Nilsi

Glad I could help. I'd actually be really interested to hear your take on psychoanalysis. From what I gather, your practice seems aimed at eliminating mind-wandering by cultivating awareness and eventually arriving at a kind of radical presence - what you might call enlightenment. But from a psychoanalytic perspective, especially in Freud and Lacan, this "involuntary mental activity" - the drifting, the unbidden thoughts, the slips - is precisely the terrain of the unconscious. And far from being a distraction, it's seen as constitutive of the subject. That is, the unconscious isn’t just noise - it’s what structures our experience of the world and ourselves. Lacan, in particular, encountered many analysands who were trying to bypass or foreclose the unconscious - seeking some purified state of unity, wholeness, or presence. He saw that when this drive is taken to its extreme, one inevitably encounters what he called the Real - that which resists symbolization, the raw traumatic core beneath language and fantasy. Traditionally, the Real is unbearable. It’s what erupts when the symbolic order collapses. But in his later seminars, Lacan suggests that there are subjects who manage to develop a new relation to the Real - not to be annihilated by it, but to endure it, and perhaps even find a strange kind of jouissance in it. He called this figure the saint. So in that sense, what you’re doing strikes me as quite saintly. I've run my own experiments in that direction - extended periods of radical presence over several weeks - and I found it profoundly destabilizing. Not peaceful at all, but rather boring to the point of existential horror. My body felt on the verge of imploding under the sheer intensity of simply being - as if every breath was echoing into a void too vast to process. (Just to be clear, I wasn’t sitting in a room staring at a wall the whole time. I was going about my normal life, but with a kind of relentless, all-consuming attentiveness - drawing heavily on the methods and ideas of Peter Ralston) That’s why I find it fascinating that your practice is framed as something desirable or beneficial for ordinary people. To me, it feels more like a radical asceticism - something closer to mystical ordeal than mainstream wellness. But maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing entirely, in which case feel free to ignore my rambling.

As if his wild gesticulations and compulsive tics didn’t already scream neurosis.

Let me ask you a simple but serious question: Is it not conceivable that one could know exactly what they’re “missing” - and still affirm their choice? Isn’t that, in fact, how incarnation even happens in your cosmology? God, being omniscient and omnipotent, would not have incarnated blindly or ignorantly. It knew precisely what it was giving up by becoming finite, temporal, embodied. And yet it chose to do so - not in spite of its knowing, but because of it. Because even in its absolute fullness, it knew there was something missing: the experience of lack, of separation, of individuation. This, I suggest, is not just a mythic event but a cosmic pattern, a structure that can repeat itself “on earth as it is in heaven.” In other words, the genesis of divinity into limitation can recur within the human soul. Now, if such a possibility exists - wouldn’t you agree, given the nature of infinity, that every genuine possibility is also, somewhere, actual? Infinity does not contain mere hypotheticals. It contains actualities. So if this movement from divine totality into embodied seeking is possible, then it is also actual. And if it is actual, it can be found. Wouldn’t you also agree that if someone is absolutely determined to actualize such a possibility, then the universe - or God, if you prefer - will conspire to make a path available? And isn’t it then possible - maybe even likely - that such a path could lead directly through texts like Phenomenology of Spirit, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Écrits, or Difference and Repetition? Not because they’re canonical, but because they happen to be locations where such a metaphysical movement has already been inscribed, encoded, made manifest in language and form? Which would also explain why so many academics who approach these texts merely as objects of study remain clueless. They lack the existential drive, the metaphysical thirst, that alone allows such works to be properly read - and lived. Because such an actuality, if it exists, would only disclose itself to the earnest seeker, not to the casual browser or intellectual tourist. You won’t arrive there through skimming Wikipedia or prompting ChatGPT. So again I ask: Are you truly not open to the possibility that you’re missing something?

Peak Midwest Emo.

You have to project strength - fundamentally and without exception. People like this will exploit any weakness for their own petty, selfish ends. That’s just how they operate. You don’t “learn” this in theory - you internalize it through direct exposure. Over time, through repeated contact, your body learns. Your nervous system calibrates. Until it’s not just an idea - it’s in your gait, your posture, your vocal inflection, your eye contact. It’s in how long you hold a pause. Whether you flinch. Whether you look away. Whether you apologize too quickly. Only then - once it’s second nature - are you, as goes Whiteheads formula, truly free to pursue whatever moral or visionary project you’re on without it collapsing under its own weight. And more importantly, without putting yourself in danger.

Also, just as a sidenote: at 30:30, Jordan Hall shows his cards when it comes to his direct apprehension of infinity - which, in my view, is precisely the hallmark (no pun intended) of someone with a clear understanding of God. He argues, very precisely and clearly, that any attempt to grasp or formalize God is ultimately futile. That moment recontextualizes his Christian framing as just one attempt to gesture toward the ineffable. Another sidenote: Ken Wilber never makes that kind of move, which is why I’ve never understood why you hold him in such high regard. To me he is just a highly sophisticated ideologue. In contrast, Jordan Hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger clearly strike me as way further along. So I don’t get why Wilber is treated like some sacred cow here. And to be even more heretical - many European philosophers do give this kind of honest signal in their work. Hegel, Nietzsche, Lacan, Deleuze and many others. Yet their work isn't framed around “God-realization” per se. In fact each of them pursues a radically distinct philosophical trajectory, yet at the core of their work is a shared, implicit understanding of reality. Which should give you a real epistemological crisis, if you take what I say seriously. Also, this is exactly Žižek’s point with the cup of coffee without cream: It’s not what’s explicitly said that reveals one’s true position, but what’s left out. The absence itself structures the meaning. What’s omitted isn’t just nothing - it’s constitutive.

I’m not here to defend or critique Jordan Hall or Christianity - I’ve got no stake in either. My point is about philosophy more broadly. You said, “the point of philosophy is to understand reality,” and that’s where I fundamentally disagree. Yes, philosophy involves understanding - but the real question is: when does understanding stop being the highest aim, and what could possibly justify putting it second? I don’t think you need to privilege understanding above all else to live virtuously, do serious philosophy, or engage in good politics. If your highest values are beauty or creativity or whatever you value, chasing pure understanding will inevitably undermine them. There are real trade-offs. I'd be surprised if you'd deny that. Same goes for you. If you care about teaching, conscious politics, and advanced personal development, then being too rigid about "understanding" as the supreme goal will probably jeopardize those pursuits. That’s where things get tricky - when people try to “catch” philosophers with their pants down, as if they’ve lost the plot, when really they might just be pursuing different values. Unless you're looking at someone like Plotinus, fully and single-mindedly committed to metaphysical inquiry, it's hard to say whether someone “gets” God or not. Those who move on from the pursuit of pure understanding aren’t necessarily lost - they may have reached some profound threshold in their own development and begun exploring new directions: What else is worth doing? What does it mean to live well, not just to know? How might the divine express itself through love, through art, through embodiment, through failure, through joy? What does philosophy become when it’s no longer just about understanding, but about becoming? etc. etc. So what I’m really getting at is epistemology - how we read and interpret philosophers. I know you gravitate toward thinkers who dwell explicitly in metaphysics, but someone writing literary criticism, or making art, or crafting narrative, might be doing equally profound philosophical work. They’ve just chosen a different medium - one that doesn’t always announce its implicit metaphysics, but often cuts just as deep, if one really pays attention. Hope that makes sense.

It’s funny how, on the one hand, you paint humans as this useless, stupid failure - and yet, on the other hand, you assign them the godlike power to either destroy or save the entire planet. Also, once we’ve “saved the planet” or whatever your ethical project is - what’s the point of humanity after that, if not to create art (in the broadest sense possible)? So what I’m saying is: we already have the gold. And maybe the shit just comes with it. Of course, I’m totally for ecological concerns and all that - but only because they sustain the possibility of novelty and creativity, in a way that preserves the cultural heritage humanity has already produced. So I guess what I’m really saying is: I might be a closet conservative.

Sorry, had to do it.

Neither of them would care about the other's project on its own merits - so no, this wouldn’t be fruitful at all.

Animals don’t do art. So yeahhh… I hate your argument.

OMG, this blink record was one of the first CDs I ever owned - also one of those eternal earworms.