Dear friends,

I had a peculiar encounter recently that I want to share with you. I was with my fiancée and stepson in Greece, and I was struggling to fall asleep in our hot, tiny hotel room, which faced a noisy main street. I was sweating all over, tossing and turning, suspended in some kind of liminal, hallucinatory space where dream and reality intermingled. In this space, there appeared before me, just as real and matter-of-fact as the furniture around me, my old mentor, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

I was not in any way surprised by Nietzsche’s presence. If anything, I felt happy to see him after such a long time apart. As soon as I greeted him, I started sharing about my experiences in recent years and the lessons life has taught me. I was eager to hear his thoughts and for the two of us to celebrate our shared love of wisdom, as we had in old times. But this time, something was off.

Whatever insight or opinion I shared with him, Nietzsche obliterated it with impeccable logic and psychological criticism. Without mercy, he pointed out the vanity and inconsistencies in every bit of wisdom I thought I had acquired. The experience was humiliating. To make something good out of it, I decided to take it as a learning opportunity. I started agreeing with Nietzsche’s arguments (which appeared unassailable) and ended up extolling the exact opposite of every idea and view I had shared at first. I hoped my mentor would be pleased that, while I had not been able to reach the right conclusions myself, at least I could recognize the errors of my thinking.

To my utter dismay, Nietzsche shook his head in disapproval. He took each of the arguments he had given me—arguments I had just agreed with—and demonstrated how crude and naive they were. While at first I had been unable to defend my own position, I was now just as unable to defend the opposite of my position! Desperate and confused, I started suggesting alternative concepts, theories, and interpretations, hoping that something would land, but Nietzsche kept refuting every statement I made. Seeing that whatever I said only got me more tangled up in his web of logic, I gave up.

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Dear friends,

I’ve had something of a revelation recently that I want to share. It concerns a vulnerable, not-yet-healed part of myself, so I will approach it from somewhat farther away.

Lately, I’ve been reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. A key element of the story is the One Ring, forged by the Dark Lord in the fires of Mount Doom. As evil spreads over the land, the people’s final hope rests with two unassuming friends tasked with sneaking the Ring back into the mountain where it was forged. Only by casting the Ring back into the fires it came from can it be destroyed, along with the evil that created it. It is a gripping story, but only recently have I begun to appreciate how meaningful it is.

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A few days ago, I had the chance to speak with Advaita Vedanta teacher Francis Lucille, and I want to share a deeply moving exchange I had with him. An exchange that may not seem like much on the surface, but is nevertheless the most moving teaching I’ve received in recent memory. It came as a single line Francis sent me over email:

Ninety-nine out of a hundred times you read Francis’ email, it says nothing special. But like a Zen kōan, if it meets you at the right moment and the right state of mind, it can shake you to the core. It did me.

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Dear friends,

I hope you are well in these confused and trying times. Something that has served me as an anchor for years (and even more so lately) has been my meditation practice. I thought I might share a new perspective on it that’s recently opened for me.

I try to do a bit of formal practice every day. Some sits feel like a waste, as my thinking has so much inertia that no amount of mindfulness seems to slow it down. (Still, I think this makes these sessions no less valuable, as it is one thing to be distracted and quite another to know just how distracted you are.) But sometimes, the mind does cool down, thought subsides, and the openness of non-dual awareness blossoms. It is after these sessions that something special occurs.

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Dear friends,

This Valentine’s Day taught me a simple but deeply meaningful lesson, one I’d like to share with you.

It was time for breakfast, and my partner and I were waiting for our boy, Alexy, at the kitchen table. He was taking more time than usual to get ready, and when he arrived, he came with two Valentine’s Day cards, one for me and one for Elly, my partner. The cards were in DIY envelopes on which Alexy had drawn heart-shaped portraits of Elly and me. Inside, he expressed his love and gratitude for our being there for him. (Alexy’s cards were all the more moving for his brazen disregard of Bulgarian grammar and punctuation; modernist prose at its finest!) Elly teared up, and the three of us embraced… But I was filled with a mixture of feelings that was altogether not too pleasant.

Alexy’s gift moved me deeply, moved me to tears in fact, but in spite of that—or rather, because of that—a gnawing sense of guilt arose within me. First, I thought, I had not gotten any present for him, and second, the beautiful necklace I had bought for Elly seemed like such an inadequate, impersonal gift next to what Alexy had made for us. So, there I made my first mistake; clinging to my perceived “performance” on the occasion, I made myself unable to receive Alexy’s gift, unable to allow myself the love he was giving me freely. I made my second mistake, too: I determined to “fix” the situation by buying more gifts.

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Dear friends,

Lately, I have been slowly finding my way back to the Christian tradition. Or it may be more accurate to say that I am finding my way to it anew, now that I have spent years focused on the contemplative traditions of the East and on the insights of depth psychology.

In any case, I have been reading John A. Sanford’s book, The Kingdom Within, where he applies Jungian concepts in his reading of the Gospels to reveal the hidden meanings of Jesus’ teachings. (You can read it for free here.) It is a wonderful book, and here I wanted to share with you one interesting observation the author makes on how Jesus uses language.

Sanford points out that Jesus’ parables release meaning in the same way that our dreams do. In Jungian terms, Jesus’ language is not semiotic, nor allegorical, but symbolic.

A semiotic expression would be to say, “I’m travelling to the Big Apple”. Here, I say one thing which both you and I know means some other specific thing. “Big Apple” means “New York City”.

An allegorical expression would be to say, “A relationship is like a tree, and good memories are like the fruit of the tree, so tend to the tree if you wish to reap the fruit.” Here, I am using images to illustrate some facts from life we are both familiar with. I am paraphrasing reality in the language of images. We may easily assume this is what Jesus is doing in his teachings, but we would then miss out on the true depth he is offering.

Jesus speaks symbolically, which Carl Jung defines so:

[T]he best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic…

C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

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Dear friends,

The end of the year approaches, and with it approaches renewal. The past 12 months have been a difficult and humbling experience for me, and yet I cannot help but look back on them with gratitude. This reminds me of an experience I had a few months ago…

I was standing in an empty c…

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Dear friends,

Thank you for helping me do this work and give it the time and space it requires. I have been pondering ways of showing my appreciation for your support that will be both meaningful to you and sustainable for me… Today I am launching a new series of monthly letters I’ll be writing just for you. I hope this will be a way to connect on a more personal level, and also a way for me to share thoughts that don’t make it into my public work.

I had a striking experience recently I thought I might share in this first letter. It happened in the midst of inner misery, after a bad argument with Elly, my partner, that left both of us hurt and distant. I felt broken, abandoned, misunderstood… Life was cruel, and somehow I was both the victim and to blame for it all. Making my usual escape from feelings into work, I was trying to do reading for my upcoming podcast with Dr Pim van Lommel. A verse from the Katha Upanishad he had included in his book caught my eye:

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