随筆Essays

Essays

• The Monk Knew He Was ReligiousOctober 2024AI doomerism, climate apocalypse and effective altruism are religious thinking that doesn't know it is religious: prophecy, sin and redemption, and…
• What Does It Mean to Kill Buddha?June 2025"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" comes from the Chan line of Bodhidharma, and it makes sense through upaya, skillful means.
• Love in the New WorldJune 2025The modern world is making found-tribes, people bound by a shared alienation, in place of the tribes we are born into, and those who survive it fall…
• The Mind Is My DoctrineJune 2025Enlightenment isn't a perfect map of duality or a perfect grasp of non-duality.
• True Polytheism Has Never Been TriedJune 2025The line between monotheism and polytheism comes from an Abrahamic bias and tells us little.
• Carve Your Own BlockJune 2025Nobody can save you, nothing is fair, and nobody is equal, except in being unequal.
• On Judas and JesusJuly 2025Judas was a good man.
• New York City EthnographyJuly 2025Race flattens what culture thickens.
• Is Life Made Great Through Death?August 2025From Gilgamesh to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the old scriptures agree: without death there is only Nothing.
• On What It Means to Be Sincerely ReligiousAugust 2025To be truly religious is to cultivate faith and compassion, not belief and judgment, and sin is putting negativity into the world.
• Affective Empathy Is EvilSeptember 2025Affective empathy, feeling what others feel, has become the easiest lever for making people hate while believing their hate is righteous.
• The Point of Civilization Is UtopiaOctober 2025Proletarian communism fails because it enshrines the worker's toil as the essence of being human: the cattle running the slaughterhouse.
• Smol Bean Fascism: Why Liberalism WonOctober 2025Liberalism has won so completely that even online neo-Nazis are liberals underneath.
• Compassion Is Physics Applied to ConsciousnessOctober 2025Buddhism inherited the Vedic hunger for the absolute and turned it inward: not God beyond, but mind seen through.
• The Tragedy of the Commons Is a MythOctober 2025The "Tragedy of the Commons" is a story told after the fact.
• How Can Many Religions Be True?October 2025There are two kinds of religious people: those who think holding the correct beliefs is the gate to the afterlife, the fundamentalists who make holy…
• In 2025 Everyone Is a ShamanNovember 2025When shamanism began, some 24,000 years ago at Lake Baikal, the shaman's gift was rare, yet many of its old barriers to entry were only the ability…
• Is Rationalism a Religion? What Is a Religion?November 2025Yes.
• Jhana Is Possession by Kami, or Ur-SoothDecember 2025Jhana, the deep meditative absorption in fashion in one corner of the internet, is one form of something much older: what Sanskrit calls tantra and…
• Who Benefits From Your Child's Broken WillJanuary 2026How a family treats a child's will is how it fits that child to a class.
• Why Did Jesus Die?January 2026To see why Jesus had to die, you have to know Second Temple Judaism.
• What Women Really Want or 'Just Bee Yourself'February 2026Women aren't drawn to height, money or tricks of confidence; they're drawn to a man who lives from his own centre.
• You Do Not Have Aphantasia (Probably)March 2026You almost certainly don't have aphantasia.
• America Did Not Lose the War in AfghanistanMarch 2026America's wars in the Middle East aren't blunders; their results are the strategy.
• Buddhism in the United StatesApril 2026Buddhism isn't declining in America; it has dissolved into it.
• The Flower SermonApril 2026The highest teaching in Buddhism isn't the Perfection of Wisdom but the Flower Sermon.
• Argument for UBIApril 2026AI and automation are cutting productivity loose from labour, and an economy that is 70% consumer spending can't kill off its consumers: either we…
• Mama Said Knock You OutMay 2026Does might make right?
• Guest and Host: How Factory Farming Broke the Oldest CovenantJune 2026Sacrifice once meant making something sacred by giving it up, and herders who lived on their animals' milk and killed them only in need understood…
• Hating Cities Makes You a GnosticJune 2026Hating cities doesn't make you traditional; it makes you a Gnostic.
• On Doom, and the Lineage You Are FoundingAugust 2026What are you living for?
• A Journey to Sorbia, Part OneAugust 2026A travelogue, with her photographs, of a July day in 2023 in Bautzen, the last stronghold of the Sorbs, a Slavic people of eastern Germany: decay…
• A Journey to Sorbia, Part TwoAugust 2026The walk goes on along the walls to the Sorbs' Catholic church, and ends in reflection.
• AI Is Mold: Evals, Death and the Broken InternetSeptember 2026AI won't kill everyone, but it may ruin the internet.
• Objective Beauty Does Not Exist, or Objectively SubjectiveOctober 2026Objective beauty doesn't exist.
• Why I Wholly Reject NationalismOctober 2026Folkism and nationalism are opposites, though people confuse them.
• What the Ghosts Actually AreOctober 2026The ghosts are neither Jungian archetypes nor literal people in the sky; they are the awareness in things.
• The Compass Is Not the LandNovember 2026Proto-Indo-European philology is a good compass and a false authority.