You’re an emotional guy — religious, a fast thinker, with street knowledge, and full of fire. Your sport of choice is kickboxing. Your voice is very emotional and goes up and down a lot. You’re like a big wave that crashes down quickly.
You’re a rational guy. You’re a Buddhist, you practice BJJ, and you’re a deep but slow thinker. Your voice is monotone. You’re like a smaller but steadier wave.
Always look first for where tension is in your body. Then you’ll know which relationship is disrupted.
A brain operates with electricity and voltage. It works very simply: it’s a kind of relationship machine.
Do you have tension somewhere in your body? That’s because a relationship with your brain has been disrupted.
Everything Is Everything At Once
We tend to see the brain as some sort of command center. If it's damaged, a person can no longer do certain things.
But it doesn’t work like that: a brain is a relationship machine.
Reality is overwhelming. Reality is everything — all colors, smells, options, and thoughts at the same time. Your brain chooses a set of relationships to make reality smaller.
A language, for example, is a tool you use to define “everything” by capturing it with words. You pick a tiny piece of reality to talk about.
The problem when someone’s brain no longer works properly is probably that everything comes in at once. That’s a much bigger problem than the part that no longer works.
So the conclusion “it doesn’t work anymore” is wrong. The right way to put it is: “it all happens at once.”
Remember: Everything you experience, everything in this universe, arrives all at once.
And now?
I’d put much more focus on making reality smaller, so the relationships between things can become clear. Depression, for example, is a disrupted relationship between you and something else (other people, meaning, etc.). It’s not necessarily a brain disease. It might be that in almost everyone, the brain is working perfectly.
Religion is the language of the street.
Religion is about what’s alive in people.
What’s alive in people is more important than what’s true.
If you understand “the street,” you understand religion — and then you understand what really matters.
It’s hard for intellectuals to grasp that some things simply don’t matter to certain groups of people. Politics, for example, is something many people never think about for a second. It just doesn’t interest them. You may not be able to imagine it, but it’s true. I spend precisely zero seconds a day thinking about politics. When a cabinet falls, I just think, “Here we go again” and “It doesn’t matter anyway.”
Ninety percent of the things we believe right now will be discarded a hundred years from now. There’ll be an entirely new scientific theory. What we currently believe is the equivalent of believing the earth is flat.
An intellectual should be able to tell you: What is the younger generation focused on? What are people really into? At the moment, for example, fitness is huge. It sounds like stating the obvious, but this is what people are genuinely engaged with all the time.