In 2019, I was going to beat the illness by minimizing my presence with other people, and through attention to my behaviors, including what I put into my body that week. I rented an Airbnb as far away from the backpacks as I could find. That turned out to be Ocean Beach in San Francisco, out near the Zoo. It was wonderful because this place turned out to be a total surfer pad. Surfboards. Surf magazines stacked in aesthetically pleasing piles throughout the apartment. There was a skylight in the bathroom so big that on a couple of days it felt like the whole ceiling was the sky. And there were the front windows of the apartment that stretched across the apartment building’s face between the living room and the bigger bedroom. The ocean was all-consuming. Any sized-television would have felt small in those rooms. I was overwhelmed by that view of the Pacific Ocean, looking out across the Great Highway in San Francisco.

Look, I’m a Midwestern American boy who grew into a man and never left. I love the Midwest because it’s where things grow in spite of themselves. I feel that way about myself. So, as a Midwesterner, I have no concept of what surfing means. I grew up around lakes created by the Army Engineering Corps decades before I was born because FDR had to put young men to work before a Fascist revolt took them into private armies. My waves were manufactured. So, imagine my befuddlement when I became obsessed with watching these surfers and their daily activities. Or should I say lack of activity? Most of what I saw were people sitting around and watching the waves. What the hell were they waiting for? What were they looking at? I became obsessed, and not because there was anything remotely attractive to me about sitting waist deep in freezing ocean water on a wooden waxed surfboard with only a thermal wetsuit between me and instant death at the bottom of an ocean I would likely never behold without jet airplanes.

One of the reasons I had committed to focusing on my well-being through attention that week in San Francisco was because, in years past, I allowed free alcohol and food to direct my behaviors while attending events and conferences. I witnessed many poor decisions made, a couple by myself and many by others. With the exception of the seemingly inevitable flu-like viruses I contracted over the years, I mostly avoided the worst decisions and dealt with the hangovers as an indication of the damage I was doing to my physiology and therefore my mind.

And the older I got, the more depleted I was in the days after those soaked-up nights; I started seriously considering whether these trips were worth it, given the damage to my health. Is a job worth doing if it steals your health and saps your joy? Sometimes, it is. But most times, it’s not. So I was having those kinds of thoughts, and I blame the Transcendental Meditation technique for cultivating the sensitivity to notice the situation. I was aware enough of it to question if there was a better way to live and work during this annual conference. Like a good scientist, I started testing a hypothesis to gather empirical data.

We may not all be able to do the hard maths the most rigorous science requires, but each of us can become aware of our emotional field in relation to the flowing river of our thoughts, and from that awareness, we can start to employ empirical testing with the goal of learning the truth of ourselves, so that we may then make behavioral changes that will shift reality in a more favorable direction for ourselves and everyone who has to deal with us every day.

Let me tell you about two books I’ve recently finished and why you may enjoy them and find value in their journeys. The first book is about dying. More specifically, it’s a book about dying and coming back from the dead.

Parnia, Sam. Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Death. New York: Hachette Books, 2024.

Sam Parnia, MD, PhD, is the Director of Critical Care & Resuscitation Research at the New York University School of Medicine. His career is filled with incredible experiences at the edges of life. He is obsessed with death in the best way, meaning he wants us all to understand the process of dying as a biological and psychological phenomenon. And he’s here to tell you that what we’ve believed to be true about dying is largely false and limited, given the emerging scientific research and the empirical data it’s yielding.

“What if what we believe about death is fundamentally wrong and the paradigm we have been operating with no longer exists? Perhaps life and death can no longer be considered as easily separable binary events. Most importantly, what if death itself is not the end we have thought and assumed? What if who we are – our very consciousness and selfhood – is not annihilated with death? And what if science can prove it? What will that mean for us, for society, for religion, for philosophy, for how we live our lives?” (4)

So, here’s the story with this book. And it starts off a bit gross, so apologies, but it’s worth it. In 2018, Dr. Nenad Sestan gave a presentation to a gathering of the world’s leading neuroscientists, ethicists, and legal experts at a symposium sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. What he told them over 25 minutes changed the world, if slowly. Consider how long it’s taken to get to you, which is only slightly longer than it took to get to me. This doctor’s team had successfully restored cellular and metabolic function to the brains of dead pigs. This team was performing biological research on the brain activity of recently deceased animals, who were already by-products of the industry of commercial slaughter. The specimens of study were sentient life forms, likely existing at lower levels of selfhood consciousness than humans, but conscious nonetheless. The neurological activity of their brains is the same neurological activity in human brains, in all mammalian biological systems, and many others. Everything is consciousness manifested within its own limitations. Nature grows until it’s stopped by natural force. At that point, the entity has only to be, to live, to experience their place in this temporary existence. Even stars die, eventually.

So, think of how monumentally important it is to realize that there is a biological process that consistently happens when beings with brains die. Within four hours, they shipped these pig heads (now “specimens”) and, when received, immediately treated them with a cocktail solution containing artificial blood and other brain-protective and -stabilizing drugs. It’s a process called BrainEx. Look it up; it’s weird.

Over 6 to 14 hours after the specimen passed (see how easy it is to transfer violence behind muted words), these doctors consistently observed neurological activity returning to these cut-off pig heads. The longest they kept one active was 36 hours, with all the observable functionality of a normal, living brain. Also, there was no damage to the brain cells; blood vessels and blood flow were not restricted, and all showed signs of normal brain metabolism.

Also, here’s an important point to know: the pigs didn’t feel anything. Those drugs in the cocktail kept the brain activity near-comatose. The doctors were careful to draw an ethical and moral line at risking global-brain electrical activity, which is the common definition of personhood for humans.

So, this book is about a targeted research project that took place after that shockwave started working its way into science. If death is a process that happens consistently across all humans studied, then we can build a science of knowledge around observation, theorizing, and empirical proof. This is how categories of Science are born. And now, we’re in an age where the Science of Death has met the Science of Consciousness.

For the entire history of our species, we have wondered and ached to know what happens when we pass away from this life. This comprehensive study (called AWARE-II) collated data from 567 cardiac arrest patients, with 53 survivors, 28 interviewed, and 11 reporting memories suggestive of consciousness. The researchers transferred both medical and qualitative interviews into subject-aligned data. The researchers used cutting-edge AI to analyze all relevant data to search for common themes, trends, and variations. What did people say consistently happened to them when they had a Recalled Experience of Death (RED), meaning they were fully lucid during the entire experience of dying and coming back again? As you might suspect, not many people who have this experience are willing to talk about it.

I found Dr. Parnia’s description of being “near to death” valuable:

“From a medical science perspective, being “near to death” is a precise and objective event. You are biologically near to death when any life-threatening illness or accident causes your blood pressure to drop to dangerously low levels (also referred to as shock) together with loss of consciousness. This is when intensive care doctors are armed and working frantically to prevent you from actually reaching death. In medical shock, when your low blood pressure drops past a critical threshold, blood flow to the brain drops to dangerously low levels. This leads to confusion and, if severe enough, total loss of consciousness, meaning a deep coma.” (60)

This next quote (from the same page) woke up the Vedic scholar in me.

“Evidence was beginning to emerge that, during this period of a diminished and deepening state of unconsciousness, the person going through death may paradoxically be undergoing an internal, transcendent, hyperconscious, lucid experience, which they would later either totally forget or partially forget and only recall in fragments. Traversing from life to death can be analogized to entering an ocean, where life is land and death is the ocean.” (60)

Let me pause and offer a brief Vedic and metaphysical point of view.

Consciousness is an ocean. At its depth, there is a stillness in manifested reality from which all sounds emerge into vibrations which slow and gather into the accretion of matter. Manifestation is physics working from the unified field of Consciousness, from which all matter, energy, and experience emerge. Human life experiences have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The implication is that our lives are a pile of experiences left behind as our individual consciousness engages in the field of relationship over time. Human time is filled with relationships with other people, the planet, and the other life it supports. The Vedic view is to achieve cosmic awareness about the universal connecting truth that exists beyond opposites and conflict in the waking world, and then act in the world with that knowledge.

To live this life properly, one must constantly assess their behavior and its impact on the world, people, and life happening outside their experience of self.

So imagine my surprise when it was revealed in this book what is experienced after we die, told in fragmented stories across nearly every survivor of death who came back with a story to tell. A consistent process seems to happen in the moments between, when, according to current laws, we are neither legally alive nor dead. Here is a list of twelve sub-themes related to the process consistently experienced for “coming back home” to the body after medically dying and returning to conscious awareness.

1. Traveling back “home.”

2. Traversing through a metaphorical tunnel.

3. Traveling at very rapid speed toward a luminous place.

4. Returning “home”: a place of perfection I had known.

5. Time: nonlinear and not as it would seem.

6. A glance at my past and prior past.

7. Communication: thought is everything.

8. A source, an origin.

9. Feels more real: ordinary life is like a dream.

10. Learning the importance of making amends for infringement.

11. Acquiring knowledge of the future.

12. Suicide: not an end and not an option. (134)

Consider the following quote. The part in bold is the key concept to retain:

“More important is what we learned with time. People who undergo a recalled experience of death do so through what can be best described as a field of consciousness. This can be analogized to an electromagnetic field that can carry and at the same time capture information.” (284)

For me, the most important of the twelve sub-themes of common Recalled Experiences of Death (RED) is #6, a glance at the past.

Paraphrasing what subjects consistently revealed, linear time, as we commonly experience it, loses meaning when people in the grey zone experience countless realities like millions of software simulations running in the same context window at a rapid pace. People also consistently report that there is a cause for everything that happens to a human during life. And responsibility is another key theme. When your consciousness fills the cosmos, there is no blame, only total responsibility and accountability without shame. It seems we will each undergo a life review like the Albert Brooks classic film Defending Your Life. During that life review, we relive our actions and directly experience their impact through the biology and emotions of the lives we interacted with. We will each gain a thorough understanding of the positive and negative value of our actions and the intentions behind them.

Parnia summarizes the pattern:

They realize that even seemingly small moments of genuine kindness, sacrifice, and selflessness are immensely valuable, even if they were not valued by others. The status and values of society are irrelevant. Instead, they judge themselves based on a universal, moral and ethical code, independent of their belief systems. (286-7)

One lady interviewed said she remembered holding her pet guinea pig as a child. When it bit her finger, she threw it across the room, and instantly she was experiencing that memory from the guinea pig’s perspective, being hurled and afraid, landing hurt and confused, unable to fully understand the environmental care going forward. It’s the needle and the damage done. People who died and woke up again with memories return to the world as a different human than those who died. Their perspective on reality has dramatically shifted as it expands.

Another Vedic injection.

The journey of life is about expanding consciousness to its absolute limits, while directly engaging with the universal field of pure consciousness which lies beyond the limits of life manifested in the universe for a limited time. Once we are in constant contact with Cosmic consciousness at this scale, behaviors shift, moving culture with greater force and purpose than any physical threat or incentivization lever in the known universe. Aligning with the way nature works when left to its own operations is the primary biological goal of existence. The metaphysical goal is to achieve cosmic-scale consciousness, while remaining firmly embedded in the field of action. Eternity pouring through the vicissitudes of time in the vessel of human physiology. This is our business on Earth.

Which brings me to the second book. When I was in my early 20s, I started reading multiple books at a time, all different subjects and genres. My theory was that my mind would work from strange angles to assimilate what I experienced intellectually with the written text of multiple books at once. I have maintained this habit of reading widely and deeply for over 30 years, and I believe it is the foundation for why I think differently than most people around me, and this is something I share with both of these authors.

Finnegan, William. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. Penguin Press, 2015.

Let’s go back to those surfers bobbing on the ocean outside my San Francisco Ocean Beach Airbnb. Seriously, check this place out. I took a video tour of the apartment:

Think of them out there in the freezing San Francisco morning, sitting on their surfboards; the only thing between them and the abyss is their insulated suits, their boards, and pure attention, because if you lose focus in the ocean, and the ocean acts on you without your wholly present awareness, you could likely die.

William Finnegan is a brave journalist, essayist, and diarist. But older than all these expressions of vocation, he is a surfer. This 450-page book is about the obsession that drove his life choices during often chaotic times he lived through while traveling around the world in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Finnegan explores more than four decades of chasing waves around the world; while a writing career emerges from that experience, he meets the love of his life, and his most precious relationship with his daughter is revealed as the pearl of his life experience. William Finnegan traveled all over the world to surf the most intense waves he could find. A few almost killed him. His “Barbarian Days” were spent wandering from California to Hawaii, through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa, and back to places he could call home again.

Finnegan spends an entire chapter of the book on his experiences living in San Francisco in the 1980s and surfing what seemed like chaotic wave patterns around the peninsula. And guess where the primary spot he surfed was. Ocean effing Beach! The very same set of waves I woke up every morning that week of the conference to watch these surfers bobbing on their boards, until eventually, they moved into action and caught a wave. Through Finnegan’s recollections and often poetic descriptions of the movement of water, I came to understand what those surfers were doing when they stayed so long in the freezing ocean of the outer dark.

But before he gets to Ocean Beach, Finnegan undergoes a self-imposed odyssey to find…something beyond the waves, beneath them. Something had been speaking through the waves he’d been surfing since he was a child. They became his obsession when life hollowed out after college and meaningful employment with the railroad in Northern California. Finnegan had all the experience he needed to assess whether the world was too damaged to live in. So, he went on an odyssey to find the answer to what spoke to him through and beyond the waves. This is my reading of this period in the author’s life: a critical one that shaped every facet of his future and influenced what we know about the war-ravaged places and events of injustice he’s written about over the course of his career as a journalist and essayist.

Finnegan notes that, during this time, his father expressed fears over specific elements emerging from his son’s behavior. The words the author uses are: “monomania, antisocial, and ill-balanced.” When someone close to you sees you in a way you’re not ready to see yourself, it’s understandable why that person would want to leave and be somewhere else. For many Boomers and Gen Xers, restlessness started early, when we were young. For many of us, that restlessness never went away.

In those days, of the gray early 1970s, human beings could still disappear for a few years, become spiritual outlaws, and roam. Finnegan took that road, setting off with one of his best friends, who was also in a spiritual outlaw phase, and they became dropped-out ghosts of society, existing only to travel and engage with the ocean on surfboards, often staying in place just long enough to make connections and confessions.

Finnegan eventually stares into the mirror of his behavior and accepts he has been living with the philosophy of, “cut school, lose jobs, lose girlfriends, if it’s good,” meaning the relationship with the ocean’s waves propelling them forward through Asia Pacific, down into Australia, then over to South Africa, where the author ended up teaching poor, Black children under the shadow of apartheid in order to earn enough money to chase the next set of waves on the other side of the continent.

But something stuck with Finnegan in South Africa, stuck and started growing inside his heart as he taught poor Black children in the country that had recently imprisoned Nelson Mandela. Suddenly, his surfing obsession seemed hollow in the face of the injustice he witnessed with his eyes, mind, and heart. A solid rage against injustice and the desire to witness it and report news to the world. His life started taking a more orderly shape around this newly emerging vocation. It took him to some of the most dangerous places and situations on Earth, where he boldly reported the truth as he found it. And all the while, he kept surfing the waves.

He stopped cutting from the school of life, meaning he started showing up for more than just the waves. He started keeping jobs. He invested in a life partnership with a strong, supportive girlfriend who became his spouse and then the mother of their child, and who made him a father. Finnegan’s unique flowering of life grew from his obsession with chasing waves for a few years, like a barbarian rebel. It seems Finnegan was searching for authenticity in what was fast becoming a plastic world produced by American media, factories, and retailers. And what he found, by taking a short-term job teaching poor Black children in one of the most oppressive societies in Western Civilization (at the time), was his mission and his calling.

And surfing became something different for Finnegan: an intense pressure valve through which he exorcised the worst of what he witnessed but could not put into words.

This is the universal hero’s journey, and it’s not just reserved for superhero movies. This is the journey we are each supposed to take, one where we identify the source of joy in our life and follow it to where it’s leading us. But the hero’s journey also comes with risk and cost.

His obsession with the waves nearly cost Finnegan his life in Madeira, an experience he shared with a surfing partner who gave up surfing after an intense near-death set. Later, Finnegan asked his wife why she put up with the risks he took in his career and hobby. She told him he wouldn’t be who he is without the risks he’d taken to get to her and their child. What a sobering revelation that must have been. What a gift!

Life comes full circle when you’re sensitive enough to experience it happening. But you can’t be sensitive when you’re overwhelmed by stress and traveling down the wrong path. We know we are on the wrong path when our lives become leached of joy. The most refined measure of enlightenment is not wearing a robe with beads and chanting verse, while turning away from the world’s suffering. Enlightenment is simple: you appreciate beauty and feel contented joy where others see only ugliness and feel only endless suffering.

Throughout his life, William Finnegan turned to the waves to process that suffering. And then he wrote about it. When I read his book, it answered the question of what those surfers were doing in the silent dark before they sprang into action to catch specific waves they chose based on a million calculations and a single inspiration (to float fast on water and ride it as long as possible).

Surfers, all around the world, read the movement of massive water upon the untamed surface of this planet. Earth is a liquid world that suffers a few dry spots, where unique manifestations of life gather and fight over shared resources. The lands of Earth obey the will of water because water goes where it will. And when it comes to the will of life, humans are like the ocean. We go where we will, but where we will is not always the wisest place, especially when we lose sight of that which is beautiful even if that beauty is sublime.

Finnegan went where he willed himself to go, meaning he chased the killer breaks off a Pacific island called Tavarua, to the killer breaks off some Atlantic island called Madeira, to the waves always assaulting New Jersey and New York, sometimes threatening hurricanes which bring their own unique experiences of massively moving water, to whatever mystical motion happens with the waters around the islands of Hawaii, to the West Coast of North America and Mexico.

San Francisco’s Ocean Beach culture testifies to the act by pulling everyone who witnesses what goes on out there into the water beyond civilization, where barbarians occupy moving spaces for a very limited time. The ocean pulls us all when we see it. Some of us get pulled in physically, but we all get pulled in at the level of imagination.

The idea that these surfers undergo their own versions of life reviews, sitting bobbing on the slapping or roaring water, testifies to sports as meditation. The physical act, merging with the emotional and spiritual movement, all together a singular motion of consciousness, smeared across the plane of living matter through intense relationships between biological beings moving at variable rates of speed and decline.

But my God, it’s beautiful when we can ride the wave and feel completely free while in the motion of our lives.

It’s the life review that connects these two books for me in this particular moment.

Look, I get it. It’s a big leap from cardiac arrests to the plight of the human soul in transition between life and death. These findings have some hair on them. It’s not perfect science yet, but it is compelling science, which is more important when ideas are brewing up to become thesis statements, followed by more empirical study fueling the exchange of ideas and data.

There are many facets of modern life that we know as processes now, but which were mysteries of the past, taken on faith, and accepted with sorrow, gratitude, or stubborn resignation. Jimo Borjigin at Michigan found that when he detected oxygen starvation (hypoxia) in the dying brain, it stimulated gamma brainwave activity as a final action of the primary organ of biological experience. A last burst of energy. Borjigin’s finding, which many read as explaining the whole phenomenon without any need for consciousness to go anywhere, may be the beginning of a much bigger scientific exploration.

Borjigin's finding suggests nothing leaves the human corpse upon death, but energy is neither created nor destroyed; it transfers. Here, the Vedic thinker points out that Consciousness is the Unified Field of all matter, energy, and experience. So, while these observable energy transfers in the final moments of death are not indicative of something leaving, they do allow the opportunity for energy to change into other forms, including dissolving back into the unified field from which everything emerges.

And if you were paying attention to the numbers of subjects studied in the primary research, they were small, highly targeted, and focused. But the potential and impact of what the numbers reveal are staggering and worth becoming obsessed over as a species. Understanding more about dying will make us more sensitive about good living.

The subtext of Parnia’s book is the same as the subtext of Finnegan’s, and it’s the same as the subtext of what those surfers were doing out there bobbing on the darkened water of the Pacific in Ocean Beach, San Francisco, on any given day.

Attention. What kind of attention are we bringing to our lives? These authors and the people they write about put a massive amount of focused attention into filling these books with enough experience to add value to the world. They affected me so much that I’m writing to you about them.

And so it goes.

Here is how I’m currently synthesizing these books together.

For Lucid Dying, the concept of the grey zone of death has already changed how humanity thinks about dying. In the grey zone, beyond the legal and medical definitions of death, there is a process that takes place that is both psychological as well as electro-chemical. Physiology combines both the biological processing of the body and the intellectual and emotional processing; it’s one movement, this whole consciousness thing.

In the film Gladiator, it is said that what we do in life echoes in the afterlife. But what is the afterlife? Is it a life review, where we examine every behavior we executed during our lives without judgment, experiencing the full and total knowledge of our accumulated experiences of being alive along with the direct impact we had on other living beings and the natural world while we were here on Earth kicking around on a piece of ground in our hometown? That sounds reasonable to me, and preferable to living without hope or joy.

If what these individuals commonly come back from dying to tell us is accurate, the goal of living our lives is to expand our individual consciousness until it fills the universe. Our lives are like the briefly flowering leaves on tree branches, all rooted in the same source root and seed before it.

In Barbarian Days, William Finnegan chased waves, but what he was really doing was having a conversation with life about dying and the purpose of being alive. The purpose is to tell the tale you were made to live. Becoming enlightened means becoming sensitive to life. The enlightened human being is one fully present in this waking moment. It is the enlightened ones who bring their whole selves into this life with the fullness and swelling of ocean waves riding the surface of our planet for a short, intense aperture of time, which has no meaning outside the wave's movement.

While Finnegan proved nothing new about the ocean’s movement, he did prove something important about a human moving through the ocean with attention. And Dr. Parnia has offered new knowledge about one of the most important mysteries of human life: how to live a good one and die smiling over it at the end. But it’s the same attention being applied to living and dying.

May we all become loyal barbarians and live so deeply, with purpose, so that we lucidly pass away with honor, dignity, and grace.

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Why would a movie director do that? Why would an artist whose job is to produce images, sound, and story spend decades pointing people away from the screen and toward something invisible? Something that, by definition, cannot be filmed?

I think the answer is this: Lynch understood that the unified field wasn’t a backdrop to the story he was telling. It was the story. Every story.

That’s the argument of Chapter Four.

But here’s the problem this chapter has to solve — and it’s a serious one. If consciousness is all there is. If the unified field underlies everything — every person, every place, every act of violence and every act of grace — then what exactly is the Black Lodge?

More precisely: what’s the threat of the Black Lodge in Twin Peaks?

If BOB and Cooper are both expressions of the same unified consciousness. If Laura’s suffering and Laura’s transcendence emerge from the same source. If the Lodge and the FBI, the darkness and the light, are all waves on the same ocean — then what are the stakes in Twin Peaks or any story with elements of good and evil? How can consciousness be endangered by itself?

This is not a casual question. It is the central ontological paradox of Twin Peaks. And if we can’t answer it, the entire architecture of this book comes down. It’s no wonder most Twin Peaks would rather stare at props, answer trivia questions, and listen to other people talk about making art instead of staring oneself in the eyes through the mirror of art.

Chapter Four is where the serious among us step across that line to ask the question: If Consciousness is all there is, then what is the Black Lodge?

I’ll warn you: the answer is more uncomfortable than most Twin Peaks analyses are willing to go. Because it requires holding two things simultaneously that most of us are trained to keep apart — the absolute and the relative. The view from Level Seven, where nothing is ultimately at stake, and the view from Level Three, where everything is at stake. Both perspectives are equally valid, and yet only one leads to fulfillment.

It seems Lynch led his band of merry artists while holding both views at once. Fifty-two years of daily Transcendental Meditation doesn’t make the suffering disappear. It makes them large enough to contain suffering without being consumed by it.

The Black Lodge is not what most people think it is. And once you understand what it actually represents, what it’s doing to consciousness, and why that matters even in a universe where consciousness cannot be destroyed, you will never watch this show the same way again.

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This is a book about Twin Peaks — all of it: the original series, Fire Walk With Me, and The Return. But it’s not a fan theory. It’s not a plot breakdown. It’s not an appreciation of David Lynch as an auteur. It’s something more ambitious than any of those things, and I think, more useful.

David Lynch has practiced Transcendental Meditation every single day for over fifty years. That practice didn’t just influence his art. It structured it. Using Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven states of consciousness — from deep sleep through waking to transcending, all the way to Unity Consciousness — this book reveals the hidden architecture of Twin Peaks and shows you something that will permanently change the way you watch it: you are not a passive viewer. Lynch made you the final, essential piece of the story.

That’s the book. Thirteen chapters. One per week. You can’t binge it, and that’s by design. The format mirrors the show’s own demand: slow down, integrate, and witness.

Chapter 3 is called “Cooper Arrives: The Awakened Detective” — and it’s where the framework starts to breathe inside the story.

In the first two chapters, we established the foundation: what active witnessing requires of a viewer, and why Maharishi’s science of consciousness is the right tool for understanding what Lynch built. We introduced Levels 1 through 3 — sleeping, dreaming, waking — the states most of us spend our entire lives cycling through.

Now we meet Dale Cooper. And Cooper is different.

He arrives in Twin Peaks operating at Level 3 — Waking Consciousness — fully engaged with the FBI investigation, with evidence, with deduction. But something in him reaches beyond that. His Tibetan rock-throwing method. His Dictaphone meditations to Diane. His trust in dreams as investigative tools. These aren’t quirks. They’re windows into Level 4 — Transcending — the state where the mind settles beyond thought and consciousness touches knowledge directly.

And then the Red Room dream arrives.

That dream is not a plot device. It is Cooper’s first genuine breakthrough into transcendent awareness — and also, crucially, the first warning of what happens when that awareness is accessed before the nervous system is ready to hold it. BOB is already there. Crouching. Waiting.

This chapter traces Cooper’s early arc from Level 3 into the threshold of Level 5 — Cosmic Consciousness — where transcendent silence begins to run beneath every waking moment. You’ll understand why Cooper is the most spiritually advanced detective in the history of television, and exactly why that advancement contains the seeds of his eventual catastrophic fall.

By the end of Chapter 3, you’ll never watch Cooper throw those rocks at that bottle the same way again.

Now, here’s the thing. Free subscribers receive this introduction video, which is an overview of what’s in the chapter and why it matters. But the full chapter text, the complete deep reading, and my author reading of the chapter itself — those are available to paid subscribers only. Sorry friends, I have to keep the lights on here.

This book is being serialized over thirteen weeks, and every week, that full chapter is waiting for you on the other side of a very simple upgrade.

If Twin Peaks has ever haunted you — if you’ve ever felt that it was reaching for something you couldn’t quite name — this book will name it. And Chapter 2 is where the naming begins.

Upgrade to paid on Terms of Enlightenment today.

The link is right below. Join us, and let’s go deeper together.

Below is the full chapter for paid subscribers.

• Cooper In Seasons 1-2 Operates Primarily At Consciousness Level 3 (WAKING)

• But Something Is Different About Cooper: An Introduction To Consciousness Level 4 (TRANSCENDING)

• The Red Room Dream: The First Taste Of Consciousness Beyond Level 3 (WAKING)

• Cooper’s Move Toward Consciousness Level 5 (COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS)

Dale Cooper’s Journey Through Seven Levels of Consciousness

Dale Cooper’s arc across the Twin Peaks narrative represents one of the most profound explorations of consciousness in television and cinema, mapping perfectly onto Maharishi’s seven states. Cooper’s journey is not linear but cyclical and catastrophic, a spiritual ascent followed by a devastating fall and eventual transcendence.

Season 1-2: The Awakened Detective (Consciousness Levels 3-5)

Cooper arrives in Twin Peaks operating primarily at Level 3 (WAKING), but with unusual and mysterious (to him) access to higher states. He is outwardly directed, engaged with objects and thoughts, including: the recent Blue Rose Task Force murder investigation Oregon, this pending murder investigation in Twin Peaks, the town’s mysteries, his FBI protocols, and an interdimensional conspiracy that seems to operate outside of time and space as experienced at consciousness Level 3 (WAKING).

Yet, unlike his colleagues, most of whom are trapped between Levels 1-3, Cooper displays clear glimpses of Level 4 (TRANSCENDING). His Tibetan meditation techniques, his openness to dreams as investigative tools, and his famous Dictaphone ruminations to his most trusted assistant show a mind that regularly “settles beyond thought” to access direct intuition.

Watch how Cooper works. When he throws rocks at a bottle while reciting the names of suspects, he’s not being eccentric, he’s bypassing the analytical mind to access deeper knowing. The Tibetan method he employs creates a state where, as Maharishi would describe it, “the mind settles beyond thought, and consciousness experiences itself directly as pure Being.” Cooper trusts this process completely. While Sheriff Truman and the other investigators rely solely on evidence and deduction, operating strictly within Level 3 (WAKING), Cooper adds another dimension: he allows his awareness to transcend the surface of objects and events to perceive the patterns beneath.

His Dictaphone messages to Diane function similarly. “Diane, I’m holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.” This isn’t mere observation. It’s a practice of presence, of bringing full awareness to the smallest details of experience. Each recording is a meditation, a way of settling his consciousness while simultaneously engaging it. He’s maintaining the observer’s position, aware that he is aware, while fully immersed in the investigation. This is the hallmark of someone who has tasted Level 4 (TRANSCENDING) the ability to be simultaneously transcendent and engaged.

The Red Room Dream: A Gateway to Higher Consciousness

Cooper’s dream of the Red Room in Season 1 represents a breakthrough into Transcendent Awareness (Level 4), but it also reveals the mechanics of how consciousness moves between levels, and the dangers inherent in that movement.

The dream begins with Cooper sitting in the Red Room, twenty-five years older. Immediately, we’re shown consciousness operating outside linear time, one of the first indicators that we’ve moved beyond Level 3 (Waking), where time appears to flow in only one direction. The little man, who will later be known as the Man from Another Place, speaks backwards, his words incomprehensible to the waking mind but pregnant with meaning.

This backwards speech is crucial. It represents consciousness encountering itself from an angle that the waking mind cannot process through conventional linguistic structures. When Maharishi describes Level 4 as a state where “consciousness experiences itself directly,” this is precisely what’s happening. The content isn’t gibberish, it’s consciousness communicating with itself in a language that bypasses the intellect entirely.

Laura Palmer appears, radiant, vital, somehow more real than the waking world despite being in a dream. She leans in and whispers to Cooper. We, the viewers, cannot hear what she says. But Cooper hears it. And when he wakes, he knows the identity of Laura’s killer.

How?

This is where Maharishi’s framework becomes essential. In Level 3 consciousness, knowledge comes through sensory perception and logical deduction. You see evidence, you reason, you conclude. But in Level 4, the Transcendent state, knowledge is direct. There is no intermediary between the knower and the known. Consciousness touches the answer without the process of questioning.

Laura’s whisper is not information being transferred from one person to another; it’s Cooper’s own consciousness, having settled beyond thought, accessing knowledge that was always present but obscured by the noise of the waking mind. The Red Room is the visualization of that inner space where the mind becomes still enough to know directly.

But here’s where the dream reveals something darker: consciousness at Level 4 is not yet stable. Cooper receives the knowledge, but he also encounters BOB, crouching behind the couch, a predatory presence waiting. This image suggests that accessing higher states of consciousness before one is fully prepared opens the door not just to transcendent knowledge but also to the fragmenting forces that dwell in the deeper layers of the psyche.

Maharishi taught that the nervous system must be purified through regular practice before higher states can be safely stabilized. Cooper’s Tibetan techniques give him access to Level 4, but that access is sporadic, and unintegrated. He can touch the transcendent state in dreams, in moments of intuitive clarity, but he cannot maintain it. And this instability will eventually prove catastrophic.

Notice what Cooper does with the dream knowledge. He doesn’t dismiss it. He doesn’t rationalize it away. He trusts it implicitly, demonstrating an integrated relationship between waking rationality and transcendent knowing. This is Cooper’s greatest strength: he can operate effectively at Level 3 (following FBI protocols, analyzing evidence, conducting interviews) while remaining open to Level 4 (trusting dreams, following intuition, allowing knowledge to arise from silence).

Like Fox Mulder in The X-Files, Cooper believes, but unlike Mulder, whose belief often alienates him from his colleagues, Cooper’s trust in transcendent knowing enhances his practical effectiveness. He solves the case. His openness to higher consciousness produces results in the waking world.

But that same trust, that same openness, that same willingness to follow intuition without skepticism, this will also be Cooper’s Achilles Heel. Because trust without discernment, openness without boundary, intuition without grounding can lead consciousness not upward toward unity but downward into fragmentation.

Moving Toward Cosmic Consciousness

By Season 2, Cooper moves toward Level 5 (COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS). His love for Annie, his appreciation of cherry pie and “damn fine coffee,” and his childlike wonder at the Douglas firs aren’t distractions from his spiritual nature but evidence of it manifesting deeply in his perception and behavior. He begins to settle into the notion of home as a community and a place, both of which align with an internal perception rooted in the bliss of understanding a higher truth.

In Maharishi’s framework, Level 5 (COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS) is characterized by the individual experiencing “the Self as unbounded, unchanging, and distinct from activity.” This doesn’t mean withdrawal from the world. It means being so established in the silent witness within that external activity can no longer disturb that inner stability. The Self watches the body act, the mind think, the emotions rise and fall, but remains untouched by all of it, like the ocean depths remaining still while waves crash on the surface.

Cooper demonstrates this beautifully. When he tells Harry, “I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange,” he’s not speaking as someone anxious about the unknown. He’s speaking as someone established in the Self, for whom uncertainty in the external world poses no threat to internal stability. He can say “I have no idea” and “I have a definite feeling” in the same breath because he’s operating from two levels of consciousness simultaneously: the active, investigating mind (Level 3) and the witnessing, all-knowing Self (Level 5).

His delight in simple pleasures, the warmth of coffee, the sweetness of pie, the majesty of trees, reveals consciousness that has refined its perception. He doesn’t just taste coffee; he experiences the essence of coffee, the intelligence of nature expressing itself through that particular combination of bitterness and warmth. This is not mere appreciation. This is perception operating from a level where, as Maharishi describes it, “the laws of nature are perceived as expressions of consciousness.”

Ancient wisdom exudes from Cooper’s attitude, behavior, and words: the understanding that consciousness is all there is. He moves through the investigation with the lightness of someone who knows that his true nature cannot be touched by success or failure, by danger or safety, by solving the case or leaving it unsolved. He does his duty with full commitment while remaining internally free.

But Level 5, while stable, is not immune to error. The witnessing Self may be “unbounded, unchanging, and distinct from activity,” but the individual still acts, still chooses, still moves through the world making decisions that have consequences. And Cooper, for all his elevation of consciousness, for all his access to transcendent knowing, is about to make a choice that will shatter everything.

The Fall

Dale Cooper fancies himself a modern day chivalrous knight, perhaps King Arthur himself, but most realistically Cooper is Lancelot because he got the girl and won the glory. Cooper never met a woman he didn’t want to save. And at the end of Season 2, Cooper falls prey to his weakness. While caught in the fugue of the Red Room with BOB and Windom Earle, Laura Palmer, and Caroline Earle, Cooper is overwhelmed with choices, and his naïveté gets the best of him, and he pauses from acting.

Here, in this crucial moment, we see the limitation of even elevated consciousness when it encounters a situation that requires not just witnessing, but decisive action aligned with cosmic law. Cooper hesitates. He deliberates. He tries to reason his way through a circumstance that exists beyond reason, in a realm where the very laws of cause and effect have been suspended.

His love for Annie, pure in its intention, becomes the hook. When he acts out of fear for her safety rather than remaining established in the Self, he breaks the connection to the witnessing consciousness that has protected him throughout his investigation. He makes the Mistake of the Intellect: he identifies completely with the observed (Annie’s suffering) and forgets his position as observer (the unbounded Self).

At this moment, Cooper’s character fails, and the worst part of his nature takes over, controlling the perception of his consciousness. Dale Cooper capitulates to the devils of his mind, and he is about to journey through Hell.

BOB doesn’t overpower Cooper. Cooper surrenders his position. He abandons the witness and drowns in the image. And once consciousness loses awareness of itself as consciousness, once the observer forgets that it is also the observed, fragmentation becomes inevitable.

Cooper will spend the next twenty-five years of dream time, learning what happens when elevated consciousness falls: the descent is not back to where you started. It’s into regions far darker than anything you knew before you began to climb.

COMING NEXT WEEK FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS…

CHAPTER FOUR

THE BLACK LODGE PARADOX

This is a book about Twin Peaks — all of it: the original series, Fire Walk With Me, and The Return. But it’s not a fan theory. It’s not a plot breakdown. It’s not an appreciation of David Lynch as an auteur. It’s something more ambitious than any of those things, and I think, more useful.

David Lynch has practiced Transcendental Meditation every single day for over fifty years. That practice didn’t just influence his art. It structured it. Using Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven states of consciousness — from deep sleep through waking to transcending, all the way to Unity Consciousness — this book reveals the hidden architecture of Twin Peaks and shows you something that will permanently change the way you watch it: you are not a passive viewer. Lynch made you the final, essential piece of the story.

That’s the book. Thirteen chapters. One per week. You can’t binge it, and that’s by design. The format mirrors the show’s own demand: slow down, integrate, and witness.

Now — Chapter 2. It’s called “Viewing Experience As Consciousness,” and it is the engine room of everything that follows.

Before we can talk about Cooper, Laura, the Black Lodge, or what that final scream actually means, we need to lay the groundwork. Chapter 2 is where we do that.

Here’s what’s inside. First, we look at how consciousness actually works — not as philosophy, but as mechanics. What is the difference between a mind that is sleeping, dreaming, waking, or transcending? Why does it matter which level you’re operating from when you sit down to watch The Return?

Second, we meet Maharishi Mahesh Yogi — not as a figure to worship, but as the teacher whose scientific map of consciousness gives us the lens to read what Lynch built. And we look at how Lynch’s own daily practice is the secret ingredient in Twin Peaks that conventional criticism has always missed.

Third, and this is where it gets genuinely exciting — Chapter 2 introduces the idea that watching Twin Peaks is itself a form of consciousness training. Not metaphorically. Structurally. Lynch designed the viewing experience to require the audience to function as a witnessing awareness. If you’ve ever watched The Return and felt confused, frustrated, or strangely moved in ways you couldn’t explain — Chapter 2 will tell you exactly what was happening to you, and why it was supposed to happen.

By the end of this chapter, the seven levels of consciousness will no longer be abstract ideas. There’ll be a map you can read — and you’ll start seeing the territory everywhere.

Now, here’s the thing. Free subscribers receive this introduction video—an overview of what’s in the chapter and why it matters. But the full chapter text, the complete deep reading, and my author reading of the chapter itself — those are available to paid subscribers only.

This book is being serialized over thirteen weeks, and every week, that full chapter is waiting for you on the other side of a very simple upgrade.

If Twin Peaks has ever haunted you — if you’ve ever felt that it was reaching for something you couldn’t quite name — this book will name it. And Chapter 2 is where the naming begins.

Upgrade to paid on Terms of Enlightenment today.

The link is right below. Join us, and let’s go deeper together.

Below is the full chapter for paid subscribers.

• The Three Elements Of Watching A Movie

• Introduction To “The Mistake of the Intellect”

• When We Lose Ourselves In The Story vs. When We Actively Witness The Story

• The Importance Of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Science Of Consciousness

• What Makes Twin Peaks Different From Watching Other Shows

• Introduction To Consciousness Levels 1-3, Where Twin Peaks Begins

Stories Expand Human Consciousness

Whether literary or cinematic, stories are vehicles with the potential to encourage human enlightenment, which means the growth of individual consciousness. When you watch an important film, you grow as a person from the experience. As human consciousness expands, life feels more fulfilling at the individual level, and that feeling bleeds into society.

Art builds culture.

The inverse is also true. When art discourages the growth of consciousness, encouraging it to shrink and contract, the opposite is also true, and we find ourselves less fulfilled, diminished in consciousness.

Art destroys culture.

Art is a tool, and, like any tool, can be used as a weapon against the best interests of individual happiness and, by extension, human society. Therefore, we must be careful with the art we let inside our minds and hearts. And when we discover art that expands our consciousness, it is worth taking the time to study and discuss it together, so as to fully contribute to the fulfillment of all living human beings. This should emphasize the importance of deep, critical analysis, combined with appreciation and gratitude for art that hits the mark, inspiring the growth of consciousness toward enlightenment, while also providing a deep sense of being entertained.

What Twin Peaks Requires Of The Viewer

Most television is designed for passive consumption. You turn it on, settle into the couch, and let the story wash over you. The narrative moves forward with clear cause and effect. Characters explain their motivations. The music signals when you should feel tension, when you should laugh, when you should anticipate the next plot development. Your job as viewer is to receive what the creators have made, to follow where they lead, to understand what they’ve clearly communicated, and to buy all the shit that’s advertised on screen or between commercial breaks. If you stream, don’t worry, your phone is watching you and those ads will show up some other place you’re scrolling. The delivery system of digital entertainment is designed to fracture your attention and frack your money away from you in the process. This is not a criticism; there’s genuine craft in creating commercial entertainment delivered in this flawed, but effective, format. And there’s often genuine pleasure in consuming it.

Twin Peaks does not work this way.

From the first episode, Twin Peaks demands something different from you. When Agent Cooper stands in front of the Great Northern Hotel and dictates observations about Douglas firs and the air temperature into his tape recorder, the show isn’t advancing the plot. When he throws rocks at a glass bottle while reciting suspects’ names, the show isn’t explaining a mystery; it’s asking you to trust a process you don’t understand yet. When the Log Lady appears with cryptic messages, when the Giant materializes in Cooper’s hotel room, when Laura whispers in dreams and speaks backwards in the Red Room, the show is testing whether you can hold ambiguity without demanding immediate resolution.

You are in training. But what kind of training?

This is active witnessing, not passive consumption. You must stay present even when you don’t understand. You must hold multiple incompatible interpretations simultaneously: Is this supernatural or psychological? Real or symbolic? Literal or metaphorical? And do this without collapsing into certainty, because you will be disappointed. You must allow Twin Peaks to work on you at levels deeper than plot comprehension, trusting that meaning will emerge not from explanation but from cumulative experience. Most crucially, you must resist the impulse to dismiss what you cannot immediately explain, to mock what seems strange, or to demand that the show conform to the conventions of normal television.

Twin Peaks: The Return takes this demand even further. For thirteen episodes, you watch Dougie Jones stumble through Las Vegas, barely able to speak, repeating words like a child learning language, staring blankly at coffee and pie. The show gives you no flashbacks, no exposition, no reassurance that this will resolve into something you recognize. If you’re watching passively, waiting for the story to entertain you, expecting the show to do the work of meaning these episodes may seem boring, frustrating, and even insulting. “When will Cooper wake up?” you demand. “How long do I have to watch this ish?”

But if you’re watching actively, if you’re holding the memory of who Cooper was while witnessing who Dougie is, if you’re perceiving the patterns in his scribbles and recognizing the intuition beneath his vacant stare, if you’re present to the poignancy of consciousness rebuilding itself one “Helloooo” at a time, then these episodes become profound. They become meditation. They become the experience of witnessing awareness itself, stripped of identity and personality, slowly remembering what it forgot and leaning towards what is quiet and peaceful and calm.

This is why we need to understand consciousness mechanics. Because Twin Peaks isn’t asking you to analyze consciousness intellectually; it’s asking you to be consciousness in a specific way. It’s asking you to function as the observer who maintains awareness while the observed (Cooper’s identity, Laura’s story, the entire narrative of Twin Peaks) fragments and reconstructs itself. And you cannot fully perform this function if you don’t understand what consciousness is, how it operates, what happens when it forgets itself, and what it takes to remember.

The framework we’re about to explore: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s seven states of consciousness, isn’t just a lens for analyzing Twin Peaks. It’s the instruction manual for how to watch it. It’s the map that shows you where you are when the show disorients you, what’s being asked of you when the narrative refuses to explain itself, and why your presence as witness isn’t optional but essential to the story’s completion.

So before we can properly understand what happens to Dale Cooper, what Laura Palmer achieves, or why the final Scream tears reality apart, we must first understand the machinery of consciousness itself, how it works, what it’s for, and why you sitting in front of a screen watching people who don’t exist are performing one of its most essential functions witnessing itself.

How Consciousness Works

This subject matters to both the narrative value of Twin Peaks (what happened) and the aesthetic value for the viewer of Twin Peaks (why it matters).

When critical analysis is applied from higher levels of conscious awareness, we water the root of the tree of knowledge, instead of pruning emotional branches and uprooting the xylem and phloem of lower intellect, where viewers tend to get caught up in the image and forget all about their presence and purpose as independent observers of art. When this happens, a small consciousness that’s still bound up in a tiny perception of time is also overwhelmed by the complexity of circumstance. Let’s call this level of consciousness a juvenile adolescent state, or “The Conventional” mindset. We want to avoid this mindset if our goal is to understand art’s impact on the expansion of consciousness.

But why consciousness? What’s so important about consciousness as the absolute foundation of effective critical thinking? Before we consider the importance of consciousness, let’s be clear about how it functions as a mechanical process. And then we’ll apply it all to the story told in Twin Peaks.

Consciousness is a machine-like function of nature. Animals have it. Trees have it. Humans have it. So do rocks, stars, and the space between them. All matter, energy, and experience emerge from a single source of pure creative energy. Consciousness is all there is, and everything we perceive (including ourselves) is a manifested expression of a singular field of pure consciousness, of which the only purpose is to know itself completely from every possible angle.

And this is where people and movies come in, because, in human beings, the energy of consciousness pours through our physiological framework from which splinters and shoots both mind and body, two equal sprouts from the same source, leading back to the same root. Validate this for yourself. You have a mind, and you can watch it move in real time.

Consider human physiology as an energy grid through which the forces of the universe flow into a biological vessel capable of sustaining a unique experience of being alive for several decades. It’s easy to understand how consciousness works because you are aware of being conscious. You are the instrument. You are the one who peers through the instrument. And you are the subject of what you are viewing through your instrument. No other animal we know of has this level of awareness, like Humans, to be aware that they are aware and to observe the process of awareness play out in real time through our relationship with the external world and those who inhabit it with us, together through life, as Bob Dylan sang about.

The machinery of consciousness produces only one output, which is experience. There are three elements to this machine: 1. The Observer 2. The Object Being Observed 3. The Process Of Observation. The Knower, the Known, and the Process of Knowing. Or, because we’re talking about Cinema, there is the viewer, the movie being viewed, and the screen, which allows the magic of the eye to take place, letting people ingest incredibly dense stories every time they watch a movie on any screen.

When those three factors are active, consciousness is working in complete kinetic motion. However, there is a common error that befalls every human being during this process; it is known as the “Mistake Of The Intellect.”

When the observer loses awareness of the separation between the object beheld and the act of observation, they lose a sense of presence and mistake themselves for the object. This provides some experience, but it comes at a cost: that experience is fragmented and incomplete. Our whole lives, meaning our flimsy identities assembled from these bits of occluded experience over time, are built upon this mistake of the intellect, where we assign identity and validity to these pencil shavings of experience, cast off from the illusion of getting lost in the images we behold.

Watching a movie is a perfect analogy for the situation that has produced a fragmented world filled with fragmented individual consciousness.

Have you ever become aware that your mind is racing? That awareness is worth considering. Many people assume their thoughts are who they are, what they are. But there is another layer of your consciousness, one that watches without effort, is aware without intellectual focus; this foundational layer of consciousness is never tired, and its energy is never expended. Every human being who has ever drawn breath has experienced this still layer of consciousness when they are completely settled, and it is this layer we are interested in when it comes to experiencing art as it impacts the expansion of consciousness in a process I will refer to henceforth as “Enlightenment.”

Consciousness is primary. There is nothing beyond consciousness. The way humans think about the world is our consciousness, but consciousness itself isn’t unique to humans. Rather, consciousness is a mechanical function of nature. Scientists who study nature at its smallest scale, in quantum physics, have determined that, at the foundation of all existence, matter and energy dissolve into interconnected fields of patterns that, in turn, dissolve into a single unified field of pure energy. Consciousness is that ultimate field. Consciousness is all there is, and all matter, energy, and experience emerge from that unified field to become manifested objects in time and space, subject to the universal laws of physics and causality. At least one of these manifestations has evolved into a species (humans) that has expanded our localized individual consciousness into awareness of consciousness itself, which is how we each maintain individuality during our mortal lives.

The exciting implications of conceding that consciousness is all there is are that, when we pass away, the content of our individual consciousness dissolves back into the unified field of consciousness, allowing that supreme energy field to know itself from all aspects.

This view of consciousness as primary is a core tenet of Vedic philosophy that has survived in the East for thousands of years and was later brought to the West in the 20th Century by the work of several scholars, philosophers, and gurus.

In this Vedic understanding of consciousness, there are seven levels, and this is the framework within which we will explore the journey to transcendence told throughout the Twin Peaks narrative.

We have established that if consciousness is primary to all matter, energy, and experience, then logically everything that emerges from unified consciousness is inherently composed of that same energy. In other words, consciousness is absolute, but to be conscious is relative. We could argue that humans are localized containers of the by-product of conscious awareness (experience), which extends from absolute consciousness.

The word “guru” is from Sanskrit. GU means darkness, and RU means remover. A guru is someone who removes darkness within people by illuminating the ancient light of universal knowledge. The word Veda comes from the Sanskrit root Vid, which means to know or see clearly. Veda is not a book; it means reliable knowledge that is valued above opinion and belief because it has been tested and endured over time and widely agreed-upon experience.

One of the most influential gurus of the 20th Century was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008), the man who brought Transcendental Meditation to the West, not as mysticism but as a repeatable method for clearing neurophysiological stress. Trained in physics and the Advaita Vedanta tradition, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi stripped meditation of spiritual theater and repositioned it as a technology meant to stabilize awareness and make clarity, creativity, and ethical action inevitable rather than aspirational.

His framework was consciousness-based, meaning he started from the premise that perception improves when the nervous system is less burdened. This wasn’t philosophy, it was body mechanics. Reduce internal noise, expand awareness, and watch behavior align with natural law. No guru worship required, but gratitude for the teacher’s work is appreciated.

Maharishi systematically applied individual consciousness-based principles for healthier, happier longevity to education, the arts, and professional life, founding institutions designed to integrate inner silence with external achievement. The approach worked because it made no promises of transformation, only the restoration of what individual and social stress had obscured for too long.

To put it simply, Maharishi taught that suffering is an unnecessary mistake, and that all life is bliss when the individual puts themselves into accord with the rhythm and values of natural law, meaning the way things work when left to their own spontaneous action.

The young filmmaker David Lynch immediately understood the value of this science of consciousness. Maharishi’s insistence that deeper consciousness expands creative range without sacrificing craft or commercial viability gave artists, like Lynch, permission to turn inward without abandoning discipline. It’s not about becoming enlightened. It’s about becoming less manipulated by your own accumulated garbage. Lynch has said as much about his early experiences with meditation.

The Transcendental Meditation technique is simple. The results are measurable. Consciousness is not emergent. It is foundational. Maharishi understood this and built a system that worked whether you believed in it or not; it was founded on ancient knowledge. His deep scientific roots, combined with decades of work alongside the most brilliant experts in health, government, physics, and applied sciences, complemented his experience teaching artists to transcend. It could be argued that there would be no Beatles’ White Album or any of David Lynch’s films had Maharishi not taught these artists to consistently touch silence within themselves every day.

The Seven Levels of Consciousness

There are seven levels of consciousness, as interpreted by Maharishi Vedic Science, which were enormously influential on David Lynch’s worldview. Let’s explore them, briefly:

Level 1: SLEEPING

A state of rest with minimal awareness. Mental activity has largely withdrawn, but consciousness is not aware of itself.

Level 2: DREAMING

A state of inner mental activity with limited awareness. Experiences arise from memory and impression, without full clarity or control.

Level 3: WAKING

A state of outward-directed activity and perception. Awareness is engaged with objects and thought, but disconnected from its own source.

Level 4: TRANSCENDING

A state of deep rest combined with alert awareness. The mind settles beyond thought, and consciousness experiences itself directly as pure Being. This state profoundly restructures the nervous system.

Level 5: COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

A stabilized state in which transcendental consciousness is maintained throughout waking, dreaming, and sleeping. The individual experiences the Self as unbounded, unchanging, and distinct from activity.

Level 6: REFINED COSMIC CONSCIOUSNESS

A state of refined perception in which the intelligence and beauty of creation are directly experienced. The laws of nature are perceived as expressions of consciousness, and appreciation of life deepens dramatically.

Level 7: UNITY CONSCIOUSNESS

A state in which the distinction between inner Self and outer world dissolves. Consciousness is experienced as the sole reality, expressing itself as both observer and observed.

COMING NEXT WEEK…FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS ALSO

CHAPTER THREE

COOPER ARIVES: “THE AWAKENED DETECTIVE”

The Teacher’s Teacher

Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought Transcendental Meditation to the West, before he taught the Beatles and David Lynch, before he systematized the science of consciousness and made ancient Vedic knowl…

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A Book That Changes How You See Twin Peaks — And Yourself

What Is Enlightenment and Twin Peaks?

David Lynch practiced Transcendental Meditation every day for over fifty years. That fact is not biographical trivia. It is the hidden architecture of everything he created.

Enlightenment and Twin Peaks is a work of critical analysis and consciousness training that reveals what Twin Peaks: The Return actually is, not a television mystery to be solved, but a structured experiment in expanding human awareness, disguised as prestige television.

Drawing on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven states of consciousness, author JB Minton maps Cooper’s fragmented journey, Laura Palmer’s transcendence, and the Black Lodge’s strange geography onto a precise science of the mind. What emerges is not an interpretation of Twin Peaks. It is a key that unlocks why the show affected you the way it did, and why you’ve never been able to fully explain it to anyone else.

You weren’t confused. You were being trained.

The Argument at the Heart of This Book

Lynch’s greatest act of generosity as an artist was not the creation of Cooper, or Laura, or the Red Room. It was this: he made you, the viewer, the final, essential element of his greatest work of art.

When Dougie stares blankly at his coffee, you hold the memory of what coffee means to Dale Cooper. When the narrative refuses to explain itself, you supply the coherence it cannot maintain on its own. You are not watching Twin Peaks. You are functioning as the witnessing consciousness that Cooper has temporarily lost.

This book shows you exactly how that works, and what it means for your understanding of your own awareness.

What You’ll Discover Inside

Thirteen chapters. One complete map of consciousness.

From Cooper’s awakened detective in the opening episodes, through the long dissolution of Dougie Jones, through Carrie Page’s catastrophic failure of witnessing, to the final black screen, every movement of Twin Peaks: The Return corresponds to a precise stage of consciousness development described in Vedic science thousands of years before Lynch picked up a camera.

You’ll discover why the Black Lodge is consciousness forgetting itself. Why Laura Palmer is not a victim but an axis of cosmic awareness. Why the ending is not a failure, but the only conclusion possible. And why watching this show, attentively, with the right framework, functions as a genuine contemplative practice.

Who This Is For

This book is for Twin Peaks viewers who felt the show reach inside them and rearrange something — and never quite found the language for what happened. It is for meditation practitioners who want to see their practice operating in art and culture. It is for serious students of film and consciousness who are tired of criticism that stays safely on the surface.

It is not for casual fans looking for Easter eggs and fan theories. The work requires what the show requires: your active, sustained attention.

How the Program Works

Beginning February 20, 2026, Enlightenment and Twin Peaks is being released chapter by chapter over thirteen weeks: one chapter per Friday because Consciousness develops through sustained practice over time, not through binge consumption. The format is itself part of the teaching.

Paid subscribers receive:

• Each chapter in full as it is released

• A video introduction to every chapter from the author

• Audio and video of the author reading each chapter aloud

• Access to the comments section for each chapter, to ask questions, offer insights, and engage in genuine critical dialogue

• JB Minton’s complete back catalog on Substack, including A Skeleton Key to Twin Peaks: Second Edition

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• The video introduction to each chapter

• Access to the first and last chapters for the program’s entire weekly release schedule before it all moves behind the paywall, and then the work begins on designing the ebook and paper book.

Before You Subscribe — Free Pre-Work

Don’t leave without sampling the analysis. Below you’ll find introductory material that gives you a genuine taste of what this book does — the quality of attention it brings, the framework it applies, and the transformation it offers. Come prepared to think differently about a show you thought you already understood.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Why does Twin Peaks haunt us decades later? Why does it feel less like television and more like a spiritual experience?

Because David Lynch, who has practiced Transcendental Meditation every day for 52 years, created something unprecedented: a television series that requires an elevated state of consciousness to experience fully.

Through Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven consciousness states, this book reveals the hidden architecture of Twin Peaks, how Cooper’s journey maps enlightenment, how Laura’s death represents Unity Consciousness achieved through suffering and sacrifice, and how the Black Lodge is consciousness forgetting itself.

And most importantly: how Lynch made you, the viewer, the missing piece.

When Dougie stares blankly at the steaming cup, you feel the poignancy because you remember Cooper’s love of “damn fine coffee.” When the narrative refuses to explain itself, you hold the coherence it cannot maintain on its own. You aren’t watching Cooper’s journey. You’re living it as the witnessing consciousness he’s temporarily lost.

Twin Peaks isn’t a show to be solved. It’s consciousness training disguised as television. And once you see how it works, you’ll never watch anything the same way again. Minton argues that the greatest act of generosity David Lynch performed as an artist was bringing the viewer of Twin Peaks: The Return into the story as the last missing piece of his greatest work.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JB Minton is a Creative Writer, New Critic, and Consciousness Advisor Professional who practices Transcendental Meditation daily. His work explores how art functions as technology for the development of consciousness, revealing fundamental patterns of human experience beyond celebrity worship and conventional entertainment journalism. He writes Terms of Enlightenment on Substack, applying the science of Consciousness to contemporary culture, art, and the ongoing project of expanding human awareness.

Chapter 1 — Opening: The Mysterious Power of Twin Peaks. Why does Twin Peaks linger in the mind for years, even decades, after viewing? This opening chapter rejects the conventional approach to film and television criticism- the celebrity worship, the auteur mythology, and the obsessive hunt for Easter eggs- and asks the only questions that truly matter: What is the story being told, and why does it matter to human beings? Here you’ll encounter the framework that governs everything that follows: art as a vehicle for consciousness expansion, and Twin Peaks as the most sophisticated example of that vehicle ever produced for television. By the time this chapter ends, you’ll understand why solving Twin Peaks was never the point, and why you were doing something far more important every time you watched.

Chapter 2 — Viewing Experience As Consciousness. Before analyzing a single scene, we must understand what actually happens in the human nervous system when we watch a story, and why most of us have been watching Twin Peaks at a limited level of awareness. This chapter introduces Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's framework of seven states of consciousness and applies it to the viewing experience itself, distinguishing between losing yourself in a narrative and actively witnessing it. You'll learn what the "Mistake of the Intellect" is and why it's the single most important concept for understanding why The Return frustrates some viewers and transforms others. After this chapter, you'll never watch anything passively again.

Chapter 3 — Cooper Arrives: "The Awakened Detective" Dale Cooper does not arrive in Twin Peaks the way detectives arrive in ordinary crime dramas. He arrives as a man already operating from an elevated consciousness, a witness whose attention transforms what it touches, whose enthusiasm for coffee, Douglas firs, and the smell of pine is not a quirk but a sign of awareness fully present in ordinary life. This chapter maps Cooper's initial level of consciousness against Maharishi's framework and reveals why Lynch gives us an awakened protagonist at the outset rather than one we watch develop. Understanding where Cooper begins is essential to understanding the magnitude of what the Black Lodge takes from him, and what it will cost to get it back.

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Chapter 4 — The Black Lodge Paradox: The Black Lodge is not simply a place where evil lives. It is consciousness forgetting itself, the same unified field that produces enlightenment, expressing as fragmentation, entropy, and the horror of awareness severed from its own nature. This chapter confronts the central paradox of Twin Peaks: if consciousness is all there is, then BOB and the Lodge are also expressions of it, which means the enemy cannot be destroyed, only understood. You'll discover why Cooper's fight against the Black Lodge is not futile but is, in fact, the only response available to an evolving consciousness, and why the journey through darkness matters even when the darkness cannot ultimately win.

Chapter 5 — Laura Palmer: "The Axis of Consciousness." Laura Palmer is not the victim whose death sets the plot in motion. She is the axis around which every consciousness in Twin Peaks rotates, the character whose completed arc from innocence through devastation to transcendence defines the spiritual stakes of everything Cooper attempts in The Return. This chapter traces Laura's reverse journey through the consciousness levels, beginning at the heights of cosmic awareness in childhood, descending through the fragmentation of abuse and self-destruction, and arriving at Unity Consciousness through the one act available to her: refusal. Understanding Laura's achievement is key to why Cooper's attempt to save her in the finale is not heroism but the most costly mistake of the series.

Chapter 6 — Fire Walk With Me: Perception Beyond Time Lynch's 1992 prequel film is not backstory. It is perception operating beyond the ordinary boundaries of time, a work that can only be fully understood after The Return reveals what it was preparing us to witness. This chapter examines Fire Walk With Me as a consciousness document, showing how Lynch used the film's disorienting structure to reproduce the experience of awareness attempting to hold multiple timelines simultaneously. You'll see how the film's disturbing intimacy with Laura's final days is not exploitation but a necessary transmission, giving the viewer the experiential knowledge of her suffering that makes our role in The Return spiritually coherent.

Chapter 7 — The Return: Naido's Reversal & The Viewer's Injection. In Part 3 of The Return, something happens that has no precedent in television history: the viewer's relationship to the narrative changes fundamentally and permanently. When Naido throws the switch in the purple room, reversing the machine's polarity and expelling Cooper from the Lodge's gravity, she also injects you into the story as a functionally necessary participant, not metaphorically, but structurally. This chapter identifies the precise moment this occurs, explains the mechanism by which it operates, and names the sacred responsibility it creates: you are now Cooper's memory, his coherence, his witnessing awareness, and without your active participation, he cannot find his way home. This is why Twin Peaks: The Return will be studied alongside Shakespeare and Sophocles for centuries to come.

Chapter 8 — Dougie Jones: "The Long Awakening." The Dougie episodes are not filler. They are the heart of the teaching. This chapter makes the case that the most spiritually demanding thing Twin Peaks: The Return asks of its viewers is not to decode the mythology or solve the mystery, but to remain present through nine episodes of a man who cannot tie his own shoes — and to do so without impatience, without frustration, without demanding resolution on the timeline of Level 3 waking consciousness. Here you'll discover that the "boring" Dougie scenes are, in fact, advanced consciousness training: an invitation to develop the same witnessing awareness that allows you to be present with another being's suffering without trying to fix, rush, or escape it. What you learned to do for Dougie, you can now do for any person in your life.

Chapter 9 — Cooper Wakes: The Return to Cosmic Consciousness "I am the FBI." Three words. The flood begins. This chapter examines the most cathartic moment in The Return's eighteen parts, Cooper's reintegration in Part 16, and reveals that what rushes back into him is not simply memory or identity but consciousness awareness across all levels simultaneously. But the chapter does not stop at the triumph: it traces Cooper's elevation to Level 5 and then Level 6, and identifies the fatal error hidden inside his plan to save Laura Palmer. You'll understand for the first time why Cooper's heroism at the height of his power is simultaneously his greatest mistake, and what this teaches about the danger of applying elevated consciousness without the humility to recognize the patterns we cannot alter.

Chapter 10 — Carrie Page: When Witnessing Fails, What is worse than the Black Lodge? Consciousness that has achieved Unity but been severed from its own story. Carrie Page is not a new character; she is Laura Palmer stripped of context, a woman who carries the full weight of cosmic awareness without the narrative that would make that weight meaningful. This chapter analyzes the final two parts of The Return as the consequences of Cooper's hubris: by attempting to alter Laura's completed arc, he fails to save her. He creates a consciousness more tragic than the one that died in the train car. The scream that ends the series is not ambiguity; it is the sound of recognition, of Unity Consciousness breaking through temporal displacement, and it is the most precise note Lynch could have played to complete the transmission.

Chapter 11 — The Viewer's Position: What We've Learned. Having traveled through eighteen parts of The Return as active participants rather than passive observers, this chapter turns the lens inward: what has this experience actually done to your consciousness? Here, the book consolidates everything the preceding chapters have demonstrated about witnessing awareness, dual attention, pattern recognition across time, and the ability to hold coherence for another being without interference. You'll discover that the skills you developed watching Cooper as Dougie- the patience, the presence, the refusal to collapse the narrative- are transferable to every relationship and encounter in your daily life. The training was real. The question now is what you do with it.

Chapter 12 — The Purpose of Consciousness: Why does consciousness exist at all? Why does it fragment into individual beings, experience suffering, reach toward unity, and return? This chapter moves from the specific to the universal, drawing on everything Twin Peaks has demonstrated to address the series's deepest question: what is the point of this entire pattern of emergence, experience, and return? Drawing on Maharishi's framework and the completed arcs of Cooper, Laura, and the viewer, the chapter arrives at an answer that is neither mystical nor abstract; it is as immediate and verifiable as your own awareness in this moment. Your life matters not in spite of its confusion and suffering but because consciousness is experiencing itself through you, and every experience contributes to the totality of what consciousness knows about itself.

Chapter 13 — Closing: "Jai Guru Dev" Before Maharishi Mahesh Yogi could teach the world, he had to learn, for thirteen years, from a teacher whose embodiment of pure consciousness was so complete that those who encountered him were transformed without a word being spoken. This final chapter honors the lineage through which the knowledge of this book arrived: from Guru Dev to Maharishi, from Maharishi to Lynch, from Lynch to the screen, from the screen to you. It offers practical guidance for how to share what you've learned without becoming what the book warns against: the evangelist, the celebrity worshiper, the person who insists others must see things their way. The closing is not an ending. It is a transmission: Jai Guru Dev. Glory to the teachers who removed darkness. Now you are part of the lineage.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Why does Twin Peaks haunt us decades later? Why does it feel less like television and more like a spiritual experience?

Because David Lynch, practicing Transcendental Meditation every day for 52 years, created something unprecedented: a television series that requires elevated consciousness to experience fully.

Through Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s framework of seven consciousness states, this book reveals the hidden architecture of Twin Peaks, how Cooper’s journey maps enlightenment, how Laura’s death represents Unity Consciousness achieved through suffering and sacrifice, how the Black Lodge is consciousness forgetting itself.

And most importantly: how Lynch made you, the viewer, the missing piece.

When Dougie stares blankly at the steaming cup, you feel the poignancy because you remember Cooper’s love of “damn fine coffee.” When the narrative refuses to explain itself, you hold the coherence it cannot maintain on its own. You aren’t watching Cooper’s journey. You’re living it as the witnessing consciousness he’s temporarily lost.

Twin Peaks isn’t a show to be solved. It’s consciousness training disguised as television. And once you see how it works, you’ll never watch anything the same way again. Minton argues that the greatest act of generosity David Lynch performed as an artist was bringing the viewer of Twin Peaks The Return into the story as the last missing piece of his greatest work of art.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JB Minton is a Creative Writer, New Critic, and Consciousness Advisor Professional who practices Transcendental Meditation daily. His work explores how art functions as technology for consciousness development, revealing fundamental patterns of human experience beyond celebrity worship and conventional entertainment journalism. He writes Terms of Enlightenment on Substack, applying the science of Consciousness to contemporary culture, art, and the ongoing project of expanding human awareness.

CHAPTER ONE

Opening: The Mysterious Power of Twin Peaks

Why Do We Watch Movies?

When we encounter art that profoundly affects us, art that lingers in our thoughts for days, months, even years, what exactly has happened? Why does Twin Peaks, decades after its creation, continue to generate such intense discussion and devotion?

The only questions that truly matter when analyzing and appreciating the value of narrative art are: “What is the story being told and why does it matter to me?”

Notice what’s absent from those questions: “Who made the art and why they did it.” That’s trivia, nostalgia, and, if bent into fanatical worship, a distraction that draws us away from the art itself.

This isn’t to diminish David Lynch or Mark Frost or Angelo, Kyle, Sheryl, Sherilynn, or anything in Snoqualmie, Washington. But we’ll return to the creators and places later, after we’ve applied this knowledge to the art. First, we must examine what happens within us when we encounter transformative art.

In the absence of a functional modern religious mythology, many movie lovers have sublimated their worship to the screen and, beyond that, to its creators. This tendency found its intellectual justification in Auteur Theory, a framework that, whatever its critical merits, has contributed to our contemporary culture of celebrity worship, superficial engagement with art, and even political and economic manipulation.

But we are serious people interested in how stories actually work on Human consciousness. And so we ask two questions:

What is the story being told?

Why does the story matter to human beings?

Let’s explore this together.

COMING NEXT WEEK…FOR FREE SUBSCRIBERS ALSO

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CLOSING: “JAI GURU DEV”

Why are so many important journalists, educators, and artists too eager to complain about Artificial Intelligence?

Generative AI is an easy target for three reasons:

✅ ONE: Every sensible person hates the concept of “Techbros,” which has become a meme that amalgamates every misogynistic alpha-male stereotype stitched together into zip-up vests that seemingly get paid far too much for what they don’t seem to be doing.

✅ TWO: Large Language Model Platforms stole the Internet and put paywalls around the next phase of information technology, likely breaking the spirit (if not the language) of every copyright law in history. And they’re likely going to get away with breaking those laws because the digital landscape of the Internet remains largely unregulated, like an Old West bank with swinging half doors on the vault.

✅ THREE: Because every form of commercial art is being disrupted while tech companies suck up IP and the ownership of movies, films, and novels, which is all going back into those large language models regurgitating artistic assets into what many mindlessly call “AI Slop,” patting themselves on the back for being so clever as to repeat a meme that seems to matter to everyone and no one at the same time.

But Let’s Take a Beat From What Feels Right To Consider What May Be Right, In Spite of How We Feel.

Generative AI, along with its developers, product managers, marketers, lawyers, lobbyists, and sales professionals, is easily vilified in journalistic attack pieces from companies that openly sue Large Language Model Platforms, demanding access to their users’ activities. I question the integrity of such obviously biased journalism. I want to see more data, because I know where Enterprise is going with Generative AI.

There are companies out there, some born in the Cloud (meaning their applications, digital services, and data storage all run over the internet), who are synthesizing their entire data architectures into digital services empowering AI Agents to engage with any human in plain language and get shit done faster and, in some cases, much better with fewer resources used and less time wasted. That is happening across all industries right now.

The world has been using machine learning AI effectively for a long time, but some companies have been faster than others to adapt and adopt Generative AI. There are massive companies right now that will be demoted in earnings because smaller competitors are willing to experiment with and deploy Generative Artificial Intelligence integrated with all their first- and second-party data. While these big companies shuffle their feet and waste time in useless committees, the smaller competitors who adopt emerging AI technology are going to eat their market share.

How is Hollywood doing these days compared to Netflix? The answer is Netflix is buying Hollywood for a song. Netflix is buying an entire industry. This isn’t market shifting; it’s paradigm shifting.

Another factor to know is that not every Large Language Model is based on stolen IP from the Internet. Information fuels LLMs, and Enterprise information is highly protected. In industries like government, healthcare, and financial services, some information is highly regulated and mandated by law to be preserved and protected. Human beings are always the weakest link in the chain of protecting information. Time and again, it’s because a human being clicked a link they shouldn’t have behind their corporate firewall that the hack occurs. It’s not the technology at fault, but rather the buffoon who misused it.

The myth that Generative AI has no value is a memetic emotional manipulation tactic by those I’ll refer to as “TECHSPERTS.” Like a priest lecturing on the immoral danger of oral sex before marriage, these Techsperts can tell you all about why they hate AI, but they would never dirty their dirty bits by using it earnestly to produce value.

Like so many complex issues with human social interactions at scale, there is nuance that the AI haters refuse to acknowledge, or maybe they don’t know about it. My purpose here is to educate them by offering a broader perspective while acknowledging the serious risks and disruptions already occurring across all industries of commerce due to Generative AI. There will likely be further disruption from this technology.

Reader, beware of those who only complain about AI, writing and speaking in tones of great moral certainty while remaining conveniently vague about causes, mechanisms, and responsibility regarding the use of generative artificial intelligence in our personal and professional lives.

Rather than declaring what AI is, it’s worth exploring what the complaints about it reveal. So, let’s start there with…

The Seven Sins of Complaining About AI

1. Nostalgia

When a learned expert says, “AI is ruining art, work, and writing,” which paradigm are they defending? The one where only certain people (read: “professional experts”) are allowed to command commercial entertainment, educational, and journalistic resources? Are they heralding a world in which the publishing and distribution of scholarship and art exist as gated communities?

Is the world these sleighted experts are constantly moaning about protecting from AI, the one where opportunities are meted out through back channels, political favors, and outright racist and classist nepotism? Is it the world where labor was slow, expensive, and largely invisible to those who funded it, with a thick layer of unnecessary middlemen following archaic processes that produced lesser value but still required unionized resources whose sole modern purpose is to retard progress in order to ensure the distribution of less-productive profit?

Are these so-called experts really protecting the same apparatus that gave us Donald Trump as the Reality TV Potentate of the Earth? Yes, it’s probably this world the moral technology experts are nostalgic for, but no modern artist with common sense guiding their thoughts would seek to build or work in that busted old world ruled by the morally vacant Hollywood and New York City illiterati.

Generative AI is disrupting our world, and a new order is emerging, one where artists and entrepreneurs can now own the entire supply chain of bringing ideas to markets of all sizes and demographics. And the illiterati are worried about their empty palms being put back in their pockets when the cold wind blows through an annoying crowd they are suddenly stuck standing in.

If the impacts of Generative AI feel like a loss to that ancient, corrupted industry that brought ideas to market for over a century, is it because something inherently valuable disappeared, or because something exclusive suddenly became accessible to those they consider commoners?

And how confident are these moral techsperts that the past they hold up so dearly ever really existed for any but a few privileged people?

Nostalgia is a weak argument against the ethical and moral use of modern computing in bringing ideas to the commercial market for the equally important purposes of entertainment and education.

2. Category Error

When the techspert says, “AI is stealing, lying, and cheating,” who or what exactly do they think is doing the stealing? Does technology make choices independently from humans? Or does technology execute instructions, like all complex computer code?

See, Generative AI doesn’t actually think as human beings think. It doesn’t do anything close to our level of thinking. In its current state, Generative AI technology is an effective probabilistic word calculator that performs a single function: find the next best word in a series based on the words presented and the information the model is grounded in. That’s it. Simple.

Generative AI, despite its cultural saturation as a topic of anxious conversation, is still just computer code, executing instructions.

If a human deploys AI carelessly, who is responsible for the outcome? The tool? The developer? The government? Or is assigning blame to the technology simply more comfortable than confronting human incentives that cause bent people to do horrible things to others with the tools at their disposal? Many of us remember what box cutters did on September 11th, 2001. Box cutters were a fearful image for several years after that day. But what we should have been focused on were the people holding them, and what didn’t prevent them from committing mass murder that day.

What problem do the techsperts solve by turning tools into straw man villains? Is there any difference in categorical error between the politician who vilifies the immigrant as the main problem and the moral technology journalist who thoughtlessly blames the tool and its creator instead of the wielder?

Change can be overwhelming, but change also brings opportunities to reset the balance according to natural law, meaning the way things naturally work when left to their own expressions of behavior. Ideally, human technology is the application of tools to the way nature works with the goal of producing an expected result that is (again, ideally) aligned to the common good.

Some technology builds (farming). Some destroys (fire). And some rebuild into a new cycle (atomic-nuclear fission). Generative AI is all three at once.

3. Status Panic

If AI didn’t threaten their position as techsperts, would they object as vociferously? I wonder whether they would be as concerned if Generative AI only replaced work they didn’t want to do? If the technology only empowered people whom they already respected, starting with themselves. They’re so proud of their big brains, aren’t they, these Techsperts?

Or are they gatekeeping the moral application of AI because the technology could make life easier for those they perceive as below them, rather than just doing that for them, their peers, and self-acknowledged superiors?

Is this petty character flaw of ego and pride really the reason they scold and scoff at the rest of us, looking down their noses before removing their glasses, rubbing their eyes, and solemnly shaking their heads at how ignorant we all are for moving the way the market of ideas wants to go?

When access expands and gatekeeping collapses, is it a marker of cultural decay or a necessary redistribution of power that opens up opportunities that didn’t exist a year ago?

And how do you tell the difference between ethical concern and wounded pride? The answer is you poke these experts somewhere else and watch how they react. Poke them in their pride because it always screams first and loudest.

4. Labor Romanticism

Which jobs are techsperts actually trying to protect?

I’ve successfully sold Enterprise software for many years across nearly every industry it’s possible to sell to (Energy, Transportation, Insurance, Banking, IT, Government, Retail, Consulting, etc.). I’ve almost seen it all, and I’ve nearly sold it all.

Now, I sell the future of AI for profit to large companies, and I’m effective at this job. I’m a global expert in my field, and I have the results to prove it. Writing and publishing are hobbies I’ve turned into a side business, but mostly just for funsies right now.

One of the consistent conversations I’m having today goes like this:

Customer (after seeing a relevant, value-laden technology demo, and being given commercial numbers for the cost to buy and implement it, weighed against the likely ROI): 

“Oh, you know Jim is our top producer, and he will never use this technology. In fact, he doesn’t use any technology except for occasional emails. Old Jim likes to write things down on a paper and then hand it to his assistant, and she uses the technology to get the job done for Jim. And because he is our top producer, if Jimmy won’t use this technology, then it’s not worth it to us investing in it right now."

It turned out Jimmy was 56.

I’ve had this conversation four times in the past two months with different customers. And I’ve given the same response that I’ll tell you:

We CANNOT make major technology decisions based on people and roles who will be exiting the workforce in five years.

I’m talking about stubborn Boomers and pig-headed GenXers who refuse to change and expect to still be paid for doing last decade’s job last year.

If your job can be automated, it will. Accept it and start preparing for change or ejection from corporate work. If a task was repetitive, underpaid, and exhausting before AI touched it, why does its automation suddenly become immoral? Working efficiently is exactly what nature does. And working like nature works is a very intelligent thing for humans to do. Was the suffering of these inefficiencies more acceptable when humans absorbed it quietly because they got paid? Are we preserving inefficient work, or cheap dignity? And what happens when those goals conflict? And why preserve either when there may be a better option?

Technology CEOs are never going to beg for your handout, but we’re all going to beg for theirs if you don’t wake up and learn to use and shape the application of this technology. This is the world we live in, and this is your duty. Complaining about it will only make you feel better every time your post gets liked, and for most of us, that’s not enough.1

The choice to adopt Generative AI is yours, but make it fast before it’s made for you by those who aren’t as concerned with your welfare as you.

5. False Zero-Sum Thinking

Why do we assume AI gains must equal human losses?

I’m old enough to remember when bringing a graphing calculator to any test in high school was considered cheating. The thinking at the time of that decision was that they were teaching reasoning functions to the human mind using outdated, if still effective, methodologies. Those methods are now too slow and produce terrible results compared with students armed with calculators who were taught how to use them effectively to solve specific problems. It turns out my math teachers in the early 1990s should have taught me how to use a graphing calculator and tested me on its application. Eventually, math teachers started doing exactly that, teaching and testing the use of the graphing calculator as an informational reference and a tool for executing specialized algorithms to solve specific problems.

We are each challenged by the cultural and historical limitations of the educational institutions we attended and the commercial institutions that feed, house, clothe, and entertain us. And again, we are going through the same struggle with the calculator, only now it’s Generative AI. Shouldn’t we get it right this time and start testing with the calculator?

When calculators appeared, did mathematicians disappear? When video cameras and editing software in our pockets became ubiquitous, did making movies end? Or did the nature of participation with the functional purposes of these tools change and let us do more and better human work with greater ease? The jury is still out on the last one, so the wise aren’t clicking subscribe on the AI Slop meme just yet. Smart people are taking a wait-and-see, long-term view of this technology while tactically jumping in to experiment with its applications.

If Generative AI amplifies capability, who decides how that leverage is used? And what responsibility comes with refusing to engage while others do?

Is the danger really replacement, or should we instead be wary of those who threaten disengagement and the fracturing of modern digital labor methods in order to preserve a system that wasn’t working all that well to begin with?

6. Moral Outsourcing

Who do techsperts expect to fix this problem? Governments? Corporations? Committees yet to be formed (no doubt staffed by the best techsperts from all the prestigious pillars of old media)?

While waiting for perfect regulation, followed by pristine judicial review, and honest broker police enforcing the law through threat of bankruptcy or the gun, how is one to justify our daily choices when a compelling option is so morally vilified on one side?

What is morally acceptable to automate? Is it only what techsperts verify, publish, and ignore?

Is demanding ethical clarity from institutions a sincere request or a way to delay personal accountability for getting in line with what might work best for all instead of the privileged few?

At what point does complaining become avoidance, impasse, and stagnation? Not even being open to applying Generative AI technology is a fool’s game that only the already successful Techspert can play. But you and I can’t play that moral game of “Earning Without Learning” successfully.

7. Refusal to Learn

How well do these people understand the systems they condemn? Have they applied them deeply and earnestly, or just enough to confirm their worst fears? Are their critiques grounded in firsthand experience or in YouTube outrage videos, sympathetic screenshots, and polemical summaries hot-dipped in the wax of oversimplification?

If you refuse to learn how something works, on what basis do you claim authority over its use and impact? Is your resistance informed skepticism, or is it simply discomfort with being a beginner again? There’s that pesky ego pride showing its behind.

The Problem Behind The Problem

Anyone who has worked a day in professional consulting knows that the problem the client comes to you with is never the actual problem. You have to dig a little. So, let’s dig. What if AI isn’t the problem? What if it’s a stress test? What if Generative AI exposes those who relied on unfair and ineffective industries, revealing the motives of those seeking to protect a system of assumed scarcity that Generative AI technology has shown to be potentially abundant?

Unnecessary complexity is not a virtue, and doing work we don’t have to do for less value than we’d get by applying emerging technology is like eating stupid sandwiches every day and expecting to get smart. So, let’s be smart instead.

After the fall of kings, humans outsourced our thinking to institutions that grew more complex and more corrupt over centuries. By any moral measure, every institution concocted by the limited minds of human beings has failed to deliver a consistent experience of human fulfillment worldwide. There is no hope left in any institution.

But there is hope in human beings working efficiently together with natural law to deliver a more consistent experience of living that is calmer, wiser, and kinder. This alignment problem is one we can solve with technology, and I argue it’s the only problem that matters, with everything else being either a supporting argument or a convenient distraction.

Hating AI is a convenient distraction being used to manipulate your emotions and steer you away from opportunity. We don’t have time to listen to biased Techsperts with axes to grind because they once played well in a rigged game and are suddenly upset that they now have to compete against the rest of us in the open with technology they don’t like and probably don’t understand.

When they complain about AI, are they protecting humanity or protecting themselves? Let’s each be an honest broker and admit which one gives you more anxiety, the AI or the people who might use it to do better than you can alone without it.

*no humans were harmed in the writing of this essay.

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I have experienced joy while watching Star Wars for nearly fifty years. I hope to pass on this flame of pleasure and knowledge by offering a suggested viewing program order for the Star Wars Cinematic, Animated, and Live-Action Serial Dramas. I also want to convey a set of moral and philosophical perspectives that I hope will bring you fulfillment through an exciting, multi-generational epic story, one you’ll spend nearly a year and a half of your life experiencing and reflecting on. This program is for the serious Star Wars enthusiast, not for those looking to waste time by watching a movie.

This program will offer you a deeper experience of the overall drama of the Star Wars universe, one that also reflects on the world we all live in together, while offering us metaphors we can use to discuss righteousness, virtue, fortune, love, and mercy; understanding these critical elements of not just living through our current challenges, but thriving in our bodies and minds. Understanding these vital factors of a functional society and a joy-filled life is essential to making the most of our brief existence as humans.

And I believe Star Wars, as commercial an enterprise as it’s become, still holds hope for those patient and sensitive enough to pay attention and learn.

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So, are you ready to commit to a 15-Month Star Wars viewing program?

All you’ll need is an active Disney+ subscription (or a library card and some patience) and will require three hours a week spent watching Star Wars.

And you will become a paid subscriber and get access to the whole program in this unlocked Substack post.

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Turning On The Empathy Machine: Understanding The Moral Value of Watching Movies And Thinking About Them

Movies are empathy machines.

Suppose the purpose of life is to gain experiences that lead to fulfillment. In that case, we must actively seek out as many experiences as possible to grow and develop our consciousness, thereby increasing our fulfillment. In the process of becoming fulfilled, we will experience happiness, and others will sense the joy radiating from within us.

Movies are an easy and effective way of gaining additional experience. As viewers, we can step into other worlds to see through different eyes, and every time we watch a movie, we add bits of consciousness, arranged in audio-visual narrative formats, to our own experiences. Essentially, the experience of watching a film is no different from having lived through the audio-visual experience presented on screen and through speakers.

And the best movies change who we are as people, hopefully for the better.

Movies aren’t just entertainment. Cinema delivers value to our lives beyond just filling and killing time. It is life-affirming to understand what creatures around us think and how their feelings influence their behavior in critical situations with much at stake. The best movies are these kinds of stories.

Creators of film strive to balance light and sound in the service of telling a story, passing along complex, tragic, and often hilarious narratives of experience that are deliberately composed constructions of consciousness, allowing every viewer to experience these stories from a unique perspective of differentiated personal experience.

Watching movies is a biological gift of art. Human eyes communicate information to our brains in just the right way, which, when projected onto a screen that moves at a consistent pace, recreates the drama of the never-lived moments (except in documentaries) in containers of captured information that can be replayed nearly forever.

Movies are humanity’s highest art form because they tell our stories and grant us the ability to learn through experiences that may have never happened, except on screen. Fiction on film is a special gift. We have the privilege of experiencing empathy and immersing ourselves in the minds and hearts of human beings on screen, navigating dire, tragic, and often hysterical situations.

BEGIN PublicServiceAnnoucement

During this program, I encourage you to consider leaving your phone and other devices in the other room if possible. Take off your watch. Go away for a few hours. The world will wait for Star Wars.

/END PublicServiceAnnoucement

Like all conscious activity, there are three elements to watching movies:

1. The Viewer: You, as a conscious entity, focus all your energy of awareness onto a single object, the movie (including audio).

2. The Movie: What’s on screen and coming through the speakers.

3. The Process of Observation: Connects the viewer (you) with the movie.

The process of observation is our primary concern when we consider spending over thirty weeks of our time watching and thinking about all this commercial art. Is it worth your time? I think it is. I know from experience that watching and thinking about Star Wars can make you a better person, a better parent, a better spouse, a better friend, and a better neighbor and citizen. It’s never too late to learn to think and talk about Star Wars. And I want to help you sharpen that skill set, while we learn by sharing ideas in a supportive environment focused on growing in conscious awareness through the appreciation of art. As long as you stay respectful when sharing your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs with other Star Wars fans, you will have friends all over the world.

If you’ve read this far, you are likely a person who is passionate about films, and maybe you also love Star Wars, or perhaps you want to understand what the big deal is about this franchise, why all the dorks won’t ever shut up about the Skywalkers and their drama. You’re in the right place.

You may only be able to watch 30 minutes of Star Wars a day throughout the week. That’s okay. Or you may binge your weekly program assignments with an ice-cold beverage and a hot snack on a Sunday afternoon. That’s okay, too. It doesn’t matter; just get your viewing time in and be present with Star Wars for a few hours each week. The rest is letting your natural thoughts align with the art, allowing you to reflect on the characters and story situations between your viewing sessions. Keep Star Wars in the quiet of your mind and let the art roll around in your thoughts. Examine Star Wars from different angles, because it beats thinking about politics and worrying about the weather. After all, when we delve deeply into art like Star Wars, we can go deep enough to reveal ourselves to ourselves, and this is always a worthy expenditure of time, akin to abstracted self-therapy because we inevitably learn from what we focus on.

Human lives are collections of experiences, little boxes filled with bits of consciousness (observer + object + process of observation) packed together into meat containers that move around and run our mouths too much. However, when we actively watch movies, we sit, remain silent, and pay attention to what we see on screen and hear from the speakers. Think of movies as guided meditations delivered through sight and sound. When we watch a film with this level of intense awareness, we enjoy carefully crafted collections of experiences designed to convey narrative crises, telling a story with compelling characters, while expanding our consciousness with every film we watch.

A story told in the movie may be horrible, fantastic, or just informative. Still, cinema has the power to change everyone who actively watches and is open to new experiences on screen. The actively aware viewer understands that they are watching a movie, but also recognizes that they bring a unique set of experiences to the film. As a reward, the actively engaged viewer collects new experiences from the film to add to their life experiences. They hold the fantasy and the collected reality together in the same mind simultaneously, often with equal value.

That may sound impossible, but it’s true. Humans can hold conflicting ideas together in the same space and pretty close to the same time. The speed of thought limits the human mind in this function, which is how quickly we can mentally flip from one idea to the next; this is about as long as it takes a frame of film to advance and move the story forward. And each set of experiences informs the other.

When we watch a movie, we add that film’s collection of experiences to our own. And those experiences become part of us. Movies become part of us, especially the great ones. We each become more than we were before we watched the movie, and that’s the whole point of watching one to begin with, outside of seeking mindless entertainment.

Movies make actively aware viewers into better people, the deeper we look, and the more we watch them. Movies are tools to expand consciousness in real-time, emotionally, and through intellectual reflection. Whether a fictional character or a flesh-and-blood person, life is composed of creatures acting in critical situations with one another, and no life form acts in a void. Past experiences inform our current decisions, and we impact each other through behavior. Sometimes we impact with a hug and a kiss, and other times with weapons sharpened from tools meant for building.

There are numerous moral decisions made throughout Star Wars that correlate to nearly every aspect of our modern lives. We can think about Star Wars forever, but first, we need the entire experience (currently), and that is what this program seeks to deliver. Humans can project their thoughts through fictional narrative art and derive a moral analysis from the behaviors and consequences depicted on screen, which can then be applied to the never-ending news of the cruel world we unfortunately call “reality.”

Star Wars provides a fictional lens through which anyone can reconsider our world and our place in it. The goal of this 15-month viewing program is to ignite your self-respect, to focus your mind and heart together, and to activate your civic pride so that you can become a better person by watching and thinking about Star Wars.

A Long Time Ago…in 1977

The story of Star Wars is now much different and richer than when I first saw the movie on screen in the Summer of 1977. I was two years old, and I swear I remember it. My dad’s younger brother took me to see Star Wars one day when he was babysitting me, and I probably saw the movie for free because I was so small that I sat on his lap. I remember he told me that I shut up like a statue when the music started. I was an anxiety-riddled shit head of a toddler, but Star Wars always shut me up. Eventually, playing Star Wars also shut me up while I learned to tell my own stories within the small universe of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope.

The first Star Wars film released remains elegant in its brevity, clarity, and simplicity. It will always work as a standalone cinematic experience, but the film also contains a wealth of subtext and historical context. Subtext refers to the underlying meaning or significance that exists beneath the surface of the story on the page or screen. Sometimes, subtext is hidden in dialogue, as when Obi-Wan reveals to Luke that his father was a great student of his, until the worst creature in the galaxy murdered him through an act of betrayal. A machine-man betrayed everything he once claimed to love and murdered the people he had sworn an oath to protect, and somehow that involved Luke’s father and his destiny to begin his life on the planet furthest from the center of the galaxy.

Another subtextual revelation in the original Star Wars movie is how it teaches all viewers about the horror of genocide. Everyone who has ever watched Star Wars understands that destroying a planet of peaceful people is an act of supreme evil. That act of terror, and the near glee with which Grand Moff Tarkin undertakes it, sets a standard for the viewer’s understanding of how sick this Imperial society has become, and why Luke must not miss the shot into the ventilator shaft.

On one level, Star Wars is a simple moral tale of redemption and personal growth. On another level, Star Wars is a deep political and philosophical movie that is far more than just a son coming to terms with the innumerable sins of his father. Star Wars is also a story about how bad things get when greed and cruelty fuel a never-ending lust for power, driven solely by the petty pursuit of accumulating corrupted wealth and engineering immortality at the expense of all matter and life in the universe.

Star Wars is ultimately about how moral corruption takes root and spreads like a spiritual cancer, first from within the heart of the most courageous protectors, when they fail to show up just when they are most needed, matched by Imperial machinery that feeds on atrocity, grievance, and suffering.

Star Wars is a story about how a republic falls into dictatorship and then back again, as the cycle of ignorance continues to prop up ancient, broken institutions that no longer represent the will of the people, and new institutions, incapable of governing because all they’ve known is war, come to an end. Governing with balanced justice is the goal of civil society. No society has ever fully achieved that goal, not even those in a galaxy far, far away.

One thing that becomes apparent in Phase 2 of this viewing program is that the Jedi f***ed it in Star Wars; they really messed up defending the galaxy, so that not even Yoda could stop what happened, because he didn’t see the Phantom Menace until it was too late. The Jedi, as an institutional army rooted in an ancient religion, was plagued by self-righteousness, hubris, ritual, and myopia. By Episode III, the Jedi were so deflated and distracted by the painful ruse of the Clone Wars engineered on both sides by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine that they couldn’t see their biggest enemy had them caged in from all sides for years.

Emperor Palpatine is arguably the most fantastic story villain of our modern age. Though he shares a deus with dark-hearted characters like Voldemort, Walter White, and Hannibal Lecter, each of whom is interchangeable when considering the reasons why bad people do bad things to others who don’t deserve it. Uniquely, Star Wars is also about how religions still have good things in their most secret ideological spaces. A possible lesson from Star Wars is that religions need to be set aside once the limitations of their silence are exposed, ejected like a rocket booster after the flame has burned out, and it is only now weighing down the command module.

However, I believe Star Wars is ultimately about the profound wisdom of letting go of the past to embrace the present living moment and the people who share it with us. We may not all be here tomorrow, but we’re here now, and we can act with discipline and affirmation. Affirmation without discipline is the beginning of delusion, and this is a lesson you can learn for yourself by watching Star Wars and paying attention.

I have put together a Star Wars viewing program. We won’t be watching it together physically, but we can watch it together asynchronously. No matter where you are in this viewing program, if paid subscribers offer their thoughts and experiences in the comments of this Substack essay, they will be responded to with respect and seriousness.

The Star Wars Cinematic, Animated, and Serialized universe is a vast project to watch, and it’s going to take a long time to complete, but it promises to be both fun and rewarding. You’ll feel like a kid again. Or maybe you’re lucky and you are still a kid in your heart. After nearly fifty years of watching Star Wars, I still love watching and discussing it with others. I don’t complain about Star Wars. I don’t love everything equally, but I love the overall story and how Star Wars has taught me moral lessons that I carry inside, along with those I learned from Mister Rogers, Little House on the Prairie, Star Trek, and hundreds of other shows, films, and novels. Art still matters to me.

I spent a good deal of time thinking about the best way to watch Star Wars, but I’m old enough now that I’ll only get to watch Star Wars completely like this once or twice more in my life. I want those viewing experiences to be meaningful by bringing me joy and helping me find comfort in the chaos of our world through the fictional lens of a universe supported by an all-powerful force of natural wisdom that can be channeled and manipulated through freedom of choice.

If this viewing program functions as intended, it will expand your consciousness and deepen your joy in life. Movies are magic, and we can all use a little bit of magic each week. Maybe we both enjoy watching Star Wars. Or perhaps you’re not currently a Star Wars fan, but you’re willing to learn and try to understand why this complex story has become so important to so many people worldwide. I’ll bet more people on Earth watch Star Wars than go to church or vote, and it’s because Star Wars brings us hope. That word “hope” is literally in the title of the first Star Wars movie the world watched. Star Wars will always be a new hope for every generation.

Some Logistical Details…

The first thing you should know is that this program does not adhere to the established release order of the cinematic, animated, and serialized timeline. Nor does this program follow the current chronological order of the narrative. We’re not starting at the beginning with Episode I, and I hope to convince you why that would be a mistake if we intend to enter each phase with the proper context to get the most from the overall narrative. Instead, consider these as segments of consecutive storytelling that we will gather into phases and rearrange to fit the purpose of exposing specific segments of the story in a particular order, thereby supporting a consciousness-based understanding of the narrative. You’ll learn about this as we proceed.

You won’t see Luke Skywalker for a long time when we start this program, not until Phase 2. You won’t know who Anakin is or why he was sent to bring balance to the Force. You’ll meet a few Jedi, but they’ll be monkish weirdos fighting battles they can’t possibly win. Or, maybe they can. When we arrive to meet those beloved later characters, you will have a deep and unique perspective with which to experience the space opera tragedy at the heart of Star Wars, and I think it will mean more to you because your conscious thoughts will be expanded.

And by the time we get to the end, you’ll have so many thoughts about Star Wars that you may never stop thinking about it again. And wouldn’t that be wonderful? It beats scrolling through angry politics on your phone and worrying about the cruelty of the weather.

Please consider this viewing program a weekly movie club, where paid subscribers can share their experiences throughout their viewing in the comments section.

RECOMMENDATIONS:

Consider these other fine publications where Star Wars is intelligently and respectfully discussed.

The Death Star Human Resources Department Newsletter

Star Wars news...from a certain point of view.

By Jeff K

Ahch-To Baby

A newsletter about Star Wars by award-winning playwright Matthew Freeman.

By Matthew Freeman

Wherever you are in this Star Wars viewing program, please consider an annual subscription and share your experiences in the comments as you engage with this great art of Star Wars.

REPEAT MarketingMessage1

So, are you ready to commit to a 15-Month Star Wars viewing program?

All you’ll need is an active Disney+ subscription (or a library card and some patience) and will require three hours a week spent watching Star Wars.

Become a paid subscriber and get access to the whole program in this Substack post.

/END MarketingMessage1

Phase 1

PHASE 1 THE SPARK OF REBELLION:

“Ordinary Heroes, Impossible Odds”

The beginning of our Star Wars viewing program isn’t about chosen ones or ancient prophecies. It’s about thieves, spies, orphans, and soldiers who are forced to decide whether survival is enough. Solo, Rebels, Andor, and Rogue One show us how the galaxy’s “nobodies” and “has beens” are the only ones who can make tyranny bleed, and that’s because they have nothing to lose from resistance and everything to gain.

BEFORE THE BATTLE OF YAVIN (BBY) / AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN (ABY)

The Battle of Yavin is where Luke Skywalker blows up the first Death Star. This is a critical milestone in Star Wars, and we will use it as a reference point in time to understand the chronological order of events.

We begin Phase 1 around 13 BBY, during the cold period that follows the fall of the late Republic and the Rise of the Empire. This is a time of great suffering and danger. The galaxy is controlled by a merciless beauracracy that runs on suffering, corruption, terror, and death, all feeding into the ever-consuming will of a Dark Lord of the Sith. But we don’t understand any of this yet. At the beginning of our Star Wars viewing program, we see people who are hungry and barely surviving, yet they are remarkably skilled in combat and intelligent. Han Solo is a survivor…

Enjoy this conversation with Jeff K of , recorded in October, 2025.

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I hope it doesn’t bring you down.

I hope it lifts you.

I was lifted doing it.

In possibly the most narcissistic action I’ve taken in my life, I sought my own words from the past as comfort during this grieving process of losing our beloved dog Cora. I haven’t read this essay since I wrote it after our Boxer dog Louie (pictured below) passed away unexpectedly after a painful tumor burst in his gut, ending his quality of life.

And though I hadn’t read these in nearly three years, they were an instant comfort when I read them out loud for this Sunday’s Meditation.

They were written in a raw moment and convey a universal truth about love and loss that bled through me with the support of all my will. Something moved through me when I wrote this essay. And there is a magic in these words that would have healed my suffering regardless of who wrote them. It just happened to be me, and I just happened to know where to find them when I needed them most.

Because I took the time to write that shit down and shape it like art.

This is a sermon about love and loss, but this time it’s not about a movie; I’m giving you a critical analysis and appreciation for something that poured out of me like a tropical storm in Florida.

I hope you enjoy. I truly appreciate you taking the time to read and listen to the words I've put together for you.

Below, you’ll find the essay I read from during this Sunday Meditation. Thank you for reading. Please share with other intelligent people and consider a paid annual subscription as a form of support.

JB

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