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 internet.

This is one of the peculiar intimacies of the internet: we can feel close to people who have never heard of us. The term for this is a parasocial relationship.

I know this feeling not only from philosophers and writers, but even from musicians with very autobiographical lyrics. All lyrics are autobiographical in some sense, but you know what I mean. Listening to artists like beastboy or Logic can feel strangely close, as if they’re old friends.

Alan Watts

The first spiritual teacher I found on the internet was Alan Watts.

During med school, YouTube started recommending recordings of his old lectures. I clicked on one, then another, and soon found myself walking through the city with his voice in my headphones, listening to someone talk about consciousness as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

That mattered to me because I had already developed the usual teenage nihilism. Modern science seemed to suggest a cold, hellish worldview: matter moving through empty space, meaning as an illusion, consciousness as an accidental side effect. Watts did not ask me to renounce science. He helped me unfreeze the world without denying its truths.

His lectures taught me that reality is not made of concepts. Concepts arise inside reality. Every symbol, every word, every number appears within consciousness. There is nowhere else they could appear.

I’m collecting songs featuring Alan Watts in this playlist - let me know if I’m missing any!

Jordan B. Peterson

Around the same time, I discovered Jordan B. Peterson, who had uploaded entire university lectures to YouTube. He became a different kind of teacher for me. While Watts showed me that the deepest layer of reality is non-conceptual, Peterson showed me that consciousness can still be mapped and navigated - with stories and symbolism.

The ideas from his 1999 book Maps of Meaning remain almost unchanged at the center of my own world model. It is the deepest book I have ever managed to read. His insistence on personal responsibility also aligns with everything I later learned through psychotherapy.

His four-part discussion with Sam Harris is my personal Super Bowl. Eight hours of two brilliant minds trying to understand each other in real time. I have watched the whole thing several times, and it still gives me new thoughts.

Sam Harris

Alan Watts, and later Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, sparked my interest in meditation. But I learned the actual practice from Sam Harris — or more precisely, from his app Waking Up.

That app taught me meditation not as relaxation, but as a direct investigation of consciousness. Not just calming down, not just breathing nicely, but looking closely at experience itself: thoughts, sensations, attention, the feeling of being a self.

His book The Moral Landscape also had a strong influence on me. I still recommend it to anyone who wants an accessible but complete philosophical argument for taking morality seriously without leaving science behind.

Eckhart Tolle

I am currently reading Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, and Tolle always makes me want to reduce.

Not in a harsh minimalist way. More like: what if I stopped feeding the part of me pretending it can achieve permanence through objects?

There is a passage in the book where he describes ownership as one of the ego’s favorite illusions:

The ego identifies with having, but its satisfaction in having is a relatively shallow and short-lived one. Concealed within it remains a deep-seated sense of dissatisfaction, of incompleteness, of “not enough.” “I don’t have enough yet,” by which the ego really means, “I am not enough yet.” As we have seen, having the concept of ownership is a fiction created by the ego to give itself solidity and permanency and make itself stand out, make itself special. Since you cannot find yourself through having, however, there is another more powerful drive underneath it that pertains to the structure of the ego: the need for more, which we could also call “wanting.” No ego can last for long without the need for more. Therefore, wanting keeps the ego alive much more than having.

Suddenly, a closet is no longer just a closet. It becomes a small museum of identity experiments. Some useful, some beautiful, some forgotten, and some quietly whispering: maybe this will make you more complete.

Fasting Is Overpowered

Before A New Earth, I read Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. One idea stayed with me: the suggestion that a person only needs three skills in life — thinking, waiting, and fasting.

Thinking and waiting have already become important practices for me. So I thought: why not try fasting too?

And it turned out to be surprisingly powerful.

I don’t mean fasting only in the literal sense of not eating. I mean it more broadly: temporarily abstaining from a pattern instead of wrestling with it every day. Not arguing with the craving, not optimizing around it, not building a whole identity around quitting. Just fasting from it.

I have tried this with a few habits already, and it creates a useful distance.

Quest Of The Week

The emerging plan of moving, combined with reading A New Earth, has created a very specific desire in me: to reduce the amount of material “I” pretend to own.

Tolle makes the illusion of the ego and its possessions painfully clear. And once that illusion becomes visible, it gets harder to look at your stuff as just stuff.

I have had a somewhat minimal approach to clothing for a while, at least in the sense that I allow myself a little unusual style and only buy things that make me go “hell yea.” That alone makes most shopping pointless.

But “hell yea” also includes quality, and quality means long-lasting, which means things accumulate. I still actively wear a Carhartt sweater I bought almost ten years ago.

So it is time to check the closet.

I’ll report the results next week.

✒️ Quote of the Week: “I am not a thing in the world; I am the space in which the world is happening.” -Richard Lang

🍿 Video of the week: Is Consciousness Fundamental? - Annaka Harris

🎧 Song of the Week: Foreigner - Girl on the Moon

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All the best,

Adrian / Urth

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