I come to this as someone with a deep investment in philosophy of mind and relational ontology, and as a shamanic practitioner who has sat with people navigating the territory between life and death. This is not an abstract question for me. It is one of the most urgent questions there is. And it deserves better than either the credulity of true believers or the reflexive dismissiveness of those who have decided the answer before examining the evidence.

Drumming has long been a powerful tool in shamanic traditions worldwide. Its steady beat connects practitioners to altered states of consciousness, healing energies, and spiritual realms. This universal language of percussion transcends cultural boundaries, offering a practical method for transformation and connection. Exploring how drumming functions in shamanism across different cultures reveals its deep significance and practical uses as a healing and spiritual tool.

We usually speak of death as if it were the end of a thing. A person lives, and then that person dies. It sounds straightforward, almost tidy. But that clarity may be borrowed from an older picture of what a person is. If you are a substance - a distinct, enduring entity that inhabits a body - then death is the destruction of that entity. But if you are not a substance at all, and instead a pattern, the question becomes much stranger. What exactly dies when a pattern ends?

Most people say they want the truth. They don’t. What they want is confirmation, dressed up as insight. They want their beliefs reflected back at them, their motives excused, their choices validated, and their self-image left intact. The moment truth threatens the ego, it stops being 'helpful' and starts being called rude, negative, or unrealistic. That is the real problem: people are not usually offended by truth itself. They are offended by what truth costs them.

Have you ever wondered if healing could transcend physical boundaries? Imagine receiving a gentle, soothing energy that nurtures your spirit, calms your mind, and revitalises your body, all without leaving your home. This is the magic of remote energy healing. As someone who has walked this path, I’m excited to share with you the profound benefits of this practice and how it can gently transform your life.

Most people think of disagreement as a failure. A conversation that ends in consensus has succeeded; one that ends in unresolved dispute has not quite managed it. Philosophy, at least in its self-presentation, reverses this. It is the discipline that treats disagreement as the medium through which understanding develops, that regards the persistent challenge as more intellectually honest than the premature resolution. Socrates did not walk away from conversations once everyon

In many indigenous traditions, grief is understood as the soul's appropriate response to love encountering loss. If you loved something, a person, a relationship, a version of yourself, a way of life, then grief is the price of that love, and it is also the proof of it. To rush through grief is to dishonour the love that caused it. To medicate it into silence is to refuse the very thing that might change you.

There is a passage in the Philosophical Investigations that philosophy of mind has not yet finished digesting. It concerns what Wittgenstein called the private language argument, and while the argument has attracted an enormous secondary literature, most of that literature debates its validity as an argument rather than attending to what it reveals. What it reveals, I want to suggest, is something that changes the terms of consciousness studies entirely.

Modern spirituality is, in its dominant form, a self-improvement project wearing borrowed robes. Mindfulness is sold as a cognitive enhancement tool. Yoga is sold as a fitness product. Silence is sold as a premium commodity: book a retreat, pay for the quiet, come back refreshed and ready to produce. We have taken the most subversive insight in human history - that the self is not the centre of the universe - and converted it into a personal development strategy.

Start with a sensation you have probably had and probably dismissed: the feeling when looking at a forest or a river or a night sky, that the thing in front of you is not merely a thing. Not that it is alive in the way you are alive, not that it has thoughts or intentions or feelings you could name, but that there is something it is like to be it, some interiority that your gaze is meeting even if it cannot understand what it meets. Most people learn to dismiss this feeling e

We live under electric light that tells the brain it is always midsummer. We heat our homes to the same temperature year-round. We eat strawberries in January and expect our productivity to be identical in February as in July. We demand of our nervous systems a constancy that nothing in our evolutionary history prepared them for.

Soul retrieval is a core practice in shamanic healing that many people find mysterious or unfamiliar. At its heart, it involves restoring parts of a person’s soul that have been lost or fragmented due to trauma, stress, or significant life challenges. This process aims to bring back wholeness, balance, and a renewed sense of self. If you have ever felt disconnected, numb, or incomplete, soul retrieval might offer a path to healing.

David Chalmers gave philosophy one of its most useful formulations when he distinguished the easy problems of consciousness from the hard one. The easy problems concern function: explaining how the brain integrates information, how it discriminates stimuli, how it produces reports about internal states. The hard problem is different. It asks why any of this processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all. Why is there something it is like to see red, to feel pain, t

Imagine two people make identical claims. Same words, same evidence, same delivery. One is believed. One is not. What changed? Not the claim. Not the evidence. Something about the person making it. The alternative is uncomfortable: that what gets believed is shaped as much by who is saying it as by what is being said. That alternative is, however, well supported by evidence. And it matters far beyond academic philosophy.

Tricksters appear in myths and stories across cultures, often stirring up chaos and challenging norms. Yet, their role goes beyond mischief. Tricksters like Loki from Norse mythology and Coyote from Native American traditions play a vital part in healing and self-discovery through shadow work. This post explores how these figures embody chaos that leads to transformation, helping us confront hidden parts of ourselves.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that has no obvious name. It is not the loneliness of isolation, of having no one around. It is the loneliness of being in a room full of people and finding that you do not quite belong to either half of it. I love people in both halves of that room. And I have found, repeatedly, that fully belonging to either half requires a kind of amputation I am not willing to perform. This essay is about what that costs. And it is exactly the righ

Energetic connections shape much of our emotional and spiritual experience. Many people turn to cord cutting as a way to free themselves from negative ties, but this approach is not always the best choice. Sometimes, maintaining or healing these energetic links can lead to deeper growth and balance. This post explores when to cut energetic cords and when to focus on healing them instead.

The dark night of the soul is a profound spiritual crisis that can feel overwhelming and isolating. It often arrives without warning, shaking the foundations of your beliefs, identity, and purpose. While this experience can be deeply challenging, it also offers a unique opportunity for transformation and growth. Shamanic wisdom provides practical guidance and healing tools to navigate this difficult passage with courage and clarity.

We live in a culture that has decided, largely without examining the decision, that propositional knowledge is the real kind and everything else is something lesser: intuition, gut feeling, superstition, or at best a heuristic waiting to be replaced by a proper algorithm. Ryle, Polanyi, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, Klein: these are not fringe thinkers. They represent decades of serious philosophical and scientific work showing that this picture is wrong. The body knows.

In scientific observation, the observer is supposed to remain separate from the observed. In shamanic journey, they interpenetrate. When I journey to understand a client's situation, I'm not observing it from outside. I'm participating in it. The boundaries between my consciousness, the client's consciousness, and the situation itself become fluid. Where's the boundary? What's subject and what's object?