U.G. Krishnamurti spent most of his life chasing enlightenment, then decided the entire search had been a mistake. He rejected gurus, methods and the promise that enough spiritual work would eventually produce a better version of you. What interested him instead was the seeker itself: the part of us constantly comparing who we are with who we think we ought to become.

Some of U.G.’s claims are difficult to defend, particularly his account of the biological transformation he called the “calamity”. But the problem he kept pointing at is harder to shake off. A useful practice can become another way of grading yourself, and self-improvement can quietly turn into permanent self-surveillance. Can we change the things that genuinely need changing without turning ourselves into a permanent renovation project?

Much love, David x

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What happens when the mind catches itself in the act? This episode explores self-awareness, metacognition and the strange moment where a thought, reaction or impulse becomes visible before it turns into behaviour.

But more self-awareness isn’t always better. We look at rumination, cognitive defusion, choice blindness and the limits of introspection, asking whether noticing the mind gives us any real control over it, or simply gives us another layer of thought to get trapped inside.

Much love, David x

What if having a child is a moral decision we rarely treat like one? Anti-natalism begins with an awkward fact: nobody consents to being born, every life contains some degree of suffering, and the person who will live with the consequences has no say in the decision that creates them. In this episode of The Observing I, I look at the philosophy behind that argument, from Schopenhauer’s pessimism to David Benatar’s claim that coming into existence is always a harm. Benatar’s case is more difficult to dismiss than simply saying that most people are glad to be alive, because he draws a distinction between a life being worth continuing once it exists and that same life having been worth starting in the first place.

Taken seriously, that distinction leads somewhere fairly extreme. If suffering can be avoided by never creating the person who would experience it, while nobody is deprived of the pleasures they never exist to miss, then the safest ethical choice appears to be not to create anyone at all. But that argument also raises problems of its own. How much weight should we give to the judgement of people who actually live these lives? Does the impossibility of consent make procreation wrong, or simply something we should take far more seriously than we usually do? And what happens when the imagined baby becomes an adult with their own view of the decision somebody else made for them?

Much love, David x

PS: I've finally gotten around to setting the a Discord server for the podcast. If you want to join in some philosophical chats, recommend ideas for future episodes, or just hang out with a group of people who like to think, then the link is discord.gg/yUJGTCUmS5.

You can dissolve the self, touch the infinite and return convinced you have seen behind the curtain. Then the tea goes cold, someone still deserves an apology, and the ego quietly promotes itself to “the awakened one”. This season finale asks what altered states are worth once the visions fade, and where spiritual insight ends and psychological crisis begins.

Stanislav and Christina Grof, William James and Jack Kornfield guide us through the difficult return to ordinary life. The real test is not how intense the breakthrough felt, but whether it changes how you listen, apologise and live once the laundry needs doing.

Much love, David x

Wilber’s four quadrants begin with a persuasive idea. A human problem has an inside and an outside, and it belongs to an individual as well as the world around them.

This episode explores Integral Theory, the difference between waking up and growing up, and the danger of mistaking a comprehensive explanation for the person it claims to understand.

That danger becomes painfully real in Grace and Grit, Wilber’s account of his wife Treya’s cancer and death. Her story leaves us with a difficult question: can a map reveal what we have overlooked without giving us another way to explain somebody else’s experience away?

Much love, David x

Bernardo Kastrup argues that consciousness may not be something the brain produces, but the reality within which brains, bodies and the physical world appear. In this episode, I follow his route from computer engineering into analytic idealism, and examine why he believes physicalism has mistaken a successful scientific model for a final account of what reality is.

We look at the hard problem of consciousness, Kastrup’s idea that individual minds are dissociated centres within a larger field, and what psychedelic ego dissolution can and can’t tell us about the boundary between self and world. The argument eventually reaches more difficult ground: dementia, grief, death, and whether a philosophy of universal consciousness can offer anything honest without turning uncertainty into comfort.

Much love, David x

We like to believe that our eyes are honest, that the world we see is a reasonably accurate representation of what is actually there. But the math suggests a different story. We aren't observers of a physical world; we are users of a biological interface. From the green of an apple to the distance between two people, we are navigating a system of simplified icons designed to keep us alive by keeping us blind.

In this exploration of Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception, we look past the pixels of space and time to find the raw, non-spatial network beneath, and discover why the lie of the material world is the only thing that makes connection possible.

Much love, David x

Waking up is a slow return, a flicker of weight, a point of view, the sudden, jarring realisation that you're here again. It's the most basic fact of your existence, yet the one thing you can never hand to another person.

For decades, neuroscientist Christof Koch has tried to break that lock, attempting to turn the most private experience in the universe into a public science. It is an exploration of the 'Problem of Other Minds,' that quiet, enduring horror that suggests you're the only conscious entity in a world of sophisticated puppets, and the desperate search for the 'neural correlate,' the physical signature of the ghost.

As the map grew more precise, the gap only widened. You can track every neuron and chemical cascade, but the data doesn't explain why it feels like red, or why the shiver of a ghost remains. This friction leads to Integrated Information Theory, where consciousness isn't a trophy for the biologically complex, but a fundamental property of the universe. If a system is integrated enough, there is a 'feeling' there, whether it's a honeybee in a field of lavender or the humming circuitry of a server farm in Iceland.

This is where the science meets a crushing responsibility. To accept this is to acknowledge a world suddenly, violently full of feeling, and therefore, full of suffering. We stop being the masters of a dead machine and become guests in a living house. It is a journey from the white light of the laboratory to a place of quiet humility.

We move from the suspicion that we're alone in our skulls to the recognition that we're all just different apertures, letting in different amounts of the same, eternal glow.

Much love, David x

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Recommended reading

1. Then I Am Myself the World - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/198493988-then-i-am-myself-the-world

2. Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/133227745-consciousness