It was a long, thoughtful response to an essay I published on June 19, 2026.

The essay my friend responded to begins with the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer sent in 1944 to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to destroy the airfield, harass the population, and never surrender.

Living deep in the jungle, Onoda was unaware that Japan had officially surrendered to the Allied Powers in September 1945.

For the next 29 years, he and a small group of men held out on the island, convinced the war was still going on.

In October 1945, American aircraft dropped leaflets over the island, announcing Japan’s defeat and surrender, urging combatants to come out of hiding and prepare to return to Japan.

When Onoda and the men with him examined the dropped leaflets, and later the Japanese newspapers, letters, and photographs left by search parties—all announcing that the war had ended, and pleading for them to come out of hiding—they concluded it was fake, enemy propaganda.

In Onoda’s world, the only thing that could end the war was his commanding officer’s direct order, not the world’s evidence that the war had already ended.

Any evidence against his perceived reality was reinterpreted as deception, and the structure of his world remained untouched.

One of the most striking reinterpretations of disconfirming evidence Onoda made concerned Japanese newspapers left on the island, which clearly showed post-surrender life in Japan.

Instead of seriously considering the possibility that the war was over, Onoda saw these newspapers as proof that the war against America was still going on.

In Onoda’s mind, if Japan had truly been defeated, no Japanese citizen would be alive, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death before ever surrendering to the Americans.

The newspapers, Onoda reasoned, far from proving the war had ended, proved it had not ended. They showed Japanese civilians living normal lives, which, in his logic, would be impossible if Japan had truly lost.

Evidence that clearly demonstrated the war was over was recast by his self-sealing logic as convincing proof that he must carry on fighting the enemy.

I saw the same kind of self-sealing logic at work in my friend’s responses.

Over several days of email exchanges about the essay, an unsettling, almost Twilight Zone–like feeling came over me.

At first, I called it disorientation, but that word does not aptly capture what I experienced.

Disorientation suggests confusion, a temporary loss of bearings.

What I felt, as the messages accumulated, was a shifting mix of sadness, rage, exasperation, bewilderment, and, by the end, a quiet hopelessness.

Beneath all of it was a single, persistent question I asked: When does accumulating disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework?

I’m writing from inside a tradition that understands itself as carrying a divine mandate, with a clear structure of authority, calling, and assignment.

I have seen, first-hand, how this framework allowed for abuse, neglect, and tragic circumstances to play out in the lives of faithful, devoted people.

When I suggested that potential disconfirming evidence against a framework might require the framework to be questioned, my friend’s response was not to examine the framework, but to reinterpret any so-called disconfirming evidence.

In his view, the framework remains pure.

Any failure is the individual’s failure to stay properly aligned with it, for whatever reason.

The framework cannot be blamed for what happens to individuals within it.

Instead, it must be upheld as the standard by which individuals within it are judged.

That move is what made our exchange feel so uncanny.

I was bringing concrete pain, lived experience, and observable harm with my question.

He was offering a self-sealing logic that turned those very facts into proof of personal misalignment.

At first, the sadness surprised me.

I had expected disagreement, maybe even debate.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly our exchange became a place where lived harm was translated, almost gently, into a lesson about personal responsibility and alignment.

I thought of all the faithful, devoted individuals doing everything asked of them, whose suffering gets reinterpreted this way.

The sadness wasn’t just for them.

It was for the realization that someone I cared about could hold this logic so firmly.

With each message, the same logic returned: the framework remains pure. It is the individuals within it who are found wanting.

Something in my gut tightened when I realized what my friend was alluding to here.

It wasn’t just intellectual disagreement.

It felt like a betrayal of the very people the framework claims to serve.

There were moments I wanted to grab hold of him, shake him, plead with him, just as the search parties and dropped leaflets pleaded with Onoda to come out of the jungle, give up, and acknowledge that the war was over.

But every plea I made to my friend got absorbed into the same logic.

In his world, my leaflets of possible disconfirming evidence were not evidence at all. They were temptations to be rejected.

I would ask, “When does the pattern itself become evidence?”

He would answer, “The pattern is always a collection of individual stories.”

I would press, “What if the individuals are faithful, devoted, doing everything asked of them?”

He would return, “Then the issue must be alignment.”

The loop closed neatly every time.

Exasperation set in.

I was playing chess while he was quietly playing checkers and insisting I was breaking the rules.

There were moments I read his messages and had to pause, not because they were unclear, but because they were too clear.

They made perfect sense inside a world I no longer recognized as my own.

We were speaking the same language about framework, evidence, and responsibility, but the grammar had changed.

I was using those terms to ask when a framework might need to be questioned.

He was using the same terms to explain why that question, properly understood, cannot and does not need to be asked.

The bewilderment was not about his clarity.

It was about the realization that we were living in different realities, built from the same words.

There was one crucial difference between his world and Onoda’s.

Onoda’s conviction, however rigid, was a belief about the world, a claim that could, in principle, be proved false.

That is why it could end.

When his commanding officer arrived in 1974 with the standing to declare the war over, Onoda could finally give up the fight and return to Japan. He was finally able to let the evidence in, evidence that had accumulated over decades, but which his self-sealing logic had refused to let in.

My friend’s posture cannot be approached the same way.

There is no commanding officer who can arrive to confirm any disconfirming evidence, because the vow he has taken is self-authored, self-enforced, and self-sealing.

Any “commanding officer” who showed up with contrary evidence would, by his own logic, be just another biased observer, another individual whose testimony is tainted by misalignment.

By the time of our final exchange, the rage had burned down.

What remained was a quiet hopelessness.

Not about my friend, not about our relationship, but about the possibility of this conversation ever reaching a different place.

The framework he described was built to withstand exactly what I was bringing to it.

Onoda at least had a commanding officer who could arrive and end the war.

My friend had no such off-ramp.

The vow he had taken offered no end date.

And to make it even harder, this was someone I had called a friend for years.

We had developed and nurtured a relationship in which I felt safe enough to share my doubts, my questions, the experiences that didn’t fit the story I’d been given, the story I’d lived in for decades.

Over the years, whenever I shared with my friend about my doubts and the things that didn’t fit the story I’d been given about the framework, I now realize he rarely directly replied or tried to argue with me.

He often remained politely silent.

I told myself this was openness, a kind of generous space for my uncertainty.

What I didn’t realize was that the silence wasn’t neutrality.

It was the quiet carrying of a framework that, when finally voiced, reclassified everything I’d shared as personal failure, for whatever reasons or excuses I might offer, to remain aligned.

The silence, I came to see, was not a space for my doubts.

It was a holding pattern for a logic that, once spoken, left no room for them.

That realization added a new edge to everything.

Sadness, yes, but also a sharp sense of betrayal.

Not because he disagreed with me, but because the terms of our friendship, as I understood them, were not the terms he was operating under.

My vulnerability was being quietly reclassified as misalignment, a failure to stay aligned with the framework.

I’m not trying, in the end, to prove who is right or wrong here.

What I care about is identifying the pattern and its consequences.

What it does to people, to relationships, to the possibility of truth-telling inside a community that claims to value it.

Here is the core of my friend’s logic, as I see it, stated plainly:

Individuals within the framework will never uncover objective evidence against the framework, because such so-called evidence will always be tainted and biased by the observer, whatever their reason or motive, and thus cannot be trusted.

It always comes down to misalignment with the framework.

The people are the ones who, unfortunately, fail to adhere to it.

That is the self-sealing move.

Evidence is not weighed.

It is automatically disqualified by definition.

The observer in possession of what is claimed as disconfirming evidence is always suspect.

It cannot be any other way.

The framework is always innocent.

I still don’t have a clean answer to the question I started with: When does accumulated disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework itself?

What I do know is what it felt like to live inside that question for several days with someone I care about.

I know the sadness of seeing harm reinterpreted as failure.

The anger of watching a system protect itself by placing all the blame on individuals.

The exasperation of circling the same logic with no exit.

The bewilderment of sharing a language but not a world.

And the hopelessness of realizing that, for my friend, the framework is not something that can be questioned from the inside.

That realization does not end the question.

It only makes it more urgent.

Because the danger is not just in holding a self-sealing view.

It is in inhabiting a system that reflexively reinterprets all disconfirming evidence, folds it over into something it is not, and calls that faithfulness.

On the last day of our email exchange, I told him I was planning to use this experience as the basis for my next essay.

He acknowledged that.

And that’s where it stands.

If he believes I’ve misrepresented what passed between us, he’s welcome to respond in the Substack comments or with me, personally.

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered how such a thing is possible. I have asked myself the same question in relation to my own life.

Before looking more closely at my own situation, let us examine the case of Japanese World War II soldier Hiroo Onoda, which may help us understand a persistent human tendency: the refusal, sometimes for years, to let contrary evidence reshape our prevailing view of reality.

Onoda was not a typical Japanese soldier. Before being sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944, he trained as an intelligence officer at an elite military school specializing in guerrilla warfare and counterintelligence.

His orders were to destroy the airfield and pier there and harass the enemy. His commanding officer told him never to surrender and not to commit suicide, even if it meant being captured by the enemy. He was promised that, whatever happened, the Japanese military would one day return to retrieve him.

Onoda carried these orders and promises with him long after World War II ended.

He first heard news about Japan’s defeat and the end of the war a few months after the formal signing of Japan’s surrender.

A campaign of dropping leaflets throughout the island had started, declaring the news of Japan’s defeat and surrender, but when Onoda and the other men with him examined them, they concluded that they were fake, enemy propaganda.

Over the next twenty-nine years, each time more convincing evidence was presented that the war was over and he could safely come out of hiding, he continued to disbelieve it, finding new ways to dismiss it.

In Onoda’s imagined world, the newspapers dropped on the island showing daily life in Japan did not convince him that the war was over. Instead, they confirmed that the war was still going on.

If Japan had really lost the war, he reasoned, there should not have been any life in Japan. Everybody should have been dead, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death and never surrender to America.

Onoda believed that his country, and by extension himself, had been assigned the task of creating what was, at the time, referred to as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Japan’s wartime vision of a Japan-led Asian bloc presented as liberation from Western colonialism.

Only after his former commanding officer came to the island in March 1974 and declared that the war was over and Japan had lost, could Onoda allow the evidence before him for years to penetrate his imagination and overturn his deeply held convictions.

At the end of his memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, Onoda describes the scene of his departure from Lubang by helicopter the day after his surrender. In a moment of reflection as he looked down at the island where he had spent the last thirty years of his life, he wondered, “Why had I fought here for thirty years? Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?”

Earlier in the memoir, he seems to hint at possible inner turmoil when he recalls looking out of his hotel window after returning to Tokyo:

“When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

Because the memoir ends with his 1974 return to Tokyo from Lubang, we cannot know for sure what internal changes he experienced after his surrender.

We do know that he eventually moved to Brazil, where he worked on a cattle ranch. Then, in 1984, at the age of sixty-two, he returned to Japan to work with young people through the Onoda Nature School.

He may have gradually constructed a new world of meaning and orientation, or he may have carried his old orientation forward into new circumstances without fully letting go of the old.

His memoir suggests that factual recognition and inner transformation are not the same thing. One can be brought face to face with reality and still have to reckon with the slower, more uncertain work of becoming someone who can actually live in relation to it.

In my case, what I had taken for granted as reality was, in fact, a reality of my own making. Through imagination, story, narrative, and truth claims, I constructed a world that felt solid, necessary, and true. I lived and moved confidently within that framework for decades.

When that world began to break apart, when the leaflets started falling and contradicting my carefully constructed world of beliefs and attitudes, I initially denied the conflicting evidence.

The first leaflet contained rumors that a highly respected leader in the organization had been drinking and using drugs. This was inconceivable to me. So, I denied the possibility.

I had been living for so long in this imaginative world that nothing from the outside could make its way in. As far as I was concerned, this was an unsubstantiated rumor meant to besmirch the reputation of a righteous man. It later turned out to be true.

The second leaflet announced that the wife of a popular and respected man in our faith community, whom I personally knew, one day, up and took her kids, and left her husband for good, never to return.

I would have readily dismissed this evidence as well, seeing it as another attempt to sully the reputation of a morally upright man, if not for the fact that I happened to be around on the day she left, at the time not knowing she and her kids were never coming back.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, cracking open the door a bit for me to take a closer look.

My denial of factual evidence up to then stemmed from the belief that I had been called by a transcendent God to carry out a special task through a specific organization sanctioned by God for that purpose.

This vision was shaped by an aspiration to help build a world of unity and cooperation among all nations and peoples, without physical violence.

How could these kinds of problems and behavior be a part of my imagined world? I asked myself.

As mounting evidence continued to contradict the story I had been telling myself for decades, I slowly confronted the frightening possibility that I would have to transform the way I saw myself and the world around me.

The implications of this realization felt like the floor I had been walking on suddenly giving way beneath me. It was as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of my chest, a hole so wide and deep, it took all my strength to get out of bed every morning and face the world.

And yet the way forward was not simply to adopt a better interpretation or quickly exchange one story for another.

The deeper task was to move through the discomfort of that collapse and let it affect the very center from which I understood myself.

That meant not only revising what I believed, but changing my relation to belief itself. It meant learning to live with less certainty, less defense, and less need to force reality into forms that could protect me from pain.

In that sense, the transformation was not primarily intellectual, though thought was part of it. It was existential. It involved a gradual reorientation toward myself, toward others, and toward the larger world I inhabit.

What changed was not only the content of my view, but the way I stood in relation to truth, vulnerability, and reality itself.

And perhaps that is the hardest kind of change: not replacing one framework with another, but the slow becoming of a person able to live without needing every question answered.

Recently, I pulled a printed photograph from among a heap of old pictures in my bedroom dresser drawer. Looking into the faces of the six adults in the photo, I realized that three of them had already died.

When they were alive, each seemed as if they would always be around, always a part of my life.

I felt pulled into the photograph, into memories of these men and women who had helped shape my life and whom I loved dearly. Now, each of them was gone from my life.

Never to be seen or heard from again—gone just like that.

The photograph raised a larger question: all of us will be part of this one day.

When our time comes, those who’ve loved us will also stare at our photo and feel that same sense of finality.

One of the men in the photo was my old boxing coach. I met him when I signed up for his boxing class at the local community college. In his late sixties, he had trained champions in the New York City area decades earlier.

We stayed in touch long after the boxing course I took with him ended, and over time became close friends.

I got to know his wife and children. I helped him with chores inside and outside his three-story home. Occasionally, we’d have lunch or dinner together. He used to bring me along to help with his annual boxing dinner event, where he honored former champions.

As time went by, we both got older, and I got busier with family and work. Gradually, we saw one another less and less.

One day, after a long stretch between visits, I went to see him.

After his assistant told me he was in his upstairs office, I went up to see him.

I found him in a wheelchair behind his desk, his back to me, staring out the window onto the street below. His hair was now snow white and nearly all gone, and he seemed much smaller. I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or awake.

I slowly walked up and stood behind him, wondering what he was thinking, how he was doing.

He never turned.

Two months later, he was gone.

One day, we are not going to wake up again.

Here one moment, gone the next.

It all started innocently enough.

One Saturday afternoon, while stretched out on our living room couch scrolling through YouTube on my phone, I stumbled across music reaction videos. Here, people who looked young enough to be one of my own kids expressed awe, admiration, and respect for the songs I listened to in high school and college.

As I lay there watching, a smile spread across my face, and a quiet warmth seemed to spread over my body. Watching young people from diverse backgrounds and musical interests react this way stirred up my own long-standing attachment to music and all it has carried for me over the years.

Gradually, I started making sure my phone was on the nightstand before going to bed. It became a familiar, needed presence I could turn to like a trusted friend.

I can now see that the familiar surrounding space filling the bedroom gradually faded from my awareness until little remained except the glowing screen in front of me.

A couple of nights ago, while reaching for the phone as I crawled into bed, I paused and stared at it in my hand. For a moment, the routine seemed strange. Here I was, preparing for sleep with a glowing screen inches from my face, voices and music flooding my ears. For the first time, I considered whether it would be better to stop bringing my phone to bed.

Over the next few nights, this question kept gnawing at me, but I still kept taking the phone to bed.

And then, one night, I didn’t put the phone on the nightstand. For the first time in months, the nightstand was empty.

When I lay my head on the pillow, the bedroom seemed to expand. My bed and the surrounding space, previously faded into the background, suddenly felt present again. Somehow it all seemed alive, almost as if the room itself were talking to me.

What’s happening? I asked myself.

Then I became conscious of the darkness in the room and how my body seemed to blend with it as I sank into the mattress.

I began to wonder whether I’d be able to fall asleep right away or lie awake for a long time.

Suddenly, several unrecognizable images, green and flesh-colored, appeared in rapid succession. Were my eyes closed when this happened? I couldn’t tell, and I had no idea where the images came from. Were those human faces I’d just seen? I asked myself. I couldn’t be sure.

At once, my thoughts turned to some recent family concerns. Faces, conversations, and situations involving specific family members began moving through my mind. I began to meditate on these concerns, consciously sending thoughts of love and care to specific family members.

With my eyes closed, I turned my attention to what might happen after I fell asleep. What kind of dreams might I have? Would I be ready for whatever came, especially if it brought fear or dread, as sometimes happened over the years?

Almost immediately, I found myself offering a simple prayer: I want to be ready for whatever comes, not trying to avoid or deflect it, but meeting it with courage, faith, and openness.

The empty nightstand had given something back to me I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

It would be hard to go back.

But the story of this knee is much older than three months. It goes back to 2021, when swelling and discomfort finally brought me back to my knee doctor.

“Your knee,” he said, directing my attention to the X-rays on the screen, “shows signs of osteoarthritis. The degree of cartilage degeneration is more severe on the inside of the joint, and that’s likely where your discomfort is coming from. Because you’re not in significant pain right now, I’d be careful not to place too much stress on it, and if it gets worse, come back and see me.”

I trusted what my doctor told me. He came highly recommended by a close friend. At the time, I knew little about the inner workings of the knee.

The diagnosis worried me. This same doctor had already performed total knee replacement surgery on my left knee two years earlier. The first few weeks after that surgery, my wife had to wait on me hand and foot. It took nearly six months before I trusted the knee enough to return to work.

I didn’t want us to go through that experience again.

Unfortunately, my fears began to grow. Gradually, walking became increasingly difficult. With nearly every step, I felt a stabbing pain at the center of my kneecap. If you can imagine a hundred sewing needles clumped together, jabbing straight into your knee and then retracting, that’s what it felt like each time my foot hit the ground.

It seemed like my knee had a mind of its own, functioning according to its own logic, and there was little I could do about it. Before all of this, I just assumed my knee would always function smoothly. Now it had become something I constantly had to contend with, no longer silently cooperating.

All I knew was that I wanted the pain to go away. I feared I was slowly heading toward another knee replacement, and I felt helpless.

As all of this was happening, I kept recalling two earlier injuries to the knee, both of which I had pushed past without ever really dealing with them. At that time, my attitude toward doctors was to stay away from them as much as possible.

Both injuries resulted from my martial arts practice. The first injury frightened me more than anything else. During judo practice, my partner threw me in a way that rapidly twisted my right knee counterclockwise. As the knee twisted, I heard clicking and felt popping across the middle of the joint. My mind raced: What the hell just happened? As I hit the mat, I wondered if I’d be able to stand back up and walk.

To my surprise, I was able to get off the floor and move around without any pain or discomfort in the knee. I was shocked and relieved. As far as I was concerned, since there was no pain, no real injury had occurred, and I simply carried on with the remainder of the practice.

The second injury happened years later during a self-defense class. My instructor was demonstrating a judo sweep, and I landed forcefully on the inside of my right knee. Upon impact with the mat, a piercing pain shot through the inside of the joint, as if the tip of a sword had penetrated deep into the knee.

Unlike the earlier incident, this time, as I picked myself up, a hot, burning sensation flooded the inside of my knee, and when I stepped forward, sharp pain pulsed through my knee. Embarrassed more than anything else, I tried to ignore what had just happened and gutted out the rest of the practice as best I could. But I knew an injury had occurred.

For several days, I could hardly put pressure on the knee, walking with a slow, deliberate limp. Gradually, the pain went away on its own, and I was able to resume my practice. It felt like the knee had completely healed.

From the beginning of my training, I could feel the stress certain kicks and judo throws placed on my knees. I always pushed through the discomfort and pain anyway. Martial arts became part of my professional training while working in executive protection for high-profile individuals. At the time, I had made up my mind that if my knees ended up worn out or damaged down the line, that was a price I was willing to pay.

For the next three years, my knee became something I had to think about all the time. Simple activities like going for a walk or meeting up with people in public places were always accompanied by this nagging pain with every step I took. Constant swelling and a lingering sense of heaviness in the knee became an unwanted companion. I could no longer run, and sitting cross-legged on my meditation cushion became increasingly painful.

What I couldn’t see at the time was how completely I had adapted to living with the knee. I no longer expected the pain to go away. The discomfort became part of my everyday experience, something I quietly and reluctantly accepted. My knee became more like a separate part of my body, always demanding attention and limiting my comfort with nearly everything I did.

There was no way I was going to go back to my knee doctor for another X-ray. I did not want to hear that another knee replacement was only a matter of time. Looking back now, I cannot remember making any real effort to strengthen the knee or improve what was happening until one day last year, when I had a conversation with my oldest son about it.

After dinner one night, as we talked about what I could do for the knee, he suggested, “Before you get too old, why don’t you have the surgery done? You might be prolonging the inevitable, and the longer you wait, the longer it will take you to recover. The surgery you had on your left knee was successful, and it seems to have solved the problem. Why not just get it done?”

His suggestion was sound and based on the fact that my surgeon had taken a severely compromised knee and replaced it with one that functioned normally again. I went from limping around like Chester on Gunsmoke to what now feels like a normal knee again. Yet, something in me resisted his suggestion.

About a year earlier, I came across several well-known studies involving patients with chronic knee conditions facing surgery as a last resort. The patients were led to believe that surgery had been performed on them when, in fact, it had not.

In some cases, patients who were given these sham procedures reportedly improved. These reports raised questions about the role of expectations, beliefs, and the mind in pain and healing. At the time, though, my interest remained mostly intellectual. I was fascinated by the possibilities these studies pointed toward, but never seriously considered how my situation might improve if I actually applied some of the ideas they were exploring.

During a recent visit to my son’s house to see our newborn grandson, he suggested I check out a professional sports medicine facility to see how they might help with the knee. I found myself immediately getting excited about the possibility, even though I had never seriously pursued anything like that before.

The following week, I found myself at this facility. I remember standing there in front of the kinesiologist, pointing to my swollen knee. After explaining the history of the knee, he hooked me up to three different machines for ten minutes at a time, telling me these treatments could help increase blood flow, reduce swelling, encourage healing, and loosen scar tissue. At the end of our session, I could see the swelling had gone down a lot, but the sharp, shooting pain was still there with each step.

I returned four more times over the next few weeks. By the time my wife and I were ready to return home, the swelling seemed to be under control, and on occasion, while walking around during the day, I’d suddenly realize that I was walking and the knee felt almost normal.

The first time I experienced little or no pain in the knee, it was a shock. I’d gotten so used to walking around in a constant state of nagging pain that suddenly being without it seemed almost alien.

YouTube videos explaining the mechanics of the knee became an important part of learning about how the joint functions and responds to injury and trauma. As I learned more about the intricate relationship between muscles, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and nerves, it felt like discovering an unexplored world inside my own body.

The more I watched, the more I found myself marveling at what it actually takes for our knees to function properly. I began to realize how much I’d taken for granted what my knees had quietly done for me over the years, and also how my lifestyle and habits may have contributed to their deterioration.

As the knee slowly began responding, I found myself relating to it differently. While walking, I’d quietly talk to the knee, sometimes imagining it moving smoothly with each step. During rehab exercises, I began paying close, gentle attention to how the joint actually functioned, how muscles, tendons, and movement all worked together. Somewhere along the way, this evolving relationship with my knee deepened into a growing appreciation for the remarkable complexity and quiet intelligence of the human body.

Today, my knee feels lighter with less discomfort and pain. That’s today. I’m not sure what tomorrow will be like.

Whether my knee will continue to improve or eventually require surgery is not of primary concern right now.

What stays with me most through all of this is the mystery of how debilitating or life-threatening conditions can slowly or suddenly emerge, often without us even noticing what has been building beneath the surface for years.

Perhaps by learning to pay attention and listen more carefully to what our bodies may be communicating through pain, tension, fatigue, limitation, or even silence, we may discover ways of living with greater care and attentiveness.

It’s not just about the rope. You're watching how the cowboy works with its motion without forcing it. It may look like it’s all in the wrist, but the whole body has to be aligned just right to keep those loops from collapsing to the ground, going slack and lifeless. The rope tends to follow when it’s handled just right.

The wind doesn’t respond in quite the same way.

No cowboy in his right mind would try to lasso the wind with his rope, would he?

Human ingenuity has found ways to harness the wind through sails, windmills, wind turbines, and gliders, but it cannot be captured or controlled. It can only be influenced, channeled, and adapted. It moves on its own terms, not ours.

And yet, that doesn’t stop us, does it? We look for methods, techniques, breakthrough moments, and new information, trying to get somewhere else, moving beyond where we currently stand.

We aren’t talking here about business acumen, time management, or career-track programs, which can all be measured and improved through the implementation of proven strategies. This is something else.

In those areas, progress is enhanced by controlling clear inputs, monitoring measurable outputs, and producing repeatable gains. But what if what we’re touching here doesn’t yield to control at all?

Is there a way this “wind” can be experienced as it is, without trying to harness it, control it, or influence it? What might that be like, not trying to get somewhere else, but remaining within what already is?

Or do we find ourselves trying to locate it, name it, describe it, and sort out what it can and cannot do?

Empirical studies demonstrate that most people dream regularly, but only a small number of individuals pay attention to their dreams. Those who do pay attention usually do not try to interpret them or record them for insight or future reference.

Before we go further, we need to understand why, in our culture, most people don’t consider their dreams a significant part of their lives.

One reason many Americans overlook their dreams is cultural conditioning. In a society that prizes productivity, logic, results, and measurable output, dreams often seem too vague or impractical to be worth our time. After all, if success means mastering a craft, making an impact, or “getting ahead,” then ambiguity and inner wandering don’t cut it. Another issue is our society’s obsession with the scientific method as the primary way to determine what is true or real.

The scientific method is built around forming hypotheses, testing them through controlled observations, and drawing conclusions from repeatable, measurable results. By design, this method struggles to account for deeply personal or subjective experiences produced by the dream process. As a result, many adopt the mindset: “If you can’t measure it or quantify it, it doesn’t exist.”

There’s also a built-in cultural bias toward the purpose of why we sleep. It’s viewed as a biological necessity, as the way to recharge the tired physical body and allow the physical brain to unwind from the busyness of a demanding workday. Sleep is seen as a means to an end, namely, that of supporting productivity and output during one’s waking hours. This is a utilitarian view of the sleep process that excludes dreams from having any meaningful value in one’s life.

This approach to sleep is like viewing one’s physical body, including its shape, size, and skin color, and assuming that’s all there is to a human being. It’s like judging a car by its paint job, without ever looking under the hood to see what makes it run.

In recent decades, dream science has revealed a great deal about what happens in the brain during sleep. Working with the most advanced tools available, scientists still cannot explain how we experience space, time, color, sound, emotion, and even unexpected insights while dreaming.

If you believe only physical matter is real and everything is explainable by physical processes, don’t worry, I’m not here to argue with you. You’re welcome to read this essay and take from it whatever you like. Or, if it strikes you as nothing more than a fart in the wind, that’s fine too. I’ll happily refund the money you didn’t pay to read it.

In all seriousness, is it possible our waking reality is only one slice of something broader and deeper we’ve not considered up until now? If so, what can one do to begin a process related to one’s dream world?

One can begin with a broad review of the literature on this subject, and also investigate individual anecdotal stories related to dreaming and its impact on one’s life. In one of my early essays on Substack, I share a significant dream I experienced about my favorite uncle, who unexpectedly passed away from brain cancer when I was in high school.

In the dream, I’m walking down a long, dimly lit hallway in an old office building. About one hundred feet in front of me, I see the outline of someone standing in an office doorway. As I draw nearer, I realize it’s a man dressed in a white T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. I suddenly recall this is how my dead uncle used to dress all the time. Getting closer, I can see that the man is indeed my dead uncle! I’m confused and startled.

Suddenly, our eyes lock. In silence, we stand there, staring at one another. I’m drawn to the contours of his mouth. His lips appear to be pressed firmly together, and I get the feeling he is struggling mightily to say something to me, but he can’t open his mouth. What are you trying to tell me, Uncle? I hear myself cry out in my mind. The dream ends there. This dream had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life, from this moment forward. You can learn more details by clicking HERE to read the full essay.

Numerous books have been published on dreams, dreaming, and how to experience a dream life, from both secular and sacred perspectives. Matthew Walker’s 2017 book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, is a neuroscientific, evidence-based account of sleep. The 2024 book, Dreamwise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, authored by three Jungian analysts, looks at the dream world through the lens of inner exploration, personal growth, and symbolic meaning.

If there is something to the idea of a dream world that wants to interact with us, making an effort to understand this dimension of our life might lead to unexpected or surprising outcomes.

💬 Have You Had a Dream That Won’t Let You Go?

We’d love to hear about it.

• Share your dream in the Comment Section below.

• Or, if it feels personal, message Jack privately through the One-on-One Conversations portal at everydayspiritualhealth.com

To get started immediately, here’s a simple guide to help you.

1. INTENTION: Create a specific intention for this practice that you can refer to often, like: I intend to consciously enter the dreamworld with openness, humility, and readiness to receive what the deeper wisdom of life is offering.

2. SHIFT TO RELAX MODE: Give yourself a few minutes to slow down. Put away your phone. Use silence or soft music to help make the shift.

3. GROUNDING ACTIVITY: Use a grounding activity such as washing your face and hands, or gently breathing, and repeat: I cleanse the day from me. I release all I carry that is not mine to bear.

4. PHYSICAL RELEASE: Lightly stretch or breathe deeply into your belly and repeat: I soften into rest. My body is no longer needed for striving.

5. Write down a grounding ritual phrase you can slowly repeat to yourself. Here’s an example: I now cross the threshold from waking to dreaming, leaving behind the noise, the effort, the burdens of daylight. Tonight I enter the dreamworld with reverence, asking nothing but to be shown what wants to speak. I offer my sleeping self to the greater wisdom of life.

6. Here’s an Amazon link to look at a DREAM REMEMBRANCE JOURNAL. You will need a way to record your dream impressions, and this kind of journal helps by providing specific prompts you can use. Keep the journal nearby, or use your phone for a digital voice recording you can later transcribe, if you like.

Start tonight. If nothing comes through, no worries. You can record this fact and consider it part of the process.

What if your dreams aren’t just random noise or misfiring neurons, but instead, messages from a deeper part of you, or from something greater than you?

You don’t need to solve the mystery of your dreamworld all at once. Just begin by paying attention. Keep a journal, notice patterns, or lie down at night with a little more wonder before you lazily drift off to sleep.

You might be surprised at what you encounter while you sleep.

Good luck, and I’d love to hear about any progress you make.

Whether in the workplace, family relations, a romantic relationship, a competitive sport, or inside a casket at your future wake, how do you envision you will be seen—for who you are, for what you did, or a combination of both…?

Naturally, at times, it is more important to be seen for doing, right?

Suppose I need a brain operation to survive. Do I pick a brain surgeon who has operated only on cats in my local neighborhood, or one who has successfully performed hundreds of brain surgeries on human beings with a 98% success rate?

So yes, there are times when what we do is more important than being fully seen. But those actions are most meaningful when they are rooted in the deep, inner essence of ‘I know who I am on the inside,’ identity, not when used to prove one’s identity.

Being accepted for who you are, in essence, not for your image, role, or resume, is likely a key ingredient to emotional resilience, deep connection, and an overall sense of inner well-being.

While cultures differ in their consideration of the importance of doing and being, the core human need to be seen for who we are, beyond our roles and results, remains constant.

Modern-day Western societies, such as America, England, Germany, and France, tend to condition us to earn worth through action and performance, each finds its way to create space to see oneself as “being enough,” beyond the noise, striving, pushing, and overcoming.

Societies may condition us to see our worth through the lens of accomplishments, output, and productivity. Spiritual health invites us to reclaim our worth by reminding ourselves that we are already enough and always have been, even before we were born.

Everyday Spiritual Health grows through conversation. What insight or questions did this essay stir in you? Share your voice below.

“Ugh,” you might be thinking, “What the hell are you talking about!”

Fair enough. I'll try to explain to you.

For readers old enough to remember manual transmission cars, with a clutch and stick shift on the floor, the engine was designed to move through four gears. Each one built on the last, transferring ever-increasing power from the engine to the wheels with increasing efficiency and speed.

But imagine a new driver never learns about 4th gear!

They’d be stuck between the torque-heavy low gears (1st and 2nd) and the high-speed cruising gear (4th), shifting back and forth without ever completing the proper sequence. They’d hear the constant strain and vibration of the engine. They might sense that something’s off, but unaware that fourth gear exists, they’d keep pressing on, never realizing or experiencing that there’s a smoother way to travel.

When you shift into 4th gear at the right moment, the engine is no longer climbing or struggling, but now moving more efficiently, more quietly, and with a natural rhythm.

The quiet within I’m referring to may be the missing “gear” you’ve sensed all your life, like the driver pressing along in third gear, faintly aware there should be another shift to smooth out the ride, with no idea how to access it.

When you allow this 4th gear to integrate into your life, there’s now a way of being in the world without force, urgency, or reaction. You listen differently. You hear differently. There’s no rushing about. Even when you move fast, something in you stays unhurried. You no longer live in performance, but presence.

How much money, or years of your life, would you be willing to give to operate from this quiet within…?

But what if it’s something altogether different, something that doesn’t need to be demonstrated, practiced, or performed?

On my website, everydayspiritual.com, we clarify what spiritual health is not.

It’s not therapy.

It’s not self-help.

It’s not a belief system.

So what is it, then?

This is where things start to get tricky—when we try to name or define spiritual health (or God, for that matter). Still, let’s take a stab.

Two weeks ago, I accidentally scraped my elbow. The top layer of skin was rubbed off, and there was some bleeding. I didn’t even notice it until my wife pointed it out a few hours later. The skin around it had turned reddish-yellow and was sensitive to the touch. She helped me clean the wound, apply antiseptic, and cover it with a bandage.

Over the next several days, I watched as the raw skin formed a scab. The surrounding redness faded. Within a week, the scab fell off. The new skin looked almost untouched, like nothing had happened.

I marveled at how my body restored itself, seemingly on its own, without any conscious effort from me.

What allowed this to happen?

We might be tempted to name it. Maybe call it a self-organizing directive. Or an intelligence in the body. But if we say intelligence, what do we mean?

Science can describe the mechanisms of healing that took place at my elbow, cellular response, chemical signaling, inflammation, immune activity, tissue regeneration. It can explain what happens, but not fully why it happens. It doesn’t account for why this self-organizing directive exists in the first place.

Where does the body’s capacity to heal come from? And why should it know what to do?

Science is an extraordinary tool for measuring, observing, and modeling phenomena. But it’s not built to assign meaning. It’s not designed to ask the deeper question of being.

What if this same intelligence that healed my elbow is silently waiting to be in relationship with you?

Not as a belief system.

Not as a therapy model.

Not as a self-help, create-the-best-version-of-yourself plan.

But as a quiet collaboration.

You can speak to it.

You can listen.

And when you do, something shifts.

Spiritual health is not a thing with qualities we can name or characteristics we can identify it with. No.

Maybe the most important thing is simply to pause and listen.

Not for answers, but for presence.

Not to fix something, but to remember you’re already in relationship with what heals.

John Locke, the 17th-century English philosopher, Enlightenment thinker, and theological dissenter, promoted one of the most influential ideas in the West about the nature of human beings. He argued the human mind is a “blank slate,” that all knowledge, morality, and behavior arise exclusively from experience and sense perception. According to Locke, we are not born with innate tendencies such as love, morality, imagination, or any inclination to believe in a “higher power.”

But experiencing my grandson’s smile makes it hard for me to swallow this explanation whole.

To stay true to his claim, Locke would likely deem my grandson’s smile a learned behavior, mimicked through repeated interactions with smiling caregivers. And yet, I could not help but see the smile on my grandson’s face as an indication of something more, something mysterious, something pointing beyond the idea that we are born empty and shaped entirely by our interactions with the outside world.

In 1964, psychologist D.G. Freedman conducted a groundbreaking study in which he observed that blind infants smiled and laughed just like infants with normal sight, despite never having seen a face or learned to mirror joy. Decades later, Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist and former philosopher, affirmed in her book The Philosophical Baby (2009) that babies come not as blank slates, but as minds already alive with moral intuition, wonder, and the seeds for connective relationships.

In contrast to Locke’s claim that all comes from experience, these findings sing another tune: we do not arrive empty, totally dependent on the outside world to mold us into this or that kind of individual. Rather, we enter this world hardwired with curiosity, moral intuition, and a capacity to infer meaning and intention from the environment.

And yet, Locke’s ideas are still quietly alive in the assumptions of many of our institutions. Public education, secular higher education, various therapy modalities, and even some spiritual coaching programs often assume we are formed from scratch by our environments and the personal choices we make. The prevailing narrative says that the everyday phenomena we observe are explainable solely through the natural sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics. Any suggestion of agency beyond what these sciences can measure is often dismissed as irrational or even naïve.

Developmental psychology has learned that infants typically don’t experience self-reflective awareness until around 18 to 24 months of age. My grandson, at seven weeks old, is not self-aware in that technical sense. But he’s smiling at me. And I’m staring back, wondering what knows how to smile in him before he knows who he is. Maybe the smile is coming from a pre-self—a kind of presence, a relational field, deeply aware without yet being self-reflective.

What else might we be missing when we take a purely natural science orientation to explain all of life, all of being, in the world and throughout the cosmos?

After all, do you know what you were and where you were before your appearance as a human being on earth? Do you know who you are, beyond your name and personality? And do you know where you will be when you one day stop breathing and all brain activity in the body you now reside in goes silent?

Note to the reader: This essay also appears on my new website EverydaySpiritualHealth.com, where all future content will eventually live.”