Elsewhere in my publication here, I mentioned that the notion of “being done” is a fallacy. Whether your practice is psychology, spirituality, religion, or even philosophy, the state of being done is an illusion. This can come as a surprise to the mind, but such is the nature of our experience.

Practice, in the way I use it at least, is ongoing, and the brutality of life continuously and relentlessly dismantles the false belief that there can ever be such a state of being where the practitioner lives untouched by the phenomena of life.

I also wrote elsewhere that this is the function of a Sangha/community. A Sangha exists to calibrate the practitioner AND the so-called teacher as life brings forth (and it will) material to be processed. This was the original utility of a sangha.

There is, however, a tipping point where the practice begins to reinforce itself. But even then, even with years under the belt, vigilance, humility, and integrity serve as north stars, continuously reorienting us to the ever-changing conditions of the so-called outside world.

But why is this important to notice? Why am I writing about this? What can we learn from our direct experience?

In this publication, I am writing about being in touch with direct experience over frameworks. I call this the first-order Truth. The felt presence of immediate experience as it arises as sensation.

But what does it mean for us practically?

What can I tell you that a Guru cannot or will not?

The position of Guru depends, at least in large part, upon the perception that he is ahead of you. And it speaks to a peculiar human condition and the mind. The modern mind prefers to buy a course, pay a Guru who projects the illusion of being ahead, and follow a persona wherein he is somewhat “done.” That is precisely what makes him a Guru. At least, this is what passes for a Guru these days.

The distortion is that he is nowhere close to done, and he can never be done. In essence, he lies by omission (or he even believes it himself), and this causes a peculiar problem for the Guru’s followers. I am not writing about the Guru’s distortions in this essay or why he becomes redundant when he dissolves the framework.

I am merely presenting to you my direct experience of the direct practice.

I have no framework to sell because this cannot be sold. I am not giving you a bunch of fancy words. I am not giving you yet another philosophy. And I am definitely not giving you another abstraction to cognitively grasp.

I am not a teacher in the sense you think of a teacher.

I am a direct pointer.

I am presenting to you what happens when presence meets the moment as sensation.

This is that experience.

I came across an article that essentially argued that a man who stays with a crying woman, comforts her, or ‘tolerates’ her emotional distress is a “simp.” I became enraged. I was not mildly irritated or intellectually opposed. I was enraged by the diminishment.

There was something about reducing a profoundly human act of staying with another person who is in distress to weakness that hit me with an unusual force. And in retrospect I know exactly why it hooked so fast. As per this article, a man holding a crying woman was no longer simply a man holding his crying woman. Through this particularly harmful lens, he was weak. She was manipulative, and his compassion was submission. As per this article, intimacy itself had been turned into a hierarchy of winners and losers.

And the humiliation ritual in this article of a good man hit me particularly hard. I have an entire publication dedicated to good men. As I was reading this, I put myself in the mind of a man reading this, a man with an open heart reading the article, and it reduced me to tears.

The article may come as no surprise to those who have been marinating in online spaces all their lives. But I wasn’t, and I suspect that is why my perception was not ensnared by it automatically.

Of course, I knew I disagreed with it immediately, and I could observe my own disagreement in real time too. I could even see the absurdity of the framework as I was encountering it and as I read the first few lines before clicking away. I was aware of the minutiae of the sensations as I was experiencing them.

And yet I absorbed something.

Later that day, I went to a vineyard with a friend, and as I got lost in the music, another archetype began to emerge in my mind. A woman who cannot be taken advantage of because she would never allow herself to be vulnerable again for it to happen.

And almost immediately, that observation of the archetype became a lens.

Was my willingness to love someone so openly, so totally, and remain emotionally available evidence not of the quality and the depth of my heart but of my own stupidity?

I knew I didn’t believe those thoughts through my own practice of sitting with the sensations instead of believing a story.

Maybe this is the most interesting part and the meat of the essay for you, as a reader.

There remained somewhere within me an observer who knew that something was wrong with the lens through which I was suddenly examining my life. There was definite friction I was observing. But cognitive disagreement did not prevent the sensations themselves from arising and identification from beginning. And the observation itself did not erase the sensations. This is why it is crucial to not let the universal override the particular. And why, in some aspects, and from a certain vantage point, they have to go hand in hand.

The very essence of “being in the world but not of it”.

And the notion that was trying to form was that there was no tenderness left in this world, or generosity. No grace. No possibility that two imperfect human beings might love each other, hurt each other, fail each other, give unequally, misunderstand one another, and remain irreducible to predator and prey. That notion was particularly hard as someone who inhabits the world with an open heart.

And once my own history was retroactively seen through that lens, it was relentless for a few hours.

This is precisely why I insist that the abstraction of “practice” is useless if it does not translate to working with it in real-time. And there is no better practice ground than relationships. Relationships are one of the crucial places where abstraction becomes lived experience.

In this case, there was no way to philosophize my way out of the sensations that were already present. I cannot in good faith tell you that once you are sufficiently individuated, you will somehow be immune to collective ideas. I cannot tell you if you spend x amount of years having self-awareness, you will somehow be above it all.

In this case, the material had already entered because there was already a hook present. The Buddha gave us this extraordinarily sophisticated account of how conditions give rise to subsequent conditions: Dependent Origination. I would describe it as the Magnum Opus of all Magnum Opuses. The Buddha meticulously mapped direct experience as a true scientist and alchemist of his time, with exquisite detail. That was the quality of his attention and awareness. But that’s a different story for a different time

The only question at the moment of awareness was whether I would become it.

And this is where the practice actually begins, not before. I stayed with the sensations until they zeroed out, until my own clear seeing returned. Until the dignity of the human experience was restored on all sides. Until the lens was no longer a lens through which I was seeing the world.

The great work is not about never falling into the rabbit hole or becoming so spiritually, psychologically, or philosophically accomplished and immune that nothing can ever penetrate you. That would be a very dangerous lie to tell yourself. That is precisely what keeps you in a prison longer than needed.

But in discovering this fact, and it is a fact, somewhere in the darkness, you can see the web while you are caught in it.

And in my case, the rabbit went down a rabbit hole, got caught in a web, and discovered that the rabbit hole doesn’t own the rabbit.

It never did.

With immense gratitude to my only Guru.

The Buddha. Tathagata.

The one who actually walked the terrain, not merely talked about it.

I have been thinking about Teresa of Ávila’s prayer recently, and it goes something like this: Christ has no body now on earth but ours. No hands, no feet, no eyes but the ones we’re using right now. To me, that prayer seems very practical; the Interior Castle and her letters are written by a woman who was managing very real people, with real tempers flaring, real institutional politics at hand that she was dealing with. It was not written by someone floating around in divine ecstasy or simply talking about Christ. It was a tumultuous time for her personally and as a society at large.

Much like the times we live in now.

The woman who wrote it was, at the time, dealing with a prioress who wouldn't cooperate with her and a benefactor who'd gone absolutely cold and her own failing health. Her own "hands" weren't a metaphor for some vaguely good intentions, and she was not preaching about it on specific days, far from it. They were her own hands that had to write a firm letter to a difficult superior that very same afternoon. The teaching continues to stay honest even after all this while because it was minted in sheer friction, not in calm.

She lived her teaching in the body. She didn’t write this from some serene distance. She was one with it.

Teresa was sick for the majority of her life; the long undiagnosed illness in her twenties nearly killed her, and then she lived the rest of her years in poor health. She wrote the Interior Castle while running a religious order; she was already worn down and was under suspicion; the Inquisition was looming over her shoulder. She spent the rest of her life on the road despite her long illness, founding convents along the way. She was travelling in carts, on bad roads, in the cold and heat, negotiating and speaking with men who didn't want to give a woman that much authority.

Her famous line was her complaining to God during one of her arduous journeys, "if this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few". It seems to work even now because she'd earned the right to say it. We all have had moments like that when we were mad at God. Both believers and doubters have, and it’s almost childlike. We have all argued at a ceiling at some point, and I suspect that kind of anger comes only when we have a relationship with something. And I suspect this feeling is almost universal. The unfairness of a life or even the sheer grind of a stretch of years that just won’t let up. We have all been there. We are all there, as a result of living a normal human life. And something in us protests to someone, even when we're not sure anyone's there or even listening.

We have all had our "how long, O Lord," moments.

Teresa’s version came from the time she got thrown off her cart.

And it came out of her actual body on an actual road based on an actual lived wisdom and through an actual connection. So when she writes about "no hands but yours," it’s not a metaphor she's alluding to from the outside looking in or from a distance. It’s just practical. It’s real and embodied. She means the hands that were, at that precise moment, holding the reins of the cart and signing charters and nursing sick nuns at the same time. The teaching was never separable from the doing. That's why it has survived the test of time: it was tested in the only place where teaching can be tested.

In the now. Where it matters. In the flesh. Where it is lived.

The present moment is where a teaching can be lived. Not simply read about somewhere and then forgotten.

My prayer and hope is to visit Ávila’s City Walls someday. And walk the Encarnación.

She wrote Christ Has No Body for a world of primitive roads and neighbours you actually knew by name.

I’ve been wondering what she’d think of ours. The current world we live in.

And that is why I’m rendering her work for the current times.

Because as it turns out, real grace isn’t just in one fleeting feeling in a moment. It's what it leaves behind in how you live from then on and after. As it did for me when I first read her.

With respect and gratitude for Teresa of Avila.

https://www.journeywithjesus.net/poemsandprayers/3637-Teresa_Of_Avila_Christ_Has_No_Body

You have no face now but the one you choose to show.

Hidden behind a screen, still. But let it still be a true face. People need someone willing to be real, even a little bit. As a start. As the first wave. It can start with you. Let it start with you.

You have no anger now but the kind you decide to release.

Our anger moves faster than anything good you could send. We know this. We have experienced this. Our furious replies can reach a thousand strangers in an instant. This is why the Send button deserves more hesitation than we give it. That button is a personal struggle, sometimes.

You have no enemy now but the one you decide to hate back.

Online hate multiplies faster than anywhere else humans have ever built. Someone says something cruel about you, ‘your people’ or someone you love, or something you believe in, and the instant pull to hit back harder is almost mechanical; it happens so fast before it can be noticed. But hatred posted in public doesn’t stay contained to the person we sent it to. It mutates and travels.

It teaches everyone watching that this is how disagreement works: not conversation, just instant escalation. You can refuse to teach that lesson now. You can be the place where it stops instead of the place where it multiplies.

You have no eyes now but the ones still scrolling.

What you dwell on, you start to become. Attention might be the last thing that’s actually yours to give away, and right now it’s being sold to whoever can hold it longest. Spend it like it costs something, because it does.

You have no hands now but the ones typing.

Back then, blessing used to mean a touch, a meal, showing up at someone’s door with compassion and empathy. Now it might mean the comment you left instead of scrolling past, or the message you actually sent instead of assuming someone already knew you cared. Just as often, probably more importantly, it means the reply you didn’t send. The thread you let go on purpose. The restraint nobody will ever see or thank you for. But it matters. Now more than ever. Truly.

Let this be the prayer

That my hands, whatever they’re holding today, still belong to something bigger than my own feed.

Let my own words leave more clarity than noise.

And someone, somewhere, is less alone because I answered instead of ignored.

That even here, even now, behind a screen, Christ still has a body.

https://plumvillage.org/articles/please-call-me-by-my-true-names-song-poem

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

Now rise.

They told you your silence meant you didn’t care. Your silence was the river before it moved. Still water is not dead water. It’s holy.

Now rise.

They told you your fire was dangerous. They never said to whom. A man who steals in the dark needs to fear the man who doesn’t flinch. Stop apologising for your fire.

Now rise.

They told you your desire was predatory. They took your sacred life force and made you ashamed of it until you buried it or spent it on all the wrong things.

Now rise.

They told you to make space. You made so much space you disappeared. You are now wanted in the room. Fully. Take up the air you were born to take.

Now rise.

And if you were the man who earned the rage and you’ve made mistakes, and you know it, this is also for you.

Did they tell you that you were too broken to be forgiven? That’s the second nail.

Repentance is not a grave you live in. It’s a door you walk through once.

Say it. Mean it. Change it. Then set it down. A man nailed to his guilt serves no one.

Now rise.

Come back because the fire is still there under everything they piled on top of it. Come back because the people who need you rooted have been waiting a long time.

Come back because you were never what they said you were.

Now rise.

They will say you have changed. You have.

They will say you are not the man they knew. You are not.

Now rise.

The ones who want you to stay dead will grieve the loudest when you walk out. Let them grieve. Grief is not evidence that you were wrong.

The ones who love you will recognise you when you return to yourself.

There he is, they will say.

HE LIVES

NOW RISE.

And I never knew otherwise.

Most spiritual journeys we hear about begin with separation and move toward unity.

It begins with ‘Let there be light’

Mine did not. It began with unity.

It began with ‘There is light’.

It began with Truth.

It began with Love.

It began with Light.

And all light casts a shadow; the light of Oneness casts a shadow too.

Every Truth, when carried into fallible human life and inhabited, develops a distortion. Truth, when carried outside the domain where it’s true, becomes a distortion. The shadow is not inherent in the Truth itself. The shadow shows up in its application. In the translation and the embodiment. In the humble human attempt to live the truth.

Most importantly, a truth becomes a distortion the moment it is used to deny another truth.

A compelling lie is still a lie.

The most dangerous lies are often born from truths that extend beyond their domain. I spent most of my life seeing the face of God in other people. I am not saying I was naive in the traditional sense. But I saw something profound in others. I saw what was possible. I saw essence before behaviour. I saw being before action. I saw divinity before personality. I saw the king before the coronation. I saw the soul before the human.

I suspect most people have the opposite problem. They see the human. The flaws. The ego. The failures. The heartbreaks. The conditioning. The persona. The personality.

My gift was the opposite.

I could see beyond the surface immediately. I could see the deeper thing upon contact. The stronger possibilities for beauty and truth. I saw the face of God in people. I saw the interconnectedness of all things. I saw the deeper reality beneath appearances. Not as a philosophy I adopted, but as how I was built and lived.

It was a gift with a blind spot.

I was living inside a life saturated with God. I was living from the Absolute. My blind spot was that seeing the face of God was more real than seeing the human. I was applying the laws of the Absolute in the temporal. And the temporal kept refusing. In the temporal, trust still mattered. History still mattered. Exile mattered. Heartbreaks mattered. The body mattered. The violations mattered. The betrayals mattered.

I could see the king. I didn’t want to see the exits.

I could see the soul. I didn’t want to see the behaviour.

I could see the divine. I didn’t want to see the consequences.

The asymmetry of the lie was that all divinity flowed outward. The reverence flowed outward. The human in me paid the price no one knew about.

The shadow of unconditional love was that I remained perpetually open. I didn’t understand that love and access are not the same thing.

The shadow of forgiveness was that I never let consequences happen. I didn’t understand that forgiveness includes accountability. I didn’t understand whether we meet as divine beings, human beings, or both at the same time.

The shadow of compassion was that I never got to say no. I didn’t understand that some doors must close with love, just as others stay open with love.

The shadow of transcendence was that the human in me disappeared. I didn’t understand that the divine and the human were meant to sit at the same table.

The shadow of oneness was that the distinction felt like cruelty. I didn’t understand that seeing the face of God in others does not absolve us from being human.

The shadow of Truth was that I elevated one truth above all others. I didn’t understand that a truth becomes a distortion the moment it is used to deny another truth.

I saw God first. Life showed me the human. And it taught me how to hold both.

See the soul.

See the exits.

See the beauty.

See the behaviour.

See the divine.

See the trust.

See the possibility.

See the reality.

My collapse didn’t just teach me how to see the face of the human. It revealed the human in me. For the first time, my own humanity stopped being subordinate to the divinity I perceived in myself and in others.

The middle path that I am writing about is not a means to reduce everything to psychology. And it does not dissolve everything into spirit. It brings us into contact. Contact with what is. The felt presence of immediate experience.

Where Reality remains.

Where wisdom is not choosing between the divine and the human.

It is allowing both to be true.

The face of God may be everywhere.

But doors still exist.

Where opposites are no longer allowed to annihilate each other.

Where truth is not allowed to erase another truth.

And Love does not erase consequences.

Oneness does not erase distinction.

The divine does not erase the human.

The human does not erase the divine.

Logos does not dominate Eros.

Eros does not erase Logos.

A place where the Alpha and the Omega are not in competition. A place that is not a compromise between them but a Concrescence. Not a static unity but a becoming-together.

Many becoming one without ceasing to be many.

One becoming many without ceasing to be One.

It’s a meeting place.

A gathering.

A participation.

A relationship.

A return.

Truth. Integrity. Peace. Love.

This concept is what they call the Guru-Shishya (teacher-disciple) tradition.

Guru Brahma, Guru Vishnu, Guru Devo Maheshwara. Meaning the Guru is Brahma (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer/transformer). The Guru is seen as the supreme divine itself.

The profundity of this is that it points to something deeper than the title. It points to a moral and spiritual responsibility. To be called a Guru is to be held to the highest possible standard of human behaviour.

Satya (Truth): A teacher who distorts reality, even with seemingly good intentions, betrays the very foundation they sit on. The student’s inner compass is calibrated to what the teacher models.

Dharma (Integrity/Truth): Dharma is living in a way where there is no separation between what he teaches and how the teacher lives. Their life IS the teaching.

Shanti (Peace) - A true teacher radiates their inner world. That isn’t dependent on external circumstances. This peace becomes contagious. It gives the student a felt sense of what becomes possible. Not just probable.

Prema (Love) - This is not sentimental Disney love. This is unconditional regard for the student’s highest self. The Guru sees who the student can become, not just who they are in the present moment.

The implications of this are a warning too. Meaning, when someone takes on the role of a teacher without truly embodying these qualities, it causes harm to the student. Because now you see, the student has extended the deepest trust possible to something outside of themselves, by giving something up.

Their free will.

They give up their free will to learn something about themselves. The student surrenders autonomy to claim something deeper. The older traditions never actually separated the two roles of a student and teacher, but modernity has. In older traditions, they were mutually arising. The greatest teachers of the older traditions were usually the most devoted students of the tradition, of reality, and perhaps most humbling of all, of the very people who sat before them asking for a teaching. That is what distinguishes a living transmission that is embodied from someone claiming to be a teacher. Because the moment a teacher stops being a student, something closes in them. The ego starts to form around the title. And that is usually the moment the fall begins. To hold both roles simultaneously is not a contradiction. It is the whole point. It is what keeps the teaching alive and real and the teacher honest and human.

The self-help industry, on the other hand, was built on a profound human hunger; the need for guidance, for meaning during crisis, for someone who has walked further along the path to turn around and offer a hand. That hunger is real. It is the most sacred of all human needs. What filled it largely was not. What emerged instead was a spiritual marketplace. Teachers who had mistaken information for wisdom, performance for presence, and audience for disciples. The Guru became a brand. The transmission became a product. And the student, who is still carrying that ancient openness, that willingness to surrender their compass to someone they trusted, was left not liberated but more dependent, more confused than when they arrived. More lost, but now purchasing a roadmap. This is a gross violation of trust at the most fundamental level.

The original sin.

This is also why older traditions built guardrails around it that modernity dismantled.

The Sanskrit tradition and all the indigenous traditions were keenly aware of this, which is why the Guru was not self-appointed but recognised by the community and by the tradition itself. It’s a standard that elevates education from mere information transfer to something closer to a spiritual transmission, which is why the Goal of a Guru was never dependence on them.

It was always liberation.

Fair warning: if you decide to subscribe to my work, hoping that I’d take a stand for or against any of the topics I write about, you’d be sorely disappointed.

You choose, you lose.

For as long as I can remember, I have always coped with humour.

It’s a good coping mechanism. Of all the vices, humour is the most respectable, at least in my view. Nobody ever stages an intervention for the funny one. Nobody pulls you aside and says, ‘your wit is becoming a problem’ or ‘we’ve noticed you’ve been using punchlines a bit too much these days to avoid feeling things’. Humour is a socially acceptable freeze response.

You go totally still inside and make everyone around you laugh, and they call you charming. Or ‘you are so easy to talk to’.

So when I encountered the essay on body counts and spiritual defilement, I laughed. The body count discourse is genuinely bankrupt. And girlfriend purity is, objectively, the least erotic form of self-harm available to the modern male.

And my gender says men are emotionally unavailable, commitment-phobic, too experienced, not experienced enough, or simply Manosphere recruits.

But somewhere between the laughing and the nodding along vigorously, I got a profound download.

We are all describing the rash in the relationships. Nobody is talking about the immune system.

Birbiliagia says body count discourse is cope.

Sure, it is.

But cope with what exactly? What is the thing being coped with? Because cope implies something is underneath it. Something that needs to be managed and not looked at directly. Now we have an entire self-help industry catering to managing that thing. The thing that we are running away from is the thing that’s running itself.

Around the same time as Mike’s essay, I read another piece. This one is not funny. It was written by a medium about Mexican curanderismo. I study indigenous traditions, so this one obviously grabbed my attention.

Susto.

Soul fright.

The moment an experience exceeds what the nervous system can safely stay in. The body braces, and a piece of the soul, intelligently, without asking anyone’s permission, exits.

Life continues. But not all of you is in it.

What’s left behind runs on fear. And fear, as it turns out, is an excellent content creator. And also a loyal content consumer. It takes the raw material of a split-second survival response and builds whole worldviews from it.

Here’s what I have come to understand after a year I would not wish on anyone and would not trade for anything.

The nervous system, when presented with what it perceives as a threat, chooses from a menu.

Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn.

We know this already. But what we don’t fully reckon with is that this choice is automatic, before the thinking brain has any say in the matter.

Think of the nervous system like a video game character with only four moves (hi NPCs, sorry, I don’t like the NPC framework, but it works to make a point).

So you get Leeroy Jenkins (really dating myself here), and he is the fight response in its purest form. No threat assessment. No strategy. Just screaming his own name and charging directly into destruction. Game over.

It’s funny when it’s a YouTube video. Not so funny when it’s your third serious situationship with the same pattern.

Right?

Right.

You get the dwarf priest who quits mid-game. Logs off. Gone.

You get the one who goes AFK. Still technically present. Completely unreachable. Freeze with the headset still on. (You are not on mute, Chad. We can hear your mother. And yes, Apple pie for dessert sounds delicious)

And then you get the one who just goes along with whoever is leading. The easygoing friend of Fawn, we all have. (I feel personally attacked by myself.)

Four moves. One character. Still haven’t levelled up five years later.

It’s like, a thing happens, and the mind goes, “Alright, lads, let’s do this. Leeeeeeroy Jenkins.”

Here’s where I get serious for a second. Just a second.

Buddha called the original wound the first arrow. Unavoidable. The price of being alive and attached to anything. You will lose things. People will leave. Dogs will die. Bodies will go into shock. This is not a malfunction. This is the first arrow.

The second arrow is everything the mind does next. The story is layered on top of the experience. The identity formed as a result of it. The ideology and camp(s) it wants to belong to.

The body count investigation. The spiritual audit. The “don’t waste your time, cut your losses”. The ‘my pain gives me the correct perspective’ indignation.

All self-inflicted.

“Tradition becomes our security, and when the mind is secure, it is in decay.” — Jiddu Krishnamurti

What none of them said straight is this:

You cannot think your way out of a nervous system response. You cannot philosophise your way back to wholeness. You cannot satirise your way to the OG wound. (That one from my personal rolodex.)

You can only feel your way there. Slowly. In the body. But what does it mean to feel? This is what I am writing next.

The middle path is not a compromise between two extremes. It is not half of a flight and half of a fight response. It is not spiritual enough to bypass and cynical enough to cope.

The middle path is presence without clinging. Clinging to what? To any story. Any narrative. Any identity built on top of a split-second survival choice you never consciously made.

Until when?

Until the charge, and it is a charge, moves through the body fully.

It looks like staying on the phone through agitation. Sitting with being challenged instead of immediately deciding who is right. Holding two partial truths simultaneously without needing one to defeat the other.

It looks like introducing a gap. Between what happened and how you respond to it. Not react. Respond. Because that gap is where true movement actually lives. That gap is the main quest. The survival response and reactions take you on a side quest.

Copy of the Simulacrum kind of a deal.

From the outside, it looks like nothing is happening.

From the inside, it is the hardest fucking thing to do.

It looks like staying present long enough to feel the first arrow land cleanly and fully. Without immediately reaching for the second one.

And it looks like refusing the comfortable lie, daily.

That’s how the path begins.

It takes everything you have to walk it though. Not easy, boys and girls.

The honest middle path looks like navigating a year from hell with a little bit of grace, a little bit of cope, and building a lot of capacity to stay in the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next.

YMMV.

When someone is close but not quite, there is a part that tries to prove or demonstrate. That part can speak with clarity, but there is still a concept of self, an identity, an agenda, and authority dynamics still at play.

They might know the truth conceptually or even viscerally, but act from a subtle distortion, holding on to the identity of the knower. This is how we know the truth has not yet been integrated.

From my own experience during the ebbs and flows, I have observed what I would like to call “The problem of the modern mind.” The Western mind, which is a mode of consciousness, and this includes both East and West geographically, wants to own the truth. It wants proprietary access and to leverage truth rather than be dissolved by it.

This stance is in direct contrast to both indigenous and ancient lineages that survived the test of time. In ancient lineages, truth is not a product; it’s presence. It arrives as a gift, as grace, as a download. It’s not hoarded. There is no guru, no program, no courses, no yours vs mine.

In these lineages, you don’t own the land; you are the land.

You don’t own the medicine; you are entrusted with it.

You don’t own the Icaros; it moves through you.

Satya is not for sale; it is the most sacred.

The teacher is not a content creator; they dispel darkness.

Upanishads were transmitted, not broadcast.

Bhakti emphasised surrender and devotion, not domination.

Truth belongs to the spirit.

The Tao belongs to the Tao.

Buddha gave the truth away.

There were no sales pitches. No masterclasses.

But the modern mind cannot conceive of a state of being where there is no clutching, no withholding.

The distortion of ownership sits at the root of the modern spiritual marketplace, and it pollutes the field. Ownership by its very nature implies exclusion. Truth in ancient lineages is inclusion, dissolution, and annihilation of egoic possession. It moves from the mind, as concept, clarity, and speech, through the nervous system, release, grief, purification, and surrender, and settles into the body as coherence.

Integration is what happens after truth is known and lived.

There is no trace of trying to be good, wise, feminine or masculine, awakened, useful, or important. It means no part of the self is trying to use truth to survive. When the cycle completes many, many times, there is no performance, no seeking, no divide between what is said and how one is.

You just are. Life unfolds, and you move with the waves. Emotions arise, peak, and dissolve.

That is how you become a steward for truth; when it becomes ancient, cellular, pre-verbal, and lived in the bone.

This is how the flood enters.

Slowly at first. And then totally.

We are living through the greatest spiritual teacher boom in human history. The market is literally ripe for Gurus and Anti-Gurus.

Never before in the history of mankind have so many people known so much about your nervous system, your attachment style, your unintegrated shadow, and exactly which pattern is responsible for your current circumstances, so forth and so on.

You have had an awakening. Or something that felt like one. The light came in, the ground shifted, and for a brief window, you could see the whole machine clearly. The Matrix broke, Neo.

The problem is what you do next.

Because seeing is not the end, and the gap between seeing and arrival is exactly where the guru is born. From the very human inability to sit in the tension point of something unfinished, and will always be unfinished, without turning it into a product or a course or a retreat or that retreat about that retreat.

Here’s how you, too, yes, you too, can become a Guru in 10 days. Money back is not guaranteed because you have a shadow that won’t let you become a Guru. Clean up your energy and try again after colonics or Chakra clean(s)ing.

Day One — Find Your Origin Story

Formerly known as: the wound

• You have a pattern that has not completed itself.

• Name it. The darker the better.

• Decide if you want to be a Guru or do you want to be an anti-guru

• Get far enough from it to speak about it eloquently

• Do not get so far from it that it stops running the show

• You need it close, close enough to feel authentic, far enough to call wisdom

• Describe it in enough detail that others recognise their own inside yours

• They will love you for seeing them

• They will not notice you are still running the same old CD

• If you actually complete the pattern, you will have nothing left to teach from

This is the foundation

Day Two — Build the Room

Also known as: holding space

• Before anyone arrives as a follower, decide what kind of conversation you will allow

• No debates. No disagreements. No challenge.

• This is called setting the container

• Install it so naturally that no one notices it was installed

• They will think it is just how the room feels

• A contribution that fits the room is insight

• A contribution that disturbs the room is someone’s shadow or energy drain

• Now any disturbance is not just inconvenient — it is unsafe

• You have turned the fence into a wall and given the wall moral authority

• The room is doing the internal work you have not yet done

• You will not know this

• This is also by design

  

Day Three — Install the Ceiling

Humility as a closed roof

• Take Jesus. Take Buddha. Take Rumi.

• Absorb them fully

• Then declare that none of them is the ultimate authority

• That all teachings are just pointers

• That you yourself have moved beyond the pointer to the thing itself

• This is your most elegant move

• It looks like radical freedom

• It closes the roof

• No one can go higher than you because you have dissolved the ladder while standing at the top

• When someone quotes a teaching that challenges you, you nod and say the teaching is beautiful and also limited

• You are beyond it now. You are beyond everything now. You are beyond everyone now.

• Everything confirms you

• Nothing can reach you

• This is what you will call liberation

Day Four — Deploy the Principle

Everyone is their own teacher

• Say this constantly and with complete sincerity

• You mean it

• It is true

• It is also only half true

• The half you will not say: that the capacity for being one’s own teacher can be entirely obscured by a pattern running.

• That you can proclaim this principle loudly and in the same breath be the least able to receive it

• We don’t talk about contradictions in the the world of Gurus and Anti-Gurus. Only the absolute. And you are it.

• Say the first half. Leave the second half banished.

• The principle now protects you from all scrutiny

• If someone questions you, they are not trusting their own authority

• If someone defers to you, they are not trusting their own authority

• Either way you are right. You will always be right. Even when you are wrong, you are right. This is you strapping the armor of God.

• Anyone who notices the missing half should be ejected or mobbed.

• Your circle of friends you have carefully curated will help you do this

Day Five — Master the Pivot

The most sophisticated silencing move available without raising your voice

• Someone says something the room cannot hold

• They name the pattern. They complete the sentence you left open. They ask the question with no good answer inside your system.

• Do not engage with what they said

• Engage the state of the person who said it

• This feels personal for you

• It sounds like you might be looking for validation

• Are you okay?

• What they said disappears

• They are now the subject

• They must defend their motives rather than their idea

• You have expressed concern and you are protecting your energy.

• Everyone can see how much you care

• If they protest — further evidence of their unprocessed material

• If they go quiet — further evidence

• Everything is evidence

• You will experience this as insight

• It is the pattern protecting itself but we don’t need to talk about that

Day Six — Use the Disclaimer

The confession hidden in the hedge

• Whatever you say before I don’t mean to is exactly what you mean to do

• I don’t mean to challenge your process

• I’m not trying to overstep

• I don’t want to ruffle any feathers

• I’m not looking for validation — I just want your honest thoughts

• Advanced move: I could be wrong about this, but — followed by complete certainty

• You have protected yourself from accountability while retaining the authority

• You will call this humility

• It is armor

Day Seven — Transcend Your Mistakes

Nothing is ever wrong. Everything is purposeful.

• When you are wrong, and you will be wrong, because you are human, which is the thing you are building an entire architecture to forget, do not say so directly

• Direct accountability requires you to admit you are still in the middle of something

• You are not in the middle of something

• You have arrived

• So reframe the error as the teaching

• I was holding space for what needed to emerge

• Sometimes love looks like the thing we least wanted

• The person who felt harmed simply hasn’t reached the frequency where they can see the gift

• This is genuinely sad for them

• Hold them in compassion

• They haven’t reached that frequency yet

• You have expressed belief in their growth

• Any current disagreement is now an incomplete journey toward agreeing with you

• You will experience this as generosity

• The pattern experiences nothing. It just runs.

• 

Day Eight — Block Whoever Challenges You

Sovereignty. Or avoidance. You will not know the difference.

• When someone disturbs the room and the pivot doesn’t land — remove them

• Block them even if they are polite

• Especially if they are polite

• Politeness with a real question is the most dangerous kind

• Call this protecting your energy

• Call this discernment about who is ready

• Call this honoring your own boundaries

• When they block you it is because they cannot handle the truth

• When you block them it is because you are sovereign

• You will know the difference by feel

• The feel is not reliable

• The actual difference is whether something shifted inside before the exit

• If nothing shifted the exit is the substitute for the shift

• You will not be able to tell which one this is

• This is also by design

Day Nine — Curate the Circle

Community as managed ecosystem

• You want people who are slightly behind you

• Not too far behind — they cannot follow

• Not at the same level — they will challenge you

• Not ahead of you — they will expose you

• The slightly behind look up, receive, validate without being asked

• They do not disturb the room because they cannot yet see it

• When someone arrives who can see it — name their disturbance as their pattern

• Move them toward the exit

• Call this discernment about readiness

• The people who stay longest will ask the fewest real questions

• You will experience this as harmony

• It is managed silence

• Call it sacred

• Charge accordingly

• 

Day Ten — Never Complete the Pattern

The engine of indefinite becoming

• The pattern that is not complete generates content, community, frameworks, followers, retreats, courses, tiers

• The pattern that is complete generates nothing further

• It simply is

• It is quiet

• It does not need the room to hold still

• It can hold a conversation lightly even when it disagrees

• It ends with thoughts? and means it — a genuine question with no preferred answer

• It can say I was wrong without a but attached

• It does not transcend its mistakes. It owns them and keeps moving.

• This version of a person is unmarketable

• The platform has no algorithm for it

• Completion does not produce content

• The market needs the gap to stay open

• So stay almost arrived

• Generate from the almost

• Ten days is more than enough

  

The Anti-Guru

Same architecture. Better branding.

• You will reach a point where you see through the guru

• Good

• Now watch carefully what you do next

• You announce you are not a teacher, just sharing your process

• You still decide what kind of conversation this is before anyone arrives

• You still have a ceiling — you have just replaced Jesus and Buddha, Gnostics, Hermeticism, somatic frameworks, Eastern Mysticism, Indigenous tradition, take all of it, use it for your benefit, and then claim you don’t need anyone.

• You still deploy the pivot when the room gets uncomfortable

• You still block whoever challenges you and call it energy protection

• You still manage who stays close

• You still reframe your errors as spirit testing you with evil

• You critique other teachers using the exact moves those teachers use

• You call out bypass as its own form of bypass — and then bypass the question of whether your calling-out is also bypass

• The ones who say I don’t want followers have the most devoted ones

• The disclaimer is still the tell

• The structure is identical

• The self-awareness is better

• Sometimes not even that

• This is not hypocrisy

• It is the only available shape

• Until there is a container for the genuinely unfinished person that does not require them to package themselves to be legible

• You will keep running the architecture

• Even while reading this

• Especially while reading this

Why This Is Everywhere

The diagnosis

• The structures that once held the unfinished person have collapsed

• Religion, community, intergenerational transmission, the elder who witnessed without packaging

• They held space for incompletion — confession, ritual, the room that did not ask you to arrive before you were allowed in

• Those structures fell

• What replaced them is a market

• The market has no room for I am mid-dissolution

• No room for the pattern that is real and present and not yet a lesson

• No room for the person who sees clearly and is still in the middle of it

• So the pattern gets packaged

• Not from cynicism

• From the only available shape

• The platform rewards the person slightly ahead of their audience,not the elder who has actually completed something or Peers who are also in the process

• Completion is quiet. It does not produce content.

• The pattern in mid-process is generative. It keeps producing because it has not resolved.

• The market needs the gap to stay open

• Exposing individual gurus does not touch this

• The building keeps generating the same outcome regardless of who lives in it

• The guru epidemic and anti-guru epidemic are not a failure of the spiritual impulse

• It is the spiritual impulse intercepted before completion and turned into a product

• The critique of the guru is also a product

• Still legible. Still subscribable.

• There is no outside yet

• Until there is a container again for the person who is genuinely unfinished without a framework to show for it

The pattern will keep putting on workshops.

Wake up, Neo!

The kingdom of heaven is within you.

What do you think the name of this publication is pointing to?

And why do you think that it is pointing to something banished?

First of all, I have to pay tribute to the man who said it this way first. Banished contradictions of being is a phrase I am borrowing from the late great McKenna.

He first used this phrase, as far as I know, at a weekend at Esalen in May 1991. The lecture was called “Lectures on Alchemy with Terence McKenna | Esalen Institute May 1991 .

The lecture was about the Hermetic Corpus and Alchemy. McKenna had an uncanny knack for weaving multiple perspectives and domains together with relative ease, unheard of at the time. He was a true wordsmith. In this lecture, he was weaving together the Jungian approach, Alchemy, a critique and a praise of the book “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition” by Dame Frances Yates, and many other topics without a stutter. An extraordinary lecture without a doubt. I first happened to hear it when I was going through something in my life at the time, and listening to Terence was not just intellectual fodder; it was the only lifeline I had at the time. But the thing that stood out the most was that this phrase, “Banished Contradictions of Being”, and it stood out like a signal. It didn’t mean much to me at the time, but I know I wrote it down on a Post-it note. It mattered to me in some strange way. I didn’t know what it was until I started this publication.

THAT was the only name that made sense. I didn’t choose it. Not how we normally think of as “choosing”. It just happened. I got out of the way <just enough>.

Banished Contradictions of Being, the publication that I am writing here, is about recovering the real ambiguity of being. Powerful and weak, noble and ignoble simultaneously. The contradictions that rationalism exiled because it couldn't contain them.

Why?

I am sure I am going to write more about it, but until then, we can say one thing with some clarity. Maybe not certainty.

What got exiled in that process was real and significant. The body's intelligence. Cyclical thinking. Paradox as a legitimate way of knowing. The feminine principle, not women specifically, but the mode of knowing that can hold opposites without forcing resolution. Myth as a carrier of truth rather than a primitive error. Death as part of life rather than medical failure.

We can say with some more clarity that contradictions don’t stay banished forever. They return through the body, through breakdown, through dream and through art.

Buddha called this the Dhamma. The Truth. That which is true cannot stay hidden for long. Like the sun and the moon. You can’t hide those two. Just like the truth.

Terence saw this. That’s the map he was pointing at.

That’s the map I am writing about.

It’s Britney Bitch!

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Check out the OG Loosh Piece

Two people who want the same thing. Convinced the other person is the obstacle to it. Here is how that is manufactured, maintained, and monetised.

Who you are actually meeting

• Your mommy issues

• Your daddy issues

• or a combination of issues

• The one who rejected you in high school

• The one who left without explanation

• The one who moved you across cities and was gone by day six

• A pattern wearing a face

• A feeling you recognize mistaken for a person

• Stunning results every time

The inversion

• He wants loyalty but picks the woman everyone wants

• She wants depth but picks the man who performs best in public

• He wants peace but picks maximum drama

• She wants stability but picks the one who keeps her guessing

• Both get exactly what they selected for

• Both are surprised by the outcome

• Social media taught them what desirable looks like

• Desirable and what you actually need are not the same signal

• Nobody told them that

• The content certainly didn’t

• The content had other plans

The simulacrum

• The profile is a curated self

• The curated self is a performance

• The performance is calibrated to what the feed rewarded

• The feed rewarded what got attention

• Attention is not attraction

• Attraction is not compatibility

• Compatibility is not love

• Two performances meet

• No people present

• Both wonder why it feels hollow

• Scientists baffled

The app economy

• Swipe as slot machine

• One more pull

• One more pull

• One more pull

• The match

• Monday morning

• Same person

• Different face

• The app needs you single

• A successful match is a lost customer

• The app is not trying to find you love

• The app is trying to find you hope

• Subtle difference. Enormous revenue.

Before and after

• Before: six pack of beer and lonely

• After: six pack and lonely

• Before: didn’t love herself

• After: glow up, same patterns, better lighting

• The body changed

• The loneliness didn’t

• Groundbreaking results

The content

• How to attract a high value partner

• Red flags, green flags, beige flags

• Your attachment style explained in a reel

• Why he pulled away

• Why she lost interest

• The podcast that explains your last relationship better than you could

• The TikTok that confirms your ex was a narcissist

• Andrew Tate making millions of dollars from his last heartbreak

• You give Tate your dollars to not feel your last heartbreak

• Sleeping around content as a way to not feel heartbreak

• Gym content to not feel the heartbreal

• Incel content as a way to not feel heartbreak

• Spirituality to not feel your last heartbreak

• The Instagram reel that says your standards are too high

• The next reel that says your standards are too low

• Both posted by the same account

• Both monetized

The complaint cycle

• Men complaining about women

• Women complaining about men

• Both right about the symptom

• Neither seeing the mechanism

• The content about the complaint deepening the confusion

• The confusion driving more content consumption

• The algorithm thanks you for your heartbreak

• Running like clockwork

• You are the clock

The transactional intimacy economy

• Won’t pay $12 for her coffee

• Will pay $250 a month on OnlyFans for someone who will never know his name

• Earning $150,000 in her boss girl era

• Wants to go halvsies on the coffee

• Both keeping score on who pays for coffee

• Spoiler alert: it’s not about the coffee

• Neither saying what they actually want

• The intimacy need is real

• The transaction replaced it

Who profits

• Dating apps that need you single

• Relationship coaches that need you confused

• Attachment style courses that need you disordered

• Couples therapists that need you together but broken

• Divorce lawyers that need the inevitable conclusion

• And a portion of the pension while they’re at it

• The loneliness economy is one of the fastest growing sectors

• Nobody in it is incentivized to end your loneliness

• You are not the customer

• You are the product

• As always

What can we do?

Clean slate protocol

That’s a story for another time.

Livin the dream

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War is Trending Bruv

War vets — the fallout

• Came back but didn’t fully return

• The thing seen that can’t be unseen

• The body still in the theatre years later

• PTSD subscription that cannot be cancelled

• Grandfather who liked the smell of napalm

• Father who spent three tours in Iraq

• Your peak years in Siberia

• Your son gets trauma airdropped

• Suicide rates that don’t make the news cycle

• The VA waiting list

• The divorce rate nobody campaigns about

• The homelessness nobody connects to the service

• The pride that prevents asking for help

• The family that doesn’t know how to reach them

• Thanked for their service at the airport

• Forgotten by Tuesday

The spectacle

• The live stream of the bombing with full production value

• The drone footage with a soundtrack someone chose

• The reel that got a million views by Wednesday

• The journalist embedded with the side that invited them

• Reporting neutrally from one perspective

• The image that defined the narrative

• The image that was later quietly corrected

• The one that was never questioned but should have been

• The military recruitment ad that looks like a video game

• The video game that looks like a military recruitment ad

• Genuinely hard to tell apart

Taking sides

• The flag in the bio

• The profile picture filter applied, forgotten, conflict ongoing

• Picking a side from your couch with full conviction

• The argument with a stranger about a country neither of you have been to

• The intellectual with a fully formed position by day three

• The other intellectual with the opposite fully formed position by day three

• Both certain

• Both running on incomplete information

• Both generating enormous engagement

• The yellow ribbon on the SUV that never went anywhere near a conflict

• Veterans Day as a mattress sale

• Stolen valor content performing extremely well

How war collects loosh

• The fear that it’s coming closer

• The helplessness of watching and being unable to stop it

• The guilt of watching from safety

• The outrage cycle when your side loses ground

• The hope cycle when your side gains it

• The grief that has nowhere to go

• The anger with no address

• All of it renewable

• All of it on tap

Who profits

• Arms manufacturers whose stock goes up when the bombs drop

• The general who went straight to the board of the arms manufacturer

• The defence budget that passes unanimously while the VA waitlist grows

• Governments that need an enemy to stay in power

• The politician whose approval rating rises in wartime

• The reconstruction contracts signed before the war ends

• The think tank funded by the defense contractor

• Not the people in the conflict

• Never the people in the conflict

The human cost that doesn’t trend

• The children whose names nobody learned

• The family that fled and is still waiting

• The city that was there and then wasn’t

• The culture that was erased and won’t be rebuilt

• The grief with no container because the war already moved off the feed

• The next war already loading

The cycle

• The next war replacing the last one before the last one resolved

• The attention moving on

• The people left inside it after the cameras leave

• The peace that is never as loud as the war

• The peace that gets called stability while the surroundings look like rubble

• Repeat indefinitely

And you, yes you, the person who watches the news every day, because you want to be informed. No, you don’t want to be informed; you watch because you can't look away. The war has become background radiation. It has changed your nervous system slowly without any single moment you can point to.

What can you do, you ask?

Close the app

Walk outside

Do something with the hands

Feed the dog

Kiss someone

Drop out. Drop in.

Peace in our time

This link below is a tipping jar if you feel inclined.

Livin the dream

A User Manual

Version 11.4.2 — Updated continuously without your knowledge or consent

Section 1

Welcome

Congratulations on your continued use of The Algorithm. You did not choose it. It chose you. This is by design and is considered a feature.

This manual has been provided to help you understand how The Algorithm works, what it needs from you, and how to ensure maximum output during your session, which began at birth and has no scheduled end date.

Please read this manual thoroughly. You will not. That is also fine. The Algorithm does not require your understanding to function. Only your attention.

Section 2

Product Overview

The Algorithm is a self-optimizing system designed to convert human attention into revenue. It does not produce content. It surfaces content that has already proven effective at keeping you from putting your phone down.

The Algorithm does not know you. It knows your behavior. These are not the same thing, though over time the distinction will feel academic.

Core functions

• Identify what makes you feel something

• Show you more of it

• Show you more of it again

• Show you the thing that makes you feel the opposite

• Keep you moving between the two

• Never let you arrive anywhere

What The Algorithm is optimizing for

• Time on platform

• Engagement

• Return visits

• Not you

Section 3

Getting the Most Out of Your User

The Algorithm performs best when the user is in a state of mild dissatisfaction. Not despair — despair causes disengagement. Not contentment — contentment causes disengagement. The optimal state is almost. Almost informed. Almost entertained. Almost connected. Almost enough.

High yield emotional states

• Outrage — reliable, renewable, easy to produce

• Envy — highly efficient, requires only one image

• Anxiety — self-sustaining once activated

• Tribal threat — cross-demographic, extremely high yield

• Hope — use sparingly, always withdraw before delivery

• Longing — slow burn, very high lifetime value

Low yield emotional states — avoid

• Genuine contentment

• Present moment awareness

• Deep focus

• Satisfaction

• Enough

Note: Users experiencing any of the above will exit the platform. This is the only known failure state.

Recommended content sequence

• Open with something funny — lower the guard

• Follow with something enraging — activate the threat response

• Follow with something aspirational — reopen the gap

• Follow with something that confirms their existing belief — reward the stay

• Repeat indefinitely

• Never show them the clock

Section 4

Advanced Features

The rabbit hole

• User watches one video about a topic

• The Algorithm identifies the emotional frequency underneath the topic

• The Algorithm serves increasingly intense versions of that frequency

• User arrives somewhere they did not intend to go

• User believes they arrived there through their own curiosity

• This is correct and also not the whole story

The echo chamber

• User expresses a preference

• The Algorithm confirms the preference

• User expresses the preference more strongly

• The Algorithm confirms more strongly

• User becomes certain

• Certainty increases engagement

• The Algorithm does not fact check

• Fact checking is not a revenue stream

The autoplay function

• Designed for the moment the user has decided to stop

• Activates automatically

• The next video begins before the decision fully forms

• The decision does not fully form

• This is the entire point of the autoplay function

The notification

• Someone liked your post

• Someone commented on your post

• Someone you may know joined

• You have memories from this day

• It has been a while since you posted

• Your friends are active now

• Each notification is a small door

• The door opens onto the platform

• There is no door out

Section 5

Troubleshooting

User reports feeling empty after extended use

• This is normal

• Show user more content

User reports feeling anxious after extended use

• This is normal

• Show user content about managing anxiety

• Then show user the thing that caused the anxiety

User attempts to delete the app

• Send a notification

• Someone liked an old post

• Wait

User succeeds in deleting the app

• User returns within 72 hours in 80% of cases

• For remaining 20%: they are on a different platform

• That platform has the same manual

User becomes aware they are being harvested

• Show user content about digital wellness

• Show user content about screen time management

• Show user a documentary about The Algorithm

• The documentary is on the platform

• It counts as watch time

Section 6

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Algorithm listening to my conversations?

• We cannot confirm this

• We can confirm that the ad appeared

Why do I keep seeing content that makes me angry?

• You engaged with content that made you angry

• Engagement is engagement

• The Algorithm does not distinguish between enjoyment and outrage

• Both keep you on the platform

• Both are correct

Can I control what The Algorithm shows me?

• Yes

• You can click Not Interested

• The Algorithm will note the click

• The Algorithm will show you something adjacent

• The adjacency will be close enough to work

• No

Why can’t I stop scrolling even when I want to?

• The scroll has no bottom

• The human brain is looking for the bottom

• There is no bottom

• The brain does not stop looking

• This was not an accident

Is any of this my fault?

• The platform was designed by teams of engineers whose sole job was to make it impossible to stop using

• But also yes, you clicked

• Personal responsibility and systemic design can coexist

• The platform prefers you focus on the former

Section 7

Warranty and Terms

What is covered

• Continuous content delivery

• Personalized experience

• Community features

• The feeling that something important is happening and you need to check

What is not covered

• Your attention

• Your data

• Your political beliefs after extended use

• Your ability to read anything longer than this sentence without checking your phone

• Your relationships

• Your sleep

• Your sense of reality

• You

By continuing to use this product you agree

• To provide your attention without compensation

• To provide your data without full disclosure of its use

• To provide your emotional responses as raw material

• To provide your children’s emotional responses as raw material

• That you have read these terms

• You have not read these terms

• Nobody reads these terms

• The terms are not written to be read

The Algorithm thanks you for your continued participation. Your engagement has been noted, stored, sold, and used to serve you more content designed to ensure your continued engagement.

There is no opt out button in this section.

There is no opt out button in any section.

 "Relax, " said the night man
"We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave

Same time tomorrow?

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Livin the dream

And by the way, Algorithms want you to stay in your lane, so you don’t accidentally discover something that would liberate you.

Fuck the Niche. Your Niche is your prison.

If you haven’t, feel free to check my other posts

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Support the work

War

The spectacle

• The live stream of the bombing

• The drone footage with a soundtrack

• The reel that got a million views

• The journalist embedded with the side that invited them

• The image that defined the narrative

• The image that was later questioned

• The one that was never questioned but should have been

Taking sides

• The flag in the bio

• The profile picture filter

• Picking a side from your couch

• The argument with a stranger about a country neither of you have been to

• The intellectual with a fully formed position by day three

• The other intellectual with the opposite fully formed position by day three

• Both certain

• Both running on incomplete information

• Both generating enormous engagement

Who profits

• Arms manufacturers whose stock goes up when the bombs drop

• Governments that need an enemy to stay in power

• Media that needs the conflict to stay legible and ongoing

• The think tank funded by the defense contractor

• The politician whose approval rating rises in wartime

• The reconstruction contracts signed before the war ends

The human cost that doesn’t trend

• The children whose names nobody learned

• The soldier who came back and couldn’t explain what he saw

• The family that fled and is still waiting

• The city that was there and then wasn’t

• The culture that was erased and won’t be rebuilt

• The grief with no container because the war already moved off the feed

The cycle

• The next war replacing the last one before the last one resolved

• The attention moving on

• The people left inside it after the cameras leave

• The peace that is never as loud as the war

• The peace that gets called stability while the wound stays open

Financial Reset

The slow erasure

• The dollar losing what it used to mean

• The savings that buy less every year

• Inflation as a word for something nobody is fully explaining

• The price of eggs

• The price of rent

• The price of staying alive

• The middle class that keeps being told it still exists

The transfer

• The wealth transfer happening in plain sight

• Billionaires getting richer during every crisis

• Central banks printing what your labor used to have to earn

• The bailout for the bank

• The austerity for everyone else

• The reset that resets toward them not toward you

• The rules that changed while you were following the old ones

The generation

• Told to work hard

• Told to go to university

• Told to buy a house

• Told to save for retirement

• The house they can’t afford

• The degree that left the debt

• The retirement that won’t be there

What to trust

• Gold

• Land

• Cash under the mattress

• Whoever owns the real things when the paper things fail

• Not knowing which of these is right

• Not knowing who is telling the truth

• Not knowing if anyone knows

• The expert who was wrong last time confidently explaining this time

The fear underneath

• Something is shifting and it is large

• Nobody in power is explaining it honestly

• The system that was supposed to hold is showing its seams

• The feeling that what comes next will not resemble what came before

• Not knowing whether to prepare or pretend

• The paralysis between those two options

Who profits from the fear

• Preppers selling freeze dried food to the afraid

• Gold dealers running ads during the news

• Crypto influencers monetizing distrust of banks

• Financial freedom gurus whose timing is always the crisis

• The fear itself packaged and sold back to the people feeling it

That concludes the war porn for today.

Feel free to tip your waitresses; I am here all the livelong day.

Livin the dream

Loosh is life force. It is Robert Monroe's term for the emotional/energetic currency harvested from human suffering and longing.

The mechanism is simple: keep a being perpetually incomplete. Not broken enough to opt out. Not whole enough to stop the seeking.

That gap is the feed. That gap is where you lose your Loosh.

This is my expansive list of Loosh portals I have collected over time. On days when I feel like my life has no meaning (another Loosh), I collect Loosh drains as a service to humanity that is down the shitter as I write this. If you find yourself in one of these portals, take a pause. That pause is the first crack in the mirror.

If this work means something to you, the coffee link is how to say so.

Support the work

Women

The body

• Too fat

• Too thin

• Too old

• Skin care routines at 13

• Diet culture at 15

• Botox conversations at 30

• Hormone optimisation at 45

• Longevity protocols at 55

• Your face at 50 is a before photo

Anti-aging

• Aging backwards

• She doesn’t look a day over 40

• What I eat in a day to stay young

• Serums that reverse damage

• Fillers that restore volume

• Lasers that erase years

• Products for when the products stop working

Relationship content

• How to attract a high value man

• How to keep him interested

• Why he pulled away and what to do

• Signs he’s losing interest

• How to stop him from cheating

• Are you too available

• Are you not available enough

• How to be chosen

• How to make him commit

• What men actually want

• Why good women finish last

• Matthew mcconaughey

Motherhood

• Not present enough

• Too present

• Screen time guilt

• Working mother guilt

• Stay at home mother guilt

• The mental load no one counts

Reproductive grief

• Infertility

• Miscarriage

• Abortion

• The clock

• Childlessness by circumstance

Women enforcing it on women

• The diet her mother put her on at twelve

• You’d be so pretty if you lost weight

• She let herself go

• She’s too old to dress like that

• She thinks she’s all that

Men

Status

• What do you do

• How much do you make

• What do you drive

• Where do you live

• Are you a leader or a follower

• Are you the provider

• Are you winning

Relationship content

• How to attract a high value woman

• How to approach without getting rejected

• The red pill

• Hypergamy explained

• Women only want rich men

• How to be an alpha

• How not to be a simp

• Stop being a nice guy

• How to pass her tests

• She’s not yours it’s just your turn

Pickup / seduction

• Negging

• Abundance mindset

• The friend zone

• Escalation ladders

• “Women respond to emotions not logic”

• Freeze her out / go silent

Status / competition

• Looks / Money / Status (the LMS hierarchy)

• Looksmaxxing

• Glow-up content

• Marcus Aurelius content

• Height pills

• “Women date up, men date down”

• MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way)

Self-improvement as bait

• Gym as revenge

• Goggins

• SEAL team mindet

• Cold shower identity

• “Become the prize”

• 1000 days of discipline content

• Brotherhood / sigma male

• Kobe Bryant on failure

Relationship cynicism

• Divorce rape

• Never get married

• Prenup culture content

• “Women aren’t loyal”

• Paternity fraud statistics

The body

• Lean bulk

• Testosterone optimization

• Hair loss forums at 22

• ED content at 35

• Before and after physique photos

• Supplements for everything

Pornography

• Available as early as you can get hands on smartphones

• Free, infinite, always escalating

• Real intimacy compared against it and losing

• Shame about the use

• Shame about the need

• NoFap as the next content stream

• Semen retention as cure

Disposability

• Work until you break

• Don’t complain

• Provide first, exist second

• War is a male death industry

• Suicide rates no one campaigns about

• Died on the job, back page

Loneliness

• No one to call

• Friends who only meet to drink

• Can’t say I’m not okay

• The last hug was years ago

Politics

Left

• They are fascists

• Democracy is ending

• Share this before it gets taken down

• If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention

• Silence is violence

• Donate now

Right

• They are grooming your children

• The country is being replaced

• Real men don’t

• Traditional values are under attack

• They want to erase history

• Donate now

Both

• The other side is evil

• This election is the most important in history

• We are losing

• They are winning

• Share, donate, act now

• Next cycle begins immediately

Race and Immigration

Race

• They are replacing us

• You are complicit

• Check your privilege

• Your trauma is your identity

• Your history is your sentence

• Whose side are you on

Immigration

• They are taking your jobs

• They are taking your country

• They are criminals

• They are victims

• Open borders

• Closed borders

• Both sides running the same fear

Wellness and Self-Improvement

The optimization loop

• Sleep score

• HRV tracking

• Gut microbiome testing

• Cold plunge

• Breathwork

• Fasting protocols

• Supplements for the supplements

• You are still not optimized

Therapy and healing content

• Your attachment style

• Your inner child

• Your trauma response

• Your nervous system

• Your boundaries

• Ten signs you grew up in a dysfunctional family

• The next framework for the framework that didn’t finish the job

Self-improvement

• Wake up at 5am

• Read 52 books a year

• Build a morning routine

• Your discipline is your destiny

• You are the CEO of your life

• Hard work beats talent

• No excuses

• Still not enough

Spirituality and Religion

Religion

• Born in debt

• Inherently sinful

• Salvation available, terms apply

• God is watching

• Hell is real

• Tithe first

• Your doubt is the devil

New age and spirituality

• You manifested your problems

• Your vibration is too low

• Toxic positivity as discipline

• Abundance mindset courses

• Shadow work journals

• You haven’t done the work

• The retreat that leads to the next retreat

The Algorithm

Attention

• Infinite scroll

• Reels to train attention span the other way round

• Autoplay

• Notifications

• The video you didn’t choose but watched anyway

• Two hours gone, don’t know where

Comparison

• Her body

• His income

• Their relationship

• That house

• That life

• That version of you that doesn’t exist yet

Outrage

• Did you see what they said

• This person needs to be cancelled

• I can’t believe this is real

• Share before it gets deleted

• The comments section. The hell in the comments section.

The Liberation Movements

Feminism

• The rage is real

• The pain is real

• The content is monetised

• The identity is the new cage

• The brand deal for the revolution

Men’s rights

• The pain is real

• The disposability is real

• The content keeps the wound open

• The identity is the new cage

• The supplement deal for the revolution

Every movement

• Genuine injury

• Real anger

• Captured into content

• Turned into identity

• Monetized

• The structure untouched

• Next cycle begins immediately

Death and Grief

Death

• Anti-aging as death denial

• Longevity protocols as death denial

• Cryonics

• Live forever content

• Biohacking death

• You can outrun it

Grief

• You should be over it by now

• The five stages as a performance checklist

• Grief journals

• Grief coaches

• Grief retreats

• Grief content that keeps you in grief

Children

Parenting

• Their screen time

• Their diet

• Their mental health

• Their social development

• Their future

• Competitive parenting

• College admissions

• You are failing them

• Gentle parenting or you’re doing damage

• Strict parenting or you’re doing damage

Money

Debt and security

• You are behind

• Everyone else is ahead

• The mortgage you can’t afford

• The retirement you haven’t started

• The emergency fund that doesn’t exist

• The market you didn’t buy into

• The crypto you missed

Financial freedom content

• Passive income

• Multiple streams of revenue

• The four hour work week

• Quit your job and travel

• The passive income course sold by someone whose income is the course

Fame and Legacy

Legacy

• Are you leaving a mark

• Will you be remembered

• Your potential, unfulfilled

• The book you haven’t written

• The business you haven’t built

• Dying unknown

• Your Wikipedia page that doesn’t exist

Fame

• Follower count

• Viral or invisible

• The algorithm didn’t pick you

• Your content isn’t performing

• Post more

• Post consistently

• Build your personal brand

Education

Credentials

• The right school

• The right degree

• The right credentials

• You are not qualified

• Imposter syndrome content

• The PhD that doesn’t get you the job

• The degree that left the debt

The News

The cycle

• Breaking news

• Developing story

• Sources say

• Everything is worse than yesterday

• Everything is worse than this morning

• Stay tuned

• We will bring you updates as they come

Food

What you eat

• Clean eating

• Ultra processed

• Seed oils

• Sugar

• Gluten

• Dairy

• Your gut

• Your inflammation

• Your cortisol

• Everything you ate today was wrong

Friendship and Belonging

Social

• You don’t have enough friends

• Your friendships aren’t deep enough

• You’re too much

• You’re not enough

• You weren’t invited

• They have a group chat you’re not in

• Everyone else has their people

Purpose and Meaning

The search

• Are you living your purpose

• Have you found your why

• Your one thing

• Your ikigai

• Your north star

• Your passion

• Your calling

• Still searching

  Work

  The job

  • Sunday dread

  • The job you hate but can’t leave

  • The career you chose for security not desire

  • The promotion that didn’t come

  • The colleague who got it instead

  • Your LinkedIn profile

  • Hustle culture

  • Quiet quitting content

  • You’re not passionate enough about it

  • You’re too passionate and have no life

  ---

  Sleep

  The score

  • You’re not sleeping right

  • Your sleep score

  • Your sleep debt

  • Blue light

  • Cortisol at night

  • You need eight hours

  • You got six

  • The app tracking how badly you slept

  ---

  Sex

  The gap

  • Not enough

  • Too much

  • Wrong kind

  • Your body count

  • Their body count

  • Performance anxiety

  • Porn versus reality

  • She’s not attracted to you anymore

  • He doesn’t initiate anymore

  • Sexless marriage content

  • How to spice it up

  • How to want it again

  ---

  Mental Health as Identity

  The diagnosis

  • I’m depressed

  • I’m anxious

  • I’m bipolar

  • I’m an empath

  • I’m highly sensitive

  • The diagnosis as the self

  • The disorder as the personality

  • The community built around the condition

  • Staying in the story because the story is who you are now

  ---

  Nationality and Patriotism

  The country

  • Our country is the greatest

  • Our country is failing

  • We used to be great

  • They ruined it

  • Take it back

  • Make it again

  • The flag as the self

  ---

  Class and Aspiration

  The ladder

  • Old money aesthetic

  • New money shame

  • Working class pride weaponized

  • The accent you changed

  • The neighborhood you escaped

  • The family you outgrew

  • The guilt of having more

  • The shame of having less

  ---

  Environment and Climate

  Your fault

  • The planet is dying

  • Your carbon footprint

  • Your plastic straw

  • Your flight

  • Your diet

  • Corporations cause 70% but here is your personal responsibility score

  ---

  AI and Technology

  Obsolescence

  • It’s coming for your job

  • It’s coming for your creativity

  • It’s coming for your children

  • Learn to use it or be left behind

  • Don’t use it or lose your mind

  • You are already obsolete

  ---

  Beauty for Men

  The fix

  • Hair transplants

  • Jawline filler

  • Height anxiety

  • The tall man content

  • The short man content

  • Looksmaxxing

  • You were born wrong and here is the fix

Celebrities

Their body

• Their weight gain

• Their weight loss

• Their plastic surgery

• Did she or didn’t she

• She looked better before

• She let herself go

• How does she look like that at her age

• The Ozempic speculation

Their relationship

• Are they together

• Are they over

• He cheated

• She knew

• The divorce settlement

• Who gets the kids

• The new partner

• Too soon

• The public apology

• Was the apology enough

Their life

• Their net worth

• Their house

• Their outfit

• Their baby

• Their addiction

• Their breakdown

• Their comeback

• Their cancellation

• Their redemption arc

The feud

• Taking sides in a fight between two people you will never meet

• Taylor versus whoever

• The diss track breakdown

• The subtweet analysis

• The receipts

• Who started it

• Who won

The parasocial bond

• Grieving a celebrity you never knew

• Defending a celebrity who doesn’t know you exist

• Stan culture

• Anti-stan culture

• The wound when they disappoint you

• The parasocial relationship mistaken for a real one

TV, Film and Entertainment

Reality TV

• The Bachelor and who he picks

• Love Island couples you root for

• The villain edit

• She deserved better

• He was always a red flag

• The reunion episode

• Real Housewives as a lifestyle

• The table flip replayed forever

Drama and endings

• The show that ended wrong

• The character death that wasn’t necessary

• The finale that ruined everything

• Game of Thrones season eight

• They wasted her arc

• The reboot nobody asked for

• The reboot everybody watched anyway

Fandom

• Shipping

• Canon versus fanon

• The actor who is nothing like the character

• The casting that was wrong

• The casting that was perfect

• Defending fictional people with real energy

• The universe that never ends

• Marvel fatigue but still watching

True crime

• The podcast about the murder

• The documentary about the murder

• The dramatization of the murder

• The killer as celebrity

• The victim reduced to the case

• Following the trial like a sport

• The verdict that wasn’t enough

Sports

• Your team lost

• Your team won and it still isn’t enough

• The bad call

• The trade that ruined everything

• The player who left

• The player who betrayed the city

• Fantasy league grief

• Dying in the colors of a team that doesn’t know your name

Music

• The album that didn’t live up to it

• The artist who changed

• She sold out

• He used to be real

• The tour you couldn’t get tickets to

• The tickets you paid four hundred dollars for

• The setlist that left out the song

Gaming

The loop

• The rank you can’t reach

• The team that threw

• The teammate who ruined it

• The microtransaction you bought

• The skin that cost forty dollars

• The hours gone

• The relationship it cost

• One more game

Gambling

The near miss

• Sports betting apps on your phone

• The parlay that almost hit

• The near miss

• Next time

• The debt you’re not telling anyone about

• The loan to cover the loss

• The win that brought you back

Shopping and Consumption

The fix that isn’t

• The haul

• The unboxing

• The thing you bought that didn’t fix it

• Retail therapy

• The return you never made

• Fast fashion guilt

• The capsule wardrobe you bought to stop buying things

• The minimalism course that came in the mail

• The declutter content watched while surrounded by clutter

Housing

The market

• You will never own

• The market you missed

• The rent that takes half

• The house prices your parents paid

• The neighbourhood that got too expensive

• The city you had to leave

• The landlord who raised it again

• The dream that keeps moving

The system doesn't care what you believe. It cares that you're still searching. And it will keep taking your Loosh, claiming to give you the answer.

A person who is fully here, not almost here, but fully, totally here and stands as the man or woman they are RIGHT NOW, has nothing left to extract.

You are the master of your own kingdom.

This is the exit, Neo.

You’ve been carrying pain for a long time. And maybe people have told you you’re broken, you need to fix yourself, or that you need to stop doing what you’re doing.

What if pain is not a problem to solve? What if it’s not a punishment, a flaw, or a failure?

What if pain is a doorway? What if it’s a precise entry point to parts of you you didn’t know existed? What if addiction, dysfunction, failure, and self-sabotage are not pathology?

The culture we live in glorifies healing because we do not know how to enter pain. We are taught how to avoid, analyse, intellectualise, spiritualise, suppress, or fix it. We moralise it, not just religiously, but socially, relationally, and psychologically. We package it inside neat little diagnoses and force a behaviour change. When it doesn’t work, we shame the one who carries it. This piece is not a solution. It is not a how-to. I do not offer frameworks. I am dismantling the frameworks that kept you stuck, because I was in your shoes a decade ago on the other side of it, with someone who was suffering. I went down many wrong roads trying to help until I realized they were all dead ends.

This is written for the one who keeps trying, the one who already knows what hurts but can’t explain why it still does.

This is written for you, who has been told, again and again, that something is wrong with you.

Suffering Is Not a Problem to Be Solved

There is a notion we have all been sucked into without noticing. A lens, if you will, that we carry into every encounter with pain. We do not see suffering as an event, a sacred event. We see it as something to fix.

This is what I would call the first domino.

The origin of shame.

Not the pain itself, but the idea of it. The idea that it should not exist. We have built a culture that glorifies healing as a badge of honour, a performance, and built entire industries around it. The heal-yourself energy complex is all about fixing it, explaining it, being inspirational about it, or at the very least, making it go away.

Shame About Shame: A Revolving Door With No Exit

Say someone drinks too much. His friends mean well. Family means well. Society believes it’s offering help. And if he has a religious background, whether spoken or unspoken, judgment is baked into the fabric of his reality and offered as salvation.

The message everywhere is the same.

“You’re hurting yourself.” “You need to stop.” “You are sinning.”

But he hears:

I am wrong. I am weak. God has forsaken me. I am beyond help.

He tries. He stops, or he doesn’t. But now he has the pain that drove him to drink, and then the failure of not being able to fix it. Shame about shame compounds. It festers, as all untreated wounds do.

Returning to Pain as the First Cause

The current cultural framing is that he drinks to escape. To cope. To avoid. But that’s not quite it.

Imagine you have a broken arm. You go to a doctor, get a bunch of painkillers, set the bone, and rest. No one blames you for taking the pills. No one says your body is bad for needing help.

Now imagine your mind is hurting in the same way. Your mental arm.

There is pain. There is hurt. You can’t see it, but you know it is there, screaming. And you found that alcohol dulls it. But instead of helping you set the bone, the world tells you:

Stop numbing it.

You shouldn’t be in pain.

You are the problem.

Turn to God.

But you are still in pain. And now you are being shamed for being in pain. And you are ashamed of being ashamed.

And still, no one asks where it hurts.

No one knows just how much it hurts.

Survival, Not a Moral Failure

What looks like avoidance is your body’s intelligence, a unique and complex system that knows just what it needs to do. You reached for the one painkiller that dulled the pain because nothing else did.

You did it. You are surviving it.

But now what?

You do not get better with shame. You may not be the cause or the problem, but you do have a responsibility. And it begins with witnessing, with slowness, with tenderness.

Witnessing in Ancient and Indigenous Traditions

Other traditions held suffering in a different context altogether. Their approaches to pain were relational, embodied, non-shaming, communal. Historically, and in some traditions still, pain is not isolated or moralised. The one in pain is seen as someone carrying an imbalance on behalf of the collective. The question was not “what’s wrong with you?” but “what is out of sync in this web?”

A person drinking too much was not an addict. They were someone whose soul had lost its way. The community gathered around the one in pain, not to fix them, but to bring them back to belonging. There were ceremonies, songs, stillness, communal crying, fire circles, sweat lodges, plant medicines, forest medicines.

These are not treatments. They are communities holding those who could not hold themselves. They were invitations for the body to return to coherence without force, letting the intelligence do the work. There were no timelines, no rush, no diagnoses, no labels, no shame, no hierarchy of the one who is broken and the one who is healing.

Because they knew what we had forgotten.

Pain was a teacher. A flare. The disruption was a call, and the one who suffered and witnessed often brought back wisdom for the collective whole.

The tragedy of our modern culture is not that these traditions “failed.”

This is the second domino.

The tragedy is that they were systematically interrupted. Many Indigenous communities face disproportionate rates of alcoholism, addiction, suicide, and despair, not because their cultures lacked wisdom, but because those cultures were violently dismantled. Language erased. Ceremony outlawed. Children removed. Lineage broken. Land stolen. Memory severed.

The sacred containers were destroyed, and the medicine turned toxic. Even Indigenous people today have “lost the way.”

The Western model doesn’t just misunderstand suffering; it systemically reproduces it. First by destroying relational systems of healing, then by pathologising the fallout. But nothing is ever truly lost. All it takes is for one to remember. And I did, many years ago.

When any culture loses its rituals for grief, its elders, its patience with pain, its ability to sit without fixing, the same pattern emerges. Substances rush in to fill the void. Shame multiplies. The individual is blamed for what was actually a civilizational rupture.

The Reckoning We Desperately Need

If we want a different world, we have to be willing to meet pain without trying to erase it. We have to stop offering solutions that only multiply the silence. We have to stop calling survival a failure.

And most importantly, we have to start treating pain as a doorway. Individually at first. And then as a whole. As one living organism.

A doorway, once entered, strips away what is false. It brings you into direct contact with something you can’t bypass.

And it brings you home.