Adrian Schug
I've been sending a new episode of my free Newsletter each Monday for more than 100 weeks! 🚀
The White Wall ◻️
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 110 The Theatre Of Perception I’m currently working on a project called The Realm, an interactive website to lay out and play with my personal mythology. It currently consists of six areas, two of which opened their gates in the last weeks: The Ocean of Being explores the original state of consciousness, pure and borderless. It’s the origin and destination of everything. The Thought Forge hints at the process of creating something from everything. It’s where potential...
The Thought Forge 🔨
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 109 I Am, Therefore I Am Thoughts are at the center of the human experience. “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum) is René Descartes’ famous conclusion to the mystery of existence. While it isn’t very useful without context (you could as well say “I am, therefore I am”), it is one of the most popular philosophical quotes. It sticks because we all know how important thoughts are. Thoughts are interpretations of the world, of other people, and most importantly of...
The Ocean of Being 🌅
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 108 My main notion of the world in a nutshell: Consciousness allows us to compress infinite complexity (the quantum soup around you) into something navigable (a room with furniture). We do not experience raw reality, but an abstraction on a useful scale. It’s built to guide our actions - by evolution, the greatest designer of the world. Here are some fun features: The world appears to us not just as a place of things, but as an arena of action with a narrative structure...
The Invisible Crowd 🏙️
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 107 Imagine you're walking through a university campus. A tourist approaches you and asks for directions. You want to help, but your answer gets interrupted by two guys carrying a door, briefly obstructing your view of the stranger. As you attempt to continue the explanation, you suddenly notice it's a different tourist you're talking to! Or maybe you wouldn't realize the switch at all. In an experiment about "change blindness," researchers Daniel Simons and Daniel...
You Inhabit a Dream 🌌
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 106 The Mystery of Experience Look around the room you’re currently in. Notice the colors, shapes, and sounds around you. Notice the feeling of your clothes against your skin, the feeling of having a body in space. It all seems perfectly ordinary. But in these ordinary experiences lurks the biggest mystery of life (as far as I am concerned). Take the color red. We know quite a lot about how seeing works. Light of different wavelengths enters the eye and stimulates...
What's The (Un)Known? 🌁
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 105 I’ve been talking a lot about the known and the unknown lately. But what exactly are they? The world unfolds as a landscape within consciousness. Part of this landscape is geographical. It contains rooms, roads, trees, cafés, mountains, and chairs. But another part is emotional. It contains hopes, fears, goals, memories, desires, and relationships. These two layers are deeply intertwined. There aren’t Objective Objects Look at a chair. Take in your perception of it...
What's A Dragon? 🐲
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 104 Ouroboros Review Last week, I wrote about the dragon tattoo on my arm as a version of the ancient Ouroboros: the self-devouring snake, the circle, the horizon of consciousness. March 2026 The core idea was that our experience is always shaped by the tension between the known and the unknown. We live inside a small illuminated sphere of perception, surrounded by something larger, darker, and more mysterious. Culture, language, concepts, and habits give us stability...
The Dragon On My Arm 🐉
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 103 Last March, I got my first tattoo. Even though I only developed the concrete design recently, the motif had been clear for a long time. The idea had been maturing in me for almost ten years, so there is quite a lot to say about it. In this episode, I will try to summarize what the dragon on my arm is about — as well as I can. The Origins and History of Consciousness Last week, I mentioned Maps of Meaning (Jordan B. Peterson, 1999) as “the deepest book I ever managed...
My Spiritual Teachers 📼
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 102 Spiritual Teachers Most of my teachers don’t know that they are my teachers. That is one of the stranger features of the modern world. A person can shape your worldview, accompany you through years of your life, and become a quiet voice in your mind — without ever learning your name. Their teachings reach me through YouTube, Spotify, Substack, Audible. Even books are often digital now, and the physical ones usually arrive through the same invisible machinery of the...
Live As If You’re Chased by a Snail Assassin 🐌
LIFE ON URTH - Episode 101 Last weekend, I had a long conversation with two friends about the immortal snail meme. The rules are simple: Somewhere in the world, a random regular snail is chosen to become your nemesis. From that moment on, it is invincible. It always knows where you are. And if it ever touches you, you die instantly. The good news: it is still a snail. It does not fly. It does not teleport. It does not sprint through the night with tiny murderous legs. It just crawls. In the...
I've been sending a new episode of my free Newsletter each Monday for more than 100 weeks! 🚀