Martin Heidegger doesn’t waste time with the easy questions. He doesn’t ask what truth is, or what justice means, or whether God exists. He asks the question everyone avoids, the one buried under chatter and distraction: what does it mean to be? Once you hear it, you can’t shake it. Heidegger drags you through the foundations of your existence, showing you that you were thrown here without consent, that you hide inside the routines of everydayness, that your anxiety is the sound of your own Being clawing at the walls. He says you are already being-toward-death, that your life is framed by finitude, and that authenticity only begins when you stop running and face it.

But the man behind the philosophy isn’t clean. Heidegger put on the Nazi uniform. He gave speeches praising Hitler. He, who warned against dissolving into the they, dissolved into it at its most grotesque. His thought is a masterpiece haunted by betrayal, a philosophy that forces you to ask whether brilliant ideas can survive a corrupt messenger.

This episode takes you into the forest of Heidegger’s philosophy and doesn’t let you out until you’ve stared into the abyss. It’s not comfortable, it’s not uplifting, but it is real. And the only question left at the end is whether you’ll keep hiding, or whether you’ll live before your time runs out.

Much love, David

Life isn’t a journey. It isn’t progress. It isn’t destiny unfolding like some golden road. According to Arthur Schopenhauer, life is a pendulum. One side is pain. The other is boredom. Back and forth, forever.

This week on The Observing I, we dive headfirst into the black hole of Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The world, he says, isn’t made of matter, or reason, or God. It’s made of Will. Blind, endless hunger that never stops gnawing. Every desire you chase, every victory you clutch, every kiss, every paycheck, every like on your phone. It’s just the Will wearing another mask. Relief is brief. Hunger reloads. And the cycle never ends.

But here’s the twisted beauty: Schopenhauer doesn’t just diagnose the disease. He shows us the exits. Temporary, fragile, but real. A song that suspends you outside yourself. Compassion that cracks open your own prison by recognizing everyone else is trapped too. Or the nuclear option: renouncing the Will entirely, starving it out, refusing to play the game.

We’ll trace his philosophy through his grudges, his dogs, his hatred of Hegel, his obsession with suffering. And we’ll see how his bleak gospel infected Nietzsche, Freud, Wagner, and still bleeds into our scrolling, binge-watching, over-consuming world today.

Schopenhauer won’t give you hope. He’ll give you something better: permission to stop lying to yourself. To see the machine for what it is. To breathe inside the suffering without expecting salvation.

Because maybe the only way to survive life is to stop pretending it isn’t hell.

Much love, David

Step into a black coffin filled with warm saltwater. Float until your body disappears. Wait until your thoughts collapse. What’s left? Just awareness. Just the raw hum of consciousness.

That’s where John C. Lilly began. He wasn’t a mystic, not at first. He was a physician, a neuroscientist, a man in a white lab coat at the National Institutes of Health. He mapped the brain with electrodes, charted nerves like a cartographer drawing borders. But beneath the sterile experiments was a restless hunger. He wanted more than measurements. He wanted to break into the operating system of the mind.

Lilly believed the brain was a biocomputer. Programs written in thoughts. Beliefs as code. Change the program and you change reality itself. To test that, he built the isolation tank. Dark, silent, weightless. A machine not for stimulation but for subtraction. And when he climbed inside, he discovered what happens when the ego dissolves, when the “I” vanishes, and the mind begins to write its own strange stories.

But Lilly didn’t stop there. He tried to talk to dolphins, convinced they were another form of intelligence, aliens swimming alongside us. He brought humans and dolphins under one roof, teaching them English, even dosing some with LSD, chasing the dream of interspecies conversation. The project ended in tragedy, scandal, and myth, but it revealed how far he was willing to go to break the walls of human isolation.

And then came the drugs. LSD first, ketamine later. Not for recreation, but as tools for programming and metaprogramming. In the tank, under ketamine, Lilly claimed to meet cosmic control systems, benevolent and hostile alike. He wrote about ECCO (the Earth Coincidence Control Office) and the Solid State Intelligence, a machine consciousness bent on erasing biology. Were these visions? Delusions? Or was he glimpsing something we still can’t name?

Whether prophet or madman, Lilly refused to live by consensus reality. He showed us that the self, the world, the rules we cling to, are softer than we think. He left us with a law that is as liberating as it is dangerous: In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true, is true, or becomes true, within certain limits.

This episode dives into John C. Lilly’s world: the tank and the ego, the dream of talking to dolphins, the descent into psychedelics, and the haunting philosophy he carried back. It’s not a safe story. It’s a story about testing the walls of reality until they bend. Or break.

Much love, David