“William James observed that wisdom was learning what to overlook. Prince Hamlet is the most intelligent of literary characters, but by James’s pragmatic test the doom-eager Shakespearean charismatic is anything but wise. Hamlet can overlook nothing, and so sets the pattern for all who can illuminate wisdom yet cannot themselves embody it.”

— Harold Bloom

There is an intriguingly common theme in Indian philosophies of mind: that one is not most fundamentally a self but a field of awareness — a limited one, at that. …

“…although the attributes of Christ … undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. …

I would like to bear my testimony that I do not know a thing.

Our best understandings of God are idols which must be destroyed before we can encounter God.

To borrow from the first shahada of Islam’s first pillar, “lā ʾilāha ʾillā-llāh”— “there is no God but God.” When first we accept that there is no God — then we meet God.

No amount of words can encapsulate or exhaust the Word. They’re like clothes on an invisible body, flecks of paint on an invisible object of which we can’t quite make out the shape.

As Derrida would put…

“Why then do you marvel at the resurrection of Jesus? What is marvelous is not that he arose but that he did not arise alone, that he raised many other dead ones who appeared to many in Jerusalem.”

— Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate) 17:1 (c. 600s)

“… if you have power to seal [yourselves to one another] on earth and in heaven, then we should be crafty. The first thing you do: go and seal on earth your sons and daughters unto yourself, and yourself unto your fathers in eternal glory. And go ahead and … use a…

“The fear of infinity is a form of myopia that destroys the possibility of seeing the actual infinite, even though it in its highest form has created and sustains us, and in its secondary transfinite forms occurs all around us and even inhabits our minds.”

— Georg Cantor

Just over six eventful years ago, I returned home from my two years in California as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It wasn’t until much later that I realized I likely had PTSD. After returning home, I would experience panic attacks when I encountered male missionaries…

The following is a brief investigative report on some of the research surrounding the history and potential therapeutic and psychiatric applications of psychedelics. Neither non-exhaustive in scope nor to be taken as medical advice, the following serves as a primer for those who may be unfamiliar with the subject but who would like an introduction. The works cited at the end will provide a list of resources for further research. If you have any additional resources on this subject that you would like to recommend, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

In large part due to…

Sleep is an exceptionally important part of our daily lives.

Achieving deep sleep helps the mind to transfer the short-term memories of the day to the brain’s long-term memory networks. Additionally, during deep sleep, the brain is “rinsed” in spinal fluid to help clean out neural debris that wasn’t metabolized or disposed of in the reuptake process.

Perhaps most interestingly, during this “cleaning” and “inventory” process, the subsystems that produce our sense of self downregulate — the self you were that day evaporates. On a related note, as psychotherapist Irvin Yalom notes in his book Staring at the Sun: Overcoming…

In my personal interests, I tend to lean closer to psychotherapy and psychology, but I’ve learned a number of important lessons from the neurosciences. I think the most important lesson can be summarized like this: we do not experience “reality itself” but an essentialized distillation of reality, constructed by our subjectively-conditioned brain, from selectively limited sensory data, organized around limiting principles (eg, self-preservation). In a manner of speaking, rather than experiencing “reality itself,” what we experience is something more comparable to a virtual reality, a low-resolution copy of the objective original.

Eric Steinhart, in his short book On Nietzsche, compares…