Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

All human lives are complex tapestries of lighter and darker threads. Perception involves choice, and sometimes we focus on the dark elements, sometimes on the light. This is a propitious time to focus on the light elements, the aspects of your life you appreciate and can choose to feel grateful for. Many things have been…

There are times when it is crucial to stoke your inner fire, to summon as much energy as you can. In the ancient Yoga Aphorisms of Pantajali it is written, “Energy is like a muscle, it grows stronger through being used.” Depression (and so many people today seem to be subclinically depressed) is largely a…

It takes courage to look into the unknown. If we don’t have that courage, we attempt to cauterize and bandage the unknown. We paste labels on the unknown, and want it to flow into the shape of our expectations. When we attempt to gaze into the future we encounter the horizon line of the unknown.…

This image relates to a very practical and grounded way to navigate your pathway through a chaotic world. I have a very poor natural sense of direction, and yet I was able to use ordinary map and compass skills to navigate myself, and a small group, through a maze of canyons with no marked paths…

The matrix would like you to be so immersed in the mundane and busy work that you will come to see junk food and channel surfing as rewards. You did not incarnate to be a worker drone willing to settle for inferior nourishment. A couple of summers ago I saw a billboard ad for Starbucks…

Self-acceptance cannot be postponed until you feel you are good enough, untill you have reached your ideal weight, idealized romantic relationship or other images of success. Even if you achieved such things you would need to keep the cyanide capsules close at hand because any of these things can be taken away. When will you…

A relationship has its own lifecycle, an arc of organic development that may be out of the control of either party and which may unfold in ways that confound conscious intentions. Long-term intimate relationships are usually characterized by one person being the container and the other person the contained. In the image the container is…

As Arthur Eddington put it, “Reality is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.” Don’t cringe from the unknowable strangeness; embrace it. It is what gives your existence an edge of mystery; it is what generated your existence. Leave space around your certainties for all those unknown X factors potently…

Perception so often tricks us into seeing our inner contents out in the world. The world so easily becomes our projection screen, a globe of a thousand mirrors reflecting back to us fragments of our fragmented selves. Most violence, physical, psychological, environmental, is done in a state of projection. Imagine the following thought experiment. You…

“Look, I bear a wound that is not yet healed, my ambition to make an impression.” — C.G. Jung, Black Book 2 Most of us have a need for attention or acknowledgment We want to be seen and welcomed into the perceptual fields of others. We may want to light up the back rows with…