Ancient societies did not build religious and spiritual systems because they lacked scientific understanding. They did so to help us remember a truth about our world that becomes harder to directly experience as our minds fill with intellectual thought and reason, the mental activities that uphold the modern world. What was once a default experience for ancient peoples, as it is for the rest of life on Earth, began to fade from memory as society advanced, so they built ritualistic practices and teachings to help bring us back to that more ancient wisdom. We are using our minds to construct an ivory tower, but in doing so we are becoming mentally, physically, and spiritually unwell. The computer is an opportunity to free us from this burden. Bitcoin and A.I. are part of this thinking machine so that it can continue to build this tower for us, so we can return to our more ancient way of being.

Meditation is not simply stress reduction; it is an inquiry into the true Self. The self you habitually claim is a fiction woven from memory and social identity. Beneath it flows a signal older than language, which cannot be heard while you are busy telling narratives about yourself. Stillness lets the fiction settle so something prior can be felt.

We brought nature into the digital world with Bitcoin. Nature is a humbling force. We don’t tell nature what it is, it tells us who we are. Bitcoin is a discovery, and through it we may discover ourselves.

As the winds of time propel our sails forward, the cultures that endured were those that tied themselves to the mast. They knew the siren song was never a creature upon the rocks, but the pollution of the mind itself, promising truth while scattering the signal. Meditation, ritual, and sacred practice were not ornaments. They were ballast against the amnesia that follows prosperity. A civilization is not refined by what it builds, but by what it remembers to preserve in the quiet between the waves. The work of culture is to make the stillness repeat, so the vessel does not lose its way.

The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao. This warning opens the foundational text of Daoism because its author understood that language corrupts the subject it tries to capture. The same understanding appears in the tetragrammaton, where the name of the divine is deliberately a placeholder, and in the Zen insistence that the Buddha nature is already present, not earned. In my book, I trace a common arc across cultures. The original instruction was always interior: quiet the mind, dissolve the experienced self, and know the true Self through direct encounter. The rituals, whether incubation in Greek caves or the carefully measured kykeon at Eleusis, were not pageants. They were calibrated alterations of consciousness designed to make the individual feel the wholeness that underlies all reality. When a civilization must transmit wisdom through text and sermon, the ineffable hardens into doctrine. The kingdom of heaven, once described as within you and before your eyes, becomes a destination after death. Jihad, once the internal struggle of self-knowing, becomes a call to external conquest. The pursuit of immortality shifts from an altered attitude toward death to a medical project of bodily preservation. The experienced self is a creature of language; it builds identity from story. When the story replaces the silence, we inevitably mistake the map for the territory. The quiet that ancient practices cultivated was the condition under which the mind could stop manufacturing the self and begin perceiving what is underneath. That perception has no need of belief. It only needs a pond calm enough to receive the signal.

I wrote this article when reflecting on the work of @Jack K. Hopefully it can stimulate discussion that leads to more peace, civility, harmony, cohesion, and resolution in the Bitcoin community. How many blocks does it take? View article →