THREADS TO PULL ON
The Living Mystery
The Living Mystery is a Substack exploring consciousness, reality and the edges of what we know. It follows serious research, theoretical work, philosophical arguments, first-person experiences and other evidence that might tell us something about what consciousness is and what kind of reality we are living in.
I’ve been interested in spirituality since I was about fourteen. But for most of that time, the basic framework underneath my thinking remained unchanged. Reality was fundamentally physical; minds arose somehow from brains; and the extraordinary complexity of life, consciousness and evolution provided more than enough mystery and wonder within that picture.
Over the last year or so however, I’ve begun to genuinely question that framework.
I’ve come across credible research, reports, experiences and theoretical positions that press are difficult to account for within it. Consciousness is central to much of this. Some serious researchers are asking whether the brain produces consciousness in quite the way we have tended to assume, and whether positions such as panpsychism and idealism deserve more serious attention. Neuroscientist Christof Koch, for example, has described his own recent thinking and experiences as producing a “seismic shift” in the ontological ground he had previously lived on. More broadly, the range of questions being seriously entertained about consciousness seems to be widening.
Encountering mystery at this level feels different to me. Genuinely allowing for the possibility that reality may be more deeply entangled with consciousness than my habitual picture of the world allows seems to alter the quality of my relationship with my own experience. That shift feels new, despite the much longer-standing interest in spirituality.
The Living Mystery is a way of returning to that encounter: it gives us regular contact with credible ideas, research, experiences, traditions and anomalies that shake the sense that reality is fundamentally physical, and already adequately understood.
Read The Living Mystery →
Becoming less governed by shame, status, approval and self-doubt.
We spend much of our lives inside familiar patterns of thought and feeling, ways of interpreting what happens and ways of understanding who we are. They can become so familiar that they simply feel like me. I’m interested in what allows those patterns to become visible, and one question I return to particularly often is self-worth.
Tara Brach tells a story in Radical Acceptance about a meeting between the Dalai Lama and a group of Western Buddhist teachers and psychologists. When somebody asked him about the suffering caused by self-hatred, he initially struggled to understand what they meant. The Westerners around him, by contrast, recognised it immediately. Brach places the story in a wider discussion of a culture in which many of us learn early that belonging involves proving ourselves worthy — standing out as sufficiently intelligent, attractive, capable or successful.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira approaches something related from another direction in Hospicing Modernity. In a chapter called Getting to Zero, she describes the pull within modernity towards a kind of seesaw: plus one or minus one, superior or inferior, above or below. “Zero” offers another place to stand, outside the continual need to establish where we rank.
I’m interested in what these cultural patterns look like from inside a person.
It feels good to be seen. There is real pleasure in somebody finding us funny, being moved by something we have made, recognising that we are good at something or responding warmly to who we are. I don’t think a sturdy sense of self-worth makes us indifferent to any of this.
But attention can gradually move from the thing itself to the reflected image of ourselves doing it. I recognise this in myself. I can start with something I genuinely want to learn, make or contribute and find that part of my attention has migrated towards whether somebody thinks I am impressive, interesting or particularly capable.
The badge begins to take the place of the thing it was supposed to signify.
Something similar can happen in the other direction. An interest, emotion or way of expressing ourselves may once have brought embarrassment, ridicule or shame, and we learn to withdraw from it. Between the pull of approval and the avoidance of shame, it can become surprisingly difficult to know what we actually want, what interests us, what we want to express and what we are doing principally because of the picture of ourselves it creates.
For me, part of the value of reflection and journalling is simply becoming able to catch this happening. Ah. I’ve become very interested in whether they think I’m impressive. Once I can see that, I have a little more choice about where I put my attention.
I’m also curious about how this connects with the questions in The Living Mystery. If our ordinary sense of who we are sits inside a much larger reality that may be stranger and less completely understood than we usually remember, does repeatedly encountering that possibility change our relationship with the part of us that is busy establishing its worth? Does it give us a little more room around it — enough to notice what it is doing, while staying connected to the interests, relationships and experiences underneath?
My book, Befriend Your Inner B*tch, grew out of this wider territory: learning to notice difficult and self-protective movements in ourselves, become curious about them and understand more about what they are trying to do.
Befriend Your Inner B*tch →
Making a living and bringing what we have to give
It is tempting to imagine an ideal in which our work and our gifts comes together. We find something we love and are good at, offer it to other people, make a useful contribution and earn enough money doing it to sustain a good life.
Sometimes that really can happen. But the relationship between livelihood, gifts and contribution seems more complicated than that.
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s writing about gift economies offers one way into this. In Braiding Sweetgrass and The Serviceberry, gifts belong within relationships of reciprocity rather than being understood only through their market value. There is something here that shifts the emphasis slightly: from asking what we can make of our gifts to asking how they participate in relationships with other people and with the wider living world.
A story shared by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira in collaboration with Cree elder John Crier complicates the picture further. In The Four Mountains, part of adulthood involves discovering and developing your gifts and learning how to offer them in ways that contribute to family, community, land and other relations. But the story also says that sometimes you need a day job to sustain your family while doing that work alongside it. The distinction it makes between the job and the work that needs to be done has stayed with me.
That doesn’t mean our gifts necessarily belong outside paid work. Being paid for something can be precisely what gives us enough time to do more of it.
I’m experiencing that very practically at the moment. I played the violin to Grade 8 when I was younger and then left that capacity largely unused for years. I’ve recently realised that playing music could become part of how I earn my living. What appeals to me is not only the income, but the possibility of spending more of my working life making music and bringing music into other people’s lives.
It has made me think more about what work does to us.
We spend a great deal of our lives working. Different kinds of work call different parts of us into use. They can develop concentration, patience, cooperation, judgement, physical skill, imagination or ways of relating to other people. They can also leave particular parts of us almost entirely unused.
Music puts me somewhere different from writing and thinking. It asks something different of my attention and my body.
So alongside What work can I get? I’m interested in another question:
What ways of being does my work foster in me?
Time belongs in this picture too. For many families, paid work sits alongside cooking, cleaning, caring, school, homework, appointments and everything else required to keep a household going. A gift that produces no income may be deeply important and still struggle to find a place simply because there are only so many hours available.
That makes the relationship between gifts and money genuinely complicated. Sometimes protecting a gift from the market may preserve something valuable about it. Sometimes being paid for it may be exactly what gives it room to grow.
And perhaps underneath all of this is a larger question about participation.
Near the end of Befriend Your Inner B*tch, I found myself asking whether there might be some greater movement of life and creation that we can participate in if we become available to it, and then asking:
How can we serve it?
I’m still drawn to that orientation.
One of the strange things about modern life is how easy it is to experience nature as somewhere else: a beach, a woodland, a beautiful view, somewhere we go for a walk.
Meanwhile, ordinary life depends continuously on soil, water, weather, plants, animals and ecosystems that most of us barely encounter directly. Our food arrives in shops, water through pipes, energy through sockets. Much of the living world on which we depend disappears from view.
There are other ways of understanding that relationship.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, Te Awa Tupua — the Whanganui River system — is recognised in law as a legal person and an “indivisible and living whole”. The legal framework reflects a much older understanding of Whanganui iwi, expressed in the phrase Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au: I am the River and the River is me.
I find that interesting partly because it makes our own assumptions easier to see. The idea that humans are here and “nature” is something outside us can feel like a simple description of reality, when it is also a particular cultural way of organising the relationship.
And the relationship we currently have is plainly causing enormous damage. The global rate of species extinction is already estimated to be tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past ten million years, and still accelerating.
What makes this difficult to think about is that the damage is woven into ordinary life. Food that nourishes us can depend on farming practices that diminish soils or habitats. Things that make daily life convenient can require extraction somewhere else or become waste after a few minutes of use. Animals largely disappear from sight when they become part of systems of food production.
Most of us are participating in all of this while also caring about the world being harmed.
That seems worth looking at without immediately turning it into a demand for purity, guilt or a list of things we ought to do.
I’m interested in the relationship itself.
What happens when nature stops being primarily somewhere we visit and we experience ourselves more clearly as living beings within a living world?
There may be something here that matters in both directions. A deeper sense of belonging might change what we notice and what we are willing to protect. But contact with the living world may also give something back to us.
There are experiences — being in the sea, walking through woodland, growing something, watching an animal closely, noticing what the season is doing — in which the boundaries of our usual preoccupations can shift a little.
Perhaps there are parts of ourselves that are difficult to recognise as missing until something brings them back into view.
What shapes what we can imagine?
Our imaginations don’t develop in isolation. They are being fed all the time: by films and television, games and books, headlines and advertising, what people talk about at the school gates, what appears on our social media feeds, what schools reward, what our friends aspire to, and the stories we absorb about what a successful life looks like.
Most of this doesn’t feel like culture shaping us. It just feels like reality.
At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote about the “end of history”: not the end of events, but the possibility that Western liberal democracy represented the end point of humanity’s ideological development. Whatever we make of his argument now, it captures something of the confidence of that period — the sense that the broad direction of travel had been discovered and the remaining task was largely to extend it.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira approaches that confidence from a very different direction in Hospicing Modernity. Her critique is of a modern-colonial culture that has treated its own ways of organising knowledge, progress, development and our relationship with the more-than-human world as though they were simply reality rather than one historically produced way of understanding it.
Some of these cultural threads show up in the other threads. How we imagine work and success; our relationship with the living world. Artificial intelligence is making another of our assumptions particularly visible.
As machines become capable of writing, making images, reasoning, programming and doing other things we have associated with distinctively human ability, people increasingly ask: What makes us human?
That question is being asked so frequently, it makes me wonder about the story underneath it.
In an echo of the questions about personal self-worth in an earlier thread, how much have we in the West relied on our species being exceptional as part of our understanding of human value?
We are living in a rapidly changing world, with a future we can no longer assume will be familiar. At the same time, questions that used to sit well outside mainstream scientific and cultural inquiry are being asked more openly — including those that reach right down into our assumptions about reality as fundamentally physical.
Perhaps those things together will broaden our imagination around the choices available to us — the kinds of lives we might build, the things we might value, and the possibilities we are capable of noticing.
