Sartre writes on the contradiction of love in Being and Nothingness. One does not merely want to possess the other, one wants to possess their freedom. And freedom, by definition, means your partner can always choose someone else. The more free their love is, the less secure it can ever be. There is a mutual gaze at work too: each consciousness threatens to turn the other into an object, and love becomes a standoff between two freedoms trying to capture one another’s captivity.

Kierkegaard moves in a different direction. Love, he argues, cannot be grounded in feeling – feeling is fleeting, moody, and unreliable – so he grounds it instead in command: you shall love. A duty can outlast fluctuation; a feeling cannot. You still hear this framework today in the language of “choosing your partner every day.”

For Camus, love is a gesture: an action undertaken with no guarantee the universe will meet you halfway. Maybe love is the most absurd act of all. Each time we fail, we push the rock back up the hill anyway, knowing that failure waits at the top more often than not. Love, for Camus, is about the act of loving, not the outcome. Not some final, completed state.

All three orient love around pain, which is, of course, inevitable. But what’s also evident across their accounts is a rootedness in the self, which is exactly what causes them to miss what love actually is.

In Nature, Man and Woman, Alan Watts draws a distinction between love that is contrived – willfully provoked to escape the empty feeling of an isolated ego – and love simply allowed to follow its own course, ungrasped by will. Contrived love is what we hide behind when we feel incomplete within ourselves: unable to be alone, we seek out another to fill the void. Much of the time, love isn’t really present in this space, and neither is any radical acceptance of another: you cannot be present with someone if the bond’s foundation is an insecure ego. Watts offers the image of gobbling food down instead of tasting it, taking it in reverence for the flavors and the time it took to prepare. One practices presence; the other fills a void as quickly as possible to avoid discomfort.

Deepen that presence far enough, toward a total dissolution of self in other, and you approach the Vedic term tat tvam asi, thou art that. The gap between self and other, the Vedic view holds, was always illusory; love is what floods in once you stop maintaining that difference. Let another’s presence pour over you, and the gap dissolves.

Across these viewpoints, love converges on a description of what happens after the self stops being the main character. To bond, to unite as one, has none of the self-preoccupation the existentialists locate at the center of love as pain.

I don’t think the existentialists are wrong to distrust the feeling. I think they’re describing exactly what I’ve felt: the wonderful moments that have collapsed in my own self-awareness. That account is the truest report we have of love as most of us live it.

But, this account diminishes why any of us continue to push the boulder back up the hill. There are moments we reach when we’re so engrossed in another that the moment simply cannot collapse into something fleeting. Full dissolution of self in a bond may be something we can only reach for, but in the moments it happens, we touch something so powerful that the pain of getting there, the pain of a Self still trying, dissipates entirely.

One of the more interesting texts I have been engaging with recently is Carl Jung’s The Red Book, which documents his personal venture into the depths of his subconscious – something I have been experimenting with as I grapple with these ideas, and to be honest need a bit of a break from. What Carl Jung was doing when turning inward was crossing the threshold of the ego – letting the neatly packaged coalescence of self deteriorate in order to more thoroughly examine the inner states without the typical regulatory systems holding everything together. Jung documented the fear this aroused within him, stating that without the ability to properly integrate these dives, he would surely become insane.

From sitting with countless individuals in acute psychosis over the past year and a half, I have staunchly noticed that a psychosis is not the addition of anything alien. The thoughts and experiences of a psychotic individual follow the same frameworks of people in a more typical state of mind. There is a grammar of meaning within human beings: persecution, revelation, special mission, the certainty that the world is organized around a private meaning. We all have an internal universe we are in constant dialogue with. What happens with a psychosis is the dissolution of the boundary that would allow a person to hold that content as thought, rather than the world itself. Rather than someone having a thought that they are being followed, they are simply being followed. The term “losing my mind” is actually pretty accurate. One is getting lost within their mind, as the boundary that separates internal thought and external reality collapses.

Jung’s structural account distinguishes the ego from the Self – the larger organizing totality of the psyche. Think conscious thoughts and the unconscious, as both make up the entirety of what you would consider you. Health requires an ongoing dialogue between the ego and the Self: an ego permeable enough to receive what the unconscious offers, bound enough not to be overwhelmed by it. If the ego becomes too large or too thin, pathologies come into play: neuroticism, depression, eventually psychosis as the very extreme. The more you identify with thoughts, the worse mental health becomes.

What is striking is that the same ancient philosophies structure the self in nearly the same way, arriving at the same map through entirely different routes. Vedantic philosophies state that the self is a series of nested sheaths (the Pancha Kosha) moving from the physical body inward toward pure awareness. The layer most relevant here is the Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of witnessing intelligence. This is the part of you that can observe your thoughts rather than simply be them – the capacity that says I notice I am afraid rather than I am fear.

Buddhism arrives at the same structure through its very practice. The practice of vipassana is essentially the training of that witnessing capacity: learning to observe the arising and passing of thought without identifying with it. What the practice reveals is that thoughts are events. They arise dependent on conditions and pass away. The meditator is not the thinker, the meditator is the knowing. The Buddhist concept of papañca – conceptual proliferation – describes what the mind does when this witnessing function fails: it spins bare sensation into narrative, narrative into identity, identity into reality, without interruption. We’ve all gone into a spiral before – this is papañca. A panic attack is not all so different from a psychosis. In acute psychosis, papañca has consumed the entire field. There is no bare sensation left to return to, as thoughts are now the reality.

What all three of these orientations point toward is the same underlying architecture. There is awareness. There is content. And between them is the structural capacity to hold a relationship between the two. To know that a thought is a thought. To feel fear without becoming fear. This capacity is not the self. It is what makes a self possible. Surfing between awareness and content.

This fluctuating barrier is something we all experience – at all times – even if psychosis is not something we’ll ever fully grapple with. Stress thins it, lack of sleep thins it, grief, substances, heartbreak. All of these everyday events mold this architecture; thoughts become world, and the witnessing function goes quiet. Recovery is not the elimination of that content. It is the slow rebuilding of the container. The ego reconstituting.

I once had a patient tell me they had a secret they needed to tell me urgently but couldn’t say out loud, and asked for a sticky note to jot it down on. They had come from an entirely different state on a Special Mission, so this was something important for him. When he handed it to me a moment later, I read the word “secret.”

Fleeting moments, aging, ending relationships, seasons changing, loved ones passing away. All point to a constancy of change and end, and can bring bouts of depression to many of us. In the crisis center I work in, one of the most common issues I see among my patients is their processing of this change; losing loved ones, a really hard divorce, a custody battle for their children. All threats of the removal of people’s most important ties to the world. Even when we look at aging; youthful beauty and vanity are ways of being in the world. As we lose these traits or attachments, our way of being is forced to shift, as we are confronted with the inevitable.

But there is liberation from this struggle that I was introduced to first by Henry David Thoreau, in my early ventures into philosophy. A quote that has stuck with me from Walden and is one I continually aim to live by is “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” At first I took this line as a form of grasping, seizing what life has to offer. But these terms, “grasp” and “seize” seek to execute control, inevitably being forced to confront that one is unable to execute control over the fleeting nature of a moment. Though, when read into this line further, what churns up is not grasping, but being so completely in an experience that the ending does not hollow you out. Grief over impermanence is a result of being only half-present. We lose the things we were never fully with.

Consider the parent who watches a child grow. The toddler disappears as the teenager arrives, and the teenager transforms into the adult. A parent who grieves each stage is never quite present for any of them – always mourning the form that just passed, already dreading the one to come. But the parent who loves each form fully, while sensing the continuous current of the person beneath, loses nothing. Each stage arrives whole and leaves whole. This is what it means to belong to what persists beneath form.

I’ve been engaging with this idea lately through my recent reading of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. Samuel Hamilton is perhaps the novel’s most fully present character. He is a man who meets each person and each moment with complete attention and passion. He is someone who truly listens to the world – maybe to a fault – at times needing a good grounding lesson from his wife, Liza. After Samuel’s death, Adam Trask says of him: “Such a man doesn’t really die. I can’t think of him dead. He seems maybe more alive to me than before.” What Adam is discovering, in his grief, is that Samuel never withheld himself from any moment. His death is not the end of something – it is a completion. The form passes; what was poured into those around him remains. Maybe more alive than before.

This is the very thing Thoreau was reaching for at Walden – not solitude for its own sake, but the kind of presence Samuel lived so naturally. It’s something the transcendentalist movement weaves into the core of their texts. And it just so happens that transcendentalists like Thoreau and Waldo Emerson were moved by one text in particular: The Bhagavad Gita. Like Thoreau’s quote, one of the most well known lines from the Gita is often misread with the notion of control in mind. “Act without attachment to outcome” which leaves many of us flattening this to detachment. But detachment is not the crux of this quote, instead it suggests we love the form (what is subject to impermanence) fully, while understanding that we belong to what persists beneath this form. Now we are tied back to this awareness that remains when all thoughts are stripped away.

Both the transcendentalists and the Gita point to the same structure: a layer of the self that participates in what is permanent, and a layer that is fully subject to impermanence. The art of living may be the balance between these two. Thoreau states that we must identify with the Eternal (the deeper layer that persists) while maintaining full connection to the Particular (the connection to the surface). The Gita would say the Atman (that same deeper layer) moving through form.

Transience becomes something beautiful when we allow presence to pour over us fully. If we ground ourselves in the awareness Self, each moment arrives whole and leaves whole. Passing becomes completion.

But why does this work? Why is it that when we locate ourselves in our minds, we have no control over the thoughts that pop in? And if we don’t have control over our thoughts, then what exactly are they – and what are we?

I meditate regularly, aiming for every morning but you know how it goes. The way I meditate is by tracing my breath through its course. I feel the cool sensation of it entering my nostrils, visualize the air moving into my chest as I feel it rise, feel it expand as I hold the breath in my belly, and trace it back out the same way through my lips. It takes me about ten minutes before I gain release from thoughts and enter a still place – no thoughts whatsoever, just a euphoric sensation rising through my center. The world feels slow after this.

This practice feels like it establishes control. I begin each day by understanding that I am not these clouds of thought that enter the sky of my mind. But the reason I say feels like is because something stranger is going on than taking control of the weather. It is instead a removal of awareness from the weather to place emphasis on the awareness itself.

When I try to locate myself, more thoughts pop up. But if I am not my thoughts, then something is definitely noticing them. I can’t quite grasp what this noticing is. The only way I can describe the self removed from thoughts is as a noticing. A bare awareness, prior to content.

In vipassana Buddhism, sustained practice reveals that you can’t find a fixed “knower” separate from the knowing itself. There’s just awareness registering experience. The Vedantic answer goes further: the Self is not a thing you find by looking. It’s the looking itself. When you search for the thinker, something is doing the searching – but that something has no form, no location, no arrival time. When the question shifts from “what is the self?” to “what is aware right now?” that question has no answer in thought. But something notices the question. This is apophatic knowing: the thing can only be pointed toward, never held.

There is a 14th century English text of unknown authorship called The Cloud of Unknowing which instructs that when drawing closer to divinity (however you may define it) you must place a “cloud of forgetting” between yourself and all mental content. The moment a thought or feeling is held onto, you are already one step removed from the thing itself. Even consoling thoughts, even spiritual ones. This same stripping is described in the 16th century by John of the Cross as the Noche Oscura (the Dark Night): the experience of losing the thoughts, images, and feelings that gave the self its sense of solidity. What remains when all of that falls away? Something that cannot be grasped, only inhabited.

What this means practically, in an everyday sense, is that the closer we get to that awareness, that Self with a capital S, the more at peace we become. This is what my client was doing when they reestablished presence during their panic attack. Not gaining control of the weather, but remembering they were the sky. For some reason that the mystics, the meditators, and the clinicians of modern times have all noticed, the more we strip away, the closer we get to pure awareness, and the closer we get to something that feels, unmistakably, like peace.

This piece is a continuation of that. Because since writing it, the thread has kept pulling.

What I’ve noticed since is this: there is an infinity within every single moment.

Most of the time, we move through life with immediacy, trying to get from point A to point B. But what if we attend to that mood we wake up with, that “random” flutter of the heart, or that onset of loneliness you might get late at night. Instead of moving away from it or past it, just sit with it. Don’t analyze it. Don’t name it. Stay. Feel. The feeling doesn’t resolve into something smaller. It opens into something much, much larger.

In psychology, emotions are conceptualized as three components: an appraisal, the feeling, and the behavior/physiological response that stems from the latter two. An appraisal of an event, say being frightened, takes in every single bit of information from around you – information you are not even cognitively aware of, haven’t directly looked at, heard, smelled – and interacts with how your mental set and internal state has been primed. Like, you just watched a horror movie, so when a squirrel jumps out in front of you as you walk down a dark alley it scares you to bits because you anticipate fear. I say all this to get to the point: there is an infinite amount of information you are bringing into this appraisal. Now think – what if rather than letting our automatic responses drive us forward, we explored that infinity.

The Zen tradition has a concept – sometimes called mu, or the gateless gate – that points toward something similar. Any single thing, fully attended to, opens into boundlessness. The Hindus describe it through Indra’s net: an infinite web of jewels, each one reflecting every other, infinitely. What looks like a boundary, examined closely enough, is not a boundary at all.

What I love about this spiritual research is that I find I can’t claim these frameworks as discoveries. That’s the strange thing about following this thread – I keep arriving at ideas that feel less like new information and more like a recognition. Like the tradition isn’t teaching me something foreign, it’s handing me language for what I already, wordlessly, knew.

Which raises a question I keep returning to: what does it mean to know something through presence rather than through analysis? Not knowledge about a thing, but a kind of knowing-from-within-it? The contemplatives call this apophatic knowing: the recognition that the closer language gets to truth, the more it breaks down. That some things can only be approached, never arrived at.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of people, too. In clinical work I spend time with people at the edges of their interior worlds – places where the social self has collapsed and what is left is raw and strange and often terrifying. People entirely lost within their own minds. Unable to differentiate thought from reality. You can’t intellectualize your way into that room. You have to actually be there, engaging with them, to have some semblance of understanding. And what I keep finding is that presence is the only thing that matters. Not the right words. The willingness to stay with them. The unspoken language when language seems to collapse. Presence.

Maybe that’s what the spiritual path keeps teaching me, no matter which tradition I’m reading or following: the door is always the same. Sit with what is here. Trust that meaning is already there, waiting for attention to arrive.

This one is dedicated to my dear friend Duncan, who has been fleshing this out with me for a while.

I decided to sit with it. Better than the rock formation if you ask me.

I settled maybe five feet away to give it some space. For a few minutes nothing happened. Then slowly, a head emerged. It looked me over – genuinely looked, the way you look at something you’re actually trying to understand – sizing me up, taking its time. After some time acclimating, it made its decision. It walked straight toward me and settled not six inches from where I sat. It stayed there for about fifteen minutes, regarding me with a kind of unhurried curiosity.

I spoke to it. Asked what it was up to. Tried to find out what this tortoise was trying to tell me. And I wasn’t getting much.

Then it began to move past me, and I followed at a distance – giving it room, watching. It climbed rocks, ate grass, flowers, cacti. It did not take the most direct path anywhere. It seemed to be enjoying the landscape, exploring, playing almost. This creature whose entire architecture is built around protection was moving through the world with what I can only call delight.

That’s when it landed.

The shell is what makes boldness possible. The tortoise doesn’t retreat into itself out of fear and stay there. It retreats when it needs to, and then it emerges, fully, into curiosity and contact. The protection exists in service of the opening, not the other way around.

And then there was the matter of what had happened between us. The tortoise had come to me. Not because I pursued it, but because I had gone still enough, open enough, that something in my presence became trustworthy. It walked over and sat down. It offered me its unprotected self. So much so that I was able to pet it without it hiding away.

What reveals itself, when you make that gesture, is friendliness. When you treat something as a friend, it shows you its friendliness. I watched this happen in real time, in the Mojave, with a creature who had every reason to stay in its shell.

The oldest teachings seem to have known this, as I have since found this same gesture described in a multitude of traditions. The Last Supper, in one of his final teachings before his arrest, Jesus turns to his disciples, and redraws the entire relationship. “I no longer call you servants,” he says in John 15. “I have called you friends.” The word in the original Greek is philos, which means deep, chosen, reciprocal love. He is collapsing the established hierarchy, insisting that genuine relationship requires mutual knowing and mutual presence.

In the sixth chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that the untrained mind – scattered, reactive, driven by desire and fear – becomes your greatest enemy. But the mind turned toward itself with discipline and friendship becomes your greatest ally. The interior is not neutral ground. It is either working for you or against you, and the difference is whether you have learned to meet what lives there with something resembling kindness.

The Buddhist Metta Sutta makes this practice explicit. Metta (loving-kindness) is not a feeling you wait for or stumble upon. It is trained, cultivated, built through sustained attention. It begins not with the world but within yourself. The capacity to extend genuine warmth outward depends entirely on what is happening inside first. You cannot offer real presence from a place of inner hostility. The practice moves in widening circles, from yourself outward to all beings, until the boundary between who deserves friendship and who doesn’t quietly dissolves.

I think about the stillness that was required that day in the desert. Not just physical stillness, but something within me had to actually be at rest. I was not urging something to happen. I had no expectations or fantasies. I was open, placing nothing upon this creature. And from that place, contact became possible.

I have since learned a lot from this tortoise. We are all carrying shells. The question is whether we’ve learned to use them the way the tortoise does: as protection that enables presence, rather than armor that prevents it. The tortoise taught me that the goal was never to get rid of the shell. The goal is to know when to come out of it, and to move through the world with the kind of unhurried curiosity that turns a desert afternoon into something that connects with you on a deeper level.

I used to primarily work in entertainment. I shot celebrities, produced content for studio shows, moved through a world built almost entirely around image. It was exciting, and I was good at it. But something about it sat wrong with me in a way I couldn’t name for a long time. Not a dramatic wrongness, more like a low buzz of uneasiness that I kept mistaking for ambition, or anxiety, or just the cost of doing business in a competitive industry. I was, as I would later put it to myself, totally lost in the sauce.

The shift didn’t happen all at once. But eventually I stopped being able to outrun the feeling. And when I finally stopped running, what I found waiting for me on the other side of all that noise was something I hadn’t expected: a pull toward the unglamorous, toward the difficult, toward the real. I left production and went to work in a psychiatric ward, counseling people in crisis on next steps after discharge.

People in my life had questions about this. I understood why. From the outside, it looked like a step away from the success I worked so hard to achieve; less glamour, notoriety, earning potential, less of really everything the entertainment world measures itself by. But from the inside, for the first time in a long time, nothing felt wrong.

That gap – between how a life looks and how it feels – is what I keep coming back to. And it has become, slowly, the thread I can’t help but follow. The interior is not just a private theater of moods and preferences. It is a way of knowing.

A writer I’ve been sitting with lately, Daniel Thorson, calls this anthro-ontology – the idea that the human is not standing outside reality looking in at it, but is reality knowing itself. We are not separate from the world we are trying to understand. We are woven of the same stuff. When I first read that, something in me recognized it, not as a new idea, but as a name for something I had already been living toward.

I keep returning to Hinduism when I try to think this through. There’s a vision of consciousness there that I find clarifying: the universe not as a collection of separate things, but as one awareness expressing itself in infinite forms – structured like a mandala, patterns repeating at every scale, inward and outward leading finally to the same place. We are not separate from God in this framing. We are what God looks like from the inside.

I am still early in understanding all of this. But what I know from the last year and a half is that listening inward has not led me away from the world. It has led me further into it.