My colleague’s strategy

I noticed that I was, from time to time, caught in a weird chain of reactions.

If I had an unpleasant feeling—the sense that something was off—my reaction was to try to control it, either by restricting myself through diet or by exercising more.

Really weird.

Now, whenever this happens, I use a strategy one of my colleagues told me about (she doesn’t have this problem). When she feels off, the first thing she does is check whether she has had enough:

• food

• water

This sounds trivial, but returning to the basics of the basics has absolutely helped me. I’ve noticed that often I simply need to eat more.

The second thing—and this is possibly more important than the food/water check—is telling yourself exactly how you feel, honestly. You are not overreacting when you do this; just be honest with yourself when you feel bad. Thinking that you are overreacting is probably one of the problems.

The problem with probability is that in real life there is only one outcome.

The doctor told my friend: you have a 25 percent chance of having a baby next year.

My friend said: next year I am sitting here with a baby, or I am not.

I think the key word is learning to trust your doctor on the outcome, but in real life, my friend is right.

I also do not look at the world in terms of probability. Probability is an arrow. Probability is not something fundamental in our universe. There is only one outcome, all the time.

I have never understood why science has such a strange focus on trying to predict the future.

If we could predict everything, then it would mean that we would not live in freedom. There is always an individual who does something new that you cannot know beforehand.

Suppose you have mapped the behavior of all particles, and then, in the end, you arrive at me—then I simply do something that falls outside of that. It is literally that simple.
Or have you ever looked at a classroom full of children? It does not get less predictable than that. You think you have an idea of what everyone will do, and then someone does something completely different.

I mean, there are no wrong questions you can ask. But predicting the future is a bit like using tarot cards.

If we don’t look, no energy is spent on showing what it is.
Nature is extremely efficient with energy: it doesn’t waste energy when we don’t look. That doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

When you look at something through a microscope,
and see how it works at the cellular level,
you also create a certain distance.
You make it clinical; you take the life out of it
when you look at something that is not yours.
In a sense, you know more —
in another sense, less

How to manually “state” your body

We humans move from energy state to energy state.

You are in a certain state right now.

It is fun to sometimes switch states manually.

This is how you do that.

1. Imagine that you are sitting in the same spot (or standing—I don’t know what you are doing right now) and that you feel 100% love. Truly imagine it, as if it were real. From the tip of your head to every fiber in your body.

2. You are already there. You already feel it. Now your body is going to follow. It takes a few moments before your body is there on a cellular level.

3. You feel everything adjusting, again on a cellular level.

4. You feel 100 percent love.

Yes, this is really possible. You moved from one state to another state, and you did it yourself.

We are looking at a wooden table.

"This wooden table is made up of quarks," I say.

"If many things are made up of quarks, then, relatively speaking, it is a meaningless label. It would only be relevant if only a few things were made of quarks. The world is not made of wooden tables," says Mary.

It does not suit our universe if there would be multiple parallel universes. It would also not suit our universe if there would be an afterlife. It would be impure, not polished, a little bit gross. I do not want to see my dead grandmother ever again. It should be like that.

I do not believe that we have bodies with parts inside them whose workings we cannot know.

So I simply started by figuring out how our brains work.

Step 1: I just asked—inside myself—my own brain.

And I got an answer.

I have now set my thoughts in such a way that in the morning I get a wave of this and that, and then in the afternoon I want to put another layer on top of it.

A wrong train of thought is (even if you are partly right): the chance that life emerged and that the universe is the way it is, is so unlikely that we can hardly express it in numbers.

Correct is: how special that we live. Amazing.

But we probably mean the same thing.

When you say: the universe came into being like this, you already make a small mistake by literally taking everything (the beginning of the universe) and wrapping it into one innocent word: the universe. It is better to look per element at how it came into being. Not everything at once. The fact that something expands does not mean that the opposite must shrink.