There’s a particular species of person who tells you they’re “spiritual” within the first five minutes of meeting them, usually unprompted, usually with a faint air of having said something slightly superior. It’s worth asking why the claim needs making at all. Genuinely spiritual people - the quiet, disciplined kind - rarely announce it. The ones who do are often doing something else entirely: signaling status while dressing it up as humility.

The overlap between narcissism and performed spirituality isn’t coincidental. Both run on the same fuel: the need to be seen as exceptional, plus a deep discomfort with being ordinary. Traditional narcissism chases status through wealth, looks, or achievement. Spiritual narcissism chases the same thing through a different currency - enlightenment, awareness, “vibration,” proximity to some cosmic truth the unenlightened masses haven’t grasped yet. It’s status-seeking laundered through humility-language, which makes it harder to call out, because who wants to be the cynic picking a fight with someone talking about compassion and oneness?

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Emil Cioran, patron saint of people who’ve seen the game and laugh, once observed that we end up achieving the opposite of what we pursue - that life is basically a boomerang factory where every throw comes back to hit us in the face. Chase love, get hatred. Chase wealth, get poverty. Chase health, get a torn hamstring. Chase happiness, get a support group.

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Three centuries separate Spinoza’s Ethics (1677) from Freud’s founding of psychoanalysis, yet the two share a structural conviction: psychological suffering is driven by causes we do not initially understand, and understanding those causes is itself curative. Freud never hid the debt. He remarked more than once that he had “no right” to call himself the first to recognize the unconscious and the role of instinct in mental life, and biographers note that as a young man in Vienna he moved in circles where Spinoza was read seriously.

The overlap starts with the basic diagnosis. For Spinoza, we suffer because we are subject to “passions” — emotions caused by things external to us, which we register only through their effects, not their causes. We feel the sinking sensation and blame Joe for insulting us, without seeing the fuller chain that produced it. Freud’s clinical picture is strikingly parallel: neurotic symptoms are effects of unconscious ideas, memories and drives whose actual causes the patient cannot see. The patient’s conscious mind, like Spinoza’s passive mind, is gripped by forces it does not comprehend and therefore cannot govern.

Both then propose the same cure in outline: bring the cause into view. Spinoza’s “adequate idea” — clear, complete, causally grounded knowledge of the emotion — is remarkably close to Freud’s making the unconscious conscious. Psychoanalysis’s basic technique, free association followed by interpretation, exists to trace a symptom back to its real origin, on the theory that once the repressed material is understood, its grip loosens. Spinoza’s Part V of the Ethics says almost the same thing in different vocabulary: an emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion the moment we form a clear and distinct idea of it. Freud’s word for this was insight; Spinoza’s was adequacy.

There are real differences worth naming. Spinoza’s is a rationalist, near-geometrical system: the “cause” he wants understood is embedded in a deterministic order of nature, and adequate ideas are ultimately about grasping necessity itself, not excavating a repressed personal history. Freud’s causes are developmental and biographical — infantile wishes, trauma, the dynamics of repression — and his method is clinical rather than contemplative. Spinoza also expects that understanding alone reduces an emotion’s power; Freud came to think insight was necessary but often insufficient, requiring the slower work of “working through” resistance in the transference.

Even so, the family resemblance is real, and later thinkers noticed it explicitly — the psychoanalyst and philosopher figures who followed Freud, from Stuart Hampshire to Jonathan Lear, have argued that psychoanalysis is best read as a naturalized, clinical descendant of Spinoza’s rationalist therapy of the passions.

We are all searching for a ground, for something certain to build our lives on. To achieve this, we accommodate all kinds of pathetic ideas, and perhaps the most pathetic is the notion that we only need the here and now. There is no here, and there is no now. In fact, I have to admit that talk of here and now produces a feeling of nausea in me, probably because I too once believed this clap-trap. The notion of “here and now” is an idea, and all ideas are divorced from the reality they attempt to describe. Your body gets along just fine without your sickly sweet attempts to tell it how to live.

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Nietzsche announced that God was dead and immediately worried about the consequences: without a transcendent order, what stops meaning itself from collapsing? Most people quietly inherited that worry without quite admitting it. Institutional religion’s decline in the West didn’t eliminate the need it once answered - the need to be more than a temporary arrangement of matter that stops mattering the moment it stops moving. What’s followed isn’t calm secularism so much as a scramble of substitute metaphysics, each one doing quiet theological work under a scientific or philosophical disguise.

Consciousness studies supplies one candidate. Panpsychism - the view that mind or proto-experience is a basic feature of matter, not something that emerges accidentally from neurons - has moved from fringe to respectable in philosophy of mind, championed by figures like Philip Goff and Galen Strawson. Its appeal isn’t purely explanatory; it’s consoling. If experience is woven into the fabric of reality rather than a fluke of biology, then consciousness didn’t come from nothing and needn’t return to nothing. Integrated Information Theory, and looser talk of a “universal consciousness” behind quantum mechanics, serve the same function: dressing an old intuition - that mind is fundamental, not incidental - in the language of physics.

Idealism does related work from the philosophy side. Bernardo Kastrup’s “everything is mind” cosmology, or informal appeals to Donald Hoffman’s argument that spacetime is a user interface rather than reality itself, both relocate consciousness from a byproduct of the physical to the ground of it. This isn’t so different from Advaita Vedanta’s claim that individual selves are appearances of one undivided consciousness (Brahman) - which is precisely why Western seekers, from the Theosophists onward, have imported Vedanta, Buddhism, and Taoism wholesale. “You are the universe experiencing itself,” a phrase equally at home in a physics-adjacent podcast and a yoga studio, is nondualism repackaged for an audience that would recoil from the word “soul.”

Psychology contributes its own genre of substitute transcendence. Terror management theory, developed by Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski from Ernest Becker’s work, argues directly that culture itself - nationalism, legacy, art, ideology - exists to buffer death anxiety once literal immortality beliefs weaken. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious and archetypes offered a quasi-mystical structure beneath individual minds decades before consciousness researchers got there. More recently, “flow states,” psychedelic-occasioned “ego dissolution,” and the therapeutic vocabulary of finding your “true self” all gesture at self-transcendence without requiring belief in anything supernatural - Michael Pollan’s account of psychedelics deliberately borrows mystical vocabulary while insisting it’s all neurochemistry.

Even physics offers versions: the multiverse as a secular afterlife of infinite variation, and Max Tegmark’s mathematical universe hypothesis, which grants mathematical structures - and by extension patterns like minds - a kind of eternal existence.

None of this is necessarily dishonest. These are live positions with real arguments behind them. But their popularity follows the same gradient every time - audiences reach hardest for theories that make consciousness fundamental, unified, or persistent, and reach past equally defensible theories that don’t. That pattern is the tell. We didn’t stop needing cosmic significance when we stopped believing in God; we just started sourcing it from physics journals and philosophy departments instead of scripture.

The search for significance is a futile undertaking pursued by frightened people, but that won’t stop the search in all its desperate forms.

Somewhere in your body, right now, a tiny primitive alarm system is scanning for threats to your stuff. Not predators. Not weather, but another human ignorant of the territorial boundaries you place around everything.

Humans like to think we’ve evolved past the animal kingdom’s habit of peeing on trees to claim ground. We haven’t. We’ve just gotten more sophisticated about it, and considerably pettier.

Take land, the original territorial battleground. We’ve turned it into an elaborate bureaucracy of deeds, fences, and passive-aggressive notes about where exactly your hedge is allowed to grow. Nothing says “this is mine” quite like a property line dispute that outlives the two neighbors who started it and gets inherited by their unsuspecting children.

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Only stupid people believe in self-discipline, and this might include stupid spiritual people, stupid business people, stupid athletes, and so on. Self-discipline can be easily defined as one part of a person bullying the rest of the person. The part that does the bullying has ingested the idea that developing self-discipline will increase the host’s survival fitness. Very few people would be motivated to torture themselves with self-discipline in order to diminish their survival fitness. So we see people boasting of their self-discipline because they go to the gym every day, when in reality they are serving their survival and procreation drives - look better, live longer, feel better. It has nothing to do with self-discipline and everything to do with vanity, fear of death, and trying to earn an immortality pass. It’s the same with the businessperson who has turned themselves into a slave serving money and status. No self-discipline needed.

While self-discipline as an idea is nonsense, letting our survival and procreation drives determine what we do subjects us to unnecessary suffering. Understanding is much, much more effective than the perverted notion of self-discipline. Our drives create all kinds of self-torture in order for us to persuade ourselves that we are in control and marching forward into those sunlit uplands where death, illness, poverty, rejection, betrayal, lying, and low status do not exist. I have personally witnessed people with almost no understanding and a desire for great things treat themselves as slaves through self-discipline and arrive in the dark valleys where death, illness, poverty, rejection, betrayal, lying, and low status do exist.

If you do not want to indulge in delusional stupidity, gain some understanding. Your mind is an out-of-control problem-solving monster. Your emotions tell you the status of your survival fitness, and your desires tend to focus on survival and sex. As a machine, you will be driven by these things, but the more you understand them, the less power they have over you, and so you do not have to react to every prompting, and certainly you will never entertain the idea of self-discipline; leave that to the inadequate braggarts.

Busyness promises depth through motion. Fill the calendar, cross off the tasks, keep the momentum, and surely something substantial will accumulate. But depth does not work this way. Depth requires duration, the willingness to stay with one thing long enough for it to reveal itself. Busyness, by definition, cannot afford this. It moves on. And so each activity is grazed rather than inhabited, and the sum of a busy life is a wide, thin surface rather than a deep, narrow well.

This is why activity functions as a kind of opium. It does not solve the discomfort underneath; it sedates us against feeling it. The person who cannot sit still is rarely resting from something. More often, they are running from it. Motion becomes the anesthetic, and like any anesthetic, it wears off the moment we stop, which is precisely why we do not stop.

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Laugh is live on Amazon today — paperback and Kindle.

You’ve possibly read most of what’s in it across these posts over the years: the essays on impermanence, the ones on status and pretense, the short story, the aphorisms. What the book does is put it in one place, in the right order, with a beginning and an end.

The Kindle edition is $2.99 at launch for a few days. It goes up to $12 after that. I want the launch concentrated, which is why the price is what it is — if you’re going to read it, now is the time.

There is a particular power that belongs only to human beings: the power to negate. An animal cannot decide that its hunger is not the whole of its reality. It cannot step back from an instinct and say, “this is not me.” But a person can look at a belief they have held for decades and say, quietly, no. They can look at an opinion, sharpened over years of argument, and set it down. They can look at their own attachment to a person, a possession, a self-image, and release it — not through force, but through a kind of inner refusal that has no equivalent anywhere else in nature.

This is the beginning of the void. Not emptiness as absence, but emptiness as achievement — the result of a long labor of subtraction. Every idea we hold, we hold because we have added it to ourselves, layer upon layer, until we mistake the accumulation for identity. The void asks the opposite question: what remains when the layers are peeled away? Not “what more can I acquire” but “what can I release.”

Negation is not destruction. To negate an opinion is not to replace it with its opposite — that would only be trading one attachment for another. True negation empties the space entirely. It says: I no longer need to hold this position at all, for or against. This is why the void is so rare and so difficult. Most of what passes for open-mindedness is just a rotation of beliefs, a reshuffling of furniture in the same cluttered room. The void requires clearing the room.

As this negation deepens, something changes in the texture of experience. Thought, which is naturally restless — always reaching, comparing, defending — begins to quiet. This is the silence of the void: not the absence of sound, but the absence of the compulsive inner commentary that ordinarily never stops. Beneath that silence lies stillness, a stillness of will. The self stops grasping toward outcomes, stops leaning into the next moment, stops performing its usual work of wanting. And beneath stillness, darkness — not a frightening darkness, but the darkness of unlit rooms where nothing is being illuminated because nothing is being sought. Nothing is being watched for, because there is nothing left to defend or pursue.

This sequence — negation, silence, stillness, darkness — terminates in what might be called total repose. It is not sleep, not unconsciousness, but a wakeful emptiness in which the usual machinery of selfhood has been switched off by choice rather than by exhaustion. It is the one condition available to a being that can say no to its own mind.

What makes this uniquely human is not intelligence, or language, or tool use, but this capacity for negation itself. Other animals live entirely within affirmation — they are what they are, moment to moment, without the strange doubling-back that lets a person regard their own convictions as objects and refuse them. The void, then, is not an escape from being human. It is the fullest exercise of it — the one act that only a creature capable of saying no to itself could ever perform, and in that refusal, finding a rest that affirmation alone could never reach.

Without thought, there would be no problems. This isn’t mysticism — it’s a simple observation about what a “problem” actually is. A problem doesn’t exist in the world the way a rock or a tree does. It exists only when a mind compares what is happening to what it thinks should be happening, and finds a gap between the two. Take away the comparing mind, and the gap disappears. The situation remains; the problem does not.

This points to something worth examining: the mind is fundamentally a problem-solving device. Evolution built it that way. Early humans needed to spot threats, plan hunts, remember which berries were poisonous, and outmaneuver rivals. A brain that constantly scanned for what was wrong and how to fix it had a survival edge over one that didn’t. We are, in a very real sense, descended from the best worriers and planners of our species.

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Something Wrong

Most people would say there is a great deal wrong with the world, meaning that things should be different from what they are. Common complaints would include global warming, famine, wars, economic problems, and so on. Slightly more thoughtful people might think about death and suffering and see them as undesirables, but that’s about it. Typically, there is no further reflection, and personal issues such as a failing marriage, financial difficulties, illness, low status, loneliness, and so on just add to the feeling that everything is wrong. This feeling can lead to profound unhappiness, depression, and possibly worse. For the vast majority of people, there is no understanding of either themselves or the world, and so they suffer like animals; happy when things go well and unhappy when they don’t.

Nothing Wrong

Even a smattering of understanding about our own nature and the world can demonstrate that absolutely nothing is wrong. A brief recap of issues I’ve addressed many times:

1. We are driven by a survival drive that convinces us we are the only important thing in the universe and that others are just objects.

2. Life is a process of decay that leads to illness and death.

3. People naturally hate each other; they are competing for similar resources after all.

4. We are all machines driven by circumstances without any faculty of free will.

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The natural course of a person’s life is to become hollowed out, leaving nothing inside them except anger, resentment, and bitterness. We don’t start life in such a state, but as life progresses, disappointments eat away at the hopeful expectations we have. This hollowing out tends to accelerate as we get older, and generally speaking, many old people have lost all joy, to be replaced with bitterness.

The hollowing out process goes something like this. At an early age, and certainly by puberty, society will have created all manner of expectations: financial success, happy relationships, glowing health, and all ambitions realized. Up to the age of around forty, it seems that these things might be possible, although even at this age, betrayal, lack of financial success, poisonous relationships, and maybe health problems have made their mark. We can add to this the default state of envy, which affects many people and causes anger and resentment. Comparing ourselves with others is a sure-fire way to become envious, angry, and bitter.

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We are desperate to escape the confines of our mortal existence. Thought, emotion, desire, and sensation define what we can experience, but for many it is not enough. Although they may never have explored the scope of our thinking, our emotional nature, our desires, and our sensations, like a spoilt child, they easily tire of their toys and imagine the new toys will be so much more exciting. I’m reminded here of the latest craze drug DMT, which does nothing more than alter brain chemistry but is seen as a gateway to a new world of toys. Side effects can include anxiety, loss of muscle coordination, and maybe schizophrenia, like toys that were once painted with lead-based paint.

This quest to discover some extraordinary toy that will open up new vistas is everywhere. Academics and spiritual people talk endlessly about consciousness as though it were some magical thing that might offer salvation. I agree with the Buddhists that consciousness is just one of the five skandhas and is a property of the body that disappears when the body dies. Schopenhauer said pretty much the same thing when he said: “For consciousness is conditioned by the intellect, and the intellect is a mere accident of our being, for it is a function of the brain.” The academics are employing all manner of smoke and mirrors to prove the independent existence of consciousness, one of the leading characters being Donald Hoffman with his conscious agents and mathematical formulas that apply to them. I’m not exactly naive where mathematics is concerned, and with a bit of imagination you can conjure up any amount of mathematical nonsense. Sabine Hossenfelder’s book, “Lost in Math,” explains this very well.

My own approach to these things is captured by Immanuel Kant:

“Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.”

The questions are endless; our ability to answer them is limited, and all because we can ask a question doesn’t mean that it makes sense or can be answered. So a little humility is required. We are limited things, and maybe we should concentrate more on eating, defecating, sleeping, fornicating, walking, and other basic functions. As Gurdjieff commented, it’s a real achievement if someone can make a decent cup of coffee.

If we must ask questions, and it is a function of our problem-solving brains, then make sure they do not appeal to things that are beyond our experience. The risk of doing otherwise is to stumble through life chasing silly things such as enlightenment, awakening, non-duality, and the ultimate achievement of solving why a cow has four legs.

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Your mind is a problem-solving device, and the human mind has learned to use language and symbols to help it in that task. Now, the problems that occupy the mind’s processing usually center around survival and procreation in all the shades of gray that affect those things. But, being an out-of-control monster, the mind also works on all manner of problems that keep it entertained but serve no useful function. At a mundane level, crossword puzzles serve such a need. Much more damaging, however, are the spiritual quest, philosophical questions, and idle curiosity (why does a cow have four legs).

All of the constant stream of thinking that is a curse upon our species is driven by wanting, by desires both trivial and profound. Do not underestimate the negative effect of this incessant thinking; it can and does drive people mad and into the doctor’s surgery for prescriptions of anxiety and antidepressant medications.

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There is nowhere to go; can you bear it? The big problem for you is your daytime waking consciousness and its problem-solving mind. Having evolved to address survival issues and being well equipped to do so, it has come to believe it can address issues beyond its remit. Because your mind’s central capability is problem-solving, it creates problems just for the fun of it, although trying to answer its fun questions might lead to insanity or a life wasted on nonsense. What is consciousness? - a stupid question if ever there was one, but it doesn’t stop people calling it the “hard problem of consciousness” in the hope that they might solve this hard problem and be proclaimed geniuses. There are many other questions our out-of-control mind likes to ponder in its mental masturbation. Who am I, or what am I? Why is there something instead of nothing?

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Apparently, there are three parts to an attitude: how the thing in question makes you feel, what your behavior toward it is, and what you think about it. The most significant attitude we develop is the one we have toward life itself, and so it might be a good idea to form an impartial evaluation of life and determine a sane attitude toward it.

At this point, it is worth noting that most people will have no interest whatsoever in formulating an impartial attitude toward life. Being exclusively driven by the survival and procreation drives, they will think life is okay when these drives are largely satisfied, and will complain bitterly when fortune deals a crappy hand, and they come to know lack and pain. Obviously, this attempt to formulate a sane attitude to life will not appeal to people driven in this way.

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Sex and food: the great pacifiers of our inner beast, and if we don’t get the requisite amounts, we can get aggressive. Without that wafer-thin layer called civilization, we would revert to our natural state of violence, with the biggest brutes ruling the day. But civilization is a costly commodity; as Freud pointed out, we have to censor our natural aggression and sexual behavior so that things run more or less smoothly. As a result, we pretend not to be violent sexual monsters (men especially) and instead have created substitute behaviors, which means we spend most of our lives pretending.

Humans are not naturally friendly toward each other since we all compete for pretty much the same resources. Our overdeveloped greeting rituals reveal that we are pretending to be on good terms with others, and the more effusive and elaborate the ritual, the greater the pretense and the underlying hostility. As Freud commented, such is our nature that the request to “love our neighbors” cannot work when most of our neighbors are unlovable.

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Zen student: What is awakening? Zen master: The moon was very bright last night. Or, to take away the woo-woo and express it in everyday language, the Zen master is saying, “Shut the fuck up.”

Knowledge is nothing more than explaining one thing in terms of other things. What exactly are the other things consciousness can be explained in terms of? But the other things are known through consciousness. It’s all circular, which is why it is better not to give a shit.

We create Gods and then kill them when they prove ineffective.

We live by appearances; nature as eye candy, flattery and charm as sincere expression, all things new and shiny. We can’t help it unless we see the beast beneath it all.

How about that. Reality is as shallow as shallow can be. We flatter it with our lofty words and ideas.

The negative liberates, stripping away the shackles. The positive is for the fearful who need a soft cushion to rest on until it suffocates them. For these people, suffocation is preferable to freedom; it’s much safer.

There are no answers, so don’t even bother looking

Hope is an opiate for the fearful.

Rivers of inconsequential intellectual sewage, and I contribute to it.

Beware of declarations of love; they are usually declarations of ownership.

You will never be happy. Now, isn’t that a relief?

A sane, honest person might conclude that life is not worth the effort. This is a wonderful conclusion. To make life worthwhile, simply reduce the effort until the equation balances.

We all know we are lying, to ourselves more than others.

This is the worst of all possible worlds. If it were any worse, people would opt out.

If you feel like a stranger in a strange land, it’s because you are.

Enthusiasm is disgusting. The more enthusiastically we start something, the more we will abandon it with the same enthusiasm. The slow burn always wins.

Where human character is concerned, whatever manifests on the outside, the opposite is inside.

Why do people need to repeat their positive affirmations over and over? Simple - because they are not true and do not reflect reality. No one needs to repeat negative affirmations.

If you are miserable, you should rejoice, having flicked off the advice of all the smiling idiots, and been authentic enough to rest in the natural state for humans.

Do not regret the past. No matter what you did, it would have turned out badly.

Unhappiness is bliss. I’m aware that this confuses two ideas, but let me explain. Everything is against us, and we only maintain our existence through constant effort. Physically, we are required to feed the body and keep it in good order, but despite our best efforts, it is subject to disease, accident, and, of course, old age and death. The environment is unfriendly, posing constant threats. At a psychological level, we find ourselves competing with others for basic resources (food, shelter), status, significance, community, and support. However, the harsh reality of our existence is that others compete with us for the very things we want and, in effect, become adversaries (although we are too polite to say so). The social environment is hostile, and even the family is not without thorns. So, everything is against us. Some people have swallowed the secular and religious mantras that happiness is possible. When everything is against us, and particularly when we are aware that our lives end with annihilation, what mental gymnastics is a person required to execute to convince themselves that life is okay? What better person to summarize the situation than Schopenhauer:

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