# Radical kindness > _Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle._ --- Unknown > _For so long as the root of wickedness is hidden, it is strong. But when it is recognized, it is dissolved. When it is revealed, it perishes. ... It is powerful because we have not recognized it._ --- The Gospel of Philip I have been carelessly spreading evil my whole life. I am not yet done. May this post serve as both a confession and a warning. Please forgive the third-person style. --- When you perceive someone as evil, and feel a twinge of hatred, malice, or even just the slightest contempt, you are experiencing your *own* evil. A mind that is free of evil simply does not perceive reality this way. If you accede to this perception, you are inviting evil to further colonize your mind. From there, it will *inevitably* leak into the world, one way or another. You will then disown any responsibility for its far-ranging consequences and come away further convinced of your own good. You mock someone for their backward beliefs, but they just dig in their heels. You were only trying to help them see their idiocy --- or if not exactly them, then at least the rest of the world. Either way, it's *surely* a net good. Their recalcitrance just proves that you were right about them after all, and that your cruelty is justified. This nasty encounter will fester in their mind and erupt in some form or another later. Any such effects will be remote enough in time and space that you can _definitely_ wash your hands of any complicity. They had free will, after all. Why didn't they simply choose to be better instead? You wring your hands at the sorry state of the world and vow to fight even harder. Part of you knows that this story is a crock, but if you were to admit that to yourself, your whole carefully-constructed reality --- and the hierarchy of blame that scaffolds it --- would suddenly come crashing down. It is impossible to communicate how painful the full epiphany is; to be forcefully shown just how much of the world's darkness can be traced back to your own decisions to be unkind --- but you suspect it, and do everything in your power to avoid confronting it. But astonishingly --- and mercifully --- what lies on the other side of that hellish epiphany is a glory so vast that it defies description. You discover that what you are at your innermost core is _pure unconditional love_; the primordial principle that gave birth to the universe itself. You honestly never wanted to hurt anyone --- and in your deepest being, never _could_ want such a thing. That being so, what explains your behavior? Somewhere along the line --- countless lifetimes ago, if you want to think of it that way --- there arose the fear that you might _not_ be good. You projected this fear outward, thereby perceiving _others_ as bad. This gave you something to vanquish to prove your own goodness beyond doubt. Unfortunately, it only induced the perception in them that _you_ were bad. Part of you could sense the truth in this accusation, thus intensifying your fear and making you project even harder. Thus began an endless cycle of amplification, resulting in a hall of mirrors that you can no longer even _suspect_ that you are trapped in. You have been on the lam from your "original sin" ever since. Ironically, you are only running from your own Light. Somehow, you must be reminded of your true nature. This is the grace you feel when others show you kindness --- especially when you don't "deserve" it. Sometimes it comes in the form of tough love, and you don't realize its impact [until much later](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrZbMXtDuNA). The whole thing started off as an innocent misunderstanding, but it quickly spiraled out of control. Every single one of us is caught in this web of illusion, whether we know it or not. Mostly, we do not. Perceiving this clearly, it is _impossible_ not to be overcome by profound grief at the horrible irony of it all, and the overwhelming desire to be of service in ending the madness instead of mindlessly perpetuating it. You vow to unflinchingly hold the Light for others, even when --- _especially_ when --- they cannot hold it for themselves. Make no mistake: people *do* act out evil, and it must be relentlessly fought. But the crucial insight is that the evil is not intrinsic to their minds: that is just a trick your *own* mind uses to hide your own complicity from yourself, and only buries us all deeper into the maze. This one "small" shift in perception changes absolutely everything. I suspect it is not until we see just how badly we've been trapped --- without ever suspecting it --- that we discover the true meaning of compassion, and begin the long journey of healing. Alas, seeing this once is (generally?) not enough. The same message must be driven home repeatedly in different ways until we finally Get It. In case you're wondering, I certainly have not. What you long for most deeply is to return Home. So does everybody else, even though it certainly doesn't look like that. It _can't_ yet look like it, by your mind's own clever design. The world does not need more sanctimony and contempt. What it needs most desperately is your fierce, uncompromising Love --- whatever form it takes. It may not look like "love" from the outside, but you will always know from the inside. It is the only way to guide yourself --- and all of us --- back home. --- > _If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?_ --- Alexander Solzhenitsyn --- > _Such a [person] knows that whatever is wrong in the world is also in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved problems of our day._ — Carl Jung --- > *My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was [tied to a tree and burned alive](https://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8033) in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt / thought more or less okay about what he was doing. **And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual / behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.*** > > *Reminds me of something (I think) Duncan [Trussell] said on some recent podcast, quoting somebody else: it isn't the victim of violence you have to pray for so much. It's the perpetrator. They are the one who is more trapped in delusion, more estranged from love, etc.* > > [From an online forum. This is a perfect example of discovering one's own self-deception, and why pyschedelics are such a powerful and important tool.] --- > *I wasn’t just watching the events; I was actually reliving them again, while at the same time I was also re-experiencing the actions from other people’s points of view. I was them. I was reliving the experience from their point of view and at the same time (and I don’t know how this works) I was also experiencing it from a higher reality; the truth of the matter. So what I saw was my own lies and my own self deception to myself, which I had used to convince me that doing certain things was okay because people had deserved it. Then I was experiencing the emotional impact it had on other people. I felt their pain. I felt the shock on them… [But] the judgment came all from myself. It was not from an outside source, but then this being that was with me was also sending me comforting messages – thank goodness! – and one of them was it was alright as I was only human.* > > [From a near-death experience] --- Also see this [page of quotes](https://hackmd.io/@monktastic/radical-kindness-quotes).
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Emptiness, no-self, and nonduality

Along the way to full awakening (as understood by the Buddhist tradition), there are several profound realizations that practitioners commonly mistake for the end goal. Because each one can feel utterly "final," this can stall progress for decades (or perhaps lifetimes). One often hears this in statements to the effect of "I am the space of pure awareness; ideas of gain and loss can no longer touch me." What more can be said at that point? Not only is there the risk of getting stuck in this way, but there is the all-too-common phenomenon of assuming the role of teacher and spreading one's misunderstanding to many others. Therefore, it is extremely valuable to have a map ahead of time. It is difficult to piece together such a map from disparate sources, particularly because language can make different realizations sound the same. This has resulted in much confusion in the literature (some of which we will explore below). This piece is meant to be (part of) such a map. These are not my original ideas. I am deeply indebted to Soh Wei Yu and John Tan (and their community) for tirelessly sharing these insights. Numerous serious practitioners have found them invaluable, and I hope you will, too. This map focuses on stages of nonduality (i.e., the realization(s) that one is not ultimately separate from the world). There are realizations that go beyond those listed here, as well as other paths that do not take this route at all (but perhaps meet up with it later). Some will be discussed briefly later.

12/23/2022
Why idealism?

Idealism is the philosophical position that reality is fundamentally mental in nature. It is often contrasted with materialism, which says that reality is physical. Although it may seem difficult or impossible to know which of these (among countless other possibilities) is correct[1], I'd like to explain why you should bet all of your chips on idealism. Suppose you really are an individual being embedded in a fundamentally external reality --- which materialism, amongst others, entails. In that case, nothing could prevent a malicious entity from taking over your mind and presenting you with a false reality. If executed flawlessly, you could never even detect that it was happening. Therefore, you could not even assign a meaningful probability that you were being thus controlled. In this way, materialism prevents you from ever having any confidence whatsoever in the ultimate nature of your reality. On the other hand, suppose that what you truly are is the self-aware ground of reality itself, whose very nature is fundamentally conscious. You dance realities into apparent existence, and then live out seemingly-mundane lives from countless perspectives within these dreams. If that is true, then nothing outside yourself could prevent you from "waking up" and confirming this fact with flawless certainty --- there being nothing outside yourself in the first place. It is difficult to imagine what such "confirmation" could possibly be like. Although nothing logically prevents confirmation, it's hard to fathom how any experience, no matter how convincing, could provide you with certainty. After all, how could you be sure that that wasn't just another very compelling trick, too? The short answer is that it does not fall into the category of experience. Experiences are indeed, by their very nature, unreliable. What it is is much harder to say, and cannot be precisely described from within the dream. Mostly, the realization has been communicated via poetry. Reality is miraculous, in the sense of transcending any and all attempts to pin it down --- idealism itself ultimately included --- and this can be known directly and concretely.

12/17/2022
QM and consciousness (for people who don't like math)

When people say that QM has nothing to do with consciousness, they usually mean consciousness in general --- and this is (probably) true. On the other hand, your consciousness is indeed relevant: it is the point at which quantum events attain definite outcomes for you. You may find this fascinating or boring, but most popular treatments --- both technical and "New Age" --- tend to misrepresent it. I'd like to remedy that. A single particle can be in a superposition. It is possible to prove that it's in superposition by something called an interference experiment. As the superposition interacts with other particles, they join the superposition (i.e., become entangled with it). As far as we know, this is true even if those "other particles" constitute a conscious being. In this way, the superposition just keeps growing and growing forever[^collapse]. [^collapse]: Interpretations of QM can be broadly divided into collapse and no-collapse. The former state that superpositions undergo a real physical collapse. Technically, their distinct predictions make them distinct theories, and not interpretations of QM. The vast majority of physicists are in the no-collapse camp. This piece takes the no-collapse perspective, and is agnostic about interpretation. However, doing an interference experiment requires careful control of all particles in the superposition. If you leave out even one particle, the remainder will behave classically. In other words, they will appear to have collapsed. This has a few immediate consequences:

12/1/2022
Quantum myths

There are a few common myths about quantum mechanics that I'd like to address. A full understanding of the issues requires math, which most people don't have the time for. So here I will try to explain them as simply as possible. The measurement problem I suspect that a substantial majority of physicists who use quantum mechanics in their everyday work are uninterested in or downright hostile to attempts to understand the quantum measurement problem. --- Caltech physicist Sean Carroll The biggest mystery still surrounding QM is the nature of measurement. Why do superpositions seemingly "collapse" into one result or the other? And when, exactly does this happen? Here are two common (but unhelpful) answers.

12/1/2022
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