#6 - “The common thread of Eastern traditions.”
Dear Reader,
this month I almost didn't write. For the first time since starting this newsletter, I sat in front of my notes for weeks and couldn't find a way in. I wanted to read into Eastern Traditions, as I am a practitioner of mindfulness meditation and last month’s issue came to the conclusion, that consciousness must be used in order to experience it, which kind of is what mindfulness meditation is about. I’ve lived in Asia before and am married to a Chinese. So I can tell from my first hand experience, while there are completely non-spiritual people in Asia as well (like my in-laws), spirituality does by and large play a bigger role in Asian cultures than it does in Western cultures. And funnily I write these lines as Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley VC prominence, has just publicly announced he believes that introspection and reflection are pointless exercises as they limit one’s personal success. My first reaction to that was: „Sorry to say that PMA, but imho you are full of shit.“. However after another consideration, if your goal is to become a billionaire, he’s probably right. It is just not my goal.
During my almost bankruptcy, which I have luckily been able to turn around, I had ample opportunity to reflect on success and came to the conclusion, that a life well lived for me consists of more than mere material success (even though that is still somehow also important to me). And I know a bunch of successful entrepreneurs who’d happily trade in a huge part of their fortune to buy back some of the missed time they didn’t get to spend with their loved ones. Or others whose purchases (like expedition trucks etc.) speak loudly about the personal adventures they’d like to embark on, if only they’d find the time beside managing all their assets. So these toys remain just unused matter taking space.
Long story short, this is what my own reflection and introspection taught me, as I’ve been using meditation to explore what it is, that my own self really wants, while it isn’t subjected to external pressure or bowing down to other people‘s will. So let’s look into what eastern traditions have to teach us about the self.
To give you an exec summary: The Hindus say there is an eternal self behind the self you think you are. The Buddhists say there is no self at all. The Taoists say stop trying to figure it out and move with what is already moving. And Huxley, who I have read for this month’s issue, says, they are all pointing at the same thing.
Last month I ended with the idea that consciousness is not something we have but something we practice. That came from Plato. He believed the soul moves closer to truth only if it actively orients itself upward, toward clarity and what he called the Good. A soul that doesn't try just keeps circling, mistaking shadows for truth and noise for something worth listening to. The eastern traditions I read about this month don't just say the soul should orient itself upward. They ask what happens when it arrives.
This month is about that structure. About what I believe to have understood about three traditions that seem to contradict each other but might be describing the same experience from different angles. And about a strange little book called the Kybalion that, whether you take it seriously or not, offers a surprisingly useful set of keys for seeing how these pieces fit together.
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Lets start with Hinduism. The texts that form it‘s philosophical core, the Upanishads, were composed roughly between 800 and 200 BCE, though the tradition they draw from is older still. The goal it is ultimately pointing at is called moksha (liberation from the eternal cycle of rebirth). And crucially, the path to that liberation runs straight through understanding what the self actually is.
The concept at the centre of this search is Atman. In the simplest terms, Atman is the true self. Which is not the self that has a name and a job and a body that ages. But what remains when all of that is stripped away. The witness behind the experience. The awareness that watches you think without being the thought itself.
If this sounds familiar, it should. In the first issue of this newsletter, I described what I called the observer self, the part of you that watches what happens to the objective self. The Hindus had already arrived at the same distinction thousands of years earlier.
Because Atman, in Hindu philosophy, is not just a quiet observer sitting inside your skull. Atman is identical to Brahman. And Brahman is the ultimate reality. The ground of all being. The source from which everything emerges and into which everything returns. This equation, Atman equals Brahman, is probably the single most important idea in Hindu thought. It means that the deepest layer of your individual consciousness is not individual at all. It is the same substance as the universe itself. You are not a small self looking out at a big world. For them you are the big world, looking at itself through the keyhole of a small self.
The Upanishads express this in the phrase: Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. Not you are like that, or you are part of that. You are that. The separation between you and everything else is not real. It is Maya, an illusion, a kind of cosmic misunderstanding that keeps us trapped in the belief that we are isolated creatures bumping into an external world.
The everyday self feels real and the world feels solid. The belief system does not deny any of that. It just says that this feeling of solidity is not the final layer. That there is something underneath it. And that the entire point of spiritual practice is to learn how to perceive that deeper layer without losing your ability to function in the surface one.
Now I want to reference the Kybalion which I also read for this month’s issue. Which calls itself a „Master-Key with which he (the student) may open the many inner doors in the Temple of Mystery“ and claims that the teachings described in it, those of allegedly ancient Egyptian author Hermes Trismegistus, predate those of the Eastern Traditions and that „Even the most ancient teachings of India undoubtedly have their roots in the original Hermetic Teachings.“. The actual historical authorship of the teachings, which is evidently of relatively recent origin, need not be determined here, provided that the book helps me to better understand the Eastern traditions.
The first of its seven principles is Mentalism. It states that the All is Mind, and the Universe is Mental. Placed next to the Atman-Brahman equation, that sounds pretty familiar. Both are saying the same thing in different vocabularies. Consciousness is not a byproduct of matter. Matter is a byproduct of consciousness. The universe is not a machine that accidentally produces minds. The universe is the mind, expressing itself as what we experience as matter, energy, space, and time.
Plato was circling this idea with his theory of Forms. He said that the visible world is a shadow of a more real, invisible world. But he still kept the soul and the Forms somewhat separate. The soul could approach the Good, but it was not the Good. Hinduism collapses that distance. Atman does not approach Brahman. Atman is Brahman. And the Kybalion's Mentalism principle formalises this into something almost axiomatic. If the All is Mind, then everything you perceive, including your sense of being a separate person, is a thought within that Mind. Not a lie. But not the final truth either.
In my very first text on my website, I reported about a shamanic meditation where I encountered a power animal for the first time. I went into it as a skeptic, allergic to anything spiritual. But what I experienced was not a hallucination, rather it was a layer of my own psyche that communicated in symbols and not in words. It was Atman, although I did not have that word for it at the time. A part of me that is not my rational mind, and that clearly did not depend on my conscious will to exist.
The Hindu tradition would say that this is not special. That Atman is always there, in everyone, at all times. The problem is not that it is hidden. The problem is that we are too distracted by Maya, by the noise of the surface, to notice it. My frequent reader will be reminded of Plato's cave from my last month’s issue. The prisoners staring at shadows on the wall are living in Maya. The painful process of turning toward the light is what the Hindus call waking up to Atman. Different words, different century, different continents. Same diagnosis.
I don't want to pretend that I now understand Hinduism. The tradition is vast and I have barely scratched the surface. There are entire schools of thought, Advaita Vedanta, Dvaita, Vishishtadvaita, that disagree with each other about the precise relationship between Atman and Brahman, about whether the world is truly illusory or just misunderstood, about whether devotion or knowledge or action is the primary path. I am not qualified to adjudicate any of that after my short read this month.
But what I believe to have understood from it is the idea that consciousness is not produced by the world but is the substance of the world. That to the Hindus, the observer I have been trying to locate since the first issue of this newsletter might not be a part of me at all, but the thing I am a part of. And the Kybalion helped me to understand how this ancient Hindu idea connects to Plato and to the Egyptians and to conclusion as to why all Eastern Traditions seem to point in the same direction. Because if the All is Mind, then of course the books sound the same. They are all being written by the same author.
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The Buddhists at a first glance seem to disagree with most of that.
Buddhism begins with a man who grew up in Hinduism. Siddhartha Gautama was raised in the Vedic tradition. He knew the Upanishads and the concept of Atman. And after years of extreme ascetic practice that nearly killed him, he sat down under a tree and arrived at something that directly contradicted the tradition he came from. There is no eternal self. There is no Atman. What you call yourself is a process, not a thing. A river, not a stone.
The Buddhist term for this is Anatta, or Anatman in Sanskrit. Literally: not-self. It is one of the three marks of existence in Buddhist thought, alongside impermanence (Anicca) and suffering (Dukkha). And of the three, Anatta is the one that at first glance stands in the starkest opposition to the hindu belief system and its idea that there is a deep self, identical to ultimate reality, eternal and unchanging. Buddhism says that is an illusion. The desire for a permanent self is itself the problem. It is the root of attachment, of suffering, of the endless cycle of craving and disappointment that defines human life.
Let me try to lay out what the Buddha taught, as far as I believe to understand it.
He taught that what we experience as a person is not a unified thing but a bundle of five aggregates, the Skandhas. Form, which is the body and its sensory apparatus. Sensation, meaning the raw feeling tone of experience, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Perception, which is the labelling and recognising of what the senses deliver. Mental formations, which include will, intention, emotion, habits, everything we might call character or personality. And consciousness, which in this context does not seem to mean awareness in the grand sense but rather the basic capacity of each sense to register its object: eye-consciousness for sight, ear-consciousness for sound, and so on.
The Buddha's point was that none of them is you. Not individually, not collectively. There is no owner behind the aggregates, no one watching from backstage. What we experience as a self is the aggregates in motion, interacting, producing the feeling of continuity. Like a flame that looks like a single thing but is actually a process of combustion that changes in every instant.
When I read this, my first reaction was that it cannot both be true. Either there is a self or there isn't. Either Atman is real or Anatta is. And for a while I was stuck in exactly this binary, going back and forth between the two, feeling like one of them had to be wrong.
This is where Kybalion's principle of Polarity helped me to make sense of it.
The fourth principle states that everything is dual. That opposites are identical in nature but different in degree. That hot and cold are not two different things but the same thing, temperature, measured at different points. That love and hate are not enemies but two poles of the same spectrum (or vibration if you will). What looks like contradiction from up close often turns out to be complementarity from further away.
Applied to Atman and Anatta, this reframing means for me, that the Hindus and the Buddhists are not disagreeing about the nature of reality, but pointing at different poles of the same experience.
The Hindus look inward and find something like a foundation. A witness or observer as I called it in the first issue of this newsletter. They call it Atman and say it is eternal. The Buddhists look inward and find that everything changes. That every fixed point dissolves under close enough inspection. They call this Anatta and say the search for permanence is itself the cause of suffering.
But both traditions agree on what they are looking past. The surface self. The everyday personality with its name and opinions and fears. Both say that this self is not ultimate. Both say that attachment to it produces suffering. Both say that liberation requires seeing through it. They simply differ on what is left once the seeing-through has happened. The Hindus say: what is left is everything. The Buddhists say: what is left is the seeing itself, with nothing behind it that could be called a thing.
I kept thinking about the Egyptian soul model from the third issue while reading this. The Egyptians assumed from the start that a person is not a single thing. The Ka, the Ba, the Akh, the Ren, the Sheut. A human being was a collection of parts that could fragment, dissolve, or integrate depending on how you lived and how you prepared for death. The Buddhists arrived at something structurally similar with the five aggregates, but drew the opposite conclusion. The Egyptians wanted to hold the pieces together. The Buddhists say the pieces were never meant to fit. What you call coherence is a story you tell yourself, and the story is what traps you.
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The concept in Buddhism that summarizes that is called Pratityasamutpada, which is usually translated as dependent origination. It means that nothing exists independently. Everything arises in dependence on conditions. A flame depends on fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove any one of them and the flame ceases. It simply stops, because it was never a thing to begin with. It was a relationship between conditions.
The Buddha applied this logic to the self. Your sense of being you depends on memory, on bodily continuity, on the habit of narration that stitches each moment to the next. Change the conditions and the self changes. Damage the memory and parts of the self disappear. This is not a philosophical abstraction. Anyone who has watched a family member lose their memory to dementia has seen dependent origination in action. The person is still breathing. The aggregates are still operating. But the self that you knew has dissolved, because the conditions that sustained it have changed.
This thought hit harder than anything I read in the Hindu texts. Because it is verifiable. You don't need faith to believe in it.
And yet I could not fully let go of the Atman concept either. Because the observer I described in the first issue, the part of me that watches my thoughts without being my thoughts, does not feel like a process but more like a presence to me. When I sit in silence to meditate long enough, which happens less often than I would like, there is something there in me. I cannot prove it is eternal. I cannot prove it is Brahman. But it also doesn’t feel like just the aggregates spinning fast enough to create the illusion of cohesion.
Maybe that is the point and my “grand realization” in this month’s newsletter. Atman and Anatta are not answers but tools. The Hindu approach is: there is a ground, locate it and then rest in it. This is useful when you are drowning in the noise of your own surface. The Buddhist approach is: there is no ground, stop clinging, let the river carry you. This is useful when you are rigid, attached, locked into a version of yourself that has stopped growing. Both diagnose the same illness, which is the tyranny of the surface self. They just prescribe different medicine depending on which direction you are stuck in.
This also resembles the concept I wrote in the third issue about Horus and Set. Order and chaos. Stability and disruption. Early Egypt understood that consciousness contains both impulses and that neither one can be eliminated without the whole system collapsing. In this equation Atman is the Horus of inner life: the ground, the structure, the continuity. Anatta is the Set: the disruption, the dissolving, the refusal to let any structure become permanent. And maybe consciousness needs both. Not as a compromise, but as a rhythm.
Which, as it turns out, is exactly what the Taoists think.
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After Hinduism and Buddhism, last but not least I tried to get a rough understanding of Taoism and its belief system.
The founding text of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, is attributed to Laozi, though whether Laozi was a single person, a collective, or a legend is a question nobody has settled. It was composed roughly around the 6th or 4th century BCE, which means it overlaps historically with both the later Upanishads and the early Buddhist teachings. What is immediately obvious when you read about it is that it is not trying to build a system.
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
That is the first line. And it essentially tells you that everything that follows will fail to say what it means. That the thing being pointed at, the Tao, is by definition beyond language because language works by dividing reality into categories, and the Tao is what exists before the dividing starts. It is the whole that precedes the parts. The river before you name the banks.
Hinduism says the ground of reality is consciousness (Brahman) and Buddhism says there is no ground at all, Taoism says there is something, but the moment you try to pin it down you have already lost it. The Tao is not a thing, not a force and not a god. It is the way things move when nothing is interfering with them. The current beneath the surface. The pattern that emerges when you stop imposing patterns.
This brings us to Wu Wei, which is the Taoist concept that connects most directly to what I have been exploring in this newsletter.
Wu Wei is usually translated as non-action or effortless action. Both translations are misleading. It does not mean doing nothing, passivity, laziness or surrender. It means acting without forcing. Moving with the grain of reality rather than against it. Responding to what is actually in front of you instead of what you think should be in front of you.
A good analogy in the Tao Te Ching for that concept is water. Water does not fight the rock. It flows around it. Given enough time, it wears the rock away, through persistence and an absolute lack of rigidity. Water has no fixed shape. It takes the shape of whatever contains it. And yet it is one of the most powerful forces on earth. Wu Wei is the instruction to be more like water. Not soft in the sense of weak, but soft in the sense of adaptability. Formless in a way that turns out to be more durable than any form.
When I read this, I thought about my own life. Running a company with fifty employees is, on most days, the opposite of Wu Wei. It is constant forcing. Deadlines, targets, investor expectations, team dynamics, all requiring me to push, steer, decide, intervene. Fatherhood is similar. You cannot let a two-year-old follow the Tao. You have to impose structure, set boundaries, be the rock. And yet the moments where I actually function best, where the decisions are clear and the effort disappears, are exactly the moments where something like Wu Wei takes over. When I stop overthinking and just act from whatever knowledge has already accumulated in me. When the response comes before the deliberation.
Athletes call this flow. Psychologists call it optimal experience. The Japanese martial arts tradition calls it Mushin, no-mind. Laozi just called it the Way. And I suspect he would say that the reason we have so many different words for it is that we keep trying to name something that only works when you stop naming it.
Again I tried to use the Kybalion as a key and its fifth principle aligns very well with the concept of Wu Wei.
The principle of Rhythm states that everything flows, out and in. That everything has its tides. That the pendulum swing manifests in everything. That the measure of the swing to the right is the measure of the swing to the left. Things go up and down. Good times follow bad times.
If everything moves in rhythms, then forcing is the attempt to hold the pendulum at one end of its swing. To keep things permanently good, permanently productive, permanently under control. And the Taoist insight is that this forcing is not just exhausting but counterproductive. The harder you hold the pendulum to one side, the more violent the swing when it inevitably goes the other way. Wu Wei is the practice of moving with the pendulum instead of against it. Not controlling the rhythm but learning to feel it and act in time with it.
Before knowing this concept, I seem to have been following it naturally for my whole life already. The periods where I burn myself out and force productivity are usually followed by crashes, where I allow myself to hang loose for a couple of weeks.
Another fitting concept of Taoism is the idea of the complementarity of opposites. This is most visible in the Yin-Yang symbol, which everyone has seen and almost nobody thinks about carefully. It is not a symbol of balance in the sense of two equal things sitting peacefully side by side. It is a symbol of interpenetration. The black contains a seed of white. The white contains a seed of black. And the whole thing is in motion. Yin does not exist without Yang. Activity does not exist without rest. Form does not exist without emptiness. The Tao Te Ching says it explicitly: being and non-being create each other.
This is Polarity again, the Kybalion's fourth principle, the one that helped me hold Atman and Anatta together. But Taoism turns that principle into a way of life. Don't choose one pole. Don't try to eliminate the other. Learn to ride the movement between them. That is Wu Wei. That is the Way. Not a destination but a quality of movement.
And this is where I connected the dots all the way back to the fourth issue of this newsletter, where I wrote about beauty and Becker's Denial of Death.
I wrote that beauty opens a crack. Through that crack, something looks back at you. That the perception of beauty interrupts function. It stops the machinery of survival and reproduction and craving for a moment and reveals something underneath. I called it the part of consciousness that evolution did not predict.
Wu Wei is the instruction to live in that crack. Not just in the rare moments when beauty ambushes you, but as a continuous practice. To stop forcing, stop grasping, stop running from death and toward permanence. Not because permanence is bad, but because the grasping itself is what closes the crack. The moment you try to hold the beautiful moment, it is gone. The moment you try to make Wu Wei into a technique, it stops being Wu Wei. The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. It keeps pointing at itself and then dissolving the finger.
I found this infuriating and liberating in equal measure. Infuriating because I am someone who wants to understand things, take them apart, see how they work. Liberating because it gave me permission to stop trying to resolve the contradictions I had been accumulating across these months of reading. Atman says there is a ground. Anatta says there is no ground. Wu Wei says stop looking for the ground and pay attention to the fact that you are already standing.
Huxley, in the Perennial Philosophy, quotes Chuang Tzu, the second great Taoist thinker after Laozi, who wrote: "The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep." When I read that, I thought about doomscrolling. About how my mind, on most days, is the opposite of a mirror. It grasps everything. It keeps everything. It reacts to every stimulus as if survival depended on it. Plato would say I am sitting in the cave. The Hindus would say I am trapped in Maya. The Buddhists would say I am attached. The Taoists would say I am simply out of rhythm.
And maybe that is the kindest diagnosis of the four. Not that I am deluded or trapped or suffering from a cosmic misunderstanding. Just that I am out of rhythm. And that the rhythm is always there, waiting for me to stop forcing long enough to hear it again.
This, at least, I can work with.
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So is there actually a common thread, or am I just seeing what I want to see?
This is the question Aldous Huxley tried to answer in The Perennial Philosophy. His thesis is that beneath the surface differences of the world's major spiritual traditions lies a single, recurring insight: that there is a divine ground of all beings, that this ground can be known directly through the human mind, and that realising this identity is the highest purpose of human life. The Hindus call the ground Brahman. The Buddhists describe it by negation. The Taoists call it the Tao and warn you that the name is not the thing. Plato called it the Good. The Kybalion calls it the All. Huxley says they are all pointing at the same mountain from different valleys.
I want to believe him. After six months into my reading journey, I read many things in different sources that sounded too consistent to be coincidental. The idea that there is a shared structure underneath is deeply attractive. But I also don't trust how attractive it is. The human mind is a pattern-matching machine. We see faces in clouds and constellations in random stars. The fact that Atman and Mentalism sound similar does not prove they describe the same thing. It might just prove that I am the kind of reader who looks for bridges.
Huxley was aware of this objection and did not fully resolve it. What he did instead was simply lay the texts next to each other and let the resonance speak for itself. Hindu mystics, Sufi poets, Christian contemplatives, Buddhist monks, Taoist sages, all describing an experience of ego dissolution followed by contact with something vast and impersonal and alive. Either they all independently hallucinated the same thing, or there is something there.
I don't know which it is. But I notice that the question itself has changed how I read. I no longer approach each tradition asking what does this one believe. I approach it by asking what experience is this tradition trying to protect from language. And when I read that way, the walls between them get very thin.
Whether that means the walls were never real, or just that I have gotten better at ignoring them, is a question I am going explore elsewhere. Because I do want to explore what I can learn from some other traditions in the next couple of months as well.
- Transmission Sent -
Reference materials for this issue
Aldous Huxley - The Perennial Philosophy
William Walker Atkinson - The Kybalion
https://philosophy.institute/religions-of-the-world/buddhism-concept-anatta-no-self/