I need to be very clear on this point: none of what I write is the truth.

I’m thinking, and then writing, to inspire you to think, and maybe write back.

But it’s a mistake to think that thinking ever leads anywhere. At least not this type of spiritual philosophical thinking motivated by a search for the deepest truth. The deepest truth is unknowable by the mind, and using the mind to try and find it is folly. You can’t think your way to the divine.

Maps are a useful approximation of the terrain. But they are necessarily a simplification, a lower resolution version of reality, useful in helping us navigate to new and exciting places if we subsequently make the physical effort to travel there. If we attempt make a map with enough resolution to understand the terrain itself without traveling, it would necessarily be as big and complex as the terrain and therefore have no useful value.

Thoughts and conceptualizations are always going to be lower resolution approximations of reality. To make them sufficiently accurate as a means to experience reality itself would require complexity beyond the capabilities of our mind. The mind is a subset of reality and can never contain it. But thoughts can help us navigate to new and exciting places if we subsequently focus our efforts on our direct experience.

One of my enlightened teachers determined that the right proportion of thinking seems to be about 25% of the time, devoting the remaining 75% to direct experience. Certain types of practical thinking are necessary for our personal and societal growth, like designing a rocket or deciding what to eat for dinner.

Thinking as a philosophical search for the deepest truth is closer to art than data. It may inspire a feeling, and open a doorway to a direct experience of truth, but it will never be truth itself.

Reality is as insubstantial as a dream, spontaneously self-arising and then immediately gone. A moment that can only be experienced directly with the clear light of conscious awareness.

Don’t attribute too much solidity to these writings, or to me, or to yourself. None of this is true.