I start meditating and focusing first on my mind.

How do I feel? What are the thoughts that arise right now? What are the thoughts that have been occupying my brain during my dreams, if I wake up, then throughout the day as I am awake?

The negative thoughts will likely come first: what I need to do that I haven’t yet, what bothers me, or, worse, what worries me, or, even stronger, what am I fearing right now, if anything?

If I have the time, I will write them all down, as my pen or keyboard could write them automatically without thinking. I write only for myself, for nobody else, and then I don’t judge myself, I just write as if a river were flowing.

Once this is done, I do a gratitude exercise. What works? What makes me feel good? The presence of my three-year-old son, for example, always gives me joy, as he has no conditioning yet and mostly wants to play and explore everything. I can learn from him.

I also bring to my mind the simplest “good” things, I can sleep in and enjoy my home, I can eat (and learning to cook for myself these days!), I will or have just met a friend, etc. I tend to forget the abundance I already have. If I am alone, I can bring to mind all the friends who love me and, why not, call one of them later.

I noticed that I tend to over-dramatize negative thoughts and overlook the positive ones. This is exactly what my native indigenous friends have been repeating to me for years and hundreds of times.

“Once you do this work, you should have only positive thoughts, for yourself and for others.”

How can I have positive thoughts when the World is at war? It doesn’t have to damage my mind; I can limit my consumption to the strict minimum. I could also ignore it all or go to a long, silent meditation, but I have chosen to live in society.

If I manage to stabilize my mind and focus on the good thoughts and the positive I have done and will still do today, I resume my tasks.

If I feel I am not in a good state, I can keep meditating until I clear the “bad thoughts.” I can also take a shower or a bath, exercise, or simply go for a walk.

I have also learned to clear myself with sage, copal, or whatever cleansing smoke I have with me.

If I have good thoughts, I will also speak, write, and act well.

Visualization (which, for me, means creating my own visions) is also an excellent way to shift my energy.

I will write about it tomorrow. It looks like I am writing a series of posts about taking care of one’s energy.

We are talking from our experience and our own conditioning since we were born, from what we inherited from generations, good and bad, and from what society wants or imposes on us.

When I am asked for advice, I try to remember that I am talking to myself.

I try to remember that I know nothing about what I could know of consciousness.

Consciousness isn’t us isolated, I feel; it is the entire field of consciousness. Our brains and bodies are antennas, perceiving very little but perceiving not only what’s inside of us but a fraction of the universal consciousness. Then we think, speak, and act based on the limited information we have about the universe.

This is why giving advice is so tricky. We are giving ourselves advice, really, nothing more. I remember to apply any advice I give to myself first.

With this approach, I always need to talk as “maybe.” I should never talk as being certain of anything.

In the past three days, I have had friends using language with me as if they are absolutely certain of their beliefs and giving me advice (sometimes using should and must do) based on those uncertain beliefs.

I always thank them for their advice and welcome it, but also always distance myself from it and remember what feels true to me.

Please remind me if I fall again into the trap of certainty and telling others they “must” do anything.

I will post it here again: “Who is there to tell you what to do…?”

I am absolutely certain that I know almost nothing.

Losing friends is quite a normal thing when you develop. The concept of friendship is strongly biased: I think it is something that tears you away from yourself; friends are confusing you.

At first, this seemed to me a very provocative and frankly sad thought. Is it true?

I thought immediately about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where “Love and belonging” sits as the third most important need of humans. Humans are often seen as the most social animals on Earth, even though many other animals also live in organized groups, show affection, and communicate with each other. In The Hidden Life of the Trees, Peter Wohlleben beautifully writes about how trees also have a social life with one another and many other beings, such as the mycelial network.

Would friendship be a confusing distraction from the Self?

Social networks have redefined the concept of friendship. For the last thirty years or so, it has been easy to have enormous quantities of friends around the world and keep in touch with them.

Social networks also confuse us in mixing “friend” with “follower.” I won’t even start here, defining what a “follower” would be.

It is easy to observe, though, that we do not have so many “real” friends, the ones we keep in touch with regularly and throughout the years.

Business friends vanish when you change jobs. Friends based on a shared passion often disappear when you no longer share that passion; there isn’t much left to talk about.

The conscious crowd would say that you also change friends as you change “frequency.” It is true, our interests change, what we talk about changes, the way we talk changes, and those we might have loved hanging out with, we can only spend a little time with, suddenly. It goes both ways.

I can easily observe that those whom I consider the wisest have very few friends and generally spend considerable amounts of time alone.

Back to my philosophy teacher friend, and what I remember clearly, “friends tear you away from yourself and confuse you.”

Loneliness brings us back to ourselves. Meditation in heavy doses does it even more; there are no distractions at all.

Who do we find when we find ourselves? I’m working on it.

I still love my “real” friends and cannot be more grateful for their friendship. I will still take that “distraction” with pleasure, but consciously.

The illusion is a fashionable concept addressed by most spiritual practices and is also described as life being a simulation, as experienced by some of my friends, like Fabrice Grinda, who described it very well: life as a game.

A good friend of mine, Loïc Hecht, has written an upcoming book titled La Simulation, which I am currently reading.

Elon Musk and many other public figures mention it all the time, and it definitely seems that he treats his life and the world like a video game.

Nothing new, Plato brilliantly described it as “The Cave.”

In the allegory, Plato describes people who have spent their entire lives chained by their necks and ankles in front of an inner wall with a view of the empty outer wall of the cave. They observe the shadows projected onto the outer wall by objects carried behind the inner wall by people who are invisible to the chained “prisoners” and who walk along the inner wall with a fire behind them, creating the shadows on the inner wall in front of the prisoners. The “sign bearers” pronounce the names of the objects, the sounds of which are reflected near the shadows and are understood by the prisoners as if they were coming from the shadows themselves.

Only the shadows and sounds are the prisoners’ reality, which are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent distorted and blurred copies of reality we can perceive through our senses, while the objects under the Sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason.

-” The allegory of the cave” Wikipedia

Krishnamurti says, “The illusion is removed not by a path or technique, but by realizing that the mind creates these distortions.”

We see ourselves, our thoughts, and the world through the lens of our thoughts, past experiences, and conditioning.

I wrote about this in 2022 and unarchived it so I could read it again: “We definitely live in a simulation.”

I have a three-year-old son named Falco, and he has become a teacher of presence to me. There is only the now that exists; he mostly wants to play all the time when he doesn’t eat, and he needs to eliminate his natural waste from eating or when he is a little sick, mostly from catching viruses at school, a necessary step to build his immune system. He is not only always present, but he also sees what is as it is, not through all the adult thoughts, and speaks the same way; he also expresses his needs without wondering how anyone will feel when he does.

Falco is also extremely focused when he plays, to the point that anyone who talks to him while he is playing is often simply ignored.

I often struggle with presence and focus; that’s one way Falco is a teacher.

As I write this, I could be checking if I have new messages on WhatsApp or getting notifications on social media (I turned them all off, and my phone is always on silent), I could be wondering what a reader will think about what I write and change my writing, thinking about something else, etc.

Spending time with Falco reminds me of simplicity, focus, and the importance of reducing distractions.

I am also constantly reminded by him at his “pre-conditioning” and “pre-illusion” stage (the illusion is being formed daily, though!) that I could still be more like him again.

Now, my words and how it is related.

What I say is based on my perception, my thoughts, my past, and my conditioning. It takes significant effort to see myself not as the Self but as the observer of the whole, outside myself.

Krishnamurti offers here a simple solution: always observing our thoughts, reactions, and motives without judgment, keep a silent mind to see reality directly, and end conflict by realizing the observer is the observed. The division ends, and any energy spent in any conflict is wasted.

I have been working on practicing this.

If someone says something I perceive as wrong or an attack, I “see myself outside of myself, see that there is no Self, and try to observe clearly what is going on.” Why is it triggering me? What is inside of me that seems to be suffering from what I heard or saw? What does this person really mean? Why does he or she say this that I perceived badly? Is it about him or her or about me?

Compassion for all of us, and the understanding that I cannot understand what is going on in the other, or that I cannot perceive all of what is going on in me, resolves the conflict.

Love for both is always the resolution and definitely not engaging in the conflict.

This changes everything in the way I speak. More meditation, constantly, and more silence are required. Not engaging in any conflict. Compassion for both of us. Freedom and lightness.

Observe my thoughts and any judgment as a cloud that passes in the sky; it is all an illusion.