iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

(Response to a post elsewhere.) Jung was an advocate of his version of the perennial philosophy; in other words, behind everyday enchantment lies mysticism, & behind that lies an even greater cosmic consciousness, combining psychedelia with infinite profundity & God & everything else.

211

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Consciousness can't be contingent on something which it reveals, unless the 'laws of causality/contingency' can operate randomly & non sequentially - eg the light from a ceiling bulb can be wholly contingent on the cardboard boxes & the carpets it illumines

200

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Jed McKenna sharpens the blade expertly & then can’t do anything with it. He urges us to keep ‘going further’, meaning never settling for anything less than total ‘truth/infinity’(!) But then never asks the question that destroys his entire discourse at the outset: ‘What’s any of this all about?

200

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Philosophy (properly understood) is the application of critical thinking only (analysing ideas, presenting arguments, following scholarly rules &c); philosophy doesn’t have a creed or a belief system; its only goal is teaching how to think & analyse critically. Confusingly,

220

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Double slit experiment: key implication: Basic experience (no matter what the phenomenon) is inherently unstable & ungraspable as a 'particularity/singularity' & this simple fact is way beyond most physicists as it undermines their belief in stable perception (what!?) as ontologically ultimate.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Mystics try to maximise their sense of divine communion, forgetting that ‘hacking divinity’ is only one aspect of our experiencing. Yet spiritual insight begins with the realisation that the answer to existence is not selecting parts of it we might happen to like, but querying it as a totality.

113

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

Basic ontology of experience: Limits on actuality are only momentarily, meaning that anything which appears singular & immutable is only apparently so; & if you observe experience objectively & persistently you can easily see that anything - rpt anything - can happen anytime, anywhere.

210

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 19/02/2026

Insoluble problem: 'consciousness' is the elemental lucidity which informs us of 'what is what' & ergo can't be explained in terms of something more primordial than it; the idea that it can shows a misunderstanding of basic laws of thought. Yet not a problem for those arguing contingency theories.

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

(Free book download) Adult spirituality in plain English, so an easy read. (Free download here): petereastman.substack.com/p/advanced-b... And you can always buy a copy from Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B08VYLP3NY

000

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 06/02/2026

How can consciousness be contingent (that is, be causally dependent) on something consciousness is not only 'conscious of' but something which consciousness itself - as an empty, natureless 'revelatory capacity' – actually reveals to us in a revelatory presentation? Somebody help me out, please.

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

The most extraordinary New Age book of all time? But it led so many of us into delusional, weak-minded mysticism. (Article free to read) Yogananda: The Autobiography of a Yogi petereastman.substack.com/p/yogananda-...

petereastman.substack.com

Yogananda: The Autobiography of a Yogi

Classics of spiritual misdirection #7

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 17/01/2026

Hacking happiness (many posts): regret futile. Only one thing to do in life = ‘engage’ ie get a purpose (any, no matter how silly) & then, using intelligent time management (ask Spike Lee) just do it! If after all that, life is still very shit, then tough: welcome to adulthood.

113

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

Went out into the garden late one evening last summer & some bats were swooping around in the darkness, & glancing up at them I knew exactly what it felt like to be a bat. (But if I had then thought philosophically I would suddenly have realised that I didn’t know what I knew.)

120

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

When it comes to spirituality, the Intellect (our capacity for impartial, objective & dispassionate judgements) is the ONLY guide we have; the heart & the soul & the imagination are impulsive, blind & misleading. Clarity of thought leads to the promised land; nothing else does.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

‘The Buddhas say that Enlightenment cannot be attained because there is nothing to attain.’ Yes but you need first to attain the ‘unattainable’ to realise that truth; you are not ‘already a Buddha’ as your ordinary dumb self, as taught by various utterly moronic New Age sects.

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 16/10/2025

Academic philosophy is currently unable to teach people to think objectively & independently & so be able to explore experiential existence with confidence & advantage; instead it teaches people to submit only to the musings of an authorised tradition. One angle: www.academia.edu/8090287/The_...

academia.edu

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

Philosophy - that is, using your intellect to maximum effect on received ideas - is a preparation (if you're lucky) for metaphysics - ie exploring the furthest reaches of existence; and if you can get that far, consolation (in life) is trivial; alcohol will do just as well.

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Consciousness illuminates anything & everything without revealing itself; it is truly an invisible capacity; so how can we even know it's there? By deduction only. Can it be felt? No; the imagination supplies feelings & we can feel those, but they're not consciousness itself. tinyurl.com/2485h96s

tinyurl.com

‘Consciousness’ as an ‘identifiable’ something

An exercise in primordial ontology - involving observation and reasoning

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Academics! if you want ppl to read your scholarly book you'll have to give it away for free (as I'm doing) even if pub by a UPress they make a profit from subscription sales & after costs you get zero.(Ok New Age spiritual sh*t sells but that's different.) petereastman.substack.com/p/advanced-b...

petereastman.substack.com

Advanced Buddhist Metaphysics: Exercises in Sceptical Spirituality

(Free pdf book download) A way out of endless religious delusion: this is a ruthlessly sceptical approach to all things spiritual & mystical, including Buddhism (!)

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Adult spirituality starts here: abandon/shelve all beliefs & received ideas about God, Life, the Universe, everything & simply ask yourself: ‘what is existence?’ & ‘is there anything wrong with things as they are?’ Don’t turn to received ideas & dogma: look & see for yourself!

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Went into the kitchen & found I had forgotten to buy peanuts for my vodka blowout. Idiot! Life ruined! Worse, I should have been reflecting on deep spiritual metaphysics, not raging over f*king peanuts. So? Thoughts, from most infantile to utterly divine are just more thoughts.

130

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Ground (base) yourself (intellectually) not with theories & doctrines & likes but rather with what you can see with your own mind’s eye; & if you can’t see anything, it’s because your education was defective & you were never taught how to think for yourself. But it’s never too late: start today.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Ontological uncertainty (now there's a thing!) always refuses to be put to bed by analytical clever-dickery. petereastman.substack.com/p/wittgenste...

petereastman.substack.com

Wittgenstein and ‘Certainty’

And the implications for ‘spiritual exploration’ as well as for philosophical metaphysics

120

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

QM, string theory, relativity &c; those who look to physics for an 'insight into reality' need to grasp that science is wholly unrelated to ultimate human existential needs & concerns (fulfilment, insight, enlightenment) & might just as well be regarded as misleading gibberish.

130

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

Meditation basically encourages the imagination to run wild & depending on the person, this can result in all kinds of problems, especially in someone who has a weak sense of normality. More importantly, mystical imaginings are not spiritual insights. medium.com/new-earth-co...

medium.com

I Meditated 1 Hour For 30 Days To Joe Dispenza (& Here’s What Happened)

The true highs, lows, and mystical

231

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 15/07/2025

Zen/Ch’an began in China as a core version of Buddhism- enlightenment only- nothing else. Idea was basic meditation could do it, but meditation activates imaginings & soon semi-psychotic states= enlightenment. Clarity of mind crucial for metaphysical quest, not idiocy. petereastman.substack.com

120

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

To engage meaningfully with metaphysics, you genuinely need to want to know what 'your being' can tell you about the ultimate meaning of existence. You have to be able to observe, explore & analyse objectively & impartially all aspects of mind. (Hard work; not for everyone.)

130

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

‘What’s the point of existence?’ can’t be resolved by identifying a feature of experience (mind, evolution, God, physics &c) & then explaining it causally in those terms; if the mystery is to be settled at all, something wholly unknown & unexpected & other will have to 'occur'.

230

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Basic choice (since Big Bang!?) between faith & belief (received ideas) or believing in nothing & taking life as it comes. But why not explore objectively – using intellect & observation– the features of experience itself & see if the mystery of existence can perhaps be resolved?

330

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 02/07/2025

Are we all worshipping the same God? Allah, Ganesha, Jesus, Baphomet? If God doesn’t know what I want/ need/think & has to be told (by me)=wow! If God does, why clutter the airwaves with junk? But can a Big Cheese answer the ultimate question: what’s the point of God? (No point.)

130

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 30/06/2025

Religious faith is about how to save poor ‘me myself & I’ from a dreadful annihilation. But if we closely observe experiencing itself, we can easily see that ‘me myself & I’ are mere items in the mix & are not its ultimate constituents. So any key to existence must lie elsewhere.

100

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

Achtung! Ultimate question is NOT ‘how do I please God?’ but rather ‘what’s the point of all this (including any God)?’ ie what’s the point of existence itself? What’s the ultimate point of this endless flow of experience? With serious questioning, God becomes very trivial.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Nobel physicists/neuroscientists: get to work on theorising about ‘the hand’! an incredible organ which can make things, play music, gesture, allude; surely the result of collapsing invisible crystal microtubules & god knows what other wonderful fancies; fame awaits your genius.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

How does ‘spirituality’ work? Use the intellect to shelve thoughts of adolescent self-obsession & sentimental religiosity & explore objectively how experience presents itself to you. Why? So you can see clearly what the 'problem with existence' is & where a solution might be.

221

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

2 kinds of 'SOUL'; 1) a specific spiritual 'gift' granting us access to love, God, virtue, &c; this is an imaginative fantasy reifying biased ideas 2) a psychological propensity for deep imaginative experiencing both positive & negative; not everyone has this but it is very real.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

‘God’: an imagining + feelings + yearnings - & being only an idea, everyone thinks their version of God is supreme. In our culture 'God' emerged from the ancient ravings of some truly despicable & likely psychotic Jews & Arabs of the sort we often see on TV. C’mon guys seriously?

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Impossible fact for the 'big brains' to grasp: human existence begins (& ends) with ordinary experiencing, & not with atoms, QM, spacetime curvature, evolution, God, the brain, or similar invisible fancies. Imaginative phantoms fill our minds, yet they explain nothing. Puzzling.

120

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 26/05/2025

Bizarre though it may seem, meditation (supposedly ancient spiritual ‘mind control’) is delusional & a total waste of time. Why? b/c all it does is encourage the imagination to run wild; how do we know? Talk to long-term meditators & discover their lack of insight into anything, notably meditation.

110

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 30/04/2025

Idealism – the theory that everything is ultimately 'mental' – is existentially worthless (ie pointless) because at best it only ever offers a partisan redescription of experience as we already have it. If everything is eternally ideal, how come existence is such a nightmare?

191

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

Spirituality is about about attempting to resolve – decisively – the mystery of the totality of existence. To make a start, you have to learn to THINK slowly, carefully & objectively. Groovy New Age mysticism is not the way to go. You’ve got to apply yourself. Not so easy, but it’ll be worth it.

1111

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

As usual (since the very beginning of human history) we depend on other people to think for us, along the lines of 'omniscient QM (etc) guru, look though my eyes & tell me what I see'; so yes, feel sorry for me, as I for you: tell me what I need to see so that I can see what I need to see.

171

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

An 'argument' (evolution, theism, atheism, materialism) no matter how convincing, is just a bunch of words pretending to be definitive; it's an enticement. Yet could a 'decisive argument' somehow capture a genuine ‘TRUTH'? Not if you really care; we're just eternally gullible.

160

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 26/03/2025

‘Spirituality’ is about resolving – decisively – the mystery of existence. To make a start, you have to learn to THINK (yes!) slowly, carefully & objectively, avoiding all forms of belief. Fog will then lift. New Age garbage about ‘all paths lead to a loving God’ is infantile.

160

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Metaphysics is NOT the ‘philosophical study of what there is’: any fool can have a flatulent stab at that; instead metaphysics is a search for what the ultimate point of existence is - beyond God & anything else - & it takes a special kind of fool (!) to want to swim out there.

1207

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

The human spiritual predicament: outlined in the simplest possible non-religious terms (as always, article free to read) petereastman.substack.com/p/the-human-...

petereastman.substack.com

The human spiritual predicament

Outlined in the simplest possible non-religious terms

294

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 04/02/2025

Why are there so many experts on consciousness who are quite unable to define it without talking nonsense? (No need to name names.) Can one make a good living out of being a consciousness expert without having the least idea what consciousness actually is? Got to love academia!

1132

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Awakening/Enlightenment? What are we trying to achieve? We possess a lucid ‘capacity’ (not a ‘something’) which witnesses experience as we know it; awakening is when it reveals itself to us; it is beyond any experiential manifestation of any kind & so can’t be described with reference to other +

170

Zen.Buddha.Tao @indybuddhist.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Have written about a clear path to metaphysical insight extensively on Medium & Substack for those interested; everything in simple, jargon-free language. Apparently not to everyone's taste; but try for yourselves. medium.com/@peter-eastman (members) petereastman.substack.com (all free to read)

050