What is consciousness?
Knowing and understanding that you are alive. Therefore, a computer—no matter how smart—is zero percent conscious. It couldn't be further from consciousness.
We humans are staring at lifeless electronic plates as if they’re going to give us answers about the universe. If you understand the irony of that…

What is intelligence?
Being thoughtful about the energy you use and the energy you spend. Balance.
Also, it's about how much you invest in changing the world around you, and how often you take a few seconds to enjoy how it is right now—without wanting to change it. Or yourself.
Religious people have always been infinitely better at this than non-religious people. And I’m not even religious myself. (Or maybe I am.)

Time

The only thing that exists is the here and now.
The past exists, but only in our memories. That doesn’t mean it’s not important.
A simple way to see it is that the past transforms into memories that we carry day to day.
So the past exists in ourselves, but the only place you’ll ever be is here and now.
The future also doesn’t exist. That’s a here and now that’s still got to happen, later.

So you never have to worry about ‘returning to the here and now’ or returning to your breath. You are always here and now, even when you are daydreaming. You just forget the here and now for one second.

I’m sure time traveling is possible, but you can’t travel back in life.

My Uncle Who Was Not Sick

My uncle smoked for 20 years. He also worked with poisonous paint.
He went to the doctor.
The doctor said: “You have COPD.”
What the doctor should have said:
“Your body works perfectly. I would be worried if you didn’t have COPD. That would be a real irregularity in the system.

So congratulations — you are not sick.

What Happens When You Turn Off Your Feelings

I vividly remember turning off my feelings when I was younger. It was a brief moment, with my dad, when I decided — I’m going to do it without feelings from now on.

I knew I had to remember that exact moment, because a lot of problems would follow, and I would forget the original issue — that moment with my dad, and turning my feelings off.

And that’s exactly what happened. I forgot that I did that, and instead I got a ton of other diagnoses: ADHD, autism, GAD. I even had a touch of anorexia (though that one wasn’t officially diagnosed — the rest were).

My point: while it wasn’t my fault, it was still my own behavior that got messed up. Until I turned 36, I basically didn’t feel anything. No bad things — but also no good things.

When you turn your feelings off, it ends up looking a lot like depression. Everything becomes ‘grey’. But it makes sense: you don’t feel bad, but you don’t feel good either.

What Tarot Cards Are for You, Probability Is for Me

Not knowing how something works doesn’t make it probabilistic.

It may look random — that doesn’t mean it is.

Conversely, when you unpack everything and see how it works, that doesn’t mean everything is deterministic either.

It’s also important to understand stochastics for what it is.
You can’t simply say, “The chance of rolling a six on a die is 1 in 6.”
First, there aren’t six outcomes. You don’t know all possible outcomes — the world could fall apart a second from now. So you’re only describing the outcomes you already know.

Second, when you say something like “throwing a fair coin,” you’re already making an assumption about the coin’s randomness. Saying, “The chance of throwing a fair coin is 50%,” is a mistake; calling the coin fair already implies that probability.

People who believe in stochasticism practically say: there is a 100 percent chance that, at a fundamental level, particles behave probabilistically.
But this is a flaw in logic—because by saying there is a 100 percent chance, you're making a definitive statement about probability, which you can't do if the world were truly random.
If it were really random, you couldn't say, “there is a 100% chance of this or that.”

Thus, randomness and probability can't be true at the same time.