Never forget when William James said that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer remind him “of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.”

Please participate in my very rigorous user research: If you hear "contemplative science and practice," what does that mean to you?

Wrote about the ~abundance agenda~ The book has this errant mention of shorter workweeks & shared profits, neither of which will follow from what it actually covers. But we can still deal an abundance of time & worker power into the agenda — why not try? open.substack.com/pub/musingmi...

Imagining the bygone days where...*one major assignment per couple of years* (???) could pay a writer's rent in NYC........

does anyone have strong preferences on good over-ear headphones?

This is pretty neat — the eruption of phenomenology in the West through a “planetary synchronicity,” in Varela’s phrase, across Husserl, James, & the Kyoto School boys

I wrote about advanced meditation research, my mom's curious recovery from brain surgery, Abhinavagupta's metaphysics, & the surprisingly plausible case that minds are, to some literal degree, made of wonder. musingmind.substack.com/p/are-minds-...

If you want frontier research on the upside of breathing, James Nestor reports the relevant scientific field has "next to nothing." Pulmonologists "focus on emergencies...that's how the system works." To focus on positive capabilities, guess you've gotta go hunt in the wild

I wish more great novelists would decide to read the canon of classical economics & tell us what they think. From Marilynne Robinson's Is Poverty Necessary: "Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests."

checking phone for 20min reset ~5 days worth of deepening into meditation mind-space, & took another ~18 hours to (not even) recover from. considering most of us never go 18 hours (let alone 5 days) w/o phones, how much of our mind-regions are just unknown to us?

Dig this bit from Levin's paper on biology & buddhism — as evolution enables living systems to pursue larger goals, that also creates cognitive space for progressively more complex causes of stress to unfold

thrilled to announce that about ~650 pages into Infinite Jest, my mind began to detect something like the contours of a plot, and I’m now on track to greatly exceed my ~20 pages/year average pace

a little note from Adam Smith: “These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished..."

May we all feel each moment of existence with as much gushing adoration, reverence, and sacrality as financial planners feel towards Roth IRAs

When I was a freshman in college, I tried walking into a frat party — some guy with flowing black hair and a button down opened to his sternum stopped me, grabbed my collared shirt, stared down my chest, and sneered: “Never wear an undershirt with a dress shirt again.”

Roasted

Bookchin’s take on the abundance agenda — a sheer abundance of goods that would ‘explode capitalism from within’ by permitting the expression of preferences for forms of life that don’t need to also fetch a living wage off of labor markets

There's a fun conflict in how different groups think about awe/wonder. The 'science of awe' sees it as an evolutionary tool; others see it as a deeper subjectivity that has to shine through evolution's other mind-tools; & psychedelic science think we evolved to keep wonder within a middling range.

Really appreciated this clear-eyed view onto the predictive processing account of meditation from @oshan.bsky.social: www.vox.com/future-perfe... Have some work coming in this space... stay tuned 📺

The Other Place can still produce gems

Today’s my last day at Vox, which means I’m entering scheming season. It’s a wildly exciting time to be writing about consciousness & economics — there’s so much to do, explore, & write about. Don’t know what’s next, but if you want to chat or collaborate: [email protected]

Threading a few of my favorite bits from the meditation series:

In a cross cultural study of experiencing awe, “the individual self was twenty times more likely to be the source of awe in the United States than in China.”

“Too beautiful to be wrong”

Wrote a 5-part series for @vox.com on the science/practice of deep-end meditation — a bridge to step beyond basic mindfulness. Q+A's w/ meditation teachers & researchers, practices, & essays sketching the emerging, surprisingly accessible field of 'advanced meditation' www.vox.com/pages/more-t...

The idea that humans could be motivated to labor by finding their work meaningful, or by releasing their “creative impulse” through work, was, at least in part, a product of early 20th century social engineering (Erik Baker’s excellent “Make Your Own Job”)

there's a meandering lineage of books that try to explicitly analyze the relationship between the structure of society & the structure of mind — or economics & phenomenology. anyone have tabs on good additions to the canon?

The 60s were a wild time — giving LSD to patients both before and after having parts of their brains removed.

So many big-picture, meta-whatever, Game-(n+1) stories about how humanity needs a new value structure or operating system or narrative or whatever would be more impactful — I think — if they just funneled into this very simple strategy: Build political institutions against economic insecurity

It's frankly unsettling how great a time I had in the Bay Area. The people, the trees, the meditation scene, the little village of cabins with roving turkeys. Look at this tree and tell me you are not bewildered. and don't even ask me about the moss

Perhaps you’ve heard of Marx’s idea of “labor power” as capitalism’s twist in our inherent potential for purposive labor. But have you heard of Abhinavagupta’s “delight power,” aunmukhya, the innate eagerness of all objects perceived in the light of consciousness?

funny that this sort of thing is still happening today

Book request: I would like to read a compendium of first-hand accounts from people recounting their first experience with meditation that convinced them to continue investing time into meditation practice.

Wrote about DMT, or "the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family," over on Vox. Andrew Gallimore calls DMT "the most efficient reality-switching molecule currently known to exist," & neuroscientists I spoke with are excited as research is finally beginning to ramp up: www.vox.com/the-highligh...

unbundling "mysticism"!

Annie Dillard's greeting for those who land on her website:

absolutely wild how much something has triumphed over nothing

Wrote about how maybe mind is the consequence of holding experience in a muscular amber, and my thwarted desire to communion with a herd of cattle: open.substack.com/pub/musingmi...

I'll be roaming around Oakland/San Francisco from Dec. 6th — 13th, if any of you weirdos want to get coffee/hangout/discuss schemes about the mind or economy, DM's are open

Ireland: what is your secret to generating so many great artists? Is it your landscapes?

Entomologist V. B. Wigglesworth suggesting researchers effectively anesthetizing insects before messing with them “helps to preserve in the experimenter an appropriately respectful attitude towards livings organisms…”

Now there’s a way to open a movie review

oh noooo 2025 The Science of Consciousness Conference: July 6 - 11. 2025 Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness 28th conference: July 6 - 9. Decisions will have to be made. Old alliances shattered, new allegiances formed.

Really dig this angle from @tasshin.com's Rob Burbea piece. A lot of meditation messaging focuses on 'reducing suffering' — raising the floor of human experience. But others might resonate more w/ raising the ceiling — increasing vitality, soulfulness, meaning, flourishing, etc.

Kerouac, in a 1955 letter to Ginsberg: "Dear Allen... I don't want to contaminate you with thoughts...that relate to the existence of many selves divided into many living beings...nor with ideas of or about phenomena."

may we all develop minds as fluid as Ødegaard’s feet

"the [ozempic] treatments have transformed her experience of flavor & mouthfeel...Freed from her addiction, Kenney believes she can now...perceive what Hostess treats, loaded with sugar, actually are. Develop sensory clarity > transform experience > taste true nature of phenomena > "interesting"

A 'general theory of meditation' [from the perspective of Western science] is born!

love when I contract into a spiteful condition toward all things, the world is infuriating, people intolerable, life pointless, & then I remember I haven’t gone for a walk today, do so, & immediately, all things become wondrous & bright, the world full of delightful possibility

We’ve had the “uh oh ayahuasca makes you quit your tech job” moment, now pangs of the “uh oh what if deeper meditation drains you of useful motivation” follow-up. This is an echo of Freudian “the cost of civilization is neurosis” vibes — hoping we get a Marcuse cleanser soon