The Round Year

We waste untold amounts of time and energy on things of no consequence. We don’t see that in the present, as the situations always present themselves as urgent, critical, and dire.

Very few tasks are truly urgent and most things are fixable; those that are not are often outside our control. All of them take up real estate in your mind and emotions, however, wearing you down while yielding no benefit. They are energy wasters.

In an environment that constantly instills a sense of emergency, how do you protect your peace?

People gi...

Who are we, without even knowing it? How many people speak with our voices, think with our minds, quietly guide our beliefs and our actions?

If we dig a little deeper into our identity, we’re likely to find our parents’ convictions, our friends’ preferences, our mentors’ codes of conduct, the faith of our spiritual role models.

We are all aware of this, of course, maybe take it for granted, and don’t realize that our core identity has been molded by countless generations, through the socio-cultural past, farther back in time than we can possibly i...

In physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction; the same applies to the realm of the mind.

Every thought you nurture, especially profound beliefs and openly expressed convictions, will create both its intended result and its conceptual opposite, and will somehow manage to attract both of them into your reality.

You can think of this as reality testing you to see if you meant it, and outlandish as it seems, it works with incredible consistency, and in ways too blatant to miss.

I don’t know why that happens – the principle of b...

Focus is the ability to ignore all signals save one.

Your mental capacity stays unchanged, but it’s solely focused on one objective.

Focus runs on emotions and excitement, not willpower. If you need to force yourself to pay attention, your subconscious is telling you the task doesn’t interest you enough.

That’s why people often struggle to focus on their tasks while unrelated trivia lingers in the background.

It usually implies that the chosen subject of concentration hasn’t managed to hold their attention enough to drown out the...

Those born with exceptional traits often remain unaware of them until adulthood, as we tend to take our own mental and physical capabilities for granted and assume everyone else is the same.

What is a gift? It is an innate skill, sense, or ability that is so second nature to you that you’re oblivious to others not having it.

Do you possess a heightened sensitivity to your surroundings, easily detecting overlooked details and connections?

Do you possess a special musical ability to recreate concerts and symphonies in your head, with all the in...

Intent is not precise, nor is it linear, it loosely aims for the direction you plan while bringing about many echoes, counterpoints, and unintended results.

Their effects continue long after the flame of their original intent has died out, often surprising the author, who has already moved on to something else and forgotten the purpose of the initial action.

Every project comes with child themes, effects that blossom around it, coexist with it and further its intricacies, a result of the greater context coming together to create your desired outcome.

Nothing happens in...

Maintaining control over your mind when the latter is challenged in the battle of influences, inducements and restrictions we call daily life is a critical survival skill.

People fight to win this battle because they don’t understand eliminating mental spam shouldn’t take any willpower at all.

Just because someone makes a conjecture, that doesn’t mean you have to entertain it.

We flitter away a lot of emotional energy in trifling mental brawls with no consequence.

Remember, when these intrusions occur, that no matter what the background noise is that d...

Where are you right now?

You may think you are at home, tending to mundane activities, but part of you is still at work, unable to let go of the problem you’re trying to solve, at the beach, dreaming of that tropical vacation, across the street, unable to extricate yourself from the rumble of a passing motorcycle, at the restaurant, choosing what to order for dinner.

Our minds are in the future, creating many versions of our lives, and in the past, holding onto memories, we are here and in all those other places at...

Understanding is a tough mistress who makes you deserve her favor: it demands focus, effort, humility, time and patience.

Whether gained through years of painstaking trial and error or learned from other people’s experiences, there is no shortcut to knowledge.

Life always makes you earn it.

The discernment that makes a fundamental difference in one’s life can not be faked, purchased, transferred or taken away.

This is one of its perks, actually: it makes the world transparent to your wide-open eyes in every way, big or small, good...

We call them omens, signs, kismet, synchronicities, and they simultaneously hearten and distress us, because they dismantle our illusion reality is random.

We call it God’s will and surrender to it, or fate, and fight it at every turn, proud to withstand its unfair grip.

We never think to just sit and listen to what reality has to say.

She is not your enemy. It’s a partner who enjoys offering guidance, especially when you’re distracted and frazzled and can’t be bothered with nonsense. Most of the misfortunes of our lives co...

Remember the old maps with boundaries beyond which anything could happen? They always said here be dragons, even in the middle of the ocean.

When we try to think past the limits of our understanding, we always assume we would envision a blank space, a vast emptiness, but that’s not what actually happens.

We fill every gap in knowledge with weird versions of our familiar models.

It works for everything, from imagining what alien life forms might be like to what lies beyond the edges of our visible universe.

The an...

Life works in probabilities. Everything is a gradient of maybe between yes and no. Since nothing is impossible, and nothing is absolute, life plans only make sense in broad strokes, and obsessing over their specific details is frequently doomed to failure.

Events tend to cluster around coherent outcomes and we get drawn towards those clusters without even realizing.

Between intent and outcome an entire tree of possibilities unfolds, whose branches intertwine with other people’s intents and probabilities, and the final outcome is not an instance, but a range of acceptable developments.

Many of...

What is a ritual? Any activity which carries or can carry symbolic meaning.

Rituals appeal to our desire for recognizable patterns, our need to place ourselves into a familiar frame of reference that connects past, present and future and inside which we can anticipate and plan. They reinforce the knowledge shortcuts we create for ourselves to make sense of the world.

A ritual never changes, and that is its power as well as its tedium. Through endless repetition, the tedium dissolves into muscle memory to appeal to deeper and otherwise inaccessible areas of the mind...

The inability to share ineffable experiences is a limitation of our human condition, which makes us feel helpless and sublime at the same time. These moments are by definition impossible to put into words, but their characteristics and circumstances are broadly recognizable. They often attempt to find expression in metaphor – an open sky, an endless void, a pregnant silence, an all-encompassing presence – but they rarely emerge from it with their meanings unaltered.

What unites these experiences is they are removed from time, with which they have no relationship, and essentially different from normal sensory perception, with which they...

The round year is an ideal that got lost in our modern experience of time, but which is so deeply embedded in old spiritual systems, it often goes unquestioned.

It is a simple concept, really. We don’t live years; we live the Year in perpetuity. When the Year ends, the Year begins again. The concept of round time.

People attuned to the cycles of nature, who spend a lot of their life outdoors, have a deep instinct about this way of experiencing time, and feel its truth to the core of their being, because th...

People picture their memory as a large body of water in which they’re immersed, one which challenges their sense of control, as they struggle to swim against its currents, or allows them the enjoyment of floating, relaxed, on its calm surface when the influx is pleasant.

Frequently, its driving currents drag the unfortunate mind into a whirlpool it can’t control, and drown it in weakening and defeating feelings.

The thoughts you are compelled to host against your will diminish and controlyou.

Fighting them only gives them more power, and trigger the cons...

Whose thoughts run your head? That is a strange question. We take for granted we are the ones who think our thoughts, when in fact they are only in part our production, if at all. This article is a perfect example of that.

We act like resonators for other people’s minds, contemporary intellectual currents, commonly held unquestioned beliefs, willful influences, and overpowering models.

Our thoughts are socially constructed composites inside which those mental influencers weave themselves around our personal circumstances and general zeitgeist.

This is a truth we keep parked under normal ci...

There are truly powerful forces at work in our universe, forces so awe-inspiring our minds can’t comprehend them: giant black holes of near infinite gravity, invisible waves that propagate through vast expanses at speeds that bend space and time, energy rays which permeate all the matter in their path, enormous forces in something as small as a neutron, patterns that organize entire galaxies with impeccable precision.

If there is anything we humans understand, is power. We run our lives by it, struggle to negotiate it, acquire it, maintain it. Power rules everything that is made of ma...

Once upon a time, emotions were the key to our survival. They are fast, much faster than thoughts, and can assess a situation at lightning speed, before our rational analysis, before our senses even; they are a lost superpower we forgot how to wield.

Unlike instincts, which are devoid of information, emotions are pre-analyzed: they’re shortcuts to things we already know, they make connections between seemingly unrelated data, and they’re rarely wrong.

Much as we like to think of ourselves as rational, emotions still run the show silently in the background.

Noth...

EmailShare

A breeze quickens in the middle of the forest, and all the tree branches turn in unison, revealing the undersides of the leaves and changing the color of the canopy. 

The birds startle and take flight together, suddenly, and your heart gets startled with them, surprised by their sudden motion.

You look up at the sky through the branches, taken by their beauty, feeling the light dim as clouds pass across the sun, and instinctively monitor the fussing in the branches, relieved to hear it subside when the sun peeks out again f...

We live in our own perception of reality, where our level of knowledge is the real constraint on what we can see. 

This is the kind of knowledge that makes us understand the sun, moon and stars are not really in the sky, but very far away, that roads don’t taper off to a fine point on the horizon, and what we think we see is not necessarily what’s actually there.

We run on assumptions, because we’d be hard pressed to make decisions otherwise, in an environment that asks them of us relentl...

A symbol is a stand-in for something else. What? Anything you wish and anything your mind can conjure: ideas, feelings, objects, events, shorthands, messages, memory aids.

We use symbols to condense meaning into its smallest form, for immediate reference, portability, and emotional impact.

The main purpose of a symbol is to evoke and reinforce memories and feelings at lightning speed. Even a casual glance will retrieve the message it was meant to convey.

Unlike words and numbers, which are primarily designed to communicate meaning to our rational mind, even though they too can...

There is an old Navajo blessing that starts with ‘may you walk in beauty’, a reminder to appreciate what a gift it is to belong in the world. 

The beauty of existence runs deep beneath its surface, into its structure and even into our perception of it. 

Things aren’t beautiful because we perceive them as such. We perceive them as beautiful because they align with the way reality, and our own beings, which are part of it, organizes itself.

Everything participates in this giant quest for harmony and order, everything, from our mental c...

We’re all many people, spun together in a bundle of threads we call the self, a constantly changing manifold that gains and loses components like a branching river with tributaries and deltas.

We don’t think about how much we change throughout our life as these pieces of ourselves get swapped and replaced. We never analyze their mix, which we unconsciously accept as our self.

Every morning we wake up different people.

We’re not the people we were the day before and we don’t even realize it, because the instinct to accept chan...

The seasons, the revolution of heavenly bodies, the water cycle, circadian rhythms, the endless chain of births and deaths, the structure of the atom, reality is made of circles.

Some are obvious and some are set to time frames that differ significantly from our lifespan, which makes them difficult to see.

If you look at life from a distance, you are going to notice things repeating. Older people have the field advantage here, because they had a slightly longer running time for this experiment called life.

Reality is stingy with its resources, it does...

By definition, order is the condition in which everything is in its correct or appropriate state. That is just one of the many meanings of the word, and a misinterpreted one. Our love for symmetry, our desire to complete the picture, created an expectation of order not held up by reality.

Just as you can’t point to something and declare that’s the color blue, but you can easily identify all the blue objects in the room, you can’t describe natural order, which is elusive, chock full of obfuscating exceptions and impossible to maintain, but you can...