Thinking is the world’s most common addiction and the first step to recovery is recognizing there’s a problem.

Waking Up is a refreshing, rational middleground on spirituality avoiding both denial of spiritual experiences by skeptics and mystical woo-woo peddled by Deepak Chopra and other pseudointellectuals.

This post serves as a guide on how to interpret my previous posts on spirituality while explaining the purpose for future spiritual writing and suggests reasons why spiritual experiences and ideas are so hard to talk about.

In the subjective sense there’s only one time and place for everything to happen. Memories from the past and thoughts of the future occur in the present moment. The mind’s eye is the only place where things are seen. The mind’s ear the only place where things are heard. It’s all here and now.

Remember when you got stuck thinking about something but you didn’t realize you were thinking until after? Even if you don’t know what I’m talking about you’ve almost certainly had that experience before. Ego traps are the self-reinforcing thoughts that set you on the path of thinking without awareness of thinking.

What doublethink means in the context of this post is to feel a certain way about how you feel. It means to have an opinion of your own thoughts. It normally goes by the name metacognition. As novice practitioners of meditation quickly realize, you can “go meta” infinitely about your own thinking to the point that your mind becomes twisted into a complicated knot. In this post I talk about common ways the mind-knot is tied.

There is no isolated, unchanging self that answers to the name of “I”. The feeling that there is this self, this center to the flow of experience, is only an illusion. Experience has no center. The self is the unbearable burden that we’re all better off without.