Chain Reaction

Two people work for the same company. They both have busy jobs, but they do not know each other.

The company also has an IT specialist who has set up the system so that their computers have to be restarted 27 times a day. This causes a lot of frustration for the two people. They become very angry because they want to finish their work, but they are constantly interrupted by computer updates.

At the end of the workday, they go home. One cycles in one direction and the other cycles in the opposite direction. They crash into each other.

Because they are already angry, they immediately start fighting.

Whose fault is it?

I think the IT specialist is partly responsible as well, because they caused the two people to become angry in the first place. On the other hand, we don't know why the IT specialist made the computers update 27 times a day.

Knowledge is not something static, but something alive

You don't want to give someone a painting.

You want to give them the clay to create something themselves, if that makes sense.

The same applies to science. If someone gives you a formula with some kind of definitive answer, a definitive law, that is not how it works at all. You will keep discovering new laws that eventually turn out not to be completely true either.

An easy way to approach this is to take the goal as the starting point. A healthy planet, and healthy animals and people, for example.

How do you achieve that?

By teaching someone how to work with the clay themselves.

Why the concept ‘ego’ is an inside joke for smart people

Let's say you have a finite amount of energy points you can distribute.

Some go to your heart pumping, some to what you hear, and some to what you do.

Simplified, you have two options:

Spending only energy on yourself. If every time I have a thought, I return to my breathing, I simply redirect all my energy to myself. ‘Ego’ therefore is an inside joke, because if you meditate, you are the most selfish person in the world (which is not necessarily wrong). You redirect energy towards yourself.
You spend all your energy on what you are doing in the outside world. You redirect the energy you extract from food and water towards changing the external world around you, based on what you find important. This can be anything: writing, drawing, gardening.

In reality, you obviously do both the whole time.

But some people are extremely tilted towards one side. If you are someone who is only busy with others, and not with yourself, you can forget that you have to spend energy on yourself too. If you are a Buddhist, and you are mostly occupied with yourself, you have to learn that there is an outside world too.

In religious traditions, people have come up with very smart strategies to deal with these imbalances. What you can do is take one day off every week. Or you take a few moments of silence every day. In these moments, the energy you spend slightly rebalances towards your inner world, which is important if you go hard the whole time.

You Are the Thing in Between

You eat, drink, breathe (you take in energy).
Now it’s yours. Now you have to choose what you do with it.
You give yourself. You spend your energy on what you find most important (you give back).

I, of course, understand that I am not saying anything new. But remember: when Mother Earth gives you all this food—animals that have died for you, plants—and you spend that precious energy you carry around on some big multinational oil company, then remember where the guilt comes from.