The cat does not eat standing at the counter scrolling through bad news. The cat does not eat its feelings. The cat has feelings and the cat has food and the cat keeps these separate, like a sensible creature.

Reflect on this the next time you finish a packet of biscuits without remembering the middle ones.

On the Box

You buy the cat a bed. It costs forty pounds. The cat sits in the box the bed came in.

The cat is not being ironic. The cat has assessed the box and the bed and chosen the box. The bed wants to be a bed. The box wants nothing. The cat understands this distinction better than you do.

On Sudden Sprinting

At 11pm the cat will run sideways down the hall for no reason. This is also mindfulness. The cat is fully committed to the running. The cat is not running because of a deadline or a guilt or a January resolution. The cat is running because running is happening.

Then it stops. Completely. As if running was a country it has now left.

On Being Watched

The cat does not perform. When you enter the room, the cat does not adjust its face. The cat is the same cat alone as in company. You should try this sometime. You will find it difficult.

On Naps

The cat does not feel guilty about the nap. The cat does not say “I’ll just rest my eyes for ten minutes.” The cat naps. The nap ends when the nap ends. There is no negotiation, no apology, no Sunday-evening dread.

The Lesson

You cannot become a cat. You have rent and emails and a vague sense that you should be reading more. But you can borrow from the cat. You can sit and only sit. You can eat and only eat. You can choose the box.

Try one thing today with the whole of your attention. A cup of tea. A walk to the bins. A conversation where you are not also thinking about the next conversation.

The cat is already doing it. The cat has been doing it the whole time you read this.

Go on. Pick your leaf.

Alan /|\

The Japanese Art of Not Losing Your Head

Something is on fire. The cat is missing. Your boss is on line two, and your toddler is on line one, and the line between them is dental floss.

You have two choices. You can flap. Or you can do what samurai, monks and slightly smug aikido teachers have spent a thousand years training for. You can have presence of mind.

The Japanese have rather a lot of words for this. They had to. When your day job involved swords, you did not get to panic twice.

Reisei Chinchaku (冷静沈着)

Cool, calm and collected.

This is the workhorse phrase. The one a Japanese newsreader uses to describe the pilot who landed the plane on the river. Reisei is cold and quiet. Chinchaku is sunk and settled, the way a stone sits at the bottom of a pond.

It is the bureaucrat of composure words. Reliable. Unflashy. Gets you home alive.

If your mind were a kitchen, reisei chinchaku is the friend who turns off the hob while everyone else is screaming about the smoke alarm.

Mushin (無心)

No mind.

Now we are in Zen territory and things get slippery. Mushin does not mean stupid. It means your head is finally quiet enough to let your body do its job.

You have felt it. The catch you made without looking. The sentence you typed before you knew you knew it. The reply you fired off in an argument that was, annoyingly, perfect.

A swordsman with mushin does not think block, parry, strike. He just is the sword. Which is wonderful for him and very bad for the other chap.

The trouble is you cannot try to have mushin. Trying is the opposite of mushin. It is like being told to fall asleep faster.

Zanshin (残心)

Lingering mind.

This one is glorious. Zanshin is the awareness that remains after the act. The archer who lowers the bow but stays alert. The chef who plates the dish and watches it leave the pass. The parent who hands over the toddler and does not actually let go for another half-second.

Most of us live in the opposite of zanshin. We send the email and close the laptop. We finish the sentence and reach for the phone. We are always already somewhere else.

Zanshin says the action is not over when the action is over. The arrow is still in flight in your mind. Stay with it.

Fudōshin (不動心)

Immovable mind.

Named after Fudō Myō-ō, a Buddhist deity who sits on a rock, wreathed in flames, holding a sword and a length of rope, and looks frankly unbothered by all of it. A useful patron saint for anyone with a full inbox.

Fudōshin is not stoicism, which is mostly about clenching. It is the still pond that reflects the moon clearly because nothing is rippling it. Tradition warns of four illnesses that ruin the pond. Surprise. Fear. Doubt. Confusion. The shikai. Get one and you get all four, usually in the wrong order.

Notice that fudōshin is not about being right. It is about not being moved. There is a difference. Plenty of people are wrong with great equanimity and they sleep beautifully.

Kiten (機転)

Quick-wittedness. Tact. The flick of the mind.

If reisei chinchaku is the calm and mushin is the silence, kiten is the cleverness that arrives in the gap. The waiter who turns a spilled wine into a free dessert. The teacher who catches a child’s lie and steers it into a story. The boardroom save.

Kiten literally suggests a turning point or a mechanism shifting. The mind pivots. The situation pivots with it. The English phrase presence of mind almost catches it, but English makes it sound passive. Kiten is active. It is a small bright move.

A culture that names this quality is a culture that rewards it. A culture without a word for it tends to call such people lucky.

Heijōshin (平常心)

Ordinary mind.

The last one is the quiet trick. Heijōshin means the mind you have on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing much is happening. The point of training, the old teachers say, is not to develop a special mind for emergencies. It is to make your everyday mind so steady that emergencies become Tuesdays.

This is the bit the self-help books usually skip. They want to sell you peak states. The Japanese tradition is offering something humbler and harder. Be the same person at the funeral that you are at the bus stop.

So what do you do with all this?

You do not need a sword. You probably do not even need a cushion.

You need to notice which kind of mind you actually have when the alarm goes off. Are you flapping? Are you frozen? Are you already three moves ahead of a problem that has not happened yet?

Try this. The next time something goes mildly wrong today, do not fix it for ten seconds. Just watch your own mind do its thing. That is zanshin in cheap shoes. That is where the work starts.

The samurai had a saying. Mental calmness, not skill, is the sign of a mature warrior. They were not talking about combat. They were talking about everything.

Including, presumably, the cat.

Alan /|\

The Tyranny of Either/Or

There is a particular pleasure in being right. It warms the chest. It straightens the spine. And in our age, it is available wholesale, for free, with no qualifications required beyond a phone and a pulse.

This is the bargain modernity offers. Pick a side. Any side. The aisle does not matter, only that you stand firmly on one of them, preferably shouting. The middle has been abolished. Nuance has been escorted from the premises by security. What remains is a country fair where every stall sells the same two flavours of ice cream, and the vendors hate one another with a fervour usually reserved for war crimes.

Welcome to the tyranny of either/or.

The oldest trick in the book

The false dilemma is not new. It is, in fact, embarrassingly old. Logicians have been waving their arms about it since the Greeks were still inventing column shapes.

The fallacy of presenting only two choices, outcomes, or sides to an argument as the only possibilities, when more are available — this is the move. It is also known, charmingly, as the all-or-nothing fallacy, black-and-white thinking, the fallacy of exhaustive hypotheses, bifurcation, excluded middle, no middle ground, polarisation. Quite the list of aliases. The fallacy travels under more assumed names than a small-time con artist, which should tell you something.

The trick works because thinking is hard. Properly hard. Holding two contradictory ideas in the head at once is, as Fitzgerald suggested, the test of a first-rate intelligence. The rest of us, sweating, would rather be told which jersey to wear.

George W. Bush, never knowingly subtle, gave us the canonical specimen: you are with us or you are with the terrorists. “Either you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists” — note the elegance. Two boxes. No third. The man on the street, who might have preferred a fourth option involving lunch, was simply not on the menu.

The Dane in the room

Now, a slight inconvenience. The phrase “either/or” was made famous by Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who looked as if he had been assembled from sad weather. His 1843 book of that name has been blamed for two centuries of binary thinking. Unfairly.

There isn’t actually an either/or choice between the aesthetic and the ethical: both are necessary. The either/or choice hinted at by the title Either/Or is actually a choice between the aesthetic/ethical life and the religious life. Even Kierkegaard, the patron saint of the agonised decision, was not really offering you two doors. He was telling you that the doors you thought you saw were both painted on the same wall.

One criticism of Either/Or is that it can be a false dichotomy, as it is not made clear that the only ways of life are those portrayed in A and B. The Dane himself, it seems, suspected that life had more letters in it.

The lesson is awkward. Even the philosopher who put the slash between the words did not believe in the slash.

The cult of personal gnosis

Here is where things get interesting, and by interesting I mean grim.

There was a time, not long ago, when “I think” was the opening move of an argument. You said it, and then you had to do some work. You had to follow with a reason. Maybe a fact. Possibly, if you were ambitious, a source.

Today, “I think” has been replaced by something more potent. “My experience is...” And from this small phrase, all argument ceases. The drawbridge goes up. The moat fills. You have entered the cathedral of personal gnosis, where the only sacrament is the speaker’s autobiography and the only heresy is doubt.

Gnosis, from the Greek for knowledge, originally meant a kind of mystical insight available to the initiated. In the modern cult, initiation is simply being alive and paying attention to yourself. That is the qualification. That is the ordination.

The philosophical name for the polite version of this is standpoint epistemology. Feminist scholars working within a number of disciplines—such as Dorothy Smith, Nancy Hartsock, Hilary Rose, Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar and Donna Haraway—have advocated taking women’s lived experiences, particularly experiences of (caring) work, as the beginning of scientific enquiry. There is something genuinely useful here. The view from the caring window is not the same as the view from the boardroom. To pretend otherwise is to be a fool, and not even an interesting one.

But useful starting points have a habit of becoming finishing lines. The modern descendant of standpoint theory has acquired a peculiar property. Insight into societal truths is available, by virtue of standpoint theory, to members of minoritized groups who are also critical theorists, but essentially nobody else. The starting point has become the only point. The epistemological humility — we should listen — has become an epistemological monopoly. Only those with the right experience may speak. The rest of us may applaud.

This is not, despite appearances, progress. It is the medieval guild system with better branding. The bricklayers know about bricks and only the bricklayers may pronounce on bricks. Fine. Until someone notices the building is on fire and we need someone, anyone, who can think about fire.

Rocks, water, and the brain that prefers cement

If Kierkegaard supplied the title, Edward de Bono supplied the diagnosis.

In 1991 he published I Am Right, You Are Wrong, a book whose cover promised a journey “from rock logic to water logic” and whose contents amounted to a polite, sustained, slightly cranky assault on the Western intellectual tradition. De Bono’s argument was simple enough to fit on a beer mat and unsettling enough to ruin the evening.

We do not think, he said. We pattern-match.

Modern thinking, including critical thinking and analysis built on the foundation of Western logic, is insufficient and incomplete. The status quo mode of thinking, which De Bono refers to as “Rock Logic” falls prey to the brain’s need for order and patterns. Consequently, we focus too much on what is or what has been. We argue, analyse, and criticise to explain, and we draw hard lines in the sand where, in reality, there may be none.

Rock logic is the logic of the boulder. It is hard. It is fixed. It sits where it sits, daring you to move it. It says a thing is what it is and not what it is not, and if you do not agree, it will sit on you until you do. Aristotle would have loved it. So would your worst uncle at Christmas.

Water logic is the other thing. Water logic, adaptive and imaginative, will replace our confrontational, repetitive rock logic. Water does not argue with the bowl's shape. It becomes the bowl. It does not insist on being right. It asks where it is going next. Where rock logic asks “what is this?”, water logic asks “what does this lead to?”.

The genius of the metaphor is that it diagnoses the disease without curing it. We do not have rock logic because we are stupid. We have rock logic because the brain is, on de Bono’s account, a self-organising system that generates patterns. The grooves form. The grooves deepen. Soon, the marble rolls down the same channel every time, and we mistake the channel for the truth.

This is the engine room of the either/or. Once a pattern is laid down, the brain reaches for it the way a hand reaches for a familiar mug in the dark. Two options arrive pre-cut. Choosing between them feels like thinking. It is not. It is recognition wearing a thinking coat.

De Bono was, it must be said, not always his own best advocate. The book reads, in places, like a motivational seminar handbook, full of catchy slogans, and he had a weakness for declaring civilisations finished before lunch. Critics noted, fairly, that he treated formal logic as a single monolith and then knocked it over with great satisfaction. The man invented the word “po” and expected the rest of us to use it. However, we did not.

But the central wound he opened has not healed. He saw, decades before the algorithm came for our attention spans, that a culture trained on argument would mistake the loudest groove for the deepest truth. He saw that the brain rewards us for being right far more reliably than it rewards us for being correct. He saw that the binary is not a feature of the world but a feature of the equipment.

The cult of personal gnosis, which we are about to meet, is rock logic with a personal pronoun bolted to the front. Myrock. My groove. My boulder, sitting in the middle of the conversation, refusing to be moved on the grounds that I, personally, put it there.

De Bono would have recognised it instantly. He might even have laughed.

The trouble with experience

Experience is wonderful stuff. It is also, on its own, almost completely useless for telling you what is true about the world. A man who has spent forty years convinced his neighbour is stealing his post is a man with forty years of experience. He is not, on this basis alone, correct about the post.

Experience without examination is just data without a hypothesis. It tells you what happened to you. It cannot, by itself, tell you why, or whether the same thing happened to anyone else, or whether your interpretation of what happened bears any relation to what actually occurred. For that, you need the unfashionable trinity: doubt, evidence and the willingness to be wrong.

The cult of personal gnosis dispenses with all three. Doubt is disloyalty. Evidence is what colonisers use to gaslight you. Being wrong is impossible because you are reporting an experience, and an experience cannot be wrong, only doubted by people who hate you.

Notice the move. The argument has been smuggled out of the realm of claims, where it could be tested, and into the realm of feelings, where it cannot. To disagree with the claim is now to deny the feeling. To deny the feeling is to commit a moral offence. The drawbridge stays up. The moat deepens.

Why we love the binary

The either/or and the cult of personal gnosis are not strangers. They are, in fact, married, and the reception is still going.

The binary tells you which team to be on. Personal gnosis tells you why you cannot be questioned. Together they form a closed system. You pick a side. Your side is correct because you experience it as correct. Anyone who disagrees experiences something different, which is fine, but obviously, they are also evil.

Over time, this pushes people away from nuanced thinking and into extremism. Extremism and polarisation have become a particular issue in recent years, as seen in the continued lament that our country is “more divided than ever.” False dilemmas only make that situation worse, undermining many of the systems and philosophies that make a society function in a healthy manner.

We love the binary because the binary loves us back. It flatters us. It tells us we are clever for having picked the right side, brave for defending it, and persecuted when challenged. It is the only system in the world where being shouted at proves you correct.

The pre-Socratics knew better. Heraclitus, that gloomy Ephesian, said you cannot step in the same river twice. Hegel, irritating as ever, made a career out of the idea that every thesis contains its own antithesis. Even Aristotle, who did love a tidy category, distinguished between contraries (hot and cold, with warm in the middle) and contradictories (alive and dead, with no third option). Most of life, it turns out, is the first kind. We just keep treating it like the second.

The exit

There is no clever escape. There is only the unfashionable work.

Notice when someone offers you two doors. Ask where the others went. Notice when someone replaces an argument with their biography. Ask what the argument was. Notice when you do it yourself, which you will, because you are a human being and not a logic gate.

Hold two ideas at once. Concede a point to someone you dislike. Withhold a point from someone you love. Read something written by a person who would not invite you to dinner. Be wrong, in public, on a Tuesday, and survive it.

The opposite of either/or is not neither. It is more. More options, more evidence, more patience, more thought. The opposite of the cult of personal gnosis is not the denial of experience. It is the humility to treat your own experience as a hypothesis rather than a verdict.

This will not make you popular. It will not get you retweeted. It may, however, make you a person who is occasionally right about something for reasons other than wanting to be.

That is the deal. Take it or leave it.

But notice, as you decide, that I have just offered you a false dichotomy. And smile.

Alan /|\

Note: This article was penned shortly after the announcement the creation of this “Board”

Trump’s Board of Peace: A Critical Assessment

I. What Is It, and How Did It Come About?

The Board of Peace (BoP) is an international organisation with the stated purpose of promoting peacekeeping around the world. Established by Donald Trump and led by the government of the United States, it was proposed in September 2025 and formally established on the sidelines of the 56th World Economic Forum in January 2026. It is named in UN Security Council Resolution 2803 as a body tasked with overseeing the processes of the Gaza peace plan.

Its genesis was the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair initially proposed placing the Gaza Strip under international administration in August 2025. Following the entry into force of the Gaza Peace Agreement, Trump declared “the war is over” and that the BoP would be formed quickly. What began as a narrow Gaza oversight mechanism rapidly ballooned into something far more ambitious — and far more controversial.

II. The Executive Board and Key Personnel

Apart from Donald Trump, who chairs the Executive Board, members include Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff, Robert Gabriel Jr., Tony Blair, World Bank President Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan (CEO of Apollo Global Management).

Each member has been assigned a specific portfolio. These cover governance capacity-building, regional relations, reconstruction, investment attraction, large-scale funding, and capital mobilisation. Bulgarian diplomat and former UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov serves as High Representative for Gaza, acting as the on-the-ground link between the Board and the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG). Major General Jasper Jeffers has been appointed Commander of the International Stabilization Force (ISF).

It is also worth noting where the Board convened its first full meeting: the former premises of the US Institute of Peace — a nonpartisan think tank that Trump seized and fired almost all of the staff of — now renamed the “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.”

III. Member States: Who Has Joined, and How Many Are Active Conflict Parties?

The confirmed member states are: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cambodia, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Mongolia, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the UAE, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam (Asia); Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Kosovo (Europe); Egypt and Morocco (Africa); Argentina and Paraguay (South America); and El Salvador (Central America).

The striking fact is how many members are themselves currently engaged in, or directly implicated in, live conflict zones:

Israel is the primary protagonist of the Gaza war, which killed over 71,000 Palestinians, and continues to occupy more than half the Strip. Netanyahu faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court and has fumed at the inclusion of Turkish and Qatari officials on the Gaza Executive Board, yet Israel has joined regardless.

Turkey and Qatar were central diplomatic brokers and open critics of Israeli conduct throughout the war. Both are simultaneously Board members and parties with significant partisan interests in the outcome.

Armenia and Azerbaijan signed a US-brokered peace agreement that gave the US exclusive development access to a critical transit corridor — making their membership transactional rather than principled.

Belarus is under Alexander Lukashenko, widely described as Europe’s last dictator, and is closely aligned with Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Russia has been invited to join, and Putin has said his foreign ministry would “study the documents.”

Hungary under Orbán has consistently blocked EU sanctions on Russia and is the EU’s most Kremlin-aligned government.

Pakistan and Turkey both have longstanding internal security conflicts and regional entanglements.

Conspicuously absent are all other G7 nations. No other G7 state has joined. The UK and France have not joined, citing concerns about Russia’s potential membership and the board’s remit going beyond Gaza.

IV. The Cost of Membership: $1 Billion for a Permanent Seat

Member states serve for three-year terms, after which they must pay $1 billion for a permanent seat. The funds raised will, according to a US official, go toward rebuilding Gaza — but the move has been criticised as susceptible to corruption.

The White House pushed back on the characterisation of a “minimum fee,” saying the $1 billion contribution “simply offers permanent membership to partner countries who demonstrate deep commitment to peace, security, and prosperity.” One analyst compared it to joining Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.

At the inaugural Washington meeting, Trump announced that member states had pledged $7 billion for Gaza reconstruction, and that the United States would contribute $10 billion to the Board’s efforts.

V. Policies and Planned Actions: What Actually Exists?

In formal terms, the stated mandate covers:

• Overseeing the NCAG (the Palestinian technocratic governance committee led by Ali Shaath)

• Deploying the International Stabilization Force (ISF) to Gaza

• Disarming Hamas

• Facilitating reconstruction

At the 19 February summit, Albania, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Morocco pledged to send troops for an ISF consisting of 20,000 soldiers, while Egypt and Jordan agreed to train the police, expected to number 12,000.

However, independent analysts are scathing about what actually exists on the ground. There is, at present, absolutely no connection between the diplomatic proceedings and any reality on the ground. Israeli forces occupy more than half of Gaza including almost all its arable land, Hamas governs the smaller western portion where most civilians live, and neither Israel nor Hamas appears inclined to cooperate in meaningful reconstruction. Reconstruction funds would not go to the area where Palestinians are currently living, but to areas under Israeli military control.

The NCAG is based in Egypt and has not entered Gaza. Furthermore, Palestinians have no direct representation on the Board of Peace itself. Hamas, while saying it supports the transitional committee, is critical of the Board as constituting “international guardianship.”

VI. Deeper Concerns: Structural Power Concentration

The charter itself is arguably the most alarming document. Trump chairs the board and can be replaced as chairman only through “voluntary resignation or as a result of incapacity, as determined by a unanimous vote of the Executive Board.” Member states serve no more than three years unless they pay the $1 billion fee.

The Board dissolves at such time as the Chairman considers necessary or appropriate, or at the end of every odd-numbered calendar year unless renewed by the Chairman. In other words, it is an international body that exists at one man’s pleasure and dissolves at his discretion.

Trump has stated that the BoP could potentially replace the United Nations, while also expressing continued support for the UN. The charter makes no direct mention of the UN, referring instead to “institutions that have too often failed.”

Senator Ed Markey’s letter to the administration formally asked: “What actual or potential conflicts of interest — including financial, business, or personal — have been identified for individuals involved in the Board’s development, particularly Kushner and Witkoff? What steps has the Administration taken to mitigate actual or apparent conflicts? Is President Trump advancing this initiative in his personal capacity or as an action of the United States government?” No formal answer has been publicly provided.

VII. The Conspiracy Theory Perspective — and Its Likelihood

Let us be precise here: the term “conspiracy theory” covers a spectrum from the delusional to the thoroughly evidence-based. In this case, several critiques deserve to be taken seriously on their merits.

Theory 1: The BoP is a vehicle for personal and financial enrichment

This is not really a fringe theory. Jared Kushner’s reconstruction “master plan” was presented at Davos complete with AI-generated renderings of glass towers and marinas — a vision that bears little relation to the humanitarian catastrophe facing 2.2 million displaced Palestinians. Kushner stated “there’ll be amazing investment opportunities.” The special Gaza Executive Board includes Israeli-Cypriot real estate mogul Yakir Gabay, a close friend of Kushner’s. Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, manages assets almost exclusively from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE — the same petrostates central to the reconstruction deal. This is not speculation; it is documented in Congressional letters and investigative journalism. Likelihood of self-enrichment as a motive: HIGH.

Theory 2: The BoP is a deliberate mechanism to sideline and eventually replace the United Nations

A letter from Senator Markey described the Board as “a blatant power grab that will undermine both UN and US influence throughout the world,” noting that its charter “is designed to elevate one individual above all others and to concentrate power in his hands.” Trump himself said it would “almost be looking over the United Nations.” The charter’s broad, Gaza-free language supporting “stability, peace, and governance in areas affected or threatened by conflict” gives it a virtually unlimited global mandate. Likelihood: MODERATE TO HIGH — this appears to be a conscious parallel architecture, whether or not its ambitions are realisable.

Theory 3: The membership is a protection racket — join to avoid being targeted by US tariffs, sanctions, or diplomatic hostility

The membership list reads strikingly like a list of countries seeking US favour: autocracies seeking rehabilitation (Belarus under Lukashenko), Gulf monarchies seeking strategic cover, Central Asian states seeking American endorsement of their regional authority. There are no established liberal democracies from Western Europe. The $1 billion fee for permanence has been described explicitly as analogous to a club membership. Putin even floated using frozen Russian assets to pay the fee. Likelihood: MODERATE — correlation between geopolitical dependency on US goodwill and membership is striking, though hard to prove as explicit quid pro quo.

Theory 4: The entire Gaza “peace” dimension is a property development hoax

Kushner’s vision would “obliterate Gaza’s history and society by imposing a top-down economic and tourism model” and has been developed without consultation with Palestinians. ECFR analysts warn that “placing vast, unsupervised reconstruction funds and contracting decisions under the control of politicians and financiers risks profiteering and graft at the expense of a vulnerable population.” The fact that the NCAG has not entered Gaza, that Israel continues to restrict aid flows, and that Hamas remains in control of the areas where civilians actually live means reconstruction is, as one senior analyst called it, “a diplomatic hoax.” Likelihood that this functions primarily as a legitimising narrative for property speculation rather than humanitarian relief: MODERATE TO HIGH.

VIII. Overall Assessment

The Board of Peace is a genuinely novel and structurally troubling entity. It is real enough — it has a UN Security Council resolution behind it, a signed charter, pledged funds, and a peacekeeping force being assembled. But it is also extraordinary: an international organisation chaired in perpetuity by a sitting head of state, accountable to no legislature, with a global mandate of undefined scope, whose permanent membership carries a $1 billion price tag, and whose key personnel have undisclosed financial interests in the very reconstruction contracts it will award.

The conspiracy theories surrounding it are not wild extrapolations from thin evidence — they are logical inferences from the publicly documented structure, personnel, and financial arrangements. What separates analysis from conspiracy thinking here is simply the level of certainty one claims. The structure enables self-enrichment, UN circumvention, and geopolitical leverage. Whether that was the primary intent is harder to prove definitively — but it would be extraordinary naïveté to dismiss these concerns as merely conspiratorial.

Postscript: The Irony Intensifies

An Update on Peace Through Exclusion

Since the initial creation of this critique, events have rather magnificently vindicated the central thesis: that the Board of Peace has less to do with actual peace and rather more to do with... well, everything except peace.

Canada: The Peaceful Nation Too Dangerous for the Peace Board

In what must surely rank as one of the more exquisite ironies in recent diplomatic history, Trump withdrew Canada’s invitation to join the board.

Let us recap: Canada, a nation whose military operations are predominantly peacekeeping missions, whose international reputation rests largely on being polite and inoffensive, whose most controversial export is arguably poutine, and whose geese represent a greater international threat than its armed forces – this Canada was deemed unsuitable for the Board of Peace.

Meanwhile, Belarus – actively facilitating invasions of neighbouring countries – remains a welcome member. Azerbaijan – recently engaged in ethnic cleansing – perfectly acceptable. Egypt – with its massacre of 800+ protesters in a single day – absolutely fine. But Canada? Far too destabilising.

The stated reason appears to involve dairy tariffs and trade disputes. So the Board of Peace excludes nations based on... disagreements about cheese pricing. One struggles to imagine a more fitting encapsulation of the initiative’s priorities.

The $1 Billion Peace Fee

Let us also revisit the financial arrangements, which have become clearer since the Davos signing ceremony.

To secure a permanent seat on the board, which Trump is expected to chair for life, countries will have to pay at least $1 billion US. Other members receive three-year terms – rather like a country club membership, but with more autocrats and fewer golf courses.

Canada said it won’t pay to join, which may explain why their invitation was subsequently withdrawn. Apparently peace isn’t just priceless – it’s specifically priced at one billion dollars.

The message is clear: if you want permanent representation on the Board of Peace, you need either a billion dollars or a sufficiently authoritarian government that Trump finds acceptable. Preferably both. Democracy and human rights records are entirely optional; payment plans, less so.

The Wine Tariff Diplomacy

The president threatened France with 200% tariffs on French wine and champagne if the French don’t join the board</icate>.

Nothing encapsulates the spirit of peaceful international cooperation quite like threatening economic warfare against nations that decline your peace initiative. “Join our Board of Peace or we’ll devastate your wine industry” is certainly a novel approach to conflict resolution.

France, to its credit, appears unmoved by this oenological hostage-taking. One imagines French diplomats responding with a Gallic shrug and a muttered “Tant pis pour vous.”

The Permanent Chairman for Life

Trump is expected to chair the board for life, which raises fascinating questions about succession planning and democratic governance in an organisation ostensibly dedicated to peace.

Historically, “chairman for life” positions have been held by such peaceful luminaries as:

• Mao Zedong (Chairman for Life of the Chinese Communist Party)

• Kim Il-sung (Eternal President of North Korea)

• Saparmurat Niyazov (President for Life of Turkmenistan)

• Various other autocrats whose commitment to peace was matched only by their commitment to never relinquishing power

The pattern is unmistakable: lifetime appointments tend to correlate inversely with democratic governance and directly with authoritarian consolidation of power. That the Board of Peace follows this model tells you everything you need to know about its actual purpose.

Russia: The Invited But Absent Peace Partner

Russian President Vladimir Putin received an invitation to join Trump’s peace group but no representative was present at the signing event. Russia – currently engaged in a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, having annexed Crimea, and accused of numerous war crimes – was invited to join the Board of Peace.

The UK’s foreign secretary said Britain wouldn’t be a signatory over concerns about Russian President Vladimir Putin “being part of something that’s talking about peace when we’ve still not seen any signs from Putin that there will be commitment to peace in Ukraine”.

This is rather like inviting an active arsonist to chair the Fire Safety Committee. Except the arsonist is still actively setting fires whilst you’re extending the invitation.

The fact that Putin was invited whilst Canada was disinvited rather crystallises the Board’s priorities: active military aggression against neighbouring states is negotiable; disagreements about dairy tariffs are not.

The Democratic Vacuum

The final count of Western democratic participation makes for sobering reading:

Major democracies that declined or were absent:

• United Kingdom

• France

• Germany

• Italy

• Canada

• Spain

• Belgium

• Sweden

• Norway

• Slovenia

• Australia (apparently invited but absent)

Major democracies that participated:

• [This space intentionally left blank]

When literally every major Western democracy looks at your “Board of Peace” and collectively decides “we’re good, thanks,” perhaps it’s time to reconsider either the composition or the name. Preferably both.

What This Actually Reveals

The updated membership list and exclusion criteria reveal the Board of Peace to be precisely what the initial analysis suggested: not a genuine peace initiative, but rather:

1. A Loyalty Test: Participation signals alignment with Trump’s geopolitical preferences, regardless of actual commitment to peace

2. A Revenue Stream: The billion-dollar membership fee suggests this is as much about fundraising as peacekeeping

3. An Autocrat’s Club: The membership composition – heavy on authoritarian regimes, light on democracies – speaks volumes

4. A UN Alternative for the Disgruntled: Not genuinely replacing the UN, but providing an alternative forum where inconvenient topics like human rights won’t arise

The Peace That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Here’s what the Board of Peace actually appears to be:

A coalition of nations willing to:

• Pay for access to Trump

• Align with US geopolitical priorities regardless of principle

• Ignore human rights concerns in pursuit of transactional diplomacy

• Accept authoritarian governance as legitimate

• Exclude democracies that question these premises

What it demonstrably is not:

• A genuine peacekeeping initiative

• Representative of peaceful nations

• Committed to democratic governance

• Concerned with human rights

• Interested in Canada’s dairy policies except as a pretext for exclusion

The Orwellian Achievement

In the annals of Orwellian double-speak, the Board of Peace deserves special recognition. It has managed to:

• Create a “peace” initiative that excludes peaceful nations

• Invite countries actively engaged in conflicts

• Charge membership fees for peace advocacy

• Appoint a chairman for life to promote democratic values

• Threaten economic warfare to encourage participation

• Exclude Canada whilst welcoming Belarus

This is performance art masquerading as diplomacy, geopolitical theatre staged for an audience that increasingly isn’t watching.

A Modest Proposal

In the spirit of accuracy in advertising, might I suggest some alternative names that better capture the initiative’s actual nature:

• The Board of Compliance (more honest)

• The Coalition of the Billing (acknowledges the fee structure)

• The Autocrats’ Affirmation Assembly (alliterative and accurate)

• The Anti-Dairy Alliance (at least Canada would understand)

• The UN, But Without All Those Annoying Democracies (unwieldy but precise)

The Final Irony

The most delicious irony of all is this: by withdrawing Canada’s invitation over trade disputes, Trump has inadvertently proven that the Board of Peace has nothing whatsoever to do with peace.

If it were genuinely about promoting global peace and stability, Canada – with its peacekeeping tradition, diplomatic reputation, and general inoffensiveness – would be precisely the sort of nation you’d want involved. But it isn’t about that. It never was.

It’s about creating a forum where Trump can be chairman for life, where autocrats can gather without facing uncomfortable questions about political prisoners, and where a billion dollars buys you a permanent seat at a table that most of the world’s democracies are actively avoiding.

The Board of Peace is the diplomatic equivalent of a members-only club where the entrance fee is either cash or authoritarianism, the dress code is “no democracy required,” and the mission statement bears no relationship whatsoever to the actual activities.

Conclusion: Peace in Our Time (Fee Required)

As this postscript goes to press, the Board of Peace remains chaired by Trump (for life), composed primarily of authoritarian regimes, absent most Western democracies, and distinguished primarily by having excluded Canada over cheese whilst inviting Putin despite Ukraine.

If you’d told a political satirist in 2015 to write the most absurdist version of international relations possible, they’d have struggled to top this. Reality has outpaced satire, leaving commentators in the awkward position of simply describing what’s actually happening and watching it sound increasingly implausible.

The Board of Peace stands as a monument to the principle that if you want to create an initiative with no relationship to its stated purpose, the key is audacity. Call it the opposite of what it is, charge people a billion dollars to join, appoint yourself chairman for life, exclude peaceful nations over trade disputes, and invite war criminals in the name of reconciliation.

It’s not peace. It’s not a board. But it is certainly something – even if that something bears no resemblance whatsoever to what it claims to be.

Canada, meanwhile, remains excluded from the peace process, presumably because their peaceful nature posed too great a threat to an organisation nominally dedicated to peace.

The irony would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly, devastatingly revealing.

Postscript to the Postscript: As of this writing, it remains unclear whether the Board of Peace will address any actual conflicts, promote genuine reconciliation, or simply serve as an expensive photo opportunity for autocrats. Early indicators suggest the latter. Canada, for its part, seems unbothered by its exclusion, which tells you everything you need to know about the initiative’s actual importance.

note: Being excluded from a “peace” board composed primarily of human rights violators might actually be the highest diplomatic honour Canada has received in recent memory.

Alan /|\

The New Thought Movement

Or: How a Maine Clockmaker Accidentally Invented the Self-Help Industry and Doomed Us All to Vision Boards

Origins: It All Started With a Man Who Couldn’t Stop Healing People

The New Thought Movement began, improbably, in the workshop of a Maine clockmaker named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a man who looked exactly as Victorian as his name suggests. Quimby was a sickly fellow obsessed with mesmerism, that fashionable nineteenth-century pseudoscience involving magnets, hand-waving, and the conviction that one’s bowels could be regulated through hypnosis.

Having mesmerised himself into apparent good health, Quimby concluded that all illness was essentially a misunderstanding. The body, he reasoned, was simply doing what the mind told it to, and the mind was, frankly, an idiot being misled by doctors and clergymen.

This was a remarkable theory, particularly in an era when medicine still involved bleeding people and prescribing mercury for headaches. Quimby’s diagnosis, that medicine was largely nonsense and people made themselves sick through wrong belief, was, depending on your perspective, either a profound spiritual insight or the foundational text of every wellness influencer who has ever sold you turmeric. Possibly both.

Quimby never wrote a book. He scribbled notes, treated patients in Portland, and died before anyone thought to make him famous. His ideas, however, did not die with him. They were carried off by his patients like spiritual head lice.

Mary Baker Eddy and the Schism That Wasn’t Quite

The most consequential of Quimby’s patients was Mary Baker Eddy, a frail New Englander whose subsequent founding of Christian Science represents one of history’s great acts of intellectual reattribution. Eddy insisted her ideas came directly from God; Quimby’s followers insisted they came directly from Quimby. The resulting century-long argument has produced more pamphlets than the Reformation.

Christian Science is technically not New Thought. Eddy’s followers will tell you this with the patient firmness of someone explaining for the fifth time that they don’t take aspirin. But the family resemblance is unmistakable: matter is illusion, mind is supreme, and your tumour is a thinking error. New Thought, by contrast, is the more permissive cousin who’ll let you take the aspirin AND visualise wellness AND book a reiki appointment, and who would never dream of forbidding you the chemotherapy.

The Founding Trinity: Hopkins, Trine, and the Wattles of Wealth

The actual New Thought Movement coalesced in the 1880s and 1890s around three figures who deserve more credit and more side-eye than history has given them.

Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), often called “the teacher of teachers,” is the woman who took Eddy’s ideas, removed the requirement to worship Eddy, and franchised the result. She trained the founders of nearly every major New Thought denomination: Unity, Religious Science, Divine Science. Hopkins was, in effect, the spiritual venture capitalist of late-Victorian metaphysics, and she did this while being a woman in the 1880s, which is genuinely impressive and not at all funny, so we’ll leave her with her dignity intact.

Ralph Waldo Trine (1866–1958) wrote In Tune with the Infinite (1897), a book Henry Ford pressed into the hands of every employee, friend, and probably his mechanic. Trine’s central claim, that there exists a “Universal Mind” with which one can align oneself for health, prosperity, and serenity, has been rebranded approximately four hundred times since, most recently as “manifesting.” The vocabulary changes; the proposition does not.

Wallace D. Wattles (1860–1911) wrote The Science of Getting Rich (1910), a title that tells you everything you need to know about where this is going. Wattles assured readers that the universe wanted them to be wealthy, that thinking in a “Certain Way” would attract money, and that poverty was essentially a failure of imagination. He died the following year, somewhat undercutting the case for his methods. The Science of Getting Rich would later be the explicit source material for Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, which is to say that the entire 2006 cottage industry of magnetic visualisation was a 96-year-old book in a feather boa.

The Philosophy: Or, What Are These People Actually Saying?

Stripped of its variations, New Thought rests on a small, audacious set of claims:

• The universe is mental in nature. Mind is primary; matter is downstream of thought. This is an old idealist position dressed in American clothing, with traces of Hegel, Berkeley, and the Upanishads filtered through a cheerful Yankee optimism that wouldn’t take “the void” for an answer.

• Thought has causal power. Not merely on your mood or your circumstances. Believe the right things and the world rearranges. Believe the wrong things and you have arthritis.

• The divine is immanent, not transcendent. God isn’t up there judging; God is in here, and also in you, and also in the chair, and possibly in the cat. This is essentially Spinoza for people who don’t want to read Spinoza.

• Salvation is psychological. You aren’t saved from sin; you’re saved from wrong thinking. Hell is a mental state with poor furnishings.

The questions this raises are genuinely serious. If consciousness is causally efficacious, does the placebo effect become a window into something profound rather than a methodological nuisance? If divinity is immanent, what does ethics look like when there’s no external lawgiver? If your circumstances reflect your thinking, what do you say to someone born into famine? The movement has good answers, bad answers, and some answers that should be put in a drawer and never spoken of again.

Influence on Modern Philosophy and Culture

The reach of New Thought, once you start looking, is genuinely staggering. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), devoted serious attention to it under the heading “the religion of healthy-mindedness,” treating it as a legitimate American contribution to the philosophy of religion. James was too good a thinker to swallow it whole, but he recognised something authentic in the movement’s insistence that subjective experience matters and that meliorism — the belief that things can be made better — is not the same as naïveté.

From New Thought flow several distinct streams:

The prosperity gospel of figures like Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking, 1952) and his theological descendants Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland — a Christianised, often Pentecostalised, often deeply commercialised version. Peale, incidentally, was the pastor of Donald Trump’s family, which is one of those biographical footnotes that explains rather a lot.

The human potential movement of the 1960s and 70s — Esalen, est, Werner Erhard’s “you create your own reality” — which dropped the explicit theism but kept the metaphysics.

The self-help industrial complex — Tony Robbins, Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, The Secret, every TED talk that mentions “mindset,” every LinkedIn post about manifesting Q4 targets. This is a multi-billion-pound global industry whose intellectual genealogy traces, with surprising directness, back to a clockmaker in Maine who thought magnets cured dyspepsia.

Even Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the dominant evidence-based psychotherapy of our time, shares some DNA here, though it would prefer not to be photographed at the family reunion. The CBT insight that distorted cognitions produce suffering is a clinically rigorous, empirically validated cousin of the New Thought claim that wrong thinking causes affliction. Aaron Beck would have words for the comparison; the philosophical resemblance is nonetheless real.

Politics and Religion: The Awkward Conversations

New Thought has always had a politics, even when it claimed not to. Its emphasis on individual mental sovereignty made it congenial to American libertarianism and hostile to structural explanations of suffering. If your thoughts make your reality, then poverty, racism, and illness become, in some uncomfortable sense, your fault. The movement has tried, with varying success, to wriggle out of this implication for over a century. Some of its leaders, particularly women and Black thinkers like the Reverend Johnnie Colemon, used New Thought as a tool for emancipation and dignity in a hostile society — a genuinely radical use. Others used it to sell people stuff.

Religiously, New Thought sits in the strange American space between Protestantism and pantheism — too theistic for atheists, too unitarian for evangelicals, too universalist for traditionalists, and too prosperous for monks. Its enduring appeal is that it offers spirituality without doctrine, transcendence without obedience, and meaning without metaphysical homework. Its enduring danger is that it can shade into a smug indifference to the genuine miseries of existence — what Barbara Ehrenreich, in Bright-Sided (2009), diagnosed as the tyranny of compulsory optimism, the thing that tells cancer patients to think positively as though tumours were impressed by attitude.

What It Asks of Us

The questions New Thought poses are not silly, even where its answers occasionally are. Is consciousness fundamental? What is the relationship between belief and reality? Can a community organised around inner experience produce a coherent ethics? Is optimism a virtue, a vice, or a coping mechanism dressed up as either? Where is the line between agency and self-blame, between empowerment and delusion?

The movement’s deepest claim — that what happens inside our minds is not epiphenomenal, that subjective experience matters, that we are not merely passengers in our own lives — is one philosophy is still working through. The fact that this profound question arrives wrapped in a vision board does not make it less profound. It just makes it harder to discuss with a straight face.

And so we end where we began: with a clockmaker in Maine, who thought he had figured out the universe, and who turned out to have started a movement that would eventually convince millions of people that they could think themselves into a Tesla. He’d probably be horrified. Or he’d take credit. With New Thought, it’s genuinely hard to tell.

PS:

It’s not often I get the opportunity to reference Spinoza in an article and so I thought I’d offer a brief over view of the man and his ideas.

Spinoza’s Key Ideas: A Summary

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was a Dutch-Portuguese Jewish philosopher whose ideas were so heretical that his own community excommunicated him at 23 with one of the most spectacular curses ever issued, and so influential that nearly every major thinker since has had to wrestle with him. He ground lenses for a living, refused a prestigious professorship to preserve his independence, and died at 44, probably from inhaling glass dust.

God, or Nature (Deus sive Natura)

Spinoza’s central and most explosive claim is that there is only one substance in the universe, and that substance is God, but God understood as identical with Nature itself. There is no transcendent deity sitting outside creation; God is the totality of what exists. Everything, stars, stones, thoughts, you, is a “mode” or expression of this single infinite substance.

This is pantheism, or arguably panentheism, and it cost him his community, got his books banned, and earned him the label “atheist” from people who couldn’t tell the difference between “no God” and “God is everything.”

The Two Attributes We Can Know

Substance has infinite attributes, but humans can perceive only two: Thought and Extension (mind and matter). Crucially, these are not two separate things interacting — they are the same reality viewed under different aspects. This dissolves Descartes’ famous mind-body problem by denying its premise. Your mind and body aren’t two substances mysteriously coordinating; they’re one thing seen two ways.

Determinism and Freedom

Everything that happens follows necessarily from the nature of God/Nature. There is no free will in the libertarian sense — choices feel free only because we’re ignorant of their causes. Yet Spinoza isn’t fatalistic. Freedom, for him, means understanding the causes that shape us. The free person is not the one who escapes necessity but the one who comprehends it and acts from their own nature rather than from confused passions.

The Ethics of the Passions

In his masterwork, the Ethics (1677, published posthumously), Spinoza analyses human emotions with the cool precision of a geometer — the book is literally structured like Euclid, with definitions, axioms, and propositions. Emotions are either active (arising from adequate understanding) or passive (arising from confused ideas). Suffering comes from being buffeted by passions we don’t understand. Joy comes from increasing our power of acting and thinking clearly.

The famous line — “Do not weep; do not wax indignant. Understand” — captures the ethical project. Not Stoic suppression, but illumination.

The Intellectual Love of God

The highest human achievement is what Spinoza calls amor intellectualis Dei — the intellectual love of God. This isn’t worship; it’s the serene joy of understanding reality as it actually is, of grasping one’s place in the infinite causal web of Nature. It is, essentially, the experience of comprehending the universe and finding that comprehension itself blissful.

Politics and Religion

In the Theological-Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza argued for freedom of thought and speech, the separation of religion from political power, and a historical-critical reading of the Bible — treating scripture as a human document rather than divine dictation. He was effectively the first modern biblical scholar and a foundational theorist of liberal democracy. He argued that the purpose of the state is to enable people to live freely and rationally, not to enforce orthodoxy.

Key Statements Worth Knowing

• Deus sive Natura — “God, or Nature.” The whole system in three words.

• “All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” (the closing line of the Ethics)

• “Peace is not an absence of war; it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.”

• “He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return.” (Love of the universe is not a transaction.)

• “Men are deceived if they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.”

Why He Still Matters

Spinoza is the philosopher Einstein invoked when asked whether he believed in God (”I believe in Spinoza’s God”). He’s the hidden ancestor of much of modern thought: his immanent divinity prefigures pantheism in Romanticism, his determinism shapes neuroscience’s view of free will, his biblical criticism founded modern religious studies, and his political philosophy underwrites liberal democracy. Deleuze called him “the prince of philosophers.” Hegel said you were either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.

He was, in short, a quiet lens-grinder who saw the universe more clearly than almost anyone before or since — and who connects, not at all coincidentally, to that earlier conversation about New Thought, since his immanent God is the philosophical grandparent of nearly every “the divine is within you” claim made in the past 150 years.

Alan /|\

Mindfulness Is Not Just “Being Here Now”…

And Pretending It Is Will Wreck Your Life

You have seen the tote bag. *Be Here Now*. You have heard the app voice, smooth as warm honey, telling you to gently release thoughts of yesterday and tomorrow and return, just return, to the breath. You have probably sat cross-legged at some point and felt vaguely guilty for thinking about your tax return, or, as in my case, how really uncomfortable and impossible to attain this psoture is

Here is the good news: you can let the guilt go.

Not because mindfulness is rubbish — it isn’t — but because the version you’ve been sold is so ofen is!

Mindfulness has been flattened, in its journey from Himalayan monasteries to Instagram, into something that resembles a mild form of amnesia. *Don’t think about the past. Don’t think about the future. Just feel your toes.* It sounds soothing. It is also, as a description of what mindfulness actually is, almost exactly wrong.

A mindfulness that forbids memory and planning cannot help you save for retirement, apologise for something you did in 2009, spot a recurring pattern in your relationships, or decide what to do on Tuesday. Which is awkward, because those happen to be the things human life is mostly made of.

The good contemplative traditions knew this perfectly well. So does the actual research. Both say something more interesting: mindfulness is a *quality of attention*. You can bring it to the present, the past, *or* the future. The whole point is how you attend, not when the thing you’re attending to happens to live.

The word itself gives the game away

Let’s start with a small philological joke at the wellness industry’s expense.

“Mindfulness” translates the Pali word *sati* (Sanskrit *smṛti*). And *smṛti* originally means — this is going to hurt — “to remember.” To recollect. To bear in mind. It comes from the Vedic tradition of remembering sacred texts.

So the word the Buddha used for the practice we all now think means “don’t think about the past” originally meant, roughly, “keep it in mind”.

The philologist Bryan Levman has argued that without the memory component, mindfulness can’t really be understood or applied at all; that mindfulness *requires* memory to work.

Bhikkhu Bodhi, one of the most respected living translators of the Pali canon, notes that sati occasionally still gets explained in a way that connects it to memory, and that even the famous early translation “bare attention” (by Nyanaponika Thera) was never meant as the whole story. Nyanaponika himself treated it as only the initial phase of proper mindfulness, which in full includes *sampajañña* (”clear comprehension”) and *apramāda* (”vigilance”).

None of which sounds like “empty your head.”

Think about what *sati* actually does when you read it this way. It’s the faculty that lets you hold something in mind: an intention, a value, a lesson, a promise you made yourself at 2 am, and bring it to bear on the moment you are currently in. That is not a holiday from thinking. It is thinking with the handbrake off the wisdom you’ve already earned.

A clinician walks into a therapy room…

This matters because clinicians have started noticing a specific kind of patient: the enthusiastic mindfulness practitioner who has quietly gone a bit strange.

The psychotherapist Steven Hendlin has written about three cognitive distortions that show up when pop-culture mindfulness meets a real person. The first is that people take a *formal meditation instruction* — “when your mind wanders, come back to the breath” — and generalise it into a rule for all of life. Any thought about yesterday becomes a failure. Any plan for tomorrow becomes a failure. You end up in a sort of attentional kettling, forever herding your own mind back into a one-second window.

The second distortion is a quiet contempt for memory. People start treating the past as suspect, constructed, biased, probably unreliable, and trust only what’s arriving through the senses right now. This feels very sophisticated until you realise you’ve just made it impossible to learn from anything that has ever happened to you.

The third is my favourite, and it is genuinely funny in a dark way. Hendlin recounts a neuropsychologist at a workshop on age-related cognitive disease cheerfully suggesting that Alzheimer’s patients, despite their difficulties, had at least achieved what the Eastern sages spent their whole lives working towards: consistent presence in the moment. Hendlin interrupted to point out that this is not, in fact, what the tradition meant. The enlightened present moment in Buddhist thought is a *hard-won* present, reached after the monkey mind has been tamed. A present with no past and no future isn’t nirvana. It’s a medical emergency.

The past: there’s a difference between replaying and reflecting

Here is the distinction the wellness market has fumbled. There is rumination, the stuck, circular, self-chewing mode in which the same bad memory shows up at 3 am for the hundredth time and drags you under. And there is reflection. Looking back on something with a bit of distance, seeing what it has to teach, and going to bed.

Mindfulness is extremely good at turning the first into the second. It is not good at pretending the past doesn’t exist.

A major review of mindfulness research describes how mindfulness training appears to increase *metacognitive awareness*, the ability to notice your thoughts and feelings as passing mental events rather than as accurate reports from the front lines of reality.

This ability is sometimes called *decentering*, and it’s associated with reductions in rumination, which is itself a well-established risk factor for depression and other disorders. Preliminary evidence suggests that mindfulness training increases metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination, and that the decentering component specifically predicts better clinical outcomes, such as lower rates of depressive relapse.

Read that carefully. Nobody is saying the memory stops showing up. They’re saying your *relationship* to it changes. The thought arrives. You see it arrive. You don’t grab it by the lapels and wrestle it to the floor.

This is precisely the architecture of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), developed by Zindel Segal, Mark Williams and John Teasdale for preventing depressive relapse. The first half of the course teaches people to work skilfully with the thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations that make them vulnerable to slipping back into depression. The second half uses those skills to build — wait for it — a relapse prevention plan. This document outlines your past vulnerabilities, anticipated future difficulties, and what you intend to do about them.

You cannot write that plan by staring at your breath. You write it by *remembering*, *anticipating*, and then meeting both with the kind of open, non-reactive attention mindfulness actually is.

And in case this sounds like a clever therapist’s workaround rather than real mindfulness: a study on self-rumination and self-reflection found that people higher in self-reflection showed more decentering and fewer depressive symptoms, while ruminators showed less decentering and more symptoms. Reflecting on your own life, the right way, is itself an act of mindful awareness. It’s the stuck version, the replay loop, that’s the enemy.

Now the other side of time. Worry is the future-facing cousin of rumination: narrow, repetitive, catastrophic, and tends to strike at 4 am. Prospection, the cognitive ability to simulate what might happen and act accordingly, is something else, and without it you cannot function as a person.

Prospection research has shown that thinking vividly about the future helps us make better decisions now. It counteracts something called *delay discounting*, the lovely human tendency to choose a small reward today over a larger one next year.

In a UK study, asking people to vividly imagine spending £35 at a pub 180 days from now (rather than just estimating where they’d be) shifted their actual financial decisions. Describing the time until retirement in *days* rather than years nudged people to start saving earlier, because suddenly the future person who needed the money felt a bit more like them. A 2014 study showed that participants' realistic computer-generated images of their own future faces alone caused them to contribute more to a hypothetical retirement account.

Imagining the future, in other words, is not the enemy of a good life. It’s one of the ways we build one.

The psychologists Martin Seligman and Anne Marie Roepke have gone further and argued in *Homo Prospectus* that faulty prospection is a core driver of depression itself. Depressed people imagine more negative futures, overestimate risk, and expect worse outcomes. Which should give the “never think about the future” crowd at least one moment of pause. If your mindfulness practice is asking you to adopt a cognitive posture that resembles depression, something has gone sideways.

Here is where it gets genuinely practical. The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has spent decades studying what actually works when humans try to reach their goals, and the answer is not — I’m sorry — “visualise your dream life.” That on its own is called *indulging*, and the research suggests it actively reduces goal-relevant effort. Your brain, charmingly, confuses vivid imagining with partial accomplishment and lets the motivation leak out.

What works is something called **mental contrasting with implementation intentions**, sold to the public as WOOP: **Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan**.

You picture what you want. You picture the best outcome. Then, and this is the bit manifestation books leave out, you look steadily and unflinchingly at the specific obstacle standing between you and it. And then you write down a concrete if-then plan.

In a physical activity study (Stadler, Oettingen, and Gollwitzer, 2009), participants who used the WOOP framework were roughly twice as active as those who received only an information session. In an eating-habits study (Adriaanse and colleagues, 2010), mental contrasting with implementation intentions produced about a 30% improvement in diet compared with controls. The trick is not the dreaming. It’s the dreaming *plus* the honest look at what’s in the way.

If that sounds suspiciously like a mindful way of engaging with the future, that’s because it is.

“But doesn’t mindfulness make you less ambitious?”

Fair question, and there’s actual research on it. A 2018 set of studies by Andrew Hafenbrack and Kathleen Vohs in *Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes* found that mindfulness meditation inductions reduced task motivation, and that this effect was mediated by reduced future focus and reduced arousal. So there is a real finding here: sit someone down, get them to do a focused breathing meditation, and in the minutes immediately after, they’ll be less hyped up to crush their inbox.

But notice what that finding is actually telling us. It’s saying that *one specific, short, calming induction* of *one specific kind of state mindfulness* will, briefly, take the edge off anticipatory arousal. Which, yes, obviously, that’s sort of what focused breathing is *for*. The mistake is sliding from “my ten-minute body scan chilled me out” to “a mindful life cannot be a planned or ambitious one.” Those are very different claims, and the research doesn’t support the second one.

In fact, a study in the *Journal of Cognitive Enhancement* on mindfulness and prospective memory found that brief app-based meditation *modestly increased* completion of time-based future tasks. The effect was small, but it was in the opposite direction from what the “present-only” folk theory predicts. You don’t forget to do your stuff because you meditated. If anything, you remember slightly better.

The actual picture, if we’re being grown-ups about it

Mindfulness is not a small reserved room at the centre of time labelled NOW, with the doors to past and future locked. It is a way of attending — open, steady, non-reactive, reasonably kind — that can travel in any temporal direction the mind wants to go.

Point it at the present and you get the classical breath-and-body awareness. Point it at the past and you get reflection instead of rumination: the memory shows up, gets acknowledged, gets learned from, gets released. Point it at the future and you get prospection instead of worry: the possible scenario gets examined, the obstacles get named, a plan gets made, and then you put it down.

Even Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous definition of mindfulness — “the awareness that emerges through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience” — is doing something subtler than the tote bags suggest. “In the present moment” is where the attending happens. It’s not a rule about what the attention is allowed to be *about*. You can only ever think in the present, because there is no other time available to think in. A person mindfully remembering their grandmother is doing that remembering now. A person mindfully drafting next quarter’s budget is drafting it now. Mindfulness concerns the *how*, not the *when*.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

So, a slightly more grown-up version of the practice. You sit. You come back to the breath. You notice the body. A worry about Friday’s meeting floats to the surface. You do not scold it, or frantically shepherd it back to your nostrils as if it were a naughty sheep. You notice it. You let it be seen for what it is. And if it seems useful, you let yourself actually look at Friday’s meeting, calmly, without being bullied by it, and you ask: *what do I actually want here? what is genuinely in the way? what is one concrete thing I could do today that would matter?*

A painful memory surfaces. You don’t dive in, and you don’t flinch away. You meet it. You see what it has to teach. You let it go when it’s ready.

Later, off the cushion, you get up and you do some of the things. You write things down. You keep promises to your future self. You make the plan. You learn from the last time.

None of this is a departure from mindfulness. It’s mindfulness finally doing the full job it was designed for; the job the word *sati*, back when it just meant “remembrance,” always implied.

The mindfulness that exists only in the present, unmoored from memory and planning, isn’t a deeper practice. It’s a shallower one wearing deeper clothes. So next time someone tells you, in that slightly glassy voice, that mindfulness is really just about *being here now*, you are allowed to smile, breathe, remember this article, and plan a polite reply.

Alan /|\

An Evidence-Based Evaluation of Donald Trump’s Leadership: Second Term (January 2025 – February 2026)

I. Rhetoric and Governing Style

Trump’s second term has been characterised by a governing style that is, in the words of a 50-expert CEPR assessment, defined by “unpredictability,” “economic brinkmanship,” and “public confrontation.” By mid-May 2025, Trump had signed over four times more Executive Orders than he had in the equivalent period of his first term — surpassing even Franklin Roosevelt’s famous first hundred days — though policy reversals have occurred within days, courts have been flooded with litigation, and financial markets have reacted to what analysts describe as a reactive governance style.

His rhetoric has been deliberately combative, not merely towards political opponents but towards traditional allies. He has described Europe as a “decaying” group of nations led by “weak” people, and his administration’s National Security Strategy argued the continent had lost its “national identities and self-confidence.” He has upended long-standing alliances through trade disputes, sharp rhetoric toward allied governments, and shifts in military posture.

On domestic matters, his communication has centred on immigration, crime, and national strength — issues that resonate with his base but which, as we shall see, crowd out the economic concerns that most Americans actually prioritise.

II. Domestic Policy: What Has Genuinely Benefited Ordinary Americans?

Any honest assessment must acknowledge areas of genuine achievement or potential benefit.

Immigration enforcement: Trump’s headline-level promises on border control have achieved tangible results in terms of reduced illegal crossings. His approval ratings remain relatively stronger on immigration than any other policy area, with polling showing he does “reasonably well” on immigration and crime — the issues to which he has devoted most attention.

Tax cuts extended and expanded: The extension and expansion of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the One Big Beautiful Budget Act (OBBBA), will, according to Goldman Sachs, deliver a 0.4 percentage point bump in disposable income over the first half of 2026. For working families, this is a modest but real benefit.

Credit card interest cap proposal: In early January 2026, Trump called for capping credit card interest rates at 10%, against an average of over 19% that American consumers currently pay. This is a populist measure that, if enacted, would directly benefit lower-income borrowers — though Wall Street analysts regard its legislative prospects as slim.

Deregulation and capital access: Looser capital restrictions have contributed to investment activity, and the AI investment boom — which comprised around 40% of GDP growth for 2025 through August according to the St. Louis Fed — has been facilitated by a deregulatory environment.

Overall GDP: The economy grew 2.2% in real terms in 2025, somewhat above the Congressional Budget Office’s January 2025 projection of 2.1%, and relatively similar to 2024’s 2.4% growth — suggesting that while no great leap forward occurred, neither did the sharp downturn many had feared.

III. Domestic Policy: Where Ordinary Americans Have Been Harmed

The picture here is substantially more damning, particularly for those lower down the income scale — the very people Trump campaigned on behalf of.

Inflation and cost of living: Inflation has continued to run at around 3%, significantly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. More specifically, food-at-home inflation accelerated from 1.7% in 2024 to 2.4% in 2025, and health care inflation also accelerated — two of the largest household expenditures after housing and transport.

Tariffs: Trump’s signature economic policy has been profoundly chaotic in execution. Average effective tariff rates changed from 2.4% to a high of 28% and then back down to 17% by January 2026 — a historically unprecedented scale of volatility in trade policy. The consequences have been significant: 75% of Americans, including 56% of Republicans, believe that tariffs are raising prices, and only 14% support imposing additional ones. Rather than reviving manufacturing as promised, the uncertainty and retaliatory actions from trading partners resulted in a steady decline in manufacturing jobs in 2025.

Healthcare premiums: 61% of Americans believe Trump’s policies have raised health insurance premiums, and his approval on healthcare sits at a dismal 32%. For lower-income people relying on exchange-based insurance, premiums have risen dramatically.

Widening inequality: Income and wealth gaps have widened under the second administration, and his policies are likely to widen the gap further. Only roughly 60% of Americans own shares, and most gains from the stock market boom have accrued to wealthier Americans. 65% of the public believes Trump’s policies favour the wealthy, compared to just 12% who think they are oriented towards the middle class.

Workers’ rights: Trump rolled back minimum wage increases for hundreds of thousands of federal workers, finalised regulations reducing farm workers’ wages, and mounted a sustained assault on labour enforcement agencies — weakening oversight bodies and appointing anti-worker officials to key positions.

Consumer confidence and economic expectations: A Pew Research survey conducted in January 2026 found that 52% of Americans say Trump’s economic policies have made conditions worse, with only 28% saying they have made them better. And only one-third of Americans believe their family’s finances will improve in 2026, down from 48% the previous June.

Rule of law: Perhaps most troubling institutionally: Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts described the rule of law as “endangered” in May 2025, as the administration pressed constitutional debates around the unitary executive theory and used presidential authority to influence businesses, academic institutions, law firms, the media, and foreign leaders.

IV. How the World Now Sees America

The international picture represents one of the most dramatic reputational collapses in modern American diplomatic history.

Decline among traditional allies: By April 2025, the US had plummeted to a net approval score of –5 globally, a fall of 22 points since the previous year. In Germany, the US scored –44; in Canada, –47; in Spain, –42. In Canada, 56% of respondents now describe the United States as a negative global force, compared to just 26% who see it positively.

Loss of confidence in Trump personally: A 24-country median of 67% lack confidence in Trump to handle global economic problems. In nine of eleven NATO allies surveyed, roughly six-in-ten adults or more say they do not have confidence in his handling of the Russia-Ukraine war. Majorities in almost every country surveyed describe Trump as “arrogant” and “dangerous.”

China as the principal beneficiary: China’s global net approval score rose to +14 in 2025, and China now outperforms the United States in terms of positive perceptions in 19 European countries — a remarkable inversion of the post-Cold War order. As ECFR’s analysis concluded, “Trump’s campaign to put America first has made it less popular among its allies and has helped put China in pole position.”

The fracturing of the Western alliance: Just one in five Europeans now say they view the US as an ally, down significantly from two years ago — half the proportion of Americans who view the EU as an ally. Ukrainians have shifted their gaze from Washington to Brussels. The liberal international order, already under strain, has been further destabilised.

Some exceptions: Trump retains strong approval in Israel (83% favourable) and Nigeria (78%). He is also popular among European populist movements, including 88% of Hungarian Fidesz supporters and 56% of Alternative for Germany supporters. Majorities in 18 countries still consider him a strong leader — even if they distrust his judgement. And his welcome in parts of the non-Western world reflects, as ECFR notes, a broader embrace of a more transactional, post-liberal international order.

V. Summary Judgement

Based on the available evidence, Trump’s second-term leadership presents a consistent pattern: rhetorical boldness combined with structural policy choices that have disproportionately benefited the already-wealthy, generated deep economic uncertainty for working Americans, and accelerated the erosion of America’s global standing.

Where he has delivered — immigration enforcement, modest tax relief, a broadly resilient (if underwhelming) macroeconomy — these gains are real but limited in scope. They have not translated into felt improvements for the majority of Americans, 66% of whom identify the economy, inflation, or health care as the top issue facing the country — the very areas where Trump polls most poorly.

The central paradox of his second term is captured neatly by Brookings: he was elected largely on a promise to help working-class Americans, yet his policies have systematically widened the gap between the wealthy and everyone else, while his chaotic governance style has created the kind of uncertainty that actively depresses investment, wage growth, and consumer confidence. Internationally, America is weaker, less trusted, and in relative terms losing ground to China — not through China’s strength, but through American self-sabotage.

Whether this constitutes a long-term restructuring of global power or a temporary disruption will depend largely on what comes next. But as Nobel laureate Michael Spence has written, the effects are likely to be “far-reaching and probably only partly reversible.”

Alan /|\

Emotional Regulation

What neuroscience says about managing difficult feelings

Somewhere inside your skull, right now, there is a small almond-shaped structure that is approximately two hundred million years older than your capacity for abstract thought, and it has opinions. Strong opinions. Opinions about that email you received this morning, about the driver who “cut you up” on the way to work, about the slightly ambiguous tone in which your manager said ‘fine’ when you asked if everything was all right. It has processed all of these events and filed its assessment before your conscious mind has finished reading the subject line.

This structure, called the amygdala, is, in the technical language of affective neuroscience, doing its job extremely well. The problem is that its job was specified during the Pleistocene, when the principal threats were large cats, rival tribes, and the general indifference of the Ice Age, and it has not been updated since. It is running, with great efficiency and absolute conviction, software that was designed for a rather different operating environment.

Emotional regulation — the capacity to manage, modulate, and meaningfully respond to our own emotional states rather than simply being detonated by them — is one of the most studied and practically important topics in contemporary psychology and neuroscience. It is also, in the view of this author, one of the few areas where ancient contemplative wisdom and modern brain science are saying essentially the same thing in completely different vocabularies, and where the conversation between them is genuinely more interesting than either tradition alone.

This article is a tour of that territory: what the brain actually does with difficult feelings, what the research says about managing them effectively, and why — quietly, without making a fuss about it — the mystics got rather a lot of this right long before we had fMRI machines to tell us so.

Part One: The architecture of feeling — what is actually happening in there

To understand emotional regulation, it helps to understand what emotions are doing in the first place — which is to say, it helps to understand them as solutions rather than problems. Emotions did not evolve to make your life complicated. They evolved to help you make decisions quickly.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, developed through his landmark work with patients who had damage to the prefrontal cortex, demonstrated something counterintuitive and important: patients without access to emotional processing became dramatically worse at making decisions, not better. Without the evaluative signal that emotions provide — the felt sense of this is good or this is dangerous — these patients were paralysed by choices that most people navigate automatically. Reason, it turns out, needs emotion. Without the somatic markers that tag options as promising or threatening, the rational mind has no basis for prioritising.

This reframes the entire problem of difficult emotions. The issue is not that we feel too much. The issue is that the emotional system, which is fast, associative, and operating largely below conscious awareness, does not always distinguish well between a genuine threat and a social threat, between a present danger and a remembered one, or between the lion in the grass and the deadline in the inbox. The signal is real. The signal is often disproportionate. Both things are true simultaneously, and the tension between them is where emotional regulation lives.

The Neuroscience Bit: The Triune Brain — Useful Fiction or Useful Framework?

The popular ‘triune brain’ model — the reptilian brainstem, the limbic mammalian system, and the rational neocortex — was developed by neuroscientist Paul MacLean in the 1960s and has had an enormous influence on popular psychology, stress management training, and corporate leadership development. It is also, in its strong form, largely wrong in neuroscience.

Modern neuroimaging has established that the brain is not neatly divided into evolutionary layers operating in competition. Emotional and cognitive processing are deeply integrated; the amygdala has direct reciprocal connections with the prefrontal cortex; ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are not anatomically separable in the way the triune model implies. The neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s ‘theory of constructed emotion’ (2017) goes further, arguing that emotions are not fixed, pre-programmed responses located in specific brain regions, but actively constructed predictions — the brain’s best guess about the meaning of incoming bodily sensation given current context and prior experience.

For practical purposes, the older model retains some descriptive usefulness: we do experience what feels like a faster, more visceral emotional response, followed by a slower, more reflective one. But the clean ‘emotional brain vs rational brain’ framing should be treated as a metaphor rather than an anatomy.

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam. Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The window of tolerance

One of the most clinically useful concepts in contemporary trauma and affect regulation theory is what the psychiatrist Dan Siegel calls the window of tolerance: the zone of emotional activation within which we can function effectively. Inside this window, we experience and process emotions without being overwhelmed or shutting down. Outside the window, in either direction, our capacity for integrated functioning degrades.

Outside the window upward is hyperarousal: anxiety, panic, rage, hypervigilance — the amygdala at full volume, the threat-response system in overdrive. Outside the window, downward is hypoarousal: numbness, dissociation, collapse, the emotional flatness of a system that has stopped processing rather than risk being overwhelmed. Both are defensive responses. Neither is pathological in itself. Both become problems when they are chronic, disproportionate, or the only tools available.

The goal of emotional regulation is not to eliminate difficult feelings, which is both impossible and undesirable, given what Damasio showed us about the decision-making value of emotional signals. The goal is to widen the window: to increase the range of emotional experience within which we can remain present, responsive, and functional. Everything that follows in this article is, in some form, about widening the window.

Part Two: The six strategies — what the research actually recommends

James Gross at Stanford University has produced what is probably the most comprehensive and well-validated framework for emotional regulation currently available in the literature.

His process model identifies the major strategies people use to regulate emotion, organised by where in the emotion-generation process they intervene. Some strategies work by changing the situation before an emotion is generated. Others work on the meaning attributed to a situation. Others work on the emotional response itself once it has arrived. The timing matters, and the evidence on which strategies work best is rather more nuanced than most popular psychology accounts suggest.

Strategy 1: Situation selection and modification

The simplest and often most effective form of emotional regulation is also the one we most stubbornly resist: not putting yourself in situations that reliably generate difficult emotions you cannot manage. This sounds obvious. It is, in practice, systematically ignored by a remarkable proportion of the adult population, many of whom know exactly which relationships, environments, and conversations reliably produce a specific flavour of emotional distress and return to them with the dedication of field researchers.

Gross’s model distinguishes between situation selection (choosing, where possible, environments and relationships that support rather than undermine emotional stability) and situation modification (changing the aspects of an unavoidable situation that drive the difficult emotion). Both are antecedent-focused strategies — they intervene before the emotion is generated, which makes them considerably more efficient than trying to manage an emotion that has already arrived at full intensity. They also require self-knowledge, honesty about one’s own patterns, and the willingness to make changes that may be inconvenient. This is, naturally, why they are the least popular strategies available.

Strategy 2: Attentional deployment

Where we direct our attention within a situation substantially determines the emotion we experience. Attentional deployment involves deliberately directing attention toward or away from emotionally evocative features of a situation. Distraction — directing attention away from a difficult stimulus — is one of the oldest and most studied forms of this strategy, and the evidence suggests it is genuinely useful in the short term: it reduces emotional intensity, allows physiological arousal to diminish, and creates space for more considered response.

The important caveat is that distraction is a short-term regulation strategy, not a long-term one. Chronic avoidance of emotional material — persistently refusing to attend to difficult feelings — is associated with a range of poor outcomes, including increased intrusive thoughts, emotional blunting, and the accumulation of unprocessed material that tends to surface at inconvenient moments, usually during important meetings or just before sleep.

The constructive version of attentional deployment is not avoidance but mindful attention: the deliberate, non-judgemental direction of awareness toward emotional experience. The capacity to observe one’s own emotional state — to notice anger as anger, grief as grief, anxiety as anxiety, rather than simply being those things without meta-awareness — is one of the most consistently supported emotional regulation skills in the research literature. We return to this in some depth shortly.

Strategy 3: Cognitive reappraisal

If there is a single strategy that the emotional regulation literature endorses most strongly, most consistently, and across the widest range of contexts, it is cognitive reappraisal: changing the meaning attributed to a situation or stimulus in order to change the emotional response it generates. This is not positive thinking, which involves replacing an accurate appraisal with an inaccurate but comforting one. Cognitive reappraisal involves finding a different accurate interpretation of events — one that generates a less destructive emotional response without requiring self-deception.

The classic experimental paradigm: show participants distressing images — medical procedures, accidents, scenes of suffering. Instruct some to view them with detachment, as a clinician would; instruct others to reappraise the meaning of the scenes (focusing on recovery rather than injury, for instance). Compared with controls, reappraisers show reduced emotional reactivity and physiological arousal, and — crucially — report no sense of suppression or inauthenticity. They do not feel they have denied their emotional response. They have genuinely changed it, by changing the cognitive frame.

The Neuroscience Bit: What Reappraisal Does to the Brain

Neuroimaging studies of cognitive reappraisal consistently show a characteristic pattern: increased activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex (associated with cognitive control and conflict monitoring), coupled with reduced activation in the amygdala and insula (associated with threat processing and visceral emotional response).

This pattern is the neural signature of top-down regulation: once engaged, the prefrontal cortex sends inhibitory signals that dampen amygdala reactivity. The brain is, in the most literal neuroanatomical sense, thinking itself calmer — not by suppressing the emotional signal, but by revising the meaning that generates it.

Importantly, Gross and colleagues found that cognitive reappraisal, unlike suppression, does not increase physiological stress markers, does not impair memory for the regulated event, and does not reduce social closeness when used interpersonally. It is, by most metrics, the cleanest regulation strategy available.

Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249. Gross, J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Strategy 4: Response modulation — the suppression trap

Emotional suppression, the attempt to inhibit emotional expression and experience after the emotion has been generated, is probably the most commonly used emotion regulation strategy in the adult population of countries where emotional display is culturally discouraged, which is to say, most of them. And it is, the research suggests with admirable consistency, one of the worst available.

Gross’s studies found that habitual suppressors show increased physiological stress responses, reduced well-being, impaired cognitive performance (suppression is metabolically expensive — it takes working memory resources that would otherwise be available for thinking), and, critically, increased subjective emotional intensity rather than reduced. The emotion does not go away because you have declined to express it. It goes underground, where it does its worst work undisturbed.

The cultural pressure toward suppression — the injunction to keep a stiff upper lip, to be professional, to not make a scene — is therefore, from a neuroscientific perspective, a set of instructions for generating chronic stress while maintaining the social appearance of having things under control. The British national character, one cannot help but observe, has been conducting a long-term experiment in precisely this strategy, with results that are arguably visible in the national rates of anxiety, alcohol consumption, and the peculiar emotional tone of conversations on public transport.

Part Three: Mindfulness, acceptance, and the wisdom the mystics had first

We arrive now at the part of the article where the neuroscience and the contemplative traditions have a slightly awkward but ultimately very productive meeting. The awkwardness is that the contemplative traditions got here about two and a half thousand years earlier, and have been waiting with a mixture of patience and mild exasperation.

The Buddhist concept of dukkha , often translated as ‘suffering’ but more precisely meaning something like ‘unsatisfactoriness’ or the fundamental friction of existence, is, in one of its key formulations, about the relationship between experience and resistance to experience. The suffering, in this framework, is not the difficult feeling itself. The suffering is the resistance to the difficult feeling: the demand that it not be happening, the story we construct about what it means that it is happening, the energy we expend trying to make it stop. The original pain plus the resistance to the pain equals, as the contemporary mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young memorably formulated it, total suffering. Remove the resistance and you are left with the original pain, which is usually considerably more manageable than the compound experience.

This is not a claim about enlightenment or spiritual transcendence. It is a psychologically testable proposition about the relationship between meta-cognitive stance and emotional intensity, and it has been tested extensively by the research programmes that grew out of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s development of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts in 1979. The results are, by the standards of psychological interventions, remarkably robust.

The Research Bit: Mindfulness and Emotional Regulation

The evidence base for mindfulness-based interventions in emotional regulation is now substantial. Key findings:

Mindfulness training increases activity in the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex while reducing amygdala reactivity — the same neural signature as cognitive reappraisal, achieved through a different route. The meditating brain is not suppressing emotional response; it is changing its relationship to it.

A landmark study by Farb et al. (2010) found that MBSR training produced a shift in how participants processed emotional experience: less narrative elaboration (telling stories about the feeling), more direct sensory awareness (experiencing the physical components of the feeling without adding interpretation). This decoupling of sensation from story is associated with reduced emotional reactivity and faster recovery from negative affect.

Hölzel et al. (2011) found that eight weeks of MBSR training produced measurable increases in grey matter density in the hippocampus (associated with learning and memory), the posterior cingulate cortex, the temporoparietal junction’, and measurable decreases in amygdala grey matter density, correlated with self-reported reductions in stress.

The brain, in short, is physically changed by sustained mindfulness practice. This is not a metaphor.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Delacorte Press. Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.

Affect labelling — naming the beast

One of the most practically useful and deceptively simple findings in the emotional regulation literature is what UCLA researcher Matthew Lieberman and colleagues call affect labelling: the act of putting feelings into words reduces their neurological intensity. When participants in Lieberman’s studies were shown images of emotionally expressive faces and asked to label the emotion depicted, amygdala activation decreased relative to conditions where participants simply viewed the faces or named non-emotional information about them. Naming the feeling at the neural level turns it down.

The mechanism appears to involve the prefrontal cortex: verbalising an emotional state activates language-processing regions that have inhibitory connections to the amygdala. Putting the feeling into words — even silently, even in a single word — engages the cognitive system in a way that modulates the threat-response system. The act of naming is itself a regulatory intervention.

For the Rational Mystic, it is difficult not to notice that this mechanism has a remarkably close parallel in the esoteric traditions of naming and knowing. In numerous magical traditions, to know the true name of something is to have power over it. Rumpelstiltskin loses his power when his name is spoken. Demons in exorcism rites are commanded to name themselves before they can be expelled. In Kabbalah, the power of language to shape reality is foundational. The traditions arrived at the insight through mythology and spiritual practice. Neuroscience arrived at it through fMRI. The insight is the same: naming is not merely descriptive. Naming is an act of power over the named thing.

Part Four: The body in the room — somatic approaches to regulation

The neuroscience of emotion has undergone something of a revolution in recent decades in its understanding of the relationship between the brain and the body. The older model — in which the brain perceives a situation, generates an emotion, and the body responds — has been substantially revised. The newer model, drawing on the work of Antonio Damasio, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the neuroscientist Stephen Porges, understands the relationship as far more bidirectional: the body sends continuous signals to the brain, and a significant portion of what we experience as emotion is the brain’s interpretation of those bodily signals rather than a top-down response to external events.

This has practical implications that are both scientifically robust and, for a certain kind of rationalist, mildly inconvenient. Because if emotion is partly constituted by bodily state, then changing the body is a direct route to changing the emotional experience — a route that bypasses the cognitive system entirely and operates on the source material.

Breathing: the most ancient regulation technology

The breath is the only component of the autonomic nervous system that is simultaneously involuntary and fully available to conscious control. You cannot decide to slow your heart rate by thinking about it. You can decide to slow your breathing, and your heart rate will follow. This is not a metaphor or a wellness industry claim. It is a physiological fact with a specific mechanism: slow, extended exhalation activates the vagus nerve, which stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system — the physiological counterpart to the sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ response — producing genuine, measurable reductions in heart rate, blood pressure, and cortisol levels.

The physiological sigh — a double inhale through the nose followed by a long, slow exhale — has been identified by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and colleagues as one of the fastest available routes to reducing acute physiological stress. A single physiological sigh, they found, produces statistically significant reductions in anxiety within sixty to ninety seconds. It requires no equipment, no training, no subscription, and no understanding of neuroscience to deploy. It is also, the Rational Mystic observes, what humans naturally do when they are very distressed — the involuntary double inhale of someone who has been weeping is the body’s own attempt to recalibrate. We knew how to do this. We just needed a neuroscientist to explain why.

The Neuroscience Bit: The Polyvagal Theory and Emotional Regulation

Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory (1994, 2011) proposes a hierarchical model of the autonomic nervous system’s response to threat, with three levels: the ventral vagal system (associated with social engagement, safety, and connection), the sympathetic system (associated with mobilisation — fight or flight), and the dorsal vagal system (associated with immobilisation — collapse, shutdown, dissociation).

In Porges’ model, the most powerful regulator of emotional state is the perception of safety — specifically, safety signalled through social connection. The face, voice, and proximity of a calm, attuned other directly activates the ventral vagal system and downregulates the threat response. This is why co-regulation — the calming effect of being with a regulated other — is so powerful, and why isolation under stress is physiologically as well as psychologically damaging.

The practical implication: when you are dysregulated, one of the most effective things you can do is seek the company of someone who is calm. This is not weakness. It is your nervous system using the social engagement system it evolved for exactly this purpose.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation. Norton.

The body as emotional memory

Bessel van der Kolk’s influential work on trauma — summarised in his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score — documents the extensive evidence that unresolved emotional experience is stored not just psychologically but somatically: in patterns of muscular tension, postural habit, autonomic regulation, and proprioceptive experience. The body is not a passive vehicle for emotional experience. It is an active participant in generating, storing, and perpetuating it.

This is consistent with the contemplative traditions’ longstanding emphasis on the body as a site of spiritual and psychological work. Yoga, Tai Chi, Qigong, and the somatic components of many meditation traditions are not primarily exercise systems, though they have physical benefits. They are, in their original conception, practices for working with the relationship between bodily state, emotional experience, and conscious awareness. The fact that neuroscience is now providing the mechanistic account of why these practices produce the effects they do is, from the Rational Mystic’s perspective, exactly how it should work: the map and the territory converging, each validating the other.

Part Five: Self-compassion — the strategy we resist most

There is a regulation strategy that has accumulated one of the strongest evidence bases in contemporary psychology, produces robust improvements in emotional well-being, resilience, and recovery from failure, and is resisted with particular determination by exactly the kinds of people who most need it: high achievers, academics, perfectionists, and the British. It is self-compassion, and it has nothing to do with self-indulgence, lowered standards, or the consolation of the mediocre. The evidence suggests that it is, in fact, the opposite.

Kristin Neff, whose research programme at the University of Texas has defined the field, describes self-compassion as having three components: self-kindness (treating oneself with the same care one would offer a good friend in similar difficulties), common humanity (recognising that suffering, failure, and inadequacy are part of the shared human experience rather than evidence of personal uniqueness in one’s inadequacy), and mindfulness (holding one’s painful experience in aware, balanced attention rather than over-identifying with it or suppressing it). All three components are required for the full effect. Kindness without mindfulness tips into wallowing. Mindfulness without kindness tips into cold observation. Common humanity without either is merely philosophical consolation.

The research findings are consistent and counterintuitive to those who mistake self-compassion for weakness. Self-compassionate individuals show greater emotional resilience following failure, faster recovery from negative affect, increased motivation to improve after setbacks (not decreased — the common fear is that self-compassion will produce complacency; the evidence shows the opposite), and lower rates of anxiety, depression, and rumination. They are also, importantly, no less likely to maintain high standards — they are simply less devastated when they fail to meet them, and therefore quicker to learn from the failure and try again.

Part Six: Putting it together — the Rational Mystic’s emotional regulation toolkit

We have covered a considerable amount of ground. Let us consolidate it into something practically useful. A description of what an evidence-based, psychologically literate approach to difficult feelings actually looks like in practice.

The first and most important shift is one of orientation rather than technique: from suppression to regulation. These are fundamentally different projects. Suppression attempts to eliminate the emotional signal. Regulation attempts to stay in relationship with it — to be present to it, to allow it the space it needs, to understand what it is asking, and to respond to it in ways that are proportionate and constructive rather than simply reactive.

The goal is not a life with fewer difficult feelings. It is a life in which difficult feelings are less likely to ambush you, overwhelm you, or make decisions on your behalf.

In practice, this means: when a difficult emotion arrives, the first move is to name it — not with a narrative (I’m anxious because of the meeting and the meeting matters because my career is at stake and my career is at stake because...) but with a label (this is anxiety). Then, to locate it in the body — where does this feeling actually live? What are its physical components? The somatic attention itself is regulatory; it activates the observing self and interrupts the narrative escalation that turns manageable feelings into consuming ones.

Then, if the emotion is intense, to regulate the physiology — breathe slowly, particularly extending the exhale. If possible, seek the company of someone calm. Move, if the emotion is one of mobilisation. Rest, if the system has collapsed into shutdown. Give the nervous system something concrete to do with the activation rather than simply sitting with it at full intensity.

Then, once the acute physiological arousal has reduced sufficiently for the prefrontal cortex to re-engage, to reappraise — not to minimise or dismiss, but to look for alternative accurate interpretations that generate less destructive emotional responses. What else might this mean? What is the version of this situation that does not require me to be catastrophically threatened? What would I say to a friend who came to me with this?

And throughout, to bring self-compassion — the recognition that being a mammal with an ancient emotional system navigating a complicated modern world is genuinely difficult, that emotional difficulty is not a character flaw, and that the capacity to be kind to oneself in the midst of struggle is not weakness but the most efficient available route back to functioning.

The Practical Bit: A Regulation Sequence

When a difficult emotion arrives at full intensity:

1. NAME IT: ‘This is anger/grief/anxiety/shame.’ One word, not a story.

2. LOCATE IT: Where in the body? Chest, throat, stomach? What are the physical sensations specifically?

3. BREATHE: Double inhale through the nose, long slow exhale through the mouth. Repeat three to five times.

4. OBSERVE: You are having this feeling. You are not this feeling. There is a difference.

5. REAPPRAISE: What else might this mean? What is the least catastrophic accurate interpretation?

6. RESPOND: From this slightly more regulated place, what does the situation actually need from you?

This sequence takes approximately two to four minutes and requires no equipment, no special training, and no belief in anything that cannot be verified by a suitably equipped laboratory.

The mystic would add: and when you have done all of that, sit with what remains. Not everything that arises needs to be resolved. Some feelings are simply asking to be witnessed.

Conclusion: The feeling is the message

The amygdala, to return to where we began, is not your enemy. It is a structure that has been keeping your ancestors alive since before the invention of language, fire, or agriculture, and it is very good at its original job. The fact that its original job and your current life are a poor fit is not the amygdala’s fault. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do, in an environment it was not designed for, with the urgency and conviction of something that is absolutely certain it is saving your life.

Emotional regulation is not the project of silencing that system. It is the project of learning to be in relationship with it — to receive its signals with the seriousness they deserve, to understand what they are actually saying beneath the melodrama of their delivery, and to respond to them with the combination of care and discernment that the situation requires. To feel, in other words, without being entirely at the mercy of the feeling. To be moved without being swept away.

The neuroscience provides the mechanism. The contemplative traditions provide the map. The practice is yours to develop, and it is lifelong. The brain is plastic; the window of tolerance can be widened; the relationship between the observing self and the felt sense of emotional experience can be genuinely transformed with sustained, compassionate attention.

There will still be ambushes. The amygdala is not going to retire. The difficult feelings will continue to arrive with their characteristic confidence that they know exactly what is happening and exactly what you should do about it. But — and this is the thing that both the neuroscientist and the mystic agree on, from their very different vantage points — you are not obliged to believe everything you feel. You are invited to listen to it, understand it, and then decide what to do with it from the clearest part of yourself you can access in that moment.

Which is, as it turns out, exactly what wisdom has always looked like. Just with better brain imaging now.

Alan /|\

Further Reading & References

Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. Putnam.

Barrett, L.F. (2017). How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gross, J.J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.

Gross, J.J. & John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362.

Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2005). The cognitive control of emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242–249.

Siegel, D.J. (1999). The Developing Mind. Guilford Press.

Lieberman, M.D. et al. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18(5), 421–428.

Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Delacorte Press.

Hölzel, B.K. et al. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.

Porges, S.W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. W.W. Norton.

van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.

Neff, K.D. (2011). Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself. William Morrow.

Huberman, A.D. et al. (2023). Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal. Cell Reports Medicine, 4(1).

Young, S. (2016). The Science of Enlightenment. Sounds True.

Tarot as a psychological tool

The case for rational divination

There is a woman at a table in a candlelit room, and she is about to tell you something important about yourself.

She is not psychic. She is not in contact with the spirits of the departed, the whisperings of the cosmos, or the particular celestial committee that has apparently been meeting about your career prospects since 1987.

She is, however, extremely good at asking questions. She holds a tool that has been helping people ask better questions about themselves for the better part of three centuries, even though almost everyone involved has consistently described it as something else entirely.

The tool is a tarot deck.

Seventy-eight cards, divided into twenty-two Major Arcana and fifty-six Minor Arcana, decorated with images so richly symbolic that psychologists have been quietly excited about them since Carl Jung noticed, in the early twentieth century, that they appeared to map onto something he was calling the collective unconscious. Jung had a habit of noticing things and then attaching very large concepts to them. In this case, however, he was onto something.

The argument of this article is not that tarot predicts the future. It does not. The argument is not that tarot cards carry magical energy, channel spiritual forces, or represent a direct line to the universe’s customer service department. They do not. The argument is considerably stranger and, I would suggest, considerably more interesting: that a shuffled deck of illustrated cards, drawn at random and interpreted through the lens of a person’s current situation, can be a genuinely powerful psychological instrument. Not despite the absence of supernatural mechanisms, but because of the presence of very ordinary psychological ones.

Put differently: the tarot works. Just not the way anyone tells you it works.

Part One: A brief and somewhat undignified history of the cards

The tarot began its career not as a mystical oracle but as a card game. This is the kind of fact that makes occultists uncomfortable, and historians quietly pleased. In fifteenth-century northern Italy, a game called tarocchi was played by wealthy aristocrats using a deck of illustrated cards. The standard four suits supplemented by a set of elaborate trump cards depicting allegorical figures: the Emperor, the Empress, Death, the Tower, the Fool. These were not spiritual symbols. They were game pieces, used in a trick-taking game not entirely unlike whist, with considerably better artwork.

The earliest known decks, the Visconti-Sforza tarots, commissioned by the Duke of Milan around 1450, were hand-painted by professional artists and cost approximately as much as a small house. They were not instruments of divination. They were status symbols, used to play an expensive game by people who could afford expensive games. The mystical associations came later, largely through a process of enthusiastic misattribution.

The critical moment of reinvention arrived in 1781, when the French occultist Antoine Court de Gébelin published a treatise claiming, entirely without evidence, that the tarot was the lost wisdom of ancient Egypt, preserved in symbolic form after the destruction of the great library at Alexandria. This claim was false in every particular. Egypt had nothing to do with the tarot. De Gébelin had made the whole thing up, or more precisely had convinced himself of it through the kind of enthusiastic pattern-matching that is the intellectual equivalent of deciding you can see a dog in a cloud formation and then writing a paper about dogs.

It did not matter. The claim took root, spread, mutated, and eventually produced the entire edifice of Western esoteric tarot tradition — Etteilla, Lévi, the Golden Dawn, Waite, Smith, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909 that remains the visual template for almost every tarot deck published since.

The History Bit: The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck

The deck most people picture when they think of tarot was designed in 1909 by Arthur Edward Waite, a scholar of Western esotericism, and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, an artist and fellow member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Smith, frequently omitted from the credit, in the way that women who did the actual creative work of history often were, introduced something genuinely novel. Fully illustrated pip cards, where previously the minor arcana had featured only the relevant number of suit symbols arranged geometrically.

These illustrations were not arbitrary decoration. They depicted scenes, emotions, and situations. Figures in moments of triumph, grief, decision, isolation, community. Smith was essentially creating a visual vocabulary of human experience, drawing on her background in theatre, folklore, and symbolism. Whether she intended it or not, she was producing the world’s most widely distributed set of projective stimuli.

She was paid a flat fee and received no royalties. The deck sold millions of copies.

Part Two: Projective psychology — the science that explains the magic

In 1921, a Swiss psychiatrist named Hermann Rorschach published a paper describing his ink-blot test. The principle was elegantly simple: show a person an ambiguous image and ask them what they see. The person, faced with visual material that has no definitive interpretation, will project the contents of their own mind onto it. What they see in the blots reveals, with more or less reliability, depending on which subsequent decade of research you consult, something about the structure of their inner world.

This is projective psychology: the use of ambiguous stimuli to elicit material from the unconscious that might not be accessible through direct questioning. Alongside the Rorschach, the tradition includes the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan in 1935, in which subjects are shown ambiguous scenes and asked to tell a story about them. The theory is that the stories people construct about other people in ambiguous situations reveal the narratives, preoccupations, and emotional patterns that organise their own interior lives.

Now look at a tarot card.

The Ten of Swords from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck depicts a figure lying face-down, ten swords plunged into their back, under a black sky with a thin line of dawn on the horizon. Ask a hundred people what this image means, and you will receive a hundred answers, all of them revealing. Some will see catastrophic defeat. Some will see the end of a painful situation — note the dawn. Some will see self-inflicted suffering. Some will see drama and exaggeration. Some will notice that ten swords is considerably more than necessary and will have thoughts about that.

Each of those responses is a projection. And each projection is data about the person’s current emotional state, their habitual narratives, their relationship with adversity, and the stories they tell themselves about suffering and survival. The card did not cause these responses. It invited them. The distinction is important, and it is the entire point.

The Psychology Bit: Projective Tests and Their Limits

The scientific status of projective tests is genuinely contested. The Rorschach in particular has had a turbulent century: periodically attacked as pseudoscience (Wood et al., 2003) and periodically defended with updated scoring systems that restore modest predictive validity (Meyer et al., 2011). The TAT has similar problems with reliability and standardisation.

The honest position is that projective tests are more useful as clinical conversation-starters than as standardised measurement instruments. They generate material — narratives, associations, emotional responses — that a skilled clinician can work with productively. They are poor at diagnosing specific conditions but considerably better at opening up a person’s inner world for exploration.

This is exactly what tarot does well. It is not diagnosing anything. It is generating material for reflection. The standards we apply to it should therefore be the standards of a clinical conversation tool, not a psychometric test — and by those standards, it performs rather well.

Relevant references: Exner, J.E. (2003). The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System. Wiley. Murray, H.A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Harvard University Press.

Part Three: Jung, archetypes, and the suspiciously convenient Major Arcana

Carl Jung — who appears in this series of articles with the regularity of a recurring character in a novel, which is either a coincidence or a synchronicity depending on your philosophical commitments — became interested in tarot as early as the 1930s. His interest was not in prediction. It was in symbolism, and specifically in what he called archetypes: universal patterns of human experience that recur across cultures, mythologies, and dreams, and which he believed were encoded in what he called the collective unconscious — a layer of the psyche shared across humanity, containing the accumulated experiential wisdom of the species.

The Major Arcana of the tarot maps onto archetypal experience with a coincidence so thorough that it would be suspicious if we did not already know about the Italian card game.

Consider: The Fool (new beginnings, the leap into the unknown, the untested self). The Magician (will, agency, the capacity to shape circumstances). The High Priestess (intuition, hidden knowledge, the unconscious itself). The Tower (sudden disruption, the collapse of false structures). Death (transformation, ending, the thing we resist that turns out to be necessary). The World (completion, integration, the journey arrived at).

These are not arbitrary images. They are a map of the kinds of situations, transitions, and experiences that every human life contains. Not every life is in the same order, or with the same emphasis, or with the same outcome, but every life encounters the Fool’s precipice, the Tower’s collapse, the Hermit’s necessary withdrawal, the Wheel’s unwelcome reminder that circumstances change whether we are ready or not. The Major Arcana endures because it describes experiences that are genuinely universal. Jung would have called these archetypal. An anthropologist might call them cross-cultural. A cynic might call it vague enough to apply to anything. All three positions contain some truth.

The Psychology Bit: Archetypes and Analytical Psychology

Jung’s concept of archetypes has had a complicated reception in academic psychology. The specific claim — that archetypes are inherited psychological structures encoded in a collective unconscious — is not scientifically testable in its strong form and has not been adopted by mainstream psychology.

However, the weaker version of the claim has fared better: that certain narrative patterns, character types, and experiential themes recur with remarkable consistency across cultures, mythologies, and individuals. Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (1949), the narrative structures identified by Vladimir Propp in folk tales (1928), and more recent work in evolutionary psychology on universal emotional themes all suggest that there are indeed recurring patterns in human experience that transcend cultural particularity.

The tarot’s Major Arcana functions as a catalogue of these recurring patterns. Whether their origin is Jungian collective unconscious, evolutionary psychology, or the accumulated folk wisdom of European culture is, for practical therapeutic purposes, largely irrelevant. What matters is that the patterns resonate — and they do, with striking consistency, across very different people and situations.

Jung, C.G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press. Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.

Part Four: The art of asking better questions

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly, without mystical dressing.

Most of the time, most of us are not thinking very carefully about our lives. We are reacting, habituating, following established patterns, and telling ourselves the same stories we have always told ourselves about who we are and what is happening to us. We are, in the cognitive science term, operating on System 1 — the fast, automatic, associative thinking that handles most of daily life with admirable efficiency and almost no genuine reflection.

What interrupts System 1 is novelty, incongruity, or deliberate effort — the three conditions that activate what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2: slow, deliberate, effortful thinking that can actually examine assumptions, notice contradictions, and generate new perspectives. The problem is that System 2 is metabolically expensive and fundamentally lazy. It resists activation. It requires a prompt.

A tarot reading, whatever else it is, is an extremely effective prompt. It works in several distinct ways, and it is worth separating them.

The random card as unexpected mirror

You draw the Three of Swords — three swords piercing a heart, a sky full of rain — in a position nominally representing your current emotional state. You are, consciously, absolutely fine. You have been telling people you are absolutely fine for three months. You are extremely fine, thank you.

And now there is this card, sitting on the table, and something in your chest does something involuntary.

The card has not diagnosed you. The card is a piece of illustrated cardboard. What has happened is that the image has bypassed your habitual narrative, the protective story of being fine, and landed somewhere that the protective story had been carefully covering. The randomness was essential. If someone had sat across the table and said “I think you might be grieving something,” you would have deflected. The card cannot be deflected in the same way, because you drew it, and because the interpretation is yours to make or refuse. Both the agency and the ambiguity serve the psychological function.

This is the tarot’s most important property: it can say things that other people cannot say to you, and that you cannot easily say to yourself, because it arrives from outside your habitual self-narrative while being interpreted entirely within it. The card is the stranger who tells you what your friends have been too kind to mention.

Constraint as creative liberation

There is a well-established phenomenon in creativity research sometimes called the paradox of choice: the observation that unlimited options frequently produce paralysis, anxiety, and worse decisions than a constrained set of possibilities. Barry Schwartz documented this extensively in his 2004 book of the same name. When everything is possible, nothing feels right, because the cost of choosing one thing is the loss of every other thing, and that loss feels permanent.

A tarot reading introduces productive constraint. You drew these cards, not those cards. These specific images, in these specific positions, represent the frame within which you are being asked to think about your situation. This is not a limitation. It is a liberation. Instead of facing the open ocean of all possible ways to think about a problem, you are given a specific inlet; navigable, bounded, with a particular character. The constraint directs attention in ways that unconstrained reflection frequently fails to.

Poets know this. Sonnets work not despite the constraint of fourteen lines and a rhyme scheme, but because of it. The form forces particular choices, particular compressions, particular connections that would never have been made in free verse. The tarot spread is, in a very real sense, a thinking form a structured constraint that produces insights that open-ended rumination does not.

Externalisation and the third-person advantage

One of the most consistently robust findings in cognitive-behavioural therapy is the therapeutic value of externalisation: placing a problem, pattern, or part of oneself outside the self where it can be examined with something approaching objectivity. Narrative therapy (White & Epston, 1990) built an entire modality on this principle. When a problem is externalised — given a name, a form, a location outside the person — the person can relate to it rather than simply being it.

A spread of tarot cards on a table externalises your situation with remarkable efficiency. Your circumstances, relationships, fears, and possibilities are represented by objects outside yourself — objects you can look at, rearrange mentally, argue with, and approach with the slightly greater objectivity that physical distance provides. The problem is no longer entirely inside you, where it is warm and dark and comfortable and has had years to make itself at home. It is out there, on the table, in the light, looking rather smaller and more manageable than it did a few minutes ago.

The Psychology Bit: Externalisation and Narrative Therapy

Michael White and David Epston’s Narrative Therapy (1990) developed the therapeutic practice of externalisation as a core technique: helping clients understand that they are not their problems, but rather people in relationships with problems that can be examined, named, and re-narrated. The therapeutic impact of this simple reframe has been extensively documented.

Ethan Kross and Ozlem Ayduk’s research on ‘self-distancing’ (2011, 2017) demonstrates that adopting a third-person perspective on one’s own experiences — even linguistically, by referring to oneself by name rather than ‘I’ — significantly reduces emotional reactivity, improves decision-making, and increases the capacity for constructive self-reflection.

A tarot layout accomplishes something similar spatially: your situation is now represented by objects at arm’s length. The psychological benefit of this distance is real and measurable, even if the mechanism by which a playing card represents ‘your current emotional state’ involves no forces detectable by physics.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. Norton. Kross, E. & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81-136.

Part Five: The randomness is a feature, not a bug

This is the part where the committed sceptic objects, and the objection is worth taking seriously. If the cards are drawn at random, how can the reading be meaningful? The image on the card bears no causal relationship to your actual situation. The universe has not arranged the deck. The cards do not know who you are. You might as well read tea leaves, examine the flight patterns of birds, or consult the relevant passages of a dictionary opened at random.

To which the answer is: yes, and those things also work, for exactly the same reason.

The randomness is not a flaw in the mechanism. It is the mechanism. Here is why.

When you draw a random card and are told it represents your current situation, you do not simply stare at it and wait for information to arrive. You engage with it. You ask, actively and often urgently: how does this apply to me right now? That question — forced by the combination of the card’s meaning and the position in which it was drawn — searches your actual experience for relevant material. The search is real. The material it retrieves is real. The connection you make between the card and your life is real. The card itself is random, but the psychological activity it prompts is anything but.

This is closely related to what psychologists call the generation effect: the well-replicated finding that information we generate ourselves is remembered more effectively and processed more deeply than information we receive passively. A therapist who tells you something about yourself is useful. But you arriving at the same insight yourself — prompted by a question, a card, an image, a conversation — is considerably more powerful, because the insight is now genuinely yours.

The tarot reading, at its best, does not deliver wisdom. It provokes the discovery of wisdom that was already present, waiting for the right question to bring it to the surface. The card's randomness is the question's randomness. And the right random question, it turns out, is often more useful than the most carefully considered one.

“The question the card asks is not one you would have asked yourself. That is precisely why it is useful. You have been asking the same questions for years. The answers have not improved noticeably.”

Part Six: What a rational tarot practice actually looks like

Having argued that tarot is a legitimate psychological tool, it is only honest to describe what using it that way actually involves — because it looks somewhat different from the midnight reading in the candlelit room with which we began.

The question is everything

Tarot used predictively asks: what will happen? Tarot used psychologically asks: what is happening in me right now, and what might I be failing to see about it? The second question is the useful one, because it is answerable. Nobody knows what will happen. You know rather more than you think about what is happening in you — but that knowledge is often buried under habitual narrative, defended against by ego, or simply not translated into language yet.

Good questions for a rational tarot practice include: What am I not allowing myself to see about this situation? What am I afraid this decision means about me? What story am I telling myself that might not be accurate? What am I avoiding, and what is the avoidance protecting? What would I advise a friend who brought me this situation? These questions are useful with or without tarot. The cards make them harder to dodge.

Interpretation as dialogue, not decree

The rational reader treats the card’s meaning not as a verdict but as a proposition — an opening move in a conversation with oneself. The traditional meaning of the card is the starting point, not the conclusion. What matters is not what does this card mean but what does this card mean to me, right now, in this situation? If the image resonates, the resonance is the data. If it does not resonate, that non-resonance is also data — worth examining, because sometimes the cards we most want to dismiss are the ones we most need to hear.

Hold the interpretation lightly

A reading is a snapshot, not a verdict. The appropriate response to a difficult card is not dread but curiosity: what does this pattern suggest? What might I do differently? Where is the agency in this situation that I have not yet claimed? The tarot is not issuing instructions from on high. It is prompting reflection. The difference matters enormously, both psychologically and ethically.

Used this way, tarot is not fortune-telling. It is a structured form of self-examination — one that uses the richness of symbolic imagery, the productivity of constraint, the mechanics of projection, and the surprising power of the random question to access parts of the mind that direct introspection frequently misses. It requires no supernatural claims. It produces real psychological value. And it is considerably more interesting than it looks from the outside.

Conclusion: The honest oracle

Let us return to the woman at the table with the candlelight and the cards.

She is not communicating with spirits. She is not reading the future in the fall of the cards. She does not have access to information about you that you have not provided through your expression, your posture, your responses, and the card that is now lying face-up between you, which you drew at random and which happens to depict exactly what you have been trying not to think about for the past six months.

What she is doing. if she is skilled and honest, is facilitating a conversation you could not easily have had with yourself. She is using the images on the cards as projective stimuli, the structure of the spread as a constraint that organises thought, the randomness of the draw as an interruption to your habitual self-narrative, and the interpretive framework of the tarot tradition as a shared vocabulary for experiences that are otherwise difficult to name. She is doing, in short, something that has genuine psychological utility — and she is doing it with a tool that was invented for an Italian card game.

The tarot is not magic. It is something considerably rarer and more useful: a technology of self-examination that has survived five centuries because it works, and that works because it is built — however accidentally — on a remarkably sophisticated understanding of how the human mind generates insight.

You do not have to believe in anything supernatural to use it. You do not have to abandon your scepticism, your scientific training, or your well-developed sense of the ridiculous. You just have to be willing to sit with an image, ask a genuine question, and pay attention to what comes up.

Which is, when you think about it, what good therapy asks you to do. The cards just have nicer pictures.

Alan /|\

Further Reading & References

Dummett, M. (1980). The Game of Tarot. Duckworth. [The definitive scholarly history of tarot as a card game.]

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Jung, C.G. (1968). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Princeton University Press.

Murray, H.A. (1943). Thematic Apperception Test Manual. Harvard University Press.

Exner, J.E. (2003). The Rorschach: A Comprehensive System (4th ed.). Wiley.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Pantheon Books.

White, M. & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W.W. Norton.

Schwartz, B. (2004). The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Ecco Press.

Kross, E. & Ayduk, O. (2017). Self-distancing: Theory, research, and current directions. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 55, 81–136.

Wood, J.M., Nezworski, M.T., Lilienfeld, S.O. & Garb, H.N. (2003). What’s Wrong with the Rorschach? Jossey-Bass.

Nichols, S. (1980). Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey. Red Wheel/Weiser. [Accessible Jungian tarot scholarship.]

Pollack, R. (1980). Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom. Thorsons. [The standard reference for Rider-Waite-Smith symbolism.]

Jones, A. (2024). The Fool’s Journey: A History of the Tarot. [Available on my website)