Although this pattern hasn’t left me feeling more tired during the day, it’s still a drag to drag my butt out of bed in the middle of the night to pee.

And then there’s the nagging thought, Is there something not right with my bladder or prostate gland? gnawing in the back of my mind.

Nestling a heating pad between my legs and placing my hands over my abdominal area, I began visualizing this urinary tract, recalling recent video clips I’d studied of how this tract functions.

Slowing my nervous system through focused breath work, I began to silently speak from my mind to this area inside my body: I want you to relax and be calm. Our kidneys, bladder, ureters, and urethra are being cleansed and are functioning normally. Thank you for the marvelous work you do. Together we are healthy and strong.

When I bring this kind of heightened attention into my body, I begin to experience a different awareness of my immediate surroundings as well.

Even if my eyes are wide open while silently speaking intentions into my body, I notice nothing around me. But then, suddenly I do, after finishing this internal conversation.

Staring up from my bed, I notice the broken, patterned shadows cast onto the ceiling from the street lights outside my window, now feeling almost eerily alive, dancing about.

And then, I turned my attention back to, me.

Lying there in bed, I started scanning my body, feeling into each limb, beginning at my feet and slowly moving up, eventually passing over my heart, then sweeping over my face and head, and then into the inside of my brain, as if I’d just crawled inside it.

Then the image of Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, appeared across the screen of my mind’s eye.

It was a flashback from a TED talk she presented after recovering from a severe stroke that left her losing nearly all higher cognitive and physical functions, which took eight years to rebuild.

At one point during her talk, a man walked out from the side of the stage holding a serving tray with a round object covered over by a white towel. Dr. Taylor then informed the audience that the object on the tray was a real human brain.

After putting on some surgical-like protective gloves, she removed the towel, revealing the brain. Picking it up off the tray, she gingerly held it out in front of her chest, and with the attached spinal cord dangling in front of her, began to explain its anatomy.

Her stroke, she said, had interrupted the left hemisphere, which she reported is responsible for language and verbal processing, analytical thought, time orientation, a sense of individual identity, fine motor control, and detail-oriented processing.

Suddenly, the image of the human brain in her hands disappeared from my mind, and I became aware of me, lying in the bed.

Feeling my body pressing into the mattress, I said to myself while gazing at the shadowy light dancing and flickering on the ceiling, Here I am, aware of my body and my surroundings, but who is this me that I think is doing this?

Dr. Taylor spent a lot of time during her TED talk unpacking what it felt like for her to no longer have a sense of being separate from everyone else and everything around her, as the left side of her brain deteriorated during the stroke.

Later, during a podcast discussing her stroke, she described this phenomenon as the moment when the idea of a me, the girl Jill Bolte-Taylor, died, not physically, but as a felt sense, a way of experiencing herself that stopped being generated, leaving something else in its place.

Lying there on my bed, I could see and feel my body stretched out beneath me.

I had the felt sense that I’m an individual, seemingly separate from everything around me, and in that same moment, the underlying sense that something else is happening, allowing this idea of a me to emerge.

Before there was a bladder to talk to, a brain to hold, shadows to name, what was there?

Trump is a buffoon. Only Jesus saves. Democrats care for the country. All religions are scams. America never landed a man on the moon. Republicans are a “basket of deplorables.”

Climate change is a hoax. Anyone who denies climate change is ignoring the science.

Free-market capitalism works. Free-market capitalism must be abolished.

Suffering is a delusion of the mind. Your suffering stems from childhood trauma.

And so on.

How can two people look at much of the same evidence and come away with completely different understandings of what is true or real? What’s going on?

It’s one thing to draw conclusions and make claims. It’s another thing to explore whether those conclusions or claims can actually be justified.

I’m not talking about beliefs around things like what happens to your car tire if you keep driving on it when it’s flat, or whether your credit-card agreement says you’ll be charged a late fee if you don’t pay on time.

Those are claims that can be checked and verified from outside one’s individual beliefs or personal experience.

Things start to get more challenging when we posit claims about human nature, God, truth, political ideology, spiritual experience, or the ultimate meaning of an event.

In this kind of territory, the evidence often does not interpret itself, and fair-minded people can arrive at radically different conclusions.

When reasonable people sit at opposite ends of the spectrum around a given phenomenon, what might be the next step to move things forward?

One possibility is to look not only at what they believe, but at how they arrived at those beliefs, and whether the grounds for their conclusions hold up under careful examination. In real life, this process is extremely challenging.

In a recent conversation with someone I’ve known for a long time, I was surprised to discover just how far his convictions about God and truth extended beyond anything I had previously imagined.

Over a series of lengthy email exchanges, he emphatically told me that the framework he operates within regarding truth, God, and God’s providence cannot be proved false. No amount of alleged disconfirming evidence against that framework, he maintained, could invalidate it.

Not every framework works this way. Some leave room for being wrong. His didn't.

Lately, I’ve been encountering similar experiences with other friends. The subject matter might differ, but the underlying pattern is similar. Deep conviction gradually leaves less and less room for considering that the framework itself might be mistaken.

These days I’m less interested in arguing over whose conclusions or beliefs might be correct or true. What I am interested in is how those conclusions are being justified in the first place.

If a claim or belief cannot be independently verified, or if reasonable people disagree about what is true, what might that tell us about how well the claim is being justified?

This does not necessarily mean the beliefs or convictions are false. Nor does it mean they have not been meaningful or beneficial to the person holding them.

The larger question is whether the grounds for those beliefs are strong enough to justify the claims beyond that person’s own experience and interpretive lens.

I know something about this from the inside.

I used to understand reality through what might be called a providential lens, meaning I saw people, events, conflicts, and historical developments as part of a larger divine purpose unfolding according to God’s plan.

This worldview offered a comprehensive understanding of the meaning and purpose of my life, along with a newfound confidence that I might one day realize my deepest-held dreams and desires while taking part in God’s work on the earth.

However, at that time, if someone had asked me, “What can you point to that justifies your belief in this providential framework?” my answer would have largely been my personal experiences and what I regarded as the truth of the teachings espoused by the framework itself.

But what justified my confidence that my experiences and the teachings themselves were reliable evidence that the framework was true?

Could what I was personally convinced about, for whatever reason, be validated by someone from outside the world I was living in?

At the time, those outside my worldview regarded it as misguided, false, and dangerous. What I was seeing and what they were seeing were miles apart.

So where do we go from there?

If two people disagree about the meaning of the evidence, what would allow either one to say that their interpretation is better justified?

If we keep asking why someone believes what they believe, and then ask for the reasons behind those reasons, where does the chain of reasoning eventually end, if at all?

When do we finally arrive at something we simply accept as true, without asking for further justification?

And what happens when the reasoning begins to circle back on itself, when the framework is used to validate the authority behind the framework?

In my case, for example, I pointed to the teachings embodied in the framework as verification that the framework must be true. But in doing so, I was using the teachings to validate themselves, like someone claiming the Bible is the Word of God because the Bible says so.

But how much of what we call evidence is already being interpreted through the lens we bring to it?

For example, a while back, I watched a video testimony of someone claiming he died and went to Hell, where God showed him the terrible fate that awaits those who don’t believe in the message of the Gospel.

Another person might interpret the same experience as a psychological event. Another might regard it as a delusion.

And still another might see it as an experience whose meaning cannot ultimately be known.

None of this automatically tells us which interpretation is better justified.

What it does tell us is that disagreement can run deeper than the facts themselves.

It can reach into the assumptions, authorities, experiences, relationships, and interpretive frameworks we use to decide what the facts mean.

Perhaps the real work begins not with better explanations or answers, but with noticing when we've stopped letting evidence count against us.

Anyone for a cup of epistemic humility, please?

Growing up in the Catholic tradition, I was taught that I was a good person because God created me and loves me, but I also shared a wounded human nature that sometimes led me to choose wrongly and commit sin.

We were taught to examine our conscience: What did I do? Did I lie? Did I disobey my parents? Was I mean? Did I steal? Did I use God’s name improperly? Did I miss Mass?

I felt loved by God, and at the same time, conflicted about my tendency to not live up to what it meant to be a good Catholic boy: upright, honest, obedient, loving, and caring. Going to confession on Saturday afternoon allowed me to tell the priest what I’d done wrong and to ask forgiveness for any sins I’d committed during the week.

What strikes me now is how uncomplicated and satisfying this weekly confession routine was for me as an elementary school boy.

In my experience, I wasn’t entering the confessional wondering what was wrong with me or where my troubling thoughts and behavior came from. That had already been explained. I was a human being living with the consequences of the Fall and, like everybody else, capable of sin and in need of God’s forgiveness. My job was to look closely enough at myself to identify where I had done wrong, own up to it, and be reconciled.

After receiving absolution from the priest and reciting my assigned prayers, I’d step out of the church into the normal, noisy world, usually feeling lighter, relieved, and thankful for another chance to make good on my promise to obey God’s rules for being an upright Catholic boy.

Looking back, what strikes me is that I wasn’t being asked to understand why I had done what I’d done. The priest wasn’t helping me uncover something about myself that I hadn’t yet discovered. I brought something specific into the confessional, named it, and received something specific in return: forgiveness from God through the priest.

The questions we ask ourselves are more complicated now. Gradually, the question I had been taught to ask, What have I done?, was joined by others. Why did I do it? Where did that feeling come from? Why do I keep repeating the same bad behaviors? Is there something within me I don’t yet understand? What’s wrong with me?

Over time, our understanding of what troubles us expanded beyond ideas about right and wrong. Questions about our feelings, motivations, relationships, past experiences, and aspects of ourselves outside our conscious awareness now take a central role in trying to understand who we are, why we suffer, and why we do what we do.

Today, looking inward has become one of the primary ways we try to understand ourselves and find relief from what troubles us. We are encouraged to understand our patterns, process our experiences, heal our wounds, and work toward becoming healthier versions of ourselves. There is much in this that can be helpful. But it also introduces a very different way of experiencing ourselves.

If I need forgiveness, I have done something wrong. If I need healing, I have been wounded. If I need repair, something in me is not working as it should. Each begins with an understanding of what is wrong before the remedy begins. [In my previously published essay, I wrote more about what it actually feels like to live inside that logic of woundedness—the particular weight of it, the way it never quite closes.]

Perhaps the question worth asking is not only how we get better, but what we have come to believe about ourselves that tells us we need to get better in the first place.

What would it feel like, just for a moment, to set that belief down rather than examine it?

The beat goes on, or maybe not.

Human suffering has been around at least since someone, long ago, in one of the oldest stories in the Western tradition about shame, loss, and loneliness, tried to pass the blame to someone else for their lapse in moral judgment.

Suffering appears in every human culture and every generation, although no two people experience or carry it in quite the same way. We can count on experiencing some form of emotional, physical, or existential pain in life.

Long before I had any clear notion about what suffering was, I already knew what it felt like to place mine before someone I believed could receive it.

Every Saturday afternoon from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM, local Catholic churchgoers would line up in the aisle, one behind the other, facing the confessional box at the back of the church. Sometimes the line extended toward the middle of the church, and at other times, just a few people lined up.

Occasionally, my Nana would take me. Other times I’d go with a playmate, and I’d also go by myself. The whole thing was part of what you did on Saturday afternoon. Most of us who showed up knew each other, although occasionally I wouldn’t recognize one of the older people waiting in line.

Standing there, I mostly looked straight ahead, eyeing the confessional entrance to see who was entering and leaving, often guessing how long each person stayed inside talking to the priest.

Entering the confessional box was an ordeal. The less than fifteen-foot walk from the pew aisle to the confessional door felt like a mile. As I approached the wooden entrance door, I’d go over in my mind what I was going to say and confess. I’d ask myself: Did you forget anything? Are you sure you want to tell him your deepest secrets this time?

From what I can recall, the confessional compartment was about three or four feet wide, about the same depth, and maybe six feet high. It always felt much bigger to me, though, as I slowly opened the door and stepped inside. Maybe because, aside from a small crucifix on the wall, lit by a tiny, blurry, soft red light just above it, the room felt totally dark.

I’d always open the door slowly because sometimes it creaked, and against the dead silence of the church, any creaking sounded like a loudspeaker blaring to my hyper-attentive ears.

Once inside, making sure the door was closed, I’d kneel on the small, narrow, padded wooden ledge fixed low to the floor. The kneeler was positioned in front of a small, screened window in the partition separating me from where the priest sat on the other side.

With my knees resting on the padded kneeler and my body upright, my face landed roughly level with the small covered screen in front of me, close enough to speak quietly through the opening without needing to lean in or raise my voice.

The priest never turned to directly face me. Through the mesh screen I could only make out his profile. His face was angled toward the front of the church, as if he were listening not to me, but through me, to something else, even though I was speaking directly to him.

Nana had told me once that the priest wasn’t really the one listening to my confession, but that he was standing in for Jesus, who would always love me and forgive me for any sin.

Whatever I said to the priest, according to my Nana, he would carry it to God on behalf of Jesus. She encouraged me to see the priest not as a normal man, but as someone far larger, who already knew what I was going to say and who was ready to forgive my sins and love me regardless of what I had done.

Sometimes it seemed like I was kneeling there forever before the priest slid the mesh screen curtain open, casting a little more light into my compartment. He was also listening to confessions from someone on the opposite side of the booth, alternating between the two of us. The longer I waited, the more nervous and self-conscious I became.

I couldn’t hear the other person’s confession as I knelt there, but the muffled voice of the priest did reach my ears, without my being able to make out what he was saying.

When the mesh screen curtain finally opened, I’d speak first, staring at the priest’s profile, wondering if he recognized my voice. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one week since my last confession.” I do confess here that, on occasion, I’d have to say it had been two, three, or more weeks!

The priest always responded, “Go ahead, my child.”

One Saturday, during confession, I decided to tell the priest that one of my sins was throwing hard-packed snowballs at passing cars in front of the church earlier in the week. I think it must have been the last sin I uttered to him because I can remember an awkward pause hanging in the air for a moment. Then, suddenly, he asked, “Are you a good shot?” His voice felt more playful than usual.

I felt a surge of electricity through my body at this shocking, out-of-the-blue question. I wriggled, contorting my body from side to side. My face quickly felt hot with embarrassment as my mind raced to come up with an answer.

“Ugh…I guess I’m pretty good,” I said softly.

I honestly don’t remember much else about what happened after my answer. It likely ended in the usual way, with the priest assigning specific prayers for my penance, followed by his absolution: “I absolve you from your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

After reciting my prayers, sometimes quickly, other times more reflectively, in the same pew I’d sat in before confession, I’d step out of the church into the normal, noisy world. I often felt relief and a sense of cleanliness, as if I’d been given a new lease on life, another chance to be good and not disobey God’s rules for being an upright Catholic boy.

Decades later, after my understanding of God had evolved many times, I found myself in a very different place.

Unlike my mostly voluntary trips to the confessional on Saturday afternoons, carrying relatively minor sins to be gently absolved by the local priest, this time I arrived at the office of a family counselor carrying something much heavier. I felt overwhelmed by what I saw as my grave moral failures as a father and husband.

The fifteen-minute drive from my apartment to the counselor’s office felt like I was descending into one of Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of tortured, agonizing souls in Hell.

Back in high school, in 1969, I’d bought Deep Purple’s third album largely because of its cover, a detail from the Hell panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, filled with contorted, deformed, and tormented human bodies. I’d never heard of Bosch before, but I was so fascinated by the grotesque imagery that I had to buy the album.

I must have stared at that cover a hundred times as a teenager without ever really considering its unsettling implications. Now, decades later, gripping the steering wheel on my way to a stranger’s office, the image rose up uninvited, its tormented figures suddenly accompanying me on the drive.

By the time I trudged up the sidewalk and entered the building where the counselor’s office was located, I had little hope that a meeting with a man I’d never met could do much to lift the heaviness I was carrying.

The counselor, John, directed me to sit in the faded green sofa chair across from his desk. I stared at the worn seat cushion, permanently molded by the countless people who had sat there before me, and wondered, “Did everyone who sat in this chair for the first time feel as confused and hopeless as I do right now?”

I remember very little of what I actually said to John that day, or how he responded as I tried to explain what was happening in my family. I do remember telling him something about my faith background. He said he had counseled other members of my faith community before, but I didn’t believe him. At the time, we were discouraged from seeking counseling outside the faith, so his claim didn’t make sense to me.

That only added to my caution about how much of myself I wanted to reveal. I didn’t know what John believed about God, or whether he believed in God at all, and at that point in my life, that mattered greatly to me.

I was sitting across from a stranger, wondering what he could offer that my faith, my prayers, and my relationship with God had so far been unable to provide. As our session drew to a close, John asked calmly, “Jack, have you ever had any thoughts of suicide?”

After I assured him that, because of my faith, suicide was not an option, he walked over as I stood up, wrapped me in a bear hug, and said, “You’re going to be okay,” as he patted me on the back. I felt my body relax as his words sank into me, even though my mind couldn’t believe them.

“I’ve sat in that chair just like you did today, okay?” he said reassuringly as he walked me to the door.

When I got outside, I felt relieved that I’d gone through with the session, but I knew I wouldn’t and couldn’t come back again. A man’s reassurance was not the same as receiving God’s approval and forgiveness, at least not as I understood it back then.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since I walked out of John’s office that day.

New relationships and some first-time experiences have given me a window into very different ways people understand and respond to suffering these days.

One of those windows opened when I was introduced to a coach who works with entrepreneurs and business leaders. Reading through his website and listening to one of his leadership seminars, I found myself lingering over the language he uses to describe how he works with clients.

Deep self-awareness. True essence. Limiting beliefs. Profound inner work. The wisdom of the body. Authentic connection to yourself. Your deepest values. Your inner landscape.

The words were familiar enough. I had encountered variations of them many times before in conversations and in the expanding worlds of coaching, wellness, healing, and personal growth. I had also explored some of these ideas and practices in my own life, including spending ten days in silence at a Vipassana meditation retreat, observing my breath, bodily sensations, and the seemingly endless movement of my own mind.

I wasn’t encountering this language as an outsider. What struck me this time was something I hadn’t paid much attention to before. It was where all those words seemed to be pointing.

The person who feels stuck, unfulfilled, disconnected, or anxious is invited to turn inward, become more aware of what is happening within, listen to the body, uncover what may lie outside conscious awareness, and discover something more authentic beneath the surface.

But what does it feel like to be suffering and be told to look within? What exactly am I looking for? How will I know when I’ve found it? And what happens when what I encounter inside myself isn’t wisdom or clarity, but more confusion?

Looking back across these different encounters, I am struck less by which approach offers the better answer than by where each one directs us when suffering arrives.

As a boy, I brought what troubled me before God.

Years later, overwhelmed by problems I could no longer resolve through faith alone, I reluctantly carried them into another man’s office.

Today, much of the language surrounding wellness, healing, and personal growth invites us to turn inward, toward the body, the inner landscape, and resources assumed to already be there.

Suffering has followed me through all three worlds. What has changed is where I have looked for an answer.

Anyone who says they’ve got the definitive answer to this question is, if you’ll pardon the expression, full of that something that sometimes comes out of you in a big, dark and heavy lump.

Let me say up front that I used to think I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the answer to this question.

My certainty rested on unprovable metaphysical assumptions about the nature of the cosmos, the nature of human beings, and yes, that three-letter word with a capital G, God.

Back then, I assumed there was a God as explained to me in my parents’ Catholic tradition. God, as a reality, was a given.

I held for decades the belief that life was inherently meaningful because God, as I understood Him, created all things, was interested in my life, and would always be there to watch over me.

Just because my beliefs rested on assumptions that cannot be proven or disproven doesn’t mean those assumptions were meaningless.

Have you ever experienced being held by a power or force, or whatever you want to call it, in such a way that every second of your life overflowed with joy and a “peace that passeth all understanding”?

To try and put this experience into words, I’d say it’s like eating your favorite ice cream, recalling a beautiful sunset, and quietly drifting off into a peaceful sleep, while somehow knowing you are an integral part of everything that IS, all at once.

I have a different kind of certainty now, the certainty of uncertainty. A different kind of holding, the holding that comes from letting go of any definition of what’s holding.

Yes, I’ve listened to the anthropologists, believers, materialists, and others offer their particular answers to this question. Bless them all for giving it the old college try.

Many of us want concrete answers about most everything, even the toughest existential questions.

I know what evolution says. I’ve read enough to trust that it explains, remarkably well, how the human form arose from earlier forms.

But the question of why there is form at all, or a universe capable of producing form, is a different question altogether.

When we say form, what are we referring to?

The human form isn’t only something described in textbooks or traced back through fossil records or DNA, is it?

Perhaps the deeper question isn’t simply how the human form emerged, but what makes this human form possible to appear?

Before we ask where we are going, we might first pause before the fact that we are here.

Recently, I stumbled upon the story of the Inca girl, La Doncella, discovered by archaeologists in 1999, fully clothed and remarkably preserved on Llullaillaco, a 22,110-foot volcano on the Argentina-Chile border.

According to known Inca history, this teenage girl was offered to the gods as part of the Inca ritual of capacocha, to secure the empire’s favor, protection, and success.

This aspect of the story is fascinating in itself, but I was drawn to something beyond her selection as a ritual sacrifice.

Looking at photographs and watching short video clips of La Doncella enclosed in a glass display case, I found myself mysteriously drawn to her.

Sitting there in still-colorful but faded ceremonial garb, with her long dark hair, well-preserved skin, and seemingly serene facial expression, I found myself unable to look away.

Yet, what was I being drawn towards?

“She” no longer existed—only her form.

I imagined making the journey to that museum to stand before her. Not to study her, as the scientists were doing, but to ponder what makes it possible for this human form to appear, to live, to grow, and to “die”?

Somehow, I felt at one with this stranger’s form, as though I were sitting beside her in that glass chamber.

I experienced a slight feeling of disorientation, as though I were frozen in time, everything narrowing to that one moment projected back to me through my phone.

I found myself asking: What happened to this young girl when her physical body froze to death?

Where did she go, or not go?

We’ve progressed rapidly in the West since the introduction of Enlightenment thinking and science.

We understand far more than previous generations about how our bodies work, how diseases spread and are cured, how the universe expands, and how the human form evolved over thousands and thousands of years.

And yet, when it comes to the question of where we came from and where we are going, we are still incapable of answering it with conviction.

Isn’t that odd? Isn’t it strange?

Why is human life like that?

Why isn’t a clear answer available to us?

Would our lives be any better off if we had a convincing, universally accepted answer to this question?

Or would it not matter one iota?

Over the next few weeks, through a series of long phone conversations, we caught up on the previous thirty years and what life looks like today. In one memorable conversation, he asked me to list the influential teachers, books, and other spiritually related materials I’d accumulated, and to share what each had done for me.

At one point, he said something that struck me as odd.

“Jack, I actually don’t have any beliefs that I live by.”

Surprised, I immediately shot back, “But Tom, isn’t what you just said a belief? If you say you have no beliefs, isn’t that a belief about not having any beliefs?”

“No,” he replied instantly. “It’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” I returned, a defiant tone in my voice. “Everyone has beliefs. Even the Cowardly Lion had beliefs. Remember? ‘I do believe in spooks. I do believe in spooks. I do. I do. I do…’”

I quickly followed up. “And what about the recent bestseller by Shawn Achor, The Power of Beliefs? He identifies seven core power beliefs that will lead to greater success and life fulfillment.”

“I’m not saying beliefs don’t have merit,” Tom replied, “but I no longer make beliefs the centerpiece of my life. I’m done playing that game on myself.”

Tom’s statement jarred me. Without realizing it at the time, it planted a kind of worm in my mind that wiggled its way into my thinking over the next several days.

“Okay, Tom, I can see we aren’t going to resolve this right now, but I still say having no beliefs is itself a belief.”

We both chuckled, and over the next few months, Tom and I continued sharing our ideas and attitudes about life.

What Tom meant by having “no beliefs,” I slowly realized, wasn’t that he had no opinions or working assumptions. It was that he refused to turn any of them into ultimate, unchallengeable stories about reality.

“I still make decisions,” he told me at one point. “I still care about things. I still have hunches about what’s true, but don’t look at any of this as the final word on reality or who I’m supposed to be. I live each day by responding to what shows up in front of me, without adding drama or interpretations to each experience.”

So maybe I was right that Tom had beliefs after all. But I’d been asking the wrong question. The real difference between us wasn’t whether he had beliefs, it was whether he’d let any of them harden into something no experience was allowed to touch.

That distinction is what I want to follow here, because once I saw it in Tom, I started seeing its absence everywhere.

One writer friend of mine writes extensively about America as God’s beacon of hope for the world, God’s chosen nation at this time in history. As far as he’s concerned, if Christians in America don’t start doing a better job of living up to the teachings of Jesus, America’s future will darken further, and the world will plunge into greater chaos and violence.

His writing doesn’t project a proposition about America and its destiny so much as a confident, self-assured tone, as if what he writes is already an actual, verifiable fact, not to be critiqued or reconsidered for accuracy or veracity.

What struck me wasn’t that he believed America had a unique role in history. Lots of people have believed that. What struck me was that there was no hint this was an interpretation, a hope, or even a deeply held conviction. It was presented as settled knowledge, a fact about reality itself.

It's like the proverbial claim some Christians make about the Bible: "The Bible is the Word of God." How do you know that? "Because the Bible tells me so."

I bring him up briefly, as a milder version of something I encountered more fully in another friend, one I’ve known for over fifteen years. His case is worth slowing down for.

He holds an absolute belief in the truthfulness of his church’s teachings about God and the solution to human suffering and evil. When I pointed to the possibility of disconfirming evidence, things that might implicate the framework he’s committed to, he let me know that the framework itself can never be directly implicated.

To him, any alleged disconfirming evidence against the framework is, by definition, untrustworthy because the person bringing it is always biased, and their views about the framework are inevitably tainted and never objective.

When I pushed further and asked what evidence, in principle, could ever show his framework was wrong, he offered three hypothetical, internal doctrinal errors, the only kinds of flaws his framework could contain.

Every example he gave was framed at a metaphysical level, almost impossible to test in any straightforward way. Meanwhile, any lived outcomes of the framework, like harm, contradiction, or disillusionment in the community, were automatically ruled out in advance as irrelevant and untrustworthy.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t think this makes him a fool or a liar. Most working belief systems, including the scientific ones and the moral ones I rely on every day, keep some core commitments that aren’t up for grabs at every moment. You can’t function without some bedrock.

The difference isn’t that my friend has convictions he protects. It’s that his framework has quietly expanded the protected zone to cover everything, so that no lived experience, no matter how damaging, ever counts as evidence against it.

He gave me the impression that, from the inside, his framework feels robust, rational, and open. From the outside, it looks like a system that has quietly immunized itself against the very experiences that might call it into question.

That’s the pull and the cost of self-sealing frameworks. They offer coherence, safety, and belonging. They answer the deep human hunger for a world that makes sense. But they allow a steady filtering of reality, where some experiences are welcomed as confirmation and others are labeled as noise, irrational bias, or attack.

Over time, a person inside this kind of framework may genuinely not see what others see. Not because they’re dishonest, but because the framework was allowed to train perception to sort experience in a particular way.

His openness was genuine, but it was directed only at corrections unlikely ever to occur, while the evidence that actually challenges the story from the outside gets dismissed as tainted or misdirected.

That’s the quiet power of a self-sealing framework. It allows open discussion and inquiry while making sure the most threatening kinds of evidence are never allowed in.

I recognize this pattern because I’ve lived inside it myself, not just observed it in others.

There was a time when my own faith community functioned as a self-sealing framework for me. My dad, who passed away a few years ago, used to point out his objections, often with disdain: “When are you going to get the hell out of that group before the bottom falls out and you’re left with nothing?” I didn’t hear concern. I heard ignorance. I was convinced he didn’t understand what my community really was, and that one day he’d have to change his mind.

It took years, and the actual collapse of parts of that world, for me to see that he had spotted cracks from the outside that I was too invested to see from the inside. He wasn’t inside the story with me, and that was exactly why he could see what I couldn’t.

That’s part of why I can see my friend’s framework the way I do. I’ve spent years inside a framework built the same way his is, sealed, complete, unable to let outside evidence register as real.

I know what that feels like from the inside, not just what it looks like from a distance. He hasn’t had the occasion, or maybe the need, to stand outside a framework the way I’ve had to stand outside mine.

I don’t say that to claim my vantage point is truer than his. I say it because it’s different, built by having occupied both positions rather than just the one he’s still standing in. Whether that gives me anything worth trusting is a separate question, and probably his to answer as much as mine.

I think about that a lot now, because the clearest view of a self-sealing framework rarely comes from within it. It comes from someone standing close enough to care, but far enough outside to notice what’s being filtered out.

A different kind of filtering shows up in Karen Carpenter’s story, and the more I sit with it, the less I think this is a stretch.

Karen didn’t just misjudge her body the way you might misjudge a distance or a color. She held something closer to a conviction about it, strong enough to override the evidence right in front of her.

People close to her tried to show her, with medical charts and visible signs, that she had lost too much weight and needed to eat. From the outside, the evidence seemed undeniable. From the inside, when Karen looked in the mirror, she experienced herself as not thin enough, still needing to do something about it.

That’s not a passive glitch in perception. That’s a belief doing what beliefs do when they are allowed to seal off and filter out the weight scales, the charts, the people who loved her, because none of it was allowed to count as evidence against what she already knew to be true about her body.

Karen did eventually find her way to a different vantage point, gaining weight and making plans to rebuild her life, but not until real, permanent damage had already been done.

If any of this feels familiar, it may not be because you share my friend’s theology or Karen’s struggle, but because you recognize what it’s like to live inside a story that protects itself.

The sense of certainty. The safety of having an answer for everything. The belonging that comes from sharing the same script. And maybe, too, the quiet discomfort when some experience, some relationship, some fact doesn’t fit and has to be pushed away or reinterpreted.

I’m not suggesting we try to live with no frameworks or beliefs. We all need working stories to get through the day, and some of those stories need a firm floor under them, or they wouldn’t hold us at all. But there’s a difference between a floor and a sealed room.

Although my friend and I have known each other for over fifteen years, only now, for the first time, have I fully sensed the weight of a life lived inside a sealed story that doesn’t allow outside evidence in.

There’s a texture to our friendship I hadn’t noticed before, the careful sidestepping of certain topics, the way some conversations glide smoothly while others hit an invisible wall. We’ve been batting these things around for years, but now that I see the structure underneath, something has shifted.

I want to hold that seeing loosely, though, and not mistake it for the last word. What I’m calling clarity is still my own reading of him, built from my side of the glass, and it deserves the same question I’m asking of his framework: what would count as evidence that I’ve got this wrong?

The trust between us is still there. The history is still there. But the ground has changed, and I don’t think things will be quite the same again.

The next time we meet up for an early morning breakfast at our favorite spot, if we do, I imagine us sitting there, looking at each other across the table. We’ll look the same, our faces, the history in our eyes, but something unspoken will occupy the space between us that wasn’t there before.

Maybe we’ll talk about it. Maybe we won’t.

But underneath it all, both of us will know that a certain conversation, not available previously, has become possible now, or impossible, depending on how you look at it.

That’s the thing about seeing the structure of someone’s framework. Once you see it, you can’t quite unsee it. And once you suspect the other person knows you’ve seen it, something in the relationship recalibrates, not necessarily for the worse, but not simply for the better either.

I don’t know what happens next. I only know that whatever happens will carry the weight of this recognition, and of the question I’m still asking myself along with him: what kind of evidence would I allow to matter here?

Some friendships survive that kind of seeing. Some don’t.

Some become something else entirely.

All I know is that sitting across from him next time, I’ll be looking into the eyes of someone I’ve known for a very long time, and also someone I’m meeting for the first time.

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.”