Hello,

Things have been moving fast this past week. Many of us are working from home, self-isolating, and acutely feeling the social distance. So we create memes, we jump on Zoom calls, we try to make ourselves helpful. 

This is the last edition of March—and boy was it a long month! It felt so long it's become a popular joke to say you have been alive in several decades: the 1990s, the 2000s, the 2010s, the 2020s, and March.

For the first time in my life, we have really worked on a goal globally and are starting to solve it. I would like to see the same for other topics as well.

I just got up and in the last few weeks, I haven't felt very well. My meditation today was about Mindfulness, Health, and Healing. Especially the last part is becoming more and more important for me, even though I still have little experience with it. It is about paying attention to your own body and mind.

EVERYTHING IS THE SAME until it is not. Tightly woven ideas and theories may be fabrications that make it hard to see how things could be otherwise. Scientists elaborate on theory with a series of concatenated probabilities to the point that it becomes very difficult to take accepted truth apart in the face of so much “supporting” data. For example, while we all have a pretty good picture of what dinosaurs looked like, clearly no one has ever actually seen one. At first, a few bones were found, and a picture of dinosaurs was constructed based on someone’s view of how they fit together. Then more bones were found, and it was easier to put together the picture of other dinosaurs once we had a starting point. Now imagine that a new and different set of bones were found and scientists began creating a picture of what would become a Metasaurus, where the bones made a reasonably complete image. After it was finished, imagine that a new bone was found that didn’t fit the prior conception of the Metasaurus.

How many new, previously missing pieces that don’t fit would have to be found before we entirely remade our conception of a Metasaurus?

We might “know,” for instance, that certain brain injuries create “irreversible” brain damage and accept that as fact. But if we asked how we could reverse “irreversible” brain damage, we would seek out information different from what we now examine when we take such labels as hard-and-fast truths and merely test existing theories. And so our medical conditions appear more and more to us as they have been defined by the research behind them. It is very similar in modern medicine and often we do not know which drugs really cure and why. Many of our chronic diseases have an unknown origin and the placebo effect is the strongest medicine. We can heal ourselves and many times this is the greatest power our body has. Sometimes those are small things like breathing, drinking structured water or mediate. Sometimes things like a broken leg can be healed in a few days with Plant Medicine and ancient healers. I first heard about that when I was a little child and my mom told me about these things. For many years these memories remained hidden.

In recent weeks I have been able to confront my own vulnerability. Which leads to some clear thoughts that the current path I am going sometimes maybe is not the best option for me.

I'm just thinking about two formats here. I would like to write 2-3 longer articles per month and several small "thoughts" and maybe we can create out of these small thoughts some roundtables via zoom or something similar.

What do you think?

The next two longer editions are about:

Happiness—Meditation, the Brain, and the Immune System

The Economy of Wellbeing

Until next week,
Malte