There is a gap between the brain scanner and the experience it measures. David Chalmers calls it the Hard Problem, and it is the question that will not go away no matter how precise our maps become. Why does it feel like something to be you?

We travel through the psychonaut's testimony, the philosophical zombie, and the possibility that consciousness is not something the brain produces but something it taps into. And we end up somewhere unexpected, standing in a queue at the post office, staring at the most mysterious thing in the universe.

Much love, David x

In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Pema Chödrön, exploring shenpa, groundlessness, tonglen, and the uncomfortable spiritual practice of staying present when everything in us wants to escape.

Rather than treating awakening as a way to rise above pain, Pema points us back into the exact moment we get hooked: the tight chest, the old story, the message we want to send, and the small space where something other than habit can begin.

Much love, David x

In this episode of The Observing I, we enter the work of Stanislav Grof, the Czech-born psychiatrist whose psychedelic research led him to a stranger view of the unconscious: one shaped not only by childhood and memory, but by birth, death, the body, symbols, and non-ordinary states of consciousness. We explore what Grof’s maps of the psyche still offer, where they overreach, and why powerful experiences can feel true even when their meaning remains uncertain.

Much love, David x