Selected articles

There are more than 9,000 published articles on this site, written over about two decades. (In addition to four thousand unpublished articles.)

See below for a selection of the more recent articles.

To find more articles, use the search function on the top right or explore using the tags.

INTRODUCTORY ARTICLES

The following articles can serve as an introduction to some of the central themes here.

The practice I mostly use these days: Befriend & Awaken: The essence of many healing and awakening traditions

A brief story of the initial awakening shift in my life: Why the spontaneous awakening shift?

Something about our nature: Talking about the inevitability of what we are | What are we in our own first-person experience? | Why do many scientists and psychologists ignore our nature?

Small and big interpretation of awakening: Why don’t awakening teachers more often differentiate between small and big interpretations of awakening?

A few words on basic meditation: Basic meditation: Notice and allow what’s here, and notice it’s already noticed and allowed | Failing in basic meditation and finding what’s already here

A brief autobiography: A brief personal history

Dialog: Dialog with someone who has lived innumerable lives in many places in the cosmos | Dialog with one who has lived eons and has a mystic streak

CHRONOLOGICAL SELECTION OF ARTICLES

Psychology 101: My culture is inside me

In addition to articles tagged as essential articles, have selected a few recent ones here:

States highlight features of who and what we are

An example of dream telepathy (?)

The universality of consciousness

What’s the relationship between the divine and the human?

The overview effect & Big Mind

Anything we can name is not what we (most fundamentally) are

Weeding the garden: Supporting the natural self-healing processes of the mind

Robin Wall Kimmerer: We say that humans have the least experience with how to live and thus the most to learn

A rich and simple life: going to evolution for clues

Experience of time and age

Adyashanti: The ego is waiting for a cosmic finish line: “I’ll be really really conscious so I can cross the finish line, then I don’t have to be conscious anymore”

Idealism, realism, our economic system and ecological reality

Roshi Shunryu Suzuki: When you feel the oneness of everything, you naturally don’t want to harm anything

Byron Katie: “I don’t know” is a lot of freedom

Is it possible to directly perceive change?

Impermanence – good to remember, the great cleanser, happening here and now & pointing to our nature

The world doesn’t fit categories

Awake without realizing it?

When something I don’t like happens, what stories do I tell myself about it?

Visualize the other as healed, whole, wise, and kind, and have a dialog

[…]

Form is emptiness, emptiness is form

The future of awakening

What releases us from the reincarnation cycle?

Does all time happen now? Yes, to us it does

Something comes from nothing

Glimpses of Spirit

Does explaining through psychology remove the mystery and magic from life?

Waking up parts of our psyche: Become & wake up

Finding healing for our relationship with a wound vs finding healing for the wound itself

Exploring identities and finding what we more fundamentally are

Life 101: different kinds of validity in different views 

Understanding awakening in an atheist and materialistic context

The relationship between who and what we are (our human self & consciousness)

Life 101: Playing roles in life

Animal communication

Failing in basic meditation and finding what’s already here

Why do many scientists and psychologists ignore our nature?

Why do I love animals? Why do I love nature?

My memories from between lives, how it has colored my life, and similarity to near-death experiences (NDEs)

Nicolette Sowder: May we raise children who love the unloved things

Maps for the awakening path

The logic of what we are (awakening)

How old am I?

“I went against God’s will”

Why rewilding?

The world in me

The fantasy of arriving

Awakening and self-esteem

John Seed: I am part of the rainforest protecting myself

Rewilding: Nature protecting itself

Holding onto overly simplistic views for safety

Oneness through my life

Clarifying motivation & differentiate needs and strategies

Priorities & our ecological crisis

Why I rarely talk about unconditional love

Returning to the basics

Aspects of awakening

Litt mer om oppvåkning

Finding an easier way: chronic illness as a guide

Our human identity is not wrong, it’s just incomplete

Simone Weil: There are two atheisms of which one is the purification of the notion of God 

Our brains and this world are not made to make us happy

Spiritual stories vs what’s here in immediacy

From seeing to visceral

May your inner voice be the kindest voice you know

“I don’t know” is the only true statement?

Teenage experience: the shift from simplified duality to oneness

I am my own final authority

What does “oneness” mean? Some examples of different forms of oneness

The universality of my experience

Worldviews and how we experience distance energy healing

Hilde: When the scaffolding of taking yourself as the center of the universe falls, the jaguar emerges

The dark night trainwreck

Center of gravity shifting from separation to oneness

“It’s so easy to be tricked by our senses”

“I look at a tree, and divinity is looking back at me”

A few of my favorite music albums

Am I dreaming or awake, right now?

Pretending to be apolitical

Why do we love our land? An evolutionary perspective on landscape

The more you know, the more you know how little you know

The multiverse of sanity: Healing through alternate realities

The outer is (also) inner

Spirituality as indulging in fantasy vs exploring reality

Does our timeless nature mean we live forever?

AI and consciousness

The dreamlike quality of reality

Is God he, she, it, neither?

“I am picking up feelings that aren’t mine”

Taking refuge in a story to make ourselves feel better

What is memory?

– When I am with you, I feel I am out here (pointing to the area outside of the body)

A brief personal history

Is being reactive and angry the same as being authentic and unfiltered?

Being stuck in the absolute is not very helpful

Amplify and release: actively welcoming the experience we fear

Our ecological bottleneck and personal decisions

The banality of awakening

Waking up issues, parts, and subpersonalities

The field

“We are not humans”

Awakening comes from and is a kind of maturity

Everyday mystics

The essence of the dark night: Viscerally getting any experience as the divine

Awakening doesn’t change our life?

Byron Katie: When you walk in a dream and know it’s a dream, that’s love

No experience is local

Awakening is in the sweet spot of what can be described and studied, what cannot be proven to our satisfaction by others, and what we have to find for ourselves

Ways of knowing our nature

When we don’t know how little we know

The 80-20 rule in spiritual practice: Most of it is about transformation, and only a bit is about awakening

Perception of causality when I notice my nature

Themes of awakening in my own process

Themes in an awakening process

Stage models, reality, and when the sequences are jumbled

I am a mystery to myself

Perception of capacity and consciousness when I notice my nature

Dune and fascination with saviors

Several onenesses and one oneness

Nondual but dismissing the human?

Adapting to our more real identity vs attaching to a familiar mistaken one

Voting on behalf of non-human species

The experience of my human self when I notice my nature 

Phases in an awakening process

My nature is all I know and all I have ever known

“I don’t know anything for certain”

My intuition lights things up

Perception of the physical when we notice our nature

Perception of doership when we notice our nature

Perception of time when we notice our nature

Perception of movement when we notice our nature

Perception of distance when we notice our nature

This human self is connected with my world in a special way

Our nature: From conceptual understanding to noticing to finding ourselves as it, and living from it 

Some aspects of what I am: Capacity, oneness, human self, etc.

The logic of awakening & the inevitability of what we are and how it plays itself out

We are as rich as the world

Grounding speculations in what’s here and now

Noticing our nature vs our nature noticing itself

Why I am drawn to a psychological interpretation of awakening

Would it hold up in a court of law?

Paradoxes: Awakening shifts and how initial paradoxes may appear different when we are more familiar with the terrain

Some aspects of what we are – oneness, love, bliss, capacity, and so on

This human self is happening on its own

Exploring the world like a dream

A memory from between lives

Out-of-body experience as a child

How does God see us?

The background becomes the foreground in an awakening shift, and this shapes how we see ourselves, others, and reality

When awakening shifts happen without preparation: some upsides and downsides

What are we in our own first-person experience?

Here be dragons

The body as capacity, space, and consciousness

Tension & Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) – a brief overview

Befriend & Awaken: The essence of many healing and awakening traditions

Wolfwalkers & our relationship with the wild in nature and ourselves

An I Ching experience

The loops of consciousness creating a sense of separation within oneness

We cannot escape the dream, but we can learn to recognize and find appreciation for it

We are something, nothing, everything, and between nothing and something

The different types of validity in different stories

What is omniscient and omnipresent? Turning the story around and see what we find

Basic meditation: Notice and allow what’s here, and notice it’s already noticed and allowed

How do we know what’s true? (part one)

What awakens? What holds a belief?

Spiritual fantasies

Awakening described in five levels of difficulty

Byron Katie: What’s called bliss and what’s called ordinary mind are equal

Monkeys are Buddhas too

Why is (what we discover through) awakening difficult to put into words?

“I am picking up feelings that aren’t mine”

This human self is happening on its own

Each being is a world

Why do we tend to be identified with the head area?

Putin as a mirror

Two of us – perceiving ourselves as observer and observed

The transformations of awakening

There is an inner desert into which each one of us must one day go

A few quotes from Ramana Maharshi

Travel as an eagle

Finding what seems most as an I or me

Why do we find nature beautiful?

Demystifying and pointing out the mystery as needed

The no-thing that allows all things

Happy because he doesn’t have thoughts saying blindness and cancer is wrong

Phases in the awakening process, and maturing in spirituality

Adyashanti: There is only watching and/or observing

Why don’t awakening teachers differentiate between small and big interpretations of awakening?

The gifts of impermanence

Everything & nothing comes from somewhere else

Adyashanti: If we’re not trying to control so much, a lot of the meditative experience is actually naturally occurring

“I am picking up emotions that aren’t mine!”

Adyashanti: When you welcome all of experience into your awareness, a certain type of stillness starts to emerge organically

The same principles used in magic tricks apply to how we unawake ourselves

Meister Eckhart: We are all meant to be mothers of God

Jung: The God I experienced is more than love, he is also hate

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Jesus comes in the form of the beggar

Fascinated by mysteries in the world, and the mystery of existence

What we are to ourselves vs what reality is

Aspects of what we are

Who or what is unawake? Or has emotional issues?

The different parts of us have real needs, and we are the one in position to give them what they need

Who or what is awake?

Waking up issues: medicines for a condition

Ground of being as other vs what we are

As what I am, all is subject and object

Awakening doesn’t require any spirituality or religion, and is compatible with (philosophical) materialism

From the point of view of our system, knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing

Notice what seems the least like my nature

Awakening & reversals: figure-ground and subject-object reversals

The dark night of embodiment

Tracing to what’s more essential

We are familiar with what we are, we just may not recognize it *as* what we are (awakening)

Befriending life… through befriending our contractions

I am in you and you in me?

What is consciousness?

The mundane side of awakening

More pervasive emotional issues tend to be felt all over the body

Objectifying ourselves and others

Enlightenment is a destructive process

If investigated, ordinary insights can lead us to notice what we are

Essential doubt

How it works: Basic meditation

Own dialog: The inner victim & victimizer

Lao Tzu: kindhearted as a grandmother

Finding the one

Talking about awakening: a more sober and grounded approach

Our mental activity is a kind of dream

Adyashanti: All ideas of what should or shouldn’t have happened are just dreams

Adyashanti: Experiencing many dimensions of being allows you to be more fluid

Adyashanti: When we use the word consciousness, it gives the impression that we are talking about something other than us

The experience of no-self

Thoughts as an evolutionary experiment

The grey zone of awakening

Is awakening inherently better than not being awake?

Two forms of completely ordinary insanity

If I don’t love something, what am I actually not loving?

How spiritual practices become ongoing

A pragmatic view on free will

Do we live in a simulation?

A tantric approach to spirituality

Our three-part nature

In the world and not of it

Awakening is a habit

When realization appears as philosophizing

Spiritual pointers & practices are medicine for specific conditions

Gospel of Thomas, verse 22

Oneness = pragmatic love

The importance of love: From relationships to finding ourselves as love

What we find in awakening is already familiar

Spiritual practices mimic awakening

Awakening is not incompatible with “ego” dynamics

The value in a memory of awakening

Underestimating & overestimating awakening

What does awakening feel like?

Looking for what we are

Healing from within awakening

A relatively simple and pragmatic view on awakening

Some ways to look at reincarnation

How we interpret the behavior of others

What does the Buddhist emptiness mean?

Projections and how I (Imagine I) know others & the world

Projections and the larger context

Talking about the inevitability of what we are

A YES to the world

How does God speak to us through nature?

Tools for emotional emergencies

Recovering from Covid 19: post-viral fatigue pointers from someone with CFS

My own story: before and after awakening and the awakening itself

The essence of spirituality doesn’t require anything esoteric

The banality of evil and our ecological crisis

Only Lovers Left Alive: a dialog with someone who has lived for centuries

Dialog with someone who has lived innumerable lives in many places in the cosmos

ARTICLES ON SELECTED TOPICS

[in progress]

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Why the spontaneous awakening shift?

AWAKENING

ONENESS / SEPARATION

The loops of consciousness creating a sense of separation within oneness

WHO & WHAT WE ARE

SMALL AND BIG INTERPRETATIONS OF AWAKENING

Why don’t awakening teachers more often differentiate between small and big interpretations of awakening?

DARK NIGHTS

AWAKENING MISCONCEPTIONS / SPIRITUAL FANTASIES

Spiritual fantasies

BEFRIEND & AWAKEN

Befriend & Awaken: The essence of many healing and awakening traditions

BASIC MEDITATION

Basic meditation: Notice and allow what’s here, and notice it’s already noticed and allowed

INQUIRY

HEART-CENTERED PRACTICES

HEALTH

TENSION & TRAUMA RELEASE EXERCISES

Tension & Trauma Release Exercises (TRE) – a brief overview

SOCIETY / CONSPIRACY THEORIES

SCIENCE / BIAS / TRUTH

PSYCHOLOGY / EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

ECOPSYCHOLOGY / ECOSPIRITUALITY / UNIVERSE STORY

Wolfwalkers & our relationship with the wild in nature and ourselves

LIFE / PSYCHOLOGY 101

DIALOG

Only Lovers Left Alive: a dialog with someone who has lived for centuries

Dialog with someone who has lived innumerable lives in many places in the cosmos

[…]